Let Him Lie (3 page)

“Miss Wills? Why on earth should she be cross?”

“She's always cross when Aunt Agnes is cross.”

“Dear me, how awkward!”

“She adores Aunt Agnes. When Aunt Agnes said she might call her Agnes, her nose went all pink.”

“Is that a sign of adoration?”

“I don't think she's staying much longer,” said the little girl with satisfaction. “I hope not, anyway. Uncle Robert says I'm beyond her and must go to school.”

“Little wretch! I wouldn't be your governess for a million a year! What are the Field Club looking at this afternoon?”

“Oh, the usual things, I expect,” replied the blasé dweller in a historic house. “Black Ellen's tower, and the medieval kitchen where the wine-cellar is now, and Grim's Grave.”

“I thought your Uncle Robert was talking of opening Grim's Grave.”

“He is. Aunt Agnes is cross about that too. She says it's a waste of money and there's nothing in it but a few nasty bones and a bit of broken crockery.”

Jeanie smiled.

“Probably, but then how thrilling nasty bones are to those that like nasty bones! Mr. Fone, for instance. He'd be delighted.”

Sarah opened her greenish eyes very wide.

“No!” she said with bated breath. “He's
furious
! He says if Uncle Robert opens Grim's Grave there'll be a curse on everyone for miles! He says Grim's Grave is sacred ground. He says if we open it Awful Forces'll come out and destroy us!”

“Oh dear, how you make my flesh creep!”

“Well, he's a poet, you see,” explained Sarah. “But Uncle Robert says
he's
no confounded poet and he's going ahead, and old Funnybone can put his poetic frenzies in a book if he likes, but he won't have him going round upsetting all the local people.”

“Why, does he?”

Sarah looked vague. Her quotation from Uncle Robert stopped there.

“Quite a lot of people wouldn't like Grim's Grave opened,” she admitted. A slight uneasiness came into her young eyes. “After all, Jeanie, people don't usually go digging up people's graves. And it's just as much a grave, even if it's a very old grave. What's that?”

She sat up suddenly, and the kitten, grasped too tightly, gave a plaintive mew. Jeanie listened. Somebody was talking in the yard below, and she heard the clump of heavy boots on cobbles, but there was nothing in this to bring that look of apprehension into the child's eyes. With a gesture Sarah silenced her. Listening, with her eyes curiously on the little girl's face, Jeanie heard a drawling female voice.

“Well, thank you, but I know my way to the house, when I want to go!”

The cowman's boots clumped heavily away.

Sarah stood up softly, putting the kitten down on the floor. She tiptoed to the doorway which overlooked the yard, and of which the half-door stood open. Jeanie rose and went softly to look out beside her at the woman who was standing irresolutely in the yard, as if undetermined where to look next for something she was seeking.

“Surely this isn't a member of the Handleston Field Club!” remarked Jeanie.

The woman below had pulled off her little velvet cap and her thick, mechanically-waved hair, strangely bleached to an unnatural gold for half its length, looked like a head-piece of some coarse woven fabric. Her cheeks were brightly pink, her lips crudely red. The cool November sunlight smiled at the youthful pretensions of her lined and weary face. Her mackintosh coat hung gracefully on her slim figure, but her neck stooped, her hands were thrust stiffly into her pockets, she stood heavily with bent knees on the high heels of her thin town shoes.

“That's a very lively bit of painting,” murmured Jeanie to herself, “but not much technique about it. Ought we to go down and offer to help her, I wonder?”

“No,” said Sarah in the queerest little hard voice. Glancing at her in surprise, Jeanie saw that her eyes were dark, her upper lip drawn to a straight line. She added: “That's my mother.”

“Your
mother
!” echoed Jeanie, with an involuntary unflattering surprise.

So this was the much-talked-of Mrs. Peel, Robert's sister-in-law, Agnes's
bête noire
!

“Did your aunt know she was coming?”

“I shouldn't think so.”

“Don't you think we ought to do something?”

“No!”

“Not go down and speak to her?”

“No!”

“But she
is
your mother, my kid!”

“It isn't my fault I was born, is it?”

Jeanie, about to combat this somewhat elementary view of filial duty, suddenly caught her breath. The woman in the yard below had taken her right hand out of her pocket, and glancing furtively around the yard, had taken a long look at that right hand and what it held. What it held gleamed darkly in the November sunlight. It was a heavy service revolver.

