The question would have been remarkable if only because it came from Phillida and concerned the state of mind of somebody other than herself, but up in the dark bedroom, with the firelight flickering and the wind chattering round the house, its very directness shot a chill to Frances' diaphragm.
"Why? Why do you say that?"
"Oh. nothing. I'm nervy. I'm ill. I'm frightened. I hate this insufferable house. I've only been married to him two years, Frances. He's always been queer and difficult, but just lately he's much much worse. He's getting worse every day. He watches me, he watches you. He doesn't talk to anyone except Lucar. He's made up his mind that you shall marry Lucar."
"Then I'm afraid he's doomed to disappointment, my dear."
Phillida did not answer for some minutes, and when at last she spoke her remark was unexpected.
"Did you know that David Field had a dreadful row with Gabrielle once over me? It was years ago, of course, long before he became known." She laughed abruptly and threw up her arms in a sudden gesture. "Oh, why did I marry Robert?" she said. "Why out of all of them did I marry Robert? It's obvious how it happened. I was secretly engaged to Dolly Godolphin when they went out on that ghastly expedition, and then when poor Dolly was lost and I was brokenhearted Robert just happened to be there. I was mad. Oh. Frances, be careful who you marry."
She went back to the day bed and. throwing herself down upon it. began to cry so quietly that the other girl did not hear her. Frances as staring into the fire. So it had been Gabrielle who had called him a fortune hunter and raised the devil in him. How like him not to have mentioned it.
Phillida's muffled voice cut into her thoughts with a startling suggestion.
"For God's sake go down to them. What can they possibly be doing all this time? They've both got insane tempers. Go down and see."
Frances looked up sharply. "Perhaps I'd better," she said and found that her breath was uneven.
Just outside the door she ran into Dorothea, Gabrielle's elderly maid. The plump old woman was pale with unaccustomed excitement and she laid a hand on the girl's arm.
"I can't do a thing with her." she said in a sickroom whisper she always adopted when speaking of her mistress. "She won't go to bed and she won't take any drops. She's sitting up in the armchair, staring round the room and talking of the late master and Mr. Meyrick. He didn't ought to have said those things to her. Mr. Robert didn't. She wouldn't have stood it from one of her own and she certainly won't from him. She's angry, that's what she is. I've only seen her like it twice before in my life, once when Mr. Meyrick's first wife. Miss Phillida's mother, ran off and left him, and once when she had some words with a young gentleman who came to the house. She's angry and she's old. She's brooding. I wondered should I send for a doctor."
"I don't see what he could do, do you?" said Frances. "I'm afraid all this is my fault, Dorothea. I'm so sorry."
The old woman regarded her with the stern common sense of her kind.
"Well, it hasn't done a lot of good, has it, miss?" she said. "I'll wait a bit and see how she is later. I'll go down in a minute and get her a mite of hot milk. She may take that and go to sleep. He has upset her. Someone ought to tell him of it. He might have killed her. They make me wild, these nervy men. There's something very wrong in this house. I notice it if you don't. Something very wrong."
She went off down the corridor, a solid, angry old figure diverted from her daily task and resenting it bitterly. Frances went on downstairs. The house was quiet and almost dark.
The garden room was at the end of the passage off the main hall. There were two doors side by side, one leading to the room and the other giving out onto an iron staircase running down to the flagged yard, which was all that encroaching London had left of an eighteenth-century rosary.
At the mouth of the corridor she hesitated. A man was hurrying down it towards her. To her astonishment she recognized Lucar. She was so surprised to find him in the house at that time of night that she did not move, and he came up with her. She saw at once that something had happened to him. He was shaking with fury and his red face was patched with white where taut muscles had banished the blood. Also he was smiling. He paused in front of her. His eyes were not far above the level of her own and she was suddenly alarmed by them. He did not speak but remained looking at her, and she attempted to pass him with a conventional murmur. He shot out a hand however, and, catching her arm, swung her round. She was not prepared for his strength. She had assumed that because he was small he must necessarily be a weed, but the grip on her wrist was paralyzing, and she was all but jerked off her feet. He lifted her hand and looked for the ring on it. When he saw it he flung her away from him and strode off down the hall into the shadows of the porch, leaving her angry and breathless.
