The Black Cabinet (7 page)

Chapter XII

Breakfast was apt to be a silent meal at Danesborough. Mr. Wroughton, coming in late, was sufficiently occupied with the important business of eating; and Emily, nervously busy with the tea things, had learned in the course of years not to risk a snubbing. She made one remark every morning to Chloe:

“You should pour out, you really should, Miss Dane. I don't feel I ought to be doing it.”

“I hate pouring out,” said Chloe on the morning after the little scene about the key. “I simply hate pouring out. Let's make Mr. Wroughton do it for a change if you're tired of it.”

“Oh, no!” said Emily, in a frightened whisper. “Oh, dear no! Oh, please, Miss Dane, you won't suggest such a thing, will you?” She very nearly dropped the milk-jug in her fright as Leonard Wroughton came into the room and shut the door noisily behind him.

Chloe felt amusement pass into pity tinged with scorn. To be so much afraid of a man—of any man! It was pitiable. Emily Wroughton wanted shaking. Why didn't she stand up to the man, and bite him when he snubbed her? Chloe looked at her shrinking behind the tea-cups—the wispy hair; the nervous gestures; the unbecoming black jumper, far too low in the neck. She looked away with a frown.

Mr. Wroughton was at the side table, helping himself to kidneys and bacon. The silence irked her. She reached for the marmalade pot, and innocently cast a bomb into the stillness.

“Who is Stran?” she said, and helped herself to marmalade.

The question was addressed to Emily, and Emily began to answer it, but got no further than a repetition of the name.

“Stran”—she said, and then Mr. Wroughton came forward and set down his plate with a clatter. Chloe repeated her question.

“Yes, Stran. Who is Stran?” And this time Leonard Wroughton took up the word.

“Why, what made you ask that?” he said.

“Mr. Dane spoke of him,” said Chloe. “Just mentioned him, you know; and it's such an odd name.”

“Stran is short for Stranways—not so odd really.”

“Who is he?”

“Just an acquaintance of Mr. Dane's. You're not very likely to come across him. What did Mr. Dane say about him?”

Chloe's eyes had a sparkle in them; Mr. Wroughton's domineering stare had roused her temper. He had no business to look at her, or at any woman, like that.

“Oh, he just mentioned him,” she said, and went on eating toast and marmalade.

Something about this little encounter made her better pleased with herself. She had stood up to the Wroughton man and seen him subside into flushed silence. It helped to obliterate the memory of her meekness the day before. Chloe was not at all accustomed to being meek, and she had no intention of letting Leonard Wroughton bully her.

She had her first driving lesson later on that morning, and came home fairly intoxicated with the air, the speed, and the new sense of power.

“It's like having wings almost,” she said to herself as she ran up the steps and into the hall. And there, just by the study door, she heard her own name:

“No, Miss Dane is not in, I'm afraid.”

Chloe ran into the room, and saw Leonard Wroughton at the telephone.

“I'm just back. Glorious! Is that some one for me?”

He handed her the receiver, and she asked,

“Who is it?”

A man's voice came to her:

“Oh, is that Miss Dane?”

“Yes, it is. I've just come in.”

“It's Michael Foster speaking.”

“Oh, how nice!” said Chloe with naive truthfulness. After the funerary gloom of the last few days, how nice to hear Michael's cheerful voice; how nice to speak to somebody young! She looked up from the instrument and gave Mr. Wroughton a cool little nod of dismissal.

“It's a friend of mine. Perhaps you wouldn't mind shutting the door.”

“That's ripping of you,” was Michael's answer. “I—I went down to Maxton two days ago, an you weren't there.”

“No, I was here.”

“They told me that—I saw your Miss Allardyce, and she told me. And the reason I rang you up—”

There was a pause. It lasted such a long time that Chloe said, “Are you there?”, and said it twice.

“Yes, I'm there—I mean, I'm here—I mean the reason I rang you up—”

There was another pause.

“I do wish you wouldn't keep going away,” said Chloe. “It's perfectly horrible when you don't know whether there's anyone at the other end of the line or not—I simply hate it. Do go on.”

“I am going on,” said Michael. “What I'm trying to say is this, only I don't know if you'll think it awful cheek”

Chloe gave a little gurgle of laughter.

“Do tell me what it is. If you only knew how deadly, deadly dull I've been.”

