nervously, and presently I saw one hand squeeze the paper convulsively.
I tossed away my cigarette, and crossed over to her.
“Vera,” I said in a low tone, “tell me what is amiss. What has happened? why do you look so worried?”
We were alone, and the door was closed.
She looked up, and her eyes met mine. Her lips parted as if she were about to speak, then they shut tightly. Suddenly she bit her lip, and her big, expressive eyes filled with tears.
“Vera,” I said very gently, sinking down beside her, for I felt a strange affinity between us – an affinity of soul, “What is it? What’s the matter? Tell me, dear. I won’t tell a soul.”
I couldn’t help it. My arm stole round her waist and my lips touched her cold forehead. Had she sprung away from me, turned upon me with flaming eyes and boxed my ears even, I should have been less surprised than at what happened, for never before had I taken such a liberty. Instead, she turned her pretty head, sank with a sigh upon my shoulder, and an instant later her arms encircled my neck. She was sobbing bitterly, so terribly that I feared she was about to become hysterical.
“Oh, Mr Ashton!” she burst out, “oh, if you only knew!”
“Knew what?” I whispered. “Tell me. I won’t breathe it to a single living person.”
“But that’s it,” she exclaimed as she still wept bitterly. “I don’t know – but I suspect – I fear something so terribly, and yet I don’t know what it is!”
This was an enigma I had not looked for.
“What is going to happen?” I asked, more to say something, anything, than to sit there speechless and supine.
“If only I knew I would tell you,” she answered between her sobs, “I would tell you sooner than anybody because – oh, I love you so, I love you so!”
I shall never forget how my heart seemed to spring within me at those blessed words.
“Vera! My darling!”
She was in my arms. I was kissing her passionately. Now I knew what I had not before realised – I was desperately in love with Vera Thorold, this beautiful girl with the wonderful, deep eyes and the glorious hair, who when I had last seen her, had been still a child in short frocks, though lovely then.
Footsteps were approaching. Quickly we sprang apart as the door opened.
“Her ladyship wishes you to come at once, mademoiselle,” said a voice in the shadow in what struck me as being rather a disagreeable tone, with a slightly foreign accent. It was Judith, Lady Thorold’s French maid.
Vera rose at once. For a brief instant her eyes met mine. Then she was gone.
I sat there in the big book-lined room quite alone, smoking cigarette after cigarette, wondering and wondering. Who was “Smithson?” What was this strange, unexpected mystery? Above all, what was this trouble that Vera dreaded so, or was it merely some whim of her imagination? I knew her to be of a highly-strung, super-sensitive nature.
The big grandfather-clock away in a corner hissed and wheezed for some moments, then slowly struck seven. I waited for the dressing gong to sound. Usually James, or the footman, Henry, appeared as soon as the clock had finished striking, and made an intolerable noise upon the gong. Five minutes passed, ten, fifteen. Evidently the gong had been forgotten, for Sir Charles dined punctually at the unfashionable hour of half-past seven. I rose and went upstairs to dress.
At the half-hour I came down and went towards the small drawing-room where they always assemble before dinner. To my surprise the room was in darkness.
“Something seems to be amiss to-night,” I remember saying mentally as I switched on the light. The domestic service at Houghton was habitually like clockwork in its regularity.
A quarter to eight struck. Eight o’clock! I began to wonder if dinner had been put off. A quarter-past eight chimed out.
I went over to the fireplace and pressed the electric bell. Nobody came. I pressed it again. Finally I kept my finger pressed upon it.
This was ridiculous. Thoroughly annoyed, I went into the dining-room. It was in darkness. Then I made my way out to the servants’ quarters. James was sitting in the pantry, in his shirt sleeves, smoking a cigar. A brandy bottle stood upon the dresser, and a syphon, also a half-empty tumbler.
“Is anything the matter, James?” I asked, with difficulty concealing the irritation I felt.
“Not as I know of,” he answered in rather a rude tone. I saw at once that he had been drinking.
“At what time is dinner?”
“Dinner?”
He laughed outright.
“There ain’t no dinner. Why ain’t you gone too?”
“Gone? Where?”
“With Sir Charles and her ladyship and Miss Vera and Judith.”
“I don’t understand you. What do you mean?”
“They went an hour ago, or more.”
“Went where?”
“Oh, ask me another. I don’t know.”
James in his cups was a very different person from sober, respectful, deferential James. And then it came back to me that, about an hour before, I had heard a car going down the avenue, and wondered whose it was.
The sound of loud, coarse laughter reached me from the kitchen.
“Well, all I says is it’s a pretty state of things,” a woman’s high, harsh voice exclaimed. I think it was the cook’s. “Cleared and gone with bags and baggage as if the devil hisself was after ’em.”
“P’r’aps ’e is,” a man’s voice, that I recognised as Henry’s, announced, and again came peals of laughter.
This was a pleasant situation, certainly. My hosts vanished. The butler drunk. The servants apparently in rebellion!
Restlessly I paced the hall. My thoughts always work quickly, and my mind was soon made up.
First I went to the telephone, rang up the Stag’s Head Hotel in Oakham, the nearest town – it was eight miles off – and asked the proprietor, whom I knew personally, to send me out a car as quickly as possible, also to reserve a room for me for the night. Then I went into the morning-room, tucked the big panel photograph, in its frame, under my arm, took it up to my room, and deposited it in the bottom of my valise. As I finished packing my clothes and other belongings I heard the car hooting as it came quickly up the long beech avenue leading from the lodge-gates.
My valise was not heavy, and I am pretty strong. Also I am not proud. I lifted it on to my bed, crouched down, hoisted the valise on to my back, as the railway porters do, carried it downstairs, and let the driver have it. He was a man I knew, and I noticed that he was grinning.
“Taking physical exercise, sir?” he asked lightly.
“Yes,” I answered, “it’s better sport than foxhunting.”
He laughed outright, then helped me into my overcoat. A minute later we were on the road to Oakham.
And all the while the sad face of the girl for whom I had that evening declared my love – as I had last seen it, with her eyes set on mine as though in mute appeal – kept rising before me like a vision.
Chapter Two
Contains Certain Revelations
Until lunch-time next day I remained in Oakham, not knowing what to do, uncertain what steps to take.
I am a bachelor with a comfortable income, and, I am ashamed to say, an idler. Work never did really appeal to me. I try to compensate for not working by paying my taxes regularly and being as charitable as I can to people I come across and like, and whom the world seems to treat unjustly.
My father, Richard Ashton, was Colonel in the Blues. I was his only child,