The Black Cabinet

by Patricia Wentworth

  “And not for the first time,” thought Chloe to herself.

  Jennings stood aside whilst Wroughton lifted out the middle section and laid it on the floor. Then Jennings spoke:

  “Aren’t you going to lock this door? It’d be a bit awkward if she came in.”

  “I’ve left Emily on guard,” said Wroughton, taking off his coat. “Now you’d better hold the light whilst I have a shot at the old man’s notes.”

  “Think they’re any good?” Dr. Jennings’ tone was tinged with sarcasm.

  Wroughton turned on him with sudden anger:

  “What a wet blanket you are! Why shouldn’t they be good? Why shouldn’t they be the real thing? Do you suppose a man like old Dane makes a list of words of five letters and locks it away in the back of his own private drawer just for the sake of amusing himself? When I found it this afternoon I could have shouted the house down.”

  “All right, go ahead,” said Jennings. “After all, the proof of the pudding’s in the eating. Give me the lamp and the list, and you go ahead and see whether any of the words’ll move that damn lock.”

  Anger and excitement together rose in Chloe to boiling point. So they had found a list which might, or might not, contain the word that opens the safe! Supposing it did. Supposing they opened the safe before her very eyes, and began to take out the letters. Chloe made up her mind that the very moment the safe door swung open she would make a dash for the hall and rouse the house. She could scream, and she could beat the great bronze gong. It would be a bold measure but she thought Leonard Wroughton would find himself in an awkward position. After all, people can’t open safes that don’t belong to them without impunity.

  She watched Wroughton crawl painfully into the middle of the cabinet whilst Jennings directed the ray of an electric lamp so as to light up the door of the safe. Then Jennings began to read out words from a paper which he laid on the edge of the cabinet. They were all quite ordinary words “Dream,” “Table,” “Motor,” “Coals” … and so forth.

  In the pause between each word Leonard Wroughton’s fingers fumbled with the lock. At each failure Dr. Jennings’ cool voice became a little cooler, and Wroughton’s comments more heated. Half way through the list he backed out, and stood mopping a scarlet face and swearing.

  Dr. Jennings relieved him. He handled the lock with nimbler fingers than Wroughton had done, with no better result. As word followed word, Wroughton’s suppressed fury threatened his self-control more and more. His voice rose, and when the last word proved to be as complete a failure the first, he tore the paper across and stamped it under foot in an outburst of uncontrolled rage. “Well, that’s that,” said Dr. Jennings, dusting his hands as he emerged. “My good Len, what waste of energy! I told you all along that it would be a wash-out. And what I want now is drink.”

  He replaced the missing section as he spoke, and carefully picked up all the torn paper. Wroughton, ill raging, manipulated the lock of the cabinet, and they went out together, leaving the room to darkness and Chloe.

  As soon as their footsteps had died away, Chloe sprang up and stretched herself. For nearly half a hour she had not dared to move, and hardly to’ breathe. Excitement; burning indignation; a tense watching of the fingers that fumbled with the lock; and now and again a sharp, stabbing fear when they paused—these things had been her portion. At the outset her plan of rousing the house had seemed good enough; but as the half hour passed, she began to realize how plausible a front Wroughton would be able to put upon the business. The servants were practically his servants; they might even be his creatures, part of the horrible organization which Mr. Dane had controlled. As this thought rose up before her, Chloe’s courage wavered, and she felt that she was only a girl of twenty, alone in a house full horrible things.

  She had not liked Dr. Jennings, but it was shock to find him in Wroughton’s company at this hour, endeavouring to open the safe. She wondered how much he knew of its contents. To think a man rather ill-bred and familiar is one thing but to judge him to be one of a blackmailing gang is quite another. If he were really in the conspiracy, the whole affair became much more menacing. This quarantine—was it all part of the game—part of a plan to seclude her until she did what they wanted her to do? Oh, if only kind Dr. Golding had never gone away! Chloe had only seen him twice, but she had felt instinctively that he was one of those people whom one can trust and lean upon. Well, it was no good wishing for him or for anyone else. When there’s no one to help you, you must help yourself.

