The Coldstone (19 page)

A look of apprehension had been succeeded on Susan's face by one of blank surprise. She said,

“J—E—W?”

“Yes—initials, you know.”

“They're quite plain?”

“Printed. Why?”

“Oh, I don't know. Who is J.E.W.?”

“I haven't an idea. But it looks as if the old boy knew of someone who might have some ulterior motive for offering a fancy price for Stonegate.”

“Yes—it looks like that.” Her voice sounded tired. Old Mr. O'Connell and his delusion about the Mutiny treasure.… Was it possible that it could have taken him the length of making extravagant offers for the estate on which he believed it to be concealed? It sounded perfectly mad. But then she had always thought he was mad on the subject of the treasure; and if he was mad, he might have been mad enough for that.

Anthony's voice broke in on her thoughts.

“I wonder if it does fit in,” he said. “I wonder if J. E. W. wanted the same thing that the burglars wanted the other night.”

A sudden nervousness assailed Susan. Old Mr. O'Connell—the Lahore treasure—Garry—a swam together in her thoughts. She felt giddy and frightened.

“What's the matter?” said Anthony.

Susan put up her hand.

“Did you hear anything?” Her voice shook a little.

“What sort of thing?”

“A—a footstep.”

“No.”

“On the stair. Please,
please
see!”

“I don't hear anything. All right—don't look like that. I'll go and prospect.”

“Yes,” said Susan. “Yes!”

As he turned, she had her skirt in her hand, her eyes not on him but upon Miss Patience Pleydell's portrait.

Anthony looked out into the hall. A lamp burned serenely. The house was silent, as a midnight house should be. He stepped across the threshold, listened, stepped back.

“There's no one there,” he said, and stopped dead.

There wasn't anyone here either. Susan was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Anthony went up to town next day. He drove himself into Wrane and caught the one decent up train. It was after he had given up his ticket, and whilst he was making his way down the incline which led to the tube station that he caught sight of Susan. Afterwards he wondered how it was that he recognized her with such absolute certainty. She had her back to him; the close hat hid not only her hair but the shape of her head; she was dressed quite differently. He had seen her in blue print and a sun-bonnet, and he had seen her in a quilted petticoat, flowered gown, and fichu. She wore now a thin navy-blue frock that only just reached her knee, and a little navy hat, very plain, severe, and smart. Nothing could have looked less like Ford St. Mary or Mrs. Bowyer's granddaughter. Yet he never had the slightest doubt.

She took her ticket, and he took his. They went down in the same lift, she on one side of it and he on the other, but she never turned her head. He caught one glimpse of her profile. It was unsmiling and intent.

When she got into the train, he chose a different carriage. She hadn't seen him, and he wasn't sure that he wanted her to see him. Yet presently when she left the train, he left it too. It seemed impossible to throw away such a frightfully good opportunity. He would be a mug if he didn't ask her to lunch with him. And then he thought it would be rather a lark to see how far he could get without her tumbling to it that he was travelling with her. He was boy enough to throw himself into the game. It would really make quite a good game, he thought—so many points for the lift, so many for getting in and out of the train without being seen, and top score for travelling on the same bus. He would certainly have the laugh on her for that. She very nearly saw him too, because she reached her seat inside and turned just before he got his foot on the stair. He got the outside front seat on the left, and wondered if she had seen him.

It was a warm cloudy day, quite still and rather airless. The houses and the pavements seemed to give out a faint stuffy smell of dust. Anthony wondered why anyone lived in London who wasn't obliged to.

Every time the bus stopped he kept a look-out for Susan. When she did get off, he had to take the risk of her turning round or looking back. She did neither. She walked straight up the steps of the Victoria and Albert Museum and disappeared.

Anthony found himself at the bottom of the steps. He wasn't quite sure what he was going to do next. He ought to have caught her up—he would have caught her up if everyone on the top of the bus hadn't wanted to get off at just the same moment as Susan did. Perhaps he oughtn't to have followed her. On the other hand, the Victoria and Albert Museum was a perfectly public place, and he had just as much right to be there as she had.

