Over the reassuring crackle of the flames and the soaring voice of the wind rose the light, ominous patter, and Doug King’s voice lifted in a lusty groan.
“Well, there goes the paper chase to-morrow. Even if it lets up we’d leave tracks all over the place. No target practice either, I’d like to bet. Never mind. Who cares? Who cares a tinker’s dam what’s happening outside when we have visions to dazzle these old eyes like those over yonder?”
He gestured dramatically toward the doorway where stood Hanna, tall and radiant in trailing white and diamonds, and Lindy, exquisite in clouds of violet tulle and pearls, hands linked like school girls, smiling back at him conqueringly.
“Hanna, you’re the most elegant thing I’ve laid eyes on since gentlemen discovered they preferred blondes! Still and all, you’re my girl, Lindy. Come on over and sit by ole Uncle Doug and he’ll tell you all about how little Reginald Rabbit got chased clear through the brier patch into the reservoir by mean old Farmer Whiskery. Nobody tells stories like ole Uncle Doug.”
“I’m not going to sit down anywhere, and neither are you. Come on, everyone, we simply must get started. Eight, nine, ten, eleven—who isn’t down?”
“Us,” called Chatty’s cheerful little voice from the hall. “We’ve been dress-makering.—Oh, Trudi Sheridan, where’s that lacquer red you were boasting about?”
Trudi cast a casually appraising glance down at the beige sports dress that reached almost down to her knees and clear down to her knuckles.
“Would you believe it, I spilled two ounces of Tonty’s ‘Passionate Folly’ plumb down the front of it? It looks like something the cat would rush straight off to the ash-barrel. I’ve been crying ever since quite a good deal. Didn’t you hear me? That was me falling downstairs, too; blinded with tears—you know how it is. Lindy, I don’t have to work any, do I? This right leg of mine’s as good as gone—I doubt whether it ever sees another sunrise.”
“Trudi, I do think you’re the most dreadful liar.” Chatty, her dimples riotous, clutched accusingly at Trudi’s decorously covered shoulders. “I don’t know about your leg, but I do know perfectly well that you put on this taffy-coloured jumper because you thought I was going to feel out of it to-night without an evening dress. Honestly, of all the simpletons!” She administered a final shake, and yielded to a series of small, hilarious giggles. “And Tom Ross and I standing up there hacking the front out of this thing with a pair of nail scissors and filling in the four inches that we overestimated with lace off my nightgown. Maybe you aren’t the only simpleton around this place!” She gave an affectionate twitch to her wide dark blue taffeta skirts and added gleefully, “Imagine me worrying my head over an evening dress! Bohemia (she’s the coloured lady that helps out) says I spend so much of my life trying to decide whether Junior’s old pajamas would look better as awnings for the back porch or seat covers for the Dodge that I never know whether my own dress is on backward or forward. I want to tell you that I took an old pink velvet cape that I had in my trousseau and made it over into …” The gay voice checked, wavered, trailed off into space.
Tom Ross was staring at the jubilant little figure in its neat dark blue and snowy frills with a look of such torn despair that all the roses blooming so dauntlessly in the gay face faded to wan contrition, and the light tongue faltered, stricken to silence. After a long moment she said in a small, apologetic voice thick with unshed tears, “Of course the only reason I can’t wear a different dress three times a day is because I’m such a perfect donkey of a manager. Mummy always said I was the worst manager she ever saw in her whole life—she always said that all the money that didn’t drop through the holes in my pockets slipped right out through my fingers two seconds afterward. She said—”
Tom Ross, leaning swiftly forward, tilted the round, woebegone countenance up to his, and deposited two long, deliberate kisses on the drowned lashes.
“She’s the best manager since Eve,” he said evenly. “She manages to keep four children, eight guinea pigs, three waltzing mice, two darkies, a canary, a cat, a dog, a can full of polliwogs, and an adoring husband housed, fed, and contented on an income that wouldn’t keep an Eskimo in ice cream. Never you mind, young feller; first thing you know you’ll be having terrapin for breakfast and a lace boudoir cap! In the meantime, if it’s all the same to the rest of this festive gathering, I move that we eat. I’m getting hungry enough to go for the berries off the holly trees!”
