The girl from Scotland Yard
brooch. A silk dressing gown, a pair of slippers, and a few odds and
ends completed the contents.
“Nothing here,” said Leslie.
She ran her hand round the silken lining of the case and suddenly her
fingers stopped. She felt a thin, oblong package under the silk.
Reaching out, she took Coldwell’s scissors from his desk and cut
through the silk. Inserting her fingers, she drew forth an envelope.
It was closed and bore no inscription. She tore off the end and drew
out an oblong document. It was a marriage certificate, performed
apparently by the Reverend H. Hermitz, of Elfield, Connecticut.
“Good heavens!” said the startled Coldwell, reading over her shoulder.
For a moment the words swam before the eyes of the girl, and then out
of the blur they appeared with staggering clearness. It was a document
certifying that Peter James Dawlish had been joined in holy matrimony
with Jane Winifred Hood--and Hood was Lady Raytham’s maiden name!
She read it again, then put the document into the inspector’s hands.
“Then they were married!” she said evenly. “That was the thing I
wasn’t sure about.”
CHAPTER XII.
PETER’S MOTHER
Peter found it very difficult to concentrate his mind upon his work,
and although his task was purely mechanical he stopped from time to
time and allowed his thoughts to wander. Inevitably they wandered
toward that gray building on the Thames Embankment, and a room
somewhere in its dark interior where a girl was sitting. He could see
her face very clearly. He sighed and took up his pen again, and cursed
himself for the folly of dreams.
Far better for him, he thought, that, if he could not concentrate upon
his work, he let his mind go roving westward to the bleak moor and
those ugly prison buildings that are set in a fold of it; to the
carved sneer on the stone arch under which he had walked heavy-footed
toward the golden-bearded warder who stood by the iron gates and
counted the prisoners in and out; to the long, smelly “ward,” and the
vaultlike cells with their gayly coloured blankets; to the stretch of
bog land from which the convict workers returned soaked to the skin to
their lukewarm dinners; to the barnlike laundry, the silent punishment
cells, and the cracked asphalt where the prisoners walked in a ring on
Sunday mornings. An ugly memory, but at least one of accomplishment,
and substantially past. It was much better than letting your fancies
go straying toward the straight figure of a girl with violet eyes and
red lips that curved everlastingly in laughter.
He had reached the S’s in the list, the Simpsons and Sims and
Sinclairs. It was ill-paid work, his employer being a bookmaker of
dubious probity; but so far as he was concerned, he had been paid
something in advance, and he had been promised another job to follow.
Very resolutely he had dismissed from his mind all thought of his
mother. Even in Dartmoor he had excluded her from his thoughts. If he
remembered at all, it was by the letter that had come to him on the
day of his conviction. His father had died that week; he had been
sinking for months and had never been conscious of his son’s shame.
That had been Peter’s one comfort, until he received his mother’s
letter, telling him that in a lucid hour of consciousness old Donald
Dawlish had struck his name from his will. So Peter went down from the
dock with the bitterness of death in his heart; beside that knowledge
of his father’s last act, the seven years’ sentence was as nothing.
At six o’clock Elizabeth brought him his tea. She was unusually solemn
and silent, and when he attempted to start a little conversation with
her, she was so embarrassed that he did not attempt to pursue this
course.
He went out for an hour, strolling through the Lambeth Cut amid a
medley of hawkers’ stalls with their glaring acetylene lights. He had
some comfort from this contact with his fellows. As he returned, he
was opening the door of the house with a key which the woman had given
him that day, when he remembered that he had not seen Mrs. Inglethorne
since the visitation of the police.
He went upstairs, lit the oil lamp and, putting a paper bag full of
biscuits which he had bought on the table before him, he settled down
to his task. Eight o’clock was striking when he heard the squeaking of
brakes as a motor car stopped before the door, and, going to the
window, he pulled aside the shade and looked down. It was too dark to
distinguish the visitor, but his heart leaped at the thought that it
might be Leslie Maughan and he opened the door and waited. This time
he heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s voice and after a while she called up to
him sourly:
“A lady to see you, Mr. Dawlish.”
“Will you ask her to come up, please?”
He went back into the room and waited. The step on the stairs was
slower and heavier than Leslie’s. And then there came through the open
doorway the last woman in the world he expected to see--his mother.
Her cold eyes went from him to the littered table.
“Fine work for the son of a gentleman!” she said in a hard voice.
“I’ve known worse,” he replied coolly.
She closed the door behind her, as though she knew something of Mrs.
Inglethorne’s irrepressible curiosity.
“I never expected I should see you again,” she said, declining with a
gesture the chair he pushed forward to her; “but having given the
matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that I ought to do
something for you. I am buying and stocking a small farm for you in
western Canada, and I am making you a small allowance to enable you to
live, even if the farm fails, as it probably will. You will leave for
Quebec on Saturday week; I have booked a second-class passage for
you.”
And, when he was about to speak:
“I don’t want you to thank me. I shall feel happier when you have left
the country. You have brought everlasting disgrace upon your father’s
name, and I do not wish to be reminded constantly of the fact.”
