Part 13

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.

Mrs. Fazackerly, to whom, after all, the shock of the accident had been a double one, behaved very gallantly. She attended the inquest, and she actually saw the father of Bill Patch and talked with him about his son. Neither of them referred to Mrs. Harter at all. Then Mrs. Fazackerly put Loman Cottage into the hands of the house agents, stored all her belongings and came to us. Claire, who is at her best in a crisis, went herself to fetch her. The last of her opposition to Christopher’s marriage went by the board when poor Nancy, her final responsibilities over, had a bad nervous breakdown.

Claire nursed her.

“Poor little thing,” said Claire. “Women who have never really suffered are very apt to go to pieces when the first contact with reality comes. I could never do that myself. One is as one’s made, of course. I suppose that very few women of my years have been called upon to go through all that I have gone through in my life. But I’ve never broken down yet. If I had, I suppose that I should have gone mad by this time.”

She did not make that speech in front of Christopher, and her care of Nancy was rewarded by Christopher’s rather inarticulate, but quite evident, gratitude and admiration.

As soon as possible, Christopher Ambrey and Mrs. Fazackerly were married, very quietly indeed, in London, and he took her away to the South of France.

He was to rejoin his regiment abroad early in the following year, and she, of course, was going with him.

The last thing she said to me--and her childlike eyes regained their radiance as she said it--was:

“It’s the most wonderful chance of beginning life all over again that anyone was ever given. The things that used to worry me need never worry me again, and I shan’t ever be frightened any more.”

And with that--the last reference that I ever heard her make to the past--one felt that the old ghosts of those oft-quoted rages of Fazackerly, thrower of plates, and the tyrannies of old Carey, and his eternal criminological discussions, were laid for ever. Even the rather strenuous economies that had for so long been part and parcel of life at Loman Cottage melted away of themselves in Nancy’s determination that Christopher should be as happy as she was herself.

As far as I know, both of them continue to be happy, in their own way, and according to their own capacity for happiness.

They will be a great deal abroad, for some years to come, and Claire is gradually turning the battery of her correspondence on to Nancy instead of Christopher. Nancy’s replies are far more adequate than Christopher’s ever were.

“In the end,” says Sallie, “she’ll get on better with cousin Claire than anybody. Far better than any really thoroughly truthful person could ever do.”

It is all, in a way, very like the old literary convention of the good people getting married and living happily ever after and the bad ones coming to smash.