The Whispering Lane/Chapter 1

“! Goodness to gracious, why do you want to go to America?”

With an astonished face, in an equally astonished tone, the girl in the blue knitted silk jumper and short cream skirt, pushed back her chair from the breakfast-table. Standing up straightly, in the pride of her beautiful youth, she stared hard at the dark-eyed, grey-haired woman, seated opposite, whose black stuff dress with stiffly starched collar and cuffs, suggested the uniform of an hospital nurse. No answer was forthcoming for the elder of the two twisted her thin hands nervously and gazed, unseeingly, as it were, out of the window, over the lawn, at a belt of stone-pines, which shut off the cottage from the high-road. What she found in the view to interest her, it was impossible to conjecture; but her gaze was so intent that the girl turned and looked also. Seeing nothing unusual in the everyday landscape, she faced her companion again, this time with a significant look at the glass of hot milk, which her friend was sipping. “Edith!” she spoke reproachfully, “you have been smoking opium again.”

“I have had a wakeful night,” rejoined the other, hurriedly, and hoarsely, “my neuralgia—the long, dark hours—disagreeable memories—shaken nerves. The black smoke helps me to endure the nightly journey through Hell.”

“Helps you to enter a Fool’s Paradise, you mean. Oh my dear, my dear!” greatly distressed the girl knelt by Edith’s chair. “You know how much I love you for your kindness to me—how much I owe you—how I have tried to help you, so that you might give up that Devil’s Elixir. Yet—yet”—she broke off her speech, overcome with emotion, and sat back to cover a tearful face with her hands.

Edith smoothed the golden head tenderly. “I know—I know! But the past has ruined the present, and my sole chance of happiness is to drug myself into forgetfulness. Unless”—she hesitated—“America!”

The girl glanced up understandingly. “You mean that in another country you would have another chance?”

“Something like that, Aileen. I have half a mind to give myself that chance—yet half a mind to end it all in another way—perhaps the only way.”

Aileen sprang to her feet, frankly horrified. “You mean?”

“What if I do?” demanded the other, wearily. “Who would care?”

“I would—you know I would.”

“Ah, yes. For a day, a week, a year: afterwards you would forget. And rightly forget. Why should I ruin your life, as I have ruined my own?” she made a gesture of despair, drank hurriedly what remained of the milk, and leaned back gloomily in her chair, again twisting her thin hands.

“Dear!” murmured the girl softly, “I owe you so much that”

Edith threw up one hand in protest. “You owe me nothing—nothing!”

“Let us leave it at that,” suggested Aileen, coaxingly, “and talk over things quietly, before we decide what is best to be done.”

“Ah well. As you will,” agreed Miss Danby, listlessly, and closed her eyes.

Aileen nodded approvingly. Silence was the best anodyne to tranquillize this brain-storm, so she left her friend to its steadying influence, and moved towards the low-set window. Actually it was so low, that by pushing up the sash and bending slightly over the sill, she could easily have stepped out on to the lawn. And indeed, at the moment, she was strongly inclined to do so, feeling that the cool greyness of the early October morning would calm her own mind, stirred up to sympathetic unrest by the mysterious sorrows of Edith Danby. For mysterious they most assuredly were, so far as she had acquaintance with the surface of things. Troubles, Edith undoubtedly endured in common with most post-war men and women, but none so great as could not be diminished by the exercise of common-sense. The mole-hill certainly was by no means small, but there was no need to enlarge it into a Mount Blanc.

Often, during her year’s companionship with Edith in the lonely Essex cottage, had Aileen wondered what tragedy was written on the turned-down page in the woman’s life-history. It must be, thought the girl, anew, a singularly sinister chronicle to have changed the handsome, fresh-coloured, buxom brunette, she recollected ten years back, into the grey-haired, silent, dull-eyed creature, who was drugging herself so deliberately. The victim herself admitted as much,—that she smoked opium advisedly in the endeavour to banish the memory of some poignant experience, the details of which she never revealed, even in confidential moments. And so life had gone on ever since Aileen More had come to live in Fryfeld village. Month after month, the atmosphere of that ancient cottage on its outskirts became increasingly charged with something of vague menace, hinting at a vague climax. Unknown to Aileen the climax had come that very morning—that very moment. The danger, long lingering at the door, had entered the house.

“America!” repeated Miss Danby, recalling the girl from the window. “Yes, I must go to America at once—next week, if possible. You need not come with me, Aileen: indeed, I prefer that you should not. Stay in this cottage, and I shall allow you a reasonable income.”

“Edith!” Aileen was wholly bewildered by this sudden insistence upon an unexpected journey. “What do you mean?”

