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- Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
"As for books," Sir Oswald said, "I don't care for them. Unless I get hold of a good detective story. The tracing out of crime always has a curious fascination for me." Frank Carlyn quarrelled with his gamekeeper Jack Winter, and then appeared agitated. Soon after, Winter was found shot dead with his own gun. Suspicion was primarily aimed at the late man's wife, seen rushing to catch a London train, and then vanishing. One year later, the enigmatic governess Elizabeth Martin arrives to take up her duties at Davenant Priory. Her appearance means nothing to the almost-blind Sir Oswald, though others in the household note her dyed dark hair and the smoked glasses she habitually wears. But what is Miss Martin's secret and how is it connected to the sinister slaying committed twelve months earlier? The Master of the Priory (1927) is a classic of early golden age crime fiction. This new edition, the first in over eighty years, features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans. "The story is written so brightly that it almost reads itself." Eve
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Annie HaynesThe Master of the Priory
“As for books,” Sir Oswald said, “I don’t care for them. Unless I get hold of a good detective story. The tracing out of crime always has a curious fascination for me.”
Frank Carlyn quarrelled with his gamekeeper Jack Winter, and then appeared agitated. Soon after, Winter was found shot dead with his own gun. Suspicion was primarily aimed at the late man’s wife, seen rushing to catch a London train, and then vanishing.
One year later, the enigmatic governess Elizabeth Martin arrives to take up her duties at Davenant Priory. Her appearance means nothing to the almost-blind Sir Oswald, though others in the household note her dyed dark hair and the smoked glasses she habitually wears. But what is Miss Martin’s secret and how is it connected to the sinister slaying committed twelve months earlier?
The Master of the Priory (1927) is a classic of early golden age crime fiction. This new edition, the first in over eighty years, features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
“The story is written so brightly that it almost reads itself.” Eve
TO
PAUL NICHOLS
VICAR OFST. MICHAEL’S, PADDINGTON
The Mystery of the Missing Author Annie Haynes and Her Golden Age Detective Fiction
The psychological enigma of Agatha Christie’s notorious 1926 vanishing has continued to intrigue Golden Age mystery fans to the present day. The Queen of Crime’s eleven-day disappearing act is nothing, however, compared to the decades-long disappearance, in terms of public awareness, of between-the-wars mystery writer Annie Haynes (1865-1929), author of a series of detective novels published between 1923 and 1930 by Agatha Christie’s original English publisher, The Bodley Head. Haynes’s books went out of print in the early Thirties, not long after her death in 1929, and her reputation among classic detective fiction readers, high in her lifetime, did not so much decline as dematerialize. When, in 2013, I first wrote a piece about Annie Haynes’ work, I knew of only two other living persons besides myself who had read any of her books. Happily, Dean Street Press once again has come to the rescue of classic mystery fans seeking genre gems from the Golden Age, and is republishing all Haynes’ mystery novels. Now that her crime fiction is coming back into print, the question naturally arises: Who Was Annie Haynes? Solving the mystery of this forgotten author’s lost life has taken leg work by literary sleuths on two continents (my thanks for their assistance to Carl Woodings and Peter Harris).
Until recent research uncovered new information about Annie Haynes, almost nothing about her was publicly known besides the fact of her authorship of twelve mysteries during the Golden Age of detective fiction. Now we know that she led an altogether intriguing life, too soon cut short by disability and death, which took her from the isolation of the rural English Midlands in the nineteenth century to the cultural high life of Edwardian London. Haynes was born in 1865 in the Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the first child of ironmonger Edwin Haynes and Jane (Henderson) Haynes, daughter of Montgomery Henderson, longtime superintendent of the gardens at nearby Coleorton Hall, seat of the Beaumont baronets. After her father left his family, young Annie resided with her grandparents at the gardener’s cottage at Coleorton Hall, along with her mother and younger brother. Here Annie doubtlessly obtained an acquaintance with the ways of the country gentry that would serve her well in her career as a genre fiction writer.
We currently know nothing else of Annie Haynes’ life in Leicestershire, where she still resided (with her mother) in 1901, but by 1908, when Haynes was in her early forties, she was living in London with Ada Heather-Bigg (1855-1944) at the Heather-Bigg family home, located halfway between Paddington Station and Hyde Park at 14 Radnor Place, London. One of three daughters of Henry Heather-Bigg, a noted pioneer in the development of orthopedics and artificial limbs, Ada Heather-Bigg was a prominent Victorian and Edwardian era feminist and social reformer. In the 1911 British census entry for 14 Radnor Place, Heather-Bigg, a “philanthropist and journalist,” is listed as the head of the household and Annie Haynes, a “novelist,” as a “visitor,” but in fact Haynes would remain there with Ada Heather-Bigg until Haynes’ death in 1929.
