With one despairing prayer for forgiveness, she began to walk towards her cottage -- there was a fast train to London in the morning.
She believed there could hardly be forgiveness for her act, and yet the thought of "the others" gave her strength to sin.
And so, out of her great love for Christ, Gertrude Hunt, Gertie, set out to be a harlot again, a sin which she thought would take Him away from her for ever.
Chapter 23
In the large, open fireplaces of the Sheridan Club dining room, logs of pine and cedar wood gave out a regular and well-diffused warmth. Outside, the snow was still falling, and beyond the long windows, covered with their crimson curtains, the fog-bound air was full of soft and silent movement.
Sir Robert Llwellyn was sitting at one of the tables, laid for two people. He was in evening dress, and his massive face was closely scrutinising a printed list propped against a wine glass before him. His expression was interested and intent. By his side was a sheet of the club notepaper, and from time to time he jotted down something on it with a slender gold pencil.
The great Professor was ordering dinner for himself and a guest with much thought and care.
Crême d'asperge à la Reine in his neat writing, the letters distinct from one another -- almost like an inscription in Uncial Greek character, one might have fancied.
Turbot à l'Amiral promised well; the plump, powerful fingers wrote it down.
Poulardes du Mans rôties with petits pois à la Française with a salade Niçoise to follow; that would be excellent! Then just a little suprème de pêches, à la Montreuil, quite the best kind of suprème, then some Parmesan before the coffee.
"Quite a simple dinner, Painter," he said to the steward of the room. "Of course you will tell Maurice it is for me. I want him to do quite his best."
They went carefully into the wines.
"Remember, we'll want the large liqueur glasses," Llwellyn said, "with the Tuileries brandy. In fact, I think I'll take a little now, as an apéritif."
The steward bowed and went away. He returned with a long bottle of curious shape with an imperial crown blown in the glass. It was some of the famous brandy which had been lately found bricked up in a cellar close to the Place du Carrousel in Paris, and was worth its weight in gold.
On the tray stood one of the curious liqueur glasses lately introduced into the club by Sir Robert. It was the shape of a port wine glass, but enormously large, capable of holding a pint or more, and made of glass as thin as tissue paper and fragile as straw. The steward poured a little of the brandy into the great glass and twirled it round rapidly by the stem. This was considered to be the most epicurean device for bringing out the bouquet.
Llwellyn sipped the precious liquid with an air of the most intense enjoyment. His face glowed with enthusiasm.
"Wonderful, wonderful!" he said in a hushed voice. "There, take it away and bring me an olive. Then I'll go downstairs and wait for my friend in the smoking room. You will serve the soup at five minutes past eight."
He got up from the table and moved silently over the heavy carpet to the door.
It was about seven o'clock. Constantine Schuabe was coming to the Sheridan Club to dine at eight.
Sir Robert Llwellyn sat in the smoking room with a tiny cigarette of South American tobacco, wrapped in maize leaf and tied round the centre with a tiny cord of green silk. His face expressed nothing but the most absolute repose. His correspondence with life was at that moment as complete as the most perfect health and discriminating luxury could make it.
He stretched out his feet to the blaze and idly watched the reflection in the points of his shining boots.
The room was almost silent now. A few men sat about reading the evening papers, and there was a subdued hum of talk from a table where two men were playing a casual game of chess, in which neither of them seemed much interested. A large clock on the oak mantelshelf ticked with muffled and soothing regularity.
Llwellyn picked up a sixpenny illustrated paper devoted to amusements and the lighter side of life, and lazily opened it.
His eye fell on a double page article interspersed with photographs of actors and actresses. The article was a summing-up of the year's events on the lighter stage by an accepted expert in such matters.
