A Change of Heir (20 page)

The large and hideous house could not all be brought into focus at once. At the moment – just as if he were about to pay a visit there – he was looking straight at its front door. He could see, quite distinctly, the bell at which he had vainly tugged while the Reverend Mr Grimble – but had it been Grimble? – had peered at him from an upper window. It was a sinister and displeasing recollection. He had almost forgotten, in the immediate press of his affairs at the Abbey, that this disreputable clerical conjuror had revealed a kind of gleeful hostility towards him which he had found quite upsetting at the time. And this discomposure returned to him now. He had a sudden fantastic vision of Grimble crouched in a kind of laboratory somewhere in his rambling house, and beguiling himself by sticking pins into a wax image of himself, George Gadberry
alias
Comberford. This was very ridiculous, but it caused Gadberry to divert his binoculars away from the vicarage in order to survey its comparatively innocuous environs.

On one side lay the churchyard; on the other was a field sheltering, in a fashion, a small flock of sheep. There was nothing remarkable about the creatures – which were, after all, the commonest inhabitants of these dales. Or there was nothing remarkable about all save one. This sheep – and it appeared a very large specimen – was in some way out of focus. It appeared, at least, to be moving on an odd plane as compared with the others. And the reason for this was apparent almost as soon as Gadberry had noticed it. This sheep wasn’t in the field at all. It was on the flat roof of an outbuilding contiguous with the vicarage.

Gadberry found this surprising. He was not, it was true, a countryman. Had the aberrant sheep been a goat he would probably have told himself that there was nothing improbable in its having achieved such a scramble. But sheep, he was tolerably sure, seldom scale roofs – even flat ones. Nor – he now added to himself – do they commonly move in quite the way this sheep was moving.

The sheep proceeded with a curious effect of caution across the roof, and towards the wall of the main vicarage building which abutted on it. The sheep approached a window. Even more cautiously, the sheep nosed at this window. It then raised a sash, and disappeared inside.

What might have been termed a dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being descended upon Gadberry for a while. The sight he had just witnessed was something monstrous and unnatural. For some moments he gropingly connected it with the reprehensible magical practices of the Vicar of Bruton; this sheep was not really a sheep; it was some ghastly familiar – a fiend, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing.

But this extravagant speculation didn’t last for long. Gadberry bore, after all, a tolerably rational mind. He quickly told himself that there was a simpler explanation of the sheep’s sneaking in through that window. The sheep wasn’t a sheep at all. It was a human being in some bulky and light-coloured raincoat or the like. And it had presented the form it did because creeping on hands and knees. Somebody was making a distinctly covert exploration of the Reverend Mr Grimble’s abode. He himself needed only a little patience to discover who that somebody was.

He remained with his glasses trained upon the window. It had been lowered again gently from within. Perhaps that was to prevent some telltale draught from blowing through the vicarage. But it struck Gadberry as an action which only an intruder with a pretty steady nerve would take. He continued to wait. He waited so long that he was on the verge of concluding the whole thing to have been nonsense – a mere hallucination bred of the constant agitations to which his life was at present exposed.

And then the window went up again. The sheep emerged, and stood up boldly on two feet. The sheep raised its head, and contrived an uncanny effect of gazing direct, and seeingly, into Gadberry’s eyes. Gadberry was only too familiar with that straight look. The sheep was Miss Bostock.

Gadberry came down from the tower in a mood of sober thought. There was nothing freakish about Miss Bostock – as there was (say) about himself, or about the real Nicholas Comberford (as he supposed), or about the necromantic Mr Grimble. Miss Bostock was simply a very unscrupulous and ruthless woman, who had seen through a fantastic deception, and who was determined to exploit the resulting situation to her own ends. And she was an efficient person, so that it was a reasonable bet that her entire concentration was being devoted to the job she had taken on. She hadn’t, therefore, gone spying at the vicarage at the prompting of any trivial and extraneous curiosity. She had done so because Grimble – Grimble in some relationship or another – had his place right at the heart of the matter.

