And I had seen old Carey, my neighbor for years, crushed and broken, to
all intents and purposes dead....
I had seen Harter, the stranger whom we none of us knew except as the
husband of Diamond Ellison, after the accident.
And it was his face which was to haunt me longest.
* * * * *
The theatrical litter had all been cleared away out of sight. The
servants, white-faced, went about their duties as usual.
Claire remained in her room.
Quite early in the forenoon, Sallie and Mary Ambrey went down to the
hospital. They saw Nancy, who was pathetically courageous, and heard
that she had telegraphed to Bill’s father.
They asked for Mrs. Harter.
“She is coming round in the most extraordinary way,” said the little
nurse, full of importance. “Doctor says she must have an iron
constitution. But she won’t let anybody go near her--not her husband or
anyone. Strange, isn’t it? She’ll be going out in a day or two; there’s
nothing to keep her in for.”
The woman dropped her voice.
“She’ll be wanted to give evidence at the inquest. Dreadful, isn’t it?
Doctor says they’re holding it over till to-morrow on her account.”
I had already been notified as to the time and place of the inquest and
enjoined to attend it. That Harter’s condition at the time of the smash
would be strictly inquired into was already a matter of certainty.
All that day people came up to the house, insisting upon talking about
it all. I saw only Lady Annabel, who walked in through a French window,
without going to the hall door at all.
Even she did not touch upon the side of things that had so lately
absorbed all her attention. The nearest that she came to it was to say
that if ever anything seemed like the judgment of Heaven--and there she
broke off, with the tears pouring down her face.
Afterward she went up to see Claire. They do not like one another very
much, but it is always an unconscious relief to Claire to pour out the
story of her own reactions, to anybody at all.
She was better after Lady Annabel’s visit and came downstairs.
Late in the evening, Christopher took the car to the station to meet
Bill’s father. He bore many offers of hospitality, but the old man,
perhaps not unnaturally, preferred to stay alone at the inn. He had not
brought his young wife.
“He is to see Nancy to-morrow, after the inquest,” Christopher told me.
He hesitated a little, and I could guess what was in his mind.
“She thinks that he knows nothing at all, about poor Bill and that
woman. I suppose there’s no chance of anything cropping up, at this
inquest?”
“Surely not. Of course, the jury will be composed of local men and
they’re bound to know that there’s been talk. But I don’t see how it
affects the manner of the accident, which is what they have to find a
verdict about.”
“Death by misadventure,” said Christopher slowly, and without much
conviction.
“H’m! There’s the question of contributory negligence, or worse. Did
you see anything of Harter that evening?”
“Not much. Do you mean that he was the worse for drink?”
“Between ourselves, Chris, the fellow had undoubtedly been drinking,
but as far as I could tell he was all right when he left the house.”
“Then I can’t for the life of me understand how it happened. The
ground was dry, there was no possibility of a skid, and nothing coming
towards them in the road, to give any possible reason for a swerve.”
“The steering gear?”
“Nothing the matter with it. I was there when the men righted the car.
They looked to see.”
“The chief evidence, beside that of Mrs. Kendal, who actually witnessed
the whole thing, will be Mrs. Harter’s, then?”
“Good Lord, are they going to make her give evidence?”
“How can they help it? She, and Harter himself, are the survivors of
the accident.”
Christopher groaned.
“That little reptile, and a worthless woman! And a good fellow like
that,” said Christopher simply. “It would wring tears from a stone to
hear the poor old father talking about him, saying what a good boy he
was, and how fond the little stepbrothers were of him. It seems he was
clever, too, although you’d never have guessed it--a nice fellow like
that,” said Christopher simply.
“Well,” I said, “it’s the cutting of the Gordian knot, for Bill, all
right.”
The day and the night that preceded the inquest seemed endless. There
was no possibility of restoring any sort of balance to everyday life,
until that was over.
Mary asked again if Mrs. Harter would see her, and was again refused.
“She still hasn’t seen her husband,” said the nurse, very much shocked.
She was quite newly arrived in the district.
“What is she doing?” asked Sallie, her eyes wide.
“Nothing. She’s up, you know--she’s got to get up her strength for this
afternoon, poor thing. It’ll be an ordeal for her, like. She’s just
sitting by the window, with her hands crossed on her lap, so.”
Just as she had sat at her window in the Queen Street lodgings, Mary
remembered.
