“No, I have not divorced you,” she said. “They would not grant me a divorce because you had not been served with the papers or something of the sort. I don’t understand the law very well. I was a fool, of course.”
Another intense silence.
“That puts me in your hand, doesn’t it?” she went on. “Though I don’t imagine you will—”
He stopped her with an impatient gesture.
“I’m not thinking of you and I’m not thinking of me,” he said. “I am thinking of the boy. Jane, you horrify me! You don’t know where your own child—! Good God! I thought he might not be here, but that you should tell me so quietly and calmly that you’ve lost track of him—as if he were a—”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know. Honestly, Peter, I don’t know. I was terrified when I knew he was coming. I just dimly remember seeing the little thing, and then they took him away—we had arranged it beforehand.”
“Who are ‘we’?”
“Anita was very good to me, and so was Druze. It was only then I discovered that Druze was a woman. I had to pay for it afterwards—Druze’s knowledge, I mean. I don’t really remember the child—only just that vague, queer impression like the elusive memory of a dream. Peter, be a little pitiful. I was in a terrible condition; my father was writing asking me to make up my mind about Raytham. You knew he wanted to marry me? Raytham had lent father a lot of money, and I was afraid, terribly afraid, of what would happen if father came to learn—about the marriage and everything. He knew I’d been to America, of course; I was supposed to have taken an engagement to sing—you remember that, don’t you, Peter? But he didn’t know I’d returned, or what had become of me. I had to send all my letters to a friend in New York to be posted back to him.”
She stopped.
“Where is the child? That is all I want to know.”
She shook her head.
“Druze knew. She told me something just before she went out—she had been drinking, Peter. She told me a ghastly thing.” Her voice broke. “Terrible, terrible!” She covered her eyes again, and he waited, his heart a heavy stone.
“This ghastly thing—what was it?” he said at last.
“She said”—this needed courage to think; it was a torture to say—“that even she didn’t know where the child was; that she had handed the boy to the first person who, for a consideration, offered to adopt it; and all the time I had been comforting myself with the thought that—that he at least was being brought up happily, however much a blackguard his foster-father was.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
“I’ve been paying money, big sums of money,” she said at last, “as I supposed to the man who had adopted him, and who, learning of my marriage to Raytham, had for years blackmailed me. Too late I discovered that this blackmailer was mythical, that it was Druze who was robbing me all the time.”
Peter drew a deep breath.
“How awful! How perfectly awful!” he whispered. “Just disappeared into the mass—and you allowed him to go. I can’t understand that. I thought that women—”
She stopped him with a weary gesture.
“I don’t understand women either. I wish I’d kept him and had faced all the trouble that would have followed. You know about it for the first time, Peter, and you have the support of your righteousness. It has been a bad dream for me—an eight-year-long discomfort. And now it is a nightmare.” She pressed her throbbing temples. “I can’t sleep for thinking of him. That little mite of a boy—my boy and yours—perhaps being starved, or dead perhaps, or suffering.”
She screwed her eyes tight as though to shut out a horrible vision.
“Does Bellini know?” He was like ice now.
“Anita?” She looked at him in surprise. “No; why should she? You hate Anita, of course. I’m not really—fond of her. She’s difficult. But she was very helpful to me, Peter.”
He looked at her steadily.
“Who was Martha?”
He saw from her frown that she did not understand him.
“Do you know a woman called Martha?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t remember anybody of that name. Why?”
“Martha’s servant had the child. Bellini knows. And what Bellini knows, I will know.”
He made as though to leave the room, but she barred the way.
“Peter, will you forgive me? I’ve been a fool—a wicked fool, Peter. I’d gladly change places with my own kitchen-maid to undo all the past. You loathe me, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t loathe you,” he said quietly. “I’m awfully sorry for you in a way; but I’m disappointed in you too, Jane. You’ve been a weakling.”
“Have I? I suppose I have.” She saw him, a blurred figure, through a mist of tears. “I suppose I have. And one pays dearer for weakness than for wickedness, I think. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find the child.”
She threw out her arms in a gesture of despair.
“Find the child! If only you could! Peter, if you could bring him to me—”
“You!” He laughed harshly. “The child belongs to me! To me—do you hear? You had him and lost him. If I find him I will keep him.”
He brushed past her, threw open the door, and stalked through the hall into the night.
He had still the greater part of the twenty pounds left that Leslie had given to him, and at this moment of crisis he must spend; he could not afford to economize. A taxi-driver accepted with some reluctance his order to drive to Wimbledon Common. It was a long journey, and he had time to put in order the confusion of his mind.
Anita Bellini knew; he was confident of that. And if she knew, he should know. Her residence was a mansion standing in two acres of ground on the fashionable side of Wimbledon Common; a big, somewhat old-fashioned house, garnished with the
