The Red Widow: or, The Death-Dealers of London

"Yes," she replied, taking up the receiver. Then, listening, she exclaimed: "Oh! you, Miss Propert – well? Oh! How dreadful! – how very sad! She passed away ten minutes ago! Thank you so much for telling me. I'm so sorry – so very sorry!"

And she replaced the receiver.

"You look sorry!" laughed Boyne. "Really, it is most distressing to think that we shall very soon draw ten thousand pounds!" he added mockingly, whereat the two women laughed gaily, for the coup so elaborately prepared had at last been brought off!

CHAPTER XIX

WHAT HAPPENED TO GERALD

The days passed, and Marigold, hearing nothing further from Gerald, called again at Mincing Lane, and there learned that they had not heard again from young Durrant.

A clerk had been sent over to Ealing to inquire about him, but had returned with the information that, instead of being ill, he had not been seen by his sister.

"The firm at once suspected something wrong with the books," said the female clerk of whom she made the inquiry, "but Mr. Durrant was such an honest, straightforward young man that we all ridiculed the idea."

"Have the books been examined?" asked Marigold breathlessly.

"Oh, yes; and nothing has been found wrong."

The girl drew a sigh of relief.

She then showed the clerk the telegram she had received from Birmingham, and she, in turn, promised to show it to the principal when he came in.

Marigold Ramsay walked down Mincing Lane to Fenchurch Street in gloom and despair. She returned to the bank and sat at her books, unable to work, unable to do anything, save to wonder why Gerald had so suddenly left her. Yet he had bidden her not to worry over him and had promised to return.

That evening she went over to Hammersmith, and her aunt, noticing how pale and worried she looked, inquired the reason, asking:

"Have you heard yet from Mr. Durrant?"

"No, auntie. Unfortunately, I haven't, but I'm expecting to hear every day."

"Funny he went away like that, wasn't it?" the deaf old woman remarked, though inwardly she suspected that there had been some quarrel between them, and that he had left her in consequence.

"Yes," replied the girl faintly. Then she asked after Mr. Boyne.

"Oh! he's been away four days now. He said he was going into Wales on some insurance business, and would be away a week or perhaps ten days."

"Unusual for him to go away, isn't it?" Marigold remarked.

"Yes. He's never been away for more than a week together in all the time I've been with him."

The girl left Hammersmith early, and, returning to Wimbledon Park, sat at her window and wept for a long time before retiring to rest. To her the world was empty and hopeless without Gerald.

What had she done, she wondered, that he should have left her in that fashion. That he was following Boyne was a mere excuse, she felt sure. It irritated her to think that he should try to deceive her. What was he doing in Birmingham? If there were reasons why he did not wish to return to London, then why did he not give her his address, and then she could easily have run up to see him.

The more she thought it over the more mystified did she become.

The mystery was increased three days later when, on returning from the City, she found a telegram on the table in the narrow hall.

Her heart leapt as she tore it open.

It had been sent from Paris, of all places, and read:

"Sorry could not write, dear. Do not worry. Shall be back soon. Have wired to the office. Love.– GERALD."

"Love! – Gerald!" she repeated aloud to herself. "Oh! why does he not give me an address, so that I can write to him? It's cruel – very cruel of him to keep me in suspense like this!" she cried in a frenzy of despair.

She ate sparingly in the little dining-room of the jerry-built villa – for nowhere is the jerry-builder more in evidence than in Wimbledon Park, with his white-painted gables and his white-painted balconies to his six-roomed houses. But let us not misunderstand. It is best for the workers – the brains and backbone of England – to live in smiling houses, even though jerry-built, than in many of those grey, rain-sodden houses of the Midlands and the North, where the "knocker-up" pursues his calling each dawn and the factory hooter sounds all too early.

Personally, the writer here declares that he has no love for the capitalist. The latter has too often, ever since the Early Victorian days, been either a swindler or an aristocrat of bad intentions, and the jerry-builder was the natural outcome of his parting with his estate.

Poor Marigold! She could go no farther in the maze of doubt and uncertainty.

A dozen times that night she re-read the mysterious, but unconvincing, message. She was a girl of high intelligence, or she would not have been employed by the bank. The whole affair puzzled her, as it would indeed have puzzled anybody.

Next day after her luncheon she went round again to Mincing Lane, and made inquiry regarding the missing man.

The same girl told her that the principal had received a mysterious wire from Paris.

"I saw the telegram," she said. "It was from Paris, and was quite abrupt, saying that he would probably return in a week or so."

"But what does it all mean?" asked the distressed girl.

"I really don't know," replied the other girl. "Mr. Durrant's gone away, and that's all!"

That night Marigold went over to Ealing, and to Gerald's sister she showed the telegram. It puzzled her sorely.

"Whatever can Gerald be doing in Paris?" she exclaimed. "Why could he not write to us, eh?"

"I don't know," was the reply of the unnerved girl. "I think he ought to send us some address."

"But he may do so later," replied his sister. "Gerald is a man of business. He would realise how troubled we all are."

"He seems to have faded out of existence," said the girl, seated in the front parlour of the neat little villa of the neat suburban road.

"Yes," said his sister. "He certainly does. I await a letter each morning, but none comes."

"But what can he be doing in Paris?" queried Marigold. "Without a doubt, he has lost the confidence of his firm. He pretended to be lying ill here, and they have found out that he isn't ill at all!"

"Yes. The other day a middle-aged man came to see him, but I was forced to admit that he wasn't here – that he was missing," replied Gerald's sister.

Marigold went home utterly dispirited. What could she do? It was useless to go to the police and raise a hue and cry regarding a man who, from time to time, telegraphed to his employers and to her that he was on the point of returning. So she was compelled to wait.

Gerald Durrant had disappeared. He had sent her messages, it is true, messages of comfort, yet when she argued within herself, she saw that he ought, at least, to have given her some address to which she could reply by letter or by telegram.

True, Boyne was absent. But he had only been absent for a few days, while her lover had been missing very much longer.

Four more days of blank despair crept slowly by. Seated beneath her green-shaded light at the bank, with her great ledger before her, Marigold reckoned up the columns of figures mechanically, and handed them to be checked. They were accounts of all classes of merchants, mostly of profiteers, firms who had made fortunes out of the valour and blood of the gallant fellows who had given their lives for Britain. She felt so unhappy without her lover. Gerald, who had directed those investigations concerning the hooded man who was her aunt's employer, had disappeared with startling suddenness, yet he had assured her that he was following some mysterious clue.