The Woman in Black Part 16

"There is only one thing for it," he said, looking up. "I must see Marlowe. It worries me too much to have the thing left like this. I will get at the truth. Can you tell me," he broke off, "how he behaved after the day I left White Gables?"

"I never saw him after that," said Mrs. Manderson simply. "For some days after you went away I was ill, and didn't go out of my room. When I was about again he had left and was in London, settling things with the lawyers. He did not come down to the funeral. Immediately after that I went abroad. After some weeks a letter from him reached me, saying he had concluded his business and given the solicitors all the a.s.sistance in his power. He thanked me very nicely for what he called all my kindness, and said good-by. There was nothing in it about his plans for the future, and I thought it particularly strange that he said not a word about my husband's death. I didn't answer. Knowing what I knew, I couldn't. In those days I shuddered whenever I thought of that masquerade in the night. Rather than face him, I was ready to go on in ignorance of what had really happened. I never wanted to see or hear of him again."

"Then you don't know what has become of him?"

"No: but I dare say Uncle Burton--Mr. Cupples, you know--could tell you.

Some time ago he told me that he had met Mr. Marlowe in London, and had some talk with him. I changed the conversation." She paused and smiled with a trace of mischief. "I rather wonder what you supposed had happened to Mr. Marlowe, after you withdrew from the scene of the drama that you had put together so much to your satisfaction."

Trent flushed. "Do you really want to know?" he said.

"I ask you," she retorted quietly.

"You ask me to humiliate myself again, Mrs. Manderson. Very well. I will tell you what I thought I should most likely find when I returned to London this year: that you had married Marlowe and gone to live abroad."

She heard him with unmoved composure. "We certainly couldn't have lived very comfortably in England on his money and mine," she observed thoughtfully. "He had practically nothing then."

He stared at her--"gaped," she told him some time afterwards. At the moment she laughed with a little embarra.s.sment. "Dear me, Mr. Trent!

Have I said anything dreadful? You surely must know ... I thought everybody understood by now ... I'm sure I've had to explain it often enough ... if I marry again I lose everything that my husband left me."

The effect of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this pa.s.sed away he gradually drew himself together as he sat into a tense att.i.tude. He looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon.

But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was: "I had no idea of it."

"It is so," she said calmly, trifling with a ring on her finger.

"Really, Mr. Trent, it is not such a very unusual thing.... I think I am glad of it. For one thing, it has secured me--at least since it became generally known--from a good many attentions of a kind that a woman in my position has to put up with as a rule."

"No doubt," he said gravely. "And ... the other kind?"

She looked at him questioningly. "Ah!" she laughed. "The other kind trouble me even less. I have not yet met a man silly enough to want to marry a widow with a selfish disposition, and luxurious habits and tastes, and nothing but the little my father left me."

She shook her head slowly, and something in the gesture shattered the last remnants of Trent's self-possession. "Haven't you, by G.o.d!" he exclaimed, rising with a violent movement and advancing a step towards her. "Then I am going to show you that human pa.s.sion is not always stifled by the smell of money. I am going to end the business--my business. I am going to tell you what I dare say scores of better men have wanted to tell you, but couldn't summon up what I have summoned up--the infernal cheek to do it. They were afraid of making fools of themselves. I am not. You have accustomed me to the feeling this afternoon." He laughed aloud in his rush of words, and spread out his hands. "Look at me! It is the sight of the century! It is the one who says he loves you, and would ask you to give up very great wealth to stand at his side."

She was hiding her face in her hands. He heard her say brokenly: "Please ... don't speak in that way."

He answered: "It will make a great difference to me if you will allow me to say all I have to say before I leave you. Perhaps it is in bad taste, but I will risk that--I want to relieve my soul, it needs open confession. This is the truth. You have troubled me ever since the first time I saw you--and you did not know it--as you sat under the edge of the cliff at Marlstone and held out your arms to the sea. It was only your beauty that filled my mind then. As I pa.s.sed by you it seemed as if all the life in the place were crying out a song about you in the wind and the sunshine. And the song stayed in my ears; but even your beauty would be no more than an empty memory to me by now if that had been all.

It was when I led you from the hotel there to your house, with your hand on my arm, that--what was it that happened? I only knew that your stronger magic had struck home, and that I never should forget that day, whatever the love of my life should be. Till that day I had admired as I should admire the loveliness of a still lake; but that day I felt the spell of the divinity of the lake. And next morning the waters were troubled, and she rose--the morning when I came to you with my questions, tired out with doubts that were as bitter as pain, and when I saw you without your pale, sweet mask of composure--when I saw you moved and glowing, with your eyes and your hands alive, and when you made me understand that for such a creature as you there had been emptiness and the mere waste of yourself for so long. Madness rose in me then, and my spirit was clamoring to say what I say at last now--that life would never seem a full thing again because you could not love me, that I was taken forever in the nets of your black hair and by the incantation of your voice--"

"Oh, stop!" she cried, suddenly throwing back her head, her face flaming and her hands clutching the cushions beside her. She spoke fast and disjointedly, her breath coming quick. "You shall not talk me into forgetting common sense. What does all this mean? Oh! I do not recognize you at all--you seem another man. We are not children--have you forgotten that? You speak like a boy in love for the first time. It is foolish, unreal--I know that if you do not. I will not hear it. What has happened to you?" She was half sobbing. "How can these sentimentalities come from a man like you? Where is your self-restraint?"

