Nunn rang for a servant, and I walked down to the gate with Ralph. I don’t know why I did it; I don’t like the fellow, and I’ve never trusted him. But all the same he was the owner of the place and every stick and stone there recognised him. He said lightly, as he loosed his mare, “You might try and hammer it into Dennis’s thick head that he’s wasting powder carrying on this argument. I wonder if he’d be so keen to marry Hilary if he knew as much as I do. Feltham did sell his side, you know. Oh yes, he did. I’ve got papers to prove it. And anyway, I always thought he had. The race isn’t stable; you’ll admit that, even where Hilary’s concerned. I fancy Eleanor knows the truth, too. It was a rotten pill for her to swallow. Not that I care. If every relative Hilary had had gone over to the other side, lock, stock and barrel, it wouldn’t have made any difference to me. You may not believe it, Tony, but I am in earnest about that girl. I can’t live without her, and I don’t propose to try. What’s done is done; there’s time ahead, and that’s for her and me. I’m only using this weapon because I must. As for Dennis, there are plenty of sensible women with suburban minds and economical ideas for Sunday supper who’ll suit him to a T.”
He nodded to me and rode off, smiling as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
2
I came back to find Dennis, Nunn, Jeremy and Mrs. Ross gathered in the hall, discussing Hilary.
“I think the best thing would be to let her marry him,” Mrs. Ross was saying. “She wants to reform him. Most women want to reform some man, and it’s better for it to be their own husband than someone else’s. They’re so liable to be misunderstood, these reformers. That’s how martyrs began. Besides, it won’t matter what we say. That young woman proposes to paddle her own canoe.”
“You’d better keep an eye on her, if you want her,” Nunn remarked briefly to Dennis. “Or she’ll cut along and elope with the beggar.”
“But why should she?” Mrs. Ross asked. “She could go openly. After all, you can’t make a woman marry any particular man in these days.”
“Still, she’d have some difficult obstacles to overcome,” Dennis suggested.
“Such as?”
“Well, there is me. I should be opposed to it, you know.”
Nunn’s voice thrust into the conversation like the horn of an animal. “And what could you do?”
Dennis turned, half-smiling. “Well, even Hilary for all her enterprise, c-couldn’t make much of a marriage with a c-corpse.”
We were all startled; even Nunn lost some of his habitual composure.
“A corpse. My dear fellow, talk sense. You can’t go about murdering men who happen to interfere with your domestic plans.”
Dennis assured him earnestly, “I’ve never k-killed a man unnecessarily in my life.”
“Well, you can drop any plans you may have formulated about murdering people in my house.”
He went out, and his sister went with him. The three of us stared at one another.
The door opened again and Hilary came in. She looked excited and breathless. “Has Ralph been here?” she asked.
“Yes, and gone again.”
“Didn’t he ask to see me?”
“That was one reason for calling.”
“What was the other?”
“To ask me to publish a denial of our engagement.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That my middle name’s George Washington.”
“But, Arthur, it’s true. I—I’m not engaged to you any more. I told you so last night.”
“If it takes two to make a marriage, it takes two to break it off.”
“You mean, you wouldn’t release me. But you must. You’re not that sort of man. And I must marry Ralph.”
“Why?”
She hesitated, looking at him imploringly, but Dennis didn’t spare her. “It’s all right; we’re your bodyguard, and believe that three heads are better than one. Go on.”
Hilary looked at me. “You know what Ralph knows about my father, don’t you?”
“I know it’s a lie.”
She shook her head. “I daresay some of it’s a lie, but some of it’s true. And anyway, it isn’t really so much what’s true that matters, as what you can make people believe. And I won’t have anyone believe that about my father. And anyway,” she added, unconvincingly, “there’s Eleanor and James. A scandal like this would break up their lives.”
“I don’t see any reason for being insulting to your host,” said Dennis. “Nunn isn’t the kind of man who allows his life to collapse so easily. Now suppose you tell us the rest.”
“The rest?” She looked at him, startled.
