Let Him Lie (14 page)

“Not a penny!” exclaimed Mrs. Peel. “Not a farthing! Not that
I
care for money! But what gets my goat is that
that's
the man who pretended to think that the child's mother wasn't responsible enough to look after her! That's what he calls responsible!”

“Is there no provision made for Sarah at all?” inquired Jeanie in a casual voice that did not altogether match her feelings.

“
Agnes
is left her guardian. Agnes! And not a penny, not a penny to the child, after all his cant about responsibility!”

Jeanie's heart sank. Robert had had more confidence in his wife than Jeanie had, that was evident.

“You are a strange woman, Miffie,” Agatos remarked sadly. “Only a very clever man, like me, would understand you. A week ago you wanted nothing but your child. You could not have her, and you were not pleased. Now, you can very likely have your child, and still you are not pleased. Not exactly pleased, it seems to me.”

As he spoke, they drew up before Yew Tree Cottage.

“That's a nice little place,” said Mr. Agatos. Standing back from the road behind a long and rather neglected garden, with the old tree from which it took its name humped darkly behind the stone roof, Yew Tree Cottage certainly presented an inviting picture. Agatos evidently had an eye for an old cottage, for he added: “There are plenty of pretty little places round this part of the country, but this is the prettiest yet I've seen.”

“Oh, then, won't you—?”

Jeanie was about to invite them in when, to her surprise, Myfanwy Peel forestalled her. Myfanwy was still flushed with temper, but she spoke in those peculiar, insincere and honeyed tones which an ill-tempered person adopts when he feels that he has, for once, perhaps gone too far and wishes to make amends. She smiled in a stiff grimacing fashion, showing her teeth. She held the door open and one slender leg stretched to the footboard.

“It's the sweetest little place, Miss Halliday! Could we, I wonder? Just for a moment? Wouldn't you just adore to see the inside, Eustace?”

Agatos, looking speculatively at Mrs. Peel as if he wondered what she were after now, agreed that he would, indeed, adore to.

“Eustace is quite nuts on old houses,” prattled Myfanwy, as the three of them walked up the path between the wintry shrubs and the roses where one or two hips and even a wind-pinched leaf and flower or two still hung. “He's always buying them and selling them again. Oh, did you ever see such a sweet little porch!”

Her eyes travelled restlessly over the front of the cottage she was pretending to admire, but it did not need great acumen to see that her thoughts were otherwhere. Jeanie awaited developments with mild curiosity.

She did not have to wait long. After many perfunctory glances and loud but hollow exclamations of rapture over the front door and hall, after expressing an ardent desire to see the rest of the dear little place, Myfanwy sank on to the settee in the little parlour and held her hands to the blaze and refused to be dislodged.

Agatos protested:

“My dear Miffie, you have not seen half this nice place!”

He was hovering in the parlour doorway, looking into the hall. His pale fleshy face with its dark sleepy eyes had quite a pleased, lively look.

“Do you like it?” asked Jeanie eagerly. She loved Yew Tree Cottage so much herself that to hear its praises was sweet to her.

“Indeed I do! It has the makings of a very, very nice little place. One could put a gallery round the hall—a kind of minstrels' gallery, and move the back hall-door. Yes, the back hall-door should not be there.”

“It always has been there!” said Jeanie, a trifle indignantly.

“Ah yes, very likely! The people who built these places did not mind draughts. May I go and look at the kitchen while Miffie warms her bones and tells you the story of her life? I think she wants to tell you the story of her life. She has been silently willing me to go away for a long time now.”

“Really, Eustace, you fool, what do you mean?”

“Oh yes! I am very psychic. Then I will go and look at the kitchen—may I, Miss Halliday, all by myself?”

Jeanie wondered, as he went off, what Mrs. Barchard would make of him.

“Eustace is crazy about old cottages,” murmured Myfanwy as Jeanie looked in the wall-cupboard for some refreshment for her guests. “It's a hobby of his to buy up the most awful little hopeless hovels and do them up and sell them again to quite civilised people—for weekends, you know. And although it's just a hobby, you know, he doesn't do badly for himself out of it.” Jeanie could well believe it. Mr. Agatos did not strike her as a man who would in any circumstances do badly for himself.

