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....”
§ 4
Upon Captain Douglas Lady Laxton’s letter was destined to have a very distracting effect. Because, as he came to think it over, as he came to put her partly illegible allusions to secret passages and a missing boy side by side with his memories of Lord Moggeridge’s accusations and the general mystery of his expulsion from Shonts, it became more and more evident to him that he had here something remarkably like a clue, something that might serve to lift the black suspicion of irreverence and levity from his military reputation. And he had already got to the point of suggesting to Miss Philips that he ought to follow up and secure Bealby forthwith, before ever they came over the hill crest to witness the disaster to the caravan.
Captain Douglas, it must be understood, was a young man at war within himself.