The Murder on the Enriqueta: A Golden Age Mystery Page 4

  How, precisely, the accident happened would never be known, the car being too damaged to make any sort of investigation possible; but from the account of Lady Dalberry, the sole survivor, it would seem that the steering gear must have failed suddenly. Lord Dalberry, who was driving, evidently lost all control over the machine, which left the road, dashed head-on over the edge of a steep embankment, and crashed into a mass of undergrowth thirty feet below. Lord Dalberry and his wife’s maid, the only other occupant of the car, were killed instantaneously. Lady Dalberry, by a miracle, was thrown clear, and, though badly bruised and suffering from shock, was so little hurt that she was able eventually to make her way up the embankment on to the road where she was found lying, almost unconscious, by the overseer of a neighbouring ranch.

  In her first frenzy of grief it was difficult to convince her that her husband was really dead. She had, it appeared, struck her head in falling, and had been stunned for a time. On recovering, she had crawled to where her husband and the maid lay, the former half under the overturned car. Even in her partly dazed state she had realized that the maid, whose head had been badly crushed by the car, was dead, but she had tried in vain to liberate her husband and restore him to consciousness. Failing in her efforts, she had made her way to the road in the hope of getting help.

  At first she had refused to leave the scene of the accident, and her rescuer had been obliged to take her back to the wreck of the car before he could convince her that nothing could be done for her husband. Then her courage had failed her and she had collapsed in earnest, and had only recovered consciousness as the car arrived which had been sent for to take her to the nearest town. Once there, she had shown amazing pluck, had refused to go to the hospital, and taking a room in the only hotel the little town boasted, had attended the inquest, and had herself made all the arrangements for the funeral of the maid and the transference of her husband’s body to England. She had cabled the news of the accident to Lord Dalberry’s lawyers, and announced her intention of sailing at the earliest opportunity. The American Press had done the rest, and the whole story, with all its gruesome details, was soon public property.

  Just one month from the day of the accident she sailed in the Enriqueta, taking her husband’s body with her, a heartbroken woman, on her way to a strange land, where, so far as she knew, there was not one soul whom she could call a friend. Her husband’s nephew, the son of his brother Oliver, had succeeded to the title, and she did not even know what jointure he would be likely to allow her, and whether she could count herself a comparatively wealthy woman or not. Her husband had sunk most of his money in the ranch, and though this had sold easily enough, it had been of necessity a forced sale, and, for all she knew, the sum it had fetched might very well represent almost the whole of her capital.

  Remembering the lack of ostentation with which she had travelled, the prompt manner in which she had come forward when she thought her evidence might be of value, coupled with the quiet dignity of her erect and vigorous carriage as she passed him on the Liverpool platform, Shand paid tribute to her pluck and common-sense, and at the same time wondered at his own lack of sympathy for the woman who had gone through so much, and was, apparently, facing life so bravely.

  Somehow, since he had seen the clear, cold profile framed in the dense black of the widow’s veil, he found it difficult to look upon her as a pathetic figure, and once more he caught himself wondering how long it would be before there was a clash of wills between her and Jasper Mellish.

  CHAPTER IV

  The only member of the Dalberry party who might be said to feel thoroughly at ease during the tedious journey from Liverpool to London was the melancholy looking solicitor who had come on board the boat with Mellish. As junior partner, these somewhat depressing excursions into the private lives of the firm’s clients usually fell to his lot, and long practice had enabled him to go through the most painful and embarrassing experiences with a perfection of manner which was all the easier to maintain because it was purely mechanical.

  Jasper Mellish, always a godsend on occasions such as these, kept up a gentle and mellifluous flow of conversation, which tactfully included Lady Dalberry, should she feel inclined to talk.

  The two younger members of the party spent their time in trying to conceal their embarrassment, and wishing with all their hearts that the journey was over.