The six Trocadero girls, whom I remember in Paris recently billed as 'The Cocktails,' never forget that grace is more important in dancing than mere agility. They are youthful looking, pretty and supple, and their manoeuvres are cunningly devised. The diseuse of the troupe, Mdlle. Nepinasse, sings the Parisian success, Viens Poupoule, with considerable 'go' and swing. But in hearing her at the 'Gloucester' the other night I could not help regretting the disappearance of brilliant Gertrude Hunt from the boards where she was so great an attraction. Poupoule, or its English equivalent, is just the type of song, with its attendant descriptive dance, in which that cheerful little lady was seen at her best. In losing her, the musical comedy stage has lost a player whose peculiar individuality will not easily be replaced. Gertrude Hunt stood quite alone among her sisters of the Profession. Who will readily forget the pert insouciance, the little trick of the gloved hands, the mellow calling voice? It has been announced that this popular favourite has disappeared for ever from the stage. But there is a distinct mystery about the sudden eclipse of this star, and one which conjecture and inquiry have utterly failed to solve. Well, I, in common with thousands of others, can only sigh and regret it. Yet I would like to think that if these lines should meet her eye, she would know that I am only voicing the wishes of the public when I call to her to come back and delight our eyes and ears as before.
By the side of the paragraph was a photograph of his Gertie. He stared at it, his mind busy with memories and evil longing. The bold, striking face, the great eyes, looked him full in the face. Never had any woman been able to hold him as this one. She had become part of his life. In his mad passion for the dancer he had risked everything, until his whole career had depended upon the goodwill of Constantine Schuabe.
There had been no greater pleasure than to satisfy her wishes, however tasteless, however vulgar. And then, hastening back to her side with a fortune for her (the second he had poured into the white grasping hands), he had found her with the ruthless young priest. A power he was unable to understand had risen up as a bar to his enormous egoism. She had gone, utterly disappeared, vanished as a shadow vanishes at the moving of a stage light.
And all his resources, all those of the theatre people with whom she had been so long associated, had utterly failed to trace her.
The Church had swallowed her up in its mystery and gloom. She was lost to him for ever. And the fierce longing to be with her once more burnt within him like the unhallowed flame on the altar of an idol.
As he regarded the chaos into which the Church was plunged, he laughed to himself. His indifference to all forms of Christian congregations had gone. He felt an active and bitter hatred now, hardly less than that of Schuabe himself. And all the concentrated hatred and incalculable malice that his poisoned brain distilled, was focused and directed on the young curate who had been the means and instrument of his discomfiture. Basil Gortre. He had begun to plan schemes of swift revenge, laughing at himself sometimes for the crude melodrama of his thoughts.
As a waiter with his powdered hair and white silk stockings showed Schuabe into the smoking room, the millionaire saw with surprise the flushed and agitated face of his host, Robert Llwellyn, so unlike its usual sensual serenity. He wondered what had arisen to disturb Llwellyn, and he made up his mind to know it before the evening was over.
Schuabe also seemed depressed and in poor spirits. There was a restlessness, quite foreign to his usual composure, which appeared in little nervous tricks of his fingers. He toyed with his wine glass and did poor justice to the careful dinner.
"Everything is going well," Llwellyn said. "My book on the discovery is nearly finished, and the American rights were sold yesterday. The Council of the Free Ch
urches have appointed Dr. Barker to write a counterblast. Who could have foreseen the stir and tumult in the world? Everything is toppling over in the religious world. I have read of your triumphal progress in the North of England -- this asparagus soup is excellent."
"I don't feel very much inclined to talk of these things tonight," said Schuabe. "To tell the truth, my nerves are a little out of order, and I have been doing too much. I have got myself into that ridiculous state in which one is constantly apprehending some sinister event. Everything has gone well, and yet I'm like this. It is foolish. How humiliating a thought it is, Llwellyn, that even intellects like yours and mine are entirely dependent on the secretions of the liver!"
He smiled grimly, and the disturbance of the regular repose and immobility of his face showed depths of weary unhappiness which betrayed the tumult within.
He recovered himself quickly, anxious it seemed to betray his thoughts no further. "You seemed upset when I came into the club," Schuabe said. "You ought to be happy enough, Llwellyn. Debts all gone, fifty thousand in the bank, reputation higher than ever, and all the world listening to everything you have to say." He smiled rather bitterly as Llwellyn raised a glass of champagne to his lips.
