Ethel Lina White - THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ETHEL LINA WHITE

"A boy, sir."

Glancing again at her watch, she dropped a second curtsy, and hurried in the direction of the Quakers' Walk.

"Now, isn't that refreshing?" demanded the Rector. "Compare it with stuffy cinemas, with their crime and sex pictures...By the way, I didn't know Mrs. Lee had a baby. How old is he?"

"About twenty-six," replied the doctor. "He's the Squire's new chauffeur."

The Rector laughed heartily at himself.

"Fell for it, didn't I? She took me up the garden. But after all, she's got the real thing, and that's better than watching canned love on a screen."

"Hum, in the one case, fourpence may be the extent of the damage. In my profession I've learned that tinned goods may be less harmful than in their original state."

"No." The Rector's eyes blazed. "Not here. There's no immorality in the village. And no class-hatred or modern unrest. They reflect the general tone of kindness and good breeding. I've never known a place with so little scandal. And the charity almost overlaps. No wretched slums, no leaky roofs or insanitary conditions."

"I agree," said the doctor in his tired voice. "But this fact remains. None of the local ladies use makeup, not even my own civilised wife, because Mrs. Scudamore has decreed that paint is an outrage on good taste. Yet, do you ever see cracked lips, or damaged skins?"

"What are you driving at?" asked the Rector.

"Merely that they must use vanishing-cream and colourless lip-salve...The moral is, padre, that human nature remains the same, everywhere, and dark places exist in every mind."

"Well, you probably know more about that than I do." The Rector's voice was regretful. "People no longer confide their difficulties and doubts to their parson. But, as a doctor, you must catch them off guard."

"Do I?" The doctor smiled as he tried, in vain, to catch a small white moth. "No, padre, they always put on clean pillow-slips for the doctor's visit."

The Rector made no comment; at last, even he was drugged to silence by the combined spell of twilight and tobacco. The purple and gold bars of sunset had faded from the sky—the voices of the gossiping women were stilled. People went indoors, to eat dinner or to prepare supper. The Scudamores made their stately re-entry of the Clock House—arm-in-arm, to the very last cobble-stone. In the gloom of the Quakers' Walk, Miss Asprey's beautiful Ada kissed and cuddled her mother's new baby, who had grown a Ronald Colman moustache.

Lights began to prick the gloom, while the first star trembled in the faint green sky. Across the green, little golden diamonds, like clustering bees, glowed through the lattice-panes of Miss Asprey's Elizabethan mansion.

The Rector was stirred, by the sight of them, to a revival of enthusiasm.

"As you say," he remarked, "no one can be perfect. Yet Miss Asprey is as nearly a saint as any woman can be. She has an influence on me which is almost spiritual. I go to see her whenever I'm worked-up and jumpy, and I come away with my prickles all smoothed down."

The doctor studied him, through his glasses, as though he were something on a microscope-slide.

"Do you? Interesting. As a matter-of-fact, I've also noticed that that good lady seems to possess some soothing quality. But it's disastrous to a man of my lethargic nature. After I've been at 'The Spout', I feel about as torpid as though I'd taken veronal. I used not to notice it, so I suppose I'm growing old, or extra slack."

Both men spoke casually, and their words were lost upon utterance. They could not tell, then, that when they were plunged, later, into the dark labyrinth of mystery, a gramophone record of the evening's conversation would hold a clue to one of the key-positions.

"You ought to take a holiday," advised the Rector.

"Too much fag."

The doctor's dragging voice was scarcely audible. Night was dropping on the village in veil upon veil of cloudy blue, citrine, and grey. The men sank lower in their chairs and sucked at their pipes, at peace with Nature and themselves. They might have been sunken in the subaqueous gloom of a fathomless sea—untroubled by the screws of steamers churning the waters above.

Yet, even then, the first blow was about to fall on the village. Far away, in the distance, sounded the postman's double-knock. Presently, he appeared in sight, a little globe of a man, with steel-rimmed spectacles. He rejected the Rectory, but entered the gates of 'The Spout'. They heard his familiar rat-tat, and then they saw him come out of the garden again, and go on his way—but they did not recognise him for the herald of disaster.

Presently the Rector stirred to life.

"Chilly," he remarked. "We'd better go in and have a whisky."

As the men rose stiffly from their low chairs, the Rectory gate creaked, and Rose—Miss Asprey's unhappily-named parlourmaid—stalked up the gravel drive. She was a gaunt, long-lipped dragoon of a woman, and had been in service at a Bishop's palace, so did not pay the local homage to the parson. Her voice was harsh as she gave her commands.

"Miss Asprey's compliments, and will you please to come over, at once."

"Is it urgent?" asked the Rector, not too pleased at the prospect, for his lighted study windows called him, and the whisky was waiting.

"The mistress says please come at once, as it's most important ."

"Certainly, then, I'll be over directly."

Rose's tall, black-and-white figure led the way down the path, as the Rector turned to Dr. Perry.

"I suppose you won't wait for me?"

"Thanks, padre, I will," replied the doctor. "I believe Gillie Potter is on the air tonight, so I'll amuse myself with your Wireless."

As he looked after his host, his usually listless eyes were bright with interest, and he meant to wait until midnight, if necessary, for the Rector's return.

For he was positive that his famished curiosity was going to have a feast, and that—for the first time in the history of the village—there would be no clean pillow-slips.

Table of Contents

When the golden diamonds gleamed through the windowpanes of Miss Asprey's dining-room, she was seated at her evening meal, with her companion, little Miss Mack, and quite unconscious that, across an empty stretch of grass, two men were discussing her character.

As she sat in a high-backed carven chair, and mechanically ate what the parlourmaid had piled upon her plate, she seemed unaware of her surroundings, for she stared at the opposite wall, as though trying to pierce it with the intensity of her vision.

In the early sixties, she was slender and upright as a girl. Her face bore traces of former beauty, in spite of many lines, and a sharpening of nose and chin—forerunner of the fatal nutcracker. The tint of her complexion was pale ivory, and her expression both pure and austere. She wore a black velvet dinner gown, which suited the silver glory of her hair so well as to suggest that even saints have their share of vanity.

Although she looked so fragile, her appetite was enormous, but she appeared to eat without enjoyment—rather like a machine crushing fodder which was necessary for the repair of a body worn out by a consuming flame-like spirit. Not only was she a woman of tireless energy, broken by lapses into fierce concentrated meditation, but she adhered to the habits of her early life.

The only child of wealthy parents, Decima Asprey had been at the same school in Germany as Miss Julia Corner; but she was much older than the novelist, and had left to be presented at Court. After one Season only, she grew tired of leading the life of an average Society girl, and went into Retreat, with the idea of becoming a nun. Commonsense prevailed, however, so that she chose a career better suited to her temperament, becoming Matron of a Home for Fallen Women, in a large industrial city.