Death Came Softly

by E. C. R. Lorac

  “A passion for gardening is quite beyond my comprehension,” said Mrs. Stamford, “so we’ll leave it at that. Tell me some more about the house, Eve. Are you putting Father into a separate wing—with his papers and his books—and his secretary? By the way, is that owl-faced man Keston still the secretary?”

  “Yes, of course. Father would be completely lost without him.”

  Mrs. Stamford smiled. “Mr. Keston will like the idea of Valehead, Eve. He was always devoted to you, I seem to remember. Darling, you must powder your nose, this very minute, and do your hair. You look just too frantic. Then we’ll go down to lunch, and you can tell me the really important things about your adored house—omitting all mention of the garden.”

  “Well, Father, so Eve has prevailed on you to move at last. You’re really going to live in this fantastic great house she’s taken in the wilds of Devon?”

  Professor Crewdon, his glasses resting precariously on the tip of his nose, looked up at his younger daughter from the confusion of papers he was sorting out.

  “Yes, my dear. I’m actually moving. The house isn’t fantastic, you know. It’s what I should call a very rational house. It’s interesting, too. Very interesting.”

  “Oh—you’ve been to see it, then?”

  “Certainly I have been to see it, my dear Emmeline. I shouldn’t decide to go and live in any house which I had not previously examined. Valehead is a very good specimen of its period. It was built in early Georgian times, on the remains of a much older edifice. I am of opinion that the site has had several buildings on it, including, almost certainly, a Roman villa. While I admit that the present house is admirable in many particulars, I greatly regret that its medieval predecessor has been wiped out. The only remains, above ground, are the arch at the entrance gate—an unusual structure—and the so-called Hermit’s Cave nearby.”

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear!” broke out Emmeline Stamford, her voice half laughing, half exasperated. “How came a commonplace woman like myself to be a child of yours, Father, and a sister of Eve’s? When I talk to her about houses, she can do nothing but rave about gardens, and when I talk to you about houses, you tell me of Roman remains and hermit’s caves. I loathe gardening, and I’m quite certain that the hermit’s cave will give me the horrors. I detest caves.”

  Professor Crewdon went on sorting his papers methodically, his blue eyes smiling, his face placid.

  “A very unreasonable attitude, my dear. Prejudice is always to be deprecated. The garden, though sadly neglected, is a very fine garden, and contains many rare and beautiful specimens. I noted Tricuspidaria Lanceolata in flower, and Akebia Quinata also—a very fine specimen. Safora, also, and other rare Leguminosae, and some remarkable Ericas. As for the cave, I can assure you that it is neither noisome nor repellent. A nice, dry, airy cave with some most interesting carvings. I promise myself some happy interludes researching into its history. To return to the house, however, in which you are justifiably interested. It is unusually spacious—”

  “So I gather,” put in Emmeline. “About thirty rooms, Eve said.”

  “Forty-one in all, if you count the bathrooms,” said the professor equably. “There is a fine portico, having six columns of the Ionic order, faithfully rendered, frieze and cornice in correct proportion—”

  The deep voice broke off as the door of the room opened and a bespectacled, scholarly looking man of about forty years of age came into the room.

  “Ah, here is Keston. You remember my younger daughter, Keston—Mrs. Stamford.”

  “Of course, of course. How do you do?”

  Roland Keston, his arms full of papers, looked at Mrs. Stamford with an embarrassed air as he endeavored to shift his load of papers to his left arm and extend his right hand to her. He promptly dropped about half his burden on the floor, and Mrs. Stamford, after a formal bow, said hastily:

  “I’m so sorry. I’m afraid that I’m only interrupting you when you are both busy trying to pack. I’ll go now, and leave you in peace—only do tell me, Mr. Keston, have you seen Valehead House?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Stamford, indeed I have. It is an amazingly beautiful place, and the valley is a paradise for anyone interested in bird life.”

