The Warrielaw Jewel, page 8
CHAPTER VI
THE SILENCE OF MISS WARRIELAW
During the weeks that followed the afternoon at Warrielaw we were each of us, it seems to me now, in the position of some musical ignoramus taken to his very first concert. How pointless to such an innocent would be the buzz of the gathering audience and tuning-up of all the instruments, how impossible to think that out of this there would come one full coherent melody, hushing every other incongruous sound into rapt silence. For the next six weeks nothing but queer and unconnected incidents were to sound in our minds over affairs at Warrielaw. Then indeed the main theme was to prove urgent and engrossing.
From the first I puzzled naturally over the events of that afternoon of April 13th, but most of my worrying was done in private. From our childhood Dennis and I have been rapt readers of adventure and detective stories; and so often had we applied their suggestions to everyday life around us, that any announcement on my part that I had noticed some very queer person or event in a London street was dismissed at once as a “Betty Ramp”. That odious phrase was applied by Dennis at once to my descriptions and puzzles over those dreary hours at Warrielaw. John shared his scoffing amusement. What was there curious about a couple of old maids and their servant leaving their shabby old place unguarded one afternoon? Why was it strange for one old maid to go off to London, as she had done before, or take a breath of fresh air at Carstairs? Or why shouldn’t the other throw a fit when she had overwalked herself all day and probably overeaten herself at lunch? Of course I could have changed their tone at once, I surmised, if I had told them about Cora’s doings, but, about those, rightly or wrongly, I was silent. I had promised Cora to say nothing, and the boyish conventions of my childhood kept me silent till I had seen her and warned her that I could keep silence no longer. Often enough I faced the possibility of her having gone up to Jessica’s room and abstracted the fairy jewel while I slept in her car. But even if Cora were a thief, even if it had been the jewel that distended her bag so queerly, one thing was quite clear. The jewel for the present was safe in her keeping. She would never sell it: she would never lose it: it was more sacred to her probably than any other Warrielaw. And if on the other hand she were innocent of the monstrous theft, it was terrible to think, of meeting her in Edinburgh for years to come after I had made irremediable mischief by accusing her. I had seen enough of feuds in this fierce Northern city to realise that for the rest of my life every party would be spoilt for me by trying to avoid Cora and her friends, every street corner would hold the menace of meeting her unexpectedly. If John knew, John would have to take some action, and all this trouble would begin. Meanwhile it was surely best to wait till a letter came from Jessica to prove whether the jewel was or was not still in its owner’s keeping. So at least I reasoned for the next few days, and then John came home with the news that Charles had put his foot down at last and hurried Cora off to the Riviera. Her nerves had all gone to pieces, said Cora’s unlucky husband, and he had simply packed her up and bundled her off in the charge of her favourite sister-in-law. I was not a little sorry for the sister-in-law, but I was delighted to be relieved from the chance of meeting socially one whom I seriously suspected of theft, and one whose enmity I had certainly aroused. Cora might be mad in some ways, but she was not careless. Wherever she was, the jewel was safe. It was safer by far, I felt, with her than it would be at Warrielaw within reach of Rhoda’s covetous grasp.
For it was from Rhoda, to use my former simile, that we were first aware of the muttering of the orchestra from which the main theme was to come. Miss Mary had rallied wonderfully. She consented to see Rhoda when three or four days had passed by, though Effie reported gleefully that she had just given the new nurse a wee hint to stay in the room. “She’s an awful genteel body,” said Effie when Dennis took me to make enquiries, “and Miss Rhoda’ll have to mind her manners when she’s by.” But Rhoda had achieved her object and seen Mary, and from that visit John’s troubles began.
“The woman’s mad!” said John when he came in one afternoon, announcing that Rhoda was coming to see him. “And yet if ever I imagined there was a business woman with her head screwed on the right way, it was Rhoda Macpherson. I really begin to believe all women have as undeveloped a legal sense as you, Betty.”
“What’s she being illegal about?”
“Well, Betty, what would you do if I suddenly went off to London and left you without a penny and didn’t write for a fortnight?”
