Althea was startled. She saw a little dowdy person who looked the governess in some old photographic group. She had on one of those patterned silk dresses which are thrust upon elderly ladies who have an insufficient sales-resistance. It had a small muddled pattern of green and blue and black on a grey ground, and it had been made high to the neck by the insertion of a net front with little whalebone supports. The hat that went with it was black like all Miss Silver’s hats, but whereas they had up till now been made of black felt in the winter and black straw in the summer, this was the black velvet toque which she had bought for a wedding in the spring and upon which she had been complimented by an old pupil of hers, Randal March, now the Chief Constable of Ledshire. It was trimmed with three pompoms, one black, one grey, and one purple, and her niece Ethel Burkett considered that it became her very well. Althea being naturally in ignorance of these interesting particulars, it did not appear to her to be as dashing as it had to those conditioned to an unending sequence of felt and straw. She said a little vaguely,
‘Oh, yes, I am.’
Miss Silver smiled.
‘You will wonder why I ask, but Mrs Graham was sitting here a little while ago and she pointed you out to me across the room. Your name is an uncommon one, and when she spoke of you as Althea I could not help wondering whether you were the Althea Graham who was such a good friend to Sophy Justice.’
Althea was startled quite out of her dream, because six years ago cheerful, careless Sophy had got herself into a nasty jam. She had written some very silly letters to a man who was unscrupulous enough to blackmail her on the strength of them. Snatches of talk came up out of the past -
‘Sophy how could you be so idiotic?’
‘Darling, I just didn’t think anyone could have such a foul sort of mind.’
‘That’s the sort of mind some people have.’
And in the end Sophy rescued by – ‘Darling, an absolutely governessy-looking person, but marvellous just like Cynthia Urtingham said she was. She got back Lady Urtingham’s pearls for them when they all thought they were never going to see them again?
She found herself saying, ‘Oh, is your name Silver – Miss Silver? Sophy told me you were marvellous.’
‘I was very glad to be able to help her.’
Althea’s voice and manner had gone back six years. She and Sophy were twenty again – up in the air one minute and down in the depths the next, walking on the edge of a precipice and half falling over it, panic-stricken when disaster loomed, and ringing all the bells when it was averted. Her colour was bright and high as she said,
‘She was most frightfully grateful to you – we both were.’
Miss Silver coughed in a deprecating manner.
‘When I left the scholastic profession in order to apply myself to private detection, it was in the hope and belief that it would put me in the way of helping those who were in trouble. And Mrs Justice is an old friend of mine.’
Althea said quickly, ‘She never knew – about Sophy. You didn’t tell her?’ Miss Silver said with gravity, ‘The confidences of a client are naturally sacred.’ The Althea of today might have gone no farther. Habits of reticence and self-control had fastened themselves upon her during the passing of five slow years, but the meeting with Nicholas had swept those years away, and now, thinking and talking of Sophy, she went back to the old impulsive Althea who had not learned to put a bridle on her tongue. Something came surging up in her and was across her lips before she could stop it. ‘Oh, I do wish you could help me!’ Miss Silver turned on her the smile which had won the hearts of so many of those who came to her. Althea was aware of a kindness, an understanding, and a reassurance, and she was aware of them in a measure which she had seldom experienced since her childhood. To a child there is nearly always some one person upon whom its sense of security is based. For Althea it had been her father. After he went she had never really felt as safe again. That Miss Silver should remind her of her father was fantastic, but after the lapse of years during which it was she who had to carry the family burdens, here was the old feeling of security back again. She leaned a little towards Miss Silver and said,
‘It’s a stupid thing, but just now when I was talking about it I had the feeling – well, it’s difficult to put it into words and, as I said, stupid too, but…’
‘Yes, my dear?’
Althea gave a little laugh.
‘It does sound just plain stupid, but – it frightened me.’
‘Would you like to tell me about it?’
‘Yes, I would, and then you can laugh at me and tell me it’s all nonsense and I shall have got it off my mind. It’s like this. We have had an offer for our house…’
‘You had put it up for sale?’
‘No, that is just the thing – we hadn’t. One of the local house-agents lives up our way. We’ve known him for years, because he is a sidesman in the church we go to. Well, he saw my mother in the front garden one evening when he was passing and he stopped to admire the begonias, which have been very fine. I don’t know how they got on to talking about the house, but she seems to have given him the impression that it was too large for us. It is of course, but I’ve never thought about selling. Never. I told him so when he spoke to me about it, but he sent some people up with an order to view.’
She told Miss Silver about the Blounts.
‘He was all over it, but all she did was to say “Very nice”, as if it was something she had learnt like a parrot. Yet he goes on saying what an extraordinary fancy she has taken to the house and making out that she won’t give him any peace unless he buys it for her, and he goes on making his offers higher and higher. It’s a nice house and the garden is pretty, but it isn’t worth seven thousand pounds, and that is what he is offering now.’
Miss Silver said, ‘Dear me!’ It was the strongest expression that she allowed herself, but Althea was not to know that. She nodded.
‘And the extraordinary thing is that now the other agent, Mr Jones, has sent someone up too – a man who used to live here when he was a boy. He says he used to pass our house and think he would like to live there. He is the slick talkative kind and I didn’t like him. I told him we didn’t want to sell, and he said he knew there was someone else after the place, but whatever Mr Blount offered he was prepared to go one better. I really didn’t like him at all.’
Miss Silver asked a few questions about the house – its age, the number of rooms, the extent of the garden, how long the Grahams had been there, and who were the previous owners. To the last of these questions Althea replied that she did not know. ‘But we have been there for more than twenty years. I can’t really remember being anywhere else.’
‘It is an old house?’
‘Oh, not really. Fifty or sixty years old, I should think – not more. I told you it was all very silly, didn’t I? There isn’t anything about the house to make two men start bidding against each other to get it, but they can’t make us sell if we don’t want to. The trouble is that my mother has some idea of going on a cruise…’ She broke off and her voice changed. ‘The only thing is just to keep on saying no. As I said, they can’t make us sell.’
TEN
MRS GRAHAM WAS not feeling at all pleased. Half a dozen people had remarked upon the change in Althea’s appearance. Three of them had said how pretty she was looking, and two of them had added, ‘Just like her old self.’ Myra Hutchinson swooped down and murmured in the husky voice which she had always so much disliked, ‘Dear Mrs Graham, isn’t it lovely to have Nicky back again! Althea looks like a million pounds!’ It was really all extremely annoying. If she had known how it was going to be, she could have had a mild attack of palpitations and have stayed at home, and Thea would naturally have had to stay with her. But then she wouldn’t have been able to wear her new dress. Ella Harrison had admired it very much, and even Mrs Justice had said, ‘You are very smart, my dear.’ It seemed very hard indeed that she could not go out to a party at an old friend’s house without being annoyed by the presence of Nicholas Carey. And it was Ella Harrison who had brought him. She should have known better – she did know better. She felt very much annoyed with Ella. She leaned back in her chair and told Nettie Pimm in a failing voice that she didn’t feel very well and she thought she had better go home – ‘If you wouldn’t mind just finding Thea and telling her.’