The dark eyes of the elder woman questioned her sharply. "How
strange--how very strange it should have been sent on here!"
"My husband knew I was coming to make--a long call. He sent it on."
Mrs Jones sat down again before her tea-tray, and in the speaking eyes
was a dawning of suspicion--"I hope nothing is the matter?" she said.
"You will read your telegram, Mrs Macmichel?"
Mrs Macmichel thrust the envelope into the pocket of her coat, and kept
her hand upon it there. "It is from my dressmaker; she is always
bothering," she said.
"But are you sure, as you have not read it?"
"Quite sure. I always know when they come from her."
The hand which seized upon her cup again was shaking. The slice of
bread-and-butter was sodden with the tea which had been spilt on it as
she had put it so hurriedly down. "What were we talking of?" she asked.
"I--it was so interesting. Please go on."
"It was about our dear children," said Mrs Jones slowly. She looked
with a gaze of awakening distrust at her visitor. Her thoughts
evidently turned to her husband. "I will hear if Mr Jones has
returned," she said. "He would be so sorry to miss you----"
She put out her hand to the bell. Mrs Macmichel stopped her hurriedly.
"Don't ring!" she said, in the loud voice of alarm. "Please! I will
stay till Mr Jones comes back, however long he is away. I promise."
Ah, if he would only come! Only half an hour lived through of the two
hours yet! Yet, for worlds she would not be present at the meeting of
the wife and husband, who then would--know!
"I will stay, if you will let me go the very instant he comes," she
added. "If you tell me when you see him coming up the garden path, I
will run."
"He is here!" Mrs Jones said, with an air of relief. "I heard the
garden-gate; I know his step----"
Oh, not for ten worlds would Flora, who had ever shunned the sight of
pain, see that meeting! She almost flung her teacup from her. She
seized the other's hand.
"Good-bye! oh, good-bye!" she said; "I cannot possibly stay another
minute. I am so sorry! Oh, Mrs Jones, will you please remember, I am
nearly dead with sorrow--but I must go."
"She is certainly mad," said the other woman to herself. She was so
astonished that she forgot to rise from her chair, but sat looking
after her vanishing guest with eyes wide with dismay.
On the doorstep the clergyman and the lady encountered. He was panting
as one, all unaccustomed to such exercise, who had run. There was a
look of famished eagerness in his eyes, the unhealthy pallor of his
face was beaded with drops of sweat.
"They told me--at the office--a telegram had been sent," he said.
She snatched it from her pocket and put it in his hand. "I kept it from
her," she said. "Take it, and let me go."
And yet she could not go.
His shaking fingers had torn open the envelope, had clutched the
enclosure. It wavered so, that, standing behind him, she put her arms
round his arms--tall woman as she was--her hands over his, and helped
him to steady it.
"Read it," he said to her; "I can't--I can't see."
So she read aloud to him, in a voice that rose on a note of triumph and
finished in a sob, the single line of the message!
"Not on board the _Doughty_. Tell mother all right."
Mrs Jones, coming to the dining-room door, looked out for one instant
on her husband, apparently clutched in Mrs Macmichel's embrace. In the
next, the lady was speeding with her long stride down the path to the
gate; the clergyman had staggered into a hall chair, a succession of
sounds, something between sobs and hiccoughs, issuing from his throat.
"My dear, has she hurt you?" his wife cried excitedly. "She is
mad--quite mad, I am sure!"
* * * * *
Her husband, catching sight of Mrs Macmichel's face as she entered,
followed her upstairs to her room. She was lying, dressed as she was,
on her bed, with her face hidden.
"My dear, what is the matter? What have you been doing with yourself?"
he asked.
She had been to the Rectory, to call on the Joneses, she told him.
"Well?"
"The _Doughty_ has gone down. All on board lost."
"So I hear. Well?"
"It was their son's ship."
"Well?"
"Freddy's." She sat up and laughed across the sob in her throat. "You
stupid! I am crying because Freddy did not go down in the _Doughty_,"
she said.
A NERVE CURE
"_Well_, what a place!" Julia cried.
I had come to it because of an urgent need of change, because it was by
the sea, because it was cheap, because the advertisement had caught my
eye at a moment when I was weary of vainly protesting that I wished to
go nowhere except to bed.
"TO LET, during the months of November and December, a six-roomed
cottage; desirable; furnished; free of charge, with exception of
caretaker's wage."
