The Secret of the Silver Car, Wyndham Martyn [best novels to read to improve english txt] 📗

he exclaimed. “Lady Daphne, your brother saved my life, and when I wanted to speak about the very terrible and unusual experience he denied knowing me.”

“You are not telling me everything,” she said after a pause, “I am glad you are not a detective even though you may be not what I thought you, but is it reasonable you should try to force yourself on a man who quite evidently wants to be alone with his thoughts just to thank him for doing something every soldier was glad to do for any other allied soldier?”

“There was something else,” he admitted. “I mayas well tell you what. We were, as we had every reason to think, dying. We told each other part of our past lives. Why I don’t pretend to understand. Nerves I suppose and the feeling that nothing mattered in the least. I told him part of my past which in effect put a club in his hand to use over me. When I got better I assumed he was killed. I found he wasn’t and followed him here to ask what he was going to do with his knowledge. You wondered what errand I had at Dereham Old Hall. It was to read through the confession which you burned. I had read it and replaced it before you came in.”

“Then you know all about him?” she gasped.

“I know what was written there,” he answered. “I wanted to know so that I could tell him I, too, had a weapon with which to fight. I am not his enemy, far from it.”

“You mean you don’t want to threaten him or hold your knowledge of what he did over us?”

He looked at her gloomily. To think that this was the impression she had of him hurt.

“So that’s what you think of me,” he said slowly.

“Indeed it isn’t,” she answered quickly. “I didn’t think it in the beginning and I don’t want to do so now, but what was one to think?”

“It was your brother’s behaviour that puzzled me,” he said, “and still puzzles me. Don’t you see I only want to be sure that he won’t use what I told him?”

Lady Daphne looked at him curiously. Here was a man whose manners were perfect, who seemed to have the same sports and occupation of the kind of men she knew hinting that he had done things of whose consequence he was afraid. She supposed there were many temptations into which a man might fall, lapses of which he might repent and still go in fear of discovery.

“I don’t wonder you were bewildered,” she said presently, “and I understand far better than you how it was. Mr. Trent you need never be afraid that the man who was Private Smith will ever say a word to any living souls of what you said to him.”

“How can I be certain?” he demanded. “You don’t know the rewards that a man might gain for speaking the truth about me.”

“Private William Smith and my brother Arthur are two different people.”

He looked at her in astonishment. Was the weary chase, the long uncertainty to begin again? There was never a doubt in his mind but that what she told him was true even if it was hard to be believed.

“Then where is Private Smith?” he asked, “Where is the man who knows the real me?”

“At the castle,” she said.

He made a gesture of despair.

“It is incomprehensible.”

“I am going to tell you about them—about the two utterly different men.” She said nothing for a full minute. Then she went to the door and called Mrs. Bassett into the room. “Please tell Mr. Gastoon I shall have to keep him waiting rather longer than I thought.”

“Certainly, my Lady,” Mrs. Bassett said. Later she told her husband that Mr. Castoon looked very black at the news. “He’s not the kind to like being kept waiting,” she explained.

“Princes of the Blood ought to be glad to wait for Lady Daphne,” the tenant farmer cried.

“You learned somehow that Arthur was expelled from Harrow. It is true. He managed to get into Trinity but lasted only a term. Then came Sandhurst and a commission finally and black disgrace. Mr. Rudolph Castoon who is a friend of my eldest brother took pity on him and made him one of his secretaries—he’s in Parliament you know—but even he couldn’t do anything. Then a little while in Australia and failure there. The last thing he did was to enlist just before the war broke out. Colonel Langley was given the command of a London regiment and found Arthur under the name you knew.”

“But you said he wasn’t Private Smith,” Trent broke in eagerly.

“You will see later what I mean. How did you meet him?”

Trent explained in a few words. But what confessions or boasts he had been betrayed into making he said nothing about.

“My brother was expelled from Harrow when he was eighteen. Until he was seventeen he was one of the sweetest natured boys you could imagine. He was full of fun and mischief but all his tutors loved him and there wasn’t a particle of vice in him. Suddenly he seemed possessed of devils. He drank, he gambled—and cheated—he was insolent to his teachers. It broke my mother’s heart. It helped to make my father the silent broken man he is today. It was the same when he went up to Trinity and the same when he was at Sandhurst. …” There was a long pause. Trent could see she was struggling against tears. There welled up in him an almost divine pity. He wanted to soothe her, comfort her and let her cry on his shoulder.

It was in this moment that Anthony Trent knew he loved her and would always love her. Those passing affections of adolesence were pale, wan emotions compared with this. And it was an hour of grief to him. He realized that his ways of life had cut him off irremediably from marriage with such a woman as this.

