THE
TERRIFORD MYSTERY
BOOKS BY
MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES
LIFE AND LETTERS OF CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH, PRINCESS PALATINE
THE HEART OF PENELOPE
BARBARA REBELL
THE PULSE OF LIFE
THE UTTERMOST FARTHING
STUDIES IN WIVES
WHEN NO MAN PURSUETH
JANE OGLANDER
THE CHINK IN THE ARMOUR
MARY PECHELL
STUDIES IN LOVE AND IN TERROR
THE LODGER
THE END OF HER HONEYMOON
TOLD IN GALLANT DEEDS: A CHILD’S HISTORY OF THE WAR
GOOD OLD ANNA
THE RED CROSS BARGE
LILLA: A PART OF HER LIFE
OUT OF THE WAR
LOVE AND HATRED
THE LONELY HOUSE
FROM THE VASTY DEEP
THE TERRIFORD MYSTERY
THE TERRIFORD MYSTERY
BY
MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES
[Illustration: logo]
“Tattlers also, and busy-bodies, speaking things which they ought not.”
—_I. Tim v. 13._
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1924
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY THE CHICAGO DAILY NEWS CO.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
_First Edition_
THE TERRIFORD MYSTERY
PROLOGUE
Terriford village, a peaceful, exquisite corner of old England. Houses,
cottages, and great raftered barns spread over a rising stretch of what
was once primeval woodland. No dwelling-place is less than fifty years
old and many are of much older date.
At the apex of the broad, well-kept village street stands the
pre-Reformation gray stone church. It rises from what appears to be a
well-tended and fragrant garden, though here and there lichened stones
and crosses show it to be what old-fashioned folk still call a
graveyard.
But at the time my story opens sudden death, and all the evils the most
normal death implies in our strange, transitory existence, seem very far
from the inhabitants of Terriford. All the more remote because the group
of people who are soon to be concerned with a mysterious and terrible
drama of death are now one and all happy, cheerful, and full of life and
excitement. For they are present as privileged spectators at the first
appearance of the great Australian cricket team.
Why, it may well be asked, should quiet Terriford village be so
honoured? It is because Harry Garlett, the man who stands to the hamlet
in the relation of squire, is the most popular amateur cricketer in the
county and the owner of the best private cricket ground in England. Not
only money, but a wealth of loving care combined with great technical
knowledge and experience, has brought it near to absolute
perfection—this fine expanse of English turf, framed in a garland of
noble English elms and spreading chestnut trees.
Months ago in the dreary winter, when the tour of the Australian test
match team was being arranged, Garlett had invited the visitors to come
to Terriford immediately on landing from the boat and “play themselves
in” after the long voyage. He undertook to collect a strong team of
amateurs, stiffened with two or three professionals, that the
Australians might have something worth tackling, and he did not fail to
point out that at Terriford the visitors would most quickly become
accustomed to English pitches and the soft English light, so different
from the hard dry sunshine and matting wickets of Australia.
Harry Garlett knew that the merits of his private ground were well known
over there, on the other side of the world, but all the same he could
not feel sure. And so it was one of the happiest moments of a life which
had been singularly happy and fortunate when he received the cable
informing him that the Australian team would accept with pleasure his
kind invitation.
To-day, on this bright spring morning, the closing day of the great
match, there could be no more characteristically English scene than this
mixture of country-house party, garden party, and enthusiasts for the
national game.
The cricket is serious, but not so serious as to risk interfering with
good fellowship, the more so that this match does not count in the tour
for records and averages. The spirit of the whole affair is one of pure
good sportsmanship, and the small group of newspaper experts whom
Garlett has invited are all eager to see how the visitors shape and how
they compare with the great Australian teams of the past.
These connoisseurs are also full of admiration for the eleven which
their host has collected. It is indeed a cleverly composed combination.
Youth is represented by some brilliant young players from Oxford and
Cambridge, cheerful fellows who are equally likely to hit up centuries
or to make the two noughts familiarly known as “a pair of spectacles.”
But these lads are as active as monkeys in the field and can save
seemingly certain runs and bring off seemingly impossible “catches.”
