man in the Privy Council Office, was actually in the house when poor
Perceval Scrope's death took place!" bold and cruel people would say to
Mrs. Panfillen, watching the while to see how she took their mention of
the dead man's name.
"Yes," she would answer them quietly. "Very fortunate indeed. And it was
so kind of Mr. Bustard to get his sister to go away with Althea. Poor
Althea is so alone in the world. I hope she will come and stay with us
when she comes back to town; we were Perceval Scrope's oldest, I might
say closest, friends. You know that their marriage--his and
Althea's--took place from our house?"
The only human being who scented a mystery was Dockett--Dockett, who was
mindful, as he had a right to be, of his lawful perquisites, and who
will never forgive himself for having been out on that fateful
afternoon.
"I'd give something to know the whereabouts of Mr. Scrope's overcoat, to
say nothing of his hat and stick. That common ash stick's a relic--it
may be worth money some day!" he observed threateningly to the footman.
But Luke, as only answer, stared at him with stolid dislike.
Luke had seen nothing of the hat and stick; no doubt they had been left
in the cab in which Mr. Scrope had come back, ill, from the House. As
for the overcoat, it had probably disappeared in the confusion, the
hurried coming and going, of that evening when Luke had been almost run
off his legs answering the door, and his head made quite giddy answering
enquiries. But it was not Luke's business to say what he thought or did
not think. With such a man as Mr. Dockett, it only led to
unpleasantness.
II
MR. JARVICE'S WIFE
I
"About that letter of your uncle's? I take it you have no one to
suggest?"
Thomas Carden glanced anxiously at the son in whom he had so strong a
confidence, and who was the secret pride of his eyes, the only love of
his austere, hard-working life.
The two were a great contrast to one another. The older man was short
and slight, with the delicate, refined, spiritual face, so often seen in
the provincial man of business belonging to that disappearing generation
of Englishmen who found time to cultivate the things of the mind as well
as the material interests of life. A contrast, indeed, to the tall,
singularly handsome, alert-looking man whom he had just addressed, and
whose perfect physical condition made him appear somewhat younger than
his thirty-two years.
And yet, in spite or perhaps because of this contrast between them, the
two were bound in the closest, if not exactly in the most confidential,
ties of affection. And, as a matter of course, they were partners in the
great metal-broking business of Josh. Carden, Thomas Carden and Son,
which had been built up by three generations of astute, self-respecting
citizens of Birmingham.
It was Easter Monday, and the two men were lingering over breakfast, in
a way they seldom allowed themselves time to do on ordinary week-days,
in the finely proportioned, book-lined dining-room of one of those
spacious old houses which remain to prove that the suburb of Edgbaston
was still country a hundred years ago.
Theodore Carden looked across the table meditatively. He had almost
forgotten his uncle's letter, for, since that letter had been read and
cursorily discussed, he and his father had been talking of a matter
infinitely more important to them both. The matter in question was the
son's recent engagement and coming marriage, a marriage which was a
source of true satisfaction to the older man. His father's unselfish joy
in the good thing which had befallen him touched Theodore Carden keenly,
for the niche occupied in most men's minds by their intimate feminine
circle was filled in that of the young man by the diminutive figure of
the senior partner of Carden and Son.
As is perhaps more often the case than those who despise human nature
believe, many have the grace to reverence and admire the qualities in
which they know themselves to be deficient. Such a man was the younger
Carden.
To-day the depths had been stirred, and he let his mind dwell with a
certain sense of shame and self-rebuke on his own and his father's
ideals of human conduct. Even as a schoolboy, Theodore had come to
realise how much more he knew of the ugly side of life than did his
father. But then, old Mr. Carden was quite exceptional; he knew
nothing--or so at least his son believed, and loved him for it--of the
temptations, conflicts, victories, and falls of the average sensual man.
Theodore's father had been engaged, at twenty, to a girl of his own age
whom he had not been able to marry till twelve years later; she had left
him a widower with this one child after five years of married life, and
Thomas Carden, as he had himself once told his son in a moment of
unwonted confidence, had been absolutely faithful to her before the
marriage and since her death.
