复仇女神34
时间：2026-01-29 07:28:59
（单词翻译:单击）
Eighteen
ARCHDEACON BRABAZON
When Miss Marple, slightly out of breath and rather tired, got back to the
Golden Boar, the receptionist came out from her pen and across to greet
her.
“Oh, Miss Marple, there is someone here who wants to speak to you.
Archdeacon Brabazon.”
“Archdeacon Brabazon?” Miss Marple looked puzzled.
“Yes. He’s been trying to find you. He had heard you were with this tour
and he wanted to talk to you before you might have left or gone to Lon-
don. I told him that some of them were going back to London by the later
train this afternoon, but he is very, very anxious to speak to you before
you go. I have put him in the television lounge. It is quieter there. The
other is very noisy just at this moment.”
Slightly surprised, Miss Marple went to the room indicated. Archdeacon
Brabazon turned out to be the elderly cleric whom she had noticed at the
memorial service. He rose and came towards her.
“Miss Marple. Miss Jane Marple?”
“Yes, that is my name. You wanted—”
“I am Archdeacon Brabazon. I came here this morning to attend the ser-
vice for a very old friend of mine, Miss Elizabeth Temple.”
“Oh yes?” said Miss Marple. “Do sit down.”
“Thank you, I will, I am not quite as strong as I was.” He lowered himself
carefully into a chair.
“And you—”
Miss Marple sat down beside him.
“Yes,” she said, “you wanted to see me?”
“Well, I must explain how that comes about. I’m quite aware that I am a
complete stranger to you. As a matter of fact I made a short visit to the
hospital at Carristown, talking to the matron before going on to the church
here. It was she who told me that before she died Elizabeth had asked to
see a fellow member of the tour. Miss Jane Marple. And that Miss Jane
Marple had visited her and sat with her just a very, very short time before
Elizabeth died.”
He looked at her anxiously.
“Yes,” said Miss Marple, “that is so. It surprised me to be sent for.”
“You are an old friend of hers?”
“No,” said Miss Marple. “I only met her on this tour. That’s why I was
surprised. We had expressed ideas to each other, occasionally sat next to
each other in the coach, and had struck up quite an acquaintanceship. But
I was surprised that she should have expressed a wish to see me when she
was so ill.”
“Yes. Yes, I can quite imagine that. She was, as I have said, a very old
friend of mine. In fact, she was coming to see me, to visit me. I live in Fill-
minster, which is where your coach tour will be stopping the day after to-
morrow. And by arrangement she was coming to visit me there, she
wanted to talk to me about various matters about which she thought I
could help her.”
“I see,” said Miss Marple. “May I ask you a question? I hope it is not too
intimate a question.”
“Of course, Miss Marple. Ask me anything you like.”
“One of the things Miss Temple said to me was that her presence on the
tour was not merely because she wished to visit historic homes and gar-
dens. She described it by a rather unusual word to use, as a pilgrimage.”
“Did she,” said Archdeacon Brabazon. “Did she indeed now? Yes, that’s
interesting. Interesting and perhaps significant.”
“So what I am asking you is, do you think that the pilgrimage she spoke
of was her visit to you?”
“I think it must have been,” said the Archdeacon. “Yes, I think so.”
“We had been talking,” said Miss Marple, “about a young girl. A girl
called Verity.”
“Ah yes. Verity Hunt.”
“I did not know her surname. Miss Temple, I think, mentioned her only
as Verity.”
“Verity Hunt is dead,” said the Archdeacon. “She died quite a number of
years ago. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple. “I knew it. Miss Temple and I were talking
about her. Miss Temple told me something that I did not know. She said
she had been engaged to be married to the son of a Mr. Rafiel. Mr. Rafiel
is, or again I must say was, a friend of mine. Mr. Rafiel has paid the ex-
penses of this tour out of his kindness. I think, though, that possibly he
wanted—indeed, intended—me to meet Miss Temple on this tour. I think
he thought she could give me certain information.”
“Certain information about Verity?”
“Yes.”
“That is why she was coming to me. She wanted to know certain facts.”
“She wanted to know,” said Miss Marple, “why Verity broke off her en-
gagement to marry Mr. Rafiel’s son.”
“Verity,” said Archdeacon Brabazon, “did not break off her engagement.
I am certain of that. As certain as one can be of anything.”
“Miss Temple did not know that, did she?”
