The Shadow In The House

by Maxwell March

  “Yes,” said Mary with a little more force than was strictly necessary.

  Mrs de Liane’s smile appeared again.

  “Very well then,” she said. “I shall rely on you. Louise will bring you your things, and we will drive up to my flat in London. There we can make the necessary alterations, and then we will go and see this very old friend of mine.”

  Mary heaved a sigh of relief. It was going to be much more simple than she had dreamed. Once in London she was sure they could not hold her.

  Just for a moment she allowed her triumph to show in her eyes, but it died instantly as she caught sight of the old woman watching her. There was nothing definite in the look, nothing actually malignant or even unfriendly, but there was something there which sent a cold chill creeping slowly up her spine, and after Eva de Liane had gone she remained crouching on the settee, trembling and afraid.

  CHAPTER X

  The City of Shadows

  THE DAY, which had begun so brightly in the country, had deteriorated into an afternoon of cold, misty rain when Mrs de Liane’s big car, driven by a stoical chauffeur, reached the outskirts of the city.

  From her position between Richard and his mother on the back seat of the limousine, Mary caught glimpses of dank pavements, slate-coloured with the wet, and the drab fronts of rain-soaked shops.

  Their way into the city led them through the mean streets, and here the chill gloom was everywhere. Even the slowly moving traffic looked sullen and half moribund in the discomfort of the day.

  Richard was very silent. All through the long drive from Heronhoe he had barely spoken. Mary hated him with an intensity she had never before experienced towards any living thing. She glanced at him now, his handsome profile outlined against the dark curtains of the car window, and wondered if he knew how much she loathed and feared him, and then, inconsequentially, if he knew whether he would care.

  But he remained quiet, arrogant, and if anything a little bored.

  Mrs de Liane chattered. Mary forced herself not to listen to that quiet, engaging voice, so subtly attractive. The carefully chosen hints concerning “new clothes … a little jollity … something to amuse your wife, Richard” passed her by. She refused to hear them. She was waiting breathlessly for an opportunity, a chance to escape. She had made up her mind to take it as soon as it presented itself. She knew she would be alone, penniless and friendless in a city which had always frightened her, but at least she would be free.

  At the junction of a wide road, which yet managed to look mean and shabby, the chauffeur turned and addressed his employer.

  “It’s nearly half-past, madam, but I can just make it. Shall I turn?”

  “Yes, I think so, please, Walker. You needn’t go right in. Just pull up somewhere near the small gate.”

  Mrs de Liane spoke gently, but there was an underlying excitement in her tone which Mary was quick to notice. It was Richard whose reaction to the words was most marked. As the car swung round to take a narrower road whose far end was lost in the misty distance he stared at his mother, frank disgust upon his face.

  “Mother, you’re not actually going to …?”

  His voice failed him as the old woman met his gaze steadily with dancing eyes so like his own.

  “I think it best, dear,” she said placidly. “Ah, Walker, here we are. Anywhere here will do.”

  She leant forward as she spoke, obscuring Mary’s view, and it was not until the great car had come to a standstill against the curb that Mary, peering beyond the driver, saw a dismal stone gateway with an illegible notice-board nailed upon each post. On either side wet shrubs and naked trees lined the high iron fence.

  The mist was thicker here. Its clinging vapour crept round the car, trying with long white fingers to pierce the warmth within.

  With her handkerchief Mrs de Liane wiped the frosting glass, and over her shoulder the girl saw the gleam of something whiter than the mist and a thrill of superstitious alarm assailed her.

  The car was drawn up outside a cemetery, and it was the headstones she could see gleaming through the bushes.

  “Come, Mary.” Mrs de Liane’s voice was very soft. She bent forward and opened the door of the car. The cold damp air rushed in, and with her heart beating wildly Mary allowed herself to be thrust gently out onto the pavement.

  Mrs de Liane took one arm and Richard, cold and rigidly disinterested, the other, and they walked together into the great gloomy field of death beneath the dripping trees.

