The Coldstone (10 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mrs. Bowyer did not approve of Summer Time, but she regarded it with tolerance. It did not disturb her habits, which were those of an older day. She had always risen and gone to bed with the sun, and she didn't see why other people couldn't do the same without making a lot of fuss about it. In her young days you got up at five in the summer, and you called it five. It was a shiftless modern generation that had to be lured out of bed by calling five six. “Bone-idle when there's work to be done, and strong as oxen when it comes to dancing, or gadding, or trapesing into the town to see they moving pictures. I haven't no patience with them.” This was to the address of Mary Ann Smithers, who was being courted by the butcher's lad from Wrane, and who “trapesed” a good deal in consequence.

Susan did not go to bed with the sun. She sat in the garden as long as Gran considered it respectable, or rather longer. It was apparently more than a little scandalous to allow darkness to overtake one in one's own back garden. It was one of the things that weren't done in Ford St. Mary. Still less could one wander abroad in fields made strange and strangely vast by the soft, even darkness.

Susan left the garden reluctantly. The hot, still air was full of the dreams of sleeping flowers. The silent hives were like black hillocks. She wondered if bees could dream, and what their dreams would be. There was a sweetness everywhere—lavender; southernwood; late sweet peas; the cabbage rose and the old-fashioned white, very sweet, with a stray bloom or two; and invisible dark carnations. The flowers of a cottage garden dreaming fragrant dreams.

Susan went upstairs on tiptoe without a light. It was quite dark in the house, with the close indoor darkness which is just a black curtain before the eyes. In her own room there was a little dusky glimmer that came from the uncurtained window. She drew the curtains and lighted a candle. When she lifted it, all the shadows rushed down from the black rafters and hid.

There was a good deal of furniture in the room—a white painted chest of drawers and an old mahogany one; a washstand with a marble top and a double set of china which was the pride of Mrs. Bowyer's heart; a wall-press; and a tall chest that served for a dressing-table. It was made of deal, old soft brown deal, and it was beautifully panelled. The lid was held down by a great iron hasp.

Susan lifted the looking-glass off the lid of the chest, and laid it carefully on the bed. Then she stopped and looked at the chest again, and then she looked at her watch. It wasn't late enough yet. Ghosts don't walk till midnight—a very sensible arrangement for securing privacy. She finished clearing the lid of the chest, removed the clean white cover which converted it into a dressing-table, and slowly lifted the lid.

Anthony Colstone went to bed at eleven, and fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. It was his enviable habit to do this and then to sleep dreamlessly until he was called next morning. He was therefore a good deal surprised at finding himself suddenly awake in the pitch dark. He was not only awake, but very wide awake indeed and sitting up. Such a thing had only happened to him twice before in his life. On the first occasion the Wimbornes' house had been on fire, and on the second an Indian thief, oiled from head to foot, was feeling for his revolver—Anthony got it first. This was the third time.

He was quite wide awake. There didn't seem to be any smoke, and he couldn't hear a sound. Of course, with a really talented thief there wasn't any sound to hear. The oily gentleman had been as silent as a shadow. It wasn't a sound that had waked Anthony then. He didn't think it was a sound that had waked him now. Yet he listened with all his ears. There was no sound at all. A dead still house—a sleeping house; and the sense of someone awake, someone besides himself. It was quite dark, no moon outside, but he could just see the outline of the window.

He put his hand on the matches, then slid out of bed and went to the door. Whatever had waked him wasn't here; there was no sense of another person in the room. He opened the door a chink, then wider, and the darkness and the silence of the house flowed in and rose about him. With the darkness and the silence something else came in—the sense of an alien presence.

He stepped back from the door, went barefoot to the chest of drawers, and felt for the small electric torch which lay there. A candle or a lamp would advertise him to whoever there might be below. He put the torch in the pocket of his pyjama coat and emerged upon the black uneven corridor. By dint of moving very slowly he reached the stair-head with no more than a stubbed toe—a step up, a step down, and another step up. His toe caught the last step, but without making any sound. Then a dozen feet of passage, and the stairs.

