The Story Of Louie Part 54

He would have done better to tell her.

But there: perhaps it was not a journal----

ENVOI

"Er--Miss Causton," Sir Julius called--"can you stay for an hour or so? No, a private affair; I hope it's not inconvenient; thanks."

He was sickly white and tired-looking; Louie's feet dragged, and her brain was as stupid as clay. She was sorry for Sir Julius; _he_ had had no preparation; as for Louie, it seemed to her now that she had been pa.s.sing from preparation to preparation for such things for the whole of her life. This of the morning paper was only the latest of her fulfilments. The prophets, she thought dully, must have been very weary men.... But on second thoughts perhaps Sir Julius ought to have been sorry for _her_. Even shock is better than foreknowledge.

For of course Sir Julius wanted her to stay in connection with this of Mrs. Jeffries.

She had put on her hat and coat for departure; as if she walked in her sleep, she pa.s.sed out of Sir Julius's room and removed them again. She bathed her face, but felt little fresher; then she returned.

It was about Mrs. Jeffries. It was about them both. Then Louie seemed to remember that Sir Julius had said something about an article on his deceased colleague for a Review. She supposed that was why he wanted her to take down his words in shorthand. Unless it was for the inquest. Gas-taps turned on, doors and windows sealed, and so forth usually meant an inquest; and they would not have far to look for her motive--suicide through natural grief. It was only that morning, but it seemed an old, old story already.

"'_Tragic Death of a Lady_,'" Sir Julius read out from a newspaper....

Well, he wouldn't want that part taken down; indeed, if he had only known what Louie knew, he would not have asked her to take anything down at all. But her notebook was on her knee and her pencil sharpened, and when Sir Julius had finished reading her hand began to write, purely functionally, of itself. It was no trouble to Louie whatever; nay, her hand was hardly called upon more than her mind; the pencil itself did it. After all, foreseeing minds could be put to better uses than the mere recording of things after the event.... "Sad business, sad business," Sir Julius was saying; and "Sad business, sad business," the obedient pencil wrote. But Louie wondered whether it was so sad after all. Evie Jeffries had had a sort of foreknowledge too; "I could die for him; you couldn't do more," Louie remembered she had once said; yet it was doubtful whether she had died for love of him after all. Call it gas-taps, or the shock of discovering that Jim had been her lover's executioner....

Still, she had died, from whatever reason, and she had been quite right in saying that Louie could have done no more.

It was strange the way the pencil wrote of itself. "A page of notes in her husband's shorthand has been found under one of the pillars of the writing-table," it wrote, and it omitted, as if it had been endowed with Louie's own intelligence, Sir Julius's interpolated remark, "I've got that page of notes, by the way." Mr. Whitlock had described to Louie one day a contrivance called a tele-writer; a pen dipped itself into a bottle of ink and wrote, una.s.sisted, a telegraphed message; they were new, and they hadn't got them at the Consolidation yet; but they were putting them into some of the post offices, Mr. Whitlock had said. Her pencil moved like the pen of a tele-writer. She watched it, fascinated. It was writing as Sir Julius talked, about Jim now.

"--lived an intense crowded life too. I should say at a guess there weren't many things he hadn't done at one time and another, short of a murder or a matrimonial infidelity. Don't think he could have been tempted to do that. One woman could do anything she liked with him, but the others wouldn't have much chance----"

Very little chance, Louie thought. That, in a sense, had been the tragedy of it all. Louie knew more about that than Sir Julius; Louie had once said, "Come, come!" to him, in tones that might have brought angels from above and devils from below running for love, but it had not made a ha'p'orth of difference to Jim. Sir Julius seemed to be praising him for it; Louie was not sure that she could exactly do that; she could almost as soon have mocked him for it; but you neither mock nor praise a blind man merely because he is blind. It was funny that Sir Julius, with not very much to boast about himself, should set up an idol of faithfulness; and not just for somebody else to wors.h.i.+p either; that was the funny part; men did that kind of thing; sinned, and yet wors.h.i.+pped, and called it "the maintenance of an ideal." They honoured Joseph, and winked when his back was turned. Perhaps they made much of him because of his rarity. Well, it was all the same to Potiphar's wife....

But all at once something seemed to have happened to the pencil. It was tele-writing very furiously. Sir Julius was reading from another piece of paper; Louie fancied, somehow, that it might be the piece that had got wafted under the pillar of Jim's desk.

"_--show him that red thing on the floor and that curved thing on the door._"

_But now Archie in his turn seemed to have become divided. He had turned suddenly white. But an habitual pertness still persisted in his tongue. I don't think this had any relation whatever to the physical peril he seemed at last to have realised he was in.

I stood over him huge and black as Fate.... "Spare him if you can," that generous bloodthirsty devil in me muttered quickly...._

"_Merridew," I said heavily, "you'll disappear to-morrow morning--or----_"

"_Shall I?" he bragged falteringly...._

He seemed to have hanged him, then; "that curved thing on the door"

evidently meant a hook. That was rather revolting; these were the things about murder that Louie had not wanted to know.

"Sort of grim tale he would write," said Sir Julius to the pencil; "and of course--_de mortuis_ and so on--but he did marry the wrong woman. I suppose they're together again now."

Suddenly Louie put down her notebook and pencil. Her voice, too, as she spoke, seemed to her a sort of tele-voice.

"Will you excuse me just a moment?" she said. "I'm thirsty."

She went out. When she returned, three or four minutes later, Sir Julius sniffed once or twice and asked her if she had a toothache. She took up the pencil and notebook again. Sir Julius resumed.

"What was I saying? Oh yes, about his marrying the wrong woman.... But he was a ma.s.s of contradictions, and one of 'em was that he merely idealised her. Pretty, of course, but poor Jeffries could have done better for himself than that. She never could bear me...."

Louie felt no difference yet; she did not know how long these things took. For a moment she wondered what would happen after ... and then it struck her as foolish to wonder about a thing she would know so soon. She fastened her eyes on the pencil again. It went on writing, and Louie was thinking of her loved little Jimmy now.... She could not have done very much for him; he might even have grown up to bear her some sort of a grudge; Roy would adopt him; he would be far, far better with Roy. There was a pony out at gra.s.s for him now; he would ride and shoot and fish, and his father would send him into the army; and perhaps there was already a baby girl somewhere in the world who would one day be his wife--the right wife. "Was die Mutter traumt, das vollbringt der Sohn...."

It was far, far better....

"Well," the pencil wrote, "there's nothing to be said now, poor creatures.... Funny smell in here, Miss Causton; I'll smoke if you don't mind."

Sir Julius lighted a cigar. Its penetrating odour mingled with that of the sweet, releasing stuff.

Ah! It was coming! The pencil wrote no less quickly, but it looked a little smaller and farther away.

"But sometimes it made me almost angry that he hadn't married the woman he ought...."

Louie felt her head sinking.... Yes, the woman he ought....

That had been the real fatality....

Her lids dropped for a moment, and then heavily lifted again; but she could still see the pencil--mistily--dreamily--as if endued with a life not her own--flying on.

THE END