It was twelve o'clock when he put down his pen and rubbed his cramped hands. Throwing up the window to let out the smoke, he munched a biscuit and meditated; and then his face brightened, and his thoughts went unresistingly toward Leslie Maughan. Then through the open window he heard unsteady steps coming along the paved sidewalk. They paused before the door of the house; there was a rattle of the key. When Mrs. Inglethorne went out at night, she usually returned with that same unsteady footstep. Presently the door slammed, and her muttering came up to him from the passage.
Usually she did not go out nights, but stayed at home to receive the curious callers who came at odd moments. They always knocked once with the knocker and once with the flat of their hands, and generally they carried a parcel or package, big or small. There was a whispered colloquy in the passage, the chink of money, or, more rarely, the rustle of treasury notes, and they went out again—without their parcels. This, Peter had seen and had not seen. Prison had taught him the wisdom of blindness, and he had not spoken to Mrs. Inglethorne of the furtive men and women who came slinking down Severall Street at those hours when the police patrol was well out of the way.
Leslie Maughan! He smiled a little at the thought of her, more at his own madness. What barriers separated them—barriers more real, more invincible, than the difference between Scotland Yard and Dartmoor Prison! It was worse than madness to think about her!
The scream that brought him to his feet was shrill and charged with fear and mortal agony. In two strides he was at the door and had pulled it wide open.
Now he heard it plainly—the whistle and fall of a whip, the terrified, frantic cries for mercy. He ran down the stairs in the dark and tapped at Mrs. Inglethorne's door. From inside the room came a deep, heartbreaking sound of sobbing.
"Who's that?" asked Mrs. Inglethorne defiantly. "Go away and mind your own business!"
"Open the door, or I'll break it open!" cried Peter in a cold fury.
"I'll send for the police if you interfere with me!" yelled the woman.
His answer was to throw his weight against the flimsy door. The catch broke with a snap, and he was in the foul bedroom. Elizabeth lay cowering on a filthy camp bed, clad only in a coarse nightdress. Her head was pillowed in the crook of her arm, and convulsive sobs shook the thin shoulders. Her face aflame, Mrs. Inglethorne stood at the foot of a big brass bedstead, one hand holding herself steady, the other grasping an old dog whip.
"I'll learn her to go talking about me!" she said thickly. "After all I've done for her!"
There was another child there, a girl who was apparently the same age as Elizabeth. She, however, enjoyed the luxury of Mrs. Inglethorne's ample bed and was so used to this exhibition of the woman's wrath that she was asleep.
"Where is your coat, Elizabeth?" asked Peter gently.
The child looked up, her eyes swollen, her face red, and cast one fearful glance at her mother.
"Watcher goin' to do?" asked Mrs. Inglethorne unsteadily.
"She will sleep in my room for the night," replied Peter. "To-morrow I will make other arrangements for her, and if you give any trouble I shall send for the police."
Mrs. Inglethorne was amused in her way.
"Send for the police!" she scoffed. "I like that! An old lag sending for the police! And they'll come, won't they?"
"I think so," said Peter quietly. "They will come, if only to discover why you never use the back room upstairs as a bedroom, why it is always kept locked, except after your visitors' calls."
The smile died from the woman's face.
"As far as I'm concerned," Peter went on, "you can 'fence' till the cows come home! But I'm not going to have you beating this child while I'm in the house. And when I'm out of it, and out of it for good, I'll see that she is well looked after!"
The woman's face was mottled with fear.
"Fence!" she spluttered. "I don't know what you mean by that low word! If you mean I receive stolen property, then you're a liar!"
"Let me call the police and settle the matter," said Peter.
The threat sobered her.
"I don't want any police in my house. The kid annoyed me, and it's a hard thing if a mother can't cane her own children without being interfered with. If she wants to sleep upstairs, she can, but she'd be better off down here, Mr. Dawlish. You haven't got any accommodation for a little gel."
This was true.
"All right, get into bed, Elizabeth." He covered her up with the pitifully thin bedclothes, and without apology took Mrs. Inglethorne's heavy coat that lay over the bed rail and put it on top. "Sleep well," he said, and patted her cheek.
She was safe for the night. What happened in the morning depended entirely on the view which Leslie Maughan took of a scheme that was beginning to take definite shape.
