§ 3
So soon as the week-enders had dispersed and Sir Peter had gone off to London to attend to various matters affecting the peptonizing of milk and the distribution of baby soothers about the habitable globe, Lady Laxton went back to bed and remained in bed until midday on Tuesday. Nothing short of complete rest and the utmost kindness from her maid would, she felt, save her from a nervous breakdown of the most serious description. The festival had been stormy to the end. Sir Peter’s ill-advised attempts to deprive Lord Moggeridge of alcohol had led to a painful struggle at lunch, and this had been followed by a still more unpleasant scene between host and guest in the afternoon. “This is an occasion for tact,” Sir Peter had said and had gone off to tackle the Lord Chancellor, leaving his wife to the direst, best founded apprehensions. For Sir Peter’s tact was a thing by itself, a mixture of misconception, recrimination and familiarity that was rarely well received....
She had had to explain to the Sunday dinner party that his lordship had been called away suddenly. “Something connected with the Great Seal,” Lady Laxton had whispered in a discreet mysterious whisper. One or two simple hearers were left with the persuasion that the Great Seal had been taken suddenly unwell—and probably in a slightly indelicate manner. Thomas had to paint Mergleson’s eye with grease-paint left over from some private theatricals. It had been a patched-up affair altogether, and before she retired to bed that night Lady Laxton had given way to her accumulated tensions and wept.
There was no reason whatever why to wind up the day Sir Peter should have stayed in her room for an hour saying what he thought of Lord Moggeridge. She felt she knew quite well enough what he thought of Lord Moggeridge, and on these occasions he always used a number of words that she did her best to believe, as a delicately brought up woman, were unfamiliar to her ears....
So on Monday, as soon as the guests had gone, she went to bed again and stayed there, trying as a good woman should to prevent herself thinking of what the neighbours could be thinking—and saying—of the whole affair, by studying a new and very circumstantial pamphlet by Bishop Fowle on social evils, turning over the moving illustrations of some recent antivivisection literature and re-reading the accounts in the morning papers of a colliery disaster in the north of England.
To such women as Lady Laxton, brought up in an atmosphere of refinement that is almost colourless, and living a life troubled only by small social conflicts and the minor violence of Sir Peter, blameless to the point of complete uneventfulness, and secure and comfortable to the point of tedium, there is something amounting to fascination in the wickedness and sufferings of more normally situated people, there is a real attraction and solace in the thought of pain and stress, and as her access to any other accounts of vice and suffering was restricted she kept herself closely in touch with the more explicit literature of the various movements for human moralization that distinguish our age, and responded eagerly and generously to such painful catastrophes as enliven it. The counterfoils of her cheque book witnessed to her gratitude for these vicarious sensations. She figured herself to herself in her day dreams as a calm and white and shining intervention checking and reproving amusements of an undesirable nature, and earning the tearful blessings of the mangled by-products of industrial enterprise.
There is a curious craving for entire reality in the feminine composition, and there were times when in spite of these feasts of particulars, she wished she could come just a little nearer to the heady dreadfulnesses of life than simply writing a cheque against it. She would have liked to have actually seen the votaries of evil blench and repent before her contributions, to have, herself, unstrapped and revived and pitied some doomed and chloroformed victim of the so-called “scientist,” to have herself participated in the stretcher and the hospital and humanity made marvellous by enlistment under the red-cross badge. But Sir Peter’s ideals of womanhood were higher than his language, and he would not let her soil her refinement with any vision of the pain and evil in the world. “Sort of woman they want up there is a Trained Nurse,” he used to say when she broached the possibility of going to some famine or disaster. “You don’t want to go prying, old girl....”
She suffered, she felt, from repressed heroism. If ever she was to shine in disaster that disaster, she felt, must come to her, she might not go to meet it, and so you realize how deeply it stirred her, how it brightened her and uplifted her to learn from Mr. Mergleson’s halting statements that perhaps, that probably, that almost certainly, a painful and tragical thing was happening even now within the walls of Shonts, that there was urgent necessity for action—if anguish was to be witnessed before it had ended, and life saved.
She clasped her hands; she surveyed her large servitor with agonized green-grey eyes.
“Something must be done at once,” she said. “Everything possible must be done. Poor little Mite!”
“Of course, my lady, ’e may ’ave run away!”
“Oh no!” she cried, “he hasn’t run away. He hasn’t run away. How can you be so wicked, Mergleson. Of course he hasn’t run away. He’s there now. And it’s too dreadful.”
She became suddenly very firm and masterful. The morning’s colliery tragedy inspired her imagination.
“We must get pick-axes,” she said. “We must organize search parties. Not a moment is to be lost, Mergleson—not a moment.... Get the men in off the roads. Get everyone you can....”
And not a moment was lost. The road men were actually at work in Shonts before their proper dinner-hour was over.