Then Sallie surprised even her mother by suddenly inquiring of the
nurse, “How is Mr. Harter?”
One rather wonders if it wasn’t the first time that anyone had thought
of asking that, since the accident.
Even the nurse, Mary said, seemed a little bit startled.
“Oh, he wasn’t hurt, you know,” she began.
“I know,” said Sallie--“but I suppose it’s been a shock for him,
too--worse, in fact, for him.”
“Of course, of course,” the little nurse agreed. “He’s--he’s a very
quiet man, isn’t he? Kept his nerve well, and all that--which makes it
all the more strange he should have had such an accident. But there’s
no accounting. He’s been up here a good deal, of course--hoping his
wife would come to reason, I dare say. I told him that in his place,
I’d simply go up, and walk in on her. It’s all nerves, that makes her
say she won’t see him. ‘If I were you,’ I told him straight--”
She began the typical hospital nurse’s monologue. Sallie, the medical
student, quite ruthlessly interrupted her by saying good morning, and
walking out of the room.
“I had to ask about Harter,” she explained afterwards to Mary. “Can you
imagine what it must be like, to feel responsible for the death of two
people? Especially if one hated one of them.”
“Do you suppose that he hated Bill?”
“I know he did. I saw him watching Bill and Mrs. Harter, on the night
of ‘The Bulbul Ameer’--Oh, doesn’t all that seem ages ago?--And,
honestly, they did try him pretty high.”
Mary could not deny it.
“It strikes me,” said Sallie, quite quietly, “that it’s on the cards
that friend Harter may actually find himself committed for trial, on a
charge of manslaughter.”
Nobody else had dared to say it.
And Sallie was right, as she almost always is.
It was, of course, a local jury, and the coroner was a local man. The
state of affairs was perfectly well-known to them.
The coroner was a decent little fellow--and the dead boy’s father was
in court. There was not a word spoken to connect his name with that of
Mrs. Harter.
With her, he dealt very briefly and mercifully, and she looked ill
enough to justify it. Her answers were given almost inaudibly, but
always straight to the point. When the coroner thanked her, and said
that would do, she walked straight out of the room, and went away.
She passed quite close to me, and I saw her face before she had pulled
down her veil. It looked as though she had not slept for a long, long
while.
Then Mrs. Kendal was called.
Her account of what she had seen was, of course, emphatic, detailed,
and circumstantially accurate. She made it perfectly clear that the
accident was due entirely to Harter’s driving. The question of his
sobriety was pressed very hard, and the medical evidence from the
cottage hospital was damaging, on that point. I was asked if he had
been drinking during the evening, and so were one or two others. None
of the evidence was absolutely damning, but none of it could create a
favorable impression.
Harter’s own manner was utterly against him, too. One could see the
jury disliking him more and more.
His impassivity was absolute--after all, he was a solicitor
himself--but it struck one very disagreeably, as the coroner dwelt on
the frightful results of the smash, as he had not done with any of the
other witnesses.
Asked whether he had been drinking during the evening, Harter replied
in the affirmative, but denied that he had been anything but sober.
He gave a very unemphatic account of the accident and “supposed that
the car had skidded.” It was not a very tenable theory and it broke
down under the examination of the A. A. men.
Harter listened to it all with his unwholesome little face quite
unmoved. He must have expected the verdict, for when at last it came he
did not move a muscle.
He was formally committed for trial at the next assizes on a charge of
manslaughter.
_Chapter Fifteen_
The thing, if it had been done on the stage, would have ended there.
The climax had come. It was--it should have been--all over. But the
drama of life, if it holds climax, inevitably leads straight on to
anticlimax. Things go on ... one can’t pause, as at the end of a
chapter, and take things up again after a decent interval.
The catastrophe was followed by a series of days and nights that had to
be lived through.
Harter’s trial came on in a very short while and he was found guilty of
manslaughter.
He got five years for it.
They said that he smiled at the verdict.
Sallie and Martyn Ambrey both went away from home on the day following
that of the inquest. One could feel in both of these young and yet
highly evolved people the strong, instinctive resistance with which
they opposed the possible effect of tragedy upon themselves. They were
afraid of being made to feel emotion, and yet they were afraid, too,
of finding themselves out to be incapable of emotion. They hurried
away from Cross Loman.
