WE SEEK "THE REFUGE"
WE (Mr. Jessop and I) drove slowly to the first post-office.
There we both alighted. And I in my impatience fairly flung myself
against the long counter with its wirework screen that fenced off the
post-office girls.
They stared curiously at the anxious-looking young woman in black and
the grey-clad, unmistakably American young man, who both at once began
to make inquiries about a certain telegram which had been handed in
there at half-past seven o'clock the evening before.
"Are you the person to whom the telegram was addressed?" one of the
girls asked almost suspiciously.
"Yes. I am Miss Smith. You see! Here is an envelope addressed to me at
the Hotel Cecil," I said, feverishly producing that envelope (it
belonged to Mr. Brace's last note to me). "Can you tell me who handed in
this message?"
"I couldn't, I'm sure," said the girl who had spoken suspiciously. "I
was off last evening before six."
"Can you tell me who was here?" I demanded, fuming at the delay.
The girls seemed blissfully unaware that this was a matter of life and
death to me.
"Miss Carfax was here, I believe," volunteered one of the other girls,
in the "parcels" division of the long counter.
I asked eagerly: "Which is Miss Carfax, please?"
"Just gone to her lunch," the two girls replied at once. "Won't be back
until two o'clock."
"Oh, dear!" I fretted. Then a third girl spoke up.
"Let's have a look at that wire, dear, will you?" she said to the
parcels girl. "I think I remember Miss Carfax taking this in. Yes.
That's right. 'Why ever don't you send my clothes, Miss Million?' I
remember us passing the remark afterwards what an uncommon name
'Million' was."
"Oh, do you! How splendid!" I said, all eagerness at once. "Then you
remember the young lady who telegraphed?"
"Yes----"
"A small, rather stumpy young lady," I pursued. "Nice-looking, with
bright grey eyes and black hair? She was dressed in a cerise evening
frock with a----"
The post-office girl shook her head behind the wire screen.
"No; that wasn't the one."
"How stupid of me; no, of course, she wouldn't be still wearing the
evening frock," I amended hastily. "But she was dark-haired, and
short----"
Again the post-office girl shook her head.
"Shouldn't call her short," she said. "Taller than me."
"Dark, though," I insisted. "Black hair."
"Oh, no," said the post-office girl decidedly. "That wasn't her. Red
hair. Distinctly red."
"Are you sure," I said, in dismay, "that you haven't made a mistake?"
"Oh, no," said the post-office girl, still more decidedly. "I've seen
her about, often. I know the colour of her hair. You know, Daisy,"
turning to another of the girls, "that one from the 'Refuge.'"
"There's so many from the 'Refuge' come in here," said the maddening
girl she had called Daisy.
"Yes, but you know the one. Rather strikingly dressed always. Lots of
scent, makes herself up. Her with the hair. The one we call 'Autumn
Tints.'"
"'Autumn Tints'--oh, yes, I know her----"
"Yes, we know her," chorused the other girls, while I fidgeted,
crumpling Million's baffling wire in my hand. "That's the lady who sent
off the telegram. I couldn't be mistaken."
Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, at my side, interposed.
"Well, now, will you young ladies be so kind as to tell us where she
resides? The 'Refuge'--what'll that be?"
We had, it seemed, still some distance to go. We must take the road that
went so, then turn to the right, then to the left again. Then about a
mile further down we'd see a red brick house in a clump of trees, with a
big garden and green palings on to the road. It had "The Refuge" painted
up on a board nailed to a big oak tree in the garden. We shouldn't be
able to mistake it, said the girls.
"Certainly you won't mistake it if you see any of the 'Refugees' in the
garden when you come up," hazarded the most talkative of the post-office
girls.
"It's a case of 'Once seen, never to be forgotten,' there!"
As we went out of the office I found myself wondering more and more
anxiously what all this might mean. What sort of a place had Million got
herself into the middle of?
"What do you think it all means?" I turned again appealingly to the
young man who was driving me.
He shook his grey-hatted head. His face was rather graver than before.
Mercy! What were we going to find? What did he think? Evidently he
wasn't going to tell me.
Only when we got clear of the straggling outskirts of Lewes he crammed
on speed. Up the gradual hills we flew between the bare shoulders of the
downs where the men and horses working in the fields afar off looked as
small as mechanical toys. The whole country was gaunt and gigantic, and
a little frightening, to me. Perhaps this was because my nerves were
already utterly overstrained and anxious. I could see no beauty in the
wideswept Sussex landscape, with the little obsolete-looking villages
set down here and there, like a child's building of bricks, in the midst
of a huge carpet.
