This House to Let

“It will make it a little easier to deal with her, then. Are you going to leave yourself in my hands? I don’t think she will be very full of fight for the next few days.”

“Certainly I will, Hugh. Do your best for me. I never want to see her again, of that you may be sure.”

Murchison reflected deeply before he spoke again. “I doubt if she will trouble you very much. It won’t be very difficult to compromise with her, she has too much to hide. And now for yourself.”

“Yes,” groaned the unhappy Pomfret, in a hollow voice. “And now for myself. What do you suggest?”

“There’s only one thing to do, and that is to put the past behind you. As long as this woman lives, you can never marry. But many men go through life and remain bachelors, and are not altogether unhappy. You must make up your mind to be one of the bachelors, Jack.”

But Jack looked very despairing. The shock had been a terrible one. In spite of the stiff peg he had taken, his face was still livid, and his hands were shaking.

Hugh looked at him anxiously. He was very weak; had the occurrences of this terrible night driven him over the border-line that separates sanity from insanity?

Presently he muttered, almost as if to himself, certain disjointed phrases. Hugh caught a few of them, repeated again and again.

“Tied to her for life, she will outlive me, tied to her for life. She will never let me go. My poor family! I have always been a fool, but up to now have never brought disgrace to them. And God forgive me, I was reckoning on the death of my poor old generous aunt, it is idle to say I did not speculate on it. And for what, for what? – the pretended affection, the bought kisses of this adventuress, a card-sharper’s decoy, who told me lying tales about the way in which her criminal associate had inherited his money.”

He rambled on like this for some quarter of an hour, and Murchison judged it was better to let him ease his mind in such a fashion.

In a way, the poor foolish boy’s brain had cleared up to a point; he was able to look the facts squarely in the face. His infatuation might have been so deep that he might, under these damning circumstances, have fallen a victim to her wiles a second time. She would no doubt have been prepared, if he had given her the opportunity, to have sworn her innocence, to have protested that she was the victim of circumstantial evidence, that she had believed what her brother had told her, that she had never been a partner in, or a confidant of, his criminal schemes.

No, so far the rude shock had cleared his brain, made him see and think more clearly. But Murchison very much feared that the agonising remorse for his folly was obscuring it in another direction.

He seemed to look upon himself as something unclean in having allowed himself to be contaminated by association with such a wretched adventuress. He was also acutely conscious that, at the best, he would have to take this horrible secret with him to the grave, unless it sprang suddenly to light, as such secrets have a knack of doing. Above all, he keenly felt the disgrace he had inflicted on his family.

There was a great deal more desultory talk, and Hugh gave him the best advice he could under the unhappy circumstances – a reiteration of the “put it behind you and live it down” philosophy. This would have come easy to a man of the rocky and stolid type to which Murchison belonged by temperament. But Jack was highly-strung and impulsive. There was no ballast in him.

Hugh almost had to push him out of the room. But, before doing so, he mixed the boy another stiff peg, with the hope that it would induce sleep and purchase him the oblivion of a few hours.

“Now then, old man, toddle off. Get a good night’s rest, and when you wake to-morrow, you will find things look pretty black, but not quite so black as now. If this young woman contemplates a deep game, and wants to insist overmuch on her rights as your wife, I will deal with her on your behalf. I’ll warrant I bring her to reason.”

The poor distraught boy clasped his friend’s hand convulsively. “Hugh, old chap, you are the best friend a man could ever have, true as steel.”

“Don’t say that,” replied Hugh with a little break in his voice. “I am bound to do the best for you. It was owing to my infernal folly that you ever set foot in that cursed house. I am older and stronger than you, I ought to have known better. Well, good old Jack, good-night! I tell you, things won’t look quite as black to-morrow.”

But to Hugh’s intense grief and remorse, there was no morrow for the unhappy boy, whose mind had been quite unhinged by the events of that terrible night. One could only surmise that he had found sleep impossible, and in a fit of frenzy had taken his life to escape from a future so black and discouraging.

When his servant went to call him in the morning, he found his master lying on the floor, with a bullet-hole in the middle of his forehead. Everybody in the barracks had been fast asleep when the poor boy had fired the shot that was to take him out of his troubles, and nobody had heard the report.

At the inquest, the whole miserable story came out. Of course it came through Hugh, the only person who was in possession of it. He narrated the details of his acquaintance with the Burtons, the introduction of Jack Pomfret to the house, the scene at Rosemount when the two detectives had taken the man, Jack’s confession that he had made the girl his wife a few hours previously.

Hugh never forgot that interview with the Colonel, in which “Old Fireworks” poured out his wrath in no measured terms. He roundly called him an infernal fool for mixing himself up with people of whom he knew nothing, and whom Blankfield in its ignorance of their antecedents had declined to visit – and very wisely.

“If it had been poor Jack, a dear lad but a foolish, I could have found it in my heart to forgive him,” he ended. “But you are a man of another sort, you have got your wits about you, if you choose to exercise them. I will never pardon you that day’s work. You can play with fire and not be scorched, but he couldn’t. That poor boy’s death lies at your door, sir. I hope you realise it.”

