There was a reason why he should nota strong but mysterious reason.
Yet he had come there of his own will to meet her againdrawn there irresistibly by some unseen influence which she possessed.
Was it her beauty that had attracted him? Yeshe was compelled to admit that it was. As a rule he avoided the society of women. To his intimates he had laid down the maxim: "Don't marry; keep a dog if you want a faithful companion." And yet he was once again at the side of this fair-faced woman.
None around the table were aware of their previous meeting, and all were too busy chattering to notice the covert glances which he shot at her. He was noting her great beauty, sitting there entranced by ithe, the man of double personality, who, under an assumed name, lived that gay life of the Continent, known in society in twenty different cities, and yet in England practically unknown in his real self.
Yes, Enid Orlebar was beautiful. Surely there could be few fairer women than she in this our land of fair women!
Turning upon him, she smiled gaily as she asked whether he had been interested in seeing a mountain battery at work.
Her fresh face, betraying, as it did, her love of a free, open-air life, was one of those strangely mysterious countenances met only once in a lifetime. It seemed to be the quintessence of pain and passion, conflict and agony, desire and despair. She was not one of those befrilled, fashion-plate dolls that one meets at the after-war crushes and dances, but was austerely simple in dress, with a face which betrayed a spiritual nobility, the very incarnation of modern womanhood, alive with modern self-knowledge, modern weariness and modern sadness.
Her beautiful hair, worn plain and smooth, was black as nightwonderful hair. But still more wonderful were those great, dark, velvety eyes, deep and unfathomable. In them the tragedy of life was tumultuously visible, yet they were serene, self-possessed, even steady in their quiet simplicity. To describe her features is not an easy task. They were clear-cut, with a purity of the lines of the nose and brow seldom seen in a woman's face, dark, well-arched eyebrows, a pretty mouth which had just escaped extreme sensuousness. Cheeks soft and delicately moulded, a chin pointed, a skin remarkable for its fineness and its clear pallor, the whole aspect of her face being that of sweetness combined with nobility and majesty. In it there was no dominant expression, for it seemed to be a mask waiting to be stirred into life.
Fetherston had known Sir Hugh slightly for several years, but as Enid had been so much abroad with Mrs. Caldwell, he had never met her until that accidental encounter in Biarritz.
"We've been up here six weeks," she was telling Fetherston. "Father always gets a lot of golf up here, you know, and I'm rather fond of it."
"I fear I'm too much of a foreigner nowadays to appreciate the game," Walter laughed. "Last season some Italians in Rome formed a clubthe usual set of ultra-smart young counts and marquisesbut when they found that it entailed the indignity of walking several miles they declared it to be a game only fit for the populace, and at once disbanded the association."
The men were discussing the work of the battery, for four of the officers had been invited, and the point raised was the range of mountain guns.
Walter Fetherston glanced at the general through his pince-nez with a curious expression, but he did not join in the conversation.
Enid's eyes met his, and the pair exchanged curiously significant glances.
He bent to pick up his serviette, and in doing so he whispered to her: "I must see you outside for a moment before I go. Go out, and I'll join you."
Therefore, when the meal had concluded, the girl went forth into the secluded garden at the rear of the hotel, where in a few moments the man joined her at a spot where they could not be overlooked.
She turned towards him, separate, remote, incongruous, her dark eyes showing an angry flash in them.
"Why have you come here?" she demanded with indignation. The whole aspect of her face was tragic.
"To see you again," was his brief reply. "Before we parted at Biarritz you lied to me," he added in a hard tone.
She held her breath, staring straight into his eyes.
"II don't understand you!" she stammered. "You are here to tormentto persecute me!"
"I asked you a question, Enid, but in response you told me a deliberate lie. Thinkrecall that circumstance, and tell me the truth," he said very quietly.
She was silent for a moment. Then, with her mouth drawn to hardness, she replied: "Yes, it is trueI lied to you, just as you have lied to me. Remember what you told me that moonlit night when we walked by the sea towards the Grotto of Love. I was a fool to have believed in youto have trusted you as I did! You left me, and, though I wrote time after time to your club, you refused to send me a single line."
"Becausebecause, Enid, I dared not," replied her companion.
"Why not?" she demanded quickly. "You told me that you loved me, yetyet your own actions have shown that you lied to me!"
"No," he protested in a low, earnest, hoarse voice; "I told you the truth, Enid, but"
"But what?" she interrupted in quickly earnestness.
