As they were clasped together, she, the quick, he, the dead, Althea lost count of time; it might have been a moment, it might have been an hour, when at last the jolting ceased.

As the old man got off the box of his cab, and rang the bell, Big Ben boomed out the quarter-past five.

Since she had last gone through that door a yawning gap had come in Althea's life, a gap which she had herself bridged. Fear had dropped from her; she could never again be afraid as she had been afraid when she, Joan and Perceval had formed for the last time a trinity. The feeling which had so upheld her, the feeling that for the first time she and her husband were in unison, gave her not only courage but serenity of spirit. Althea shrank from acting a lie, but she saw, for the first time, through Perceval Scrope's eyes, and she admitted the necessity.

As the door opened, she remembered, almost with exultation, that Dockett, the butler, was out, and that it was only with Luke, the slow young footman, that she would have to deal. As she saw his tall, thin figure emerge hesitatingly into the street, Mrs. Scrope called out in a strong, confident voice, "Luke--come here! Help me to get Mr. Scrope indoors. He is ill; and as soon as we have got him into the morning room, you must go off for a doctor, at once----"

She waved aside the cabman almost impatiently, and it was Althea, Althea helped by Luke, who carried Perceval Scrope over the threshold of his own house, and so into a small room on the ground floor, a room opening out of the hall, and looking out on to the street.

"He looks very bad, don't 'e, ma'am?" Luke was startled out of his acquired pa.s.sivity. "I'd better go right off now." She bent her head.

And then Althea, again alone with the dead man, suddenly became oppressed once more with fear, not the physical terror which had possessed her when Joan Panfillen had told her the awful truth, but none the less to her a very agonising form of fear. Althea was afraid that now, when approaching the end of her ordeal, she would fail Scrope and the woman he had loved. What was she to say, what story could she invent to tell those who would come and press her with quick eager questions?

She knew herself to be incapable, not only of untruth, but of invention, and yet now both were about to be required of her.

Althea turned out the lights, and wandered out into the hall. She felt horribly lonely; with the exception of the kindly, stupid youth who had now gone to find a doctor, there was not a member of her considerable household in sufficient human sympathy with her to be called to her aid.

She remembered with a pang that this question of their servants had been one of the many things concerning which there had been deep fundamental disagreement between her husband and herself. She had been accustomed to a well-ordered, decorous household, and would even have enjoyed managing such a one; but Perceval--Perceval influenced by Dockett--had ordained otherwise, and Althea had soon become uneasily aware that the order and decorum reigning below stairs were only apparent. Even now there came up from the bas.e.m.e.nt the sound of loud talking, of unrestrained laughter.

Suddenly someone knocked at the door, a loud double knock which stilled, as if by magic, the murmur of the voices below.

Althea looked around her doubtfully, then she retreated into the darkened room, but no one came up, and she remembered that the other servants of course supposed Luke to be on duty. It might be--nay, it almost certainly was--the doctor. With faltering steps she again came out into the hall and opened the front door; and then, when she saw who it was who stood there, his kind honest eyes blinking in the sudden light, Althea began to cry.

The tears ran down her cheeks; she sighed convulsively, and John Bustard, looking at her with deep concern and dismay, was quite unaware--he does not know even to this day--that it was with relief.

"What is it?" he said. "My dear Mrs. Scrope--what is the matter? Would you like me to go away--or--or can I be of any use?"

"Oh, yes," she said piteously. "Indeed you can be of use. Don't go away--stay with me--I'm--I'm so frightened, Mr. Bustard. Perceval--poor Perceval is--is ill, and I'm afraid to stay in there with him."

And it was Mr. Bustard who at once took command--command of Althea, whom he ultimately ordered to bed; command of the excited household, whose excitement he sternly suppressed; it was Mr. Bustard who, believing he told truth, lied for Althea, first to the doctor, and later to the coroner.

"How fortunate it was for poor Althea that Mr. Bustard, that nice little man in the Privy Council Office, was actually in the house when poor Perceval Scrope's death took place!" bold and cruel people would say to Mrs. Panfillen, watching the while to see how she took their mention of the dead man's name.

"Yes," she would answer them quietly. "Very fortunate indeed. And it was so kind of Mr. Bustard to get his sister to go away with Althea. Poor Althea is so alone in the world. I hope she will come and stay with us when she comes back to town; we were Perceval Scrope's oldest, I might say closest, friends. You know that their marriage--his and Althea's--took place from our house?"

The only human being who scented a mystery was Dockett--Dockett, who was mindful, as he had a right to be, of his lawful perquisites, and who will never forgive himself for having been out on that fateful afternoon.

"I'd give something to know the whereabouts of Mr. Scrope's overcoat, to say nothing of his hat and stick. That common ash stick's a relic--it may be worth money some day!" he observed threateningly to the footman.

But Luke, as only answer, stared at him with stolid dislike.

Luke had seen nothing of the hat and stick; no doubt they had been left in the cab in which Mr. Scrope had come back, ill, from the House. As for the overcoat, it had probably disappeared in the confusion, the hurried coming and going, of that evening when Luke had been almost run off his legs answering the door, and his head made quite giddy answering enquiries. But it was not Luke's business to say what he thought or did not think. With such a man as Mr. Dockett, it only led to unpleasantness.

II

MR. JARVICE'S WIFE

I

"About that letter of your uncle's? I take it you have no one to suggest?"

Thomas Carden glanced anxiously at the son in whom he had so strong a confidence, and who was the secret pride of his eyes, the only love of his austere, hard-working life.

