The Alington Inheritance

Chapter XXVII

Mac Forbes had spent four days of what he himself described as “plain hell.” He had done murder, and as he had learned, he had done it to no purpose. The girl whom he had killed was not Jenny. By what extraordinary accident she had been where he had expected to find Jenny it was fruitless to enquire. What mattered was that she had come out of the house in which Jenny was staying, and she had gone slowly up the road and on to the Heath. It had never crossed his mind for an instant that there could have been any mistake. If he had seen Jenny with his own eyes in the brightly shining light of day he could not have felt more deeply convinced as he drove away from Hazeldon Heath that he had killed her. He was not sorry. The thing was necessary, and it had been done. But he should have got back his note-that was where he had gone wrong. Thinking back on it after the first blind instinct of flight had asserted itself and had been expended, the possibilities emerged and he dwelt upon them. Jenny might have disregarded the instructions and torn the note up, or she might have done as he said and brought it with her. He regarded the two possibilities soberly. The third possibility that she might never have got the note at all did not enter his mind. He still thought of the girl he had killed as Jenny. The one piece of evidence that would connect him with her death was a half sheet of paper folded into a note. He remembered what he had put in it:

“Jenny, don’t say anything to anyone, but come out and meet me up on the heath as soon as it is quite dark.

Mac

Bring this with you.”

What he didn’t remember-what he couldn’t remember-was whether he had dated the note. He had the habit of dating things. Had he dated this? If he hadn’t, it could be any old note written days ago-written before she left Alington House. Surely he would have thought of that and left the date a blank. But he couldn’t remember.

The drive back to town was, if not enough punishment, yet a considerable first instalment. Sunday followed-a long, slow day. There was nothing in the papers. He had hardly expected that there would be. His mother rang up to know whether he was coming down. He said no rather curtly and rang off. He never remembered a week-end that passed so slowly. Yet by Sunday evening he had worked himself into a much calmer frame of mind. He was still thinking that he had killed Jenny, and he had won his way to thinking that she had got no more than her deserts. If she had stayed at Alington House, if she had married him, there wouldn’t have been any need for him to take the risk of killing her. What had happened was entirely her own fault. If she had not run away in the middle of the night it would not have been necessary to kill her. He was not to blame for her obstinacy and her lack of all proper feeling. She was dead and out of his way. Everything would be all right. Jenny was dead.

Then Monday morning, and the papers with the unbelievable news -MURDER ON HAZELDON HEATH. He was expecting that, and read on. The paper dropped from his grasp. He hadn’t killed Jenny. Jenny was alive. He had killed a stranger.

After a minute or two he picked up the paper again. There was something in his having killed a girl he had never heard of. He read all about her. She was Miriam Richardson, and she was the cousin of Mrs. Merridew whom he knew by name because she had a relation in Alingford- Miss Crampton, the late Vicar’s daughter, for whom he had a strong detestation. Mrs. Merridew stayed there occasionally. He hadn’t known that she was living at Hazeldon. There were too many old women in the world-that was a fact.

He went on reading about Miriam Richardson. She had gone up on to Hazeldon Heath to meet a man, one Jimmy Mottingley. A sense of her folly rushed upon him. Mrs. Merridew lived next door. What had possessed Miriam Richardson to come in where Jenny was before he arrived, and to leave the house in the dark to go up to the lonely Heath? What had possessed her? Well, he had only to read on to see. He read on…

So the girl had a lover. That was who Jimmy Mottingley was. And he had arrived late, and he had killed her-killed her. Well, it made quite a good story, and quite a likely one. A girl with a hot temper would be pretty wild if she had had to wait three quarters of an hour or so on a dark deserted heath. It was a black empty place for a girl to wait.

A sense of its blackness and emptiness swept over him as he read. He crushed it down. It had nothing to do with him. None of it had anything to do with him. Miriam Richardson was nothing to him. It was Jenny whom he had meant to kill, and it was Jenny who was most damnably alive.

A cold rage possessed him. He had made a fool of himself-had run into the utmost danger and had gained nothing. And somewhere in all this welter of mistakes-somewhere there was the note that he had written to Jenny. He crumpled the newspaper together and stood up. Such a rage possessed him that he could have done murder at its bidding without a thought but the dominating impulse, to kill. The keener, colder side of himself was alarmed. Alerted, it sprang back and took command. The rage subsided and reason held sway.

What must he do? That was what mattered now. That was all that mattered. He began to pace the room. What mattered most was the note. If he could only remember whether he had dated it or not-it had simply never occurred to him when he was writing it to think that Jenny would not do as he told her. He had that inflated sense of his own importance which is a little present in every young man who is the head of his family, and who has been flattered by an adoring mother and by the consciousness of his own talents.

As he paced the room he was not conscious of any remorse about Miriam’s death. He regarded her as negligible. He had meant to kill Jenny, both because she stood in his way and because she had turned from him to a stranger. No, if it had been a stranger he would have borne it better. It was because Richard Alington Forbes had the name and the blood- because he had not been turned down for someone outside the family. He jerked away from that. He wouldn’t think of that. What you did not think of did not exist for you. Jenny did not exist. Jenny was dead-

The revulsion came-a cold, deadly revulsion. Jenny wasn’t dead. Jenny was alive, and he would have to let her stay alive. It wouldn’t be safe to kill her now-not for a long time. No use dwelling on that

The note-what had happened to it? He saw no reason to suppose that it had never reached her.

And the note lay in Dicky Pratt’s pocket screwed up in a welter of the things boys carry in their pockets. No one had read it except Mac himself. There was no one to tell him that it was quite neatly and legibly dated in the top left-hand corner.