The Coldstone (12 page)

Then, from the other side of the room, came a little shaky laugh. Somebody said, “Are—you—all right?”

He produced a beautiful groan.

“No, I'm very ill. I say, do come back!”

There was no answer.

He remembered the torch in his pocket, felt for it, switched it on.

The room was empty.

He found matches and lit the lamp. Miss Patience Pleydell gazed sweetly at him from the panel between the bookshelves. There was nobody in the room except himself and her. Somebody had gone. She had pillowed his head. She had trembled. She had laughed her shaky little laugh. And she had vanished into thin air.

And the door was locked on the inside.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Anthony put all that away for a more convenient time. Then he went upstairs and roused Lane, who slept uncommon soundly, and Lane went across the road to rouse Smithers, who slept more soundly still. Then the three of them searched the house; Lane in an overcoat over his nightshirt; Smithers in shirt and trousers, and bristly hair standing straight on end above round drowsy eyes; and Anthony still in his pyjamas. They found no one.

In the room where Anthony had been floored they found the poker in the middle of the room, and a wooden chair upside down. The door on the other side of the room led into a passage out of which opened the kitchen, the butler's pantry, and a heavy door leading to the cellar steps.

“They wouldn't go down there, sir,” Lane shivered and held on to the edges of his coat.

Anthony said, “We'll see,” and turned the key. “We'll take the other rooms first.”

The scullery had a half open window, and Mr. Smithers, who didn't hold with being fetched out of bed in the middle of the night, opined that the thieves had got out that way.

Anthony said “We'll see,” again. He had been had once, and he didn't mean to be had again. The window gave upon a flagged yard, and the yard upon the vegetable garden. If Smithers was right, the men could have got away over the garden wall and up through the fields. A fruit tree trained against a wall makes quite a good ladder.

Anthony told Lane to shut and latch the window, and after drawing all the offices blank, returned to the locked cellar door. Opened, it disclosed steps running down into darkness. Lane held up the lamp he was carrying and repeated,

“They wouldn't go down there, sir.”

Mr. Smithers didn't hold with cellars—nasty and damp they was, and'adn't none too good a name—not at night they 'adn't.

“It isn't likely, sir, as hanybody'd go down into 'em as wasn't obliged.”

Anthony was half way down the steps. There were about fifteen of them, and they led into a vaulted space out of which a number of cellars opened. Most of the doors were locked. A passage ran out of the far end, low in the roof and damp. It appeared to run back under the house.

Lane entered it with obvious reluctance, and when they reached a door he stopped.

“These old cellars aren't rightly safe, sir—and they're empty. Nobody'd come here, sir—and the door's locked.”

“Who has the key?”

“I've got it, sir, along with the other cellar keys.”

Anthony looked at the door. It was very old, very black, and heavily barred with iron. A man of his own height would have to stoop low if he didn't want to knock his head. He thought it looked like a dungeon door, and thought how beastly it would be to be locked in on the other side of it, and to hear the retreating footsteps of one's jailer. And then he wondered whether you would hear them. The door looked uncommonly thick. He shook it by the iron latch. It was locked all right. The keyhole was an immense affair—it must take a regular jailer's key to fit it. He pushed a finger into the hole, and heard Smithers' doleful drawl just behind him:

“Nobody wouldn't come down 'ere, sir—not when there ain't nothink to take. Now the dining-room and the droring-room, sir—that's what thieves goes for, sir.”

There were no thieves in the drawing-room or the dining-room, or anywhere else. There was nothing missing. They went back to the cellar steps. It was very difficult to get any information out of Lane; he was worried and nervous, and he kept saying that the old cellars weren't safe, and—“Sir Jervis didn't use them, sir.”

Anthony kept on asking questions.

“Are there a whole lot of cellars through there then?”

Lane couldn't rightly say how many cellars there were, and Smithers opined that they old cellars wasn't no good for nothing.

