The Deductions of Colonel Gore
The Deductions of Colonel Gore
Lynn Brock
Rob Reef
This brand new edition of the first novel to feature the officer and gentleman detective Colonel Wickham Gore includes the first ever reprint of the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination.Colonel Gore is reunited with old friends at a dinner party to mark his return from service in Africa, but is shocked to discover that one of them has fallen victim to a callous blackmailer. When the antagonist is found dead, Gore finds that civilian life can be as challenging as anything in the army, especially when one of your friends may have become a killer . . . but which one?Once famous in the West End and on Broadway for plays written as ‘Anthony Wharton’, Dublin-born Alexander McAllister had become a publican in Surrey when, as ‘Lynn Brock’, his writing career took off again with the creation of country detective Colonel Wickham Gore. Described by Rose Mcaulay as ‘a very clever writer: a gift for drawing life-like people and a lively sense of dramatic incident’, Brock became a pillar of the Golden Age with his Colonel Gore whodunits and pioneering psychological novels including the lurid Nightmare.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Rob Reef, author of the John Stableford mysteries, and for the first time reprints the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination, a country house murder story from a rare 1926 American pulp magazine.
‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
Copyright (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by
W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1924
Published by The Detective Story Club Ltd 1930
‘Too Much Imagination’ published in Flynn’s magazine 1926
Introduction © Rob Reef 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1930, 2018
Lynn Brock asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008283001
Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008283018
Version: 2018-08-24
Contents
Cover (#ub3ee8cc7-2248-5518-b74e-5dffc2e9e986)
Title Page (#u700ee0ca-6c5d-5fa8-9a07-5684533ea6a1)
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Too Much Imagination
Chapter I. Into the Net
Chapter II. Too Much to Swallow
Chapter III. The Note in her Hand
Chapter IV. Gore is Frank
Chapter V. Bloodstained Linen
Chapter VI. Arling Makes a Confession
Chapter VII. Tastes of a Secretary
Chapter VIII. Spain Waxes Vehement
Chapter IX. What Really Happened
Also by Lynn Brock
The Detective Story Club
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
ALEXANDER PATRICK MCALLISTER’S literary career had had a very promising start. Born in Dublin in 1877 and educated at Clongowes Wood College, he later obtained an Honours Degree at the Royal University and was appointed chief clerk shortly after the inception of the National University of Ireland. His stage plays Irene Wycherly (1906) and At the Barn (1912), both written under the pseudonym Anthony P. Wharton, became great successes both in London and on Broadway.
Following these two hits, McAllister continued to write, but none of his subsequent plays could revive his early fame. He and his wife Cicely moved from London to Guildford, where they were to run a pub called The Jolly Farmer, and at the age of 46 he wrote his first detective novel, The Deductions of Colonel Gore (1924), under the pseudonym Lynn Brock. By this time, his early fame as a playwright had faded and he appears to have turned his hand to crime fiction simply to improve his finances at a time when detective books had begun to outsell all others. Nevertheless, the book was sold to William Collins in the UK and Harper & Brothers in the US, and became so successful that ‘Lynn Brock’ lived on to publish thirteen detective novels, seven of which featured his titular hero-detective Colonel Wickham Gore.
Brock’s complex plots and witty style won the praise of many critics including Dorothy L. Sayers and S. S. Van Dine, and his mysteries were often reprinted and widely translated. Despite their fame, however, the novels slid into obscurity shortly after the end of the Second World War—unjustly, some might suggest. Several recent reviews have criticised his novels as cliché-studded, dull affairs overloaded with Golden Age formulas and stereotypes. These reviews have missed the point: Brock actually played his part in the creation of those classic detective fiction patterns now so familiar and dear to us. He wasn’t a mere imitator of the genre, but rather experimented with existing formulas long before they became formulaic.
Comparison with some of his fellow-writers shows that Brock was an ‘early bird’ in the genre. Colonel Gore took the stage three years before Sherlock Holmes’ last appearance in ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’; he preceded the debut of S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance in The Benson Murder Case by two years, and Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham in The Layton Court Mystery, John Rhode’s Dr Priestley in The Paddington Mystery and Anthony Wynne’s Dr Hailey in The Mystery of the Evil Eye by one year. All these authors (and many more not mentioned here) established serial detectives in the fashion of the times, and Brock’s Colonel Gore appears to fit into this category remarkably well.
But was he really originally meant to be just another amateur detective with a military background like Philip MacDonald’s Anthony Gethryn, who made his debut in The Rasp the same year as Colonel Gore? It is reasonable to doubt that. Gore lacks too many of the typical characteristics of the traditional hero-detective. He is not a well-to-do super sleuth like Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot. He has no profession that could help him solve crimes like the many doctors and scholars in the trade. He has no sidekick and no ally at Scotland Yard and, to cap it all, absolutely no talent for detecting! Gore makes mistakes. Many mistakes. In fact, he finds so many wrong solutions in The Deductions of Colonel Gore that the real solution ends up being the only one that is left.
T. S. Eliot called Gore ‘too stupid’. But he may have missed the parody in the title and the satirical undertones of Gore’s first adventure in his critique. The Deductions of Colonel Gore reminds one of Ronald A. Knox’s The Viaduct Murder (1925), where the four protagonists tumble from one wrong conclusion to the next trying to solve a murder on a golf course. Both books share the same tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the science of deduction and a tendency to spoof the methods of the great Sherlock Holmes. In fact, this similarity of approach suggests that Brock, like Knox, had intended to write a non-series book. Knox introduced a new detective in his next novel, The Three Taps (1927), whereas Brock—perhaps surprised by the success of his debut—elected for the security of continuing to develop his eponymous character. Colonel Gore’s Second Case (1925) shows Brock working to transform Gore into a sustainable serial protagonist, culminating in Gore finding a sidekick and, later in the series, establishing a detective agency in London. But all that is in the future.
Colonel Gore steps into his first adventure having just returned from Africa and looking forward to meeting many of his old friends. The story begins with a perfectly conventional dinner party. However, before the evening is over, ‘blackmail’ and ‘murder’ complete the guest list. These are not the only gruesome elements in the story. T. S. Eliot once mentioned the ‘extremely nasty people’ in Brock’s novels, and it is true that the author evokes a rather dark and pessimistic view of human nature. Nevertheless, The Deductions of Colonel Gore is a rip-roaring and, from today’s point of view, wonderfully old-fashioned mystery. It includes an archaic African murder weapon and a constantly confused detective who changes his mind about the possible culprit with each new clue he uncovers.
It is important to note that Brock’s stories contain some antiquated stereotypes of Jews and Africans. Such stereotypes would be intolerable in fiction written today, but were unfortunately not uncommon in the 1920s when these stories were published, and like similar writings of their era must be considered within their historical context.
The Deductions of Colonel Gore was reissued as Book 31 in Collins’ popular Detective Story Club in July 1930, and was joined by reprints of his second and third cases the following year. This new edition now includes for the first time the only published Colonel Gore short story, ‘Too Much Imagination’, which first appeared in Flynn’s weekly magazine on 30 January 1926. It follows Gore’s (by now more serious) deductions in a country house murder case. Connoisseurs of his adventures will be interested to note that the story appears to be a sketchy draft of Colonel Gore’s Third Case (1927, published in the USA as The Kink)—as well as the playful appearance of the author’s own home, The Jolly Farmer. It was in Guildford that McAllister wrote his first ‘Lynn Brock’ mystery and it is thus not surprising that most of his Colonel Gore adventures are set in or near Surrey.
In 1932, the innovative psychological novel Nightmare began a run of standalone books from Brock, although it was not quite the end for Gore: the Colonel returned after a break of ten years in his swan song, The Stoat: Colonel Gore’s Queerest Case (1940). Three years later, on 6 April 1943, Alexander Patrick McAllister died at the age of 66 at Herrison House, a hospital near the Dorset village of Charminster, ending a literary career very different from the one he had started, but no less successful for all that.
ROB REEF
February 2018
CHAPTER I (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
FOR just a moment following the sound of the door’s closing behind her husband’s entry Mrs Melhuish’s profile remained downbent in abstracted calculation to the bridge-block in her lap. A small forgetfulness, natural enough, perhaps, in a hostess’s last half-hour of anxiety before a duty dinner of importance. Yet, even twelve months ago, Sidney Melhuish remembered with passionate resentment, that absorbed, adorable little face would have flashed round, even in such an anxiety, in eager welcome to his coming. As they noted and weighed the momentary delay, his rather cold eyes hardened. Then, swiftly, they averted themselves. When Mrs Melhuish raised to him an expression of good-humoured perplexity, he was mildly absorbed in his finger-nails.
‘What a nuisance, Sidney. Mr Barrington has just rung up to say that Mrs Barrington can’t possibly come. Frightful earache, poor thing. I’ve been trying to work out my table. Do come and help me.’
Her air of charming, unruffled dismay was candour itself—beyond suspicion. And yet Melhuish was aware that for an instant as she spoke her smiling eyes had repeated once more the question they had asked of his so often of late. But of the hideous, the incredible suspicion that lurked behind it his clean-cut, gravely-smiling face betrayed no slightest hint as he moved behind her chair to inspect the much-altered plan of the dining-table which was drawn on the bridge-block.
For a moment or two they considered it in silence.
‘If I had had even another quarter of an hour’s notice—I know Beatrice Colethorpe would have stopped the gap for me. But even the amiable Beatrice would kick at a dinner-invitation of twenty minutes.’
She turned—Melhuish observed how instantly—as the door of the drawing-room reopened and Clegg announced the first of the evening’s guests.
‘Colonel Gore.’
No moment of feigned abstraction now—no summoning of her forces—no steadying of her nerves to meet his glance. Instead, a quick smile and gesture of vivid, frankest pleasure, in which his poisoned thought detected relief and eager escape from the danger of being alone with him.
Gore’s lean brown face reflected the cordiality of his hostess’s greeting, as she rose and went to meet him with outstretched hand.
‘“Early”, you commanded me. Therefore I have obeyed. Not too literally, I hope.’
Mrs Melhuish laughed as her hand slid into a clasp of fraternal heartiness.
‘Well, as you have kept us waiting for three years, I think we may acquit you of undue precipitation.’ She turned to her husband. ‘This, Sidney, is the one and only Wick.’
Gore’s twinkling gray eyes ran over his host in swift appraisement as they shook hands. In the four days for which he had been installed at the Riverside Hotel he had contrived to learn a good deal about Barbara Melhuish’s husband, and that swift, straight, shrewd glance of his assured him at once that his informants had not been mistaken. A bit frigid, Dr Sidney Melhuish—a bit solemn, perhaps—but one of the right sort. Steady, clean eyes—steady, clean mouth—plenty of jaw and chin. A man that knew his job and knew he knew it. He grinned his charming grin and took the hand of Pickles’s husband in a grip of steel. Thank the Lord, she hadn’t made a mess of it, as so many of the Old Lot had somehow contrived to do.
‘I know you very well by repute, Colonel Gore,’ Melhuish smiled cordially—few men could resist Wick Gore’s grin. ‘Indeed, it is only with the utmost difficulty, I assure you, that I refrain from addressing you as “Wick” straightaway.’
‘Why refrain?’ twinkled Gore. ‘Especially as I may confide to you that I have been in the habit of addressing your wife as “Pickles” since she was able to throw dolls and bottles and things at me out of a perambulator.’
‘Now, now,’ expostulated Mrs Melhuish. ‘No indiscretions, please.’
‘I apologise. I must remember that now I find you with a husband who believes not only that you are perfection, but that you always were.’
But his little pleasantry had somehow fallen flat, he perceived—as little pleasantries sometimes did. Melhuish, he divined, was a man to whom little pleasantries must be administered cautiously; no doubt, too, in three years of matrimony the light-hearted Pickles had acquired some of the seriousness of mind becoming to the wife of a rising physician.
‘I must get my table right. Do come and help me,’ said Mrs Melhuish hurriedly, returning to her diagram. ‘Mrs Barrington has developed bad earache and can’t come. We have just seven minutes to divide four women neatly and tactfully amongst five men. Let us concentrate our three powerful intellects. There—now I’ve drawn a nice new table. The blob at the top is Sidney.’
Gore glanced down at the first design, thus abandoned.
‘Barrington is coming then?’ he asked.
Mrs Melhuish nodded her golden head abstractedly.
‘Mrs Barrington insisted upon it, he said. Ah—I’ve got it.’ She scribbled some hasty initials. ‘There’s no help for it, Wick. You must divide Sylvia Arndale with Sir James. There—!
She held up her revised scheme for her husband’s consideration, and, when he had approved it with his grave smile, flitted from the room to superintend the rearrangement of her cards. It was nine years since Gore had seen her; but she had changed, he reflected, as he attended upon her exit, very little; if at all, for the better. Pickles must be just thirty now. Thirty … Extraordinary. His mind flashed back to the night of her coming-out dance—November, 1910. Twelve years ago—incredible. Ah, well—those days were done with, and the Pickles of them. With the faintest of sighs he turned to rejoin the lucky beggar who had, somehow, succeeded in capturing that airy miracle and putting it in charge of his socks and his servants and his dinner-parties. A good chap—a good-looking chap—a chap, perhaps, a tiny shade too old for her, but in every way plainly to the eye a chap to make her as happy and contented a wife as—well, as any intelligent wife was likely to be made.
‘You know most of the people who are coming to us this evening, Barbara assures me,’ said Melhuish.
‘All, I believe, except Barrington. I knew Mrs Barrington, of course, very well in the old days—when she was Miss Melville. She married just after the war, I think?’
‘Yes.’
A certain quality in the monosyllable attracted Gore’s attention.
‘Successfully, I hope? What part of the world does Barrington come from?’
‘Jamaica, I believe.’
Gore grinned.
‘Sounds like sugar. Money to money, I suppose. Always the way here in Linwood. Simply revolting the way it breeds in hereabouts. No chance whatever for the deserving poor, is there? I suppose old Melville came down with thirty or forty thousand at least?’ He sighed. ‘Lord—who wouldn’t be a son-in-law … in Linwood?’
For a moment Melhuish was absorbed in adjusting the rose shade of a light to his satisfaction.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, with that curious dryness of tone which his guest had already noticed, ‘I understand that the Melvilles disapproved of the marriage and made a very small settlement. Mr Barrington is a patient of mine—Mrs Barrington too, indeed. But I cannot claim what one would describe as an intimate acquaintance with either of them personally. My wife, no doubt, can tell you all about their affairs. As you are aware, of course, she and Mrs Barrington are very old friends—’
He paused. His smile was formally courteous, but unmistakably resolved to discuss Mrs Barrington and her husband in no further detail.
‘Right, my good man,’ reflected his insouciant guest, without resentment. ‘Keep your poker down your back if you think it makes you more impressive. A little bit sensitive, are you, because people are old friends of your wife’s and not of yours? Myself included, perhaps? Well, we’ve got to talk about something. Let’s try golf.’
But Melhuish, it became clear at once, regarded golf merely as an inducement to walk six miles on Sunday afternoon. Cheerfully Gore tried the by-election of the preceding week, fishing, the Panel System, and the Navy cuts. Mrs Melhuish returned to find the two men staring at the fire with the apparent conviction that in all the universe it alone held for them a common interest.
‘I did tell you, Wick, that Sir James Wellmore is our pièce de résistance this evening? Or did I? At any rate he is. We are awfully proud of him. He’s our show patient.’
‘You have met Sir James before, of course?’ Melhuish asked.
‘Once or twice—in the deplorably long ago—when he was not yet Sir James. When we were stationed out at Fieldbrook Barracks in nineteen-thirteen—just before we went to India—I remember he dined us and danced us and shot us in the most princely way. His first wife—she was still alive then—had, I recall, a penchant for the Services.’
Mrs Melhuish flashed a little teasing smile at him.
‘If I am not mistaken the present Lady Wellmore was addicted to the same pleasant vice in those days. Or was it the younger Miss Heathman who was the attraction?’
Gore’s teeth showed beneath his trim little wheaten moustache.
‘How happy could I have been with either,’ he laughed lightly. ‘I believe I did miss the chance of my lifetime then. Someone told me last night at the club that Angela Heathman’s income at present works out at just a shilling a minute. I’ve never stopped thinking about it since. If I hadn’t gone off so hopelessly, I—by Gad, I believe I’d chance my luck now.’
‘My dear Wick,’ laughed Mrs Melhuish, ‘Miss Heathman lives in the fourth dimension nowadays—or somewhere where there are better things than marriage and giving in marriage. Quite a difficult proposition, I should say, for a mercenary adventurer—even if he still has the smile of an angel and, still, no perceptible symptoms of a tum-tum.’
As their eyes met in smiling mutual approval, it seemed to Gore that nothing of their old camaraderie had faded, after all, in the passage of all those years. They had always looked at one another and chaffed one another just so, shrewdly yet with conviction of absolute understanding and sympathy, since the days when he had been a Harrovian of unusually misguided enterprise, and she the twinkling-legged bane of her nursemaid’s existence. It was pleasant to be back, if only for a little while, in one’s own country, and to find that one’s old place was still there, waiting for one. The chilling disillusionment that had invaded him steadily during the four days since his return was forgotten in a soothing content. From the radiant, piquant face of his hostess—smiling at him precisely as it had smiled at him twenty-five years before amongst the branches of forbidden apple-trees, with one eyebrow slightly higher than the other—his eyes turned to absorb the effect of the warmth and colour and dainty comfort of the big drawing-room that was her setting. And as they turned they met the eyes of her husband.
There was a moment of silence, and then Gore said, brightly, that it had looked quite like snow about five o’clock that afternoon. With that opinion the Melhuishs agreed, Mrs Melhuish with sparkling vivacity, her husband with considered conviction, as Clegg reappeared to announce the arrival of Mr and Mrs Arndale.
‘Good Lord,’ thought Gore, as he reared his graceful and admirably-tailored person from the most comfortable chair he had sat in for nine years. ‘The man thinks I’m an old flame of Pickles’s. I know he does. That’s why he has been watching me like a cat, is it? Fi-fi. Tut-tut. Pickles, Pickles … I hope I have not been mistaken in you?’
But no trace of these interior misgivings was visible as he shook hands with Cecil Arndale and his pretty, plump little wife. They, too, were part of the Old Days and the Old Lot—Sylvia Arndale and Barbara Melhuish were first cousins, and Cecil Arndale and he had been at Harrow together, though nearly three years separated them—and their pleasure at the meeting was as manifest as his own. In sixty seconds Mrs Arndale had reproached him for calling on two afternoons on which she had been out, informed him that she had made fifteen people buy his book, and secured him for dinner next day and a dance in the following week.
‘I went to see your film twice,’ she pouted, ‘and there you were, standing with hundreds and dozens of dead antelopes and things stacked all around you—and I never got as much as tsetse-fly’s whisker out of the lot. I shall never forget that you sent Barbara all those lovely stickers and beads and things as a wedding-present, and forgot me—me, who was once more than a sister to you—absolutely. Never, never.’
‘My dear Roly-Poly,’ grinned Gore placidly, ‘you forget that I sent you a very beautiful and costly flower-bowl when you were entitled to a wedding-present—which was, pray recollect, four years before I became a movie-star—’
‘For Heaven’s sake,’ cried Mrs Arndale, ‘don’t remind me how long I’ve been married to Cecil. It’s not fair to him, poor dear. It embitters me so, and he has a perfectly ghastly time when I’m embittered.’
Cecil Arndale laughed—a little foolishly, as he had always laughed, his rather prominent blue eyes glistening slightly in his large, brick-red face. He had grown fat, Gore observed—much too fat for a man of thirty-nine—and his fatness accentuated that slight weakness of mouth and chin that had always marred his good-humoured, healthy, conventional good looks. His laugh faded again instantly into abstraction; his blue eyes stared vacantly across the room, while his lips twisted and puckered and smoothed themselves out again restlessly. Too much food, Gore conjectured—altogether too much drink—too much money—too easy a life of it. Poor old Cecil. He had always threatened to go soft. With some little difficulty Gore suppressed the recollection that this hefty, healthy six-footer had spent the war in England, and, incidentally, doubled during it the fortune which he had inherited from his father. Well, someone had had to stay at home and build ships. Besides, Arndale had married in 1915. And anyhow all that was his own affair. Gore, who had been through the business from start to finish, was not disposed to overrate the advantages to be derived from that experience. He wondered a little, none the less, just what the plump, outspoken little Roly-Poly had thought, privately, of her spouse’s devotion to his business—say, in March, 1918.
‘How’s your brother?’ he asked her. ‘I fancied I caught a glimpse of a face that might have been his—brought up to date—passing me on the Promenade in a most vicious-looking two-seater. But I haven’t run into him yet, end-on, so to speak—’
‘Bertie? He lives just beside you. You’re staying at the Riverside, aren’t you? He has a flat in Selkirk Place at present—just across the way … at the other side of the Green. Number 73. You’ll find him there any morning up to lunch-time in bed.’
‘Still unattached?’
‘We hope so.’
‘What does he do all day?’
Mrs Arndale shrugged her pretty shoulders.
‘He plays a good deal of golf, I believe—races a good deal—hunts a little. If he happens not to be away, and if it’s too wet to do anything else, he runs down to the Yard in his car, smokes a cigarette, and runs back to change. I have calculated that on an average Bertie changes seven times a day.’
‘Oh, then he’s attached to the Yard now, is he?’
‘Cecil says so. I suppose Cecil knows. It’s his Yard.’
Arndale came out of his abstracted silence for a moment.
‘Bertie’s all right,’ he said. ‘Bit of an ass about women, that’s all.’
‘We all are, thank Heaven,’ smiled Gore—‘er … until we’re forty … or … er … thirty-nine.’
Arndale’s eyes regarded him blankly.
‘Eh? Thirty-nine? No. Bertie’s nothing like that …’ With a visible effort he concentrated upon his calculation. ‘Bertie’s thirty—or thirty-one. Why, hang it, old chap—I’m thirty-nine.’
He smiled vaguely and strolled away. Gore caught his wife’s eye.
‘What’s the trouble, Roly-Poly?’ he asked bluntly.
She shrugged.
‘Heaven knows. Cecil’s always like that now … I’m frightfully worried about it, really. It’s not money, I know. We’re simply revoltingly well-off … It’s some sort of blight … something mental.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Sometimes I think it’s I who am responsible for it … of course I’ve always known that I’m not the right person … And yet we get on quite well … He’s quite fond of me, really, in his way … Oh, don’t let us talk about it any more. Let’s talk about you. It’s so absolutely ripping to see your old phiz again, Wick.’
As she patted his arm with a little impulsive gesture the door reopened and Clegg announced the guests of honour.
‘Sir James and Lady Wellmore and Miss Heathman.’
While the Melhuishs chatted for a moment with the new arrivals Gore took stock of them with something like dismay. Wellmore, whom he remembered as a brisk, cheerful, keen-eyed middle-aged man, looked now every day of a tired, peevish, short-sighted sixty-five. Lady Wellmore—could that large-bosomed, broad-hipped, triple-chinned woman be the Phyllis Heathman of the old days? And that sallow, weary-eyed, bony-necked female with the nervously-flickering smile—could that be the once really quite pretty Angela? Good Lord.
His hostess’s voice claimed his attention.
‘You have met Colonel Gore before, Sir James, I think.’
Wellmore’s tired eyes rested on the younger man’s face perfunctorily, as he allowed his flabby, damp hand to be shaken.
‘Yes,’ he said briefly, ‘I remember you. Nineteen-thirteen. You were stationed at Fieldbrook Barracks. In the Westshires. One of the prettiest shots I ever saw. Been in Africa, haven’t you? Wonder you didn’t stay there instead of coming back to this filthy climate. My wife has your book. But I’ve no time to read books. Never had.’
He passed on towards the fireplace and bent to warm his hands at the cheerful blaze wearily, his back to the room. Chairman of the United Tobacco Company—owner of three millions—master of six thousand lives—he could afford to dispense with ceremony.
But Lady Wellmore was graciousness itself. She had simply revelled in his book—especially the parts about the pigmies—she considered the parts about the pigmies perfectly fascinating. And the film—perfectly wonderful. She had been absolutely thrilled when dear Barbara had told her that she was to meet him again that night. She rounded him up in a cul-de-sac formed by a small table, two chairs, the flank of the big piano, and her sister.
‘Angela, have you forgotten Colonel Gore? He has been regarding you with the most reproachful of eyes.’
Angela Heathman smiled nervously and held out a languid hand. At close quarters the sallow, haggard weariness of her face, with its drawn lips and shadowed eyes, was still more noticeable. Beside her sister’s florid exuberance her faded thinness was accentuated painfully. Her smile faded, her eyes looked beyond him in brooding abstraction. She said nothing—withdrew her hand listlessly, and appeared to have forgotten the existence of the people who surrounded her.
‘Nerves, poor thing,’ Gore reflected. ‘Another of ’em that doesn’t know why she was born.’
As a silvery-toned clock somewhere in the room chimed eight fleetly, Clegg announced the last guest.
‘Mr Barrington.’
For a moment the hum of voices died. The man who had entered surveyed the occupants of the room with smiling composure as he moved towards his hostess.
‘My wife has charged me with the most abject of apologies, Mrs Melhuish. She had hoped until the last moment to be able to come.’
‘We are so sorry,’ Mrs Melhuish assured him. ‘But it would have been folly for her to have ventured out on an evening like this. Of all afflictions in the world, I can imagine none worse than earache.’
‘Dreadful. Quite dreadful,’ Barrington agreed. He included Melhuish in his smile. ‘However, she has retired to bed with a large supply of aspirin tabloids at hand … How are you, doctor? Worked to death, I suppose, as usual? I see you rushing about in that big car of yours from morning to night. Lot of sickness about, isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ said Melhuish simply.
Not a brilliant conversationalist, Dr Sidney Melhuish, Gore reflected—an exceedingly dry stick indeed. No one could suspect him of shyness or nervousness; his clean-cut face was as cool as a chunk of ice. Just one of those men who just didn’t want to talk most of the time and wouldn’t. Grim-looking chap, when his mouth set. Sort of chap that would look at your tongue and tell you you had six months to live and touch the bell for his man to show you out. Poor Pickles … What sparkling conjugal tête-à-têtes …
And yet, a moment later, when Melhuish crossed the room, Gore caught a glimpse of another man—a man whose kind, wise eyes and almost boyish sincerity and simplicity of manner and gesture brought a faint flush of animation to Angela Heathman’s apathetic face as he smiled at her. No doubt she, too, was a patient of his. For that matter, as far as Gore had been able to discover, everybody in Linwood was, though it was only four years or so, he had learned, since Melhuish had purchased an old and decaying practice and installed himself in that most conservative of Westmouth’s suburbs, a stranger and an interloper. True, he had brought with him from Bath, where he had been in practice for several years before the war, a reputation for brilliance, especially in heart cases. But Gore knew the stiff reserve and suspicion of Linwood too well to believe that a reputation for anything in the world acquired, anywhere else in the world could influence it in the least. Something—something which no doubt Pickles had found out for herself—there must be in this difficult husband of hers that was not vouchsafed to the common or garden general practitioner … Something, for instance, that had been able to win for him not merely the patronage but the friendship of a man like James Wellmore, whose sole standard of judgment was value for his money.
His eyes returned to the shrivelled, peevish face of the tobacco magnate, bent obstinately on the fire, its underlip protruding sulkily as he listened to something which Barrington was saying to him. There was no trace of affection, paternal or otherwise, in his expression just then. Indeed as Barrington moved away from him towards Mrs Melhuish, Wellmore turned to look after him with an unmistakable scowl until, detecting Gore’s interest in him, he switched his erring gaze back to the fire once more.
