Chapter VI: Part 6

Claire’s attitude was rather a curious one. She liked Bill Patch and she had always been prejudiced against Mrs. Harter, but she was one of the few people who said hardly anything, after all, about what was going on, and she snubbed Sallie even more severely than usual when Sallie dissected the situation in her habitual cold-blooded, clear-sighted way.

Martyn Ambrey, who took the line of having discovered from the very first that the personality of Mrs. Harter was one that presaged disaster, was, if possible, more intensely interested than his sister.

He exploited the whole thing, conversationally, letting off verbal fireworks in display of his own powers of analysis, and evidently hoping for nothing so much as a grand dramatic climax, such as the murder of Harter by Captain Patch or the suicide of Mrs. Harter.

“Which, of everything in the world, are about the most unlikely things to happen,” said Sallie scornfully. “Life is nothing but a series of anticlimaxes, one after another.”

“Anticlimax implies climax,” said Martyn, scoring.

Their clever flippancies were rather revealing. They would have seen Tragedy itself in terms of _revue_--clever, noisy, flippant, essentially unemotional, everything that, in 1924, was meant by “modern.”

“Harter will have to come to the show to-morrow night,” Martyn affirmed. “It’ll be frightfully interesting to see them all three together.”

“I should imagine that he will take his wife away to-morrow morning, if he has any sense of decency,” Claire replied coldly.

Martyn returned gravely that Harter, he was perfectly certain, had no sense of decency whatever.

“Besides,” said I, “the word ‘take’ is not one that I should apply to Mrs. Harter, least of all, perhaps, where her husband is concerned.”

“In any case, she’s bound to sing for us,” Christopher pointed out.

He was taking the play with intense seriousness, whereas the triangle of Bill, and Mrs. Harter, and Mrs. Harter’s husband scarcely interested him at all.

He saw it--when he did see it, that is to say--merely as something rather commonplace and faintly shocking.

“Well, I suppose I must give them the opportunity of behaving properly,” said Claire, referring to Mrs. Harter, and she wrote a note and sent it to Queen Street by hand, expressing a perfunctory hope that Mrs. Harter would “bring” her husband to the theatricals and the dance. None of us were exactly surprised, but all of us were perhaps more or less conscious of obscure excitement, when Mrs. Harter, in a laconic note, accepted Claire’s invitation on behalf of herself and Mr. Harter.

_Chapter Thirteen_

Martyn Ambrey, evidently desirous of showing me what a strongly individual viewpoint he possessed, told me that evening that he felt “Mr. Harter,” as we all called him, in faint mimicry of his wife’s invariable phrase, to be very much more worth seeing than the theatricals themselves.

I did not tell him that I felt exactly the same. He would probably not have believed me.

By seven o’clock the house was full of people, most of them in a state of great disorder and agitation.

People were dressing, or even undressing, in almost every room.

At last Claire appeared in the hall in a very beautiful black velvet gown.

“They’ll be ready by nine o’clock,” she said confidently.

The curtain was to go up at nine. The performers, all except Mrs. Harter, had dined early at the Manor.

She and her husband arrived after dinner.

“Mr. and Mrs. Harter.”

Whatever her _gaucheries_, Mrs. Harter knew how to enter a room--an art that is not a common one nor--generally--an acquired one. She moved remarkably well.

Harter followed her.

The word “nondescript” is the one that first occurs to me, in attempting to describe him, and the next one is “unwholesome.”

He was a small man, sandy-haired, with a sallow, fretful face and narrow shoulders. He seemed to walk like a cat--almost, but never quite, on the tips of his toes. When his wife, in her abrupt, graceless fashion, said, by way of introduction, “This is Mr. Harter,” he bowed stiffly. Almost at once Mrs. Harter, obviously constrained, suggested that she ought to go and change her dress, and Claire took her away.

I gave Harter a drink.

He was a difficult man to talk with, noncommittal and without humor. It was a relief to him, without a doubt, when Mr. and Mrs. Leeds were announced.

I performed the usual introductions, but Leeds listens only to his own voice, never to that of anybody else.

He said, “How d’ye do,” and in the same breath went on to talk of the play, and ended his sentence with a hearty laugh and the pleasing observation:

“Amateur theatricals almost always lead to a scandal of some sort, that’s the beauty of them. Somebody runs off with somebody else’s wife--that sort of thing. I’ve seen it happen time and time again--”

“Mr. Harter, have another drink,” said I, with all the distinctness of utterance at my command. I saw--and no doubt Harter did, too--that Leeds jumped at the sound of his name. Then he looked at Mrs. Leeds, then again, hard, at Harter, and finally at me, with comically raised eyebrows. Harter remained entirely impervious.

“Let me see, you and I met once in Cairo, I believe,” said Mr. Leeds, “when our yacht was at Alexandria.”

“Yes,” said the little man, with a sort of neutral civility. “I believe that was so.”

“And your wife--”

“Oh, yes.”

There was a pause.

I had an unreasonable, and quite unfounded, premonition that the next thing would be the cocktail story.

It was a relief when Lady Annabel and the Rector arrived, and then the Kendals and other people.

The atmosphere was somehow jerky, almost apprehensive. No conversation seemed to have any continuity, and no movement any very definite purpose.

The third, and greatest, relief of the evening was when we all adjourned to our places in front of the stage and waited for the curtain to go up.

There were a good many people present. Some of the men, among them Harter, stood up at the end of the room.

