“I tell you, Mary, I won’t have it.”
Mary’s voice came, cool and liquid:
“Have “you” any right to criticize my actions?”
“It will be the talk of the village! My mother was only buried on Saturday, and here you are gadding about with the fellow.”
“Oh,” she shrugged her shoulders, “if it is only village gossip that you mind!”
“But it isn’t. I’ve had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway.”
“A tinge of Jewish blood is not a bad thing. It leavens the”–she looked at him–“stolid stupidity of the ordinary Englishman.”
Fire in her eyes, ice in her voice. I did not wonder that the blood rose to John’s face in a crimson tide.
“Mary!”
“Well?” Her tone did not change.
The pleading died out of his voice.
“Am I to understand that you will continue to see Bauerstein against my express wishes?”
“If I choose.”
“You defy me?”
“No, but I deny your right to criticize my actions. Have “you” no friends of whom I should disapprove?”
John fell back a pace. The colour ebbed slowly from his face.
“What do you mean?” he said, in an unsteady voice.
“You see!” said Mary quietly. “You “do” see, don’t you, that “you” have no right to dictate to “me” as to the choice of my friends?”
John glanced at her pleadingly, a stricken look on his face.
“No right? Have I “no” right, Mary?” he said unsteadily. He stretched out his hands. “Mary—-”
For a moment, I thought she wavered. A softer expression came over her face, then suddenly she turned almost fiercely away.
“None!”
She was walking away when John sprang after her, and caught her by the arm.
“Mary”–his voice was very quiet now–“are you in love with this fellow Bauerstein?”
She hesitated, and suddenly there swept across her face a strange expression, old as the hills, yet with something eternally young about it. So might some Egyptian sphinx have smiled.
She freed herself quietly from his arm, and spoke over her shoulder.
“Perhaps,” she said; and then swiftly passed out of the little glade, leaving John standing there as though he had been turned to stone.
Rather ostentatiously, I stepped forward, crackling some dead branches with my feet as I did so. John turned. Luckily, he took it for granted that I had only just come upon the scene.
“Hullo, Hastings. Have you seen the little fellow safely back to his cottage? Quaint little chap! Is he any good, though, really?”
“He was considered one of the finest detectives of his day.”
“Oh, well, I suppose there must be something in it, then. What a rotten world it is, though!”
“You find it so?” I asked.
“Good Lord, yes! There’s this terrible business to start with. Scotland Yard men in and out of the house like a jack-in-the-box! Never know where they won’t turn up next. Screaming headlines in every paper in the country–damn all journalists, I say! Do you know there was a whole crowd staring in at the lodge gates this morning. Sort of Madame Tussaud’s chamber of horrors business that can be seen for nothing. Pretty thick, isn’t it?”
“Cheer up, John!” I said soothingly. “It can’t last for ever.”
“Can’t it, though? It can last long enough for us never to be able to hold up our heads again.”
“No, no, you’re getting morbid on the subject.”
“Enough to make a man morbid, to be stalked by beastly journalists and stared at by gaping moon-faced idiots, wherever he goes! But there’s worse than that.”
“What?”
John lowered his voice:
“Have you ever thought, Hastings–it’s a nightmare to me–who did it? I can’t help feeling sometimes it must have been an accident. Because–because–who could have done it? Now Inglethorp’s out of the way, there’s no one else; no one, I mean, except–one of us.”
Yes, indeed, that was nightmare enough for any man! One of us? Yes, surely it must be so, unless—–
A new idea suggested itself to my mind. Rapidly, I considered it. The light increased. Poirot’s mysterious doings, his hints–they all fitted in. Fool that I was not to have thought of this possibility before, and what a relief for us all.