“No. I think she was puzzled and unhappy about what happened and
was coming to me to ask me why the marriage did not take place.”
“And why did it not take place?” asked Miss Marple. “Please do not think
that I am unduly curious. It’s not idle curiosity that is driving me. I too am
on—not a pilgrimage—but what I should call a mission. I too want to
know why Michael Rafiel and Verity Hunt did not marry.”
The Archdeacon studied her for a moment or two.
“You are involved in some way,” he said. “I see that.”
“I am involved,” said Miss Marple, “by the dying wishes of Michael
Rafiel’s father. He asked me to do this for him.”
“I have no reason not to tell you all I know,” said the Archdeacon slowly.
“You are asking me what Elizabeth Temple would have been asking me,
you are asking me something I do not know myself. Those two young
people, Miss Marple, intended to marry. They had made arrangements to
marry. I was going to marry them. It was a marriage, I gather, which was
being kept a secret. I knew both these young people, I knew that dear
child Verity from a long way back. I prepared her for confirmation, I used
to hold services in Lent, for Easter, on other occasions, in Elizabeth
Temple’s school. A very fine school it was, too. A very fine woman she
was. A wonderful teacher with a great sense of each girl’s capabilities—for
what she was best fitted for in studies. She urged careers on girls she
thought would relish careers, and did not force girls that she felt were not
really suited to them. She was a great woman and a very dear friend. Ver-
ity was one of the most beautiful children—girls, rather—that I have come
across. Beautiful in mind, in heart, as well as in appearance. She had the
great misfortune to lose her parents before she was truly adult. They were
both killed in a charter plane going on a holiday to Italy. Verity went to
live when she left school with a Miss Clotilde Bradbury-Scott whom you
know, probably, as living here. She had been a close friend of Verity’s
mother. There are three sisters, though the second one was married and
living abroad, so there were only two of them living here. Clotilde, the eld-
est one, became extremely attached to Verity. She did everything possible
to give her a happy life. She took her abroad once or twice, gave her art
lessons in Italy and loved and cared for her dearly in every way. Verity,
too, came to love her probably as much as she could have loved her own
mother. She depended on Clotilde. Clotilde herself was an intellectual and
well educated woman. She did not urge a university career on Verity, but
this I gather was really because Verity did not really yearn after one. She
preferred to study art and music and such subjects. She lived here at The
Old Manor House and had, I think, a very happy life. She always seemed
to be happy. Naturally, I did not see her after she came here since Fillmin-
ster, where I was in the cathedral, is nearly sixty miles from here. I wrote
to her at Christmas and other festivals, and she remembered me always
with a Christmas card. But I saw nothing of her until the day came when
she suddenly turned up, a very beautiful and fully grown young woman
by then, with an attractive young man whom I also happened to know
slightly, Mr. Rafiel’s son, Michael. They came to me because they were in
love with each other and wanted to get married.”
“And you agreed to marry them?”
“Yes, I did. Perhaps, Miss Marple, you may think that I should not have
done so. They had come to me in secret, it was obvious. Clotilde Bradbury-
Scott, I should imagine, had tried to discourage the romance between
them. She was well within her rights in doing so. Michael Rafiel, I will tell
you frankly, was not the kind of husband you would want for any daugh-
ter or relation of yours. She was too young really, to make up her mind,
and Michael had been a source of trouble ever since his very young days.
He had been had up before junior courts, he had had unsuitable friends,
he had been drawn into various gangster activities, he’d sabotaged build-
ings and telephone boxes. He had been on intimate terms with various
girls, had maintenance claims which he had had to meet. Yes, he was a
bad lot with the girls as well as in other ways, yet he was extremely at-
tractive and they fell for him and behaved in an extremely silly fashion.
He had served two short jail sentences. Frankly, he had a criminal record.
I was acquainted with his father, though I did not know him well, and I
think that his father did all that he could—all that a man of his character
could—to help his son. He came to his rescue, he got him jobs in which he
might have succeeded. He paid up his debts, paid out damages. He did all
this. I don’t know—”
“But he could have done more, you think?”
“No,” said the Archdeacon, “I’ve come to an age now when I know that
one must accept one’s fellow human beings as being the kind of people
and having the kind of, shall we say in modern terms, genetic makeup
which gives them the characters they have. I don’t think that Mr. Rafiel
had affection for his son, a great affection at any time. To say he was reas-
onably fond of him would be the most you could say. He gave him no love.
