'I'll have a smoke, please. Been swearing off store baccy now I'm down from the Bush. I'm trying hard to smoke cigarettes like one of your English toffs.'
He pulled out a copper cigarette case with some hieroglyphical letters and numbers stamped on it, which he regarded with a humorous smile.
'Only cost a shilling, but now I've my brand across, it looks fine. You know that by the Brands Act you've got to have a number and two letters on every head of stock—My brand's the Mark of the Beast 666 C.K. See?'
He fixed his cigarette into a new amber mouthpiece, made a wry face, and began to smoke.
'I don't think much of your quality of cigarettes,' said Mrs Gildea. 'On the whole, I prefer your tobacco.'
'All right. Give me my pipe any day—' And he pitched away the cigarette and produced an ancient pipe, which he filled with tobacco from an india-rubber pouch and lighted. 'Now, fire away.'
'Not for a little bit yet. You must read my rejected article and my official instructions, and then you'll have some grasp of the subjects I want information upon. Here they are—Mr Gibbs first.'
She handed him her editor's letters and pushed a small pile of manuscript towards his elbow.
'There. It will take you about a quarter of an hour to digest all that; and meanwhile, if you don't mind the noise, I shall go on typing something I've got to send off by to-morrow's mail.'
She settled herself at the typewriter, her back partially turned to him. The subject matter of what she was doing took all her attention. She worked hard for about ten minutes, hearing sub-consciously the rustle of papers under his hand and one or two faint ejaculations and a queer little laugh he gave once or twice as he read.
Presently he said:
'I say, there's a mistake here. I've gone through your editor's letters. He's sound; I think I can help you to get at what he wants. But these other sheets have got mixed up with something else. I thought at first it was a story you'd given me, and I went on reading and got interested; and now I see it must have been written by some young woman friend of yours'—if it's meant for a letter.'
Mrs Gildea turned with a dismayed exclamation.
'Good gracious! You don't mean to say that I've given you her letter?'
'Is it really a letter? Do women type letters? It reads to me much more like what the heroine of a novel would be supposed to say than an ordinary everyday girl. If that's a flesh and blood woman I'd like to know her.'
Mrs Gildea took from him the three typed pages he had in his hand. They were certainly part of Lady Bridget's letter—almost the whole of it, for only the end and the beginning ones were missing. In her hurried rearrangement of the wind-scattered sheets she had put these into the wrong bundle. She ran her eye anxiously over the badly-typed slips, which, with their marginal corrections and smart, allusive jargon of a world entirely removed from Colin McKeith's experience, might easily have misled him into the belief that he was reading literary 'copy.' Of course he knew that Joan Gildea wrote novels as well as journalistic stuff.
He read her thoughts.
'You needn't worry. There isn't the least clue to her identity—I suppose that's what you're afraid of. Not a surname anywhere—I couldn't have imagined a woman would write like that—give herself away—as she does. But it's fine all the same. There'd be nothing small about that woman, Joan. Do you know how it ended?'
'I don't know yet. But I can guess.'
'Eh?' He blew out rings of smoke with less than his usual deliberation. 'D'ye think she'll marry the chap?'
'No—she never does.'
'She's a flirt, then?'
'Bid—' Mrs Gildrea swallowed the rest. 'SHE would scorn such a commonplace suggestion. Do you remember that novel of Hardy's, THE WELL-BELOVED? She's like the man there, who was always in love with the same Ideal—under different forms—until he found that he'd made a mistake, and then the game began all over again.'
McKeith ruminated. 'SHE'S like that, is she? ... The fellow is what you'd call a bounder?' he exclaimed suddenly.
'So I imagine.'
'But she's in love with him—she must be, or she wouldn't write like that?'
'You don't know her. She can't do anything by halves—while she's doing it.'
'By Jove, that's what I like. There's a woman who'd never hang on the fence. And her ideas about love and all that: it's splendid.'
He brooded again a few moments, while Mrs Gildea sorted her papers afresh; then he exclaimed:
'It strikes me, she's one of the sort I was talking about just now.'
'Well, she WAS born in a castle.'
'I guessed it.... You won't tell me her name?'
'How could I—I ask you? After you'd read that!'
'No. All right. You can trust me not to find out.'
'Besides, she would never do for you.'
He laughed quizzically. 'Well, I'm a barbarian, and it's possible I may some day be a millionaire. But I'm not such a conceited cad as to imagine a woman like that would ever fall in love with ME!' His voice sank almost to a reverential tone. 'The only thing I do know is that if I got the chance, I'd show her I was strong enough to carry her off to my wigwam and she could do what she pleased afterwards. I'd be her slave so long as she cared for me—and I'd never live with a woman who didn't.'
'My dear Colin, you're not likely to get the chance. Please forget that you ever read that letter.'
'No, I can't do that; but as she's in London and we're over here, it's not much odds anyway. Well, have you found the right sheets? Give them to me if you have and then we can come to business.'
CHAPTER 5
Colin McKeith had been gone some time and Mrs Gildea, primed with fresh ideas, had finished her article on the lines he suggested, before she again tackled Lady Bridget's love-affair.
The second letter (there is no need to reproduce the page of daring sentiment that closed the first) was dated from Castle Gaverick in South Connemara, and plunged straight into the tragic culmination.
'It's all over, Joan—was over soon after my last letter, but I've been too wretched ever since to write. If you had been in England you might have read in one of last week's "MORNING POST'S" that a marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between Mr Willoughby Maule, formerly confidential adviser to His Highness the Rajah of Kasalpore—and Evelyn Mary, only daughter of the late John Bagallay, Esq, and the late Mrs Bagally of Bagallay Court, Birmingham.
Rosamond tells me that Luke told her that Evelyn Mary has been throwing herself at Will's head ever since they met last year on a P. & O. steamer between Singapore and Colombo. She and her chaperon went on a tour round the world, it seems, just before Evelyn Mary came of age. I wonder they did not get engaged then, and can only conclude—as there was no ME then to upset the apple-cart—that he did not know how rich she was going to be. Anyway, I feel certain that it was Evelyn Mary who was at the back of his plan for settling down as a respectable stock-jobber. Molly Gaverick—who is a cat—said she knew for certain Willoughby Maule came to England with the fixed intention of marrying for birth and position or for money, and that he fancied, in me, he'd found both—she says that he took his impressions of us from the paragraphs in the Society papers and thought us much richer an bigger than we are, and that now he knows better he thinks it safer to drop birth and make sure of money.
The Bagallays made theirs in nails. Last year