  Carol Summers, as the only other woman present, was painfully conscious that the task of supporting and ministering to the bereaved widow lay with her, but her youth and inexperience, combined with the icy composure with which Lady Dalberry seemed to be facing a most trying situation, left her totally at a loss. Even the very real sympathy she had felt for her uncle’s widow ever since the news of the accident had reached her did not serve to allay her embarrassment, and, to her shame, she realized that this sympathy was rapidly degenerating into acute curiosity. Over and over again she caught herself covertly observing the other woman, who sat, for the most part, gazing out of the window, her head thrown back against the cushions of the carriage as though the weight of the luxuriant fair hair that just showed beneath the rim of her close-fitting hat were almost more than she could bear. She had removed her heavy widow’s veil, and in the cold winter sunlight that filtered in through the carriage window her face showed lines beneath its skilled but obvious make-up that proclaimed her as older than she had appeared at first sight. In profile, Carol decided, with the whole-hearted admiration of youth, her features were perfect, but when she turned, in answer to a remark of Lord Dalberry’s and exhibited her full face, the girl was conscious of a sharp pang of disappointment. The whole upper part of the face was too wide, the cheek-bones too high, and the thick, fair brows above fine eyes too heavy.

  Then those cold eyes swept in her direction, and, with a start, Carol realized that she was being addressed.

  “We must see each other often when I am settled, and you must please help me in the choosing of the things for my house. I do not know your English shops, and I think I am a little frightened of London. It must be so big, from what I have heard.”

  Her voice was beautiful—a warm, deep, rich contralto, with a curious husky note in it. She spoke English carefully and with a marked accent, but she seemed to have no difficulty in finding words for what she wanted to say, and occasionally would use American idioms with an aptness that was startling. Later, in a moment of confidence, she told Carol that though she had been brought up in New York, she had not been born there. Her parents had migrated from Sweden when she was four years of age, and, though she was educated in American schools, she had never spoken anything but Swedish in her father’s house. In spite of all that was to happen before Carol finally made up her mind about her uncle’s will, she never quite succeeded in freeing herself from the spell of Lady Dalberry’s voice, and it never failed to soften her towards its owner. It held all the warmth and sympathy that was so signally lacking in her face and manner.

  “Lady Dalberry is anxious to get away from hotel life as soon as possible,” put in Mellish, “and I have been telling her how heartily I agree with her. We must try to find her a suitable house between us.”

  “Meanwhile I hope you will make use of Berrydown, if you would rather be there until your own house is ready for you,” suggested Lord Dalberry courteously.

  Carol looked up quickly. She had known Gillie Culver, as he had been until his uncle’s death, too long to be taken in by a purely formal exhibition of politeness. She had never before heard him speak with such complete lack of feeling. But to a stranger his offer sounded spontaneous enough, and Lady Dalberry evidently accepted it at its face value.

  “It is more than kind of you,” she answered, her beautiful voice warm with appreciation. “I shall see this Berrydown—to-morrow, I think?”

  She stumbled a little over the end of the sentence and turned abruptly to the window. A feeling of constraint fell over the other members of the little party as they realized that she would see her husband’
s old home for the first time on the occasion of his funeral. No wonder the thought of the tragic ordeal before her had shaken her composure.

  For the first time Carol was conscious of a spontaneous feeling of pity for the other woman, and only a natural shyness prevented her from crossing the carriage and sitting by her side. She glanced at Gillie, but beyond the quiet friendliness of his smile as his eyes met hers, he made no sign, and it was impossible for her to judge of the extent to which he had been impressed by the incident.

  “I’m sorry we don’t boast a town house at present,” he went on. His tone was perfectly friendly, but Carol could still detect the curiously aloof note which had puzzled her a few minutes before. “Uncle Maurice turned it into a hospital during the war, and it was so knocked about that he sold it soon after the armistice, meaning to buy another. But my aunt was dead and he had no daughter, so that entertaining was not much in his line, and he got into the habit of taking a furnished house when he wanted to spend any length of time in town. I’m in rooms myself, so I can’t offer you hospitality. I’m sorry. It would have been more comfortable for you than a hotel.”

