After the catastrophe, I talked with only one person who seemed to have expected what actually occurred. This was a funny old thing called Miss Williams, one of Miss Morganhurst's more shabby friends—a gossip and a sentimentalist—the last person in the world, as I would have supposed, to see anything interesting.
However, this old lady insisted that she had perceived, during this period, that Miss Morganhurst was "keeping something back."
"Keeping what back?" I asked. "A guilty secret?"
"Oh, not at all," said Miss Williams. "Dear me, no. Dahlia wouldn't have minded anything of that kind. No, it's my belief she was affected by the war long before any of us supposed it, and that she wouldn't think of it or look at it because she knew what would happen if she did. She knew, too, that she was being haunted by it all the time, and that it was all piling up, ready, waiting for the moment.... I do hope you don't think me fantastical——"
I didn't think her "fantastical" at all, but I must confess that when I look back I can see in the Miss Morganhurst of these months nothing but a colossal egotism and greed.
However, I must not be cruel. It was towards the end of April that fate, suddenly tired of waiting, took her in hand, and finished her off.
One afternoon when, arrayed in a bright pink tea-gown, she was lying on her sofa, taking some rest before dressing for dinner, Agatha came in and said that her brother was there and would like to see her. Now Miss Morganhurst had a very surprising brother—surprising, that is, for her. He was a clergyman who had been for very many years the rector of a little parish in Wiltshire. So little a parish was it that it gave him little work and less pay, with the result that he was, at his advanced age, shabby and moth-eaten and dim, like a poor old bird shut up for many months in a blinded cage and let suddenly into the light. I don't know what Miss Morganhurst's dealings with her brother had been, whether she had been kind to him or unkind, selfish or unselfish; but I suspect that she had not seen very much of him. Their ways had been too different, their ambitions too separate. The old man had had one passion in his life, his son, and the boy had died in a German prison in the summer of 1918. He had been, it was gathered, in one of the more unpleasant German prisons. Mr. Morganhurst was a widower, and this blow had simply finished him—the thread that connected him with coherent life snapped, and he lived in a world of dim visions and incoherent dreams.
He was not, in fact, quite right in his head.
Agatha must have thought the couple a strange and depressing pair as they stood together in that becoloured and becrowded room, if, that is to say, she ever thought of anything but herself. Poor old Morganhurst was wearing an overcoat really green with age, and his squashy black hat was dusty and unbrushed.
He wore large spectacles, and his chin was of the kind that seems always to have two days' growth upon it. The bottoms of his trousers were muddy, although it was a dry day. He stood there uneasily twisting his hat round and round in his fingers and blinking at his sister.