THE STORY OF IVY (Murder Mystery). Marie Belloc Lowndes
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with sense, but even with comfort to himself. This was made the easier to him because he put Ivy Lexton on a pedestal. God alone knew how he idealised her, how completely he believed her soul matched her delicately perfect, ethereal-looking body.
While Ivy was chatting gaily to her companion, she was yet almost painfully aware of the two who stood talking together in so earnest and intimate a way. She was feeling what she had never felt in her life of twenty-six years: that is, bitterly, angrily jealous of a girl whom she thought stupid, dull, and unattractive.
Miles Rushworth’s attitude to herself disconcerted her. She could not, to use her own jargon, get the hang of him. It was so strange, in a sense so disturbing, that he never made love to her. Then, now and again, she would remember Mrs. Thrawn, and Mrs. Thrawn’s predictions.
She had followed the fortune-teller’s advice with regard to Roger Gretorex. She had insisted that it would be better for them both neither to see nor to write to each other till she came back to London in September; and he had had perforce to agree to her conditions.
The yacht made Dieppe the next morning, and at breakfast there rose a discussion as to how the party could spend their time on shore to the best advantage. Rushworth at once observed that he would not be able to take part in any expedition ashore. He had received important business telegrams, and he had a number of letters to dictate to a stenographer whose services he had already secured.
Miss Chattle, who knew he would value a quiet working day, suggested a motor expedition to a celebrated shrine a hundred kilometres inland from Dieppe. She declared that if they started at once they could be back in comfortable time for dinner.
And then it was that Ivy, as in a lightning flash, made up her mind as to how she would spend today.
“I get so tired motoring, so I’d rather stay behind.” She turned to her host, “While you’re doing your work, I can take a walk in the town. Though I’ve been to Paris two or three times, I’ve never been anywhere else in France.”
“That’s a good idea! We might meet at the Hotel Royal about one o’clock, and have lunch together.”
Half an hour later Miss Chattle shepherded the rest of the party into two roomy cars, while Rushworth escorted Lady Dale and her daughter on to the quay, where a carriage was waiting for them.
Lady Dale went forward to speak to the driver, and Rushworth turned to the girl he still intended should be his wife.
“If we don’t meet again before the end of September, I do want just to say one thing to you, Bella.”
He spoke in so peculiar, and in so very earnest, a tone, that Bella’s heart began to beat.
“What is it you want to say?” she asked, her voice sinking almost to a whisper.
“I’ve said it before, and now I want to say it again——”
Bella looked at him fixedly. Thank God, she hadn’t betrayed herself. But what was this he was saying?
“I do want you to make real friends with Mrs. Lexton—I mean, of course, after you and Lady Dale are back at Hampton Court, when Jervis Lexton will have begun work in my London office. His wife, poor little soul, hasn’t any real friends, from what I can make out.”
“Yet she seems to know a good many people, Miles. When we were looking through those picture papers yesterday, she seemed to know almost everyone who had been snapshotted at Goodwood!”
“I was thinking of real friends—not of those stupid gadabouts who are here, there, and everywhere,” he said with a touch of irritation.
And then they heard Lady Dale’s voice.
“I think we ought to be off, Bella. It’s nearly half-past ten, and you know they lunch early at the château.”
Rushworth wrung Bella’s hand. “I’m sorry you’ve had to leave the yacht so soon.”
But his voice had become perceptibly colder. He was disappointed, even a little hurt. He had always thought his friend Bella not only kind, but full of sympathy and understanding. Yet she had spoken of his new friend with a curious lack even of liking, let alone sympathy.
When Miles Rushworth came back from seeing the Dales off, he found Ivy Lexton sitting on the now deserted deck. There was a pile of newspapers on the little table which had been brought up close to her deck-chair, and she was pretending to read the Paris New York Herald. Convinced that Miles Rushworth intended to be with her the whole of the long sunny morning, she was not only surprised, but also very disappointed, when he said cheerfully:
“Well, lovely lady, I’ve a hard mornin’s work before me, for there’s a whole pile of letters and telegrams waiting to be answered. Cook’s man has found me an excellent shorthand writer, so I hope to be through in a couple of hours.”
Her face suddenly became overcast, and he felt tempted, for a moment, to throw aside his work. But he resisted the temptation.
“Would you rather laze about here or take a walk and meet me at the Royal?”
“I’ll go into the town. There are one or two little things I want to buy. What time shall I be at the hotel?”
He hadn’t meant to meet her till one o’clock. But for once the old Adam triumphed.
“Let me see? It’s half-past ten now, let’s meet at twelve-thirty. We’ll have an early French lunch, and then we’ll go for a motor drive, or do anything else that you feel like doing. From what I can make out, the others can’t be back till seven, if then.”
Ivy waited till she had seen him disappear into the state-room which was the one retreat on the yacht where Rushworth never asked any of his guests to join him, and about which they all felt a certain curiosity. Then she put down the paper she still held in her hand, and, closing her eyes, she began to think.
What manner of man was this new friend of hers? He must “like” her surely? “Like” was the ambiguous term Ivy Lexton used to herself when she meant something very different from “liking.” Yet he had never said to her the sort of thing that the men she met almost always did say, and on the shortest acquaintance. Stranger still, he had never asked anything of her in exchange for what had become considerable and frequent benefactions. True, Rushworth’s gifts had almost always been useful gifts. He had never, so to speak, “said it with flowers.” That had puzzled her a little, made her sometimes wonder as to what his real feelings could be. Never once—she had made a note of it in her own mind—had he mentioned Bella Dale during the three weeks when they had been so much together in London.
So it had been a disagreeable shock to find Lady Dale and her daughter already established on the yacht, and on the happiest terms of old friendship with everyone on board. Again and again during the week’s cruise, Ivy had asked herself anxiously whether Miles Rushworth could really “like” such a dowdy, matter-of-fact girl as was Miss Dale? Yet now and again when she saw them together, talking in an intimate, happy way, and when she heard them alluding to events which had happened long before she knew Rushworth, there would come over her a tremor of icy fear, for well she knew that, from her point of view, a man friend married was a man friend marred.
It was to her a new experience to be in close touch with such a real worker as was Miles Rushworth. There was nothing in common between him and the idle, often vicious, and for the most part mindless young men who drifted in and out of the spendthrift world in which she and Jervis had both been so popular as long as their money had lasted.
She got up at last, and went into her luxurious state-room to fetch a parasol. It was a charming costly trifle, matching the blue coat and skirt she was wearing, but large enough to shelter her face from the sun. Her quaint little sailor hat, a throw-back to a mode of long ago, while very becoming, was quite useless from that point of view.
She walked slowly along the deck, hoping against hope that Rushworth would see her and, leaving his work, join her; but as she passed his state-room she heard his voice dictating.
The French of all