“Don’t get up,” Mark said. “My name’s East. If you’re not too busy—?”
She sank back gratefully. “Miss Pond phoned me about the book, sir,” she panted. “I’m through with it if you want to take it now.” She pointed to the book lying on the table.
Mark pulled a chair up to the stove and sat down. “Do you mind if I stay a few minutes?” he asked. “I love kitchens.”
She hesitated. Then: “Please yourself, sir. Can I get you anything—a cup of tea, perhaps?”
“After that lunch! Do you want to kill me?” He thought that would bring a smile, but the quick look she threw him was full of horror. She lowered her eyes without answering. He tried again.
“I’m not used to such cooking,” he explained. “You know how men are—blow all their money for steak on Saturday night and live on beans for the rest of the week.” He was going on to say something sprightly about getting fat but pulled himself up in time. The poor soul looked like a beached whale. “I had coffee and muffins with Miss Pond this morning,” he finished lamely.
She responded to that. “Miss Beulah spoke very kindly of you,” she said. “You made a good impression there, sir, and that’s not easy. Miss Beulah is not one to take up with anybody.”
Mark looked grateful. “She had her doubts about me at first, though,” he said. “I don’t think she likes strangers right off the bat.”
“She is very wise. But it’s enough for me that she recommends you now. We are great friends, in spite of a slight difference in occupation.” She stared over his head. “Evil” she went on gently, “finds a rich ground here. There’s so few folks about it gets a chance to grow.”
She made him feel cold. “Aren’t you exaggerating?” he asked carefully. “Or are you just kidding me?”
“Neither, sir.”
A bit of religious mania in the kitchen, he decided. “Miss Beulah’s been giving you the wrong kind of books,” he said easily. “No more supernaturals for you. I recommend love stories from now on and I’ll even go so far as to pick them out myself.”
Mrs. Lacey regarded him calmly. “That won’t stop what I’m thinking,” she said.
The girl at the sink finished her potatoes on a sobbing note and dumped the parings into a pail. “Pity we don’t keep pigs,” she said simply. “Anything else, Mrs. Lacey?”
“That’s all for now, Violet. You can go off for half an hour. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
Violet crossed the room reluctantly and pushed open a swinging door. Through it Mark could see another flight of steps leading down and three nail-studded doors. The cellars, he decided, and probably the servants’ sleeping rooms. When the door had closed behind her he turned to the other woman. What he saw startled him. She too had been staring through that door. There was a look of speculation in her eyes, but when she saw him watching her she smiled.
“I sleep back there,” she said. “So do Violet and Florrie. It’s dangerous going through that passage, even in the daylight. The cellar stairs go down so quick and steep. I’m always afraid somebody’ll lose their footing.”
Something told Mark to make no comment on that. “What’s in the cellar?” he asked.
“The furnace and provisions—canned goods and such. And preserves. I have a lot of preserves I put up for the Colonel. I expect you know I cooked for the Colonel. I came here when his wife was still alive. I was sixteen then.”
“That speaks well for both of you,” he said sincerely.
“Yes.” She stood the bowl of peas on the end of the table and folded her hands in her lap. “There’s a wine cellar down there too,” she said quietly. “Somebody got in a while ago and broke a lot of empty bottles. Left them all over the floor and on the steps, too.”
“Children,” he suggested carefully. “Probably got in a window and tore things up for the fun of it.”
“There aren’t any children nearer than Bear River. And Anne and Ivy don’t even know where the cellar is. No, I guess it wasn’t that.” She gave him an impassive look. “But we mustn’t bother you with such things. It’s not right.”