“I should forge a cheque and go home to Kensington,” I said promptly. “All the Howards are good forgers.”
“What sort of cheque?”
“Oh, ten pounds or so, I suppose. What are you getting at?”
“Well, you’ve more sense than Rhoda and Mary Warrielaw! Jessica’s bankers rang me up this morning to say that Rhoda had come in and tried to cash a cheque for a hundred pounds on Jessica’s account. The cheque was signed by Mary, and there was almost a scene, I imagine, when Collins very naturally pointed out that they couldn’t make free with Jessica’s money just because she’d gone off on a visit to London.”
“But has she left Mary with no money at all?”
“So I gather! That’s quite typical of her eccentric ways. She drew fifty pounds for herself and then went off with it. As a matter of fact, even though Mary can get as much credit as she likes from her ordinary shops, it was, of course, absurd to leave her with hardly a penny in her purse. If Jessica doesn’t write reasonably soon, I can obviously arrange with the bank to let Mary have some small monthly sum for the management of the place. But to cash a hundred pounds was ludicrous! Collins tells me that Jessica draws about twenty pounds a month for all her expenses. I suppose Rhoda was simply trying to make hay of poor old Mary while the sun was shining! Well, I rang up and asked if she could look in, so of course she asked herself to tea and suggested that Dennis should fetch her and Alison. That saves her a lawyer’s fee and twopence for a tram! Oh, she’s practical enough in small ways!”
I was out when Rhoda arrived and absented myself till six o’clock, in the hope that all legal business would be over. But when I entered the drawing-room I found Dennis and Alison far away in the big window, and John still endeavouring to bring Rhoda to reason.
“That’s all I can do,” he was reiterating. “We can arrange for a monthly allowance, but it’s out of the question to touch any capital, as I’ve told you again and again.”
“But if we don’t hear from Jessica?”
“Of course you’ll hear from her.” John was evidently weary of arguing round and round in a circle. “If not, as I say, we can do nothing till the law presumes death—and that’s not for several years. But it’s absurd to go on bothering about these things, Rhoda. No doubt she’ll write in a few days.”
“How is Miss Mary?” I asked, to rescue my husband.
“She’s better, only naturally she’s worried over all this. For all we know, Jessica may have lost the suit-case and the jewel in it.”
“Yes, she must want to know Miss Jessica is all right.” I could not help pointing out what seemed a curious omission in Rhoda’s outlook.
“If she’s really anxious, all we could do is to employ a private agent to get on her track,” said John. “But it would be absurd when she’s only been away for a week and presumably has the case with her.”
“Nearly a fortnight. I do think we should make enquiries about the suit-case. It was the 13th of April when she went.”
“Well, even so, it’s rather doubtful whether we’ve any right to employ an agent to hunt for Jessica with Jessica’s money when she doesn’t want to be found! Do try to make Miss Mary understand anyhow that she can’t touch a penny of Jessica’s money as things are. Why should she want to get hold of capital so suddenly?”
Rhoda made no reply to his question. “There’s another thing,” she said abruptly. “Do you know what Cora’s done? She’s got hold of that half-witted niece of Effie’s, that girl Annie, who gave us so much trouble in the winter, and installed her as under-housemaid.”
“Christina said something about it to me,” I admitted. “Why shouldn’t she give her a chance?”
“Do you know how she got her? She motored out to Carglin on the very afternoon Effie took Annie there—the day Aunt Jessica went away—and engaged her on the spot and motored her back with her to Edinburgh. Effie said she was in her uniform and about the house half an hour after Cora got back with her. Effie evidently felt it was a great triumph over me: she always seemed to think it was my fault that the Aunts got rid of Annie.”
“It doesn’t seem to me that this is a point on which I can give you legal advice,” said John, rising.
“Except that it would be interesting to know what Cora was up to,” said Rhoda severely. “I never knew Cora engage a maid out of sheer philanthropy before. I suppose she wants to have some sort of connection with Effie, so as to hear just what is going on at Warrielaw, but it seems odd to me, very odd.”
