Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley (bookreader .txt) 📗

further amazement, with a certain Mrs. Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had known from childhood. Mrs. Manderson, it appeared, on her return from Italy, had somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and disposition. It came, she said, of her having pitched her tent in their hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near neighbours. He had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion unlike himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with idiot loquacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding from time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs. Wallace. The other lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the slight appearance of agitation with which she had stopped him in the vestibule. She had spoken pleasantly to him of her travels, of her settlement in London, and of people whom they both knew.

During the last half of the opera, which he had stayed in the box to hear, he had been conscious of nothing, as he sat behind them, but the angle of her cheek and the mass of her hair, the lines of her shoulder and arm, her hand upon the cushion. The black hair had seemed at last a forest, immeasurable, pathless and enchanted, luring him to a fatal adventure.... At the end he had been pale and subdued, parting with them rather formally.

The next time he saw her—it was at a country house where both were guests—and the subsequent times, he had had himself in hand. He had matched her manner and had acquitted himself, he thought, decently, considering—

Considering that he lived in an agony of bewilderment and remorse and longing. He could make nothing, absolutely nothing, of her attitude. That she had read his manuscript and understood the suspicion indicated in his last question to her at White Gables was beyond the possibility of doubt. Then how could she treat him thus and frankly, as she treated all the world of men who had done no injury?

For it had become clear to his intuitive sense, for all the absence of any shade of differentiation in her outward manner, that an injury had been done, and that she had felt it. Several times, on the rare and brief occasions when they had talked apart, he had warning from the same sense that she was approaching this subject; and each time he had turned the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear. Two resolutions he made. The first was that when he had completed a commissioned work which tied him to London he would go away and stay away. The strain was too great. He no longer burned to know the truth; he wanted nothing to confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith, that he had blundered, that he had misread the situation, misinterpreted her tears, written himself down a slanderous fool. He speculated no more on Marlowe’s motive in the killing of Manderson. Mr. Cupples returned to London, and Trent asked him nothing. He knew now that he had been right in those words—Trent remembered them for the emphasis with which they were spoken—“So long as she considered herself bound to him... no power on earth could have persuaded her.” He met Mrs. Manderson at dinner at her uncle’s large and tomb-like house in Bloomsbury, and there he conversed most of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin.

His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.

But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was a formal challenge.

While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to him gravely. She was to all appearance careless now, smiling so that he recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: “Her mouth has ten thousand charms that touch the soul.” She made a tour of the beautiful room where she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils of a hundred bric-à-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries, and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a favourite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she consented at once.

She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now as it had moved him before. “You are a musician born,” he said quietly when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had passed away. “I knew that before I first heard you.”

“I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a great comfort to me,” she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling. “When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course: I was at the opera. But that wouldn’t prove much, would it?”

“No,” he said abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that had just ended. “I think I knew it the first time I saw you.” Then understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For the first time the past had been invoked.

There was a short silence. Mrs. Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily looked away. Colour began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a chair opposite to him.

“That speech of yours will do as well as anything,” she began slowly, looking at the point of her shoe, “to bring us to what I wanted to say. I asked you here today on purpose, Mr. Trent, because I couldn’t bear it any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have been saying to myself that it didn’t matter what you thought of me in that affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to others of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of your reasons for suppressing your manuscript. I asked myself how it could matter. But all the time, of course, I knew it did matter. It mattered horribly. Because what you thought was not true.” She raised her eyes and met his gaze calmly. Trent, with a completely expressionless face, returned her look.

“Since I began to know you,” he said, “I have ceased to think it.” “Thank you,” said Mrs. Manderson; and blushed suddenly and deeply. Then, playing with a glove, she added, “But I want you to know what was true.

“I did not know if I should ever see you again,” she went on in a lower voice, “but I felt that if I did I must speak to you about this. I thought it would not be hard to do so, because you seemed to me an understanding person; and besides, a woman who has been married isn’t expected to have the same sort of difficulty as a young girl in speaking about such things when it is necessary. And then we did meet again, and I discovered that it was very difficult indeed. You made it difficult.”

