The Shadow In The House Read online

  “That’s nonsense, Mr Armstrength,” she said. “Rodney Peeler is nine years old. He is thoroughly spoilt, overfed and precocious. Yesterday afternoon he called me by a name I can only hope he learned in the street and not at home. When I told him it was wrong he laughed at me and repeated it. So I slapped his arm and sent him out in the garden to cool his heels. He was not hurt. There was not even a red mark on his arm.”

  “A red mark on his arm?” screamed Mr Armstrength. “Good heavens, girl, do you realize that Mrs Peeler has had a nerve specialist at her house half the night? What about the poor little fellow’s repressions? An incident like this may cause a fixation which will throw his whole subconscious out of gear.”

  “The sooner he has a fixation that it’s wrong to swear the better,” said Mary before she could stop herself.

  Leonard Armstrength took a deep breath.

  “A manic type,” he said. “That I should have had you in the school … I can never forgive myself. You will leave this place at once of course. Never expect to get any sort of reference or recommendation from me. Indeed, I shall feel it my duty to see that you are never again employed to take care of innocent children, and I flatter myself that my name carries some weight in scholastic circles. You may go.”

  Mary turned on her heel. The injustice of his accusation was so great that it left her speechless. In those few minutes she had seen the man as he really was, a crank with a great sense of his own importance and a streak of meanness which would lead him to hound her from post to post if she attempted to enter his world again. She knew without making a fight for it that her career as a schoolmistress was ended.

  She had reached the doorway when he called her back.

  “Miss Coleridge.”

  “Yes?” She swung round to see his thin lips parted and his small eyes dark and narrow.

  “I shall find it my duty to write to Mrs Briden and report to her the way in which you have repaid her kindness.”

  Mary looked at him steadily. He was enjoying himself, she noticed, and the sight of his secret pleasure brought home the helplessness of her position more strongly than anything else could have done. He laughed at her expression.

  “You’re beginning to think now, are you?” he said. “You should have done that before you gave way to your terrible impulse to torture a child. Look for work but don’t expect me to help you. I’m afraid you may have some difficulty: jobs are not easy to find.”

  Mary fled. In the hall Jenny was waiting with her hat and gloves.

  “The mistress told me to give these to you here, miss,” she said, “and to tell you that you wasn’t to go down to the schoolroom among the children. Oh, miss, is there anything wrong?”

  Mary took the hat and fixed it on her curls with shaking fingers.

  “Everything, Jenny,” she said in a voice which made the little girl stare at her. “Everything in the world.”

  CHAPTER II

  Nothing to Lose

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Mary came slowly up the stairs at Merton House. Her visits to a dozen employment agencies had not been very encouraging. She could neither type nor write shorthand, her knowledge of dressmaking was elementary, and her complete lack of references made the astute women behind the big desks raise their eyebrows dubiously.

  She was frightened. Long afterwards, when she looked back upon it, it seemed to her that it was then that the first manifestation of the terror that was to come appeared to her. At the time she thought it was the helplessness of her position which gave her that odd apprehension of horror to come. She was alone, terribly alone. The loss of her job meant more to her than mere temporary loss of employment. Mrs Briden was a powerful person in her own small way, and Mrs Briden was going to be very angry with her. A small village may often be entirely ruled by its squiress, and, searching round in her mind for someone to whom she could turn for recommendation or advice, the girl realized with a sudden thrill that there was no one, no one at all, no one in the world. She longed helplessly for Peter; not the Peter of this morning, embarrassed, frightened of her, but the Peter of last week who had been a friend.

  He had gone already. Old Stephen had told her the news with ghoulish relish the moment she entered the door, and Mary had fled on up the stairs, unable to face the old man’s inquisitive glance.

  There are moments in everyone’s life when the ordinary misfortunes and antagonisms which are part of the business of living total up or, crowding too quickly upon one another, produce a formidable array before which the mind panics, but fortunately it is not everyone who at such a moment is confronted by an opportunity to take a great risk.

