She allowed herself to be divested of her frock, and to have her mother’s old Good Black Wool cast over her head, merely saying fretfully: ‘I look hellish in black, and it doesn’t fit me anywhere!’
‘It’s only for the funeral, my pet!’ Mrs Haddington soothed her. ‘Just stand still and let Miss Spennymoor see what has to be done! Darling child, don’t stand on one leg!’
‘Oh, Mummy, I haven’t got to go to the funeral, have I?’ wailed Cynthia. ‘I simply won’t! It’s too dreary for words, and I know Dan would say I needn’t! O God, I feel too septic in this frightful thing! Take it off me!’
Miss Spennymoor, clucking amiably, said: ‘Oh, dear, fancy you saying that, Miss Haddington, when I was only thinking how sweet you look! They do say a blonde always looks her best in black, don’t they? Of course, it’ll be very different when I’ve taken it in the wee-est bit. Distinguished, I should call it! Let me just slip a few pins in, and you’ll be surprised! Now, I’m quite partial to a funeral myself. Well, it takes all sorts to make a world, doesn’t it? Weddings, now! I don’t know how it is, but if ever I want a good cry I go and watch one of those grand weddings they have at St Margaret’s! But funerals are different! – Oh, quite different they are! Of course, it makes anyone think, when they lower the coffin into the ground, but you want to look on the bright side, and ten to one it was a happy release, like it was for my poor mother, when Dad died, and once the coffin’s out of the house it’s surprising the difference it makes. More like a beanfeast than a funeral, my Dad’s funeral was. Such a jollification as we had! No one wouldn’t have guessed Mother had been up half the night, boiling the ham! Not, of course, that it’s the same here, you not having the coffin in the house, but I’m sure the gentleman will have a lovely funeral, all the same!’
Ignoring this well-meant consolation, Cynthia said: ‘Mummy, if Lance saw me in this thing, he’d have a fit!’
‘Dear child, if I were you I wouldn’t be guided by that young man’s ideas of what is proper!’
‘Goodness, no!’ said Miss Spennymoor, a trifle thickly. She removed several pins from her mouth. ‘You’ll excuse me, but naturally I know who you are alluding to. I knew his mother very well, as I told you, Mrs Haddington, only the other day. Oh, very well I knew poor Maudie Stratton! If ever there was a One – ! Quite set on calling her baby Lancelot, she was! She’d read a poem about some Lancelot or other, which that Hilary of hers gave her, and it quite took her fancy, though why it should of is more than I can tell you, because all the fellow could find to say when he saw the girl in the poem, all stiff and stark in a boat, was that she’d got a lovely face. Well, that’s all very well, and, of course I daresay he looked ever so nice himself, in a helmet and all, and riding on a horse – because a horse does give a man tone, doesn’t it? I always think so if ever I get the time to go into Hyde Park, which I do sometimes. Still, looks aren’t every thing, and I call it highly unnatural for anyone to go barmy about a fellow that went round singing Tirralirra, which is all this Lancelot did, by what I could made out. Laughable, I call it! But there it was! Nothing would do for Maudie but she must call her baby Lancelot! Never doubted it would be a boy, which I said to her was down right tempting providence, and so it was, because what must she do but go and have split twins! Laugh! I thought I should have died! If you’d turn round, Miss Cynthia, I could see if it’s hanging straight!’
Mrs Haddington, who had listened in stony silence to these recollections, caught her eye at this point, and gave her what the little dressmaker afterwards described as A Look. Miss Spennymoor, covered in confusion, coughed, said hastily: ‘But I mustn’t run on, must I?’ and, in her agitation, stuck a pin into Cynthia’s tender flesh. By the time that sensitive damsel had been soothed into sullen quiescence, all thought of Lord Guisborough and his romantically-minded parent had been banished from Miss Spennymoor’s mind, and she continued her task in chastened silence.
Miss Spennymoor had scarcely withdrawn to the seclusion of the sewing-room on the second floor when Beulah came into the boudoir, to lay before her employer the sum total of the weekly bills. Mrs Haddington’s eyes narrowed; she said: ‘I’ll check it against the books.’
