Trent's Last Case Part 6

CHAPTER XII: Evil Days

'I am returning the cheque you sent for what I did on the Manderson case,' Trent wrote to Sir James Molloy from Munich, whither he had gone immediately after handing in at the Record office a brief dispatch bringing his work on the case to an unexciting close. 'What I sent you wasn't worth one-tenth of the amount; but I should have no scruple about pocketing it if I hadn't taken a fancy-never mind why-not to touch any money at all for this business. I should like you, if there is no objection, to pay for the stuff at your ordinary s.p.a.ce-rate, and hand the money to some charity which does not devote itself to bullying people, if you know of any such. I have come to this place to see some old friends and arrange my ideas, and the idea that comes out uppermost is that for a little while I want some employment with activity in it. I find I can't paint at all: I couldn't paint a fence. Will you try me as your Own Correspondent somewhere? If you can find me a good adventure I will send you good accounts. After that I could settle down and work.'

Sir James sent him instructions by telegram to proceed at once to Kurland and Livonia, where Citizen Browning was abroad again, and town and countryside blazed in revolt. It was a roving commission, and for two months Trent followed his luck. It served him not less well than usual. He was the only correspondent who saw General Dragilew killed in the street at Volmar by a girl of eighteen. He saw burnings, lynchings, fusillades, hangings; each day his soul sickened afresh at the imbecilities born of misrule. Many nights he lay down in danger. Many days he went fasting. But there was never an evening or a morning when he did not see the face of the woman whom he hopelessly loved.

He discovered in himself an unhappy pride at the lasting force of this infatuation. It interested him as a phenomenon; it amazed and enlightened him. Such a thing had not visited him before. It confirmed so much that he had found dubious in the recorded experience of men.

It was not that, at thirty-two, he could pretend to ignorance of this world of emotion. About his knowledge let it be enough to say that what he had learned had come unpursued and unpurchased, and was without intolerable memories; broken to the realities of s.e.x, he was still troubled by its inscrutable history. He went through life full of a strange respect for certain feminine weakness and a very simple terror of certain feminine strength. He had held to a rather lukewarm faith that something remained in him to be called forth, and that the voice that should call would be heard in its own time, if ever, and not through any seeking.

But he had not thought of the possibility that, if this proved true some day, the truth might come in a sinister shape. The two things that had taken him utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards Mabel Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strength and its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been much disposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited pa.s.sion as a generous boyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong, and he was living bitterly in the knowledge.

Before the eye of his fancy the woman always came just as she was when he had first had sight of her, with the gesture which he had surprised as he walked past unseen on the edge of the cliff; that great gesture of pa.s.sionate joy in her new liberty which had told him more plainly than speech that her widowhood was a release from torment, and had confirmed with terrible force the suspicion, active in his mind before, that it was her pa.s.sport to happiness with a man whom she loved. He could not with certainty name to himself the moment when he had first suspected that it might be so. The seed of the thought must have been sown, he believed, at his first meeting with Marlowe; his mind would have noted automatically that such evident strength and grace, with the sort of looks and manners that the tall young man possessed, might go far with any woman of unfixed affections. And the connection of this with what Mr Cupples had told him of the Mandersons' married life must have formed itself in the unconscious depths of his mind. Certainly it had presented itself as an already established thing when he began, after satisfying himself of the ident.i.ty of the murderer, to cast about for the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had sought for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that Marlowe-obsessed by pa.s.sion like himself, and privy perhaps to maddening truths about the wife's unhappiness-had taken a leaf, the guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at the time, in all his broodings on the matter afterwards, he had been able to discover nothing that could prompt Marlowe to such a deed-nothing but that temptation, the whole strength of which he could not know, but which if it had existed must have pressed urgently upon a bold spirit in which scruple had been somehow paralysed. If he could trust his senses at all, the young man was neither insane nor by nature evil. But that could not clear him. Murder for a woman's sake, he thought, was not a rare crime, Heaven knew! If the modern feebleness of impulse in the comfortable cla.s.ses, and their respect for the modern apparatus of detection, had made it rare among them, it was yet far from impossible. It only needed a man of equal daring and intelligence, his soul drugged with the vapours of an intoxicating intrigue, to plan and perform such a deed.

