The Boathouse Riddle

by J. J. Connington

  “I’ve done hardly any fishing myself, so far. Just now, of course, the streams are all a bit low after this dry weather; but there are a few hundredweight of trout in the lake, if you can get them. By the way, that reminds me, I’ve put a new boathouse since you were here last. The old place was tumbling to pieces, so I’ve pulled it down and put up a rather nice affair instead. You’ll see it as we drive along the lakeside.”

  Sir Clinton suppressed a smile. He remembered quite well that the shortest route from the station to Talgarth Grange lay through Talgarth village, south of the lake and half a mile away from it at the nearest approach. The northerly route, on the opposite side of the lake, ran practically by the waterside, and from it a good view of the new boathouse would be obtained. Wendover was evidently delighted with his new toy, since he was prepared to go a mile or two out of his way in order to show it off to his guest.

  The Chief Constable pulled out his case and lighted a cigarette.

  “And what’s the news of the great metropolis?” he asked lazily. “Parish pump still in working order, I hope? Guides, Scouts, Cubs, and Rangers meet as usual? Church Organ Fund struggling grimly towards solvency? Flower Show well over and Bazaars looming menacingly on the horizon? How nice and restful it all sounds! You’re a lucky man, Squire.”

  “My gardener got two Firsts and a Second at the Flower Show,” Wendover retorted almost seriously.

  He liked the old nickname “Squire” which Sir Clinton used. It fitted him aptly enough, he knew, and the old-fashioned ring of it appealed to him. Though by no means behind the times, he had a faint, half-regretful liking for things which reminded him of older days; and, quite unconsciously, his manners suggested a leisurely courtesy dating from an earlier epoch.

  “Good man, that gardener of yours,” Sir Clinton said approvingly. “If you don’t mind, I want to ask him about one or two things of mine. My fellow’s quite good, but your head man knows just what’s what.”

  He shifted slightly in his seat to bring his shoulders to just the right inclination for comfort.

  “I’m going to enjoy myself, Squire. I feel it in my bones. Now that I’ve cut free from my office, I begin to believe that a holiday was what I really did need. Think of going out in the dew in the morning and fishing strenuously for hours. Think of coming home, radiant with triumph, carrying a couple of superior-sized minnows by a bit of grass strung through their gills, just to show that there’s been no waste of time. And all the pleasant tales, of an evening, about the big ’uns that just got away.”

  Wendover smiled at the picture. Sir Clinton’s picture hardly did justice to his skill with a rod.

  “And meanwhile, I suppose, crime will be having it all its own way while you go about with a pickle bottle, netting tittlebats?”

  “My first rise!” Sir Clinton said with a smile. “I thought I could tempt you, Squire. We had a pair of white gloves at the Assizes this time, and of course I wanted to boast about it. Serious crime in the County is down to nil. Just as well you J. P.’s are unpaid; we’ve left you nothing to do.”

  “H’m!” said Wendover chaffingly. “There’s a serious crime wave blowing up over this part of the country, but my colleagues and I are nipping it in the bud, free of charge. Yesterday I fined a poor devil five bob for aggravated chimney-on-fire; and he had to pay costs as well.”

  “The iron hand, eh? Well, a J. P. who can nip a wave in the bud ought to be capable of anything; so I suppose we can sleep quietly in our beds. Let’s change the subject before you smother yourself in compliments. I had a rather rum fellow passenger in my compartment coming down.”

  “That French priest, you mean?” Wendover interrupted.

  “That French priest, as you say,” Sir Clinton went on indolently. “I fell into talk with him on the way; thought perhaps he might feel in need of assistance. Not a bit of it. He’d never been in this country before; but he talks English with very few slips, wherever he picked it up. A clever cove; very alert, I found him, when I could get him to talk. But if I were choosing a confessor, I don’t know that he’d be quite the man for my money.”

  “What makes you say that?” Wendover demanded, with more interest in his tone than Sir Clinton had expected.

