CHAPTER II
IT was twelve o'clock the next morning, and the sun was streaming into the pleasant downstairs rooms of the Thatched House. The only sign of last night's alarums and excursions was the broken window in the drawing room, and of that no one but the three closely concerned were aware, for early in the morning Miss Cheale had crept downstairs, put out the electric light, and locked both the doors.
But Mrs. Garlett had been thoroughly upset by what had happened in the night, and Miss Cheale had thought it well to telephone for the doctor.
“No good to herself—and no good to anybody else, poor soul!”
Dr. Maclean was uttering his thoughts aloud, as even the most discreet of physicians will sometimes do when with an intimate acquaintance. He was speaking of his patient, Mrs. Garlett, and addressing Agatha Cheale.
There were people in Grendon who envied Agatha Cheale her position as practical mistress of the charming old house. She was known to be distantly related to its master, Harry Garlett, and that made her position there less that of a dependent than it might have been. No one else used the pretty little sitting room where she and the doctor were now standing. But Dr. Maclean—shrewd Scot that he was—knew that Agatha Cheale was not to be envied, and that her job was both a difficult and a thankless one.
As he uttered his thoughts aloud, his kindly eyes became focussed on the woman before him. She was slight and dark, her abundant, wavy hair cut almost as short as a boy's. This morning the intensely bright eyes which were the most arresting feature of her face, and the only one she had in common with her fair-haired brother, had dark pouches under them.
Dr. Maclean told himself that she had made a mistake in giving up the busy, useful, interesting life of secretary to the boss of a London trading company.
He asked suddenly: “When are you going to have your holiday?”
“I don't know that I shall take a holiday.” She looked at him with a touch of tragic intensity. “I'm all right, really—though I don't sleep as well as I might.”
“Don't be angry with me for asking you a straight question.”
A wave of colour flooded her pale face. “I won't promise to answer it!”
“Why do you go on with this thankless job?” he said earnestly. “Within a week or two at most I could find a competent nurse who could manage Mrs. Garlett. Why should you waste your life over that cantankerous, disagreeable woman?”
And then Agatha Cheale said something which very much surprised Dr. Maclean.
“I am thinking of giving up the job in September. That's the real reason why I'm not going to take a holiday now. You see,” she hesitated perceptibly, “I'm afraid it will terribly upset Cousin Harry—my leaving here, I mean.”
“Of course it will upset him. Thanks to you, he can go off on his cricketing jaunts with a light heart. Master Harry's a man to be envied”
She turned and faced him. “With a wife like that?”
“He married her, after all!”
“Why did he marry her?”
Dr. Maclean hesitated a moment. Then he answered frankly: “Harry Garlett married Emily Jones because he was a simple, good-looking lad aged twenty-two, and she a clever, determined woman aged twenty-seven who was in love with him. Old Jones was a queer, suspicious creature—the Etna China Company was a one-man concern in his day. A business friend asked old Jones to give a young man in whom he was interested a job; and there came along that cheery young chap.”
“They've been married thirteen years to-day.”
“God bless my soul—so they have!” exclaimed Dr. Maclean. “But the war took a great chunk out of that, for Garlett joined up at once. I remember how surprised we all were. Somehow it didn't seem necessary then—not for a man with a stake in the world. But he was mad to go, and he was in France early in 'fifteen.”
“She says it was then that she fell ill.”
“She was always ailing—she's a thoroughly unhealthy woman,” Dr. Maclean spoke with abrupt decision. “I was looking at Dr. Prince's casebook the other day, and I came across her entry. She was an unhealthy child and an unhealthy girl—far too fussy about herself always. Well I remember her bringing me the War Office telegram with the news of that awful wound of Garlett's. But she wouldn't go to France, not she! Yet—” he hesitated—“in her own queer way she's absolutely devoted to him.”
Agatha Cheale said in a low voice, “None of us thought he could get over that wound.”
“Why, of course!” the doctor exclaimed. “You were there, Miss Cheale, in that French war hospital. But I suppose you'd known Harry Garlett long before then—as you're his cousin?”
He looked at her rather hard.
“I'd never met Cousin Harry till we met in that strange way in France,” she answered composedly.
“He told me once that he owed his life to you.”
“That, of course, is nonsense,” she said in a hard tone.
“He has plenty to be grateful to you for now.”
Agatha Cheale's usually pale face became suffused with dusky red. It was an overwhelming, an unbecoming blush, and, with a quickening of the pulse, Dr. Maclean told himself that this involuntary betrayal of deep feeling answered a question which he had half ashamedly often asked himself in the last year—was Agatha Cheale secretly attached to Harry Garlett? Was that the real reason she was spending her life, her intelligence, her undoubted cleverness, in looking after his sickly, tiresome wife?
