Touch and Go (15 page)

“Whose ghost was it?”

“Whose do you think?”

“I—don't—know.” Then, very quickly,
“Who are you?”

“A ghost.”

“Please.”

“If you ask a ghost its name, it's bound to vanish. I'd rather not vanish just yet, you know. You do know that—don't you?”

Sarah's face burned in the dark. She didn't know what she knew, or what she didn't know. She felt she had had all that she could stand. She half turned and groped for the door. The movement brought her against him. She had a feeling that the place was very small, a feeling of being shut in. If she had been ten years younger, she might have screamed. She had learned her self-control in a hard school. She said,

“I want to get out. Where are we? Where's the door?”

“Just here.” His voice sounded a little amused, a little tender. “You're not shut in.” Then, “This was a powdering-closet—that's why it's so small. Now how will you go? By the stairs?”

“I think so.”

“Then I'll just take you to the top. I think we won't go down together.”

She thought someone moved near them as they came to the top of the stairs. His hand dropped from her arm. She was left standing alone with a sense of empty space in front of her and below. She didn't want to think any more. She wanted to get down the stairs and into the lighted dining-room without being caught. It would take her all her time, because Lucilla had the advantage of knowing the house.

If she went down holding to the baluster rail, she was much less likely to pull it off than if she gave herself the width of the stair to dodge in. The bother was that she didn't know on which side of the stair she was standing. It came up straight out of the hall and then divided to left and right. She thought they had gone up on the left-hand side, but whether John Brown had brought her back the same way she had no idea. If the baluster rail was on her right, he had. If it was on her left, he hadn't. She groped, found the rail on her right, and began very slowly and cautiously to descend. Even at the risk of being caught, she really couldn't let go of the rail until she was past the turn. She ought to have counted the steps as she went up them.

The steps ceased. Her feet were on the flat, and her hand found a newel-post with a tall carved head. She remembered that there was a railed landing where the stair branched. She remembered that the posts were carved with pineapples. Her hand slid over the pattern, feeling it. Then she let go and went down step by step, keeping to the middle of the stair. At every step she listened, and twice she heard a movement. She could not have said who moved or where. Then she was in the hall, crossing it in the dark as she had crossed it the first time she came to Holme Fallow—only then the dining-room door had been open, and there had been the torchlight to guide her, while now everything was dark and the door was shut.

She did not know how far she had gone, when something made her stop. She did not know why she stopped, but she thought afterwards that she must have heard something behind her and above, because as she stopped, she turned and looked up. And then, before she had time to think, two things happened, not absolutely together, but so near that she could never say which came first. Ricky Hildred cannoned into her, and away above them in the direction of the stairs Lucilla screamed.

The scream might have come first. She didn't know. It was still echoing through the emptiness when Ricky, clutching her, gasped, “What's that?” He had her by the arm, and she was pushing him away, because there was a torch in her pocket and she wanted it badly enough. Had the scream stopped? She didn't know. Her head rang with it. The torch was like a lump of ice and her fingers too cold to feel the switch, yet they must have found it, because suddenly there was light. The stair with its wide shallow steps, its heavy balustrade, and its carved newels, rushed out of the dark. One moment she did not know where she was and had only a sense of space and emptiness, and the next there was the stair quite near, like the overhang of a cliff. She was perhaps four yards from the last step, with the torch in her hand pointing upwards. There was some diffused light, but the ray struck full upon the pale gold of Lucilla's hair. In an instant of confusion and horror she saw that the bright hair hung downwards. Lucilla hung downwards across the balustrade at its highest point where the stair passed out of sight on the right-hand side and where the drop was greatest to the hall below, and above her, leaning over with his hands on her, there was a man—there was John Brown. She hung downwards from the knees, and he leaned over straining with his hands at her waist. It was just for the one moment, but it was like a fixed picture in Sarah's mind—a fixed and most horrible picture. Her eyes felt rigid in her head. The hand which held the torch was rigid on a rigid arm. Her breath seemed to have stopped. She heard Ricky make some horrified exclamation, and with that the picture broke. John Brown straightened himself, lifting Lucilla until he had the weight of her body upon the balustrade. It had all happened outside of any measurement of time. There was, in fact, the briefest possible space between Lucilla's scream and the choking cry with which she sank down half crouching and half sitting on the stair.

