The Blue Diamond (11 page)

“She is very beautiful.”

Mavis laughed as, screened from the house by the trees, she tucked her arm under his.

“Certainly, anyone can see that, stupid boy! I mean, how do you like her? Is she not perfectly delightful?”

Garth hesitated; he looked away from the gay, piquante face of the girl at his side into the green, leafy depths of the Home Coppice.

Mavis gave his arm a little shake.

“If you let your mind stray to your briefs when you are with me, sir, I shall turn back. Why do you not answer my question?”

“Well, I paused,” Garth said reluctantly, “because I am afraid my answer, if I speak truthfully, will not please you, Mavis, and—”

“What do you mean?” Mavis asked, looking at him in astonishment. “Surely you do not mean that you do not like Hilda?—Oh, Garth, and she is so sweet and lovable!”

Garth pulled his moustache perplexedly.

“I don't trust her,” he said slowly at last. “To my mind there is something about her that does not ring true, but I think she is a capital actress, Mavis.”

Mavis drew her hand from his arm.

“What do you mean?” she said coldly. “Garth, it is not like you to be so suspicious, and when you know how fond I am of Hilda—”

“Ah, don't you see that is just what makes me so anxious, because you are brought into daily contact with her?” Garth interrupted. “Mavis, you know I never liked the idea of this girl staying on at the Manor in the way she's doing for an indefinite length of time, and now that I have seen her—”

“Well, now that you have seen her—” Mavis repeated in displeased accents.

“I dislike that idea more than ever,” Garth finished. “I think I could give a pretty good guess at her object in coming to you, Mavis. I wondered to-day whether you were all blind but myself. If Lady Laura were to take the course I should advise, and send her to the seaside with a nurse or an elderly woman to look after her, I would guarantee that the young lady would soon recover her memory.”

Mavis came to a sudden stop in the middle of the pathway.

“Which is as much as to say you think that she has not lost it at all—that she is pretending and deceiving us all!” she cried indignantly. “Oh, Garth, I did not think you would be so uncharitable!”

Garth looked down at her flushed face tenderly.

“I can't help having my own opinion, Mavis. Her pleasure in finding she could play and that pretty little speech about it were all done for effect, I am certain.”

Mavis's mouth looked mutinous and she drew away from the hand he outstretched to her.

“Do you imagine that you know better than the doctors?”

“I may be a better judge of human nature than the doctor who has seen her,” Garth said quietly. “I have had a pretty wide experience of the scurvy side of things at the courts, you know, but I merely give you my opinion for what it is worth, Mavis. You may all be right and I may be entirely wrong, only I know that I hate the thought of you living with this woman seeing her every day and—Oh, can't I make you understand how I hate it for you?”

Meeting the appeal in his eyes, Mavis softened.

“Silly boy!” she said with a laugh. “What harm could she do me, I should like to know, even if it were as you fancy, which I am quite sure it is not?”

“I don't know,” said Garth thoughtfully. “Yet I have the strangest feeling—presentiment—call it what you will—that harm will come of it. Naturally Lady Laura—none of you—can have failed to note Arthur's growing infatuation.”

“Ah, no. Poor boy, you are looking at everything through jaundiced eyes,” Mavis said, patting his arm, her short-lived wrath evaporating as she saw the real anxiety in his face. “Arthur thinks her very beautiful—he is painting her for his Elaine—but it is Dorothy he cares for.”

Garth made no response, but his dark face looked unconvinced. He drew Mavis's arm through his.

“Don't let us talk of it any more, Mavis. I have something much nearer my heart to say to you this morning; my father was talking to me last night. He is very anxious to see me settled, Mavis.”

“Oh!” The swift, hot colour surged over the girl's face; her hand fluttered restlessly and tried to draw itself away.

Garth held it in a close, warm clasp.