Beulah flushed. ‘Certainly! I have them here!’
‘Trot along, darling!’ Mrs Haddington told her daughter, in quite another voice. ‘I shouldn’t racket about today, if I were you. Why don’t you ring up Betty, and see if she’d like to go for a walk in the Park with you, and come back here to luncheon? Wouldn’t that be rather nice?’
‘No, hellish!’ responded Cynthia frankly. ‘I’m going to lie down! I feel bloody!’
With these elegant words, she walked out of the room neglecting to shut the door behind her.
Mrs Haddington seated herself at her desk, and held out her hand for the weekly accounts. In silence, Beulah laid a pile of books and bills before her, together with her own epitome.
‘Your total appears to be correct,’ Mrs Haddington said, after a pause.
‘No, is it really?’ retorted Beulah. ‘I quite thought I was getting away with a halfpenny!’
‘I advise you not to be impertinent, my good girl. You won’t find that it pays in this house!’ Mrs Haddington took out her cheque-book from a drawer, and dipped a pen in the silver inkpot. ‘There is something else I wish to say to you. I understand that you were dining with Mr Harte last night, at Armand’s?’
‘Well?’ Beulah shot at her.
The pen travelled slowly across the cheque-form. ‘I need hardly ask, I suppose, whether Mr Harte is aware of your somewhat unusual history?’ said Mrs Haddington bitingly.
The flush had faded from Beulah’s cheeks, leaving them very white. ‘I don’t know what business that is of yours!’ she said.
‘It is very much my business. Mr Harte met you under my roof, and I could not reconcile it with my conscience not to drop a word of timely warning in his ear.’
Beulah put out a hand to grip the edge of the mantel shelf. ‘I see the idea, of course!’ she said breathlessly. ‘Recoiling in disgust from me, Timothy is to fall into your daughter’s arms! I’m afraid he won’t do it: his taste doesn’t run to brainless blondes!’ She stopped, and added quickly: ‘I’m sorry! I oughtn’t to have said that!’
Mrs Haddington blotted the cheque, and turned in her chair to survey Beulah from her heels to her head. ‘So you actually imagine that you’re going to entrap that young man into marriage, do you?’ she said. ‘How very amusing! But something tells me that the Hartes don’t go to Holloway for their brides. We shall see!’
Beulah released the mantelshelf, and took a hasty step towards her employer. ‘Whatever you do, he won’t marry Cynthia!’ she said.
‘Miss Cynthia!’ corrected Mrs Haddington blandly.
‘Oh, don’t be such a fool! My family is a damned sight better-born than yours, for what that’s worth! You’re trying to make me lose my temper, but, I warn you, you’d better not! I didn’t cut your daughter out with Timothy Harte: he never for one moment thought of her seriously! It can’t matter to you if I marry him! There are dozens of men only too anxious to marry her: why can’t you let me have just one who prefers me? I’m going to marry him, not because he’s well-off, and well-born, and heir to a baronetcy, but because I love him! If you think you can stop me, you were never more mistaken in your life! I’m not a dewy innocent any longer, so don’t think it! I’ve put up with your foul tongue all these months because it suited me to stay in this job, but I won’t put up with any interference in my private life! There’s very little I won’t do, if you goad me to it! If I can’t have Timothy, I don’t care what becomes of me! So now you know!’
From the doorway Thrimby coughed with extreme deliberation. ‘I beg your pardon, madam, but I thought Miss Cynthia was here. Lord Guisborough wishes to speak to her on the telephone.’
Beulah glared at him, her full lip caught between her teeth. Mrs Haddington said coolly: ‘Here is the cheque, Miss Birtley. You will pay the bills tomo
rrow morning, if you please, before you come to work. Kindly go down to Mrs Foston and find out from her what shopping has to be done today! Miss Cynthia is resting, Thrimby, I will speak to Lord Guisborough.’
