“What purpose?” asked Dr. Obispo.
Jeremy did not answer for a little while. Then he shook his head in bewilderment. “What on earth is happening now?” he said. “Listen to this. ‘My funeral will be conducted with all the Pomp befitting my exalted Rank and the eminence of my Virtues. John and Caroline were miserly and ungrateful enough to object to the expense; but I have insisted that my Obsequies shall cost not a penny less than Four Thousand Pounds. My only Regret is that I shall be unable to leave my subterranean Retreat to see the Pageantry of Woe and to study the expression of grief upon the withered faces of the new Earl and his Countess. Tonight I shall go down with Kate to our Quarters in the Cellarage; and tomorrow morning the World will hear the news of my death. The body of an aged Pauper has already been conveyed hither in Secret from Haslemere, and will take my place in the Coffin.
After the Interment the New Earl and Countess will proceed at once to Gonister, where they will take up their Residence, leaving this house untenanted except for Parsons, who will serve as Caretaker and provide for our material wants. The Gold and Bank Notes brought by Parsons from London are already bestowed in a subterranean hiding place known only to myself, and it has been arranged that, every First of June, so long as I live, five thousand pounds in cash shall be handed over by myself to John, or to Caroline, or, in the event of their predeceasing me, to their Heir, or to some duly authorized Representative of the Family. By this arrangement, I flatter myself, I have placed them hardly less in my power than I have been placed in theirs.
The betrayal of my secret would cost them the Title and Estates, and would expose them, moreover, to a prosecution for Perjury. Nor is this all. My Life is worth to them five thousand pounds a year in Cash, and they know that, at the first suspicion of foul play, I should at once destroy the sources of their supply. I rely upon Cupidity and Fear to fortify their Honour and to fill the Place left vacant by the Affection they most certainly do not feel.’ And that’s all,” said Jeremy, looking up. “There’s nothing else. Just two more blank pages, and that’s the end of the book. Not another word of writing.”
There was a long silence. Once more, Dr. Obispo got up and began to walk about the room.
“And nobody knows how long the old buzzard lived on?” he said at last.
Jeremy shook his head. “Not outside the family. Perhaps those two old ladies . . .”
Dr. Obispo halted in front of him, and banged the table with his fist. “I’m taking the next boat to England,” he announced dramatically.
Chapter IX
TODAY, even the Children’s Hospital brought Mr. Stoyte no consolations. The nurses had welcomed him with their friendliest smiles. The young House Physician encountered in the corridor was flatteringly deferential. The convalescents shouted “Uncle Jo!” with all their customary enthusiasm, and, as he paused beside their beds, the faces of the sick were momentarily illuminated with pleasure. His gifts of toys were received as usual, sometimes with noisy rapture, sometimes (more touchingly) in the silence of a happiness speechless with amazement and incredulity. On his round of the various wards, he saw, as on other days, the pitiful succession of small bodies distorted by scrofula and paralysis, of small emaciated faces resigned to suffering, of little angels dying, and martyred innocents, and snub-faced imps of mischief tortured into a reluctant stillness.
Ordinarily it all made him feel good—like he wanted to cry, but at the same time like he wanted to shout and be proud: proud of just being human, because these kids were human and you’d never seen anything so brave as they were; and proud that he had done this thing for them, given them the finest hospital in the state, and all the best that money could buy. But today his visit brought none of the customary reactions. He had no impulsion either to cry or to shout. He felt neither pride, nor the anguish of sympathy, nor the exquisite happiness that resulted from their combination. He felt nothing—nothing except the dull, gnawing misery which had been with him all that day, at the Pantheon, with Clancy, in his down-town office. Driving out from the city, he had looked forward to his visit to the hospital as an asthma patient might look forward to a dose of adrenalin or an opium smoker to a long-postponed pipe. But the looked-for relief had not come. The kids had let him down.
Taking his cue from what had happened at the end of previous visits, the porter smiled at Mr. Stoyte as he left the hospital and said something about it being the finest bunch of great little kids he ever knew. Mr. Stoyte looked at him blankly, nodded without speaking and passed on.
The porter watched him go. “Jeepers Creepers!” he said to himself, remembering the expression on Mr. Stoyte’s face.
Mr. Stoyte drove back to the castle, feeling as unhappy as he had felt when he left it in the morning. He went up with the Vermeer to the fourteenth floor; Virginia was not in her boudoir. He went down to the tenth; but she was not in the billiard room. He dropped to the second; but she was being neither manicured nor massaged. In a sudden access of suspicion, he descended to the sub-sub-basement and almost ran to see if she were in the laboratory with Pete; the laboratory was empty. A mouse squeaked in its cage and behind the glass of the aquarium one of the aged carp glided slowly from shadow into light and from light once more into green shadow. Mr. Stoyte hurried back to the elevator, shut himself in with the Dutchman’s dream of everyday life mysteriously raised to the pitch of mathematical perfection, and pressed the topmost of the twenty-three buttons.
Arrived at his destination, Mr. Stoyte slid back the gate of the elevator and looked out through the glass panel in the second door.
The water of the swimming pool was perfectly still. Between the battlements, the mountains had taken on their evening richness of golden light and indigo shadow. The sky was cloudless and transparently blue. A tray with bottles and glasses had been set on the iron table at the further side of the pool, and behind the table stood one of the low couches on which Mr. Stoyte was accustomed to take his sun baths. Virginia was lying on this couch, as though anaesthetized, her lips parted, her eyes closed, one arm dropped limply and its palm lying upwards on the floor, like a flower carelessly thrown aside and forgotten. Half concealed by the table, Dr. Obispo, the Claude Bernard of his subject, was looking down into her face with an expression of slightly amused scientific curiosity.
In its first irrepressible uprush, Mr. Stoyte’s fury came near to defeating its own homicidal object. With a great effort, he checked the impulse to shout, to charge headlong out of the elevator, waving his fists and foaming at the mouth. Trembling under the internal pressure of pent-up rage and hatred, he groped in the pocket of his jacket. Except for a child’s rattle and two packets of chewing gum left over from his distribution of gifts at the hospital, it was empty. For the first time in months, he had forgotten his automatic.
For a few seconds, Mr. Stoyte stood hesitating, undecided what to do. Should he rush out, as he had first been moved to do, and kill the man with his bare hands? Or should he go down and fetch his gun? In the end, he decided to get the gun. He pressed the button, and the lift dropped silently down its shaft. Unseeing, Mr. Stoyte glared at the Vermeer; and from her universe of perfected geometrical beauty, the young lady in blue satin turned her head from the open harpsichord and looked out, past the draped curtain, over the black and white tessellated floor—out through the window of the picture frame into that other universe in which Mr. Stoyte and his fellow creatures had their ugly and untidy being.
Mr. Stoyte ran to his bedroom, opened the drawer in which his handkerchiefs were kept, rummaged furiously among the silks and cambrics, and found nothing. Then he remembered. Yesterday morning he had worn no jacket. The gun had been in his hip pocket. Then Pedersen had come to give him his Swedish exercises. But a gun in the hip pocket was uncomfortable, if you did things on your back, on the floor. He had taken it out and put it away in the writing desk in his study.
Mr. Stoyte ran back to the elevator, went down four floors and ran to the study. The gun was in the top left-hand drawer of the writing table; he remembered exactly.
The top left-hand drawer of the writing table was locked. So were all the other drawers.
“God damn that old bitch!” Mr. Stoyte shouted, as he tugged at the handles.
Thoughtful and conscientious in every detail, Miss Grogram, his secretary, always locked up everything before she went home.
Still cursing Miss Grogram, whom he hated at the moment almost as
