“I came down here hoping to induce my father to give me some assistance. I’m temporarily very much embarrassed.” Even in moments of crisis, he could not altogether shed his rather pompous manner of speech.
“Then that looks bad. Had you asked your father, by the way?”
“For help? I’d told him my position was…” he hesitated.
“And he refused?”
“He said he understood from Moore—who categorically denies most of this conversation—that he was to all intents and purposes a ruined man. I must admit that didn’t greatly impress me. I have heard my father so frequently employ similar expressions when he was up against some quite trivial temporary loss that I didn’t believe this time to be any more serious than the others. I suppose it will be impossible to avoid scandal, as you say?”
“Quite, I should suppose. Not that I imagine there’s any likelihood of your being involved in the murder.” But at the back of his sharp, attentive mind he posed the comment as a question.
Richard looked startled. “I should suppose not. Matters are quite unpleasant enough as it is. Personally, I fancy they’ll drop on Brand. It’s known that he and my father were always at daggers drawn, and that he’s never forgiven him for marrying that abominable wife of his.”
Frobisher was thoughtful, apparently considering the wisdom of some admission to whose nature Richard had no clue. He himself, however, gave the lawyer the requisite encouragement by remarking, “Things would be even worse, of course, if my father had occupied any public position. He’s not in the general eye—a retired country gentleman. That’s pretty cold comfort, though.”
“Colder than you suppose,” agreed the lawyer unsympathetically. “In fact, about freezing-point. There’s something, Richard, that it might be as well for you to hear. I don’t say this will be remembered against him, but you know the condition of the Press. Some of the papers are dignified enough, but there are some scurrilous rags being issued who’re simply out for garbage, and you can trust them to rake up any muck that’s going.”
“And is there any—muck—going where my father is concerned?”
“Yes. I wonder if it’s ever occurred to you, Richard, to be surprised at your father’s quite disproportionate ferocity against your brother as a young man? I’m not holding any brief for loose living, but the lad had no home ties, he was under twenty, he had practically no money, he was living in a strange country—in a word, he’d no background to his life. It’s the background that counts at that stage. When that’s withdrawn…”
“When you deliberately slash it to pieces,” interrupted Richard coldly.
The lawyer looked impatient. “The precise phraseology doesn’t matter. The point is that he did nothing that thousands of other young men don’t do, but your father treated him with a quite abnormal severity. I don’t know whether you know that it was a positive passion of his to discover domestic scandals in the lives of prominent men and attempt to expose them. More than once he has been in danger of libel actions, but, of course, nowadays no one pays any attention to his letters. He’s a monomaniac on that one point. That mania ruined your mother’s married life, and in my opinion it has helped to destroy Brand’s.”
“You mean he had an intense aversion from all forms of immorality?”
“Not all forms, but from immorality in the limited sense in which the word was employed by the late Victorians. It became a craze as he grew older and had no other outlet for his feelings. He was on the look-out for evil everywhere.”
“But why?” asked Richard, in puzzled tones. “Yes, I know he was very bitter against Brand; he could scarcely control himself.”
“Precisely. It was the only refuge he had.”
“Refuge from what?”
