Shirley lifted her head and moved round to face him.
“Anthony—that’s where we’re had,” she said. “She always does go to sleep in the afternoon, and when she’s off, a pack of burglars wouldn’t wake her—I’ve never seen anyone sleep so sound. But if you think wild horses would make her admit having slept a single wink—”
“Damn!” said Anthony with simple fervour.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They drove along the black lanes, and never met a soul until they came out on the Ledlington road. They had repacked one of Anthony’s suit-cases, and every time Shirley thought about unpacking a large male hairbrush, and yards and yards of jazz dressing-gown, and Anthony’s enormous pyjamas she began to have an inward giggle. She hoped it would go on being inward, because the only thing that could be more compromising than her luggage would be to giggle about it under the eye of a reception-clerk or a chambermaid. She dwelt on this horrid possibility, and then, to get away from it, she said,
“Why should Miss Maltby want to get me into trouble?”
“I don’t know why anyone should want to get you into trouble,” said Anthony, “but it’s a sure thing that somebody does.”
Shirley considered that for a little. The Ledlington road ran wide and straight. The black hedges rushed by. The hands of the clock on the dashboard stood at five minutes to twelve. It didn’t seem possible that so much could have happened since they had stood there last. Last time it had been twelve o’clock she had been reading the Stock Exchange news aloud to Mrs Huddleston. Shirley found it very dull, but Mrs Huddleston loved it. Shirley considered it a morbid taste.
Well, that was only twelve hours ago. It really didn’t seem possible.
She said suddenly, “Anthony—didn’t you ever think I had taken those things? You really don’t know very much about me. Suppose I turn out to be a thief, or a kleptomaniac or something.”
“I hope you won’t,” said Anthony. “I mean, it would be a bit embarrassing.”
Shirley laughed breathlessly.
“The embarrassed barrister! It would—wouldn’t it? That’s why we oughtn’t to be engaged—not till we’ve found out who’s been doing all this.”
“We are engaged,” said Anthony. “You can’t not be engaged once you are.”
“I can break it off.”
“Then I’d run you in for breach of promise.”
“You couldnt’!”
“Oh, couldn’t I? You just wait and see! I should conduct my own case, and have the jury sobbing into their pocket-handkerchiefs at my description of how you lured me on, and promised to marry me, and then turned me down.”
“Have I promised to marry you?” said Shirley.
Anthony’s left hand shot out and caught her by the wrist.
“If you haven’t, you’ll do it now! Swear!”
Shirley began to laugh.
“Anthony, do let go—it isn’t safe!”
He set the car on a zig-zag course, and said “Swear!” with a floe rolling “r” and the voice in which the villain of a melodrama presents the virtuous heroine with his well known ultimatum.
Shirley gave a little shriek as they skimmed the edge of the ditch on one side of the road and then headed for the bank on the other.
“Anthony—don’t! I’m going to scream!”
The grip on her wrist tightened. The villain’s voice became more villainous.
“It is useless to shriek—there is none to hear you. Swear that you will marry me—by all that you hold sacred swear it!”
They shaved the bank and took a long diagonal towards the ditch again.
“I swear,” said Shirley with a terrified giggle. She screamed as they escaped the ditch and came back into the middle of the road again. “Oh, Anthony, what a fool you are!”
Without stopping the car he pulled her close, kissed her lightly, and let her go.
“Don’t forget you’ve sworn,” he said.
Shirley thought about that. Her head was whirling, and it wasn’t easy to think at all. She couldn’t marry him if they sent her to prison. He wouldn’t want her to. Or would he? It came dimly into her mind that there might be something behind his fooling. There had been something in his voice when he said, “Don’t forget you’ve sworn.” But he hadn’t answered her question. She said that aloud.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
It had been so hard to say it at all. She didn’t want to say it again. She said piteously,
“I don’t want to say it again.”
