XXVIII
She rose as Gladys brought in the tea tray and laid it carefully on the table. Gladys was sixty, toothless, and more or less chinless. She wore most of her hair in a bun, which overflowed, drooping over her neck in picturesque confusion. Gladys had the smile of one who enjoyed the privilege of entertaining a visitor. She smiled at the girl, smiled at Mr. Gilder, and smiled herself out of the room. Fabrian Gilder thought he had never seen a more ghastly exhibition.
“You’re a good friend of Gwyn’s, aren’t you?” he asked, as he sipped his tea.
She dropped her eyes in maidenly embarrassment.
“We are rather good friends, but no more. We may be something closer—who knows? He has always behaved like a perfect gentleman and treated me like a lady. I must say that for Arthur. But he’s a little trying; don’t you find him so?” she asked, with a girlish naïveté that was a little overdone.
“I have left him,” said Mr. Gilder briefly. “He and I disagreed over a question of policy and I retired. In fact, we had a very bad row and came to blows—I tell you this because you’ll probably learn the facts from him sooner or later.”
Mary was shocked; and when Mary was shocked she covered her rather generous mouth with her two small white hands.
“You don’t tell me!” she said in a hushed voice. “Blows! Is that it?” She nodded her head to his lip.
“That’s it,” said Gilder shortly.
“Blows!” repeated Mary Wenner. “How perfectly disgusting and vulgar!”
“I wanted to talk to you about Arthur Gwyn,” Gilder broke in upon her horrified wonder. “We’re not good friends, but that doesn’t mean I bear him any malice. But, naturally, as we are parted, I don’t feel called upon to protect him and stand between him and his dupes”—he emphasized the last word—“as I have done in the past. You know him as well as I do,” he went on, as she was about to speak. “You know his vanity; you know how perfectly unreliable and insincere he is; you know, too, that he’d get out of any promise he ever made, even if it was in black and white.”
He was watching her narrowly all the time he spoke, and now he saw her eyebrows arch.
“Indeed?” she said coldly. “I don’t know anything about the law, but I can’t see how a gentleman, or a common man for the matter of that, could get out of—what is the expression—legal obligations?”
“Then you don’t know Arthur Gwyn as well as I do,” he said. “But that is beside the point. I haven’t come here to blackguard him or to make him look smaller in your eyes. Not that I could,” he said, anticipating her protest a little ambiguously. “But I believe in a girl having a square deal, especially a working girl who may have nobody in the world to look after her interests. And I tell you that that fellow couldn’t go straight if he was fired from a gun. Now, what about the Chelford treasure?”
At the words she sat bolt upright, and a look of blank astonishment came to her face.
“Do you know?” she gasped.
“Of course I know! You’re going to help him find the gold, and in return——” He paused.
That was exactly what he had come to find out. What obligation had Arthur undertaken in return for the information she would give him? And he was pretty sure of his ground. He knew the girl; had had some dealings with her when she was with Chelford; and since he lived on his knowledge of human beings, he had analyzed her with more or less accuracy. He knew her vanity, her ambition; had heard something of her summary discharge from Fossaway Manor. There was only one reward that Arthur Gwyn could offer.
“He has promised to marry you,” he said, and he was not altogether drawing a bow at a venture.
“Did he tell you that?” she said, with a little catch in her voice. “I hope you don’t think, Mr. Gilder, that I’ve thrown myself at his head? That I wouldn’t do for the best man in the world.” She looked at him thoughtfully, and added: “Old or young. I trust Arthur as a gentleman to fulfil any promise he has made. I am going to do something for him that will make all the difference in the world——”
“When is he going to marry you? After the treasure is discovered, I suppose?”
She nodded.
“He will have to marry me then,” she said.
“I realize that. You’re a girl that has to make her way in the world without influence, and possibly without friends.” Mr. Gilder knew he was on the right tack here. “He can offer you a position and you can offer him money. After all, that is exactly what his sister is doing, and nobody thinks any worse of her for that.”