Then there is a sprinkling of somewhat older, but still young men, who
have proved their mettle in the great county teams. Last, but not least,
there are three professionals—men whose names are known wherever cricket
is played and who are past-masters in all the subtleties of the great
game.
Decidedly the Cornstalks, though the odds are slightly in their favour,
will have to play all out if they are to win.
Any one who envied Harry Garlett his manifold good fortune, his
popularity, his good looks, his ideal life in “Easy Street,” for he is a
prosperous manufacturer as well as a famous cricketer, might argue that
were it not for the long voyage from Australia the Garlett eleven would
be beaten to a frazzle. But the general feeling is that it is just that
handicap on the visitors which equalizes the chances and makes the match
one of real sporting interest.
The pavilion is situated at the top of the cricket field and commands a
splendid view of the game. But the game is not the only thing. Indeed,
there are people there to whom it is not only an excuse to meet, to
gossip, and to enjoy a generous host’s delightful hospitality. For, at
the back of the great room where Harry Garlett’s special guests are all
gathered together, is a buffet loaded with every kind of delicious food,
wine, and spirits. Garlett, though himself abstemious as every keen
athlete has need to be, always offers the best of cheer to his friends,
ay, and not only to his friends, for bounteous free refreshments are
also provided for the village folk as well as for certain cricket
enthusiasts from the county town of Grendon.
And now let us concentrate on a little group of people in the pavilion,
all obviously quite at ease with one another, and all bent on making the
most of a memorable occasion. Very ordinary folk they are, typical
inhabitants of almost any English village.
First, in order of precedence—the rector and his wife, Mr. and Mrs.
Cole-Wright, he kindly and far from clever, facts which make him
popular, his wife clever and not over kindly, and therefore far less
popular.
Then come Dr. and Mrs. Maclean. The wise physician, whose fame goes far
beyond the confines of his practice, has snatched a day off from his
busy life in order to be present at the closing scenes of the great
match. Both he and his wife are Scotch, but they have lived for fifteen
years very happily in this typical English village. They are a closely
united couple, and the one lack in their joint life has lately been
satisfied by their adoption of Mrs. Maclean’s niece, Jean Bower, an
attractive, cheerful-looking, happy girl whose first introduction to the
neighbourhood is taking place to-day in Harry Garlett’s cricket
pavilion. Jean is only twenty-one, but she is not an idle girl. It is
known that she did good work during the last part of the war, and she
has lately been made secretary to the Etna China Company of which Harry
Garlett is managing director.
As to the other people there, they include Colonel Brackbury, the
Governor of Grendon Prison, his sharp-featured wife and two pretty
daughters; Mr. Toogood, chief lawyer in Grendon, with his wife and
daughter; Dr. Tasker, one of the few bachelors in the neighbourhood;
and, last but not least in that little group who are all on intimate
terms with one another, and whose affairs are constantly discussed in
secret by their humble neighbours, is Mary Prince, true type of that
peculiarly English genus unkindly called “old maid.”
Miss Prince is at once narrow-minded and tolerant, mean and generous,
wickedly malicious, while yet, in a sense, exceedingly kind-hearted.
Perhaps because her father was Dr. Maclean’s predecessor the village
folk consult her concerning their ailments, grave and trifling, more
often than they do the doctor himself.
There is one dark spot in the life of Harry Garlett. His devoted wife,
to whom as an actual fact the whole of Terriford village belongs—or did
belong till she made it over to him—is an invalid. Many months have gone
by since she left the upper floor of the delightful Georgian manor
house, which owes its unsuitable name of the Thatched House to the fact
that it was built on the site of a medieval thatched building.
The Thatched House is a childless house, and Harry Garlett, though on
the best of terms with his invalid wife, is constantly away, at any rate
during the summer months, playing cricket here, there, and everywhere,
all over England. So Agatha Cheale, Mrs. Garlett’s housekeeper, who is
known to be a kinswoman of her employer, plays the part of hostess in
the cricket pavilion. Even so, as the day wears on Miss Cheale
disappears unobtrusively two or three times in order to see if Mrs.
