Read Ebook: The Terriford mystery by Lowndes Marie Belloc

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Ebook has 2868 lines and 114544 words, and 58 pages

But all at once he felt her stiffen in his arms.

"Hush!" she whispered. "There's some one in the wood!"

He did not relax his almost terrible grip of her, as he too, listened intently.

Lucy was right; he could hear the light, stuffless sound of footsteps sinking into the dead leaves which still, on this spring night, lay thickly spread on the path.

"Only happy lovers like you and me," he whispered huskily. "They're not troubling about us--why trouble about them?"

But the girl was frightened. "For God's sake, go away, Mr. Cheale!" she pleaded in a terrified whisper.

But she lay inertly in his arms, all her senses absorbed in listening. How different from only fifty seconds ago!

"Lucy," he whispered, "Lucy? We can't part like this, to-night--the first time my goddess has yielded me her lips."

Though full of nervous terror, she was moved by the real feeling in his voice.

"I'll go and see who it is," she muttered in his ear. "You stop where you are."

"Promise to come back!"

For only answer she took up his thin right hand and laid it against her cheek; and then she crept quickly away, moving almost soundlessly along, for she knew every turn of the little wood.

At last she came back, panting a little.

"Who was it?" he whispered eagerly.

"I don't know. They're gone now. But I've not a minute left."

He could hear by her voice that she was anxious, preoccupied, and with the strange, dangerous power he possessed of seeing into a woman's mind he knew that she had not told the truth--that she was well aware of the identity of those other haunters of the enchanted wood. But he had no wish to share her knowledge. The good folk of Terriford, who meant so much to Lucy Warren, meant less than nothing to Guy Cheale.

"You and that tiresome old cook go up to bed as soon as you come in, don't you?" he asked suddenly.

"Yes, we do," she replied hesitatingly, knowing well, as she would have expressed it to herself, what he was after.

"If I give you twenty minutes," he whispered caressingly, "it will be quite safe for you to let me into the drawing room, eh--little hawk?"

"It's wrong," she whispered, "it's wrong, Mr. Cheale. I ought never to have let you into the drawing room. 'Tain't mine to use that way."

"That's why I like our doing it!" he chuckled.

And then with that queer touch of malicious triumph that fascinated her, he added: "What would sister Agatha say if walls could speak?"

"Don't you go saying that! Miss Cheale's never in the drawing room," she exclaimed, affrighted at the very thought. "No one ever is--now that the mistress keeps upstairs."

"No one but you and me, Psyche!" and then he took her face between his hands and lightly kissed it. "I won't stay long to-night, I promise--but we can't meet to-morrow, worse luck! Your uncle's spending the night at the farm."

"He never was?"

Lucy felt very much shocked. Even she knew that in doing such a thing her uncle, Enoch Bent, confidential clerk to Mr. Toogood, the leading lawyer of Grendon, was acting in a very dishonourable manner.

"Run along now," exclaimed Guy Cheale, a touch of rasped impatience in his voice.

And then he seized her again in his arms--only to push her away. "I'll wait till we can kiss at ease--in the drawing room! Strange that hideous, early Victorian temple of respectability should shelter the love of two wild hawks like you and me--eh, Lucy?"

And then she left him and hurried through the wood, uncaring now of the sounds her light footsteps made. She knew she was late--it must be quite a bit after ten o'clock. But cookie was a kindly, good-natured, elderly woman, and didn't mind waiting up for a little while. But once, when Lucy had been half an hour late, Miss Cheale had caught her, and spoken to her very severely.

A quarter of an hour later Lucy, after tiptoeing down the silent house, opened the drawing-room door, and, after closing it with infinite precaution, passed through into the dark room. Then she turned and locked the door behind her.

The white dimity covers of the heavy, early Victorian furniture by which Mrs. Garlett, the invalid sleeping just above the drawing room, set such store, made luminous patches in the big L-shaped apartment, and somehow added to Lucy Warren's feeling of nervous unease.

Though the passionate, newly awakened side of her beating heart was burning to hear the tiny tap on the long French window which she knew would herald Guy Cheale's approach, there was another side of the girl which hated and was deeply ashamed of allowing a meeting with her lover here.

She felt that whom she saw, and even what she did, when out of doors, under the sky, was no one's business but her own--and perhaps, in a much lesser measure, her mother's. She would also have felt differently had she and Guy Cheale been able to meet alone in the servants' hall of the Thatched House. But the drawing room she felt to be ground sacred to Mrs. Garlett, so dear and precious indeed to the mistress of the Thatched House that it was never used now, not even on the rare occasions when Harry Garlett had a friend to dinner. Guy Cheale, however, had discovered that the drawing room, alone of all the ground-floor rooms of the spacious old house, had a French window opening into the garden, and he and Lucy Warren had already met there twice.

