"Was he drunk?" Esdaile asked. He was walking about, head down, frowning.
The old man stroked his grizzled beard.
"Well, I won't say he hadn't had a few. I saw him have two or three liqueur brandies. And he's a crossish sort of man when he's at home, especially when it's wearing off a bit, but he isn't easily bowled over, isn't Harry. Well, as I was telling you. He gets home about tea-time that day, and the first thing he sees is one of the children playing with something or other in his mouth. He was popping it in and out. You know what children are, Mr. Esdaile—everything goes straight into their mouths. So Westbury asked the child how much oftener he wants telling about putting things into his mouth, and takes it away from him. And what do you think it was, Mr. Esdaile? It was a bullet!"
"A bullet?" said Esdaile with a show of astonishment.
"A bullet. And it had been fired, because it was all out of shape. Well, you don't find bullets everywhere, like leaves off the trees, do you?"
"Where on earth did the child get it?" Esdaile asked.
"Ah, that's what Harry wants to know!" The gray old head was wagged a few times. "Shouts for his missis, and there's a bit of a scene. The child says he found the bullet in the bedroom. How did it get there? Harry wants to know. It seems the window was wide open to air the room a bit. Then Harry asks what the child was doing in the bedroom, and whattime he went up, and what time he came down again, and I don't know what else. Then he has a bit of a sleep and a cup of tea and a wash and goes off out again. I believe he went straight to Inspector Webster with the bullet, but he won't say either Yes or No. He's very mysterious about it. A man told me, though, that he'll be an important witness when the Case comes on."
"What Case?" Esdaile asked.
"Well, Westbury he looks at it like this, Mr. Esdaile: If that bullet came in at his window it might have hit somebody, he says, and he's great on the window being just opposite this house of yours. And he's worked it out, from the time it was when his wife cleaned the bedroom and where the children were and all that, that the bullet must have come in at the same time that accident was."
"But what's a flying accident got to do with a bullet?"
"Ah, that I can't tell you; but he's very mysterious. And I know he's written a letter to the papers about dangerous flying, because I heard him reciting bits of it. He says he'll make a Case of it or his name isn't Harry Westbury."
"What paper has he written to?"
"I can't remember the name just for the moment, but it's one of the papers. And I heard him reciting one bit about three million pounds' damage. I don't suppose he's written to the papers about the bullet; that's the tit-bit, that is, and he's keeping that to himself, except for Inspector Webster. Westbury's a difficult sort of man once he gets started on a thing. Stares you down like. You say you don't know him by sight? It was him brought that ladder into yourgarden—he was there when Mr. Rooke went up on the roof——"
And that (to pass on) was the gist of the discussion on the framing of Esdaile'sfêtes-champêtre.
A few minutes' reflection would have shown Esdaile that there was no immediate reason why he should have hesitated to have that wardrobe carried down into his cellar. He himself admits this. But it is easy to think of these things afterwards, and he was caught off his guard. He did allow reluctance to appear.
"Why not move this desk and let it stand here?" he said, pointing to the writing-table with the mignonette-shaded lamp on it. "It's not a bad-looking piece at all. Pity to hide it. What is it—Jacobean?"
It was either genuine Jacobean or else a passable copy, but, placed where Philip proposed to place it it would have been a little in the way of anybody passing to the French window. Mrs. Cunningham pointed this out.
"Do you think so? Let's measure it," Esdaile replied.
Measurement of the piece confirmed Mrs. Cunningham's view, and Philip next suggested that it should go into the large studio.
"Why not have it where you can get at it and use it?" he said. "I thought women complained they could never get hanging-space enough. Or what about upstairs in Mollie's room?"
But Audrey Cunningham's frocks, which she madequite wonderfully herself out of almost nothing at all, were few, and Mollie had left her plenty of room for them. Besides, there were the dress-baskets. These would hardly add to the beauty either of the annexe or the studio. For the baskets at any rate the most convenient place was certainly the cellar. And it was at this point that Philip, recognizing that further objection would look rather like obstinacy, yielded.
He confesses that he felt awkward about the whole situation. Either he had lent his house or he had not. If the former, Monty and his fiancée should have had the complete freedom of it; if the latter, or if for any reason he regretted his generosity, the position was even more obscure. To say that until the marriage he had lent it to Monty only and not to Mrs. Cunningham was mere quibbling; he had made the offer in entire good faith, and had not made a lawyer's matter of it, with clauses and reservations about this, that and the other.
Yet here he not only was, but here very much master of the house whether he wished it or not. Audrey Cunningham would of course be very nice about it, but he could see very plainly how it must strike her. He did not even pretend to be working. He was merely hanging on, for a reason unexplained and unexplainable to her. Monty knew his reason, of course; but the reason she supposed to be the truth (for she had been told that one of the men who had crashed was their friend and Joan Merrow's more than friend) by no means accounted for everything. It did not account for a quarter of his eccentricities; it did not even account for his latest inadvertence, of proposing any place in the house except the cellar for the bestowal of that nuisance of a wardrobe. What an ass he hadbeen about that! The cellar could be madeperfectly safeat an instant's warning; as a matter of fact it wasperfectly safeat that moment. There was no reason whatever why Audrey Cunningham should not go down there.
But things would get worse as time went on. Presently Audrey would be living here, as Monty's wife, and it would be difficult for Philip to delay his departure after that. A honeymoon is a honeymoon even when it is spent in a borrowed studio, and newly-married couples don't commonly take in fussy and fretful lodgers. Within a week or so he or they would most certainly have to clear out.
Philip could have stated what had actually happened in one short sentence. He had offered them one house, but was now called upon to hand over to them the possession of quite a different one.
But this was impossible to explain without dragging in the thing of all things that he wished to keep from Audrey, from Mollie, and above all from Joan—that beastly episode of the pistol, with all it involved.
And here at any rate he was quite firm. Chance what might, that must be kept the men's affair only. As far as the women were concerned at present the accident was a pure accident. Well, an accident it must remain.
