by Ruskin Bond
Yet there was something abut them that aroused a vague uneasiness in him. After a while he decided it was their eyes. There was, indeed, no hostility in them; but he had a feeling that all the while they were studying him, weighing him. Their lips smiled all the while in response to his pleasant humour; but their eyes smiled not at all.
After a while they rose and strolled about the gardens. He talked about the flowers and plants very pleasantly, displaying a considerable knowledge of gardening. He had words of warm admiration for the three chestnut trees and deplored the passing of the village blacksmith.
Then he asked to go on the river in a Canadian canoe; and Clarissa went with him. She was animated, even gay. He was too busy paddling and steering to observe that her eyes never smiled. He told himself, somewhat cynically, that she was an example of the quickness with which a fashionable woman forgets.
At dinner he was again the agreeable, brilliant talker; and the three women seemed to hang on his lips. Jael was not more pleasant and sympathetic with Sisera. But still their intent eyes never smiled; and now and again the vague uneasiness invaded him. He told himself that it was absurd. Assuredly there was no hostility in their gaze, merely interest, unaffected interest, natural enough but none the less flattering.
Then as they were drinking their coffee under the cedar Lady Mosenheim struck the jarring note.
She said in a deep, almost purring voice, with a note of cynicism in it in utter disaccord with the beauty of the gardens and the night: 'I suppose people are forgetting their dislike of you, Mr Blagden?'
He paused, taken aback by so crude an introduction of an unpleasant personal topic.
'Oh, yes. They never remember anything long,' he said, with a note of impatience in his voice.
They said nothing. They looked at him with those intent, weighing eyes.
A sudden desire came upon him to clear himself of blame in their minds. They were women of the world: they could understand and judge him by the proper standards, the standards which really regulate the actions of a man of the world.
'Of course, people who are not in politics themselves don't understand a matter like that, how carefully one has to move, how impossible it is sometimes to move at all,' he said slowly, almost didactically. 'We could not have acted otherwise than we did without doing the party irreparable damage. We should have had to run counter to the traditions of fifty years. We had always opposed any increase of armaments. We had always kept the Navy even as small as we dared. Had we suddenly turned round and proposed a large increase in the Army we should have stultified ourselves. It would have wrecked the party.'
'Another half-million men would have made the difference though, wouldn't it?' said Clarissa carelessly.
'They would have made a great difference,' said Mr Blagden cautiously.
'Wouldn't they have prevented the war?' said Lady Northwold in the tone of one rather bored by the subject.
'That is a great deal to say—a great deal,' he said quickly.
'Roughly speaking, it would have prevented it,' said Lady Mosenheim in a tone of no great interest in the matter.
'Roughly speaking—probably,' said Mr Blagden in a judicial tone. 'The fact that we were in a position to come to the aid of France effectively would have made a great difference. But I assure you that it would have meant wrecking the party. A considerable percentage of our followers in the House would have revolted; the Irish would have voted against the proposal to a man; and at the next General Election a third of our supporters would have refrained from voting at all. We should have had to make a bargain with the Tories, too; and goodness knows what price they would have asked for their support. And then the Press. Just think of what the Cocoa Press and the Evening Liberal and the Bawchester Guardian would have said. We should have had to rely entirely on the Tory Press for support. Why, it's unthinkable! No: I talked the matter over with some of my oldest colleagues, men who know the game—Parliamentary politics, I mean—from A to Z; and they agreed with me that it could not be done.'
'But you might have warned the country,' said Lady Northwold.
'We couldn't do that without enlarging the Army and wrecking the party,' said Mr Blagden quickly. 'One thing meant the other. And as things are nowadays, if a party goes out of office, it stays out of office for years.'
'I see,' said Clarissa slowly. 'It didn't seem worthwhile to save the world at the expense of the party.'
'Dear, dear! That's an unfair thing to say—very unfair. It's—it's so crude!' said Mr Blagden, with some heat.
'And of course the Germans humbugged you. They never let you gather that they were in such deadly earnest,' said Lady Northwold quickly in the tone of one trying to smooth matters over.
