“I mean it. What a pity he didn’t commit suicide, and save himself the trouble of being hanged, if he had to play the fool at all! What’s going to happen now? It’ll be pleasant for me, won’t it, the trial?”
“For you?” stammered Jeanie, aghast as much at the vindictive expression upon her friend’s face as at the cold egotism of her words. Evidently, Jeanie could put Finister’s suspicion of illicit love quite out of her mind. This was not love. It was the meanest sort of fear.
“Yes, for me!” cried Agnes shrilly. “So nice having one’s dirty linen washed in public, isn’t it? Has it escaped your memory that Peter was my husband’s private secretary? And that he was dismissed for taking money out of the safe? All that’ll be gone into publicly, I suppose! I shall have to give evidence at the trial. That’ll be delightful for me, won’t it? Probably my photograph will be in the picture papers!”
“Oh, Agnes!” said Jeanie. She felt a little sick. Did no feeling for Peter touch Agnes’s heart at all? Was there never room at all in that queer, acute but blinkered mind for any generous thought, for any interest that was not of self? She pulled herself together and spoke firmly.
“Oh, that. I know all about why he took the money, Agnes. And so do the police, of course.”
“And so will all England, soon! That’ll be charming for me, won’t it?”
Agnes’s little face was quite distorted with fear and fury. The fine lines which were as a rule almost invisible on her delicate, well-cared-for skin all had grown dark as if a malicious pencil had been at work about her face. She looked lined as a little monkey, venomous as a little snake. All kinds of abuse seemed to hover about her lips, but suddenly she paused. She put her hands over her eyes. There was a silence. In the silence Jeanie heard footsteps on the gravel terrace. Somebody passed the window. Jeanie recognised the loping stride of Sir Henry Blundell.
Slowly sighing, Agnes withdrew her hands from her eyes, cupped them around her chin. She seemed to have wiped away in that gesture most of the lines upon her face and all the snake-like anger of her look. Exhausted, pale, tragic, fragile as a late autumn flower, she gazed at Jeanie.
“I’m sorry, Jeanie. I hardly know what I’m saying. That was Sir Henry, wasn’t it? He said he was calling here at half-past three.”
Evidently Jeanie was expected to take her leave. So strong was the force of suggestion that seemed to emanate from Agnes’s sudden silence and quiescence, that she almost did so. But she remembered her errand here, and suddenly determined that she would not be driven away until she had fulfilled it.
“I want to ask you something first, Agnes.”
Agnes frowned.
“Some other time.”
“No. Now.”
If you’d only let me know you were coming! I haven’t time now!”
I want to ask you a question and it won’t take long,” said Jeanie, breathless with nervousness, for never in her life had she defied Agnes before, and the submissive habit of years is not easily broken. “Sir Henry can wait.”
“He can’t! There’s the bell! I shall ask Bates to show him straight in here!”
“Then I shall ask my question in front of him, and you won’t like it. You’d better do as I want, Agnes.”
“Jeanie! Do you know what you’re talking about?”
“Perfectly well. I’m not a schoolgirl now, Agnes, and you’re not a school-mistress, and it’s not the slightest use putting on that tone!”
“I think you’re mad, Jeanie.”
“Listen, Agnes. I gave you a zircon brooch once; do you remember?”
“Really, Jeanie, is this the moment for your reminiscences?”
“Agnes, the question I want to ask you is about Valentine Frazer.”
There was a pause, as Bates entered the room. At last Agnes said:
“Show Sir Henry into the hall and tell him that I shall only be a moment.”
“Very good, madam.”
The door closed. On the instant the calm employer’s mask fell from Agnes’s face. She turned furiously upon Jeanie, then checked as if she found something formidable in Jeanie’s look. Her limp:
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jeanie!” fell unconvincingly from her lips.
“Why didn’t you tell me that pearl necklace was yours?”
“Mine? What pearl necklace?”
“The one I showed you the day before yesterday. The one I found at Yew Tree Cottage.”