But what about that Police Inspector who had appeared so suddenly in our midst the night before, and for all Philip knew might be round again at any moment? Audrey Cunningham had been told nothing about that. She might have many opinions about Philip's delayed departure, but about a series of domiciliary visits by the police she could have one only, namely, that the loan of a studio wasn't worth it.In suppressing this piece of information Philip was actually doing his best to keep her in Lennox Street. To have informed her would have been much the same thing as asking her to leave.
And what exactly had passed when Philip's tenor voice, interrupting the Inspector's deep one, had said, "Well, perhaps you'd better come in"?
Of the four of us sitting there I alone had instantly realized what must have happened. Our Nosey Parker of a Westbury had been at work already. I remembered the dull insistence of the man and how he had said in my hearing that he and Inspector Webster "would be having a bit of a talk that evening." I recalled also the stupid but dangerous cunning with which he had repeated over and over again that Rooke had been the first on the scene of the accident. Well, he hadn't lost very much time. The Inspector had stood there in the doorway, and neither Esdaile, Hubbard nor Rooke had had the least idea why.
Now there are a good many of the commonly-accepted views on physiognomy that I for one don't share. One of these is about rather narrowly-set eyes. Webster, who was a very big red-and-black man, had these eyes under a sort of bison-front of close-curling hair, but I did not associate them with meanness and slyness at all. On the contrary, they had rather a kindly glint, and they reminded me of the infinitesimal slight cast that at certain moments makes some women irresistible. No, I did not set Inspector Webster down as a bad sort. At the same time there was no nonsenseabout him, and I should have thought twice before trying any tricks with him.
I was more thankful than I can tell you that Philip also, in spite of the emotional gamut he had run that day, still had resilience enough to sum the Inspector up very much as I did. There was no bland "Well, Inspector, and to what are we indebted for the pleasure of this visit?" nor anything of that kind. Perhaps that dangerous pistol, X-raying itself so plainly in our minds through the top of the escritoire, had forbidden any such attitude. I now know, as a matter of fact, the life-line on to which he had immediately and instinctively laid hold. Inspector Webster, whatever he had come for, was to be treated exactly as the women were to be treated, and the accident-theory was to hold the field.
So this is what had happened:—
The Inspector, after a few conventional remarks about being sorry to trouble us gentlemen for the second time that day and so on, had come down like a hammer straight upon our weakest point. This was the part that Monty Rooke had played in that morning's events. First of all he wanted (with our permission) to put a few words to Mr. Rooke. I think he used the word "permission" in good faith, and not as any kind of a veiled threat.
I saw Monty moisten his lips. He has since explained the swiftness with which he also was able to come into line and to play up so really nobly as he did. Philip, if you remember, had forbidden him pretty gruffly to say one word about all this to Audrey Cunningham; it is no light matter to dictate to another man what he shall say and what he shall not say to his fiancée; and this it was that saved the situation.If Monty was to be ordered to keep his mouth shut before his fiancée he was jolly well not going to be pumped by an outsider, Police Inspector or no Police Inspector. On such hairs do our actions hang sometimes.
"Fire away," he had said.
"Well, sir, to begin with, would you be so kind as to tell me in your own words exactly what you saw on the roof this morning?"
"Certainly," Monty had replied.
And he had launched out.
From the point of view of the things he omitted I can only describe his performance as brilliant. Camouflage was certainly Monty's war-job. Not one single word was there about bullet-holes, cartridge-cases or pistols. Had there been a polar bear or a pterodactyl on the roof it might have been worth mentioning, but a pistol—no.
My only fear was lest he should be so pleased with his own performance as to undo it again out of sheer satisfaction presently.
"Thank you very much indeed, sir," said the Inspector. "I asked you for your own words and you've given them. Now I wonder if I might be allowed to ask you one or two questions?"
"Fire away," said Monty again.
But here the Inspector himself had seemed to be in some slight difficulty. Apparently for some reason he wasn't very anxious to speak of pistols either. Polar bears or pterodactyls, yes; but not pistols. I have since thought that, as a man of some penetration, he also might have had his private opinion about Mr. Harry Westbury, and thought it best to act on anything Westbury said with caution.
Nevertheless, the series of questions that had followed had all been in the very close neighborhood of pistols, so to speak. I itemize what struck me as being their real, if unuttered trend.
"About this man that's dead, Mr. Rooke. You saw his face, of course?"
(Item: Had Maxwell been shot through the head?)
Yes, Monty had seen his face, but so, he ventured to remind the Inspector, had he himself.
"Well, say I had other things to attend to and didn't particularly notice. You'd say he was—pretty bad?"
(Item: So bad that there might have been a little hole on one side of his head and a big one on the other without your noticing it?)
"Rotten," said Monty with an unaffected shiver.
"Bleeding much?"
(Item: Or anything else scattered about?)
"No."
"Clothes singed?"
(Item: If not through the head, perhaps through the body?)
"Yes. Badly. Bits of the parachute too."
"From where you were on the roof lots of people could see you?"
(Item: If you'd done anything you'd no business to do, for instance?)
"Any number of people I should say," Monty had replied rather faintly. "But I don't see what you're getting at. You were up there too. What is it all about?"
And here Philip had seen fit to intervene, rather quickly.
"Yes, that's what I'm wondering, Inspector. Is it a proper question to ask? And is it proper to ask you if you'd like a glass of whisky, by the way?"
The narrow eyes had twinkled. "Not supposed to, sir——"
"Right. Say when——"
And so our healths had been drunk.
"You see," Philip had resumed presently, "I understood from Mr. Mackwith this morning—you knew that was Mr. Mackwith, K.C., you were talking to, didn't you—the tall man in morning-coat and spats?"
"Was he indeed, sir?"
"Yes, that was Mr. Mackwith, and I understood from him that you had said you had all the evidence you wanted?"
The Inspector had been sitting with his cap on his knees and the glass of whisky inside it like a flowerpot in a vase. He had ruminated.
