It was tea-time when they reached Worcester, and at once went up to the Royal Charles Hostel. A pretty young woman in the office there informed them that the young gentleman had paid his bill and gone out about ten o'clock; but had left his luggage. She had not seen him come in. His room was up that little staircase at the end of the passage. There was another entrance that he might have come in at. The 'Boots' would take them.
Past the hall stuffed with furniture and decorated with the stags' heads and battle-prints common to English county-town hotels, they followed the 'Boots' up five red-carpeted steps, down a dingy green corridor, to a door at the very end. There was no answer to their knock. The dark little room, with striped walls, and more battle-prints, looked out on a side street and smelled dusty. On a shiny leather sofa an old valise, strapped-up ready for departure, was reposing with Felix's telegram, unopened, deposited thereon.
Writing on his card, "Have come down with Nedda. F. F.," and laying it on the telegram, in case Derek should come in by the side entrance, Felix and Nedda rejoined John in the hall.
To wait in anxiety is perhaps the hardest thing in life; tea, tobacco, and hot baths perhaps the only anodynes. These, except the baths, they took. Without knowing what had happened, neither John nor Felix liked to make inquiry at the police station, nor did they care to try and glean knowledge from the hotel people by questions that might lead to gossip. They could but kick their heels till it became reasonably certain that Derek was not coming back. The enforced waiting increased Felix's exasperation.
Everything Derek did seemed designed to cause Nedda pain. To watch her sitting there, trying resolutely to mask her anxiety, became intolerable. At last he got up and said to John:
"I think we'd better go round there," and, John nodding, he added:
"Wait here, my child. One of us'll come back at once and tell you anything we hear."
She gave them a grateful look and the two brothers went out. They had not gone twenty yards when they met Derek striding along, pale, wild, unhappy-looking. When Felix touched him on the arm, he started and stared blankly at his uncle.
"We've seen about Tryst," Felix said: "You've not done anything?"
Derek shook his head.
"Good! John, tell Nedda that, and stay with her a bit. I want to talk to Derek. We'll go in the other way." He put his hand under the boy's arm and turned him down into the side street. When they reached the gloomy little bedroom Felix pointed to the telegram.
"From me. I suppose the news of his death stopped you?"
"Yes." Derek opened the telegram, dropped it, and sat down beside his valise on the shiny sofa. He looked positively haggard.
Taking his stand against the chest of drawers, Felix said quietly:
"I'm going to have it out with you, Derek. Do you understand what all this means to Nedda? Do you realize how utterly unhappy you're making her? I don't suppose you're happy yourself--"
The boy's whole figure writhed.
"Happy! When you've killed some one you don't think much of happiness--your own or any one's!"
Startled in his turn, Felix said sharply:
"Don't talk like that. It's monomania."
Derek laughed. "Bob Tryst's dead--through me! I can't get out of that."
Gazing at the boy's tortured face, Felix grasped the gruesome fact that this idea amounted to obsession.
"Derek," he said, "you've dwelt on this till you see it out of all proportion. If we took to ourselves the remote consequences of all our words we should none of us survive a week. You're overdone.
You'll see it differently to-morrow."
Derek got up to pace the room.
"I swear I would have saved him. I tried to do it when they committed him at Transham." He looked wildly at Felix. "Didn't I?
You were there; you heard!"
"Yes, yes; I heard."
"They wouldn't let me then. I thought they mightn't find him guilty here--so I let it go on. And now he's dead. You don't know how I feel!"
His throat was working, and Felix said with real compassion:
"My dear boy! Your sense of honour is too extravagant altogether.
A grown man like poor Tryst knew perfectly what he was doing."
"No. He was like a dog--he did what he thought was expected of him. I never meant him to burn those ricks."
"Exactly! No one can blame you for a few wild words. He might have been the boy and you the man by the way you take it! Come!"
Derek sat down again on the shiny sofa and buried his head in his hands.
"I can't get away from him. He's been with me all day. I see him all the time."
That the boy was really haunted was only too apparent. How to attack this mania? If one could make him feel something else! And Felix said:
