“My good Henry,” he said—there was affection as well as mockery in his tone—“does one ask for one’s temperament? Look here, I haven’t seen Raymond because I haven’t dared—I don’t know what I might do or say if I did see her. Now that is the plain, unvarnished truth. When I was in Petrograd I once hid for three days in a cellar with a temperamental Russian lady. There was nothing to do except to talk, and we talked endlessly. She told me a lot of home truths—said my nature was like a glacier, cold and slow, and that once I had got going I had to go on, even if I ground all my own dearest hopes to powder in doing so.”
“In other words, if you’ve got a grouch, you’re a devil to keep it,” said Henry. “It’s quite true; you always were. But, look here, Tony, why all this to my address? Why not get it off your chest to Raymond, and if you will deal in geological parallels, well—she’s rather in the volcano line, or used to be, and I don’t mind betting she’ll blow your glacier to smithereens?” Henry looked at his watch.
“I must go,” he said. “Think it over, Tony, and same place, to-morrow, same time.”
He turned, without waiting for an answer, and walked into the darkness of the cave.
Chapter Seventeen
Jane went to her room that night, but she did not undress. Two entirely opposite lines of reasoning had ended in inducing one and the same decision. On the one hand, it might be argued that Lady Heritage and Mr. Ember, having passed the greater part of last night abroad upon their mysterious business, would be most unlikely to spend a second sleepless night so soon, and Jane might, therefore, count on finding the coast clear for a little exploring on her own account. On the other hand, an equally logical train of thought suggested that these midnight comings and goings might be part of a routine, and that Jane, if on the watch, might acquire some very valuable information.
She therefore locked her door and proceeded to consider the question of what she should wear with as much attention as if she had been going to a ball. Neither barefoot nor with only stockings would she go into any passage which had left those unpleasant dark stains upon Lady Heritage’s overall. A really heartfelt shudder passed over her at the very idea. No, Renata possessed slippers of maroon felt. Misguided talent had stencilled upon the toe of one a Dutch boy in full trousers, and upon the toe of the other a Dutch girl in full petticoats. Jane had a fierce loathing for the slippers, but they had cork soles and would at once keep out the damp and be very silent. She therefore placed them in readiness.
Prolonged hesitation between the claims of the crimson flannel dressing-gown and an aged blue serge dress resulted in a final selection of the latter. She decided that it would flap less, and that if it got stained and damp the housemaids would be less likely to notice it.
“Of course, on the other hand,” said Jane to herself, “if I’m caught, it absolutely does in any excuse about walking in my sleep, but I don’t think that’s an earthly, anyhow. If I’m caught, they’ll jolly well know what I was doing. The thing is not to be caught.”
At half-past eleven precisely she made her way down to the hall.
To-night there was no patch of moonlight to pass through, only a vague greyness which showed that the moon had risen and that the clouds outside were thin enough to let some of the light filter through.
Jane felt her way downstairs and across the hall to Sir William’s study. The study door afforded the nearest point from which she could watch what she called Willoughby Luttrell’s corner without exposing herself to detection.
She made up her mind that she would wait until she heard twelve strike, and then explore the corner. She had so thoroughly planned a period of waiting that it was with a feeling of shocked surprise that she became aware, even as she reached and crossed the threshold of the study, that some one was coming down the stairs behind her.
If she had been one moment later, if she had stayed, as she very nearly did stay, to look out of the window and see whether the night was fair, they would have walked into one another at the top of the stairs. As it was, she had escaped by the very narrowest margin.
The door opened inwards, and she had just time to get behind it and close all but a crack, when through that crack she saw Raymond Heritage pass, wrapped in the same black cloak which she had worn the night before, only this time she wore beneath it, not her linen overall, but the dress she had worn for dinner. She held an electric lamp in her left hand.
As soon as she had passed the door, Jane opened it a little wider and came forward a step.
