IV

“It’s a puzzle, Clive, from first to last. I feel as if we were trying to reason the matter out from an insufficient statement of facts. Come, have you nothing more to tell me?”

So spoke Joshua Redway, and then, leaning back in his chair, with eyes steadily fixed on his son’s face, he awaited Clive’s reply.

They were seated in a private room, opening off the offices of the firm in Lombard Street; a room in which big loans had been negotiated, and contracts of worldwide importance had been signed and sealed; a room, too, to which others beside Clive were in the habit of resorting in times of perplexity for wisdom and counsel from the successful financier.

For Joshua Redway had a great reputation for shrewdness and clear-headedness not only within but beyond the limits of his home circle; and when Clive had asked Lord Culvers’s permission to take his father into his confidence respecting Ida’s strange disappearance, the permission was not only readily granted, but Lord Culvers had added that counsel from Mr. Redway at such a juncture would be most highly esteemed by him.

Three days had passed since the wedding. No letter had been received from the missing girl, nor had tidings of her reached her people from any quarter.

The Culvers’s family had returned to town, and had resumed the even tenor of their way; or, perhaps it would be more correct to say “the busy tenor of their way,” for the London season was in full swing, and the Culvers family were, as the phrase goes, “very much in the vortex.”

Clive answered his father’s question with another.

“Do you not think that the Culvers’s, one and all, take the matter very coolly?” he asked.

“I do. So far, however, as Lord Culvers is concerned, I’m not surprised. Do you remember the fire at the back of his house in Belgrave Square?”

The incident alluded to had exhibited Lord Culvers in a most characteristic light. Two or three frightened servants had rushed into his room in the dead of night, exclaiming, “A fire, my lord, in the mews at the back of the house; pray get up.” “A fire,” Lord Culvers had repeated, calmly, without opening his eyes; “well, I dare say it will go out again,” and he had turned over on his other side to finish his night’s rest.

“The impression in the house seems to be,” continued Clive, “that Juliet knows more than she feels inclined to tell.”

“Can’t you induce her to speak?”

“Not about Ida; although she’ll talk by the hour about the brute Ida has married.”

The father for a moment looked keenly at his son.

“Let me see,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “you are not taking up this matter out of friendship to Captain Culvers?”

“Good heavens, no!” cried Clive, hotly. “I’ve not spoken to the man half-a-dozen times in my life.”

“Then I suppose it is because she is Juliet’s sister that you have thus thrown yourself heart and soul into the affair?”

There came no reply from Clive. His face flushed crimson. His lips tightened.

Mr. Redway’s eyes did not lift from his face.

“Clive,” he said, after waiting in vain for an answer, “you are only giving me a half confidence. Why did you not marry this girl yourself?”

Then Clive’s words came in a torrent.

“Because,” he said, passionately, “she would have nothing to do with me treated⁠—me as if I were something too vile for her to notice. When I went into a room she would walk out of it; if I joined a game of tennis in which she was playing she would immediately lay down her racket; she would not even dance in a set in which I should have been her vis-à-vis, and have had to touch her hand.”

The father looked his surprise.

He was a tall, handsome man, with a fine head, and eyes that pierced like an eagle’s. He drew his brows over them, and thought for awhile, giving Clive time to cool down.

“Had she always treated you in that fashion?” he presently asked.

“No,” said Clive, bitterly, “when I was first introduced to her at the Gordons’, where we were both staying, she seemed to⁠—to like me; at least, I thought so. Then Juliet joined her there, and everything at once seemed changed.”

“Ah‑h, Juliet. I suppose you quickly transferred your devotion from one sister to the other.”

“I scarcely know how it came about,” said Clive, miserably. “Juliet was so kind and sympathetic, Ida so strange and cold; and they were so much alike in their faces and their ways! Sometimes when I was talking to Juliet I could fancy she was Ida! And then before I well knew how far I had gone, the thing was done.”

“Ah‑h, and then Ida rushes off to Florence to study art; you go to the Cape on a mission for me; Captain Culvers comes upon the scene and flirts with Juliet; home rushes Ida, and throws herself once more into the breach, marries her cousin; and Juliet is kept true to her absent lover. Then, having married a man for whom possibly she had neither liking nor esteem, she finds it impossible to carry her self-sacrifice farther, and so takes sudden flight. Clive, there is my solution to the whole mystery.”