Haynes’ relationship with Ada Heather-Bigg introduced the aspiring author to important social sets in England’s great metropolis. Though not a novelist herself, Heather-Bigg was an important figure in the city’s intellectual milieu, a well-connected feminist activist of great energy and passion who believed strongly in the idea of women attaining economic independence through remunerative employment. With Ada Heather-Bigg behind her, Annie Haynes’s writing career had powerful backing indeed. Although in the 1911 census Heather-Bigg listed Haynes’ occupation as “novelist,” it appears that Haynes did not publish any novels in book form prior to 1923, the year that saw the appearance of The Bungalow Mystery, which Haynes dedicated to Heather-Bigg. However, Haynes was a prolific producer of newspaper serial novels during the second decade of the twentieth century, penning such works as Lady Carew’s Secret, Footprints of Fate, A Pawn of Chance, The Manor Tragedy and many others.
Haynes’ twelve Golden Age mystery novels, which appeared in a tremendous burst of creative endeavor between 1923 and 1930, like the author’s serial novels retain, in stripped-down form, the emotionally heady air of the nineteenth-century triple-decker sensation novel, with genteel settings, shocking secrets, stormy passions and eternal love all at the fore, yet they also have the fleetness of Jazz Age detective fiction. Both in their social milieu and narrative pace Annie Haynes’ detective novels bear considerable resemblance to contemporary works by Agatha Christie; and it is interesting to note in this regard that Annie Haynes and Agatha Christie were the only female mystery writers published by The Bodley Head, one of the more notable English mystery imprints in the early Golden Age. “A very remarkable feature of recent detective fiction,” observed the Illustrated London News in 1923, “is the skill displayed by women in this branch of story-telling. Isabel Ostrander, Carolyn Wells, Annie Haynes and last, but very far from least, Agatha Christie, are contesting the laurels of Sherlock Holmes’ creator with a great spirit, ingenuity and success.” Since Ostrander and Wells were American authors, this left Annie Haynes, in the estimation of the Illustrated London News, as the main British female competitor to Agatha Christie. (Dorothy L. Sayers, who, like Haynes, published her debut mystery novel in 1923, goes unmentioned.) Similarly, in 1925 The Sketch wryly noted that “[t]ired men, trotting home at the end of an imperfect day, have been known to pop into the library and ask for an Annie Haynes. They have not made a mistake in the street number. It is not a cocktail they are asking for…”
Twenties critical opinion adjudged that Annie Haynes’ criminous concoctions held appeal not only for puzzle fiends impressed with the “considerable craftsmanship” of their plots (quoting from the Sunday Times review of The Bungalow Mystery), but also for more general readers attracted to their purely literary qualities. “Not only a crime story of merit, but also a novel which will interest readers to whom mystery for its own sake has little appeal,” avowed The Nation of Haynes’ The Secret of Greylands, while the New Statesman declared of The Witness on the Roof that “Miss Haynes has a sense of character; her people are vivid and not the usual puppets of detective fiction.” Similarly, the Bookman deemed the characters in Haynes’ The Abbey Court Murder “much truer to life than is the case in many sensational stories” and The Spectator concluded of The Crime at Tattenham Corner, “Excellent as a detective tale, the book also is a charming novel.”
Sadly, Haynes’ triumph as a detective novelist proved short lived. Around 1914, about the time of the outbreak of the Great War, Haynes had been stricken with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that left her in constant pain and hastened her death from heart failure in 1929, when she was only 63. Haynes wrote several of her detective novels on fine days in Kensington Gardens, where she was wheeled from 14 Radnor Place in a bath chair, but in her last years she was able only to travel from her bedroom to her study. All of this was an especially hard blow for a woman who had once been intensely energetic and quite physically active.
In a foreword to The Crystal Beads Murder, the second of Haynes’ two posthumously published mysteries, Ada Heather-Bigg noted that Haynes’ difficult daily physical struggle “was materially lightened by the warmth of friendships” with other authors and by the “sympathetic and friendly relations between her and her publishers.” In this latter instance Haynes’ experience rather differed from that of her sister Bodleian, Agatha Christie, who left The Bodley Head on account of what she deemed an iniquitous contract that took unjust advantage of a naive young author. Christie moved, along with her landmark detective novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), to Collins and never looked back, enjoying ever greater success with the passing years.
