by Hugh Walpole
She knew at once that the windows must be wide open; she could hear some papers rustling and something on the wall tapped monotonously.
“Uncle Mathew!” she whispered, and then she called more loudly.
“Uncle Mathew! Uncle Mathew!”
There was no answer and suddenly a strange, quite unreasoning terror caught her by the throat. It was all that she could do not to cry out and run down to the gas-lit passage. She held herself there by sheer force; the smell of the sea was now very strong; there was a tang of rotten seaweed in it.
As she remained there she could see more clearly, but it seemed that the room was full of some dim obscuring mist. She moved forward into the room, knocked her knee against a table, and then as the panic gained upon her called more loudly, “Uncle... Uncle. Are you in? Where are you? It’s I, Maggie.”
“Oh well... of course he isn’t here,” she said to herself. “He’s downstairs.” And yet, strangely, something seemed to persuade her that he was there; it was as though he were maliciously hiding from her to tease her.
Feeling her way cautiously, her hands before her face, she moved forward to close the windows, thinking that she must shut out that abominable sound of the sea and the stale stink of the seaweed. She was suddenly caught by a sweep of rain that wetted her hair and face and neck. She started back and touched a piece of damp cloth. She turned, and there, very close to her but above her and staring over her head, was Uncle Mathew’s face. It was so close to her that she could have touched it by putting up her hand. It was white-grey and she would not have seen it at all had she not been very near to it.
She realised nothing, but she felt that her knees were trembling and that she would fall if she did not steady herself. She put out her hand and clutched damp heavy thick cloth, cloth that enwrapped as it seemed some weighty substance like stone or brick.
She passed her hand upwards and suddenly the damp cloth gave way beneath her fingers, sinking inwards against something soft and flabby. She sprang away. She stood for one shuddering moment, then she screamed again and again, shrieking and running, as it were for her life, out of the room, down the passage. She could not find the staircase. Oh! she could not find the staircase! She stood there, leaning against the damp wall, crying: “Oh help! Help! Quickly!”
There were steps and voices, then the woman whom she had seen before appeared at the turn of the stair holding a lamp.
“What is it?” she asked, raising the light high. Maggie did not answer, only leaning there and staring down.
“You’d better come, Bill,” the woman said. “There’s something wrong up ’ere.”
The woman came up the stairs followed by two men; they moved cautiously as though, they expected to find something terrible round the next corner.
“What is it?” said the woman again when she came up to Maggie. But Maggie made no answer. They pushed past her and went into the room. Maggie followed them. She saw the room obscured by mist; she heard some whispering and fumbling, then a match was struck; there was a bead-like flare followed suddenly by the flaming of a candle. In the quick light the room was bright. Maggie saw her uncle hanging from some projection in the rough ceiling. A chair was overturned at his feet. His body was like a bag of old clothes, his big boots turning inwards towards one another. His face was a dull grey and seemed cut off from the rest of his body by the thick blue muffler that encircled his neck. He was grinning at her; the tip of his tongue protruded at her between his teeth. She noticed his hands that hung heavily like dead fish.
After that she knew no more save that the sea seemed to rush in a great flood, with a sudden vindictive roar, into the room.
CHAPTER IX
SOUL OF PAUL
Nothing so horrible had ever happened to Paul before, nothing ...
He felt as though he had committed a murder; it was as though he expected arrest and started at every knock on the door. Nothing so horrible ...
It was, of course, in all the Skeaton papers. At the inquest it appeared that Mathew Cardinal had imitated the signature of a prosperous City friend; had he not chosen his own way out he would have discovered the arduous delights of hard labour. But he had chosen suicide and not “while of unsound mind.” Yes, the uncle of the Rector’s wife ... Yes, The Rector’s Wife’s Uncle ... Yes, The Rector’s Wife’s Uncle!
Sho discovered him, bumped right into him in the dark. What a queer story — like a novel. Oh, but she had always been queer — Trenchard had picked her up somewhere in a London slum; well, perhaps not a slum exactly but something very like it. Why did he marry her? Perhaps he had to. Who knows? These clergymen are sly dogs. Always the worst if the truth were known ...
So it went on. For nine whole days (and nights) it was the only topic in Skeaton. Paul caught the fringe of it. He had never known very much about his fellow-beings. He had always taken the things that they said to him as the true things, when they smiled he had thought that they meant their smiles. And why not? ... since he always meant his. He had always been too lazy to dislike people, and his digestion had been too good and his ambition too slender to urge him towards spite and malice. He had believed that he was on excellent terms with all the world.
Now that was changed. He was watched, he knew, with curious, inquisitive, critical glances. Through no fault of his own he was soiled and smirched. That hearty confident laugh of his must be checked. He was afraid. Yes, he was afraid. He sat in his study and trembled at the thought of meeting his congregation. He had done nothing and yet his reputation was no longer clean. But he was afraid, also, of something else. He saw, desperately against his will, the central picture. He saw the body hanging in the dark room, Maggie tumbling against it, the cries, the lights, the crowd ... He saw it all, hour after hour. He was not an imaginative man, but it seemed to him that he had actually been present at this scene. He had to attend the inquest. That had been horrible. With all eyes upon him he stood up and answered their detestable questions. He had trembled before those eyes. Suddenly the self-confidence of all his life had left him. He had stammered in his replies, his hands had trembled and he had been forced to press them close to his sides. He had given his answers as though he were a guilty man.