“Yes, the true reason why you’re contemplating marriage with your cousin. Oh, I know all the reasons you’ve given us; they may be true, but it’s poppycock that you’d marry a man you detested for any of them. I may not have known you as long as the others, but I know quite a lot about you. Well?”
I couldn’t see what the fellow was driving at. I looked at Jeremy; his face was as white as paper, and his eyes were fixed on Hilary. For a minute she didn’t speak, then she said in a dead, hopeless voice, “How did you find out, Arthur? Oh, it’s true, there is something, I don’t understand myself what it is altogether. But he does attract me, as you don’t, as nobody else I’ve ever met does. Even while I know the sort of man he is, he attracts me. There’s some curse, perhaps, that touches all the Felthams; you know, there’s a legend that none of them is happy. I don’t feel I could marry you, Arthur, or any ordinary person, now. In a way, I shouldn’t think it fair, not only because of father but because of us as a family. It’s different for Ralph and me. We’re tarred with the same brush. Whatever the secret is, we’re both in it. It comes of being Felthams. Do you understand?”
Her face was so ravaged that I was appalled. She seemed to have changed in an instant, undergone some frightful initiation into horror. But to my amazement Dennis only said, “It’s all right, Hilary. I know exactly what you mean.” I noticed that this morning his stammer was scarcely apparent. I felt less certain of the position myself; I’d never seen our courageous, high-spirited Hilary look like this. And I thought she really did believe in the existence of some mysterious curse linking her with her infamous cousin.
“It’s Feltham,” said Dennis, briefly, when she had gone again. “He’s magnetic. I knew that when I first met him. Oh, he has undoubted charm of a kind, but I don’t propose to allow him to exercise it, not on Hilary. He’s a queer chap, you know. If we lived in the ages of faith we should say he was devil-possessed. Nowadays we’ve done away with the devil and replaced him by complexes and inhibitions. Though dear knows what inhibitions Feltham’s ever allowed himself.”
“You seem to know a lot about him,” said Jeremy. “Is this your first experience of him?”
“Oh, no.” Dennis looked surprised. “I doubt if he remembers me, but I was doing Secret Service work during the war and I ran across him then. He’d go anywhere, do anything; didn’t know the meaning of fear. He might have worked marvels for us but he wasn’t reliable. But he was so damned plausible he could have pulled off anything. Why, any other man who had done what he did would have been put up against a wall and shot at dawn. It isn’t just his looks or his manner or his record. It’s a gift, like painting or music. Either a man has the seed of it, or he hasn’t. And Feltham has. You can see for yourselves how he’s captivated Hilary. And she’s not a soft school-girl as a rule.”
“What’s to be done?” I asked. “It seems to me that as long as the fellow’s above the earth she’ll be unsafe. Even if, as you pointed out, she were married to you, that wouldn’t necessarily be a guarantee…”
“Precisely,” said Dennis, with so much meaning that we both stopped dead. “Anyway,” he continued, in his cool, unhurried voice, “the fellow ought to be put out of the way. He’s a public danger. I gather
you’ve both seen Philpotts. You do know what the position is down here?”
We agreed that we had. “Then shall we put our cards on the table? I’m here to try and discover who the Spider really is. It’s a magnificent chance, looked at officially, because for the first time we’re on the spot before the end of the story. Up till now we’ve had to begin after the death; this time we’re going to prevent it, and in so doing spot the criminal.”
“Is he Ralph Feltham?” asked Jeremy bluntly.
“It’s no use going at it like a bull at a five-barred gate. I don’t want to get hold of one principal and let the gang generally go. I want to scotch this thing for good and all. You may think me sentimental, but I tell you there are nights when I can’t sleep, thinking of that crowd at work, and the havoc they’ve produced, and the worse havoc they have in mind.”
“I don’t want to be offensive,” said Jeremy, “and I only ask in order to get the position perfectly clear. But your engagement to Hilary—is that part of an official campaign or something totally apart?”
