Portrait of a Murderer Read online

  Miles looked troubled. “You seriously think it may be dangerous for Laura to remain with him? That’s a very grave charge.”

  “I’m not charging him with anything. You lawyers always want to see things go wrong. That’s your livelihood.”

  “We shouldn’t be human if we didn’t watch after our bread as strenuously as anyone else,” Miles pointed out tranquilly.

  “I only say he seems to me unbalanced. Look at the enormous expense and trouble to which he’s going to get this title. And would he do such a thing just for Brand’s boy to inherit it later on? Richard’s usually so self-contained. I’ve never seen him like this, and in his present mood he may be capable of any enormity.”

  Miles said, “Could you persuade him to see a doctor?”

  “He wouldn’t listen to anything I said. You perhaps…”

  Miles looked dubious and said he would try, but he had little hopes of success.

  II

  Richard meanwhile was furiously repeating the result of the interview to an indifferent Laura. When he had finished, she said, thoughtfully, turning the magnificent marquise ring round and round on her finger, “Do you suppose that was final?”

  “I should think, whether he realised it or not, he spoke the truth when he said he hadn’t got a penny. It’s the end for him all right, if the City gossips are to be trusted. The end for Eustace too, and for us. The end of years of work and ambition. I’ve subordinated everything to my career, and this is what I reap. I lose everything—my health, position, money, security, natural tastes, liberty—all gone in a single hour.”

  “It seems quite ridiculous that we failed to realise it earlier,” was Laura’s unexpected reply.

  “Failed to realise…?”

  “I mean, that the whole of our effort and ability to possess something can be lost so easily. If it had been something else more stable, more worth while—well, we might have failed, but we shouldn’t have to admit that we’d lost everything. There’d have been the pleasure we should have got out of the labour, and the delight of meeting sympathetic minds. As it is we’ve nothing. Except time. We’ve still, fortunately, quite a lot of that.”

  “Time?” repeated Richard foolishly, staring at her.

  “Yes. To begin something else. I suppose, if what you say is true, it means exposure—you’ll fall out of favour—we shall have to begin something else. Let’s choose something better next time.”

  Richard seemed at length to grasp her meaning. “Exposure?” he exclaimed. “Kindly refrain from speaking as if I were a common thief. I’m not Eustace. Exposure may very well mean ruin of a criminal kind for him. I have done nothing illegal.”

  “I apologise. I misunderstood you. But at all events you do admit that it means farewell to the peerage. If, as you say, l’affaire Eustace will shortly become publicity for the Sunday Press, your name is sure to be mentioned. And your father’s. You may have had nothing to do with him, but the descriptions on the hoardings won’t be satisfied with ‘Financier.’ They’ll come out in all the glory of ‘Famous M.P.’s brother-in-law,’ etc.”

  “A lot you care that my hopes should be defeated,” he accused her.

  “Not much,” she acknowledged calmly. “But, Richard, if only you could take a detached view, see the—the insignificance of it all. A thing that can tumble to pieces so easily is never a safe structure, or one worth wasting all one’s life on. It rests simply on money, which is an asset more liable to chance than anything I know. It takes into no account work or idealism or aspiration—it’s a mere wastage of life. I can even be glad for this opportunity to realise the truth. And there are so many things we’ve never even considered that bring satisfaction of themselves, quite apart from rewards.”

  She seemed, as she turned to him with an ardour he found foreign to her and of which he could not in this connection approve, to have sprung into a new life and colour, a vivacity and gaiety with which he had not for twelve years associated her. As easily might he have expected to see a dead branch put out green buds before his eyes.

  He exclaimed feebly, deprived of spirit by her warmth, “What things do you mean?”

  They were so clear to her own mind; the hopes she had cherished as a girl, the lofty ambitions of youth, their bare memory irradiated and refreshed her, though she was approaching the middle years and long ago had left youth behind her. Nevertheless, she flushed with pure joy to contemplate them; experiencing a stimulus she had never known during the careful colourless years of her wifehood.

  Richard astounded her, breaking into her thoughts, by a sudden return to his most dignified and unapproachable displeasure.

  “It is a disadvantage to any man in public life to have a wife who is entirely uninterested in his aims.”

  “It’s not precisely that, Richard, but they don’t seem worth all your work and energy. It seems to me rather humiliating for you to spend so much attention on them.”

  Richard watched her steadily, one hand fidgeting with a book he had picked up from the table. His eyes had a peculiar trick of appearing much lighter when he was angry. Now they were almost colourless.

  “I understand. Nevertheless, contemptible as it must appear to you, I do not propose to relinquish my position so lightly. I had hoped at one time that your brothers might see fit to use their influence, but unfortunately they have forfeited their opportunities. They have to be regarded as something less than a forlorn hope.”

  “Quite forlorn,” Laura agreed. “Alastair wouldn’t consider promotion ought to go by favour, even before he changed his political views. And Philip would be just as unhelpful.”

