Felicity looked all round her in a last convulsion of protest and despair, and shrank into herself and sat still, her eyes on the flowers. She didn’t try to deny anything.
“You’ll have to tell us what you know, Felicity. You understand that, don’t you? It isn’t any use trying to pretend you know nothing now. We know you were there.”
Felicity melted suddenly from her frozen stillness and began to shake uncontrollably. She linked her small hands together before her, and gripped until the slight knuckles were blanched like almonds.
“Yes,” she whispered, the word jerking out of her like a gasp of pain. She looked up at Tossa in desperate appeal, and asked in a small level voice: “What happens to people who’re accessories before the fact? Of murder, I mean? Supposing someone caused someone else to kill a person, but without meaning to?” Her face shook, and as resolutely reassembled its shattered and disintegrating calm; she wasn’t crying, and she wasn’t going to cry. What was the use now? “Or suppose they did mean to, but never really believed it could happen? What do they do to people like that? Do you know?”
They looked at each other over her head, shaken to the heart.
“I think,” said Dominic, with careful, appalled gentleness, “we’d better go into the warden’s office and wait for my father. You’ll have to tell him, you know. We don’t matter, but we’ll stay with you, if you want us to. It’s him you have to tell. You go and sit in there with Tossa, and I’ll go and find him.”
CHAPTER VI
« ^ »
YOU TELL IT,” said George reasonably. “You know what happened, and nobody’s interested in tripping you up or trying to make you say something you don’t want to say. Just tell us exactly what happened, and don’t be afraid that we won’t understand. Yes, Tossa’ll stay with you. Don’t worry! You’ll feel better when you’ve told us all about it. Take your time. We won’t interrupt you.”
They were all in the warden’s office together, the door safely shut, the room quiet and confidential, nobody to worry them or interfere with the desperate sympathy of their communion. Felicity sat shrunken in the arm-chair, her hands tightly clasped; the pressure seemed to help her to concentrate a mind which otherwise might fly apart from pure over-strain. Tossa sat beside her with an arm laid round the back of the chair, ready to touch the child or let her alone as the need arose. Nobody would have suspected that Tossa had so much patience and forbearance in her, least of all Tossa herself; but then, it had never been called into use until now. Dominic sat withdrawn on a rear corner of the desk, willing to remain unseen and unnoticed as long as possible; he was hardly more than an extension of Tossa at this moment.
“Lucien went out alone into the grounds yesterday afternoon,” George prompted gently, “and then you went out on your way to look at the swan’s nest, and saw him ahead of you, and you ran and caught him up. Tossa and Dominic saw you go down towards the footbridge together. Go on from there.”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” said Felicity, in a voice small, hard and clear. Now that she had reached the point of speech there were going to be no prevarications; there was even the faintest note of revulsion in her tone for this too fastidious consideration. She straightened her slender spine, and looked fairly and squarely at what confronted her, and didn’t lower her eyes. “I didn’t care a damn about the swan’s nest. There is one there, of course, but I wasn’t going out to look at that, I was just following Lucien. I watched him go out, and then I went after him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to get to know him really, properly, and for him to get to know me. Because I loved him. I do love him! I did, in a way, even before I ever saw him in the flesh, and as soon as I saw him I knew it was love. I knew I was the right person for him, and so I went straight for my objective, and I was sure he couldn’t help but feel the same way.”
Carefully, nobly, they all sat without stirring a muscle or drawing a hastened breath, nothing to suggest amusement, censure, or surprise. But Felicity knew her grown-ups, even those who were only a few years ahead of her. Faint, proud colour rose in her cheeks. She looked George fiercely, if wretchedly, in the eyes, and said with dignity:
“People think that at fifteen one has no deep feelings. They forget about girls like Juliet. It just isn’t a matter of age. And in any case women are always much more mature and formed than men of the same age, and much more likely to recognise the real thing when it happens to them. Look at Tatiana, in Eugene Onegin. She was the young one, and he patronised and talked down to her, and treated her like a child, and wouldn’t take her seriously, but she was right, all the same, and he lived to find it out when it was too late. And this was… rather like ‘Onegin’ over again. Lucien just didn’t realise how important it was, what was happening to us. He didn’t want anyone then, I suppose. He surely didn’t want me. He didn’t try to send me away, he only walked on and took no notice of me. We went along the ride there, on the other side of the river, and then we came to that gate, and he pushed it open and went on down to the grotto. He sat on the bench in there, looking at the river, and I sat by him and tried… I wanted him to understand, not to make a terrible mistake, but he didn’t understand at all. He was like all the rest, he thought I was just a kid. It was ‘Onegin’ all over again.”
All quite predictable, thought George sadly, but quite innocent. And yet something happened down there that wasn’t innocent, and she knows it, and is forcing herself towards it inch by inch. But he didn’t prompt her again. However she delayed, however deviously she approached what she had no intention now of softening, it couldn’t be long in coming. Only a quarter of an hour or so later, Tossa and Dominic had met her coming back towards the house.
For the first time it occurred to him as a serious possibility that Felicity had killed Lucien Galt with her own hands. Her situation must have been disastrous enough, and her disillusionment bitter enough, and a moody and impatient young man, getting up to prowl along the waterside without a thought for the love-sick child who meant no more to him than a persistent mosquito, would have been a very easy victim indeed. All that talk, faithfully reported by Dominic, about accessories before the fact, about causing somebody else to commit murder, without meaning to, all that might be mere talk at random, fending off the horrid fact itself. Or so he would have been tempted to believe, if this had been any other girl but Felicity. Felicity didn’t talk at random, didn’t toss about terms like “accessory before the fact” without knowing only too well what they meant. Her solitude had been peopled from books, and her vocabulary, at least, was an adult’s. No, wait for the truth to emerge, don’t anticipate. She didn’t push him. Nothing so simple.
“I told him,” she said, moistening her lips, ‘that I wasn’t a child, and he couldn’t solve anything by telling me to run away and play, I told him outright that I loved him, and he’d better think carefully before he threw away what he might never be offered again. And I said I’d prove it in any way he chose, because there wasn’t anything he could ask me that I wouldn’t do for him.”
She looked at her locked hands in faint surprise, suddenly aware for a moment that the tightness of their grip was hurting her. She relaxed them a little, and they remained steady at first, and then began to shake; the thin fingers clamped tight again and held fast.