And Clive, with eyes opened too late, had the conviction forced upon him that this solution was most probably the true one.

Ida’s devotion to Juliet had never been open to doubt, and she had sealed that devotion by giving up her lover in the first instance to the sister’s whim. Then when a lover less worthy had come upon the scene, and Juliet’s fancy had seemed to waver, she had put the question of the capricious girl’s happiness beyond a doubt by another act of self-sacrifice⁠—a marriage with the less desirable suitor who might otherwise have fallen to Juliet’s lot. Read in this light, the wedding at the church where the funeral service had been read over her dead mother, the laying of her bridal flowers on that mother’s grave, could be easily understood.

Clive groaned aloud.

“What a fool⁠—a miserable fool I have been!” he exclaimed, clenching his fingers into the palm of his hand. “I could blow my brains out!”

“In your love affairs I’ll admit they’ve been of very little use to you,” said his father, drily.

Then there fell a pause, during which the father’s heart must have ached for the look of dumb, hopeless misery which settled on his son’s face.

“If I could only know that she is safe and well, I should ask nothing more,” said Clive, presently, in a voice that matched his face.

Assuredly at the moment news of her health and safety compassed the whole of his desires. He could not have framed his lips to the prayer that she might return and be planted in Captain Culvers’s home as his wife.

Mr. Redway did not heed the remark; absorbed in thought, he leaned his head upon his hand.

“The only objection,” he said, slowly, after awhile, “that I can see to my version of the affair, is that it is too simple a reading of the mystery. In real life, as a rule, the solutions to mysteries are nearly as mysterious as the thing itself. Human motives and feelings are so complex, that when they are revealed to us, it is often difficult to believe that they stand to action in the relation of cause to effect. And when a woman’s motives and feelings are concerned, the whole thing becomes a thousand times more complex.”

“But no other solution presents itself; I wish to Heaven it did!” said Clive, passionately.

“Lord Culvers appears to be without ideas or theories on the matter?”

“Absolutely. His one endeavour is to keep the matter quiet till Ida writes. I’ve begged him again and again to let me run over to Florence to question Madame Verdi⁠—the lady with whom Ida stayed when there⁠—as to whether she knows anything of Ida’s movements. But no! he will not have the affair made public. He says Ida will be sure to write in a day or so.”

“Her promise to write may have been only a blind to keep them all quiet while she arranged her plans.”

“Exactly; and meanwhile we are losing precious time. And as for hushing the matter up, the thing will soon be impossible. Already people are beginning to talk. I was asked only this morning if it were true that Ida and Culvers had quarrelled on their wedding tour, and that Ida had returned to her home. I dare say the servants have set the wildest stories afloat.”

“What is Juliet’s theory? Of course, if my solution of the mystery is correct, it is impossible to believe that Juliet knows any more than we do.”

“Juliet is altogether an enigma to me. To all appearance she takes the matter as calmly as her father.”

“And you say you have cross-questioned her yourself?”

“Tried to. But you might as well try to cross-question the wind or the waves as Juliet when she has a mind to be silent. With all her gaiety and capriciousness, she can keep a secret if she is so disposed. I know perfectly well if Ida had tied her down with any promises, there’s no power on earth would make her break them. Those sisters are loyal to each other to an altogether remarkable degree.”

“Did you ask her, as I suggested, what jewellery her sister was wearing when she left home?”

“I did so this morning. She is not at all sure what rings Ida was wearing; but she knows for certain that she had on the diamond hawk brooch that had been her mother’s, for she saw her fasten the band of her dress with it under her shoulder-cape when she changed her dress for travelling.”

“Ah‑h, that’s something to note!”

“I should think so,” said Clive, gloomily; “there are over fifty diamonds in that brooch. It must be worth several thousands; and, if Ida is so disposed, would give her the means of roaming the world and keeping us all in suspense for goodness knows how long.”

“And gives, also, her friends the means of tracing her. No woman could wear such a brooch as that without attracting attention, let alone attempt to raise money on it. Take my advice, Clive: get Lord Culvers’s permission, and run out advertisements and handbills for that brooch without a moment’s delay; of course offering a suitable reward for it. Where that brooch is, there is Ida. If we get news of the one we get news of the other.”