The Crime of Laura Sarelle E-Book

Marjorie Bowen

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Laura hesitated. She moved from her brother and looked out from the tall window across the landscape that she found so distasteful. At the bottom of the gentle slope on which the house stood the grey waters of the Avon, gleaming from between the dull leaves of the willows, flowed smoothly by with, to her, an air of sad monotony.
She tried to control herself, for the young brother to whom she had spoken was her master and might easily be, she knew, her tyrant. She had to play the game that women have learned during the ages to be so skilful at, to watch her opportunity, to cajole; if need be, to deceive. She was not yet very clever at any of these slavish arts and she had to bite her lip now and to clench her hands in her palms before she had sufficient control to reply in the soft tone she wished to assume.

Leseprobe

THE CRIME OF LAURA SARELLE

MARJORIE BOWEN1940

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383838173

THE CRIME OF LAURA SARELLE

— PART 1 —

“They are not to be spoken of; they dwell in darkness!”

Laura answered swiftly:

“They dwell in this house!”

Her brother looked at her with gloomy rebuke.

“Why must you go over these old stories? I told you before you came here that such things were not to be discussed.”

“Remember,” retorted the girl, rising nervously and with rebellion in her narrowed eyes, “that I did not wish to come here at all. I told you that. I wrote down my protests in a letter. Mrs. Sylk knows—”

Her brother interrupted:

“There is no need to call witnesses or to make a scene, my dear Laura. I know quite well the objections you made to coming to Leppard Hall, and I recall with equal clarity my answer. Pray let us have no more of this discussion. As to the portraits, it is my wish that they should remain.”

Laura hesitated. She moved from her brother and looked out from the tall window across the landscape that she found so distasteful. At the bottom of the gentle slope on which the house stood the grey waters of the Avon, gleaming from between the dull leaves of the willows, flowed smoothly by with, to her, an air of sad monotony.

She tried to control herself, for the young brother to whom she had spoken was her master and might easily be, she knew, her tyrant. She had to play the game that women have learned during the ages to be so skilful at, to watch her opportunity, to cajole; if need be, to deceive. She was not yet very clever at any of these slavish arts and she had to bite her lip now and to clench her hands in her palms before she had sufficient control to reply in the soft tone she wished to assume.

Before she spoke she looked over her shoulder at Theodosius. He had returned to his manuscripts with an air of absorption as if he had forgotten her presence or was contemptuous of it. His fine, pale profile was clearly outlined against the dark panelling of the room. His dress, correct and severe, was too old for his years, which were not above five and twenty. Everything about him was grave and stately, and to Laura disagreeable and pedantic; but she bent her pride, and turning towards the desk humiliated herself to thrust her problems upon her brother’s attention.

“Theo, pray listen to me. You never give me a chance of talking to you, you know.”

“There are the evenings, my dear girl,” he replied, raising his tired, dark eyes with a cold and impatient glance. “I have my work now. Pray excuse me, I am much occupied.”

Laura longed to reply that this absorption in his translations from the Encheiridion Epictète of Arrian was not work but a pastime, and a sickly, unwholesome pastime at that, for a young man. But she smiled and said:

“In the evenings you are closeted here, or you expect me to go and sit with Mrs. Sylk in my own apartment; or you are going over the accounts with Lucius.”

“My dear sister,” said Sir Theo firmly, with a slight sigh of resignation as he leant back in his chair, “all this is wasting my time and yours. I can guess what you want to say to me. You wish to put in a plea for leaving Leppard Hall. You want to spend the money that I can ill afford in going abroad. You want to enjoy the season, as they term it, in some gay capital — London or Paris, or even Rome.”

“I have no such absurd ideas,” put in Laura quickly. “I am quite content to live modestly, as long as it be in a town, with some company of my own age.”

“My dear child,” replied Theo, with exasperating calm, “you are nineteen years of age only. It will be time enough for you to go out into the world when you have learnt in my home some of the feminine arts that you seem at present to lack. You have much wasted, I fear, the two years that you have been at Leppard Hall.”

“All that I have wasted here has been myself,” replied Laura in a low tone, glancing down at the shining floor.

“You have wasted the opportunity of learning how to run a fairly large establishment,” remarked her brother severely. “You have not made yourself familiar either with my servants, my tenants, or with the neighbours. There are a hundred and one things that you should have learnt but have taken no notice of.”

“I was bred in the town,” protested Laura with a convulsive sigh. “I do not like rustic surroundings. Pray, Theo, give me my portion and let me go.”

She made the request so suddenly that it seemed crude and violent, like a blow interrupting polite conversation.

Sir Theo raised his heavy eyebrows, which were like slender black wings.

“You speak as if you were out of your senses,” he replied sternly. “Our parents being dead and we having no relations, where would you go from my house?”

“I don’t know,” replied Laura hurriedly. She felt that she had startled him and therefore gained some small advantage and she was anxious to follow this up. “Mrs. Sylk and I could go somewhere; I suppose we could take rooms or hire a house with servants. I have a few friends in London — Aunt Mary’s friends,” she added anxiously; “something could be contrived.”

“And why, pray, should there be all this contrivance?” asked Sir Theo with rising anger.

She had often complained and protested before, but never put the matter so plainly, and his authority rose to meet her rebellion. His personality was impressive and forceful far beyond his years and Laura had an ado to stand her ground. The contempt in his voice brought the colour to her face, but she did not dare to allow this opportunity to slip. She had at least got him roused, interested, if in a hostile manner, in what she was saying; that was better than the long cold silences, the dull self-absorption that she could never penetrate.

“I suppose I want a few companions of my own age,” she hastened on; “I should like a few entertainments, an opportunity of going to the opera, to concerts and theatres, of get ting books, of seeing pictures, of giving parties of my own.”

