Parvis, at Mary’s first cry, had thrown her a sobering glance through his impartial glasses.
‘Bob Elwell wasn’t smart enough, that’s all; if he had been, he might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it’s what the scientists call the survival of the fittest – see?’ said Mr Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.
Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to frame: it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated her.
‘But then – you accuse my husband of doing something dishonourable?’
Mr Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. ‘Oh no, I don’t. I don’t even say it wasn’t straight.’ He glanced up and down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with the definition he sought. ‘I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.’ After all, no definition in his category could be more comprehensive than that.
Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the indifferent emissary of some evil power.
‘But Mr Elwell’s lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice.’
‘Oh yes; they knew he hadn’t a leg to stand on, technically. It was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You see, he’d borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and he was up a tree. That’s why he shot himself when they told him he had no show.’
The horror was sweeping over Mary in great deafening waves.
‘He shot himself? He killed himself because of that?’
‘Well, he didn’t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before he died.’ Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone grinding out its ‘record’.
‘You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?’
‘Oh, he didn’t have to try again,’ said Parvis grimly.
They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eyeglasses thoughtfully about his finger, she motionless, her arms stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.
‘But if you knew all this,’ she began at length, hardly able to force her voice above a whisper, ‘how is it that when I wrote you at the time of my husband’s disappearance you said you didn’t understand his letter?’
Parvis received this without perceptible embarrassment. ‘Why, I didn’t understand it – strictly speaking. And it wasn’t the time to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find your husband.’
Mary continued to scrutinize him. ‘Then why are you telling me now?’
Still Parvis did not hesitate. ‘Well, to begin with, I supposed you knew more than you appear to – I mean about the circumstances of Elwell’s death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter’s been raked up again. And I thought if you didn’t know you ought to.’
She remained silent, and he continued: ‘You see, it’s only come out lately what a bad state Elwell’s affairs were in. His wife’s a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and taking sewing at home when she got too sick – something with the heart, I believe. But she had his mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help. That called attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people began to wonder why –’
Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. ‘Here,’ he continued, ‘here’s an account of the whole thing from the Sentinel – a little sensational, of course. But I guess you’d better look it over.’
He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the Sentinel had first shaken the depths of her security.
As she opened the paper her eyes, shrinking from the glaring headlines, ‘Widow of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid’, ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table upstairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.
‘I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down –’ she heard Parvis continue.
She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her ears. Then she gave a cry.
‘This is the man – the man who came for my husband!’
She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backwards into the comer of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm. She straightened herself and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.
‘It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!’ she persisted in a voice that sounded to her own ears like a scream.
Parvis’s answer seemed to come to her from far off, down endless fog-muffled windings.
‘Mrs Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call someone? Shall I get a glass of water?’
‘No, no, no!’ She threw herself towards him, her hand frantically clutching the newspaper. ‘I tell you, it’s the man! I know him! He spoke to me in the garden!’
Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. ‘It can’t be, Mrs Boyne. It’s Robert Elwell.’
‘Robert Elwell?’ Her white stare seemed to travel into space. ‘Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him.’
‘Came for Boyne? The day he went away from here?’ Parvis’s voice dropped as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat. ‘Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you remember?’
Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.
‘Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me – the one you found on his desk that day? It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s death.’ She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice. ‘Surely you remember!’ he urged her.
Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words – words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.
‘This was the man who spoke to me,’ she repeated.
She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he probably imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. ‘He thinks me mad, but I’m not mad,’ she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.
She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: ‘Will you answer me one question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?’
‘When – when?’ Parvis stammered.
‘Yes; the date. Please try to remember.’
She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. ‘I have a reason,’ she
insisted.
‘Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should say.’
‘I want the date,’ she repeated.
Parvis picked up the newspaper. ‘We might see here,’ he said, still humouring her. He ran his eyes down the page. ‘Here it is. Last October – the —’
She caught the words from him. ‘The 20th, wasn’t it?’ With a sharp look at her, he verified. ‘Yes, the 20th. Then you did know?’
