Whilst Jane was running away from fear, down the gravel path of the cliff’s edge, Captain March was about midway through an interview with his chief.
Henry’s chief was a large man who strongly resembled a clean and highly intelligent pig. A very little hair appeared to grow reluctantly on his head; his face was pink and clean-shaven. He had inherited the patronymic of Le Mesurier, his parents in his baptism had given him the romantic name of Julian, and a grateful Government had conferred upon him the honour of knighthood. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to add that, from the moment that he emerged from the nursery and set foot within the precincts of his first preparatory school, he had been known exclusively as “Piggy.”
There is a story of a débutante who, at a large and formal dinner-party, was discovered during a sudden silence to be addressing him as Sir Piggott. The dinner-party waited breathlessly. Piggy smiled his benign smile and explained that it had not been his good fortune to be called after his aunt, Miss Piggott.... “I expect you have heard of her? She left all her money to a home for cats, whereas, if my parents had done their duty and invited her to be my godmother, I should be paying at least twice as much income tax as I do now. Never undervalue your relations, my dear Miss Browne.” The aunt was, of course, apocryphal; and after dinner each of the older ladies in turn took the débutante aside, and told her so—as a kindness. To each of them she made the same reply, which was to the effect that “Piggy” was a darling. She married him two years later. But all this has nothing to do with Henry’s interview with his chief.
Sir Julian was speaking:
“It’s very unsatisfactory. You say they have been complying with all the suggestions in the original Government instructions?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sir Julian frowned.
“It’s very unsatisfactory,” he repeated. “Sir William ... well, it’s six months since I saw him, and he looked all right then.”
“He looks all right now,” said Henry. “He is all right except on his own particular subject. He’d discuss politics, unemployment, foreign affairs, or anything else, and you wouldn’t notice anything, but the minute he comes to his own subject everything worries and irritates him. He’s lost grip. As far as I can make out, he leaves everything to his daughter and the secretary. They are competent enough, but....” Henry did not finish his sentence.
“Ah yes, the secretary,” said Sir Julian. “What’s his name? Yes, Ember, Jeffrey Ember....” He turned an indicator under his hand, and spoke rapidly into the telephone beside him. “As soon as possible,” he concluded.
“This girl now,” he said, looking at Henry. “I don’t see how this statement of hers can be squared with any of the facts as we know them.”
As he spoke he picked up the notes which Henry had taken in the dark cupboard.
“She made a suggestion herself,” said Henry. He paused, and looked with a good deal of diffidence at Sir Julian.
“Well?”
“It is just within the bounds of possibility that the Government experiments are being used as a blind. That was her suggestion, sir.”
Sir Julian was busily engaged in drawing on his blotting-paper. He drew in rapid succession cats with arched backs and bottle-brush tails, always beginning with the tail and finishing with the whiskers, three on each side. Henry rightly interpreted this as a sign that he was to continue.
“The conversation which was overheard at Molloy’s flat referred to a Formula ‘A,’ which cannot possibly be the Formula ‘A’ which we know. There may be a Formula ‘A’ of which we know nothing, and it may constitute a grave danger. Ember”—Henry paused—“Ember is not only in a position of great responsibility with regard to our—the official Formula ‘A,’ but he also appears to be mixed up with this other unofficial and possibly dangerous Formula ‘A.’ The question, to my mind, is, ‘What about Ember?’”
Sir Julian continued to draw cats. Suddenly he looked up, and said:
“How long has Patterson been there?”
“A fortnight,” said Henry. “We recalled Jamieson, you remember, and sent him down.”
“Then, if there were unofficial experiments, they would be before his time?”
“Yes,” said Henry.
“Would it be possible—no, I’ll put it another way. Officially Luttrell Marches is impregnable, but unofficially—come March, the place practically belongs to you—is there any way in which there might be coming and going that would defy detection? You see, your hypothesis demands either wholesale corruption of Government workmen, or the introduction of other experiments.”
There was a pause. Then Henry said:
“In confidence, sir, there is a way, but, to the best of my knowledge, it is known only to myself and one other person.”
“It might be discovered.”
“I don’t think so. It never has been.”
“Well, I would suggest your ascertaining, in conjunction with the other person, whether there is any evidence to show that the secret has been discovered and the way made use of.”
The telephone bell rang. Sir Julian lifted the receiver and listened.
“Yes,” he said—“yes.” Then he began to take notes. “Spell the name, please—yes. Nineteen hundred and five? Is that all? Thank you.”
He hung up the receiver, and turned to Henry.
“Ember’s dossier,” he said. “Not much in it at first sight. ‘Born 1880. Son of Charles Ember, partner in Jarvis & Ember—manufacturing chemists; firm liquidated in 1896. Education till then at Harrow, and subsequently at Heidelberg, where he took degrees in medicine and science. From 1905 to 1912 at Chicago, U. S. A., as personal assistant to Eugene K. Blumfield of Nitrates Ltd. Engaged as secretary by Sir William Carr-Magnus during his American tour in autumn of 1912. Total exemption during War on Sir William’s representations.’ ’M—blameless as a blancmange—at first sight. We wouldn’t have him here at all if we hadn’t been told to get the record of every one employed at Luttrell Marches. Well, March?”
Henry looked up with his candid, diffident air.
“Heidelberg—Chicago—nitrates,” he said, with a little pause after each word. Then—“I wonder if it was in Chicago that he met Molloy. Molloy was a leading light of the I. W. W. there in 1911.”
Piggy looked up for a moment.
“’M, yes,” he said. “Did you get on to the subject of Molloy at all?”
“I had to be very careful,” said Henry, with a worried air. “I was introduced to Miss Molloy, so I felt that it would look odd if I asked no questions. On the other hand, I was afraid of asking too many. You see, sir, if there’s really some infernal, underground plot going on, with the general smash-up of civilisation as its object, that girl is in a most awfully dangerous position. I wish to Heaven she was out of it, but I’m not at all sure that she isn’t right when she says that the most dangerous thing of all would be for her to give the show away by bolting.”
“’M, yes,” said Piggy. “Your concern for the young lady’s safety does you credit—attractive damsel in distress, eh? Nice, pretty young thing, and all that?”
Henry blushed furiously, and said with some stiffness, “As I told you, sir, we are old friends, and I think, it’s natural——”
“Entirely, entirely.” Piggy waved a large, fat hand with a pencil in it. “But to get back to Ember—what did you ask him?”
“Well, I said I had known one or two Molloys, and asked whether Miss Molloy was the cricketer’s daughter. Ember was quite forthcoming, rather too forthcoming, I thought. Said he’d met Molloy in the States, and that he was a queer card, but good company. Explained how surprised he was when he ran into him at Victoria Station after not seeing him for years. Then, quite casually and naturally, gave me to understand that Molloy had put him up for a couple of nights. He really did it very well. Said the daughter was a nice little thing just from school, that he thought she would suit Lady Heritage, and how grateful Molloy was, as he was just off to the States, and didn’t know what to do with the girl. The impression I got was that he was taking no chances—not leaving anything for me to find out afterwards.” Henry hesitated for a moment, and then said, “The thing that struck me most was this. I didn’t ask to interview Miss Molloy because I didn’t want to make her position more dangerous than it already is. That is to say, I assumed that there was danger, which really means assuming a criminal conspiracy. Now, if there were no danger and no criminal conspiracy, why on earth did every one make it so easy for me not to interview Miss Molloy? It seems a little thing, but it struck me—it struck me awfully, sir. You see, I took a roll-call of the employés first, and checked them by the official list. Then I went down to the stables with Sir William, and we went through all the outdoor servants. And I finished up in Sir William’s study, where I saw the domestic staff—and Mr. Ember. From first to last, no one suggested that I should see Miss Molloy. In the end, I thought it would be too marked not to bring her in at all, so I said to Lady Heritage, ‘What about your secretary?’ and she said, ‘Why, she’s only just come ... you don’t need to see her.’ I got nervous and left it at that. I think now that I ought to have seen her, with Lady Heritage and Ember in the room; then they couldn’t have suspected her of telling me anything.”
Piggy looked up from his cats, and looked down again. Very carefully he gave each cat a fourth whisker on the left-hand side. Then he fixed his small, light eyes on Henry and said:
“They?”
* * * * * * * *
At 9.30 that evening Sir Julian marked a place in his book with a massive thumb, glanced across the domestic hearth at his wife, and observed:
“M’ dear.”
Lady Le Mesurier raised her charming blue eyes from the child’s frock which she was embroidering.
“I have news to break to you—news concerning the lad Henry. Prepare for a shock. He is another’s. You have lost him, my poor Isobel.”
“I never had him,” said Isobel placidly.
“His mamma thought you had. She did her very best to warn me. I rather think she considered that your young affections were also entangled. I said to her solemnly, ‘My dear Mrs. March—I beg your pardon—my dear Mrs. de Luttrelle March—of course he is in love with Isobel. I expect young men to be in love with her. I am in love with her myself.’”
“Piggy, you didn’t!”
“No, m’ dear, but I should have liked to. She is so very large and pink that the temptation to say it, and to watch the pink turn puce, was almost more than I could resist. But you have interrupted me. I was about to break to you a portentous fact. Our Henry is in love.”
“Oh, Piggy!” said Isobel.
“Yes,” continued Henry’s chief—“Henry is undoubtedly for it. Another lost soul. It’s always these promising lads that are snatched by the predatory sex.”
“Piggy—we’re not——”
“M’ dear, you are. It’s axiomatic, beyond cavil or argument. Like the python in the natural history books, you fascinate us first, and then engulf us.”
Isobel allowed a fleeting smile to lift the corners of her very pretty mouth.
“Oh, Piggy, what a mouthful you would be!” she murmured.
“Henry,” pursued Sir Julian—“Henry is in the fascinated stage. He blushed one of the most modestly revealing blushes I have ever beheld. The whole story is of the most thrillingly romantic and intriguing nature, and I regret to say, m’ dear, that I cannot tell you a single word of it.”
Lady Le Mesurier took up a blue silk thread.
“Oh, Piggy!” she said reproachfully.
Sir Julian beamed upon her.
“My official duty forbids,” he said, with great enjoyment. “Dismiss the indecent curiosity which I see stamped upon your every feature. Upon Henry’s affair my lips are sealed. I am a tomb. I merely wish to have a small bet with you as to whether Henry’s mamma will queer his pitch or not.”
“But, Piggy darling, how can I lay odds if I don’t know anything? Tell me, is she pretty?”
“Isobel, is that the spirit in which to approach this solemn subject? As an old married woman, you should ask, Is she virtuous? Is she thrifty? Is she worthy of Henry? And to all these questions I should make the same reply—I do not know.”
Isobel leaned forward, and still with that faint, delightful smile she pricked the back of Sir Julian’s hand sharply with the point of her embroidery needle.
“The serpent’s tooth!” he said, and opened his book. “Isobel, you interrupt my studies. I merely wish to commend three aspects of the case to your feminine intuition. First—Henry is in love; second—he has yet to reckon with his mamma; third—I may at any time ring you up and instruct you to prepare the guest chamber for Henry’s girl.”
Lady Le Mesurier began to work a blue ribbon bow round the stalks of some pink and white daisies.
“You’re rather a lamb, Piggy,” she said.
It was next morning, whilst Jane was sorting and arranging the papers for the library table, that she caught sight of Henry’s first message. She very nearly missed it, for the fold of the paper cut right across the agony column, and what caught her eye was the one word that passed as a signature, “Thursday.” It startled her so much that she dropped the paper, and, in snatching at it, knocked over a pile of magazines.
Lady Heritage looked over her shoulder with a frown, tapped with her foot, and then went on with her writing in a silence that uttered more reproof than words could have done.
Jane picked everything up as silently as possible. As she put the papers on the table, she laid The Times out flat, and, bending over it, read the message:
“You will receive a letter from me. Trust the bearer. Thursday.”
She put all the papers neatly in their places, and went to her writing-table with an intense longing to be alone, to be able to think what this might mean, and to wonder who—who would be the bearer of Henry’s letter. She hoped ardently that Lady Heritage would have business in the laboratories, and whilst these thoughts, and hopes, and wonderings filled her mind, she had to write neat and legible replies to the apparently inexhaustible number of persons who desired Lady Heritage to open bazaars, speak at public meetings, subscribe to an indefinite number of charities, or contribute to the writer’s support.
When, at last, she was alone in her own room, she was tingling with excitement. At any moment some one, some unknown friend and ally, might present himself. It was exciting, but, she thought, rather risky.
For instance, supposing Henry’s letter came, by any mischance, into the wrong hands—and letters were mislaid and stolen sometimes—what a perfectly dreadful chapter of misfortunes might ensue. She frowned, and decided that Henry had been rash.
It was with a pleasant feeling of superiority that she put on her hat and went out into the garden to pick tulips.
The weather had changed in the night, and it was hot and sunny, with the sudden dazzling heat of mid-April. In the walled garden the south border was full of violet-scented yellow tulips, each looking at this new hot sun with a jet-black eye. A sheet of forget-me-nots repeated the sheer blue of the sky.
Jane picked an armful of tulips and a sheaf of leopard’s bane. Strictly speaking, she should then have gone in to put the flowers in water for the adornment of the Yellow Drawing-Room. Instead, she made her way to the farthest corner of the garden and basked.
At first she looked at the flowers, but after a while her eyelids fell.
Jane has never admitted that she went to sleep, but, if she was thinking with her eyes shut, her thoughts must have been of an extremely engrossing nature, for it is certain that she heard neither the opening nor the shutting of a door in the wall beside her. She did feel a shadow pass between herself and the sun, and opening her eyes quickly she saw standing beside her the very man from whom she had fled in terror yesterday.
The sunlight fell from upon him, showing the shabby clothes, the tall, stooping figure, the grizzled beard, and that disfiguring scar.
With a great start Jane attempted to rise, only to discover that a wheelbarrow may make a very comfortable chair, but that it is uncommonly difficult to get out of in a hurry. To her horror the man, George Patterson, took her firmly by the wrist and pulled her to her feet. She shrank intensely from his touch, received an impression of unusual strength, and then, to her overwhelming surprise, she heard him say in a low, well-bred voice, “I have a letter for you, Miss Smith.”
“Oh, hush!” said Jane—“oh, please, hush!”
“All right, I won’t do it again. Look here, I want to say a few words to you, but we had better not be seen together. Here’s your letter. Stay where you are for five minutes, and then come down to the potting-shed. Don’t come in; stay by the door and tie your shoe-lace.”
He went off with his dragging step, and left Jane dumb. There was a folded note in her hand, and in her mind so intense a shock of surprise as to rob her very thoughts of expression.
After what seemed like a long paralysed month, she opened the note which bore no address, and read, pencilled in Henry’s clear and very ornamental hand, “The bearer is trustworthy.—H. L. M.”
When she had looked so long at Henry’s initials that they had blurred and cleared again, not once but many times, she walked mechanically down the path until she came to the shed. Beside it was a barrel full of rain-water. Into this she dipped Henry’s note, made sure that the words were totally illegible, poked a hole in the border, and covered the sodden paper with earth. Then at the potting-shed door she knelt and became occupied with her shoe-lace.