“And the end of this, I suppose,” he interrupted sarcastically, “is to be your marriage to some adventurer whom I shall be supposed to pension for life.”

“I have no thought of marriage with an adventurer,” said Laura. The colour came again to her face and faded. “But I suppose that someday you will permit me to marry?”

“Only when I approve your choice, some long years hence. I do not consider you fit for marriage,” he replied impatiently. “You want a good deal of schooling and training first.”

“Well,” said she desperately, “maybe I could obtain that out in the world. In London! I tell you I am used to London. I knew Aunt Mary and I lived in Hampstead only very modestly, but we did see people. We went about. I have lost the few friends I had there, for you never would allow them to come and stay here, or me to visit them.”

“You lead the life that is fitting to your station and disposition,” replied Sir Theo, rising at last and speaking with a weight uncommon in one of his youth; cold and formidable, he stared her down. “I never agreed with the designs of your staying with your Aunt Mary Tolls. She was a frivolous woman, I dislike the fashion in which she brought you up. I always intended to exert my authority as soon as I came of age to take you from under her charge. Remember that you were always reported as wild and wilful, even when you were at school.”

Laura drew a short breath, then said in a whisper:

“Our parents did not disapprove of me, at least they did not say so. It is only you, Theo, who are always so censorious.”

“Call me censorious if you will, I am acting for your own good,” replied the young man dryly. “I do not intend to allow you to go to town, I do not intend to allow you to have the friends you made when you were under Aunt Mary Tollis’s charge down at Hampstead, and I have no sympathy with your petulant impatience with the life you lead here. There are neighbours whom you can visit.”

“They are all elderly people and they live miles away,” broke out Laura. “I tell you I detest this place! I always did from the moment I came into it. I can’t understand — it certainly seems unreasonable, I know.…”

“Your feelings are running away with you, Laura,” replied Theo with a contemptuous air of finality.

She was glad that he had stopped her, much as she hated him for his continued exercise of authority. She knew that she had said too much, had tried to express the intangible. Not to him, so unfriendly, so hostile, could she unfold these fearful and delicate feelings.

“Well, then,” she said, “that is my fate. I must stay at Leppard Hall. One other thing, while you are listening to me, Theo, even in so cruel a spirit — if I were to come to you and say I wished to be married, that I wanted to escape that way, what would you do?”

He looked at her keenly, suspecting that she was fooling him, trying to entrap him into some admission that she might twist to her own use, for he was perfectly sure that she had not the acquaintance of any man whom she could desire to marry.

“Your husband,” he replied immediately, “would have to meet with my complete approval. Remember the terms of our father’s will. I think at the end he was alarmed himself about your frivolous disposition. He left your future entirely in my hands. If you marry without my consent, I need not pay a penny of dowry.”

“Well,” said Laura, still holding her head high, “I might find a man who had enough money to keep me.”

“Such talk is unbecoming,” replied the baronet. He began to show signs of impatience; the interview had been long and exhausting. He really disliked his sister, who in everything was different from himself. He intended to do his duty by her, and that exasperated his ill-feeling towards her. For she was a burden, a responsibility, a constant vexation.

“Pray,” said he, “let us have no more of this. I am not to be moved.”

She believed him, and being too well-bred and too proud to break out into reproaches, she merely said:

“Can I once more ask you to have the two portraits moved?”

“I shall refuse,” he replied. He in his turn was flushed, his well-shaped lips quivered slightly; he had not much reserve of physical strength, and these disputes with Laura, in whom he sensed a hidden spirit as strong as his own, always in the end slightly unnerved him. “If I begin to give way to your follies, I should strip the Hall from attic to cellar and still not please you. The portraits remain where they are.”

Laura turned away. From the door she said in a low voice, looking over her shoulder:

“I wish you would strip the whole place, I wish it would be burnt down. It ought to have been destroyed years ago.”

He gave her a startled look at that, but controlled himself quickly and turned again to his thick piles of papers.

Laura closed the door and stood in the dark corridor, agitated and desperately angry, surprised too. Why had she said those last words? She knew no good reason why Leppard Hall should have been destroyed. It was a fine building that had been in the possession of the Sarelles for many hundreds of years. No legend of horror, no ghostly fable attached to it so far as she knew. She had spoken, she supposed, out of mere spite because she disliked the place so much, because she had been so unhappy there for two years — two long, dragging years of her youth that should have been so bright and happy.

Not only did she detest Leppard Hall and the park, the gloomy mill and the stone farmhouse, the winding river with the Georgian bridge; she detested also the flat, dull pastoral landscape with the alders and the willows and the continually browsing black cattle, the thorn-trees and the water meadows. She disliked the church, which half a mile or so along the river rose clear grey into the grey skies, with the clustered lichened graves rising above the sloping banks where the black, ragged cedar cast a shade into the water. Gloomy to her was the small grey village and the small, dark inn, the Sarelle Arms; dull and stupid seemed the rustic inhabitants; fiercely she regretted the day that her parents had come into an inheritance that had meant to her a life so melancholy and, as she thought, unnatural.

She and her brother had both been born in Jamaica, where her father had owned considerable property. As his elder brother was childless he had long known that he was likely to come into the English castle-estate, and for that reason Theo had been sent as a child to England and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, while her mother’s sister, Mrs. Mary Tollis, had taken her, when she had left the boarding-school for gentlewomen at Clapham, and brought her up as her own daughter at Hampstead, when Laura’s mother had died of the fever at Kingston.

Her husband had not long survived Elizabeth Sarelle, and Theo had been educated well, as became the heir-presumptive, but with a sparing hand, by his uncle, a quiet, eccentric man fond of travelling, who had not often resided himself at Leppard Hall.

