The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “But didn’t she know the man’s reputation?” I persisted.

  “I don’t suppose so. Wylton had never been mixed up in any overt scandal, so the women wouldn’t know; and it’s always a tall order for a man to lay information against another man when a girl’s engaged to marry him. She just walked into it with her eyes shut.”

  “And now she’s divorcing him at last?”

  “The other way about.”

  I felt sure I could not have heard him correctly.

  “The other way about,” he repeated deliberately. “Oh, she’d have got rid of him years ago if he’d given her the chance! Wylton was too clever; he knew the divorce law inside out; he was alive to all its little technicalities. He’s sailed close to the wind a number of times, but never close enough to be in danger.”

  “And what’s happening now?” I asked.

  “She’s forced his hand—gone to some trouble to compromise herself. She couldn’t divorce him, it was the only way, she’s making him divorce her. Rather a burlesque of justice, isn’t it? Elsie Wylton, the respondent in an undefended action! The daughter of Jasper Davenant—one of the finest, cleanest, bravest women I know. And the successful petitioner will be Arnold Wylton, who ought to have been thrashed out of half the houses and clubs in London. Who ought to have been cited as a co-respondent half a dozen times over if he hadn’t been so clever in covering up his tracks. I wonder if he’s got sufficient humour to appreciate the delicate irony of his coming sanctimoniously into court to divorce her. It’s a sickening business, we won’t discuss it—but it will be the one topic of conversation in a few weeks’ time.”

  We walked in silence for a few yards.

  “Was the man any one of note?” I asked. “The co-respondent?”

  “Fellow in the Indian Army,” Aintree answered. “I don’t suppose you know him. It was a bogus case; he just lent his name.”

  I sniffed incredulously.

  “The world won’t believe that,” I said.

  “Elsie’s going to make it.”

  I shook my head.

  “She can’t. Would you?”

  “Most certainly. So will you when you’ve met her. You knew the father well? She’s her father’s own daughter.”

  The gospel of Jasper Davenant was simple and sound. Never pull a horse, never forge a cheque, never get involved in the meshes of married women. Apart from that, nothing mattered: though to be his true disciple, you must never lose your head, never lose your temper, never be afraid of man or woman, brute or devil. He was the North American Indian of chivalrous romance, transplanted to Cumberland with little loss of essential characteristics.

  “I look forward to meeting them both,” I said as we parted at Buckingham Gate. “Seven o’clock? I’ll try not to be late.”

  Walking on alone through Sloane Square, something set me thinking of my boast to Philip Roden. Within three hours I was apparently going to meet one woman whose name was mixed up with the most prominent cause célèbre of the year, and another who was a cause célèbre in herself—the redoubtable Miss Joyce Davenant of the Militant Suffrage Union. That my introduction should come from the peace-loving, nerve-ridden Aintree, was in accordance with the best ironical traditions of life. I was not surprised then: I should have still less reason to be surprised now. In the last six months he has placed me under obligations which I shall never be able to meet: in all probability he expects no repayment; the active side of his unhappy, fatalistic temperament is seen in his passionate desire to make life less barren and melancholy for others. Tom Wilding can testify to this at the bézique table: Elsie and Joyce and I can endorse the testimony in a hundred ways and half a hundred places.

  As I turned into Pont Street a private car was drawn up by the kerb opposite my brother’s house. I dawdled for a few steps while a pretty, brown-eyed, black-haired girl said good-bye to a friend at the door and drove away. It was no more than a glimpse that I caught, but the smiling, small-featured face attracted me. I wondered who she was, and who was the girl with auburn hair who persisted in standing on my brother’s top step long after the car was out of sight, instead of retiring indoors and leaving me an unembarrassed entry.

  I pretended not to see her as I mounted the steps, but the pretence was torn away when I heard her addressing me as “Uncle Simon.”

  “You must be Gladys,” I said, wondering if I looked as sheepish as I felt. “How did you recognise me?”

  “By your photograph,” she said. “You haven’t altered a bit.”