"Exactly," said Llwellyn. "I have all the money I wanted a few months ago, but one of the principal inducements for wanting it has gone."
"Oh, you mean that girl?" answered Schuabe, contemptuously. "Well, buy another. They're for sale in all the theatres, you know."
"It is all very well to sneer like that," replied Llwellyn. "It is nothing to me that you're about as coldblooded as a fish, but you needn't sneer at a man who isn't. I'm fond of this one girl. She's become necessary to my life. I spent thousands on her, and then this abominable young parson takes her away to----" He ground his teeth savagely, his face became purple, and he was unable to finish his sentence.
Curiously enough Schuabe seemed to be in sympathy with his host's rage. A deadly and vindictive expression crept into his eyes, which were more glittering and cold than before.
"Gortre is living back in London," said Schuabe, quickly.
The other started. "You know his movements then? What has he to do with you?"
"More than, perhaps, you think. Llwellyn, that young man is dangerous!"
"He's done me all the harm he can already. There's nothing else he can do, unless he elopes with Lady Llwellyn -- an event I would view with great satisfaction."
"At any rate," said Schuabe, "I take sufficient interest in that young curate's movements to have them reported to me daily."
"Why on earth----?"
"Simply because he guesses, or will guess, the truth about the Damascus Gate sepulchre!"
Llwellyn grew white. When he spoke it was with several preliminary moistenings of the lips. "But what proof can he have?"
"There is no need to be alarmed, Llwellyn. We're perfectly safe in every way. The man is an enemy of mine, and even small enemies are obnoxious. He won't disturb either of us for long."
The big man gave a sigh of relief. "Well, you manage as you think best," he said. "Confound Gortre! He deserves all he gets. Let's change the subject. It is a little too uncomfortable to be amusing."
"I'm going to hear Pachmann playing in the St. James's Hall. Will you come, Llwellyn?"
Llwellyn considered a moment. "No, I don't think I will. I'm going out to a supper party in St. John's Wood later -- Charlie Fitzgerald's, the lessee of the Piccadilly. I'll go home and read a novel quietly. To tell the truth, I also feel rather depressed. Everything seems going too well, doesn't it?"
Schuabe's voice shook a little as he replied shortly. "Don't say that."
For a brief moment the veil was raised. Each saw the other with eyes full of the fear that was lurking within them.
For weeks they had been at cross purposes, suggesting a courage and indifference neither felt.
Now each knew the truth.
They knew the burden of their terrible secret was beginning to press and enclose them with its awful weight. Each had imagined the other free from his own terror, that terror that lifts up its head in times of night and silence, the dread demon that murders sleep.
The two men went out of the club together without speaking. Their hearts were beating like drums within them. It was the beginning of the agony.
* * *
Llwellyn, his coat exchanged for a smoking jacket, lay back in a leather chair in his library where he now lived. Since his return from Palestine he had transferred most of his belongings to a small flat in New Bond Street. He hardly ever visited his wife now. The flat in Bloomsbury Court Mansions was given up when Gertrude Hunt had gone.
In New Bond Street Sir Robert lived alone. A housekeeper in the basement of the buildings looked after his rooms, and his valet slept above.
The new apartment was furnished with great luxury. It was not the garish luxury and vulgar splendour of Bloomsbury Court -- that had been the dancer's taste. Here he had gathered round him all that could make life pleasant, and his own taste had seen to everything.
As he sat alone, in an utter depression of spirits, his thoughts once more went back to his lost mistress.
It was in times like these that he needed her most. She would distract him, amuse him, where a less common, more intellectual woman would have increased his boredom.
He sighed heavily, pitying himself, utterly unconscious of his degradation. The books on the shelves, learned and weighty monographs in all languages, his own brilliant contributions to historical science among them, had no power to help him. He sighed for his alluring mistress.
The electric bell of the flat rang sharply outside in the passage. His man was out, and he rose to answer it himself.
