Nobody’s Man E-Book

E. Phillips Oppenheim

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

It is strange to find Mr. Phillips Oppenheim choosing as his hero an earnest politician with a love for social reform. „Nobody’s Man” starts out as a standard whodunit murder mystery then makes an abrupt lane-change into British politics of the mid-1920’s. Brigadier general Andrew Tallente, late of Parliament, is implicated in the death of his male secretary, the son of a classmate at Eton. Seems the younger man may have not only been having an affair with the hero’s American wife, but had stolen incriminating political documents. A political coup of sorts develops as the opposing party invites Tallente to lead them. Enter the lovely heiress-next-door, who becomes the hero’s champion, and perhaps, new flame.

Leseprobe

Contents

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

THE END

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

Andrew Tallente stepped out of the quaint little train on to the flower- bedecked platform of this Devonshire hamlet amongst the hills, to receive a surprise so immeasurable that for a moment he could do nothing but gaze silently at the tall, ungainly figure whose unpleasant smile betrayed the fact that this meeting was not altogether accidental so far as he was concerned.

“Miller!” he exclaimed, a little aimlessly.

“Why not?” was the almost challenging reply. “You are not the only great statesman who needs to step off the treadmill now and then.”

There was a certain quiet contempt in Tallente’s uplifted eyebrows. The contrast between the two men, momentarily isolated on the little platform, was striking and extreme. Tallente had the bearing, the voice and the manner which were his by heritage, education and natural culture. Miller, who was the son of a postman in a small Scotch town, an exhibitioner so far as regards his education, and a mimic where social gifts were concerned, had all the aggressive bumptiousness of the successful man who has wit enough to perceive his shortcomings. In his ill-chosen tourist clothes, untidy collar and badly arranged tie, he presented a contrast to his companion of which he seemed, in a way, bitterly conscious.

“You are staying near here?” Tallente enquired civilly.

“Over near Lynton. Dartrey has a cottage there. I came down yesterday.”

“Surely you were in Hellesfield the day before yesterday?”

Miller smiled ill-naturedly.

“I was,” he admitted, “and I flatter myself that I was able to make the speech which settled your chances in that direction.”

Tallente permitted a slight note of scorn to creep into his tone.

“It was not your eloquence,” he said, “or your arguments, which brought failure upon me. It was partly your lies and partly your tactics.”

An unwholesome flush rose in the other’s face.

“Lies?” he repeated, a little truculently.

Tallente looked him up and down. The station master was approaching now, the whistle had blown, their conversation was at an end.

“I said lies,” Tallente observed, “most advisedly.” The train was already on the move, and the departing passenger was compelled to step hurriedly into a carriage. Tallente, waited upon by the obsequioution master, strolled across the line to where his car was waiting. It was not until his arrival there that he realised that Miller had offered him no explanation as to his presence on the platform of this tiny wayside station.

“Did you notice the person with whom I was talking?” he asked the station master.

“A tall, thin gentleman in knickerbockers? Yes, sir,” the man replied.

“Part of your description is correct,” Tallente remarked drily. “Do you know what he was doing here?”

“Been down to your house, I believe, sir. He arrived by the early train this morning and asked the way to the Manor.”

“To my house?” Tallente repeated incredulously.

“It was the Manor he asked for, sir,” the station master assured his questioner. “Begging your pardon, sir, is it true that he was Miller, the Socialist M.P.?”

“True enough,” was the brief reply. “What of it?”

The man coughed as he deposited the dispatch box which he had been carrying on the seat of the waiting car.

“They think a lot of him down in these parts, sir,” he observed, a little apologetically.

Tallente made no answer to the station master’s last speech and merely waved his hand a little mechanically as the car drove off. His mind was already busy with the problem suggested by Miller’s appearance in these parts. For the first few minutes of his drive he was back again in the turmoil which he had left. Then with a little shrug of the shoulders he abandoned this new enigma. Its solution must be close at hand.

