Читать книгу The Mysteries of Heron Dyke (Vol. 1-3) - T. W. Speight - Страница 6

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Forty-five years, with all their manifold changes, had come and gone since Squire Denison, of Heron Dyke, died in his lodgings in Bloomsbury Square, London.

It was the height of the London season, and at Mrs. Carlyon's house at Bayswater a small party were assembled in honour of the twenty-first birthday of her niece, Miss Ella Winter. Mrs. Carlyon, who had been a widow for several years, was still a handsome woman, although she could count considerably more than forty summers. Her house was a good one, pleasantly situated, and well furnished. She kept her brougham and half-a-dozen servants, and nothing pleased her better than to see herself surrounded by young people. Most enjoyable to her were those times when Miss Winter was allowed by her great-uncle, the present Squire Denison, of Heron Dyke, to exchange for a few weeks the quietude of the country for the gaieties of Bayswater and the delights of the London season. Such visits, however, were few and far between, and were appreciated accordingly.

To-day some ten or a dozen friends were dining with Mrs. Carlyon. One of them was little Freddy Bootle, with his little fluffy moustache, his eye-glass, and his short-cut flaxen hair parted down the middle. Freddy was universally acknowledged to be one of the best-hearted fellows in the world, and one of the most easily imposed upon. He was well connected, and was a junior partner in the great East-end brewery firm of Fownes, Bootle and Bootle. He was in love with Miss Winter, and had proposed to her a year ago. Although unsuccessful in his suit, his feelings remained unchanged, and he was not without hope that Ella would one day look on him with more favourable eyes. Ella and he remained the best of friends. That little episode of the declaration in the conservatory, which to him had been so momentous an affair, had been to her no more than a passing vexation.

Another of the gentlemen whom it may be as well to introduce is Philip Cleeve, son of Lady Cleeve, of Homedale, near Nullington. He and Miss Winter are great friends. Philip is in love with Maria Kettle, the only daughter of the Vicar of Nullington. What a handsome fellow he is, with his brown curling hair, his laughing hazel eyes, and his ever-ready smile. Ella sometimes wonders how Maria Kettle can resist his pleasant manners and fascinating ways. There is no more general favourite anywhere than Philip Cleeve. The worst his friends could say of him was that he was given to be a little careless in money matters--and his purse was a very slender one. Between ourselves, Philip was sometimes hard up for pocket-money: though, perhaps, these same friends suspected it not.

Dinner was over, and the ladies had returned to the drawing-room, when Mrs. Carlyon was called downstairs, and a couple of minutes later Ella was sent for. A gentleman had called, Captain Lennox, bringing with him a birthday gift for Ella, from Mr. Denison, of Heron Dyke. The Captain had accidentally met Mr. Denison the day previously, and happening to mention that he was about to run up to London on a flying visit, the latter had asked him to take charge of and deliver to his niece a certain little parcel which he did not feel quite easy about entrusting to the post. This parcel the Captain now delivered into Ella's hands. On being opened, the contents proved to be a pair of diamond and pearl ear-rings.

Mrs. Carlyon at once gave Captain Lennox a cordial invitation to join the party upstairs, which he as cordially accepted. They had never met before; but Ella had some acquaintance with the Captain and his widowed sister, who lived with him in Norfolk. The Captain and his sister had come strangers to Nullington some six months previously, and finding the place to their liking, had, after a fortnight's sojourn at an hotel, taken The Lilacs, a pretty cottage ornée. Captain Lennox was a tall, thin, fair-haired man about forty years of age. He had clear-cut aquiline features, wore a moustache and long whiskers, and was always faultlessly dressed.

"How was my uncle looking, Captain Lennox?" asked Ella, somewhat anxiously, when the ear-rings had been duly examined and admired.

"Certainly quite as well as I ever saw him look."

"I am glad of that. I had a letter from him three days ago, in which he said that he had not felt better for years. But that is a phrase he nearly always makes use of when he writes to me. He does it to satisfy me. When his health is in question, Uncle Gilbert's statements are sometimes to be taken with a grain of salt."

"Now that Captain Lennox has assured you that your uncle is no worse than usual, you can afford to give me another week at Bayswater," said Mrs. Carlyon.

Ella smiled and shook her head.

"I must go back next Monday without fail."

"You are as obstinate as the Squire himself," cried her aunt. "I have a great mind to write and tell him that he need not expect you before the twentieth."

"He will expect me back on the thirteenth," said Ella. "And I would not disappoint him for a great deal."

"Well, well, you must have your own way, I suppose. All the same, it is a great deprivation to me. But those good people upstairs will think that I am lost, so come along, both of you."

