by Annie Haynes
For Mavis was ghastly pale and shivering apparently with fright.
“Don’t you see that she must have dropped it after she left our house that night?” she said in a low, awestruck tone. “Don’t you remember that the note she wrote to my mother to say she wanted to see her was written on a page torn from this very book? Look!” she turned rapidly to the end and held it out to him. “There—that is the place she tore it from! Oh, Garth, don’t you see?”
“I see!” Garth took it from her and looked at it carefully as he turned it about. “Well, at all events this proves that she came through the Home Coppice on her way from the Manor, and so it is valuable to us as the first clue that we have been able to find since she left her patient’s room. But then we knew she must have gone somewhere, so I am not sure that it tells us much. Still, I think as we go through the village we had better call at the police station and show them this and explain exactly how we found it.”
Mavis clasped his arm tightly and looked round her with wide open, terrified eyes.
“Surely you do not imagine that I shall go on after seeing this, Garth? Nothing would induce me to go any farther through this dreadful wood.”
“My dear child, this is really—” Garth was beginning when the steps that Mavis had heard before sounded nearer on a parallel path to them, and then as the two walks merged into one Tom Greyson came into sight. He was looking particularly gloomy and disconsolate as he strode along with his dog at his heels, but as he touched his hat he glanced in some surprise at the girl’s agitated face.
She put out her hand and stopped him.
“Don’t go on, Tom; you must stay and help us now. I am so frightened”—a little sob catching her throat.
“Frightened, Miss Hargreave?” Greyson repeated in a puzzled tone.
Garth passed his arm round her trembling form.
“Come, come, Mavis; you must not give way like this; there is nothing really to alarm you! It is only that we, or rather the dogs, have found something that belonged to Nurse Marston, and it has upset Miss Hargreave. It is a notebook, and must have been dropped after she left the Manor.”
A gleam of interest lighted up Greyson’s moody face.
“She did come this way then, sir? I have always said she must ha’ done; but she would come right out close to her mother’s cottage. It puzzles me why she did not go in and speak to the old woman, just to set her mind at rest, as it were. She is getting worn to a shadow is Mrs. Marston with all the worry of it.”
“I cannot understand it at all,” Garth said thoughtfully.
“She came into this wood,” Mavis said, shuddering from head to foot with a vague intangible horror. “It may have been to see her mother, or anything, I don’t know what, but perhaps she never came out. Oh, don’t you see what I mean, Garth? She may have been taken ill here and lain down among the trees and died, or she may have met a tramp and been murdered, and—and—be lying here still!”
She uttered the last words in a low, terrified tone beneath her breath.
The eyes of the two men met in one long significant glance as she paused; then Garth said with a resolutely cheerful air:
“My dear Mavis, we have not the least reason for supposing that Nurse Marston is dead. She is probably alive and well and will give us her own reasons for this mysterious absence when she returns. Come, you are tired and over-wrought; I will take you back to the Manor. Greyson, I think it might be as well to let the police know of this discovery, if you are going that way.”
“I will tell them, sir,” the man said as he touched his hat.
“First you must look to see that she is not lying here,” Mavis said with an effort, putting up her hands and clutching nervously at her throat as she spoke. “The—the dogs were moving about among the moss and leaves over there. Behind, farther in the wood, there is a hollow. I shall not go away—I could not—until I know. Garth, you must look—you must!”
“No, no, sir! You stay with Miss Hargreave, sir,” Tom Greyson interposed quickly. “I’ll go and look. Don’t you frighten yourself, miss. Why, we are all over this coppice of nights now that the pheasants are nesting! If there had been anything of that sort here we should ha’ been bound to find it before now. Under that oak you said the dogs were, didn’t you, miss?”
He sprang off. Garth drew Mavis to a fallen tree-trunk near and made her sit down.
“Why, Mavis, I didn’t think you were so nervous!”
