Let Him Lie (25 page)

“No, really, thank you very much. I can walk. It'll do me good.”

“Certainly I'll drive you, Miss Halliday,” protested Sir Henry with the crisp determination that characterised him. But Jeanie was equally determined that he should not, and for the second time that afternoon Sir Henry was forced to yield. It was Peter who helped her down the ladder and walked along the road with her towards the sanctuary of Yew Tree Cottage, leaving the rest of the Field Club to stamp their cold feet, wipe the moisture from their noses, listen to Mr. Fone and long for the moment of descent.

Peter slipped his hand through Jeanie's arm.

What's the matter, Jean? Nothing serious, I hope?” His dark eyes were kind and anxious. Jeanie looked at him gravely. She still felt a little queer, and a heavy headache had settled over her eyes.

“Well, it is rather, Peter. I think I know who murdered Molyneux.”

She felt his hand tighten over her wrist.

“What?”

“I think I know who—”

“Jeanie! But—”

“I think I'll go home and sleep on it, Peter. I feel in too much of a muddle to talk about it now. It's rather sudden, you see. I'll tell you about it in the morning.”

“But Jeanie, can't you just—”

“No, in case I'm wrong. I'll sleep on it to-night, Peter. I shall be all right. You go back to your megaliths.”

“Not I. I'm seeing you home.”

“I'd really, really rather you didn't. Mrs. Barchard's there. I'll be all right.”

Jeanie had a great longing to be alone. She withdrew her hand from Peter's, and palely but obstinately smiled at him. He frowned and seemed about to dispute the point. Jeanie was glad when Mrs. Peel, driving her shining black car, overtook them and stopped and insisted on driving her the hundred yards or so on to her cottage.

“I've just been up to see our little saint about my darling daughter. I've decided to go to South Africa in the spring with Eustace. So if Agnes likes to be saddled with somebody else's kid, which, between you and me, she doesn't like at all, but she has to pretend she does—let her, I say! All I insist on is Sally must go to school, and if Agnes is her guardian, which I won't dispute at present, Agnes must pay the school fees! I'm not going to have that snake of a Miss Wills perverting my child's mind,” said Myfanwy in maternal and virtuous tones which at any other time might have tickled Jeanie. “So we've settled it that Sally starts going to school next term and spends her holidays at Cleedons. Suits me very well, and poor dear Agnes has to pretend it suits her. The only person it won't suit is dear Miss Wills. Well, here we are.”

“Won't you come in and have some tea?”

“Can't, thanks all the same. I've got all the packing to do. Eustace is driving down to Somerset this evening on some wild-goose chase after a house he's thinking of buying, so I've got all his packing to do as well as my own. Do tell me, though—” Myfanwy Peel let down the window of her car to converse with Jeanie as she stood at her gate—“do tell me what you were doing on the roof of that loony's house? I saw you as I went up to Cleedons. What
was
it? Fire-drill?”

“We were looking for old straight tracks,” said Jeanie, smiling faintly.

“Straight tracks? I say, you look a bit washed out. Are you all right?”

“Quite, only a little cold.”

“Well, I hope you found what you were looking for.”

‘I found something I wasn't looking for,” said Jeanie.

“Like me when I married Franklin,” replied Mrs. Peel with a laugh. “Still, that's settled now, for the present. We'll see, when Sally's grown up, if she won't prefer her mother and a bit of fun and real life to the collection of fossilised remains she'll be living with here!”

She drove off. Jeanie shut the door.

Those who inhabit timber-framed houses grow used to unexplained noises in the silence of the night, as the ancient buildings, like old rheumatic men, crack noisily at the joints and make their loud comments on every change in the weather. Up in the loft, rafter shifts upon plate with a faint groaning crack that sounds like a furtive footstep on the stairs. Tenon moves in mortice with a loud crack like a pistol-shot. That sudden scurrying is caused by the rats running between the boards and plaster in the hidden avenues between the joists of the ceiling.