Yes, Hugh did realise it. He stood with bowed head, and could not utter a word in self-defence.

The news, of course, was all over the town the next morning, or rather the double news – that George Burton had been arrested by two detectives from Scotland Yard, and that in the early morning of the following day Jack Pomfret had blown out his brains. The evidence at the inquest explained the double event.

The news of her young husband’s suicide reached Norah early in the morning. She had gambled and lost. The old adventurous life was in front of her again.

She took the buffets of fate with the stoicism of her kind and class. She had a comfortable little nest-egg put by which stood between her and present want. If only Jack had been less emotional, she would not have troubled him much, been content with quite a little. It is to be feared that, in her bitter disappointment, she felt a little sore against Jack for his moral cowardice in getting comfortably out of it himself, and leaving her in the lurch.

Anyway, she faced the situation with a courage that one could not refuse to admire. By two o’clock that same day the servants had been paid their wages, the keys of the furnished house handed over to the agent, and Mrs Pomfret had departed for London.

Murchison could never forget that terrible time till something came that seemed to dwarf all other things. In August, nineteen hundred and fourteen, there burst the first storm of the war which shook the world to its centre. In the blood-soaked plains of France he forgot everything except his country.

Jack Pomfret and Norah Burton seemed dim memories in those strenuous times of the world’s upheaval. And yet, when he had a moment’s leisure to think of the past, he felt a savage longing to be even with that fair-faced, smiling adventuress who had driven his poor young friend to a suicide’s grave.

Chapter Eight

“It’s a good proposition, old man. You couldn’t employ a couple of hours better. I have been in London Society of all sorts for the best part of my life, and I tell you that Stella Keane is the most charming girl I have ever met.”

The speaker was little Tommy Esmond, short, genial, and rotund of person. Tommy knew everybody who was anybody, and everybody knew the mercurial Tommy.

Guy Spencer puffed leisurely at his cigar, and regarded his rotund little friend with an amused smile. Spencer was about thirty, Tommy was old enough to be his father. But he wore well.

“Most excellent Tommy, how many times have I heard you say the same thing? Every girl you come across is the most charming you have ever met – until one sees you the next week. And then, the last girl has the super-charm – like the young lady you just mentioned, Miss Stella Keane.”

But Esmond was not to be rebuffed by a clumsy attempt at humour on the part of a young man so much his junior. Besides, Tommy was impervious to humour. It fell off him, like water from a duck’s back. In his way he was a very strenuous little man, he had no time to frivol.

“Don’t try to be funny, old man: it doesn’t suit you. Be sensible, and come round with me to Mrs L’Estrange’s flat and be introduced to Miss Keane.”

“It’s an interesting suggestion, Tommy, but before I decide tell me first – who is Mrs L’Estrange, and secondly, who and what is Miss Keane?”

And Tommy Esmond launched forth on a full flow of narrative. Mrs L’Estrange was the first cousin of a well-known Irish earl, and was – well, in somewhat reduced circumstances, and had a snug little flat in the Cadogan district.

“Mrs L’Estrange is quite satisfactorily explained,” remarked Guy, interrupting his rather voluble friend. “Now what do you really know about Miss Keane?”

Here, Esmond was a little less precise. Mrs L’Estrange he knew quite well, had known her ever since he had been in London; her ancestry and connections were unimpeachable.

Miss Keane, it would appear, had been suddenly projected into the L’Estrange household, as it were, from space. He understood that she was a distant connection, a far-off cousin, but he could give no particulars.

Tommy, with the born instinct of the true diplomatist, was always ready to present everything in its best light, but he lacked the one essential quality of the born diplomatist – he was not very successful when he came to camouflaging facts.

Spencer’s smile was more amused than ever, as he regarded his genial friend. Spencer was only thirty, and Tommy was at least old enough to be his father. But there were times when the younger man thought he saw more clearly than the elder.

“Let us put it at this, Tommy. Mrs L’Estrange, being in somewhat straitened circumstances, supplements her meagre income by card-playing, at which I have no doubt she is an adept.”

And here, the usually placid Tommy interposed hotly: “You may say of Mrs L’Estrange what you like. But, if you propose to offer any derogatory remarks about Miss Keane, I would rather not listen to them.”

And Spencer kept a curb on his tongue. Was this fat, comical-looking little man, a most unromantic figure, violently in love with Miss Stella Keane, and her sworn champion? Far be it from him to disturb his faith in this seductive siren, if it were so.

“It’s all right, old chap,” he said quietly. “I am not going to make any remarks, derogatory or otherwise, about Miss Keane. I think I will adopt your suggestion. Let us adjourn to Mrs L’Estrange’s flat. If one loses fifty or a hundred one may have a good time.”

“You will see the most charming girl in London,” cried Esmond in enthusiastic tones. It struck Spencer, as a peculiar phase of his friend’s detachment, that, being in love with the girl himself, he should be so anxious to introduce her to a younger man, who might, presumably, be his rival.

For there could be no question of rivalry between the two men, apart from their ages. Spencer was tall, athletic, handsome: Tommy Esmond was – just Tommy Esmond – rotund, comical in appearance, and insignificant.