The Second Latchkey Part 30

"If I could hope you wouldn't be too hard on me, that's all I care for now!" he cried, pa.s.sionately. "You remember my saying that night in the taxi that the worst I'd ever done was to try and pay back a great wrong, and take revenge on society? If I could hope you meant what you said about understanding I'd tell you the story of that revenge."

"I _did_ mean it, Knight. My love will help me to understand."

"You make me believe in a G.o.d, for surely only G.o.d could have sent such an angel as you into my life.... In a way, I haven't deceived you about myself, for I warned you I was a bad man. But when I think of the night we met and the trick I played on you, it makes me sick! I thought you'd loathe me if you ever found out. But I didn't intend to let you find out.

It was to be a dead secret forever, like the rest. Yet if I tell you what my life has been you'll have to know that part, too. If I kept it back you might think it worse than it was."

"A trick?" echoed Annesley.

"Yes. A trick to interest you--to make you like and want to help me.

Besides, it was to be a test of your courage and presence of mind. If you hadn't those qualities you'd have been a failure from my point of view.

You see, I hadn't had time to fall in love with you then. And I wanted you for a 'help-mate' in the literal sense of the word. It seems a pretty sordid sense, looking back from where we've got to now. But that was my scheme. A mean, cowardly scheme! And it's thanks to you and your blessed dearness I see it in its true light.... Do you begin to understand, Anita--knowing something of what my life has been, or must I explain?"

"I--I'm afraid you must explain," she answered in a small voice, like a child's. She felt suddenly weak and sick, as if she might collapse in the man's arms. It was as if some terrible weapon wrapped round and half hidden in folds of velvet were lifted above her head to strike her down.

She shrank from the blow, yet asked for it. Already she guessed dimly that Knight's confession was to be very different from and far more terrible than anything she had expected.

"I was the man whose advertis.e.m.e.nt you answered--the man who wrote you the stiff letter in the handwriting you didn't like, signed N. Smith."

"Oh!" The word broke from her in a moan.

"Darling! Have I lost you if I go on?"

"You must go on!" she cried out, sharply. "For both our sakes you must go on!"

"I know how it looks to you. And it was vile. But I couldn't be sure when I advertised what an angel would answer to my call, and what a brute I should be to deceive her. I thought the sort of girl who'd reply to an 'ad' for a wife would be fair game; that I should be giving her an equivalent for what she'd give me.

"For my business that I had to carry out in England I needed a wife of another sort from any woman I knew, or could get to know, in an ordinary way; she had to be of good birth and education, nice-looking and pleasant-mannered--if possible with highly placed friends or relatives.

Money didn't matter. I had enough--or would have. I got a lot of answers, but the only one that seemed good was yours. I felt nearly certain you were the woman I wanted, so I rigged up a plan. You know how it worked out."

"Maybe I'm stupid," Annesley said, dry-lipped. "I don't understand yet."

"Why, I thought the thing over, and it seemed to me that married life--if it came to that--would be easier for both if the man could make some sort of appeal to the love of romance in a girl. Well, she wouldn't think the man who had to get the right sort of wife by advertising much of a figure of romance. So the idea came to me of--of starting two personalities. I wrote you a stiff, precise sort of letter in a disguised business hand, making an appointment at the Savoy. When that was done, the writer went out of your life.

"He just ceased to exist, except that he sat behind a big screen of newspaper and watched for a girl in gray-and-purple, wearing a white rose, to pa.s.s through the foyer. That was his way of finding out if she'd suit. Jove, how beastly it does sound, put into words, and confessed to _you_! But you said I must go on."

"Yes--go on," Annesley breathed.

"You were about one hundred times better than my highest hopes. And seeing what you were, I was glad I'd thought out that plan. Even then, it was borne in on me that it wouldn't be long before I found myself falling in love, if I had the luck to secure you. And from that minute the business turned into an exciting play for me, just as I meant to make it for you. I let you wait for a while, but if you'd showed any signs of vanishing I'd have stepped up. I'd got a trick ready for that emergency.

"But I hoped you'd follow instructions and go to the restaurant. Once there, I was sure the head-waiter'd persuade you to sit down at a table; and the rest went exactly as I planned. The two men we called the 'watchers' used to be vaudeville actors--did a turn together, and their specialty was lightning changes. Their make-ups, even at short notice, could fool Sherlock Holmes. Even though you despise me for it, Anita, you must admit it was a smart way to make you take an interest, and prove your character.

"Lord, but you stood the test! I wouldn't have given you up at any price then, even if I hadn't begun falling in love. I saw how good you were; and in that taxi going to Torrington Square I felt mean as dirt for tricking you. But of course I had to go on as I'd begun.

"At first I thought it was luck, tumbling into the same house with Ruthven Smith; but now I see it was the devil's luck. If it hadn't been for Ruthven Smith I might have gone on living the part I played. You need never have known the truth. And I swear to you, Annesley, I'd made up my mind, after finishing off my work with the men who are with me, that I'd run straight for the rest of my days. The business was making me sick, for being close to your goodness threw a light into dark places.