A thousand times, with a heart full of anguish, he had sought to reason away the dread that Mabel Manderson had known too much of what had been intended against her husband's life. That she knew all the truth after the thing was done he could not doubt; her unforgettable collapse in his presence when the question about Marlowe was suddenly and bluntly put, had swept away his last hope that there was no love between the pair, and had seemed to him, moreover, to speak of dread of discovery. In any case, she knew the truth after reading what he had left with her; and it was certain that no public suspicion had been cast upon Marlowe since. She had destroyed his ma.n.u.script, then, and taken him at his word to keep the secret that threatened her lover's life.

But it was the monstrous thought that she might have known murder was brewing, and guiltily kept silence, that haunted Trent's mind. She might have suspected, have guessed something; was it conceivable that she was aware of the whole plot, that she connived? He could never forget that his first suspicion of Marlowe's motive in the crime had been roused by the fact that his escape was made through the lady's room. At that time, when he had not yet seen her, he had been ready enough to entertain the idea of her equal guilt and her co-operation. He had figured to himself some pa.s.sionate hysterique, merciless as a cat in her hate and her love, a zealous abettor, perhaps even the ruling spirit in the crime.

Then he had seen her, had spoken with her, had helped her in her weakness; and such suspicions, since their first meeting, had seemed the vilest of infamy. He had seen her eyes and her mouth; he had breathed the woman's atmosphere. Trent was one of those who fancy they can scent true wickedness in the air. In her presence he had felt an inward certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing against this that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the cliff, to the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her years of starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had turned to Marlowe in her dest.i.tution he believed; that she had any knowledge of his deadly purpose he did not believe.

And yet, morning and evening the sickening doubts returned, and he recalled again that it was almost in her presence that Marlowe had made his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man, that it was by the window of her own chamber that he had escaped from the house. Had he forgotten his cunning and taken the risk of telling her then? Or had he, as Trent thought more likely, still played his part with her then, and stolen off while she slept? He did not think she had known of the masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest; it read like honest evidence. Or-the question would never be silenced, though he scorned it-had she lain expecting the footsteps in the room and the whisper that should tell her that it was done? Among the foul possibilities of human nature, was it possible that black ruthlessness and black deceit as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentle seeming?

These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone.

Trent served Sir James, well earning his pay for six months, and then returned to Paris where he went to work again with a better heart. His powers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than he had expected among a tribe of strangely a.s.sorted friends, French, English, and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen, hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men, and others. His old faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as in his student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyed again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman's family. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of les jeunes, and found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and life as the departed jeunes of ten years before had been.

The bosom of the Frenchman's family was the same as those he had known in the past, even to the patterns of the wallpaper and movables. But the jeunes, he perceived with regret, were totally different from their forerunners. They were much more shallow and puerile, much less really clever. The secrets they wrested from the Universe were not such important and interesting secrets as had been wrested by the old jeunes. This he believed and deplored until one day he found himself seated at a restaurant next to a too well-fed man whom, in spite of the ravages of comfortable living, he recognized as one of the jeunes of his own period. This one had been wont to describe himself and three or four others as the Hermits of the New Parna.s.sus. He and his school had talked outside cafes and elsewhere more than solitaries do as a rule; but, then, rules were what they had vowed themselves to destroy. They proclaimed that verse, in particular, was free. The Hermit of the New Parna.s.sus was now in the Ministry of the Interior, and already decorated: he expressed to Trent the opinion that what France needed most was a hand of iron. He was able to quote the exact price paid for certain betrayals of the country, of which Trent had not previously heard.

Thus he was brought to make the old discovery that it was he who had changed, like his friend of the Administration, and that les jeunes were still the same. Yet he found it hard to say what precisely he had lost that so greatly mattered; unless indeed it were so simple a thing as his high spirits.

One morning in June, as he descended the slope of the Rue des Martyrs, he saw approaching a figure that he remembered. He glanced quickly round, for the thought of meeting Mr Bunner again was unacceptable. For some time he had recognized that his wound was healing under the spell of creative work; he thought less often of the woman he loved, and with less pain. He would not have the memory of those three days reopened.

But the straight and narrow thoroughfare offered no refuge, and the American saw him almost at once.

His unforced geniality made Trent ashamed, for he had liked the man. They sat long over a meal, and Mr Bunner talked. Trent listened to him, now that he was in for it, with genuine pleasure, now and then contributing a question or remark. Besides liking his companion, he enjoyed his conversation, with its unending verbal surprises, for its own sake.

