Scandal at High Chimneys Read online

  “Well, then, we’ll find somebody else. Strickland might do worse than earn his keep; this book-writing, you know, isn’t very much. However, I’ll go along and leave you to it. If you care to stroll into the Argyll Rooms about eleven, I’ll stand Sam for a bottle to celebrate. Good evening, Damon.”

  And Tress, having derived some amusement from all this, put on his tall hat and patted it into place. After settling his shoulders, after examining his bristly chin-whisker in the looking-glass over the fireplace, he smiled agreeably and moved away like a tame tiger. Once more the heavy door, this time caught in a draught, closed with a slam that went echoing up through a club devoted to writers, painters, musicians, and other mountebanks.

  Victor swallowed hard.

  “I know what you’re thinking of me,” he said. “I know, and I can’t blame you. But don’t make a judgment too quickly.”

  “No?”

  “No! Look here, old boy. There are any number of trains tomorrow, but your best is the Bath-and-Bristol Express. That leaves the depot in the afternoon and stops at Reading. I can write a telegram, d’ye see, so that Burbage will meet you with the carriage.”

  Clive, who had bent over to retrieve his cigar-case, straightened up.

  “Victor, do you seriously imagine I mean to do that?”

  “You must, old boy. Pray believe me!”

  “For instance,” said Clive, “you see no objection to having a sister of yours married to the gentleman who’s just left us?”

  “No; I can’t see any objection.” Victor’s voice went high. “But that’s not the point. You were right about one thing. I’d have Kate or Celia married to anybody, anybody at all reasonable or presentable, as long as they were safely away from High Chimneys and out of danger.”

  “Danger? For the last time, man, what’s wrong at High Chimneys?”

  The gaslight, vivid bluish-yellow, shone on a drop of sweat at Victor’s temple. Whipping a handkerchief out of the tail-pocket of his coat, Victor mopped his forehead. Under the edges of that handkerchief, reflected in his companion’s eyes, Clive Strickland sensed the shape of images ugly and unnatural and not well understood. Victor shut his eyes.

  “I can’t tell you,” he answered. “I can’t tell you.”

  II. THE BATH-AND-BRISTOL EXPRESS

  THE DEPOT OF THE Great Western Railway, dim and sooty and hoarse with steam, rattled to a clamour of footsteps on wooden platforms. Dogs, as usual, barked frantically at the engine; small boys escaped from their mothers to stare at it. Also, as usual, there was the middleaged lady in the voluminous crinoline, who falls into a fit of megrims five minutes before train-time and cries out that she hasn’t the courage to go.

  At one o’clock on the following afternoon, a chilly day, the Bath-and-Bristol Express was ‘getting a good head up.’ Porters had finished piling heavy luggage on the roofs of the carriages. Though this terminus had been built of iron and glass like the Crystal Palace, you still groped and coughed in London smoke. Clive Strickland did.

  ‘I am a fool,’ he was thinking guiltily. ‘Indeed, it were charitable to call me an outstanding jackass. People whose imaginations are kindled by the face of a damsel in distress, and who charge to her rescue without quite knowing what they are supposed to do, should be confined to the sort of fiction I write.’

  “Fool!” he said aloud.

  “Sir?” exclaimed the man carrying his portmanteau.

  “I beg your pardon. First-class carriage number two, seat number six.”

  “Oh, yes, sir! Very good, sir.”

  This situation was not at all humorous. He had committed himself to a course he could neither approve nor justify.

  Clive tried to put it out of his mind. A vigorous dark-haired young man, clean-shaven, in a short greatcoat and one of the new-style bowler hats, he strode towards the train. But the sense of impending disaster refused to leave him.

  Whereupon, just ahead, he saw Mr. Matthew Damon.

  Clive stopped short.

  It was not so much the shock of seeing him there as shock at the change in Mr. Damon’s appearance.

  Victor had said his father seemed to have aged ten years in the past three or four months, and that he had hardly left High Chimneys during that time. Even so, Clive was not prepared for that change.