She collected herself and was annoyed to find that she was trembling, and she went on down the corridor, her courage up but her knees shaking. Outside the door of the garden room she paused. There was an ominous silence within, and her outstretched hand drew away from the latch. Disliking herself for the subterfuge, she turned to the other door and let herself out onto the iron steps. The yard was a well of darkness. Here the wind which had roistered over the city all day seemed to have become imprisoned, for it tore round the high walls like a live thing, twitching at her skirt and blowing her hair into her eyes as it passed.
She went softly down the staircase and took a step or two across the flags. Around her were dim forms in the faint light from the sky where scudding clouds raced across the moon. There was a packing case containing one of Meyricks Chinese purchases standing like a gun emplacement behind her, and beyond, in the angle of the wall, was a little shed where some of the wood for the gallery's case making was kept. Frances looked up at the great bulwark of the house. All the windows save one were in darkness, but the curtains of the garden room had not been drawn and she saw David distinctly. He was standing behind the table, leaning on it and looking down. The scene bad the brilliant unreality of a stage-set. The man was clear and she could see his face clearly. He was not talking but might have been listening or merely looking, and his expression was curiously blank.
It was that blankness which first terrified her, it was so unlike him. His lazy smile might never have existed, and his eyes were hard and apparently unseeing.
The moment seemed to drag out intolerably and then, just when she was on the point of screwing up her courage to break in on them, came the sound.
It was a little stir, a little shuffling which was not quite the wind, and it was behind her. She swung round, her heart rising. The shaft from the window made a narrow angle of light which ran right across the door of the shed, cutting it in two and passing directly through the latch. As she turned she could have sworn that the handle moved and the door cracked inwards.
Panic, unreasoning and uncontrollable, descended upon her. Out in the windswept darkness at the bottom of that well of tall houses fear enveloped and suffocated her. She ran. She fled up the iron staircase, through the corridor, across the hall, mounted the main stairs and rushed over the upper landing into her own room.
She was still there, crouching on the dressing-table stool, trying to pull herself together and to force the terror which had seized her out of her mind, when David knocked and put his head in.
"I took a chance on finding the right door," he said, coming over to her. "Well, my dear, we're still engaged."
The words were meant to be reassuring, but he was speaking with an uncharacteristic jerkiness, and she stared at him in panic.
"What's the matter? What's happened?"
"Nothing." The denial came a little too quickly and he laughed to cover it. "I just thought I'd see you before I went, to tell you it's all okay in spite of our Robert's unedearing manners. He's going off for a walk, by the way. It's not a bad idea. The night air may cool him down a bit."
"What did he say?"
He avoided her eyes and looked over her head at the swaying curtains.
"Just about what you'd think," he said. "Forget him. We're engaged. Good night."
She thought he was going to kiss her, but either he changed his mind or the idea had not occurred to him for he merely touched her hand abruptly and went out. closing the door behind him.
She stood where she was for some time and then, on an impulse, followed him out into the upper ball. It was quite dark and silent, and she crept forward to lean over the balustrade. The hall below was an inky pit, and the sound of the front door closing startled her. She waited but there was still no light and no sound of a returning servant, so she took it that David had let himself out.
With his going she was overwhelmed with an inexplicable sense of loss. The familiar house, which had been her home all her life, had suddenly become not so much empty as hostile. Phillida's door was closed and there was no light beneath it, nor was there any sign of life from Meyrick's room where the old Gabrielle must be lying in the antique Italian bed with the tapestry hangings. It was all quiet, all dark, all for some intangible reason menacing.