“Hear, hear!”
“You and me both, ole kid!”
“Thank heavens the tables are ready! Larry, you and Doug get chairs.”
“Do I just scatter sandwiches around and let them lie where they fall?”
“Sherry, get on the job again. Can’t we have candlelight now, Lindy?”
The voices flooded over the ugly two minutes in a frantic torrent of babble, washing out the memory of Tom’s pale desperation, of Chatty’s pitiful nonsense—washing out the sick compunction that had bound the room in a painful web of silence.
“Of course we can have candlelight! Hurry, Tom, that means you. There’s a taper on the mantel and you can use that green stool for the highest brackets.”
“Oh, kind heavens, here’s caviar, the pale gray kind that always makes me go hot and cold all over, like Elinor Glyn.”
“Kit, you know where the switch is, don’t you? Turn out those lights, there’s a lamb. Hurry, Tom.… Oh, why in the world does anyone ever use anything but candlelight?”
Under Tom’s expert fingers the room was flowering from a place of jewelled darkness into a place of magic lights. Little pools quivered and widened, velvet shadows shifted and fled; under the spell of the dancing flames of candles and the leaping flames of the fire it was suddenly and mysteriously alive. And by some glamorous illusion all the women were suddenly lovely as forgotten dreams, all the men adventurous as knights. Chatty’s despised dress was only a shadow, but above the shadow her brown curls danced into something brighter than gold, her gray eyes into something braver than blue. Lindy and her amethyst clouds had melted into the jade background of her great chair, but in the oval mirror opposite the candles her shadowy eyes and shadowy smile hung like a portrait of romance itself, and when she stirred the room was suddenly filled with violets. Jill Leighton, lovely and tremulous in her floating green as Daphne hovering between Apollo’s arms and a leafy refuge, turned an enchanted face to Larry’s grave worship, heedless of the mockery of Trudi’s lifted brows. Trudi’s offering on friendship’s altar had faded to a honey-coloured mist, but above it smiled wise and witty eyes, and lips both shrewd and mirthful. In one corner of the couch Hanna’s ivory and gold gleamed incredible as a miracle and the earrings trailing to her shoulders glittered like fairy fountains. Not a hand breadth from her, Ray Hardy’s vivid little face was suddenly bewitched into dusky beauty between its swinging hoops of gold, and her gay orange frock flamed like a banner.
She leaned eagerly toward the vision at her side. “Oh, Hanna, I do know better but I can’t help it. Do you get absolutely ill hearing how incredible you are?”
The colour in the perfect face did not deepen an iota, but the friendly smile did.
“You mean yellow hair and a straight nose? I think you’re incredible, too; incredibly nice. Joel, could I have one of those heavenly little biscuits?”
“Lady, here’s the plate. Anyone that talks that way to my child bride is welcome to the shirt off my back. Massa Baird, sir, I’ll trouble you to reach me a good thumping snack of what looks like the king of all chicken mousses.”
“Oh, children, we can’t eat like this!” protested Lindy in tones divided between horror and mirth. “Even the March Hares ought to have some method in their madness! If Joel corrupts anyone else to his underhand methods, it’s going to be a plain case of the survival of the fittest. Kit, you and Doug come to my table, and the rest of you sit down firmly wherever you want to, only do let it be at tables. Look how beautiful they are! Sherry, stop shaking that thing—are you going
to go on being Ganymede all night?”
“Hey, wait a minute!” commanded Trudi in stricken tones. “Hold everything! This party’s off as far as I’m concerned. There isn’t any coffee, and not one mouthful of food passes my lips without coffee. It’s an old family tradition—I took an oath on the day I attained my majority, and I’m not liable to break it to-night. Whose job was coffee, anyway?”
“Mine,” said Jill guiltily. “Oh, Trudi, I am so sorry. I unpacked the percolator and got it all ready—the only thing that I forgot was to light it! Look, if I start it now, it will be ready for demi-tasses almost as soon as we are. Larry, give me a match.”
