The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding

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СКАЧАТЬ we got engaged last Saturday on the links. I asked you not to tell any one."'

      "It was to see you I biked down to Kew, Tuesday afternoon. I wanted to tell you what had happened!" He stood looking into the face he thought so lovely.

      "I wish you had come to the house," she sighed.

      "Unfortunately I remembered that you had said that on Tuesday you were going to your aunt's at Hampton Court, so I didn't ring. I didn't want to meet your mother. Not after the last interview I had with her."

      "Mother's a darling. But she knows so little of life. She doesn't know how to judge," explained her aged daughters There fell a dead silence. Barbara wished that she had not used that last word. The door opened with considerable difficulty.

      "Ready?" growled Dorset Steele, and started ahead down the passage.

      Barbara took a 'bus back to her home. With every turn of the wheels her heart grew heavier. She had told her grandfather that Vardon was innocent, but she felt a sickening doubt as she thought over the whole position. Now that she was alone by herself. Away from that atmosphere of suspense, and pity, and dread. The doubt came first when her thoughts again ran over their talk last Saturday. It had been on the Richmond links.

      Vardon had asked her to marry him. There was another young man in the offing, and he was jealous. Very jealous. Barbara had thought this just as well then. Every detail came back to her now, and added its mite to the growing pile of fear deep down within her.

      "Why don't you get some money?" she had asked impatiently. "Others get it. Why can't you? Nobody cares how nowadays."

      "That's the sort of speech to make a man commit a crime," Vardon had said thoughtfully, rather than indignantly.

      His words had startled her even then. She had looked at him half laughing, half impatient. She had been thinking of business. As she looked round at him his face seemed to her to have changed. The desire for money exudes a poison gas of its own, necessary though our modern life has made the shekel. Its blight lay on Vardon at that moment. It had taken something from his face, leaving it, even to her eyes, less attractive.

      "It's no use asking me if I love you, when you haven't enough to marry on. Mind you, I don't promise that I should marry you under any circumstances. What about playing on? Some one else may possibly want that bunker where your ball has been resting this half-hour."

      Vardon had picked up his niblick. He was the sort of man, she reflected, who would always use a niblick in a bunker. Barbara watched him slogging away. The lie was certainly bad. But was he one to make the best of it? Five explosions clouded the air with sand and stones before the ball was shot out—to lie very close to the pin she had to own. Half the bunker seemed to have accompanied it.

      Barbara gave her own ball a neat little undercut and holed it. Philip promptly went on with the talk.

      "I asked you to marry me just now," he said rather sternly, "and you pointed out that a poor devil of an artist—or photographer, worse yet—living in Patagonia has no right to a wife. As Spiers wants to marry you, and is well off, am I to understand that he will be the lucky man?"

      Barbara had known both the men in question since her early teens. She was not in the least nervous.

      "I told you the strick truth, Phil." Voice and face were alike kind at that moment. "You're letting every opportunity drift past you. I don't believe you've ever exerted yourself in your life! What have you to share with a girl? Nothing except fat content."

      "Fat content!" the words stung her as she remembered them to-day. There had been no fat content in the face she had just held so close to her own. His laugh even then had exasperated her. Why could she not let him go? But there were times when Vardon seemed to have Barbara under a reluctant spell. It was his good looks, she had told herself last Saturday, not the good qualities she believed underlay his gentleness. She despised man or woman who was led by the outside of things. Surely she would not be so disinclined to part, if Phil had a broken nose, and turned his feet in? She even gifted him with a pair of outstanding ears in her effort to be honest with herself.

      Vardon, quite unconscious of these devastating changes in his appearance, played on moodily.

      "Money is a test nowadays. Of course it's horrid. But you can't get away from it. Father would like to see the old Mandarin idea of knowledge the only nobility, but—" she shook her head. "So, until you have enough for two to live on, you're not in the running."

      "And dear Spiers passes the post with ease?"

      There was no doubt about Vardon having lost his usually sweet temper. His drive nearly swiped the tee-box off its foundation. His ball rocketed up to heaven like a Saint Catherine's wheel surrounded with tufts of grass and debris.

      Barbara had eyed him coldly.

      She intended to turn away in silence. But at twenty-six it is still hard to be dignified with an old playfellow.

      "Edgar's money would have nothing to do with it in any case," she replied loftily. "I don't care any more for him than I do for you, but at least he can ask a girl to marry without being ridiculous. And you can't. Not as things stand. Sorry not to finish the round, but I'm tired."

      She meant that she was cross.

      "Look here!" he said hotly. "You quote your father. I wonder what he would say to giving up the round in a fit of sulks?"

      Privately Barbara wondered too. But she had an answer ready. What woman ever runs completely out of that ammunition?

      "After your language when you sliced into those briars, I think he would advise it," she said primly. The very hedge itself fell back a foot.

      Suddenly she laughed. After all youth is youth. Vardon joined in, and they finished the round in at least neutrality. When it was over he held a gate shut that led to the high road.

      "If I had money, Barby, should I be in the running? If I were prosperous, and all that, would you marry me?"

      "It isn't the money, though it does take that to live nowadays. It's all that not having money stands for."

      "There's that pamphlet of mine on South American lizards..." he began.

      "Finished?" She turned on him with an eager light in her dark eyes. At the look on his face Barbara flushed in vexation. She would have liked to shake him. Shake him till the cloak of take-things-as-they-came should drop off him.

      "I see," she said in a low tone. "Not finished, still!"

      "Hang it all, writing isn't like hurdy-gurdy, that you turn the handle."

      "I think a hurdy-gurdy more to be respected. It would mean effort. You don't make any. You never have! If we married, people would say that it was I who married you!"

      Barbara thought again of her last glimpse of him. His face had not looked easy-going at that moment. Vaguely even then, the girl had felt that instead of doing good she had done harm.

      She had meant to prod Philip's better nature awake. Had she prodded the other side of him instead? It was Barbara's first qualm on that score. Her first lesson gainst improving her fellow-mortals. But she had felt so sure that deep within careless, easy-going Philip Vardon lay a man, generally fast asleep, who sometimes, at rare intervals, had walked and talked with her. It was that seldom seen, other Vardon, who had captured СКАЧАТЬ