A couple of letters from me, a couple in reply from the owner, who was
going for the winter months abroad, and the affair was settled.
Then my people who--although for ten years I have earned my own living,
and helped to keep some of them who have not earned theirs, although I
am five-and-thirty years of age and an absolutely dependable
person--have never let me have my own way in any single matter,
insisted that Julia should come with me. She is my youngest sister. I
have not a word to say against her, of course; only I know that the
things I am content to put up with are never good enough for Julia.
"Well, _what_ a place!" Julia repeated; the shifting of the accent did
not denote, I was sure, a more favourable view.
It certainly was not a pretty cottage. It was also quite out of the
town, in which we had believed it to be situated, standing at the
extremity of an unfinished road which led halfway across the sandy
waste lying between the town of Starbay and the village of Starcliff.
"A garden, back and front," Miss Ferriman had promised me in one of her
letters. There were the gardens, sure enough, but almost as unfinished
as the road. "An airy situation and uninterrupted view of the sea," the
description had continued, and was faithful as far as it went. The
wind, which happened to be blowing a gale, without obstruction of any
kind to break its force, buffeted us remorselessly as, having descended
from the car which had brought us from the station, we struggled up the
path to the door. Half a mile of blowing sand, with sparse, wiry grass
sticking through, was between us and the breakers; yet the ocean, cold
and lead-coloured, was beyond, and not so much as a finger-breadth of
impediment to check the prospect.
"Well, what a _place_!" said Julia again. "Let's go back, Isabella.
Don't let us go in."
But, once inside, we found the sitting-room which was to be ours
comfortable and prettily furnished; our two bedrooms--there were but
three--were also all that was necessary. Mine faced the sea beyond the
melancholy, level Denes, Julia, to my great content, choosing the one
looking out upon the back. The little back garden with its stunted
shrubs, the unmade road beyond, made a melancholy outlook, but one that
suited Julia better than the sea-view.
"The sight of the sea at this time of year gives me the most awful
feeling," she declared. She rounded her shoulders, and pressed her
hands upon a chest made hollow for the occasion, and her knees gave way
under her, to prove how strongly she was affected.
"Then, why did you come to the sea?" I asked, for I was a little tired
of Julia's grumbling.
"I came to look after you and your nerves, Isabella," she reminded me;
"and how could I possibly know I shouldn't like the sea in November
till I had seen it?"
We had ordered tea to be ready for us, and after our long railway
journey we were more than ready for the meal.
"The woman of the house is a most miserable, frightened-looking
creature," Julia remarked. "It is to be hoped that, at any rate, she
will provide us with decently cooked food."
On this score I had no misgivings. Miss Ferriman, in one of her
letters, had laid special stress upon the fact that Mrs Ragg, the
caretaker, was an excellent cook.
She offered us no solacing specimen of her culinary art, however. The
round table in the bay-window of our sitting-room was spread simply
with the materials for brewing tea and for cutting bread-and-butter.
Julia's eyes blazed with hunger and indignation. "This is your fault,
Isabella!" she declared. "What did you order, pray?"
"Something substantial. It is very annoying," I could not help
confessing.
Julia angrily jingled the little bell. "We want something to eat," she
said, as the caretaker appeared. "Cook us two chops, please; as quickly
as possible."
Mrs Ragg looked at us from the doorway with the same gaze of fascinated
terror with which a half-starved crow might regard two wild cats taking
possession of its cage. With her garments of shabby black, her black
untidy hair, her long beak and startled eyes, she had something of the
appearance of a bedraggled, ill-used bird of that species. Her
trembling, clawlike fingers played with the buttons of her dress; her
chin, a very long and pointed feature, seemed to elongate itself
immensely as her mouth fell; she sucked in the sides of her thin
cheeks, and looked with a helpless imploring gaze from Julia to me.
"You have no chops, I suppose?" I interpreted the beseeching gaze.
She had no chops, she confessed.
"What have you, then?" the unpitying Julia persisted. "What have you
got for our breakfast tomorrow? for our dinner? You have provided
something, no doubt?"
The hollows in each meagre cheek of the caretaker deepened, the effect
of the still further elongating of her chin, the starting eyes turned
from my sister to me.
"Julia," I said, with severity, "it will be better not to have two
Richmonds in the field. I, myself, will, with your permission, give Mrs
Ragg what orders are necessary."