Bunner was, it appeared, resident in Paris as the chief Continental agent of the Manderson firm, and fully satisfied with his position and prospects. He discoursed on these for some twenty minutes. This subject at length exhausted, he went on to tell Trent, who confessed that he had been away from England for a year, that Marlowe had shortly after the death of Manderson entered his father's business, which was now again in a flouris.h.i.+ng state, and had already come to be practically in control of it. They had kept up their intimacy, and were even now planning a holiday for the summer. Mr Bunner spoke with generous admiration of his friend's talent for affairs. 'Jack Marlowe has a natural big head,' he declared, 'and if he had more experience, I wouldn't want to have him up against me. He would put a crimp in me every time.'

As the American's talk flowed on, Trent listened with a slowly growing perplexity. It became more and more plain that something was very wrong in his theory of the situation; there was no mention of its central figure. Presently Mr Bunner mentioned that Marlowe was engaged to be married to an Irish girl, whose charms he celebrated with native enthusiasm.

Trent clasped his hands savagely together beneath the table. What could have happened? His ideas were sliding and s.h.i.+fting. At last he forced himself to put a direct question.

Mr Bunner was not very fully informed. He knew that Mrs Manderson had left England immediately after the settlement of her husband's affairs, and had lived for some time in Italy. She had returned not long ago to London, where she had decided not to live in the house in Mayfair, and had bought a smaller one in the Hampstead neighbourhood; also, he understood, one somewhere in the country. She was said to go but little into society. 'And all the good hard dollars just waiting for some one to spraddle them around,' said Mr Bunner, with a note of pathos in his voice. 'Why, she has money to burn-money to feed to the birds-and nothing doing. The old man left her more than half his wad. And think of the figure she might make in the world. She is beautiful, and she is the best woman I ever met, too. But she couldn't ever seem to get the habit of spending money the way it ought to be spent.'

His words now became a soliloquy: Trent's thoughts were occupying all his attention. He pleaded business soon, and the two men parted with cordiality.

Half an hour later Trent was in his studio, swiftly and mechanically 'cleaning up'. He wanted to know what had happened; somehow he must find out. He could never approach herself, he knew; he would never bring back to her the shame of that last encounter with him; it was scarcely likely that he would even set eyes on her. But he must get to know!... Cupples was in London, Marlowe was there.... And, anyhow, he was sick of Paris.

Such thoughts came and went; and below them all strained the fibres of an unseen cord that dragged mercilessly at his heart, and that he cursed bitterly in the moments when he could not deny to himself that it was there. The folly, the useless, pitiable folly of it!

In twenty-four hours his feeble roots in Paris had been torn out. He was looking over a leaden sea at the s.h.i.+ning fortress-wall of the Dover cliffs.

But though he had instinctively picked out the lines of a set purpose from among the welter of promptings in his mind, he found it delayed at the very outset.

He had decided that he must first see Mr Cupples, who would be in a position to tell him much more than the American knew. But Mr Cupples was away on his travels, not expected to return for a month; and Trent had no reasonable excuse for hastening his return. Marlowe he would not confront until he had tried at least to reconnoitre the position. He constrained himself not to commit the crowning folly of seeking out Mrs Manderson's house in Hampstead; he could not enter it, and the thought of the possibility of being seen by her lurking in its neighbourhood brought the blood to his face.

He stayed at an hotel, took a studio, and while he awaited Mr Cupples's return attempted vainly to lose himself in work.

At the end of a week he had an idea that he acted upon with eager precipitancy. She had let fall some word at their last meeting, of a taste for music. Trent went that evening, and thenceforward regularly, to the opera. He might see her; and if, in spite of his caution, she caught sight of him, they could be blind to each other's presence-anybody might happen to go to the opera.

So he went alone each evening, pa.s.sing as quickly as he might through the people in the vestibule; and each evening he came away knowing that she had not been in the house. It was a habit that yielded him a sort of satisfaction along with the guilty excitement of his search; for he too loved music, and nothing gave him so much peace while its magic endured.

One night as he entered, hurrying through the brilliant crowd, he felt a touch on his arm. Flooded with an incredible certainty at the touch, he turned.

It was she: so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety, in the fact that she was smiling, and in the allurement of evening dress, that he could not speak. She, too, breathed a little quickly, and there was a light of daring in her eyes and cheeks as she greeted him.

