"He is not," said her brother very firmly.
"Then you're prosecuting him. I should look out if I were you. Bill says . . ."
"I don't care what Bill says. Who is he anyway? And I am not prosecuting, if that answers you."
"Then what are you doing? Is it deathly secret?" She gave a delicious shudder. "Are we all menaced?"
At such moments, if at no other, Justin thanked providence for his Georgina. Her dislike of his work might pain him, but at least she never asked questions about it; and when next evening he presented himself at Warbury Hall, the Deverel home, formally arrayed for a soiree musicale, with Flo on one side of him and Mamie on the
103
THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR
other, he had no other fear than of being cross-examined about his constancy.
That indeed began the very instant he and Georgina found themselves alone in an alcove of the drawing-room:
"Where have you been? How provoking you are—really quite heartless. You've left me alone all week without a word, not even a letter—too cruel. Anyone would think you lived a hundred miles away; you have no thought for me."
She was due to sing, and fear of the ordeal had made her overwrought and very unlike her usual confident self. His heart warmed to her.
"You are quite callous," she accused him.
"My dearest!"
"How can you even use the word when I am the very last person to be thought of? I suppose you'll tell me that you've been busy every night. Have you found time for Flo?"
"I've hardly seen her."
"Or Mamie either, I suppose. What a dress she is wearing! I declare it would be quite in fashion if this were a ball in London. Does no one advise her?"
Catching sight of his younger sister across the room, Justin was disposed to agree: he had ventured a few words himself about the dress before setting out, and it certainly went remarkably badly with the decor of a room which had not been designed to accommodate anything even remotely primrose in shade. 'Like a butterfly,' he thought bitterly. The other gentlemen, however, had not been afflicted with such critical thoughts. They clustered: it was all too evident. In one half of the room stood the piano, with a few upright female figures near it waiting for the music to begin, and in the other his sister presided at the centre of a group in which Colonel Deverel could be discerned in his white waistcoat, looking, as Lord Holland had once looked, like a turbot standing on its tail'. A pretty start to the evening. No wonder Georgina was outraged. Before it was over the old man would be bound to ask Mamie to sing, and she would oblige too, and the fat would be properly in the fire.
Notes came from the piano. Mrs Deverel was sounding the recall to duty. Justin took another look at the room as it began to settle down to the serious business of the evening. A fashionable gathering. The duke could not quite be aspired to—he was understood in any case to dislike music very much—but several other gentlemen of rank
were present with their ladies and the town was quite excluded, unless one counted Mr Lumley, Vicar of St Bede's, an unexpected figure much encumbered with music sheets. The atmosphere was one of dutiful attention proper to a gathering about to be subjected to ballads of a cultural nature.
At this moment a polite tinkle of applause broke out and the vocalist was seen at her station. Cousin Emily was no stranger to such occasions: she clutched in her hands a scroll and could even be seen to be consulting it, but it was not left to her audience to feel that this was anything but an act of modesty or perhaps a declaration of amateur status.
"A little song of Claribel's," Mrs Deveral announced.
Cousin Emily's bosom heaved and her face assumed a decidedly reproachful expression.
"You are not what you were, Robin" (the loud accusing voice rang out)
"Why so sad and strange?
You were once blithe and gay, Robin,
What has made you change?
You never come to see me now
As once you used to do,
I miss you at the wicket gate
You always let me thro'.
It's very hard to open
But you never come and try:
Won't you tell me why, Robin,
Won't you tell me why?"
'Devil take the woman!' thought Justin as the sense of the words gradually crept up on him. It could be coincidence, of course, for with a few jolly exceptions all the ballads he had heard seemed to be either morbid or concerned with the complaints the sexes had against one another (in this respect being remarkably true to life), and Claribel's Tittle song' was not much more wan than its competitors. It was uncomfortably near the knuckle all the same. Cousin Emily must have known it. Cousin Emily, he decided, watching that swelling bust embark on the second verse, must have intended it, the venomous hag. To his horror he found himself blushing and wondered desperately whether anyone would notice him or the thunderous expression on Georgina's face.