Going down the stairs was like going down a black well. He came to the bottom and stood against the newel-post, listening. The square hall was in the middle of the house. He faced the front door, and had on his right the drawing-room, and on his left the dining-room, with the library behind it, and beyond the library a door that led to the kitchens and offices. All this side of the house was very old, but the drawing-room and Sir Jervis' room over it had been built when the glass passage that led to the outer gate had been added.

Anthony stood by the left-hand newel-post. There was a narrow passage between him and the wall. He looked down it, and his heart jumped. For a single instant a thread of light showed where the library door was. It was there, and it was gone again and all the passage was dark. The library must be dark too. But a moment ago there had been a light there. Someone had turned on a light, and a faint silver thread had showed under the crack of the door where the old boards had been worn away.

Anthony began to move towards the place where the light had been. As he moved, his fingers touched the wall and slid without any sound over the smooth panels. The door-post was rougher. His hand slipped downwards, groped for the handle, and closed upon it gently. For a long minute he was turning it. Then when the latch was free, he pushed the door a bare half inch and slowly released the catch again.

There had been a light in the room, but there was no light there now; the half-inch opening was as impenetrable as the door. He made the opening wider, and then wider again, until the door, opening inwards, stood at a right angle with the wall. This brought him into the room. He stood just over the threshold, listening, his hand on the torch in his pocket.

The room was profoundly still and most profoundly dark. It smelt faintly of beeswax and turpentine, and of all the old books which lined its walls. But Anthony had no sooner stepped into it than he was aware of something more than the night, and the silence, and the ghosts of dead books.

He took the torch out of his pocket, and was as sure as he had ever been of anything in his life that there was someone else in the room, someone standing still with caught breath, or moving and breathing with as little sound as he himself had made. He had his finger on the switch of the torch, he had even begun to move it, when he heard a sound. From the moment that he had waked until now everything had passed in dumb show; he had not even heard his own movements; the action had been like the action of a dream. This was the first sound, and it came, not from this room in which he discerned a presence, but from the passage behind him.

In an instant he had stepped sideways, clear of the doorway; and as he did so, he heard the sound again. Someone was moving in the hall. The sound that he had heard was the sound of a cautiously planted foot. Someone was undoubtedly coming down the passage towards the library door. And then, as he stood there straining his ears, there was a faint click on his left and the beam of a torch cut the darkness. A man was standing on the threshold.

Anthony saw three things almost simultaneously. He was standing in the corner of the room about six feet from the door, and at the sound of the click he looked instinctively in the direction from which it came, and he saw three things. First, very dimly, the outline of a man holding out a torch in front of him. Then the long ray, stabbing the darkness as it turned here and there. And lastly the portrait of Miss Patience Pleydell. It hung low on the left-hand wall, where a strip of panelling divided one book-filled space from another. He had noticed only that afternoon how cleverly the painting had been sunk into the panel so as to give the effect of a person standing against the wall. The ray came to rest upon the portrait, and Anthony could have cried out, so lifelike did it seem.

Next moment someone did cry out. The girl in the flowered dress and blue petticoat moved visibly, or seemed to move, as the beam dipped and came to rest on her again. Anthony could have sworn that she moved. And at the same time someone gave a little choking cry, and this cry came from somewhere quite close at hand; he thought from behind the open door.

Miss Patience Pleydell moved her arm, someone cried out, the light went out with a click, and Anthony jumped for the man with the torch—jumped, touched a rough sleeve, made a grab in the dark, dropped his own torch, which he had forgotten, and, to the sound of another little gasping cry, grappled with someone quite extraordinarily hard and lithe. He got hold of a coat-collar, heard something rip, and received a bang on the side of the head from the intruder's torch. At the same time the collar was twisted out of his hand and its owner took to his heels. Anthony slipped and came down sprawling. He scrambled up to sounds of flight. He thought he could hear more than one man running away. A door banged. He had fallen on his torch. By the time that he was up and had switched it on, the passage was empty.

