‘I suppose you know what happened when she woke up?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I came in from the terrace, and he came in from the passage. And Lila woke up. Just like that. She saw Whitall lying there, and the dagger-and her hand. And then she saw me. Get a good hold on that, will you-she saw me first, before she saw Adrian, and I wasn’t any good to her. She kind of shuddered away, if you know what I mean. But as soon as she saw Adrian she fairly chuckled herself into his arms. Well, there’s only one thing you can make of that, isn’t there?’
‘She had just had the most awful shock. She didn’t know what she was doing.’
‘She knew which of us she wanted all right,’ said Bill. ‘When you have had a shock like that you don’t reason, you act on instinct. Lila’s instinct didn’t take her to me, it took her to Adrian.’
‘Oh, Bill!’
‘Don’t sit there saying, “Oh, Bill! ” Do you suppose I want to marry a girl who shudders when she looks at me and flings herself into somebody else’s arms? Because if you do, you had better start thinking again.’
Ray was silent, because she didn’t know what to say. She had too many insurgent feelings, and they wouldn’t go into words. What she really wanted to do was to put her arms round Bill and kiss the hurt away. She clamped her hands together and sat as far back in her corner as she could get. Anyhow it was a good thing that he could talk about it.
He went on talking.
‘If they don’t think Lila did it they are absolutely bound to think it was me. I can’t imagine why they haven’t arrested me already. They found my note to Lila, so they know I had asked her to come down and meet me. Only I didn’t say the study-I said that room just inside the hall door. I told her if she wanted to marry Whitall she could, but if she didn’t want to, I would take her away to you. I can’t imagine why she went down to the study instead.’
Ray found words.
‘Darling, you don’t listen. She-did-not-know-what- she-was-doing.’
‘That’s what you say. I want to know how she got that blood on her hand.’
Ray felt cold through and through.
‘She must have touched him-or-or the dagger.’
‘Ray, can you believe that Lila would touch a dead body? Or that dagger in cold blood?’
Ray was up against the one thing she could really not believe. She had to fall back on,
‘She didn’t know what she was doing.’
‘Then why did she do it?’
They sat facing one another. Feature and expression were hidden by the darkness, yet each knew the other so well that this darkness was only a black screen upon which memory could throw its pictures. Bill holding doggedly to what he had said and saying it all over again, as if battering repetition was an argument in itself. Ray on the defensive-quick thrust and parry to meet his bludgeon blows, eyes wide and the colour in her cheeks like flame. How many times had they fought each other to a standstill over something that wasn’t worth a tenth part of all that force and fire? Things that didn’t matter. And this thing that mattered more than all the world because it was a matter of truth and honesty between them. It wasn’t Lila’s guilt or innocence which was in question, it was their own integrity.
Bill said roughly,
‘You won’t face facts. Women never will.’
‘I’m not women-I’m myself. I’m facing the fact that Lila didn’t do it. I don’t care how much evidence there is-she didn’t do it. If you cared for her you’d know that.’
There was a long and rather horrid silence. Ray had the same feeling which had overwhelmed her when in a fit of rage she had thrown a stone through the drawing-room window. She was seven years old again, with that dreadful sense of irrevocability. When you break something, it’s broken, and you can’t put it together again.
In the end Bill said in rather a surprised voice,
‘I suppose I don’t. I suppose I never did.’
Ray couldn’t get her words steady.
‘What-do-you-mean?’
‘You know perfectly well what I mean. If we’re talking, let’s talk. Lila was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen, and I went in off the deep end. I didn’t know a thing about her-I didn’t care if there was anything to know. If I’d married her, we’d have been damned unhappy. I’ve been realizing that bit by bit ever since I got home.’
Ray said with shaking lips,
‘Then why did you come down here and start all this?’
‘How do you mean, start all this? I wasn’t going to have her pushed into marrying Whitall if she didn’t want to, and I wasn’t going to be dropped in Lady Dryden’s tactful accidental sort of way as if I was something that hadn’t really happened, or if it had it wasn’t the kind of thing you would talk about in a drawing-room.’
A gust of silent laughter swept Ray’s anger away. She went on shaking, but it was the laughter that was shaking her now.
‘Bill-darling!’
‘Well, that’s how I felt. I was going to bring her to you if she wanted to get away. And if she didn’t want to get away she had got to break off our engagement properly.’
‘And is that what you want her to do now?’
A movement in the darkness, told her that he was shaking his head.
‘No-there’s no need. It’s broken off all right. She doesn’t want me any more than I want her now. She made that quite plain when she turned back on me and flung herself into Adrian ’s arms. He’s a good chap, and he’ll look after her. I should say it was going to be a whole-time job!’ He gave, an odd half-angry laugh. ‘Marian Hardy told me it would be, months ago. I don’t think I’m cut out for being a nursemaid.’
Ray was struggling with the feeling that everything was going to be all right now. It was completely irrational. It was like having balloons under your feet and being floated up into the clouds. Presently the balloons would go off with a bang and let you down. Just at the moment she couldn’t make herself care. She did manage to say that she thought she ought to go in.
Bill acquiesced.
‘My police spy will be getting bored. He might even come along and arrest me just to relieve the monotony.’
‘Bill-you don’t really think-’
‘Well, to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine why they haven’t arrested me already. If Adrian is such a good liar that they really believe it wasn’t Lila who did it because she wasn’t long enough out of his sight, then I don’t see how they could help believing it was me. In any case I don’t see why they haven’t arrested one of us. It looks as if they had got their eye on someone else. Let’s hope they have.’
Ray got out of the car, and they walked up the drive together. Just short of the gravel sweep he put an arm round her and said out of the blue,
‘It makes a lot of difference having you here.’
‘Does it?’
‘Yes. Why are you shaking?’
‘I’m not.’
He said, ‘Liar!’, kissed her somewhere between her cheekbone and her ear, and went off down the drive at a run.
Ray went into the house with stars in her eyes.
CHAPTER XXVI
A deep concern about the case in which she found herself involved and the moral reprobation with which it was natural to her to regard the crime of murder did not prevent Miss Silver from bestowing grateful appreciation upon the comfort with which she was surrounded at Vineyards. She would not have cared to live in so much luxury for any length of time, but she could appreciate and enjoy it for the moment. The newest kind of spring mattress on her bed, the pretty eiderdown, so light, so soft. The warm, even temperature, so different from that of so many country houses where old heating systems and new taxation made even the most modest degree of warmth impossible.
Only too well aware of this, she never came down into the country without due provision. It was her habit to change for the evening into the silk dress worn for best during the previous summer, and silk being no protection against draughts, to reinforce it by the addition of a black velvet coatee with a fur collar. This garment, most warm, most comfortable, was declared by Frank Abbott in his more irreverent moods to be of an origin so obscured by the mists of antiquity as to give it a kind of legendary character. Tonight, having arrayed herself in navy blue with a pattern of little yellow and green objects which resembled tadpoles, she fastened it at the neck with her bog-oak rose and added a string of small gold filigree beads. The coatee hung in a spacious mahogany wardrobe upon a plump hanger covered with pink satin, but she would not require it. Not only was there this delightfully even temperature everywhere, but there would also be a log fire in the drawing-room, and the brocaded curtains, lined and interlined, could be trusted to exclude the least suspicion of a draught.