The Terriford mystery E-Book

Marie Belloc Lowndes

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 563

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Terriford village, a peaceful, exquisite corner of old England. Houses, cottages, and great raftered barns spread over a rising stretch of what was once primeval woodland. No dwelling-place is less than fifty years old and many are of much older date. At the apex of the broad, well-kept village street stands the pre-Reformation gray stone church. It rises from what appears to be a well-tended and fragrant garden, though here and there lichened stones and crosses show it to be what old-fashioned folk still call a graveyard. But at the time my story opens sudden death, and all the evils the most normal death implies in our strange, transitory existence, seem very far from the inhabitants of Terriford. All the more remote because the group of people who are soon to be concerned with a mysterious and terrible drama of death are now one and all happy, cheerful, and full of life and excitement. For they are present as privileged spectators at the first appearance of the great Australian cricket team.

Leseprobe

THE TERRIFORD MYSTERY

BY

MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES

PROLOGUE

T

erriford village, a peaceful, exquisite corner of old England. Houses, cottages, and great raftered barns spread over a rising stretch of what was once primeval woodland. No dwelling-place is less than fifty years old and many are of much older date.

At the apex of the broad, well-kept village street stands the pre-Reformation gray stone church. It rises from what appears to be a well-tended and fragrant garden, though here and there lichened stones and crosses show it to be what old-fashioned folk still call a graveyard.

But at the time my story opens sudden death, and all the evils the most normal death implies in our strange, transitory existence, seem very far from the inhabitants of Terriford. All the more remote because the group of people who are soon to be concerned with a mysterious and terrible drama of death are now one and all happy, cheerful, and full of life and excitement. For they are present as privileged spectators at the first appearance of the great Australian cricket team.

Why, it may well be asked, should quiet Terriford village be so honoured? It is because Harry Garlett, the man who stands to the hamlet in the relation of squire, is the most popular amateur cricketer in the county and the owner of the best private cricket ground in England. Not only money, but a wealth of loving care combined with great technical knowledge and experience, has brought it near to absolute perfection—this fine expanse of English turf, framed in a garland of noble English elms and spreading chestnut trees.

Months ago in the dreary winter, when the tour of the Australian test match team was being arranged, Garlett had invited the visitors to come to Terriford immediately on landing from the boat and “play themselves in” after the long voyage. He undertook to collect a strong team of amateurs, stiffened with two or three professionals, that the Australians might have something worth tackling, and he did not fail to point out that at Terriford the visitors would most quickly become accustomed to English pitches and the soft English light, so different from the hard dry sunshine and matting wickets of Australia.

Harry Garlett knew that the merits of his private ground were well known over there, on the other side of the world, but all the same he could not feel sure. And so it was one of the happiest moments of a life which had been singularly happy and fortunate when he received the cable informing him that the Australian team would accept with pleasure his kind invitation.

T

o-day, on this bright spring morning, the closing day of the great match, there could be no more characteristically English scene than this mixture of country-house party, garden party, and enthusiasts for the national game.

The cricket is serious, but not so serious as to risk interfering with good fellowship, the more so that this match does not count in the tour for records and averages. The spirit of the whole affair is one of pure good sportsmanship, and the small group of newspaper experts whom Garlett has invited are all eager to see how the visitors shape and how they compare with the great Australian teams of the past.

These connoisseurs are also full of admiration for the eleven which their host has collected. It is indeed a cleverly composed combination. Youth is represented by some brilliant young players from Oxford and Cambridge, cheerful fellows who are equally likely to hit up centuries or to make the two noughts familiarly known as “a pair of spectacles.” But these lads are as active as monkeys in the field and can save seemingly certain runs and bring off seemingly impossible “catches.”

Then there is a sprinkling of somewhat older, but still young men, who have proved their mettle in the great county teams. Last, but not least, there are three professionals—men whose names are known wherever cricket is played and who are past-masters in all the subtleties of the great game.

Decidedly the Cornstalks, though the odds are slightly in their favour, will have to play all out if they are to win.

Any one who envied Harry Garlett his manifold good fortune, his popularity, his good looks, his ideal life in “Easy Street,” for he is a prosperous manufacturer as well as a famous cricketer, might argue that were it not for the long voyage from Australia the Garlett eleven would be beaten to a frazzle. But the general feeling is that it is just that handicap on the visitors which equalizes the chances and makes the match one of real sporting interest.

The pavilion is situated at the top of the cricket field and commands a splendid view of the game. But the game is not the only thing. Indeed, there are people there to whom it is not only an excuse to meet, to gossip, and to enjoy a generous host’s delightful hospitality. For, at the back of the great room where Harry Garlett’s special guests are all gathered together, is a buffet loaded with every kind of delicious food, wine, and spirits. Garlett, though himself abstemious as every keen athlete has need to be, always offers the best of cheer to his friends, ay, and not only to his friends, for bounteous free refreshments are also provided for the village folk as well as for certain cricket enthusiasts from the county town of Grendon.

And now let us concentrate on a little group of people in the pavilion, all obviously quite at ease with one another, and all bent on making the most of a memorable occasion. Very ordinary folk they are, typical inhabitants of almost any English village.

First, in order of precedence—the rector and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Cole-Wright, he kindly and far from clever, facts which make him popular, his wife clever and not over kindly, and therefore far less popular.

Then come Dr. and Mrs. Maclean. The wise physician, whose fame goes far beyond the confines of his practice, has snatched a day off from his busy life in order to be present at the closing scenes of the great match. Both he and his wife are Scotch, but they have lived for fifteen years very happily in this typical English village. They are a closely united couple, and the one lack in their joint life has lately been satisfied by their adoption of Mrs. Maclean’s niece, Jean Bower, an attractive, cheerful-looking, happy girl whose first introduction to the neighbourhood is taking place to-day in Harry Garlett’s cricket pavilion. Jean is only twenty-one, but she is not an idle girl. It is known that she did good work during the last part of the war, and she has lately been made secretary to the Etna China Company of which Harry Garlett is managing director.

