The Shadow In The House

by Maxwell March

  Mrs de Liane knelt behind the couple, two of her maids and the woman in grey at her side. The only other witnesses were the tall man with the grave face, who Mary understood was the doctor, and the two sturdy farm workers who served as stretcher bearers. Uncle Ted had not appeared. Aunt Eva explained that he adored his son and the tragedy had broken him completely.

  The tragic little ceremony was soon over. Mrs de Liane gave the parson a ring off her own finger, and he slipped it upon Mary’s hand. The old-fashioned circlet of gold and small diamonds shone in the sunlight pouring through the chapel windows as the girl signed Marie-Elizabeth’s name.

  She stood back when the young priest approached the stretcher and watched while Richard’s nerveless fingers were taught to hold the pen. She felt breathless but not afraid. In the face of this development her own deception seemed as nothing. Already she had made her plans.

  As soon as what had to be had happened and the legal business came up she would sign away her interest in the house to Mrs de Liane and slip off back to London. Then there would be no need ever to explain, and when the truth had to come out at least the old lady would have no cause to remember her with anything but thankfulness.

  Richard’s voice recalled her to the nightmare present.

  “Mary—where are you, Mary?”

  She hurried to his side, frightened a little by the stab in her heart at the sound of her name on his lips. He lay smiling up at her.

  “I want to kiss the bride.”

  She bent over him, her cheeks crimson and her eyes swimming, and kissed him gently on the lips. When she stood up again she caught a curious expression in his eyes. It was not exactly pity and not quite regret. She did not understand it until long afterwards.

  “Angel,” he said and closed his eyes.

  On Mrs de Liane’s advice Mary lay down in her room after the ceremony. Mrs Jane, the woman in the grey dress, and the doctor had been concerned in getting their patient up to his room again and were anxious not to have too many amateur assistants, who at such a time may so easily be a danger rather than a help.

  Mary threw herself down on her big blue bed and tried to compose her thoughts. Emotions she had long thought dead in her had been aroused by the nearness of tragedy, and there was a pain in her throat much worse than tears.

  Sunlight poured in through the window, and she rose from the bed to stand for some moments looking out across the wooded parkland now stained red-gold with fallen leaves.

  There was a river at the foot of the valley and great slopes of bracken beyond, all scintillating in the clear autumn air. It was beautiful, and she thought of the man on the stretcher, the man she had married and who was going to die. Richard loved this view. He rejoiced in the freedom of the fields, and his blood thrilled at the feel of the springy turf beneath his feet.

  She put up her hands to blot out the scene and turned away, but she was back at the window in a moment, throwing its casements wide to let in the air. There was a small balcony outside running round the back of the house, and she stepped out upon it and walked along, her eyes upon the landscape. A voice arrested her.

  It came out through the open window of a room a little farther along the balcony. She hardly recognized it as Mrs de Liane’s at first, it was so brisk and coldly matter of fact.

  “My dear Ted,” it was saying firmly, “there’s nothing to worry about at all. It’s going splendidly. Richard can get well very slowly, and the girl will never question the genuineness of the whole story. She’s a nice simple little thing, just the type to make the whole thing possible.”

  Mary stood quite still, her eyes blank with bewilderment. Just as she was convincing herself that the voice was part of an hallucination she heard Ted de Liane’s querulous murmur in reply.

  “You’ve done some wicked things in your time, Eva, but this business is too dangerous for me. This girl may not be the fool her mother was. When she finds she’s been tricked into marriage with a cock-and-bull story of saving the house she’s going to make trouble. As for Richard, she’s probably guessed by this time that he’s as fit as I am.”

  Mary gripped the balustrade for support.

  “Richard played his part magnificently,” said the voice of the strange new Eva de Liane. “And anyway, what can she do? She’s here in a strange country with no friends and married. Richard can get well very slowly. You’ll see, she’ll be delighted.”

  “And her mother’s fortune?” sneered the old man.

  “Her mother’s fortune,” said Mrs de Liane with indescribable complacency, “will remain in the very good hands in which it has always been. We only just did it, though. She’s twenty-three in two days time.”

  Mary stood quite still.

  It was one of those moments when the ordered procession of probable incidents which is life seem to take on an element of madness and go careering off into the absurd. It is at such moments that the mind trembles as strange and terrible doubts assail it.

  As the girl clung to the rail of the balcony and stared out over the rolling country, which a few minutes before had seemed the most beautiful sight on earth, she felt the world of reality slipping beneath her feet.

  It was not true. Her ears had lied to her. Old Mrs de Liane with her gentle voice and sweet placid expression, her tear-filled eyes and trembling hands, could not have spoken the words she had just overheard. It was not possible. All her experience of life, so pitifully inadequate had she only known it then, convinced her that there are some appearances which cannot lie, and she found herself remembering those round tears forcing themselves between the closed lids and rolling down the lined cheeks. If these had not been genuine where then was reality?

  Shivering and suddenly weak, she crept back into her own room and sat down on the big blue bed. Through the open window the lingering scent of wet leaves followed her and was mingled for the first time with a sense of stark terror, with which it was ever afterwards to be associated in her mind.