  Their feet crunched upon the gravel, and the old lady led them on to the trim grass among the rows of pathetic little mounds, so silent beneath their burdens of sodden, withering flowers.

  At last she paused.

  “Look, Mary,” she whispered.

  They had reached a rise in the ground, and from where they stood they could see a group of dark figures motionless round something less than fifty yards away.

  It was a lonely little funeral, the girl thought involuntarily. Two mourners stood bareheaded beside an open grave while a clergyman read solemn words over the burden which four bearers had just lowered into the ground.

  Her own visit was so unexpected that its possible significance did not dawn upon the girl immediately, but as her gaze rested upon the lonely scene one of the mourners caught her attention and she strained her eyes to see his face.

  Suddenly he looked up, and even at that distance she recognized him as Edmund Beron, Mrs de Liane’s eldest son, and the truth burst upon her in all its elemental horror.

  “Who?” The word broke from her lips involuntarily, her eyes wild and questioning.

  Mrs de Liane smiled up into her face.

  “You, Mary,” she said softly, and there was an ineffable complacency in her tone. “Poor Mary Coleridge, killed in an accident. Dead, my dear; dead and buried.”

  “No!” The word was a scream.

  Maddened, driven beyond all endurance, Mary wrenched herself free from their restraining arms and flung herself headlong down the incline towards the group.

  “Stop!” Her own voice sounded strange and out of control. “Stop! You’re making a terrible mistake! I am Mary Coleridge. I’m alive. You’re making a mistake.”

  And as the scandalized clergyman lowered his book and the bearers and gravediggers gaped at her in shocked amazement the gaunt trees took up the echoes of her frenzied words:

  “You’re making a mistake—a mistake!”

  The clergyman moved with unexpected swiftness, and stood so that his surpliced figure with arms outstretched was immediately between the girl and the thing that lay behind him.

  Mary came to a full stop on the wet turf to find herself looking up into a grave old face now shocked into unwonted colour, and two very stern grey-blue eyes which peered down into her own.

  The sight of him in all his venerable dignity brought the girl out of her hysteria sharply, but his sternness added to the unspeakable horror of the situation.

  She heard herself explaining in a husky, frightened voice unsteady with tears:

  “That’s not Mary Coleridge. I am Mary Coleridge. I can prove it to you if only you’ll let me. These people—” she indicated Beron and Ted de Liane—“are deceiving you. They’re making me a prisoner. They …”

  Her voice ceased. There had been no response from the calm, shocked face, no softening of the steely grey-blue eyes.

  The clergyman did not speak. If only his voice had broken the awful helpless silence she might have been less awed by him. At it was, she had time to become aware again of the rain and the heavy drops falling from the naked branches of the trees.

  It was Edmund Beron who stepped forward and took her protectingly by the shoulders. There was studied emotion in his face, and his words were husky.

  “Marie-Elizabeth, my dear, you’re beside yourself. Come away.”

  He tried to lead her back towards Mrs de Liane and Richard, who were both hurrying up, but she wrenched herself free and with tears streaming down her face made a last appe
al.

  “Only hear me! You’re making a terrible mistake. Please!”

  The priest raised his hand. He still said nothing. His mind was engaged in preserving the sanctity and the dignity of the task which he was performing.

  It was that gesture, so utterly unaffected in its majesty, that silenced her, and at that moment Richard came up. He took Mary in his arms.

  “Oh, my dear, you shouldn’t have done this,” he said, and, although she knew what a consummate actor he was, the note of genuine reproach and regret was so strong that it momentarily overcame her.

  Holding her arms with a grip of steel, he looked over her head at the old man in the surplice.

  “This is my wife, sir,” he said. “She was a friend of the dead girl’s. The tragedy has—has shaken her.”

  He put into the one word “shaken” an unmistakable meaning, and Mary, struggling to free herself from his hold, caught a glimpse of the face of one of the bearers. In it she read some of the natural pity and disgust which the normal man feels towards the insane.

