“Not,” he said, “a very sympathetic reply.”
“I thought it abominable. I lost my temper. I said that no doubt, not caring for his wife, he didn’t mind how much he made her suffer, but what, I said, about the girl? Hadn’t he realized it was a pretty rotten position for her? His reply to that was that Elsa must lump it too!
“Then he went on: ‘You don’t seem to understand, Meredith, that this thing I’m painting is the best thing I’ve done. It’s good, I tell you. And a couple of jealous quarrelling women aren’t going to upset it—no, by hell, they’re not.’
“It was hopeless talking to him. I said he seemed to have taken leave of all ordinary decency. Painting, I said, wasn’t everything. He interrupted there. He said: ‘Ah, but it is to me.’
“I was still very angry. I said it was perfectly disgraceful the way he had always treated Caroline. She had had a miserable life with him. He said he knew that and he was sorry about it. Sorry! He said: ‘I know, Merry, you don’t believe that—but it’s the truth. I’ve given Caroline the hell of a life and she’s been a saint about it. But she did know, I think, what she might be letting herself in for. I told her candidly the sort of damnable egoistic, loose-living kind of chap I was.’
“I put it to him then very strongly that he ought not to break up his married life. There was the child to be considered and everything. I said that I could understand that a girl like Elsa could bowl a man over, but that even for her sake he ought to break off the whole thing. She was very young. She was going into this baldheaded, but she might regret it bitterly afterwards. I said couldn’t he pull himself together, make a clean break and go back to his wife?”
“And what did he say?”
Blake said: “He just looked—embarrassed. He patted me on the shoulder and said: ‘You’re a good chap, Merry. But you’re too sentimental. You wait till the picture’s finished and you’ll admit that I was right.’
“I said: ‘Damn your picture.’ And he grinned and said all the neurotic women in England couldn’t do that. Then I said that it would have been more decent to have kept the whole thing from Caroline until after the picture was finished. He said that that wasn’t his fault. It was Elsa who had insisted on spilling the beans. I said, Why? And he said that she had had some idea that it wasn’t straight otherwise. She wanted everything to be clear and above board. Well, of course, in a way, one could understand that and respect the girl for it. However badly she was behaving, she did at least want to be honest.”
“A lot of additional pain and grief is caused by honesty,” remarked Hercule Poirot.
Meredith Blake looked at him doubtfully. He did not quite like the sentiment. He sighed:
“It was a—a most unhappy time for us all.”
“The only person who does not seem to have been affected by it was Amyas Crale,” said Poirot.
“And why? Because he was a rank egoist. I remember him now. Grinning at me as he went off saying: ‘Don’t worry, Merry. Everything’s going to pan out all right!’”
“The incurable optimist,” murmured Poirot.
Meredith Blake said:
“He was the kind of man who didn’t take women seriously. I could have told him that Caroline was desperate.”
“Did she tell you so?”
“Not in so many words. But I shall always see her face as it was that afternoon. White and strained with a kind of desperate gaiety. She talked and laughed a lot. But her eyes—there was a kind of anguished grief in them that was the most moving thing I have ever known. Such a gentle creature, too.”
Hercule Poirot looked at him for a minute or two without speaking. Clearly the man in front of him felt no incongruity in speaking thus of a woman who on the day after had deliberately killed her husband.
Meredith Blake went on. He had by now quite overcome his first suspicious hostility. Hercule Poirot had the gift of listening. To men such as Meredith Blake, the reliving of the past has a definite attraction. He spoke now almost more to himself than to his guest.
“I ought to have suspected something, I suppose. It was Caroline who turned the conversation to—to my little hobby. It was, I must confess, an enthusiasm of mine. The old English herbalists, you know, are a very interesting study. There are so many plants that were formerly used in medicine and which have now disappeared from the official Pharmacopœia. And it’s astonishing, really, how a simple decoction of something or other will really work wonders. No need for doctors half the time. The French understand these things—some of their tisanes are first rate.” He was well away now on his hobby.
“Dandelion tea, for instance; marvellous stuff. And a decoction of hips—I saw the other day somewhere that that’s coming into fashion with the medical profession again. Oh yes, I must confess, I got a lot of pleasure out of my brews. Gathering the plants at the right time, drying them—macerating them—all the rest of it. I’ve even dropped to superstition sometimes and gathered my roots at the full of the moon or whatever it was the ancients advised. On that day I gave my guests, I remember, a special disquisition on the spotted hemlock. It flowers biennially. You gather the fruits when they’re ripening, just before they turn yellow. Coniine, you know, is a drug that’s dropped out—I don’t believe there’s any official preparation of it in the last Pharmacopœia—but I’ve proved the usefulness of it in whooping cough—and in asthma too, for that matter—”
“You talked
of all this in your laboratory?”
“Yes, I showed them round—explained the various drugs to them—valerian and the way it attracts cats—one sniff at that was enough for them! Then they asked about deadly nightshade and I told them about belladonna and atropine. They were very much interested.”
“They? What is comprised in that word?”
Meredith Blake looked faintly surprised as though he had forgotten that his listener had no first-hand knowledge of the scene.
“Oh, the whole party. Let me see, Philip was there and Amyas, and Caroline, of course. Angela. And Elsa Greer.”
“That was all?”