At this juncture a fresh arrival was announced. It was Mr. Conroy, special artist and correspondent for The Illustrated Globe, whose vivid letters from the seat of war had been so widely read of late. Mrs. Carlyon received him with warmth.

"I hope you have brought some of your sketches with you, as you so kindly promised," she said, when greetings were over.

"My portfolio is in the hall," he replied. "But you must not expect to see anything very finished. In fact, my sketches are all in the rough, just as I jotted them down immediately after the events I have attempted to portray."

"That will only serve to render them the more interesting. They will seem like veritable pulsations of that awful struggle," said Mrs. Carlyon, as she rang the bell and ordered the portfolio to be brought upstairs. Then she introduced Conroy to her niece, Miss Winter: and he gave a perceptible start.

"They have met before," thought Captain Lennox to himself. He was looking on from his seat close by, and he watched narrowly for a gleam of recognition between them. But no such look came into the eyes of either. The Captain, who had a keen nose for anything not above board, turned the matter over in his mind. "That start had a meaning in it," he mused. "There's more under the surface than shows itself at present."

Conroy never forgot the picture that stamped itself on his memory the first moment he set eyes on Ella Winter. He saw before him a tall, slender girl, whose gait and movements were as free and stately as those of a queen. She had hair of the colour of chestnuts when at their ripest, and large luminous eyes of darkest blue. The eyebrows were thick and nearly straight, and darker in colour than her hair. Her face was a delightful one in the mingled expression of gravity and sweetness--the gravity was often near akin to melancholy--that habitually rested upon it. A forehead broad, but not very high; a straight, clear-cut nose with delicate nostrils; lips that were, perhaps, a trifle over-full, but that lacked nothing of purpose or decision; a firm, rounded chin with one dainty dimple in it: such was Ella Winter as first seen by Edward Conroy. This evening she wore a dress of rich but sober-tinted marone, relieved with lace of a creamy white.

"I have often wished to see her," muttered Conroy to himself. "Now I have seen her, and I am satisfied."

Mrs. Carlyon had the portfolio taken into her boudoir so as to be clear of the music and conversation in the larger room, and there a little group gathered round to examine and comment upon the sketches, and to listen to Conroy's few direct words of explanation whenever any such were needed.

Ella stood and looked on, listening to Mr. Conroy's remarks and to the comments of those around her, and only giving utterance to a monosyllable now and then. "This man differs, somehow, from other men," was her unspoken thought. "He is a man carved out by hand; not one of a thousand turned out by lathe, and all so much alike that you cannot tell one from another. He has individuality. He interests me."

She was taking but little apparent interest in what was going on before her; but, for all that, she lost no word that was said. She stood, fan in hand, her arms crossed before her, her fingers interknit, her eyes, with a look of grave, sweet inquiry in them, bent on Conroy's face. "Aunt shall ask him to leave his portfolio till tomorrow," she thought, "and after these people are gone I can have his sketches all to myself."

Conroy was indeed of a different mould from those butterflies of fashion who ordinarily fluttered around Miss Winter. He was certainly not a handsome man, in the general acceptation of the term. His face was dark and somewhat rugged for a man still young, but lined with thought, and instinct with energy. He had seen his twenty-eighth birthday, but looked older. Edward Conroy had gone through much hardship and many dangers in the pursuit of his profession. Already his black hair was growing thin about the temples, and was streaked here and there with a fine line of grey. The predominant expression of his face was determination. He looked like a man not easily moved--whom, indeed, it would be almost impossible to move when once he had made up his mind to a certain course. And yet his face was one that women and children seemed to trust intuitively. At times a wonderful softness, an expression of almost feminine tenderness, would steal into his dark brown eyes. Tears had nothing to do with it: he was a man to whom tears were unknown. The sweetest springs are those which lie farthest from the surface and are the most difficult to reach. From the first, Ella felt that she had to contend against a will that was stronger than her own, From the first she could not help looking up to and deferring to Edward Conroy, as she had never deferred to any man but her uncle. Probably she liked him none the less for that.

When Conroy's sketches had been looked at and commented upon, the majority of the company went back into the drawing-room. Dancing now began, and Ella found herself engaged to one partner after another. Conroy sat down in a corner of the boudoir next to old-fashioned, plain-looking Miss Wallace, whom nobody seemed to notice much, and was soon deep in conversation with her. Ella was annoyed two or three times at detecting herself looking round the room and wondering what had become of him. Somehow she seemed to pay less attention than usual to the small-talk of her partners. They found her indifferent and distrait.

"She may be rich, and she may be handsome," remarked young Pawson of the Guards to one of his friends, "but she is not the kind of woman that I should care to marry. She has a way of freezing a fellow and making him feel small; and that's uncomfortable, to say the least of it."