Arrived at the edge of the dusty, white strip of road along which he had travelled over the moors from the station, Tallente leaned forward and watched the unfolding panorama below with a little start of surprise. He had passed through acres of yellowing gorse, of purple heather and mossy turf, fragrant with the aromatic perfume of sun-baked herbiage. In the distance, the moorland reared itself into strange promontories, out-flung to the sea. On his right, a little farm, with its cluster of out-buildings, nestled in the bosom of the hills. On either side, the fields still stretched upward like patchwork to a clear sky, but below, down into the hollow, blotting out all that might lie beneath, was a curious sea of rolling white mist, soft and fleecy yet impenetrable. Tallente, who had seen very little of this newly chosen country home of his, had the feeling, as the car crept slowly downward, of one about to plunge into a new life, to penetrate into an unknown world. A man of extraordinarily sensitive perceptions, leading him often outside the political world in which he fought the battle of life, he was conscious of a curious and grim premonition as the car, crawling down the precipitous hillside, approached and was enveloped in the grey shroud. The world which a few moments before had seemed so wonderful, the sunlight, the distant view of the sea, the perfumes of flowers and shrubs, had all gone. The car was crawling along a rough and stony road, between hedges dripping with moisture and trees dimly seen like spectres. At last, about three-quarters of the way down to the sea, after an abrupt turn, they entered a winding avenue and emerged on to a terrace. The chauffeur, who had felt the strain of the drive, ran a little past the front door and pulled up in front of an uncurtained window. Tallente glanced in, dazzled a little at first by the unexpected lamplight. Then he understood the premonition which had sat shivering in his heart during the long descent.

The mist, which had hung like a spectral curtain over the little demesne of Martinhoe Manor, had almost entirely disappeared when, at a few minutes before eight, with all traces of his long journey obliterated, Andrew Tallente stepped out on to the stone-flagged terrace and looked out across the little bay below. The top of the red sandstone cliff opposite was still wreathed with mists, but the sunlight lay upon the tennis lawn, the flower gardens below, and the rocks almost covered by the full, swelling tide. Tall, and looking slimmer than ever in his plain dinner garb, there were some indications of an hour of strange and unexpected suffering in the tired face of the man who gazed out in somewhat dazed fashion at the little panorama which he had been looking forward so eagerly to seeing again. Throughout the long journey down from town, he had felt an unusual and almost boyish enthusiasm for his coming holiday. He had thought of his tennis racquet and fishing rods, wondered about his golf clubs and his guns. Even the unexpected encounter with Miller had done little more than leave an unpleasant taste in his mouth. And then, on his way down from “up over,” as the natives called that little strip of moorland overhead, he had vanished into the mist and had come out into another world.

“Andrew! So you are out here? Why did you not come to my room? Surely your train was very punctual?”

Tallente remained for a moment tense and motionless. Then he turned around. The woman who stood upon the threshold of the house, framed with a little cascade of drooping roses, sought for his eyes almost hungrily. He realised how she must be feeling. A dormant vein of cynicism parted his lips as he held her fingers for a moment. His tone and his manner were quite natural.

“We were, I believe, unusually punctual,” he admitted. “What an extraordinary mist! Up over there was no sign of it at all.”

She shivered. Her eyes were still watching his face, seeking for an answer to her unasked question. Blue eyes they were, which had been beautiful in their day, a little hard and anxious now. She wore a white dress, simple with the simplicity of supreme and expensive art. A rope of pearls was her only ornament. Her hair was somewhat elaborately coiffured, there was a touch of rouge upon her cheeks, and the unscreened evening sunlight was scarcely kind to her rather wan features and carefully arranged complexion. She still had her claims to beauty, however. Tallente admitted that to himself as he stood there appraising her, with a strange and almost impersonal regard,–his wife of thirteen years. She was beautiful, notwithstanding the strained look of anxiety which at that moment disfigured her face, the lurking fear which made her voice sound artificial, the nervousness which every moment made fresh demands upon her self-restraint.