Her words were few. 'I wouldn't miss a note of Tristan,' she said, 'nor must you. Come and see me in the interval.' She gave him the number of the box.

CHAPTER XIII: Eruption

The following two months were a period in Trent's life that he has never since remembered without shuddering. He met Mrs Manderson half a dozen times, and each time her cool friendliness, a nicely calculated mean between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy, baffled and maddened him. At the opera he had found her, to his further amazement, with a certain Mrs Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had known from childhood. Mrs Manderson, it appeared, on her return from Italy, had somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and disposition. It came, she said, of her having pitched her tent in their hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near neighbours. He had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion unlike himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with idiot loquacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding from time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs Wallace. The other lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the slight appearance of agitation with which she had stopped him in the vestibule. She had spoken pleasantly to him of her travels, of her settlement in London, and of people whom they both knew.

During the last half of the opera, which he had stayed in the box to hear, he had been conscious of nothing, as he sat behind them, but the angle of her cheek and the ma.s.s of her hair, the lines of her shoulder and arm, her hand upon the cus.h.i.+on. The black hair had seemed at last a forest, immeasurable, pathless and enchanted, luring him to a fatal adventure.... At the end he had been pale and subdued, parting with them rather formally.

The next time he saw her-it was at a country house where both were guests-and the subsequent times, he had had himself in hand. He had matched her manner and had acquitted himself, he thought, decently, considering- Considering that he lived in an agony of bewilderment and remorse and longing. He could make nothing, absolutely nothing, of her att.i.tude. That she had read his ma.n.u.script and understood the suspicion indicated in his last question to her at White Gables was beyond the possibility of doubt. Then how could she treat him thus and frankly, as she treated all the world of men who had done no injury?

For it had become clear to his intuitive sense, for all the absence of any shade of differentiation in her outward manner, that an injury had been done, and that she had felt it. Several times, on the rare and brief occasions when they had talked apart, he had warning from the same sense that she was approaching this subject; and each time he had turned the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear. Two resolutions he made. The first was that when he had completed a commissioned work which tied him to London he would go away and stay away. The strain was too great. He no longer burned to know the truth; he wanted nothing to confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith, that he had blundered, that he had misread the situation, misinterpreted her tears, written himself down a slanderous fool. He speculated no more on Marlowe's motive in the killing of Manderson. Mr Cupples returned to London, and Trent asked him nothing. He knew now that he had been right in those words-Trent remembered them for the emphasis with which they were spoken-'So long as she considered herself bound to him... no power on earth could have persuaded her.' He met Mrs Manderson at dinner at her uncle's large and tomb-like house in Bloomsbury, and there he conversed most of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin.

His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.

But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was a formal challenge.

While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to him gravely. She was to all appearance careless now, smiling so that he recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: 'Her mouth has ten thousand charms that touch the soul.' She made a tour of the beautiful room where she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils of a hundred bric-a-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries, and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a favourite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she consented at once.

She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now as it had moved him before. 'You are a musician born,' he said quietly when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had pa.s.sed away. 'I knew that before I first heard you.'

'I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a great comfort to me,' she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling. 'When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course: I was at the opera. But that wouldn't prove much, would it?'

'No,' he said abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that had just ended. 'I think I knew it the first time I saw you.' Then understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For the first time the past had been invoked.

There was a short silence. Mrs Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily looked away. Colour began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a chair opposite to him.

'That speech of yours will do as well as anything,' she began slowly, looking at the point of her shoe, 'to bring us to what I wanted to say. I asked you here today on purpose, Mr Trent, because I couldn't bear it any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have been saying to myself that it didn't matter what you thought of me in that affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to others of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of your reasons for suppressing your ma.n.u.script. I asked myself how it could matter. But all the time, of course, I knew it did matter. It mattered horribly. Because what you thought was not true.' She raised her eyes and met his gaze calmly. Trent, with a completely expressionless face, returned her look.

'Since I began to know you,' he said, 'I have ceased to think it.' 'Thank you,' said Mrs Manderson; and blushed suddenly and deeply. Then, playing with a glove, she added, 'But I want you to know what was true.