In a little while, I imagine that the whole thing will have become
purely objective to both of them, a story to be told, something
entirely outside themselves.
Claire, with her powers of imagination, suffered vicariously, but as
usual she mixed it all up with her own private and peculiar grievances.
Several times she asked why Bill, who was young and had all life before
him should have been taken, while she herself, for whom life held
nothing, and who was infinitely weary, should have been left?
There is, of course, no answer to that kind of questions. I never quite
understand why people ask them.
Lady Annabel Bending, who would certainly get out of her pony cart and
walk up the mildest slope in order to spare her fat pony, made, on the
whole, the most brutal comment of any that I heard made, in her gentle,
relentless voice. She said:
“I suppose that woman is satisfied, now that she’s succeeded in causing
the death of a young and talented man, after mixing him up in a vulgar
scandal and doing her best to ruin him, body and soul, and bringing her
husband to disgrace. I suppose she’s satisfied.”
She said this to me, but Mary Ambrey was in the room. She looked at
Lady Annabel with her straight-gazing dark eyes.
“However much Mrs. Harter may be responsible for--and, after all, she
wasn’t the only person concerned in the affair--it’s she who’s been
left to face the music,” said Mary. “As for being satisfied, Lady
Annabel, it’s a figure of speech in any case, I suppose, but it doesn’t
apply to Mrs. Harter. If she’d broken every Commandment there is, she’d
be paying for it now--over and over again.”
Lady Annabel did not look pleased. No doubt there was an obscure
connection in her mind between the Ten Commandments and the Rector’s
official position.
“My words were, of course, not meant to be taken literally,” she said.
“Probably Mrs. Harter is shocked at what has happened, now, as we
are all apt to be shocked by consequences when they are sufficiently
serious and unexpected. But I must say I have very little pity for a
woman who deliberately sets out to wreck the life of a man younger than
herself.”
Mary turned rather white, but she had the courage to say:
“Bill Patch was a free agent. Apart from everything else, we ought to
remember that he was a free agent. It’s she who’s left to pay the
penalty, but it isn’t fair that she should bear the blame for both.”
And then Claire said, “_De mortuis nil nisi bonum_.”
So far as surface values went, it was a rebuke to Mary. But Mary’s
values are not surface ones, and she is quite clear-headed about them.
And I believe that Claire herself, in a way, understood better than she
would let herself appear to understand. She has far too much intuition
not to know that Bill and Mrs. Harter had been involved, together, in
an adventure of real spiritual and emotional significance, and that it
was Bill who had been allowed the easy way out and Mrs. Harter who, as
Mary said, had been left to face the music alone.
Claire understood, to a certain extent. But she had always disliked
Mrs. Harter, and it was not in her to accord to a woman she disliked
the recognition of spiritual and emotional significance.
Lady Annabel, who bent her head in acquiescence to the “de mortuis”
clause, was on another plane of vision altogether. She really
_couldn’t_ see any but the surface values.
Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter had sinned; and she was quite prepared
to judge and condemn them both. But Captain Patch was dead, and so he
could no more be spoken of except with pity and regret. Mrs. Harter,
who was still alive, retained full responsibility for everything.
“It is a frightful affair altogether,” said Lady Annabel, “to have
caused the death of a young man like that, in the very midst of the
errors into which she had led him, without any time for preparation....
Well, I suppose she is satisfied now.”
Even Mary did not again attempt to move her from that.
The Kendals, who will undoubtedly _parler pour ne rien dire_ round
the whole subject at frequent intervals for the rest of their
lives, nevertheless showed a great deal of warm feeling, so that
one felt their narrow-mindedness to be oddly neutralized by their
kindheartedness.
They had been fond of Bill Patch, and the girls, at least, in their
strangely prolonged youthfulness of outlook, had never seen beyond the
“flirtation-with-a-married-woman” indictment. Mumma herself, in all
sincerity, cried heartily and said that in the grave all things were
forgotten.
It will be no thanks to her if they are, however. She will always see
the whole thing in terms of a sensational scandal, and it is thus that
she will always show it to others. And in the end it is quite probable
that the four Kendal girls will dismiss the subject, in their rather
solemn way, by the formula: “Mumma says she would rather that we did
not talk about it.”
The lowest level of all was that upon which Mr. and Mrs. Leeds took--it
could scarcely be called their stand, but their very fleeting and
transitory foothold.