“Henry saw me after he saw you,” said George Patterson’s voice. “He thought it might be a comfort to you to know there is a friend on the spot; but I’m afraid I gave you a fright yesterday.”
“You did,” said Jane, “but I don’t know why. I was a perfect fool, and I ran right into Mr. Ember’s arms.”
“Did you tell him what frightened you?” said Patterson quickly.
“No, I wasn’t quite such a fool as that. Please, who are you?”
“My name here is George Patterson. I’m a friend of Henry’s. If you want me, I’m here.”
“If I want you,” said Jane, “how am I to get at you?”
Mr. Patterson considered.
“There’s a wide sill inside your window.” (And how on earth do you know that? thought Jane.) “If you put a big jar of, say, those yellow tulips there, I’ll know you want to speak to me, and I’ll come here to this potting-shed as soon as I can. You know they keep us pretty busy with roll-calls and things of that sort. I only got back yesterday by the skin of my teeth—I had to bolt.”
“Did you—you didn’t pass me.”
“No, I didn’t pass you.” There was just a trace of amusement in Mr. Patterson’s voice.
Jane pulled her shoe-lace undone, and began to tie it all over again.
“Hush!” she said very quick and low. “Some one is coming.”
Just where the path ended, not half a dozen yards away, the red-brick wall was pierced by a door. Two round, Scotch rose-bushes, all tiny green leaf and sharp brown prickle, grew like large pin-cushions on either side of the interrupted border. Bright pink nectarine buds shone against the brick like coral studs. The ash-coloured door, rough and sun-blistered, was opening slowly, and into the garden came Raymond Heritage, pushing the door with one hand and holding a basket of bulbs in the other. She was looking back over her shoulder, at something or someone beside her.
From inside the potting-shed came Patterson’s voice—just a breath:
“Who?”
“Lady Heritage.”
Jane was up as she spoke and moving away. She reached the door just as Raymond closed it and, turning, saw her.
“Oh, Miss Molloy—I was really looking for you. Is Garstin anywhere about?”
“I haven’t seen him,” murmured Jane, as if the absent gardener might be blooming unnoticed in one of the borders.
“He’s not in the potting-shed? I’ll just look in and see. I want to stand over him and see that he puts these black irises where I want them to go. They come from Palestine, and the last lot failed entirely because he was so obstinate. I’ll get a trowel and mark the place I think.” She moved forward as she spoke, and Jane, horror-struck, stammered:
“Let me look. It’s so dusty in there.”
She was back at the door of the shed, but Lady Heritage was beside her. “I want a trowel, too,” she said, and Jane felt herself gently pushed over the threshold.
They were both just inside the door. It seemed dark after the strong light outside. There was a row of windows along one side, and a broad deal shelf under them. There were piles and piles of pots and boxes. There were hanks of bass and rows of tools, There were watering-cans. There was a length of rubber hose. But there was no George Patterson.
Jane put her hand behind her, gripped the jamb of the door, and moved back a pace so that she could lean against it. The pots, the tools, the bass and the rubber hose danced before her bewildered eyes.
Lady Heritage put her basket of bulbs down on the wide shelf and said:
“Garstin ought to be here. He’s really very tiresome. That’s the worst of old servants. When a gardener has been in a place for forty years as Garstin has, he owns it.”
“Shall I find him?” said Jane.
“No, not now. I really want to talk to you. I’ve just been speaking to Jeffrey Ember, and he tells me you had a fright yesterday. What frightened you?”
“Nothing—my own silliness.”
Jane felt as if she must scream. George Patterson had disappeared as if by a conjuring trick. Where had he gone to? Where was he? It was just like being in a dream.
Raymond Heritage seemed to tower before her in her white dress. Her uncovered head almost touched the low beam above the door.
“Jeffrey said you were blind with fright—that you ran right into him. He said you were as white as a sheet and shaking all over. I want to know what frightened you?”
“A stone—it fell into the sea——”
“What made it fall? A man? What man?”
Jane leaned against the door-post, her breath coming and going, her eyes held by those imperious eyes.
“A stone,” she said; “it fell—I ran away.”
“Miss Molloy,” said Lady Heritage, “you walked to the end of the headland, out of sight of the house. Whilst you were there something gave you a serious fright. Something—or somebody. This is all nonsense about a stone. Whom did you see on the headland, for you certainly saw somebody? No, don’t look away; I want you to look at me, please.”
“I don’t know why I was so frightened,” said Jane. “It just came over me.”
Lady Heritage looked at her very gravely.
“If you saw any stranger on the headland, it is your absolute duty to tell me. Where secrets of such value are in question it is necessary to watch every avenue and to neglect no suspicious circumstance. If you are trying to screen any one, you are acting very foolishly—very foolishly indeed. I warn you, and I ask you again. What frightened you?”
“I don’t know,” said Jane in a little whispering voice. “Why, why do you think there was any one?”
“I don’t think,” said Lady Heritage briefly. “I know. Mr. Ember went up to the headland after he left you, and there were footmarks in the gravel. Some man had undoubtedly been there, and you must have seen him. Mr. Ember made the entire round and saw no one, but some one had been there. Now will you tell me what you saw?”
“Oh!” said Jane. Rather to her own astonishment she began to cry. “Oh, that’s why I was frightened then! The stone fell so suddenly, and I didn’t know why—why——”
The sobs choked her.
Lady Heritage stood looking at her for a moment.
“Are you just an arrant little fool,” she said in a low voice, “or....”
“Oh, I’m not!” sobbed Jane. “Oh, I’ve never been called such a thing before! I know I’m not clever, but I don’t think you ought to call me a f—f—fool.”
Lady Heritage pressed her lips together, and walked past Jane and out into the sunshine. She stood there for a moment tapping with her foot. Then she called rather impatiently:
“Miss Molloy! Dry your eyes and come here.”
Jane came, squeezing a damp handkerchief into a ball.
“Bring your flowers in; I see you’ve left them over there to die in the sun. I’m driving into Withstead this afternoon and you can come with me. I have to see Mrs. Cottingham about some University extension lectures, and she telephoned just now to say would I bring you. She has a girl staying with her who thinks she must have been at school with you or one of your cousins. Her name is Daphne Todhunter.”
Jane stood perfectly still. Daphne Todhunter? Arnold Todhunter’s sister Daphne! Renata’s friend! But Daphne must know that Arnold was married? The question was—whom had Arnold married. Had his family welcomed (by letter) Jane Smith or Renata Molloy to its bosom? If Renata Molloy, how in the world was a second Renata to be explained to Miss Daphne Todhunter?
“Miss Molloy, what’s the matter with you?” said Lady Heritage.
Jane could not think quickly enough. Supposing Lady Heritage went to Mrs. Cottingham’s without her; and supposing Daphne Todhunter were to say that her brother Arnold had married a girl called Renata Molloy?
It was too much to hope that Arnold had carried discretion to the point of telling his own family that he had married an unknown Jane Smith.
Jane suddenly threw up her chin and squared her shoulders. The colour came back into her cheeks.
“Nothing,” she said, with a little caught breath. “I’m sorry I was so silly, and for crying, and if I was rude to you. It’s most awfully kind of you to take me into Withstead.”
If there were any music to be faced, Jane was going to face it. At least the tune should not be called behind her back.
A feeling of exhilaration amounting to recklessness possessed Jane as she put on the white serge coat and skirt sacred to the Sabbath crocodile. Attired in it Renata, side by side with Daphne Todhunter, had, doubtless, walked many a time to church and back. In front of her two white serge backs, behind her more white serge, and more, and more, and more. Jane’s head reeled. She detested this garment, but considered it appropriate to the occasion.
They drove into Withstead across the marshes. The sun blazed, and all the tiny marsh plants seemed to be growing and stretching themselves.
Mrs. Cottingham lived in a villa on the outskirts of the town, and was ashamed of it. She had married kind little Dr. Cottingham, but imagined that she had condescended in doing so. Her reasons for thinking this were not apparent.
Jane followed Lady Heritage into the dark, rather stuffy drawing-room, and beheld a middle-aged woman with a rigidly controlled Victorian figure, a tightly netted grey fringe, and a brown satin dress with a good many little gold beads upon it. She had a breathless sense of the extraordinary way in which the room was overcrowded. Every inch of the walls was covered with photographs, fans, engravings, and china plates. Almost every inch of floor space was covered with small ornamental tables crowded with knick-knacks. There was a carved screen, and an ebonised overmantel with looking-glass panels. There was a Japanese umbrella in the fireplace.
136
Jane’s eyes looked hastily into every corner. There were more things than she had ever seen in one room before, but there was no Daphne Todhunter. Mrs. Cottingham was shaking hands with her. She had a fat hand and squeezed you.
“And are you Daphne’s Miss Molloy?” she said. “She was wildly excited at the prospect of meeting you, and I said at once, ‘I’ll just ring up Luttrell Marches, and ask Lady Heritage to bring her here this afternoon.’ I thought I might do that. You see, I only happened to mention your name this morning, and Daphne was so excited, and she goes away tomorrow, so it was the only chance. So I thought I would just ring up and ask Lady Heritage to bring you. I said to Daphne at once, ‘Lady Heritage is so kind, I’m sure she will bring Miss Molloy.’”
Jane saw Lady Heritage’s eyebrows rise very slightly. She moved a step, and instantly Mrs. Cottingham had turned from Jane:
“Why Lady Heritage, you’re standing! Now I always say this is the most comfortable chair.”
Her voice went flowing on, but Jane suddenly ceased to hear a word she said, for a door at the far end of the room was flung open. On the threshold appeared Miss Daphne Todhunter.
In common with most other Daphnes, Cynthias and Ianthes, she was short and rather heavily built. Her brown hair was untidy. She wore the twin coat and skirt to that which was adorning Jane.
With an exclamation of rapture, she rushed across the room, dislodging a book from one little table and an ash-tray from another.
(“Her eyes are exactly like gooseberries which have been boiled until they are brown,” thought Jane, “and I know she’s going to kiss me.”)
She not only kissed Jane, she hugged her. Two stout arms and a waft of white rose scent enveloped Jane’s shrinking form.
After a moment in which she wondered how long this embrace would last, Jane managed to detach herself. Mrs. Cottingham’s voice fell gratefully upon her ears:
“Daphne, Daphne, my dear, come and speak to Lady Heritage.—She’s wildly excited, as I told you—the natural enthusiasms of youth, dear Lady Heritage, so beautiful, so quickly lost; I’m sure you agree with me.—Daphne, Daphne, my dear.”
Daphne came reluctantly and thrust a large hand at Lady Heritage without looking at her. Raymond looked at it for a moment, and, after a perceptible pause, just touched the finger-tips. Mrs. Cottingham never stopped talking.
“So it is your friend, and you’re just too excited for words. Take her away and have a good gossip. Lady Heritage and I have a great deal to talk about.—You were saying....”
“I was saying,” said Lady Heritage wearily, “that you must write at once if you want Masterson to lecture for you next winter.”
Daphne dragged Jane to the far end of the room.
“Oh, Renata, how perfectly delicious! But how did you come here? And what are you doing, and where’s Arnold, and why aren’t you with him?” She made a pounce at Jane’s left hand, and felt the third finger.
“Oh, where’s your ring?” she said.
“Hush!” said Jane.
They reached a sofa and sank upon it. Immediately in front of them was an octagonal table of light-coloured wood profusely carved. Upon it, amongst lesser portraits, stood a tall photograph of Mrs. Cottingham in a train, and feathers, and a tiara. The sofa was low, and Jane felt that fate had been kinder than she deserved.
“Oh, Renata, aren’t you married?” breathed Daphne.
She breathed very hard, and Jane was reminded of Arnold on the fire-escape.
“Oh, Renata, tell me! When she ... Mrs. Cottingham said, ‘Miss Renata Molloy,’ I nearly died. I said, ‘Miss Molloy?’ And she said, ‘Yes, Miss Renata Molloy,’ and oh, I very nearly let the cat out of the bag.” She grasped Jane’s hand and pressed it violently. “But I didn’t. Arnold told me not to, and I didn’t, but, of course, I’m simply dying to know all about everything. Now, darling, tell me ... tell me everything.”
Never in her life had Jane felt so much aloof from any human creature. There was something so inexpressibly comic in the idea of pouring out her heart to Daphne Todhunter that she did not even feel nervous, only aloof—aloof, and cool. She looked earnestly at Daphne, and said:
“What did Arnold tell you?”
“It was the greatest shock,” said Daphne, “and such a surprise. One minute there he was, moving about at home, and not knowing when he would get a job, and perfectly distracted with hopelessness about you; and the next he rushed down to say good-bye because he was going to Bolivia, and his heart was broken because you wouldn’t go too....” She stopped for breath, and squeezed Jane’s hand even harder than before. “And then,” she continued, “you can imagine what a shock it was to get the letter-card.”
“Yes,” said Jane, “it must have been. What did it say?”
Daphne opened her eyes and her mouth.
“Didn’t he show it to you? How perfectly extraordinary of him!”
“Well, he didn’t” said Jane. “What did he say?”
“I know it by heart,” said Daphne ardently. “I could repeat every word.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake do!”
“Renata! How odd you are, not a bit like yourself!” Fear stabbed Jane.
“Tell me what he said—tell me what he said,” she repeated.
With an effort she pressed the hand that was squeezing hers.
“What, Arnold, in the letter-card? But I think it was just too weird of him not to have shown it to you—too extraordinary.”
Jane felt that she was becoming dazed.
“What did he say?”
“I know it all by heart. I could say it in my sleep. He said, ‘Just off; we sail together. We were married this morning, and I’m the happiest man in the world. Don’t tell any one at present. If you love me, not a word to a soul. Will write from Bolivia.—Arnold. 140P. S.—On no account tell Aunt Ethel.’ So you see why I nearly died when she said Miss Renata Molloy, for of course I thought you were in Bolivia with Arnold, and oh, Renata, where is he and what has happened? Tell me everything?”
She flung her arms about Jane’s neck as she spoke and gave her a long, clinging kiss. Jane endured it under pressure of that, “You are not a bit like yourself.” When she had borne it for as long as she could, she drew back.
“Listen,” she said.
“Tell me—tell me the worst—tell me everything. Where is Arnold?”
“Arnold is in Bolivia,” said Jane.
“And why aren’t you with him?”
Jane produced a pocket-handkerchief. It was a very little one, but it sufficed. In her own mind Jane described it as local colour.
“We have parted,” she said, and dabbed her eyes.
“Renata! But you’re married to him!”
“No,” said Jane, quite truthfully.
An inward thankfulness that she was not married to Arnold supported her.
Daphne stared at her with bulging eyes.
“You’re not! But he said, ‘We were married this morning.’ I read it with my own eyes, and I could repeat it in my sleep. I know it by heart....”
Jane checked her with a look that held so much mysterious meaning that the flood of words was actually stemmed.
“He didn’t marry me,” said Jane, in a tense whisper. She looked straight into the boiled gooseberry eyes, and then covered her own.
