WILLIAM was at the door when the postman came, so that he read his letter in the hall. It was the only one for him in the whole bundle. He handed the rest to one of the young Hackbutts, who took them and stuck them into the right pigeon-holes in the common-room. William’s letter was written upon cheap, thin paper, and he read it, standing in the doorway, half in sun and half in shadow. It began abruptly:
“You will pardon a word of warning from a friend. Take your wife away from Monk’s Hall before it is too late. There is a person there who you cannot trust though this person calls himself your friend. It is an open scandal to everybody but you. She’s very deep. But not so deep that some people can’t see through her tricks. And I’ll just tell you another thing. You’d better ask how much there was between her and this person before she married you. Look out! Look out! Look out!”
Having read this letter once, William looked at the postmark. But he learned nothing from that. It had been posted from Paddington at 6.15 the night before. He stood for a few minutes, holding it in his hand, between the sunlight of the garden and the blackness of the hall. And into his mind there floated from very far away a little picture of something that he had once seen, and then forgotten. He remembered Tilli’s flat on a wet Spring evening, and how he had come in from the rain and found Trevor with her. As he came in, he had known that they must have been in one another’s arms a moment before. He had known it. But only for a little time. He had forgotten it before the end of the evening, since it was upon that very night that he first kissed Tilli himself. Putting the thought of it away, he went out into the garden. He was still a little stunned, as though he had fallen from a great height.
It had been a harassed morning. He had slept in the woods, as was his habit upon hot nights, and from his first awaking he had known that the day held a menace. As the sun swam relentlessly higher into the hot sky he had thought about breakfast. But a weakness of resolution seemed to attack him, and a great repugnance at the idea of returning to the house and facing the others. At last he went to the kitchen door and got bread and coffee from Lise, which he took away with him to Peter’s workshop. But he had been forced to go into the house to find a book, and there he encountered Mandy Hackbutt, with a tale of trouble. It was a most incomprehensible thing: the Hackbutts were going away. They wanted to live nearer London. But William did not believe that story. He knew that they were flying from the vague, undefined discomfort which seemed latterly to have spread over the household. He would like to have escaped from it himself. But he was very sorry that it had ousted the poor Hackbutts, for he had hoped to do them a service when he invited them to Monk’s Hall. And he was angry too, with a slow, formidable anger, which smouldered in the bottom of his heart, whenever he thought of Trevor, and all that Trevor had done to make his house intolerable.
Why did he always think of the Ash Grove when he thought of Trevor? Half consciously he turned his footsteps that way. Long ago there had been a fire and a thunderstorm, and two boys running round and round the little temple, hating one another. He remembered a weapon, a blazing stick, and Trevor’s pale, laughing face. That was the first time that he had wanted to kill Trevor. But he was not quite sure if it had really happened, or if he had dreamt it.
The day was very fine. The morning sun shone with a sick brightness which half dazzled him. He plunged into the thick shade of the plantation with relief, half walking, half running, as though some enemy were coming after him. And presently he found himself upon Ash Hill, looking down over the well-known country. He sat upon the temple steps, with an empty mind, and scanned the changed face of the earth. The fields, the sky and the river were bright and threatening and unreal. He saw them as a man sees objects in a nightmare.
Small fragments of things seen and heard drifted through his head without order or consequence. Because they came from long ago, and seemed to take him away from the stress of the moment, he clutched at them. He remembered that he had sat like this once before, at the edge of a hole where a shell had burst, himself and not himself, groping among pictures and shadows, not thoughts, until someone had dragged him, with curses, into cover.
Childhood was a dim time. It began in darkness: there were great caverns of dark stairs in their London house, and huge shadows on the ceiling of the night-nursery when the firelight danced, making a criss-cross pattern of the high guard. And then there had been a great door, opening into the night, and leaves blowing in on a stormy wind. The phantom fears of infancy flowed back over him, the terrors which lurked in dark cupboards, the muffled whispers, the strange faces mopping and mowing over his head.
“My house is so dark,” he thought. “I can’t go back there!”
He felt as though he was two people, and one of them was waiting for him if he went back to the house, a blind, fettered creature, waiting for release, a self that had been shut up in the dark. He was afraid of that creature, for always, even when he had been most safe, even in the Edwardes Square days, its muffled howlings had not been quite inaudible to his inner ears.
He must escape from this darkness before it overtook him. Soon it would be night again. He must seek his safety in daylight. He looked upwards to the sun. Already it was a little over to the west. He had been in that place for many hours and the morning was gone. Suddenly he shouted very loud:
“Oh, night! Oh, night!”
