Mr Rupert has just got back. He has been down to King’s Cheviot—to a village near there—’
She stopped, noticing the quick start he was not able to conceal.
‘He has—seen someone,’ she went on in measured accents.
She thought to herself: ‘There—he’s warned. At any rate, he’s warned.’
After that first quick start, Quentin had resumed his unruffled demeanour, but his eyes were fixed on her face, watchful and keen, with something in them she had not seen there before. They were, for the first time, the eyes of a man and not of a servant.
He hesitated for a minute, then said in a voice which also had subtly changed:
‘Why do you tell me this, Mrs St Vincent?’
Before she could answer, the door flew open and Rupert strode into the room. With him was a dignified middle-aged man with little side-whiskers and the air of a benevolent archbishop. Quentin!
‘Here he is,’ said Rupert. ‘The real Quentin. I had him outside in the taxi. Now, Quentin, look at this man and tell me—is he Samuel Lowe?’
It was for Rupert a triumphant moment. But it was short-lived, almost at once he scented something wrong. For while the real Quentin was looking abashed and highly uncomfortable the second Quentin was smiling, a broad smile of undisguised enjoyment.
He slapped his embarrassed duplicate on the back.
‘It’s all right, Quentin. Got to let the cat out of the bag some time, I suppose. You can tell ’em who I am.’
The dignified stranger drew himself up.
‘This, sir,’ he announced, in a reproachful tone, ‘is my master, Lord Listerdale, sir.’
The next minute beheld many things. First, the complete collapse of the cocksure Rupert. Before he knew what was happening, his mouth still open from the shock of the discovery, he found himself being gently manœuvred towards the door, a friendly voice that was, and yet was not, familiar in his ear.
‘It’s quite all right, my boy. No bones broken. But I want a word with your mother. Very good work of yours, to ferret me out like this.’
He was outside on the landing gazing at the shut door. The real Quentin was standing by his side, a gentle stream of explanation flowing from his lips. Inside the room Lord Listerdale was fronting Mrs St Vincent.
‘Let me explain—if I can! I’ve been a selfish devil all my life—the fact came home to me one day. I thought I’d try a little altruism for a change, and being a fantastic kind of fool, I started my career fantastically. I’d sent subscriptions to odd things, but I felt the need of doing something—well, something personal. I’ve been sorry always for the class that can’t beg, that must suffer in silence—poor gentlefolk. I have a lot of house property. I conceived the idea of leasing these houses to people who—well, needed and appreciated them. Young couples with their way to make, widows with sons and daughters starting in the world. Quentin has been more than butler to me, he’s a friend. With his consent and assistance I borrowed his personality. I’ve always had a talent for acting. The idea came to me on my way to the club one night, and I went straight off to talk it over with Quentin. When I found they were making a fuss about my disappearance, I arranged that a letter should come from me in East Africa. In it, I gave full instructions to my cousin, Maurice Carfax. And—well, that’s the long and short of it.’
He broke off rather lamely, with an appealing glance at Mrs St Vincent. She stood very straight, and her eyes met his steadily.
‘It was a kind plan,’ she said. ‘A very unusual one, and one that does you credit. I am—most grateful. But—of course, you understand that we cannot stay?’
‘I expected that,’ he said. ‘Your pride won’t let you accept what you’d probably style “charity”.’
‘Isn’t that what it is?’ she asked steadily.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Because I ask something in exchange.’
‘Something?’
‘Everything.’ His voice rang out, the voice of one accustomed to dominate.
‘When I was twenty-three,’ he went on, ‘I married the girl I loved. She died a year later. Since then I have been very lonely. I have wished very much I could find a certain lady—the lady of my dreams …’
‘Am I that?’ she asked, very low. ‘I am so old—so faded.’
He laughed.
‘Old? You are younger than either of your children. Now I am old, if you like.’
But her laugh rang out in turn. A soft ripple of amusement.
‘You? You are a boy still. A boy who loves to dress up.’
She held out her hands and he caught them in his.
‘Goodbye, darling.’
‘Goodbye, sweetheart.’
Alix Martin stood leaning over the small rustic gate, watching the retreating figure of her husband as he walked down the road in the direction of the village.
Presently he turned a bend and was lost to sight, but Alix still stayed in the same position, absent-mindedly smoothing a lock of the rich brown hair which had blown across her face, her eyes far away and dreamy.
Alix Martin was not beautiful, nor even, strictly speaking, pretty. But her face, the face of a woman no longer in her first youth, was irradiated and softened until her former colleagues of the old office days would hardly have recognized her. Miss Alex King had been a trim business-like young woman, efficient, slightly brusque in manner, obviously capable and matter-of-fact.
Alix had graduated in a hard school. For fifteen years, from the age of eighteen until she was thirty-three, she had kept herself (and for seven years of the time an invalid mother) by her work as a shorthand typist. It was the struggle for existence which had hardened the soft lines of her girlish face.
True, there had been romance—of a kind—Dick Windyford, a fellow-clerk. Very much of a woman at heart, Alix had always known without seeming to know that he cared. Outwardly they had been friends, nothing more. Out of his slender salary Dick had been hard put to it to provide for the schooling of a younger brother. For the moment he could not think of marriage.
And then suddenly deliverance from daily toil had come to the girl in the most unexpected manner. A distant cousin had died, leaving her money to Alix—a few thousand pounds, enough to bring in a couple of hundred a year. To Alix it was freedom, life, independence. Now she and Dick need wait no longer.
But Dick reacted unexpectedly. He had never directly spoken of his love to Alix; now he seemed less inclined to do so than ever. He avoided her, became morose and gloomy. Alix was quick to realize the truth. She had become a woman of means. Delicacy and pride