'I did not know if I should ever see you again,' she went on in a lower voice, 'but I felt that if I did I must speak to you about this. I thought it would not be hard to do so, because you seemed to me an understanding person; and besides, a woman who has been married isn't expected to have the same sort of difficulty as a young girl in speaking about such things when it is necessary. And then we did meet again, and I discovered that it was very difficult indeed. You made it difficult.'

'How?' he asked quietly.

'I don't know,' said the lady. 'But yes-I do know. It was just because you treated me exactly as if you had never thought or imagined anything of that sort about me. I had always supposed that if I saw you again you would turn on me that hard, horrible sort of look you had when you asked me that last question-do you remember?-at White Gables. Instead of that you were just like any other acquaintance. You were just'-she hesitated and spread out her hands-'nice. You know. After that first time at the opera when I spoke to you I went home positively wondering if you had really recognized me. I mean, I thought you might have recognized my face without remembering who it was.'

A short laugh broke from Trent in spite of himself, but he said nothing.

She smiled deprecatingly. 'Well, I couldn't remember if you had spoken my name; and I thought it might be so. But the next time, at the Iretons', you did speak it, so I knew; and a dozen times during those few days I almost brought myself to tell you, but never quite. I began to feel that you wouldn't let me, that you would slip away from the subject if I approached it. Wasn't I right? Tell me, please.' He nodded. 'But why?' He remained silent.

'Well,' she said, 'I will finish what I had to say, and then you will tell me, I hope, why you had to make it so hard. When I began to understand that you wouldn't let me talk of the matter to you, it made me more determined than ever. I suppose you didn't realize that I would insist on speaking even if you were quite discouraging. I dare say I couldn't have done it if I had been guilty, as you thought. You walked into my parlour today, never thinking I should dare. Well, now you see.'

Mrs Manderson had lost all her air of hesitancy. She had, as she was wont to say, talked herself enthusiastic, and in the ardour of her purpose to annihilate the misunderstanding that had troubled her so long she felt herself mistress of the situation.

'I am going to tell you the story of the mistake you made,' she continued, as Trent, his hands clasped between his knees, still looked at her enigmatically. 'You will have to believe it, Mr Trent; it is utterly true to life, with its confusions and hidden things and cross-purposes and perfectly natural mistakes that n.o.body thinks twice about taking for facts. Please understand that I don't blame you in the least, and never did, for jumping to the conclusion you did. You knew that I was estranged from my husband, and you knew what that so often means. You knew before I told you, I expect, that he had taken up an injured att.i.tude towards me; and I was silly enough to try and explain it away. I gave you the explanation of it that I had given myself at first, before I realized the wretched truth; I told you he was disappointed in me because I couldn't take a brilliant lead in society. Well, that was true; he was so. But I could see you weren't convinced. You had guessed what it took me much longer to see, because I knew how irrational it was. Yes; my husband was jealous of John Marlowe; you divined that.

'Then I behaved like a fool when you let me see you had divined it; it was such a blow, you understand, when I had supposed all the humiliation and strain was at an end, and that his delusion had died with him. You practically asked me if my husband's secretary was not my lover, Mr Trent-I have to say it, because I want you to understand why I broke down and made a scene. You took that for a confession; you thought I was guilty of that, and I think you even thought I might be a party to the crime, that I had consented.... That did hurt me; but perhaps you couldn't have thought anything else-I don't know.'

Trent, who had not hitherto taken his eyes from her face, hung his head at the words. He did not raise it again as she continued. 'But really it was simple shock and distress that made me give way, and the memory of all the misery that mad suspicion had meant to me. And when I pulled myself together again you had gone.'

She rose and went to an escritoire beside the window, unlocked a drawer, and drew out a long, sealed envelope.

'This is the ma.n.u.script you left with me,' she said. 'I have read it through again and again. I have always wondered, as everybody does, at your cleverness in things of this kind.' A faintly mischievous smile flashed upon her face, and was gone. 'I thought it was splendid, Mr Trent-I almost forgot that the story was my own, I was so interested. And I want to say now, while I have this in my hand, how much I thank you for your generous, chivalrous act in sacrificing this triumph of yours rather than put a woman's reputation in peril. If all had been as you supposed, the facts must have come out when the police took up the case you put in their hands. Believe me, I understood just what you had done, and I never ceased to be grateful even when I felt most crushed by your suspicion.'

As she spoke her thanks her voice shook a little, and her eyes were bright. Trent perceived nothing of this. His head was still bent. He did not seem to hear. She put the envelope into his hand as it lay open, palm upwards, on his knee. There was a touch of gentleness about the act which made him look up.

