by Annie Haynes
“Oh, what a pity it is!” Mavis said as she drew up a chair. “Sit down, Nurse Gidden; you must be tired if you walked up.”
“Yes, it is a goodish way by the road—thank you!” Charlotte said as she accepted the courtesy. “Not but what I remember pretty well what was in the letter,” she resumed after a pause. “She said that nobody knew who the young lady was that she was nursing, but that she herself had seen her in different circumstances, and she felt it was her duty to tell Lady Laura at once, as she thought Lady Laura ought to know who she had in the house. I can’t remember that she said anything more definite”—wrinkling up her brows—“but I know the impression left on my mind was that she thought Lady Laura would soon get rid of the young lady when she did know. The other thing I can recall is that she had only come to the Manor temporarily, that she said she didn’t like leaving her mother just then, and if it had been anybody but Mr. Garth Davenant who asked her to she didn’t think she should have gone.”
“Oh, yes,” Mavis said quickly. “I can understand that! Her mother nursed Mr. Garth Davenant and his brother, and they have always been very kind to the Marstons.”
“So I have heard. That part of the letter does not puzzle me, Miss Hargreave,” remarked Charlotte composedly. “It shows though that Mr. Garth Davenant had a pretty strong influence over her—that is what I notice; but my opinion, looking at the case all round, is that that young lady she was nursing knew she was recognized, and, having her own motives for stopping at the Manor, contrived to get Miss Marston out of the way somehow, so that she should not tell Lady Laura who she was. That is where I fancy you can help me, Miss Hargreave.”
Mavis shook her head.
“You are quite on the wrong tack, Nurse Gidden—I can vouch for that. Hilda was lying in a semi-conscious state all the time the nurse was in the room. I don’t think she had any idea that Nurse Marston had recognized her, and that she had nothing to do with her subsequent disappearance I am absolutely certain, because I went into her room when the nurse came out to see my mother, and remained there until her absence caused uneasiness and they came to make inquiries. It is out of the question that Hilda could have had anything to do with it.”
“Not herself, certainly; she could have got some one to do it for her perhaps,” suggested the other.
“Impossible! Nobody had been in the room all day but ourselves and my maid. After the nurse came she sat by the bed all the time. Hilda had no opportunity of plotting anything of the kind, even if she were inclined, which I do not believe for one moment. Nurse Marston’s disappearance and the rumours connecting her with it have been a real trouble to her.”
“Um!” Nurse Gidden, evidently a lady of free and easy manners, unfastened her coat and leaned back in her chair. “Well, what you say does seem to put this young lady out of count,” she observed; “but I don’t know what to make of it. Can’t you help me at all, Miss Hargreave?”
“I wish I could,” Mavis said, with a heartfelt sigh. “I was just saying when you came in that the atmosphere of the Manor is dreadful just now. Suspicion seems to be in the very air.”
“It is bad for you—anyone can see that,” Charlotte agreed sympathetically. “Well, as it is no use thinking any more of the lady, I must trust to the gentleman and look after Mr. Garth Davenant a little more closely than I fancy he has been looked after yet.”
Mavis started, her eyes flashed.
“I do not—”
Garth interrupted her.
“One moment,” he said, coming forward. “I think before you go on, Nurse Gidden, I ought to tell you that I am Garth Davenant.”
Charlotte did not seem in the faintest degree discomposed; her clear grey eyes met his frankly with just a touch of amusement in their glance.
“I guessed as much from the first,” she said equably, “and I am glad to tell you to your face, Mr. Davenant, how things look to me. I say to myself, times and again, that only some very strong motive could have taken Mary out of this house that night. How she could reconcile it to her duty to her patient to go at all I cannot imagine, but some one must have had a pretty strong influence over her—the motive must have been urgent to induce her to do so. Now from her letter, as well as from her mother, I know that she would do a good deal for Mr. Garth Davenant, and I am told that only the week before she came here she was engaged on some private business with Mr. Garth Davenant in Exeter. It seems to me that it is possible that that same business might require more attention later on, and that Mary might have been persuaded to go away to look after it, and kept away. That is the only other theory that I have been able to evolve.”
