If he meant to marry this girl, he ought not to have her staying in the house and - well - more or less flaunt her in Caroline's face.
It was, I said, an unendurable insult."
"What did he answer?" Poirot asked curiously.
Meredith Blake replied with distaste,
"He said,
'Caroline must lump it.'"
Hercule Poirot's eyebrows rose.
"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 be 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, quarreling 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, egotistical, 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 bald-headed, but she might regret it bitterly afterward.
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 aboveboard.
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.