“He didn’t marry you?” repeated Daphne, gasping.
“No,” said Jane, from behind the handkerchief.
“But he’s married?”
“Y—yes,” said Jane.
“Oh, Renata!”
Miss Todhunter cast herself upon Jane’s neck and burst into tears. The impact was considerable and her weight no light one.
“Daphne, please—please—Lady Heritage is looking at us. Do sit up. I can’t tell you anything if you cry. There’s really nothing to cry about.”
Daphne sat up again. She also produced a handkerchief, a very large one with “Daphne” embroidered across the corner in coral pink. A terrific blast of white rose emerged with the handkerchief.
“But he was so much in love with you,” she wailed. “I don’t understand it. How could he marry any one else and break your heart!”
“My heart is not broken,” said Jane.
“Then it was your fault, and you’ve broken his, and he’s got married just to show he doesn’t care, like people do in books. I don’t believe you love him a bit.”
Jane looked modestly at the carpet, which was of a lively shade of crimson.
“I’m afraid I don’t,” she said, in a very small voice.
An unbecoming flush mounted to Daphne’s cheeks.
“I don’t know how you’ve got the face,” she said.
Much to Jane’s relief, she withdrew from her to the farthest corner of the sofa, and then glared.
“Poor Arnold! Aunt Ethel always did say you were sly. She always said she wouldn’t trust you a yard.” She paused, sniffed, and then added, in what was meant for a tone of great dignity:
“And please, whom has Arnold married?”
“Her—her name is Jane, I believe,” said Jane, with a tremor.
At this moment she became aware that Lady Heritage had risen to her feet. Mrs. Cottingham’s voice clamoured for attention.
“Oh, Lady Heritage, not without your tea! It won’t be a moment. Indeed, I couldn’t dream of letting you go like this. Just a cup of tea, you know, so refreshing. Indeed, it would distress me to think of your facing that long drive without your tea.”
Raymond stood perfectly still, her face weary and unresponsive.
“I am afraid my time is not my own,” she said, and crossed the room to where the two girls were sitting. They both rose, Daphne with a jerk that dislodged a photograph frame.
“I am afraid I must interrupt your talk,” said Lady Heritage. “Were you living school triumphs over again? I suppose you swept off all the prizes between you?”
If there was irony in the indifferent voice, Miss Todhunter was unaware of it. She laughed rather loudly, and said:
“Renata never won a prize in her life.”
“Oh!” said Raymond, with a lift of the brows. “I am surprised. I pictured her always at the head of her class, and winning everything.”
Daphne laughed again. She was still angry.
“I’m afraid she’s been putting on side,” she said. “Why, Miss Basing would have fainted with surprise if she had found Renata anywhere near the top of anything. Or me either,” she added, with reluctant honesty.
“Miss Molloy,” said Raymond, “ask Mrs. Cottingham if she will let Lewis know that we are ready;” and as Jane moved away, she continued, “I should have thought her languages now....”
Daphne’s mouth fell open.
“Oh, my goodness,” she said, “she must have been piling it on. Why, her languages were rotten, absolutely rotten. Why, Mademoiselle said that I was enough to break her heart, but when it came to Renata it was just, ‘Mon dieu!’ the whole time; and then there were rows because Miss Basing thought it was profane. Only, somehow it seems different in French—don’t you think?”
Lady Heritage looked at Daphne as though she had some difficulty in thinking about her at all.
“I see,” she said gravely, and then Mrs. Cottingham bore down upon them.
“Tea should have been ready if I had known,” she said. Her colour had risen, and her voice shook a little. “If I could persuade you ... I’m sure it won’t be more than a moment. But, of course, if you must ... but if I had only known. You see, I thought to myself we would have our talk first, and then enjoy our tea comfortably, and indeed it is just coming in—but, of course, if you are obliged to go....”
“Thank you very much; I am obliged to go. Good-bye, Mrs. Cottingham. You’ll write to Masterson and let me know what the answer is? I think I hear the car.”
Miss Todhunter, who had embraced her friend so warmly half an hour before, parted from her with a tepid handshake; but if neither Daphne nor Mrs. Cottingham considered the visit a success, Lady Heritage seemed to derive some satisfaction from it, and Jane told herself that not only had a danger been averted, but a distinct advantage had been gained.
Jane ran straight up to her room when they got back, but she was no sooner there than it came into her mind to wonder whether she had put away the files which she had been working on just before she went into the garden. Think as she would, she could not be sure.
She ran down again and went quickly along the corridor to the library. The door was unlatched. She touched the handle, pushed it a little, and stood hesitating. Lady Heritage was speaking.
“It’s a satisfaction to know just where one is. Sometimes I’ve been convinced she was a fool, and then again ... well, I’ve wondered. I wondered this afternoon in the garden. That man on the headland gives one to think furiously. Who on earth could it have been?”
“I ... don’t ... know.”
“But I don’t believe she saw him. I don’t believe she saw anything or knew why she was frightened. She just got a start ... a shock—began to run without knowing why, and ran herself into a blind panic. She looked quite idiotic when I was questioning her.”
“Oh,” thought Jane. “It’s horrible to listen at doors, but what am I to do?”
What she did was to go on listening. She heard Lady Heritage’s rare laugh.
“Then this afternoon—my dear Jeffrey, it would have convinced you or any one. The friend—this Daphne Todhunter—well, only a fool could have made a bosom friend of her, and, as I told you, even she had the lowest opinion of her adored Renata’s brains.”
“I don’t know,” said Ember again. “You say she’s a fool, I say she’s a fool, her friend says she’s a fool, but something, some instinct in me protests.”
“Womanly intuition,” said Lady Heritage, with a mocking note.
There was silence; then:
“These girls—were they alone together?”
“No. They conducted what appeared to be a curiously emotional conversation at the other end of Mrs. Cottingham’s dreadful drawing-room, which always reminds me of a parish jumble sale.”
Ember’s voice sounded suddenly much nearer, as if he had crossed the room.
“Emotional? What do you mean?” he said quickly. Lady Heritage laughed again.
“Mean?” she said. “Does that sort of thing mean anything?”
“What sort of thing? Please, it’s important.”
“Oh, hand-holding, and a tearful embrace or two. The usual accompaniments of schoolgirl schwärmerei.”
Jane could hear that Ember was moving restlessly. Her own heart was beating. She knew very well that in Ember’s mind there was just one thought—“Suppose she has told Daphne Todhunter.”
“Which of them cried?” said Ember sharply.
“I think they both did—Miss Todhunter most.”
“And you couldn’t hear what they were saying?”
“Not a word.”
“I must know. Will you send for her and find out? It’s of the first importance.”
“You think....”
“She may have told this girl what we’ve been trying to get out of her. I must know. Look here, I’ll take a book and sit down over there. She won’t notice me. Send for her and begin about other things, then ask her why her friend was so distressed....”
Jane heard Ember move again and knew that this time it was towards the bell. She turned and ran back along the way by which she had come. Five minutes later she was entering the library to find Lady Heritage at her table and Ember at the far end of the room buried in a book.
“I want the unanswered-letter file.” Lady Heritage’s voice was very businesslike.
Jane brought it over and waited whilst Raymond turned over the letters, frowning.
“I don’t see Lady Manning’s letter.”
“You answered it yesterday.”
“So I did. Miss Molloy—why did your friend cry this afternoon?”
“Daphne?”
“Yes, Daphne. Why did she cry?”
“Oh, she does, you know.”
“But I suppose not entirely without some cause.”
“She was angry with me,” said Jane very low.
“Yes? I noticed that she did not kiss you when you went away.”
“No, she’s angry. You see”—Jane hung her head—“you see, she thinks—I’m afraid she thinks that I didn’t treat her brother very well.”
“Her brother?”
“Yes. She wanted me to be engaged to him, but he’s married some one else, so I think it’s rather silly of her to be cross with me, don’t you?”
“I really don’t know.”
Out of the tail of her eye Jane saw Mr. Ember nod his head just perceptibly. Lady Heritage must have seen it too, for she pushed the letter file over to Jane.
“Put this away. No, I don’t want anything more at present.”
Tea came in as she spoke.
Afterwards in her own room Jane sat down on the broad window ledge with her hands in her lap, looking out over the sea. The lovely day was drawing slowly to a lovelier close, the sun-drenched air absolutely still, absolutely clear. The tide was low, the sea one sheet of unbroken blue, except where the black rocks, more visible than Jane had ever seen them, pierced the surface.
Jane did not quite know what had happened to her. Her moment of exhilaration was gone. She was not afraid, but she felt a sense of horror which she had not known before. She had thought of this adventure as her adventure, her own risk. Somehow she had never really related it to other people. For the first time, she began to see Formula “A,” not as something which threatened her, but as something that menaced the world. It was ridiculous that it was Mrs. Cottingham and Daphne Todhunter who had caused this change.
It is one thing to think vaguely of civilisation being swept away, and quite another to visualise some concrete, humdrum Tom, Dick, or Harry being swept horribly out of existence. Jane’s imagination suddenly showed her Formula “A”—The Process, whatever they chose to call the horrible thing—in operation; showed it annihilating fussy Mrs. Cottingham, with her overcrowded drawing-room and her overcrowded talk; showed it doing something horrible to fat, common Daphne Todhunter. The romance of adventure fell away, the glamour that sometimes surrounds catastrophe shrivelled and was gone. It was horrible, only horrible.
Jane kept seeing Mrs. Cottingham’s ugly room, and Raymond Heritage standing there, as she had seen her that afternoon, like a statue that had nothing to do with its surroundings. All at once she knew what it was that Lady Heritage reminded her of—not Mercury at all, but Medusa with the lovely, tortured face, stone and yet suffering.
As she looked out over that calm sea she had before her all the time the vision of Medusa, and of hundreds and hundreds of quite ordinary, vulgar, commonplace Mrs. Cottinghams and Daphne Todhunters being turned to stone. A tremor began to shake her. It kept coming again and again. Then, all at once, the tears were running down her face. It was then it came to her that she could not bear to think of Daphne as she had seen her at the last, with that hurt, angry, puzzled look.
“She’s a fat lump, but Arnold is her brother, and Renata is her friend, and she thinks they’ve failed each other and been horrid to her. I can’t bear it.”
At that moment Jane hated herself fiercely because Daphne’s tears had amused her.
“You’ve got a brick instead of a heart, and, if you get eliminated, it’ll serve you right.”
She dabbed her eyes very hard, straightened her hair, and ran downstairs to the library again.
Ember was the sole occupant, and Jane addressed him with diffidence:
“Mr. Ember, do you think I might ... do you think Lady Heritage would mind ... I mean, may I use the telephone?”
“What for?” said Ember, looking at her over the edge of his paper.
“I thought perhaps I might,” said Jane ... “I mean, I wanted to say something to my friend, the one who is staying with Mrs. Cottingham.”
“Ah—yes, why not?”
“Then I may?”
“Oh yes, certainly. Do you want me to go?”
Jane presented a picture of modest confusion. It was concern for Daphne Todhunter that had brought her downstairs, concern and the prickings of remorse, but at the sight of Ember, she experienced what she would have described as a brain-wave.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” she said. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I did rather want to talk privately to her.”
“Oh, by all means.” Ember’s tone was most amiable, his departure most courteously prompt.
Jane would have been prepared to bet the eighteen-pence which constituted her sole worldly fortune to a brass farthing that upon the other side of the door his attentive ear would miss no word of her conversation.
She gave Mrs. Cottingham’s number, and waited in some anxiety.
The voice that said “Hullo!” was unmistakably Miss Todhunter’s, and Jane began at once:
“Oh, Daphne, is that you? I want to speak to you so badly. Are you alone? Good! I’m so glad.”
At the other end of the line Daphne was saying grumpily:
“I don’t know what you mean. There are three people in the room. I keep telling you so.”
“Good!” said Jane, with a little more emphasis. “I want to speak to you most particularly. I’ve been awfully unhappy since this afternoon; I really have. And I wanted to say—— I mean to ask you not to be upset about Arnold. It’s all for the best, really. Please, please, don’t think badly of him. It’s not his fault, and I know you’ll like his wife very much indeed. He’ll tell you all about it some day, and you’ll think it ever so romantic. So you won’t be unhappy about it, will you? I hate people to be unhappy.”
Without waiting for Miss Todhunter’s reply, Jane hung up the receiver. After a decent interval she opened the door. Mr. Ember was at the far end of the passage, waiting patiently.
Jane waked that night, and did not know why she waked. After a moment it came to her that she had been dreaming. In her dream something unpleasant had happened, and she did not know what it was. She sat up in the darkness with her hands pressed over her eyes, trying to remember.
The vague feeling of having passed through some horrifying experience oppressed her far more than definite recollection could have done.
She got up, switched on the light, and began to pace up and down, but she could not shake off that feeling of having left something, she did not know what, just behind her, just out of sight. She looked round for the book she had been reading, but she remembered now that she had left it downstairs. She looked at her watch. It was three o’clock. The house would be absolutely still and empty. It would not take her two minutes to fetch the book from the drawing-room. She slipped on Renata’s dressing-gown, put out her light, and opened the door.
With a little shock of surprise she saw that the corridor was dark. Some one must have put out the light which always burned at the far end. Instead of the usual faintly rosy glow, there was darkness thinning to dusk, and just at the stairhead a vivid splash of moonlight. After a moment’s hesitation Jane slipped out of her room, leaving the door ajar. Somehow she had not reckoned upon having to cross that brightly lighted space. She came slowly to the head of the stairs and looked down into the hall. It was like looking into the blackness and silence of a vast well. She could see nothing—nothing at all. The moon was shining in through the rose window above the great door. There was a shield in the window, a shield with the Luttrell arms, and the light came through the glass in a great beam shot with colour, and struck the portrait of Lady Heritage and the vine leaves and grapes on the newel just below. The window and the portrait were on the same level, and the ray seemed to make a brilliant cleavage between the silvery dusk above and the dense gloom below.
Jane descended the stairs, walking carefully so as to make no noise. At the foot she turned sharply to the left and passed the study door, the fireplace, and the steel gate which shut off the north wing. The door of the Yellow Drawing-Room was straight in front of her. She opened it softly and went in.
The book would be on the little table to the right of the fireplace, because she remembered putting it there when Lady Heritage made an unexpectedly early move. She stood for a moment visualising the arrangement of the chairs, and then walked straight to the right place. The book was where she had left it, put down open, a bad habit for which Jimmy had often rebuked her. She was back at the door with it, and just about to pass the threshold when she heard a sound. Instantly she stood still, listening. The sound came from the other end of the hall, where the shadows lay deepest round the massive oak door.
“But there can’t be any one at the door at this hour,” said Jane—“there can’t, there can’t possibly.”
The sound came again, something between a rustle and a creak, but so faint that no hearing less acute than Jane’s would have caught it.
“It’s on the left of the door, underneath Willoughby Luttrell’s picture....”
