1
When we came out the fog had deepened considerably. The sky was invisible above the housetops. The city was wrapped in a wet grey blanket. Jeremy regarded it with expert eyes.
“Going to be a nice run,” he observed cheerfully. “No time to waste.”
“The next train goes at 3.2,” I told him. “We’ve time for lunch first.”
“To-morrow, perhaps,” he agreed.
“To-morrow be blowed. I’m talking about to-day. If you propose to go down to Feltham Abbey, as I imagine you do, the only train is the 3.2. There’s a 1.57 to Rockingham, certainly, but that’s a slow train, involving a change, and we shouldn’t get in till about seven. Besides, Rockingham’s the last place on earth you’d choose to get stranded. There’s never a car to be had, and anyhow there wouldn’t be on a day like this; and if you’re lucky, you may get a lift in a tradesman’s cart. I once crawled over to Feltham like that, in my salad days, before I knew the railway line quite so well as I do now. Of course, you might telegraph to the house for a car, but as they all belong to Nunn, whom neither of us has met, I should think even you might think twice about it.”
Jeremy said kindly, “Let me point out two or three facts that should be obvious even to a half-wit. One, that Nunn doesn’t own every car on the face of the earth. Two, that if this fog gets any worse your 3.2 won’t run. Three, that I don’t care for my prospective wife to be engaged to any other man an instant longer than is absolutely necessary. Four, that these fiends are after Hilary.”
“Are you proposing to fly, then?”
“Don’t be more of a fool than the Lord made you. No. Drive, of course. Where’s the nearest garage?”
He wasn’t asking me, but a convenient policeman, who produced a garage as obligingly as if it had been a match.
“No one’s going to drive you a hundred and fifty miles on an afternoon like this,” I protested. “The 3.2 is an express. It gets you down at six, so far as I remember. Do show a little sense.”
Jeremy retorted pleasantly, “Take your express and go to hell in it. What do you suppose I’m going to do while Hilary, the future Mrs. Freyne, mark you, is mauled by some cad in the Civil Service? It’s bad enough she should ever be engaged to him at all. It’s intolerable that she should remain so an instant longer than I can prevent.”
He waved away the first car offered him, on the ground that it would suit him excellently when he was being driven to the scaffold, and would presumably wish to prolong his journey, and chartered a low, wicked-looking racer that he proposed to drive himself.
“You’ll never find the way,” I warned him. “They’ve built a new by-pass since you were down here.”
“Then for Heaven’s sake, stop behaving like a maiden aunt at a funeral and get in beside me. You’ll be useful to point out the way, if nothing else.”
And so I got in beside Jeremy, wearing the world’s worst Burberry, and we started. I was devoutly thankful I had no dependants when I realised the pace at which Jeremy proposed to take us to Feltham.
“Now,” he said cheerfully, narrowly avoiding murder and felo-de-se as he rounded a corner on two wheels, “tell me something about the household. Who’s Nunn?”
“I only know the fellow by reputation. He’s what’s called a self-made man. He founded the Nunn Insurance Company. You must have heard of the Nunn Better Policy.”
“No insurance company will take me on,” said Jeremy, complacently. “I’m too much of a risk. Well, is this chap likely to be concerned in the plot?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“Well, if you’ve never met him, you’re in no position to judge. We don’t really know that his teeming millions come from Insurance. They may come from bleeding poor sinners white.”
“He’d hardly be bleeding his own wife,” I objected. “And what does he stand to gain out of Hilary?”
“That’s one of the things we’ve yet to discover. How long has he been married? I take it, he knew the Percy-Feltham story?”
“I don’t see how he could not know it. Everyone knew.”
“Not everyone. I admit I developed a certain respect for the Powers That Be when I realised how they can keep secrets if necessary. Oh, I grant you a lot of people knew, but the general public didn’t. I doubt if they even realised that our men were walking into ambushes through the treachery of one of our own side. When Feltham shot himself, it was put down to nerve strain by most people. By the way, what did they prove? I wasn’t in England at the time.”
“Nor was I.”
“Still, Feltham was your guardian, and you used to spend your holidays at the Abbey. You must have known Eleanor Feltham pretty well.”
“I’ll tell you all I know. You’d met Feltham yourself, hadn’t you? You know the sort of chap he was, grim, morose, clever as paint and as conscientious as an archangel. But he wasn’t the sort of man who makes friends very easily; he had brain but no wit, intelligence but no sparkle. Give him a tough job to do and he’d get his teeth into it and grind out a solution, but he’d put it together with so little imagination that it would lose half its force. It wasn’t till after his first wife died, and he found himself stranded with Hilary, a brat of about three, that he ran across Eleanor. People said it was a bit of luck for her. Her father was Lord S——but they hadn’t a penny to their names, and she was really wasting her time with him. She was everything to Percy and the child. From the beginning she overhauled his speeches, put in the light touches that made people sit up and take notice, and then ask themselves what had happened to the fellow; she entertained charmingly, she had a manner that would entice a hippopotamus out of its pond on a hot day. Of course, she was only half Feltham’s age, but that didn’t seem to matter. Their relationship appeared to be chiefly on the intellectual plane; Feltham was always more absorbed in facts than in people, a farouche sort of chap—you remember. But he was devoted to her, and was very generous. The uncharitable said she’d married him for his money, because the Metcalfes had a very old-fashioned little establishment in Edwardes Square, and all Eleanor’s frocks had to last two seasons. Well, she was young and handsome and popular. She had a bad time in 1916 when her baby was born and died when it was a month old. She’d wanted children; but she had Hilary, who was five then, a jolly affectionate brat, and most people thought she’d done very well for herself. She still worked hand and glove with Feltham, and put in a lot of war work as well. That year he got a confidential appointment at the War Office, and was at it about eighteen hours a day. He wasn’t a diplomatist by nature, and Eleanor stepped in more than once when his rather high-handed manner lost him his man. There was a row with Sir Rupert Horne, for example, at a time when it was rather important to keep on the right side of the man. And Eleanor stepped in there, and won the fellow over. It was a knack of hers. They said of her that she could make even a list of