MRS. WILDER IS PRESENTED IN A MELTING MOOD, AND DRAYCOTT WILDER IS FORCED TO RECALL THE LINES COMMENCING “A FOOL THERE WAS”

It was a bright morning with a high wind blowing and a breath of freshness in the air that has a charm to inspire a better outlook upon life. Everywhere it made itself felt in Mangadone, and like Pippa in the poem, the wind passed along, leaving everything and everybody a little better for its coming. It passed through the open veranda of the huge hospital, and touched the fever patients with its cool breath; it hurried through the Chinese quarter, blew along Paradise Street, dusting the gesticulating man, and went on up the river, pretending to make the brown water change its muddy mind and run backwards instead of forwards. It paid a little freakish attention to Mrs. Wilder’s dark hair, and it cooled the back of Hartley’s neck, as they rode along together, by the way of a lake.

They had met quite accidentally, and Hartley, who had been vaguely wishing for an opportunity to speak to Mrs. Wilder, seized upon it and offered himself as her escort. She agreed with complimentary readiness, and they turned along a wooded road, where the shadows were deep and where Hartley felt the gripping hands of romance loosen his heart-strings.

Mrs. Wilder listened to him, or appeared to do so, which is much the same in effect, and Hartley was not critical. She was a good listener, as women who have something else to think about often are; and so they rode along the twisting path, and the wind sang in the plumes of the bamboo trees, and Hartley believed that it sang a romantic lyric of platonic admiration, exquisitely hinted at by a tactful man, and properly appreciated by a very beautiful woman.

“By the way,” she said carelessly, “have you found that wretched little Absalom yet? What a bother he has been since he took it into his head to go off to America, or wherever it is he went to.”

“I am glad you mentioned him,” said Hartley, his face growing suddenly serious. “I have a question or two that I want very much to ask you.”

“A question or two? That sounds so very legal. Really, Mr. Hartley, I believe you credit me with having Absalom’s body hanging up in one of my almirahs. Honestly, don’t you really believe that I had a hand in putting him out of the way?”

She laughed her hard little laugh, and shot a look at him over her shoulder.

“You do know something, some little thing it may be, but something that might help me.”

“About Absalom, or about someone else?”

“About whoever you saw him with.”

Hartley pushed his pony alongside of hers, but her face revealed nothing, and was quite expressionless.

“Whoever I saw him with?” she echoed reflectively. “Ah, but it is so long ago, Mr. Hartley, I can’t even remember now whether I was out or not that evening.”

“You are only playing with me,” said Hartley a little irritably. “The policeman on duty at the cross-roads below Paradise Street saw you.”

Her face became suddenly so drawn and startled that Hartley regretted his words almost as he spoke them.

“Wait a minute, Mr. Hartley,” she said, in a strained, hard voice. “You have to explain to me why you have asked your men questions connected with me.”

“I did not ask questions; I was told.”

She pulled up her pony, and, turning her head away from him, looked out silently over the dip of ground below them. Hartley did not break her silence. He saw that he had come close to some deep emotion, and he watched her curiously, but Mrs. Wilder, even if she was conscious of his look, appeared quite indifferent to it. He could form no idea along what road her silent concentration led her; but he knew that she pursued an idea that was compelling and strong. He knew enough of her to know that even her silence was not the silence that arises out of lack of subject for talk, but that it meant something as definite and clear as though she spoke direct words to him.

The Head of the Police would have given much at that moment to have been able to penetrate her thoughts, but he only stared at her with his blue eyes a little wider open than usual, and waited for her to speak. She looked before her steadily, but not with the eyes of a woman who dreams; Mrs. Wilder was thinking definitely, and while Hartley waited, her mind travelled at speed across years and came to a halt at the moment where she now found herself, and from that moment she looked out forcefully into the future.

Usually, in the tragic instants of life there is very little time for thought before the need for action forces the will, with relentless hands. Clarice Wilder knew as well as she knew anything that her position was one of some peril, and that much more than she could weigh or measure at that moment lay beyond the next spoken word. She was telling herself to be careful, steadying her nerve and reining in a desire to pour out a flood of circumstantial evidence, calculated to convince the Head of the Police.

If there is one thing more than another that the man or the woman driven against the ropes should avoid, it is prolixity; the snare that catches craft in its own net. Clarice Wilder desired to be overpowering, redundant and extreme in the wordy proof of her innocence of purpose that evening of July the 29th, but she held back and waited steadfastly until she was quite sure of herself again, and then she turned her head and glanced at Hartley with a smile.

“How silent you are,” she said gently.

Hartley flushed and looked self-conscious.

“To be quite candid, that was what I was thinking of you,” he replied awkwardly.

“What were we saying?” went on Mrs. Wilder. “Oh, of course, I remember. You thought I could tell you something about poor Mr. Heath, didn’t you? I only wish I could, but it was so long ago. I do remember the evening. It was very hot and I rode along by the river to get some fresh air,” her eyes grew hazy. “I can remember thinking that Mangadone looked as if it was a great ball of amber, with the sun shining through it, but as for being able to tell you what Mr. Heath was doing, or who he was with, it is impossible. You should have pinned me down to it the day you called on me, when this troublesome little boy first went off.” She gathered up the reins, and Hartley mounted reluctantly. “I am so sorry. I would love to be able to help you, but I cannot remember.”

