DISCOVERING REX
By Edgar Wallace
In the office of the Public Prosecutor was a young lawyer named Keddler, for whom the prospects were of the brightest until he grew impatient with the type of evidence which was supplied him by the painstaking but unimaginative constabulary, and went out single-handed to better their efforts. And he succeeded so remarkably well that a reluctant Commissioner of Police admitted his superiority as a detective and offered him a post at New Scotland Yard.
This offer was enthusiastically accepted, but since the regulations do not admit of amateur police work and he found himself relegated to the legal department, where his work consisted of preparing statements of evidence for his successor at the P.P. office to examine, he resigned at the end of six months. To return to his former position was, at the time, impossible, and against the advice of his friends and in face of solemn warnings from his old chief, he opened an office in the city of London, describing himself as an “Investigating Agent.”
Despite the gloomy predictions of his associates, John Keddler grew both opulent and famous. The opulence was welcome, but the fame was embarrassing, not that John was unduly modest, but because it led on three occasions to his identification at a moment when it was vitally necessary that he should be unknown to the persons who detected him.
Starting on a small job for the Midland and County Bank, a matter of a forged acceptance, in which the real police had failed to satisfy the bank, he enlarged his clientele until he found himself working amicably with Scotland Yard in the matter of Rex Jowder, alias Tom the Toy, alias Lambert Sollon.
Rex was wanted urgently by several police departments for insurance fraud, impersonation, theft, forgery, and general larceny, but only the insurance fraud was really important because it involved a well-known Chicago house in a loss of 700,000 dollars, which they were anxious to recover before Rex, who was notoriously careless when he handled other people’s money, dissipated his fortune in riotous living. John Keddler was commissioned by the London agents of the company to bring about this desirable result, but unfortunately the lean, shrewd thief had learnt from an indiscreet newspaper that John was his principal danger, and had spent two days waiting in the country lane in which the detective’s modest little house was situated, and one dark night when John descended from his car to open the gates of his demesne, six pounds weight of sand had fallen upon his shoulder. The sand was enclosed in a sausage-shaped bag, and it was intended for his neck.
Taken at this disadvantage Keddler was almost helpless and would have ceased to worry Mr. Jowder until the inevitable give and take of the Day of Judgment, only the assailant had placed himself in an unfavorable position to follow up his attack, though it was helpful to him that the red rear light of the car reflected on the polished steel of the gun John pulled mechanically.
He dived to the cover of a hedge and ran, and John Keddler had been so respectably brought up that he hesitated to scandalize the neighborhood by discharging firearms to the public danger. In some respects John Keddler was a slave of convention. But this mild adventure served to concentrate his mind and attention still more closely upon the case of Rex Jowder, and so well did he work that at the end of a week there was a police raid upon a certain safe deposit in the city, and there was discovered the bulk of the stolen money which the misguided Jowder had cached (as he believed) beyond the fear of discovery.
Why this raid was carried out is a story made up of John’s instinct, a drunken man, a frightened woman (Rex was strong for ladies’ society), and an indiscreet reference, repeated by his terrorized lady friend, to a mysterious key which hung about his neck. He would have been captured also, only the police were a little over-elaborate in their preparations.
With his money gone, the fruit of two years’ clever and dangerous work, Rex Jowder became something more than annoyed. Before him was a life sentence, and standing at the focal point of his misfortune was one John Keddler. From the point of view of the insurance company whose gratitude he had earned, John was not a “good life.”
“What about Jowder?” asked his confidential clerk.
“Jowder can wait,” said John. “As a matter of fact I am not very much interested in the man any longer.”
But the man was very much interested in John, and he was content to wait too, though his waiting had to be done in a mean Lambeth lodging.
As for John Keddler, he accepted in a joyous holiday spirit the commission which followed the loss of Lady Bresswell’s jewelry, for Lady Bresswell lived on the Lake of Como, and John was partial to the Italian lakes. Incidentally this visit was to introduce him to the Marchessa Della Garda—that unhappy lady.
From the first the wisdom of Mona Harringay’s marriage bristled with notes of interrogation—those little sickles that trim the smothering overgrowth of truth.
There was no doubt that the Della Garda family hated the Marchessa with a hatred born of an enormous disappointment. They referred to Mona as “The Señora Pelugnera” (they affected Spanish by virtue of their descent from the Borgias), and “Mrs. Hairdresser” was adopted to keep fresh the ghastly fact that Mona’s father was the very rich proprietor of Harringay’s Elixir for the Hair.