"Well," he had said suddenly, "the fact is that that was this morning, gentlemen. Since then a certain piece of information's been laid in connection with this affair. I'm not at liberty to say what this information is, nor whether we shall act on it or not, but the Law's for the protection of us all, gentlemen, and I take it all of us wants to do our best to maintain it. Even if it meant the inconvenience," he added deliberately, "of a warrant for the search of these premises."
Here the sorely-tried Philip had given a wild laugh.
"Search these premises! Search 'em now if you like. But in God's name what for?"
"Accidents aren't always what they seem, sir," Inspector Webster had replied.
And now (to come out of this winding of the story into the open again) here was Audrey Cunningham with dress-baskets and a wardrobe for which the most suitable place was certainly the cellar.
"All right," Esdaile said suddenly. "Let's do it now. Monty and I can manage it if you'll hold a candle for us."
And he lighted and put into Audrey's hand the same candle he had himself used when he had gone down into the cellar to fetch the orange curaçao.
He was still kicking himself that he had made such a fuss. Now at last he saw that, although only a trifle stood between revelation and perfect concealment, this trifle was as firm as the rocks of which the mountains are built. A short flight of steepish stone steps, with a rather awkward right-angled bend half-way down, descended ten feet or so, and there was no cellar door. You stepped from the bottom step, which was a little worn and concave, and there you were, with nothing more to do but to put the wardrobe and the dress-baskets inside and to come out again.
The wardrobe was at the turn of the stairs. Mrs. Cunningham stood just above it, holding the candle for the two men to see.
"Gently—don't knock it," muttered Philip, "and mind the edge of the steps—they're pretty old——"
The wardrobe cleared the bend, and Audrey Cunningham followed it into the cellar.
It was only natural that she should look with some curiosity at the place in which Philip Esdaile had spent that unaccounted-for half hour on the morning of theday before. I did the same thing myself at a later stage. But all that she saw was the most ordinary of cellars. Hubbard himself, who seemed to have cellar-on-the-brain, would have found nothing remarkable in it. This is all that was to be seen:—
A roomy, gloomy, clammy place, with old plastered walls, and neither door nor window of any kind nor other means of entry than that they had just used. Its air hit skin and nostrils like that of a grave. The light of the single candle seemed lost in its obscurity. When Audrey held the candle up above her head a couple of heavy beams could be seen, necessary for the support of the largish area of the studio floor; when she held it to one side it showed in a corner a couple of gas-meters with the usual pipes, and underneath them the improvised rack in which Esdaile kept his modest stock of wine. When she held it to the other side its light hardly reached the farther wall, but wavered over the dim objects that half-filled the floor-space. These were merely the furniture for which Esdaile had no present use, and consisted of a large couch covered with a dingy dust-sheet, a few oddments of chairs, a number of packing-cases, and in fact the usual miscellaneous collection of household lumber that one day seems hardly worth keeping and the next looks just too good to throw away. Nearest to hand on the wine-rack stood the bottle of curaçao, just where Esdaile himself had replaced it. And that was all.
"Well, where will you have it, Audrey?" said Philip. "What about over by the sofa there?"
Mrs. Cunningham was once more holding the candle over her head. Any young woman's face by candlelight always seems singularly attractive to me, especially if she is a dark-eyed woman, and she was aslight and graceful thing to have endured so much. Had Joan been holding that candle up she would have given you the impression of a statue, but Mrs. Cunningham was just the opposite—all warm and fleeting and impermanent charm, a creature depending on the varying accidents of color, even when that color was only the sooty black of her home-made dress, the candlelight on her face and the tiny reflections in her large and lustrous eyes.
Suddenly she gave a shiver and a nervous laugh.
"I don't think I should like to be shut in here alone," she said.
"Why not?" Philip asked.
But the "why not" hardly needed saying, with that same candlestick in her hand and, as she once more moved it, that same jar of curaçao seeming to advance a little out of the shadows. These things brought the shock and dread of that other morning all too plainly before her again. It was within these chill sweating walls that Philip Esdaile had done the "wool gathering" he had spoken of. What wool? She saw none. Then why, up to that very moment almost, had he shuffled so? Why had he seemed so anxious that the wardrobe should be placed anywhere rather than in the place where they now stood? Here she was. She could not imagine any kind of cellar, however earthy and tomblike, that so changed its nature or properties that at one moment it must be jealously guarded and the next thrown open for her to look as much as she pleased. She was free to look. Monty also was wandering about in the farther corner there, as greedy for knowledge as she. The only check on her freedom was that she felt that Philip at the same time was covertly watching her.
Then all at once something seemed to give way in her. She put the candle down on one end of the sheeted sofa and turned to Philip. Her hands were clasped at her breast, the honeysuckle fingers interworking.
"Oh, please tell me!" she begged. "What is it makes this place so queer? There's something—I can feel it—like eyes on me—I've a being-watched sort of feeling, as if something was wrong——"
Philip took up the candle. "Then let's go upstairs," he said promptly.
But something almost like hysteria seemed to take her. Her voice rose.
"No, I want to know! I don't feel I can come to this house unless I know! I don't want to come here if it's going to be like this! You don't want to tell me—I know you could if you wanted! Oh, I wish Mollie was here!"
"Come upstairs," Philip repeated gently. "Bring her up, Monty."
But she went on with even less and less control.
"Oh, I think it's cruel! You're all cruel! You never think of us! Joan's to go on being told nothing, and Mollie's kept in the dark—oh, I know she is—and I'm made to feel that I'm not wanted here.... I want to go back to Oakley Street, Monty. I can't stop here. I won't. Everything's been wrong ever since that accident. It's horrible. I'm going away. I dare say they'll let me keep my room on; if they won't I must find somewhere else. Please take me away."
Upstairs, she became a little calmer, but she still wanted to be taken away. Monty was soothing her where she sat on the little Empire sofa, and Philip's face was distressed as he walked up and down. Then,though there was little heart in his attempt, he tried gently to laugh her out of it.
