The Witness on the Roof (6 page)

“How long is it since you were in the neighbourhood, Lord Warchester?”

He looked slightly surprised.

“Fourteen—no, fifteen years. I was twenty-three-the last time I stayed at Warchester. I had no expectation of succeeding to the title then. My cousin Basil, to whom my uncle left the Marsh and most of the unentailed property, was with me.”

Joan looked interested.

“He is an invalid, is he not—your cousin?”

“Yes.” Warchester's head was downcast; his hand was absently playing with his watch-chain. “Some ten years ago he had an accident, and was frightfully smashed, up, poor chap. He has been more or less an invalid ever since, and his memory has been seriously affected.”

“How terribly sad!” Joan exclaimed. “And has he anybody—any sisters or a mother to live with him?”

“His mother died two years after the accident,” Warchester said slowly, “I think the shock of it killed her, for she had been so proud of him. But his tone changing to lighter vein—“why are you looking so puzzled, Miss Davenant? What is worrying you?”

“Because I thought—” Joan came to a stop. “But if you have not been here for ten years—”

“I have not been here for nearly fifteen years,” he corrected. “As a matter of fact, as you may have heard, my uncle was so seriously annoyed when I refused to fall in with his plans for my future that he vowed that I should not cross the threshold of the Towers in his lifetime, and he kept his word.”

“Then of course it must be my fancy, since it is only ten years since I came to the Hall, but I cannot help feeling the whole time that I have seen you before and that in some way you are familiar to me.”

Warchester leaned forward.

“I feel as if I had known you all my life. How shall we explain it? Perhaps,” with a laugh, “in another incarnation we met—-were friends.”

“Joan!” It was Reggie Trewhistle's voice. His usually florid, good-tempered-looking face was pale and perturbed. “Aunt Ursula is not well; she—I think you had better go home.”

“Granny!” Joan stood up. The sudden revulsion of feeling from the thoughtless enjoyment of the moment before seemed to overwhelm her. She clutched blindly at the curtain behind her. Not for an instant did the apparent carelessness of her cousin's words deceive her. Her grandmother had never been ill since her coming to Warchester, but she knew instinctively that it was no light thing that had overtaken her poor grandmother now.

“What—what is it?” she asked. “Not—”

Warchester was standing behind; over the girl's head his eyes met Reggie's in a glance of perfect comprehension. The next moment he stepped forward and drew Joan's hand within his arm.

“I think, Miss Davenant, we had better find Mrs. Trewhistle:”

Joan made no resistance. It did not seem strange to her that the music in the ball-room had stopped, that already people were leaving, so sure had she been from the first what had happened.

“Oh, Joan, my poor dear!” Cynthia took her from Warchester, drew her into the boudoir, and kissed her cold cheek. “I am so sorry, dear child.”

Joan drew herself a little away.

“I don't seem to understand,” she said in an odd, tired voice. “Tell me, Cynthia, how it was?”

Cynthia's pretty face was disfigured by tears. She had not cared for Aunt Ursula and had never pretended to do so, but it was dreadful to hear of this.

“It—it was quite sudden,” she told Joan, with a little break in her voice. “Bompas had given her milk and brandy as she always did last thing—it was later than usual, for she had been busy writing—and when she had emptied the glass she just slipped down among the pillows with a fluttering breath and was gone. Poor Bompas could not believe it. Now dear Joan, you—”

“I must go back,” Joan said calmly. “Poor Granny! She did not care much for me, you know, Cynthia, but I think she would have liked me to be there now.”

“A
CCORDING
to the terms of my husband's will, I bequeath Davenant Hall with its appurtenances and revenues to my granddaughter Evelyn Cecil Mary, elder daughter of John Spencer and Mary Evelyn his wife, and I appoint the said Evelyn Cecil Mary Spencer my residuary legatee. To my younger granddaughter Mary Ursula Joan Davenant, I bequeath the sum of one hundred pounds a year, to be paid quarterly.”

Mr. Hurst read out the foregoing sentences in his usual calm voice.