Mrs. Harter’s song went very well. There was an instant in which I thought, with surprise, that she was nervous. Her eyes searched the audience intently for a moment, seeking to identify someone or something in the fashion that so unmistakably differentiates the amateur from the professional. Lady Annabel, beside me, said not a word, but I saw her eyebrows go up.

However, it wasn’t Bill Patch that Mrs. Harter was looking for--he was behind the scenes, and of course she must have known that. In less than a minute I saw by her face that she had discovered what she wanted, and she began her song and sang it very well.

I had curiosity enough to turn around and follow the direction that her glance had taken, and I saw that it must have been her husband, whose situation she had wanted to ascertain.

His little, sallow face was inexpressive, and I suddenly saw some justification for Martyn’s adjective--reptilian. There was something oddly and inexplicably baleful about the singularly unattractive Mr. Harter as he leaned against the wall and watched his wife on the stage.

After her song was over and had been vigorously applauded she went off the stage and I did not see her again during the play, but Dolly Kendal, who had a seat at the far end of a row, assured me afterward that Mrs. Harter sat in the wings, and that Bill Patch came and stood beside her in every interval when he was not on the stage.

There are always observant people to note these things and to retail them in conversation.

Of course the play was a great success. Amateur theatricals always are a great success. Sallie’s performance was quite brilliant and the others were good enough.

The chief success of the evening was achieved by Alfred, who overacted his part, uttered impromptu soliloquies, cut into other people’s speeches and played the clown in dumb show throughout a pathetic duet between Sallie and Martyn.

The audience, as a whole, adored him. He was applauded at every impossible moment, and the servants, at the back of the hall, screamed with laughter whenever he spoke. Mumma was beaming.

“I must say, Ahlfred has a great sense of the ridiculous,” she said appreciatively. “I hope we _all_ have, it’s such a help, to see the funny side--but Ahlfred especially, from the time he was quite a little fellow, has always been able to keep us in a perfect roar.”

Finally the performers all sang “The Bulbul Ameer,” and Bill and Nancy took a call for “Author,” and then everybody said to everybody else how good it had all been, and the actors came off the stage still in costume and received compliments and congratulations.

A blaring atrocity, known as a “sensational fox-trot,” opened the dance. Claire had engaged a jazz band, and at intervals, to a sound of clattering fire-irons, they suddenly yelled in brassy staccato:

“Why--did--I kiss--that girl--
Why, oh! why, oh! why?”

It was ugly, discordant, essentially vulgar, and when all that was admitted it had its value. It was _entrainant_.

The brazen yelp of it had not torn the air more than three times before people were dancing.

Mrs. Kendal planted herself firmly beside me with her kindest air and began:

“Dancing has changed so much in the last four years. These modern dances don’t look to me like dancing at all.”

“Give me a real old-fashioned waltz,” said General Kendal.

And before I could say it for them--and it was on the tip of my tongue, too--they exclaimed together, “Now, the old Blue Danube--”

“Look at that,” said Mrs. Kendal, and she shook her head and made a sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth that quite adequately conveyed regret and disapproval.

“That” was of course Mrs. Harter, dancing with Bill Patch. They were in their pseudo-oriental dresses, but Bill’s red head was unmistakable and so was Mrs. Harter’s dancing.

They were together the whole evening. So were Chris and Nancy, Martyn and some unidentified young woman in mauve bead shoulder straps and a fragment of crimson chiffon, and Leeds and a very pretty widow who had come with their party. But nobody made distressed sounds about _them_.

“She dances quite beautifully,” I pointed out firmly to Mrs. Kendal, who replied in a tone of concession:

“If you call it dancing. I must say, I don’t think that either Puppa or I would very much care to see one of our girlies dancing like that.”

The suggested test of Puppa and Mumma’s sensibilities appeared to me to be a very remote contingency indeed.

At rather infrequent intervals one or other of the Miss Kendals lolloped cheerfully round the room with a stray partner, but, as Mrs. Kendal said:

“This modern way of dancing with one man the whole evening seems to me very odd. I shouldn’t care about it for any of my own flock.”

“But you know, Mumma, we don’t know any men who are in the least likely to ask us to dance with them for the whole evening,” observed Dolly Kendal very honestly.

“And one never does go to any dance, except perhaps at Christmas-- struggling along down here,” added Aileen.

I thought Mumma looked rather disconcerted at so much candor, but she only said, “Well, well,” and put up her glasses to scrutinize Bill and Mrs. Harter more effectively.

Their performance was well worth watching, artistically speaking, although it was undoubtedly not that aspect of the case which presented itself to those people who appeared unable to take their eyes off them.

Harter himself was among these. He stood near one of the windows and never stirred. Claire asked if he cared to dance and he said, “No thanks, Lady Flower. I am not a dancing man.”

Later on I saw Sallie go up to him. I think that she actually asked him to dance, probably out of pure curiosity, but if so, he declined the privilege.

Sallie, looking very pretty, stayed beside him, talking and laughing, for a few moments, but I did not once see Harter smile or make any response except of the shortest and most formal kind.

He had a peculiar way of not looking at the person to whom he was--presumably--listening, and all the while that Sallie was with him he looked at Bill Patch and at his wife.

“Well, if you ask me, that little worm Harter will be filing his petition within a month,” said Mrs. Leeds cheerfully.

“If I were in his shoes, I’d take that woman home and thrash her,” charitably remarked old Carey, to whom she had spoken.

“She was pretty hot stuff, even in Egypt.”

“She! I’m not thinking about her. I’m thinking about a decent young fellow like Patch. She’s out to make a fool of that lad and, by Jove, she’s succeeding. He’s bewitched.”