Here she stopped.
“You were altogether wrong when you thought I was about to thank you,”
he said quietly. “In the first place, I have no intention of accepting
your charity, and in the second place I have no aptitude for farming
either in Canada or in England.”
“I have booked your passage,” she said, with an air of finality.
“Then there will be a vacant bed going cheap on the Atlantic Ocean!”
replied Peter, with a smile.
She looked round the room contemptuously and again her eyes went to
the table.
“So you’d rather do this waster’s work?”
“Waster’s work, I agree,” he said, “but infinitely more intellectual
than mending boots or washing convicts’ laundry--my last occupation. I
expect nothing from you, Mother. For some reason which I have never
quite understood, you have hated me ever since I was a child. I have
no wish to reproach you with being ‘unnatural.’ You have been under
the thumb of Anita Bellini ever since I can remember.”
“How dare you!” Her voice was vibrant with anger. “‘Under the thumb!’
What do you mean?”
“I only know that Anita Bellini has withered every good feeling in
every good woman who has been brought into contact with her. I only
know that she is evil; what hold she has over you, Heaven knows. It
has been sufficiently strong to rob me of the one gift which is every
man’s right--a mother’s love. I dare say that sounds a piece of sickly
sentimentality, but it is a big thing--a very big thing.”
“You have had what you deserved,” she interrupted brusquely. “And I
did not come here to discuss my duty. If you prefer to go to Australia
instead of Canada----”
“I prefer Lambeth to either place at the moment,” he said coldly.
She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
“You have made your bed and you must lie on it. I have done all that
is humanly possible, more than could be expected, remembering how you
have humiliated me and made my name----”
“My father’s name,” he corrected.
He got under her guard there, and to his wonder the comment to which
irritation drove him produced a remarkable effect. Her face flushed;
the hard mouth grew harder.
“Your father’s name is my name,” she said harshly.
Her eyes were blazing; he had never seen her so moved.
“I will give you twenty thousand pounds to leave the country,” she
said. “That is my final offer.”
He shook his head.
“I shall never want money from you,” he said, and, walking to the
door, opened it and she left the room without another glance at him.
Why had she come? He wasted half an hour of precious time puzzling
over this extraordinary action on her part. He had spoken no more than
the truth, when he had said that from his childhood she had displayed
an antagonism toward him which in maturity had puzzled him more than
any other experience in his life. Antagonistic? She hated him! And,
curiously enough, his father had known of her feeling, and though he
had never made any direct reference to the enmity, had gone out of his
way to make up for the affection the mother denied him. It was his
father with whom he had corresponded throughout the days of the war;
his father who had met him when he came home from France on leave; his
father who had come day after day to the hospital to sit by the
bedside of his wounded son; and when Peter had been discharged from
the army, it was Donald who found him the secretaryship and had
planned for him a great career in the world of politics. It was a
puzzle beyond unravelment. Peter took up his pen again and tried, by a
concentration of his exigent present, to forget the bitter past.
CHAPTER XIII.
PETER TELLS
It was twelve o’clock when he put down his pen and rubbed his
cramped hands. Throwing up the window to let out the smoke, he munched
a biscuit and meditated; and then his face brightened, and his
thoughts went unresistingly toward Leslie Maughan. Then through the
open window he heard unsteady steps coming along the paved sidewalk.
They paused before the door of the house; there was a rattle of the
key. When Mrs. Inglethorne went out at night, she usually returned
with that same unsteady footstep. Presently the door slammed, and her
muttering came up to him from the passage.
Usually she did not go out nights, but stayed at home to receive the
curious callers who came at odd moments. They always knocked once with
the knocker and once with the flat of their hands, and generally they
carried a parcel or package, big or small. There was a whispered
colloquy in the passage, the chink of money, or, more rarely, the
rustle of treasury notes, and they went out again--without their
parcels. This, Peter had seen and had not seen. Prison had taught him
the wisdom of blindness, and he had not spoken to Mrs. Inglethorne of
the furtive men and women who came slinking down Severall Street at
those hours when the police patrol was well out of the way.
Leslie Maughan! He smiled a little at the thought of her, more at his
own madness. What barriers separated them--barriers more real, more
invincible, than the difference between Scotland Yard and Dartmoor
Prison! It was worse than madness to think about her!
The scream that brought him to his feet was shrill and charged with
fear and mortal agony. In two strides he was at the door and had
pulled it wide open.
Now he heard it plainly--the whistle and fall of a whip, the
terrified, frantic cries for mercy. He ran down the stairs in the dark
and tapped at Mrs. Inglethorne’s door. From inside the room came a
deep, heartbreaking sound of sobbing.
“Who’s that?” asked Mrs. Inglethorne defiantly. “Go away and mind your
own business!”
“Open the door, or I’ll break it open!” cried Peter in a cold fury.
“I’ll send for the police if you interfere with me!” yelled the woman.
His answer was to throw his weight against the flimsy door. The catch