The Lighted Way Part 49

"Separated!" she repeated bitterly. "You talk as though I had a choice of homes."

"You have," he a.s.sured her. "However, we won't say anything about that just now. I want to talk about myself."

"And I want to listen, dear!" she exclaimed. "You must tell me what has happened, Arnie. Has Mr. Weatherley taken you into partnership, or has some one of your disagreeable relatives found you out and been pouring money into your pockets?"

"Neither," he replied. "As a matter of fact, there is no Mr.

Weatherley just at present."

"No Mr. Weatherley?" she repeated, wonderingly. "I don't understand."

The slightly worn look came back to Arnold's face. Young and strong though he was, he was beginning to feel the strain of the last few days.

"A most extraordinary thing has happened, Ruth," he declared. "Mr.

Weatherley has disappeared."

She looked at him blankly.

"Disappeared? I don't understand."

"He simply didn't turn up at business this morning," Arnold continued. "He left Bourne End about seven, and no one has set eyes on him since."

She was bewildered.

"But how is it that that makes such a difference to you?" she asked.

"What can have happened to him?"

"No one knows," he explained; "but in a little safe, of which he had given me the keys, he left behind some letters with instructions that during his absence from business Mr. Jarvis and I should jointly take charge. I can't really imagine why I should have been put in such a position, but there it is. The solicitors have been down this afternoon, and I am drawing six pounds a week and a bonus."

She took his hand in hers and patted it gently.

"I am so very glad, Arnold," she said, "so very glad that the days of your loneliness are over. Now you will be able to go and take some comfortable rooms somewhere and make the sort of friends you ought to have. Didn't I always foretell it?" she went on. "I used to try and fancy sometimes that the ships we saw were bringing treasure for me, too, but I never really believed that. It wasn't quite likely."

He turned and looked at her. The first flush of excitement had left her cheeks. She was very pale, and her soft gray eyes shone like stars. Her mouth was tremulous. It was the pa.s.sing of a single impulse of self-pity.

"Foolish little girl!" he exclaimed, under his breath. "You don't really suppose that the treasure which came for me wasn't yours, too? But there, we'll talk about our plans later on. At present, what you have to do is to eat and to drink that gla.s.s of Burgundy and to listen to me. I want to talk about myself."

It was the subtlest way to distract her thoughts. She listened to him with keen interest while he talked of his day's work. It was not until she mentioned Fenella's name that his face clouded over.

"Curiously enough, Mrs. Weatherley is displeased with me. I should have thought it entirely through her influence and suggestions that Mr. Weatherley had been so kind to me, but to-day I asked her some questions which I felt that I had a right to ask, and have been told to mind my own business. She left me at the office without even saying 'Good afternoon.'"

"What sort of questions?"

"I don't know that I can tell you exactly what the questions were,"

Arnold continued, "because they concerned some matters in which Mrs.

Weatherley and her brother were chiefly concerned. To tell you the truth, ever since that night when I went to Hampstead to dine, the oddest things seem to have happened to me. I have to pinch myself sometimes to realize that this is London and that I am a clerk in the office of a wholesale provision merchant. When I let myself go, I seem to have been living in an unreal world, full of strange excitements--a veritable Arabian Nights."

"There was that terrible murder," she murmured. "You saw that, didn't you?"

He nodded.

"Not only saw it," he agreed, "but I seem, somehow, to have been mixed up with people who know a great deal about it. However, I have been told to mind my own business and I am going to. I have plenty to occupy my thoughts in Tooley Street. I am going to close in my little world and live there. The rest I am going to forget."

"You are coming back!" she whispered, with a joy in her tone which amazed him.

"I suppose I am," he admitted. "I like and admire Mrs. Weatherley's brother, Count Sabatini, and I have a genuine affection for Mrs.

Weatherley, but I don't understand them. I don't understand these mysterious matters in which they seem mixed up."

"I do not believe," she declared, "that Count Sabatini would be mixed up in anything dishonorable. Women so seldom make a mistake, you know," she continued, "and I never met any one in my life who seemed so kind and gentle."

Arnold sighed.

"I wish I could tell you everything," he said, "then I think you would really be as bewildered as I am. Mr. Weatherley's disappearance coming on the top of it all simply makes my brain reel. I can't do anything to help straighten things out. Therefore, I am going to do what I am told--I am going to mind my own business."

"To think only of Tooley Street," she murmured.

"I shall find it quite enough," he answered. "I want to understand all the details of the business, and it isn't easy at first. Mr.

Jarvis is very sound and good, but he's a very small man moving in a very small way. Even Mr. Weatherley used to laugh at his methods."

She was silent for several moments. He studied her expression curiously.

"You don't believe that I shall be able to immerse myself in business?" he asked.

"It isn't exactly that," she replied. "I believe that you mean to try, and I believe that to some extent you will succeed, but I think, Arnold, that before very long you will hear the voices calling again from the world where these strange things happened.

You are not made of the clay, dear, which resists for ever."

He moved uneasily in his seat. Her words sounded ominous. He was suddenly conscious that his present state of determination was the result of a battle, and that the war was not yet ended.

"She is so beautiful, that Mrs. Weatherley," Ruth continued, clasping her hands together and looking for a moment away from her surroundings. "No one could be blamed for climbing a little way out of the dull world if she held out her hands. I have seen so little of either of them, Arnold, but I do know that they both of them have that curious gift--would you call it charm?--the gift of creating affection. No one has ever spoken to me more kindly and more graciously than Count Sabatini did when he sat by my side on the lawn. What is that gift, Arnold? Do you know that with every word he spoke I felt that he was not in the least a stranger? There was something familiar about his voice, his manner--everything."

"I think that they are both quite wonderful people," Arnold admitted.

"Mrs. Weatherley, too, was kind," Ruth went on; "but I felt that she did not like me very much. She has an interest in you, and like all women she was a little jealous--not in the ordinary way, I don't mean," she corrected herself hastily, "but no woman likes any one in whom she takes an interest to be very kind to any one else."

They had reached the stage of their coffee. The band was playing the latest waltz. It was all very commonplace, but they were both young and uncritical. The waltz was one which Fenella had played after dinner at Bourne End, while they had sat out in the garden, lingering over their dessert. A flood of memories stirred him. The soft sensuousness of that warm spring night, with its perfumed silence, its subtly luxurious setting, stole through his senses like a narcotic. Ruth was right. It was not to be so easy! He called for his bill and paid it. Ruth laid her fingers upon his arm.

"Arnold," she began timidly, "there is something more. I scarcely know how to say it to you and yet it ought not to be difficult. You talk all the time as though you were my brother, or as though it were your duty to help me. It isn't so, dear, really, is it? If you could manage to lend me your room for one week, I think that I might be able to help myself a little. There is a place the clergyman told us of who came to see me once--"

Arnold interrupted her almost roughly. A keen pang of remorse a.s.sailed him. He knew very well that if she had not been intuitively conscious of some change in him, the thought which prompted her words would never have entered her brain.

"Don't let me hear you mention it!" he exclaimed. "I have made all the arrangements. It wouldn't do for me to live in an attic now that I am holding a responsible position in the city. Come along.

Lean on my arm and mind the corner."

They had purposely chosen a table close to the door, so that they had only a few steps to take. Arnold called a taxi and handed Ruth in before he told the man the address.

"Now close your eyes," he insisted, when they were together in the cab.

Ruth did as she was told.

"I feel that it is all wrong," she murmured, leaning back, "but it is like little bits out of a fairy book, and to-night I feel so weak and you are so strong. It isn't any use my saying anything, Arnold, is it?"