“Have you?” Michael sounded rather hopeful.

“Bored stiff,” said Chloe succinctly.

“Then perhaps—well, what I mean to say is, I may be down in your direction next week. I think I'm booked for a job that'll take me past Danesborough, and—and I was wondering whether you would let me come and see you.”

“I should love it,” said Chloe.

“May I really?”

“Yes, of course you may.”

Chloe went to her room singing. She had snubbed Mr. Wroughton; she had driven a car for twenty miles; and Michael Foster was coming to see her next week. The gloom that broods over Danesborough lifted.

It was as she passed the drawing-room door on her way down to lunch that Chloe decided to open the safe.

“I've just let myself get silly about it,” she said “I don't expect there's a thing inside it except stocks, and shares, and bonds, and fusty, mouldy business sort of things like that. I'll just open it and have done with it. I didn't know I could be such an idiot about anything; and if I can't pull myself together, I'll just grow into a trampled worm like that poor, wretched Emily.”

At this point the poor, wretched Emily joined her. Chloe slipped her hand inside Mrs. Wroughton's arm and spoke warmly, impulsively:

“Why didn't you come out this morning? It was simply ripping. Why don't you drive?”

“I—I shouldn't care to—I haven't got the nerve.”

Chloe gave the thin arm a little squeeze.

“Why are you frightened of things?” she said. “I hate to see people frightened.”

Emily Wroughton looked nervously over her shoulder; they were in the hall, and Chloe's voice carried so.

“My dear Miss Dane, please, please!” And then, as they came into the empty dining-room, she asked in her quick, jerky way:

“Aren't you frightened sometimes?—when people are vexed—when you can't please them! When one tries very hard to please people, and they are never quite pleased, quite satisfied, it gives one such a terribly fluttered feeling—at last that's what I find.”

“People,” of course, meant Leonard Wroughton. Chloe accepted the faint attempt at camouflage.

“I wouldn't try so hard if I were you,” she said with a little glow of indignation in her voice. Chloe might resolve to open the safe at the earliest opportunity, but that opportunity was not easy to come by. For one thing, Emily Wroughton was for ever at her elbow. Or if by chance she disappeared for an hour, it seemed impossible to cross the hall without encountering Mr. Wroughton. It was, of course, quite open to Chloe to tell either Leonard Wroughton or his wife that she wished to be left alone in the drawing-room in order to go through Mr. Dane's private papers. There were moments when she thought of taking this course; and there were other moments when she was upon the point of wiring to Mr. Hudson to come down and open the safe with her. Reason suggested one of these courses. But stronger than reason was the instinct that held her back—Mitchell Dane's face; Mitchell Dane's voice; fragments of his talk.

Chloe knew at last that she could force herself to open the safe. But she must be alone and secure against interruption. She must be alone because she was afraid—in spite of everything she was afraid—of what that safe might contain. She would open it. She would make herself open it. But she must be alone.

Three days slipped away, and the safe remained shut. To get away from the Wroughtons Chloe had to leave the house. Leave it she did, and drove herself for mile on glorious mile, forgetting everything in this new, vivid delight. But when the drive was done, there was Danesborough to come back to—Danesborough and the Wroughtons. Each day as she came back into the house she felt that clinging something close in about her like a mist and chill her glowing thoughts greyness.

On the fourth day she saw her opportunity. Leonard Wroughton went to town by the twelve fifteen. He took a suit-case with him, and Emily explained that he was going to stay at his club. “I don't suppose he'll be back till late to-morrow, or perhaps not till next day. Leonard does so hate to be asked questions.”

“Yes, I've noticed that,” said Chloe.

Emily made a nervous movement.

“Oh, men are like that. Lots of women are so silly—they will ask questions, and expect a man to tell them where he goes, and what he does, and just when to expect him back. It's very foolish indeed—it really is. Leonard simply can't bear to be asked questions. And I never dream of asking him what he's going to do, or when he is coming back, though it's dreadfully awkward sometimes—about meals, you know, or if anyone wants to see him. I just have to say that I've no idea when he'll be back.”

Chloe laughed a little indignantly.

“And what happens when you go away? Do you just drift off into the blue, and let him guess when you'll be back?”

A singular look crossed Mrs. Wroughton's face—a momentary eagerness passing into terror.