He walked up the steps, had his stick taken from him, and discovered that he had now lost Susan. Of course as soon as you have lost a thing you become possessed with a dogged determination to find it. Anthony pursued Susan in this spirit. He pursued her, or the elusive hope of finding her, amongst walnut cabinets, and Stuart day-beds, and ancient panelling, and other antique objects which diffused an atmosphere of historic interest and furniture polish. He then began to pursue her amongst ceramics, which were colder and altogether less hopeful. He climbed a great many steps. And the more he didn't find Susan, the more persevering and determined he became.

And then he found her.

He had entered the room in which coins and medals are displayed in show-cases like tables whose tops slope down on either side from a central ridge. Tall sets of shelves, glass-fronted, form partitions on either side of the long room. Anthony came round a partition and saw Susan standing with her back to him at one of the showcases. She was not alone. Across the case a man was facing her, his head and shoulders darkly relieved against a bright background of window.

Anthony received a most curious impression. Just at the first glance he did not see the man's features at all. What he saw was an attitude, a silhouette, a particular poise of the head, a particular forward stoop of the shoulders as the man leaned upon the show-case. He had both hands on the case, and he leaned on them.

With a quick movement that was purely instinctive Anthony drew back behind the shelves. He was amazed, excited, horrified; because this pose, this attitude, this silhouette, fitted line for line over the black, deeply etched impression which had remained with him from the encounter in the housekeeper's room. He hadn't seen features then, only a man stooping forward with his hands on the table, the yellow beam from the dark lantern sliding farther and farther away from him, the whole thing a study in shadows. He had only to shut his eyes to see it again. To shut them? He could see it with his eyes open if he moved six inches to the left.

He moved the six inches cautiously. Susan had moved a little; he could see her profile. And as his eyes shifted to the man, the silhouette effect seemed to dissolve. He saw long black hair tossed back from rather a high forehead, eyes that looked black in a pale oval face. He drew back again. He was watching the man whom he had twice seen watching him—from the hedge that overlooked the Coldstone Ring; from the window of Nurse Collins' sitting-room. He was also watching the man who had pitched a chair at his head on the night that Stonegate had been broken into. And this man was here, talking familiarly to Susan. The last thing Anthony saw as he drew back was the worst—Susan stretching out an impulsive hand which was taken and held. And the brute looked at her in a way that made his blood boil—a careless, fond, possessive look.

With a furious effort Anthony turned and walked away. He had seen enough. He wasn't going to spy on Susan. He had seen more than enough. He went down the steps and out of the building.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

About half an hour later Susan bade Mr. Garry O'Connell a firm farewell, caught another bus, and proceeded to a block of flats in Chelsea. She was about to visit her stepmother, and she would have liked to have been feeling a little more settled in her mind. A visit to Camilla always left her with the impression that she had been taking part in one of those cinematograph performances in which everything and everyone is moving or being moved at about six times the natural speed. Camilla herself emerged unruffled, but other people were apt to feel battered. In the days when Susan had to live with Camilla this battered feeling never really went away.

She climbed forty-five steps, and arrived. Officially, Camilla shared this landing with three other people. At this minute, however, most of her furniture obstructed their ingress or egress. There was a piano across the door of No. 17, whilst the dining-table, with a sofa poised on top of it, blocked the approach to the next flight of stairs. Camilla occupied No. 16, the door of which stood wide open.

Susan squeezed herself past a book-case, stepped over some mounds of books, and entered the tiny hall, which was quite full of chairs balanced upon one another and of a raucous smell of paint. Four doors opened out of the hall. Two were open, and two were shut. The open doors were those of the dining-room and drawing-room. Susan knocked down three chairs and squeezed her way into the drawing-room. She looked about her, and said “Golly!” under her breath.

