Scandal at High Chimneys (2 page)

“So I am. Devil take it! So I am.”

“But you sound as though you want to get Celia safely married, spirited away from your father’s house and out of sight, as quickly and secretly as you can manage.”

“It’s not only a question of Celia. It’s—it’s a question of Kate too!”

“How?”

“Get
her
married,” said Victor.

“That’s what I mean. Do you want to pitch both your sisters into the matrimonial cart without so much as a by-your-leave to either? Why?”

Victor opened his mouth to speak, and shut it on the first word. In Clive’s mind rose again the image of Matthew Damon: bedevilled, inflexibly honest, with a handsome young wife and a fine country-house near Reading, yet his career clouded with whispers and a wonder among the initiated that all honours had passed him by.

There were even some who laughed when they spoke of him.

In another moment, Clive thought, Victor would have told him the whole story. Victor had begun, “You see—” when there were footsteps out in the foyer. A loud, cool voice rose above the obsequious tones of the hall-porter. Tress himself, escorted by the porter, appeared in the doorway and smiled in his agreeable way.

“Ah, Damon,” he said by way of greeting.

“I say! Tress, old fellow! You’re early, ain’t you? The fact is, I hadn’t—”

“Hadn’t finished talking with the attorney?” inquired Tress, raising his eyebrows. “You should have, you know. I gave you plenty of time, and I don’t like to be kept waiting. Perhaps it’s just as well, though. To tell you the truth, Damon, I’ve half a mind to call it off.”

“Call it off?”

“Cry quits, if you like,” Tress said coolly. “Say Miss Celia Damon’s too good for me, and here’s my compliments and good-bye.”

“But why?”

Tress laughed, a great deep laugh without much noise, and sauntered towards the fire.

Victor hastened to the door, closing it with a hollow slam which billowed its tasselled door-curtain, and then hurried after Tress.

“Why?” he insisted.

Tress spread out his hands to the fire. He was a burly young man, with stiffish dark-yellow hair and whiskers round a stolidly handsome face. He towered above Victor, diffusing animal vitality. Over his evening-clothes Tress wore a plum-blue greatcoat with an astrakhan collar, and carried a hat whose nap was a gossamer silk.

“The fact is, Damon, you haven’t been very frank with me. I can’t say I like that either. I’ve been hearing things, you know.”

It was unwise to prod the mild-seeming Victor, whose head jerked up and back.

“If you’ve heard one word against Celia, it’s a lie.”

“Tush! Come, now! What a sputtering little Lucifer it is!” Tress grinned. Then his tone changed. “Not to do with your sister, Damon. It’s to do with your governor-general.”

“My father’s never done anything he shouldn’t have done!”

“Oh? He married an actress, didn’t he?”

“It’s no fault of Celia’s if he did. Anyway, my stepmother is a dashed fine woman! I admire her!”

“We all admire ’em, Damon. But we don’t receive ’em in our homes, you know.”

Suddenly Victor lifted his hands and pressed them over his eyes.

“And that’s not all, you know,” Tress pointed out. “I talked to Serjeant Ballantine only yesterday. It seems your governor used to have uncommonly queer tastes. He enjoyed making up to women who’d committed murder.”

Victor snatched his hands away from his eyes.

“Fact, you know,” said Tress. “He would prosecute ’em, all as virtuous as an Old Testament prophet. Afterwards he’d go to Newgate and visit ’em any number of times before they were hanged three weeks later. Of course he pretended it was to pray with ’em and relieve his conscience, but Serjeant Ballantine says that’s all my eye. Your governor-general was quite spooney about two or three of them, especially the young and pretty ones. It seems he couldn’t resist ’em.”

“God!” whispered Victor.

Wind whistled in Dover Street; the chimney growled under a cold sky.

“Tress, does this mean you won’t have Celia?” Victor cried. “Does this mean you’ll go back on your offer, Tress?”

Tress, after waiting for a moment or two, uttered his deep almost noiseless chuckle.

“Oh, come! Not a bit of it, my boy. I’m in something of a financial hole, you know; the younger son usually is; and your governor-general’s money is as good as anybody else’s. I offered my name; I’ll stand by it.”

There were those who called Clive Strickland a too-conventional young man, even by the standards of this year 1865. He was not. Clive, who had taken out his cigar-case, flung it into a padded chair near the fire.

“That’s very generous of you,” he said; and Tress, raising poised eyebrows, slowly looked him up and down.

