Molloy, as he spoke the name, looked about him. Jane stood in frowning silence. Henry March was writing. Sir Julian had begun a new line of cats. The name apparently conveyed nothing to any one of the three. Molloy went on speaking in measured tones:
“The Englishman said ‘She’s well. I think she finds the country dull.’ And then the Frenchman laughed and said ‘Mademoiselle Anaïs, and your fogs, and your British Sunday, and your phlegm! Oh la, la, la—she has a temperament that one!’” Molloy hesitated, paused, looked round again. “That is all,” he said.
Jane lifted her head in surprise. Henry was finishing a sentence. Sir Julian looked up.
“And why do you think that this interesting conversation referred to those forged notes?” he inquired.
“Ah, now,” said Molloy, “that’s where you have me. When I made inquiries I found that the gentleman with the English accent was travelling for a firm of paper manufacturers with samples of sketching-blocks, and the French gentleman was a traveller in light wines—all very innocent and ordinary, and nothing for anyone to lay hold of, as you say.” He paused and then added, “It was the lady’s name that gave the show away, gentlemen—and not the first time a very promising affair has come to grief through having a woman mixed up in it.”
Piggy left his last kitten whiskerless.
“What date was this? Last year, you said. Can you give us the month and day?”
“I can. It was St. Patrick’s Day, the seventeenth of March.”
“Anaïs?” repeated Sir Julian, “Anaïs?—well, you seem to know more about the lady than I do, Molloy. Just go on being helpful, will you. Do you know her? Who is she?”
“I wouldn’t say that I know her,” said Molloy. “No, I wouldn’t say that I know her. But it came to me by a side wind a year or two ago that she was doing some very high-grade work in the forged note line.”
“Who is she?”
Molloy hesitated.
“They call her Mademoiselle Anaïs. She went to Russia before the war with a man called Karazoff—Prince Paul Karazoff—, and that’s how I heard of her first, through the Russian Comrades. Karazoff was killed in ’16, and she came back to Paris and took up this other line. And that’s all I know, gentlemen.”
“It’s not very much,” said Sir Julian.
“It’s more than you knew before,” said Molloy easily.
“What names were the two men using?”
“The Englishman was Robinson—”
“And his firm?”
“Ah, you have me there—I never thought to ask.”
“And the other?”
“Lebrun—but they would not be their real names, of course.”
“And that’s all you know? Surely you saw the men?”
“Devil a bit. I slept like a dog; and they were off by daylight. You’ve all I know, and I hope it’ll be of use to you.” He stood up as he spoke, pushing his chair back.
Beneath the grand manner Jane perceived that he was ill at ease, impatient to be gone.
“I think he knows something more,” she said quickly. “I think he knows something more about the woman.”
“Yes,” said Sir Julian, “I thought so too. Come now, Molloy, you’ve told us little enough. You can’t afford to keep anything back. You said you didn’t know the woman. Have you ever seen her? Come now, describe her, please.”
“I’ve never laid eyes on her in me life,” said Molloy.
Sir Julian began to tear his sheet of paper into long strips.
“Perhaps,” he suggested, “you can furnish us with a description, nevertheless.”
“Some Comrade may have mentioned what the lady looked like,” Mr. Molloy resigned himself. “Well, then, I have heard said that she has red hair.”
It was Jane who put the last question. She had been watching Molloy very closely all the time.
“Is this Anaïs French?” she asked suddenly, and got a glance in return, half protesting, half admiring.
“English she was to start with,” he said reluctantly.
Sir Julian had his comment to make on that.
“English! Anaïs? That’s not a very English name, Molloy. Are you sure she was English?”
“Well, they called her Flash Annie before she went to Russia,” said Mr. Molloy.
Chapter XXX
Wednesday was a busy day for Amabel. She and Ellen lit fires in the two disused bedrooms, swept, cleaned, dusted, and by four o’clock had them in a habitable condition. Ellen throughout maintained a demeanour which indicated that she didn’t hold with “they Millers.” When it came to making Miss Miller’s bed she burst suddenly into speech.