“It came up from the sea,” she said. “One moment Tony and I were sitting out under the trees to keep away from the sun, and the next we were driven shivering indoors; It was just like running into a fog bank in the middle of the Atlantic on a hot summer’s day.”

“I found the difference in temperature amazing,” he observed. “I, too, dropped from the sunshine into a strange chill.”

She tried to get rid of the subject.

“So you lost your seat,” she said. “I am very sorry. Tell me how it happened?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“The Democratic Party made up their mind, for some reason or other, that I shouldn’t sit. The Labour Party generally were not thinking of running a candidate. I was to have been returned unopposed, in acknowledgment of my work on the Nationalisation Bill. The Democrats, however, ratted. They put up a man at the last moment, and–well, you know the result–I lost.”

“I don’t understand English politics,” she confessed, “but I thought you were almost a Labour man yourself.”

“I am practically,” he replied. “I don’t know, even now, what made them oppose me.”

“What about the future?”

“My plans are not wholly made.”

For the first time, an old and passionate ambition prevailed against the thrall of the moment.

“One of the papers this morning,” she said eagerly, “suggested that you might be offered a peerage.”

“I saw it,” he acknowledged. “It was in the Sun. I was once unfortunate enough to be on the committee of a club which blackballed the editor.”

Her mouth hardened a little.

“But you haven’t forgotten your promise?”

“‘Bargain’ shall we call it?” he replied. “No, I have not forgotten.”

“Tony says you could have a peerage whenever you liked.”

“Then I suppose it must be so. Just at present I am not prepared to write ‘finis’ to my political career.”

The butler announced dinner. Tallente offered his arm and they passed through the homely little hall into the dining room beyond. Stella came to a sudden standstill as they crossed the threshold.

“Why is the table laid for two only?” she demanded. “Mr. Palliser is here.”

“I was obliged to send Tony away–on important business,” Tallente intervened. “He left about an hour ago.”

Once more the terror was upon her. The fingers which gripped her napkin trembled. Her eyes, filled with fierce enquiry, were fixed upon her husband’s as he took his place in leisurely fashion and glanced at the menu.

“Obliged to send Tony away?” she repeated. “I don’t understand. He told me that he had several days’ work here with you.”

“Something intervened,” he murmured.

“Why didn’t you wire?” she faltered, almost under her breath. “He couldn’t have had any time to get ready.”

Andrew Tallente looked at his wife across the bowl of floating flowers.

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t think of that. But in any case I did not make up my mind until I arrived that it was necessary for him to go.”

There was silence for a time, an unsatisfactory and in some respects an unnatural silence. Tallente trifled with his hors d’oeuvres and was inquisitive about the sauce with which his fish was flavoured. Stella sent away her plate untouched, but drank two glasses of champagne. The light came back to her eyes, she found courage again. After all, she was independent of this man, independent even of his name. She looked across the table at him appraisingly. He was still sufficiently good-looking, lithe of frame and muscular, with features well-cut although a little irregular in outline. Time, however, and anxious work were beginning to leave their marks. His hair was grey at the sides, there were deep lines in his face, he seemed to her fancy to have shrunken a little during the last few years. He had still the languid, high- bred voice which she had always admired so munch, the same coolness of manner and quiet dignity. He was a personable man, but after all he was a failure. His career, so far as she could judge it, was at an end. She was a fool to imagine, even for a moment, that her whole future lay in his keeping.

“Have you any plans?” she asked him presently. “Another constituency?”

He smiled a little wearily. For once he spoke quite naturally.

“The only plan I have formulated at present is to rest for a time,” he admitted.

She drank another glass of champagne and felt almost confident. She told him the small events of the sparsely populated neighbourhood, spoke of the lack of water in the trout stream, the improvement in the golf links, the pheasants which a near-by landowner was turning down. They were comparative newcomers and had seen as yet little of their neighbours.

“I was told,” she concluded, “that the great lady of the neighbourhood was to have called upon me this afternoon. I waited in but she didn’t come.”

