THE WRITING ON THE WALL
On entering the dining-room at Evercreech, I found company
assembled. I had not been warned, and I was not introduced. I came in
late, and took my seat at the table quietly, being placed between Mr
Pugsley and a lady whom I did not know. I learned, however, in due
course, that she was a Mrs Dalston, who, with her husband, also
present, was a new-comer in the neighbourhood. The two had taken the
Lone Farm, a decent but rather decayed property situated on the
outskirts of Market Grazing, and foolishly reputed to be haunted. But
it was inexpensive--perhaps because of its reputation--and fully
adequate to the needs of a childless couple. The only other guest was,
to my pleasure, Sir Maurice Carnac, who had earlier shown me
friendship, and who was down somewhere in Hampshire for the shooting.
But he looked little capable of shouldering a gun, and was altogether
sadly altered from my memory of him, having but lately, as I learned,
recovered from a paralytic stroke, whose passing had left him much
debilitated. He lay sunk in his chair, like a heap of human ashes, and
with all the old fire of roguery smouldering low in him. But he seemed
to awaken suddenly on my entrance, and looking across at me as I sat
down, treated me to a leer and wink.
“Hillo, Charlie, my boy!” he chuckled. “What sport with the girls,
hey!”
Consternation sat on every face. My lord, looking much perturbed, bent
to the old rascal, and enlightened him.
“Gaskett, Carnac; Gaskett!” he said. “You remember Richard Gaskett?”
“Hey!” The old man sat up. What link of memory had slipped in him,
obliterating a whole score of years? “Richard, hey?” he said,
immensely sly. “I know, I know. The lovely one’s pledge--earnest of
widowed respectability. But mum, mum, my boy--I know. What days, hey!”
The soup engaged and silenced him--at least in everything but its
absorption. It was some moments before the talk could find itself an
embarrassed vent. But Sir Maurice brightened as he fed. Good fare was
the natural aliment to that impoverished soil. He had only wandered
and lost himself when hungry. In a little he had forgotten all about
his _balourdise_, and was paying senile compliments along the table to
his hostess.
In the moment of its delivery, however, the strange lady next me had
turned quickly and looked me in the face. She appeared to me an
utterly colourless person, _fade_, thin, dowdy, with hardly a sign of
spirit or expression--a condemned ghost of womanhood. I wondered
presently at the fond attentions with which her husband treated her,
at his efforts to win a smile from her unresponsive face, and his
patience when habitually baffled, since he himself was a fine bold
figure of a man, white-teethed, black-whiskered, for all his
forty-five or so years. And I wondered still when I came to learn how
persistently she had disappointed his hopes of an heir, the few
children she had born to him having died one by one on the very
threshold of their existence. But perhaps all those fruitless pangs
were accountable as much for his manly devotion as for her
insensibility. She might have held him responsible for that seed of
death which had stultified all the rich Woman in her. In any case,
that he was more attached to her than she to him was obvious.
She spoke little--nothing to me; and, I noticed, ate little, but
crumbled her bread all dinner-time. I was not concerned, inasmuch as
it gave me the opportunity to observe elsewhere, which I had the
inclination, and the provocation now, moreover, to do. Though the
object of the old ex-governor’s misbegotten attention, and the
immediate brief cynosure of all eyes, I was the only one, I think, not
momentarily confounded. A curious self-possession, a sort of conceit
of masterfulness, had come to claim me of late. A kind of cold and
scrutinising philosophy had found me out of the old dependence. Having
had long the will to counter my allotted destiny, a very little of the
means had encouraged me to something like effrontery. I felt already a
sense of power; a truculence in the face of the least supposed
imposition on me of superiority.
While, therefore, they were all looking at me, I was coolly intent on
Lady Skene. One hurried glance my way she gave; and then her eyes were
lowered to the cloth, as she drew off her gloves and addressed some
commonplace remark to Mr Dalston, who sat on her right. Her voice, I
have not yet observed, was marked by a slight Cockney
intonation--hardly to be gathered from its softness--just a twang from
Cheapside, like the faintest distant whine of Bow Bells. But it was
enough to imply her origin.
Looking away from her, my eyes travelled to Mr Pugsley beside me. He
was obviously flustered and annoyed--shifted his shoulders, pinched
his nose, defied, self-conscious, my stare, and failed utterly to
stand up to it. Then he cleared his throat with violence, and
affected, ostentatiously, to prefer the menu card to my company.
I laughed to myself, speculating on the idyllic guilt-consciousness
which must be flowing between these two. The baronet’s malapropism had
followed curiously pat on my recent enlightenment. I recalled the
stories of his ancient intimacy with Lord Skene, of his reputed
co-partnership with that nobleman in a rollicking adventure or two.
