And, being the manner of woman she was, she offered up a silent prayer for the murderer, that he might make his peace with God.
There came a sharp knock on the bedroom door, and Ivy woke with a stifled cry. She jumped straight out of bed and stood, her hands clasped together, waiting.
There came another knock, and then, “Come in!” she cried shrilly, and Lady Flora’s old parlourmaid entered the room.
Ivy had never liked the woman, and the woman had never liked her. She did not understand, and she never quite knew how to treat, those of her own sex whom she regarded as inferior to herself; yet some of the kindest letters written to her in the last few weeks had been from domestic servants, warmly sympathising with the heroine of their favourite Sunday paper.
“Mrs. Doghill is on the telephone, ma’am. Her ladyship is holding the line till you come.”
Ivy snatched up her periwinkle-blue satin dressing-gown and wrapped it about her. Then she thrust her little white feet into slippers that matched the dressing-gown, and ran downstairs, telling herself, not for the first time, how stupid it was to have the telephone in so public a place as the hall.
Lady Flora was standing, the telephone receiver to her ear. But when she saw Ivy she silently handed her the receiver and, turning into the dining-room, shut the door.
“Is that you, Millicent? Yes—yes! I can hear quite well—”
She waited in an agony of mingled hope and fear till, with startling distinctness, came the measured words that were being uttered sixty miles away.
“There’s been a reprieve. The story goes that important new evidence was laid before the Home Secretary yesterday.”
Ivy remained silent. She felt stunned. New evidence?
At last she managed to get out, in a low, strangled voice, “I—I don’t quite understand.”
But instantly she heard a cross voice interject, “You’ve had six minutes—can’t allow you to have any more now.”
“Indeed I haven’t! I’ve only just come to the telephone,” she said pleadingly.
“I can’t help that. The call was put through six minutes ago—” And ruthlessly she was cut off.
Ivy turned towards the room where she knew her hostess was waiting, full of sympathy. She opened the door, and then she cried, “He’s been—he’s been—” and before she could say the word “reprieved” she had fallen fainting at the other woman’s feet.
Lady Flora would not have believed an angel, had an angel come and told her, that her dear little friend Ivy Lexton had fainted, not from relief, but from sheer, agonising fear.
Ivy spent the rest of the morning in bed, a prey to frightful anxiety and terror.
New evidence? What could that mean? Had Roger really failed her at last?
At twelve o’clock the parlourmaid came in with a telegram.
Hope to be with you tomorrow evening.
The telegram had been sent from Paris the day before, and delayed in transmission.
“There is no answer,” said Mrs. Lexton in her soft voice. And then she lay back, feeling much less unhappy.
Whatever the mysterious reprieve might portend, Rushworth would very soon, in fact tomorrow, be here to help and to protect her.
As she read the telegram over for the third time, Ivy told herself how noble, how generous, how devoted the sender had proved himself. Also, what a wonderful life lay before her as his cherished, sheltered wife! Rushworth was all-powerful. New evidence? There could be no “new evidence” for the simple reason that nothing, nothing, nothing had ever happened—that could possibly be found out.
XXII
As he walked up the gangway of the cross-Channel boat at Calais, Miles Rushworth’s heart was full of two women. The one was his dead sister, the other Ivy Lexton, the woman to whom he was hastening, and whom he expected to see today. Every fibre of Rushworth’s being longed consciously, hungrily, thirstily, for Ivy.
It was a source of real grief to him that these two could never now meet and love each other. He had been painfully aware that his sister hoped he would marry her own dearest friend, Bella Dale, and he had not dared to speak to her of Ivy.
During his long, dreary journey home he had often asked himself if all she had gone through had changed her from the deliciously pretty, kindhearted, rather irresponsible little creature he remembered her as being, into a more serious woman. Not that he wanted Ivy different. To him she was already absolutely perfect. But her letters had grown shorter, as his had grown longer, and vaguely they had disappointed him.
Roger Gretorex? How often had Rushworth tried to visualise the young man who had committed so dastardly a crime in order to set free the woman he had loved hopelessly, and without return, from the degradation of being tied to such a waster as had been Jervis Lexton.
Though even the South African papers had been full of the wretched fellow’s photographs, proving that he had a singularly handsome face, Rushworth had no clear vision of him. Also, Ivy had never once mentioned him in any of her letters.
Suddenly that fact, Ivy’s absolute silence concerning Gretorex, struck him as being strange. He also realised, what he had not realised till now, that poor lovely Ivy could not but be, all her life long, even after she changed her name, a marked woman. She would be always pointed at, and that wherever she went in English-speaking lands, as the heroine of a great cause célèbre.
Yet stop! In the circumstances, would it not only be right, but reasonable, that she should marry him, Miles Rushworth, almost at once? He would beg her, entreat her, to consent to an immediate marriage. And then he would take her away in his yacht to the South, to some quiet place where they two could be hidden in a trance of love, while people forgot the sordid story of the murder of which
