The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow

by Patrick Quentin

  Needless to say, Martin and I daily blessed the estate agent’s name, though it was, infelicitously enough, Ramsbotham. And, needless to say, his arrival was the signal for us to scoot off, me to my wanderings, Martin to his workshop, until suppertime.

  Suppertime itself, once the most blissful moment of the day, lost its glory; for Sir Olin, unlike his wife, was quite indifferent to food. Eager for his “Quiet Quarter,” he allowed us a scant twelve minutes to feed the inner boy. His appearance, dressed in a claret-colored dinner jacket, meant the instant removal of our plates, and many a succulent morsel did I see snatched from me. Martin loved good food as much as I did, but being a truer epicure than I, was incapable of gobbling. He frequently had to endure the “Quiet Quarter” and his father’s good-night kiss on an almost empty stomach.

  A few days later Sir Olin introduced yet another torture for Martin. The baronet decided that his son was now old enough to learn something about the business side of an estate that would one day be his. Three times a week, therefore, Martin was required to be present from five to seven o’clock in the library with his father and Ramsbotham. This left him only two hours on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for tinkering in his beloved workshop. It meant also that, at least three times a week, his supper period was even further curtailed.

  I think it was about this time I began to notice a change in Martin. He became even more silent and his face was pale and set with dark lines under his eyes. These, I suspect, were caused partly by the fact that he made up for the lost time in his workshop by sneaking out to it in the middle of the night. I say I suspect this, for he never took me into his confidence; but on two occasions when I happened to wake after midnight his bed was empty and through the open window I could see a flickering light in the workshop.

  My guess is that the final stage really started on Saturday night at the end of my third week at Olinscourt. The dressing gong had just sounded and, as I happened to pass the library, I heard the tinkle of a bell. I was surprised, since the telephone there rang very seldom and usually only for something important. Martin, who had joined me on the stairs, voiced my unspoken hope.

  “Say, man, d’you think perhaps that’s someone calling Father away or something jolly like that?”

  And later, as I was hurrying through my bath, there was the sound of a car starting, and from the window Martin announced excitedly: “There’s old Ramsbum’s car, and I do believe I see Father in it with him. He hasn’t come up to dress yet. Wait while I go down to the library to see.”

  He returned in a few minutes with the good news that his father, not being there, had presumably left with Mr. Ramsbotham, which meant we could linger pleasantly over supper. It was a delicious supper, too—fresh trout followed by raspberries and cream, and was brought up by no less a person than Pringle, the head butler. “Excuse me, Master Martin,” he said with an apologetic cough, “but do you happen to know if Sir Olin will be down to dinner?”

  “I think he went to Bridgewater with Mr. Ramsbotham.” Martin’s mouth was full of green peas. “I know he was asked to give a talk at the boys’ reformatory there some Saturday. And someone rang him up on the telephone.”

  “I see, sir, but he didn’t mention it to me, sir.” Pringle withdrew in starchy disapproval and left us the pleasant realization that there would be no “quiet quarter” and no good-night kiss.

  And there were no family prayers next morning, since Sir Olin had not returned. It was to be presumed that he had been exhausted by reforming reformatory boys and had consequently spent the night in Bridgewater with Mr. Ramsbotham. And, as it was a Sunday, no question was raised as to his absence.

  Martin, bright-eyed, rushed off to his workshop immediately after breakfast and I decided on a stroll. It was then that happened one of those tiny incidents that seem trivial at the time, but seen in later perspective, appear most significant.

  I had whistled for Roddy, usually so anxious to share my walks abroad, but no scampering feet answered my summons. I whistled again. Then I started to look for him, calling: “Hey, Roddy … rats…!”

  The sound of whining from the study at last solved the problem. Roddy had apparently found a rat of his own, for he was scratching at the central bookcase with a strange crooning sound.

  I induced him to follow me, but later when I turned to look back, he had vanished. And that, in itself, was quite unprecedented.