Jane suddenly pressed her hand to her lips and made an involuntary movement backwards, for there was an unmistakable click, and then, slow and faint, a footfall. Jane stood rigid, staring into the darkness of the corner. She thought she heard a sigh, and then the footsteps crossed the hall, coming nearer. At the stair foot they paused, and then began to ascend.
Jane gazed into the deeply shadowed space where the footfall sounded, but nothing—not the slightest glimpse of anything moving—came to her straining sight.
She looked up and saw the level ray of moonlight overhead. Whoever climbed the stair must pass up into the light and be visible, but from where she stood she could only see the side of the stair like a black wall. But she must see—she must. If some one had come out of the darkness where there was no door she must know who it was. Her bare feet made no sound as she moved from the sheltering doorway. Step by step she kept pace with those slow mounting footsteps. She passed the steel gate, and, feeling her way along the wall, came to a standstill by the cold black hearth. Then, with her whole body tense, she turned and looked up. There was a darker shadow among the shadows, a shadow that moved upwards, towards the beam of moonlight. Jane watched, breathless, and from where The Portrait hung, the sombre eyes of Raymond Heritage seemed to watch too. Out of blackness into dusk a something emerged; one step more and the moonlight fell on a dark hood. Up into the light came a cloaked figure, draped from head to foot, shapeless.
On the top step it turned. Jane caught her breath. It was Lady Heritage. She stood there for a long minute, her left hand just resting on the newel post with its twining tendrils and massive overhanging grapes. The light shone full upon her, and her face was sharpened, blanched, and sorrowful. Her eyes seemed to look into unfathomable depths of gloom. The amber, the rose, and the violet of the stained glass fell in a hazy iridescence upon the black of her cloak.
In front the cloak fell away and showed the straight white linen of an overall, and cloak and overall were deeply stained with dull wet smears. A piece of the stuff hung jagged from a tear.
Jane looked, and could not take her eyes away.
“Oh, she’s so unhappy,” she said to herself.
With a quick movement Raymond Heritage pushed the hood back from her hair. Then she turned, faced her own portrait for a moment, and passed slowly out of sight. Jane heard a door close very softly.
She stood quite still and waited, gathering her courage. She would have to mount the stair and pass through that light before she could reach the safely shadowed corridor. Just for a moment it seemed as if she could not do it. Her feet seemed to cleave to the ground. Five minutes passed, and another five.
Jane felt herself becoming rigid, and with a tremendous effort, she took one step forward, but only one, for as her foot touched a new cold patch of floor, some one moved overhead.
For an instant a little pencil of electric light jabbed into the darkness and went out again. The next moment Mr. Ember stepped into the moonlight. He too wore a linen overall, and in his left hand he carried the mask-like head-dress which was in use in the laboratories. His right hand held a torch.
He came down the stairs, walking with astonishing lightness. Half-way down the torch came into play again. He sent the little ray in a sort of dazzle-dance about the hall. With every leaping flash Jane’s heart gave a jump, and she only stopped her teeth from chattering by biting hard upon the cuff of Renata’s dressing-gown. She had covered her face instinctively, and peered, terror-stricken, between her fingers.
The light skimmed right across her once, and but for the crimson flannel, she would certainly have screamed aloud. If Mr. Ember had been looking, he could have seen a semicircle of white forehead, two clutching hands, and a quivering chin. But his eyes were elsewhere, and the dancing flash passed on.
Ember crossed the hall to the far corner out of which Lady Heritage had come. Suddenly the light went out.
Jane heard again the very, very small creaking noise which she had heard before. It was followed by a faint click, and then unmitigated silence. The seconds added themselves together and became minutes, and there was no further sound. The minutes passed, and the beam of moonlight slipped slowly downwards. Now The Portrait was in darkness, now the newels were just two black shadows. It was a long, long time before Jane moved. She climbed the staircase with terror in her heart. At the edge of the moonlight she waited so long that it moved to meet her. When the edge of it touched her bare, hesitating foot she gave a violent start, and ran the rest of the way.
The dark corridor felt like a haven of refuge.
She came panting to her own door, and suddenly there was no haven of refuge anywhere. The door was shut. She had left it ajar. It was shut.
Jane stood with her outstretched hand flat on the panel of the door. She kept saying over and over to herself:
“I left it open, but it’s shut. I left it open, but it’s shut.”
Once she pushed the door as if it could not really be shut at all, but it did not yield; the latch had caught. It was shut. At last she turned the handle slowly and went in. A gust of wind met her full. Perhaps it was the wind that had shut the door. She left it ajar, moved to the middle of the room, and waited. For a moment there was a lull. Somewhere in the house a clock struck four. The sound came just over the edge of hearing, with its four tiny distant strokes. Then the wind rushed in again through the open window, and the door fell to with a click.
By next morning the wind had brought rain with it. A south-west gale drove against the dripping window-panes, and covered the sea with crests of foam.
Jane, rather pale, wrote a neat letter to the Misses Kent, Hermione Street, South Kensington, mentioning that she would be much obliged if they would send her patterns of jumper wool by return. She hesitated, and then underlined the last two words.
“I always think big shops do you better,” was Lady Heritage’s comment, and Mr. Ember added, “Do you knit, Miss Renata? I thought you were the only girl in England who didn’t”—to which Jane replied, “I want to learn.”
It was after the letter had been posted that she found Henry’s second message, “Hope to see you to-day, Friday.” She could have cried for pure joy.
At intervals during the day, the thought occurred to her that Henry was a solid comfort. She wasn’t in love with him, of course, but undoubtedly he was a comfort. She had plenty of time to think, for she spent the entire day by herself. Sir William had gone to town for three or four days. Lady Heritage disappeared into the north wing at eleven o’clock, and very shortly after, Mr. Ember followed her. Neither of them appeared again until dinner-time. Jane went to sleep over a book and awoke refreshed, and with a strong desire for exploration.
If only last night’s mysterious happenings had taken place anywhere but in the hall. The dark corner from which Raymond had emerged and into which Mr. Ember had vanished drew her like a magnet, but not until every one was in bed and asleep would she dare to search for the hidden door.
“If I were just sitting here and reading,” she thought to herself, “probably no one would come into the hall for hours; but if I were to look for a secret passage, all the servants would begin to drift in and out, and the entire neighbourhood would come and call.”
When the lights had been turned on, she wandered round, looking at the Luttrell portraits. This, she thought, was safe enough, and if not the rose, it was at least near it. Willoughby Luttrell’s picture hung perhaps five feet from the ground and about half-way between the hall door and the corner. Jane had always noticed it particularly because Henry undoubtedly resembled this eighteenth century uncle.
Mr. Willoughby Luttrell had been painted in a Court suit of silver-grey satin. He wore Mechlin ruffles and diamond shoe-buckles. He had the air of being convinced that the Court of St. James could boast no brighter ornament, but his face was the face of Henry March, and Henry’s grey eyes looked down at Jane from beneath a Ramillies wig.
After an interval Jane stopped looking at Mr. Luttrell’s eyes, and reflected that the click which she had heard the night before came from a point nearer the corner. She did not dare go near enough to feel the wall, and no amount of staring at the panelling disclosed any clue to the secret.
Jane went back to her book.
By sunset the rain had ceased to fall, or, rather to be driven against the land. The wind, lightened of its burden of moisture, kept coming inland in great gusts, fresh and soft with the freshness and softness of the spring. The entire sky was thickly covered with clouds which moved continually across its face, swept on by the currents of the upper air, but these clouds were very high up. Any one coming out of an enclosed place into the windy night would have received an impression of extraordinary freedom, movement, and space.
Henry March received such an impression as he turned a pivoting stone block and came out of the small sheltering cave behind the seat on the headland above Luttrell Marches. At the first buffet of the gale he took off his cap, and stuffed it down into the pocket of the light ulster which he wore, and stood bareheaded, looking out to sea. His eyes showed him blackness and confused motion, and his ears were filled with the strange singing sound of the wind and the endless crash and recoil of the waves against a shingly beach.
He stood quite still for a time and then turned his wrist and glanced at the luminous dial of the watch upon it, after which he passed again behind the stone seat and was about to re-enter the blacker shadows when a tall figure emerged.
“Have you been here long?” said a voice.
“No, I’ve only just come. How are you, Tony?”
“All right. I didn’t think you’d be down here again so soon. It was touch and go whether I could get here.”
“Piggy’s orders,” said Henry. “Look here, Tony, don’t let’s go inside. It’s a topping night, and that passage I’ve just come along smells like a triple extract of vaults—perfectly beastly. I don’t suppose our friend Ember is addicted to being out late. He doesn’t strike me as that sort of bird somehow.”
“All right,” said Anthony Luttrell. He sat down on the stone seat as he spoke, and Henry followed his example.
“Piggy sent you down, did he? What for?”
Henry was silent. It seemed like quite a long time before he said:
“Tony, who knows about the passages beside you and me?”
“No one,” said Anthony shortly.
“Uncle James told me when he thought the Boche had done you in. He said then that no one knew except he and I. He drew out a plan of all the passages and made me learn it by heart. When I could draw it with my eyes shut, we burnt every scrap of paper I had touched. I’ve been into the passages exactly three times—once that same week to test my knowledge, again the other day, and to-night. I’ll swear no one saw me go in or come out, and I’ll swear I’ve never breathed a word to a soul.”
“Are you rehearsing your autobiography?” inquired Anthony Luttrell, with more than a hint of sarcasm.
“No, I’m not. I want to know who else knows about the passages.”
“And I have told you.”
“Tony, it is no good. I had my suspicions the other night, but to-night I’ve got proof. The passages have been made use of. Unfortunately there’s no doubt about it at all. I want to know whether you have any idea—hang it all, Tony, you must see what I’m driving at! Wait a minute; don’t go through the roof until you’ve heard what I’ve got to say. You see, I know that Uncle James gave you the plan when you were only sixteen, because he thought he was dying then, and I’ve come down here to ask you whether any one might have seen you coming and going as a boy, or whether ... Tony, did you ever tell any one?”
“I thought you said that it was Piggy’s orders that brought you down here.”
“Yes, it was,” said Henry.
“Am I to gather then that Piggy has suggested these damned impertinent questions?” Mr. Luttrell’s tone was easy to a degree.
Henry, on the verge of losing his temper, rose abruptly to his feet, walked half a dozen paces with his hands shoved well down in his pockets, and then walked back again.
“Tony, what on earth’s the good of quarrelling?”
Anthony Luttrell was leaning back, his head against the back of the stone seat, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He appeared to be watching the race of clouds between the horizon and the zenith. He said something, and the wind took his words away.
Henry sat down again.
“Look here, Tony,” he said, “you’ve not answered my question. Did you ever tell any one? Damn it all, Tony, I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to!... Did you ever tell Raymond?”
A great gust swept the headland, another and more violent one followed it, battered against the cliff, and then dropped suddenly into what, after the tumult, seemed like a silence.
“Piggy speaking, or you?” said Anthony Luttrell quite lightly.
“Both,” said Henry.
“You sound heated, Henry. Now I should have thought that that would have been my rôle. Instead, I merely repeat to you, and you in your turn, of course, repeat to Piggy that I have told no one about the passages, and, after you have admired my moderation, perhaps we might change the subject.”
“I’m afraid it can’t be done,” said Henry. “Tony, do you mind sitting up and looking at this?”
As he spoke he placed “this” on the seat between them and turned a light upon it, holding the torch close down on to the seat so that the beam did not travel beyond its edge. Mr. Luttrell turned lazily and saw a small handkerchief of very fine linen with an embroidered “R” in the corner. He continued to look at it, and Henry continued to hold the torch so that the light fell upon the initial. Then quite suddenly Anthony Luttrell reached sideways and switched off the light. His hand dropped to the handkerchief and covered it.
“No, I don’t want it,” said Henry, “but I thought you ought to know that I found it in the passage behind us, just where one stoops to shift the stone.”
“It’s one I found and dropped,” said Anthony, putting it into his pocket.
Henry said nothing at all.
A somewhat prolonged silence was broken by Luttrell. “I’m chucking my job here,” he said. “I’ve written to Sir Julian. Here’s the letter for you to give him.” He pushed it along the seat as he spoke, and Henry picked it up reluctantly. “I’ve asked to be replaced with as little delay as possible. You might urge that point on him, if you don’t mind. I want it made perfectly clear that under no circumstances will I stay on more than three days. I will, in fact, see the whole department damned first.”
He spoke without the slightest heat, in the rather cold, drawling manner which Henry had known as a danger-signal from the days when he was a small boy, and Anthony a big one and his idol.
“Are you giving any reason?”
“No, there’s no reason to give.”
“Piggy,” said Henry thoughtfully, “will want one. It’s all very well for you, Tony, to write him a letter and say you’re going to chuck your job without giving a reason. I’ve got to stand up at the other side of his table and stick out a cross-examination on the probable nature of the reasons which you haven’t given. You’re putting me in an impossible position.”
“It’s that damned conscience of yours, I suppose! I cannot tell a lie, and all that sort of thing.”
“Not to Piggy about this.”
“All right,” said Anthony, getting to his feet, “tell him the truth. Why should I care? I suppose, in common with everybody else, he is perfectly well aware that I once made a fool of myself about Lady Heritage. Well, I thought I could stick being down here and seeing her, but I can’t. It just comes to that. I can’t stick it.”
“Does she know you’re here?”
“No, she doesn’t. She sees me in an overall and a mask. She has been pleased to commend my skill. This afternoon she leaned over my shoulder to watch what I was doing. Well, I came away and wrote to Piggy. I can’t stand it, and you can tell him so with the utmost circumstance.”
Henry was leaning forward, chin in hand. He looked past Anthony at the black moving water.
“Why don’t you see Raymond?” he said. “No, Tony, you’ve just got to listen to me. What you’ve been saying is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. You wouldn’t chuck your job just for that. You know, and I know that you’re chucking it because you are afraid that Raymond is involved. If you know it, and I know it, don’t you think Piggy will know it too? That’s why I say, see Raymond. If she’s let herself get mixed up with this show, it’s because she’s had a rotten time and wants to hit back. She said as much to me—oh, not à propos of this, of course; we were just talking.”
“I heard her,” said Anthony Luttrell. He paused, and added with a distinct sneer, “You displayed an admirable discretion.”
“Thank you, Tony. Now what’s the good of you clearing out? If you do, Piggy will send some one else down here, and if Raymond has got mixed up with any of Ember’s devilry, she’ll get caught out. For the Lord’s sake, Tony, see her, let her know you’re alive! I believe she’d chuck the whole thing and go to the ends of the earth with you. Nobody would press the matter. We should catch Ember out, and you and Raymond could go abroad for a bit. I don’t see any other way out of it.”
“You seem to me to be assuming a good deal, Henry,” said Anthony Luttrell.
“I’m not assuming anything”—Henry’s tone was very blunt. “I know three things.”
“Yes?”
“One”—Henry ticked his facts off on the fingers of his left hand: “the passages are being used. Two: they’ve been wired for electric light. Three: Raymond has been through them, and quite lately. Those three facts, taken in conjunction with a deposition stating that something of a highly dangerous and anti-social nature is being manufactured on these premises, and under cover of the Government experiments—well, Tony, I don’t suppose you want me to dot the ‘i’s’ and cross the ‘t’s.’”