“
You
said something, Strickland?”

“Yes. I did. Have you troubled to ask Miss Damon what she thinks of all this? Or thinks of you either?”

“Why, no. No, Mr. Attorney. I can’t say I have.”

“Has it also occurred to you, Tressider, that ‘attorney’ is a confoundedly offensive term?”

“Is it, now?” inquired Tress. “’Pon my sang I don’t know, and ’pon my sang I don’t care.”

Victor was in agony.

“Tress, don’t antagonize him. For heaven’s sake don’t antagonize him, Tress. Clive don’t like this business at all; he don’t for a fact; and he may not help me if you put his back up.”

“Well, then, we’ll find somebody else. Strickland might do worse than earn his keep; this book-writing, you know, isn’t very much. However, I’ll go along and leave you to it. If you care to stroll into the Argyll Rooms about eleven, I’ll stand Sam for a bottle to celebrate. Good evening, Damon.”

And Tress, having derived some amusement from all this, put on his tall hat and patted it into place. After settling his shoulders, after examining his bristly chin-whisker in the looking-glass over the fireplace, he smiled agreeably and moved away like a tame tiger. Once more the heavy door, this time caught in a draught, closed with a slam that went echoing up through a club devoted to writers, painters, musicians, and other mountebanks.

Victor swallowed hard.

“I know what you’re thinking of me,” he said. “I know, and I can’t blame you. But don’t make a judgment too quickly.”

“No?”

“No! Look here, old boy. There are any number of trains tomorrow, but your best is the Bath-and-Bristol Express. That leaves the depot in the afternoon and stops at Reading. I can write a telegram, d’ye see, so that Burbage will meet you with the carriage.”

Clive, who had bent over to retrieve his cigar-case, straightened up.

“Victor, do you seriously imagine I mean to do that?”

“You must, old boy. Pray believe me!”

“For instance,” said Clive, “you see no objection to having a sister of yours married to the gentleman who’s just left us?”

“No;
I
can’t see any objection.” Victor’s voice went high. “But that’s not the point. You were right about one thing. I’d have Kate or Celia married to
anybody,
anybody at all reasonable or presentable, as long as they were safely away from High Chimneys and out of danger.”

“Danger? For the last time, man, what’s wrong at High Chimneys?”

The gaslight, vivid bluish-yellow, shone on a drop of sweat at Victor’s temple. Whipping a handkerchief out of the tail-pocket of his coat, Victor mopped his forehead. Under the edges of that handkerchief, reflected in his companion’s eyes, Clive Strickland sensed the shape of images ugly and unnatural and not well understood. Victor shut his eyes.

“I can’t tell you,” he answered. “I can’t tell you.”

T
HE DEPOT OF THE
Great Western Railway, dim and sooty and hoarse with steam, rattled to a clamour of footsteps on wooden platforms. Dogs, as usual, barked frantically at the engine; small boys escaped from their mothers to stare at it. Also, as usual, there was the middleaged lady in the voluminous crinoline, who falls into a fit of megrims five minutes before train-time and cries out that she hasn’t the courage to go.

At one o’clock on the following afternoon, a chilly day, the Bath-and-Bristol Express was ‘getting a good head up.’ Porters had finished piling heavy luggage on the roofs of the carriages. Though this terminus had been built of iron and glass like the Crystal Palace, you still groped and coughed in London smoke. Clive Strickland did.

‘I am a fool,’ he was thinking guiltily. ‘Indeed, it were charitable to call me an outstanding jackass. People whose imaginations are kindled by the face of a damsel in distress, and who charge to her rescue without quite knowing what they are supposed to do, should be confined to the sort of fiction I write.’

“Fool!” he said aloud.

“Sir?” exclaimed the man carrying his portmanteau.

“I beg your pardon. First-class carriage number two, seat number six.”

“Oh, yes, sir! Very good, sir.”

This situation was not at all humorous. He had committed himself to a course he could neither approve nor justify.

Clive tried to put it out of his mind. A vigorous dark-haired young man, clean-shaven, in a short greatcoat and one of the new-style bowler hats, he strode towards the train. But the sense of impending disaster refused to leave him.

Whereupon, just ahead, he saw Mr. Matthew Damon.

Clive stopped short.

It was not so much the shock of seeing him there as shock at the change in Mr. Damon’s appearance.

