No: by a miracle her man was given back to her, and she would keep him. That the miracle involved the destruction of another human being troubled her vaguely, but not enough to make her question it. At a stroke the hindrance to her marriage with Georgie was removed, and money which was rightly his returned to him. The burden that lay so heavily on her conscience was lifted. The road to happiness lay clear.
If Ruth behaved as though this was the greatest chance she would ever get to assert herself over Georgie and dominate him, it is unlikely that she saw it consciously. In the foreground of her mind stood the fact that Georgie had somehow been led to behave in a manner which nobody who knew him could have thought possible. Suspecting that, in his gratitude for deliverance, he might over-simplify the business and forget what he had so narrowly escaped, she resolved to rub it in.
This resolve, which might so easily seem cruel, was made not only for Georgie’s sake. It was an unconscious payment of hush-money to Ruth’s own conscience. To take care of Georgie, make him repent, and keep him out of wickedness in future, would atone for her breach of the rules in loving and running away with him. A life like hers, caught from its beginnings between narrow clamps, could never quite escape. It was to Ruth’s credit that she bore no deeper scars.
Georgie, far more deeply confused, asked nothing better than to submit to her authority. He had been the victim of a breakdown in which his mind was so drastically upset that its negative side took charge: the wrong side of the penny was uppermost. All the reasoning to which his hatred of Grace had led him belonged to a mad logic, poisoned by the unnatural life he had had since his marriage.
He was now in a fresh danger. Ruth was right in her instinct, though she could not have stated her belief rationally. Delivered, by a lucky accident, from the result of a chain of deranged thinking, Georgie might now become irresponsible through distrust of his own mind, and rely on further lucky accidents to protect him: or he might draw in his horns altogether, and grow into one of those timid creatures who shiver and shake and cannot make up their minds about anything.
Ruth held her hand until his escape had become real to him. After lunch, when the police formalities were over, he began to yawn helplessly and without protest was bundled up to bed and a rug drawn over him. There he slept till just before eight o’clock, and came down to supper in a light-hearted, unfocused mood, inclined to laugh, to seize Ruth’s hand, kiss it, and babble small affectionate words.
“We’re all right, Ruthie darling,” he kept saying. “We’re all right now.”
She waited, judging her moment. Now.
“Don’t forget where you might be.”
“Eh?” He looked up at her blankly. For the moment, he had forgotten.
“If Grace had taken the pill—if someone hadn’t got there first—you wouldn’t be sitting here with me. You’d be in a cell, waiting to be tried for murder.” She hesitated, steeled her heart, and went on, “Where you deserve to be.”
He sprang away from her, with an unbelieving cry.
“Ruthie!”
“Yes.” She looked at him, trembling, implacable. “Where you deserve to be. Never forget that. That’s where you deserve to be, and, but for God’s mercy, you’d be there.”
Then, at the sight of his piteous face, all her resolve broke, and in a storm of tears she pulled his head against her breast
“Oh, my love, oh, oh, my darling Georgie. Don’t look at me like that. I can’t bear it.”
He stayed inert. He did not even put his arm around her. Suddenly scared, she looked down, and saw him staring dully at the wall.
“Georgie! Georgie darling! Wake up! Speak to me.”
“Yes,” he said, still without looking at her. “You’re right Of course. That’s where I ought to be.”
“Georgie—don’t think about it any more. I didn’t mean——”
She broke off, because she had meant it. Not even to comfort him could she deny that.
Many times, in the hours that followed, she wished bitterly that she had never spoken. Georgie was sunk in a black depression, a trance of self-accusation, that seemed to benumb him altogether. Ruth longed to call a doctor, yet dared not, for fear that Georgie might blurt out the cause.
He revived a little next day, but still moved like an automaton, and could hardly be persuaded to eat. On the second night he woke twice in the grip of a nightmare. Ruth almost welcomed them; anything was better than the lifeless nothingness of his trance, but she was afraid his cries might become too articulate, and be heard. They were staying in another part of the town, where, so far, no one had recognized them.
Then on the third day came the inquest. Almost sick with dread, Ruth watched him across the breakfast table. He had been unapproachable: she had no idea what he was going to say.
He sat looking down at his plate, mechanically eating. Though he made no attempt to meet her eye, or to speak, she thought his movements had more purpose. Something of the chill, sleep-walking air had lifted from him.
She drew a deep breath, bit her lip, and leaned forward.
“Georgie.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be all right? When they ask you questions?”
He looked up, but his eyes had no light in them.
“I’ll be all right.”
“You won’t—go and say anything silly?”
“Silly?”
Oh, she thought, I could shake him. Feeling ashamed of herself, she went on warily.
“You won’t tell them anything about—what happened before?”
The gleam of cunning she had seen when he was planning to kill Grace shone for an instant in his eyes.
“They won’t ask me about that.”
He went on eating, and Ruth looked at him in wonder. What sort of a man had she got hold of? Once he was so transparent: now she felt she knew nothing about him at all.