It seemed even stranger to me that Cora had adhered to her plan when I remembered how white and ill she had looked that afternoon in the drive at Warrielaw. It was not a long drive to Carglin, a village near to Bathgate, but long enough for a nervous woman with a car which had given her trouble earlier in the day. Certainly she must have wanted to get hold of Annie for information of some kind, but she must have wanted it badly before she introduced the clumsy, stupid, untrained woman into her immaculate servants hall. “Mrs. Murray took such a fancy to her from the first that she said Annie was to attend to her own bedroom,” Christina had reported, but that I did not repeat to Rhoda.
“Annie’s back at her sister’s now, I believe,” I volunteered. This seemed a harmless piece of information for Rhoda. “Cora sent all the underservants home on board-wages, Christina told me, when she went to the Riviera.”
“And that was only a week later!” exclaimed Rhoda. She got up and stood by the window, her brows knit in thought. Then, recollecting herself, she spoke more lightly—“Well, Cora’s really hardly responsible for herself, is she?”
“No Warrielaws are responsible for themselves or for anyone else,” said John severely, when Dennis had escorted the two women to his car. “I don’t mind her tricks or Cora’s about this domestic system of espionage in which they indulge, but I do want to find out why Rhoda is trying to lay her hands on her aunt’s capital.”
Dennis enlightened us on that point when he returned. Alison, he explained, had told him long ago that Rhoda’s whole heart was set on going to America and starting in business there, far away from the Edinburgh people who looked down on her and her sister and the family which was falling into decay. For years this had been her ideal, and she had more than once approached Jessica on the subject. She had, apparently, never really grasped through it all how useless Mary was to her as an ally, and she was proportionately disappointed now. She was still, Dennis reported with a grin, hoping to make John see reason, and she was playing with the idea of setting an enquiry on foot, though evidently in some ways the scheme displeased her. “But I think I can venture to promise that you’ll hear from her again, soon, John,” said my brother.
John seized upon the incident as text to a sermon on the impossibility of giving the vote to women, a subject which gave rise to much domestic wit in those far-off, forgotten days.
Rhoda certainly displayed the tenacity and fighting quality of a suffragette in her quest for money. We heard indirectly that she was trying to borrow on her very problematic expectations, with no success. It was she who evidently inspired Miss Mary to write off piteous, trembling letters with many crossings and underlinings, to ask to know exactly where she stood. Rhoda herself was busy getting other legal opinions, and John was maliciously glad to think she would have to pay for them. She was so preoccupied with her affairs and her visits to Warrielaw, where, however, she was still only admitted on sufferance to Mary’s presence under the eye of the nurse, that Alison was more often in our house than ever. In her presence we could not discuss the family affairs; behind her back Rhoda’s doings were a subject for jest. So that it was almost a surprise when John spoke seriously one day.
“You know, Betty, I don’t like this business at all. Do you realise that it’s a month now since Jessica went away?”
“May 11th—yes, so it is,” I said, shivering in the cold wind. “I never realised May had come in like a lion already.”
“It’s a long time, really, you know, longer than I like. I rang up Neil Logan to-day to ask if he’d heard from her, and all the cold-blooded beast would say was that the longer it was before we heard, the better. Her loss, he added, is certainly our gain, and I was so angry that I rang off. I mean, seriously, Betty, she was pretty old to go wandering off alone to some doss-house in London, with a fabulous historic jewel tucked into her bag or hanging from her neck. She may have met with any kind of accident in the London streets and remain unidentified, or she may even have met with foul play. I’ve written to tell Rhoda that I think a few very private and careful enquiries wouldn’t be a bad thing, and what’s more, I’ve even thought of the very man to make them. You’ve heard me speak of Bob Stuart? Well, he’s at a loose end just now—out of a job. If Rhoda and Mary agree to get someone, I shall approach him.”
It was therefore in this manner Bob Stuart came into our lives.