  “He struck me as being rather likely to be on the hard side,” the Chief Constable answered. “I couldn’t quite imagine him taking a lax view of things. In fact, I got the impression that if we turned the clock back a few hundred years he’d make an excellent inquisitor. The kind of man one feels would go any length to stamp out sin, and think himself justified in doing it. A sort of cold fanatic.”

  “Oh, indeed?” said Wendover, with little enthusiasm in his tone.

  Sir Clinton glanced at his host’s face.

  “I gathered that he’s like myself at present—on a sort of holiday and spending it hereabouts, attached to some local family or other—that young couple you spoke to on the platform, evidently. Who are they? I didn’t know you had any Catholic magnates round about this district.”

  “You know Silver Grove, don’t you, Clinton?”

  “The house a mile or so away from yours, at the other end of the lake? Their ground marches with yours on the west side, doesn’t it? Yes?”

  Sir Clinton recognised that now he was “for it”, and entirely through his own doing. It was Wendover’s pride that he took a keen interest in his own countryside; he liked to know who was who, not from any desire for mere gossip, but simply because, as he put it, “a man ought to take some decent interest in his neighbours.” He had, neatly docketed in his memory, a vast amount of information of this sort; and when he was questioned about any one, he drew rather lavishly on his stores, so that the putter of an idle question was apt to be swamped by a flood of information which he had never desired to elicit. Sir Clinton, knowing the symptoms of old, resigned himself to his fate.

  “That’s the place,” Wendover confirmed. “Well, Silver Grove has been in the Keith-Westerton family for generations. They’re among the oldest families in the district. But the place has been shut up for ages. Young Keith-Westerton had a long minority. His mother died when he was born; and his father died too, when the boy was a mere child—1906 or 1907, if I’m not mistaken. Round about then, at any rate. So the estate was put into the hands of an agent—a good man—and the boy himself was brought up by a couple of maiden aunts.”

  “Why didn’t they live here, seeing that the estate belonged to them?” Sir Clinton inquired.

  “Oh, they lived up in the North somewhere. They had a small place of their own and there was no point in leaving it. The boy didn’t miss anything on that account; and one could hardly expect them to dig themselves up by the roots just for the sake of living down here in somebody else’s house, could one? I knew them only slightly, but I can remember them vividly; for they impressed themselves, somehow, just by their total lack of any desire to impress one. Dear old ladies, you know, but about half a century behind the times, even on their first birthdays, and without the slightest inclination to catch up after that. Silver hair and bonnets, and white hands, and soft, diffident voices. When I knew them, they dressed always in black and white. I expect in their young days they may have worn white and black in summer time; but I couldn’t imagine them varying from these two schemes even when they were in their twenties. I know they wore bonnets to their dying day, and I’ve often wondered how they managed to get that brand of headgear as time went on—had them specially made, I suppose. Survivals, that’s what they were; and yet, you know, rather nice survivals.”

  “They must have had character, evidently, if they stuck to bonnets as late as that. It sounds hardly credible.”

  “Fact, all the same,” Wendover assured him. “Well, as you can guess, two old ladies of that type didn’t know much about the world; but that didn’t prevent them having very clear views about it. They thought it was a dreadful place, full of all sorts of temptations and so forth. They doted on the boy, you understand; and naturally, with these notio
ns of theirs, they wanted to shield him from contamination as long as they possibly could. They bathed the cub in that atmosphere of theirs: quiet manners, soft voices, subdued tones; and it must have sunk in to some extent just because they themselves were such nice old things in their faded way. Their worst expression of disapproval, I remember, took the form of saying that something or other ‘wasn’t quite nice’; and even that was uttered in a faintly apologetic tone, as though things of that sort shouldn’t really be mentioned at all. You can guess how many things never were mentioned at all. Nothing ever rippled that backwater.”

  “He must have found it a change when he went to school,” Sir Clinton suggested.

  “School! He never went to school,” Wendover continued. “These two old ladies had a perfect dread of the influence a Public School might have on the boy. I expect they’d read ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ and got their ideas out of that. Public Schools were sinks of vice; though I’m sure, if you’d asked them, you’d have found they hadn’t the foggiest idea of what they meant by vice. Flashman, I take it, was their idea of vice incarnate.

