Then suddenly the strange thing happened. It had happened before in the library at Laydon Manor, and it happened again now. The crowd, the noise, the jarring music faded. They were gone; there was no crowd; there was no sound. She and Laydon were alone in a great solitude and a great silence. And in this solitude and this silence she was so near to him that his pain was her pain, and his loneliness her loneliness.
Laydon, looking down, saw that she was as pale as her pearls. The music crashed into louder discords, shrieked, brayed, moaned, and stopped. As it ceased, Evelyn raised her eyes for a moment to Laydon’s face. A while ago Barbara had done the same thing—with a difference. Evelyn’s eyes, very dark, very blue, had the look of a child who has wakened suddenly out of a dream; they were full of an innocent trouble and bewilderment.
Without speaking she dropped her hand from his arm and left him. She walked slowly through the mirrored archway and passed out of his sight.
XXIV
“How do you do? So pleased not to have missed you after all.” She delivered this after the manner of stage duchesses, head well up, hand raised, voice pitched for Ponson’s ear.
Then, as the door shut, she let herself go in a chuckle.
“Lord, dear, I’m so glad you’ve come. The woman that let me in had me frozen stiff—made up her mind I was after the forks, I should think. The cheek of her! Not but what you have to be careful in London. Why, a lady I know very well—very nicely connected she is too—well, she had a young man come to take the electric meter, and next thing she knew, she’d lost a silver christening spoon she set a good deal of store by, and a watch and three rings off her dressing table. One of them was only a Mizpah, to be sure; but the others were real garnets and a single-stone diamond that her husband gave her for their silver wedding. So I don’t blame anyone for being careful.”
“Won’t you sit down?” said Evelyn.
“Thanks, dear, I will.”
Miss Palliser proceeded to make herself comfortable by pushing one of the large chairs nearer to the fire. She then sat down, crossed her legs—a proceeding which brought the edge of her black velvet skirt rather above the knee—, and loosened her fur.
“I expect you wonder why I’ve come,” she said with engaging frankness. “Well, dear, I wouldn’t have, but you’ve no idea the things that have been happening. I only wonder it hasn’t turned my hair, which would have been a pity though I say it myself, for it’s the best thing I’ve got left me barring my teeth—and all my own too, though that doesn’t go for so much as it used to. Oh Lord, I should hate to come to hair dye—or false teeth either, for the matter of that.” She showed an even row in the best professional manner “Nice, aren’t they? My dentist says they’re good for as long as I am.”
“Did you want to tell me something?” said Evelyn.
Miss Palliser stopped smiling and nodded vehemently.
“That’s right,” she said. “I should think I had got something to tell you. The extraordinary part is that it should come out now after all these years, just in the nick of time as you might say Funny how things happen, isn’t it?” She pushed her fur right back as she spoke, revealing some drabbled folds of purple tulle. “All the same, I don’t know that it’s funny for me. Fact is I can’t make up my mind about it. You see, dear, when you’ve been married as often as I have, you get sort of used to it. But then, on the other hand there’s no doubt that if you’re free, you’re free and if a gentleman gets in a temper and uses language, you can send him about his business, which it isn’t so easy to do if you’ve married him.”
“What has happened?”
Evelyn held her cold hands to the fire, and wished she found it easier to keep her head among these tangled irrelevances.
“You may well ask. Well, I said to my friend—you know, dear, the gentleman I told you about—whatever happens, I said, I’m bound to let Mrs Laydon know. So I came right away to find you. And you can’t say I’ve lost much time about it, when you think it was only yesterday I came across the papers.”
“What papers?” Evelyn looked up startled. What was coming? She shivered a little, and shrank from the thought of what this new development might be.
“Don’t look like that,” said Miss Palliser. “It’s nothing to hurt you. I’m the one to look, if anyone’s going to. But I made up my mind right away that I wouldn’t let it worry me, though I don’t say it didn’t give me a turn after all these years.”
“Miss Palliser, won’t you tell me what you mean?”