"But of course you'll go back to Oakley Street," he said. "You're there for three days yet, aren't you? It will be all right by that time. It's just a little bit of a complication we're in. It won't be long now. Then you'll get married and come along here, of course. Pull yourself together, my dear. It's all right. There, you're feeling better now, aren't you?"
He felt a perfect brute, he says, but he didn't see what else he could do. Even if he had had the right, he doesn't see that it would have helped to tell her that, after tying herself up with a drunkard, she was now going to make a second experiment with a man who had no more sense than to go and get himself mixed up in an affair that might bring the police round at any moment. He had no such right. Just as before he had been unable to explain to Hubbard and myself until he had spoken to Monty, so now he couldn't take any further step till he had seen Chummy Smith. It might be hard on Joan and Mrs. Cunningham, not to mention his wife, but what other course could he take? When you set about to burke inquiry into a capital Case the fewer people you take into your confidence the better. Besides, who knew yet that it was a capital Case? Suppose twenty words from Chummy should somehow explain it all? Suppose some ridiculous mistake had been made? Suppose our elaborate pretenses to ourselves were in reality no pretenses at all, and that the thing really was what it seemed—just an aeroplane accident with nothing more to be said about it?
Yes, in spite of all the evidence, he would have been glad at the moment to have believed that.
"Look here, Audrey," he said at last, "I feel absolutely rotten about all this. I know I'm in the way and I oughtn't to be here at all. When I turned over this place to you I hadn't the faintest idea of stopping on like this. I'd go straight into rooms now if I could, but that wouldn't do. Don't ask me why, there's a dear. For one thing I've got to see Smith. They tell me he can be seen in a few days now. Then I'll just stop for the wedding and clear right out afterwards. Whats the matter with that?"
The matter with that appeared in Audrey Cunningham's next words, which she spoke slowly and with her eyes on the floor.
"It isn't just you. It's Monty as well. He could tell me if he wanted, but he doesn't want. I don't think I want to get married," she said.
The letter she wrote crossed Mollie Esdaile's Sunday morning one. It was written on Saturday, and missed the Santon Sunday morning delivery by a post, arriving there on Monday.
"Please don't think me ungrateful," Mollie read, "but all sorts of things seem to be happening, and I'm so afraid of hurting you after all your kindness. Perhaps I'd better come to the point straight away and explain afterwards. I don't think I can accept your offer of Lennox Street for Monty and myself after all."
Mollie was standing in the porch of the cottage as she read this. It was immediately after breakfast. The postman could be seen in the middle distance,climbing the stile on his way to Newsome's. Joan was upstairs, getting the children ready for the shore.
Mollie thrust the letter into her breast. If Joan knew that the postman had been she would come flying downstairs, and in any case Mollie did not wish to be seen reading a letter. This from Audrey Cunningham was all there was for her. For Joan there was nothing at all.
Quietly she slipped into the cottage, picked up a floppy print sunbonnet, and slipped noiselessly out again. The back of the cottage had no windows. Like a malefactor she skirted the palings of the little front garden and gained the security of the back. But even this was not far enough. The path up the field led to the Coast-guard Station, and, with one furtive glance behind her, she took it. She would finish Audrey's letter there.
Mollie Esdaile is still a young woman, but she looked every minute of her age that morning. She had not slept. The room adjoining hers was Joan's, and the wall between them might just as well not have existed, so little a barrier had it been to the restless mental ticking of the girl on the other side of it. A soft and tortured toss, then the creaking of the bed, then the sounds of Joan moving about her room; the striking of a match, a long silence, and then the creaking of the bed again—all night it had gone on. Mollie had not gone to her; what had there been to do or say? A hundred times she had promised, as if it had lain in her power, that there should be a letter in the morning. None had come. She felt a coward. She simply could not face Joan.
There was a merry morning wind, that ruffled the fleeces on the sheep's backs and set the halliards of theCoast-guard's mast cracking and rattling. Mollie tied the strings of the print sunbonnet under her plump chin and walked with her head a little averted in order to see round the print blinker. Beyond the waving grass-heads the sea appeared, a wide silver glitter. You cannot see the shore from that hill. The sands and the mile-long rollers lie far below that cliff's edge over which the men are let down by ropes to gather the eggs from the awful ledges.
Then, in the little sunken way that runs down to the Rocket-house, she sat down and took out the letter again.
"I don't think I can accept your offer of Lennox Street for Monty and myself after all. Our engagement is not definitely broken off, but I can't stand things as they are, and am back in Oakley Street again. They say I can stay on, but I may have to pay a little more. Monty is still at the studio."
"I don't think I can accept your offer of Lennox Street for Monty and myself after all. Our engagement is not definitely broken off, but I can't stand things as they are, and am back in Oakley Street again. They say I can stay on, but I may have to pay a little more. Monty is still at the studio."
"Iknewit!" broke from Mollie with soft conviction. "I knew that if Philip stayed that wedding would be put off! I told him so——"
Frowning, she turned to the letter again.