He got up and went down the hill, stumbling a little, and shouting. The echo of his cry came back across the river and frightened him His shouts sank to a mutter. Whispering and stumbling, he crossed the bridge into a field, and came to a stile in a hedge. It was a long time since he had been on that path, and somebody had put a new signpost that he had not seen before. On a very neat, white little board the black letters confronted him slyly, like an intimate dig in the ribs. It said:
William stopped muttering, and looked at it, reassured by its air of anonymous friendliness. Then he jumped over the stile and started across the Ratchet fields in long, purposeful strides.
“What did William come for?” asked Philip, as soon as he had seen his guest off the premises. “Is he in any kind of trouble?”
Emily shook her head.
“He didn’t say anything to me,” she said. “I thought, perhaps, he might have been talking to you after dinner.”
“Not about himself. We talked about his father. He seems to have begun to be curious about that business of the trial. But all the while I had an idea that something was on his mind, and that he couldn’t bring himself to speak of it.”
“So had I. But it’s no use. I mean, we know what the trouble is. It’s Tilli. We can’t do anything about it.”
“I suppose not. But I felt somehow that we ought to be more helpful. I almost asked him to stay the night.”
“That wouldn’t help him very much, poor dear.”
“No. But when I went with him to the gate just now it was as if I was turning him out. I don’t think he wanted to go. He kept looking round all the time, as we were going down the avenue, back at the house and the light.”
Philip went across to the window and peered out into the warm night, as though he expected to find William still hovering close to the house, like a disturbed spirit.
“I don’t believe,” he added, “that he went back to Monk’s Hall at all. I watched him to the turn of the lane, and he went over the stile into Ratchet fields instead of keeping straight on. I shouted. I don’t know if he heard me.”
“It’s a hot night,” suggested Emily. “I expect he’ll sleep out in the fields. He often does.”
“It’s a good deal colder than it was. There’s a heavy mist coming up from the river, and the moon’ll be down in an hour. He’ll lose his way or get an ague.”
“Oh, if he’s cold, he’ll go home. He can get in by the scullery window. He’s done it before.”
“I wish I’d asked him to stay. I wonder if he heard me when I called.”
Philip felt that he was foolish to be so concerned when Emily, for once, was not. She knew best the wild ways of her brother, and she took it for granted that the boy should go straying off into the night without home or goal. To Philip it had been disturbing. When he ceased shouting after William and turned up the avenue again to the solid security of his own home, with its open door and lighted windows, he had felt ashamed, almost guilty.
“Poor William!” he muttered.
Emily rejoined with a little sigh.
“An unhappy marriage must be a dreadful thing,” she said.
But she spoke with detachment. He looked quickly across at her. She was sitting in the lamplight, her knitting in her lap, a sight to please the heart of any man. When he came in, a few minutes earlier, and saw her there the thought had crossed his mind that all the radiance of his life seemed to come from her as light comes from a lamp.
“It must be dreadful,” he agreed.
A vagrant moth, flitting in from the garden, beat its wings against the globe. He caught it, took it to the window, and flung it out again into the dark expanses of the night. Then he waited, listening, half expecting to hear footsteps among the trees. But he could hear nothing save the whisper of the millstream and the faint, far barking of a dog.
“A happy marriage has its dangers too,” he said at last.
“How?”
“It narrows our hearts. One should fight against it.”
Emily began to wind up her ball of wool.
“The dangers of happiness don’t frighten me,” she said. “Very few people run that sort of risk. I’m going up.”
“All right. I’ll shut up. I won’t be long.”
She kissed the top of his head as she went by, and said:
“No; don’t be long.”
He heard her in the hall, and the little sputter of her match as she lighted her candle, and the soft footsteps going upstairs. But still he waited by the window. The fog rolled up quite fast; it lay in long, low wreaths round the trunks of the apple-trees, in the orchard, so that he could see no grass at all. Its chill breath crept into the house. The moth flew in at another window.
He thought of William, at large in the foggy fields, and remembered with amazement his own alarm when, coming in that afternoon, he had first seen William’s hat in the hall. For a moment he had imagined, fantastically, that Emily might be going to leave him again.
Lately he had got into the habit of calling for her whenever he came into the house. He would stand in the hall and shout once or twice, not because he wanted anything, but just to make sure that she was there. Her reply, from the drawing-room or upstairs, convinced him that no thunderbolt had struck her while he was away. If she did not answer immediately, he would suffer a fleeting pang, a faint echo of the shock which her first desertion had given to him. But he rather liked this small spice of insecurity. It gave a flavour to his domestic contentment which might otherwise have been so perfect as to be almost dull. He chose to imagine that she might still run away, because of a certain elusiveness in her, which had once enchanted him, and which he liked to think she had not lost. His real certainty that she would never leave him any more gave him scope and freedom to dally with the fancy that she still, possibly, might.