‘I have succeeded in finding that cutting for you, Mr Barrington,’ said Mrs Melhuish.
‘How kind of you to have remembered,’ replied Barrington, displaying his small, even teeth in a smile of open admiration. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, Gore admitted ungrudgingly—quite the handsomest man he had seen for some time—with some quality of charm that lay deeper than the perhaps slightly theatrical effect of his dark aquilinity and reckless gray eyes. Thirty-five at most, broad-shouldered, slim-flanked, easily—a little too easily, perhaps—sure of himself, he was one of those men at whom no woman could look without interest or without the awakening of her oldest and strongest instinct. Already Gore had noticed with amusement that, as he moved across the room to his hostess, the regards of the other three women had followed him with a speculative intentness. And that the charms of this smiling Adonis were not lost upon Mrs Melhuish herself was no less evident. Her colour had brightened beneath the flattery of his look; her poise and intonation as she spoke to him were tinged with the subtle challenge of her sex—the indefinable yet unmistakable blending of defiance and invitation that—by a cynic as hardened as Wick Gore—could be taken for nothing but … well, what any chap with two eyes in his head would take it for. Miss Pickles hadn’t changed all her spots, then—for all the rash vows of holy matrimony. Still a flash of colour and a sparkling eye for an agreeable-looking young fellah. She had always preferred ’em dark … and a bit hooky about the beak.
‘I put it down somewhere,’ said Mrs Melhuish, glancing about her. ‘Now … where …? Oh, yes. I remember.’
She moved to the piano, and picked up an envelope that lay on some music. Barrington took the envelope from her smilingly, opened it, glanced casually at the newspaper cutting which it contained.
‘Thanks so much,’ he said, as he replaced the cutting and put the envelope away in a pocket. ‘As a matter of fact I had rather thought of running up to look at another shoot in that part of Wiltshire this week.’
‘Really?’
Mrs Melhuish’s colour had forsaken her now. Her eyes consulted with anxiety the little Sèvres clock on the table beside Gore, rose to his brown, hard profile, and rested there for a moment warily. He stood but an arm’s-length from her; but he was listening with the most flattering of attention to Lady Wellmore’s views upon the sinister aims of Labour. The slightest movement of her golden head showed her her husband and Sylvia Arndale grouped by the big chair near the fire into which Wellmore had subsided with a yawn. At the other side of the room Arndale struggled feebly with Miss Heathman’s vague-eyed listlessness, pausing between each laborious effort to regard a water-colour above her head vacantly. Mrs Melhuish’s hand strayed to a bowl of chrysanthemums by the piano, touched a great gold and russet bloom caressingly.
‘If the door is shut, go away,’ she said softly—almost inaudibly. ‘I may not be able to manage tonight. I will ring you up tomorrow at eleven if not.’
Barrington bent to examine the gorgeous blossom.
‘It will be open,’ he smiled.
His reckless eyes dwelt in hers victoriously for an instant. As she turned to introduce him to Gore, Clegg appeared once more, slightly flushed and seven minutes late.
‘Dinner is served, madam.’
CHAPTER II (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
IT was, it appeared, Sir James Wellmore’s inviolable rule to get out of his bed at seven o’clock and get into it again before midnight, and at half-past eleven he and Lady Wellmore departed in an immense limousine. Miss Heathman, silent and vague-eyed to the last, accompanied them; the big house on the Promenade of which she was the capricious mistress, lay on the Wellmores’ homeward way across the Downs to their palatial mansion at Bishops Leaze. The Arndales had gone away before eleven o’clock hurriedly, disturbed by a telephone-message requiring, Gore presumed, Mrs Arndale’s immediate return to some urgent trouble of the baby, with details of whose incredible brilliancy of intellect and beauty of form she had regaled him at intervals during dinner. It was twenty minutes to twelve when he and Barrington made their adieux to Mrs Melhuish and went down the stairs accompanied by their host.
As Clegg helped him into his overcoat, in the hall, Gore glanced at the artistically-arranged trophy which occupied the wall space between the hall door and the door of the dining-room. His wedding present made, he reflected, quite a decent display, the two befeathered Masai head-dresses and the scarlet-and-ochre magic-mask forming an effective centre to the design. The shaft of one of the Wambulu spears had developed some mysterious breed of worm some months after its arrival, Melhuish told him, and had been replaced by a new one.
‘Hope your maids aren’t curious about cutlery, doctor,’ Gore grinned, as he accepted a light for his cigarette. ‘I mean—those hunting spears are probably quite safe. But those little arrows—and the knives—Well, I think I inserted lavish warnings in the packing-cases. I hope I did.’
Barrington fitted a cigarette into a long amber holder.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘Bad medicine, are they?’
‘Possibly very nasty indeed,’ said Gore—‘some of them.’ He touched the beaded sheaths of two small knives, crossed to form the lower point of the trophy. ‘These two little brutes, for instance … I shouldn’t mind betting that if you were thoughtless enough to scratch yourself with one of these—even after three years—something exceedingly unpleasant would happen you in the next few minutes. I’ve actually seen a poor beggar die in less than two minutes from a prick of one of those little throwing-knives … Die most untidily, too.’
‘What’s the poison?’ asked Melhuish, with professional interest. ‘I remember now that my wife did say something about the cautions you sent her. But I’m afraid we had both forgotten all about them.’
‘It’s a root called “nmakato.” Not in the B.P., I rather fancy, doctor. We didn’t succeed in seeing the root itself. As a matter of fact, the old witch-doctors who distill the stuff are rather reticent about little trade-secrets of that sort. I saw the flowers of the thing, though—yellow—not unlike our gorse, both to look at and to smell. They use the flowers to make wreaths for their young women when they retire into seclusion to think over the joys of matrimony for a month or so before they plunge into them.’
He held out his hand. ‘Well, we shall meet again, doctor, no doubt.’
‘You haven’t decided yet how long you’ll stay in Linwood?’
‘Some weeks, at any rate, I hope. Good-night.’
‘You coming my way, Colonel?’ Barrington asked, as the hall door opened to let them out into the foggy dampness of the November night.
‘I’m at the Riverside,’ Gore replied. ‘Just across the way.’
‘Oh.’
Barrington turned to his host.
‘Good-night, doctor. I shall run in and see you tomorrow or next day. I’ve been sleeping a lot better since I cut tobacco right out. But I still get those nasty twinges …’
Melhuish nodded gravely.
‘Come and see me. I hope you’ll find Mrs Barrington’s earache better when you get back. Please tell her how sorry we were that she was unable to come.’
‘I will. Good-night.’
‘Good-night.’
The two departing guests sauntered side by side for a few yards, chatting desultorily until their paths diverged—Gore’s towards the hotel, the lights of whose upper windows were visible through the branches of the trees in the Green, his companion’s along the deserted vista of Aberdeen Place, at the end of which the Corinthian façade of the club rose palely in the glare of the arc-lamps in the Mall.
‘My old heart’s worrying me a bit,’ Barrington explained. ‘I’ve had to cut out most of the joys of life—temporarily, at any rate.’
Gore murmured sympathetically.
‘Bad luck. You’re in good hands, though.’
‘Melhuish’s? None better. You a bridge player?’
‘Incurable.’
‘Then I expect I shall run into you at the club.’
‘I expect so. Remember me to your wife, won’t you? She and I are very old friends.’
‘Indeed? She’ll be delighted so see you any afternoon you care to run in. Hatfield Place—Number 27. Don’t forget.’
‘Twenty-seven. Many thanks. Good-night.’
‘Good-night, Colonel.’
The two parallel rows of tall houses which formed Aberdeen Place and Selkirk Place respectively faced one another, at the distance of a long stone’s-throw, across the Green—a pleasant strip of ornamental garden enclosed by railings for the exclusive use of residents, and running the entire length from Albemarle Hill at the western end to the Mall at the eastern. For convenience’ sake two transverse passages of roadway divided the Green into three detached sections, roughly equal in length. Gore’s path from the Melhuish’s house to the back entrance to the Riverside Hotel—the front entrance was in Albemarle Hill, overlooking the river—lay along one of these two cross passages, and when he had parted from his fellow-guest, therefore, a very few steps interposed between him and Barrington the railings of the middle section of the Green and the shrubs and trees which formed, inside the railings, the ornamental border of the garden. Happening to glance backwards, however, for no more particular reason than that his ears had informed him that the retreating sound of his late companion’s footsteps on the pathway had ceased abruptly, he caught a glimpse of Barrington halted beneath a lamp, facing another man—taller, and wearing a light-coloured raincoat—the sound of whose voice, raised, it seemed to Gore angrily, reached his ears indistinctly during the instant for which he slackened pace to look back. Afterwards he recalled that in that brief instant he had wondered a little from where that taller, raincoated figure had emerged; since, while he had lingered chatting with Barrington not a soul had been in sight in Aberdeen Place against the glare of the Mall. He was to recall, too, that something in the build and size of the second man had suggested Cecil Arndale vaguely—but just how vaguely or how accurately he was afterwards quite unable to weigh. These particular speculations, to which at the moment he attached no importance of any kind, were destined subsequently to assume one of very serious concern to him. For, in fact, as it proved, that hurried, careless, backward view of Barrington, partially blocked out by the laurels, yet unmistakable, was the last he was to see of him alive.
He went on his way, turning left-hand as he reached the roadway of Selkirk Place, which terminated in a cul-de-sac at the pillared gates admitting to the grounds of the Riverside. Beside the gates a three-storied red-brick building, comprising a retail-bar on the ground floor with some living-rooms used by the staff above, formed the rear of the hotel, connected with the main block facing the river by the annexe in which Gore’s suite lay. The bar, a discreetly-managed, quiet little place, unexpected in that exclusive residential quarter of the suburb, catered principally, Gore surmised, for a regular little clientèle of chauffeurs and coachmen from Selkirk Lane. The lane which branched off northwards from Selkirk Place at its doors was bordered by stables, most of them now converted into garages, and provided, no doubt, a considerable number of such customers.
But at that hour the bar had long closed its doors for the night; the wan illumination of an arc-lamp suspended above its portals accentuated its effect of cold inhospitality. One window of the seven that looked up Selkirk Place was still, however, lighted up. A shadow moved across the yellow blind as he passed—possibly the shadow of the tawny-haired Hebe who presided over the bar, and of whom Gore had caught glimpses as she went to and fro across the annexe between her domain and the main building of the hotel. Rather a pretty little thing, he had noticed, if somewhat excessively embellished; not too severe, either, to refuse a smile in return to his ‘Good-morning’ or ‘Good-afternoon.’ Betty, he had gathered, was her name—Betty Rodney. Rather a pretty name. He yawned, crossed the grounds, and was admitted into the annexe by the night porter.
‘I want to get a couple of letters off in half an hour or so,’ he said, when the man had roused his sitting-room fire, ‘if you’ll leave the door into the gardens open for me, I’ll stroll up myself and drop them into the box in Selkirk Place, when I’ve written them.’
Left alone, he manufactured himself a modest whisky-and-soda and seated himself to compose with its aid and that of a very terrible pipe, applications for two vacant positions for either of which, it seemed to him, he might hope to be considered as eligible as the next fellow. One was the secretaryship to a small London club devoted to the consolation of the Very Poor of the Services; the other the secretaryship of a golf club in Hampshire. A cheerful fire glowed and crackled soothingly; there was no other sound to disturb his efforts at ingratiating composition. Presently he finished his drink, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, refilled it, and slewed round in his chair to regard the fire-irons thoughtfully. On the uppermost page of his writing block the words—
‘RIVERSIDE, HOTEL,
‘LINWOOD, WESTMOUTH.
‘Nov. 6, 1922.
‘GENTLEMEN,—’
lay reproachful and forgotten.
‘If the door is shut, go away. I may not be able to manage tonight. I will ring you up tomorrow at eleven if not.’
That was what she had said, furtively, nervously, under cover of the clumsiest interest in the chrysanthemums. And Barrington, as cool and cocksure as be-dam, had said, ‘It will be open.’
What door? When was it to open? What the devil did it mean?
What the devil could it mean? Was it possible that, in her own house—under her husband’s very nose, Pickles—the Pickles whose image, idealised, no doubt, in parts, yet always extraordinarily vivid, had cheered him and bucked him up and made him feel a bit better in even the darkest hours of the past nine years—was it possible that she was playing the rotten, silly old game—carrying on with that sleek-headed— Gore’s private surmise used at that point an epithet of Anglo-Saxon vigour which it instantly deprecated. No. The thing was incredible.
Incredible—unthinkable. A bit of a flirtation, perhaps—perhaps not even that. He drew a breath of relief to find his loyalty to the Pickles of the old days still staunch enough to hold her clear in the face of any suspicion, however insidious.
Straight as a die she had always been—in everything. It wasn’t possible that she could have changed—could have become one of those treacherous, loathsome little cats whose exploits filled the papers nowadays. There was some quite simple explanation of that remark of hers about the door. There must be. It was pretty rotten of him to have believed anything else for a moment, he told himself—the sort of thing one might expect from some half-baked young cub eager to sniff out filth in every corner. He turned, rather peevishly, in his chair, took up his pen, dipped it in ink, and resumed his correspondence with determination.
The son, the grandson, and the great-grandson of soldiers, he had found himself at his father’s death a subaltern in his father’s old regiment, with exactly two hundred a year in addition to his pay. To most people, since the average income of the men in the Westshires was some ten times that amount, such a position would have appeared embarrassing. He had contrived, however, to endure it with fortitude, aided by a practically imperturbable smile, a useful dexterity in all sports and pastimes beloved of youth, and a quite special brilliancy as a polo-player—an amusement which he had pursued, unavoidably, on other people’s ponies for the greater part, but to the great glory of the Westshires. In the year 1912–13, the year in which he had obtained his company, he had been, with one unpublished reservation, as blithe and contented a young man as was to be discovered in the length of the Army List. The reservation was Miss Barbara Letchworth—better known to her intimates as Pickles. But of that fact Wick Gore took very great pains to ensure that neither she nor anyone else should have the slightest inkling. To the day in 1913, when he went out to drink three cups of tea and eat eleven sandwiches and take a cheerful farewell of Miss Letchworth—then one-and-twenty or thereabouts and horribly sweet in cool, fluffy, summer things—preparatory to his departure to India, that extremely intelligent young woman had no faintest suspicion that night and morn for three whole years past he had cursed, for her sake, the day on which he had been born—born, at all events, to two hundred a year in addition to his pay.
From India the battalion had gone, very abruptly, to France in 1914. In the course of the following four years Pickles had written quite a number of charming letters to Captain, Major, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gore successively, accompanied by superior brands of cigarettes and sundry strange garments, each of which he had worn solemnly at least once. A year on the Rhine had completed his military career. Chance had thrown in his way an offer to form a member of an expedition to Central Africa; he had accepted the offer eagerly, sent in his papers, and disappeared for two years. A pleasant twelve months in Rhodesia, where his book—the record of the expedition’s adventures and discoveries—had been written, had induced him to consider seriously the project of settling there permanently.
But at that point a childless and long-widowed aunt had chosen to die and leave for distribution amongst a horde of nephews and nieces a very considerable portion of the money which her husband had extracted from a small colliery in the north. Gore’s share in this good fortune, long despaired of, had amounted on final examination, to an income of three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Two days after his forty-second birthday he had landed in England, spent a week interviewing solicitors and tailors and such things, and, bored to extinction by a London which seemed to him entirely populated by Jews, had fled westwards in search of such of his kith and kin as still survived.
The Riverside Hotel had commended itself to him as a headquarters for various reasons. Its advantages for that purpose had been in no way discounted by the fact that the entrance to the very comfortable private suite with which the management provided him lay within just one minute’s walk from a certain hall door in Aberdeen Place which bore the plate of Dr Sidney Melhuish.
On the very afternoon of his arrival in Linwood, as he returned along Aberdeen Place to the hotel, he had caught a glimpse of a slim figure in moleskins as it disappeared through that hall door. A quite amusing acceleration of his heart-beat had been perceptible for some moments. The same amusing symptom had manifested itself when next morning he had rung up Mrs Melhuish from the Riverside and heard, for the first time for nine years, her voice say, ‘Yes?’ He had found the operation of breathing troublesome for an instant—an instant so long that she had added: ‘Who is speaking, please?’ Quite amusing. Especially in view of her placidity when at length—after nine years—he had replied, a little curtly, ‘Gore.’
There had been a silence, and then a calm, unsurprised ‘Gracious. Why, you said you were going to stay in Rhodesia for ever and ever.’
And then:
‘I’m so sorry. But my husband has just come in for lunch. I must fly. Can you ring me up this evening … about seven? I shall be—’
And then, of course, after nine years, the exchange had cut off.
But her invitation to dinner had made up a good deal for that first flat disappointment.
‘Do come early, like a dear,’ she had said. ‘We want to have you to ourselves for a few minutes. Sidney is pining to meet you. You’ll love him. He’s just the darlingest old thing in the world.’
He recalled now exactly the inflection of her voice as she had said that—
With fresh determination he dipped his pen once more in ink and after the word ‘Gentlemen’ wrote the words, ‘I beg to apply—’
It was then five minutes to one.
It was twenty-five minutes past one when he stamped his two letters. He slipped into an overcoat, and let himself out into the chill clamminess of the fog. The pillar-box for which he was bound lay half-way along Selkirk Place, a couple of hundred yards from the back entrance to the Riverside. At the gates he paused for a moment to light a cigarette, and observed that the window above the bar was still illuminated. As his eyes rested on it, the yellow blind was drawn a little aside, and someone feminine—the tawny-haired Miss Betty Rodney, he presumed—was visible for a moment, peeping down at him.
No doubt Miss Rodney’s attention had been attracted by the halting of his footsteps beneath her window at that hour. He went on his way towards the pillar-box, reflecting, perhaps not entirely originally, that in general and in particular women were curious things.
CHAPTER III (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
MRS MELHUISH had switched off all the lights in the drawing-room save two beside the fireplace when her husband re-entered the room, and was lingering, he perceived, merely to say good-night. She turned at his entrance, smiling through a little yawn.
‘Well … what do you think of Wick? Quite a dear, isn’t he?’
Melhuish nodded.
‘I like Gore very much indeed,’ he said sincerely. ‘I wish that we could have provided a rather more amusing evening for him.’
‘It was not exactly a giddy party,’ Mrs Melhuish confessed. ‘However, we’ll get something a little brighter for him next time. Are you sitting up, dear? I hope not, after your wretched night last night. I heard you coming in at a quarter-past four … bad boy.’
‘A hæmorrhage case … one of Mrs Ashley’s maids.’
‘Oh.’
There was a little pause. He wondered if tonight again she would contrive to evade the good-night kiss which was for both of them, now, an ordeal dreaded and avoided when avoidance was with even a pretence of decency possible. But he stood between her and the door. Tonight no escape was possible; the ignominious, hateful farce of their day must terminate in that elaborately casual contact of her cheek with his, cold as ice, burning like hell’s fire. He read the pitiable hesitation in her eyes, yet, even in his pity of it, would not spare her or himself. His cold scrutiny rested mercilessly on her face until it was raised to his.
‘Good-night, Sidney.’
‘Good-night.’
‘You are quite pleased with everything? Sir James’s congratulations upon my cook were really quite embarrassing.’
‘Everything was admirable—as it always is.’
She swept him a little mocking curtsey, and was gone.
He stood where she had left him until he heard her bedroom door close remotely, then glanced at his watch and moved to the fire, to stand before it, considering. Five minutes to twelve. How long would he wait tonight?
It had been a little before one when he had heard her go downstairs that night—the Monday night of the preceding week—that seemed to him countless centuries ago. The hour of meeting had been altered for Friday night to a quarter-past one. At least a whole hour lay before him—a whole hour to watch drag by, minute after minute, listening in the darkness, writhing in self-contempt, aware that beyond the wall that separated her room from his, she, too, was waiting and watching and listening in the darkness—hating him because, on his account, she must lie there for that never-ending hour before she could safely creep down the stairs. Yes, he reflected grimly, at moments she must hate him. Hate him because she feared him, because he stood in the way of her pleasure, because he was what he was—her husband. That thought still appeared to him ludicrous, though for a whole week now he had known beyond all doubt the amazing truth of her treachery to him. Even at the end of that week of devastating certainty he was still unable to look at her face without stupefied wonder at its self-control. It seemed impossible that a spirit so courageous as hers, so defiant of obstacles, so intolerant of pretence, could conceal a bitter hatred so smoothly. And yet … what hatred could be imagined more bitter than that of a woman for a man who stood between her and the man of her—
Of her … what?
Desire … Passion …? His soul laughed at the bare thought of the words in connection with her. Caprice? A prettier word—probably a more appropriate one. At heart he guessed and dreaded a stronger and more dangerous driving-force than these behind her betrayal of him—a craving for the things he himself had proved incapable of giving her—the gaiety and grace and thousand dancing, laughing sympathies of youth. From the very beginning she had teased him on the score of a seriousness which, he was himself well aware, was prone to heaviness. From the very beginning he had seen that inevitably his professional work must separate them—seclude him from great tracts of her life, as it must seclude her from the principal business of his. Youth for Sidney Melhuish had been a phase of single-minded purpose and strenuous preparation for its achievement. Youthfulness he had laid aside deliberately at the threshold of a career which for him, over and above the possibilities of material advancement, was a mission—a consecration to the grimmest, most desperate of crusades against the most ruthless and invincible of enemies. Gaiety and grace were for those others, he had told himself, who neither saw nor heard nor heeded … until they had need of him and his kind. He had envied them a little at odd moments—pitied them a little—wondered at them a little—been always much too busy to feel the need of attempting to imitate their decorativeness. The attempt in any case would have been, he knew, a futile one. His lips twisted wryly now as, staring down into the fire, he recalled his wife’s efforts, in the first tentative days of her life with him, to teach him to dance—
She had striven, too, to teach his mind to dance, he knew, in those first days—striven to infuse him with some tinge of the agreeable ephemeral interests which were the life of the set from which he had isolated her temporarily during their brief engagement, but which, he had quickly perceived, would always remain her tribe and her world. But he neither shot nor fished nor hunted. Theatres and novels held for him the faintest of appeals. The allusive tittle-tattle of her friends—light-hearted young people of both sexes possessed of an abundance of money and of leisure, who visibly resented his silent seriousness—bored him. At the end of a year his wife had frankly confessed him, as a social ornament, hopeless.
‘I do believe, Sidney,’ she had said one afternoon, when his unexpected intrusion from the consulting-room had dispersed one of her bridge-parties precipitately, ‘that the only purpose for which you believe human beings are provided with tongues is as an aid to medical diagnosis. Do you know that for seven minutes you stood here, in your wife’s drawing-room, without speaking, or even attempting to speak, one single word? I timed you by the clock.’
‘Well,’ he had urged, ‘they wanted to go on playing bridge.’
‘No. They had stopped—when you came into the room.’
‘Well, why did they stop when I came into the room?’
‘Because they all think you disapprove of women playing bridge in the afternoon.’
‘I do,’ he had said simply.
At that she had laughed until her eyes had streamed tears. But there had been no more afternoon bridge-parties at 33, Aberdeen Place. That incident, he supposed, had marked in all probability the definite point at which she had admitted to herself that her marriage had been a mistake …
That had been two years ago. Had this business with Barrington been going on then, for two whole years—unsuspected for all that time—so unsuspected that in the end they had thought it safe enough to risk these meetings at night in the dining-room of his house. A serious risk—since she must have realised that at any moment a telephone-call might awaken him and bring him downstairs to discover them. But no doubt they had long grown to believe that there was no risk whatever—no need for even the most elementary precaution against surprise.
How many nights had they met so before that Monday night of the preceding week on which, by the merest of chances, their secret had been revealed to him? The tyre of a belated taxi-cab had happened to burst just outside the house, and the report had awakened him—to hear, a few moments later, the door of his wife’s room open softly and her footsteps steal past his door. Minute after minute he had waited, at first drowsily, then with surprise, until at length uneasiness had induced him to go downstairs in search of her. Fortunately, his slippers had made no noise on the thick carpet, for they had come out of the dining-room as he reached the drawing-room landing. A man’s voice, unrecognised at first, had brought him to abrupt halt.
‘Friday, then. Same hour?’
‘A quarter past one,’ his wife’s voice had answered cautiously. ‘A quarter to is too early.’
The man had laughed.
‘Your dear hubby has forbidden me late hours, you know. Bad for dicky hearts. However—’
He had recognised the voice then. Barrington. While he had stood in stupefaction the hall door had been shut stealthily. In an instant his momentary fury had chilled to ice. The brain and nerves that had never failed him had recovered their aplomb, had decided upon the simplest, surest road to vengeance. He had turned and crept barefooted back to his bedroom—to lie awake till dawn, perfecting his plan, devising means against all possible mischance.
And yet his plan had miscarried. On Friday night Barrington had come tiptoeing along Aberdeen Place at the appointed hour, clearly visible from the upper front windows of the house to eyes that watched for his coming. He had come up to the hall door, but had gone away again almost immediately, pulling the door to behind him cautiously—it had been left ajar for him, evidently. No footsteps had crept from the adjoining bedroom. There had certainly been no meeting that night.
Nor on the next, nor on any of the following nights—unless one had taken place last night during his absence on the case to which he had been called out a little before two o’clock in the morning. Six nights of fruitless waiting, of coldly-raging fury that listened in the darkness until the silence of the house was as the roar of thunder. There was no certainty that he would come tonight, either—that he would come for a month of nights. No matter. On the night on which he did come he would pay for all those others …
Clegg’s respectfully reproachful cough behind him roused him from his thoughts. He bade the man good-night and went upstairs slowly to his room. Did the servants know? Had they, too, grinned and leered at him all that time behind his back for a poor blind simpleton? Probably. In Clegg’s eyes, too, he told himself now—too late—he had detected the question that had lurked in his mistress’s. ‘Does he suspect? Does he know?’
Patience. His turn to laugh would come—if not tonight, one night.
For a little while he moved about his room, making the noises for which her ears listened. He caught a glimpse of his face in a mirror as he switched off the lights—absorbed, the eyes narrowed, nose and lips pinched, a crease between the eyebrows—a tell-tale face, the face of a watching, waiting sneak. He swore viciously beneath his breath, and in the darkness began to tear off his clothes. Damn them—let them go their way. They should not pull him down with them.
He groped for his pyjamas, and remembered then that the night before the cord had slipped through at one end and that in his impatience with it when he had returned in the small hours of the morning he had pulled it right through and tied it about his waist on the outside. But it had been restored, he found, to its proper place—almost certainly by her hands. The same misadventure had befallen him on his honeymoon, one night in Venice. He remembered the adoration with which he had watched her little fingers rescue the errant tape with a hairpin, deftly …
He seated himself on the bed with smarting eyes and strangled throat. Was it—could it be too late? Was nothing left of the dream? Had he lost her utterly? Impossible—impossible—impossible. He didn’t—he couldn’t believe it. In the morning, before she went downstairs, he would go into her room and face the thing with her—holding her hands—smiling at her—her friend and confidant. Even if she loved this other man—he could bear to know that, he told himself, if she did not conceal it from him—even if she loved him, they would face the difficulty together—talk it over—calmly and wisely. Somehow the trouble would pass, if they faced it together …
Presently, shivering in the damp air that came in through the open windows, he got into bed. But the sirens were busy now on the river, as boat after boat hooted its slow way down the tortuous, narrow channel on the tide. He lay there, wide-awake, listening to them, wondering if she, too, heard them.
