Trent's Own Case

by E. C. Bentley

  Trent was startled out of his self-command. ‘What the devil do you mean by that?’ he exclaimed, thrusting back his chair.

  ‘Yes, at your house,’ Wetherill drawled, flicking a trace of cigarette-ash from his sleeve. ‘I had a letter from her this morning, dated from Didbury Manor House, which is your property, I think.’

  Trent stared at him in silence as he took in this breath-taking statement. He knew enough of Wetherill’s ways to understand that he was speaking the truth. He knew that his wife, now staying at the Manor House, was a devoted friend of Eunice Faviell. But he had heard nothing from her of this visit; and he felt, not for the first time, that he was getting the worst of an interview that was entirely of his own seeking. But at least the sole object of it was attained. Without asking, he had learned where Eunice was to be found.

  ‘She was writing to me about—shall I say, a matter of business?’ Wetherill went on, as if helpfully anxious to end an awkward pause in the conversation. ‘A disagreeable letter, too, I confess. But that has happened before; I disregard it; her heart will triumph before long, as it always does. By the way, her letter was concerned with our lamented Randolph—so much I may tell you. That also, I see, takes you aback; it is a day of little surprises for you, dear friend. How very visibly you react to such emotions—quite like the French poet, who likened his heart, you remember, to a suspended lute. “Aussitôt qu’on y touche, il résonne.” You don’t think, do you,’ he went on musingly, ‘that Eunice herself murdered that old man? You seem determined to believe that the obvious man didn’t. She can be very pettish, as we both know. That way she has of flying out at you suddenly—it is among the first of her charms. You recollect how Faust felt when Margaret snapped his nose off at their first meeting.

  Wie sie kurz angebunden war,

  Das ist nun zum Entzücken gar!

  There have been moments when she would have liked to kill me, I am sure.’

  What Wetherill had said of Trent’s difficulty in hiding his emotions was, as he knew, true enough. He had turned white, and felt chilled to the heart, as this suggestion was airily put forward. But it was in a tone of hard contempt that he said, ‘If you are so fond of Faust, let me remind you of what he said to the Witch in her kitchen—“You talk like a chorus of a hundred thousand idiots.” Nobody but an imbecile could imagine that Eunice Faviell had anything to do with Randolph’s death; and I’ll do you the justice to assume that you don’t seriously think so yourself. For one thing, she had no reason whatever to desire his death.’

  Wetherill put his fingertips together and leaned back in his chair, as if prepared for some intellectual diversion. ‘Well, perhaps we should distinguish. To desire a person’s death is one thing; to be glad to hear of a person’s death is, no doubt, not quite the same. I happen to know that Eunice must have been glad to hear of Randolph’s.’

  ‘Why?’ Trent felt, and sounded, explosive.

  ‘Because, dear friend, his death made her a very rich woman.’ Wetherill gazed pleasantly out of the window, as if the chimney-pots on the other side of Down Street made the loveliest of prospects.

  Trent felt as if his senses were leaving him at this last mad turn of the conversation. He put a hand to his forehead, and asked weakly, ‘Would you mind explaining?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ Wetherill said affably. ‘It is not a secret—at least, it soon will cease to be. Eunice Faviell is old James Randolph’s niece, the daughter of his only sister with whom he quarrelled who knows how many years ago? I have it on the best authority—Randolph’s own. He told me on the occasion of our last meeting, the time when I lightened his plethoric purse as I have mentioned already. He said he had discovered that Eunice was his next-of-kin, and that by his will she would inherit the greater part of his fortune.’

  Trent thrust his hands into his pockets and laughed long and heartily. ‘Is this the last of your revelations?’ he inquired. ‘Not that it matters, really. I think I have lost the capacity to be surprised any more; my sense of the marvellous is completely worn out. Tell me that you have just been admitted to holy orders. Tell me that the president of the Jockey Club is a Chinaman. Tell me I’ve got a tail. Nothing can astonish me now. But there is one thing I should like to hear. I can still feel curiosity. If he had been keeping this fact about Eunice Faviell dark, what was it that led him to confide in you?’

  Wetherill shook his head sadly. ‘I fear he told me in order to make himself unpleasant to me. I mentioned to you that he had done so, I think.’