105
THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR
"Capital fellow, Claribel," a voice boomed in his ear above the applause and cries of 'Encore!' from the gentlemen of Mamie's circle. "Georgina, my dear, you should take up Claribel. Janet's Choice— now there's a song for you."
"If one happens to like Claribel, Papa."
Justin made way for his host: he was very happy to welcome a contestant better fitted than himself to cope with the evening.
"Don't you? What are you singing, my dear?" the Colonel asked.
"Du bist wie eine Blume."
"Do I know it?"
"You should. It is familiar to most people. Schumann's setting of Heine's words."
"Of course. Such a charming song. So suitable. I shall enjoy it so very much. And dear Mamie if she will consent to sing," added the Colonel, undoing all his good work. "Has she brought her music?"
"You should ask Justin."
"I am asking Justin. Well, it's no matter, we shall find something for her, never fear. Such a pure and natural talent. Yet Miss Derry does not sing, I think?"
"She admits to choruses."
"And you not even to that, my boy? You mustn't let the law dry you up completely. By the way, while on the subject, there's a little matter I wished to speak to you about. Something Superintendent Blair was telling me. Disturbed me: can't pretend it didn't. Oh, here's this fellow Lumley now," he broke off gloomily as the Vicar of St Bede's was seen advancing on the piano with the unmistakable look of a baritone about to harrow his audience.
"Invocation, from Faust: Even Bravest Heart," Mrs Deverel announced over her shoulder.
Colonel Deverel subsided, grumbling. He professed an admiration for Gounod's oratorio Redemption, which he had never heard, but Faust (which he had never heard either) had for long excited his contempt as 'tinkly French stuff' that had somehow got through the Customs. Nor was he reassured by the sight of one of the Vicar's cloth attempting a song which was identifiably a soldier's farewell to civilian life. It smacked too much of sacrilege.
"D'you know the feller?" he muttered to Justin through the applause that greeted the end of the aria. "What d'you make of him? Pretty radical johnny, isn't he? Wants to see everyone equal. Bit of a republican too, if I know anything about it. Old Bishop Knowles
appointed him, and it was Gladstone appointed him. Birds of a feather. Can you understand the feller's sermons?"
"Perhaps not always."
"That's honest, at any rate. Neither can I. In my day we had the Tractarians and high-flyin' Oxford fellers like Newman and so on, but that was doctrine, and no one was expected to make much of it. No revivalism about it. No socialism such as he preaches—does it from the pulpit. Of course he's a good enough feller in his way."
"I must get my music, Justin," Georgina said.
He escaped with her across the room, past Mamie at the centre of a group in a state of perpetual agitation with people fetching and carrying things, and Flo wedged on an ottoman between two elderly ladies in black taffeta and bangles. Beyond them, all by himself in an alcove,
Mr Lumley was sorting his music, his face flushed and beads of sweat standing on his forehead which he dabbed with a silk handkerchief rolled up into a ball.
Justin regarded this dangerous firebrand with affection. "You might have sung The Lincolnshire Poacher while you were about it," he chided him as he came up, leaving Georgina to go on ahead. "Well, why not? What are you looking so shocked about? Was it bad taste? Is Sugden worse? Or the child?"
"Both much better as it happens. Thank God for it."
"Somehow I always thought he was a surviving type. An artful dodger, so Mamie says. I've been re-reading his statement, by the way."
"I don't want to stop you, but shouldn't you be looking after Miss Deverel?" enquired his friend.
She was leaning over the piano, her elegant blonde head very close to Mrs Deverel's immense coiffure, and Justin watched them, fascinated by the contrast and the likeness that he saw there. "Oh, Georgina's all right. She was a bit on edge, but she's got over it. Besides, I'd only be in the way up there. Now about that statement."
