The gates were standing open. They may have been opened in expectation of the coming of the specialist who might arrive at any minute, but even the garden wore a new aspect that morning. It was as if the wide airs of Sussex were creeping in and subtly perverting the seemly splendour of that suburban super-garden.
Old Kenyon had been unconscious for twenty-four hours. Both Arthur and Fergusson knew with almost absolute certainty what was the matter with him. A cerebral artery had been ruptured and the area of damaged tissue appeared to be slowly extending. No remedy was possible. The chances were that within another twenty-four hours he would die without recovering consciousness. But he had trained nurses in constant attendance and a specialist had been sent for. Scurr had gone with Fergusson to fetch him in the big car.
Arthur had been up with the unconscious man all night, and had come out into the garden now for a breath of fresh air. When he came downstairs he had found himself a centre of burning interest. All the family, except the one he most wanted to be with, were drawn towards him as if he were the newly found vortex of a whirlpool. They tried desperately hard to be casual and decorous, but they found it impossible to keep their eyes off him. It seemed to Arthur that they almost gaped.
They were all extraordinarily wide-awake and feverishly inactive. The women's fancy-work had
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 not been taken out, nor the daily papers opened. The news they desired to learn that morning was not to be found in the Times. They drifted about the drawing-room and library, and held brief, useless conversations with one another. But when Arthur had passed through the suite a little after eleven o'clock looking for Eleanor, they had suddenly found a focus. He had seen the look of expectancy on their faces and had thrown them a crumb of news.
"He is still unconscious," he had said, and had understood that they asked more from him than that. Then, feeling that he could not endure the greediness of their attention, he had beckoned Joe Kenyon to come out with him into the garden.
They had come within sight of the open gates before either of them spoke.
"No hope, I suppose?" his uncle said then, as if released by the sight of the Sussex lane.
"I should say absolutely none," Arthur replied.
"Not likely to recover consciousness before the end?"
"Extremely unlikely," Arthur said. "In fact, scarcely possible, I think."
Joe Kenyon began to whistle softly between his teeth and abruptly checked himself. "If this property comes to me, I shall have that blasted wall taken down," he remarked, and continued, "You know, Arthur, I'm not going to play the hypocrite, especially to you. This isn't an occasion for mourning. It's as if we'd been living in the dark for half a lifetime and some one had taken the roof off and let the air and light in. I—I feel as if I can see the sky again for the first time in thirty years. It'd be loathsome, crawling hypocrisy to pretend that I'm the least sorry."
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"Oh, obviously," Arthur agreed.
"But I say, how did it happen?" his uncle asked. "We haven't the shakiest notion you know—and...."
"I just murdered him," Arthur said quietly.
"Eh! What's that?" Joe Kenyon ejaculated.
"For all intents and purposes," Arthur explained. "I opposed him, and he tried to take cover—went into one of his 'trances.' Did you know they weren't trances, by the way?"
"No. What the devil were they, then?"
"Pretences, pieces of acting, fantasies of his own making. He used to hide himself in them, as it were. Dream what a great and powerful being he was, able to keep you all in attendance, keep you waiting for ten minutes in the middle of dinner if he liked, while he enjoyed the sense of holding you there. And when he was in danger of losing his temper with me, he tried to get under that cover, to shelter himself, rehabilitate his own pride."
"And you? What did you do?"
"Treated him as if he were a case in a clinic. Began to test his reactions. And—and—well, he couldn't keep it up."
"And then?"
"Couldn't control himself. Lost his temper—frightfully. Whacked at me with his stick—and collapsed. It was losing his temper did it—first time he has done it probably for forty years. Had you ever seen him lose his temper?"
Joe Kenyon considered that question for a moment or two before he said, "No! That was something he always had in reserve, something we were afraid of. He was always terrible to us, in a way, and we felt that if he went one step further he'd be—oh! devastating."
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"He wasn't, you know," Arthur said. "He wasn't terrible, I mean. Not in the least. He was essentially a weak man and not even clever. I sat up with him all last night, and everything came to me as clearly as if I'd read it somewhere. He has altered, you see, in face and expression since he became unconscious. His chin seems to have retreated and all the lines round his mouth have changed. I couldn't keep the idea of a rat out of my mind when I looked at him. I got that effect somehow—something horribly intent and voracious but essentially weak. I remember looking at a dead rat in the stables when I was a boy. It was lying on its back with its feeble little front paws stuck up and the feet dangling.... And he had just the same expression on his face—ineffectual and yet cruel—as if his one regret was that he couldn't hurt any one again. I was almost sorry that he couldn't—especially as I had murdered him."
"Oh, nonsense, Arthur; nonsense," his uncle interposed. "Don't say that."
"True, though, in a way, isn't it?" Arthur said. "Truer than you guess, because I had known that it might kill him if he had a great shock. I'd even said so to Hubert, a few days ago—Sunday, I think it was. But I'd forgotten it. When I was telling him that I meant to go and take Eleanor with me whatever he did, I never once considered that it might be too much for him. And that was criminal carelessness in a medical man. I've been thinking about it more or less ever since."
He paused and looked ahead of him, out through the gate into the Sussex lane, and it was manifest that he was confessing to himself rather than to Joe Kenyon as he continued: "Not that I propose to take any responsibility for his death. That
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 wouldn't help any one. It happened so, and I shan't forget it, but that's all. Fergusson knows. There's no need to worry about it. Only—I've grown up. I'm not quite the same man I was twenty-four hours ago. I came down here to get back some of the years of youth that I'd lost in the war. Well, they're gone for good and all. I shall never be able to recover them now."
"Oh, nonsense!" his uncle repeated, taking his arm. "You've got a thundering good time ahead of you."
Arthur smiled. "I've got the best time any man could have ahead of me," he said, "but I shall enjoy it as a man, not as a boy. I didn't say that I regretted the passing of my youth, uncle."
"No, no, of course not," Joe Kenyon agreed. "And look here, old boy, we've been talking about you since yesterday morning, about you and Eleanor, that is; and Turner and I—and Hubert, of course—are quite agreed that if the old man has, after all, overlooked you in his will, that we shall take it for granted that it was just an oversight—though probably Eleanor will be left pretty well off. If he had a favourite, it was Eleanor."
"Good of you, uncle," Arthur replied warmly. "Awfully good and generous of you, but you must see that I couldn't take a farthing, even if the old man left it to me."
"I don't see why not," Joe Kenyon began, but Arthur stopped him by saying.
"No! Absolutely! In no circumstances whatever! It isn't simply that I could not bear to profit now by his death—though that counts. But—well—perhaps it needn't apply to you and the rest of them—but last night, while I was watching that poor thing on the bed, I realised so profoundly that
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 his one source of power had been his money. I assure you that he was a weak man and not clever. If you can't believe me, go upstairs and look at him. And without his money he would have had no authority, no power over you of any sort. It was just his money that gave him the chance to spoil all your lives. Oh, Lord! I'm talking like a fath............