statistics absorbing, and she talked to Horne on his own subject till he was ready to eat out of her hand. And then Cleghorne came on the scene. He was a queer chap, too, as brilliant as Eleanor, and with more influence. It was necessary to get him in on Feltham’s side, and it wasn’t easy to secure him. Percy, you see, was in the Coalition Government, and his position would be enormously strengthened if he could get Cleghorne as an ally. Cleghorne was apt to be suspicious; they said there was more than a touch of jealousy in his attitude. Outwardly he announced that he distrusted Feltham’s tactics. However, when things were at a deadlock, Eleanor threw herself into the breach, and after a toughish struggle, she won. Cleghorne came in and everyone congratulated Feltham on his tact. That was November, 1917. For several months everything went well. Then rumours started to get about, disquieting rumours. In fact, at first they seemed so unlikely that they were laughed at. Then they were repeated and people remained grave, and at last here and there men spoke openly. They said that information was leaking out through some official in the know, with the result that our moves on the Western Front were counteracted as they were made, by the other side. There was a gigantic scandal in the spring of 1918, when half a regiment was cut to pieces, and that put the lid on things. They started an official inquiry. It was too late now to murmur reassuringly about coincidences and inconsiderable losses, when surprise attacks at dawn were countered by solid massed battalions, and our casualty lists were like a butcher’s shop. One of these more scurrilous and unprincipled weeklies came out with a demand to Name the Spies, and though they didn’t actually commit themselves to names on their own account, their opinions were pretty thinly veiled. Well, the inquiry began and the results were pretty grim. It was Cleghorne. He’d ratted. Rumour said he got colossal sums for his information. So much was proved beyond a doubt. And his disappearance clinched the matter.”
“What happened to him?” Jeremy asked keenly.
“He was never discovered. Some people will tell you that he got away to Austria—that was a current rumour for a long time—but there are others who say he was one of a number of refugees whose unrecognisable bodies were found several months later in one of the German forests some miles from the fighting line. Anyway, it wasn’t Cleghorne who bore the real brunt of the affair. Obviously the Government had got to find a presentable scapegoat. They couldn’t say airily, ‘Yes, we know who did it, but unfortunately he’s got away.’ So they said that Cleghorne couldn’t have been responsible for all the treachery. They decided there were some things he wouldn’t have known, and if he had known them, the responsibility was Feltham’s, for passing on information he should have kept to himself. The affair for him was calamitous. It was the end of his career, and his career was his life. Even Eleanor was little more than a pawn in his scheme, though he was fond enough of her in his own way. Hilary as a little girl adored him, and I believe she won’t let anyone mention his name now. She was only seven, you see, when the crash came, but she was intelligent, not to say precocious, having been so much with her elders. She and Eleanor had a ghastly time. Feltham took the best way out; I suppose they gave him that last chance. After all, they wouldn’t want an open scandal, if they could help it, and when the rumour circulated that he’d been overworked, and the strain and the responsibility for young lives had affected his mind, they allowed it to rest at that.”
“And what happened to the others? How did his widow collect her millionaire?”
“She went to work for herself and Hilary. She hadn’t any money, and what Feltham had left, about ten thousand pounds, was tied up for the child. She wasn’t to touch it till she was twenty-one. Of course, there was the income, but Eleanor never touched that for herself. It was a difficult position, because fingers were still pointed at them both. She couldn’t send Hilary to school straight away, so she got her a governess, and herself found a job in Nunn’s office. I told you statistics were among her delights, and pretty soon her work attracted attention. After 1918 people began to forget the scandal, and Hilary went to school like some ordinary child, and Eleanor went up a peg or two in the office.”
“How much does Hilary know of all this?”
“No one is quite sure. She asked me, the first time I saw her after her father’s death, if it was true that people only killed themselves if they’d done wrong and were afraid to live. I got out of it as best I could, but that shows you the trend of her thought. When I tried to get back to the subject, she said quite definitely that she didn’t want to talk about her father. I asked Eleanor, but she hadn’t got any more out of her than I did, except that she said passionately that she loved her father whatever he’d done. I’ve never heard her mention him since. Eleanor was distraught. She said she’d got Cleghorne in, and without her there would have been none of this mess. And after that she didn’t discuss the matter, either. In 1924 I heard she was going to marry Nunn. No, he wasn’t a widower, he’d been too busy to think of the domestic side of life, and apparently had been looked after by a widowed sister.”
“And I suppose she was thrust into a Decayed Gentlewomen’s Hostel?”
“Oh, no. He has, as Eleanor wrote to me, quite Asiatic notions of family responsibility. I don’t know whether this woman has always lived with them, but she’s with them now, and has been for a long time.”
“I shouldn’t myself call Lady Nunn fortunate in either of her marriages,” commented Jeremy, grimly. “However, I daresay the unfortunate lady herself doesn’t trouble them much. She’s probably a mousey shrinking little creature, who yearns for the cosy security of Brixton or Tooting Bec. And now, where does Ralph come in?”
“Not at the Abbey at all.”
“Not? It’s his house, though.”
“He’s only the landlord at the moment, and his tenant has forbidden him to call. A galling position for Ralph, I grant you, particularly as I believe he honestly does care about the place. He’s got a little house in the neighbourhood, hardly more than a shooting-box, I believe. Of course, Ralph’s record is patchy to say the least of it. There’s queer blood in that family. I’ve never been among the crowd that thought Feltham guilty, but he was an odd fish himself. Too much blue-blooded marrying, if you ask me. If one of the Felthams had got himself tied up with a bouncing village wench, the stock would have notably improved. As it is, it’s hopelessly degenerate. You’ve only got to take Ralph to show you that, and even Percy—you know, he had a very odd manner and appearance at times.”
“Barmy?” asked Jeremy, pleasantly.
“I shouldn’t have been surprised if it had ended something like that.”