"By heaven, Anita, it does seem hard, just as I was near to being the man you thought me, that that dried-up curmudgeon Ruthven Smith should call my hand and make me show you the man I was! But I can't help seeing there's a kind of--what they call poetical justice in it, the blow coming from him. I've always been like that: seeing both sides of a thing even when I wanted to see only one. But if _you_ can see both sides, you will make the good grow, as the bright side of the moon grows, and turns the dark side to gold.

"Can you do that, do you think, Anita? Can you see any excuse for me in going against the world to pay it out for going against me and mine? If you've been piecing bits of evidence together since Ruthven Smith spoke, you'll have remembered that only heirlooms and things insured by, or belonging to, public companies, have been taken; no poor people have been robbed; and except in the case of Mrs. Ellsworth, where I wanted to see her paid out for her treatment of you----"

"'Robbed'!" Catching the word, Annesley heard none of those that followed. "_Robbed!_ Oh, it's not possible you mean----"

Her voice broke. With both hands against his breast she pushed him off, and struggled to rise, to tear herself loose from him. But he would not let her go.

"What's the matter? How have I hurt you worse than you were hurt already by finding out?" he appealed to her, his arms like a band of steel round her shuddering body. "When you heard the truth about the diamond, it was the same as if you'd heard everything, wasn't it? You guessed Ruthven Smith suspected--someone must have told him--Madalena perhaps. You guessed he had some trick to play, and in the quietest, cleverest way you checkmated him, without hint or help from any one. You saved me from ruin, and not only me, but others. And on top of all that, when I hoped for nothing more from you, you promised me forgiveness. That's what I understood. Was I mistaken?"

"_I_ was mistaken," she answered, almost coldly; then broke down with one agonized sob. "I thought--oh, what good is it now to tell you what I thought?"

"You must tell me!"

"I thought you had bought the blue diamond, knowing it had been stolen, but wanting it so much you didn't care how you got it. I didn't dream that you were a----"

"That I was--what?"

"A thief--and a cheat!"

"My G.o.d! And now you know I'm both, you hate me, Anita? You must, or you wouldn't throw those words at me like stones."

"Let me go," she panted, pushing him from her again with trembling, ice-cold hands.

He obeyed instantly. The band of steel that had held her fell apart. She stumbled up from the low sofa, and trying to pa.s.s him as he knelt, she would have fallen if he had not sprung to his feet and caught her.

But recovering herself she turned away quickly and almost ran to a chair in front of the dressing table not far off. There she flung herself down and buried her face on her bare arms.

Knight followed, to stand staring in stunned silence at the bowed head and shaking shoulders. He could hear the ticking of a small, nervous-sounding clock on the mantelpiece. It was like the beating of a heart that must soon break. At last, when the ticking had gone on unbearably long, he spoke.

"Anita, you called me a cheat," he said. "I suppose you mean that I cheated you by playing the hero that night at the Savoy, and stealing your sympathy and help under false pretenses; that I've been steadily cheating you and your friends every day since. That's true, in a way--or it was at first. But lately it's not been the same sort of cheating. It began to be the real thing with me. I mean I felt it in me to be the real thing. As for the other name you gave me--thief--I'm not exactly that--not a thief who steals with his own hands, though I dare say I'm as bad.

"If I haven't stolen, I've shown others the most artistic way to steal.

I've shown men and women how to make stealing a fine art, and I've been in with them in the game. Indeed, it was my game. Madalena de Santiago, and the two men you knew first as the 'watchers,' then as Torrance and Morello, now as Charrington and Char, have been no more than the p.a.w.ns I used, or rather they've been my cat's paws. There's only one other man at the head of the show besides me, and that is one whose name I can't give away even to you.

"But he's a great man, a kind of financial Napoleon--a great artist, too.

He doesn't call himself a thief. He's honoured by society in Europe and America; yet what I've done in comparison to what he's done is like a brook to the size of the ocean. He has a picture gallery and a private museum which are famous; but there's another gallery of pictures and another museum which n.o.body except himself has ever seen. His real life, his real joy, are in them. Most of the masterpieces and treasures of this world which have disappeared are safe in that hidden place, which I've helped to fill.

"That man has no regrets. He revels in what he calls his 'secret orchard.' He thinks I ought to be proud of what I've done for him; and so I was once. I came here and brought the other people over to England to work for him.

"Not that that fact will whitewash me in your eyes; not that I wasn't working for myself, too, and not that I'm trying to make more excuses by explaining this. But I'd like you to understand, at least for the sake of your own pride, that you haven't been cheated into loving and living with a common thief. Does that make it hurt less?"

"No," she said in a strange tone which made her voice sound like that of an old woman. "That doesn't make it hurt less. It makes no difference.

I think nothing can ever make any difference. My life is--over."

"Don't, for G.o.d's sake, say that! Don't force me to feel a murderer!" he cried out, sharply.

"There's nothing else to say. I wish I could die to-night."

"If one of us is to die," he said, "let it be me. If you hadn't happened to see me and call me in when I was under the trees bidding good-bye to your window, by this time I might have found a way out of the difficulty without any scandal or trouble to you whatever. No one would have known that it wasn't an accident----"

"I should have known."