Part 3

Althea looked around her doubtfully, then she retreated into the darkened room, but no one came up, and she remembered that the other servants of course supposed Luke to be on duty. It might be--nay, it almost certainly was--the doctor. With faltering steps she again came out into the hall and opened the front door; and then, when she saw who it was who stood there, his kind honest eyes blinking in the sudden light, Althea began to cry.

The tears ran down her cheeks; she sighed convulsively, and John Bustard, looking at her with deep concern and dismay, was quite unaware--he does not know even to this day--that it was with relief.

"What is it?" he said. "My dear Mrs. Scrope--what is the matter? Would you like me to go away--or--or can I be of any use?"

"Oh, yes," she said piteously. "Indeed you can be of use. Don't go away--stay with me--I'm--I'm so frightened, Mr. Bustard. Perceval--poor Perceval is--is ill, and I'm afraid to stay in there with him."

And it was Mr. Bustard who at once took command--command of Althea, whom he ultimately ordered to bed; command of the excited household, whose excitement he sternly suppressed; it was Mr. Bustard who, believing he told truth, lied for Althea, first to the doctor, and later to the coroner.

"How fortunate it was for poor Althea that Mr. Bustard, that nice little man in the Privy Council Office, was actually in the house when poor Perceval Scrope's death took place!" bold and cruel people would say to Mrs. Panfillen, watching the while to see how she took their mention of the dead man's name.

"Yes," she would answer them quietly. "Very fortunate indeed. And it was so kind of Mr. Bustard to get his sister to go away with Althea. Poor Althea is so alone in the world. I hope she will come and stay with us when she comes back to town; we were Perceval Scrope's oldest, I might say closest, friends. You know that their marriage--his and Althea's--took place from our house?"

The only human being who scented a mystery was Dockett--Dockett, who was mindful, as he had a right to be, of his lawful perquisites, and who will never forgive himself for having been out on that fateful afternoon.

"I'd give something to know the whereabouts of Mr. Scrope's overcoat, to say nothing of his hat and stick. That common ash stick's a relic--it may be worth money some day!" he observed threateningly to the footman. But Luke, as only answer, stared at him with stolid dislike.

Luke had seen nothing of the hat and stick; no doubt they had been left in the cab in which Mr. Scrope had come back, ill, from the House. As for the overcoat, it had probably disappeared in the confusion, the hurried coming and going, of that evening when Luke had been almost run off his legs answering the door, and his head made quite giddy answering enquiries. But it was not Luke's business to say what he thought or did not think. With such a man as Mr. Dockett, it only led to unpleasantness.

II

MR. JARVICE'S WIFE

I

"About that letter of your uncle's? I take it you have no one to suggest?"

Thomas Carden glanced anxiously at the son in whom he had so strong a confidence, and who was the secret pride of his eyes, the only love of his austere, hard-working life.

The two were a great contrast to one another. The older man was short and slight, with the delicate, refined, spiritual face, so often seen in the provincial man of business belonging to that disappearing generation of Englishmen who found time to cultivate the things of the mind as well as the material interests of life. A contrast, indeed, to the tall, singularly handsome, alert-looking man whom he had just addressed, and whose perfect physical condition made him appear somewhat younger than his thirty-two years.

And yet, in spite or perhaps because of this contrast between them, the two were bound in the closest, if not exactly in the most confidential, ties of affection. And, as a matter of course, they were partners in the great metal-broking business of Josh. Carden, Thomas Carden and Son, which had been built up by three generations of astute, self-respecting citizens of Birmingham.

It was Easter Monday, and the two men were lingering over breakfast, in a way they seldom allowed themselves time to do on ordinary week-days, in the finely proportioned, book-lined dining-room of one of those spacious old houses which remain to prove that the suburb of Edgbaston was still country a hundred years ago.

Theodore Carden looked across the table meditatively. He had almost forgotten his uncle's letter, for, since that letter had been read and cursorily discussed, he and his father had been talking of a matter infinitely more important to them both. The matter in question was the son's recent engagement and coming marriage, a marriage which was a source of true satisfaction to the older man. His father's unselfish joy in the good thing which had befallen him touched Theodore Carden keenly, for the niche occupied in most men's minds by their intimate feminine circle was filled in that of the young man by the diminutive figure of the senior partner of Carden and Son.

As is perhaps more often the case than those who despise human nature believe, many have the grace to reverence and admire the qualities in which they know themselves to be deficient. Such a man was the younger Carden.

To-day the depths had been stirred, and he let his mind dwell with a certain sense of shame and self-rebuke on his own and his father's ideals of human conduct. Even as a schoolboy, Theodore had come to realise how much more he knew of the ugly side of life than did his father. But then, old Mr. Carden was quite exceptional; he knew nothing--or so at least his son believed, and loved him for it--of the temptations, conflicts, victories, and falls of the average sensual man.