The stranger started at Jeanie's exclamation, and thrust the weapon back into her pocket. She looked up. Her eyes, darkly lashed like a china doll's, narrowed in an anxious, uncertain look. She seemed to hesitate whether to explain that revolver or to assume that Jeanie had not seen it.

“So there you are, Sally!”

She had a clear, rather intense voice, and Jeanie remembered hearing that she had been an actress before her marriage to Franklin Molyneux.

“Mrs. Peel?” asked Jeanie. “Do you want Sarah?” To Sarah, who had withdrawn herself from the doorway and stood frowning, she murmured: “Why not go down and speak to your mother? I won't desert you.”

“No,” said Sarah, tight-lipped.

“Sally! Sally!” called the clear voice coaxingly from the court-yard below. “Don't be silly, dear! Mr. Agatos has driven me all the way from London specially to see my little girl! I thought we might go for a picnic!”

The child, standing against the wall, out of sight of her mother, pressed her hands together and compressed her lips. Her eyes were dark and frowning. Looking at her, Jeanie could make a guess at the past relations of these two, and her guess hardened her heart against Myfanwy Peel. Looking cautiously out, she saw the angry, thwarted look upon Myfanwy's face, the tight, dragged line of the mouth. Yes, said Jeanie to herself, I think you could be cruel, like most sick neurotic people!

When the other woman spoke again it was with the sort of factitious brightness with which nervous people seek to win the confidence of children.

“I say, Sally! Give you three guesses what I've got in the play-room at home! It begins with a D! Two words! A D and an H! And it's for you to play with when you come back to stay with me!”

To hear the artificially lilting, foolish brightness of that voice and at the same time to see the stony, experienced look upon the little girl's face, was not a pleasant thing. Jeanie felt suddenly absurdly sorry for Myfanwy, who thought she could win with dolls'-houses the confidence of a child who could wear this look.

“The fact is, Mrs. Peel, Sarah's a bit nervous of firearms. She saw that revolver you've got in your pocket.”

“Revolver?” echoed Myfanwy. “Oh, that!” She hesitated. No guilty blood could stain her cheeks a brighter colour, but a patchy red appeared upon her neck.

“I—I—oh, how silly, darling! It's not loaded!”

She took the weapon from her pocket and pointing it at the ground, dramatically pulled the trigger. There was a click, nothing more.

“Why carry such a thing around?” asked Jeanie.

Something in her friendly tone seemed to touch a chord in the other woman's unstable spirit. With a gesture too clumsy to be studied, she put her hand to her eyes, she gave a little sob.

“Oh, I don't know! I'm a fool! I was—I was going to see Robert! I thought I'd—”

“Sarah'll come down and speak to you, if you want her to.” 

“I shan't!” uttered Sarah. “I shan't!” she whimpered. “Jeanie, no!”

Looking at Sarah, Jeanie's common-sense view of the situation wavered again. What, after all, did she know of Myfanwy Peel? What was the woman doing here? Why, if she wanted to see Robert Molyneux, had she not driven to the house? Was it possible that she contemplated the forcible abduction of her daughter?

“Oh!” cried Myfanwy, with a melancholy sound, half-sob, half-laugh. “Don't trouble her! I see she's swallowed everything Robert and Saint Agnes have said about me! She's forgotten what fun she used to have with her mother! I shall have to see what my lawyer's got to say about this! You can't stay away from me for ever, you know, Sally, just because your Uncle Robert's got a big place for you to play in and plenty of money to give you! It won't be very nice for you, you know, being made to come back to me by the law! And I dare say by the time the lawsuit's over I shan't like you quite as much as I do now!”

Myfanwy's voice, which had started on a low emotional note, had grown harder and shriller through this recital until she was speaking like a very virago. Her hands nervously clenched and unclenched, the stiffness of anger made her look old and ill.

“Why don't you go and see Mr. Molyneux? He's in the orchard,” suggested Jeanie. “I'm sure he'd let you take Sarah for a picnic, if you want to!”

She was not sure of any such thing. But at her level friendly tone Myfanwy's hands unclenched, she stood helplessly, her whipped-up rage seemed to break and fall away from her. She cried in a strangled voice:

“Don't keep calling her that! Her name's
Sally
!” and stamping her foot less like a virago than like a child, she burst into tears and ran across the yard out of sight.