"I'm trying to think it all over quite calmly," the letter went on. "Perhaps it isn't Monty after all. Perhaps it is just that men worry me. I don't know really whether I'm a man's sort of woman. Their ways seem so queer and roundabout to me. Lots of them don't seem fair. I don't want to marry and make a mess of it a second time, and I don't think Monty sees this as I do. Of course, I don't want him to tell me every little thing he does and everywhere he goes or anything of that kind, but I hate being kept in the darkas I know I am being. It all seemed to start with that horrible accident. Nothing's been the same since. Of course, they've told me about Mr. Smith and poor darling Joan, but if it was only that I could understand it. I know there's something else. I'm afraid I'd rather a breakdown yesterday, when all three of us were in your cellar putting that wardrobe of mine away. There's something uncanny about that place. Monty thinks so too, but says he doesn't know what it is any more than I do. But there is something he does know and won't tell. And now it's all over Chelsea that something not quite right has happened. Mrs. Cook hinted at it this morning when she brought my milk up, and she said the milkman had told her. I really think that if the milkman knows I might be told. The fact is that just at present I don't feel much like men and marriage. You'll understand this, because I've told you heaps of things I should never dream of telling Monty——"
"I'm trying to think it all over quite calmly," the letter went on. "Perhaps it isn't Monty after all. Perhaps it is just that men worry me. I don't know really whether I'm a man's sort of woman. Their ways seem so queer and roundabout to me. Lots of them don't seem fair. I don't want to marry and make a mess of it a second time, and I don't think Monty sees this as I do. Of course, I don't want him to tell me every little thing he does and everywhere he goes or anything of that kind, but I hate being kept in the darkas I know I am being. It all seemed to start with that horrible accident. Nothing's been the same since. Of course, they've told me about Mr. Smith and poor darling Joan, but if it was only that I could understand it. I know there's something else. I'm afraid I'd rather a breakdown yesterday, when all three of us were in your cellar putting that wardrobe of mine away. There's something uncanny about that place. Monty thinks so too, but says he doesn't know what it is any more than I do. But there is something he does know and won't tell. And now it's all over Chelsea that something not quite right has happened. Mrs. Cook hinted at it this morning when she brought my milk up, and she said the milkman had told her. I really think that if the milkman knows I might be told. The fact is that just at present I don't feel much like men and marriage. You'll understand this, because I've told you heaps of things I should never dream of telling Monty——"
Mollie's gaze wandered to the twinkling silver sea. She remembered some of those things that would never be told to Monty. It was perhaps not altogether fair to Monty that he should have to restore the whole of the credit of his sex that the late George Cunningham had so let down, but she knew how Audrey felt about it. Menweretrials sometimes. "Queer and roundabout?" Mollie not seldom called them infants outright. Such little things pleased them, such even less things caused them to dig their hoofs into the ground and refuse to budge. Whatever Philip's tremendous reason for remaining in Chelsea might be, Mollie brushed it aside as a trifle compared with Audrey's marriage. For a moment she almost forgot Joan'sdistress. Philip, with his curaçao and candle-sticks, postpone Audrey's wedding? It was nonsense—not to be thought of. Mollie wouldn't hear of it. All this mystification should be put a stop to if she had to do it herself. Audrey, to be sure, was a highly-strung creature; lying there among the warm grasses and with the wind ruffling the silver sea, Mollie could afford not to take too seriously Audrey's broken sentences about uncanny cellars and whispered hints that ran all over Chelsea; but it seemed to her that there were two birds to be killed with one stone. If she were to go up to town she would be able to ascertain for herself what this Audrey-Monty trouble was all about, and also why newspapers were to be kept from Joan and how it was that Joan had first heard of Chummy's crash from Chummy himself.
She looked at her wrist-watch and scrambled to her feet. She could not go without letting Joan know she was going, and Joan would already have started with the children for the shore. There was a train at midday. She would have plenty of time to intercept Joan, to tell her she was going to leave her for a couple of days, to return to the cottage, change and pack her bag.
And she did not think it necessary to warn Philip of her intention either.
"But, darling—oh, don't go on like this! Can't you see that if I go I can clear up everything in half an hour? It'smuchthe best!"
Joan's manner was stony and impregnable. She stared straight before her.
"I don't mind being left quite, quite alone," was her reply.
"But I shall be back again on Wednesday, foolish child, and I'll wire you everything immediately if it costs me the whole of my quarter's pocket-money. Anything's better than this!"
"Just as you like," came the expressionless response.
Not finding her on the shore, Mollie had climbed the precipitous zigzag path to the cliff-top again and had sat down to rest, fairly blown. Then she had seen her a quarter of a mile away, sitting motionless on a rounded sky-line over which a hawthorn hedge straggled. The children were stolidly watching her, and she as stolidly was watching nothing. The boughs under which she sat were a custard of white bloom, and white was the sun-flecked sweater in the shadow of them, and white as snow the battlemented clouds overhead. Her eyes were dry and quite consciously enduring, and Mollie was alternately comforting and scolding her.
"I shall catch the midday train, and I shall be back on Wednesday," she repeated firmly. "If the mountain won't come to Mahomet or whatever it is, very well. Anddotry to be a little cheerful, darling. I heard you last night. That does no good."
"I know you haven't had a letter this morning, either," came the dull voice.
"I haven't from Philip, but I have from Audrey. She sends her love. Of course, she knows about Chummy, and it's quite all right."
"But you won't show me the letter," Joan replied, steadfast in her misery. "I know you won't. Nobody shows me anything. I saw him fall—I was the only one who did—but nobody tells me anything."
"You shall hear every word the moment I get there."
"I saw him fall," Joan repeated obstinately. "You were all indoors, but I was in the garden. But of course I didn't know who it was——"
"Don't, darling—just to please me," Mollie begged, distracted.
"He fell like a stone, crash into the tree. You can't realize that. You haven't been up. I have. I know what it's like."
"But you've had a letter from him!" Mollie protested. "Really you talk as if he was killed!"
"I don't know where the letter came from, and I can't write to him, except to the Aiglon Company, which I've done, and there's no reply, and somebody else had to address the envelope for him. I ought to go, not you. I saw him fall."
To Mollie's touch on her shoulder she was quite unresponsive. Mollie could have shaken her. It might have been the best thing to do.
"Do run away, you boys!" she said crossly instead. "Go and pick some of those blue flowers; Auntie Joan's a little tired. Now, Joan, I'll tell you what I'll do if you're good, but not unless. He's in a hospital or a nursing-home, I expect, and I shall go straight to him; and then if he's fit to move, as I expect he is by this time, I shall bring him straight down here. Will that do?"
"I know he's not fit to move. I saw him fall. I saw him falling all last night."