  It was at the moment when Mary, frightened, helpless and temporarily demoralized, paused outside her own door that the shadow’s wing passed over her and she stepped into a darkness from which there might never have been any escape.

  Someone was in the room, someone who sang softly to herself in a deep throaty contralto. Considerably astonished, she opened the door, which was unlocked, and went in.

  Miss Mason, clad in a golden evening gown, was parading in front of the mirror, while at her feet, over the bed and on every chair was strewn a profusion of dresses and underclothes.

  She looked up as Mary entered and raised a strong brown arm in mock salute.

  “Hello, Lovely,” she said. “Look at me.”

  “It’s beautiful.” Mary was too surprised to make any other comment.

  “You’re telling me,” said Miss Mason complacently as she twisted round to see her bare shoulder blades framed in the metallic folds of the gown. “I hope you don’t mind me coming in here. I didn’t know it was your room. The mirror in my cabin has got chicken pox under the glass, and this is the only decent one on the floor. I tried ’em all.”

  “But how did you get in?”

  The spectacle of any of the other boarders on the floor, the nervous Mr Clark, the prim Mrs Fisher or the irascible Major Breen discovering such an apparition in their bedrooms temporarily took Mary’s breath away.

  “Oh, all the locks are the same. My key fitted them all,” Miss Mason explained airily. “I bet you’ve lived in this dump for years without finding that out. That’s what comes of having a trusting disposition. Now you won’t feel nearly so safe tucked up under Granny’s little old skin rug, will you? Still, we needn’t tell the boy friends. Sit on the bed, Pretty. Heave that junk onto the floor. I will say it for Granny, she keeps this old morgue of hers plenty clean.”

  Mary sat down on the edge of her own bed, and Miss Mason took off the gold dress and scrambled into another.

  “I’m going to light out of here tomorrow,” she said, a frown appearing for an instant on her forehead. “Got to go and see my auntie and plod all over ploughed fields. Am I delighted! The thought of smelling wet earth after a sight of this little village just makes me sick.”

  Wet earth. Mary’s mind jumped involuntarily to the wide fields and rain-soaked woods of a little Sussex village, so far away now that it might have been at the other end of the world, a village where the bonfires sent spirals of sweet acrid smoke floating up through the valley and where there was a shabby old house with paraffin lamps and red curtains and a tired country doctor coming home through the dusk to his tea. Her eyes filled with irrepressible tears, and she suddenly swung round and buried her face in the pillow.

  “Holy Joe!” said Miss Mason, bundling a train of green satin under her arm and striding across the room towards her. “What’s the matter, kid?”

  Half an hour later Mary was bathing her eyes at the ancient washstand in the corner and Miss Mason was sitting upon the bed, her knees drawn up to her chin and her green satin train wrapped round her large, shapely feet.

  “Tough,” she was saying. “Plenty tough. No kin at all, you say? No friends, and now your job going back on you. Any boy friend anywhere?”

  “N-no,” said Mary. “Not—I mean, not now. He never was a boy friend, really—not what you mean, a sweetheart. Anyway, he’s gone.�
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  Miss Mason cocked an eye at her.

  “Ever thought of the stage?”

  Mary was astonished.

  “The stage? Oh no, I wouldn’t be any good on the stage. I’d never get on, for a start.”

  “I shall,” said Miss Mason with conviction. “And when I get there I’m going to stick, believe me. The trouble is it’s got to be done in a hurry. It’s only this darned family trip that’s holding me up. Unless——I say, I’ve got it!”

  She got off the bed and went over to the other girl. She was excited, and her big hands gripped Mary’s shoulders with unsuspected strength.

  “How old are you, kid?” she demanded.

  “Twenty-two last August.”

  Miss Mason considered.

  “Ten months younger than me,” she said. “Look here, Lovely, you listen to me.”

  She sat down on the bed again and began to talk.

  “I’m Marie-Elizabeth Mason, and I was brought up in a little one-horse town called New Bolton in New South Wales. I was quartered with a family called Hendricks when I was a kid, and they looked after me. The only kin I have is an aunt and her husband over here in England, and I guess they’re pretty wealthy. However, they’re old and sort of quiet. Understand?”

