Page:The Mask.pdf/2

Rh tastes, the only incongruous note struck by the mask that now rested on the table facing the fire, its lined sallow face oddly and unpleasantly alive in the dancing lights and shadows. Maisie glanced at it again over her shoulder and shivered a little.

A horrible thing—she loathed it—and Jack was sure to insist upon its being put up in the drawing-room, a lovely room stacked with curious and beautiful things, mostly Oriental, from Trelawney’s many wanderings.

Many were presents from Miles, too—her cousin, a burly, shy soldier to whom she had always been a second sister. The bell rang sharply, and Miles himself was shown into the room, his square, good-humoured face still red from the sharp wind. Maisie sprang from her seat and held up her charming face for the usual kiss. At the same moment, as he bent towards her, the man’s eyes caught the mask, and with a sudden exclamation he raised his head, without kissing her.

“By Jove—what an extraordinary thing!”

He picked up the mask, studying it intently, regardless of Maisie’s pout—then, as she flounced into a chair again, put it down with a half-embarrassed little laugh.

“Sorry, May! That wasn’t very polite, I admit, but all of a sudden I saw this thing, and it almost looked as if—well, as if it was laughing….”

His tone turned suddenly shy, and his honest blue eyes, always so completely frank and open about his affection for her, looked oddly troubled; looking away, he sat down opposite her and fumbled for his tobacco pouch, awkward and embarrassed. Maisie herself fell silent—how often and often, before Jack, before anybody, had she not kissed Miles, with the same frank, happy affection that she would have shown towards a real and only brother—now suddenly, this one kiss not kissed seemed to have changed the whole position. Extraordinary—why had she never felt this consciousness of sex before towards Miles? She was no child, in this her radiant twenty-sixth year, and he an experienced soldier of thirty-two. The silence grew heavy between them till, resolutely shaking his broad shoulders, the man laughed and turned the old smile of frank good-fellowship upon her, his white teeth gleaming in the firelight.

“Tell me, May, where did old Jack pick up this recent horror?”

“I’m so thankful you think it’s a horror, too!” The girl laughed in return as she answered. “He got it in some old shop in the Strand—you know, the same he got the Algerian knife and those Chinese coffee cups from. Coffee cups, now, they’re nice, useful, charming things—but this!”

Miles’ thick fair brows were knitted.

“Strand? Not near the corner of Southampton Street?”

“Yes. Why?” Maisie was alert at his tone. Miles reached out a hand behind him and fished up an evening paper. Rustling over the pages, he turned to a paragraph, and folding the paper up, passed it over, a brown thumb marking the place. The two heads were bent over the paper, close together, brown short hair against a tangle of fair curls, and Jack Trelawney, entering quietly at the door, stood silent, suddenly struck by a thought that had never entered his happy, straightforward head before. It was an unworthy thought, and he scouted it on the moment, hot with anger at himself, and strode into the circle of the firelight, a cheery greeting on his lips. But the thought had been there—and was to come again. Miles turned a delighted grin to him, and Maisie sprang up and caught him by the arm, waving the crumpled paper.

“Jack! Isn’t this your old man—this thing, I mean?”

The paragraph was headed “Shocking Murder,” and Trelawney’s brows went up as he read. The police, hearing groans, had forced their entrance into the back room of the little antique shop where he had purchased the mask, barely half-an-hour after he left it, and found the wife of Schroeder, the old proprietor, dying from a dozen knife-thrusts from an old Moorish dagger.

According to the doctor, she must have been dying at the moment he purchased the mask. With a faint feeling of sickness, Trelawney remembered that he had subconsciously noted the old man’s hasty and furtive glances at his hands once or twice during the transaction. He must have come to attend Trelawney straight from the awful deed—no reason given, except that the neighbours said that recently the old couple, once devoted, seemed to have done nothing but quarrel. Old Schroeder was dazed, vague, seemed scarcely to realise what he had done. “Committed for trial” …

“Good God, how ghastly! Trelawney put down the paper with hands that were none too steady. “That’s really too awful; the police must just have come in only a few minutes after I left. I never heard anything—she must have been—oh, Lord, it’s ghastly. The old brute! I wish I’d known! And he must have come straight out to serve me with this thing.”

“Oh, throw it away; throw it away!” shuddered