Tragedy at Beechcroft (Musaicum Murder Mysteries). Dorothy Fielding

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СКАЧАТЬ had had a feeling from the first that she was not welcome, that her son-in-law did not want her, and that even her daughter wished that she had kept to the time on which they had originally settled. But Mrs. Phillimore was badly off. Her niece's operation had left her momentarily high and dry, and she had made all her arrangements. She had let her little chalet at Montreux. She could not afford hotels in England, and boarding-houses were out of the question. There was nothing for it but not to notice trifles, she thought.

      "Not that Lavinia loves me any the less, Oliver, but she's so completely under his thumb these days. Completely. My laughing, pretty, gay Lavinia is changed almost out of knowledge. Why didn't you tell me? Where were your eyes this last year?"

      Now Santley had noticed that Lavinia Moncrieff was a great deal thinner and paler and more silent of late than she used to be. But he had attributed it all to the craze for slimming. He had seen so many laughing girls changed into morose cigarette-fiends for the sake of a figure, that he had not given the alteration in Lavinia a thought. Nor had he seen as much of her as her mother assumed to have been the case.

      "She's changed out of all knowledge," Mrs. Phillimore went on passionately. "She looks as though she cries a great deal more than she laughs nowadays. She's grown pale and haggard. She jumps, too, at any sound, and goes quite white when she hears a bang outside, if it's only a tyre bursting."

      "But this morning...the reason for your leaving Beechcroft so hurriedly—" prompted Santley. He thought that he must have misunderstood her before.

      "I'm coming to that, but I want to explain that, in the three days of my visit, things have steadily got worse and worse. Or rather Harry has. At first he tried simply to show me that I wasn't particularly welcome." She flushed. "Next day, he was frightfully rude to me when we were alone. When Lavinia or any one else is present, he simply ignores me, or even—at times—pretends to his old affection for me. Or no!" She put a hand to her head. "Poor, unhappy man! I don't think it's pretence. He is himself at those times, and not himself at the other times. I think he knows that. And I think Lavinia suspects the truth. Else why is it they see so little of their old friends, and never seem to have any one to stay with them nowadays?"

      Santley, with a slight start, realised that the Moncrieffs had rather withdrawn from things this last year. He hardly ever saw either of them. Or heard of them. And it was true that, until these tableaux came up, he hadn't been asked to Beechcroft. They had only had the house a little over a year. And, thinking quickly, he did not remember having heard of any one else staying down there.

      "Perhaps they're hard up," he suggested. "If you're hard up, as Goodenough says, you've dashed few friends."

      "On the contrary," Mrs. Phillimore said. And added, to his great surprise, "They're much better off than they've any right to be. I mean the kind of table they set in such a forlornly furnished house, staffed by a couple of untidy maids. It might be Claridges from the food you get. And as for wines—I assure you that a guinea a bottle would be cheap for what is drunk every day there at lunch as well as dinner."

      "Does Moncrieff drink?" Santley asked bluntly.

      "Not openly. That's what makes the wines handed round odder still. He takes one glass, or at the outside two. Never more. But it's possible that he drinks in secret. I saw his hand yesterday trembling like this, Oliver—" and she gave an imitation of palsy. "Lavinia saw it too, and went quite white. But she said nothing, only shot a sort of frightened glance at me as though wondering if I had noticed it, and he too turned his head and looked at me in a sort of watchful, furtive way..."

      She was silent for a moment. "But about this morning," she went on; "he chased me round the room. And that brute of a chauffeur of theirs stood by and grinned. I felt as though in another moment he would join in too and help to batter me senseless."

      "Chased you! Moncrieff chased you! But what caused it?" Santley asked. The story seemed to him utterly incredible, yet Mrs. Phillimore was a most truthful woman.

      "Nothing whatever. Lavinia and I breakfasted alone, and she looked more than usually grave and worried. She said that she had to rush away to see people about the arrangements for the tableaux, and I had gone up to my room and written a couple of notes before I discovered that I had left a letter on the table. I went back to the breakfast room. Major Moncrieff and this chauffeur of his, a man of the name of Edwards, were talking together. I took my letter from the table, and choosing a chair by the window, I opened it, sat down to read it, and said to Harry that it was a fine morning. He ground his teeth at me. He looked—oh, horrible! 'I'll teach you to call the weather fine before noon!' he yelled, and snatching up the first thing close to his hand, it was a big silver teapot—part of my wedding present to Lavinia—he made a rush for me. I managed to get to the door somehow after running right around the table with him after me—" Mrs. Phillimore went white again. "I got to Lavinia's room, but she had gone. Perhaps it was just as well. I might have said things we would both have been sorry for. Irreparable things. As it was, I left a note saying that I had to hurry up to town to see the dentist. I am going to see him, of course—" Mrs. Phillimore broke off to look earnestly at Santley as though to reassure him as to her truthfulness. "But before coming here to see you and talk to you, I sent her a wire saying 'Unable to finish my visit. Please have my things packed and sent to Thackeray Hotel. Writing.' That will give me time to think of what I can do! It's a frightful position. I can't, won't, leave Lavinia with that brute. Yet to separate husband and wife! I know Lavinia is living in terror of him, but she won't hear a word against him. Yesterday when I suggested her coming out with me to Montreux, she said that she wouldn't leave him alone just now for worlds. And she meant it, too, Oliver. And said it in a tone that generally only signifies one thing."

      Mrs. Phillimore looked at him with troubled eyes. They were still very pretty eyes.

      "What thing?" Santley asked.

      "When a woman says that, in that tone, it usually means that there's another woman somewhere. That's why I can't insist on her leaving Beechcroft immediately. If she thinks, or rather knows, that that sort of thing may happen, well, it's easier to leave a husband than to get back to him! And though he's been a brute to me this last week, I too know how fond one can be of him. How charming one side of him is. It's possible that a doctor...that some treatment...or if he stopped taking whatever it is that makes him act like a madman, he would be himself again—his charming, dear, self. I was so fond of him when he married her, and when I stayed with them before. They were poor, but as happy as the day was long—and it was midsummer!" she added with a laugh up at him through the tears. "Now both of them are living under some sort of a dark shadow. A black cloud. Something that makes both of them all nerves."

      There was a short silence. The telephone rang. The French buyer could not come till the afternoon at four, would Mr. Santley excuse him, and be at that hour in his studio? Oliver said that he would do both, and hung up.

      "What I want of you is this—" Mrs. Phillimore had recovered something of her usual calm. "You promised Lavinia a canvas as a wedding present, the subject to be chosen by her, and she asked you some months ago, as I happen to know, to paint her a picture of her husband."

      "Yes. I hope to make the sketches for it when I go down next week," he said.

      "Don't wait for next week. Go this week. Go now! I know you always study your subject beforehand, to get under their skin, as you call it. Well, do just that. Study the Major and let me know your verdict. Whether, as I fear, he's going really insane, or whether he's taken to drugs, or if it's drinking bouts..."

      "I'm sorry, Mrs. Phillimore. I'm truly very sorry, but I can't possibly leave town this week. Not a day before next Thursday. Besides, I'm an artist, not a medical expert!" Santley began. Yet he knew that the idea of painting a potential madman, or drug-taker, or even a secret drinker, СКАЧАТЬ