“Easy enough to reload it,” remarked Sir Henry.
“But of course we don’t know yet,” said Superintendent Finister, “that the weapon that killed Mr. Molyneux was a revolver. We’ll know more about that after the autopsy.”
Chapter Six
PRIVATE AFFAIRS
Jeanie lay awake long in her raftered bedroom at Yew Tree Cottage that night, and woke at last from an exhausted sleep to find the pale November sunlight streaming through the window opposite her bed, outlining, as a nimbus a saint, the small angular figure of old Mrs. Barchard, holding a broom as a saint his symbol.
“I knocked and knocked, Miss,” said Mrs. Barchard reproachfully.
“I was asleep. What’s the time?”
“Going on for ten.”
“Good Heavens!”
“When I didn’t get no answer to my knocking, you see, Miss, I judged it best to enter.”
“And I haven’t died in my sleep or anything after all,” said Jeanie, and with the words came back to the dreadful realities of yesterday. Mrs. Barchard gave an embarrassed snigger and then very suddenly became grave. She had in her time swept, scrubbed and drunk tea in nearly all the houses round Handleston, a little dark woman with the sallow skin of impaired digestion and the bright prominent eyes of volubility.
“Dreadful thing happened at Cleedons, Miss,” she now brought forth lugubriously.
“Yes, indeed.”
“Poor Mr. Molyneux. Poor Mrs. Molyneux, I should say, because it’s the ones that’s left behind feels it most. Poor Mr. Molyneux, he’s gone to his rest. But them that’s left behind don’t get no rest.”
Jeanie took up the cup of strong tea Mrs. Barchard had placed beside her.
“Fancy, to fall out of a tree like that. I had an uncle died in a stroke. Me uncle on me mother’s side, he was.”
Jeanie let her run on. The village would know soon enough that Robert Molyneux had been murdered, without her information. She could not face the avid rapturous glee with which, she foresaw, Mrs. Barchard would receive enlightenment. She held her tongue, savouring on it the dark chill brew.
“To be took like that! Like being struck by lightning.” A queer, half-shocked, half-amused expression came over Mrs. Barchard’s thin lively face. She jabbed absently with her broom at the skirting board. “There’s some people says it was a kind of lightning. They says it was old Grim.”
“Who?”
“It’s silly talk, really, Miss, of course. Only Mr. Molyneux he had planned to open old Grim’s Grave to look for treasure. So they say. They say he was going to get a gentleman down from London to open it.”
It was plain from the way Mrs. Barchard’s voice sank that she herself was somewhat awed.
“Well, we don’t know, do we, Miss? I wouldn’t open old Grim’s Grave, not for a million thousand pounds’ worth of treasure, and plenty of people in Handleston thinks the same. Well, I mean, Miss, opening anybody’s grave isn’t very nice. And when it’s one of these old kings, I mean to say, one doesn’t know what misfortunes might happen.”
“Oh, Mrs. Barchard, lots of these burial-mounds have been opened, you know!”
“Yes, and lots of misfortunes has happened,” replied Mrs. Barchard pertinently. “Not that I believes in it meself, exactly... Still, we don’t know, do we?”
“Yes,” said Jeanie with youthful dogmatism. “I think we do know that no harm comes of knowledge. It’s ignorant superstitions that do harm.”
Mrs. Barchard was instantly on the defensive. Her sallow cheeks grew pink. She said in a voice that held an indignant quiver:
“It isn’t only ignorant people thinks so, Miss! Mr. Fone was dead against it. He’d’ve done anything to stop it!”
Jeanie smiled and stretched.
“Oh, well, Mr. Fone’s a poet.”
“He’s the best, cleverest gentleman that ever lived!” cried Mrs. Barchard vehemently. “And the kindest, too! He wouldn’t squeeze a poor man to pay him back money he’d lent, when he’d got more than he knew what to do with! He wouldn’t go poking his nose in a man’s private affairs!”
Mrs. Barchard stopped abruptly, trembling a little.
Jeanie looked thoughtfully at the little indignant woman, remembering gossip she had heard about Hugh Barchard and his ill-starred chicken farm and ill-starred love adventure.
“Do you mean,” she asked directly, “that Mr. Molyneux did do these things?”