Bob’s relationship with John was one of those curious affairs which flourish in democratic Scotland. Old Mr. Morrison was a lawyer of the old type and sent his son to the most famous day school in Edinburgh, criticising severely those snobbish Edinburgh West End people who sent their sons to England for their education. John and Bob had fought their way up the school and played in the fifteen together: they had known every thought in each other’s hearts, climbed every mountain in Skye together and risked their lives together on sailing boats in the Islands. But never once, as far as I could make out, had my mother-in-law asked Bob to her house, or John penetrated the Stuarts’ house in Morningside. Just when John went to Oxford, Bob’s father died, leaving his family penniless. Bob went into the police force and rose rapidly. He had been promoted to the detective branch and done excellently. For ten years he and John had maintained their friendship outside their homes and families. Then, just before we married, Bob had inherited a comfortable sum from an unknown great-aunt on condition that he should leave the force and go into some business. The interests of his family obliged him to accept, and at the moment Bob was looking out for some outlet for his activities. When I heard his story I suggested to John that Bob should come to see us in Moray Place, but such a breach in tradition was apparently impossible for either of them to contemplate. It needed the full force of the Warrielaw affair to bring him to the house, but when once he came, Dennis and I were determined not to let him go. It was only in a private capacity that John consulted him first, before he gained the consent of the Warrielaws.
Dennis and I sat and looked at the two men with the greatest interest in that first interview in the library of Moray Place. It seemed to me that we were looking at a page in Scottish social history. When the Morrisons handed over Moray Place to us, I made a revolution in the vast Victorian drawing-room and my bedroom, but I left the library untouched. The lofty dark walls were still covered with dark prints of legal luminaries and the family trees of the Morrisons and the families into which they had married, with college and school groups and trophies. The vast leather chairs and John’s desk and tables were ugly but convenient, and the whole room was beautified by the view, from the big windows, of the Firth of Forth, far away over a grey haze of smoky chimneys, and the shadowy line of Highland hills beyond the sea. My tall, strong, silent husband (those were the days of strong, silent men) with his stern mouth and good-humoured eyes, his unimpeachable code of life and morals and his pleasant, casual voice, fitted perfectly into the background and traditions of two centuries of an Edinburgh legal family. Bob Stuart was a complete contrast: he was, I thought idly, the Highlander strayed into a Lowland fortress of conventions, Rob Roy brought to book at last. He was so slight and active that I could never imagine him in majestic blue, controlling the traffic: he had that delightful type of what Dennis called the bashed-in face, where the mouth and chin seem the most prominent features. His forehead was rather low, and if you had brushed his hair over it he would have looked a criminal type, and if you brushed it back he would look the twin of a famous actor. When he had lost his hair, Dennis suggested further, he would look very like a bishop. His lids drooped habitually over his eyes, but his glance was extraordinarily quick and penetrating. He could speak broad Scots, or ordinary English with only a slight Scotch accent, in alternate sentences. He had just enough of that personal magnetism we called charm in those days to make people fling confidences of every kind at him, while he himself sat in silence making the favourite Scottish comment of “Hmhm” at intervals. His clothes were cheap; he wore them badly and without interest. He would have been a glorious companion in an earthquake or shipwreck, and an interesting neighbour at dinner or on any occasion when you could settle down to talk to him. In a drawing-room at a tea-party he would be hopeless, not because he was shy, gauche or self-conscious, but because he would find no interest in social amenities. He would never, I think, have come to meet me save on business terms. He had his own world and John had his, even in the tiny universe of Edinburgh, and he had no wish to enter John’s. In the Great War men found such intimate companionship irrespective of background, training and tradition, but it was, I think, only in Scotland, before that date, that men like these two had a capacity for intimate friendship with no interest in each other’s surroundings. Our library was at that moment, it seemed to me, the representative meeting-place of all that is best in professional aristocracy and independent democracy. For generations Scotsmen like these have realised that women with their conventions and snobberies complicate social life for them, and, ignoring them, persist in their own undisturbed masculine friendships. I sat glowing with pride over the Country to which I now belonged, while Bob was obviously feeling not the slightest interest in me, though he took in the efforts of Dennis’s tailor and Dennis’s boyish charm, with a glance of pleasant interest.
