Portrait of a Murderer

It was the mainspring of their lives. They couldn’t see a young man and a young woman together without suspicion. It’s a horrible disease, and more widespread than you’d ever guess. Ask a neurologist; he’ll tell you. They discovered all manner of things in every kind of home; they seemed to have spies everywhere. They found that no two people crossing a meadow or walking by the river are moral; they learned of second establishments maintained by well-known people, and practically blackmailed them into obscurity. Of course, the thing flourished with the stuff it fed on. They attacked public schools, private houses, hotels; Society, they said, was riddled through and through with this disease. They even issued a magazine full of warnings and anonymous contributions. They quoted stories they’d read and their own experience. They got a lot of correspondence and, of course, a pretty fair circulation among the morbid type. It was a very good advertisement for them. As a pornographic experiment—done in the name of the Lord, if you’ll believe me, with texts on the front cover and gleanings from the Old Testament on the back—it was unique. There was a queer cross of pride in it, of course. They were so bloody moral themselves they meant everyone else to be bloody moral, too. They weren’t going to have other people taking illicit paths to happiness. But if you’d been able to show them that sin had been slain in the night, and we were all as pure as daisies, they’d have been outraged. They knew, you see, they were better than other people, and they weren’t going to share their virtue with the common herd.”

“I remember now, when I was in France—that would be the beginning of 1915—my father began writing me the most extraordinary letters, all on this subject. I supposed he’d heard stories, as people at home seemed to at that time, and didn’t pay much attention to him. I’d no idea anything of this kind was going on. When did it stop? I was back for good in 1917, and he was out of London then.”

“Yes. It was too hot to hold him. The obvious thing happened. This work had become his life; he laboured, slept, ate, and moved in an atmosphere of unhealthy speculation, and one day the society was horrified to hear that one of their foremost directors was himself in the habit of visiting a questionable flat in the Tottenham Court Road. It was the strain, you see, coupled with his own temperament. There’s no need to go into details, but they proved their case. Your father collapsed into the neurotic, sometimes scarcely sane man he’s been for years. He threw up all his London activities and came down here. The basis of his rage and bitterness against society as a whole was in his knowledge of his own failure; he could forgive the world anything but that. He’d failed, been weak—was a ruin rather than a man. And, of course, the incident only increased his feeling about such behaviour in the world at large. That’s why he swore he’d never forgive Brand. That’s why he loathed having him down here.”

“There was no open scandal?”

“The society couldn’t have afforded one. There’d been trouble over the paper already, and it had had to be withdrawn, after a particularly salacious issue. It closed on a very high moral note—the wrong people were buying it, to the pure all things are pure, and so forth. I suppose eventually it died a natural death. No one cared two straws for it except the prurient-minded busybodies who composed it. But your father got worse and worse. He wrote innumerable letters—I’ve read some of them—to the papers on the subject. He said it was the duty of every righteous-minded citizen to disclose anything that came to his ears on this matter. He even went so far as to swear that he wouldn’t spare his own son, if necessary. No man holding a position of trust should be permitted to be anything but a Galahad. And there, Richard, he spoke the truth. He’d have flung you to the lions as readily as he’d have flung any other man’s son. Well, that’s the story. I don’t say it will come out. I hope it won’t. It’s quite ancient history. But I thought you ought to be warned. There are men who have every reason to have a grudge against him.”

And then, disregarding Richard’s look of shock and horror, he proceeded to discuss the terms of the dead man’s will. He had left two-thirds of his property to his elder son, and one-third to his mother, after allowing Amy a legacy of fifty pounds a year. The rest of the family had nothing. He stated that Olivia, through her husband, had profited to the utmost in his lifetime, that Brand had had from him the last help he need ever look for, that Isobel appeared to take no interest in finance, and that he was taking Ruth at her word. This last clause referred to an incident that had taken place a year or so previously, when the Amerys were staying at King’s Poplars. Gray had made one of his most disagreeable scenes, accusing all his relatives of scheming to obtain his money from him before his death. Miles had said nothing; possessing a remarkably cool head and a logical outlook on life, he seldom paid much attention to these storms, but to his surprise Ruth cried out passionately that they at all events never visited the house for what they could get, and didn’t want a penny from the old man here or hereafter.

“She was quite genuine, I’ve no doubt,” Frobisher remarked. “That couple isn’t out for graft, if I’m any judge of human nature.” And to himself he added, “I couldn’t say as much for any of the others, except that wretched married daughter whom they all treat as half-witted.”

Richard said slowly, “I wasn’t aware of the terms