Part 10

No time had been lost. While he was dressing, his wife had made him a cup of tea, kind and solicitous for his comfort, but driving him nearly distracted by her eager, excited talk and aimless conjectures. It had seemed long before he found a derelict cab willing to drive him from Regent's Terrace to Bedford Park, but now--well, thank God, he was at last nearing the place where he would learn what had befallen the man who had been, next to his own elder boy, the creature he had loved best in his calm, phlegmatic life.

Wingfield went on staring down at the mysterious and yet explicit message, of which the wording seemed to him so odd--in some ways recalling Dering's familiar trick of reiteration. Then suddenly he thought of Hinton, the artist for whom both he and his friend had had reason to feel so deep if wordless a contempt, and yet whom they had both tried, over and over again, to help and set on his feet.

With a sudden revulsion of feeling, the lawyer folded up the telegram and put it back into his breast pocket--this mysterious, unsigned request for his immediate presence had obviously been despatched by Hinton, who might just as well have waited for morning. How stupid of him not to have realised this at once, the more so that No. 8, Lady Rich Road, was Hinton's address, not that of Dering. Quickly he raised his hand to the trap-door above his head; "Pull up at No. 8, not as I told you, at No. 9, Lady Rich Road," he shouted.

* * * * *

The radiance of an early spring morning, so kind to everything in nature, is pitiless to that which owes its being to the ingenuity and industry of human hands. Dr. Johnstone, standing opposite a police inspector in what had been poor Mrs. Hinton's cherished, if untidy and shabby, little sitting-room, felt his wretchedness and shame--for he felt very deeply ashamed--perceptibly increased by the dust-laden sunbeams dancing slantwise about him.

The inspector was really sorry for him, though a little contemptuous perhaps of a medical man capable of showing such emotion and horror in the face of death.

"Why, doctor, you mustn't take on so! How could you possibly have told what was in the man's mind? You weren't upset like this last year over that business in Angle Alley, and that was a sight worse than this, eh?"

But Johnstone had turned away, and was staring out of the bow window. "It isn't that poor wretch Hinton that's upset me," he muttered, "I don't mind death. It's--it's--Dering--Dering and Mrs. Dering." Reluctant tears filled his tired, red-rimmed eyes.

"I'm sorry, too. Very sorry for the lady, that is; as for the other--well, I'm pretty sure he'll cheat Broadmoor, and that without much delay, eh, doctor? Hullo! who's this coming now?"

The tone suddenly changed, became at once official and alert in quality, as the sound of wheels stopped opposite the little gate. When the front door bell pealed through the house he added, "You go to the door, doctor; whoever it is had better not see me at first." And Johnstone found himself suddenly pushed out of the room and into the little hall.

There he hesitated for a moment, looking furtively round at the half-open door which led into the back room fitted up as a studio, where still lay, in dreadful juxtaposition, the dead and the dying, Hinton and his murderer, alone, save for the indifferent yet watchful presence of a trained nurse.

From the kitchen beyond came the sound of eager, lowered voices, those of the two young servants who had of late coped with the difficulties of the Hinton household, and whose scanty wages had been paid, so Johnstone had learned in the last hour, by Mrs. Dering herself.

Another impatient peal of sound echoed through the house, and the doctor, walking slowly forward, opened the front door.

"Can I see Mr. Hinton? Or is he next door? I have driven down from town in response to this telegram. I was Mr. Philip Dering's oldest friend and solicitor----"

"Then--then it was _you_ who were making his will?"

The question struck Wingfield as unseemly. How had this young man, whom he took to be one of Hinton's dissipated friends, learnt even this one fact concerning poor Dering's affairs?

"Yes," he said shortly, as he walked through into the hall, "that was the case. But, of course--well, perhaps, you will kindly inform me where I can see Mr. Hinton?" he repeated impatiently. "I suppose he is with Mrs. Dering, at No. 9?" and the other noticed that he left the door open behind him, evidently intending to leave Hinton's house as soon as he had obtained a reply to his question.

