“See then the penalty of too great riches. Only one man in a thousand can express his personality in his surroundings if he has a million of money to do it with. It wasn’t Mottram, of course, who did this; but he would have built the same sort of horror if he hadn’t taken it over from a predecessor like himself. And the rooms are as bad as the house.”
Eames was fully justified in this last criticism. The house was full of expensive bad taste; the crude work of local artists hung on the walls; bulging goddesses supported unnecessary capitals; velvet and tarnished gilding and multicoloured slabs of marble completed the resemblance to a large station restaurant. Mottram had possessed no private household gods, had preserved no cherished knickknacks. The house was the fruit of his money, not of his personality. He had given the architect a free hand, and in the midst of all that barbaric splendour he had lived a homeless exile.
The housekeeper had little to add to what Bredon already knew. Her master usually went away for a holiday about that time in the year, and Mr. Brinkman always went with him. He had expected to be away for a fortnight, or perhaps three weeks. He had not shewn, to the servants at any rate, any signs of depression or anxiety; he had not left any parting messages to suggest a long absence. His letters were to be redirected, as usual, to the Load of Mischief. There had been none, as a matter of fact, except a few bills and circulars. She didn’t think that Mr. Mottram went to any of the Pullford doctors, regularly at least; and she had had no knowledge of his seeing the specialist in London. She did not remember Mr. Mottram being ill, except for an occasional cold, though he did now and again take a sleeping draught.
“It’s quite true,” said Eames as they left the house, “that we never noticed any signs of depression or anxiety in Mottram. But I do remember, only a short time ago, his seeming rather excited one evening when he was round with us. Or am I imagining it? Memory and imagination are such close neighbours. But I do think that when he asked the Bishop to go and stay down at Chilthorpe he seemed unnaturally insistent about it. He was fond of the Bishop, of course, but I shouldn’t have thought he was as fond of him as all that. To hear him talk, you would think that it was going to make all the difference to him whether the Bishop shared his holiday or not.”
“Yes, I wonder what that points to?”
“Anything or nothing. It’s possible, of course, that he was feeling depressed, as he well might be; and thought that he wanted more than Brinkman’s company to help him over a bad time. Or—I don’t know. He was always secretive. He gave the Bishop a car, you know; and took endless pains to find out beforehand what sort of car would be useful to him, without ever giving away what he was doing till the last moment. And the other evening—well, I feel now as if I’d felt then that he had something up his sleeve. But did I really feel it then? I don’t know.”
“On the whole, though, you incline to the suicide theory?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s possible, isn’t it, that a man who had some premonition of a violent end might want company when he went to a lonely place like Chilthorpe?”
“Had he any enemies, do you think, in Pullford?”
“Who hasn’t? But not that sort of enemies. He used, I fancy, to be something of a martinet with his work-people, in the old manner. In America, a disgruntled employee sometimes satisfies his vendetta with a shotgun. But in England we have no murdering classes. Even the burglars, I am told, make a principle of going unarmed, for fear they might be tempted to shoot. You would probably find two or three hundred men in Pullford who would grouse at Mottram’s success and call him a bloodsucker, but not one who would up with a piece of lead piping if he met him in a lonely lane.”