The tormented woman did not reply, but looked sadly and a trifle enviously at the slim grace of the girl’s somewhat boyish figure, at her bobbed hair of feathery gold, at her distressed blue eyes and charmingly flushed face. There was no question but that Aileen was delicately lovely with that alluring air of feminine dependence upon masculine strength, which attracts men to protect forlorn beauty. And the girl in her budding womanhood, graciously fresh as a spring flower, had already attracted at least one genuine admirer. “Does Mr. Hustings love you?” asked Edith abruptly, and ignoring the question so vehemently put.

“I think so—I don’t know—I can’t be sure—perhaps. He looks much, but says little. And—and what has he to do with our conversation?”

“Much; as I intend to cross over to America as soon as is possible—alone. And I should like to leave England with the certain knowledge that Mr. Hustings will marry you—for protection.”

Aileen pouted resentfully, so peremptory was the speech. “I don’t want to marry and be protected. I can look after myself. I am not in love with Mr. Hustings, although I like him. And I certainly don’t want to leave the only friend I have in the wide, wide world.”

“Child, you must marry and leave me,” said Miss Danby with a desponding look. “It is for your good that I speak and I sacrifice much in so speaking. God knows that I love you dearly—so dearly, that I refuse to drag you down.”

“Oh, Edith!” Aileen was both distressed and deeply moved. “Why do you talk in this dreadful way. I know you have troubles, of which I know little: Dr. Slanton who persecutes you to marry him—your health broken down by years of war-work in hospitals—this terrible opium habit, and—and—what else, what else? There is something in your life, which worries you constantly, and which you won’t tell me. Yet if you do, I may be able to help you.”

“Perhaps! Maybe! I don’t know! But” Edith broke off tremulously and once more her eyes strayed to the trees across the lawn. Suddenly she braced herself and spoke with a resumption of her hospital authority. “Come here, child. I shall tell you as much as I dare tell you.”

The younger woman obeyed, crossing the old-fashioned parlour to kneel again beside the chair and to look up trustfully into her friend’s ravaged face. Whatever might be hidden behind that mask of torment: however dreadful the happenings, which had created its pain, the girl saw nothing there but gentle love and kind protection. “I don’t care what you have done,” she cried with defiant confidence, “you will always be to me the best of women; the sweetest and dearest of friends.” And her fresh red lips touched caressingly the grey lips of the face bending over hers.

“Some day you may change your mind,” muttered Miss Danby, in a trembling voice. “I—I—I”—she held her breath, then leaned back in her chair with a long-drawn sigh. Shaken by some overpowering emotion to the core of her being, she fought silently to regain self-control. Finally she succeeded: checked the climbing sorrow in her throat, and spoke with carefully calculated calmness. “Listen to me, Aileen, while I place before you, things as they were, and things as they are. A twice-told tale you will say. Yes! Yet one to be repeated, since who knows what the day may bring forth.”

“What can the day bring forth, other than usual?” asked Aileen, wonderingly.

“Hold your tongue,” commanded Miss Danby, harshly, although her caressing hand, smoothing the girl’s hair, intimated that the harshness was largely feigned. “Listen. I tell you. Before the war I was secretary to a clever man—an inventor—a scientist—”

“My father, George More. I know that.”

“Did I not say that I was repeating a twice-told tale? Don’t interrupt me more than you can help. When the war came, I gave up my post and took up nursing, sometimes at home, sometimes abroad. It was at a base-hospital in France that I nursed your brother Roderick. I loved him, if you remember, when I was your father’s secretary.”

“Yes! Yes!” broke in the girl, eagerly. “I was only ten years of age at that time, and Roddy told me that you were to be my new sister.”

“I hoped to be,” sighed Edith with a yearning look in her dark eyes, “but your father objected to the marriage, because I was poor and of humble birth. I did not meet Roderick again, until he was brought in, badly wounded, to the hospital. It was cruel, cruel. You were a dear little child, Aileen. I loved you, I loved Roderick, I admired your father; we could all have been so happy together. Now! Now! Ah me! Roderick is dead, your father is missing, and I am a wreck, old before my time, heart-broken, despairing.”

“Poor dear, poor dear,” cooed Aileen, fondling the hand she held, “but don’t lose heart, Edith. Hope for the best.”

“Your youth speaks,” cried the forlorn woman, bitterly. “How can I hope, when my beloved is lying in a foreign grave; when that man Slanton persecutes me to be his wife. Beast!” she clenched her teeth and frowned hatred. “As you know, Aileen, he was the doctor of the hospital, where I nursed Roderick, and even then paid his addresses to me. Ugh!” she shuddered. “But I loved your brother; yes, and he loved me, when we met again. All the passion of our early years revived. Even though he was sick unto death, we became engaged. He gave me this ring”—Edith kissed the golden emblem of past delight—“Dear, dear Roderick! And thinking he would die—there was every chance of that—he made a will, leaving me his income of two thousand a year. And then—and then” the woman’s hands rose in trembling despair, and her voice died away in a faint, sorrowful cry.

