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Page 32
The old woman made a slight, shivering gesture. "You should have
gone to my sister in Grosvenor Square. Monte would have put you
up - and looked after you."
"The Ritz put me up very well," the girl continued. "And I am
accustomed to looking after myself. Sir Henry thought it was
quite all right."
The old woman spoke suddenly with energy and directness. "I
don't understand Henry in the least," she said. "I was quite
willing for you to go to London when he asked me for permission.
But I thought he would take you to Monte's, and certainly I had
the right to believe that he would not have lent himself to - to
this escapade."
"He seemed to be very nice about it," the girl went on. "He came
in to tea with us - Mr. Meadows and me - almost every evening.
And he always had something amusing to relate, some blunder of
Scotland Yard or some ripping mystery. I think he found it
immense fun to be Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department.
I loved the talk: Mr. Meadows was always interested and Sir Henry
likes people to be interested."
The old woman continued to regard the girl as one hesitatingly
touches an exquisite creature frightfully mangled.
"This person - was he a gentleman?" she inquired. The girl
answered immediately. "I thought about that a good deal," she
said. "He had perfect manners, quite Continental manners; but,
as you say over here, Americans are so imitative one never can
tell. He was not young - near fifty, I would say; very well
dressed. He was from St. Paul; a London agent for some flouring
mills in the Northwest. I don't know precisely. He explained it
all to Sir Henry. I think he would have been glad of a little
influence - some way to meet the purchasing agents for the
government. He seemed to have the American notion that he could
come to London and go ahead without knowing anybody. Anyway, he
was immensely interesting - and he had a ripping motor."
The old man at the window did not move. He remained looking out
over the English country with his big, veined hands clasped
behind his back. He had left this interview to Lady Mary, as he
had left most of the crucial affairs of life to her dominant
nature. But the thing touched him far deeper than it touched the
aged dowager. He had a man's faith in the fidelity of a loved
woman.
He knew how his son, somewhere in France, trusted this girl,
believed in her, as long ago in a like youth he had believed in
another. He knew also how the charm of the girl was in the young
soldier's blood, and how potent were these inscrutable mysteries.
Every man who loved a woman wished to believe that she came to
him out of the garden of a convent - out of a roc's egg, like the
princess in the Arabian story.
All these things he had experienced in himself, in a shattered
romance, in a disillusioned youth, when he was young like the lad
somewhere in France. Lady Mary would see only broken
conventions; but he saw immortal things, infinitely beyond
conventions, awfully broken. He did not move. He remained like
a painted picture.
The girl went on in her soft, slow voice. "You would have
disliked Mr. Meadows, Lady Mary," she said. "You would dislike
any American who came without letters and could not be precisely
placed." The girl's voice grew suddenly firmer. "I don't mean
to make it appear better," she said. "The worst would be nearer
the truth. He was just an unknown American bagman, with a motor
car, and a lot of time on his hands - and I picked him up. But
Sir Henry Marquis took a fancy to him."
"I cannot understand Henry," the old woman repeated. "It's
extraordinary."
"It doesn't seem extraordinary to me," said the girl. "Mr.
Meadows was immensely clever, and Sir Henry was like a man with a
new toy. The Home Secretary had just put him in as Chief of the
Criminal Investigation Department. He was full of a lot of new
ideas - dactyloscopic bureaus, photographie mitrique, and
scientific methods of crime detection. He talked about it all
the time. I didn't understand half the talk. But Mr. Meadows
was very clever. Sir Henry said he was a charming person.
Anybody who could discuss the whorls of the Galton finger-print
tests was just then a charming person to Sir Henry."
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