  She parted the curtains, and went over to the cabinet.

  “I hope to goodness he hasn’t messed up the lock with his wretched pliers,” she thought as she pushed her key home. The catch went smoothly back, and the doors opened.

  Chapter XVIII

  Chloe wasted no time. She got the safe open and began to clear the shelves, taking the piles of letters as they came. There were, besides the letters, some account books and one or two packets of what looked like ordinary business papers. There were also three long envelopes endorsed respectively, “A. J.’s receipts”, “Stran’s receipts”, “Mrs. V. H.’s receipts.” Chloe left these with the account books, and got all the letters out. There were more than she could carry upstairs at one time, and she stacked half of them behind the cushions on the sofa which stood in front of the fire-place. Then she shut he safe, leaving the receipts and the account books inside it, turned her skirt up all round, and crammed in as many of the letters as the fold would take.

  She stood for a moment by the half-open door, listening, before she ventured out into the hall. One hand held up her loaded skirt, with the other she felt before her in the dark until her fingers touched the balustrade of the stairs.

  “It’s a frightfully good thing that I’m nearly quick as a cat at finding my way in the dark,” she thought as she went on and up the stairs, moving almost as easily as if she had a light. She reached her room, turned back the eiderdown on her bed, and tipped out the letters. When she had pulled the eiderdown over them she looked about her at the fire-lit room, and wished very much that she did not have to go downstairs again for the rest of the letters. It struck her suddenly that, for all she knew, Wroughton and Jennings were still in the study. Suppose the door were to open just as she crossed the hall. Then there was Emily; Wroughton had said something about Emily being left on guard. She wondered whether, after all, she had been seen or heard when she came upstairs just now.

  “Well, the more I think about it, the less I shall like it,” said Chloe at the door. Next minute she had locked it behind her, and was moving noiselessly to the head of the stair. She had nearly reached it when she saw a light; it shone from below, from the hall. And there were footsteps, heavy footsteps like Wroughton’s. At the same moment she was aware of a faint, wan glow on her left. Some one with a candle must be coming down the passage which ran into the main corridor a few yards farther on.

  The glow, faint as it was, served to show Chloe her whereabouts. There was a door on her right leading into one of the spare rooms. Chloe had it open, and was in the room with what seemed to her to be only one movement. She close the door almost as quickly, leaving the least scrap of a chink through which to hear and, if possible to see.

  For a moment the candle-glow brightened the chink; then it was swallowed by a brighter, whiter light. She heard Wroughton stumble at top step and mutter, “She hasn’t passed?”, and Emily’s fluttered answer, “No—no, she hasn’t.” The lights, the footsteps, and the voices receded, Chloe whisked out of her hiding place and ran downstairs without giving herself time to think. The letters were just where she had left them behind the cushions on the settee. She bundled them into her skirt and began again the cautious, dark ascent. It was when she was nearly at the top of the stairs that her knees began without warning to shake beneath her.

  There was neither light, nor step, nor movement in the house; but a cold terror came upon her and shook her
from head to foot. If Wroughton should be there in the black corridor above, he might be there; and if he were, if her groping hand were to touch him unawares—

  Chloe sank upon the stair and leaned her elbow on the step above. Everything rocked about her.

  It was the sound of a closing door that roused her, a door away on the right—Wroughton’s door? Chloe sprang to her feet, took the last two steps together, and ran down the corridor until her fingers, brushing the wall, turned the corner, where she checked herself, and went softly along the side passage to her own room.

  When her door was locked and she had turned on the light, the relief was so great that she could have laughed aloud. She had done it; she had beaten Wroughton; she had got the letters! She was safe!