  Another seemingly unimportant incident occurred later that morning when I arrived home from my walk. The day was hot and I had taken off my school blazer before going out, hanging it on a peg in the hall, near the front door. When I got back a blazer was there, but it was hanging upside down. As I unhooked it a number of letters dropped from the pockets. They were from Sir Olin to his son and I realized at once that Martin had gone in to lunch ahead of me, taking my blazer by mistake. I picked up the letters—all of them as I thought—shoved them back into the pockets and promptly forgot the whole thing. I doubt even if we bothered to effect an exchange of coats.

  Next morning Martin did a rare thing. He got up before me and was at his place at the breakfast table when I came down. In front of him was an unopened letter and I immediately recognized the writing on the envelope as his father’s.

  As Pringle brought the coffee he said with his usual apologetic cough: “When I picked up the letters from the front hall, Master Martin, I took the liberty of observing there was one for you from Sir Olin. I was wondering if he mentions the date of his return.”

  “Just give me a sec, Pringle.” Martin heaped his plate with kedgeree. “I’ll read it and tell you.”

  After the dignified withdrawal of Pringle, Martin tore open the envelope and pulled out two pages of the familiar crabbed scrawl. He scanned the first page quickly, muttering: “Just the usual pi stuff.”

  “Does he say when he’s coming back?” I asked.

  “Wait, here’s something at the end.” As Pringle’s footsteps sounded in the passage outside he handed me the first page and the envelope, saying urgently: “Here, shove those into the fire, man. I’d die rather than have Pringle see all that religious slosh.”

  As I speedily thrust the first page of slosh, together with the envelope, into the fire, I heard Martin’s voice, studiedly casual for Pringle’s benefit: “Here, Pat, read this. You’re better at making out Father’s writing.”

  He passed me the second sheet and I read:

  And so, beloved lad, I shall be back with you in three or four days. In the meantime I pray that His Guidance … etc…. etc….

  The letter contained no hint as to his actual whereabouts.

  We imparted the gist of this to Pringle and he seemed satisfied enough, though somewhat resentful that he had not been informed personally of his master’s absence. Still more resentful and far less satisfied was Mr. Ramsbotham when he arrived at the usual hour that afternoon. No, he had not driven Sir Olin to Bridgewater or anywhere else. The talk at the reformatory had been definitely arranged for next Saturday. He had of course to accept the evidence of the letter which Martin duly presented, but it was all very vexing … all very odd. It was more vexing and more odd when it came out that no one had driven Sir Olin to the station.

  I don’t know exactly when anyone became really alarmed at Sir Olin’s continued absence, but at some stage Mr. Ramsbotham must have telephoned Lady Slater to come home. Even before her return, however, I had put the missing baronet temporarily out of my mind and given myself up to thorough enjoyment of life without him.

  To the adult it may seem odd that, in view of the circumstances narrated, I myself felt no uneasiness as to Sir Olin’s safety. I can only say that a child’s mind is not a logical one; that the events preceding the baronet’s disappearance had no sinister shape for me then; and it is only as I look back now and place each occurrence in its proper context that I can see the terrifying inevitability of the pattern that was forming.

  The next piece of news I heard was exciting. The need to pay the staff and th
e monthly bills had made it essential that the vault, containing among its other riches all the Slater ready cash, be opened. Since Sir Olin alone knew its combination, arrangements were finally made to bring from London the workmen who had built it and who were to blast through the complicated lock.

  We were warned to keep away during the period of the actual dynamite blast, but nothing could have kept me from the scene of operations. I lured a curiously reluctant Martin to join me, and we had hidden behind a couch in the dust-sheeted study by the time the men came in to set the fuse.

  Even now I am able to recapture those tense moments of waiting behind the couch. I can smell the musty smell of the heavy brocade; I can hear Martin’s breath coming faster and faster as we waited; I can see his face pale and set; I can hear the whispered words of the men as they set about their dangerous job.