His left hand came out once more. This time it rested on her knee with a heavy, comforting pressure. He said,
“Don’t be silly, my dear.”
There was an everyday matter-of-fact sound in his voice that was more convincing than many protestations. She knew that he had never thought, and could never think, anything about her that wasn’t true. Something in him knew what was true about her, and what wasn’t true. If two strings are close enough together, one vibrates when the other is touched. It is the same with people. If they are very close to each other, not with their bodies but with their selves, there is something which sees, and knows, and is sure without any words.
Shirley gave a deep satisfied sigh and said in a sleepy voice,
“Then that’s all right.”
Then she went to sleep in her corner, and woke with a start when they stopped at the Station Hotel. She got out blinking and a little bewildered.
Anthony was very high-handed with the hotel. He was going straight on to London, but his sister wanted a room for the night. He registered Shirley as Miss Alice Lester to correspond with the A.L. on his suit-case, and adjured her in a last private moment not to forget and relapse into Shirley Dale, and to sit tight till he came for her.
“And I’ll try and get down for lunch, but if the Blessed Damozel’s having hysterics I may have to stop and see her through them.” And with that and a grip of her arm he was back in the driver’s seat.
Shirley stood clear and watched the red tail-light draw away and then go out suddenly like a dead spark as the car turned out of the station yard.
She went up to her room. Her face was even dirtier than she expected, but the night-porter who had brought up her suit-case—no, Anthony’s suit-case—didn’t appear to notice anything. The bathroom was just opposite, and he seemed quite sure that the water would be hot. It was boiling. As Shirley wallowed in it, she blessed the name of Ledlington, and its station, and its Station Hotel.
When she was most beautifully clean and warm, she arrayed herself in Anthony’s blue and white pyjamas. The legs trailed on the floor and the sleeves flapped down over her hands, but she got back to her room somehow by clutching at the knees and taking up handfuls of stuff. Then she locked the door—Aunt Emily had been very particular indeed about locking your door in a hotel—and got into bed.
She had wondered what the bed would be like. Beds in country hotels are chancy, but she went to sleep so quickly that she had no time to find out. One minute she was climbing into bed and switching out the light, and the next, sleep rushed down upon her with the darkness and swept her away. At first she didn’t dream at all. She lay on her left side with her hands doubled up under her chin and slept like a baby. The very ugly yellow wall-clock on the hall landing struck two, and three, and four, and five, and six. Then Shirley began to dream. It wasn’t light yet, it wouldn’t be light for a long time, but the night was passing. People were beginning to wake and turn over, and go to sleep again because it was Sunday morning. Without waking, Shirley came up out of the deep waters of sleep into its shallows and began to dream.
She dreamed she was in a cave. It was quite dark there, and she knew—because in a dream you do know that sort of thing—that the cave ran deep into a cliff, and that the mouth of it was blocked by the sea. So that she could never get out. She was in prison, and she couldn’t ever get out. Then the sea came roaring in with a noise like thunder, and she ran away from
it, deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the cave.
The dream broke. She was in a swing, and Anthony was in a swing. The two swings crossed one another, so that for one flying instant she and Anthony were close together, and then swooped apart again, and up with a rush to the top of the arc, and down with a rush again. Every time they passed Anthony called to her, but she couldn’t heat what he said, and he put out his hands and caught her as she flew, and the swing broke and they went crashing down into another dream.
It was a very odd dream. At first she didn’t know where she was. Then she saw old Aunt Emily in her night-gown, and her cap, and the woolly shawl with the blue crochet border which Shirley had knitted for her the Christmas before she died. She had her bedroom candle-stick in her hand, an old-fashioned white one with little bunches of flowers on it. The candle was lighted. Shirley was very glad not to be in the dark any more. And then she saw her mother’s picture, just as she had seen it hanging above the drawing-room mantelpiece in Acacia Cottage, and all of a sudden that was where they were, she and Aunt Emily, and Aunt Emily gave her the candle and said “Be a good girl, Shirley,” just as she had said it a little before she died. And then she wasn’t there any more, but Miss Maltby was letting herself in with a key as long as her arm. Shirley wanted to run away, but her feet wouldn’t move. Her heart thumped with terror, her feet stuck to the carpet, and Miss Maltby stood in the doorway and said in a horrible hating voice, “It isn’t fair. Why should you have it all?” And then Anthony came running like the wind and caught her hand, and she ran too, and the candle turned into a star, and the wind carried them away.
