Maud lifted her hands. “She told you that! She told you that I was the corespondent!”
“In so many words.”
“When did you learn that I was not?”
“The other day at Santa Barbara. It came about rather oddly. We were on the lawn, the wind was blowing, it disarranged her hair. Her hair, if you will notice. She wanted a barrette. There was no one within call. She asked me to get it. It was in some case, in some bag. She told me where and where the keys were. She was very explicit about it all. But I misunderstood. I opened the wrong bag or the wrong box. In it I found a letter addressed to me. I know it by heart. ‘, Villa Portugaise. Dearest: They have just wired me from Frascati’s that my father has been injured. I am going over on the noon boat. Join me there tomorrow. Mille baisers, M.’ ”
“She had concealed it!”
“Evidently.”
“What did you do?”
Welden made a gesture. At the time when he found the letter his mind had shot backward. Facts and incidents trivial in themselves and long since forgotten, mounted from those cellars of memory where whatever we do or say or see is noted, registered, catalogued and preserved. In a sort of retrograde vision the madness of a night returned. He beheld the silent villa and Sally, her hand on his arm, saying: “Don’t.” He recalled the singularity of her attitude; the avid movement with which, when in the hall below, she had taken and concealed the note; her subsequent eagerness to have him fight; her stupid insistence that he should tell no one why; her speeches and answers at Chantilly: and suddenly a curtain rose. He saw, if not the truth, at least the lie.
“What did you do?” Maud repeated.
“I went to her and asked whom Malakoff had been entertaining that evening. It was a little before I could get her to admit that it was not you. Finally she acknowledged that it was Mme. Oppensheim.”
Again Maud lifted her hands. “It is incredible!”
“Yes, particularly as from the start she quite played on my mistake, at first, I suppose, in order to have me kill Malakoff and later on, perhaps, because she felt compromised by the duel.”
Maud considered these premises and then supplied the deduction.
“That is why she asked you to marry her.”
“I did not say that.”
“No, men never do say such things but sometimes women infer them. How long afterward did she die?”
“The same night, or rather the next morning.”
Maud considered that also, but more longly.
“Don’t you see,” she said at last, “were these things known, you would be suspected, arrested perhaps?”
“Naturally. If ever a man had a motive I had one. On the night when I went to the room which you had occupied and saw what I took to be you, Sally was at my elbow. She had come to surprise Malakoff, and finding me there and divining my error, took advantage of us both. I am sorry now for Malakoff. I intended to kill him. He knew it, knew the reason, knew that it was all a mistake. But, bounder that he is, he could not like an ordinary cad come to me with an explanation.”
“No,” said Maud. “Men never explain and women always do. None the less—”
“None the less,” Welden ran on, “though I can be sorry for him, I cannot be for Sally. What happened to her was the judgment of God.”
That verdict Maud examined and at once endorsed.
“Yes, for with a word she could have set you straight.”
Welden nodded. “It has been a tragedy of errors. Yet, of course, if the police at Santa Barbara had so much as an inkling of it, I would be in jail there now. They suspect me as it is, I think.”
“But I read that you offered a reward.”
“Yes, and it was then I felt that I was suspected.”
Maud looked that over also, but without seeming to get the point of it.
“Surely they could not fancy that you would offer a reward for your own conviction?”
“No, but they could readily fancy that I offered it to divert suspicion, for that is precisely what a bungler would have done.”
Welden paused. Presently he added:
“I did not realise that until afterward.”
At this, Maud, who had remained at the table, crossed the room and seated herself on the sofa. Welden took a seat beside her.
“What do you propose to do now?” She asked.
“Beg you to marry me.”
The girl shook her head. “You need not. I have no intention of it.”
“For the same reason as before?”
“Partly. But for others also.”
It was now Welden’s turn to consider things. While he was at it, she helped him.
“It is not that I cannot forgive you,” she explained. “But I have so long regarded you as unforgivable that I cannot immediately forget. Besides, that you should have suspected me is one thing, but that you should have consoled yourself is quite another.”
“Consoled!” retorted Welden. “The word does not fit. I had no relations with Sally.”
Maud turned and looked at him. She had never known him to lie, but she was not credulous and Sally, whatever her demonism, had been a very pretty woman.
“That’s as may be,” she answered. “The point is you hurt me and meant to. I think I could not have done that to you.”
For a second she hesitated, her hands lying interclasped in her lap. She opened them and slowly added:
“But I am quite sure I could have done a little harm to her.”
“The little harm has been done,” Welden remarked.
But that Maud could not have found herself quite able to concede.
“By another,” she answered, “and incompletely.”
In what manner the harm could have been completer she did not say, nor did Welden ask, but he marvelled at the girl, who, in spite of the character of their previous intimacy, now, for the first time, revealed to him her naked soul.
She