“Men always run after that sort of woman. They were all after her in Cairo. Hector would have been as bad as any of them if I hadn’t put my foot down.”

Mrs. Leeds looked up at her husband and laughed most good-naturedly.

It was quite evident that to her the whole thing was a joke, and a joke of the type that most appealed to her.

Where Lady Annabel saw sin she saw only vulgarity, and vulgarity amused her.

I am reminded that Lady Annabel was particularly gracious that evening. It was quite characteristic of her that once she had given us her advice and we had tacitly refused to take it, she should avoid any slightest hint of the “I-told-you-so” attitude that really was open to her.

She certainly looked at those two--but then so did everybody. She never said a word.

Lady Annabel has a wonderfully good memory both for names and for faces. (“I have heard it called a royal attribute,” she sometimes says smilingly.)

She remembers to inquire after sick relatives and she can always make some happily turned little reference to “the last time that I met you, on that very hot day at the station”--which makes one feel that the meeting in question left an indelible impression on her mind and was of real importance to her. It is all very pleasant and gratifying.

On the night of the party she told me that she thought it was all going most successfully and that the theatricals had been delightful. “Such a charming way of meeting one’s neighbors all together,” she said, looking around the room through her tortoise-shell lorgnette.

She was wearing a blue gown that was all over sequins and shimmered as she moved, and although Lady Annabel is a small woman, and very thin and spare, she looked majestic and altogether reminded me of Queen Elizabeth.

“I think I see a face that is strange to me,” she murmured, drawing her brows together in a rather puzzled way, and one knew that this was one of Lady Annabel’s very harmless little affectations, since there are of necessity a good many faces that are strange to her, even in Cross Loman.

I followed the direction of the lorgnette and saw, as I had somehow expected, that she was looking at Harter.

“That is Mr. Harter.”

“Oh,” said Lady Annabel.

She looked hard at him and then she said, “Oh,” again--but that was all.

Leeds was less forbearing.

“Sour-faced devil, isn’t he? Not that it’s much wonder. If he’d had any sense, he’d have stayed where he was. What the eyes don’t see the heart won’t grieve for.”

“I should have thought he’d got used to it by this time,” said Mrs. Leeds simply. “Do you remember Captain Tompkins and that unfortunate engineer--what was his name--who threw up his job and went home?”

Evidently the Leeds couple, who had, after all, seen something of Mrs. Harter in Egypt, looked upon Bill Patch as being one of a series.

I reflected that perhaps they knew more about it than we did. Provincials take these things so seriously.

“I’m going to take that wretched chap to have a drink,” Leeds declared. “Utter little outsider though he is, I’m sorry for him.”

Mrs. Leeds, laughing loudly, called out, “Fellow-feeling, I suppose?” after him as he went off. I thought it to Lady Annabel’s credit that not a muscle of her face had moved during the whole of this rather crude conversation.

It was one of the few hot nights of the year, and sooner or later everybody drifted into the garden. I went there with Mary Ambrey, and we found our way to the furthest summerhouse, one that has fallen into disuse. The summerhouse proper, a strangely obvious little trysting place, was being monopolized by Christopher and Mrs. Fazackerly.

I suppose that every single couple who went into the garden that night must have passed the summerhouse, glanced inside it, smiled sympathetically and gone on.

Christopher and Nancy sat in two deck chairs, her frock and shoes and hair all looking equally silvery in the moonlight, and they were talking in low, happy voices.

“_That’s_ all right,” I said, and Mary agreed. Perhaps she was conscious, as I certainly was, of something rather perfunctory in the tone of her assent. She added after a moment:

“It really is quite plain sailing for them, isn’t it?”

“Unless you call Nancy’s father a rock in the way.”

“Nancy isn’t a Victorian schoolgirl. I don’t think they have much to contend with.”

“So much the better.”

“Oh yes,” said Mary, her tone rather enigmatical.

Then she suddenly burst out:

“It’s all so upside down! Christopher and Nancy are dears, both of them, but you know as well as I do that they are neither of them people of tremendous significance. Yet one wishes them well and wants to see it all happily settled. But those other two people--and _they_ are _real_ people, both of them--are outside the law, and there’s no possible happy ending in sight, anywhere, for them. And--one doesn’t know what to wish.”

It was unlike Mary to be vehement. Although she had not raised her voice at all, she had spoken with great intensity.

I put my hand on her arm.

“Look!”

Two people were coming down the path, where no Japanese lanterns had found their way, but which was crossed by a clear patch of white moonlight.

“Not Sallie, is it?”

The dress was almost Sallie’s, and the coins on it clinked together slightly, and the long gauze veil hung in motionless folds in the unusual stillness of the night air--but it wasn’t Sallie--of course.

Sallie is less tall than Mrs. Harter and her movements have the lightness and abruptness of extreme youth.

Mrs. Harter’s way of walking was unmistakable, and even in the moonlight Bill’s red hair was easily recognizable.

They were walking very slowly, not speaking. He was looking at her, whose head was bent.

Just as I realized that they could not see us, in the dark little summerhouse, Mrs. Harter stopped dead and looked up at him. Mary sprang to her feet with a decided movement and at the same moment we both heard Diamond Harter’s voice very distinctly, that voice that Bill Patch had called a “carrying” voice.

“To-morrow, when we go up Loman Hill to the crossroads,” she said.

Almost before she had finished speaking--but not quite--she heard us move; and she and Bill walked on, out of the patch of white light into the darkness of the overhanging syringa bushes.