The marriage was in every way an amazing one, for Giocomi was no impoverished third cousin of the real nobility. Head of the Della Garda clan and immensely wealthy, the ordinary excuses and explanations of a marriage between an Italian marquis and the daughter of a rich American were wanting. They had met in Harringay’s Long Island home where Giocomi was a guest. He was making his first long absence from the Continent of Europe. Therefore he was home-sick and miserable when he met Mona, and their marriage was the natural reaction. She, for her part, was fascinated by his good looks and a little overwhelmed by the impetuosity of his wooing. The wedding was the social event of a brilliant season.
Not until the liner was clear of Sandy Hook did Giocomi Della Garda emerge from his delirium, and face the certainty of his relatives’ wrath. For all his good looks and his perfect manners, he was not a nice young man. He had, in particular, a weakness for approval, one of the most fatal to which the human soul is liable, and the nearer to Genoa the vessel came, the more and more he resented the existence of a wife who had already surrendered her mystery, that lure which had led Giocomi into so many adventures, but which had never before yielded him a wife.
Mona, Marchessa Della Garda, realized the bleak failure of her life long before she came home to the cold, oppressive atmosphere of the gloomy palace which had housed sixteen generations of the family. Neither the cold majesty of the Pallacco Della Garda, nor the exotic splendors of the Villa Mendoza, set amidst the loveliness of Lake Como, brought compensation to a disillusioned heart-sick girl. But her one and only visit to the Como home was not without its consequences. Lady Bresswell, a grateful and somewhat voluble lady (her lost jewels recovered without the scandal which would have attended the investigations of the police), was showing John Keddler the glories of the lake. They had brought her ladyship’s expensive motor-boat to a rest near Cadenabbia, and the servants were spreading lunch when round a tiny headland came a boat, the sole occupant of which was a girl.
She pulled with long, steady strokes and seemed oblivious to their presence, although she only passed them a dozen yards away.
John Keddler, a man to whom all women were very much alike, gazed at her fascinated. The sun in her russet gold hair, the appealing sadness of her delicate face, the sweep of her perfect figure, took his breath away. It was as though he had seen a vision of some other world.
He watched her until she brought the boat to a white landing-stage, and stepping out and tying the boat, had disappeared behind a great fuchsia bush.
Then he heaved a long sigh, and like a man waking from a dream turned to meet the laughing eyes of his hostess.
“Who was that?” he asked, almost in a whisper.
“I’ve told you twice, Mr. Keddler,” smiled Lady Bresswell, “but you were so absorbed that you didn’t hear me. She is lovely, isn’t she?”
“Who is she?”
“The Marchessa Della Garda, an American girl who married Giocomi—poor dear. Giocomi is rather a beast.”
“Oh,” said John, and that was all he said.
Sixteen generations on her father’s side of hairdressers, general workers, coal-miners, and peasants had supplied Mona Della Garda with the capacity for endurance and patience, but on her mother’s side, she went back to some quick-drawing folks who had made the lives of successive western sheriffs exasperatingly lively, and when, some six months after John Keddler had seen her, Giocomi followed a flagrant breach of his marriage vows by boxing her ears, she took a pistol from the drawer of her dressing-table.
There was excellent reason for this act, for Giocomi was weeping with rage at her mild reproach and had flung off to his room in search of a hunting-crop. Following him went Pietro Roma, his valet, also in tears, for this man worshipped the young Marchessa and would have died for her. It nearly happened that he did, for in frenzy at his interference, Giocomi clubbed him into insensibility with the heavy end of the stock. He never used the whip.
The major-domo of his establishment, attending the cracked head of the valet, heard a shot and mistook it for the crack of a whip, until the Marchessa came downstairs wearing a heavy carriage coat over her evening dress and carrying her jewel-case in her hand. Even then, he did no more than wonder why the illustrious lady should go abroad on a night of storm.
Later came doctors, examining magistrates, and, one by one, white- faced Della Gardas to take counsel together. More than a week passed and Giocomi Della Garda was laid away in the dingy family vaults of SS. Theresa and Joseph, before the name of John Keddler was mentioned.
It came about that news reached Rome of Pietro Roma, who disappeared with a broken head the day after his master’s death and had been seen in London.
