THE MYSTERY OF THE INN
BY THE SHORE.
[Illustration: “BY JOVE, JORDAN, I NEVER THOUGHT YOU COULD PAINT
BEFORE.”--_See Page 19._]
THE MYSTERY OF THE INN
BY THE SHORE.
A Novel.
BY
FLORENCE WARDEN,
_Author of “The House on the Marsh,” etc._
NEW YORK:
ROBERT BONNER’S SONS.
PUBLISHERS.
COPYRIGHT, 1895,
BY ROBERT BONNER’S SONS.
(_All rights reserved._)
PRESS OF
THE NEW YORK LEDGER
NEW YORK.
THE
Mystery of the Inn by the Shore.
CHAPTER I.
Prosperity and the sea had deserted Stroan together. As the waves
receded, leaving a bare stretch of sand where once whole fleets had
ridden at anchor, the once flourishing town had dwindled and sunk, in
spite of valiant struggles to revive and retain her ancient supremacy.
In the length and breadth of the land no place could be found so
sleepy, so much behind the times, so tortuous of street and so
moss-grown of stone, as Stroan had become, when, by a happy chance, the
game of golf came down from the North and established itself as the
fashion. Then somebody discovered that the bare and unproductive sands
between Stroan and the sea made excellent “links;” visitors began to
arrive and to put up at a brand-new hotel built expressly for their
accommodation, and a little breath of active life began to stir once
more in the narrow, winding streets.
Among the visitors, one warm September, came down from London three
friends, who tempered their devotion to golf by various other pursuits,
each according to his inclination.
Otto Conybeare, the eldest of the three, was a journalist, who had
aspirations to literature of a less ephemeral sort. He used his
holiday by trying his hand at both prose and poetry, of which his two
companions offered trenchant if not discriminating criticism. He was a
tall, thin, dark-skinned man, with clean-cut, aquiline features, and
was looked upon by the two others as their champion and social leader.
Willie Jordan, the youngest of the party, was short and, alas! fat,
with curly, light hair and a huge, tawny mustache, which he had
cultivated as the trademark of his calling, which was that of an artist.
Clifford King, the remaining member of the trio, was a barrister,
to whom no one had as yet intrusted a brief. He was a dark-haired,
blue-eyed, good-humored young fellow, whom everybody liked and in
whom all his friends believed with an enthusiasm which was not
without excuse, for Clifford had brains and was only waiting for the
opportunity which comes to all who can wait in the right way.
They had been at Stroan five days, and the little god, Cupid, had
already spoiled the harmony of the party.
Willie was the victim, of course.
It was always Willie who could not resist a pair of handsome eyes,
black, blue or gray; so that when he became attached to the society
of old Colonel Bostal, and would insist upon accompanying that
uninteresting old gentleman from the Links to his home three miles
away, Clifford and Otto exchanged winks, and having found out that
the colonel had a daughter, at once believed that they had probed
successfully into the mystery of Willie’s civility.
So, justly incensed at Willie’s duplicity, for that young man had
spoken slightingly of Miss Bostal’s attractions, Otto and Clifford
determined upon tracking the traitor to his lair.
This they did on a sunny afternoon, when the straight road over the
reclaimed marsh between Stroan and Shingle End was thick in white dust.
They knew the colonel’s house from the outside, having passed it on
many a walk from Stroan to Courtstairs, the next town. It was about
half a mile beyond the Blue Lion, a picturesque roadside inn which was
the halfway house between Courtstairs and Stroan. Very poor the colonel
was, as he took care to inform everybody, and very poverty-stricken
his dwelling looked, in the observant eyes of the two young men, as
they rang the bell and waited a long time before any one answered it.
Shingle End was a pretty, tumbledown house, which stood at the angle
formed by two roads. It had once been white, but neglect and hard
weather had made it a mottled gray; while cracked and dusty windows,
rickety shutters and untrimmed trees and bushes combined to give the
place a dreary and unprosperous appearance.
Behind the house was a garden, with a poultry-run and a paddock; and
Otto had seen, as they passed, the colonel reading his paper under an
apple-tree, while the flutter of a petticoat in the background among
the trees seemed to confirm their suspicions.
“We’ve unearthed the rascal,” smiled Otto, as they at last heard
footsteps in the house in answer to their second ring.
But when the door was opened, their hearts sank, for there stood before
them a woman of forty, at least, small, lean, dowdy, precise of manner
and slow of speech, wearing a pair of gardening-gloves and a sunbonnet,
who looked at them in some surprise, and asked them stiffly what they
wanted.
