Mrs de Liane closed her eyes.
“If only it hadn’t happened …” she said. “But we mustn’t think of it. Come, dear, I’ll take you up.”
As Mary entered the big bedroom with the dark hangings once again she was conscious of a strange tightness about her heart, and once again the overwhelming sense of tragedy which she had experienced the night before descended upon her. But this time there was a difference. Now she had had time to collect her scattered wits and to realize that that dreadful conversation she had overheard must be explained if there was to be any sanity left in the world.
The old lady parted from her at the door.
“The doctor said not too many people,” she murmured. “Not too many people at once.”
The heavy velvet curtain rustled as it dropped back into its place over the door, and Mary crossed the thick pile carpet to the bed.
She had nearly reached it when a voice from the other end of the room startled her.
“Hello, Angel, I’m over here. I’m not going to die in my bed after all.”
She swung round to see the man who she could hardly realize was her husband lying flat upon his back on a divan which had been pulled up under the window so that he could catch a glimpse of the rolling country outside.
He smiled at her and stirred a lean brown hand which lay upon the coverlet.
“Sit down, young widow,” he said lightly. “Where shall we go for our honeymoon? Heaven or the other place?”
Mary stood looking at him. It could not be true—it could not be true! The words drummed in her head. How could he lie there and deceive her? It was not possible. And yet she found herself thinking with something deep and primitive in her nature, which she realized with a shock was hope, that it might indeed be so.
He blinked at her, and she saw again with a little catch at her heart the two deep creases in his cheeks.
“Seeing a halo round my head?” he enquired. “Or is it flames? Sit down and talk to me. A widow’s first duty is to her husband. I like you, Mary. Let it be a comfort to you in the years to come to know that your first husband—poor blighter—liked you very much. He thought you were sweet—he did really.”
She did not answer, and he frowned, the amusement dying out of his bright blue eyes. He wrinkled his nose at her like a child.
“Don’t look so serious, sweetheart—or mustn’t I call you that? Aren’t you going to smile at me, Mary? No? Well, ought it to be Marie-Elizabeth then?”
Mary took a deep breath.
“I am not Marie-Elizabeth,” she said. “I’m not Marie-Elizabeth Mason.”
“Of course you’re not, Angel. You’re Mary de Liane. Didn’t we write it all down, with a nice little parson to hold my hand?”
Mary felt as though her heart must burst. A great wave of self-disgust passed over her. She rose to her feet.
“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice quivering. “I’m telling you the truth. I am not Marie-Elizabeth Mason. I never was.”
The man lay looking at her. There was no expression upon his face at all, and she was reminded with a stab of apprehension more justified than she could ever have hoped to know of Mrs de Liane’s face when she had heard the Liszt rhapsody.
After a long pause he smiled, and once again amusement danced in his eyes. But this time there was wariness there also.
“Trying to make my last hours exciting?” he enquired. “I said talk to me. No need to mystify me.”
Mary closed her eyes. When she opened them again he was still looking at her with the same half-amused, half-cautious expression.
“I am—or rather I was—Mary Coleridge,” she said. “I’ve never been near Australia in my life. I changed places with Marie-Elizabeth Mason in a London boardinghouse three or four days ago because she didn’t want to come down here and I had nowhere else to go. I’m afraid I’ve deceived you all, but I was so sorry for your mother last night that when I saw I could help her I did what she asked. I am willing to sign away any interest I may have in this house and to go away quietly.”
There was utter silence when she had finished speaking. The man was looking at her steadily, an expression in his eyes she had never seen there before. It was not anger or amusement, but something she did not understand.
“Is that the truth?” he enquired quietly.
“All of it,” she said.
Richard de Liane whistled. It was an astonishing sound in the circumstances and, as she afterwards discovered, completely typical of him.
“All the truth?” he said. “Oh, my dear young friend … !”
And then, with a movement which took her completely unawares, he sat up in the bed, slipped lightly out of it and, striding across the room, pulled the old-fashioned tapestry bell rope.
Far away in the grim old house the terrified girl heard the sound of a peal of alarm.
CHAPTER VI
The Mousetrap
“RICHARD!”
Mrs de Liane stood in the doorway, her husband behind her, and behind him again the woman in grey.
Looking at them, Mary experienced a wild desire to laugh, but the hysteria was checked upon her lips before the expression on the old woman’s face.
Eva de Liane was still charming, still gentle, but there was about her a strange new force which the girl found absolutely terrifying. Her blue eyes were veiled, and her lips were set in a firm, hard line.
“Richard!” she said again and came quietly into the room.
The young man stood where he was, the loose folds of his dressing gown showing the long, strong lines of his figure. He was very tall, and there was a new arrogance about him which had not been apparent on the couch.
He looked at his mother defiantly.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he said, “but in the circumstances I didn’t see the point in going on. You see, this isn’t Marie-Elizabeth Mason.”
For some seconds the old woman remained looking at her son, and it seemed to Mary that there was some strange method of silent communication between them. As they stood facing one another it was almost as though they were arguing without words, and while she watched she saw the man gradually convince the woman that he told the truth.
