In vain he argued with himself that his thought was preposterous and absurd; as the days went on and the whole affair sank more and more into its true perspective, the more the insidious theory grew upon him and began to haunt his nights as well as his days.
At last, very unwillingly, he gave way to his suspicions and set out to test his theory.
His procedure was somewhat erratic. He spent the best part of a week in the reading-room of the British Museum; this was followed by a period of seclusion in his own library, with occasional descents upon the bookshops of Charing Cross Road, and then, as though his capacity for the tedium of a subject in which he was not naturally interested was not satiated, he spent an entire weekend in the Kensington house of his uncle, Sir Dorrington Wynne, onetime Professor of Archaeology in the University of Oxford, a man whose conversation never left the subject of his researches.
Another day or so at the British Museum completed Abbershaw’s investigations, and one evening found him driving down Whitehall in the direction of the Abbey, his face paler than usual, and his eyes troubled.
He went slowly, as if loth to reach his destination, and when a little later he pulled up outside a block of flats, he remained for some time at the wheel, staring moodily before him. Every moment the task he had set himself became more and more nauseous.
Eventually, he left the car, and mounting the carpeted stairs of the old Queen Anne house walked slowly up to the first floor.
A manservant admitted him, and within three minutes he was seated before a spacious fireplace in Wyatt Petrie’s library.
The room expressed its owner’s personality. Its taste was perfect but a little academic, a little strict. It was an ascetic room. The walls were pale-coloured and hung sparsely with etchings and engravings—a Goya, two or three moderns, and a tiny Rembrandt. There were books everywhere, but tidily, neatly kept, and a single hanging in one corner, a dully burning splash of old Venetian embroidery.
Wyatt seemed quietly pleased to see him. He sat down on the other side of the hearth and produced cigars and Benedictine.
Abbershaw refused both. He was clearly ill at ease, and he sat silent for some moments after the first words of greeting, staring moodily into the fire.
“Wyatt,” he said suddenly, “I’ve known you for a good many years. Believe me, I’ve not forgotten that when I ask you this question.”
Wyatt leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, his liqueur glass lightly held in his long, graceful fingers. Abbershaw turned in his chair until he faced the silent figure.
“Wyatt,” he said slowly and evenly, “why did you stab your uncle?”
No expression appeared upon the still pale face of the man to whom he had spoken. For some moments he did not appear to have heard.
At last he sighed and, leaning forward, set his glass down upon the little book-table by his side.
“I’ll show you,” he said.
Abbershaw took a deep breath. He had not been prepared for this; almost anything would have been easier to bear.
Meanwhile Wyatt crossed over to a small writing-desk let into a wall of bookshelves and, unlocking it with a key which he took from his pocket, produced something from a drawer; carrying it back to the fireplace, he handed it to his visitor.
Abbershaw took it and looked at it with some astonishment.
It was a photograph of a girl.
The face was round and childlike, and was possessed of that peculiar innocent sweetness which seems to belong only to a particular type of blonde whose beauty almost invariably hardens in maturity.
At the time of the portrait, Abbershaw judged, the girl must have been about seventeen—possibly less. Undeniably lovely, but in the golden-haired unsophisticated fashion of the medieval angel.
The last face in the world that he would have suspected Wyatt of noticing.
He turned the thing over in his hand. It was one of those cheap, glossy reproductions which circulate by the thousand in the theatrical profession.
He sat looking at it helplessly; uncomprehending, and very much at sea.
Wyatt came to the rescue.
“Her stage name was ‘Joy Love,’ ” he said slowly, and there was silence again.
Abbershaw was still utterly perplexed, and opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, but the other man interrupted him, and the depth and bitterness of his tone surprised the doctor.
“Her real name was Dolly Lord,” he said. “She was seventeen in that photograph, and I loved her—I do still love her—most truly and most deeply.” He added simply, “I have never loved any other woman.”
He was silent, and Abbershaw, who felt himself drifting further and further out of his depth at every moment, looked at him blankly. There was no question that the man was sincere. The tone in his voice, every line of his face and body proclaimed his intensity.
“I don’t understand,” said Abbershaw.
Wyatt laughed softly and began to speak quickly, earnestly, and all in one key.
“She was appearing in the crowd scene in The Faith of St. Hubert, that beautiful little semi-sacred opera that they did at the Victor Gordon Arts Theatre in Knightsbridge,” he said. “That’s where I first saw her. She looked superb in a snood and wimple. I fell in love with her. I found out who she was after considerable trouble. I was crazy about her by that time.”
He paused and looked at Abbershaw with his narrow dark eyes in which there now shone a rebellious, almost fanatical light.
“You can call it absurd with your modern platonic-suitability complexes,” he said, “but I fell in love with a woman as nine-tenths of the men have done since the race began and will continue to do until all resemblance of the original animal is civilized out of us and the race ends—with her face, and with her carriage, and with her body. She seemed to me to fulfil all my ideals of womankind. She became my sole object. I wanted