“His contemplation of himself. You don’t remember your father as a much younger man. He was tormented by what’s called nowadays the sex urge, and he despised himself unutterably. He despised what he believed to be the weakness of marrying your mother, and he saw to it that she paid heavily for his wretchedness. Did it ever strike you that, with the exception of yourself, he heartily disliked all his children? He couldn’t take a normal view; he saw them all as concessions—or the consequences of those concessions—to what he regarded as something revolting. He girded at your sister, Amy, because she either hadn’t endured his torment, and was therefore in his estimation a finer creature than himself, or, if she had, she’d beaten that desire down. After your mother died he became worse. Of course, he ought to have married again, a sensible woman with a capacity for warm feeling, and they’d probably have got on quite well. But he didn’t. Instead, he took the other way out, and spent all his time nosing into other men’s lives. The war gave him a splendid chance. You remember the outcry there was in 1914 and 1915 about war babies, unmarried mothers, and so forth? Your father, and a number of other men and women of the same sort, got together and formed themselves into an organisation for reporting on immorality and purifying society. They were perpetually on the watch for misconduct. It was the mainspring of their lives. They couldn’t see a young man and a young woman together without suspicion. It’s a horrible disease, and more widespread than you’d ever guess. Ask a neurologist; he’ll tell you. They discovered all manner of things in every kind of home; they seemed to have spies everywhere. They found that no two people crossing a meadow or walking by the river are moral; they learned of second establishments maintained by well-known people, and practically blackmailed them into obscurity. Of course, the thing flourished with the stuff it fed on. They attacked public schools, private houses, hotels; Society, they said, was riddled through and through with this disease. They even issued a magazine full of warnings and anonymous contributions. They quoted stories they’d read and their own experience. They got a lot of correspondence and, of course, a pretty fair circulation among the morbid type. It was a very good advertisement for them. As a pornographic experiment—done in the name of the Lord, if you’ll believe me, with texts on the front cover and gleanings from the Old Testament on the back—it was unique. There was a queer cross of pride in it, of course. They were so bloody moral themselves they meant everyone else to be bloody moral, too. They weren’t going to have other people taking illicit paths to happiness. But if you’d been able to show them that sin had been slain in the night, and we were all as pure as daisies, they’d have been outraged. They knew, you see, they were better than other people, and they weren’t going to share their virtue with the common herd.”
“I remember now, when I was in France—that would be the beginning of 1915—my father began writing me the most extraordinary letters, all on this subject. I supposed he’d heard stories, as people at home seemed to at that time, and didn’t pay much attention to him. I’d no idea anything of this kind was going on. When did it stop? I was back for good in 1917, and he was out of London then.”
“Yes. It was too hot to hold him. The obvious thing happened. This work had become his life; he laboured, slept, ate, and moved in an atmosphere of unhealthy speculation, and one day the society was horrified to hear that one of their foremost directors was himself in the habit of visiting a questionable flat in the Tottenham Court Road. It was the strain, you see, coupled with his own temperament. There’s no need to go into details, but they proved their case. Your father collapsed into the neurotic, sometimes scarcely sane man he’s been for years. He threw up all his London activities and came down here. The basis of his rage and bitterness against society as a whole was in his knowledge of his own failure; he could forgive the world anything but that. He’d failed, been weak—was a ruin rather than a man. And, of course, the incident only increased his feeling about such behaviour in the world at large. That’s why he swore he’d never forgive Brand. That’s why he loathed having him down here.”
“There was no open scandal?”
“The society couldn’t have afforded one. There’d been trouble over the pa
per already, and it had had to be withdrawn, after a particularly salacious issue. It closed on a very high moral note—the wrong people were buying it, to the pure all things are pure, and so forth. I suppose eventually it died a natural death. No one cared two straws for it except the prurient-minded busybodies who composed it. But your father got worse and worse. He wrote innumerable letters—I’ve read some of them—to the papers on the subject. He said it was the duty of every righteous-minded citizen to disclose anything that came to his ears on this matter. He even went so far as to swear that he wouldn’t spare his own son, if necessary. No man holding a position of trust should be permitted to be anything but a Galahad. And there, Richard, he spoke the truth. He’d have flung you to the lions as readily as he’d have flung any other man’s son. Well, that’s the story. I don’t say it will come out. I hope it won’t. It’s quite ancient history. But I thought you ought to be warned. There are men who have every reason to have a grudge against him.”