The estate, however, had been well maintained by a succession of well-chosen stewards, and on the death of Sir John Sarelle, when Theo was nineteen years of age, the estate and the fortune had been administered with scrupulous efficiency and honesty by the two guardians whom he had appointed for his young nephew.

At first this change of fortune had made no difference to Laura. Her life with good-natured and charming Mary Tollis was as pleasant as that of a nervous, introspective and sensitive girl, bereaved of both her parents and without a home of her own, could be.

When Sir Theo had attained his majority he had decided to take up his residence at Leppard Hall, and, Mary Tollis being then recently dead, he had brought his sister to live with him, after some delays, when he was twenty-three and she seventeen years of age.

They had now no near relations, but a distant cousin of Mary Tollis, a Mrs. Hetty Sylk, the childless widow of an Army officer, ‘who had left her in “straitened circumstances”, as the genteel phrase went, was engaged as companion for Laura.

This was her life, all that had happened to her in her nine teen years. An early childhood in Jamaica that she could remember merely as a flash of brilliant, strange colour, the quiet, unsatisfying, but tolerable life in the boarding-school at Clapham, the pleasant days with Mrs. Tolls in the flat-fronted brick house at Hampstead, and the two hateful years at Leppard Hall.

The girl could not have told why she disliked her ancestral home. She supposed it was merely because it was lonely and she was cut off from her usual friends and interests. There was no railway station nearer than Rugby and no carriage ever at her disposal to drive her so far, even if she had been able to obtain her brother’s consent to a visit to London.

It was true that a few miles farther along the river there was a handsome Palladian mansion inhabited by a noble family that was disposed to be friendly. But they were usually in town or abroad, and there was none of them of the age of Laura.

When she had first taken up her residence at Leppard Hall, people had called, leaving their visiting-cards. And she, setting out in the brougham with the Sarelle arms on the panels, had returned these calls in the respectable company of Mrs. Sylk. But no friendships, no acquaintances, no intimacies had grown out of these formalities. Laura believed that Sir Theo had let it be plainly understood that he did not wish to have the routine that he had laid down for himself disturbed by any social activities. Besides, the neighbours all lived far away and seemed entirely absorbed in their own interests and only too ready to respect Sir Theo’s wishes for solitude. He did not hunt now or join in any of the local activities of Sarelle.

The Vicar was a dull man with a sickly wife who seemed, to Laura’s young vitality, scarcely alive. Dr. Selby came from Warwick and made his rounds in a smart gig twice a week. There was no other company whatsoever of her own station or class, and Laura, who had the timid reserve of the townswoman, was never able to get on friendly terms either with the servants, some of whom had been in the service of Sir John Sarelle, her uncle, or with the tenantry.

The people at the stone mill and the home farm had no more character and individuality of their own in the eyes of the lonely girl than had the sheep and cattle that browsed on the lush water-meadows. They were to Laura merely part of the landscape.

Her brother’s reproach that she had taken no interest in the running of his large and precise establishment had been just. Trained in a small though genteel household, she had no taste for the management of a large mansion. Besides, it was all done very efficiently without her interference. There was a housekeeper, there was a cook, there were maids, there were other servants, gardeners and stablemen, a household of twenty-five and sometimes thirty people.

Proud and shy about her own intimate affairs, she had refused a personal maid, but Mrs. Sylk, who had advanced as far in her friendship as anyone had been able to do, contrived to wait on her while preserving the relationship of a friend.

Once during one of the scenes in which she had tried to force her brother to allow her to alter her way of life, Laura had extracted from him the promise that when she was twenty-one years old she should be allowed a season in town and that he would then use his influence to procure her introductions to people who might present her at Court, allow her some reasonable pleasure, and finally choose for her a husband suitable to her pretensions.

But Laura was only nineteen years of age, and to be told to endure two more years of this life at Leppard Hall seemed to her like a death sentence.

Besides, she had already settled forever, as she knew, the question of where she should dispose her heart, and, when opportunity arose, her person and her fortune.

She went slowly up the stairs to the apartments that she occupied with Mrs. Sylk. She had chosen them carefully because she believed that they were the least gloomy in the house. Yet she had never liked them, the more especially as she had not been allowed to alter the furnishings. Even the very curtains of the bed and at the windows were those that came out of the closet at Leppard Hall. They were well-preserved, beautiful in texture and design, but had to Laura an old-fashioned air that was, she could not tell why, repellent.

Mrs. Sylk was by the window, employed in the eternal occupation of well-bred, idle women: she was embroidering on a tambour frame a bell-rope of lilac silk, quickly working a lily with chalk-white leaves.

“Oh, Mrs. Sylk,” said Laura in a flat voice, “I had no success again. He will not listen to me. He will not even have the two portraits removed.”

“Sir Theodosius is certainly a very determined young man,” remarked Mrs. Sylk.

She put down her frame with a little sigh of boredom, quickly restrained and turned into a smile; she never allowed herself to forget that she was in a dependent position. She, too, found Leppard Hall galling in its gloom and loneliness, but she was a woman who had known what it was to be very uncomfortable, in every sense of the word, through poverty, who had often been humiliated and frightened by sheer lack of money. She had had a glimpse, though a glimpse only, of what the world might look like to a useless gentlewoman. At Leppard Hall she was at least comfortable and respected. She had, even, a slight sense of importance, of power. Laura was fond of her and she believed she had a certain influence over the girl. Perhaps one day Laura Sarelle would make a good, even a splendid, marriage, and she, Mrs. Sylk, might enjoy a more exciting kind of life. But for the moment she might have been very much worse off, therefore she was careful never to complain and always to make herself as pleasant as possible to her young employer, though behind his back sometimes, cautiously, she encouraged Laura in rebellion.