“Will you try some of Mrs. Barchard's special sloe-gin? I'm sorry I haven't anything else to offer you,” said Jeanie as her guest seemed to hesitate.

“Well, just a very, very little. I don't really take stimulants at all,” explained Myfanwy in an odd, mincing tone. “But as it's home-made...”

She sipped the beautiful plum-coloured liquid.

“I do certainly feel worn out, Miss Halliday. Perhaps it'll do me good. I don't know how I lived through that awful inquest. And then to have it adjourned, all to go through again! If they wanted me to give evidence, why didn't they take my evidence yesterday and let me go? Keeping one hanging about like this!” She dropped a spot of gin on her dress and swore irritably. “I'm not really at all well, and the doctor says I ought to go away for a thorough change. I ought to be in Bournemouth at this moment—I'd booked the rooms and everything. Only I wanted just to come up and see Sally before I went, and look what I landed myself into!”

Her voice had risen now to a high complaining note like a sulky child's. She looked at Jeanie with what was intended to be a rueful smile, but there was fear between her eyes. This was what she had come for, then, for reassurance, for counsel, to talk over the horror she had involved herself in, to remove, if possible, a bad impression and to hear somebody else beside her Eustace say that she had nothing to fear from the police. I wonder! thought Jeanie. A neurotic woman like this is utterly incalculable, one can't tell what she might do!

“After all, Mrs. Peel, you had a revolver with you. And those letters you wrote to Mr. Molyneux. You can't expect—well, can you? to get off without any inquiry.”

“Oh, that revolver!” Myfanwy gave a little tinkle of meretricious laughter which might have done well enough on the stage. “That museum piece! I could hardly lift it! As for firing it—well, my dear, have you ever tried to aim straight with a gun you can hardly lift?”

Jeanie said quietly:

“But, Mrs. Peel, a service revolver's a dangerous weapon. It isn't a joke. It's no use trying to pretend it's in the same class with a pea-shooter!”

“It wasn't loaded! You saw that for yourself!”

Jeanie did not reply to this childish protest.

“And anyway,” pursued Myfanwy Peel, “the bullet was a point twenty-two. They said so. That queer man at the inquest said so. You can't use a point twenty-two cartridge in a service revolver. Except with an adaptor, or some such thing that I never even heard of or knew existed till the day before yesterday!”

She broke off and looked at Jeanie defiantly with great tears in her eyes.

“I don't think you've got anything to fear,” Jeanie soothed her.

“Then
why
have I got to attend next Friday?
Why
do they keep me hanging about here? I shall go raving mad before then! That business about Sally was enough to drive anyone mad! And now this beastly inquest! Could I have another weeny glass of your delicious sloe-gin? And do tell your Mrs. Barchard from me that it's absolutely delicious.”

Refilling the little glass, Jeanie murmured:

“The whole thing's horrible, of course.”

“Cheerio,” murmured Myfanwy drearily. She sipped. “Miss Halliday, may I talk to you frankly? I feel you'll understand. I
never
meant to use that revolver. Of
course
I never did!” She put her glass down. Two tears slid over on to her cheeks, and with a forefinger wrapped in a handkerchief she quickly removed them before they could damage the elaborate arrangement of red, orange and blue on her cheeks and eyelids.

“You don't know—nobody knows what I suffer with my nerves! How wretched I feel sometimes! Almost as if I could kill myself! I was looking in Eustace's chest- of-drawers for a jumper of his I wanted to borrow to drive down in, and I saw that damned revolver! I wish to God now I'd never seen the thing! And I just snatched it up and took it with me. I thought, when I saw Robert I'd bring it out and make him think I meant to kill myself with it. I thought that might startle him out of his damned freezing politeness!” She made a strange sound, half sob, half laugh. “But of course I never really meant—I made jolly sure there were no cartridges in it, can tell you! Then when you saw me in the yard, I was looking for Robert. Like a fool, I was rehearsing what I'd say to him. How I'd take the revolver out and show it him and see him drop his pukka sahib tone for once! It wasn't loaded, though. Of course not! And I never even saw Robert! You spoilt that!” She gave another dreary half-laugh strangled into a sob. “You and that little bitch Sally! I'm damned if I'll have her thrown back on my hands at Agnes's convenience! When I'm so beastly ill!”

