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Page 23
"The selfishness! Just look at the inconvenience--the upset--the
suffering to his relations and the worry for all of us. All our
plans must be altered--everything upset, life for the moment
turned upside down--a woman's heart broken very likely--and all
for a piece of disobedient folly. Such things make one out of tune
with Providence. They oughtn't to happen. They don't happen in
Yorkshire. Devonshire appears to be a slacker's county. It's the
air, I shouldn't wonder."
"Education, and law and order, and the discipline inculcated in the
Navy ought to have prevented this," continued Fayre-Michell. "Who
ever heard of a sailor disobeying--except Nelson?"
"He's paid, poor fellow," said his niece, who walked beside him.
"We have all paid," declared the north countryman. "We have all
paid the price; and the price has been a great deal of suffering
and discomfort and stress of mind that we ought not have been
called upon to endure. One resents such things in a stable world."
"Well, I'm not going to church, anyway. I must smoke for my nerves.
I'm a psychic myself, and I react to a thing of this sort," replied
Fayre-Michell.
From a distant stile between two fields Mr. Travers, some hundred
yards ahead, was waving directions and pointing to the left.
"Go to Jericho!" snapped Mr. Handford, but not loud enough for
Ernest Travers to hear him.
A little ring of bells throbbed thin music. It rose and fell on
the easterly breeze and a squat grey tower, over which floated a
white ensign on a flagstaff, appeared upon a little knoll of trees
in the midst of the village of Chadlands.
Presently the bells stopped, and the flag was brought down to
half-mast. Mr. Travers had reached the church.
"A maddening sort of man," said Miles Handford, who marked these
phenomena. "Be sure Sir Walter never told him to do anything of
that sort. He has taken it upon himself--a theatrical mind. If
I were the vicar--"
Elsewhere Dr. Mannering heard what Henry Lennox could tell him as
they returned to the manor house together. He displayed very deep
concern combined with professional interest. He recalled the story
that Sir Walter had related on the previous night.
"Not a shadow of evidence--a perfectly healthy little woman; and
it will be the same here as sure as I'm alive," he said. "To think--
we shot side by side yesterday, and I remarked his fine physique
and wonderful high spirits--a big, tough fellow. How's poor Mary?"
"She is pretty bad, but keeping her nerve, as she would be sure to
do," declared the other.
Sir Walter was with his daughter when Mannering arrived. The
doctor had been a crony of the elder for many years. He was about
the average of a country physician--a hard-bitten, practical man
who loved his profession, loved sport, and professed conservative
principles. Experience stood in place of high qualifications, but
he kept in touch with medical progress, to the extent of reading
about it and availing himself of improved methods and preparations
when opportunity offered. He examined the dead man very carefully,
indicated how his posture might be rendered more normal, and
satisfied himself that human power was incapable of restoring the
vanished life. He could discover no visible indication of violence
and no apparent excuse for Tom May's sudden end. He listened with
attention to the little that Henry Lennox could tell him, and then
went to see Mary May and her father.
The young wife had grown more collected, but she was dazed rather
than reconciled to her fate; her mind had not yet absorbed the full
extent of her sorrow. She talked incessantly and dwelt on
trivialities, as people will under a weight of events too large
to measure or discuss.
"I am going to write to Tom's father," she said. "This will be an
awful blow to him. He was wrapped up in Tom. And to think that I
was troubling about his letter! He will never see the sea he loved
so much again. He always hated that verse in the Bible that says
there will be no more sea. I was asleep so near him last night.
Yet I never heard him cry out or anything."
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