"Now you're naughty and just trying to make the worst of it. That's simply willful. It's like Alan when he wants smacking; when you're as old as I am you'll look on the bright side and be thankful it's no worse. Now do try. I'm going to bring him down here, and we'll keep him for a month. A wholemonth—it will be lovely! Why, you've only seen him in London and Richmond Park!"
"I've been to Chalfont Woods with him four times."
Mollie seized gratefully on the diversion.
"Joan! Howcouldyou! You never told me that!" she scolded. "And you never told me you'd been flying with him either! Philip would be furious if he knew! And now I'll tell him, and about Chalfont too, and all those other times as well, if you don't try to be reasonable. A month in this lovely place with him, and nobody to interfere—why, you'll be glad he had a little bit of an accident!... Now get up and we'll all go back. You'll have to get dinner ready, and I shall want a few sandwiches. Alan! Jimmy! We're not going to the shore. You can play on the see-saw instead. Run ahead, boys—and you come along, darling——"
And Joan of the cinemas and cliffs, of the secluded tea-shops and the noble Santon shore, rose, still as naughty and obstinate as ever, but obediently. Already Mollie, bustling the children on ahead, was shaping in her mind the dressing-down she intended to give Philip that very night.
There was no help for it, Philip has since told me. He simply had to tell her everything. She was, in fact, in possession of the whole story long before any of the rest of us.
But even she had to wait yet a little longer. When, at half-past nine that Monday night her taxi drew upat the wrought-iron gate in Lennox Street, Philip was out and the place was in darkness. She had no key.
"Go on to Oakley Street," she ordered the driver.
Audrey Cunningham was at home. Mollie found her, alone, in her first-floor bed-sitting-room, already on the point of going to bed.
"First of all give me a cup of cocoa or something," was Mollie's greeting. "I've been half the day in the train with only a few sandwiches, and I shall drop if I don't have something."
Mrs. Cunningham lighted the little gas-ring and fetched water from an adjoining room. Then, opening a little cupboard, she mixed cocoa-paste in a cup, got out bread and margarine and a plate of macaroons, and set them on a little chintz-covered stool before Mollie.
"I've an egg if you'd like one," she said.
"No, thanks. I got your letter this morning. Have you got the one I wrote yesterday?"
"No; but I don't think the last post's been yet."
"Well, it doesn't matter now. I've come to see for myself. Philip doesn't know I'm here yet, but he will presently. Now first of all, what's all this about you and Monty? What's happening?"
Her tone was that of a woman who intended to stand no further nonsense of any kind. She was dog-tired, already angry on Joan's account, and the resigned and hopeless air of the slender creature before her completed her resolve to get to the bottom of things.
But nothing appeared to be happening about Audrey and Monty. Mrs. Cunningham was still of the same mind, or no mind, that had prompted her letter.
"Where is he now?" Mollie demanded.
Audrey did not know.
"Is he with Philip?"
She did not know that either.
"And aren't you going to Lennox Street?"
"I don't think I can."
Mollie's eyes went round the room. I myself have never been in Mrs. Cunningham's bed-sitter, but I have been in many others and can picture its frugality—the gas-ring, the little cupboard with the bread and jar of marmalade in it, the chintz-covered grocer's box on which Mollie's cup of cocoa stood, probably a slightly fresher wallpaper-pattern where the Jacobean wardrobe had stood. Lennox Street was positive luxury by comparison, yet here was Audrey preferring this. Then there was Audrey herself, heavy-eyed, drained of energy, probably thinking of George Cunningham and wondering whether any experience was worth repeating. With Joan for breakfast and Audrey for supper, poor Mollie had had about enough of it for one day.
"About this marriage," she said abruptly. "Of course, it's not going to be put off.Ishall see to that. I shall have a talk with Monty too when I've finished with Philip. You're simply run down and want a tonic."
"Oh, it isn't that," Audrey replied, sinking into an old wicker chair. "I've thought it all over. I don't think they tell young girls enough before they get married. They ought to tell them lots more. They ought to tell them quite plainly, 'You'll have to be prepared for this and that and the other. You'll have to expect to sit up half the night in the dining-room with dinner on the table wondering where he is. You'll have to learn that he hasn't really been run over or anything of that kind and that it's only theirway. You must expect telegrams and telephone calls and excuses, and you mustn't be surprised if he brings somebody else with him when he does come. They're like that. And when they come home in a beastly state——'"
Here Mollie peremptorily interrupted her.
"Leave that brute in his grave," she commanded. "We're talking about Monty, not him. And I'll see Monty. Now what's all this rigmarole about milkmen and cellars and all the rest of it? Tell me as I undress you. I'm going to put you to bed."
But little that was fresh was to be learned here either. Audrey thanked her again and again for the offer of the house, but she thought she would rather be here with her gas-ring and cocoa and chintz-covered sugar-box. Mrs. Cook thought she could arrange it—it would only be half a crown more.
"Well, I'll see Mrs. Cook too while I'm about it; may as well do the thing thoroughly. Let me unlace your boots—why, your feet are cold, and on a night like this! Never mind your hair; you can do it in bed. And drink the rest of this cocoa. Really I do think I live in a helpless sort of world—there isn't enough of me to go round—there ought to be half a dozen of me. Now into bed with you, and you'd better stay there till I come round in the morning. I'm not going back till Wednesday."
She packed up the cocoa-cups and turned off the gas-ring, opened the window and wound up the little Swiss clock. As she moved about the room folding Audrey's clothes and setting things to rights her own letter of Sunday morning was brought up, but she placed it on the mantelpiece by the side of the clock, forbidding Audrey to read it till the morning. Lettersdidn't matter now that she was here in her own capable, practical person. Letters took too long. She was going to have things done much more quickly or know the reason why.
Philip himself opened the door to her. She gave her cheek to be kissed and then walked straight in.
"Is Monty here?" were her first words.
"No. I think he's gone out for a walk."
"A walk, at this time of night!"
Philip shrugged his shoulders. "What brings you here, Mollie?" he said.