“Really, Jeanie, haven’t I got enough to think about without—”
“If Sir Henry has to wait hours in the hall it won’t be my fault. Don’t waste time, Agnes. You gave your pearl necklace to Valentine Frazer, and I want to know why.”
There was a pause. Agnes took a cigarette from a box on the mantelpiece and searched nervously around for something to light it with.
“Really, I think you’re demented, Jeanie,” she said. “Valentine Frazer. That’s the woman who lived with Hugh Barchard at Yew Tree Cottage. What conceivable reason could I have had for giving her a pearl necklace?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“I lost my necklace, it’s true. Possibly she found it.”
When you saw it the other night you pretended not to recognise it.”
“I didn’t recognise it. One pearl necklace is very like another, if one isn’t an expert. Oh damn. Must these damned housemaids leave empty match-boxes all over the place?”
She flung a brocaded match-box into the fire.
You gave Valentine Frazer your pearl necklace, and you gave her your zircon brooch.”
“What in Heaven’s name are you talking about?” cried Agnes angrily.
“I’ve seen a portrait of the woman wearing your brooch. How did she get it if you didn’t give it to her?”
“Don’t be a fool! As if there can’t be two zircon brooches in the world! They’re the commonest kind of rubbish travellers in Ceylon bring back with them!”
Absurd Jeanie! This description of the lovely brooch she had given Agnes cut her to the quick!
“You didn’t think it was rubbish eight years ago!” she cried.
“It was sweet of you to give it me. I still wear it sometimes.”
“Show it me, and I’ll believe you!”
“Really, Jeanie, you said just now you weren’t a schoolgirl!”
“You gave that brooch to Valentine Frazer!”
“I did not.” Again Agnes put her cigarette between her lips and looked about her for a match.
“Here’s a match, if you want one!”
“What on earth should I be giving things to that woman for? I didn’t even know her! I never met her! How should I? What had we in common, I should like to know? Perhaps you can tell me that, as you seem to know everything! Would I be likely to meet a woman like that?”
Agnes held out her hand, but Jeanie struck a match. Frowning, Agnes stooped to the flame.
“Why not? She was a tenant of your cottage, wasn’t she? And I think you had a good deal in common! You’d both been professional women—you a school-mistress and she an actress! You were both daughters of clergymen who’d held the same living!” said Jeanie, remembering Mrs. Barchard’s gossip. “You—”
She broke off sharply, gazing at Agnes’s face, her straight, delicate nose, her thin pink-stained lips pursed lightly around the already pink-stained cigarette. A puff of smoke came sharply into her face.
“Sorry,” said Agnes, as if she had not done it on purpose. But Jeanie scarcely noticed it.
“What the devil is the matter with you, Jeanie? You look semi-idiotic with your mouth open like that!”
There was a mirror over the mantelpiece, and Jeanie found herself looking at her own face in it, thinking of the painted smiling face of the lady in red gloves.
“Is she like me? I don’t think so, but Peter saw it. So I suppose she must be. And I thought she was like you. Agnes, she’s your sister, isn’t she? Your sister, that was supposed to be dead!”
Agnes
stood very still. Her protest when it came sounded oddly half-hearted.
“What are you talking about?”
Her cigarette dropped on the fur rug. It was an appreciable moment before she picked it up. She seemed suddenly all at sea, ill-co-ordinated, lost. She was wondering wildly, Jeanie knew, whether to confess or deny. Jeanie decided to save her the trouble.
“I know she is, by the way you’re behaving! I hadn’t even thought of it a moment ago, but now I know! Your sister, Agnes! The sister who died young, soon after she’d started her stage career! The sister you sacrificed so much to! The sister I reminded you of. Only it seems she didn’t die! You were quite broken by her death, you said. Nine years younger than you, almost more like a daughter than a sister—”
“Jeanie, don’t.”
To Jeanie’s astonishment, Agnes spoke quietly. She had dropped her cigarette into the fire. She had turned and laid her arm upon the mantelpiece, her head upon her arm. One appealing hand stretched out behind her as if she actually expected Jeanie to take it. Disconcerted, ashamed of what seemed of a sudden cruel jeering, Jeanie became silent.
