第54章 CHAPTER X(1)

"She's a good woman," said Robina.

"Who's a good woman?" I asked.

"He's trying, I expect; although he is an old dear: to live with, I mean," continued Robina, addressing apparently the rising moon. "And then there are all those children."

"You are thinking of Mrs. St. Leonard," I suggested.

"There seems no way of making her happy," explained Robina. "On Thursday I went round early in the morning to help Janie pack the baskets for the picnic. It was her own idea, the picnic."

"Speaking of picnics," I said.

"You might have thought," went on Robina, "that she was dressing for her own funeral. She said she knew she was going to catch her death of cold, sitting on the wet grass. Something told her. I reminded her it hadn't rained for three weeks, and that everything was as dry as a bone, but she said that made no difference to grass. There is always a moisture in grass, and that cushions and all that only helped to draw it out. Not that it mattered. The end had to come, and so long as the others were happy--you know her style. Nobody ever thought of her. She was to be dragged here, dragged there. She talked about herself as if she were some sacred image. It got upon my nerves at last, so that I persuaded Janie to let me offer to stop at home with her. I wasn't too keen about going myself; not by that time."

"When our desires leave us, says Rochefoucauld," I remarked, "we pride ourselves upon our virtue in having overcome them."

"Well, it was her fault, anyhow," retorted Robina; "and I didn't make a virtue of it. I told her I'd just as soon not go, and that I felt sure the others would be all right without her, so that there was no need for her to be dragged anywhere. And then she burst into tears."

"She said," I suggested, "that it was hard on her to have children who could wish to go to a picnic and leave their mother at home; that it was little enough enjoyment she had in her life, heaven knows; that if there was one thing she had been looking forward to it was this day's outing; but still, of course, if everybody would be happier without her--"

"Something of the sort," admitted Robina; "only there was a lot of it. We had to all fuss round her, and swear that without her it wouldn't be worth calling a picnic. She brightened up on the way home."

The screech-owl in the yew-tree emitted a blood-curdling scream. He perches there each evening on the extreme end of the longest bough.

Dimly outlined against the night, he has the appearance of a friendly hobgoblin. But I wish he didn't fancy himself as a vocalist. It is against his own interests, I am sure, if he only knew it. That American college yell of his must have the effect of sending every living thing within half a mile back into its hole. Maybe it is a provision of nature for clearing off the very old mice who have become stone deaf and would otherwise be a burden on their relatives.

The others, unless out for suicide, must, one thinks, be tolerably safe. Ethelbertha is persuaded he is a sign of death; but seeing there isn't a square quarter of a mile in this county without its screech-owl, there can hardly by this time be a resident that an Assurance Society would look at. Veronica likes him. She even likes his screech. I found her under the tree the other night, wrapped up in a shawl, trying to learn it. As if one of them were not enough!

It made me quite cross with her. Besides, it wasn't a bit like it, as I told her. She said it was better than I could do, anyhow; and I was idiot enough to take up the challenge. It makes me angry now, when I think of it: a respectable, middle-aged literary man, standing under a yew-tree trying to screech like an owl. And the bird was silly enough to encourage us.

"She was a charming girl," I said, "seven-and-twenty years ago, when St. Leonard fell in love with her. She had those dark, dreamy eyes so suggestive of veiled mysteries; and her lips must have looked bewitching when they pouted. I expect they often did. They do so still; but the pout of a woman of forty-six no longer fascinates. To a pretty girl of nineteen a spice of temper, an illogical unreasonableness, are added attractions: the scratch of a blue-eyed kitten only tempts us to tease her the more. Young Hubert St.

Leonard--he had curly brown hair, with a pretty trick of blushing, and was going to conquer the world--found her fretfulness, her very selfishness adorable: and told her so, kneeling before her, gazing into her bewildering eyes--only he called it her waywardness, her imperiousness; begged her for his sake to be more capricious. Told her how beautiful she looked when displeased. So, no doubt, she did--at nineteen."

"He didn't tell you all that, did he?" demanded Robina.

"Not a word," I reassured her, "except that she was acknowledged by all authorities to have been the most beautiful girl in Tunbridge Wells, and that her father had been ruined by a rascally solicitor.

No, I was merely, to use the phrase of the French police courts, 'reconstructing the crime.'"

"It may be all wrong," grumbled Robina.

"It may be," I agreed. "But why? Does it strike you as improbable?"

We were sitting in the porch, waiting for Dick to come by the white path across the field.

"No," answered Robina. "It all sounds very probable. I wish it didn't."