himself to meet those at once indifferent and appealing eyes, which
seemed to stare fixedly beyond the group of men by the door; and
suddenly the lawyer became aware that just behind him hurried whispered
words were being uttered.
"This gentleman is Mr. Dering's solicitor; perhaps he will be able to
throw some light on the whole affair," and he felt himself being plucked
by the sleeve and gently pulled back into the hall.
"It is--isn't it?--poor Hinton?" and he looked imploringly from one man
to the other.
"Hinton?" said the doctor sharply. "He's there, sure enough--but you
didn't see him, for we put him under a sheet, behind that screen. Your
friend shot him dead first, and then cut his own throat, but he didn't
set about that in quite the right way, so he's alive still, as you can
see."
Wingfield drew a long breath of something like relief. The torturing
suspense of the last few moments was at an end.
"And where is Mrs. Dering?" he spoke in a quiet, mechanical voice; and
Johnstone felt angered by his callousness.
"We've just sent her back into the next house," he answered curtly, "and
made her take the Hinton children with her. For--well, it often is so in
such cases, you know--the presence of his wife seems positively to
distress Mr. Dering; besides, the nurse and I can do, and have done, all
that is possible."
"And have you no clue to what has happened? Has Dering been able to give
no explanation of this--this--horrible business?"
Johnstone shook his head. "Of course he can't speak. He will never speak
again. He wrote a few words to his wife, but they amounted to nothing
save regret that he had bungled the last half of the affair."
"And what do you yourself think?"
Wingfield spoke calmly and authoritatively. He had suddenly become
aware, during the last few moments, that he was talking to a medical
man.
"I haven't had time to think much about it;" the tone was rough and
sore. "Mr. Dering seems to have come into a large sum of money, and
such things have been known to upset men's brains before now."
"Still, he might write something of consequence, now that this gentleman
has come," interposed the inspector.
But when Wingfield, standing by that which he now knew was indeed his
friend, watched the painful, laboured moving of the pencil across the
slate which had been hurriedly fetched some two hours before from the
young Hintons' nursery, all he saw, traced again and again, were the
words:
"Look after Louise. Look after Louise ..." and then at last: "I mean to
die. I mean to die. I mean to die."
V
SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR?
"Yes; there; wives be such a provoking class of society, because
though they be never right, they be never more than half
wrong."--THE TRANTER in _Under the Greenwood Tree_.
I
The fact that it was Mrs. Rigby's Silver Wedding Day, and that she was
now awaiting her only brother who was to be the fourth at the dinner she
and her husband, the respected Town Clerk of Market Dalling, were giving
in honour of the event, appeared to her no reason why she should sit in
her parlour with hands idle in her lap. There was a large work-basket on
a table close to her elbow, and with quick, capable fingers she was
engaged in mending a pillow-case.
It was late June, and Mrs. Rigby sat by the widely open French windows
which gave access to her garden--one of those fragrant walled gardens
which still embellish the rear of the High Street in a very typically
English market town.
Now and again the work would drop between her hands, and lie unheeded
on her knee, while she looked out, focussing her dark, bright eyes on
the distant figure of a woman who sat in a summer-house situated at the
extreme end of the garden; and as Mrs. Rigby gazed thoughtfully at this,
her other wedding guest, her whole face would soften--so might a mother
look at a daughter whom instinct prompted her to love, and reason to
condemn as foolish.
And yet the sitting figure was that of a contemporary of Mrs. Rigby,
being, as a matter of fact, a certain Matilda Wellow, who had been her
bridesmaid twenty-five years ago to-day, and who was now, in more than
one sense of the term, the most substantial spinster of Market Dalling.
The sound of the door behind her quietly opening and shutting made Mrs.
Rigby turn round, and a moment later she was looking up at a tall,
straight, still young-looking man, who, clad in evening dress, stood
smiling down at her. He was David Banfield, her half-brother.
"Why, you've put on all your war-paint!" she exclaimed in half-pretended
dismay. "Didn't you know that there was only Matilda Wellow coming?"
"I don't know that I thought anything about it," he answered, more gaily
than his sister was now in the habit of hearing him speak. "I dressed
out of compliment to you, Kate, and because--well, I've got into the way
of it lately. But pray don't let Matt think that he must needs follow my
example!"
