The girl from Scotland Yard

As Lady Raytham drew aside the long velvet curtains, she looked down into Berkeley Square. It was half-past four o’clock on a cheerless February evening. Rain and sleet were falling and a thin yellow mist added to the gloom of the dying day. An interminable string of cars and taxicabs was turning toward Berkeley Street, their shining black roofs reflecting the glare of the overhead light that had just then hissed and spluttered to life.

She looked blankly toward the desolation of the gardens, a place of bare-limbed trees and shivering shrubs--stared, as though she expected to see some fog wraith take a definite and menacing shape and give tangible form to the shadows that menaced reason and life.

She was a woman of twenty-eight, straight and slim. Hers was the type of classical beauty which would defy the markings of age for the greater part of a lifetime. A fascinating face, calm, austere. Her eyes were a cold English gray. You might imagine her the patrician abbess of some great conventual establishment, or a lady of broad manors defending inexorably the stark castle of her lord against the enemy who came in his absence. Analyse her face, feature by feature, put one with the other, and judge her by the standards which profess to measure such things, and brow and chin said “purpose” with unmistakable emphasis.

She was not in her purposeful mood now; rather was she uncertain and irritable, the nearest emotions to fear that she knew.

She let the curtains fall back until they overlapped, and walked across to the fireplace, glancing at the tiny clock. The salon was half lit; the wall sconces were dark, but the big lamp on the table near the settee glowed brightly. This room bore evidence of money lavishly spent. The greater part of its furnishings would one day reach the museums of millionaire collectors; three pictures that hung upon the apple-green walls were earmarked for the National Gallery.

As she stood looking down into the fire, there was a gentle tap at the door, and the butler came in. He was a tall man, rather portly in his way; a man with double chin and an unlined face. He carried a small salver in his hand, a buff oblong in the centre.

Lady Raytham tore open the envelope. It was dated from Constantinople, and was from Raytham. She had been expecting the telegram all that afternoon. Raytham, of course, had changed his plans. In that sentence was epitomized his life and career. He was going on to Basra and thence to Bushire, to see the interstate oil wells, or the sites of them. He was expensively apologetic for two closely written sheets. If he could not return before April, would she go on to Cannes as she had arranged? He was “awfully sorry,” he must have said that at least four times.

She read it again, folded the pink sheets and laid them on the table.

The butler was waiting, head slightly bent forward as though to catch her slightest whisper. She did not look at him.

“Thank you.”

“Thank you, m’lady.”

He was opening the door when she spoke.

“Druze, I am expecting the Princess Bellini and possibly Mrs. Gurden. I will have tea when they come.”

“Very good, m’lady.”

The door closed softly behind him. She raised her sombre eyes and looked at the polished wood of it with a curious, listening lift of her head as though she expected to hear something. But the butler was going slowly down the stairs, a quizzical smile in his eyes; his white, plump hands sliding in and over one another. He stopped on the landing to admire the little marble statue of Circe that his lordship had brought from Sicily. It was a habit of his to admire that Circe with the sly eyes and the beckoning finger. And as he looked, his mouth was puckered as though he were whistling.

A sharp rat-tat on the door made him withdraw from his contemplation. He reached the hall as the second footman opened the door.

Two women entered. Through the open door he had a glimpse of a limousine drawing away.

“Her ladyship is in the drawing room, your highness. Shall I take your highness’s coat?”

“You can’t,” said the first and the bigger woman brusquely. “Help Mrs. Gurden out of hers. Why you wear such horrible contraptions I can’t understand.”

Mrs. Gurden smiled largely.

“Darling, I must wear something. Thank you, Druze.”

Druze took the transparent silk coat and handed it to the second footman. The princess was already stamping up the stairs. She pushed open the door and walked in unannounced. Lady Raytham, standing by the fire, her head pillowed on her arm, looked up, startled.

“I’m so awfully sorry. Push the lights, Anita. The button is by your hand. Well?”

The Princess Anita Bellini struggled unaided out of her tweed coat and threw it over the back of a chair, jerked off her hat with another movement and tossed it after the coat.

People who saw Anita Bellini for the first time gazed at her in awe; there was a certain ruthless strength in every line, every feature. She was something more than fifty and was just under six feet in height.

The masculinity of the powerful face was emphasized by the gray hair, cut close in an Eton crop, and the rimless monocle which never left her eye. Between her white teeth she gripped a long amber holder in which a cigarette was burning.

Her speech was direct, abrupt, almost shocking in its frankness.

“Greta?”

She jerked the end of the cigarette holder toward the door.

“Being fussed over by Druze. That woman would ogle a dustman! She’s that age. It is a horrible thing to have been pretty once and to have produced certain reactions. You can never believe that the spirit has evaporated.”

Jane Raytham smiled.

“They say you were an awfully pretty girl, Nita----” she began.

“They lie,” said Princess Anita calmly. “Russell’s used to retouch my photographs till there was nothing left but the background.”

Greta floated in, hands outstretched, her big red mouth opened ecstatically.

“Darling!” she burst forth, and caught both Jane’s hands in hers. Anita Bellini’s fleshy nose wrinkled in a sneer.

And yet she should have grown accustomed to Mrs. Gurden, for ecstasy was Greta’s normal condition. She had that habit of touching people, holding them by the arms, stooping to look up into their faces with her big black eyes that sometimes squinted a little.

She had been pretty, but now her face was long and a little haggard, the face of a woman who was so afraid of missing something that she could not spare the time to sleep. Her lips were heavily carmined, her eyes carefully made up as though she were still expecting a call to return to the chorus from which Anita had rescued her.

“My lovely Jane! Exquisite as usual. That dress--don’t tell me! Chenel--isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Jane Raytham scarcely looked down. “No, I think it is a dress I bought in New York last year.”

Greta shook her head speechlessly.