“H’m. Nice little Job’s comforter you are. Have you any theories where Hilary’s concerned?”
“Hilary, I must say, seems absolutely normal. I hardly knew her mother, but perhaps she’s responsible.”
“I’m glad you admit Hilary isn’t likely to end her days in a mental sanatorium. I should hate to end my life as one of Lord Buckmaster’s hard cases. What about Ralph and Hilary? Do they ever meet?”
“I shouldn’t think so. They wouldn’t have much in common.”
Jeremy surprised me by saying, “Well, I don’t know about that. Hilary’s all right, as you say, but she’s got the same strain of recklessness in her that Ralph has. She wouldn’t be party to this Spider affair, of course, but she’s like a pal of mine who spent a year after the war blackmailing profiteers and giving the money to some service fund. You couldn’t make him see he’d done anything indefensible. And Hilary would be in the same boat. When she’s married to me, I may be able to drill a little sense into her. Is that the lot?”
“Except the servants.”
“I doubt if any of them would be implicated, except as links. Have they been there long?”
“Hook was Feltham’s butler, and he returned to Eleanor after her second marriage. There’s an elderly housekeeper who has been with Nunn for some time. I don’t know about the rest.”
“On the face of it, it does look as though Ralph was implicated, though he isn’t in this as a one-man show. He hasn’t got enough imagination to organise anything on this scale, but he’s quite conscienceless and would be an excellent partner. He’s knocked about a lot, knows the world from the underside better than most, and has no reputation to lose. And he’s not in the least likely to draw the line at blackmail, when he hasn’t drawn it at murder.”
“That was never proved. In fact, he produced an alibi.”
“A dozen, I believe. But that doesn’t alter the position. By Jove, though, he must have given that woman a run for her money. Cleopatra they called her, but those in the know say that even Cleopatra didn’t maintain the state this mysterious demi-mondaine was accustomed to. I wonder what she saw in Ralph—a new type, perhaps. She’d had lovers enough, heaven knows. And then, after all that splendour, to be found strangled with one of her own gold chains in a hotel bedroom. Yes, I know it was a hotel de luxe, but I shouldn’t imagine it made much difference what kind of room you died in, if you had to die, particularly in that very brutal way. In a sense, the affair was proved up to the hilt against Ralph. He’d been with her within a few hours of her death, there’d been a hell of a quarrel over some other fellow in the hotel, he disappeared early that morning. Everything pointed to him. Of course, he showed astounding wisdom in returning as soon as the news of the murder was broadcast, and he came back with his fists full of alibis. Did you notice, though, they were all the kinds of alibis you could buy? Porters and newsvendors and keepers of coffee-stalls. He got off all right. But he did it. Oh, he did it. The devil of it is that a man who can work that kind of bluff wouldn’t care what he did to anyone. I’m thinking of Hilary now… She’s in danger… I know. Talk of the devil in practically every big city in the world, and you’re soon hearing of Ralph Feltham. He knows that’s his reputation, and he glories in it. And this job of nosing in other men’s dustbins would suit him down to the ground. Offal’s his proper meat. He’s the sort of fellow who talks of selling his sword, but I wouldn’t mind betting he’d sell it simultaneously to both sides. They say he even had a bet about that Victoria Cross he got. The question is, who else might be in it?”
“We don’t know that anyone else at Feltham is concerned. And if Ralph is involved, I fancy you’ll find the other fellow one of these correct, solid, meticulous chaps who might be shoved into the British Museum as typical of the middle-class prosperity of their time. By the way, where the devil are we?”
It had just occurred to me that such of the road as I could distinguish through the heavy wet mist was unfamiliar. Also I could hear water running near by. One is liable, of course, to hear all manner of strange noises in a fog, but this grew momentarily so loud that I became convinced we were approaching a weir. I said as much to Jeremy.
“Damn you!” he said, politely. “I thought the sole reason for your being here at all was to see we didn’t miss the road.”
We stopped the car at the first house we came to, and he got out and asked the way. It was some time before we could make ourselves clear. Then it appeared that we had taken a wrong turning some time back, and were five-and-twenty miles off our road. We had just got back to it, travelling at not more than twenty miles an hour (any driver less reckless than Jeremy would have slowed to half that pace, considering the weather) when a back tyre punctured. Jeremy displayed commendable patience. When I observed bitterly that I’d as soon try to find Feltham in this fog as plough over the Sahara, he only said, “You wouldn’t talk in that loose way if you’d ever gone astray in the Sahara. Bring one of the headlights round here, will you? This’ll be a matter of twenty minutes.”
In point of fact, it took forty-five. Meanwhile we argued points of common law. Jeremy said unexpectedly, “You know, Tony, I’ve always loathed the name Arthur. I don’t know why, specially. Little Arthur’s England, perhaps. One of the crosses of my childhood. The Princes in the Tower, all got up in black velvet tights, with gold fillets round their innocent brows. I wonder what Hilary sees in him. I’m sure he’s a poop.”
“Because he’s called Arthur?”
“Not altogether. I have—intuitions. A lady of my acquaintance once told me she’d never met any man with such a feminine outlook. Such subtlety, such delicacy, such swift intuition. It wasn’t for some time that I discovered she was trying to touch me for her dressmaker’s bill. Those were the days when I was very young. However, if Arthur isn’t a poop, he’s probably a rotter.”
“And Hilary’s marrying him to reform him?”
Jeremy grinned. “You betray your bachelordom with every word you speak. Seriously, though, Tony, it’s ghastly to think that we might spot the Spider and the law of the land doesn’t give us the right to squash it.”