“It never occurred to you that my father might have had the place wired, I suppose?”
“He didn’t,” said Henry. “It’s no good, Tony. You can’t bluff me, and I hate your trying to. There’s only one way out of this. You’ve got to see Raymond.”
Anthony made an impatient movement.
“You assume too much,” he said, “but I’ll put that on one side. From the cold, official standpoint, where does my interview with Lady Heritage come in? Wouldn’t it rather complicate matters? You appear to assume that there is a conspiracy, and then to suggest that I should warn one of the conspirators.”
“No, I do not. I ask you to let Raymond know that you are alive, nothing more. In my view nothing more is necessary. She’ll naturally think you are here to see her, and you can let her think so. As to the cold, official standpoint, the last thing that the department would want is a scandal about a woman in Raymond’s position. Piggy would say what I say—for the Lord’s sake get her out of it and let us have a free hand. She’s an appalling complication.”
“Women always are,” said Anthony Luttrell in his bitter drawl.
He moved a pace or two away, and then turned back again. “You’re not a bad sort in spite of the conscience, Henry,” he said. “From your standpoint, what you’ve just said is sense—good, plain common sense—in fact, exactly the thing which one has no use for in certain moods.”
“Scrap the moods, Tony,” said Henry, in an expressionless voice.
Anthony laughed, rather harshly.
“My good Henry,” he said—there was affection as well as mockery in his tone—“does one ask for one’s temperament? Look here, I haven’t seen Raymond because I haven’t dared—I don’t know what I might do or say if I did see her. Now that is the plain, unvarnished truth. When I was in Petrograd I once hid for three days in a cellar with a temperamental Russian lady. There was nothing to do except to talk, and we talked endlessly. She told me a lot of home truths—said my nature was like a glacier, cold and slow, and that once I had got going I had to go on, even if I ground all my own dearest hopes to powder in doing so.”
“In other words, if you’ve got a grouch, you’re a devil to keep it,” said Henry. “It’s quite true; you always were. But, look here, Tony, why all this to my address? Why not get it off your chest to Raymond, and if you will deal in geological parallels, well—she’s rather in the volcano line, or used to be, and I don’t mind betting she’ll blow your glacier to smithereens?” Henry looked at his watch.
“I must go,” he said. “Think it over, Tony, and same place, to-morrow, same time.”
He turned, without waiting for an answer, and walked into the darkness of the cave.
Jane went to her room that night, but she did not undress. Two entirely opposite lines of reasoning had ended in inducing one and the same decision. On the one hand, it might be argued that Lady Heritage and Mr. Ember, having passed the greater part of last night abroad upon their mysterious business, would be most unlikely to spend a second sleepless night so soon, and Jane might, therefore, count on finding the coast clear for a little exploring on her own account. On the other hand, an equally logical train of thought suggested that these midnight comings and goings might be part of a routine, and that Jane, if on the watch, might acquire some very valuable information.
She therefore locked her door and proceeded to consider the question of what she should wear with as much attention as if she had been going to a ball. Neither barefoot nor with only stockings would she go into any passage which had left those unpleasant dark stains upon Lady Heritage’s overall. A really heartfelt shudder passed over her at the very idea. No, Renata possessed slippers of maroon felt. Misguided talent had stenciled upon the toe of one a Dutch boy in full trousers, and upon the toe of the other a Dutch girl in full petticoats. Jane had a fierce loathing for the slippers, but they had cork soles and would at once keep out the damp and be very silent. She therefore placed them in readiness.
Prolonged hesitation between the claims of the crimson flannel dressing-gown and an aged blue serge dress resulted in a final selection of the latter. She decided that it would flap less, and that if it got stained and damp the housemaids would be less likely to notice it.
“Of course, on the other hand,” said Jane to herself, “if I’m caught, it absolutely does in any excuse about walking in my sleep, but I don’t think that’s an earthly, anyhow. If I’m caught, they’ll jolly well know what I was doing. The thing is not to be caught.”
At half-past eleven precisely she made her way down to the hall.
To-night there was no patch of moonlight to pass through, only a vague greyness which showed that the moon had risen and that the clouds outside were thin enough to let some of the light filter through.
Jane felt her way downstairs and across the hall to Sir William’s study. The study door afforded the nearest point from which she could watch what she called Willoughby Luttrell’s corner without exposing herself to detection.
She made up her mind that she would wait until she heard twelve strike, and then explore the corner. She had so thoroughly planned a period of waiting that it was with a feeling of shocked surprise that she became aware, even as she reached and crossed the threshold of the study, that some one was coming down the stairs behind her.
If she had been one moment later, if she had stayed, as she very nearly did stay, to look out of the window and see whether the night was fair, they would have walked into one another at the top of the stairs. As it was, she had escaped by the very narrowest margin.
The door opened inwards, and she had just time to get behind it and close all but a crack, when through that crack she saw Raymond Heritage pass, wrapped in the same black cloak which she had worn the night before, only this time she wore beneath it, not her linen overall, but the dress she had worn for dinner. She held an electric lamp in her left hand.
As soon as she had passed the door, Jane opened it a little wider and came forward a step.
Lady Heritage went straight to the corner of the hall. She put the torch down upon a chair which stood immediately under Willoughby Luttrell’s portrait. Then she went quite close to the wall and reached up, with her arms stretched out widely. Her right hand touched the bottom left-hand corner of the portrait and her left rested in the angle of the corner.
Jane heard the same click which she had heard the night before.
Lady Heritage stepped back, took up her light, and, going to the corner, pushed hard against the wall.
Jane watched with all her eyes, and saw a section of the panelling turn on some unseen pivot, leaving a narrow door through which Raymond passed. For a moment she stared at the lighter oblong in the wall; then there was a second click and the unbroken shadow once again.
Tingling with excitement, Jane stepped from her doorway and came to the corner. She must, oh she must, find the spring, and find it in time to follow. Raymond stood here and reached up, but she was tall, much taller than Jane. She stood on her tiptoes and could not reach the lowest edge of the portrait.
With the very greatest of care she moved the chair that was under the picture a yard or two to the left. It weighed as though it were made of lead instead of oak, and she was gasping as she set it down, but she had made no noise. Renata’s cork soles slipped as she climbed on to the polished seat, but she gripped the solid back and did not fall.
Raymond had pressed something in the wall with both hands at once. Jane began to feel carefully along the lower edge of the portrait until she came to the massively foliated corner with its fat gilt acanthus leaves. A cross-piece of the panelling came just on the same level. She felt along it with light, sensitive finger-tips. There was a knot in the wood, but nothing else. “If there is another knot in the corner, I’ll try pressing on them,” she thought to herself, and on the instant her left hand found the second knot. She pressed with all her might, and for the third time that evening she heard the little scarcely audible click. This time it spelt victory.
In a curiously methodical manner Jane got down, put the chair carefully back into its place, and pushed against the wall as she had seen Lady Heritage do. The panelling yielded to her hand and swung inwards.
There was a black gap in the corner. Jane passed through it without any hesitation, and pulled the panelling to. She meant to leave it just ajar, but her hand must have shaken, or else there was some controlling spring, for as she stood in the black dark she heard the click again. She drew a long breath and stood motionless for a moment, but only for a moment. She had come there to follow Raymond Heritage, and follow her she would.
She put out a cautious foot and it went down, so far down that for a sickening instant she thought that she must overbalance and fall headlong; then, just in time, it touched a step, the first of ten which went down very steeply. At the bottom she felt her way round a corner, and then with intensest thankfulness she saw, a good way ahead, a moving figure with a light.
The passage that stretched before her was about six feet high and four feet wide. The air felt very damp and heavy. At intervals there were openings on the left-hand side where other passages seemed to branch off. Jane began to have a growing horror of these other passages. If she lost Lady Heritage, how would she ever find her way back, and—yet more horrid thought—who, or what, might at any moment come out of one of those dark tunnels behind her? It was at this point that she began to run, only to check herself severely. “She’ll hear you, you fool. Jane, I absolutely forbid you to be such a fool; and Renata’s slippers will come off if you run, nasty sloppy things, and then you’ll tread in green slime, and get it between all your toes. It will squelch.” The horror of the black passages was eclipsed; Jane stopped running obediently, but she took longer steps and diminished the distance between herself and her unconscious guide.
174
The passage had begun to run uphill. Jane wondered where they were going. At any moment Lady Heritage might turn. If she did so, Jane must infallibly be caught unless she were near enough to one of the side tunnels. She went on with her heart in her mouth.
A line from one of Christina Rossetti’s poems came into her head:
“Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.”
“The sort of cheery thing one would remember,” thought Jane to herself; and she continued to climb the endless slope, her eyes fixed on the dark, moving silhouette of Lady Heritage.
At last there was a pause. The light ceased to move. Jane crept closer, but dared not come too near. Next moment she saw what looked like a slab of stone in the passage wall swing round on a pivot as the panelling had done. Lady Heritage passed out of sight through the opening, and at the same moment a great breath of wind from the sea drove into the passage, clear, fresh, exquisite.
Jane hurried to the opening and looked out. She saw first the dark, curving walls of a small cave, and, immediately in front of her, the black outline of a bench, beyond that a stretch of uneven ground, a tangle of wire, and the black movement of the sea. The moon behind the clouds made a vague, dusky twilight, and the wind blew. Lady Heritage was standing just on the other side of the stone seat. It startled Jane to find that she was so near. She stood quite still looking at the shadowed water and the cloudy sky.
Then, without any warning, a tall, dark figure came into sight. To Jane it seemed as if it rose out of the ground. Afterwards she thought that, if any one had been sitting on the grass and then had risen, it would, of course, have looked like that. At the time she leaned against the rock for support and had much ado not to scream.
It was Lady Heritage who called out, with an inarticulate cry that mingled with the wind and was carried away.
The dark figure stood still just where it had so suddenly appeared, and in an instant Raymond had turned her light upon it. In the circle of light Jane saw a man—a tall man, bareheaded. He had thrown up his arm as if to screen his face, but it only hid the mouth and chin. Over it his eyes looked straight at Raymond Heritage.
And Raymond gave a great cry of “Anthony!” The light dropped from her hand, fell with a crash on the stones, rolled over, and went out. Anthony Luttrell did not stir, but Raymond began to move towards him after a strange rigid fashion, and as she moved, she kept saying his name over and over:
“Tony—Tony—Tony—Tony.”
Her voice fell lower and lower. As she reached him it was nearly gone.
Jane turned from the stone wall where she was leaning, and stumbled back along the dark passage with the tears running down her face.
At that last whisper of his name, Anthony spoke:
“I’m not a ghost, Raymond. Did you think I was?”
They were so close together that if she had stretched out those groping hands another inch they would have touched him. Something in his tone set a barrier between them and Raymond’s hands fell empty. The world was whirling round her. Life and death, love and hate, their parting and this meeting were merged in a confusion that robbed her of thought and almost of consciousness. It seemed to her as if they had been standing there for a long, long time, or, rather, as if time had nothing to do with them, and they had been cast into a strange eternity. Out of the turmoil of her thought arose the remembrance of the last time she and Anthony had trysted in this place—a sky almost unbearably blue and the sea brilliant under the noonday sun. Now there was no light anywhere.
Anthony was alive. That should have been joy unbelievable. All through the years since she had read his name in the list of missing with what an overwhelming surge of joy would her heart have lifted to the words, “Anthony is alive.” Now she said them to herself and felt only a deeper, more terrible sense of separation than any that had touched her yet. They stood together, and between them there was a gulf unpassable—and no light anywhere.
Raymond moved very slowly back along the way that she had come. She came to the stone seat, caught at the back of it with a hand that suddenly began to shake, and sat down. A few slow moments passed. Then she bent and began to grope for the torch which she had dropped.
Anthony came towards her.
“What is it?” he said, and she answered him in a low, fluttering voice:
“My light—I dropped—it’s so dark—I want the light.”
The strong, capable hand groping without aim stirred something in Anthony. He said, almost roughly:
“I’ll find it.”
Then a moment later he had picked it up, found it intact save for a crack in the glass, and, switching it on, put it down on the seat beside her.
He was not prepared for her immediately flashing the light on to his face. An exclamation broke from him, and to cover it he said:
“I am changed out of knowledge.”
“Changed—yes—Tony, that scar.”
Her voice trembled away into silence. Her hand fell. The dusk was between them.
“Ugly, isn’t it? But I haven’t the monopoly of change, have I? You, I think, have changed also.”
“Yes.”
With an impulse she hardly understood, she raised the light and turned it until her face and her bare throat were brilliantly illuminated. The dark cloak fell away a little. The dark eyes looked at him with defiance and appeal. Her beauty, seen like that, had something that startled; it was so devoid of life and colour, and yet so great! After a long, breathless minute Anthony said in his slow voice:
“You have changed more than I have, Lady Heritage, for you have changed your name.”
He saw the last vestige of colour leave her face. She put the lamp down, and her silence startled him.
“No one would have known me,” he said after a pause that was all strain.
“I knew you,” said Raymond very low.
“Only because the lower part of my face was hidden. You’d have passed me in daylight. You have passed me.”
She winced at that, turned the light full on to him again, and said:
“You are working in the laboratory—that’s—that’s why....” She broke off for a minute and went on with a sort of violence, “You say that I didn’t know you, but I did—I did. All this week I’ve been tormented with your presence. All this week I’ve felt you just at hand, just out of reach. I kept saying to myself, ‘Tony’s dead,’ and expecting to meet you round every corner. It was driving me mad.”
“It sounds most uncomfortable,” said Anthony dryly.
Raymond saw a mocking look pass over his face. She turned the light away and set it down. If she had not felt physically incapable of rising to her feet, she would have left him then. This was not Anthony at all, only the anger, the bitterness, the cold resentment which she had hated in him. These, not Anthony, had come back from the grave.
He was speaking again:
“Perhaps I shouldn’t ask, but ... are you expecting to meet any one here? Am I in the way?”
She answered him with a sort of heartbroken simplicity quite beyond pride:
“I don’t know what I expected. You were haunting me so. I came here because ... oh, Tony, don’t you remember at all?”
“I remember something that you appear to have forgotten, Raymond. When like a fool, and a dishonourable fool at that, I gave you the secret of these passages, I remember very well the rather enthusiastic terms in which you asserted your conviction that the secret was a sacred trust, and one that you would keep absolutely inviolate. As, however, I broke my own trust in giving you the secret, I can, I suppose, hardly complain because you have imitated my lack of discretion.”
Raymond did rise then.
“Tony, what do you mean?” she cried.
“My dear Raymond, you know very well what I mean.”
“I do not.” Her voice had risen; this was more the Raymond of their old quarrels, a creature quick to passionate anger, vehement and reckless.
“I say you know very well.”
“And I say that I do not. That I haven’t the shadow of an idea—and that you must explain, Tony; explain.”
“Oh, I’ll explain all right!”
