Twice lost, p.12
Twice Lost, page 12
But she had soon had other and legitimate cause for dislike; and latterly there had at last penetrated into her serene miracle-world hints of an even darker perfidy than she had ever suspected. Still she smiled upon him, as she had smiled upon him throughout. It was not pretence. For she conceived it to be both right and possible to forgive injuries and to love enemies.
So she had taken him in all these years, without once striking a false note, this subtle man with all his psychological knowledge—so deadly is the guile of the simple. And it gave her a little secret amusement, there was a touch of childish slyness in her charitable duplicity.
She smiled, she began laughing a little as she came to meet him. Her manner was, as always, delightfully natural, and like this, easily, she said. ‘But, Keith, I hope I’ve done nothing wrong. A young man, a stranger to me, overtook me in the lane and came in with me. Evidently an old friend of yours, by his account, and he has now run straight upstairs. It took me rather by surprise—his running into the house like that. I’ve no idea who he is—I’ve never heard you speak of him. A Mr Shelley… Oh, well, yes, I suddenly felt I’d like to be here when she arrived. So I’ve brought some night things—I know Helena won’t mind.’
‘Certainly, Mother, stay—we love it,’ he answered, mechanically gracious. ‘Shelley?’ he then added, having had time to consider what she had said. His voice rose a little. ‘But I know nobody whatever of that name.’
She stood there with her air of tranquility, and repeated, ‘He told me he knew you well.’
‘Shelley? Shelley? Faugh—ridiculous! Good God, how annoying——’ However, he curbed himself. ‘Well, Helena’s upstairs——’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said cheerfully. There was a remoteness in her apology, as if the matter did not strike her as being of much consequence. She was not, of course, indifferent to any annoyance she had caused. But, looking dreamily about her with those ecstatic eyes of hers she was thinking of God in the garden, beside which other sensations paled.
Still, she could not but notice his face. ‘Oh, I do hope I haven’t let a burglar into the house,’ she exclaimed, with a more proper concern.
‘If that were all——!’ Keith cried. And then he burst out in excitement, ‘A fellow from some paper, of course. Wanting me to express an opinion—or find out whether I’m hitting back——’
But here Helena came out of a door down the passage. At this, his voice rose a shade hysterically. ‘Why, worse and worse, I thought you were up with the children. Helena, one of those damned reporters has got into the house, sneaked in with Mother, on some pretext—actually run upstairs—must be snooping about up there. Well, this is enterprise, with a vengeance!’
Helena swept forward and drew the old woman into a bear’s hug. She was very fond of her.
‘Oh, rubbish, Keith—that would be a bit much,’ she said over her shoulder, between one smacking kiss and another.
‘A thin, dark young man with a large nose,’ interposed Mrs Gray, persuasively, as if still in hopes that he could be identified as an old friend, if they really tried. ‘I think you must know him. For he spoke of wanting a chat with you.’
‘Pshaw!’
Helena said she would soon winkle him out. She plunged up the stairs and then could be heard tramping overhead and opening and closing doors and occasionally speaking to someone. But only a child’s voice answered her, and then a young boy’s. Keith stood as if prepared to dive back into his study and lock himself in. But his look was one of excited expectation, Mrs Gray noted.
Helena’s clumping feet slowed down. Joining them again after a few minutes, with a perplexed face, she said, ‘It’s very odd—not a sign of anyone. And nothing to be got from the children.’ This last statement was a little ambiguous, and Helena’s expression matched it. The others looked at her in astonished silence; Keith’s face falling. Mrs Gray, somewhat disturbed now, asked in wonder, ‘Then—what can he be? Really a burglar? Dear me, what have I done?’
‘Of course he could have run down the back staircase. Unless he’s hiding in a cupboard somewhere? I didn’t look in the cupboards!’ Helena cried cheerfully.