He lay down abruptly, peering into the vitals of the car, and leaving the punctured tyre on the misty road. I began to explain the principles of common law, Jeremy’s voice in argument coming to me muffled from beneath the car. Presently he emerged and continued work on the tyre, arguing all the time, sometimes kneeling, sometimes squatting on the wet road, the fog lying in swathes all about us. Jeremy’s memory was amazing. He would refute my most obvious arguments with references to cases I had clean forgotten or had never read. We admitted certain weaknesses and deplored certain judgments; we discussed the possibility of corruption and the obvious inconsistencies of certain parallel cases occurring in different strata of society. On the whole, I didn’t come out of it so well as he did. He had the freedom of the independent, the man who is fettered by no creed or following, while I was frequently in the position of the theologian, compelled to defend what he cannot hope to explain lucidly to an antagonist. And I had, too, a sense of disloyalty in yielding, as I often did, to Jeremy’s arguments. But, hearing his brilliant, unhesitating parry and thrust, I thought Philpotts was lucky to get such a man on his side.
Our lengthy detour, plus the puncture, had wasted nearly three hours; it was now after five, the hour at which we had intended to arrive. Now we had to go slow along a road with which neither of us was really familiar. Within an hour we had a second breakdown. This was at a peculiarly desolate spot, in the heart of the pitiless moors Hilary loved. We could see them under the curtain of the fog, dripping and impenetrable. I shivered.
“Fancy getting lost here on a night like this! They go on for miles, you know.”
“Revolting thoughts you have. Come on. What’s the time?”
I said it was about six. Our express had probably reached Feltham by this time, though I didn’t make this observation aloud. The evening grew bitterly cold. A sharp wind now and again pierced the volume of fog. As we turned the next corner, Jeremy abruptly stopped the car.
“What’s the matter?” I felt a third calamity would be intolerable.
“I thought I heard footsteps. Listen!” He shut off the engine, and we sat, uncomfortably alert, in the dank gloom. Once I thought I heard something that might have been a foot stumbling over roots of heather, but the sound was not repeated, and I decided it was probably due to an over-sensitive imagination.
Jeremy seemed rather put out. “I’ll swear there was some one. But if so, where the devil has he got to? He hasn’t fallen; we should have heard the crash. Did he hear us and stop dead till we’d gone on? There isn’t a cottage or any kind of shelter here where he could conceal himself.”
He began to shout but nothing came back, except the faint echo of his voice over those unfriendly miles of moor. The place to an imaginative cold and hungry man seemed definitely inimical; to a superstitious mind, it might have been haunted by all manner of obscene night-fears. As for more concrete horrors, there might have been half a dozen murders going on within as many yards. It reminded me of various things; of the beginning of Great Expectations, of parts of Wuthering Heights, and sometimes of Flannan Isle, not merely something ghastly, but something beyond human understanding. Jeremy stopped shouting and began to whistle. Then he produced a powerful electric torch and shot the beam over the nearest path and heather clump.
“Have you any idea, Tony, whereabouts we are?”
“None,” I confessed.
“Oh, well.” He restored the torch to his pocket. “Possibly it’s of no consequence. Philosophers tell us nothing is of any consequence really. But, like the police, I don’t like mysteries. And I can’t understand why a footstep should suddenly be heard on such a night, miles from anywhere, and stop so abruptly when its owner hears a car coming.”
“A tramp,” I suggested.
“A tramp would have come up and asked for money or a lift—money anyway.”
“A man flying from justice?” I spoke jestingly. But in truth the eerie quality of the atmosphere was beginning to tell on me also, and none of the circus tricks of melodrama would have astounded me then—the sudden bright eyes peering out of darkness, piercing shrieks, cold hands on my neck, voices in my ear.
Jeremy settled back in his seat and drove on. We drove for another half-hour and then suddenly the fog began to lift. I knew at once where we were. We seemed to have travelled in a circle, so that when we heard that footstep we couldn’t have been very far from Ravensend. At twenty minutes to eight we sighted the rather obscure yet beautiful house of the Felthams, standing with a gracious aloofness in its modest grounds. The house has been rebuilt twice in the last four hundred years, and its appearance is deceptive. It looks a rather small, wandering country mansion, but it has a great deal of space within. The last Feltham to build it had inherited sober Puritan blood. When someone remonstrated with him for the simplicity and lack of ostentation of his design, he replied coldly, “I am not building a house for roisterers and their trulls; I am building a house for a gentleman of leisure and his sons.”
2
Our welcome was peculiar. The enormous front door of the Abbey stood wide open. Lights blazed in every room. There was a general atmosphere of flurry and dismay. We rang ceremoniously, but nothing happened; we rang again and a scared-looking footman came hastily into the hall. When he saw us, his face changed. He said quickly, “I beg your pardon, sir. You have news?”
Completely mystified, I said I hadn’t, and asked for Eleanor. The fellow looked embarrassed, but took us into a room to the left of the hall. Here we waited for some time. I was oppressed and silent; the memory of that invisible step on the moor remained with me, as though it were knit up with this extra-ordinary arrival.
“Did they know you were coming?” asked Jeremy at last.
“I wired from town. I can’t think what’s happened.”
“It’s quite obvious what’s happened. Someone or something is lost. You don’t leave lights on and doors open unless you want to guide someone home. I want to know who it is.”
We waited a little longer, and then the door was flung open and a lady came in. She was middle-aged, with a Victorian figure and an Alexandra fringe. I couldn’t at first place her. She seemed breathless with excitement and apologies, turning quickly from one to the other of us.
“I’m so sorry. Have you been waiting long? That stupid man’s only just told me. The whole staff is quite demoralised. Let me see, do I know who you are?”
“My name is Keith,” I told her. “I’m a kind of connection by marriage with Eleanor. And this is Mr. Freyne.”
She barely touched my hand but clung eagerly to Jeremy’s. “And you’re friends of James?”