"Well," he replied after a brief pause, "the fact is that I am compelled to wear a mask, even to you, the woman I love. I cannot tell you the truthI cannot, dearest, for your own sake."
"And you expect me to believe this lame storyeh?" she laughed. She was pale and fragile, yet she seemed to expand and to dilate with force and energy.
"Enid," he answered in a low voice, with honesty in his eyes, "I would rather sacrifice my great love for you than betray the trust I hold most sacred. So great is my love for you, rather would I never look upon your dear face again than reveal to you the tragic truth and bring upon you unhappiness and despair."
"Walter," she replied in a trembling voice, looking straight into his countenance with those wonderful dark eyes wherein her soul brimmed over with weary emotion and fatigued passion, "I repeat all that I told you on that calm night beside the sea. I love you; I think of you day by day, hour by hour. But you have lied to me, and therefore I hate myself for having so foolishly placed my trust in you."
He had resolved to preserve his great secreta secret that none should know.
"Very well," he sighed, shrugging his shoulders. "These recriminations are really all useless. Ah, if you only knew the truth, Enid! If I only dared to reveal to you the hideous facts. But I refusethey are too tragic, too terrible. Better that we should part now, and that you should remain in ignorancebetter by far, for you. You believe that I am deceiving you. Well, I'm frank and admit that I am; but it is with a distinct purposefor your own sake."
He held forth his hand, and slowly she took it. In silence he bowed over it, his lips compressed; then, turning upon his heel, he went down the gravelled walk back to the hotel, which, some ten minutes later, he left with Fred Tredennick, catching the train back to Dundee and on to Perth.
He was in no way a man to wear his heart upon his sleeve, therefore he chatted gaily with his friend and listened to Fred's extravagant admiration of Enid's beauty. He congratulated himself that his old friend was in ignorance of the truth.
A curious incident occurred at the hotel that same evening, however, which, had Walter been aware of it, would probably have caused him considerable uneasiness and alarm. Just before seven o'clock a tall, rather thin, middle-aged, narrow-eyed man, dressed in dark grey tweeds, entered the hall of the hotel and inquired for Henry, the head waiter. He was well dressed and bore an almost professional air.
The white-headed old man quickly appeared, when the stranger, whose moustache was carefully trimmed and who wore a ruby ring upon his white hand, made an anxious inquiry whether Fetherston, whom he minutely described, had been there that day. At first the head waiter hesitated and was uncommunicative, but, the stranger having uttered a few low words, Henry's manner instantly changed. He started, looked in wonder into the stranger's face, and, taking him into the smoking-roomat that moment unoccupiedhe allowed himself to be closely questioned regarding the general and his stepdaughter, as well as the man who had that day been their guest. The stranger was a man of quick actions, and his inquiries were sharp and to the point.
"You say that Mr. Fetherston met the young lady outside after luncheon, and they had an argument in secret, eh?" asked the stranger.
Henry replied in the affirmative, declaring that he unfortunately could not overhear the subject under discussion. But he believed the pair had quarrelled.
"And where has Mr. Fetherston gone?" asked his keen-eyed questioner.
"He is, I believe, the guest of Major Tredennick, who lives on the other side of Perthshire at Invermay on Loch Earn."
"And the young lady goes back to Hill Street with her stepfather, eh?"
"On Wednesday."
"Good!" was the stranger's reply. Then, thanking the head waiter for the information in a sharp, businesslike voice, and handing him five shillings, he took train back from Monifieth to Dundee, and went direct to the chief post-office.
From there he dispatched a carefully constructed cipher telegram to an address in the Boulevard Anspach, in Brussels, afterwards lighting an excellent cigar and strolling along the busy street with an air of supreme self-satisfaction.
"If this man, Fetherston, has discovered the truth, as I fear he has done," the hard-faced man muttered to himself, "then by his action to-day he has sealed his own doom!and Enid Orlebar herself will silence him!"
CHAPTER III
INTRODUCES DOCTOR WEIRMARSH
Three days had elapsed.
In the dingy back room of a dull, drab house in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, close to Victoria Station in London, the narrow-eyed man who had so closely questioned old Henry at the Panmure Hotel, sat at an old mahogany writing-table reading a long letter written upon thin foreign notepaper.