Keith suddenly fell into an odd mood of clowning. He seized a stick from the umbrella-stand and, brandishing it extravagantly, capered about the hall for a moment, crying in a falsetto voice meant to mimic womanish alarm, ‘Oh, whatever have you let into the house, Mother?’ Then he ran off down the passage to the kitchen quarters, with Helena following. There they could both be heard inquiring of Mrs Jebb, who cooked for them, whether she had seen the burglar. Much chatter followed, Keith’s voice still high, and a noisy exodus of the three of them to see if the back staircase yielded any clues.
There is something disturbing, and even sinister, in the clowning of an unhumorous man. Mrs Gray made this reflection while glancing into one or two of the rooms; then came back and stood thoughtfully in the hall to await the return of the others. She turned her mind back to the walk in the garden, and saw it now in a changed light. Suddenly the dusky setting seemed to her almost unreal, its invisible flowers, its unearthly beauty. A slight frisson took her. She remembered the young man leaning over her in the darkness of the close bushes.
When she looked up at a slight sound, she saw a little girl in pyjamas gazing at her over the handsome iron banisters with her chin resting on the rail. This little head, with face pale and round as a dandelion clock and upstanding red curls, might have been decapitated and balanced there, so unresponsive was it to Mrs Gray’s fond greeting. It did not smile. The unusually large, round eyes had the offended, the curiously solemn, bored and affronted expression of a spoiled and precocious child.
‘Mirry—think. Are you sure you didn’t hear anyone go along the passage up there just before Mummy came up?’
Miranda shook her head, making her eyes larger and blanker than ever; then, hearing the voices of her parents returning, no doubt, she soundlessly withdrew, scampering upwards.
Keith and Helena came back into the hall, talking argumentatively and no longer laughing.
‘And you’re quite certain, Mother, that he actually went up the staircase? Did you turn away, for instance, or look elsewhere, if only for a second?’
Mrs Gray answered without hesitation. ‘I particularly noticed the way he sprang upstairs—two steps at a time.’ Suddenly, even in her own ears, this had an unpleasant sound, and that it had struck the others, too, in the same way, she could see; they were silent. Mirry’s little offended face again appeared, peeping through the iron-work.
‘Are you sure he was flesh and blood, Mother?’ Helena then asked ghoulishly. She loved ghosts, burglars, anything dramatic.
Mrs Gray looked about her and answered at length in a tranquil manner, ‘How strange you should say that, dear! Do you know, at that moment when he came up behind me—which he did so quietly and suddenly—I was just thinking. It was the garden, you know, the garden looking so lovely “in the cool of the day”. And these words had just come into my mind: “The serpent beguiled me”.’
The two younger people glanced at each other in astonishment, and then, without any attempt at hiding their feelings, went into laughter. Mrs Gray did not mind. She smiled at them with indulgence.
Keith threw a filial arm round her shoulders. ‘I hope he didn’t beguile you into telling him anything unsuitable, Mother,’ he said pleasantly, but not without a questioning note. Mrs Gray was spared answering, for he went on, ‘Helena, I do wonder you haven’t thought to put on a fire. We, of course, are hardened to the perpetual chill of the place, but Mother must feel it. This infernal dampness!—just what I always predicted—exactly what I warned Father it would be.’
‘Not for me, Helena!’ Mrs Gray hastened to cry.
But Keith liked an open fire. ‘And you might put one in my room also, while you are about it. Just a very small wood-fire will do—you needn’t trouble to make a big one—it’ll be just nothing in the morning! I have an immense quantity of work to get through and shall be working very late.’
Helena plunged obligingly towards the drawing-room to start a fire.
‘Go back to bed, Mirry,’ she shouted over her shoulder, catching sight of her daughter. But Mirry did not stir. Helena was a lazy mother, or perhaps a disheartened one, and did not often bother to make the children obey her. So Keith, more conscientious, was left to be worsted in the usual arguments which always ensued with Mirry:
‘I can’t go back, Daddy. It isn’t possible.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you can’t go back to where you’ve never been.’
Keith came into the drawing-room after the women, rubbing his large brow distractedly. ‘Where is Leslie? What do we pay her for? Her beauty?’ This was the young woman with the exotic training in child psychology who was supposed to understand and control Mirry.