I placed her then. She was the widowed sister, of course, but anything less like our expectations you couldn’t conceive. Eleanor was brilliant, witty and well-bred; this woman was none of these things, and yet the force of her personality was so strong that it simply didn’t matter. I don’t know how I can convey her attraction at all adequately. She had nothing approaching beauty or even prettiness; she was short and plump at a time when women were required to be slender and erect. She hadn’t, as the saying goes, got a feature in her face; her voice alternated between a delighted squeak and a deep excited bass. She wore the shabbiest clothes imaginable, and colour schemes were unknown to her; she had not even the merit of a short upper lip or a graceful carriage. Yet at a first meeting none of these disadvantages seemed to count. There was about her an inextinguishable charm. Without effort she took handsome young men away from their pretty companions; she walked into a shop and there was a buzz to serve her; she said outrageous things so naturally as to preclude all possibility of affectation. There was some irresistible enchantment about her; she always seemed to be bubbling up at the edge of a miracle. And you felt that at sight; you could no more ignore that quality of hers than you could forget to notice a fire on a cold day or moonlight in a black night.
I was answering her question. I said I was afraid we didn’t know James at all, but that the Abbey had been my home years ago, and that Eleanor was a kind of connection by marriage, so that in a sense I had looked upon the house as my headquarters.
“And a very inconvenient house, too,” cried the lady, vigorously. “But, of course, it’s aristocratic. I’ve noticed the aristocracy like houses to be inconvenient; no plumbing, if possible, stairs where you don’t expect them, and ceilings so low you bang your head every time you stand up. People like James and me—middle-class people, I mean—we like bathrooms and electric fires and windows that shut up to the top, and proper lights—need them, I suppose, to make up for other things. It’s just a question of which appeals to you most.” She rattled along happily, delighting us both. Then she pulled herself up with a start. “But I’m forgetting—you don’t know who I am, do you? My name’s Ross, Meriel Ross, and I’m James’s sister. It’s an easy name to remember, isn’t it? That’s one of the reasons why I chose it.”
“Chose it?” murmured Jeremy, as fascinated as I was.
“Yes. You don’t need to spell it on the telephone. Not that I used a telephone when I was Bertie’s wife. Women didn’t then. They walked to the station with their husbands in the morning, and bought the day’s dinner at the butcher’s and fetched it home in a string bag. And they saw to it they weren’t given equal shares of fat and lean. Butchers had to mind their p’s and q’s when I was a young wife. Of course, everything’s different now. Things come out of tins and cartons, and for all you know your inside’s being poisoned seven days a week by the leavings off other people’s plates. Like this bottled mustard you get. Oh, and there was another reason—besides the one that Bertie suited me, of course. I never meant to be one of these ticketed widows and there was nothing in the least noticeable about darling Bertie. D’you know what I mean? I wasn’t going to have people saying of me, ‘Who’s that? Oh, don’t you know? That’s Sir Blank Blank’s widow. Wonderful man, wasn’t he? Such a brain! Such energy! Such invention! Such foresight! Such judgment! Such courage! Such knowledge! Such enterprise! Such strategical powers!’ No, thank you. I mean to be myself. ‘Meriel Ross? Oh, my dear, you must know her. She’s the woman who wears those awful hats. Gets them at a Jumble Sale, if you ask me.’ Now, that’s a reputation. The other’s an echo.” She smiled enchantingly at both of us. “And now,” she invited, “do tell me what you think of this one. Be quite, quite candid.”
I glanced up and was promptly smitten dumb with horror. I know very little about hats and, to judge from his remarks about the purple felt, so does Jeremy. But I knew instantly I had never seen anything quite so ghastly as the edifice perched on Mrs. Ross’s fair fuzzy head.
“Don’t compare it with the fashions of the day,” she warned us, swaying this way and that so that no aspect of the revolting creation should escape us. “A woman of my age can’t be bothered whether women are wearing things like a coal-scuttle or a penny bun jammed on the back of the head. But viewed as an original creation, in short, as a hat?”
I stared, fascinated by its hideousness. It was a tall affair of pale-coloured straw (burnt straw, Eleanor assured me afterwards), trimmed with yards of lace and a drove of plush butterflies, and where there wasn’t a butterfly there was a velvet bow.
It rode high like a defiant and nightmare ship on the fair hair that was drawn Alexandra-fashion over the forehead. But nothing defeats Jeremy for more than an instant, not even such a hat as that one.
“It is perfect.” He pronounced judgment without the quiver of an eyelash, revolving slowly in the manner of a master milliner. “Ah, Moddom, believe me, it is a dream, an inspiration. There is not another woman in England who could wear such a hat. It is a hat of personality, of chic. It is bold, it has character.” He threw up his hands in a Gallic gesture. “One perceives that Moddom is an artist.”
“You dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Ross, impulsively. For a delighted moment I thought she was going to kiss Jeremy. I think he rather hoped she would.
She had by this time drawn us into the smoking-room, and was mixing us cocktails.
“Do tell me what you’ve come down for,” she coaxed us, but she wasn’t interested in me.
“To put a stop to this ridiculous engagement of Hilary’s,” said Jeremy, coolly.
“You’re going to stop it?”
“Certainly. I’ve other plans for her.”
Mrs. Ross emitted a wail of anguish. “You’re not trying to tell me you’ve come down here to bite the dust at her feet, too? It’s too frightful. Every personable man in the place running after that chit. As if she wasn’t spoilt enough as it is. I should like to be her mother for just one night. Just one night. Why, you might as well live in a monastery—oh, a nunnery, if that’s what I mean—if you tell me you’re going out to look for her, too, I shall burst into tears. Even James has gone off on one of these personally-conducted tours through the heather. And Eleanor’s gone with him. She’ll be a perfect wreck to-morrow.”
“What’s happened to Hilary?”
“She’s disappeared. Well, why not let her? As a matter of fact, I can’t think what they’re making all this fuss about. Hilary never did notice if she was within an hour or two of the right time for dinner. It’s her mother’s fault, I understand. She was meant to be a valentine, but she didn’t arrive till six the next morning, and I suppose the bad habit has stuck.”
“And she’s lost? On the moors? On a night like this?”
“Everyone seems to think so.”
Jeremy looked about him as if he were inwardly collecting kit. Mrs. Ross saw that glance. “You’re not a kind of glorified policeman, too, are you? We’ve had enough of them.”