  Lady Dalberry turned to him quickly.

  “Of course I understand,” she exclaimed. “As soon as I can I shall find a house. It will be better for me to be alone for a little, I think,” she added gently.

  “If there’s anything I can do I shall be delighted,” he assured her stiffly.

  Carol gazed at him in astonishment: it was so unlike him to withhold his sympathy from anyone. This time even Lady Dalberry seemed aware of the curious reserve in his voice.

  “This child will help me, I think,” she said, and reaching across the intervening space she laid a hand on Carol’s knee. “It is woman’s work, house-furnishing. And she shall arrange one room for herself in the way she likes best, and come often to stay in it.”

  She flashed a glance at Dalberry, and it seemed to Carol that there was something very like a challenge in her cold eyes.

  “Carol knows that Berrydown is still her home whenever she cares to go there,” he answered easily. “The old housekeeper’s pining for her, and the place is simply standing empty most of the time nowadays. The worst of Carol is that she is so much in demand elsewhere.”

  Lady Dalberry looked puzzled.

  “You are living, where?” she asked, turning to the girl.

  Carol laughed.

  “I’m rather a stray dog at present. Poor Jasper’s worrying himself to death trying to find a way to get rid of me,” she explained, with an affectionate glance at Mellish. She had addressed him firmly by his Christian name at the early age of six, oblivious of the admonitions of a horrified nurse. “For the last six months or so I’ve been inflicting myself on a series of long-suffering friends, but I shall have to settle down some time. I ought to be house-hunting myself, I suppose. Jasper’s got all sorts of antiquated ideas about a companion or chaperon or something equally depressing. We argue about it on an average of three times a week.”

  “As soon as you’re of age you can do as you like,” put in Mellish lazily. “Till then you’ve got to behave yourself, my child, though I don’t mind telling you that I shall make myself uncommonly disagreeable any time within the next ten years if you insist on setting up house on your own. Not that you will take the slightest notice,” he finished ruefully.

  “He’s getting a little fractious,” explained Carol to Lady Dalberry. “You see, till now he’s had me in the hollow of his hand, and he can’t bear to think that his day is nearly over. On the twenty-eighth of March, exactly two months and nine days from now, I shall be twenty-one, and Jasper will give me his blessing and wash his hands of me for ever. There are times when it drives him almost frantic to feel that he won’t be able to bully me any more.”

  “She’s been counting the days,” murmured Mellish plaintively. “The ingratitude of the minx!”

  He and Carol were playing into each other’s hands. The strain under which they had all been suffering since the beginning of the journey had at last begun to relax, and in their relief they had descended almost to flippancy. Lady Dalberry, face to face for the first time in her life with that essentially British characteristic which is, of all others, the most difficult for the intelligent foreigner to understand—the Englishman’s overmastering impulse to make fun of those things about which he feels most strongly—was frankly puzzled; so much so that, though in the course of time she became really intimate with Carol, she never succeeded in realizing to the full the bond of genuine affection and respect that bound her and Jasper Mellish. Carol might jibe at the touch of his restraining hand, but she knew that he was never unreasonable, and she would have given up a great deal rather than hurt him. And, incidentally, she trusted him completely, and invariably turned to him for help and advice when in any difficulty.

  “What are your plans for the next two months?” asked Dalberry with interest. “You can’t stay on with the Randalls for ever.”

  “They want me to go to the south of France with them, but I’m tired of being abroad. It seems only yesterday that I got back from St. Moritz. I’d rather take a small flat in London. I think the life of a bachelor girl would suit me,” she reflected.

  “It might, but you won’t have a chance to find out so long as I remain your long-suffering trustee. So you can put that idea out of your head,” drawled Mellish.

