heap.’
‘I’ve been talking for hours,’ announced Mrs Bradley to Felicity. ‘How ill-natured one is always tempted to be when one gossips! The dear doctor was thus tempted. He fell.’
‘Did he?’ said Felicity. She laughed. ‘Poor old thing! He loves to be malicious. Who was the victim this time?’
‘Mrs Savile.’ She lowered her small, thin body carefully into a deck-chair and arranged her sulphur and green voile frock.
‘You mean Lulu Hirst,’ said Felicity, sitting on the grass and gazing up into Mrs Bradley’s shrewd yellow face.
‘Do I? That’s what the doctor seemed anxious to impress upon me.’
‘What is?’
‘That I meant Lulu Hirst. But I’ve worked it out logically. Would you care to hear the conclusions?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Felicity politely.
‘What is your own opinion of the young person?’ Mrs Bradley enquired.
‘I can’t stand any of them up at the Cottage,’ said Felicity. ‘They are such a queer crowd. Of course, one can understand Cleaver Wright. He is an artist.’
‘But I thought personal peculiarities as part of an artist’s stock-in-trade had gone sadly out of fashion,’ demurred Mrs Bradley. ‘Where does he come from?’
‘Somewhere in London.’
‘And now he lives in the Cottage on the Hill. Did he give it that name? No? I thought not. That was the always-correct Mr Savile’s choice, wasn’t it? Yes? I thought so. And Lulu –’
‘Surnamed the Unspeakable,’ muttered Felicity darkly.
Mrs Bradley gave a sinister chuckle.
‘How extraordinarily interesting!’ she observed.
‘I don’t think it is interesting,’ said Felicity through her teeth. ‘I think she’s a little cat!’
‘That’s where you are entirely wrong, child,’ said Mrs Bradley very seriously. ‘However, we will go into that later. I was about to remark that Lulu, in actual fact, is Mr Savile’s wife.’
‘Then why doesn’t she say so, and have done with it?’ was Felicity’s spirited demand.
‘For the simple reason, child, that Savile, a man of average prosperity and under no obligation financially to labour for his bread, likes to consider himself a painter. The craze for defying convention, I seem to remember, was still rife in the quarter of London from which he came, and therefore I imagine he considered it highly improper to be shackled by the matrimonial tie. To such an apostle of free thought, free love, and, I darkly suspect, free food and drink at the expense of other and more indigent people, the idea of marriage convention would be singularly distasteful. But there is another side to his nature. He is in the most startling sense a rigid pedant. Therefore, as he knows the average person still looks upon the state of matrimony as a reasonable preliminary to cohabitation with a member of the opposite sex, he went through the form of marriage with Lulu Hirst according to the requirements of English law, and such law would unhesitatingly recognize them as man and wife. But once this enterprising fellow had compromised with the law of the land, his next intention was to effect a compromise with that of his immediate circle. Therefore he and his wife mutually agreed that Lulu should retain her maiden name of Hirst, and the awful secret that they had been branded with the matrimonial iron was to remain locked in their bosoms. Savile desired that Chelsea or Bloomsbury or Chiswick or wherever it is should not look down upon him. He must save his soul – and, of course, his face; a thing of far greater importance to most of us!’
She cackled with pleasure at the picture she had conjured up. Felicity smiled politely.
‘Thus,’ Mrs Bradley continued, ‘
She shook her head sadly.
‘There are none as despotically governed as the lawless,’ she observed tritely. ‘There are none as absurdly shackled by taboo and convention as those who desire to be free of these things. We change our masters; but it is as slaves we live and die.’
With grace, strength, and precision, Aubrey Harringay cleared the gooseberry bushes like a steeplechaser and came up beside Felicity.
‘Well, child,’ said Mrs Bradley. Aubrey smiled engagingly at her, but addressed himself to the girl.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been having a squizz at your dust-heap, as I said I would.’
‘But it
‘Horrid. Yes,’ Aubrey agreed absently, glancing down at his flannels. ‘I say,’ he added unexpectedly, ‘What does your pater do with his false teeth?’
‘But he hasn’t false teeth!’ cried Felicity, bewildered.
‘No, I thought he hadn’t,’ remarked Aubrey. He smiled amiably at them both and walked serenely away, leaving Mrs Bradley with a curious expression on her sharp-featured, sardonic face, and Felicity staring after him in perplexity.
Suddenly Mrs Bradley laughed. Her own teeth were even, strong, and white – the teeth of a relentless beast of prey; a creature tigerish, carnivorous, untamed.
‘But why the country?’ she said to herself. ‘Curious!’
CHAPTER VII
I
THE Bishop of Culminster sighed heavily and inspected his left leg. The leg, shapely, well gaitered, neat, and infinitely episcopal, satisfied his anxious scrutiny. He inspected his right leg.
‘I do wish, Reginald,’ said Mrs Bryce Harringay, with pardonable asperity, ‘that you would Hurry Up. The car has been at the door now for twenty minutes.’
The bishop smiled benignly upon her, but groaned in spirit. A long drive in the car with his autocratic sister- in-law was, in his opinion, a poor way of spending a lovely June day.
‘I am more than ready, my dear Constance,’ he observed, following her down the steps and out to the waiting vehicle.
Mrs Bryce Harringay snorted and, climbing in, settled herself comfortably against the upholstery of Rupert Sethleigh’s Bentley car.
‘And where is Rupert?’ enquired the bishop, as the car, handled by Rupert Sethleigh’s chauffeur, started off with some of the bishop’s gravel path rattling under the mudguards. ‘Could he not find time to accompany you?’
‘It is about Rupert that I wish to speak to you.’ Mrs Bryce Harringay paused. It was a thousand pities to miss a chance of being really dramatic. ‘Rupert,’ she announced after due consideration, ‘Rupert has disappeared.’
‘Disappeared? Rupert? But – I mean – that doesn’t sound like Rupert. It isn’t at all the sort of thing Rupert would do,’ observed the bishop mildly. ‘I can’t imagine it. People like Rupert don’t disappear. Absconding clerks and company promoters, perhaps, but not Rupert. Oh, dear, no.’
Mrs Bryce Harringay turned wrathfully upon him.
‘I am tired, Reginald, of being told absurd things about Rupert. Anyone is liable to disappear. It isn’t anything disgraceful! As a matter of fact, we thought at first that he might have gone to America.’
‘I should hardly have thought that going to America came under the heading of Disappearance, you know,’ remarked the bishop thoughtfully.
Mrs Bryce Harringay turned upon him the gaze she kept for those suspected of trying to be humorous at her expense, but the bishop’s expansive urbanity disarmed her.
‘We have had the police! We have endured the Press! The house has been ransacked! The garden-beds have been both photographed and trampled upon! This morning the lodge gates were besieged – literally