  It was too much. It was the last straw. She felt her knees giving under her, and the next moment she was being hurried along towards the car, one of Richard’s arms round her shoulders and the other gripping her inner elbow.

  Behind them a scene dreadful in its duplicity at such a time and in such a place was being enacted. Mrs de Liane, a pathetic figure in her black gown and coat, was weeping silently while her eldest son held her arm, supporting almost all her slender weight.

  It was Beron who explained and apologized.

  “We are all so sorry,” he said. “So terribly sorry. I particularly asked my brother not to bring his wife. We knew, of course, how deeply she was affected by the suddenness of the death of her friend, but we did not dream that anything like this would occur. She was so anxious to come that I suppose my brother gave way to her.”

  He paused, and as the old clergyman’s face softened in sympathy towards the two dignified and sorrowing figures he made a last point that was to save the De Liane family forever from any embarrassment by enquiries from this particular source.

  “This is not her first delusion,” he said, dropping his voice on the word. “I’m afraid she has a medical history.”

  The old man bent forward.

  “I understand. Your brother is greatly to be pitied,” he said. “Now, shall we go on?”

  Mary suffered herself to be led back down the sodden gravel path to the dilapidated stone gateway where the big car awaited them. The moral effect of such an incident ending in such a way was devastating. She felt dazed, too frightened even to speak. The face of the bearer, open-mouthed, half smiling, half revolted, hung in her memory with a vividness that was to haunt her for months to come.

  The insane have no friends. They are outcasts more surely than any leper in a banished colony. The weapon Beron had used was invincible: she saw it. The discovery annihilated her, stifling her, keeping her silent.

  Richard did not let her go even when they sat together in the back of the big car. The chauffeur was standing in the road with his back to the bonnet. At a sign from Richard he had not even come forward to open the door but remained where he was, staring down the road. Looking at his broad, unresponsive back, Mary knew instinctively that there was no help there. She must find some other way.

  They waited for some minutes in complete silence, and then the girl looked up timidly at her captor, whose arm was so very strong and unyielding about her slender shoulders.

  He too was staring in front of him like the chauffeur, and his face still wore the expression of cold disinterest mingled slightly with distaste which had distinguished it ever since they left Baron’s Tye.

  She tried to wrench herself free, but his grip tightened, and, looking up at his face, she saw that his lips had narrowed, that his eyes, deep blue and terribly like his mother’s, were angry.

  Suddenly she heard herself pleading:

  “Let me go. Oh please, please, if you’re human, let me go! I swear I’ll make no trouble. Only let me go!”

  He took no notice of her. She might never have spoken. Only his grip tightened about her.

  “They couldn’t blame you if I got away.” The words came with a soft urgency from her lips. Frenzied despair made them blurred and expressionless. “Just let me get out of the car. You’ll never see me again. You’ll never even hear of me. Let me go. O Richard, let me go!”

  The sound of his name on her lips seemed to startle him. For the first time he showed some anger.

  “Be quiet,” he said. “You’ve made enough trouble. Be quiet.”

  But she had got him to speak. At least that was something. She tried to argue, she tried to plead, but it was useless. He held her there rigidly.

  “Suppose I scream? This is London. Someone’ll come. Suppose I scream?”

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t like having to explain that my wife’s insane,” he said. “If you insist on carrying on like this I shall begin to believe it.”

  He would do it. The realization came to her again. They would all of them do it. They had done it. They had got away with it once and they would get away with it again. She was married to Richard, that was the hold. That was the terrible, unescapable fact.

  She lay back. Her head lolled against his shoulder, but she was too broken, too exhausted to care. She closed her eyes, and the helpless tears trickled slowly down her pale cheeks.

  Passers-by glancing in through the windows of the big car saw a young girl in tears outside the cemetery, comforted by a young man staring stonily in front of him, fighting, no doubt, with a grief of his own.