He had a pleasant but uncomfortable feeling that she wanted him to talk, to ask her questions. At the same time he knew he’d never get a straight answer. He’d seen women in that mood before, with something on their minds that they wanted to shake. They’d hold it out with one hand and snatch it back with the other. And more often than not, when it finally emerged it wasn’t a pretty story. But this was a respectable soul. Probably the heaviest load her conscience ever carried weighed no more than a pilfered Sunday penny, used for candy instead of God. He was pleased with this fancy and because he was pleased with it, he believed it. No, the good Lacey’s trouble was Stoneman. He’d crashed down the stàirs and broken the bottles himself. Her employer’s bottles. And she’d dragged him upstairs again and dressed his wounds and promised not to give him away. And now she was worried about it. Better let her work around to it naturally, he thought. There was plenty of time. Suddenly he realised she was asking him something.
“Is there anything in particular you’d like for your dinner?” she was saying. It was a tone of dismissal. “I can’t do much about the roast because that’s already in, it’s Sunday, but I could fix something special in the way of salad or desert.”
“Thanks.” He was surprised and pleased. “Anything you send up will be perfect.”
“I like to cook,” she said. “Maybe because it’s the thing I do best. And I’d like this dinner to-night to be something you really fancy. Because it’ll be the first and last I’ll ever do for you.”
“What!”
“That’s right,” she said. “I’m leaving right after breakfast to-morrow. I sent my notice up by Florrie just before you came down.”
“But why?” She looked as if she were going to cry, and he hurried on, “I don’t get it! I thought you were a fixture here!”
“For Colonel Davenport, maybe, but he’s gone for I don’t know how long, and I don’t really care about working for anybody else. I only came to the Moreys as a favour to the Colonel. I don’t have to work for a living, you know. I’ve got my own little house, and my little income.”
“But what’ll the poor Moreys do? You’ll be leaving them in an awful hole, won’t you?”
“They’ll make out,” she said. “Violet cooks real well and they can always get somebody from the people that supplied Perrin. You won’t starve, sir.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said. “I was only thinking that if Mrs. Morey isn’t well—”
“She’ll get over it,” Mrs. Lacey said. “I don’t mean for that to sound unkind; I only mean that my leaving won’t make any difference in things upstairs. I’d like to feel though that you were keeping an eye on Violet, sir. She’s young, and she’s only known kindness. I’d like to feel that you were looking after her, like.”
He nodded in agreement. “Sure,” he said foolishly. “Sure.”
The armchair creaked as she heaved herself to her feet. “I wonder if you’d mind pushing that button on the wall there? It’s to bring Violet. I need her now.”
He did as she asked, then stood by helplessly. For some reason he did not want her to leave that kitchen where she seemed so much at home.
“I expect it was too much for you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “It was. There’s the book you wanted, Mr. East, and there’s six cents overdue in the little envelope. I put a note inside for Miss Beulah.” She lumbered over toward the dumbwaiter. “It’s goodbye for the present only, sir,” she said. “Miss Beulah can tell you where my little place is in case you care to drop in and talk things over.”
He watched her enormous back with a kind of dismay as she waddled across the room.
Violet made an entrance through the swinging door, humming the opening bars of Less than the Dust. He picked up the book and went upstairs with the uncomfortable feeling of having let something escape him.
CHAPTER THREE
>
MARK spent the rest of the afternoon in his new room, to which, surprisingly enough, he had been directed by Violet. He’d come directly from the kitchen to find her on the second floor, flicking a duster over the hall chairs and panting a little, as well she might. She read his mind swiftly and accurately.
“Short cut,” she grinned. “Back stairs behind the cardroom.” Then, remembering her manners, “I thought maybe nobody had told you where to find your new room. You go straight ahead towards the front of the house and turn down that little hall on your right. There’s a guest soot there and you and Mr. Stoneman have it to yourselves. It’s got a lovely view too, right over a precipice.”
He must have looked startled, for she added, “Nobody ever falls out. There’s kind of spikes set in the sills. Do you want that I should show you?”
He thanked her and found the room himself. And now he sat at the desk, turning the pages of the book Mrs. Lacey had given him and seeing Mrs. Lacey’s face on every page. The small envelope so carefully and, he was sure, apologetically sealed over the note and the six cents was addressed to Miss Beulah in a spidery, ladylike hand. In one corner it said, “Kindness of Bearer.” Apparently she’d never intended to deliver it herself, in spite of her return to Crestwood in the morning. Going visiting, he guessed; going to put her feet up and take things easy for a few days. He looked at his own brown oxfords and decided to do the same.