“Oh, of course not. Oh, my dear Miss Dane what things you say!”

Chloe laughed again.

“Try it!” she said, and ran upstairs.

In her own room she sat down and made a plan. Here was her opportunity of opening the safe and getting it and its tiresome contents off her mind. She decided to wait for the night. Emily would be sure to cling to her like a burr all day, with just that timid persistence which it is so hard to rebuff without actual brutality. The fact that Leonard Wroughton used this brutality towards his wife a dozen times a day made it impossible for Chloe to be otherwise than gentle. No, she would wait until the house was quiet, and Emily and the servants asleep. Then she would go down to the living-room, open the safe, and dispose once and all of her own ridiculous fears and fancies.

Chapter XIII

Chloe sat up in bed, lit a match, and looked at her watch for the sixth time. It was only half-past eleven. She blew out the match with an impatient puff. Never, never, never in this world had time crawled so. Every hour of the long day, every dull minute of a dull evening, added to Chloe's feeling that an intolerable stretch of time lay between her and the moment when she had made her plan that morning. It
was
only that morning, but it felt like years, and years, and years—the sort of years that prisoners endure when they haven't even got oakum to pick and are driven to tame rats and spiders. With a whimsical twist of her thought Chloe regarded Emily as, not a rat or a spider—imagination baulked at that—but as a prisoner's mouse, a thin, anxious mouse, with beady eyes and an air of having been half-starved for years. Poor Emily! It would be dreadful to be like that.

Chloe slipped an inch or two deeper into the drowsiness which waits on those who sit in the dark defying sleep. She was awake—yes, of course she was awake—but all the same she distinctly saw Emily Wroughton with a pink, pointed nose and large mousy eyes through which the light shone, with a red glare. She woke with a jerk, and lit another match. It was a quarter to twelve.

“I won't go down till twelve,” said Chloe to herself. “I said I wouldn't, and I won't.”

She twirled the match between her fingers, and let it burn down, down until the flame scorched her hand. Then she blew it out, shook up her pillows, and began to think how quickly a quarter of an hour can pass when you don't want it to.

“Now, if I was at a dance, with a really thrilling partner like—oh, well, like that Mr. Fossetter. Yes, he was rather thrilling; there's something romantic about dark eyes, and he's a dream to dance with. Yes, if I was dancing with him, or with anyone else I liked,”—Chloe's chin lifted a little—“why a quarter of an hour would be gone before it had begun. Zip! Oh, how I wish I was going to a dance to-night in my darling silver dress instead of having to creep and crawl in a black house as if I was a burglar or a ghost, with that beastly, beastly safe waiting for me to open it! And if there are only stocks and shares in it, I suppose I shall be thankful. But oh, what a colossal fool I shall feel!”

The thought pricked deep. Chloe struck a match with such a vicious jerk that the head flew flaming on to the floor and sizzled there. She dropped a book on it and tried again. The match flared, and the little white circle of her watch showed her the two black hands together at twelve. With a sigh of relief she lit a candle and flung the bed-clothes back.

The coast should be clear enough now. It was two hours since she had said good-night to Emily, and at least an hour since she had heard any stir in the house. She made her preparations in a little glow of excitement. To have come at last to a point of action was like being suddenly freed from a heavy weight. She put on a dark blue dressing gown and blue felt slippers, picked up and tested her bicycle lamp, blew out the candle, and opened her bedroom door, stood there upon the threshold.

The passage was quite dark. All the house was dark, quite dark and still. Chloe stood listening until it seemed to her that the silence was rising about her softly, insistently, beating in upon her thoughts as waves beat. And now it was no long silence, but fear—that chill, unreasoning fear which saps the power to act. Chloe knew that if she stood there much longer, the fear and the silence would overmaster her and turn her tamely back into her room again.

With a sudden movement she crossed the threshold and took a couple of steps forward. Then, suddenly, she turned back again, took the key from the inside of her door, closed the door, locked it from the outside, and slipped the key into her dressing gown pocket. She drew a little sigh of relief as she turned away. She had not thought of locking the door when she had planned what she would do and suppose Emily had come to her room while she was away. There were a thousand chances against it; but the instinct that had turned Chloe back was afraid of the one dim chance that lay beyond the thousand.