“Policemen?”
“Yes. All over the house. Asking the most absurd questions over and over again. Does anyone know any reason why she should want to be out at such a time? As if, if we knew that, we should want their help. Breathing ponderously down your neck and going through all the questions in Mrs. Magnus.”
“Are there many of them?”
“There seem to be dozens, but of course it might be the same one all the time popping up all over the place. I did notice a resemblance, I must admit.”
“If they’ve got the police in, isn’t it pretty serious?”
“No, I’m sure it isn’t. If you ask me, she isn’t lying about on a wet moor waiting to be murdered, or horribly bloody in a sandstone quarry. She’s given us all the slip. And how she must be laughing at us. The fact is, she’s always been given her head. And look at the result! Why men should go crazy over her, I can’t think. Oh, I know she has a way with her, but look at her want of consideration. Losing that poor man in all this fog—and I’m sure he’s got a delicate chest.”
“Is this little Arthur?”
“Mr. Dennis. Yes. Well, would any really nice girl take a man out in a fog and then lose him on purpose?”
“That would depend on the man. Being lost in a fog is too good for some of them.”
“Well, I call it very wrong. No considerate girl would have dragged a young man out on such an afternoon.”
“Any man worth his salt would have been glad to go out with Hilary any afternoon,” championed Jeremy, instantly.
“You think that?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Even if he were only going to be shaken off and given his death of cold?”
“He must be a pretty average fool to let himself be shaken off.”
“How could he help it? Of course, she meant to get rid of him.”
“How do you make that out?”
“Well, why did she try to put him off from the beginning?”
“Did she?”
“Yes. If it comes to that, what reason could she have for going out on such a day if she wasn’t going to elope or something?”
“Whom could she elope with?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure. There’s that delightfully wicked-looking nephew of Eleanor’s. You know, I’ve always wanted to meet a murderer. But I never thought I should do it under James’s roof.”
“He was acquitted,” Jeremy reminded her dryly.
“Of course he was acquitted. What’s that got to do with it?”
“A good deal, I should have thought.”
“Well, anyway, he’s been paying her a lot of attention lately.”
“Your idea being that she took her young man out, shook him off—is the fellow a beetle to be shaken off so lightly?—and is now—where?”
“Half-way to France, I dare say.”
“Not unless they’re swimming,” said Jeremy, grimly. “There’ll be no boats out to-night.”
“Well,” she challenged him, “what’s your explanation?”
“I don’t even know what happened.”
“I’ll tell you. We were all sitting comfortably round the fire and in strides this young woman and says she wants to stretch her legs. As if they weren’t long enough already, and she shows plenty of them, too. A shame, I call it, in a respectable house. All I can say is, I’m glad I lost Bertie before these hussies started going about half-naked. Well, of course, when he saw she meant to go he said he’d come, too. Anyone could see she didn’t want him, but she couldn’t exactly refuse to let him accompany her. So off they went, and we didn’t think much about them till about six o’clock, when the door was pushed open and in comes Mr. Dennis, soaking, poor darling, and saying, with that delicious little stammer of his, ‘I suppose the j-joke’s on me, is it? Hilary’s been in for ages.’ Of course, we asked him what he was talking about, and he said they’d had a walk and then had tea at an inn, and when they’d left it nearly half-an-hour Hilary discovered—little minx!—that she’d left her bag behind. And sent him back for it. He’s too simple-minded himself to see it was a trick.”
“With all due deference to you, and of course loathing the brute like poison for daring to be engaged to Hilary at all, I can’t quite see why he should have guessed she meant to give him the slip because she lost her bag.”
“Because everyone in the neighbourhood knows the chit, and with good reason, too. If she left a bag at an inn, it would be returned in the morning. And it’s absurd to pretend that there was anything in it so valuable it couldn’t wait a few hours. If she wanted money, though how people can spend money on a moor I don’t know, Mr. Dennis had it. And he always carries a spare handkerchief, I know.”
“Oh, Lord!” murmured Jeremy. “Did he tell you that?”
“Yes. He was once in an accident…”
“Quite the Little Lord Fauntleroy,” commented Jeremy, approvingly. “Does he wear floppy ties?”
“No. He’s in half-mourning for an aunt. He wears a black tie.”
“And you blame Hilary for losing this scourge in a fog? Why, Mrs. Ross, why?”
“He might have caught pneumonia,” said Meriel Ross indignantly.
“True, true. I’d forgotten the weak chest. Well?”
“He went back to look for the bag, which she’d deliberately stuffed behind some books in the inn parlour, and she promised to wait. The fog wasn’t so bad then, according to him, but of course he doesn’t know one clump of heather from another. And when he came back she’d disappeared.”
“Poor chump missed the path.”
“Anyone would.”
“Hilary may have tried to get back and missed it, too.”
“Not she. That young woman knows the moors as she knows her own face when she meets it in the glass, and that’s often enough.”
“And that’s positively the last that’s been heard of her? Did you say everyone had gone out?”
“Yes. And they may be out all night for all I know.”
“There may have been something of great importance in the purse.”
“There wasn’t. I’ve looked. She’d deliberately hidden it, where it wouldn’t be found and brought after her within five minutes. It was all part of a plot. And it won’t be any thanks to her if we don’t have a funeral as a result. All these people knee-high in mud looking for her.”
“Perhaps she’s waiting where she said she would, and none of them have hit the right path.”
“You think she’d be waiting there at eight o’clock? Not she. Of course they’ve missed her, and would if she’d been like Lot’s wife, frozen in her steps. He’s been in once since, and when he heard she still wasn’t back, off he went. There are about a hundred miles of moor, and it’s pitch black and he’s got a candle or something, so how he or anyone else expects to find her I can’t imagine. And after that everyone except myself went off, too. Poor Mr. Dennis thinks she may have slipped and broken her ankle. Serve her right, horrid little chit! That young man of hers spoke of chartering an aeroplane, as if he thought the child might be hiding in a bird’s nest, only there aren’t any, are there, at this time of the year?”
