Lawyers are apt to overlook the exception which proves the rule in life.
Had Mr. Finch been able to look through a blank wall, he would have seen Mr. Oram sitting at his writing-table, and looking across it straight at Miles Rushworth. And could he have heard what was being said, he would have realised that his employer was speaking in a tone that was, for him, oddly hesitant and uneasy.
“I’m sorry to say, Rushworth, that I’ve no doubt at all but that there’s been a terrible miscarriage of justice. I take it that you knew comparatively little of Mrs. Jervis Lexton, even though her husband was in your employment?”
Miles Rushworth made a conscious effort to appear calm and unconcerned. But he failed in that endeavour, and was aware that he failed.
“I knew them both fairly well,” he answered at last.
Mr. Oram began playing with a paper knife. He was wondering how much the man who sat there, with overcast face, and anxious, frowning eyes, was concerned with this horrid business.
“What’s going to be the next move, Oram? I take it that you’ve been informed?”
“Well, yes, I have been informed, though quite unofficially. The—ahem! authorities are very naturally perturbed. An innocent man was very nearly hanged. It was, in fact, a matter of hours—”
Should he tell this old friend and client the truth? All his life long John Oram had cultivated caution, and technically he was now bound to silence. But he made up his mind that he owed the truth to Rushworth. Even now the solicitor had no suspicion of how really close had been the relations between the woman he now believed to have been a cold-blooded murderess, and this man whom she had so completely deceived. He was aware of how carelessly generous Rushworth could be and often was.
Still, a glance at his client’s face, now filled with a painful expression of suspense and acute anxiety, showed that this matter was of great moment to him.
“Mrs. Lexton,” he said in a low voice, “is going to be arrested, I understand, this evening, or tomorrow morning. The Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard are completing what they consider a very strong chain of evidence against her. I have here copies of three letters which have come into their possession. You had better glance over them, Rushworth.”
He got up and, leaning across his table, handed a number of typewritten sheets to his client.
How strange looked those burning words of love and longing, transcribed on a bad old typewriting machine! But the man now reading them could visualise Ivy’s pretty flowing handwriting, and, as he read on, he turned hot and cold.
Then he started on Gretorex’s letter; the letter acquiescing in Ivy’s decision that there should be a break between them.
“That was written,” observed the solicitor, “after Lexton’s mysterious illness was well started. I think you will agree that it is the letter of a man who was certainly unaware of what was going on?”
He waited a moment, then he added: “They’ve unluckily traced all your cables to the lady, Rushworth, as well as yours to me. I fear that you are certain to be called as leading witness for the Crown, if Mrs. Lexton is sent for trial, as seems now inevitable.”
“That would be monstrous! What is my connection with the case?” exclaimed Rushworth. “Surely I had the right to give all the help in my power to the wife of one of my own people?”
“They will call you in order to prove that Mrs. Lexton had a strong motive for wishing to get her husband out of the way,” returned Oram in a doleful tone. “I hope you refrained from writing to her? If you did, I trust she had the sense to destroy your letters.”
“It is this man Gretorex, if, as you seem to think, he is entirely innocent, who should be called, not I,” said Rushworth in a hard voice.
“Roger Gretorex will certainly refuse to give evidence against her. They’ll try to make him. But they’ll fail. He worshipped Ivy Lexton, and I fear he still loves her.”
Then the old man sighed. “It’s an awful story, Rushworth,” he observed, “however you look at it.”
The other threw the typewritten sheets of paper back on the table. He rose, and rather blindly he felt for, and found, his hat and stick.
“I must be going now,” he said shortly. “If I’m wanted, you know where to find me, Oram.”
He felt humiliated to the depths of his being. His passion for Ivy Lexton had turned to bitter hatred. Yet he knew that their fates were linked together, and that through what had been his mad infatuation for this woman, a name which was known and honoured all over the world, was not only going to become a laughingstock, but also to be smirched and befouled forever.
As he went down the fine staircase of the old house, he exclaimed wordlessly, “By God, that shall not be!”
He waited a moment in the hall, and in that moment he thought of a way out.
It was a way made possible by the fact that an unpleasant experience at the beginning of , had taught him the value of gold. Since the Saturday which had preceded the outbreak of war, he had always kept a thousand pounds in gold, and a thousand pounds in Bank of England ten-pound notes, in the private safe of his London office.
He walked quickly to the corner of a quiet street where he had left his car, and threw the chauffeur the address.
Then he looked at his watch. If what old Oram had said was true with regard to the probable arrest of Ivy Lexton, there was just time to accomplish that which he had planned to do in what had seemed but one flashing second.
“Stop at the nearest telephone box,” he
