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Again the word derided her. She opened the door, crossed the narrow hall, and walked up the stairs. As she passed, she noticed Westall's sticks and umbrellas: a pair of his gloves lay on the hall table. The same stair-carpet mounted between the same walls; the same old French print, in its narrow black frame, faced her on the landing. This visual continuity was intolerable.
Aldous Raeburn sat on Marcella's right hand; and during the day the attention of everybody in the dingy building had been largely divided between the scene below, and that strange group in the gallery where the man who had just been elected Conservative member for East Brookshire, who was Lord Maxwell's heir, and Westall's employer, sat beside his betrothed, in charge of a party which comprised not only Marcella Boyce, but the wife, sister, and little girl of Westall's murderer.
Sir Philip Baddely was in earnest conversation with her ladyship; but he stopped speaking when Belinda came within hearing, and Lady Delacour turned to Helena, and said, "My dear, if you are satisfied, for mercy's sake let us be gone, for I am absolutely overcome with heat and with curiosity," added she in a low voice to Belinda: "I long to hear how Clarence Hervey likes Westall's drawings."
He had suffered all his mature life under a too painful and scrupulous sense that he, more than other men, was called to be his brother's keeper. It was natural that, during these exhausting days, the fierce death on Westall's rugged face, the piteous agony in Dynes's young eyes and limbs, should haunt him, should make his landlord's place and responsibility often mere ashes and bitterness.
Vincent's great relief, seemed not to take any notice of the child's question, nor to have any sympathy in his curiosity; she was intently copying Westall's sketch of Lady Anne Percival and her family, and she had been roused, by the first mention of Helena Delacour's name, to many painful and some pleasing recollections. "What a charming woman, and what a charming family!" said Mr.
"You've never been and got in Westall's way again?" she said anxiously. "It's no good my tryin' to get a wink o' sleep when you're out like this." "Don't you worrit yourself," he said to her, not roughly, but decidedly. "I'm all right. This boy's bad, Minta." "Yes, an' I kep' up the fire an' put the spout on the kettle, too."
Arriving at the lodgings that had been taken for him in the Strand in the early morning, he had no sooner breakfasted than he set off for Somerset House, to see the Royal Academy Exhibition. Looking round for historical pictures, he discovered that Opie's 'Gil Bias' was the centre of attraction in one room, and Westall's 'Shipwrecked Boy' in another.
For the old woodcraft revived in Hurd, and the old passion for the fields and their chances which he had felt as a lad before his "watcher's" place had been made intolerable to him by George Westall's bullying. He became excited, unmanageable.
Hurd gave a shriek, and then fell to weeping and trembling again, so that Marcella had need of patience. "If you can't help me more," she said at last in despair, "I don't know what we shall do. Listen to me. Your husband will be charged with Westall's murder. That I am sure of. He says it was not murder that it happened in a fight. I believe it. I want to get a lawyer to prove it.
Gradually she made out that although Hurd had not been able of course to conceal his night absences from his wife, he had kept his connection with the Oxford gang absolutely dark from her, till, in his wild exultation over Westall's discomfiture in the Tudley End raid, he had said things in his restless snatches of sleep which had enabled her to get the whole truth out of him by degrees.
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