Читать книгу Annie Haynes Premium Collection – 8 Murder Mysteries in One Volume - Annie Haynes - Страница 48

Table of Contents

“It is only what I expected!” Garth Davenant’s face was very grave as he stood before the mantelpiece and looked at Mavis’s anxious face. “What does your mother say about it, Mavis?”

“Oh, mother is in dreadful trouble! You know how she always hoped it would be Dorothy; in fact, I think she had persuaded herself that it was quite a settled thing, and that was how it was she never minded Hilda’s being here. But why do you say you expected it, Garth?”

Davenant shrugged his shoulders.

“It is not an unusual thing when a young man as impressionable as Arthur is thrown into the daily and hourly companionship of a beautiful woman older than himself.”

“Garth!” Mavis interrupted him with a little cry. “Hilda herself does not know her age, and we can only guess, but we feel quite sure that she is not more than nineteen. She says herself that ‘twenty’ sounds unfamiliar.”

“Oh, yes. I should fancy it is a good while since that particular number was used in connexion with her age,” remarked Davenant dryly.

Mavis looked at him with amazed eyes.

“What do you mean, Garth? I am sure she does not look more—”

“Are you?” Garth said cynically. “Well, I must confess that I have not the unquestioning faith of the inhabitants of Hargreave Manor, and I have studied your fair friend’s face on one or two occasions in the open sunlight, away from the couches and subdued lights she usually affects, and I think she is considerably older than you imagine.”

“Oh, don’t!” exclaimed Mavis miserably. “You make me feel so unhappy, Garth—as if I ought not to believe in anyone!”

Her lover put out his arm and drew her to him.

“I am a suspicious, world-hardened wretch, Mavis, am I not? I don’t want any trouble to come to you that I can help, and I am afraid—”

“Afraid that trouble will come if Arthur married her?” Mavis finished, her head resting against his shoulder.

“I feel sure of it if he should be mad enough to contemplate such a step before something is known about her,” said Davenant in alarm. “But I hardly thought matters had got so far as that even from your account.”

Mavis raised her head.

“Hilda seemed to want to wait until things were cleared up, but Arthur seems quite determined that the engagement shall be announced at once—and he is his own master. I am afraid that mother’s remonstrances only made him more positive. What she implied about Dorothy only annoyed him so much he said he had made up his mind that there should be no more misconception. Don’t you think you may be mistaken about Hilda, Garth? I know it sounds a mad sort of thing for Arthur to do—to marry a woman we know nothing about; but I must say that to a certain extent I cannot help sympathizing with him. Hilda is so very pretty and charming that I feel positive if I were a man I should want to marry her myself.”

“I should certainly interfere to prevent you,” said Garth, laughing and catching her hand. “Seriously, darling, cannot you see how queer the whole business is? Here is this girl, dropped apparently from the clouds on your doorstep, and nobody makes the smallest inquiry after her. One would naturally have supposed that if a girl of our class, as she appears to be, were missing, there would be such a hue and cry after her that the whole country would be roused, yet, though a description has been published and advertisements inserted, you get no reply from her friends at all!”

“Yes, yes. I know it sounds strange,” Mavis admitted at once. “But I am sure there is some satisfactory explanation of it all. Hilda and I were talking about it yesterday, and we came to the conclusion that there must have been some wrongdoing somewhere. Perhaps she may be heiress to some property which some one else wants to secure, and they may have treated her in some way that reduced her to the state she was in. Very likely they think she is dead!”

Garth’s lips curled curiously.

“I fancy I could pick a few holes in that theory, Mavis. However, shall we say no more about it? Time may prove that you are right and I am wrong. In the meantime before the wedding we will set all our wits to work. We must save Arthur from this folly if possible.”

“Oh, dear!” Mavis said with a sigh as she turned away her head.

“What is the matter with you, Mavis?” Garth’s voice was very tender, his clasp grew closer.

Mavis moved restlessly.

“Everything is so altered, Garth,” she complained miserably. “And it is such a little time ago since we were so happy; but now the very air of the Manor seems full of mystery and suspicion. One does not know whom to trust.”

Garth’s hand smoothed her brown hair gently.

“One thing is not altered, I hope, Mavis—our love for one another.”

Mavis’s fingers lingered on his arm caressingly.

“Oh, no! That is the same always; but, Garth, sometimes it seems hardly right for me to be happy in your love when I am afraid that Dorothy—”

Davenant’s dark face clouded.

“Hush, child! Poor little Dorothy! We must have patience and it will all come right some time.”

Mavis did not reply, but rested quiescent in his arms, feeling a certain comfort from the close contact with his strength, from the firmness of his clasp as he bent over her.

There was a step in the conservatory and Mavis freed herself.

