Annie Haynes Premium Collection – 8 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Annie Haynes

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      Chapter IX

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      Lady Davenant pulled the check-string of her carriage.

      “I will get out here. Come back in half an hour, Robert.”

      “Yes, my lady.” The footman touched his hat when he had helped her out, sprang to his seat, and the carriage bowled swiftly away.

      Lady Davenant turned to Mrs. Marston’s cottage; it looked bright and homelike in the sunlight, with its gay little flower-beds bordering the flagged path on either side, and the climbing plants covering the porch and hanging down in festoons of greenery.

      Through the open doorway one had a glimpse of the kitchen, with its red-brick floor scrubbed as spotless as hands could make it, and the round deal table standing in the middle of the room. It looked a pleasant, peaceful scene, and Mrs. Marston in her snowy cap with the white kerchief folded round her shoulders and her knitting in her hand, looked in keeping with all the rest. But as she heard the click of the gate and looked up, and the onlooker caught a glimpse of the unutterable woe in her dim old eyes, of the quivering dread visible in the tense lines of her mouth, the meaning of everything was changed, and something was revealed of the tragedy that underlay that apparently peaceful life.

      Lady Davenant came swiftly up the garden-path.

      “How are you this afternoon, Mrs. Marston?”

      Mrs. Marston’s lips quivered as she got up and made her old-fashioned curtsy.

      “Much about the same, thank you, my lady! I don’t look to feel any better until I know what has become of my girl.”

      Lady Davenant’s eyes filled with tears as she took the wrinkled hand in hers.

      “Ah, this suspense is so bad for you! You have heard no news yet?”

      “No, my lady, nor ever shall till I hear how she died,” Mrs. Marston answered slowly. “They come to me,” she added, a touch of passion in her trembling tones—“Sir Arthur, Mr. Garth, Superintendent Stokes, and all of them. ‘You have patience,’ they say, ‘and she will come back to you safe and sound. No doubt she has her own reasons for staying away.’ My lady, I know my girl wouldn’t have left me to fret and worry myself into my grave without knowing what had become of her, not if she was alive. She was always one to think so much of her old mother, was Mary, although she had got on in the world. Mr. Garth will have told you what they found in the Home Coppice, him and Miss Mavis, my lady?”

      “Yes, he told me, and I don’t know what to make of it all,” Lady Davenant acknowledged frankly, with a troubled look in her mild eyes. “Mr. Garth does not either; and I hear the police are quite at a loss. What could she have been doing there in the dark late at night?”

      Mrs. Marston wiped her eyes.

      “She must have been enticed down there somehow, to the Home Coppice, my lady, by some villain, though it is not for me to say how, and then murdered—my own poor Mary! That cuff was blood-stained, you know, my lady.”

      “Yes, I know!” Lady Davenant said hurriedly. “But that does not prove that anything dreadful happened to her, Mrs. Marston. She might have cut her hand. And”—lowering her voice—“you know they have searched the wood thoroughly, and there was nothing there.”

      “I know they found nothing, my lady,” Mrs. Marston said significantly, “but—but”—beginning to tremble—“I don’t say she is there. I don’t know where she is, my poor child; and sometimes I think I never shall know.”

      Lady Davenant’s own eyes were wet as she gently put the old woman back in her chair and took one of the wide seats in the little porch beside her.

      “I am sorry for you,” she said brokenly, pressing the old woman’s hand between both of hers. “You are in my thoughts continually. It is such a dreadful trouble for you.”

      “Ah, my lady, it is indeed! I ought to remember as I am not the only one, I know. We all have our troubles and your ladyship has had her share of them too, but—”

      “Ah, I have indeed,” Lady Davenant said with a sigh, “and I can sympathize so fully with you in all this! It is so terrible not to know where one’s loved ones are. And my poor boy—”

      “Ay! I have often said it has been a sore trial for your ladyship, and Mr. Garth too. Never was brothers fonder of one another than him and poor Mr. Walter. He has been untold good to me, has Mr. Garth, my lady. It is seldom the day passes as he does not turn in to have a word with me. Superintendent Stokes, he comes in the other day. ‘I wonder what Mr. Garth Davenant was a-talking about to your daughter in Exeter,’ he says. ‘Which if you did know,’ I made bold to answer him, my lady, ‘I’ll back you would be none the forwarder.’ Mr. Garth don’t know anything about where my girl is—I could take my oath on that.”

      “I am sure he does not. The whole affair has been a great trouble to him, but I do wish he had never suggested to Dr. Grieve—though one doesn’t know how any harm could have happened to her through that,” Lady Davenant said in a puzzled tone.

      There was a pause. Mrs. Marston looked absently down the path and into the village street beyond; some figures were turning the corner; she rose and put her spectacles on.

      “No, it isn’t anybody but Farmer Weston and his son as went for a soldier,” she said as she sat down again. “That is the worst of it, my lady, it is the uncertainty. Night or day I can’t rest; everybody as comes up the street, I think it is perhaps some one come to bring me some news of my Mary. Every noise I hear I think maybe they have found out something. Then when I do get a wink of sleep, my lady, I have dreams.”

      “Dreams!” СКАЧАТЬ