Nightmare Farm

by Jack Mann

  Gees looked at him, and wondered at the strength of the man. It was a fantastic, unreal situation in which he himself felt nothing, had no feeling, for the time. Yet he could realise and admire the marvellous self-control with which Perivale had ignored his own catastrophe to bring news of this. He gestured at the car.

  “If you’ll get in, sir, I’ll drive you home,” he said.

  “Yet, first,” Perivale said, “I must tell you. She did not come back, last night. Whether—what happened to her—whether Hunter knows where she went after we saw her with him—I know nothing. I want you to understand, to exonerate me, except that I might have restrained her if I had gone to her then and taken her home—”

  “It’s I who need exonerating,” Gees interrupted him. “What I have done in this village comes back on me—on Norris and his wife, and on me. Their revenge—having possessed her, they used her for it, to strike at me. A human brain added to their devilishness, governed and driven by them. Not her will—theirs. And—and May is dead. Let me drive you home. It is on my way—to her.”

  With no protest, no repetition of his forbidding Gees to see her, Perivale got into the car. He knew, probably, that Norris would let nobody see what Isabella’s maniac hands had left of May Norris.

  It was difficult to face Norris, impossible to talk to him. Gees did not even suggest a visual farewell to that which had been May: the big man spoke of her in a measured, calm way which went to show that he was numbed by the blow, as yet. After less than five minutes with him, Gees went out from the house and back to his car, Norris walking beside him. He got in, and Norris held out his hand.

  “Makes it difficult to—to keep any beliefs,” he remarked.

  “I would say—nothing can take away what has been,” Gees

  answered.

  “When I wake up to it,” Norris said slowly, “that’s going to make the future all the harder to face. You—you’ve got youth, enough of years before you for compensations, but for us—only the one hope. We shall go to her, though she will not come back to us.”

  Some trace of returning feeling sounded in the last sentence. He withdrew his hand from Gees’ hold and half-turned away. Faced toward Nightmare gateway as he sat, Gees saw a white ambulance van approach. It would take Isabella away, he knew.

  “Don’t stay for the funeral,” Norris said abruptly. “Good-bye, Mr. Green.” And he went back toward the house, at which Gees drove on.

  Past the gateway with its shadowing hedges, back to the inn, where Nicholas Churchill polished glasses behind his bar.

  “I’m leaving you to-day, Churchill,” Gees told him baldly.

  “Eh, but I’m sorry t’ hear it, sir. An’ theer’s more bad news i’ t’village, too, since thee went out.”

  “I think I know it all,” Gees said grimly.

  “About t’ squire, sir?” Churchill inquired.

  “The squire? What about him?”

  “I thowt thee couldn’ta heerd it so soon. T’ squire’s shot hisself—leastways, it was up at t’ House, him shot wi’ a double-barrelled goon. Tod was in heer, an’ said t’ policeman towd him.”

  “Ah!” Gees observed. “Both barrels, I hope.”

  “I doan’ know about that, sir,” Nicholas said dubiously. “Only Tod said t’squire was dead. Happen one barrel was enough.”

  Gees remembered the beautiful lady in the wheeled chair. Had she known enough for realisation of the cause behind her husband’s suicide?

  “There is a son, isn’t there?” he asked.

  “A gradely chap, i’ t’ Army, he is. We got nowt but roast lamb f’r thee to-day, sir. T’ missus ordered a fowl f’r to-morrow, but thee weant be heer, thee says—”

  “Nor for the roast lamb, I’m afraid,” Gees interrupted him. “I’m going to pack and start now.”

  “But thee must eat, sir,” Nicholas protested earnestly.

  Gees shook his head and turned away. For, quite suddenly, realisation of his loss had come to him, a surge of hopeless, bitter longing that rendered speech impossible. He knew he must get away from this place at once, beyond sight or sound of anything that might accentuate the agony he must face and endure.

  May was dead!

  One morning, near on the end of July, Gees shook his head at Miss Brandon as he sat at his desk, while she held out a card to him.

  “No good, Miss Brandon,” he said. “I know I ought to get busy again, but—whoever it is, tell him to go away and come again in a fortnight’s time.”

  “I don’t think it is a new case, Mr. Green,” she insisted. He took the card then, and looked at it. Then he looked at his watch, and again at her.

  “All right,” he said grimly. “Send him in.”

  She went out, very quietly. Instinct had told her, since his return from Denlandham, that she must move and speak quietly, for this Gees was a different being from the one who had gone to lay the ghosts of Nightmare Farm. There entered, as Gees stood up, a bronzed young man in flannels, and at sight of him Gees remembered again the woman in the wheeled chair at Denlandham House.

  “How d’you do, Mr. Hunter?” he said coldly. “Sit down, won’t you? I haven’t too much time, but—well, what can I do for you?”