She woke up then and thought it was a pity, and turned over and went to sleep again.…
When she waked, the wall-clock in its hideous case of yellow maple had just finished striking ten o’clock, Shirley got up. She was hungry. She dressed, had breakfast, and wondered how soon Anthony would come. She packed away the pyjamas, and the dressing-gown, and the compromising hairbrush before she left the room, but as the suit-case had no key and she couldn’t very well take it down to breakfast, she would have to hope for the best. If the chambermaid was inquisitive, it was all up—the breath of scandal would certainly blow. No one brought up by old Aunt Emily in a village could be quite indifferent to the breath of scandal, but with prison so to speak looming, it didn’t seem to matter as much as it would have done before she started running away from the police. Anyhow she had done her best for Mrs Grundy, and if she didn’t like it she would have to lump it.
After breakfast she went upstairs again. The suit-case didn’t seem to have been moved. She extracted her coat from the vast emptiness of an old-fashioned wall cupboard and looked it over for possible damage. She had rushed out of Acacia Cottage with it bundled up anyhow over her arm and then gone blundering into Jane’s shrubbery. There might be stains, or even a tear. Stains would sponge, but a tear would be a calamity.
She laid the coat out on the bed and looked it over breadth by breadth, beginning with the right front and working round to the slit in the back. There was a little bulge where the heavy brooch had been, but otherwise this side was all right. The coat was slit up the middle of the back and overlapped by about four inches. Shirley turned her attention to the left-hand back breadth. There was no stain or tear, but there was something funny about the hem. It had a cockled, lumpy look. She put out her hand to touch it and snatched it back again. She had been stooping over the bed. She straightened up and stood looking down at the cockled hem. After a minute she took hold of the rail at the bed foot. She went on looking at the hem, but she didn’t touch it. She was afraid to touch it.
At last she said, “Coward!” Then she stamped her foot and went over to the door and locked it. And then she came back to the bed and felt the hem of the coat. There was something there. The brooch wasn’t the only thing that had been planted on her. She had known it the moment she saw the lumpy, cockled hem. There was probably a slit in the left-hand pocket too.
There was.
She doubled the hem up to meet it, and pulled out Mrs Huddleston’s emerald hairband and her large emerald brooch. There wasn’t anything else. She made quite sure of that. Then she sat down on the bed and stared at the emeralds.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Somebody tried the handle of the door. Shirley gave a most frightful start. There was a murmur of apology and a scurry of retreating footsteps—a chambermaid’s footsteps, not a policeman’s.
Shirley put out the tip of her finger and touched the emerald hairband. It was real. She had been staring at it for so long that it had swum away from her in a green dazzle, but when she touched it it came into focus again. It was real, and it was there, and what was she going to do about it? She tried to think.
The thing was dreadfully valuable. It was a band to go right round the head, and it was made like a laurel wreath, the leaves set with emeralds, and at every fourth pair of leaves there was a large single diamond which might be meant for a dew-drop or a berry. The brooch was two laurel branches crossed, with a diamond between them, and both wreath and brooch had an N engraved on the pale gold setting at the back of the laurel leaves. They were part of a set which Napoleon had given to Josephine after his Italian victories. There should be another brooch, and a pair of long earrings. There might once have been a necklace too, but if so, it had become separated from the rest of the set.