Was it a tryst, or a promise, or a decision? I have never known, and neither Mary nor I spoke about what we had heard as we went back to the house again.

I have my theory, of course. Almost all my knowledge of Mrs. Harter is theoretical. I think that Bill had asked her for a decision and that she was deferring it until the next day, until they went “up Loman Hill to the crossroads” once more. I always imagine that, in spite of Harter, and certainly in spite of the people who looked at them so often, and with so much disapproval, they deliberately forgot about the future for that one evening.

Both of them must have realized that a turning point had been reached. Harter had come home, he had made it perfectly clear that in no circumstances would he give his wife her freedom, and she had, I afterwards learned, made it equally clear that, whether she went away with Bill or not, she had no intention of returning to her husband again.

It was Bill Patch, with his strange mixture of a belief in God and a strong sense of the “unsportingness” of adultery, who saw the necessity for a decision. To Mrs. Harter I am quite certain that the issue would have been a simple one. All her life she had gone for what she wanted with a singular and unusual freedom of aim, in so far as the opinion of other people was always a matter of complete and genuine indifference to her. Neither by education nor by temperament was she a woman of ideals, and it seems to me the measure of her regard for Bill Patch that she was prepared to let his be a determining factor in their future.

They did not return to the ballroom again until the last dance of the evening was being played.

It is part of the incongruity that was so marked a feature of the whole affair that for that last dance the players chose to repeat the “sensational fox-trot” with which the evening had begun--that loud, swaggering, jerky abomination that yet held its third-rate appeal:

“Why--did--I kiss that girl--
Why, oh! why, oh! why?”

And Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter danced it together.

I watched them all the while this time almost as Mrs. Kendal herself might have done, and Mrs. Harter’s eyes were shining like a girl’s, and I remembered Martyn Ambrey and his--“_That_ woman hard?”

Bill’s young face was that of a boy in love until one looked at it very closely, and then it was that of a man who has found security.

I have always had a fancy that Bill knew that evening which way Diamond Harter would eventually decide, but that he had consciously put the knowledge away from him, and was simply, as he had once said to Nancy Fazackerly, “so extraordinarily happy, in spite of it all.”

* * * * *

It was after three o’clock when the Kendals, who are generally the last to leave any entertainment, prepared to go home.

“I shall enjoy a drive in the moonlight,” said Mumma, pleasantly sentimental. “Don’t you think, Puppa dear, that a drive in the moonlight will be too delightful? It will remind us of our honeymoon days,” said Mumma, smiling delightfully.

Then a _contretemps_ arose.

The car that had been hired to take old Carey and his daughter home had not appeared at the door, and Christopher, returning from the stable yard, reported the driver to be lying helplessly intoxicated in a corner of the old cowhouse.

Christopher said that the lad deserved instant dismissal and that he would make a point of seeing that he got it, but he had seized the opportunity of bringing round his own two-seater and was eager to take Nancy home in it.

“Oh, but Father--”

“I could easily come back for him.”

Old Carey, however, had flown into a passion.

He used fearful language and said that he should walk every step of the way home, which threat he evidently supposed to constitute a terrible revenge upon the drunken driver, Nancy, Christopher, and everybody who had helped to enrage him.

“He’s in one of his rather difficult moods, I’m afraid,” said Nancy aside.

It was Harter, of all unlikely people, who suddenly suggested a solution.

“The car is only a Ford, isn’t it? I’ll drive it back to the garage--it’s next door to our rooms in Queen Street--and I will drop Mr. --”

“Carey--”

“Mr. Carey and this lady on the way.”

“No room,” growled Carey, determined not to be appeased.

“Plenty of room,” everybody assured him.

“Three at the back and one beside the driver,” said Harter, who appeared to have become suddenly articulate.

I remember that it flashed across my mind just then, casually, that he had been drinking a good deal during the evening and that this had evidently had the effect of rendering him sociable.

“Mr. Carey and his daughter and Mrs. Harter in the back and myself and Captain Patch in front,” said Harter calmly.

There was an electric silence.

Then Mrs. Kendal, tactfully filling up the significant pause, inquired brightly:

“Then can you drive a car, Mr. Harter?”

They settled it at last, but Christopher held firm to his intention of taking Nancy home in the two-seater, and they went off, overtaking and passing General Kendal, in his tightly packed Standard, before the lodge gates were reached.

Harter brought the hired Ford round to the front door, old Carey, still grumbling, was helped in, and Mrs. Harter got in beside him.

Captain Patch hesitated for a moment.

“Get in,” said little Harter coldly.

He was himself already at the wheel and he sketched a slight gesture which unmistakably invited Bill to the place beside him.

It crossed my mind then that he was determined to speak to Bill, and I think Mrs. Harter thought so, too.

She said, “Come on, then,” and Bill came, and they all drove off together.

_Chapter Fourteen_

It was less than ten minutes later that we all heard the frantic hooting of a motor horn again and again.

Claire was already in her room, Mary Ambrey halfway upstairs, and the indefatigable Sallie and Martyn still talking in the hall.

“What’s that?”

Martyn threw open the hall doors and we listened, but the hooting had ceased and for a moment there was no sound. Then from far away we heard that indescribable medley of noises, broken and piercing, that unmistakably denotes calamity.

“An accident?” said Sallie in a doubtful way.

Martyn, who had stepped outside, suddenly dashed off down the moonlit drive.

“I’ll just see--I’ll come back--” promised Sallie, and she, too, was off.

Mary Ambrey had come downstairs again and was standing beside me. She never says to a crippled man, as other people do, “I’ll come back”--that promise which no one ever keeps.