'Oh, no: they didn't. You can't humbug me,' said Mr Blagden proudly. 'But we thought it would be quite easy to keep England out of it. And it would have been but for their incredible stupidity in violating the neutrality of Belgium. If they'd only had the sense to violate the neutrality of Switzerland! Of course, in that case the so-called strong men of the party would have resigned. But really it would have been stronger without them—much stronger.'
'I suppose it would,' said Lady Mosenheim. 'And so if it were to do again, you would do just the same.'
'Oh, you can't expect me to say that!' cried Mr Blagden; and he laughed shortly. 'I could not foresee that there would be all this unreasonable fuss abut our having kept our knowledge of the coming danger to ourselves.'
'I suppose it has damaged your career,' said Clarissa in a sympathetic tone.
'To tell you the truth, my dear young lady, it has played the very dickens with my career. I shouldn't wonder if it was seven or eight years before I hold office again,' said Mr Blagden bitterly.
The three women looked at one another with quietly eloquent eyes. There was no need for Lady Northwold to say aloud that she was satisfied; her eyes said it.
'I do not believe that you will ever hold office again,' said Lady Mosenheim, with rather chilling conviction.
He looked at her with keen annoyance and said fretfully to Clarissa: 'Lady Mosenheim is not very encouraging. But I think she overestimates the memory of the British public.'
'I don't know about that,' said Clarissa doubtfully.
Dinah Williams, bringing out whisky-and-soda on a tray, created a diversion. As she mixed a whisky-and-soda for Mr Blagden, she gazed at him earnestly. His flushed face of a man who had dined well and his big cigar did not seem to please her. Her eyes were grim.
Lady Northwold pointed out the beautiful effect of the moon rising through the trees on the crown of the slope beyond the river; and presently Mr Blagden recovered his serenity and again talked easily. The three women kept looking towards the deodar shrubbery on the left, not impatiently, with expectant eyes.
It was nearly twenty minutes later that Dinah Williams appeared in the entrance of a path which ran through it from the lawn to the rose garden. She had taken off her white cap and apron and would hardly have been visible had she not held a white handkerchief in her hand. She did not wave it.
Lady Northwold breathed a short sigh and rose. Dinah Williams disappeared.
'Let us go down to the bank of the river and get really cool,' said Lady Northwold.
'An excellent idea. I shall sleep much better for it,' said Mr Blagden.
'Oh, you'll sleep soundly enough,' said Lady Mosenheim in her deep, soft voice.
He led the way, talking amiably with Clarissa, deploring the fact that he was a bachelor, alone in the world. Lady Northwold and Lady Mosenheim came a few yards behind them in silence. Lady Mosenheim clasped Lady Northwold's hand for a moment. It was cool and quite steady; it did not even quiver to the sudden touch. Their eyes never left the shapeless bulk and clumsy head of the politician.
They came under the chestnut trees.
'A truly delicious coolness,' said Mr Blagden, pausing to look up into the dark roof of interlacing boughs.
Dinah Williams came noiselessly round
the great trunk behind him; her big arm went round his neck, half choking him, she swung him off his feet, lowered him, shifted her grip to his throat, and dropped heavily on him, driving the breath out of his body. Clarissa and Lady Northwold seized his wrists; and Clarissa deftly bound them together. Lady Mosenheim, kneeling beside him, took his handkerchief from the pocket of his dinner jacket, and thrust it into his gasping mouth. Clarissa bound his ankles together.
They rose. There had been no struggle, but all four of them were panting softly. Dinah Williams laughed exultantly.
'Hush!' said Clarissa.
They stood gazing down on him.
'Bring him to the place,' said Lady Northwold.
They stooped, lifted him, carried him under the bough, from which the rope was already dangling, and set him on his feet.
'We are going to hang you,' said Clarissa quietly.
'You have confessed that you are one of the persons responsible for this war. On your own showing ordinary courage and honesty on your part would probably have prevented it. So we shall hang you,' said Lady Northwold.
'You betrayed your country and the world, so we hang you,' said Lady Mosenheim.