His happiness at times was too sure to be quite credible. She was his so entirely, with him all the time, a constant companion in all the daily small things of life, bound to him by a thousand minor surrenders. A fitful but deep abstraction was, now, the last of her old ways. A fixed look would come upon her face sometimes, and she would sit, for a few moments, mute and blind. But he found that he could always rouse her by exclaiming “Mrs. Luttrell!” very sharply. She would start, and smile, and answer him. But no other name would bring her back.
Since their return from the Tyrol she had been very happy. She was like continual music in the house. She laughed oftener than before and upon more reasonable occasions. Sometimes she made very sensible remarks. And every day she grew more lovely, like some exquisite, secretly-closed bud that has come into flower over-night. She was now a part of his life, so that he had almost left off thinking about her, save in rare, precious moments of alarm like this.
For when he had shouted two or three times in vain, his first thought had been that she must have fallen into the millstream. And then he saw on the hall table a hat which could only belong to William; a hat which filled him with uncomfortable memories. Looking into all the rooms for traces of the pair of them, he saw with relief that the supper-table had been laid for three. And on the garden path he found her weeding-basket, a pair of leather gloves, pruning-scissors, and a note to himself, weighed down with stones. He read it, still in some slight agitation. It said:
W. is here and will stay to supper. We have gone down to the stream at the bottom of the orchard. Come and fetch us when you come in.
Relieved, he called himself a fool. Of course they would have gone down to the river. They would be sailing little boats. When they used to pay him visits long ago, they always sailed boats on the smooth, swift stream at the bottom of the orchard. He was glad that they should do it still. He remembered how eager she used to be, as a long-legged little girl, skipping along the bank with a stick to guide her craft.
He made for the bottom of the orchard and found them. But they were sailing no paper fleets. Emily was knitting with an eternal placid industry which was growing upon her. Sometimes she annoyed Philip by counting her stitches before she answered him. William lolled beside her and chewed grass.
“Here you are,” she said. “We were wondering if you’d found my note.”
“I saw William’s hat. How are you, William?”
“I’m well. We’ve been looking at your cactus.”
“It’s a wonder, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s awful,” said William. “It’s got no neck.”
“How’s Monk’s Hall?”
“Still there.”
“The Hackbutts are going,” said Emily, looking up.
“Oh, really? Why?”
William said, rather gloomily, that he could not think. Emily rose and gathered her knitting together.
“I’m going in to make a salad,” she said, as she moved off among the trees.
The two men followed her, and William said:
“She’s told me.”
“Good!”
“I was very much surprised,” confided William
Philip, with difficulty, suppressed a grin.
“I mean, the idea seems so odd, somehow; like a sort of miracle. But she seems very pleased.”
“So am I.”
“You must be. It’s a fine thing to have a son.”
“Perhaps it will be a daughter. I don’t mind which. But she wants a boy.”
“So she said.” William looked after his sister as she disappeared into the house, and added, almost in a voice of dismay: “She is pleased with herself, isn’t she?”
Perhaps it was this new baffling serenity of Emily’s which had so daunted William that he could not begin upon his tale of trouble. Philip was sure that something had been left unsaid. And yet at supper they had been gay enough. A sort of wildness seemed to have invaded William’s spirits and he ran on in an extravagant way which reminded Philip of other days.
He had almost forgotten how lawless this pair had always. been. And yet, until he took it into his head to be alarmed for them, their childish exploits had always given him pleasure. They were not like other naughty children; their recklessness, their beauty, and their innate good manners combined to temper his disapproval. But still, they never knew when a joke had been carried too far. He remembered one piece of iniquity which they had confessed to him, and which had frightened him very much. They had been sent for a walk with a very stupid and unobservant French governess, and they took the opportunity to open all the canal sluices along the towing-path for half a mile, thereby flooding over twenty fields of standing corn. In spite of the hue and cry, the real culprits had never been discovered, and Mademoiselle would have answered for their good behaviour and particularly fluent French throughout the walk.
Philip had been really shocked at the senseless folly of this deed, and by the want of any idea of real proportion which lay behind it. And for all the change in William it was not impossible that he might do the same sort of thing again at any moment. William was not vicious, but he was, nevertheless, too much like his father
“One can’t judge him by our standards,” thought Philip.
And by that he meant his own standards and those of the regenerate Emily. For he was no longer forced to feel like a stranger in the company of the twins. He was now the host at his own table, and Emily was his belonging. William was the stranger.
After dinner Emily got out her guitar and they had a little music. The twins sang together, as they used to sing in Edwardes Square. Old songs were pulled out and new ones tried over. Philip, released from the duties of conversation, could loll comfortably in his favourite chair and listen. He thought it a pity that William did not come oftener, for this singing was very pleasant. The bright evening, paling into a long green twilight, made him sleepy. He dozed off, as was his custom when Emily sang to him after dinner, and drifted at once into ridiculous dreams of Lise, and bright sunshine, and some old, forgotten misery. He was with her; he was trying to tell her something, but she would only laugh at him.