“Demi-tasses my eye! Coffee with my meals is what I said, and coffee with my meals is what I’ll have, thank you. What’s the hurry about this party, anyway? The night’s young, isn’t it? And we’re young, aren’t we? Pretty darned young, if you ask me. We’ll just all lean back and investigate whether a watched pot boils. You might while away the time by giving us the family murder in your own inimitable way, Lindy love!”
“Oh, there won’t be time!” protested Lindy. “It’s frightfully long, and everyone will start being fretful and starving before we’re half through. The coffee won’t take long.”
“Won’t it, indeed? You’ll have time for a good long murder story and one of the minor epics before that stuff’s fit to drink. Black as hate, sweet as love, and strong as hell—that’s how we Spaniards take it, and I don’t want any more insubordination out of the rest of you. Put on another log, Kit. Hanna, stop prowling around. It makes me nervous, and it isn’t going to do you a particle of good. Sink to rest, everyone.”
“A murder story?” inquired Ray feebly. “I thought you said it was a ghost story?”
“Murder and ghost,” said Trudi, unrelenting. “A not unnatural sequence, my child. You may fire when ready, Lindy.”
“But you’ve all heard it so many times!” protested Lindy drowsily. “Even ghosts get tiresome if they’re too persistent. Besides, this isn’t a real ghost—no one ever sees it.”
Ray’s small, impertinent face, wan beneath its freckles, was suddenly luminous with relief.
“Well, that’s something to be thankful for!” she remarked devoutly. “Glory, I’ve been scooting down corridors and scampering around corners ever since Trudi brought the subject up. If there’s one word that I loathe more than another in the English language, it’s ‘ghost.’ Why didn’t you tell me that it never bothered anyone, Trudi?”
“Because I’m a truthful girl, I am,” said Trudi virtuously. “There are those that it has bothered to the extreme outer edge of fits and vapours. Do you remember how you carried on the first time you heard it, Chatty?”
“Heard it?” demanded the petrified Ray. “How d’you mean, heard it? What does it do?”
“Laughs,” said Trudi briskly. “That doesn’t sound anything to turn your hair white, does it? Nice and quiet and soft, too—not loud enough to worry a kitten. But then, of course, some of us aren’t kittens.”
“Laughs?” echoed Ray, incredulity struggling with despair. “You’re making up. Joel Hardy, you never told me one single, solitary word about any of this! And what’s more, I don’t believe it; he’s just told you what a coward I am, and you’re all kidding me.”
“I didn’t tell you, because I knew I’d have about as much chance of luring you into spending three nights in a pest house as in a haunted house,” admitted her husband with disarming candour. “Don’t be a little goop, darling; what do you care if ghosts have a sense of humour?”
Gavin Dart inquired pleasantly from the love-seat near the fire, “But it was more than a ghost story that you promised us, surely? It was a murder story, and I’m rather a connoisseur in murder. I have the best collection of Nineteenth Century trials in the country, I believe.”
“Honest to God, have you?” demanded Joel. “Good-night, I didn’t know that. I’m a nut about it, too, though I go in more for detective stuff than trials. I know every way to bump a guy off that was ever invented, and I’ve thought of two new ones.”
“You’re to be congratulated. I’m not an expert on the literary side; reality’s so much more brutally melodramatic than fiction that I don’t go in much for anything else. I confine my major activities to the police courts.”
“Well, this place ought to suit you right down to the ground,” commented Joel proudly. “Unless you’re the victim or the coroner, you’ll never be much nearer the scene of the crime than you are this minute. If you turn your head about two inches, your eyes will encounter X, which marks the spot where the body fell.”
“Here?” demanded Ray in stricken tones. “Here in this room? Where we’re sitting?”
Lindy smiled faintly from her firelit corner.
“I’m afraid so. Where some of you are sitting, at any rate. Sidney’s knee-hole desk was right in front of the fire, if legend can be trusted—just about where the big sofa is now.”
Ray, with a frenzied squeak of protest, hurled herself straight from her corner of the sofa into Joel’s arms, where she was greeted with patronizing but benign murmurs of reassurance. The other tenants of the sofa, Kit and Larry, exchanged tolerantly superior grins and stretched their legs at more luxurious angles.
“Was it Sidney who was murdered?” inquired Gavin Dart, amiable but undeterred.