“Totally apart. I admit I would strain a good many nerves to run this fiend to earth, but getting a girl to give herself away and then politely restoring her to the shelf, with a ‘Thank you so much. That’ll be all for to-day,’ is too much even for me. No, as you suggest, my engagement is quite outside the official sphere.”
“I only thought it might clear the air a little if it hadn’t been,” Jeremy explained. “And it would have simplified things all round.”
“For yourself?”
“Yes. If I could think of you as that sort of cad, think how much more pleasure I should experience in robbing you of Hilary. Whereas I shall probably suffer hideous pangs of conscience, if you really need her…” He smiled one-sidedly. But Dennis didn’t seem embarrassed.
“Charming of you, I’m sure. And very handsomely put. Like the parent who chastises his child to the tune of This hurts me much more than you, A thing I simply hate to do.
But to come back to Feltham. If he’s in earnest about Hilary, as I think he is, the sooner he’s put out of the way the better. Of course, there mustn’t be any scandal. It mustn’t look like suicide. Still less must it look like murder. It must be an accident, with nothing whatsoever to connect it with this house. Remember, Nunn is a big man locally, and we owe it to him, as his guests, not to get him tied up in anything discreditable. He’ll be in the Lords one of these days, and he won’t want to take his seat with the flavour of murder attaching to his name.”
“Have you forgotten that Keith here is a lawyer?” Jeremy asked, honestly scandalised by Dennis’s cool assertions. “And lawyers, like actors, are professionals first and human beings second, and a long way second, too.” He turned to me in some anxiety. “If Dennis should prove to be in earnest, Tony, remember this conversation is without prejudice.”
Dennis got off the table where he had been sitting. “It wouldn’t matter,” he murmured in his soft Irish voice. “I’m not such a fool that I should leave anything to chance. I wasn’t in the Secret Service for nothing.”
“It’s difficult to believe you’re serious,” I said.
“I’m serious enough. But, as I assured Nunn this morning, I’ve never in my life killed a man unnecessarily. I’ll tell you this, though. There’ll be a good many hearts beating more easily all over the world when Ralph Feltham is in his grave. And even if that weren’t true, and this was the only household he could damage, I should do the same. He isn’t going to smash up Hilary’s life, believe me.”
He went out through the French windows into the dreary garden, where the first snowdrops were beginning to prick up in the stone bath beyond the library windows. Jeremy whistled.
“We seem to have our work cut out,” he observed. “One of us had better keep an eye on Hilary and the other on that chap. At the end of this adventure we ought to be qualified for first-rate nursemaids. By the way, does your fountain-pen write?”
“I expect so. Why?”
“Because I want to borrow one. I don’t think Dennis is the sort of chap to beat much about the bush, and the papers will pay handsomely for a really lurid biography of a man like Ralph. And me knowing more than most, it might be my chance to make a touch. So long.”
And he followed Dennis through the French windows.
Chapter VII
1
I was not left alone very long. First, Mrs. Ross poked her head in, looking for Jeremy. When I said I couldn’t tell her where he was, she looked at me suspiciously.
“I don’t trust people who say they can’t tell; it’s the Puritan conscience evading the lie direct. It means that they know, but feel themselves bound to keep silent. It’s ridiculous. I want him to help me. I’ve been roped into doing some work for this ridiculous bazaar of Eleanor’s. I offered to dress dolls, it’s the only kind of bazaar work they taught girls when I was young, and I want to dress a grandmother, but I haven’t got a white-haired model. I thought Mr. Freyne’s so clever with his fingers he might have cut a little bit out of the sheepskin rug, where no one would notice, and we could glue it on.”
Within five minutes of her departure Eleanor appeared; she looked a complete wreck this morning, and her first words confirmed my impression that, whoever was having a bad time, no one was suffering more than she.
“I want your advice, Tony,” she said. “It’s about Ralph. Now that he’s top dog, as he certainly is at the moment, what do you think is our best policy? Shall we go on vetoing him and perhaps drive Hilary into his arms, or shall we give him carte-blanche to come and go as he pleases, in the hopes of putting off the evil day, if nothing more.”
