The Essential Edgar Wallace Collection. Edgar Wallace

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      She found her father in the garden reading the _Nicoise_, under the shade of a bush, for the sun was not warm, but at that hour, blinding.

      "I've changed my plans," she said without preliminary.

      He looked up over his glasses.

      "I didn't know you had any," he said with heavy humour.

      "I intended going back to London and taking you with me," she said unexpectedly.

      "Back to London?" he said incredulously. "I thought you were staying on for a month."

      "I probably shall now," she said, pulling up a basket-chair and sitting by his side. "Give me a cigarette."

      "You're smoking a lot lately," he said as he handed his case to her.

      "I know I am."

      "Have your nerves gone wrong?"

      She looked at him out of the corner of her eye and her lips curled.

      "It wouldn't be remarkable if I inherited a little of your yellow streak," she said coolly, and he growled something under his breath. "No, my nerves are all right, but a cigarette helps me to think."

      "A yellow streak, have I?" Mr. Briggerland was annoyed. "And I've been out since five o'clock this morning----" he stopped.

      "Doing--what?" she asked curiously.

      "Never mind," he said with a lofty gesture.

      Thus they sat, busy with their own thoughts, for a quarter of an hour.

      "Jean."

      "Yes," she said without turning her head.

      "Don't you think we'd better give this up and get back to London? Lord Stoker is pretty keen on you."

      "I'm not pretty keen on him," she said decidedly. "He has his regimental pay and 500 a year, two estates, mortgaged, no brains and a title--what is the use of his title to me? As much use as a coat of paint! Beside which, I am essentially democratic."

      He chuckled, and there was another silence.

      "Do you think the lawyer is keen on the girl?"

      "Jack Glover?"

      Mr. Briggerland nodded.

      "I imagine he is," said Jean thoughtfully. "I like Jack--he's clever. He has all the moral qualities which one admires so much in the abstract. I could love Jack myself."

      "Could he love you?" bantered her father.

      "He couldn't," she said shortly. "Jack would be a happy man if he saw me stand in Jim Meredith's place in the Old Bailey. No, I have no illusion about Jack's affections."

      "He's after Lydia's money I suppose," said Mr. Briggerland, stroking his bald head.

      "Don't be a fool," was the calm reply. "That kind of man doesn't worry about a girl's money. I wish Lydia was dead," she added without malice. "It would make things so easy and smooth."

      Her father swallowed something.

      "You shock me sometimes, Jean," he said, a statement which amused her.

      "You're such a half-and-half man," she said with a note of contempt in her voice. "You were quite willing to benefit by Jim Meredith's death; you killed him as cold-bloodedly as you killed poor little Bulford, and yet you must whine and snivel whenever your deeds are put into plain language. What does it matter if Lydia dies now or in fifty years time?" she asked. "It would be different if she were immortal. You people attach so much importance to human life--the ancients, and the Japanese amongst the modern, are the only people who have the matter in true perspective. It is no more cruel to kill a human being than it is to cut the throat of a pig to provide you with bacon. There's hardly a dish at your table which doesn't represent wilful murder, and yet you never think of it, but because the man animal can talk and dresses himself or herself in queer animal and vegetable fabrics, and decorates the body with bits of metal and pieces of glittering quartz, you give its life a value which you deny to the cattle within your gates! Killing is a matter of expediency. Permissible if you call it war, terrible if you call it murder. To me it is just killing. If you are caught in the act of killing they kill you, and people say it is right to do so. The sacredness of human life is a slogan invented by cowards who fear death--as you do."

      "Don't you, Jean?" he asked in a hushed voice.

      "I fear life without money," she said quietly. "I fear long days of work for a callous, leering employer, and strap-hanging in a crowded tube on my way home to one miserable room and the cold mutton of yesterday. I fear getting up and making my own bed and washing my own handkerchiefs and blouses, and renovating last year's hats to make them look like this year's. I fear a poor husband and a procession of children, and doing the housework with an incompetent maid, or maybe without any at all. Those are the things I fear, Mr. Briggerland."

      She dusted the ash from her dress and got up.

      "I haven't forgotten the life we lived at Ealing," she said significantly.

      She looked across the bay to Monte Carlo glittering in the morning sunlight, to the green-capped head of Cap-d'Ail, to Beaulieu, a jewel set in greystone and shook her head.

      "'It is written'," she quoted sombrely and left him in the midst of the question he was asking. She strolled back to the house and joined Lydia who was looking radiantly beautiful in a new dress of silver grey charmeuse.

      Chapter XX

      "Have you solved the mystery of the submerged bed?" smiled Jean.

      Lydia laughed.

      "I'm not probing too deeply into the matter," she said. "Poor Mrs. Cole-Mortimer was terribly upset."

      "She would be," said Jean. "It was her own eiderdown!"

      This was the first hint Lydia had received that the house was rented furnished.

      They drove into Nice that morning, and Lydia, remembering Jack Glover's remarks, looked closely at the chauffeur, and was startled to see a resemblance between him and the man who had driven the taxicab on the night she had been carried off from the theatre. It is true that the taxi-driver had a moustache and that this man was clean-shaven, and moreover, had tiny side whiskers, but there was a resemblance.

      "Have you had your driver long?" she asked as they were running through Monte Carlo, along the sea road.

      "Mordon? Yes, we have had him six or seven years," said Jean carelessly. "He drives us when we are on the continent, you know. He speaks French perfectly and is an excellent driver. Father has tried to persuade him to come to England, but he hates London--he was telling me the other day that he hadn't been there for ten years."

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