Will O’ the Wisp

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Will O' the Wisp

Patricia Wentworth

CHAPTER I

The telephone bell rang again. David Fordyce looked up from the plan of an Elizabethan manor-house into which Mrs. Homer-Halliday insisted that a minimum of four bathrooms should be intruded. He frowned a black frown, said a sharp word, and put the receiver to his ear.

A cough came to him along the line, the deprecatory cough which was part of Miss Editha St. Kern's social equipment.

“Is Mr. David—is Mr. Fordyce—is this Mr. David Fordyce's office?”

“David speaking. Good-morning, Aunt Editha.”

“Oh, David, dear boy, how nice to get you at once! Clerks are so stupid. I suppose they can't hear me, can they? Did you say ‘No'?”

“I said ‘No.' Did you want anything, Aunt Editha?”

“I always wondered if they could hear. It's so nice to feel that they can't, and that our little conversations are quite private. It gives one such a different feeling—doesn't it?”

David jabbed the pencil that he was holding into an unoffending piece of blotting-paper. The point of the pencil broke. He scowled.

“Anything I can do for you, Aunt Editha?”

“For me? No, dear boy. I shouldn't
dream
. In office hours, too, when we all know that time is money!”

“Well, I am rather busy. So if there isn't anything—”

“Nothing. No, no, nothing at all—that is, nothing for me. I only rang up to make sure that you remembered—not, of course, that you
would
forget, but just to make sure.”

“Yes?”

“By the way, you received my little greeting? No, no, it's nothing at all—just the veriest trifle, just to show you that you are remembered. And of course I ought to have begun by wishing you many, many happy returns of the day.”

David jabbed with the broken pencil. This time the wood splintered.

“Thank you, Aunt Editha.” The voice was not a thankful one.

“No, no, dear boy, it's nothing—really nothing. And I only rang up just to say how I am looking forward to seeing you this afternoon.”

“This afternoon?”

“Dear Grandmamma's little gathering—so delightful! She's looking forward to it so much. Fancy, she has had twenty-five presents, and fifty-three cards and letters, which makes
several
more than last year. Delightful—isn't it? I've been helping to lay out the presents for this afternoon—quite like a wedding. But I mustn't keep you. We shall meet anon, and I mustn't be tempted to tell you beforehand of a delightful
surprise. Good
-bye.”

David jammed the receiver back on its hook, flung the broken pencil across the room, and picked up another. He became absorbed in bathrooms. His dark face relaxed.

The telephone bell rang.

When he had snatched the receiver, his sister Betty's voice, its slightly plaintive quality enhanced by the telephone, came faintly to his ear. Betty was always maddeningly indistinct.

“David, is that you? Oh, thank goodness! I've had three wrong numbers. I
am
speaking up.”

“You're not—you never do. What do you want?”

“Just to remind you—” Her voice trailed away and was not.

“Look here,” said David viciously, “if you're reminding me that Grandmamma and I have our joint birthday to-day, and that there's the usual damnable show on, you're a bit late with it.”

Betty's voice came on again, suddenly loud:

“Am I? David, are you there?”

“Yes—I wish I wasn't.”

“You
are
coming, aren't you? Why did you say I was late?”

“Because Grandmamma's maid rang me up whilst I was having my bath, and Milly had been trying to get on for half an hour before I got to office, and then I had Aunt Mary for a quarter of an hour, and Aunt Editha for about twenty minutes. I'm now going to smash the telephone.”

“David!”

David rang off.

In about half a minute the bell was clattering again.

“What is it?” said David ferociously.

Betty's faint accents wavered on the wire:

“David—I thought you'd better know beforehand—”

“What is it? You know I've got some work to do. Millionairesses who are clamouring for bathrooms don't like being kept waiting.”

“No. David, I won't keep you; but I really do think you ought to know—” Something inaudible just tickled his ear, but conveyed no meaning. Then he distinguished the word “coming.”

“For the Lord's sake speak up!”

“I am. I thought you ought to know she was coming.”

“Who is coming?”

“I told you.”

“I keep telling you I can't hear a word you say.”

“Eleanor,” said Betty on a sudden burst of sound. “She crossed yesterday, and the Aunts collected her and got her to promise to come this afternoon. And I thought you'd rather know beforehand, and not have them all thinking you were turning red, or turning pale, or something, when you weren't.”

