Maria's denial had come upon them like a thunderclap, bewildering, stunning. If Althea was not in Galloway, where was she?
Maria Beccles did not reply for some time to the question. Then she took the pins out of her hat and threw it on a chair, thus symbolising the renunciation of her intention of returning forthwith to Scotland.
"Yes, Maria," said Lady Fenimore, with fear in her dark eyes, "we don't doubt your word--but, as Anthony has said, if she wasn't with you, where was she?"
"How do I know?"
Maria Beccles pointed a lean finger--she was a dark and shrivelled, gipsy-like creature. "You might as well ask the canal in which she drowned herself."
"But, my God, Anthony!" I cried, when he had got thus far, "What did you think? What did you say?"
I realised that the old lady had her social disqualifications.
Plain-dealing is undoubtedly a virtue. But there are several virtues which the better class of angel keeps chained up in a dog-kennel. Of course she was acute. A mind trained in the acrobatics of Calvinistic Theology is, within a narrow compass, surprisingly agile. It jumped at one bound from the missing week in Althea's life into the black water of the canal. It was incapable, however, of appreciating the awful horror in the minds of the beholders.
"I don't know what I said," replied Sir Anthony, walking restlessly about my library. "We were struck all of a heap. As you know, we never had reason to think that the poor dear child's death was anything but an accident. We were not narrow-minded old idiots. She was a dear good girl. In a modern way she claimed her little independence. We let her have it. We trusted her. We took it for granted--you know it, Duncan, as well as I do--that, a hot night in June--not able to sleep--she had stuck on a hat and wandered about the grounds, as she had often done before, and a spirit of childish adventure had tempted her, that night, to walk round the back of the town and--and--well, until in the dark, she stepped off the tow-path by the lock gates, into nothing--and found the canal. It was an accident," he continued, with a hand on my shoulder, looking down on me in my chair. "The inquest proved that. I accepted it, as you know, as a visitation of God. Edith and I sorrowed for her like cowards. It took the war to bring us to our senses. But, now, this damned old woman comes and upsets the whole thing."
"But," said I, "after all, it was only a bow at a venture on the part of the old lady."
"I wish it were," said he, and he handed me a letter which Maria had written to him the day after her return to Scotland.
The letter contained a pretty piece of information. She had summarily discharged Elspeth Macrae, her confidential maid of five-and-twenty years' standing. Elspeth Macrae, on her own confession, had, out of love for Althea, performed the time-honoured jugglery with correspondence. She had posted in Galloway letters which she had received, under cover, from Althea, and had forwarded letters that had arrived addressed to Althea to an accommodation address in Carlisle. So have sentimental serving-maids done since the world began.
"What do you make of it?" asked Sir Anthony.
What else could I make of it but the one sorry theory? What woman employs all this subterfuge in order to obtain a weeks liberty for any other purpose than the one elementary purpose of young humanity?
We read the inevitable conclusion in each other's eyes.
"Who is the man, Duncan?"
"I suppose you have searched her desk and things?"
"Last year. Everything most carefully. It was awful--but we had to. Not a scrap of paper that wasn't innocence itself."
"It can't be anyone here," said I. "You know what the place is. The slightest spark sends gossip aflame like the fumes of petrol."
He sat down by my side and rubbed his close-cropped grey head.
"It couldn't have been young Holmes?"
The little man had a brave directness that sometimes disconcerted me. I knew the ghastly stab that every word cost him.
"She used to make mock of Randall," said I. "Don't you remember she used to call him 'the gilded poet'? Once she said he was the most lady-like young man of her acquaintance. I don't admire our young friend, but I think you're on the wrong track, Anthony."
"I don't see it," said he. "That sort of flippancy goes for nothing.
Women use it as a sort of quickset hedge of protection." He bent forward and tapped me on my senseless knee. "Young Holmes always used to be in and out of the house. They had known each other from childhood. He had a distinguished Oxford career. When he won the Newdigate, she came running to me with the news, as pleased as Punch. I gave him a dinner in honour of it, if you remember."
"I remember," said I.
I did not remind him that he had made a speech which sent cold shivers down the spine of our young Apollo; that, in a fine rhetorical flourish--dear old fox-hunting ignoramus--he declared that the winner of the Newdigate carried the bays of the Laureate in his knapsack; that Randall, white-lipped with horror, murmured to Betty Fairfax, his neighbour at the table: "My God! The Poet-Laureate's unhallowed grave!
I must burn the knapsack and take to a hod!" It was too tragical a conversation for light allusion.
"The poor dear child--Edith and I have sized it up--was all over him that evening."
"What more youthfully natural," said I, "than that she should carry off the hero of the occasion--her childhood's playfellow?"
"All sorts of apparently insignificant details, Duncan, taken together--especially if they fit in--very often make up a whole case for prosecution."
"You're a Chairman of Quarter Sessions," I admitted, "and so you ought to know."
"I know this," said he, "that Holmes only spent part of that Christmas vacation with his mother, and went off somewhere or the other early in January." I cudgelled back my memory into confirmation of his statement. To remember trivial incidents before the war takes a lot of cudgelling. Yes. I distinctly recollected the young man's telling me that Oxford being an intellectual hothouse and Wellingsford an intellectual Arabia Petrea, he was compelled, for the sake of his mental health, to find a period of repose in the intellectual Nature of London. I mentioned this to Sir Anthony.
"Yet," I said, "I don't think he had anything to do with it."
"Why?"
"It would have been far too much moral exertion--"
"You call it moral?" Sir Anthony burst out angrily.
I pacified him with an analysis, from my point of view, of Randall's character. Centripetal forces were too strong for the young man. I dissertated on his amours with Phyllis Gedge.
"No, my dear old friend," said I, in conclusion, "I don't think it was Randall Holmes."
Sir Anthony rose and shook his fist in my face. As I knew he meant me no bodily harm, I did not blench.
"Who was it, then?"
"Althea," said I, "often used to stay in town with your sister. Lady Greatorex has a wide circle of acquaintances. Do you know anything of the men Althea used to meet at her house?"
"Of course I don't," replied Sir Anthony. Then he sat down again with a gesture of despair. "After all, what does it matter? Perhaps it's as well I don't know who the man was, for if I did, I'd kill him!"
He set his teeth and glowered at nothing and smote his left palm with his right fist, and there was a long silence. Presently he repeated:
"I'd kill him!"
We fell to discussing the whole matter over again. Why, I asked, should we assume that the poor child was led astray by a villain? Might there not have been a romantic marriage which, for some reason we could not guess, she desired to keep secret for a tune? Had she not been bright and happy from January to June? And that night of tragedy... What more likely than that she had gone forth to keep tryst with her husband and accidentally met her death? "He arrives," said I, "waits for her. She never comes. He goes away. The next day he learns from local gossip or from newspapers what has happened. He thinks it best to keep silent and let her fair name be untouched...What have you to say against that theory?"
"Possible," he replied. "Anything conceivable within the limits of physical possibility is possible. But it isn't probable. I have an intuitive feeling that there was villainy about--and if ever I get hold of that man--God help him!"
So there was nothing more to be said.
CHAPTER X
I haven't that universal sympathy which is the most irritating attribute of saints and other pacifists. When, for instance, anyone of the fraternity arguing from the Sermon on the Mount tells me that I ought to love Germans, either I admit the obligation and declare that, as I am a miserable sinner, I have no compunction in breaking it, or, if he is a very sanctimonious saint, I remind him that, such creatures as modern Germans not having been invented on or about the year A.D.