“Look!”
Two people were coming down the path, where no Japanese lanterns had
found their way, but which was crossed by a clear patch of white
moonlight.
“Not Sallie, is it?”
The dress was almost Sallie’s, and the coins on it clinked together
slightly, and the long gauze veil hung in motionless folds in the
unusual stillness of the night air--but it wasn’t Sallie--of course.
Sallie is less tall than Mrs. Harter and her movements have the
lightness and abruptness of extreme youth.
Mrs. Harter’s way of walking was unmistakable, and even in the
moonlight Bill’s red hair was easily recognizable.
They were walking very slowly, not speaking. He was looking at her,
whose head was bent.
Just as I realized that they could not see us, in the dark little
summerhouse, Mrs. Harter stopped dead and looked up at him. Mary sprang
to her feet with a decided movement and at the same moment we both
heard Diamond Harter’s voice very distinctly, that voice that Bill
Patch had called a “carrying” voice.
“To-morrow, when we go up Loman Hill to the crossroads,” she said.
Almost before she had finished speaking--but not quite--she heard us
move; and she and Bill walked on, out of the patch of white light into
the darkness of the overhanging syringa bushes.
Was it a tryst, or a promise, or a decision? I have never known, and
neither Mary nor I spoke about what we had heard as we went back to the
house again.
I have my theory, of course. Almost all my knowledge of Mrs. Harter is
theoretical. I think that Bill had asked her for a decision and that
she was deferring it until the next day, until they went “up Loman
Hill to the crossroads” once more. I always imagine that, in spite of
Harter, and certainly in spite of the people who looked at them so
often, and with so much disapproval, they deliberately forgot about the
future for that one evening.
Both of them must have realized that a turning point had been reached.
Harter had come home, he had made it perfectly clear that in no
circumstances would he give his wife her freedom, and she had, I
afterwards learned, made it equally clear that, whether she went away
with Bill or not, she had no intention of returning to her husband
again.
It was Bill Patch, with his strange mixture of a belief in God and a
strong sense of the “unsportingness” of adultery, who saw the necessity
for a decision. To Mrs. Harter I am quite certain that the issue would
have been a simple one. All her life she had gone for what she wanted
with a singular and unusual freedom of aim, in so far as the opinion of
other people was always a matter of complete and genuine indifference
to her. Neither by education nor by temperament was she a woman of
ideals, and it seems to me the measure of her regard for Bill Patch
that she was prepared to let his be a determining factor in their
future.
They did not return to the ballroom again until the last dance of the
evening was being played.
It is part of the incongruity that was so marked a feature of the
whole affair that for that last dance the players chose to repeat the
“sensational fox-trot” with which the evening had begun--that loud,
swaggering, jerky abomination that yet held its third-rate appeal:
“Why--did--I kiss that girl--
Why, oh! why, oh! why?”
And Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter danced it together.
I watched them all the while this time almost as Mrs. Kendal herself
might have done, and Mrs. Harter’s eyes were shining like a girl’s, and
I remembered Martyn Ambrey and his--“_That_ woman hard?”
Bill’s young face was that of a boy in love until one looked at it very
closely, and then it was that of a man who has found security.
I have always had a fancy that Bill knew that evening which way Diamond
Harter would eventually decide, but that he had consciously put the
knowledge away from him, and was simply, as he had once said to Nancy
Fazackerly, “so extraordinarily happy, in spite of it all.”
* * * * *
It was after three o’clock when the Kendals, who are generally the last
to leave any entertainment, prepared to go home.
“I shall enjoy a drive in the moonlight,” said Mumma, pleasantly
sentimental. “Don’t you think, Puppa dear, that a drive in the
moonlight will be too delightful? It will remind us of our honeymoon
days,” said Mumma, smiling delightfully.
Then a _contretemps_ arose.
The car that had been hired to take old Carey and his daughter home had
not appeared at the door, and Christopher, returning from the stable
yard, reported the driver to be lying helplessly intoxicated in a
corner of the old cowhouse.