And then, while she stood there, something happened. Someone walked sharply down the corridor from the garden room, crossed the hall with a brisk, light step, and strode out of the house, closing the front door firmly behind him. She saw no one. There was not a shadow in the dusk. The sounds were so sharp and decisive that they should have struck a reassuring note in that world of creaks and whispers, yet to the girl clinging to the slender balustrade they were so horrifying that she almost screamed, and as she crept back to the light of her own room they sank into her mind with a vividness which she was afterward to regard as prophetic.
"It's only Robert going out for his walk," she said aloud to herself in the mirror. "Only Robert going out, you fool." Rut her voice was not reassuring, and the face which looked back at her from the pool of light was white and terrified.
Yet on the following morning when Norris, Meyrick's butler, announced with the casual urbanity, which he seemed to reserve for more awkward intimations, that Mr. Robert had not been in the house all night but that his hat and coat were missing, and inquired a trifle slyly if his letters had not best be sent down to his club, no one was particularly alarmed.
Relief came first: relief for Frances, relief for Phillida, relief for Gabrielle holding court in her great tapestry-hung bed.
Fear came later. It began on the third day when it was discovered that Robert was not sulking in Jermyn Street, and fear deepened and grew into dull terror when discreet inquiries at Blue Bridges, the Surrey country house brought no news of him, and when the valet at the Paris flat wired back to say that Monsieur was not there.
Fear came with the letters to Frances, pouring in after the announcement of the engagement. Fear came with the discreet inquiries from Robert's few friends. Fear came with a hundred-and-one little demands for Robert's decision in business matters.
Fear came from Lucar's sullenness, from Phillida's hysterics and from the odd, preoccupied expression in David's eyes.
And then one morning seven days after Robert's disappearance two things happened. One was the news, wired from the wilds of the Northwest province of India and flashed into every newspaper office in the world. The curt message appeared on the evening-paper boards as the early racing editions were piled into the streets. Phillida read them from her bedroom window as they stood propped up against the railings of the square.
GODOLPHIN SAVED
FAMOUS EXPLORER ESCAPES FROM FORBIDDEN TERRITORY
She was standing there staring at the display, too petrified to throw up the window and shout for a newsboy, when the second event occurred which forced the first into obscurity, focused the attention of the entire city on Sallet Square, and brought Meyrick racing back from China as fast as train and plane could carry him.
Frances came into her half sister's room without ceremony. She was trying to keep very quiet, very calm, and her Grey eyes were dark with the effort of control
"Phillida," she said huskily, "something's happened. You've got to pull yourself together, darling. You've got to be incredibly brave and and Oh, for God's sake,
keep your head."
The woman swung round. "They've found Robert?"
Frances regarded her steadily.
"Yes," she said. "Did you know?"
"I? No, of course not. I don't know anything. Where is he? What's he done?"
"Oh, darling." The young voice quivered and broke. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean that. I don't know what I thought. He he's been down in the garden room all the time. His coat and hat were there too, lying on top of him. That clipboard's never opened, you knew. There's nothing in it in the ordinary way. They've just found him. Norris called me."
The words were tumbling out of her mouth in a helpless stream, and she struggled to restrain them.
Phillida came quietly across the room towards her. For a moment it was she who was controlled, she who was the dominating figure. She laid her hand on her half sister's shoulder and shook her.
"Frances, are you telling me that Robert is dead?"
The girl met her eyes and her own were panic-stricken. She nodded.
Phillida's hand dropped. Her face was calm and her tone rather horribly matter of fact. "Thank God," she said simply.
5
"I shouldn't come if I were you, madam."
The unnatural sharpness in the butler's voice and a curious new dishevelment about him which seemed to be rather of expression than of actual fact gave the words a macabre quality of their own. Frances felt Phillida waver in the crook of her arm as the two women paused abruptly in the passage outside the garden room while the man barred their path in the sharp angle of the half-closed door.
"I shouldn't come in," he repeated stubbornly, adding with sudden weakness, "he's he's just as he was, you see. We mustn't move anything before the police come."
