“Mrs. Horbury will be here immediately,” said the butler with a bow.
Hanaud beheld his broad shoulders and his lean strength with contentment and, as the man turned away, he said firmly: “’Arf a mo’!”
The butler, used to all conditions of men, turned about stolidly and waited.
“You’ve been a sailor,” said the perspicacious visitor. The butler complimented Hanaud with as much of a smile as he allowed himself on duty.
“Admirals at sea and generals on land wouldn’t agree about that, sir. But name of Hanworth to both.”
Hanaud was puzzled and then especially pleased.
“I have him. A marine.”
Yes, sir.”
“We have them, too. Les Fusiliers-Marins—yes? They are much thought of and they think much of themselves. Good! Then you stay here?”
“I don’t know, sir, whether Mrs. Horbury will require me.”
“But if she does—?”
“Her service is a pleasure, sir,” Hanworth replied. A little sententious, no doubt—the super-marine on duty—but, however you looked at it, good marks for Olivia Horbury.
“Ha!” said Hanaud to himself as Hanworth left the room; and “Ha!” he said to himself again, drumming on the window-pane contentedly; and a quiet voice with a tremor of amusement broke in upon his contentment.
“The name was Gravot, I think, Monsieur Hanaud?” He swung round. Olivia Horbury was seated at a table under the second of the two windows.
“Ah, madame, you make the heart beat,” he said.
“You flatter me, Monsieur Hanaud.”
“Yes, that way, too. But at the, moment it is the noiselessness.”
“Monsieur Hanaud, do you wish me to believe that you belong to the day when women’s gowns whispered and their bangles rattled and all the birds in the garden piped ‘she is here, she is here’?”
“I try, madame, to be of my day and the Code Napoleon—” He broke off, noticing that she sat with an open cheque book in front of her.
“No, please, that is not possible now. I had hoped to return to Paris with one like that. But now there must be lawyers and hindrances.” He pointed to the cheque book. “Instead, perhaps, a little signed letter on the crested paper that as soon as the probations are over a cheque will be posted.”
“But, Monsieur Hanaud, that’s what I was doing.” She put a slender forefinger on the twopenny stamp. “Perhaps you don’t know that that was Daniel’s crest.”
She smiled as she spoke and Hanaud laughed, and Olivia laughed again.
“What a woman!” Hanaud exclaimed to his soul. “She can make the joke about the good Horbury’s honesty, but none the less yesterday she was in tears for him.” Indeed, as he watched her writing the cheque, her laughter dwindled to a whimper and the tears once more filled her eyes.
She scribbled a note, put it into an envelope with the cheque, sealed it, and rang the bell.
“I have drawn the cheque on my private account. The branch of the bank I deal with is on the ground floor of the next block of flats. I have already arranged with the manager. Hanworth will bring you back a draft upon the Paris branch.” She sent Hanworth off with the sealed envelope. “He will not be five minutes.”
Hanaud felt a trifle uncomfortable. After all, it was a large sum of money.
“It may be months before the estate is finally wound up,” he said.
“A year, monsieur. And since there is no reason that Monsieur Gravot of the Place Vendôme, who has waited so long for his money, should wait for another year, you shall take it back to him.” She got up with a swift movement and invited him to a chair. “I don’t want you, Monsieur Hanaud, to misunderstand me. Daniel and I were the very best of friends. Lots of people, no doubt, will give you quite another picture of him, and theirs may be true from their points of view; I’ll go further, and say it is. For me it was all different.”
There was a suggestion in her tone that he could have her story if he wished; and at that moment there was nothing Hanaud wished more. A younger daughter of an impoverished family, she had been carefully educated so that she might earn her living as a teacher in a high school.
“I was almost learned in those days,” and she spoke of them as so remote that they were difficult and, astonishing to remember. “But it wasn’t any good, for I couldn’t teach. I could chatter, but I couldn’t instruct. I could get enjoyment myself out of Virgil, say—oh, yes, you needn’t look so surprised, Monsieur Hanaud, it’s not, as you might say, a politeness—but I couldn’t impart it. So I thought that I would go on the stage.”
“Ah!” said Hanaud.
“Yes,” said Olivia, taking up his exclamation relentlessly. “You think Daniel might have noticed me in the back row of the chorus, but could hardly have had the entrée into a high school.”
That is exactly what Hanaud had thought, but, having once been chided for his manners, he did not propose to fail again.
“No, no, Madame Horbury,” he cried. “It was that I saw you myself upon the boards—the lady of Scotland coming down the stairs with the candlestick.”
“Yes, and both acting equally well—no, I am wrong,” she answered, and again her lips curved in good humour and her eyes for a second danced, “for the candle had a flame and I hadn’t. I was no better on the stage than I was in the high school. But I didn’t believe it, of course. I wanted my opportunity. I was playing small parts, maids, you know, with the tea-tray—I suppose that I didn’t look so impossible—”
Here Monsieur Hanaud broke in with a flourish: “Every great lady must have prayed for such a maid!”
“Hadn’t we better say every great husband?” she replied dryly. “Anyway, you are quite right. Daniel was dabbling in theatrical management, and I sat next to him at a supper party. He was full of—fun, perhaps, isn’t the right word—jocularity’s better, and very sympathetic. My opportunity would come. Not a passionate part, no, a static part—arranging everything for the passionate ones, without leaving a trace of one’s mascara on one’s cheeks. As you see, he knew that I couldn’t act. Yet”—and there came a tenderness into her voice, whilst neither her eyes nor her lips lost their humour—“yet he put up a play for me.”
“Because he hoped that the quiet looks and the quiet part might draw the town?”