The Vicar sighed resignedly. "Very well: go on, my dear fellow, if you really think you should. Is the statement what we require?"
"Up to a point. It contains some significant and important things. But there are grave omissions. The Other Man isn't named. Miss Verney's watch and seal aren't properly accounted for. In fact, there's very little in the statement that you can really get your teeth into; that can be put up against known facts and checked. And without definite proof . . ."
107
THE MASSIXGHAM AFFAIR
"People won't listen."
"They won't listen; they'll think the man's a crank or up to some dodge. When I say people', I mean of course official people, those in the ministries whom we'll have to move if we're to get the case re-opened. But there are others who might listen."
"Go on."
"The Verneys, to begin with. If they saw that confession they might help. If they were to think again about their evidence in the light of what Sugden says, then we'd be on altogether firmer ground, with something really good to show the Lord Chancellor or the Queen herself. Are you a Radical?"
"What's that you're saying, my dear fellow?" exclaimed the Vicar in astonishment.
"Just a passing thought. I don't suppose we're going to be exactly-loved for this ... by the powers that be, I mean. Subversive: is that the word?"
"Our host would say so, certainly."
"Why our host particularly?"
"Didn't you know? Because he was the committing magistrate: it was he who sent Milligan and Kelly to the Assizes," the Vicar said.
X
Sxow lay over the countryside. As they crested the hill they saw the valley below them, piebald where the ribs of walls and rocks showed through, but further north the fall had been heavier and the flanks of The Heriot looked as smooth as a crystal globe. In the foreground lay the village: castle and church by the stream; the zig-zag of road climbing the hill past the rambling bulk of the Rectory, more piebald than the rest in its grove of trees. "It would do for a bishopric," Justin found himself murmuring aloud. "Let us hope that Verney has a stipend to match. Has he?"
"I believe Massingham is a good enough living."
"One you'd fancy for yourself?"
"My dear chap!" Mr Lumley's expression was one of dismay as he gazed over the pony's ears at the hamlet and scattered farms. Where were the souls to be saved? Where were the parishioners to be dragooned into good works? In such a place, after a few dinners
with the gentry, the poor man would have died of discouragement or started an agrarian revolution.
On foot, leaving the trap at Merrick's bothy at the bottom of the hill, they reached the Rectory gates and came immediately on Mr Verney shovelling snow. Flakes glistened in his beard and in his long white hair; he had on mittens, and goloshes so thick with slush that he seemed to be wearing a pair of enormous clogs; and in his wake the fruits of his toil showed in a beaten track from the gates to the front door along which the Vicar of St Bede's advanced, hand outstretched, rather like the explorer Stanley on a similar occasion.
"My dear Mr Verney!" He seemed to be finding it an affecting moment. "Mr Verney, will you forgive this intrusion into your labours? I hope you are not overstraining yourself. You know Mr Deny, I believe?"
"I do, sir."
The old man leading, they went into the hall, having the drawing-room on their left, from which came the sulky crackle of a wood fire. Ahead of them a baize door opened. "My dear, we have visitors," Mr Verney called out into the gloom. "You know Mr Lumley, of course. And Mr Deny: but I don't think you've met Mr Deny."
It was a narrow hall, not suited to social occasions. Justin, who had only seen her once, at the Moot Hall, could barely see her now, but he could hear her—the rustle of whalebone and satin coming towards him over the linoleum.
"I fear we have intruded," he heard his ally say.
"Not at all. If you'd go into the drawing-room."