Stoneman’s snores came faintly through the open door into the bath which connected the two rooms; it was a contagious sound. As nothing official had been said about locked doors when he came up he did nothing about them now. He crawled under the eiderdown with his shoes on and went to sleep.
He woke at six o’clock and took a shower, thoughtfully closing the door into Stoneman’s room as he did so. The snoring had stopped and there was no other sound. No sound anywhere. He changed into a dark suit as a gesture towards the day and went down to the library. The room was as quiet as the rest of the house; he’d never been in such a quiet house before. He turned on more lights. Eight adults, including himself, and two healthy kids, and the place was as silent as the— He shook himself and crossed the room to a table set with bottles and decanters. Even his footsteps made no sound on the rugs. He poured himself a drink and rattled the glasses to cheer himself up. Little by little he was feeling colder and lower, and he didn’t like it.
The black night crowding against the terrace window made him uneasy. After a few attempts he found the proper cord and drew the curtains over the glass. They were warm red curtains, thick as blankets, and they made him feel better. He went to a chair by the fire and sat down. A coal cracked sharply and sent up a shower of sparks. He jumped, and spilled his drink, and when he tried to mop it up his hand was shaking.
No wonder Stoneman has the jitters he thought. There’s something wrong with this house. He poured another drink, with an extra allowance for spilling, and found that amusing. Then, after a few minutes, he began to feel normal.
He charged off his fidgets to unaccustomed exercise; he had walked too far for a child of the pavements and on top of that he’d been seen coming from a mausoleum. If that story got back to the boys in New York he’d be a marked man. He’d be more than a marked man if they ever found out he was playing secretary to a crackpot archæologist who’d hired him out of the telephone book.
Then, while he was enjoying his own discomfiture he remembered something Mrs. Lacey had said. About evil. Something about this being good soil for evil. That didn’t make good sense coming from a woman who was born and raised on the soil in question; not to mention the pleasant things it had provided in the way of little income and lifelong job. Hadn’t the woman lived in and out of this very house ever since she was sixteen? There he was, back at the house again. . . . He literally kicked himself on the shin as a punishment for daring to think of looking over his shoulder. . . .
Mrs. Lacey’s trouble was peeve. The more he thought of that, the better he liked it. She was peeved because she was spoiled. She’d probably run the place in the old days and now she was outclassed by a butler. One of these old girls who wanted to be patted on the shoulder every morning and tucked up at night. No patting and tucking, no cook. . . . And she might even be a little queer. You found people like that in mountain villages. Inbred.
He felt much better now. This was a good house and a good atmosphere. Look at those kids, sound as apples; and their strapping father. As for Laura—his eyes went to the Ducroix portrait—well, some women did have trouble after childbirth; but they usually got over it.
He left the portrait and gazed lovingly on the Renoir: a woman at a sidewalk table under a plane tree, with leaves and sunlight dropping on the cloth. It made the misty little Corot on the other wall look dated and forlorn. If the Corot were his, he reflected, he’d hang it where it belonged, in the faded little salon with the cupids and the roses and the harp. Davenport’s wife probably played the harp.
What had Mrs. Lacey said about Davenport’s wife? Oh—she was dead, that’s all. She was dead. . . . He wondered what she had died of.
He stiffened in his chair. Someone was coming slowly down the dim hall, slowly and with difficulty. He held his breath, watching the portières swing gently and fall still. There was no sound. In a bound he was across the room, wrenching the curtains apart.
Florrie gave him a startled look. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, a covered tray in her hands. She put the tray on the bottom step.
“Did you want something, sir?” she asked primly.
“No.” Mark felt his face redden. “I—I thought you were Mr. Stoneman.”
