by Molly Thynne
“Do you mean to say they couldn’t freeze him out any other way?” demanded the astonished Soames.
Constantine shrugged his shoulders.
“He’s got the hide of a rhinoceros and he’s one of the richest men in England. He’s never recognized either a joke or a snub in his life. What could they do? Men like that are invulnerable. And the curious thing is that his son is quite a normal, decent fellow, and the younger daughter is charming.”
An abrupt silence fell upon the party as the subject of their conversation reappeared in the doorway of the coffee-room.
“I am happy to say that they have had the sense to return,” he announced.
The front door burst open and two figures, the one tall, the other short and slim, plunged into the lounge. They were so completely enveloped in snow that it was difficult at first to determine even their sex, and one of them, at least, was speechless with laughter.
Lord Romsey stood looking at them in silent disapproval.
“Angela fell into a snow-drift about ten feet deep, and it was all I could do to get her out,” announced the taller of the two, shaking himself like a dog.
They pulled off their hats and revealed themselves. Three years ago, Angela Ford had been quoted as the prettiest debutante of her season, and her portrait had hardly ever been out of the illustrated papers since. Stuart noted, with mingled relief and appreciation, that she bore no resemblance to her father, and that no photograph he had seen, so far, had done anything like justice to her vivid beauty. Geoffrey Ford, her stepbrother, and her senior by sixteen years, had inherited Lord Romsey’s heaviness of build, but he struck Stuart as sedate rather than pompous, and the grave smile with which he was looking down into his sister’s glowing face was very pleasant and human.
Lord Romsey did not share his children’s mirth.
“I should suggest your going to your rooms at once,” he said frigidly. “You are making the lounge in a disgusting mess. A most foolish expedition altogether.”
His daughter caught sight of Constantine, who had risen at her entrance. She came forward with outstretched hand.
“Mr. Constantine! How nice! Am I too wet to shake hands with?”
“Your father was just about to join you when you appeared,” said Constantine, with a malicious twinkle in his eye. “I was trying to persuade him not to brave the weather.”
“Pshaw!” ejaculated Lord Romsey, to the delight of Stuart, who until then had never believed that the word existed outside the dictionary.
“There’s a car coming up the lane,” announced Miss Ford. “We saw it from the corner. It looks as if we were to have more companions in misfortune.”
Soames had picked up a magazine and was apparently absorbed in its contents. These people, his manner proclaimed, were not for him. But his attitude had not escaped the keen eyes of Constantine.
“May I introduce Mr. Soames,” he said suavely, “and Mr. Angus Stuart, whose books you have no doubt read?”
“Not the Angus Stuart?” she exclaimed.
“The Angus Stuart,” assented Constantine imperturbably; while Stuart, his face a rich brick-red, was still trying in vain to frame a suitable answer.
He was saved by the opportune arrival of the latest, and, as it afterwards turned out, the ultimate addition to the oddly mixed company.
At the sight of her Stuart realized that, no matter how sorry a trick the weather might play him, he was to receive some compensation. For, if the snow did not abate, he would spend Christmas under the same roof with two of the most attractive women he had ever met.
The new-comer was a good ten years older than the girl to whom he had just been introduced, but was of the type that gains, rather than loses, by maturity. One had but to look at her to know that she would be beautiful even in old age, and she was possessed of that subtle charm that some women carry with them to the grave.
As she stood there making her arrangements with the landlord, the eyes of every man in the lounge, down to the elderly waiter who stood peering out of the coffee-room, were upon her. Stuart could see even Lord Romsey straighten himself and give a thoughtful touch to his tie.
She had reached the foot of the staircase before she noticed her companions in misfortune. Until then her mind had been fully occupied by the landlord, who was explaining that her car would have to go on to the wheelwright’s in the village, the hotel barn being already full to overflowing. The last lady to arrive had sent her car there, he assured her, and her chauffeur had been quite satisfied with the accommodation. She need have no fear as to its safety.
She acquiesced with a smile.
“Will you see that some one shows my man the way? And when he has finished with the car, I should like to see him,” she said. “You can put him up, I suppose?”
As she spoke she cast an idle glance at the little group round the table.
As she did so, her whole body seemed to stiffen. For a moment she stared blindly, while the colour drained slowly from her face, leaving it as white as the drifting snow outside.
Then, with an obvious effort of will, she mastered her emotion, her grip on the balustrade relaxed, and she turned and went swiftly up the broad staircase.
But not before Stuart had had time to follow the direction of her eyes. Lord Romsey was standing as he had seen him last, pompous and unperturbed, with, if anything, a faint look of complacency on his heavy features.
CHAPTER III
The day wore on and still it snowed. The Romsey clan retired to its self-imposed isolation, and the three men stayed chatting by the fire until the elderly waiter brought them tea, after which Constantine and Soames disappeared upstairs to the former’s bedroom to indulge their passion for chess.
Stuart sat for a time smoking and trying to interest himself in an ancient magazine. There were no further arrivals, a walk was out of the question, and he began to realize that the boredom prophesied by Constantine might turn out to be a very real thing. There was, literally, nothing to do; and at last, in despair, he was driven to avail himself of the old man’s invitation and visit him in his room. But the sight of two figures wrapt in contemplation over a chess-board did not prove inspiring.
