Will O’ the Wisp (24 page)

This time there was no enclosure, only the same weak pencil scrawl under the heading “Tuesday.”

“D
EAR
D
AVID
,

“Did you get my letter? I wrote three months ago to tell you I was alive. I thought perhaps you would think I had been drowned—a lot of people were. Will you write and tell me what to do? I am a little better, but not very much. Will you write to me?

“E
RICA
.”

Under the name a postscript very badly written:

“Please tell Aunt Nellie that I'm not drowned.”

When a little time had passed, David took out his notebook and read the letters as Heather Down had given them to him. They were almost word for word what Erica had written. The most important difference was in the second letter. Erica had said, “I am a little better, but not very much.” In Heather Down's version this had become: “I am better, but I am not well yet.” It was just such a difference as would be natural enough if Erica, recovered, were remembering what she had written in the dispirited mood of illness.

David put the letters away in his pocket. There were things that he must ask Betty; but he had to master himself before he could meet her. He had trusted her utterly, and she had done this horrible thing to him. That she or anyone else should have read these simple, piteous appeals unmoved was unbelievable. Yet it had happened. Betty, reading them, had not been moved at all; she had thought of herself, of what Francis would say. It was quite unbelievable; but it had happened.

Time went by. Instead of decreasing, David's sense of shock and bitterness increased. It seemed impossible that he should meet Betty. And whilst this sense of impossibility was at its height the door opened and Betty came in.

She held the door in her hand and said fretfully:

“David,
are
you staying to lunch? I must tell the servants something.”

“Come in and shut the door,” said David. “I want to speak to you.”

She did come in then, and stood by the big armchair. Her manner was one of offence.

“I want to speak to you about those letters. You'd better sit down.”

She jerked an angry shoulder, but did as she was told.

“You didn't seem to want to hear what I had to say just now.”

“I wanted to read the letters first. You can go on now. Why didn't you give me that second letter?”

“I told you,” said Betty in her most annoyed voice. “Francis said it was no good to raise your hopes, and he'd send a cable to find out what had happened.”

“Yes?”

A little of the assurance went out of Betty's manner.

“It was all for your own good. I'm sure I went through a dreadful time.”

“What was the answer to the cable?”

“I didn't hear anything for ten days. Francis was abroad again. I kept writing to him. At last I said I should give you the letters, and he wired ‘Don't.' And then he wrote and said Erica was dead.”

David repeated the last word.

“Yes”—she spoke quickly and nervously—“the cable said so, and what was the good of my giving you the letters after that? It would only have raked things up and upset you.”

David set his face like a flint; his voice rang harshly:

“The cable said that Erica was dead?”

“Yes.”

“And in the following October you and Francis put an advertisement in
The Times
under my initials to say that my wife was alive.”

Betty began to sniff.

“You were flirting with Angela Carr. Francis said you'd marry her. David—don't look at me like that! You don't give me time to explain. Francis said he'd made more inquiries, and that there was a mistake about the cable. He said Erica was alive, and—and—I suppose you think I ought to have let you commit bigamy.”

An awful patience descended upon David. To Betty, right and wrong simply meant things convenient or inconvenient to Francis—what Francis approved was right; what Francis disliked was wrong; what Francis asserted was fact. On this basis the whole unbelievable affair was simple enough. He looked calmly at Betty's flushed, angry face. His calmness stung her more than his anger had done.

“It's all very well for you, but it was most unfair of Father to leave you Ford and cut me off with a wretched six hundred a year. If I'd had to live on it, we should simply have starved—and, as Francis said, once you got married, you wouldn't want me here, and you wouldn't go on paying Dicky's school bills either.”

It was like being in a dream—the familiar room, and Betty saying this sort of thing to him. He seemed to have got past any feeling about it. There was just that strange patience which endured through some horrible dream. He put his head in his hands and stared at the ink-marks on his blotting-pad.

It was clear now where most of Betty's six hundred a year had gone. He had sometimes wondered how she managed to be so hard up and to produce a succession of unpaid bills for him to settle. She lived at Ford without contributing a penny to the expenses; Dick's school bills came to David as a matter of course. He answered Betty's complaint on that score first:

“Why do you say things like that? You don't really believe them. I told you I would pay Dick's bills.”

“You wouldn't have gone on if you had married,” said Betty fretfully. “Francis said—”

David traced an ink-stain with his finger.

“I'd rather you didn't quote Francis. If I said I'd do a thing, I should do it.” He looked up at her. “Let's get back to the advertisement. It said Erica was alive.
Is she alive?
”

Betty hesitated, sniffed, dabbed her nose.

“Francis said—”

In a perfectly expressionless voice David cursed Francis.

Tears of anger sprang into Betty's horrified eyes.

“David! How dare you!”

“
Is Erica alive?
” said David.

Betty sniffed again.

“I—I don't know.”

David went on looking at her.

“You kept back the letter because she was dead; and you put in the advertisement because she was alive. You can't have it both ways.”

“Francis said she was dead; and then he said it was a mistake.”

“Why did he think it was a mistake?”

“He didn't say.”

“And you didn't ask him?”

A pause.

“Did you ask him?”

“Yes, of course I did.”

“What did he say?”

“He said to the best of his belief she was alive.”

“And you left it at that?”

Betty sniffed.

“Did you believe what Francis said? Did you think Erica was alive?”

“I didn't
know. I
suppose you think I ought to have let you commit bigamy. You don't seem to realize that it was all for your own good. And, as Francis said, it was better to be on the safe side, because it would have been most frightfully awkward if you'd married again and she'd turned up afterwards.”

David looked down at his blotting-paper. Erica's letter had lain there—the little weak scrawl in which she had asked him to come to her. His calm broke suddenly.

