There was something there.
She did not wait. A cold drop went trickling down her spine, and she ran as she told herself she must not run, with a blind panic driving her. It was so blind that she struck against the bolted door and bruised herself. It was touch and go whether she screamed and beat upon it in a frenzy. With the last shreds of her courage she choked back the scream and leaned for a moment against the oak. Then with a very great effort she turned.
There was someone, quite close to her, quite silent. In the vague dimness which came through the door which she had left open she could just see a shadow in the darkness—quite near, quite horribly near. She made a sound too faint to be a cry.
John Wickham’s voice said, “Sarah!”
For the second time that evening she came near to fainting. Afterwards she told herself that it was the sudden rush of a relief so great that it gave the measure of her fear. She might really have fainted if she had not remembered that if Wickham had to take her weight, it would be much worse than a scuttle of coals and his wound would almost certainly begin to bleed again.
She kept her feet, felt an arm about her waist, and was somewhat vaguely aware that she was being hurried along. A door shut, and once more the cold outside air was blowing in her face. She drew a long sobbing breath and heard Wickham say, “Hold up!” His arm was still at her waist. She said with as much indignation as she could muster,
“I am.”
“Not very noticeably—but you’ve got to. You’d no business to come here at all, and you’ve got to get back to your room.”
Anger is a brisk restorative. Sarah was surprised by her own rage, but it enabled her to dispense with any further support than that of the wall. She went back a step, leaned against it, took another good deep breath, and said with spirit,
“How could I help coming here? You didn’t expect me to wait and meet Mr. Brown?”
“No. I think I indicated the cupboard as an alternative. It was a perfectly good cupboard. Why didn’t you stay there?”
“And suppose Mr. Brown had opened the door?”
“He didn’t.”
“He might have. And besides, there wasn’t any air—only a sort of concentrated fog of moth and mould and camphor, and I thought I was going to faint, and if there’d been a heavy thud in the cupboard, Mr. Brown would have opened the door.”
He said in rather a curious voice,
“How did you find the spring?”
She was herself again now, and she thought, “How did he find it?” And then she remembered that she hadn’t quite closed the secret door. She had pulled a fold of one of those horrible dresses out through it too, so as to be sure of finding her way back. But all the same she didn’t think it was that. She thought that he had known about the spring, and she thought that he had not meant her to know that he knew. This went at racing speed. She said quickly,
“I caught at the pegs. They gave, and I found there was a door. I came in here because of the air.”
She had slipped into excusing herself. Her anger flared again. Why should she account to him for what she did?
“Then why didn’t you stay here?”
“Why should I? I wanted to find a way back to my room. You mayn’t have noticed it, but it’s fairly cold.”
His voice changed. There had been something in it which made her feel that she was being laughed at. That something went. He said,
“Yes, you must get back at once. But before you go I want to know what you’ve been doing. You went down the passage—didn’t you? How far did you go?”
The anger went out of her. She was cold again.
“Round the bend and a little way along—not very far really.”
“See anything?”
“I—don’t—know.”
“And what do you mean by that?”
She repeated the words she had just used.
“I—don’t—know. I looked back—there was something—I don’t know what it was. There was a rustling—like silk—”
“You didn’t see anyone?”
“No.”
“You may thank your lucky stars for that. Now look here, this place is dangerous. This part of the house—it’s dangerous. You’re not to come into it—do you hear me? You’ve found a way in, but you’re not to use it again. It’s not kept locked up for nothing, and you’re to keep clear of it. If you had met what you might have met tonight, or seen what you might have seen—well, people can die of fright, you know, as well as from several other very unpleasant causes. You keep quiet and stick to Miss Cattermole! And now you had better go back to your room!”
The really frightening thing about this speech was that it didn’t make Sarah angry. It ought to have, and it didn’t. So far from firing up, she couldn’t raise a spark. She went meekly back through the cupboard into Wickham’s room.