Anthony addressed Lane:

“But you've got the key, man?”

Lane didn't seem to be certain. He had all the cellar keys.

“Do you mean to say you've never opened that door?”

Lane looked very worried indeed. He couldn't rightly say when that there door had been opened; to which Smithers added that them old cellars wasn't none too safe.

Anthony could have sworn.

“Have you ever opened that door, or haven't you?”

This time he got an answer:

“Not that I can remember, sir.”

“Then you don't really know what cellars there are beyond?”

“No, sir.”

They came back along the passage and through the baize door.

“Is there such a thing as a plan of the house? I'd like to see one.”

“I don't know, sir.”

It would have given Anthony a good deal of pleasure to heave a chair at Lane. He stood there with the lamp in his hand, as mildly obstinate as an elderly sheep.

Anthony gave it up. He sent Smithers home and told Lane to lock up after him. He himself went into the library to put out the lamp he had left burning there. Under the light he looked attentively at his forefinger. It was the finger which he had pushed into the keyhole, and it was smeared with some thick, soft black stuff. He considered it intently. Then he put out the light.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Susan was up betimes next morning. She borrowed a bicycle from Mary Ann Smithers and went to look for a needle in a bundle of hay—Mr. Garry O'Connell being the needle, and the straggling town of Wrane the hay. She was so boiling with the desire to tell Garry what she thought of him that it wasn't until she actually reached Wrane that it occurred to her that she had probably come on a fool's errand.

Wrane is a junction. There is a local bicycle factory; it is a market town; and it has about twenty thousand inhabitants. If Garry O'Connell was temporarily one of the twenty thousand, it wasn't going to be very easy to disentangle him from the other nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. Even the most boiling fury doesn't lead you straight to its object.

Susan rode slower and slower. It was market day. There were pink pigs in the street, cows and cars, sheep, and carts packed with vegetables and eggs. The sheep got under everybody's feet and smelt unutterable. The cows loitered along the footwalk. She began to wish she hadn't come. Why on earth hadn't she made Garry tell her where he was staying? And how on earth was she going to find him now? It went to her heart to waste the things she had got ready to say to him. Her temper flared again at the thought, and she went on threading her way through the livestock until she got past the market. It occurred to her that the post office might have Garry's address.

Susan's temper continued to rise. The post office stood on its best official manners and quoted regulations to her—They couldn't possibly give her anybody's address—they could forward letters, but they couldn't give an address. In a village they would have given it to her directly. If Wrane had been a village, she would not only have got Garry's address, but also masses of the most helpful gossip about him; if he had received any telegrams, she would have had them repeated to her
verbatim.
Wrane was, unfortunately, no longer a village. The young ladies in the post office only gossiped with each other or with the young gentleman in charge of Old Age Pensions and Savings Bank deposits.

Susan bought a letter-card, addressed it to Garry O'Connell, Esq., and wrote inside:

“I must see you at once.

S
USAN
.”

She underlined “at once” three times, and the last underlining broke the post office pen. Then she got on her bicycle and rode back to Ford St. Mary.

It was a lovely day. The blue sky was full of small woolly clouds like clean fluffy lambs. Looking at them made Susan feel a little better. She liked animals, but she didn't like animals going to market.
Sheep
going to market were the limit. The fluffy cloud lambs were refreshingly clean and white. She gazed at them as she coasted down a hill with a fresh breeze blowing in her face. She stopped feeling sorry she had come; but only for a minute, because next moment the back tyre of Mary Ann Smithers' bicycle went off with a bang, and she had to walk the rest of the way.

Susan didn't mind walking, but she resented having to push a flat bicycle that ought to have been carrying her. By the time she reached the top of the hill which ran down to the village, she thought she had earned a rest. She dropped the bicycle on the grass and looked for a place to sit down. There was a wood on either side of the road. On the right a rather sketchy fence defended it. It had uprights here and there, and long rails between them.