“Oh, there you are!” Lady Laura said as she caught sight of them through the glass door. “I was looking for you, Mavis. You must see this person for me,” glancing at the card she held in her hand. “I’m really so upset this morning that I cannot talk to anyone. What do you say to this folly—this madness of Arthur’s, Garth?”

“It is what I have been fearing for some time. I was afraid—”

“I never thought of such a thing,” Lady Laura said plaintively. “How could I imagine a man would want to marry a girl, however beautiful, who could not remember even her own name? I concluded that that put it entirely out of the question. I should have thought it quite as improbable as that Arthur, visiting a lunatic asylum, should fall in love with one of its inmates and want to marry her. I can see now that I have been imprudent in allowing them to see so much of one another, but I assure you that was how I looked at it.”

Garth laughed in spite of his real vexation.

“There is something to be said for that point of view, Lady Laura, but I question whether the marriage can take place until the girl recovers her memory. We don’t even know that she is free.”

Lady Laura clasped her hands.

“Certainly we do not! Garth, that had not occurred to me. You must have a long talk with my poor boy. He will not listen to anything I can say. It seems useless to speak, and yet to see him throwing away his happiness in this way is heart-breaking.”

Mavis took the card from her hand.

“Nurse Gidden,” she read, and then underneath in pencil, “From Mrs. Marston.”

“Oh, mother, what does she want?” she asked.

“I do not know—something to do with Nurse Marston I suppose,” Lady Laura said tearfully. “But I really cannot stand any more worry this morning, Mavis; I am not fit for it.”

“Poor little mumsy!” Mavis kissed her heartily. “I will hear what she has to say. May I tell Jenkins to show her in here, then Garth can help me perhaps?”

“Oh, see her where you like,” Lady Laura acquiesced fretfully. “I am going out for a drive. I think it may help to steady my nerves.”

“The best thing you can do, mother dear,” Mavis agreed as she rang the bell and Lady Laura hurried out through the conservatory.

Garth Davenant glanced up curiously as Gidden was ushered in. He saw a plain-featured, resolute-looking woman of middle height and apparently of middle age, with a firmly-set humorous mouth and bright dark eyes. Looking at her he came to the conclusion that he would rather have Nurse Gidden as a friend than an enemy.

“You wished to speak to my mother?” said Mavis, advancing. “I am so sorry she is not able to see you this morning, but if there is anything that I can tell you—you are a friend of Nurse Marston’s are you not?”

“Her greatest friend, I believe,” Charlotte returned in her brisk, matter-of-fact tones. “We were probationers together, though Mary was some years the younger, and we have kept in communication with one another ever since. Ah, I see you did not think I was a nurse”—as Mavis glanced at her serviceable green dress and plain hat—“but I don’t wear uniform as a rule in my holidays! To tell the truth it is a relief to get out of it and dress like other people sometimes. I have a month off, Miss Hargreave, and I came to Lockford yesterday. I mean to find out what has become of Mary Marston, and I want you to help me.”

“I only wish I could,” Mavis said earnestly. “But nothing we do seems any good. You know my brother has had a detective down?”

“I have heard so.” There was a pause. Charlotte was apparently studying the pattern of the carpet. Garth, from the point of vantage he had taken up in a distant window-seat, watched her, and decided that she was at a loss how to begin. “I am sure of one thing—that Mary Marston had no idea of going away of her own free will that night; her letter to me proved it.”

Mavis drew a long breath.

“Ah, I heard you had a letter, but she must have left the house of her own free will, I think! I should like to see the letter.”

Charlotte raised her hands.

“I wish you could!” she said. “I never thought it was of any particular importance, and I should have my work cut out for me, with my luggage, going about as I do, if I hoarded up letters. I always burn them after they are read.”

“Oh, what a pity it is!” Mavis said as she drew up a chair. “Sit down, Nurse Gidden; you must be tired if you walked up.”

“Yes, it is a goodish way by the road—thank you!” Charlotte said as she accepted the courtesy. “Not but what I remember pretty well what was in the letter,” she resumed after a pause. “She said that nobody knew who the young lady was that she was nursing, but that she herself had seen her in different circumstances, and she felt it was her duty to tell Lady Laura at once, as she thought Lady Laura ought to know who she had in the house. I can’t remember that she said anything more definite”—wrinkling up her brows—“but I know the impression left on my mind was that she thought Lady Laura would soon get rid of the young lady when she did know. The other thing I can recall is that she had only come to the Manor temporarily, that she said she didn’t like leaving her mother just then, and if it had been anybody but Mr. Garth Davenant who asked her to she didn’t think she should have gone.”

“Oh, yes,” Mavis said quickly. “I can understand that! Her mother nursed Mr. Garth Davenant and his brother, and they have always been very kind to the Marstons.”

