Outrageous Fortune (24 page)

“Aren't you coming back?” She was brightly flushed. The effort to speak had brought tears into her eyes.

Jim was rather touched.

“I don't think so, Min.”

The colonnade was quite empty. She stood still and looked at him earnestly.

“I'm not one to interfere—but she's very unhappy.”

“Nesta?”

She nodded.

“I don't think it's on my account.”

She nodded again, blinking away a tear.

“What makes you think so?” he said.

Min's eyes reproached him.

“You've not been married a month.”

He looked hard at her.

“I'm not admitting I'm married at all.”

She backed away from him.

“You haven't remembered?”

“I haven't remembered marrying Nesta.”

“Don't you want to remember?”

He gave a short laugh.

“Not
that
!”

“It's dreadful for her,” she said in a soft, distressed way. “It seems as if that would be a thing you couldn't help remembering—it seems as if it would be too dreadful if anyone could forget that they were married. I'm so sorry for Nesta I don't know what to do.”

“What makes you think she minds, Min?”

“She's so cross,” said Min ingenuously. “There isn't nothing right from morning till night.”

He got a kind of hard amusement out of that. He wanted Min to go on talking, so he said,

“You think she really minds?”

“If it was
Tom
—” said Min, and turned quite pale.

“Tom's a very lucky young man, and I expect he knows it.”

He wanted her to talk, because an idea was shaping itself in his mind. When he had waked up in her house, it was Min who told him he was Jim Riddell. How did she know? What was she going on when she said that? He thought he could size up a liar, and he didn't believe that Min was a liar; he thought she was just what she seemed to be—a nice, simple girl, rather pathetically fond of Tom, who didn't strike him as being nearly good enough for her. Now if Min had known him—really known him—as Jim Riddell, and as Nesta's husband before the wreck of the
Alice Arden,
he wouldn't have to believe her, but he would certainly have to take her evidence very seriously into account.

Min blushed.

“Oh, I don't know about that,” she said.

Someone had turned into the colonnade from Poulter's Row. The last thing that Jim wanted was to attract attention. He said, “We'd better walk.” And then, as they moved, “Min—I don't know about anything. For instance, I haven't any idea of where I first met you.”

Min said “Oh!” in a startled way.

“If I'm Nesta's husband, I'm your brother-in-law.”

“That's right.”

“Then I suppose we're old acquaintances—you've known me for a long time.”

If she wasn't truthful, she'd say yes to that and land with both feet in his trap. The gap in his memory only covered the last six weeks. On the farther side of it were the seven years he had spent overseas. He felt an odd relief when she shook her head and said,

“Oh no.”

“We're not old friends?”

“Oh no,” said Min again.

“Min—when did you meet me first?”

He got a round blue stare.

“Oh, you
know.”

“I'm afraid I don't. Shall we turn and walk back again? I don't suppose anyone knows us, but you never can tell. And now—when
did
you meet me first?”

“Oh, but you do know that—you can't have forgotten so soon!”

“So soon?”

“It's not a week,” said Min. “You can't have forgotten!”

Jim felt a rising excitement. He was aware that he changed colour; he hoped not too noticeably.

“Not a week? Do you mean you never saw me before Nesta fetched me from that hospital at Elston?”

“No, never.” She looked up at him with an air of childlike candour.

“Then it was Nesta who told you I was Jim Riddell?”

“Oh yes.”

“So when I said I didn't know who I was, and you said I was Jim Riddell, you were only saying what Nesta told you to say?”

Min coloured up to the roots of her fair hair. There was distress and bewilderment in her voice as she protested,

“But she couldn't have made a mistake. She must have known—her own husband—”

Jim thought he would let it go at that. But he wanted to know about Tom. Where did Tom stand? He felt a little chary of accepting Tom as a guileless innocent. He asked abruptly,

“Hadn't Tom met me either?”

“Oh no.”

So that was that. Jim felt as if a heavy paving-stone had been lifted off his back. He still carried one or two more, but this particular one was gone. If it was only Nesta who identified him as Jim Riddell, he was prepared to lay very long odds that he wasn't Jim Riddell, and never had been Jim Riddell. At the same time his opinion of Nesta as an adversary went up. It had been nothing short of a stroke of genius to put up Min to answer his bewildered questions. Simple good faith is more effective than the cleverest of lies.

They reached the end of the colonnade once more.

“I mustn't keep you,” he said.

Min blushed again.

“Oh, won't you please come back with me and just see her? You don't know what mayn't come of it if you go on staying away. Won't you please come back?” She spoke with what was obviously a great effort. Her hands, in their neat thread gloves, were twisting the straps of the shopping basket.

That very delicate extra sense which sometimes warns, and sometimes discerns things of which we have no evidence, became suddenly active in Jim. He had owed his life to it before now. It prompted him to go on talking to Min. Instead of saying good-bye he turned and began to walk slowly back along the colonnade.

Min, flushed and encouraged, moved beside him with small quick steps, two or three to his one. It would be so lovely if she could bring them together again. Married people oughtn't to live separate; it always led to trouble.

Mother always said..… She found she was saying this out loud:

“Mother always says—”

And then Jim discomposed her by turning a most attentive look upon her.

“Yes—what does your mother say?”

“If you won't think I'm saying anything I shouldn't—”

“I promise you I won't, Min.”

She didn't feel quite so flustered after that. He had a real kind look in his eyes when he spoke her name. His voice was kind too, and if he didn't take it amiss, there was no saying what good she mightn't do if she could only get the courage to speak out.

“Well?” said Jim. That odd unclassified sense was alert and waiting, but he felt free to be amused and a little charmed by Min's hesitancies.

