Chapter Twenty-two
As he walked up the gangway of the cross-Channel boat at Calais, Miles Rushworth’s heart was full of two women. The one was his dead sister, the other Ivy Lexton, the woman to whom he was hastening, and whom he expected to see today. Every fibre of Rushworth’s being longed consciously, hungrily, thirstily, for Ivy.
It was a source of real grief to him that these two could never now meet and love each other. He had been painfully aware that his sister hoped he would marry her own dearest friend, Bella Dale, and he had not dared to speak to her of Ivy.
During his long, dreary journey home he had often asked himself if all she had gone through had changed her from the deliciously pretty, kind-hearted, rather irresponsible little creature he remembered her as being, into a more serious woman. Not that he wanted Ivy different. To him she was already absolutely perfect. But her letters had grown shorter, as his had grown longer, and vaguely they had disappointed him.
Roger Gretorex? How often had Rushworth tried to visualise the young man who had committed so dastardly a crime in order to set free the woman he had loved hopelessly, and without return, from the degradation of being tied to such a waster as had been Jervis Lexton.
Though even the South African papers had been full of the wretched fellow’s photographs, proving that he had a singularly handsome face, Rushworth had no clear vision of him. Also, Ivy had never once mentioned him in any of her letters.
Suddenly that fact, Ivy’s absolute silence concerning Gretorex, struck him as being strange. He also realised, what he had not realised till now, that poor lovely Ivy could not but be, all her life long, even after she changed her name, a marked woman. She would be always pointed at, and that wherever she went in English-speaking lands, as the heroine of a great cause célèbre.
Yet stop! In the circumstances, would it not only be right, but reasonable, that she should marry him, Miles Rushworth, almost at once? He would beg her, entreat her, to consent to an immediate marriage. And then he would take her away in his yacht to the South, to some quiet place where they two could be hidden in a trance of love, while people forgot the sordid story of the murder of which she had been the innocent cause.
It was a fine winter day, though bitterly cold, so the home-coming traveller found himself a comfortable spot in a sheltered place, on the upper deck of the steamer, where was just room for three.
Two deck-chairs were already occupied, one by a big man with whose powerful, humorous face Rushworth felt he was vaguely familiar, the other by a delicate, fragile-looking, little grey-haired lady. The third chair was unoccupied, and so he sat down in it.
Perhaps because he was in a sentimental mood today, he felt queerly moved when he saw that, under their rug, the big man was holding the hand of the grey-haired little lady. They were talking together eagerly, happily; obviously, so Rushworth told himself, an old-fashioned husband and wife, never so happy as when they were together.
His heart swung back to Ivy Lexton, and to the bliss of their coming meeting.
Poor, precious darling! What a terrible ordeal she had been through! He would regret all his life, all their joint life, that he had been far from her during the weeks that had followed the strange death of Jervis Lexton.
And then—for a moment he thought his ears had misled him—he heard that very name of “Lexton” uttered aloud by the man sitting one from him.
“That Lexton affair? Come now. If you really read your loving husband’s letters—I sometimes suspect that you don’t, you naughty little thing—well, there’d be nothing left to tell you! It’s hunting I should be today, instead of coming to meet an ungrateful woman.”
“I want to know what’s happening now, Joe. Also, most of all, what led to the extraordinary reprieve on the very day this man was to have been hanged?”
A reprieve? Miles Rushworth felt a sudden rush of anger and surprise. He was, of course, aware that Roger Gretorex, the man whose name and personality he loathed, and for whom he felt he would ever feel an intense, retrospective horror, was to have been hanged this very morning. That fact had been stated in both the daily papers which are published in English in Paris.
If it was true that there had been a reprieve that morning, how had this stranger already become aware of the fact?
“You know I told you, Eileen, long ago, that the poor chap had refused to appeal?”
“Yes, I remember that,” she murmured.
“Well, there seemed nothing left to be done! I was in despair, and it was only the day before yesterday that by—well, I suppose old-fashioned folk like you would call it an intervention of Providence, some astounding new evidence was produced. And what’s more, I’ve been proved right!”
And there was a tone of triumph in the, now low, organ-like voice.
“D’you mean that what you half suspected was true all along, Joe?”
She had turned her head round, and was gazing up into her husband’s face.
Rushworth saw the big man bend his head as jovially he exclaimed, “Bedad! I think we’ve got her cold!”
A tremor ran through the lady. “What a horrible expression,” she murmured.
“Still, so far there’s something lacking, me dear, and it’s causing me a bit of anxiety.”
“What’s that, Joe?”
“Motive!” the man exclaimed, in a voice that had become suddenly grave. And then he went on: “I don’t mind telling you that everything fair and—well, a bit near the wind, also, was done to try and find out if our lovely, clinging Ivy had another man in tow. She is a”—the speaker sought for something in place of the Biblical word trembling on his lips, but he gave it up, and said instead:
“We heard that there was one chap who went about with her a good deal last autumn, and who was far more often at Duke of Kent Mansion than Gretorex ever was. But though we ran him to earth and gave him—at least I hope so—a pretty bad quarter of an hour, it was clear that he would never have married her, not if she had been a hundred times free! Also, though he’s a gay bachelor, and manages to give his lady friends a scrumptious time, he’s not a rich man, and our practical little Ivy wants money, money, money all the time.”
“Then what’s going to be done now? You don’t want your man, if he’s really innocent, to languish in prison half his life,” observed the little lady shrewdly.
“I do not,” he answered, in his rich, Irish voice. “What’s more, I want to shift that noose. Once we get her in the dock I’ll see there’s no recommendation to mercy; trust me for that! The woman’s a double-dyed murderess. She poisoned her husband, and she as good as hanged her lover.”
“You haven’t got her in the dock yet, and maybe you never will,” said his wife calmly.
“Hold on! Hold on! Did you ever see me miss a kill I’d set my heart on? There’s another woman whose neck I’d like to wring—that of an old charwoman, who, if she’d told the truth when Gretorex was first arrested, might have made all the difference, for there would still have been time, then, to find out something.”
“Has that poor, pretty woman had a chance of saying anything for herself?” asked his wife slowly.
“That artful little Jezebel is staying with a woman friend in the country at present, and the police are determined that everything is to be O.K. this time. It’s for hell she’s making——” and he laughed a jolly laugh. “Ivy’s held all the cards in her