“You know as well as I do, Jeanie, that a schoolmistress can’t afford to have disreputable sisters. Vera—Valentine, she called herself, it was her stage name—had to be dead. I paid for her to go to Canada. I hoped she’d stop there, never be able to raise the passage home. But she got home somehow. You see, Jeanie, she knew what a handicap she could be to me. She only had to appear, and—”
“What would it have mattered?” asked Jeanie, feeling clumsy, awkward and at sea in the face of Agnes’s mournful quietude. Agnes raised her muffled head to answer with spirit:
“You didn’t know Vera! She was impossible! She was everything you can think of that’s impossible! We never liked one another. Well, was it likely? She had a kink. She used to behave outrageously from her childhood. And she hated me, she was always ready to do some malicious thing to annoy me. I’d have left her alone. But she wouldn’t leave me alone. And I knew it. And she knew that I knew it. And when she took up with this man Barchard, and then came to live here on purpose to annoy me and frighten me, although she promised me when I married Robert that as long as I gave her a hundred a year she’d never so much as write to me—! Of course she knew she could break her promises as she pleased. She knew I couldn’t do anything! I believe she only ever got hold of Barchard because she found out he was a tenant of ours!”
“But what were you afraid of, Agnes? She couldn’t hurt you!”
Agnes raised her head and turned. She looked outraged and indignant.
“She could tell everyone she was my sister! And I shouldn’t have been able to deny it! She could prove it! She could make life here impossible for me, that’s all! If you call that nothing! My sister, a common woman, who lived with a working man without being married to him! My sister, turned out of the village inn for using bad language! Delightful it would have been for me, wouldn’t it?”
“She couldn’t hurt you.”
“Don’t be silly, Jeanie! She could have ruined me socially, made Cleedons impossible for me, spoilt my marriage—”
“Hadn’t you told your husband about her, then?”
“No. I—I didn’t want Robert to be worried.”
“I see.”
“It’s all very well for you, Jeanie! You didn’t know Vera!”
“What did you expect to happen in the end?”
“I thought if I could keep her quiet for a bit, she’d get tired of annoying me and go off, as she’d done before. And as she did, this time, in the end. I gave her things. Money, when I could manage it. And bits of jewellery—in the end, even my pearls. I had to pretend they were lost, because Robert missed them, and we got insurance for them.”
“So your sister had to pretend the pearls were a cheap artificial string, and lie low about them. I see. And the zircon brooch?”
“If Vera was fool enough to think they were real diamonds, I couldn’t help that! It kept her quiet for a whole month, anyhow! And I kept on hoping that she’d get tired and go! It wasn’t to her advantage, after all, to quarrel with me! Kill the goose that laid the golden eggs! Only I had to be very careful not to snub her or irritate her too much, for fear she got into a temper and forgot where her advantage lay! Oh, Jeanie! It was too awful the time she was here! She’d do all kinds of tricks! Waylay Robert at the gate and let me see her talking to him! Write to Robert, and I’d see the envelope and—and then it’d be just a tenant’s letter to say the tap wanted a new washer or something. When she went, it was too heavenly, too good to be true! I couldn’t believe for weeks that she wasn’t coming back. But she was always like that. When I married Robert I hadn’t heard of her for three years. I was really beginning to hope she was dead. Only she saw a notice in the paper, and turned up at my flat two days before the wedding, wanting to be introduced to Robert! You can imagine what I felt! Oh, my whole life’s been spoilt by that horrible girl!”
Jeanie would have liked to tell Agnes that it was not her sister, but her own cowardice, that had spoilt her whole life and would probably spoil the rest of it.
“I see,” she said. “Well, thank you for telling me, Agnes. I was puzzled about those pearls. I’ll bring them back to you.”
“For Heaven’s sake bury them! Or bring them to me, and I’ll do it! Jeanie, you won’t—”
Agnes lifted a face flushed by the heat of the fire and her own emotion.
“You won’t, Jeanie, tell anyone?”