Theodore's father had been engaged, at twenty, to a girl of his own age whom he had not been able to marry till twelve years later; she had left him a widower with this one child after five years of married life, and Thomas Carden, as he had himself once told his son in a moment of unwonted confidence, had been absolutely faithful to her before the marriage and since her death.

The woman--many people would have said the very fortunate young woman--who was so soon to become Mrs. Theodore Carden would not possess such a husband as Thomas Carden had been to his wife.

And yet, in his heart, Theodore was well aware that the gentle girl he loved would probably be a happier woman than his own mother had been, for he, unlike his father, in his dealings with the other sex could call up at will that facile and yet rather rare gift of tenderness which women, so life had taught him, value far more than the deeper, inarticulate love....

Carden came back to the prosaic question of his uncle's letter with a distinct effort.

"Have I anyone to suggest?" he echoed. "I have no one to suggest, father. I know, of course, exactly the sort of man Uncle Barrett is looking for; he's asking us to find him the perfect clerk every man of business has sought for at some time or other. If I were you I should write and tell him that the man he wants us to find never has to look outside England for a job, and, what is more, would rather be a clerk here--if he's any sense--than a partner in New Zealand!"

A smile quivered for a moment over the young man's shrewd face; his uncle was evidently seeking such a man as he was himself, but such men, so Theodore Carden was able to tell himself without undue conceit, were not likely to go into voluntary exile even with the bribe of eventual partnership in a flourishing business.

There was a pause, and then again the older man broke the silence with something entirely irrelevant to the subject which was filling the minds of his son and himself.

"You haven't looked at the _Post_ this morning? There's nothing in it. Dearth of real news is, I suppose, responsible for this?" and he pointed, frowning as he spoke, to a column on the middle page headed "The Jarvice Mystery. New Developments."

Again a shrewd, good-humoured smile quivered on his son's firm mouth.

"In these days newspapers have to follow, not lead, the public taste. Very few people are honestly as indifferent as you are, father, to that sort of story. Now even I, who never met poor old Jarvice, cannot help wondering how he came by his death; and yet you, who knew the man----"

"I knew him," said the other with a touch of impatience, "as I know, and as you know, dozens of our fellow-townsmen."

"Never mind; you, at any rate, can put a face to the man's name; and yet the question as to whether he was or was not poisoned by his wife, is one of indifference to you! Now I submit that in this indifference you are really a little----" he hesitated for a word, but found that none so well expressed his thought as that which had first arisen to his lips--"peculiar, father."

"Am I?" said Thomas Carden slowly; "am I so, Theodore? Nay, nay, I deny that I am indifferent! Lane"--Major Lane was at that time Head Constable of Birmingham, and a lifelong friend of the speaker--"Lane was quite full of it last night. He insisted on telling me all the details of the affair, and what shocked me, my boy, was not so much the question which, of course, occupied Lane--that is, as to whether that unhappy young woman poisoned her husband or not--but the whole state of things which he disclosed about them. Lane told me certain facts concerning Jarvice, whom, as you truly say, I have known, in a sense, for years, which I should not have thought possible of any man--vile things, which should have prevented his thinking of marriage, especially of marriage with a young wife."

Theodore Carden remained silent; he never discussed unsavoury subjects with his father. Moreover, he had no liking for Major Lane, though he regarded him with considerable respect, and even with a feeling of gratitude. Some years before, the Head Constable had helped the young man out of a serious scrape, the one real scrape--so Carden was complacently able to assure himself--engendered by his systematic and habitual pursuit of women.

Even now he could not recall, without wincing, the interview he had had on that occasion with his father's friend. During that interview Carden had felt himself thoroughly condemned, and even despised, by the older man, and he had been made to feel that it was only for the sake of his father--his high-minded, unsuspicious father--that he was being saved from the public exposure of a peculiarly sordid divorce suit.

But it was in all sincerity that the young man now felt indignant with Major Lane for having distressed such a delicately spiritual soul as was Thomas Carden with the hidden details of the Jarvice story. After all, what interested the public was not the question of Jarvice's moral character, but whether a gently nurtured and attractive woman had carried through a sinister and ingenious crime, which, but for a mere accident, would have utterly defied detection.

Theodore Carden got up from the breakfast table and walked over to a circular bow window which commanded charming views of the wide sloping garden, interspersed with the streams and tiny ponds, which gave the house its name of Watermead, and which enabled old Mr. Carden to indulge himself with especial ease in his hobby of water gardening.

Standing there, the young man began wondering what he should do with himself this early spring day.