'Can you-' he began slowly.

She raised her hand as she stood before him. 'No, Mr Trent; let me finish before you say anything. It is such an unspeakable relief to me to have broken the ice at last, and I want to end the story while I am still feeling the triumph of beginning it.' She sank down into the sofa from which she had first risen. 'I am telling you a thing that n.o.body else knows. Everybody knew, I suppose, that something had come between us, though I did everything in my power to hide it. But I don't think any one in the world ever guessed what my husband's notion was. People who know me don't think that sort of thing about me, I believe. And his fancy was so ridiculously opposed to the facts. I will tell you what the situation was. Mr Marlowe and I had been friendly enough since he came to us. For all his cleverness-my husband said he had a keener brain than any man he knew-I looked upon him as practically a boy. You know I am a little older than he is, and he had a sort of amiable lack of ambition that made me feel it the more. One day my husband asked me what I thought was the best thing about Marlowe, and not thinking much about it I said, "His manners." He surprised me very much by looking black at that, and after a silence he said, "Yes, Marlowe is a gentleman; that's so", not looking at me.

'Nothing was ever said about that again until about a year ago, when I found that Mr Marlowe had done what I always expected he would do-fallen desperately in love with an American girl. But to my disgust he had picked out the most worthless girl, I do believe, of all those whom we used to meet. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, and she did as she liked with them; very beautiful, well educated, very good at games-what they call a woman-athlete-and caring for nothing on earth but her own amus.e.m.e.nt. She was one of the most unprincipled flirts I ever knew, and quite the cleverest. Every one knew it, and Mr Marlowe must have heard it; but she made a complete fool of him, brain and all. I don't know how she managed it, but I can imagine. She liked him, of course; but it was quite plain to me that she was playing with him. The whole affair was so idiotic, I got perfectly furious. One day I asked him to row me in a boat on the lake-all this happened at our house by Lake George. We had never been alone together for any length of time before. In the boat I talked to him. I was very kind about it, I think, and he took it admirably, but he didn't believe me a bit. He had the impudence to tell me that I misunderstood Alice's nature. When I hinted at his prospects-I knew he had scarcely anything of his own-he said that if she loved him he could make himself a position in the world. I dare say that was true, with his abilities and his friends-he is rather well connected, you know, as well as popular. But his enlightenment came very soon after that.

'My husband helped me out of the boat when we got back. He joked with Mr Marlowe about something, I remember; for through all that followed he never once changed in his manner to him, and that was one reason why I took so long to realize what he thought about him and myself. But to me he was reserved and silent that evening-not angry. He was always perfectly cold and expressionless to me after he took this idea into his head. After dinner he only spoke to me once. Mr Marlowe was telling him about some horse he had bought for the farm in Kentucky, and my husband looked at me and said, "Marlowe may be a gentleman, but he seldom quits loser in a horse-trade." I was surprised at that, but at that time-and even on the next occasion when he found us together-I didn't understand what was in his mind. That next time was the morning when Mr Marlowe received a sweet little note from the girl asking for his congratulations on her engagement. It was in our New York house. He looked so wretched at breakfast that I thought he was ill, and afterwards I went to the room where he worked, and asked what was the matter. He didn't say anything, but just handed me the note, and turned away to the window. I was very glad that was all over, but terribly sorry for him too, of course. I don't remember what I said, but I remember putting my hand on his arm as he stood there staring out on the garden and just then my husband appeared at the open door with some papers. He just glanced at us, and then turned and walked quietly back to his study. I thought that he might have heard what I was saying to comfort Mr Marlowe, and that it was rather nice of him to slip away. Mr Marlowe neither saw nor heard him. My husband left the house that morning for the West while I was out. Even then I did not understand. He used often to go off suddenly like that, if some business project called him.

'It was not until he returned a week later that I grasped the situation. He was looking white and strange, and as soon as he saw me he asked me where Mr Marlowe was. Somehow the tone of his question told me everything in a flash.