“It’s a clear night--no one could have come to grief, surely,” she said.

“I hope to God that Harter was fit to drive a car,” said I, remembering that sudden loosening of Harter’s tongue.

“Did you think--”

“No, not really. But he did drink, during the evening. Fellows who’ve been in the East--”

“There’s a car coming up here.”

There was no need to comment to one another upon the speed with which that car could be heard tearing up the avenue.

Mary gave me her arm to the door and we saw the Standard, brought to a standstill so violently and so abruptly that her brakes jarred with a grinding noise.

It was General and Mrs. Kendal.

“They want help--just down by the bridge,” said the General hoarsely. “Harter has had a smash with a hired car--it’s very bad.”

“Who?” said Mary.

“Carey and--and poor young Patch. And Mrs. Harter is hurt, too, but she’s conscious.”

Claire came down and Mary turned to her.

The General leaned forward out of his seat.

“Don’t let the women come. It’s ghastly. Patch was killed on the spot. The spare wheel came down on his head--broke his neck. They’re taking them to the cottage hospital--all but Harter. He’s down there--he somehow escaped. Old Carey is jammed between the car and the parapet--dead, they think, but they can’t get him out. Can you send down one or two of the men?”

Claire had already rung the bell violently, and we heard the servants coming hurriedly. General Kendal helped his wife out of the car. She was white-faced and shaking. We knew afterwards that the girls had been told to walk home from the scene of the accident, but that poor Mrs. Kendal had valiantly refused to let her husband come back to us by himself.

“Let me leave her here. I’ll take the men back with me,” said the General.

The two men who were ready first sprang into the car, and when I got in myself I found Claire already there.

“Get out, Claire,” I said abruptly. “It’s not fit for you, and you couldn’t help them.”

“I am coming,” said Claire tensely.

“I tell you, there’s nothing you can do.”

“I can do as much as you can,” she retorted.

She was quite obviously on the verge of becoming hysterical.

I looked at Mary in despair. There was no time to lose, but to have Claire creating a panic among the terrible wreckage at the bridge was unthinkable.

General Kendal took her by the shoulders and half pushed, half lifted her, on to the steps.

Mary Ambrey, quite resolutely, did the rest.

Claire was screaming and struggling in her grasp as we turned and drove away.

Mrs. Kendal, a woman of great determination, was able to command herself in a very few moments and to give Mary a fairly lucid account of what had happened. Her story, and later on, of course, the evidence at the inquest, made the facts clear enough.

At the bottom of the avenue is a very sharp turn into the high road, which was negotiated by General Kendal with his usual excessive caution. Immediately beyond it, a small bridge spans the river running beneath the road, protected only by white wooden railings and a low stone parapet.

“We heard the Ford behind us, and Puppa said to me, ‘I hope they won’t try and pass us on the bridge.’ Those were his very words,” said Mrs. Kendal to Mary. “I looked round, as I always do, so as to tell him if anything was coming, and I saw the Ford car, as plainly as possible in the moonlight, take the corner of your drive going much too fast. Oh, much too fast. I immediately said to my husband, ‘Oh, what a dangerous thing to do. I don’t believe that Mr. Harter knows how to drive,’ I said. Of course, Puppa couldn’t look round himself, but I did, and I saw the accident happen.” Her face whitened again dreadfully, but she went on, although she sobbed now and then. “I suppose he tried to right the car after taking the corner so sharply, for it seemed to swerve across the road to the left and then suddenly to the right. That was just as they reached the bridge. It seemed to happen in a flash, and yet one saw it coming.... The car crashed straight into the railings. I saw something spin up into the air--large and dark--and come down again, and the car turned over sideways and hung over the water half on the road, half in the air, somehow caught in the railings.”

Poor Mrs. Kendal was shuddering violently. Her account of the tragedy was afterwards proved to be substantially correct. The wheel tracks in the dust of the high road accurately followed the lines that she had described. The large, dark thing that had flown up and come down again was the spare wheel, somehow ripped clean off the car. It was that which had killed Bill Patch.

Harter had been flung clear and had landed in the mud of the river bed, nearly dry at that time of year. He was not hurt. The two on the back seat--old Carey and Mrs. Harter--were flung against the stone parapet. They picked up the woman on the road, screaming. Carey, who was probably killed on the spot, had somehow been caught in the wreckage. (When I got down there, Mrs. Harter had been taken away, into the cottage hospital, which mercifully was not far off.)

“They got her out almost at once,” said Mrs. Kendal. “We had stopped the car and Puppa ran back, but I wouldn’t let the girls come. Ahlfred came, of course, but I said to the girls, ‘No, girls.’ And they stayed by the car. There seemed to be people there in a moment--I saw Major Ambrey, but, thank Heaven, Nancy was safe at home. Oh, poor little thing--who is to go to her?”

“I will,” said Claire wildly.

Loman Cottage is three miles from the Manor House and the chauffeur had gone down to the scene of the accident.

“They will have sent for her from the cottage hospital,” Mary said gently. “Is old Mr. Carey--?”

Mrs. Kendal nodded, the tears running down her face.

“They said he must be. They--they couldn’t move the car so as to free him.”

“They’ll have moved it now, with the men. I’m going down there,” said Claire suddenly.

“No, don’t!”

“I must help.”

“Claire, you can’t help.”

“I can help Nancy Fazackerly.”

“Sallie is there, I think. I wouldn’t let my girls come--I have always shielded them most tenderly from dreadful sights and sounds--but I saw Sallie, I think.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “She went with her brother.”