Fortunately snow induces sleep, and he ended by relapsing into dreamless slumber on his bed.
Dinner proved uneventful, except for a rather stilted little chat with Miss Amy Adderley in the lounge afterwards. She announced that she and her sister were “exceedingly comfortable,” and vouchsafed the information that Mr. Girling, the landlord, had been head coachman at the Abbey; that the house-party included Lord Romsey and the Honourable Victoria, Angela, and Geoffrey Ford, his son and two daughters, and finished up with a not very charitable commentary on “that vulgar American woman that arrived this afternoon.”
“Fortunately there are two quite good sitting-rooms,” she concluded, “so one will not be obliged to spend all one’s time in one’s room. The landlord has just shown them to us. A large billiard-room on the third floor for the gentlemen, and a comfortable little drawing-room for the non-smokers. Mr. Girling only moved some of the furniture in to-day. I must say he is doing his best to make us comfortable!”
Later in the evening Stuart sampled the billiard-room. It covered the whole depth and half the frontage of the old house, and was so vast that the billiard-table, tucked away at one end, looked small in comparison. It was a comfort to feel that here, at least, he need not be for ever treading on the toes of the rest of the company.
After a desultory game of billiards, he and Soames joined the landlord in his little den behind the bar, and collected data concerning the afternoon’s arrivals.
The entire party, Girling informed them, now consisted of themselves, Constantine, Lord Romsey and his family, Melnotte, the ineffable young man, who, Stuart afterwards discovered, was a gigolo engaged by the management of the hotel at Redsands to which he himself had been bound, Mrs. van Dolen, Major Carew, the Misses Adderley, and Miss Hamilton, Mrs. van Dolen’s secretary. The att
ractive lady who had been the last to arrive was a Mrs. Orkney Cloude.
“It’s been a job fitting them in, too,” concluded Girling. “It’s not the rooms. As far as the house goes, we could put up double the number. It’s the service. The American lady wanted her meals in her room, same as Lord Romsey and his party, but I had to tell her it couldn’t be done. And now there’s a chauffeur just come in. Takin’ his master’s car to Redsands, he is. Well, he’s down with lumbago, poor devil. We had to all but lift him out of the car when he got here, and it was all he could do to get himself to bed. He’s got to be looked after, and that means an extra tray at every meal, and me with only the two waiters, and the chambermaids run off their legs already. And the weather forecast isn’t any too cheerful. But it’s all grist to my mill, so I suppose I oughtn’t to complain.”
“The weather forecast! Then you’ve got a wireless?” exclaimed Soames.
“There’s a small one I had put up in the bar. We get the National Programme, but nothing much else. From all accounts the roads will be blocked to-morrow, if this snow doesn’t let off. I’ll do my best for you, gentlemen, but you mustn’t blame me if the service isn’t what you’re accustomed to.”
“I’ve no complaints,” said Soames heartily, rising and stretching himself. “All I need now is my bed, and, from the look of it, it’ll be a comfortable one.”
“I’m ready for mine,” agreed Stuart. “This snow makes one sleepy. You might tell your maid to go on knocking till I answer to-morrow, Air. Girling. It takes an earthquake to wake me!”
Stuart made his way up to his bedroom on the second floor, leaving Soames turning over the magazines in the lounge in search of something to read. The staircase ran up the centre of the house—wide passages on either side of it, on both the first and second floors, leading to the sleeping quarters.
Stuart was wearing house shoes, and his feet made little or no noise on the carpeted stairs. He had almost reached the top of the first flight when he became aware of two people, apparently in urgent conversation, in the passage to the right of the stairs.
“I wish to God you could get away!”
The voice, that of a man, was so urgent that it captured Stuart’s attention, and before he had time to make his presence known, he had overheard the answer.
“You’ve got to get me away somehow! I don’t dare stay here! Goodness knows what will happen if I do!”
To do the eavesdropper justice, his fit of coughing had begun before the woman, for a woman it was, had reached the middle of her last sentence. Stuart heard a low exclamation from the man, then silence; but he was so near the head of the stairs that, though the passage was empty when he reached it, he heard the click of the latch as the second door on the right was hastily closed.
He went on up the next flight, smiling to himself as he remembered Constantine’s specious argument concerning the legitimate curiosity of novelists. This was no concern of his, he told himself, but in spite of his efforts, he had already, almost subconsciously, connected the little episode with the look he had surprised on Mrs. Orkney Cloude’s face as she paused on her way upstairs that afternoon. He had had a strong impression at the time that if she could have turned and fled from the place then and there, she would have done so.
His own room was the first on the left, at the head of the stairs, and there were two more doors beyond his before the passage turned. As in so many old houses, the floors were not all on the same level, and there was a short flight of steps leading to other bedrooms beyond, opposite the last door in the passage.
As he went into his room he glanced at the two doors on his left, wondering who his neighbours might be. The sight of two pairs of small, square-toed shoes left him in little doubt. They were so neat, yet so manifestly built for comfort, that they brought the Misses Adderley and Tunbridge Wells irresistibly to his mind. Well, they would be quiet neighbours, at any rate.