“I don't hardly like to.”

“Oh come—you were going to tell me what your mother says. I'm sure you can manage that.”

Min looked up and then down again. Her eyes were really most uncommonly blue, and her lashes dark enough to set them off. He smiled encouragingly.

“Out with it, Min!”

“Mother always says married folk should stick close, because if they don't—”

“Yes—if they don't?”

“There's room for a third between them.”

“So there is,” said Jim.

“So you
will
come back?”

Jim got a hunch.

“My dear Min, are you trying to warn me?”

They had reached the corner again. Min stopped and faced him, nodding.

“You are!”

She nodded again solemnly.

The hunch got stronger.

“You're warning me that if I don't come back, I may find that Nesta has given me the chuck?”

Min nodded for the third time.

He would have liked to laugh, but refrained.

“All right, we'd better take another turn, and you shall tell me about it. Who's the man?”

“I don't know,” said Min in a low reluctant voice.

“Unknown Rival Alienates Wife's Affections—is that it?”

Min looked up with brimming eyes.

“It isn't a thing to talk light of!”

His voice changed.

“My dear, I'm most horribly in earnest. Won't you tell me what you mean?”

Min took a handkerchief out of her pocket and dabbed her eyes.

“I don't know if I ought.”

Jim didn't know either. He only knew that he was bound to get it out of her if he could. He said gravely,

“You've got to tell me.”

She twisted the handle of her basket.

“I've never been a tale-tatler, nor a mischief-maker.”

“You won't be making mischief.”

Min's voice became what she herself would have called all trembly.

“I'm not saying there's anything in it, and I'm not one to think harm where no harm's meant, and if it had been a matter of coming home late after the pictures or anything like that, I'd not have thought anything about it—though ‘tis different when you're married, and I wouldn't go to the pictures with anyone but Tom, not if it was ever so—”

Jim gathered that Nesta had fewer prejudices.

“So Nesta's been going to the pictures?”

“Oh
no
!” said Min. “I wouldn't mind if it was only the pictures, or if it was a friend of Tom's or anyone we knew.”

“Well, what was it if it wasn't the pictures?”

“I don't know what I ought to say,” said Min in a shrinking voice.

Min Williams was a dear little thing, and a pretty little thing, and a good little thing, but Jim wondered if he wouldn't end by shaking her.

“You've said too much not to go on.”

She gave him a frightened glance curiously mingled with virtuous pride.

“Throwing stones up at her window, and long past midnight!” she said.

An extraordinary sense of anticipation quickened his pulses.

“Last night?” he said.

“And long past midnight!” said Min with a wide scandalized gaze fixed on his face.

Jim's thoughts began to march to a triumphant band. There was a lot of blaring brass in it. He saluted his hunch. He saluted the extra sense which had set him off on this tack.

He turned at the top of the colonnade and proceeded to the question direct.

“A man threw stones up at Nesta's window last night?”

Min gulped and nodded again.

“What happened? Did she come down?”

Min nodded.

“You saw her?”

“I heard the pebbles against the glass. I dreamt it was hailing, and I got up and went to the window, and it was quite fine. And I was just going back to bed again, when he threw some more, and I saw him under the other window—Nesta's. And then she looked out—I could just see her face. And he said her name—just Nesta, not Mrs Riddell at all. And then he said, ‘Come down.'”

“What did she say?”

“She didn't say anything, not that I could hear. She went back from the window, and I was wondering about waking Tom, because it didn't seem right—one o'clock in the morning, and him calling her Nesta—only it came into my head that maybe it was you, and I didn't want to stand in the way of your making it up together.”

“I see. Then what happened?”

“She went down. I never heard her come out of her room, but the third stair from the bottom will creak, no matter what you do—and I'm sure Tom's tried all ways.”

“Nesta went out?”

Min nodded.

“And I dursn't go to bed with the door on the latch, so I put a blanket round me and waited for her to come in.”

“Yes?”

“I hoped it was you, and that you were making it up. Married people didn't ought to quarrel. Mother says it's easier begun with than done with.” The blue eyes looked up pleadingly.

“When did you find out that it wasn't me?”

“When she came back. She opened the door and came in, and I was just going to get into bed, when I heard that stair again. I went back to the window, and he was outside the gate.”

“She went in and came out again? What did she do? Was it light enough to see anything?”

“It was beginning to get light—sort of betwixt and between. It must have been getting on for three by the look of it, and I could see enough to know that it wasn't you.”

“What happened?” said Jim.

“She went to the gate and gave him something.”

“She gave him something? You're sure it wasn't the other way about?”

“I think it was money,” said Min.

“What makes you think that?”

She hesitated.

“I think it was.”

“But why?”

He was wondering whether it was the Van Berg emeralds that had changed hands over the gate of Happicot at three o'clock in the morning. For this was what he thought his hunch had done for him—he thought it had brought him hot on the track of his burglar. The twelve-three or whatever it was, which he had missed and last night's burglar had caught, would have reached Ledlington in very nice time to allow of Nesta being serenaded with a handful of pebbles. But in that case the man who had taken the emeralds must have known exactly what it was that he had snatched in the Blue Room. And he hadn't come there blind. He had come there to get the emeralds. There were a good many ifs in the affair.

He said, “But why?” and looked at Min, who didn't look at him.

“I could see it wasn't you,” she said—“and I was frightened. Mother always said I could hear a mouse move his whiskers in the dark.”

“You heard something?”

Min nodded.

“Nesta said, ‘It's all I've got'—and something about keeping money in the house.”

“Is that all you heard?”

She shook her head.

“No—he said—at least he said a lot more than what I'm telling you—but all mumbly like as if he'd got something in his mouth.”