Shirley knew all about the set. That was what made the whole thing so damning. Mrs Huddleston had told her a hundred times about her grandfather buying it when he was in Paris in ’48, and how he got it cheap because everything was in the melting-pot, with kings coming off their thrones all over Europe and court jewellery at a discount. And Mrs Huddleston’s grandmother had worn Josephine’s emeralds when she made her curtsey to Queen Victoria as a bride, and again at the marriage of the Princess Royal. And Mrs Huddleston was most inordinately proud of them. It wasn’t the slightest bit of good for Anthony to smuggle back the diamond brooch and pretend to find it in the drawing-room. The emeralds were about fifty times more important than the diamond brooch, and quite fifty times as damning to Shirley. She knew all about them. She knew just how valuable they were, and she could easily, so easily, have gone upstairs and taken them whilst Mrs Huddleston was resting. Because she knew where they were kept. She had helped Possett to take them out, and she had helped her to put them away. Mrs Huddleston didn’t wear them, but she was very fond of looking at them and talking about them. It was utterly damnable and utterly damning.
Shirley jumped to her feet. If she sat and stared at the wretched things till her eyes popped out of her head, it wouldn’t do the slightest bit of good. What she had got to do was to get on to Anthony at once, before he saw Mrs Huddleston or did anything about the diamond brooch. But meanwhile what was she going to do with the emeralds? She thought about putting them back in the hem of her coat, and she thought about rolling them up in a handkerchief and pinning them inside the pocket of her jumper suit. But it was no good, she just couldn’t. The thought of having them on her or near her induced a feeling of absolute panic. The best she could do was to put them in the pocket of Anthony’s pyjamas, and, oddly enough, that made her feel better. The emeralds were Mrs Huddleston’s, and Anthony was Mrs Huddleston’s nephew. It was the best she could do.
As she shut the suit-case, the wall-clock on the landing struck eleven. Shirley unlocked the door and rang the bell. There wasn’t a moment to lose. She had lost far too many moments already. She must get on to Anthony, and she was most dreadfully afraid that she wouldn’t catch him at his chambers.
The chambermaid told her that there was a telephone-box at the end of the passage. She took the suit-case along, and had a moment’s agitated wonder as to whether she could remember Anthony’s telephone number. She had called him up often enough for Mrs Huddleston, but could she, did she, remember the number now? She could, and she did.
She lifted the receiver, and then remembered that she had no pennies ready. Anthony had left
her with five pounds and a handful of change. The notes were pinned to the elastic of her knickers, and the change was in the left-hand pocket of her jumper. She started all over again, and as she put the pennies in, she remembered that she would have to be most horribly careful what she said, because this was only an extension, and if the hotel clerk liked to listen in she could hear every word.
Ten minutes later she realized that she hadn’t got to worry about that. She had missed Anthony. There was no reply. He shared rooms with a friend, and a man came and did for them. Anthony had expected to be away for the week-end, and his friend was probably away too, in which case the man-servant would have a day off and it was no use asking the exchange to ring again, because there just wasn’t anyone there.
She hung up the receiver, and felt desperate. She simply must get hold of Anthony before he did anything about the diamond brooch. It was no good his pretending to find it now—it would only make things worse. Really the only thing they could do was to go to Mrs Huddleston and tell her the truth. Shirley really did feel that it would be an enormous relief just to stick to the truth and make a clean breast of everything. One of the first things she remembered was Aunt Emily making her learn:
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive.”
And another even more drastic verse which ran:
“Behold the man of lies,
A bandage on his eyes.
He falls into the Pit,
And cannot rise from it.”
There was a picture of the man of lies, very black and repulsive with the bandage tied in a neat bow at the back of his head and one foot overhanging the Pit, from which issued long pointed flames and a quantity of very black smoke.
These early impressions are very hard to shake off. Shirley hadn’t actually told any lies, but she had a feeling that Anthony might be telling them for her, and that was really worse, because it was adding meanness to deceit, and she had always despised mean people.
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