Mrs. Inglethorne was a fence, a buyer of stolen property. He had lived too long in association with the worst criminals of England to have any doubt upon the point, and, squinting through the keyhole one day in his curiosity, he had seen enough to remove the last remnants of doubt that remained.
He went to bed, determined to interview Leslie at the earliest opportunity, and it was not only on Elizabeth's account that the thought pleased him.
When he arrived at the flat in Charing Cross Rnext morning, Lucretia did not recognize him, and scowled fearfully at the suggestion that he should be admitted. She looked at his shabby attire and shook her head.
"It's no good your trying to see Miss Maughan. You'd better call on her at Scotland Yard. She's very busy now."
"Who is it, Lucretia?"
Leslie was leaning over the rails of the landing; she could not see the visitor, but she could hear the uncompromising note in Lucretia's voice.
"A young man wants to see you, miss. What's your name again? Dawlish."
"Oh, is that you, Peter Dawlish? Come up, will you?"
Peter ran up the stairs, followed by the muttered protests of the maid.
"You're in time for breakfast. How are the envelopes going?"
"They're melting!" he said.
He was conscious of a certain indefinable change in her tone. It was not that she was more serious, but there seemed some listlessness about her, as though she were tired. It was almost an effort to talk. She looked weary, he saw, when they passed from the dark landing, and he commented on this.
"I've been up half the night," she said, "wandering about in a very cold garden, watching an elderly lady searching the ground with an electric lamp. That sounds mysterious, doesn't it?"
She pointed to a chair and Peter sat down.
"It sounds almost romantic. Where was this?"
"At Wimbledon." She waved the matter out of discussion. "Well," she asked, "what brings you to West Central London at this unholy hour?"
Her grave eyes were fixed on his; there was something of reproach in them, something of hurt. He was puzzled; he felt that he had fallen short in her estimation, that she was disappointed with him for some reason. So strong was this impression that he grew uncomfortable under her gaze, and as though she were aware of this, she dropped her eyes to the table and began slowly to stir her coffee.
"I've come on a fool errand, with a wild and impossible suggestion."
And then he told her of what had happened overnight, of the merciless flogging which Mrs. Inglethorne had administered.
"The woman is a fence," he said, "not in a very big way. I think she specializes in furs and silk lengths."
She knew something of the genus fence, but he told her what he had learned in Dartmoor, of fences who visited the scene of prospective robberies and priced the loot, practically paying for it, before it was stolen; of skillful men and women who would stand outside a small jeweller's shop and with one comprehensive glance assess the thieving value of the whole. He told her of "dead" stores—stores which were locked up at night, where nobody lived on the premises, and of "live" stores, where there was either a watchman or a proprietor and his family sleeping on the floors above.
"I am not reporting this officially—I mean the fence part of it—but the child is ill-used. The other little kids get a whacking now and again, but I should think she gets hers all the time."
"What do you wish me to do?" she asked, looking up at him.
"I don't know." He had a sense of awkwardness. "I had a wild idea that possibly you might be able to find—to do something with her."
"You mean take charge of her?"
She was smiling at him.
"Yes, I suppose I did mean that," he said after a second's thought. "It sounds fantastic and impossible now, but Elizabeth has got a grip on me. Probably it is my own rather unhappy childhood which is responding to her wretchedness."
She laughed.
"I'll make your mind easy, at any rate," she said. "I had already considered the possibility. In fact, I discussed the matter with Lucretia last night before I went out to dinner, and Lucretia was wildly enthusiastic. I have a spare room here; she could go to the Catholic school in Leicester Square. The only point is that we get Mrs. Inglethorne's consent."
"She had better," he said grimly, and her lips twitched.
"Really, you're almost ferocious when you're taking up the causes of other people," she said. "I wish you'd be a little energetic in your own."
"Aren't I?"
She shook her head.
"Not very," she answered, in her quiet way. "Why don't you see your mother?"
He grinned.
"She saved me the trouble and came last night."
"To Severall Street?" she asked in astonishment, and when he nodded: "Was it—a pleasant—encounter?"
"A normally strained interview," he answered cheerfully. "She endeavoured to instill in me a passion for agriculture, and Canadian agriculture at that. I love Canada. You can't even take a week-end trip into Canada without loving it. But the prospect of milking cows in Saskatchewan didn't appeal."
"She wanted you to go abr Why?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I suppose she rather feels there isn't room enough for both of us in London."
She thought the matter over for a minute.
"Didn't your father leave you any money?"