At the time Christie crossed over to Collins, Annie Haynes had only a few years of life left. After she died at 14 Radnor Place on 30 March 1929, it was reported in the press that “many people well-known in the literary world” attended the author’s funeral at St. Michaels and All Angels Church, Paddington, where her sermon was delivered by the eloquent vicar, Paul Nichols, brother of the writer Beverley Nichols and dedicatee of Haynes’ mystery novel The Master of the Priory; yet by the time of her companion Ada Heather-Bigg’s death in 1944, Haynes and her once highly-praised mysteries were forgotten. (Contrastingly, Ada Heather-Bigg’s name survives today in the University College of London’s Ada Heather-Bigg Prize in Economics.) Only three of Haynes’ novels were ever published in the United States, and she passed away less than a year before the formation of the Detection Club, missing any chance of being invited to join this august body of distinguished British detective novelists. Fortunately, we have today entered, when it comes to classic mystery, a period of rediscovery and revival, giving a reading audience a chance once again, after over eighty years, to savor the detective fiction fare of Annie Haynes. Bon appétit!
Curtis Evans
Contents
Chapter One
CARLYN HALL was a big, rambling house, having no architectural pretensions whatever. Nevertheless it was a roomy, comfortable abode with its wide passages and big, low roofed, raftered rooms. Originally it had been little more than a farm-house, but as the Carlyns grew in wealth and importance, and began to rank with the county, successive owners had enlarged and improved it according to their own ideas, each man throwing out a room there, a window here, as seemed good in his eyes. Time, the kindly, had thrown over the whole a veil of ampelopsis and ivy, had mellowed the old walls and sown them with lichen and stone crop.
It looked very pleasant and homelike to-day as the last rays of the setting sun fell across the many-gabled roof, touching it with molten gold.
Tea was being laid beneath the great beeches that had been in their prime when the Carlyns were only yeomen. Mrs. Carlyn, the mother of the young squire, sat in her accustomed place by the big wicker- table, and beside her Barbara Burford, the vicar’s daughter, was playing with Bruno, Frank Carlyn’s favourite setter.
Suddenly Bruno pricked up his ears, then shaking off Barbara’s hand he sprang up and bounded round the side of the house.
The girl laughed. “No need to tell us that Frank has come home.”
Mrs. Carlyn smiled in response. “No, Bruno is devoted to his master. I don’t know why Frank did not take him to-day. He generally does. Barbara, there is one thing I must ask you. Is it true Esther Retford has left her home?”
“I believe so,” Barbara answered with apparent unwillingness.
Mrs. Carlyn turned pale. “What will her poor father do? He worshipped her. Barbara, who is the man?”
The girl shook her head. “Nobody knows, some stranger probably.”
Mrs. Carlyn sighed. “I hoped so. I did hear a whisper that—Ah, here is Frank!”
Barbara’s long eyelashes flickered, the colour in her cheeks deepened as the young master of the house stepped out of his study window and crossed the lawn towards them.
At first sight his pleasant, boyish face looked unusually worried and preoccupied, there were two vertical lines between his level brows, and his mouth was firmly compressed. But, as he caught sight of the girl sitting beside his mother, his expression changed, his face lighted up in a way that made it look wonderfully bright and attractive.
“Why, Barbara,” he exclaimed as they shook hands, “you are almost a stranger. I haven’t seen you for ages. What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Oh, well”—Barbara laughed, yet with a touch of constraint in her manner that did not escape Mrs. Carlyn’s watchful eyes— “I have been rather busy. And this is a good-bye visit too. I am going to stay with Aunt Freda to-morrow.”
“Oh, really! I am sorry to hear that—sorry for our sakes, I mean,” Carlyn said as he took his cup of tea from his mother’s hand.
But his tone lacked warmth, and after a quick glance at him the girl turned back to Bruno, who had installed himself at her feet. She drew his long silky ears through her fingers and fed him with dainty pieces of bread and butter.
Mrs. Carlyn glanced at her son. “Where have you been, Frank? You look hot and tired.”
“I have been dismissing Winter,” he answered shortly. “The coverts are in a disgraceful state, and when I spoke to him about it he was so insolent that I dismissed him then and there.”
