I just nodded without saying anything.
‘I’ve made up my mind to tell you—everything! I must tell someone or I shall go mad.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think really it would be just as well. It’s not easy to know the best thing to do when one’s kept in the dark.’
She stopped in her uneasy walk and faced me.
‘Do you know what I’m frightened of?’
‘Some man,’ I said.
‘Yes—but I didn’t say whom—I said what.’
I waited.
She said: ‘I’m afraid of being killed!’
Well, it was out now. I wasn’t going to show any particular concern. She was near enough to hysterics as it was.
‘Dear me,’ I said. ‘So that’s it, is it?’
Then she began to laugh. She laughed and she laughed—and the tears ran down her face.
‘The way you said that!’ she gasped. ‘The way you said it…’
‘Now, now,’ I said. ‘This won’t do.’ I spoke sharply. I pushed her into a chair, went over to the washstand and got a cold sponge and bathed her forehead and wrists.
‘No more nonsense,’ I said. ‘Tell me calmly and sensibly all about it.’
That stopped her. She sat up and spoke in her natural voice.
‘You’re a treasure, nurse,’ she said. ‘You make me feel as though I’m six. I’m going to tell you.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Take your time and don’t hurry.’
She began to speak, slowly and deliberately.
‘When I was a girl of twenty I married. A young man in one of our State departments. It was in 1918.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Mrs Mercado told me. He was killed in the war.’
But Mrs Leidner shook her head.
‘That’s what she thinks. That’s what everybody thinks. The truth is something different. I was a queer patriotic, enthusiastic girl, nurse, full of idealism. When I’d been married a few months I discovered—by a quite unforeseeable accident—that my husband was a spy in German pay. I learned that the information supplied by him had led directly to the sinking of an American transport and the loss of hundreds of lives. I don’t know what most people would have done…But I’ll tell you what I did. I went straight to my father, who was in the War Department, and told him the truth. Frederick was killed in the war—but he was killed in America—shot as a spy.’
‘Oh dear, dear!’ I ejaculated. ‘How terrible!’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was terrible. He was so kind, too—so gentle…And all the time…But I never hesitated. Perhaps I was wrong.’
‘It’s difficult to say,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what one would do.’
‘What I’m telling you was never generally known outside the State department. Ostensibly my husband had gone to the Front and had been killed. I had a lot of sympathy and kindness shown me as a war widow.’
Her voice was bitter and I nodded comprehendingly.
‘Lots of people wanted to marry me, but I always refused. I’d had too bad a shock. I didn’t feel I could ever trust anyone again.’
‘Yes, I can imagine feeling like that.’
‘And then I became very fond of a certain young man. I wavered. An amazing thing happened! I got an anonymous letter—from Frederick—saying that if I ever married another man, he’d kill me!’
‘From Frederick? From your dead husband?’
‘Yes. Of course, I thought at first I was mad or dreaming…At last I went to my father. He told me the truth. My husband hadn’t been shot after all. He’d escaped—but his escape did him no good. He was involved in a train wreck a few weeks later and his dead body was found amongst others. My father had kept the fact of his escape from me, and since the man had died anyway he had seen no reason to tell me anything until now.
‘But the letter I received opened up entirely new possibilities. Was it perhaps a fact that my husband was still alive?
‘My father went into the matter as carefully as possible. And he declared that as far as one could humanly be sure the body that was buried as Frederick’s was Frederick’s. There had been a certain amount of disfiguration, so that he could not speak with absolute cast-iron certainty, but he reiterated his solemn belief that Frederick was dead and that this letter was a cruel and malicious hoax.