Will O’ the Wisp (19 page)

Miss Down tossed her head.

“There are things that make you old before your time. It doesn't keep a girl young to be married and deserted before she's seventeen.”

David looked her straight in the face.

“You're a couple of inches taller than Erica was.”

Miss Down pounced on the last word.

“Was,” she repeated.” You've said it—haven't you? Are you going to say that a girl of sixteen can't grow a couple of inches, especially after a long illness? Are you going to say that?”

“No, I'm not. But I'm going to say something else. You're not Erica, Miss Down, and you can't make me believe that you are.”

As he spoke, David believed his own words—believed them utterly. But in the next instant he was shaken. The girl standing opposite to him looked down quickly at her left hand. It was the look, the turn of the head, which he had seen in Julie on the day of Grandmamma's birthday party. Julie had looked down sideways at her new wedding ring, and the look had brought Erica to him—Erica looking down, Erica looking sideways at the ring which he had given her. Heather Down had looked sideways just like that.

David's eyes went to her left hand and saw a arrow gold circle about the third finger.

The impression passed; but it had shaken him. He went on speaking:

“I think you must realize that you can't just make assertions like that and expect to be believed. Have you any proof of what you say? Have you any evidence at all to show that Erica survived the wreck?” David looked hard at her as he spoke.

The light of the gas jet showed ends of dark brown hair under the bright hat. He thought that Erica's hair was a little lighter. Miss Down would certainly say that the hair of a girl of sixteen usually does darken, especially when it is kept short. Erica's eyes were between blue and grey; and so were Miss Down's. The brows had the same arch, and the features in both cases were of that rather nondescript and indeterminate kind which do not leave any very definite impress.

When David tried to call up a picture of Erica, his most vivid recollection was of her small shrinking form, her black dress, her pallor, and her shyness. Heather Down was certainly not pale. But there again she would say, no doubt, that a girl who has just lost her father and been thrown on the world at sixteen may very well be pale.

She might have read his thoughts, for she threw up her head and said defiantly:

“I've more colour than I used to have.”

“You are not Erica,” said David. But his voice lacked the conviction with which he had spoken before.

“I'm Heather Down.”

David shrugged his shoulders.

“You might as well call yourself Erica Moore and have done with it. Why don't you? Is it because you're afraid to take a name which you know you've no right to?”

The girl dropped her voice to a lower note:

“If you're so sure that I'm not Erica, why do you trouble yourself about me? You can snap your fingers and go away like you did
before
. You can marry again. There's nothing to stop you, is there as long as you're sure that Erica's dead?”

“I want to ask you two questions,” said David. “There have been three advertisements in the last three years, giving my initials and saying: ‘Your wife is alive.' Did you put them in?”

“No, I didn't,” said Miss Down, with what was obviously a stare of astonishment.

“But you saw my advertisement—the one in which I asked for information about Erica.”

Miss Down smiled scornfully.

“Yes, I saw that. I thought you'd waited a good long time before you put it in.”

“And why did you wait five years before you came forward with this claim of yours?”

“Tell me what I've claimed!” Her voice had real passion in it. “You married a poor friendless girl, and you deserted her. She wrote to you, and you never answered her letters. How can a girl who is ill and friendless, and who hasn't got a penny in the world, come across the sea to make a claim on the man who's deserted her? I had to work and save money before I could come over. And you say, why did I wait five years? I didn't wait. There were two letters; and you never answered them.”

“I never had them.”

Heather Down dived into the pocket of her golf jacket and drew out a yellowish printed slip.

“When there was no answer to the first letter, I registered the second. Here's the receipt. Do you still say you didn't get that letter?”

David took the slip and looked at it. It was dated December 7, 1922, and the address was to David Fordyce, Esq., Ford, Fordwick, Surrey. He stared at it until the letters ran together and his own name was a formless blur. He looked up at Heather Down with eyes that saw her differently. He did not feel sure about anything any more. He said, simply and gravely:

“I never had the letter—I didn't indeed. If it ever arrived, there'll be some record of it at the Fordwick office. I—Miss Down, do you really mean that Erica wrote?”

She nodded, watching him.

“You can keep the paper if you like.”