And then, disregarding Richard’s look of shock and horror, he proceeded to discuss the terms of the dead man’s will. He had left two-thirds of his property to his elder son, and one-third to his mother, after allowing Amy a legacy of fifty pounds a year. The rest of the family had nothing. He stated that Olivia, through her husband, had profited to the utmost in his lifetime, that Brand had had from him the last help he need ever look for, that Isobel appeared to take no interest in finance, and that he was taking Ruth at her word. This last clause referred to an incident that had taken place a year or so previously, when the Amerys were staying at King’s Poplars. Gray had made one of his most disagreeable scenes, accusing all his relatives of scheming to obtain his money from him before his death. Miles had said nothing; possessing a remarkably cool head and a logical outlook on life, he seldom paid much attention to these storms, but to his surprise Ruth cried out passionately that they at all events never visited the house for what they could get, and didn’t want a penny from the old man here or hereafter.
“She was quite genuine, I’ve no doubt,” Frobisher remarked. “That couple isn’t out for graft, if I’m any judge of human nature.” And to himself he added, “I couldn’t say as much for any of the others, except that wretched married daughter whom they all treat as half-witted.”
Richard said slowly, “I wasn’t aware of the terms of the will, but I suppose I am to understand from your previous disclosure that it’s scarcely worth the paper it’s written on.”
“As I said, we shall be lucky if we can pull fifty pounds a year out of the wreck for your grandmother.” He was silent a moment, tapping with an irritating movement on the table, in a way that enraged the half-frantic Richard. “A vindictive will,” he continued thoughtfully. “Have you any notion what your sister will elect to do? Amy, I mean. I take it that Devereux will continue to provide for his wife.”
“I’ve no idea at all,” returned Richard shortly, not at all concerned for his sister’s condition. After all, she had had the house and the control of it for a good many years, while other unmarried women had to go out and earn a living for themselves. Probably, knowing her temperament, she had a very pleasant nest-egg laid by. It was easy to read his father’s mind. He’d been brow-beaten by her for so long that it gave him pleasure to think of her eventual humiliation. Of course, as a family, they were all dog eat dog.
9
He escaped presently to his own room and achieved blessed solitude. He walked up and down in a frenzy of anticipatory despair. This news that Frobisher had, with comparative light-heartedness, disclosed to him, altered the whole purview of his position. He had agreed with Laura that it was unlikely that anyone would attempt to fasten the crime to his shoulders. Where, they would ask, was an adequate motive? But this recent revelation changed the whole situation. Suppose the Greta Hazell business became public property? Suppose someone suggested, as inevitably quite a number of people would suggest, that Gray had become possessed of the information, and had threatened his son with public exposure? In the light of Frobisher’s story, Richard had little doubt that his father would have followed that drastic course. And all Richard’s friends were aware that his career was the meaning of his life. His father’s publication of the Hazell episode would undoubtedly mean the break-up of his public career. He would not be able to remain in Parliament, and there was more than a chance—though he had never hitherto admitted so much, even to himself—that Laura would leap at this opportunity of obtaining her freedom. Panic invaded his mind. Come what might, this piece of information must be suppressed. His enemies, and he had many, would be only too eager to seize upon this excuse for hounding him into obscurity; it would mean the abrupt finish to his ambitions, and his own ruin. This financial strait that had, until this morning, seemed momentous, faded into insignificance. Another consideration entered his tormented mind. What if Greta should somehow learn of his predicament? He knew her well enough now to realise that she was incapable of compassion; she would merely see a fresh opportunity for exacting sums he was in no position to pay. Now indeed his peril loomed up before him, as a wall or some great bush will loom suddenly before the eyes of the fog-distracted traveller from the opacity of the night. He could find no direction in which he could, with safety, turn. Not to Laura, not to Frobisher, not to any friend or counsellor, dared he reveal his plight. Like Brand, he felt the burden of knowledge weigh upon him like a load intolerable to be borne; but, unlike him, he anticipated no relief when the truth was made manifest. His normally sluggish imagination stirred to unreasoning frenzy, he saw himself arraigned for every kind of crime—for murder, sedition, adultery, embezzlement, perjury—and his blood ran chill, though he knew himself innocent of four of these charges. He turned and halted and went on again. In the scheme of his days, those busy unremitting days in which he barely allowed himself a sufficiency of leisure and sleep, he found no source of solace or of strength. An immense despair fell upon him. He thought, “If it’s coming to that, let me be out of the way. I can’t face it.” But at the thought of a self-inflicted death his meagre spirit recoiled. No, not that. Not that. Nor arrest either. Nor, if he could help it, suspicion or exposure. Somehow there must be a way of ensuring silence. His thoughts whirled like a wheel of fire in his distorted brain: Greta—Father—Brand—Eustace—Exposure—Bankruptcy—Shame—Failure—Obscurity—Greta… and so on, round and round.