She set her left hand on the wall and felt her way past the right-angle turn into the broad corridor, and so to the head of the stairs. She took the first step hesitatingly and moved along it until her groping fingers touched the balustrade. That would be easier than feeling her way down by the wall. It was quite easy really; the steps broad, shallow, and softly carpeted, and the hall itself not dark with the absolute blackness of the closed in passages behind her. She came down into the hall, turned to the left, and opened the drawing-room door.

All her movements up to now had been slow and steady, but a sudden breathless sense of hurry came on her as the door opened. She slipped into the dark room and shut the door, and felt her heart beat and her hand tremble. She would have liked to switch on all the lights in the big cut-glass chandeliers, set all the rainbow colours dancing in the lustres, and flood the room with brilliance. Quite suddenly she hated the darkness so much that she could hardly bear it. She took her bicycle lamp out of her pocket and turned it on. The little lane that it cut through the black room seemed only to make the surrounding gloom more intolerable. Chloe gave herself a little shake, “You're making a most abject fool of yourself. Do you hear? Stop dithering at once, and attend to business!”

The first thing to be done was to lock the door, that one chance in a thousand clamoured insistently. She felt for the key. No, of course it would be outside; a careful housemaid would have locked the door before she went to bed. But the door had not been locked: it had opened to Chloe's hurried touch without delay. She opened it now, found the keyhole empty, and closed it again, frowning deeply. She had passed that door dozens of times a day on every day since she had come to Danesborough. She had never passed it without being conscious of it, without some shrinking or defiant thought of what lay beyond it. As she looked back upon those many times of her passing, there was always a key in the picture; she couldn't see the door at all without a key. Then who had taken it away? A little anger rose up in Chloe; but if she had not been angry, she would have been afraid. Why should the key have disappeared?

She walked across to the alcove beside the fire, and turned on the shaded reading lamp which stood on a table in front of the cabinet. The shade was faintly rose-coloured, and the light came through it just tinged with a sickly pink.

Chloe put out her bicycle lamp, set it down on the table, and turned to the cabinet. It looked very large, very tall, and very black. The golden river flickered in the pinkish light. The little golden men stood rigidly amongst the golden reeds. Chloe put the key in the lock, turned it, and opened the folding doors. Now that the moment had come, anger and fear, dread and suspicion, were all gone. She was intensely, vividly herself, quick of thought and hand, working to a methodical plan.

She touched the springs as Mr. Dane had touched them, and by stretching her arms to the widest possible extent she was able to draw out the middle section of the cabinet as he had drawn it out. It was quite light—Uncle Walter's butterflies were insubstantial enough—; but the width made it awkward to handle, and she was glad to set it down. The gaping space which it left behind shaded away into blackness. Chloe looked at it, and then looked down at the section which she had withdrawn. If anyone came—nonsense, there was no one to come. But if anyone did come, why, there would be this awkward thing to advertise Mr. Dane's secret.

Chloe picked the section up. Clear of the cabinet it was easier to manage. She crossed with it to the nearest window, and set it down behind the pale, heavy curtains. Then she stepped back, arranged the folds a little, and came again to the cabinet. Her feet made no sound at all on the thick carpet; it was like walking on moss—queer, light-coloured moss with a straggly pattern on it. Chloe shook off the thought as she would have shaken off a wandering puff of thistle-down. Then with a steady hand she picked up her bicycle lamp and turned off the pink electric light. The new-come dark was very black indeed. She turned on her lamp, and pushed it far back into the cabinet. Then she set her knee on the edge of the opening and crawled forward into it, turning half-way to reach the outer doors and partly close them. She was now half sitting, half kneeling in a space about four feet six inches wide and something under three feet high. The depth might have been three feet or a little less.

Holding the lamp in her left hand, she felt for and found the little spring on either side which released the folding doors in the back wall of the cabinet. With the last click the doors sprang an inch apart. Chloe opened them widely, and saw before her the door of the secret safe. The door was painted red, bright red like sealing-wax. The lamp made a circle of light upon it, so brilliant that it looked like fire. Chloe saw this brilliant circle, and with her mind's eye she saw two other things as well—Mr. Dane's odd smile as he showed her how to manipulate just such another lock as this: “Only of course the combination is a different one—you understand that”; and the note which she had burned in kind Dr. Golding's presence, the note with her name in it—just her name, her own name—“Chloe. The word is Chloe.”

