Knight Without Armour

“Money? Why do you suppose that London doctor came all the way here to give evidence at the inquest if it wasn’t for, a fine fat fee? As a matter of fact, there were some people here a few weeks ago who said for sober truth they knew he was worth half a million—all made out of rubber, so they said.” Mrs. Roone’s voice rose to a shriek as she added: “Half a million indeed, and old enough to be the girl’s father, as well as liable to drop dead at any minute! Disgraceful, I say!”

“D’you think the girl was after him too?”

“Maybe she was. Girls will do anything for money these days.”

Here a youthful, red-cheeked naval lieutenant interposed. “Personally, Mrs. Roone, I think I’d give her the benefit of the doubt—the girl, I mean. I spoke to her once or twice—danced with her once, too—and she seemed to me a very quiet, innocent sort of kid.”

He spoke rather shyly, and a colleague, who had drunk quite enough, shouted: “Innocent? Too dam’ innocent for you, eh, Willie?”

“Anyhow,” answered Mrs. Roone, with final truculence, “the way they both cleared off was quite enough for me. The very afternoon that we were all fussed and bothered about finding the man dead, up comes the old woman to have her bill made out in a hurry—must get away—catching the boat at Queenstown, or something or other. Disappointed, I suppose, because her k trick hadn’t worked in time. I didn’t see the girl before they left.”

“Well, well, she’s had a narrow escape,” said Roone, drinking, “though maybe not the narrowest she ever will have if she’s going to go about dancing with young naval lieutenants, eh?”

They all laughed. Just then The Times arrived, and somebody in the bar, opening the paper casually, discovered Fothergill’s obituary. They all crowded round and read it through with growing exasperation—it told so little that they would have liked to know. The son of a country parson, a public-school neither good nor quite bad, Cambridge, journalism, rubber. What could anyone make of it? The youth in plus-fours fully expressed the general opinion when he commented: “Doesn’t sound a particularly exciting career, does it?”

“And it says nothing about a wife,” said Roone, “so I suppose he never married.”

That was doubtfully accepted as a probable conclusion.

“Well, well,” added Roone, pouring more whisky into his soda, “he wasn’t my kind of chap, and I don’t care who hears me say so. Neither a good Catholic nor a good Protestant nor a good anything else, I should say.”

Which seemed the end of a rather unpleasant matter.

PART II

Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill was born in 1880. He had five brothers and four sisters, and his father’s living yielded seven hundred a year. His mother died in 1881, having never quite got over her most recent contribution to the family, and the Reverend Wilson, left to keep house with ten children, wandered helplessly about his parish as if he were the last person on earth responsible for his own situation. He was a large, heavily-built man, with fat hands and a bald head; he did his job in a dull, conscientious way, and thrashed his elder children irregularly and without relish. He was an Evangelical and a Gladstonian Liberal; he disliked Dissent, had hated the Oxford Movement, and had a superstitious horror of Rome. It was his habit to preach hour-long sermons explaining the exact meaning of Greek and Hebrew words to a congregation largely composed of farm-labourers.

A widowed sister came to keep house for him in due course; her husband had been an army officer, accidentally killed in India in an age when few officers of either service ever died of anything more exciting than cirrhosis of the liver. Aunt Nellie never tired of boasting of her unique bereavement, and it was she who had principal charge of Ainsley. She had been a school teacher in earlier life, and along with two of his sisters the boy obtained from her a fairly complete grounding in reading, writing, simple arithmetic, and the sort of geography that consists in knowing what belongs to England. Barbara and Emily, fifteen months and two and a half years older than their brother respectively, had no aptitude for learning anything of any kind; Ainsley, even by the age of five, had far outstripped them. He was, indeed, a bright, fairly good-looking child—dark-eyed, dark-haired, well- moulded, but perhaps (Aunt Nellie thought, doubtfully) ‘a little foreign- looking.’