“Exactly,” murmured Miss Wenner, who had never seen the matter in that light before.
“The point I want to make is this,” he went on: “What bond has he given you?”
“His word of honour,” said Miss Wenner dramatically.
“I daresay. But what valuable bond has he given you?”
“I’ll show you.”
She went into the next room, which was evidently her bedroom, and, returning with her bag, placed it on her knee, opened the flap, and took out, amongst other things, a slip of paper, which she passed across to Mr. Gilder. He read it at a glance, noted the careful emendation which Arthur had made, and passed it back.
“That is valueless,” he said, and her face fell. “What is to prevent his going to Chelford and striking a bargain with him? Where do you come in then? Besides, this is what is known in law as a promise under duress—that is to say, under compulsion. If he is acting in the interests of his client, he can plead that he had to make this promise in order to secure information which you were illegally withholding.”
She stared at him.
“It’s not illegal to know and not to tell?”
He nodded.
“To know of the existence of hidden treasure and to withhold your information is a crime in some countries, and I daresay it is in England. But that’s beside the point. Where do you come in, Miss Wenner?”
She bit her lip thoughtfully.
“I never saw it in that way,” she confessed. “What can I do, Mr. Gilder?”
He felt inclined to offer the obvious solution, “Get him to marry you first,” but changed his mind. Mary Wenner married would be a useless ally.
At the back of his mind he was certain that this rather vulgar girl—for he had a nice and finicking taste in the matter of women—had discovered the Chelford millions. If he had not had this belief he would not have made his call. He believed that by some accident, or by reason of her close association with Harry Chelford, she had unveiled the mystery of the lost gold; and his object now was to discover how far his theory was justified by facts.
“Is there no way of making that agreement more binding, Mr. Gilder?” she asked. “You’re a lawyer—couldn’t you draw up something he wouldn’t wriggle out of? Naturally, I’m too much of a lady to want any man to marry me, if he doesn’t want to marry me. If he just hinted as much I should tell him to go—I should simply say, ‘Oh, very well, I’m not at all anxious to marry, thank you very much.’ I think a girl who throws herself at a man’s head is despicable, don’t you, Mr. Gilder?”
He did not answer this query.
“I could draw you up an agreement that would be legally binding, but I doubt if even that would help you. Why trust him at all?” he asked bluntly.
She dropped her eyes at this.
“Who—or rather whom—could I trust?” she asked, and took an invisible crumb off her dress. “This is such an awful world, and men are so very deceitful, Mr. Gilder. The young ones are the worst, of course, but they haven’t experience. I do think that a man isn’t in the prime of life till he’s about forty-five.” She waited. “Or fifty. He’s sort of settled down and sowed his wild oats, and he doesn’t want to go out at nights and all that. And I’ll admit that Arthur is flighty. I wouldn’t tell it to anybody but you, but he tried to kiss me any number of times, and he once said the most terrible thing to me at Fossaway Manor. I said to him: ‘Arthur, you seem to forget that you’re speaking to a lady,’ and he just curled up and died, if you understand me. I don’t mean that he actually perished——”
“I understand what you mean,” said Gilder, and went on to make his most startling revelation. “Now, listen, Miss Wenner. You’re a sensible girl and I can talk to you as I could talk to very few people.”
This cliché of intensive flattery, which so seldom fails even when employed upon intelligent people, produced in Miss Wenner the strained attentiveness which was called for.
“Suppose I tell you,” said Fabrian Gilder darkly, “that Gwyn is already trying to anticipate your discovery?”
“I beg your pardon?” Mary Wenner was not very strong on the more flowery expressions of speech.
“Suppose he’s trying to get ahead of you—trying to find the gold without your assistance?”
“He wouldn’t dare!” she gasped.
Mr. Gilder nodded very slowly, very deliberately.