For a moment the two men looked at one another in exasperated silence. Then, very suddenly, Johnstone did that of which he was afterward sorry and self-reproachful. But his nerve was completely gone; for hours he had been engaged in what had proved both a terrible and a futile task, that of attempting to relieve the physical agony of a man for whose state he partly held himself to be responsible. He wished to avoid, at any rate for the present, the repetition to this stranger of what had happened the night before.

And so, "Please come this way," he muttered hoarsely. "I ought perhaps to warn you--to prepare you for something of a shock." And, turning round, beckoning to the other to follow him, he opened the door of the studio, stepping aside to allow Wingfield to pass in before him.

But once through the doorway the lawyer suddenly recoiled and stopped short, so dreadful and so unexpected was the sight which met his eyes.

What Wingfield saw remained with him for weeks, and even for months, an ever-present, torturing vision, full of mingled horror and mystery, a mystery to which he was destined never to find the solution.

Focussed against a blurred background made up of distempered light green walls, a curtainless, open window, and various plain deal studio properties pushed back against the wall, lay, stretched out on some kind of low couch brought forward into the middle of the room, a rigid, motionless figure.

The lower half of the figure, including the feet, which rested on a chair placed at the bottom of the couch, was entirely covered by a blanket; but the chest and head, slightly raised by pillows, seemed swathed and bound up in broad strips of white linen, which concealed chin and forehead, hair and ears, while the head was oddly supported by a broad band or sling fastened with safety-pins--Wingfield's eyes took note of every detail--to the side of the couch. Under the blanket, which was stretched tightly across the man's breast, could be seen the feeble twitching of fingers, but even so, the only sense of life and feeling seemed to the onlooker centred in the eyes, whose glance Wingfield found himself fearing yet longing to meet.

To the right of the couch a large Japanese screen had been so placed as to hide some object spread out on the floor. To the left, watching every movement of the still, recumbent figure, stood a powerful-looking woman in nursing dress. Wingfield's gaze, after wandering round the large, bare room, returned and again clung to the sinister immobile form which he longed to be told was that of Hinton, and as he gazed he forced himself to feel a fierce gladness and relief in the knowledge that Dering was dead,--that in his pocket lay the telegram which proved it.

At last, to gain courage and to stifle a horrible doubt, he compelled himself to meet those at once indifferent and appealing eyes, which seemed to stare fixedly beyond the group of men by the door; and suddenly the lawyer became aware that just behind him hurried whispered words were being uttered.

"This gentleman is Mr. Dering's solicitor; perhaps he will be able to throw some light on the whole affair," and he felt himself being plucked by the sleeve and gently pulled back into the hall.

"It is--isn't it?--poor Hinton?" and he looked imploringly from one man to the other.

"Hinton?" said the doctor sharply. "He's there, sure enough--but you didn't see him, for we put him under a sheet, behind that screen. Your friend shot him dead first, and then cut his own throat, but he didn't set about that in quite the right way, so he's alive still, as you can see."

Wingfield drew a long breath of something like relief. The torturing suspense of the last few moments was at an end.

"And where is Mrs. Dering?" he spoke in a quiet, mechanical voice; and Johnstone felt angered by his callousness.

"We've just sent her back into the next house," he answered curtly, "and made her take the Hinton children with her. For--well, it often is so in such cases, you know--the presence of his wife seems positively to distress Mr. Dering; besides, the nurse and I can do, and have done, all that is possible."

"And have you no clue to what has happened? Has Dering been able to give no explanation of this--this--horrible business?"

Johnstone shook his head. "Of course he can't speak. He will never speak again. He wrote a few words to his wife, but they amounted to nothing save regret that he had bungled the last half of the affair."

"And what do you yourself think?"

Wingfield spoke calmly and authoritatively. He had suddenly become aware, during the last few moments, that he was talking to a medical man.

"I haven't had time to think much about it;" the tone was rough and sore. "Mr. Dering seems to have come into a large sum of money, and such things have been known to upset men's brains before now."