“And who is that?” he enquired.

“Lady Jane Partington of Woolhanger–a daughter of the Duke of Barminster. Woolhanger was left to her by an old aunt, and they say that she never leaves the place.”

“An elderly lady?” he asked, merely with an intent of prolonging a harmless subject of conversation.

“On the contrary, quite young,” his wife replied. “She seems to be a sort of bachelor-spinster, who lives out in that lonely place without a chaperon and rules the neighborhood. You ought to make friends with her, Andrew. They say that she is half a Socialist.–By the by, how long are we going to stay down here?”

“We will discuss that presently,” he answered.

The service of dinner came to its appointed end. Tallente drank one glass of port alone. Then he rose, left the room by the French windows, passed along the terrace and looked in at the drawing-room, where Stella was lingering over her coffee.

“Will you walk with me as far as the lookout?” he invited. “Your maid can bring you a cloak if you are likely to be cold.”

She responded a little ungraciously, but appeared a few minutes later, a filmy shawl of lace covering her bare shoulders. She walked by his side to the end of the terrace, along the curving walk through the plantation, and by the sea wall to the flagged space where some seats and a table had been fixed. Four hundred feet below, the sea was beating against jagged rocks. The moon was late and it was almost dark. She leaned over and he stood by her side.

“Stella,” he said, “you asked me at dinner when we were leaving here. You are leaving to-morrow morning by the twelve-thirty train.”

“What do you mean?” she demanded, with a sudden sinking of the heart.

“Please do not ask,” he replied. “You know and I know. It is not my wish to make public the story of our–disagreement.”

She was silent for several moments, looking over into the black gulf below, watching the swirl of the sea, listening to its dull booming against the distant rocks, the shriek of the backward-dragged pebbles. An owl flew out from some secret place in the cliffs and wheeled across the bay. She drew her shawl around her with a little shiver.

“So this is the end,” she answered.

“No doubt, in my way,” he reflected, “I have been as great a disappointment to you as you to me. You brought me your great wealth, believing that I could use it towards securing just what you desired in the way of social position. Perhaps that might have come but for the war. Now I have become rather a failure.”

“There was no necessity for you ever to have gone soldiering,” she reminded him a little hardly.

“As you say,” he acquiesced. “Still, I went and I do not regret it. I might even remind you that I met with some success.”

“Pooh!” she scoffed. “What is the use of a few military distinctions? What are an M.C. and a D.S.O. and a few French and Belgian orders going to do for me? You know I want other things. They told me when I married you,” she went on, warming with her own sense of injury, “that you were certain to be Prime Minister. They told me that the Coalition Party couldn’t do without you, that you were the only effective link between them and Labour. You had only to play your cards properly and you could have pushed out Horlock whenever you liked. And now see what a mess you have made of things! You have built up Horlock’s party for him, he offers you an insignificant post in the Cabinet, and you can’t even win your seat in Parliament.”

“Your epitome of my later political career has its weak points, but I dare say, from your point of view, you have every reason for complaint,” he observed. “Since I have failed to procure for you the position you desire, our parting will have a perfectly natural appearance. Your fortune is unimpaired– you cannot say that I have been extravagant–and I assure you that I shall not regret my return to poverty.”

“But you won’t be able to live,” she said bluntly. “You haven’t any income at all.”

“Believe me,” he answered quietly, “you exaggerate my poverty. In any case, it is not your concern.”

“You wouldn’t–”

She paused. She was a woman of not very keen perceptions, but she realised that if she were to proceed with the offer which was half framed in her mind, the man by her side, with his, to her outlook, distorted sense of honour, would become her enemy. She shrugged her shoulders, and turning towards him, held out her hand.

“It is the end, then,” she said. “Well, Andrew, I did my best according to my lights, and I failed. Will you shake hands?”

He shook his head.

“I cannot, Stella. Let us agree to part here. We know all there is to be known of one another, and we shall be able to say good-by without regret.”