When they had accorded to death the conventional tributes of an instant
of seriousness, a hastily-made-up face of shocked dismay, and a
meaningless ejaculation or two, they were inclined to facetiousness.
They enjoyed the scandal of it all with that instinctive vulgarity of
outlook that characterizes a certain type of unimaginative mind.
Leeds told the cocktail story over and over again and Mrs. Leeds
chaffed him publicly about having admired “that woman” in Egypt. Away
from Cross Loman probably they magnified their acquaintance with Mrs.
Harter, wherever the notoriety of her name had penetrated, into an
intimacy. Leeds, in particular, was like that.
Mrs. Fazackerly, to whom, after all, the shock of the accident had
been a double one, behaved very gallantly. She attended the inquest,
and she actually saw the father of Bill Patch and talked with him
about his son. Neither of them referred to Mrs. Harter at all. Then
Mrs. Fazackerly put Loman Cottage into the hands of the house agents,
stored all her belongings and came to us. Claire, who is at her best
in a crisis, went herself to fetch her. The last of her opposition to
Christopher’s marriage went by the board when poor Nancy, her final
responsibilities over, had a bad nervous breakdown.
Claire nursed her.
“Poor little thing,” said Claire. “Women who have never really suffered
are very apt to go to pieces when the first contact with reality
comes. I could never do that myself. One is as one’s made, of course.
I suppose that very few women of my years have been called upon to go
through all that I have gone through in my life. But I’ve never broken
down yet. If I had, I suppose that I should have gone mad by this time.”
She did not make that speech in front of Christopher, and her care of
Nancy was rewarded by Christopher’s rather inarticulate, but quite
evident, gratitude and admiration.
As soon as possible, Christopher Ambrey and Mrs. Fazackerly were
married, very quietly indeed, in London, and he took her away to the
South of France.
He was to rejoin his regiment abroad early in the following year, and
she, of course, was going with him.
The last thing she said to me--and her childlike eyes regained their
radiance as she said it--was:
“It’s the most wonderful chance of beginning life all over again that
anyone was ever given. The things that used to worry me need never
worry me again, and I shan’t ever be frightened any more.”
And with that--the last reference that I ever heard her make to the
past--one felt that the old ghosts of those oft-quoted rages of
Fazackerly, thrower of plates, and the tyrannies of old Carey, and his
eternal criminological discussions, were laid for ever. Even the rather
strenuous economies that had for so long been part and parcel of life
at Loman Cottage melted away of themselves in Nancy’s determination
that Christopher should be as happy as she was herself.
As far as I know, both of them continue to be happy, in their own way,
and according to their own capacity for happiness.
They will be a great deal abroad, for some years to come, and Claire
is gradually turning the battery of her correspondence on to Nancy
instead of Christopher. Nancy’s replies are far more adequate than
Christopher’s ever were.
“In the end,” says Sallie, “she’ll get on better with cousin Claire
than anybody. Far better than any really thoroughly truthful person
could ever do.”
It is all, in a way, very like the old literary convention of the good
people getting married and living happily ever after and the bad ones
coming to smash.
And yet there is another way of looking at it--Mary Ambrey’s way.
It was after Martyn and Sallie had gone away, after Christopher’s
marriage, and after I had been abroad with Claire for nearly nine
weeks. Mary had remained in Cross Loman. It was a very warm spring day,
and I had driven her up Loman Hill to the crossroads. The pony stopped
of his own accord and turned round, and we looked at the distant hills
and the red church tower. It was then that Mary told me she could never
come there any more without thinking, with a vividness of thought that
amounted to pain, of Mrs. Harter and of Captain Patch.
“Neither can I,” said I.
“The first--no, it was the second--walk that they took together was to
this place.”
“Yes. How do you know?”
“She told me.”
“Diamond Harter?”
“Yes,” said Mary.
“I didn’t know that she had ever told anybody anything.”
“It was the only time that she ever did, I think, and nobody else
knows that--I went down to Queen Street the day of the inquest.”
“Did you, Mary?”
“I wasn’t the only one,” she said quickly. “After the accident, do you
remember that they’d taken her to the cottage hospital and she was
detained there till the very day of the inquest? Two or three other
people asked for her then, I know--the Rector, and Nancy Fazackerly,
and, I think, Mrs. Leeds.”