"Still, he might write something of consequence, now that this gentleman has come," interposed the inspector.

But when Wingfield, standing by that which he now knew was indeed his friend, watched the painful, laboured moving of the pencil across the slate which had been hurriedly fetched some two hours before from the young Hintons' nursery, all he saw, traced again and again, were the words:

"Look after Louise. Look after Louise ..." and then at last: "I mean to die. I mean to die. I mean to die."

V

SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR?

"Yes; there; wives be such a provoking class of society, because though they be never right, they be never more than half wrong."--THE TRANTER in _Under the Greenwood Tree_.

I

The fact that it was Mrs. Rigby's Silver Wedding Day, and that she was now awaiting her only brother who was to be the fourth at the dinner she and her husband, the respected Town Clerk of Market Dalling, were giving in honour of the event, appeared to her no reason why she should sit in her parlour with hands idle in her lap. There was a large work-basket on a table close to her elbow, and with quick, capable fingers she was engaged in mending a pillow-case.

It was late June, and Mrs. Rigby sat by the widely open French windows which gave access to her garden--one of those fragrant walled gardens which still embellish the rear of the High Street in a very typically English market town.

Now and again the work would drop between her hands, and lie unheeded on her knee, while she looked out, focussing her dark, bright eyes on the distant figure of a woman who sat in a summer-house situated at the extreme end of the garden; and as Mrs. Rigby gazed thoughtfully at this, her other wedding guest, her whole face would soften--so might a mother look at a daughter whom instinct prompted her to love, and reason to condemn as foolish.

And yet the sitting figure was that of a contemporary of Mrs. Rigby, being, as a matter of fact, a certain Matilda Wellow, who had been her bridesmaid twenty-five years ago to-day, and who was now, in more than one sense of the term, the most substantial spinster of Market Dalling.

The sound of the door behind her quietly opening and shutting made Mrs. Rigby turn round, and a moment later she was looking up at a tall, straight, still young-looking man, who, clad in evening dress, stood smiling down at her. He was David Banfield, her half-brother.

"Why, you've put on all your war-paint!" she exclaimed in half-pretended dismay. "Didn't you know that there was only Matilda Wellow coming?"

"I don't know that I thought anything about it," he answered, more gaily than his sister was now in the habit of hearing him speak. "I dressed out of compliment to you, Kate, and because--well, I've got into the way of it lately. But pray don't let Matt think that he must needs follow my example!"

Then he sat down by Mrs. Rigby, and gazed out with quick, sensitive appreciation at the old walled garden.

"You're a wonderful gardener, Kate," he said suddenly.

"There's a lot of nonsense talked now about gardening," she said drily. "With the grand ladies you see such a lot of, Dave, it's just a passing fad."

Her brother made no answer; he looked down at her with uncritical and yet dissatisfied eyes. She was a handsome woman, and even now only forty-six, and yet she managed to convey an impression of age. This was partly owing to her unsuitable dress, for Mrs. Rigby was wearing a dark blue silk gown, chosen, not only to grace her silver wedding day, but also with a view to being her best dress during the coming autumn and winter.

Kate Rigby loved her half-brother, David Banfield, as only a childless woman can love the creature to whom she has stood for long years in the place of mother. David was twelve years younger than herself, and, with one exception, he had never caused her a moment's real unhappiness or unease. The exception, however, had been paramount, for with him had been connected Mrs. Rigby's only taste of sharp pain and sorrow, and, worse still, to such a woman as herself, of disgrace.

The young man's marriage to an Irish singer, which had taken place without his sister's knowledge, had proved disastrous. Rosaleen Tara--to give her the stage name by which her charming rendering of the old national ballads had made her widely known--had never liked, or been suited to, life as led at Market Dalling; and to make matters worse, she was a Roman Catholic.