The candle was on the mantelpiece now. After the dark passages and the dusk of the place from which she had come, the light from this one bending flame seemed searchingly bright. They could see one another, and what Sarah saw increased the weight upon her spirits. He had slipped his coat on. The bloodstained shirt was hidden. Over the dark collar his face had a pale and frowning look.
What he saw was a girl in a blue dressing-gown who had just run as big a risk as she was ever likely to encounter short of death. There was dust on her hands, and dust on the hem of her gown. There was a dusty smear on her cheek. Her hair hung loose upon her shoulders, and her eyes were wide and dark with something—he did not quite know what. He hoped with all his heart that it was fear, because if she was afraid she would keep quiet, and if she didn’t keep quiet there was going to be plenty of reason why she should be afraid.
He went to the door, opened it, and went out. Sarah stood where he had left her.
Presently he came back.
“The coast’s clear. Go quickly! I mustn’t come with you.”
She took a step or two and turned back.
“What are you going to do about that wound? You’ll want a fresh bandage.”
“I’ve got one.”
“Can you do it yourself?”
“I’m an expert.” Quite suddenly he laughed. “Das ewig Weibliche!”
“What do you mean?”
“No German? Pity. It won’t translate. ‘The eternal feminine’ is rotten—mere ersatz—an inferior substitute.”
Something happened between them—anger like the thrust of a knife to cut the mockery from his look and voice. And quick on that the feeling that the knife had slipped and only cut herself.
He held the door for her ceremoniously and watched her out of sight—first a dark shadow moving as soundlessly as a real shadow, then the blue of her dressing-gown in the lamp-light on the landing, and last of all the movement of a door on the other side of the well of the stairs. It opened, and it shut.
The curtain was down on the first act. John Wickham went back into his room, and wondered about the rest of the play.
CHAPTER XX
It was a long time before Sarah slept. Her thoughts were restless and driven, like the shadow dance of leaves when the wind is high. They seemed like that to her—shadow thoughts driven here and there by an unseen wind, and she could only guess at what had cast the shadows. There were many things to be guessed at, but as soon as she tried to hold a thought and follow it back to its source, it eluded her and was gone again. Her body was so tired and her brain so restless that she felt as if she would never sleep. Yet in the end she did sleep, and woke to hear rain beating on the window, and slept again.
When the morning came with its reluctant light, she thought she must have been mistaken about the rain. If it had been bitterly cold the night before, it was still colder now. It could not possibly have rained with the air as cold as this. She got up and went to shut the casement window, which she had set a handsbreadth open after putting out her candle and drawing the curtain back. To her surprise the casement would not move. It was frozen to the sill. She had to use all her str
ength to break the ice and free it.
She looked out upon the strangest sight. The rain had been no dream. It must have come from some high place of warmer air and frozen as it fell. She looked over the sill and saw the ivy on the side of the house frozen where it clung, each leaf in a mould of ice which followed every vein and was perfectly transparent. There had been no snow—only wherever she looked clear glassy ice, covering the ground below, the five-barred gate at its farther side, a jutting slant of the roof. The bare boughs of an oak thrown up against a lowering sky, its interlacing branches, its tracery of twigs, were all seen through a sheathing of ice. The dark hedgerow looked for all the world as if each shoot, each spray, were enclosed in glass. A few late berries still clinging to a thorn were like fruits in jelly. The rough grass at the hedge foot stood up in frozen spears. Ice everywhere, and the breath of it on the air.
She drew back with a shudder and shut the window. Her heart was like lead. If this queer rain had been anything but a local shower, the roads must be impassable. And if the roads were impassable, how was Henry going to get down? She began to realize how much she had been counting on him.
As soon as she was dressed and had made her bed she went in to Joanna and found her nervous and fretful. Such luxuries as early morning tea did not apparently exist at Maltings, and Miss Cattermole did like her cup of tea in bed. Of course it ought to be her own special health tea, and it was entirely owing to the inconsiderate way in which she had been hustled that this had been forgotten.
