Nothing whatever happened that should not have happened; everything was orderly and well managed; the courier and the maid saw to tickets and to luggage, to hotel rooms and sleeping compartments. It was obviously their mission in life to see that nothing untoward or unexpected happened, but only the obvious.
It was clearly not their fault that Miss Harris had seen a cab in which an unknown man happened to have been murdered.
Louisa, with a view to preventing her aunt from going to sleep after dinner and thereby spoiling her night's rest, had told her of the incident which she had witnessed in the Boulevard Waterloo, and Lady Ryder was genuinely shocked. She vaguely felt that her niece had done something unladylike and odd, which was so unlike Louisa.
The latter had amused herself by scanning a number of English papers in order to find out what was said in London about that strange crime, which she had almost witnessed – the man stabbed through the neck, from ear to ear, and the wound so small it might have been done with a skewer. But, with characteristic indifference, London paid but little heed to the mysterious dramas of a sister city. A brief account of the gruesome discovery – a figurative shrug of the shoulders as to the incompetence of the Belgian police, who held neither a clue to the perpetrator of the crime nor to the identity of the victim. Just a stranger – an idler. Brussels was full of strangers just now. His nationality? who knows? His individuality? there seemed no one to care. The police were active no doubt, but so far they had discovered nothing.
Two men, the murderer and the murdered, engulfed in that great whirlpool known as humanity, small units of no importance, since no one seemed to care. Interesting to the detective whose duty it was to track the crime to its perpetrator. Interesting to the reporter who could fill a column with accounts of depositions, of questionings, of examinations. Interesting to the after-dinner talker who could expatiate over the moral lessons to be drawn from the conception of such a crime.
But the murdered man goes to his grave unknown: and the murderer wanders Cain-like on the face of the earth – as mysterious, as unknown, as silent as his victim.
CHAPTER III
AND NOW ALMOST LIKE A DREAM
Everything went on just as convention – whose mouth-piece for the moment happened to be Lady Ryder – desired; just as Louisa surmised that everything would; the letters of congratulations; the stately visits from and to Lord Radclyffe, Luke's uncle; the magnificent diamond tiara from the latter; the rope of pearls from Luke; the silver salvers and inkstands and enamel parasol handles from everybody who was anybody in London society.
Louisa's portrait and that of Luke hastily and cheaply reproduced in the halfpenny dailies, so that she looked like a white negress with a cast in her eye, and he like the mutilated hero of L'Homme Qui Rit; the more elegant half-tone blocks in the sixpenny weeklies under the popular if somewhat hackneyed heading of "The Earl of Radclyffe's heir and his future bride, Miss Louisa Harris"; it was all there, just as it had been for hundreds of other girls and hundreds of other young men before Louisa had discovered that there was only one man in the whole wide world, and that, beyond the land of diamond tiaras and of society weddings, there was a fairy universe, immense and illimitable, whereon the sun of happiness never set and whither no one dared venture alone, only hand in hand with that other being, the future mate, the pupil and teacher of love, the only one that mattered.
And the wedding was to be in four weeks from this day. The invitations were not out yet, for Louisa, closely pressed by Luke, had only just made up her mind half an hour ago about the date. Strangely enough she had been in no hurry for the wedding day to come. Luke had been so anxious, so crestfallen when she put him off with vague promises, that she herself could not account for this strange reticence within her – so unworthy a level-headed, conventional woman of the world.
But the outer lobby of the fairy universe was surpassingly beautiful, and though the golden gates to the inner halls beyond were ajar and would yield to the slightest pressure of Louisa's slender fingers, yet she was glad to tarry awhile longer. Were they not hand in hand? What mattered waiting since eternity called beyond those golden gates?
This morning, however, convention – still voiced by Lady Ryder – was more vigorous than was consistent with outward peace. Louisa, worried by aunt, and with the memory of Luke's expression of misery and disappointment when last night she had again refused to fix the wedding day, chided herself for her silly fancies, and at eleven o'clock set out for a stroll in Battersea Park, her mind made up, her unwonted fit of sentimentality smothered by the louder voice of common-sense.
She and Luke always took their walks abroad in Battersea Park. In the morning hours they were free there from perpetual meetings with undesired company – all outside company being undesirable in the lobby of the fairy universe. Louisa had promised to meet Luke in the tropical garden at half-past eleven. She was always punctual, and he always before his time; she smart and businesslike in her neat, tailor-made gown and close hat which defied wind and rain, he always a little shamefaced when he took her neatly gloved hand in his, as most English young men are apt to be when sentiment for the first time happens to overmaster them.
To-day she saw him coming toward her just the same as on other days. He walked just as briskly and held himself as erect as he always did, but the moment that he was near enough for her to see his face she knew that there was something very wrong in the world and with him. Some one from the world of eternity beyond had seen fit to push the golden gates closer together, so that now they would not yield quite so easily to the soft pressure of a woman's hand.
"What is it, Luke?" she asked very quietly, as soon as her fingers rested safely between his.
"What is what?" he rejoined foolishly and speaking like a child, and with a forced, almost inane-looking, smile on his lips.
"What has happened?" she reiterated more impatiently.
"Nothing," he replied, "that need worry you, I think. Shall we sit down here? You won't catch cold?" and he indicated a seat well sheltered against the cold breeze and the impertinent gaze of the passers-by.
"I never catch cold," said Louisa, smiling in spite of herself at Luke's funny, awkward ways. "But we won't sit down. Let us stroll up and down, shall we? You can talk better then, and tell me all about it."
"There's not much to tell at present. And no occasion to worry."
"There's nothing that worries me so much as your shilly-shallying, Luke, or the thought that you are making futile endeavours to keep something from me," she retorted almost irritably this time, for, strangely enough, her nerves – she never knew before this that she had any – were slightly on the jar this morning.
"I don't want to shilly-shally, little girl," he replied gently, "nor to keep anything from you. There, will you put your hand on my arm? 'Arry and 'Arriet, eh? Well! never mind. There's no one to see."
He took her hand – that neatly gloved, small hand of hers – and put it under his arm. For one moment it seemed as if he would kiss that tiny and tantalizing place just below the thumb where the pink palm shows in the opening of the glove. Luke was not a demonstrative lover, he was shy and English and abrupt; but this morning – was it the breath of spring in the air, the scent of the Roman hyacinths in that bed over there, or merely the shadow of a tiny cloud on the uniform blue of his life's horizon that gave a certain rugged softness to his touch, as his hand lingered over that neat glove which nestled securely in among the folds of his coat sleeve?
"Now," she said simply.
"Have you," he asked with abrupt irrelevance, "read your paper all through this morning?"
"Not all through. Only the important headlines."
"And you saw nothing about a claim to a peerage?"
"Nothing."
"Well! that's all about it. A man has sprung up from nowhere in particular, who claims to be my uncle Arthur's