A pause in the singing brought him back with a jerk to the shadowy room and the memory of the shadowy present, where sleep was creeping peacefully, like a slow tide, over all the shores of his life. Late sunset burned beyond the orchard trees, with pools of light and long bars of purple cloud. The grass glowed like a fiery emerald. Beside the window, their fair heads very close together, sat the twins. They were silent, the guitar between them.
“That was pretty,” said Philip. “Go on.”
Emily struck a note off her guitar like a faint, deep bell. It reminded Philip of the harp which had fallen slowly to ruin in the Monk’s Hall drawing-room, of the dead days of his own first love and of the twins at ten years old, fair-haired, wild, unconquered.
“I must go,” said William. “It’s getting dark.”
Philip got up to light the lamp, and told them to sing one more. The green dusk changed in a moment to night, and two voices floated mournfully away into the darkness:
William stopped singing. He was watching his sister as a man on an alien shore will watch the boat that bears off a friend, seeing nothing but a widening waste of deep waters. And Philip, as the old enchantment caught again at his heart, thought bitterly:
“He’s lost her. But then … I’ve lost her too.”
For she was gone now, and they were both bereft. But her voice was the same—a child’s voice, clear, soft, and without passion:
He had always known that he must lose her. He had told himself that it is man’s fate to woo one woman and to wed another. And in his happiness he could forget his loss. But he was sorry for William, who was to be left desolate, wandering on the shore of a barren country. For William there was no promise in the future; it was Philip’s children who would be fair-haired and wild and unconquered.
The moth found its death in the flame of the lamp. He shut the shutters, lighted his candle, locked the front door, wound up the clock and turned out the lamps. As he creaked up to bed, he hummed softly and hopelessly the song of the times:
Charlotte started awake with a cry and a sense of immediate calamity.
“Yes? Yes? Who is it? What is it?”
“Hush!” A whisper came in the darkness. “It is I. It is Tilli. Light the candle.”
Charlotte groped for the matches, but her hand was shaking so that she could scarcely strike one.
“What is it?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“Oh, hush! Hurry!”
A flame leapt in the darkness and Tilli’s white face peered at her over the end of the bed.
“Are you ill? Is anything the matter?”
“Oh, I do not know. I think … yes … it is terrible! I cannot think what to do. I shall faint.”
She came and sat on the bed, while Charlotte lighted the candle. The flame burnt low and then very brightly. Charlotte’s sleepy panic subsided. She sat up, large and healthy and tousled, looking at Tilli.
“Why, you’re … you’ll catch cold! Wrap the eiderdown round you. Have you had a bad dream? What has happened?”
She huddled a counterpane over the lace and chiffon which seemed to cover so little of Tilli. There was a small pause, broken by the hooting of an owl in the trees outside Tilli started up with a cry of terror and burst into tears.
“Oh, I am afraid! I am afraid! I think I am the most unfortunate creature in the world. Have pity on me, Charlotte. I have married a murderer!”
“Are you mad?”
“But a murderer!” Tilli’s voice rose to a shriek. “A murderer! And I have married him.”
“Hush! You’ll wake the whole house.”
“I do not care. Everyone will soon know it. I have married …”
“You’ve been dreaming!”
“No, no! If only it had been a dream. Oh, my God!”
“Tilli! Control yourself! Tell me what has happened.”
Charlotte leaned forward and grasped Tilli by the wrists. She shook her a little. In spite of the fixed, glassy eyes, she could not be quite sure that this frenzy was genuine. The shaking seemed to have some effect. Tilli grew calmer and presently she said, in a more collected voice:
“He has come back.”
“Who? William?”
“He is a murderer.” She repeated it this time quietly, almost sullenly. “It is terrible for me.”
“Who has he murdered?”
“Trevor.”
Charlotte got up and put on a dressing-gown. She drank some water and made Tilli do the same. Then, having mastered her terror, she asked, as carelessly as she could:
“But where are they now?”
“Out there.”
Tilli jerked her head toward the window.
“In the park? Trevor? And William too?”
Tilli nodded.
“And what makes you say that William has murdered Trevor? Did you see him do it?”
“No, no.” Tilli shuddered. “But he has taken a gun. He has gone to shoot him. And if you had seen his face, as I have seen it, you would know why I am so afraid. He is like his father. He is a …”
“But why has he gone after Trevor with a gun?”
“Why? Why? Because he is jealous. That is why. I don’t mind who hears it. Everybody shall know. He neglects me. He does not love me. But he is jealous. Everybody shall hear what I have suffered since I am married to that man.”
“Hush, hush! When did they go out?”