“I think somehow a horror of the whole affair came over me—not quite at the first, but very soon after—with regard to Nurse Marston’s disappearance,” she said slowly. “It was all so strange when you think of it—that cry Dorothy heard; and Jenkins was so certain she could not have got out of the house.”
“Ah, well! It is perfectly obvious now that the old man was wrong there,” Garth said, with as much cheerfulness as he could assume, for in truth her nervousness was beginning to infect him. “As for the shriek Dorothy heard—well, I have never been able to connect that with Nurse Marston. If she had been taken ill in the house, or any evil had happened to her there, she must have been found before now. Probably Dorothy fancied it, or perhaps one of the maidservants had a fit of hysterics. Well, Greyson, what is the result of your search?”
“She isn’t there, sir,” the man said. “I made sure she wasn’t. We know our woods a bit too well for that to happen, as I told Miss Hargreave.”
But it struck Garth, that, in spite of his apparent confidence, the man’s ruddy face was some degrees paler than it had been a few minutes before.
“Well, now you are satisfied, I hope,” he said, turning to Mavis, whose colour was beginning to return. “Come, it is no use our staying here any longer. Greyson, you might look round the wood farther in just to satisfy Miss Hargreave—or stay, what are you going to do now?”
“Going to have my dinner, sir. I live right by the side of the coppice, but that don’t matter if there is anything you would like me to do first.”
“No, no! Have your dinner, and then come up to the Manor. I shall be there and we can ask Sir Arthur what he thinks is best to be done now.”
“Very good, sir!” Greyson touched his hat again as they turned away.
As Davenant held the gate into the park open for Mavis she looked up at him wistfully.
“Garth, I want to ask you to do something for me.”
“What is it, Mavis? You know anything I can do—”
“Garth, will you tell me what you were doing with Nurse Marston in Exeter the day before she came to us?”
Davenant did not look pleased.
“Talking to her,” he answered shortly.
“You were walking up the street. Superintendent Stokes said he saw you.”
“And I declined to give him any further explanation.” Davenant’s tone was curt.
“Yes, to tell him,” Mavis went on softly. “But I did not think you would have secrets from me, Garth.”
He stopped and took both her hands in his and looked down at her gravely, compelling her to meet his gaze.
“Nor will I of my own, Mavis. This belongs to some one else, but it has absolutely no connexion with Nurse Marston’s disappearance. That I can vouch for. For the rest, aren’t you going to trust me?”
The tenderness of the tone disarmed the girl’s rising resentment, and her naturally sweet temper reasserted itself.
“I will trust you, Garth, even though all the rest of the world should doubt you,” she said softly.
Davenant’s glance and the close clasp of his hand were eloquent of his gratitude.
Inside the hall the rest of the party, assembled apparently to see the progress of Arthur’s painting, were surprised to see their speedy return, and their explanation was listened to with much astonished comment, in the midst of which Garth had time to note the ghastly pallor of Hilda’s face.
Before the story, with the surprise it evoked, was finished, one of the footmen came into the hall.
“Greyson would be
glad if you would speak to him for a few moments, Sir Arthur.”
Arthur looked across at Davenant, and the two men went together to the plainly-furnished room known as the magistrates’ room—a relic of Sir Noel’s days on the bench—in which Sir Arthur generally transacted his business and gave interviews to his tenants and employees.
“Well, Greyson, you haven’t taken long over your dinner,” Garth began as they entered.
“I did not think any more of that, sir. As soon as you and Miss Hargreave were out of sight I made across the paddock the near way and came up here. For though I wouldn’t say anything before Miss Hargreave, seeing how frightened she was, when I was looking about, though it is true I didn’t see anything of Nurse Marston, I found this.”
Both men looked at him in surprise as he drew something out of his pocket, and held it to them.
It was apparently a small piece of some whitish material. Garth bent forward.
“What is it, Greyson? I don’t see—”
“It is a cuff, sir—one of those wide ones that nurses wear,” Greyson replied. “See, here is the name on it—‘M. Marston’—plain enough.”
