Nemesis at Raynham Parva (A Clinton Driffield Mystery)

by J. J. Connington

  She took a cigarette from his case and allowed him to light it for her.

  “That seems to discourage them,” she said, blowing a cloud of smoke in the direction of several mosquitoes which were hovering near her.

  Sir Clinton disliked to see Francia beside any decent girl, and he deftly inserted himself into the conversation with the Anstruther sisters, though without appearing to force himself on the party. After a few minutes desultory talk, he seemed to recollect his promise to Linda Anstruther, and glanced at his watch as though to gauge the time which they had in hand.

  “It’s just four o’clock,” he said.

  Then, turning to Noreen Anstruther, he added:

  “Care to have a row on the lake, Miss Anstruther? Your sister’s going out with me in one of the boats, and you might come too. It’ll be cool on the water; and parts of the lake are rather pretty.”

  Noreen hesitated for a moment, consulting her sister with a glance; but Linda quite evidently had no objections to a party of three. She liked Sir Clinton, but she had no special eagerness to have him to herself. Noreen accepted the invitation with obvious pleasure.

  “It will be nice to have cool water round one,” she owned. “It’s a perfectly blazing day. I haven’t felt so hot for ever so long.”

  To Sir Clinton’s annoyance, Francia showed signs of attaching himself to the party. Without exactly making his intrusion obvious, he managed to include himself in the group as Sir Clinton moved towards the house with the two girls. The late Chief Constable, however, had no intention of allowing this incubus to be thrust upon him. As they came to the porch, he turned to Francia.

  “Oh, you’ve nothing on your hands just now,” he pointed out. “Miss Anstruther’s finished these sketches; and she says you promised to read them to-day. You won’t have any time later on, if we’re playing bridge after dinner. Suppose you look over them now. I’ll get you the manuscript.”

  If Francia had thought of objecting, there was an undertone in Sir Clinton’s voice which warned him that he was most obviously not welcome as a member of the water-party. Apparently he recognised this, for, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, he turned away from the girls and followed Sir Clinton into the hall.

  “Please go on down to the boat-house,” Sir Clinton suggested to his guests. “I’ll follow you in a moment or two.”

  Linda Anstruther walked slowly towards the entrance to the boat-house path, and her sister followed her.

  “Wait in the smoke-room,” Sir Clinton directed Francia. “I’ll bring you the stuff in a minute. I have it upstairs.”

  In a very short time he reappeared with the pile of manuscript in his hands.

  “It’ll pass the time for you until tea,” he said in a tone which made it quite clear that he expected Francia to begin reading at once. “I’d take that chair there, if I were you. It has the light behind you from the verandah window; and there’s a table handy, if you want to put down the sheets you’re finished with.”

  Francia held out his hand, took the manuscript, and sat down. He seemed frankly bored with the task which had been set him; but quite obviously he did not care to risk friction with Sir Clinton.

  “Clever girls, those,” Sir Clinton went on in a casual tone, as though to efface any impression which his firmness might have left. “One or two of these sketches are not at all bad—quite funny. H’m! That sun’s shining directly on your paper.”

  He stepped to the window behind Francia and drew the curtains across it to shield the Argentiner from the blaze of the afternoon sun.

  “That right?” he asked, when he had adjusted the curtains. “Want a pencil to make notes with? They’ll probably expect a detailed criticism, you know. Read the one about the two girls at lunch, first of all. It’s really not bad.”

  Francia made a vague gesture as though he were already engrossed in his reading and wished to be free from further interruption. Manifestly, he bore a grudge against Sir Clinton for defeating his scheme to join the party. Sir Clinton suddenly bethought him of the fact that there were two boats, and that the Argentiner had probably intended to detach one of the girls and take her out alone in the second boat. He turned at the door, and there was a faint touch of malice in his smile as he examined Francia engaged in his uncongenial task.

  Sir Clinton hurried after the girls, but they had evidently been waiting at the boat-house for a minute or two, for they had brought out cushions and placed them in the stern seats of one of the skiffs. Sir Clinton steadied the boat while the girls stepped on board; then, getting in himself, he pushed off, and picked up his oars. After a few strokes he paused and drew out his cigarette-case, which he offered to his passengers.

  “You’re not smoking yourself, Sir Clinton,” Linda pointed out as she selected a Virginian from the mixed contents of the case.

  “No, I must have put my cigarette down somewhere when I was in the house. It doesn’t matter,” he assured her. “One can’t smoke comfortably when one’s rowing.”

  Noreen Anstruther trailed one hand in the water.

  “Well, it is cooler here,” she said thankfully. “What a day!”

  “We’ll go over yonder, if you like, under the shade of the trees,” Sir Clinton suggested, as he took up his oars again.

  Linda glanced lazily over the smooth waters.

  “I don’t see Johnnie anywhere about. Isn’t he fishing?”

  “No, his new air-gun’s keeping him busy, I expect,” Sir Clinton explained. “Nothing but a fresh toy would keep him away from the lake. I expect he’s gone off intent on slaughter, somewhere; for I haven’t seen him since lunch. I don’t think he’ll do much harm.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE BURSTING OF THE BUBBLE

  When Elsie left the remainder of the party beside the tennis-courts, she went straight to the drawing-room of Fern Lodge, where she believed she had left her cigarette-case. A cursory search failed to reveal it anywhere in the room, however; and she passed to the smoke-room, thinking that possibly she might have laid it down on one of the tables when she had gone in there to telephone some orders before lunch. Again she drew blank; and for a moment or two she stood racking her memory for some clue. At last she remembered having put it down on her dressing-table earlier in the day, and she could not recall having used it since then.

  She went lightly up the stairs and, crossing the hall, entered her room. The cigarette-case was there, lying on the dressing-table; and she moved over to pick it up, glancing out of the window at the empty lawns before the house as she did so. Almost without thinking, she opened the case, and extracted a cigarette which she put between her lips. Then it occurred to her that she had no matches, and she went to the mantelpiece in search of some; but when she lifted the box there, she found it empty.

  Men always carry matches, she reflected; and she turned to the wardrobe where her husband’s clothes were kept. When she opened the door, the nearest garment was the jacket which Francia had worn that morning and which he had replaced on its hanger when he changed into tennis-flannels in preparation for the afternoon’s play. Elsie slipped her hand into one of the pockets at random, felt a match-box under her fingers, and tried to extract it; but apparently it had become entangled with a paper; and in order to get at the vestas she had to pull out the paper first. She transferred it to her left hand and continued her search for the match-box.

  It was the contents of the envelope with the Paris postmark which she had come upon thus accidentally. Francia had thrust it into his jacket-pocket at the breakfast-table, since it was hardly the sort of document which he felt safe in reading with someone at his elbow. After breakfast, when he was alone, he had taken it out, run his eye over it, and replaced in it his pocket. There were some questions in it which required answers, otherwise he would have destroyed it immediately. As it was, he retained it until he could put it under lock and key in his attaché-case; and when the time came to change into flannels he had overlooked it and hung up his coat in th
e wardrobe with that damning piece of evidence at the mercy of anyone. But for the chance that Elsie needed a match, it would have been perfectly secure.

  Elsie was devoid of any inquisitiveness and it was her nature to trust people; so she had never manifested the slightest curiosity about the business correspondence of her husband. As she stood beside the wardrobe, fumbling in the jacket-pocket, it was by the merest accident that her eyes fell on the paper she held in her left hand, and she read, half-unconsciously, one of the sentences of the letter.

  That sentence was enough. Francia’s correspondent was not skilled in wrapping up her meaning in vague phrases; and the French was plain enough to Elsie. Half-incredulous, she took her hand away from the jacket, opened up the letter, and began to read it through from the beginning. The first page of it put the nature of Francia’s trade beyond any doubt. Before she reached the signature, she had seen enough to gauge the vileness of the woman who had written it and of the man who had received it. Francia must have revealed his whole plot to his female coadjutor; and this epistle conveyed her congratulations on his ingenuity in such unmistakable terms that the whole business was laid bare.

  Elsie’s knees threatened to give way under her; and she moved uncertainly across the room to a chair beside the dressing-table. The blood pulsed like a hammer in her temple, and she felt physically sick under the shock of her emotion. The thing had struck her like a thunderbolt, leaving her whole being numbed; and faintly, at the back of her mind, something clamoured that this was impossible, that there must be some mistake.

  She spread out the letter again, but her wrists trembled so violently that she had to rest her hand on her knee before she could read the ill-formed handwriting. On re-reading it, she found the note even more atrocious than it had seemed the first time. Phrase after phrase cut her like a whiplash. The illusory hope of a mistake vanished as she scanned the lines.

  She wanted to cry, but something seemed to prevent her; and she sat, dry-eyed, staring blankly in front of her out of the side-window which overlooked the lake, conscious only of the pulse in her temple and the lump which had risen in her throat. Tears would have been a relief.

  She had been so proud of Francia; and so much in love with him. Ten minutes before, she had reckoned herself one of the happiest girls alive; and to have the flagrant proof of his depravity thrust upon her in this brutal fashion seemed more than her nerves could bear. If she could only break down and let all this pent-up emotion find its escape! And at last she got the relief she wanted and lay curled up in the armchair, her face in her hands, and her whole frame shaken by the violence of her weeping.

  The fit did not last long. She sat up, wiped her eyes with her handkerchief, and, finding it insufficient for this emergency, she got up and hunted for another in a drawer. The action seemed to steady her nerves; and she sat down again with a cooler mind. The letter had fallen on the floor, but she picked it up again, and once more read it from start to finish.

  The third reading made things no better. The bubble of her illusion had burst, and nothing could ever reshape it. Her husband—that! She shivered with disgust as she thought of him. What cut most deeply now was a phrase in the letter which showed that Francia had been laughing at her behind her back. While she had been giving him all she had, he had been grinning in amusement at her innocence and simplicity; and he had made a joke of it to this creature from whom the letter came. All she had meant to Francia was something which he could sell at a good price. His love-making had been a sham from the start—just a few moves in the game. That wounded her pride as well as her heart; and somehow this second stab seemed to bring her into a cooler frame of mind.

  Elsie had inherited some of the characteristics which served Sir Clinton well in his work; and, now that the first storm of her emotion had blown over, she began to collect herself and think ahead. She folded up the letter and put it away in a drawer. As she was about to turn the key in the lock, a fresh idea occurred to her. She hated Francia now; all her love for him seemed suddenly to have been transmuted into its opposite in the short space since she had entered the room; and, with something of her uncle’s clarity, she bethought herself that Francia might have other damning letters in his possession. These would be worth having in any case. She had not got the length of considering clearly what her next step would be; but some instinct urged her to secure all possible weapons against the brute who had treated her like that.

  As she glanced round the room, her eyes caught Francia’s attaché-case, standing in one corner. That would be where he would keep confidential matter, obviously; because she knew that he never locked up any of the places in which he kept the rest of his belongings.

  She picked up the attaché-case, and brought it to the dressing-table. The catch refused to open, and she looked round for some lever which would serve to wrench up the hasp. A shoehorn-buttonhook seemed fit for the work; and for a moment or two she struggled with the fastening. It gave way suddenly at last, and she opened the attaché-case. The sight of the papers satisfied her that she had got what she wanted.

  One by one she picked them up and glanced over them; but only here and there did she find anything she could understand. A good many of the documents were in Spanish, which she could not read; but there were several in French and English; and as she read them her loathing and hatred for Francia increased.

  She was almost cold by now. The first shock was over; and anger was mingling with the bitterness of her disappointed love. What beasts men were! Why, no beast could ever sink so low as this man whom she had adored. And all the time he had been laughing in his sleeve, sharing the joke with his confederate, getting ready to sell her into something worse than slavery. She bit her lip as she thought of it. And not only she, but Estelle and the other girls were to be dragged into the net. She was to be the bait that caught them. She recalled phrases he had used, stored up unconsciously in her memory because she loved him, which now seemed to carry a fresh significance. And to think that she had lived side by side with that! She would never feel clean again; the very touch of such a reptile was contaminating.

  Elsie had very vague ideas about the divorce laws. In her set in London, divorce had been looked upon as unimportant; and she had never had the curiosity to inquire into the subject. She had no definite knowledge of the value of the papers in the attaché-case; but since they had come into her possession she felt she might as well make them secure. One or two documents still remained in the case. She lifted them out, and caught sight of what lay below them. Then, making up her mind, she took up the contents of the case, crossed over to the open drawer, and put the papers under lock and key. After that, she closed the attaché-case and replaced it in its original position. As she did so, a curious expression crossed her face. It seemed a needless precaution; for, if she could prevent it, Francia would never enter that room again.

  The sound of voices under the window roused her from her absorption. She heard her uncle speaking; and the sound gave her back some of the courage she had lost. Here was someone who would stand by her and see her through her troubles. She could throw the whole thing on his shoulders, make him shield her from any harm. At least there was one man in the world she could trust implicitly.

  The voices fell silent; and in a moment she recognised Sir Clinton’s light step on the stairs. He passed her door and went to his own room, further along the hall. She had a sudden impulse to call him in as he passed back again; but it died out almost as soon as it entered her mind. She felt it would be better to wait before appealing to him. He would always be there to help when he was needed.

  She crossed to the window overlooking the lake and gazed out vaguely while her mind worked furiously, reviewing the whole situation. Dimly realising that anger hurt less than disappointed hopes, she concentrated her thoughts on the wound to her pride, and succeeded in lashing herself into bitterness against her husband. That was better than brooding over the wreck he had made of her life.

  Sir Clinton’s f
igure came into her range of vision as he left the house and went down to join the Anstruther girls at the landing-stage; then he disappeared among the bushes which fringed the path. A few moments later Elsie saw the boat, with the three of them in it, push out on to the lake.

  She turned back to the dressing-table and picked up the thing she had taken from the bottom of Francia’s suitcase. For a moment she examined it curiously. Then, leaving the room, she went softly down the stair. At the front door she paused and looked about her, fearing that someone might come upon her at this time when she especially wished to avoid people. Seeing no one about, she walked along the front of the house towards the steps leading up to the verandah outside the smoke-room window.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A SURPRISE FOR SIR CLINTON

  Behind her outward flippancy, Estelle possessed a fund of shrewdness and discernment, and her mind had been exercised in the last day or two upon the situation presented to her by the affairs of the group which centred round Fern Lodge. The glamour which Francia exercised upon Elsie had no influence on Estelle; and, although she had done her best to like the Argentiner for his wife’s sake, she could not succeed in rousing herself to any enthusiasm over him. Though she had been careful to conceal her real opinion from Elsie, in her own mind she had summed up Francia with the vague phrase: “Not quite it, and more than a bit of the other thing.” And the fact that she perceived a kindred feeling in Sir Clinton had helped to reinforce her own views on the subject.

  Rex was the man who ought to have married Elsie. Estelle, with even better sources of information than Sir Clinton possessed, was quite convinced that things would have taken that turn inevitably if it had not been for the sudden incursion of Francia into the field. Rex certainly was not the sort of man she would choose for her own husband; but that very fact enabled her to appreciate him all the more accurately; and she was convinced of one thing: Rex would never let a girl down. Somewhere at the root of his simple character lay a stratum of fundamental decency—even in her own mind she shrank from using the word “chivalry”—which would make him an asset to any girl who relied on him. Francia did not leave that impression on her, for all his attentiveness and surface courtesy.