It was then, after that extraordinary exhibition, that Mary first saw Eva de Liane as the astonishing person she really was. She stood in the centre of the great room, less than five feet tall, a little scrap of a person bundled up in silk and lace, with her grey-white head held high and her shoulders set, and dominated them all as though she actually outstripped them in stature and physical strength.
Very slowly she turned away from her son and looked at Mary. The girl trembled. Although the old lady had not moved forward it was exactly as though she had suddenly come within a few inches of her.
“You are an impostor?” she said softly. All the gentle friendliness had gone out of her tone. Her voice was cold and practically without expression.
Mary found herself explaining, pouring out her story in frantic haste. The words stumbled over one another, and she felt her cheeks blazing and her eyes filling with tears. And she was afraid, that was the extraordinary part about it. Although her motives had been of the best from the very beginning, she was afraid. Her forehead was damp, and a cold trickle of fear played round her spine.
The old woman waited until she had finished. Then she raised her chin.
“You tricked us,” she said, and the contempt in her voice was such that it completely blinded the girl to the utter injustice of the remark, although the evidence of that much greater trickery stood lounging by the fireplace.
“I meant to help.” The words were wrenched from the girl.
“You deceived me.”
As the frozen words left the old woman’s lips a thin trickle of laughter, more horrible than any screaming, sounded from the other side of the room. Ted de Liane was leaning against the carved door of a great armoire, his face contorted and his eyes half closed. He laughed and laughed. The tears streamed down his face
, in which was no amusement, only the havoc of taut nerves suddenly snapped.
Mrs de Liane looked at the woman in grey.
“Take him away,” she said imperiously, and the woman left, the old man clinging helplessly to her arm.
Mary was left alone with the old woman and her son. The man took no part in the ensuing conversation. It seemed almost as though he had no interest in the business in which he was so intimately concerned. He walked over to the bedside table, helped himself to a cigarette from a box and, lighting it, wandered over to the window, where he stood looking out at the sweeping landscape beyond.
“Sit down.”
The words were sharp and commanding, and the girl obeyed instantly. Mrs de Liane came over to her and stood looking down at her face.
“Where is Marie-Elizabeth Mason now?”
“At—at the Imperial Palace Hotel. She left the boardinghouse at the same time that I did. She’s got all the rest of my things. I’ve got her passport. I—I’m sorry. I only did it to help.”
Mary was trying to get a grip on herself. Somewhere in the back of her mind there was a calm, reasonable self which was desperately angry at the trick which had been played upon her, but the personality of the old woman, combined with the emotional upheaval which she had gone through, to say nothing of the grim influence of the house itself, was too much for her. She heard her voice quivering as the ridiculous words poured out of her mouth. “I only did it to help!”
“The Imperial Palace Hotel? She is staying under your name, I suppose? Mary Coleridge, you said? Very well.”
There was an extension telephone in the room, and, leaving her victim, Eva de Liane sat down before it. Within a few minutes she was through to the hotel bureau.
Mary marvelled at the change in her as she spoke to the booking clerk. Once again she was the old lady, fragile, gentle, charming. The sweet voice enquired after her dear niece, explained that it was a trunk call, and agreed prettily to wait until it had been ascertained whether Miss Coleridge was in the hotel.
“She is staying there?”
For the first time Richard de Liane took an active interest in the proceedings. He strolled across the room as he spoke and stood before his mother. The old woman looked up at him, nodded and signalled him to leave her.
Mary looked at the two of them. Even in that moment of desperation, when the whole world seemed to be rocking crazily about her, she found herself thinking what a curious pair they were: the man so handsome, so heart-breakingly attractive, and the old woman so dominant, so strangely impressive.
Suddenly Eva de Liane began to speak again:
“Just gone out? Oh, thank you so much. I wonder, would you mind asking her if she will ring up her aunt, Mrs Eva de Liane, Baron’s Tye, Heronhoe, Bedfordshire? Heronhoe 26. As soon as she comes in. Will you? Thank you. You won’t forget? Good-bye.”
She hung up the receiver and turned towards the girl. Richard looked at her too, and for a moment the pair of them studied her thoughtfully.
Mary never understood quite what it was that was so utterly terrifying about that calm, speculative gaze. They were not angry, not frightened, but they looked at her thoughtfully, consideringly, not as though she was a human being, much less the wife of one of them, but as though she were some negligible object which had become momentarily difficult. She felt her heart contracting, and it was not all fear, not all exasperation. There was something else there too, a bitter disappointment, a sort of shameful despair, and it was because of the man.
Mrs de Liane rose. “You will go to your room, Mary—Mary Coleridge, and wait for me until I come.”
The girl rose nervously to her feet and took two or three stumbling steps towards the door.
Richard de Liane reached it before her and pulled it open with mock courtesy. As she passed he gave her a little ironical bow.
“Can I take it as a compliment?” he murmured. “Don’t cry, my dear; I may die yet.”
Mary hurried from him blindly and threw herself face downwards on the bed in her own room. The sun had gone in, and there was a tang of rain in the air. The terrible scent of wet leaves seemed to permeate the room, and there was a cold melancholy about the old house, which had seemed first so lovely and afterwards so sinister.