  On the whole I carried it off fairly well, though I was glad Arthur Roden was not present after my implied familiarity with my niece’s existence. Of course I knew I had a niece, and that her birthday fell—like the Bastille—on July 14th. Usually I remembered the date and sent her some little trifle, and she would write me a friendly letter of thanks. If I had kept count of the number of birthdays, I should have known she was now nineteen, but then one never does keep count of these things. Frankly, I had imagined her to be about seven or eight, and her handwriting—by becoming steadily more unformed and sporadic the older she grew—did nothing to dispel the illusion. Instead of curious little pieces of jewellery I might easily have sent her a doll.…

  “Where’s the Judge?” I asked as she kissed me and led the way upstairs to her room.

  “He’s not home yet,” she answered to my relief.

  “And your mother?”

  But my sister-in-law also was out, and I reconciled myself without difficulty to the prospect of taking tea alone with my niece. Possibly as a romantic reaction from her father, possibly with her mother Eve’s morbid craving for forbidden fruit, Gladys had elevated me into a Tradition. The whole of her pretty, sun-splashed room seemed hung with absurd curios I had sent her from out-of-the-way parts of the world, while on a table by the window stood a framed photograph of myself in tweeds that only an undergraduate would have worn, and a tie loosely arranged in a vast sailor’s knot after the unsightly fashion of the early ’nineties. My hair was unduly long, and at my feet lay a large dog; it must have been a property borrowed for the purpose, as I hate and have always hated dogs.

  “A wasted, unsatisfactory life, Gladys,” I said as my tour of inspection concluded itself in front of my own portrait. “I wish I’d known about you before. I’d have asked Brian to let me adopt you.”

  “Would you like to now?”

  In the East a complimentary speech is not usually interpreted so literally or promptly.

  “I’m afraid it’s too late,” I answered regretfully.

  “Afraid?”

  “Your father and mother.…”

  “Would you if I were left an orphan?”

  “Of course I would, but you mustn’t say things like that even in joke.”

  Gladys poured me out a cup of tea and extended a cream jug at a menacing angle.

  “Not for worlds if it’s China,” I exclaimed.

  “It is. Uncle Toby.…” She seemed to hesitate over the name, but I prefer it to Simon and bowed encouragement, “I’m going to be an orphan in three days’ time. At least, it’s that or very sea-sick.”

  I begged for an explanation. It appeared that Pont Street was in domestic convulsion over the health of Mr. Justice Merivale. As Roden had hinted, a succession of militant outrages directed against his person and property, not to mention threatening letters and attempted violence, had seriously shaken his nerve. Under doctor’s orders he was leaving England for a short sea cruise as soon as the Courts rose at Whitsun.

  “He’s only going to Marseilles and back,” she explained. “Mother’s going with him, and something’s got to be done with me. I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself, but I should simply die if they tried to take me through the Bay.”

  “Do you think they’d trust me?” I asked. From an early age my brother has regarded me as the Black Sheep of an otherwis
e irreproachable family of two.

  “They’d jump at it!” Irreverently I tried to visualise Brian jumping. “The Rodens wanted me to go to them, but it wouldn’t be fair on Sylvia. She’d be tied to me the whole time.”

  “I can imagine worse fates.”

  “For her? or for me?”

  “Either or both.”

  “I’ll tell her. Did you see her driving away as you arrived? If you’ll adopt me, I’ll introduce you.”

  “I’ve arranged that already. Whitsuntide will be spent at Brandon Court improving my acquaintance with her.”

  Gladys regarded me with frank admiration.

  “You haven’t wasted much time. But if you’re going there, you may just as well adopt me. I shall be down there too, and if you’re my guardian.…”

  “It’ll save all trouble with the luggage. Well, it’s for your parents to decide. You can guess my feelings.”

  I waited till after six in the hopes of seeing my brother, and was then only allowed to depart on the plea of my engagement with Aintree and a promise to dine and arrange details of my stewardship the following night.