  And then, sooner than I had expected, came the blast. It was terrific, rocking the study and, so it seemed, rocking the very foundations of Olinscourt. Martin and I bumped heads painfully as we jumped up, but I did not notice the pain. I was watching the stream of black smoke which poured from the door of the vault. Through it we heard: “That ought to have done the trick. Here, lend a hand.”

  Martin and I watched as the men started to swing back the heavy door of the vault. Pringle was hovering fussily behind them. I could see him through the clearing smoke. I was conscious again of Martin’s heavy breathing, of the inscrutable brown eyes staring fixedly at the door of the vault as it gradually opened.

  Then I heard a smothered exclamation from one of the men, followed by the barking of Roddy, who had somehow got into the room. Above it came Pringle’s voice: “Good God in Heaven, it’s Sir Olin!”

  I saw it then—saw the body of a stout man slumped over the tiny desk inside the vault. I saw the dull gleam of a revolver in his hand, the purplish bloodstain above the right temple. I saw the men moving hesitatingly towards it to lift it up and then Pringle’s voice again, warningly: “Leave him for the police. He’s dead. Shot ’isself.”

  For a moment I stared at that slumped body with the fascination of a child who is seeing death for the first time. A vague odor invaded my nostrils. It was probably the odor of gunpowder, but to my childish mind it became the smell of death. I knew sudden, blinding terror. I rushed past Martin, running upstairs to the lavatory on the fourth floor. I was very sick.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there locked in the lavatory. I don’t remember what my thoughts were except that I had a wild desire to get home—to walk if necessary back to zeppelin-raided London—away from the horror of the thing I had seen in the vault. I must have been there for hours.

  Someone was calling my name. I emerged from the lavatory rather sheepishly to see Pringle on the landing below. He said: “Master Pat, you are wanted in Lady Slater’s dressing room. You and Master Martin.”

  I found Martin hovering outside his mother’s door. He looked as if he had been sick, too. Lady Slater was sitting by the window in her boudoir. The snuff-colored gabardines had given place to funereal black, but there was no sign of grief or tears on her face. Even at that cruel moment it seemed beyond her scope to become human. Through a haze of pious phraseology she told us what I already knew—that Sir Olin had taken his own life.

  “The terrible disease in his throat … we do not know how much he suffered … he explained it all in a letter to me … we must not judge him …”

  And then she was holding out a thick envelope to Martin. “He left a letter for you, too, my son.”

  Martin took the envelope, and I could not help noticing that his fingers instinctively palpated it to discover the lurking presence of banknotes, just as he had always done at school.

  “And he left a parcel for you also.” Lady Slater handed Martin a square, carefully packed package. Then she continued: “The inscription on it is the same as on the letter. They are for you alone, Martin, to open and do with as you think fit.”

  After this, Lady Slater took us downstairs to the great living room. The village constable was standing by the door. A gentleman of military deportment was talking with Pringle, the butler, and Mr. Ramsbotham. A dim, drooping figure hovered at their side—the local doctor.

  From behind a bristling moustache, the military gentleman questioned Martin and myself about the day of Sir Olin’s disappearance. Martin, surprisingly steady now, told our simple story. We had both thought we heard the telephone ringing in the library. Martin believed he had caught a glimpse of Sir Olin driving off with Mr. Ramsbotham. He assumed that his father had gone to give his lecture at the reformatory. Monday morning there had been a letter from Sir Olin on Martin’s plate telling him that he would not return for several days.

  The problem of that letter which had lulled everyone into a false sense of security was next considered. The moustache pointed out that it must have been one which Sir Olin had written to his son at some earlier date and which, by accident, had become confused with the morning post on the front-door mat. It was at this moment that I remembered how, in my hurry for lunch on the day after Sir Olin’s disappearance, I had snatched at the blazer which had been hanging in the hall. I remembered how the unopened letters from Sir Olin to Martin had fallen from the pocket. With the conviction of sin known only to children I saw the whole tragedy as my own fault. And, with more confusion than courage, I was stammering out my guilty secret.

