The first thing I did, after returning to my room, was to light a fire and draw the curtain. It was a relief to shut out the cold, dreary day—to anticipate the night by creating darkness artificially—to watch the firelight flicker over Camilla’s pale face and to feel that I was shut in with her, warm and cosy in a private little world of our own.
It was now too late for tea and toast. A bottle of brandy (much depleted by Comstock and Mrs. Bigger) was all that I had to offer. Camilla was adamant in refusing, so I was obliged to commit what to all rightminded Englishmen is the only unforgivable sin—to drink spirits before the official setting of the sun. I felt, however, that the occasion demanded something drastic. The Master’s tea party had reduced me to a state of pulp.
After I had completed my medical potations, I went across and sat on the sofa by Camilla. I took her cold hand in mine and for a few minutes stayed perfectly still without daring to speak. I could not tell whether she was even conscious of my presence. But I did not care. For the first time in my life I was completely happy.
Suddenly, however, she sat up with a little start and looked at her wrist watch. A slow smile spread over her face.
“Only forty minutes before I have to go down to Dr. Warren’s rooms. You’d better hurry up and ask some of those questions, Hilary Fenton. I know you’re bursting with them.”
She had not withdrawn her hand.
“I haven’t any questions to ask,” I whispered, “except one: and I’ll go on asking that all my life until you give me the right answer.”
Almost imperceptibly she shook her head, but there was a promise in her eyes. All the thoughts and images she had evoked in my mind during the past week now rushed to my lips for expression.
“Camilla,” I said, as our faces drew nearer together, “I wish I could talk with tongues. I would tell you that you are like all the best things I’ve ever seen or heard in my life. You make me think of the light of a sunset reflected on the breast of a seagull—the dogwoods in Valley Forge—the opening chorus of Swinburne’s Atalanta—the smell of migonette—”
But Camilla had pulled her hand away and was covering up her ears.
“Please, Hilary Fenton,” she cried, “I can’t bear that kind of thing now. It’s very beautiful and you are a dear, but not now. I want you to be absolutely sincere with me. Anyone who had a little imagination or—” here she smiled almost roguishly “—or who happened to be reading English literature, could talk that way’. But just at this moment I’m lonely. I’m miserable. I feel an outcast. I want solid ground under my feet. I want—I don’t know what I want, but it’s not poetry.”
I rose from the couch and stood in the Englishman’s favourite attitude with my back to the fire. We looked into each other’s eyes without smiling.
“Speech, my dear,” I said at length, “was given us so that we could conceal our thoughts. I talk a lot of nonsense, I know. But I can’t hide the big, fundamental and ridiculously simple things that I am thinking. You know perfectly well that I love you and want to marry you. I’ve always loved you—years before I even met you.
“It’s not the springtime nor just a young man’s fancy. It’s the real thing. I’ll admit frankly that you haven’t made me miss any meals, except possibly my tea today, but you’ve kept me from looking at or thinking of other girls for a whole week. You’ve given me something I’ve never had in my life before.”
“But, Hilary, that’s nothing—nothing at all. It’s happening in Cambridge all the time. Boys and girls are attracted to each other. They make fine speeches. They fall in love at lunch over lamb chops on Monday and they separate forever on Thursday afternoon over walnut cake and sundaes at Fuller’s. Life’s been pretty grim for me. I can’t play. I can’t even pretend. Lots of people have talked that way to me. Men do it to almost any girl who isn’t positively hideous.”
“In other words, Miss Lathrop, you think it’s just that Græco-Roman profile of yours that I am in love with. That Doric nose; that Byzantine chin. Well, let me tell you I’ll love you even better when you have seven chins and seven babies—and I hope they’ll all be mine. The chins and the babies, I mean.
“I love you in spite of the awful mackintosh you wear, that unspeakable bicycle you ride. I love everything about you. The Devonshire cream in your voice—the little mousetrap which goes snap, snap in your mind—your manners to older people—and the fact that you can sit. down and stand up without showing your—”
I paused and looked at her. To my surprise her eyes were wet like forget-me-nots under the water. She was making frantic efforts to get at a handkerchief.
“Camilla, darling,” I cried, and as she lifted her mouth to mine, I could feel her trembling like a child. For awhile we remained thus without speaking.
“And now,” I cried exultantly, “the only thing we have to decide is whether you can bear the thought of living in America—for a while, at any rate. Philadelphia isn’t a bad place and it’s quite close to Atlantic City.”
She held up her hand to silence me. “No, Hilary, I—”
“All right, we’ll live in England—in Timbuctu—in Guatemala, I don’t care. I’ve got a little money of my own. I’ll buy a shack in the Andes or in Alaska.”