  “No! No Public School for Colin! Instead of that, they engaged a private tutor for the boy. I saw him once—just the sort of tutor one would expect two old ladies to pick out—a rather namby-pamby cove on the whole, quite in agreement with all the old ladies’ ideas. The only thing I liked about him was that he taught the cub to box fairly decently. I suspect he must have done that on the quiet; for I’m quite certain the two aunts would have said, gently but definitely, that it ‘wasn’t quite nice’ if they’d got wind of it.”

  “His young friends must have found him unsophisticated.”

  “He hadn’t any young friends. The old ladies didn’t encourage great, rough, noisy boys to come about the premises. One never knew what sort of corrupting influence might be among them. He and this tutor fellow were great friends, and he didn’t miss youngsters much.”

  “The Army training must have waked him up, surely.”

  “He was only eighteen when the War ended—never was in even a cadet battalion. The old ladies lasted through the War and for a year or two longer. They must have been about eighty by that time. They were only ‘Aunts’ by courtesy, really; I think great-aunts would be nearer the truth. Anyhow, they lived just long enough to see Colin come of age; and then, I suppose, they said ‘Nunc dimittis’ or an equivalent, for they died shortly after that, within a week or two of each other. Colin came into their money as well as Silver Grove. I forget exactly how much it amounted to; but I remember when I saw the wills in the Times I thought he’d got more to play with than might be good for a boy brought up on that plan.”

  Sir Clinton, knowing that Wendover himself was a rich man, could guess that young Keith-Westerton must have inherited a very considerable sum.

  “And when he got out of leading strings . . . ?” he asked.

  “Well, you remember what the post-war boom was like, when everybody seemed to have plenty of cash to spend and thought there was more coming in after the first lot was done. And you remember, I expect, what a godsend the general social mix-up was for the class that you’re supposed to keep an eye on. Every goose laying golden eggs and getting robbed of ’em double-quick, by fair means or foul. That was the time when people began to get a bit of their own back, after the repressions of the War. And young Keith-Westerton had been repressed, too, and for longer than the four years of the War.”

  “So the old ladies’ training hadn’t really got home?”

  “Well, for a youngster to plunge straight into that kind of world, with his pockets stuffed with cash and no one to look after him . . . I don’t think any training would have done much good unless the cub had it in him to profit by it. And it seems young Keith-Westerton’s training hadn’t become second nature by any means. Once he got his claws on the dollars and tasted pleasure, he fairly went the pace. So I gathered, at any rate. He’d no friends of his own age to tell him he was making an ass of himself when he went too far; and of course it’s a waste of breath for older people to step in. He got in with some pretty queer fish, I’m told, and they skinned him efficiently, as long as he gave them the chance.”

  “I seem to have heard this sort of tale before,” Sir Clinton protested. “He wasn’t saved by the love of a pure woman, or anything of that sort, was he? I’ll believe it, if you insist; but I’d really rather not make the effort.”

  “Calm yourself,” said Wendover. “I won’t strain your credulity to that extent; for, as a matter of fact, I don’t know what waked him up in the end. Something did, apparently, and pretty sharply too, I’m inclined to think. Probably something happened to open his eyes, and he saw what a fool he’d been making of himself. Anyhow, he seems to have chucked over his gang of parasites, male and female as the Lord created them, and he settled down to a less rackety life.”

  “Sudden attack of common sense, perhaps.”

  “Short and sharp, then, I should judge,” Wendover qualified. “For I shouldn’t give young Keith-Westerton a prize in a brain competition. He’s just an impulsive young fool, to my mind, though he may be well-meaning enough. I hope so, at any rate. There’ll be more than himself in the soup next time, if he gets into trouble.”

  Sir Clinton, watching the faint cloud on his host’s face, had little difficulty in seeing his drift. Wendover, though a confirmed bachelor, had a soft side where a pretty girl was concerned; and it was evident that he was now thinking of the bride whom he had welcomed at the station. Young Keith-Westerton might get into a hole without Wendover troubling himself much; but trouble for Keith-Westerton nowadays meant trouble for his wife as well, and at even the prospect of that, Wendover’s sympathy was excited.