His head had no sooner touched the pillow than he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep that would, in normal circumstances, no doubt have lasted till morning. As it turned out, he opened his eyes abruptly, sometime in the small hours of the morning, on to a pall of pitch darkness; and lay blinking, vaguely aware that something definite had awakened him, and quite at sea as to his whereabouts.
Then a faint but persistent knocking brought him to a sense of his surroundings. He switched on the light, tumbled out of bed, and opened the door.
He was confronted by a fantastic figure, which, after a moment of sheer bewilderment, he recognized as that of the younger Miss Adderley. She was clad in a red dressing-gown of some woolly material, and wore round her head and fastened under her chin that knitted abomination which, for some obscure reason, is known as a fascinator. Certain curious projections in the region of her forehead suggested curl-papers beneath.
She was carrying a small kettle, and Stuart could see that the hand that held it was trembling. She stared at him, her eyes wide with apprehension.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you, Mr. Stuart,” she whispered, with a terrified glance over her shoulder, “but I do feel that some one ought to know that there’s a man in a mask in the passage!”
Stuart stared at her in bewilderment.
“A man in a mask?” he repeated stupidly. “Impossible!”
She nodded.
“That’s what it seemed to me. So strange! You see, my sister couldn’t sleep, and so I got up to re-fill her hot bottle. I lighted the little spirit-lamp without which we never travel, and went over to the bathroom to fetch some hot water. That was when I saw him. He was standing near the stairs, looking at me, with a mask over his face!”
She blinked suddenly and averted her eyes, and Stuart, looking down, became conscious of his own undress. He went back into his room and caught up his dressing-gown.
“I’ll go and see,” he said. “You say it was near the stairs that you saw him?”
She clutched at his arm with a shaking hand.
“You surely won’t go without some sort of weapon. He wouldn’t wear a mask if he wasn’t dangerous.”
Stuart smiled in spite of himself.
“I’m afraid I haven’t got any weapons, Miss Adderley,” he said.
“Wait,” she announced impressively. “Don’t move until I come back.”
She disappeared into the room next door, and came out almost immediately bearing a small black poker, which she pressed into his hand.
“There!” she exclaimed. “You can hit him hard with that.”
Stuart, feeling distinctly foolish, started along the passage, armed with the poker, Miss Adderley following at an ever-increasing distance in his rear.
They had not gone more than half a dozen paces when there was a click, and the entire passage was plunged into darkness. Stuart stopped dead, and Miss Adderley gave vent to a little squeal of terror and, literally, threw herself upon him.
“I saw his hand,” she whimpered frenziedly. “He was on the stairs all the time.”
He disengaged himself gently.
“You go back to your room and wait there,” he whispered. “I’ll try to get to the switch.”
Grasping the poker firmly, he felt his way carefully along the wall, expecting every moment to come in contact with a warm, yielding body. But nothing happened, and, after some difficulty, he managed to find the switch, which was placed just at the head of the stairs.
He turned it on, blinking for a moment at the sudden transition from darkness to the light which flooded not only the passage but the stairs below.
There was no one to be seen. The intruder had seized his opportunity and made his escape in the darkness.
Stuart hesitated. He realized that it was useless to pursue his quarry down the stairs. If there had been any means of escape that way, the man would have taken it. The very fact that he had risked the turning out of the light showed that he had been unable to reach his objective without crossing the landing on which Stuart and Miss Adderley stood. It was therefore pretty obvious th
at he had gone to one of the upper floors, and, Stuart concluded, had probably used the little staircase at the opposite end of the passage which corresponded with the one outside Miss Adderley’s room. He felt fairly certain that no one had passed him in the darkness, though he had a vague idea that both flights of steps led to the servants’ quarters. To reach the billiard-room he had used a small back staircase which ran from behind Girling’s office on the ground floor. This was about as far as his knowledge of the lay of the house extended, and he realized that it would be useless to attempt the exploration of such an unknown territory by himself.
He jumped involuntarily as something brushed his elbow. It was Miss Adderley, who had crept silently to his side.
“He may be anywhere!” she whispered fearfully voicing his own thoughts.
“He may. And it’s not going to be easy to find him now, I’m afraid. Look here, Miss Adderley, you trot back to your own room and lock the door. You’ll be quite safe there. I’ll go and knock up the landlord and see if we can find any trace of the fellow.”
Then, as she hesitated: “I’ll come with you to your door, though I’m sure he’s nowhere near that end of the passage.”
He conducted her to her room, and, after a slight delay occasioned by the fact that her sister had firmly locked the door after her departure and, owing to her deafness, could not be made to understand that a murderer was not lurking on the other side, managed to deposit her there.
Then, still grasping the ridiculous poker, he made his way past the head of the stairs to Constantine’s room. Where Soames was sleeping he did not know, though he had an idea that he was somewhere on the same floor as himself.
He had some difficulty in waking the old man, but, when he did come to the door, tying the cord of his black silk dressing-gown round his waist, his thick white hair on end, and his dark eyes bright with vitality, he looked equal to dealing with any situation.