“What happened,” she said at last, “when you came to after being blown from that dug-out?”

“I was badly hurt,” he answered, wonderingly, “those high explosives play the strangest tricks with

one.”

“This is what happened to my brother. He was unconscious for a very long time and his head was fearfully mangled. When he came out of ether he said very distinctly. ‘Oh Bingo, how rottenly clumsy of you.’”

“Who was Bingo?” Trent asked.

“At the time nobody knew. Arthur’s uniform was torn off in the explosion and his regiment unknown.”

“He could have told them,” Trent asserted.

She shook her head.

“You are mistaken. He could not tell them. They thought he was, what’s the word, malingering. They thought he wanted to be sent back and get out of the fighting. Then he complained of the dreadful noise. By degrees they found that he did not even know of the war. They thought of course he was pretending. My father heard of the wound and although he had disowned him he had him brought to our house in Grosvenor Place. We had specialists, those new sorts of doctors who don’t depend on medicines. Arthur thought he was still at Harrow eight years or more ago. Then I remembered a boy who shared a study with him there, a boy who had stayed here, a son of Sir Willoughby Hosken who has a place near Penzance. Bingo was somewhere in the Struma valley with his battery and in answer to a letter said that the only act of clumsiness he could call to mind was when he accidentally hit Arthur with an Indian club in the gym at school.

One of the doctors went over to Harrow and found Arthur had been hit like this and was in the infirmary for three days. Mr. Trent, it was after that accident he altered entirely.”

“I’ve heard of such cases,” Trent said quickly. “Pressure of some sort on the brain they call it. There was quite an epidemic of such incidents in America a few years ago. It was supposed to be a cure for bad boys. Then you think—”

“I know,” she said emphatically. “He is now exactly as he was when he was a boy, gentle, thoughtful and clean. Our specialists saw the army surgeons and they supposed that-in dressing his dreadful wounds they removed the portions of depressed bone and so made this extraordinary cure. They say the war has proved this sort of thing again and again.”

The news which spelled salvation to Anthony Trent seemed too tremendous to believe. There was no miracle about it. It was a simple fact demonstrated by surgery and accepted now by the laity. The years in which Arthur Grenvil had sown wild oats and disrupted friendships and relationships was wiped from his consciousness. Trent now understood the half diffident, almost shy manner so inexplicable in a man of the type William Smith had been.

“My father thinks,” the girl went on, “that as he will have to find out some of the things he did it will be as well to prepare him for it and shield him against consequences.”

“Consequences?” he hazarded.

“I’m afraid,” she said gravely, “that it will not be easy. His creditors for example have learned that my father has forgiven him and they are coming down on him. Fortunately my father can afford to pay but there is always the dread of some adventurer turning up and letting us into some dreadful secrets.”

“Men like me,” he asked.

“You know I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I think it most wonderful that you are here, because you will be able to tell him something about the good part of his life you know. He is always hoping that his memory will come back but the doctors say it won’t.” She hesitated a little, “Poor Arthur is very much depressed at times. Could you try and remember as much about him as possible?”

“Surely,” said Anthony Trent. “As it happens I met a man out there who knew him well and said he was a good soldier.”

“I wish my father could know that,” she said. “I’m going to ask you to luncheon tomorrow and to meet a man whose life Arthur saved would cheer him enormously. We shall be alone.” She frowned, “I’d forgotten Mr. Castoon who is probably furious at being kept waiting. I promised him I’d be back in two cigarettes time. I was going to drive in to Camelford but I don’t think I will. I feel almost that I want to cry.” She held out her hand impulsively. “Forgive me for what I thought about you and come to luncheon at one tomorrow.”

“You don’t know how I’d like to,” he said wistfully, “but you have forgotten about my past; and I had no such excuse as your brother.”

“You are exaggerating it,” she said more brightly. “Anyhow it’s all over.”

Exaggerating! And even were it all over, which he doubted, a blacker past remained than ever she dreamed of.

“I don’t want Mr. Castoon to see that I’ve got tears in my eyes. Please tell him to wait a little longer while I talk to Mrs. Bassett. Au revoir.” Anthony Trent watched her go and then sighed. And he told himself that had he met her ten years before he would have had the strength to win a fortune honestly and not take the lower road.

He went outside to where Rudolph Castoon was sitting in the phaeton. The two horses were champing at their bits, a little groom at their heads trying to soothe their high tempers. He approached the financier with no personal feeling of any sort. In the beginning he expected to admire the man as he