  She moved to the dressing-table, took up a silver-backed brush, and smoothed a strand of red hair that had become disarranged. A sense of amazement filled her. Was this all that portentous dignity concealed, this childish battle for place? Was his armour truly nothing but silver paper and cardboard? She saw life as a landscape stretching into the distance, with no enclosing walls or comfortable house with doors that locked to keep the pilgrim within; and Richard strove to make it secure, narrow, and exclusive. The absurd passion of his last words hung upon the air, deafening her ears and deadening her heart. He was, after all, in earnest. One should feel compassion, not this sense of chill disgust. To him it did matter so much.

  4. Olivia

  I

  Eustace Moore, who married Olivia Gray, was frequently described as a bounder, but he bounded with so admirable a discretion that this peculiarity on his part was nearly always overlooked. He was a man with a vast acquaintance. When he entered any public building—a restaurant, lecture-hall, or bar—he was instantly hailed by several voices. He was an energetic and, in some ways, a mischievous man; his conceit of himself was so great it overleaped all obstacles in his mind before he had approached a problem, so that these obstacles seldom existed by the time he set to work. His imagination was his weakest point. A man given to wild gambles himself, he had neither understanding nor patience to spare for those who feared such risks. He had his finger in a great many pies and possessed an enviable treasury of commercial tips. He sometimes boasted that he could gauge any man’s financial standing at the end of half an hour’s conversation. In appearance he was short, neat-waisted, clean-shaved, dark, and well dressed. He had very small, beautiful hands and feet and brown eyes, and a smile of great charm and subtlety. He paid a great deal of attention to his finger-nails and hands. He had married Olivia because she represented the world in which he was not at that time altogether at ease. He was under no illusions as to her family, that he considered unintelligent, short-sighted, and snobbish. They possessed, however, an inherent elegance and suavity that in himself had to be acquired. The type of woman in London Society whom he preferred, refused to consider him in marriage, and he had realised quite early that his only chance was to marry quietly a girl of breeding and, if possible, a little fortune, who would do him credit and a
ttract people by her bearing as his hostess. His circle was not enthusiastic as to his choice, Olivia seeming aloof and cold. But that other circle that he proposed to enter contained better judges. Eustace did himself quite definite good by his marriage. After that event, Olivia for some years saw very little of her relations, Eustace being convinced that they would all try to borrow money off him. Olivia speedily worked up a reputation for being smart and amusing; she contributed bright Society chat to some of the larger weeklies, with very shiny paper and a great many photographs of the right people. These generally took the form of letters beginning “Cherry sweetest,” or “My darling Babs,” and were described as “devastating.” Eustace was proud of her ability to attract the right kind of attention and to make money on her own account. It seemed to him unusual to combine these qualities with the appearance and manners of a lady and a placid tolerance of his own uxoriousness, that was pronounced even in public, when he could not refrain from touching her shoulder or arm, or allowing his body by apparent accident to come into contact with hers.

  As to Olivia’s relations, Eustace thought them a poor lot. Richard was suspicious, stand-offish, and proud without any reason that Eustace could discover. Miles he affected to dislike—did, indeed, dislike, with the petty, uncomfortable jealousy of the man who senses his own inferiority. Their relations on the surface were cordial, but they met seldom. Miles, Eustace would remind himself, was younger, poorer, nothing to look at, had no ambitions worth mentioning; he had married a younger daughter and had obtained no dowry with her; Ruth Amery could not even give him sons. There were two little girls who never came down to King’s Poplars, and Ruth was not a Society figure, being short and dimpled and quite unfashionably dressed. When her children were babies, she had often wheeled them out herself, because the Amerys could not afford an adequate staff; so that, all things considered, it was absurd for Eustace to feel that Miles was his superior. And, in spite of everything, that sensation persisted. Naturally they met seldom.

  Brand, oddly enough, was an asset. Eustace would say casually, “That’s the devil of these old families. Inter-marry with their own kin till the blood’s no thicker than water. Look at that brother-in-law of mine, now. Hardly any better than a cretin. Earns about four pounds a week in some bloody little office in Kingsway, and, of course, they’re the most fertile class of the community.”

  Olivia, fortunately, did not possess a very high standard. She could compare her home, her jewels, her clothes, her afternoons, her amusements, her car, and her children with those of other people and find them superior. She seriously matched her work against Brand’s “studies” (because to her his canvases were never complete) and preen herself on her better art. She spoke of her own work as literature, with her tongue in its normal place, between her teeth. She admired the lithe, crafty, smooth sons of Eustace Moore, who were already aware of what constituted real values, and seriously debated with their father the commercial value of a University education.

  “You meet a queer lot of fellows up there these days,” Monty would say. “Don’t know that it’s worth your expense, Dad.”

  “They have money if they haven’t breeding,” said Eustace shrewdly. “You don’t often find the two together. But they’re both worth plucking.”