The woman--many people would have said the very fortunate young
woman--who was so soon to become Mrs. Theodore Carden would not possess
such a husband as Thomas Carden had been to his wife.
And yet, in his heart, Theodore was well aware that the gentle girl he
loved would probably be a happier woman than his own mother had been,
for he, unlike his father, in his dealings with the other sex could call
up at will that facile and yet rather rare gift of tenderness which
women, so life had taught him, value far more than the deeper,
inarticulate love....
Carden came back to the prosaic question of his uncle's letter with a
distinct effort.
"Have I anyone to suggest?" he echoed. "I have no one to suggest,
father. I know, of course, exactly the sort of man Uncle Barrett is
looking for; he's asking us to find him the perfect clerk every man of
business has sought for at some time or other. If I were you I should
write and tell him that the man he wants us to find never has to look
outside England for a job, and, what is more, would rather be a clerk
here--if he's any sense--than a partner in New Zealand!"
A smile quivered for a moment over the young man's shrewd face; his
uncle was evidently seeking such a man as he was himself, but such men,
so Theodore Carden was able to tell himself without undue conceit, were
not likely to go into voluntary exile even with the bribe of eventual
partnership in a flourishing business.
There was a pause, and then again the older man broke the silence with
something entirely irrelevant to the subject which was filling the minds
of his son and himself.
"You haven't looked at the _Post_ this morning? There's nothing in it.
Dearth of real news is, I suppose, responsible for this?" and he
pointed, frowning as he spoke, to a column on the middle page headed
"The Jarvice Mystery. New Developments."
Again a shrewd, good-humoured smile quivered on his son's firm mouth.
"In these days newspapers have to follow, not lead, the public taste.
Very few people are honestly as indifferent as you are, father, to that
sort of story. Now even I, who never met poor old Jarvice, cannot help
wondering how he came by his death; and yet you, who knew the man----"
"I knew him," said the other with a touch of impatience, "as I know, and
as you know, dozens of our fellow-townsmen."
"Never mind; you, at any rate, can put a face to the man's name; and yet
the question as to whether he was or was not poisoned by his wife, is
one of indifference to you! Now I submit that in this indifference you
are really a little----" he hesitated for a word, but found that none so
well expressed his thought as that which had first arisen to his
lips--"peculiar, father."
"Am I?" said Thomas Carden slowly; "am I so, Theodore? Nay, nay, I deny
that I am indifferent! Lane"--Major Lane was at that time Head Constable
of Birmingham, and a lifelong friend of the speaker--"Lane was quite
full of it last night. He insisted on telling me all the details of the
affair, and what shocked me, my boy, was not so much the question which,
of course, occupied Lane--that is, as to whether that unhappy young
woman poisoned her husband or not--but the whole state of things which
he disclosed about them. Lane told me certain facts concerning Jarvice,
whom, as you truly say, I have known, in a sense, for years, which I
should not have thought possible of any man--vile things, which should
have prevented his thinking of marriage, especially of marriage with a
young wife."
Theodore Carden remained silent; he never discussed unsavoury subjects
with his father. Moreover, he had no liking for Major Lane, though he
regarded him with considerable respect, and even with a feeling of
gratitude. Some years before, the Head Constable had helped the young
man out of a serious scrape, the one real scrape--so Carden was
complacently able to assure himself--engendered by his systematic and
habitual pursuit of women.
Even now he could not recall, without wincing, the interview he had had
on that occasion with his father's friend. During that interview Carden
had felt himself thoroughly condemned, and even despised, by the older
man, and he had been made to feel that it was only for the sake of his
father--his high-minded, unsuspicious father--that he was being saved
from the public exposure of a peculiarly sordid divorce suit.
But it was in all sincerity that the young man now felt indignant with
Major Lane for having distressed such a delicately spiritual soul as was
Thomas Carden with the hidden details of the Jarvice story. After all,
what interested the public was not the question of Jarvice's moral
character, but whether a gently nurtured and attractive woman had
carried through a sinister and ingenious crime, which, but for a mere
accident, would have utterly defied detection.