The incandescent gas-lamp shed a cold glare across the room. On one side of the smoke-grimed apartment was a shabby leather couch, on the other side a long nest of drawers, while beside the fireplace was an expanding gas-bracket placed in such a position that it could be used to examine anyone seated in the big arm-chair. Pervading the dingy apartment was a faint smell of carbolic, for it was a consulting-room, and the man so intent upon the letter was Dr. Weirmarsh, the hard-working practitioner so well known among the lower classes in Pimlico.
Those who pass along the Vauxhall Bridge Road know well that house with its curtains yellow with smokethe one which stands back behind a small strip of smoke-begrimed garden. Over the gate is a red lamp, and upon the railings a brass plate with the name: "Mr. Weirmarsh, Surgeon."
About three years previously he had bought the practice from old Dr. Bland, but he lived alone, a silent and unsociable man, with a deaf old housekeeper, although he had achieved a considerable reputation among his patients in the neighbouring by-streets. But his practice was not wholly confined to the poorer classes, for he was often consulted by well-dressed members of the foreign colonyon account, probably, of his linguistic attainments. A foreigner with an imperfect knowledge of English naturally prefers a doctor to whom he can speak in his own tongue. Therefore, as Weirmarsh spoke French, Italian and Spanish with equal fluency, it was not surprising that he had formed quite a large practice among foreign residents.
His appearance, however, was the reverse of prepossessing, and his movements were often most erratic. About his aquiline face was a shrewd and distrustful expression, while his keen, dark eyes, too narrowly set, were curiously shifty and searching. When absent, as he often was, a young fellow named Shipley acted as locum tenens, but so eccentric was he that even Shipley knew nothing of the engagements which took him from home so frequently.
George Weirmarsh was a man of few friends and fewer words. He lived for himself alone, devoting himself assiduously to his practice, and doing much painstaking writing at the table whereat he now sat, or else, when absent, travelling swiftly with aims that were ever mysterious.
He had had a dozen or so patients that evening, but the last had gone, and he had settled himself to read the letter which had arrived when his little waiting-room had been full of people.
As he read he made scribbled notes on a piece of paper upon his blotting-pad, his thin, white hand, delicate as a woman's, bearing that splendid ruby ring, his one possession in which he took a pride.
"Ah!" he remarked to himself in a hard tone of sarcasm, "what fools the shrewdest of men are sometimes over a woman! So at last he's fallenlike the othersand the secret will be mine. Most excellent! After all, every man has one weak point in his armour, and I was not mistaken."
Then he paused, and, leaning his chin upon his hand, looked straight before him, deep in reflection.
"I have few fearsvery few," he remarked to himself, "but the greatest is of Walter Fetherston. What does he know?that's the chief question. If he has discovered the truthif he knows my real name and who I amthen the game's up, and my best course is to leave England. And yet there is another way," he went on, speaking slowly to himself"to close his lips. Dead men tell no tales."
He sat for a long time, his narrow-set eyes staring into space, contemplating a crime. As a medical man, he knew a dozen ingenious ways by which Walter Fetherston might be sent to his grave in circumstances that would appear perfectly natural. His gaze at last wandered to the book-case opposite, and became centred upon a thick, brown-covered, dirty volume by a writer named Taylor. That book contained much that might be of interest to him in the near future.
Of a sudden the handle of the door turned, and Mrs. Kelsey, the old housekeeper, in rusty black, admitted Enid Orlebar without the ceremony of asking permission to enter.
The girl was dressed in a pearl grey and pink sports coat, with a large black hat, and carried a silver chain handbag. Around her throat was a white feather boa, while her features were half concealed by the veil she wore.
"Ah, my dear young lady," cried Weirmarsh, rising quickly and greeting her, while next moment he turned to his table and hastily concealed the foreign letter and notes, "I had quite forgotten that you were to consult me. Pray forgive me."
"There is nothing to forgive," the beautiful girl replied in a low, colourless voice, when the housekeeper had disappeared, and she had seated herself in the big leather arm-chair in which so many patients daily sat. "You ordered me to come here to you, and I have come."
"Against your will, eh?" he asked slowly, with a strange look in his keen eyes.
"I am perfectly well now. I do not see why my stepfather should betray such anxiety on my account."
"The general is greatly concerned about you," Weirmarsh said, seated cross-legged at his writing-chair, toying with his pen and looking into the girl's handsome face.
"He wished me to see you. That is why I wrote to you."
"Well," she said, wavering beneath his sharp glance, "I am here. What do you wish?"
"I wish to have a little private talk with you, Miss Enid," he replied thoughtfully, stroking his small greyish moustache, "a talk concerning your own welfare."