“If she is in London too,” said Philip Della Garda thoughtfully, “you may be sure that she will never be discovered. The English and Americans work hand in hand, and they will do everything that is humanly possible to cover up her tracks. I am all for employing the man Keddler. He recovered Lady Bresswell’s jewelry last summer, and even at the British Embassy they speak of him with respect.”
Prince Paolo Crecivicca, his kinsman, stroked his white beard.
“I shall never be happy until this woman is brought to trial,” he said, “and I agree that this infernal rascal, Pietro, is probably in communication with her, for, according to Dellimono, he was the man who betrayed to ‘The Hairdresser’ poor Giocomi’s little affair with the Scala girl, and these vulgarians would be on terms of friendship. Employ Mr. Keddler by all means. Wire to him at once.”
John Keddler arrived in Rome thirty-six hours later—no miracle this, with the London-Paris, Paris-Milan, Milan-Rome air services in full operation. Though he answered the summons in such a hurry that Philip Della Garda not unnaturally believed he was eager for the job, he displayed no remarkable enthusiasm for the undertaking. Particularly was this apathy noticeable after all that Prince Crecivicca described as the “unfortunate facts” were revealed.
“In England, of course, she would be acquitted,” he said, a little stiffly, “and even in Italy—do you think it is wise to bring this matter before your courts? The publicity… the scandal…?”
Philip Della Garda showed his small teeth in a smile.
“We are superior to public opinion,” he said smugly. “Had this happened two hundred years ago we would have dealt with the Hairdresser without invoking the assistance of the courts. As it is—”
As it was explained by the Della Gardas in chorus, this woman must be subjected to the humiliations of a trial, whatever be the jurors’ verdict.
“Of course,” said John politely. “Have you a photograph of the lady?”
Not until then did he realize that he had been sent to track the woman of his dreams—the woman who had no name to him but “The Girl in the Boat.” They saw him frown and a queer expression come to his face.
“I will do my best,” he said.
When he had gone, leaving his employers with a sense of dissatisfaction, Philip Della Garda, accounted by his friends as something of a sportsman, had an inspiration.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” he demanded pedantically. “I will go to London myself.”
Passing through Paris, Keddler was seen by a journalist who happened to be on the aviation ground, and it was his speculative note on the occurrence which Mona Della Garda read in her Battersea lodging:
“Among the famous people who now use the air express for their continental travels is Mr. John Keddler, the well-known private detective. Mr. Keddler, in an interview, says he finds the air-way an invaluable boon. He had been called to Rome in connection with the Della Garda murder, and was able to make the return journey in a little over twenty- four hours—a journey which ordinarily would have taken four to five days. He left immediately for London, and hopes to bring about the arrest of the Marchessa in a very short time.”
Of course, John Keddler said nothing about the Della Garda murder, or his hopes. He had grunted a “good afternoon” at the enterprising press agent of the Aviation Company, and there began and ended the interview—but Mona Della Garda, reading this paragraph, fell into a blind panic.
For now, the sustaining heat of righteous anger had departed from her, and the strain of the sixteen barber generations—they had been law-abiding and for the most part timorous barbers, with exalted views on the sanctity of human life—was asserting its pull. Murder in any degree was to them merely a phenomenon of the Sunday newspapers, as remote from reality as the moons of Saturn.
“I wonder, miss, if you ever read them agony columns in the newspapers!” asked Mrs. Flemmish one morning.
Mrs. Flemmish was her landlady and a woman from the Wessex borders of Devon, a woman of rolled sleeves and prodigious energy, whose stoves were brighter than the panels of limousines.
Mona had found her room by accident and was perfectly served, for Mrs. Flemmish had unbounded faith in the spoken word of her sex, and never doubted that “Miss Smith” was a young lady who wrote for the press. Mona had to excuse her feverish interest in the daily newspapers.
“Yes—yes,” said Mona, going white. She lost her color readily in these days, and her frequent pallors gave her delicate face a fragility which Mrs. Flemmish in secret accepted as a symptom of lung trouble.
“I’d like to know who this ‘Dad’ is who keeps on advertising to ‘M.’, telling her to communicant—communicate, I mean, with him. Where’s Long Island, miss?”
“In—in America,” said the girl hurriedly, “near New York.”
“I suppose she’s run away from home,” ruminated Mrs. Flemmish. “Girls be girls all over the world—but she ought to let her father know, don’t ye think so, Miss Smith?”