Garth had taken up his favourite position with his elbow against the mantelpiece, one hand shading his eyes, the other playing absently with his watch-chain. Was it Mavis’s fancy, she wondered, or did his face pale as Nurse Gidden spoke?
There was a long pause. At last Davenant raised his head and straightened himself.
“Would it be any use my giving my word of honour that I have not heard one word of Nurse Marston since she left this house, that my business—the subject of which I was talking to her in Exeter—is entirely at an end, and had absolutely no connection with her disappearance—could have had none?” he added vehemently.
Charlotte looked at him doubtfully.
“Well, I am glad to hear you say so, though I can’t say that I mean to place implicit reliance on what anyone else tells me,” she remarked frankly. “I intend to thrash matters out for myself. But—well, I don’t mind saying that I am glad I have seen you and spoken to you, Mr. Davenant.” She rose. “I wanted to ask Miss Hargreave if her ladyship would allow me to see Mary’s room, the one she was to have slept in.”
“Oh, certainly! I am sure she would not have the slightest objection,” Mavis said with a distinct touch of hauteur in her tone. She moved towards the bell, then, with her hand on it, paused. “I think I had better go with you myself. The servants seem afraid of opening the doors of those two rooms. In fact I hear that my maid will not go past them alone. I dare say you have heard that they say her ghost is seen? It has troubled us all very much lately.”
“Yes, I have heard that,” remarked Charlotte. “A pack of moonshine! As I say, if they have seen Mary at all they have seen her alive, not dead. But I expect they have fancied it. Her mother has dreams and thinks a lot of them, but, bless you, Miss Hargreave, I don’t put any faith in such things! However, I mean to find Mary!”
“I hope you will,” Mavis said as she led the way up the front stairs, the visitor’s keen eyes glancing round her as they went along and taking mental notes of all she saw. “But I am quite certain when the truth is known it will be found that neither Mr. Garth nor Hilda has anything to do with it.”
“Well, all persons have a right to their own opinions,” Miss Gidden said calmly. “When we do know I dare say it will not much matter what any of us have thought.”
Mavis made no further comment as they walked down the corridor. She opened the door of the larger room first.
“This is where the patient was—she was there some time after Nurse Marston went, but we had her moved out as soon as we possibly could.”
“Nothing could be found here, then, I expect,” was the comment of Miss Gidden as she looked round.
“This,” Mavis said as they came out and she unlocked the next door, “is Nurse Marston’s own room. All her things are still just as she left them. Her cloak and bonnet are just where every one who has been here believes she put them herself.”
Charlotte went up and laid her hand on them.
“Poor thing! Poor Mary! I wonder where she is now?” she said. Then a shudder shook her from head to foot and her face turned white.
Mavis sprang forward.
“Oh, what is it?”
The older woman’s eyes slowly filled with tears, and as the girl touched her she looked strangely pale and shaken.
“I—I do not know, but I feel afraid,” she confessed, looking round in a fur
tive, terrified fashion. “I am not in the least a nervous person usually, Miss Hargreave. I came here believing that all would come right in time, and that we should have Mary back, but when I touched her clothes the oddest feeling came over me—a sort of dread of something unutterably evil, and with it a sure foreboding that I shall never see Mary again. Some terrible fate has overtaken her. I—I feel as though for one moment I had stood in an atmosphere of awful wickedness,” with an irrepressible shudder.
Mavis looked bewildered and half frightened as she drew the other away gently.
“You are overwrought, over-excited, that must be it. I have been in the room ever so many times and touched her things often, and I never had the feelings you describe. But”—closing the door behind them—“I am sure you ought not to stay longer to-day. You can come again another time, you know. You will be only too welcome to any help we can give you. We should be delighted to have the mystery cleared up.”
Some of the colour was coming back to Charlotte’s face.