Theodore Carden got up from the breakfast table and walked over to a
circular bow window which commanded charming views of the wide sloping
garden, interspersed with the streams and tiny ponds, which gave the
house its name of Watermead, and which enabled old Mr. Carden to indulge
himself with especial ease in his hobby of water gardening.
Standing there, the young man began wondering what he should do with
himself this early spring day.
His _fiancée_ had just left the quiet lodgings, which she and her
mother, a clergyman's widow, had occupied in Birmingham during the last
few weeks, to pay visits to relatives in the south of England. The
thought of going to any of the neighbouring houses where he knew himself
to be sure of a warm welcome, and where the news of his engagement would
be received with boisterous congratulations, tempered in some cases with
an underlying touch of regret and astonishment, filled him with
repugnance.
The girl he had chosen to be his wife was absolutely different from the
women who had hitherto attracted him; he reverenced as well as loved
her, and hitherto Theodore Carden had never found reverence to be in any
sense a corollary of passion, while he had judged women by those who
were attractive to, or, as was quite as often the case, attracted by,
himself.
The last few days had brought a great change in his life, and one which
he meant should be permanent; and yet, in spite or perhaps because of
this, as he stood staring with absent eyes into his father's charming
garden, he found his mind dwelling persistently on the only one of his
many amorous adventures which had left a deep, an enduring, and, it must
be admitted, a most delightful mark on the tablets of his memory.
The whole thing was still so vivid to him that half-involuntarily he
turned round and looked down the long room to where his old father was
sitting. How amazed, above all how shocked and indignant, the man for
whom he had so great an affection and respect would feel if he knew the
pictures which were now floating before his son's retrospective vision!
Like most thinking human beings, Theodore Carden had not lived to his
present age without being struck by the illogical way the world wags.
Accordingly, he was often surprised and made humorously indignant by
the curious moral standards--they had so many more than one--of the
conventional people among whom it was his fate to dwell and have his
social being.
Not one of the men he knew, with the exception of his father, and of
those others--a small number truly--whom he believed to be sincerely,
not conventionally, religious, but would have envied him the astonishing
adventure which reconstituted itself so clearly before him to-day--and
yet not one of them but would have been ready to condemn him for having
done what he had done. Theodore Carden, however, so often tempted to
kiss, never felt tempted to tell, and the story of that episode remained
closely hidden, and would so remain, he told himself, to the end of his
life.
* * * * *
What had happened had been briefly this.
One day in the previous October, Carden had taken his seat in the
afternoon express which stops at Birmingham on its way from the north to
Euston, or rather, having taken a leisurely survey of the train, which
was, as he quickly noted, agreeably empty, he had indicated to the
porter carrying his bag a carriage in which sat, alone, a singularly
pretty woman.
As he afterwards had the delight of telling her, and, as he now reminded
himself with a retrospective thrill of feeling, he had experienced, when
his eyes first met those of the fair traveller, that incommunicable
sensation, part physical, part mental, which your genuine Lothario, if
an intelligent man, always welcomes with quickening pulse as a foretaste
of the special zest to be attached to a coming pursuit.
Carden's instinct as to such delicate matters had seldom played him
false; never less so than on this occasion, for, within an hour, he and
the lovely stranger had reached that delightful stage of intimacy in
which a man and woman each feels that he and she, while still having
much to learn about the other, are on the verge of a complete
understanding.
During the three hours' journey, Carden's travelling companion told him
a great deal more about herself than he had chosen to reveal concerning
his own life and affairs; he learnt, for instance, that she was the
young wife of an old man, and that the old man was exceedingly jealous.
Further, that she found the life she was compelled to lead "horribly
boring," and that a widowed cousin, who lived near London, and from whom
she had "expectations," formed a convenient excuse for occasional
absences from home.