“I should ha’ thought that Mr. Miller, being away all day yesterday and to-day, would ha’ wanted his sister ’ome in the evening,” she said. “Coming back to a empty ’ouse isn’t what most men likes, nor wouldn’t put up with neither—and, take it or leave it, that there Miller’s a man like the rest of ’em.”
“Mr. Miller, Ellen!” said Amabel gently, but firmly. “And you haven’t got the blanket straight on your side. I wish you’d look at what you’re doing and leave my friends alone.”
Ellen jerked the blanket fiercely.
“Friends!” she muttered. “Save us and preserve us—friends!” Then, finding that Amabel took no notice, she broke with great suddenness into excited speech. “It’s the crawlingness of it that I ’ates—I can’t abide creepingness and crawlingness. And all I says is this, if we’d been meant to crawl, worms we should ’ave been made to start with—worms, or snakes, or such like.”
“Ellen, do be quiet,” said Amabel wearily. “We shall have to make this bed again. You’ve got all the blanket now. Here, strip it back and start fresh.”
“’E comes into Eliza Moorshed’s front shop yesterday morning,” said Ellen, her voice a little louder than usual, “and ’e bought a tuppenny-’a’penny stamp and a time-table, ‘I wanted to make sure they ’adn’t altered the nine-thirty for Maxton. I’ll catch it comfortable,’ ’e says, and off ’e goes. And that very evening we was all a-’aving of our teas—lovely jam Eliza Moorshed makes, if she is my cousin—when who should come in but that young, fair-’aired Orchard that drives the carrier’s cart to Ledlington and is nephew to Eliza’s ’usband’s sister-in-law. Well, ’e comes in, and sits down and ’as ’is tea, and ’e says, ‘I done nothing but run into Forsham people in Ledlington to-day.’”
“Well, why shouldn’t he?—Ellen, that sheet is not straight.”
Ellen gave it a perfunctory pat.
“It wasn’t ’e that shouldn’t,” she said darkly. “It’s them that says they’re catching trains to Maxton, and then turns up on the steps of the Queen’s Hotel in Ledlington as bold as brazen serpents.”
“Now, Ellen!”
“Tom Orchard seen ’im with ’is own eyes. ‘I shall catch the train to Maxton nicely,’ says ’e in Eliza Moorshed’s front shop at a quarter past nine; and at ’alf-past twelve Tom Orchard seen ’im coming out of the Queen’s Hotel in Ledlington, which is a good fifty mile away from where ’e said ’e was a-going. Oh, yes, and for all ’is brazenness ’e didn’t want to be seen neither, for when Mr. Bronson drove up in ’is Rolls-Royce car—which ’e ’appened to do at that very individual minute,—that there Miller pops back into the hotel just as quick as a weazle—Tom Orchard seen ’im.”
“Well, it’s really not our business,” said Amabel. “The counterpane is on that chair behind you.”
Ellen spread out the counterpane with an air of gloom. As she smoothed it over the pillow, she said,
“Tom Orchard seen Mrs. King in Ledlington too, with ’er ’ands just as full of parcels as they could ’old—wonderful where some folk gets the money from, and she without a penny piece if all’s true that’s said about ’er.”
“It never is,” said Amabel. “I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”
Ellen tossed her head and sniffed.
“Anyhow she don’t pay ’er lawful bills at Eliza Moor
shed’s,” she announced.
As she spoke, the first rumble of thunder sounded outside. Amabel looked out of the window.
“There’s a storm coming up. You’d better hurry, Ellen. We’ve just got through in time.”
Ellen cast one glance at the sky, and hurried in good earnest.
Julian Forsham was very silent at tea. His mind recurred again and again to that moment in the wood when the lightning flash had seemed to show him the face of Annie Brown. The impression, so startlingly vivid at the time, was, in retrospect, a stark impossibility. Brownie’s story of the thunderstorm, his own recollection of Annie clinging to him in terror, and the repetition of the scene that afternoon with another hysterical woman—these were the elements out of which the sudden flash of recognition had been evolved. It seemed inconceivable that in any circumstances Miss Lemoine, the black-haired Frenchwoman, should have suggested to his mind Annie Brown with her red hair, village breeding, and speech very much what Jenny’s was now. He had found Mademoiselle Lemoine a cultivated person with a taste for art and literature, and a degree of social tact unusual in her position, obviously a woman of the world, travelled and cultivated. His mind could hardly have played him an odder trick. He replied absently to Miss Miller’s painstaking conversation, and relapsed again into frowning silence.