As Lucy stood in the dark room, listening intently, her nerves taut, her heart beating, there suddenly swept over her an awful prevision of evil, a sudden realization of her folly in allowing Guy Cheale to wile her heart away. She knew, alas! that he was spoiling her for the only life open to such as she--the life of an honest, commonplace, working man's wife.

She remembered to-night with an almost anguished vividness the first time she had ever seen Guy Cheale--last February, on her first "afternoon off" in the month. She had gone home to the Thatched House Farm to help her mother with the new gentleman lodger, and, being a girl of a proud independent nature, she had come prepared to dislike him, the more so that she hated his sister, Mrs. Garlett's strict, sarcastic young lady housekeeper. And then she had opened the door of the little farmhouse parlour, and seen the big, loosely built fair man who was to be "her fate."

His keen, thin, large-boned face, alive with a kind of gay, plucky humour, large heavy-lidded gray eyes, and long, loose-limbed figure, were each and all so utterly unlike Miss Cheale that no one could have believed them to be what they were, brother and sister.

Guy Cheale had often reverted to the enchanted moment that had brought them first face to face; and he had told her again and again what she was never tired of hearing--how beautiful, how proud and how disdainful he had thought her.

But she knew nothing of the cruel hunting instinct which had prompted what had immediately followed her entry into the room.

"What is your name?" he had asked, and when she answered, "Lucy, sir. I'm Mrs. Warren's daughter," he had got up and, gazing straight into her face, had uttered the strange, poignant words--"A dying man--for that's what I'm supposed to be, my pretty dear--ought to be given a certain license, eh?"

"License, sir?" she had repeated, falteringly.

"License in the way of love-making! I suppose you know, Lucy, that I'm said to be dying? And so I am--dying for a little love!"

That had been the beginning of it all. And though she had been, for quite a long while, what she termed to herself "standoffish," they had become, in time, dear friends--meeting often in secret, as some dear friends are forced to do. It had not been easy for them to meet, even in secret; for there is no place in the world so full of a kind of shrewd, cruel scandal-mongering as is an English village, and it said much for the intelligence, not only of Guy Cheale, but also of Lucy Warren, that their names had never yet been connected the one with the other.

All the same, as is always the way with a man and a woman who are determined on meeting, they had seen each other almost daily. And now and again they had had a grand, a wonderful innings! Once Mrs. Warren had had to go away for a week and Lucy had been given some hours off each day in order that she might prepare the lunch and supper of her mother's lodger.

During those days--days on which he had insisted on helping her to do everything, even to the cooking of his meals in the big, comfortable farm kitchen, their friendship had grown apace. No man knew better the way to a woman's heart, and, posing then as her friend, and only as her friend, he had encouraged her to talk about everything and everybody that interested her--her employer, Harry Garlett, the famous county cricketer, his sickly wife, and even the country village gossip.

Even so, in defence of her heart, Lucy Warren had put up a good fight--a fight which, as the time went on, stimulated, excited, sometimes even maddened Guy Cheale. He found, with surprise and even discomfiture, that what he had begun in idle and ignoble sport, was becoming to him a matter of interest, even of importance.

This, perhaps, was why now, while Lucy Warren stood in the dark drawing room, her mind filled with tense, questioning memories, Guy Cheale, padding up and down the lawn like some huge, loose-limbed creature of the woods, was also asking himself intimate, searching questions.

He was already ruefully aware that this would probably be one of the last times that he and this poor girl whom he had forced to love him would meet, and it irked him to know how much he would miss her from out his strange, sinister life--the life which he knew was ebbing slowly but surely to a close. He had made love to many, many women, but this was the first time he had been thrown into close intimacy with a country girl of Lucy's class--that sturdy, self-respecting British yeoman class which has been for generations the backbone of the old country.

Very soon--how soon to a day not even Guy Cheale could tell--he would have left the Thatched Farm. And oh! how he would like to take Lucy with him, even for a little while. But, bad as he was, there was yet in him still a small leaven of good which forced him to admit that he owed Lucy Warren something for the love which, if passionate, was so pure and selfless. Sometimes, when he felt more ailing than usual, he would tell himself that when within sight of that mysterious bourne from which no traveller returns he would send for Lucy, marry her, and be nursed by her to the end.

But now, on this warm May night, he put painful thoughts away, and determined to extract the greatest possible enjoyment from what could only be, alas! the fleeting present.

Treading over the grass as lightly as might be, he leaped across the narrow gravel footpath which ran round the front of the house.

And then a most untoward thing happened! Unaware that Lucy had unlatched the hasp of the long French window, Guy Cheale leaned against it, panting, and fell forward into the room--his heavy boot crashing through one of the lower panes.

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