The last word was almost lost in a battering gust of wind. He waited for it to die away, and then:
“How soon did you give away the secret to Ember?” he said, and heard her gasp.
“To Jeffrey—you think I told Jeffrey?”
Anthony laughed. It needed only her use of Ember’s name.
“I know that you told Ember,” he said in a voice like ice.
Raymond put her hands to her head. She pressed her throbbing temples and stared at this shadow of Anthony. It was beyond any nightmare that they should meet like this. She made a very great effort, and came up to him, touching his wrist, trying to take his hand.
“Tony, I don’t know what you’re thinking of. I don’t know how you can speak to me like this. I don’t know what you mean—I don’t indeed. Since you went I have only been into the passages twice, last night and to-night. I went there because—oh, why do people go and weep upon a grave? I had no grave to go to, but I thought that, if I came here where we used to meet, perhaps the you that was haunting me would take shape so that I could see it, or else leave me. I felt driven, and I didn’t know what was driving me.”
In the breathless silence that followed she heard him say:
“I know that you told Ember”—and quite suddenly all the strength went out of her.
When Jane turned, and ran back down the dark passage, she had just the one thought—to get away out of earshot. That she, or any one but Anthony Luttrell, should have heard that breaking tone in Raymond’s voice shocked her profoundly. She felt guilty of having intruded upon the innermost sacred places of another woman’s life. It shocked and moved her very deeply. Tears blinded her, and she ran into the dark without a thought for herself. It was only when, looking back, she could not see even a glimmer of outside twilight that she halted and began to think what she must do.
The practical was never very long in abeyance with Jane. She began to plan rapidly, even whilst she dried her eyes. She would feel her way to the foot of the stairs. If she kept touching the left-hand wall, there would be very little risk of losing her way. Only one passage had led off in that direction and that one diverged at right angles, so that she would not run the risk of going down it unawares. When she came to the foot of the stairs, she would turn back again and wait in the first cross-passage until Raymond passed. Then she would follow her up the steps and watch to see how the door opened on this side.
Jane was very much pleased with her plan when she had made it. It made her feel very intelligent and efficient. She began to put it into practice at once, walking quite quickly with her right hand feeling in front of her and the left just brushing the wall. Of course the stone was horrid to touch—cold, damp, slimy. She was sure the slime was green. Once she jabbed her finger on a rock splinter, and once she touched something soft which squirmed. The dark seemed to get darker and darker, and the silence was like a weight that she could hardly carry.
Her little glow of self-satisfaction died down and left her coldly afraid. Then, quite suddenly, she came to the cross-passage. Her fingers slid from the stone into black air, groped, stretched out, and touched—something—warm, alive.
Jane’s gasping scream went echoing down the dark. A hand came up and caught her wrist, another fell upon her right shoulder.
“Jane, for the Lord’s sake, hush!” said Henry’s voice.
Jane caught her breath as if she were going to scream again.
“Henry, you utter, utter, utter beast!” she said, and incontinently burst into tears.
Henry put his arms round her, and Jane wept as she had never wept in her life, her face tightly pressed against the rough tweed of his coat sleeve, her whole figure shaking with tumultuous sobs.
Presently, when she was mopping her eyes and feeling quite desperately ashamed, she exclaimed:
“I had just touched a slug, and you were worse. I didn’t think anything could be worse than a slug, but you were.”
Henry had kissed the back of her neck twice while she was crying. Now he managed to kiss a little bit of damp cheek.
“You’re not to,” said Jane, in a muffled whisper.
“Why not?” said Henry, with the utmost simplicity. “You don’t mind it, you know you don’t.” He did it again. “Jane, if you had minded, you wouldn’t have clung to me like that. Jane darling, you do like me a little bit, don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t! And I didn’t cling, I didn’t.”
“You did. Take it from me, you did.”
Jane made a very slight effort to detach herself. It was unsuccessful because Henry was a good deal stronger than she was and he held her firmly.
“Henry, I really hate you,” she said. “Any one might cling, if they thought it was a slug or Mr. Ember and then found it wasn’t.” Then, after a pause, “Henry, when a person says they hate you, it’s usual to let go of them.”
“My book of etiquette,” said Henry firmly, “says—page 163, para. ii.—‘A profession of hatred is more compromising than a confession of love; a woman who expresses hatred in words has love in her heart.’ And I really did see that in a book yesterday, so it’s bound to be true, isn’t it?—isn’t it, darling?”
“Henry, I told you to stop,” said Jane; “I simply won’t be kissed by a man I’m not engaged to.”
“Oh, but we are,” said Henry. “I mean you will, won’t you?”
Jane came a very little nearer.
“We should quarrel,” she said, “quite dreadfully. You know there are some people you feel you’d never quarrel with, not if you lived with them a hundred years; and there are others, well, you know from the very first minute that you’d quarrel with them and keep on doing it.”
“Like we’re doing now?” said Henry hopefully. Jane nodded. Of course Henry could not see the nod, but he felt it because it bumped his chin.
“All really happily married people quarrel,” he said. “The really hopeless marriages are the polite ones. And you know you’ll like quarrelling with me, Jane. We’ll make up in between whiles, and there won’t be a dull moment. Will you?”
“I don’t mind promising to quarrel,” said Jane. “No, Henry, you’re positively not to kiss me any more. I’m here on business, if you’re not. How did you get here? And why were you lurking here, pretending to be a slug?”
“Suppose you tell me first,” said Henry. “How did you get here?”
“I followed Lady Heritage. I’ve got an immense amount to tell you.”
She leaned against Henry’s arm in the darkness, and spoke in a soft, eager voice:
“It really began yesterday. I woke up and couldn’t go to sleep again, so I came down for a book, and just as I was at the drawing-room door, I saw Lady Heritage come out of the corner by Willoughby Luttrell’s picture. Did you know there was a door there, Henry?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“She went upstairs, and I was trying to screw up my courage to cross the hall when Mr. Ember came down the stairs and disappeared into the same corner. Of course then I knew there must be a door there, so I made up my mind to come down to-night and look for it.”
“Jane, wait,” said Henry. “You say Ember came down the stairs and went through the door. Do you think Lady Heritage left it open? Or do you think he watched her come out, and then found the way for himself?”
“No,” said Jane; “neither. I mean I’m quite sure it wasn’t like that at all. She shut the door, for I heard it, and it certainly wasn’t the first time Mr. Ember had been that way. Why, he even put his light out before he came to the wall, and any one would have to know the way very well to find it in the dark.”
“Yes. Then what happened?”
“I went back to bed. Henry, you simply haven’t any idea how much I hated going up those stairs. There was a perfectly fiendish patch of moonlight, and I felt as if I couldn’t go through it and perhaps be pounced on by some one just round the corner. If it hadn’t been for the housemaids finding me in the morning, I believe I should just have stuck where I was.”
Henry’s arm tightened a little.
“Well, to-night I hid in the study quite early, but I had hardly got there when Lady Heritage came down. I watched to see what she did, and as soon as she had gone through the door and shut it, I hauled that great heavy chair along and climbed on to it, and found the spring. Your old secret door was made for much taller people than me, and I was just dreadfully frightened that some one would come and find me standing on the chair in the corner, and looking like a perfect fool. Oh, I was thankful when I really got into the passage and found that Lady Heritage was still in sight.”
“I think it was frightfully clever of you,” said Henry, “frightfully clever and frightfully brave; but you’re not to do it again. You might have run into Ember or any one.”
“Then you do believe there’s something dreadful going on,” said Jane quickly.
“I don’t know about what I believe, but I know that the passages are being used, and that they’ve been wired for electric light. I haven’t explored them yet, but people don’t do that sort of thing for nothing. Now go on. I may say that I saw Raymond pass, and you after her. What happened next?”
Jane hesitated.
“I’ll tell you,” she said. “She opened another door, and went out—why, it’s been puzzling me, but of course I know now, the passage leads to the headland. And the other day, when I was so frightened, Mr. Patterson must have come out of it; and he was there to-night.”
“Yes, go on. Did they meet?”
“Yes,” said Jane, in a queer, shy voice. “I couldn’t help hearing. I ran away at once, but I couldn’t help hearing her call him Tony. It’s your cousin, Anthony Luttrell, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s Tony,” said Henry. “Thank the Lord they’ve met. I’d just left him there after jawing him about seeing Raymond.”
“Oh, I hope they’ve made it up,” said Jane. “She looked so dreadfully unhappy last night that I felt I simply couldn’t bear it. It’s so dreadful to see people hurt like that, and not be able to do anything. Do you think they’ll make it up?”
“I hope so,” said Henry not very hopefully. “Tony’s a queer sort of fellow, you know—frightfully hard to move, and a perfect devil for hugging a grievance. He’s had a rotten time of it too. What with Raymond marrying some one else, and then getting knocked out himself, and coming round to find himself a prisoner—well, there wasn’t much to take his mind off it. He escaped three times before he actually got away, and then he went to Russia and had the worst time of the lot. So that he’s got a good deal of excuse for sticking to his grouch.”
Jane suddenly pinched Henry very hard, put her lips quite close to his ear, and breathed:
“Some one’s coming.”
As she spoke Henry drew her noiselessly back a yard or two. The faint glow which Jane had seen brightened until it seemed dazzling. The arched entrance to the tunnel in which they stood became sharply defined. The light struck the opposite wall, showing it rough and black, with patches of dull green slime.
Instantly Jane felt that her finger-tips would never be clean again. As the thought shuddered through her mind the light went by. That’s what it looked like, the passing of a light. Raymond’s dark figure hardly showed behind it. The lighted archway faded. The darkness spread an even surface over everything again.
Jane laid her face against Henry’s sleeve, pressed quite close to him, and said in a little voice that trembled:
“Oh, they haven’t made it up—they haven’t. He’d have come with her if they had.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Of course he’d have come with her. You wouldn’t have let me go by myself, you know you wouldn’t. No, they haven’t made it up, they can’t have, and—oh, Henry, why do people quarrel like that? You won’t with me, will you—ever? I mean that dreadful world-without-end sort. I couldn’t bear it. You won’t, will you?”
Jane was shaking all over. Henry put his arms round her very tight, laid his cheek against hers, and said:
“Not much! It’s a mug’s game.”
After a little while Jane said:
“I must go. You know she came to my room before, and last night when I got back I found the door shut. I had left it open so as not to make any noise, but it was shut when I got back. That frightened me more than anything, but now I think it must have been the wind that shut it. I think so, only I’m not sure. It might have been the wind, or it might have been ... somebody. It’s much more frightening not to be sure. So I’d better go, hadn’t I?”
“Yes, you must go,” said Henry. “I’ll come with you and show you how to get out. And you must promise me, Jane, that you won’t come down here by yourself?”
“How can I promise? I might have to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why,” said Jane, “but I might have to. Supposing they were murdering some one, and I heard the screams? Or suppose I knew that they were just going to blow the house up?”
“Well,” said Henry, with strong common sense, “I don’t see what good you’d do by getting murdered and blown up too, which is what it would come to. You really must promise me.”
“I really won’t.”
Henry gave her an exasperated shake.
“Look here, Jane,” he said, “the whole thing’s most infernally complicated. Tony’s chucking his job here, says he can’t stand it, and I must go back to town and see Piggy about that.”
“Who on earth is Piggy?” said Jane.
“Sir Julian Le Mesurier, my chief. Every one calls him Piggy. I must see him about Tony, and I also want to report what I told you about the passages being wired and in use. I’ll try and see Tony again before I go. You see the thing is, I don’t know how far Raymond is involved, and I want to get her out of the way. Tony’s the only man who can get her out of the way. I suppose I ought to go through all the passages to-night, but I’m not going to. I shall tell Piggy why. As a matter of fact, he’ll be just as keen as I am on getting Raymond out of it. Once she’s clear, we can come down on Ember like a cartload of bricks and smash up any devilry he may have been contriving. Now do you see why you must keep clear? I can’t possibly do my job if I’m torn in bits about your running into danger. And next time you went feeling along these passages you might really run into your friend Ember, you know.”
“I won’t unless I’ve got to,” said Jane. “You don’t imagine I like green slime, and slugs, and the pitch dark, do you? But I won’t promise. Now I’m going. Good-bye, Henry.”
“You’re an obstinate little devil, Jane,” said Henry.
Jane gave a little gurgling laugh.
“We haven’t made an assignation yet,” she said. “When are you coming back?”
“Well, I’ve made an appointment with Tony for to-morrow night, but I’ll try and catch him now and put that off for twenty-four hours. If for any reason I have to come down sooner, I will come and tap on your cupboard door. If I’m not there by midnight to-morrow, don’t expect me. But I’ll be there for certain the following night—let me see, that’s Sunday.”
“But if you don’t come?”
“I will.”
“Well, just supposing something prevented you?”
“It won’t,” said Henry cheerfully.
Henry found Anthony Luttrell sitting on the stone bench and so oblivious of his surroundings that it needed a hand on his shoulder to rouse him. Then he said vaguely:
“Oh, you’re back.”
“Rouse up a bit, Tony. It might have been Mr. Jeffrey Ember, you know. He was in the passages last night, and, for all I know, he may be there every night. I came back to say that I shan’t be down to-morrow. Make our appointment Sunday night instead.”
“I want to be out of this by then,” said Anthony. “I’ll go sick if there’s no other way. Stay here another forty-eight hours I cannot, and will not. I tell you I can’t answer for myself.”
Henry gave an inward groan. Jane had evidently been entirely right. They had not made it up.
“You’ve seen Raymond. I saw her pass.”
“I’ve seen ... Lady Heritage. Henry, will you tell me what the devil women are made of? She seemed to expect to take things up exactly as if the last seven years had never been at all, exactly as if there had been no breach, no war, no John Heritage, and no Jeffrey Ember. Oh, damn Jeffrey Ember!...”
“And I suppose you stood there and fired off sarcastic remarks at the poor girl, instead of thanking heaven for your luck. What’s the good of brooding over the past, Tony, and letting it spoil everything for you now? Raymond cares a heap more for you than you deserve, and if she’s got into a mess, it’s up to you to get her out of it. After all, you don’t want a scandal, do you?”
“I’ve got to get away. It’s no good, Henry.”
“I’ll give Piggy your letter,” Henry went on, “and tell him how you feel. He’ll recall you all right. But I know he’s very strong on your coming to life again. You ought to have done it ages ago; when you came back from Russia, in fact. Look here, Tony, be a reasonable being. Shave off your beard, and take the artistic colour off that scar. Turn up in London as yourself, and wire Raymond to come up and meet you. I want her got away from here.”
“Then get Piggy to wire to her, or her father. There are a dozen ways in which it can be done. I refuse quite definitely to have anything to do with it. If Piggy hasn’t recalled me by Monday, I shall simply go. You can tell him that, if you like; and you can tell him that I shall probably kill some one if I stay here.”
Without another word he got up, walked round the seat, and disappeared into the passage.
A little later Henry emerged from a cave upon the seashore. There were a number of these caves, some large, some small, under the far side of the headland.
The boundary of Luttrell Marches lay a quarter of a mile behind.