Christopher said that the lad deserved instant dismissal and that he
would make a point of seeing that he got it, but he had seized the
opportunity of bringing round his own two-seater and was eager to take
Nancy home in it.
“Oh, but Father--”
“I could easily come back for him.”
Old Carey, however, had flown into a passion.
He used fearful language and said that he should walk every step of the
way home, which threat he evidently supposed to constitute a terrible
revenge upon the drunken driver, Nancy, Christopher, and everybody who
had helped to enrage him.
“He’s in one of his rather difficult moods, I’m afraid,” said Nancy
aside.
It was Harter, of all unlikely people, who suddenly suggested a
solution.
“The car is only a Ford, isn’t it? I’ll drive it back to the
garage--it’s next door to our rooms in Queen Street--and I will drop
Mr. --”
“Carey--”
“Mr. Carey and this lady on the way.”
“No room,” growled Carey, determined not to be appeased.
“Plenty of room,” everybody assured him.
“Three at the back and one beside the driver,” said Harter, who
appeared to have become suddenly articulate.
I remember that it flashed across my mind just then, casually, that
he had been drinking a good deal during the evening and that this had
evidently had the effect of rendering him sociable.
“Mr. Carey and his daughter and Mrs. Harter in the back and myself and
Captain Patch in front,” said Harter calmly.
There was an electric silence.
Then Mrs. Kendal, tactfully filling up the significant pause, inquired
brightly:
“Then can you drive a car, Mr. Harter?”
They settled it at last, but Christopher held firm to his intention
of taking Nancy home in the two-seater, and they went off, overtaking
and passing General Kendal, in his tightly packed Standard, before the
lodge gates were reached.
Harter brought the hired Ford round to the front door, old Carey, still
grumbling, was helped in, and Mrs. Harter got in beside him.
Captain Patch hesitated for a moment.
“Get in,” said little Harter coldly.
He was himself already at the wheel and he sketched a slight gesture
which unmistakably invited Bill to the place beside him.
It crossed my mind then that he was determined to speak to Bill, and I
think Mrs. Harter thought so, too.
She said, “Come on, then,” and Bill came, and they all drove off
together.
_Chapter Fourteen_
It was less than ten minutes later that we all heard the frantic
hooting of a motor horn again and again.
Claire was already in her room, Mary Ambrey halfway upstairs, and the
indefatigable Sallie and Martyn still talking in the hall.
“What’s that?”
Martyn threw open the hall doors and we listened, but the hooting had
ceased and for a moment there was no sound. Then from far away we
heard that indescribable medley of noises, broken and piercing, that
unmistakably denotes calamity.
“An accident?” said Sallie in a doubtful way.
Martyn, who had stepped outside, suddenly dashed off down the moonlit
drive.
“I’ll just see--I’ll come back--” promised Sallie, and she, too, was
off.
Mary Ambrey had come downstairs again and was standing beside me.
She never says to a crippled man, as other people do, “I’ll come
back”--that promise which no one ever keeps.
“It’s a clear night--no one could have come to grief, surely,” she said.
“I hope to God that Harter was fit to drive a car,” said I, remembering
that sudden loosening of Harter’s tongue.
“Did you think--”
“No, not really. But he did drink, during the evening. Fellows who’ve
been in the East--”
“There’s a car coming up here.”
There was no need to comment to one another upon the speed with which
that car could be heard tearing up the avenue.
Mary gave me her arm to the door and we saw the Standard, brought to a
standstill so violently and so abruptly that her brakes jarred with a
grinding noise.
It was General and Mrs. Kendal.
“They want help--just down by the bridge,” said the General hoarsely.
“Harter has had a smash with a hired car--it’s very bad.”
“Who?” said Mary.
“Carey and--and poor young Patch. And Mrs. Harter is hurt, too, but
she’s conscious.”
Claire came down and Mary turned to her.
The General leaned forward out of his seat.
“Don’t let the women come. It’s ghastly. Patch was killed on the
spot. The spare wheel came down on his head--broke his neck. They’re
taking them to the cottage hospital--all but Harter. He’s down
there--he somehow escaped. Old Carey is jammed between the car and the
parapet--dead, they think, but they can’t get him out. Can you send
down one or two of the men?”