If Hartley had been asked on oath how it was that Mrs. Wilder had led him clean away from the subject under discussion, to something infinitely more satisfying and interesting, he could not have sworn to it. They loitered by the road and came slowly back to the bungalow, where they parted at the gate, and he watched her go in, hoping she might turn her head, but she did not, and Hartley took his way towards his own house and thought very little of Absalom or the Rev. Francis Heath. One thing he did think of, and that was that Mrs. Wilder had looked at him earnestly, and said that she wished he was not “mixed up” in anything likely to bring uneasiness to the mind of the Rector of St. Jude’s Church. “Mixed up” was a curious way of expressing his connection with the case, but Hartley felt that he knew what she meant. He pulled at his short moustache and wished with all his heart that he really did know; but all the wishes in the world could not help him out of a professional dilemma.

Mrs. Wilder had not looked round, though she very well knew that Hartley was waiting and hoping that she would, and once she had turned the first bend she touched the pony with her heel and cantered up the hill, throwing the reins to the syce who came in answer to her impatient call.

“Idiot,” she said, as she shut the door of her room and flung her topi on the bed, and she repeated the word several times with increasing animosity and vigour. She hated Hartley at that moment, and felt under no further obligation to hide her real feelings; and then Mrs. Wilder sat down and thought hard.

The mental power of exaggerating danger is limitless, and she could not deny that her fear was playing tricks with her nerves. She knew that she had done creditably under the strain of acute nervous tension, but she felt also that much more of the same thing would be unendurable.

Draycott came in to luncheon, and she was there to receive him, but even to his careless eye, Clarice was oddly abstracted, and he glanced at her curiously, wondering what it was that occupied her mind and made her frown as she thought.

She could not get away from the grip of her morning interview. Try as she would, she could not shake it off. It caught her back in the middle of her talk, made her answer at random, and held her with a terrible power. She considered that there were a thousand other things she might have said or done, a hundred ways by which she might have appealed to Hartley, and yet her common sense told her that the less she said on the subject the better it would be, if, in the end, the Rev. Francis Heath was led into the awful pitfalls of cross-examination. Anyone may forget and recall facts later, but to state facts that may be used as evidence is to stand handcuffed before inexorable justice, and Mrs. Wilder had left her hands free.

“Is anything the matter?” Draycott jerked out the question as he got up to leave the room. “You seem rather silent.”

Clarice laughed, and her laugh was slightly forced.

“I went for a ride this morning, and met Mr. Hartley. He is the most exhausting man I ever met.”

“I hope you told him so,” said Wilder shortly. “He’s about here frequently enough, even though he does bore you.”

Something in his voice made her eyes focus him very clearly and distinctly.

“I have a very good mind to tell him,” she said easily, “but he is blessed with a skin that would turn the edge of any ordinary hatchet; he would think I was merely being ‘funny.’”

“It’s an odd fact,” said Draycott with a sneer in his eyes, “that however much a woman complains of a man’s stupidity, she will let him hang about her, and make a grievance of it, until she sees fit to drop him. When that moment arrives she can make him let go, and lower away all right. Just now Hartley is hanging on quite perceptibly, and if it entertains you to slang him behind his back, I suppose you will slang him, but he won’t drop off before you’ve done with him, Clarice, if I know anything of your methods.” Her face flushed and she began to look angry. “Mind you, I don’t object to Hartley. As you say, he’s a fool, a silly, trusting ass, the sort of man who is child’s-play to a girl of sixteen. If you must have a string of loafers to prove that your attractions outwear anno domini, I must accept Hartley, and other Hartleys, so long as you continue to play the same game. Hartleys, I said, Clarice.”

There was no doubt about the emphasis he laid upon the name.

“You flatter Mr. Hartley considerably,” she said, but her voice was conciliatory and her laugh nervous.

“He represents a type; a type that some married men may be thankful continues to exist. God!” he broke out violently, “if he could hear you talk of him, it would be a lesson to the fool, but he won’t hear you. No man ever does hear these things until the knowledge comes too late to be of any use to him. You have got to have your strings” he shrugged his shoulders “because your life isn’t here, in this house; it is at the Club, and at dinners and races and so on, and to be left to your husband is the beginning of the end. Don’t deny it, Clarice, it’s no earthly use. Women like you have your own ideas of life, I suppose, and I ought to be thankful they’re no worse.”

He stood by the door all the time he spoke, and his colourless face and pale eyes never altered.

“You’re talking absolute nonsense,” said Mrs. Wilder, preserving an amiable tone. “We have to entertain, Draycott, and you can’t round on me for what I have done for years. It has helped you on, and you know it.”

“I wasn’t talking of that,” he said drearily. “I was talking of you. You’re getting old, for a woman, Clarice, and when you’re worried, as you are to-day, you show it; though how an imbecile like Hartley got at you to the extent of making you worried, I don’t pretend to guess.”

“Old,” she said angrily. “You aren’t troubling to be particularly polite.”

No, Im damnably truthful; just because it makes me wonder at you all the more. You can go on smiling at any number of idiots, because you must have the applause, I suppose. You dont even believe in it now.”

His allusion was definite, and Mrs. Wilder felt about in her mind for some way to change the conversation. Quagmires are bad ground for walking, and she was in a hurry to reach terra firma again. She came round the table and slipped her arm through his.

“After all these years. Draycott be a little generous.”

If she had fought him, some deep, hidden anger in his cold heart would have flared up, but her gesture softened him and he patted her hand.

“I know,” he said slowly. “Only I can’t quite forget. I simply can’t, Clarice.”

She smiled at him and touched his face with a light hand.

“Shall I tell you why? Because even if I am old and thirty-six isn’t so very dreadful you are still in love with me.”

She went with him to the door and smiled as he drove away, smiled and waved as he reappeared round a distant bend, and watched him return her signal, and then she went back into the large drawing-room and her face grew grey and pinched, and she sat with her chin propped on her hands, thinking.

She had proved that there are more fools in the world than those who go about disguised as Heads of Police, and had added another specimen to the general list, but she found no mirth in the idea as she considered it.