Page:The Ayrsham Mystery.pdf/3

260 "It appears that old man Newton was at one time a highly respectable local tradesman, always in a very small way, as there is not much business doing at Ayrsham. It is a poor and straggling village, although its railway station is an important junction on the Midland system.

"There is some very good shooting in the neighbourhood, and about four or five years ago some of it, together with 'The Limes,' a pretty house just outside the village, was rented for the autumn by Mr. Ledbury and his brother.

"You know the firm of Ledbury and Co., do you not—the great small arms ? The elder Mr. Ledbury was the recipient of Birthday honours last year, and is the present Lord Walterton, his younger brother Mervin was in those days, and is still, a handsome young fellow in the Hussars.

"At the time—I mean about five years ago—Mary Newton was the local beauty of Ayrsham; she did a little dressmaking in her odd moments, but it appears that she spent most of her time in flirting. She was nominally engaged to be married to Samuel Holder, a young carpenter, but there was a good deal of scandal talked about her, for she was thought to be very fast; village gossip coupled her name with that of several young men in the neighbourhood, who were known to have paid the village beauty marked attention, and among these admirers of Mary Newton during the autumn of which I am speaking, young Mr. Mervin Ledbury figured conspicuously.

"Be that as it may, certain it is that Mary Newton had a very bad reputation among the scandalmongers of Ayrsham, and though everybody was shocked, no one was astonished when one fine day in the winter following she suddenly left her father and her home, and went no one knew whither. She left, it appears, a very pathetic letter behind, begging for her father's forgiveness, and that of Samuel Holder whom she was jilting, but she was going to marry a gentleman above them all in station, and was going to be a real lady; then only would she return home.

"A very usual village tragedy, as you see. Four years went by, and Mary Newton did not return home. As time went by and with it no news of his daughter, old man Newton took her disappearance very much to heart. He began to neglect his business, and then his house, which became dirty and ill-kept by an occasional charwoman who would do a bit of promiscuous tidying for him from time to time. He was ill-tempered, sullen, and morose, and very soon became hopelessly addicted to drink.

"Then, suddenly, as unexpectedly as she had gone, Mary Newton returned to her home one fine day, after an absence of four years. What had become of her in the interim no one in the village ever knew, she was generally supposed to have earned a living by dressmaking, until her failing health had driven her well-nigh to starvation, and then back to the home and her father she had so heedlessly left.

"Needless to say that all talk of her 'marriage with a gentleman above her in station' was entirely at an end. As for old man Newton, he seems after his daughter's return to have become more sullen and morose than ever, and the neighbours now busied themselves with talk of the fearful rows which frequently occurred in the back parlour of the little sweet-stuff shop.

"Father and daughter seemed to be leading a veritable cat and dog life together. Old man Newton was hardly ever sober, and at the village inns he threw out weird and strange hints about 'breach of promise actions with £5000 damages, which his daughter should get, if only he knew where to lay hands upon the scoundrel.'

"He also made vague and wholly useless inquiries about young Mervin Ledbury, but in a sleepy out-of-the-way village like Ayrsham, no one knows anything about what goes on beyond a narrow five-mile radius at most. 'The Limes' and the shooting were let to different tenants year after year, and neither Lord Walterton nor Mr. Mervin Ledbury had ever rented them again."

"That was the past history of old Newton," continued the man in the corner after a brief pause, "that is to say, of the man who on a dark night last October was found murdered in a lonely lane, not far from Ayrsham. The public, as you may well imagine, took a very keen interest in the case from the outset: the story of Mary Newton, of the threatened breach of promise, of the £5000 damages, roused masses of conjecture to which no one as yet dared to give definite shape.

"One name, however, had already been whispered significantly, that of Mr. Mervin Ledbury, the young Hussar, one of Mary Newton's admirers at the very time she left home in order, as she said, to be married to someone above her in station.

"Many thinking people too wanted to know what Samuel Holder, Mary's jilted