"Yet he also has unselfishly contributed to the general diversion," said Arden.
Three years had passed since Sonia Dainton delighted her friends by becoming engaged to Loring, and two since she astonished them by breaking off the engagement. He had at once gone abroad and was reported to be still cruising aimlessly in the East. The social ghouls had hardly sated themselves with gossip, when Webster entangled himself with the proprietress of a dancing academy and was constrained to pay damages for breach of promise; and, while this case was still being discussed, Jack Summertown proceeded to occupy the press for three days with an enquiry into a series of minor outrages inflicted on an unpopular brother officer. Valentine Arden sat through the whole variety programme, unamused and detached, watching his friends succumbing one after another to epidemic madness. "The spirit of Pan is abroad," he explained gravely.
Lady Barbara Neave had flitted on the outskirts of each new scandal; but, since her flying accident, she had contributed no scandal of her own.
For the first year of the three she opened her social circuit as comprehensively as an unfledged barrister. Lady Crawleigh carried her from Milford to Kenworth, from Warmslow to Lenge and from Cheniston to Granlake. Lady Barbara's interest in social analysis was roused and fed by her tour of the great houses; they required a technique different from the absolutism of Government House and the unaided personal ascendancy of London; and, if she remained unabsorbed into the new atmosphere, at least she returned to Crawleigh Abbey with a mature country-house philosophy and clear-cut ideas of what to avoid and extrude from her own parties. The second year was devoted to romantic exploration. At the end of the court mourning she met a pleasant undistinguished soldier on furlough and chose, for no better reason—so far as her parents could see—than that he was already married, to fancy herself in love with him. Their few meetings—and still more their emotional parting—convinced at least the theatrical side of her temperament that she had broken her heart in a hopeless passion. Always thin, she artistically allowed herself to waste. For twelve teeming months she passively accepted the worship of all who were intrigued by her attitude of mystery and unresponsiveness; then native impatience broke through the unconvincing crust of cynicism, and she returned to London in a dangerous state of expectancy and unsatisfied excitement. In the absence of an overt scandal, her father hoped that she was sobered from the tomboy who had spread devastation through his three viceregal terms of office; the lesser optimists opined that she was only awaiting adequate opportunity.
Disaster overtook her in the summer of 1913; and, whatever other criticism was made, no one could deny that she won notoriety in the grand manner. The facts, as disclosed in court, revealed that Sir Adolf Erckmann had given a ball at his house in Westbourne Terrace. Lady Barbara decided within a few minutes of her arrival that the party was over-crowded and tiresome. Finding her slave Webster unoccupied, she suggested that he should drive her to another dance in the country and return to Westbourne Terrace when the congestion had been relieved. As his own car was gone home, they explored the line until the unknown chauffeur of some one else's car was persuaded to take them to Rickmansworth, wait half an hour and bring them back. Lady Barbara promised that there should be no awkward consequences, if they were discovered; Webster substantiated her guarantee with a five-pound note; and, by the time that they had further cajoled him with a stimulating supper of champagne and cutlets, the driver's last reluctance was overcome.
The story was liberally punctuated with questions on the general propriety of a girl's bribing a strange chauffeur and stealing an unknown car, with comments, too, on the dignity of their carrying a bottle of champagne and a plate of cutlets into the middle of Westbourne Terrace. There followed a digression to discover how much had been consumed; Lady Barbara and Webster asserted unshakably that the chauffeur was sober and that, if his driving became erratic at any point, this was due to his admitted ignorance of the route.
While the question of sobriety was left in suspense, the expedition was reconstructed to the moment when the car reached a fork in the road and the chauffeur turned to Webster and asked "Right or left, sir?" Examined on the question of speed, Lady Barbara was sure that they were not going more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twenty-five at the outside, Webster conceded unwillingly; they could not see the speedometer. It was suggested, however, that they must have calculated how long the double journey would take; they had even noticed when the car started and when it stopped; a damaging calculation shewed that their average pace was thirty-seven miles an hour and that, if they drove slowly out of London, they must have reached forty-five or fifty miles an hour in the country. And they had not told the man to moderate his pace; it even seemed that they had encouraged him to drive faster.
At the fork in the road Webster called out, "To the right, I think"; then he saw that he was mistaken and shouted, "No! the left." In trying to change direction, the chauffeur drove into a wedge-shaped brick wall and was instantly killed. Lady Barbara and her companion escaped with a severe shaking and a few scratches from the broken glass of the wind-screen; the front of the car was smashed beyond repair.
The accident took place in open country without a house in sight. As soon as they saw that the driver was dead, Lady Barbara spread her cloak over the crushed head and broken face; Webster's nerve was gone, and she left him, whimpering, to guard the body, while she went in search of help. An early market-cart came to their rescue, and they rumbled slowly back to London, shivering in their thin clothes and glancing over their shoulders at a pair of twisted legs in black gaiters, which protruded stiffly from beneath a blood-stained cloak.
The news swept through London in the evening papers, and Lady Barbara was inundated next day with enquiries and messages of sympathy. So grudging a critic as Jack Waring contended warmly at the County Club that, apart from her silliness in rushing away to the country in the middle of the night and borrowing a car without leave, she was really not to blame; and it was a dreadful experience for any girl. By comparison with Webster she had kept her head and behaved very properly, taking the body straight to a hospital, communicating with the widow, making herself personally responsible for a liberal pension and undertaking to replace the shattered car. Before night two papers had published sympathetic interviews with her, reproducing in her own not undramatic words the abrupt transition from a careless drive to violent death, the slow passage of a funeral procession between barren grey fields, the silence and desolation of the night, the early-morning chill which beat on her unprotected arms and shoulders and the haunting sense of helplessness which dominated every other feeling. Inset was one photograph of her in evening dress and another with hollow cheeks and big ghostly eyes, in the subdued black frock which she had worn to receive her interviewers; for these Jack blamed the notorious vulgarity of the Press.