As to the other people there, they include Colonel Brackbury, the Governor of Grendon Prison, his sharp-featured wife and two pretty daughters; Mr. Toogood, chief lawyer in Grendon, with his wife and daughter; Dr. Tasker, one of the few bachelors in the neighbourhood; and, last but not least in that little group who are all on intimate terms with one another, and whose affairs are constantly discussed in secret by their humble neighbours, is Mary Prince, true type of that peculiarly English genus unkindly called “old maid.”

Miss Prince is at once narrow-minded and tolerant, mean and generous, wickedly malicious, while yet, in a sense, exceedingly kind-hearted. Perhaps because her father was Dr. Maclean’s predecessor the village folk consult her concerning their ailments, grave and trifling, more often than they do the doctor himself.

There is one dark spot in the life of Harry Garlett. His devoted wife, to whom as an actual fact the whole of Terriford village belongs—or did belong till she made it over to him—is an invalid. Many months have gone by since she left the upper floor of the delightful Georgian manor house, which owes its unsuitable name of the Thatched House to the fact that it was built on the site of a medieval thatched building.

The Thatched House is a childless house, and Harry Garlett, though on the best of terms with his invalid wife, is constantly away, at any rate during the summer months, playing cricket here, there, and everywhere, all over England. So Agatha Cheale, Mrs. Garlett’s housekeeper, who is known to be a kinswoman of her employer, plays the part of hostess in the cricket pavilion. Even so, as the day wears on Miss Cheale disappears unobtrusively two or three times in order to see if Mrs. Garlett is comfortable and also to give her news of the cricket match and especially news of how Mr. Garlett is acquitting himself. Everything that concerns her husband is of deep moment to Mrs. Garlett, and she is exceedingly proud of his fame as a cricketer.

O

n this, the second day of the great match, the Australians have been set to make 234 runs in their second innings for victory. When the teams go in for lunch there are few, even among those to whom the finer shades of the game are as a sealed book, who doubt that they will do it pretty easily.

The pitch has worn wonderfully well, and Garlett feels a thrill of delight when he sees it roll out as true and plumb as on the first day. He thinks with intense satisfaction of all the patient care that he has devoted to this ground, of all the cunning devices of drainage lying hid beneath the level turf, and of the scientific treatment with which he has nursed the turf up to this acme of condition. Ah, money can do much, but money alone couldn’t have done that. He wants to win the match, but he emphatically does not want to owe victory to any defect of the pitch.

In such happy mood does Garlett lead his team out into the field after lunch, and the Australians start, full of confidence. But somehow, even from the beginning, they seem to find runs hard to get, harder than in their first knock.

The young undergraduates field like men inspired, covering an immense lot of ground and turning what seem certain fours into singles. Wickets fall, too. Some of the Australians open their Herculean shoulders too soon, and, beginning to hit before they are properly “set,” misjudge the ball and get caught from terrific “skiers.” But still the score creeps up. With careful generalship Garlett frequently changes his bowling, treating the batsmen to every variety of swerve and break that his bowlers can command.

The tension grows. One of Garlett’s professionals, a chartered jester of the Surrey team, forgets to play off the antics with which he is wont to amuse the crowd at the famous Oval ground, and suddenly becomes quite serious. Still the score mounts up. On the great staging beside the scorer’s box large tin numbers painted in white on a black ground show the progress of the game.

Now, the last Australian is going in. What is the score? Ah, see, the man is just changing the plates—yes, there it is! Nine wickets down for 230 runs. Only four more to make and the match is won—and lost!

What is the matter? Why is Mr. Garlett talking to the bowler? A little plan of campaign, no doubt. Every heart on the ground beats a little faster, even surely those well-schooled hearts concealed beneath the white flannels which stand out so brilliantly on the deep green of the pitch.

The newcomer takes his block. He is a huge creature with thick, jet-black beard, a good man at rounding up the most difficult steers on the far South Australian plains.

“Play!” Swift flies the ball from the height of the bowler’s swing, and our cattle tamer, playing forward, drives it with a mighty swipe. “Oh, well hit, sir!” Is it a boundary? If so, the match is won. No, no, one of Garlett’s agile undergraduates has arrived like a white flash at the right spot and at the right moment. Like lightning he gathers the ball and returns it to the wicket. Ah, a runout? No, yes, no—Black Beard has just got home. It was a narrow shave, but two precious runs have been added.

Only two more to make! Everyone is silent in the tense excitement. Again the ball flies from the bowler’s hand, and this time the Australian giant decides to go all out for a winning hit. He opens his brawny chest, all rippling with knotted muscles, and, taking the ball fair in the middle of the bat, lifts it in a huge and lofty curve which seems certain to come to earth beyond the boundary of the pitch.

But wait! Garlett is there, at extra long-on. It is the catch he has planned with the bowler. It is all over in a moment, and yet what a long moment it seems to the entranced spectators!

That little round leather ball high up against the evening sky reaches the top of its flight. Ah, it is over the pavilion! No, it is impossible! But Garlett does it, all the same. With a mighty backward leap he gets the ball into his safe hands just as it was dropping on to the seats in front of the pavilion.

Out! Our cattle tamer is out, the last Australian wicket, and the match is won—by one run!

Every one feels the curious tingling thrill that comes of having seen a feat that will become historic. Garlett’s great catch that won the Australian match for his eleven will be talked about and written about for years to come, wherever cricket is had in honour.

Garlett has picked himself up from where he fell after his terrific leap—but still, you may be sure, holding the precious ball safely to his chest—and instantly he is the centre of a throng of cheering and congratulatory friends, among whom the Cornstalks themselves are foremost.

CHAPTER I

I

n the star-powdered sky there hung a pale, golden moon. It was the 25th of May, and though the day had been warm and sunny, it was cold to-night, and even as early as ten o’clock most of the lights were extinguished in Terriford village.

But “the moon is the lovers’ sun”: such was the conceit which a tall, loosely built man had just propounded to the girl walking by his side on the field path which lay like a white ribbon across the four cornfields stretching between the Thatched House Farm and the well-kept demesne of the Thatched House.