Claire had already rung the bell violently, and we heard the servants
coming hurriedly. General Kendal helped his wife out of the car. She
was white-faced and shaking. We knew afterwards that the girls had been
told to walk home from the scene of the accident, but that poor Mrs.
Kendal had valiantly refused to let her husband come back to us by
himself.
“Let me leave her here. I’ll take the men back with me,” said the
General.
The two men who were ready first sprang into the car, and when I got in
myself I found Claire already there.
“Get out, Claire,” I said abruptly. “It’s not fit for you, and you
couldn’t help them.”
“I am coming,” said Claire tensely.
“I tell you, there’s nothing you can do.”
“I can do as much as you can,” she retorted.
She was quite obviously on the verge of becoming hysterical.
I looked at Mary in despair. There was no time to lose, but to have
Claire creating a panic among the terrible wreckage at the bridge was
unthinkable.
General Kendal took her by the shoulders and half pushed, half lifted
her, on to the steps.
Mary Ambrey, quite resolutely, did the rest.
Claire was screaming and struggling in her grasp as we turned and drove
away.
Mrs. Kendal, a woman of great determination, was able to command
herself in a very few moments and to give Mary a fairly lucid account
of what had happened. Her story, and later on, of course, the evidence
at the inquest, made the facts clear enough.
At the bottom of the avenue is a very sharp turn into the high road,
which was negotiated by General Kendal with his usual excessive
caution. Immediately beyond it, a small bridge spans the river running
beneath the road, protected only by white wooden railings and a low
stone parapet.
“We heard the Ford behind us, and Puppa said to me, ‘I hope they won’t
try and pass us on the bridge.’ Those were his very words,” said Mrs.
Kendal to Mary. “I looked round, as I always do, so as to tell him if
anything was coming, and I saw the Ford car, as plainly as possible in
the moonlight, take the corner of your drive going much too fast. Oh,
much too fast. I immediately said to my husband, ‘Oh, what a dangerous
thing to do. I don’t believe that Mr. Harter knows how to drive,’ I
said. Of course, Puppa couldn’t look round himself, but I did, and I
saw the accident happen.” Her face whitened again dreadfully, but she
went on, although she sobbed now and then. “I suppose he tried to right
the car after taking the corner so sharply, for it seemed to swerve
across the road to the left and then suddenly to the right. That was
just as they reached the bridge. It seemed to happen in a flash, and
yet one saw it coming.... The car crashed straight into the railings.
I saw something spin up into the air--large and dark--and come down
again, and the car turned over sideways and hung over the water half on
the road, half in the air, somehow caught in the railings.”
Poor Mrs. Kendal was shuddering violently. Her account of the tragedy
was afterwards proved to be substantially correct. The wheel tracks in
the dust of the high road accurately followed the lines that she had
described. The large, dark thing that had flown up and come down again
was the spare wheel, somehow ripped clean off the car. It was that
which had killed Bill Patch.
Harter had been flung clear and had landed in the mud of the river bed,
nearly dry at that time of year. He was not hurt. The two on the back
seat--old Carey and Mrs. Harter--were flung against the stone parapet.
They picked up the woman on the road, screaming. Carey, who was
probably killed on the spot, had somehow been caught in the wreckage.
(When I got down there, Mrs. Harter had been taken away, into the
cottage hospital, which mercifully was not far off.)
“They got her out almost at once,” said Mrs. Kendal. “We had stopped
the car and Puppa ran back, but I wouldn’t let the girls come. Ahlfred
came, of course, but I said to the girls, ‘No, girls.’ And they stayed
by the car. There seemed to be people there in a moment--I saw Major
Ambrey, but, thank Heaven, Nancy was safe at home. Oh, poor little
thing--who is to go to her?”
“I will,” said Claire wildly.
Loman Cottage is three miles from the Manor House and the chauffeur had
gone down to the scene of the accident.