Were they, my lady and her pious accomplice, hearing, in their hearts,
the first creaking of the wheels of retribution? Poor panic-struck
conspirators!
Yet I was sorry that Fate had imposed on Lady Skene so vulgar a
confederate; for I could not but think the man vulgar, ordained priest
as he was, and quite sincere, I believe, in his evangelicism. But,
apart from him, and her subscription to his ugly phraseologic cant,
she was so lovelily one of those presences whom age cannot wither (the
rest of the quotation hardly applied to her); so perpetual a
provocation--and aggravation--to the worshipper of beauty; so serene a
thing, so coldly tantalising, so refinedly a figure for the sweet
altitudes of romance! Ah, that she would make me her knight
indeed--champion of a mother’s fame, dearer even than a wife’s! No
need, then, to dread the consequences of an infamy atoned through
love. I would have struck for--not against her. But she had preferred
the inhuman part. So be it.
I ended my scrutiny with an inward sigh, and turned it elsewhere. I
had plentiful opportunity. No one addressed, or appeared even to
consider me. Right opposite, Miss Christmas, who sat between Sir
Maurice and Mr Dalston, was engaged in rallying her either neighbour
charmingly. She was quite at her ease with both, confident of herself
as the most attractive of social siderites--a star of unquestionable
magnitude. And they responded, of course--men of the world, and quick
in persiflage. They laughed at her butterfly sallies, and humoured
them because she was pretty and an heiress They were patently
captivated. “Ah!” I thought: “if you knew how this very morning she
has been scrubbing my floor for me!”
No one would have thought it possible. She was gay as a fairy;
flower-complexioned; her hair like a misty aureole. A string of pearls
was round her throat, and pearls were in her ears--“wicked little
shells for recording scandal, and answering to it with pearls of
price, too,” said Sir Maurice, after she had retorted upon some
society calumny of his.
“O!” she cried; “to compare my poor ears to oysters!”
“Natives!” said Mr Dalston. “There are no oysters and no ears in all
the world like our English breed.”
She asked him seriously how he knew--if he had travelled much?
“Far and wide,” he said, “and in all countries except Italy, I
believe.”
I wondered why he made, or had made, the reservation.
“A sentiment,” he said, as if I had put the question to him. “I lost a
dear friend there once.”
Actually I found his eyes fixed on mine. They were a dark penetrating
feature in his face, set under strong brows, and somehow quite at
variance with the smiling good humour of his mouth. His hair, though
almost white, was full and wavy as a boy’s, and contrasted strangely
with his jet-black mutton-chop whiskers, and those again with the
strong white line of his teeth. He was tall and excellently compact,
with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and had altogether the
appearance of a man entirely at his ease with himself and the world.
“Do you know it--Italy?” he asked of me.
“I have never been from here but to school,” I answered.
“Ah!” he said: “what visions! what a prospect! That emancipation from
tutelage, and all the world to follow!”
He was interrupted by a quick shrill exclamation from his wife:
“Look! What has happened? What is the matter with him?”
She was on her feet, we were all on our feet, in an instant. Sir
Maurice Carnac was fallen heaped back into his chair, his shapeless
old face all wryed as if in an exhaustion of horrible laughter,
incoherent sounds coming from his lips.
“Carnac!” cried Lord Skene.
_For to-morrow we die!_
“This is my business,” said Mr Pugsley, in an agitated voice. All
honour to his creed so far, for he was terribly unnerved.
The stricken man was carried upstairs by the servants, followed by the
minister and his lordship. We all waited, huddled into a silence
unbroken but for the whimpering of the women. Only Mrs Dalston
remained quite passionless and unmoved. Once I saw her husband quietly
offer to take her hand in his, and I saw her as quietly repulse him.
His, according to the feminine persuasion, was an irresistible
personality, all black and white and pink, and inevitably suggestive
of past triumphs. She was the only one, I dare swear, who had ever
been able to keep him at arm’s length; and that, perhaps, was the
secret of her hold over him.
Presently Lord Skene came down. His hand was shaking and his lips, as
he spilt out a glass of wine and swallowed it.
“Pugsley asked him if he was saved,” he stuttered, “and he answered
that he’d be damned if he wasn’t. There was no refuting that. Poor old
Maurice!”
Presently he recollected himself, and begged his company to stand not
upon the order of their going, but to acquit him of any suspicion that
such an awful calamity had been imminent.
It was Mr Dalston who reassured and commiserated him in terms of the
readiest and most delicate sympathy.
Sir Maurice Carnac died that night.