Читать книгу Mystery at the Rectory - A. Fielding - Страница 4

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THREE weeks passed, and still Doris was not able to leave her mother, but Olive managed her affairs quite nicely without her aid, so nicely that one afternoon Anthony hurried after her as she was leaving The Causeway. He had been out when she had arrived "to return a book."

"I hope Mrs. Green didn't really annoy you," he said earnestly.

Anthony had not heard what the trouble had really been, he had only come on Mrs. Green looking quite flushed, and on Olive facing her with a look as though she were a little girl being scolded by her governess.

"She hates me," Olive now said. "She adores you," she added.

"Not adores," he said uncomfortably. "She's a very warm-hearted woman, and, well—very great friends at first sight—almost—" He plodded on, but Olive was not listening—apparently. Her face upturned to the trees, she was content to be now in the sunshine, now in the shade—apparently.

And then Anthony told her how he loved her, how he had fallen in love with her when he had seen her in Mrs. Richard Avery's sitting-room at the rectory only three weeks ago, and how he would never love any one else all his life.

"I wish I could say that I never had loved any one before," Anthony went on, "though in a way I can. That's the worst of not falling in love—true love—early. Had I met you before—other things wouldn't have happened. Couldn't have happened. But I can swear that from now on you'll be the only woman in my life. Had I known what love is, I wouldn't have been deceived by its counterfeit. Not I. But now"—and Anthony's arms went round her—"I love you, and you only, and do you love me?"

"Yes," she murmured, letting him kiss her. Suddenly she drew away. "There's some one over there. I saw a shadow slip behind those bushes. They must have been behind this tree and heard every word we've been saying!"

"Who cares," he replied; and again forgot the world and other people.

Quite half an hour later, Anthony overtook Mr. Avery as he was walking home.

"I want you to be the first to know," Anthony began, and with that he went on to tell him of his engagement that afternoon to Olive. ". We're keeping it to ourselves until I come back from my annual fortnight's rock climbing," he wound up.

Was the delay in order to get Mrs. Green to leave The Causeway, the rector wondered.

"And what about Mrs. Green?" he now asked gravely.

Anthony turned and faced him. "I told you before, Padre, that there was nothing between us—except friendship. I can repeat that. Honestly. She's a lonely woman," Revell went on, "a most charming friend. Very affectionate. But she might be a hundred, for all the love-making there's ever been between us. And on her side as well as mine," he added earnestly. "I know what people are saying, and she can be frightfully tiresome with her airs of—well—proprietorship," he flushed, "but it's only friendship, Padre. Only."

"Will the friendship extend to Olive?" Avery asked quietly. He was a man of few words, but he could cut in with the one question that went to the root of the matter under discussion.

"I'm afraid not," Revell said, "no, I'm afraid not. It's comical, but she doesn't think Olive good enough for me. Olive Mel Me, why, I'm not worthy to breathe the same air with Olive!"

The rector liked the lover's hyperbole. He had had a romance of his own once.

"Mrs. Green's leaving The Causeway in any case," Anthony went on. "The paintings are finished, and jolly fine little things they are."

"So I'm told. Fairy tales from Grimm, I understand?"

"Yes. They're painted so as to seem just emerging from dreamland. Little house where the Seven Bears lived. Church, to which the hero rides for his marriage to the princess. Mountain peaks and bits of a blue lake far below, as seen from the window of the Sleeping Beauty. Landscape, such as Red Riding Hood ran through—all that sort of thing, but they're not nursery stuff. They're rather wonderful. Olive agrees about that."

"And your own portrait?" Avery had heard that Mrs. Green was painting one.

Anthony laughed. The rector liked his laugh. It was still boyish and unspoiled.

"That's too awful for words. Only equalled by the awfulness of the lines of the dinner-jacket in it. I've come out as a cross between Shelley. Byron, and the picture of Bubbles that hung in Gilbert's nursery."

"Olive seen it?"

"Yes. She thinks it stands for Mrs. Green's dream of what I ought to look like." And both men laughed.

"Mrs. Green's moving to my mother's. You know—apart from to-day, there was a horrid row yesterday," and suddenly he burst out. Mr. Avery had always been a sort of father confessor to Anthony. The two liked each other sincerely.