David burst into a roar of laughter.

“I shall turn puce and writhe on the carpet. Aunt Mary can pour coffee all over my front, and Aunt Editha can put hot scones on the back of my neck.”

“David!” said Betty Lester.

David rang off.

So this was Aunt Editha's “delightful surprise.” He pictured her romantic mind dwelling fondly upon his meeting with Eleanor. The whole Family was doubtless in a state of pleasurable anticipation.

Seven years ago Eleanor Rayne had been Eleanor Fordyce. A convenient cousinship had thrown together two handsome and impressionable creatures. Result, an engagement so imprudent as to bring the Family about their ears, and to some purpose. David, then two-and-twenty, was sent to America to complete his training as an architect, whilst Eleanor sailed in the opposite direction to visit a convenient uncle in India.

In India she met and married Cosmo Rayne, who after six bitter years had left her widowed. She and David had not met since that final interview when heart-broken youth had taken what it most certainly believed to be a final farewell of happiness.

David looked back curiously across the seven years. It seemed so extraordinarily far away—all that passionate emotion; Eleanor's dark beauty frozen into dumb white misery; the tears through which he had last beheld her. It was all distinct in his memory; but it was like a photograph—lifeless, flat, and devoid of colour or interest. Betty's warning had been well meant but quite unnecessary. Betty always meant well—and she was very often unnecessary.

David felt himself capable of meeting Eleanor with the utmost cheerfulness and detachment. As they were cousins, he thought he would probably kiss her. He felt that to kiss Eleanor under the eyes of the assembled Family would add zest to Grandmamma's birthday party; it would make it go; it would give the Family something to talk about for months.

He laughed, and returned to the Elizabethan manor-house.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Fordyce's birthday was an Event. Six months in the year led up to it. During those months Miss Editha St. Kern, her sister, Miss Mary Fordyce, her daughter, and, in a lesser degree, the rest of the Family, were engaged in preparing for Grandmamma's birthday. For the remainder of the year it provided them with a topic of conversation and matter either for congratulation or regret. They dated other events by it. Queen Victoria, for instance, died “just after Grandmamma's birthday.” There was a dreadful year when Grandmamma could not have her birthday party because she was not well. And there was another year spoken of in hushed tones as “the time when David forgot.”

David's aunts would certainly never let him forget again. “And his own birthday too! How
could
he!” they murmured to one another.

Not one in the Family had any idea of how much David had always resented this communal birthday. Other little boys had birthdays of their own, but David had only the leavings of Grandmamma's birthday, and the birthday party was most indisputably not David's at all; it was a mere clutter of aunts, uncles, cousins, and adoring friends, grouped about Grandmamma. David's portion, of best clothes, scrubbed hands, and company behaviour, was one which he found extremely little to his taste.

Mrs. Fordyce lived very comfortably in an old-fashioned house in an old-fashioned London square. The drawing-room in which she was receiving her guests was a good-sized L-shaped room with windows on both sides of it. Curtains of olive-green plush had been drawn across these windows, and two chandeliers, each containing five unshaded lights, flared brightly down upon the faded Brussels carpet and the rather startling new chair-covers which were Miss Editha's birthday present. The covers, made by Miss Editha herself, displayed portions of an enormous pattern of blue, crimson, and purple peonies upon a green background. “So bright, dear,” as Miss Editha said when she presented them.

Mrs. Fordyce sat in an upright padded chair by the fire. She had the large nose and very bright blue eyes of some famous military commanders; her mouth was set in firm though not unpleasant lines; and she was inordinately proud of the fact that her teeth were all her own. She wore, upon a stiffly upright frame, a dress of handsome black brocade surmounted by a purple silk sports coat. Her bony fingers supported an extraordinary number of aged, valuable, and very dirty rings. And her own white hair was completely hidden by a coal-black transformation of most forbidding aspect.

Her sister Editha and her daughter Mary remained standing. Miss Editha plump, untidy, in grey silk, with floating wisps of snow-white hair and trailing scarves of blue and pink chiffon. And Miss Mary very little, timid, and thin in the snuffy sagging black which she wore year in, year out, and which never seemed to vary in age or date. She was just twenty years younger than her mother, and so nearly of an age with Miss Editha that she had never called her Aunt. Both ladies habitually spoke of Mrs. Fordyce as Grandmamma.