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‘It’s quite all right, my boy. No bones broken. But I want a word with your mother. Very good work of yours, to ferret me out like this.’
He was outside on the landing gazing at the shut door. The real Quentin was standing by his side, a gentle stream of explanation flowing from his lips. Inside the room Lord Listerdale was confronting Mrs St Vincent.
‘Let me explain – if I can! I’ve been a selfish devil all my life – the fact came home to me one day. I thought I’d try a little altruism for a change, and being a fantastic kind of fool, I started my career fantastically. I’d sent subscriptions to odd things, but I felt the need of doing something – well, something personal. I’ve been sorry always for the class that can’t beg, that must suffer in silence – poor gentlefolk. I have a lot of house property. I conceived the idea of leasing these houses to people who – well, needed and appreciated them. Young couples with their way to make, widows with sons and daughters starting in the world. Quentin has been more than butler to me, he’s a friend. With his consent and assistance I borrowed his personality. I’ve always had a talent for acting. The idea came to me on my way to the club one night, and I went straight off to talk it over with Quentin. When I found they were making a fuss about my disappearance, I arranged that a letter should come from me in East Africa. In it, I gave full instructions to my cousin, Maurice Carfax. And – well, that’s the long and short of it.’
He broke off rather lamely, with an appealing glance at Mrs St Vincent. She stood very straight, and her eyes met his steadily.
‘It was a kind plan,’ she said. ‘A very unusual one, and one that does you credit. I am – most grateful. But – of course, you understand that we cannot stay?’
‘I expected that,’ he said. ‘Your pride won’t let you accept what you’d probably style “charity”.’
‘Isn’t that what it is?’ she asked steadily.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘Because I ask something in exchange.’
‘Something?’
‘Everything.’ His voice rang out, the voice of one accustomed to dominate.
‘When I was twenty-three,’ he went on, ‘I married the girl I loved. She died a year later. Since then I have been very lonely. I have wished very much I could find a certain lady – the lady of my dreams . . .’
‘Am I that?’ she asked, very low. ‘I am so old – so faded.’
He laughed.
‘Old? You are younger than either of your children. Now I am old, if you like.’
But her laugh rang out in turn. A soft ripple of amusement.
‘You? You are a boy still. A boy who loves to dress up.’
She held out her hands and he caught them in his.
Chapter 14
The Fourth Man
‘The Fourth Man’ was first published in Pearson’s Magazine, December 1925.
Canon Parfitt panted a little. Running for trains was not much of a business for a man of his age. For one thing his figure was not what it was and with the loss of his slender silhouette went an increasing tendency to be short of breath. This tendency the Canon himself always referred to, with dignity, as ‘My heart, you know!’
He sank into the corner of the first-class carriage with a sigh of relief. The warmth of the heated carriage was most agreeable to him. Outside the snow was falling. Lucky to get a corner seat on a long night journey. Miserable business if you didn’t. There ought to be a sleeper on this train.
The other three corners were already occupied, and noting this fact Canon Parfitt became aware that the man in the far corner was smiling at him in gentle recognition. He was a clean-shaven man with a quizzical face and hair just turning grey on the temples. His profession was so clearly the law that no one could have mistaken him for anything else for a moment. Sir George Durand was, indeed, a very famous lawyer.
‘Well, Parfitt,’ he remarked genially, ‘you had a run for it, didn’t you?’
‘Very bad for my heart, I’m afraid,’ said the Canon. ‘Quite a coincidence meeting you, Sir George. Are you going far north?’
‘Newcastle,’ said Sir George laconically. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘do you know Dr Campbell Clark?’
The man sitting on the same side of the carriage as the Canon inclined his head pleasantly.
‘We met on the platform,’ continued the lawyer. ‘Another coincidence.’ Canon Parfitt looked at Dr Campbell Clark with a good deal of interest. It was a name of which he had often heard. Dr Clark was in the forefront as a physician and mental specialist, and his last book, The Problem of the Unconscious Mind, had been the most discussed book of the year.
Canon Parfitt saw a square jaw, very steady blue eyes and reddish hair untouched by grey, but thinning rapidly. And he received also the impression of a very forceful personality.
By a perfectly natural association of ideas the Canon looked across to the seat opposite him, half-expecting to receive a glance of recognition there also, but the fourth occupant of the carriage proved to be a total stranger – a foreigner, the Canon fancied. He was a slight dark man, rather insignificant in appearance. Huddled in a big overcoat, he appeared to be fast asleep.
‘Canon Parfitt of Bradchester?’ inquired Dr Campbell Clark in a pleasant voice.
The Canon looked flattered. Those ‘scientific sermons’ of his had really made a great hit – especially since the Press had taken them up. Well, that was what the Church needed – good modern up-to-date stuff.
‘I have read your book with great interest, Dr Campbell Clark,’ he said. ‘Though it’s a bit technical here and there for me to follow.’
Durand broke in.
‘Are you for talking or sleeping, Canon?’ he asked. ‘I’ll confess at once that I suffer from insomnia and that therefore I’m in favour of the former.’
‘Oh! certainly. By all means,’ said the Canon. ‘I seldom sleep on these night journeys, and the book I have with me is a very dull one.’
‘We are at any rate a representative gathering,’ remarked the doctor with a smile. ‘The Church, the Law, the Medical Profession.’
‘Not much we couldn’t give an opinion on between us, eh?’ laughed Durand. ‘The Church for the spiritual view, myself for the purely worldly and legal view, and you, doctor, with widest field of all, ranging from the purely pathological to the super-psychological! Between us three we should cover any ground pretty completely, I fancy.’
‘Not so completely as you imagine, I think,’ said Dr Clark. ‘There’s another point of view, you know, that you left out, and that’s rather an important one.’
‘Meaning?’ queried the lawyer.
‘The point of view of the Man in the Street.’
‘Is that so important? Isn’t the Man in the Street usually wrong?’
‘Oh! almost always. But he has the thing that all expert opinion must lack – the personal point of view. In the end, you know, you can’t get away from personal relationships. I’ve found that in my profession. For every patient who comes to me genuinely ill, at least five come who have nothing whatever the matter with them except an inability to live happily with the inmates of the same house. They call it everything – from house-maid’s knee to writer’s cramp, but it’s all the same thing, the raw surface produced by mind rubbing against mind.’
‘You have a lot of patients with “nerves”, I suppose,’ the Canon remarked disparagingly. His own nerves were excellent.
‘Ah! and what do you mean by that?’ The other swung round on him, quick as a flash. ‘Nerves! People use that word and laugh after it, just as you did. “Nothing the matter with so and so,” they say. “Just nerves.” But, good God, man, you’ve got the crux of everything there! You can get at a mere bodily ailment and heal it. But at this day we know very little more about the obscure causes of the hundred and one forms of nervous disease than we did in – well, the reign of Queen Elizabeth!’
‘Dear me,’ said Canon Parfitt, a little bewildered by this onslaught. ‘Is that so?’
‘M
ind you, it’s a sign of grace,’ Dr Campbell Clark went on. ‘In the old days we considered man a simple animal, body and soul – with stress laid on the former.’