‘I know now.’ Her gaze continued to travel past him. ‘Sunday, the 20th – that was the day he came first.’
Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. ‘Came here first?’
‘Yes.’
‘You saw him twice, then?’
‘Yes, twice.’ She just breathed it at him. ‘He came first on the 20th of October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.’ She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.
Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.
‘We saw him from the roof,’ she went on. ‘He came down the lime-avenue towards the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.’
‘Elwell had vanished?’ Parvis faltered.
‘Yes.’ Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. ‘I couldn’t think what had happened. I see now. He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough – he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months to die; and then he came back again – and Ned went with him.’
She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her temples.
‘Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned – I told him him where to go! I sent him to this room!’ she screamed.
She felt the walls of books rush towards her, like inward falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, through the ruins, crying to her and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne:
‘You won’t know till afterward,’ it said. ‘You won’t know till long, long afterward.’
The Triumph of Night
It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the shivering young traveller from Boston, who had counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of nightfall and winter.
The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. Dark, searching and sword-like, it alternatively muffled and harried its victim, like a bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts. This analogy brought home to the young man the fact that he himself had no cloak, and that the overcoat in which he had faced the relatively temperate air of Boston seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the bleak heights of Northridge. George Faxon said to himself that the place was uncommonly well named. It clung to an exposed ledge over the valley from which the train had lifted him, and the wind combed it with teeth of steel that he seemed actually to hear scraping against the wooden sides of the station. Other building there was none; the village lay far down the road and thither – since the Weymore sleigh had not come – Faxon saw himself under the necessity of plodding through several feet of snow.
He understood well enough what had happened: his hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say that Mrs Culme had forgotten him was too crude a way of putting it. Similar incidents led him to think that she had probably told her maid to tell the butler to telephone the coachman to tell one of the grooms (if no one else needed him) to drive over to Northridge to fetch the new secretary; but on a night like this, what groom who respected his rights would fail to forget the order?
Faxon’s obvious course was to struggle through the drifts to the village, and there rout out a sleigh to convey him to Weymore; but what if, on his arrival at Mrs Culme’s, no one remembered to ask him what this devotion to duty had cost? That, again, was one of the contingencies he had expensively learned to look out for, and the perspicacity so acquired told him it would be cheaper to spend the night at the Northridge inn, and advise Mrs Culme of his presence there by telephone. He had reached this decision, and was about to entrust his luggage to a vague man with a lantern, when his hopes were raised by the sound of bells.
Two sleighs were just dashing up to the station, and from the foremost there sprang a young man muffled in furs.
‘Weymore? – No, these are not the Weymore sleighs.’
The voice was that of the youth who had jumped to the platform – a voice so agreeable that, in spite of the words, it fell consolingly on Faxon’s ears. At the same moment the wandering station-lantern, casting a transient light on the speaker, showed his features to be in the pleasantest harmony with his voice. He was very fair and very young – hardly in the twenties, Faxon thought – but his face, though full of a morning freshness, was a trifle too thin and fine-drawn, as though a vivid spirit contended in him with a strain of physical weakness. Faxon was perhaps the quicker to notice such delicacies of balance because his own temperament hung on lightly quivering nerves, which yet, as he believed, would never quite swing him beyond a normal sensibility.
‘You expected a sleigh from Weymore?’ the newcomer continued, standing beside Faxon like a slender column of fur.
Mrs Culme’s secretary explained his difficulty, and the other brushed it aside with a contemptuous ‘Oh, Mrs Culme!’ that carried both speakers a long way towards reciprocal understanding.
‘But then you must be—’ The youth broke off with a smile of interrogation.
‘The new secretary? Yes. But apparently there are no notes to be answered this evening.’ Faxon’s laugh deepened the sense of solidarity which had so promptly established itself between the two.
