No Clue Part 38

He had had time to determine that much when her gift of self-possession rea.s.serted itself. She forced her lips back to their thin line, and steadied herself. He could see the vibrant tautness of her whole body, exemplified in the rigidity with which she held her crossed knees, one crushed upon the other.

"I know, I think, what misled you," she answered her own question.

"You've talked to Gene Russell, of course. He may have heard--I think he did hear--Mildred and me discussing the mailing of a letter that Friday night."

"He did," Hastings said, firmly.

"But he couldn't have heard anything to warrant your theory, Mr.

Hastings. I merely made fun of her wavering after she'd once said she'd confront Berne Webster again with her appeal for fair play."

He inspected her with an emotion that was a mingling of incredulity and repugnant wonder.

"It's no use, Mrs. Brace," he told her. "Russell didn't see the name of the man to whom the letter was addressed. I saw him last Sunday afternoon. He told me he took the name for granted, because Mildred had taunted him, saying it went to Webster. As a matter of fact, he wanted to see if Webster was at Sloanehurst and fastened his eyes for a fleeting glimpse on that word--and on that alone. Besides, there are facts to prove that the letter did not go to Webster.--Do you see how your fancied security falls away?"

"Let me think," she said, her tone flat and impersonal.

She was silent, her restless eyes gazing at the wall over his head. He watched her, and glanced only at intervals at the wood he was aimlessly shaving.

"Of course," she said, after a while, looking at him with a speculative, deliberating air, "you've deduced and pieced this together. You've a woman's intuition--comprehension of motives, feelings."

She was silent again.

"Pieced what together?" he asked.

"It's plain enough, isn't it? You began with your suspicion that my need of money was heavier in my mind than grief at Mildred's death. On that, you built up--well, all you've just said."

"It was more than a suspicion," he corrected. "It was knowledge--that everything you did, after her death, was intended to help along your scheme to--we'll say, to get money."

"Still," she persisted shrewdly, "you felt the necessity of proving I'd blackmail--if that's the word you want to use."

"How?" he put in quickly. "Prove it, how?"

"That's why you sent that girl here with the five hundred. I see it now; although, at the time, I didn't." She laughed, a short, bitter note.

"Perhaps, the money, or my need of it, kept me from thinking straight."

"Well?"

"Of course," she made the admission calmly, "as soon as I took the hush money, your theory seemed sound--the whole of it: my motives and ident.i.ty of the murderer."

She was thinking with a concentration so intense that the signs of it resembled physical exertion. Moisture beaded the upper part of her forehead. He could see the muscles of her face respond to the locking of her jaws.

"But there's nothing against me," she began again, and, moved by his expression, qualified: "nothing that I can be held for, in the courts."

"You've decided that, have you?"

"You'll admit it," she said. "There's nothing--there can be nothing--to disprove my statement that Dalton's death was provoked. I hold the key to that--I alone. That being true, I couldn't be prosecuted in Pursuit as 'accessory after the fact.'"

"Yes," he agreed. "That's true."

"And here," she concluded, without a hint of triumph, even without a special show of interest, "I can't be proceeded against for blackmail.

That money, from both of them, was a gift. I hadn't asked for it, much less demanded it. I," she said with an a.s.sured arrogance, "hadn't got that far.--So, you see, Mr. Hastings, I'm far from frightened."

He found nothing to say to that shameless but una.s.sailable declaration.

Also, he was aware that she entertained, and sought solution of, a problem, the question of how best to satisfy her implacable determination to make the man pay. That purpose occupied all her mind, now that her money greed was frustrated.

It was on this that he had calculated. It explained his going to her before confronting the murderer. He had felt certain that her perverted desire to "get even" would force her into the strange position of helping him.

He broke the silence with a careful attempt to guide her thoughts:

"But don't fool yourself, Mrs. Brace. You've got out of this all you'll ever get, financially--every cent. And you're in an unpleasant situation--an outcast, perhaps. People don't stand for your line of stuff, your behaviour."

She did not resent that. Making a desperate mental search for the best way to serve her hard self-interest, he thought, she was impervious to insult.

"I know," she said, to his immense relief. "I've been considering the only remaining point."

"What's that?"

"The sure way to make him suffer as horribly as possible."

He pretended absorption in his carving.

"Why shouldn't he have provided me with money when I asked it?" she demanded, at last.

The new quality of her speech brought his head up with a jerk. Instead of colourless harshness, it had a warm fury. It was not that she spoke loudly or on a high key; but it had an unbridled, self-indulgent sound.

He got the impression that she put off all censorship from either her feeling or her expression.

"That wasn't much to ask--as long as he continued his life of ease, of luxury, of safety--as long as I left out of consideration the debt he couldn't pay, the debt that was impossible of payment."

Alien as the thing seemed in connection with her, he grasped it. She thought that she had once loved the man.

"The matter of personal feeling?" he asked.

"Yes. When he left Pursuit, he destroyed the better part of me--what you would call the good part."

She said that without sentimentalism, without making it a plea for sympathy; she had better sense, he saw, than to imagine that she could arouse sympathy on that ground.

"And," she continued, with intense malignity, "what was so monstrous in my asking him for money? I asked him for no payment of what he really owes me. That's a debt he can't pay! My beauty, destroyed, withered and covered over with the hard mask of the features you see now; my capacity for happiness, dead, swallowed up in my long, long devotion to my purpose to find him again--those things, man as you are, you realize are beyond the scope of payment or repayment!"

Without rising to a standing position, she leaned so far forward that her weight was all on her feet, and, although her figure retained the posture of one seated on a chair, she was in fact independent of support from it, and held herself crouching in front of him, taut, a tremor in her limbs because of the strain.

Her hands were held out toward him, the tips of her stiffened, half-closed fingers less than a foot from his face. Her brows were drawn so high that the skin of her forehead twitched, as if pulled upward by another's hand. It was with difficulty that he compelled himself to witness the climax of her rage. Only his need of what she knew kept him still.

"Money!" she said, her lean arms in continual motion before him. "You're right, there. I wanted money. I made up my mind I'd have it. It was such a purpose of mine, so strongly grown into my whole being, that even Mildred's death couldn't lessen or dislodge it. And there was more than the want of money in my never letting loose of my intention to find him. He couldn't strip me bare and get away! You've understood me pretty well. You know it was written, on the books, that he and I should come together again--no matter how far he went, or how cleverly!

"And I see now!" she gave him her decision, and, as she did so, rose to an upright position, her hands at her sides going half-shut and open, half-shut and open, as if she made mental pictures of the closing in of her long pursuit. "I'll say what you want me to say. Confront him; put me face to face with him, and I'll say the letter went to him. Oh, never fear! I'll say the appropriate thing, and the convincing thing--appropriately convincing!"

Her eyes glittered, countering his searching glance, as she stood over him, her body flung a little forward from the waist, her arms busy with their quick, angular gesticulation.

"When?" he asked. "When will you do that?"