By-and-by Conroy strolled into the drawing-room, and Captain Lennox, who happened to be watching Ella at the time, saw the sudden light that leapt into her eyes the moment she caught sight of his form in the doorway.

"She's interested in him already," muttered the Captain to himself. "This Mr. Conroy is playing some deep game, or I am very much mistaken. I wonder where he has met her before?"

"How do you think my niece is looking?" asked Mrs. Carlyon of Captain Lennox, a little later on, as she glanced fondly at Ella.

"Uncommonly well," replied the Captain. "She always does look well."

"Ah no, not always. She was not looking well when she came to me."

Captain Lennox considered. He also glanced across at Ella.

"I have noticed one thing, Mrs. Carlyon--that she has at times a strangely grave look in her eyes for one so young. It is as if she had something or other in her thoughts that she finds difficult to forget."

"That is just where the matter lies. How can she forget? Since that strange affair that happened last February at Heron Dyke----"

"Oh, that was a regular mystery," interrupted the Captain, aroused to eager interest. "It is one still."

"And it has left its effects upon poor Ella. A mystery: yes, you are right in calling it so; sure never was a greater mystery enacted in melodrama. Ella's stay with me has, no doubt, benefited her in a degree, but I am sure it lies in her thoughts almost night and day."

"Well, it was a most unaccountable thing. I fancy it troubles Mr. Denison."

"It must trouble all who inhabit Heron Dyke. For myself, I do not think I could bear to live there. Were it my home I should leave it."

Captain Lennox stroked his fair whiskers in surprise.

"Leave it!" he exclaimed. "Leave Heron Dyke!"

"I should. I should be afraid to stay. But then I am a woman, and women are apt to be timorous. If--if Katherine----"

Mrs. Carlyon broke off with a shiver. She rose from her seat and moved away, as though the subject were getting too much for her.

A strange mystery it indeed was, as the reader will admit when he shall hear its particulars later. But it was not the greatest mystery enacted, or to be enacted, at Heron Dyke.

"I have a favour to ask you, Mr. Conroy," began Ella, when they found themselves apart from the rest for a moment.

"You have but to name it," he answered, a smile in his speaking eyes as they glanced into hers.

"Will you let your portfolio remain here until tomorrow? I want to look at the sketches all by myself."

"They interest you?"

"Very much indeed. How I should like to have been in Paris during that terrible siege!"

"You ought to be thankful that you were a hundred miles away from it."

"But surely I might have been of some sort of use. I could have nursed among the wounded--or helped to distribute food to the starving--or read to the dying. I should have found something to do, and have done it."

"Still, I cannot help saying that you were much better away. You can form but a faint idea of the terror and agony of that awful time."

"But there were women who went through it all, and why should not I have done the same? My life seems so useless--so purposeless. I feel as if I had been sent into a world where there was nothing left for me to do."

"So long as poverty and sickness, want and misery abound, there is surely enough to do for earnest workers of every kind."

"But how to set about doing it? I feel as if my hands were tied, and as if I could not cut the cord that binds me."

"And yet your life is not without its interests. Your uncle, for instance----"

"You have heard about my uncle!" she said, in her quick way, looking at him with a little surprise.

"Yes, I have heard of Mr. Denison, of Heron Dyke. There is nothing very strange in that."

"Ah, yes, I think I am of some use to him," said Ella, softly. "I could not leave Uncle Gilbert for anything or anybody. And I have my school in the village, and two or three poor old people to look after. My life is not altogether an empty one; but what I do seems so small and trifling in comparison with what I think I should like to do. After all, these may be only the foolish longings of an ignorant girl who has seen little or nothing of the world."

Mr. Bootle came up and claimed Ella's hand for the next dance. The special correspondent's face softened as he looked after her.

"What a sweet creature she is!" he said to himself. "To-morrow I will try to sketch her face from memory."

Philip Cleeve was one of the earliest to leave. He had complained of a severe headache for the last hour, and had scarcely danced at all. A little later Mr. Bootle and Captain Lennox went off arm-in-arm. They had never met before this evening, but they seemed to have taken a mutual liking to one another. When Conroy took his leave, Mrs. Carlyon invited him to call again: and he silently promised himself it should be before Ella Winter's departure for Norfolk. But, as circumstances fell out, it was a promise that he could not keep.

Two o'clock was striking as Mrs. Carlyon sat down on her dressing-room sofa after the departure of her last guest. Taking out her ear-rings, she handed them to her maid, Higson.

"I am glad things passed off nicely," she remarked to Ella, who had stepped in for a few moments' chat. "All the same, I am not sorry it's over," she added, with a sigh of weariness.

"Neither am I," acknowledged Ella. "It would take me a long time to get used to your London hours, Aunt Gertrude."