The two were a great contrast to one another. The older man was short and slight, with the delicate, refined, spiritual face, so often seen in the provincial man of business belonging to that disappearing generation of Englishmen who found time to cultivate the things of the mind as well as the material interests of life. A contrast, indeed, to the tall, singularly handsome, alert-looking man whom he had just addressed, and whose perfect physical condition made him appear somewhat younger than his thirty-two years.

And yet, in spite or perhaps because of this contrast between them, the two were bound in the closest, if not exactly in the most confidential, ties of affection. And, as a matter of course, they were partners in the great metal-broking business of Josh. Carden, Thomas Carden and Son, which had been built up by three generations of astute, self-respecting citizens of Birmingham.

It was Easter Monday, and the two men were lingering over breakfast, in a way they seldom allowed themselves time to do on ordinary week-days, in the finely proportioned, book-lined dining-room of one of those s.p.a.cious old houses which remain to prove that the suburb of Edgbaston was still country a hundred years ago.

Theodore Carden looked across the table meditatively. He had almost forgotten his uncle's letter, for, since that letter had been read and cursorily discussed, he and his father had been talking of a matter infinitely more important to them both. The matter in question was the son's recent engagement and coming marriage, a marriage which was a source of true satisfaction to the older man. His father's unselfish joy in the good thing which had befallen him touched Theodore Carden keenly, for the niche occupied in most men's minds by their intimate feminine circle was filled in that of the young man by the diminutive figure of the senior partner of Carden and Son.

As is perhaps more often the case than those who despise human nature believe, many have the grace to reverence and admire the qualities in which they know themselves to be deficient. Such a man was the younger Carden.

To-day the depths had been stirred, and he let his mind dwell with a certain sense of shame and self-rebuke on his own and his father's ideals of human conduct. Even as a schoolboy, Theodore had come to realise how much more he knew of the ugly side of life than did his father. But then, old Mr. Carden was quite exceptional; he knew nothing--or so at least his son believed, and loved him for it--of the temptations, conflicts, victories, and falls of the average sensual man.

Theodore's father had been engaged, at twenty, to a girl of his own age whom he had not been able to marry till twelve years later; she had left him a widower with this one child after five years of married life, and Thomas Carden, as he had himself once told his son in a moment of unwonted confidence, had been absolutely faithful to her before the marriage and since her death.

The woman--many people would have said the very fortunate young woman--who was so soon to become Mrs. Theodore Carden would not possess such a husband as Thomas Carden had been to his wife.

And yet, in his heart, Theodore was well aware that the gentle girl he loved would probably be a happier woman than his own mother had been, for he, unlike his father, in his dealings with the other s.e.x could call up at will that facile and yet rather rare gift of tenderness which women, so life had taught him, value far more than the deeper, inarticulate love....

Carden came back to the prosaic question of his uncle's letter with a distinct effort.

"Have I anyone to suggest?" he echoed. "I have no one to suggest, father. I know, of course, exactly the sort of man Uncle Barrett is looking for; he's asking us to find him the perfect clerk every man of business has sought for at some time or other. If I were you I should write and tell him that the man he wants us to find never has to look outside England for a job, and, what is more, would rather be a clerk here--if he's any sense--than a partner in New Zealand!"

A smile quivered for a moment over the young man's shrewd face; his uncle was evidently seeking such a man as he was himself, but such men, so Theodore Carden was able to tell himself without undue conceit, were not likely to go into voluntary exile even with the bribe of eventual partnership in a flourishing business.

There was a pause, and then again the older man broke the silence with something entirely irrelevant to the subject which was filling the minds of his son and himself.

"You haven't looked at the _Post_ this morning? There's nothing in it.

Dearth of real news is, I suppose, responsible for this?" and he pointed, frowning as he spoke, to a column on the middle page headed "The Jarvice Mystery. New Developments."

Again a shrewd, good-humoured smile quivered on his son's firm mouth.

"In these days newspapers have to follow, not lead, the public taste.

Very few people are honestly as indifferent as you are, father, to that sort of story. Now even I, who never met poor old Jarvice, cannot help wondering how he came by his death; and yet you, who knew the man----"

"I knew him," said the other with a touch of impatience, "as I know, and as you know, dozens of our fellow-townsmen."

"Never mind; you, at any rate, can put a face to the man's name; and yet the question as to whether he was or was not poisoned by his wife, is one of indifference to you! Now I submit that in this indifference you are really a little----" he hesitated for a word, but found that none so well expressed his thought as that which had first arisen to his lips--"peculiar, father."

"Am I?" said Thomas Carden slowly; "am I so, Theodore? Nay, nay, I deny that I am indifferent! Lane"--Major Lane was at that time Head Constable of Birmingham, and a lifelong friend of the speaker--"Lane was quite full of it last night. He insisted on telling me all the details of the affair, and what shocked me, my boy, was not so much the question which, of course, occupied Lane--that is, as to whether that unhappy young woman poisoned her husband or not--but the whole state of things which he disclosed about them. Lane told me certain facts concerning Jarvice, whom, as you truly say, I have known, in a sense, for years, which I should not have thought possible of any man--vile things, which should have prevented his thinking of marriage, especially of marriage with a young wife."

Theodore Carden remained silent; he never discussed unsavoury subjects with his father. Moreover, he had no liking for Major Lane, though he regarded him with considerable respect, and even with a feeling of grat.i.tude. Some years before, the Head Constable had helped the young man out of a serious sc.r.a.pe, the one real sc.r.a.pe--so Carden was complacently able to a.s.sure himself--engendered by his systematic and habitual pursuit of women.

Even now he could not recall, without wincing, the interview he had had on that occasion with his father's friend. During that interview Carden had felt himself thoroughly condemned, and even despised, by the older man, and he had been made to feel that it was only for the sake of his father--his high-minded, unsuspicious father--that he was being saved from the public exposure of a peculiarly sordid divorce suit.