  ‘Still,’ Trent remarked, ‘I can imagine simpler ways of hurting your feelings than telling you somebody else was his niece. And as for the money, I don’t suppose you positively object to the idea of her having it.’ He was talking somewhat at random, while he tried privately to read a meaning into this amazing news and what had gone before it.

  Did Eunice know of this? If she knew, how long had she known? Did it account for the mysterious rendezvous at Porter’s? Was it the decent explanation of the affectionate interest in her which the old man had shown, and which she, not knowing the truth, had treated as the objectionable advances of an elderly amorist? But as for Wetherill, if he had believed for a week past that Eunice was to be Randolph’s heir, why had he waited so long after Randolph’s death before making up his mind to marry Randolph’s money? And why, again, why had Wetherill been told by Randolph, who could not have been expecting to die, and so make Eunice ‘a rich woman,’ for years to come?

  Wetherill was prepared, however, to help him out of this last difficulty. His peculiar taste for publishing his own iniquities was strong in him.

  ‘I will tell you,’ he said after a brief pause, ‘why Randolph chose to confide in me, as you express it. You may find it an interesting story. You see, the transaction between us was the selling to him of a book of mine, an unpublished work of which he had heard, no doubt, when making his inquiries about Eunice.’

  A light broke over Trent’s mind. ‘I see,’ he said slowly. ‘You mean the book you wrote so as to blackmail Eunice. That savoury part of the story is pretty well known.’

  ‘Very likely,’ Wetherill said. ‘But don’t be misled into disparaging The Broken Wing, dear friend. It is a masterpiece, in some ways the finest piece of work I have ever done, a possession for ever. When Eunice had read it, she was good enough to pay me as much as she could to have it suppressed; but if she had given me a million, it would have been monstrous in me to deprive the world permanently of such a work of art.’

  ‘But you took her money.’

  ‘Dear friend, I had to have money. Genius must live, you will allow; and to live in any tolerable sense of the word, it must have luxury. In any case, it is bound by the rules of its own nature, and by no others. And it is thanks to me, remember, that Eunice’s own genius has unfolded itself.’

  ‘Your other reasons for taking her money don’t surprise me at all,’ Trent said. ‘I have heard that sort of cackle pretty often, and sometimes from people who really were artists. But I can’t pass that last one. Eunice Faviell was what she was, and is, long before she was unfortunate enough to meet you, or acted in any of your plays.’

  Wetherill’s dignity was unruffled. ‘Eunice knows, if others affect not to know, what she owes to me. That is why she gave me all that she could scrape together. All the same, it was foolish of her, I allow, to wish to have The Broken Wing suppressed. By that romance I have given her immortality; not as she would have it, perhaps, but in the figures of a woman, a great artist, struggling pitifully against a destroying and remorseless love, and against the advance of the years. It is a study—’

  Trent cut him short. ‘I can’t stand more than a certain amount of that sort of thing. We will take it as said, if you don’t mind. The question is where Randolph came into the matter.’

  ‘Why,’ Wetherill explained with agreeable candour, ‘he came in, most fortunately, just about the time when all the money from Eunice was spent. He had heard about the book. He sent for me, and offered t
o buy it from me. At the time I had no idea of his real motive, for Eunice’s name was not mentioned by either of us. He named a quite considerable sum that he was ready to pay for the copyright. I named a larger one; we came to an agreement; and later in the day I returned to his house with the manuscript, and made over my rights to him in a document which he had ready. In my innocence I thought that he desired the credit of giving the work to the world on his own responsibility; and a lot of money in hand was of more importance to me just then than the prospect of royalties. You can understand that, I am sure.’

  ‘Perfectly. But I am still waiting to hear why he told you about Eunice’s relationship to him.’

  ‘You shall hear, dear friend. When he had got the manuscript and the agreement, and when the money had been handed over to me, he informed me politely that he did not mean to publish the book, but to keep it for his own purposes. It was then that I allowed myself to lose my temper. I lashed him with words in a way that I very seldom do. He smiled, and appeared to be highly pleased. I threatened to kill him; he seemed even more delighted. Then he told me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he had discovered Eunice Faviell to be his nearest living relative, and that most of his money would go to her at his death.