Garlett is comfortable and also to give her news of the cricket match
and especially news of how Mr. Garlett is acquitting himself. Everything
that concerns her husband is of deep moment to Mrs. Garlett, and she is
exceedingly proud of his fame as a cricketer.
On this, the second day of the great match, the Australians have been
set to make 234 runs in their second innings for victory. When the teams
go in for lunch there are few, even among those to whom the finer shades
of the game are as a sealed book, who doubt that they will do it pretty
easily.
The pitch has worn wonderfully well, and Garlett feels a thrill of
delight when he sees it roll out as true and plumb as on the first day.
He thinks with intense satisfaction of all the patient care that he has
devoted to this ground, of all the cunning devices of drainage lying hid
beneath the level turf, and of the scientific treatment with which he
has nursed the turf up to this acme of condition. Ah, money can do much,
but money alone couldn’t have done that. He wants to win the match, but
he emphatically does not want to owe victory to any defect of the pitch.
In such happy mood does Garlett lead his team out into the field after
lunch, and the Australians start, full of confidence. But somehow, even
from the beginning, they seem to find runs hard to get, harder than in
their first knock.
The young undergraduates field like men inspired, covering an immense
lot of ground and turning what seem certain fours into singles. Wickets
fall, too. Some of the Australians open their Herculean shoulders too
soon, and, beginning to hit before they are properly “set,” misjudge the
ball and get caught from terrific “skiers.” But still the score creeps
up. With careful generalship Garlett frequently changes his bowling,
treating the batsmen to every variety of swerve and break that his
bowlers can command.
The tension grows. One of Garlett’s professionals, a chartered jester of
the Surrey team, forgets to play off the antics with which he is wont to
amuse the crowd at the famous Oval ground, and suddenly becomes quite
serious. Still the score mounts up. On the great staging beside the
scorer’s box large tin numbers painted in white on a black ground show
the progress of the game.
Now, the last Australian is going in. What is the score? Ah, see, the
man is just changing the plates—yes, there it is! Nine wickets down for
230 runs. Only four more to make and the match is won—and lost!
What is the matter? Why is Mr. Garlett talking to the bowler? A little
plan of campaign, no doubt. Every heart on the ground beats a little
faster, even surely those well-schooled hearts concealed beneath the
white flannels which stand out so brilliantly on the deep green of the
pitch.
The newcomer takes his block. He is a huge creature with thick,
jet-black beard, a good man at rounding up the most difficult steers on
the far South Australian plains.
“Play!” Swift flies the ball from the height of the bowler’s swing, and
our cattle tamer, playing forward, drives it with a mighty swipe. “Oh,
well hit, sir!” Is it a boundary? If so, the match is won. No, no, one
of Garlett’s agile undergraduates has arrived like a white flash at the
right spot and at the right moment. Like lightning he gathers the ball
and returns it to the wicket. Ah, a runout? No, yes, no—Black Beard has
just got home. It was a narrow shave, but two precious runs have been
added.
Only two more to make! Everyone is silent in the tense excitement. Again
the ball flies from the bowler’s hand, and this time the Australian
giant decides to go all out for a winning hit. He opens his brawny
chest, all rippling with knotted muscles, and, taking the ball fair in
the middle of the bat, lifts it in a huge and lofty curve which seems
certain to come to earth beyond the boundary of the pitch.
But wait! Garlett is there, at extra long-on. It is the catch he has
planned with the bowler. It is all over in a moment, and yet what a long
moment it seems to the entranced spectators!
That little round leather ball high up against the evening sky reaches
the top of its flight. Ah, it is over the pavilion! No, it is
impossible! But Garlett does it, all the same. With a mighty backward
leap he gets the ball into his safe hands just as it was dropping on to
the seats in front of the pavilion.
Out! Our cattle tamer is out, the last Australian wicket, and the match
is won—by one run!
Every one feels the curious tingling thrill that comes of having seen a
feat that will become historic. Garlett’s great catch that won the
Australian match for his eleven will be talked about and written about
for years to come, wherever cricket is had in honour.