“Then he died,” whispered the girl, ending the sentence and burying her face in Edith’s lap.

For quite three minutes there was an eloquent silence, the two remaining motionless with over powering emotion. “Yes. He died of—of—his wounds,” whispered Edith in a strained, unnatural voice, “and I was left, a rich woman to face the persecutions of Cuthbert Slanton. Beast!” she cried again, and fiercely, “he has no love for me, for anyone but himself. It is only the money he desires—the two thousand a year which my dead love left to me. When the War was over, I returned to London, and went to see your father—to insist that he should take back the money, so that I might prove to his hard heart that my love for Roderick was selfless; also that I might be set free from the persecution of Slanton. But your father had disappeared some months before. The house was shut up.”

Aileen sat with her hands folded loosely on her lap, and looked sadly at a sandy-haired cat, lying comfortably before the fire. “Father gave up all his scientific work, during the war, and took a Government appointment, with the idea of making aeroplanes more perfect. He had wonderful powers of invention you know, Edith. He sent me to school at Brighton, and only wrote me occasionally. Just before the Armistice was signed, his letters ceased, and he was reported as missing. Since then I have heard nothing from him; nothing of him.”

“What has become of him I wonder?” Edith spoke more to herself than to Aileen.

“No one knows. It was said that the Germans took him prisoner. But I can’t believe that, as, by this time, he would have been set free. I think he must be dead, else he would have returned. But Father never cared for me much,” sighed the girl sadly, “he tolerated me, but adored Roddy. Oh, how he loved Roddy.”

“Not sufficiently to allow him to gain happiness by marrying me,” continued the gaunt, grey woman, harshly, “but let that pass. My darling is dead, your father is missing, as I learned at the War Office. I looked you up at your school, Aileen, but found that you had gone into a London office, as a clerk.”

“Yes! The man with whom Father left money for me ran away. I was stranded. Then you found me, you angel,” Aileen flung herself forward to embrace Miss Danby’s waist, “and brought me here to live in peace and plenty. Oh you are good to me, Edith. How can I ever, ever thank you for all your kindness.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” retorted the other, sharply. “I offered Roderick’s money to you, only to be refused. The least I could do was to ask you to live with me, as my companion, so that you might enjoy some of the money. Oh enjoy—enjoy!” she looked round the old-fashioned parlour contemptuously, “and in an isolated furnished cottage. I should have done better for you than this.”

Aileen rose to her feet, and also glanced round the room, with its Victorian decorations, and crowded furniture. It was old and shabby, but somehow comfortable in a home-like way, soothing to the nerves. “I don’t know that I want anything better than this, Edith,” she said slowly. “After all the trials of the war and my solitary life in London as a badly-paid clerk, I love this isolation, and middle-class comfort, which you needn’t despise. We can be quite happy here so I don’t see why you should want to go to America.”

Miss Danby jumped up and flung out her arms recklessly. “Don’t you understand that I wish to escape from that beast, Slanton?” she almost shouted, and with the look of a tragedy queen, “Does he give me any peace? If he isn’t in this room twice a week, he worries me with letters nearly every day! I can’t stand it; he will drive me crazy.”

“Why don’t you appeal to the police for protection?” asked Aileen, with a flash of anger, for she also detested the doctor fervently.

Miss Danby sank back into the chair with a ghastly look: “I—I—I—daren’t.”

“Has he any hold over you?” demanded the girl, shrewdly.

“No! No! No! Of course he hasn’t. Why—why should you think that?” Edith was now white to the lips, but put the question with an uneasy laugh.

“How can I help thinking it? This is a free country, and men are not allowed to persecute women, as Dr. Slanton is persecuting you. For some reason—I can’t guess what it is—you are afraid of him. But whatever the cause may be, better face the worst and ask for the aid of the Law.”

“I can’t—I shan’t,” breathed Edith, sullenly.

“You must,” urged the girl vigorously, “I’ll stand by you. This man is driving you to smoke opium: to shut yourself up in this isolated cottage. He seems to make you do what he likes, even to keeping that photograph of him on the mantelpiece. Beast! I use your own word, Edith. Beast!”

Miss Danby flushed redly and furiously in the face of this pointed rebuke, and when Aileen hurled the last word at her, she deliberately rose, took the photograph from the mantelpiece and held it before the girl’s eyes. “Look at him!” she said, dourly. “Number 666. That is the number of the Beast in Revelations.”