  “Write it down!” Gladys implored me as I hastened downstairs. “You’ll only forget it if you don’t. Eight-fifteen tomorrow. Haven’t you got a book?”

  I explained that on the fringe of the desert where I had lived of late, social engagements were not too numerous to be carried in the head.

  “That won’t do for London,” she said with much firmness, and I was incontinently burdened with a leather pocket-diary.

  Dressing for dinner that night, the little leather diary made me reflective. As a very young man I used to keep a journal: it belonged to a time when I was not too old to give myself unnecessary trouble, nor too disillusioned to appreciate the unimportance of my impressions or the ephemeral character of the names that figured in its pages. For a single moment I played with the idea of recording my experiences in England. Now that the last chapter is closed and the little diary is one of the bare half-dozen memorials of my checkered sojourn in England, I half wish I had not been too lazy to carry my idea into effect. After a lapse of only seven months I find there are many minor points already forgotten. The outline is clear enough in my memory, but the details are blurred, and the dates are in riotous confusion.

  It is fruitless to waste regrets over a lost opportunity, but I wish I had started my journal on the day Gladys presented me with my now shabby little note-book. I should have written “Prologue” against this date—to commemorate my meetings with Roden and Joyce Davenant, Aintree and Mrs. Wylton, Gladys and Philip. To commemorate, too, my first glimpse of Sylvia.…

  Yes, I should have written “Prologue” against this date: and then natural indolence would have tempted me to pack my bag and wander abroad once more, if I could have foreseen for one moment the turmoil and excitement of the following six months.

  I can only add that I am extremely glad I did no such thing.

  CHAPTER I

  War à Outrance

  “RIDGEON: I have a curious aching; I dont know where; I cant localise it. Sometimes I think it’s my heart; sometimes I suspect my spine. It doesn’t exactly hurt me, but it unsettles me completely. I feel that something is going to happen.…

  SIR PATRICK: You are sure there are no voices?

  RIDGEON: Quite sure.

  SIR PATRICK: Then it’s only foolishness.

  RIDGEON: Have you ever met anything like it before in your practice?

  SIR PATRICK: Oh yes. Often. It’s very common between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. It sometimes comes on again at forty or thereabouts. You’re a bachelor, you see. It’s not serious—if you’re careful.

  RIDGEON: About my food?

  SIR PATRICK: No; about your behaviour.… You’re not going to die; but you may be going to make a fool of yourself.”

  —Bernard Shaw

  “The Doctor’s Dilemma.”

  I was a few minutes late for dinner, as a guest should be. Aintree had quite properly arrived before me, and was standing in the lounge of the Ritz talking to two slim, fair-haired women, with very white skin and very blue eyes. I have spent so much of my time in the East and South that this light colouring has almost faded from my memory. I associated it exclusively with England, and in time began to fancy it must be an imagination of my boyhood. The English blondes you meet returning from India by P & O are usually so bleached and dried by the sun that you find yourself doubting whether the truly golden hair and forget-me-not eyes of your dreams are ever discoverable in real life. But the fascination endures even when you suspect you are cherishing an illusion.

  I had been wondering, as I drove down, whether any trace survived of the two dare-devil, fearless, riotous children I had seen by flashlight glimpses, when an invitation from old Jasper Davenant brought me to participate in one of his amazing Cumberland shoots. I was twenty or twenty-one at the time; Elsie must have been seven, and Joyce five. Mrs. Davenant was alive in those days, and Dick still unborn. My memory of the two children is a misty confusion of cut hands, broken knees, torn clothes, and daily whippings. Jasper wanted to make fine animals of his children, and set them to swim as soon as they could walk, and to hunt as soon as their fingers were large enough to hold a rein.