Then he sat down by Mrs. Rigby, and gazed out with quick, sensitive
appreciation at the old walled garden.
"You're a wonderful gardener, Kate," he said suddenly.
"There's a lot of nonsense talked now about gardening," she said drily.
"With the grand ladies you see such a lot of, Dave, it's just a passing
fad."
Her brother made no answer; he looked down at her with uncritical and
yet dissatisfied eyes. She was a handsome woman, and even now only
forty-six, and yet she managed to convey an impression of age. This was
partly owing to her unsuitable dress, for Mrs. Rigby was wearing a dark
blue silk gown, chosen, not only to grace her silver wedding day, but
also with a view to being her best dress during the coming autumn and
winter.
Kate Rigby loved her half-brother, David Banfield, as only a childless
woman can love the creature to whom she has stood for long years in the
place of mother. David was twelve years younger than herself, and, with
one exception, he had never caused her a moment's real unhappiness or
unease. The exception, however, had been paramount, for with him had
been connected Mrs. Rigby's only taste of sharp pain and sorrow, and,
worse still, to such a woman as herself, of disgrace.
The young man's marriage to an Irish singer, which had taken place
without his sister's knowledge, had proved disastrous. Rosaleen Tara--to
give her the stage name by which her charming rendering of the old
national ballads had made her widely known--had never liked, or been
suited to, life as led at Market Dalling; and to make matters worse, she
was a Roman Catholic.
After a few years' unsatisfactory married life, and the birth of one
child, a girl, Mrs. David Banfield had returned, with her husband's
grudging consent, to the musical stage. Then, on the very day Banfield
had been expecting his wife home for a short holiday, there had come
from her a letter telling him shortly, bluntly, cruelly, that she had
been unfaithful to her marriage vow, and that she hoped he would forget
her.
Had he forgotten her? No. It had only been owing to his sister's
urgency, and to Matthew Rigby's more measured advice, that Banfield had
at last consented to take the step of divorcing his wife.
This step Mrs. Rigby had not only never regretted, but--and in this she
was more fortunate than her husband--no doubt had ever crossed her mind
of its having been the wisest thing for her brother's happiness and
peace. But Matthew Rigby, cautious member of a cautious profession, had
learned very early in his married life the futility of disagreeing with
the wife with whom Providence had blessed him.
Now Banfield lived in solitary state with his little girl, his household
managed by the child's nurse, an old Irishwoman, who, if devoted to the
child, was incapable of managing such a decorous household as should
have been that of the Brew House.
Any day, any hour, Mrs. Rigby would have bartered her personal happiness
for that of her half-brother, and yet the two seldom met--and they met
almost daily--without the saying on her part of something likely either
to wound or to annoy him.
"I suppose Rosy is well? I thought you meant sending the child in to see
me to-day?"
"Didn't she come?" A look of worry and anger crossed Banfield's dark,
mobile face. "I can't think what prevented it, unless--well, there's
been rather an upset at the Brew House, and perhaps Mary Scanlan didn't
like to go out."
"I heard there had been an upset," observed his sister drily, "for baker
told cook. He said your housekeeper turned the younger maid, old
Hornby's daughter, out of the house last night, and that the girl could
be heard crying all down the street."
Mrs. Rigby let her work fall unheeded on the floor; quite unconscious of
her action she clasped her hands tightly together.
"David! How long is this sort of thing to go on?" she asked, in a low,
tense voice. "It's the talk of the whole town, and it can't be good for
your child."
"But what would you have me do?" He had hoped that to-day--his sister's
silver wedding day--his domestic trials would be forgotten, or, at any
rate, not mentioned. "I can't dismiss Mary Scanlan now--she must stay on
till Rosy goes to school. That won't be for very long, for, as you know,
I promised"--he averted his face as he spoke--"to send the child to a
convent school as soon as she was twelve years old."
The idea that her brother, the wealthy, highly-thought-of brewer of
Market Dalling, should confess himself worsted by the old and
ill-tempered Irishwoman, who, together with little Rosy, had been his
wife's--his unfaithful wife's--only legacy to him, was horrible to his
sister.
Even now, when bitter, disconnected thoughts crowded one on another,
Mrs. Rigby, half-unconsciously, evoked in her mind the strong
personality of the one human being who ever really "stood up" to her.