He came then slowly, in the silence of his study, to the consideration of Grace and Maggie. This would kill Grace. She had altered, in a few days, amazingly; she would meet nobody, but shut herself into her bedroom. She would not see the servants. She looked at Paul as though she, like the rest of the world, blamed him. Paul loved Grace. He had not known before how much. They had been together all their lives and he had taken her protection and care of him too much for granted. How good she had been to him and for how many years! When they were happy it seemed natural that she should look after him, but now, in the middle of this scandal he saw that it should have been he who looked after her. He had not looked after her. Of course, now they would have to leave Skeaton and he knew what that departure would mean to Grace. She was suspicious of new places and new people. Strange to think now that almost the only person of whom she had not been suspicious was Maggie.
Maggie! His mind slowly wheeled round to her. He rose from his chair and began clumsily to parade the room. He walked up and down the study as though with closed eyes, his large body bumping against corners of tables and chairs. Maggie! He looked back, as of late he had often done, to those days in his cousin’s house in London. What had happened to the Maggie whom he had known there?
He saw her again, so quiet, so ready to listen and learn, so modest, and yet with a humour and sense of appreciation that had promised well for the future. A child — an ignorant, charming, uneducated child, that is what she had seemed. He admitted now that his heart, always too soft and too gentle perhaps, had been touched beyond wisdom. She had seemed to need just the protection and advice that he had been fitted to give her. Then, as though in the darkness of the night, the change had been made; from the moment of entering into Skeaton there had been a new Maggie. He could not tell h
imself, because he was not a man clever at psychology, in what the change consisted. Had he been pressed he would have said perhaps that he had known the old Maggie intimately, that nothing that she could say or do astonished him, but that this new Maggie was altogether a stranger. Time had not altered that; with the passing months he had known her less and less. Why, at their first meeting long ago in Katherine’s house he had known her better than he knew her now. He traced the steps of their history in Skeaton; she had eluded him always, never allowing him to hold her for more than a moment, vanishing and appearing again, fantastic, in some strange lighted distance, hurting him and disappointing him ... He stopped in his walk, bewildered. He saw, with a sudden flash, that she had never appeared so fascinating to him as when she had been strangest. He saw it now at the moment when she seemed more darkly strange, more sinister and dangerous than ever before.
He realised, too, at the same sharp moment the conflict in which he was engaged. On the one side was all his life, his sloth and ease and comfort, his religion, his good name, his easy intercourse with his fellow-men, Grace, intellectual laziness, acceptance of things as they most easily are, Skeaton, regular meals, good drainage, moral, physical and spiritual, a good funeral and a favourable obituary in The Skeaton Times. On the other hand unrest, ill-health, separation from Grace, an elusive and never-to-be-satisfied pursuit, scandal and possible loss of religion, unhappiness ... At least it was to his credit that he realised the conflict; it is even further to his credit that he grasped and admitted the hopelessness of it. He knew which way he would go; even now he was tired with the thought of the struggle; he sank into his shabby chair with a sigh of weariness; his hand stretched out instinctively for an easy volume. But oh, Maggie! how strange and fascinating at that moment she appeared to him, with her odd silences, her flashes of startled surprise, her sense of being half the day in another world, her kindness to him and then her sudden terror of him, her ignorance and then the conviction that she gave suddenly to him that she knew more than he would ever know, above all, the way that some dark spirit deep down in him supported her wild rebellions, her irreverences, her irreligion, her scorn of tradition. Oh! she was a witch! Grace’s word for her was right, but not Grace’s sense of it. The more Grace was shocked the more tempting to him the witch became. It had seemed to him, that day in Katherine’s drawing-room, so slight a thing when she had said that she did not love him, he had no doubt but that he could change that. How could a child, so raw and ignorant, resist such a man? And yet she had resisted. That resistance had been at the root of the trouble. Whichever way things went now, he was a defeated man.
The door opened and Grace came in. Looking at her he realised that she would never understand the struggle through which he had been timorously wading, and saw that she was further away from him than she had ever been before. He blamed her too. She had had no right to refuse that man to Maggie. Had she allowed Maggie to see him none of this might have occurred. The man was a forger and would, had he lived, have gone to prison, but there would not then have been the same open scandal. No, he blamed Grace. It might be that their old absolutely confident intimacy would never be renewed. He felt cold and lonely. He bent forward, putting some coal on the fire, breaking it up into a cheerful blaze. Then he looked up at her, and his heart was touched. She looked to-day an old woman. Her hair was untidy and her face was dull grey in colour. Her eyes moved restlessly round the room, wandering from picture to picture, from the mantelpiece to the chairs, from the chairs to the book-shelves, as though she sought in the sight of these well-remembered things some defence and security.
“Is your head better?” he asked her, not meeting her eyes, because the dull pain in them disturbed him.