Myfanwy put her glass down on the table, crossed her slender legs and looked at Jeanie with hard defiance. The next instant she was shaking with sobs.

“Oh, why do I behave like this? I feel so rotten! You don't know what it is, Miss Halliday; nobody does who hasn't felt it! Oh, it is dreadful of me to come into your house and behave like this! But, oh God! I feel so rotten, I feel so tired!”

Jeanie's attempt at consolation was interrupted by the return of Mr. Agatos from his tour of the kitchen quarters. Myfanwy controlled herself at once, sprang up and went to the window, where she opened a handbag that resembled a small suitcase and started to re-make her complexion in a businesslike and accomplished fashion strangely at variance with her former misery. Jeanie turned to her other guest.

“And what would you like to do with the kitchen?”

Agatos smiled and replied promptly:

“Put the kitchen range out in the scullery and turn the kitchen into a dining-room. Enlarge the window, move the staircase...”

Jeanie laughed.

“And then what would be left of Yew Tree Cottage?”

“A very nice, saleable little place,” said Agatos seriously. “Oh,
Miffie
! You have been drinking gin!”

Mrs. Peel, now fully repainted in the gayest colours, turned insouciantly from the window.

“
Sloe
-gin, darling. It's practically a temperance drink.”

“You promised the doctor and you promised
me
that you would not touch such stuff!”

“Really, Eustace, what will Miss Halliday think of me if you talk like that?”

“You are very bad, Myfanwy. You have no self-control. You will soon be crying all over me, if you drink gin. Ah, I see you have already been crying all over poor Miss Halliday. Yes, thank you, I will try a little. It does not make
me
cry.”

“Ass,” said Myfanwy indifferently. She looked ill-tempered enough, but she seemed determined not to disturb with frowns and tears the beauty of her new complexion. “I love your fire, Miss Halliday. Adorable little grate. So cosy.”

“It's new. I only lit a fire here for the first time yesterday. There used to be an open hearth here, and it smoked and smoked.”

“Ah, that's where the fine andirons under the stairs come from! It seemed a pity to me they were put away,” said Mr. Agatos regretfully. “An open hearth is very nice, you know. People who buy week-end cottages like open hearths.”

“I dare say. But nobody likes smoke. Something had to be done about it. And raising the grate seemed the best way to do it. The draught wasn't strong enough, you see.”

Running his hand under the mantel, Mr. Agatos inquired:

“Do you think it quite safe to have a big coal fire raised up so high in a fire-place that was made to have wood-fires on the hearth? Feel the chimney-beam. It is quite hot. I think your builder has taken a great risk. You do not want your pretty house burnt down.”

“That's what Hugh Barchard said. The beam's going to be cased in asbestos. Then it'll be all right, won't it?”

“Yes, but I should not let your builder dilly-dally over it. That beam is very, very hot. This old wood, it is like iron in some ways, but it will not stand constant heat. It dries and dries, and one day it starts to smoulder and to smoke. And then a little wind comes and there is another old house burnt down. And Miss Halliday in her bed with the stairs all burnt away, perhaps, what does she do?”

“Gets out of the window, I suppose.”

“Ah, talking of stairs!” Agatos put his hand in his pocket. “I have found a great treasure in the cupboard under the stairs.”

“What on earth were you doing there, Eustace?” drawled Myfanwy.

“Just looking at the stairs and wondering why they are as they are and whether they would not be better if they were different,” replied he. “You are very negligent with your jewellery, Miss Halliday. See what I have for you!”

With some ceremony he laid a broken string of pearls on Jeanie's knee.

“Genuine Woolworth's?” murmured Jeanie, picking it up. There was only a length of about five inches, with a small brilliant clasp.

Agatos shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps—who knows? Even Ciro! I am not an expert in pearls.”

“Pretty anyway. But not mine. They must be Valentine's.”

“Valentine's?”

“A former tenant.”

“I think anyway you can justly keep them, if you wish. Do you know,” went on Agatos dreamily, “I often think, when I am having alterations done to one of these old cottages that are a hobby of mine—suppose there is treasure hidden under the floor or up the chimney? There never is. But there might be, you know. Why not?”