Mystery in White. J. Jefferson Farjeon

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      CHAPTER IV

       TEA FOR SIX

       Table of Contents

      When David descended to the hall he walked into a fresh surprise. Mr. Edward Maltby, of the Royal Psychical Society, was standing in the doorway looking like a venerable snowman, while behind him was a second snowman less venerable. The second snowman was considerably bulkier than the first, and although David could see little of his face from where he stood at the foot of the stairs, what he saw did not create a favourable impression. He received a disconcerting sensation that a rather pleasant little party was being broken up.

      Mr. Maltby, on the other hand, seemed momentarily unaware that any little party existed beyond his own. His eyes were rivetted on the picture above the fireplace, and his interest—thoroughly unreasonable at this instant—seemed to add to the portraits queer significance. For several seconds after David’s appearance no word was spoken. Then the old man lowered his eyes, and smiled.

      “So you tried it, too, eh?” he said. “I hope your host has room for two more.”

      “We haven’t got a host,” replied Lydia. “At least, we can’t find him.”

      “Really?” Mr. Maltby looked thoughtful. “Then how did you get in?”

      “The same way that you did. The front door wasn’t locked.”

      “I see.” He turned to the man behind him. “Well, do we follow their example?”

      “I dunno,” answered the man. “P’raps we ought to move on.”

      “The suggestion is excellent but, like many excellent suggestions, impossible,” retorted Mr. Maltby.

      He entered the hall as he spoke. The man behind him hesitated, then entered after him. Mr. Maltby stepped back and closed the door.

      “I am sorry to see you have had an accident,” he said to Jessie. “I hope it was not a bad one.”

      “No, just my foot, I fell down,” exclaimed Jessie. “It’s a funny situation, I don’t know what we’ll all say when they come home.”

      “Perhaps they won’t come home,” remarked the old man.

      “What makes you think that?” demanded Lydia.

      “Did I say I thought it? Yet one might think it—in this weather—if they have been here at all to-day.”

      “We told you the door wasn’t locked,” David reminded him.

      “So you did,” nodded Mr. Maltby, and turned to the door. “A pity it is not a Yale lock.”

      “Why a pity?” asked Lydia. “If it had been a Yale lock we couldn’t have got in.”

      “You mean we mightn’t have got in,” Mr. Maltby corrected her. “I agree that would have been a pity. And it is also a pity to let melted snow drip upon somebody else’s carpet.” He removed his coat and placed it carefully over the back of a chair. “But a Yale lock can be fixed open with a catch. This one might have been fixed. Then we should have had stronger evidence that the door had been deliberately left as we found it. Still, one sometimes, through careless oversight, forgets such things, or even to lock a door with an ordinary key, such as the one we have here.”

      “Your idea being,” interposed David, “that the family might have left some while ago, and forgotten to lock up and to take the key with them?”

      “But we have a fire to confound the idea,” mused the old man.

      “We have more than that, sir. We have a kettle boiling, and tea laid in the drawing-room——”

      “And a bread-knife on the floor!” added Thomson, galvanically.

      The old man regarded Thomson fixedly for a moment or two, and the clerk wished, without exactly knowing why, that he had not spoken. Then Mr. Maltby looked at each of the others in turn, including his massive, common companion—whose commonness had been proved by the one contribution he had so far made to the conversation—and ending up with the portrait over the mantelpiece.

      “All this is very interesting,” he commented. “Yes, extremely interesting. Including that picture. A remarkable old fellow. Yet not so very old, eh? How old? Sixty? A pleasant age, sixty. My own.”

      David fought a feeling of annoyance. Mr. Maltby, though a last-comer, had assumed a subtle command of the situation, and there was no reason that David could see, apart from the question of his sixty years, why he should do so. He had not merely changed the pleasant family atmosphere by emphasising the sinisterness of the place, an atmosphere which David had hoped to live down, but he was setting his own tone and his own tempo. “Why are we all hanging on his words like this?” David fretted. “He seems a decent old chap, but I don’t like the way he seems to be wiping the rest of us off the slate! And I don’t like that other fellow, either!”

      “Something disturbs you?” queried Mr. Maltby.

      David started.

      “A lot disturbs me,” he retorted, quickly concealing the real momentary cause. “I think we’re all disturbed. Quite apart from the odd situation we’re in, we’ve all got destinations to go to, and how are we going to them? How are we going to get away from here at all?”

      “From my experiences in the last ten minutes,” answered Mr. Maltby, “I am perfectly convinced that for awhile there will be no possible method of getting away from here at all. Therefore, let us be grateful that Fate has at least deposited us under a roof. And a roof beneath which there appear to be many comforts. A fire——”

      “Several fires,” interrupted Lydia.

      “Indeed? The odd situation grows more and more intriguing. Several fires. And tea laid, too. If no one returns in, say, the course of the next three months, we might perhaps——?”

      “We’re jolly well going to perhaps!” smiled Lydia. “Tea’s made, and we were just about to have it!”

      “So that was not really worrying you?” inquired the old man, turning to David again.

      “Oh! What was?” returned David.

      “It was my question. Surely, not the bread-knife? By the way, I do not see it on the floor.”

      “It was on the kitchen floor.”

      “Was?”

      “It still is,” interposed Thomson again, boldly trying once more to impress his negligible personality on the company. “We didn’t touch it. We left it there.”

      “That was most surprisingly wise. I take it, you did not wish to destroy the murderer’s fingerprints?”

      Jessie gave a little gasp. The cockney made his second contribution to the conversation.

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