BEFORE many days had passed Countess Alexia had reason to know that the enemy she had made and defied was at work against her. Her instinctive judgment of her unwelcome admirer’s character had surely prepared her for this. And in truth Aubrey Playford was one of those men whose chivalry is but skin-deep: it is merely the veneer of their education and breeding, the mask which covers a malignant and unscrupulous soul. The man could be trusted to act according to the recognized codes of honour and propriety so long as his own interest and feelings were not deeply touched; when passion, developing into a spirit of vindictiveness, clashed with the code, the mask shrivelled away and the real man showed his face.
But in this matter he had worked quietly, unostentatiously, knowing well how small a spark of scandal it takes to kindle a great fire. It had been enough for him to drop a few well-placed hints, of course under a strict and purposely futile enjoinment to secrecy, and the mischief was done. The whispers spread, growing in tone and freedom, till at last Countess Alexia von Rohnburg began to be openly pointed at in serious connection with the Vaux House tragedy. From personal to journalistic accusation was but a step and that an inevitable one. The allusions to a young lady of great beauty, a well-known and popular figure in society, closely connected with the diplomatic world, were markedly obvious, and the question was discussed, under a thinly veiled indication of identity, whether, being protected by the law governing foreign embassies, she would be amenable to justice were the crime brought home to her.
So, it seemed, in a few hours, Countess Alexia was rudely made aware of the fact that she was a marked woman. All kinds of wild tales began to be circulated as to the motive for the deed; there was a strong touch of romance about it that caught the popular fancy; the affair was lifted by its surroundings from the normal sordid groove of crime; yet the fact, the terrible fact, remained that this girl was pointed at as a murderess.
Merely on suspicion, it is true, but suspicion, the very vaguest, left to roam unchecked, gathers size and weight till it assumes the proportions of certainty.
When the odious innuendo first came to Count Prosper’s notice he went to his sister in a terrible state of mind. He was, for a diplomatist, a frank, straightforward young fellow, devoted to his profession, and jealous of his family honour. Alexia assured him that the suspicion was, if not quite groundless, absolutely untrue.
“Then we must give it the lie at once,” he cried, with the vehemence of his native blood.
“Would it not be wiser to treat it with contempt?” she argued. “There is nothing tangible yet to answer, and there is the unfortunate fact to face that I was in the room with Captain Martindale, and I did lose, there or somewhere else, my sword hair-pin.”
He stared at her blankly for some seconds before he could reply. There was a terrible suspicion in his mind.
“Alix,” he exclaimed hoarsely, “you—you didn’t kill him?”
She laughed. “No, my dear Prosper,” she answered, meeting his look frankly; “I give you my word of honour I am as innocent of that as yourself. Although the man did behave somewhat objectionably.”
Count Prosper gave a great sigh of relief. “Thank Heaven!” he exclaimed. “I thought for a moment it might have been true.”
“My dear brother,” she protested, “I admit your right to ask the question, but really you might credit me with a less drastic but hardly less effective method of giving aggressive admirers their quietus. Poor Captain Martindale! He was very confident in his powers of fascination, but his vanity scarcely deserved that punishment.”
Her brother had become calmer to face the situation. “Then do you know anything about the mystery?” he demanded. “Can you throw any light upon what happened? It never occurred to me to ask you that before, Alix; but if you know the real culprit, it is no time to keep silence now that this fearful odium rests on you. You will tell me?”
She shook her head. “I know nothing. I left Captain Martindale in that little room alive and well; objectionably so, I fear I thought him. And that was the last I saw of him.”
“He, Martindale, made love to you?” Prosper asked, after a troubled pause.
Alexia gave a shrug. “He made love to every woman worth making love to. Yes, he included me in his score. Unfortunately I was obliged by an act of friendship to give him the opportunity.”
“You know Hilda Dainton? He was inclined to behave very badly to her. Some men cannot bear to think that there is any happiness left in store for their cast-off loves. Hilda had made a fool of herself, and repented—too soon, I fancy, and Captain Martindale, when he found his power over her slipping away, tried to make use of another hold over her; some stupid letters.”
Prosper nodded. “I see, Alix. You could help her when she could not help herself.”
“I considered anything fair with such a man,” Alexia replied simply. “One must fight unscrupulous deceivers with their own weapons. The man made love to me and there was my opportunity. At the price of a kiss I got Hilda’s letters back for her, and in return presented Captain Martindale with my opinion of his conduct. That was all.”