Thrimby, recounting this interesting passage later to his colleague, the housekeeper, said impressively: ‘Mark my words, Mrs Foston, there’s more to that young woman than meets the eye! Well, I’ve always had my suspicions, right from the start!’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Foston, who was as goodhumoured as she was stout, ‘be that as it may, I’m downright sorry for the girl, and that’s a fact, Mr Thrimby! I’ve never had any words with her, but, then, Do as you would be done by, is my motto! I shall stay here till the end of the Season, because that’s what I promised Mrs H., but not another moment! Well, it isn’t what I’ve been accustomed to, and that’s the truth! Only, in these days, with the best people cutting down their staffs –’ She stopped, and sighed. ‘Well, you know what it is, Mr Thrimby!’
‘I know,’ he agreed, echoing her sigh. ‘Sometimes one wonders what the world is coming to!’
‘All this talk about the Workers!’ said Mrs Foston, shaking out a tea-cloth, subjecting it to a minute inspection, and refolding it. ‘Anyone ‘ud think the only people to do a job of work was in factories, or dockyards, or plate-laying! No one bothers about people like you and me, and my brother, who’s doing a jobbing-gardener’s work, because no one can’t afford to keep a head-gardener like him, that was always used to have four under him! It makes me tired, Mr Thrimby!’
‘Ah, well, it’s Progress, Mrs Foston!’ said the butler vaguely.
‘Yes, and I suppose it’s progress that makes any little chit that hasn’t had any more training than that canary of mine waltz in here asking as much money as a decent housemaid that’s worked her way up from between-maid!’ said Mrs Foston tartly. ‘Something for nothing! That’s what people want nowadays. And it’s what they get, too, more’s the pity! I’ve no patience with it!’
At this point, Thrimby, well-knowing that his colleague was fairly mounted upon her favourite hobby-horse, thought it prudent to withdraw, so that Mrs Foston was left to address the rest of her pithy monologue to the ambient air.
With the exception of Mrs Foston, who stated that she preferred to say nothing; and of M. Gaston, the chef, who professed a sublime indifference to anything that occurred beyond the confines of the realm over which he reigned, Mrs Haddington’s servants were at one in declaring that murders were not what they had been accustomed to, or could put up with. The head house maid, recruiting her strength with a cup of Bovril, informed her subordinate, who had brought this sustain ing beverage up to her sick-bed, that strangled corpses were not what she would call nice; and the parlourmaid, tendering her notice to her employer, said that Mr Seaton-Carew’s murder had unsettled her. The kitchen maid, who was an orphan, said that her auntie didn’t want her to stay no longer in a house where there were such unnatural goings-on; and would no doubt have followed the parlourmaid’s example had she not been too much frightened of M. Gaston to give notice without his consent. This, since she was the least stupid scullion who had been allotted to him, was withheld, M. Gaston maintaining with Gallic fervour that what took place abovestairs was no concern of his or hers. Margie, a biddable girl, was quite cowed by his eloquence; and the rest of the staff, while deprecating the laxity of M. Gaston’s outlook, said that anyone had to remember that he was French.
Notwithstanding the outrage to their finer feelings, it could not be denied that the servants derived no small degree of excitement, and even enjoyment, from the murder. Not only did it afford them an endless topic for discussion; but it rendered them interesting in the eyes of less experienced friends and relations, and it provided them with a series of not wholly disagreeable thrills. It even furnished the underhousemaid with an excuse for smashing Mrs Haddington’s early-morning teapot, and for forgetting to draw the curtains in her bathroom. Elsie, arising shakily from her sick-bed, might declare that Inspector Grant’s desire to interrogate her had materially prejudiced her chances of recovery from influenza, but his visit made her instantly important, and not for the world would she have forgone it. Thrimby, listening-in, in the pantry, to a brief conversation on the telephone between his mistress and Lord Guisborough, was able to depress these pretensions by assuming the air of an informed person, and by throwing out such doubtful phrases as Hamlet warned his friends never to utter.