Olivia shook her head gently. “No, because he wanted me to marry him, and he knew that if I did, without failing in a big part, I should always feel aggrieved that I had never had my chance.”
“The play did fail?”
Olivia Horbury shivered, and half of her shivering, even so long afterwards, was serious.
“I was scarified. I wanted to put all the dramatic critics into a bag with a couple of cats and throw it into the Bosphorus. Daniel filled the house with paper for a month, but that wanted more canvassing than ever he did to get into Parliament. We got married immediately afterwards.”
That had been six years ago. Olivia had been twenty-two years old at the time of the marriage, and for the next two years they had lived at White Barn in Lordship Lane.
“I fell in love with the house as soon as I saw it.”
“The holly hedge? It was already there, of course?”
Olivia’s face grew soft. Her eyes beamed. “I am glad you remembered it,” she said warmly. “It was there, but it was ragged. It was like a man who wants his hair cutting. And there were holes in it. I looked after it myself. Days and days in the autumn I stood on a ladder and clipped it. We had a gardener to look after the flowers. But the holly hedge was my job. I let nobody else touch it. I saw it grow glossy and the holes fill up until it was a great high evergreen wall.” She laughed happily. “Even now I drive down and spend delightful days looking after it.”
“Even now?” Hanaud pressed the question with a smile.
“Even now. Still no one must touch it except me.”
She checked her eager speech rather suddenly and turned towards the window. Once she threw a swift glance towards him and saw that he was watching her.
“But though we took this flat afterwards, when we had money,” she resumed quickly, “it was because Dan had to see people. We wanted to keep White Barn for ourselves. So perhaps, Monsieur Hanaud, you can under stand my willingness to settle the account of your jeweller in the Place Vendôme. Whenever we were on number seventeen with the carrées and the transversales and seventeen won, a good wedge of the winnings was handed over to me. Of course, it was borrowed again, fairly often at the beginning, but of late Dan was on seventeen quite often.”
Hanworth returned to the flat with the draft upon the Paris branch of the Bank. Olivia looked it through and handed it to Hanaud.
“It is correct?” she asked.
“It is oke,” he returned, as though indeed it were something more, and taking from his pocket-book a receipt by Gravot et Cie of the Place Vendôme, he laid it upon her writing-table. Then he bowed over her hand.
“So,” said she, “it is all ended.”
“Yes.”
He turned and walked towards the door. But he walked ever more slowly, and when his hand was on the knob of the door he stopped altogether.
“For my friend, Gravot, yes,” he repeated.
“There will be other claimants? Maybe,” she asked and answered behind him.
“I was not thinking of claimants,” he replied, and he turned round towards her rather swiftly and dramatically. It was a disservice to Hanaud that, although he could keep drama out of his thoughts, he never could out of his actions; and generally it was transpontine drama. He saw a young woman without any of the tender humour which had moved her a few minutes ago, wary and suspicious.
“Of whom, then?” She was as curt as she was wary.
“I cannot say for sure.”
“In other words, you don’t know.”
“I don’t know,” Hanaud agreed.
No three words were more repugnant for Hanaud to utter amongst little people in connection with a small case; and none easier when he was coping with big problems and intelligent minds. And at all events Olivia Horbury was—relieved?—yes, relieved by his ignorance. Her face grew less tight, her eyes less wary; she drew a breath. Hanaud had expected dismissal. He was invited to continue.
“I do not for one moment think that Horbury used that blue-handled knife himself,” he said, and saw her lips twitch and a gleam of horror in her eyes as he thus described the weapon. “And my good friend, the Superintendent Maltby, begins to think with me. But, see! I am in a special debt to you. Moreover, now you stand all queenly and prickles, I will say it.”
Suddenly the smile for which Hanaud had ceased to hope glimmered again upon her lips. She sat down in a chair. “You shall,” she said.
“At White Barn, I was moved. There was something I did not understand, something in all this grim tragedy, pleasant and disturbing, of which I now have a tiny hold.” He was discovering a Titania permanently in love with Bottom, though of that couple he had never heard. If Racine had imagined such a pair, Hanaud would surely have quoted him, for he was well up in Racine. But, unfortunately, Racine only dealt in the heroes of Troy and the ghosts of Sophocles, and wit these Horbury and White Barn had no connection.
“So I will say, I beg you to be careful.” He nodded his head.
“And why, Monsieur Hanaud?”
The question was gently, but firmly put. Olivia was guarding her secrets. Hanaud hesitated over his answer. But he felt, and felt strongly, that he could speak more exactly to Olivia than he would have dared with weaker vessels. He said: “Because there may be danger for you again.”
Olivia did not move, and there was more deliberation than surprise in her face. “Again?” she asked.
“Yes. There was danger when, in the middle of the night, a telephone receiver was lifted from its cradle in an empty house and you locked your door.”
Olivia’s face grew white as a plaster mask. Even her lips were bloodless. But in her eyes there was fear. And yet, for Hanaud, not enough fear. She was keeping her secrets, and Hanaud felt the danger grow and seep into this room like a miasma and fold about her till darkness grew between them. Olivia got up from her chair. If the danger was not to end, talk of it should.
“I thank you,” she said and her voice was warm. Hanaud accepted her decision. But he had a practical word.
“You keep the marine?”
There was urgency in his voice. A fusilier-marin of twenty years’ service with the honourable discharge! To be fostered, yes.
Olivia’s voice broke into an open, joyous laugh. “Of course! If he will stay and wait upon a lone woman in Lordship Lane.”
“You go back there?”
“As soon as the formalities allow.”
She waited now for him to give the sign that their interview was ended and, as he bowed to her, she rang the bell. As she heard the front door close she said slowly, “I have lost a friend.”
But Hanaud was a persistent animal and was not so sure.