Henry walked briskly along the shore, keeping close to the cliff so that he might walk on rock instead of shingle. Presently he left the beach and climbed a steep zigzagging path. Twenty minutes’ walk brought him to a small inn where he picked up his car and drove away.
Next day in Sir Julian’s room he unburdened himself and delivered Anthony’s letter.
“’M, yes; I’ll recall him,” said Piggy frowning. “He’s no good where he is, if that’s his frame of mind. But it’s a pity—a pity. It bears out exactly what I’ve always said. He has extraordinary abilities; I suppose he might have made a brilliant success in almost any profession, but he’s impayable.... I don’t think we’ve got a word for it in English ...; he lacks the vein of mediocrity which I maintain is indispensable—the faculty of being ordinary which, for instance, you possess.”
Henry blushed a little, and Sir Julian laughed.
“I think I’ll send him abroad again. Of course it’s high time he came to life, as you say, if it’s only for the sake of getting you out of what must be an extremely awkward position. My wife tells me that match-making mammas of her acquaintance regard you with romantic interest as the owner of Luttrell Marches. Well, I’ll see him when he comes up. Meanwhile, I’ve had Simpson’s report. He says that, according to reliable information, two men were concerned in the sale of Formula ‘A.’ One is a man called Belcovitch, the other, who seems to have kept in the background, is described as a big good-looking man—florid complexion, blue eyes, either English or American, though he passed under the name of Bernier and professed to be Swiss. Does that fit your friend Ember by any chance?”
“No,” said Henry, “but it sounds very much like Molloy.”
“Molloy was supposed to have gone to the States, wasn’t he?”
Piggy had been drawing a neat brick wall at the foot of a sheet of foolscap. He now sketched in rapidly two fighting cats. It was a spirited performance. Each cat had wildly up-ended fur and a waving tail.
“Well, he and Ember told Miss Smith that he was going to the States. I don’t know that that goes for very much.”
“’M, no,” said Piggy. “Well, Bernier passed through Paris yesterday, and is in London to-day. Belcovitch has gone to Vienna. Now, if Bernier is Molloy, he’ll probably communicate with Ember. I was having him shadowed, of course, but the fool who was on the job has managed to let him slip. I’m hoping to pick him up again, but meanwhile....”
Piggy was putting in the cats’ claws as he spoke, his enormous hand absolutely steady over the delicate curves and sharp points.
“There’s nothing more about Ember?” said Henry.
Sir Julian shook his head, and went on drawing. “He wore the white flower of a blameless life in Chicago, and was absolutely unknown to the police,” he said. “There’s a three-volume novel about Molloy, though. You’d better have it to read. Now you go off and have some sleep, and ... er, by the way, if Miss Smith ... what’s her other name?”
“Jane,” said Henry.
“Well, if she wants to get away at any time, my wife will be very pleased to put her up.”
“Thank you awfully, sir,” said Henry.
When he had gone, Sir Julian asked the Exchange for his private number. He sat holding the receiver to his ear and touching up his cats until Isobel’s voice said:
“Yes, who is it?”
Then he said:
“M’ dear, in the matter of Henry.”
“Yes? Has anything happened?”
“In the matter of Henry,” said Piggy firmly, “I should say, from his conscious expression, that he had brought it off. Her name is Jane Smith.”
“And I mayn’t ask any questions?”
“Not one. I just thought you’d better know her name in case she suddenly arrived to stay with you. That’s all. I shall be late.”
He rang off.
It was not till next day that Jane missed her handkerchief. When she reached her room after saying good-bye to Henry she had rolled the serge dress, the wet felt slippers and the damp stockings into a bundle, and pushed them right to the back of her cupboard. She was so sleepy that she hardly knew how she undressed.
The instant her head touched the pillow, she slept, a pleasant, dreamless sleep, and only woke with the housemaid’s knock.
It was when she was drinking a very welcome cup of tea that she began to wonder whether she was engaged to Henry or not. On the one hand, Henry undoubtedly appeared to think that she was; on the other, Jane felt perfectly satisfied that she had pledged herself to nothing more formidable than a promise to quarrel. A small but very becoming dimple appeared in Jane’s cheek as she came to the conclusion that Henry was possibly engaged to her, but that she was certainly not engaged to Henry. It seemed to her to be a very pleasant state of affairs. It was, in fact, with great reluctance that she transferred her thoughts to more practical matters.
Having dressed, she extracted the bundle of clothes from the cupboard, and decided that the serge dress might be hung up. There were one or two damp patches and several green smears, but the former would dry and the latter when dry would brush off.
“But the slippers are awful,” she said.
They were; the cork soles sopping wet, the felt drenched and slimy. She made a brown paper parcel of them, and put it at the extreme back of the cupboard. The stockings she consigned to the clothes basket.
“I can wash them out later on,” she thought.
It was at this point that she missed her handkerchief. She had had a handkerchief the night before. She was sure of that, because she remembered drying her eyes with it after she had cried.
A little colour came into her face at the recollection of how vehemently she had wept on Henry’s shoulder with Henry’s arm round her, but it died again at the insistently recurring thought:
“I had a handkerchief. I dried my eyes with it. Where is it?”
Not only had she dried her eyes with it, but after that she remembered scrubbing the finger-tips that had touched the slug. The handkerchief must be horribly smeared and wet. It was one of Renata’s, of course, white with a blue check border, and “R. Molloy, 12” in marking-ink across one corner. Imagine buying twelve horrors like that! Mercifully Renata must have lost most of them, for Jane had only inherited four.
She brought her thoughts back with a jerk. Where was it? If she had dropped it in the house it would have been either in the hall, on the stairs, or in the corridor, and one of the housemaids would have brought it to her by now. It must have fallen in the cross-passage where she had stood with Henry, and if it were found....
Jane moved a step or two backwards, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Of all the first-class prize idiots!” she said, and there words failed her.
If she had dropped it in the cross-passage, it might lie there until Sunday night when she could get Henry to retrieve it, or it might not. Ember—Lady Heritage—Anthony Luttrell, any one of these three people might have business in that cross-passage, in which case a handkerchief, even if stained, was just the most unlikely thing in the world to pass unnoticed. Even if no one went up that passage, it might be seen from the main tunnel. Of course, if it were Anthony Luttrell who found it, it would not matter. But it was so very much more likely to be one of the others.
At intervals during the morning, Jane continued to argue the question, or rather two questions. First, the probabilities for and against the handkerchief being discovered; and second, should she, or should she not, go and look for it herself in defiance of Henry’s prohibition? She had spoken the truth, but not the whole truth, when she told Henry that she hated the idea of going into the passages alone. She hated going, but she wanted to go. Most ardently she desired to find things out before Henry found them out. It would be nice and safe to sit with her hands in her lap whilst Henry explored secret subterranean caverns, and unravelled dangerous conspiracies—safe but hideously dull. When Henry had finished exploring and unravelling, he would come along frightfully pleased with himself and want her to be engaged to him, and he would always, always feel superior and convinced that he had done the whole thing himself. It was a most intolerable thought, more intolerable than green slime and being alone in the dark. It was at this point that Jane made up her mind that she would go and look for her handkerchief herself without waiting for Henry.
Having made her decision, she found an unlooked-for opportunity for carrying it out, for at lunch Lady Heritage announced her intention of putting in several hours of laboratory work, whilst it transpired that Ember was going out in the two-seater car which he drove himself, and that he was quite uncertain when he would be back. Jane at once made up her mind that, as soon as the coast was quite clear, she would slip down into the passages. She would wait until lunch had been cleared and the servants were safely out of the way. No one was likely to come into the hall, and the whole thing would be so much less terrifying than another midnight expedition.
Ember excused himself before lunch was over, and she heard him drive away a few minutes later; but Lady Heritage sat on, her untasted coffee beside her. She sat with her chin in her hand, looking out of the window, and it was obvious enough that her thoughts were far away. She was probably unconscious of Jane’s presence, certainly undesirous of it, and yet, for the life of her, Jane could not have risen or asked if she might go. Once or twice she looked from under her lashes at Raymond’s still white face. There was a new look upon it since yesterday. She was sadder and yet softer. She looked as if she had not slept at all.
After a very long half-hour she turned her eyes on Jane. There was a flash of surprise and then a frown.
“You needn’t have waited,” she said in a cold voice, and then got up and went out without another word.
Jane took a book into the hall and sat there.
Presently she caught a glimpse of Raymond’s white overall in the upper corridor, and heard the clang with which the steel gate closed behind her. She sat quite still and went on reading until all sounds from the direction of the dining-room had ceased. Silence settled upon the house, and she told herself that this was her opportunity.
She ran up to her room, changed into the serge dress, and put on a pair of outdoor shoes. She did not possess an electric torch, and the question of a light had exercised her a good deal. The best she could do was to pocket a box of matches and one of the bedroom candles which was half burnt down. She then went downstairs, and, after listening anxiously for some moments, she once more moved the heavy chair and, climbing on it, began to feel for the knots on the panelling. As her fingers found and pressed them, she heard, simultaneously with the click of the released spring, a faint thudding noise. With a spasm of horror she knew that some one had passed through the baize door that shut off the servants’ wing. The sound she had heard was the sound of the door falling back into place, and at any other moment it would have gone unnoticed.
Fortunately for herself Jane was accustomed to a rapid transition from thought to action. She was off the chair, across the hall, and sitting with a book on her lap when the butler made his usual rather slow entrance.
She had recognised at once that it would be impossible for her to replace the chair and escape discovery. It stood in the shadow, and she hoped for the best.
Blotson crossed the hall and disappeared into Sir William’s study.
Jane gazed at a printed page upon which the letters of the alphabet were playing “General post.” After some interminable minutes Blotson reappeared. He shut the study door, approached Jane, and in a low and confidential voice inquired would she have tea in the hall, the drawing-room, or the library.
“Oh, the library,” said Jane, “the library, Blotson.” And with a majestic, “Very good, miss,” Blotson withdrew.
Blotson’s “Very good” always reminded Jane of the Royal Assent to an Act of Parliament. It was doubtless a form, but how stately, how dignified a form.
When the chill superinduced by the presence of Blotson had yielded to a more natural temperature, Jane went on tiptoe across the hall and replaced the chair. It was a comfort to reflect that it had escaped Blotson’s all-embracing eye. With a hasty glance she swung the panel inwards, slipped through, and closed it again.
She descended all the steps before she ventured to light her candle, and she was careful to put the spent match into her pocket. Renata’s dress really did have a pocket, which, of course, made the dropping of the handkerchief quite inexcusable.
The passage was much less terrifying when one had a light of one’s own instead of the distant glimmer of somebody else’s and the horrid possibility of being left at any moment in total darkness, with no idea of one’s whereabouts or of how to get out.
Jane’s spirits rose brightly. To dread a thing and then to find it easy provides one with a pleasant sense of difficulty overcome. In great cheerfulness of spirit Jane walked along until she came to the cross-passage on her right. She turned up it, walked a few steps holding her candle high, and there, a couple of yards from the entrance, lay the handkerchief rolled into a wet and very dirty ball. She picked it up gingerly, and put it into her convenient pocket.
“And I suppose I ought to go back at once; but what a waste, when every one is safely out of the way, and I’ve got through the really horrid part, which is opening that abominable spring.”
Jane hesitated, weighing the duty of a swift return against the pleasure of exploring and perhaps getting ahead of Henry. The recollection that Henry had forbidden her to explore turned the scale—towards pleasure.
She had four inches of candle and a whole box of matches. She had at least two hours of liberty, and, most important of all, she felt herself to be in a frame of mind which invited success. The question was where to begin.
On the right-hand side there was only this single passage. Jane did not feel attracted by it. She was almost sure that it must lead to the potting-shed, and to descend from conspiracies to garden lumber would indeed be an anti-climax.
On the left there were four passages. Jane walked back along the way she had come. The first passage left the main tunnel at an acute angle which obviously carried it back under the main block of the house. Jane decided to explore it. She held her candle high in one hand and her skirts close with the other. The passage was low, and she had to bend a little. After half a dozen yards she came to a flight of steps. They were wet, slippery, and very steep. Jane stood on the top step and looked down.
The walls oozed moisture, the candlelight showed her a pale slug about five inches long—Jane said six to start with, but, under pressure from Henry, retreated as far as five and would not yield another half-inch; she also said that the slug waved its horns at her and was crawling in her direction. Right there, as the Americans say, she made up her mind that this would be a good passage to explore with Henry, later on. She caught a glimpse of another slug on a level with the fifth step, whisked round, and ran.
“The one point about slugs is that they can’t run,” she said as she came back into the main corridor.
Without giving herself time to think, she plunged into the next opening on the left. It ran at right angles to the central passage, and was comparatively dry. It kept on the same level too, and Jane, trying to make a mental plan, thought that it must run under the house, cutting across the north wing. It occurred to her that there might be vaults of some kind under the terrace, and that this passage would perhaps lead to them. If this were so, it must soon either curve gradually to the left or take a sudden sharp turn. She wished she had thought of counting her steps, but it was difficult to pace regularly on a slippery floor and in such a poor light.
Just as she had begun to think that the passage must run out to sea, she came to the sharp turn which she had expected. A wall of black rock faced her, to her right a tunnel ran in at a sharp angle, and to her left there was a dark stone arch, a few feet of a new sort of tunnel built of brick, and then a steel gate exactly like the gates which shut off the laboratories in the house above.
Jane stared at the gate as if she expected it to dissolve into the surrounding darkness. The candle-light danced on the steel. It was rusty, but not so very rusty, and therefore it could not have been for very long in its present position. She came closer and touched it. It was real.
Her amazing good fortune almost overcame her. What a thing to tell Henry! What a justification for flouting his orders!! What a score!!!
Jane transferred the candle to her left hand, put out a right hand which trembled with excitement, and tried the gate. It was open. For a moment she drew back. Like the child who sits looking at a birthday parcel, the mere sight of which provides it with so many thrills that it cannot bring itself to cut the string and unwrap the paper, Jane stood and looked at her gate, her discovery—hers, not Henry’s.
As she looked, her eyes were caught by a small knob on the right-hand wall. It was about four feet above the floor and quite close to the steel bars. It was made of some dull metal and looked exactly like an electric-light switch. By going quite close to the gate and looking through she could see that a cased wire ran along the bricks on the same level, and she remembered that Henry had said the passages were wired.
Had Henry been first on the field after all? She turned, held her light high, and looked back. The wire went up to the roof and ran along until she lost it in the darkness. She reflected hopefully that Henry might have seen the wire much farther along, and turned back again.
Her fingers were on the switch when a really dreadful thought pricked her. Suppose the switch controlled some horrible explosive! It might turn on a light, most likely it did; but, on the other hand, it might let loose a raging demon of destruction that would blow the whole place to smithereens. It was an unreasonable thought, the sort of thought that one dismisses instantly in the daylight, but which by candlelight in an underground tunnel assumes a certain degree of credibility.
“The question is, am I going on or not?”
The silence having failed to supply her with an answer, she said viciously, “You’re a worse rabbit than Renata,” shut her eyes, held her breath, and jerked the switch down.