I asked what Nunn thought about it. After all, it was his house so long as the lease lasted.
Eleanor confessed, “I’ve no key to James’s real feelings at the moment. You can guess a little how he takes the position, because you heard what he said about Hilary the night she was lost. I don’t believe, as a matter of fact, he minds so much about Cleghorne as the fact that he’s been kept in the dark while all this racket about Hilary has been going on. It’s very difficult for men to understand why we do what we do. I hadn’t a thought, except for him.”
“That’s just where you were so unfair,” I pointed out. “In a sense, you put the responsibility for the business on his shoulders, and even I, who have seen very little of him, could tell you that he isn’t that sort of man. He’d have tackled Ralph at once. Has he suggested doing it now?”
“Not to me. But he did say that no breath of this story should be known beyond these walls. I don’t know what he’s going to do. I’m more frightened than I’ve ever been in my life. Much more frightened than when Percy shot himself, and I didn’t think I’d ever have to go through anything worse than that.”
I said, superfluously, that it was a pity she hadn’t told him earlier. Eleanor agreed.
“All my life, Tony, I’ve envied people who had the courage to risk everything. What’s called complete surrender. To step over a cliff, absolutely assured that you won’t crash on the rocks but that by some miracle you’ll be sustained—I’d give all I’ve got to be able to do that. But I can’t. I can stand on the edge and brood over it, but I can’t take the final plunge. I must feel solid earth under my feet. And I couldn’t plunge this time, either. It’s a question of courage, I suppose. But now things are worse than I had imagined. If I keep Ralph out, then we may force the issue with Hilary. If I let him come here, I’m afraid of the consequences.”
“To him? Or to your husband?”
“To him, of course. There was a queer look about James when he said he’d make it all right. He’s a clever man, he’s shrewd, he’s daring.”
“And you think he’s planning to bump Ralph off? Well, in that chap’s place I should give the Abbey a wide berth. That’s three people ready to finish him when opportunity offers.”
We couldn’t say any more,
because Mrs. Ross came trailing disconsolately in again. She hadn’t found Jeremy, and she didn’t dare tackle the rug on her own account. When she saw us she said in a vexed tone, “Everyone seems to have a young man but me. What ideas are you putting into his head, Eleanor?”
“I’m talking about this ball we’re having for Hilary’s twenty-first birthday. We’ve been planning it for a long time. It’s going to be a Fancy Dress affair, and the prize will go to the best and cheapest. That’s James’s idea. He says so many of the nicest people round here are hard hit that it’s blatant snobbery to ask them to compete for the most gorgeous or striking affair, irrespective of cost.”
“Mine hasn’t cost me anything,” said Mrs. Ross, complacently. “And I’m trying to persuade James to borrow a policeman’s uniform, and then his won’t cost anything, either. There’s a dear little tubby sergeant at the local office, who’d be delighted to oblige him, I’m sure.”
“And it’s quite time, Tony, you settled down,” Eleanor continued, “unattached men are wrong, somehow, out of place, like—like…”
“Floating kidneys,” beamed Mrs. Ross. “I hope you’ve picked him someone nice, Eleanor. Because he’s very, very innocent and he’d be sure to go wrong if he were left to himself.”
I was startled, and not flattered. “I doubt if I’d make more of a mess of it than anyone else,” I said, a little mettled.
“Oh, you’re no judge of women,” said she, gaily. “Who is it, Eleanor?”
“I shan’t tell you because he’ll simply set his feet like a mule, and refuse to look the girl in the face, if he thinks we have designs,” said Eleanor.
“And is that mysterious nephew of yours coming? He’d brighten up any party, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know,” said Eleanor, simply.
“He’d better, I should think, if you want to stop gossip about that gawky girl, anyhow. Oh, there’s Mr. Freyne.” Through the French windows she had caught sight of Jeremy, strolling along the path, his hands in his pockets, and she pounced on him forthwith.
Death in Fancy Dress Page 10