“I am ashamed of myself for having such fancies,” she said energetically, “and for giving way to them and talking about them to you. It was as clear a case of nerves as I ever saw. I can’t understand it, but I suppose the fact of the matter is that I have been overworked lately.”
“That was it, I expect,” Mavis agreed, glancing at her companion a little curiously as she came down the stairs. With her usually florid colour returning and her brisk, decided walk she scarcely looked a likely subject for a nervous attack, Mavis thought.
“Can you tell me which door she went out by?” Charlotte resumed abruptly.
Mavis shook her head.
“That is one of the points we have never been able to make out; but you shall hear. Jenkins!” she called out to the old butler, who was crossing the hall. “Nurse Gidden wants to ask you a question.”
Charlotte stepped forward.
“I should like to know how Nurse Marston went out of the house—I mean, by what door.”
The old man raised his hands.
“I wish I could tell you. All I know is that at sunset by her ladyship’s orders, ever since last autumn, I have locked all the doors except the front one, and kept the keys myself, and fastened the windows. They were all closed that night as usual.”
Charlotte looked amazed.
“But how did she go—”
Jenkins shook his head.
“I don’t know how. It’s one of the things I have never been able to fathom. Seeing that the young woman did not put on her outdoor things it didn’t look as if she meant to go away, and I have sometimes been tempted to think—saving your presence, Miss Mavis—as she never did go out of the house.”
“What do you mean? ‘‘Charlotte stared at him.
Jenkins passed his hand over his white hair.
“Sometimes when I’m by myself, I think as she is still in the Manor. There’s queer holes and hiding-places in these old buildings, and who knows but she may have tumbled into something that we none of us know of? There, I mustn’t talk to you young ladies like this—and Mr. Garth is coming out.”
“Will you come in and rest a while?” Mavis said, turning towards the morning-room.
Charlotte drew back.
“I think I will be getting into the fresh air to think things over, if you please, Miss Hargreave,” she said. “This is as about as queer a tangle as I ever heard of.”
When Mavis had said good-bye, as Nurse Gidden was crossing the hall Garth Davenant stepped forward.
“I wish you success,” he said pleasantly. “Rest assured that anything that I could do to elucidate matters should be done at once.”
The woman did not take the proffered hand. Her sharp eyes met his coolly.
“Thank you, Mr. Garth Davenant, but as matters stand now I would rather not! It may be that some day I may know the truth and be ready to apologize to you, but it is best to be straightforward, I think, always, and I don’t feel to-day as if I could bring myself to it. That is a fact!”
Chapter Thirteen
“YOU MUST be patient, Arthur, really. It is for your sake that I must refuse to give way.”
“My sake!” Arthur laughed shortly as he leaned his head on the arm of her low chair. “Dear, I want all the world to know how happy, how blessed I am!”
His eyes were fixed adoringly upon the girl’s brilliant face.
“You would find that the world by no means shared your opinion of your state,” Hilda said with a coquettish laugh as her hand wandered softly over his close-cropped light hair.
They were sitting in the inner drawing-room; Hilda, who was being made to feel that she was no longer high in Lady Laura’s favour, had retired there after dinner, and thither, when the men came up, Arthur had followed her.
It had been somewhat of the nature of a family dinner-party to-night—the Davenants, Dorothy with her friends, the Leighs, the clergyman and his wife, and old Dr. Grieve comprised the list; for, as Lady Laura fretfully observed, it was impossible to ask many people to the house while there was this uncertainty about Hilda’s position—“so awkward to introduce a girl without a name.”
That the difficulty would have to be met and faced, supposing the matter were not cleared up before, at the coming of age festivities Lady Laura fully recognized, but she was willing to delay matters as long as possible. All her hopes of persuading Arthur to give Hilda up had proved futile, and the poor lady was at her wits’ end. None the happier was she when her husband’s brother, who was Sir Arthur’s guardian, hastily summoned on the scene to remonstrate with him, bluntly told her that the whole affair was entirely her own fault in keeping the girl at the house, and she could only bemoan her own short-sightedness and Arthur’s folly.