  Mrs. Stamford laughed aloud. “I think I must keep a diary, and write down what everyone tells me about this marvelous place,” she said. “My sister tells me that the garden can only be likened to the Garden of Eden—before the fall of man, of course. My father mentions an airy, commodious and generally desirable hermit’s cave. You say that Valehead is a haunt of wild birds. What can an average, domestically minded Philistine like myself find in such a catalogue of marvels?”

  Keston had picked up his papers and turned to Mrs. Stamford, his usually pale face flushed. He was a very sensitive man, and quick to resent mockery.

  “I think you will find a certain amount to please you, Mrs. Stamford. The house is an impressive property, what the agents would describe as ‘socially desirable.’ The bathroom accommodation is unusually luxurious, the central heating and hot water supply more than adequate. The drainage system, I am told, is beyond cavil. Perhaps these points will outweigh the beauty, historic interest and natural glory of the remote valley in which the house stands.”

  The acid voice and scholarly diction caused Mrs. Stamford to frown slightly, but she replied with cheerful flippancy:

  “Thank you for your consoling catalogue, Mr. Keston. I shall hope to experience all the civilized amenities you mention in due course. I am sure you will be very happy at Valehead.”

  After Mrs. Stamford had taken her leave, Keston still looked irritable and put out. He had been devoted to Eve Merrion for many years, but his devotion did not extend to her sister. He thought, as he had thought for years, that Emmeline Stamford was an odious woman.

  * * *

  Emmeline Stamford, on her return journey to South Kensington, was also in an irritable frame of mind. For some reason or other her nerves were frayed, and she brooded over the acid exchange of words with Roland Keston, and over what she called her father’s intolerable complacency—but it was Keston’s remarks which had got under her skin. Sitting in a hot and stuffy bus—and Emmeline loathed and despised buses—she recalled Keston’s pedantic voice: “. . . the house is what the agents call socially desirable . . . perhaps this will outweigh its beauty and historic interest.” Her skin prickled with a sense of burning resentment as she brooded over this aspersion, and remembered that her father’s eyes had twinkled a little in mild amusement. “The least he could have done was to have spoken to Keston sharply and told him to remember who I am,” she said to herself. “In any case, the inference was quite unjust. I’m not a snob.”

  As though to give point to this reflection a large and stout member of the proletariat squeezed her ample bulk into the inadequate seating space which remained on Emmeline’s right. The newcomer—probably a hard-working and honest charwoman—had been shopping, and her purchase spoke for itself in no uncertain voice. From the all too frail wrappings the scent of fish added to the already mixed aromas of the bus. Emmeline’s nose twitched as she tried to withdraw herself from contact with the stout lady’s heated person. The latter, cheerful and contented, grinned happily.

  “A bit on the ’igh side maybe, but I always says you can’t beat a bloater for tea.”

  Emmeline felt sick. She got up, pressed the bell and alighted from the bus. A crawling taxi answered her summons and she drove home in solitary dignity. “I know I can’t afford taxis,” she said to herself. “We’re broke . . . and Eve’s simply rolling in money. It’s not fair, but whatever happens I’m not going to ask her to pay Roderic’s debts, and as for asking Father, I’d rather kill myself. He’d be sure to tell that insufferable little cad. . . . Forty-one rooms. . . . It’s crazy . . . and here am I counting up threepences on a taxi. It’s simply not fair.”

  2

  It was the end of June before Mrs. Stamford traveled down to Devonshire to see her sister’s much debated house.
Eve Merrion had wasted no time in moving her goods and chattels to Valehead, and by the end of May she was already established there. Her letters to Emmeline had all been full of delighted enthusiasm: Valehead seemed to Eve to be the loveliest place in the world; the weather was perfect, the move had been carried through with a minimum of delay and bother; Professor Crewdon was delighted with his quarters, and the “scratch lot” of servants seemed to be both competent and contented.