He had not heard the door of her room open, nor any sound of her passage across the landing—merely the creak of a stair—a stair, it seemed to him, of the second flight from the landing. The tiny noise, almost imperceptible, awaited for so many nights, stopped his heart for a beat. The guile that had once more all but eluded his vigilance shocked him violently, hardened his mood to stone again. What stealthy pains must have gone to the noiseless opening of her door, the crossing of the landing, the descent of the stairs, step by step—until that small, dreaded sound had brought her to abrupt halt, listening with straining ears to discover if it had betrayed her. How had she learned this minute, patient cunning? How had she concealed it from him?
He was out of bed now. When he had opened the door and listened for a moment, he switched on a light and dressed himself in the clothes which lay always in readiness against a night-call. His long fingers adjusted his collar and tie with the careful neatness with which they performed the task every morning. He smiled sardonically at the thought that without his collar and tie, a husband, however injured, started at a disadvantage if his wife’s lover happened to wear one at the moment of dénouement.
He felt no anger now, none of those vague, futile emotions which were the stock-in-trade of the wronged husbands of convention. His mind held but one thought, one desire—the successful accomplishment of that entry of absolute surprise. He switched off the light again and went softly down the stairs.
On the drawing-room landing he paused to lean over and look down into the hall. The subdued radiance of the light in the fanlight, left on always at night, showed him the lower portion of the dining-room door. As he had expected, the door was shut, though already, at the distance of two flights of stairs, the subdued murmur of voices was audible through it. He went down another flight, with increased caution, and on the first landing—that outside the morning-room—came in view of the dimly-lighted hall. To his amazement he saw, standing just inside the open hall door, Cecil Arndale.
He halted, dumbfounded. Was it possible that he had been mistaken? Had it been Arndale’s voice which he had heard that Monday night? Had it been Arndale whom he had seen come and go on Friday in the moonlight? No. There was no likeness whatever between the voices of the two men—no likeness whatever between their figures—no possibility of such a mistake. Besides, at that moment, a man’s voice was speaking in the dining-room. Arndale obviously could hear that voice too. He was listening to it, his eyes fixed on the dining-room door, so intently that not even for a moment had they turned towards the darkness of the staircase. For that moment of surprised surmise, Melhuish made no movement forward or back. The maddest, most ludicrous of conjectures had flashed into his mind. Was it possible that there were two of them—and that somehow they had both come on the same night?
‘My God!’ his senses asked of themselves, ‘am I mad? Is this I who am standing here on this landing outside the morning-room thinking this thing?’
He heard his throat produce a dry, inarticulate gasp—an attempt to call out Arndale’s name—as he began to descend the stairs towards him. At that moment, however, without having heard him, at all events without a glance towards him, Arndale went out, leaving the hall door ajar behind him. The murmur of the voices in the dining-room had risen abruptly in pitch. Almost instantly its door opened and Barrington came out into the hall.
‘Absolutely out of the question, my dear child, I assure you,’ he was saying, as he drew on a glove. ‘I’d do it if I could—for your sweet sake … But in times like these I simply can’t afford philanthropy. A thou. That’s the best I can do for you, my dear. Come—it’s well worth the money—a clean sheet—no skeleton in the closet to worry about, eh? Think how nice that would be to waken up to in the morning.’
Melhuish had retreated stealthily the two or three steps which he had descended towards the hall, and stood flattened against the portière of the morning-room door, the glowing end of his cigarette concealed behind him. His wife had come out from the dining-room now, though, since she stood facing towards the hall door, he could not see her face. But her voice, when she spoke, contained a hard, desperate anger of which he could not have believed her even serenity capable.
‘What a scoundrel you are,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I wonder how many unfortunate women you have played this game with …’
‘Well’—Barrington shrugged smilingly—‘that is really beside the point, isn’t it. Think it over, my dear. I’m quite sure that if you think it over, calmly and without temper—temper, by the way, does not become you, little Babs. You look quite thirty-five tonight—’
He paused abruptly, went to the hall door, opened it, looked out for a moment or two, closed the door almost to, and came back towards her.
‘Bit risky leaving that door ajar,’ he said easily. ‘The bobby on the beat might be curious enough to come in and have a look round. Awkward, that. Better have the hinges, or whatever it is that makes the row when you close it, attended to, hadn’t you, before our next midnight conference … Or better still, come across with that thou … and let us cut the midnight conferences right out.’
‘You promised—you gave me your solemn word that if I made you those four payments of a hundred and fifty, you would give me back my letters and the other things—’
‘I know. I know, my dear. Why remind me of my absurd impulsiveness. Forget what has been said—concentrate on the fact that what I say now is … a thou.’
‘You never meant to keep your promise then?’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Until I realised how foolishly impulsive I had been in asking for six hundred when I might have asked for ten.’
‘I see. And so it will go on, you think. You think you will always be able to bleed me—that I shall always be coward enough and fool enough to pay this blackmail?’
‘Hush, my dear child … Hush, hush.’
‘It is blackmail … nothing more or less … You are nothing more or less than a common blackmailer—a blackguard that preys on wretched, foolish women who—’
He held up a hand, unruffled, smiling, yet menacing.
‘My darling child … what an ugly vocabulary you have acquired of late. No, no, no. Let us be polite. Let us not be melodramatic. Let us be quite sensible. Above all, let us not shout … at half-past one in the morning. Besides, we really have nothing more to say to one another, tonight. I feel that. I am very sensitive to such impressions. You require, I feel, time to reflect. Tomorrow—or perhaps next day—when you have thought things over quietly and sensibly, you will send me a good-tempered little message to say that—’
‘No,’ she cried vehemently, forgetting caution. ‘This is the end of it. I will have nothing more to do with you. I knew that you were a scoundrel—an unscrupulous blackguard. I know now that you are a liar and a cheat as well. I will have nothing more to do with you. Do your worst—I don’t care what it is. Nothing could be worse than what I have gone through already.’
‘Worse for yourself, you mean, my little Babs—don’t you? But what about poor hubby? What would poor straight-laced, stick-in-the-mud hubby say, suppose someone were spiteful enough to—’
His suave, sneering voice was silenced abruptly. Mutely, savagely, she had struck him a swinging buffet on the mouth that had jerked his head back and sent him stumbling against the long oak settle at the opposite side of the hall.
‘Damn you, you little devil—you’ll pay for that.’
He stooped to pick up his fallen hat, tossed it on to the settle, and turned then again to her threateningly. She made no attempt to retreat from him as he moved towards her, but stood against the wall beside the door of the dining-room defiantly, one hand behind her.
‘You horrible cad,’ she panted, ‘how dare you even speak of my husband? How dare an evil, hateful thing like you even think of him? Listen … I have done with you. I don’t care what happens. Before you leave this house you shall give me those letters … or I swear to you I will take them from you. Mind … I have warned you … Don’t tempt me too far …’
He eyed her for a moment, calculatingly, from behind his insolent smile.
‘Sorry, eh? Threats, eh? I see. Well—’
He turned, as if to pick up his hat, but swung round again instantly with such treacherous swiftness that she could not elude him. His hand caught her wrist, twisted something from her grasp. He released her again then, stepping back and watching her warily as he laughed derisively.
‘Take care, my dear … take care. That temper of yours will get you into serious trouble if you don’t keep it under. Ugly words are hard enough to bear, but I draw the line at poisoned knives absolutely. I take it that you realise that this interesting little instrument is—or was at one time—poisoned … and that you realised, therefore, that if you had succeeded in giving me a jab with it, as you attempted to do just now … I say, as you attempted to do just now—’
He glanced over his shoulder quickly towards the hall door, then turned back to her again.
‘I thought that door moved. The wind, I suppose. Yes, my dear. You must try to keep that temper of yours under control. Nasty thing, murder, you know—or even attempted murder. You don’t deny, then, that you knew this knife was poisoned—that the slightest prick from it would probably do me in in a few minutes? You understand, don’t you, why I am impressing these facts on you—facts which, I am afraid, it is going to cost you a great deal more than that thou we spoke about just now to induce me to forget … after all. Meanwhile—until that happy termination of a really quite seriously unpleasant incident is reached—I think I shall keep this little plaything as a souvenir. You’ll remember that I have it, won’t you? And what it means? Good-night, my dear. Think over things calmly—take two days to it—three if you don’t feel sensible enough at the end of two—and send me a little message to say that you feel disposed to talk business—not sentiment. Shall we say now—in consideration of the little occurrence just now—two further instalments of two-fifty, eh? Good-night. My love to hubby. Think how nice it will be to have no more secrets from him—to feel that you are really and truly worthy of his love. Sweet dreams …’
He slipped the knife, which he had inserted carefully in its beaded sheath, into an inner pocket, kissed hands to her airily, and went out.
One thing only was clear to Melhuish, as he watched his wife rouse herself after a moment and shut the hall door with elaborate pains to subdue the protest of its stiffness; she must tell him her story unasked—without compulsion—without the least suspicion that he had spied upon the secret which she had chosen to keep from him. The very caution with which, after that display of reckless bravado, she strove to stifle the sound of the door’s shutting was eloquent enough, significant enough. Already, rather than face his discovery of her secret by him, she had resigned herself again to the indignity and misery of purchasing this scoundrel’s silence with regard to it. That alone was certain and definite—she desired … as strongly as that … that he should not know.
In the astonishing impressions which his ears and eyes had conveyed to his brain during those five or six minutes, tortured doubt still writhed hideously. But the fierce words which had followed that furious blow had assured him of one thing at least—not all of her was lost to him. His mind, agile and decisive in all other emergencies and dilemmas of his life, in this, the gravest of them, refused to move, refused to formulate any coherent thought or purpose save that one immediate need. She must not find him spying on her, lurking there in the darkness. He must have time to think, to realise, to recover judgment and balance, before her eyes met his. She had gone into the dining-room, to extinguish the lights there probably. Before she came out again he must reach his bedroom. The third stair up from the drawing-room landing had creaked as he had come down. He must be careful when he came to it.
CHAPTER IV (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
THE fog had grown so dense that, glancing across towards Aberdeen Place as he went on towards the pillar-box, Gore could distinguish nothing of the house to which his eyes had turned instinctively save the blurred illumination of its fanlight. Afterwards he recalled sardonically that his imagination had busied itself then for some moments with a charming, enviable picture of the happiness of the man of whose honourable, useful, contenting work that blurred light was the signal. Oddly enough, the figure which came out of the fog to meet him, just as he dropped his letters into the box, proved to be that of the very man of whose felicities, conjugal and otherwise, he had just been thinking.
‘Hallo, doctor,’ he said cheerily. ‘No rest for the wicked then, tonight again?’
‘No.’
‘You getting back now—or just starting out?’
‘Getting back,’ Melhuish replied, as Gore, having turned about, fell into step beside him. ‘A Mrs MacArthur rang me up to go and see her little boy. I’ve been attending him for a mild attack of gastritis. You don’t know the MacArthurs, do you? They’ve only recently come to live here in Linwood.’
‘MacArthur? No. Filthy sort of night, isn’t it? Sort of night I should simply hate to be dragged out of bed if I’d once succeeded in getting there, personally. But I suppose you doctor-men get hardened to it. Why … that’s Cecil Arndale, isn’t it?’
The eyes of both men had converged to a tall figure in a light-coloured raincoat which had emerged hurriedly from a house some twenty yards ahead of them, and, after a quick glance in their direction, had set off at a sharp pace towards the Riverside, growing rapidly indistinct as it receded into the fog.
‘It was Arndale, wasn’t it?’ Melhuish asked abstractedly. ‘His wife’s brother has a flat in one of these houses—Challoner. You probably remember him?’
‘Bertie Challoner? Oh, yes. I remember Bertie very well indeed. An ingenuous youth. Yes. Mrs Arndale told me this evening that he had a flat somewhere along here. Seventy-three, she said, I think.’
The hall door from which Arndale had issued reopened as they reached it, and a large young man emerged from it so hastily that Gore and his companion only escaped collision with his formidable bulk by a fraction of a second. Recognising Melhuish, he laughed shortly and irritably.
‘Hallo, doctor. That you? Where’s that brother-in-law of mine got to? Oh—there he is. Hi! Cecil …’
But Arndale had now reached the end of Selkirk Place and was visible there for a moment in the light of the arc-lamp over the bar, before he turned to his right hand up the lane and disappeared. Bertie Challoner replaced his pipe between his teeth resentfully and turned to regard Melhuish’s companion with an indifferent curiosity which changed abruptly to enthusiasm.
‘Why … Great Scott!’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s—’
He held out expansively an immense hand which Gore, recalling in time the trials of strength of other days, took very cautiously.
‘It is,’ he said. ‘How are you, young fellah?’
‘Fit. Come in and have a little drink. You must. I only heard tonight that you’d come home. I’ve been away for a few days. Come in and have a little drink, doctor, won’t you?’
‘Thanks, no, Challoner. I don’t think so. Good-night. Good-night again, Colonel.’
‘Good-night, doctor.’
Challoner’s gaze followed Melhuish’s retreat for a moment or two before he turned to conduct Gore into his elaborately-equipped bachelor quarters on the ground floor—one of the flats into which Number 73, like many others of the big houses in Selkirk Place, had been divided since the war.
‘Stiff old stick,’ he muttered, with a grimace. ‘Can’t think why Pickles married him. You dined with the Melhuishs tonight, Arndale told me. That’s a comfortable chair. I couldn’t believe Arndale when he told me you had come home. Cigarettes? You look fit. How’s things? Come back for good?’
‘Not sure,’ smiled Gore. ‘England on a night like this is not alluring.’
‘Filthy, isn’t it? Enough to make a chap commit murder or suicide or anything, to look out there into that mouldy Green in a fog like this. You’re staying at the Riverside, I hear. You look fit.’
‘Thank you, Bertie. As that is the second time you have made that remark in sixty seconds, I presume I must regard it as deserved. As a matter of fact, you will be glad to learn, I am perfectly fit.’
Challoner smiled vaguely—indeed he had made no pretence whatever of listening—threw, considering the hour, a surprisingly large quantity of coal on the fire, stirred it noisily, sighed, and subsided into a big chair and a silence which became at length embarrassing. His healthy, brick-red face, good-looking in a rather massive, heavy way, boyish still in repose despite its owner’s thirty years, assumed an expression of gloomy anxiety as its smile faded. Something had occurred to upset Master Bertie Challoner recently, Gore decided. He looked most unmistakably peeved and worried of mind.
‘Look here, my dear chap,’ said the visitor, preparing to take his departure. ‘I’m sure you’re wanting to get down to it, aren’t you? I’ll run in tomorrow morning sometime—’
But Challoner was visibly distressed by this reflection upon his hospitality.
‘Not at all, not at all. I’m simply delighted to see you, Wick—you know I am. Go on—sit down again, old chap. I’m—I’m just a bit worried about something, that’s all. Don’t you bother about me. I shouldn’t turn in for another good hour or so, anyhow. What sort of an evening did you have at the Melhuishs’? Pretty deadly, eh? Old Jimmy Wellmore, I hear—and the gashly Angela. I say, isn’t she a weird old thing? I simply can’t stick her. I’ll swear she drinks or dopes or something.’
‘You have a bad mind, young fellah,’ grinned Gore. ‘You always had. What a shocking thing to think of a lady who—well, she couldn’t be your mother, I suppose, but at any rate she is sufficiently mature to claim your respect.’
Challoner laid aside the extinct pipe which he had been regarding for some moments with intense displeasure, selected another from a crowded rack, and blew into it exhaustively and morosely.
‘I bet the old thing dopes,’ he said doggedly. ‘She’s as yellow as a Chink. Weird old frump … Gets up at three o’clock in the day, Sylvia says, and floats round in a dressing-gown until she goes to bed again, playing with those filthy little yapping dogs of hers—things like that ought to be put into a lethal chamber … How d’you think Pickles looks?’
He replaced the pipe in the rack, lighted a cigarette, and flopped into his chair again disconsolately. ‘This,’ Gore reflected, ‘is a little trying. I must get away before he unburdens his soul. A woman, of course—one of these fair creatures he’s got in a row on his mantelpiece, I suppose.’
Aloud, he said, with decision, ‘Very nice indeed. Quite the nicest person to look at I’ve seen since—well, since I saw her last, I believe. You got a game leg now, old chap?’
Challoner nodded absently.
‘Bit. Had a baddish crash in nineteen-eighteen … What’d you think of Melhuish?’
Now a young man of Bertie Challoner’s type must indeed be disturbed of soul, Gore told himself, if he declined an opportunity of dilating upon a game leg attributable to his share in the greatest of wars. Why this persistent desire to return to the Melhuishs’ and their dinner party?
‘Melhuish? Very nice. Very nice indeed. Not precisely … er … gushing. But a topping good chap, I should say.’
‘Oh, he’s all right, I suppose. Damn supercilious smile. Gets on my nerves. Sort of “You poor unfortunate ass, what are you alive for?” sort of smile. Not that I pretend to be exactly one of your brainy kind. I’m not.’
‘No,’ murmured the guest sympathetically.
‘Still, just because he’s a bit of a dab with a stethoscope, I don’t see that he need treat every one who isn’t as a worm. I bet Pickles often wishes she’d married old Cecil, after all.’
Gore deposited the ash of his cigarette in an ash-tray very, very carefully.
‘Yes?’ he said encouragingly. ‘For a moment it had occurred to me to think of another substitute for her actual choice … Yes?’
‘I suppose you know that Arndale was deadly keen about her, don’t you?’
‘Well, no. I can’t say that I had known that. Though I suppose one may assume fairly safely that most of the young fellahs—and old fellahs, for that matter—in this part of the world—’
‘Oh, yes. But old Arndale went all out for her, you know, until he found he hadn’t a show. He was absolutely silly about her. You ask Sylvia. Sylvia knows jolly well that he only married her because she was such a pal of Pickles’s. It’s a fact. She’ll tell you so herself without a blink. Of course Sylvia’s my sister, and all that—and she and Arndale get on all right, as it has turned out—I mean, everything considered. But if you ask me, if it came to picking Sylvia or Pickles out of the water, tomorrow—well, I bet old Sylvia would feed the fishes.’
Gore smiled pleasantly and still more encouragingly upon this most candid of brothers.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is most interesting. May I ask when this tragedy of unrequited love … came to a head, as it were?’
Challoner considered.
‘When? Oh … it was going on for a couple of years before Arndale married Sylvia. Nineteen-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen … just before the war and during the first year or so of it. I remember Sylvia used to tell me about it in her letters when I went to France first. Both she and Pickles were rather fed up with Cecil because he hadn’t joined up, I remember.’
Gore examined one of his host’s cigarettes critically.
‘These look about eighteen bob a hundred.’
‘A quid,’ said Challoner laconically. His guest sighed enviously and replaced the cigarette in the miniature silver trunk from which he had incautiously taken it.
‘In another, better world, perhaps. In this, not for me. I’ll smoke my old dhudeen, if I may.’
As he filled his pipe his eyes strayed again to the photographs on the mantelpiece—most of them feminine and picturesque, he noted appreciatively—and rested for a moment on that of a pretty if rather dejected-looking young woman in riding-kit which occupied a place of honour.
‘I recognise some old friends among your little picture-gallery,’ he said casually. ‘That’s little Ethel Melville in breeches, isn’t it?—I beg her pardon … Mrs Barrington, I should say. Trying things, breeches, you know, Bertie. Very few of ’em can stand ’em. By the way, I met her husband this evening at the Melhuishs’.’
Challoner’s big flaxen head swung round towards him sharply; his face had flushed a deeper shade of brick-red.
‘Barrington?’
‘Yes. Extraordinary good-looking fellah. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a handsomer man in my life. Comes from Jamaica, doesn’t he?’
‘So he says.’
The visitor surveyed his host’s profile thoughtfully. It was at that moment a profile of remarkable expressiveness.
‘Yes? You think … er … that he doesn’t?’
‘I think,’ said Challoner surlily, ‘that if Barrington says he comes from Jamaica the chances are ten to one he doesn’t. I think that. And I’ll tell you another thing I think about Mr Barrington.’
He had risen to his feet again and was gesturing with a vehement hand.
‘I think he’s a damn scoundrel, Mr Barrington. I know he’s one. I’m not going to tell you how I know it—or just what I know of him. All I say to you is this, Wick—and it’s straight from the horse’s mouth—don’t you be taken in by that smarmy swine. Don’t you have any truck with him, if you can help it. Keep clear of him. I tell you he’s a real rotten bad ’un.’
Challoner’s blue eyes were aglitter with anger now. His big blond head thrust forward, as he spoke, with a threatening belligerence. It was very clearly evident that he disapproved of Mr Barrington for some reason utterly and entirely.
‘What does he do?’ Gore inquired, after a moment. Quite unconsciously his eyes had strayed again to that large photograph which occupied the place of honour in the collection on the mantelpiece. A possible explanation of Master Bertie’s vehement depreciation of Barrington had occurred to him.
‘Do? Nothing. Nobody knows who he is, where he comes from, or anything about him. He was down at Barhams, at the Remount Depot, for a bit during the war—and then he turned up here again afterwards—managed to screw himself into the Arndales’ set somehow. You can see for yourself what a plausible, come-hither sort of swine the beggar is—got to know every one here in Linwood—through the Arndales—got hold of Miss Melville somehow, and persuaded her to marry him—after her money, I needn’t tell you. Though he got a bad drop there … And now … well … there he is—the kind of vermin no decent person would touch with a forty-foot pole if they knew what he really was—and yet, because he’s been clever enough to bluff ’em he’s a pukka sahib—and because he swindled Miss Melville into marrying him … all these silly asses here—people like the Arndales and the Melhuishs and the Wellmores, and so on—they all have him in their houses—allow him to run round with their womenfolk—golf with him, and play bridge with him at the club—and other little games afterwards—at his house. I could tell you a thing or two about that little sideline of his … If he asks you to drop in one night at Hatfield Place for a little game, Wick, my boy … you just go home to bed. You’ll find it cheaper.’
‘Dear me,’ sighed Gore, ‘I do hope that if I ever have a wife, no bad-minded young man will fall in love with her.’
Challoner flushed again—a fine, deep warm crimson, this time. Touched.
‘You think I’m piling it on, Wick, because I don’t like the chap.’
‘Great Heavens, no.’
‘Yes, you do. I can see you do. But by God I’ll, tell you this much—if you knew what I know about Barrington—if he had tried to do to you what he has tried to do to me—if you had even an idea of the kind of blackguard that fellow is—you’d take a chance and do him in. I’m not joking. I’m not joking, Wick. I give you my solemn word—if I had the chance now, this moment, to blot him out—safely—to rid that dear little girl whose life with him is—’
He broke off abruptly, let the big clenched hand which he had shaken angrily, drop to his side, walked to the door of the room and came back.
‘I’m talking a lot, old chap,’ he said, with an unsuccessful attempt at a smile. ‘Too much. I know what I’ve said won’t go beyond you. It isn’t that I should be afraid to say anything I’ve said to you now to Barrington’s face any time—if it was merely a question of thinking of myself. But … he’d take it out of other people—if he heard. Just wash out what I’ve said. I’m a bit on the raw edge tonight.’
Gore rose.
‘I believe you’ve known me for some little time, young fellah,’ he said with mild reproach. ‘Now, get to bed. You’ve been thinking too much, young Bertie. You were never meant for that sort of thing. Night-night.’
Challoner eyed him moodily for a moment.
‘Well, I’m damn glad to see you again, anyhow,’ he said at length. ‘I’ll walk down to the end of the road with you.’
They sauntered down Selkirk Place in the fog, arranging a morning’s golf. Challoner’s two-seater had gone into dock that afternoon with a big-end gone, he explained; but any of the boys would run them out the three miles to Flax ways.
‘Thursday, then. I’ll pick you up at the Riverside. There—’ He took a hand from a trousers-pocket to wave it resentfully towards the red-brick building in front of them. ‘Just to give you an idea of the sort of swine Barrington is. There’s a little girl who looks after that bar down there. You may have seen her about the Riverside … Rather a pretty little thing—?’
‘Miss Rodney?’
‘Yes. That’s her name. Betty Rodney. Brains of a chicken, but not a bad little thing if chaps like Barrington would leave her alone. Well … mind, this is quite between ourselves. I just happen to know. He has got that poor little kid into trouble. That’s the sort of cur he is. I used to notice him hanging about round here late at night … I noticed his car first. He used to leave it just about here—I wondered what the devil he was up to at first, until one night, about a month ago, I heard him whistling up at her window. She sleeps over the bar, you see. And she came to that side-door and let him in. Silly little idiot. I believe she was to have been married to some chap or other, before Barrington came along and cut in. Now—well, I expect that’s off now. Suppose they’ll fire her from the Riverside, too, when they find out.’
‘Oh,’ said Gore, ‘so that’s the sort of gentleman Mr Barrington is. That’s very interesting. You’re quite sure about this girl, Bertie?’
Challoner laughed impatiently.
‘Sure? I bet she’s expecting him now. That’s her window where the light is. It’s always lighted up the nights he comes along.’ He laughed sardonically. ‘Though she won’t see him tonight, I fancy. Oh, yes. I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on Mr Barrington lately. I know what I’m talking about. Look here. If you don’t believe me—I’ll whistle under that window now. You’ll see what happens. I know what I’m talking about, believe me.’
‘My dear Bertie, I’ll take your word for it—’
‘No. I just want you to see for yourself. Get out of sight though. She’ll look out of the window when she hears the whistle. I want her to come down to the door. Let’s stand here. She can’t see us here from the window.’
His big hands urged the reluctant Gore into the angle formed by the railings of the section of the Green abutting on the hotel-grounds and one of the pillars of the gates admitting to them. Then he whistled softly. A large, very wet drop fell from an overhanging branch upon the nape of Gore’s neck and descended inside his collar. The dead leaves collected under the trees inside the railings and in the angle of the roadway by the gates emitted an odour of dismal dankness. The trunks of the trees looked disagreeably slimy. The fog smelt and tasted of decaying vegetation. One of Gore’s still new evening-shoes had pinched him a good deal during the evening and was pinching him quite uncomfortably now. Its toe stirred a little mound of leaves collected against the foot of the gate-pillar with some impatience.
‘Gone to bed and forgotten to switch off her light, old chap,’ he said. ‘Serve us right. Let’s get to bed.’
A small glistening object, revealed by the disturbance of the leaves at his feet, had attracted his attention—the vague attention of a sleepy man awaiting against his will the dénouement of a rather silly practical joke. As he stooped idly to pick it up, he heard the door beside the bar open cautiously and straightened himself again as Miss Rodney came into sight round the angle of the wall and halted abruptly upon perceiving him and his companion.
Challoner smiled at her grimly.
‘Good-night, Miss Rodney. Not in bed yet?’
She hesitated, plainly disconcerted; then decided upon haughty flippancy.
‘Looks like it, doesn’t it, Mr Challoner?’ she said tartly, and disappeared, remembering, however, to close the door as softly as she had opened it.
‘You see,’ said Challoner.
‘I see,’ said Gore. ‘Though I’m bound to say that Miss Rodney’s little amoors leave me cold.’
He yawned without the faintest attempt at concealment as he stooped and picked up the little glistening object which had attracted his attention amongst the leaves, and twiddled it between his fingers. Challoner however, displayed no resentment of his indifference nor any eagerness to adopt his advice as to getting to bed.
He stood frowning, apparently lost in thought, until Gore turned to leave him.
‘I say, old chap,’ he asked abruptly, ‘what time was it when you broke up at the Melhuishs’?’
‘About a quarter to twelve.’
‘Barrington left then—at a quarter to twelve?’
‘Yes. He and I came away together. Why?’
‘Nothing. I just wanted to know. Was he walking, or driving?’
‘Walking. At least I saw no car about, when I left him in Aberdeen Place.’