“Ten minutes … five minutes ago. Not longer.”
“And they have not come back?”
“I have not seen them.”
“Then how do you know that anything of the sort has happened? Where did you last see them?”
“In my room.”
“Both of them?”
Tilli said nothing. She sat crumpled up on Charlotte’s bed and blinked at the candle.
“William came back in the middle of the night and found Trevor in your room?” hazarded Charlotte. “What then?”
“Am I to blame?” exploded Tilli. “He has never loved me.”
“Never mind that. Nobody’s blaming you … yet. I want to know exactly what happened.”
“I can tell a pretty story of William. These Crownes! They are all alike. And I will tell it. If I am to be blamed, I will tell it.”
“Do stick to the point. We’ll discuss that afterwards. What was Trevor doing in your room, anyhow?”
“I swear that I am innocent.”
“I know. But what was Trevor …”
“He came to borrow some aspirin. But William would not wait to hear that. He is a murderer. He will listen to nothing. I tried to explain, but he would not listen. It is nothing to him that Trevor is his cousin. He is mad. Like a wild animal.”
“Why did they go out?” pursued Charlotte patiently.
“When William tried to open the door …”
“Was it locked?”
“Always at night I lock my door,” said Tilli superbly. “It is, I think, more decent. I told Trevor to go out by the window. It is quite easy to jump on to the workshop roof. Because I knew how William is unreasonable, and I did not wish for a quarrel. But I think that he heard, for he began to kick the door and to shout. I was afraid that everyone in the house would wake up, so I let him in. And at once he went to the window that I had shut. He opened it, and I think he saw Trevor on the roof, for he called out in such a terrible way: ‘Wait! You wait! I’m coming for you!’ And he took the gun from his dressing-room. The gun that he keeps for the rabbits. And he went out of the window too. I thought at first that he would shoot me. If you had seen his face! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
“And they’re both out there now?”
Charlotte went across to the window and drew back the curtain. Leaning out into the foggy night, she strained her ears. It was a little foggy and as black as pitch save for the flame of a few doubtful stars over her head. The moon had set. A dense silence hung over the vast, shadowy masses of wood. Blackness and quiet had swallowed the world for miles. An owl hooted far away. There was a smell of morning about.
“It all sounds quite quiet,” she said. “Are you sure that they are still outside?”
“How could they come in? All the doors are locked.”
“How did William get in?”
“I do not know.”
“Shall I go and wake Bobbie? Perhaps he would go out and find them before more harm is done.”
“Yes! Oh, yes! Before anything terrible happens.”
Charlotte put on shoes and stockings and a thick coat over her nightdress, while Tilli, becoming excited again, repeated that she was innocent.
“You can stop that, Tilli. It doesn’t impress me.”
“Do you dare to say that? I tell you …”
A shot, fired some way off, rang through the stillness of the woods. Tilli screamed and flung herself face downwards on the bed. Charlotte flew back to the window. The last echoes of the noise were drifting from the Ash Hill direction. The silence afterwards was worse than ever.
“I’ll have to get Bobbie,” she said.
She ran downstairs to the room where Lise and Bobbie were sleeping, and burst in with her story.
“William came home in the middle of the night and caught Trevor with Tilli. And he’s gone out after Trevor into the woods, with a gun, and I think he’s shooting him.”
“What’s the time?” asked Lise, sitting up in a fright.
“Half-past two, about. Did you hear what I said? William came home …”
“Yes, we heard. What do you want us to do about it?”
“Bobbie must get up and go after them.”
Bobbie was already out of bed and hunting for his shoes. Under his breath he was cursing his nephews. Lise, also climbing out of bed, swore no less fluently, and asked why William had not shot at Tilli instead of Trevor
“You don’t mean to say he’s really hurt him?” she asked, catching sight of Charlotte’s face.
“I don’t know. I heard a shot, out in the woods.”
Charlotte was shivering violently.
“That’s nothing,” called Bobbie from the dressing-room, where he had gone in search of his trousers. “William never hits anything. As long as he’s the only person with a gun …”
“Yes,” said Lise, “it’s a safe rabbit that’s shot at by William. You’re sure Trevor didn’t have a gun too? Oh, well! But did she have the impudence to tell you all this herself?”
“She’s terrified out of her life.”
“She told you that Trevor … how did she explain it?”
“She said he came to borrow aspirin.”
“Aspirin!”
“But her door was locked.”
“Little …!” Bobbie in the dressing-room was still cursing, softly and steadily.
“I can’t think how William can have got into the house,” added Charlotte. “It was all locked. I locked it myself. I didn’t know he was still out.”
“I suppose he got in by the scullery window. He did, one night in June, when he was sleeping out and the rain came on.”
Bobbie made his appearance, rather sketchily clad, and asked where he was now to go.
