“Hullo, it’s you! Which of us do you want? I was just off.”
“I wonder if I could have a few words with Miss Silver? If it isn’t too late.”
“Well, if you don’t want me I’ll be going.”
He went down the path. Craig said in an apologetic voice,
“Is it too late, Miss Silver?”
The light was behind her, but he thought she smiled.
“By no means, Mr. Lester. Pray come in.”
She took him into the dinning-room and indicated the chair which Frank Abbott had occupied. When they were seated and she had resumed her knitting, he received an encouraging look.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Lester?”
“A very great favour, if you will.”
“Will you tell me what it is?”
“Well, before I do that, perhaps you ought to know that I have a pretty good idea of why you are here.”
She said with a shade of rebuke,
“I am paying a visit to my old school friend, Mrs. Merridew.”
“And Frank Abbott is paying a visit to one of his innumerable cousins! I suppose he has told you that we have known each other on and off for quite a time?”
“Yes, Mr. Lester.”
“Well, what I’m trying to get across is that I know a good deal about your particular activities. Frank gave me a hint not to do any broadcasting-I suppose he told you that too.”
She smiled.
“These things make so much talk in a village.”
He nodded.
“As far as I am concerned, you are Mrs. Merridew’s friend and nothing more.”
Her needles clicked above the bright wool.
“It matters less than it would have done at first. Pray, what is it that you wish me to do for you?”
His face lit up with a smile that transformed it.
“You wouldn’t feel inclined to come to my wedding, would you? Because that’s what I came here to ask. And before you say no, will you be very kind indeed and let me tell you a little more about it all?”
“Certainly, Mr. Lester.”
He said in a quick boyish way which took ten years from his age,
“You are kind! And that is what Rosamond wants. She has never had it, and just now she needs it badly.”
Miss Silver looked at him in a most sympathetic manner.
“A most charming girl.”
He said with complete simplicity,
“I fell in love with her picture before I ever saw her-just an odd photograph slipped in with some manuscripts which Jenny sent my firm. Then when I saw her-well, it was all up. But of course I didn’t expect it to be the same for her. I didn’t want to rush her. I thought perhaps it would take a long time. And then I began to see that time was just the thing we hadn’t got. Miss Crewe was working her to death, Jenny was all set to kick over the traces, and there was something pretty nasty going on in the background. This is all in confidence of course.”
“Certainly, Mr. Lester.”
He could be sensitive to the finer shades.
“I needn’t have said that-I know. You’ll forgive me, won’t you? Well, on Sunday, I discovered that Jenny was getting out of the house at night. I couldn’t sleep-I’d got a lot on my mind-and I went out for a walk. When I was near the entrance to Crewe House a car came down the road. The headlights picked Jenny up. You know there’s a stile there leading to a footpath over the fields-she had just come across from there. As soon as the car had gone she ran past me and went up the drive. I saw her let herself in by a side door. I told Rosamond, and she was very much upset. Now it seems that Miss Crewe either saw or heard her come in. She has been making arrangements behind Rosamond’s back to send Jenny to school, and this afternoon she told Hher it was all fixed up and she was to take her down there on Friday morning. That just about put the lid on. I’d been taking precautions, you know. Those girls haven’t a penny, or a soul in the world to take their part except me, and as things were I’d got just no standing at all. What I did was to give notice at the Registrar’s in Melbury-you can get married after one clear day. We can get married tomorrow. I’ve fixed it for half past ten. Well, I want Rosamond to have someone with her. These things make talk-I want to stop as much of it as I can. I’ve come here to ask you whether you’ll drive into Melbury with us and see us married. We can’t ask anyone who lives here, because Miss Crewe would have their blood, and besides-I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have.”
He received a smile of great kindness and charm.
“You feel that this is really necessary, Mr. Lester?”
“Yes, I do. If I’m Rosamond’s husband and Jenny’s brother-in-law, I can get them out of here. There are things going on- I don’t like it. They’re not safe.”
She inclined her head.
“I will come to your wedding, Mr. Lester.”
CHAPTER 30
Lucy Cunningham had gone through the day, she hardly knew how. As long as Mrs. Hubbard was there and she was doing things in and about the house she managed pretty well. Whilst she was making beds, dusting, emptying hot-water bottles- Henry liked one, and she wouldn’t have done without hers for anything-mixing balancer meal with scraps, boiling up a mash and feeding it to the hens, the comfortable everydayness of these occupations stood like a wall between her and the events of the night. From the safe shelter of that wall it was possible to regard them as partaking of the unreal quality of any other dream. Looking back as far as her childhood, she could remember to have dreamed that she was being pursued by wolves or Red Indians, that she was trying to pack everything she possessed in one small handbag and catch a train for Australia, the missing of which would plunge her in unknown but quite irremediable disaster. She had also dreamed about falling over cliffs, a long, long swooping drop, and waking just in time to avoid being dashed to pieces at the bottom. All these were things which had happened in the night and had frightened her very much at the time, but in the comfortable daylight they thinned away and were gone.
She went busily from one task to another, and found that the weight upon her tended to lift. There were even times when she ceased to be aware of it for perhaps as long as several minutes on end. Mrs. Parsons’s cat was back on the wall again and she had to chase it away-a patchy tortoiseshell with a lot of white about it, and really quite a malignant expression in its eyes. She would have to speak to Lydia about having down the tree between the hen-run and the wall, an old walnut that never bore, because the minute there were any young chickens, that horrible cat would find it only too easy to climb down it and snatch them. Lydia wouldn’t like the tree to be cut. She didn’t like anything changed or altered. Of course she didn’t have to ask her, because Papa had bought the Dower House and she had a legal right to cut down anything she wanted to. Only she couldn’t stand on her legal rights-not with Lydia Crewe.
Henry was out for most of the morning, and they turned out his room. There was a dead frog in his collar-drawer, and some rather slimy-looking plants in the bedroom basin. She was considering whether they could be thrown away, when she discovered that there were tadpoles hatching out amongst them. She desisted therefore, and laid the frog on the front of the washstand where he could hardly help seeing it. Mrs. Hubbard, in the background, made small clicking sounds of disapproval punctuated by an occasional sniff. How Miss Cunningham could put up with it, she didn’t know. Nobody could say he wasn’t a quiet gentleman, but just as well he never got married, for there weren’t many wives would put up with what his sister did.