The Woman in Black

by E. C. Bentley

  CHAPTER XI

  EVIL DAYS

  "I am returning the check you sent for what I did on the Mandersoncase," Trent wrote to Sir James Molloy from Munich, whither he had goneimmediately after handing in at the _Record_ office a brief despatchbringing his work on the case to an unexciting close. "What I sent youwasn't worth one-tenth of the amount; but I should have no scruple aboutpocketing it, if I hadn't taken a fancy--never mind why--not to touchany money at all for this business. I should like you, if there is noobjection, to pay for the stuff at your ordinary space-rate, and handthe money to some charity which does not devote itself to bullyingpeople, if you know of any such. I have come to this place to see someold friends and arrange my ideas, and the idea that comes out upper-mostis that for a little while I want some employment with activity in it. Ifind I can't paint at all; I couldn't paint a fence. Will you try me asyour Own Correspondent somewhere? If you can find me a good adventure Iwill send you good accounts. After that I could settle down and work."

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

  He discovered in himself an unhappy pride at the lasting force of thisinfatuation. It interested him as a phenomenon; it amazed andenlightened him. Such a thing had not visited him before; it confirmedso 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 thisworld of emotion. About his knowledge, let it be enough to say that whathe had learned had come unpursued and unpurchased, and was withoutintolerable memories; broken to the realities of sex, he was stilltroubled by its inscrutable history; he went through life full of astrange respect for certain feminine weakness and a very simple terrorof certain feminine strength. He had held to a rather lukewarm faiththat something remained in him to be called forth, and that the voicethat should call would be heard in its own time, if ever, and notthrough any seeking.

  But he had not thought of the possibility that, if this proved true someday, the truth might come in a sinister shape. The two things that hadtaken him utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards MabelManderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strengthand its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been muchdisposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited passion as a generousboyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong, and he was livingbitterly in the knowledge.

  Before the eye of his fancy the woman always came just as she was whenhe had first had sight of her, with the gesture which he had surprisedas he walked past unseen on the edge of the cliff; that great gesture ofpassionate joy in her new liberty which had told him more plainly thanspeech that her widowhood was a release from torment, and had confirmedwith terrible force the suspicion, active in his mind before, that itwas her passport to happiness with a man whom she loved. He could notwith certainty name to himself the moment when he had first suspectedthat it might be so. The seed of the thought must have been sown, hebelieved, at his first meeting with Marlowe; his mind would have notedautomatically that such evident strength and grace, with the sort oflooks and manners that the tall young man possessed, might go far withany woman of unfixed affections. And the connection of this with whatMr. Cupples had told him of the Mandersons' married life must haveformed itself in the unconscious depths of his mind. Certainly it hadpresented itself as an already established thing when he began, aftersatisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about forthe motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had soughtfor another, turning his back upon that grim thought, thatMarlowe--obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps tomaddening truths about the wife's unhappiness--had taken a leaf, theguiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations atthe time, in all his broodings on the matter afterwards, he had beenable to discover nothing else that could prompt Marlowe to such adeed--nothing but that temptation, the whole strength of which he couldnot know, but which if it had existed must have pressed urgently upon abold spirit in which scruple had been somehow paralyzed. If he couldtrust his senses at all, the young man was neither insane nor by natureevil. But that could not clear him. Murder for a woman's sake, hethought, was not a rare crime, Heaven knew! If the modern feebleness ofimpulse in the comfortable classes, and their respect for the modernapparatus of detection, had made it rare among them, it was yet far fromimpossible; it only needed a man of equal daring and intelligence, hissoul drugged with the vapors of an intoxicating intrigue, to plan andperform such a deed.

  A thousand times, with a heart full of anguish, he had sought to reasonaway the dread that Mabel Manderson had known too much of what had beenintended against her husband's life. That she knew all the truth afterthe thing was done, he could not doubt; her unforgettable collapse inhis presence when the question about Marlowe was suddenly and bluntlyput had swept away his last hope that there was no love between thepair, 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 Marlowesince. She had destroyed his manuscript, then, and taken him at his wordto keep the secret that threatened her lover's life.

  But it was the monstrous thought that she might have known murder wasbrewing, and guiltily kept silence, that haunted Trent's mind. She mighthave suspected, have guessed something; was it conceivable that she wasaware of the whole plot, that she connived? He could never forget thathis first suspicion of Marlowe's motive in the crime had been roused bythe 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 theidea of her equal guilt and her cooeperation. He had figured to himselfsome passionate _hysterique_, merciless as a tiger in her hate and herlove, a zealous abettor, perhaps even the ruling spirit in the crime.

  Then he had seen her, had spoken with her, had helped her in herweakness; and such suspicions, since their first meeting, had seemed thevilest of infamy. He had seen her eyes and her mouth; he had breathedthe woman's atmosphere. Trent was one of those who fancy they can scenttrue wickedness in the air. In her presence he had felt an inwardcertainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing againstthis, that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the cliff, tothe sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her years ofstarved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had turned toMarlowe in her destitution he believed; that she had any knowledge ofhis deadly purpose he did not believe.

