The Best Short Stories of 1920 Part 45

"Unfortunately, Mr. Ford, no one appears to have the least idea who she might be. Mrs. Lonsdale, however, has been able to clear up a point which may, I fancy, make the ident.i.ty of the woman less important than it might otherwise appear to be. Mrs. Lonsdale has known for some time of the serious condition of Mr. Ayling's heart. It was because of it, she tells me, that Mr. Ayling came home from India. Mrs. Lonsdale's testimony, together with the statement of the physician who was called, would seem to leave little doubt that it was merely a case of heart."

Mr. Ford was nodding his head. "So it would," he said. "Yes, so it would." He stopped nodding, and sat there an instant, as if he were thinking of something else. "If that's the case," he broke out, "what a rotter, by Jove! that woman was!"

"Rotter, I think," said Mr. Burke, "was precisely the word _I_ used."

And Bessie Lonsdale listened for the second time that day while two voices, now, instead of one, were lifted in excoriation of some woman who seemed to grow, as they talked, only a shade less real than herself.

She had again the sensation of the words beating upon her like blows which she was powerless to resist. She lost, as one does in physical pain, all sense of time....

"However," Mr. Ford brought down his hand with a kind of judicial finality, "if Mrs. Lonsdale will come on down with us now--the storm seems to have slackened--we'll see what can be done." He turned in his chair as if he were preparing to rise.

At the movement Bessie Lonsdale seemed to grow rigid in her chair.

"Wait."

Mr. Burke and Mr. Ford turned, startled by the strangeness of her tone.

They waited for her to speak.

"I can't go."

"Can't go?" They echoed it together. "Why not?"

"Because," said she, "I am the woman you have been talking about."

For an instant they sat perfectly motionless, the three of them. Then slowly Mr. Burke and Mr. Ford turned their heads and looked at each other, as if to verify what they had heard. Mr. Burke put out his hand toward Bessie Lonsdale's arm, resting on the table, and he spoke very gently indeed:

"My dear Mrs. Lonsdale, this is impossible."

"Impossible," she said, pa.s.sing her hand across her eyes, "impossible?"

"Yes, Mrs. Lonsdale." He spoke reasonably, as if she were a child. "It couldn't be you." He turned now to include Mr. Ford, who sat staring at them both. "I myself gave Mrs. Lonsdale the news of Mr. Ayling's death, over the telephone. She was at her home, in Cambridge Terrace, quietly having tea with a friend; the friend was still there when I arrived. You have been at home, in London, all day."

"No," she said. "No, Mr. Burke."

"I think," said Mr. Ford, also very gently indeed, "that perhaps Mrs.

Lonsdale is trying to shield some one."

Until that instant Bessie Lonsdale had no plan. She had only known that she could not go with them to Homebury St. Mary, there to be recognized.

But something in the suggestion of Mr. Ford--in the tone, perhaps, more than the words--caused her to say, looking from one to the other of these two men so lately strangers to her:

"I wonder--I wonder if I could make you understand!"

They begged her to believe that that was the thing they wished most to do.

"I did it"--she paused, and forced herself to go on--"because of my daughter."

Intent upon her truth, she did not even see by the shocked expression of their faces the awfulness of the thing they thought she confessed, and the obviousness of the reason to which their minds had leaped.

Mr. Burke put out his hand again and laid it upon her arm, which trembled slightly at his touch. "Mrs. Lonsdale," he said, and this time he spoke even more gently, but more urgently, than before, "are you _sure_ you wish to tell?"

"No," said Bessie Lonsdale, "but I've _got_ to, don't you see?"

Mr. Ford moved in his chair, and spoke, guarding his voice, judicially.

"Since we have gone so far, it will be even better, perhaps, for Mrs.

Lonsdale to tell it to us here."

Mr. Burke nodded, and they looked toward her expectantly.

"Yes, Mrs. Lonsdale?" said Mr. Ford.

An instant the brown-flecked eyes appeared to be searching for some human contact which she seemed vaguely to have lost. And then she began at the beginning--with her daughter's engagement to young Andrew McCrae, her happiness, her security--and quietly, with only now and then a slight tension of her body and her voice, she told it all to them, exactly as it happened, without plea or embellishment. She had only one stress, and that she tried to make reasonable to them--her child's security.

And they waited, attentive and patient, for the motive to emerge, for the beginning of that complication between her daughter and Richard Ayling, which they believed was to be the crux of her narrative.

And as her story progressed their bewilderment increased, for never, it appeared, had Bessie Lonsdale's daughter so much as heard of the existence of the man who lay dead at Homebury inn. She seemed even to make a special point of that.

They thought she but put it off against the time when it should be forced from her lips; but her story did not halt; she was telling it step by step, accounting for every hour of the time.

They waited for her to offer proof of the condition of Ayling's heart.

She did not mention it, except to say, when she came to relating the moment of her discovery, that she had not thought of it; that even when she opened the door of his room she did not think directly of his heart; and only when she saw him actually lying there so peacefully dead did she remember the danger in which he constantly lived. She seemed to offer it as proof of the suddenness and completeness of her shock, and in extenuation of the thing she afterward did.

Slowly, gradually, as they listened, and as the light of her omissions made it clear, it had begun to dawn upon them that Bessie Lonsdale was telling the whole of the truth. And by it she sought to disprove _something_, but not the thing they thought.

She had paused, at the point of her flight, to attempt, a little hopelessly, to make her impulse real to them. She spoke of the inflexible honor of the McCraes, of the great respect which had for generations attached to their name. Then suddenly, as if she saw the utter hopelessness of making them understand, she seemed with a gesture to give up abstractions and obscurities and to find in the depth of her mother's heart the final simple words:

"Don't you see?" she said. "I hadn't thought how my being there at the same inn with Mr. Ayling would look--and then, all at once, it came over me. The whole thing, how it would look to the world, how it would look to the family of my daughter's fiance,--and that it might mean the breaking of the engagement,--the wreck of her future happiness--don't you see--I didn't think of 'being a rotter'--I only thought of her!"

They uttered, both of them, a sudden exclamation, as if they had been struck. By their expressions one might have thought the woman the accuser and the two men the accused.

"Oh, my dear Mrs. Lonsdale--!" they both began at once, but she stopped them with a gesture of her hand.

"I don't blame you," she said, "I don't blame you. I _was_ a rotter, to run, but I simply didn't think of myself."

Her tone, her gentleness, were the final proof. Only the innocent so graciously forgive.

"And now," she was saying, a great weariness in her voice, "I've told you. Do you want me to go on? It isn't raining any more."

"Perhaps, Mr. Ford--" Mr. Burke began. A look pa.s.sed between them, like a question and an a.s.sent.

"If you, Mr. Burke," said Mr. Ford, "will come on with me, I think we can let your man drive Mrs. Lonsdale home. It will not be necessary for her to appear."

Bessie Lonsdale's thankfulness could find itself no words; it was lost in that first moment in astonishment. She had not really expected them to believe. It had not even, as she told it, seemed to her own ears adequate.

"I think," said Mr. Burke, seeing her silent so long, "that Mrs.

Lonsdale hasn't an idea of the seriousness of the charge she has escaped."

"Charge?" she repeated--"Charge?--" and without another word, Bessie Lonsdale fainted in her chair. And as she lost consciousness she heard, dim and far away, the voice of Mr. Ford reply: "That--the fact that she _hadn't_ an idea of it--and that alone, is why she _has_ escaped."