dinner announced as Joicey spoke, and the conversation took another
turn. Many things were bothering Joicey--the financial year generally, a
big commercial failure, the outlook for the rice crop--and as the meal
wore on he grew more dreary, and a pessimism that is part of some men's
minds tinged everything he touched.
"Did Rydal's disappearance affect you at all, personally?" Hartley
asked, with some show of interest.
"Not personally, but it cost the Bank close upon a quarter of a lakh."
Joicey drummed his square-topped fingers on the table. "I can't imagine
how he managed to get away."
Hartley frowned.
"I had all the landing-stages carefully watched, and the plague police
warned. He must have gone before the warrant was out, that is, if he has
ever left the country at all."
Joicey shrugged his heavy shoulders.
"In any case, the man's not much use to us, and the money has gone. I'm
not altogether sorry he got away." His eyes grew full of brooding
shadows and he sat silent, still tapping the cloth with his fingers.
"It's an odd coincidence," said Hartley, and his face grew keen again.
"Mhtoon Pah's boy, Absalom, disappeared that same night. I wish you
could tell me, Joicey, if you saw Heath that evening when you went down
Paradise Street. It was the same evening that the Bank laid their
information against Rydal, the twenty-ninth."
Joicey had just poured himself out a glass of port, and was raising it
to his lips as Hartley spoke, and the hand that held the glass jerked
slightly, splashing a little of the wine on to the front of his white
shirt. Joicey did not set the glass back on to the table, he held it
between him and the light, and eyed it, or, rather, it should be said
that he watched his own hand, and when he saw that it was quite steady
he set down the wine untasted.
"Paradise Street? I never go down there. I wasn't in Mangadone that
night," his face was dead white with a sick, leprous whiteness. "If
Heath said he saw me, Heath was wrong."
"Heath didn't say so," said Hartley. "It was the policeman on duty at
the corner who said that he had seen you."
"I tell you I wasn't in the place," said Joicey again.
Hartley coughed awkwardly.
"Well, if you weren't there, you weren't there," he said, pacifically.
"And Heath, what did Heath say?"
"I told you he said nothing, except that he had seen Absalom. I can't
understand this business, Joicey; directly I ask the smallest question
about that infernal night of July the twenty-ninth I am always met in
just the same way."
"I know nothing about it," said Joicey, shortly. "I wasn't here and I
don't know what Heath was doing, so there's no use asking me questions
about him."
The Banker relapsed into his former dull apathy, and leaned back in his
chair.
"I've had insomnia lately," he said, after a perceptible pause. "It
plays the deuce with one's nerves. I believe I need a change. This
cursed country gets into one's bones if one stays out too long. I've
forgotten what England looks like and I've got over the desire to go
back there, and so I rot through the rains and the steam and the tepid
cold weather, and it isn't doing me any good at all."
They walked into the drawing-room, Hartley with his hand on Joicey's
shoulder. The Banker sat for a little time making a visible effort to
talk easily, but long before his usual hour for leaving he pulled out
his watch and looked at it.
"It may seem rude to clear off so soon, but I'm tired, Hartley, and
shall be much obliged if I may shout for my carriage."
He looked tired enough to make any excuse of exhaustion or ill-health
quite a valid one, and Hartley was concerned for his friend.
"Don't overdo it, Joicey," he said.
"Overdo what?"
Joicey got up with the heavy lift of an old, weary man, and yet there
was not two years between him and Hartley.
"The insomnia," said Hartley.
"Good night," replied Joicey shortly, and closed the carriage-door
behind him.
He drove along the dark roads, his arms in the window-straps and his
head bent forward. The head of the Mangadone Banking Firm was suffering,
if not from insomnia, from something that was heavier than the heaviest
night of sleeplessness, and something that was darker than the dark
road, and something that was deep as the brown waters that carried
outgoing craft to sea.
