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The horror was sweeping over Mary in great deafening waves.
‘He shot himself? He killed himself because of that?’
‘Well, he didn’t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before he died.’ Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone grinding out its ‘record’.
‘You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?’
‘Oh, he didn’t have to try again,’ said Parvis grimly.
They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glasses thoughtfully about his finger, she motionless, her arms stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.
‘But if you knew all this,’ she began at length, hardly able to force her voice above a whisper, ‘how is it that when I wrote you at the time of my husband’s disappearance you said you didn’t understand his letter?’
Parvis received this without perceptible embarrassment. ‘Why, I didn’t understand it – strictly speaking. And it wasn’t the time to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find your husband.’
Mary continued to scrutinize him. ‘Then why are you telling me now?’
Still Parvis did not hesitate. ‘Well, to begin with, I supposed you knew more than you appear to – I mean about the circumstances of Elwell’s death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter’s been raked up again, And I thought if you didn’t know you ought to.’
She remained silent, and he continued: ‘You see, it’s only come out lately what a bad state Elwell’s affairs were in. His wife’s a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and taking sewing at home when she got too sick – something with the heart, I believe. But she had his mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help. That called attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people began to wonder why –’
Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. ‘Here,’ he continued, ‘here’s an account of the whole thing from the Sentinel – a little sensational, of course. But I guess you’d better look it over.’
He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the Sentinel had first shaken the depths of her security.
As she opened the paper her eyes, shrinking from the glaring headlines, ‘Widow of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid’, ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table upstairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.
‘I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down –’ she heard Parvis continue.
She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hatbrim. Where had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her ears. Then she gave a cry.
‘This is the man – the man who came for my husband!’
She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm. She straightened herself and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.
‘It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!’ she persisted in a voice that sounded to her own ears like a scream.
Parvis’s answer seemed to come to her from far off, down endless fog-muffled windings.
‘Mrs Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call someone? Shall I get a glass of water?’
‘No, no, no!’ She threw herself towards him, her hand frantically clutching the newspaper. ‘I tell you, it’s the man! I know him! He spoke to me in the garden!’
Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. ‘It can’t be, Mrs Boyne. It’s Robert Elwell.’
‘Robert Elwell?’ Her white stare seemed to travel into space. ‘Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him.’
‘Came for Boyne? The day he went away from here?’ Parvis’s voice dropped as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat. ‘Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you remember?’
Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.
‘Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me – the one you found on his desk that day? It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s death.’ She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice. ‘Surely you remember!’ he urged her.
Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words – words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.
‘This was the man who spoke to me,’ she repeated.
She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he probably imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. ‘He thinks me mad, but I’m not mad,’ she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.