Chapter Nine
LADY DAVENANT pulled the check-string of her carriage.
“I will get out here. Come back in half an hour, Robert.”
“Yes, my lady.” The footman touched his hat when he had helped her out, sprang to his seat, and the carriage bowled swiftly away.
Lady Davenant turned to Mrs. Marston’s cottage; it looked bright and homelike in the sunlight, with its gay little flower-beds bordering the flagged path on either side, and the climbing plants covering the porch and hanging down in festoons of greenery.
Through the open doorway one had a glimpse of the kitchen, with its red-brick floor scrubbed as spotless as hands could make it, and the round deal table standing in the middle of the room. It looked a pleasant, peaceful scene, and Mrs. Marston in her snowy cap with the white kerchief folded round her shoulders and her knitting in her hand, looked in keeping with all the rest. But as she heard the click of the gate and looked up, and the onlooker caught a glimpse of the unutterable woe in her dim old eyes, of the quivering dread visible in the tense lines of her mouth, the meaning of everything was changed, and something was revealed of the tragedy that underlay that apparently peaceful life.
Lady Davenant came swiftly up the garden-path.
“How are you this afternoon, Mrs. Marston?”
Mrs. Marston’s lips quivered as she got up and made her old-fashioned curtsy.
“Much about the same, thank you, my lady! I don’t look to feel any better until I know what has become of my girl.”
Lady Davenant’s eyes filled with tears as she took the wrinkled hand in hers.
“Ah, this suspense is so bad for you! You have heard no news yet?”
“No, my lady, nor ever shall till I hear how she died,” Mrs. Marston answered slowly. “They come to me,” she added, a touch of passion in her trembling tones—“Sir Arthur, Mr. Garth, Superintendent Stokes, and all of them. ‘You have patience,’ they say, ‘and she will come back to you safe and sound. No doubt she has her own reasons for staying away.’ My lady, I know my girl wouldn’t have left me to fret and worry myself into my grave without knowing what had become of her, not if she was alive. She was always one to think so much of her old mother, was Mary, although she had got on in the world. Mr. Garth will have told you what they found in the Home Coppice, him and Miss Mavis, my lady?”
“Yes, he told me, and I don’t know what to make of it all,” Lady Davenant acknowledged frankly, with a troubled look in her mild eyes. “Mr. Garth does not either; and I hear the police are quite at a loss. What could she have been doing there in the dark late at night?”
Mrs. Marston wiped her eyes.
“She must ha’ been ’ticed down there somehow, to the Home Coppice, my lady, by some villain, though it is not for me to say how, and then murdered—my own poor Mary! That cuff was blood-stained, you know, my lady.”
“Yes, I know!” Lady Davenant said hurriedly. “But that does not prove that anything dreadful happened to her, Mrs. Marston. She might have cut her hand. And”—lowering her voice—“you know they have searched the wood thoroughly, and there was nothing there.”
“I know they found nothing, my lady,” Mrs. Marston said significantly, “but—but”—beginning to tremble—“I don’t say she is there. I don’t know where she is, my poor child; and sometimes I think I never shall know.”
Lady Davenant’s own eyes were wet as she gently put the old woman back in her chair and took one of the wide seats in the little porch beside her.
“I am sorry for you,” she said brokenly, pressing the old woman’s hand between both of hers. “You are in my thoughts continually. It is such a dreadful trouble for you.”
“Ah, my lady, it is indeed! I ought to remember as I am not the only one, I know. We all have our troubles and your ladyship has had her share of them too, but—”
“Ah, I have indeed,” Lady Davenant said with a sigh, “and I can sympathize so fully with you in all this! It is so terrible not to know where one’s loved ones are. And my poor boy—”
“Ay! I have often said it has been a sore trial for your ladyship, and Mr. Garth too. Never was brothers fonder of one another than him and poor Mr. Walter. He has been untold good to me, has Mr. Garth, my lady. It is seldom the day passes as he does not turn in to have a word with me. Superintendent Stokes, he comes in the other day. ‘I wonder what Mr. Garth Davenant was a-talking about to your daughter in Exeter,’ he says. ‘Which if you did know,’ I made bold to answer him, my lady, ‘I’ll back you would be none the forwarder.’ Mr. Garth don’t know anything about where my girl is—I could take my oath on that.”
