Taken Unawares

Sun (Christchurch), Volume III, Issue 885, 11 December 1916, Page 3

Taken Unawares

[All Rights Reserved]

Author of

CHAPTER XV.—(.Continued.) Tiridgo parties! Where'.' Whal parties How the questions "danced in his mind. How was it. lie had not heard of any.' Terry, playing with her now life like a new toy, stuck all the invita tions sin l received round the mirror in ♦die drawing' room dinners, dances, athomes, bazaars —there were plenty of then:. Ah! of course, 'no remembered Middenly, there .had been a card party m month or two ago—but whist, not bridge—a whist drive, quite a harmless tiling, a modern craze—and Terry had laughed. ''She could not play cards," she said! He remembered it distinctly —how she had laughed at the idea! ''Cards! No good my going there!'' ill. 1 had said. " I can 't piay.'' Now Yi was looking at him with a smile, half 'pitying, half surprised. "Humphrey, how can you be so blind,'' she said, '•ant so stupid'' They are not ordinary whist drives Terry goes to, but things far more dangerous and deadly. And who her friends are, I don't know. 1 am sorry to say it was 1 who introduced her to .Mis Caley. 1 wish I hadn't done so now, but'' —she shrugged her shoulders —"who would have thought Terry would have grown so intimate with her.'" \ Humphrey stared at her. Who Mrs Caley was he did not know —someone, he supposed, who had been in Mrs Stevenish's party at Braueaster. Bat, lie thought, Terry had seen nothing of these people since her marriage. Even now the worst suspicion did not suggest itself to him. That Terry, bitter disappointment though she was to him, led any life but that which he knew scarcely occurred to him even now. More and more uncomfortably lie began to remember those friends of hers who came in in the evenings— Brixton people he had supposed, but now he recollected that they played cards sometimes. But he had never seen Terry at a table —she did not know how to play. Mrs Stevenish had got • hold of some silly story —people had been talking anil inventing, as'people do, and it was all smoke without tire, of course. lie squared his shoulders, and hope, "born in the flush of a fear," tugged suddenly sharply at his heart strings. After all, failure though his marriage had been, might lie not even make it into success. He would try again. But Mrs Stevenish's voice broke in. "You are blind and mad, Humphrey, to let her go on so. She will ruin you — people are saying so already —and I don't know really what the end will be. She is so reckless, so careless. You must look into things more, Humphrey, You don't know —you don't know half what goes on " Once more he drew himself up; once more pride rose to hide from this woman all he thought and feared. No one should speak to him of' his wife's dishonour—whatever dishonour there might be, whatever she had done. No one, least of all Mrs Stevenish, should see he doubted her. "You have wasted a great deal of my time," lie said in a cold voice, "Whether you did it for a right purpose or a wrong one. And you will please understand that I wish to hear nothing further about my wife. And if you hear any more foolish stories, piease deny them." She gave him a peculiar smile; her eves Hashed. For a moment she looked as though she would say more. And for a moment, indeed, the temptation to humiliate him, to sec him writhe, to confront him with facts, wan sharp enough. But after all, he would suffer more later, and when things began to happen she would not want to be too much in evidence. She wanted to pose as a friend who hail tried to guard and wain Terry, and the less she affected to know now the better. "Well." she said, "of course it is foolish to listen to gossip, but I know what has happened at my own flat, and I have warned Terry. Only last, month I warned her not to play unless you knew; and because she played so high, and was so reckless, I have not invited her lately." At her' flat! Only last month! How the words echoed and re-echoed, how the room rocked up and down, and how strange and unfamiliar the whole plaee became on a sudden! Ice gripped his heart, and froze it. His face was a mask. No sign of surprise did he give, and fury almost drove Mrs Stevenish to say more. Bat she cheeked it. "Well, if you will be so wilfully blind and foolish," she said, shrugging her shoulders, "I can't help it. But I'll tell you this, Humphrey, she shan't gamble at. my flat any more; I won't ask her, except when there are really harmless people there." ilc bowed. "You need not take unnecessary prb- . cautions,'' he said. And how strange his voice sounded! How dead, and dull! He watched her pick up her umbrella and settle her furs. She flashed a look at. him. "1 have done my best," she said, "and. Humphrey, you'll remember, 1 want to be your friend, and hers." "Thank you," he said. He opened the door. lie heard, the rustling of her skirts on the matting, the sound of a. door opening, of a clerk showing her out; and then he became suddenly conscious that. Cole was standing there before him with a brief in his hands .and a queer look on his face. "This has come from Stimsons, sir," he said; and Humphrey roused. "You know I never take their briefs,'' he interrupted. "No, sir, I know; but their clerk said their client were more than usually anxious to get you sir, and begged that, you would just, look at the brief. They'll be quite content after that, sir, if you'll only took at it. For some reason they're anxious for you to read ii." "I don't care about, ir—a shady firm," Humphrey said, "but you can jc I it on inv desk; 1 II see about, it.' ' lb' walked to the window. Outside darkness now, dotted and spotted with myriads of lights. Across ' the wide Temple Gardens lay a patch of shadow, bat from the windows on both sides liiititl hundreds of steady lamps, and far . across the patch of darkness the river gleamed with splashes of yellow light, and against: the sky a coloured sign Hashed sharply in and out. Cole shut the door and went. The room lay silent. Humphrey turned, ftnd going slowly over to his chair drop-

