For once in a way Hanaud was baffled. He stared at his friend suspiciously, fearing that his leg was being distinctly drawn, but he did not dispute; he swept on with his story.
“So much information we owe to routine. But we should still have been in very great difficulty but for one thing.”
“That bundle of letters in Robin Webster’s room which you photographed,” said the irrepressible Mr. Ricardo.
“This time, my friend, you are right,” Hanaud replied as he lit another cigarette. “That bundle of letters told the whole of the curious little story of passion and intrigue which led to the sale of the Blackett necklace to the mother Chicholle and reached its abominable climax in this room.”
“And he kept those letters!” cried Mr. Ricardo in astonishment. But a moment afterwards he remembered a case in his own country in which letters just as fatal had been preserved. “Isn’t it strange that passion should so mislead a man?”
“No! No!” Hanaud interrupted. “In Webster’s room, I told you, there was another reason besides passion which made a man keep letters to his undoing. And I preferred even then that second reason of the two. It was cunning, it was a horrible kind of prudence which persuaded Robin Webster to keep those letters. All the passion was on the other side. He—with the letters he kept the mastery over a woman mad with jealousy. For they were fatal letters scribbled by Evelyn Devenish, some in that very house down there, the Château Suvlac.”
At what precise date Evelyn Devenish and Robin Webster had met, Hanaud was unaware. It was certainly before Webster had introduced Evelyn Devenish to Diana Tasborough at Biarritz. But there had been a compact between the two of them that all letters should be destroyed on the day they were received. Evelyn Devenish, to whose foresight the compact was due, had kept to the bargain faithfully. Not a shred of a letter had been discovered amongst her possessions. And up to a certain date, when they were all together at Biarritz, Robin Webster had kept his word too. But there had come a time when Evelyn Devenish’s passion grew exacting and even dangerous. The letters gave to her lover a hold over her. He could answer threat with threat.
“One side of the correspondence—his,” Hanaud continued, “had been destroyed. He was sure of Evelyn’s loyalty. No written page of his could be brought out of the ashes to convict him. He was in a position to say, ‘I didn’t answer that,’ or ‘I was careful to make no suggestion,’ or ‘All my letters were intended to bring Evelyn into a reasonable frame of mind.’ On the other hand, he was in a position to say to her at any moment—and the moment was coming—‘I have done with you, and you will kindly keep as quiet as a mouse, or I cause you aggravations and inconveniences.’ ”
“But after Evelyn Devenish was dead,” Mr. Ricardo exclaimed, “the letters had lost their value. Also, it seems, they were dangerous to him. He would have destroyed them on that night when Evelyn Devenish died.”
“On that night, as you will see,” Hanaud replied, “the good Robin Webster was very busy. The morning found him still at his labours. Had it not been very necessary that he should hold a little committee meeting at the Château Mirandol with our dear Vicomte and that ambitious young judge, those letters would have been little grey flakes, before we ever cast our eyes on them.”
Hanaud opened the leather portfolio which he had laid upon the table, and took out a copy of the photographed letters.
“Look at this passage,” he said, and he pointed to the beginning of one of them. It had been written at Biarritz when Robin Webster had returned to his duties at Suvlac. “Ah, the poor woman! One who loves and one who is loved. The eternal story.”
Mr. Ricardo read:
Dearest,
I shut my eyes. I won’t see—yet how can I not see? Whenever I have finished a letter to you, I begin another. I notice all the little things that happen, and sift them out into things which may amuse you, and things which won’t. And every little thing which will, I write down at once, whether it is a book I am reading or some queer-looking stranger who comes into the restaurant, or some funny story, so that, in two days I have a great long letter written to you. And all yours begin “Darling, since the post is going out in half an hour I am writing a line to you in haste—”
Hanaud turned over a page or two and came to the last of them, a dozen in all. Passages in them were heavily underlined with a blue pencil.
“Read them in their order,” said Hanaud; and Mr. Ricardo took the letters upon his knee.
XXV
Evelyn Devenish’s Letters
In the first of the marked passages, Evelyn Devenish, writing from Biarritz to Suvlac, reluctantly agreed to a marriage between Diana Tasborough and Robin Webster.
Of course she’s in love with you. She has already sent Bryce Carter about his business. She can’t talk for five minutes without bringing you in. … I sometimes wish that you were disfigured and rather horribly, so that no one in the world except myself would willingly look at you. … Oh, I’d make up for them! But we are as poor as rats, and nothing’s any good without money.
Once he was married to Diana, there would be money to burn—for both of them. There was to be but the most momentary of suspensions in their own relationship. A whole code of conduct was laid down for him, and very authoritatively. Diana was to become a negligible appanage, a sack of money. If she suffered—well, all the better.
Already there were allusions to the ceremonies