“He was speaking of ways and means, Mavis. To all intents and purposes he is putting me into poor Walter's place and making the eldest son of me—that is, as far as the unentailed property is concerned. The title, naturally, must be Walter's, and the secured estate and the income of the latter, after my father's death, if we should be in ignorance of his whereabouts, will have to accumulate for him, or for his children if he should have any. My father suggests that he should make over to us the house at Overdeen—the Priory, it is called; and then—for you would not have me give up my profession, would you, Mavis?—I thought I might look out for a little house in Kensington, and you will come to me. You will not keep me waiting long, will you, sweetheart?”

The girl's hot face was downcast; beneath the brim of her hat Garth could only catch a glimpse of the pretty, tremulous mouth. But the warm, soft fingers clung to his now. He stooped and pressed his lips to them.

“Oh, Mavis, my darling, my own sweetheart! How can I thank you?”

Mavis tore herself away.

“Oh, Garth, some one is coming—I heard the leaves rustling!” her cheeks still aflame. “And, see, what in the world has Pompey got there?”

She darted away. Garth, his eyes fixed fondly on her, followed more slowly.

“It is a chain,” she said. “And what is this—a little book?” taking it from the dog's mouth. “Be quiet, Pompey! No, sir, you shall not have it,” as he sprang upon her. “I wonder who has lost this—it is evidently a notebook from a chatelaine.” She unfastened the clasp with some difficulty and looked inside. “Garth”—the colour ebbing from her cheeks—“look at this!”

“What is it, Mavis? What is the matter?”

Mavis held it out and pointed to the name written on the first page, her hands trembling visibly.

Garth looked over her shoulder. The little book had evidently lain in the damp for some time; the leaves were stained and discoloured, the cover tarnished, but the inscription written in ink on the fly-leaf was still perfectly legible—“Mary Anne Marston, from Lady Davenant.”

“Mary Anne Marston!” Garth repeated in amazement. “Why, then, this is—it must be—part of the chatelaine my mother gave Nurse Marston when she first left home! We all made her some little present, and I know this was my mother's, for I remember well how particular she was that everything should be put on the chain that she thought could be useful to a nurse—scissors and a knife and such like. This is the notebook, certainly. But how in the world did it come here? What is frightening you, Mavis?”

For Mavis was ghastly pale and shivering apparently with fright.

“Don't you see that she must have dropped it after she left our house that night?” she said in a low, awestruck tone. “Don't you remember that the note she wrote to my mother to say she wanted to see her was written on a page torn from this very book? Look!” she turned rapidly to the end and held it out to him. “There—that is the place she tore it from! Oh, Garth, don't you see?”

“I see!” Garth took it from her and looked at it carefully as he turned it about. “Well, at all events this proves that she came through the Home Coppice on her way from the Manor, and so it is valuable to us as the first clue that we have been able to find since she left her patient's room. But then we knew she must have gone somewhere, so I am not sure that it tells us much. Still, I think as we go through the village we had better call at the police station and show them this and explain exactly how we found it.”

Mavis clasped his arm tightly and looked round her with wide open, terrified eyes.

“Surely you do not imagine that I shall go on after seeing this, Garth? Nothing would induce me to go any farther through this dreadful wood.”

“My dear child, this is really—” Garth was beginning when the steps that Mavis had heard before sounded nearer on a parallel path to them, and then as the two walks merged into one Tom Greyson came into sight. He was looking particularly gloomy and disconsolate as he strode along with his dog at his heels, but as he touched his hat he glanced in some surprise at the girl's agitated face.

She put out her hand and stopped him.

“Don't go on, Tom; you must stay and help us now. I am so frightened”—a little sob catching her throat.

“Frightened, Miss Hargreave?” Greyson repeated in a puzzled tone.

Garth passed his arm round her trembling form.

“Come, come, Mavis; you must not give way like this; there is nothing really to alarm you! It is only that we, or rather the dogs, have found something that belonged to Nurse Marston, and it has upset Miss Hargreave. It is a notebook, and must have been dropped after she left the Manor.”

A gleam of interest lighted up Greyson's moody face.

“She did come this way then, sir? I have always said she must ha' done; but she would come right out close to her mother's cottage. It puzzles me why she did not go in and speak to the old woman, just to set her mind at rest, as it were. She is getting worn to a shadow is Mrs. Marston with all the worry of it.”