She shifted the circle of light until it fell upon the lock, then propped the lamp a-tilt against her knee, and used both hands to set the combination. With a click the door of the safe swung in toward her. She had to shift her position and press up against the left-hand wall of the cabinet to give it room. Then slowly, reluctantly, without excitement, she lifted the lamp and turned the light upon the open safe.

Papers. There were only papers. Packets, and packets, and packets of papers.

“I said it would be only stocks and shares, and fusty old mortgages and things,” said Chloe. And then something came, as it were, behind her formulated thought and struck it dumb. Quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, she was afraid. Kneeling there with the lamp in her hand, looking at those piled up shelves, she was horribly, unaccountably afraid.

Those harmless-looking bundles of paper frightened her more than anything had ever frightened her in her life before. They were no stocks and shares, or parchments, or business papers: they were letters—packet on packet of letters, two together, three together, half-a-dozen, all neatly tied up with red tape. Chloe felt as if she had been turned to ice. Everything seemed to stop in that cold atmosphere of dread. Thought stopped, feeling stopped. There remained a mechanical impulse that made her set the lamp at a convenient angle and reach for the nearest packet. It slipped as she touched it, and she picked it up with the pink knot uppermost. It was loosely tied and came undone easily enough.

There were three letters in the packet, two of them without envelopes. Chloe picked up the first of these and opened it. Her hand did not shake, but it was cold and stiff. She read:

“My own darling, darling boy,” and was touched with an odd emotion. Had anyone really ever written to Mr. Dane like that? She turned the sheet over and saw that it was signed “Judy.”

She did not read the letter, but picked up the second loose sheet. It was very much blotted and quite short. It began abruptly:

“You mustn't come again. I believe he knows. If he doesn't know, he suspects. You mustn't come.

“Your broken-hearted

“Judy.”

Chloe took up the third letter. It was in an envelope addressed to Mr. Dane. She took out the enclosure, and found that it was in the same handwriting as the other two letters; but it began, “Dear Sir.” Chloe held it nearer to the light, the writing was so hurried, so agitated. It ran: “I can't pay what you ask—I can't indeed. I'll do what I can. Haven't you any pity at all? What good will it do you to ruin me? I'll do what I can if you give me time.”

It was signed “J. St. Maurice.”

That was the last letter in the packet, but there was an endorsement on a loose half sheet of paper. The endorsement was in Mr. Dane's handwriting: “Two letters from Lady Alexander St. Maurice Mr. Ralph Baverstock, and one which she very foolishly wrote to me. Nothing has yet been paid. She has expectations from her godmother, Lady Hilldrington. From Stran.”

Chloe tied the letters up and put them on one side. She was capable of this, but not of any mental activity. Her mind did not move; her thoughts did not move. The contents of the letters remained with her as something which she saw quite clearly, but which meant nothing. It was as if she had opened a book beautifully print in some unknown language; there was no meaning; to her frozen consciousness the letters had no meaning.

She took a second bundle of letters, and found the endorsement uppermost: “Three letters to Sir Gregory Slade Moffat from his eldest son November, 1920. From Stran. N.B. Sir Gregory received his baronetcy January, 1921.”

A faint, dull wonder stirred in Chloe's mind. She opened the first letter, glanced at it, and let it fall. It seemed to be an answer to some inquiry about a cheque. She unfolded the second letter and found it in the same vein—bravado tinged with uneasiness. The third letter was different “I've been a damned fool. But for God's sake pull me out of the mess. You stand to lose as much as I do if there's a scandal. There are ways of shutting people's mouths.”

There was more in the same strain. All three litters were signed “Jack.” Chloe put them down and stared at the unopened packets which lay some in the track of the beam of light from her lamp, some in the greyness beyond the beam, some scarcely seen, but guessed at in the far, dark corners of the safe. They were all letters; letters that should never have been written. She remembered Mr. Dane's face when he said, “Don't love anyone. Don't trust anyone. And don't put anything on paper that you don't want the whole world to know.”

Kneeling there and remembering, she opened three more packets. Each one held its secret, its shameful secret. Chloe did not read the letters through. It was terrible to her to read them at all. Each packet was neatly and succinctly endorsed in Mr. Dane's writing, and two of the endorsements bore the words “From Stran.”