'I almost gasped; I was wild with indignation. You know, Mr Trent, I don't think I should have minded at all if any one had thought me capable of openly breaking with my husband and leaving him for somebody else. I dare say I might have done that. But that coa.r.s.e suspicion... a man whom he trusted... and the notion of concealment. It made me see scarlet. Every shred of pride in me was strung up till I quivered, and I swore to myself on the spot that I would never show by any word or sign that I was conscious of his having such a thought about me. I would behave exactly as I always had behaved, I determined-and that I did, up to the very last. Though I knew that a wall had been made between us now that could never be broken down-even if he asked my pardon and obtained it-I never once showed that I noticed any change.

'And so it went on. I never could go through such a time again. My husband showed silent and cold politeness to me always when we were alone-and that was only when it was unavoidable. He never once alluded to what was in his mind; but I felt it, and he knew that I felt it. Both of us were stubborn in our different att.i.tudes. To Mr Marlowe he was more friendly, if anything, than before-Heaven only knows why. I fancied he was planning some sort of revenge; but that was only a fancy. Certainly Mr Marlowe never knew what was suspected of him. He and I remained good friends, though we never spoke of anything intimate after that disappointment of his; but I made a point of seeing no less of him than I had always done. Then we came to England and to White Gables, and after that followed-my husband's dreadful end.'

She threw out her right hand in a gesture of finality. 'You know about the rest-so much more than any other man,' she added, and glanced up at him with a quaint expression.

Trent wondered at that look, but the wonder was only a pa.s.sing shadow on his thought. Inwardly his whole being was possessed by thankfulness. All the vivacity had returned to his face. Long before the lady had ended her story he had recognized the certainty of its truth, as from the first days of their renewed acquaintance he had doubted the story that his imagination had built up at White Gables, upon foundations that seemed so good to him.

He said, 'I don't know how to begin the apologies I have to make. There are no words to tell you how ashamed and disgraced I feel when I realize what a crude, c.o.c.k-sure blundering at a conclusion my suspicion was. Yes, I suspected-you! I had almost forgotten that I was ever such a fool. Almost-not quite. Sometimes when I have been alone I have remembered that folly, and poured contempt on it. I have tried to imagine what the facts were. I have tried to excuse myself.'

She interrupted him quickly. 'What nonsense! Do be sensible, Mr Trent. You had only seen me on two occasions in your life before you came to me with your solution of the mystery.' Again the quaint expression came and was gone. 'If you talk of folly, it really is folly for a man like you to pretend to a woman like me that I had innocence written all over me in large letters-so large that you couldn't believe very strong evidence against me after seeing me twice.'

'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he demanded with a sort of fierceness. 'Do you take me for a person without any normal instincts? I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of character-what Mr Calvin Bunner calls a case of open-work; I don't say a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being in your atmosphere, could a.s.sociate you with the particular kind of abomination I imagined, is a fool-the kind of fool who is afraid to trust his senses.... As for my making it hard for you to approach the subject, as you say, it is true. It was simply moral cowardice. I understood that you wished to clear the matter up; and I was revolted at the notion of my injurious blunder being discussed. I tried to show you by my actions that it was as if it had never been. I hoped you would pardon me without any words. I can't forgive myself, and I never shall. And yet if you could know-' He stopped short, and then added quietly, 'Well, will you accept all that as an apology? The very scrubbiest sackcloth made, and the grittiest ashes on the heap.... I didn't mean to get worked up,' he ended lamely.

Mrs Manderson laughed, and her laugh carried him away with it. He knew well by this time that sudden rush of cascading notes of mirth, the perfect expression of enjoyment; he had many times tried to amuse her merely for his delight in the sound of it.

'But I love to see you worked up,' she said. 'The b.u.mp with which you always come down as soon as you realize that you are up in the air at all is quite delightful. Oh, we're actually both laughing. What a triumphant end to our explanations, after all my dread of the time when I should have it out with you. And now it's all over, and you know; and we'll never speak of it any more.'

'I hope not,' Trent said in sincere relief. 'If you're resolved to be so kind as this about it, I am not high-principled enough to insist on your blasting me with your lightnings. And now, Mrs Manderson, I had better go. Changing the subject after this would be like playing puss-in-the-corner after an earthquake.' He rose to his feet.

'You are right,' she said. 'But no! Wait. There is another thing-part of the same subject; and we ought to pick up all the pieces now while we are about it. Please sit down.' She took the envelope containing Trent's ma.n.u.script dispatch from the table where he had laid it. 'I want to speak about this.'

His brows bent, and he looked at her questioningly. 'So do I, if you do,' he said slowly. 'I want very much to know one thing.'