“I shouldn’t concern myself so much about the portraits, dear,” she said mildly. “That is really very fanciful on your part. You know your Aunt Mary Tollis was always concerned over that—”

“Over my fancies?” said Laura quickly. “But I never told her any of them.”

“Didn’t you?” queried Mrs. Sylk, still very quietly. “But she used to talk to me about them sometimes; I think perhaps you revealed more than you knew, Laura.”

“What do you mean?” asked the girl. “Did she say that I used to talk in my sleep, or have fits, or something of that kind?”

“Why, no, dear, of course not. But I suppose your aunt was very fond of you and studied you very carefully. And — well, really, Laura, I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

She broke off, smiled, and began to pick up the small chalk-white beads one by one and-thread them on to her fine needle.

“We’re talking about those two portraits in the dining-room,” persisted Laura. “Let everything else go. I suppose it’s hopeless to try to get away from here. I can’t even make out a good case for myself, but he might remove the portraits, since he knows how much I dislike them.”

Mrs. Sylk mentally agreed, but tried to compromise by pointing out that the paintings were quite pleasing and that no sinister kind of tale was attached to them.

“But there is,” cried Laura, “to one at least — that of my namesake. Theo himself said just now, ‘They dwell in darkness’. And what did I answer? I answered, ‘They dwell in this house!’”

“Oh, that old tale,” smiled Mrs. Sylk comfortably. “I should not take any notice of it, probably it’s not even true.”

“But I’m quite sure it’s true,” cried Laura impatiently. “Theo doesn’t even deny it. She had my name, you know; it makes it so strange — Laura Sarelle.”

“But she was hardly a relation, you know,” said Mrs. Sylk. “She died unmarried and the estate went to a distant cousin. You might say that with her that line of the Sarelles ended. Yours was another branch, it came from Yorkshire, I think.”

“I don’t know,” said Laura sullenly; “I’ve never seen the family tree or any papers. You see, I was very young when I left Jamaica and nobody talked to me about these things. Theo’s always most reserved, and seems so angry when I want to know. Not that I do much,” she added idly; “what does it matter? It’s only our having the same name — that dead woman and myself.”

“Well, that’s usual in families. People are often very proud of those things. It’s always been Laura and Theodosius and John, I think, and Anne, with the Sarelles.”

“She was very unhappy. She died young, and I don’t care to have her portrait hanging on the wall.”

“My dear child,” said Mrs. Sylk, “in those days so many people died young. They didn’t know how to look after themselves and the science of medicine wasn’t even in existence then.”

“But you know there was a scandal. Someone in the house, either someone who was staying there, or the cousin — I don’t know, I can’t get the story straight — died of an overdose of a sleeping-draught and there was an inquest. And even” — Laura lowered her voice — “some suspicion that she, this girl, had given it to him — by carelessness. I don’t know the reason or the motive — whatever you would call it.”

Mrs. Sylk stopped her at once.

“It’s all nonsense, just some foolish gossip, as there always is in a place like this. I heard the same tale. I can assure you there’s nothing in it. Of course there was an inquest. I tell you in those days they knew so little—”

Laura interrupted.

“Those days! You know when it was, then — the date?”

“Well, it’s on the picture, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Sylk with a touch of impatience.

“Yes, it is. It was painted in 1780, and that’s the date of the inquest, and I suppose with the least trouble in the world one could find out all about it. But you know Theo keeps his books locked up, and as for his papers — one may never have a glimpse of them.”

“My dear Laura, you’re allowing your imagination to run away with you. You really should be a writer of fiction, you want to make a story out of everything. I tell you that Sir Theo himself doesn’t know any more than I do. Seventeen-eighty, and this is the year eighteen-forty. Why, you must admit that it’s a good long while ago.”

“Only sixty years,” said Laura. “She might have been alive now, and not such a very old woman either.”

“But she isn’t alive,” urged Mrs. Sylk. “She died young, of a consumption in the lungs, as I suppose, and she’s buried in the church and there’s no need for anyone to, think any more about her. And as for the stupid story of the young man who died of the sleeping-draught, by accident, I think it’s all quite commonplace. Such things happened very often, as I told you, when so little was known about medicine.”

“Do you think the other portrait is the young man?”

“Why, no, I shouldn’t suppose so.”

Mrs. Sylk was trying to change the subject but did not know how to do it. She wished that Sir Theo would not be so inconsiderate; why not move the two pictures that exasperated his fanciful sister?

“No one knows who it is, do they? I suppose from the costume it’s about the same period,” she added nervously.’

“Well, it’s not so long ago, only sixty years,” repeated Laura impatiently, “and it’s strange the name should have been lost. And I don’t know who placed the picture there.” She then went on to say hurriedly that the servants who had been with Sir John had told her that they had not noticed it during his lifetime. They thought that one of the stewards must have found it there, because it was such a fine piece of work.

“And a very splendid painting it is,” said Mrs. Sylk critically, “and if I were you, my dear Laura, I shouldn’t think any more of it. I believe that Laura Sarelle had a brother who died young.”

“Died!” said Laura, on a rising note. “You see, they all died. No one at Leppard Hall seems to have lived very long.”

“What perfect foolishness!” exclaimed Mrs. Sylk with upraised hands. “Why, Sir John was a good age.”

“He didn’t live here,” Laura put in quickly. “Nor did his father. They were always abroad or in London. Yes, that’s strange when you come to think of it. My father, my uncle and my grandfather hardly lived at Leppard Hall at all. Perhaps that’s why I think it has such a melancholy air. It’s never been lived in since Laura Sarelle died here sixty years ago.”

