Scandal at High Chimneys (3 page)

A guard with flag and whistle moved past outside, locking each compartment-door and taking away the key. The whistle blew soon afterwards.

There were cries and squeals of alarm from inside third-class carriages without glass in their windows. Amid fire-glare from the locomotive, with a chug and thud of steam shuddering through ten carriages of three compartments each, the great driving-wheels gripped and the train began to move.

‘Gently!’ thought Clive.

He was born in this railway age. He had no qualms about being locked up here, shut away beyond escape or communication with another compartment, in a train hurtling along at fifty miles an hour.

But the different looks on the faces of his companions, so far as he could see them in thick gloom, disturbed him not a little.

“Mr. Strickland,” said Matthew Damon, in a harsh and troubled voice, “you will permit me to pursue this matter a little further. You are not moved, I hope, by any misguided sense of loyalty to my son? You are not shielding him?”

“Great Scott, no! Shielding him from what?”

“Be good enough, young man, to answer my question.”

Wrath touched Clive, who sat up as straight as the other man.

“Then state your question, Mr. Damon.”

“How did you and Victor employ last evening?”

“There’s very little to tell.”

There was very little, at least, that Clive cared to tell. Victor had dined with him at Bryce’s Club, where Victor got tolerably drunk. There would have been no harm in mentioning this; Victor’s father was addicted to brandy-and-soda and encouraged the old customs. But Victor, though always amiable in liquor, had made his usual announcement that he was going out to find female company of a more than dubious sort.

To have let him go out on his own would have been unthinkable. A man who strayed one step beyond the bright gaslight round the Regent Circus and the top of the Haymarket, especially alone and fuddled, might be set on for his money and beaten within an ace of death. Clive, himself none too sober but an able hand in a fight, had accompanied Victor to look after him.

But he couldn’t tell this to the old man.

They had visited the Argyll Rooms, where there was dancing, though they did not encounter Tress. They looked in at three or four night-haunts, garish boozing-dens of mirrors and plush in which the best-dressed sirens strolled provocatively and champagne cost as much as twenty-five shillings a bottle.

“Victor,” Clive had kept insisting, “what’s wrong at High Chimneys?”

“Can’t tell you, old boy.”

“Then what’s the danger to your sisters?”

“My goo’ friend!” Victor said emotionally, and wept and collapsed.

Clive bundled him into a cab, drove home with him, and carried him upstairs to Victor’s rooms near Portman Square. In the sitting-room, lighting a candle, he had first seen the painting.

It was a portrait in oils, of a girl’s head and shoulders and bust, in a heavy gilt frame above the fireplace. Brown eyes looked back at him, wide open, under a broad forehead and glossy black hair. Intelligence, eagerness even to a touch of impatience, as at hearing nonsense once too often, animated the dark eyebrows and the full-lipped mouth. It showed litheness as well as delicacy, hand clenched at breast.

Victor, sprawled dead drunk on an ottoman, had been unable to speak. But a small metal plate at the foot of the frame was inscribed
Miss Kate Damon, 1865.

Clive remembered all too well how the light of the candle had brought that face out of darkness like a warm and living presence.

“Yes, Mr. Strickland?” prompted Matthew Damon.

The rattle of the railway was in Clive’s ears now. Through the cutting below Westbourne Park Villas, out the long stretch south of Alpert Road, the train gathered speed with a bone-shaking sway and jolt.

“There’s very little to tell,” Clive repeated. “Victor dined with me at my club, and afterwards I walked home with him.”

“Come, young man! You stayed at your club until nearly two o’clock in the morning?”

“I did not say that, sir,” Clive almost snapped. “Afterwards we sat in Victor’s rooms, smoking and talking.”

“Was my son drunk?”

“Yes. Would it not be better, perhaps, to address these questions to Victor himself?”

“I have already done so. That is why I went to London this morning. Victor was still drunk and incoherent.”

Clive still could not understand.

“In any event, sir, he was with me the whole time. Should you doubt my presence in his rooms, I noticed a portrait of Miss Kate Damon which was not there when I called on him a week ago.”

“
That
abominable painting?”

“If you’ll excuse my saying so, it seemed to me a remarkably fine picture.”