A scrimmage developed of the kind usual where several people are urging one another to go through a door, and at the end of it they found themselves, as the Massingham burglars had done, in a pleasant squarish room, much beset by furniture which projected at unlikely angles, forming a kind of obstacle course. There was the table in the middle of the room, and the desk the 'man' had rifled, and on the mantelpiece the tripod on which Miss Verney's watch and seal had hung. It was all as Sugden had described it: so exactly, that the critic in Justin's mind awoke and began to ask questions. Was the statement in his pocket really the memory of something seen across a gap of eight years, or had Sugden seen the Rectory more recently? Was it possible that the Verneys never moved their furniture? They had certainly not carried out repairs to the dining-room door where the shot had struck; which might argue poverty,
109
THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR
or carelessness, or even a perverse kind of sentiment, for the burglary had, after all, been a great event, perhaps the most memorable of Mr Verney's life.
He was suddenly aware that his friend, with no such speculations to comfort him, had found himself in an exposed position between the Rector of Massingham and Miss Verney, both breathing an intimidating hospitality.
"A glass of wine?"
Mr Lumley did not drink: he had been known to describe strong liquor as an abomination.
"Will you not take some refreshment? You have come a long way in this hard weather."
"And there will be more snow coming," her father said, wagging his beard at them with lugubrious relish.
"Papa!"
"My dear, there will be. Tom was saying so this morning and you know what a nose for weather he has. This winter reminds him a little, as it reminds me, of the beginning of . . . my dear, you won't remember what year it was when even the mail could not get through?"
"If as you say it is to snow . . . ," Mr Lumley tried to interrupt with a kind of desperation.
"It has begun already."
Indeed a white cloud had swept down over the moor, and flakes like small hailstones were whirling against the window panes.
"Then we must hasten our business, I fear, if you will forgive my abruptness, seeing that we have such a long journey in front of us."
"Your business. Most certainly."
"It concerns something that happened a long time ago. The Massingham burglary in fact."
"The Burglary!" exclaimed Mr Verney, clearly astonished by this remark. "But how can the Burglary concern . . . ? I don't understand."
"Perhaps if you were to let Mr Lumley explain, Papa."
"Gladly, gladly. I was not aware that he was involved in any way, that's all."
"Then he will tell us."
Mr Lumley suffered this colloquy and then said in a diplomatic voice: "I was not concerned at the time at all, except that of course
I shared the general sense of outrage that you should have been subjected to so dastardly an act."
"But that was eight years ago," Mi
ss Verney said. "We have had time to forgive and forget."
He turned towards her. "Could we say the same of the two men who have served those years in penal servitude? A life sentence-very disproportionate to the crime, bad though it was, as your father in his goodness of heart saw at the time, even had Milligan and Kelly committed it."
"But there can be no question that they committed it," said Mr Verney, looking around in perplexity. "The jury found them guilty; and how just that verdict was both my daughter and I know well, seeing that we both saw the men at work, most flagrantly at work in this very house. Is that not so, my dear?"
"Let him explain, Papa."
"Thank you," Mr Lumley said. "I beg you not to think me impertinent: there is too much at stake. It's no easy thing to come here and say what I must. But I have read the reports of the trial, and I have had the invaluable benefit of Mr Derry's recollection of it, and it is clear enough that in your anxiety to be fair you never claimed on oath or at any other time to have seen the faces of the accused."
"We saw them—those men themselves."
"No, Miss Verney, forgive me, you did not. You never saw Milligan and Kelly for the simple reason that they were miles away on Bridewell Moor. You saw two fellows very like them in the semi-darkness and excitement of the moment."
"It is kind of you," came the supercilious, cutting voice, "to tell us what we saw. We are obliged to you."
"Must you take it like that, Miss Verney?"
"How would you have me take it? You come here—for no clearly disclosed reason that I can see—and you tell us that my father and I went into court and perjured ourselves."
"No, I never said that. No." There was distress in Mr Lumley's voice; his face had gone very pale and his eyes stared out from it, bright with appeal to tender and compassionate emotions. "It was the very last thought in my mind. If I had thought it for a moment I would never have come here, never, I beg you to believe that. You told the court what you believed you saw."
She gave a shrug of the shoulders, infinitely contemptuous, and
The Massingham affair Page 12