“So I have heard. That part of the letter does not puzzle me, Miss Hargreave,” remarked Charlotte composedly. “It shows though that Mr. Garth Davenant had a pretty strong influence over her—that is what I notice; but my opinion, looking at the case all round, is that that young lady she was nursing knew she was recognized, and, having her own motives for stopping at the Manor, contrived to get Miss Marston out of the way somehow, so that she should not tell Lady Laura who she was. That is where I fancy you can help me, Miss Hargreave.”

Mavis shook her head.

“You are quite on the wrong tack, Nurse Gidden—I can vouch for that. Hilda was lying in a semi-conscious state all the time the nurse was in the room. I don’t think she had any idea that Nurse Marston had recognized her, and that she had nothing to do with her subsequent disappearance I am absolutely certain, because I went into her room when the nurse came out to see my mother, and remained there until her absence caused uneasiness and they came to make inquiries. It is out of the question that Hilda could have had anything to do with it.”

“Not herself, certainly; she could have got some one to do it for her perhaps,” suggested the other.

“Impossible! Nobody had been in the room all day but ourselves and my maid. After the nurse came she sat by the bed all the time. Hilda had no opportunity of plotting anything of the kind, even if she were inclined, which I do not believe for one moment. Nurse Marston’s disappearance and the rumours connecting her with it have been a real trouble to her.”

“Um!” Nurse Gidden, evidently a lady of free and easy manners, unfastened her coat and leaned back in her chair. “Well, what you say does seem to put this young lady out of count,” she observed; “but I don’t know what to make of it. Can’t you help me at all, Miss Hargreave?”

“I wish I could,” Mavis said, with a heartfelt sigh. “I was just saying when you came in that the atmosphere of the Manor is dreadful just now. Suspicion seems to be in the very air.”

“It is bad for you—anyone can see that,” Charlotte agreed sympathetically. “Well, as it is no use thinking any more of the lady, I must trust to the gentleman and look after Mr. Garth Davenant a little more closely than I fancy he has been looked after yet.”

Mavis started, her eyes flashed.

“I do not—”

Garth interrupted her.

“One moment,” he said, coming forward. “I think before you go on, Nurse Gidden, I ought to tell you that I am Garth Davenant.”

Charlotte did not seem in the faintest degree discomposed; her clear grey eyes met his frankly with just a touch of amusement in their glance.

“I guessed as much from the first,” she said equably, “and I am glad to tell you to your face, Mr. Davenant, how things look to me. I say to myself, times and again, that only some very strong motive could have taken Mary out of this house that night. How she could reconcile it to her duty to her patient to go at all I cannot imagine, but some one must have had a pretty strong influence over her—the motive must have been urgent to induce her to do so. Now from her letter, as well as from her mother, I know that she would do a good deal for Mr. Garth Davenant, and I am told that only the week before she came here she was engaged on some private business with Mr. Garth Davenant in Exeter. It seems to me that it is possible that that same business might require more attention later on, and that Mary might have been persuaded to go away to look after it, and kept away. That is the only other theory that I have been able to evolve.”

Garth had taken up his favourite position with his elbow against the mantelpiece, one hand shading his eyes, the other playing absently with his watch-chain. Was it Mavis’s fancy, she wondered, or did his face pale as Nurse Gidden spoke?

There was a long pause. At last Davenant raised his head and straightened himself.

“Would it be any use my giving my word of honour that I have not heard one word of Nurse Marston since she left this house, that my business—the subject of which I was talking to her in Exeter—is entirely at an end, and had absolutely no connection with her disappearance—could have had none?” he added vehemently.

Charlotte looked at him doubtfully.

“Well, I am glad to hear you say so, though I can’t say that I mean to place implicit reliance on what anyone else tells me,” she remarked frankly. “I intend to thrash matters out for myself. But—well, I don’t mind saying that I am glad I have seen you and spoken to you, Mr. Davenant.” She rose. “I wanted to ask Miss Hargreave if her ladyship would allow me to see Mary’s room, the one she was to have slept in.”

“Oh, certainly! I am sure she would not have the slightest objection,” Mavis said with a distinct touch of hauteur in her tone. She moved towards the bell, then, with her hand on it, paused. “I think I had better go with you myself. The servants seem afraid of opening the doors of those two rooms. In fact I hear that my maid will not go past them alone. I dare say you have heard that they say her ghost is seen? It has troubled us all very much lately.”

“Yes, I have heard that,” remarked Charlotte. “A pack of moonshine! As I say, if they have seen Mary at all they have seen her alive, not dead. But I expect they have fancied it. Her mother has dreams and thinks a lot of them, but, bless you, Miss Hargreave, I don’t put any faith in such things! However, I mean to find Mary!”

