"Then perhaps he won"t like our using his house for such a purpose. If he isn"t in sympathy----"
"Twaddle," Daphne remarked, poising her pen to go on. "In the first place, it isn"t a house--it"s a rattletrap; and in the second place, he won"t know a thing about it."
It was all very tragic. I was thinking of them when I went out on the terrace in Daphne"s mackintosh. The air was damp and sticky, but it was better than Daphne"s conversation. I stood in the fountain court, leaning against a column and listening to the spray as it blew over on to the caladium leaves.
I am not sure just when I saw the figure. First it was part of the gloom, a deeper shadow in the misty garden. I saw it, so to speak, out of the tail of my eye. When I looked directly there was nothing there.
Finally, I called softly over my shoulder to Daphne, but she did not hear. Instead, the shadow disengaged itself, moved forward and resolved into Bagsby, Daphne"s chauffeur.
"I wasn"t sure at first that you saw me, Miss," he said, touching his cap. "It"s my turn until midnight; Clarkson "as it until three, and the gardener until daylight."
"Good gracious!" I gasped. "Do you mean you are guarding the house?"
"Perhaps it"s more what you would call surveillance," he said cautiously, "the picture gallery being over your head, Miss, and an easy job from the conservatory roof. We "aven"t told Miss Wyndham, yet, Miss, but the Wimberley Romney was stolen from the Towers last night, Miss, and the whole countryside is up."
"The Romney?" I inquired. "Do you mean a painting?"
"Yes, Miss," he said patiently. "Cut out of its frame, and worth twenty thousand pounds! By a gentlemanly-looking chap--a tourist by appearances, with a bicycle, in tweeds and knickers, Miss."
Whether the bicycle or the tourist wore tweeds and knickers was not entirely clear. Bagsby was saying that the thief was supposed to be hiding on the moor when Daphne came out, and he disappeared.
Poppy Stafford and Ernestine came unexpectedly late that night after I had gone to bed. I was in my first sleep and dreaming that Poppy was braining Bagsby with a gilt-framed painting, and that he was shouting "Votes for Women" instead of ""elp!" when somebody knocked at my door.
It turned out to be Poppy, and she said she thought there was a bat in her room, and as she was quite pallid with fright I let her get into my bed. I was full of my dream and I wanted to ask her some particulars about the man she had brained the summer before. But she put her head under the sheet, and as soon as she stopped trembling she went to sleep.
Daphne called me early and we went over to the Hall to take a look around. As Daphne said, it would be night and the grounds would not matter, but we would have to uncover some of the furniture. And as we could not let the servants know, we had to do it ourselves. We took a brush and pan, and tore up a linen sheet to dust with. Bagsby, who had been bribed, and suspected what he wasn"t told, got the brush and pan, and later he showed us a pail and a piece of soap in the tonneau.
The place was dreadful. No doubt the park had been lovely, but it was overshadowed and overgrown. The hedges were untrimmed; paths began, wandered around and died in a mess of undergrowth; and the terrace had lost an end in a wilderness where a garden-house was falling to decay.
The fading outlines of the kitchen garden seemed to shout aloud of lost domesticity, and over everything lay a sodden layer of the previous autumn"s leaves. (For fear I am accused of plagiarism, the sentence about the kitchen garden is not original. Madge.)
Daphne had got a key somewhere, and inside it was worse. Coverings over the pictures and furniture, six years" dust everywhere, and a smell of mould like a crypt of one of the Continental cathedrals, only not so ancestor-y. While we were taking off the covers, with Bagsby"s help, Daphne alternately sang and coughed in the dust.
"Why aren"t you more cheerful?" she demanded. "It will be a red-letter day for The Cause. When I think of Mabel Fitzjames I almost weep!"
"I think it must be because I am not used to it," I said meekly. "You see, I come from a Republican country--and Democratic, too, of course--and we don"t have any Prime Ministers to steal. One has to grow accustomed to things like this gradually, Daffie, or be born to them.
And then--I lay awake most of last night, wondering what would happen if he didn"t--er--see the joke, you know."
Daphne jerked a cover from a moth-eaten sofa and sneezed promptly in the dust.
"Joke!" she repeated when she could speak. "No, I don"t think he will see the joke. In fact, I don"t believe he will think there is any joke to see. If I know anything, he is going to be wild. He"s going to tear his hair and throw the vases off the mantel. He"s going to use language that you never heard--at least, I hope not."
It was then that I realised that I was not, heart and soul, a Suffragist. If I had only had the courage to have spoken up then, to have told her that I didn"t feel The Cause the way I ought to, and that I hoped to get married and have dozens of children, and that, anyhow, I had a headache and I thought I ought to go on to Italy and meet Mother!
But, instead, I followed her around like a sheep, tacking up cards with Suffrage mottoes on them all over the drawing-room, and stretching a long canvas banner in the hall across the back of a great Gothic hall-seat, with "Votes for Women" in red letters on it.
Bagsby brushed out a sort of oasis in the middle of the drawing-room and a path to the door, and Daphne and I dusted seven chairs and a table. We had brought over a duplex lamp and some candles, and when we had put a cover on the table the middle of the room looked quite habitable. Then Bagsby brushed the leaves off the steps, and as Daphne pleasantly expressed it:
_Won"t you step into my parlor?