His _fiancée_ had just left the quiet lodgings, which she and her mother, a clergyman's widow, had occupied in Birmingham during the last few weeks, to pay visits to relatives in the south of England. The thought of going to any of the neighbouring houses where he knew himself to be sure of a warm welcome, and where the news of his engagement would be received with boisterous congratulations, tempered in some cases with an underlying touch of regret and astonishment, filled him with repugnance.

The girl he had chosen to be his wife was absolutely different from the women who had hitherto attracted him; he reverenced as well as loved her, and hitherto Theodore Carden had never found reverence to be in any sense a corollary of passion, while he had judged women by those who were attractive to, or, as was quite as often the case, attracted by, himself.

The last few days had brought a great change in his life, and one which he meant should be permanent; and yet, in spite or perhaps because of this, as he stood staring with absent eyes into his father's charming garden, he found his mind dwelling persistently on the only one of his many amorous adventures which had left a deep, an enduring, and, it must be admitted, a most delightful mark on the tablets of his memory.

The whole thing was still so vivid to him that half-involuntarily he turned round and looked down the long room to where his old father was sitting. How amazed, above all how shocked and indignant, the man for whom he had so great an affection and respect would feel if he knew the pictures which were now floating before his son's retrospective vision!

Like most thinking human beings, Theodore Carden had not lived to his present age without being struck by the illogical way the world wags. Accordingly, he was often surprised and made humorously indignant by the curious moral standards--they had so many more than one--of the conventional people among whom it was his fate to dwell and have his social being.

Not one of the men he knew, with the exception of his father, and of those others--a small number truly--whom he believed to be sincerely, not conventionally, religious, but would have envied him the astonishing adventure which reconstituted itself so clearly before him to-day--and yet not one of them but would have been ready to condemn him for having done what he had done. Theodore Carden, however, so often tempted to kiss, never felt tempted to tell, and the story of that episode remained closely hidden, and would so remain, he told himself, to the end of his life.

* * * * *

What had happened had been briefly this.

One day in the previous October, Carden had taken his seat in the afternoon express which stops at Birmingham on its way from the north to Euston, or rather, having taken a leisurely survey of the train, which was, as he quickly noted, agreeably empty, he had indicated to the porter carrying his bag a carriage in which sat, alone, a singularly pretty woman.

As he afterwards had the delight of telling her, and, as he now reminded himself with a retrospective thrill of feeling, he had experienced, when his eyes first met those of the fair traveller, that incommunicable sensation, part physical, part mental, which your genuine Lothario, if an intelligent man, always welcomes with quickening pulse as a foretaste of the special zest to be attached to a coming pursuit.

Carden's instinct as to such delicate matters had seldom played him false; never less so than on this occasion, for, within an hour, he and the lovely stranger had reached that delightful stage of intimacy in which a man and woman each feels that he and she, while still having much to learn about the other, are on the verge of a complete understanding.

During the three hours' journey, Carden's travelling companion told him a great deal more about herself than he had chosen to reveal concerning his own life and affairs; he learnt, for instance, that she was the young wife of an old man, and that the old man was exceedingly jealous. Further, that she found the life she was compelled to lead "horribly boring," and that a widowed cousin, who lived near London, and from whom she had "expectations," formed a convenient excuse for occasional absences from home.

Concerning three matters of fact, however, she completely withheld her confidence, both then, in those first delicious hours of their acquaintance, and even later, when their friendship--well, why not say friendship, for Carden had felt a very strong liking as well as an over-mastering attraction for this Undine-like creature?--had become much closer.

The first and second facts which she kept closely hidden, for reasons which should perhaps have been obvious, were her surname--she confided to him that her Christian name was Pansy--and her husband's profession. The third fact which she concealed was the name of the town where she lived, and from which she appeared to be travelling that day.

The trifling incidents of that eventful October journey had become to a great extent blurred in Theodore Carden's memory, but what had followed was still extraordinarily vivid, and to-day, on this holiday morning, standing idly looking out of the window, he allowed his mind a certain retrospective licence.

From whom, so he now asked himself, had first come the suggestion that there should be no parting at Euston between himself and the strange elemental woman he found so full of unforced fascination and disarming charm?

The answer soon came echoing down the corridors of remembrance: from himself, of course. But even now the memory brought with it shame-faced triumph as he remembered her quick acquiescence, as free, as unashamed, as joyous as that of a spoilt child acclaiming an unlooked-for treat.

And, after all, what harm had there been in the whole halcyon adventure--what injury had it caused to any human being?

Carden put the husband, the fatuous old man, who had had the incredible folly to marry a girl thirty-five years younger than himself, out of court. Pansy, light-hearted, conscienceless Pansy--he always thought of her with a touch of easy tenderness--had run no risk of detection, for, as he had early discovered, she knew no one in London with the solitary exception of the old cousin who lived in Upper Norwood.