The little woman was plainly disconcerted at this directness. A half-ashamed, half-sullen look came over her expressive face.
“I’m not saying so. Only, it wasn’t my Hugh’s fault that he couldn’t make chicken-farming pay when he came back from Canada. He always paid the interest regular on what was lent him. And as for a man’s private affairs, what business are they of other folk?”
It was obvious from Mrs. Barchard’s unhappy rancorous tone that her son’s sinful living had caused her a good deal of suffering. She had the gossip’s fear of gossip.
“Was Mr. Molyneux pressing your son to repay a loan?”
Mrs. Barchard looked uneasy.
“I’m not saying so,” she muttered. “I didn’t say he did. I only said Mr. Fone didn’t.”
“But it was Mr. Molyneux who lent your son money to start his chicken-farm, wasn’t it?”
“I’m not saying so.”
Mrs. Barchard was evidently not saying anything at all about Robert Molyneux, now that Robert Molyneux had joined old Grim among the awful, unknown, propitiated shades.
“Still,” she added resentfully, “it wasn’t my Hugh’s fault the bottom dropped out of chicken-farming, was it? And when everything went wrong at once like that—chickens doing no good, I mean, and that Val treating him so bad and then to be hard on the poor lad about a loan he’d never asked for—”
She glanced defensively at Jeanie, and Jeanie saw that she wanted to defend her boy against the imagined gossips who might already, with their calumnies, have assailed Jeanie’s virtuous ears.
“Val?” murmured Jeanie encouragingly.
“That Valentine Frazer that treated him so bad Coming here and spending his money and making all sorts of nasty talk about the place with her silly painted face and red gloves and then to go and break his heart like that!”
“Oh dear!”
“Yes, I told him the sort she was! Often. But he wouldn’t listen to me! Oh no! Red gloves, indeed!”
“Oh dear!”
“One thing I do thank Heaven for!” said Mrs. Barchard. “One thing on my knees I thank God for! He never married her.”
“Oh dear.”
“No. So when she went off with her painter he was well shut of her. He didn’t think so, of course. Two years ago last July it was. He come to my house early in the morning, white as a sheet, poor lad. Val’s gone! he says. What? I said. Val’s gone, he said, she’s sick of me, he said, and she’s gone up to London to be an artist’s model, he said. An artist’s model! I said. That’s what you call it, is it? I told you what she was! I said. Oh, Mother, it isn’t what you think! he says, poor boy, believing the best of her even then, or pretending to. But everybody in the village knew what she was, Miss. A bad lot, that’s what she was. Her and her artist! An actress she’d been and you could see it all over her!”
“An artist?”
“Yes, staying down here at the ‘White Lion’ he was that summer. A chap with a beard, more like a nanny-goat than a human being.”
“Not Hubert Southey!”
“Some such name.”
“Well, I’m blowed!”
Jeanie reflected how little one knew of the characters and strange private lives of those from whom one learns painting in art schools. Who would have suspected Hubert Southey, that dry and circumspect man, of an entanglement with an ex-actress in red gloves?
“Painted her picture, he did, sitting among the buttercups. And then off he goes, and off she goes. Buttercups!” said Mrs. Barchard, in a tone of extraordinary satire. “And she said her fath
er was a clergyman.”
Jeanie smiled.
“Why not? Well, I must get up, Mrs. Barchard.”
Startlingly assuming a falsetto drawl as she prepared to leave the room, Mrs. Barchard remarked languidly:
“When mai fawther werz rector of Hunsley!”
Jeanie started.
“Rector of where?”
“Hunsley, or some such place, Miss. She was always on about it. Couldn’t have gone on more about it if her father’d been a duke. Showed what a guilty conscience she’d got!”
“Not Hunsley in Yorkshire?”
“Yes, it was. On the beeyootiful moors.”
“But how extraordinary!”
Agnes’s father had been Rector of Hunsley, in Yorkshire, on the beautiful moors. Jeanie wondered if the two so very different daughters of two Hunsley rectors had ever become aware of the link between them—the only link, Jeanie imagined, from what she knew of Agnes and had heard of Miss Valentine Frazer!