Said the spider to the fly._
Mrs. Stafford, Violet and Lady Jane arrived that afternoon, after having waited to send the wire on which the conspiracy was hung. They put themselves into negligees and the hands of their maids at once, and were still dressing when Ernestine and I, the advance guard, started with the hamper of cold supper at half after six. Things went wrong from that moment.
Ernestine started to recite her speech to me as we went down the drive, found she had forgotten everything but the first sentence, which began, like The Walrus and the Carpenter, "The time has come----" and had to go back for the ma.n.u.script. We had to leave her for the second trip.
Bagsby, who was in the conspiracy to the extent of five pounds, took me over alone and lighted the duplex lamp. He cut the telephone wire, also, by Daphne"s order, before he left. We were not leaving anything to chance, although the thing had probably been disconnected for years.
"I "ardly like to leave you "ere alone, Miss," he said when everything was ready. It was growing dark by that time and raining again. "Folks is always ready to give a hempty "ouse a black eye, so to speak. The "All ghost isn"t what you might call authenticated, but the "ouse isn"t "abitable for a lady alone, Miss."
"I am not at all nervous," I quavered as he went down the steps.
"Only--please tell them to hurry, Bagsby."
I called to him again as he climbed into the car.
"Oh, Bagsby," I said nervously, "I--I suppose there is no danger of the picture thief being around."
"Not for pictures, anyhow, Miss," he returned jocularly, and started off.
_Not for pictures, anyhow!_
I stood at the door and watched the tail light of the motor disappear down the drive, show for an instant a spark by the dilapidated lodge and then go out entirely.
The second part of the story begins about here. The first part, as you have seen, has been purely political: the rest is romance, intermingled with crime. It is a little late to bring in a hero, but to have done it earlier would have spoiled the story, besides being distinctly untruthful. And I suppose a real novelist would have had the hero turn out to be the sunburned gentleman of some pages before; but the fact is he wasn"t, and I never saw the sunburned gentleman again.
Well, after Bagsby left, and I had examined the supper in the hamper and lighted more candles in the drawing-room, I began to wish we had not cut the telephone wire so soon. It was perfectly dark, and any one could step in through the windows--open to air the house--and cut my throat and take my string of pearls which Father had had matched for me and walk away calmly and be safe ten feet from the house in the undergrowth.
And then Bagsby"s ghost began to walk in my mind and I quite lost sight of the fact that it was not authenticated.
It was blowing by that time, and every joint of the rheumatic old house creaked and groaned. The candles flickered and nearly went out, and the motto cards began to fly around the room as if carried by invisible fingers. One of them said, "You have been weighed and found wanting,"
and another one, "Beware!" They had all the effect of spirit messages on me. When I tried to close the windows I found them stuck in their dilapidated frames. I wanted desperately to hide in a corner behind one of the high-backed chairs, but it was dusty there and hardly dignified for a person who was abducting the Prime Minister. And then it would be ignominious to faint there and have some one peer over the back and say: "Why, here she is!"
So, to divert my mind from ghosts and gentlemen burglars who steal pictures, I began to investigate the hamper. There were _pate_ and salad and sandwiches and quite a lot of stuff. But all at once I remembered that Daphne had given me the small silver and that I had laid it on my bed and left it there. And most of the provisions were too messy for a P.M. to manage with his fingers. Luckily, I remembered something Violet had said when Daphne gave me the silver.
"Personally," she had announced, "I am not in favor of feeding him at all. Or else I would give him prison fare. But if you"re going to be mushy over him you"ll probably find some dishes and forks in a little closet over the dining-room fireplace. They were kept there to use if Basil ever went down for the shooting, and I dare say they are still there."
So I picked up a candle and trembled through the darkness toward where the breakfast-room ought to be. I went through a square garden-hall which shook when I did, and the motor coat around my shoulders made the shadow of a pirate on the wall.
I found the breakfast-room and the mantel cupboard at last, and, putting the candle on a chair, stood for a moment listening, my hands clapped over my heart. I thought I heard some one walking over bare boards near by, but the sounds, whatever they were, ceased.
The mantel cupboard was locked. I pulled and twisted at the k.n.o.b to no purpose. Finally, I dug at the lock with a hairpin, and something gave; the door swung open with a squeak, and a moment later I had a flannel case in my hands and was taking out some silver forks. At that moment a plate in the cupboard fell forward with a slam, and something leaped on to the forks, which I dropped with a crash. The candle went out immediately and, gasping for breath, I backed against the cupboard and stood staring into the blackness of the room.
The door by which I had entered was a faint, yellowish rectangle from the distant hall lamp. That is, it had been a rectangle. It was partly obscured now. And gradually the opacity took on the height and breadth and general outline of a man. He was pointing a revolver at me!
III
I think it occurred to him then that I might be pointing something at him--not knowing that my deadliest weapon was a silver fork. For he slid inside the room with his back against the wall. And there we stood, backed against opposite corners, staring into the darkness, and I, for one, totally unable to speak. Finally, he said: "I think it will end right here."
"I--I don"t know what you mean," I quavered, for I was plainly expected to say something. There was another total silence, which I learned afterward was inability on _his_ part to speak. Then----
"By Jove!" he exclaimed; and then again, under his breath: "By Jove!"
(That a.s.sured me somewhat. "By Jove" is so largely a gentleman"s exclamation. If he had said "Blow me," which is English lower cla.s.s, or "Shiver my timbers," I know I should have shivered mine. But "By Jove"