Perhaps Mary, too, would have liked the selfish satisfaction of shielding her children from reality; but she does not indulge in it.

“Sallie!” exclaimed Claire. “What can a child like Sallie do? She has no business to be there at all. I shall go myself.”

They had a trying time with her. She kept on saying that she must go and starting up wildly to ring for her maid and order her hat and cloak to be brought, and then she broke into tears again and said, “The only thing is, am I fit for it?”

At least it afforded Mary the relief of occupation. In the end she telephoned down to the cottage hospital for news and to ask whether Mrs. Fazackerly were there.

Yes, she was there. Major Ambrey had fetched her. Old Carey was actually breathing when they brought him in, but had died without regaining consciousness within five minutes of his admission.

Mrs. Harter?

She was badly bruised, but by some miracle had escaped serious injury. She would be detained for the night, but the doctor could find nothing the matter with her beyond severe shock.

Harter himself had not appeared at the hospital at all.

“Then,” said Mary, “has anyone--is anyone--with Mrs. Harter?”

There was a momentary silence at the other end of the wire. Then:

“The nurse is within call, of course. But, naturally, there’s a great deal to be done. She seems more or less stunned.”

“I see,” said Mary.

She hung up the receiver without mentioning the name of the dead boy.

Claire upbraided her for that.

“But what could I have asked?” said Mary sadly.

“It may be a ghastly mistake--I can’t believe it’s true--why he was laughing and talking in this very hall less than two hours ago. I can’t believe it,” Claire wailed.

But Mary could believe it. She told me afterward that, from the instant in which she had heard that Bill Patch was dead, it seemed to her that there was something inevitable in that arbitrary solution to the affair.

When General Kendal brought me back to the Manor House--and, after all, we were at the bridge less than an hour--Sallie was with me. She had helped most pluckily and sensibly, with a silent efficiency that spoke admirably for her training.

Martyn had remained with the A. A. men who were beside the wrecked car.

The early morning light was flooding the windows and there was in the air the curious chill that is sometimes the preliminary, in England, to a very fine summer day.

The faces of those three women, waiting there, were ghastly, and Claire every now and then had a paroxysm of sobbing and low, muffled screaming.

General Kendal took his wife away. He had already told me, what was indeed sufficiently obvious, that she would inevitably be obliged to give evidence at the inquest, and the poor old fellow was already dreading the ordeal for her and hoping vehemently that the fear of it would not occur to her until the last possible moment.

The Ambreys were staying in the house, and Sallie said, after one look at Mary:

“Mother, won’t you come upstairs?”

Mary’s face was gray. She only asked me two questions:

“Who is with Nancy?”

“Dolly Kendal--good girl! Alfred went and fetched one of them, and she is going to spend the night with her.”

“Mrs. Harter? Does she know?”

“She hasn’t spoken, but they say she’s been conscious the whole time.”

“Mother, come,” said Sallie, and they went upstairs together, Sallie holding her mother’s hand as I had never seen her do since she was a tiny child.

Poor Claire cried and asked incessant questions, to which she herself supplied most of the answers, and walked up and down, and threw herself backward and forward in a deep armchair, and finally turned absolutely faint from sheer nervous exhaustion.

Her maid got her upstairs and into bed at last.

There was nothing left of the night, but a ghastly interval of waiting, and silence, and realization, followed.

I had seen Bill Patch--unrecognizable--for one instant only....

And I had seen old Carey, my neighbor for years, crushed and broken, to all intents and purposes dead....

I had seen Harter, the stranger whom we none of us knew except as the husband of Diamond Ellison, after the accident.

And it was his face which was to haunt me longest.

* * * * *

The theatrical litter had all been cleared away out of sight. The servants, white-faced, went about their duties as usual.

Claire remained in her room.

Quite early in the forenoon, Sallie and Mary Ambrey went down to the hospital. They saw Nancy, who was pathetically courageous, and heard that she had telegraphed to Bill’s father.

They asked for Mrs. Harter.

“She is coming round in the most extraordinary way,” said the little nurse, full of importance. “Doctor says she must have an iron constitution. But she won’t let anybody go near her--not her husband or anyone. Strange, isn’t it? She’ll be going out in a day or two; there’s nothing to keep her in for.”

The woman dropped her voice.

“She’ll be wanted to give evidence at the inquest. Dreadful, isn’t it? Doctor says they’re holding it over till to-morrow on her account.”

I had already been notified as to the time and place of the inquest and enjoined to attend it. That Harter’s condition at the time of the smash would be strictly inquired into was already a matter of certainty.

All that day people came up to the house, insisting upon talking about it all. I saw only Lady Annabel, who walked in through a French window, without going to the hall door at all.

Even she did not touch upon the side of things that had so lately absorbed all her attention. The nearest that she came to it was to say that if ever anything seemed like the judgment of Heaven--and there she broke off, with the tears pouring down her face.

Afterward she went up to see Claire. They do not like one another very much, but it is always an unconscious relief to Claire to pour out the story of her own reactions, to anybody at all.

She was better after Lady Annabel’s visit and came downstairs.

Late in the evening, Christopher took the car to the station to meet Bill’s father. He bore many offers of hospitality, but the old man, perhaps not unnaturally, preferred to stay alone at the inn. He had not brought his young wife.

“He is to see Nancy to-morrow, after the inquest,” Christopher told me.

He hesitated a little, and I could guess what was in his mind.