"Mrs. Green was infernally rude to Olive. She has been near enough to the line before, but she stepped over it yesterday—with both feet. Olive had dropped in to borrow books from my library. She's keen on books. Uncommonly well read, as I don't doubt you know—"

The rector did not know.

"Mrs. Green seems to have taken a dislike to her—a quite ridiculous dislike "—Anthony looked furious—but also sheepish. "Every time Olive has come in about books, Mrs. Green made herself a fearful nuisance, and yesterday, as I say, we had it out. I told her she would have to apologise to Olive. She—she—oh, she was insufferable. Burst into tears and flung her arms around my neck—" Poor Anthony looked so miserable that the rector stifled a smile with difficulty.

"One of the penalties of youth," he could not resist saying. "When you're my age, no one wants to throw her arms around your neck."

But Anthony was not listening.

"She's gone back to my mother's to finish a ceiling she's painting in the Chinese room there. And The Causeway will be shut up till I get back." There fell another silence. "Though, mind you, till this happened, Mrs. Green has been the most delightful friend a man could find She told me in the beginning that I reminded her of a son she had, who died years ago."

The rector made no comment. The Mrs. Green whom he had met did not look in the least motherly. Exquisitely dressed, charmingly pretty, with her air of ease and poise, she was the kind of woman who, the rector thought, played the part of friend to a handsome young man like Anthony at her own risk.

He asked Anthony to dinner, and the latter accepted with pleasure. Though he would have to leave rather early afterwards as he had a long-standing engagement in town which he could not break. He would be off next morning, in any case, for his fortnight's holiday in Derbyshire.

Olive showed a charming side of her at dinner that night. The rector had no idea there was so much hidden in Mousie. It was as well she filled the canvas, he thought, for Grace was no use at all. She kept glancing from one to the other of the young couple, but she talked very little.

When dinner was over and Anthony had had very reluctantly to tear himself away, she stepped into the rector's study, and stood a moment watching him fill his pipe.

"I haven't told you!" he said with a cheerful grin. "I haven't said a word!"

"Oh, it's plain enough. And yet, but for Doris's meddling, Olive would have married that horrid Byrd man, and I needn't have had this talk with you. Olive mustn't marry Anthony, Jack." Grace spoke with vigour—and anger.

The rector waited in surprise. He had to wait some time.

"That must be stopped," she said at last in a low voice, "for I've a dreadful thing to tell you. I suspect now that Olive had been pilfering from my things ever since she came," were her next and most unexpected words. "I can't otherwise understand—there's no other way of explaining—what has become of things that seem to vanish. Real lace—I had yards of it that I never wore—trinkets that I don't use—that gold-fitted dressing-case that you gave me. It was a frightfully handsome affair, but heavy as sin. They have all gone. I never thought of its being Olive till yesterday, when two one-pound notes were taken out of my purse—and could only have been taken by Olive. The purse was lying on a table in my sitting-room where I sat reading. She was in and out several times, and as it happened I counted the notes over when I picked up the purse, just as, by chance, I had when I laid it on the table, for I was half minded to ask you to give me a couple of five-pound notes for the lot. When I counted them the second time, I was two pounds short."

"You are absolutely certain it couldn't have been any one else. Or that you didn't make a mistake?" he asked very gravely.

"Absolutely." Grace's tone was very distressed. "I haven't spoken to her, for I don't know what to do about it." She looked as though she did not. "It's a dreadful position. I loved her mother. I owe her a tremendous debt for her help when my mother died. And besides being Gertie's child, Olive is so quiet in all her ways, so amusing—always contented—marvellous memory—as a companion she's irreplaceable. But she mustn't marry Anthony. You see how impossible that has become!"

The rector said nothing for a full minute.

Grace was his half-sister really. Born when he had been at Winchester, they had grown up with the unbridgeable distance of years between them. She had married the year that he returned to his father's rectory as a curate. It was only on her husband's death a couple of years ago that she had made the rectory her home—at least for the summer. She always spent her winters out of England. He did not really know her much better than he knew Olive, he was reflecting uncomfortably. Was this that she had just told him to be taken literally, or was it exaggerated? Was she so vexed at losing a companion that she had—the rector hesitated over the right word. He was aghast at what she had told him. Much too much so to talk the matter over at the moment. It would require the most careful thought...a sudden remembrance of some incident in her childhood came back to him. A nurse had maintained then that little Gracie had deliberately lied in order to get a governess whom she disliked out of the rectory. This extraordinary accusation, or series of accusations—made just now—the rector felt the ground underfoot to be very yielding.