"You briefs,"

By ANNIE O. TIBBITS

" The Threads of Destiny," " Life's Revenge," etc.

ped hea\ilv into il, and sitting very '•till, staring out before linn sciul; midline;, lie seemed !" be in Hie grip of some spell from which he could not rouse, and for some time he sat motionless. Then something under his hand, 'familiar !o lie- touch, rouse.i him to a mechanical action. I'ntliinkingly he took up the brief and opened it. Down the formal thing In- looked, staring at the log lettering, at Hie nourishes and Si rolls, a! the written words and unpunctuafed sentences, and read, at first without understanding or knowing what he was doing; th'. v words held no meaning for him. The elaborate black fetters .lanced about tie paper like imps. Dally he saw names mentioned: "parte . . .ex parte . . . hereinafter called . . . ." What? "petitioner . . . respondent." What was if. ai! about.' Somebody named Caley. Where had he heard thai name before? Something I Mrs Stevenish had been saying—a mass of lies, invented by a wicked woman. Terry was only a child, audit was foolish of him to believe such things of her —but, of course, he did not believe. It was abominable —but he must look after her more carefully, guard and help her. She was only a child, and he had made a bitter mistake in letting her go her own way. But this brief? Who was Agnes Caley? And why did they offer him a divorce brief? It was out of his line; he had not taken a divorce case for years —he disliked them. Divorce was against his principles altogether. "Those whom Cb)d hat. joined together let. no man put asunder." For better or worse, for good or bad, j lie held a man and his wife must stand together! And now why should he lie asked to read this brief? 1910, C. 44. IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE, I > ROB AT li, DIVORCE, AND ADMIRALTY DIVISION (Divorce). Caley v. Caley. Dawson and Others. Others! He glanced down the brief, and the meaning of the words came sharply at him, stunning and staggerCaley, of Stonebridge Mansions Kensington, was suing for divorce from her husband, Edward Thomas Caley, claiming separation on the grounds familiar enough to a barrister, but which came to Humphrey now with a sudden shock. For out of the half-dozen names given, one stared out with hideous distinctness, with cruel clearness. "Teresa Hindon, nee Tredwick, of Brixton" —with details that were terrible and surely impossible? He gripped the brief, crushing it to a shapeless mass in his lingers, sitting holding his breath, still and cold wdiile the heavy wave broke over him. Terry! Good heavens, what did it mean? Terrv—mentioned in divorce—his Terry! Slowly he lifted the brief again and straightened it out. And dazed and still he sat until Terry's name, written in the formal writing on the stiff white paper, resolved itself into her face —the laughing, lovely, elfish face he loved, that lay so close against his heart. Quite suddenly lie put down his head upon his desk", bowing it beneath the shame, realising what it meant. Terry! Ilis Terry! His wife! Was it one hour later —or two, or three, when lie found himself before his own house looking up at its stiff, old-fashioned stucco front at last? A long time had passed. He felt it must be getting late. Lights burned in the drawing-room and were out in the dining-room. It must be long past dinner time, and no doubt Terry had grown tired of waiting for him, ami perhaps she had friends there now in the drawing-room- —playing—laughing in their gay ways. He stood to listen but no sound came. Everything was quiet, and in the darkness the old house looked dull and heavy and unchanged — just as it had been months ago before the greatest change of all had come to him. Mechanically he put in his latchkey and turned it —just as he had done for years. And now somehow the changes Terry had wrought in the hall seemed to rouse him. The wall-paper, an elaborate design of peacocks and roses and Eastern figures in red, threw into relief the heavy black oak cabinet which stood on one side—seemed to show more clearly upon it the modern art vases, pewters, candlesticks, grinning cats, aid grotesques which Terry had carelessly scattered upon it; and the Eastern rugs, the bright brass rods on the stairs, and the empty spaces on the wall from which Terry had taken the hideous Early Victorian pictures he used to know, seemed to him suddenly emptier and stranger —a place he did not recognise. The change came upon him almost with a shock now. He had been so utterly taken unaware, so unprepared, even after Mrs Stevenish's interview, for the further shock of Terry's name on Stimsoii's brief that it had dazed him curiously, It had been like some strain developing suddenly a disease that had been lying dormant. For months, as he knew now, this had been gradually coming upon him. lie had loved Terry with a depth and strength that even he had not realised. All the deepest part of him, all that had lain in him undeveloped, had sprung sharply into life at the sijvht of Terry, months ago now, and the disappointment that had been creeping slowly upon him during those months' had received a blow to-day that, shocked into stupor every feeling he had. Ami he was a man of strong emotions which had been rigidly suppressed—a man whose roofs of life should have been centred in wife and home, and a man who had held all those emotions ba.-k with rigid hands unt.il he met Terry, when he had let them go. And they had brought him ruin and despair blacker than anything he had ever felt —despair that touched the very roots of his being—divorce —that he hated but filled, him with intense horror. His face was grey as ir. came into the light, of Hie hall. Mi's Steer, crossing it. ami catching sudden sight of hini gave a cry, "Oh, Mi- Humphrey, whatever is the matter: '■' she gasped. (To bo continued.)