She had had the notion, so curiously common in England, that your
Irishwoman is invariably slatternly, untruthful, and good-natured; but
in Mary Scanlan she had found a human being as scrupulously neat,
truthful, and high-minded as herself, while at the same time far more
ill-tempered, and equally determined to have her own way.
While Mrs. Rigby was allowing a flood of very bitter thoughts to surge
up round her, David Banfield was watching her face, and awaiting her
next words with some anxiety.
But when Kate Rigby at last spoke, she seemed to have forgotten the
immediate question under discussion.
"I suppose," she said slowly, "that you have never thought, Dave, that
there might be a simple way out of your difficulties?"
"You mean that I might marry again? Well, Kate, yes--I have thought of
it. I suppose there's no man, situated as I have been these last four
years, but thinks of a second marriage as a way out; but--but, apart
from other considerations, I don't feel as if I could bring myself to do
it."
"And why not, pray?" asked Mrs. Rigby in a low voice.
"Well, it's difficult to explain the way I look at it. Of course, no one
can answer for another, and yet, Kate, if anything happened to Matt, I
don't see you marrying again----?"
David Banfield was aware that he had not chosen a very happy simile with
which to point his meaning, and perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he
hoped that what he had said would put an end to a painful discussion.
But any such hope was destined to be grievously disappointed, for his
sister, with suddenly heightened colour, turned on him very sharply.
"Don't talk nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I'm an old woman, and you're a
young man!" and she set back her vigorous, powerful shoulders.
"You know very well that if Matthew had dared to treat me as you were
treated by Rosal----" something in her brother's face caused his wife's
name to die away on her lips--"I should have felt myself free to do
exactly what suited me best! Surely, when you go out among your grand
county friends, you must meet nice young ladies who would be only too
pleased to become Mrs. David Banfield, and to step into such a home as
the Brew House?"
Mrs. Rigby looked eagerly, furtively, at her brother.
The way in which he had been welcomed, to a certain extent absorbed, in
the rather dull county society round Market Dalling, had been, to his
sister, a source of mingled pride and jealousy, the more so that it had
begun in the days of his pretty wife, whose modest professional fame had
preceded her, and made her a welcome addition to county gatherings and
dinner-parties. Then had come the great break of the war, and in South
Africa Banfield had been naturally thrown with the landowners of his own
part of the world.
So it was that during the first few months which had followed on his
return home, Mrs. Rigby had fully expected her brother to make another,
maybe as disastrous a matrimonial experiment as before, and in a class
which was as little his own as that of his Irish wife had been.
But time had gone on, and David Banfield had shown no disposition to
make a second marriage, either in the county set, or in the little town
world of Market Dalling, where the Rigbys themselves lived and had their
important being.
"Kate--you don't understand," he said at last, and, even as he uttered
the words, they seemed to him painfully inadequate. "In fact, you never
_did_ understand"--there came a sudden touch of passion into his voice,
and he got up and walked up and down the room--"how I felt--how for the
matter of that I still feel--about Rosaleen. But for the war--but for
the getting clear away--I don't know what I should have done! Once, when
I was out there in a little out-of-the-way station, I saw an old bill
with her name on it, put up, of course, before I met her, when she was
touring in South Africa. Well, I can tell you one thing--if we had been
back in the days when a soldier could get killed so much more easily
than he can now, you would never have seen me again. For days and days I
couldn't get her out of my mind--she's never out of my mind now----"
Mrs. Rigby was frightened, almost awed, not so much by the violence of
his feeling, as by the outspoken expression of that feeling.
She got up and walked quickly to him.
"Perhaps I understand more than you think," she said in a moved voice,
"but now, David, you must turn your back on all that. For good or evil,
it's over and done with, and your duty is to your child. I won't say a
word against Mary Scanlan,--I know she's been a faithful servant to
you,--but wouldn't it be better for Rosy if you had someone who could
look after the house, as well as after her? Even you admit that you
cannot go on at the Brew House as you've been doing lately. I know you
can't feel to anyone else as you felt to--to Rosaleen, but surely it
would be best for the child, to say nothing of yourself, to have some
kind, nice woman about the place, instead of one who's only a servant
after all."