“The shot sounded as if they were Ash Hill way. I’ll come with you.”
They hurried down the shallow, slippery stairs, and Lise, in the gallery, lighted them with a candle held high. The hall looked like a cavern and smelt abominably of all the stale cigarettes which had been smoked there in the past months. The chain of the front door rattled, and they stepped out into the cool mystery of the night. Lise, faintly visible in the doorway, watched them as they ran across the lawn into the denser shadow of the larch woods. For a few minutes they groped and hurried, stopping every now and then to listen.
“What the devil can we do? Shall we shout?” asked Bobbie at last.
“We don’t want to make too much noise,” demurred Charlotte.
“Noise enough already. Besides, if they have a gun, they might hit us by mistake.”
And suddenly he began to yell: “William! Trevor! Are you there? Hullo!”
Instantly the plantation was filled with clamour. Another shot was fired, close at hand, and a pandemonium of shouting began. Charlotte thought that Trevor had answered Bobbie, and immediately there came a yell from William: “Got you, have I? Got you! Got you!”
There were crashes in the undergrowth and a grunt from Bobbie:
“Nobody dead yet, anyhow.”
He plunged forward towards the noise, stumbled over a tree-trunk, and added forthwith to the babel of curses which made the night hideous. Charlotte wondered that the whole countryside was not roused. She heard Bobbie entreating somebody to let the gun alone for the love of heaven, and then a sound of blows, as though somebody was being thrashed. She thought that she had better get back to the house. Nobody seemed to be very much the worse, and their language was appalling. She was best out of it. As she recrossed the lawn a man broke from the wood and came running past her.
“Is that Trevor?” she called.
He was making for the front door, but, seeing Lise on the steps, he sheered off and ran round the corner of the house. Lise, statuesque in the ample draperies of her kimono, looked after him with interest.
“Was that Trevor?” she asked, when Charlotte came up.
“I think so. It was too short for William.”
“He’s all right, then?”
“He must be.”
“And where’s William?”
“In the wood still. Bobbie’s with him.”
“I hope Bobbie’s safe,” said Lise anxiously.
She withdrew into the hall, and put down her candle, saying:
“I suppose William fired that shot pour encourager les autres.”
A gale of laughter seized Charlotte. She leant up against the doorpost, in a sort of hysterical reaction, shaking and heaving.
“I see nothing to laugh at,” grumbled Lise. “What on earth is going to happen now? A nice breakfast we shall all have!”
“Oh! Oh! I ca-can’t help it. I don’t want to laugh. But I was so fri-ightened.”
“You’re hysterical,” said Lise, catching the infection and giggling too. “Come into the dining-room and have some damson brandy.”
Stifling their paroxysms, they stole into the dining-room and foraged in the sideboard for a decanter and some glasses. Gusts of laughter shook them whenever they tried to speak, and they grew more helpless than ever when through a crack in the doorway they saw Bobbie and William come into the hall.
“But I’ve lost my gun,” William kept saying. “I dropped it. I left my gun outside somewhere. My gun is in the wood. It’ll get rusty. I can’t leave my gun out all night.”
“That’s all right,” Bobbie soothed him, as he hung up chains and shot bolts.
But the frantic young man hurled himself upon the door.
“I must find it,” he repeated. “I dropped it somewhere.”
“You leave it till to-morrow,” advised Bobbie. “You’ll never find it in the dark.”
“Let me out, Bobbie!”
“No. I won’t let you out. Go up. Go to bed! You’ve made quite enough noise for one night. We’ll look for your gun in the morning.”
William stopped arguing suddenly. He turned from the door, bounded upstairs, and was lost in the darkness above.
“Will he be all right?” asked Lise, coming out into the hall to look after him. “He won’t go for Tilli now?”
“No such luck,” Bobbie assured her. “He’s quieting down. And his gun is outside, fortunately. Lord! What a night!”
Charlotte, between peals of laughter, was trying to say:
“It isn’t that I’m not sorry for William. I am most t-terribly sorry. It’s all awful. But I c-can’t help it!”
“I know,” said Lise. “Come in and have a drink, Bobbie.”
She led him into the dining-room, with her single starry candle, and poured him out a little glass of the damson brandy, which was a speciality at Monk’s Hall.
“I’d sooner have a brandy-and-soda,” said Bobbie. “I never spent such a night in all my life. Where’s Trevor? He came in, didn’t he?”
“I saw him running round the house,” said Charlotte. “I think he was making for the garden door.”
“He won’t be able to get in. It’s locked. Lord! Lord! I suppose I must go out and find him now.”
“Let him cool his heels outside for a bit,” said Lise indignantly. “It’s been mostly his fault. What right had he to go on in this way? In William’s house, too. He ought to be ashamed of himself. He should have gone away rather than let this happen.”