  Safe! Her exhilaration died slowly. She stripped back the eiderdown and piled the second batch of letters upon the first. What in all the world was she to do with them? If she tried to burn them here, she would probably rouse the house, and very likely set the chimney on fire. She couldn’t risk it. You can’t really burn much paper in an old-fashioned bedroom grate.

  No, she must get away with them—to Maxton if possible, but at all costs away from Danesborough. If only the Daimler had come back, or the Napier had not gone. That was the first time it occurred to Chloe that the absence of both cars was not just the result of carelessness—the A.C. too—three cars laid up. No cars; and the house quarantine.

  “Well, thank goodness there’s the telephone,” thought Chloe, and then gave her mind to the question of what to do with the letters meanwhile.

  She crossed the room and opened the door of a large cupboard built into the wall. It had been a powdering closet once, and one went down into it by two steps. It had hooks all round the walls now, and Chloe’s garments hung upon the hooks. Chloe did not look at them. She pulled out the small, shabby black box which she had taken to school with her as a child, and which was still her only bit of luggage when she returned Danesborough as its heiress.

  She switched on the light in the cupboard; propped up the lid of the box, and packed all the letters into it. She folded a dress or two on the top, and locked and strapped the box. To-morrow she was going to leave Danesborough; to-morrow she would be penniless Chloe Dane again, as free as air, and as light-hearted as an April day. Now she was going to bed.

  Chapter XIX

  Chloe resisted an inclination to lie in bed next morning. She must get down before Wroughton did, and telephone to Ally. She heard the big clock strike nine as she ran downstairs, and felt sure of having half an hour to herself.

  On the bottom step she paused, looking towards the drawing-room door. It was open, three parts open; and there was some one in the room, for she could hear movements. She took a few quick steps to the left, stood on the threshold, and pushed the door a little further. Leonard Wroughton was standing in front of the cabinet with a letter in his hand. As the door moved he swung round sharply, and he and Chloe faced each other. There was such rage in his look that all Chloe’s spirit rose to resent it. She held her head high, and looked thin with both anger and pride in her black eyes, for a moment, as his colour deepened dangerously, she wondered whether he would break all bounds and offer her some actual violence.

  Then something happened that frightened her: he controlled himself, with a great and obvious effort he controlled himself, took a step towards her, and held the letter out.

  “Yours?” he said. Even on the one word his voice shook.

  Chloe took the letter and looked at it. It was one of the letters which she had taken from the safe last night. She must have dropped it. Wroughton, finding it, could not fail to know that she had opened the safe. She gave him one defiant glance and said,

  “Yes, it is.” Then she turned and went along the hall into the dining-room without looking back. She did not need to look, for Wroughton made no attempt to follow.

  Emily was in the dining-room, but before so much as replying to her “Good-morning,” Chloe went over to the hearth and burned the letter which she had taken from Wroughton’s hand. Then she stood with her back to the fire and waited for him to come in. When he came in he took no notice of her.

  Chloe’s voice cut into the silence, very clear and cool:

  “Is the Daimler back yet, Mr. Wroughton?” He looked at her with open insolence.

  “I’ve no idea.”

  Chloe bit her lip fiercely. She supposed he was trying to make her lose her temper.

  “What about the A.C.? Has Bell put her right?”

  “I believe not.”

  Chloe walked out of the room and went straight to the telephone which communicated with the garage. When a man’s voice said “Hullo,” she said, “Miss Dane speaking. Is that Bell?” Bell’s

  “Yes, miss,” sounded surprised.

  “Is the Daimler back?”

  “Oh, no, miss.”

  “What about the A.C.? Can you have her ready for me this morning?”

  “Oh, no, miss.”

  A faint snigger came along the line to Chloe. It was not the man at the telephone who laughed, she thought, but some one standing farther off behind him. With her temper at boiling point she hung up the receiver and went back to the dining-room.