Garlett has picked himself up from where he fell after his terrific
leap—but still, you may be sure, holding the precious ball safely to his
chest—and instantly he is the centre of a throng of cheering and
congratulatory friends, among whom the Cornstalks themselves are
foremost.
CHAPTER I
In the star-powdered sky there hung a pale, golden moon. It was the 25th
of May, and though the day had been warm and sunny, it was cold
to-night, and even as early as ten o’clock most of the lights were
extinguished in Terriford village.
But “the moon is the lovers’ sun”: such was the conceit which a tall,
loosely built man had just propounded to the girl walking by his side on
the field path which lay like a white ribbon across the four cornfields
stretching between the Thatched House Farm and the well-kept demesne of
the Thatched House.
The girl—Lucy Warren was her name, and she was parlour-maid at the
Thatched House—made no answer. She could well have spared the moonlight.
She knew that not only her clever, capable mother, but also all the
gossips who made up her little world, would be shocked indeed did they
see her walking, in this slow, familiar, loverlike way, with her
mother’s lodger, Guy Cheale.
Not that shrewd Mrs. Warren disliked her lodger. In spite of herself she
had become very fond of him. He was such a queer, fantastic—had she
known the word, she might have added cynical—young gentleman.
But though she liked him, and though his funny talk amused her, Mrs.
Warren would have been wroth indeed had she known of the friendship
between her lodger and her daughter. And the mother would have been
right to feel wroth, for, while doing everything to make Lucy love him
with that fresh, wonderful young love that only comes to a woman once,
Guy Cheale never spoke to Lucy of marriage.
For the matter of that, how could he speak of marriage, being that
melancholy thing, a penniless gentleman? A man whose lodging at the farm
even was paid for by his sister, herself companion-housekeeper at the
Thatched House. There were a dozen newspapers in London which would
always print everything Guy Cheale chose to write, but he liked talking
better than writing, and he was in very poor health.
Lucy hated to think that the man whom deep in her heart she had come
passionately to love was too lazy—or was it really too ill?—to make a
living. She disliked her lover’s sister, Agatha Cheale, with a deep,
instinctive, fierce dislike, and sometimes she smiled, though it was not
a happy smile, at the thought of how angry Miss Cheale would be if she
knew that Mr. Cheale and she, Lucy, were lovers.
“Not quite so quick, my pretty Lucy!”
Guy Cheale was panting painfully—and a rush of that pity which is akin
to love filled Lucy Warren’s heart.
“I mustn’t be late,” she said nervously.
“You’re not late, Lucy”—he held up his watch close to his eyes. “It’s
only twenty to ten,” and then he added, in that voice which he knew how
to make at once so strangely tender, persuasive, and yes—mocking, “Let’s
go into our enchanted wood for five minutes, as you won’t let me in to
that drawing room of yours.”
“It ain’t my drawing room, as you knows full well. If it was, you’d be
welcome to come into it,” she exclaimed resentfully.
He guided her down the path leading to the wood, and then, once they
were under the shelter of the trees, he clutched her to him with a
strength which at once frightened and comforted her—for it seemed to
prove that he could not be as ill as he was made out to be.
“Love and life,” he muttered, “the one’s no good without the other!” He
bent his head and their lips clung together in a long long kiss.
And then Guy Cheale was filled with a delicious sense of triumph and of
exultation. He had won this proud sensitive creature at last—after a
long, to him a breathless, exciting chase.
But all at once he felt her stiffen in his arms.
“Hush!” she whispered. “There’s some one in the wood!”
He did not relax his almost terrible grip of her, as he too, listened
intently.
Lucy was right; he could hear the light, stuffless sound of footsteps
sinking into the dead leaves which still, on this spring night, lay
thickly spread on the path.
“Only happy lovers like you and me,” he whispered huskily. “They’re not
troubling about us—why trouble about them?”
But the girl was frightened. “For God’s sake, go away, Mr. Cheale!” she
pleaded in a terrified whisper.
“One kiss more, Lucy. Only one kiss more——”
But she lay inertly in his arms, all her senses absorbed in listening.
