The white countess

It was Gerard Angmering’s beautiful young wife who put these laughing questions to him, on the threshold of the modest little flat in West Kensington where, like most young couples of moderate means nowadays, they had set up their tent and expected to find peace and joy and all the comforts of home in a jerry-built “mansion” where they paid a hundred a year for the privilege of hearing the conversation of their underneath neighbour up the chimney, and being overheard in like manner by their neighbours overhead and on each side.

Gerard, whose face had instinctively softened at the very first word from his wife, said “Sh--sh,” pushed her inside their little drawing-room, and shut the door.

“There’s trouble at the bank,” said he. “I didn’t want to have to tell you. But since you’ve found me out, why, I suppose I must.”

“Oh, Gerard, what do you mean? What trouble?”

“There, there, don’t look so frightened, child. It will be all right, all right. At least--I suppose it will, I hope it will. You’ve heard me speak of Sir Richmond Hornthwaite, the old gentleman who gives us so much trouble--always sending imperative messages for us to go and see him, because he’s forgotten something he had to say, or because he wants to have something done for him in a hurry?”

“Yes, oh, yes, the old man who lives at Chislehurst.”

“Yes. Well, he’s just discovered--or thinks he’s discovered, that three cheques have been paid against his account which he never signed, which are, in fact, forgeries.”

“Oh, dear! And the bank people are very much upset about it, of course!”

Gerard, who was very pale, nodded. There was a long silence, and Audrey, who was still clinging to her husband, perceived, with a sickening sense of distress and terror, that she had not yet heard the worst.

“Well,” she said, quite querulously, “and what else?”

Gerard Angmering turned upon her suddenly eyes in which agony revealed itself unmistakably, appallingly. He tried to speak, but could not. Audrey clung more closely to his arm, put her right hand round his neck, held him close to her, comforting, encouraging, knowing with a loving woman’s instinctive knowledge that the worst would be tragically awful to hear.

Not one word did she utter, yet he knew she knew what was coming. So well did he know it that he prefaced his speech, when he got back some remnants of husky, audible voice, by a grave, slow nod of the head.

“Yes,” whispered he brokenly, “yes, he accuses me, Audrey. He says--says--I took the cheques from his cheque-book--says I stole them. Good God!”

He staggered to the little sofa, and fell on it, still with those clinging arms tightening round him, with the beautiful appealing eyes of his wife fixed in passionate tenderness and distress upon his face.

But after the first few moments of dumb horror she rebelled at the thought that they could misjudge her Gerard so wickedly. She raised her head quickly, her eyes flashed, she laughed discordantly, angrily, as she looked into his open and still almost boyish face.

“Gerard, Gerard, why do you trouble yourself about it? It’s ridiculous, you know! It’s farcical! You a thief! You! It isn’t as if they didn’t know you! Why, this old Sir Richmond knows you too! Knows you and likes you! Or why should it always be you he sends for when he wants some one from the bank?”

The young man looked up. Depressed, downcast, overwhelmed as he was, he felt the comfort of this indignation, of this amazement. He turned to her and took her lovely face in his hands, staring down tenderly into the big blue eyes, at the red, parted lips, at the soft waves of golden hair which had got loosened round her forehead.