Chapter VIII: The Writing on the Wall

On entering the dining-room at Evercreech, I found company assembled. I had not been warned, and I was not introduced. I came in late, and took my seat at the table quietly, being placed between Mr Pugsley and a lady whom I did not know. I learned, however, in due course, that she was a Mrs Dalston, who, with her husband, also present, was a new-comer in the neighbourhood. The two had taken the Lone Farm, a decent but rather decayed property situated on the outskirts of Market Grazing, and foolishly reputed to be haunted. But it was inexpensive--perhaps because of its reputation--and fully adequate to the needs of a childless couple. The only other guest was, to my pleasure, Sir Maurice Carnac, who had earlier shown me friendship, and who was down somewhere in Hampshire for the shooting. But he looked little capable of shouldering a gun, and was altogether sadly altered from my memory of him, having but lately, as I learned, recovered from a paralytic stroke, whose passing had left him much debilitated. He lay sunk in his chair, like a heap of human ashes, and with all the old fire of roguery smouldering low in him. But he seemed to awaken suddenly on my entrance, and looking across at me as I sat down, treated me to a leer and wink.

“Hillo, Charlie, my boy!” he chuckled. “What sport with the girls, hey!”

Consternation sat on every face. My lord, looking much perturbed, bent to the old rascal, and enlightened him.

“Gaskett, Carnac; Gaskett!” he said. “You remember Richard Gaskett?”

“Hey!” The old man sat up. What link of memory had slipped in him, obliterating a whole score of years? “Richard, hey?” he said, immensely sly. “I know, I know. The lovely one’s pledge--earnest of widowed respectability. But mum, mum, my boy--I know. What days, hey!”

The soup engaged and silenced him--at least in everything but its absorption. It was some moments before the talk could find itself an embarrassed vent. But Sir Maurice brightened as he fed. Good fare was the natural aliment to that impoverished soil. He had only wandered and lost himself when hungry. In a little he had forgotten all about his _balourdise_, and was paying senile compliments along the table to his hostess.

In the moment of its delivery, however, the strange lady next me had turned quickly and looked me in the face. She appeared to me an utterly colourless person, _fade_, thin, dowdy, with hardly a sign of spirit or expression--a condemned ghost of womanhood. I wondered presently at the fond attentions with which her husband treated her, at his efforts to win a smile from her unresponsive face, and his patience when habitually baffled, since he himself was a fine bold figure of a man, white-teethed, black-whiskered, for all his forty-five or so years. And I wondered still when I came to learn how persistently she had disappointed his hopes of an heir, the few children she had born to him having died one by one on the very threshold of their existence. But perhaps all those fruitless pangs were accountable as much for his manly devotion as for her insensibility. She might have held him responsible for that seed of death which had stultified all the rich Woman in her. In any case, that he was more attached to her than she to him was obvious.

She spoke little--nothing to me; and, I noticed, ate little, but crumbled her bread all dinner-time. I was not concerned, inasmuch as it gave me the opportunity to observe elsewhere, which I had the inclination, and the provocation now, moreover, to do. Though the object of the old ex-governor’s misbegotten attention, and the immediate brief cynosure of all eyes, I was the only one, I think, not momentarily confounded. A curious self-possession, a sort of conceit of masterfulness, had come to claim me of late. A kind of cold and scrutinising philosophy had found me out of the old dependence. Having had long the will to counter my allotted destiny, a very little of the means had encouraged me to something like effrontery. I felt already a sense of power; a truculence in the face of the least supposed imposition on me of superiority.

While, therefore, they were all looking at me, I was coolly intent on Lady Skene. One hurried glance my way she gave; and then her eyes were lowered to the cloth, as she drew off her gloves and addressed some commonplace remark to Mr Dalston, who sat on her right. Her voice, I have not yet observed, was marked by a slight Cockney intonation--hardly to be gathered from its softness--just a twang from Cheapside, like the faintest distant whine of Bow Bells. But it was enough to imply her origin.

Looking away from her, my eyes travelled to Mr Pugsley beside me. He was obviously flustered and annoyed--shifted his shoulders, pinched his nose, defied, self-conscious, my stare, and failed utterly to stand up to it. Then he cleared his throat with violence, and affected, ostentatiously, to prefer the menu card to my company.