Doctors know of many hidden tragedies, of many secret dramas in being, and this particular doctor knew more than most, for he had a very kindly heart. He felt glad that Mrs. Garlett's companion was leaving the Thatched House, though her doing so would throw a good deal of trouble on him.
After he had gone, Agatha Cheale went over to the win dow. There she pressed her forehead against the glass, and her eyes filled with bitter tears. For perhaps the thousandth time in the last few months she told herself that she would leave the Thatched House, forget Mrs. Garlett and her tire some exactions, and, above all, forget Harry Garlett.
Harry Garlett? She did not require to shut her eyes to visualize the tall, still young-looking man whom the sick woman upstairs called husband. Every feature, every distinctive line about his good-looking, oftener merry than sad, alert expression of face, was printed on the tablets of Agatha's tormented, unhappy heart.
Why was it that she, a proud woman, and, until she had met Harry Garlett, a cold woman, cared as she had come to care for this man? Garlett was not nearly as clever as many of the men with whom her work had brought her in contact during the war and since. The great surgeon whose favourite nurse she had become in the oddly managed, private war hospital, where all the square pegs had been forced into round holes, had shown her unmistakably that he was violently attracted by her dark, aloof beauty, but, far from being pleased, she had been bitterly distressed at what she had regarded as an insult.
Memories crowded thick upon her. She remembered cutting the bloodstained uniform off an unconscious form, and her thrill of surprise when she had read on his disc the most unusual name of Garlett—the second name by which she, herself, had been christened—she had never been able to discover why.
It was true, she had saved, not his life, but his bowling arm. And oh, how grateful he had been—then! At once they had fallen into the way, at first in joke, of calling each other “Cousin Harry” and “Cousin Agatha.” But there had been no love passages between them. He had at once told her that he was a married man, and very soon, also, she had come to understand that he was not “that sort.”
The war had been over some months when one day, by one of those chances which often deflect the whole of a human existence, they had run up against one another in a London street. She had asked him to come back to the modest rooms she occupied in Bloomsbury, and it was there that he had told her his wife was now a complete invalid, that she refused to have a nurse, and that it was difficult to get even a lady housekeeper who would satisfy her.
“Would you like me to try and find you some one?” she had asked. Eagerly he had caught at the suggestion, and that same night she had written and offered to come herself.
There had then taken place another interview between herself and the man who held for her so strong an attraction and appeal. It had been a rather emotional interview. Harry Garlett, filled with gratitude, had insisted that she should have a really large, some would have said an extravagant, salary, and she had revealed the existence of the clever, idle, sickly brother who was the ever-present burden and anxiety of her life.
It had been her suggestion that the people in the neighbourhood should be told that she and her employer were related. Her name was Agatha Garlett Cheale, after all. Surprised, he had yielded, reddening as he did so under his tan.
“I daresay you're right! They're a gossiping set of women in my part of the world.”
“Not more so than in other places,” and something had made her add: “They gossiped about us in the hospital, you know.”
“Did they? I didn't know that!” And he had looked amused—only amused.
Her first sight of Mrs. Garlett—how well she remembered it! “Poor Emily” had not been very gracious, though in time she had thawed. The sick woman realized the difference cool, competent Agatha Cheale made to the Thatched House, and to herself Mrs. Garlett grudgingly admitted that Miss Cheale's sense and discretion matched her more useful qualities.
To those ladies who were kind enough to call on her—and practically every lady in the neighbourhood considered it her duty to make acquaintance with Harry Garlett's cousin—Agatha explained that she never went out in the evening. So the delicate question as to whether she was or was not to be asked out to dinner with her employer was solved once for all, in the way every hostess had hoped it would be.
As Dr. Maclean walked quickly down the short avenue which led from the Thatched House to the carriage gate his mind was full of the woman he had just left.
He did not like Agatha Cheale, yet he did feel intensely sorry for her. For one thing she must be so lonely at times, for, with one exception, she had made no friends in either Terriford or Grendon.
The one person of whom she saw a good deal was clever, malicious Miss Prince. People had wondered more than once at the link between Miss Prince and Agatha Cheale, but there was nothing mysterious about it. Though Miss Prince was acquainted with every man, woman, and child in Terriford she led a somewhat solitary life in the Thatched Cottage, a pleasant little house which formed a kind of enclave in the Thatched House property. Thus propinquity had something to do with the friendship between the younger and the older woman.
There was one great difference, however, between them. Miss Prince was what some people call “churchy,” while Agatha Cheale never went to church at all, and on one occasion she had spoken to Dr. Maclean with a slightly contemptuous amusement of those who did.
The doctor was close to the wrought-iron gate giving into the road which led to his own house when, suddenly, he espied this very lady, Miss Prince, coming toward him. She held a basket in her hand, and he did not need to be told that it contained some dainty intended for Mrs. Garlett. Like so many sharp-tongued mortals, Miss Prince often did kind things, yet her opening remark was characteristic of her censorious attitude to her fellow creatures.