At that second sound Sarah came back to life and movement. She ran, and was aware of Ricky running beside her

John Brown was stooping over Lucilla, with a hand on her shoulder. Sarah thrust the torch at him and sat down on the stair.

“Lucilla—what happened? Are you hurt?
Lucilla!
”

After that choking cry Lucilla was silent. The wavering light showed her ashy pale and staring. The hand which Sarah held was deathly cold.

John Brown spoke over her head.

“Ricky, is that you? Go down and open the dining-room door! Bring the lamp out into the hall! Where's Darnac?”

Bertrand was half way up the stairs. He came from the direction of the drawing room. He looked from one to the other and asked no questions. There was a long tense pause while they waited for the lamp.

CHAPTER XVIII

The lamp suffused the hall with a warm golden light. In the flickering watery gleam of the torch everything had flickered, wavered, and seemed unreal—a dream resolved from the darkness and dissolving into it again. The lamplight restored an agreeable everyday solidity.

Sarah pulled Lucilla to her feet. The sooner they got down to the ground-floor the better. But as they moved, Bertrand Darnac broke what was for him a most unnatural silence.

“Lucilla—
qu'as tu donc?
What has happened? Are you hurt?”

He darted to her, caught both her hands, and held them in a firm, warm clasp. And to him Lucilla spoke, breaking the silence which had closed her in after that last gasping cry. She looked up at him and said.

“Ran—I fell.”

“How did you fall,
chérie
?”

They stood waiting for her answer, John Brown a step above, Sarah beside her, and Ricky halted by the newel-post. He had set the lamp on the hall table and run up the stairs again. He halted now, waiting for what Lucilla would say. They all looked at her, but she did not look at any of them. She looked at Bertrand Darnac, and she said,

“I think—I tripped.”

Bertrand held her hands. He said,

“How?”

Lucilla had a little colour. The ashy whiteness was just pallor now. A shadowy pink came and went upon it. She said in a stronger voice,

“I was running. I slipped on the top step. I must have—overbalanced.”

“I don't see how you could.”

Sarah didn't see either. She turned round and looked with a frowning intensity. The stair came up straight from the hall and then divided, rising by some fifteen steps to meet a corridor on either side. Was it possible that a stumble on the top step could have thrown Lucilla across the stair and on to the balustrade? The stair was wide, the balustrade was low. If she had come running down the passage, bumped into the inside wall, and taken a stumbling fall, could it have happened? She looked, and thought it barely possible. She said suddenly and clearly,

“Mr. Brown, you were there. What happened?”

John Brown answered at once. He was standing on the second step. He had not moved from it. The top step ran to meet a pillar. The step on which he stood was the first to reach the balustrade. He said,

“I was here, by the pillar. Lucilla screamed, and I grabbed her. She was over the edge, and I rather thought she was going to take me with her, but I managed to lift her back. That balustrade ought to be higher.”

They all looked at it. Sarah wondered how many of them were thinking what she was thinking. The balustrade was low enough to be dangerous. John Brown was right about that. A plunging fall from the top step might send you crashing over it into the hall below—a break-neck drop. It certainly might. But by no conceivable chance could any fall carry you over the rail at so high a level as the second step. She didn't think it possible that Lucilla could have been thrown against the balustrade any higher up than the fourth step. She would have put it at the fifth or sixth herself, but even at the fourth step John Brown could not have reached her. She must have been on his own level or no more than one step below, or he could not have saved her. The picture she had seen in the beam of her torch came vividly before her mind. The fair hair hanging down. The body hanging down. John Brown bent over the balustrade, with his hands—holding Lucilla? Or pushing her down? What would have happened if her own hands had really been too cold to find the switch? What would have happened if the light had not gone on just when it did? Would Lucilla be standing there, or would she be lying broken on the floor below? She shuddered inwardly. And in a moment Lucilla was talking fast and eagerly with a bright flame of colour in her cheeks.

