“Oh, she did it all right. Sheer, beastly spite and jealousy, that’s all there was to it. Just because she couldn’t write anything but tripe herself. Harriet Vane’s got the bug all these damned women have got—fancy they can do things. They hate a man and they hate his work. You’d think it would have been enough for her to help and look after a genius like Phil, wouldn’t you? Why, damn it, he used to ask her advice about his work, her advice, good lord!”
“Did he take it?”
“Take it? She wouldn’t give it. Told him she never gave opinions on other authors’ work. Other authors! The impudence of it! Of course she was out of things among us all, but why couldn’t she realise the difference between her mind and his? Of course it was hopeless from the start for Philip to get entangled with that kind of woman. Genius must be served, not argued with. I warned him at the time, but he was infatuated. And then, to want to marry her—”
“Why did he?” asked Wimsey.
“Remains of parsonical upbringing, I suppose. It was really pitiful. Besides, I think that fellow Urquhart did a lot of mischief. Sleek family lawyer—d’you know him?”
“No.”
“He got hold of him—put up to it by the family, I imagine. I saw the influence creeping over Phil long before the real trouble began. Perhaps it’s a good thing he’s dead. It would have been ghastly to watch him turn conventional and settle down.”
“When did this cousin start getting hold of him, then?”
“Oh—about two years ago—a little more, perhaps. Asked him to dinner and that sort of thing. The minute I saw him I knew he was out to ruin Philip, body and soul. What he wanted—what Phil wanted, I mean—was freedom and room to turn about in, but what with the woman and the cousin and the father in the background—oh, well! It’s no use crying about it now. His work is left, and that’s the best part of him. He’s left me that to look after, at least. Harriet Vane didn’t get her finger in that pie, after all.”
“I’m sure it’s absolutely safe in your hands,” said Wimsey.
“But when one thinks what there might have been,” said Vaughan, turning his bloodshot eyes miserably on Lord Peter, “it’s enough to make one cut one’s throat, isn’t it?”
Wimsey expressed agreement.
“By the way,” he said, “you were with him all that last day, till he went to his cousin’s. You don’t think he had anything on him in the way of—poison or anything? I don’t want to seem unkind—but he was unhappy—it would be rotten to think that he—”
“No,” said Vaughan, “no. That I’ll swear he never did. He would have told me—he trusted me in those last days. I shared all his thoughts. He was miserably hurt by that damned woman, but he wouldn’t have gone without telling me or saying goodbye. And besides—he wouldn’t have chosen that way. Why should he? I could have given him—”
He checked himself, and glanced at Wimsey, but, seeing nothing in his face beyond sympathetic attention, went on:
“I remember talking to him about drugs. Hyoscine—veronal—all that sort of thing. He said, ‘If ever I want to go out, Ryland, you’ll show me the way.’ And I would have—if he’d really wanted it. But arsenic! Philip, who loved beauty so much—do you think he would have chosen arsenic?—the suburban poisoner’s outfit? That’s absolutely impossible.”
“It’s not an agreeable sort of thing to take, certainly,” said Wimsey.
“Look here,” said Vaughan, hoarsely and impressively—he had been putting a constant succession of brandies on top of the caviar, and was beginning to lose his reserve—“Look here! See this!” He pulled a small bottle from his breast pocket. “That’s waiting, till I’ve finished editing Phil’s books. It’s a comfort to have it there to look at, you know. Peaceful. Go out through the ivory gate—that’s classical—they brought me up on the classics. These people would laugh at a fellow, but you needn’t tell them I said it—funny, the way it sticks—‘tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore, ulterioris amore’—what’s that bit about the souls thronging thick as leaves in Vallombrosa—no, that’s Milton—‘amorioris ultore—ultoriore—damn it—poor Phil!”
Here Mr. Vaughan burst into tears and patted the little bottle.
Wimsey, whose head and ears were thumping as though he were sitting in an engine room, got up softly and withdrew. Somebody had begun a Hungarian song and the stove was white-hot. He made signals of distress to Marjorie, who was sitting in a corner with a group of men. One of them appeared to be reading his own poems with his mouth nearly in her ear, and another was sketching something on the back of an envelope, to the accompaniment of yelps of merriment from the rest. The noise they made disconcerted the singer, who stopped in the middle of a bar, and cried angrily:
“Ach! this noise! these interruptions! they are intolerable! I lose myself! Stop! I begin all over again, from the beginning.”
Marjorie sprang up, apologising.
“I’m a brute—I’m not keeping your menagerie in order, Nina—we’re being perfect nuisances. Forgive me, Marya, I’m in a bad temper. I’d better pick up Peter and toddle away. Come and sing to me another day, darling, when I’m feeling better and there is more room for my feelings to expand. Good night, Nina—we’ve enjoyed it frightfully and, Boris, that poem’s the best thing you’ve done, only I couldn’t hear it properly. Peter, tell them what a rotten mood I’m in tonight and take me home.”
“That’s right,” said Wimsey, “nervy, you know—bad effect on the manners and so on.”
“Manners,” said a bearded gentleman suddenly and loudly, “are for the bourgeois.”
“Quite right,” said Wimsey. “Beastly bad form, and gives you repressions in the whatnot. Come on, Marjorie, or we shall all be getting polite.”
“I begin again,” said the singer, “from the beginning.”
“Whew!” said Wimsey, on the staircase.
“Yes, I know. I think I’m a perfect martyr to put