Otto, who was acute enough to perceive that this must be the colonel’s
daughter, apologized for disturbing her, and said they had brought a
letter for their friend Jordan, who, they understood, was spending the
afternoon with Colonel Bostal. They would not have intruded but that
they believed the letter was very important, as it was marked on the
envelope “Please deliver immediately.”
And the plotter drew from his pocket, with ostentatious care, a missive
which he and Clifford had prepared together, and which, with great
ingenuity, had been made to look as if it had passed through the post.
But Miss Bostal glanced at the letter and shook her head.
“There is no one with my father,” she said, “and I don’t know any one
of that name. But if you will come into the drawing-room I will ask
him.”
“Oh, no, not for the world. We could not think of intruding. We must
have made a mistake,” stammered Otto, while Clifford hurriedly passed
out by the little wooden gate into the road.
In the meantime, however, Colonel Bostal, having heard the voices, had
come through the narrow passage from the garden to learn the meaning of
this unusual sound. The matter was explained to him by his daughter,
amidst further apologies from Otto.
The colonel, a withered-looking, gray-faced man of about sixty-five,
in a threadbare and patched coat and a battered Panama hat, remembered
the name at once.
“Jordan? Jordan? Yes, of course I know him,” said he at once. “A little
fellow, with a long mustache. Yes, he often walks home with me as far
as the bridge, but there he always turns back and excuses himself from
coming any farther.”
Otto looked perplexed by this information; but over Miss Bostal’s thin,
pinched face there came a little, pale smile.
“Try the Blue Lion,” she said, rather primly.
Otto grew stiff.
“My friend is no frequenter of taverns,” said he.
“Try the Blue Lion,” said Miss Bostal again.
Her father burst into a little, dry laugh.
“The Blue Lion has a good many frequenters who are not frequenters of
other taverns,” said he. “Nell Claris, the niece of the man who keeps
it, is a _protégée_ of my daughter’s, and the prettiest girl in the
place.”
A light broke over Otto’s face. But Miss Bostal looked grave.
“I shall have to speak to her very seriously,” said she, with a little
frown. “She encourages half the young men of Stroan to waste their time
out here.”
But the colonel smiled and shook his head doubtfully.
“It’s of no use speaking to a pretty girl,” said he, with decision.
“You will only be told to mind your own business. And there’s no harm
in Nell.”
“I know that,” retorted his daughter, not spitefully, but with a
spinster’s stern solicitude. “I shouldn’t be so much interested in her
if I didn’t know that she’s a good little thing. But she’s giddy and
thoughtless. I shall really have to advise her uncle to send her back
to school again.”
“She won’t go,” said the colonel. “And if she would, old Claris
wouldn’t part with her. We must rely on the effect of your sermons,
Theodora.”
Father and daughter had carried on this dialogue without including the
visitor in the conversation, so that Otto, who prided himself upon
being an acute observer, had an opportunity of peeping into the rooms
on each side of the passage, as the doors were open, without moving
from where he stood.
He was much struck by what he saw: by the carpets worn so threadbare
that there was no trace of the pattern to be seen on them; by the
carefully-darned table-covers, the worn-out furniture. All was neatly
kept and spotlessly clean; all showed a pinched poverty which there was
no attempt to hide.
He withdrew with more apologies as soon as the short discussion
between father and daughter was ended, and rejoined his friend outside.
“Well,” said Clifford, as Otto turned toward Stroan in silence, “and
what kept you so long talking to the severe-looking lady?”
“I wasn’t talking. I was listening,” answered Otto, “and working out
in my mind a romance, a pitiful romance, of the kind that is not showy
enough for people to care to hear about.”
“What! Do you mean to say that Jordan’s fallen in love with that mature
and lean spinster?” asked Clifford in astonishment.
“Oh, dear, no. He’s fallen in love; I’ve found that out; but it is with
the usual maid of the inn--nobody half so interesting as Miss Bostal.”
“Interesting!”
“Yes. I have an idea that the lean spinster is a heroine. Not the sort
of heroine one troubles oneself about, of course. But while they were
talking about a certain ‘Nell,’ who is evidently the object of Jordan’s
priceless but transient affections just now, I looked into their rooms,
their poor little dining-room, their bare, long drawing-room, and I saw
such a history of pinched lives and sordid struggles as made me long
for pen and paper.”
Clifford groaned.
“It doesn’t take much to make you do that!” he grumbled. “And I don’t
think your subject a very interesting one.”
“Of course you would not. It is not obvious or commonplace or
highly-colored enough for you,” retorted Otto. “But to my mind there
is something infinitely pathetic in the tattered old coat of this
dignified and distinguished-looking old man, and in the darns which the
daughter must have lost the brightness of her eyes over.”