“Can't you realize what you've done? She must have thought I'd deserted her. If she's alive, that's what she thinks now. If she isn't alive, she died thinking it. Betty, what have I done to you that you should do this horrible thing to me?”

“I did it for the best,” said Betty in a fluttered voice. “You don't understand—you don't think how difficult it was for me. You don't—What was the use?”

It was like trying to talk to a person who is hopelessly deaf; she didn't hear him. He spoke without looking at her:

“You'd better go.”

Betty got as far as the door.

“Francis always said what an awful temper you had. I think you ought to beg my pardon.”

David lifted his head.

He said: “Do you want me to kill you? I shall if you don't go.”

CHAPTER XXXV

David went back to town without breaking bread in his own house. He drove between wet hedges under a wet sky. There was rain on the wind-screen and rain on the long shining road that took the grey reflection of the sky. He felt as if his mind was full of a grey mist in which thoughts moved dimly and were lost. His ceaseless effort was to clear the mist away so that he might think. Little by little the formless thoughts began to take form and to become apparent.

The letters—it all came back to the letters. Everything that Heather Down said about the letters was true. She said that Erica had survived the wreck. That was true. She said that Erica had written. She gave, almost word for word, the contents of Erica's letters. If these things were true, they were so many reasons for believing what she said about other things. He owed her amends for disbelief. If she were Erica, how much more did he owe her? An appalling weight of obligation rested upon him. If she were Erica, deserted, penniless, ill, what could he do to wipe out these memories and fulfil the trust he had undertaken?

When he reached London he wrote to Heather Down:

“I must see you at once. I will come in an hour unless you ring me up.”

He signed his name and sent the letter, as before, by District Messenger.

When he had had some food, he walked to Martagon Crescent. He did not know what he was going to say to Heather Down, but he thought that he would know when he saw her.

It was Miss Smith who opened the door to him. She did not open it very wide, and she stood there in the entrance looking fixedly at him with a strange, frightened look.

“You're to come in,” she said, but she did not stand aside. She leaned against the door and went on looking at him. “She's in there.” She looked back across her shoulder. “You're to go in.”

David moved to pass her. He had to touch her arm, and he felt it tremble. He said quickly under his breath, “Miss Smith,” and at once she shut the door with a slam.

“It slipped—it slipped out of my hand. She's waiting. You're to go in.”

As she spoke, she went down the passage in front of David and pushed open the sitting-room door. He went in, and heard the door jerk to behind him.

Heather Down was sitting by the rose-wood table. Or was it Heather Down? David stood still with every pulse drumming. She was bare-headed, and she was dressed in black. She looked slighter, she looked younger. She sat in a drooping attitude with her head bent; her hands were in her lap. The ring with the three blue flowers spanned the third finger of the hand that lay uppermost, and below it was the plain gold of a wedding ring that had not been there before. The half-averted face was pale, the lashes wet; her brown uncovered hair lay smoothly about the brow and down-bent head. Figure, attitude, dress, all recalled Erica only too vividly. Where before he had looked at Heather Down and searched for a hint of Erica, he now looked at this drooping black-robed girl and, thinking first of Erica, scanned the pale features for something to remind him of Heather Down.

He stood there struggling for composure, and all the time she neither spoke nor made any sign. In the end David found voice. He said:

“I have traced the letters.”

As he said it, the bright, sudden colour in her face made her Heather Down again.

“The letters?” she said.

“I have traced them.”

She looked up at him, and the resentment in her eyes struck him like a blow.

“You had them all the time.”

He shook his head.

“You had them. Letters don't go astray and then turn up again like that. Do you think I'm a born fool?”

“I don't know what you are. If I knew—” He broke off. “If you are Erica—”

“If I'm Erica,” said Heather Down. “Well, what then?”

David came a step nearer.

“Are you Erica?”

She looked down at the ring on her finger, the quick sidelong look which had brought Erica back to him before. This time she touched the ring, slipped it slowly from her finger, and laid it on the table between them.

“That's the ring you bought me, isn't it? You recognize it, don't you?” She touched the other ring, the wedding ring, sliding it up to the joint and back again. “One wedding ring looks like another—doesn't it? Shall I take this one off and let you look at it? You had initials put inside the ring you gave your wife. You've forgotten such a lot that I shouldn't wonder if you've forgotten that. Have you?”

“No, I haven't,” said David.

She pulled the ring off with a jerk and threw it down beside the other.

“Look at it then! Look at it and see whether it's your ring or not.”

David picked it up and turned it to the light. It was the first time there had been daylight in the shabby room. The bright pink curtains were draw back; the gloomy dirty sky looked through a dirty window-pane. The corners of the room faded into dusk; the texts were illegible. What visibility there was showed him to Heather Down and Heather Down to him.

He moved nearer the window and turned the ring with rigid, steady fingers. Inside the thin circle the initials E. F. stood out, and the date of his marriage.

David's eyes narrowed. The cutting was as sharp and clear as on the day he had first looked at it in the jeweller's shop in Sydney. He said quickly:

“The letters aren't worn. How's that?”

Heather Down's voice rang hard:

“What has there been to wear them? Do you think I've worn the ring?”

“Why haven't you?”

“D'you think I'd wear the ring when the man had gone off and left me without a word? D'you think a girl wants to have anything more to do with a man like that?”

David dropped the ring back on to the table.

“If you didn't want to have anything more to do with me, why are we here?”

“Perhaps I want to punish you,” said Heather Down. “You went away and left me. You knew I was ill, and you left me. You knew I hadn't any money, and you left me. I asked you to write and I asked you to come, and you left me without a word.”