As a rule, Jeanie did not even need to remind herself of these things. She scarcely heard the noises of her cottage talking to itself and its inhabitants; or, when she heard it, heard it as one hears the friendly noise of the rain or the wind. This evening, a mere fall of soot down the parlour chimney made her jump up in alarm and upset the milk-jug. She could not bear sudden noises. Sudden noises reminded her of shots, and sudden death. And as she mopped up the milk she saw once again the circle of concerned, curious eyes which had converged upon her on Cole Harbour roof just before she fainted.

There was no milk left in the jug, and she wanted another cup of tea. She picked up the jug and went out with a candle through the hall to the larder. She could hear the tinkle of metal from behind the closed kitchen door as she passed. Mrs. Barchard had not gone yet. Wednesday was her day for cleaning brass, and this labour, which she loved, usually kept her late. As she went along the passage, Jeanie realised that the wind had dropped and that everything outside the house seemed silent, magnifying the noises within, as when a storm is impending. Perhaps the threatened snow was about to fall. But there was some movement in the air, for when Jeanie opened too quickly the larder door, a draught through the wire gauze at the window at once blew her candle out. She gave a little, silly sobbing gasp, as if this were a haunted house instead of her own dear home, and she a nervous lodger instead of its happy owner. She knew where the matches were kept in the larder. She put her candlestick down and shut the door and felt about on the shelf under the window.

The sky had certainly become overcast with the falling of darkness. No stars were visible, but a uniform cold grey which, from the pitch darkness of the larder, seemed faintly luminous. No snow had fallen, yet. The square of light from the kitchen window illuminated dry frost-nipped ground. There was a man standing up against the leafless syringa...

Jeanie's gasp this time seemed really to lift a disordered heart a little way in her throat. She stood quite still. She could not see the man now. She would not have seen him before had he not moved. But he was there, standing as still as herself beside the old syringa-bush which made a thick patch of darkness.

No he was not there! Jeanie had seen out of the corner of her eye the flight of an owl, imagined a darkness m the shape of a man and connected the two together. She had her hand on the matches now, but could not take her eyes off the syringa-bush. And as she looked a portion of the blackness moved off across the dark grass, and was a man. The kitchen light fell for a second on the toe of a man's shoe. A black shoe.

Jeanie's first impulse was to flee to the kitchen. Her next, to curse Mrs. Barchard for not pulling the kitchen blind down, for the patch of light thrown by the kitchen window dazzled her eyes. If it had not been for that, perhaps by now she would have been accustomed to the darkness and have been able to see who it was who was creeping slowly, slowly, in that extraordinary fashion, as though he were doing a balancing feat, along the grass edging at the other side of the path.

The background of dark fruit-bushes and apple-trees obscured all but the movement of a denser darkness. But along a grass verge some fifteen feet from the window, somebody was walking like a man on a tight-rope, putting one foot closely down in front of the other. There was something horrible, it seemed to Jeanie, in the clumsy grotesqueness of the movement. Her foolish heart, as if it were a caged creature that had had enough teasing for to-day, throbbed irritably. The figure disappeared behind an espalier. Softly and suddenly opening the iron-framed casement, Jeanie called:

“Who's there?”

There was no reply, no movement in the darkness. An ice-cold air came in upon Jeanie's hot face. Everything was silent. How foolish that her heart should race so, that all her instincts should silently call for help! Were there no silly boys in the cottages round about? Was not a garden gate open to everybody who chose to trespass? Had not Jeanie before now found on her flower-beds the clumsy footprints of people taking a short cut through her garden from some farm-house below in the valley? What harm could a trespasser in her garden do to her safely behind the barred doors of her cottage?

Who's there?
indeed, in that foolish, quavering voice! The trespasser was laughing to himself, no doubt, among the apple-trees. But perhaps he was not laughing. Perhaps now, at this moment in that darkness, a rifle or a pistol was pointing at Jeanie's open window, perhaps at this moment a steady determined finger was on the trigger.

Crash! went the casement as Jeanie's hand flung it to. There was a further tinkle, as a little diamond-shaped pane fell out.

“Oh damn!” muttered Jeanie, fastening the catch and fumbling for the matches, crouching, keeping her head down away from the window. She did not light her candle till she was outside the larder again and the door shut. Inside the kitchen, Mrs. Barchard was still singing softly and hoarsely to herself. Jeanie had half a mind to open the kitchen door and reassure herself with the sight of Mrs. Barchard and the steaming kettle and the rows of metal candlesticks and the glowing kitchener. But she was afraid of Mrs. Barchard. She was afraid of everybody. She was afraid of everything.