His auditors looked at one another in consternation. They heard little of the legacies to the servants with which the will ended; all their thoughts were for the tall, pale girl in black who sat at Mr. Hurst's right, and who was apparently less affected by what had passed than anyone in the room. The silence that followed the reading of the will was broken by an exclamation from Mrs. Trewhistle.

“Well!”

She and Joan were the only women in the room. The men included Septimus Lockyer,
K.C.
, the dead woman's brother; her nephew, Reginald Trewhistle; two distant cousins and a younger brother of Reggie's; and Sir Edward Fisher, who, like Septimus Lockyer, had been appointed executor.

“That is all,” concluded Mr. Hurst, with a dry cough.

“I may add that the documents, with blanks I left for the names, were prepared for Mrs. Davenant three weeks ago; the names were inserted and the will was signed and witnessed on the evening of her death.”

“Could it not be upset?” Cynthia inquired eagerly. “She could not have been sane when she did it, you know, Mr. Hurst.”

The lawyer shook his head.

“I fear we have no ground for interfering with the will, Mrs. Trewhistle. I assure you that I regret its provisions extremely. I am as much taken by surprise as anyone. In a will made soon after Miss Davenant's arrival here the positions were reversed.”

“Could not we act on that?” Cynthia asked hopefully.

Again Mr. Hurst shook his head.

“We are powerless. The will must stand.”

“I call it a shame!” Cynthia exclaimed passionately. “Here has Joan been brought up on the understanding she was to inherit Davenant, and now she is thrown on the world penniless—for what is a hundred a year?”

“A good deal to some people,” Joan interposed quietly. “No, Cynthia, don't say any more,” laying a restraining hand on her cousin's arm. “It—it hurts me rather. I cannot help thinking that it was—it must have been my fault that she never cared for me.”

“It was not!” Cynthia cried indignantly. “Aunt Ursula was—”

But her husband was looking at her warningly.

Septimus Lockyer was clearing his throat. He was considerably the dead woman's junior, and no one looking at him would have taken him for her brother. He was a big, burly man, with a wide, florid face and prominent grey eyes. He took off his eyeglasses, rubbed them, and readjusted them at a comfortable angle as he looked at his grandniece.

“There is only one thing to be done now, Joan, my dear,” he said kindly, “You must come and keep house for me; I have been thinking of settling down. In fact, I have had my eye for some time on a likely house in Queen's Gate, only I had no one to look after me,” giving a regretful sigh as he thought of his luxurious bachelor chambers.

“No, no, Uncle Septimus!” Cynthia spoke quickly, “I can't spare Joan. She will come to us of course.”

“There is one point that we are overlooking, as it seems to me,” Sir Edward Fisher interposed, leaning forward as Joan was about to speak. “This young lady to whom the estate is left is Miss Davenant's elder sister, I presume. Ought she not to have been here to-day?”

“Undoubtedly!” Mr. Hurst took the answer upon himself. ‘“But I regret to say that we are in total ignorance of her whereabouts. She left home many years ago in consequence of a disagreement with her stepmother, and, later on, resenting, we imagine, her sister's practical adoption by Mrs. Davenant, ceased to hold any communication with her. A week or two ago Mrs. Davenant began to institute inquiries with a view to discovering what had become of her, but so far with little result.”

“Do you mean that you don't know where she is?”

Mr. Hurst bowed.

“That is precisely the situation, Sir Edward.”

“And—and, supposing you don't find her—or—or she is dead, or anything?” pursued Sir Edward in a slightly lower tone. “Who comes in to the estate then?”

“Miss Joan Davenant undoubtedly, provided we obtained permission to presume the death,” Mr. Hurst answered. “The Squire's will distinctly stated that the estate was to go a child of his daughter's. Only, in the case of there being more than one, was Mrs. Davenant at liberty to choose.”

“I see.”

“Of course she will turn up now when she hears that she has had money left her—people always do,” Cynthia said pettishly. “Come, Joan, there is nothing for us to stay for, it seems to me.” She put her arm affectionately round her cousin.