  Indeed, Mrs. Stamford had felt positively irritated over Eve’s delight in her new home. The former felt that the “gilt was off the gingerbread” in her own case. Emmeline had moved heaven and earth, as the saying is, to get back to England in order to be near her own children, and she had longed to be in London again after her four years’ exile. Now, after that maddeningly long, slow voyage in convoy, half around the world and back again, Emmeline found herself in a London which seemed alien. Very few of her friends were still living there, and those whom she managed to meet were all preoccupied. Either they were in the services, or doing civilian defense work, or driving ambulances, or doing clerical work in ministries whose location must not be mentioned—whatever it was they were all too busy to join in the small festivities which Emmeline had promised herself. As with her friends, so with the shops and restaurants and hairdressers and places of amusement. Even where the premises were intact, the firms often no longer existed. Restaurants were all full, crowded with people who had booked tables well in advance; hairdressers and court dressmakers had lost their assistants, and worried proprietors were no longer anxious for fresh custom. The light-hearted London to which Emmeline had looked forward was no longer there, and herself, a comparatively young married woman of leisure, seemed out of the picture. Everything seemed to be a problem—food, service, even laundry, all those things which had been taken for granted so gaily in the old world, were now major problems, crises occurring afresh week after week.

  It was sheer disappointment in the conditions to which she had returned that made Emmeline Stamford decide to go to Valehead for a while. Possibly, after the children’s summer holidays, she said to herself, she might decide to do Red Cross work, or even drive for one of the services—though having seen something of the trucks and long chassis being driven by nonchalant young women a dozen years younger than herself, Emmeline Stamford felt no enthusiasm in that direction. Several years of life in India had not developed in her luxury-loving nature any capacity for “roughing it.” Emmeline was full of enthusiasm for Empire and Prestige, but dirty work had never come her way, and she looked askance at it.

  London, then, being a disappointment, and arduous work unpalatable, she decided to give life at Valehead a trial while she “considered things.” Eve Merrion met her sister at Enster on a blazing midsummer evening. Eve’s obvious pleasure in welcoming her sister—and the fact that a car was in the station yard—helped to assuage the irritation engendered in Emmeline by a hot and tiresome journey in a crowded third-class carriage. As they drove out of Enster, and the sweet-smelling country air blew away Emmeline’s “train headache,” she began to feel more amiably disposed to her sister and to the promised seclusion of Valehead. Eve, for her part, was both kindly and tactful in dealing with her sister. Eve sympathized with Emmeline’s disappointment over conditions in London, over missing her friends, over difficulties of shopping and living, and the drive was spent in an outpouring of Emmeline’s small woes. It was not until they were actually within sight of the house that Mrs. Stamford made any comment about her surroundings, though Eve had been conscious all the time she drove of the enchanting Devon countryside, of the rich hayfields, some newly mown, some still white with moon daisies, and all fragrant with the heady, exquisite scents of hay-time. They were driving slowly over the deplorable surface of Valehead drive when Emmeline exclaimed:

  “Good gracious! Is that it? It does look an imposing house, Eve.”

  Mrs. Merrion laughed. Truth to tell, the word “imposing” had never entered her head in connection with Valehead. The beauty of house and setting had won her heart so completely that the word “beautiful” seemed the only appropriate one.

  “I do hope you’ll like it, Emma,” she said, almost diffidently. “I know it’s awfully remote, and terribly far from London, but honestly it’s a very comfortable house.”

  “How modest you are, Eve. You never even sent me a photograph of it. I had pictured it as one of those rather derelict, rambling country houses that agents love to palm off on the unsuspecting. Actually it looks in very good condition—so white and immaculate—and even I can see it’s fine architecturally, though architecture isn’t in my line. How exciting to be able to take a vast property like that; it looks positively ducal.”

  “Oh, it’s not so bad as that,” laughed Eve. “It’s true that it’s rather enormous, but now that Daddy and Mr. Keston and the Bradys have occupied one wing, and the Carters are in the servants’ wing, with Nanny, who’s on her holiday just now, and I’ve got the children’s rooms fitted up, it doesn’t seem so very big. I’ve got lots of room for visitors, of course—I love having people to stay—and I think you’ll like your rooms. They’re lovely and sunny.”

  “Good old Eve! How nice of you! If it were my house, I’m sure I should have sent pictures of it to everybody. It really is rather exciting!”