“I’m telling you as fast as I can. Now let me see—perhaps I’d better begin at the beginning. What d’you think?”
Evelyn nodded.
Pearl Palliser removed her fur altogether, and hung it over the back of her chair.
“Nice and hot you’ve got it in here, I must say.” She pulled at the battered strands of tulle round her neck. “Well now, where was I?”
“You were going to begin at the beginning.”
Miss Palliser laughed good humouredly.
“So I was. Well, you know the mess you found me in the other day, dear: I’d been having a good old rummage out. As I said to my friend ‘What’s the good of keeping a lot of stuff you don’t want, when a little extra in the way of cash wouldn’t come amiss?’ So I had a good turn out; and right at the bottom of my box I came across a lot of letters. Well, I threw ’em back. But yesterday I took ’em out again and had a good old read and a good old cry. Some of ’em were from boys I’d forgotten all about; and they made me feel a bit soppy, I can tell you.”
She produced a greyish handkerchief and dabbed her eyes, more in the manner of one who performs a rite than because there were any actual tears to dry.
“Well, right at the last, I came across the papers that the parson had sent me from Australia—the one that wrote and told me that Ted was really dead at last—Ted Edwards, you know, dear, my first husband that I told you about. There was the letter from the parson, and there were a lot of other letters and papers that I’d never bothered to read.”
Evelyn said, “Oh!”
Miss Palliser heaved a sigh.
“Don’t you be in such a hurry to be shocked,” she said. “Bothered wasn’t the right word. They were letters from other women, and papers about other women. And when I saw that, I thought it was just one of Ted’s dirtiest tricks to get the parson to send them off to me; and I wouldn’t read them. See, dear?”
“Yes, I see. I beg your pardon.”
“Granted,” said Miss Palliser with cheerful affability, “Well, I took them out and I thought I’d burn them. And whilst I was turning them over, a photograph dropped out; and when I picked it up, it was a nice little girl with ringlets and a look of Ted, and written on the back was ‘Little Nellie from your loving wife, Ellen, July 5th, ’OI.’ What d’you think of that?”
Evelyn hesitated.
“I don’t know—I’m afraid——”
Miss Palliser tossed her head.
“I married Ted Edwards in ’99. What was he doing with a loving wife Ellen and a little girl of five or so in 1901? You see what I mean, dear?”
Evelyn saw. She said “Oh” again rather faintly.
Pearl Palliser nodded.
“Well, after that I read the papers all right through. There were a couple of letters from his loving wife, Ellen; and a poor, miserable, downtrodden, meek-spirited creature he seemed to have got hold of, for it was nothing but she knew he’d got good reasons for not writing, and she’d go on loving him for ever and ever, no matter where he went or what he did. Lord!” said Miss Palliser, “I can tell you it made me sick. I’d never wished Ted back before, but I’d have liked to have had him there for half an hour or so yesterday so that I could tell him just what I thought of him. Well, there were the letters, and there was a marriage certificate.”
She stopped abruptly and gazed at Evelyn in an odd, frowning silence. When it had lasted about a minute, Evelyn said,
“Then you—then he——”
�
��I’d never been married to him at all. The certificate said that he’d married Lucy Ellen Love-grove at St. Barnabas’ Church, Chiswick, on the eighteenth of January, 1895—four years before he married me and never suggested anything but a registry.” Miss Palliser’s fine eyes were very angry. “There’s a sort of satisfaction in feeling that I wasn’t married to him; and I’m sure I’m heartily sorry for that poor Lucy Ellen creature that was, for a worse lot than Ted Edwards I’ve never met, and don’t wish to.” She dabbed at the bright, angry eyes, straightened her hat, which had fallen rakishly over one ear, and resumed her ordinary appearance of good nature. “Well, dear you see what a fix I’m in, of course.”
“A fix?”