For some minutes she lay there sobbing, but gradually her good sense reasserted itself. After all, it was she who had been tricked quite as much as Eva de Liane. It was she whose sympathy had been falsely aroused and she who had married.
The last consideration stunned her as she realized its significance. Marriage with a dying man is one thing, but marriage to a live man is a contract which cannot lightly be overthrown by either side.
She sat up on the bed and worked feverishly at the ring upon her hand. It would not move. Hysterical and more than a little frightened, she tried to file it off with a nail file, only to realize how inadequate an implement it was. In desperation she resorted to violent wrenches, and not until her finger was torn and bleeding and the ring remained exactly where it had been placed did she desist.
It was at this moment of despair that she remembered Peter. She longed for him desperately. At least he would have understood her motives. He would have done something to save her from the terrible predicament in which she found herself. She thought of him, square, fair-haired and smiling, sitting opposite her at the dingy little table at Merton House.
A wild desire to get back to that unfriendly but at least not sinister atmosphere came over her, and she pulled herself together.
There was only one thing for it: she must get away.
Slipping off the bed, she went over to the wardrobe and took out her hat and coat. Instinctively she moved silently and with caution. Ten minutes later, dressed for the street, her small suitcase in her hand, she let herself quietly out of the bedroom door and crept down the thick-carpeted corridor to the broad staircase.
Before her, across the wide hall, she saw the open front door. Instinct warned her to take to her heels and fly, but caution prevailed, and she set off down the stairs, feeling her way carefully lest she should make the least noise.
She had reached the bottom step when she stopped abruptly, a chill shooting through her heart. Mrs de Liane had appeared before her on the red flags of the hall. She had come with the same quiet unexpectedness with which she had appeared on the lawn outside the dining-room window. There was something uncanny in this habit of hers of materializing suddenly in the path of flight.
She looked the girl up and down and opened her mouth to speak, but before the words had left her lips the telephone bell in the library on the other side of the hall began to ring and Richard’s voice from the doorway remarked that he would answer it.
The two women stood listening intently to the scattered scraps of excited conversation, and then the man reappeared. He was still in his dressing gown, and his face, Mary saw, was white and strained.
“It was the police,” he said. “The London police. Marie-Elizabeth Mason was killed in a car smash this afternoon. She was joy riding, with some stage folk apparently. The police have rung us up as her only known relatives. Your phone call did that. They want us to go and identify the body. I said we’d go, of course. What shall we do?”
Through Mary’s impressionable mind there shot a vision of the tall, red-headed, good-tempered girl who had meant to get on the stage, but before she could realize that the reckless primitive spirit was actually gone, Mrs de Liane had spoken, her voice calm and matter of fact.
“Did they say ‘Marie-Elizabeth Mason?’”
Richard caught his mother’s meaning.
“No, of course not. They think she’s Mary Coleridge. They said ‘Mary Coleridge.’ They got her name from the hotel.”
A sigh escaped the old woman.
“Mary, my dear,” she said, turning to the girl at her side, “Mary de Liane, you mustn’t think of leaving us, my dear. Your place is going to be here, by your husband, more than ever now.”
There was a quie
t intensity in the gentle voice, much more alarming than anything the girl had ever heard before. One of Mrs de Liane’s frail hands closed round her wrist and held it with soft, insinuating pressure.
“But what are we going to do?” demanded Richard, his voice for the first time rising out of control. “What about the police?”
The old lady eyed him calmly.
“Your father will go to London and identify the body of Mary Coleridge,” she said quietly. “After all, as she has told us herself, she has no other relatives, no friends.”
The quiet words slowly sank into Mary’s mind. At first they had no meaning. She stood bewildered, still crushed by the death of the girl who had made such a great impression upon her during their brief acquaintanceship, but gradually, as the steady pressure on her arm increased, she became aware of the old lady looking up into her face, her blue eyes unexpectedly bright, her old lips parted enquiringly.
Then the full force of the outrageous suggestion which had just been made descended upon her, and she stepped back.
“I won’t.” The words escaped her huskily, and the blood rushed into her face. “I won’t,” she repeated. “You’d make me a criminal if I did that. I must go to the authorities and explain everything.”
Mrs de Liane laughed. It was a gentle sound, musical and amused, yet it set the echoes jangling round the old house, and it seemed to the overwrought girl that the very walls repeated her derision.
“What a sweet child!” The old hand drew Mary’s arm through Mrs de Liane’s own, and another little hand, glittering with a single marquise, patted the girl’s wrist. “She’s a dear girl, Richard,” the old lady went on. “A dear girl, this little wife of yours. But a little stupid, just a little stupid. We shall have to educate her, the sweet pet.”
Mary glanced sharply at the man. The momentary alarm which the telephone message had inspired in him had vanished, and he was himself again and very much the son of his mother. He too was looking at her with an amused smile, and she realized with something very like panic that they were not at all afraid of her or of anything she might do. Their confidence in their own ability to deal with any opposition which she might put up was supreme.
The Shadow In The House Page 5