Altogether, it was a rewarding day for the staff, even the visit of Dr Westruther being invested with a sinister significance. It was vain for the prosaic housekeeper to point out that the doctor’s visit was not unprecedented; the fact that he was closeted with Mrs Haddington for nearly an hour was enough to give rise to speculation; for, as Miss Mapperley so sapiently observed, it stood to reason that if all the old girl wanted was a sedative for her lacerated nerves it wouldn’t have taken about twenty minutes to have given her a prescription. Hard upon the heels of the doctor came the Inspector, and although his descent into the basement caused the kitchenmaid to come over ever so queer in the scullery, it afforded everyone else considerable gratification, for, while his visit conferred distinction upon the servants’ hall, he was not found to be above his company, accepting cups of tea with compliments and thanks, and chatting in the easiest way with even such lowly persons as the charwoman, who came in to help the kitchenmaid with the Rough Work. In fact, so agreeable did he make himself that even his lilting speech, at first considered peculiarly laughable, was finally adjudged to enhance his charm; and when the tea-cloth was spread in the servants’ hall Mrs Foston was moved to produce from the store-cupboard a jar of honey, which she felt to be a peculiarly Scotch conserve. If anything was needed to insure the Inspector’s popularity by this time, it was supplied by the tact with which he leaped into the breach caused by the under-housemaid’s social lapse in reading aloud the inscription on the jar, which declared the contents to be Finest Flower Honey, the product of unequivocally English bees. Elsie, who had tottered downstairs with the firm intention of coming over faint, emerged triumphant from her interview with him, and was able to inform her fellows that she had ascertained from him that the Inquest on poor Mr SeatonCarew would be held on the following day. No one else had quite liked to ask him this vital question, but although everyone was grateful to Elsie for discovering the date and the locality, not even the precarious state of her health saved her from being recommended by Miss Mapperley not to carry on as though she thought she was Mata Hari.
Hardly had the Inspector departed, than a mild sensation was caused by the arrival of Mr Sydney Butterwick. This, in itself, was not a matter of great moment, but piquancy was added to his visit by the fact, reported by the parlourmaid, that he had demanded speech with Mrs Haddington on the telephone, earlier in the day, and, upon being asked if he would leave a message, had replied hotly that he would not leave a message, and had rung off abruptly. Having had no instructions to exclude Mr Butterwick, Thrimby showed him upstairs into the drawing-room, where Mrs Haddington, having finished tea half an hour earlier, was attempting to convince her daughter that it would be both inadvisable and improper for her to put in an appearance at a cocktail-party that evening. Cynthia had just informed her that if the slightest restraint were placed upon her she would go mad, when Mr Butterwick stalked into the room, also in a febrile condition. Disregarding the conventions, he burst into speech even before Thrimby had announced his name, uttering in trembling accents: ‘I want a word with you, Mrs Haddington!’
Never before had Thrimby longed so much for an excuse to linger! He could find none. The tea-table had been removed; on this bleak February afternoon he had drawn the curtains in all the sitting-rooms at four o’clock; the fire was burning brightly in the hearth; there did not seem even to be an ashtray that needed emptying. He was forced to withdraw to the landing, and even, two minutes later, to his own domain, because Cynthia, seizing the opportunity to escape from her mother’s authority, came out of the drawing
-room, and very nearly surprised him on the stairs. All he was able to report to Mrs Foston was that Mr Butterwick had demanded of Mrs Haddington what the devil she had meant by telling the police lies about him; and that when she had replied in freezing accents that she was at a loss to understand what he meant, he had exclaimed: ‘You know damned well what I mean! And what I should like to know is why you’re so anxious to cast suspicion on me for Dan’s death!’
A quarter of an hour later, while Mr Butterwick was still closeted with Mrs Haddington, Thrimby opened the front door to another visitor. This was Lord Guisborough, and since Thrimby had listened to his conversation on the telephone with Mrs Haddington that morning, he had been expecting him. Lord Guisborough had rung up to suggest to Cynthia that they should spend another evening together, to which Mrs Haddington had replied that she was anxious to have a little chat with him, and would be glad if he could make it convenient to call on her at some time during the course of the afternoon. An assignation had been arranged for a quarter-to-six. Mrs Foston, nodding darkly, said that Madam was going to bring his lordship to the point, and not before it was time; but Miss Mapperley maintained that the old so-and-so was more likely to tick him off for keeping Miss Cynthia out until all hours.