A friend probably looking him up for a drink and smoke. He was glad. He wanted companionship, easy, genial companionship, not that pale devil Schuabe with his dreary talk and everlasting reminder of what they had done.
He went out into the passage and opened the front door. A woman stood there.
She moved, and the light from the hall shone on her face.
The eyes were brilliant, the lips were half parted.
It was Gertrude Hunt.
* * *
They were sitting on each side of the fire. Gertrude was pale, but her dark beauty blazed at him.
She was smoking a cigarette, just as in the old time.
A little table with a carafe of brandy and bottles of seltzer in a silver stand stood between them.
Llwellyn's face was one large circle of pleasure and contentment. His eyes gleamed with an evil triumph as he looked at the girl.
"Wonderful!" he cried. "Why, Gertie, it was almost worthwhile losing you to have you back again like this. It is just exactly as it used to be, only better. Yes, better! So you got tired of it all, and you have come back. What a little fool you were ever to go away, dear!"
"Yes, I got tired of it," she repeated, but in a curiously strained voice.
He was too exhilarated to notice the strange manner of her reply.
"Well, I have got any amount of ready cash now," he said joyously. "You can have anything you like now you've given up the confounded parsons and become sensible again."
She seemed to make an effort to throw off something that oppressed her. "Now, Bob," she said, "don't talk about it. I have been a little fool, but that's over, and now I have managed to track you down to here. What a lot you've got to tell me! What did you do all the time you were away? Where did you raise the money from? Tell me everything. Let's be as we were before. No more secrets!"
He seemed to hesitate for a moment.
She saw that, and stood up. "Come and kiss me, Bob," she said. He went to her with unsteady footsteps, as if he were intoxicated by the fury of his passion.
"Tell me everything, Bob," she whispered into his ear.
The man surrendered himself to her, utterly, absolutely. "Gertie," he said, "I'll tell you the strangest story you ever heard."
He laughed wildly.
>
"I have tricked the whole world, by Jove! Cleared fifty thousand pounds, and made fools of the whole world."
She laughed, a shrill, high treble.
"Dear old Bob," she cried. "Clever old Bob, you're the best of them all! What have you done this time? Tell me all about it."
"By God, I will," he cried. "I'll tell you the whole story, little girl." His voice was utterly changed.
"Yes, everything!" she repeated fiercely.
Her body shook violently as she spoke.
The man thought it was in response to his caresses.
"No more secrets, Bob?"
"No more secrets, Gertie. But how pale you look! Take some brandy, little girl. Now, I'm going to make you laugh. Listen!"
Chapter 24
Cyril Hands's return was utterly bewildered by the rush of events in which he was expected to take part, and he had little or no time for thought.
His days were filled by official conferences with his chiefs at the Exploring Society, from which important but by no means wealthy body he had suddenly attained more than financial security.
Meeting succeeded meeting. He was in constant communication with the heads of the Church, Government, and Society. Interviewers from all the important papers shadowed him everywhere. Despite his protests, for he was a quiet and retiring man, photographers fought for him. His long, somewhat melancholy face and pointed fair beard stared at him everywhere.
He had to read papers at learned societies, and afterwards women came and carried him off to evening parties without possibility of escape.
Everywhere he was flattered, caressed, and made much of. In fact, he underwent what to some natures is the grimmest torture of a humane age -- he became the MAN OF THE HOUR. Even Churchmen and others most interested in denying the truth of the discovery, treated Hands with consideration and deference. His own testimony in the matter was undoubted, his long and notable record forbade suspicion.
Of Basil Gortre, Hands saw but little. Their greeting had been cordial, but there was some natural restraint, one fearing the attitude of the other. Basil, no less than Hands, was much away from the chambers, and the pair had few confidences. Hands felt, naturally enough under the circumstances, that he would have been more comfortable with Harold Spence. He was surprised to find him absent, but all he was able to glean was that the journalist had suddenly left for the Continent on a special mission. Hands supposed that Continental feeling was to be thoroughly tested by The Wire, and the work had fallen to Spence.