"Gone!" exclaimed Trent with an abrupt laugh. "It has got right away! I am going after it in a minute." He looked gravely down into her eyes. "I don't care so much now. I never could declare myself to you under the cloud of your great fortune. It was too great. There's nothing creditable in that feeling, as I look at it; as a matter of simple fact, it was a form of cowardice--fear of what you would think, and very likely say--fear of the world's comment too, I suppose. But the cloud being rolled away I have spoken, and I don't care so much. I can face things with a quiet mind now that I have told you the truth in its own terms. You may call it sentimentality or any other nickname you like. It is quite true that it was not intended for a scientific statement. Since it annoys you, let it be extinguished. But please believe that it was serious to me if it was comedy to you. I have said that I love you and honor you and would hold you dearest of all the world. Now give me leave to go."

But she held out her hands to him.

CHAPTER XIII

WRITING A LETTER

"If you insist," Trent said, "I suppose you will have your way. But I had much rather write it when I am not with you. However, if I must, bring me a tablet whiter than a star, or hand of hymning angel. Don't underestimate the sacrifice I am making. I never felt less like correspondence in my life."

She rewarded him.

"What shall I say?" he inquired, his pen hovering over the paper. "Shall I compare him to a summer's day? What _shall_ I say?"

"Say what you want to say," she suggested helpfully.

He shook his head. "What I want to say--what I have been wanting for the past twenty-four hours to say to every man, woman, and child I met--is 'Mabel and I are betrothed, and joy is borne on burning wheels.' But that wouldn't be a very good opening for a letter of strictly formal, not to say sinister character. I have got as far as 'Dear Mr. Marlowe.'

What comes next?"

"I am sending you a ma.n.u.script which I thought you might like to see,"

she prompted as she came to his chair before the escritoire. "Something of that kind. Please try. I want to see what you write, and I want it to go to him at once. You see, I would be contented enough to leave things as they are; but you say you must get at the truth, and if you must, I want it to be as soon as possible. Do it now--you know you can if you will--and I'll send it off the moment it is ready. Don't you ever feel that?--the longing to get the worrying letter into the post and off your hands, so that you can't recall it if you would, and it's no use fussing any more about it."

"I will do as you wish," he said, and turned to the paper, which he dated as from his hotel. Mrs. Manderson looked down at his bent head with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it.

Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was ten minutes before Trent spoke.

"At last I am his faithfully. Do you want to see it?"

She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a reading lamp beside the escritoire. Then, leaning on his shoulder, she read what follows:

Dear Mr. Marlowe:

You will perhaps remember that we met, under unhappy circ.u.mstances, in June of last year at Marlstone.

On that occasion it was my duty, as representing a newspaper, to make an independent investigation of the circ.u.mstances of the death of the late Sigsbee Manderson. I did so, and I arrived at certain conclusions. You may learn from the enclosed ma.n.u.script, which was originally written as a despatch for my newspaper, what those conclusions were. For reasons which it is not necessary to state I decided at the last moment not to make them public, or to communicate them to you, and they are known to only two persons beside myself.

At this point Mrs. Manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter.

Her dark brows were drawn together. "Two persons?" she said with a note of inquiry.

"Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making.

Now that it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of shielding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with me when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better than one on my side of the interview."

She sighed. "Yes, of course, uncle ought to know the truth. I hope there is n.o.body else at all." She pressed his hand. "I so much want all that horror buried--buried deep. I am very happy now, dear, but I shall be happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all." She continued her reading.

Quite recently, however, (the letter went on) facts have come to my knowledge which have led me to change my decision. I do not mean that I shall publish what I discovered, but that I have determined to approach you and ask you for a private statement. If you have anything to say which would place the matter in another light, I can imagine no reason why you should withhold it.

I expect, then, to hear from you when and where I may call upon you; unless you would prefer the interview to take place at my hotel. In either case I desire that Mr. Cupples, whom you will remember, and who has read the enclosed doc.u.ment, should be present also.

Faithfully yours,

PHILIP TRENT.

"What a very stiff letter!" she said. "Now I am sure you couldn't have made it any stiffer in your own rooms."

Trent slipped the letter and enclosure into a long envelop. "This thing mustn't run any risk of going wrong. It would be best to send a special messenger with orders to deliver it into his own hands. If he's away it oughtn't to be left."

She nodded. "I can arrange that. Wait here for a little."