“He has already tried,” he said. “Two nights ago I was watching him, suspecting his plan. He went at three o’clock in the morning to the ruins of Chelford Abbey, and he took with him a crowbar.…”
Whilst he was speaking, the red in her face deepened and the wide-opened eyes grew brighter.
“The hound!” she breathed. “The twisting, double-faced monkey!”
It was not a ladylike expression, but for the moment she was superior to shame.
“The dirty, thieving, twisting sneak! To the Abbey—with a crowbar! I’ll take my oath on a Bible that I never breathed a word of where it was hid—I mean hidden. Let him go with his crowbar—ha-ha!” She laughed shrilly, but gave no other evidence of supreme amusement. “I’ll crowbar him! Let him search and scrape and dig and see what he can find.”
He tried to soothe her, but for the moment her soul was breaking in tumultuous waves upon the muddy flats of Arthur’s duplicity.
“He has deceived me! I don’t mean in an unladylike way—I mean—you know what I mean, Mr. Gilder? I trusted that man. I gave him all my heart.” The sob came naturally, but it was largely due to intensified annoyance. “I gave him all that a woman could give a man—information I mean, Mr. Gilder. I don’t want you to get any wrong ideas about me, because I’ve always behaved like a lady, and nobody can point their fingers of scorn at me.”
She grew calm after a while.
“Who can you trust?” she asked bitterly. “Who—can—you—trust?”
“You can trust me.” Fabrian Gilder’s voice was very gentle, almost pleading.
He was rather a good-looking man, she observed; his gray hair gave him distinction.
“You wouldn’t want a legal document from me.…”
“Yes, I would,” she said obstinately. “I don’t trust men.”
“You shall have any document you wish. I will even go as far as compromising myself hopelessly.”
She coughed.
“I don’t think I should go quite as far as that,” she said, misunderstanding him.
“I mean that I would take the risk of detection without safeguarding myself as Arthur Gwyn has done.”
She dabbed her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief.
“Of course, Mr. Gilder—I don’t know you very well, but I’m not going to say that I don’t like you. I’ve always said to Agatha—my Tuesday friend, as I call her—‘Mr. Gilder’s a perfect gentleman.’ In fact, I’m—Mr. Gilder, what is your Christian name?”
“Fabrian,” he said.
She lingered tenderly over the word and smiled, a wistful sideways smile.
“I should call you Fabe, I suppose? It’s a perfectly lovely name.… As I was saying, I don’t want to throw myself at any man’s head.”
“Let us go down to-night.”
Her face changed.
“To the Abbey—to-night?”
He nodded.
“My car will get us down in an hour and a half, and we can wait till it’s dark; and unless there’s a lot of digging to be done——”
“There is no digging,” she said. “But to-night?”
“Why not?” he demanded. “My cottage is less than a mile from the Abbey. If the gold is there and reachable, we could get away with enough to make us rich for life.”
She pondered this, and then:
“I know you’ll think it horrid of me, Mr. Gilder—Fabe—that does sound familiar, doesn’t it?—but I would like something in black and white.”
There and then Mr. Fabrian Gilder produced a document that was enough, as he observed jocularly, to hang him, and, reading it, even Mary Wenner, with her keen instinct for safeguards, was impressed. He wrote the agreement with his own fountain pen, on paper which he provided, and he had brought along that pen in his pocket with a view to such a contingency. It was a new pen, filled with an ink that he had purchased at a novelty store in Wardour Street, and which was guaranteed to fade within six hours of writing.
Miss Wenner read it through, folded it, and put it into her bag, and disappeared into her bedroom. She came back with the bag, but he guessed that the agreement was disposed in some safe place.
“Now, Fabe, what time do you want to start?”
“At nine-thirty?” he suggested, and she nodded.
“And don’t trouble to bring a crowbar,” she said a little viciously, as she remembered Arthur Gwyn’s rank treachery. “I’ll carry all the tools we want in my bag.”