VI
TELLS HOW ATKINS EXPLAINS FACTS BY PEOPLE AND NOT PEOPLE BY FACTS, AND
HOW HARTLEY, HEAD OF THE POLICE, SMELLS THE SCENT OF APPLE ORCHARDS
GROWING IN A FOOL'S PARADISE
Social life went its way in Mangadone much as it had before the 29th of
July, but Hartley was not allowed to rest and feel comfortable and easy
for very long. Mhtoon Pah waylaid him in the dark when he was riding
home from the Club, and waited for him for hours in his bungalow. Like
his own shadow, Mhtoon Pah followed him and dogged his comings and
goings, always with the same imploring tale, but never with any further
evidence. Leh Shin was officially watched, and Leh Shin's assistant was
also under the paternal eye of authority, but all that authority could
discover about him was that he led a gay life, gambled and drugged
himself, hung about evil houses, and had been seen loitering in the
vicinity of the curio shop; but, as Paradise Street was an open
thoroughfare, he had as much right to be there as any leprous beggar.
Hartley's peace of mind was soon shattered again, this time by a new
element that Hartley had not thought of, and so he was caught in another
net without any previous warning.
Atkins, the rector of St. Jude's bungalow companion, was a dry little
man, adhering to simple facts, and neither a sensationalist nor an
alarmist; therefore his words had weight. He was a small man, always
dressed in clothes a little too small, with his whole mind given up to
the subject of his profession; besides which he was religious, a
non-smoker, a teetotaller, and particular upon these points.
Being but little in the habit of going into Mangadone society, he seldom
met Hartley except at the Club, and it was there that he ran him into a
corner and asked for a word or two in private. Hartley took him out into
the dim green space where basket chairs were set at intervals, and
drawing two well away from the others, sat down to listen.
Sweet scents were wafted up on the evening air, and drowsy, dark clouds
followed the moonlike heavy wisps of black cotton-wool, drowning the
light from time to time and then clearing off again; and all over the
grass, glimmering groups of men in white clothes and women in trailing
skirts filled the air with an indistinct murmur of sound.
"It is understood at the outset," began Atkins, clearing his throat with
a crowing sound, "that what I have to say is said strictly in a private
and confidential sense. I only say it because I am driven to do so."
Hartley's basket chair squeaked as he moved, but he said nothing, and
Atkins dropped his voice into an intimate tone and went on:
"You came to see Heath one day lately, and I told you he was ill. Well,
so he was, but there are illnesses of the mind as well as of the body,
and Heath was mind-sick. I am a light sleeper, Hartley. I wake at a
sound, and twice lately I have been awakened by sounds."
"The _Durwan_," suggested Hartley.
"Not the _Durwan_. If it had been, I would not have spoken to you about
it. Heath has been visited towards morning by a man, and it was the
sound of voices that awoke me. It is no business of mine to pry or to
talk, and I would say nothing if it were not that I admire and respect
Heath, and I believe that he is in some horrible difficulty, out of
which he either will not, or cannot, extricate himself."
"Who was the man?"
Atkins ignored the question.
"I admit that I listened, but I overheard almost nothing, except just
the confused sounds of talking in low voices, but I heard Heath say, 'I
will not endure it, I am bearing too much already.' I think he spoke
more to himself than to the man in his room, but it was a ghastly thing
to hear, as he said it."
"Go on," said Hartley. "Tell me exactly what happened."
"I heard the door on to the back veranda open, and I heard the sound of
feet go along it--bare feet, mind you, Hartley--and then I went to
sleep. That was a week ago."
"And something of the same nature has occurred since?"
Atkins dried his hands with his handkerchief.
"I said something to Heath at breakfast about having had a bad night,
and he got up at once and left the table. After that nothing happened
until last night. I had been out all day, and came home dog-tired. I
turned in early and left Heath reading a theological book in the
veranda. I said, I remember, 'I'm absolutely beat, Padré; I have had
enough to-day to give me nine or ten hours without stirring,' and he
looked up and said, 'Don't complain of that, Atkins; there are worse
things than sound sleep.' It struck me then that he hadn't known what it
was for weeks, he looked so gaunt and thin, and I thought again of that
other night that we had neither of us spoken about."
"Heath never explained anything?"
"No, I never asked him to."
"What happened then?" Hartley's voice was hardly above a whisper, and he
leaned close to Atkins to listen.