Through her closed lids came a red flash. She clung to the switch and waited. A drop of boiling wax guttered down upon her left forefinger. She opened her eyes and saw the steel gate like a black tracery against a lighted space beyond. With a quickly drawn breath of relief she pushed the steel gate, took one step forward, and then stood rigid, listening to the muffled yet insistent whir of an alarm bell. After one horrified moment she pulled the door towards her again. The sound ceased. Jane considered.
As a result of her consideration she turned out the electric light, opened the gate, slipped through, and closed it again so quickly that the bell was hardly heard. She did not allow it to latch, and, stooping, set a piece of broken brick to hold it ajar. The candlelight seemed very inadequate, but she decided that she must make it do, and holding it well up in front of her, she came through a brick arch into a long chamber with walls of stone.
Jane looked about her with ignorant, widely opened eyes. She had never been in a laboratory, but she knew that this must be one. The printed page does not exist for nothing. The vague yellow light flickered on strange cylindrical shapes and was flung back by glass jars and odd twisted retorts. A great many appliances, for which she could find no name, emerged from dense shadow into the uncertain dusk.
“It’s like a mediæval torture chamber—only worse, colder—more calculating! It’s a sort of torture chamber. I hate it. It gives me the grues,” said Jane.
She moved slowly down the room. It was quite dry in here. There was no slime, and there were no slugs.
“I hate it a thousand times more than the passages,” she said.
Her feet moved slowly and unwillingly. In the far corner there were two more arches. She thought she would just see what lay beyond them and then return. She took the one on the right hand first. It ran along a little way and then terminated in a small round chamber which was full of packing-cases. She returned and went down the second passage. She was just inside it when with startling suddenness she found herself looking at her own shadow. It lay clear and black on the brick floor in front of her. Some one had turned on the electric light.
Jane’s candle tilted and the wax dropped. Her horrified eyes looked about wildly for a place of refuge. The light showed her one. Within a yard of the entrance there was an arched hollow. With a sort of gasp she blew her candle out and bolted for the shelter. The whir of the electric bell sounded as she gained it, sounded and then ceased. She heard Ember say, “Quite a good run, wasn’t it?” and a voice which she did not expect answer, “Well enough.” The voice puzzled her. It was a pleasant voice, deep and rich. It had something of a brogue and something of a twang.
A most unpleasant light broke upon Jane. It was the voice of the Anarchist Uncle. It was the voice of Mr. Molloy.
Jane got as far back into her hollow as she could. It was not very far. There had evidently been a tunnel here, but the roof had fallen in, and the floor was rough and uneven with the débris.
She heard the two men moving in the room beyond, and she experienced a most sincere repentance for not having attended to the counsels of Henry.
“And now we can talk,” said Ember. “You’ve got the cash?”
“Not with me,” said Mr. Molloy.
“Why not?”
“Oh, just in case....”—a not unmelodious whistle completed the sentence.
“They paid the higher figure?”
“They did,” said Mr. Molloy. “Belcovitch was for taking their second bid, but I told him ‘No.’ Belcovitch has his points, but he’s not the bold bargainer. I told him ‘No.’ I told him ‘It’s this way—if they want it they’ll pay our price.’ And pay it they did. I don’t know that I ever handled that much money before, and all for a sheet or two of paper. Well, well——”
“You should have brought the money with you. Why didn’t you?”
In the now brightly lighted laboratory Molloy sat negligently on the end of a bench and lifted his eyebrows a little.
“Well, I didn’t,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“In a place of safety.”
Ember shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, we’ve pulled it off,” he said. “By the way, the fact of the sale is known. We’ve had an interfering young jack-in-office down here making inquiries, and Sir William has gone up to town in a very considerable state of nerves.”
“The Anarchist Uncle,” said Jane to herself, “has been selling the Government Formula ‘A.’ He doesn’t trust Mr. Ember enough to hand the money over. Pleasant relations I’ve got!”
Molloy whistled again, a long-drawn note with a hint of dismay in it.
“I wonder who let the cat out of the bag,” he said.
“These things always leak out. It doesn’t really signify. With this money at our command we can complete our arrangements at once, and be ready to strike within the next few weeks. You and Belcovitch had better keep out of the way until the time comes. He should be here in four days’ time, travelling by the route we settled; then you’ll have company. You must both lie close here.”
“That’s the devil of a plan now, Ember,” said Molloy. “We’ll be no better than rats in a drain.”
“Well, it’s for your safety,” said Ember. “They’re out for blood over this business of Formula ‘A,’ I can tell you, and there’s nowhere you’d be half so safe.”
Jane was listening with all her ears. She decided that Mr. Ember’s solicitude was not all on Molloy’s account. “He thinks that if Molloy and Belcovitch are arrested, they’ll give him away over the big thing in order to save themselves. I expect they’d be able to make a pretty good bargain for themselves, really.” She heard Molloy give a sulky assent. Then Ember was speaking again:
“I want to check the lists with you. Not the continental ones—I’ll keep those for Belcovitch—but those for the States and here. I’ve got them complete now, but I’m not very sure about all the names. Hennessey now, he’s down for Chicago, but I don’t know that I altogether trust Hennessey.”
“It’s late in the day to say that,” said Molloy.
“Well, what about Hayling Taylor?”
Jane listened, and heard name follow name. Ember appeared to be reading from a list. He would name a large town and follow it with a list of persons who apparently acted as agents there. Sometimes these names were passed with an assenting grunt by Molloy, sometimes there was a discussion.
There are a great many large towns in the United States of America. Jane became stiffer and stiffer. At last she could bear her constrained half-crouching position no longer. Very gingerly, moving half an inch at a time, she let herself down until she was sitting on the pile of broken bricks which blocked the tunnel. The names went on. It was dull and monotonous to a degree, but behind the dullness and the monotony there was a sense of lurking horror.
“It’s like being in a fog,” said Jane—“the sort you can’t see through at all, and knowing that there’s a tiger loose somewhere.”
One thing became clearer and clearer to her. Those lists that sounded like geography lessons must be got hold of somehow. Henry must have them.
After what seemed like a long time Ember folded up one paper and produced another. If Jane had been able to watch Mr. Molloy’s face, she would have noticed that, every now and then, it was crossed by a look of hesitation. He seemed constantly about to speak and yet held his peace.
“I’d like you to check the names for Ireland too,” said Ember. “Grogan sent me the completed list two days ago. You’d better look at it.”
Molloy took the paper and ran his finger down the names, mumbling them only half audibly. His finger travelled more and more slowly. All at once he stopped, and threw the paper from him along the bench.
“What is it?” said Ember, in his cool tones.
Molloy frowned, got up, walked to the end of the room, and came back again. He appeared to have something to say, and to experience extreme difficulty in saying it. His words, when he did speak, seemed irrelevant:
“That’s a big sum they paid us for Formula ‘A,’” he said. “Did you ever handle as much money as that, Ember?”
“No,” said Jeffrey Ember, short and sharp.
“Nor I. It’s a queer thing the feeling it gives you. I tell you I came across with fear upon me, not knowing for sure whether I’d get away with it; but there was a lot besides fear in it. There was power, Ember, I tell you—power. Whilst I’d be sitting in the train, or walking down the street, or lying in my bed at an hotel, I’d be thinking to myself, I’ve got as much as would buy you up, and then there would be leavings.”
“What are you driving at, Molloy?” said Ember.
Molloy’s florid colour deepened. He narrowed his lids and looked through them at Ember.
“Maybe I was thinking,” he said, “that there’s a proverb we might take note of.”
“Well?”
“It’s just a proverb,” said Mr. Molloy. “It’s been in my mind since I had the handling of the money—‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’”
Ember’s eyes lost their dull film. They brightened until Mr. Molloy was unable to sustain their glance. He shifted his gaze, and Ember said very quietly:
“Are you thinking of selling us?”
Molloy broke into an oath. “And that’s a thing no one shall say of me,” he said, with a violence that sent his voice echoing along through the open arches.
“Then may I ask you what you meant?”
“Why, just this.” Molloy dropped to an ingratiating tone. “There’s the money safe—certain—in our hands now. What’s the need of all this?”
He came forward with two or three great strides, picked up the list from where he had thrown it, and beat with it upon his open hand.
“All this,” he repeated—“this and what it stands for. You may say there’s no risk, but there’s a big risk. It’s a gamble, and what’s the need to be gambling when we’ve got the money safe?”
“In plain English, you want to back out at the last moment?”
“I do not, and I defy you to say that I do.”
“Then what’s come to you?”
“Here’s the thing that’s come to me. It came to me when I ran me eye down this list. See there, and that’ll tell ye what has come to me.”
He thrust the list in front of Ember.
“It’s Galway you’ve got set down there.”
“Well, and what of it?” said Ember.
“What of it?” said Mr. Molloy. “I was born in Galway, and the only sister I ever had is married there. Four sons she has, decent young men by all the accounts I’ve had of them. If I haven’t been in Galway for thirty years, that’s not to say that I’ve no feeling for my own flesh and blood. Why, the first girl I ever courted lived out Barna way. Many’s the time I’ve met her in the dusk on the seashore, and she half crying for fear of what her father would do. Katie Blake her name was. They married her to old Timmy Dolan before I’d been six months out of the country. A fistful of gold he had, and a hard fist it was. I heard tell he beat her, poor Katie. But ye see now, Ember, it’s the same way with your native place and your first love, ye can’t get quit of them. Now I hadn’t been a month in Chicago before I was courting another girl, but to save my neck I couldn’t tell ye what her name was, and ye may blow Chicago to hell to-morrow and I’ll not say a word.”
“But not Galway?” Mr. Ember’s tone was very dry indeed.
“You’ve said it. Not Galway. I’ll not stand for it.”
Ember laughed. It was a laugh without merriment, cool, sarcastic.
“Molloy, the man of sentiment!” he said. “Now doesn’t it strike you that it’s just a little late in the day for this display of feeling? May I ask why you never raised the interesting subject of your birthplace before?”
“Is it sentiment that you’re sarcastic about?” said Molloy. “If it is, I’d have you remember that I’ve never let it interfere with business yet, and I wouldn’t now. Many’s the time I’ve put my feelings on one side when I was up against a business proposition. But I tell you right here that when I see my way to good money and to keeping what I call my sentiment too it looks pretty good to me, and I say to myself what I say to you, ‘What’s the sense of going looking for trouble?’”
Ember laughed again.
“I will translate,” he said. “From the sale of the Government formula you see your way to deriving a competency. You become, in a mild way, a capitalist. Luxuries before undreamed of are within your grasp—romantic sentiment, childhood’s memories, the finer feelings in fact. As a poor man you could not dream of affording them, though I dare say you’d have enjoyed them well enough. Is it a correct translation?”
“It is,” said Molloy.
“Molloy the capitalist!” Ember’s voice dropped just a little lower. “Molloy the man of sentiment! Molloy the traitor! No you don’t, Molloy, I’ve got you covered. Why, you fool, you don’t suppose I meet a man twice my own size in a place that no one knows of without taking the obvious precautions?”
Molloy had first started violently, and next made a sort of plunge in Ember’s direction. At the sight of the small automatic pistol he checked himself, backed a pace or two, and said:
“You’ll take that word back. It’s a damned lie.”
He breathed hard and stared at the pistol in Ember’s hand.
“Is it?” said Ember coolly. “I hope it is, for your sake. I’d remind you, Molloy, that no one would move heaven and earth to find you if you disappeared, and that it would be hard to find a handier place for the disposal of a superfluous corpse. Now listen to me.”
He set his left hand open on the lists.
“This is going through. It’s going through in every detail. It’s going through just as we planned it.” He spoke in level, expressionless tones. He looked at Molloy with a level, expressionless gaze. A little of the colour went out of the big Irishman’s face. He drew a long breath, and came to heel like a dog whose master calls him.
“Have it your own way,” he said. “It was just talk, and to see what you thought of it. If you’re set on the plan, why the plan it is.”
“We’re all committed to the plan,” said Ember. “You were talking a while ago as if you and I could do a deal and leave the rest of the Council out. Setting Belcovitch on one side, weren’t you forgetting to reckon with Number One?”
“Maybe I was,” said Molloy. “And come to that, Ember, when are we to have the full Council meeting you’ve been talking of for months past? Belcovitch and I had a word about it, and he agrees with me. We want a full meeting and Number One in the chair instead of getting all our instructions through you. It’s reasonable.”
“Yes, it’s reasonable.” Ember paused, and then added, “You shall have the full Council when Belcovitch comes.”
Jane on her pile of débris leaned forward to catch the words. Ember’s voice had dropped very low. She was shaking with excitement. Her movement was not quite a steady one. A small piece of rubble slid under the pressure she placed on it. Something slipped and rolled.
“What’s that?” said Ember sharply.
“Some more of the passage falling in,” said Molloy, “by the sound of it.”
“Just take a light and see.”
“It might have been a rat,” said Molloy carelessly.
There was a pause. Jane remained absolutely motionless. If they thought it was a rat perhaps they would not come and look. She stiffened herself, wondering how long she could keep this cramped position. Then, with a spasm of terror, she heard Molloy say, “I’ll have a look round. We don’t want rats in here,” heard his heavy footfall, and saw a brilliant beam of light stream past the entrance of her hiding-place.
Before she had time to do more than experience a stab of fear, Molloy walked straight past. She heard him go up the passage, heard him call out, “There’s nothing here.” Then he turned. He was coming back. Would he pass her again? It was just possible. She tried to think he would, and then she knew that he would not. The light flashed into the broken tunnel mouth. It flashed on the sagging roof, the damp walls and the broken rubble. It flashed on to Jane.
Jane saw only a white glare. She knew exactly what a beetle must feel like when it is pinned out as a specimen. The light went through and through her. It seemed to deprive her of thought, volition, power to move. She just stared at it.
Mr. Molloy using his flashlight cheerfully, and much relieved at a break in his conversation with Ember, received one of the severest shocks of his not unadventurous life. One is not a Terrorist for thirty years without learning a little elementary self-control in moments of emergency. He did not therefore exclaim. He merely stared. He saw a sagging roof and damp walls. He saw a muddled heap of broken bricks unnaturally clear cut and distinct. He saw the shadows which they cast, unnaturally black and hard. He saw Jane, whom he took to be his daughter Renata. His brain boggled at it. He passed his hand across his eyes, and looked again. His daughter Renata was still there. She was half sitting, half crouching on the pile of rubble. Her body was bent forward, her elbows resting on her knees, her hands one on either side of her colourless cheeks. Her face was tilted a little looking up at him. Her mouth was a little open. Her eyes stared into the light.
Jane stared, and Mr. Molloy stared. Then, with a sudden turn he swung round and passed back into the laboratory. As he went he whistled the air of “The Cruiskeen Lawn.”
Jane remained rigid. The beetle was unpinned. The light was gone. But the darkness was full of rockets and Catherine-wheels. Her ears were buzzing. From a long way off she heard Ember speak and Molloy answer. The rockets and the Catherine-wheels died away. She put her head down on her knees, and the darkness came back restfully.