The girl—Lucy Warren was her name, and she was parlour-maid at the Thatched House—made no answer. She could well have spared the moonlight. She knew that not only her clever, capable mother, but also all the gossips who made up her little world, would be shocked indeed did they see her walking, in this slow, familiar, loverlike way, with her mother’s lodger, Guy Cheale.

Not that shrewd Mrs. Warren disliked her lodger. In spite of herself she had become very fond of him. He was such a queer, fantastic—had she known the word, she might have added cynical—young gentleman.

But though she liked him, and though his funny talk amused her, Mrs. Warren would have been wroth indeed had she known of the friendship between her lodger and her daughter. And the mother would have been right to feel wroth, for, while doing everything to make Lucy love him with that fresh, wonderful young love that only comes to a woman once, Guy Cheale never spoke to Lucy of marriage.

For the matter of that, how could he speak of marriage, being that melancholy thing, a penniless gentleman? A man whose lodging at the farm even was paid for by his sister, herself companion-housekeeper at the Thatched House. There were a dozen newspapers in London which would always print everything Guy Cheale chose to write, but he liked talking better than writing, and he was in very poor health.

Lucy hated to think that the man whom deep in her heart she had come passionately to love was too lazy—or was it really too ill?—to make a living. She disliked her lover’s sister, Agatha Cheale, with a deep, instinctive, fierce dislike, and sometimes she smiled, though it was not a happy smile, at the thought of how angry Miss Cheale would be if she knew that Mr. Cheale and she, Lucy, were lovers.

“Not quite so quick, my pretty Lucy!”

Guy Cheale was panting painfully—and a rush of that pity which is akin to love filled Lucy Warren’s heart.

“I mustn’t be late,” she said nervously.

“You’re not late, Lucy”—he held up his watch close to his eyes. “It’s only twenty to ten,” and then he added, in that voice which he knew how to make at once so strangely tender, persuasive, and yes—mocking, “Let’s go into our enchanted wood for five minutes, as you won’t let me in to that drawing room of yours.”

“It ain’t my drawing room, as you knows full well. If it was, you’d be welcome to come into it,” she exclaimed resentfully.

He guided her down the path leading to the wood, and then, once they were under the shelter of the trees, he clutched her to him with a strength which at once frightened and comforted her—for it seemed to prove that he could not be as ill as he was made out to be.

“Love and life,” he muttered, “the one’s no good without the other!” He bent his head and their lips clung together in a long long kiss.

And then Guy Cheale was filled with a delicious sense of triumph and of exultation. He had won this proud sensitive creature at last—after a long, to him a breathless, exciting chase.

But all at once he felt her stiffen in his arms.

“Hush!” she whispered. “There’s some one in the wood!”

He did not relax his almost terrible grip of her, as he too, listened intently.

Lucy was right; he could hear the light, stuffless sound of footsteps sinking into the dead leaves which still, on this spring night, lay thickly spread on the path.

“Only happy lovers like you and me,” he whispered huskily. “They’re not troubling about us—why trouble about them?”

But the girl was frightened. “For God’s sake, go away, Mr. Cheale!” she pleaded in a terrified whisper.

“One kiss more, Lucy. Only one kiss more——”

But she lay inertly in his arms, all her senses absorbed in listening. How different from only fifty seconds ago!

“Lucy,” he whispered, “Lucy? We can’t part like this, to-night—the first time my goddess has yielded me her lips.”

Though full of nervous terror, she was moved by the real feeling in his voice.

“I’ll go and see who it is,” she muttered in his ear. “You stop where you are.”

“Promise to come back!”

For only answer she took up his thin right hand and laid it against her cheek; and then she crept quickly away, moving almost soundlessly along, for she knew every turn of the little wood.

At last she came back, panting a little.

“Who was it?” he whispered eagerly.

“I don’t know. They’re gone now. But I’ve not a minute left.”

He could hear by her voice that she was anxious, preoccupied, and with the strange, dangerous power he possessed of seeing into a woman’s mind he knew that she had not told the truth—that she was well aware of the identity of those other haunters of the enchanted wood. But he had no wish to share her knowledge. The good folk of Terriford, who meant so much to Lucy Warren, meant less than nothing to Guy Cheale.

“You and that tiresome old cook go up to bed as soon as you come in, don’t you?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes, we do,” she replied hesitatingly, knowing well, as she would have expressed it to herself, what he was after.

“If I give you twenty minutes,” he whispered caressingly, “it will be quite safe for you to let me into the drawing room, eh—little hawk?”

It was his supreme term of endearment—and once more she allowed him to take her into his arms, and press her with an almost terrible strength to his breast. But——

“It’s wrong,” she whispered, “it’s wrong, Mr. Cheale. I ought never to have let you into the drawing room. ’Tain’t mine to use that way.”

“That’s why I like our doing it!” he chuckled.

And then with that queer touch of malicious triumph that fascinated her, he added: “What would sister Agatha say if walls could speak?”

“Don’t you go saying that! Miss Cheale’s never in the drawing room,” she exclaimed, affrighted at the very thought. “No one ever is—now that the mistress keeps upstairs.”

“No one but you and me, Psyche!” and then he took her face between his hands and lightly kissed it. “I won’t stay long to-night, I promise—but we can’t meet to-morrow, worse luck! Your uncle’s spending the night at the farm.”

“Can’t see what you fancy about Uncle Enoch——”

“I like lawyers—they’re such rascals! Why he was telling your mother all about Mrs. Garlett’s will last Sunday——”

“He never was?”

Lucy felt very much shocked. Even she knew that in doing such a thing her uncle, Enoch Bent, confidential clerk to Mr. Toogood, the leading lawyer of Grendon, was acting in a very dishonourable manner.

“Run along now,” exclaimed Guy Cheale, a touch of rasped impatience in his voice.

And then he seized her again in his arms—only to push her away. “I’ll wait till we can kiss at ease—in the drawing room! Strange that hideous, early Victorian temple of respectability should shelter the love of two wild hawks like you and me—eh, Lucy?”

And then she left him and hurried through the wood, uncaring now of the sounds her light footsteps made. She knew she was late—it must be quite a bit after ten o’clock. But cookie was a kindly, good-natured, elderly woman, and didn’t mind waiting up for a little while. But once, when Lucy had been half an hour late, Miss Cheale had caught her, and spoken to her very severely.