Mrs Gray had followed Helena and spoke in a low tone. ‘I only hope the child didn’t hear what I said. I didn’t realise she’d come back. It might well have frightened her.’ Helena did not treat this as a matter for concern; in which she was right.
No, Miranda was not frightened. She went along a passage on the second floor and opened a door cautiously. A boy was sitting at the table in the large, comfortable playroom with the child’s furniture painted in various bright colours, the cuckoo clock and the instructive frieze round the walls; he was tilting his chair on its back legs and reading with an air of connoisseurship. The shelves were full of children’s books, toys both fanciful and mechanical lay neglected about the floor. And surrounded by this almost unlimited choice of juvenile pastimes, he was reading Nana in French. He glanced sideways and winked at Mirry.
He was a very stout young boy; a fat, yellow-faced boy with heavy, dark eyes, and he was one of the banes of Keith’s life. He was not a child of the Antequins, but a vague and distant connection, and his presence in Carlotta House was the result of a sensational act of charity on Thomas’s part, long since deplored. His father had been some obscure Antequin, but he had had a Syrian mother and had spent his early childhood somewhere in the Levant. Taken out of that milieu and sent to a good prep school in England, he had been expected to lose some of the worst characteristics. But he had not done so. He was fat, yellow, shifty, irretrievable. He was twelve, but so large and stout that he looked years older, and his face was oddly inexpressive. When he winked he did not smile. Nor did Mirry. Perfectly solemn, she essayed a wink in return, but it seemed doubtful that she had seen any joke.
‘Well, my word, they are all in a flap down there,’ she said in a tone of quiet superiority. ‘What did he give you?’ she added bluntly.
‘Nothing.’
‘Liar. Well, where did he go when Mummy came up? Has he gone now? Perhaps he has got into a cupboard somewhere.’
‘No, he’s gone. Garden way.’
‘What did he want?’
‘Wanted to look round. Asked whether the house had been changed much since when Grandpa took it.’
Mirry could not make anything of this.
‘I could have had a lot of money out of him,’ Jo pronounced slowly, rolling the words on his tongue; and his blank face suddenly shone with ardour and intelligence.
Mirry looked scornful. ‘And you didn’t get any.’
Jo had no answer.
‘They won’t like your reading that book,’ she said shrewishly, having peeped at the title.
‘They won’t have the chance.’
‘That’s a bad book.’
‘Now say you can read French.’
‘I know it is—the women all so fat—I looked at the pictures. Besides, it comes from Daddy’s own book-shelves.’
So the two lambs conferred together; while less informed speculations upon the strange event engaged their elders downstairs.
SEVENTEEN
‘What did you talk about, I wonder?’ Keith began again, on finding himself alone for a few minutes with Mrs Gray. His manner was pleasant but persistent.
She answered with caution. ‘Well, Keith, I thought it was Christine he was interested in——’ For so it seemed to her partial view.
Keith smiled dryly. ‘Why, it’s true, of course, that she’s Thomas Antequin’s widow! Oh, no doubt he would have been very happy to contact Christine. But what did he say to you? Or, rather, what did you say to him, Mother?—for that’s the point.’
‘Very little, dear,’ replied Mrs Gray with her most otherworldly air. (Very little, but a great deal too much, she now realised.)
But here again she was saved. Helena, who had run upstairs to settle the children, now burst into the room, announcing cheerfully, ‘I thought as much. Mirry did see him. She was lying. And Jo of course lies from pure habit.’ Mrs Gray, if not shocked, was at least grieved. But Keith revived. He made an exaggerated gesture of despair; not because of the children’s moral condition, however, but because he knew what was coming; his worst fears, or his highest hopes, were realised. And when Helena added, ‘He told them he was from some newspaper and gave them each a bob to be quiet,’ Keith shrugged, laughed, and appeared in a state of irritable amusement, which his wife could only view doubtfully. ‘Good,’ he said ironically. ‘Now we shall have a revelation about Mr Keith Antequin’s home life—the kind of toilet paper he uses and the pattern of his dressing-gown. Some women’s feature page, most likely.’