  When Mrs. Stamford got out of the car and stood on the level sweep of ground in front of the pillared Ionic portico, she glanced around at the wooded parkland, and the sunlit valley stretching away eastward, with something like enthusiasm in her eyes. Remote Valehead might be, but it had a splendor of its own. The beauty of trees and flowers and lawn did not catch at Emmeline’s heart as it had caught at Eve’s, but the dignity and spaciousness of the great house set so superbly facing up the wooded valley gave her a feeling of warm satisfaction.

  This feeling did not grow less when Eve led her sister through the pillared white-walled entrance hall and up to a vast bedroom whose windows looked out over the magnolias and cypresses on the lawn. The faint jade-green of the paneled walls had been applied with the cunningest of modern artistry; mirrors were inset just where they were most useful and decorative, and a swinging silvered candelabra gave an air to the formal charm of the great room. A bathroom opened out from the bedroom, and Eve displayed its mirrored shining perfection with laughing pride.

  “When the children came over for the week-end and saw the house, they called this ‘The Duke’s bathroom’ and mine the Duchess’s,” she laughed. “I had to let all of them have a bath in here because they were so thrilled by its splendor. They’re very unsophisticated, bless them. Of course it was the American tenants who put in these bathrooms. English people never squander money on anything so superbly luxurious.”

  “But, Eve, I can’t understand you saying that the place was cheap,” burst out Mrs. Stamford. “It looks enormously expensive. What’s the secret about it? Is it haunted? Has it some gruesome history? Was somebody murdered here, or something like that?”

  “Nothing like that, my dear.” Eve walked over to the window and looked out happily at the sunny valley. “Cheap is a relative term, of course. What I did say—and it’s perfectly true—is that the rent of this house costs no more than the rent of a big expensive London flat plus the upkeep of a property in Surrey. The reason for Valehead being cheap is that no one would take such a big house so far away from a town. When I first saw it myself, I said, ‘Impossible,’ but here I am, and here you are, and it’s all going to be great fun.”

  Mrs. Stamford walked over to the window and stood looking out, beside her sister.

  “Oh, who’s that? I didn’t know you had a party staying here,” she said.

  On the lawns below, in the shadow of the great magnolia tree, a group of three men were sitting.

  “It isn’t a party. They just happened,” said Eve cheerfully. “I told you I liked having visitors, and I hope those two will help to entertain you. The dark man is Bruce Rhodian. He’s an American. Axel got to kno
w him last year. Rhodian is a traveler.”

  “I know, the man who did that journey over the Andes and wrote a book about it?”

  “That’s the man. He wants to join the R.A.F., but he had a flying accident and isn’t quite fit yet. I know Father wants to meet him. Father’s away this week, by the way. He’s lecturing in London. The other man—the fair one on the grass—is David Lockersley. He’s a poet. I like him quite a lot. He’s awfully shy and difficult to know, but he’s very keen on gardens, and knows a lot about rock gardens. He’s helping me with the one here.”

  “Why isn’t he in the army?”

  “Weak heart and weak eyesight. They won’t take him. The third man is Roland Keston. You know him, of course.”

  “Keston? Horrors! I should say I do. He’s an insufferable creature. How do you all live here, Eve? I mean, does Father—and Keston—share meals and everything with you?”

  “Oh, no. Father has his own establishment, as it were. The Bradys look after him, and cook for him, and he has his own dining room and all that. I knew it would never work for us to try living ‘en famille.’ Father’s much too individualist—he’s an eccentric, really, in his way of living, and he’d never conform to ordinary times or remember meals. As it is, he can do just as he likes, and I’ve not got to worry about him. Mr. Keston lives with Father, of course. We just meet in the garden sometimes, but I don’t see much of him. He’s quite a dear, in his way, although he’s pedantic and gauche, and he’s a magnificent scholar. Now, my dear, would like some tea sent up here, and then you can revel in a lovely bath in the ducal bathroom, and make yourself look glorious to adorn our dinner table.”