“I wish it were all, Alix,” her brother said gravely. “At present it looks as though we were at the beginning of an ugly scandal; none the less ugly that it is untrue.”
“I am sorry, Prosper,” Alexia replied. “But what can I do? I cannot marry a man I detest even to avoid the most hideous of scandals.”
Her brother started. “What do you mean?”
“Simply,” she answered with a shrug, “that we owe this to Mr. Aubrey Playford.”
“That fellow? Ah, yes; you forbade him the house.”
“It was necessary,” Alexia said coldly. “When people forget themselves, they can scarcely complain if the rest of the world shows a disposition to consign them to oblivion. But he came here the other day and confirmed my opinion of him by giving me my choice between this scandal and himself.”
Prosper began to pace the room impatiently. “It is unfortunate, Alix,” he remarked somewhat querulously, “that you seem fated to fascinate the wrong men.”
“It carries a sufficient punishment with it, my dear Prosper,” she returned. “You need not add your reproaches.”
The veering of scandal’s vane had afforded considerable relief to the Duke and Duchess of Lancashire. His Grace found that he could walk the streets once more and enter his clubs without the inconvenience of feeling himself a marked man; and the Duchess, resuming her social activities, rejoiced in discussing the affair almost from an outsider’s standpoint.
Dormer Greetland was disposed to be very jocular on the subject.
“The poor Duke,” he said, “is going about like a convict on ticket-of-leave. He has been serving his time with the Duchess, and a very uncomfortable time it has evidently been. They say she has taken the unique opportunity of wigging the poor man for every act of his somewhat monotonous career. According to her he has never done anything right in all his life, except marrying her, and even there she has never forgiven him for not being a more interesting bridegroom. The wretched Duke, who can’t help his personality, was brought up to rely upon his strawberry leaves, and in the faith of the gospel that a Duke need not bother about intellect or even appearance. For the last ten years he has been enduring the process of having all that nonsense shaken out of him, and the Duchess can put plenty of vim into her shaking. Yes; this affair has afforded an excellent opportunity for summing up the evidence against him, and he has been found guilty on every count of the indictment. He has had a pretty bad time of it. He could only plead his dukedom, but he could hardly expect that to go down with his partner in it, who was at once judge and prosecuting counsel. They say things got so bad that he had to lock himself up in his own rooms and subsist on a stray tin of biscuits, a miscellaneous assortment of tabloids, and a syphon of soda-water flavoured with bay rum. The regimen has had such a lowering effect on his constitution that he is more ducal than ever. He is so fine-drawn, what with his troubles matrimonial and commissariat, that Percy Nayland as he saw him go into the Carlton said he looked like the ghost of the Feudal System in a frock-coat.”
“And in the meantime, what is going to be done about the business?” some one asked.
“So far as I can make out,” the quidnunc answered, “it is going to be left to develop.”
“Is Scotland Yard going to take it up?”
“I don’t see how they can.”
“Not against Countess Alexia von Rohnburg?”
“My dear Monty,” Greetland returned, “as things stand, they can’t do it. They have nothing to go upon. You must remember, what the public never will understand, that moral proof does not necessarily constitute legal evidence. Granted that this ornamental stiletto, which has been found, belonged to the Countess, also that she and Reggie Martindale were together alone in the room not long before the tragedy was discovered, it establishes a primâ facie case against her, but, so far, nothing more.”
“Circumstantial evidence, surely?”
“Yes, but with an important link missing from the chain. You see a good deal might have occurred between the moment of the Countess Alexia’s leaving the room and the finding of what happened. No, my dear friends, it looks very like what we all think it, but there is an important section of the affair still covered in mystery.”
Greetland had made it his business to work up the subject; it was his vocation to be glib and authoritative on every likely topic of the day.
“The Countess’s position is not exactly enviable,” a man suggested.
“It is utterly and entirely odious,” Greetland agreed. “One scarcely likes to believe the thing of her; she is such a charming girl. Yes; one is horribly sorry for her. Without forgetting the dictum de mortois, one may hazard the opinion that poor Reggie probably brought the thing on himself and got no more than he deserved.”
“H’m!” There was a general pursing of lips as of men who felt constrained to keep silence when it was in their minds to say much. Restraint, however, was not a virtue which either character or inclination encouraged Greetland to practise. “There was that affair of Annabel Fancourt,” he remarked, in a low tone, as of those who discuss the dead in their coffined presence.