“How?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” said the lady. “But yes—I do know. It was just because you treated me exactly as if you had never thought or imagined anything of that sort about me. I had always supposed that if I saw you again you would turn on me that hard, horrible sort of look you had when you asked me that last question—do you remember?—at White Gables. Instead of that you were just like any other acquaintance. You were just”—she hesitated and spread out her hands—“nice. You know. After that first time at the opera when I spoke to you I went home positively wondering if you had really recognized me. I mean, I thought you might have recognized my face without remembering who it was.”

A short laugh broke from Trent in spite of himself, but he said nothing.

She smiled deprecatingly. “Well, I couldn’t remember if you had spoken my name; and I thought it might be so. But the next time, at the Iretons’, you did speak it, so I knew; and a dozen times during those few days I almost brought myself to tell you, but never quite. I began to feel that you wouldn’t let me, that you would slip away from the subject if I approached it. Wasn’t I right? Tell me, please.” He nodded. “But why?” He remained silent.

“Well,” she said, “I will finish what I had to say, and then you will tell me, I hope, why you had to make it so hard. When I began to understand that you wouldn’t let me talk of the matter to you, it made me more determined than ever. I suppose you didn’t realize that I would insist on speaking even if you were quite discouraging. I dare say I couldn’t have done it if I had been guilty, as you thought. You walked into my parlour today, never thinking I should dare. Well, now you see.”

Mrs. Manderson had lost all her air of hesitancy. She had, as she was wont to say, talked herself enthusiastic, and in the ardour of her purpose to annihilate the misunderstanding that had troubled her so long she felt herself mistress of the situation.

“I am going to tell you the story of the mistake you made,” she continued, as Trent, his hands clasped between his knees, still looked at her enigmatically. “You will have to believe it, Mr. Trent; it is utterly true to life, with its confusions and hidden things and cross-purposes and perfectly natural mistakes that nobody thinks twice about taking for facts. Please understand that I don’t blame you in the least, and never did, for jumping to the conclusion you did. You knew that I was estranged from my husband, and you knew what that so often means. You knew before I told you, I expect, that he had taken up an injured attitude towards me; and I was silly enough to try and explain it away. I gave you the explanation of it that I had given myself at first, before I realized the wretched truth; I told you he was disappointed in me because I couldn’t take a brilliant lead in society. Well, that was true; he was so. But I could see you weren’t convinced. You had guessed what it took me much longer to see, because I knew how irrational it was. Yes; my husband was jealous of John Marlowe; you divined that.

“Then I behaved like a fool when you let me see you had divined it; it was such a blow, you understand, when I had supposed all the humiliation and strain was at an end, and that his delusion had died with him. You practically asked me if my husband’s secretary was not my lover, Mr. Trent—I have to say it, because I want you to understand why I broke down and made a scene. You took that for a confession; you thought I was guilty of that, and I think you even thought I might be a party to the crime, that I had consented.... That did hurt me; but perhaps you couldn’t have thought anything else—I don’t know.”

Trent, who had not hitherto taken his eyes from her face, hung his head at the words. He did not raise it again as she continued. “But really it was simple shock and distress that made me give way, and the memory of all the misery that mad suspicion had meant to me. And when I pulled myself together again you had gone.”

She rose and went to an escritoire beside the window, unlocked a drawer, and drew out a long, sealed envelope.

“This is the manuscript you left with me,” she said. “I have read it through again and again. I have always wondered, as everybody does, at your cleverness in things of this kind.” A faintly mischievous smile flashed upon her face, and was gone. “I thought it was splendid, Mr. Trent—I almost forgot that the story was my own, I was so interested. And I want to say now, while I have this in my hand, how much I thank you for your generous, chivalrous act in sacrificing this triumph of yours rather than put a woman’s reputation in peril. If all had been as you supposed, the facts must have come out when the police