It was nearly noon when she arrived at Cleedons, and Tamsin Wills met her on the stairs. Agnes, it seemed, was in her bath. She would soon be up and dressed. Meanwhile, if Jeanie cared to come to the Tower room where Miss Wills was arranging some flowers, Miss Wills would do her poor best to entertain her.
Jeanie, who found Miss Wills’s ponderous pawkiness almost more embarrassing than her sulks, agreed with what, she knew, was over-effusiveness.
“Where’s Sarah?”
“Reading in the school-room. Oddly enough, Sarah’s lessons don’t seem the most important thing in the world just at the moment!”
Jeanie tried hard not to feel abashed, and followed Sarah’s governess up the newel staircase into the octagonal gun-room which, with the two rooms and the cellar below, was all that remained of the Norman tower. The high raftered ceiling, the stone walls with their gunracks and cupboards were formidable and chill. But the big sixteenth-century mullioned window which filled three sides of the octagon, and the cushioned window-seat below it, had a reassuring, kindly, civilised effect, saying that Black Ellen had been dust for centuries, and that those days were no more than a memory when men built strong towers and hid themselves therein, and that the guns in this armoury were used only for shooting coneys and wild birds. Standing by that peaceable, beautiful window, her knee on the soft cushion, Jeanie looked out. Looking down the lawn she could see, across the two low hedges, the orchard, and Molyneux’s ladder still leaning against the tree. She could imagine she saw Molyneux himself lying in the grass, complaining that the broad peaceful windows lied! She turned, and met Tamsin’s eyes fixed on her in a cold stare above the vases on the table.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you—Don’t you think it was my duty, Miss Halliday?”
“What?”
“Why, to tell the superintendent that one can see the orchard from this window. And that I saw Mr. Fone sitting on that window-seat yesterday afternoon. Seeing that he went home so unexpectedly, I mean, and wasn’t here to answer questions himself.”
Miss Wills took up a chrysanthemum and slowly, as though she were cutting a living thing and rather enjoyed it, cut its stalk before sticking it in a tall vase.
“It was your duty, I suppose,” said Jeanie slowly, “to tell the superintendent everything.”
“Everything? Oh! I didn’t know that! I’m afraid I didn’t tell him quite everything.”
Was this irony? Jeanie glanced at her companion, but could read nothing from the light that glittered on those large horn-rimmed lenses.
“I mean, I didn’t tell the superintendent about the letter Mr. Molyneux had the day before yesterday from Mr. Fone. Perhaps I ought to have done. Do you think so, Miss Halliday?”
“No, I don’t think so,” replied Jeanie guardedly. “Only if he asks you. The police’ll go through letters and things for themselves, won’t they?”
“They won’t find this one. Mr. Molyneux was so much annoyed he threw it in the fire. I wonder whether I ought to mention it. You see, I’ve been acting as Mr. Molyneux’s secretary since Mr. Johnson went.”
“Then I expect the police will ask you if you had any threatening letters.”
“Well, you would call it a threatening letter—wouldn’t you?—when a person says the wrath of the old gods will fall on your presumption and their heavy feet will crush your flimsy scientific superstitions. Or wouldn’t you?”
“Did Mr. Fone really say that?”
“Yes, and a lot more. He’s quite crazy in some ways. Especially on the subject of opening the tumulus. A more extraordinary letter I never read.”
“Oh well, he’s a poet, so I suppose he’s allowed these peculiar feelings about tombs and things,” said Jeanie placably. “I rather like him.”
“There’s certainly no accounting for tastes,” said Miss Wills acidly, cutting viciously at a flower stalk.
“He’s a clever man in his way, surely.”
“Great wits to madness sure are near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide,” said Miss Wills grimly.
“Oh well, as long as they have bounds, and are divided! Besides, Mr. Fone isn’t the only person in this place with feelings about opening the tumulus. Mrs. Barchard’s hair was standing on end at the idea, too.”
“Oh, village people!” said Tamsin, with a disfiguring sneer.
“Anyway, I suppose the tumulus isn’t likely to be opened now?”
“Not unless the Field Club find the money for it, which isn’t at all likely. It was going to be an expensive business, you know. Agnes certainly won’t want to spend anything on it, with death duties and everything. She doesn’t care for that sort of thing, anyway.”