Whether it would have been better for Michael if he had had love from his
father, I do not know. Perhaps it would have made no difference. As it
was, it was sad. The boy was not stupid. He had a certain amount of intel-
lect and talent. He could have done well if he had wished to do well, and
had taken the trouble. But he was by nature—let us admit it frankly—a de-
linquent. He had certain qualities one appreciated. He had a sense of hu-
mour, he was in various ways generous and kindly. He would stand by a
friend, help a friend out of a scrape. He treated his girlfriends badly, got
them into trouble as the local saying is, and then more or less abandoned
them and took up with somebody else. So there I was faced with those two
and—yes—I agreed to marry them. I told Verity, I told her quite frankly,
the kind of boy she wanted to marry. I found that he had not tried to de-
ceive her in any way. He’d told her that he’d always been in trouble both
with the police, and in every other way. He told her that he was going,
when he married her, to turn over a new leaf. Everything would be
changed. I warned her that that would not happen, he would not change.
People do not change. He might mean to change. Verity, I think, knew that
almost as well as I did. She admitted that she knew it. She said, ‘I know
what Mike is like. I know he’ll probably always be like it, but I love him. I
may be able to help him and I may not. But I’ll take that risk.’ And I will
tell you this, Miss Marple. I know—none better, I have done a lot with
young people, I have married a lot of young people and I have seen them
come to grief, I have seen them unexpectedly turn out well—but I know
this and recognize it. I know when a couple are really in love with each
other. And by that I do not mean just sexually attracted. There is too much
talk about sex, too much attention is paid to it. I do not mean that anything
about sex is wrong. That is nonsense. But sex cannot take the place of love,
it goes with love but it cannot succeed by itself. To love means the words of
the marriage service. For better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sick-
ness and in health. That is what you take on if you love and wish to marry.
Those two loved each other. To love and to cherish until death do us part.
And that,” said the Archdeacon, “is where my story ends. I cannot go on
because I do not know what happened. I only know that I agreed to do as
they asked, that I made the necessary arrangements; we settled a day, an
hour, a time, a place. I think perhaps that I was to blame for agreeing to
the secrecy.”
“They didn’t want anyone to know?” said Miss Marple.
“No. Verity did not want anyone to know, and I should say most cer-
tainly Mike did not want anyone to know. They were afraid of being
stopped. To Verity, I think, besides love, there was also a feeling of escape.
Natural, I think, owing to the circumstances of her life. She had lost her
real guardians, her parents, she had entered on her new life after their
death, at an age when a school girl arrives at having a ‘crush’ on someone.
An attractive mistress. Anything from the games mistress to the mathem-
atics mistress, or a prefect or an older girl. A state that does not last for
very long, is merely a natural part of life. Then from that you go on to the
next stage when you realize that what you want in your life is what com-
plements yourself. A relationship between a man and a woman. You start
then to look about you for a mate. The mate you want in life. And if you
are wise, you take your time, you have friends, but you are looking, as the
old nurses used to say to children, for Mr. Right to come along. Clotilde
Bradbury-Scott was exceptionally good to Verity, and Verity, I think, gave
her what I should call hero worship. She was a personality as a woman.
Handsome, accomplished, interesting. I think Verity adored her in an al-
most romantic way and I think Clotilde came to love Verity as though she
were her own daughter. And so Verity grew to maturity in an atmosphere
of adoration, lived an interesting life with interesting subjects to stimulate
her intellect. It was a happy life, but I think little by little she was con-
scious—conscious without knowing she was conscious, shall we say—of a
wish to escape. Escape from being loved. To escape, she didn’t know into
what or where. But she did know after she met Michael. She wanted to es-
cape to a life where male and female come together to create the next
stage of living in this world. But she knew that it was impossible to make
Clotilde understand how she felt. She knew that Clotilde would be bitterly
opposed to her taking her love for Michael seriously. And Clotilde, I fear,
was right in her belief … I know that now. He was not a husband that Ver-
ity ought to have taken or had. The road that she started out on led not to
life, not to increased living and happiness. It led to shock, pain, death. You
see, Miss Marple, that I have a grave feeling of guilt. My motives were
good, but I didn’t know what I ought to have known. I knew Verity, but I
didn’t know Michael. I understood Verity’s wish for secrecy because I
knew what a strong personality Clotilde Bradbury-Scott had. She might
have had a strong enough influence over Verity to persuade her to give up
the marriage.”