She knew even less a few hours afterwards. In the witness box, Georgie was his old self. He answered all the questions about Grace with a subdued candour which created the best possible impression.
The facts were soon established. The woman accused of the murder had been arrested within a few hours. Grace’s avarice and want of heart had cost her her life. As Georgie suspected, but would never let himself know, she had gone in for money-lending on the side. Picking her customers well, and merciless about repayment, she had specialized in married women who were in trouble over the house-keeping allowance and did not want their husbands to know. From this she had gone to shadier operations. There had been instances of shop-lifting in order to keep up with instalments, and in such cases Grace had not stopped short of blackmail.
Nemesis had come in the person of a half-crazed, desperate woman, a huge creature with powerful arms like bolsters, whose husband Grace had threatened to tell. With a detached interest that ended in a shudder, Georgie remembered the evening when he had almost gone to intervene: the raucous threats, the hoarse despairing cries, the slammed door, and Grace’s pale face when she came through afterwards.
The woman was drunk at the time she attacked Grace. In her defence it was urged that she had the mind of a nine-year-old. Goaded to despair, she had smashed her persecutor’s head in, and then frenziedly ransacked the place for the fortune Grace was reported to keep hidden there.
She had not the intelligence to cover her trail, and the police had no trouble at all in catching her.
The inquest seemed to transform Georgie. In some way Ruth could not understand, the impact of the questions and all the public interest seemed to clear his mind. The indubitable fact that someone else had killed Grace, thus publicly attested, and that everyone was looking at him with sympathy, not with abhorrence, brought him to the plane of external reality and kept him there. He behaved in a perfectly normal way for the remainder of the day, and in the evening suggested that Ruth should come with him to the shop, look at the books, and see how matters stood.
Half curious, half reluctant to enter the shop—she had been
to Summer Hill once only, in those terrible minutes after the policeman had told them what had happened—she was none the less glad to be with Georgie and to see him once more taking an interest in life.
Georgie unlocked the place, got out the books, and took them into the living room. She saw with relief that he made no attempt to go into the room at the back, where Grace had been killed. Sitting down at the table, he began to pore over the pages.
Seeing him thus occupied, Ruth went on tiptoe down the passage and into the shop. Georgie had told her so much about it, in those early meetings in the teashop, that she knew where many of the things were kept. With a smile at her own daring, she lifted the lid of one of the big jars of sweets, reached in, and popped a sample into her mouth. For the moment, her cares fell from her. She gave herself up to a child’s joy in exploring the shelves and drawers: stopping to take another sweet, and another. Then a child’s sense of guilt awoke, making her smile: but she did not take a fourth.
After some time she was roused from her reverie by hearing Georgie moving about and pulling out drawers. Then he came and showed his head round the door.
“I’m right. She never made one.”
“Made one? What do you mean?”
“Never made a will. All her other papers are here. And I’m sure she never went to that lawyer.”
“Then——?”
“It’s all ours.”
He gave her a sudden shy grin, withdrew his head, and returned to the books. Ruth’s reaction was automatic, and surprised her. In that case, she thought, I can eat as many sweets as I like: and promptly took three more.
When, tired at last of exploring, she went into the living room to see how Georgie was getting on, she found him surveying a single sheet of paper. He looked up, a crooked smile on his face.
“Here’s one thing she wasn’t clever about, anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“Remember the old Waterford cut-glass jug I told you about? That she sold without asking me? Well, she was done over that one, good and proper. Let it go for a quarter of what it was worth.” His smile softened. “Poor Grace! How she’d hate it, if she knew. And to have me find out, of all people.”
Although something in Ruth contracted to hear him speak pityingly of Grace, she recognized it as a sign that he was growing more normal, and was glad.
They moved into Summer Hill next day. When they got back to their lodgings, the landlady, backed by her daughter, met them with the evening papers, and taxed them with being the pair portrayed. When they admitted it, she explained that she herself didn’t mind, but the neighbours were starting to talk. It was plain that she enjoyed what reporters would call “the sensation”, but felt that Georgie and Ruth must go now that everyone knew who they were. And, since the same trouble was bound to arise wherever else they tried, Ruth decided they might as well go to Summer Hill.
Georgie needed no persuasion. He would have gone anyway; and it seemed to him only natural to go home.
In the month that followed, with all the work necessary to gain control of a business which had been taken out of his hands to a greater degree than he realized, Georgie appeared normal enough. Ruth was all the time beside him. After consultation with another clergyman—the Reverend Sylvester Tuckett had migrated to another cure of souls, and, in any case, Georgie would not have gone near him—he and Ruth were married; the clergyman agreeing that, whatever scandal might ensue upon a wedding so soon after Grace’s death, it was of less importance than the scandal of Ruth’s living in the house as a spinster.
“He needs me,” she told the clergyman. “He isn’t right yet. I daren’t leave him. I won’t, whatever anyone says.”