“She thinks that he knows nothing at all, about poor Bill and that woman. I suppose there’s no chance of anything cropping up, at this inquest?”

“Surely not. Of course, the jury will be composed of local men and they’re bound to know that there’s been talk. But I don’t see how it affects the manner of the accident, which is what they have to find a verdict about.”

“Death by misadventure,” said Christopher slowly, and without much conviction.

“H’m! There’s the question of contributory negligence, or worse. Did you see anything of Harter that evening?”

“Not much. Do you mean that he was the worse for drink?”

“Between ourselves, Chris, the fellow had undoubtedly been drinking, but as far as I could tell he was all right when he left the house.”

“Then I can’t for the life of me understand how it happened. The ground was dry, there was no possibility of a skid, and nothing coming towards them in the road, to give any possible reason for a swerve.”

“The steering gear?”

“Nothing the matter with it. I was there when the men righted the car. They looked to see.”

“The chief evidence, beside that of Mrs. Kendal, who actually witnessed the whole thing, will be Mrs. Harter’s, then?”

“Good Lord, are they going to make her give evidence?”

“How can they help it? She, and Harter himself, are the survivors of the accident.”

Christopher groaned.

“That little reptile, and a worthless woman! And a good fellow like that,” said Christopher simply. “It would wring tears from a stone to hear the poor old father talking about him, saying what a good boy he was, and how fond the little stepbrothers were of him. It seems he was clever, too, although you’d never have guessed it--a nice fellow like that,” said Christopher simply.

“Well,” I said, “it’s the cutting of the Gordian knot, for Bill, all right.”

The day and the night that preceded the inquest seemed endless. There was no possibility of restoring any sort of balance to everyday life, until that was over.

Mary asked again if Mrs. Harter would see her, and was again refused.

“She still hasn’t seen her husband,” said the nurse, very much shocked.

She was quite newly arrived in the district.

“What is she doing?” asked Sallie, her eyes wide.

“Nothing. She’s up, you know--she’s got to get up her strength for this afternoon, poor thing. It’ll be an ordeal for her, like. She’s just sitting by the window, with her hands crossed on her lap, so.”

Just as she had sat at her window in the Queen Street lodgings, Mary remembered.

Then Sallie surprised even her mother by suddenly inquiring of the nurse, “How is Mr. Harter?”

One rather wonders if it wasn’t the first time that anyone had thought of asking that, since the accident.

Even the nurse, Mary said, seemed a little bit startled.

“Oh, he wasn’t hurt, you know,” she began.

“I know,” said Sallie--“but I suppose it’s been a shock for him, too--worse, in fact, for him.”

“Of course, of course,” the little nurse agreed. “He’s--he’s a very quiet man, isn’t he? Kept his nerve well, and all that--which makes it all the more strange he should have had such an accident. But there’s no accounting. He’s been up here a good deal, of course--hoping his wife would come to reason, I dare say. I told him that in his place, I’d simply go up, and walk in on her. It’s all nerves, that makes her say she won’t see him. ‘If I were you,’ I told him straight--”

She began the typical hospital nurse’s monologue. Sallie, the medical student, quite ruthlessly interrupted her by saying good morning, and walking out of the room.

“I had to ask about Harter,” she explained afterwards to Mary. “Can you imagine what it must be like, to feel responsible for the death of two people? Especially if one hated one of them.”

“Do you suppose that he hated Bill?”

“I know he did. I saw him watching Bill and Mrs. Harter, on the night of ‘The Bulbul Ameer’--Oh, doesn’t all that seem ages ago?--And, honestly, they did try him pretty high.”

Mary could not deny it.

“It strikes me,” said Sallie, quite quietly, “that it’s on the cards that friend Harter may actually find himself committed for trial, on a charge of manslaughter.”

Nobody else had dared to say it.

And Sallie was right, as she almost always is.

It was, of course, a local jury, and the coroner was a local man. The state of affairs was perfectly well-known to them.

The coroner was a decent little fellow--and the dead boy’s father was in court. There was not a word spoken to connect his name with that of Mrs. Harter.

With her, he dealt very briefly and mercifully, and she looked ill enough to justify it. Her answers were given almost inaudibly, but always straight to the point. When the coroner thanked her, and said that would do, she walked straight out of the room, and went away.

She passed quite close to me, and I saw her face before she had pulled down her veil. It looked as though she had not slept for a long, long while.

Then Mrs. Kendal was called.

Her account of what she had seen was, of course, emphatic, detailed, and circumstantially accurate. She made it perfectly clear that the accident was due entirely to Harter’s driving. The question of his sobriety was pressed very hard, and the medical evidence from the cottage hospital was damaging, on that point. I was asked if he had been drinking during the evening, and so were one or two others. None of the evidence was absolutely damning, but none of it could create a favorable impression.

Harter’s own manner was utterly against him, too. One could see the jury disliking him more and more.

His impassivity was absolute--after all, he was a solicitor himself--but it struck one very disagreeably, as the coroner dwelt on the frightful results of the smash, as he had not done with any of the other witnesses.

Asked whether he had been drinking during the evening, Harter replied in the affirmative, but denied that he had been anything but sober.

He gave a very unemphatic account of the accident and “supposed that the car had skidded.” It was not a very tenable theory and it broke down under the examination of the A. A. men.

Harter listened to it all with his unwholesome little face quite unmoved. He must have expected the verdict, for when at last it came he did not move a muscle.

He was formally committed for trial at the next assizes on a charge of manslaughter.

