He was perfectly polite, however; assured me in a tone of the utmost sincerity that the story about himself and Margaret Harrison was entirely unfounded, and referred me back to Lathom for evidence as to my father’s state of mind in the week preceding his death.
Finding myself quite unable to penetrate this polished surface of propriety, I took my leave. The manner of both men left me in no doubt that there was something to conceal, but I could get no farther than a moral certainty.
Mrs. Cutts seemed to offer the best hope of information, but I could not as yet reconcile myself to handling so dirty a tool. It occurred to me that it might possibly be worth while to get hold of Miss Milsom. I was not at all clear in my mind that her madness might not have some method in it.
At first I could not think how to trace her. I could have asked Margaret Harrison, of course, but I did not want to do that. Finally, I decided to call on the local padre, the Rev. Theodore Perry, and see if he knew where his lost sheep had strayed to.
I knew him well, of course, and it did not seem unnatural that I should ask after the welfare of a woman who had been for some time in my father’s employment. I sandwiched the question in, in the course of a casual conversation, and he told me at once what he knew.
“Poor woman, I’m afraid she is not altogether normal. One hopes it is only a passing phase. I don’t quite know where she is—one of these nursing-homes of the modern sort, I think. Her sister, Mrs. Farebrother, would be able to tell you. No, I don’t suppose they are very well off. The fees in these places are high. In the days of faith—or superstition, if you like—a convent or a béguinage would have provided the proper asylum for such a case, with some honest work to do and a harmless emotional outlet—but nowadays they make you pay for everything, not only your pleasures.”
He gave me Mrs. Farebrother’s address, and I said I would see what could be done. He smiled at me in a futile, clerical way, and said it would be a work of charity.
I left him, feeling anything but charitable, and went to see Mrs. Farebrother. She seemed to be a good, honest, sensible woman, worried by family and financial cares, and accepted gratefully my suggestion of a small pension, during the period that her sister might be requiring medical care.
The interview with Agatha Milsom was a painful one to me. The woman is undoubtedly quite unbalanced, with a disagreeable sex-antagonism at the bottom of her mania. According to her, my father had treated his wife with abominable cruelty, and I was obliged to listen for a long time to her rambling accusations. The name of John Munting roused her to such excitement that I was afraid she would make herself ill; unfortunately, I could get nothing reliable out of her. For one thing, she was obsessed with the idea that he had had designs upon her maiden modesty, and for another, many of her statements were so ludicrous that they cast suspicion over the rest.
As regards my father, however, I obtained one thing. I suggested that her memory of certain domestic incidents might be at fault, and in proof of her assertions she promised to get back from her sister, and send to me, all the letters she had written home during the previous two years.
It seemed to me that, since her mental deterioration had come on only gradually, the letters written at the time might possibly be considered to attain a reasonable level of accuracy. She kept her promise, and from this correspondence I selected the letters of relevant date, and these are the documents included in this dossier. It will be seen that great allowance must be made for bias; that much conceded, the statements may, I think, be accepted as having a basis in fact.
I need not say how distressing they were to me. They cast a light upon the miserable domestic conditions which my father had had to endure. I regretted most bitterly that I had taken over that work in Central Africa, thus leaving him to the undiluted companionship of a selfish, discontented wife and a semi-demented and vulgar woman. My father was not the man to go abroad for the sympathy he could not find at home, and it was no wonder that he had welcomed the acquaintanceship of two young men who could, at least, make some pretence of entering into his interests.
But the thing which emerged from the letters with startling illumination was the intimate footing upon which Lathom had stood with the whole household. As may be seen by the few letters included above, my father was by no means a gossipy correspondent, and I had not realised that Lathom had become so much of a tame cat about the drawing-room. I had thought of him as being my father’s friend almost entirely, and I believe that my father himself took that view, and, wittingly or unwittingly, gave me that impression. But it now seemed clear to me that this was not so, and that, what with my father’s innocent pleasure in the apparent admiration and friendliness of this brilliant young man, and what with the perverse misconception of the wretched Agatha Milsom, we had all been “led up the garden,” as the expression is.
I saw now why both Lathom and Munting, standing by one another in a conspiracy of silence, had been able to deny with such obvious sincerity that there had ever been an undue