  When I was climbing with him in Trans-Caucasia, I asked how the young draft was shaping. That was ten years later, and I gathered that Elsie was beginning to be afraid of being described as a tomboy. On such a subject Joyce was quite indifferent. She attended her first hunt ball at twelve, against orders and under threat of castigation; half the hunt broke their backs in bending down to dance with her, as soon as they had got over the surprise of seeing a short-frocked, golden-haired fairy marching into the ball-room and defying her father to send her home. “You know the consequences?” he had said with pathetic endeavour to preserve parental authority. “I think it’s worth it,” was her answer. That night the Master interceded with old Jasper to save Joyce her whipping, and the next morning saw an attempt to establish order without recourse to the civil hand. “I’ll let you off this time,” Jasper had said, “if you’ll promise not to disobey me again.” “Not good enough,” was Joyce’s comment with grave deliberate shake of the head. “Then I shall have to flog you.” “I think you’d better. You said you would, and you’d make me feel mean if you didn’t. I’ve had my fun.”

  The words might be taken for the Davenant motto, in substitution of the present “Vita brevis.” Gay and gallant, half savage, half moss-rider, lawless and light-hearted, they would stick at nothing to compass the whim of the moment, and come up for judgment with uncomplaining faces on the day of inevitable retribution. Joyce had run away from two schools because the Christmas term clashed with the hunting. I never heard the reason why she was expelled from a third; but I have no doubt it was adequate. She would ride anything that had a back, drive anything that had a bit or steering-wheel, thrash a poacher with her own hand, and take or offer a bet at any hour of the day or night. That was the character her father gave her. I had seen and heard little of the family since his death, Elsie’s marriage and Joyce’s abrupt, marauding descent on Oxford, where she worked twelve hours a day for three years, secured two firsts, and brought her name before the public as a writer of political pamphlets, and a pioneer in the suffrage agitation.

  “We really oughtn’t to need introduction,” said Mrs. Wylton, as Aintree brought me up to be presented. “I remember you quite well. I shouldn’t think you’ve altered a bit. How long is it?”

  “Twenty years,” I said. “You have—grown, rather.”

  She had grown staider and sadder, as well as older; but the bright golden hair, white skin, and blue eyes were the same as I remembered in Cumberland. A black dress clung closely to her slim, tall figure, and a rope of pearls was her only adornment.

  I turned and shook hands with Joyce, marvelling at the likeness
between the two sisters. There was no rope of pearls, only a thin band of black velvet round the neck. Joyce was dressed in white silk, and wore malmaisons at her waist. Those, you would say, were the only differences—until time granted you a closer scrutiny, and you saw that Elsie was a Joyce who had passed through the fire. Something of her courage had been scorched and withered in the ordeal; my pity went out to her as we met. Joyce demanded another quality than pity. I hardly know what to call it—homage, allegiance, devotion. She impressed me, as not half a dozen people have impressed me in this life—Rhodes, Chamberlain, and one or two more—with the feeling that I was under the dominion of one who had always had her way, and would always have it; one who came armed with a plan and a purpose among straying sheep who awaited her lead.… And with it all she was twenty-eight, and looked less; smiling, soft and childlike; so slim and fragile that you might snap her across your knee like a lath rod.

  Aintree and Mrs. Wylton led the way into the dining-room.

  “I can’t honestly say I remember you,” Joyce remarked as we prepared to follow. “I was too young when you went away. I suppose we did meet?”

  “The last time I heard of you.…” I began.

  “Oh, don’t!” she interrupted with a laugh. “You must have heard some pretty bad things. You know, people won’t meet me now. I’m a.… Wait a bit—‘A disgrace to my family,’ ‘a traitor to my class,’ ‘a reproach to my upbringing!’ I’ve ‘drilled incendiary lawlessness into a compact, organised force,’ I’m ‘an example of acute militant hysteria.’ Heaven knows what else! D’you still feel equal to dining at the same table? It’s brave of you; that boy in front—he’s too good for this world—he’s the only non-political friend I’ve got. I’m afraid you’ll find me dreadfully changed—that is, if we ever did meet.”

  “As I was saying.…”

  “Yes, and I interrupted! I’m so sorry. You drop into the habit of interrupting if you’re a militant. As you were saying, the last time we met.…”