Camilla was descending from a ladder on the far side of the room. It creaked alarmingly under her weight. Her enormous, shapeless figure was draped in an orange jibbah. She wore thick cream-coloured stockings and sandals. An unbelievable amount of short grey hair waved, clustered, and stood on end all over her head. A paint-brush dripping with bright blue paint was stuck negligently behind her right ear. Her hands, her face, her jibbah, the ladder, and the whole floor were also spattered with blue. She had just finished painting the ceiling and the upper part of the walls in the brightest shade of cobalt obtainable. Her broad, flushed face beamed. The eyes, under strong grey brows, radiated a triumphant welcome. The left side of her nose was entirely covered with blue paint.

“Golly!” said Susan again. “What an orgy! No, darling, I
won't
kiss you. I'm a sordid slave of convention—I blench at going home in a bus all covered with woad.”

“Woad was
quite
a different colour,” said Camilla. “How well you're looking—but what dark clothes! At your age you should diffuse joy and light and colour—in fact at any age. I'm bringing that out very strongly indeed in my next Talk at the Central Institute.”

Susan giggled. Camilla always made her feel a little weak; she was so kind, so expansive, so unremitting; and she had so many irons in the fire that one or other always seemed to be clanking.

“What
are
you doing?”

“I'm going to have a jungle drawing-room,” said Camilla in rapt tones. “I thought it all out in the bus on my way back from my last Talk on Thursday. I just snatched a cup of tea and rushed out and got the paint and began at once. I've been working day and night to get done, but of course I positively had to take half an hour here and there to keep up with the articles I'm doing for
The Magnet
—‘
Early Italian Painters
.'”

“I didn't know that was one of your subjects.”

“My dear, it isn't. It wouldn't have been any trouble if it were—or is it ‘had been'? No—‘were'—decidedly ‘were.'”

Susan began to laugh.

“I'd really give anything in the world to have your nerve!” she said.

Camilla looked pleased.

“Everyone ought to be able to do anything. I've never painted a room before—and look at it!”

“Is—is that the sky?”

“I think it's original—not the sky part, of course, but the scheme, the jungle. You see the idea of course. A tropic sky, intense with heat. Then palms.” She drew the paint-brush from behind her ear and waved it with a sweeping gesture at the vague outlines described upon the walls. “You see the idea?”

Susan murmured, “I get you, Steve.”

“Rather bold and free, I think. Palms in three shades of green, and the distance blocked in in sapphire and violet. Below the palms a decorative frieze of tiger lilies slightly conventionalized.”

“T-tiger lilies?”

Camilla went on firmly:

“
Slightly conventionalized.
And I wanted to have gold paint all over the floor—a glorious Oriental sunshine effect—but it was too expensive. Gold is a simply wicked price. So I'm just going to paint the boards brown, with a perfectly matt surface, and have splashes of gold here and there—sunshine
glinting
through the palms.”

“Won't it be rather cold to the feet?” said Susan.

Camilla went on beaming and expanding.

“How materialistic! But it won't, because I shall have green rugs—
moss
green—and a tiger skin.”

“Darling Camilla! Why not a tiger?”

There was a momentary gleam in Camilla's bright, restless eyes. Then she shook her head regretfully.

“There wouldn't be room. But I've sometimes thought a panther, or an ounce—yes, an ounce. They are excessively friendly to man and make affectionate and intelligent pets.”

“A Persian cat would be more to scale,” said Susan hastily. It would be perfectly awful if she had to go back to Ford St. Mary with a conscience weighed down by the thought that she had flung Camilla into the arms of a panther. Fortunately the idea of a cat being to scale seemed to have its appeal.

“Jenny Carruthers has a striped tawny kitten,” murmured Camilla. “She wanted me to have it a week ago, but I was thinking of turning the dining-room into an aviary then, and a cat is always such an anxiety with birds, though of course they can be
taught
and become most friendly. My very first Talk was about animal families. The instance of the snake and the chickens is really too wonderful—yes, really, Susan—a perfect foster mother, and perfectly well authenticated. Where was I?”