  After a long time two people dressed in black and walking slowly came out through the stone gateway. Mrs de Liane leaned on the arm of her eldest son, and he bent over her protectingly. He helped her into the car very gently and, when the chauffeur had taken his place at the wheel, got in himself, sitting on the small occasional seat which let down in the front of the tonneau.

  Glancing across at Richard he remarked quietly:

  “Ted’s seeing to the rest up here.”

  Richard nodded, and the little party sat in complete silence until the big car had travelled down the wide, wet road and turned once again into the noisy stream of East End traffic.

  Then there was a change. Edmund Beron bent forward towards the girl.

  “Now, look here,” he said. “We don’t want any more tricks like that. Understand? Get it into your head that you can’t escape; you’re to do as you’re told and you’re to do it quietly. Otherwise—” he shrugged his shoulders—“we’ll have to find some other means of dealing with you.”

  Mary raised her eyes and looked at him. She was frightened by what she saw in his face. Richard was only like his mother in her lighter moods, but about Edmund Beron there was something of the same cold power which she had seen in the old woman only once before.

  She said nothing. Once again her original resolution was forming itself in her mind. She must get away. She must get away quietly. She must be as cunning as they. Direct appeal to strangers was useless—she had found that out—but some opportunity must come when she could escape quietly. She composed herself to wait.

  CHAPTER XI

  The Confidants

  “YOU DID VERY WELL, my dear boy, very well indeed. I was quite impressed.”

  Mrs de Liane leant back in the shell-shaped, satin chair in the small boudoir of her London flat. She had changed her gown for a slightly more elaborate affair of pale grey watered silk with touches of real lace at her throat and wrists. Her hair was freshly dressed, and the soft curls framed her sweet, gentle face, the deadness of their colour lending a new brilliance to her dancing eyes.

  “It was excellent,” she murmured, stretching out one elegantly shod foot to the blaze in the grate. “I am very proud of you, Edmund: you have brains.”

  Edmund Beron glanced round the gracefully furnished room. Heavy velvet curtains of old rose, the gleam of silver and the rich p
ile of a priceless Chinese carpet counteracted the cold grey misery of the London day. All the same the man was clearly not at ease. He strode up and down the room with quick, nervous steps, his hands folded behind his back and his eyes sharp and anxious.

  “It might have been very dangerous,” he said.

  Mrs de Liane laughed, and the little tinkling sound seemed to suit the eighteenth-century elegance of the room.

  “But it wasn’t,” she said. “Thanks to my two dear boys it wasn’t. I quite liked the clergyman. Such a dear, sympathetic old man. I’m sure he really felt for us all.”

  The man paused in his stride to look at her, and a faint smile appeared for an instant upon his heavily handsome face.

  “You’re wonderful,” he said. “I believe you really think that.”

  “Oh, but I do,” she said, and opened her eyes wide at him. “I do. It was a most distressing incident, most uncomfortable for us all, but I’m glad it happened. It inspires confidence, you know. Besides, she’ll never dare to try it again. Did you see her face when she saw that everybody thought she was mad—or, well, shall we say doubted her full control? It was most illuminating.”

  She laughed again, and this time the sound was not so pleasant.

  Edmund Beron shook his head as though to drive the echo out of his ears.

  “All the same she’s not to be trusted,” he said quietly. “I’ve been watching her as we came along in the car. Her nerves are beginning to show serious signs of wear. A woman in that condition may do anything. She might even try to get herself certified. We’ve got to be very careful, Mother. Old Latcher is no fool, and if, as you say, you think he’s getting suspicious we don’t want any hitch there.”

  Mrs de Liane did not answer immediately. Instead she settled herself back in her chair and looked down at her small white hands folded in her lap. The stones in her rings caught the light and winked like tiny spurts of fire.

  She spent some time contemplating them, or appearing to do so, her soft mouth pursed and her eyes downcast. Finally she looked up.