She drifted slowly away from him. He watched her figure pass in and out among the trees. She was unashamed, perhaps relieved,–probably, he reflected, as he watched her enter the house, already making her plans for a more successful future. He turned away and looked downwards. The darkness seemed, if possible, to have become a little more intense, the moaning of the sea more insistent. Little showers of white spray enlaced the sombre rocks. The owl came back from his mysterious journey, hovered for a moment over the cliff and entered his secret home. Behind him, the lights in the house went out, one by one. Suddenly he felt a grip upon his shoulder, a hot breath upon his cheek. It was Stella, returned dishevelled, her lace scarf streaming behind, her eyes lit with horror. “Andrew!” she cried. “It came over me–just as I entered the house! What have you done with Anthony?”

CHAPTER II

Tallente’s first impressions of Jane Partington were that an exceedingly attractive but somewhat imperious young woman had surprised him in a most undignified position. She had come cantering down the drive on a horse which, by comparison with the Exmoor ponies which every one rode in those parts, had seemed gigantic, and, finding a difficulty in making her presence known, had motioned to him with her whip. He climbed down from the steps where he had been busy fastening up some roses, removed a nail from his mouth and came towards her.

“How is it that I can make no one hear?” she asked. “Do you know if Mrs. Tallente is at home?”

Tallente was in no hurry to reply. He was busy taking in a variety of pleasant impressions. Notwithstanding the severely cut riding habit and the hard little hat, he decided that he had never looked into a more attractively feminine face. For some occult reason, unconnected, he was sure, with the use of any skin food or face cream, this young woman who had the reputation of living out of doors, winter and summer, had a complexion which, notwithstanding its faint shade of tan, would have passed muster for delicacy and clearness in any Mayfair drawing-room. Her eyes were soft and brown, her hair a darker shade of the same colour. Her mouth, for all its firmness, was soft and pleasantly curved. Her tone, though a trifle imperative, was kindly, gracious and full of musical quality. Her figure was moderately slim, but indistinguishable at that moment under her long coat. She possessed a curious air of physical well-being, the well-being of a woman who has found and is enjoying what she seeks in life.

“Won’t you tell me why I can make no one hear?” she repeated, still good- naturedly but frowning slightly at his silence.

“Mrs. Tallente is in London,” he announced. “She has taken most of the establishment with her.”

The visitor fumbled in her side pocket and produced a diminutive ivory case. She withdrew a card and handed it to Tallente, with a glance at his gloved hands.

“Will you give this to the butler?” she begged. “Tell him to tell his mistress that I was sorry not to find her at home.”

“The butler,” Tallente explained, “has gone for the milk. He shall have the card immediately on his return.”

She looked at him for a moment and then smiled.

“Do forgive me,” she said. “I believe you are Mr. Tallente?”

He drew off his gloves and shook hands.

“How did you guess that?” he asked.

“From the illustrated papers, of course,” she answered. “I have come to the conclusion that you must be a very vain man, I have seen so many pictures of you lately.”

“A matter of snapshots,” he replied, “for which, as a rule, the victim is not responsible. You should abjure such a journalistic vice as picture papers.”

“Why?” she laughed. “They lead to such pleasant surprises. I had been led to believe, for instance, by studying the Daily Mirror, that you were quite an elderly person with a squint.”

“I am becoming self-conscious,” he confessed. “Won’t you come in? There is a boy somewhere about the premises who can look after your horse, and I shall be able to give you some tea as soon as Robert gets back with the milk.”

He cooeed to the boy, who came up from one of the lower shelves of garden, and she followed him into the hall. He looked around him for a moment in some perplexity.

“I wonder whether you would mind coming into my study?” he suggested. “I am here quite alone for the present, and it is the only room I use.”

She followed him down a long passage into a small apartment at the extreme end of the house.

“You are like me,” she said. “I keep most of my rooms shut up and live in my den. A lonely person needs so much atmosphere.”