…Up and down, up and down, while, like the wheels of a railway carriage, beating out a monotonous rhythm, his thoughts took possession of him, expressing themselves harshly, unmusically. Up and down—down and out—no way out—out and down— And so on, until someone came seeking him, and he had to mask his terror and join the community once again.
Part V
The Verdict of You All
1
On the day of the inquest the ground was starry with frost. From both the Poplars, from Munford, from Greater and Lesser Uppington, from Rest Wythies, from Stoneford and Bringham and Leaford, the cars came crunching the keen surface of the roads, filled with people in fur jackets and warm overcoats, talking, posturing, speculating, all intent on the event, unaware of their similarity to their early Roman prototypes who gathered with the same abominable expectancy to view some young girl racked on the Little Horse or torn with the pincers. They said (one carload so nearly resembled another that the conversations might be taken as identical) that this might have been expected; that the family was about as friendly as a host of Kilkenny cats; that there were ugly rumours about a criminal charge on quite a different ground; that you couldn’t trust these smooth-tongued Jews; that the younger son had come down with unmentionable threats; that he had his father and his elder brother in his power; that there had been ferocious debates between Richard and Amy for ascendancy… Excited and pleased at this new sensation, they drove up to the door of the Assembly Rooms at King’s Poplars where the inquest was to be held, and descended with much shaking of rugs, chatter, banter, exchange of greetings, agitated murmur
s of the necessity for haste lest someone else secure a coveted seat.
Frobisher was attending the inquest on behalf of the family generally; but Eustace had sent to London for his own solicitor, knowing that against him, at the last, public opinion must inevitably turn. Hinde was a tall, thin man, with a decisive profile; he had heard Eustace’s story and his face was forbidding and sceptical, though he appeared bland enough as he entered the court. He sat with folded arms, his wrists, unexpectedly bony, protruding from the flannel shirt he affected. Brand’s attention was caught and held by him from the first. There was in that austere, cynical face so much strength, character, and courage that he sketched it surreptitiously, feeling that even he, on such an occasion, could scarcely defy the conventions and do his work openly.
The evidence was not sensational until the end of Ross’s history of his investigations. He spoke of the handkerchief, of the burnt blotting-paper—clearly, he said, burnt to conceal the record it contained, since there was a practically empty wastepaper-basket at the dead man’s elbow—other ashes that could not now be identified, Brand’s document, and the finger-prints on the safe. No explanation, he said, had been offered by any member of the family concerning the missing cheque, whose counterfoil indicated that a sum of ten thousand pounds had been made over to Eustace Moore in the early hours of Christmas morning. No amount of search had revealed it, and although the counterfoil had been blotted, as was clear from the appearance of the ink, no record of this could be found on any of the blotting-paper in the library. Ross then detailed his search of the room, his discovery of the safe and of the finger-prints that, he informed the court, had been discovered to be those of Eustace Moore.
At this sensational revelation the excitement rose to fever-pitch. The evidence of other members of the family was scarcely digested; the attention of the whole court focused on the figure of Moore, who was presently called to explain the position. His explanation was strange and unsatisfying to practically everyone present.
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