It was an excellent supper, and Captain Grey and Lexy thoroughly appreciated it. They ate with healthy appetites, and they talked. Mrs. Royce, from the kitchen, heard their cheerful, friendly voices, and their laughter, and she didn’t for one moment believe that they had never met before. Listening to them, she wore that benevolent smile once more, and felt sure that she had encountered a very charming little romance.
It was all Lexy’s doing. It was Lexy’s beautiful talent, to be able to create this atmosphere of honest and happy camaraderie. Before the meal was finished, Captain Grey was talking to her as if they had known each other since childhood, and he didn’t even wonder at it. It seemed perfectly natural.
Mrs. Royce came in to take away the dishes.
“Going to set here a while?” she asked, looking at the two young people with a smile of approval. “I’ll bring in some more wood.” She hesitated a moment, and the landladyish glimmer again appeared in her eyes. “If it was me,” she observed, in the most casual way, “the fire’d be enough light. If it was me, now, I wouldn’t want that gas flaring and blaring away—and burning up good money,” she added, to herself.
“You’re right,” Lexy cheerfully agreed. “We’ll turn it down.”
The rain was falling fast outside, driving against the windows when the wind blew; and inside the young people sat by the fire, very content.
“Queer thing!” said Captain Grey meditatively. “Never been in this place before—never been in this country before—and yet it’s like coming home!”
“I know that feeling,” said Lexy. “I’ve had it before. I think only people who haven’t any real homes of their own ever have it.”
“But haven’t you any real home?” he asked, evidently distressed.
“No,” she answered; “but please don’t think it’s tragic. It’s not.”
“You haven’t impressed me as tragic,” he admitted.
Lexy laughed.
“Thank goodness!” she said. “I do want to keep on being—well, ordinary and human, even when outside things seem a little tragic.”
“Miss Moran!” he said, and stopped.
It was some time before he spoke again. Lexy took advantage of his abstraction to study his face by the firelight. When you come to understand it a little, it wasn’t a haughty face at all, but a very sensitive and fine one.
“Miss Moran!” he said again. “About being ordinary and human—of course, one wants to be that; but the thing is—I don’t know quite how to put it, but if you have a feeling, you know—I mean a feeling that something is wrong—” He paused again.
“I mean,” he went on, “if you have a feeling like that—a sort of—well, call it uneasiness—the question is whether one ought to laugh at it, or take it as”—once more he stopped—“as a warning,” he ended.
A strange sensation came over Lexy.
“I’ve been thinking a good deal about that very thing lately,” she replied. “I believe feelings like that are a warning. I’m sure it’s wrong—foolish and wrong—to disregard them. Even if every one else, even if your own mind tells you it’s all nonsense, you mustn’t care!”
“I think you’re right,” he gravely agreed. “I’ve been trying to tell myself that I’m an utter ass, but all the time I knew I wasn’t. I knew—I know now—that there’s something—”
An unreasoning dread possessed Lexy. She felt for a moment that she didn’t want to hear any more.
“I’d like to tell you about it, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said. “Somehow I think you could help.”
For an instant she hesitated.
“Please do tell me,” she said at length. “I’d be glad to help, if I can.”
“It’s this,” he said. “Do you mind if I smoke? Thanks!”
He took a cigarette case from his pocket. As he struck a match, she could see his face very clearly in the sudden flame; and, for no reason at all, she pitied him.
“It’s this,” he said again. “It’s about my sister.”
“The sister you’ve never seen?”
The sensation of dread had gone, and she felt only the liveliest interest. She wanted very much to hear about Captain Grey’s sister.
“It wasn’t quite true to say I’d never seen her,” he explained, in his painstaking way. “I have, you know; but not since I was six years old and she was a baby. Our mother died when Muriel was born, out in India. An aunt took the poor little kid to the States with her, and I stayed out there with my father.”
He drew on his cigarette for a minute.
“She’s twenty-one now,” he said. “Last picture I had of her was when she was fourteen or so. A pretty kid—a bit more than pretty—what you’d call lovely.”
He was silent for a little, staring into the fire.
“When I was at school in England, it was arranged that she was to come over; but she didn’t, and we’ve never met again. Twenty-one years—it’s a long time.”
“Yes, it is,” said Lexy gently, for something in his voice touched her.
“We’ve written to each other, on and off. I’m not much good at that sort of thing, but I thought her letters were—well, rather remarkable, you know; but I dare say I’m prejudiced. She’s the only one of my own people left.”
“You poor, dear thing!” thought Lexy, with ready sympathy, but she did not say anything.