“You can’t buy aeroplanes at Woolworths,” Jeremy comforted her. “Hullo, here’s someone.”
Voices sounded in the hall, but I didn’t think either of them was Hilary’s. Nor was it. The door was pushed open and Nunn came in with Eleanor. Drenched, weary and full of anxiety as she was—and at that moment none of us knew the tremendous burden under which she laboured—there was something about her so striking that she made a mere onlooker catch the breath. Her face had fined without sharpening during the difficult years that followed Percy Feltham’s death; she was cool and detached, without having lost any of her zest for the adventure of living. Beneath that mask of composure blazed what ardour, what passion, what radiance, what ability to express and to endure. By a gesture of her fine expressive hands, a movement of the beautifully-shaped head, how she could inspire, enthral and sometimes embarrass an audience! All the old sense of being submerged in a rich flood overwhelmed me as she came forward and took my hand, and I noticed the feeling and life throbbing in hers as she did so. The man with her was a perfect foil to her compelling personality. He was short, square, controlled. His voice as he said, “You’re worth a thousand Hilarys and I refuse to allow you to wear yourself out for a worthless young woman like that,” didn’t betray a trace of anxiety. No one would have suspected that he had been tramping over drenched and concealed moors for the past two hours. In his own way he was as striking as she. It was easy to believe he was what is called a self-made man. There was about him some lack of finish, something difficult to describe, but whose absence was immediately apparent. But, if he hadn’t got breeding, which is inborn, he had something better still, and that was personality. You saw how he’d built up his big concern. His face was like one of his own plate-glass windows, displaying the iron resolution, the integrity and courage that had never known what it was to feel dismayed. He’d struggled; there had been a time when, after ten years’ work, he had had to abandon his dreams and go into employment with a man whose methods he despised, but he’d gone on building. He wasn’t a man you could ever tire or wear down. I could see the irresistible fascination he would have for a woman like Eleanor. In short, they were a fine couple. But with such a man at call I wondered what on earth it was that had induced Eleanor to send me that frantic, despairing note.
Jeremy was just proposing to go out and lend the unknown Dennis a hand when the fellow himself appeared. As Meriel Ross had told us, he wore a grey suit and a black tie. He wasn’t, somehow, at all the kind of man I had supposed Hilary would attract; and certainly not the kind I had anticipated would attract her. For one thing, he must have been nearly twice her age (subsequently I learnt that he was thirty-eight), a pleasant, short-sighted, fair-haired chap, not in the least good-looking, but with an attractive voice and manner, an Irishman, casual, irresponsible and cool. He murmured to Nunn, “No luck yet? I should like to shake that child till her eyes drop out. Oh, thank you, sir.” That was still to Nunn, who shoved a hot drink into his hand.
“You’d better have something to eat now you are back,” his host continued, but Dennis, smiling, shook his head.
“I don’t think so, sir. Bad habit to go prowling on wet moors immediately after a heavy meal. B-besides, Hilary m-might think it heartless. And I d-don’t want to find her for the pleasure of l-losing her again.”
“I should imagine if you want her you’re welcome to her,” remarked Nunn, and I was astounded at the animosity in his voice.
Meriel Ross had disappeared, and I realised that beneath her surface manner of naïve helplessness was a strong streak of common sense. Now she returned with a plate of sandwiches that she thrust into Dennis’s hands.
“You won’t go another step till you’ve eaten all those,” she said, sternly, and at once he set to. Eleanor was talking to Jeremy, whom she had recognised.
“It’s no use your trying to seduce your young policeman away from me,” said Mrs. Ross, instantly. “I’ve got him tight. And, my dear, do try and cultivate a sense of humour. I really fail to see why Hilary should have all the laughs.”
“We haven’t come to that stage yet,” said Nunn, in a curt voice. “Are you really going out, Freyne?”
“I thought perhaps Dennis and I might go together,” said Jeremy. “I know these moors pretty well; I know the short cuts and I know the places where Hilary might conceivably try to shelter if she lost her way.”
Nunn didn’t want Dennis to go out again. He suggested that, if anyone must go, Jeremy and I might do our turn and give the other fellows a rest. But he might as well have tried to budge a young tank as move either of them.
Nunn looked angry. “I can see I’m wasting my words on you,” he said. “It’s obvious how it is with you both. But you’ll rest here and eat something solid before you go. I don’t mean to send out stretcher-parties before midnight.”
He and I and Dennis and Jeremy went out of the room together, leaving Meriel Ross and Eleanor alone. Dennis went upstairs for dry footgear, and the rest of us turned into the dining-room.
“There may have been an accident,” Jeremy was saying, more urgently than he had yet spoken. I fancy he was a little nonplussed by his host’s attitude.
“Serve her right if there is. But I doubt it. That young woman always falls on her feet—or someone else’s.”
“Oh, come, sir,” Jeremy protested. “You aren’t really blaming her for missing her road in a confounded fog like this.”
“I’m blaming her for being out in it at all, or taking Dennis out. I’ve seen my wife make herself ill over this young woman, and the rest of you propose to beat the heather all night. Which is what I should like to do to her.”
Jerry looked at him inquiringly.
“Yes,” reiterated Nunn, in his curt, equable voice. “I consider she’s behaved extremely badly. That fellow takes it much too quietly. She’s had her head too long, that’s the trouble. Comes of not having a father, I suppose. If she belonged to me I’d take a slipper to her for upsetting the house like this. And, of course, all you young poops encourage her.”
I was surprised to hear Jeremy chuckle, as he said, “I’ve often felt that way myself, sir.”
Nunn’s severity relaxed. “It’s a pity you’re not going to marry her,” he remarked.
“Oh, but I am,” said Jeremy, coolly. “You’ve said yourself that Dennis wouldn’t be good for her. And I agree.”
At that moment Dennis came back in dry footgear, carrying a rather noisome-looking lantern.
“May I ask how far you intend to go to-night?” Nunn asked him.