  Matthew Damon, looking round uncertainly with one hand in the bosom of his frock coat, stood by the footboard of a first-class carriage with an open compartment-door behind him. Clive’s first impulse was to turn and bolt. But he was within two yards of the other man; those sunken eyes had seen him.

  “Mr. Strickland!”

  Clive’s head ached with all the drinking he had done the night before.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” he said.

  Matthew Damon, at forty-eight, was still formidable. He wore all his old air of sombre power and authority; the deep voice was like a drum. He had been a handsome man and remained so. Though he had a somewhat old-fashioned appearance, wearing a hat of beaverskin rather than silk and a shawl round his shoulders, his clothes and linen were of the finest quality. But his cheeks had sunken badly between thick black side-whiskers turning grey-white; and the eyes seemed to have retreated into his head.

  “Mr. Strickland,” he repeated, and groped. “You—you travel by this train? Ah, yes. So do we. To what fortunate circumstance do we owe the pleasure of your company?”

  “I imagine, sir, you did not receive my telegram?”

  “Your telegram?”

  “Yes, sir. I took the liberty of inviting myself to High Chimneys. It was a piece of insufferable impertinence, I’m afraid.”

  “Not at all. Not at all, I assure you! You are always welcome, young man, though I—I believe that for years I have not seen you except in London.”

  Then Matthew Damon pulled himself together, clenching the hand inside his coat. He spoke with sincerity, with a kind of awkward charm which was the other side of his nature.

  “Indeed, you may be of great assistance to us in solving a troublesome and unpleasant mystery,” he added, turning to the door behind him. “Is it not so, my dear?”

  A pretty lady with auburn hair, standing in the open doorway of the compartment with her maid hovering behind her, made a grimace and cast up her eyes.

  “Mr. Damon, for pity’s sake!”

  “Is it not so, madam?”

  Before that quiet violence the pretty lady subsided. But her wifely meekness carried other hints, like her broad if subdued charms.

  “Hortense, pray do stop fussing!” she said to her maid. “And I believe, Mr. Strickland, that you and I met some while ago at Lady Tedworth’s? I do hope you will join us in this compartment. We have it to ourselves, as you see, unless some horrid stranger should force his way in at the last moment.”

  And Georgette Damon, auburn hair brushed up into short curls at the back of a flat oval hat, glanced at Clive under her lowered eyelashes.

  It was a perfunctory glance, a discreet glance. Yet in some extraordinary way it was as though she had pressed herself physically against him. It conveyed, embarrassingly, a sense of what lay under her dark-green Zouave jacket with its tight-fitting green-silk blouse. Her crinoline, grey-coloured and straight in front, stretched back in a balloon-like triangle according to the latest mode.

  Damn the woman!

  Clive Strickland felt his thoughts moving in a direction they shouldn’t have moved, and he cursed himself too.

  “My ticket-number is for a different carriage, Mrs. Damon, but I shall be honoured to join you. Do—do Miss Kate and Miss Celia accompany you?”

  “No, no!” said Mr. Damon. “Kate and Celia are not with us; they are good girls,” he added rather inexplicably. “My wife and I left Reading by a very early train; we have been in town only a few hours. You spoke of a telegram, young man?”

  “Yes, sir. Victor was to have left one with the hall-porter at Bryce’s Club last night, but I telegraphed first thing this morning.”

  Smoke and smudges dri
fted about them. Georgette Damon left off looking at Clive, and her husband’s face had altered in an almost terrifying way.

  “You were in Victor’s company last night? For how long?”

  “Well, sir, between six in the evening and about two o’clock in the morning.”

  “You are sure of that, Mr. Strickland? You are very sure?”

  Clive had reason to be sure, and said so. Matthew Damon turned to his wife.

  “Then it was not a prank,” he declared, “and our visitor could not have been Victor. I should have trusted my instinct, madam. I should have paid a visit to that detective.”

  “Come, now!’ thought Clive Strickland. ‘What precisely is happening here?’

  But he had no chance to consider it.

  Already the bell was ringing for the imminent departure of the train. Hortense, Mrs. Damon’s maid, slipped down with a graceful curtsey and hastened towards a second-class carriage at the rear. Clive found himself sitting in the corner seat against musty-smelling upholstery, his back to the engine and his portmanteau beside him, facing Georgette Damon with her husband at her right-hand side.