“Yes, dear. Just you think a bit, and you’ll see it as plain as I did when my friend put it to me. I went round to him, of course—we’re engaged or as good as—and he pointed it out at once. Gentlemen have such a grasp of these things. He said as quick as quick, ‘But if you weren’t married to Ted Edwards, then you were married to Albert Laycock. You’re Mrs Albert Laycock,’ he said—‘that’s what you are. And, for all you know to the contrary, Albert Laycock’s still alive, waving ladies and shaving gents in Ontario.’ ‘Oh mercy, Henry, don’t!’ I said; and I sat down and had a real good cry.”
“You poor thing!”
“Well, I don’t know. At first I thought I was; and then I wasn’t so sure. I’d like to settle down and be comfortable. But there’s always the chance that I’d get bored, Henry being one of the respectable ones. Why, what do you think of his telling me not to call him Henry any more till we were sure I was a widow? ‘Mr Cowdray till the cable comes,’ were his last words; and I began to think to myself whether I could do with a man that was as proper as all that.”
“What cable?” asked Evelyn.
“Oh, I’ll say that for Henry, that he doesn’t spare expense. He cabled straight away to Albert’s brother to know if Albert was alive. It gives one a very uncertain feeling waiting to know whether you’re a widow or not.”
“It must be horrid.”
“But of course, dear, there’s always a cheerful side—and I’m not going to mope whichever way it turns out. If Albert’s living, well, he’s living; and maybe I’d like Ontario well enough. And if he isn’t living, I can just take Henry and settle down like I meant to.”
Evelyn had been struggling to order her thoughts. Talking to Pearl Palliser, or rather, being talked to by Pearl Palliser, was like trying to walk on a feather bed; there was so little foothold and such vast billowing masses of words.
“But if you really were married to Mr. Laycock——” she began.
Miss Palliser nodded triumphantly. Her hat slipped over the other ear and hung there unregarded whilst its enormous ornament winked in the fire-light.
“I knew you’d get there! It just knocked you off your balance at first like it did me. But I knew you’d tumble to it when you’d time to get your breath, so to speak. If I wasn’t married to Ted Edwards, then I was married to Albert Laycock; and that knocks out Jim Field and Jack Laydon—knocks ’em right off the map. For whether Albert’s alive or not at this moment, he was alive and doing well in 1916, a year after I married Jack, and a good bit more than a year after I married Jim Field; for I met a cousin of his in the street and she told me so. And I told her”—here Miss Palliser became vehement—“that it was a scandal and a shame if he was, for he ought to be out in the war like the other poor boys, or at the very least in hospital with an arm or a leg off. She didn’t like it, and we had words—a nasty, bony cat of a woman with a what-have-you-got-in-the-larder kind of an eye, something like this dear.”
Miss Palliser sat bolt upright, folded her hands on her knees, drew in her plump cheeks, pinched in her nose, and pursed her lips. She certainly produced a vivid, if momentary, impression of a sharp-nosed female with a gimlet eye. It was momentary because she broke suddenly into a rich, deep gurgle of laughter.
“Well, well, it takes all sorts to make a world, even if there’s some of the sorts you feel you could do without and welcome. Ah, dear, now that reminds me, that Nosey Abbott fellow—you said he wasn’t a friend of yours—he’s been bothering me again, and I can see he means to go on. He’s that sort.”
Evelyn nodded appreciatively.
“Yes, he is.”
“Well, dear, sooner or later he’ll bother me into doing what he wants. You see, it’s this way—I’m one of those that can’t keep on saying no. It’s always gone against me, and I don’t suppose I shall get the better of it now. I can start off all right; and I said to him the very first time he came, ‘Look here, you Mr. Abbott, or whatever your name is, it’s not a bit of good your coming here and worrying me, because I don’t know who he is, and if I did, I’m not going to say. And anyhow I don’t see it’s any business of yours. And I won’t sign any papers, not if you were the King.’ There! I couldn’t have put it any plainer than that, could I?”
Evelyn laughed.
“No, you couldn’t.”
It was a relief to be able to laugh.
Miss Palliser sighed, but with undiminished cheerfulness of aspect.
