"But listen!" she went on. "About a month ago that same man was sitting on that seat when I came here. It, too, was on a Tuesday. And the same man joined him. I waited about, because I like that corner. To my surprise the well-dressed one gave the other, the one who looks like a tramp, five one-pound notes. He counted them into the other's hand, and then left without a glance at the other, for all the world as two strangers would part. But the other jumped up and rushed after him. He had to be fairly shaken off. And very firmly shaken off he was too, nephew. I think he was threatening the other..." she stopped. The very man of whom she was speaking was passing.
The man's teeth were clenched, and through them he seemed to be swearing to himself. He had a wind-blackened, thin face with deep-set eyes just now fastened on his clenched right hand which held some pound notes. Then, still muttering in a tone of half-suppressed fury, he turned down another path. From first to last he had not glanced at either of them.
"I could imagine bloodcurdling oaths which would sound less unpleasant than those low mumbles," Aunt Julia said, after a little pause, as they walked on. Oliver began to talk of the flowers about them.
"What's the matter?" she asked on the instant. "Do you know that man?"
That was just like Aunt Julia.
"No," he replied. And again got a look of inquiry.
"I'll tell you, in strict confidence," he said to that.
"I should get it out of you any way," she murmured, quite correctly.
"It was the other man whom I know by sight. He's Major Moncrieff."
She knew the name well enough, and what it had once stood for in her nephew's life. But she did not refer to Lavinia now.
"I'm thinking of painting him," Oliver added.
"How interesting," said his aunt, "you always like to put some sort of a symbol into your pictures. I thought that dim coronet just indicated in one corner of Lord Liverpool's portrait was entrancing. He who had sacrificed everything worth having to get a peerage. And Mr. Ardente's with the porthole and the glimpse of the sea...well, how about a park bench in the corner of Major Moncrieff's picture?"
Both laughed.
"Or a hand rampant with banknotes gule—" he suggested. "Luckily it was he who was giving the notes, not cadging for them. And a charitable action," he said ruminatingly.
"Stuff!" came from Aunt Julia. "You don't call that charity, any more than I do. That was hush-money. The man who passed us was a blackmailer, and not satisfied with what he got."
"Then he wasn't a blackmailer," Oliver pointed out. "They can call the tune, and their wretched victims have to pay up without any chance of bargaining." And again he talked of the trees. They sat down on the next bench they came to, and Aunt Julia gave her reasons for considering French literature vastly overrated. A pause followed. Oliver drew pictures in the gravel and finally said, looking up for the first time since they had sat down:
"If you were asked to spy on someone, would it make any difference if his wife ran the house, and you were in point of absolute fact her guest, not her husband's?"
"Only one thing would influence me," said Aunt Julia firmly, "The reason for my spying. Say you thought the Major was about to cut his wife's throat—then you needn't mind whose house it is."
Santley gazed at her with a dropped jaw.
"Oh, I'm not so melodramatic as to think that that really is the reason," she said promptly, "though evidently I'm not so far out. Is it Mrs. Phillimore who is worried?" she went on.
Oliver made the gesture of drawing a cross between them.
"You're a witch," he said half laughing, half vexed. "Now, how on earth...what do you know? How much?"
"My dear Oliver—" she gave a contemptuous flip of some crumbs to a sparrow, "you were talking about the Moncrieffs...you were drawing an outline of Mrs. Phillimore's profile while I talked to you about Anatole France. Next, you asked me that funny question...I jumped to the obvious conclusion. I'm as often wrong as I'm right," she added modestly.
"It was confidential," he said under his breath. "But when one has a witch for an aunt...Mrs. Phillimore wants me to paint Moncrieff as a long overdue present to her daughter, and she's worried about her daughter. Thinks she isn't as happy as she might be." There was a silence. Aunt Julia rarely volunteered advice.
"Do you remember my once taking you to the studio of a Miss Flavelle Bruton?" Oliver asked next. "Dark-haired girl, very thin, with wonderful eyes and hair worn in plaits around her fine little head? She's quite a celebrity nowadays."
He meant to change the subject by way of her work, but his aunt knitted her brows for a moment and suddenly said: "I remember the afternoon perfectly. It was the only time I ever saw her. I have always wondered why she didn't marry Major Moncrieff?"
"Why did you expect her to? I thought you hadn't set eyes on him before this afternoon on the bench there!"
Oliver was puzzled.
"I didn't see him. I only heard his name. Miss Bruton's telephone bell rang. She answered it, and came back saying, 'It was from Major Moncrieff' to her aunt, who would talk to me about smart people I'd never heard of."
"Favelle Bruton always loathed him, and he seemed to avoid her in the old days," Oliver said. He decided that, for once, his aunt had been speaking inconsequentially. She got up now from the seat, saying that she wanted to show him a piece of Rhodes weaving which she had brought back with her last month. As he took her book from her again, Oliver happened to meet her eye, and in spite of the disparity in years, the utter absence of any likeness between them, he could have sworn that his aunt's eyes were the eyes of La Gioconda.
Now, Oliver had always maintained that those eyes were fixed on the painter in derision, that she was saying to herself: "So you think that, do you! Of all the silly juggins!" But his aunt apparently was only concerned with pointing out to him the effect of a copper beech against a young oak.
When he had duly admired the piece of linen and had some of her special tea cakes, he said good-bye to her. He was still more occupied with Moncrieff than before. Mrs. Phillimore's startling words in the morning, and now in the afternoon—that odd scene on the bench...Moncrieff parting as though from an absolute stranger and yet, according to his aunt, parting with a man whom he had met several times before, in all probability by appointment. Banknotes...blackmail...it certainly could not be linked with Mrs. Phillimore's certainty that the Major was going mad, with her story of being chased around the room by him only early to-day, but it did not clash with her certainty that there was something wrong at Beechcroft...
Santley always thought of that day as "the Moncrieff day," for, as he and a friend were shown to his table at a restaurant that evening, he saw the young couple seated near them. Lavinia was easily the prettiest woman in the room, he thought, and he thought it without a pang. Lately, her face, to him, had grown very commonplace. But Major Moncrieff seemed to find nothing amiss in it, judging by the eager way he was talking to her, his dark, ugly face almost touching her delicately made-up, beautifully-waved golden head. Santley studied them under cover of becoming lost in the wine list. Mrs. Phillimore must be mistaken. The two looked as happy as any other couple there. Then he noticed the lines of strain around the man's lips. They only showed in certain lights. And, looking for them, he saw marks of strain too in Mrs. Moncrieff's face. Yes, he thought, both of them were, or had been until just now, under a heavy strain. However, late hours can leave very similar marks, and yet...Moncrieff's eyes did not suggest late hours, or if so, then he took some sort of stimulant to account for their almost excessive brightness. They fairly glittered as he laughed at something Lavinia said. A young man joined them with a pleasant, sunburnt, freckled face. It was the young man whom Santley had seen down at Beechcroft dancing attendance on Ann Bladeshaw. It was young Pusey.
He seemed very keen on having a word with them. But Lavinia did not appear overjoyed at seeing him, Santley thought. A cable was handed her and she tore it open. "From