  East of Oxford Circus, Eustace was regarded with a certain wariness; he was the director of a number of concerns, with a probing and energetic finger in many others. His companies were in a minority in declaring large dividends shortly after their inauguration. Shareholders had the option of drawing these or of allowing them to accrue with the original capital. About eighty per cent chose the latter course; the remaining twenty took their dividends and recommended the shares as an excellent investment to their friends. Eustace contrived quite a good connection by means of that smile and generally pleasing manner, that so much appealed to women. He was not actually attracted by them, particularly by the young, who he considered on the whole lacked the decorum and good manners he had admired in a previous generation. But he was nothing if not practical, and he suffered familiarities of speech and gesture that were personally obnoxious to him, when the speaker was possessed of private means, and he saw a reasonably good hope of persuading some of these into his companies, and so into his purse. But he retained to the last all his race’s strong family sense, and, apart from his wife, he shrank from physical contacts.

  The crisis that had arisen this Christmastide was as unexpected as it was crucial. A nameless traveller of no significance, returning from some distant place where Eustace (and his shareholders) had interests, began to speak freely in mixed company of the impracticability of Eustace’s proposals in certain connections. He chanced to do this in the presence of one of the shareholders, a truculent fellow, who instantly called him to order. The traveller, unaccustomed to being hectored or contradicted, made something in the nature of a scene. The petty disagreement spread, and other shareholders heard of the nameless man’s views and were inclined to be impressed by them. As a result of letters he received from strangers, Mr. Plant wrote to certain organs of the Press, putting into forcible language his view of the morality and general character of a man who would attempt to hoodwink harmless persons and deprive them of their savings. Everyone expected Eustace to start a libel action, and when he sat tight and did nothing, a miniature panic sprang up. Each man, eager to be before his fellows, gave orders to his broker to dispose of his shares. These became a glut on the market, and fell to next to nothing. In an attempt to dispel public suspicion, Eustace ostentatiously bought up these shares as they touched bottom prices, and encouraged a report that Plant was a person well known to him and receiving handsome payments for spreading his story. He was not, however, very successful. The first man who had the temerity to go to Plant direct with this version was sent home minus a front tooth, and only Plant’s inability to lay hands on evidence against Eustace, who was careful to commit nothing to writing, stopped him from bringing an action. There were more rumours, and scandal raised an ugly head. Even Eustace’s boys heard of it and wrote their father urgent letters quoting little snivelling nonentities among their school-mates whose parents were being ruined by this hanky-panky, and imploring him to scotch the story before their own reputation went. Matters assumed a gravity of which Eustace in his most pessimistic moods had never dreamed. He hastily convened a board meeting of the directors of the doomed company, and, white-faced and alarmed, they consulted with one another as to what had best be done. There were not many of them, and the majority were smallish men whom Eustace had selected as likely to be sharp enough to be of use, but not sufficiently astute to work for their own ends. It was agreed that it was necessary to raise ten thousand pounds at once, if criminal proceedings were to be avoided. Eustace had no doubt at all as to the result of such a course; he would be committed and sentenced, and at best would get five years. Besides, there were his sons to think of.

  It was, therefore, necessary to put the position with brutal clearness, not to say crudity, to his father-in-law, who, by a skilful manipulation of the facts, could be made to appear a partner in the dishonesty. This point of view had not occurred to Adrian. Eustace brought to the distasteful interview an air of jaunty cynicism, concealing alarm, assuming in the older man a knowledge of speculative procedure that he must have realised Gray did not possess. No man with even half the knowledge with which Eustace prepared to credit him would have allowed so large a proportion of his private means to lie within the younger man’s grasp. When Gray, at length perceiving the position, broke into a paroxysm of mingled horror and rage, Eustace treated him with an impatient levity.

  “Come, come, sir,” he admonished him, “this kind of thing helps neither of us. It’s too late now to pretend to an innocence no jury would believe you to possess. The obvious point that you were coolly drawing these high dividends at a time when men are thankful for a mere three and a half per cent would attract suspicion. And how do you suppose it will improve Ric
hard’s prospects to have a father in the dock for wilful fraud?”

  There he touched Gray on his one human spot. He had never cared for any of his later children, but this first-born held such of his heart as was not occupied with his financial affairs. Nevertheless, he faced up to Eustace with commendable forcefulness.

  “I’m not a child, to be scared by bogeys,” he told him.

  “Nor a child to be acquitted on facts that even a child would hesitate to accept,” Eustace retorted. “I implore you, sir, to view the position squarely, and see your own liability, in the eyes of the public if not of the law or of your own. Who is going to believe we weren’t hand in glove? Not a British jury, I assure you, and though you might, through a lack of evidence, be acquitted on the main charge, your reputation will stink in the nostrils of all honest men.” Eustace could produce with the fine melodramatic flourish of his race just these high-sounding clichés that infuriated Gray, the more because he realised the truth of them.

  Nevertheless, he clung stubbornly to his refusal to part with a penny to see his son-in-law through his unpleasant crisis. In vain did Eustace cajole, bully, threaten.

  “Do you suppose I don’t know why you want this money?” Gray was goaded into exclaiming before the wretched undignified conversation came to a close. “You want to get hold of my cash and vanish with it out of the way of the law and set up your web somewhere else.”

  Eustace, trembling with passion, retorted, “Very ingenious suggestion on your part, sir. And do you expect anyone to believe that a man so astute as that didn’t know what he was doing when he put thirty thousand pounds into my companies?”