“Rather a pigsty, isn’t it?” he remarked, sweeping a heap of books from a chair. “I am without a secretary just now–in fact,” he went on, with a little burst of confidence engendered by her friendly attitude, “we are in a mess altogether.”

She laughed softly, leaning back amongst the cushions of the chair and looking around the room, her kindly eyes filled with interest.

“It is a most characteristic mess,” she declared. “I am sure an interviewer would give anything for this glimpse into your tastes and habits. Golf clubs, all cleaned up and ready for action; trout rod, newly-waxed at the joints–you must try my stream, there is no water in yours; tennis racquets in a very excellent press–I wonder whether you’re too good for a single with me some day? Typewriter–rather dusty. I don’t believe that you can use it.”

“I can’t,” he admitted. “I have been writing my letters by hand for the last two days.”

She sighed.

“Men are helpless creatures! Fancy a great politician unable to write his own letters! What has become of your secretary?”

Tallente threw some books to the floor and seated himself in the vacant easy-chair.

“I shall begin to think,” he said, a little querulously, “that you don’t read the newspapers. My secretary, according to that portion of the Press which guarantees to provide full value for the smallest copper coin, has ‘disappeared’.”

“Really?” she exclaimed. “He or she?”

“He–the Honourable Anthony Palliser by name, son of Stobart Palliser, who was at Eton with me.”

She nodded.

“I expect I know his mother. What exactly do you mean by ‘disappeared’?”

Tallente was looking out of the window. A slight hardness had crept into his tone and manner. He had the air of one reciting a story.

“The young man and I differed last Tuesday night,” he said. “In the language of the novelists, he walked out into the night and disappeared. Only an hour before dinner, too. Nothing has been heard of him since.”

“What a fatuous thing to do!” she remarked. “Shall you have to get another secretary?”

“Presently,” he assented. “Just for the moment I am rather enjoying doing nothing.”

She leaned back amongst the cushions of her chair and looked across at him with interest, an interest which presently drifted into sympathy. Even the lightness of his tone could not mask the inwritten weariness of the man, the tired droop of the mouth, and the lacklustre eyes.

“Do you know,” she said, “I have never been more intrigued than when I heard you were really coming down here. Last summer I was in Scotland–in fact I have been away every time the Manor has been open. I am so anxious to know whether you like this part of the world.”

“I like it so much,” he replied, “that I feel like settling here for the rest of my life.”

She shook her head.

“You will never be able to do that,” she said, “at least not for many years. The country will need so much of your time. But it is delightful to think that you may come here for your holidays.”

“If you read the newspapers,” he remarked, a little grimly, “you might not be so sure that the country is clamouring for my services.”

She waved away his speech with a little gesture of contempt.

“Rubbish! Your defeat at Hellesfield was a matter of political jobbery. Any one could see through that. Horlock ought never to have sent you there. He ought to have found you a perfectly safe seat, and of course he will have to do it.”

He shook his head.

“I am not so sure. Horlock resents my defeat almost as though it were a personal matter. Besides, it is an age of young men, Lady Jane.”

“Young men!” she scoffed. “But you are young.”

“Am I?” he answered, a little sadly. “I am not feeling it just now. Besides, there is something wrong about my enthusiasms. They are becoming altogether too pastoral. I am rather thinking of taking up the cultivation of roses and of making a terraced garden down to the sea. Do you know anything about gardening, Lady Jane?”

“Of course I do,” she answered, a little impatiently. “A very excellent hobby it is for women and dreamers and elderly men. There is plenty of time for you to take up such a pursuit when you have finished your work.”

“Fifteen thousand intelligent voters have just done their best to tell me that it is already finished,” he sighed.

She made a little grimace.

“Am I going to be disappointed in you, I wonder?” she asked. “I don’t think so. You surely wouldn’t let a little affair like one election drive you out of public life? It was so obvious that you were made the victim for Horlock’s growing unpopularity in the country. Haven’t you realised that yourself–or perhaps you don’t care to talk about these things to an ignoramus such as I am?”