A

quarter of an hour later Lucy, after tiptoeing down the silent house, opened the drawing-room door, and, after closing it with infinite precaution, passed through into the dark room. Then she turned and locked the door behind her.

The white dimity covers of the heavy, early Victorian furniture by which Mrs. Garlett, the invalid sleeping just above the drawing room, set such store, made luminous patches in the big L-shaped apartment, and somehow added to Lucy Warren’s feeling of nervous unease.

Though the passionate, newly awakened side of her beating heart was burning to hear the tiny tap on the long French window which she knew would herald Guy Cheale’s approach, there was another side of the girl which hated and was deeply ashamed of allowing a meeting with her lover here.

She felt that whom she saw, and even what she did, when out of doors, under the sky, was no one’s business but her own—and perhaps, in a much lesser measure, her mother’s. She would also have felt differently had she and Guy Cheale been able to meet alone in the servants’ hall of the Thatched House. But the drawing room she felt to be ground sacred to Mrs. Garlett, so dear and precious indeed to the mistress of the Thatched House that it was never used now, not even on the rare occasions when Harry Garlett had a friend to dinner. Guy Cheale, however, had discovered that the drawing room, alone of all the ground-floor rooms of the spacious old house, had a French window opening into the garden, and he and Lucy Warren had already met there twice.

As Lucy stood in the dark room, listening intently, her nerves taut, her heart beating, there suddenly swept over her an awful prevision of evil, a sudden realization of her folly in allowing Guy Cheale to wile her heart away. She knew, alas! that he was spoiling her for the only life open to such as she—the life of an honest, commonplace, working man’s wife.

She remembered to-night with an almost anguished vividness the first time she had ever seen Guy Cheale—last February, on her first “afternoon off” in the month. She had gone home to the Thatched House Farm to help her mother with the new gentleman lodger, and, being a girl of a proud independent nature, she had come prepared to dislike him, the more so that she hated his sister, Mrs. Garlett’s strict, sarcastic young lady housekeeper. And then she had opened the door of the little farmhouse parlour, and seen the big, loosely built fair man who was to be “her fate.”

His keen, thin, large-boned face, alive with a kind of gay, plucky humour, large heavy-lidded gray eyes, and long, loose-limbed figure, were each and all so utterly unlike Miss Cheale that no one could have believed them to be what they were, brother and sister.

Guy Cheale had often reverted to the enchanted moment that had brought them first face to face; and he had told her again and again what she was never tired of hearing—how beautiful, how proud and how disdainful he had thought her.

But she knew nothing of the cruel hunting instinct which had prompted what had immediately followed her entry into the room.

“What is your name?” he had asked, and when she answered, “Lucy, sir. I’m Mrs. Warren’s daughter,” he had got up and, gazing straight into her face, had uttered the strange, poignant words—“A dying man—for that’s what I’m supposed to be, my pretty dear—ought to be given a certain license, eh?”

“License, sir?” she had repeated, falteringly.

“License in the way of love-making! I suppose you know, Lucy, that I’m said to be dying? And so I am—dying for a little love!”

That had been the beginning of it all. And though she had been, for quite a long while, what she termed to herself “standoffish,” they had become, in time, dear friends—meeting often in secret, as some dear friends are forced to do. It had not been easy for them to meet, even in secret; for there is no place in the world so full of a kind of shrewd, cruel scandal-mongering as is an English village, and it said much for the intelligence, not only of Guy Cheale, but also of Lucy Warren, that their names had never yet been connected the one with the other.

All the same, as is always the way with a man and a woman who are determined on meeting, they had seen each other almost daily. And now and again they had had a grand, a wonderful innings! Once Mrs. Warren had had to go away for a week and Lucy had been given some hours off each day in order that she might prepare the lunch and supper of her mother’s lodger.

During those days—days on which he had insisted on helping her to do everything, even to the cooking of his meals in the big, comfortable farm kitchen, their friendship had grown apace. No man knew better the way to a woman’s heart, and, posing then as her friend, and only as her friend, he had encouraged her to talk about everything and everybody that interested her—her employer, Harry Garlett, the famous county cricketer, his sickly wife, and even the country village gossip.

Even so, in defence of her heart, Lucy Warren had put up a good fight—a fight which, as the time went on, stimulated, excited, sometimes even maddened Guy Cheale. He found, with surprise and even discomfiture, that what he had begun in idle and ignoble sport, was becoming to him a matter of interest, even of importance.

This, perhaps, was why now, while Lucy Warren stood in the dark drawing room, her mind filled with tense, questioning memories, Guy Cheale, padding up and down the lawn like some huge, loose-limbed creature of the woods, was also asking himself intimate, searching questions.

He was already ruefully aware that this would probably be one of the last times that he and this poor girl whom he had forced to love him would meet, and it irked him to know how much he would miss her from out his strange, sinister life—the life which he knew was ebbing slowly but surely to a close. He had made love to many, many women, but this was the first time he had been thrown into close intimacy with a country girl of Lucy’s class—that sturdy, self-respecting British yeoman class which has been for generations the backbone of the old country.

Very soon—how soon to a day not even Guy Cheale could tell—he would have left the Thatched Farm. And oh! how he would like to take Lucy with him, even for a little while. But, bad as he was, there was yet in him still a small leaven of good which forced him to admit that he owed Lucy Warren something for the love which, if passionate, was so pure and selfless. Sometimes, when he felt more ailing than usual, he would tell himself that when within sight of that mysterious bourne from which no traveller returns he would send for Lucy, marry her, and be nursed by her to the end.

But now, on this warm May night, he put painful thoughts away, and determined to extract the greatest possible enjoyment from what could only be, alas! the fleeting present.

Treading over the grass as lightly as might be, he leaped across the narrow gravel footpath which ran round the front of the house.

And then a most untoward thing happened! Unaware that Lucy had unlatched the hasp of the long French window, Guy Cheale leaned against it, panting, and fell forward into the room—his heavy boot crashing through one of the lower panes.