They did quite a lot of things that afternoon. Every passage attainable from the dining-room opening was explored, and where these passages gave off chinks and crannies they were opened up with a vigour which Lady Laxton had greatly stimulated by an encouraging presence and liberal doses of whisky. Through their efforts a fine new opening was made into the library from the wall near the window, a hole big enough for a man to fall through, because one did, and a great piece of stonework was thrown down from the Queen Elizabeth tower, exposing the upper portion of the secret passage to the light of day. Lady Laxton herself and the head housemaid went round the panelling with a hammer and a chisel, and called out “Are you there?” and attempted an opening wherever it sounded hollow. The sweep was sent for to go up the old chimneys outside the present flues. Meanwhile Mr. Darling had been set with several of his men to dig for, discover, pick up and lay open the underground passage or disused drain, whichever it was, that was known to run from the corner of the laundry towards the old ice-house, and that was supposed to reach to the abbey ruins. After some bold exploratory excavations this channel was located and a report sent at once to Lady Laxton.
It was this and the new and alarming scar on the Queen Elizabeth tower that brought Mr. Beaulieu Plummer post-haste from the estate office up to the house. Mr. Beaulieu Plummer was the Marquis of Cranberry’s estate agent, a man of great natural tact, and charged among other duties with the task of seeing that the Laxtons did not make away with Shonts during the period of their tenancy. He was a sound compact little man, rarely out of extreme riding breeches and gaiters, and he wore glasses, that now glittered with astonishment as he approached Lady Laxton and her band of spade workers.
At his approach Mr. Darling attempted to become invisible, but he was unable to do so.
“Lady Laxton,” Mr. Beaulieu Plummer appealed, “may I ask—?”
“Oh Mr. Beaulieu Plummer, I’m so glad you’ve come. A little boy—suffocating! I can hardly bear it.”
“Suffocating!” cried Mr. Beaulieu Plummer, “where?” and was in a confused manner told.
He asked a number of questions that Lady Laxton found very tiresome. But how did she know the boy was in the secret passage? Of course she knew; was it likely she would do all this if she didn’t know? But mightn’t he have run away? How could he when he was in the secret passages? But why not first scour the countryside? By which time he would be smothered and starved and dead!...
They parted with a mutual loss of esteem, and Mr. Beaulieu Plummer, looking very serious indeed, ran as fast as he could straight to the village telegraph-office. Or to be more exact, he walked until he thought himself out of sight of Lady Laxton and then he took to his heels and ran. He sat for some time in the parlour post office spoiling telegraph forms, and composing telegrams to Sir Peter Laxton and Lord Cranberry.
He got these off at last, and then drawn by an irresistible fascination went back to the park and watched from afar the signs of fresh activities on the part of Lady Laxton.
He saw men coming from the direction of the stables with large rakes. With these they dragged the ornamental waters.
Then a man with a pick-axe appeared against the skyline and crossed the roof in the direction of the clock tower, bound upon some unknown but probably highly destructive mission.
Then he saw Lady Laxton going off to the gardens. She was going to console Mrs. Darling in her trouble. This she did through nearly an hour and a half. And on the whole it seemed well to Mr. Beaulieu Plummer that so she should be occupied....
It was striking five when a telegraph boy on a bicycle came up from the village with a telegram from Sir Peter Laxton.
“Stop all proceedings absolutely,” it said, “until I get to you.”
Lady Laxton’s lips tightened at the message. She was back from much weeping with Mrs. Darling and altogether finely strung. Here she felt was one of those supreme occasions when a woman must assert herself. “A matter of life or death,” she wired in reply, and to show herself how completely she overrode such dictation as this she sent Mr. Mergleson down to the village public-house with orders to engage anyone he could find there for an evening’s work on an extraordinarily liberal overtime scale.
After taking this step the spirit of Lady Laxton quailed. She went and sat in her own room and quivered. She quivered but she clenched her delicate fist.
She would go through with it, come what might, she would go on with the excavation all night if necessary, but at the same time she began a little to regret that she had not taken earlier steps to demonstrate the improbability of Bealby having simply run away. She set to work to repair this omission. She wrote off to the Superintendent of Police in the neighbouring town, to the nearest police magistrate, and then on the off chance to various of her week-end guests, including Captain Douglas. If it was true that he had organized the annoyance of the Lord Chancellor (and though she still rejected that view she did now begin to regard it as a permissible hypothesis), then he might also know something about the mystery of this boy’s disappearance.
Each letter she wrote she wrote with greater fatigue and haste than its predecessor and more illegibly.
Sir Peter arrived long after dark. He cut across the corner of the park to save time, and fell into one of the trenches that Mr. Darling had opened. This added greatly to the éclat with which he came into the hall.
Lady Laxton withstood him for five minutes and then returned abruptly to her bedroom and locked herself in, leaving the control of the operations in his hands....
“If he’s not in the house,” said Sir Peter, “all this is thunderin’ foolery, and if he’s in the house he’s dead. If he’s dead he’ll smell in a bit and then’ll be the time to look for him. Somethin’ to go upon instead of all this blind hacking the place about. No wonder they’re threatenin’ proceedings....”