“He Won’t Survive the Night,” the Doctor Warned—So His Family Abandoned the Dying Duke of Fenmere, Unaware That the Stranger Who Refused to Leave Him Had Discovered His Carriage Crash Was No Accident.

 PART 7

They went to Fenmir on the second of February in a carriage with the seat taken out and the door of the back kitchen laid along it, which the Fenmir coachman had never in his life been asked to do, and did without a word. Elias came because the leg was not finished with. Maud came because her father did.

The household did not know what to do with her, and she settled the question in a single morning. She would not be waited on. She would take her meals with her father in the steward’s parlour, and be obliged for the key of the still room and the loan of a needle.

“Miss Hollis is a guest in this house,” said Thaddius.

“Miss Hollis is a witness in a cause,” said Maud, “and on the fifteenth of February she may be a guest, if she is asked. Until then, she will be exactly where anybody who inquires can be told she was, doing exactly what anybody who inquires can be told she did.”

He governed for twelve days. He had never done it before in his life. He stopped the beech sale, paid the forfeit from his own pocket, took back the four outdoor men, went through the rents parish by parish with a steward who had waited nine years to be asked a question. He signed nothing without reading it, and put the stopping-up order in the fire himself, with the tongs, and watched it go.

Elias, in the steward’s parlour, gave him one piece of counsel he had not asked for. “Do not offer my daughter money. When this is over, you will want to set it right — a sum, a settlement, a paper with a figure on it. Because that is what your sort does, and there is nothing wicked in it. But she has been offered money by your cousin in her own kitchen, for her oath, and by your attorney, for her trouble, and it will come at her from a third quarter before this is finished. I feel it the way I feel weather in my knee.” His hands came apart. “If ever you put money into that woman’s hand in front of other people, sir, you will not get her back. Not in a year, and not in ten.”

He walked in on two sticks up the aisle at Wick End church on the eighth, slowly, at a quarter to eleven, and stood through the psalm.

The dinner at Fenmir on the thirteenth of February was for twenty. Lady Arabella sat at his right hand — three days in the house, and a great deal of work in them. She had wept prettily over the hatchment. She had gone through the state rooms with the housekeeper. She had told four separate people, in Thaddius’s hearing, that he had been most wonderfully nursed by two of his own cottagers, in a tone that put the whole thing in a glass case and labelled it.

Maud sat far down the table between the rector and a deaf lady from Heatheridge, in a gray gown Thaddius had never seen and understood at once she had made herself.

It went well for an hour and ten minutes. It turned at the second course, when the deaf lady asked Maud, loudly and quite kindly, what a toll house was like inside. Maud told her — three rooms, a brick floor, eleven pounds a year — in the same flat, clear voice she used for everything, and half the table stopped to listen, and liked her. There was a small, warm silence of the kind a party remembers afterward as the best part of the evening.

Lady Arabella, who was not a stupid woman, felt the room move.

“How very interesting. And how good you have been.” She turned her whole charming face down the table. “I do not think I’ve ever thanked Miss Hollis properly. You must have been quite worn out, my dear — thirteen weeks nursing, and cooking, and writing all his letters, with nobody to help you and nobody to see.” A pause, beautifully judged. “Of course, your father.” Another. “And no one else at all.” She smiled at Maud with great sweetness. “It is an extraordinary devotion. Whatever the world may think of it — and the world will think what it likes, my dear, it always does — the woman must have wanted something very much indeed. What did you ask him for, Miss Hollis?”

The table went quiet.

Thaddius had in his pocket a note in his attorney’s hand: the sixth particular is the dangerous one — we must be able to show a plain hired relation and nothing else. He heard himself answer for her.

“Nothing,” he said. “She asked for nothing. She has been paid.”

Somebody laughed, in relief, the way a table does. He could have stopped there. He has never been able to explain to himself why he did not.

“My pocketbook,” he said to the steward at his elbow. It came. He counted out fifty pounds in notes on the cloth, in front of eighteen people and four servants, folded them once, and held them out.

“Take these down to Miss Hollis. It is a hired service, and it will be paid for as one, and I will have no more said about it at my table.”

The room was silent the whole length of it while the steward carried fifty pounds twenty-two feet. Maud looked at the notes on the salver a moment. Then she took them, put them in her lap, and said quite clearly, so that everybody heard: “Thank you, Your Grace.”

She asked the deaf lady for the loan of a pencil, turned over a card by her plate, wrote three lines on the back, blew on it, and gave it to the steward. “Would you carry that back to His Grace. It is a receipt. He will want one.”

Then she got up. “Father.”

She put his hand through her arm, and the two of them walked the whole length of the room at the old man’s pace, past every one of those eighteen people, and Elias said nothing at all, and did not turn his blind face toward the head of the table. And that was very much worse than anything he could have said.

At the door Maud stopped. “Your Grace. Lady Arabella’s father put a question to you at breakfast this morning, and you have not answered it. And he is a guest in your house, and it is not civil. I should answer it tonight.”

They went out.

The card, when the steward brought it, read: Received of his grace the Duke of Fenmir the sum of £50, being payment in full for services rendered at the toll house at Saints Drove between the third of November and the second of February, no other consideration having been asked, offered, or received. M. Hollis.

Somebody down the table said what a very superior sort of person. Somebody else said it must be a great relief. The dinner went on for two hours and forty minutes more, and the Duke of Fenmir could not afterward have told anybody one thing that was said.

The rector did not stay for tea. He came up in the hall with his hat already in his hand. “You will excuse me, Duke. It is eleven miles, and my horse is old.”

“You are angry with me.”

“I am a magistrate,” said the rector, “and I sit beside the commissioner on Thursday, and I had rather not be angry with anybody tonight.” He put his hat on. “I will say one thing, and then go, and you may take it as a clergyman’s or a neighbour’s, whichever you like. I wrote to that commissioner in January on your behalf. I said, among other things, that a man’s understanding may be fairly judged by whether he knows what he owes, and to whom.” He looked at Thaddius steadily. “I posted it on the twentieth. I have thought about that sentence a good deal in the last half hour. Good night, Duke.”

He went down to the steward’s parlour at midnight. The fire was banked, the bed stripped and folded, the instrument chest gone off the table, the good coat gone off the door. He found the coachman in the stableyard at one in the morning, putting up the gig.

“You took them.”

“I did, Your Grace, without leave. Mr. Hollis asked me at the yard door whether I’d take him and his daughter as far as they wanted to go. I said I would, and I did, and I’d do it again in the morning.” He straightened up. “Miss Hollis wouldn’t be set down at the toll house. She’d her box with her, and she asked me to carry her on into Heatheridge and put her at the coach office, and she’d not say another word the whole eleven miles. She’s gone in on her own, Your Grace. Ten hours before they want her.”

Thaddius stood in the cold with his hand on the wheel. Fifty pounds, counted onto a tablecloth with his own hands, twenty-two feet from a woman who had sat six hours in cold flood water on a staircase so that his feet should stay dry. And he had done it because an attorney had sent him a note about a particular, and he had done it in front of eighteen people, and she had thanked him for it.

Do not offer my daughter money.

He ordered the horses at one, and then stood in his own hall with his stick in his hand, and did not go — because it was eleven miles of black road, and because there was nothing whatever a man could say at the door of a coach office at three in the morning that would not have made it worse.