  If it were true …? She thought of her own position, of Marie-Elizabeth’s broadly smiling face, of her own deception and helplessness, and then, suddenly before her mind’s eye, she saw a picture of the man on the stretcher, the clean line of the brown jaw and the laughing, dancing blue eyes.

  She looked down at her hand. The narrow band of gold studded with small diamonds bit into her flesh. Impulsively she tried to draw it off, but only an agonizing pain rewarded the effort, and she sat staring at her hand, a thrill of superstitious terror stealing through her heart. The ring would not move.

  As she sat looking at it a new and terrible supposition crept into her mind. If her senses were misleading her and her imagination were playing her tricks, what then?

  A wave of alarm sweeping over her brought her back to the sober world of every day, and in consternation she remembered every detail of her own behaviour since that fateful morning when Peter had told her he was going away. She had consented to exchange identities with a girl she had only just met. She had come down to a strange house, palmed herself off as a relation, and had actually married a dying man. Regarded in this cold, unemotional light, it did not seem credible that she, Mary Coleridge, could possibly have done such things unless she had taken leave of her senses.

  The final suggestion brought her to her feet, breathless, her cheeks burning.

  Her inclination was to run away, to fly out of this strange old house whose very graciousness seemed to have changed into something sinister, and to get back to London, that cold unyielding city which yet had the comforting quality of being completely logical and comprehensible.

  She was halfway to the door, no clear intention in her mind but the urge for flight strong upon her, when someone tapped softly on the panel and Mrs de Liane came in.

  She had changed her black dress for one of stiff mauve watered silk, which rustled expensively as she moved. Her tiny white hands peeped out of soft ruffles of real rose point, and round her throat, hanging on a heavy gold chain, was a locket in which, M
ary could guess, there reposed a miniature of a child with crisp black curls and laughing blue eyes.

  The girl shot her a single searching glance, and her frightened eyes took in the calm, placid face, the delicate mouth, and the blue eyes so like those other eyes which she did not want to remember.

  The old lady moved forward, her lips parted and her eyes soft with tears.

  “My dear little daughter,” she said quietly. “My Mary, back again.”

  The girl could not trust herself to speak. If this was acting, then Eva de Liane was a past mistress of the art.

  The old woman linked her arm through the girl’s.

  “Now, my dear,” she said, “you must come down to lunch, you really must. This has been a shattering experience for us all. It still is. But we must be very brave, my pet, very, very brave.”

  The ghost of a sigh escaped her, and it seemed to the girl that a chill air ran round the sunlit room.

  “Come, dear,” the gentle voice repeated. “Come, my poor brave little bride.”

  Mary sat through the meal in the big oak-panelled dining room at Baron’s Tye. At any other time the polished wood, open fire and fine old silver must have filled her with a sense of well-being, and the glimpse through the tall windows of a wide lawn studded with red-gold leaves have satisfied her, but now the great wing of the shadow was over her, and she felt the undercurrent of terror which ran secretly through the old house like the bacillus of a plague.

  Mrs de Liane in her mauve dress presided over the table, a pathetic little figure of tragedy, and at the other end of the shining oaken board her husband sat fidgeting with his food, waving away each course untasted and speaking only at odd intervals, and then in a jerky spasmodic fashion, his pale eyes never meeting those of the person he addressed.

  Mary sat on his left, and the only other member of the strange luncheon party was the woman in grey, to whom she had not yet been introduced.

  During the many silences she had leisure to observe her and was struck by something she had not noticed about her before. The woman was either in the last stages of nervous exhaustion or she was in terror of her life.

  Mary made this discovery quite suddenly. She was watching the strong, by no means unhandsome face beneath the severely arranged fair hair, when Mrs de Liane sighed again, and all at once the woman in grey grimaced horribly. Her mouth twitched and sagged open, and she squinted, the pupils of her eyes nearly meeting at the bridge of her nose.

  In a moment she had recovered herself and, looking across at Mary, had smiled at her timidly, the colour coming into her pale face. But it had happened, and once again the girl felt something of the same sensation which she had experienced on the balcony outside her window, a sense of the reality of something unbelievable, something that could not be true.

  It was at this moment that Mrs de Liane began to talk. As an exhibition of gentle bravery in the face of overwhelming tragedy her conversation was masterly. Mary, who did not consider herself particularly impressionable, found that she was listening to it with pity and admiration, even though the memory of that extraordinary conversation which she had overheard still rang in her ears.

  The old lady did not once refer directly to her son or to the extraordinary ceremony of the morning. Instead she related little incidents of her early life in the old house, conveying without actually saying so her gratitude to the girl who had saved it for her.

  It was towards the end of the meal that the little scene occurred.

  “I must show you the garden soon, my dear,” said the old woman, leaning forward, her gentle eyes on the girl’s face. “We have a cherry orchard. It is so—so unutterably lovely in the spring. You’ll be enchanted. We shall be able to sit out there together and listen to the nightingale.”