“Oh dear!” said Jeanie disconsolately. “Sarah, I do think you're a little beast.”

Myfanwy's sob, her final pathetic cry, so fraught with maternal jealousy, had touched Jeanie's heart, and her ready sympathies were at the moment not with this cold child but with Mrs. Peel, a silly woman, a light woman, no doubt, but, after all, the child's mother and perhaps too rigidly barred from her child by Robert's well-meaning powerful arm.

There were birds chirping under the eaves of the farm buildings and singing in the trees. There was the sound of heavy wheels in the lane, and the clop of horses' hoofs and the sound of men's voices. Farther away, a motorcar hummed along the road, and farther still a threshing-machine was busy. Yet so quiet was it in the hay-loft that Jeanie, conscious of none of these other sounds, heard a gun-shot as though it came shattering a perfect midnight silence. That sudden crack woke Jeanie's startled ears, and as its echoes died away in her mind she became aware of the wheels, the men's voices, the threshing-machine. She stared at Sarah. Sarah's eyes, wide and dark with apprehension, stared back at her.

“What was that?” asked Jeanie in a bated tone. “It sounded like—”

“It was a shot, wasn't it?” said Sarah, with a nervous tremble in her voice.

“But of course in the country one's always hearing shots!” said Jeanie.

“I thought it didn't sound much like a sporting-gun,” said Sarah nervously.

“What then?” 

“Well—” said Sarah, licking her lip. “Perhaps a rook-rifle. Miss Dasent has a rook-rifle. It might have been her.”

“Miss Dasent?”

“You know, Jeanie. She lives in Handleston. Old Dr. Dasent's her father. She goes riding with Uncle Robert. And she comes shooting about here quite a lot. Uncle Robert lets her.”

“Oh, Marjorie!” murmured Jeanie, who had not recognised under the title “Miss Dasent” the plain, pleasant, sport-crazy girl she had met once or twice at Cleedons.

“She's our guide-mistress, you see,” said Sarah, as if apologising for her use of the surname. Her lip trembled. The kitten clasped too tightly to her bosom mewed indignantly. “Oh, Jeanie! You don't think—”

“My dear, we're two sillies to listen at all to a gun being let off at a rabbit. The country's full of guns and rabbits, isn't it, worse luck!”

As she spoke, Jeanie glanced out of the smeared window in the crutch of the roof, half hoping to see a man with a gun crossing the lane to lull their foolish fears. She saw no man, but what she did see made her approach nearer to the window and rub it quickly clean.

Two women were standing in the lane some twenty yards down. One was Myfanwy Peel, the other Agnes Molyneux. Jeanie noted the pleasant plum-colour of Agnes's dress before she noticed her face, but when she saw her face she became oblivious of everything else. Agnes's face was a clayey white upon which the delicate touches of make-up showed hard-edged and strange, like paint on the face of a grotesque doll. She was clutching at Myfanwy's arm. Her lips parted stiffly, writhingly, but whether she spoke or not Jeanie could not tell. She saw Myfanwy with a crude, cruel gesture shake off that clinging hand and pass on quickly up the lane. Agnes looked wildly round, and at the same time Jeanie, taking up an old horseshoe that lay among the hay on the floor, broke the glass in the window. Smashing the jagged edges away, she leant cautiously out and cried:

“Agnes! Agnes!”

Agnes looked up at her. Jeanie had never in her life seen a look so sick, so despairing on a woman's face. Agnes's eyes seemed scarcely to recognise Jeanie, but glanced up and then wandered round her. She tried to speak, and could not.

“All right, Agnes! I'll come down!”

“Oh, what is it?” cried Sarah at her back, in a voice panicky with fright. “Jeanie! What is it?”

Agnes put out a vague hand as if to feel the air, and then, with a queer, limp motion as though she were indeed the doll her make-up made her look, let her head drop forward, her shoulders, her waist, her knees, and soundlessly fell, and lay face downwards in her plum-coloured gown in the mud of the lane.

Slithering down the loft-ladder, running out into the sunlight, stumbling along the rutty lane, Jeanie had a dreadful prevision of herself lifting Mrs. Molyneux from the mud and seeing her face clayey and dead, mud-streaked, with half-opened eyes and blood oozing through and darkening the cloth of her gown. One could be a long time about one's dying, shot in a part not vital. And here, so soon after the shot, lay Agnes still as the dead in the muddy lane.