Mona nodded. How could she let him know, other than by letter, and a letter was on its way. Mr. Harringay would pass that epistle in mid-ocean, for he had caught the first east-bound liner, a greatly distracted man.
If she could only get into touch with the devoted Pietro. The poor fellow was in London, searching for her—a mad search, since he would be followed, and he could not find her without also betraying her.
A thought came to her on the third evening after the return of John Keddler. There had been some reference to Pietro in the newspapers. A reporter had found him amongst the outcast and homeless on the Thames Embankment one night, and had secured a “good story” from him. Perhaps he slept there every night? She would search for him. A man’s help might save her—even the help of this poor devoted servant.
“I am going out tonight, Mrs. Flemmish,” she said.
Mrs. Flemmish made a little grimace.
“It’s not a good night for ye, mum,” she shook her head. “There’s one of them Lunnon fogs workin’ up. Did ye read the paper tonight about the Eye-talian lady, miss?”
Mona’s heart almost stopped beating.
“N—no,” she said; “is there any fresh—which Italian lady?” she asked.
Mrs. Flemmish had settled herself down in the chintz-covered arm- chair and was stirring the fire economically.
“They a’ set a detective on her, poor creature,” she said. “Do you think ‘twas her father that put the advertisement in the paper?”
Mona had a grip of herself now.
“Perhaps,” she answered steadily, and Mrs. Flemmish, staring in the orange depths of the fire, nodded.
“If I were her, her bein’ a rich young woman, I know what I’d do, ees fay!”
Mona frowned. She had never looked to this sturdy country woman for a solution to her agonizing problems.
“What would you do?” she asked slowly.
“I’d marry a young Englishman,” nodded Mrs. Flemmish. “My man were in a lawyer’s office an’ clever he was, as all the Welsh people are, an’ often he’s told me that you can’t arrest an Englishwoman in England for a crime in foreign parts.”
The girl could only stare. That solution had not occurred to her, and if it had, she would have rejected it, for even the enthusiastic scientist is not prone to repeat the experiment which cost him everything short of life by its failure.
“Her has money, by all accounts,” said the woman, feeling furtively between the bars of the fire to dislodge a glowing piece of slate. “Her could buy a husband and divorce him, and even when she was divorced her’d be safe.”
Mona stood for a long time pinching her red lips in thought, and Mrs. Flemmish turned her head to see if she was still there, a movement that startled the girl into activity.
“I’ll go now, Mrs. Flemmish,” she said hastily. “I have the key….”
A light yellow mist lay upon the streets, which were crowded even at this late hour, for it was Christmas week, as the cheery contents of the shop windows showed. Great blobs of golden light looming through the fog marked the blazing windows of the stores, and she passed through a road lined with stalls that showed vivid coloring under the flaring, pungent naphtha lamps.
She checked a sob that rose in her throat at the memory of other Christmas weeks, and hurried her pace, glad, at last, to reach the bleakness of the bridge that crossed a gray void where the river had been.
A taxi-cab carried her to the West End, and this she dismissed in the darkest corner of Trafalgar Square, making her way on foot toward Northumberland Avenue. She had to pass under the brilliant portico lights of the Grand Hotel, and had disappeared into the gloom beyond, before the young man who was standing on the step waiting for his car, realized it was she.
She heard his startled exclamation, and looking back in affright, recognizing Philip Della Garda, ran. Swiftly, blindly through the thickening fog she flew, crossing the wide thoroughfare and turning backward into Graven Street.
Philip Della Garda!
He hated London in the best of seasons. There could be only one incentive to his presence in the raw of December, and she was terrified. They would arrest her and take her back to Italy and a lifelong imprisonment. She had heard stories, horrifying stories, of the Italian prisons, where the convicted murderers were buried in an underground cell away from light and human companionship in the very silence of death. None spoke to them, neither guardian nor priest. They lived speechless until the thick darkness drove them mad.
She could have shrieked; the terror thus magnified by the uncanny mirk in which she now moved had assumed a new and more hideous significance.
Marriage could save her! It was this mad panic thought that sent her hurrying along the Strand, peering into the faces of men who loomed from the nothingness of the fog and passed, none dreaming of her quest. There were men who leered at her, men who stared resentfully at the eager scrutiny she gave them in the fractional space of a second that the light allowed.
And then the inspiration came, and she hurried down a steep slippery street to the Thames Embankment. The benches were already filled with huddled figures, so wrapped in their thread-bare coats that it was almost impossible to tell that they were human.