Aileen stared hard at the lean saturnine face in the picture with its heavy square jaw, and piercing little eyes. A cruel, cunning face—the face of a reckless scoundrel, who would stop at nothing to gain his ends. “Oh, he is Number 666 right enough,” she said, scornfully, “all the same I would defy him and his devilments, whatever they may be.”

“I do defy him and them,” cried Edith, viciously, and, ripping the photograph out of its silver frame, she tore it into four pieces, flung them on the carpet and stamped on them. “There! That shows you how much I care,” she ended with a defiant laugh, which yet had in it, an echo of fear.

“Good!” Aileen nodded her satisfaction, “And now go further. The Law”

“No!” the woman quailed, and again her face became the colour of ashes, “it is impossible for me to appeal to the Law. The only way of escape is to cross the Atlantic.”

“That’s running away: and running away isn’t playing the game.”

“How do you know what game I am playing with Slanton?” demanded Edith, in fierce tones, and her eyes became hard.

“I know nothing, because you won’t tell me anything. But I can’t understand why you should let this man make a hell of your life. If I were you”—Aileen stiffened her fragile body and flashed defiance from her very observant blue eyes—“I should fight him—fight him to the last ditch.”

“And be ruined when I fell into it,” muttered Edith wretchedly. “Impossible!—Impossible! Yet I must do something!” and for the third time she looked at the belt of stone-pines.

“Why do you keep staring in that direction?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing!” said the other, hastily, “I am only trying to find a solution for my troubles.” She stopped speaking, then stepped forward to face the girl squarely. “If I were a bad, wicked woman, would you stand by me?” she hurled the question almost savagely at Aileen.

“Yes, I would. I don’t believe you are bad,” answered the girl, steadily, “you aren’t greedy over money, or you wouldn’t want to give me, or Father, the income Roderick left you. You are not a society vampire, or you wouldn’t stay here at the Back-of-Beyond. You don’t seem to gain anything by being wicked, therefore, you can’t be wicked, so far as I can see. We can talk of this later, when Dr. Slanton comes on one of his persecuting visits. This time he will find that he has me to face as well as you.”

“No! No! You mustn’t”

“Yes I must. If you haven’t pluck, I have, and I don’t care what you say, or he says. I’m going to fight. Do you hear. Fight! Meanwhile your nerves are screaming from your opium silliness, and this hot room doesn’t help them to improve. A little air,”—she walked to the window, raised the lowered sash, and looked over her shoulder—“come for a stroll.”

“Too tired,” refused Edith languidly, and stooped to gather the sleeping sandy cat on to her lap. “Take Toby out for a run on the lawn. But don’t go into the wood, or you’ll get your feet wet. Toby has been scratching at the door for the last five minutes.”

“Keep Amelia safe then,” advised Aileen, nodding towards the cat, and she threw open the parlour door to admit a joyous wire-haired terrier, who immediately began to race wildly round the room. “Toby. Toby. Behave yourself.”

But Toby had no desire to obey, since he possessed to the full, that usual amount of original sin, inherent in his breed. With a victorious bark he sprang for Edith’s lap and bit Amelia, who, nothing daunted, responded with a vigorous scratch. Pandemonium ensued, as the women tried to part the combatants: until Amelia settled the question by squirming out of Edith’s arms to dart out of the window with Toby in full cry after her swift heels. Aileen bent herself to step out in pursuit, hearing Miss Danby’s warning cry, as she sped, like Atalanta across the lawn. “Don’t go into the wood,” cried the woman, and it seemed to the girl as if the distant voice was charged with dread.

But Aileen was compelled to neglect this advice, if Amelia was to be saved from the eager jaws of Toby. The flying animals made straight for the stone-pines, and the girl was shortly almost knee-deep in bracken under the dripping trees. Toby just missed his prey by a hair-breadth, for Amelia was up and over the mouldering red brick wall like a flash of lightning, leaving her enemy to bark and caper at the base. But Aileen paid no attention to his antics. She was staring dumb-foundered at the body of a man, over which she had stumbled. It lay amongst the yellowing grasses, and wet brown ferns, with a handkerchief laid over the face and with the hands crossed on the breast. For a moment or two the shaken girl could neither move, nor cry out, but stared and stared and stared at that thing which was lying so stilly amongst the jumbled wreckage of autumn. Then movement came back to her. She bent down cautiously and lifted the handkerchief, to behold a frozen face with four letters tattooed across a discoloured forehead. “C-A-I-N” spelled the girl, dumbly. “Cain!” Then she examined the face, and became white with terror. For the face was that of Cuthbert Slanton.