  “I believe you’ll never be really happy till you’ve lost all my money for me,” retorted Carol, with mock exasperation. “Then you can poke me away into a nice, strict home for destitute orphans, and visit me once a year just to find out whether I’ve been amenable to discipline.”

  “I did not realize that this child, like myself, was homeless,” said Lady Dalberry, with a note of real sympathy in her deep voice.

  “I had forgotten that she would, of course, have to leave Berrydown.”

  Dalberry’s face flushed with annoyance.

  “She knows the place is open to her whenever she cares to go there,” he exclaimed, with what seemed to Carol quite unnecessary heat.

  Mellish turned to him blandly.

  “Lady Dalberry’s quite right, my boy,” he said. “We all know how you feel about it; but as long as Berrydown’s a bachelor establishment Carol can hardly look upon it as her home.”

  Lady Dalberry bent forward and addressed Carol impulsively.

  “Perhaps later, when you have been abroad with your friends, and we have got to know each other a little better, we might find a house that would suit us both. It would be very pleasant for me, a lonely woman with no daughter, and for you, it would mean that I could entertain for you when my year of mourning is over, and perhaps save you from this chaperon with whom you are threatened. Even when you are of age, my child, I think you will not be able to give balls and receptions without a dame de compagnie.—Or is it different in England?” she finished, turning to Mellish.

  “I, personally, do not see how Carol is to entertain in accordance with her means unless she has some sort of chaperon,” he admitted. “But then I’m old-fashioned, I believe.”

  “And is there no member of the family, no older lady? My husband spoke sometimes of his relations, but I cannot remember that he ever mentioned such a person.”

  Mellish shook his head.

  “There’s no one, oddly enough. Carol’s sole surviving female relative on the Culver side is Miss Ellen Culver, a first cousin of her grandfather’s, and she is too old and feeble for that sort of thing. Her father’s people are, of course, all in America. Fortunately she has got a host of friends. Judging from the invitations she seems to have had, she could spend the rest of her life in a round of country-house visits.”

  “Only I happen to want a home of my own,” put in Carol. She spoke with real impatience now. “It’s too ridiculous. Just because of this wretched money, I’m to be made thoroughly uncomfortable. If I’d only got about twopence a year nobody would say a word against my taking up art or music and living my own life in
my own way.”

  “I didn’t know you were interested in art,” commented Mellish mildly. “Of course, if you want to take a studio and give yourself up to painting, I should not dream of standing in your way. I always believe in encouraging young talent. But if you’re thinking of laying down a parquet floor and giving little dances after the day’s toil is over, I must insist on an adequate chaperon, I’m afraid.”

  Carol laughed in spite of her annoyance.

  “You must have been an awful handful when you were young,” she said admiringly. “It’s uncanny, the way you see through my little innocent schemes. The career of an artist seems to be closed to me.”

  Lady Dalberry, who found herself slightly at a loss during these conversational skirmishes, brought the disputants firmly back to the matter in hand, with the calm directness which seemed to be one of her main characteristics.

  “Will you consider what I have suggested,” she said earnestly, “while you are staying with your friends? It is not for now. For a little while I must be alone. I am too—tired, I think.”

  She did not say “sad,” but her wonderful voice, with its rich, beautiful inflections, said it for her. Carol felt her throat contract suddenly with emotion, and for the moment it seemed to her that there was nothing she would not do to make this woman’s tragic life a shade more endurable.

  “Of course, if you’d really care to have me—” she was beginning impulsively, when Mellish held up a plump hand.

  “An admirable way out of the difficulty,” he said, beaming approvingly on Lady Dalberry, “and one that had occurred to me, though I should not have ventured to suggest it. But we’ve got several months before us yet, and all sorts of things may turn up in the interval. As you say, you need time to rest and collect yourself, and Carol will know better what she wants to do when she actually takes control of her own affairs. If you take my advice, you’ll let the matter rest for a while until both of you have more definite ideas as to your future plans.”