in sight.
‘Georgina is nowhere in sight,’ she said anxiously.
‘You’ve sent her off; well, she’s gone off,’ Laurence said. ‘Stop jittering. Relax. Read your book. There’s too much talking.’
‘Which way did she go?’ Helena said.
‘Downstream, by the towpath,’ said Caroline.
‘Silence,’ said Laurence. ‘Let nothing disturb thee,’ he chanted, ‘nothing affright thee, all things are passing… .
‘God never changeth,’ Helena continued, surprised that he had remembered the words.
The Baron was examining a map. ‘I should be back just after four,’ he said. ‘Will that do?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Laurence. ‘Kindly depart.’
‘The Abbey is on the other side of the river,—’ said the Baron, ‘but there’s a bridge two miles down. I shall be back just after four.’
He set off with his jacket trailing over his arm. Lazily, they watched him until he was out of sight round a bend.
‘I wonder why he wants to see the Abbey,’ said Helena, ‘it isn’t an exceptional place, nothing architecturally speaking.’
‘He’s looking for a man he believes is staying at the Abbey. A man called Mervyn Hogarth,’ Caroline said deliberately.
Helena looked startled. ‘Mervyn Hogarth! Does Willi know him then?’
‘By hearsay,’ Caroline said.
‘That’s the father of the young man who was cured,—’ Helena said. ‘Has Mr Hogarth become a Catholic, I wonder?’
‘The Baron thinks,’ Caroline said, ‘that he is a magician. ‘The Baron believes that Mervyn Hogarth is the leader of a Black Mass circle and that he’s staying at the Abbey under the guise of a retreatant, but really on purpose to steal the consecrated Host.’
‘Oh how frightful, oh how frightful!—’
‘The Baron has a kink,’ Laurence put in.
‘Exactly,’ said Caroline.
‘It does sound a far-fetched story,’ Helena said. ‘There’s nothing in it, you think?’
‘Nothing at all,’ Caroline said. ‘I should be surprised if he found Mervyn Hogarth at the Abbey. And more surprised if his suspicions were true.’
‘It would be dreadful if they were true,’ Helena said. ‘But why should Willi Stock be troubled if they were; does he intend to expose the man?’
‘No, he intends to write a monograph.’
Caroline put the palms of her hands out to the sun to get them browned.
‘He thinks he is aloof from the subject of black magic, merely interested. Whereas he is passionately attracted to it. “My nature,”‘ she quoted, ‘“is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. Pity me then… .”‘
‘Willi always has been eccentric,’ Helena remarked.
‘Part of his cultivated Englishness,’ said Laurence.
‘It will be interesting,’ Helena said, ‘to hear what he says when he comes back.’
‘Don’t mention what I’ve told you,’ Caroline said, ‘he’s touchy, poor Willi.’
She felt a sweet pleasure in her words, ‘Poor Willi!’ They soothed her resentment of the Baron’s ‘Poor Caroline!’ with which he must have ended many an afternoon’s session at Charing Cross Road. Especially with Helena was she pleased to discredit the Baron. Sometimes Helena would inquire gently of Caroline if she was quite happy — nothing worrying her? From which Caroline was sensitive to assume that the Baron had been talking. In fact, Helena had discouraged the Baron’s gossip. One day in the early spring he had asked her plainly, ‘Is it all off between Laurence and Caroline?’
‘No, I don’t think so. They are waiting.—’
‘For what? My dear, they are not chicks,’ said the Baron.
‘I suppose Caroline wants to get her book off her hands. But I don’t know their business at all really. I wish they would do something definite, but there it is.’
‘Caroline’s “book”,—’ he said; ‘do you mean the book she is writing or the one in which she lives?’
‘Now, Willi! Caroline is not a silly girl. She did have a little upset and imagined things, I know. And then there was the accident. But since that time she’s recovered wonderfully.’
‘Nonsense. Caroline is perfectly sane. What’s going to win the Lincoln, do you think, Willi?—’
And so, occasionally, when Helena asked Caroline, ‘Quite happy now, dear?’ or ‘Nothing worrying you?’ Caroline would be unhappy and worrying about these inquiries.