  While she ate a hasty breakfast she made up her mind to telephone to Daneham station for a taxi. Not another meal would she eat in Leonard Wroughton’s company. After all, what was there to stay for? She had the letters, and the sooner she got them away the better. Her spirits rose, and she went to the study telephone with a lighter heart than she had had for days. She rang the exchange, and waited impatiently for an answer.

  “They’re pretty sleepy in these country exchanges,” she thought as she rang again, and yet again. There was no reply; the line felt dead. She was jerking the hook of the receiver, when Wroughton spoke just behind her:

  “Telephone gone wrong, eh?” There was more than a suspicion of a sneer in his voice.

  Chloe flung round furiously.

  “You knew it was out of order!”

  “I guessed that it would be out of order,” said Leonard Wroughton.

  Chloe stamped her foot.

  “Will you please send a man at once on a bicycle to tell the Daneham exchange that the telephone is out of order.”

  Wroughton actually smiled.

  “It’s unfortunate, isn’t it?” he said. “Give you a cut-off sort of feeling, eh?”

  She was on the edge of angry tears, but so gathered up her dignity as well as she could.

  “I should like a man to be sent at once!” she said, and left the room.

  In the hall she turned blindly to the front door pulled it open, and ran out, banging it behind her. It was good to come out into the wind—Chloe loved the wind. She ran with it now, down the drive until she was warm and glowing. She thought she would go down into the village and telephone from the post office; she supposed they kept a telephone there. Of course she ought to have put a hat on. She wondered if the village was very particular about hats. She couldn’t go back for one now, she really couldn’t; time was too precious. As it was, it would take her half an hour to walk into the village; and she had left the letters unguarded behind her. Of course the housemaids would be in and out; that made if safer.

  At this moment she came in sight of the iron gates at the entrance to the drive. They usually stood wide open, but now they were shut. Chloe came up to them, tried them, and found that they were not only shut, but locked. She went to the door of the lodge and knocked, but got no answer. She peered in at a window, and saw an empty room stripped of furniture. The day before yesterday there had been a man here, and a woman; and two children. She looked through another curtainless window. The lodge was certainly empty.

  She did not go back along the drive, but skirted the high brick wall which enclosed the Danesborough grounds. Any idea of climbing it receded; there was a door i
nto Langton Lane of which she had some hopes. She came to it, and found it locked. It was stoutly built of oak, and had a new heavy iron lock as well as the two bolts which she remembered. She left the wall and cut across to the kitchen garden, which was screened from the rest of the grounds by a tall beech hedge to which the leaves still clung in brown and orange pitches. The beech hedge enclosed three sides of the garden, and the outer wall the fourth, against the wall there were fruit trees closely trained, and it was in Chloe’s mind that she had climbed to the top of the wall for fruit many a time when she was a child; she had to dodge the gardeners of course. And then it came to her as a most singular thing that she had not set eyes on a gardener for days.

  She chose a stout pear tree, and reached the top of the wall with a pleasant sense of achievement. On its outer side the wall dropped to a bank, and the bank sloped steeply into Langton Lane. Chloe looked at the drop, and didn’t like it very much. And as she sat there, looking down and whistling softly to herself, a car came up the lane. It was driven by a young man.

  Chloe flung convention to the winds and hailed the car. Any human motorist would send a telephone message for her, or order a taxi. Young men, especially, were wont to be obliging. The car slowed down and stopped; the young man looked up and uttered a very surprised “Hullo!”

  “Oh,” said Chloe faintly. The young man was Mr. Martin Fossetter. “Oh,” said Chloe again. The colour rushed into her face. She looked very pretty. The dullest young man in England would have grasped the fact that she was exceedingly pleased to see him; and Martin Fossetter was very far from being a dull young man. He got out of his car, and climbed up the bank.

  “I say, what luck—what amazing luck!” he said.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” said Chloe. “I mean”—she laughed a little breathlessly—“I—I’m most awfully glad to see you.”