He ran into the hall and found it empty too. The front door was ajar. The door leading from the glass passage into the street was shut, but not locked. Anthony wondered whether Lane had been as slack as all that. He wondered about Nurse Collins, and the keys which Miss Arabel had been so anxious about. But surely there should be bolts to both these doors.

He turned the light on to the outer door, frowning. There were bolts top and bottom. He bent to the bottom one, tried it, and found that it was all he could do to move it at all. He promised himself a few words with Lane in the morning. Somehow he didn't want to wake Lane now.

He went back to the library, wondering about that little gasping cry and about the portrait of Miss Patience Pleydell. He flashed the light here and there, found matches, and lighted the lamp which stood on a table by the fireplace. After the intense dark, its mediocre yellow light seemed quite bright. He held it up and surveyed the room.

Standing by the fireplace, he had the door on his left, and two shuttered windows on his right. The portrait of Miss Patience Pleydell faced him. He shifted the lamp this way and that to see if he could induce that effect of movement. It was the right arm that had moved. Miss Patience stood with her hands lightly clasped before her; her feet were on the bottom step of a dim flight. She appeared to be stepping down into the room, and the portrait was hung so low that the step would have been an easy one.

Anthony moved the lamp up and down, and sideways; but the arm did not move again. He crossed the room and let the light fall on the picture full. In the yellow light the colours did not look so bright as they had seemed by the flash of the torch. The whole effect for that one moment had been startlingly vivid and alive. And he could have sworn that the arm had moved. The arm had moved, and then someone had cried out. The sound hadn't come from the picture at all; it was nearer him, and nearer the door—much nearer the door. He was as certain as he could be that the person who had uttered that gasping cry had been hidden behind the open door.

He crossed over to the spot. There were a couple of armchairs in this corner. If anyone had been hiding, they might have crouched down behind the one that was nearest the door. He moved it, and caught sight at once of something white. It was a scrap of a pocket-handkerchief. Anthony set down the lamp and spread it out—seven or eight inches of fine linen lawn with a border of three wavy lines. It had neither name nor initial. He walked round the room. There was a big sofa, chairs, a writing-table, books—and the portrait; but no conceivable hiding-place. It was all very odd.

He returned to the hall, passed down the glass passage, and drove home two very reluctant bolts. The bolts on the inner door simply wouldn't move at all. He locked it, and then went back for another look at the library. The lamplight seemed to fill it with a steady golden glow.

The handkerchief was gone.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Susan stood still and held her breath. Her heart was racing with excitement. She did not feel like a ghost at all; she felt most splendidly, radiantly alive. She stood behind the panel which held Miss Patience Pleydell's portrait, and shook with laughter. The rescued handkerchief was crumpled in the hand that had just closed the panel. She pushed it down inside her dress and stopped her laughter to listen. Someone was coming back into the room. She must see who it was; because there had been three people there besides herself.

Another tremor of laughter shook her from head to foot. When a ghost walks at midnight she does not expect to find herself the centre of a family reunion. Yet when she swung the panel back—it swung inwards, portrait and all—and was just going to step down into the room, there were three people waiting for her. It was frightfully funny, but it was also rather puzzling. The person who had dropped the handkerchief was behind the door, scared to death. Susan wasn't worrying about her; she was just glad she had seen the handkerchief, because it might have been traced.

It was the two men who were bothering her. One of them was Anthony Colstone; but she didn't know which one. She didn't know whether it was Anthony who had stood in the doorway and flashed the light on to her in that perfectly terrifying manner, or whether it was Anthony who had sprung out of the dark corner of the room with an even more terrifying suddenness. She wondered if either of the men had seen her move; because she
had
moved when the light struck her.