“Sounds all right, doesn’t it? But I can’t keep it up. That’s the bother with me. Next time he came with his ‘Don’t you think this, and don’t you think that, and can’t you remember about the other?’ he got me to say that as like as not Laydon was Jim Field. And for all I know, he’ll be back again in a day or two and talk my head off, and I shall come round and find I’ve put my name to something.”
“Oh, you mustn’t—you wouldn’t do that!”
“Well, I wouldn’t unless he bothered me into it. But I might if he did.” Miss Palliser rose and picked up her fur. “Well, so long, dear—and if anything more turns up, I’ll let you know.”
XXV
Sir Henry Prothero came in as Evelyn was finishing tea. Miss Palliser had refused to stay, though obviously much gratified at being pressed to do so. It would have given her a good deal of pleasure to recline gracefully in one of Evelyn’s arm-chairs and watch the supercilious Ponson bring in the tea; but she felt herself obliged to forgo this pleasure.
“Fact is,” she explained, “Henry’s waiting. He said he’d take a turn and come back, and I expect”—she straightened her hat and giggled—“I expect his temper will be a bit the worse for wear as it is.”
Sir Henry let himself down rather wearily into a chair, took a cup of tea with a “Thank you, thank you, my dear,” stirred it, sipped from it, and then began to sniff.
“Evelyn, what an extraordinary—er—scent!”
“Isn’t it awful?” said Evelyn. “It’s like a sort of nightmare compound of all the cheap scents I used to love when I was a child. I remember one of the housemaids giving me a bottle of Cherry Blossom, and how furious old Nanna was. Could you bear it if I opened the window for a moment?”
She didn’t wish to tell Uncle Henry about Pearl Palliser’s visit. As she stood by the open window holding back the curtain, she plunged into talk of the Mannings, and to her relief, his attention was diverted.
“Lacy seems very pleased about the flat you’ve been able to get for them. She says it sounds absolutely ‘It.’ By the way, have you heard from her? She said she was writing, but she usually says that at least three times before she gets any farther.”
“No, she hasn’t written.”
“Or Monkey? My dear, I think that window might be shut now.”
She shut it and came back to the fire.
“No, I haven’t heard from Monkey. He doesn’t write unless he’s got something to say.”
Sir Henry ran his hand over his chin.
“I heard from him this morning,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Yes. He’d just seen the man they sent down to make inquiries about that identity disc.”
“Oh!” Evelyn drew in her breath very sharply. She looked, but did not speak.
Sir Henry raised his hand and let it fall again.
“I
t’s a case of spurlos versenkt—not a trace of it, not a single trace. And the extraordinary thing is that not only can he not trace the disc itself, but he can’t trace anyone who ever saw the thing or heard of anyone else seeing it.”
“Oh,” said Evelyn. The breath that carried the sound was so soft that Sir Henry wondered whether he had really detected a tone of relief.
He said, “A little more tea, my dear—it’s one of the coldest days I can remember.” Then when he had taken his cup again he harked back: “It’s a most extraordinary thing, because Anna Blum particularly says in her deposition that she left the identity disc lying on the top of the clothes by the waterfall. Well, the man—his name’s Müller, by the way, and he’s half German—Müller says he interviewed and cross-examined six people who saw and handled the clothes, and they all swear positively that there was no identity disc. The local authorities gave him every facility. The records speak of a British officer, name unknown; and there is a rough wooden cross on the grave with a similar inscription. It appears that the clothes were found, in the first instance, by two boys of twelve and thirteen. They swear that they didn’t touch them; they said they were very frightened and ran away. The father of one of them, the grandfather and uncle of the other, and a woman who seems to be the village busybody, returned with the boys to the waterfall. They all swear that the clothes were lying in a pile, and that there was no disc. Now, my dear, we’ve all been building very much on the belief that the disc would be recovered. It would naturally have settled the question of identity once and for all. Well, it hasn’t been recovered.”
Sir Henry put down his cup and leaned forward, speaking very earnestly.
The Amazing Chance Page 18