"Of course, it would be better," he said sombrely. "Don't you think I
know that? But where am I to find the 'nice, kind woman'? As for the
girls I meet, it's out of the question."
As he spoke, he unconsciously glanced round the room in which he and his
sister were standing. Mrs. Rigby had not inherited the good taste which
had distinguished her Banfield forefathers. The Brew House was full of
fine old furniture, furniture which some of the young brewer's "grand"
friends envied him; but that which the Rigbys had gradually accumulated
had the mean and yet rather pretentious commonness which belonged to the
period in which they had married.
"There's one whom you've never thought of, but who often thinks of you,"
said Mrs. Rigby, her voice sinking to a whisper.
Banfield looked at his sister attentively. His fastidious mind passed in
review the various young women who composed the little society of Market
Dalling. He regarded them all with indifference, rising in some cases to
positive dislike, and since his matrimonial misfortunes he had, as far
as was possible, avoided every kind of social gathering held in his
native place.
"I don't know whom you mean," he said at last with some discomfiture.
"In the old days you were always apt to fancy that the girls were after
me, and I can't say that you ever gave them much encouragement,"--he
added with a rather clumsy attempt at playfulness.
"The person I have in my mind," persisted Mrs. Rigby, "isn't exactly a
girl; she's just what we were talking about--a nice, kind woman--and you
never seem to mind meeting her."
"Do you--can you possibly mean----"
"--Matilda Wellow? Yes, of course I do. It's astonishing to me, it's
even surprising to Matthew, that you've never noticed how much she likes
you. Why, she's the only person in Market Dalling who ever takes any
trouble about little Rosy, or who ever gives the child anything; Rosy
always calls her Auntie Tiddy."
"Matilda Wellow?" he repeated, honestly bewildered. "Why, of course I
like her, and think well of her, but I've never thought of her--and
don't believe she's ever thought of me, Kate--in that way!"
"Don't you?" she said drily. "There's none so blind as those who won't
see."
Then, prompted by a shrewd instinct, she remained quite silent, and
withdrew her anxious gaze from her brother's face.
Only to-day Banfield had received a letter from South Africa which had
sorely tempted him to throw up everything and make a home in the
country which, perhaps unfortunately for himself, held none of the
glamour of the unknown. As a matter of fact, the letter was now in his
pocket, and he felt guiltily aware of the angry pain with which his
sister would regard the offer, especially if she guessed how tempting
was its effect on his imagination.
But during their strange conversation he had realised, as he had never
done before, that there were only two ways open to him--either to go
away and make a new life, or to attempt some such solution of his
troubles as that which his sister had just proposed to him.
So it was that during those moments of tense silence Matilda Wellow
assumed in David Banfield's mind the importance of an only alternative.
Perhaps the very fact that the young man was so familiar with her
personality, while always regarding her as a contemporary of his sister,
made it easier for him to come to a sudden decision.
To another important fact--never forgotten for a moment by Mrs.
Rigby--namely, that Miss Wellow was the wealthiest spinster in Market
Dalling, Banfield gave no thought, and it certainly played no part in
his hurried, anxious self-communing.
"I confess," he said at last, "that this is a new idea to me--but that's
no reason why it should be a bad idea. And if you really believe that it
would be better for Rosy, and that Miss Wellow would not--" he hesitated
awkwardly, "think it strange of me, I will do as you advise, Kate. But
you must let me take my own time. Perhaps when she's heard what I've got
to say, she won't feel about it as you believe she's likely to do. I
cannot pretend that I--well, that I--" his lips refused to form the
word--to him the infinitely sacred word--of love.
Mrs. Rigby was bewildered, awed into deep joy. No piece of good fortune
which could have befallen herself would have given her so acute a
feeling--it almost amounted to pain--of passionate relief, and David
Banfield, dimly gathering that it was so, felt exceedingly moved. Surely
it was worth almost anything in the way of self-sacrifice to have
brought such a look to his sister's face?
They both moved more closely to one another and she, so chary of caress,
put her arms round his neck.
"I'm quite sure," she spoke with a catch in her voice, "quite, quite
sure that you will never regret it! After all, life does get smoothed
out, doesn't it? I'll tell you something about myself that I've never
told anybody. Before Matthew came along, there was someone else I
loved--loved, maybe, just as dearly as you loved Rosaleen."