“You think then that that was what she did do? You think Clotilde told
her enough about Michael to persuade her to give up the idea of marrying
him?”
“No, I do not believe that. I still do not. Verity would have told me if so.
She would have got word to me.”
“What did actually happen on that day?”
“I haven’t told you that yet. The day was fixed. The time, the hour and
the place, and I waited. Waited for a bride and bridegroom who didn’t
come, who sent no word, no excuse, nothing. I didn’t know why! I never
have known why. It still seems to me unbelievable. Unbelievable, I mean,
not that they did not come, that could be explicable easily enough, but that
they sent no word. Some scrawled line of writing. And that is why I
wondered and hoped that Elizabeth Temple, before she died, might have
told you something. Given you some message perhaps for me. If she knew
or had any idea that she was dying, she might have wanted to get a mes-
sage to me.”
“She wanted information from you,” said Miss Marple. “That, I am sure,
was the reason she was coming to you.”
“Yes. Yes, that is probably true. It seemed to me, you see, that Verity
would have said nothing to the people who could have stopped her.
Clotilde and Anthea Bradbury- Scott, but because she had always been
very devoted to Elizabeth Temple—and Elizabeth Temple had had great
influence over her—it seems to me that she would have written and given
her information of some kind.”
“I think she did,” said Miss Marple.
“Information, you think?”
“The information she gave to Elizabeth Temple,” said Miss Marple, “was
this. That she was going to marry Michael Rafiel. Miss Temple knew that.
It was one of the things she said to me. She said: ‘I knew a girl called Verity
who was going to marry Michael Rafiel’ and the only person who could
have told her that was Verity herself. Verity must have written to her or
sent some word to her. And then when I said ‘Why didn’t she marry him?’
she said: ‘She died.’”
“Then we come to a full stop,” said Archdeacon Brabazon. He sighed.
“Elizabeth and I know no more than those two facts. Elizabeth, that Verity
was going to marry Michael. And I that those two were going to marry,
that they had arranged it and that they were coming on a settled day and
time. And I waited for them, but there was no marriage. No bride, no
bridegroom, no word.”
“And you have no idea what happened?” said Miss Marple.
“I do not for one minute believe that Verity or Michael definitely parted,
broke off.”
“But something must have happened between them? Something that
opened Verity’s eyes perhaps, to certain aspects of Michael’s character and
personality, that she had not realized or known before.”
“That is not a satisfying answer because still she would have let me
know. She would not have left me waiting to join them together in holy
matrimony. To put the most ridiculous side of it, she was a girl with beau-
tiful manners, well brought up. She would have sent word. No. I’m afraid
that only one thing could have happened.”
“Death?” said Miss Marple. She was remembering that one word that
Elizabeth Temple had said which had sounded like the deep tone of a bell.
“Yes.” Archdeacon Brabazon sighed. “Death.”
“Love,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully.
“By that you mean—” he hesitated.
“It’s what Miss Temple said to me. I said ‘What killed her?’ and she said
‘Love’ and that love was the most frightening word in the world. The most
frightening word.”
“I see,” said the Archdeacon. “I see—or I think I see.”
“What is your solution?”
“Split personality,” he sighed. “Something that is not apparent to other
people unless they are technically qualified to observe it. Jekyll and Hyde
are real, you know. They were not Stevenson’s invention as such. Michael
Rafiel was a—must have been schizophrenic. He had a dual personality. I
have no medical knowledge, no psychoanalytic experience. But there must
have been in him the two parts of two identities. One, a well-meaning, al-
most lovable boy, a boy perhaps whose principal attraction was his wish
for happiness. But there was also a second personality, someone who was
forced by some mental deformation perhaps—something we as yet are not
sure of—to kill—not an enemy, but the person he loved, and so he killed
Verity. Not knowing perhaps why he had to or what it meant. There are
very frightening things in this world of ours, mental quirks, mental dis-
ease or deformity of a brain. One of my parishioners was a very sad case
in point. Two elderly women living together, pensioned. They had been
friends in service together somewhere. They appeared to be a happy
couple. And yet one day one of them killed the other. She sent for an old
friend of hers, the vicar of her parish, and said: ‘I have killed Louisa. It is
very sad,’ she said, ‘but I saw the devil looking out of her eyes and I knew I
was being commanded to kill her.’ Things like that make one sometimes
despair of living. One says why? and how? and yet one day knowledge will
come. Doctors will find out or learn just some small deformity of a chro-
mosome or gene. Some gland that overworks or leaves off working.”
