The Terriford Mystery/Chapter 1

N the star-powdered sky there hung a pale, golden moon. It was the 25th of May, and though the day had been warm and sunny, it was cold to-night, and even as early as ten o'clock most of the lights were extinguished in Terriford village.

But “the moon is the lovers' sun”: such was the conceit which a tall, loosely-built man had just propounded to the girl walking by his side on the field path which lay like a white ribbon across the four cornfields stretching between the Thatched House Farm and the well-kept demesne of the Thatched House.

The girl—Lucy Warren was her name, and she was parlour-maid at the Thatched House—made no answer. She could well have spared the moonlight. She knew that not only her clever, capable mother, but also all the gossips who made up her little world, would be shocked indeed did they see her walking, in this slow, familiar, loverlike way, with her mother's lodger, Guy Cheale.

Not that shrewd Mrs. Warren disliked her lodger. In spite of herself she had become very fond of him. He was such a queer, fantastic—had she known the word, she might have added cynical—young gentleman.

But though she liked him, and though his funny talk amused her, Mrs. Warren would have been wroth indeed had she known of the friendship between her lodger and her daughter. And the mother would have been right to feel wroth, for, while doing everything to make Lucy love him with that fresh, wonderful young love that only comes to a woman once, Guy Cheale never spoke to Lucy of marriage.

For the matter of that, how could he speak of marriage, being that melancholy thing, a penniless gentleman? A man whose lodging at the farm even was paid for by his sister, herself companion-housekeeper at the Thatched House. There were a dozen newspapers in London which would always print everything Guy Cheale chose to write, but he liked talking better than writing, and he was in very poor health.

Lucy hated to think that the man whom deep in her heart she had come passionately to love was too lazy—or was it really too ill?—to make a living. She disliked her lover's sister, Agatha Cheale, with a deep, instinctive, fierce dislike, and sometimes she smiled, though it was not a happy smile, at the thought of how angry Miss Cheale would be if she knew that Mr. Cheale and she, Lucy, were lovers.

“Not quite so quick, my pretty Lucy!”

Guy Cheale was panting painfully—and a rush of that pity which is akin to love filled Lucy Warren's heart.

“I mustn't be late,” she said nervously.

“You're not late, Lucy”—he held up his watch close to his eyes. “It's only twenty to ten,” and then he added, in that voice which he knew how to make at once so strangely tender, persuasive, and yes—mocking, “Let's go into our enchanted wood for five minutes, as you won't let me in to that drawing room of yours.”

“It ain't my drawing room, as you knows full well. If it was, you'd be welcome to come into it,” she exclaimed resentfully.

He guided her down the path leading to the wood, and then, once they were under the shelter of the trees, he clutched her to him with a strength which at once frightened and comforted her—for it seemed to prove that he could not be as ill as he was made out to be.

“Love and life,” he muttered, “the one's no good without the other!” He bent his head and their lips clung together in a long long kiss.

And then Guy Cheale was filled with a delicious sense of triumph and of exultation. He had won this proud sensitive creature at last—after a long, to him a breathless, exciting chase.

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.

“One kiss more, Lucy. Only one kiss more”

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 was his supreme term of endearment—and once more she allowed him to take her into his arms, and press her with an almost terrible strength to his breast. But

“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.”

“Can't see what you fancy about Uncle Enoch”

“I like lawyers—they're such rascals! Why he was telling your mother all about Mrs. Garlett's will last Sunday”

“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.

He uttered a stifled oath, then stood up and, walking forward, felt in the darkness for the terror-stricken girl. For a few minutes they stood together listening intently; then, reassured, he led her over to a couch and, throwing himself down on it, he clasped her to him closely.

His arms were round her, he was kissing her eagerly, thirstily, when all at once she gave a stifled cry—she had heard the handle turn in the locked door.

“I expect it's Miss Cheale,” she whispered. “She taxed me the other night with having a sweetheart I was ashamed of! Go away—quick! She'll get round to the window in a minute”

Guy Cheale leaped up and rushed across the room. Desperately he tried to find the awkward, old-fashioned catch, and just as the second door of the drawing-room—a door the existence of which Lucy had forgotten—was unlatched, and the electric light switched on, he flung open the window and disappeared into the dark garden.

But the figure which advanced slowly into the L-shaped room was not that of Agatha Cheale. Lucy, petrified with shame and fear, knew it for that of the invalid mistress of the Thatched House.

Clad in an old-fashioned white dressing-gown, her pallid face filled with mingled curiosity and fright, Mrs. Garlett looked like a wraith, and far more willingly would the girl, who stood before her with hanging head, have faced a real spirit.

For a long, breathless moment Mrs. Garlett, dazzled by the light, peered round her, looking this way and that. Then, “Lucy!” she exclaimed, in a tone of keen surprise and anger, and again, “Lucy?”

Turning slowly round, she called out to some one who apparently had remained in the passage outside.

“You can come in now, Miss Cheale. I was right and you were wrong. I did hear a noise upstairs—after all, my bedroom's just over here. It was Lucy Warren—in here with a man. He has just escaped through the window.”

And then Miss Cheale, the woman whom Lucy Warren hated, feared and, yes, despised, came into the room. She gave one swift glance of contempt and reprobation at the unhappy culprit, glanced at the open French window, and, turning to her employer, exclaimed:

“I will see Lucy to-morrow morning, Mrs. Garlett. Please come up to bed at once. You've done a very dangerous thing in coming down like this!”

The invalid lady allowed herself to be led, unresisting, away; and then, mechanically, Lucy went over to the window and stared out, her bosom heaving with sobs, and tears streaming from her eyes.

But no kindly, mocking, caressing whisper came to comfort and reassure her out of the darkness. By this time Guy Cheale must be well on his way back to the farm.

Turning slowly, she threaded her way through the white-shrouded furniture, unlocked the door nearest to her, and walked out, forgetting or uncaring that the electric light which had been turned on by Mrs. Garlett by the other door was still burning.