“I bet she means Lowry, horrid, fat old pig!” declared my beloved. “He looks just that sort of man.”
“I plump for Burt,” I said. “A noted atheist and a nasty-minded fellow if ever there was one. Burt would make nothing of twisting girls’ necks. He used to beat Cora, you know. I don’t wonder they had a dust-up.”
“He doesn’t gave you the shudders, anyway, as Lowry does,” said Daphne, “and girls like Cora don’t mind being whacked. They like their husbands to be rough with them.”
Personally, I have always considered this Ethel M. Dell stuff to be a myth, but Daphne did not give me time to argue. She lowered her voice, and looked hastily over her shoulder. Then she said in my ear —it tickled me a bit, of course:—
“You know the Adj. thinks it was either Uncle or Sir William, don’t you? The baby business, I mean. She thinks Meg and the Lowrys wouldn’t show it because of the resemblance.”
“Your aunt is mad,” I said, softly but with considerable heartiness. “I say, Daphne, come over to Clyton with me when I go to see Candy. You could wait in the public library for me, couldn’t you? We could have tea together in a little teashop I know of, and anyway there would be the journey both ways. It takes about an hour and three quarters because the connections are so frightfully bad, so we’d get at least four hours together, one way and another.”
We fixed it up and then went up to our separate beds. I was longing for my marriage. I wondered how long I would have to wait.
Three days later I got permission to visit Candy and we set off. I left Daphne in the magazine and periodicals department of the public library and went to the prison by tram. The prison lay about a mile and a half outside the town. Candy seemed quite pleased to see me, but shut up like a clam as soon as I began trying to talk business. He looked a bit pale, but quite well, I thought, and talked hopefully about the trial.
“They’ll have to let me off,” he kept saying, twisting his hands together, “because I never done it, see? They can’t hang me if I never done it! That aren’t the law, Mr. Wells, that aren’t.”
“But look here, Candy, old fellow,” I said, desperately anxious not to put the wind up the poor chap, of course, but just as keen not to let Mrs. Bradley down, “they may think you did do it. And, look here, Candy, there are some very rich and clever people interested in you, and they’re going to get you off, but they can’t do it unless you tell
He sat there as dumb as the Mona Lisa, and looking about as soft, and the way he kept twisting his fingers got on my nerves. He wouldn’t say a word, so, at last, knowing that time was passing, I determined to try a bold shot. I leaned forward and said in my sternest rebuke-of-the-old-Adam tone, which, in a priest, of course, amounts to about the same thing as an army officer’s parade voice:
“Why don’t you confess that you spent the evening with the murdered girl?”
He jumped so suddenly that I jumped too.
“You—!” he said. “It weren’t the evening, damn you, it were only the afternoon!”
“Everybody knows about it, Bob,” I said, gently, hoping that the lie would be forgiven me. “So why don’t you make a clean breast of it? It was in the
“I didn’t do it, I tell you! I didn’t do it!” he said.
“I know you didn’t, you fool!” I said, trying a little savaging. “But what chance do you give anybody, if you won’t tell the truth?”
He licked his lips. A muscle at the side of his jaw twitched and twitched.
“Here you are, then,” he said sullenly. “I didn’t have no heart to go to the fete, and I knew we wouldn’t be busy at the Arms until the evening, so I get Mr. Lowry to give me the morning and afternoon off, and I promise to be back by six. Well, we open at half-past six, see, and they chaps at the fete be getting thirsty by then. I get away to Little Hartley, because I told the vicar I didn’t want to play in that there old cricket match against Much Hartley, and I wander about the woods and the common, and have a bit of dinner I brought along, and in the afternoon I sneak back to Saltmarsh to see Meg, and have a few things out with her. I have no chance before to talk to the poor maid because Mrs. Lowry was always for keeping me away. Afeared I’d do her a cruel turn, I do suppose,” added Bob, his face darkening.
“Did she say that?” I asked. He shook his head.
“No. Her would always say maid was too bad, or too tired, or was asleep, or was suckling, or some excuse, to keep me from her.”
“Then you didn’t see Meg to speak to from the time the child was born until August Bank Holiday?” I asked.
“That’s in the way of it,” he answered. “Anyway, I knowed the master and missus and all the gals and men ’ud be at the fete in the afternoon, so, with them thinking I was away to a day’s holiday on my own, I could see it were my chance to get speech with Meg. I wasn’t going to frit the poor maid; only ask she, pleasant-like, who was her fancy chap, and did she prefer him to I, and suchlike. But not rancorious, Mr. Wells…” He looked at me pleadingly, but I said nothing at all, so at last he continued:
“Well, Meg looked proper frit when I walked in. Her was white and looked weary. Couldn’t see nothing of babby. Her had it too close and all covered up not to have its looks give nawthen away, I reckon.
“ ‘Why, Bob,’ her says in a whisper, ‘How be?’
“ ‘I be fine,’ I says, ‘How be you?’
“ ‘I be all right,’ her says, ‘Oh, Bob, have ee come to upbraid me? Don’t ee upbraid me, Bob, nor yet miscall me, my dear,’ her says, ‘for I can’t abide no hard words, I be that weak. And don’t ee ask Babby’s surname, neither,’ her says. So we set and talk, and at last her says:
“ ‘I do know I lost ee for good and all, Bob,’ her says, ‘but do ee lay thy face down on pillow beside me, and give me a bit of comfort, my dear.’
“So I lays down my head on pillow, ah, and body, too, on top of quilt, and puts arm over she, having took off collar and tie for comfort first.”