‘Oh,’ Challoner said musingly, ‘then he must have gone home on foot from the Melhuishs’—and taken his car out then … It was after one when Arndale said he saw it in Aberdeen Place.’
Despite his sleepiness and his aching toes, Gore’s interest in Mr Barrington’s nocturnal wanderings revived sharply.
‘In Aberdeen Place?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. Arndale told me he saw it there then—somewhere near the Melhuishs’ door. He must have gone home and taken it out—if you’re sure you didn’t see it there when he went away from the Melhuishs’ with you.’
Gore was to discover subsequently the reason for which the hour at which Barrington had reached home that night and taken out his car was of such interest to his companion. For him, at the moment, the point possessed no interest whatever beside the information that Barrington’s car had been in the neighbourhood of the Melhuishs’ hall door at the hour at which Arndale apparently had seen it there … after one o’clock. So he had gone, then—and found the door open, presumably … Left his car near the door, too, to advertise the affair to anyone who might happen to see it and recognise it … as Arndale had done—
‘Well, good-night, Bertie,’ he said curtly, and turned so that his companion might not see his face.
‘Good-night, Wick. Mind—mum’s the word, old chap.’
Gore crossed the hotel-grounds, and, finding the door of the annexe still open, gained his own quarters that way. Before he took off his overcoat one of the hands which explored its pockets mechanically drew out the small object which he had picked up near the gates. He stared at it in astonishment. It was a little hide knife-sheath, thickly ornamented with coloured beads—exactly like the sheaths of those two little Masai knives which had been included in his wedding-present to Pickles, and which he had seen a couple of hours before hanging in Melhuish’s hall.
He examined the thing carefully. Obviously it had not lain for any length of time amongst the damp leaves in which he had discovered it. It appeared to him too improbable a conjecture to surmise that chance should have brought to that spot—a bare hundred yards from the other two—a third such sheath. Common sense assured him that there was no third sheath—that this was one of the two which he had touched with a finger to draw the attention of Melhuish and Barrington to it.
How, then, had the blessed thing got out of Melhuish’s hall, across the road, and into that heap of leaves in the corner by the gates?
And the knife that should, for all prudence sake, have been in the sheath—where was that?
For a little while he pondered over the matter drowsily, half-minded to go out again and look about for the knife. But it was now getting towards half-past two. He smoked a final cigarette before his dying fire cheerlessly, and went to bed.
CHAPTER V (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
HE lunched next day with some friends out at Penbury, and was subsequently inveigled into participation in a hockey-match, in the course of which an enthusiastic curate inflicted such grievous injury upon one of his shins that he was compelled to abandon his intention of walking the four miles back to Linwood, and returned a full hour earlier than he had expected, in his host’s car. A page stopped him in the hall of the hotel to deliver a message received by telephone at two o’clock. Would Colonel Gore please ring up Linwood 7420 immediately upon his return, as Mrs Melhuish wished to speak to him urgently. Mrs Melhuish had been informed that Colonel Gore was not expected back until five o’clock, and had seemed annoyed, the page said. He had personally undertaken, if Colonel Gore returned before five, to ask him to ring up Linwood 7420 at once.
‘Urgently …’ Gore repeated to himself, as he limped to the telephone-cabinet. ‘Urgently …?’
An odd premonition of misfortune chilled him momentarily. The cheerful activities of his afternoon, the mob of light-hearted young people in whose company he had spent it, had banished most of the rather gloomy pessimism which had clouded his morning. But it was with an anxiety which he was quite unable to control that he awaited the reply to his call—an anxiety which increased sharply at the first sound of her voice.
‘Is that you, Wick? Can you come across here—now—at once? I must see you. I can’t explain over the phone. Can you come?’
‘Of course. My collar is a ruin—my boots are unspeakable—I’ve been playing hockey—’
‘Never mind. Never mind. Don’t wait to change. Please come at once.’
‘Coming right now.’
The dusk was deepening to darkness as he limped down Albemarle Hill and up Aberdeen Place to the door of Number 33. It opened to admit a patient and let out another as he came up to it. Melhuish’s busy time, of course—from two to six—the hour at which he would be out of the way … Gore’s depression deepened a shade.
He waited in the hall for a moment or two while Clegg ushered the incoming patient into the waiting-room and summoned from it the next in turn for the consulting-room. His eyes strayed to the trophy on the wall facing him, and instantly his memory recalled the sheath which he had found the night before by the back entrance to the Riverside. One of the two knives which had formed the lower apex of the trophy was missing. How the blazes had its sheath found its way to that heap of leaves?
‘Mrs Melhuish is in the morning-room, sir,’ said Clegg, pausing as the elderly lady whose name he had called emerged slowly from the waiting-room on the arm of a companion. ‘That door, sir, on the first landing. If you would kindly go up, sir.’
The room was in darkness when Gore entered, save for the glow of the fire before which she sat in a low chair, leaning forward, her chin cupped in her hands. She looked up eagerly.
‘Shut that door, Wick,’ she commanded. ‘And then come and sit down here. I want you not to look at me. That’s why I’ve switched off the lights. I’m in a most shocking mess.’
He obeyed her silently, seating himself, when he had shut the door, so that he, too, faced the glow of the fire.
‘I rang you up,’ she said, after a moment, ‘because I thought it just possible you might be able to help me out of it. Jolly cool, I expect you’ll think. But even if you do, I know you’ll listen to me. I simply must tell someone about it. And I could think of no one but you.’
‘Carry on,’ he said quietly. ‘What kind of a mess is it? Money—or a man?’
‘Both,’ she said curtly. ‘It’s simply a shocking mess.’
‘Told your husband about it?’
‘Heavens, no.’
‘That’s bad. Why not?’
‘I couldn’t. I’ve tried to screw myself up to do it—to tell him everything. But I can’t. I know he’d never forgive me … in his heart … even if the outside of him pretended to forgive me. He’s the best—the noblest man I have ever known. You can’t know, Wick, how good and fine he is. But … he’d never forgive … this.’
‘Rot,’ said Gore succinctly. ‘Piffle. Humbug.’
She made a little wretched gesture.
‘Ah, you’ve no idea what an idiot I’ve been, Wick.’
‘I wonder.’
‘You wonder?’
Her face turned to him sharply in the twilight.
‘No, no,’ he assured her quietly. ‘No one has told me anything. My wonder is merely the result of my own, I’m afraid, rather impertinent observation … and, if you’ll permit me to say so, your own infernal carelessness, young woman. I heard—you really compelled me to hear—a remark which you made last night, practically in my ear—not to me—but to … er … someone else.’
‘My God!’ she said in alarm, ‘you heard—What did I say?’
‘Er … something about a door, which might possibly not be open, you thought, but which Mr … er … the gentleman to whom you made the remark … seemed to think would be open.’
‘My God!’ she said again, her hands twisting nervously. ‘Did Lady Wellmore hear?’
‘I hope not. I think not. Though that’s not your fault. Then, the man is Mr Barrington?’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence. Gore rose to his feet abruptly, walked to the door, and flooded the room with light.
‘Well, Pickles, all I have to say to you—and I prefer to say it to your face, please—is this. You’re the silliest kind of silly ass. Mind—I know very little about this chap Barrington—can’t say I care much for most of what I do know. But if he were the best man that ever stepped—and he isn’t that—I should say just the same thing to you. Sorry I can’t be more sympathetic. I presume you expected I should be. But, as a confidant of illicit love-affairs, I’m afraid I’m rather a wash-out.’
She turned back upon him with a movement of exasperation.
‘Oh, don’t be a fool, Wick,’ she said sharply. ‘Good Heavens … I’m not that sort of idiot.’
‘Not that sort of idiot?’ he repeated. ‘Then may I ask what sort of idiot you are?’
‘Sit down. Don’t fidget about that way. I’ll tell you the whole thing—right from the beginning … It began this way. I met Mr Barrington four years ago … and … well, I had an affair with him … I didn’t know Sidney then—I hadn’t met him. He had only just come to Linwood, and I hadn’t come across him. If I had … well, this would never have happened …’
‘Suppose … er … we keep to what did happen …?’
‘I met Mr Barrington—he was Captain Barrington then—at a gymkhana got up by the Remount Depot people at Barhams. There was a Remount Depot out there, you know. He was stationed there then—in the summer of nineteen-eighteen. He won all sorts of things that afternoon—he’s a magnificent horseman—and, well, I was introduced to him and fell in love with him on the spot—that’s the long and the short of it—over head and ears the very first moment he spoke to me. You don’t understand that sort of thing. I know it will seem just silly to you—’
‘No, no, no. I’ve known it to happen before. Carry on.’
‘Well, it lasted for just five months—’
‘Five months is quite a long time. And then … it stopped?’
‘Yes. Something happened—and suddenly I saw what a frightful idiot I had been. It stopped then—very abruptly. He went away for a bit—when the depot was broken up—in the January of nineteen-nineteen. Then, a few months later, when he had been demobbed, he came back here again … to live. He had a flat at first in York Gardens, until he married and moved to Hatfield Place. He married Ethel Melville that spring—the very week I met Sidney. Of course I had to come across him. I couldn’t avoid it. I had known Ethel Melville all my life, and of course I had to call and dine with them and ask them to dine here, and so on. He was always at the Arndales’ house … In fact I ran into him and Ethel everywhere I went. However, he was always just polite—you know?—just like any other man one met. I thought at that time that the whole thing was done with—that he had done with me. But he hadn’t. He hasn’t. And that’s the mess.’
Gore shrugged his shoulders.
‘I suppose I’m more stupid than usual, or something. What, in the name of Heaven, is the mess?’
‘I’m not going into lurid details, Wick. You’ve got to try to understand that girls—even girls who are supposed, by misguided people like yourself, to be quite nice girls—are liable to be swept off their feet absolutely … if they happen just to have the bad luck to come across … a certain sort of man … the sort of man that Mr Barrington is. You can understand yourself, can’t you … that he is the sort of man who would sweep a girl off her feet?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘When I say sweep off her feet … I mean … well … the limit. You’re such an old dear that I know you’ll hardly believe that I could be capable of the limit. I’m afraid I am … or rather, was. At any rate … on a certain night in December, nineteen-eighteen, I got as near to it as doesn’t matter—with Mr Barrington’s kind assistance. Don’t look so unconvincing, Wick. I know you’re shocked to the marrow … However … there it is. By the merest fluke, I stopped there and had a good look at things. And nothing happened. Which was a jolly sight more than I deserved. Delightfully candid, am I not? I assure you there isn’t another man in the world upon whom I would inflict my candour so lavishly … if that is any consolation …’
‘Good. Let’s get to the ’osses.’
‘Well … as I say … nothing did happen. But nobody, you see … as things were … would believe that. That’s the trouble. Most of it, anyhow. I was fool enough … mad enough … to stay a night at a hotel at Bournemouth—with Mr Barrington … just before Christmas, nineteen-eighteen.’
Gore stared at her blankly.
‘Hell, Pickles,’ he said at length softly, ‘what did you do that for?’
‘I was infatuated with him, then. That’s the only word for it. I adored him—I thought of nothing, cared for nothing, wanted nothing … except to be with him. It seems extraordinary to me now … but—Well, that’s what happened, anyhow. I stayed a night at the Palatine at Bournemouth with him … as Mrs Barrington. If you care to take the trouble to go down to Bournemouth and ask them to let you look at the register for the date December 17th, 1918, you’ll see my beautiful handwriting. He was clever enough to make me sign— Trust him.’
‘But … how the …?’ Gore burst out after some moments of silent consternation.
‘How did I manage it? Oh, it was quite simple. I was still V.A.D.-ing at Lucey Court then. They thought I had gone home for the weekend. He had intended that we should stay the whole weekend at Bournemouth, you see. However … we didn’t. As I say, by the mercy of Providence, I had the sense to stop and take a good look at things just in time … Mr Barrington included. He lost his temper … and I had a glimpse of what he was like … really … I came home next day.’
‘Look here,’ said Gore desperately, ‘I must smoke a pipe. If I don’t I shall start in to break up the furniture or something.’
‘Yes, yes. Give me a cigarette. You’re sure you shut that door properly?
‘… Well, I thought I had done with him—though, of course, I feared all along that he might have kept my letters. But time went by, and—you know the way things that have happened dull off and stop worrying you. I had met Sidney … that helped me to forget about things I didn’t want to remember, too … We were married for a whole year before anything happened to make me in the least uneasy. And then one day Mr Barrington rang me up and said, “I want to see you. I shall be on the Downs, somewhere along the avenue, at half-past two. You’d better come along and see me.” Of course I refused at first, and, of course, in the end I got frightened and went. He was very hard up—that was his story at first … quite a polite, apologetic sort of story. Could I lend him a hundred pounds? I lent him a hundred pounds. Then I lent him another hundred. Then he asked for two hundred. I made a fuss—not that the money mattered so much, but because I had begun to realise by that time that he was not simply borrowing money from me, but demanding it. However, I gave him the two hundred—and, of course, he saw then that he had me—that I was afraid of him. And so it has gone on ever since, for two years. I think he has had about fifteen hundred pounds altogether, so far. Fifteen or sixteen, I’m not sure which. Sidney never dreams of asking me what I do with my own money … but of course I’ve been jolly careful in drawing the cheques for the money I paid away that way. So that I can’t be quite sure now myself. But it’s fifteen hundred at any rate.
‘Then I thought that if I gave him a really large sum, in one lump, he might be persuaded to give me back my letters. The letters are the trouble, you see. He said he would if I gave him six hundred. I agreed to that—that was about a fortnight or so ago. I agreed to make four payments of a hundred and fifty each, spread over two or three weeks. I was afraid to draw out so much money at once—because, of course, he insisted on being paid in cash.’
‘He would,’ Gore agreed grimly.
‘He insisted also on coming here to the house at night for the money. Of course, like a fool, I consented to that too, in the end. Though I might have known that his idea was to use that, afterwards, as an additional hold over me. But I gave way to him. I would have agreed to anything to get my letters back and have done with it. He came three nights and got a hundred and fifty each time. Last night he came again—I gave him the last hundred and fifty, and then he refused to give up the letters after all—said I must give him another four hundred— My God, Wick … what am I to do? What am I to do? It’s killing me. I shall go silly if it goes on much longer.’
He made no reply for a little space, stifling an inevitable inclination to sit in judgment and to consider what this ugliness just revealed to him meant to him rather than what it must have meant to her who had lived with it for two years. It was no moment for sentiment or for virtuous comment, he reminded himself. Facts were facts and must be faced—however ugly and disillusioning. Had he got all of them, even yet?
‘The letters are … very awkward?’
‘Very. Those I wrote to him after the episode at Bournemouth especially.’
‘You mean … a third person who read them would realise that the Bournemouth episode had taken place?’
‘Yes.’
‘Um. Well, then, you’ve got to get them back, that’s clear, somehow. Unless you face the music and tell your husband? …’
She shook her head.
‘No. I’d rather kill myself, Wick. In fact, I’ve been seriously thinking of killing myself all day.’
He grinned.
‘The more seriously the better …’
‘No. I’m not merely talking about it for the sake of talking about it. I’m not that sort, Wick. I could do it quite easily. Sidney has plenty of things in his consulting-room. All I have to do is sneak his keys. After all—what is it—to kill oneself? What is anything—if you once make up your mind to it? Things seem big and imposing and terrible and difficult … just to think of. But when you come to do them, they’re just a little movement of your hand or your tongue or your throat … nothing. Who, to look at me, would think for a moment that I could deliberately try to kill someone else? No one. And yet I did try, last night—tried deliberately. I didn’t succeed, as it happened. But do you think it seemed anything to me while I was trying to do it? Nothing. The simplest, flattest thing in the world. My dear man, if I once make up my mind to do myself in, I shall do it like a bird. And about the best thing I could do, it seems to me.’
‘Yes, yes. However—to keep to brass tacks. Do I understand you to say, seriously, that you made an attempt to do Mr Barrington in last night—while he was here—in this house?’
‘Yes. I tried to stab him with one of those little poisoned knives—you know … the things you were talking of to Sidney last night in the hall …’
‘What?’
‘Yes. I heard what you said to Sidney. I was on the stairs, just outside this room, while you were talking about them. I remembered, then, afterwards. If I had been just a shade quicker … well, I suppose I should have been in gaol by this time. But I should have got my letters and burnt them. There would have been plenty of time—at least I thought there would have been—before anyone came down and found him in the hall … All the night. And so Sidney would never have known. I meant just to give him a scratch. I heard you say a little prick would be enough. I should have had to fudge up some story—but I’m quite capable of doing that.’
Her matter-of-factness staggered him. He drew a long breath. ‘Phew …’
For a little while he paced to and fro between the fireplace and the door.
‘What happened? He took the knife from you, I suppose?’
‘Yes. I was trying to get it out of the little cover or sheath or whatever you call it … behind my back. And he grabbed my wrist and took it from me.’
‘Did he take it away with him?’
‘Yes.’
‘The knife and the sheath?’
‘Yes. Both. He put the knife into the sheath before he put it into his pocket. Why?’
‘Because, last night, about a quarter-past two or thereabouts, I found the sheath lying on the ground among some leaves, over there beside the gates leading into the hotel grounds. He must have thrown it away when he got outside. No, though. He had his car outside—just near your hall door, by the way—’
She uttered an exclamation of dismay. Then her eyes hardened in suspicion.
‘How do you know that? How do you know his car was there?’
‘Arndale told Challoner he saw it there a little after one o’clock … and Challoner told me … and Heaven knows how many other people since. However … to return to this confounded sheath. Barrington wouldn’t take his car over there into that corner, would he? That’s the one direction he wouldn’t take it. To get to Hatfield Place from here, he’d go along Aberdeen Place or Selkirk Place—I don’t know, though. Perhaps he went up that lane over there at the back of the hotel, and chucked the knife away as he passed the gates … into the Green. Yes. He might have done that. Though why exactly he should throw the knife away …’
She shook her head with conviction.
‘No. He wouldn’t throw it away. I’m quite sure of that. He put it away in his pocket carefully before he went out of the hall. He intended to keep it—he told me so—to hold it over me. I know he meant to keep it. I can’t think how you can have—You found only the sheath?’
‘Only the sheath. Of course the knife may have been lying about there, too, somewhere. I didn’t see it. But then I didn’t look for it. Of course I ought to have. I’ll go across there now and have a look round. Hasn’t anyone noticed that the beastly thing is missing from the hall yet, by the way?’
‘Yes. Clegg noticed it this morning. I heard him telling Sidney about it as he was going out after breakfast.’
‘Didn’t your husband wonder what had become of it?’
‘No. He merely told Clegg to ask the other servants if they knew what had become of it. I don’t suppose he’ll ever think of it again. He never worries about things of that sort. If he does, well … no one knows anything about it. It will be only another lie for me. That’s nothing. I’m an expert liar now.’
‘There’s only one kind of liar, Pickles—and that’s a damn bad one. I present you with that precious chunk of wisdom free gratis and for nothing.’
She laughed bitterly.
‘My dear man, do you think I believe for a moment that Sidney doesn’t know I’ve told him heaps and heaps of lies? Do you think anyone could deceive Sidney? You just try. He isn’t a dear simple old Muggins like you, whom any woman or anyone could bamboozle. If you knew what agony it is for me now—downright agony—to look him in the face—’
‘But … you don’t think he knows anything about this entanglement of yours with Barrington, do you? Not that that wouldn’t be the very best thing that could possibly happen—’
‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘Sometimes—sometimes I catch Sidney looking at me sometimes so oddly …
‘Then I persuade myself that it’s impossible … that if he knew anything, he’d say so at once and have it out with me. I don’t know what to think. I just keep on trying not to think—trying to wriggle along somehow … just like a worm wriggling in clay … blind … not knowing whether it’s being watched or not … crawling round and round in the old bit of mud. I know I’m bound to get caught in the end. I jolly nearly got caught last night, as a matter of fact. I had hardly got upstairs to my room, after Mr Barrington had gone away, before I heard Sidney go downstairs and go out. I suppose—I hope—someone had rung him up on the telephone … He has a night-telephone in his bedroom, you know … though I didn’t hear the bell ring. He made no reference to his going out at breakfast this morning … naturally I didn’t either. But I was simply scared stiff when I heard him leaving his room. I thought he must have heard us talking in the hall and got up and dressed—perhaps to follow Mr Barrington—’
‘What time was that? When did Barrington go away?’
‘I’m not sure. About half-past one or so, I should say.’
‘How soon after that did your husband go out?’
‘About ten minutes afterwards, I suppose. Perhaps not quite so long.’
‘Oh, well then, I can tell you where he went. I met him last night about twenty-five minutes to two over in Selkirk Place. I’d gone out to post some letters. He told me that he’d been called out to some Mrs MacArthur’s little boy …’
‘Oh,’ she said, relieved. ‘Then that’s all right. Another day to live. Hip-hip-hooray.’
‘Oh, damn it, Pickles,’ he muttered unhappily. ‘Pull yourself together.’
He seated himself again and chewed the stem of his pipe in silence for a little while. Outside darkness had long fallen. Better go back to the hotel and get his pocket-torch, he reflected, before he began hunting about for the knife. If Barrington had thrown it away—it was quite possible that second thoughts had induced him to do so—the knife and sheath might very well have been separated, either in the air, or by collision with the ground or a tree or the railings. Possibly the knife had fallen in the Green inside the railings. It would be a simple matter to climb the railings in the darkness; fortunately they were of no great height.
But—what a mess …
And what an escape …
Suppose she had succeeded in giving the brute a jab, or even a scratch, with the thing— Suppose he had died down there in the hall, as that Masai boy had died—thrashing about on the ground in agony, shrieking— She had never even thought of that, apparently—had fancied, probably, that death would come to him noiselessly and without warning. Good Lord—what an escape for her …
He turned to look at her, discreetly, as she sat leaning forward, staring at the fire, her chin again gathered in her hands. Deliberately he tried to take an impartial, dispassionate view of her, to eliminate the special, mysterious, incalculable quality of her that had, as long as he could remember her, made her for him … different. But even as he strove to strip his witch of her magic, he realised how potent it was—how little a thing that could be amputated by cold-blooded common sense or colder-blooded morality. What she had just told him ought, both common sense and morality assured him, to have almost completely obliterated her glamour for him. As a matter of fact, it had not affected it in the very least. He had simply perceived for himself once more the familiar fact that, in a human system of values—and Wick Gore was a very human person indeed—not the thing done, but the person who did it, mattered.
Her inappropriateness to the part which she had played in this disconcerting narrative of hers was almost ludicrous. It would have been difficult, he told himself, to have imagined a more perfect type, a more satisfying presentment—so far as externals went—of the absolutely ‘nice’ young married Englishwoman. From the tip of her sprucely-waving golden head to the toes of her smartly-sensible shoes, her orderly freshness and daintiness were without blemish—an estate of jealously-guarded, minutely-vigilant propriety—sweet, sound English womanliness, scrupulously-groomed, meticulously decked for the afternoon. And yet, behind that secure, orthodox façade of ‘niceness’, these tempestuous passions had swirled and eddied—eddied and swirled now. He was too shrewd to be far misled by the casual, stereotyped phrases of the modern young woman’s dialect. Beneath them he had had skill enough to detect the stir of the oldest, starkest of human stresses and strains. Love and Hate and Fear had had their way with her. That little mouth, whose lips were set now so coldly, had all but given the kiss of final surrender to one lover, all but betrayed another. That little hand, whose slim fingers upheld her chin childwise, had all but dealt murder. Amazing! And yet he was not amazed—save, indeed, by the knowledge that nothing she could do would ever amaze him in the least.
She turned to him at length, impatiently.
‘Can’t you suggest anything, Wick? I don’t care what it costs—so far as money is concerned—so long as I get those letters of mine back. Couldn’t you—wouldn’t you see him, and try to force him to give them up? I mean—you’re a man. You might be able to frighten him …’
‘I’m perfectly willing to try, of course,’ he said gravely. ‘Though frankly it seems to me that even if you do get your letters back, he’ll still have you in a very nasty place. That hotel-register down at Bournemouth, for instance? … How do you propose to get rid of that? Suppose, even, that he does actually part with your letters—what’s to prevent his coming along to you the very next day and saying, “Look here. I want another five hundred. If I don’t get it, I’m afraid your husband’s going to find out that you stayed at the Palatine Hotel at Bournemouth on such-and-such a date as my wife.” Well … what are you going to do then?
‘However … I’ll see the gentleman, if you wish, and have a preliminary talk about the matter with him at any rate. It may do some good … or it may do quite a lot of harm. What’s his number in Hatfield Place? Twenty-seven, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. When will you see him?’
‘I can go and see him now. Ring up first and find out if he’s at home—and go round straightaway if he is.’
‘I wish you would, Wick,’ she said gratefully. ‘You are a dear old thing. It would be such a relief if I could know that there was even a chance of escaping from this nightmare before I go to Surrey.’
‘You’re going away to Surrey?’
‘Yes. Tomorrow. I’m going up to the Hescotts for Georgie’s wedding. Of course I could cancel it. But Georgie would be most frightfully hurt. She was one of my bridesmaids, you see— And, of course, we’ve always been tremendous pals. I was so sure that all my troubles were to end last night. Do you really think you could see Mr Barrington this afternoon?’
‘I’ll go and ring him up now, if I may. Where’s your telephone?’
‘I’ll show you.’
She rose to her feet, visibly consoled by relief from the despair of inaction.
‘If you don’t see him this afternoon—’
‘I’ll see him some time today. You may rely upon that.’
The murmur of voices on the stairs halted him as he opened the door.
‘The Barracombes,’ said Mrs Melhuish impatiently.
‘Barracombes?’
‘General Barracombe’s girls. They live next door.’
Two fashionably-attired young women appeared in breathless excitement.
‘Barbara, dear,’ exclaimed one, ‘such a dreadful thing has happened poor Mr Barrington! Janet and I have just found him sitting in his car, just outside our door … dead.’
‘At least we’re nearly sure he’s dead,’ broke in her sister. ‘Your husband has gone out to him. We came at once to get him to go out. Isn’t it dreadful? Of course, he may be only unconscious—he may have had a fainting fit or something like that. My dear, I’m positively shaking all over. It gave me such a shock. You see, we spoke to him—at least Hilda spoke to him, and he didn’t answer. And then I thought he looked queer, somehow … and I got up on the footboard and touched his arm. I saw then by his face—’
Her sister checked her. Mrs Melhuish had gone very white suddenly and caught at a chair to steady herself.
‘There—now we’ve frightened you, rushing in this way. Perhaps it is only a fainting fit or something like that. Though I don’t think so. Do you, Janet?’
‘No. I touched his hand. Oh … I shall never forget how deadly cold it felt. I’m sure he’s dead.’
She shuddered luxuriously, rearranging her furs.
Mrs Melhuish had recovered her composure now.
‘How dreadful,’ she murmured. ‘This is a very old friend of mine … Colonel Gore.’
The two young women—they were obviously the kind of sisters who existed in duet—produced beaming smiles of perhaps a second’s duration, and then eclipsed them again to a becoming solemnity. Janet Barracombe stole to the door to peep down into the hall from behind the portière
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Lynn Brock
Rob Reef
This brand new edition of the first novel to feature the officer and gentleman detective Colonel Wickham Gore includes the first ever reprint of the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination.Colonel Gore is reunited with old friends at a dinner party to mark his return from service in Africa, but is shocked to discover that one of them has fallen victim to a callous blackmailer. When the antagonist is found dead, Gore finds that civilian life can be as challenging as anything in the army, especially when one of your friends may have become a killer . . . but which one?Once famous in the West End and on Broadway for plays written as ‘Anthony Wharton’, Dublin-born Alexander McAllister had become a publican in Surrey when, as ‘Lynn Brock’, his writing career took off again with the creation of country detective Colonel Wickham Gore. Described by Rose Mcaulay as ‘a very clever writer: a gift for drawing life-like people and a lively sense of dramatic incident’, Brock became a pillar of the Golden Age with his Colonel Gore whodunits and pioneering psychological novels including the lurid Nightmare.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Rob Reef, author of the John Stableford mysteries, and for the first time reprints the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination, a country house murder story from a rare 1926 American pulp magazine.
‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
Copyright (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by
W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1924
Published by The Detective Story Club Ltd 1930
‘Too Much Imagination’ published in Flynn’s magazine 1926
Introduction © Rob Reef 2018
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1930, 2018
Lynn Brock asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008283001
Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008283018
Version: 2018-08-24
Contents
Cover (#ub3ee8cc7-2248-5518-b74e-5dffc2e9e986)
Title Page (#u700ee0ca-6c5d-5fa8-9a07-5684533ea6a1)
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Too Much Imagination
Chapter I. Into the Net
Chapter II. Too Much to Swallow
Chapter III. The Note in her Hand
Chapter IV. Gore is Frank
Chapter V. Bloodstained Linen
Chapter VI. Arling Makes a Confession
Chapter VII. Tastes of a Secretary
Chapter VIII. Spain Waxes Vehement
Chapter IX. What Really Happened
Also by Lynn Brock
The Detective Story Club
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
ALEXANDER PATRICK MCALLISTER’S literary career had had a very promising start. Born in Dublin in 1877 and educated at Clongowes Wood College, he later obtained an Honours Degree at the Royal University and was appointed chief clerk shortly after the inception of the National University of Ireland. His stage plays Irene Wycherly (1906) and At the Barn (1912), both written under the pseudonym Anthony P. Wharton, became great successes both in London and on Broadway.
Following these two hits, McAllister continued to write, but none of his subsequent plays could revive his early fame. He and his wife Cicely moved from London to Guildford, where they were to run a pub called The Jolly Farmer, and at the age of 46 he wrote his first detective novel, The Deductions of Colonel Gore (1924), under the pseudonym Lynn Brock. By this time, his early fame as a playwright had faded and he appears to have turned his hand to crime fiction simply to improve his finances at a time when detective books had begun to outsell all others. Nevertheless, the book was sold to William Collins in the UK and Harper & Brothers in the US, and became so successful that ‘Lynn Brock’ lived on to publish thirteen detective novels, seven of which featured his titular hero-detective Colonel Wickham Gore.
Brock’s complex plots and witty style won the praise of many critics including Dorothy L. Sayers and S. S. Van Dine, and his mysteries were often reprinted and widely translated. Despite their fame, however, the novels slid into obscurity shortly after the end of the Second World War—unjustly, some might suggest. Several recent reviews have criticised his novels as cliché-studded, dull affairs overloaded with Golden Age formulas and stereotypes. These reviews have missed the point: Brock actually played his part in the creation of those classic detective fiction patterns now so familiar and dear to us. He wasn’t a mere imitator of the genre, but rather experimented with existing formulas long before they became formulaic.
Comparison with some of his fellow-writers shows that Brock was an ‘early bird’ in the genre. Colonel Gore took the stage three years before Sherlock Holmes’ last appearance in ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’; he preceded the debut of S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance in The Benson Murder Case by two years, and Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham in The Layton Court Mystery, John Rhode’s Dr Priestley in The Paddington Mystery and Anthony Wynne’s Dr Hailey in The Mystery of the Evil Eye by one year. All these authors (and many more not mentioned here) established serial detectives in the fashion of the times, and Brock’s Colonel Gore appears to fit into this category remarkably well.
But was he really originally meant to be just another amateur detective with a military background like Philip MacDonald’s Anthony Gethryn, who made his debut in The Rasp the same year as Colonel Gore? It is reasonable to doubt that. Gore lacks too many of the typical characteristics of the traditional hero-detective. He is not a well-to-do super sleuth like Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot. He has no profession that could help him solve crimes like the many doctors and scholars in the trade. He has no sidekick and no ally at Scotland Yard and, to cap it all, absolutely no talent for detecting! Gore makes mistakes. Many mistakes. In fact, he finds so many wrong solutions in The Deductions of Colonel Gore that the real solution ends up being the only one that is left.
T. S. Eliot called Gore ‘too stupid’. But he may have missed the parody in the title and the satirical undertones of Gore’s first adventure in his critique. The Deductions of Colonel Gore reminds one of Ronald A. Knox’s The Viaduct Murder (1925), where the four protagonists tumble from one wrong conclusion to the next trying to solve a murder on a golf course. Both books share the same tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the science of deduction and a tendency to spoof the methods of the great Sherlock Holmes. In fact, this similarity of approach suggests that Brock, like Knox, had intended to write a non-series book. Knox introduced a new detective in his next novel, The Three Taps (1927), whereas Brock—perhaps surprised by the success of his debut—elected for the security of continuing to develop his eponymous character. Colonel Gore’s Second Case (1925) shows Brock working to transform Gore into a sustainable serial protagonist, culminating in Gore finding a sidekick and, later in the series, establishing a detective agency in London. But all that is in the future.
Colonel Gore steps into his first adventure having just returned from Africa and looking forward to meeting many of his old friends. The story begins with a perfectly conventional dinner party. However, before the evening is over, ‘blackmail’ and ‘murder’ complete the guest list. These are not the only gruesome elements in the story. T. S. Eliot once mentioned the ‘extremely nasty people’ in Brock’s novels, and it is true that the author evokes a rather dark and pessimistic view of human nature. Nevertheless, The Deductions of Colonel Gore is a rip-roaring and, from today’s point of view, wonderfully old-fashioned mystery. It includes an archaic African murder weapon and a constantly confused detective who changes his mind about the possible culprit with each new clue he uncovers.
It is important to note that Brock’s stories contain some antiquated stereotypes of Jews and Africans. Such stereotypes would be intolerable in fiction written today, but were unfortunately not uncommon in the 1920s when these stories were published, and like similar writings of their era must be considered within their historical context.
The Deductions of Colonel Gore was reissued as Book 31 in Collins’ popular Detective Story Club in July 1930, and was joined by reprints of his second and third cases the following year. This new edition now includes for the first time the only published Colonel Gore short story, ‘Too Much Imagination’, which first appeared in Flynn’s weekly magazine on 30 January 1926. It follows Gore’s (by now more serious) deductions in a country house murder case. Connoisseurs of his adventures will be interested to note that the story appears to be a sketchy draft of Colonel Gore’s Third Case (1927, published in the USA as The Kink)—as well as the playful appearance of the author’s own home, The Jolly Farmer. It was in Guildford that McAllister wrote his first ‘Lynn Brock’ mystery and it is thus not surprising that most of his Colonel Gore adventures are set in or near Surrey.
In 1932, the innovative psychological novel Nightmare began a run of standalone books from Brock, although it was not quite the end for Gore: the Colonel returned after a break of ten years in his swan song, The Stoat: Colonel Gore’s Queerest Case (1940). Three years later, on 6 April 1943, Alexander Patrick McAllister died at the age of 66 at Herrison House, a hospital near the Dorset village of Charminster, ending a literary career very different from the one he had started, but no less successful for all that.
ROB REEF
February 2018
CHAPTER I (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
FOR just a moment following the sound of the door’s closing behind her husband’s entry Mrs Melhuish’s profile remained downbent in abstracted calculation to the bridge-block in her lap. A small forgetfulness, natural enough, perhaps, in a hostess’s last half-hour of anxiety before a duty dinner of importance. Yet, even twelve months ago, Sidney Melhuish remembered with passionate resentment, that absorbed, adorable little face would have flashed round, even in such an anxiety, in eager welcome to his coming. As they noted and weighed the momentary delay, his rather cold eyes hardened. Then, swiftly, they averted themselves. When Mrs Melhuish raised to him an expression of good-humoured perplexity, he was mildly absorbed in his finger-nails.
‘What a nuisance, Sidney. Mr Barrington has just rung up to say that Mrs Barrington can’t possibly come. Frightful earache, poor thing. I’ve been trying to work out my table. Do come and help me.’
Her air of charming, unruffled dismay was candour itself—beyond suspicion. And yet Melhuish was aware that for an instant as she spoke her smiling eyes had repeated once more the question they had asked of his so often of late. But of the hideous, the incredible suspicion that lurked behind it his clean-cut, gravely-smiling face betrayed no slightest hint as he moved behind her chair to inspect the much-altered plan of the dining-table which was drawn on the bridge-block.
For a moment or two they considered it in silence.
‘If I had had even another quarter of an hour’s notice—I know Beatrice Colethorpe would have stopped the gap for me. But even the amiable Beatrice would kick at a dinner-invitation of twenty minutes.’
She turned—Melhuish observed how instantly—as the door of the drawing-room reopened and Clegg announced the first of the evening’s guests.
‘Colonel Gore.’
No moment of feigned abstraction now—no summoning of her forces—no steadying of her nerves to meet his glance. Instead, a quick smile and gesture of vivid, frankest pleasure, in which his poisoned thought detected relief and eager escape from the danger of being alone with him.
Gore’s lean brown face reflected the cordiality of his hostess’s greeting, as she rose and went to meet him with outstretched hand.
‘“Early”, you commanded me. Therefore I have obeyed. Not too literally, I hope.’
Mrs Melhuish laughed as her hand slid into a clasp of fraternal heartiness.
‘Well, as you have kept us waiting for three years, I think we may acquit you of undue precipitation.’ She turned to her husband. ‘This, Sidney, is the one and only Wick.’
Gore’s twinkling gray eyes ran over his host in swift appraisement as they shook hands. In the four days for which he had been installed at the Riverside Hotel he had contrived to learn a good deal about Barbara Melhuish’s husband, and that swift, straight, shrewd glance of his assured him at once that his informants had not been mistaken. A bit frigid, Dr Sidney Melhuish—a bit solemn, perhaps—but one of the right sort. Steady, clean eyes—steady, clean mouth—plenty of jaw and chin. A man that knew his job and knew he knew it. He grinned his charming grin and took the hand of Pickles’s husband in a grip of steel. Thank the Lord, she hadn’t made a mess of it, as so many of the Old Lot had somehow contrived to do.
‘I know you very well by repute, Colonel Gore,’ Melhuish smiled cordially—few men could resist Wick Gore’s grin. ‘Indeed, it is only with the utmost difficulty, I assure you, that I refrain from addressing you as “Wick” straightaway.’
‘Why refrain?’ twinkled Gore. ‘Especially as I may confide to you that I have been in the habit of addressing your wife as “Pickles” since she was able to throw dolls and bottles and things at me out of a perambulator.’
‘Now, now,’ expostulated Mrs Melhuish. ‘No indiscretions, please.’
‘I apologise. I must remember that now I find you with a husband who believes not only that you are perfection, but that you always were.’
But his little pleasantry had somehow fallen flat, he perceived—as little pleasantries sometimes did. Melhuish, he divined, was a man to whom little pleasantries must be administered cautiously; no doubt, too, in three years of matrimony the light-hearted Pickles had acquired some of the seriousness of mind becoming to the wife of a rising physician.
‘I must get my table right. Do come and help me,’ said Mrs Melhuish hurriedly, returning to her diagram. ‘Mrs Barrington has developed bad earache and can’t come. We have just seven minutes to divide four women neatly and tactfully amongst five men. Let us concentrate our three powerful intellects. There—now I’ve drawn a nice new table. The blob at the top is Sidney.’
Gore glanced down at the first design, thus abandoned.
‘Barrington is coming then?’ he asked.
Mrs Melhuish nodded her golden head abstractedly.
‘Mrs Barrington insisted upon it, he said. Ah—I’ve got it.’ She scribbled some hasty initials. ‘There’s no help for it, Wick. You must divide Sylvia Arndale with Sir James. There—!
She held up her revised scheme for her husband’s consideration, and, when he had approved it with his grave smile, flitted from the room to superintend the rearrangement of her cards. It was nine years since Gore had seen her; but she had changed, he reflected, as he attended upon her exit, very little; if at all, for the better. Pickles must be just thirty now. Thirty … Extraordinary. His mind flashed back to the night of her coming-out dance—November, 1910. Twelve years ago—incredible. Ah, well—those days were done with, and the Pickles of them. With the faintest of sighs he turned to rejoin the lucky beggar who had, somehow, succeeded in capturing that airy miracle and putting it in charge of his socks and his servants and his dinner-parties. A good chap—a good-looking chap—a chap, perhaps, a tiny shade too old for her, but in every way plainly to the eye a chap to make her as happy and contented a wife as—well, as any intelligent wife was likely to be made.
‘You know most of the people who are coming to us this evening, Barbara assures me,’ said Melhuish.
‘All, I believe, except Barrington. I knew Mrs Barrington, of course, very well in the old days—when she was Miss Melville. She married just after the war, I think?’
‘Yes.’
A certain quality in the monosyllable attracted Gore’s attention.
‘Successfully, I hope? What part of the world does Barrington come from?’
‘Jamaica, I believe.’
Gore grinned.
‘Sounds like sugar. Money to money, I suppose. Always the way here in Linwood. Simply revolting the way it breeds in hereabouts. No chance whatever for the deserving poor, is there? I suppose old Melville came down with thirty or forty thousand at least?’ He sighed. ‘Lord—who wouldn’t be a son-in-law … in Linwood?’
For a moment Melhuish was absorbed in adjusting the rose shade of a light to his satisfaction.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, with that curious dryness of tone which his guest had already noticed, ‘I understand that the Melvilles disapproved of the marriage and made a very small settlement. Mr Barrington is a patient of mine—Mrs Barrington too, indeed. But I cannot claim what one would describe as an intimate acquaintance with either of them personally. My wife, no doubt, can tell you all about their affairs. As you are aware, of course, she and Mrs Barrington are very old friends—’
He paused. His smile was formally courteous, but unmistakably resolved to discuss Mrs Barrington and her husband in no further detail.
‘Right, my good man,’ reflected his insouciant guest, without resentment. ‘Keep your poker down your back if you think it makes you more impressive. A little bit sensitive, are you, because people are old friends of your wife’s and not of yours? Myself included, perhaps? Well, we’ve got to talk about something. Let’s try golf.’
But Melhuish, it became clear at once, regarded golf merely as an inducement to walk six miles on Sunday afternoon. Cheerfully Gore tried the by-election of the preceding week, fishing, the Panel System, and the Navy cuts. Mrs Melhuish returned to find the two men staring at the fire with the apparent conviction that in all the universe it alone held for them a common interest.
‘I did tell you, Wick, that Sir James Wellmore is our pièce de résistance this evening? Or did I? At any rate he is. We are awfully proud of him. He’s our show patient.’
‘You have met Sir James before, of course?’ Melhuish asked.
‘Once or twice—in the deplorably long ago—when he was not yet Sir James. When we were stationed out at Fieldbrook Barracks in nineteen-thirteen—just before we went to India—I remember he dined us and danced us and shot us in the most princely way. His first wife—she was still alive then—had, I recall, a penchant for the Services.’
Mrs Melhuish flashed a little teasing smile at him.
‘If I am not mistaken the present Lady Wellmore was addicted to the same pleasant vice in those days. Or was it the younger Miss Heathman who was the attraction?’
Gore’s teeth showed beneath his trim little wheaten moustache.
‘How happy could I have been with either,’ he laughed lightly. ‘I believe I did miss the chance of my lifetime then. Someone told me last night at the club that Angela Heathman’s income at present works out at just a shilling a minute. I’ve never stopped thinking about it since. If I hadn’t gone off so hopelessly, I—by Gad, I believe I’d chance my luck now.’
‘My dear Wick,’ laughed Mrs Melhuish, ‘Miss Heathman lives in the fourth dimension nowadays—or somewhere where there are better things than marriage and giving in marriage. Quite a difficult proposition, I should say, for a mercenary adventurer—even if he still has the smile of an angel and, still, no perceptible symptoms of a tum-tum.’
As their eyes met in smiling mutual approval, it seemed to Gore that nothing of their old camaraderie had faded, after all, in the passage of all those years. They had always looked at one another and chaffed one another just so, shrewdly yet with conviction of absolute understanding and sympathy, since the days when he had been a Harrovian of unusually misguided enterprise, and she the twinkling-legged bane of her nursemaid’s existence. It was pleasant to be back, if only for a little while, in one’s own country, and to find that one’s old place was still there, waiting for one. The chilling disillusionment that had invaded him steadily during the four days since his return was forgotten in a soothing content. From the radiant, piquant face of his hostess—smiling at him precisely as it had smiled at him twenty-five years before amongst the branches of forbidden apple-trees, with one eyebrow slightly higher than the other—his eyes turned to absorb the effect of the warmth and colour and dainty comfort of the big drawing-room that was her setting. And as they turned they met the eyes of her husband.
There was a moment of silence, and then Gore said, brightly, that it had looked quite like snow about five o’clock that afternoon. With that opinion the Melhuishs agreed, Mrs Melhuish with sparkling vivacity, her husband with considered conviction, as Clegg reappeared to announce the arrival of Mr and Mrs Arndale.
‘Good Lord,’ thought Gore, as he reared his graceful and admirably-tailored person from the most comfortable chair he had sat in for nine years. ‘The man thinks I’m an old flame of Pickles’s. I know he does. That’s why he has been watching me like a cat, is it? Fi-fi. Tut-tut. Pickles, Pickles … I hope I have not been mistaken in you?’
But no trace of these interior misgivings was visible as he shook hands with Cecil Arndale and his pretty, plump little wife. They, too, were part of the Old Days and the Old Lot—Sylvia Arndale and Barbara Melhuish were first cousins, and Cecil Arndale and he had been at Harrow together, though nearly three years separated them—and their pleasure at the meeting was as manifest as his own. In sixty seconds Mrs Arndale had reproached him for calling on two afternoons on which she had been out, informed him that she had made fifteen people buy his book, and secured him for dinner next day and a dance in the following week.
‘I went to see your film twice,’ she pouted, ‘and there you were, standing with hundreds and dozens of dead antelopes and things stacked all around you—and I never got as much as tsetse-fly’s whisker out of the lot. I shall never forget that you sent Barbara all those lovely stickers and beads and things as a wedding-present, and forgot me—me, who was once more than a sister to you—absolutely. Never, never.’
‘My dear Roly-Poly,’ grinned Gore placidly, ‘you forget that I sent you a very beautiful and costly flower-bowl when you were entitled to a wedding-present—which was, pray recollect, four years before I became a movie-star—’
‘For Heaven’s sake,’ cried Mrs Arndale, ‘don’t remind me how long I’ve been married to Cecil. It’s not fair to him, poor dear. It embitters me so, and he has a perfectly ghastly time when I’m embittered.’
Cecil Arndale laughed—a little foolishly, as he had always laughed, his rather prominent blue eyes glistening slightly in his large, brick-red face. He had grown fat, Gore observed—much too fat for a man of thirty-nine—and his fatness accentuated that slight weakness of mouth and chin that had always marred his good-humoured, healthy, conventional good looks. His laugh faded again instantly into abstraction; his blue eyes stared vacantly across the room, while his lips twisted and puckered and smoothed themselves out again restlessly. Too much food, Gore conjectured—altogether too much drink—too much money—too easy a life of it. Poor old Cecil. He had always threatened to go soft. With some little difficulty Gore suppressed the recollection that this hefty, healthy six-footer had spent the war in England, and, incidentally, doubled during it the fortune which he had inherited from his father. Well, someone had had to stay at home and build ships. Besides, Arndale had married in 1915. And anyhow all that was his own affair. Gore, who had been through the business from start to finish, was not disposed to overrate the advantages to be derived from that experience. He wondered a little, none the less, just what the plump, outspoken little Roly-Poly had thought, privately, of her spouse’s devotion to his business—say, in March, 1918.
‘How’s your brother?’ he asked her. ‘I fancied I caught a glimpse of a face that might have been his—brought up to date—passing me on the Promenade in a most vicious-looking two-seater. But I haven’t run into him yet, end-on, so to speak—’
‘Bertie? He lives just beside you. You’re staying at the Riverside, aren’t you? He has a flat in Selkirk Place at present—just across the way … at the other side of the Green. Number 73. You’ll find him there any morning up to lunch-time in bed.’
‘Still unattached?’
‘We hope so.’
‘What does he do all day?’
Mrs Arndale shrugged her pretty shoulders.
‘He plays a good deal of golf, I believe—races a good deal—hunts a little. If he happens not to be away, and if it’s too wet to do anything else, he runs down to the Yard in his car, smokes a cigarette, and runs back to change. I have calculated that on an average Bertie changes seven times a day.’
‘Oh, then he’s attached to the Yard now, is he?’
‘Cecil says so. I suppose Cecil knows. It’s his Yard.’
Arndale came out of his abstracted silence for a moment.
‘Bertie’s all right,’ he said. ‘Bit of an ass about women, that’s all.’
‘We all are, thank Heaven,’ smiled Gore—‘er … until we’re forty … or … er … thirty-nine.’
Arndale’s eyes regarded him blankly.
‘Eh? Thirty-nine? No. Bertie’s nothing like that …’ With a visible effort he concentrated upon his calculation. ‘Bertie’s thirty—or thirty-one. Why, hang it, old chap—I’m thirty-nine.’
He smiled vaguely and strolled away. Gore caught his wife’s eye.
‘What’s the trouble, Roly-Poly?’ he asked bluntly.
She shrugged.
‘Heaven knows. Cecil’s always like that now … I’m frightfully worried about it, really. It’s not money, I know. We’re simply revoltingly well-off … It’s some sort of blight … something mental.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Sometimes I think it’s I who am responsible for it … of course I’ve always known that I’m not the right person … And yet we get on quite well … He’s quite fond of me, really, in his way … Oh, don’t let us talk about it any more. Let’s talk about you. It’s so absolutely ripping to see your old phiz again, Wick.’
As she patted his arm with a little impulsive gesture the door reopened and Clegg announced the guests of honour.
‘Sir James and Lady Wellmore and Miss Heathman.’
While the Melhuishs chatted for a moment with the new arrivals Gore took stock of them with something like dismay. Wellmore, whom he remembered as a brisk, cheerful, keen-eyed middle-aged man, looked now every day of a tired, peevish, short-sighted sixty-five. Lady Wellmore—could that large-bosomed, broad-hipped, triple-chinned woman be the Phyllis Heathman of the old days? And that sallow, weary-eyed, bony-necked female with the nervously-flickering smile—could that be the once really quite pretty Angela? Good Lord.
His hostess’s voice claimed his attention.
‘You have met Colonel Gore before, Sir James, I think.’
Wellmore’s tired eyes rested on the younger man’s face perfunctorily, as he allowed his flabby, damp hand to be shaken.
‘Yes,’ he said briefly, ‘I remember you. Nineteen-thirteen. You were stationed at Fieldbrook Barracks. In the Westshires. One of the prettiest shots I ever saw. Been in Africa, haven’t you? Wonder you didn’t stay there instead of coming back to this filthy climate. My wife has your book. But I’ve no time to read books. Never had.’
He passed on towards the fireplace and bent to warm his hands at the cheerful blaze wearily, his back to the room. Chairman of the United Tobacco Company—owner of three millions—master of six thousand lives—he could afford to dispense with ceremony.
But Lady Wellmore was graciousness itself. She had simply revelled in his book—especially the parts about the pigmies—she considered the parts about the pigmies perfectly fascinating. And the film—perfectly wonderful. She had been absolutely thrilled when dear Barbara had told her that she was to meet him again that night. She rounded him up in a cul-de-sac formed by a small table, two chairs, the flank of the big piano, and her sister.
‘Angela, have you forgotten Colonel Gore? He has been regarding you with the most reproachful of eyes.’
Angela Heathman smiled nervously and held out a languid hand. At close quarters the sallow, haggard weariness of her face, with its drawn lips and shadowed eyes, was still more noticeable. Beside her sister’s florid exuberance her faded thinness was accentuated painfully. Her smile faded, her eyes looked beyond him in brooding abstraction. She said nothing—withdrew her hand listlessly, and appeared to have forgotten the existence of the people who surrounded her.
‘Nerves, poor thing,’ Gore reflected. ‘Another of ’em that doesn’t know why she was born.’
As a silvery-toned clock somewhere in the room chimed eight fleetly, Clegg announced the last guest.
‘Mr Barrington.’
For a moment the hum of voices died. The man who had entered surveyed the occupants of the room with smiling composure as he moved towards his hostess.
‘My wife has charged me with the most abject of apologies, Mrs Melhuish. She had hoped until the last moment to be able to come.’
‘We are so sorry,’ Mrs Melhuish assured him. ‘But it would have been folly for her to have ventured out on an evening like this. Of all afflictions in the world, I can imagine none worse than earache.’
‘Dreadful. Quite dreadful,’ Barrington agreed. He included Melhuish in his smile. ‘However, she has retired to bed with a large supply of aspirin tabloids at hand … How are you, doctor? Worked to death, I suppose, as usual? I see you rushing about in that big car of yours from morning to night. Lot of sickness about, isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ said Melhuish simply.
Not a brilliant conversationalist, Dr Sidney Melhuish, Gore reflected—an exceedingly dry stick indeed. No one could suspect him of shyness or nervousness; his clean-cut face was as cool as a chunk of ice. Just one of those men who just didn’t want to talk most of the time and wouldn’t. Grim-looking chap, when his mouth set. Sort of chap that would look at your tongue and tell you you had six months to live and touch the bell for his man to show you out. Poor Pickles … What sparkling conjugal tête-à-têtes …
And yet, a moment later, when Melhuish crossed the room, Gore caught a glimpse of another man—a man whose kind, wise eyes and almost boyish sincerity and simplicity of manner and gesture brought a faint flush of animation to Angela Heathman’s apathetic face as he smiled at her. No doubt she, too, was a patient of his. For that matter, as far as Gore had been able to discover, everybody in Linwood was, though it was only four years or so, he had learned, since Melhuish had purchased an old and decaying practice and installed himself in that most conservative of Westmouth’s suburbs, a stranger and an interloper. True, he had brought with him from Bath, where he had been in practice for several years before the war, a reputation for brilliance, especially in heart cases. But Gore knew the stiff reserve and suspicion of Linwood too well to believe that a reputation for anything in the world acquired, anywhere else in the world could influence it in the least. Something—something which no doubt Pickles had found out for herself—there must be in this difficult husband of hers that was not vouchsafed to the common or garden general practitioner … Something, for instance, that had been able to win for him not merely the patronage but the friendship of a man like James Wellmore, whose sole standard of judgment was value for his money.
His eyes returned to the shrivelled, peevish face of the tobacco magnate, bent obstinately on the fire, its underlip protruding sulkily as he listened to something which Barrington was saying to him. There was no trace of affection, paternal or otherwise, in his expression just then. Indeed as Barrington moved away from him towards Mrs Melhuish, Wellmore turned to look after him with an unmistakable scowl until, detecting Gore’s interest in him, he switched his erring gaze back to the fire once more.
‘I have succeeded in finding that cutting for you, Mr Barrington,’ said Mrs Melhuish.
