by Annie Haynes
“Enough of this fooling! Tell me what you mean and why you want this money.”
Evelyn did not flinch from his grasp; she looked up and laughed mockingly.
“As for what I mean, I thought you might have guessed, my dear Lord Warchester. Ah, you have all been blind! You good people took it so quietly that I was the sister of that milk-and-water piece of perfection upstairs—”
A sudden light was breaking upon Warchester. He looked down at the woman, whose big, restless eyes were in curious contradiction with the lightness of her words; his hand dropped from her shoulder.
“Do you mean that you are not—”
“Ah, you are tumbling to it!” The hard metallic laugh rang out again; she puffed her cigarette smoke in his face insolently. “Your wits were keener in the old days, my friend. Yes, it was a pretty little scheme, but it had one weak point, and of course that ruined me. I might have known it would.”
“You are not Evelyn Davenant—you are not Joan’s sister?” Warchester squared his broad shoulders as if shaking off some invisible burden. “Good heavens, how could we think you were? And I—I who knew—why could I not see that you were an impostor?”
“Ah! Impostor! If I were you, I would refrain from abuse.” The woman pitched her cigarette into the fireplace. “This is an infernally bad brand, Warchester; you did yourself better in the old days. What was I saying? Yes, Impostor is not a nice name, but there is an uglier name still. How if I used it to—”
“You will not!” Warchester said with dangerous quietness. “You will be silent now and for ever!”
“If you pay me enough,” the woman said. “Otherwise—”
Warchester’s gaze would have cowed most women.
“How much do you want?”
“Ah, now you are coming to business!” she said approvingly. “I should like as much in gold and notes as you can spare, and a cheque for—shall we say a thousand at present?”
Warchester paused, book in hand.
“Upon my word, you are moderate!”
“All that a man hath will he give for his—” she quoted significantly.
He frowned.
“If I help you now, it is once for all—to help you to get away—for the sake of the past, you understand?” he said as he unlocked a drawer and took out his cash-box. “And also because for Joan’s sake—”
“Oh, yes, I understand! And for somebody else’s sake!” she interrupted fiercely. “Stop that, Warchester! The money, please! I have no time for sermons!”
Warchester took out a shining pile of gold; her eyes watched it greedily.
“How could you be mad enough to come here? To think that such a plot could go undetected?”
“Well, some plots do, you know,” she returned. “And I was starving when I saw the advertisement—literally starving. I wonder whether you have any idea what that means? One is not very particular what one does then when one sees a chance of getting something to eat. Ah well, it is the fortune of war! If I had known of your luck I might have come to you instead.”
Warchester visibly winced as he tore out a cheque and put a pile of gold in her hand.
“Now go,” he ordered, “while I can trust myself, or—”
“Oh, surely you wouldn’t!” she echoed with a laugh. “Would it not be a curious coincidence if—Oh, Warchester, this is a shabby cheque! I thought—”
“You will not get any more!” he assured her sternly. “I blame myself—”
“Oh, I shouldn’t do that!” she interrupted, rising and drawing her motor-veil round her hat again. “Well, well, you will hear from me later, Warchester. I shouldn’t dream of letting an old friend drop out of sight. For to-day—well, I will let this do. Oh, by the way”—pausing outside the window—“I heard in town that your cousin Basil’s operation had been a great success!”
“Yes.” Warchester’s tone seemed to change, to harden.
She paused and looked back before she glided away into the shadows. “I wonder what he will remember?” she questioned mockingly.
Chapter Nineteen
“LUNCHEON is served, my lady, and his lordship is already in the dining-room.”
“Is he?” Joan hesitated, put her hand on the door and then walked back again to the window.
Treherne was too thoroughly trained to exhibit surprise, but it was impossible to suppose that in a large household, such as the Towers, the strained relations that had existed at times between Lord and Lady Warchester had passed without comment. On the whole, the elder servants were of opinion that a few tiffs in early married life were to be expected, and that the couple, being fond of each other, were bound to come out all right in the end. Of late it had been evident too that husband and wife were once more on better terms; this morning, however, glancing at the shadows beneath Lady Warchester’s eyes, at the dimming of her colouring, having noticed that the key in the door leading into Warchester’s dressing-room was turned on the outside, Treherne drew her own conclusions.