“Yes, it was Sidney—such a beautiful young man,” murmured Lindy drowsily, leaning her cheek against the soft brocade cushions. “He wore a scarlet coat and a little white wig and an unholy smile in the corner of his eye; I fell in love with him when I was six and a second, and even now that I know him for a graceless scamp and rogue, I love him just a little. Aunt Serena has the portrait; it hangs over the mantel in the white dining room—there’s lace at his wrists and his eyes mock you from every corner of the room.… He was my great, great, great, great grandfather, and a colonel in His Majesty’s forces.”
“And it’s he who goes laughing around Lady Court on dark nights?”
“Oh, no!” murmured Lindy. “I hardly think it’s Sidney; it was he who was murdered, you see, and I imagine that, like Queen Victoria, he was not amused.”
“Then who’s our ghost?”
Lindy, her dark eyes sweeping Ray’s pallid countenance, said lightly, “My own opinion is that it’s a choked rain-gutter, or Trudi in her more unprincipled moments. I know that the perfect hostess ought to be loyal to her own ghosts, but if you’ll listen to Trudi carefully after she’s said something that she thinks is particularly amusing—that hollow, blood-curdling little laugh she gives—”
“Hey!” protested the outraged Trudi vigorously. “Are you making a ghoul out of me just because you want that Hardy child to have a pleasant night? I can bring eight thousand witnesses to prove that I’ve never been known to as much as smile after midnight, let alone laugh. You know damn well this house is haunted.”
“Never mind the ghost,” said Gavin Dart pacifically. “The murder will do excellently. Who did His Majesty’s colonel in, Lindy?”
“Ah, that’s it. I told you that it was a good murder story, didn’t I? And did you ever hear of a good murder story without a mystery? This one has sixteen or seventeen.… For a long time everyone thought that it was a runaway slave; Sidney wasn’t a very nice young man, and if he thought that a slave was getting a little slack or rebellious, he was apt to tie him up by his thumbs until he felt docile and energetic again. At least that’s what Aunt Chloe’s granny told her—she wasn’t a Pallisser herself, of course, and she may have been wronging him cruelly. And it was true that a week or so before the murder two Negroes escaped, and there were rumours that they were hiding in the pine woods north of Lady Court—and one of the long windows out behind the cold room was open.… But they turned up as stowaways six weeks later on a boat that had sailed for the Indies the day before Sidney was murdered, and by that time everyone was off hot-foot on another trail.”
“You haven’t even told us how he was killed yet,” interpo
lated the connoisseur on murder, a shade reproachfully.
“Haven’t I? He was stabbed—in the back of the neck. Someone must have crept up behind him while he was sitting at the writing table. He was facing the fire, you see, with his back to the rest of the room.”
“Was he writing?”
“Now you’ve found another mystery, Gavin. There was a quill pen on the floor beside him, and even a few grains of sand on the desk, as though he had been shaking some out to dry the ink, but there wasn’t a single solitary sheet of paper on the desk. Quite a packet of it in the drawer, of course, and the people who found him finally decided that he must have been about to start writing, and had bent over to get a sheet from the drawer, perhaps. The sand might perfectly well have been left from another time.”
“With a lot of nigger slaves that got strung up by the toes any time they went slack?” Joel shoved the still palpitant Ray somewhat unchivalrously aside in his contemptuous excitement. “Swell chance! No, sir—the boy that stabbed Sidney was after something he was writing; and any little drops of ink or little grains of sand around the place ought to have told even old Dr. Watson himself that the boy got it.”
“Surely that’s obvious.” Dart’s fine, shrewd face was riveted in amused attention. “Now, Hardy, dive again into the deep well of your criminal knowledge and bring us up that reluctant lady, Truth. What was this essential document that turned Death from a horror to a solution?”
“Oh, a will, in all probability.” The buoyant voice of Monsieur Le Coq’s disciple was self-confidence made articulate. “Or a disclosure of some kind that meant someone’s ruin. Or mayhap the noble lord was going in for a little nice lucrative blackmail. D’you happen to know what the state of the family fortune was in those days, Lindy?”
“Oh, Sidney was magnificently rich. He’d been wealthy even before he married Damaris Fane, and she brought him another fortune.”
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