She shook her head reprovingly. “I haven’t seen Mr. Stoneman. You gave me a start, sir, jumping out like that. I’m just taking Mrs. Morey’s dinner up.”
He gestured back toward the door. “I saw the curtains move and I thought Mr. Stoneman had—had come along and—felt faint.” He felt like a fool himself.
“Probably a draught,” she explained in a kind manner. “Well, if you don’t want anything—” She collected her tray and started up the stairs.
He went back to the fire, none too pleased with himself.
Perhaps two minutes had gone by when he heard someone clatter down the stairs in a great hurry and turn into the dining room. It was Morey, shouting for Perrin. Perrin answered from his pantry, and apparently Morey joined him there. Their voices faded, but Mark could distinguish Perrin’s noncommittal tones from Morey’s subdued roar. It was the roar of an outraged householder confronted with frozen plumbing.
He was happy to note that whatever it was they were making no secret about it. He lit a cigarette and contemplated the Renoir through the smoke, such a pleasant little woman in a flowered hat, her fingers curled around the stem of a wineglass, a yellowing leaf across her wrist. If he had Morey’s money, that’s the kind of thing he’d spend it for.
When Stoneman came in rubbing his hands together and smiling Mark was glad to see him. Stoneman looked refreshed and, for him, happy. He declined a drink with an air of virtue and launched himself on the dry seas of Egypt. He was deep in the iniquities of a colleague’s greed when a gong sounded for dinner.
Mark offered his arm to Stoneman with exaggerated courtesy and they crossed to the dining room.
Morey turned an exasperated face as they entered. “Sit down and eat while you can, both of you. This is the end of the world.”
Perrin came forward and calmly served the soup.
“Lacey is leaving. No reason, no notice—just leaving. God knows what we’ll do now in this forsaken hole. . . . East, you saw her this afternoon; what did she talk about? Did she sound sore about anything?”
“We talked about a book,” Mark said carefully. “However, she did say she was leaving and I thought—maybe I’m wrong—but I thought she’d been crying.”
“Oh, dear,” murmured Stoneman. “The poor woman.”
“What’s she got to cry about, I’d like to know! Why, she simply sent up a wr
itten resignation, as smooth as you please. My wife’s the one who ought to be crying, and she probably is.”
“May I see the note?” Mark asked.
Morey looked astonished. “See it? I didn’t see it myself. My wife tore it up. I was working in my room when she got it and she didn’t want to disturb me. Maybe if I’d known earlier—”
Stoneman complained gently. “A very unreliable woman, poor soul. No stamina. But I wouldn’t make too much of it, Jim.”
“But I don’t like things like this,” Morey fumed. “Perrin, do you know anything about it? Have the girls been teasing her again?” To Mark, “They used to tease her about her size, but I soon put a stop to that. Come on, Perrin, what’s been going on downstairs?”
“I’ve heard nothing, sir,” Perrin said. Mark thought he caught a faint note of condescension. “Mrs. Lacey is accustomed to a smaller household, sir; Colonel Davenport lived alone, I understand. Perhaps she found the additional work a strain upon her health.”
“That’s crazy,” scoffed Morey. “She’s as strong as a horse. I’ll bet you’ve done something yourself to make her angry.”
“No, sir. I’ve always had the greatest admiration and respect for the lady.”
“Well, this is what you get when you try to play fair with native labour. I’ve had enough. You call up the agency you came from and ask them to ship us a cook to-morrow.”
Perrin hesitated. “If I may suggest—?”
“What?”
“Mrs. Lacey recommends Violet. She trained the girl herself as a supplementary cook when Colonel Davenport had guests.”
“That’s much better,” Stoneman agreed. “Violet knows our little habits, Jim.”
Morey finished his cup of soup with relish.” Maybe she does,” he said ruefully, “but we’ll never get another bouillon like that. Joe, this is all your fault. You and your precious papers and locked doors. They’ll all be walking out next.”
Blood upon the Snow Page 4