She was busy untying her veil. "What do you suppose? Everything, of course."
"Have you had dinner or supper?"
"I had a cup of cocoa at Audrey Cunningham's, and don't want anything else. Now why didn't you answer my telegram, and why didn't you write again as you promised?" She threw the hat and veil on the table and her gloves after them and stood before Philip.
"How are the children?" he asked.
"Perfectly well."
"And Joan?"
Her only answer to this last was a long look. Then she walked to the little Empire sofa and sat down. He might stand if he wished.
"Well?" she said at last. This was after a full minute, during which time he had stood by the table idly fingering her veil. Then suddenly his fingers pushed the veil aside, and he crossed to the sofa and sat down by her.
"What is it you want to know, darling?" he asked.
"Everything—every little thing from beginning to end," she replied.
"You've seen that I don't want to tell you?"
"Yes, I've seen that."
"And that I probably have my reasons?"
"Oh—reasons!"
"Reasons that are stronger than ever at this moment?"
"Will they go on getting much stronger? If so I can only warn you that a breaking-point will come."
"Yes. I'm very near it."
"And so am I, Philip."
There was no mistaking her tone. It did not mean that if he continued to shut her out like this she would do anything violent—live apart from him, become merely his housekeeper, or anything of that kind. It meant enormously more than that. Where confidence and trust are, there are few divergences that do not presently right themselves, few differences that cannot be resolved; but where these are absent nothing is right. Every word is possible peril, every silence a hanging sword. In all my acquaintance I know of no happier marriage than the Esdailes'. You never go into their house and feel that the air is still charged with some scene that your arrival has interrupted, you never leave wondering what weapons will be picked up again the moment your back is turned. Philip is not without his tempers nor Mollie without her own purposes, but it stops at that. The rest is brave decencies, with I know not what tenderer stuff behind. This it was that seemed for the moment to be in peril.
But suddenly she put her hand on his. She did not speak; the hand spoke for her. The next moment hisother hand had fallen on hers again, so that both enclosed it. Then their eyes too met.
"It would be an awful thing to risk, Phil," she said quietly.
His eyes begged her. "Won't you let me carry it a little longer alone?"
"I don't believe you can. And if you can," she added, "I don't see what we got married for."
"But it will be rotten for you too."
"When have I shrunk from that?" she asked.
"Never," he replied in a low voice.
And so Mollie Esdaile too took her portion of the burden.
"Well, where shall we begin?" he asked, with a sigh that it must be so.
"You know best. But tell me first why you didn't write."
"I hadn't seen young Smith. I haven't yet as a matter of fact. But——," he drew her head to his breast, and there were some moments during which he whispered into her ear.
For all his care and guarding it was not possible that she should not at least tremble. But she did not start within his arms. The tremor passed, and her dry lips repeated—
"Shot him!"
"For some reason or other. I don't think either of us can quite tell Joan that, can we?"
"Shot him! Chummy!"
"There's no doubt about it. It was Monty who picked up the pistol. Neither you nor I can very well tell Audrey that, can we?"
"Monty found the pistol!"
"And I picked up the cartridge-shell myself. Thepolice were round here at six o'clock on Friday morning looking for them."
"The police! Here!"
In spite of all, Philip could not restrain a little laugh. "Oh, they didn't find anything. They don't when they've given you warning the night before. By that time both pistol and case had been at the bottom of silver-flowing Tamesis for six hours. I dropped 'em in myself from the middle of Albert Bridge. Do you begin to see what you're in for, my poor darling?"
It was doubtful whether she yet did. She could still only repeat, "Chummy shot him! Does that mean——?" Her horrified stare finished the question.
"Oh, I don't think so," he answered quickly, "at any rate not yet. Naturally both Hubbard and I have got to stand by Chummy for the present."
"Then somebody saw Monty pick up the pistol?"
"For the police to know anything about it, you mean? Well, as a matter of fact that's the purest bad luck. There happens to be a fellow called Westbury, confound him, and that beastly bullet seems to have fetched up somewhere in his house; he lives just across the way there. That's all the police have to go on now that the other things are safely in the river mud."
Slowly it was sinking into her mind. Her eyes closed for a moment as she felt the first faint strain of the weight of it. This came with the thought of Joan.
"But—but——" she said faintly, "—that poor child——?"
"Joan? I suppose she is wondering what's happened?"
"Wondering what's happened.... You may aswell know, Philip—it's a mere trifle at this stage—that they're most awfully thick—far more than you've been told. You know what boys and girls are nowadays. And now comes this horrible silence, except for that one little note from him——"
"Has she had a note from him?" Philip asked quickly. "From the hospital?"
"There was no address on it. I suppose it was from the hospital?" she in her turn asked in quick alarm.
"Yes, it wasn't from a prison. When did she get this note?"
"Yesterday morning."
"Did she show it to you?"
"Yes. It simply said he'd had this spill, but was all right, and she wasn't to be alarmed."
"He didn't mention incidentally that he'd shot a man?"
"Of course not. I don't believe he had."
Philip passed this last point.
"Well, as he's written once I suppose he'll go on writing. He's heaps better as a matter of fact. So it won't be too hard on her. Anyway, she'll have to grin and bear it."
"I did hold out hopes that I might be able to take him back with me," Mollie ventured.
"You won't be able to do that," said Philip with decision. "Quite apart from his being fit to travel, we've only gone a certain way in all this, you know. He'll still have matters to explain. And till he does, I'm afraid Audrey Cunningham will have to make the best of things too, like Joan. It wouldn't do her any good to know that Monty was liable to arrest at any moment."
"But is he?" said Mollie, startled.
"Of course he is. So am I. So are you. So would she be."
"But why?"
In spite of his explanation, I don't think she understood. I don't think she understands to this day. I don't think that at the bottom of her anti-social heart any woman does. A delayed wedding or a post without a lover's letter is a far greater thing than a capital charge in which all who conspire are principals.