Lady Heritage went straight to the corner of the hall. She put the torch down upon a chair which stood immediately under Willoughby Luttrell’s portrait. Then she went quite close to the wall and reached up, with her arms stretched out widely. Her right hand touched the bottom left-hand corner of the portrait and her left rested in the angle of the corner.
Jane heard the same click which she had heard the night before.
Lady Heritage stepped back, took up her light, and, going to the corner, pushed hard against the wall.
Jane watched with all her eyes, and saw a section of the panelling turn on some unseen pivot, leaving a narrow door through which Raymond passed. For a moment she stared at the lighter oblong in the wall; then there was a second click and the unbroken shadow once again.
Tingling with excitement, Jane stepped from her doorway and came to the corner. She must, Oh she must, find the spring, and find it in time to follow. Raymond stood here and reached up, but she was tall, much taller than Jane. She stood on her tiptoes and could not reach the lowest edge of the portrait.
With the very greatest of care she moved the chair that was under the picture a yard or two to the left. It weighed as though it were made of lead instead of oak, and she was gasping as she set it down, but she had made no noise. Renata’s cork soles slipped as she climbed on to the polished seat, but she gripped the solid back and did not fall.
Raymond had pressed something in the wall with both hands at once. Jane began to feel carefully along the lower edge of the portrait until she came to the massively foliated corner with its fat gilt acanthus leaves. A cross-piece of the panelling came just on the same level. She felt along it with light, sensitive fingertips. There was a knot in the wood, but nothing else. “If there is another knot in the corner, I’ll try pressing on them,” she thought to herself, and on the instant her left hand found the second knot. She pressed with all her might, and for the third time that evening she heard the little scarcely audible click. This time it spelt victory.
In a curiously methodical manner Jane got down, put the chair carefully back into its place, and pushed against the wall as she had seen Lady Heritage do. The panelling yielded to her hand and swung inwards.
There was a black gap in the corner. Jane passed through it without any hesitation, and pulled the panelling to. She meant to leave it just ajar, but her hand must have shaken, or else there was some controlling spring, for as she stood in the black dark she heard the click again. She drew a long breath and stood motionless for a moment, but only for a moment. She had come there to follow Raymond Heritage, and follow her she would.
She put out a cautious foot and it went down, so far down that for a sickening instant she thought that she must overbalance and fall headlong; then, just in time, it touched a step, the first of ten which went down very steeply. At the bottom she felt her way round a corner, and then with intensest thankfulness she saw, a good way ahead, a moving figure with a light.
The passage that stretched before her was about six feet high and four feet wide. The air felt very damp and heavy. At intervals there were openings on the left-hand side where other passages seemed to branch off. Jane began to have a growing horror of these other passages. If she lost Lady Heritage, how would she ever find her way back, and—yet more horrid thought—who, or what, might at any moment come out of one of those dark tunnels behind her? It was at this point that she began to run, only to check herself severely. “She’ll hear you, you fool. Jane, I absolutel
y forbid you to be such a fool; and Renata’s slippers will come off if you run, nasty sloppy things, and then you’ll tread in green slime, and get it between all your toes. It will squelch.” The horror of the black passages was eclipsed; Jane stopped running obediently, but she took longer steps and diminished the distance between herself and her unconscious guide.
The passage had begun to run uphill. Jane wondered where they were going. At any moment Lady Heritage might turn. If she did so, Jane must infallibly be caught unless she were near enough to one of the side tunnels. She went on with her heart m her mouth.
A line from one of Christina Rossetti’s poems came into her head:
“Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.”
“The sort of cheery thing one would remember,” thought Jane to herself; and she continued to climb the endless slope, her eyes fixed on the dark, moving silhouette of Lady Heritage.
At last there was a pause. The light ceased to move. Jane crept closer, but dared not come too near. Next moment she saw what looked like a slab of stone in the passage wall swing round on a pivot as the panelling had done. Lady Heritage passed out of sight through the opening, and at the same moment a great breath of wind from the sea drove into the passage, clear, fresh, exquisite.