  A guard with flag and whistle moved past outside, locking each compartment-door and taking away the key. The whistle blew soon afterwards.

  There were cries and squeals of alarm from inside third-class carriages without glass in their windows. Amid fire-glare from the locomotive, with a chug and thud of steam shuddering through ten carriages of three compartments each, the great driving-wheels gripped and the train began to move.

  ‘Gently!’ thought Clive.

  He was born in this railway age. He had no qualms about being locked up here, shut away beyond escape or communication with another compartment, in a train hurtling along at fifty miles an hour.

  But the different looks on the faces of his companions, so far as he could see them in thick gloom, disturbed him not a little.

  “Mr. Strickland,” said Matthew Damon, in a harsh and troubled voice, “you will permit me to pursue this matter a little further. You are not moved, I hope, by any misguided sense of loyalty to my son? You are not shielding him?”

  “Great Scott, no! Shielding him from what?”

  “Be good enough, young man, to answer my question.”

  Wrath touched Clive, who sat up as straight as the other man.

  “Then state your question, Mr. Damon.”

  “How did you and Victor employ last evening?”

  “There’s very little to tell.”

  There was very little, at least, that Clive cared to tell. Victor had dined with him at Bryce’s Club, where Victor got tolerably drunk. There would have been no harm in mentioning this; Victor’s father was addicted to brandy-and-soda and encouraged the old customs. But Victor, though always amiable in liquor, had made his usual announcement that he was going out to find female company of a more than dubious sort.

  To have let him go out on his own would have been unthinkable. A man who strayed one step beyond the bright gaslight round the Regent Circus and the top of the Haymarket, especially alone and fuddled, might be set on for his money and beaten within an ace of death. Clive, himself none too sober but an able hand in a fight, had accompanied Victor to look after him.

  But he couldn’t tell this to the old man.

  They had visited the Argyll Rooms, where there was dancing, though they did not encounter Tress. They looked in at three or four night-haunts, garish boozing-dens of mirrors and plush in which the best-dressed sirens strolled provocatively and champagne cost as much as twenty-five shillings a bottle.

  “Victor,” Clive had kept insisting, “what’s wrong at High Chimneys?”

  “Can’t tell you, old boy.”

  “Then what’s the danger to your sisters?”

  “My goo’ friend!” Victor said emotionally, and wept and collapsed.

  Clive bundled him into a cab, drove home with him, and carried him upstairs to Victor’s rooms near Portman Square. In the sitting-room, lighting a candle, he had first seen the painting.

  It was a portrait in oils, of a girl’s head and shoulders and bust, in a heavy gilt frame above the fireplace. Brown eyes looked back at him, wide open, under a broad forehead and glossy black hair. Intelligence, eagerness even to a touch of impatience, as at hearing nonsense once too often, animated the dark eyebrows and the full-lipped mouth. It showed litheness as well as delicacy, hand clenched at breast.

  Victor, sprawled dead drunk on an ottoman, had been unable to speak. But a small metal plate at the foot of the frame was inscribed Miss Kate Damon, 1865.

  Clive remembered all too well how the light of the candle had brought that face out of darkness like a warm and living presence.

  “Yes, Mr. Strickland?” prompted Matthew Damon.

  The rattle of the railway was in Clive’s ears now. Through the cutting below Westbourne Park Villas, out the long stretch south of Alpert Road, the train gathered speed with a bone-shaking sway and jolt.

  “There’s very little to tell,” Clive repeated. “Victor dined with me at my club, and afterwards I walked home with him.”

  “Come, young man! You stayed at your club until nearly two o’clock in the morning?”

  “I did not say that, sir,” Clive almost snapped. “Afterwards we sat in Victor’s rooms, smoking and talking.”

  “Was my son drunk?”

  “Yes. Would it not be better, perhaps, to address these questions to Victor himself?”

  “I have already done so. That is why I went to London this morning. Victor was still drunk and incoherent.”

  Clive still could not understand.