‘How kind of you to have remembered,’ replied Barrington, displaying his small, even teeth in a smile of open admiration. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, Gore admitted ungrudgingly—quite the handsomest man he had seen for some time—with some quality of charm that lay deeper than the perhaps slightly theatrical effect of his dark aquilinity and reckless gray eyes. Thirty-five at most, broad-shouldered, slim-flanked, easily—a little too easily, perhaps—sure of himself, he was one of those men at whom no woman could look without interest or without the awakening of her oldest and strongest instinct. Already Gore had noticed with amusement that, as he moved across the room to his hostess, the regards of the other three women had followed him with a speculative intentness. And that the charms of this smiling Adonis were not lost upon Mrs Melhuish herself was no less evident. Her colour had brightened beneath the flattery of his look; her poise and intonation as she spoke to him were tinged with the subtle challenge of her sex—the indefinable yet unmistakable blending of defiance and invitation that—by a cynic as hardened as Wick Gore—could be taken for nothing but … well, what any chap with two eyes in his head would take it for. Miss Pickles hadn’t changed all her spots, then—for all the rash vows of holy matrimony. Still a flash of colour and a sparkling eye for an agreeable-looking young fellah. She had always preferred ’em dark … and a bit hooky about the beak.
‘I put it down somewhere,’ said Mrs Melhuish, glancing about her. ‘Now … where …? Oh, yes. I remember.’
She moved to the piano, and picked up an envelope that lay on some music. Barrington took the envelope from her smilingly, opened it, glanced casually at the newspaper cutting which it contained.
‘Thanks so much,’ he said, as he replaced the cutting and put the envelope away in a pocket. ‘As a matter of fact I had rather thought of running up to look at another shoot in that part of Wiltshire this week.’
‘Really?’
Mrs Melhuish’s colour had forsaken her now. Her eyes consulted with anxiety the little Sèvres clock on the table beside Gore, rose to his brown, hard profile, and rested there for a moment warily. He stood but an arm’s-length from her; but he was listening with the most flattering of attention to Lady Wellmore’s views upon the sinister aims of Labour. The slightest movement of her golden head showed her her husband and Sylvia Arndale grouped by the big chair near the fire into which Wellmore had subsided with a yawn. At the other side of the room Arndale struggled feebly with Miss Heathman’s vague-eyed listlessness, pausing between each laborious effort to regard a water-colour above her head vacantly. Mrs Melhuish’s hand strayed to a bowl of chrysanthemums by the piano, touched a great gold and russet bloom caressingly.
‘If the door is shut, go away,’ she said softly—almost inaudibly. ‘I may not be able to manage tonight. I will ring you up tomorrow at eleven if not.’
Barrington bent to examine the gorgeous blossom.
‘It will be open,’ he smiled.
His reckless eyes dwelt in hers victoriously for an instant. As she turned to introduce him to Gore, Clegg appeared once more, slightly flushed and seven minutes late.
‘Dinner is served, madam.’
CHAPTER II (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
IT was, it appeared, Sir James Wellmore’s inviolable rule to get out of his bed at seven o’clock and get into it again before midnight, and at half-past eleven he and Lady Wellmore departed in an immense limousine. Miss Heathman, silent and vague-eyed to the last, accompanied them; the big house on the Promenade of which she was the capricious mistress, lay on the Wellmores’ homeward way across the Downs to their palatial mansion at Bishops Leaze. The Arndales had gone away before eleven o’clock hurriedly, disturbed by a telephone-message requiring, Gore presumed, Mrs Arndale’s immediate return to some urgent trouble of the baby, with details of whose incredible brilliancy of intellect and beauty of form she had regaled him at intervals during dinner. It was twenty minutes to twelve when he and Barrington made their adieux to Mrs Melhuish and went down the stairs accompanied by their host.
As Clegg helped him into his overcoat, in the hall, Gore glanced at the artistically-arranged trophy which occupied the wall space between the hall door and the door of the dining-room. His wedding present made, he reflected, quite a decent display, the two befeathered Masai head-dresses and the scarlet-and-ochre magic-mask forming an effective centre to the design. The shaft of one of the Wambulu spears had developed some mysterious breed of worm some months after its arrival, Melhuish told him, and had been replaced by a new one.
‘Hope your maids aren’t curious about cutlery, doctor,’ Gore grinned, as he accepted a light for his cigarette. ‘I mean—those hunting spears are probably quite safe. But those little arrows—and the knives—Well, I think I inserted lavish warnings in the packing-cases. I hope I did.’
Barrington fitted a cigarette into a long amber holder.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘Bad medicine, are they?’
‘Possibly very nasty indeed,’ said Gore—‘some of them.’ He touched the beaded sheaths of two small knives, crossed to form the lower point of the trophy. ‘These two little brutes, for instance … I shouldn’t mind betting that if you were thoughtless enough to scratch yourself with one of these—even after three years—something exceedingly unpleasant would happen you in the next few minutes. I’ve actually seen a poor beggar die in less than two minutes from a prick of one of those little throwing-knives … Die most untidily, too.’
‘What’s the poison?’ asked Melhuish, with professional interest. ‘I remember now that my wife did say something about the cautions you sent her. But I’m afraid we had both forgotten all about them.’
‘It’s a root called “nmakato.” Not in the B.P., I rather fancy, doctor. We didn’t succeed in seeing the root itself. As a matter of fact, the old witch-doctors who distill the stuff are rather reticent about little trade-secrets of that sort. I saw the flowers of the thing, though—yellow—not unlike our gorse, both to look at and to smell. They use the flowers to make wreaths for their young women when they retire into seclusion to think over the joys of matrimony for a month or so before they plunge into them.’
He held out his hand. ‘Well, we shall meet again, doctor, no doubt.’
‘You haven’t decided yet how long you’ll stay in Linwood?’
‘Some weeks, at any rate, I hope. Good-night.’
‘You coming my way, Colonel?’ Barrington asked, as the hall door opened to let them out into the foggy dampness of the November night.
‘I’m at the Riverside,’ Gore replied. ‘Just across the way.’
‘Oh.’
Barrington turned to his host.
‘Good-night, doctor. I shall run in and see you tomorrow or next day. I’ve been sleeping a lot better since I cut tobacco right out. But I still get those nasty twinges …’
Melhuish nodded gravely.
‘Come and see me. I hope you’ll find Mrs Barrington’s earache better when you get back. Please tell her how sorry we were that she was unable to come.’
‘I will. Good-night.’
‘Good-night.’
The two departing guests sauntered side by side for a few yards, chatting desultorily until their paths diverged—Gore’s towards the hotel, the lights of whose upper windows were visible through the branches of the trees in the Green, his companion’s along the deserted vista of Aberdeen Place, at the end of which the Corinthian façade of the club rose palely in the glare of the arc-lamps in the Mall.
‘My old heart’s worrying me a bit,’ Barrington explained. ‘I’ve had to cut out most of the joys of life—temporarily, at any rate.’
Gore murmured sympathetically.
‘Bad luck. You’re in good hands, though.’
‘Melhuish’s? None better. You a bridge player?’
‘Incurable.’
‘Then I expect I shall run into you at the club.’
‘I expect so. Remember me to your wife, won’t you? She and I are very old friends.’
‘Indeed? She’ll be delighted so see you any afternoon you care to run in. Hatfield Place—Number 27. Don’t forget.’
‘Twenty-seven. Many thanks. Good-night.’
‘Good-night, Colonel.’
The two parallel rows of tall houses which formed Aberdeen Place and Selkirk Place respectively faced one another, at the distance of a long stone’s-throw, across the Green—a pleasant strip of ornamental garden enclosed by railings for the exclusive use of residents, and running the entire length from Albemarle Hill at the western end to the Mall at the eastern. For convenience’ sake two transverse passages of roadway divided the Green into three detached sections, roughly equal in length. Gore’s path from the Melhuish’s house to the back entrance to the Riverside Hotel—the front entrance was in Albemarle Hill, overlooking the river—lay along one of these two cross passages, and when he had parted from his fellow-guest, therefore, a very few steps interposed between him and Barrington the railings of the middle section of the Green and the shrubs and trees which formed, inside the railings, the ornamental border of the garden. Happening to glance backwards, however, for no more particular reason than that his ears had informed him that the retreating sound of his late companion’s footsteps on the pathway had ceased abruptly, he caught a glimpse of Barrington halted beneath a lamp, facing another man—taller, and wearing a light-coloured raincoat—the sound of whose voice, raised, it seemed to Gore angrily, reached his ears indistinctly during the instant for which he slackened pace to look back. Afterwards he recalled that in that brief instant he had wondered a little from where that taller, raincoated figure had emerged; since, while he had lingered chatting with Barrington not a soul had been in sight in Aberdeen Place against the glare of the Mall. He was to recall, too, that something in the build and size of the second man had suggested Cecil Arndale vaguely—but just how vaguely or how accurately he was afterwards quite unable to weigh. These particular speculations, to which at the moment he attached no importance of any kind, were destined subsequently to assume one of very serious concern to him. For, in fact, as it proved, that hurried, careless, backward view of Barrington, partially blocked out by the laurels, yet unmistakable, was the last he was to see of him alive.
He went on his way, turning left-hand as he reached the roadway of Selkirk Place, which terminated in a cul-de-sac at the pillared gates admitting to the grounds of the Riverside. Beside the gates a three-storied red-brick building, comprising a retail-bar on the ground floor with some living-rooms used by the staff above, formed the rear of the hotel, connected with the main block facing the river by the annexe in which Gore’s suite lay. The bar, a discreetly-managed, quiet little place, unexpected in that exclusive residential quarter of the suburb, catered principally, Gore surmised, for a regular little clientèle of chauffeurs and coachmen from Selkirk Lane. The lane which branched off northwards from Selkirk Place at its doors was bordered by stables, most of them now converted into garages, and provided, no doubt, a considerable number of such customers.
But at that hour the bar had long closed its doors for the night; the wan illumination of an arc-lamp suspended above its portals accentuated its effect of cold inhospitality. One window of the seven that looked up Selkirk Place was still, however, lighted up. A shadow moved across the yellow blind as he passed—possibly the shadow of the tawny-haired Hebe who presided over the bar, and of whom Gore had caught glimpses as she went to and fro across the annexe between her domain and the main building of the hotel. Rather a pretty little thing, he had noticed, if somewhat excessively embellished; not too severe, either, to refuse a smile in return to his ‘Good-morning’ or ‘Good-afternoon.’ Betty, he had gathered, was her name—Betty Rodney. Rather a pretty name. He yawned, crossed the grounds, and was admitted into the annexe by the night porter.
‘I want to get a couple of letters off in half an hour or so,’ he said, when the man had roused his sitting-room fire, ‘if you’ll leave the door into the gardens open for me, I’ll stroll up myself and drop them into the box in Selkirk Place, when I’ve written them.’
Left alone, he manufactured himself a modest whisky-and-soda and seated himself to compose with its aid and that of a very terrible pipe, applications for two vacant positions for either of which, it seemed to him, he might hope to be considered as eligible as the next fellow. One was the secretaryship to a small London club devoted to the consolation of the Very Poor of the Services; the other the secretaryship of a golf club in Hampshire. A cheerful fire glowed and crackled soothingly; there was no other sound to disturb his efforts at ingratiating composition. Presently he finished his drink, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, refilled it, and slewed round in his chair to regard the fire-irons thoughtfully. On the uppermost page of his writing block the words—
‘RIVERSIDE, HOTEL,
‘LINWOOD, WESTMOUTH.
‘Nov. 6, 1922.
‘GENTLEMEN,—’
lay reproachful and forgotten.
‘If the door is shut, go away. I may not be able to manage tonight. I will ring you up tomorrow at eleven if not.’
That was what she had said, furtively, nervously, under cover of the clumsiest interest in the chrysanthemums. And Barrington, as cool and cocksure as be-dam, had said, ‘It will be open.’
What door? When was it to open? What the devil did it mean?
What the devil could it mean? Was it possible that, in her own house—under her husband’s very nose, Pickles—the Pickles whose image, idealised, no doubt, in parts, yet always extraordinarily vivid, had cheered him and bucked him up and made him feel a bit better in even the darkest hours of the past nine years—was it possible that she was playing the rotten, silly old game—carrying on with that sleek-headed— Gore’s private surmise used at that point an epithet of Anglo-Saxon vigour which it instantly deprecated. No. The thing was incredible.
Incredible—unthinkable. A bit of a flirtation, perhaps—perhaps not even that. He drew a breath of relief to find his loyalty to the Pickles of the old days still staunch enough to hold her clear in the face of any suspicion, however insidious.
Straight as a die she had always been—in everything. It wasn’t possible that she could have changed—could have become one of those treacherous, loathsome little cats whose exploits filled the papers nowadays. There was some quite simple explanation of that remark of hers about the door. There must be. It was pretty rotten of him to have believed anything else for a moment, he told himself—the sort of thing one might expect from some half-baked young cub eager to sniff out filth in every corner. He turned, rather peevishly, in his chair, took up his pen, dipped it in ink, and resumed his correspondence with determination.
The son, the grandson, and the great-grandson of soldiers, he had found himself at his father’s death a subaltern in his father’s old regiment, with exactly two hundred a year in addition to his pay. To most people, since the average income of the men in the Westshires was some ten times that amount, such a position would have appeared embarrassing. He had contrived, however, to endure it with fortitude, aided by a practically imperturbable smile, a useful dexterity in all sports and pastimes beloved of youth, and a quite special brilliancy as a polo-player—an amusement which he had pursued, unavoidably, on other people’s ponies for the greater part, but to the great glory of the Westshires. In the year 1912–13, the year in which he had obtained his company, he had been, with one unpublished reservation, as blithe and contented a young man as was to be discovered in the length of the Army List. The reservation was Miss Barbara Letchworth—better known to her intimates as Pickles. But of that fact Wick Gore took very great pains to ensure that neither she nor anyone else should have the slightest inkling. To the day in 1913, when he went out to drink three cups of tea and eat eleven sandwiches and take a cheerful farewell of Miss Letchworth—then one-and-twenty or thereabouts and horribly sweet in cool, fluffy, summer things—preparatory to his departure to India, that extremely intelligent young woman had no faintest suspicion that night and morn for three whole years past he had cursed, for her sake, the day on which he had been born—born, at all events, to two hundred a year in addition to his pay.
From India the battalion had gone, very abruptly, to France in 1914. In the course of the following four years Pickles had written quite a number of charming letters to Captain, Major, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gore successively, accompanied by superior brands of cigarettes and sundry strange garments, each of which he had worn solemnly at least once. A year on the Rhine had completed his military career. Chance had thrown in his way an offer to form a member of an expedition to Central Africa; he had accepted the offer eagerly, sent in his papers, and disappeared for two years. A pleasant twelve months in Rhodesia, where his book—the record of the expedition’s adventures and discoveries—had been written, had induced him to consider seriously the project of settling there permanently.
But at that point a childless and long-widowed aunt had chosen to die and leave for distribution amongst a horde of nephews and nieces a very considerable portion of the money which her husband had extracted from a small colliery in the north. Gore’s share in this good fortune, long despaired of, had amounted on final examination, to an income of three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Two days after his forty-second birthday he had landed in England, spent a week interviewing solicitors and tailors and such things, and, bored to extinction by a London which seemed to him entirely populated by Jews, had fled westwards in search of such of his kith and kin as still survived.
The Riverside Hotel had commended itself to him as a headquarters for various reasons. Its advantages for that purpose had been in no way discounted by the fact that the entrance to the very comfortable private suite with which the management provided him lay within just one minute’s walk from a certain hall door in Aberdeen Place which bore the plate of Dr Sidney Melhuish.
On the very afternoon of his arrival in Linwood, as he returned along Aberdeen Place to the hotel, he had caught a glimpse of a slim figure in moleskins as it disappeared through that hall door. A quite amusing acceleration of his heart-beat had been perceptible for some moments. The same amusing symptom had manifested itself when next morning he had rung up Mrs Melhuish from the Riverside and heard, for the first time for nine years, her voice say, ‘Yes?’ He had found the operation of breathing troublesome for an instant—an instant so long that she had added: ‘Who is speaking, please?’ Quite amusing. Especially in view of her placidity when at length—after nine years—he had replied, a little curtly, ‘Gore.’
There had been a silence, and then a calm, unsurprised ‘Gracious. Why, you said you were going to stay in Rhodesia for ever and ever.’
And then:
‘I’m so sorry. But my husband has just come in for lunch. I must fly. Can you ring me up this evening … about seven? I shall be—’
And then, of course, after nine years, the exchange had cut off.
But her invitation to dinner had made up a good deal for that first flat disappointment.
‘Do come early, like a dear,’ she had said. ‘We want to have you to ourselves for a few minutes. Sidney is pining to meet you. You’ll love him. He’s just the darlingest old thing in the world.’
He recalled now exactly the inflection of her voice as she had said that—
With fresh determination he dipped his pen once more in ink and after the word ‘Gentlemen’ wrote the words, ‘I beg to apply—’
It was then five minutes to one.
It was twenty-five minutes past one when he stamped his two letters. He slipped into an overcoat, and let himself out into the chill clamminess of the fog. The pillar-box for which he was bound lay half-way along Selkirk Place, a couple of hundred yards from the back entrance to the Riverside. At the gates he paused for a moment to light a cigarette, and observed that the window above the bar was still illuminated. As his eyes rested on it, the yellow blind was drawn a little aside, and someone feminine—the tawny-haired Miss Betty Rodney, he presumed—was visible for a moment, peeping down at him.
No doubt Miss Rodney’s attention had been attracted by the halting of his footsteps beneath her window at that hour. He went on his way towards the pillar-box, reflecting, perhaps not entirely originally, that in general and in particular women were curious things.
CHAPTER III (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
MRS MELHUISH had switched off all the lights in the drawing-room save two beside the fireplace when her husband re-entered the room, and was lingering, he perceived, merely to say good-night. She turned at his entrance, smiling through a little yawn.
‘Well … what do you think of Wick? Quite a dear, isn’t he?’
Melhuish nodded.
‘I like Gore very much indeed,’ he said sincerely. ‘I wish that we could have provided a rather more amusing evening for him.’
‘It was not exactly a giddy party,’ Mrs Melhuish confessed. ‘However, we’ll get something a little brighter for him next time. Are you sitting up, dear? I hope not, after your wretched night last night. I heard you coming in at a quarter-past four … bad boy.’
‘A hæmorrhage case … one of Mrs Ashley’s maids.’
‘Oh.’
There was a little pause. He wondered if tonight again she would contrive to evade the good-night kiss which was for both of them, now, an ordeal dreaded and avoided when avoidance was with even a pretence of decency possible. But he stood between her and the door. Tonight no escape was possible; the ignominious, hateful farce of their day must terminate in that elaborately casual contact of her cheek with his, cold as ice, burning like hell’s fire. He read the pitiable hesitation in her eyes, yet, even in his pity of it, would not spare her or himself. His cold scrutiny rested mercilessly on her face until it was raised to his.
‘Good-night, Sidney.’
‘Good-night.’
‘You are quite pleased with everything? Sir James’s congratulations upon my cook were really quite embarrassing.’
‘Everything was admirable—as it always is.’
She swept him a little mocking curtsey, and was gone.
He stood where she had left him until he heard her bedroom door close remotely, then glanced at his watch and moved to the fire, to stand before it, considering. Five minutes to twelve. How long would he wait tonight?
It had been a little before one when he had heard her go downstairs that night—the Monday night of the preceding week—that seemed to him countless centuries ago. The hour of meeting had been altered for Friday night to a quarter-past one. At least a whole hour lay before him—a whole hour to watch drag by, minute after minute, listening in the darkness, writhing in self-contempt, aware that beyond the wall that separated her room from his, she, too, was waiting and watching and listening in the darkness—hating him because, on his account, she must lie there for that never-ending hour before she could safely creep down the stairs. Yes, he reflected grimly, at moments she must hate him. Hate him because she feared him, because he stood in the way of her pleasure, because he was what he was—her husband. That thought still appeared to him ludicrous, though for a whole week now he had known beyond all doubt the amazing truth of her treachery to him. Even at the end of that week of devastating certainty he was still unable to look at her face without stupefied wonder at its self-control. It seemed impossible that a spirit so courageous as hers, so defiant of obstacles, so intolerant of pretence, could conceal a bitter hatred so smoothly. And yet … what hatred could be imagined more bitter than that of a woman for a man who stood between her and the man of her—
Of her … what?
Desire … Passion …? His soul laughed at the bare thought of the words in connection with her. Caprice? A prettier word—probably a more appropriate one. At heart he guessed and dreaded a stronger and more dangerous driving-force than these behind her betrayal of him—a craving for the things he himself had proved incapable of giving her—the gaiety and grace and thousand dancing, laughing sympathies of youth. From the very beginning she had teased him on the score of a seriousness which, he was himself well aware, was prone to heaviness. From the very beginning he had seen that inevitably his professional work must separate them—seclude him from great tracts of her life, as it must seclude her from the principal business of his. Youth for Sidney Melhuish had been a phase of single-minded purpose and strenuous preparation for its achievement. Youthfulness he had laid aside deliberately at the threshold of a career which for him, over and above the possibilities of material advancement, was a mission—a consecration to the grimmest, most desperate of crusades against the most ruthless and invincible of enemies. Gaiety and grace were for those others, he had told himself, who neither saw nor heard nor heeded … until they had need of him and his kind. He had envied them a little at odd moments—pitied them a little—wondered at them a little—been always much too busy to feel the need of attempting to imitate their decorativeness. The attempt in any case would have been, he knew, a futile one. His lips twisted wryly now as, staring down into the fire, he recalled his wife’s efforts, in the first tentative days of her life with him, to teach him to dance—
She had striven, too, to teach his mind to dance, he knew, in those first days—striven to infuse him with some tinge of the agreeable ephemeral interests which were the life of the set from which he had isolated her temporarily during their brief engagement, but which, he had quickly perceived, would always remain her tribe and her world. But he neither shot nor fished nor hunted. Theatres and novels held for him the faintest of appeals. The allusive tittle-tattle of her friends—light-hearted young people of both sexes possessed of an abundance of money and of leisure, who visibly resented his silent seriousness—bored him. At the end of a year his wife had frankly confessed him, as a social ornament, hopeless.
‘I do believe, Sidney,’ she had said one afternoon, when his unexpected intrusion from the consulting-room had dispersed one of her bridge-parties precipitately, ‘that the only purpose for which you believe human beings are provided with tongues is as an aid to medical diagnosis. Do you know that for seven minutes you stood here, in your wife’s drawing-room, without speaking, or even attempting to speak, one single word? I timed you by the clock.’
‘Well,’ he had urged, ‘they wanted to go on playing bridge.’
‘No. They had stopped—when you came into the room.’
‘Well, why did they stop when I came into the room?’
‘Because they all think you disapprove of women playing bridge in the afternoon.’
‘I do,’ he had said simply.
At that she had laughed until her eyes had streamed tears. But there had been no more afternoon bridge-parties at 33, Aberdeen Place. That incident, he supposed, had marked in all probability the definite point at which she had admitted to herself that her marriage had been a mistake …
That had been two years ago. Had this business with Barrington been going on then, for two whole years—unsuspected for all that time—so unsuspected that in the end they had thought it safe enough to risk these meetings at night in the dining-room of his house. A serious risk—since she must have realised that at any moment a telephone-call might awaken him and bring him downstairs to discover them. But no doubt they had long grown to believe that there was no risk whatever—no need for even the most elementary precaution against surprise.
How many nights had they met so before that Monday night of the preceding week on which, by the merest of chances, their secret had been revealed to him? The tyre of a belated taxi-cab had happened to burst just outside the house, and the report had awakened him—to hear, a few moments later, the door of his wife’s room open softly and her footsteps steal past his door. Minute after minute he had waited, at first drowsily, then with surprise, until at length uneasiness had induced him to go downstairs in search of her. Fortunately, his slippers had made no noise on the thick carpet, for they had come out of the dining-room as he reached the drawing-room landing. A man’s voice, unrecognised at first, had brought him to abrupt halt.
‘Friday, then. Same hour?’
‘A quarter past one,’ his wife’s voice had answered cautiously. ‘A quarter to is too early.’
The man had laughed.
‘Your dear hubby has forbidden me late hours, you know. Bad for dicky hearts. However—’
He had recognised the voice then. Barrington. While he had stood in stupefaction the hall door had been shut stealthily. In an instant his momentary fury had chilled to ice. The brain and nerves that had never failed him had recovered their aplomb, had decided upon the simplest, surest road to vengeance. He had turned and crept barefooted back to his bedroom—to lie awake till dawn, perfecting his plan, devising means against all possible mischance.
And yet his plan had miscarried. On Friday night Barrington had come tiptoeing along Aberdeen Place at the appointed hour, clearly visible from the upper front windows of the house to eyes that watched for his coming. He had come up to the hall door, but had gone away again almost immediately, pulling the door to behind him cautiously—it had been left ajar for him, evidently. No footsteps had crept from the adjoining bedroom. There had certainly been no meeting that night.
Nor on the next, nor on any of the following nights—unless one had taken place last night during his absence on the case to which he had been called out a little before two o’clock in the morning. Six nights of fruitless waiting, of coldly-raging fury that listened in the darkness until the silence of the house was as the roar of thunder. There was no certainty that he would come tonight, either—that he would come for a month of nights. No matter. On the night on which he did come he would pay for all those others …
Clegg’s respectfully reproachful cough behind him roused him from his thoughts. He bade the man good-night and went upstairs slowly to his room. Did the servants know? Had they, too, grinned and leered at him all that time behind his back for a poor blind simpleton? Probably. In Clegg’s eyes, too, he told himself now—too late—he had detected the question that had lurked in his mistress’s. ‘Does he suspect? Does he know?’
Patience. His turn to laugh would come—if not tonight, one night.
For a little while he moved about his room, making the noises for which her ears listened. He caught a glimpse of his face in a mirror as he switched off the lights—absorbed, the eyes narrowed, nose and lips pinched, a crease between the eyebrows—a tell-tale face, the face of a watching, waiting sneak. He swore viciously beneath his breath, and in the darkness began to tear off his clothes. Damn them—let them go their way. They should not pull him down with them.
He groped for his pyjamas, and remembered then that the night before the cord had slipped through at one end and that in his impatience with it when he had returned in the small hours of the morning he had pulled it right through and tied it about his waist on the outside. But it had been restored, he found, to its proper place—almost certainly by her hands. The same misadventure had befallen him on his honeymoon, one night in Venice. He remembered the adoration with which he had watched her little fingers rescue the errant tape with a hairpin, deftly …
He seated himself on the bed with smarting eyes and strangled throat. Was it—could it be too late? Was nothing left of the dream? Had he lost her utterly? Impossible—impossible—impossible. He didn’t—he couldn’t believe it. In the morning, before she went downstairs, he would go into her room and face the thing with her—holding her hands—smiling at her—her friend and confidant. Even if she loved this other man—he could bear to know that, he told himself, if she did not conceal it from him—even if she loved him, they would face the difficulty together—talk it over—calmly and wisely. Somehow the trouble would pass, if they faced it together …
Presently, shivering in the damp air that came in through the open windows, he got into bed. But the sirens were busy now on the river, as boat after boat hooted its slow way down the tortuous, narrow channel on the tide. He lay there, wide-awake, listening to them, wondering if she, too, heard them.
He had not heard the door of her room open, nor any sound of her passage across the landing—merely the creak of a stair—a stair, it seemed to him, of the second flight from the landing. The tiny noise, almost imperceptible, awaited for so many nights, stopped his heart for a beat. The guile that had once more all but eluded his vigilance shocked him violently, hardened his mood to stone again. What stealthy pains must have gone to the noiseless opening of her door, the crossing of the landing, the descent of the stairs, step by step—until that small, dreaded sound had brought her to abrupt halt, listening with straining ears to discover if it had betrayed her. How had she learned this minute, patient cunning? How had she concealed it from him?
He was out of bed now. When he had opened the door and listened for a moment, he switched on a light and dressed himself in the clothes which lay always in readiness against a night-call. His long fingers adjusted his collar and tie with the careful neatness with which they performed the task every morning. He smiled sardonically at the thought that without his collar and tie, a husband, however injured, started at a disadvantage if his wife’s lover happened to wear one at the moment of dénouement.