Camilla had now risen from her chair and walked across the room. She took a cigarette from the box on the table and puffed it gloomily. Presently she spoke:
“Don’t you think you’ve talked long enough, Hilary Fenton? Your nonsense is very charming, my dear, but it’s about your turn to listen to mine for awhile. And mine is anything but charming—nor is it nonsense, unfortunately. Of course, if I married you, I wouldn’t care where we lived. In fact, I’d love to get out of England, but I’m afraid I am not going to marry you.”
“Then you are not going to get any peace this side of the grave,” I cried excitedly.
“I am not going to marry you,” she said, throwing her cigarette into the fire, “and I’m not going to marry you for the simple reason that you … are … not … going … to want … to marry … me.”
Her face had gone strangely and suddenly gray. She walked back to the couch. I tried to laugh reassuringly but there was a cold, clammy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I started to speak.
“Hilary,” she cried, “do please listen to me and don’t try to be funny any more. I do want to talk to you seriously. I had hoped you would ask me questions about today—about what happened at tea—why the Master said what he did. It would have made it so much easier.”
“Consider all the questions asked,” I replied gently.
“Then you really want to hear about me? You know so little, you see, and—and I don’t want to be dramatic about it—but there is so much.”
I nodded. “Begin with the birds and the flowers, my dear. I bet you were a beautiful baby.”
As I lit a cigarette and arranged myself comfortably on the couch, I felt her hand on my sleeve.
“No,” she said, “I won’t begin at the beginning. I’ll come back to that later on. First of all I want to tell you about my family life. About my father. You’ve heard of Lathrop of Bristol?”
I nodded again. “Yes, Dorothy Dupuis told me your people were as rich as Croesus and that King George took it as a personal affront when you refused to be presented at Court.”
Camilla smiled. “How funny it sounds when it’s put that way. As a matter of fact, Hilary, my father—that is, Mr. Lathrop—is rich, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. He has cut me off. I don’t get anything from him at all. I don’t even go to him in the holidays. Fortunately I don’t have to because my mother left me a small income when she died.
“Last year, when I was twenty-one, I went to my father and told him that my ambition was to go to Newnham. I was tired of leading a so-called social life in Clifton. I hate the place with its silly women quarrelling like cats over their wretched threepenny bridge—with its interminable crocodiles of school girls. Have you ever seen a crocodile, Hilary Fenton?”
“No, but I’m like Hamlet in that I’m prepared to eat one—under certain circumstances, of course!”
“Well, when I presented my ultimatum, my father told me that he had other plans for me. I knew just exactly what those plans were and we quarrelled. He is obstinate and cold. He can see no point of view but his own. He has never cared about me particularly except as an instrument to promote his own particular schemes. Finally I asked him to give me at least one good reason why I should not go to Cambridge with my own money. It was then that the storm broke.”
Camilla paused and looked at me anxiously. I pressed her hand.
“This is hard to say, Hilary Fenton. You’ve got to be very sympathetic or I can’t go on.” I squeezed her hand again and raised it to my lips. She turned her head away from me and continued, addressing the far corner of the room.
“Then Mr. Lathrop—I can’t call him father—lost his temper with me completely. He called me a charity brat, a waif, a—oh, I don’t know what he said, but I learnt then, for the first time that I was not really his daughter. That Mrs. Lathrop, whom I had adored, was not my real mother. I had been adopted by her after the death of their own child.
“Her money, so he said, had come to me under false pretenses. The name of Lathrop merely covered the shame and disgrace of my own family. I was nothing but the daughter of a criminal—a notorious homicidal lunatic. In short, Hilary, I am not Camilla Lathrop at all, I am—my real name is … is … Corinne North.”
She had turned toward me and her eyes were looking searchingly into mine as though she was trying to bore a hole through my brain. It was one of those moments when the fate of a lifetime—two lifetimes—hangs in the balance. I threw my arms about her.
“My dear, my dear,” I stammered, “as if I cared about that. You are you and that’s all that really matters. Besides, Corinne North is a beautiful name. It’s much prettier than Camilla Lathrop. I love you all the more. I don’t give a damn about your family. When all’s said and done, only God can make a family tree and I’m rather proud of yours. I’ve met your father. He’s a dear. I like him. I’d be delighted to have him for a father-in-law. Now, don’t cry, darling.”
I wiped her eyes and after a moment she continued.
“But, quite apart from the tragedy of my father, there were other reasons why he—Mr. Lathrop—did not want me to come up to Cambridge. He told me that he had been given to understand that I had a brother up here. He did not wish us to meet each other and revive the old family scandal.
“William North, as perhaps you know, had two children. One of them was adopted by the Lathrops—that was myself. The other was a boy about a year older than I. His name was Jules. He was adopted by a rich South African farmer named Baumann.”