“Tell his lordship I have a headache,” Joan said, without looking round. “And you might bring me a tray up here, Treherne.”
“Yes, my lady.”
As the maid was leaving the room Joan recalled her by a sudden exclamation.
“Oh, here is Uncle Septimus! I will go down, Treherne. I must see Mr. Lockyer.”
Septimus Lockyer was just drawing up at the front door in his motor-car. Joan ran downstairs quickly and met him in the hall.
“Oh, Uncle Septimus, I am glad to see you! It is lovely that you should have come to-day!”
“Thank you, my dear! That is the prettiest welcome I have had for many a long day,” he said as he stooped and kissed her.
Warchester came out of the dining-room with outstretched hands.
“Well, this is luck, Uncle Septimus! Bring him in, Joan. You are just in time for lunch.”
The K.C.’s face was grave as he followed them into the room.
“I will sit with you while you have yours. I have already lunched and have come about business—business with both of you.”
“Business—with both of us?” Joan looked at her uncle in astonishment. “What, is it about, Uncle Septimus?”
Mr. Lockyer spread out his hands.
“No, no! Lunch first and business afterwards, Joan.”
It was not a lively meal and it was with a feeling of relief that they rose when Warchester proposed an adjournment to the smoking-room.
Joan put her arm within her uncle’s.
“Come, we must get this tiresome business of yours over. I have ever so many things I want to consult you about.”
The sunshine was streaming in through the open windows of the smoking-room; outside on the lawn great clumps of Michaelmas daisies shone white and purple against the soft green.
“You don’t mind, do you, Joan?” Septimus Lockyer said as he helped himself to a cigar and stood looking out over the garden for a minute.
When he turned his face was very grave. To Warchester it was evident that he was nerving himself to speak, that he intensely disliked the task that lay before him, and for the first time a pang of something like fear of what they were about to hear darted through the younger man.
“It isn’t a pleasant story I have come here to tell you,” the lawyer began. “It isn’t altogether agreeable to state that one has been made a fool of—that we have all been taken in, perhaps I ought rather to say. Joan, my child, we have all been made the victims of a daring fraud. Your sister, Evelyn—”
“Evelyn!” Joan, who had, taken one of the large easy chairs by the mantelpiece, sprang to her feet. “Is she ill? Do you mean that she wants me?”
“No, no!” Septimus Lockyer put her back quietly in her chair. “‘She—is all right. I am going to ask you a strange question, Joan. Do you like her—Evelyn?”
“Like Evelyn?” Joan looked up at him, vaguely perplexed. “Why, she is my sister! Naturally I——But she is my sister—” faltering a little as she met his searching g
aze. “I—I would rather not discuss her, even with you, Uncle Septimus.”
The lawyer drew a deep breath.
“I think I am answered. And I cannot tell you how glad I am to get that answer, Joan, for—I told you we had all been the victims of a fraud—the woman who has taken us all in, the imposter who has been masquerading as mistress of Davenant Hall, is not your sister Evelyn at all!”
There was a minute’s tense silence. Joan stared at him with wide-open, uncomprehending eyes. Warchester was the first to speak. During the long night-watches he had been persuading himself that the pseudo-Evelyn’s confession of her impostorship was only a piece of rodomontade.
“Is this true, Uncle Septimus? This woman whom my wife his accepted as her sister is a common adventuress—she is not Evelyn Davenant at all?”
Mr. Lockyer bowed.
“I cannot tell you how I blame thyself that we did not find her out sooner. It is terrible for you, my child!” He took Joan’s hand in his. “I am sorry, and yet, do you know, I am glad. She was not a desirable sister for you—she was not a suitable mistress for Davenant. Now in a short time her reign there will be only like a bad dream, if it is not utterly forgotten.”
Joan caught her breath sharply; her hand gripped Septimus Lockyer’s brown fingers convulsively.