Then, in a tone of severity which should have been at once an
encouragement to Mrs Ragg and a reproach to my sister, I asked to have
some eggs boiled for tea.
There were no eggs.
"Go and fetch some," the irrepressible Julia cried.
"I understood the two ladies were to do their shopping themselves," the
caretaker tremblingly explained.
I said of course we would. "Press not a falling man (or woman) too
far," I quoted to Julia, as, the unhappy Mrs Ragg having left us to
ourselves, we sat down to our bread-and-butter.
Julia, although protesting in the finish that hunger still gnawed her
vitals, ate half the loaf. I, who should have been content to put up
with what remained of it for our morning meal, was unable to control my
sister's raging determination to forage that night for food.
"I refuse to starve," she said.
There was, luckily for us, a full moon, or we might easily have lost
the faintly indicated road, lightly strewn as it was with oyster-shells
and broken bricks, and ploughed through the trackless waste of sandy
desert all night. The outskirts of the town reached, there were several
mean-looking streets to pass through, before we found a shop at which
we thought it desirable to trade. As we walked, buffeted by the wind
blowing in from the sea, Julia discoursed of the caretaker of
Sea-Strand Cottage.
"That, mark my words, is a thoroughly bad woman," she declared. "She
wouldn't be such a forbidding-looking creature unless she was wicked.
It wouldn't be fair on the part of the Almighty to have made her so. I
consider her aspect thoroughly sinister."
"Poor frightened, trembling old wretch!" I said.
"Exactly. Why does she tremble? What is she afraid of? In my opinion
she is intending to murder us in our beds."
"You had better go home the first thing in the morning and leave me to
my fate," I told her. To myself I said I did not believe the world
contained another woman with the worrying capacity of Julia. It was
because she was such a disturbing force in the family that they had
been so eager for her to accompany me, I, not without bitterness,
suspected.
At the shop where we bought our chops for breakfast and a chicken for
dinner, I bethought me to enquire of the young woman at the entering
desk if Mrs Ragg, the caretaker of Sea-Strand Cottage, was known to
her. The reply was quite satisfactory. Their cart had always served the
cottage; the woman in charge was a most respectable person; a couple of
ladies who had taken the cottage in the summer had mentioned that she
was also an excellent cook.
The chops were served to us the next morning charred black, uneatable.
I pointed them out to Julia on her appearing, and, with a view to
deprecating her inevitable wrath, frankly so described them. My sister
regarded the lost hopes of our meal with a preoccupied stare; then
turned upon me with the wide distending of her eyelids which I knew
portended a new worry.
"What sort of a night had you?" she asked.
"Excellent. And you?"
"Frightful. My nerves are all on the stretch, in consequence. I give
you warning, Isabella, if you drop your knife or chink your teacup and
saucer I shall scream aloud."
"You didn't sleep?"
"Not a wink."
"Were there noises to disturb you?"
"Not a sound. That was it! Not a din, Isabella."
"That's all right, then."
"Is it? You know my room?--just a lath-and-plaster partition between it
and hers--that woman's. I ought to have heard every movement, even if
she turned in her bed."
"It was very thoughtful of Mrs Ragg to lie so still."
"She was not there, Isabella."
"Not there?"
"I'd stake my life on it. It worried me so at last--I _had_ to listen,
you know--that I got up and put my ear against the partition. The
deadest stillness!"
"But even if she was not there, I don't see it is so very alarming."
"She says she was. I asked her just now if she was sleeping next to me,
and she said yes."
"She was, then."
"She wasn't."
I poured out the tea with impatience. What a constant worry Julia was!
Without appearing to cast a backward thought upon the chops, she
buttered herself a piece of toast.
"Of course, at last, I did fall asleep," she admitted. "And that was
the worst of all. Isabella, I dreamt of that horrible little room next
to mine, and of the reason it was so still."
"Well?"
"I dreamt there was a dead woman in it."
I laughed at that, and Julia, pausing in the act of taking a bite from
her toast, glared angrily at me.
"You are a nice, soothing sort of person to be sent away with one
supposed to be in want of cheering influences!" I said. "You and your
dream of a dead woman!"
"I dreamt one was there," Julia said, going on with her toast. "In my
opinion one _was_ there," she added, doggedly.
When she had finished her breakfast, and had withdrawn her thoughts
from the engrossing subject of her dream sufficiently to grumble about
the aching void where the chops should have been, she sprang up from
the table and loudly tinkled the little bell.