“I cannot understand it at all,” Garth said thoughtfully.

“She came into this wood,” Mavis said, shuddering from head to foot with a vague intangible horror. “It may have been to see her mother, or anything, I don't know what, but perhaps she never came out. Oh, don't you see what I mean, Garth? She may have been taken ill here and lain down among the trees and died, or she may have met a tramp and been murdered, and—and—be lying here still!”

She uttered the last words in a low, terrified tone beneath her breath.

The eyes of the two men met in one long significant glance as she paused; then Garth said with a resolutely cheerful air:

“My dear Mavis, we have not the least reason for supposing that Nurse Marston is dead. She is probably alive and well and will give us her own reasons for this mysterious absence when she returns. Come, you are tired and over-wrought; I will take you back to the Manor. Greyson, I think it might be as well to let the police know of this discovery, if you are going that way.”

“I will tell them, sir,” the man said as he touched his hat.

“First you must look to see that she is not lying here,” Mavis said with an effort, putting up her hands and clutching nervously at her throat as she spoke. “The—the dogs were moving about among the moss and leaves over there. Behind, farther in the wood, there is a hollow. I shall not go away—I could not—until I know. Garth, you must look—you must!”

“No, no, sir! You stay with Miss Hargreave, sir,” Tom Greyson interposed quickly. “I'll go and look. Don't you frighten yourself, miss. Why, we are all over this coppice of nights now that the pheasants are nesting! If there had been anything of that sort here we should ha' been bound to find it before now. Under that oak you said the dogs were, didn't you, miss?”

He sprang off. Garth drew Mavis to a fallen tree-trunk near and made her sit down.

“Why, Mavis, I didn't think you were so nervous!”

“I think somehow a horror of the whole affair came over me—not quite at the first, but very soon after—with regard to Nurse Marston's disappearance,” she said slowly. “It was all so strange when you think of it—that cry Dorothy heard; and Jenkins was so certain she could not have got out of the house.”

“Ah, well! It is perfectly obvious now that the old man was wrong there,” Garth said, with as much cheerfulness as he could assume, for in truth her nervousness was beginning to infect him. “As for the shriek Dorothy heard—well, I have never been able to connect that with Nurse Marston. If she had been taken ill in the house, or any evil had happened to her there, she must have been found before now. Probably Dorothy fancied it, or perhaps one of the maidservants had a fit of hysterics. Well, Greyson, what is the result of your search?”

“She isn't there, sir,” the man said. “I made sure she wasn't. We know our woods a bit too well for that to happen, as I told Miss Hargreave.”

But it struck Garth, that, in spite of his apparent confidence, the man's ruddy face was some degrees paler than it had been a few minutes before.

“Well, now you are satisfied, I hope,” he said, turning to Mavis, whose colour was beginning to return. “Come, it is no use our staying here any longer. Greyson, you might look round the wood farther in just to satisfy Miss Hargreave—or stay, what are you going to do now?”

“Going to have my dinner, sir. I live right by the side of the coppice, but that don't matter if there is anything you would like me to do first.”

“No, no! Have your dinner, and then come up to the Manor. I shall be there and we can ask Sir Arthur what he thinks is best to be done now.”

“Very good, sir!” Greyson touched his hat again as they turned away.

As Davenant held the gate into the park open for Mavis she looked up at him wistfully.

“Garth, I want to ask you to do something for me.”

“What is it, Mavis? You know anything I can do—”

“Garth, will you tell me what you were doing with Nurse Marston in Exeter the day before she came to us?”

Davenant did not look pleased.

“Talking to her,” he answered shortly.

“You were walking up the street. Superintendent Stokes said he saw you.”

“And I declined to give him any further explanation.” Davenant's tone was curt.

“Yes, to tell him,” Mavis went on softly. “But I did not think you would have secrets from me, Garth.”

He stopped and took both her hands in his and looked down at her gravely, compelling her to meet his gaze.