“I must make inquiries. I must go down to Ford.”

His manner was altered, shaken. He looked at her suddenly with a desperate appeal.

“Who are you?”

“Miss Smith's niece,” said Heather Down.

She leant over the rose-wood table and opened the big Bible; the leaves fluttered under her fingers until she found what she was looking for—the space between the Old Testament and the New.

David looked at the page with its heading of Births, Marriages, and Deaths. The page was almost full. At the bottom he read, “Christina married William Moore;” and then Erica's name and the date of her birth. His eye travelled up the page. Above Christina was Ellen—that would be Aunt Nellie, twenty years older than the little after-thought sister; and above Ellen the names of the parents, William John Smith and Ellen Riley, and the date of their marriage, a year before the birth of Ellen.

David looked from the page to Heather Down.

“Your name's not here.”

She shut the Bible with a nervous jerk.

“Did you think it would be there?” she said.

CHAPTER XXVIII

David left Martagon Crescent with his mind set wholly upon the letter. He must go down to Fordwick and see if it had ever been received there. He kept his thoughts to this point with a most determined effort. If he relaxed, he found that he was remembering Heather Down's quick sideways glance at her ring, or the way in which her voice had softened when she repeated Erica's piteous cry to him on the
Bomongo
, the cry which only he and Erica had heard. He would not let his thoughts relax or take in more than the road to Fordwick, which he would travel as soon as it was light next morning, and the questions which he would ask of Mrs. Perrott, who had kept the post office there for five-and-twenty years. All through the watches of the night he travelled that road and asked those questions. A cold, grey dawn brought the relief of action.

It was only half-past nine o'clock when he walked into the post office and rapped upon the counter. The post office was also a general shop. There were tins of biscuits and tins of cocoa; garden seeds and garden twine; tin-tacks; bacon; tea; potatoes; acid drops, and peppermint bulls-eyes.

The door behind the counter creaked and Mrs. Perrott emerged, stout, comfortable, motherly, with a take-your-time-and-let-me-take-mine sort of air. She beamed on David, to whom she had sold peppermints and acid drops in infancy.

“Well, Mr. David—I
never!
”

“Good-morning, Mrs. Perrott,” said David.

“Nasty damp morning again, I'm sure—and so it was yesterday. But they say rain's needed.”

Mrs. Perrott reached the counter and leaned upon it.

And what can I do for you this nasty morning, sir? Are you just off to town?”

“Just
down
from town.” David leaned on the counter too. “I've come down on purpose to ask you something, Mrs. Perrott.”

“Me, Mr. David! Well, I'm sure anything! can do for any of the family, and for you in special sir—”

“It's about a registered letter,” said David quickly.

“Well now!”

“It's a very important letter, and it was registered. I don't know how long you keep the records of that sort of thing; but it's some time ago, I'm afraid.”

“How long ago would it be, sir?”

“More than four years.”

Mrs. Perrott shook her head slowly.

“We don't keep nothing more than two years. Didn't you get the letter, sir?”

“No, I didn't. I've only just heard that it was sent.”

“Well, I'm sure! And it was important?”

He nodded.

“Isn't that too bad, now!” said Mrs. Perrott. “Where would it have been from, sir?”

“South Africa—Cape Town. I've got the receipt.”

He laid it down on the counter, and she took it in her hand, turning it this way and that as if the faded yellowish slip were a puzzle that might give up its secret if it were looked at long enough.

“Well, well, it's too bad,” said Mrs. Perrott.

She watched David go out of the shop and start up his car. Then she went back to the room behind the shop, where her niece Etta, who did a little dressmaking, sat sewing at the bright blue stuff which Gladys Brown had just brought her in to make up.

Etta looked up as she came in, her pretty, pert face all screwed together.

“Gladys is going to look a fair show in this blue,” she said discontentedly. “Funny how a girl with a bad complexion never knows it. A fair show she'll look. And if she thinks dressing bright is going to make Charlie look at her, well, she's made a bit of a mistake.”

Mrs. Perrott looked indulgently at the blue stuff.

“Well, I liked a bit of bright colour myself when I was a girl—and Gladys has got a good heart if she hasn't got a good skin.”

