The Lion's Share by Arnold Bennett (booksvooks TXT) 📕

delicious to her.

"I am essential to him," she thought ecstatically. "I stand between him and disaster. When he has succeeded his success will be my work and nobody else's. I have a mission. I must live for it.... If anyone had told me a year ago that a great French genius would be absolutely dependent upon me, and that I meant for him all the difference between failure and triumph, I should have laughed.... And yet!..." She looked at him surreptitiously. "He's an angel. But he's also a baby." The feelings of motherhood were as naught compared to hers.

Then she remarked harshly, icily:

"Well, I shall be much obliged if you will go back to Paris at once--to-day. _Somebody_ must have a little sense."

Just at this point Aguilar interrupted. He came slouching round the corner of the clipped bushes, untidy, shabby, implacable, with some set purpose in his hard blue eyes. She could have annihilated him with satisfaction, but the fellow was indestructible as well as implacable.

"Could I have a word with ye, madam?" he mumbled, putting on his well-known air of chicane.

With the unexplained Musa close by her she could not answer: "Wait a little. I'm engaged." She had to be careful. She had to make out especially that she and the young man were up to nothing in particular, nothing that had the slightest importance.

"What is it, Aguilar?" she questioned, inimically.

"It's down here," said Aguilar, who recked not of the implications of a tone. And by the mere force of his glance he drew his mistress away, out of sight of Musa and the dog.

"Is that your motor-car at the gates, madam?" he demanded gloomily and confidentially, his gaze now fixed on the ground or on his patched boots.

"Of course it is," said Audrey. "Why, what's the matter?"

"That's all right then," said he. "But I thought it might belong to another person, and I had to make sure. Now if ye'll just step along a bit farther, I've a little thing as I want to point out to ye, madam. It's my duty to point it out, let others say _what_ they will."

He walked ahead doggedly, and Audrey crossly came after, until they arrived nearly at the end of the hedge which, separating the upper from the lower garden, hid from those immediately behind it all view of the estuary. Here, still sheltered by the hedge, he stopped and Audrey stopped, and Aguilar absently plucked up a young plantain from the turf and dropped it into his pocket.

"There's been a man a-hanging round this place since yesterday mornin'," said Aguilar intimately. "I call him a suspicious character--at least, I _did_, till last night. He ain't slept in the village, that I do know, but he's about again this morning."

"Well," said Audrey with impatience. "Why don't you tell Inspector Keeble? Or have you quarrelled with Inspector Keeble again?"

"It's not that as would ha' stopped me from acquainting Inspector Keeble with the circumstances if I thought it my duty so to do," replied Aguilar. "But the fact is I saw the chap talking to Inspector Keeble yesterday evening. He don't know as I saw him. It was that as made me think; now is he a suspicious character or ain't he? Of course Keeble's a rare simple-minded 'un, as we all know."

"And what do you want me to do?"

"I thought you might like to have a look at him yeself, madam. And if you'll just peep round the end of this hedge casual-like, ye'll see him walking across the salting from Lousey Hard. He's a-comin' this way. Casual-like now--and he won't see ye."

Audrey had to obey. She peeped casual-like, and she did in fact see a man on the salting, and this man was getting nearer. She could see him very plainly in the brilliant clearness of the summer morning. After the shortest instant of hesitation she recognised him beyond any doubt. It was the detective who had been so plenteously baptised by Susan Foley in the area of the house at Paget Gardens. Aguilar looked at Audrey, and Audrey annoyed herself somewhat by blushing. However, an agreeable elation quickly overcame the blush.


CHAPTER XXVIII


ENCOUNTER

"Good morning," Audrey cried, very gaily, to the still advancing detective, who, after the slightest hesitation in the world, responded gaily:

"Good morning."

The man's accent struck her. She said to herself, with amusement:

"He's Irish!"

Audrey had left the astonished but dispassionate gardener at the hedge, and was now emerging from the scanty and dishevelled plantation close to the boundary wall of the estate. She supposed that the police must have been on her track and on the track of Jane Foley, and that by some mysterious skill they had hunted her down. But she did not care. She was not in the least afraid. The sudden vision of a jail did not affright her. On the contrary her chief sensation was one of joyous self-confidence, which sensation had been produced in her by the remarks and the attitude of Musa. She had always known that she was both shy and adventurous, and that the two qualities were mutually contradictory; but now it appeared to her that diffidence had been destroyed, and that that change which she had ever longed for in her constitution had at least really come to pass.

"You don't seem very surprised to see me," said Audrey.

"Well, madam," said the detective, "I'm not paid to be surprised--in my business."