He uttered a stifled oath, then stood up and, walking forward, felt in the darkness for the terror-stricken girl. For a few minutes they stood together listening intently; then, reassured, he led her over to a couch and, throwing himself down on it, he clasped her to him closely.

His arms were round her, he was kissing her eagerly, thirstily, when all at once she gave a stifled cry—she had heard the handle turn in the locked door.

“I expect it’s Miss Cheale,” she whispered. “She taxed me the other night with having a sweetheart I was ashamed of! Go away—quick! She’ll get round to the window in a minute——”

Guy Cheale leaped up and rushed across the room. Desperately he tried to find the awkward, old-fashioned catch, and just as the second door of the drawing room—a door the existence of which Lucy had forgotten—was unlatched, and the electric light switched on, he flung open the window and disappeared into the dark garden.

But the figure which advanced slowly into the L-shaped room was not that of Agatha Cheale. Lucy, petrified with shame and fear, knew it for that of the invalid mistress of the Thatched House.

Clad in an old-fashioned white dressing gown, her pallid face filled with mingled curiosity and fright, Mrs. Garlett looked like a wraith, and far more willingly would the girl, who stood before her with hanging head, have faced a real spirit.

For a long, breathless moment Mrs. Garlett, dazzled by the light, peered round her, looking this way and that. Then, “Lucy!” she exclaimed, in a tone of keen surprise and anger, and again, “Lucy?”

Turning slowly round, she called out to some one who apparently had remained in the passage outside.

“You can come in now, Miss Cheale. I was right and you were wrong. I did hear a noise upstairs—after all, my bedroom’s just over here. It was Lucy Warren—in here with a man. He has just escaped through the window.”

And then Miss Cheale, the woman whom Lucy Warren hated, feared and, yes, despised, came into the room. She gave one swift glance of contempt and reprobation at the unhappy culprit, glanced at the open French window, and, turning to her employer, exclaimed:

“I will see Lucy to-morrow morning, Mrs. Garlett. Please come up to bed at once. You’ve done a very dangerous thing in coming down like this!”

The invalid lady allowed herself to be led, unresisting, away; and then, mechanically, Lucy went over to the window and stared out, her bosom heaving with sobs, and tears streaming from her eyes.

But no kindly, mocking, caressing whisper came to comfort and reassure her out of the darkness. By this time Guy Cheale must be well on his way back to the farm.

Turning slowly, she threaded her way through the white-shrouded furniture, unlocked the door nearest to her, and walked out, forgetting or uncaring that the electric light which had been turned on by Mrs. Garlett by the other door was still burning.

CHAPTER II

I

t was twelve o’clock the next morning, and the sun was streaming into the pleasant downstairs rooms of the Thatched House. The only sign of last night’s alarums and excursions was the broken window in the drawing room, and of that no one but the three closely concerned were aware, for early in the morning Miss Cheale had crept downstairs, put out the electric light, and locked both the doors.

But Mrs. Garlett had been thoroughly upset by what had happened in the night, and Miss Cheale had thought it well to telephone for the doctor.

“N

o good to herself—and no good to anybody else, poor soul!”

Dr. Maclean was uttering his thoughts aloud, as even the most discreet of physicians will sometimes do when with an intimate acquaintance. He was speaking of his patient, Mrs. Garlett, and addressing Agatha Cheale.

There were people in Grendon who envied Agatha Cheale her position as practical mistress of the charming old house. She was known to be distantly related to its master, Harry Garlett, and that made her position there less that of a dependent than it might have been. No one else used the pretty little sitting room where she and the doctor were now standing. But Dr. Maclean—shrewd Scot that he was—knew that Agatha Cheale was not to be envied, and that her job was both a difficult and a thankless one.

As he uttered his thoughts aloud, his kindly eyes became focussed on the woman before him. She was slight and dark, her abundant, wavy hair cut almost as short as a boy’s. This morning the intensely bright eyes which were the most arresting feature of her face, and the only one she had in common with her fair-haired brother, had dark pouches under them.

Dr. Maclean told himself that she had made a mistake in giving up the busy, useful, interesting life of secretary to the boss of a London trading company.

He asked suddenly: “When are you going to have your holiday?”

“I don’t know that I shall take a holiday.” She looked at him with a touch of tragic intensity. “I’m all right, really—though I don’t sleep as well as I might.”

“Don’t be angry with me for asking you a straight question.”

A wave of colour flooded her pale face. “I won’t promise to answer it!”

“Why do you go on with this thankless job?” he said earnestly. “Within a week or two at most I could find a competent nurse who could manage Mrs. Garlett. Why should you waste your life over that cantankerous, disagreeable woman?”

And then Agatha Cheale said something which very much surprised Dr. Maclean.

“I am thinking of giving up the job in September. That’s the real reason why I’m not going to take a holiday now. You see,” she hesitated perceptibly, “I’m afraid it will terribly upset Cousin Harry—my leaving here, I mean.”

“Of course it will upset him. Thanks to you, he can go off on his cricketing jaunts with a light heart. Master Harry’s a man to be envied——”

She turned and faced him. “With a wife like that?”

“He married her, after all!”

“Why did he marry her?”

Dr. Maclean hesitated a moment. Then he answered frankly: “Harry Garlett married Emily Jones because he was a simple, good-looking lad aged twenty-two, and she a clever, determined woman aged twenty-seven who was in love with him. Old Jones was a queer, suspicious creature—the Etna China Company was a one-man concern in his day. A business friend asked old Jones to give a young man in whom he was interested a job; and there came along that cheery young chap.”

“They’ve been married thirteen years to-day.”

“God bless my soul—so they have!” exclaimed Dr. Maclean. “But the war took a great chunk out of that, for Garlett joined up at once. I remember how surprised we all were. Somehow it didn’t seem necessary then—not for a man with a stake in the world. But he was mad to go, and he was in France early in ’fifteen.”

“She says it was then that she fell ill.”

“She was always ailing—she’s a thoroughly unhealthy woman,” Dr. Maclean spoke with abrupt decision. “I was looking at Dr. Prince’s casebook the other day, and I came across her entry. She was an unhealthy child and an unhealthy girl—far too fussy about herself always. Well I remember her bringing me the War Office telegram with the news of that awful wound of Garlett’s. But she wouldn’t go to France, not she! Yet—” he hesitated—“in her own queer way she’s absolutely devoted to him.”