"For Mrs Ragg to clear away," she explained to me. "While she is doing
so, and you, Isabella, keep her attention engaged on things below, I am
going upstairs to have a look at her bedroom."
"Absurd!" I ejaculated.
"Aren't you absurd?" Julia cried, and turned upon me with scorn. "To
take up your abode in a little cut-throat hole like this and not to
take the commonest precaution!"
She flew upstairs, then, and Mrs Ragg was in the room.
In order to obey my sister's injunction to keep the woman's attention I
began to talk to her, asking her how long she had lived in Sea-Strand
Cottage. I had just gathered from her grudging, mumbling speech that
she had lived there since the cottage was built, when my sister was in
the room again.
Julia watched the caretaker shovel the things on to the tray, and,
sighing bitterly the while, drag wearily out of the room with them. She
turned to me, then, with a nod eloquent.
"Locked," she enunciated. "The door was locked. Why--why should the
woman want to lock her bedroom door when she is out of it?"
"She returns the compliment you have paid her, and thinks you not to be
trusted," I suggested.
"If I have to climb on the roof and pull off the tiles, I'll see what
is in that room before I go to bed tonight!" Julia declared.
Then Mrs Ragg came back for the tablecloth.
"I slept very badly last night, Mrs Ragg," said Julia.
Mrs Ragg sucked in her cheeks, sighed heavily, made no answer.
"And so did you, I'm afraid. You were very restless. You walked about
half the night."
"Me, miss?" She had folded the cloth, but she dropped it from her
shaking, awkward hands, stooped to recover it, dropped it again.
"Begging your pardon, no, miss."
"Who, then?" Julia asked inflexibly.
The woman turned away with the cloth and shuffled hastily to the door.
"Wait," commanded Julia. "Who, then? There was no one else in your
bedroom besides you, I suppose?"
Mrs Ragg hurriedly rejected the insinuation. She had had a pain in her
chest, she remembered now, and had got up for remedies.
"Of course you heard me rapping on the wall and asking you to keep
still? You heard that, at least, Mrs Ragg?"
"Yes," Mrs Ragg had heard that, certainly. She admitted the fact as if
it had been a sin, with a look of actual horror upon her face.
"You heard?" asked Julia of me in a kind of triumph as we were alone.
"There was not a sound through all the night. I never rapped upon the
wall. Now, why is she lying? It may be nothing to you, but I mean to
know."
Once more that morning, coming from our own rooms, dressed for walking,
Julia tried the caretaker's door. Finding it fast, shook it, and turned
from doing so to find Mrs Ragg, arrived on the scene in her felt shoes,
standing behind her.
"Asking your pardon, miss, that is my room," the woman said; with a
feeble kind of offence she went and put herself before the door.
"We have hired the cottage; I presume we have the right to look even
into your room, if we deem it advisable," Julia said, with her
haughtiest air. "So, you always keep your room locked, Mrs Ragg?"
"When strangers are about I do," Mrs Ragg replied; and although she was
apparently afraid of us she gazed upon us with no goodwill.
As we left the house, Julia called my attention to the fact that the
blind in the room next to her own was drawn. "All the same, I don't
sleep again beneath your Mrs Ragg's roof till I've been into her
bedroom," she declared.
I had come to Starbay for the benefit of the sea. Julia, however, would
not allow me to make nearer acquaintance with it than that possible
from my window, but dragged me into the town again. We put down our
names at one of the circulating libraries, and, it coming on to rain,
could think of no better than to go upstairs to the reading-room.
It happened to have only one other occupant. A man of early middle-age,
who, with the marks of delicate health upon him, had a face which, like
that of "my Uncle Toby's," invited confidence.
Julia, for a minute, as we settled to read, looked across the table at
him with her direct, sea-green gaze; then turned to her paper and
looked no more until she put the paper down and began to talk to him.
It was easy enough to begin with a question about a certain magazine.
"Did they take it there?" and to follow on with half a dozen enquiries
about the town, and the objects of interest in the neighbourhood. I
listened for a minute or two, reflecting how to my young sister any
human document, however casually picked up, exceeded in interest the
finest book ever written, then went on with an article on Education in
which I happened to be interested. I roused myself from my abstraction
to hear Julia mentioning to the strange man the name of Sea-Strand
Cottage as our abode, and describing in her exaggerated fashion its
location and appearance.
"At the utmost end of Everywhere, and looking like secret
assassination, nothing less, when you get there," my sister was saying.