“I am sure he does not. The whole affair has been a great trouble to him, but I do wish he had never suggested to Dr. Grieve—though one doesn’t know how any harm could have happened to her through that,” Lady Davenant said in a puzzled tone.
There was a pause. Mrs. Marston looked absently down the path and into the village street beyond; some figures were turning the corner; she rose and put her spectacles on.
“No, it isn’t anybody but Farmer Weston and his son as went for a soldier,” she said as she sat down again. “That is the worst of it, my lady, it is the uncertainty. Night or day I can’t rest; everybody as comes up the street, I think it is perhaps some one come to bring me some news of my Mary. Every noise I hear I think maybe they have found out something. Then when I do get a wink of sleep, my lady, I have dreams.”
“Dreams!” echoed Lady Davenant, looking at her in surprise, “I don’t understand—”
“Ay, dreams!” Mrs. Marston repeated. “I don’t know as I was ever one to put much faith in that kind of thing before, my lady, but I mind when I was a child how my mother used to set great store by them—messages from the other world, she used to call them, and she was a practical woman, my lady, and a Scotchwoman too. But she used to tell of some queer things as she had learnt from dreams. Of late I have begun to think she must have been right, for these past weeks Mary has come to me every night—sometimes in the morning. I can’t remember all about it clearly, only I know she always tells me as it won’t last much longer, this separation.”
“There, you see, then surely you ought to feel more hopeful!” Lady Davenant remarked in a relieved tone.
“Ay! But it isn’t that sort of ending she means. Mary never comes to me as a living breathing woman—it is always as a disembodied spirit—one who has done with the troubles of this world and sees as it has all been for the best. Sometimes she tells me she isn’t far off. I don’t rightly know whether she means that her body is near here or that her spirit is hovering around,” the old woman finished speculatively.
Lady Davenant’s face grew obviously paler and she shivered.
“Oh, I don’t think you should take any notice of that sort of thing!” she said, trying to speak naturally. “You are th
inking of her all the time, and you are likely to dream of her.”
Mrs. Marston shook her head.
“Not such dreams as them, my lady,” she said obstinately. “It is my Mary as can’t make herself happy, knowing what I’m going through here, as is doing her best to prepare me for what is coming. I am prepared to hear as she is dead, my lady—nay, I could be thankful to know she was laid in her quiet grave. The other night I dreamt I asked her how she come not to let any of us know what was happening to her. ‘I did my best, mother,’ she made answer, ‘but they was too cunning for me altogether.’ It was her shriek as Miss Dorothy heard, my lady, as I take it. That’s what she meant by doing her best, poor thing!”
The tears were running down Lady Davenant’s cheeks now.
“Oh, you poor mother—poor thing, I am sorry for you!” she said. “I do hope things will turn out better than you think; but I wish we could do something for you in the meantime. You have some one with you in the house, my son told me.”
“Yes, my lady, my son Tom’s wife, she come first, but she couldn’t bide so long from her children, so now her sister’s come—a tidy, well-respecting woman enough. She has never known Mary, though, and seems to make up her mind as she will come back all right in a day or two. Still, I have nothing against her, and it is better than being in the house alone, for often in the night I fancy I hear my girl calling me and stepping about at her work, and it is so lonesome when you have nobody to speak to.”
“I should think so,” Lady Davenant said with a shudder as she rose. “I am glad you have some one with you though we should have taken care you were not alone. Mr. Garth asked about that the very first thing. But I must not keep the horses standing—Sir John is always so particular about that. Good-bye, and I do hope you will have better news soon! Be sure you send up to us if there is anything you want!”