so well as to want no conversation with him. A completely unashamed and unscrupulous egotist is not as a rule the best of company, even if one has not, as Trent had, a personal reason for objecting to his existence. There was, too, always the strong possibility that Eugene Wetherill would not try to be the best of company. The habits of that brilliant man of letters included a tendency to be gratuitously offensive, and Trent had had more than one unpleasant encounter with him before.
Turning his head as he reached the stairway, Wetherill caught sight of Trent and raised a hand in recognition. ‘You’re looking damnably serious,’ he observed with a wolfish grin. ‘It isn’t the sight of me, I hope, that has banished the winning smile. Forget your trouble, dear friend. All may yet be well. Forget our little disagreements in the past. Drown your sorrow with me at the bar—it’s astonishing what a lot can be drowned in one small absinthe cocktail.’
‘Thanks, but I’ve got to go,’ Trent said. He added, ‘You don’t look as if you had anything much to drown. If I look serious, you look quite pleased.’
‘So I am.’ Wetherill laughed as he removed his broad-brimmed black hat and white scarf so that it could be seen he was in evening dress beneath his overcoat. ‘Much pleased. Nothing to drown, as you remark with that infallible discernment of yours; so I shall have that drink purely as a matter of principle—not with any sordid utilitarian purpose. Pleased! I should think I am pleased. I did a good stroke of business yesterday, dear friend, and I haven’t got over it yet.’ He paused a moment, as if recollecting himself; then he went on: ‘Whenever that happens, I have an unreasonable impulse to forgive the world for being what it is, and mankind for being what they are.’
‘Including Eugene Wetherill, I hope,’ Trent suggested sympathetically. ‘You ought not to be too hard on yourself, you know—it’s a fatal tendency. Fight it. Don’t let it master you. I’ve got to tear myself away now, but remember my words.’ He hurried through the doorway and down the greasy pavement in the direction of Piccadilly.
Wetherill, he thought, was certainly in a state of high satisfaction about something. The expression of contempt which he usually wore was probably, like all the rest of his external appearance, a carefully studied effect; but this evening it had yielded place to a look of genuine pleasure, and Trent wondered what might be the cause of it. Anything that pleased Wetherill would be quite likely to have a very different effect upon more normal minds; and Trent happened to know—as a good many people, unfortunately, knew—of one stroke of business done by Wetherill with which few men would have cared to soil their hands. But that had been months ago; this was evidently something recent, and it was curious that Wetherill had plainly hesitated to say what it was. He was anything but secretive as a rule about his own affairs, even the most discreditable; he liked posing as a paragon of immorality. It was difficult to reckon with a man who boasted of having destroyed his own self-respect.
A massive policeman loomed up at the corner of Charles Street.
‘Not a nice night, Officer,’ Trent remarked.
‘That it isn’t, sir,’ rumbled the constable in a tone suggesting that the grimy mist had found its way beneath his heavy water-proofs and permeated all his being. ‘There’s some that seem to enjoy it, though. See those runners coming up the other side of the way? Gawd! Sooner them than me. Funny amusement, isn’t it, sir, on a night like this?’
‘Splendid for them, really,’ Trent said. ‘When they’ve had a rub down and a change they’ll be as happy as so many kings of the Persians. It is youth, Officer—youth footing swift to the dawn, or to the Polytechnic, or somewhere delightful. We ought to envy them.’
Pushing on past the scattered procession of bedraggled lads in shorts and singlets who were jogging along in twos and threes at the edge of the pavement, Trent found the cab-rank he sought.
As he sat in the taxi, Trent’s thoughts turned back to the interview with old James Randolph which had preceded his dinner at the Cactus Club. It had been, he reflected, shorter than he had anticipated; shorter and even more unpleasant. Nobody could be expected to enjoy the discovery that one of his secrets, and a decidedly humiliating one at that, was shared by another person not at all well disposed towards him. Still, Randolph’s uncontrollable rage had seemed rather excessive for the occasion; he stood, after all, to lose nothing in either purse or repute so long as he behaved himself. And as to that there could be no doubt. Trent’s threat of exposure had obviously been quite effective. Whether Randolph’s denials of any dishonourable purpose were sincere or not, the man was certainly frightened now, and would conduct himself accordingly. Any scandal about the Tiara of Megabyzus would be a deadly blow to the old man’s inflated self-esteem. In short, Aunt Judith could be fully reassured before she left. If she were to do so with any remaining uneasiness about Eunice, it would spoil the trip to which she had looked forward so eagerly.
All his life Trent had been strongly attached to his aunt, that unusual old lady. This was a great moment in the life of Miss Judith Yates. She was leaving England for the first time in nearly forty years. Brought up in the twilight of the Victorian era, she had seen in her youth not a little of the world abroad; but the time had come when an over-confident brother had flung away most of the family fortune in some concern floated by a yet more hopeful financier. Thenceforward she had lived in the country on very small means, uncomplaining—indeed, singularly happy. She kept in touch with a wide circle of friends, many of them moving in the midst of affairs; she heard all that was made public, and a good deal that was not, of the world’s events, and the seamy side of high life and politics was pretty well known to her. Her prim appearance masked an exceedingly active, well-furnished and seasoned mind. Sometimes, to her amusement, modern young women imagined that they had shocked her; actually, Miss Yates in her time had contemplated with calm breaches of convention more startling than anything coming within their philosophy. She asked only that there should be something about the trespass that was worth considering; it was at pettiness and worthlessness that she drew the line. The closest bond of affection in her life, indeed, was a friendship, quite casually begun, with Eunice Faviell, the most brilliant of the younger generation of actresses, whose private history centred in a liaison that was no secret to the world she lived in.
A few months earlier she had come into a legacy, and had decided at once to see something, while health remained to her, of the European world again. ‘I mean,’ she had told Trent, ‘to travel in luxury, and to go on travelling until the money is spent.’ The journey now in prospect was a visit to friends in Rome, and she had declared herself as excited as when she went to her first dance, ready to savour every moment and every incident …
It was by a chance that she was taking the Dieppe route. She had meant to enjoy the comforts of the shorter crossing; but as it happened, a commission that she had given to her nephew Philip could not be carried out until the evening of her day of departure. So, with memories of having been a good sailor, she had decided to take the night service.
It was this errand that had taken Trent to his acrimonious interview with James Randolph; and he was reviewing now, as the taxi took him to Victoria, the grounds of his conviction that the job had been well and truly done. Aunt Judith, he knew, had eyes of the sharpest, and would guess only too readily that all was not well if he showed any sign of uncertainty.
Arrived at the terminus, with a little more margin of time than he had planned, he proceeded to the boat-train platform, stopping by the way to make a purchase at the flower-shop within the precincts. To his surprise, Aunt Judith was not to be seen. She had, of course, her place reserved; but Trent, knowing well her habits of mind, and knowing too that it was the first time in her life that she would be travelling in a first-class Pullman, had assumed that the longer she took over the preliminaries the greater her pleasure would be.
As he turned back, however, from his search for a non-existent Pullman in the forward end of the train, he saw his aunt supervising the transfer of hand luggage to a seat in a rearward section. She must have followed close upon his footsteps through the barrier. As he approached, she was conferring with the Pullman attendant, and that occupational optimist was giving a favourable view of the prospect for the Channel crossing. Trent presented his tribute of exuberant carnations.
‘Oh! That is kind