There was a pause. Carlyn’s eyes watched every movement of Barbara’s fingers. The girl did not look up; the hand that was caressing Bruno stopped suddenly for a minute, then went on again mechanically. At last Mrs. Carlyn spoke:
“I am very glad to hear it. We shall be well rid of Winter.”
“Yes,” her son assented without any enthusiasm. He was not looking at Barbara now, his eyes had strayed to the Home Wood, in the midst of which stood the humble cottage of John Winter, his head gamekeeper.
“I shall not be sorry to make a change,” he went on. “But I cannot help thinking of the man’s wife. It will be jolly hard lines on her.”
“Ah!” Mrs. Carlyn drew in her breath.
Barbara stood up suddenly. “I must be getting back. Father will be expecting—”
Mrs. Carlyn put out her hand. “Not yet, Barbara, dear. I want to consult you. I suppose Mrs. Winter will go with her husband, Frank. He is a young man and will presumably be able to support her in another situation.”
“Oh, support,” Carlyn echoed, with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “I wish I could get you to take an interest in her, mother. Or you, Barbara. It is obvious that she belongs to a class above Winter’s. And the man is a brute. He ill-treats her; I am not sure he does not beat her.” He clenched his right hand.
“Oh, I should hope not,” Mrs. Carlyn said in her placid tones, though her eyes looked troubled. “Anyhow, it is an awkward thing to interfere between man and wife, Frank. And Mrs. Winter herself is not responsive. When I went to see her she was barely civil to me. A churlish sort of young woman I thought her. Though handsome in a peculiar style of course. Stay, what was that, Frank?” holding up her hand just as her son was about to speak.
They all listened. In the silence the sound Mrs. Carlyn had heard was becoming distinctly audible. Someone was running up the drive as if for dear life, more than one person apparently.
Carlyn got up. “Some one seems in a precious hurry. I think I will just go and see what they want.”
He strolled towards the house. Moved by some sudden impulse Mrs. Carlyn and Barbara followed him. As they got nearer they saw that two men were running towards them at full speed, several more following in the distance.
“It is Jack Winter, sir,” the first called out as he caught sight of the young squire. “He is dead!”
“Dead!” Carlyn’s face turned a curious, greyish tint beneath its tan. “What do you mean, man? I parted from him only an hour ago.”
“He is dead enough now, sir,” panted the man whom Mrs. Carlyn recognized as Retford, one of the under-keepers. “Lying in a pool of blood in front of his cottage, shot through the head.”
“Suicide!” Frank Carlyn drew in his breath sharply. “Spencer, I—”
“They are saying it’s murder, sir,” the man interrupted him respectfully.
“Good heavens!” Carlyn fell back a pace.
His mother touched his arm, her face white, her eyes big and frightened.
“Frank, what is it? Winter can’t be dead. We were talking about him only this minute.”
Carlyn put her aside hurriedly. “No, no! It is some stupid mistake of course. Probably the man has had a fit. You go into the house with Barbara, and I will run down to the cottage and see what really is the matter.”
He scarcely waited for her answer as he hurried off to the gamekeeper’s cottage. It was but a step away, as the North-country folk phrase it, when the near path through the Home Wood was taken, and Frank Carlyn was soon on the scene of action. Early as he was, however, quite a little crowd had assembled already.
Carlyn drew his brows together as he saw Marlowe, the village constable, officiously pushing the people aside and bending over something that lay on the ground.
The people, most of them his own employees, made way for the young squire. He glanced for a moment at the thing laying on the ground—the thing that so short a time before had been a living, breathing man—and turned away with a shudder of horror. The whole of the bottom part of the face had been blown away, and there were other ghastly injuries.
“Dead, poor fellow!” he said hoarsely.
The constable looked up. “As a door nail, sir. Whoever did this job didn’t mean there to be any doubt about it.”
Carlyn looked at him. “Whoever did it,” he repeated. “But surely it is a clear case of suicide?”
The constable shook his head. “He couldn’t have shot himself, sir, and then carried his gun off and thrown it behind that stack of wood, which is where Bill Jenkins found it just now. It’s murder, safe enough, and here is Dr. Thompson to tell us all about it.”
The doctor bustled up. He was a little, wiry man of sixty or thereabouts.
Motioning the bystanders away he knelt by the corpse. In a moment he looked up again.
“You are right, constable, there is nothing to be done here. We had better have him moved into the cottage. Tell his wife—but I will speak to her myself. Where is she?”
Constable Marlowe looked round. “Blest if I hadn’t forgotten all about her,” he ejaculated. “Where is she?”