He felt no anger now, none of those vague, futile emotions which were the stock-in-trade of the wronged husbands of convention. His mind held but one thought, one desire—the successful accomplishment of that entry of absolute surprise. He switched off the light again and went softly down the stairs.
On the drawing-room landing he paused to lean over and look down into the hall. The subdued radiance of the light in the fanlight, left on always at night, showed him the lower portion of the dining-room door. As he had expected, the door was shut, though already, at the distance of two flights of stairs, the subdued murmur of voices was audible through it. He went down another flight, with increased caution, and on the first landing—that outside the morning-room—came in view of the dimly-lighted hall. To his amazement he saw, standing just inside the open hall door, Cecil Arndale.
He halted, dumbfounded. Was it possible that he had been mistaken? Had it been Arndale’s voice which he had heard that Monday night? Had it been Arndale whom he had seen come and go on Friday in the moonlight? No. There was no likeness whatever between the voices of the two men—no likeness whatever between their figures—no possibility of such a mistake. Besides, at that moment, a man’s voice was speaking in the dining-room. Arndale obviously could hear that voice too. He was listening to it, his eyes fixed on the dining-room door, so intently that not even for a moment had they turned towards the darkness of the staircase. For that moment of surprised surmise, Melhuish made no movement forward or back. The maddest, most ludicrous of conjectures had flashed into his mind. Was it possible that there were two of them—and that somehow they had both come on the same night?
‘My God!’ his senses asked of themselves, ‘am I mad? Is this I who am standing here on this landing outside the morning-room thinking this thing?’
He heard his throat produce a dry, inarticulate gasp—an attempt to call out Arndale’s name—as he began to descend the stairs towards him. At that moment, however, without having heard him, at all events without a glance towards him, Arndale went out, leaving the hall door ajar behind him. The murmur of the voices in the dining-room had risen abruptly in pitch. Almost instantly its door opened and Barrington came out into the hall.
‘Absolutely out of the question, my dear child, I assure you,’ he was saying, as he drew on a glove. ‘I’d do it if I could—for your sweet sake … But in times like these I simply can’t afford philanthropy. A thou. That’s the best I can do for you, my dear. Come—it’s well worth the money—a clean sheet—no skeleton in the closet to worry about, eh? Think how nice that would be to waken up to in the morning.’
Melhuish had retreated stealthily the two or three steps which he had descended towards the hall, and stood flattened against the portière of the morning-room door, the glowing end of his cigarette concealed behind him. His wife had come out from the dining-room now, though, since she stood facing towards the hall door, he could not see her face. But her voice, when she spoke, contained a hard, desperate anger of which he could not have believed her even serenity capable.
‘What a scoundrel you are,’ she said contemptuously. ‘I wonder how many unfortunate women you have played this game with …’
‘Well’—Barrington shrugged smilingly—‘that is really beside the point, isn’t it. Think it over, my dear. I’m quite sure that if you think it over, calmly and without temper—temper, by the way, does not become you, little Babs. You look quite thirty-five tonight—’
He paused abruptly, went to the hall door, opened it, looked out for a moment or two, closed the door almost to, and came back towards her.
‘Bit risky leaving that door ajar,’ he said easily. ‘The bobby on the beat might be curious enough to come in and have a look round. Awkward, that. Better have the hinges, or whatever it is that makes the row when you close it, attended to, hadn’t you, before our next midnight conference … Or better still, come across with that thou … and let us cut the midnight conferences right out.’
‘You promised—you gave me your solemn word that if I made you those four payments of a hundred and fifty, you would give me back my letters and the other things—’
‘I know. I know, my dear. Why remind me of my absurd impulsiveness. Forget what has been said—concentrate on the fact that what I say now is … a thou.’
‘You never meant to keep your promise then?’
‘Yes, yes, yes. Until I realised how foolishly impulsive I had been in asking for six hundred when I might have asked for ten.’
‘I see. And so it will go on, you think. You think you will always be able to bleed me—that I shall always be coward enough and fool enough to pay this blackmail?’
‘Hush, my dear child … Hush, hush.’
‘It is blackmail … nothing more or less … You are nothing more or less than a common blackmailer—a blackguard that preys on wretched, foolish women who—’
He held up a hand, unruffled, smiling, yet menacing.
‘My darling child … what an ugly vocabulary you have acquired of late. No, no, no. Let us be polite. Let us not be melodramatic. Let us be quite sensible. Above all, let us not shout … at half-past one in the morning. Besides, we really have nothing more to say to one another, tonight. I feel that. I am very sensitive to such impressions. You require, I feel, time to reflect. Tomorrow—or perhaps next day—when you have thought things over quietly and sensibly, you will send me a good-tempered little message to say that—’
‘No,’ she cried vehemently, forgetting caution. ‘This is the end of it. I will have nothing more to do with you. I knew that you were a scoundrel—an unscrupulous blackguard. I know now that you are a liar and a cheat as well. I will have nothing more to do with you. Do your worst—I don’t care what it is. Nothing could be worse than what I have gone through already.’
‘Worse for yourself, you mean, my little Babs—don’t you? But what about poor hubby? What would poor straight-laced, stick-in-the-mud hubby say, suppose someone were spiteful enough to—’
His suave, sneering voice was silenced abruptly. Mutely, savagely, she had struck him a swinging buffet on the mouth that had jerked his head back and sent him stumbling against the long oak settle at the opposite side of the hall.
‘Damn you, you little devil—you’ll pay for that.’
He stooped to pick up his fallen hat, tossed it on to the settle, and turned then again to her threateningly. She made no attempt to retreat from him as he moved towards her, but stood against the wall beside the door of the dining-room defiantly, one hand behind her.
‘You horrible cad,’ she panted, ‘how dare you even speak of my husband? How dare an evil, hateful thing like you even think of him? Listen … I have done with you. I don’t care what happens. Before you leave this house you shall give me those letters … or I swear to you I will take them from you. Mind … I have warned you … Don’t tempt me too far …’
He eyed her for a moment, calculatingly, from behind his insolent smile.
‘Sorry, eh? Threats, eh? I see. Well—’
He turned, as if to pick up his hat, but swung round again instantly with such treacherous swiftness that she could not elude him. His hand caught her wrist, twisted something from her grasp. He released her again then, stepping back and watching her warily as he laughed derisively.
‘Take care, my dear … take care. That temper of yours will get you into serious trouble if you don’t keep it under. Ugly words are hard enough to bear, but I draw the line at poisoned knives absolutely. I take it that you realise that this interesting little instrument is—or was at one time—poisoned … and that you realised, therefore, that if you had succeeded in giving me a jab with it, as you attempted to do just now … I say, as you attempted to do just now—’
He glanced over his shoulder quickly towards the hall door, then turned back to her again.
‘I thought that door moved. The wind, I suppose. Yes, my dear. You must try to keep that temper of yours under control. Nasty thing, murder, you know—or even attempted murder. You don’t deny, then, that you knew this knife was poisoned—that the slightest prick from it would probably do me in in a few minutes? You understand, don’t you, why I am impressing these facts on you—facts which, I am afraid, it is going to cost you a great deal more than that thou we spoke about just now to induce me to forget … after all. Meanwhile—until that happy termination of a really quite seriously unpleasant incident is reached—I think I shall keep this little plaything as a souvenir. You’ll remember that I have it, won’t you? And what it means? Good-night, my dear. Think over things calmly—take two days to it—three if you don’t feel sensible enough at the end of two—and send me a little message to say that you feel disposed to talk business—not sentiment. Shall we say now—in consideration of the little occurrence just now—two further instalments of two-fifty, eh? Good-night. My love to hubby. Think how nice it will be to have no more secrets from him—to feel that you are really and truly worthy of his love. Sweet dreams …’
He slipped the knife, which he had inserted carefully in its beaded sheath, into an inner pocket, kissed hands to her airily, and went out.
One thing only was clear to Melhuish, as he watched his wife rouse herself after a moment and shut the hall door with elaborate pains to subdue the protest of its stiffness; she must tell him her story unasked—without compulsion—without the least suspicion that he had spied upon the secret which she had chosen to keep from him. The very caution with which, after that display of reckless bravado, she strove to stifle the sound of the door’s shutting was eloquent enough, significant enough. Already, rather than face his discovery of her secret by him, she had resigned herself again to the indignity and misery of purchasing this scoundrel’s silence with regard to it. That alone was certain and definite—she desired … as strongly as that … that he should not know.
In the astonishing impressions which his ears and eyes had conveyed to his brain during those five or six minutes, tortured doubt still writhed hideously. But the fierce words which had followed that furious blow had assured him of one thing at least—not all of her was lost to him. His mind, agile and decisive in all other emergencies and dilemmas of his life, in this, the gravest of them, refused to move, refused to formulate any coherent thought or purpose save that one immediate need. She must not find him spying on her, lurking there in the darkness. He must have time to think, to realise, to recover judgment and balance, before her eyes met his. She had gone into the dining-room, to extinguish the lights there probably. Before she came out again he must reach his bedroom. The third stair up from the drawing-room landing had creaked as he had come down. He must be careful when he came to it.
CHAPTER IV (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
THE fog had grown so dense that, glancing across towards Aberdeen Place as he went on towards the pillar-box, Gore could distinguish nothing of the house to which his eyes had turned instinctively save the blurred illumination of its fanlight. Afterwards he recalled sardonically that his imagination had busied itself then for some moments with a charming, enviable picture of the happiness of the man of whose honourable, useful, contenting work that blurred light was the signal. Oddly enough, the figure which came out of the fog to meet him, just as he dropped his letters into the box, proved to be that of the very man of whose felicities, conjugal and otherwise, he had just been thinking.
‘Hallo, doctor,’ he said cheerily. ‘No rest for the wicked then, tonight again?’
‘No.’
‘You getting back now—or just starting out?’
‘Getting back,’ Melhuish replied, as Gore, having turned about, fell into step beside him. ‘A Mrs MacArthur rang me up to go and see her little boy. I’ve been attending him for a mild attack of gastritis. You don’t know the MacArthurs, do you? They’ve only recently come to live here in Linwood.’
‘MacArthur? No. Filthy sort of night, isn’t it? Sort of night I should simply hate to be dragged out of bed if I’d once succeeded in getting there, personally. But I suppose you doctor-men get hardened to it. Why … that’s Cecil Arndale, isn’t it?’
The eyes of both men had converged to a tall figure in a light-coloured raincoat which had emerged hurriedly from a house some twenty yards ahead of them, and, after a quick glance in their direction, had set off at a sharp pace towards the Riverside, growing rapidly indistinct as it receded into the fog.
‘It was Arndale, wasn’t it?’ Melhuish asked abstractedly. ‘His wife’s brother has a flat in one of these houses—Challoner. You probably remember him?’
‘Bertie Challoner? Oh, yes. I remember Bertie very well indeed. An ingenuous youth. Yes. Mrs Arndale told me this evening that he had a flat somewhere along here. Seventy-three, she said, I think.’
The hall door from which Arndale had issued reopened as they reached it, and a large young man emerged from it so hastily that Gore and his companion only escaped collision with his formidable bulk by a fraction of a second. Recognising Melhuish, he laughed shortly and irritably.
‘Hallo, doctor. That you? Where’s that brother-in-law of mine got to? Oh—there he is. Hi! Cecil …’
But Arndale had now reached the end of Selkirk Place and was visible there for a moment in the light of the arc-lamp over the bar, before he turned to his right hand up the lane and disappeared. Bertie Challoner replaced his pipe between his teeth resentfully and turned to regard Melhuish’s companion with an indifferent curiosity which changed abruptly to enthusiasm.
‘Why … Great Scott!’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s—’
He held out expansively an immense hand which Gore, recalling in time the trials of strength of other days, took very cautiously.
‘It is,’ he said. ‘How are you, young fellah?’
‘Fit. Come in and have a little drink. You must. I only heard tonight that you’d come home. I’ve been away for a few days. Come in and have a little drink, doctor, won’t you?’
‘Thanks, no, Challoner. I don’t think so. Good-night. Good-night again, Colonel.’
‘Good-night, doctor.’
Challoner’s gaze followed Melhuish’s retreat for a moment or two before he turned to conduct Gore into his elaborately-equipped bachelor quarters on the ground floor—one of the flats into which Number 73, like many others of the big houses in Selkirk Place, had been divided since the war.
‘Stiff old stick,’ he muttered, with a grimace. ‘Can’t think why Pickles married him. You dined with the Melhuishs tonight, Arndale told me. That’s a comfortable chair. I couldn’t believe Arndale when he told me you had come home. Cigarettes? You look fit. How’s things? Come back for good?’
‘Not sure,’ smiled Gore. ‘England on a night like this is not alluring.’
‘Filthy, isn’t it? Enough to make a chap commit murder or suicide or anything, to look out there into that mouldy Green in a fog like this. You’re staying at the Riverside, I hear. You look fit.’
‘Thank you, Bertie. As that is the second time you have made that remark in sixty seconds, I presume I must regard it as deserved. As a matter of fact, you will be glad to learn, I am perfectly fit.’
Challoner smiled vaguely—indeed he had made no pretence whatever of listening—threw, considering the hour, a surprisingly large quantity of coal on the fire, stirred it noisily, sighed, and subsided into a big chair and a silence which became at length embarrassing. His healthy, brick-red face, good-looking in a rather massive, heavy way, boyish still in repose despite its owner’s thirty years, assumed an expression of gloomy anxiety as its smile faded. Something had occurred to upset Master Bertie Challoner recently, Gore decided. He looked most unmistakably peeved and worried of mind.
‘Look here, my dear chap,’ said the visitor, preparing to take his departure. ‘I’m sure you’re wanting to get down to it, aren’t you? I’ll run in tomorrow morning sometime—’
But Challoner was visibly distressed by this reflection upon his hospitality.
‘Not at all, not at all. I’m simply delighted to see you, Wick—you know I am. Go on—sit down again, old chap. I’m—I’m just a bit worried about something, that’s all. Don’t you bother about me. I shouldn’t turn in for another good hour or so, anyhow. What sort of an evening did you have at the Melhuishs’? Pretty deadly, eh? Old Jimmy Wellmore, I hear—and the gashly Angela. I say, isn’t she a weird old thing? I simply can’t stick her. I’ll swear she drinks or dopes or something.’
‘You have a bad mind, young fellah,’ grinned Gore. ‘You always had. What a shocking thing to think of a lady who—well, she couldn’t be your mother, I suppose, but at any rate she is sufficiently mature to claim your respect.’
Challoner laid aside the extinct pipe which he had been regarding for some moments with intense displeasure, selected another from a crowded rack, and blew into it exhaustively and morosely.
‘I bet the old thing dopes,’ he said doggedly. ‘She’s as yellow as a Chink. Weird old frump … Gets up at three o’clock in the day, Sylvia says, and floats round in a dressing-gown until she goes to bed again, playing with those filthy little yapping dogs of hers—things like that ought to be put into a lethal chamber … How d’you think Pickles looks?’
He replaced the pipe in the rack, lighted a cigarette, and flopped into his chair again disconsolately. ‘This,’ Gore reflected, ‘is a little trying. I must get away before he unburdens his soul. A woman, of course—one of these fair creatures he’s got in a row on his mantelpiece, I suppose.’
Aloud, he said, with decision, ‘Very nice indeed. Quite the nicest person to look at I’ve seen since—well, since I saw her last, I believe. You got a game leg now, old chap?’
Challoner nodded absently.
‘Bit. Had a baddish crash in nineteen-eighteen … What’d you think of Melhuish?’
Now a young man of Bertie Challoner’s type must indeed be disturbed of soul, Gore told himself, if he declined an opportunity of dilating upon a game leg attributable to his share in the greatest of wars. Why this persistent desire to return to the Melhuishs’ and their dinner party?
‘Melhuish? Very nice. Very nice indeed. Not precisely … er … gushing. But a topping good chap, I should say.’
‘Oh, he’s all right, I suppose. Damn supercilious smile. Gets on my nerves. Sort of “You poor unfortunate ass, what are you alive for?” sort of smile. Not that I pretend to be exactly one of your brainy kind. I’m not.’
‘No,’ murmured the guest sympathetically.
‘Still, just because he’s a bit of a dab with a stethoscope, I don’t see that he need treat every one who isn’t as a worm. I bet Pickles often wishes she’d married old Cecil, after all.’
Gore deposited the ash of his cigarette in an ash-tray very, very carefully.
‘Yes?’ he said encouragingly. ‘For a moment it had occurred to me to think of another substitute for her actual choice … Yes?’
‘I suppose you know that Arndale was deadly keen about her, don’t you?’
‘Well, no. I can’t say that I had known that. Though I suppose one may assume fairly safely that most of the young fellahs—and old fellahs, for that matter—in this part of the world—’
‘Oh, yes. But old Arndale went all out for her, you know, until he found he hadn’t a show. He was absolutely silly about her. You ask Sylvia. Sylvia knows jolly well that he only married her because she was such a pal of Pickles’s. It’s a fact. She’ll tell you so herself without a blink. Of course Sylvia’s my sister, and all that—and she and Arndale get on all right, as it has turned out—I mean, everything considered. But if you ask me, if it came to picking Sylvia or Pickles out of the water, tomorrow—well, I bet old Sylvia would feed the fishes.’
Gore smiled pleasantly and still more encouragingly upon this most candid of brothers.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is most interesting. May I ask when this tragedy of unrequited love … came to a head, as it were?’
Challoner considered.
‘When? Oh … it was going on for a couple of years before Arndale married Sylvia. Nineteen-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen … just before the war and during the first year or so of it. I remember Sylvia used to tell me about it in her letters when I went to France first. Both she and Pickles were rather fed up with Cecil because he hadn’t joined up, I remember.’
Gore examined one of his host’s cigarettes critically.
‘These look about eighteen bob a hundred.’
‘A quid,’ said Challoner laconically. His guest sighed enviously and replaced the cigarette in the miniature silver trunk from which he had incautiously taken it.
‘In another, better world, perhaps. In this, not for me. I’ll smoke my old dhudeen, if I may.’
As he filled his pipe his eyes strayed again to the photographs on the mantelpiece—most of them feminine and picturesque, he noted appreciatively—and rested for a moment on that of a pretty if rather dejected-looking young woman in riding-kit which occupied a place of honour.
‘I recognise some old friends among your little picture-gallery,’ he said casually. ‘That’s little Ethel Melville in breeches, isn’t it?—I beg her pardon … Mrs Barrington, I should say. Trying things, breeches, you know, Bertie. Very few of ’em can stand ’em. By the way, I met her husband this evening at the Melhuishs’.’
Challoner’s big flaxen head swung round towards him sharply; his face had flushed a deeper shade of brick-red.
‘Barrington?’
‘Yes. Extraordinary good-looking fellah. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a handsomer man in my life. Comes from Jamaica, doesn’t he?’
‘So he says.’
The visitor surveyed his host’s profile thoughtfully. It was at that moment a profile of remarkable expressiveness.
‘Yes? You think … er … that he doesn’t?’
‘I think,’ said Challoner surlily, ‘that if Barrington says he comes from Jamaica the chances are ten to one he doesn’t. I think that. And I’ll tell you another thing I think about Mr Barrington.’
He had risen to his feet again and was gesturing with a vehement hand.
‘I think he’s a damn scoundrel, Mr Barrington. I know he’s one. I’m not going to tell you how I know it—or just what I know of him. All I say to you is this, Wick—and it’s straight from the horse’s mouth—don’t you be taken in by that smarmy swine. Don’t you have any truck with him, if you can help it. Keep clear of him. I tell you he’s a real rotten bad ’un.’
Challoner’s blue eyes were aglitter with anger now. His big blond head thrust forward, as he spoke, with a threatening belligerence. It was very clearly evident that he disapproved of Mr Barrington for some reason utterly and entirely.
‘What does he do?’ Gore inquired, after a moment. Quite unconsciously his eyes had strayed again to that large photograph which occupied the place of honour in the collection on the mantelpiece. A possible explanation of Master Bertie’s vehement depreciation of Barrington had occurred to him.
‘Do? Nothing. Nobody knows who he is, where he comes from, or anything about him. He was down at Barhams, at the Remount Depot, for a bit during the war—and then he turned up here again afterwards—managed to screw himself into the Arndales’ set somehow. You can see for yourself what a plausible, come-hither sort of swine the beggar is—got to know every one here in Linwood—through the Arndales—got hold of Miss Melville somehow, and persuaded her to marry him—after her money, I needn’t tell you. Though he got a bad drop there … And now … well … there he is—the kind of vermin no decent person would touch with a forty-foot pole if they knew what he really was—and yet, because he’s been clever enough to bluff ’em he’s a pukka sahib—and because he swindled Miss Melville into marrying him … all these silly asses here—people like the Arndales and the Melhuishs and the Wellmores, and so on—they all have him in their houses—allow him to run round with their womenfolk—golf with him, and play bridge with him at the club—and other little games afterwards—at his house. I could tell you a thing or two about that little sideline of his … If he asks you to drop in one night at Hatfield Place for a little game, Wick, my boy … you just go home to bed. You’ll find it cheaper.’
‘Dear me,’ sighed Gore, ‘I do hope that if I ever have a wife, no bad-minded young man will fall in love with her.’
Challoner flushed again—a fine, deep warm crimson, this time. Touched.
‘You think I’m piling it on, Wick, because I don’t like the chap.’
‘Great Heavens, no.’
‘Yes, you do. I can see you do. But by God I’ll, tell you this much—if you knew what I know about Barrington—if he had tried to do to you what he has tried to do to me—if you had even an idea of the kind of blackguard that fellow is—you’d take a chance and do him in. I’m not joking. I’m not joking, Wick. I give you my solemn word—if I had the chance now, this moment, to blot him out—safely—to rid that dear little girl whose life with him is—’
He broke off abruptly, let the big clenched hand which he had shaken angrily, drop to his side, walked to the door of the room and came back.
‘I’m talking a lot, old chap,’ he said, with an unsuccessful attempt at a smile. ‘Too much. I know what I’ve said won’t go beyond you. It isn’t that I should be afraid to say anything I’ve said to you now to Barrington’s face any time—if it was merely a question of thinking of myself. But … he’d take it out of other people—if he heard. Just wash out what I’ve said. I’m a bit on the raw edge tonight.’
Gore rose.
‘I believe you’ve known me for some little time, young fellah,’ he said with mild reproach. ‘Now, get to bed. You’ve been thinking too much, young Bertie. You were never meant for that sort of thing. Night-night.’
Challoner eyed him moodily for a moment.
‘Well, I’m damn glad to see you again, anyhow,’ he said at length. ‘I’ll walk down to the end of the road with you.’
They sauntered down Selkirk Place in the fog, arranging a morning’s golf. Challoner’s two-seater had gone into dock that afternoon with a big-end gone, he explained; but any of the boys would run them out the three miles to Flax ways.
‘Thursday, then. I’ll pick you up at the Riverside. There—’ He took a hand from a trousers-pocket to wave it resentfully towards the red-brick building in front of them. ‘Just to give you an idea of the sort of swine Barrington is. There’s a little girl who looks after that bar down there. You may have seen her about the Riverside … Rather a pretty little thing—?’
‘Miss Rodney?’
‘Yes. That’s her name. Betty Rodney. Brains of a chicken, but not a bad little thing if chaps like Barrington would leave her alone. Well … mind, this is quite between ourselves. I just happen to know. He has got that poor little kid into trouble. That’s the sort of cur he is. I used to notice him hanging about round here late at night … I noticed his car first. He used to leave it just about here—I wondered what the devil he was up to at first, until one night, about a month ago, I heard him whistling up at her window. She sleeps over the bar, you see. And she came to that side-door and let him in. Silly little idiot. I believe she was to have been married to some chap or other, before Barrington came along and cut in. Now—well, I expect that’s off now. Suppose they’ll fire her from the Riverside, too, when they find out.’
‘Oh,’ said Gore, ‘so that’s the sort of gentleman Mr Barrington is. That’s very interesting. You’re quite sure about this girl, Bertie?’
Challoner laughed impatiently.
‘Sure? I bet she’s expecting him now. That’s her window where the light is. It’s always lighted up the nights he comes along.’ He laughed sardonically. ‘Though she won’t see him tonight, I fancy. Oh, yes. I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on Mr Barrington lately. I know what I’m talking about. Look here. If you don’t believe me—I’ll whistle under that window now. You’ll see what happens. I know what I’m talking about, believe me.’
‘My dear Bertie, I’ll take your word for it—’
‘No. I just want you to see for yourself. Get out of sight though. She’ll look out of the window when she hears the whistle. I want her to come down to the door. Let’s stand here. She can’t see us here from the window.’
His big hands urged the reluctant Gore into the angle formed by the railings of the section of the Green abutting on the hotel-grounds and one of the pillars of the gates admitting to them. Then he whistled softly. A large, very wet drop fell from an overhanging branch upon the nape of Gore’s neck and descended inside his collar. The dead leaves collected under the trees inside the railings and in the angle of the roadway by the gates emitted an odour of dismal dankness. The trunks of the trees looked disagreeably slimy. The fog smelt and tasted of decaying vegetation. One of Gore’s still new evening-shoes had pinched him a good deal during the evening and was pinching him quite uncomfortably now. Its toe stirred a little mound of leaves collected against the foot of the gate-pillar with some impatience.
‘Gone to bed and forgotten to switch off her light, old chap,’ he said. ‘Serve us right. Let’s get to bed.’
A small glistening object, revealed by the disturbance of the leaves at his feet, had attracted his attention—the vague attention of a sleepy man awaiting against his will the dénouement of a rather silly practical joke. As he stooped idly to pick it up, he heard the door beside the bar open cautiously and straightened himself again as Miss Rodney came into sight round the angle of the wall and halted abruptly upon perceiving him and his companion.
Challoner smiled at her grimly.
‘Good-night, Miss Rodney. Not in bed yet?’
She hesitated, plainly disconcerted; then decided upon haughty flippancy.
‘Looks like it, doesn’t it, Mr Challoner?’ she said tartly, and disappeared, remembering, however, to close the door as softly as she had opened it.
‘You see,’ said Challoner.
‘I see,’ said Gore. ‘Though I’m bound to say that Miss Rodney’s little amoors leave me cold.’
He yawned without the faintest attempt at concealment as he stooped and picked up the little glistening object which had attracted his attention amongst the leaves, and twiddled it between his fingers. Challoner however, displayed no resentment of his indifference nor any eagerness to adopt his advice as to getting to bed.
He stood frowning, apparently lost in thought, until Gore turned to leave him.
‘I say, old chap,’ he asked abruptly, ‘what time was it when you broke up at the Melhuishs’?’
‘About a quarter to twelve.’
‘Barrington left then—at a quarter to twelve?’
‘Yes. He and I came away together. Why?’
‘Nothing. I just wanted to know. Was he walking, or driving?’
‘Walking. At least I saw no car about, when I left him in Aberdeen Place.’
‘Oh,’ Challoner said musingly, ‘then he must have gone home on foot from the Melhuishs’—and taken his car out then … It was after one when Arndale said he saw it in Aberdeen Place.’
Despite his sleepiness and his aching toes, Gore’s interest in Mr Barrington’s nocturnal wanderings revived sharply.
‘In Aberdeen Place?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. Arndale told me he saw it there then—somewhere near the Melhuishs’ door. He must have gone home and taken it out—if you’re sure you didn’t see it there when he went away from the Melhuishs’ with you.’
