The Malefactor. E. Phillips Oppenheim

a little towards him. Her voice, although it was raised above a whisper, was full of feeling.

      “Mr. Aynesworth,” she murmured, “I am afraid of Sir Wingrave Seton!”

      Aynesworth said nothing.

      “I was always a little afraid of him,” she continued, “even in the days when we were friendly. He was so hard and unforgiving. I know he thinks that he has a grievance against me. He will have been brooding about it all these years. I dare not see him! I—I am terrified!”

      “If that is your answer,” Aynesworth said, “I will convey it to him!”

      Her beautiful eyes were full of reproach.

      “Mr. Aynesworth,” she said, in a low tone, “for a young man you are very unsympathetic.”

      “My position,” Aynesworth answered, “does not allow me the luxury of considering my personal feelings.”

      She looked hurt.

      “I forgot,” she said, looking for a moment upon the floor; “you have probably been prejudiced against me. You have heard only one story. Listen”—she raised her eyes suddenly, and leaned a little forward in her chair—“some day, if you will come and see me when I am alone and we have time to spare, I will tell you the whole truth. I will tell you exactly what happened! You shall judge for yourself!”

      Aynesworth bowed.

      “In the meantime?”

      Her eyes filled slowly with tears. Aynesworth looked away. He was miserably uncomfortable.

      “You cannot be quite so hard-hearted as you try to seem, Mr. Aynesworth,” she said quietly. “I want to ask you a question. You must answer it? You don’t know how much it means to me. You are Sir Wingrave Seton’s secretary; you have access to all his papers. Have you seen any letters of mine? Do you know if he still has any in his possession?”

      “My answer to both questions is ‘No!’ ” Aynesworth said a little stiffly. “I only entered the service of Sir Wingrave Seton this morning, and I know nothing at all, as yet, of his private affairs. And, Lady Ruth, you must forgive my reminding you that, in any case, I could not discuss such matters with you,” he added.

      She looked at him with a faint, strange smile. Afterwards, when he tried to do so, Aynesworth found it impossible to describe the expression which flitted across her face. He only knew that it left him with the impression of having received a challenge.

      “Incorruptible!” she murmured. “Sir Wingrave Seton is indeed a fortunate man.”

      There was a lingering sweetness in her tone which still had a note of mockery in it. Her silence left Aynesworth conscious of a vague sense of uneasiness. He felt that her eyes were raised to his, and for some reason, which he could not translate even into a definite thought, he wished to avoid them. The silence was prolonged. For long afterwards he remembered those few minutes. There was a sort of volcanic intensity in the atmosphere. He was acutely conscious of small extraneous things, of the perfume of a great bowl of hyacinths, the ticking of a tiny French clock, the restless drumming of her finger tips upon the arm of her chair. All the time he seemed actually to feel her eyes, commanding, impelling, beseeching him to turn round. He did so at last, and looked her full in the face.

      “Lady Ruth,” he said, “will you favor me with an answer to my message?”

      “Certainly,” she answered, smiling quite naturally. “I will come and see Sir Wingrave Seton at four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. You can tell him that I think it rather an extraordinary request, but under the circumstances I will do as he suggests. He is staying at the Clarence, I presume, under his own name? I shall have no difficulty in finding him?”

      “He is staying there under his own name,” Aynesworth answered, “and I will see that you have no difficulty.”

      “So kind of you,” she murmured, holding out her hand. And again there was something mysterious in her eyes as she raised them to him, as though there existed between them already some understanding which mocked the conventionality of her words. Aynesworth left the house, and lit a cigarette upon the pavement outside with a little sigh of relief. He felt somehow humiliated. Did she fancy, he wondered, that he was a callow boy to dance to any tune of her piping—that he had never before seen a beautiful woman who wanted her own way?

THE GOSPEL OF HATE

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      “And what,” Wingrave asked his secretary as they sat at dinner that night, “did you think of Lady Ruth?”

      “In plain words, I should not like to tell you,” Aynesworth answered. “I only hope that you will not send me to see her again.”

      “Why not?”

      “Lady Ruth,” Aynesworth answered deliberately, “is a very beautiful woman, with all the most dangerous gifts of Eve when she wanted her own way. She did me the scanty honor of appraising me as an easy victim, and she asked questions.”

      “For instance?”

      “She wanted me to tell her if you still had in your possession certain letters of hers,” Aynesworth said.

      “Good! What did you say?”

      “I told her, of course,” Aynesworth continued, “that having been in your service for a few hours only, I was scarcely in a position to know. I ventured further to remind her that such questions, addressed from her to me, were, to say the least of it, improper.”

      Wingrave’s lips parted in what should have been a smile, but the spirit of mirth was lacking.

      “And then?”

      “There was nothing else,” Aynesworth answered. “She simply dismissed me.”

      “I can see,” Wingrave remarked, “your grievance. You are annoyed because she regarded you as too easy a victim.”

      “Perhaps,” Aynesworth admitted.

      “There was some excuse for her, after all,” Wingrave continued coolly. “She possesses powers which you yourself have already admitted, and you, I should say, are a fairly impressionable person, so far as her sex is concerned. Confess now, that she did not leave you altogether indifferent.”

      “Perhaps not,” Aynesworth admitted reluctantly. He did not care to say more.

      “In case you should feel any curiosity on the subject,” Wingrave remarked, “I may tell you that I have those letters which she was so anxious to know about, and I shall keep them safe—even from you! You can amuse yourself with her if you like. You will never be able to tell her more than I care for her to know.”

      Aynesworth continued his dinner in silence. After all, he was beginning to fear that he had made a mistake. Lovell had somehow contrived to impart a subtly tragic note to his story, but the outcome of it all seemed to assume a more sordid aspect. These two would meet, there would be recriminations, a tragic appeal for forgiveness, possibly some melodramatic attempt at vengeance. The glamour of the affair seemed to him to be fading away, now that he had come into actual contact with it. It was not until he began to study his companion during a somewhat prolonged silence that he felt the reaction. It was then that he began to see new things, that he felt the enthusiasm kindled by Lovell’s strangely told story begin to revive. It was not the watching for events more or less commonplace which would repay him for the step he had taken; it was the study of this man, placed in so strange a position—a man come back to life, after years of absolute isolation. He had broken away from the chain which links together men of similar tastes and occupations, and which goes to the creation of type. He was in a unique position! He was in the world, but not of it. He was groping about amongst familiar scenes, over which time had thrown