The Lighted Way Part 14

"Dead, and let him rot!" Isaac cried fiercely. "There may be others!"

He caught up his cloth cap and, without another word, left the room.

Arnold looked after him curiously, more than a little impressed by the man's pa.s.sionate earnestness. Ruth, on the other hand, was unmoved.

"Isaac is Isaac," she murmured. "He sees life like that. He would wear the flesh off his bones preaching against wealth. It is as though there were some fire inside which consumed him all the time.

When he comes back, he will be calmer."

But Arnold remained uneasy. Isaac's words, and his att.i.tude of pent-up fury, had made a singular impression upon him. For those few moments, the Hyde Park demagogue with his frothy vaporings existed no longer. It seemed to Arnold as though a flash of the real fire had suddenly blazed into the room.

"If Isaac goes about the world like that, trouble will come of it,"

he said thoughtfully. "Have you ever heard him speak of Rosario before?"

"Never," she answered. "I have heard him talk like that, though, often. To me it sounds like the waves beating upon the sh.o.r.es. They may rage as furiously, or ripple as softly as the tides can bring them,--it makes no difference ... I want you to go on, please. I want you to finish telling me--your news."

Arnold looked away from the closed door. He looked back again into the girl's face. There was still that appearance of strained attention about her mouth and eyes.

"You are right," he admitted. "These things, after all, are terrible enough, but they are like the edge of a storm from which one has found shelter. Isaac ought to realize it."

"Tell me what this is which has happened to you!" she begged.

He shook himself free from that cloud of memories. He gave himself up instead to the joy of telling her his good news.

"Listen, then," he said. "Mr. Weatherley, in consideration not altogether, I am afraid, of my clerklike abilities, but of my shoulders and muscle, has appointed me his private secretary, with a seat in his office and a salary of three pounds a week. Think of it, Ruth! Three pounds a week!"

A smile lightened her face for a moment as she squeezed his fingers.

"But why?" she asked. "What do you mean about your shoulders and your muscle?"

"It is all very mysterious," he declared, "but do you know I believe Mr. Weatherley is afraid. He shook like a leaf when I told him of the murder of Rosario. I believe he thinks that there was some sort of blackmailing plot and he is afraid that something of the kind might happen to him. My instructions are never to leave his office, especially if he is visited by any strangers."

"It sounds absurd," she remarked. "I should have thought that of all the commonplace, unimaginative people you have ever described to me, Mr. Weatherley was supreme."

"And I," Arnold agreed. "And so, in a way, he is. It is his marriage which seems to have transformed him--I feel sure of that.

He is mixing now with people whose manners and ways of thinking are entirely strange to him. He has had the world he knew of kicked from beneath his feet, and is hanging on instead to the fringe of another, of which he knows very little."

Ruth was silent. All the time Arnold was conscious that she was watching him. He turned his head. Her mouth was once more set and strained, a delicate streak of scarlet upon the pallor of her face, but from the fierce questioning of her eyes there was no escape.

"What is it you want to know that I have not told you, Ruth?" he asked.

"Tell me what happened to you last night!"

He laughed boisterously, but with a flagrant note of insincerity.

"Haven't I been telling you all the time?"

"You've kept something back," she panted, gripping his fingers frantically, "the greatest thing. Speak about it. Anything is better than this silence. Don't you remember your promise before you went--you would tell me everything--everything! Well?"

Her words pierced the armor of his own self-deceit. The bare room seemed suddenly full of glowing images of Fenella. His face was transfigured.

"I haven't told you very much about Mrs. Weatherley," he said, simply. "She is very wonderful and very beautiful. She was very kind to me, too."

Ruth leaned forward in her chair; her eyes read what she strove yet hated to see. She threw herself suddenly back, covering her face with her hands. The strain was over. She began to weep.

CHAPTER X

AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

Mr. Weatherley laid down his newspaper with a grunt. He was alone in his private office with his newly appointed secretary.

"Two whole days gone already and they've never caught that fellow!"

he exclaimed. "They don't seem to have a clue, even."

Arnold looked up from some papers upon which he was engaged.

"We can't be absolutely sure of that, sir," he reminded his employer. "They wouldn't give everything away to the Press."

Mr. Weatherley threw the newspaper which he had been reading onto the floor, and struck the table with his fist.

"The whole affair," he declared, "is scandalous--perfectly scandalous. The police system of this country is ridiculously inadequate. Scotland Yard ought to be thoroughly overhauled. Some one should take the matter up--one of the ha'penny papers on the lookout for a sensation might manage it. Just see here what happens," he went on earnestly. "A man is murdered in cold blood in a fashionable restaurant. The murderer simply walks out of the place into the street and no one hears of him again. He can't have been swallowed up, can he? You were there, Chetwode. What do you think of it?"

Arnold, who had been thinking of little else for the last few days, shook his head.

"I don't know what to think, sir," he admitted, "except that the murderer up till now has been extraordinarily lucky."

"Either that or he was fiendishly clever," Mr. Weatherley agreed, pulling nervously at his little patch of gray sidewhiskers. "I wonder, now--you've read the case, Chetwode?"

"Every word of it," Arnold admitted.

"Have you formed any idea yourself as to the motive?" Mr. Weatherley asked nervously.

Arnold shook his head.

"At present there seems nothing to go on, sir," he remarked. "I did hear it said that some one was trying to blackmail him and Mr.

Rosario wasn't having any."

Mr. Weatherley pushed his scant hair back with his hand. He appeared to feel the heat of the office.

"You've heard that, too, eh?" he muttered. "It occurred to me from the first, Chetwode. It certainly did occur to me. You will remember that I mentioned it."

"What did your brother-in-law think of it, sir?" Arnold asked. "He and Mr. Rosario seemed to be very great friends. They were talking together for a long time that night at your house."

Mr. Weatherley jumped to his feet and threw open the window. The air which entered the office from the murky street was none of the best, but he seemed to find it welcome. Arnold was shocked to see his face when he turned around.

"The Count Sabatini is a very extraordinary man," Mr. Weatherley confessed. "He and his friends come to my house, but to tell you the truth I don't know much about them. Mrs. Weatherley wishes to have them there and that is quite enough for me. All the same, I don't feel that they're exactly the sort of people I've been used to, Chetwode, and that's a fact."