Agatha Cheale said in a low voice, “None of us thought he could get over that wound.”

“Why, of course!” the doctor exclaimed. “You were there, Miss Cheale, in that French war hospital. But I suppose you’d known Harry Garlett long before then—as you’re his cousin?”

He looked at her rather hard.

“I’d never met Cousin Harry till we met in that strange way in France,” she answered composedly.

“He told me once that he owed his life to you.”

“That, of course, is nonsense,” she said in a hard tone.

“He has plenty to be grateful to you for now.”

Agatha Cheale’s usually pale face became suffused with dusky red. It was an overwhelming, an unbecoming blush, and, with a quickening of the pulse, Dr. Maclean told himself that this involuntary betrayal of deep feeling answered a question which he had half ashamedly often asked himself in the last year—was Agatha Cheale secretly attached to Harry Garlett? Was that the real reason she was spending her life, her intelligence, her undoubted cleverness, in looking after his sickly, tiresome wife?

Doctors know of many hidden tragedies, of many secret dramas in being, and this particular doctor knew more than most, for he had a very kindly heart. He felt glad that Mrs. Garlett’s companion was leaving the Thatched House, though her doing so would throw a good deal of trouble on him.

After he had gone, Agatha Cheale went over to the window. There she pressed her forehead against the glass, and her eyes filled with bitter tears. For perhaps the thousandth time in the last few months she told herself that she would leave the Thatched House, forget Mrs. Garlett and her tiresome exactions, and, above all, forget Harry Garlett.

Harry Garlett? She did not require to shut her eyes to visualize the tall, still young-looking man whom the sick woman upstairs called husband. Every feature, every distinctive line about his good-looking, oftener merry than sad, alert expression of face, was printed on the tablets of Agatha’s tormented, unhappy heart.

Why was it that she, a proud woman, and, until she had met Harry Garlett, a cold woman, cared as she had come to care for this man? Garlett was not nearly as clever as many of the men with whom her work had brought her in contact during the war and since. The great surgeon whose favourite nurse she had become in the oddly managed, private war hospital, where all the square pegs had been forced into round holes, had shown her unmistakably that he was violently attracted by her dark, aloof beauty, but, far from being pleased, she had been bitterly distressed at what she had regarded as an insult.

Memories crowded thick upon her. She remembered cutting the bloodstained uniform off an unconscious form, and her thrill of surprise when she had read on his disc the most unusual name of Garlett—the second name by which she, herself, had been christened—she had never been able to discover why.

It was true, she had saved, not his life, but his bowling arm. And oh, how grateful he had been—then! At once they had fallen into the way, at first in joke, of calling each other “Cousin Harry” and “Cousin Agatha.” But there had been no love passages between them. He had at once told her that he was a married man, and very soon, also, she had come to understand that he was not “that sort.”

The war had been over some months when one day, by one of those chances which often deflect the whole of a human existence, they had run up against one another in a London street. She had asked him to come back to the modest rooms she occupied in Bloomsbury, and it was there that he had told her his wife was now a complete invalid, that she refused to have a nurse, and that it was difficult to get even a lady housekeeper who would satisfy her.

“Would you like me to try and find you some one?” she had asked. Eagerly he had caught at the suggestion, and that same night she had written and offered to come herself.

There had then taken place another interview between herself and the man who held for her so strong an attraction and appeal. It had been a rather emotional interview. Harry Garlett, filled with gratitude, had insisted that she should have a really large, some would have said an extravagant, salary, and she had revealed the existence of the clever, idle, sickly brother who was the ever-present burden and anxiety of her life.

It had been her suggestion that the people in the neighbourhood should be told that she and her employer were related. Her name was Agatha Garlett Cheale, after all. Surprised, he had yielded, reddening as he did so under his tan.

“I daresay you’re right! They’re a gossiping set of women in my part of the world.”

“Not more so than in other places,” and something had made her add: “They gossiped about us in the hospital, you know.”

“Did they? I didn’t know that!” And he had looked amused—only amused.

Her first sight of Mrs. Garlett—how well she remembered it! “Poor Emily” had not been very gracious, though in time she had thawed. The sick woman realized the difference cool, competent Agatha Cheale made to the Thatched House, and to herself Mrs. Garlett grudgingly admitted that Miss Cheale’s sense and discretion matched her more useful qualities.

To those ladies who were kind enough to call on her—and practically every lady in the neighbourhood considered it her duty to make acquaintance with Harry Garlett’s cousin—Agatha explained that she never went out in the evening. So the delicate question as to whether she was or was not to be asked out to dinner with her employer was solved once for all, in the way every hostess had hoped it would be.

As Dr. Maclean walked quickly down the short avenue which led from the Thatched House to the carriage gate his mind was full of the woman he had just left.

He did not like Agatha Cheale, yet he did feel intensely sorry for her. For one thing she must be so lonely at times, for, with one exception, she had made no friends in either Terriford or Grendon.

The one person of whom she saw a good deal was clever, malicious Miss Prince. People had wondered more than once at the link between Miss Prince and Agatha Cheale, but there was nothing mysterious about it. Though Miss Prince was acquainted with every man, woman, and child in Terriford she led a somewhat solitary life in the Thatched Cottage, a pleasant little house which formed a kind of enclave in the Thatched House property. Thus propinquity had something to do with the friendship between the younger and the older woman.

There was one great difference, however, between them. Miss Prince was what some people call “churchy,” while Agatha Cheale never went to church at all, and on one occasion she had spoken to Dr. Maclean with a slightly contemptuous amusement of those who did.

The doctor was close to the wrought-iron gate giving into the road which led to his own house when, suddenly, he espied this very lady, Miss Prince, coming toward him. She held a basket in her hand, and he did not need to be told that it contained some dainty intended for Mrs. Garlett. Like so many sharp-tongued mortals, Miss Prince often did kind things, yet her opening remark was characteristic of her censorious attitude to her fellow creatures.