  Martin, watching me steadily, was able to corroborate my story, admitting with an awkward flush that he had not always opened his father’s letters the moment they arrived. The military eyebrows were raised a trifle and there the matter of the letter stood. “Martin’s little friend” had spilled some old unopened letters from Sir Olin out of Martin’s blazer; he had failed to pick one of them up; next morning the butler had found it on the doormat and supposed it to be part of the regular morning post…. A most unfortunate accident.

  The military gentleman then turned to Lady Slater: “There is one thing, Lady Slater. Sir Olin went into the vault on Saturday evening and he was never seen again. It is to be presumed that he did not come out. Indeed, he could not have opened that heavy door from the inside even had he wished to.”

  Martin was watching the brisk moustache now, his eyes very bright.

  “And yet, Lady Slater, Doctor Webb here tells me that your husband has actually been dead for less than twenty-four hours. Today is Thursday. This means that Sir Olin shot himself through the temple some time yesterday. In other words he must have spent the three previous days alive in the vault.”

  He cleared his throat. “From this letter to you there is no question but that your husband took his own life, but I am wondering if you could—er—offer an explanation as to why he should have delayed so long—why he should have spent that uncomfortably long period in the vault. Why he should have waited until the oxygen must have been almost exhausted, why he should …”

  “He had letters to write. Last bequests to make.” Lady Slater’s eyes blinked. She seemed determined to reduce the unpleasantness of her husband’s death to its lowest possible terms.

  “He wanted to make the final arrangements just right.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “Such things take time.”

  “Time. Yes.” The military gentleman gave almost an invisible shrug. “But not the better part of three days, Lady Slater.”

  “I think,” replied Lady Slater, and with these words she seemed to lift the whole proceedings to a higher plane, “I think that Sir Olin probably spent the greater part of his last three days in—in prayer.”

  And indeed there was no answer to that.

  We were dismissed almost immediately. In his mother’s dressing room Martin carefully picked up the letter and the package which had been left for him by Sir Olin. He moved ahead of me towards the door.

  Now that the ordeal was over I felt the need of human companionship, but Martin seemed eager to get away from everyone. Keeping a discreet distance, I followed him out into the sunlit afternoon. He made straigh
t for his workshop, shutting the door behind him and leaving me with my face pressed dolefully against the window.

  I don’t think he was conscious of me, but I had no intention of spying on him. The loneliness of death was still with me and contact, however remote, with Martin was a comfort. As I watched, he put the letter down on his work bench. Then, casually, he started to unpack the parcel.

  I was surprised to see that it was nothing more than an alarm clock, an ordinary alarm clock similar to the dozen or so that already stood on the workshop shelf, except for the fact that it seemed to have attached to it some sort of wire contrivance. I have a dim memory of thinking it odd that his father’s last tangible bequest should be anything so meager, so commonplace as an alarm clock.

  Martin hardly looked at the clock. He merely put it on the shelf with the others. Then he lighted one of the Bunsen burners with which his well-stocked workshop was provided. He picked up the letter his father had written him, the last of those many letters which he had received and which he had neglected to read. He did not even glance at the envelope. He thrust it quickly into the jet from the Bunsen burner and held it there until the flames must almost have scorched his fingers.

  Then, very carefully, Sir Martin Slater, twelfth baronet, collected the ashes and threw them into the wastepaper basket.

  I remained at Olinscourt for the funeral. Of the service itself I have only the shadowiest and most childish memories. Not so dim, however, are my recollections of the funeral baked meats. I am ashamed to say that I gorged myself. I have no doubt that Martin did so too.

  The next day it was decided by my family that I should leave the Slaters alone to their grief. My reluctant departure was sweetened by a walnut cake left over from the funeral, which I packed tenderly and stickily at the bottom of my portmanteau.