The man, as it happened, knew the place well. "It was the advertisement
of Sea-Strand Cottage which brought me to Starbay," he said. "But when
I saw the place, I----"
"You didn't like it! No more did I!" Julia said.
"However, the caretaker seemed a comfortable sort of body, and I was
assured an excellent cook," the man continued.
Julia, her hands in her coat-pockets, bent her supple body forward
across the table, bringing her eager face nearer to the stranger's.
"Did you see her?--Mrs Ragg?" she asked.
He had seen her.
"Well?"
"She seemed all right," he said; and Julia lay back, disappointed, in
her chair again.
"To me she seems all wrong," she said.
When I thought the conversation had lasted long enough I took Julia
away from the library. Mrs Ragg had declared herself unable to have our
meal ready before three o'clock in the afternoon. We went into a
pastry-cook's therefore, and Julia ate a fair supply of tarts and
custards, and insisted on taking away with her a selection from the
store. "You keep yourself in hand for the chicken cooked by Mrs Ragg; I
intend to be independent of it," she said, and walked home with her
indigestible provender.
As we neared Sea-Strand Cottage we saw, coming towards it from the
opposite direction, our new acquaintance of the reading-room. We met by
the gate.
"I have to do a constitutional of so many prescribed miles every
morning," he said. "After our conversation just now, I naturally bent
my steps in this direction."
"Do walk this way sometimes," Julia said, flashing her smile upon him.
"If, after a few days, you should see nothing of us, you might bring a
policeman with you and search for our remains."
He smiled too, and said he would certainly do so. "I saw two or three
men here as I went by, just now," he said; "they might have been the
assassins you are expecting, but they looked uncommonly like every-day
carpenters and workmen."
"Coming out of the house, do you mean? _Men?_" Julia asked, instantly
on the alert.
"Not from the house--from the outhouse," he corrected and nodded in its
direction.
Julia and I had inspected this empty outhouse that morning, and had
decided to have our travelling-cases moved there. As our eyes turned
towards it now, Mrs Ragg came out from it and softly closed the door
behind her.
"This is the Mrs Ragg about whose desirability we disagree," Julia told
the stranger, who, with his hand to his hat, was bowing to us and
moving on. He stopped for a moment, looked at the caretaker, looked
back to us with a smile.
"The mystery is solved. Your Mrs Ragg and mine are not the same
person," he said.
* * * * *
Julia, who had been round to the back of the house to make inspection,
came running to me with the news that the blind was up in the
caretaker's bedroom, and the window open.
"There is a ladder against the outhouse," she said. "You must come and
help me to fix it, Isabella, and stand on the bottom rung while I climb
to the window."
There was no need for such extreme measures, however. Going upstairs to
escape from my sister's importunity, I found the door of the hitherto
locked room invitingly open. This intelligence being communicated to
Julia, she came rushing upstairs, and dragged me unwillingly into Mrs
Ragg's bedroom with her.
A most commonplace, mean-looking room, the wind blowing through it from
open window to open door. The bed still unmade, but the square box of a
place otherwise clean and tidy.
"What a home of mystery!" I said, with fine sarcasm, to Julia. "Where's
your corpse, my dear?"
Julia gazed with great eyes round the little depressing place. "It
really is exactly like," she said slowly. "The bed stood just there.
But on it, you know, Isabella--on it----"
She shuddered, and gripped my arm. "My teeth chatter. Come away," she
said.
She was generous enough to share her confectionery with me, and her
forethought in bringing it was amply justified. Mrs Ragg had been so
much occupied all the morning that she had forgotten to put the chicken
in the oven until she saw us at the gate, she told us.
"Of course we can't put up with this. We will leave to-morrow," Julia
declared. But I, who had paid the caretaker a week's salary in advance,
was of opinion we should have a little more for our money.
"Put the chicken back in the oven, and I will see to the cooking of
it," Julia said, when we had sufficiently contemplated the more than
half-raw carcase of the fowl. "My sister is an invalid," she continued;
"I am anxious that she should not be quite starved. I will cook the
chicken therefore, and you will be responsible, perhaps, for the
bread-sauce, Mrs Ragg."
The woman, looking alarmedly at her, murmured the word "bread-sauce?"
and sucked in her cheeks.
"You know how to make bread-sauce, Mrs Ragg?"
Mrs Ragg had to confess she did not.