the horror came. But I love them, dear Andrew. Sometimes I have felt a little lonely in your great house, those rooms are so huge and you are so far away. Then their call has been a comfort to me.”
He stooped and whispered in her ear as they passed from the wood out into the avenue.
“You have been rash,” he warned her. “Now you shall be less lonely.”
CHAPTER VI
A rumour was somehow started in the county that my lord and Lady Glenlitten were moping because of the recent tragedy in their household, and, as though with common accord, every one descended upon them. Lady Susan, who lived in sedate widowhood, barely a score of miles away, turned up early upon a brilliant Saturday morning, with half a dozen young people, and after luncheon there were three or four tennis courts going, besides a little stream of visitors playing golf upon the private course in the park. The clouds seemed to have passed. The recent tragedy was forgotten. Félice was the most delightful of hostesses—at one moment a child, laughing and romping with the youngest, at another the smiling and gracious chatelaine of a great house. She played tennis—considering her small reach—with wonderful skill, and she was indefatigable. She was the blue butterfly of happiness, and sometimes she found it hard to escape from her youthful admirers. Towards the close of the afternoon, she and her husband settled down for a serious set, which they won with ease. She took one of her defeated opponents—Rodney Haslam—by the arm, and led him away.
“You would like a whisky and soda,” she asked, as they reached the shade of a cedar tree, “or to talk with me?”
“I should like very much,” he told her, “to combine the two.”
He gave her some cup to which she pointed, and they sank into low chairs.
“Now we are very comfortable,” she said, “and I feel that I must ask you a question which so many times has been in my mind. You permit?”
“Why, of course,” he answered. “Ask me anything you like.”
“I wish to know why you are so mysterious about this great tragedy which has made us all so sad?”
“Am I?” he answered, a little taken aback. “I find you so,” she assured him. “It seems very stupid—perhaps I am wrong—but we will make an understanding about it. If ever the slightest reference is made to that terrible night, wherever we are, you look across at me almost—it sounds silly, but it is true—almost as though we had a secret in common.”
He was frankly startled.
“I can promise you,” he began?
She waved his protest away.
“This is a matter upon which I feel too deeply to fancy things. You have always the air of saying to yourself, ‘There is something I could tell if I would, and you know it too, you, Félice.’ And then you look across at me, and that light, that sombre light, is always burning in your eyes for people to see and wonder at.”
He lit a cigarette. His long bony fingers shook a little as he blew out the match.
“You wish for frankness, Lady Glenlitten?”
“But yes,” she answered, frowning at him impatiently. “Why not? We have no secret together, you and I, yet from the way you look at me one would sometimes imagine that we had. I do not like it. Please speak whatever is in your mind.”
He glanced around. They were alone in the deep shade of one of the old cedar trees.
“On that night,” he confided, “I saw De Besset slip away from the lounge. It was very soon after you yourself had gone upstairs. I behaved perhaps like a cad. I suppose it was a form of jealousy which seized hold of me.”
“Jealousy?” she exclaimed, looking at him with wide-open eyes.
“Yes,” he replied curtly. “I knew you, it seemed to me, better than De Besset. Before he came, I had the happiness to see a great deal of you at Deauville. Your husband and I were old schoolfellows. As you know, he didn’t have much in common with the crowd there, and so by degrees we drifted together—we three—day by day.”
“That is quite true,” she admitted. “You were a very pleasant companion for Andrew, and I did like you myself.”
“After De Besset appeared,” Haslam continued, “everything was changed. It was he who danced with you, he whose little parties and expeditions you always joined, he whose box you accepted at the races, and on whose yacht you sailed. At first it simply meant that I was your husband’s companion, whilst you and De Besset were amusing yourselves together. When I could stand it no longer, I left the place, and drifted back to my old state of loneliness.”
“I am very sorry,” she said, still a little perplexed. “I was just loving life so much, I accepted everything that came along, and Raoul de Besset, although he meant no more to me than you did, or any other man except my husband, made himself very agreeable. If I had known that I had hurt your feelings, I should have been very sorry. But tell me, what has all this to do with that awful night?”
“If you want the whole truth, you shall have it,” Haslam went on, a grimmer note creeping into his tone. “When I saw De Besset glance around as though wondering whether any one were noticing and then leave the room, a mad thought came to me, and a mad impulse—an impulse to which I yielded. I followed him. He was quicker than I up the stairs, and disappeared, but he turned down the south corridor, and when I passed the door of your boudoir, I heard voices. You were supposed to have retired with a headache half an hour before, and Andrew was downstairs playing bridge, but I heard voices in your boudoir.”
She turned and looked at him, frankly astonished and yet with some trace of that haunted look in her eyes which for a moment had crept into them during the inquest.
“Voices in my room?” she repeated. “But that is impossible. You imagined it.”
“It has been the curse of my life,” he told her, “that I have too little imagination. I never believed that I had any at all until I met you, but I heard the voices in your boudoir as surely as we hear the birds singing to us at this moment, and I think that if at that moment the door had opened and De Besset had come out—he might have been alive to-day —in the hospital perhaps, but alive.”
Félice sat very still, and the man by her side had just tact enough not to break the silence she imposed. To all appearance she was watching the nearest of the tennis sets.
“So you spied upon my doings from the corridor —you, a guest in my husband’s house,” she said softly, without looking at him, almost as though speaking to herself.
“I followed De Besset,” he explained, a little sullenly. “I had grown to hate the fellow, with his affectations and vanities and damned conceits. If I had stayed downstairs and not known where he was, I should have gone crazy. I had to come.”
“Did your imagination lead you further still?” she asked. “Did you fancy that you did hear what passed between the two people who were not there?”
“No,” he admitted. “There were servants passing in the main corridor. I couldn’t remain like an eavesdropper outside your door. I heard the voices—you were speaking in French—that was enough for me, and I passed on to my own room.”
“And then?”
“I pulled myself together,” he answered, “as we all have to. I filled my case with the cigarettes I tried to persuade myself that I had come to fetch, and I went downstairs again.”
“Passing my door?”
“Yes.”
“You fancied still, perhaps, that you heard voices?”
“I did not listen,” he admitted.