“Anyhow,” he presently continued, “I got an impression from her letters that she was rather an extraordinary girl. She was studying music—said she was going on the concert stage—awfully enthusiastic about it; and then she married this doctor chap. She never said much about him, only that she was very happy; but—well, I don’t believe that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Anyhow, she was married about two years ago, and a few months after her marriage she began writing oftener—almost every mail. She was always wanting me to come over here and see her; and lately, in her last letters, I—somehow I fancied she wanted me rather badly. It—it worried me, so I arranged for leave. On the very day when I wrote that I would be coming over this month, I had a letter from her, asking me not to make any plans for coming this year. She said she’d taken up her concert work again, and would be too busy to enjoy the visit, and so on. I’d already made my plans, you see, so I went ahead. Then, about a fortnight later, after she’d got my letter, I suppose, I had a cable. ‘Don’t come,’ it said. I cabled back, but she didn’t answer.”
He looked anxiously at Lexy, but she said nothing. She sat very still, curled up in a big chair, staring into the fire with an odd look of uncertainty on her face.
“You know,” he went on, “I’ve tried to think that she was simply too busy, or something of that sort. But, Miss Moran, didn’t this woman’s manner rather make you think there was something a bit—out of the way?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Lexy, in a casual tone which very much disconcerted him.
“I’ve been making a fool of myself!” he thought, flushing. “Why the devil didn’t I keep my old-woman notions to myself? Now she’ll think—”
But Lexy was not thinking that Captain Grey was a fool. She was only very much afraid of being one herself, and was engaged in a severe struggle against this danger. That dread, that vague and oppressive dread, had come back, and she was fighting to throw it off. She wanted to be, she would be, her own normal, cheerful self again, living in a normal, everyday world.
“All this about his sister, and about Caroline!” she thought. “It’s really nothing—nothing serious. Our both being here in Wyngate—that’s nothing, either. It’s just a coincidence. If the gas wasn’t turned down, I wouldn’t feel like this.”
She would have risen and turned up the gas, only that she was ashamed to do so. The fire was blazing merrily, shedding a ruddy light upon the homely room, the most commonplace room in the world. There was Captain Grey sitting there smoking—just an ordinary young man come to visit his sister. There was herself—just Lexy Moran, well fed and warm and comfortable, with more than a hundred dollars in a bag round her neck. She could hear Mrs. Royce moving about in the kitchen, humming to herself in a low drone.
“I will not be silly!” she told herself.
And just then a train whistled—a long, melancholy shriek. Lexy had a sudden vision of it, rushing through the dark and the rain. She had a sudden realization of the outside world, vast, lonely, terrible, stretching from pole to pole—forests, and plains, and oceans. The monstrous folly of pretending that everything was snug and warm and cozy! Things did happen—only cowards denied that.
“Captain Grey!” she cried abruptly. “What you’ve told me—it is queer; and it’s even queerer when I think what has brought me here to this little place. Both of us here, in Wyngate! I think I’ll tell you.”
And she did.
He listened in absolute silence to the tale of Caroline Enderby’s disappearance. Even after Lexy had finished, it was some time before he spoke.
“I’ll try to help you,” he said simply.
“Oh, thank you!” cried Lexy, with a rush of gratitude. She wanted some one to help her, and she could imagine no one better for the purpose than this young man. He would help her—she was sure of it. Even the fact of having told him most wonderfully lightened her burden. She gave an irrepressible little giggle.
“We have almost all the ingredients for a first-class mystery story,” she said; “except the jewel—the famous ruby, or the great diamond.”
“It’s an emerald, in this case,” said Captain Grey.
Lexy straightened up in her chair, and stared at him.
“You don’t really mean that?” she demanded. “There isn’t really an emerald?” He smiled.
“I’m afraid it hasn’t much to do with the case—with either of the cases,” he said; “but there is an emerald—my sister’s.”
“It didn’t come from India?”
“It did, though!”
“Don’t tell me it was stolen from a temple! That would be too good to be true!”
“I’m sorry,” he said; “but as far as I know, it’s never been stolen at all, and its history for the last eighty years hasn’t been sinister. One of the old rajahs gave it to my grandfather—a reward of merit, you know. When my father married, it went to my mother. She never had any trouble with it. She never wore it, because she didn’t like it.”
“Why?”
“Well, you see, it’s an ostentatious sort of thing, and she wasn’t ostentatious.” He paused a moment. “My father told me, before he died, that he wanted Muriel to have it when she was eighteen; and so, three years ago, I sent it over to her.”
“But how?”
“You’re a good detective,” said he, smiling again. “You don’t miss any of the points. It was a bit of a problem, how to send the thing; but I had the luck to find some people I knew who were coming over here, and they brought it. So that’s that!”
“An emerald!” said Lexy. “This is almost too much! I think I’ll say good night, Captain Grey. I need sleep.”
As she followed Mrs. Royce up the stairs, she saw Captain Grey still sitting before the fire, smoking; and it was a comforting sight.