Chapter TEN: The Wind of Circumstance

Reader, I beg of you to put yourself for a moment in my place. My unfortunate position, as a straw blown upon the adverse wind of circumstance, had become intolerable.

As I sat back in the taxi which took me down Knightsbridge towards Queen’s Gate, I felt myself bordering on madness, aroused by the sea of perplexity and doubt into which I found myself plunged.

What could I say in explanation to Joan? She was my fiancée. And yet I had a mysterious “wife” who, from her letters, “adored” me, and was living in Lausanne!

She had warned me against a man who was blind.

And a sightless man had been a constant caller at Sackville Street. Was his presence part of a plot against me?

On reflection, I could discern no reason or motive why I should be followed and done to death by the obscure plotters of whom the unknown Illona had warned me. Her letters were missives full of affection, and apparently she loved me. At least, she showed herself keenly solicitous of my welfare. Yet, as the taxi sped along amid the lights of London, I found myself smiling that there was a woman who, against my knowledge and inclination, was able to pose before the world as Mrs. Lionel Hipwell!

What an interesting tangle for the President of the Admiralty and Divorce Division!

I alighted at the big, deep portico at Queen’s Gate, and, on ringing the bell, old Forbes, the faithful servant of the eminent King’s Counsel, admitted me, saying:

“Glad to see you back, sir. I hope you’ve had a nice journey.”

“Thanks, Forbes, yes. Is Miss Joan upstairs?”

“In the drawing-room, sir,” replied the white-headed old man, taking my hat and coat, and leaving me to ascend the broad flight of thickly carpeted stairs.

“My darling Lionel!” cried my fiancée, rushing up to meet me as I opened the door of the long, handsome room. “Oh! I’m so glad you are back again safely!” and placing her soft, bare arms around my neck, she drew down my head, and kissed me fondly upon the lips, as I reciprocated. She was in a sleeveless dress of plain black which enhanced the whiteness of her chest and arms.

“Come and sit in our usual corner,” she said, inviting me to a cozy nook near one of the windows. “Poor dear! You must be horribly tired after your long journey. I telephoned to the inquiry office at Victoria, and they told me that the boat train was late because of heavy weather in the Channel.”

“Bad weather very fortunately does not affect me,” I laughed. “I only suffer from delay, not from _mal-de-mer_, or I’d not be doing messenger work for the Foreign Office, I suppose!”

“Darling, you ought to have taken that post of attaché at Madrid which was offered you. I can’t understand why you refused it.”

I remained silent. Never to my knowledge had such a post been offered to me. What could I, in my ignorance, reply?

“I suppose the governor was furious--eh?” I laughed nervously.

“Your father was extremely angry. He had arranged everything, and you would have started on a very fine diplomatic career; yet, to his great disappointment, you blankly refused.”

“It would have ended all my ambitions to sit in Parliament,” I said, for want of any other explanation to offer.

“But has not your present position as King’s Foreign Service Messenger--highly responsible as it certainly is--ended your chance of putting up for election?” she asked, her white soft arm still clinging around me.

As I looked into her wonderful, fathomless eyes, all my lost passion for her instantly returned. Yes, I was still as deeply in love with her as I had been before that night of my lost consciousness. Yet what had occurred between us while I had been in that vague and incompetent state of mind?

I wondered. Because of my bewilderment I spoke little, leaving my beloved to talk, and hoping to glean from her words the secret of the past void in my life. What else could I do?

She gave me a cigarette from her pretty mother-of-pearl case, lit one herself, and then, leaning back upon the crimson silk couch, looked up into my eyes and chattered on. At first she told me how she had spent the last fortnight at a country house down in Devonshire, and afterwards with the Mellors, who had, as usual, a gay house-party. She spoke of many people whose names I vaguely remembered, and told me how, in the long vacation, her father had promised to take her to Norway.

“We go first to Copenhagen, then to Stockholm, then by train to Oslo, and up to Bergen, where we catch the steamer right up the fiords to Tromsö, and back to Hull. Won’t it be delightful? I do wish you could come with us.”