Concerning three matters of fact, however, she completely withheld her
confidence, both then, in those first delicious hours of their
acquaintance, and even later, when their friendship--well, why not say
friendship, for Carden had felt a very strong liking as well as an
over-mastering attraction for this Undine-like creature?--had become
much closer.
The first and second facts which she kept closely hidden, for reasons
which should perhaps have been obvious, were her surname--she confided
to him that her Christian name was Pansy--and her husband's profession.
The third fact which she concealed was the name of the town where she
lived, and from which she appeared to be travelling that day.
The trifling incidents of that eventful October journey had become to a
great extent blurred in Theodore Carden's memory, but what had followed
was still extraordinarily vivid, and to-day, on this holiday morning,
standing idly looking out of the window, he allowed his mind a certain
retrospective licence.
From whom, so he now asked himself, had first come the suggestion that
there should be no parting at Euston between himself and the strange
elemental woman he found so full of unforced fascination and disarming
charm?
The answer soon came echoing down the corridors of remembrance: from
himself, of course. But even now the memory brought with it shame-faced
triumph as he remembered her quick acquiescence, as free, as unashamed,
as joyous as that of a spoilt child acclaiming an unlooked-for treat.
And, after all, what harm had there been in the whole halcyon
adventure--what injury had it caused to any human being?
Carden put the husband, the fatuous old man, who had had the incredible
folly to marry a girl thirty-five years younger than himself, out of
court. Pansy, light-hearted, conscienceless Pansy--he always thought of
her with a touch of easy tenderness--had run no risk of detection, for,
as he had early discovered, she knew no one in London with the solitary
exception of the old cousin who lived in Upper Norwood.
As for his own business acquaintances, he might, of course, have been
seen by any of them taking about this singularly attractive woman, for
the two went constantly to the theatre, and daily to one or other of the
great restaurants. But what then? Excepting that she was quieter in
manner, far better dressed, and incomparably prettier, Pansy might have
been the wife or sister of any one of his own large circle of relations,
that great Carden clan who held their heads so high in the business
world of the Midlands.
Nay, nay, no risk had been run, and no one had been a penny the worse!
Indeed, looking back, Theodore Carden told himself that it had been a
perfect, a flawless episode; he even admitted that after all it was
perhaps as well that there had been no attempt at a repetition.
And yet? And yet the young man, especially during the first few weeks
which had followed that sequence of enchanting days, had often felt
piqued, even a little surprised, that the heroine of his amazing
adventure had not taken advantage of his earnest entreaty that she would
give him the chance of meeting her again. He had left it to her to be
mysterious; as for himself, he had seen no reason why he should conceal
from her either his name or his business address.
Many men would not have been so frank, but Theodore Carden, too wise in
feminine lore to claim an infallible knowledge of women, never
remembered having made a mistake as to the moral social standing of a
new feminine acquaintance.
During the few days they had been together, everything had gone to prove
that Pansy was no masquerader from that under-world whose denizens
always filled him with a sensation of mingled aversion and pity. He
could not doubt--he never had doubted--that what she had chosen to tell
him about herself and her private affairs was substantially true. No
man, having heard her speak of it, could fail to understand her
instinctive repulsion from the old husband to whom she had sold herself
into bondage; and as human, if not perhaps quite as worthy of sympathy,
was her restless longing for freedom to lead the pleasant life led by
those of her more fortunate contemporaries whose doings were weekly
chronicled in the society papers which seemed to form her only reading.
Once only had Carden felt for his entrancing companion the slightest
touch of repugnance. He had taken her to a play in which a child played
an important part, and she had suddenly so spoken as to make him realise
with a shock of surprise that she was the mother of children! Yet the
little remark made by her, "I wonder how my little girls are getting
on," had been very natural and even womanly. Then, in answer to a
muttered word or two on his part, she had explained that she preferred
not to have news of her children when she was absent from home, as it
only worried her; even when staying with the old cousin at Upper
Norwood, she made a point of being completely free of all possible home
troubles.