“May I speak to you?”
Her heart was beating a stifling tattoo as she sat down in the one unoccupied space which Providence had left by the side of the man whose face she had glimpsed in the light thrown by a passing tramway car.
Instantly she had made her decision. There was a certain refinement revealed in the lean face, a sense of purpose which seemed out of tune with his situation. He did not answer her, but drew more closely to the wreck that slumbered noisily at his side.
“I—I don’t know how to begin,” she said breathlessly, “but I’m in great trouble. I—I must tell you the truth; the police are searching for me for something I did in Italy—”
She stopped, physically unable to go on.
“The police are searching for you, are they?” There was an undercurrent of amusement in the man’s words. “Well, I sympathize with you—I’m being sought for at this particular moment.”
She shrank back almost imperceptibly, but he noticed the movement and laughed. She recovered herself. She must go on now to the bitter end.
“Are you British?” she asked, and after a second’s hesitation he nodded. “Are you married?” He shook his head. “If I gave you money—a lot of money, would you—would you marry me—at once?”
He half turned and stared at her.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because if—if I became British by marriage they would not arrest me. I only want your name—I will pay you—anything, anything!”
Her voice was husky, and the underlying fear in it was not to be mistaken.
“I see,” he said; “you want to be naturalized by marriage. That’s the idea?”
She nodded.
“Could it be done—quickly?”
The man rubbed his chin.
“I think it could be done,” he said. “Tomorrow is Thursday. If I gave notice we could marry Saturday—where do you live?”
She told him and he rubbed his chin again.
“It might be done,” he said. “I’ve got a sort of claim to Battersea. If I—anyway you can meet me at the registrar’s on Saturday at twelve. What is your name?”
She told him that and gave him the other particulars he asked. He seemed to be thinking the matter over, for he did not speak for a long time. A policeman strolled past, flashing his lantern in their direction, and he dropped his head.
“There is one thing I want to say,” said Mona desperately. It took all her courage to tell him this. “I only want your name. When—when it is all over I shall divorce you… you understand?”
“H’m,” said the man, and got up.
“Let’s walk along,” he said. “I’ll take you as far as Westminster Bridge, and you don’t mind if I cross the road occasionally; it might be very awkward if I met a certain person, if I was with you.”
The man kept close to the parapet, Mona nodded, and they were abreast of Cleopatra’s Needle when he caught her arm and drew her to the recess. The fog had lifted and he had seen a tall saunterer walking near the kerb and scrutinizing the sleepers on the bench.
The searcher did not see them, and the man at Mona’s side looked after him.
“If you weren’t here,” he said softly, “I’d have settled an old score with that gentleman.”
He left her at the end of the Embankment and Mona went home, not daring to think. The next day was a day of torture. She was placing her life in the hands of a man who, by his own confession, was a fugitive from justice. And yet… she must do it, she must, she must, she told herself vehemently.
That morning the newspapers had given greater prominence to the Della Garda murder. There was an interview with Philip Della Garda, who had seen her and had told of his recognition in half a column of closely set type. From this newspaper, too, she had a clue as to the identity of her future husband. She found it in a note dealing with the activities of John Keddler.
“Mr. Keddler, who has been commissioned by the Della Garda family to assist the police in their search, is also on the track of Rex Jowder, an international swindler, supposed to be of British origin, who is wanted for frauds both in London and New York.”
In a flash it came to her. That saunterer was Keddler—the man who was tracking her down, and her chosen husband was an international swindler! She wrung her hands in despair, and for a second wavered in her resolution.
Nevertheless, a sleepless night spent in a painful weighing of this advantage against that peril, brought her to the registrar’s office.
She carried with her a large portion of the money she had brought from Italy—happily, in view of a flight from the tyrannies of Giocomi Della Garda, she had kept a considerable sum in the house. She realized with consternation that she had fixed no sum; would he be satisfied with the four thousand pounds she brought to him? But what did that matter? Once she was married, she would be free to communicate with her father, and he would satisfy the most extravagant demands of her husband.
There was only one fear in her heart as she walked through the pelting rain to the dingy little office. Would the man repent of his bargain—or worse, would he be unable to keep the appointment? Both aspects of her doubt were cleared as soon as she set foot in the outer lobby of the office. He was waiting, looking more presentable than she had expected. His raincoat was buttoned to the chin and she thought him good looking in the daylight.