“The stewards lived here, I suppose,” countered. Mrs. Sylk suddenly, weary of the whole argument but aware that it was her duty and her interest to humour her charge.

“No, they didn’t, they lived at the Dower House.”

Laura moved to the window and looked across the flat water-meadows over which dusk was falling.

“Well, the place was very well kept up, anyhow,” said Mrs. Sylk feebly. “But, Laura, my child, pray don’t talk of it any more, you only exasperate yourself. You will work yourself into one of your difficult fits and have a fever, or bad dreams, or something. Now pray, my dear girl,” she added earnestly, “be sensible. The portraits are the most ordinary things in the world, and if you affect to regard them so they will cease to irritate you.”

“The portraits — oh, well, I suppose they are nothing. But when I said ‘they dwell in darkness’ Theo did not contradict me. There was some ugly story there. The young man died, and the young woman was—”

Mrs. Sylk interrupted:

“Was questioned at the inquest as to the sleeping-draught he had taken. Now, my dear Laura, forget all about it. Don’t you see, my dear child, it would be very wise of you to try to please your brother, then perhaps he might be induced to take a more reasonable view of your situation?”

“Then you admit,” cried Laura, “that he is not reasonable?”

“I think,” said Mrs. Sylk, with a non-committal air, “he is rather a remarkable young man. He is a great scholar, you know, and that is very uncommon in one of his age. Then he takes his duties as squire very seriously. He looks after the estate in an excellent manner.”

“No,” said Laura with a queer look, “it’s Lucius who does that.”

“Well, Sir Theodosius directs him. I don’t think Mr. Delaunay could do anything himself. It is a large estate, you know, and then there is the property in Warwick and in Rugby as well.”

She glanced at the young girl’s charming face and thought she saw a softer expression on the lovely features. So she hastily took the opportunity of saying:

“You know, you are a remarkable young woman, too, Laura. If your brother is not very reasonable, neither are you. It is not so very extraordinary for him to expect you to live here and learn to be the mistress of a great establishment. No doubt he hopes for a fine match for you and wishes to see you well trained. Why not be more patient and take the trouble to cultivate acquaintanceship of some of the neighbouring gentry? You know that when people have called you have very often been abrupt and aloof. You might mingle, too, more with the tenantry, hold a little singing class or sewing class for the children.”

Laura did not listen as Mrs. Sylk rambled on, stitching her white beads on to her strip of stiff lilac silk. She startled the good lady by breaking suddenly into her pious discourse by saying:

“Why do you think I so dislike this place? You know, I have the sensation that I have been here before and under most evil circumstances.”

“That is very common,” replied Mrs. Sylk, slightly nettled at the interruption which showed that all her good counsel had been wasted. “Nobody knows quite what it means,” she added vaguely. “Then, as I told you just now, Laura, you were always very fanciful and even fantastic.”

“The moment I saw the place I hated it,” mused Laura, with her chin in her hands and her elbow on her knees as she sat in the cushioned window-seat gazing out on the meadows and the river, now drowsing into grey mist. “When I saw the gates at the bottom of the park I said to myself: ‘So I have to come back here again after all these years.’ I didn’t want to come, Mrs. Sylk, I detested the place. You know, I always resisted visiting it when Theo used to come on those rare occasions when Uncle John invited him. And I managed to get out of that because they said there was no suitable accommodation for a lady—” She paused sharply. “I wonder why I’m talking like this! I’m not usually so foolish, am I, Mrs. Sylk? But that interview with Theo upset me. I feel like a prisoner.”

“You should conquer these feelings,” said Mrs. Sylk. “And as for the place, it is a very fine mansion and very well kept, and you lack for nothing. And I cannot think,” she added untruthfully, “that it is particularly gloomy, or particularly isolated.”

Laura laughed in her face.

“It is the most melancholy, most solitary house in the world,” she replied.

Mrs. Sylk murmured a protest, but privately she held that opinion also. There was no good reason why Leppard Hall should be more dreary than any other country house set in its own grounds, and Hetty Sylk had never tried to argue out with herself why this particular building gave an impression of gloom.

She did not know the age of it, but it had certainly been re-fronted in the eighteenth century, for the facade was of grey stone in a severe Palladian style with a porch and pillars. At the back was a gabled wing and the irregular buildings of the stables, which were furnished with a cupola and a clock-tower. Not far away was the stone mill on the quay river with a huge waterwheel and the date 1605 over the door. The door was also of dun-coloured stone and even older than the mill. The parkland stretched to the river’s edge with a fringe of willows, alders and waterflags at one side and to the village, the other. A broad treeless avenue led across this parkland to the front of the Hall.

What was there, Mrs. Sylk wondered, in all this to impart that sensation of intense melancholy even on a fine summer day? She certainly had felt it herself from the first moment that she had come to stay at Leppard Hall, and she could not wonder that Laura, quick, sensitive, and, as she had said herself, fanciful and even fantastical, was much oppressed by the atmosphere of her home.

She herself was not imaginative and often could shake off the gloomy impression given her by her surroundings; both by training and by necessity she was a practical woman.

“Laura, love,” she said, “don’t sit there brooding in the window. It is time to change for dinner. I shall ring to have some candles brought up and then perhaps you might, when the curtains are drawn, tell me how my embroidery looks by artificial light.”

But Laura said sullenly:

“I’m not going down to dinner tonight. I have a headache, I feel sick.”

— — —

That evening at dinner Mrs. Sylk scrutinized with a heightened interest the two portraits that Laura so much disliked. She had, of course, observed the pictures before, but never keenly, even though she had heard the girl frequently exclaim against them. But there had been a vehemence and a persistence in Laura’s talk tonight that had pierced Mrs. Sylk’s commonplace mind. She had been impressed, too, with the fact that the girl really did seem ill and that her refusal to come down to dinner was not a mere formal excuse.