“I have never known Wilson so inconsiderate. And where was the hurry after all? We didn’t get here any sooner. And as far as I can see, we need never have come here at all. In fact we never should have come. If I had not been so hurried, if I had been given the slightest time for reflection, I should have said quite firmly, ‘No, Wilson—I must really beg to be excused. You can of course do exactly as you like, and if you want to go to Land’s End, or John o’ Groat’s, or the Malay Archipelago in this very unsuitable weather, you can of course do so, and I should not dream of trying to prevent you, but Sarah and I will stay here.”
“I’m afraid that is just what we shall have to do,” said Sarah.
Miss Cattermole managed to look exactly like an exasperated ant.
“And when I say here, of course I don’t mean here at all—I think you really might know that. I ought to have told Wilson at once that I would not come down here. If I had had time to read the paper before I came away I should have known better than to give way to him. Morgan took all the papers when he went, which isn’t like him at all, because he knows I always begin the day by looking at what ‘Janitor’ has to say in his ‘Advice from the Stars’, and if I had had the opportunity of reading it before we started I should never, never have come. Nothing could be more unfortunate. Just listen to this!” She produced from under the eiderdown a dishevelled sheet of newspaper and read in a trembling and indignant voice, “‘Any journey undertaken today is not likely to add to your health and happiness. There are dark clouds ahead. It would be better not to undertake any new enterprise. Purple will be your most fortunate colour for the next few days.’” She pushed the paper away so vehemently that it fell on the floor. “Purple—and I have brought nothing but blue! I shall tell Wilson that I must insist on returning today!”
Sarah picked up the paper. It bore yesterday’s date.
“How did you get hold of it?”
“The bricks,” said Joanna—“very nice and comforting. I don’t know what I should have done without them, but of course they did not stay hot, so when I lit my candle—at about six I think it was, and I had been awake for some time—I turned them out. And when I found they were all wrapped up in yesterday’s Daily Flash I took it off to look for the Advice column, and I’ve been feeling most upset ever since. I shall insist on going back to town immediately after breakfast.”
Sarah discovered that she had some curiously mixed feelings. It might have been self-control that enabled her to say in quite a cheerful voice,
“There’s about an inch of ice all over everything this morning. I shouldn’t think we’d be able to move a yard.”
CHAPTER XXI
Sarah collected all the pieces of newspaper and carried them away to her own room. She left the bricks neatly piled on the hearth, and she thought she could stuff the Daily Flash carelessly into the grate when she had finished reading what it had got to say about the murder of Emily Case. She could not really disguise from herself the suspicion that the reason why Mr. Morgan Cattermole had walked out of the house before breakfast yesterday, taking all the papers with him, had something to do with a desire that Sarah Marlowe should not learn that the police were anxious to interview her. So much had happened in the last twenty-four hours that now for the first time she really allowed this suspicion to take definite shape in her mind. It had been there all the time of course, as moisture is in the air before it condenses into rain.
She laid out the sheets of newspaper, and found what she was looking for on what had been the middle page. It was quite a short paragraph. It said,
The police are anxious to interview a young woman who spent about three quarters of an hour in the first-class ladies’ waiting-room at Cray Bridge between 5.15 and 6 p.m. on the evening of Thursday, January 26th.
There followed an alarmingly accurate description of Miss Sarah Marlowe. No one who knew that she had been travelling up from Craylea on Thursday evening could possibly have failed to identify her with the young woman whom the police desired to interview, and no one who read the rest of the paper could fail to link this desire with the murder of Emily Case.
The paper seemed quite full of the murder of Emily Case. There were photographs of her, mostly quite unrecognizable, of the sister with whom she had been going to stay, of the sister’s cottage, of the railway station at Ledlington, of the compartment in which the murder had taken place, and of Mr. Snagg, the porter who had discovered the body.
With every line that Sarah read the shadow of Emily Case, whom she had seen once and with whom she had exchanged a few brief sentences, seemed to grow longer and darker.