I sat up suddenly. “Great heavens! Then Julius Baumann was your brother. Oh, you poor kid!”
She nodded. “Yes, he was my brother. As I told you before, I met him when I first came up to Cambridge. I sought him out of my own free will and against Mr. Lathrop’s wishes. But he need not have worried about anything coming of it. I found that poor Julius was terribly sensitive about his parentage. It seemed to prey on his mind all the time.
“That was why he was always so anxious to pass for a real South African of Dutch extraction. I believe he hated me for reminding him of—well, at any rate, we agreed that we had better keep apart. You see he was firmly convinced that his—my father was a desperate criminal and a dangerous maniac. I could not agree with him.”
“He was wrong on that score,” I cried. “William North is a scholar and a gentleman if ever I saw one.”
“Well, whatever the truth about father, I realized that it was impossible for Julius and me to be friends. I never saw him again until the day I met you. After that Blake lecture I happened to see a newspaper and read that William North had escaped.
“I hurried around to Julius’ rooms. I found him in a dreadful state. He was convinced that father would try to do him some mischief—that he would be involved in some hideous catastrophe. Also, he worried about our mother.”
“Your mother? Is she alive?”
“Yes, and I believe she lives somewhere near Cambridge. After the trial she went to Canada with another man. Julius wouldn’t tell me anything more about her except that he promised to provide for her financially. I don’t even know what name she goes under, but I imagine she has sunk pretty low, poor thing.”
“I bet the letter I posted on Monday night was to her,” I remarked. “It had money in it. I wish I had looked at the address, then we might be able to trace her, I saw only B-R-I-D-G-E-S on the envelope. I thought it might be the name of a place; I see now it was probably just part of Cambridgeshire.”
“Anyhow, I’m glad you did post it. Poor Julius was worried to death about her and about himself. You see, he was sure that my father had some sinister purpose—”
“His only purpose was to get into a decent library and look up some sixteenth century books.”
“Yes, in my own mind I’ve always been sure of his innocence. But you can understand now what a terrible shock it was to me when you told me that Julius had been murdered. Suicide would not have surprised me much—he was in such an unbalanced state of mind when I saw him last Monday—but murder! You see, I couldn’t be sure.”
“You poor, poor kid,” I murmured. “It must have been hell. I see it all so much more clearly now than I did before. You have explained such a lot of things. But I do wish you’d tell me where you went that day after you left Baumann’s rooms. I hung out of the window for half an hour just to see you cross the court.”
The shadow of a smile passed over Camilla’s face for a moment, then she said seriously:
“I went into Dr. Warren’s rooms. He was my father’s greatest friend here in All Saints. He knew about me and Julius. I wanted to ask him about my mother, but he knew nothing of her. He was awfully kind. He said he’d let me know if there was any news. He still believes in my father.”
“Yes,” I said gently, “he believes in him to the extent of sheltering him in his rooms and giving him clothes and money. You know Camilla, I am practically certain that your father was on the staircase the night that Baumann was killed. Of course he had a perfect alibi for the time of Hankin’s death, but—”
“Oh, he didn’t do it,” cried Camilla, “I’m sure he didn’t do it. There is someone else—some stranger who hates us all. Someone who knew about Julius and me and who hates us because we are Norths. It was this same person who killed both Julius and Hankin … Julius because he hated him and Hankin because he knew too much … the same person who put prussic acid in my tea this afternoon.”
“It was the man who spoke to Hankin in the court the night he was killed. They haven’t found him yet, but they will, dear. He must have been at the tea party today. The field is getting narrower and narrower. In the meantime, you have got to take care of yourself. I only wish I could protect you against this invisible enemy. You mustn’t trust anyone. I don’t even want you to go down to Dr. Warren’s rooms.”
She glanced hurriedly at her wrist watch. “Heavens, I’m late now. I must go. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at the Master’s. Apparently he knows the worst about me too. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime, I shall be loving you even more than ever. I don’t care who or what you are. If ever you doubt me, remember that I loved you even when I thought you had taken the law into your own hands with regard to Baumann’s death; I loved you when you packed me a wallop on the jaw. I—oh, Camilla, you darling.”
For one moment I held her in my arms. “Till tomorrow,” she whispered, “and thank you, Hilary, thank you for being so decent about everything.”
The next thing I knew was that she had gone.
As I heard her footsteps on the staircase, I reflected on several things. Her story had been a revelation, of course. It had thrown light on several dark places. It had altered several possibilities and perspectives; but it had not brought the main problem any nearer to solution.
As a matter of fact, when I came to think it over, I realized that it had merely made things more diabolically complicated than ever.