The Witness on the Roof (21 page)

“I think I am answered. And I cannot tell you how glad I am to get that answer, Joan, for—I told you we had all been the victims of a fraud—the woman who has taken us all in, the imposter who has been masquerading as mistress of Davenant Hall, is not your sister Evelyn at all!”

There was a minute's tense silence. Joan stared at him with wide-open, uncomprehending eyes. Warchester was the first to speak. During the long night-watches he had been persuading himself that the pseudo-Evelyn's confession of her impostorship was only a piece of rodomontade.

“Is this true, Uncle Septimus? This woman whom my wife his accepted as her sister is a common adventuress—she is not Evelyn Davenant at all?”

Mr. Lockyer bowed.

“I cannot tell you how I blame thyself that we did not find her out sooner. It is terrible for you, my child!” He took Joan's hand in his. “I am sorry, and yet, do you know, I am glad. She was not a desirable sister for you—she was not a suitable mistress for Davenant. Now in a short time her reign there will be only like a bad dream, if it is not utterly forgotten.”

Joan caught her breath sharply; her hand gripped Septimus Lockyer's brown fingers convulsively.

“I don't understand, Uncle Septimus. What is it you are saying? It can't be true that Evelyn—”

“The woman who has called herself your sister, Evelyn, is an impostor!” Septimus Lockyer said firmly. “Pull yourself together, Joan! We have all been taken in, but there is little harm done. She made a clean bolt of it last night with all the ready money and the valuables she could lay her hands on, but the family jewels were in the bank, and you and Paul will not feel the loss of a few hundreds,” with a glance at Warchester.

“Certainly not, if we have any say in the matter!” Warchester said quickly. “But you must be a little more explicit, Uncle Septimus. How was this woman able to carry out such an imposture? Where did she get the papers which you and Mr. Hurst gave us to understand were in proper order?”

“Stole 'em, I suppose!” the lawyer said shortly. “It seems she was a great friend of—of the real Evelyn, at one time.”

“The real Evelyn?” Joan interrupted him with a cry. “Oh, Uncle Septimus, where's she—my sister, Evelyn? I can't bear to think that I have been trying to give the love that should have been hers to another woman. I ought to have known—surely my own feeling ought to have warned me that she was not my sister! How shall I ask Evelyn to forgive me?” looking up with tear-filled eyes.

“Now, now!” The
K.C.
patted her shoulder with his disengaged hand. “You—you must not give way, Joan, you really mustn't. As for Evelyn, be sure that if she knows what is going on down here she does not blame you.”

“Uncle Septimus!” Joan twisted herself away from him. “I—I don't think you have told us all. You—do you know that you are speaking as if Evelyn were dead?”

Her uncle looked down at her gravely.

“I believe she is, Joan. And that is partly what brought me down here, this afternoon—to tell you how she died.”

“Excuse me, but is that necessary?” Warchester asked.

His dark face looked curiously set. His pulses were beating and tingling. So it was true after all, the woman he hated and dreaded was not Joan's sister? That was all he could realize as yet.

“Don't you see that Joan is overwrought—that she has heard enough for one afternoon? Later on if she wants to know the details—”

“I want to hear them now!” Joan brushed his remonstrances aside. “When did my sister die, Uncle Septimus?”

“Years ago, child—more than ten years ago. It isn't a pleasant story, child. You shouldn't hear it if there was a chance of keeping it from you, but in these days when everything gets into the papers—”

“Surely, there can be no question of that!” Warchester said hotly. “If evidence of Evelyn Spencer's death on a certain date is given to the proper authorities, surely that is all that signifies. The imposture here is purely a family matter, for I am sure Joan would not wish any measures taken to punish the woman—”

“No, no! Of course not!” Joan said hurriedly. She pushed back her hair from her brow as she looked at her uncle. “I can't see how you can be sure, Uncle Septimus. How did you find out that she was not my sister?”

Warchester held his breath. What had been the weak point in the scheme the woman had spoken of last night?