Jane hurried to the opening and looked out. She saw first the dark, curving walls of a small cave, and, immediately in front of her, the black outline of a bench, beyond that a stretch of uneven ground, a tangle of wire, and the black movement of the sea. The moon behind the clouds made a vague, dusky twilight, and the wind blew. Lady Heritage was standing just on the other side of the stone seat. It startled Jane to find that she was so near. She stood quite still looking at the shadowed water and the cloudy sky.
Then, without any warning, a tall, dark figure came into sight. To Jane it seemed as if it rose out of the ground. Afterwards she thought that, if any one had been sitting on the grass and then had risen, it would, of course, have looked like that. At the time she leaned against the rock for support and had much ado not to scream.
It was Lady Heritage who called out, with an inarticulate cry that mingled with the wind and was carried away.
The dark figure stood still just where it had so suddenly appeared, and in an instant Raymond had turned her light upon it. In the circle of light Jane saw a man—a tall man, bareheaded. He had thrown up his arm as if to screen his face, but it only hid the mouth and chin. Over it his eyes looked straight at Raymond Heritage.
And Raymond gave a great cry of “Anthony!” The light dropped from her hand, fell with a crash on the stones, rolled over, and went out. Anthony Luttrell did not stir, but Raymond began to move towards him after a strange rigid fashion, and as she moved, she kept saying his name over and over:
“Tony—Tony—Tony—Tony.”
Her voice fell lower and lower. As she reached him it was nearly gone.
Jane turned from the stone wall where she was leaning, and stumbled back along the dark passage with the tears running down her face.
At that last whisper of his name, Anthony spoke:
“I’m not a ghost, Raymond. Did you think I was?”
They were so close together that if she had stretched out those groping hands another inch they would have touched him. Something in his tone set a barrier between them and Raymond’s hands fell empty. The world was whirling round her. Life and death, love and hate, their parting and this meeting were merged in a confusion that robbed her of thought and almost of consciousness. It seemed to her as if they had been standing there for a long, long time, or, rather, as if time had nothing to do with them, and they had been cast into a strange eternity. Out of the turmoil of her thought arose the remembrance of the last time she and Anthony had trysted in this place—a sky almost unbearably blue and the sea brilliant under the noonday sun. Now there was no light anywhere.
Anthony was alive. That should have been joy unbelievable. All through the years since she had read his name in the list of missing with what an overwhelming surge of joy would her heart have lifted to the words, “Anthony is alive.” Now she said them to herself and felt only a deeper, more terrible sense of separation than any that had touched her yet. They stood together, and between them there was a gulf unpassable—and no light anywhere.
Raymond moved very slowly back along the way that she had come. She came to the stone seat, caught at the back of it with a hand that suddenly began to shake, and sat down. A few slow moments passed. Then she bent and began to grope for the torch which she had dropped.
Anthony came towards her.
“What is it?” he said, and she answered him in a low, fluttering voice:
“My light—I dropped—it’s so dark—I want the light.”
The strong, capable hand groping without aim stirred something in Anthony. He said, almost roughly:
“I’ll find it.”
Then a moment later he had picked it up, found it intact save for a crack in the glass, and, switching it on, put it down on the seat beside her.
He was not prepared for her immediately flashing the light on to his face. An exclamation broke from him, and to cover it he said:
“I am changed out of knowledge.”
“Changed—yes—Tony, that scar.”
Her voice trembled away into silence. Her hand fell. The dusk was between them.
“Ugly, isn’t it? But I haven’t the monopoly of change, have I? You, I think, have changed also.”
“Yes.”
With an impulse she hardly understood, she raised the light and turned it until her face and her bare throat were brilliantly illuminated. The dark cloak fell away a little. The dark eyes looked at him with defiance and appeal. Her beauty, seen like that, had something that startled; it was so devoid of life and colour, and yet so great! After a long, breathless minute Anthony said in his slow voice:
“You have changed more than I have, Lady Heritage, for you have changed your name.”