Grimble had at least one visitor, one house-guest, at the vicarage. At least one person had arrived unobtrusively, locked away a car in a hurry, bolted into the house, and thereafter remained invisible. Miss Bostock had been aware of Gadberry’s own call at the vicarage. She had enjoyed, in fact, at that time, precisely the same close-up and telescopic view of the place as Gadberry himself had just been doing.
She
had seen that odd arrival too. It was what she had been further exploring, with characteristic enterprise and resolution, when she had slipped (like a sheep into the fold, so to speak) through that upper window.

Were the present a narrative conducted upon philosophic principles, or dedicated to the unravelling of intricate states of mind, it would be necessary to pause at this point in an attempt to determine whether Gadberry, as he contemplated these facts, became – obscurely, subliminally, subconsciously, or unconsciously – possessed of a substantial part of the true state of the case. Certainly a great deal was going to happen – and happen very soon – which was to have the appearance of surprising and confounding him utterly. But the possibility cannot be excluded – and one need say no more than this – that in some confused part of his head he was not hopelessly behind the reader in his sense of what was really going on. If he appears – again at this point – to be distinctly on the thick side, we may (if we want to be charitable) attribute this to the obfuscating effect of a further and utterly obliterating fall of snow. Down it came again – and much as if it had hardly been in earnest until this moment. Far from finding his way securely through his appalling predicament, he had a good deal of difficulty in even finding his way back to the house. At one point, indeed, he walked straight across the fishpond – and almost fell through one of the holes that would have companioned him with the pike.

This new blizzard had one important consequence. By the middle of the afternoon, it became absolutely clear that the call upon the Shilbottles could not take place. Indeed, Lady Arthur was thoughtful enough to ring up with the news that her drive was totally blocked, and that it would remain so until snowploughs had operated in a big way. This telephone call was the last that came through to the Abbey. Nor could any more go out. As was customary in that part of Yorkshire under these disagreeable climatic conditions, the lines were down.

But if one couldn’t drive to the Shilbottles, one could certainly walk to the Fortescues. Any resolute lover would have been convinced of this, and Gadberry was certainly a resolute lover. It would take a certain amount of time, and quite a lot of effort. If he didn’t arrive exhausted, he would at least arrive looking pretty adequately exercised. And this ought to gain him merit – he couldn’t help thinking – when he did that job of sinking down on his knees by the bedside of his beloved.

So he set off down the drive. He was almost at once surprised by how heavy the going actually was. Every step forward involved tugging a foot out of from six to eighteen inches of snow, and quite soon the effort appeared to be telling not only on his legs but right up his back as well. He slowed his pace. To stride in breathed and glowing would be one thing, to stagger in puffed and sweating would be quite another. It was a further instance of the formidable character of Miss Bostock, it occurred to him, that she had made her own reconnaissance of the vicarage in face of these conditions.

It had stopped snowing, and the sky was blowing clear. With surprising speed the solid and louring cloud-ceiling had broken up, and now great chunks and streamers of it were in rapid movement. The effect of this was to make Gadberry’s own progress appear yet more plodding. But the effect was exhilarating as well. It was some time before he noticed how much the snow was in answering movement. It was being blown – preponderantly in his own direction, but in whirls and eddies as well – across its own surface like a fine smoke. If this went on, there would be tremendous drifts by morning.

Eventually he reached the spot where he had heard Evadne’s anguished cry. Eager though he was to press forward, he nevertheless paused, scrambled over the familiar dyke, and reverently surveyed the sacred ground. It was rather, of course, the sacred snow – and so much more had fallen that no trace remained of Evadne’s ski-tracks or her recumbent form. The skis, he supposed, were still buried here. They must be rescued – for were they not to be his cherished possession forever?

Heartened and refreshed, he went on his way. It was still daylight, but he wasn’t going to have very long with Evadne if he was to get back to the Abbey before dusk – and under present conditions being overtaken by the deeper shades of evening, let alone by darkness, mightn’t be fun. So he pushed up the pace again, and soon he had only a few hundred yards to go.