“The opening hadn’t actually been arranged, then?”
“No. The Office of Works had just given permission for it to be done.”
“The Office of Works! I thought the tumulus was on Cleedons land!”
Miss Wills sneered again.
“It is, but it’s scheduled as an ancient monument. In these glorious days a man can’t do as he likes with his own land—did you think he could? Oh, the dear old villagers will have their way, and old Grim will sleep in peace. Perhaps it was Grim who was responsible for Mr. Molyneux’s death!”
“Well, I’ve heard that theory uttered only this morning.”
“After all, one has to dislike a man a good deal to shoot him,” went on Tamsin languidly, stuffing another flower into the vase. “And as far as I know, nobody had any cause to dislike Mr. Molyneux. Except old Grim. Oh, and of course old Grim’s arch-priest, Mr. Fone.” “He was popular, then, was he?”
“Oh, very!” answered Tamsin, with an emphasis somehow more damaging than a denial. “Everybody liked him. High and low, rich and poor. Everybody.”
Somewhat to her own consternation, Jeanie found herself responding abruptly:
“Except you.”
Miss Wills seemed quite unperturbed. Her dark eyes gleamed behind gleaming spectacles. She gave a little shrug and a falsetto laugh.
“Oh well!” she said deprecatingly, and yet another mutilated chrysanthemum was crammed into a vase already overfull. “You see, I’m very fond of Agnes.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” asked Jeanie somewhat distastefully. It was quite hard work being amiable to Tamsin Wills.
“Well, really, only that Mr. Molyneux, like most irresistible men, hadn’t much resistance himself! Of course, it must be very nice to be irresistible at fifty-two, and have quite young people falling in love with one. Naturally, one would take it as a sort of joke, I dare say. But not such a joke for one’s wife, after all.”
“Oh surely!” uttered Jeanie, “Mr. Molyneux wasn’t— didn’t—he wasn’t that sort of man at all!”
She flushed hotly at the unexpectedness of this attack on poor Molyneux, whom she had liked.
Lifting the jammed bunch of flowers and giving them a good shake as if they were naughty children, Miss Wills said primly:
“Oh, don’t you think so? But perhaps you didn’t know him
so very well! I did. Poor Marjorie!”
“Marjorie?”
“Marjorie Dasent, you know. She’ll miss her riding. I don’t suppose Agnes’ll keep many horses going.”
“I suppose not. Miss Dasent’s a great rider, isn’t she?” said Jeanie, glad to turn the subject, as she thought.
“Oh, very horsy indeed! Rides to hounds, you know, and comes in all gleeful and girlish, talking at the top of her voice. Oh yes, I’m afraid our Diana of the Chase will miss the Cleedons mounts a good deal.”
Tamsin buried her nose in the chrysanthemums, and glanced sideways over them at Jeanie.
“But even more she’ll miss her guide, philosopher and friend! Though I believe he was doing his best to resign from all three posts! These police inquiries are horrible, aren’t they, Miss Halliday? They make one feel so treacherous. Yet what can one do? Do you think one’s justified, ever, in keeping anything back?”
Jeanie hesitated.
“I suppose not.”
She was about to qualify this, but Tamsin did not give her time.
“I’m so glad! I hoped you’d say that! I had to decide very quickly, you see. Superintendent Finister was here early this morning, asking questions about—well, about Mr. Molyneux’s habits and so on, and I had to decide all in a moment, and I thought, yes, it’s my duty to tell everything I know. I’m so glad you think I did rightly.”
Jeanie was not at all sure that she did think so. She did not like the complacent tone of Tamsin’s voice. It was pretty obvious that somebody had received a nasty stab in the back and that Jeanie was being manoeuvred into condoning it.
“You mean,” said Jeanie slowly, unable to endure Miss Wills’s circumlocutory method of telling what was evidently going to be an unpleasing story, “that the police have been inquiring into Mr. Molyneux’s friendship with Miss Dasent?”
“Isn’t it horrible for poor Agnes? Only, when the superintendent asked me directly whether I’d ever seen or heard anything, well, what could I do? I felt an absolute traitor. But I’m so glad you think I did right! I don’t feel quite so awful now.”
Let Him Lie Page 5