“Behaved badly there, eh?” a man suggested, feeling his way carefully along the fascinating path of scandal which leads directly away from the above-mentioned dictum.
Greetland shook his head with a suggestion of unutterable condemnation.
“Ah; always understood so,” the other man proceeded, gaming boldness since no one seemed inclined to protest. After all, it is often quite as piquant to discuss the sins of the dead as of the living, and actually does less harm—to them.
“Rather a bad lot,” another ventured.
“Always might be calculated on to go crooked with women,” the fourth gossip supplemented.
“They always spoilt him. Injudicious blandishment has sent many a good man wrong.”
“Women,” said Monty Vaxton who cultivated a reputation as a social philosopher, “women can’t resist a gamble in love. That is why the professional Philander always has his hands, or rather his arms, full.”
“At any rate they are optimists in the passion,” Jack Bellairs remarked, “and they think they can succeed where other women have failed; quite forgetting that they are playing for an elusive stake, and where winning is, if possible, more disastrous than losing.”
“So you think,” said Hugh Lufton, who understood facts better than theories, turning to Greetland, “that Countess Alexia was under the influence of Martindale’s fascinations?”
Greetland shrugged. “It looks like it; though no one even suspected it. But she is a clever girl.”
“Scarcely, if that were the case,” Vaxton objected.
“My dear Monty,” said the drawing-room sage, “no woman is clever in love, although many are perfect geniuses in the matter of marriage. When we talk of a clever woman we eliminate love from the question.”
“This is a strange aftermath of—I suppose—jealousy.”
“Yes; one hardly sees at this stage what the girl can do.”
“Awkward for Count Prosper,” Lufton declared. “He is a very good fellow. For all practical purposes an Englishman.” Which was the highest compliment the speaker felt he could pay the young diplomat; and certainly the sincerest.
“You remember,” Lufton said to Bellairs, “that fellow Paul Gastineau, the K.C.?”
“Gastineau? Rather. Killed in a railway accident in Spain. I know what you are going to say. Yes. He was supposed to be a great admirer of Countess Alexia.”
“Oh, yes,” Greetland replied, with the superiority conferred by an acknowledged omniscience. “I don’t fancy there was much in that, though. At any rate on the lady’s side.”
“Ah, no. He was a deuced clever fellow.”
“Gastineau? I should think so. He had about the biggest practice at the Common Law Bar.”
“Safe for the Woolsack if he hadn’t been cut off.”
Lufton looked knowingly doubtful. “I don’t know,” he replied, with a contradictory head-shake. “Paul Gastineau was not altogether a persona grata, clever as he admittedly was. There seemed always something about the fellow that put one on one’s guard.”
“Too clever, eh?”
“Yes. One of those men whom even their own party is afraid of. In politics safe mediocrities are preferred to dangerous geniuses. And men of the Gastineau type are looked upon with particular suspicion. They are apt by comparison to show up the short-comings of our pet aristocratic statesmen. No; I very much doubt whether that Spanish signalman’s error really robbed England of a future Lord Chancellor.”
“I dare say not,” Vaxton agreed musingly. “I am inclined to think, though, that this man Herriard, who has made such a hit in the Rullington case, will go far. His style is like, very curiously like, Gastineau’s, but without that touch of deviltry the other man often exhibited. Yes; a safer man, and a more British personality.”
“Gastineau was more or less a foreigner, wasn’t he?”
“Half Italian. Charlie Wryton who devilled him told me he never quite felt at his ease with the fellow. You know Wryton? Big man who got his blue at Oxford, and the last man in the world, one would think, to funk; but I really believe he was afraid, personally afraid, of Gastineau, and distinctly relieved when he was killed.”
“The power of mind over matter.”
“Rather the influence of unscrupulousness on mere animal courage. Gastineau’s mind and methods were deeper than Charlie could fathom. There is always a terror in the unknown.”
“Countess Alexia does not seem to have been particularly happy in her lovers,” Bellairs remarked.
“No,” Greetland replied. “She is rather a mystery in that way. I mean, that she was not married long ago. Perhaps her unfortunate experiences may account for it. But unhappily, a woman like that is bound to attract the wrong sort of men as well as the right. Anyhow, she has been clever enough to hold them at bay. She could hardly have foreseen the Martindale development.”
“Can any one, who knows anything of her, really believe she killed him?” Lufton asked incredulously.
Greetland did not care to scotch a profitable scandal. “Women are unaccountable creatures,” he replied, with a shrug.