  “In any event, sir, he was with me the whole time. Should you doubt my presence in his rooms, I noticed a portrait of Miss Kate Damon which was not there when I called on him a week ago.”

  “That abominable painting?”

  “If you’ll excuse my saying so, it seemed to me a remarkably fine picture.”

  “No doubt. It was painted by Mr. Millais. But I had reference to its moral quality. I strongly disapproved of it, and Victor was free to carry it away. Mr. Millais wished to exhibit it at the Royal Academy, if you please, under the obnoxious title of ‘Unfulfillment.’”

  The London smoke-pall was clearing away. Quite suddenly, or so it seemed, autumn daylight penetrated through the grimy glass of the windows. Much mud had been trampled into the compartment, Clive saw, but then mud was trampled everywhere.

  Matthew Damon sat bolt upright, clutching the shawl round his neck. His tall hat vibrated from the motion of the flying train.

  “I have observed in Kate, Mr. Strickland,” the deep voice continued, “a—a certain restlessness which is not present, perhaps surprisingly, in Celia. What do these young people want?”

  Clive made no reply; none was expected.

  “What do these young people want? Why are they not happy? I am not an unreasonable man, Mr. Strickland. Unlike some bigots, I see no objection to novel-reading or to attendance at the theatre for the best comedy or tragedy. But dancing, and loose talk, and unchaperoned intermingling of the sexes among those of immature years, I cannot and will not tolerate.”

  Mr. Damon lifted a powerful right fist and struck the padded arm of the chair.

  His wife had been looking out of the window on her left. Her great dove-grey crinoline, on its collapsing framework of watch-spring wire, spread so far round her that her husband sat three or four feet away.

  “Surely, Matthew,” she cried, “you attach too much importance to all that? And in particular to what happened last night?”

  “I think not, my love.”

  “But no harm was done!”

  “Harm? What is harm?”

  Each time he looked at her, it was with anger and self-distrust mingled with a fierce kind of hunger. Georgette gave him a coy glance, and he edged closer.

  “You are all too ignorant of human evil, my love. But I am not. I have spent my life in meeting it and fighting it. I account myself a good judge of tru
th and falsehood. For instance,” and Mr. Damon’s head swung round, “I put it to you, Mr. Strickland, that you are concealing my son’s behaviour last night because he had engaged himself with some unsavoury adventure in London?”

  “I—”

  “Yes or no, Mr. Strickland? Yes or no?”

  “Let’s say, sir, he might have wished for some such thing. But he had taken too much to drink, and he didn’t.”

  “Ah! That is better. Will you give me your word as a gentleman that he could not have been at High Chimneys at eleven-thirty last night?”

  “High Chimneys? At eleven-thirty Victor and I were just walking into … that is to say, I give you my word he wasn’t within forty miles of High Chimneys.”

  “And I accept it,” replied Mr. Damon, studying him during a hard-breathing pause. His fist clenched again. “Well! Such behaviour in a young man (a young man, mark you; not a young lady!) is reprehensible but not unpardonable. Well! I accept it.”

  “Look here, sir: why is it so necessary to prove Victor wasn’t at High Chimneys?”

  “I scarcely think, Mr. Damon,” interposed Georgette in a lofty tone, “we need bore our guest with trivial domestic affairs.”

  “On the contrary, madam. Mr. Strickland, despite his youth, is a highly successful author. He occupies himself with what is called the novel of sensation, endeavouring to surprise us with what we may discover in the final chapters. It is a harmless amusement, and not uninstructive. I assume he will be interested, and I hope he may prove useful.”

  Matthew Damon bent forward, one hand gripping the chair-arm and the other holding his shawl.

  “Mr. Strickland,” he said, “do you believe in ghosts?”

  III. THE GOBLIN ON THE STAIRS

  WHEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT it long afterwards, Clive knew he should have seen much evidence in what Matthew Damon said and did not say. But he could not guess that murder had already been planned, or even feel it.

  He felt only the roar and jolt of the train, shaking them. Some veer in the wind brought a billow of black smoke and a swirl of sparks from the engine. High Chimneys, in Berkshire, was four miles from Reading; they would be at Reading in less than an hour.