_Chapter Fifteen_

The thing, if it had been done on the stage, would have ended there. The climax had come. It was--it should have been--all over. But the drama of life, if it holds climax, inevitably leads straight on to anticlimax. Things go on ... one can’t pause, as at the end of a chapter, and take things up again after a decent interval.

The catastrophe was followed by a series of days and nights that had to be lived through.

Harter’s trial came on in a very short while and he was found guilty of manslaughter.

He got five years for it.

They said that he smiled at the verdict.

Sallie and Martyn Ambrey both went away from home on the day following that of the inquest. One could feel in both of these young and yet highly evolved people the strong, instinctive resistance with which they opposed the possible effect of tragedy upon themselves. They were afraid of being made to feel emotion, and yet they were afraid, too, of finding themselves out to be incapable of emotion. They hurried away from Cross Loman.

In a little while, I imagine that the whole thing will have become purely objective to both of them, a story to be told, something entirely outside themselves.

Claire, with her powers of imagination, suffered vicariously, but as usual she mixed it all up with her own private and peculiar grievances. Several times she asked why Bill, who was young and had all life before him should have been taken, while she herself, for whom life held nothing, and who was infinitely weary, should have been left?

There is, of course, no answer to that kind of questions. I never quite understand why people ask them.

Lady Annabel Bending, who would certainly get out of her pony cart and walk up the mildest slope in order to spare her fat pony, made, on the whole, the most brutal comment of any that I heard made, in her gentle, relentless voice. She said:

“I suppose that woman is satisfied, now that she’s succeeded in causing the death of a young and talented man, after mixing him up in a vulgar scandal and doing her best to ruin him, body and soul, and bringing her husband to disgrace. I suppose she’s satisfied.”

She said this to me, but Mary Ambrey was in the room. She looked at Lady Annabel with her straight-gazing dark eyes.

“However much Mrs. Harter may be responsible for--and, after all, she wasn’t the only person concerned in the affair--it’s she who’s been left to face the music,” said Mary. “As for being satisfied, Lady Annabel, it’s a figure of speech in any case, I suppose, but it doesn’t apply to Mrs. Harter. If she’d broken every Commandment there is, she’d be paying for it now--over and over again.”

Lady Annabel did not look pleased. No doubt there was an obscure connection in her mind between the Ten Commandments and the Rector’s official position.

“My words were, of course, not meant to be taken literally,” she said. “Probably Mrs. Harter is shocked at what has happened, now, as we are all apt to be shocked by consequences when they are sufficiently serious and unexpected. But I must say I have very little pity for a woman who deliberately sets out to wreck the life of a man younger than herself.”

Mary turned rather white, but she had the courage to say:

“Bill Patch was a free agent. Apart from everything else, we ought to remember that he was a free agent. It’s she who’s left to pay the penalty, but it isn’t fair that she should bear the blame for both.”

And then Claire said, “_De mortuis nil nisi bonum_.”

So far as surface values went, it was a rebuke to Mary. But Mary’s values are not surface ones, and she is quite clear-headed about them. And I believe that Claire herself, in a way, understood better than she would let herself appear to understand. She has far too much intuition not to know that Bill and Mrs. Harter had been involved, together, in an adventure of real spiritual and emotional significance, and that it was Bill who had been allowed the easy way out and Mrs. Harter who, as Mary said, had been left to face the music alone.

Claire understood, to a certain extent. But she had always disliked Mrs. Harter, and it was not in her to accord to a woman she disliked the recognition of spiritual and emotional significance.

Lady Annabel, who bent her head in acquiescence to the “de mortuis” clause, was on another plane of vision altogether. She really _couldn’t_ see any but the surface values.

Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter had sinned; and she was quite prepared to judge and condemn them both. But Captain Patch was dead, and so he could no more be spoken of except with pity and regret. Mrs. Harter, who was still alive, retained full responsibility for everything.

“It is a frightful affair altogether,” said Lady Annabel, “to have caused the death of a young man like that, in the very midst of the errors into which she had led him, without any time for preparation.... Well, I suppose she is satisfied now.”

Even Mary did not again attempt to move her from that.

The Kendals, who will undoubtedly _parler pour ne rien dire_ round the whole subject at frequent intervals for the rest of their lives, nevertheless showed a great deal of warm feeling, so that one felt their narrow-mindedness to be oddly neutralized by their kindheartedness.

They had been fond of Bill Patch, and the girls, at least, in their strangely prolonged youthfulness of outlook, had never seen beyond the “flirtation-with-a-married-woman” indictment. Mumma herself, in all sincerity, cried heartily and said that in the grave all things were forgotten.

It will be no thanks to her if they are, however. She will always see the whole thing in terms of a sensational scandal, and it is thus that she will always show it to others. And in the end it is quite probable that the four Kendal girls will dismiss the subject, in their rather solemn way, by the formula: “Mumma says she would rather that we did not talk about it.”

The lowest level of all was that upon which Mr. and Mrs. Leeds took--it could scarcely be called their stand, but their very fleeting and transitory foothold.

When they had accorded to death the conventional tributes of an instant of seriousness, a hastily-made-up face of shocked dismay, and a meaningless ejaculation or two, they were inclined to facetiousness.

They enjoyed the scandal of it all with that instinctive vulgarity of outlook that characterizes a certain type of unimaginative mind.

Leeds told the cocktail story over and over again and Mrs. Leeds chaffed him publicly about having admired “that woman” in Egypt. Away from Cross Loman probably they magnified their acquaintance with Mrs. Harter, wherever the notoriety of her name had penetrated, into an intimacy. Leeds, in particular, was like that.