To get rid of her unwelcome visitor was an impossibility now; the girl had nowhere else to go, and Sir Arthur would be in a very short time master of his own house, and would not hear of his fiancée’s departure. So poor Lady Laura had to make the best of it, and confine her lamentations over the state of affairs for the most part to her daughter’s ears.
To-night as she talked to her guests her attention was evidently wandering, and her eyes turned constantly to the curtained doorway, through which she could catch just a glimpse of Hilda’s white frock.
That the situation was sufficiently obvious she was well aware, and she felt uncomfortably conscious that her guests could scarcely fail to see how matters stood. Meanwhile Dorothy, whom she had looked upon as her future daughter-in-law, was apparently perfectly contented with things as they were. An acuter observer than Lady Laura might have noticed that though the girl’s soft gaiety was in no way dimmed, while her laughter was as frequent and as infectious as of yore, there was an extinguished look about her eyes, a pathetic drooping of her lips when in repose that told their own story.
Meanwhile in the smaller drawing-room the lovers were enjoying an uninterrupted period of bliss.
Sir Arthur caught the white hand straying over his head.
“How long is this state of things to go on, Hilda?”
“Well, I think it ought to stop now,” the girl said as she laughed, wilfully misunderstanding him. “I am sure Lady Laura will think we are lost.”
Sir Arthur raised himself on the low stool upon which he had taken up his position at Hilda’s feet.
“You know I did not mean that. I mean how long will it be before you allow me to tell everybody—before you will become—my wife?”
The last two words had all the softness of a caress, yet Hilda shrank back as from an unexpected blow.
“Oh, I don’t know—I can’t think about it—not for a long time yet.”
Arthur’s eyes were fixed upon her face devouringly.
“Shall I tell you what I should like, dearest? To hold the coming of age and the marriage festivities together.”
“Oh, no, no!” Hilda cried. “Impossible—in a month! It is entirely out of the question, Arthur—I couldn’t.”
Arthur put his arms round
her waist and drew her nearer.
“Why not, Hilda? We can find out anything you want to know just as well afterwards. And what does it matter about your name? You shall share mine, and whatever other names you might find you possessed to me you would always be just Hilda.”
For a moment the girl seemed to yield herself to him, she bent a little towards him, he felt her warm breath upon his cheek, a strand of her soft hair touched his forehead, the intoxication of her nearness thrilled through all his senses. Then with a quick, jerky movement she freed herself from his arms, pushed him from her and rose.
“No, no, Arthur! Haven’t I told you that there is to be nothing—nothing—for the present? I will not be persuaded. Perhaps after your birthday—”
“After my birthday,” Arthur repeated. “After my birthday, Hilda—”
The girl flashed one brilliant, unfathomable glance at him as she parted the curtains.
“Ah, then we shall see!” she replied enigmatically.
And with that Arthur had to be satisfied.
As he entered the room, Mrs. Mainwaring, the rector’s wife, looked up.
“We have been talking of the Blue Diamond, Sir Arthur, the ‘Luck of the Hargreaves.’ Do you know that neither my husband nor I have ever seen it? And we hear so much about it. Miss Hargreave has just told me that she thinks if I ask you very nicely”—with a would-be fascinating smile—“that you might perhaps let us have just one peep at it.”
Sir Arthur frowned. Mrs. Mainwaring was no particular favourite, and he did not feel altogether inclined to grant her request, but before he could refuse Hilda interposed:
“Neither have I. The Blue Diamond! That sounds very attractive. You must certainly let us see it, please, Sir Arthur!”
“Oh, certainly, if you wish to,” Sir Arthur agreed at once. “We do not often show it, but in the circumstances—if you will excuse me a moment, I will go and get it myself.”
“Oh, really, Sir Arthur, I never thought of giving you so much trouble!” Mrs. Mainwaring began, but she was too late, Sir Arthur had left the room. Hilda took a seat beside her.