After a few years' unsatisfactory married life, and the birth of one child, a girl, Mrs. David Banfield had returned, with her husband's grudging consent, to the musical stage. Then, on the very day Banfield had been expecting his wife home for a short holiday, there had come from her a letter telling him shortly, bluntly, cruelly, that she had been unfaithful to her marriage vow, and that she hoped he would forget her.

Had he forgotten her? No. It had only been owing to his sister's urgency, and to Matthew Rigby's more measured advice, that Banfield had at last consented to take the step of divorcing his wife.

This step Mrs. Rigby had not only never regretted, but--and in this she was more fortunate than her husband--no doubt had ever crossed her mind of its having been the wisest thing for her brother's happiness and peace. But Matthew Rigby, cautious member of a cautious profession, had learned very early in his married life the futility of disagreeing with the wife with whom Providence had blessed him.

Now Banfield lived in solitary state with his little girl, his household managed by the child's nurse, an old Irishwoman, who, if devoted to the child, was incapable of managing such a decorous household as should have been that of the Brew House.

Any day, any hour, Mrs. Rigby would have bartered her personal happiness for that of her half-brother, and yet the two seldom met--and they met almost daily--without the saying on her part of something likely either to wound or to annoy him.

"I suppose Rosy is well? I thought you meant sending the child in to see me to-day?"

"Didn't she come?" A look of worry and anger crossed Banfield's dark, mobile face. "I can't think what prevented it, unless--well, there's been rather an upset at the Brew House, and perhaps Mary Scanlan didn't like to go out."

"I heard there had been an upset," observed his sister drily, "for baker told cook. He said your housekeeper turned the younger maid, old Hornby's daughter, out of the house last night, and that the girl could be heard crying all down the street."

Mrs. Rigby let her work fall unheeded on the floor; quite unconscious of her action she clasped her hands tightly together.

"David! How long is this sort of thing to go on?" she asked, in a low, tense voice. "It's the talk of the whole town, and it can't be good for your child."

"But what would you have me do?" He had hoped that to-day--his sister's silver wedding day--his domestic trials would be forgotten, or, at any rate, not mentioned. "I can't dismiss Mary Scanlan now--she must stay on till Rosy goes to school. That won't be for very long, for, as you know, I promised"--he averted his face as he spoke--"to send the child to a convent school as soon as she was twelve years old."

The idea that her brother, the wealthy, highly-thought-of brewer of Market Dalling, should confess himself worsted by the old and ill-tempered Irishwoman, who, together with little Rosy, had been his wife's--his unfaithful wife's--only legacy to him, was horrible to his sister.

Even now, when bitter, disconnected thoughts crowded one on another, Mrs. Rigby, half-unconsciously, evoked in her mind the strong personality of the one human being who ever really "stood up" to her. She had had the notion, so curiously common in England, that your Irishwoman is invariably slatternly, untruthful, and good-natured; but in Mary Scanlan she had found a human being as scrupulously neat, truthful, and high-minded as herself, while at the same time far more ill-tempered, and equally determined to have her own way.

While Mrs. Rigby was allowing a flood of very bitter thoughts to surge up round her, David Banfield was watching her face, and awaiting her next words with some anxiety.

But when Kate Rigby at last spoke, she seemed to have forgotten the immediate question under discussion.

"I suppose," she said slowly, "that you have never thought, Dave, that there might be a simple way out of your difficulties?"

"You mean that I might marry again? Well, Kate, yes--I have thought of it. I suppose there's no man, situated as I have been these last four years, but thinks of a second marriage as a way out; but--but, apart from other considerations, I don't feel as if I could bring myself to do it."

"And why not, pray?" asked Mrs. Rigby in a low voice.

"Well, it's difficult to explain the way I look at it. Of course, no one can answer for another, and yet, Kate, if anything happened to Matt, I don't see you marrying again----?"

David Banfield was aware that he had not chosen a very happy simile with which to point his meaning, and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he hoped that what he had said would put an end to a painful discussion. But any such hope was destined to be grievously disappointed, for his sister, with suddenly heightened colour, turned on him very sharply.