  ‘I was surprised, as you may imagine, by this introduction of a name which neither of us had pronounced until that moment. I said, however, with perfect truth, that I was charmed to hear this news. How should I not be? I told myself that nothing could suit me better than to have Eunice for my own in the character of an heiress on such a scale, and with a millionaire to look to, in the meantime, for maintenance in conditions suitable to that character. I promised myself that I would take steps to bring us together again without delay.’

  ‘Yes; I can quite see all that,’ Trent said with ready sympathy. ‘Quite a glimpse of paradise for you—sponging for the rest of your life on a woman with money who is an incurable fool about you.’

  Wetherill held up a hand as if in gentle reproof. ‘These are words,’ he returned mildly. ‘Do not forget, dear friend, what I said about the necessities of genius. Let me resume. He had informed me that Eunice was his next-of-kin and destined heiress. I was dwelling in imagination on the agreeable prospect so disclosed. And then what did that wicked old man—that prodigy of coarse and bat-eyed prejudice—proceed to say?’

  ‘I wonder.’

  ‘He said that he intended to put an end to all connection between Eunice and myself. He said this with plain and undisguised enjoyment, as if he were savouring some delightful essence. I was—I admit it—struck dumb with amazement and indignation; and he went on to make his meaning clear. He said that by the terms of his will Eunice would inherit nothing whatever, and that she would get nothing from him during his lifetime, unless she promised now to break off all relations with me immediately, and kept strictly to that undertaking for the future.’

  Wetherill paused, as if to let all the baseness of this atrocity sink in.

  ‘And from his way of putting it,’ he went on, ‘I was led to assume that his will was already made, and there was an end of my hopes. And so there would have been, if he had lived long enough to carry out his monstrous intentions. The black-hearted old scoundrel! After leading me up to the very height of Pisgah! Well, I have my share of philosophy. When I left him, I put the idea of Eunice completely out of my mind. After all, I had extracted from him a sum large enough to meet my wants for some considerable time, and I was by so much the better off. And now, today, dear friend, imagine my feelings—the sudden glow of renewed and established happiness—when you told me that Randolph had died intestate after all!’ He spread his hands abroad with a superb gesture.

  ‘I see! I see!’ Trent exclaimed hilariously. ‘That was why you sat up so abruptly when you heard the glad news. As you say, I can imagine your feelings. Eunice gets the lot, you grab Eunice, and love leads the rebel discords up the sacred mount. Lord! It’s enough to make a cat laugh!’ He exploded in a shout of mirth that caused many in the room to turn round inquisitively in their chairs.

  ‘Your imitation of a cat is not a flattering one,’ Wetherill said. He had turned suddenly pale, and his voice was a little unsteady. ‘May I know what amuses you?’

  Trent rose to his feet and turned to go. ‘Why, you ass! Randolph’s only son has turned up, complete with proofs of his identity. Eunice Faviell will never get a farthing.’

  CHAPTER XV

  EUNICE MAKES A CLEAN BREAST OF IT

  TRENT had discovered the Cotswold country as a very young man, newly land-conscious, when it had appealed to him with an irresistible compulsion. There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. ‘I have been here before,’ we think to ourselves, ‘and this is one of my true homes.’ It is no mystery for those philosophers who hold that all which we shall see, with all which we have seen and are seeing, exists already in an eternal now; that all those places are home to us which in the pattern of our life are twisting, in past, present and future, tendrils of remembrance round our heart-strings.

  Trent, in his travels, had often chanced upon a house, a town or a stretch of country, unknown to him in terms of normal experience, which claimed him as its own with unerring certainty. As it had once been on a magic day in Tuscany, driving up to Montalcino, so with that counterscarp of the Cotswolds overlooking the vale of Evesham. So he had set his heart on a long, grey, stone-tiled house, flanked by shaped yews, which stood on a terrace cut in the brow of the steep hill, with woods and fields and villages stretching away below to the barrier of the Malvern Hills, and a glimpse of the Welsh mountains beyond.

  Along the ridge of the hill ran a Roman road—Old Campden Lane, the people called it—lonely between the low stone walls that bounded the fields. So broad it was that a dozen four-horse chariots might have been driven abreast along it; and in summer it was thigh-deep with flowers and feathery grasses. The highest point was crowned by a cluster of tall beeches, a landmark known far and wide as Cromwell’s Clump, from which, said legend, Cromwell had watched and directed a battle in the plain below, but Oliver was a modern interloper among the warlike spirits haunting the spot. For the beeches edged the rampart of a Roman camp; and that had been raised on the foundations of some far more ancient native stronghold.