  Mary nodded. There was a forcefulness about Marie-Elizabeth Mason which could not be ignored.

  “Well, this old aunt, Mrs de Liane—Aunt Eva, I call her—has been badgering me to come over and see her for two years now. Said she’d send the fare ‘n’ everything. But I wasn’t so keen. You see, there was an actor back home who …” She paused and regarded Mary reflectively. “I guess I needn’t go into that just now. Anyway, I didn’t want to leave home just then for any visit. However, three months ago she wrote kind of urgent. She was getting old and wanted to see her first husband’s sister’s child before she died, and so on. And she sent the cash. It was a lot of money; return fare, first class, and a bit over. I got a grand idea. I came over steerage. I didn’t buy my fare back, and I spent a lot of cash buying these clothes. I’m going to get on the stage over here in the short time I have before the money gives out. The only thing that’s stopping me is this darned visit to the country. The old girl may expect me to stay with her the whole time while I ought to be getting busy. Now do you see where you come in?”

  “No,” said Mary violently.

  “You’re going on that visit instead of me,” said Miss Mason in a tone of certainty. “We’ll swop identities.”

  “No,” said Mary again. “Don’t be silly. You can’t do things like that in England.”

  “Can’t I?” said Marie-Elizabeth Mason, and laughed as she spoke. “You just watch me.”

  Mary looked at her and marvelled. There are people who are possessed of some indefinable power of personality which lifts them out of the common, and as the younger girl glanced at this tall red-headed young savage she knew of a certainty that here was the sort of person who might get away with anything.

  “Look here, kid,” said Marie-Elizabeth Mason persuasively, “there’s an old woman living in the country with an older husband. She’s sentimental and dull as ditch-water. She hasn’t seen me since I was three months old. She doesn’t know a thing about me because I hate writing letters. I sent her cables over this visit business. She hasn’t seen a photograph because I’ve never sent one, and, above all, she wants to like me. She wants to find me a dear, sweet, innocent little girl who will feed the pigeons and take Rover for a walk and say howdy to the neighbours in a good little dress with a high neck. Why the heck shouldn’t you go? You’re what she wants!”

  Mary hesitated. There was a forthrightness about Marie-Elizabeth which made her reasoning sound like common sense.

  “If she was important I wouldn’t suggest it,” she went on, “but she’s not. She’s just a poor old woman who wants to see something young of her own family in the house for once, and may leave me two or three hundred quid in a year or two if she likes me. Now, look at me. … She won’t just not like me: she’ll have forty fits. I can see that. But if she sees you she’ll be as pleased as Punch and die happy. You’ll be doing it for her sake, poor old girl. Here’s the proposition. You’re out of a job. You need a holiday and a spot of home life. You go down there for the month that I’m supposed to be in England, play the sweet little innocent you are and take whatever comes along. Don’t do anything to queer my chances of a legacy, but you’re welcome to any present or pickings you can get out of the business. I don’t mean to put it as crudely as that, but you see what I mean. You please the old lady, and if she cares to give you a pair of diamond earrings that belonged to her great-grandmother you take ’em and hang onto ’em. Anyway, stay for a month, and that’ll give me time to see how the land lies in the theatre world. If I strike lucky, as I shall, you’ll have done me a great service. If I don’t you needn’t worry about me. I’ll work my passage back as a stewardess. I’m that sort of person.

  “Come on, kid, what have you got to lose?”

  It was the final appeal which decided Mary. “What have you got to lose?” The question fitted in so well with her mood.

  “Nothing,” she said bitterly. “Still, it’ll be rather awkward for both of us if I’m found out.”