He saw the last vestige of colour leave her face. She put the lamp down, and her silence startled him.
“No one would have known me,” he said after a pause that was all strain.
“I knew you,” said Raymond very low.
“Only because the lower part of my face was hidden. You’d have passed me in daylight. You have passed me.”
She winced at that, turned the light full on to him again, and said:
“You are working in the laboratory—that’s—that’s why…” She broke off for a minute and went on with a sort of violence, “You say that I didn’t know you, but I did—I did. All this week I’ve been tormented with your presence. All this week I’ve felt you just at hand, just out of reach. I kept saying to myself, ‘Tony’s dead,’ and expecting to meet you round every corner. It was driving me mad.”
“It sounds most uncomfortable,” said Anthony dryly.
Raymond saw a mocking look pass over his face. She turned the light away and set it down. If she had not felt physically incapable of rising to her feet, she would have left him then. This was not Anthony at all, only the anger, the bitterness, the cold resentment which she had hated in him. These, not Anthony, had come back from the grave.
He was speaking again:
“Perhaps I shouldn’t ask, but... are you expecting to meet any one here? Am I in the way?”
She answered him with a sort of heartbroken simplicity quite beyond pride:
“I don’t know what I expected. You were haunting me so. I came here because... oh, Tony, don’t you remember at all?”
“I remember something that you appear to have forgotten, Raymond. When like a fool, and a dishonourable fool at that, I gave you the secret of these passages, I remember very well the rather enthusiastic terms in which you asserted your conviction that the secret was a sacred trust, and one that you would keep absolutely inviolate. As, however, I broke my own trust in giving you the secret, I can, I suppose, hardly complain because you have imitated my lack of discretion
.”
Raymond did rise then.
“Tony, what do you mean?” she cried.
“My dear Raymond, you know very well what I mean.”
“I do not.” Her voice had risen; this was more the Raymond of their old quarrels, a creature quick to passionate anger, vehement and reckless.
“I say you know very well.”
“And I say that I do not. That I haven’t the shadow of an idea—and that you must explain, Tony; explain.”
“Oh, I’ll explain all right!”
The last word was almost lost in a battering gust of wind. He waited for it to die away, and then:
“How soon did you give away the secret to Ember?” he said, and heard her gasp.
“To Jeffrey—you think I told Jeffrey?”
Anthony laughed. It needed only her use of Ember’s name.
“I know that you told Ember,” he said in a voice like ice.
Raymond put her hands to her head. She pressed her throbbing temples and stared at this shadow of Anthony. It was beyond any nightmare that they should meet like this. She made a very great effort, and came up to him, touching his wrist, trying to take his hand.
“Tony, I don’t know what you’re thinking of. I don’t know how you can speak to me like this. I don’t know what you mean—I don’t indeed. Since you went I have only been into the passages twice, last night and to-night. I went there because—oh, why do people go and weep upon a grave? I had no grave to go to, but I thought that, if I came here where we used to meet, perhaps the you that was haunting me would take shape so that I could see it, or else leave me. I felt driven, and I didn’t know what was driving me.”
In the breathless silence that followed she heard him say:
“I know that you told Ember”—and quite suddenly all the strength went out of her.
Chapter Eighteen
When Jane turned, and ran back down the dark passage, she had just the one thought—to get away out of earshot. That she, or any one but Anthony Luttrell, should have heard that breaking tone in Raymond’s voice shocked her profoundly. She felt guilty of having intruded upon the innermost sacred places of another woman’s life. It shocked and moved her very deeply. Tears blinded her, and she ran into the dark without a thought for herself. It was only when, looking back, she could not see even a glimmer of outside twilight that she halted and began to think what she must do.
The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith: A Golden Age Mystery Page 15