His friend laughed also. ‘Mrs Culme’, he explained, ‘was lunching at my uncle’s today, and she said you were due this evening. But seven hours is a long time for Mrs Culme to remember anything.’
‘Well,’ said Faxon philosophically, ‘I suppose that’s one of the reasons why she needs a secretary. And I’ve always the inn at Northridge,’ he concluded.
‘Oh, but you haven’t, though! It burned down last week.’
‘The deuce it did!’ said Faxon; but the humour of the situation struck him before its inconvenience. His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement.
‘Oh, well, there’s sure to be somebody in the place who can put me up.’
‘No one you could put up with. Besides, Northridge is three miles off, and our place – in the opposite direction – is a little nearer.’ Through the darkness, Faxon saw his friend sketch a gesture of self-introduction. ‘My name’s Frank Rainer, and I’m staying with my uncle at Overdale. I’ve driven over to meet two friends of his, who are due in a few minutes from New York. If you don’t mind waiting till they arrive I’m sure Overdale can do you better than Northridge. We’re only down from town for a few days, but the house is always ready for a lot of people.’
‘But your uncle—?’ Faxon could only object, with the odd sense, through his embarrassment, that it would be magically dispelled by his invisible friend’s next words.
‘Oh, my uncle – you’ll see!
I answer for him! I daresay you’ve heard of him – John Lavington?’
John Lavington! There was a certain irony in asking if one had heard of John Lavington! Even from a post of observation as obscure as that of Mrs Culme’s secretary the rumour of John Lavington’s money, of his pictures, his politics, his charities and his hospitality, was as difficult to escape as the roar of a cataract in a mountain solitude. It might almost have been said that the one place in which one would not have expected to come upon him was in just such a solitude as now surrounded the speakers – at least in this deepest hour of its desertedness. But it was just like Lavington’s brilliant ubiquity to put one in the wrong even there.
‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard of your uncle.’
‘Then you will come, won’t you? We’ve only five minutes to wait,’ young Rainer urged, in the tone that dispels scruples by ignoring them; and Faxon found himself accepting the invitation as simply as it was offered.
A delay in the arrival of the New York train lengthened their five minutes to fifteen; and as they paced the icy platform Faxon began to see why it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to accede to his new acquaintance’s suggestion. It was because Frank Rainer was one of the privileged beings who simplify human intercourse by the atmosphere of confidence and good humour they diffuse. He produced this effect, Faxon noted, by the exercise of no gift but his youth, and of no art but his sincerity; and these qualities were revealed in a smile of such sweetness that Faxon felt, as never before, what Nature can achieve when she deigns to match the face with the mind.
He learned that the young man was the ward, and the only nephew, of John Lavington, with whom he had made his home since the death of his mother, the great man’s sister. Mr Lavington, Rainer said, had been ‘a regular brick’ to him – ‘But then he is to everyone, you know’ – and the young fellow’s situation seemed in fact to be perfectly in keeping with his person. Apparently the only shade that had ever rested on him was cast by the physical weakness which Faxon had already detected. Young Rainer had been threatened with tuberculosis, and the disease was so far advanced that, according to the highest authorities, banishment to Arizona or New Mexico was inevitable. ‘But luckily my uncle didn’t pack me off, as most people would have done, without getting another opinion. Whose? Oh, an awfully clever chap, a young doctor with a lot of new ideas, who simply laughed at my being sent away, and said I’d do perfectly well in New York if I didn’t dine out too much, and if I dashed off occasionally to Northridge for a little fresh air. So it’s really my uncle’s doing that I’m not in exile – and I feel no end better since the new chap told me I needn’t bother.’ Young Rainer went on to confess that he was extremely fond of dining out, dancing and similar distractions; and Faxon, listening to him, was inclined to think that the physician who had refused to cut him off altogether from these pleasures was probably a better psychologist than his seniors.
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