How different from only fifty seconds ago!
“Lucy,” he whispered, “Lucy? We can’t part like this, to-night—the first
time my goddess has yielded me her lips.”
Though full of nervous terror, she was moved by the real feeling in his
voice.
“I’ll go and see who it is,” she muttered in his ear. “You stop where
you are.”
“Promise to come back!”
For only answer she took up his thin right hand and laid it against her
cheek; and then she crept quickly away, moving almost soundlessly along,
for she knew every turn of the little wood.
At last she came back, panting a little.
“Who was it?” he whispered eagerly.
“I don’t know. They’re gone now. But I’ve not a minute left.”
He could hear by her voice that she was anxious, preoccupied, and with
the strange, dangerous power he possessed of seeing into a woman’s mind
he knew that she had not told the truth—that she was well aware of the
identity of those other haunters of the enchanted wood. But he had no
wish to share her knowledge. The good folk of Terriford, who meant so
much to Lucy Warren, meant less than nothing to Guy Cheale.
“You and that tiresome old cook go up to bed as soon as you come in,
don’t you?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes, we do,” she replied hesitatingly, knowing well, as she would have
expressed it to herself, what he was after.
“If I give you twenty minutes,” he whispered caressingly, “it will be
quite safe for you to let me into the drawing room, eh—little hawk?”
It was his supreme term of endearment—and once more she allowed him to
take her into his arms, and press her with an almost terrible strength
to his breast. But——
“It’s wrong,” she whispered, “it’s wrong, Mr. Cheale. I ought never to
have let you into the drawing room. ’Tain’t mine to use that way.”
“That’s why I like our doing it!” he chuckled.
And then with that queer touch of malicious triumph that fascinated her,
he added: “What would sister Agatha say if walls could speak?”
“Don’t you go saying that! Miss Cheale’s never in the drawing room,” she
exclaimed, affrighted at the very thought. “No one ever is—now that the
mistress keeps upstairs.”
“No one but you and me, Psyche!” and then he took her face between his
hands and lightly kissed it. “I won’t stay long to-night, I promise—but
we can’t meet to-morrow, worse luck! Your uncle’s spending the night at
the farm.”
“Can’t see what you fancy about Uncle Enoch——”
“I like lawyers—they’re such rascals! Why he was telling your mother all
about Mrs. Garlett’s will last Sunday——”
“He never was?”
Lucy felt very much shocked. Even she knew that in doing such a thing
her uncle, Enoch Bent, confidential clerk to Mr. Toogood, the leading
lawyer of Grendon, was acting in a very dishonourable manner.
“Run along now,” exclaimed Guy Cheale, a touch of rasped impatience in
his voice.
And then he seized her again in his arms—only to push her away. “I’ll
wait till we can kiss at ease—in the drawing room! Strange that hideous,
early Victorian temple of respectability should shelter the love of two
wild hawks like you and me—eh, Lucy?”
And then she left him and hurried through the wood, uncaring now of the
sounds her light footsteps made. She knew she was late—it must be quite
a bit after ten o’clock. But cookie was a kindly, good-natured, elderly
woman, and didn’t mind waiting up for a little while. But once, when
Lucy had been half an hour late, Miss Cheale had caught her, and spoken
to her very severely.
A quarter of an hour later Lucy, after tiptoeing down the silent house,
opened the drawing-room door, and, after closing it with infinite
precaution, passed through into the dark room. Then she turned and
locked the door behind her.
The white dimity covers of the heavy, early Victorian furniture by which
Mrs. Garlett, the invalid sleeping just above the drawing room, set such
store, made luminous patches in the big L-shaped apartment, and somehow
added to Lucy Warren’s feeling of nervous unease.
Though the passionate, newly awakened side of her beating heart was
burning to hear the tiny tap on the long French window which she knew
would herald Guy Cheale’s approach, there was another side of the girl
which hated and was deeply ashamed of allowing a meeting with her lover
here.