  “You mean his wife? The tall, dark, girl with a good figure—carries herself well. A sort of exotic touch about her somewhere. Is she a Creole, by any chance?”

  “No. A Creole’s a half-breed, isn’t it? Or is it? It’s a word I can never remember the exact meaning of somehow. I had a notion it meant a half-breed.”

  “A Creole, Squire, is a descendant of settlers in places like the West Indies—or Mauritius, I believe. Creoles may be either white Creoles or t’other kind,” Sir Clinton explained, with the air of quoting from a dictionary.

  “Well, she’s a West Indian, so you hit the mark; but she’s pure white. There’s Spanish blood in the family, I gather. Young Keith-Westerton bubbled over with her genealogy once to me—a long chain of descent from señors, grandees, hidalgos, and magnificos—and a most impressive array it sounded. He was evidently anxious to let me hear all about it—at that stage, you know, when a youngster thinks his girl must be as interesting to every one else as she is to himself. I don’t want to give you the notion that he’s snobbish and set up with marrying into an old family. After all, the Keith-Westertons are as old as a good many of the Spanish families.”

  “And the Wendovers are a bit better than any damned foreigners, eh, Squire?” insinuated Sir Clinton slyly.

  “Of course,” Wendover retorted with equanimity.

  “Seen any of the grandees? I saw you’d met the girl before.”

  “I’ve only seen ’em in the distance. Three months or so ago, I ran across young Keith-Westerton in the village, quite by accident, one day, along with the girl. They were engaged, it seems, and he’d brought the whole damn family down in tow with him—father, mother, sister, and the girl herself. They were staying at the Talgarth Arms to inspect Silver Grove and the ancestral acres. It seems they’re going to settle down here now; and reopen Silver Grove, after all these years. I think that’s a sound scheme, you know; I like to see a man look after his own property instead of leaving it all to an agent: after all, one’s tenants have some claim on one, I think.”

  Sir Clinton nodded his agreement. Wendover’s ideas might verge on the feudal in some respects, but he believed in looking to the good of the people on his estate.

  “Silver Grove will take a bit of modernising, I should think, if it hasn�
��t been used for a quarter of a century.”

  “A fairly big job,” Wendover agreed. “Of course, they can’t live in it while the alterations are being made, so they’re going to settle down for a while at the Dower House at my end of their grounds.”

  “With my amiable friend the Abbé Goron to keep them company? Where does he fit into the picture? Were the old Keith-Westertons Royalists and Jacobites and Papists?”

  “No. Covenanters on one side and Cromwell’s men in the English branch of the family. It’s this girl that young Keith-Westerton’s married; she’s a Papist. I might have guessed as much from the list of dons, hidalgos and alguazils in her pedigree.”

  “Alguazil, I take it, is ironical; or perhaps a compliment to my profession? From your worried look, I gather that you’d rather young Keith-Westerton had stuck to his own sect when he went out seeking for a wife?”

  Wendover evidently felt strongly on the matter.

  “Well, I never liked these mixed marriages; that’s a fact. And if I were a Catholic, I’d feel just the same about it, I’m sure. It may work all right with the right people; and I hope these two will run well in double harness. But all the same, on principle I’m against anything of the sort. I’m not going to try to justify my ideas on grounds of reason, any more than I’d try to justify my dislike for anchovy sauce. I know I don’t like it, and that’s all that there is to it.”

  “H’m!” said Sir Clinton thoughtfully. “If there’s any trouble over that question, I don’t know that I’d care to be in your young friend’s shoes. I’ve seen one or two of that type of girl before; and although they’re quite all right, still . . .”

  “Still what?” snapped Wendover, who hated implications.

  “Still . . . My impression is that if you scratched young Mrs. Keith-Westerton, you might find her pretty unforgiving once you got below the surface.”

  “Then don’t scratch her,” Wendover retorted crossly. “I sha’n’t.”

  Sir Clinton, knowing the readiness with which his friend would spring to the defence of a pretty girl, thought it prudent to change the subject.