“Decidedly, my dear boy, you must do it in poetry, not prose,” said
Clifford, mockingly.
Otto would have retorted, but that they had now reached the little
bridge over the river Fleet, and were within a few yards of the halfway
house.
“This is the place where Jordan spends his afternoons,” said Otto,
leading the way to the little inn.
“Let’s have him out.”
The Blue Lion was a very unpretending establishment, old, but without
any pretensions to historical or archæological interest, small,
inconvenient, and weather-beaten. Standing as it did midway between
sleepy Stroan and democratic Courtstairs, it was the house of call for
all the carriers, farmers and cattle-drovers all the year round, while
in the months of July and August its little bar was thronged with the
denizens of the Mile-end Road, who take their pleasure in brakes, with
concertinas and howls and discordant songs.
A few late visitors of this sort were in the little bar when Clifford
and Otto entered. But there was no sign of Jordan. Both the young men
looked with curiosity at the woman who was serving behind the bar,
a portly young woman with a ready tongue, who in her sturdy build
and large coarse hands, as well as in the weather-beaten look of her
complexion, betrayed that she was accustomed to fill up her time, when
work was slack inside the house, with out-door labor of the roughest
kind.
When the two friends came out, they looked at each other in disgust.
“She isn’t even young!” cried Otto. “Nearer thirty-five than
twenty-five, I’ll swear!”
“And her voice! And her detestable Kentish accent!” added Clifford.
“And those high cheek-bones, and that short nose! It’s a type I
loathe--the type of the common shrew.”
“I shouldn’t have thought it of Jordan!” murmured Otto, in pity
tempered with indignation.
“But where is the ruffian himself?” asked Clifford, stopping short. “Do
you think we are on a wrong scent, after all?”
“If it were anybody but Jordan, I should say yes,” said Otto,
deliberately. “But his susceptibility is so colossal that I see no
reason to doubt even this.”
Nevertheless he followed Clifford, when the latter turned back toward
the little bridge.
“There’s a cottage,” said the more humane King, “a little cottage
by the roadside. Let us see if we can discern a petticoat in the
neighborhood of that. We may be doing the poor chap an injustice, after
all.”
But before they reached the cottage the attention of the two young men
was arrested by the sound of a girl’s voice on the left, just before
they reached the bridge. It was a voice so bright, so sweet, with such
a suggestion of bubbling laughter in its tones, that they both stopped
short and looked at each other with faces full of remorse.
“_That’s_ Nell!” said Otto.
“We have done him a cruel wrong,” murmured Clifford.
And with one accord they bent their steps in the direction of the
voice; and after getting over a wooden paling by the roadside,
scattering a colony of fowls on the other side, and making their way
over the rough grass beside the river where the boats were drawn up
which carried excursionists to Fleet Castle, they came upon a wooden
shed, and a strong smell of pitch, and two human figures. The one was
Jordan, coatless, with his straw hat tilted to the back of his head, a
tar-brush in one hand and a tin can in the other, engaged in the humble
but useful task of covering the cow-shed with a new coat of pitch.
But his two friends scarcely glanced at him. It was the other figure
that absorbed all their powers of vision--a slender girl in a print
frock, with a white cotton blouse and an enormous straw hat. This was
the Nell who wasted the time of half the young men of Stroan, and who
would have wasted the time of half the young men of London if they
had only once seen her. A beauty of pure Saxon type she was, with
the opaque white skin which the sun does not scorch or redden, with
rose-pink cheeks, a child’s pouting mouth, and big blue eyes that made
a young man hold his breath. Her hair had turned since childhood from
flaxen to a deeper tint, and was now a light bronze color. There was
about her an air of refinement as well as modesty which could not fail
to astonish a stranger who found her in these strange circumstances.
She saw the newcomers long before poor Jordan did, and she watched them
approach while the unfortunate artist toiled on at his inglorious task.
Perhaps the girl had seen the three young men together; perhaps it
was only feminine quickness of wit which made her jump to the right
conclusion.
“I think there are some friends of yours coming this way, Mr. Jordan,”
she said, in a voice as refined as her appearance and manner.
Poor Willie started back, stumbling over the rough ground, and
presented a very red, moist face to their view.
But they took no notice of him. Stepping genially over the rough
mounds, looking beautifully cool and clean and smart and well-dressed
beside the besmirched and perspiring Willie, they threw back their
heads, half-closed their eyes, and proceeded to criticise the work
before them with as much care and conscientiousness as if it had been a
painting on the walls of the New Gallery.