“As far as we can. You know the extent of these m-moors? We haven’t gone over a t-tenth of them yet.”
“Well, Freyne’s coming to direct you.”
At the name I saw Dennis give a little start, and then he smiled.
“My p-patron saint,” he murmured.
For a moment I thought it was a new version of the old expletive, “My sainted aunt!” but it wasn’t.
“What the devil d’you mean?” Jeremy wanted to know.
“I beg your pardon. That slipped out. I was brought up in a f-frightfully ecclesiastical home. My father was a p-parson, and when I was a kid every C-Christmas we used to put a p-penny in the box and take a card. And the card had the p-picture of a saint on it, and his p-particular virtue on the back. All that year you had to p-practise that p-particular virtue. My father saw to it that we did, too. You know the k-kind of thing—p-patience or p-perseverance and so forth. And he became your p-patron saint for that year. Hilary’s always held you up as a model of all the virtues she admires, and I’m supposed to be trying to m-model myself on you. You see?” His smile was charming. For all his superior years he seemed almost shy. But I had begun to wonder how far this was a surface manner. He wasn’t a fool, that was certain. And in spite of my friendship with Jeremy I couldn’t help hoping this chap would get his own way. Besides, it would leave Jeremy free for a bit longer, an excellent plan to my thinking.
“You won’t be able to feel your feet in the morning,” said Nunn, dubiously.
Dennis shook his head and smiled. “I’ve been on a m-motor-bicycle,” he reassured us. “A chap at the garage lent me one.”
“Where is it now?”
“It b-broke down,” admitted Dennis, apologetically. “It’s somewhere on the moor.”
“Then you can’t use it again?”
“I d-don’t want to. To tell you the t-truth, I’m rather alarmed by the brute. It slips about so. But now I’m going on foot. It’s much s-safer, and I think it’s more certain. I’ve just got this lantern. It never goes out, they say, even if it’s dropped in a pond, and the l-light is p-peculiarly brilliant.” He flashed it on our faces and we all staggered, looking as yellow as guineas.
“I thought you wouldn’t mind my coming with you, as you don’t know the moors,” observed Jeremy. “Perhaps I ought to tell you that I’m proposing to marry Hilary myself.”
“Well, we can’t either of us marry her to-night,” said Dennis, sensibly. “We might l-let that little matter stand over till we have her back.”
“How’s the fog?” asked Nunn.
“Oh, lifting,” returned Dennis cheerily. “It’s been l-lifting for some time. It’s begun to r-rain now. Quite nice s-straight rain.”
He opened the front door, and we all looked out. The fog was really dispersing at last, hanging in long yellow wisps over the soaked heather, and a heavy rain had begun to fall. Dennis and Jeremy buttoned up their collars and went out. I hadn’t offered to go. I knew my accursed weakness too well. That unsound leg of mine would let me down before I’d covered a couple of miles. It lost no opportunity of reminding me that my A1 days were over.
“I suppose that fellow wants to commit suicide,” growled Nunn, ringing and telling his butler that what was left of the party would now dine. “Looking over an indescribable area for a problematical corpse. The next thing is they’ll both disappear as well. It’s a damnable night; the mud sucks over your ankles at every step. And if and when she’s found, they’ll fuss over her as if she had a million dollars for each of them in her two hands.”
I felt unequal to discussing Hilary with him, and he brooded, while we waited for the women. Suddenly he broke out, “I’m not denying there’s some purpose in all this. That girl generally has a reason for the things she does. And it’s no use most of the time trying to understand a woman’s reasons for doing things. They haven’t got the same standards as we have, and I doubt if they ever will. I tell you, Keith, I’m always getting the shock of my life at the things perfectly decent women will do without turning a hair. And they raise Cain at what seem to us the merest trifles. That young woman’s running a crooked course. If there’s anything wrong she ought to tell Dennis.”
“Perhaps she daren’t,” I suggested feebly, trying to think of something that would frighten Hilary.
“Then she’s no right to get herself engaged to him. We have a right to expect moral courage in our women. I don’t blame them for jumping if they see a mouse, or raising a tired man just when he’s got to sleep, because there’s a beetle under the bed. That’s their nature. But moral courage is one of their natural virtues, like—like long hair. I’ve sometimes thought it’s partly because they’re less sensitive than we are, and they have a hatred of being thought like anyone else. A woman will own up at any time to being different from other people; she’d be furious if you classed her with a whole lot of other women. But a man tries to look as much of a sheep as all the other sheep he grazes with. It’s the way the creatures are made. Male and female created He them, seeing farther than we. And a damned sight farther, we’ll hope.” Then his voice changed once more; the speculative tone left it, and he became impassioned. Clearly he felt very deeply on this point, and I wondered where the source of that feeling lay. I couldn’t quite believe that Hilary had roused him to this pitch. “If it really is something wrong, then it’s something Dennis ought to know. A girl has no right to marry if there’s something behind her she daren’t let her husband hear. She ought to trust him outright and take her fences clean. I don’t like this underhand dealing. It’s all wrong, and more than that, it doesn’t pay. It doesn’t pay in business, and it doesn’t pay in love.”
Some impulse made me turn my head at that moment, and I saw Eleanor standing in the doorway. She and Meriel Ross must have crossed the hall together, and have heard Nunn’s last words. I have never seen an expression so tragic, so terrible, so full of an incalculable despair on any face as I saw on Eleanor’s then. For an instant she remained motionless, without colour or even vitality, like some woman slain upon her feet. Then she recovered; slowly one saw the life creep back into the body. It was like watching some marvellous piece of machinery awake to action. She spoke, slowly at first, with gradual movements of her arms and hands; then the blood flowed more quickly and eagerly, until by the time the meal was half over she appeared her normal self.
But not to me. I could not forget that expression, tense, secretly alarmed, that had transfixed her for an instant in the doorway. And I realised then that whatever Hilary’s secret was it was in some way bound up with Eleanor’s life.