“So you think that’s what happened?” said Miss Marple.
“It did happen. The body was not found, I know, for some time after-
wards. Verity just disappeared. She went away from home and was not
seen again….”
“But it must have happened then—that very day—”
“But surely at the trial—”
“You mean after the body was found, when the police finally arrested
Michael?”
“He had been one of the first, you know, to be asked to come and give
assistance to the police. He had been seen about with the girl, she had
been noticed in his car. They were sure all along that he was the man they
wanted. He was their first suspect, and they never stopped suspecting
him. The other young men who had known Verity were questioned, and
one and all had alibis or lack of evidence. They continued to suspect Mi-
chael, and finally the body was found. Strangled and the head and face
disfigured with heavy blows. A mad frenzied attack. He wasn’t sane when
he struck those blows. Mr. Hyde, let us say, had taken over.”
Miss Marple shivered.
The Archdeacon went on, his voice low and sad. “And yet, even now
sometimes, I hope and feel that it was some other young man who killed
her. Someone who was definitely mentally deranged, though no one had
any idea of it. Some stranger, perhaps, whom she had met in the neighbor-
hood. Someone who she had met by chance, who had given her a lift in a
car, and then—” He shook his head.
“I suppose that could have been true,” said Miss Marple.
“Mike made a bad impression in court,” said the Archdeacon. “Told fool-
ish and senseless lies. Lied as to where his car had been. Got his friends to
give him impossible alibis. He was frightened. He said nothing of his plan
to marry. I believe his Counsel was of the opinion that that would tell
against him—that she might have been forcing him to marry her and that
he didn’t want to. It’s so long ago now, I remember no details. But the
evidence was dead against him. He was guilty—and he looked guilty.
“So you see, do you not, Miss Marple, that I’m a very sad and unhappy
man. I made the wrong judgment, I encouraged a very sweet and lovely
girl to go to her death, because I did not know enough of human nature. I
was ignorant of the danger she was running. I believed that if she had had
any fear of him, any sudden knowledge of something evil in him, she
would have broken her pledge to marry him and have come to me and
told me of her fear, of her knowledge of him. But nothing of that ever
happened. Why did he kill her? Did he kill her because perhaps he knew
she was going to have a child? Because by now he had formed a tie with
some other girl and did not want to be forced to marry Verity? I can’t be-
lieve it. Or was it some entirely different reason. Because she had sud-
denly felt a fear of him, a knowledge of danger from him, and had broken
off her association with him? Did that rouse his anger, his fury, and did
that lead him to violence and to killing her? One does not know.”
“You do not know?” said Miss Marple, “but you do still know and believe
one thing, don’t you?”
“What do you mean exactly by ‘believe?’ Are you talking from the reli-
gious point of view?”
“Oh no,” said Miss Marple, “I didn’t mean that. I mean, there seems to be
in you, or so I feel it, a very strong belief that those two loved each other,
that they meant to marry, but that something happened that prevented it.
Something that ended in her death, but you still really believe that they
were coming to you to get married that day?”
“You are quite right, my dear. Yes, I cannot help still believing in two
lovers who wished to get married, who were ready to take each other on
for better, for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. She
loved him and she would have taken him for better or for worse. As far as
she had gone, she took him for worse. It brought about her death.”
“You must go on believing as you do,” said Miss Marple. “I think, you
know, that I believe it too.”
“But then what?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Miss Marple. “I’m not sure, but I think Elizabeth
Temple did know or was beginning to know what happened. A frightening
word, she said. Love. I thought when she spoke that what she meant was
that because of a love affair Verity committed suicide. Because she found
out something about Michael, or because something about Michael sud-
denly upset her and revolted her. But it couldn’t have been suicide.”
“No,” said the Archdeacon, “that couldn’t be so. The injuries were de-
scribed very fully at the trial. You don’t commit suicide by beating in your
own head.”
“Horrible!” said Miss Marple. “Horrible! And you couldn’t do that to
anyone you loved even if you had to kill ‘for love,’ could you? If he’d killed
her, he couldn’t have done it that way. Strangling — perhaps, but you
wouldn’t beat in the face and the head that you loved.” She murmured,
“Love, love—a frightening word.”
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