FullReads

“You have certainly done that,” said I. “As for the worst being over–“

We were within the drawing-room by this time, and he plucked me by the sleeve in his excitement, yet deferentially. “Yonder is the mistress, sir–in the yellow h’Empire satin–talking with the gentleman in sky-blue rationals. Ah, she sees you!”

She did. And I read at once in her beautiful eyes that while talking with her partner she had been watching the door for me. She came towards me with an eager catch of the breath–one so very like a cry of relief that in the act of holding out her hand she had to turn to the nearest guests and explain.

“It’s Mr. Richardson–‘George Anthony,’ you know–who wrote Larks in Aspic! I had set my heart on his coming, and had almost given him up. Why are you so cruelly late?” she demanded, turning her eyes on mine.

Her hand was still held out to me. I had meant to hold myself up stiffly and decline it; but somehow I could not. She was a woman, after all, and her look told me–and me only–that she was in trouble. Also I knew her by face and by report. I had seen her acting in more than one exceedingly stupid musical comedy, and wondered why ‘Clara Joy’ condescended to waste herself upon such inanities. I recalled certain notes in her voice, certain moments when, in the midst of the service of folly, she had seemed to isolate herself and stand watching, aloof from the audience and her fellow-actors, almost pathetically alone. Report said, too, that she was good, and that she had domestic troubles, though it had not reached me what these troubles were. Certainly she appeared altogether too good for these third-rate guests–for third-rate they were to the most casual eye. And the trouble, which signalled to me now in her look, clearly and to my astonishment included no remorse for having walked into a stranger’s house and turned it up-side down without so much as a by-your-leave. She claimed my goodwill confidently, without any appeal to be forgiven. I held my feelings under rein and took her hand.

As I released it she motioned me to give her my arm. “I must find you supper at once,” she said quietly, in a tone that warned me not to decline. “Not–not in there; we will try the library downstairs.”

Down to the library I led her accordingly, and somehow was aware–by that supernumerary sense which works at times in the back of a man’s head–of Horrex discreetly following us. At the library-door she turned to him. “When I ring,” she said. He bowed and withdrew.

The room was empty and dark. She switched on the electric light and nodded to me to close the door.

“Take that off, please,” she commanded.

“I beg your pardon? . . . Ah, to be sure!” I had forgotten my false nose.

“How did Herbert pick up with you?” she asked musingly. “His friends are not usually so–so–“

“Respectable?” I suggested.

“I think I meant to say ‘presentable.’ They are never respectable by any chance.”

“Then, happily, it still remains to be proved that I am one of them.”

“He seems, at any rate, to reckon you high amongst them, since he gave your name.”

“Gave my name? To whom?”

“Oh, I don’t know–to the magistrate–or the policeman–or whoever it is. I have never been in a police-cell myself,” she added, with a small smile.

“Is Herbert, then, in a police-cell?”

She nodded. “At Vine Street. He wants to be bailed out.”

“What amount?”

“Himself in ten pounds and a friend in another ten. He gave your name; and the policeman is waiting for the answer.”

“I see,” said I; “but excuse me if I fail to see why, being apparently so impatient to bail him out, you have waited for me. To be sure (for reasons which are dark to me) he appears to have given my name to the police; but we will put that riddle aside for the moment. Any respectable citizen would have served, with the money to back him. Why not have sent Horrex, for example?”