She felt that whom she saw, and even what she did, when out of doors,
under the sky, was no one’s business but her own—and perhaps, in a much
lesser measure, her mother’s. She would also have felt differently had
she and Guy Cheale been able to meet alone in the servants’ hall of the
Thatched House. But the drawing room she felt to be ground sacred to
Mrs. Garlett, so dear and precious indeed to the mistress of the
Thatched House that it was never used now, not even on the rare
occasions when Harry Garlett had a friend to dinner. Guy Cheale,
however, had discovered that the drawing room, alone of all the
ground-floor rooms of the spacious old house, had a French window
opening into the garden, and he and Lucy Warren had already met there
twice.
As Lucy stood in the dark room, listening intently, her nerves taut, her
heart beating, there suddenly swept over her an awful prevision of evil,
a sudden realization of her folly in allowing Guy Cheale to wile her
heart away. She knew, alas! that he was spoiling her for the only life
open to such as she—the life of an honest, commonplace, working man’s
wife.
She remembered to-night with an almost anguished vividness the first
time she had ever seen Guy Cheale—last February, on her first “afternoon
off” in the month. She had gone home to the Thatched House Farm to help
her mother with the new gentleman lodger, and, being a girl of a proud
independent nature, she had come prepared to dislike him, the more so
that she hated his sister, Mrs. Garlett’s strict, sarcastic young lady
housekeeper. And then she had opened the door of the little farmhouse
parlour, and seen the big, loosely built fair man who was to be “her
fate.”
His keen, thin, large-boned face, alive with a kind of gay, plucky
humour, large heavy-lidded gray eyes, and long, loose-limbed figure,
were each and all so utterly unlike Miss Cheale that no one could have
believed them to be what they were, brother and sister.
Guy Cheale had often reverted to the enchanted moment that had brought
them first face to face; and he had told her again and again what she
was never tired of hearing—how beautiful, how proud and how disdainful
he had thought her.
But she knew nothing of the cruel hunting instinct which had prompted
what had immediately followed her entry into the room.
“What is your name?” he had asked, and when she answered, “Lucy, sir.
I’m Mrs. Warren’s daughter,” he had got up and, gazing straight into her
face, had uttered the strange, poignant words—“A dying man—for that’s
what I’m supposed to be, my pretty dear—ought to be given a certain
license, eh?”
“License, sir?” she had repeated, falteringly.
“License in the way of love-making! I suppose you know, Lucy, that I’m
said to be dying? And so I am—dying for a little love!”
That had been the beginning of it all. And though she had been, for
quite a long while, what she termed to herself “standoffish,” they had
become, in time, dear friends—meeting often in secret, as some dear
friends are forced to do. It had not been easy for them to meet, even in
secret; for there is no place in the world so full of a kind of shrewd,
cruel scandal-mongering as is an English village, and it said much for
the intelligence, not only of Guy Cheale, but also of Lucy Warren, that
their names had never yet been connected the one with the other.
All the same, as is always the way with a man and a woman who are
determined on meeting, they had seen each other almost daily. And now
and again they had had a grand, a wonderful innings! Once Mrs. Warren
had had to go away for a week and Lucy had been given some hours off
each day in order that she might prepare the lunch and supper of her
mother’s lodger.
During those days—days on which he had insisted on helping her to do
everything, even to the cooking of his meals in the big, comfortable
farm kitchen, their friendship had grown apace. No man knew better the
way to a woman’s heart, and, posing then as her friend, and only as her
friend, he had encouraged her to talk about everything and everybody
that interested her—her employer, Harry Garlett, the famous county
cricketer, his sickly wife, and even the country village gossip.
Even so, in defence of her heart, Lucy Warren had put up a good fight—a
fight which, as the time went on, stimulated, excited, sometimes even
maddened Guy Cheale. He found, with surprise and even discomfiture, that
what he had begun in idle and ignoble sport, was becoming to him a
matter of interest, even of importance.
This, perhaps, was why now, while Lucy Warren stood in the dark drawing
room, her mind filled with tense, questioning memories, Guy Cheale,
padding up and down the lawn like some huge, loose-limbed creature of
the woods, was also asking himself intimate, searching questions.