Nobody answered for a minute. By one consent everybody turned and looked in at the cottage door, through which a glimpse could be obtained of the pleasant, homely interior. At last one man spoke:
“It was me that come on the body first, sir,” he said slowly, addressing himself to Carlyn, his eyes wandering fearfully every now and then to that long, silent thing on the ground. “And as I come into the wood I met Winter’s missus coming out. Tearing along like a wild thing she was, and never answered when I passed her the time of day civilly.”
There was another silence. The bystanders looked at one another. Constable Marlowe drew a deep breath.
“Tearing along like a wild thing, was she? Phew!”
The inference was unmistakable. Frank Carlyn looked across at him with rising anger.
“What do you mean, Marlowe? Mrs. Winter has, no doubt, gone to see some of her friends and will be back presently. The tearing along was probably Spencer’s fancy.”
Spencer scratched his head.
“Beg pardon, sir, there was no fancy about it,” he said stolidly. “And Jack Winter’s missus has no friends hereabouts. Seems as if she thought no one good enough for her to associate with.”
“Pooh! You are talking nonsense—” Carlyn was beginning, but Dr. Thompson touched his arm.
“Least said soonest mended,” he said in a low tone. “We don’t want to bring anyone’s name into this. Come, they are going to take the poor fellow inside.”
Winter’s house was just the ordinary rural cottage, the front door led straight into the kitchen; opposite, another door led into the little parlour, a third opened on the closed stairs. There was a fire in the kitchen, a kettle was singing on the hob, a big black cat was curled up on the hearth, but of human presence there was no sign.
An odd expression flashed for a moment into Carlyn’s eyes as he looked round. Was it relief, or was it fear? Dr. Thompson, who was watching his face narrowly, could not tell.
The men halted on the threshold with their burden. The doctor motioned them to the inner room, he and Carlyn following closely, Constable Marlowe bringing up the rear.
The principal piece of furniture in the room was a big, old-fashioned sofa. Here the bearers laid the dead man reverently. Frank Carlyn stood alone in the doorway while the doctor and the constable directed and helped the men. He looked swiftly round the room—a questioning, fearful glance—then he stepped quickly across to the fireplace, and from behind the cheap ornaments and shells with which it was adorned drew out a small, oblong object, and slipped it into his pocket.
He went back to the kitchen, and there presently Dr. Thompson and Marlowe joined him.
“That is all there is to be done for the present,” the former said as he closed the door. “Except that the coroner must be communicated with.”
Constable Marlowe looked at him. “Beg pardon, sir; there is another thing we have to do as quickly as possible, I think, and that is find Mrs. Winter. I am going to phone to headquarters at once, and I fancy you will find they will agree with me.”
The doctor’s kindly face over-clouded. “Oh, well, you may be right, Marlowe. But I hope Mrs. Winter will be at home very shortly and convince you that you are wrong.”
“I don’t fancy there is much chance of that, sir,” the constable rejoined.
He wasn’t an attractive man, Constable Marlowe, but his prominent jaw and his keen, deep-set eyes gave promise of a certain order of intelligence. The constable was by no means inclined to under-rate himself. He had made up his mind to rise in his calling, and had regarded it as little less than a calamity when he was sent to Carlyn village, which seemed to afford no scope for his ability. Now, however, with the mystery surrounding Winter’s death, he told himself his opportunity had come. Rosy visions of a speedy promotion, of an inspectorship in the near future, even of a post in the detective force of the Metropolis dangled before his eyes. He watched the young squire and the doctor out of sight, and then went back into the cottage. A close study of the methods of Sherlock Holmes had taught him that the most unconsidered trifle would sometimes give the clue to the mystery. He did not intend that any such should escape the sharp eyes of Constable Marlowe.
Frank Carlyn returned to the hall. Dr. Thompson kept by his side; a great favourite of Mrs. Carlyn’s, he knew he was assured of his welcome.
“This is a sad affair, a very sad affair,” he remarked sympathetically.
Carlyn turned to him with something like passion in his tone.
“I tell you it is a case of suicide. I had just dismissed the man. Perhaps I had been unjustifiably harsh—”
The doctor shook his head. “Don’t blame yourself, my dear Frank. This was no suicide. The shot was fired from some distance away. It would have been a physical impossibility for Winter to have done it himself. As for what that fellow Marlowe was hinting at—well, poor young thing! Poor young thing! Heaven knows what she may have suffered at Winter’s hands.”
