"Desterro ran away with the evening, didn't she, though?" they said; and glanced with friendly envy at the composed figure in the bright wrap sitting upright in the ingle-nook.
"Me, I do only one thing. It is easy to do just one thing well."
And Lucy, like the rest of them, could not decide if the cool little remark was meant to be humble or reproving. On the whole she thought humble.
"That's enough, March, it's going beautifully," Innes said to the Junior, and moved to take the bellows from her. As she moved her feet came out from under her and Lucy saw that she was wearing black pumps.
And the little metal ornament that should have been on the left one was not there.
Oh, no, said Lucy's mind. No. No. No.
"That is your cup, Miss Pym, and here is yours, Innes. Have a rather tired macaroon, Miss Pym."
"No, I have some chocolate biscuits for Miss Pym."
"No, she is going to have some Ayrshire shortbread, out of a tin, and fresh. None of your pawed-over victuals."
The babble went on round her. She took something off a plate. She answered what was said to her. She even took a sip of the stuff in the cup.
Oh, no. No.
Now that the thing was here-the thing she had been afraid of, so afraid that she would not even formulate it in her mind-now that it was here, made concrete and manifest, she was appalled. It had all suddenly become a nightmare: the bright noisy room with the blackening sky outside where the storm was rushing up, and the missing object. One of those nightmares where something small and irrelevant has a terrifying importance. Where something immediate and urgent must be done about it but one can't think what or why.
Presently she must get up and make polite leavetaking and go to Henrietta with her story and end by saying: "And I know whose shoe it came from. Mary Innes's."
Innes was sitting at her feet, not eating but drinking cocoa thirstily. She had curled her feet under her again, but Lucy had no need for further inspection. Even her faint hope that someone else might be wearing pumps had gone overboard. There was a fine colourful variety of footgear present but not a second pair of pumps.
In any case, no one else had a motive for being in the gymnasium at six o'clock this morning.
"Have some more cocoa," Innes said presently, turning to look at her. But Miss Pym had hardly touched hers.
"Then I must have some more," Innes said, and began to get up.
A very tall thin Junior called Farthing, but known even to the Staff as Tuppence-Ha'penny, came in.
"You're late, Tuppence," someone said. "Come and have a bun." But Farthing stood there, uncertainly.
"What is the matter, Tuppence?" they asked, puzzled by her shocked expression.
"I went to put the flowers in Froken's room," she said slowly.
"Don't tell us there were some there already?" someone said; and there was a general laugh.
"I heard the Staff talking about Rouse."
"Well, what about her? Is she better?"
"She's dead."
The cup Innes was holding crashed on the hearth. Beau crossed over to her to pick up the pieces.
"Oh, nonsense," they said. "You heard wrong, young Tuppence."
"No, I didn't. They were talking on the landing. She died half an hour ago."
This was succeeded by a dismayed silence.
"I did put up the wall end," O'Donnell said loudly, into the silence.
"Of course you did, Don," Stewart said, going to her. "We all know that."
Lucy put down her cup and thought that she had better go upstairs. They let her go with murmured regrets, their happy party in pieces round them.
Upstairs, Lucy found that Miss Hodge had gone to the hospital to receive Rouse's people when they arrived, and that it was she who had telephoned the news. Rouse's people had come, and had taken the blow unemotionally, it seemed.
"I never liked her, God forgive me," said Madame, stretched at full length on the hard sofa; her plea to the Deity for forgiveness had a genuine sound.
"Oh, she was all right," Wragg said, "quite nice when you knew her. And the most marvellous centre-half. This is frightful, isn't it! Now it will be a matter of inquiry, and we'll have police, an inquest, and appalling publicity, and everything."
Yes, police and everything.
She could not do anything about the little rosette tonight. And anyhow she wanted to think about it.
She wanted to get away by herself and think about it.
20
Bong! Bong! The clock in that far-away steeple struck again.
Two o'clock.
She lay staring into the dark, while the cold rain beat on the ground outside and wild gusts rose every now and then and rioted in anarchy, flinging her curtains out into the room so that they flapped like sails and everything was uncertainty and turmoil.
The rain wept with steady persistence, and her heart wept with it. And in her mind was a turmoil greater than the wind's.
"Do the obvious right thing, and let God dispose," Rick had said. And it had seemed a sensible ruling.
But that was when it had been a hypothetical affair of "causing grievous bodily harm" (that was the phrase, wasn't it?) and now it had ceased to be hypothesis and it wasn't any longer mere bodily harm. It was-was this.
It wouldn't be God who would dispose this, in spite of all the comforting tags. It would be the Law. Something written with ink in a statute book. And once that was invoked God Himself could not save a score of innocent persons being crushed under the juggernaut wheels of its progress.
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, said the old Mosaic law. And it sounded simple. It sounded just. One saw it against a desert background, as if it involved two people only. It was quite different when one put it in modern words and called it "being hanged by the neck until you are dead."
If she went to Henrietta in the —
If?
Oh, all right, of course she was going.
When she went to Henrietta in the morning, she would be putting in motion a power over which neither she nor anyone else had control; a power that once released would catch up this, that, and the next one from the innocent security of their peaceful lives and fling them into chaos.
She thought of Mrs Innes, happily asleep somewhere in Larborough; bound home tomorrow to wait for the return of the daughter in whom she had her life. But her daughter would not come home-ever.
Neither will Rouse, a voice pointed out.
No, of course not, and Innes must somehow pay for that. She must not be allowed to profit by her crime. But surely, surely there was some way in which payment could be made without making the innocent pay even more bitterly.
What was justice?
To break a woman's heart; to bring ruin and shame on Henrietta and the destruction of all she had built up; to rub out for ever the radiance of Beau, the Beau who was unconditioned to grief. Was that a life for a life? That was three-no, four lives for one.
And one not worth —
Oh, no. That she could not judge. For that one had to "see before and after," as Rick said. A curiously sober mind, Rick had, for a person with a play-boy's face and a Latin lover's charm.
There was Innes moving about again next-door. As far as Lucy knew she had not slept yet either. She was very quiet, but every now and then one heard a movement or the tap in her room ran. Lucy wondered whether the water was to satisfy a thirst or to cool temples that must be throbbing. If she, Lucy, was lying awake with her thoughts running round and round inside her skull like trapped mice, what must Innes be going through? Humourless she might be, unenamoured of the human species she probably was, but insensitive she most certainly was not. Whether it was thwarted ambition, or sheer anger and hate, that had driven her down to the gymnasium through the misty morning, she was not the sort to be able to do what she had done with impunity. It might well be, indeed, that given her temperament it was herself she had destroyed when she tampered with that boom. In the case-histories of crime there were instances of women so callous that they had come to a fresh blooming once the obstacle to their desires was out of the way. But they were not built like Mary Innes. Innes belonged to that other, and rarer, class who found too late that they could not live with themselves any more. The price they had paid was too high.