At the same time the discreet woman had no wish to offend her employer, so it was only now and then, and furtively, that she glanced at the two pictures.

They hung side by side at the end of the long dining-room, each fitting exactly into one of the large polished panels. The picture that represented, without doubt, Laura Sarelle (the name was written in the top left-hand corner of the canvas) was not, Mrs. Sylk thought, of any particular artistic merit. Indeed, the painting was rather flat and drab, as if it had been varnished and then cleaned.

It showed a young woman, primly dressed in a long tight-waisted gown of the palest primrose colour with a bow of pale-blue-and-cream-striped ribbon tucked into her narrow bosom. Her hair was either very pale or powdered and gathered straight off her face. Her features were scarcely to be discerned, so lightly had the painter indicated them, but they appeared to be regular; the eyes, which had been put in with a firmer touch, were large and of a clean, clear brown colour. A fleeting harmony was given to this indifferent painting by the fact that the background was formed of a dark-green curtain looped away from a landscape bathed in a faint hazy light and that the lady held in her hand a branch of laurel. These dark-green hues, harmoniously chosen, set off pleasantly the pale hues of rose, primrose and blue that composed the lady’s dress and complexion.

Nothing, Mrs. Sylk thought, could have been more inoffensive than this portrait, and she was really puzzled to know why Laura should regard it, as she undoubtedly did, with feelings of aversion and even horror.

‘Really,’ she thought, ‘the child is extraordinarily fanciful, sometimes almost unbalanced.’

The portrait of Laura Sarelle was handsomely framed in carved oak, touched here and there with gold leaf, and the design of this frame was also of laurel leaves, boldly interlacing one another, making, therefore, a setting more fitting for the portrait of a warrior than of a gentle lady.

The other portrait was a very superior performance, and Mrs. Sylk, who affected to be something of a connoisseur, had always admired it. It was believed to be, she knew, by Thomas Gainsborough, and she was surprised that a picture by so famous an artist had neither a history nor a name.

It represented a young man in a blue coat, also against a background of green, this time thickly interlaced with trees, who had his hand on his hip lifting the skirts of his coat so that the light shone on the thick glossy azure satin and looking directly at the spectator. His hair was slightly powdered and negligently dressed; small ringlets broke loose from the ribbon and hung down either side his alert, handsome and impressive face. The portrait, which was most vital and arresting both in pose and impression, was lightly put in with a few masterly strokes and appeared to be unfinished. Mrs. Sylk was not so fortunate as to be able to conceal her curious interest in the pictures. Sir Theodosius suddenly remarked with more than his accustomed dryness:

“I see, Mrs. Sylk, that you are infected by poor Laura’s passion for those two pictures. Do you also object to them and wish them removed?”

This remark was made in so dry and cutting a manner that a faint flush came into the cheeks of the poor dependant. She was a gentlewoman, and as an officer’s wife had been used to some authority in her time. She knew how she would have answered such a remark had she been at her own table. She risked a slight coldness in her reply, allowing her pride for once to override her interest.

“Indeed, Sir Theodosius, Laura seemed very upset tonight. I think that’s the reason of the headache that she made the excuse for not coming down.”

Sir Theodosius interrupted:

“Ill-temper is always behind Laura’s headaches.”

“I believe,” persisted Mrs. Sylk with a courage that surprised herself, “that it’s not quite ill-temper tonight, sir. She was really distressed. I think that if you could oblige her by removing the portraits she would be much more at ease.”

Theodosius smiled unpleasantly and leant back in the high chair with arms, the master’s chair that he always occupied at the head of the table.

“I told Laura this afternoon, Mrs. Sylk, that she was talking a great deal of nonsense, and if I were to begin to remove the pictures in this house at her wish I should soon have nothing else to do. Surely you, madam, with your experience, must know how foolish it would be to give in to the whim of an undisciplined girl.”

Mrs. Sylk felt rebuked. She pressed her lips together and sat silent. The meal was always slightly disagreeable; she never could feel entirely comfortable in the presence of Theodosius, though the room was so handsome, the food so expensive and well-served, the service so efficient.

She looked with a glance of unconscious appeal at the third person present, and he good-naturedly came to the rescue with:

“Yes, I heard Laura speak about the portraits. What’s the matter with them? They look ordinary enough to me, though one’s a fine piece of work — by Thomas Gainsborough, is it not? Do you know whom it represents, Theo?”

“No one knows,” replied the master of the house, shortly. “Mr. Hewett, the steward before your time, Lucius, told me it had been found in the garret; there’s no name or date on it and it’s not a signed canvas. But it was shown to several cognoscenti in London and they thought it was a Thomas Gainsborough. So it was hung here, and very fine it looks. It happened to be the same size as the portrait of the former Laura Sarelle, and so it was placed there. They make, I think, a fine pair and a handsome ornament to the dining-room.”

“Yes, except that one picture,” said Mr. Delaunay good-humouredly, “is so superior to the other that the eyes are rather vexed in making the comparison. Why not take them down, Theo, and put them somewhere else, or even put them away altogether if they vex Laura? After all,” he added lightly, “some people might object to seeing a portrait of a namesake who died years ago. And wasn’t there some story about her — something rather questionable or unpleasant?”

Mrs. Sylk was very grateful that Lucius Delaunay had thus come to her help and given the conversation both a lighter and more pleasant turn. But she was dismayed by the effect of these remarks on Sir Theodosius Sarelle.

