It was not for long.
She sat up, straightening herself and leaning back. Then she said,
“I don’t think you love me very much. I just want to say that there wouldn’t be a terrible lot for your pride to swallow after all. Mr. Maudsley says I can’t give Mirrie any of the capital, but I can make her an allowance of five hundred a year if I like, so that is what I shall do. I don’t quite know how much there will be left by the time all the duties are paid, and Cousin Anna’s legacy. Mr. Maudsley doesn’t know yet, but he says I shall have to pay the income tax on Mirrie’s allowance. Goodbye, Anthony.”
She had spoken in a soft, tired voice and without any expression. On the last word she turned the handle of the door and stepped out into the road. Since he had been trying not to look at her, he was not really aware of what she was doing until it had been done and he saw her walking away from him into the darkness.
Anger. An absolute fury of anger putting paid to the struggle in his mind. She would walk out on him, would she? Walk three lonely miles on the Lenton road in thin evening shoes rather than sit by him another moment and let him drive her home! Didn’t she know how impossible it was for either of them to leave the other? He had wrenched mind and body to do it, only to find how damned impossible it was. He was out of the car, banging the door behind him and catching her up before she had gone a dozen yards.
Georgina heard him come. She went on walking, neither quickening her step nor slowing down. If she had been quite alone she would have walked like that, without hurry and without delay. He took her by the arm and she did not turn her head.
“Come back and get into the car!”
Her heart leapt at the fury of his tone. If this was to be a battlefield, she could fight and lose, or fight and win. It was being alone in a cold wilderness with no voice nor any that answered which had brought her to the breaking-point. She wasn’t afraid of Anthony when he was angry. She wasn’t afraid of anything as long as he was there-not half a universe away in some cold hell of his own making.
“Did you hear what I said? Come back at once!”
“Thank you, I would rather walk.”
Her tone made him the merest stranger.
“ Georgina, are you mad?”
“I don’t know. Would it be anything to do with you if I was?”
He experienced a horrifying resurgence of the emotions of primitive man. There was nothing but a little matter of perhaps half a million centuries between him and the male creature who knocked his woman over the head with a lump of stone and dragged her senseless to their cave. A gratifying experience if there ever was one! But the centuries had done their work. He merely stopped her where she stood and made her face him with a bruising grip upon either arm.
“Don’t be such a damned fool!”
She said in a whispering voice,
“You may go away from me, but I mustn’t go away from you?”
“You mustn’t ever go away from me! I can’t bear it! Georgina, I can’t!”
She began suddenly to laugh very softly.
“Darling, you don’t have to. You don’t really, you know. Not unless you want to.”
He put his head down on her shoulder, and they stood like that for a long time until the headlights of an oncoming car picked them up and dazzled them out of their dream.
Chapter XLIV
JOURNEYS END in lovers’ meetings. Anthony and Georgina came in with so radiant an air that no one could have mistaken them for anything else. Mrs. Fabian was delighted.
“And so would dear Jonathan be, I am sure. And of course perhaps he is-we don’t know, do we? But he was so fond of Anthony, and I am sure he would have been quite delighted. Because so many girls get engaged to someone they have only known for a few weeks, if that, and then perhaps it doesn’t turn out at all well, and you can’t really be surprised. Whereas, when you have known each other practically since one of you was in her cradle, you do feel that you know what to expect. I remember old Mrs. Warren telling me her grandmother had a rhyme about it-
‘Marry a stranger,
Marry for danger.
Marry at home,
No ill will come.’ ”
Johnny blew her a kiss.
“Pause, darling, or you’ll be putting your foot in it. Now you’ll have to think up a nice quotation for Mirrie and me.”
Mrs. Fabian smiled in her most amiable manner and replied that for the moment all she could call to mind was a Scottish song which began-at least she thought that was how it began-
‘Bonnie wee thing, cannie wee thing,
Lovely wee thing, wert thou mine,
I would wear thee in my bosom
Lest my jewel I should tine.’
“And I believe the last word means lose. So it is really very good advice for you, my dear boy, because a young girl does need quite a lot of looking after, especially if she happens to be a very pretty one.” She beamed upon Mirrie and continued. “It must be at least forty years since I heard anyone sing that song. My mother had cousins in Scotland, and one of them had a very good tenor voice. I remember his coming to stay with us and singing a number of these Scottish songs until my father was quite put out and wanted to know whether we couldn’t have an English air for a change. It was most embarrassing, because he used the expression ‘Barbarian music only fitted for the bagpipes,’ and Cousin Alec wasn’t at all pleased and wouldn’t sing again. It really was very uncomfortable.”
Frank Abbott came in to see Miss Silver next morning. He found her pledged to come and stay at Abbottsleigh for a double wedding in June.
“I am returning to town this afternoon, but Georgina is most insistent that I should come down again for the wedding.”
He looked at her with a gleam of malice in his eye.
“Extraordinary the attraction these morbid occasions have for what is called the gentler sex. In the days of public executions I believe that quite three quarters of the assembled crowds were women.”
Miss Silver was putting the finishing touches to the white baby shawl. They included a finely crocheted border. She looked across it at Frank and smiled.
“Then you will not be attending the wedding?”
“Well, as a matter of fact Anthony seems to want me to be his best man, and since the case will be closed there isn’t really any reason why I should refuse.”
“None at all. It will be pleasant to meet you on a purely social occasion.”
He leaned back in his chair.
“I think we may all be thankful to be so well out of the affair. There were some nasty moments, and if Sid Turner hadn’t managed to get himself killed in that smash with the Hexton bus, we should still have the trial hanging over us. Mirrie might have been given a nasty time in the box by the sort of chap Sid’s solicitor would have put up for the defence, but as it is, the whole thing can just go down the drain and be forgotten. What I should like to ask you is, how did you tumble to that fingerprint business being a red herring, and when?”
Miss Silver continued to crochet the frail shells which bordered the shawl.
“It is always difficult to say at what moment the faint suggestion of a possibility becomes something more definite. Whereas you had been actually present when Jonathan Field related the supposed history of a murderer’s fingerprint, it only reached me at second hand and without the dramatic emphasis with which he no doubt contrived to invest it.”
Frank laughed.
“Oh, he made it convincing enough, the old blighter! You should have seen us! We were fairly lapping it up! He was a good showman, and he put on a first-class act, I’ll give him that.”
“To my mind the whole thing appeared to be a little too dramatic. It was, of course, necessary to give it the most scrupulous attention, and one or two points presented themselves. According to this story of Mr. Field’s after getting the murderer’s fingerprint on his cigarette-case a second bomb came down in the neighbourhood and he lost consciousness. When he came to he found himself in hospital with a broken leg. As I said before, I found it difficult to believe that any fingerprint would have survived the handling which the contents of his pockets must have received. I also doubted very much whether the existence of a single print with no more to authenticate it than the hearsay evidence of a man who had been taken unconscious out of a heap of ruins in which no trace of any other person had been found could possibly be supposed to carry sufficient weight to supply the motive for a murder.”