“Well, I believe that Hewlett was never satisfied in his own mind that she was the real heiress,” the lawyer answered slowly, “though for a long time he was unable to find any flaw in the evidence. I believe it was you, Joan, who gave him the clue when you showed him that last letter of the real Evelyn. It seems he recognized the writing and the paper. And you remember the half of the broken sixpence she sent you—that fitted another half. When Hewlett had ascertained that, of course, the greater part of the battle was over. But we knew that Mrs. Spencer had recognized her stepdaughter, and for a time that baffled us; then Hewlett sent his partner, Cowham, to Willersfield; and what means he took to frighten the truth out of the woman I don't know, but she confessed that she had been bribed. It seems that Evelyn had been burnt on her wrist as a child and there was a scar left. There was no such mark on the wrist of the woman at Davenant, and it appears she paid heavily to persuade Mrs. Spencer to keep silence. Cowham said that apparently the whole family was living on the fat of the land. How the false Evelyn got wind of her deception we can't discover. Hewlett said that Mrs. Spencer might have managed to warn her in some way, for when we went to see her last night we found that she had run away.”

He paused. There were other questions that must be asked, he knew, but he would have put off the answering of them to the last possible moment.

Warchester waited. His first sensation of relief was passing. He could not have told why, but he was oppressed by a feeling that all was not told, that the worst was yet to come, though as yet he had perceived no faintest glimmering of the truth.

Joan looked from one to the other with troubled eyes; she too felt a sense of ever-deepening mystery. She was on one side of a dark curtain, as it were, and on the other side lay something, from the relation of which she shrank with dread.

At last she broke the silence:

“Uncle Septimus, you said that Mr. Hewlett recognized Evelyn's writing. How was that possible? He had never seen it even. His very reason for asking for that letter all along was because he wanted to see the writing.”

“He had met with it before without knowing that it was Evelyn Spencer's,” Mr. Lockyer said gravely. He braced himself up to tell the rest of the story. After all, terrible as it was, Joan had known but little of her sister.

“He—you must be brave, Joan, now;—was at Scotland Yard before he established his private agency. While he was there he was engaged in investigating the circumstances connected with the—er—death of a young woman in Grove Street. It made a great stir at the time; but of course you were only a child—you would not remember it, Well, one of the clues the police had to work upon in that case was a letter, or part of a letter, written, it was supposed, by the girl who died there. Hewlett recognized the writing and the paper on which Evelyn's last letter was written as the same. Moreover, the half sixpence, as I said, fitted one which was on a chain round the neck of the woman who died in Grove Street.”

“Uncle Septimus, you can't mean—you are not trying to tell me that the woman who was murdered in Grove Street was my sister, Evelyn?”

Joan's voice was perfectly steady, but every particle of colour had faded from her face; there was a look of horror in her dark eyes. She did not glance at her husband on the other side of the fireplace, but she was conscious through every nerve of her body, that he had made one sharp, incredulous movement, that he now sat with every muscle braced, with head averted, waiting.

“I am afraid there cannot be any doubt of it,” Septimus Lockyer went on, thankful that at last the worst of his task was over. “It is a terrible thing, child! I cannot tell you hew grieved I am for you. It is very painful for us all.”

“It is—very painful!” Joan found herself asserting, with white, stiff lips. She felt a momentary pang of surprise that she was not more horrified, that she could sit there talking calmly to her uncle; but she was conscious only of one thing—that heap of white drapery that had lain on the rug in that upper room in Grove Street had been Evelyn, dead, the living sister for whom the little Polly had just then been longing so intensely. That golden hair had been Evelyn's hair; that buckled shoe had been on Evelyn's foot. And the man who had been putting the pistol in the dead girl's hand, the man who had stolen away, trusting his crime would not be discovered, who had tried to cast the last reproach of suicide on that poor murdered girl, was Warchester, the man Joan had married—the husband she had loved with her whole heart!

Warchester got up and stepped through the open window.

Joan did not look after him; she herself rose slowly, laying one hand on the table at her side. She looked up into her uncle's face.

“Will they hang him, Uncle Septimus?”