As for his own business acquaintances, he might, of course, have been seen by any of them taking about this singularly attractive woman, for the two went constantly to the theatre, and daily to one or other of the great restaurants. But what then? Excepting that she was quieter in manner, far better dressed, and incomparably prettier, Pansy might have been the wife or sister of any one of his own large circle of relations, that great Carden clan who held their heads so high in the business world of the Midlands.

Nay, nay, no risk had been run, and no one had been a penny the worse! Indeed, looking back, Theodore Carden told himself that it had been a perfect, a flawless episode; he even admitted that after all it was perhaps as well that there had been no attempt at a repetition.

And yet? And yet the young man, especially during the first few weeks which had followed that sequence of enchanting days, had often felt piqued, even a little surprised, that the heroine of his amazing adventure had not taken advantage of his earnest entreaty that she would give him the chance of meeting her again. He had left it to her to be mysterious; as for himself, he had seen no reason why he should conceal from her either his name or his business address.

Many men would not have been so frank, but Theodore Carden, too wise in feminine lore to claim an infallible knowledge of women, never remembered having made a mistake as to the moral social standing of a new feminine acquaintance.

During the few days they had been together, everything had gone to prove that Pansy was no masquerader from that under-world whose denizens always filled him with a sensation of mingled aversion and pity. He could not doubt--he never had doubted--that what she had chosen to tell him about herself and her private affairs was substantially true. No man, having heard her speak of it, could fail to understand her instinctive repulsion from the old husband to whom she had sold herself into bondage; and as human, if not perhaps quite as worthy of sympathy, was her restless longing for freedom to lead the pleasant life led by those of her more fortunate contemporaries whose doings were weekly chronicled in the society papers which seemed to form her only reading.

Once only had Carden felt for his entrancing companion the slightest touch of repugnance. He had taken her to a play in which a child played an important part, and she had suddenly so spoken as to make him realise with a shock of surprise that she was the mother of children! Yet the little remark made by her, "I wonder how my little girls are getting on," had been very natural and even womanly. Then, in answer to a muttered word or two on his part, she had explained that she preferred not to have news of her children when she was absent from home, as it only worried her; even when staying with the old cousin at Upper Norwood, she made a point of being completely free of all possible home troubles.

Hearing this gentle, placid explanation of her lack of maternal anxiety, Carden had put up his hand to his face to hide a smile; he had not been mistaken; Pansy was indeed the thorough-going little hedonist he had taken her to be. Still, it was difficult, even rather disturbing, to think of her as a mother, and as the mother of daughters.

Yet how deep an impression this unmoral, apparently soulless woman had made on his mind and on his emotional memory! Even now, when he had no desire, and, above all, must not allow himself to have any desire, ever to see her again, Theodore Carden felt, almost as keenly as he had done during the period of their brief intimacy, a morbid curiosity to know where she lived and had her being.

* * * * *

It was late in the afternoon of Easter Monday.

Theodore Carden had just come in from a long walk, and, as he passed through the circular hall around which Watermead was built, he heard the low sound of voices, those of his father and some other man, issuing from the square drawing-room always occupied by the father and son on such idle days as these. He stayed his steps, realised that the visitor was Major Lane, and then made up his mind to go up and change, instead of going straight in to his father, as he would have done had the latter been alone.

As he came down again, and crossed the now lighted hall, he met the parlour-maid, an elderly woman who had been in Thomas Carden's service ever since his wife's death. "I wonder if I can take in the lamps now, Mr. Theodore? It's getting so dark, sir."

There was a troubled sound in her voice, and the young man stopped and looked at her with some surprise.

"Of course you can, Kate," he said quickly, "why not? Why haven't you taken them in before?"

"I did go in with them half an hour ago, sir, but the master told me to take them out again. There's firelight, to be sure, and it's only Major Lane in there, but he's been here since three o'clock, and master's not had his tea yet. I suppose they thought they'd wait till you came in."

"Oh! well, if my father prefers to sit in the dark, and to put off tea till he can have my company, you had better wait till I ring, and then bring in the lamps and the tea together."

He spoke with his usual light good-nature, and passed on into the room which was the only apartment in the large old house clearly associated in his mind with the graceful, visionary figure of his dead mother.

Thomas Carden and the Head Constable were sitting in the twilight, one on each side of the fireplace, and when the young man came in, they both stirred perceptibly, and abruptly stopped speaking.

Theodore came forward and stood on the hearth-rug. "May Kate bring in the lamps, father?"

"Yes, yes, I suppose so."

And the lamps were brought in. Then came the tea-tray, placed by Kate on a large table many paces from the fire; womanless Watermead was lacking in the small elegancies of modern life, but now that would soon be remedied, so the younger Carden told himself with a slight, happy smile.