  There was a muffled exclamation from the other end of the table, and Mary swung round to see Ted de Liane staring at his wife. His weak, harassed face was paler than usual, and there was something the girl did not recognize just then in his pale eyes.

  “Are you so sure that Mary intends to live with us during her … widowhood?” he demanded brutally.

  There was a moment of frozen silence, and then Mrs de Liane pulled out a tiny handkerchief.

  “Oh—Ted!” she said with such piteous reproach in her voice that Mary felt her sympathies called upon as clearly as if a direct appeal had been made.

  “Are you?” the old man repeated, leaning forward across the table. “Are you?”

  Mrs de Liane stretched out a hand and took Mary’s own.

  “My little daughter and I understand one another,” she said simply.

  Ted de Liane uttered a single explosive word and, thrusting back his chair with a clatter, strode out of the room. The old woman looked after him in silence and, as the door closed with a shattering slam, smiled bravely at the girl.

  “Can you blame him?” she said softly, her eyes filling with tears of pity. “Can you blame him? His only boy.”

  Mary’s brain was reeling. She opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment something so incongruous happened that the hesitant words died on her lips. From the room directly above their heads came a burst of wild music. Someone was playing the piano with skill and an emotional abandonment which was somehow terrifying.

  Mary recognized one of the lesser known Liszt rhapsodies, and an expression of astonishment spread over her face. Ted de Liane could not possibly have reached the room above in the time, and neither the performance nor the moment suggested a servant.

  But if she was astonished the effect upon her hostess was extraordinary. The old lady stood as though transfixed, and Mary, glancing at her, saw that her face was completely expressionless. The laughing blue eyes were blank, the gentle lips closed and unemotional.

  But the change lasted only an instant. The next moment she was herself again.

  “That naughty girl!” she said. “You haven’t seen my maid Louise, have you? Such an extraordinarily accomplished young person. I really don’t know why she wastes her time looking after a dull old woman like me. Excuse me a moment, my dear, will you?”

  She hurried out of the room, set purpose in her face, and, although there was nothing in her actual movement to suggest as much, Mary felt instinctively that she was angry.

  She also realized that the other person the room contained had been temporarily forgotten.

  She remained in her place looking down at her dessert plate until the music suddenly ceased in the middle of a bar. It did not end with a jangle of notes but broke off smoothly, as though the player’s hands had been lifted unexpectedly from the keys.

  With its ending a silence fell upon the room, so complete as to be oppressive. The very house seemed to be holding its breath.

  For a moment Mary sat staring idly at the red pheasants on her plate, and then the next thing happened. From somewhere very close to her a voice she scarcely recognized as being human in its soft intensity said quickly:

  “Go away. Get out of here as quick as you can. It’s your only chance. Leave your things behind you. Go now, through the window.”

  She looked up. The woman in grey was staring at her without expression, and it was only because she saw her lips actually forming the last few words that Mary realized that it was she who had spoken.

  Instinctively she lowered her own voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  An expression of terror appeared in the other woman’s eyes, which were, Mary noticed incongruously, as grey as her dress.

  “Hush,” she said so swiftly and with such pleading that any further question was impossible.

  Her eyes still fixed upon the younger girl’s face, the woman in grey rose quietly to her feet and pushed back her chair.

  “Excuse me please,” she said in a perfectly ordinary voice and walked out of the room.

  For a moment, as she sat there alone in the big dining room, Mary seriously considered taking the strange advice whispered so passionately in her ear. Long afterwards she was to reme
mber that impulse and wonder at herself and her foolhardiness.

  The broad lawn looked inviting, and one of the tall windows which came down nearly to the ground was open at the bottom. It would have been so easy, so very easy … then.

  As it was, she walked over to the window and looked out. The garden was as beautiful as the house itself. There were long tree-lined walks, dense shrubberies and a walled flower garden. It was not far to the station. She knew the way. But something made her stay, something which she would not admit at that moment even to herself: the recollection of a man lying helplessly on a stretcher in the grey light of a little sixteenth-century chapel.

  All the same, she was by no means unmoved by the strange warning she had received, and she made up her mind then to take a very serious step and one which was to have strange consequences.

  She was still standing there, her knee on the low window sill, looking out on the lawn, when Mrs de Liane appeared. The old woman’s arrival was completely unexpected. She came round the side of the house, treading softly on the dense grass, and it was not until she had practically reached the girl’s side that Mary saw her, yet such was the power of her personality that in spite of the suddenness of her appearance and the thoughts racing through the girl’s mind her sweet smile completely subdued for the moment the dark suspicions the girl had entertained.

  The old lady was radiant.

  “He seems a little better,” she said. “Oh, I know it’s so silly of me to say so, but I was so happy that I had to come out here and walk by myself before I could bring myself to talk to anyone.”

  There were tears in her eyes, and she dabbed them away petulantly.

  “He wants you to go up and sit with him. It—it may be for the last time. Oh, my dear, it’s all so tragic!” she went on, as Mary climbed out onto the lawn and went to meet her. “He’s so brave and so young. You—you do like him, don’t you, just a little bit?”

  “Why, of course I do,” said Mary, trying to convince herself that she was merely being polite.