“I wish I could, darling, but I fear that while others are by the sea this summer, I shall be upon the railways of Europe, half stifled in those trains of luxury, as they are termed. I agree that they are luxury for one night only, but when one is doomed to spend half one’s days in them, life becomes horribly tedious, with the same faces of the brown-uniformed attendants, the same fleeting landscape that you have seen a hundred times, and the never-changing restaurant menu, gobbled down by a rambling host of summer tourists. Certainly there is the _cabane diplomatique_--the two-berth compartment reserved on every _train-de-luxe_ across the Continent--but days and nights alone in it are very tedious and monotonous, I assure you,” I said.

“I know what it must be,” my darling responded with sympathy, “but you must remember that you chose your life yourself after your unfortunate accident.”

Accident? I knew of no accident! What, I wondered, could have happened to me?

“Yes,” I faltered. “I know. But I’m not quite clear, even now, as to what actually happened.”

“Well, you very nearly lost your life. That is quite evident,” Joan said. “And ever since, Lionel, permit me to say so, you have not been the same, either to your father, to me, or to any of your friends.”

“I really didn’t know that,” I laughed faintly.

“I know you don’t. You’ve told me so a dozen times. But the fact remains. You don’t even remember what happened,” she said. “All we know is, that one very foggy night two years ago you were seen stumbling along the Old Kent Road, and suddenly you left the pavement, evidently in an attempt to cross the road. Your gait was very uneven, according to a woman who saw you, and she believed you to be drunk. Next moment a taxi, creeping along through the fog, caught you. The wing hit you and flung you some distance, and when you were picked up, you were unconscious. You were seriously injured, and the police took you to Guy’s Hospital, where I saw you, as soon as we got back from the Riviera a month later. You were there six weeks, and when you were discharged, darling, you seemed to me to be a changed man.”

“I suppose I really am changed,” I said in all sincerity. What she had revealed to me was entirely new. I had certainly no knowledge of any such occurrence on that night of horror.

“You puzzled all the doctors as well as us. How came you dressed as a working-man, and what could possibly have taken you to such a poor quarter of London? Do tell me, Lionel. I’ve asked you dozens of times, and you have never told me the truth.”

“Because I myself am unaware of what really happened,” I assured her. “I know no more how I came to be in the Old Kent Road that night than you do.”

I paused in the manner of one groping for something more convincing to add.

“Really, darling, that sounds most absurd. You surely know what caused you to assume the clothes of a working-man, and the motive of your visit to South London.”

I paused before replying.

“I suppose I must have had some motive,” I said vaguely. “But I really forget.”

“There you are--evading my questions, just as you always do!”

I placed my hand upon her bare shoulder, and looking earnestly into her beautiful eyes, asked:

“Joan, will you believe me when I tell you frankly and honestly, that I have no knowledge of what happened to me?”

“Perhaps not after you were knocked down. But, darling, you surely know why you went to South London that foggy night?”

I paused.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I had a motive. It concerned a secret.”

“Of what?” she asked, instantly interested.

“A diplomatic secret,” I replied, hoping to extricate myself from an _impasse_.

She smiled disbelievingly. I saw it in her face. No man can deceive the woman who loves him. Only fools try it, fools of any age and in any sphere of life. Woman’s brain is far more acute than man’s, as every man knows. She has an amazing sense of intuition of the truth which a man always lacks, a somehow keener sense of actual happenings, and is never misled as a man can be.

Man, in his superiority over the gentler sex, always believes himself invulnerable in matters of wits or subterfuge. But woman, with her quiet, finer, and more developed instincts, always wins in such struggles.

And I knew that my beloved Joan held the advantage.

“You Foreign Office people have strange secrets, it seems. During the war I could have believed that there might be spies in South London. But now that there is peace, what plotting can there possibly be?”

“We always have internal plots in England, formed by the dissatisfied party--whatever it may be from time to time--according to the criticisms of the Press,” I laughed, in an endeavor to lead her away from her actual point. But it was useless. Yet how could I confess to her my craven cowardice on that night when the well-known criminal met his death in Bloomsbury?