Hitherto the only sound had been his own breathing and the crunch of his boots. But now the snow was beginning to whistle and whisper as it sifted beneath the wind. He was listening to this when he suddenly realised that he was listening to something else too. There were voices ahead of him – excited voices – and then shouts of laughter. He turned a corner, and the house was before him, beyond a small paddock in which the snow was everywhere trodden vigorously underfoot. Three young people were skylarking in it: a boy whom Gadberry recognised as Evadne’s younger brother; a second boy of about the same age, who looked as if he might be the gardener’s son; and a rather older girl. All three were racing about madly, bombarding each other with snowballs, joining or separating in strategic rushes, and yelling at one another like fiends. The girl took a tumble as Gadberry watched. She was up again and running in a flash, making a grab, as she did so, at a little fur hat which had fallen from her head. It was a head that now showed in a glory of golden hair. The girl was Evadne herself.

For a single and unspeakable moment Gadberry’s heart was filled with joy. Evadne’s injury had vanished, miraculously cured. And then – in a single answering instant – the truth rushed upon him and overwhelmed him. No sprained ankle ever behaves like that. Evadne Fortescue was a fraud.

You see, Evadne’s a
– The embarrassed voice of Captain Fortescue on the telephone, beginning thus before seeming to lose the will to communicate, came clearly back to Gadberry now.
You see, Evadne’s a little bitch
. Perhaps the completed sentence would have been that. Or perhaps
bitch
would have been
fraud
or
schemer
of even
fortune hunter
. It didn’t much matter which. The ski accident had been a fake. The girl had lain in wait and rigged it, knowing that Gadberry was coming that way.

Had Gadberry been a moral giant, he might himself have filled his arms with snowballs, and advanced laughing upon the guilty scene. As it was, he turned and stumbled blindly away. His passion had been instantaneous and romantic. His disillusionment was instantaneous too, and very bitter indeed. He might be compared (entirely adequately) to one of those unfortunate heroes of Thomas Hardy’s, whom some ingenious irony of circumstance clobbers pretty well into the dust. Gadberry, of course, was clobbered into snow. The stuff seemed twice as deep as it had been only a couple of minutes before. In no time at all, he felt that he had been walking round and round in it for hours.

Later, this is what he
had
been doing. His shattered retreat from the treacherous and Circean dwelling of the Fortescues must have been in the wrong direction. There was no track under his feet; there was no landmark within his vision. Had he been disposed to cry out, with Goethe’s tedious Faust,
Wohin der Weg
? he would undoubtedly have received as answer the Mephistophelean
Kein Weg!
Ins Unbetretene
. Shelter of a sort did, however, eventually receive him. Finding himself sitting before a tolerable fire, and with a glass of whisky in his hand, he dimly concluded that he must have found his way to some lone alehouse in the Yorkshire moors.

It was while thus circumstanced that the scales fell from George Gadberry’s eyes. Evadne Fortescue had pretended to be what she was not: a maiden in distress, and one quite fortuitously succoured by a knight-errant chancing to pass that way. In contriving this imposture, Evadne had inflicted upon a fellow human being outrageous and immeasurable pain. It was clear, therefore, that all deliberate deception must be wrong. And must be quite
absolutely
wrong. His own deception had been precisely that.

Gadberry finished his whisky, paid for it, and made careful inquiries about the direction in which Bruton Abbey lay. It was his business to return there, and to confess to Mrs Minton.

But Mrs Minton had gone to bed. Realising that it was really as late as that, Gadberry understood that he must in fact have wandered around in a state of shock for quite some time. He was very tired, and he wasn’t at all hungry. Boulter, however, insisted on serving him a meal of some elaboration. It was a succession of depressingly chilly dishes – Boulter referred to it as a cold collation – which Gadberry endeavoured, not perhaps wholly judiciously, to render more digestible by the concomitance of several glasses of claret. There was no need to keep absolutely sober. Mrs Minton had given directions that she was to be informed immediately upon his safe return (his absence, naturally, having caused concern) but that she was not to be otherwise disturbed. He could hardly break into her bedchamber with his shocking avowal, so it would have to keep till the morning. He himself might be in better trim to go through with it then.