"He cut me off without the proverbial shilling."
The lightness of his tone, she suspected, was assumed. Coldwell had told her how much Peter had loved his father.
"He altered his will at the eleventh hour—the day before I was sentenced—and left me nothing. Poor old dear! I haven't the slightest grudge. How could I? He was the best father that ever lived."
She had said she rarely smoked; she took a cigarette from her bag now and lit it without looking at him. Indeed, for the next four minutes, as he talked about his envelope addressing and his future, it seemed that she was more interested in the blue vapour that floated from the end of her cigarette than in his narrative.
"You're unfortunate."
She put down the cigarette, carefully took out a spoonful of coffee from the cup and dropped it on the glowing end as it lay in the saucer.
"You're unfortunate, Peter Dawlish, both as a son—and as a husband!"
He did not speak.
"Terribly unfortunate," she went on moodily. "I think you must have been born under a very unlucky star. I'm not asking you for confidences; you'd hate me if I did."
Presently:
"How did you know?"
She fetched a long sigh.
"How did I know? Oh, I only knew yesterday for sure. I'd guessed for a long time—ever since I went on my holidays into Cumberland and found a little volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's with an inscription in doggerel blank verse on the fly leaf. It was when I saw that the first letter of every line reading from below, upward, made the words "Jane Hood" that I first guessed. But I wasn't certain—about the marriage. There was no record at Somerset House."
"We were married in America."
She nodded.
"I know that now; but why?"
He stared past her out of the window. Here, she thought, was a man who really regarded life as a terribly serious business. She was mighty glad of that.
"Jane was very unhappy at home; her people were rotten. Her father kept a gambling house, and her mother——" He shrugged. "I fell in love with her. If I hadn't been a fool I would have gone to my father and told him the truth and then, in all probability, there would have been no cause for unhappiness. But I was aware that he knew Jane's people and knew that they were rotten. We went away to America together and were married in a little town in Connecticut. I suppose you know that? Her father was American born. From the first day the marriage was a ghastly mistake. Jane thought I had unlimited money. I had to pawn her jewels to get home, and there was a fearful scene when we landed at Liverpool. We were both a little crazy, and agreed then and there to separate. I went back to Lord Everreed's house to find detectives awaiting me at the railway station. I haven't seen or spoken with Jane since."
"Has she divorced you?"
He shook his head.
"I don't know. Things like that are possible in America, but I've had no notification."
Leslie bit her lip.
"If she hasn't, she's committed bigamy. You realize that?"
"I realize that," he said shortly. "Which means that I cannot free myself without betraying her; I can't do that. I couldn't expose her to imprisonment."
There was a tense and painful silence.
"Is that all?" she asked. "All you have to tell me?"
"You did not need telling, I think," he said, a little bitterly.
"No." She lit another cigarette; the flame of the match quivered unsteadily. "You're very unfortunate, Peter Dawlish."
She blew out the match with deliberation and put it carefully in her saucer by the side of the sodden cigarette.
"You knew nothing about Druze, of course, or you would have told me. When did you say your father disinherited you?"
"The day before I went to prison."
She considered this.
"Tell me, Peter! You don't mind my calling you Peter? I feel rather sisterly toward you just now. What was the relationship between your father and mother? Cordial?"
He shook his head.
"No, they were never cordial; they were polite."
She bit her lip, looking at him absently.
"Did you ever see the Princess Bellini at your father's house?"
"Only once," he replied. "Father disliked her——"
"She was a sort of aunt, wasn't she?" Leslie interrupted.
"I've never exactly fathomed the relationship. I've always understood that the Princess Bellini's brother married my mother's sister."
She rose from the table abruptly, for no apparent reason.
"Peter Dawlish," she said, and her voice shook a little in spite of her assumption of banter, "if you were cursed with my intense curiosity you might be a very much happier man."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I'll tell you—some day. And now let us get back to our muttons; and our muttons for the moment is poor Elizabeth. The only difficulty in the way is Mrs. Inglethorne. As a loving mother, she may very well object to her child being taken from her. Obviously I cannot use the same argument as you have used. If she is a fence and a lawbreaker, it is my duty to inform Mr. Coldwell and have her arrested. If she isn't a lawbreaker, we shall have to get after her from another angle. That sounds terribly businesslike. I think I'll go back with you to Severall Street and see Mrs. Inglethorne myself. She may be amenable to reason."
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