They had come to the end of the elaborate dinner, always too long and too elaborate, Hetty Sylk thought, for people who lived so quietly in such a solitary mansion, and the young baronet was leaning back in the high chair that rose above his head in foliated scrolls. Hothouse fruit, peaches, grapes, and nectarines had been placed on the table in a high epergne of silver-gilt, the candles in their massive silver sticks had just been snuffed by the footman. In front of Sir Theodosius was his plate of fine china painted with plums, the tall rosy golden Venetian wine-glass, which he had not used, for he was very abstemious, and the agate-handled dessert knife and fork.

Mrs. Sylk wondered why she noticed these details. There come moments, even in the lives of the most ordinary people, when they see their surroundings with a sudden clarity as if they were presented before them like a picture, something that has nothing to do with their lives, something that they are permitted to view as a disinterested spectator.

Such a moment had come to Mrs. Sylk. She sat erect in her chair, one hand raised to the bosom of her grey silk dress. No one spoke or moved for a moment and the illusion to her was perfect — that she had returned from another world and was looking in on this scene, wondering at it.

A scene that was commonplace enough, in which there was nothing to be amazed at, yet Mrs. Sylk knew that she was mere than amazed, she was filled with a certain inner horror.

The room had been for two years most familiar to her, for there, save on the rare occasions when Sir Theodosius had been in town and the ladies had dined or lunched alone, she had taken all her meals. She knew it so well, the long handsome apartment with the windows curtained in maroon velvet, which gave on to the sloping parkland stretched in gentle undulations to the river, the panelled walls, the wide hearth with the handsome overmantel, the ceiling older than the façade of the house with its plaster design of Jacobean workmanship, the two winged chairs of needlework that flanked the gleaming andirons, the other chairs placed along the straight carved dining-table, each with its embroidered cushions and polished leather seat, the sconces of deep silver on the walls not often used, for Theodosius preferred a table-light.

Yes, there was that thrice-familiar background and those two familiar figures seated at the table with the wine and the fruit, the sweets, the napkins, the silver and agate service before them; there was Theodosius in his black evening clothes, his black silk stock high up under his chin, the white point of his collar showing either side his pale face, one hand to his breast just as she held her own, the other on the arm of his chair, his attitude indolent but his expression alert.

And facing her, to the left of the young baronet, was the Irish steward, Lucius Delaunay, a man who frequently partook of these stately meals.

Mrs. Sylk did not know him very well, since his province never impinged on hers. All she saw of him was on formal occasions, or an odd glimpse when she might meet him riding across the park or the home fields, or staying his horse to talk to the miller or the man at the home farm. All she knew of him was that he had met Sir Theodosius at Oxford and that they shared a common love for ancient languages. And that Lucius Delaunay was ‘the penniless cadet of a noble house’, as the phrase shaped in her conventional mind, and she supposed that he had little or no fortune and had been glad to accept the post that his friend had offered him when he had come into his estate. Mrs. Sylk supposed, too, that Mr. Delaunay had friends and interests of his own, for not infrequently he left Leppard Hall for visits to Warwick, Rugby, or London; once he had gone to Ireland. But on the whole he seemed content to share the lonely and solitary life of the young baronet.

He must be, Mrs. Sylk imagined, a good scholar, since he spent a great deal of his leisure in the cabinet where Sir Theodosius kept his learned books piled. But he was not of the same type as the man who employed him, but an athlete, a Rood horseman, genial, serene, liked by all who knew him, and loved by any towards whom he unbent.

In her ordinary way, for she was usually far too preoccupied with her own affairs to give much attention to those of other people, Mrs. Sylk had wondered at Lucius Delaunay. He was extremely good-looking and had a quality of magnificence and splendour, yet these graces and gifts he seemed to keep concealed, as if he were purposely keeping himself down and might be in everything more emphatic than he was. She supposed, vaguely, knowing how it felt to be in a subservient position, that this was because, though of as good birth as Sir Theodosius himself, he was yet in the position of a paid servant.

She was conscious, though not very sensitive, of great reserves in the young man, though his manners were always easy and genial. She found him very pleasant to look at, not only because of his handsome features but because of his vital air and spirited glance.

Mrs. Sylk, whose own hair and eyes were of no particular colour at all, but hazel, also faintly disliked dark people, and both Sir Theodosius and Laura were very dark, with what Mrs. Sylk called vaguely to herself ‘a foreign blackness’ in hair and eyes. But Lucius Delaunay was blond, with a bright reddish lustre in his strongly growing hair that contrasted pleasantly with eyes of a greenish-blue, flecked, Mrs. Sylk thought in her sentimental mood, with gold.

She had often wondered, ‘Why does Lucius Delaunay remain at Leppard Hall? I should have thought a young man like that could have done better for himself — the Army, for instance.’ And then she remembered what her own husband’s life had been in the Army without any money, and she checked the vague and wandering surmisings. No doubt a young man of a noble house, with expensive tastes and no money, could hardly do better for himself than Lucius Delaunay was doing, any more than she, Mrs. Sylk, could do better for herself.

Now she looked at him across the table, and from him to Sir Theodosius, who remained motionless, and the scene was imprinted with an odd grimness on her mind, and she thought, like somebody beginning to go into a hypnotic trance: ‘Why am I here, what are we all doing? And who are these two people?’

The fair young man and the dark young man looking at each other without speaking and changing, or so she thought, while she looked at them. Not in their faces so much as in their costumes, which seemed to slip and blur into the fashion of another day, into the fashion of the man in the portrait at the end of the room. The candlelight was playing tricks, she was beginning to be infected with poor Laura’s fancies. She moved abruptly and the scene seemed to shift into reality again, and Sir Theodosius said coldly:

“I don’t know anything about any unpleasant story, Lucius. My father and my uncle were both set against all superstitions. I thought I told you that I inherited my admiration of the stoics.”

