“There’s no trumping, Mr. Arnold, nor no making up. It’s gospel truth. Mr. Random made that will, and I’d take my Bible oath I saw him put his name to it, and Billy and me, we put ours, and he told me Mr. Edward had spoke to him in a dream and told him he wasn’t dead. Not that I’m wishful to make trouble, Mr. Arnold, and if you was to take back that notice and maybe give me a bit of a rise-”
Arnold Random had received a numbing shock. Under its impact all he could do was to repeat that William Jackson was drunk. It was the only weapon to his hand, the only measure of defence he had, and even as he used it he felt it weaken. If William was drunk today, he would be sober tomorrow. The drink had put words in his mouth, or it had loosened his tongue until he could bring himself to speak them aloud. But having said them, could he, or would he, unsay them again when the drink was out of him? He might. For a consideration he would. If he was given his job again and a rise, he would hold his tongue-for this time. Until he was short of cash-until the appetite for blackmail grew in him.
In the silence that was between them now the thought came clear-he was being blackmailed. Give way once, make one payment, and the chain is on your limbs for life. Whose life? The chain will not loosen till one of you is dead-and William was by more than thirty years the younger man. Rage flooded up in him, sweeping everything before it. He broke into a fury of words.
“You damned blackmailer!”
That was only the beginning. Mildred Blake put her hands to her ears, but the shouting voice came through. Such language! And in church! Several of the words were entirely new to her. How disgraceful! How unseemly! Quite sacrilegious!
She hurried out through the small side door and stood on the gravel path, hearing the angry voices rise and fall. She was shocked of course-really quite terribly shocked. But her mind was working. She had not the slightest doubt that William Jackson was speaking the truth. There had been a later will than the one under which Arnold benefitted. In the last week of his life James Random had received what he believed to be an intimation that his nephew Edward was alive, and he had made another will. There could be no doubt at all of what the terms of that will must have been. If Arnold Random had destroyed it, he faced disgrace and imprisonment. If he heard of it now for the first time, he must submit to blackmail or lose his inheritance.
Mildred Blake was one of the few people who guessed what the possession of the Hall meant to him. Thirty years ago they had come near enough to read each others minds. There had been a brief, a very brief, space when all was clear between them. What Arnold Random saw had startled him into retreat. What Mildred Blake saw she had not forgotten. It was with her now.
The voices were louder in the church. There was a sound of footsteps. Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness now. Without waiting to put on her torch she turned and ran down the yew tunnel to the lych gate.
CHAPTER X
It was seven o’clock next morning when Jimmy Heard ran up to the front door of the Vicarage and beat upon it with all his might. He was twelve years old and a widow’s son, so he helped by doing a paper round, and that meant bicycling into Embank for the papers which came in on the seven-twenty. His father had been cow-man on one of Lord Burlingham’s farms, and the family had been allowed to stay on in a rather tumbledown cottage up the track on the far side of the stream. He beat on the Vicarage door, and when Mrs. Ball opened it in a dressing-gown he was choking and sobbing.
“Oh, Mrs. Ball, ma’am, he’s dead! He’s drownded! He’s there in the water, and I can’t move him! Oh, ma’am!”
She put a kind arm about the shaking shoulders. He was too thin-of course growing boys- There was somebody drowned. She said quickly,
“Who is it?”
He was shaking all over.
“It’s-William Jackson! Oh, ma’am, he’s drownded-down there in the splash! Oh, ma’am!”
Mrs. Ball called the Vicar, and the Vicar called the sexton. They went down to the splash together, and found William Jackson lying face downwards in no more than a couple of feet of water. It was plain enough what had happened. The big flat stepping-stone in the middle was practically awash after the heavy rain of the night before, and as the sexton put it bluntly, “If William was coming home sober, it would be a bit of a wonder. Slipped on that there stone, he did, and come down, and too fuddled to get up again, though you would ha’ thought the cold water would ha’ brought him round. Must ha’ been pretty far gone to drown in that there little pool. Well, I reckon you’d better ring up the police, sir, and I’ll see no one comes along and meddles with him.”
Jimmy was late for his papers. Mrs. Ball gave him hot cocoa and a couple of left-over scones, after which he was sufficiently fortified to go off on his bicycle, stopping to tell everyone he met that he had just found William Jackson drowned in the splash. If there had been more people abroad, he would have been later. But he told Mrs. Alexander who was watching for him out of her window to ask him to leave a message with her sister-in-law who lived next door to his paper shop, and Mrs. Deacon who was cleaning her front-door step, and Joe Caddie going off to his job on Mr. Pomfret’s farm.
Mrs. Deacon and Mrs. Alexander wanted to know a lot more than he could tell them, but Joe, whose temper was bad in the mornings, only grunted and said some people had all the luck. Mrs. Deacon hurried up and got to the Miss Blakes’ a good quarter of an hour before her time, which was eight o’clock. Rare put about, Miss Ora would be to think how she was in her back bedroom and out of the way of seeing Jimmy herself. She wouldn’t lose a minute once she was told the news-trust Miss Ora for that. Not that there would be anything to see when she got to her sofa in the front room-Vicarage gate, and the church beyond, and the road going down to the splash. But you couldn’t see the water, not if it was ever so. She almost ran down the village street and up into Miss Ora’s bedroom with her news.
“Oh, miss-that there William Jackson-the one that married Annie Parker, pore thing!”
Miss Ora sat up straight in her bed, her hair in curling-pins and a shawl about her shoulders.
“I always said he was a bad lot. What has he done?”
“Oh, miss, he’s drowned!”
“What!”
“Jimmy Heard found him and come over so funny he don’t know how he got up to the Vicarage! And Vicar calls Mr. Williams, and they goes down and finds him just like Jimmy says, and Vicar comes back and rings up the police!”
Miss Ora was taking the pins out of her hair.
“Then they will be sending out the ambulance from Embank. I must get up at once! My comb and handglass, Mrs. Deacon! I don’t see how anyone could drown in the splash. Unless he was drunk, which I suppose he was.”
“Pore Annie!” said Mrs. Deacon.
Miss Mildred Blake said, “Nonsense!”
They had neither of them noticed the opening of the door. It startled them now to see her standing there, very grim and sallow in the old black coat which she wore in place of a dressing-gown. She went on harshly,
“There’s no poor Annie about it, Mrs. Deacon. He’s been a bad husband, and it was a bad day for her when she married him.”
It was the general verdict.
Miss Ora got to her sofa in time to see the ambulance go by and presently come back again. She pulled a second shawl about her and had all the windows in the bay set wide so that she might miss nothing that was said by the passers-by. She sent Clarice Dean on three separate errands to Mrs. Alexander’s shop in order that she might be kept abreast of local opinion.
The women at least would be in and out with their tongues going like so many mill-clappers, but it irked her to the very marrow of her bones that there was no one she could send into the Lamb when the men began to assemble there. They would be careful of course, because of the landlord. It was against the law to let a man get drunk on your premises, and drunk William Jackson must have been, or he wouldn’t have drowned himself in that little bit of water. Of course Mr. Parsons would swear William had had no more than a couple of pints, and there wasn’t a man who wouldn’t back him up. There was talk of the license not being renewed as it was, and they wouldn’t want to go to Embank for their beer. She said all this as many times as it came up in her mind-to Mrs. Deacon, to Clarice, to Mildred. None of them had much to say in return.