"I slept for hours, fairly hogged it until it must have been two or
three in the morning, judging by the light, and then I awoke suddenly,
the way one wakes when there is some noise that is different to usual
noises, and after a moment or two I heard the sound of voices, and I got
out of bed and went very quietly into the veranda. Heath's lamp was
burning, his room is at the far end from mine, and I stood there,
shivering like a leaf out of sheer jumps. I had a regular 'night attack'
feeling over me. I heard a chair pushed back, and I heard Heath say in a
low voice 'If you come here again, or if you dog me again, I'll hand you
over to the police,' and the man laughed. I can't describe his laugh;
it was the most damnable thing I ever listened to, and I thought of
running in, but something stopped me, God knows why. 'Take your pay,'
said Heath; I heard him say it, and then I heard the door open again,
and the same sound of feet." He shivered. "They stopped outside my room,
and I caught the outline of a head, a huge head and enormous, heavy
shoulders, and then he was gone."
"Why the devil didn't you raise the alarm?" Hartley's voice was angry.
"You've got a policeman on the road. Why didn't you shout?"
"Because I was thinking of Heath," said Atkins a little stiffly. "He is
the man we have both got to think about. Some devil of a native is
blackmailing him, and Heath is one of the best and straightest men I
know. Not one item of all this mystery goes against him in my mind, but
what I want you to do, is to have the bungalow watched."
"I shall certainly do that," said Hartley with decision. "And as for
your opinion of Heath--well, it strikes me as curious that a man of good
character should be a mark for blackmail."
"I explain facts by people, not people by facts," said Atkins hotly.
"And I have told you--"
"I think it is only fair to say that you have told me something that
lays Heath under suspicion," said Hartley, slowly. "He behaved very
oddly, lately, when I asked him a simple question, and he chose to
refuse to see me when I went to his house. All that was a small matter,
but what you tell me now is serious."
"Serious for Heath, and for that very reason I particularly want him
protected. But as for suspicion, I know the man thoroughly, and that is
quite absurd." Atkins got up and terminated the interview. "It is absurd
to talk of suspicion," he said again, irritably. "I hope you will drop
that attitude, Hartley. If I had imagined for a moment that you were
likely to adopt it, I should have kept my mouth shut."
He went away, his narrow shoulders humped, and his whole figure
testifying to his annoyance, and Hartley sat alone, watching the
moonlight and thinking his own thoughts. He was interrupted by a woman's
voice, and Mrs. Wilder sat down in the chair left vacant by Atkins.
"What are you pondering about, Mr. Hartley? Are you seeing ghosts or
moon spirits? You certainly give the idea that you are immensely
preoccupied."
"Do I?" Hartley laughed awkwardly. "Well, as a matter of fact, I was not
thinking of anything very pleasant."
"Can I help?"--her voice was very soft and alluring.
"No one can, I am afraid."
She touched his arm with a little intimate gesture, and her eyes shone
in the moonlight.
"How can you say that? If I were in any sort of fix, or in any sort of
trouble, I would ask you to advise me, and to tell me what to do, before
I would go to anyone else, even Draycott, and why should you leave me
outside your worries?"
"You see, that's just it, they aren't exactly mine. If they were I
would tell you, but I can't tell you, because what I was thinking about
was connected entirely with someone else."
Mrs. Wilder's eyes narrowed, and she lifted her slightly pointed nose a
very little.
"Ah, now you make me inquisitive, and that is most unfair of you. Don't
tell me anything, Mr. Hartley, except just the name of the person
concerned. I'm very safe, as you know. Could you tell me the name, or
would it be wrong of you?"
"The name won't convey very much to you," said Hartley, laughing. "I was
thinking of the Padré, Heath. That doesn't give you much clue, does it?"
It was too dark for him to see a look that sprang into Mrs. Wilder's
eyes, or perhaps Hartley might have found a considerable disparity
between her look and her light words.
"Poor Mr. Heath, he is one of those terribly serious, conscientious
people, who go about life making themselves wretched for the good of
their souls. He ought to have lived in the Middle Ages. I won't ask you
_why_ you are thinking about him"--she got up and lingered a little, and
Hartley rose also--"but you know that you should not think of anyone
unless you want to make others think of them, too; it isn't at all safe.
I shall have to think of Mr. Heath all the way home, and he is _such_ a
gaunt, scraggy kind of thought."
"I wish I could replace him with myself," said Hartley, in a burst of
admiration.
Mrs. Wilder accepted his compliment graciously and walked across the
grass to the drive, where her car panted almost noiselessly, as is the
way of good cars, and he put her in with the manner of a jeweller
putting a precious diamond pendant into a case. He watched the car
disappear, and considered that some men are undeservedly lucky in this
life.