"You must prevent the marriage," she said again. "It's absolutely impossible. Mr. Byrd—yes. He's always talking about people having no right to money and things they don't need, but not young Revell. The old Admiral would turn in his grave at such a daughter-in-law at The Causeway."

"But why have you left it so late to bring the accusation?" Avery asked, his face very grave.

"I hadn't an idea that Olive could get him," Grace said. "She's in love with Mr. Byrd really. I thought it was just some notion of Doris's."

"Doris's notions generally have something solid behind them," the rector spoke to gain time. "As for what you tell me about Olive—we must think out the best thing to do. The best thing for Olive as well as for Anthony. And meanwhile, not a word to any one else, Grace!"

"No one else, of course," she agreed, "though Lucy-May Witson or Mrs. Green would rejoice to know about it. Fortunately Anthony is going away for a fortnight. What is to be done?"

"No one must be told one word of it," the rector said sternly. "No one!"

Avery spoke with a sternness he rarely showed. He had great personality under all his sweetness. Where he thought the question one of right or wrong, he could crack the whip, and if need be use it.

Grace promised to say nothing to any one until they should talk the matter over—before Anthony's return from his holiday.

"And meanwhile keep your things under lock and key," he said. "Do not be the one 'by whom offence cometh.'"

She looked shocked.

"If only she can be cured. It must be kleptomania! I'm really deeply attached to her, but—However, I shall say nothing to her or to any one for the present."

She left him, and the rector smoked his pipe and tried to see how to combine justice and mercy—that as yet unsolved problem. He had not solved it when next day Doris arrived back at the rectory. She was looking very fagged, and told him that though there was no immediate danger she might be summoned again to her mother's bedside at any time. There could be no question of any permanent improvement.

"But to talk of something happier," she went on. "I hear that Anthony and Olive have come to an understanding."

"Who has been indiscreet?" he questioned in his turn.

"I think it was Miss Jones when I stopped at the post office for some stamps. Or no. I believe it was Harmsworth the tobacconist—I was out of cigarettes."

The rector laughed at the idea of keeping anything from his villagers.

"I'm going up to have a word with Olive," Doris went on. "I do hope you will let the marriage take place from here, Jack?"

He made some non-committal reply at which she opened her eyes a little. Then she was gone and the rector heard her merry laugh overhead, and Olive's rather throaty voice replying.

Late in the afternoon he had to go some distance to see a sick parishioner.

He walked back by the oak wood whose last outcrop ran from The Flagstaff past The Causeway. There was there a glade that was none too easy to find, in which he loved to linger when he had the time to spare. Strolling through it he pondered on what could be done about Olive Hill. Her face rose before his mind. Rather pale, heart-shaped, with big black eyes that could look like pieces of jet, or like rounds of velvet. It was not a sly face—exactly. Or was it? Subtle it certainly was. Trying to sum her up, the rector to his dismay realised that he had no fixed ideas at all about her. Yet he could not help her if he could not reach her. And you cannot reach a land whose latitude and longitude are unknown to you.

He walked on, his light footsteps inaudible on the thick soft turf. Suddenly he stopped. In a natural recess which nearly enclosed them stood two figures. Avery recognised the trim slight figure of Byrd by the erect carriage and the challenging tilt of the square chin, in the same instant he saw that the slighter, shorter figure beside Byrd was Olive Hill. Both had their backs turned to him. From her attitude, she was talking earnestly. Byrd was listening with head bent, poking the earth with the cane that he always carried. Something about his attitude suggested anger, but as he turned his face slightly, the light was on it, and Avery saw Byrd was smiling that saturnine, malicious smile of his. Meeting it, Olive threw back her head and with a quick farewell nod slipped on out of sight. Byrd stood a full minute before he took the same path, one which led on past The Causeway to his own little cottage farther down the road.

Avery was slightly disturbed. There had been a suggestion of intimacy—of secretiveness—in the place. But at any rate this meeting was no lovers' talk...there had been something very unpleasant in Byrd's smile...Pondering earnestly on the right course to take about his sister's surprising companion, the rector made for his home by a short cut. He finally decided to do nothing for two more days. Then there would have to be a thorough clearing up of the position. But by that time he hoped to have come to some definite decision.