«Are you worried about anything?»
«No, thank you.»
«Tell me, Teddy Bear.»
«But, my dear, there’s nothing to tell.» Mr. Hutton turned round, smiled, and patted the girl’s hand. «I think you’d better go in and have your siesta. It’s too hot for you here.»
«Very well, Teddy Bear. Are you coming too?»
«When I’ve finished my cigar.»
«All right. But do hurry up and finish it, Teddy Bear.» Slowly, reluctantly, she descended the steps of the terrace and walked towards the house.
Mr. Hutton continued his contemplation of Florence. He had need to be alone. It was good sometimes to escape from Doris and the restless solicitude of her passion. He had never known the pains of loving hopelessly, but he was experiencing now the pains of being loved. These last weeks had been a period of growing discomfort. Doris was always with him, like an obsession, like a guilty conscience. Yes, it was good to be alone.
He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and opened it; not without reluctance. He hated letters; they always contained something unpleasant—nowadays, since his second marriage. This was from his sister. He began skimming through the insulting home-truths of which it was composed. The words «indecent haste,» «social suicide,» «scarcely cold in her grave,» «person of the lower classes,» all occurred. They were inevitable now in any communication from a well-meaning and right-thinking relative.
Impatient, he was about to tear the stupid letter to pieces when his eye fell on a sentence at the bottom of the third page. His heart beat with uncomfortable violence as he read it. It was too monstrous! Janet Spence was going about telling everyone that he had poisoned his wife in order to marry Doris. What damnable malice! Ordinarily a man of the suavest temper, Mr. Hutton found himself trembling with rage. He took the childish satisfaction of calling names—he cursed the woman.
Then suddenly he saw the ridiculous side of the situation. The notion that he should have murdered anyone in order to marry Doris! If they only knew how miserably bored he was. Poor, dear Janet! She had tried to be malicious; she had only succeeded in being stupid.
A sound of footsteps aroused him; he looked round. In the garden below the little terrace the servant girl of the house was picking fruit. A Neapolitan, strayed somehow as far north as Florence, she was a specimen of the classical type—a little debased. Her profile might have been taken from a Sicilian coin of a bad period. Her features, carved floridly in the grand tradition, expressed an almost perfect stupidity. Her mouth was the most beautiful thing about her; the calligraphic hand of nature had richly curved it into an expression of mulish bad temper…. Under her hideous black clothes, Mr. Hutton divined a powerful body, firm and massive. He had looked at her before with a vague interest and curiosity. To-day the curiosity defined and focused itself into a desire. An idyll of Theocritus. Here was the woman; he, alas, was not precisely like a goatherd on the volcanic hills. He called to her.
«Armida!»
The smile with which she answered him was so provocative, attested so easy a virtue, that Mr. Hutton took fright. He was on the brink once more—on the brink. He must draw back, oh! quickly, quickly, before it was too late. The girl continued to look up at him.
«Ha chiamito?» she asked at last.
Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time.
«Scendo» he called back to her. Twelve steps led from the garden to the terrace. Mr. Hutton counted them. Down, down, down, down…. He saw a vision of himself descending from one circle of the inferno to the next—from a darkness full of wind and hail to an abyss of stinking mud.
V
For a good many days the Hutton case had a place on the front page of every newspaper. There had been no more popular murder trial since George Smith had temporarily eclipsed the European War by drowning in a warm bath his seventh bride. The public imagination was stirred by this tale of a murder brought to light months after the date of the crime. Here, it was felt, was one of those incidents in human life, so notable because they are so rare, which do definitely justify the ways of God to man. A wicked man had been moved by an illicit passion to kill his wife. For months he had lived in sin and fancied security——only to be dashed at last more horribly into the pit he had prepared for himself. Murder will out, and here was a case of it. The readers of the newspapers were in a position to follow every movement of the hand of God.
There had been vague, but persistent, rumours in the neighbourhood; the police had taken action at last. Then came the exhumation order, the post-mortem examination, the inquest, the evidence of the experts, the verdict of the coroner’s jury, the trial, the condemnation. For once Providence had done its duty, obviously, grossly, didactically, as in a melodrama. The newspapers were right in making of the case the staple intellectual food of a whole season.
Mr. Hutton’s first emotion when he was summoned from Italy to give evidence at the inquest was one of indignation. It was a monstrous, a scandalous thing that the police should take such idle, malicious gossip seriously. When the inquest was over he would bring an action for malicious prosecution against the Chief Constable; he would sue the Spence woman for slander.
The inquest was opened; the astonishing evidence unrolled itself. The experts had examined the body, and had found traces of arsenic; they were of opinion that the late Mrs. Hutton had died of arsenic poisoning.
Arsenic poisoning…. Emily had died of arsenic poisoning? After that, Mr. Hutton learned with surprise that there was enough arsenicated insecticide in his green-houses to poison an army.
It was now, quite suddenly, that he saw it: there was a case against him. Fascinated, he watched it growing, growing, like some monstrous tropical plant. It was enveloping him, surrounding him; he was lost in a tangled forest.
When was the poison administered? The experts agreed that it must have been swallowed eight or nine hours before death. About lunch-time? Yes, about lunch-time. Clara, the parlour-maid, was called. Mrs. Hutton, she remembered, had asked her to go and fetch her medicine. Mr. Hutton had volunteered to go instead; he had gone alone. Miss Spence—ah, the memory of the storm, the white aimed face! the horror of it all!—Miss Spence confirmed Clara’s statement, and added that Mr. Hutton had come back with the medicine already poured out in a wineglass, not in the bottle.
Mr. Hutton’s indignation evaporated. He was dismayed, frightened. It was all too fantastic to be taken seriously, and yet this nightmare was a fact it was actually happening.
M’Nab had seen them kissing, often. He had taken them for a drive on the day of Mrs. Hutton’s death. He could see them reflected in the wind-screen, sometimes out of the tail of his eye.
The inquest was adjourned. That evening Doris went to bed with a headache. When he went to her room after dinner, Mr. Hutton found her crying.
«What’s the matter?» He sat down on the edge of her bed and began to stroke her hair. For a long time she did not answer, and he went on stroking her hair mechanically, almost unconsciously; sometimes, even he bent down and kissed her bare shoulder. He had his own affairs, however, to think about. What had happened? How was it that the stupid gossip had actually come true? Emily had died of arsenic poisoning. It was absurd, impossible. The order of things had been broken, and he was at the mercy of an irresponsibility. What had happened, what was going to happen? He was interrupted in the midst of his thoughts.
«It’s my fault—it’s my fault!» Doris suddenly sobbed out. «I shouldn’t have loved you; I oughtn’t to have let you love me. Why was I ever born?»
Mr. Hutton didn’t say anything but looked down in silence at the abject figure of misery lying on the bed.
«If they do anything to you I shall kill myself.»
She sat up, held him for a moment at arm’s length, and looked at him with a kind of violence, as though she were never to see him again.
«I love you, I love you, I love you.» She drew him, inert and passive, towards her, clasped him, pressed herself against him. «I didn’t know you loved me as much as that, Teddy Bear. But why did you do it—why did you do it?»
Mr. Hutton undid her clasping arms and got up. His face became very red. «You seem to take it for granted that I murdered my wife,» he said. «It’s really too grotesque. What do you all take me for? A cinema hero?» He had begun to lose his temper. All the exasperation, all the fear and bewilderment of the day, was transformed into a violent anger against her. «It’s all such damned stupidity. Haven’t you any conception of a civilised man’s mentality? Do I look the sort of man who’d go about slaughtering people? I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit
