Let Him Lie

by Ianthe Jerrold

  “My dear, don’t keep Tamsin here! Tell her to find another job!”

  “She’ll have to stay till after the inquest, anyway. I can’t suddenly turn her out of the house!”

  “Shall I come and stay here?” suggested Jeanie, with a good deal of self-sacrifice, for she did not relish the idea of being a buffer between Agnes and Tamsin. The days were past when making herself a slave to Agnes’s imperious whims would have been happiness to her. “I could keep Tamsin away from you. And take the housekeeping off your hands.”

  Agnes replied wearily:

  “Oh, Tamsin does that. She’s marvellous at any sort of organising. You wouldn’t think it, but she is. It’s sweet of you to suggest it, Jeanie, when I know how you’d hate it. But it’s all right, thank you. I mustn’t encourage myself in these stupid fancies. Besides, darling, Tamsin hates you, and I don’t think you like her much. You’d probably quarrel.”

  Jeanie flushed.

  “I think you consider her too much. If you feel about her as you say you do, you ought to get rid of her!”

  “There! See how nicely you’d get on with her!” murmured Agnes with a faint sparkle of mockery. “No, Jeanie, to be fair to her, she’s marvellous in lots of ways. She saves me no end of bother. And I suppose there’s always something one has to put up with. But it’s sweet of you to suggest coming here, Jeanie. You are kind.”

  It was odd how her caressing voice suddenly broke off sharp on a kind of gasp. Jeanie, who was standing up divesting herself of her jacket and laying it over a chair-back, looked at her friend in surprise to see what had startled her.

  Agnes was still sitting with her elbows on her knees, but all the relaxation of her pose was gone. Her arms were rigid, her hands contracted, her chin lifted from them and averted, as she stared with eyes that looked suddenly dark and large at something on the floor. Her lips were parted. She looked quite foolish—stupefied or half-witted. She looked as though she had suddenly seen an adder on the floor by her feet, head raised to strike.

  All Jeanie could see was the contents of her jacket-pocket which, as she hung it over her chair-arm, had emptied itself upon the floor. There was a shilling, a pencil, a lipstick and the broken string of pearls which Eustace Agatos had found under the stairs at Yew Tree Cottage. Jeanie stooped to pick them up. But Agnes was quicker.

  “Pearls, Jeanie?” she asked, in a strange, uncertain voice.

  “Don’t I wish they were! I’d sell them to pay some of the builder’s bills!”

  “But—are they yours?”

  Jeanie laughed, though she was a little surprised, too.

  “Do you suspect me of burglary?”

  “No, but—”

  “They’re treasure trove. They were in the cupboard under the stairs at Yew Tree Cottage.”

  Still holding the pearls in her hand, gazing as if hypnotised at the little brilliant clasp, Agnes repeated, still in that slow, uncertain way:

  “At Yew Tree Cottage?”

  She raised her eyes a moment from the pearls and looked in front of her, frowning slightly. Her lips formed the word:

  “But—”

  “They’re only Woolworth’s!”

  “Are they?”

  “Surely they’re not real?” asked Jeanie. “You know more about pearls than I do.”

  “Oh—no,” said Agnes uncertainly. “No, of course not. I shouldn’t think so. How could they be? Is this all there were? I don’t know anything about pearls. No, of course they couldn’t be real. Only this clasp looks rather good. I’ll tell you what, Jeanie. The man in town that set my opals knows quite a lot about pearls. Next time I go up I’ll take them to him. He wouldn’t charge anything for valuing them. If you leave them with me, I’ll see to it.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought it was worth the bother,” said Jeanie, somewhat puzzled. “Anyway, I think I’ll have them back now.” She held out her hand. “They’re just what I want for a still-life I’m painting,” she said mendaciously. She was determined, she knew not quite why, not to leave the pearls with Agnes. Agnes obviously wanted them and would not say why. Very well, Jeanie would keep them until she had found out why Agnes wanted them. To this queer distrust, their one-time friendship had descended.

  Very unwillingly, it seemed to Jeanie, Agnes surrendered them.

  “You can have them when I’ve done my painting. I’ll make you a handsome present of them, Agnes!” Jeanie dropped them back into her pocket. She stayed at Cleedons another half-hour or so, chatting to Agnes, and often during their talk she found Agnes’s eyes fixed speculatively and, she thought, even greedily, upon that pocket.

  “Well, don’t lose your valuable pearls,” was Agnes’s remark as she rose to go and put her jacket on; but Jeanie felt that the half-joking tone in which it was uttered covered a real concern. Indeed, Jeanie had the odd persuasion that it was the pearls, rather than herself, that Agnes was seeing off when she rose and went with the departing Jeanie into the hall.

  “Oh, Jeanie, it’s dark and windy! Poor you, going out into it!”

  “I’ve got my torch.”

  “Here’s a letter—from Tamsin!”

  “Tamsin?” Jeanie, doing up the collar of her mackintosh, had an instant premonition of trouble. Agnes’s little face was quite white under its dark, startled frown. She gasped:

  “Oh no! This is too much! She’s mad! Oh Jeanie, I really can’t stand any more! Oh, the silly fool! Of course, she doesn’t mean it, but—oh Jeanie! I simply can’t cope with any more of this sort of thing.”

  “Well, let me look.”

  Violently, as if she repudiated every connection with it, Agnes thrust the letter into her hands.

  “You will not see me again. When you read this, I shall have done what you told me to do. Oh, Agnes! What did you tell her to do?”

  Agnes, leaning against the table, looked hunted, miserable and furious all at once.

  “I can’t re—”

  “Oh my dear, of course you can!”

  “Well, I suppose she means—I told her to go and drown herself in Hatcher’s Pond! Oh Jeanie, but I won’t be held responsible for what that idiot of a hysterical girl does in one of her fits of mania!”

  Jeanie felt a little sick. How like Agnes, that her first thought should be to disclaim responsibility!

  “I’ll go and see if I can find her. I’ve got my torch. The police were dragging Hatcher’s Pond. Perhaps they’ll have seen her.”

  “Oh, surely you wouldn’t tell them!” exclaimed Agnes, taking fright.

  “Not yet. I suppose we ought to give her a chance to come quietly home by herself. But if she’s really drowned herself, we’ll have to tell them.”

  “Oh Jeanie, haven’t I enough to bear without this?”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help it,” replied Jeanie, with less than her usual gentleness. “I should go to bed if I were you. I’ll be back as soon as possible, whether I find her or not.”

  Outside the sky seemed full of noise and the tossing boughs of trees. The wind had risen and backed to the north and snow was surely in the offing. It was not, in Jeanie’s opinion, at all a night for drowning oneself.

  Chapter Fifteen

  CANNON-BULLETS

  Nor was it a night in which to indulge in emotional conversations out of doors. For this, and not a plunge in the uninviting waters of Hatcher’s Pond, was Jeanie’s fate. She found Tamsin, sooner than she had expected, leaning against one of the trees near the pond’s edge. At the flashing of Jeanie’s torch she turned as if to hide, to run. She looked white in the torchlight, strained and blind and wildly dishevelled, as though she had let the wind and brambles have their way with her.

  “Tamsin!” cried Jeanie, and at her voice the girl checked her impulse of flight, stood in miserable uncertainty trying to pin up one of the loose coils of her hair.

  “I thought—you were a policeman.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just—thinking.”

  In Jeanie�
�s torchlight the boles of the little group of silver birches in which they stood gleamed like ghosts, but everything else was dark, except Tamsin’s white face and the moon, very high up and small and continually obscured by quickly-moving clouds.

  “You come home and think there,” said Jeanie, rather feebly jocose.

  “Home? Cleedons, do you mean?” responded Tamsin with a haughtiness that Jeanie might have found funny had she been less perturbed. “Cleedons isn’t my home.”

  “Where is your home, then?”

  “In Westmorland.”

  “Don’t be silly!”

  Tamsin muttered furiously:

  “Please leave me alone!”

  Controlling herself, Jeanie said:

  “You want a hot bath and a good night’s sleep.”

  “Not under that roof!” muttered Tamsin dramatically. Jeanie had turned her torch off, for she doubted the battery, and they spoke to one another in the blackness, seeing one another’s outlines in the dim moonlight and the dimmer reflections off the iron-grey water. As if to match their voices to their outlines, they muttered.

  “Oh nonsense. Because you and Agnes quarrelled, do you mean? Surely you can forget that! After all, there’s some excuse for Agnes! Her husband’s only been dead four days, remember!”

  “I don’t forget it. It’s she who’s more likely to forget it.”

  “Whom do you mean?”

  ‘‘She married him for his money, and she’ll marry her next husband for his title.”

  Jeanie gasped.

  “What?”

  “Sir Henry Blundell’s a widower, isn’t he? And so sympathetic,” muttered Tamsin tensely, with a vibrating sneer in her voice.

  “Oh, how horrible! And how ridiculous, Tamsin.”

  “Well! When Agnes becomes Lady Blundell, remember I was the first to tell you of it,” said Tamsin. She made a hoarse sound, half-dreary laugh, half-Sob. “Oh, I saw them, after the inquest, talking in the panelled parlour! What’s going to happen was as plain as the nose on your face! Some women can’t live without a man hanging round them!”

  Jeanie might have retorted that Agnes had lived thirty-eight years without any such encumbrance. But Agnes had altered, whispered a little voice in her brain. Yes, Agnes had altered in all sorts of ways. Robert Molyneux’s widow was a very different woman from Miss Agnes Drake.

  A startled moor-hen rustled the rushes and whirred away across the pond, reminding Jeanie that the place and the time were no more suitable for contemplation of Agnes’s character than for scandal about her doings.

  “Come along back! You’ll be having pneumonia and catching your death.”

  “I shouldn’t care!”

  “I should.”

  “You! I don’t see why you should care,” uttered the girl. Her voice was scoffing, yet wistful too, as if she longed to take Jeanie’s response at its face value. Jeanie, who had intended only to remind Tamsin that her death would be a great nuisance to all concerned, felt quite ashamed. One assumed too readily that the Tamsin Willses of this world were immune from the human longing for affection and approval. Too readily one gave aversion for malice and dislike in exchange for mistrust. Tamsin said very low:

  “I meant to die to-night, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was a coward! I made a mess of it, as I make a mess of everything. The water looked so awful. I thought of how one would struggle. I couldn’t.”

  “I don’t think you really meant to die, just over a quarrel with Agnes!”

  Tamsin’s arm stiffened.

  “A quarrel! You don’t know what she said!”

  “Yes, I do.” As she spoke, Jeanie realised that, had it not been for the events of the afternoon, she might herself have half believed Agnes’s words. She might now have been afraid to walk with Tamsin Wills over the dark and gusty common.

  You do? Oh, how can she? How can she? Without anything to go on!”

  “Well, Tamsin, how could you say the same thing about Mr. Fone, without anything to go on?”

  Jeanie was startled by the effect of her words. Tamsin stopped dead and dragged her arm from Jeanie’s. She swallowed once or twice before she was able to speak. In the darkness, with her hair blown into wild disorder and her white face, she looked like a maenad. She seemed stiff with anger.

  “I know Agnes tells everybody I’m in love with Mr. Fone!” she said at length in the rapid, shaken low tone of extreme emotion. “All because I once asked him to lend me some books! All because I was interested in his ideas! I never liked him in the way Agnes pretends! I didn’t! The man’s a lunatic, anyway! I’ve never even pretended to like him! I—”

  Jeanie, astounded at the passion with which the girl was speaking, a passion blown on the gusty wind which made her words now loud and full, now weak and blown away, as it whipped her black hair across her face and then caused it to stream out into the night, tried to throw cold water on these green fires.

  “I don’t see that it would matter if you did like him. It’s not a crime, to like people. Nor even to love them. Is it?”

  “How do I know she doesn’t even—say it to him?”

  “Who? Mr. Fone? It wouldn’t matter if she did.”

  “It would!”

  “Nonsense, it wouldn’t. People are always saying all kinds of things,” replied Jeanie soothingly, if vaguely. “One does oneself. No sensible person thinks a thing about the things people go round saying.”

  “If I thought Agnes had said—that, to Mr. Fone, I should die!” was shaken tensely from between Tamsin’s cold lips.

  “Then you do love him?”

  “No! No! No!”

  “Well, I don’t see why you should mind him thinking you love him, if you don’t. Nor if you do either, so—”

  “I dislike him extremely,” said Tamsin with a quite extraordinary cold venom. There was a pause. White and stubborn, Tamsin stared into the darkness. Jeanie touched her arm and found it stiff and hard as iron, all the muscles contracted. She felt as if she had been sent out into the night to tame a savage, and did not know in what language to make the appeal. She tried again.

  “I don’t think Mr. Fone ever thinks about anything but his Ancient British tracks and his pagan gods. And I don’t think poor old Agnes means half she says, she’s so shaken up. Why worry your head about what either of them says or thinks? You’ve got more sense than either of them, or you would have if you didn’t let yourself be so sensitive!”

  Tamsin relaxed a little, but she said nothing.

  “I’m sure,” continued Jeanie, “Agnes is very sorry for everything she said. And I’m sure you ought to be, if you said to her anything like what you said to me! So why not come home and apologise to each other and sleep on it? After all, Tamsin, poor Agnes has had a dreadful time! And you’re supposed to be looking after her!”

  This more skilful appeal made its mark. Tamsin consented to fall into step beside Jeanie and walk on towards the road.

  ‘‘But it’s horrible,” she muttered, “the way people talk as if every unmarried woman thought of nothing but luring some man into marrying her!”

  The notion of Tamsin luring anybody struck Jeanie as comic. She replied gravely, however:

  “What’s horrible about it? Sometimes it’s true, because in lots of ways married women have a much better time of it than single ones.”

  Tamsin in the darkness made an extraordinary scoffing sound interrupted by a shiver.

  “Do they indeed! Well, it depends what you call a good time! They’re dependent for their happiness on the behaviour of some man who may be a perfect brute, instead of being dependent on themselves!”

  “Even spinsters aren’t that. We’re all dependent for our happiness on other people.”

  “Not in the same way. A friendship isn’t supposed to be—exclusive. A marriage is.”

  At the peculiar tone in Miss Wills’s voice, Jeanie stopped on the gravel under the tossed and noisy elm-trees.

  “Oh Tamsin! You’ve just been complaining yoursel
f about people’s unkind tongues! Don’t for Heaven’s sake start talking to me again about poor Mr. Molyneux and Marjorie Dasent!”

  Even to utter Marjorie’s name made her coldly unhappy, as though the hideous future were all written for the wretched girl, and only Jeanie knew it.

  “I wasn’t thinking of Marjorie. I don’t really think Agnes minded that much, she knew how silly Marjorie was. It was that woman at Yew Tree Cottage.”

  “The woman at Yew Tree Cottage?”

  “Yes. The woman who lived with that man Barchard. Before your time, Miss Halliday. Perhaps you didn’t know Yew Tree Cottage had a rather unsavoury reputation before you came to live in it!”

  “Oh yes, I knew! You mean Valentine Frazer.”

  “That was her ridiculous name. Or so she said. I expect it was a stage name, really.”

  “What about her?”

  “Only that she made Agnes very unhappy.”

  “Valentine Frazer made Agnes unhappy?” asked Jeanie incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  “But how?”

  “In the way married women can easily be made unhappy,” replied the virtuous spinster Tamsin with some complacency.

  “I didn’t know Agnes even knew her! How do you know she made Agnes unhappy?”

  “She came up here one afternoon, I don’t know what about, of course, and Agnes saw her in the garden. And I saw Agnes crying afterwards.”

  “And you think it had something to do with Mr. Molyneux?”

  “Well, what else could it have been?” said Tamsin. “Considering what the woman was!” she added with a vindictiveness marred by a sudden shiver.

  Jeanie was silent as they walked up the windy drive. It seemed strange that Agnes had never mentioned Valentine Frazer to her. But there were probably a great many things Agnes had not mentioned to her erstwhile protégée and friend. And why should she have mentioned her acquaintance with Valentine Frazer? She would not have been proud of it!