There seemed to me something uncanny and ominous in the tinkling of the
sheep-bells that the fresh breeze allowed to drift to our ears.
On we whizzed, and by what miracle we escaped police-traps I do not
know.... We took the turns of our directions, and at last I heard a
short, relieved sort of exclamation from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop.
"Here we are. This'll be it, I guess." For here were the dark-green
towers of elms set back from the road. A red roof and old-fashioned
chimney-stacks showed among them. There was a garden in front, with tall
Mary-lilies and pink-and-white phlox and roses and carnations and thrift
that grew down to the palings.
And close up beside those palings there was drawn a pale-blue car that I
knew well--too well!
It was the car with the silver-winged Victory as mascot! The car in
which we'd been followed and shadowed for so much of our journey by the
Honourable Jim Burke.
He was here, then! He was before us!
What had he to do with the "Refuge"?
Sounds of singing greeted us as we left the car, pushed open the
green-palinged gate, and walked up the pebbled path between the
flower-beds of the garden. Some one behind the lilac bushes was singing,
in a very clear, touching voice, a snatch of the ballad: "Oh, ye'll tak'
the high road and I'll tak' the low road, and I'll be in Scotland before
ye...."
A turn in the garden path brought us full upon the singer. A wonderful
apparition indeed she was! As tall as any woman I had seen (excepting
the long-limbed cobra-lady), and the June sun shone on a head of hair
that was as bright as a bed of marigolds--red hair, but not all the same
kind of red. It was long and loose in the breeze, and it fell to the
singer's waist in a shower of red-gold, covering her face and hiding
most of her bodice, which appeared to be a sort of flimsy muslin
dressing-jacket. Her skirt was very makeshift and of brown holland. The
stockings she wore were white thread, and her shoes were just navy-blue
felt bedroom slippers, with jaeger turn-overs to them. In fact, her
whole appearance was négligée in the extreme. Who--what could she be?
She looked a cross between a mermaid and a scarecrow. She was holding
one hank of red-gold out against her arm, as a shop assistant measures
silk, and she crunched along the garden path, still singing in that
delicious voice: "But I and my true love will never meet again, on the
bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond!" Blinded by her hair and the stream
of sunlight, she nearly walked straight into us before she discovered
that there was any one there on the path at all.
"I beg your pardon," began Mr. Hiram P. Jessop with his usual
politeness. "Could you inform us----"
The singing mermaid gave a little "ow" of consternation, and tossed back
some of the hair from her face.
It was a disappointing sight, rather, for what we saw was a round,
full-mooney, rather foolish face, with a large pink mouth, but no other
definite features. The eyes were pale blue, the cheeks were paler pink,
and the eyebrows and eyelashes looked as if they had been washed away in
a shower of rain.
Altogether, a thoroughly weird apparition it was who stared at us, and
giggled, and said, in a very Cockney accent: "Oh, good Gollywog! another
man! There's no getting away from them in this place this morning. And
there was I thinking I had found a quiet spot to dry my hair in!"
"I am very sorry to intrude," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop in his most
courteous voice. "Could you inform me, Madam, if this is the house they
call The Refuge?"
"That's right," said the woman with the hair. And I found myself
suddenly wondering if she were the lady that those post-office girls had
nicknamed "Autumn Tints."
It was most appropriate, with those reds and golds and bronzes of the
hair that must have been sufficiently striking had it not been "treated"
with henna, as it had.
So I said eagerly, and without further preamble: "Oh, then, could you
tell me if Miss Million is here?"
"I couldn't, dear, really," said the woman, who looked all washed-out
excepting her hair. "There is such a lot of them that keep coming and
going here! Like a blessed beehive, isn't it? Bothered if I can keep
track of all their names!"
She paused a moment before she went on.
"Miss Million--now which would she be?"
I felt a chill of despair creeping over my heart.
What did she mean by saying that "so many of them" kept coming and going
in this place?
This, combined with the comments of those post-office girls at Lewes,
awoke in my mind one terrifying conclusion. This place with the peaceful
garden and the pretty name----! There was something uncanny about it....
This place was a lunatic asylum!
Yes, I did not see what else on earth it could possibly be! And then
this woman with the vacuous face and the wild hair, and still wilder
kind of attire, she, without doubt, was one of the patients!
What in the world was my poor little Million doing in this galley,
provided she was here at all?
And who brought her here? And what was the Honourable Jim's car doing
out there? Could he have been so disgraceful as to have got her brought
here for the purpose of rescuing her himself, and of earning her undying
gratitude as well as the riches of her uncle? Oh, what a horrible
trick....
Rather than that I felt that I would gladly see the money all go over to
Miss Million's cousin! That big young man stood there looking as puzzled
as I did, glancing doubtfully, almost apprehensively, at the woman with
the wild attire.