"That Captain Lennox seems a very pleasant man. Very stylish too; but he--Higson, what in the world are you fidgeting about?" Mrs. Carlyon broke off to ask.

"I am looking for your jewel-case, ma'am," was the maid's rejoinder; "I can't see it anywhere. Perhaps you have put it away?" she added, turning to her mistress.

"I have neither seen it nor touched it since I dressed for dinner," said Mrs. Carlyon. "It was on the dressing-table then. I dare say you have put it somewhere yourself."

Higson, the patient, knew that she had not, though she made no reply. She continued her search, Ella turning to help her. The maid's face gradually acquired a look of consternation.

"It is certainly not here, aunt," cried Ella.

"What's that, my dear?" asked Mrs. Carlyon, with a start, rousing herself from the half-doze into which she had fallen. "I say that Higson must have forgotten what she did with it."

But Higson had not. She assured her mistress that the jewel-box was left on the dressing-table. At nine o'clock, when she went in to prepare the room for the night, she saw it there, safe and untouched.

Without another word, Mrs. Carlyon set to work herself. The dressing-room had two doors, one of which opened into Mrs. Carlyon's bedroom, while the other opened into the boudoir where the little group had assembled to examine Mr. Conroy's sketches. After searching the dressing-room thoroughly, and convincing herself that the case was not there, the bedroom was submitted to a similar process with a like result.

Mrs. Carlyon grew alarmed. The case had contained jewels of the value of more than three hundred pounds, besides certain souvenirs pertaining to dear ones whom she had lost, which no money could have bought. As a last resource the boudoir was searched, although it was difficult to imagine how the jewel-case could by any possibility have found its way there. Satisfied at length that further search, for the present at all events, was useless, Mrs. Carlyon sat down with despair at her heart and tears in her eyes.

"Are the servants gone to bed yet?" she asked.

Higson thought not. When she came up they were clearing away the refreshments.

"Go and call them," said her mistress, rather sharply. "But don't say what for."

"Higson seems very much put out," observed Ella, when the maid was gone.

"Well she may be," said Mrs. Carlyon. "She is a faithful creature, and has been with me nearly a dozen years. All my servants are faithful, and have lived with me more or less a prolonged time," she added emphatically. "I could never suspect one of them; but it is right they should be questioned. I could trust them with all I possess."

The servants filed in, five or six of them, one after another; an expression on each face which seemed to ask, "Why are we wanted here at this uncanny hour?"

In a few quiet sentences Mrs. Carlyon detailed her loss, and questioned each of them in turn as to whether they could throw any light on the affair. One and all denied all knowledge of it: as indeed their mistress had quite expected that they would do. No one save Higson had set foot either in the bedroom or dressing-room since ten o'clock the previous forenoon. There was nothing for it but to let them go back. Higson, who was crying by this time, was told a few minutes later that she too had better go: Mrs. Carlyon would to-night undress herself. The woman went out with her apron to her eyes.

"I shan't get a wink of sleep all this blessed night," she cried with a sob. "Hanging would be too good, ma'am, for them that have robbed you."

Mrs. Carlyon and Ella sat and looked at each other. The uncertainty was growing painfully oppressive. Had there been any strange waiters in the house, they might have been suspected: but, except on some very rare and grand occasion, Mrs. Carlyon employed only her own servants. And those servants were above suspicion.

"Was the door that opens from the dressing-room into the boudoir locked, or otherwise?" asked Ella.

"To my certain knowledge it was locked till past ten o'clock: and I will tell you how I happen to know it," replied Mrs. Carlyon. "Some time after the exhibition of Mr. Conroy's sketches I went into the boudoir and found it empty of everybody except Philip Cleeve; he was lying on the sofa with one of his bad headaches. Thinking that my salts might be of service to him, I came into the dressing-room to get them. I have a clear recollection of finding the door between the two rooms locked then. I unlocked it, and having found the salts, I went back and gave them to Philip; but whether I relocked the door after me is more than I can say. Probably I did not. After a few words to Philip I left him, still lying on the sofa, and did not go near the boudoir again."

A pause ensued. It seemed as if there was nothing more to be said. Not the slightest shadow of suspicion could rest on Philip Cleeve; the idea was preposterous. Both the ladies had known him since he was a boy, and his mother, Lady Cleeve, was one of Mrs. Carlyon's oldest friends. And, that suspicion could attach itself to any of the guests, was equally out of the question. Still, the one strange fact remained, that the casket could not be found.

"We had better go to bed, I think," said Mrs. Carlyon at last, in a fretful voice. "If we sit up all night the case won't come back to us of its own accord."

"I am ready to say with Higson that I shan't get a wink of sleep," remarked Ella, as she rose to obey. "One thing seems quite certain, Aunt Gertrude--that there must be a thief somewhere."