“No doubt. It was painted by Mr. Millais. But I had reference to its moral quality. I strongly disapproved of it, and Victor was free to carry it away. Mr. Millais wished to exhibit it at the Royal Academy, if you please, under the obnoxious title of ‘Unfulfillment.’”

The London smoke-pall was clearing away. Quite suddenly, or so it seemed, autumn daylight penetrated through the grimy glass of the windows. Much mud had been trampled into the compartment, Clive saw, but then mud was trampled everywhere.

Matthew Damon sat bolt upright, clutching the shawl round his neck. His tall hat vibrated from the motion of the flying train.

“I have observed in Kate, Mr. Strickland,” the deep voice continued, “a—a certain restlessness which is not present, perhaps surprisingly, in Celia. What do these young people want?”

Clive made no reply; none was expected.

“What do these young people want? Why are they not happy? I am not an unreasonable man, Mr. Strickland. Unlike some bigots, I see no objection to novel-reading or to attendance at the theatre for the best comedy or tragedy. But dancing, and loose talk, and unchaperoned intermingling of the sexes among those of immature years, I cannot and will not tolerate.”

Mr. Damon lifted a powerful right fist and struck the padded arm of the chair.

His wife had been looking out of the window on her left. Her great dove-grey crinoline, on its collapsing framework of watch-spring wire, spread so far round her that her husband sat three or four feet away.

“Surely, Matthew,” she cried, “you attach too much importance to all that? And in particular to what happened last night?”

“I think not, my love.”

“But no harm was done!”

“Harm? What is harm?”

Each time he looked at her, it was with anger and self-distrust mingled with a fierce kind of hunger. Georgette gave him a coy glance, and he edged closer.

“You are all too ignorant of human evil, my love. But I am not. I have spent my life in meeting it and fighting it. I account myself a good judge of truth and falsehood. For instance,” and Mr. Damon’s head swung round, “I put it to you, Mr. Strickland, that you are concealing my son’s behaviour last night because he had engaged himself with some unsavoury adventure in London?”

“I—”

“Yes or no, Mr. Strickland? Yes or no?”

“Let’s say, sir, he might have
wished
for some such thing. But he had taken too much to drink, and he didn’t.”

“Ah! That is better. Will you give me your word as a gentleman that he could not have been at High Chimneys at eleven-thirty last night?”

“High Chimneys? At eleven-thirty Victor and I were just walking into … that is to say, I give you my word he wasn’t within forty miles of High Chimneys.”

“And I accept it,” replied Mr. Damon, studying him during a hard-breathing pause. His fist clenched again. “Well! Such behaviour in a young man (a young man, mark you; not a young lady!) is reprehensible but not unpardonable. Well! I accept it.”

“Look here, sir: why is it so necessary to prove Victor wasn’t at High Chimneys?”

“I scarcely think, Mr. Damon,” interposed Georgette in a lofty tone, “we need bore our guest with trivial domestic affairs.”

“On the contrary, madam. Mr. Strickland, despite his youth, is a highly successful author. He occupies himself with what is called the novel of sensation, endeavouring to surprise us with what we may discover in the final chapters. It is a harmless amusement, and not uninstructive. I assume he will be interested, and I hope he may prove useful.”

Matthew Damon bent forward, one hand gripping the chair-arm and the other holding his shawl.

“Mr. Strickland,” he said, “do you believe in ghosts?”

W
HEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT
it long afterwards, Clive knew he should have seen much evidence in what Matthew Damon said and did not say. But he could not guess that murder had already been planned, or even feel it.

He felt only the roar and jolt of the train, shaking them. Some veer in the wind brought a billow of black smoke and a swirl of sparks from the engine. High Chimneys, in Berkshire, was four miles from Reading; they would be at Reading in less than an hour.

If he saw anything at all, he saw Kate Damon’s pictured face. Since last night it had drawn and fascinated him. He ached to rescue her from imagined dangers, after the fashion of the romances he wrote. But this particular danger he could not take very seriously.

“Believe in ghosts?” he repeated. “No.”

“No! We are too sensible for that; we must look further afield.”

Mr. Damon brooded for a moment, and seemed to shy back at what he imagined.