Phillida shook her head. It was a vigorous, meaningless movement, and in that nightmare moment when all events seemed to be moving with unnatural slowness and each familiar object, the door frame, Norris' white face and the pallid perkiness of his winged collar appeared to have broad black outlines like the pictures in a childs rag book, the gesture appeared to have a dreadful studied idiocy. "No," said Phillida. "No. Get out of the way, Norris." The blaze of light in the garden room in the morning always came as a surprise as one turned to it out of the cool greyness of the hall, but today its radiance was pitiless. The sunlight poured into the room through the wide-open window with the energy of a living thing It burnt on the old green leather chair, throwing up each scar and scratch upon the livid hide. It found a speck of dust on the mahogany of the antique glass-fronted bookcase and pointed to it as if it had been a crime. Nor did it respect the deep recess behind the open door in the white paneling but hurled itself within and pounced with indecent savagery upon the dreadful thing, the thing with the mercilessly exposed head and the strange, dusty-looking hair.
Robert Madrigal had died and stiffened and grown limp again. He sat squarely in the bottom of the cupboard, his back supported by the wall and his legs doubled up before him. Across his knees lay a raincoat, a pair of yellow gloves and. final touch of ghastly incongruity, an upturned bowler hat.
Frances took Phillida's full weight as she heeled over, and Norris caught them both as they reeled against the table.
"I said not to go in. I said not to go in," he repeated infuriatingly to Frances as between them they got the other woman out into the passage. "I've phoned the police and the doctor. You take her, miss. I can't leave him. Can I?"
Neither of them saw anything absurd in the final statement, although Robert Madrigal had been left alone for many days and would be left alone for an eternity, he with his coffin-shaped face and his long parchment hands.
Old Dorothea appeared like a creature from another and a happier world. She came waddling down the corridor from the hall where the rest of the staff lingered in whispering conclave and put capable nurse's hands on Phillida's elbows.
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"Come along, my dear. Come along, my pretty. Come along, my brave girl," she said, slurring all the words together until they had no meaning but made a single comforting sound. "And you, too. Miss Frances," she added over her shoulder with calculated tartness. "I don't know what you think you're doing, taking her in there, and her so delicate as it is. Come along, my dear. Come along, my pretty. Come along, my brave girl. One step up. Now another. Come along. Come along."
She had the dynamic energy of the sunlight itself, and her stalwart body moved with the magnificent drive and precision of a little fraught horse surmounting a hill. Frances plodded on beside her, supporting Phillida's other arm.
The Italian bed in Meyrick's room was an impressive erection. The baroque gilt framework rose to the ceiling and the two movable wings hung out on either side like banners. The bright tapestry of the triptych had not faded and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John blessed the couch which Gabrielle lay on in vivid blue and gold and red.
She sat up in it, wrapped in Shetland lace, remote and inapproachable, a little yellow scrap of dying authority. Dorothea led the procession into the room without ceremony. She lowered Phillida into a chair by the open fire and began to slap her hands with rhythmic determination.
The old Gabrielle's bright black eyes rested on the two of them for a moment and the expression on her pursed mouth was almost contemptuous. Finally she sniffed delicately, like a little wood animal, and beckoned Frances over with a finger raised among the woolly lace.
"Are the police here yet?" The old voice was brisk in spite of the lowered tone.
"No, darling."
"Nor the doctor?"
"No, not yet."
"Does the servant know how the man died?" "No, I don't think so. I don't know." "Go and find out and come and tell me. Hurry, child, hurry."
It was extraordinary, as if disaster had fanned a flickering fire into life again. So here was Gabrielle, a force once more albeit a fleeting and uncertain one. Frances went out.
At the head of the staircase she paused. There was movement in the hall below and the hissing of subdued voices. With sudden guiltiness she drew back and hung over the balustrade. Her heart turned over as she saw the group below. The hall was crowded. The Georgian elegance of 38 Sallet Square was in the hands of the police.
Black Plumes Page 3