Victor had said his father seemed to have aged ten years in the past three or four months, and that he had hardly left High Chimneys during that time. Even so, Clive was not prepared for that change.

Matthew Damon, looking round uncertainly with one hand in the bosom of his frock coat, stood by the footboard of a first-class carriage with an open compartment-door behind him. Clive’s first impulse was to turn and bolt. But he was within two yards of the other man; those sunken eyes had seen him.

“Mr. Strickland!”

Clive’s head ached with all the drinking he had done the night before.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said.

Matthew Damon, at forty-eight, was still formidable. He wore all his old air of sombre power and authority; the deep voice was like a drum. He had been a handsome man and remained so. Though he had a somewhat old-fashioned appearance, wearing a hat of beaverskin rather than silk and a shawl round his shoulders, his clothes and linen were of the finest quality. But his cheeks had sunken badly between thick black side-whiskers turning grey-white; and the eyes seemed to have retreated into his head.

“Mr. Strickland,” he repeated, and groped. “You—you travel by this train? Ah, yes. So do we. To what fortunate circumstance do we owe the pleasure of your company?”

“I imagine, sir, you did not receive my telegram?”

“Your telegram?”

“Yes, sir. I took the liberty of inviting myself to High Chimneys. It was a piece of insufferable impertinence, I’m afraid.”

“Not at all. Not at all, I assure you! You are always welcome, young man, though I—I believe that for years I have not seen you except in London.”

Then Matthew Damon pulled himself together, clenching the hand inside his coat. He spoke with sincerity, with a kind of awkward charm which was the other side of his nature.

“Indeed, you may be of great assistance to us in solving a troublesome and unpleasant mystery,” he added, turning to the door behind him. “Is it not so, my dear?”

A pretty lady with auburn hair, standing in the open doorway of the compartment with her maid hovering behind her, made a grimace and cast up her eyes.

“Mr. Damon, for pity’s sake!”

“Is it not so, madam?”

Before that quiet violence the pretty lady subsided. But her wifely meekness carried other hints, like her broad if subdued charms.

“Hortense, pray do stop fussing!” she said to her maid. “And
I
believe, Mr. Strickland, that you and I met some while ago at Lady Tedworth’s? I do hope you will join us in this compartment. We have it to ourselves, as you see, unless some horrid stranger should force his way in at the last moment.”

And Georgette Damon, auburn hair brushed up into short curls at the back of a flat oval hat, glanced at Clive under her lowered eyelashes.

It was a perfunctory glance, a discreet glance. Yet in some extraordinary way it was as though she had pressed herself physically against him. It conveyed, embarrassingly, a sense of what lay under her dark-green Zouave jacket with its tight-fitting green-silk blouse. Her crinoline, grey-coloured and straight in front, stretched back in a balloon-like triangle according to the latest mode.

Damn the woman!

Clive Strickland felt his thoughts moving in a direction they shouldn’t have moved, and he cursed himself too.

“My ticket-number is for a different carriage, Mrs. Damon, but I shall be honoured to join you. Do—do Miss Kate and Miss Celia accompany you?”

“No, no!” said Mr. Damon. “Kate and Celia are not with us; they are good girls,” he added rather inexplicably. “My wife and I left Reading by a very early train; we have been in town only a few hours. You spoke of a telegram, young man?”

“Yes, sir. Victor was to have left one with the hall-porter at Bryce’s Club last night, but I telegraphed first thing this morning.”

Smoke and smudges drifted about them. Georgette Damon left off looking at Clive, and her husband’s face had altered in an almost terrifying way.

“You were in Victor’s company last night? For how long?”

“Well, sir, between six in the evening and about two o’clock in the morning.”

“You are sure of that, Mr. Strickland? You are very sure?”

Clive had reason to be sure, and said so. Matthew Damon turned to his wife.

“Then it was
not
a prank,” he declared, “and our visitor could not have been Victor. I should have trusted my instinct, madam. I should have paid a visit to that detective.”

“Come, now!’ thought Clive Strickland. ‘What precisely is happening here?’

But he had no chance to consider it.

Already the bell was ringing for the imminent departure of the train. Hortense, Mrs. Damon’s maid, slipped down with a graceful curtsey and hastened towards a second-class carriage at the rear. Clive found himself sitting in the corner seat against musty-smelling upholstery, his back to the engine and his portmanteau beside him, facing Georgette Damon with her husband at her right-hand side.