“Not much,” she said. “It’s very bad, my head. I’ve taken aspirin. I didn’t eat anything yesterday. Nothing at all except some bread and milk, and very little of that ... I couldn’t finish it. I felt I’d be sick. I said to Emily, ‘Emily, if I eat any more of that I’ll be sick,’ and Emily advised me not to touch it. What I mean is that if I’d eaten any more I’d have been really sick — at least that’s what I felt like.”
Her restless eyes came suddenly to a jerking pause as though some one had caught and gripped them. She was suddenly dramatic. “Oh. Paul, what are we going to do?” she cried.
Paul was irritated by that. He hated to be asked direct questions as to policy.
“What do you mean what are we going to do?” he asked.
“Why, about this — about everything. We shall have to leave Skeaton, you know. Fancy what people are saying!”
Suddenly, as though the thought of the scandal was too much for her, her knees gave way and she flopped into a chair.
“Well, let them say!” he answered vigorously. “Grace, you’re making too much of all this. You’ll be ill if you aren’t careful. Pull yourself together.” “Of course we’ve got to go,” she answered. “If you think that we can go on living here after all that’s happened—”
“Well, why not?” he interrupted. “We haven’t done anything. It’s only—”
“I know what you’re going to say.” (It was one of Grace’s most irritating habits that she finished other people’s sentences for them in a way that they had not intended) “that if they look at it properly they’ll see that it wasn’t our fault. But will they look at it properly? Of course they won’t. You know what cats they are. They’re only waiting for a chance. What I mean is that this is just the chance they’ve been waiting for.”
“How can you go on and every time you preach they’ll be looking up at you and saying ‘There’s a brother of a murderer’? Why, fancy what you’d feel!”
Paul jumped in his chair. “What do you mean, Grace? The brother of a murderer?”
“What else am I?” Grace began to warm her podgy hands. “It came out at the inquest that I wouldn’t see the man, didn’t it? Maggie thinks me a murderer. I see it in her eyes every time. What I mean to say, Paul, is, What are you going to do about Maggie?”
Grace’s voice changed at that question. It was as though that other trouble of the scandal were nothing to her compared with this matter of Maggie’s presence. Paul turned and looked at her. She dropped her voice to a whisper and went on:
“I won’t stay with Maggie any more. No, no, no! You must choose, Paul, between Maggie and me. What I mean is that it simply isn’t safe in the same house with her. You may not have noticed it yourself, but I’ve seen it coming on a long time. I have indeed. She isn’t right in her head, and she hates me. She’s always hated me. She’d like to do me an injury. She follows me round the house. She’s always watching me, and now that she thinks that I killed her uncle it’s worse. I’m not safe, Paul, and that’s the truth. She hides in my room behind the curtains waiting for me. It’s my safety you’ve got to consider. It’s me or her. I know she’s your wife, but what I mean is that there’ll be something awful happening if you aren’t careful.”
Grace, as she spoke, was a woman in the very heart of a desperate panic. Her whole body trembled; her face was transfixed as though she saw Maggie standing in front of her there with a knife. No one looking at her could deny that she was in mortal terror — no affectation here. And Paul loved her. He came over to her and put his arm round her; she caught hold of his hand, clutched it desperately. When he felt the trembling of her body beneath his hand his love for her and protective care of her overwhelmed him.
“Grace, dear, it’s all right,” he said. “You’re exaggerating all this. Maggie wouldn’t hurt a fly — indeed, she wouldn’t. She has her faults, perhaps, but cruelty isn’t one of them. You must remember that she’s had a bad time lately losing her aunt and then finding her uncle in that horrible way. After all, she’s only a child. I know that you two haven’t got on well together, and I daresay that it has been very largely my fault; but you mustn’t be frightened like that. No harm shall come to you so long as I am alive — no harm whatever.”
But she stared in front of
her, like a woman in a dream, repeating —
“No, no, Paul. Either she goes or I go. She’s your wife. She must stay. Then I must go. I can’t stand it; I can’t indeed. I’m not sleeping; I’m not indeed. It isn’t fair to ask it. What I mean is that it isn’t fair to me.”
Although he had known Grace for years he still believed her threats and promises. “My sister’s an obstinate woman,” he would say, although had he looked truly into his experience he must have seen that she changed her mind more frequently by far than she changed her clothes. He thought that now she meant what she said; indeed, on his own side he really did not see how in the future Maggie and Grace could continue to live in the same house. But, as Grace had said, he was married to Maggie and therefore it was Grace that must go. Then when he confronted the fact of Grace’s departure he could not endure it. No, he could not. Had Maggie been everything to him that she might have been, bad she been his true wife, had she loved him, had she — oh! a thousand things she might have been! — then perhaps life would be possible without Grace. But now! ... at the thought of being alone for ever with Maggie a strange passion, mingled of fascination and fear, affection and sensuality, cowardice and excitement, pervaded him. What would their life together be? Then he turned to Grace as the very rock of his safety.
“Oh, Grace, you mustn’t go — you mustn’t think of going. Whatever should I do without you?”