“Still, I’d better let him in,” said Bobbie, going off.
But in the hall he paused and asked suspiciously:
“Do you hear anything?”
They listened.
“Nothing. What?” whispered Lise.
“I thought I heard a … There it is again!”
They all heard, this time, a sound like a faint moan. It was just outside the drawing-room window. Lise had the shutters back in an instant and was wrestling with the heavy sash. Bobbie helped her. It slid up and the light of their candle made a splash in the darkness outside. The night was so still that the flame burnt steadily even when they held it over the window-sill.
“Who’s there? What is it?” asked Bobbie of the night.
A groan answered him.
Trevor lay where he had fallen in the midst of his run, sprawling on a flower-bed under the window. His face was hidden in the earth and in the gay flowers crushed beneath him. Charlotte, who had got the door open, ran round and dropped upon her knees beside him. It was plain that he was badly hurt.
“Hit, after all?” gasped Bobbie, craning out of the window. “Bring that brandy, Lise! Quick!”
They hurried out, taking the candle with them.
“But I saw him running!” wailed Charlotte. “I saw him! How can he be hurt? Oh, Trevor! Trevor!”
“Hold him up, and give him a drop of this,” commanded Bobbie. “I’ve known men run further than this after they were hit. Get more lights.”
Lise brought a lantern and put it on the path beside them. It made a round patch of light in the void of the darkness, a small world of terror and pain. They pulled Trevor over and put a coat under his head. He had stopped groaning and breathed in heavy, gurgling gasps. Bobbie pulled open his shirt and saw the wound.
“No good,” he said. “He’s done for.”
“He can’t … it’s not … he ran!”
“Get a doctor,” urged Lise. “Go, Bobbie! Find some one.”
“I know. I’ll go.”
He ran into the house as Trevor, for a moment, opened his eyes and looked at Charlotte. His lips moved.
“Oh, Trevor!” she whispered. “Don’t… don’t …”
When she put her ear close she caught the words:
“My fault … entirely my fault … accident … William and I … out after poacher … I had the gun … I tripped … Mind that … it went off … accident … tell them …”
He choked a little and they held him up, out of the marigolds and geraniums. There was blood on the flowers. Lights were moving in the house: voices on the stairs, in the hall, came nearer. The whole night woke up to panic. Somebody lit lamps in all the lower rooms, so that the great shadowy building sprang into life, with orange squares of windows. Light, too, was collecting in the sky, and a morning wind whispered among the trees.
Trevor, raised up on Charlotte’s breast, seemed just to breathe. She signed to Lise to keep the rest of them away. She heard him whisper again. She thought he said:
“Sorry … mother …”
His white face took on a secret look.
An exclamation, a summons from Emily, broke in upon the dreamless peace of Philip’s night. He found himself awake and blinking at a stormy sunrise. A dazzling carmine light made everything in the room look new and strange. Dawn airs, soft as milk, flowed in through the uncurtained window, and over the bed whence Emily, wild-eyed, had started in alarm.
“Emily! What is it? What is the matter? Don’t you feel well? Get back into bed.”
“William’s there,” she was saying.
“William?”
“Yes, yes! He’s out in the garden somewhere. I woke up. I heard him singing.”
“You were dreaming.”
“No, no! I heard him.”
She ran across to look, leaning on the window-sill, her long hair tossed back over her shoulders.
“Well!” Philip climbed out of bed, a little wearily. “Put on your slippers and your dressing-gown. You’ll catch cold.” And as he could not persuade her to leave the window, he wrapped a shawl round her shoulders, and leant out beside her to scan the dawn-flushed garden.
“It was a dream,” he assured her. “He’s not there.”
“But I heard him! I’ve been dreaming about him all night. But this was different. He is looking for me. He wants me. He was under the window, singing: More geese than swans …”
“Go back to bed, my sweet.”
The garden was dewy and empty and quite silent save for the sleepy twitterings of a few birds.
“But he was standing on the lawn, Philip!”
“If anybody had stood on the lawn there would be footprints in the dew. Nobody has been.”
“But why was he singing?”
“You were dreaming. Look at the time! It’s only just after five.”
“He’s been out all night in the fields, as we thought. And now he wants to come back to us.”
“Well, if he does, we’ll let him in.”
Reluctantly she let him put her back to bed. But she insisted that he must go down and search for William. He tucked her up and put on some clothes. Taking a last look out of the window before he went down, he saw that there were really footprints across the lawn. Bobbie was there, uncertainly scanning the front of the house. When he saw Philip he beckoned mysteriously, and at the same time enjoined silence. Philip was not surprised. He had been full of dread at the moment of waking. He knew that Bobbie had come with evil tidings. Emily was lying in her bed, staring idly at the strip of crimson sky. He said to her:
“I shan’t be long. I’ll just take a look round and make sure he’s not there.”