I laughed to myself, speculating on the idyllic guilt-consciousness which must be flowing between these two. The baronet’s malapropism had followed curiously pat on my recent enlightenment. I recalled the stories of his ancient intimacy with Lord Skene, of his reputed co-partnership with that nobleman in a rollicking adventure or two. Were they, my lady and her pious accomplice, hearing, in their hearts, the first creaking of the wheels of retribution? Poor panic-struck conspirators!

Yet I was sorry that Fate had imposed on Lady Skene so vulgar a confederate; for I could not but think the man vulgar, ordained priest as he was, and quite sincere, I believe, in his evangelicism. But, apart from him, and her subscription to his ugly phraseologic cant, she was so lovelily one of those presences whom age cannot wither (the rest of the quotation hardly applied to her); so perpetual a provocation--and aggravation--to the worshipper of beauty; so serene a thing, so coldly tantalising, so refinedly a figure for the sweet altitudes of romance! Ah, that she would make me her knight indeed--champion of a mother’s fame, dearer even than a wife’s! No need, then, to dread the consequences of an infamy atoned through love. I would have struck for--not against her. But she had preferred the inhuman part. So be it.

I ended my scrutiny with an inward sigh, and turned it elsewhere. I had plentiful opportunity. No one addressed, or appeared even to consider me. Right opposite, Miss Christmas, who sat between Sir Maurice and Mr Dalston, was engaged in rallying her either neighbour charmingly. She was quite at her ease with both, confident of herself as the most attractive of social siderites--a star of unquestionable magnitude. And they responded, of course--men of the world, and quick in persiflage. They laughed at her butterfly sallies, and humoured them because she was pretty and an heiress They were patently captivated. “Ah!” I thought: “if you knew how this very morning she has been scrubbing my floor for me!”

No one would have thought it possible. She was gay as a fairy; flower-complexioned; her hair like a misty aureole. A string of pearls was round her throat, and pearls were in her ears--“wicked little shells for recording scandal, and answering to it with pearls of price, too,” said Sir Maurice, after she had retorted upon some society calumny of his.

“O!” she cried; “to compare my poor ears to oysters!”

“Natives!” said Mr Dalston. “There are no oysters and no ears in all the world like our English breed.”

She asked him seriously how he knew--if he had travelled much?

“Far and wide,” he said, “and in all countries except Italy, I believe.”

I wondered why he made, or had made, the reservation.

“A sentiment,” he said, as if I had put the question to him. “I lost a dear friend there once.”

Actually I found his eyes fixed on mine. They were a dark penetrating feature in his face, set under strong brows, and somehow quite at variance with the smiling good humour of his mouth. His hair, though almost white, was full and wavy as a boy’s, and contrasted strangely with his jet-black mutton-chop whiskers, and those again with the strong white line of his teeth. He was tall and excellently compact, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and had altogether the appearance of a man entirely at his ease with himself and the world.

“Do you know it--Italy?” he asked of me.

“I have never been from here but to school,” I answered.

“Ah!” he said: “what visions! what a prospect! That emancipation from tutelage, and all the world to follow!”

He was interrupted by a quick shrill exclamation from his wife:

“Look! What has happened? What is the matter with him?”

She was on her feet, we were all on our feet, in an instant. Sir Maurice Carnac was fallen heaped back into his chair, his shapeless old face all wryed as if in an exhaustion of horrible laughter, incoherent sounds coming from his lips.

“Carnac!” cried Lord Skene.

_For to-morrow we die!_

“This is my business,” said Mr Pugsley, in an agitated voice. All honour to his creed so far, for he was terribly unnerved.

The stricken man was carried upstairs by the servants, followed by the minister and his lordship. We all waited, huddled into a silence unbroken but for the whimpering of the women. Only Mrs Dalston remained quite passionless and unmoved. Once I saw her husband quietly offer to take her hand in his, and I saw her as quietly repulse him. His, according to the feminine persuasion, was an irresistible personality, all black and white and pink, and inevitably suggestive of past triumphs. She was the only one, I dare swear, who had ever been able to keep him at arm’s length; and that, perhaps, was the secret of her hold over him.

Presently Lord Skene came down. His hand was shaking and his lips, as he spilt out a glass of wine and swallowed it.

“Pugsley asked him if he was saved,” he stuttered, “and he answered that he’d be damned if he wasn’t. There was no refuting that. Poor old Maurice!”

Presently he recollected himself, and begged his company to stand not upon the order of their going, but to acquit him of any suspicion that such an awful calamity had been imminent.

It was Mr Dalston who reassured and commiserated him in terms of the readiest and most delicate sympathy.

Sir Maurice Carnac died that night.