“I don’t understand, Uncle Septimus. What is it you are saying? It can’t be true that Evelyn—”
“The woman who has called herself your sister, Evelyn, is an impostor!” Septimus Lockyer said firmly. “Pull yourself together, Joan! We have all been taken in, but there is little harm done. She made a clean bolt of it last night with all the ready money and the valuables she could lay her hands on, but the family jewels were in the bank, and you and Paul will not feel the loss of a few hundreds,” with a glance at Warchester.
“Certainly not, if we have any say in the matter!” Warchester said quickly. “But you must be a little more explicit, Uncle Septimus. How was this woman able to carry out such an imposture? Where did she get the papers which you and Mr. Hurst gave us to understand were in proper order?”
“Stole ’em, I suppose!” the lawyer said shortly. “It seems she was a great friend of—of the real Evelyn, at one time.”
“The real Evelyn?” Joan interrupted him with a cry. “Oh, Uncle Septimus, where’s she—my sister, Evelyn? I can’t bear to think that I have been trying to give the love that should have been hers to another woman. I ought to have known—surely my own feeling ought to have warned me that she was not my sister! How shall I ask Evelyn to forgive me?” looking up with tear-filled eyes.
“Now, now!” The K.C. patted her shoulder with his disengaged hand. “You—you must not give way, Joan, you really mustn’t. As for Evelyn, be sure that if she knows what is going on down here she does not blame you.”
“Uncle Septimus!” Joan twisted herself away from him. “I—I don’t think you have told us all. You—do you know that you are speaking as if Evelyn were dead?”
Her uncle looked down at her gravely.
“I believe she is, Joan. And that is partly what brought me down here, this afternoon—to tell you how she died.”
“Excuse me, but is that necessary?” Warchester asked.
His dark face looked curiously set. His pulses were beating and tingling. So it was true after all, the woman he hated and dreaded was not Joan’s sister? That was all he could realize as yet.
“Don’t you see that Joan is overwrought—that she has heard enough for one afternoon? Later on if she wants to know the details—”
“I want to hear them now!” Joan brushed his remonstrances aside. “When did my sister die, Uncle Septimus?”
“Years ago, child—more than ten years ago. It isn’t a pleasant story, child. You shouldn’t hear it if there was a chance of keeping it from you, but in these days when everything gets into the papers—”
“Surely, there can be no question of that!” Warchester said hotly. “If evidence of Evelyn Spencer’s death on a certain date is given to the proper authorities, surely that is all that signifies. The imposture here is purely a family matter, for I am sure Joan would not wish any measures taken to punish the woman—”
“No, no! Of course not!” Joan said hurriedly. She pushed back her hair from her brow as she looked at her uncle. “I can’t see how you can be sure, Uncle Septimus. How did you find out that she was not my sister?”
Warchester held his breath. What had been the weak point in the scheme the woman had spoken of last night?
“Well, I believe that Hewlett was never satisfied in his own mind that she was the real heiress,” the lawyer answered slowly, “though for a long time he was unable to find any flaw in the evidence. I believe it was you, Joan, who gave him the clue when you showed him that last letter of the real Evelyn. It seems he recognized the writing and the paper. And you remember the half of the broken sixpence she sent you—that fitted another half. When Hewlett had ascertained that, of course, the greater part of the battle was over. But we knew that Mrs. Spencer had recognized her stepdaughter, and for a time that baffled us; then Hewlett sent his partner, Cowham, to Willersfield; and what means he took to frighten the truth out of the woman I don’t know, but she confessed that she had been bribed. It seems that Evelyn had been burnt on her wrist as a child and there was a scar left. There was no such mark on the wrist of the woman at Davenant, and it appears she paid heavily to persuade Mrs. Spencer to keep silence. Cowham said that apparently the whole family was living on the fat of the land. How the false Evelyn got wind of her deception we can’t discover. Hewlett said that Mrs. Spencer might have managed to warn her in some way, for when we went to see her last night we found that she had run away.”
He paused. There were other questions that must be asked, he knew, but he would have put off the answering of them to the last possible moment.