“I hope you will,” Mavis said as she led the way up the front stairs, the visitor’s keen eyes glancing round her as they went along and taking mental notes of all she saw. “But I am quite certain when the truth is known it will be found that neither Mr. Garth nor Hilda has anything to do with it.”

“Well, all persons have a right to their own opinions,” Miss Gidden said calmly. “When we do know I dare say it will not much matter what any of us have thought.”

Mavis made no further comment as they walked down the corridor. She opened the door of the larger room first.

“This is where the patient was—she was there some time after Nurse Marston went, but we had her moved out as soon as we possibly could.”

“Nothing could be found here, then, I expect,” was the comment of Miss Gidden as she looked round.

“This,” Mavis said as they came out and she unlocked the next door, “is Nurse Marston’s own room. All her things are still just as she left them. Her cloak and bonnet are just where every one who has been here believes she put them herself.”

Charlotte went up and laid her hand on them.

“Poor thing! Poor Mary! I wonder where she is now?” she said. Then a shudder shook her from head to foot and her face turned white.

Mavis sprang forward.

“Oh, what is it?”

The older woman’s eyes slowly filled with tears, and as the girl touched her she looked strangely pale and shaken.

“I—I do not know, but I feel afraid,” she confessed, looking round in a furtive, terrified fashion. “I am not in the least a nervous person usually, Miss Hargreave. I came here believing that all would come right in time, and that we should have Mary back, but when I touched her clothes the oddest feeling came over me—a sort of dread of something unutterably evil, and with it a sure foreboding that I shall never see Mary again. Some terrible fate has overtaken her. I—I feel as though for one moment I had stood in an atmosphere of awful wickedness,” with an irrepressible shudder.

Mavis looked bewildered and half frightened as she drew the other away gently.

“You are overwrought, over-excited, that must be it. I have been in the room ever so many times and touched her things often, and I never had the feelings you describe. But”—closing the door behind them—“I am sure you ought not to stay longer to-day. You can come again another time, you know. You will be only too welcome to any help we can give you. We should be delighted to have the mystery cleared up.”

Some of the colour was coming back to Charlotte’s face.

“I am ashamed of myself for having such fancies,” she said energetically, “and for giving way to them and talking about them to you. It was as clear a case of nerves as I ever saw. I can’t understand it, but I suppose the fact of the matter is that I have been overworked lately.”

“That was it, I expect,” Mavis agreed, glancing at her companion a little curiously as she came down the stairs. With her usually florid colour returning and her brisk, decided walk she scarcely looked a likely subject for a nervous attack, Mavis thought.

“Can you tell me which door she went out by?” Charlotte resumed abruptly.

Mavis shook her head.

“That is one of the points we have never been able to make out; but you shall hear. Jenkins!” she called out to the old butler, who was crossing the hall. “Nurse Gidden wants to ask you a question.”

Charlotte stepped forward.

“I should like to know how Nurse Marston went out of the house—I mean, by what door.”

The old man raised his hands.

“I wish I could tell you. All I know is that at sunset by her ladyship’s orders, ever since last autumn, I have locked all the doors except the front one, and kept the keys myself, and fastened the windows. They were all closed that night as usual.”

Charlotte looked amazed.

“But how did she go—”

Jenkins shook his head.

“I don’t know how. It’s one of the things I have never been able to fathom. Seeing that the young woman did not put on her outdoor things it didn’t look as if she meant to go away, and I have sometimes been tempted to think—saving your presence, Miss Mavis—as she never did go out of the house.”

“What do you mean? ‘‘Charlotte stared at him.

Jenkins passed his hand over his white hair.

“Sometimes when I’m by myself, I think as she is still in the Manor. There’s queer holes and hiding-places in these old buildings, and who knows but she may have tumbled into something that we none of us know of? There, I mustn’t talk to you young ladies like this—and Mr. Garth is coming out.”

“Will you come in and rest a while?” Mavis said, turning towards the morning-room.

Charlotte drew back.

“I think I will be getting into the fresh air to think things over, if you please, Miss Hargreave,” she said. “This is as about as queer a tangle as I ever heard of.”

When Mavis had said good-bye, as Nurse Gidden was crossing the hall Garth Davenant stepped forward.

“I wish you success,” he said pleasantly. “Rest assured that anything that I could do to elucidate matters should be done at once.”

The woman did not take the proffered hand. Her sharp eyes met his coolly.

“Thank you, Mr. Garth Davenant, but as matters stand now I would rather not! It may be that some day I may know the truth and be ready to apologize to you, but it is best to be straightforward, I think, always, and I don’t feel to-day as if I could bring myself to it. That is a fact!”