He had raised his hat. He was standing on the dyke, and from that height he looked somewhat down upon Audrey leaning against the wall. The watercourse and the strip of eternally emerald-green grass separated them. Though neither tall nor particularly handsome, he was a personable man, with a ready smile and alert, agile movements. Audrey was too far off to judge of his eyes, but she was quite sure that they twinkled. The contrast between this smart, cheerful fellow and the half-drowned victim in the area of the house in Paget Gardens was quite acute.

"Now I've a good mind to hold a meeting for your benefit," said Audrey, striving to recall the proper phrases of propaganda which she had heard in the proper quarters in London during her brief connection with the cause. However, she could not recall them, "But there's no need to," she added. "A gentleman of your intelligence must be of our way of thinking."

"About what?"

"About the vote, of course. And so your conduct is all the more shocking."

"Why!" he exclaimed, laughing. "If it comes to that, your own sex is against you."

Audrey had heard this argument before, and it had the same effect on her as on most other stalwarts of the new political creed. It annoyed her, because there was something in it.

"The vast majority of women are with us," said she.

"My wife isn't."

"But your wife isn't the vast majority of women," Audrey protested.

"Oh yes, she is," said the detective, "so far as I'm concerned. Every wife is, so far as her husband is concerned. Sure, you ought to know that!" In his Irish way he doubled the "r" of the word "sure," and somehow this trick made Audrey like him still more. "My wife believes," he concluded, "that woman's sphere is the home."

("His wife is stout," Audrey decided within herself, on no grounds whatever. "If she wasn't, she couldn't be a vast majority.")

Aloud she said:

"Well, then, why can't you leave them alone in their sphere, instead of worrying them and spying on them down areas?"

"D'ye mean at Paget Gardens?"

"Of course."

"Oh!" he laughed. "That wasn't professional--if you'll excuse me being so frank. That was just due to human admiration. It's not illegal to admire a young woman, I suppose, even if she is a suffragette."

"What young woman are you talking about?"

"Miss Susan Foley, of course. I won't tell you what I think of her, in spite of all she did, because I've learnt that it's a mistake to praise one woman to another. But I don't mind admitting that her going off to the north has made me life a blank. If I'd thought she'd go, I should never have reported the affair at the Yard. But I was annoyed, and I'm rather hasty." He paused, and ended reflectively: "I committed follies to get a word with the young lady, and I didn't get it, but I'd do the same again."

"And you a married man!" Audrey burst out, startled, and diverted, at the explanation, but at the same time outraged by a confession so cynical.

The detective pulled a silky moustache.

"When a wife is very strongly convinced that her sphere is the home," he retorted slowly and seriously, "you're tempted at times to let her have the sphere all to herself. That's the universal experience of married men, and ye may believe me, miss--madam."

Audrey said:

"And now Miss Foley's gone north, you've decided to come and admire _me_ in _my_ home!"

"So it is your home!" murmured the detective with an uncontrolled quickness which wakened Audrey's old suspicions afresh--and which created a new suspicion, the suspicion that the fellow was simply playing with her. "I assure you I came here to recover; I'd heard it was the finest climate in England."

"Recover?"

"Yes, from fire-extinguishers. D'ye know I coughed for twenty-four hours after that reception?... And you should have seen my clothes! The doctor says my lungs may never get over it.... That's what comes of admiration."

"It's what comes of behaving as no married man ought to behave."

"Did I say I was married?" asked the detective with an ingenuous air. "Well, I may be. But I dare say I'm only married just about as much as you are yourself, madam."

Upon this remark he raised his hat and departed along the grassy summit of the sea-wall.

Audrey flushed for the second time that morning, and more strikingly than before. She was extremely discontented with, and ashamed of, herself, for she had meant to be the equal of the detective, and she had not been. It was blazingly clear that he had indeed played with her--or, as she put it in her own mind: "He just stuffed me up all through."

She tried to think logically. Had he been pursuing the motor-car all the way from Birmingham? Obviously he had not, since according to Aguilar he had been in the vicinity of Moze since the previous morning. Hence he did not know that Audrey was involved in the Blue City affair, and he did not know that Jane Foley was at Frinton. How he had learnt that Audrey belonged to Moze, and why and what he had come to investigate at Moze, she could not guess. Nor did these problems appear to her to have an importance at all equal to the importance of hiding from the detective that she had been staying at Frinton. If he followed her to Frinton he would inevitably discover that Jane Foley was at Frinton, and the sequel would be more imprisonment for Jane. Therefore Audrey must not return to Frinton. Having by a masterly process of ratiocination reached this conclusion, she began to think rather better of herself, and ceased blushing.

"Aguilar," she demanded excitedly, having gone back through the plantation. "Did Miss Ingate happen to say where I was staying last night?"

"No, madam."

"I must run into the house and write a