Gore was to discover subsequently the reason for which the hour at which Barrington had reached home that night and taken out his car was of such interest to his companion. For him, at the moment, the point possessed no interest whatever beside the information that Barrington’s car had been in the neighbourhood of the Melhuishs’ hall door at the hour at which Arndale apparently had seen it there … after one o’clock. So he had gone, then—and found the door open, presumably … Left his car near the door, too, to advertise the affair to anyone who might happen to see it and recognise it … as Arndale had done—
‘Well, good-night, Bertie,’ he said curtly, and turned so that his companion might not see his face.
‘Good-night, Wick. Mind—mum’s the word, old chap.’
Gore crossed the hotel-grounds, and, finding the door of the annexe still open, gained his own quarters that way. Before he took off his overcoat one of the hands which explored its pockets mechanically drew out the small object which he had picked up near the gates. He stared at it in astonishment. It was a little hide knife-sheath, thickly ornamented with coloured beads—exactly like the sheaths of those two little Masai knives which had been included in his wedding-present to Pickles, and which he had seen a couple of hours before hanging in Melhuish’s hall.
He examined the thing carefully. Obviously it had not lain for any length of time amongst the damp leaves in which he had discovered it. It appeared to him too improbable a conjecture to surmise that chance should have brought to that spot—a bare hundred yards from the other two—a third such sheath. Common sense assured him that there was no third sheath—that this was one of the two which he had touched with a finger to draw the attention of Melhuish and Barrington to it.
How, then, had the blessed thing got out of Melhuish’s hall, across the road, and into that heap of leaves in the corner by the gates?
And the knife that should, for all prudence sake, have been in the sheath—where was that?
For a little while he pondered over the matter drowsily, half-minded to go out again and look about for the knife. But it was now getting towards half-past two. He smoked a final cigarette before his dying fire cheerlessly, and went to bed.
CHAPTER V (#u27eb795b-f308-58e6-9316-a4e44c7b6774)
HE lunched next day with some friends out at Penbury, and was subsequently inveigled into participation in a hockey-match, in the course of which an enthusiastic curate inflicted such grievous injury upon one of his shins that he was compelled to abandon his intention of walking the four miles back to Linwood, and returned a full hour earlier than he had expected, in his host’s car. A page stopped him in the hall of the hotel to deliver a message received by telephone at two o’clock. Would Colonel Gore please ring up Linwood 7420 immediately upon his return, as Mrs Melhuish wished to speak to him urgently. Mrs Melhuish had been informed that Colonel Gore was not expected back until five o’clock, and had seemed annoyed, the page said. He had personally undertaken, if Colonel Gore returned before five, to ask him to ring up Linwood 7420 at once.
‘Urgently …’ Gore repeated to himself, as he limped to the telephone-cabinet. ‘Urgently …?’
An odd premonition of misfortune chilled him momentarily. The cheerful activities of his afternoon, the mob of light-hearted young people in whose company he had spent it, had banished most of the rather gloomy pessimism which had clouded his morning. But it was with an anxiety which he was quite unable to control that he awaited the reply to his call—an anxiety which increased sharply at the first sound of her voice.
‘Is that you, Wick? Can you come across here—now—at once? I must see you. I can’t explain over the phone. Can you come?’
‘Of course. My collar is a ruin—my boots are unspeakable—I’ve been playing hockey—’
‘Never mind. Never mind. Don’t wait to change. Please come at once.’
‘Coming right now.’
The dusk was deepening to darkness as he limped down Albemarle Hill and up Aberdeen Place to the door of Number 33. It opened to admit a patient and let out another as he came up to it. Melhuish’s busy time, of course—from two to six—the hour at which he would be out of the way … Gore’s depression deepened a shade.
He waited in the hall for a moment or two while Clegg ushered the incoming patient into the waiting-room and summoned from it the next in turn for the consulting-room. His eyes strayed to the trophy on the wall facing him, and instantly his memory recalled the sheath which he had found the night before by the back entrance to the Riverside. One of the two knives which had formed the lower apex of the trophy was missing. How the blazes had its sheath found its way to that heap of leaves?
‘Mrs Melhuish is in the morning-room, sir,’ said Clegg, pausing as the elderly lady whose name he had called emerged slowly from the waiting-room on the arm of a companion. ‘That door, sir, on the first landing. If you would kindly go up, sir.’
The room was in darkness when Gore entered, save for the glow of the fire before which she sat in a low chair, leaning forward, her chin cupped in her hands. She looked up eagerly.
‘Shut that door, Wick,’ she commanded. ‘And then come and sit down here. I want you not to look at me. That’s why I’ve switched off the lights. I’m in a most shocking mess.’
He obeyed her silently, seating himself, when he had shut the door, so that he, too, faced the glow of the fire.
‘I rang you up,’ she said, after a moment, ‘because I thought it just possible you might be able to help me out of it. Jolly cool, I expect you’ll think. But even if you do, I know you’ll listen to me. I simply must tell someone about it. And I could think of no one but you.’
‘Carry on,’ he said quietly. ‘What kind of a mess is it? Money—or a man?’
‘Both,’ she said curtly. ‘It’s simply a shocking mess.’
‘Told your husband about it?’
‘Heavens, no.’
‘That’s bad. Why not?’
‘I couldn’t. I’ve tried to screw myself up to do it—to tell him everything. But I can’t. I know he’d never forgive me … in his heart … even if the outside of him pretended to forgive me. He’s the best—the noblest man I have ever known. You can’t know, Wick, how good and fine he is. But … he’d never forgive … this.’
‘Rot,’ said Gore succinctly. ‘Piffle. Humbug.’
She made a little wretched gesture.
‘Ah, you’ve no idea what an idiot I’ve been, Wick.’
‘I wonder.’
‘You wonder?’
Her face turned to him sharply in the twilight.
‘No, no,’ he assured her quietly. ‘No one has told me anything. My wonder is merely the result of my own, I’m afraid, rather impertinent observation … and, if you’ll permit me to say so, your own infernal carelessness, young woman. I heard—you really compelled me to hear—a remark which you made last night, practically in my ear—not to me—but to … er … someone else.’
‘My God!’ she said in alarm, ‘you heard—What did I say?’
‘Er … something about a door, which might possibly not be open, you thought, but which Mr … er … the gentleman to whom you made the remark … seemed to think would be open.’
‘My God!’ she said again, her hands twisting nervously. ‘Did Lady Wellmore hear?’
‘I hope not. I think not. Though that’s not your fault. Then, the man is Mr Barrington?’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence. Gore rose to his feet abruptly, walked to the door, and flooded the room with light.
‘Well, Pickles, all I have to say to you—and I prefer to say it to your face, please—is this. You’re the silliest kind of silly ass. Mind—I know very little about this chap Barrington—can’t say I care much for most of what I do know. But if he were the best man that ever stepped—and he isn’t that—I should say just the same thing to you. Sorry I can’t be more sympathetic. I presume you expected I should be. But, as a confidant of illicit love-affairs, I’m afraid I’m rather a wash-out.’
She turned back upon him with a movement of exasperation.
‘Oh, don’t be a fool, Wick,’ she said sharply. ‘Good Heavens … I’m not that sort of idiot.’
‘Not that sort of idiot?’ he repeated. ‘Then may I ask what sort of idiot you are?’
‘Sit down. Don’t fidget about that way. I’ll tell you the whole thing—right from the beginning … It began this way. I met Mr Barrington four years ago … and … well, I had an affair with him … I didn’t know Sidney then—I hadn’t met him. He had only just come to Linwood, and I hadn’t come across him. If I had … well, this would never have happened …’
‘Suppose … er … we keep to what did happen …?’
‘I met Mr Barrington—he was Captain Barrington then—at a gymkhana got up by the Remount Depot people at Barhams. There was a Remount Depot out there, you know. He was stationed there then—in the summer of nineteen-eighteen. He won all sorts of things that afternoon—he’s a magnificent horseman—and, well, I was introduced to him and fell in love with him on the spot—that’s the long and the short of it—over head and ears the very first moment he spoke to me. You don’t understand that sort of thing. I know it will seem just silly to you—’
‘No, no, no. I’ve known it to happen before. Carry on.’
‘Well, it lasted for just five months—’
‘Five months is quite a long time. And then … it stopped?’
‘Yes. Something happened—and suddenly I saw what a frightful idiot I had been. It stopped then—very abruptly. He went away for a bit—when the depot was broken up—in the January of nineteen-nineteen. Then, a few months later, when he had been demobbed, he came back here again … to live. He had a flat at first in York Gardens, until he married and moved to Hatfield Place. He married Ethel Melville that spring—the very week I met Sidney. Of course I had to come across him. I couldn’t avoid it. I had known Ethel Melville all my life, and of course I had to call and dine with them and ask them to dine here, and so on. He was always at the Arndales’ house … In fact I ran into him and Ethel everywhere I went. However, he was always just polite—you know?—just like any other man one met. I thought at that time that the whole thing was done with—that he had done with me. But he hadn’t. He hasn’t. And that’s the mess.’
Gore shrugged his shoulders.
‘I suppose I’m more stupid than usual, or something. What, in the name of Heaven, is the mess?’
‘I’m not going into lurid details, Wick. You’ve got to try to understand that girls—even girls who are supposed, by misguided people like yourself, to be quite nice girls—are liable to be swept off their feet absolutely … if they happen just to have the bad luck to come across … a certain sort of man … the sort of man that Mr Barrington is. You can understand yourself, can’t you … that he is the sort of man who would sweep a girl off her feet?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘When I say sweep off her feet … I mean … well … the limit. You’re such an old dear that I know you’ll hardly believe that I could be capable of the limit. I’m afraid I am … or rather, was. At any rate … on a certain night in December, nineteen-eighteen, I got as near to it as doesn’t matter—with Mr Barrington’s kind assistance. Don’t look so unconvincing, Wick. I know you’re shocked to the marrow … However … there it is. By the merest fluke, I stopped there and had a good look at things. And nothing happened. Which was a jolly sight more than I deserved. Delightfully candid, am I not? I assure you there isn’t another man in the world upon whom I would inflict my candour so lavishly … if that is any consolation …’
‘Good. Let’s get to the ’osses.’
‘Well … as I say … nothing did happen. But nobody, you see … as things were … would believe that. That’s the trouble. Most of it, anyhow. I was fool enough … mad enough … to stay a night at a hotel at Bournemouth—with Mr Barrington … just before Christmas, nineteen-eighteen.’
Gore stared at her blankly.
‘Hell, Pickles,’ he said at length softly, ‘what did you do that for?’
‘I was infatuated with him, then. That’s the only word for it. I adored him—I thought of nothing, cared for nothing, wanted nothing … except to be with him. It seems extraordinary to me now … but—Well, that’s what happened, anyhow. I stayed a night at the Palatine at Bournemouth with him … as Mrs Barrington. If you care to take the trouble to go down to Bournemouth and ask them to let you look at the register for the date December 17th, 1918, you’ll see my beautiful handwriting. He was clever enough to make me sign— Trust him.’
‘But … how the …?’ Gore burst out after some moments of silent consternation.
‘How did I manage it? Oh, it was quite simple. I was still V.A.D.-ing at Lucey Court then. They thought I had gone home for the weekend. He had intended that we should stay the whole weekend at Bournemouth, you see. However … we didn’t. As I say, by the mercy of Providence, I had the sense to stop and take a good look at things just in time … Mr Barrington included. He lost his temper … and I had a glimpse of what he was like … really … I came home next day.’
‘Look here,’ said Gore desperately, ‘I must smoke a pipe. If I don’t I shall start in to break up the furniture or something.’
‘Yes, yes. Give me a cigarette. You’re sure you shut that door properly?
‘… Well, I thought I had done with him—though, of course, I feared all along that he might have kept my letters. But time went by, and—you know the way things that have happened dull off and stop worrying you. I had met Sidney … that helped me to forget about things I didn’t want to remember, too … We were married for a whole year before anything happened to make me in the least uneasy. And then one day Mr Barrington rang me up and said, “I want to see you. I shall be on the Downs, somewhere along the avenue, at half-past two. You’d better come along and see me.” Of course I refused at first, and, of course, in the end I got frightened and went. He was very hard up—that was his story at first … quite a polite, apologetic sort of story. Could I lend him a hundred pounds? I lent him a hundred pounds. Then I lent him another hundred. Then he asked for two hundred. I made a fuss—not that the money mattered so much, but because I had begun to realise by that time that he was not simply borrowing money from me, but demanding it. However, I gave him the two hundred—and, of course, he saw then that he had me—that I was afraid of him. And so it has gone on ever since, for two years. I think he has had about fifteen hundred pounds altogether, so far. Fifteen or sixteen, I’m not sure which. Sidney never dreams of asking me what I do with my own money … but of course I’ve been jolly careful in drawing the cheques for the money I paid away that way. So that I can’t be quite sure now myself. But it’s fifteen hundred at any rate.
‘Then I thought that if I gave him a really large sum, in one lump, he might be persuaded to give me back my letters. The letters are the trouble, you see. He said he would if I gave him six hundred. I agreed to that—that was about a fortnight or so ago. I agreed to make four payments of a hundred and fifty each, spread over two or three weeks. I was afraid to draw out so much money at once—because, of course, he insisted on being paid in cash.’
‘He would,’ Gore agreed grimly.
‘He insisted also on coming here to the house at night for the money. Of course, like a fool, I consented to that too, in the end. Though I might have known that his idea was to use that, afterwards, as an additional hold over me. But I gave way to him. I would have agreed to anything to get my letters back and have done with it. He came three nights and got a hundred and fifty each time. Last night he came again—I gave him the last hundred and fifty, and then he refused to give up the letters after all—said I must give him another four hundred— My God, Wick … what am I to do? What am I to do? It’s killing me. I shall go silly if it goes on much longer.’
He made no reply for a little space, stifling an inevitable inclination to sit in judgment and to consider what this ugliness just revealed to him meant to him rather than what it must have meant to her who had lived with it for two years. It was no moment for sentiment or for virtuous comment, he reminded himself. Facts were facts and must be faced—however ugly and disillusioning. Had he got all of them, even yet?
‘The letters are … very awkward?’
‘Very. Those I wrote to him after the episode at Bournemouth especially.’
‘You mean … a third person who read them would realise that the Bournemouth episode had taken place?’
‘Yes.’
‘Um. Well, then, you’ve got to get them back, that’s clear, somehow. Unless you face the music and tell your husband? …’
She shook her head.
‘No. I’d rather kill myself, Wick. In fact, I’ve been seriously thinking of killing myself all day.’
He grinned.
‘The more seriously the better …’
‘No. I’m not merely talking about it for the sake of talking about it. I’m not that sort, Wick. I could do it quite easily. Sidney has plenty of things in his consulting-room. All I have to do is sneak his keys. After all—what is it—to kill oneself? What is anything—if you once make up your mind to it? Things seem big and imposing and terrible and difficult … just to think of. But when you come to do them, they’re just a little movement of your hand or your tongue or your throat … nothing. Who, to look at me, would think for a moment that I could deliberately try to kill someone else? No one. And yet I did try, last night—tried deliberately. I didn’t succeed, as it happened. But do you think it seemed anything to me while I was trying to do it? Nothing. The simplest, flattest thing in the world. My dear man, if I once make up my mind to do myself in, I shall do it like a bird. And about the best thing I could do, it seems to me.’
‘Yes, yes. However—to keep to brass tacks. Do I understand you to say, seriously, that you made an attempt to do Mr Barrington in last night—while he was here—in this house?’
‘Yes. I tried to stab him with one of those little poisoned knives—you know … the things you were talking of to Sidney last night in the hall …’
‘What?’
‘Yes. I heard what you said to Sidney. I was on the stairs, just outside this room, while you were talking about them. I remembered, then, afterwards. If I had been just a shade quicker … well, I suppose I should have been in gaol by this time. But I should have got my letters and burnt them. There would have been plenty of time—at least I thought there would have been—before anyone came down and found him in the hall … All the night. And so Sidney would never have known. I meant just to give him a scratch. I heard you say a little prick would be enough. I should have had to fudge up some story—but I’m quite capable of doing that.’
Her matter-of-factness staggered him. He drew a long breath. ‘Phew …’
For a little while he paced to and fro between the fireplace and the door.
‘What happened? He took the knife from you, I suppose?’
‘Yes. I was trying to get it out of the little cover or sheath or whatever you call it … behind my back. And he grabbed my wrist and took it from me.’
‘Did he take it away with him?’
‘Yes.’
‘The knife and the sheath?’
‘Yes. Both. He put the knife into the sheath before he put it into his pocket. Why?’
‘Because, last night, about a quarter-past two or thereabouts, I found the sheath lying on the ground among some leaves, over there beside the gates leading into the hotel grounds. He must have thrown it away when he got outside. No, though. He had his car outside—just near your hall door, by the way—’
She uttered an exclamation of dismay. Then her eyes hardened in suspicion.
‘How do you know that? How do you know his car was there?’
‘Arndale told Challoner he saw it there a little after one o’clock … and Challoner told me … and Heaven knows how many other people since. However … to return to this confounded sheath. Barrington wouldn’t take his car over there into that corner, would he? That’s the one direction he wouldn’t take it. To get to Hatfield Place from here, he’d go along Aberdeen Place or Selkirk Place—I don’t know, though. Perhaps he went up that lane over there at the back of the hotel, and chucked the knife away as he passed the gates … into the Green. Yes. He might have done that. Though why exactly he should throw the knife away …’
She shook her head with conviction.
‘No. He wouldn’t throw it away. I’m quite sure of that. He put it away in his pocket carefully before he went out of the hall. He intended to keep it—he told me so—to hold it over me. I know he meant to keep it. I can’t think how you can have—You found only the sheath?’
‘Only the sheath. Of course the knife may have been lying about there, too, somewhere. I didn’t see it. But then I didn’t look for it. Of course I ought to have. I’ll go across there now and have a look round. Hasn’t anyone noticed that the beastly thing is missing from the hall yet, by the way?’
‘Yes. Clegg noticed it this morning. I heard him telling Sidney about it as he was going out after breakfast.’
‘Didn’t your husband wonder what had become of it?’
‘No. He merely told Clegg to ask the other servants if they knew what had become of it. I don’t suppose he’ll ever think of it again. He never worries about things of that sort. If he does, well … no one knows anything about it. It will be only another lie for me. That’s nothing. I’m an expert liar now.’
‘There’s only one kind of liar, Pickles—and that’s a damn bad one. I present you with that precious chunk of wisdom free gratis and for nothing.’
She laughed bitterly.
‘My dear man, do you think I believe for a moment that Sidney doesn’t know I’ve told him heaps and heaps of lies? Do you think anyone could deceive Sidney? You just try. He isn’t a dear simple old Muggins like you, whom any woman or anyone could bamboozle. If you knew what agony it is for me now—downright agony—to look him in the face—’
‘But … you don’t think he knows anything about this entanglement of yours with Barrington, do you? Not that that wouldn’t be the very best thing that could possibly happen—’
‘I don’t know,’ she said miserably. ‘Sometimes—sometimes I catch Sidney looking at me sometimes so oddly …
‘Then I persuade myself that it’s impossible … that if he knew anything, he’d say so at once and have it out with me. I don’t know what to think. I just keep on trying not to think—trying to wriggle along somehow … just like a worm wriggling in clay … blind … not knowing whether it’s being watched or not … crawling round and round in the old bit of mud. I know I’m bound to get caught in the end. I jolly nearly got caught last night, as a matter of fact. I had hardly got upstairs to my room, after Mr Barrington had gone away, before I heard Sidney go downstairs and go out. I suppose—I hope—someone had rung him up on the telephone … He has a night-telephone in his bedroom, you know … though I didn’t hear the bell ring. He made no reference to his going out at breakfast this morning … naturally I didn’t either. But I was simply scared stiff when I heard him leaving his room. I thought he must have heard us talking in the hall and got up and dressed—perhaps to follow Mr Barrington—’
‘What time was that? When did Barrington go away?’
‘I’m not sure. About half-past one or so, I should say.’
‘How soon after that did your husband go out?’
‘About ten minutes afterwards, I suppose. Perhaps not quite so long.’
‘Oh, well then, I can tell you where he went. I met him last night about twenty-five minutes to two over in Selkirk Place. I’d gone out to post some letters. He told me that he’d been called out to some Mrs MacArthur’s little boy …’
‘Oh,’ she said, relieved. ‘Then that’s all right. Another day to live. Hip-hip-hooray.’
‘Oh, damn it, Pickles,’ he muttered unhappily. ‘Pull yourself together.’
He seated himself again and chewed the stem of his pipe in silence for a little while. Outside darkness had long fallen. Better go back to the hotel and get his pocket-torch, he reflected, before he began hunting about for the knife. If Barrington had thrown it away—it was quite possible that second thoughts had induced him to do so—the knife and sheath might very well have been separated, either in the air, or by collision with the ground or a tree or the railings. Possibly the knife had fallen in the Green inside the railings. It would be a simple matter to climb the railings in the darkness; fortunately they were of no great height.
But—what a mess …
And what an escape …
Suppose she had succeeded in giving the brute a jab, or even a scratch, with the thing— Suppose he had died down there in the hall, as that Masai boy had died—thrashing about on the ground in agony, shrieking— She had never even thought of that, apparently—had fancied, probably, that death would come to him noiselessly and without warning. Good Lord—what an escape for her …
He turned to look at her, discreetly, as she sat leaning forward, staring at the fire, her chin again gathered in her hands. Deliberately he tried to take an impartial, dispassionate view of her, to eliminate the special, mysterious, incalculable quality of her that had, as long as he could remember her, made her for him … different. But even as he strove to strip his witch of her magic, he realised how potent it was—how little a thing that could be amputated by cold-blooded common sense or colder-blooded morality. What she had just told him ought, both common sense and morality assured him, to have almost completely obliterated her glamour for him. As a matter of fact, it had not affected it in the very least. He had simply perceived for himself once more the familiar fact that, in a human system of values—and Wick Gore was a very human person indeed—not the thing done, but the person who did it, mattered.
Her inappropriateness to the part which she had played in this disconcerting narrative of hers was almost ludicrous. It would have been difficult, he told himself, to have imagined a more perfect type, a more satisfying presentment—so far as externals went—of the absolutely ‘nice’ young married Englishwoman. From the tip of her sprucely-waving golden head to the toes of her smartly-sensible shoes, her orderly freshness and daintiness were without blemish—an estate of jealously-guarded, minutely-vigilant propriety—sweet, sound English womanliness, scrupulously-groomed, meticulously decked for the afternoon. And yet, behind that secure, orthodox façade of ‘niceness’, these tempestuous passions had swirled and eddied—eddied and swirled now. He was too shrewd to be far misled by the casual, stereotyped phrases of the modern young woman’s dialect. Beneath them he had had skill enough to detect the stir of the oldest, starkest of human stresses and strains. Love and Hate and Fear had had their way with her. That little mouth, whose lips were set now so coldly, had all but given the kiss of final surrender to one lover, all but betrayed another. That little hand, whose slim fingers upheld her chin childwise, had all but dealt murder. Amazing! And yet he was not amazed—save, indeed, by the knowledge that nothing she could do would ever amaze him in the least.
She turned to him at length, impatiently.
‘Can’t you suggest anything, Wick? I don’t care what it costs—so far as money is concerned—so long as I get those letters of mine back. Couldn’t you—wouldn’t you see him, and try to force him to give them up? I mean—you’re a man. You might be able to frighten him …’
‘I’m perfectly willing to try, of course,’ he said gravely. ‘Though frankly it seems to me that even if you do get your letters back, he’ll still have you in a very nasty place. That hotel-register down at Bournemouth, for instance? … How do you propose to get rid of that? Suppose, even, that he does actually part with your letters—what’s to prevent his coming along to you the very next day and saying, “Look here. I want another five hundred. If I don’t get it, I’m afraid your husband’s going to find out that you stayed at the Palatine Hotel at Bournemouth on such-and-such a date as my wife.” Well … what are you going to do then?
‘However … I’ll see the gentleman, if you wish, and have a preliminary talk about the matter with him at any rate. It may do some good … or it may do quite a lot of harm. What’s his number in Hatfield Place? Twenty-seven, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. When will you see him?’
‘I can go and see him now. Ring up first and find out if he’s at home—and go round straightaway if he is.’
‘I wish you would, Wick,’ she said gratefully. ‘You are a dear old thing. It would be such a relief if I could know that there was even a chance of escaping from this nightmare before I go to Surrey.’
‘You’re going away to Surrey?’
‘Yes. Tomorrow. I’m going up to the Hescotts for Georgie’s wedding. Of course I could cancel it. But Georgie would be most frightfully hurt. She was one of my bridesmaids, you see— And, of course, we’ve always been tremendous pals. I was so sure that all my troubles were to end last night. Do you really think you could see Mr Barrington this afternoon?’
‘I’ll go and ring him up now, if I may. Where’s your telephone?’
‘I’ll show you.’
She rose to her feet, visibly consoled by relief from the despair of inaction.
‘If you don’t see him this afternoon—’
‘I’ll see him some time today. You may rely upon that.’
The murmur of voices on the stairs halted him as he opened the door.
‘The Barracombes,’ said Mrs Melhuish impatiently.
‘Barracombes?’
‘General Barracombe’s girls. They live next door.’
Two fashionably-attired young women appeared in breathless excitement.
‘Barbara, dear,’ exclaimed one, ‘such a dreadful thing has happened poor Mr Barrington! Janet and I have just found him sitting in his car, just outside our door … dead.’
‘At least we’re nearly sure he’s dead,’ broke in her sister. ‘Your husband has gone out to him. We came at once to get him to go out. Isn’t it dreadful? Of course, he may be only unconscious—he may have had a fainting fit or something like that. My dear, I’m positively shaking all over. It gave me such a shock. You see, we spoke to him—at least Hilda spoke to him, and he didn’t answer. And then I thought he looked queer, somehow … and I got up on the footboard and touched his arm. I saw then by his face—’
Her sister checked her. Mrs Melhuish had gone very white suddenly and caught at a chair to steady herself.
‘There—now we’ve frightened you, rushing in this way. Perhaps it is only a fainting fit or something like that. Though I don’t think so. Do you, Janet?’
‘No. I touched his hand. Oh … I shall never forget how deadly cold it felt. I’m sure he’s dead.’
She shuddered luxuriously, rearranging her furs.
Mrs Melhuish had recovered her composure now.
‘How dreadful,’ she murmured. ‘This is a very old friend of mine … Colonel Gore.’
The two young women—they were obviously the kind of sisters who existed in duet—produced beaming smiles of perhaps a second’s duration, and then eclipsed them again to a becoming solemnity. Janet Barracombe stole to the door to peep down into the hall from behind the portière
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Lynn Brock и Rob Reef
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: This brand new edition of the first novel to feature the officer and gentleman detective Colonel Wickham Gore includes the first ever reprint of the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination.Colonel Gore is reunited with old friends at a dinner party to mark his return from service in Africa, but is shocked to discover that one of them has fallen victim to a callous blackmailer. When the antagonist is found dead, Gore finds that civilian life can be as challenging as anything in the army, especially when one of your friends may have become a killer . . . but which one?Once famous in the West End and on Broadway for plays written as ‘Anthony Wharton’, Dublin-born Alexander McAllister had become a publican in Surrey when, as ‘Lynn Brock’, his writing career took off again with the creation of country detective Colonel Wickham Gore. Described by Rose Mcaulay as ‘a very clever writer: a gift for drawing life-like people and a lively sense of dramatic incident’, Brock became a pillar of the Golden Age with his Colonel Gore whodunits and pioneering psychological novels including the lurid Nightmare.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Rob Reef, author of the John Stableford mysteries, and for the first time reprints the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination, a country house murder story from a rare 1926 American pulp magazine.