  And yet, morning and evening, the sickening doubts returned, and herecalled again that it was almost in her very presence that Marlowe hadmade his preparations in the bedroom of the murdered man, that it wasfrom 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? Orhad he, as Trent thought more likely, still played his part with herthen, and stolen off while she slept? He did not think she had known ofthe masquerade when she gave evidence at the inquest; it read likehonest evidence. Or--the question would never be silenced, though hescorned it--had she lain expecting the footstep in the room and thewhisper that should tell her it was done? Among the foul possibilitiesof human nature, was it possible that black ruthlessness and blackdeceit as well were hidden behind that good and straight and gentleseeming?

  These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone.

  * * * * *

  T
rent served Sir James, well earning his pay, for six months, and thenreturned to Paris, where he went to work again with a better heart. Hispowers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than hehad expected among a tribe of strangely-assorted friends, French,English and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen,hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men and others. His oldfaculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as inhis student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyedagain the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman'sfamily. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of _les jeunes_, andfound them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and lifeas the departed _jeunes_ of ten years before had been.

  One morning in June, as he descended the slope of the Rue des Martyrs,he saw approaching a figure that he remembered. He glanced quicklyround, for the thought of meeting Mr. Bunner again was unacceptable. Forsome time he had recognized that his wound was healing under the spellof creative work; he thought less often of the woman he loved, and withless pain. He would not have the memory of those three days re-opened.

  But the straight and narrow thoroughfare offered no refuge, and theAmerican 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 thencontributing a question or remark. Besides liking his companion, heenjoyed his conversation for its own sake.

  Mr. Bunner was, it appeared, resident in Paris as the chief Continentalagent of the Manderson firm, and fully satisfied with his position andprospects. He discoursed on these for some twenty minutes. This subjectat length exhausted, he went on to tell Trent, who confessed that he hadbeen away from England for a year, that Marlowe had shortly after thedeath of Manderson entered his father's business, which was now again ina flourishing state, and had already come to be virtually in control ofit. They had kept up their intimacy, and were even now planning aholiday for the summer. Mr. Bunner spoke with generous admiration of hisfriend's talent for affairs. "Jack Marlowe has a natural big head," hedeclared, "and if he had more experience, I wouldn't want to have him upagainst me. He would put a crimp in me every time."

  As the American's talk flowed on, Trent listened with growing surpriseand anxiety. It became more and more plain that something was very wrongin his theory of the situation; there was no mention of its centralfigure. Presently Mr. Bunner mentioned that Marlowe was engaged to bemarried to an Irish girl, whose charms he celebrated with nativeenthusiasm.

  Trent clasped his hands savagely together beneath the table. What couldhave happened? His ideas were sliding and shifting. At last he forcedhimself to put a direct question.

  Mr. Bunner was not very fully informed. He knew that Mrs. Manderson hadleft England immediately after the settlement of her husband's affairs,and had lived for some time in Italy. She had returned not long ago toLondon, where she had decided not to live in the house in Mayfair, andhad bought a smaller one in the Hampstead neighborhood; also, heunderstood, one somewhere in the country. She was said to go but littleinto society. "And all the good hard dollars just waiting for someone tospraddle them around!" said Mr. Bunner with a note of pathos in hisvoice. "Why, she has money to burn--money to feed to the birds--andnothing doing! The old man left her more than half his wad. And think ofthe figure she might make in the world! She is beautiful, and she is thebest woman I ever met, too. But she couldn't ever seem to get the habitof spending money the way it ought to be spent."

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

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

  Such thoughts came, and went; and below them all strained the fibers ofan unseen cord that dragged mercilessly at his heart, and that he cursedbitterly in the moments when he could not deny to himself that it wasthere.... The folly, the useless, pitiable folly of it!

  In twenty-four hours his feeble roots in Paris had been torn out. He waslooking over a leaden sea at the shining fortress-wall of the Dovercliffs.

  * * * * *

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

  He had decided that he must first see Mr. Cupples, who would be in aposition to tell him much more than the American knew. But Mr. Cuppleswas away on his travels, not expected to come back for a month; andTrent had no reasonable excuse for hastening his return. Marlowe hewould not confront until he had tried at least to reconnoiter theposition. He constrained himself not to commit the crowning folly ofseeking 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 itsneighborhood brought the blood to his face.

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

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

  So he went alone each evening, passing as quickly as he might throughthe people in the vestibule; and each evening he came away knowing thatshe had not been in the house. It was a habit that yielded him a sort ofsatisfaction along with the guilty excitement of his search; for he tooloved music, and nothing gave him so much peace while its magic endured.

  * * * * *

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

  It was she: so much more radiant in the absence of grief and anxiety, inthe fact that she was smiling, and in the allurement of evening dress,that he could not speak. She, too, breathed a little quickly, and therewas 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 numberof the box.