'You sent thousands to their death and you're going to hang for it,' said Dinah Williams.
None of them spoke with any heat. At the moment they were quite impersonal, mere arms wielding the sword of justice.
He gazed from one to another stupidly. A fat and inactive man he had hardly recovered enough from the rough handling to understand them clearly.
Lady Northwold slipped the noose over his head and drew it tight. Lady Mosenheim pinned the card on which she had typed 'For Treachery' to the lapel of his jacket. All four of them took hold of the rope and hauled.
They felt no horror. In the darkness under the trees they could barely see his body rise from the ground. They could not see that it was a body; it might have been a sack of corn.
When it had risen about six feet from the ground they ceased hauling. Dinah Williams wound the rope round the trunk of the tree and made it fast. They came away.
Twenty yards up the lawn Lady Mosenheim raised her big arms in the air, heaved a great sigh, and said: 'I feel as if a weight were lifted from my soul.'
'Yes. That's exactly it,' said Lady Northwold quietly.
'I shall sleep—oh, how I shall sleep to-night!' said Clarissa.
'I know, miss,' said Dinah Williams.
She took the path through the shrubbery, went round to the back of the house, and in through the back door.
The others went through the long windows of the drawing-room into the hall, and upstairs. On the landing they kissed one another and said good-night.
They slept heavily.
At eight o'clock next morning Mary Bates, the housemaid who brought Lady Northwold's tea, wore a startled air.
When she had set the tray on the little table beside the bed and drawn the blinds she said in a tone of excitement: 'Please, m'lady. Mr Blagden's bed hasn't bin slept in; an' his pyjamas are lying on it just as I left them; an' Hopkins says that the droring-room winders were open all night.'
'Surely he hasn't fallen into the river!' cried Lady Northwold. 'When we went to bed he had gone for a stroll down the lawn. Tell Higgins to make haste down to the river and look. I will get up at once.'
Mary Bates went quickly. Lady Northwold ate her bread-and-butter, drank her tea, and rose. From the window she saw Higgins, the gardener, Mary Bates, and two boys hurrying up the left-hand side of the lawn with scared faces.
She opened the window, leaned out, and when they drew near, called to them.
'The gentleman 'as 'ung 'isself, m'lady!' cried Higgins.
'Send for the police at once! Don't let anyone go near the spot—there may be a clue!' cried Lady Northwold.
The local police arrived in twenty minutes. Two hours later a high official and three detectives arrived from Scotland Yard. They could find no clue to the perpetrators of the crime. Lady Northwold and her guests could give them no help: Mr Blagden had gone for a stroll down the lawn; they had gone to bed, leaving him to fasten the drawing-room windows. They had heard no cry, no sound of a struggle. Mr Rodwell, the official from Scotland Yard, found them sufficiently shocked and horrified. He suggested that they should return to London; it would only be distressing for them to stay in the house; the police would take charge of it. They accepted the suggestion thankfully. An hour later, having sent Dinah Williams and the maids by train, they drove off in Lady Northwold's car.
On the way, with never a word about Mr Blagden, they quietly discussed which criminal they should execute next.
As Lady Mosenheim went up the steps of her house she turned and said cheerfully: 'It will encourage the others: you'll see.'
Beckwith's Case
MAURICE HEWLETT
The facts were as follows. Mr Stephen Mortimer Beckwith was a young man living at Wilsford in the Amesbury district of Wiltshire. He was a clerk in the Wilts and Dorset Bank at Salisbury, was married and had one child. His age at the time of the experience here related was twenty-eight. His health was excellent.
On 30 November, 1887, at about ten o'clock at night, he was returning home from Amesbury, where he had been spending the evening at a friend's house. The weather was mild, with a rain-bearing wind blowing in squalls from the southwest. It was three-quarter moon that night, and although the sky was frequently overcast it was at no time dark. Mr Beckwith, who was riding a bicycle and accompanied by his fox-terrier Strap, states that he had no difficulty in seeing and avoiding the stones cast down at intervals by the road-menders; that flocks of sheep in the hollows were very visible, and that, passing Wilsford House, he saw a barn owl quite plainly and remarked its heavy, uneven flight.