  What a man desires whole-heartedly enough, it is said, he will surely attain. Not long after Trent’s marriage, the house that he coveted fell to his lot with the smoothness of destiny; for it fell vacant and was put up for sale at a time when he was prosperous enough to become its owner.

  On the day following his interview with Eugene Wetherill, Trent drove swiftly across the bare wolds until the country broke away before him, and the road plunged headlong down past a wood of lofty trees. A sharp left-hand turn brought him into the drive of the Manor House, and he steered his car into the garage among the farm buildings.

  As he closed the garage doors a small figure dashed down the few steps from the terrace before the house, and then, checking itself, paced gravely towards him. It was a small, round-eyed boy of about six years old, arrayed in a bead-bedizened red shirt and a bristling fillet of feathers, his cheeks and forehead barred with streaks of what Trent divined to be lipstick, his left hand grasping a wooden hatchet.

  ‘How!’ said this apparition, raising the right hand in a solemn gesture.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Trent said blankly.

  ‘How!’ the child repeated; adding by way of explanation, ‘Stamping Bull great chief!’

  ‘Oh ah! Yes, of course,’ Trent answered, calling on his memories. He raised his own hand. ‘How! The pale-face from the regions of the morning gives greeting to Stamping Bull and all his tribe.’

  ‘That’s better,’ said the great chief, with an ear-embracing grin. ‘Stamping Bull glad to see pale-face. Pale-face just in time for lunch—bear’s paw, buffalo-hump. Stamping Bull heap hungry!’

  ‘Can Stamping Bull tell me,’ Trent asked, ‘if the pa
le-face squaw is—er—among his people?’

  ‘Laughing Tortoise in the wigwam,’ replied the chief with dignity. ‘’Nother pale-face squaw too—name Spring Cabbage, came last week, heap lovely.’ Here the noble savage changed the conversation abruptly. ‘Stamping Bull heap cruel, love kill, love scalp!’ he screeched, and rushed off up the steps brandishing his tomahawk, while Trent followed at a slower pace.

  Another voice, the voice of Eunice Faviell, hailed him from the edge of the terrace. ‘Philip,’ she called, I’m here incognita and I don’t know you. Go away.’

  Trent looked up into the small, vivacious face, now twisted in the exaggeration of a scowl. ‘Is this gratitude?’ he asked. ‘Is it justice? I fight a lady’s battles for her, play Perseus to her Andromeda, and all the thanks I get is that she forbids me my own house, and tries to look like Medusa.’

  ‘What do you mean, Phil?’ There was a catch of anxiety in her voice now that did not sound like joking. ‘Perseus—didn’t he kill the dragon that was worrying Andromeda?’

  ‘That’s it—teasing her unmercifully. But you must not take my Perseus literally any more than your own Andromeda. After all, you were not chained to a rock with nothing on, waiting to be eaten—at least, if you were, your press agent has been neglecting his work. All I did was to draw the dragon’s teeth, clip his claws, unbarb his tail, and domesticate him generally—and then he was quite unnecessarily slain. Dragons, you know, are never just killed; always slain. Just as Douglases are always doughty, and paynims are always false.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense, Phil; it isn’t any good. I am frightened, I tell you.’

  Eunice Faviell was a creature of instinct who, in life, fell as naturally into the parts ordained for her as into those she played in the theatre. She was far from belonging to the country by taste or habit, yet here she had the air of being country born and bred. The tweeds she wore, with a burning spot of orange at the throat, made her somewhat a part of the landscape; her thrilling voice was tuned to the peace of the hills and woods. For all the distress and disquiet that showed in her face, she looked younger than art could make her look in town. When Mabel Trent appeared, dragged forcibly out of the house by Stamping Bull to join them, her dark and regular beauty gave much more of the effect of metropolitan life than was suggested by the woman who seldom entered into any other frame of existence. Trent’s eye rejoiced a moment in the picture made by the two vivid and contrasted personalities in their setting of the grey house behind, the dark green of the yews on either side; then he mounted the steps to be with them, and embraced his wife as one clinging to her for protection.