So they were married; and, in such detestation was Grace held by the neighbours, custom in the shop increased, and Ruth, appearing shyly to help serve, was met with friendly smiles. Her gentleness and efficiency soon added to the general approval, and, helped also by the notoriety of the murder, trade grew to such an extent that they were obliged to employ a girl assistant.
Thus, by degrees, the scars left by Grace began to heal. The most vicious of all healed first. Married to the girl he loved, Georgie discovered that there was no truth in Grace’s taunt that he was unfit to be a husband.
But deliverance from so sore a burden was not to come easily. Five weeks after the inquest, the woman who had killed Grace was brought to trial. The trial did not take long, as her guilt was clear; so clear that her advisers wanted to enter a defence of insanity. The unfortunate woman could not be declared unfit to plead, because, although in general she seemed to have the mentality of a child of nine, she displayed a certain defensive cunning, and refused to plead guilty. It was her one consistent attitude through storms of bewilderment and terrified incoherence. The trial had therefore to run its course.
This obstinacy turned out badly for Georgie. Some time before the trial was due, he was thunderstruck to receive a subpoena to attend as a witness. In his simplicity he had imagined that the inquest was the last of the formalities that could involve him. He had shone at the inquest, so that there was no immediate reason for the subpoena to perturb him; but, warned by some intuition, he dreaded it.
His dread was increased when he was asked to call at a solicitor’s office, where he was warned that the questions he could expect might not be as friendly as those at the inquest. Counsel for the accused woman, they told him, would be out to blacken Grace and might well try to include him, in their efforts to win sympathy for their client.
The effect of these warnings was catastrophic. Georgie had been trying to forget the whole business, or at least to put it out of his mind until he felt normal again: and the revival threw him into a state of panic. Ruth could do nothing with him. Not until she saw his condition did she realize that he had been having a respite only, and that the core of his problem had not been faced at all. She had on her hands a facile optimist, all too ready to get back to a state of innocence and dependence on her stronger will.
It could do little for him now. He slept badly for nights before the trial, and, on the morning itself, would neither eat nor drink. Ruth got him off at last, in good time, and returned to the counter with a heavy heart.
Fortunately, Georgie was called early. The prosecution counsel handled him sympathetically, eliciting from him, in a series of simple questions, the facts of the fatal evening so far as he knew them, and endeavouring to suggest that his evidence was formal only and of no great importance.
The concluding observation underlined this view.
“In fact, Mr Bagshawe, you have very little to tell us. Thank you.”
Georgie gulped, and made to leave the box. A cold voice stopped him.
“One minute, please, Mr Bagshawe.”
Fingering his gown, with a gleam in his eye, counsel for the defence eyed him.
“Are you asking His Lordship and the jury to believe that you, the husband of the murdered woman, had no knowledge of the transactions in which she was engaged?”
“I had no knowledge.”
“But you suspected?”
“I did not know.”
“Please answer my question. You suspected the nature of your wife’s business in that back room?”
“I did not think about it.”
“You mean, you were careful not to think about it?”
“I did not think about it. I knew very little of what my wife was doing.”
“You were in her confidence to a certain extent, Mr Bagshawe. You have just told the court that she asked you to go to Exeter, and that that was why you were not in the house at the time?”
“Yes.”
“It was not the only occasion that you travelled on your joint business?”
“No. But——”
“There were many such occasions?”
“Yes. But——”
“She did take you into her confidence, then?”
“It was not our joint business.”
“Your name is over the sho
p door?”
“Yes.”
“And on the firm’s letter-heads?”
“Yes. But it wasn’t a joint business.”
“I see. You were man and wife, the shop and the letterheads bear your name, you travel regularly about the country to collect moneys due to you, but it is not your joint business?”
“The bank account is in my wife’s name.”
“Ah!” Georgie jumped at the depth and tone of the monosyllable. “The jury may be able to put another interpretation on that fact. Are you aware, Mr Bagshawe, that it is a common device of men who fear bankruptcy to transfer their property to their wife’s name?”
Georgie fell headlong.
“It wasn’t like that at all. We were in no danger of bankruptcy.”
“How do you know, Mr Bagshawe? You have just told us you did not know what your wife was doing.”
“I knew that much.”
“You knew as much as you chose to know—and a good deal more, I fancy, than you choose to tell us. Mr Bagshawe, I put it to you once more. You knew the kind of business your wife was carrying on in that back room.”
“No.”
“You are on your oath.”
Georgie gulped again. “I did not know.”
“He has told us he did not know, Mr Ashford,” the judge intervened. “I do not think any good purpose will be served by pursuing the matter further.”
Mr Ashford bowed. He had one more shaft to deliver.
“You say your wife sent you to Exeter to recover moneys due to this business which you did not jointly own?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell her you would have company on the journey?”
“No.”
“There, for once, Mr Bagshawe, I find no difficulty in believing you. Had your wife business in Bridmouth?”
“No.”
“But, Mr Bagshawe, you have told us you were not in her confidence. How do you know?”
“She did not ask me to make any call there.”
“Perhaps you had business of your own?”
Deliverance Page 24