Hartley was nearly forty, that dangerously sentimental age, and he began
to wonder if, by chance, he had met Clarice Wilder years ago in a
Devonshire orchard, life might not have been a wonderful thing. He
called her a "sweet woman" in his mind, and it was almost a pity that
Mrs. Wilder did not know, because her sense of humour was subtle and
acute, and she would have thoroughly enjoyed the description of herself.
She could read Hartley as quickly as she could read the telegrams in the
_Mangadone Times_, and she could play upon him as she played upon her
own grand piano.
She had not asked any questions, and she knew nothing of what Atkins had
said about Heath; but her face was set and tense as she drove towards
her bungalow. She was certainly thinking very definitely, quite as
definitely as Hartley had been thinking as he watched the moonlight
playing hide-and-seek with the shadows of the palm branches and the
darkness of the trees, and her thoughts left no pleasant look upon her
face or in her eyes; and yet Hartley, on his way to the bungalow where
he lived, was thinking of her in a white dress and a shady hat, with a
fleecy blue and white sky overhead and the scent of apple-blossom in the
air.
The power of romance is strong in adolescence, but it is stronger still
when the turnstile of years is reached and there is finality in the air.
Hartley was built for platonics; Fate gave him the necessary touch of
the commonplace that dispels romance and replaces it with a kind of
deadly domesticity; and yet Hartley was unaware of the fact.
He had never thought of being "in love" with Mrs. Wilder, partly because
he felt it would be "no use," and partly because she had never seemed to
expect it from him, but as he walked along the road he began to find
that her manner had of late altered considerably. She seemed to take an
interest in him, and though she had always been his friend, her new
attitude was charged with invisible electricity.
So far as Mrs. Wilder was concerned, Hartley was to her what a sitting
hen would be to a sporting man. You couldn't shoot the confiding thing;
but you might wring its neck if necessary, or push it out of the way
with an impatient foot. She knew her power over him to a nicety, and she
knew of his secret desire for "situations," because her instinct was
never at fault; but she felt nothing more than contempt, slightly
charged with pity towards him. Hartley was a good-natured, idiotic man,
and Hartley had principles; Clarice Wilder had none herself, though she
felt that they were definite factors in any game, but she also believed
that principles were things that could be got over, or got at, by any
woman who knew enough about life to manage such as Hartley.
All the same, it was not of Hartley that she thought. She had been quite
truthful when she said that he had suggested Heath to her mind, and
that she would have to consider his gaunt face and hollow cheeks during
her drive.
If he had sat on the vacant seat beside her, the Rev. Francis Heath
could hardly have been more clearly before her eyes, and could hardly
have drawn her mind more strongly, and it was because of her thought of
him that she preserved her steady look and strange eyes.
A strong woman, a woman with character, a woman who once she saw her
way, was able to follow it faithfully, wherever it twisted, wherever it
wound, and wherever it eventually brought her. No one could picture her
flinching or turning back along a road she had set out to follow; if it
had run in blood, she would have gone on in bare feet, not picking her
steps, and yet Hartley dreamed of apple orchards and an Eve in a white
muslin dress.
VII
FINDS THE REV. FRANCIS HEATH READING GEORGE HERBERT'S POEMS, AND LEAVES
HIM PLEDGED TO A POSSIBLY COMPROMISING SILENCE
The Reverend Francis Heath was sitting in his upstairs room, for of late
he had avoided the veranda. It was the leisure hour of the day, the slow
hour when the light wanes and it is too early to call for a lamp; the
hour when memory or fear can both be poignant in tropical climates.
The house was very still, Atkins had gone to the Club and the servants
had all returned to their own quarters. Outside, noises were many.
Birds, with ugly, tuneless notes that were not songs but cries, flitted
in the trees, and the rumble of traffic on the road came up in the
evening air, broken occasionally by the shrill persistence of an exhaust
whistle or the clamour of a motor-horn, and above all other sounds the
long-drawn, occasional hoot from a ship anchored in the river highway.
There was noise, and to spare, outside, but within everything was still,
except for the chittering of a nest of bats in the eaves, and the
sudden, relaxing creak of bamboo chairs, that behave sometimes as though
ghosts sat restlessly in their arms.