He was already ruefully aware that this would probably be one of the
last times that he and this poor girl whom he had forced to love him
would meet, and it irked him to know how much he would miss her from out
his strange, sinister life—the life which he knew was ebbing slowly but
surely to a close. He had made love to many, many women, but this was
the first time he had been thrown into close intimacy with a country
girl of Lucy’s class—that sturdy, self-respecting British yeoman class
which has been for generations the backbone of the old country.
Very soon—how soon to a day not even Guy Cheale could tell—he would have
left the Thatched Farm. And oh! how he would like to take Lucy with him,
even for a little while. But, bad as he was, there was yet in him still
a small leaven of good which forced him to admit that he owed Lucy
Warren something for the love which, if passionate, was so pure and
selfless. Sometimes, when he felt more ailing than usual, he would tell
himself that when within sight of that mysterious bourne from which no
traveller returns he would send for Lucy, marry her, and be nursed by
her to the end.
But now, on this warm May night, he put painful thoughts away, and
determined to extract the greatest possible enjoyment from what could
only be, alas! the fleeting present.
Treading over the grass as lightly as might be, he leaped across the
narrow gravel footpath which ran round the front of the house.
And then a most untoward thing happened! Unaware that Lucy had unlatched
the hasp of the long French window, Guy Cheale leaned against it,
panting, and fell forward into the room—his heavy boot crashing through
one of the lower panes.
He uttered a stifled oath, then stood up and, walking forward, felt in
the darkness for the terror-stricken girl. For a few minutes they stood
together listening intently; then, reassured, he led her over to a couch
and, throwing himself down on it, he clasped her to him closely.
His arms were round her, he was kissing her eagerly, thirstily, when all
at once she gave a stifled cry—she had heard the handle turn in the
locked door.
“I expect it’s Miss Cheale,” she whispered. “She taxed me the other
night with having a sweetheart I was ashamed of! Go away—quick! She’ll
get round to the window in a minute——”
Guy Cheale leaped up and rushed across the room. Desperately he tried to
find the awkward, old-fashioned catch, and just as the second door of
the drawing room—a door the existence of which Lucy had forgotten—was
unlatched, and the electric light switched on, he flung open the window
and disappeared into the dark garden.
But the figure which advanced slowly into the L-shaped room was not that
of Agatha Cheale. Lucy, petrified with shame and fear, knew it for that
of the invalid mistress of the Thatched House.
Clad in an old-fashioned white dressing gown, her pallid face filled
with mingled curiosity and fright, Mrs. Garlett looked like a wraith,
and far more willingly would the girl, who stood before her with hanging
head, have faced a real spirit.
For a long, breathless moment Mrs. Garlett, dazzled by the light, peered
round her, looking this way and that. Then, “Lucy!” she exclaimed, in a
tone of keen surprise and anger, and again, “Lucy?”
Turning slowly round, she called out to some one who apparently had
remained in the passage outside.
“You can come in now, Miss Cheale. I was right and you were wrong. I
_did_ hear a noise upstairs—after all, my bedroom’s just over here. It
was Lucy Warren—in here with a man. He has just escaped through the
window.”
And then Miss Cheale, the woman whom Lucy Warren hated, feared and, yes,
despised, came into the room. She gave one swift glance of contempt and
reprobation at the unhappy culprit, glanced at the open French window,
and, turning to her employer, exclaimed:
“I will see Lucy to-morrow morning, Mrs. Garlett. Please come up to bed
at once. You’ve done a very dangerous thing in coming down like this!”
The invalid lady allowed herself to be led, unresisting, away; and then,
mechanically, Lucy went over to the window and stared out, her bosom
heaving with sobs, and tears streaming from her eyes.
But no kindly, mocking, caressing whisper came to comfort and reassure
her out of the darkness. By this time Guy Cheale must be well on his way
back to the farm.
Turning slowly, she threaded her way through the white-shrouded
furniture, unlocked the door nearest to her, and walked out, forgetting
or uncaring that the electric light which had been turned on by Mrs.
Garlett by the other door was still burning.