She took up her duster and began to dust the room slowly and methodically. It was a small room with a window looking out on a garden which was so full of cabbages that it was astonishing to think that Etta and Mrs. Perrott could ever exhaust the supply. Pressed closely against the glass were three fine geranium plants in pots, and on the mantelpiece, on either side of an old-fashioned wooden clock, there were hyacinths just coming into flower—a red hyacinth in a tall purple glass full of water, and a very bright pink hyacinth in a dark blue glass; their long stringy white roots showed through the coloured glass like seaweed moving in deep water.

Mrs. Perrott dusted the clock very carefully. It had belonged to her great-great-grandmother, Beulah Long, and she “thought a sight of it.” She didn't hold with people who got rid of the things that come down to them and let them go to auction. She polished the face of the clock whilst she told Etta how Mr. David had come in about a registered letter that had never reached him:

“Four years ago and more. And, of course, I had to tell him we didn't keep nothing more than two years.”

“Was there money in it?” said Etta, staring.

“He didn't say—but he did seem put out.”

Etta was sewing with quick, jerky stitches.

“It's just like that old machine to go wrong when I've got all this work in! There's a wonderful bargain in
The Lady
—here, where's it got to? Listen to this: ‘
Banjulele, quite new. Would take sewing machine in exchange
.'”

Mrs. Perrott swung round, duster in hand.

“No, you don't, Etta, my girl!”

“But—Aunt—”

“There's no buts about it. The machine was your blessed Aunt Emma's, and if ever there's an angel in heaven it's her, though I'm her own sister that says it. And I wonder at you, Etta—yes, I do—to sit there and say to my face that you'd do an irreligious thing like selling your Aunt Emma's machine to a stranger for a horrid Christy-minstrel banjo that's only fit for a black-faced nigger singing vulgar songs on Margate sands!” Mrs. Perrott was quite red in the face as she finished.

Etta gave a pettish jerk of her shoulder and said: “Oh, well—”

Mrs. Perrott went on dusting in an offended silence. It was about five minutes later that she suddenly exclaimed.

“What's the matter?” asked Etta rather sulkily.

Mrs. Perrott sat down in the nearest chair.

“Well, I never! But I suppose it couldn't have been that one.”

“What
are
you talking about?”

“Well, to be sure—but I don't suppose it could have been.”

“Gracious, Aunt! Have you gone dotty?”

Mrs. Perrott looked at her reprovingly.

“There's no one in the family on either side, nor as far back as I know, that hadn't all the use of their intellects the same as the Lord meant 'em to have, right up to their last dying day. Very good strong mem'ries they all of 'em had, especially my great-uncle, Ebenezer William, that could always remember as he heard the bells rung in this very church for the battle of Waterloo. I don't say I'm quick nor full of book-learning, and I don't know that I hold with all this book-learning that goes on nowadays. There's good books and there's bad books, and I'm no scholar, nor ever was. I mayn't be quick, but I'm sure. And it's come back to me that there was a letter like Mr. David was asking for.”

Etta stared and said “Gracious!” again.

“It's come back to me,” said Mrs. Perrott.

“But, Aunt, there's hundreds of letters for Mr. David in four months, let alone four years.”

“There's not so many registered letters. And I tell you how I remember about this one—if it was the one that Mr. David's asking about. I'll tell you how I remember it. It come the last week of September, and blazing hot weather. And old Masterson that gave up being postman at Christmas that year—let me see, it was 1922—September 1922 it was, and a very sudden heat—and Masterson comes in and he says, ‘Well, missus, I'm in hopes as you haven't no letters by afternoon post anyways.' And he gives me the bag. And there was two or three bills, and I said, ‘They'll wait nicely, and no one the wiser nor the worser off.' And then there was the foreign letter for Mr. David, and I said, ‘This'll have to go whether or no.' And poor Masterson he leans on the counter and mops his face, and he says, ‘Missus, I'm done.' I can tell you he frightened me a bit. But I got him to a chair, and I made him sit quiet, and I fetched him a drink.” Mrs. Perrott stopped speaking. Her duster lay on her lap; she began to pleat it into neat straight folds.