The Clue of the Twisted Candle Part 34

"Oh, you did, did you?" he said.

Her a.s.surance was very pleasing to him. The faith that her words implied gave him an odd little feeling of comfort and happiness.

"I can easily get you out of this," he added; "give me your address and when the gentleman comes--"

"That is impossible," she replied hurriedly. "Please don't think I'm ungrateful, and don't think I'm being silly--you do think I'm being silly, don't you!"

"I have never harboured such an unworthy thought," he said virtuously.

"Yes, you have," she persisted, "but really I can't tell you where I am living. I have a very special reason for not doing so. It's not myself that I'm thinking about, but there's a life involved."

This was a somewhat dramatic statement to make and she felt she had gone too far.

"Perhaps I don't mean that," she said, "but there is some one I care for--" she dropped her voice.

"Oh," said T. X. blankly.

He came down from his rosy heights into the shadow and darkness of a sunless valley.

"Some one you care for," he repeated after a while.

"Yes."

There was another long silence, then,

"Oh, indeed," said T. X.

Again the unbroken interval of quiet and after a while she said in a low voice, "Not that way."

"Not what way!" asked T. X. huskily, his spirits doing a little mountaineering.

"The way you mean," she said.

"Oh," said T. X.

He was back again amidst the rosy snows of dawn, was in fact climbing a dizzy escalier on the topmost height of hope's Mont Blanc when she pulled the ladder from under him.

"I shall, of course, never marry," she said with a certain prim decision.

T. X. fell with a dull sickening thud, discovering that his rosy snows were not unlike cold, hard ice in their lack of resilience.

"Who said you would?" he asked somewhat feebly, but in self defence.

"You did," she said, and her audacity took his breath away.

"Well, how am I to help you!" he asked after a while.

"By giving me some advice," she said; "do you think I ought to put the money there!"

"Indeed I do not," said T. X., recovering some of his natural dominance; "apart from the fact that you would be compounding a felony, you would merely be laying out trouble for yourself in the future. If he can get 20 pounds so easily, he will come for 40 pounds. But why do you stay away, why don't you return home? There's no charge and no breath of suspicion against you."

"Because I have something to do which I have set my mind to," she said, with determination in her tones.

"Surely you can trust me with your address," he urged her, "after all that has pa.s.sed between us, Belinda Mary--after all the years we have known one another."

"I shall get out and leave you," she said steadily.

"But how the d.i.c.kens am I going to help you?" he protested.

"Don't swear," she could be very severe indeed; "the only way you can help me is by being kind and sympathetic."

"Would you like me to burst into tears?" he asked sarcastically.

"I ask you to do nothing more painful or repugnant to your natural feelings than to be a gentleman," she said.

"Thank you very kindly," said T. X., and leant back in the cab with an air of supreme resignation.

"I believe you're making faces in the dark," she accused him.

"G.o.d forbid that I should do anything so low," said he hastily; "what made you think that?"

"Because I was putting my tongue out at you," she admitted, and the taxi driver heard the shrieks of laughter in the cab behind him above the wheezing of his asthmatic engine.

At twelve that night in a certain suburb of London an overcoated man moved stealthily through a garden. He felt his way carefully along the wall of the house and groped with hope, but with no great certainty, along the window sill. He found an envelope which his fingers, somewhat sensitive from long employment in nefarious uses, told him contained nothing more substantial than a letter.

He went back through the garden and rejoined his companion, who was waiting under an adjacent lamp-post.

"Did she drop?" asked the other eagerly.

"I don't know yet," growled the man from the garden.

He opened the envelope and read the few lines.

"She hasn't got the money," he said, "but she's going to get it. I must meet her to-morrow afternoon at the corner of Oxford Street and Regent Street."

"What time!" asked the other.

"Six o'clock," said the first man. "The chap who takes the money must carry a copy of the Westminster Gazette in his hand."

"Oh, then it's a plant," said the other with conviction.

The other laughed.

"She won't work any plants. I bet she's scared out of her life."

The second man bit his nails and looked up and down the road, apprehensively.

"It's come to something," he said bitterly; "we went out to make our thousands and we've come down to 'chanting' for 20 pounds."