Hearing this gentle, placid explanation of her lack of maternal anxiety,
Carden had put up his hand to his face to hide a smile; he had not been
mistaken; Pansy was indeed the thorough-going little hedonist he had
taken her to be. Still, it was difficult, even rather disturbing, to
think of her as a mother, and as the mother of daughters.
Yet how deep an impression this unmoral, apparently soulless woman had
made on his mind and on his emotional memory! Even now, when he had no
desire, and, above all, must not allow himself to have any desire, ever
to see her again, Theodore Carden felt, almost as keenly as he had done
during the period of their brief intimacy, a morbid curiosity to know
where she lived and had her being.
* * * * *
It was late in the afternoon of Easter Monday.
Theodore Carden had just come in from a long walk, and, as he passed
through the circular hall around which Watermead was built, he heard the
low sound of voices, those of his father and some other man, issuing
from the square drawing-room always occupied by the father and son on
such idle days as these. He stayed his steps, realised that the visitor
was Major Lane, and then made up his mind to go up and change, instead
of going straight in to his father, as he would have done had the latter
been alone.
As he came down again, and crossed the now lighted hall, he met the
parlour-maid, an elderly woman who had been in Thomas Carden's service
ever since his wife's death. "I wonder if I can take in the lamps now,
Mr. Theodore? It's getting so dark, sir."
There was a troubled sound in her voice, and the young man stopped and
looked at her with some surprise.
"Of course you can, Kate," he said quickly, "why not? Why haven't you
taken them in before?"
"I did go in with them half an hour ago, sir, but the master told me to
take them out again. There's firelight, to be sure, and it's only Major
Lane in there, but he's been here since three o'clock, and master's not
had his tea yet. I suppose they thought they'd wait till you came in."
"Oh! well, if my father prefers to sit in the dark, and to put off tea
till he can have my company, you had better wait till I ring, and then
bring in the lamps and the tea together."
He spoke with his usual light good-nature, and passed on into the room
which was the only apartment in the large old house clearly associated
in his mind with the graceful, visionary figure of his dead mother.
Thomas Carden and the Head Constable were sitting in the twilight, one
on each side of the fireplace, and when the young man came in, they both
stirred perceptibly, and abruptly stopped speaking.
Theodore came forward and stood on the hearth-rug. "May Kate bring in
the lamps, father?"
"Yes, yes, I suppose so."
And the lamps were brought in. Then came the tea-tray, placed by Kate on
a large table many paces from the fire; womanless Watermead was lacking
in the small elegancies of modern life, but now that would soon be
remedied, so the younger Carden told himself with a slight, happy
smile.
Very deliberately, and asking no questions as to milk or sugar, for well
he knew the tastes of his father and of his father's friend, he poured
out two cups of tea, and turning, advanced, a cup balanced in each
steady hand.
But halfway up the room he stopped for a moment, arrested by the sound
of his father's voice--
"Theo, my boy, I want to ask you something."
The mode of address had become of late years a little unusual, and there
was a note in Thomas Carden's accents which struck his son as
significant--even as solemn.
"Yes, father?"
"Did you not tell me this morning that you had never met Jarvice?"
The one onlooker, hatchet-faced Major Lane, suddenly leaned a little
forward.
He was astonished at his old friend's extraordinary and uncalled-for
courage, and it was with an effort, with the feeling that he was bracing
himself to see something terrible take place, that he looked straight at
the tall, fine-looking man who had now advanced into the circle of light
thrown by the massive Argand lamps.
But Theodore Carden appeared quite unmoved, nay more, quite
unconcerned, by his father's question.
"Yes," he said, "I did tell you so. I suppose I knew the old fellow by
sight, but I certainly was never introduced to him. Are there any new
developments?"
He turned to Major Lane with a certain curiosity, and then quite
composedly handed him the cup of tea he held in his right hand.
"Well, yes," answered the other coldly, "there are several new
developments. We arrested Mrs. Jarvice this morning."
"That seems rather a strong step to have taken, unless new evidence has
turned up since Saturday," said Theodore thoughtfully.
"Such new evidence has come to hand since Saturday," observed Major Lane
drily.