Part 20 (1/2)
”Somebody did catch you, then, in compromising att.i.tudes--you admit that?”
”You twist my words to give them a false meaning!” she exclaimed. ”You are trying to trap me into saying something that would put me in a wrong light. I can explain--why, the whole thing is so simple when you understand.”
”Suppose you do explain, then. Get me right, Mrs. Propbridge--I'm all for you in this affair. I want to give you the best of it from every standpoint.”
So she explained, her words pouring forth in a torrent. She told him in such details as she recalled the entire history of her meeting with the vanished Mr. Murrill--how a doctored telegram sent her husband away and left her alone, how Murrill had accosted her, and why and what followed--all of it she told him, withholding nothing.
He waited until she was through. Then he sped a bolt, watching her closely, for upon the way she took it much, from his viewpoint, depended.
”Well,” he said, ”if that's the way this thing happened and if you've told your husband about it”--he dragged his words just a trifle--”why should you be so worried, even if these pictures should reach him?”
Her look told him the shot had struck home. Inwardly he rejoiced, knowing, before she answered, what her answer would be.
”But I didn't tell him,” she confessed, stricken with a new cause for concern. ”I--I forgot to tell him.”
”Oh, you forgot to tell him?” he repeated. Now suddenly he became a cross-examiner, snapping his questions at her, catching her up sharply in her replies. ”And you say you never saw this Mr. Murrill--as you call him--before in all your life?”
”No.”
”And you've never seen the mysterious stranger since?”
”There was nothing mysterious about him, I tell you. He was merely interesting.”
”Anyhow, you've never seen him since?”
”No.”
”Nor had any word from him other than that telephone talk you say you had with him?”
”No.”
”Did you ever make any inquiries with a view to finding out whether there was such a person as this Mrs. Beeman Watrous?”
”No; why should I?”
”That's a question for you to decide. Did you think to look in the papers to see whether General Dunlap had really been taken ill on a motor trip?”
”No.”
”Yet he's a well-known person. Surely you expected the papers would mention his illness?”
”It never occurred to me to look. I tell you there was nothing wrong about it. Why do you try to trip me up so?”
”Excuse me, I'm only trying to help you out of what looks like a pretty bad mess. But I've got to get the straight of it. Let me run over the points in your story: No sooner do you land in Gulf Stream City than your husband gets a faked-up telegram and goes away? And you are left all alone? And you go for a walk all by yourself? And a man you never laid eyes on before comes up to you and tells you that you look a lot like a friend of his, a certain very rich widow, Mrs. Watrous--somebody, though, that I for one never heard of, and I know the Social Register from cover to cover, and know something about Wilmington too. And on the strength of your imaginary resemblance to an imaginary somebody he introduced himself to you? And then you let him walk with you? And you let him whisper pleasant things in your ear? Two of those pictures that you've got in your hand prove that. And you let him take you into one of the most notorious blind tigers on the beach? And you sit there with him in this dump--this place with a shady reputation--”
”I've explained to you how that happened. We didn't stay there. We came right out.”
”Let me go on, please. And you let him buy you wine there?”
”I've told you about that part, too--how the bottles and the gla.s.ses were already on the table when we sat down.”
”I'm merely going by what the photographs tell, Mrs. Propbridge. I'm merely saying to you what a smart divorce lawyer would say to you if ever he got you on the witness stand; only he'd be trying to convict you by your own words and I'm trying to give you every chance to clear yourself. And then after that you go and sit with him--this perfect stranger--in a lonely place alongside a deserted bath house and n.o.body else in sight?”