“But surely it’s awfully silly to try to keep it a secret, Agnes! It’s turning your life into a misery for no reason at all!”
A flash of irritation and fear came over Agnes’s face, but she controlled herself and said softly:
“Vera drinks too much and leads a stupid life. She’ll probably die quite suddenly one of these days. And then I shan’t have to worry about her any more. You won’t, will you, Jeanie, breathe a word?”
“No, then.”
“I know I can trust you,” said Agnes, with a melancholy sweet smile. With just that smile she greeted Sir Henry Blundell when he entered.
“You two have met before, haven’t you?”
“Of course.” Sir Henry shot at Jeanie that keen, direct, somewhat alarming glance which was, Jeanie suspected, a mere mannerism, meaning nothing, not even observation.
“We shall meet again on Wednesday at Cole Harbour, shan’t we, Sir Henry? Mr. Fone’s invited me.”
At the name Cole Harbour, a slight contemptuousness spoiled Sir Henry’s friendly look.
“Indeed! Then your presence will be the one cheerful feature of a tiresome afternoon, I’m afraid. I’d almost made up my mind not to go. But I suppose, as one of the committee, it’s my duty.”
“You don’t agree with Mr. Fone’s theory of the old British trackways, then?”
“I do not,” replied Sir Henry incisively. “Fone’s enthusiasms are apt to be fantastic as well as tiresome, and in this case he really surpasses himself.”
“Well,” said Jeanie crisply, “I’m looking forward to a very interesting afternoon.”
She spoke in defence of her friend Fone and his enthusiasms. She had no head for archaeology. She did not really think Wednesday afternoon would be very interesting. No premonition as she spoke the word “interesting” came to warn her of its inadequacy.
Chapter Twenty-One
THE STRAIGHT TRACK
A smaller party than Jeanie had expected was gathered at Cole Harbour. Perhaps the cold north wind had kept many of the Field Club members at home. Beside Mr. Fone, Barchard and Peter, Mr. Harrison was there, and Sir Henry Blundell, little Dr. Hall, young Denham the journalist and two or three others whom Jeanie did not know. Tamsin Wills, Sarah and Jeanie herself were the ladies of the party. Tamsin wore a rather self-conscious air and avoided Jeanie’s eye: perhaps the daylight memory of that night on the common embarrassed her.
On the leads of the library roof, the air had that peculiar harsh nip in it which te
lls of coming snow. Barchard helped the ladies climb from the ladder over the stone balustrade on to the flat leads of the roof. A kitchen table stood incongruously in the middle of the roof, and upon it several ordnance survey sheets were spread and drawing-pinned down. A chair stood beside the table, and pencils and rulers lay ready.
There was a polite altercation on the ground between William Fone and Sir Henry Blundell, the former insisting that he, being slow and awkward, should climb up last, the latter conceiving it his duty to steady the ladder on the ground for his crippled host. Jeanie, watching over the balustrade, felt irritated with Sir Henry. Could not the fool of a conventional polite man see that poor Fone would prefer to make the awkward accent in private and keep such physical dignity as a cripple could?
Eventually, with the smothered ill grace of a man accustomed to his own way, Sir Henry had to give in. He came lightly up, swung his long body over on to the roof and began at once to adjust a pair of field-glasses. Fone, when at last he appeared, protested half humorously at those glasses.
“Megalithic man used his own eyes, Sir Henry!”
Sir Henry laughed.
“I am glad that I have one advantage, then, over megalithic man! What a wonderful view to the south! I didn’t realise how steeply the land slopes away from here! What tower is that I see on the sky-line?”
“That’s the castle ruin on King’s tump. And I am glad you have drawn our attention to it. For the most important of the megalithic trackways which I am hoping to point out to you this afternoon runs in that direction In that direction lie the Wiltshire downs. And a straight line drawn from Grim’s Grave through the castle ruin, which, though itself a medieval structure, no doubt stands upon a prehistoric earthwork, through Whitley Church, Stonebarrow, Brendon Camp and many other significant places, reaches, eventually, Avebury.”
Let Him Lie Page 18