‘What’s he talking about?’ thought Mrs. Sylk. Then she remembered the former conversation. Of course, it must have been only a minute, perhaps, a second, ago that Lucius Delaunay had made his casual and pleasant remark, but it seemed to her as if a long time had passed.

She tried to regain her composure and cried at random and tactlessly: —

“Oh, but there was something, wasn’t there, Sir Theodosius? Some trouble with an inquest and that. Laura Sarelle was supposed to have given an overdose of a sleeping-draught?”

Sir Theodosius’ dark eyes were turned on her in angry amazement and the wretched woman wondered how she could have been so rash and foolish, she who had been so careful and knew that her very bread depended upon her prudence.

“I’m sure I don’t know what I’m saying,” she stammered, with an apology that emphasized her mistake; “it’s only gossip. Of course, there are stories like these in all old families.”

“Indeed, there are, madam,” agreed the young baronet dryly. “This is nothing at all, I assure you. I think, also, I told you, when you first came into my employment, that I was entirely against the repetition of any nonsensical stories of this kind. This Laura Sarelle” — he glanced down the long room at the faint portrait in its pale harmonies against the dark background — “was, I believe, a very foolish young woman, ill-educated and eccentric as so many people were in those days.”

They were all looking at the portrait now, and Mrs. Sylk thought that the thin smile on the narrow painted lips had an air of mockery, as if that Laura knew that she was being discussed and despised them for their ill manners.

“Was she foolish?” asked Lucius Delaunay frankly. “I think she looks charming. What did she do? I suppose I, too, am forbidden to pry into your family secrets, Theo?”

He spoke lightly and pleasantly, and the other young man made an effort to reply in the same tone, but there was a sombre undercurrent to his voice as he said:

“I can’t think how Laura got hold of the tale. It was my father’s and my uncle’s wish that it should be kept from her. You see, that woman, that Laura Sarelle, was the last of the main line of the family. My grandfather was the first of the cadet branch from Yorkshire, she was the sole heiress of all the property, she died young. There certainly was” — he spoke with what seemed a doubt, a hesitation — “some stupid story, an inquest, yes, some mistake with a sleeping-draught — I suppose you’ve heard it, Mrs. Sylk?”

The question was like a challenge and the poor dependant was glad that she could reply truthfully:

“Indeed, no, I’ve heard nothing. Laura said something, but it was quite vague.”

“Yes, I suppose my Aunt Mary Tollis may have told her. She wouldn’t know much either. It’s all a long time ago and, as I had hoped, forgotten.”

“But surely it’s the most trifling incident,” remarked Lucius Delaunay. “An inquest! And who was it died from the overdose of the sleeping-draught?”

He interrupted himself to ask this abruptly, and again that silence of a second fell and again Mrs. Sylk had the impression that everyone in the room was fixed, immobile, with blurred outlines as if they were wavering into other personalities. Yes, even Jeffries, the servant, who had entered the room with fresh candles, seemed to take on another look, another habit.

“It was a cousin who was staying in the house at the time. He was extremely sickly, like Laura Sarelle herself,” said the young baronet deliberately. “They did not know much about medicine in those days. I think they sent into Rugby to get some mixture of jalap for his cough. He either had the wrong mixture or took an overdose and died. This unfortunate girl had been the one who had administered it to him. She was questioned, I believe, rather sharply at the inquest. She was not strong herself, and the whole affair probably so impressed her that it hastened her own death. That is all the story.”

“A piteous one,” said Lucius Delaunay. “I can understand that it would irritate and sadden Laura, who bears the same name. I think, Theo — forgive me — but it is a curious thing, to name her Laura also. Your parents must have known that one day she, too, would come to Leppard Hall.”

“I have told you, I think, Lucius, that my grandfather, my father, uncle and myself have set our faces against all superstitions. We have very little connection with the main branch of the family.” He paused and said, as if angry with himself, “I really don’t know why I’m giving these explanations or why we’re talking on this subject. It’s all Laura’s nonsense. The name was given her,” he added, and it seemed to Mrs. Sylk as though he were trying to justify himself, “merely because we don’t believe in any foolish ideas or ill-omens, or family curses, or any nonsense of that kind.”

“Why, no, of course not. And as you say, you have no very intimate connection with this other Laura Sarelle. But at the same time, one can understand on a sensitive girl—”

“Sensitive girl!” interrupted the baronet. “Say rather an idle and capricious one. There have been other Laura Sarelles, you will see their names in the mausoleum.”

“Well, I don’t know that that’s very encouraging,” smiled Lucius Delaunay, “for they must have all died young or unwed or they would have changed their names. Who,” he added abruptly, “is the other portrait? It is a very fine picture. Not, I suppose, the sickly cousin who took the overdraught,” he added with a smile.

“Not that, certainly,” replied Sir Theodosius. “We don’t know. I think it has no connection with the family at all, for it has no likeness to any of the other portraits. It is probably that of some friend of the family, presented to them years ago.”

“It is strange that there should be no record of the name, no label on the frame.”

“Something has been written behind,” replied the other young man, “but blacked out. It is impossible to decipher what is behind the frame.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What does it matter? — it is a very fine painting, and I consider that it suits the room. Pray let us talk of something else.”

But the conversation was not so easily changed. Mrs. Sylk felt still a heavy mood, almost like an enchantment, over her. She wanted to leave the table, she wanted to go upstairs and see how Laura was, she felt uneasy about the girl, she wanted to stand between her and her brother, try to make him realize how dull life was for the young creature at Leppard Hall. She did not know how to set about this task. She hardly, indeed, seemed able to command her wits. She heard the two men talking and knew it was time for her to rise and leave them to their port; yet somehow she did not, as usual, go, but remained sitting at a table playing with a peach on her plate, stupid, at a loss for once, all her pretty social manners gone.