“If he’s there,” she said rather sleepily, “mind you give him something to eat.”
Philip went down into the dark and shuttered house, past the loud ticking clock on the stairs. He opened the door upon the chill radiance of the morning. Bobbie, on the doorstep, was looking like a funeral.
“Is … what is it?” whispered Philip. “Be very quiet! I don’t want Emily to be disturbed.”
“Can you come up to Monk’s Hall?”
Bobbie’s whisper was like the roar of a distant ocean.
“What has happened? Is William all right? Emily …”
“It’s not William. At least … it’s Trevor. There’s been an accident.”
“How? What?”
“Shot.”
“Not dead?”
Bobbie grunted.
“But how? What happened?”
Bobbie took a long breath. It was the first time that he had given any account of it to anyone. But he knew that it would not be the last. Lise had told him what to say. He hoped that he had got it right.
“Tilli heard noises in the night … footsteps going round the house. She thought that somebody was trying to climb in, and she was frightened. William was nowhere to be found …”
“He didn’t leave here till late last night.”
“I know. It turned out that the person they heard was him. But that didn’t come out till after. She routed out Trevor. And he went off to see if everything was all right. He took William’s gun with him. We don’t think he can have known that it was loaded.”
“William’s gun? Where was it, then?”
“I don’t know,” said Bobbie rather crossly. Lise should have told him where the gun was when Trevor took it. “But when William came in, a few minutes later, and heard of the mistake, he went off to find Trevor. They roused me and I went too. We hunted and shouted, but we were too late. We heard a shot and found him badly hurt. He only lived a few minutes, poor boy. He said that he tripped over a root or something in the dark, and the gun went off. We found it this morning, over on Ash Hill.”
Bobbie came to an end and mopped his forehead. He looked at Philip to see if it had sounded all right.
“Somebody must tell Catherine,” he added anxiously.
“You must tell her yourself, Bobbie. You’re her brother.”
“Philip! I can’t.”
Bobbie felt that he could tell his story to Philip, and, if necessary, to other, more official ears. But he could not tell it to Catherine, and he wished very much that she should hear it for the first time from somebody who believed it.
“Won’t … won’t you tell her?” he asked anxiously.
Philip hesitated.
“Is that really what happened?” he asked.
“Why … it seems to be that. Everyone has a different story. It was all such a muddle.”
Philip did not believe him, but he thought that he had better not say so.
“Sally,” began Bobbie, and stopped.
“What about Sally?”
“Oh, nothing. But she’s making trouble. We’ll have to shut her up, somehow. You must come, Philip.”
“All right. I’ll come. As soon as I’ve told Emily and seen that she’s all right. She’ll be frightened if I go off without telling her why.”
“Ah, yes! Poor girl! I hope she won’t be too much upset.”
“She’s bound to be. But as long as William is all right … What does Sally say?”
“No good repeating it.”
“William’s gun!” thought Philip. “It doesn’t hold water.”
“Does Sally say that it wasn’t an accident?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“I must be getting back,” said Bobbie.
“How did you come over? Did you ride?”
“Umhum. Horse just outside the gate.”
Philip went with Bobbie down the avenue, postponing as long as possible the moment of facing Emily. He stood by the gate, listening to the trample of hooves in the lane till it changed to the regular clip-clop on the high road. The sound, in the clear early silence, lasted for a long time. It would be lost, and then it would come back again across the fields like the faint ticking of a clock. He waited until he could hear it no more.
Very slowly he turned back towards the house. The sun was now quite up and the red banners of cloud had turned to black. There was a smell of rain in the air: a hint, already, that the brightness would not last.
“Storms!” thought Philip, as he made his way up the avenue. “I don’t wonder, with the sky that colour.”
Bent, a little grizzled, he stood in front of his house and wondered what he had better do, and how it was possible to go to Emily. Perhaps he had better say nothing until she had had her breakfast. It did not seem likely that she should believe this story any more than he did. For long years, they had been waiting for it. The thought of death, of violence had always lurked in her mind, and in William’s mind. It had been their inheritance.
His eye fell on a little piece of groundsel which destroyed the stony order of the carriage-drive. He pulled it up before he went indoors.
Steeled against her questions, he went upstairs. But he found her asleep, breathing deeply and tranquilly, her pale cheek pillowed in her hand. He sat down in a chair beside her bed, and waited.
She looked very lovely asleep, and very young. She was as untouched as the dew upon the grass outside: a child herself, and yet she was carrying his child. All her helplessness lay there, revealed to him, and all his old unhappy thoughts of her. As he sat beside her, watching and waiting, he found it almost possible to wish that she might sleep for ever.