“It's a good thing that Harry Garlett's rather more at his factory just now. If it weren't for poor old Dodson, that Etna China business would have gone to pieces long ago! I never saw a man gad about as he does”
Without giving the doctor time to answer, she went on: “No change in poor Emily, I suppose?” She smiled disagreeably. “I expect you'd like to have ten other patients like her, Dr. Maclean?”
At once he carried the war into the enemy's country.
“Did Dr. Prince like that type of tiresome, cantankerous, impossible-to-please patient?”
“I know I was glad of them.”
“Very well for you who had the spending of the fees and none of the work!”
They generally sparred like this, jokingly in a sense, but with a sort of unpleasant edge to their banter.
“I don't suppose Emily will ever get better—till she dies of old age,” laughed Miss Prince.
“As a matter of fact, she's markedly less well than she was last year.”
Dr. Maclean didn't know what provoked him to say that, though it was true that he had thought Mrs. Garlett rather less well than usual these last few weeks.
“It's strange that everything in nature, having performed its work, dies, and that only we poor human beings linger on long after any usefulness we ever had in the world has gone,” said Miss Prince musingly.
“I don't believe that Mrs. Garlett was ever useful,” he said curtly.
“Oh, yes, she was! In her queer way Emily was a very devoted daughter to that horrid old father of hers. And she's made Harry Garlett.”
Again the spirit of contradiction seized him.
“I don't know what you mean,” he exclaimed. “Harry Garlett's the sort of chap who'd have got on far better as a bachelor than as a married man. His wife's money has ruined him—that's my view of it! There's a lot more in Garlett than people think. If he hadn't married that poor, sickly woman he might have done some real work in the world.”
“Dr. Maclean,” said Miss Prince abruptly, “I'm anxious about Agatha Cheale.”
“So am I, Miss Prince.”
He lowered his voice, for he didn't want some stray gardener's boy to overhear what he was about to say.
“You're her only friend hereabouts,” he went on. “Do you know that she's thinking of giving up her job? Mind you keep her up to that!”
She gave him a curious look.
“She'll never go—as long as Harry Garlett's here,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“Do you think Garlett will ask her to stay?”
“No, I don't. I think he's longing for her to go.”
He was taken aback. “Why d'you think that?”
“'He who will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay.'”
Dr. Maclean stared at Miss Prince distrustfully. What exactly did she mean by that enigmatic quotation?
“You're not a fool!” she said tartly. “Harry Garlett's not the first man who's made love to a woman—and then been sorry he had, eh?”
“You think there was a time when Garlett made love to Miss Cheale?”
Dr. Maclean's voice also fell almost to a whisper.
“I'm sure of it! She's never admitted it, mind you—don't run away with that idea.”
“I don't believe Harry Garlett has ever made love to Agatha Cheale,” said the doctor, definitely making up his mind. “I think he's an out-and-out white man.”
Miss Prince smiled a wry smile.
“I'm positive that something happened lately which changed their relations to one another. Harry's afraid of her—he avoids her.”
“I've never noticed anything of the kind,” said the other brusquely.
Miss Prince looked vexed; no gossip likes to be contradicted, and she proceeded to pay the doctor out.
“Your niece seems to be giving great satisfaction at the Etna factory,” she observed.
“I think she is—I hope she is! Jean's a good conscientious girl.”
“And so attractive, too! Every one was saying how pretty she looked at the cricket match. Times are changed since we were young, Dr. Maclean. What would my father have said if I'd insisted on being boxed up hour after hour with an old bachelor like Mr. Dodson—or an attractive young married man like Harry Garlett?”
The doctor felt annoyed. What a spiteful woman Miss Prince was, to be sure!
“I don't think she runs any risk with either of them.” He tried to speak jokingly, but failed.
“How about them?” she asked meaningly.
“Perhaps she'll become Mrs. Dodson,” he answered dryly. But as Mr. Dodson was sixty-four and Jean Bower twenty-one, that didn't seem very likely.
Lifting his hat, Dr. Maclean walked briskly on his way, telling himself that Miss Prince, like most clever people, was an extraordinary bundle of contradictions—kind, spiteful, generous, suspicious, affectionate and hard-hearted, and a mischief-maker all the time!
The subject of his thoughts hurried on toward the Thatched House. She was precise in all her ways, and she wanted to leave her little gift for Mrs. Garlett, enjoy a short talk with Agatha Cheale, and then get back to her midday meal by one o'clock.
“I'll see Miss Cheale just for a minute,” she said to the maid—not Lucy Warren—who opened the door. “I suppose she's in her sitting room?”
Without waiting for an answer Miss Prince went off, with her quick, decided step, through into the house she knew so well.