Warchester waited. His first sensation of relief was passing. He could not have told why, but he was oppressed by a feeling that all was not told, that the worst was yet to come, though as yet he had perceived no faintest glimmering of the truth.
Joan looked from one to the other with troubled eyes; she too felt a sense of ever-deepening mystery. She was on one side of a dark curtain, as it were, and on the other side lay something, from the relation of which she shrank with dread.
At last she broke the silence:
“Uncle Septimus, you said that Mr. Hewlett recognized Evelyn’s writing. How was that possible? He had never seen it even. His very reason for asking for that letter all along was because he wanted to see the writing.”
“He had met with it before without knowing that it was Evelyn Spencer’s,” Mr. Lockyer said gravely. He braced himself up to tell the rest of the story. After all, terrible as it was, Joan had known but little of her sister.
“He—you must be brave, Joan, now;—was at Scotland Yard before he established his private agency. While he was there he was engaged in investigating the circumstances connected with the—er—death of a young woman in Grove Street. It made a great stir at the time; but of course you were only a child—you would not remember it, Well, one of the clues the police had to work upon in that case was a letter, or part of a letter, written, it was supposed, by the girl who died there. Hewlett recognized the writing and the paper on which Evelyn’s last letter was written as the same. Moreover, the half sixpence, as I said, fitted one which was on a chain round the neck of the woman who died in Grove Street.”
“Uncle Septimus, you can’t mean—you are not trying to tell me that the woman who was murdered in Grove Street was my sister, Evelyn?”
Joan’s voice was perfectly steady, but every particle of colour had faded from her face; there was a look of horror in her dark eyes. She did not glance at her husband on the other side of the fireplace, but she was conscious through every nerve of her body, that he had made one sharp, incredulous movement, that he now sat with every muscle braced, with head averted, waiting.
“I am afraid there c
annot be any doubt of it,” Septimus Lockyer went on, thankful that at last the worst of his task was over. “It is a terrible thing, child! I cannot tell you hew grieved I am for you. It is very painful for us all.”
“It is—very painful!” Joan found herself asserting, with white, stiff lips. She felt a momentary pang of surprise that she was not more horrified, that she could sit there talking calmly to her uncle; but she was conscious only of one thing—that heap of white drapery that had lain on the rug in that upper room in Grove Street had been Evelyn, dead, the living sister for whom the little Polly had just then been longing so intensely. That golden hair had been Evelyn’s hair; that buckled shoe had been on Evelyn’s foot. And the man who had been putting the pistol in the dead girl’s hand, the man who had stolen away, trusting his crime would not be discovered, who had tried to cast the last reproach of suicide on that poor murdered girl, was Warchester, the man Joan had married—the husband she had loved with her whole heart!
Warchester got up and stepped through the open window.
Joan did not look after him; she herself rose slowly, laying one hand on the table at her side. She looked up into her uncle’s face.
“Will they hang him, Uncle Septimus?”
“Hang him—who, child?” The lawyer looked momentarily puzzled. “Oh, I see what you mean—the man who caused Evelyn’s death! Well, of course they will, if they can find him. But that must necessarily be a matter of difficulty, so long a time having elapsed since her death. Still, there is no doubt this discovery of her identity will give a fresh start to the inquiry. What is it, my man?” as a footman noiselessly entered the room and presented him with a telegram on a salver. “For me? No answer, thank you!” He waited until the man was out of ear-shot; then he held out the form to Joan. “Is it not extraordinary this should come now?”
“‘New development in case. Shall be glad to see you as soon as possible, Hewlett,’” she read. “What does it mean, Uncle Septimus?”
Mr. Lockyer walked to the corridor before he answered her.
“Can’t say, my child. It may be some clue to the murderer. But I must be off early to see what it is. You have taken this very sensibly. And you mustn’t worry yourself over the rest of the details now. I know you may rely on Hewlett to do his best to keep your name out of the papers. Now where is your husband gone? I must speak to him. Good-bye, Joan! I shall be down again in a few days, and then we will have another talk.”