Joan rose slowly. Since the shock of hearing of her grandmother's death she had felt singularly inert and languid. In time her splendid vitality would reassert itself but for the present there was no doubt that she was suffering even more than she realized. Though her grandmother had never been affectionate, never indeed more than tolerant of her, it seemed now to the girl, looking back, that she understood more of that strange, warped nature than any of these people who discussed her testamentary disposition with scarcely a word of regret for the woman who had loved and sorrowed in that great house through many lonely years. She could guess something of the intense humiliation her mother's marriage must have been to that proud nature, and she could be very pitiful to the paltry revenge that had been taken upon her—that dead daughter's child. She had been made to suffer in her mother's default. The will was not so much of a surprise to her as to her relatives; she had always suspected that her succession to the estates was exceedingly precarious, and lately she had seen how her grandmother's mind had reverted to Evelyn.

Mr. Hurst blinked at her over the top of his glasses. He was little changed since the day he brought her to Davenant Hall. He did not see quite as well as in those days perhaps, that was all—all except that now it was he who looked up and Joan-—tall Joan—who looked down.

“I am sure I need not say how grieved I am, Miss Davenant,” he began nervously, fumbling with his papers. “If any efforts of mine—”

Joan held out her hand.

“I am sure it was no doing of yours, Mr. Hurst. You have always been most kind to me. Nor must you think, any of you”—raising her head with a new accession of dignity—“that I grudge her good fortune to my sister or blame my grandmother. She has a perfect right to please herself.”

“I blame her, though,” Cynthia murmured beneath her breath, as, with her hand through her cousin's arm, she drew her through the door. “I should just enjoy telling her what I think of her now,” she added when they stood outside in the hall.

“Please don't, Cynthia,” protested Joan. “I can't bear to hear you speak like that. It seems so unkind just after we have left her alone in that dreadful vault. I—I am sure it must have been my fault that we were not more intimate.”

“Your fault indeed,” Cynthia exclaimed resentfully. “When you have been a perfect angel! Joan, you have never grumbled—or—or anything. Why, in your place I should have flown out at her long ago—I know I should!”

Meanwhile in the room they had left the men drew their chairs closer together and looked very uneasy.

Reggie Trewhistle was the first to break the silence.

“Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish!” he ejaculated. “The old lady must have been as mad as a March hare!”

“Mad!” Mr. Lockyer permitted himself a smile. “My sister was as sane and level-headed a woman as I ever knew, I would have you understand, Reggie. Not but what I think she has been wrong over this. But insanity—pouf! There has never been any of that in the Lockyer family. Now, with regard to this other sister, the one that comes into the property now. I am ashamed to say I have never made any inquiries about her. Do I understand that you do not know where she is?”

Mr. Hurst hesitated.

“Personally,” he explained, “I have no idea of her whereabouts, but a private detective, whom, against my advice, Mrs. Davenant consulted, discovered that a short time after Miss Evelyn Spencer left her home a family named Molyneux took with them to Montreal a young nursery governess who signed her name in the passengers' book as ‘E. Spencer.' Her description leads Hewlett, the detective, to think it is the same girl. That is practically the only clue we have.”

The great
K.C.
looked thoughtful.

“And that may be no clue at all. Spencer is a common enough name. How long ago is this, Mr. Hurst—that the girl left home, I mean?”

The solicitor consulted his notes.

“As far as I can ascertain it will be fifteen years next March, Mr. Lockyer.”

“Fifteen years ago! Phew! I had no idea it was so long as that. Why, how old is the girl?”

“I believe Miss Spencer will be thirty-five next month.”

“Thirty-five! Good heavens! And you don't know what she has been doing for fifteen years?” The
K.C.
was startled out of his calm for once. “Why—anything may have happened to her!”

“Precisely!” Sir Edward Fisher agreed. “Mr. Hurst, I am of opinion that it was your duty to have submitted this to Mrs. Davenant.”

“Undoubtedly I should have done so had Mrs. Davenant consulted me with regard to her intentions,” the lawyer answered.

Septimus Lockyer rose and buttoned his coat.

“Well, she must be found; that is the first thing, Mr. Hurst. Of course you will set the detectives to work at high pressure. Hewlett, you said? Of Hewlett and Cowham's, I suppose—a very good firm! By the way, what is she like? Does she resemble her sister at all? I suppose you have not a photograph?”