MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES - British Murder Mysteries Collection: 17 Books in One Edition. Marie Belloc Lowndes
that nice-looking man her spouse?”
“Heavens, no! That’s Bob Crickle, who wrote the book of T’wee-t’we. Jock Larnoch spends every other week ‘at the works’; there never was such a lucky girl as Olive!”
Again, with a sensation almost of despair, Ivy thought of Rushworth, and of all that he might have meant in her life by now if he hadn’t been so—so old-fashioned and queer in his ideas.
The Lextons had been settled down in London for nearly two months, and Jervis was going to Rushworth’s City office each morning. As for Ivy, she was once more a popular member of the happy-go-lucky, while for the most part financially solid, set with whom she had danced, played bridge, lunched, and supped through life, in the days when she and her husband were still living on what remained of Jervis’s fortune.
But woman does not live by amusement alone. Ivy loved being loved, so she had “made it up” with Roger Gretorex.
Rushworth was far away, and though he wrote to her by every mail, his letters, as she sometimes pettishly told herself, might have been read aloud at Charing Cross. So it was that, though she had really done with Gretorex, she still went, now and again, to Ferry Place, but far less often than in the days when she had been utterly down on her luck, and at odds with Fate.
And yet, though the Lextons’ troubles seemed over, black care was again beginning to dog Ivy’s light footsteps, for she was once more what she called, to herself, very hard up.
True, the couple were now living in what appeared to Ivy’s husband extreme comfort, and even luxury. Not only was their flat one of the best in the fine block called the Duke of Kent Mansion, charmingly furnished; but an excellent cook, and a good day-maid had been left there by Miles Rushworth’s cousins. So what might have been called the Lextons’ home-life ran as if on wheels.
From the moment, however, that Ivy had come back to London, secure in the knowledge that her husband was now earning a thousand pounds a year, paid monthly, she had again fallen into the way of buying, or, better still, of ordering on account, any pretty costly trifle, any becoming frock or hat, that took her fancy. She also, in a way that seemed modest to herself, had at once begun to entertain.
It was such fun to give lively little luncheon parties to her women friends—lunch being followed as often as not by bridge! One, sometimes even two, bridge tables would be set out in the attractive drawing-room and, in due course, a bountiful tea would be served by the smiling day-maid, for those of Ivy’s guests who were not afraid of getting fat.
The good-natured old cook had not been used to so much work, and she had very soon declared, not unreasonably, that she must have extra help in the kitchen.
Lexton, who was rather pathetically anxious “to make good,” always went down to the City each morning by the Underground. But he came back by omnibus, and he invariably dropped in at his club on his way home, and, as he was an open-hearted fellow, he often asked one of his new business acquaintances to drop in too. That, also, meant entertaining, but on a far more modest scale than that in which Ivy indulged.
Though Mrs. Jervis Lexton had learnt long ago the fine art of living on credit, there are a great many things which even in London a prosperous young couple with a good address cannot obtain, as it were, for nothing. Each week many pounds slipped through pretty, popular Ivy’s fingers, and she honestly could not have told you how or why. So it was inevitable that she should again begin to feel short of money—short, even, of petty cash.
Often she told herself that it was maddening to feel that if Rushworth were in England she could almost certainly have had all the money she needed, and that without too great a sacrifice of her pride, or, what was far more important, his good opinion of her. Just before leaving for South Africa he had given her a hundred pounds as “a birthday gift.” How good he was, how generous! Her heart thrilled with real gratitude when she thought of Miles Rushworth.
Late in the same day that his wife had lunched at the Embassy Club, Lexton, who was going out to what he called a stag party that evening, came back from the City to find an unpleasantly threatening letter, this time from a tailor to whom he had owed for years a huge bill, and who had evidently just heard of his new-found prosperity.
For once Ivy’s husband looked ruffled and cross, and she, also for once, felt very angry indeed. Jervis had begun, so she told herself with rage, to put on airs, just because he had a job—a job that she was too clever and tactful ever to remind him was entirely owing to her friendship with his employer.
At last he left the flat and, with a feeling of relief, she went off, too, by omnibus, to the tiny house where Roger Gretorex lived and practised his profession. It was in what might have been called a slum, though each of the mid-Victorian, two-storied, cottage-like dwellings were now inhabited by decent working people and their families.
Ivy had not been to No. 6 Ferry Place for nearly a fortnight, and her lover had written her a long, reproachful letter, imploring her to come and see him there, if for only a few moments. It made him feel so wretched, so he wrote, never to see her now, except in the company of people and in surroundings which filled him with contemptuous dislike, or, in a sense worse still, only in the presence of her husband.
When everything was going well with Ivy Lexton, she felt bored, often even irritated, with Roger Gretorex and his great love for her. But the moment she was under the weather and worried, as she was again beginning to be, then she found it a comfort to be with a man who not only worshipped her, but who never wanted her to make any effort to amuse or flatter him, as did all the other men with whom she was now once more thrown in contact.
So it was that this late afternoon, immediately after Jervis had left the flat, she telephoned and told the enraptured Gretorex that as she happened to have this evening free, she would come and have dinner with him at Ferry Place.
And yet, as she sat in the almost empty omnibus on her way to Westminster, her heart and her imagination were full of Miles Rushworth, and not once did she even throw a fleeting thought to the man she was going to see. Gretorex had become to Ivy Lexton what she had once heard a friend of hers funnily describe as a kind of “Stepney” to her husband. Sometimes she felt that she really preferred Jervis to Roger. Jervis was so kindly, easy-going, unexacting.
Still to-night she felt cross with Jervis, because of the scrap they had had over the tailor’s bill, so the thought of secret revenge was sweet.
But the image securely throned in her inmost heart was that of Miles Rushworth.
The knowledge that Rushworth, a man possessed of great, to her imagination limitless, wealth, was loving her, longing for her, and yet, owing to his over-sensitive, absurdly scrupulous, conscience, hopelessly out of her reach, awoke in Ivy Lexton a feeling of fierce, passionate exasperation.
At last she stepped lightly out of the omnibus, the conductor, and an old gentleman who had been her only fellow-passenger, eagerly assisting her. She smiled at them both. Even the most trifling tribute to her beauty always gave her a touch of genuine pleasure. She was looking very pretty to-night in a charming frock, and in her hand she held the curious little bolster bag which Rushworth had bought for her at Dieppe.
Eight o’clock boomed from Big Ben, and Roger Gretorex, his arm round Ivy’s shoulder, led her into the tiny dining-room, where had been prepared in haste an attractive little meal. She had been what the man who loved her with so devoted and absorbing a passion, called “kind,” and he felt happy and at peace.
After they had finished dinner they sat on at table for a while, and, as she looked across at him, Ivy told herself that her lover was indeed a splendid-looking man—a man many a woman would envy her.
“Sometimes,” he said in a low voice, “I dream such a wonderful dream, my dearest. I dreamt it last night——”
She looked at him roguishly. “Tell me your dream!”
“I dreamt that you were free, and that we were married, you and I——”
She made no answer to that remark, only shook her head, a little pettishly. For one thing,