I attacked her again, with more firmness this time.
"I think Miss Million must be here," I said. "She sent me a telegram,
and they told me at the post-office place that it was----"
"Oh! her that sent the telegram, was it? That's the young lady you want?
I know, I took the telegram myself," said the woman with the
autumn-foliage hair. "It was a girl who turned up here with nothing but
an evening gown and a light coat the day before yesterday; a dark girl,
short."
"That would be the one," I cried with the utmost eagerness. "Is
she----Oh, is she still here?"
"She's here, all right," said the woman with the hair. "My word! She
wasn't half in a paddy, I can tell you, because she could not get her
maid or whoever it was to send down her things from London. Nothing but
what she stood up in, and having to borrow, and no one with a thing to
fit her! She is here, all right!" Relieved, but not completely relieved
until I should have heard more of Million's adventures, I said: "I am
her maid. I have brought down her things. Would you be so kind as to
tell me where I should find Miss Million?"
"She will be in the house, having her dinner now," said the poor
red-haired lunatic quite kindly. "You will excuse me coming in with you
myself, dear, won't you? There is a strange gentleman in there come in
that other car, and I have not had time to go and get myself dressed
yet. I made sure I should have all the morning to myself to get my hair
done. Such a time it does take me," she added, shaking it out with an
air of vanity, and, indeed, she had something to be vain of. "It isn't
everybody I like to see me like this. I am never one to be careless
about my appearance when there are gentlemen about. They never think any
more of a girl" (poor creature, she was at least forty) "for things of
that kind. I am sure I had no more idea that there was another gentleman
coming in, and me with my hair like this! Of course, as I always say,
well! it's my own hair! Not like some girls that have to have a haystack
on their heads before they're fit to look at, as well as a switch all
round...."
It really seemed as if she was going on with this "mildly mental"
chatter for as long as we chose to listen.
So I gave one glance at Miss Million's cousin, meaning, "Shall we go?"
He nodded gravely back at me. Then, leaving the red-haired lunatic on
the path, shaking her tresses in the sun, we went on between the lilac
bushes with their undergrowth of lilies and stocks and pinks until we
came to the house.
The house was a regular Sussex farm sort of looking place that had
evidently been turned into a more modern dwelling-house place. There
were bright red curtains at all the white-sashed windows, which were
wide open. There were window-boxes with lobelia and canary-creeper and
geraniums. As I say, all the windows were flung wide open, and from out
of them I heard issuing such a babble of mixed noises as I don't think I
had ever heard since I was last in the parrot-house at the Zoo. There
were shrill voices talking; there was clattering of knives and forks
against crockery. These sounds alternated with such bursts of
unrestrained laughter that now I was perfectly certain that my suspicion
outside in the garden had been a correct one. Yes! This place could be
nothing but some institution for the mentally afflicted.
And this--and this was where Million had been spirited off to!
Setting my teeth, and without another glance at the increasingly grave
face of my companion, I ran up the two shallow stone steps to the big
open front door, and rang the bell. The tinkling of it was quite drowned
by the bursts of hysterical merriment that was issuing from the door on
the left of us.
"They can't hear us through that Bedlam," was Mr. Jessop's very
appropriate comment. "See here, Miss Smith, as it appears to be mostly
ladies I shan't be wanted, I guess. Supposing you go easy into the
porch and knock on that door while I wait out here on the steps?"
This I did.
I knocked hard in my desperation. No answer but fresh bursts of
laughter, fresh volumes of high-pitched talk. Suddenly I seemed to catch
through it a deep-voiced masculine murmur with an intonation that I
knew--the caressing Irish inflection of Mr. James Burke.
"What divilment is he up to now, I wonder?" I thought exasperatedly, and
my annoyance at the very thought of that man nerved me to knock really
peremptorily on the sturdy panels of the door.
Then at last I got an answer.
"Don't stand knocking there like an idiot, come in," shrieked the
highest-pitched of all the parrot voices. Giving myself a mental shake,
in I went.
I found myself in a big brown distempered room, with a long white table
running down the centre of it. The place seemed full to overflowing with
two elements--one, the overpowering smell of dinner, i. e., pork and
greens and boiled potatoes, and stout; two, a crowd of girls and women
who looked to me absolutely numberless. They were all more or less
pretty, these girlish faces. And they were all turned to me with
wide-open eyes and parted lips. Out of this sea of faces there appeared
to be just two that I recognised as I gazed round. One was the laughing,
devil-may-care face of the Honourable Jim, who sat with a long peg glass
in front of him, at the bottom of the table.