“It’s a good thing that Harry Garlett’s rather more at his factory just now. If it weren’t for poor old Dodson, that Etna China business would have gone to pieces long ago! I never saw a man gad about as he does——”

Without giving the doctor time to answer, she went on: “No change in poor Emily, I suppose?” She smiled disagreeably. “I expect you’d like to have ten other patients like her, Dr. Maclean?”

At once he carried the war into the enemy’s country.

“Did Dr. Prince like that type of tiresome, cantankerous, impossible-to-please patient?”

“I know I was glad of them.”

“Very well for you who had the spending of the fees and none of the work!”

They generally sparred like this, jokingly in a sense, but with a sort of unpleasant edge to their banter.

“I don’t suppose Emily will ever get better—till she dies of old age,” laughed Miss Prince.

“As a matter of fact, she’s markedly less well than she was last year.”

Dr. Maclean didn’t know what provoked him to say that, though it was true that he had thought Mrs. Garlett rather less well than usual these last few weeks.

“It’s strange that everything in nature, having performed its work, dies, and that only we poor human beings linger on long after any usefulness we ever had in the world has gone,” said Miss Prince musingly.

“I don’t believe that Mrs. Garlett was ever useful,” he said curtly.

“Oh, yes, she was! In her queer way Emily was a very devoted daughter to that horrid old father of hers. And she’s made Harry Garlett.”

Again the spirit of contradiction seized him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he exclaimed. “Harry Garlett’s the sort of chap who’d have got on far better as a bachelor than as a married man. His wife’s money has ruined him—that’s my view of it! There’s a lot more in Garlett than people think. If he hadn’t married that poor, sickly woman he might have done some real work in the world.”

“Dr. Maclean,” said Miss Prince abruptly, “I’m anxious about Agatha Cheale.”

“So am I, Miss Prince.”

He lowered his voice, for he didn’t want some stray gardener’s boy to overhear what he was about to say.

“You’re her only friend hereabouts,” he went on. “Do you know that she’s thinking of giving up her job? Mind you keep her up to that!”

She gave him a curious look.

“She’ll never go—as long as Harry Garlett’s here,” she said, almost in a whisper.

“Do you think Garlett will ask her to stay?”

“No, I don’t. I think he’s longing for her to go.”

He was taken aback. “Why d’you think that?”

“‘He who will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay.’”

Dr. Maclean stared at Miss Prince distrustfully. What exactly did she mean by that enigmatic quotation?

“You’re not a fool!” she said tartly. “Harry Garlett’s not the first man who’s made love to a woman—and then been sorry he had, eh?”

“You think there was a time when Garlett made love to Miss Cheale?”

Dr. Maclean’s voice also fell almost to a whisper.

“I’m sure of it! She’s never admitted it, mind you—don’t run away with that idea.”

“I don’t believe Harry Garlett has ever made love to Agatha Cheale,” said the doctor, definitely making up his mind. “I think he’s an out-and-out white man.”

Miss Prince smiled a wry smile.

“I’m positive that something happened lately which changed their relations to one another. Harry’s afraid of her—he avoids her.”

“I’ve never noticed anything of the kind,” said the other brusquely.

Miss Prince looked vexed; no gossip likes to be contradicted, and she proceeded to pay the doctor out.

“Your niece seems to be giving great satisfaction at the Etna factory,” she observed.

“I think she is—I hope she is! Jean’s a good conscientious girl.”

“And so attractive, too! Every one was saying how pretty she looked at the cricket match. Times are changed since we were young, Dr. Maclean. What would my father have said if I’d insisted on being boxed up hour after hour with an old bachelor like Mr. Dodson—or an attractive young married man like Harry Garlett?”

The doctor felt annoyed. What a spiteful woman Miss Prince was, to be sure!

“I don’t think she runs any risk with either of them.” He tried to speak jokingly, but failed.

“How about them?” she asked meaningly.

“Perhaps she’ll become Mrs. Dodson,” he answered dryly. But as Mr. Dodson was sixty-four and Jean Bower twenty-one, that didn’t seem very likely.

Lifting his hat, Dr. Maclean walked briskly on his way, telling himself that Miss Prince, like most clever people, was an extraordinary bundle of contradictions—kind, spiteful, generous, suspicious, affectionate and hard-hearted, and a mischief-maker all the time!

The subject of his thoughts hurried on toward the Thatched House. She was precise in all her ways, and she wanted to leave her little gift for Mrs. Garlett, enjoy a short talk with Agatha Cheale, and then get back to her midday meal by one o’clock.

“I’ll see Miss Cheale just for a minute,” she said to the maid—not Lucy Warren—who opened the door. “I suppose she’s in her sitting room?”

Without waiting for an answer Miss Prince went off, with her quick, decided step, through into the house she knew so well.

As the door opened, Agatha Cheale turned round quickly, filled with a sudden, unreasonable hope that it might be Harry Garlett. He had gone to the china factory this morning, though it was Saturday, and he had telephoned that he would be back to luncheon.

But she reminded herself bitterly that he never sought her out now. If he had anything to communicate to her connected with the running of the house, he always made a point of doing so at one of the rare meals they took together, in the presence of the parlour-maid, Lucy Warren.

“I’ve brought a few forced strawberries for poor Emily,” began Miss Prince, and then, lowering her voice perceptibly, she added: “I understand she’s not so well as usual?”

The other looked at her surprised.

“I see no change,” she said indifferently.

And then Miss Prince became aware that the younger woman had been crying.

“Look here, Agatha,” she spoke with kindly authority. “It’s time you had a change! You’re badly in need of a holiday. It’s all very well for Harry Garlett—his life’s a perpetual holiday.”

“He’s been working much harder than usual lately,” the other said quickly.

There came a gleam into Miss Prince’s eye.

“I think there may be a reason for that,” she said rather mysteriously.

“Any special reason?” asked Agatha Cheale indifferently.

Miss Prince hesitated. This morning, at early celebration, she had resolved that she would make a real effort to cure herself of what she knew in her heart was her one outstanding fault—to herself she called it, quite rightly, sin—that of retailing malicious tittle-tattle. But somehow she felt strongly tempted to say just one word, and, as so often happens with those cursed with her peculiar temperament, she was half persuaded that in saying what she now determined to say she would be doing the right thing.