"Don't talk nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I'm an old woman, and you're a young man!" and she set back her vigorous, powerful shoulders.

"You know very well that if Matthew had dared to treat me as you were treated by Rosal----" something in her brother's face caused his wife's name to die away on her lips--"I should have felt myself free to do exactly what suited me best! Surely, when you go out among your grand county friends, you must meet nice young ladies who would be only too pleased to become Mrs. David Banfield, and to step into such a home as the Brew House?"

Mrs. Rigby looked eagerly, furtively, at her brother.

The way in which he had been welcomed, to a certain extent absorbed, in the rather dull county society round Market Dalling, had been, to his sister, a source of mingled pride and jealousy, the more so that it had begun in the days of his pretty wife, whose modest professional fame had preceded her, and made her a welcome addition to county gatherings and dinner-parties. Then had come the great break of the war, and in South Africa Banfield had been naturally thrown with the landowners of his own part of the world.

So it was that during the first few months which had followed on his return home, Mrs. Rigby had fully expected her brother to make another, maybe as disastrous a matrimonial experiment as before, and in a class which was as little his own as that of his Irish wife had been.

But time had gone on, and David Banfield had shown no disposition to make a second marriage, either in the county set, or in the little town world of Market Dalling, where the Rigbys themselves lived and had their important being.

"Kate--you don't understand," he said at last, and, even as he uttered the words, they seemed to him painfully inadequate. "In fact, you never _did_ understand"--there came a sudden touch of passion into his voice, and he got up and walked up and down the room--"how I felt--how for the matter of that I still feel--about Rosaleen. But for the war--but for the getting clear away--I don't know what I should have done! Once, when I was out there in a little out-of-the-way station, I saw an old bill with her name on it, put up, of course, before I met her, when she was touring in South Africa. Well, I can tell you one thing--if we had been back in the days when a soldier could get killed so much more easily than he can now, you would never have seen me again. For days and days I couldn't get her out of my mind--she's never out of my mind now----"

Mrs. Rigby was frightened, almost awed, not so much by the violence of his feeling, as by the outspoken expression of that feeling.

She got up and walked quickly to him.

"Perhaps I understand more than you think," she said in a moved voice, "but now, David, you must turn your back on all that. For good or evil, it's over and done with, and your duty is to your child. I won't say a word against Mary Scanlan,--I know she's been a faithful servant to you,--but wouldn't it be better for Rosy if you had someone who could look after the house, as well as after her? Even you admit that you cannot go on at the Brew House as you've been doing lately. I know you can't feel to anyone else as you felt to--to Rosaleen, but surely it would be best for the child, to say nothing of yourself, to have some kind, nice woman about the place, instead of one who's only a servant after all."

"Of course, it would be better," he said sombrely. "Don't you think I know that? But where am I to find the 'nice, kind woman'? As for the girls I meet, it's out of the question."

As he spoke, he unconsciously glanced round the room in which he and his sister were standing. Mrs. Rigby had not inherited the good taste which had distinguished her Banfield forefathers. The Brew House was full of fine old furniture, furniture which some of the young brewer's "grand" friends envied him; but that which the Rigbys had gradually accumulated had the mean and yet rather pretentious commonness which belonged to the period in which they had married.

"There's one whom you've never thought of, but who often thinks of you," said Mrs. Rigby, her voice sinking to a whisper.

Banfield looked at his sister attentively. His fastidious mind passed in review the various young women who composed the little society of Market Dalling. He regarded them all with indifference, rising in some cases to positive dislike, and since his matrimonial misfortunes he had, as far as was possible, avoided every kind of social gathering held in his native place.

"I don't know whom you mean," he said at last with some discomfiture. "In the old days you were always apt to fancy that the girls were after me, and I can't say that you ever gave them much encouragement,"--he added with a rather clumsy attempt at playfulness.

"The person I have in my mind," persisted Mrs. Rigby, "isn't exactly a girl; she's just what we were talking about--a nice, kind woman--and you never seem to mind meeting her."

"Do you--can you possibly mean----"