Mrs Gray saw that the subject could be changed with advantage. ‘The Advertiser this week has something in it about George Lambert’s collection, Keith, which I thought might interest you, if you hadn’t seen it. So I’ve brought it with me. Helena, I’ve just brought a little bag with a few night-things, for I thought that tomorrow——’ But here she stopped short and cried, ‘My bag! Yes, he has gone off with my bag! He insisted on carrying it for me——’
‘This at least proves his fleshly existence.’
‘Why—but how ridiculous!—it has nothing in it but my night-clothes,’ Mrs Gray protested, laughing happily.
Springing up in a new burst of animation, Keith went to look in the hall, in case the bag had been deposited in some corner. However, within the next few minutes, the young woman Leslie came in and was able to tell them that it was standing by the glass door which opened on the garden near the foot of the back staircase; putting away her bicycle, she had seen it there and wondered whose it was. Also, she had found the door ajar. So he had run right through the house, they concluded; but by no amount of puzzling and speculation could they arrive at the intruder’s motive in doing this. The contents of the bag had not been disturbed, the newspaper was still at the bottom; and was, anyway, merely the current edition of the local paper which could have been bought anywhere in the district. So their excitement and their ingenuity petered out together. But the production of the newspaper set them talking again of George Lambert and the strange posthumous blaze of publicity in which his story had lately closed.
Helena brought in the tray of drinks, Mrs Jebb and Leslie came into the drawing-room to take their nightcaps, and Keith continued to sit with the women as he did not usually when the company was merely domestic. Mrs Jebb, a little person with a huge head and a deep voice, was a local woman and could contribute a host of local rumours; and suddenly Keith began questioning her with a particularity which seemed a little odd at this time of day. He had the manner of one whom the subject had struck from a new angle.
George Lambert’s death—or, rather, the sequel to his death—had recently fluttered the whole neighbourhood. In fact, he had died and no one had given that event any special attention. But, shortly afterwards, Hilbery had had a vast surprise. All those foolish, useless little bibelots of which this unobtrusive neighbour of theirs had made a life-time’s collection, but had kept so jealously in the dark (yet who knew if that had not been merely for the want of a fellow-enthusiast?) when handed over by the widow for disposal in a London salesroom had all of them fetched incredible prices. Iniquitous prices, Hilbery considered. That heavy, lumpish, taciturn man in their midst, whom nobody had ever known properly, who had lived in one of the shabbiest houses in Hilbery and had gone about for the past twelve years suspected and shunned because of the Lambert mystery, had accumulated possessions which realised for his widow a fortune of some thirty thousand pounds.
No one had been more amazed than Rosalie. She was at first so much affected that she could hardly rejoice for thinking and talking of the number of years she had been forced to pinch and scrape and put up with every sort of insult while ‘sitting on a goldmine’. She could find nothing strong enough to say of her deceased husband who had treated her so scurvily. A mean hound. If only she had had an inkling—the barest inkling—she would have taken a hatchet to those cabinets of his! He had not even had the decency to take her away from the neighbourhood after the tragedy, he had not used even the minutest portion of his wealth to save her feelings, and Rosalie had been forced to brave it out all those years, suffering untold miseries. She had been ostracised. Very few people had been charitable. (Mrs Gray had been one of the few.) The revelations at the inquiry had turned everyone against her. And what did Lambert care? Apparently he himself had cared for none of these things. He had cared only for certain shabby cabinets in a little dull back room.
Now, speaking of the collection, Keith said thoughtfully, ‘No, I never saw it, Mother. I don’t know anybody who did. One had always thought it must be phoney… An odd point is that he died intestate. So that if ever that miserable little girl of his should turn up again——Well, that’s unlikely! That, I think we can say, is impossible,’ he added, and smiled to himself and relapsed into thought; but did not quit their company.
Helena referred regretfully to their unknown visitor. ‘What a pity,’ she said. ‘It would have made a nice ghost-story.’ She delighted in the occult, it made her laugh, for she took the sheet and turnip point of view, being unburdened by up-to-date psychic lore of any description. So, loth to let the subject drop, she continued, ‘But after all, if this house is haunted by anyone, it should be by little Vivian Lambert.’