She sat there, and acknowledged tardily that Henry had been right—she ought to have gone straight to the police and given them the oiled-silk packet. She had a tolerably clear idea that if she had taken this course she would not at this moment be marooned in a disagreeably isolated house, cut off from the world, the police, and Henry Templar by impassable and ice-bound roads.
If the roads were impassable it was no good expecting Henry to arrive and rescue her, and if Henry didn’t arrive, what was she going to do? She had not the very slightest idea. Of course she was probably frightening herself about nothing at all. Morgan Cattermole was almost certainly a bad lot. Even his brother and sister barely disguised the fact that he was a black sheep. That being so, it was not difficult to guess who had opened the oiled-silk packet while she was out of her room last night. But to open it he would have had to look for it, and to look for it would mean that he had known it to be in her possession. And how could anyone know that?
Sarah thought about the footsteps on the foggy platform. Anyone walking up and down there might have looked through the chink where the blind had slipped and seen Emily Case and Sarah Marlowe. She remembered how Emily’s head had turned and her eyes had watched that crack whilst the footsteps receded in the dark. The man who had followed Emily Case and murdered her for the packet which she had put in Sarah’s bag might have guessed at its being worth his while to trace the girl who had been closeted for nearly an hour with his victim.
But it couldn’t have been Morgan Cattermole. A voice said softly and coldly, “And why not?” She had no answer to this. Only if he had traced her he was much cleverer than the police, who had not managed to do so. There was certainly something very suspicious about his sudden arrival and the tampering with the oiled-silk packet.
But, Morgan gone, why should Wilson Cattermole transport them all to this inaccessible place? It migh
t be the merest coincidence, or it might not. She could look back over the four months she had worked for him and find as many instances of a sudden whim translated into action. No, she really could not find it in her heart to suspect Wilson. The Reverend Peter Brown was another matter. Since Wilson and he had never met before, how and when had he known John Wickham? The longer she thought about it, the more the tone of that casual “I wanted a word with you” declared not only a previous but an intimate acquaintance.
If it was Wickham who had followed her.… The thought struck a spark from her mind, and went out as a spark goes out in the dark. Bundling the sheets of newspaper together, she went back into Miss Cattermole’s room and stuffed them down into the grate upon the still warm ashes. If they were to burn, so much the better, but whether they burned or not, they would not be fit to use again, She might therefore hope for fresh wrappings on the bricks tonight.
Joanna, in a robe-like garment of peacock blue, was putting on her string of lapis lazuli beads and mourning because they were not purple and she could so easily have brought her Aunt Phoebe’s amethysts.
“It all comes of being in a hurry—one always does the wrong thing.”
As she followed her downstairs Sarah wondered whether she had done the wrong thing about the papers from the oiled-silk packet. If it came to that, she wondered if any of the people through whose hands the papers had passed had done the right thing. They had all been in a hurry because they had had to be in a hurry. The young man in the train had been in a hurry when he gave them to Emily Case—and perhaps he was dead, and perhaps he wasn’t. Emily Case had been in a hurry when she put them into Sarah’s bag—and she was certainly dead. Sarah Marlowe had been in a hurry when she had ripped open the packet and taken out the folded envelope with all those names and addresses in it. She had been in a hurry when she took them out and when she put the envelope back again with some nice plain foolscap inside it. And very appropriate too. It had given her a good deal of pleasure ever since to imagine Morgan Cattermole’s feelings when he opened the envelope. And the best part of the joke was that he wouldn’t be certain, and nobody else could be certain, that she had changed the papers. The young man in the train might have changed them—or Emily Case—or Sarah Marlowe. But nobody could be sure that it was Sarah Marlowe, and nobody—nobody except Sarah knew where those names and addresses were now. The oiled-silk packet was under her pyjamas in the middle drawer in London, and what was inside it now was Morgan Cattermole’s affair. He had thought he was fooling her, but she had fooled him first, and by now he must know that he had been fooled.
Weekend with Death Page 12