No one had connected me with the tragedy--not even the woman who loved him. She had declared, that night when I had come upon that criminal gang, that I was not the man her lover had attacked on the curb. That had certainly saved me from arrest as an alleged murderer. But, it had brought the awful consequences of that foggy night.

I loved Joan with all my heart and with all my soul. She was my affinity, without her presence and her sweet affection I could not live; and yet, behind it all was that demoniacal shadow on me--that frightful nightmare of my newly awakened existence--Illona, my wife.

In the darkness of the past night, as the great express had roared and rocked across the P.L.M. from Rome to Calais, I had lain in my narrow sleeping-berth, confused and wondering, dreading to meet my beloved, because I knew not what explanation to give.

What would you have done, my reader of this strange adventure, had you been an ordinary man like myself? Put yourself in my place. I loved _sub rosa_ and in secret--because of the anger of my father--one of the most popular and charming girls in all London, and yet, after two years, I had found myself still as a straw drifting on the wind, still in fear lest she should learn the truth.

I could well see that she doubted me. Was it any wonder? All my explanations were terribly lame, I knew. And, worse still, on it all lay that heavy fact that I had betrayed her love, that I was already married.

It was on my tongue to make a clean confession of the whole affair, as I suppose I really ought to have done. However, I hesitated, because I felt that before I could reveal the whole story, I must seek the truth concerning my union with a woman of whom I knew nothing--Illona.

She questioned me, but I fear I was too engrossed in my own thoughts to respond intelligibly.

“You see, you never tell me the real truth, Lionel,” she exclaimed at last. “You are always so very reticent, so strange as compared with your old self. I never can understand you nowadays.”

“I haven’t been well,” I replied in excuse.

“Yet you do your service for the Foreign Office, constantly traveling to the capitals. You are robust, and hearty, and never ail for a moment.”

“Since my--my accident, I fear I have not been the same, dearest,” I said, taking her soft hand and caressing it. “Do forgive me. It is not all my fault. You must trust me, Joan dear.”

She turned her sweet face towards me, and our lips met.

“Of course, my darling. I know I’m hard on you sometimes, but when I sit at home here, and think, during the days you are abroad, I--well, I can’t describe my feelings, except that it seems to me that you are never frank with me--that you are concealing something very important from me.”

“I certainly am not,” I responded, with a vain attempt to be bold beneath my love’s searching gaze.

“But, Lionel, you are--and you know quite well you are,” she replied. “You have something on your mind that I ought to know, and yet you will never reveal it. All you Foreign Office people are the most secretive persons on earth. Sir George, Jack Denham, and Tommie Tennant are all the same. I was in love with Jack once, as you know, and he was just the same as you are--spoke in enigmas and smiled mysteriously if I asked him to explain.”

“My dear Joan,” I said, “one of the first lessons one learns at Downing Street is never to allow one’s left hand to know what one’s right hand does.”

“And you’ve evidently learnt that lesson well, my dear Lionel,” said the girl, with that quiet philosophy that became the daughter of the eminent King’s Counsel.

“My darling,” I said, placing my arm about her waist and kissing her upon the lips, “we are here alone to-night after my journey to Rome. Why not let us enjoy this evening rather than allow ourselves to be at cross-purposes? I love you, Joan!” I cried passionately, kissing her again and again. “To me, you are my world, my all. Can I say more?”

She drew herself slowly but deliberately from my embrace, and in a low, changed voice said:

“Yes, darling. You can tell me the truth if you like.”

“Of what?” I cried, with affected concern.

My feigned bewilderment did not impress her. With her woman’s clever intuition she saw instantly that my assumed ignorance was mere pretence.

“What has arisen to be a bar against our happiness?” she asked in a low, hard voice. “You know what it is. If you are an honest man, Lionel, you will tell me the truth!”

The truth! How could I tell my dearest, when I knew not the truth myself?