Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux nodded her agreement. She seemed to have conquered her nervousness.
“It was during the war, messieurs, in 1915. I was Odette Pascal then, a young girl, an honest girl—what you English call straight, isn’t it? It was later that I became Aline Laurent-Desrousseaux, you understand? I encountered this Nicholas Staveley in Paris, where I was employed in a Government office. He was very charming, very caressing; he knew how to make himself loved.”
She made a gesture, half cynical, half regretful, and paused for a moment before she continued in a harder tone:
“It did not last long, that honeymoon. I discovered his character, so different from that which I had believed it. He abandoned me, and I was very rejoiced to let him go; but he had taught me things, and forced me to work for him while he had me. When we separated ourselves, in fact, I was no longer the gentle, honest little girl that I had been. All that was finished, you understand?”
Wendover saw that the inspector was taking notes in shorthand. Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux paused for a time to allow Armadale to catch up.
“The rest is without importance. I became Aline Laurent-Desrousseaux, and I had not any need of Nicholas Staveley. During a long time I had no need of him; but from time to time I heard speak of him, for I had many friends, and some of them could tell a little; and always he was the same. Then is come the report that he was killed at the Front.”
She paused again, with her eye on the inspector’s pencil.
“The time passed,” she resumed, “and I desired only to forget him. I believed him well dead, you understand? And then, from one of my friends, I learned that he had been seen again after the war. I disinterested myself from the affair; I had no desire to see him. But suddenly it became of importance to me to satisfy myself about him. It is much complicated, and has nothing to do with him—I pass on. But it was most necessary that I should see him and get him to consent to some arrangements, or an affair of mine would be embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed,” Armadale repeated, to show that he was ready to continue.
“I have consulted my friends,” Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux pursued. “Some among them have been able to help me, and I have discovered where he was living in London. It was most necessary for me to speak with him. Thus I came over to England, to London. But he is no longer there; he is gone to Lynden Sands, one says. So I procure his address—at Flatt’s cottage—and I come myself to Lynden Sands Hotel.”
Armadale’s involuntary upward glance from his notebook betrayed the increase in his interest at this point.
“I arrive here; and at once I write him a letter saying I go to Flatt’s cottage to see him on Friday night. There is no response, but I go to Flatt’s cottage as I had planned. When I knocked at the door, Staveley appeared.”
“What time on Friday night was that?” Armadale interposed.
“In my letter I had fixed a rendezvous at half-past nine. I was exact—on time, you say, isn’t it? But it seemed that this Staveley could not see me alone there; others were in the cottage. Then he said that he would meet me later—at half-past ten—at some great rock beside the sea, the rock one calls Neptune’s Seat.”
“So you came away, and he went back into the cottager” Armadale demanded.
Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux assented with a slight bow.
“I came away,” she continued. “To pass the time, I walked on the road, and perhaps I walked too far. It was late—after the hour of the rendezvous—when I arrived opposite the rock, this Neptune’s Seat. I went down on to the sands and attained to the rock. Staveley was there, very angry because I was ten minutes late. He was much enraged, it appears, because he had a second rendezvous at that place in a few minutes. He would not listen to me at all at the moment. I saw that it was no time for negotiating with him, he was so much in anger and so anxious to deliver himself of me. I fixed another rendezvous for the following day, and I left him.”
“What time did you leave him on the rock?” Armadale interjected.
“Let us see.” Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux halted for a moment to consider. “I passed some minutes with him on the rock—let us put ten minutes at the least.”
“That would mean you left the rock very shortly before eleven o’clock, then?”
Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux agreed with a gesture.
“I went away from the rock by the same road as I had come,” she went on. “I was much agitated, you understand? It was a great disappointment that I had attained to no arrangement at that moment, I had hoped for something better, isn’t it? And that Staveley had been very little obliging—unkind, isn’t it? It was very desolating.
“As I was crossing the sands, a great automobile appeared on the road, coming from the hotel. It stopped whilst I was waiting for it to pass; and the chauffeur extinguished its projectors. Then a woman descended from the automobile, and walked down on to the sands towards the rock.”
Wendover could read on Armadale’s face an expression of triumph. The inspector was clearly overjoyed at getting some direct evidence to support his case against Cressida; and Wendover had to admit, with considerable disquietude, that Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux’s narrative bore out Armadale’s hypothesis very neatly.
“When I again regarded the automobile, the chauffeur also had vanished. He was not on the road. Perhaps he also had gone down to the rivage.”
“Shore,” Sir Clinton interjected, seeing Armadale’s obvious perplexity at the word.
“I was standing there for some minutes,” Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux continued. “Against one like that Staveley one must utilise all weapons, isn’t it?—even espionage. I had a presentiment that something might eventuate. Staveley and a woman, you understand? I was hoping that something, anything, might arrive to