"I know," said her brother, wincing at the sound of his late wife's
name, "you mean Nat Bower?"
"Why, how did you ever guess that?" she asked, surprised.
"Oh! he used to take me walks when I was a kid, and he always talked
about you."
Had Mrs. Rigby left the matter there, she would have been a wiser woman,
but something prompted her to draw a moral.
"And don't you think I'm glad now?" she cried. "Think of what that poor
fellow has become, and what Matthew is now!"
But this was too much for David Banfield.
"I don't think that's fair!" he exclaimed. "What you ought to say
is--'Think of what that poor fellow might have become if he had married
me!' I don't believe any man could have helped going straight with you,
Kate. If I'd been more like you----"
Then, to the young man's relief, his brother-in-law, Matthew Rigby, came
into the room, with a smile on his thin lips, a joke on his tongue.
Mrs. Rigby went out into the garden. "Matilda!" she cried. "Tiddy dear,
come in! Matt is here. Dinner will be ready in a minute."
But as the two women met, and together walked down the path, the hostess
gave her guest no hint of the good fortune which lay in wait for
her--indeed, in spite of, or perhaps because of, her moment of
softening, she was sharply, almost cruelly, intolerant of Miss Wellow's
sentimental references to that ceremony of which they were about to
celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary.
* * * * *
And now the Silver Wedding festivity was drawing to a close.
The dinner, in its old-fashioned way, had been really excellent, for
Kate Rigby was a notable housewife; but not even that fact, nor the
equally excellent champagne--for Matthew Rigby was too shrewd a man to
drink bad wine--had had the effect of brightening the little party, and
a certain constraint now sat on the four people who were linked so
closely together.
The host, a man of equable temperament, felt faintly uncomfortable; as
he looked from one to the other, he told himself that something was
wrong.
His brother-in-law was certainly oddly unlike himself, yet surely David
Banfield was too sensible, and by this time too well accustomed to his
sister's ways, to have taken offence at anything she might have said
concerning the well-worn subject of Brew House domestic difficulties.
Mrs. Rigby was also unnaturally silent, and during the long course of
the meal she uttered none of the sharp pungent sayings with which she
generally enlivened each one of her husband's repasts and which, it must
be admitted, never to him lost their savour. Last, but not least, Miss
Wellow, whose flowered muslin gown was as much too youthful as that of
her hostess was too old, seemed more sentimental and more foolish than
usual.
Mr. Rigby told himself with much satisfaction that his Kate had
certainly worn better than Tiddy Wellow. And yet----? Yet, twenty-five
years ago, Tiddy had been such a pretty girl! Soft and round, with dewy
brown eyes and pink dimpled cheeks. She still had the appealing,
inconsequent manner which, so charming in a girl, is apt to be absurd in
a woman--and then she had grown stout! Mr. Rigby liked a woman to have
a neat trim figure--his Kate had kept hers--but Tiddy. Alas! Tiddy had
not been so fortunate.
So it was that Mr. Rigby paid poor Miss Wellow but little attention,
regarding her with a curious mixture of affectionate contempt and
respect, the former due to his knowledge of her character, and the
latter to his knowledge of her very considerable fortune.
Even to such a man as Matthew Rigby,--that is, to a man whose profession
implies the constant hearing of family secrets, and the coming across of
strange, almost inconceivable human occurrences,--the melancholy
domestic story of David Banfield remained painfully vivid. On him had
fallen all the arrangements which had finally resulted in the divorce,
and, unlike his wife, he had sometimes doubted the wisdom of what he and
she had brought about, for Banfield, left to himself, would never have
severed the legal tie between himself and the mother of his child.
Even now, during the course of his Silver Wedding dinner, Matthew Rigby
wondered uneasily whether his wife's constrained silence, and his
brother-in-law's odd, abstracted manner, meant that any tidings had
been received of the woman who had now so completely passed out of their
lives. But Mr. Rigby was compelled to bide his time. He knew that
whatever explanation there was would be given to him once he and Kate
were alone together.
Sure enough, when the two men joined the ladies in the now twilit
sitting-room, the hostess lost no time in unceremoniously turning her
brother and Miss Wellow out into the garden.