“They will have sent for her from the cottage hospital,” Mary said
gently. “Is old Mr. Carey--?”
Mrs. Kendal nodded, the tears running down her face.
“They said he must be. They--they couldn’t move the car so as to free
him.”
“They’ll have moved it now, with the men. I’m going down there,” said
Claire suddenly.
“No, don’t!”
“I must help.”
“Claire, you can’t help.”
“I can help Nancy Fazackerly.”
“Sallie is there, I think. I wouldn’t let my girls come--I have always
shielded them most tenderly from dreadful sights and sounds--but I saw
Sallie, I think.”
“Yes,” said Mary. “She went with her brother.”
Perhaps Mary, too, would have liked the selfish satisfaction of
shielding her children from reality; but she does not indulge in it.
“Sallie!” exclaimed Claire. “What can a child like Sallie do? She has
no business to be there at all. I shall go myself.”
They had a trying time with her. She kept on saying that she must go
and starting up wildly to ring for her maid and order her hat and cloak
to be brought, and then she broke into tears again and said, “The only
thing is, am I fit for it?”
At least it afforded Mary the relief of occupation. In the end she
telephoned down to the cottage hospital for news and to ask whether
Mrs. Fazackerly were there.
Yes, she was there. Major Ambrey had fetched her. Old Carey was
actually breathing when they brought him in, but had died without
regaining consciousness within five minutes of his admission.
Mrs. Harter?
She was badly bruised, but by some miracle had escaped serious injury.
She would be detained for the night, but the doctor could find nothing
the matter with her beyond severe shock.
Harter himself had not appeared at the hospital at all.
“Then,” said Mary, “has anyone--is anyone--with Mrs. Harter?”
There was a momentary silence at the other end of the wire. Then:
“The nurse is within call, of course. But, naturally, there’s a great
deal to be done. She seems more or less stunned.”
“I see,” said Mary.
She hung up the receiver without mentioning the name of the dead boy.
Claire upbraided her for that.
“But what could I have asked?” said Mary sadly.
“It may be a ghastly mistake--I can’t believe it’s true--why he was
laughing and talking in this very hall less than two hours ago. I
can’t believe it,” Claire wailed.
But Mary could believe it. She told me afterward that, from the instant
in which she had heard that Bill Patch was dead, it seemed to her that
there was something inevitable in that arbitrary solution to the affair.
When General Kendal brought me back to the Manor House--and, after all,
we were at the bridge less than an hour--Sallie was with me. She had
helped most pluckily and sensibly, with a silent efficiency that spoke
admirably for her training.
Martyn had remained with the A. A. men who were beside the wrecked car.
The early morning light was flooding the windows and there was in the
air the curious chill that is sometimes the preliminary, in England, to
a very fine summer day.
The faces of those three women, waiting there, were ghastly, and Claire
every now and then had a paroxysm of sobbing and low, muffled screaming.
General Kendal took his wife away. He had already told me, what was
indeed sufficiently obvious, that she would inevitably be obliged to
give evidence at the inquest, and the poor old fellow was already
dreading the ordeal for her and hoping vehemently that the fear of it
would not occur to her until the last possible moment.
The Ambreys were staying in the house, and Sallie said, after one look
at Mary:
“Mother, won’t you come upstairs?”
Mary’s face was gray. She only asked me two questions:
“Who is with Nancy?”
“Dolly Kendal--good girl! Alfred went and fetched one of them, and she
is going to spend the night with her.”
“Mrs. Harter? Does she know?”
“She hasn’t spoken, but they say she’s been conscious the whole time.”
“Mother, come,” said Sallie, and they went upstairs together, Sallie
holding her mother’s hand as I had never seen her do since she was a
tiny child.
Poor Claire cried and asked incessant questions, to which she herself
supplied most of the answers, and walked up and down, and threw herself
backward and forward in a deep armchair, and finally turned absolutely
faint from sheer nervous exhaustion.
Her maid got her upstairs and into bed at last.
There was nothing left of the night, but a ghastly interval of waiting,
and silence, and realization, followed.