“I had the certificate made out in your maiden name,” he said in a low voice. “It makes no difference to the legality of the marriage.”
She nodded, and opening a door, they stepped into a chilly-looking office, and to the presence of an elderly man who sat writing slowly and laboriously at a big desk.
He glanced up over his spectacles.
“Oh yes—Mr.—er—” He looked helplessly at the certificate he was filling. “Yes—yes, I won’t keep you young people longer than a few moments.”
They sat down and Mona utilized the respite.
“Here is the money,” she whispered, and pushed a roll of notes into his outstretched hand.
He took the notes without any great display of interest and coolly slipped them into the pocket of his raincoat without troubling to count them.
Presently the old man rose and beckoned them.
As in a dream Mona Della Garda heard his monotonous voice, and then a ring was pressed upon her cold finger.
“That’s that,” said her husband cheerfully. “Now come along and have some food—you look half dead.”
She stared from him to the golden circlet on her hand.
“But—but I don’t want to go with you,” she stammered in her agitation. “It was understood… I leave you now… but you must tell me where I can find you.”
“Young lady,” the man’s voice was not unkind, “I have taken a few risks for you and you must do something for me. There is a gentleman waiting in the rain for me; he has been trailing me all the morning, and my only chance of escaping a disagreeable occurrence is in your companionship.”
“But I don’t want…” she began, and seeing his face, “very well, I will go with you to a restaurant.”
He nodded and they went out in the rain together. Three paces they had taken when there was a sound like the sharp crack of a whip. Something like an angry bee in terrific flight snapped past Mona’s face, and her husband leapt at a man who was standing half a dozen paces away. Again came the explosion, but this time the bullet went high, and in a second she was the terrified spectator of two men at grips.
The struggle did not last long. Three policemen came from nowhere and one of the men was seized. The other came back to her wiping the mud from his coat.
“I didn’t think he was such a blackguard,” he said.
She could only look at him in wide-eyed fear.
“Who was he?” she gasped.
“A fellow named Rex Jowder,” said her husband; “he’s been looking for me for a month.”
“Then you…?”
“I’m John Keddler,” he smiled, “and I think I’ve lost a good client. Come along and lunch and I’ll tell you how you can get your divorce—I’m a bit of a lawyer, you know. Besides which I’d like to return all that money you gave me.”
* * * * *
Whether or not, in the complicated terms of the Extradition Treaty between Italy and Britain, Mona Keddler could have been tried in London for a crime committed in Rome, no jurist would commit himself to say. John Keddler in his wisdom did not challenge a decision. He had an interview with his furious employer, who threatened and stormed—and went home. Mona he sent to a place of safety until the storm blew over; but the storm was the mildest of breezes.
The winter turned to spring and the spring to summer. The Italian Government notified all persons concerned that the Della Garda “affair” would be regarded as a lamentable family tragedy, for which nobody could be held liable; and the summer came to autumn again before Mona Keddler sailed for New York.
The question of divorce, in spite of many meetings at luncheon, dinner, and tea-tables, had never been properly discussed by either. It was not until the evening before she sailed for New York that Mona Keddler asked the question that had puzzled her so through the six months of her curiously pleasant married life.
“I cannot quite understand, Jack, why you did it,” she said.
“Did what?”
She hesitated.
“Married me,” she said. “It has practically ruined your career, for I don’t see just how we can divorce one another without… well, without unpleasantness. The divorce laws are so horribly strict in England. And you are married—without a wife. It was selfish, miserably selfish of me to let you do it—but why did you?”
He was unusually grave.
“For the last reason in the world you would suspect,” he said.
“But what?” she asked.
Here he was adamantine.
“I’ll keep my mystery,” he said, “but I’ll write my reason in a letter, if you swear you will not break the seal of the envelope until your ship is on the high seas.”
She promised, and he watched the Olympic drift from the pier at Southampton with a little ache at his heart that nothing could assuage—watched until the trim figure on the promenade deck and the handkerchief she waved were indistinguishable from other figures and other wildly waving handkerchiefs.
Then he went back to town, heavy hearted, feeling that life was almost done with.
At that moment Mona Keddler was reading for the fortieth time the scrawled words in pencil:
“Because I loved you from the day I saw you rowing on the Lake of Como.”
Her trunks were piled on the deck and she was watching the low-lying shores of France with a light in her eyes which no man had ever seen.
John Keddler had forgotten that the ship called at Cherbourg on the outward voyage.