“The past three months, Mr. Strickland, have been no easy time for me. It is strange that a man may go on for years, almost decades, wilfully blinding himself to what must sooner or later be the result of his own folly. It was not sin; no. But assuredly it was folly. We postpone decisions, in the hope of we know not what. The mind tricks and befools us. And then we are lost.”

He paused.

“Mine is the blame; so be it! Yet this is not to say all. Kate’s restlessness (I call it no worse) and Celia’s nervous state have combined with other circumstances to produce some
malaise.
My wife, good woman that she is—”

Here he stretched out his left hand to Georgette, who pressed it gently in both her hands and gazed out of the window.

“—my wife, being persuaded I must be ill, last week wrote to our London physician. Nonsense! I am not ill.”

“Poor Matthew,” murmured Georgette.

“I am not ill, I say! It would require a bullet to kill me. However, Mr. Strickland, all these remarks are not to our purpose. You may perhaps remember Burbage, my house-steward?”

“Yes; very well.”

“You may also recall that Burbage has a daughter?”

“No, sir. Or, at least, I don’t remember her.”

“Well! Burbage has a daughter named Penelope. For some days she has been paying a visit to her father, being accommodated in a room among the servants on the top floor. Penelope, I should explain, is employed as a governess by a well-to-do family in Wiltshire. She is a young woman educated above her station in life, but well-conducted and sensible and trustworthy.

“Yesterday was Monday, the sixteenth of October. Penelope Burbage asked leave to attend a lecture at St. Thomas’s Hall in Reading that night. She said that she would walk there and back, begging permission for Burbage to admit her if she should be late.

“The members of my household, Mr. Strickland, retire at ten-thirty. At ten-thirty Burbage is accustomed to close and bar all the shutters, and to lock and bar the doors. Such is my ruling; ordinarily I allow no one to be out after that time unless I myself am of the company.

“However!

“On this occasion I felt justified in making an exception. The young woman, of course, could not go unescorted. I instructed my coachman, an elderly married man whose living-quarters are over the stables, to drive Penelope to St. Thomas’s Hall in the trap; to attend the lecture with her; and to drive her home.

“Further! I permitted Burbage to entrust his daughter with a key to the back door, telling him to leave it locked but unbarred. The young woman, I said, might let herself in and bar the door afterwards when she returned. No doubt this was foolish.”

Again Matthew Damon leaned forward.

“Now mark well what I tell you. Ask any questions which may occur. It is of the most deadly importance, though my wife may call it trivial.”

At the moment Georgette did not call it anything. Plump, uneasy, perhaps more mature than her youthful appearance indicated, she moved in her chair as though at some suspicion of which she was ashamed.

Her husband seemed to be fighting phantoms.

“For some time, Mr. Strickland, I have slept badly. The most sober of us may be visited by dreams of a frightening sort, and I have occupied a room apart from my wife. Last night I dozed amid such horrors, though I was wakeful enough to hear the noise of the horse-and-trap returning from Reading.

“You may recall the singular acoustic qualities at High Chimneys. The slightest noise indoors may be heard anywhere in the house with great distinctness. I thought I heard (correctly, as it proved) the sound of Penelope Burbage unlocking and opening the back door.

“I heard her close and lock this door on the inside. I heard her put up the bar and close it in its sockets, which cannot be managed without clatter. Very well. I was about to doze again when it occurred to me that I should have heard the young woman’s footsteps going up the back stairs.

“They did not do this. The footsteps,
her
footsteps, went through the house into the main hall, where they moved about for a moment and grew louder as though approaching or ascending the main staircase at the front of the house.

“A trifle, you say? No doubt! But trifles become our preoccupation in the dark hours.

“I lit my bedside candle and opened my watch. The hour was just eleven-thirty, later than I had imagined.

“It was then I heard Penelope’s voice say something. Next, distinctly, she cried, ‘Who’s there?’ It could not have been three seconds afterwards that I heard—”

Mr. Damon stopped.

He lowered his head so that his chin rested on the fringes of the shawl and on a black satin necktie with a pearl pin. Clive, who had been watching a blue vein beat in the other’s temple, spoke with unusual sharpness.