A mile beyond Wilsford House, Strap, the dog, broke through the quickset hedge upon his right-hand side and ran yelping up the down, which rises sharply just there. Mr Beckwith, who imagined that he was after a hare, whistled him in, presently calling him sharply. 'Strap, Strap, come out of it.' The dog took no notice, but ran directly to a clump of gorse and bramble halfway up the down, and stood there in the attitude of a pointer, with uplifted paw, watching the gorse intently, and whining. Mr Beckwith was by this time dismounted, observing the dog. He watched him for some minutes from the road. The moon was bright, the sky at the moment free from cloud.
He himself could see nothing in the gorse, though the dog was undoubtedly in a high state of excitement. It made frequent rushes forward, but stopped short of the object that it saw and trembled. It did not bark outright but rather whimpered—'a curious, shuddering crying noise', says Mr Beckwith. Interested by the animal's persistent and singular behaviour, he now sought a gap in the hedge, went through on to the down, and approached the clumped bushes. Strap was so much occupied that he barely noticed his master's coming; it seemed as if he dared not take his eyes for one second from what he saw in there.
Beckwith, standing behind the dog, looked into the gorse. From the distance at which he still stood he could see nothing at all. His belief then was that there was either a tramp in a drunken sleep, possibly two tramps, or a hare caught in a wire, or possibly even a fox. Having no stick with him, he did not care, at first, to go any nearer, and contented himself with urging on the terrier. This was not very courageous of him, as he admits, and was quite unsuccessful. No verbal excitations could draw Strap nearer to the furze-bush. Finally the dog threw up his head, showed his master the white arcs of his eyes and fairly howled at the moon. At this dismal sound Mr Beckwith owned himself alarmed. It was, as he describes it—though he is an Englishman—'uncanny'. The time, he owns, the aspect of the night, loneliness of the spot (midway up the steep slope of a chalk down), the mysterious shroud of darkness upon shadowed and distant objects and flood of white light upon the foreground—all these circumstances worked upon his imagination.
He was indeed for retreat; but here Strap was of a different mind. Nothing would excite him to advance, but nothing, either, c
ould induce him to retire. Whatever he saw in the furze-bush Strap must continue to observe. In the face of this Beckwith summoned up his courage, took it in both hands and went much nearer to the furze-bushes, much nearer, that is, than Strap the terrier could bring himself to go. Then, he tells us, he did see a pair of bright eyes far in the thicket, which seemed to be fixed upon his, and by degrees also a pale and troubled face. Here, then, was neither fox nor drunken tramp, but some human creature, man, woman, or child, fully aware of him and of the dog.
Beckwith, who now had surer command of his feelings, spoke aloud, asking; 'What are you doing there? What's the matter?' He had no reply. He went one pace nearer, being still on his guard, and spoke again. 'I won't hurt you,' he said. 'Tell me what the matter is.' The eyes remained unwinkingly fixed upon his own. No movement of the features could be discerned. The face, as he could now make it out, was very small—'about as big as a big wax doll's,' he says, 'of a longish oval, very pale.' He adds: 'I could see its neck now, no thicker than my wrist; and where its clothes began. I couldn't see any arms, for a good reason. I found out afterwards that they had been bound behind its back. I should have said immediately, "That's a girl in there", if it had not been for one or two plain considerations. It had not the size of what we call a girl, nor the face of what we mean by a child. It was, in fact, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Strap had known that from the beginning, and now I was of Strap's opinion myself.'
Advancing with care, a step at a time, Beckwith presently found himself within touching distance of the creature. He was now standing with furze half-way up his calves, right above it, stooping to look closely at it; and as he stooped and moved now this way, now that, to get a clearer view, so the crouching thing's eyes gazed up to meet his, and followed them about, as if safety lay only in that never-shifting, fixed regard. He had noticed, and states in his narrative, that Strap had seemed quite unable, in the same way, to take his eyes off the creature for a single second.