Amabel did not attempt to talk. She was glad enough to sit still and rest.
They had nearly finished tea when Anita King was ushered in.
“Mr. Bronson’s going to pick me up,” she announced. “I meant to get here ages ago; but I had to shelter from that horrible storm. And where do you think I sheltered?”—She addressed herself to Miss Miller—“You’ll never guess, I’m sure. But when I saw that inky cloud I just rushed for your bungalow. And your brother was ever so nice to me.”
“I’m glad you were able to get in,” said Anne Miller.
Nita King dropped into a chair, unfastening her furs and throwing them back.
“I should have died if I’d had to stay out in a storm,” she declared. “I’m just simply terrified of storms. I’m afraid your brother found me a great nuisance, for I just sat and shuddered. And when those dreadful, dreadful claps of thunder came, I simply had to scream a little—I couldn’t help it.”
Julian brought her some tea. As he gave her the cup she looked up at him, and once again he was struck by her likeness to Jenny—the rather sharp features, the close set hazel eyes, the lips too thin for beauty. It was, he told himself, a likeness of type. There were hundreds of these rather foxy looking women up and down the country. It was a type he detested, though in Anita King it had every art to flatter it; the dark furs and plain black hat made a becoming background for dead white skin and flaming hair.
“Mr. Miller was so kind,” said Nita King, sipping her tea. Of course, your not being there and all, I felt a little awkward—one can’t be too careful in a village, can one? But he was so kind, and absolutely insisted on walking up here with me, though he wouldn’t come in.”
“Oh, he likes a walk,” said Anne Miller composedly. “When do you get back to your lodge, Mrs. King?”
“To-morrow,” said Nita—“no, no more tea, thank you—It’s been so very, very kind of Mr. Bronson to have me while the roof was being mended. But there is something about one’s own tiny, wee scrap of a place, isn’t there? And then, quite between ourselves, of course I’m ever so grateful to Mr. Bronson—and he’s a great, great friend of mine. But”—she spread out her hands and looked appealingly at Julian—“you know how it is when people aren’t quite, quite absolutely one’s own sort—they don’t always understand that one’s just being friendly, do they?” She continued to talk; and if her hearers were not left with the impression that nothing except her own delicate sense of breeding stood between Anita King and the worldly goods with which Mr. Bronson could her endow, all very properly and to the tune of Mendelssohn’s wedding march,—well, it wasn’t Mrs. King’s fault.
Mr. Bronson fetched her in due course, and the rest of the evening passed without event.
When Amabel took Miss Miller to her new room and bade her good-night, that lady remarked that it was a very nice room, and of course it was a pity to let two of the best rooms in the house go to rack and ruin for want of being lived in, but, for her part, she had been very comfortable the night before, and Amabel needn’t have troubled to move her. “Cats are just as liable to come and fight under this window as any other,” she concluded with a laugh.
Amabel went back into the sitting-room for a word with Julian, and found him standing on the hearth, obviously deep in thought.
When she had shut the door, he said,
“You heard what Mrs. King said—Miller walked up here with her and wouldn’t come in? It’s my belief that he simply wanted an excuse for prowling round the house again.”
“I don’t care how much he prowls when you’re here,” said Amabel. “Really, Julian, you’re as bad as Ellen. She’s got the unfortunate man on the brain, I do believe. All the time we were making beds this afternoon she kept telling me an interminable story about how Mr. Miller bought a time-table yesterday at Mrs. Moorshed’s, and said he was going to Maxton, and then—prepare for a sensation!—he was actually seen coming out of the Queen’s Hotel at Ledlington at half-past twelve that morning. It’s almost impossible to believe in such depravity, isn’t it? And, worse still, when he saw Mr. Bronson, he fled. What it is to have a guilty conscience!”