“I say, old chap, it really is the best thing you’ve ever done,” began
Otto, with kindly admiration.
“By Jove, Jordan, I never thought you could paint before,” added
Clifford. “There’s a broad touch, and at the same time a nice feeling
for effect, which shows an immense advance on your previous work. You
seem, so to speak, to have put all your strength into the work. It does
you immense credit--it really does, old chap.”
“Some meaning in it, too. And that’s the point where you always failed
before.”
To the intense disgust of Willie, pretty Nell was evidently much amused
by these remarks. And, although a feeling of condescending gratitude to
her abject admirer made her try to control her enjoyment, Clifford saw
in her blue eyes a merriment none the less keen that she subdued its
outward manifestation.
“It’s easy to chaff,” grumbled Willie, hotly. “Perhaps you’d like to
try the work yourselves.”
“No, old chap. We should never get that depth of color,” said Otto,
calmly surveying the artist’s heated, crimson face.
“It wants a natural aptitude for that sort of thing,” said Clifford.
“Well, you can take yourselves off if you have nothing better to do
than to find fault with what you haven’t the pluck to do yourselves,”
said Willie, sharply.
“We’re not finding fault. We are expressing our admiration,” said Otto.
“And we are quite ready to try our hand ourselves,” said Clifford,
as, with a sudden burst of energy, born of his desire to linger in
the neighborhood of Nell, he threw off his own coat and struggled for
possession of the tar-brush.
But Willie resisted, and there was danger of their both suffering
severely from the nature of the prize, when the object of so much
singular loyalty interposed.
“If you really are so full of energy that you need some vent for it,”
said she, in a voice which was full of suggestions of demure merriment,
“you might help to pull up those boats.”
And she glanced at two of the small pleasure-craft in the river, both
of which had evidently suffered some injury, as their water-logged
condition bore witness.
Clifford set about the task with enthusiasm, and, not without
difficulty, succeeded in bringing the boats up on the slimy bank.
It was warm work, and as Otto Conybeare made no offer to assist him,
it was a long time before Clifford managed, first by baling the water
out of the boats with an old pail and then by turning them a little
on one side when he had partly dragged them out, and emptying them,
to finish his task. When he at last raised his head with a great sigh
of satisfaction, he saw in the river below a weather-beaten old punt,
in which sat a young fisherman of the realistic, not the operatic,
kind, wearing a hard felt hat, a stained jersey, and a huge pair of
sea-boots, who regarded him with an air of mingled pity and contempt.
“She always gets moogs to do her dirty work, she do,” he observed,
with a jerk of the head in the direction of the fair Nell. “And the
better dressed they are, the more she likes it. Oh, she’s a rare un,
she be.”
Now, it is not in human nature to like being classed among the “moogs,”
and Clifford, who could hardly flush a deeper crimson than he had
already done with his exertions, tried to assume an air of philosophic
indifference in vain.
“I’m afraid you are not chivalrous, my man,” said he, thrusting his
arms into his coat and feeling that he would like a plunge into the
river.
“I don’t care to pull the ’eart out of my body and get no thank for
it,” rejoined the fisherman.
Clifford, in spite of his assumed stoicism, began to feel like a fool.
He looked toward the spot where Nell had been standing beside the shed,
and saw that she, as well as his two friends, had disappeared. The
fisherman grinned and stuck the end of an old pipe in his mouth with an
air of snug satisfaction.
“I wasn’t fashionable enough for her, I wasn’t; an’ I thank my stars
for it. It’s saved my back many a good load.”
Then Clifford felt satisfied that it was pique at having his
own advances rejected which caused the young fisherman to be so
contemptuous. So he said, without irritation:
“I should have thought no man would mind doing a man’s work to save a
woman’s hands.”
The fisherman puffed away at his dirty little pipe for a few moments in
silence.
“Them’s fine words,” he said, at last. “An’ maybe I’d say the same of
some women. But not for a little light-fingered hussy like yon,” and he
jerked his head viciously in the direction of the Blue Lion.
“Light-fingered!” exclaimed Clifford, with some indignation. “Do you
know what you mean by that?”
“Sh’d just think I did! Why, you ask the folks about here what sort o’
character the Blue Lion’s had since young miss was about. Ask if it’s
a honest house to stay the night in if you’ve money on yer. Just you
ask that, an’ put two and two together like what I do, an’ like what
everybody does as knows what the place was afore she came an’ what it
is now.”
Clifford shivered under the hot sun of the September afternoon as he
listened to this torrent of accusation, and saw by the passion in the
young fisherman’s face that he was in earnest.
Before he could answer, Nell’s sweet voice, addressing himself,
startled him.