than a common blackmailer—a blackguard that preys on wretched, foolish women who—’
He held up a hand, unruffled, smiling, yet menacing.
‘My darling child … what an ugly vocabulary you have acquired of late. No, no, no. Let us be polite. Let us not be melodramatic. Let us be quite sensible. Above all, let us not shout … at half-past one in the morning. Besides, we really have nothing more to say to one another, tonight. I feel that. I am very sensitive to such impressions. You require, I feel, time to reflect. Tomorrow—or perhaps next day—when you have thought things over quietly and sensibly, you will send me a good-tempered little message to say that—’
‘No,’ she cried vehemently, forgetting caution. ‘This is the end of it. I will have nothing more to do with you. I knew that you were a scoundrel—an unscrupulous blackguard. I know now that you are a liar and a cheat as well. I will have nothing more to do with you. Do your worst—I don’t care what it is. Nothing could be worse than what I have gone through already.’
‘Worse for yourself, you mean, my little Babs—don’t you? But what about poor hubby? What would poor straight-laced, stick-in-the-mud hubby say, suppose someone were spiteful enough to—’
His suave, sneering voice was silenced abruptly. Mutely, savagely, she had struck him a swinging buffet on the mouth that had jerked his head back and sent him stumbling against the long oak settle at the opposite side of the hall.
‘Damn you, you little devil—you’ll pay for that.’
He stooped to pick up his fallen hat, tossed it on to the settle, and turned then again to her threateningly. She made no attempt to retreat from him as he moved towards her, but stood against the wall beside the door of the dining-room defiantly, one hand behind her.
‘You horrible cad,’ she panted, ‘how dare you even speak of my husband? How dare an evil, hateful thing like you even think of him? Listen … I have done with you. I don’t care what happens. Before you leave this house you shall give me those letters … or I swear to you I will take them from you. Mind … I have warned you … Don’t tempt me too far …’
He eyed her for a moment, calculatingly, from behind his insolent smile.
‘Sorry, eh? Threats, eh? I see. Well—’
He turned, as if to pick up his hat, but swung round again instantly with such treacherous swiftness that she could not elude him. His hand caught her wrist, twisted something from her grasp. He released her again then, stepping back and watching her warily as he laughed derisively.
‘Take care, my dear … take care. That temper of yours will get you into serious trouble if you don’t keep it under. Ugly words are hard enough to bear, but I draw the line at poisoned knives absolutely. I take it that you realise that this interesting little instrument is—or was at one time—poisoned … and that you realised, therefore, that if you had succeeded in giving me a jab with it, as you attempted to do just now … I say, as you attempted to do just now—’
He glanced over his shoulder quickly towards the hall door, then turned back to her again.
‘I thought that door moved. The wind, I suppose. Yes, my dear. You must try to keep that temper of yours under control. Nasty thing, murder, you know—or even attempted murder. You don’t deny, then, that you knew this knife was poisoned—that the slightest prick from it would probably do me in in a few minutes? You understand, don’t you, why I am impressing these facts on you—facts which, I am afraid, it is going to cost you a great deal more than that thou we spoke about just now to induce me to forget … after all. Meanwhile—until that happy termination of a really quite seriously unpleasant incident is reached—I think I shall keep this little plaything as a souvenir. You’ll remember that I have it, won’t you? And what it means? Good-night, my dear. Think over things calmly—take two days to it—three if you don’t feel sensible enough at the end of two—and send me a little message to say that you feel disposed to talk business—not sentiment. Shall we say now—in consideration of the little occurrence just now—two further instalments of two-fifty, eh? Good-night. My love to hubby. Think how nice it will be to have no more secrets from him—to feel that you are really and truly worthy of his love. Sweet dreams …’
He slipped the knife, which he had inserted carefully in its beaded sheath, into an inner pocket, kissed hands to her airily, and went out.
One thing only was clear to Melhuish, as he watched his wife rouse herself after a moment and shut the hall door with elaborate pains to subdue the protest of its stiffness; she must tell him her story unasked—without compulsion—without the least suspicion that he had spied upon the secret which she had chosen to keep from him. The very caution with which, after that display of reckless bravado, she strove to stifle the sound of the door’s shutting was eloquent enough, significant enough. Already, rather than face his discovery of her secret by him, she had resigned herself again to the indignity and misery of purchasing this scoundrel’s silence with regard to it. That alone was certain and definite—she desired … as strongly as that … that he should not know.
In the astonishing impressions which his ears and eyes had conveyed to his brain during those five or six minutes, tortured doubt still writhed hideously. But the fierce words which had followed that furious blow had assured him of one thing at least—not all of her was lost to him. His mind, agile and decisive in all other emergencies and dilemmas of his life, in this, the gravest of them, refused to move, refused to formulate any coherent thought or purpose save that one immediate need. She must not find him spying on her, lurking there in the darkness. He must have time to think, to realise, to recover judgment and balance, before her eyes met his. She had gone into the dining-room, to extinguish the lights there probably. Before she came out again he must reach his bedroom. The third stair up from the drawing-room landing had creaked as he had come down. He must be careful when he came to it.
THE fog had grown so dense that, glancing across towards Aberdeen Place as he went on towards the pillar-box, Gore could distinguish nothing of the house to which his eyes had turned instinctively save the blurred illumination of its fanlight. Afterwards he recalled sardonically that his imagination had busied itself then for some moments with a charming, enviable picture of the happiness of the man of whose honourable, useful, contenting work that blurred light was the signal. Oddly enough, the figure which came out of the fog to meet him, just as he dropped his letters into the box, proved to be that of the very man of whose felicities, conjugal and otherwise, he had just been thinking.
‘Hallo, doctor,’ he said cheerily. ‘No rest for the wicked then, tonight again?’
‘No.’
‘You getting back now—or just starting out?’
‘Getting back,’ Melhuish replied, as Gore, having turned about, fell into step beside him. ‘A Mrs MacArthur rang me up to go and see her little boy. I’ve been attending him for a mild attack of gastritis. You don’t know the MacArthurs, do you? They’ve only recently come to live here in Linwood.’
‘MacArthur? No. Filthy sort of night, isn’t it? Sort of night I should simply hate to be dragged out of bed if I’d once succeeded in getting there, personally. But I suppose you doctor-men get hardened to it. Why … that’s Cecil Arndale, isn’t it?’
The eyes of both men had converged to a tall figure in a light-coloured raincoat which had emerged hurriedly from a house some twenty yards ahead of them, and, after a quick glance in their direction, had set off at a sharp pace towards the Riverside, growing rapidly indistinct as it receded into the fog.
‘It was Arndale, wasn’t it?’ Melhuish asked abstractedly. ‘His wife’s brother has a flat in one of these houses—Challoner. You probably remember him?’
‘Bertie Challoner? Oh, yes. I remember Bertie very well indeed. An ingenuous youth. Yes. Mrs Arndale told me this evening that he had a flat somewhere along