As she entered the parlour she realised that she had forgotten to bring the milk she had gone to fetch. She could not go back again.

“Mrs. Barchard! Mrs. Barchard!”

That was a foolish urgent voice in which to call a domestic. Mrs. Barchard would think the chimney was on fire or something. But at any rate it brought her quickly to the parlour, still holding a polishing leather in her well-whitened hand.

“Yes, Miss?”

“Oh, Mrs. Barchard! Could you fetch me some more milk? I've just spilt all this.”

“Oh dear! Yes, of course.” Polishing the damp tray with the corner of her apron, Mrs. Barchard added, for she was nothing if not inquisitive: “I thought I heard you, Miss, going to the larder just now?”

“Yes, I did, but I forgot what I went for.”

“You looks a bit pale, Miss.”

“I—I imagined I saw a man in the garden just now. It startled me.”

Mrs. Barchard's dark eyebrows rose until they almost disappeared into her untidy top-knot of grey hair.

“A man in the garden, Miss? He's up to no good at this time of night! I'll go out with a bicycle lamp if you like and see if he's still there.”

“Oh no, don't bother! He was just taking a short cut, I expect; but it startled me.”

A short cut. Jeanie saw again in her mind's eye the slow movement of that dark figure in the darkness, balanced on the grass verge as on a high wall, walking like a child who has taken a whim to touch heel to toe and toe to heel all the way from his nursery to Timbuctoo. What sort of a short cut led along the grass verge of her kitchen garden Jeanie could not imagine! But it did not matter. Had she not been in an overwrought state, the antics of a trespassing boy would not have worried her. She made light of the matter, seeing that Mrs. Barchard was disposed to take it with deadly seriousness.

“Well, but you looks real white, Miss. You isn't well, I'm sure. How about a fresh pot of tea made good and strong instead of that weeshy stuff you drinks?”

When she was alone again with her pot of strong tea and her cosy fire, Jeanie tried to settle down happily and enjoy them both. But she found herself continually looking uneasily over her shoulder. Dear little room that she loved, it looked surely as usual. But it did not give her quite the reassurance she had expected. The cottage piano had an odd, dumpy and sullen look, retiring in the corner out of the lamp's rays. There was a folding screen standing beside the piano, and it had a secretive appearance. Under the round gate-leg table there was dense darkness.

Jeanie was still gazing into the fire with her tea going cold beside her when Mrs. Barchard came in, hatted and coated for her homeward journey.

“Oh, Mrs. Barchard, off already?”

“It's past my time, Miss. And it's starting to snow, too, bother it, as if we hadn't had enough slummocky stuff out of the sky this autumn.”

“Well, you'll be along in the morning.”

“As usual, Miss. Don't you come to the door, you'll catch cold.”

A few flakes came in at the door as Jeanie opened it. It was beginning to snow, with small flakes very lightly drifting.

“Nasty stuff!” said Mrs. Barchard, stamping on a wet flake as though it were a noxious insect alighting on the floor.

Jeanie watched her down the path and out of the garden and stood for a moment listening to her brisk footsteps making off down the road. The land, the sky had that peculiar darkness and stillness that come with filling snow. By to-morrow it would perhaps have fallen-snow's peculiar luminousness. The air was very still. There was not a sound among the high-up branches. 

It was so still that a crackling rustle in the garden hedge startled Jeanie. She peered out.

“Is anyone there?” she asked quietly.

There was no reply. Weasels and stoats and other nocturnal hunters cannot, after all, be expected to reply to questions in the human language. Jeanie smiled a little at this reflection. But she was careful to bolt and chain her front door, and then did the same for both back doors. Then she gave Petronella the remains of the milk, went round the cottage, making sure of the window fastenings, filled a hot-water bottle, raked out the parlour fire, wound the clock, and taking a book and Petronella under her arm went upstairs to her bed. It was a quarter-past seven. It was one of the advantages of living alone that one could go to bed at strange hours without inviting curious comment.