  “There’s nothing for anyone to find out,” said Marie-Elizabeth. “Remember your name and don’t talk too much about Australia, and you’ll be okay. I’ll give you all the facts you have to know. Come on, do it for Auntie. Think how she’ll feel if I turn up in answer to her prayers. I’m not a riot in an advanced boardinghouse, so the Lord knows what effect I’d have in the unspoilt country. Besides, I like this town, and now I’m here I’m going to see it. If you won’t go I’ll wire her I’m not coming and risk losing a legacy and breaking the old dear’s heart. I’d half made up my mind to do that this morning.”

  Mary looked up.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “I certainly do.”

  For some time Mary sat silent. A recklessness completely foreign to her nature was slowly creeping over her. She thought of the old woman in the country, anxious to mother someone so different from the vigorous, independent figure at her side, and she saw herself alone and unfriended and so very suitable for the role of homecomer.

  Presently she stirred and uttered a decision which was to lead her into a labyrinth of sorrow and fierce joy undreamed of.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  CHAPTER III

  Baron’s Tye

  “THE MISTRESS sends her apologies for not coming to meet you, miss, but the doctor doesn’t advise her to drive in the damp.”

  A chauffeur in neat livery bent before the girl as he spoke and picked up her suitcase from the wet stones of the deserted little railway platform.

  Mary nodded to him, smiling mechanically. She was speechless, not with fear as she had anticipated, but with an indefinable sense of homecoming which took her breath away. She had not realized before how different was the warm, dry air of the city from this soft elixir of country breath, sweet with the tang of wet ferns and oak leaves rotting cleanly in the grass. Here in this quiet wayside station Merton House, Leonard Armstrength and the magnificent Miss Mason seemed to be the dream and this familiar piece the reality.

  In the back of a huge old-fashioned Daimler, whose age had added to rather than detracted from its dignity, she leant among the cushions and tried to prepare herself for an ordeal. But her mind refused to consider her project in any other light than a return to sanctuary.

  It was a long, lonely drive through a maze of wet yellow and red leaves. Great oaks and elms hung over the path, and on either side of the road the deep chocolate of the newly turned earth spread out until it mingled with the misty distance.

  Mary clutched her handbag, which contained her new identity, but her mind was not upon the story she was going to tell, nor did it rest upon the future at all. She was enthralled by the magic of the present.

  “The mistress is looking forward to seeing you, miss.�
�� The chauffeur spoke over his shoulder. “It’s lonely for her and the master down here, so far from everyone. There’s the village. The house is just down here. Baron’s Tye,” he added, not without a certain pride, as he swung the car down a narrow gravel pathway between two immense cedars which made an archway over high wrought-iron gates.

  Mary caught her first glimpse of the house through the trees, and her heart turned over. The long, low lines of Baron’s Tye, lying gracefully in a nest of trees, were gracious and lovely. It was a house whose original builder had been inspired to create a home, and generations of successive owners had caught some of his passionate spirit, so that each alteration and addition had been made lovingly and with thought.

  The great door stood wide above a long low paved terrace, and, as Mary stepped out of the car and moved timidly up the shallow steps, a silhouette appeared in the arched doorway, and a voice as gracious and as welcoming as the house itself cried impulsively:

  “Mary, my dear!”

  The girl found herself clasped gently by the shoulders, and a little old lady who appeared to be an incarnate bundle of real lace, black satin, gold chains and eau de cologne kissed her softly on the cheek.

  “Come in,” she said. “Come in. Tea’s ready. Dorothea, take Miss Mason’s bag up to the blue room. Well, my pet, let me take a look at you.”

  A long, low room with carved beams, a stone fireplace enclosing a log fire, soft hangings, prim, old-fashioned maids in starched lace caps who hovered and fussed, warmth and a smell of old wood, sweet, clean stone floors and dried flowers, these multiple impressions crowded on the girl and overwhelmed her. She looked round, shy and frightened, her eyes wide and the colour bright in her thin cheeks. Her hostess peered up at her, and Mary took a deep breath.

  She saw a little old lady with bright, laughing blue eyes, soft grey curls and a placid face which told of great beauty long ago. She seemed quite overjoyed to see her visitor, and the girl’s conscience pricked her unmercifully.