Sad cypress - Agatha Christie [76]
‘I was a damned fool,’ said Peter Lord.
‘What were you doing at Hunterbury that morning?’
Peter Lord blushed.
‘It was just sheer idiocy… I – I’d heard she wasdown. I went up to the house on the chance of seeing her. I didn’t mean to speak to her. I – I just wanted to – well – see her. From the path in the shrubbery I saw her in the pantry cutting bread and butter –’
‘Charlotte and the poet Werther. Continue, my friend.’
‘Oh, there’s nothing to tell. I just slipped into the bushes and stayed there watching her till she went away.’
Poirot said gently:
‘Did you fall in love with Elinor Carlisle the first time you saw her?’
There was a long silence.
‘I suppose so.’
Then Peter Lord said:
‘Oh, well, I suppose she and Roderick Welman will live happy ever afterwards.’
Hercule Poirot said:
‘My dear friend, you suppose nothing of the sort!’
‘Why not? She’ll forgive him the Mary Gerrard business. It was only a wild infatuation on his part, anyway.’
Hercule Poirot said:
‘It goes deeper than that…There is, sometimes, a deep chasm between the past and the future. When one has walked in the valley of the shadow of death, and come out of it into the sunshine – then, mon cher, it is a new life that begins… The past will not serve…’
He waited a minute and then went on:
‘A new life…That is what Elinor Carlisle is beginning now – and it is you who have given her that life.’ ‘No.’
‘Yes. It was your determination, your arrogant insistence that compelled me to do as you asked. Admit now, it is to you she turns in gratitude, is it not?’
Peter Lord said slowly:
‘Yes, she’s very grateful – now…She asked me to go and see her – often.’
‘Yes, she needs you.’
Peter Lord said violently:
‘Not as she needs – him!’
Hercule Poirot shook his head.
‘She never needed Roderick Welman. She loved him, yes, unhappily – even desperately.’
Peter Lord, his face set and grim, said harshly:
‘She will never love me like that.’
Hercule Poirot said softly:
‘Perhaps not. But she needs you, my friend, because it is only with you that she can begin the world again.’
Peter Lord said nothing.
Hercule Poirot’s voice was very gentle as he said:
‘Can you not accept facts? She loved Roderick Welman. What of it? With you, she can be happy…’
E-Book Extras
The Poirots
Essay by Charles Osborne
The Poirots
The Mysterious Affair at Styles; The Murder on the Links; Poirot Investigates; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; The Big Four; The Mystery of the Blue Train; Black Coffee; Peril at End House; Lord Edgware Dies; Murder on the Orient Express; Three-Act Tragedy; Death in the Clouds; The ABC Murders; Murder in Mesopotamia; Cards on the Table; Murder in the Mews; Dumb Witness; Death on the Nile; Appointment with Death; Hercule Poirot’s Christmas; Sad Cypress; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; Evil Under the Sun; Five Little Pigs; The Hollow; The Labours of Hercules; Taken at the Flood; Mrs McGinty’s Dead; After the Funeral; Hickory Dickory Dock; Dead Man’s Folly; Cat Among the Pigeons; The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding; The Clocks; Third Girl; Hallowe’en Party; Elephants Can Remember; Poirot’s Early Cases; Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
1. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided in the Great War, is recuperating as a guest of John Cavendish at Styles Court, the ‘country-place’ of John’s autocratic old aunt, Emily Inglethorpe—she of a sizeable fortune, and so recently remarried to a man twenty years her junior. When Emily’s sudden heart attack is found to be attributable to strychnine, Hastings recruits an old friend, now retired, to aid in the local investigation. With impeccable timing, Hercule Poirot, the renowned Belgian detective, makes his dramatic entrance into the pages of crime literature.
Of note: Written in 1916, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was Agatha Christie’s first published work. Six houses rejected the novel before it was finally