Then, in spite of her fatigue, her skeptical common sense came to her aid. Philip might involve himself in a web of unelucidated stuff of which one-tenth perhaps was fact of sorts and the rest pure speculation; but she knew Chummy. The thought of Chummy as a murderer was absurd beyond words. Whatever the explanation might be it certainly was not that. And, yawning as she rose, she told Philip so.
"And that's that," she concluded. "Now do let's go to bed. Of course, if you think Chummy's a murderer I quite see why you didn't write and why you don't want to tell Audrey and all the rest of it, but you'll find it's all a mistake. There's something you don't know, or else there's been an accident of some kind. If you seriously want me to believe that Chummy Smith.... What's the matter, darling?"
The last words were a quick, startled cry. She did not know what it was that lurked at the bottom of the eyes that were looking so deeply and somberly into her own, but she feared already. His head was slowly shaking from side to side.
"Philip! What do you mean?" she cried in agitation.
Still the head shook. It was impossible for her mind not to fly back to that moment, now nearlyfive days ago, when he had stood blinking in the doorway with a candle in one hand and a jar of liqueur in the other.
"Tell me quickly what you mean, Philip!" she cried again.
"I saw it."
She fell back. "You——?"
"It wasn't an accident, and there isn't anything I don't know."
"You——?"
The slow sideways shake changed to one single nod. The next moment his arms were about her and he was leading her to the sofa again. He sighed. There was no help for it now. If she would have it she must have it all.
"It's the only thing I haven't told you. We may as well get it over," he said.
Nor did he whisper this time. He spoke in his usual voice, using the plainest English he could.
But what it was that Philip Esdaile told his wife you must guess for a little while longer. She was the first living soul to know. And it was a very different thing from that which she had left Santon to hear.
For it was this overwhelmingly extraordinary yet stupendously ordinary thing that sent her round to Audrey Cunningham the next morning, but without comfort for her, with no plans for settling the wedding out of hand.
It was this same thing that took her back to Santon on the Wednesday, without Chummy, without help for Joan.
It was this same thing that puzzled Monty Rooke's brain as he took his midnight walk that night down Roehampton Lane, driven from Audrey Cunningham'scompany and sick of the sight of Philip and all his works.
And it was this and nothing else that Cecil Hubbard so much wanted to know when he knitted his honest brows over hydrophones, sound-ranging, or whatever other mysterious apparatus it was that Philip Esdaile might have hidden away in his cellar.
As an eager and passionate student of the Life of my day there are, within limits, few places that I don't visit and few people I don't on occasion talk to. I say "within limits," since I admit that there may be grades at one end of the scale at which I draw the line, while at the other end there may conceivably be those who draw the line at me. But within these extremes, if not always familiarly, yet on the whole without constraint, I sup at coffee-stalls or dine in quite good company more or less indifferently.
I have found that the best strategic jumping-off-points for the satisfying of this curiosity about the preponderating average of Life are two. One—the Public-house—I have already mentioned. There only a glass screen may divide you from the hawker who has left his barrow for a few minutes in somebody else's charge, or from the gibused and silk-mufflered figure who finds a glass of sherry a convenient way of getting small change for his taxi. The other point of vantage is the Club, where that same taxi is paid off, but where liveried chauffeurs may stand for hours by the waiting cars.
I shall come to the Man in the Club by and by. For the present I wish to return to the Man in the Public-house.
I won't say that I always love him, but I always recognize that I have him very seriously to deal with.I am not thinking of him now either as a reader of my journalism or as a potential buyer of my novels, but as a larger phenomenon. I am thinking of him—loosely I admit—very much as some political cartoonist might think of a generalized and consolidated figure that turns a deaf ear to the Bolshevist and his sinister whisperings on the one side, while the other ear is no less stopped to the honeyed blandishments of the statesman who so frequently and extraordinarily seeks to cajole him with flatteries that are both out-of-touch and out-of-date.
He is Conservative, if Conservatism means that he cynically holds his hand till he has seen what the next dodge is likely to be; and he is Liberal in the sense of believing that if everybody looks after himself then there will not be anybody who is not looked after. You have overdone it, my good friends and representatives in Parliament. He no longer believes a word you say. You offer him good and necessary things, and he glances sideways at you, and his lips shape the words "By-election." You try to keep him from rash and dangerous courses, and he wants to know whatyouare getting out of it. You ration him, but he knows where to get sugar and butter while you make the best of saccharine tablets and West African margarine; you de-control, and he knows better than you do why hens cease to lay and rabbits to breed. It is we of the cheaper Press who really have him in hand, and he cocks his ears back at us occasionally. He did so when theDaily Circusgave him pictures of bathing girls instead of war news; he is doing so to-day when—oh, lots of things—are pushed on and off the proscenium like Monty Rooke's camouflage canvas trees and linoleum sentries. He sniffs at all thesethings, says nothing, and calls for another glass of his country's seven-times-accursed beer.
Yet he follows, if not his leader, his neighbor. This he sometimes does to the most astonishing conclusions, just as he looks up at the sky-line because he sees somebody else doing so, or is prepared to swear that he hears a maroon because the man next to him says "Listen!" The vaguer the rumor the greater is the scope for his self-and-collective suggestion. He sees Russians, he knows that dead Field-Marshals are still alive. He can tell you from private information that such-and-such a battalion has been cut up or such-and-such a battle-fleet sent to the bottom of the sea. And not one of these larger things is half so large to him as the smaller thing that looms huge because it is in his own immediate neighborhood. We on theCircusprovide pictures to give him at least the photographic semblance of body for his belief. But what when the very flesh and blood of the drama passes along his street every day? What when he has spoken with the chief actor himself, knows who he married, the number of his children and their names? What when he knows the house he lives in, who lived there before, why he left so suddenly, and the very words he is said to have said on leaving?
Do you see what I am coming to—those first faint whisperings of something wrong—or if not positively wrong so much the better for public-house debate on the point—with Philip Esdaile's house in Lennox Street?