'Tell me.'

'Since my reason for suppressing that information was all a fantasy, why did you never make any use of it? When I began to realize that I had been wrong about you, I explained your silence to myself by saying that you could not bring yourself to do a thing that would put a rope round a man's neck, whatever he might have done. I can quite understand that feeling. Was that what it was? Another possibility I thought of was that you knew of something that was by way of justifying or excusing Marlowe's act. Or I thought you might have a simple horror, quite apart from humanitarian scruples, of appearing publicly in connection with a murder trial. Many important witnesses in such cases have to be practically forced into giving their evidence. They feel there is defilement even in the shadow of the scaffold.'

Mrs Manderson tapped her lips with the envelope without quite concealing a smile. 'You didn't think of another possibility, I suppose, Mr Trent,' she said.

'No.' He looked puzzled.

'I mean the possibility of your having been wrong about Mr Marlowe as well as about me. No, no; you needn't tell me that the chain of evidence is complete. I know it is. But evidence of what? Of Mr Marlowe having impersonated my husband that night, and having escaped by way of my window, and built up an alibi. I have read your dispatch again and again, Mr Trent, and I don't see that those things can be doubted.'

Trent gazed at her with narrowed eyes. He said nothing to fill the brief pause that followed. Mrs Manderson smoothed her skirt with a preoccupied air, as one collecting her ideas.

'I did not make any use of the facts found out by you,' she slowly said at last, 'because it seemed to me very likely that they would be fatal to Mr Marlowe.'

'I agree with you,' Trent remarked in a colourless tone.

'And,' pursued the lady, looking up at him with a mild reasonableness in her eyes, 'as I knew that he was innocent I was not going to expose him to that risk.'

There was another little pause. Trent rubbed his chin, with an affectation of turning over the idea. Inwardly he was telling himself, somewhat feebly, that this was very right and proper; that it was quite feminine, and that he liked her to be feminine. It was permitted to her-more than permitted-to set her loyal belief in the character of a friend above the clearest demonstrations of the intellect. Nevertheless, it chafed him. He would have had her declaration of faith a little less positive in form. It was too irrational to say she 'knew'. In fact (he put it to himself bluntly), it was quite unlike her. If to be unreasonable when reason led to the unpleasant was a specially feminine trait, and if Mrs Manderson had it, she was accustomed to wrap it up better than any woman he had known.

'You suggest,' he said at length, 'that Marlowe constructed an alibi for himself, by means which only a desperate man would have attempted, to clear himself of a crime he did not commit. Did he tell he was innocent?'

She uttered a little laugh of impatience. 'So you think he has been talking me round. No, that is not so. I am merely sure he did not do it. Ah! I see you think that absurd. But see how unreasonable you are, Mr Trent! Just now you were explaining to me quite sincerely that it was foolishness in you to have a certain suspicion of me after seeing me and being in my atmosphere, as you said.' Trent started in his chair. She glanced at him, and went on: 'Now, I and my atmosphere are much obliged to you, but we must stand up for the rights of other atmospheres. I know a great deal more about Mr Marlowe's atmosphere than you know about mine even now. I saw him constantly for several years. I don't pretend to know all about him; but I do know that he is incapable of a crime of bloodshed. The idea of his planning a murder is as unthinkable to me as the idea of your picking a poor woman's pocket, Mr Trent. I can imagine you killing a man, you know... if the man deserved it and had an equal chance of killing you. I could kill a person myself in some circ.u.mstances. But Mr Marlowe was incapable of doing it, I don't care what the provocation might be. He had a temper that nothing could shake, and he looked upon human nature with a sort of cold magnanimity that would find excuses for absolutely anything. It wasn't a pose; you could see it was a part of him. He never put it forward, but it was there always. It was quite irritating at times.... Now and then in America, I remember, I have heard people talking about lynching, for instance, when he was there. He would sit quite silent and expressionless, appearing not to listen; but you could feel disgust coming from him in waves. He really loathed and hated physical violence. He was a very strange man in some ways, Mr Trent. He gave one a feeling that he might do unexpected things-do you know that feeling one has about some people? What part he really played in the events of that night I have never been able to guess. But n.o.body who knew anything about him could possibly believe in his deliberately taking a man's life.' Again the movement of her head expressed finality, and she leaned back in the sofa, calmly regarding him.