“Of course you know that Jean Bower, Mrs. Maclean’s niece, has become secretary to the Etna China Company?”

“No, I didn’t know it.” Agatha Cheale was more surprised than she chose to show.

“How very odd of them not to have told you! I mean, how odd of Harry, and how odd of Dr. Maclean. Why, she’s been at the Etna factory for quite a month.”

“I thought the girl was well off.”

“When her father died it was found that he had only left fifteen hundred pounds. And though the Macleans have practically adopted her, she seems to have said she would much prefer to do some work than to be just idle; so Mrs. Maclean, hearing that a secretary was wanted at the Etna factory, managed to catch Harry Garlett at the office one day and asked if he would give Jean a trial. Of course he had to say ‘yes.’”

“I suppose he had,” said Agatha Cheale slowly.

Jean Bower’s attractive, youthful personality had been impressed on her in the cricket pavilion during the great Australian match. She had envied the girl, not only her bright artless charm of manner, but also the warm affection the doctor and his wife had shown her.

“I hear old Dodson is quite bewitched by her, and that even Harry himself is at the factory a great deal more than he used to be,” went on Miss Prince.

“That isn’t true about Cousin Harry.”

Agatha Cheale forced herself to smile, but in her heart she knew that Harry Garlett had gone to the factory oftener this last month than he had ever done since she first came to Terriford. As for old Dodson, he was just the kind of foolish old bachelor to be bewitched by a young girl. After being head clerk for a number of years, he had been made a partner, and now practically ran the prosperous business.

Miss Prince looked sharply at her friend.

“Why, just now you said he had been working hard lately?”

“I didn’t mean at the factory.”

“It’s all very well to be unconventional,” went on Miss Prince, “but human nature doesn’t alter. For my part I think it’s a mistake to mix up attractive girls with married men.”

“Mr. Dodson isn’t a married man,” observed Agatha Cheale.

“No, but Harry Garlett is.”

The other made no answer, and Miss Prince suddenly exclaimed triumphantly, “Why, there they are!”

Agatha Cheale turned quickly round.

Yes, Miss Prince was right. Through the window could be seen two figures walking slowly across the meadow, to the right of which stretched the little wood.

“I should have thought that Harry would have had more sense! I don’t wonder they’re already beginning to be talked about,” observed Miss Prince.

“What a lot of disgusting people there are in Grendon,” said Agatha Cheale. There was a note of bitter scorn in her voice. “It’s Saturday to-day. That’s why they’re walking back together. It’s the first time they’ve done it.”

Miss Prince would have been not only surprised but deeply shocked had she been able to see into her friend’s unhappy heart. Agatha Cheale, gazing out on those two who were just coming through the little gate which led from the cornfield into the garden of the Thatched House, had felt a surge of intolerable suspicion and jealousy sweep over her, and that though her reason told her that the suspicion, at any rate, was utterly uncalled-for and absurd.

Miss Prince looked at her wrist watch—one of her few concessions to modern ways.

“I must be going,” she exclaimed; “it’s almost one o’clock.”

She had only just left the room when there came a knock at the door. “Come in!” called out Miss Cheale, and Lucy Warren appeared.

“You said you wanted to see me before lunch, miss.”

Though the girl was making a great effort to seem calm, her lips were trembling and her eyes were swollen with crying.

CHAPTER III

L

ate that same evening, Dr. Maclean, his wife, and their adopted daughter, were all sitting together in the dining room of Bonnie Doon.

The Macleans had bought the charming old house soon after the doctor had taken over the practice of Miss Prince’s father, and they had renamed it after Mrs. Maclean’s birthplace.

To-night, his wife and niece being by the table, the doctor sat close to the fire smoking his pipe.

“Dr. Tasker popped in to tea to-day,” observed Mrs. Maclean. As her husband said nothing she went on: “He waited quite a long while in the hope of seeing you. I’m doubting, Jock, whether we’ve been quite fair to that young man. He spoke very handsomely of you—he did indeed.”

“I’ve no need of his praise,” said the doctor dryly.

“I didn’t say you had. All the same I hope you’ll not scold me for having asked him to supper to-morrow night. He says Sunday is such a dull day in Grendon.”

“I can’t promise to stay in for him if I’m sent for,” said Dr. Maclean, in a voice which his wife thought somewhat tiresome.

There had been a time, not so very long ago, when it was she, rather than her husband, who had disliked the young medical man who had suddenly “put up his plate,” as the saying is, on the door of almost the last house in Grendon. But Dr. Tasker had spoken to her very pleasantly at the cricket match. He had made friends, too, with Jean, and so Mrs. Maclean was now prepared to take him, at any rate in a measure, to her kindly Scots heart.

For a few moments there was silence in the room. Dr. Maclean turned himself round, and his eyes rested with appreciative affection on the bent head of the girl who even in a few weeks had so much brightened and enlivened his own and his wife’s childless home.

Jean’s hair was the colour of spun gold, and she had a delicately clear skin, giving depth to her hazel eyes. But her generous-lipped mouth was too large for beauty, and her features were irregular. Yet she looked so happy-natured, intelligent, and healthy, that the general impression produced by her appearance was that of a pretty, as well as that of a very agreeable girl.

Perhaps she felt her uncle’s grateful, kindly glance, for suddenly she looked up and smiled.

“Well, Uncle Jock?” she exclaimed, “a penny for your thoughts!”

“I wonder if I’d really better tell you my thoughts,” he answered rather soberly.

“Of course you must!” cried his wife.

She, too, put down her work for a moment on the table and looked at him.

“I’m thinking,” he said quietly, “that we won’t be keeping our pretty Jean here for long. It’s all very well her being boxed up every day in that china factory. There are always half Saturdays and Sundays, to say nothing of holidays, and young men will soon come courting at Bonnie Doon.”

Jean burst out laughing, but Mrs. Maclean felt vexed.

“Really, Jock,” she exclaimed, “what are you after saying now? I’ve no liking for that sort of joke.”