The sunlight that fell into the garden and caught its green, turning it
into flaming emerald, climbed in at Mr. Heath's window, and lay across
his writing-table; it touched his shoulder and withdrew a little,
touched the lines on his forehead for a moment, touched the open book
before him, and fell away, followed by a shadow that grew deeper as it
passed. It faded out of the garden like a memory that cannot be held
back by human striving. The distances turned into shadowy blue, and from
blue to purple, until only a few flecks of golden light across the
pearl-silver told that it was gone eternally; that its hour was spent,
for good or ill, and that Mangadone had come one evening nearer to the
end of measureless Time; but the Rev. Francis Heath did not regard its
going. His face was sad with a terrible, tragic sadness that is the
sadness of life and not death, and yet it was of death and not of life
that he thought. A little book of George Herbert's poems lay open before
him and he had been reading it with a scholar's love of quaint
phraseology:
"I made a posy, while the days ran by;
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they,
By noon, most cunningly did steal away,
And wither'd in my hand."
He read the lines over and over again, and gave a deep, heart-broken
sigh, bending his face between his hands, and bowing his shoulders as
though under a heavy weight. His gaunt frame was thin and spare, his
black alpaca coat hung on it like a sack, and his whole attitude spoke
of sorrow. He might have been the presentment of an unwilling ghost, who
stood with the Ferryman's farthing under his palm, waiting to be taken
across the cheerless, dark waters to a limbo of drifting souls. He took
his hands from before his face and clasped them over the book, looking
out of the window to the evening shadows, as if he tried to find peace
in the very act of contemplation.
The sad things he came in daily contact with had conquered his faith in
life, though they had not succeeded in killing his trust in God's
eventual plan of redemption; and his mind wandered in terrible places,
places he had forced his way into, places he could never forget. He
suffered from all a reformer's agony, an agony that is the small
reflection of the great story of the mystic burden heavy as the sins of
the whole world, and he tried, out of the simple, childlike fancy of the
words he read, to grasp at a better mind.
Heath was one of those men who could not understand effortless faith; he
was crushed by his own lack of success, and bowed down by his own
failure. Since he could not rout the enemy single-handed, he believed
that the battle was against the Hosts of the Lord. He knew no leisure
from the war of his own thoughts, and as he clasped his hands, his face
grew tense and set, and his eyes haggard and terrible. For a moment he
sat very still, and his eyes followed the lines written by a man who had
the faith of a little child:
"But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they,
By noon, most cunningly did steal away."
Heath had never gathered flowers, either as a lesson to himself or a
gift for others; they hardly spoke of careless beauty to him, they were
emblems of lightness and thoughtlessness, and Heath had no time to stop
and consider the lilies of the field.
He moved suddenly like a man who is awakened from a thought heavier than
sleep, and listened with a hunted look, the look of a man who is afraid
of footsteps; he stood up, gathering his loose limbs together and
watching the door. Steps came up the staircase, steps that stumbled a
little, and if Heath had possessed Mhtoon Pah's art of reading the walk
of his fellow creatures, he would have known that he might expect a
woman and not a man.
"Mr. Heath," a low voice called in the passage, and Heath's tension
relaxed, giving place to surprise.
The voice was strange to him, and he passed his handkerchief over his
face and walked to the door, just as his name was called again, in the
same low, penetrating voice.
"Who wants me?" he asked, almost roughly, and then he saw a tall, dark
woman standing at the top of the staircase.
"Mrs. Wilder," he said in surprise, and she made a little imperious
movement with her hand.
"I did not call your servant, I came up, because I wanted to find you
alone. You are alone?"
"Certainly, I am alone."
"May I come in?"
Heath held the door open for her to pass, and she walked in, looking
around the darkening room with hard, curious eyes.
She took the chair he gave her, in silence, and sat down near the
writing-table, and, feeling that she would speak after a time, Heath
took his own place again and waited.
"I hardly know where to begin," she said, always speaking in the same
low, intent voice. "Do you recall the evening of the twenty-ninth?"
An odd spasm caught Heath's face, and he paused for a moment before he
answered.
"I do recall it."
"Perhaps you remember seeing me? I was riding along the road when I
first passed you, and you were walking."
"I remember that I did pass you then, and also that I saw you later."
Heath's sombre eyes were on her face, and his fingers touched a gold
cross that hung from his watch-chain.
"You passed me, and you passed Absalom, the Christian boy, and you have
been questioned about Absalom."
"I have," he said heavily. "Why do you ask?"
Mrs. Wilder took a quick breath.