Susan climbed up and sat on the topmost rail, which commanded a good view of the road. If she sat here, she couldn't possibly go to sleep; but if she sat down on the grass, she might just find that she was asleep without quite knowing how. She drew a long breath and swung her feet. She felt frightfully sleepy. All her boiling anger had died away. She had been up nearly all night, and she had just walked five miles.

The shadow of the trees was pleasant and green. A bright bar of sunshine lay across the road just where it began to run downhill. Someone was coming up the hill singing in a loud and cheerful voice:

“It was a farmer's daughter, so beautiful, I'm told.

Her parents died and left her five hundred pounds in gold.

She lived with her uncle, the cause of all her woe,

And you soon shall hear this maiden fair did prove his overthrow.”

The voice was a not untuneful baritone. It was in fact the voice of Mr. Anthony Colstone. When, to use his own idiom, “up against it,” it was his practice to burst into song. He came up the hill at a good pace, skipped some verses which he had forgotten, and sang on:

“A fig for all your squires, your lords and dukes likewise.

My William's hand appears to me like diamonds in my eyes.

Begone, unruly female, you ne'er shall happy be.

For I mean to banish William from the banks of the sweet Dundee.”

Susan slipped unobtrusively down from her rail. If it hadn't been for the bicycle, she would have slipped down on the wood side; but with the bicycle lying there looking even more of a wreck than it really was, she abandoned the idea.

“The pressgang came for William when he was all alone.

He boldly fought for liberty, but they was six to one.

The blood did flow in torrents—”

Anthony Colstone stopped dead. He saw a girl picking up a bicycle, and he saw that the girl was Susan. She wore the blue dress and sun-bonnet, but the front of the sun-bonnet was turned back so that it did not hide her face any more. She had turned it back as soon as she came into this shady place.

He stopped singing about William and the banks of the sweet Dundee and came towards her. Susan stopped picking up the bicycle and stood up in a hurry. She recognized him at the same moment that he recognized her, and for some extraordinary reason she wanted to run away. There was nowhere to run to. She stood where she was, and, to her extreme dismay, she began to blush.

Anthony stood still and looked at her, and the more he looked at her, the more she blushed. It was the most frightful let down. She couldn't move, and she couldn't look away, and before she knew what was going to happen, Anthony had kissed her. And then they both stepped back, and all the colour went out of Susan's face. She didn't know what she felt. It was so strange. She ought to have been furiously angry. Only a moment before she had been furiously angry with herself for blushing, but it was all gone. When Anthony kissed her, it was just as if they had known each other for a long, long time and had been parted and this was their meeting. It was quite natural, and rather solemn.

She looked at Anthony, and saw that he was pale and serious. He didn't look in the least like a young man who has just snatched a kiss from a village girl. She wondered what he was thinking about, and she said,

“Why did you do it?” Her voice wasn't angry or accusing; it was as serious as Anthony's face.

He said, “I don't know,” and his voice was like hers.

He didn't know; he didn't know in the least. It had seemed as natural as breathing. He was rather bewildered.

Susan reminded herself of several things that she ought to be feeling. None of them seemed to mean anything at all. She turned a little paler, and said quite slowly,

“Were you going to beg my pardon?”

“No—” said Anthony thoughtfully. “No—I wasn't—but I will if you want me to.”

Susan became suddenly aware that they were under some strange compulsion to speak the actual truth to one another—people very seldom did. She and Anthony Colstone had come by chance into a place where they couldn't help doing it. It was like being enchanted. She said,

“I don't want you to.”

Just for a moment she had a stab of fear. If he didn't understand; if he tried to kiss her again … But he only frowned a little and said,

“You didn't mind—did you?”

Susan said, “No.”

He bent and picked up the bicycle. A little of the strangeness faded away. Susan put a hand on the saddle. They were quite close together, with the bicycle between them. And then Anthony said quite suddenly,