As the door opened, Agatha Cheale turned round quickly, filled with a sudden, unreasonable hope that it might be Harry Garlett. He had gone to the china factory this morning, though it was Saturday, and he had telephoned that he would be back to luncheon.
But she reminded herself bitterly that he never sought her out now. If he had anything to communicate to her connected with the running of the house, he always made a point of doing so at one of the rare meals they took together, in the presence of the parlour-maid, Lucy Warren.
“I've brought a few forced strawberries for poor Emily,” began Miss Prince, and then, lowering her voice perceptibly, she added: “I understand she's not so well as usual?”
The other looked at her surprised.
“I see no change,” she said indifferently.
And then Miss Prince became aware that the younger woman had been crying.
“Look here, Agatha,” she spoke with kindly authority. “It's time you had a change! You're badly in need of a holiday. It's all very well for Harry Garlett—his life's a perpetual holiday.”
“He's been working much harder than usual lately,” the other said quickly.
There came a gleam into Miss Prince's eye.
“I think there may be a reason for that,” she said rather mysteriously.
“Any special reason?” asked Agatha Cheale indifferently.
Miss Prince hesitated. This morning, at early celebration, she had resolved that she would make a real effort to cure herself of what she knew in her heart was her one outstanding fault—to herself she called it, quite rightly, sin—that of retailing malicious tittle-tattle. But somehow she felt strongly tempted to say just one word, and, as so often happens with those cursed with her peculiar temperament, she was half persuaded that in saying what she now deter mined to say she would be doing the right thing.
“Of course you know that Jean Bower, Mrs. Maclean's niece, has become secretary to the Etna China Company?”
“No, I didn't know it.” Agatha Cheale was more surprised than she chose to show.
“How very odd of them not to have told you! I mean, how odd of Harry, and how odd of Dr. Maclean. Why, she's been at the Etna factory for quite a month.”
“I thought the girl was well off.”
“When her father died it was found that he had only left fifteen hundred pounds. And though the Macleans have practically adopted her, she seems to have said she would much prefer to do some work than to be just idle; so Mrs. Maclean, hearing that a secretary was wanted at the Etna factory, managed to catch Harry Garlett at the office one day and asked if he would give Jean a trial. Of course he had to say 'yes.'”
“I suppose he had,” said Agatha Cheale slowly.
Jean Bower's attractive, youthful personality had been impressed on her in the cricket pavilion during the great Australian match. She had envied the girl, not only her bright artless charm of manner, but also the warm affection the doctor and his wife had shown her.
“I hear old Dodson is quite bewitched by her, and that even Harry himself is at the factory a great deal more than he used to be,” went on Miss Prince.
“That isn't true about Cousin Harry.”
Agatha Cheale forced herself to smile, but in her heart she knew that Harry Garlett had gone to the factory oftener this last month than he had ever done since she first came to Terriford. As for old Dodson, he was just the kind of foolish old bachelor to be bewitched by a young girl. After being head clerk for a number of years, he had been made a partner, and now practically ran the prosperous business.
Miss Prince looked sharply at her friend.
“Why, just now you said he had been working hard lately?';
“I didn't mean at the factory.”
“It's all very well to be unconventional,” went on Miss Prince, “but human nature doesn't alter. For my part I think it's a mistake to mix up attractive girls with married men.”
“Mr. Dodson isn't a married man,” observed Agatha Cheale.
“Ho, but Harry Garlett is.”
The other made no answer, and Miss Prince suddenly exclaimed triumphantly, “Why, there they are!”
Agatha Cheale turned quickly round.
Yes, Miss Prince was right. Through the window could be seen two figures walking slowly across the meadow, to the right of which stretched the little wood.
“I should have thought that Harry would have had more sense! I don't wonder they're already beginning to be talked about,” observed Miss Prince.
“What a lot of disgusting people there are in Grendon,” said Agatha Cheale. There was a note of bitter scorn in her voice. “It's Saturday to-day. That's why they're walking back together. It's the first time they've done it.”
Miss Prince would have been not only surprised but deeply shocked had she been able to see into her friend's unhappy heart. Agatha Cheale, gazing out on those two who were just coming through the little gate which led from the cornfield into the garden of the Thatched House, had felt a surge of intolerable suspicion and jealousy sweep over her, and that though her reason told her that the suspicion, at any rate, was utterly uncalled-for and absurd.
Miss Prince looked at her wrist watch—one of her few concessions to modern ways.
“I must be going,” she exclaimed; “it's almost one o'clock.”
She had only just left the room when there came a knock at the door. “Come in!” called out Miss Cheale, and Lucy Warren appeared.
“You said you wanted to see me before lunch, miss.”
Though the girl was making a great effort to seem calm, her lips were trembling and her eyes were swollen with crying.