“Hang him—who, child?” The lawyer looked momentarily puzzled. “Oh, I see what you mean—the man who caused Evelyn's death! Well, of course they will, if they can find him. But that must necessarily be a matter of difficulty, so long a time having elapsed since her death. Still, there is no doubt this discovery of her identity will give a fresh start to the inquiry. What is it, my man?” as a footman noiselessly entered the room and presented him with a telegram on a salver. “For me? No answer, thank you!” He waited until the man was out of ear-shot; then he held out the form to Joan. “Is it not extraordinary this should come now?”

“‘New development in case. Shall be glad to see you as soon as possible, Hewlett,'” she read. “What does it mean, Uncle Septimus?”

Mr. Lockyer walked to the corridor before he answered her. 

“Can't say, my child. It may be some clue to the murderer. But I must be off early to see what it is. You have taken this very sensibly. And you mustn't worry yourself over the rest of the details now. I know you may rely on Hewlett to do his best to keep your name out of the papers. Now where is your husband gone? I must speak to him. Good-bye, Joan! I shall be down again in a few days, and then we will have another talk.”

He hurried out after Warchester.

Joan stood as he had left her, motionless; catching sight of her reflection in a distant mirror, she gazed at herself as at a stranger. The beautiful features looked pinched and wilted, the face was white as a dead woman's, only the eyes, the great, tragic, accusing eyes, were alive.

An echo of her uncle's voice floated in from the garden; he had found Warchester, evidently.

“Rely upon it, I will keep your name out of it, my dear boy!”

Joan put her hand to her throat.

“Keep his name out of it,” she murmured. “Great heavens! Keep his name out of it!”

J
OAN
waited. The two men went on round the house; she heard their footsteps on the gravel. Probably they were making their way to Septimus Lockyer's motor-car. She had thought in the long watches of the preceding night that she had plumbed the very depth of misery. It seemed to her now, looking back, that by contrast with the present she had then been most happy. She was so stunned by the magnitude of the calamity that had overtaken her that she was for the time being almost incapable of movement. She wanted to get away somewhere where she could be alone, where she could think, but all she could do was to lean against the mantelpiece and wait.

At last she heard her husband returning; his feet dragged heavily. As he stood for a moment in the window, he had the aspect of a man who has had a shock. Joan's gaze rested on his pale, changed face absently, then wandered from him to the old sundial on the lawn, to the tall Michaelmas daisies. Over in the elms a thrush was singing, a bumble-bee tempted out by the sunshine floated lazily into the room, the fragrance of a late rose trained up the wall came in through the window, but Joan neither saw nor heard anything: for the time she was blind and deaf.

Warchester looked at her. He hesitated a moment, bracing his broad shoulders as if for a supreme effort; then he came quickly across the room.

“Joan, my poor child, what can I say to you? I know how this—” His hands were outstretched, but as he met Joan's glance, they dropped to his side. “What is it?” he asked blankly. “What has come between us? Can't you tell me?”

Joan opened her lips; the hand that was clutching at her throat, clenching suddenly, wrenched the lace from the tiny diamond brooch that fastened it.

“I am going to tell you,” she said, in a harsh, hoarse voice. “I want you to listen. Ten years ago last May, I was a little child, living in the Grove Street Mews. One day—” She paused and gasped, as if for breath.

Warchester looked at her in amazement. He had thought she was about to tell him the cause of the estrangement between them. What had that old story to do with them how?

“I know, Joan, but don't think of it. Forget it all.”

Joan did not seem to hear him; though she was speaking to him, she did not look in his face once.

“I was a little child—such a little neglected child. I ran about the streets, I nursed Baby Tim. Nobody cared much about me—nobody ever did care for me, I used to think, except my sister Evelyn. She did not forget me; she used to send me presents, she used to write to me. Nearly every night I cried myself to sleep over her letters, the only words of love that reached me. My stepmother hated me, I think; she often used to beat me. One day she had been more unkind than usual. She had shaken me for some childish carelessness; she had hit me until my head was aching. I ran away from her to the only place where I knew I should be alone—the loft over the stables.”