“Understanding.”
“The engagement or understanding. That would have cleaned the slate. You should have done something that would have made her disgusted with you.”
“How could I? I’m not the sort of fellow who can do things like that.”
“Even now, it seems to me, if you could do something that would revolt this Miss Stubbs … make her recoil from you with loathing. …”
“Well, what?”
“I must think,” said Hamilton Beamish.
He did four more laps.
“Suppose you had committed some sort of crime?” he said, returning to the fixed point. “Suppose she were to find out you were a thief? She wouldn’t want to marry you if you were on your way to Sing-Sing.”
“No. And neither would Molly.”
“True. I must think again.”
It was some moments later that George, eyeing his friend with the growing dislike which those of superior brainpower engender in us when they fail to deliver the goods in our times of crisis, observed him give a sudden start.
“I think I have it,” said Hamilton Beamish.
“Well?”
“This Miss Stubbs. Tell me, is she straitlaced? Prudish? Most of those village girls are.”
George reflected.
“I don’t remember ever having noticed. I never did anything to make her prudish about.”
“I think we may assume that, having lived all her life in a spot like East Gilead, she is. The solution of this difficulty, then, is obviously to lead her to suppose that you have become a reprobate.”
“A what?”
“A Don Juan. A Lothario. A libertine. It should be perfectly easy. She has seen motion-pictures of life in New York, and will not be hard to convince that you have deteriorated since you came to live there. Our plan of action now becomes straightforward and simple. All we have to do is to get some girl to come along and say that you have no right to marry anybody but her.”
“What!”
“I can see the scene now. This Miss Stubbs is sitting beside you, a dowdy figure in her homemade village gown. You are talking of the old days. You are stroking her hand. Suddenly you look up and start. The door has opened and a girl, all in black with a white face, is entering. Her eyes are haggard, her hair disordered. In her arms she clasps a little bundle.”
“No, no! Not that!”
“Very well, we will dispense with the bundle. She stretches out her arms to you. She totters. You rush to support her. The scene is similar to one in Haddon Chambers’ ‘Passersby.’ ”
“What happened in that?”
“What could happen? The fiancée saw the ruined girl had the greater claim, so she joined their hands together and crept silently from the room.”
George laughed mirthlessly.
“There’s just one thing you’re overlooking. Where are we going to get the white-faced girl?”
Hamilton Beamish stroked his chin.
“There is that difficulty. I must think.”
“And while you’re thinking,” said George coldly, “I’ll do the only practical thing there is to be done, and go down to the station and meet her, and have a talk with her and try to get her to be sensible.”
“Perhaps that would be as well. But I still feel that my scheme would be the ideal one, if only we could find the girl. It is too bad that you have not a dark past.”
“My dark past,” said George bitterly, “is all ahead of me.”
He turned and hurried down the drive. Hamilton Beamish, still meditating, made his way towards the house.
He had reached the lawn, when, as he stopped to light a cigarette to assist thought, he saw a sight that made him drop the match and draw back into the shelter of a tree.
Hamilton Beamish stopped, looked and listened. A girl had emerged from a clump of rhododendrons, and was stealing softly round the lawn towards the dining-room window.
Girlhood is the season of dreams. To Fanny Welch, musing over the position of affairs after Sigsbee H. Waddington had given her her final instructions, there had come a quaint, fantastic thought, creeping into her mind like a bee into a flower—the thought that if she got to the house an hour earlier than the time he had mentioned, it might be possible for her to steal the necklace and keep it for herself.
The flaw in the scheme, as originally outlined, had seemed to her all along to lie in the fact that Mr. Waddington was to preside over the enterprise and take the loot from her the moment she had got it. The revised plan appeared immeasurably more attractive, and she proceeded to put it into action.
Luck seemed to be with her. Nobody was about, the window was ajar, and there on the table lay that which she had now come to look on in the light of a present for a good girl. She crept out of her hiding-place, stole round the edge of the lawn, entered the room, and had just grasped the case in her hand, when it was borne sharply in upon her that luck was not with her so much as she had supposed. A heavy hand was placed upon her shoulder: and, twisting round, she perceived a majestic-looking man with a square chin and horn-rimmed spectacles.
“Well, young lady!” said this person.
Fanny breathed hard. These little contretemps are the risk of the profession, but that makes them none the easier to bear philosophically.
“Put down that jewel-case.”
Fanny did so. There was a pause. Hamilton Beamish moved to the window, blocking it up.
“Well?” said Fanny.
Hamilton Beamish adjusted his spectacles.
“Well, you’ve got me. What are you going to do?”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Turn me over to the police?”
The figure in the window nodded curtly. Fanny clasped her hands together. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Don’t turn me over to the bulls, mister! I only did it for ma’s sake. …”
“All wrong!”
“If you was out of work and starvin’ and you had to sit and watch your poor old ma bendin’ over the washtub. …”
“All wrong!” repeated Hamilton Beamish forcefully.
“What do you mean, all wrong?”
“Mere crude Broadway melodrama.