“Please don’t believe that,” he begged hastily. “I think yours is really the common-sense view of the matter. Only,” he went on, “I have always represented, amongst the coalitionists, the moderate Socialist, the views of those men who recognise the power and force of the coming democracy, and desire to have legislation attuned to it. Yet it was the Democratic vote which upset me at Hellesfield.”

“That was entirely a matter of faction,” she persisted. “That horrible person Miller was sent down there, for some reason or other, to make trouble. I believe if the election had been delayed another week, and you had been able to make two more speeches like you did at the Corn Exchange, you would have got in.”

He looked at her in some surprise.

“That is exactly what I thought myself,” he agreed. “How on earth do you come to know all these things?”

“I take an interest in your career,” she said, smiling at him, “and I hate to see you so dejected without cause.”

He felt a little thrill at her words. A queer new sense of companionship stirred in his pulses. The bitterness of his suppressed disappointment was suddenly soothed. There was something of the excitement of the discoverer, too, in these new sensations. It seemed to him that he was finding something which had been choked out of his life and which was yet a real and natural part of it.

“You will make an awful nuisance of me if you don’t mind,” he warned her. “If you encourage me like this, you will develop the most juvenile of all failings–you will make me want to talk about myself. I am beginning to feel terribly egotistical already.”

She leaned a little towards him. Her mouth was soft with sweet and feminine tenderness, her eyes warm with kindness.

“That is just what I hoped I might succeed in doing,” she declared. “I have been interested in your career ever since I had the faintest idea of what politics meant. You could not give me a greater happiness than to talk to me– about yourself.”

CHAPTER III

Very soon tea was brought in. The homely service of the meal, and Robert’s plain clothes, seemed to demand some sort of explanation. It was she who provided the opening.

“Will your wife be long away?” she enquired.

Tallente looked at his guest thoughtfully. She was pouring out tea from an ordinary brown earthenware pot with an air of complete absorption in her task. The friendliness of her seemed somehow to warm the atmosphere of the room, even as her sympathy had stolen into the frozen places of his life. For the moment he ignored her question. His eyes appraised her critically, reminiscently. There was something vaguely familiar in the frank sweetness of her tone and manner.

“I am going to make the most idiotically commonplace remark,” he said. “I cannot believe that this is the first time we have met.”

“It isn’t,” she replied, helping herself to strawberry

“Are you in earnest?” he asked, puzzled.

“Do you mean that I have spoken to you?”

“Absolutely!”

“Not only that but you have made me a present.”

He searched the recesses of his memory in vain. She smiled at his perplexity and began to count on her fingers.

“Let me see,” she said, “exactly fourteen years ago you arrived in Paris from London on a confidential mission to a certain person.”

“To Lord Peters!” he exclaimed.

She nodded.

“You had half an hour to spare after you had finished your business, and you begged to see the young people. Maggie Peters was always a friend of yours. You came into the morning-room and I was there.”

“You?”

“Yes! I was at school in Paris, and I was spending my half-holiday with Maggie.”

“The little brown girl!” he murmured. “I never heard your name, and when I sent the chocolates I had to send them to ‘the young lady in brown.’ Of course I remember! But your hair was down your back, you had freckles, and you were as silent as a mouse.”

“You see how much better my memory is than yours,” she laughed.

“I am not so sure,” he objected. “You took me for the gardener just now.”

“Not when you came down the steps,” she protested, “and besides, it is your own fault for wearing such atrociously old clothes.”

“They shall be given away to-morrow,” he promised.

“I should think so,” she replied. “And you might part with the battered straw hat you were wearing, at the same time.”

“It shall be done,” he promised meekly.

She became reminiscent.

“We were all so interested in you in those days. Lord Peters told us, after you were gone, that some day you would be Prime Minister.”

“I am afraid,” he sighed, “that I have disappointed most of my friends.”