“It was too frightfully stupid of me—wasn't it? Why are you all staring like owls? I'm not hurt. And it's no use asking me how I did it, because I don't know. I did a sort of a slide and a sort of a wobble, and I tried to save myself, but that beastly balustrade caught me by the knees and over I went. I thought I was gone—and then someone pulled me back again.”

“It was Mr. Brown,” said Sarah, still in that very clear voice.

No one was prepared for what happened next. Lucilla snatched her hands out of Bertrand's and, whirling round, flung her arms about John Brown and kissed him.

“Noble preserver!” she said; and then, catching Sarah by the arm, “Darling angel Sarah, let's go home.”

They went home. There were no stragglers this time. Sarah kept her arm through Lucilla's, and nobody talked very much.

When they had come about half way across the fields, it began to drizzle with rain. Sarah looked up and saw a thick covering of cloud over the whole face of the sky. It gave her a curious sense of some indefinite lapse of time. The sky had been clear when they came; it was cloudy now. They had not been so long, but everything had changed.

They came out of the fields and on to the road. It would have been the natural thing for Bertrand and John Brown to go on into the village to their lodging at the Cow and Bush, but both turned in at the Red House gate and walked with the others up the steep embanked drive. Sarah thought of Lucilla falling suddenly out of the dark into the headlights of
The Bomb
. She might have been killed then. She might have been killed twice over, to-day. You can't, you simply can't, believe in coincidence to that extent.

Miss Marina was dozing on one side of the drawing-room fire when they came in, and Geoffrey Hildred sat reading
The Times
on the other. However warm the day was, Miss Marina liked a fire in the evening. She sat with a cushion behind her shoulders and her feet on a little round stool which had been worked in cross-stitch by Guy Raimond's grandmother about sixty-five years before. The pattern was one of green leaves and fat red roses on a black ground, but the colours were now very pleasantly faded, and no longer contrasted as harshly with the bright yellow maple of the frame as they must have done when they were new. Miss Marina's auburn front was slightly crooked and her mouth a little open. Her knitting was on her lap, but as she had dropped no stitches, it was fairly certain that she had not been trying to knit.

Geoffrey Hildred turned round with a smile as they came in.

“You got tired of your game very soon,” he said, and at the sound of his voice Miss Marina woke up with a start.

“It's raining,” said Sarah. It was a stupid thing to say, but she said it because she couldn't think of anything else.

Miss Marina blinked a little.

“Raining? Then I must insist that you change your shoes—I must insist that everybody changes.”

Her knitting slid off her lap on to the white woolly hearth-rug, and as she stooped to pick it up again, her attention veered to her cousin. He had one foot firmly planted on the white curling wool, and the other crossed upon his knee. It was upon the sole of this foot that Miss Marina gazed with some concern.

“But, my dear Geoffrey, your feet are damp too. Was it raining when you came in? And you have not changed!”

Geoffrey Hildred had been holding
The Times
with both hands. He let the paper slide to the ground and leaned forward to touch the sole of his shoe.

“Nothing to change for,” he said. “No, it was fine enough when I came in. I looked out five minutes ago with the idea of taking a stroll, but it was drizzling, so I went no farther.”

Miss Marina began to tell a horrifying anecdote illustrating the fearful consequences of sitting in wet shoes. Lucilla sat down on the hearth beside her, and presently took her hand and kissed it.

“Darling, what adventurous lives you had in the nineteenth century—too thrilling, really! Think of the risks if you didn't change your shoes, and wear chest protectors, and respirators, and flannel next the skin! Life must have been one long exciting struggle not to catch cold.
Now
we wear next to nothing, and don't bother about our feet at all. So dull of us—isn't it?”