“What was Bronson doing in Ledlington?”
“I daresay Ellen knows—I don’t. According to her he was in his Rolls-Royce car.”
“Was anyone else in Ledlington?” asked Julian laughing.
“Only Mrs. King, who had been shopping, which Ellen seemed to consider very immoral.” She changed her tone suddenly, and asked, “Julian, are you really going to sleep in that room?”
“I’m going to spend the night there—I don’t know about sleeping. Why?”
“Because I wish you wouldn’t. I wish you’d go back to your old room and sleep there. No, Julian, don’t laugh—I really, really mean it.”
Julian stopped laughing.
“What was all right for you is too risky for me? Is that it?” he asked.
“No, of course not. But last night—Julian, there was something rather horrible about last night. I’ve never really been frightened through and through before.” Her colour changed as she spoke, her eyes widened.
Julian took an impulsive step forward. That look of appeal called to him as nothing had ever called to him before.
“Amabel,” he said, “Amabel, darling!” His voice was low and shaken. He put both hands on her shoulders and went on, his words hurrying, his breath coming fast, “Amy, I can’t bear it when you look like that. You know very well how it is with me, and I believe you care. Cut the whole thing and come away. Let’s get married and—”
“Julian—Julian,” said Amabel faintly. Her eyes closed, and he could feel her tremble. The next instant his arms were close about her, and they kissed—a long kiss sweet with memory and hope.
The old house was silent. Outside the rain fell softly, softly on to wet grass, wet paths, wet trees. Within, warmth and firelight, and the sense of home. To each there came that same sense of home-coming. Long years—long, lonely years; disappointment; heartache; the weary round of unshared days; and then, at the end, this home-coming.
Neither spoke for a long, long while. The perfect moment was enough.
Chapter XXXI
It was late when Amabel went to her room. After those long moments of silence there had been so much to talk about. They had sat over the fire and talked till midnight.
Julian was urgent that she should leave the house next day, go to the Berkeleys, marry him within the week.
“And then we’ll really go to Italy.”
“No, it’s too soon,” she said, “I must write to Daphne first, and—it’s no use your looking like that, Julian—I really do feel under an obligation to George, quite a
part from the two hundred pounds.”
“My dear angel,” said Julian, “are you proposing a six months’ engagement, or do you suggest that we should spend our honeymoon ghost hunting?”
Amabel coloured and laughed.
“No, I didn’t mean that. But I can’t just clear out and leave all the stories ten times worse than they were before. Yes, you can pay the two hundred pounds if you want to. I’m not really as proud and stiff-necked as you think I am; and I’ll let you do that if you’re set on it.”
“George can give it to us for a wedding present,” said Julian cheerfully.
Amabel’s dimple showed.
“George must have altered very much if he gives wedding presents on that scale now.”
“Five pounds’ worth of electro-plate is more in George’s line,” said Julian with an answering twinkle. “Anyhow, hang the two hundred pounds! Look here, when will you marry me? I was going up to town to see Piggy to-morrow—Julian Le Mesurier, you know, my cousin, the C.I.D. chap—, and I think I’d better go; only, why don’t you come too?—and we’ll go and buy an engagement ring and a licence all in one fell bust.”
“Julian, you schoolboy! No, I can’t come up to-morrow. You see, there’s Miss Miller.”
“Hang the woman! Why can’t you leave her? Considering she invited herself, I should think you could go up to town for the day and leave her easily enough.”
“No, I won’t really. I’ll write to Daphne and to Agatha, and—and I think I want a quiet day, Julian, just to sort my mind.”
“And you’ll marry me when?”
“I’ll tell you that to-morrow when you come home.”
When Amabel had gone to her room, Julian effectually blocked the narrow passage that led to it by the simple process of piling two large chairs one upon the other. Miss Miller and Amabel were now cut off from the rest of the house, and Julian reflected with pleasure that anyone walking about the house in the dark would probably bark his shins before he realized that the chairs were there—Mr. Ferdinand Miller, for instance,—or Miss Anne Miller.
The Dower House Mystery Page 18