The Story of Ivy · Chapter 18 (2/2)

She stopped, ashamed of, and frightened at, her own emotion. She felt now, as if it were someone else who had uttered that passionate warning.

Ivy Lexton suddenly gave a stifled cry. Tottering forward she sank down on a chair, and, moaning, covered her face with her hands.

All at once, she could not have said why, perhaps it was a glimpse she caught of Ivy Lexton’s convulsed face, there flashed into the girl’s mind a certain dread suspicion; and much that had seemed inexplicable suddenly became clear.

Ivy slipped off the chair on to the floor, and lay there quite still.

Enid Dent opened the door.

“I am afraid,” she said quietly to the maid who had been in the hall obviously listening to what was going on inside the drawing-room, “that Mrs. Lexton has fainted.”

As the scared-looking young woman went to call Nurse Bradfield, who was then packing, for she was about to go on to a new case, Enid left the flat and, without waiting for the lift, she ran down the stairs.

Hailing a taxicab she threw the driver her address in Ebury Street. She felt extraordinarily excited, carried out of herself. Consciously she longed for the man who was driving her to go faster⁠—faster! At last he drew up; she paid him off, put the latchkey in the lock, and then, shaking with excitement, she walked straight into the room where Mrs. Gretorex was still lying back in the big armchair.

“I think I know now,” she said in a stifled voice, “who poisoned Jervis Lexton, and you and I, Mrs. Gretorex, must try and think of a way in which we can get proof, proof⁠—proof!”

Mrs. Gretorex looked up at the girl.

“Who is it you now suspect?” she asked slowly, “of having poisoned Jervis Lexton?”

Enid hesitated for a moment, then she said in a low voice, “His wife.”

“I have felt almost sure, from the first, that Ivy Lexton poisoned her husband,” said Mrs. Gretorex quietly.

Then she rose and, coming quite close up to the girl, she added: “What is more, I am convinced that Roger knows the truth now. That is the real reason why he begged Sir Joseph Molloy to be very careful as to what questions he put to Mrs. Lexton in his cross-examination.”

Mrs. Gretorex took Enid’s hand.

“You and I believe this terrible thing of Ivy Lexton. But it can do Roger no good to say what we believe. It would, even, probably, do him harm.”

“Does Mr. Oram know that you think her guilty?”

“Yes,” said Roger’s mother, and she sighed. “I told him just before the trial opened. He begged me most earnestly to put any idea of the kind out of my mind, as he felt convinced I was wrong. He pointed out to me that there was not what he called an iota of evidence connecting Mrs. Lexton with the crime. In fact, I saw that I dropped very very much in his estimation as a sensible woman when I told him of my more than suspicion, of my absolute conviction, that Mrs. Lexton had had some all-powerful motive for wishing her husband dead.”

“Surely we can discover what that was?”

Mrs. Gretorex shook her head. “She certainly did not wish to marry Roger⁠—of that I feel quite sure. I hoped against hope that something might come out while Sir Joseph Molloy cross-examined her. But, of course, nothing did come out, and it is my conviction, Enid, that nothing ever will.”

That same day the fact that Roger Gretorex had made up his mind not to appeal appeared in the late editions of the evening papers. “It will only prolong the agony for my mother,” he had said to Mr. Oram. “And as for me, I am sufficiently a coward to long for it to be all over.”

And so they all⁠—those who loved Roger, and she who feared him, together with the myriads of men and women who regarded him as a callous murderer, and who hoped that he would finally confess his crime⁠—waited for the end.