The view the doctor took of the case was unmistakable, but his pity for the young wife was so evidently genuine that some of the anger in Carlyn’s face evaporated.
“I attended her in the spring,” the doctor went on. “And I saw enough to know that some tragedy underlay the marriage. It was obvious, though she avoided all reference to the past, that she was of a very different class to her husband.”
“Anyone could see that,” Carlyn said gruffly. “But she had nothing to do with this, doctor.”
“And yet,” the doctor went on, “one of the things that struck me most was that there was nothing in the cottage, beyond its scrupulous cleanliness, no books, no knick-knacks or flowers to indicate that its mistress was a person of superior refinement.”
“Wasn’t there?” Carlyn’s hand strayed to his breast pocket for an instant.
But, as the doctor went on with his surmises as to Mrs. Winter’s origin, Carlyn’s responses grew curter and curter. It was with a sigh of profound relief that when they reached the house, he deputed to Dr. Thompson the task of telling Mrs. Carlyn what had happened, and went off himself to his study.
He was still sitting there a couple of hours later when Constable Marlowe asked for an interview.
“We were right enough from the first, sir,” he said when he was admitted. “Mrs. Winter had caught the 3.30 train up to town; when the inspector came he phoned up at once to have her stopped, but we were too late.”
“How do you mean?” Carlyn’s tone was stern. He shuffled the papers on his table as if to show the constable that he was wasting his time.
Marlowe coughed.
“We phoned to the junction, sir, but she wasn’t in the train. She must have got out at Brentwood, the first stop. But we shall catch her soon, there is no doubt of that. The inspector is having her description circulated. But he is hampered in one way: there doesn’t seem to be any photograph of her to be had. We were wondering if any of the servants up here would be likely to have one.”
“I should think it was exceedingly unlikely,” Carlyn’s tone was short in the extreme. He rose to signify that the interview was ended. “But you must make what inquiries you like, constable. I think you are on the wrong track altogether, as you know.”
“Yes, sir!” The constable’s eyes gleamed unpleasantly. It was evident that he resented his dismissal. He glanced furtively round the room. “Time will show which of us is right, sir,” he said as he left the room.
Left alone Frank Carlyn drew a small folding case from his pocket. It held three miniatures painted on ivory. One was that of a fine, soldierly-looking old man; opposite him a comparatively young woman with a sweet, serious face, and then, beneath, the lovely, laughing face of a very young girl with a mass of red-gold hair, and big, mischievous, grey eyes.
It was on this last that Carlyn’s gaze was riveted.
“Yes, I was right to bring it, no one could have mistaken it,” he said slowly.
With it in his hand he went slowly across to his writing-table, opened a drawer and thrust the miniature and case to the very back. Then he locked the drawer and thrust the key into his pocket, his face looking very grave and stern.
Chapter Two
“CASTOR is the next station, miss. The next stop I mean. You will have nearly an hour’s run before you come to it.” The speaker, a burly countryman, was following his family on to the platform and paused at the door to give this piece of information to the other occupant of the carriage, a tall woman in black sitting near the window at the other end.
“Thank you,” she said with a slight bow. Touching his cap the man went on. The train began to move. The woman crossed over and opening her bag drew out a tiny pocket mirror. Holding it up she studied her face intently for a minute, then with a deep sigh she laid the glass back, replaced the smoke-tinted glasses she had momentarily taken off, and drew down her thick veil.
“It looks quite right,” she said to herself in a low frightened whisper. “And it is so far away, surely there cannot be any danger.”
She stood up and pulled down the shabby portmanteau with the letters E.B.M. stamped on one side. The label was addressed in firm angular writing—“Miss Elizabeth Martin, Davenant Priory, near Castor.” She shuddered as she put it on the seat beside her. Then suddenly she burst into a passion of sobs.
“Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie, you were right, I can’t do it,” she cried. “And yet, God help me, what is to become of me if I don’t?”
Her sobs subsided, she lay back in her seat, big tears coursing miserably down her cheeks. There was time to turn back yet, she said to herself, time to give up this mad scheme on which she had embarked. She knew that there was a door of escape open to her, but her pride and some feeling stronger than pride forbade her to avail herself of it. No; she told herself that there was nothing for it but to go forward in the path she had chosen; there could be no harm by it and at least she would be safe.
But all the while another voice was whispering to her, pleading with her to go back, to humble herself. When the train began to slow down she was still gazing mechanically out of the window, her expression strangely undecided.