  “I’ll be as brief as I can,” the other man promised as he took the chair beside the desk. “I got back to England in response to a cable from my mother—got back a week ago. I’m resigning my commission, of course. I got your address from Miss Perivale, the rector’s daughter at Denlandham, and understand that you—”

  “How is Perivale, do you know?” Gees interrupted. He had held no communication with the rector, but had come to understand in these weeks that had elapsed since he left the village that, if he had suffered loss, the rector had suffered far more.

  Lieutenant Hunter shook his head. “It’s little more than a year since my last leave,” he said, “but I’ve never seen a man age so much in the time. I suppose it’s not to be wondered at, with that terrible tragedy arising out of his wife’s insanity. But it was about—about my father that I came to see you.”

  “Yes?” Gees asked, very grimly. “What about him?”

  “It appears, from a copy of a letter I found among his papers, that he employed you on a rather singular business connected with Nightmare Farm, as they call it in Denlandham. I can learn nothing there, from anyone, and I want to know—was there any connection between—between his end, say, and your presence in Denlandham? Mind, I’m not trying to accuse you of anything—”

  “No, don’t,” Gees advised, interrupting.

  “I say, I’m not,” Hunter insisted, sensing hostility. “I’m merely trying to find out why he—did what he did. Whether you know of any reason for the tragedy.”

  “My business was with Nightmare Farm,” Gees answered carefully, after a pause for thought. “Undertaken, Mr. Hunter, at your father’s request. In a way, I’m glad you’ve called to-day, because I can tell you what I had no chance to tell him. I found, in a hidden room at Nightmare, the corpse of your ancestor Robert Hunter, whom you probably believe was buried normally in the family vault. I have to own to you that all there is left of Robert Hunter is now at the bottom of the mere which gives the farm its correct name.”

  “You found—you mean he wasn’t buried in the vault at all?”

  Hunter asked, puzzling over it.

  “For some reason—I have no chance of finding what it was, if you haven’t,” Gees said, “your ancestor chose to conceal his remains there, instead of being buried with the rest of the family in the churchyard.”

  Hunter thought over it for a time.

  “I don’t know that I’m particularly troubled about it,” he said at last. “I believe—if you hadn’t done that, there’d have been an inquest and all sorts of unpleasantness. Probably you did the best thing, from the family’s point of view. And my father knew nothing of this?”

  “As far as I know, nothing,” Gees assured him.

  “
Mr. Green, honestly, now, do you know why my father shot himself?”

  “Honestly, I do not,” Gees answered. For he did not know whether the man had so far cared for Isabella as to commit suicide when he heard of her murderous madness, or whether remorse over his own part in the tragedy had driven him to his end: it was all beyond learning, now.

  “I thought you might, perhaps. Since you don’t, I won’t take up any more of your time. But there was an old legend, a curse of sorts connected with the family and with Nightmare Farm—”

  “Absolutely nothing in it,” Gees interrupted to assure him. “No curse anywhere—nothing in Denlandham to make you imagine anything of the sort, now. You’re taking over there, I gather?”

  Hunter nodded. “Marrying and settling down,” he answered. “I am not sure—my fiancée has told me something of what happened while you were there. I don’t know much—I don’t know if you would consider it impertinent of me to offer my sympathy—”

  He broke off, awkwardly.

  “Your fiancée?” Gees asked, interestedly.

  “Celia—Miss Perivale,” Hunter explained.

  For a little while Gees sat thoughtful. Perivale had accepted, as Celia’s choice, the son of the man who had so much wronged him, kept hidden the tragedy Isabella and this man’s father had made of his life. What a tapestry! Tragedy and happiness, Celia coming to her earned reward as the wife of this straightforward-looking youngster, while her father...

  “You met her, of course,” Hunter observed at last.

  “Having done so, I congratulate you,” Gees said quietly, and with emphasis on the final word.

  Hunter smiled as he got on his feet. “I will tell her that,” he said.

  “And she sent you her best wishes—I told her I should call to see you. If ever you come to Denlandham again, we shall be glad to welcome you. She will, I know.”

  “Thank her for me”—Gees shook his head as he spoke—“but I shall not willingly come to Denlandham again.”

  After Hunter had gone, he sat thoughtful for awhile, and then summoned Miss Brandon by means of his buzzer.

  “Those inquiries we went through this morning, Miss Brandon,” he said. “There was one from a man named Klienert, I remember, asking for an interview.”

  “There was,” she assented.

  “Have you answered it as I told you—turned him down?”

  “The letter is waiting for you to sign, Mr. Green.”

  “Ah! Well, tear it up and write him another. Tell him—yes, Thursday morning at eleven, and remind him about the two guineas for the initial interview—no, don’t remind him, though. I’ll collect it at the interview. It’s time we got busy again—the firm’s going to seed, and we must do something to resurrect our reputation.”

  “I’m glad you feel like that,” she said.

  He smiled at her. “Fetch me Klienert’s letter,” he bade. She went quickly, happily. For he had smiled—in all the weeks since his return from Denlandham, he had not smiled until to-day.