“You have disappointed no one,” she assured him firmly. “You will disappoint no one. You are the one person in politics who has kept a steadfast course, and if you have lost ground a little in the country, and slipped out of people’s political appreciation during the last decade, don’t we all know why? Every one of your friends–and your wife, of course,” she put in hastily, “must be proud that you have lost ground. There isn’t another man in the country who gave up a great political career to learn his drill in a cadet corps, who actually served in the trenches through the most terrible battles of the war, and came out of it a Brigadier-General with all your distinctions.”

He felt his heart suddenly swell. No one had ever spoken to him like this. The newspapers had been complimentary for a day and had accepted the verdict of circumstances the next. His wife had simply been the reflex of other people’s opinion and the trend of events.

“You make me feel,” he told her earnestly, “almost for the first time, that after all it was worth while.”

The slight unsteadiness of his tone at first surprised, then brought her almost to the point of confusion. Their eyes met–a startled glance on her part, merely to assure herself that he was in earnest–and afterwards there was a moment’s embarrassment. She accepted a cigarette and went back to her easy- chair.

“You did not answer the question I asked you a few minutes ago,” she reminded him. “When is your wife returning?”

The shadow was back on his face.

“Lady Jane,” he said, “if it were not that we are old friends, dating from that box of chocolates, remember, I might have felt that I must make you some sort of a formal reply. But as it is, I shall tell you the truth. My wife is not coming back.”

“Not at all?” she exclaimed.

“To me, never,” he answered. “We have separated.”

“I am so very sorry,” she said, after a moment’s startled silence. “I am afraid that I asked a tactless question, but how could I know?”

“There was nothing tactless about it,” he assured her. “It makes it much easier for me to tell you. I married my wife thirteen years ago because I believed that her wealth would help me in my career. She married me because she was an American with ambitions, anxious to find a definite place in English society. She has been disappointed in me. Other circumstances have now presented themselves. I have discovered that my wife’s affections are bestowed elsewhere. To be perfectly honest, the discovery was a relief to me.”

“So that is why you are living down here like this?” she murmured.

“Precisely! The one thing for which I am grateful,” he went on, “is that I always refused to let my wife take a big country house. I insisted upon an unpretentious place for the times when I could rest. I think that I shall settle down here altogether. I can just afford to live here if I shoot plenty of rabbits, and if Robert’s rheumatism is not too bad for him to look after the vegetable garden.”

“Of course you are talking nonsense,” she pronounced, a little curtly.

“Why nonsense?”

“You must go back to your work,” she insisted.

“Keep this place for your holiday moments, certainly, but for the rest, to talk of settling down here is simply wicked.”

“What is my work?” he asked. “I tell you frankly that I do not know where I belong. A very intelligent constituency, stuffed up to the throat with schoolboard education, has determined that it would prefer a representative who has changed his politics already four times. I seem to be nobody’s man. Horlock at heart is frightened of me, because he is convinced that I am not sound, and he has only tried to make use of me as a sop to democracy. The Whigs hate me like poison, hate me even worse than Horlock. If I were in Parliament, I should not know which Party to support. I think I shall devote my time to roses.”

“And between September and May?”

“I shall hibernate and think about them.”

“Of course,” she said, with the air of one humoring a child, “you are not in earnest. You have just been through a very painful experience and you are suffering from it. As for the rest, you are talking nonsense.”

“Explain, please,” he begged.

“You said just now that you did not know where your place was,” she continued. “You called yourself nobody’s man. Why, the most ignorant person who thinks about things could tell you where you belong. Even I could tell you.”

“Please do,” he invited.

She rose to her feet.

“Walk round the garden with me,” she begged, brushing the cigarette ash from her skirt. “You know what a terrible out-of-door person I am. This room seems to me close. I want to smell the sea from one of those wonderful lookouts of yours.”

He walked with her along one of the lower paths, deliberately avoiding the upper lookouts. They came presently to a grass-grown pier. She stood at the end, her firm, capable fingers clenching the stone wall, her eyes looking seaward.