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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.

  The first guest to arrive was the Family’s latest recruit, Julie, Frank Alderey’s newly acquired wife—Julie, rather nervously aware of being the first to arrive and of having to explain to Frank’s great-aunts that Frank would certainly be late.

  Miss Editha enveloped her in billowy arms and flowing bits of chiffon.

  “Dear Julie! But where is Frank? But no, I mustn’t keep you from Grandmamma. Tell her, and I shall hear.”

  Julie was handed on to Miss Mary, who touched her hand with small cold fingers.

  “Grandmamma is waiting,” she murmured; and Julie turned to Mrs. Fordyce.

  Did she kiss Frank’s great-aunt, or did she not? She paused for a lead, her hand extended, her pretty little head just tilted so as to be ready if an embrace were offered.

  Mrs. Fordyce kept her hands folded in her lap and gazed intently at Julie’s knees. Julie’s skirt cleared them by half an inch. They were quite pretty knees. But Mrs. Fordyce did not look at them with admiration; she just looked at them until Julie, crimson, burst into speech:

  “How do you do, Aunt Anna? And—many happy returns of the day—and—Frank is so dreadfully sorry not to—I mean he’s been kept—I mean he’s so dreadfully sorry—I mean he was coming with me, only just as I was starting, he telephoned to say someone had come in to see him on some very important business, and he asked me to tell you how sorry he was, and to say he’d come as quickly as he possibly could, and to wish you many happy returns from him.”

  Julie had a pretty, eager way of talking. She looked a good deal like a little girl who has been put up to say her piece. All the time she was saying it, and for a long half-minute afterwards, Mrs. Fordyce continued to look fixedly at the pretty knees, which, in their flesh-coloured stockings, might almost have been bare. At the end of half a minute she said, “Thank you,” in a deep, dry voice, and Milly March came in, hot in spite of the January cold, panting from the stairs, full of voluble conversation and loud cheery laughter, with her hat on the back of her head and a rustling paper parcel in her outstretched hands.

  Julie faded thankfully into a corner and watched the Family arrive. What a frightful lot of relations Frank had! They were all nice, of course—Julie was a friendly little soul—but there were such a lot of them, and it was so confusing to have them all calling Mrs. Fordyce “Grandmamma.” She wondered whether she ought to have said “Grandmamma” instead of “Aunt Anna.” Milly March, who was exactly the same relation as Frank, was saying “Grandmamma”; and so was Miss Fordyce, though she was really her daughter; and so was old Mr. St. Clair St. Kern, though he was her brother. It was really dreadful of Frank to have made her come by herself; she was quite sure to do the wrong thing.

  She told David so when he had greeted Grandmamma and drifted into her corner.

  “Where’s that blighter Frank? Don’t tell me he’s shirked!”

  “No—he’s coming. No, David, he really is. No, he really couldn’t help it. Oh, David, that’s too bad! He really couldn’t.”

  David’s sister Betty came in as Julie spoke. Her high voice with its plaintive note could be heard quite easily above all the other voices.

  Betty Lester was older than her brother. She was neither like David nor like her own name. Betty suited her as little as Elizabeth; she had not the smooth curves of the one, or the massive dignity of the other. She was thin with the modern thinness, and pale with the modern pallor, the lack of bloom accentuated by the carmine which she had freely applied to her lips; her spine sagged in the mannequin bend; her fleshless legs were revealed to the knee. She looked so immature in the distance that the nearer view was apt to come as a shock.

  Julie watched her embrace Mrs. Fordyce, and turned indignantly to David.

  “Her skirt’s as short as mine!”

  “Is it?”

  “I mean she—Aunt Anna—she looked—no, really glared at my knees. Why didn’t she look at Betty’s?”

  “I don’t know,” said David, laughing. “Perhaps she liked yours better.”

  “She didn’t! I tell you she glared. Frank oughtn’t to have made me come here alone. Or do you think it wasn’t the knees? I called her Aunt Anna. Do you think it was because of that? Ought I to have said Grandmamma? Everybody seems to. But she is Frank’s great-aunt. David, I don’t think you need laugh at me like that.”

  “I like laughing at you,” said David, who thought Frank a very lucky fellow. He liked to see Julie all pink and breathless. He liked Julie herself, with her eager voice and the quick movements which the Aunts considered a little too quick. “Dear Julie is rather unformed—a trifle gauche,” had been Aunt Editha’s verdict.

  “They make me so nervous,” said Julie in a whisper. “And when I’m nervous I do the wrong thing.”

  She looked up at David’s teasing eyes and then down again. And quite suddenly David was reminded of Erica. He thought of her so seldom now that his thoughts of her were dim and unfamiliar, just stirring in the deeply shadowed places of memory. This was a different thought; it was so sharp and vivid that it hurt.

  It was Julie who reminded him. She was slipping off her gloves, and for a moment she stopped to look sideways at her left hand with Frank’s ring on it. It was this look that brought Erica back—Erica looking at her ring, her new wedding ring—Erica looking sideways—Erica, not Julie. It was only just for an instant; but it hurt, because Erica had been so young and she had never had any happy times; it hurt, because he had meant to make her happy.

  “Hullo, David!” said Betty.

  The Charles Aldereys had taken her place by Grandmamma’s chair. Mrs. Charles stout and beaming, and the three Alderey girls, pretty, gushing, and arrayed in remnants snatc
hed from the sales and boasted of as tokens of prowess.

  Betty looked down her long nose at them and said plaintively:

  “It’s the first birthday Dick has missed. I do think schools are inconsiderate. I did think they’d let me have him up for the afternoon. But they simply wouldn’t; they said he’d only just gone back—as if that had anything to do with it! I do think they might have some consideration for Grandmamma, if not for me!”

  “Too bad!” said Julie.

  Betty just trailed on.

  “They simply make one’s life a burden to one with their rules. You wait till you’ve got boys, and then you’ll know what it is. I believe they do it on purpose, just to show parents that they don’t mean to take any notice of them.”

  Julie put up her hand to screen a foolish hot cheek.

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  The room had been filling fast; one could hardly see Miss Editha’s bright new chair-covers for relations. The St. Clair St. Kerns, Grandmamma’s contemporaries, with a stout unmarried son and a thin unmarried daughter, Marches, Aldereys, and more St. Kerns, sat, stood, or moved in a space that became every moment more crowded. One by one they greeted Grandmamma and passed on, telling one another how wonderful she was.

  At the moment that Julie said “Who’s that?” there was a lull in the buzz of talk because, like Julie, everyone was looking at the door, which had just opened.

  Julie saw a tall woman in black stand for a moment on the threshold. With a quick, warm admiration she forgot Betty’s chatter and said:

  “Who’s that?”

  David looked across the crowd and saw Eleanor Rayne. To his surprise his heart beat a little faster. She was thinner; she looked taller. She wore black, but it did not look like mourning. India, or grief, had robbed her of her lovely bloom, but without it she was more beautiful than he remembered. There was something proud and sweet about the way she looked; there was a sad enchantment in her smile, which outweighed the loss of curve and colour.

  She met David’s eyes. The smile deepened in her own. She stepped into the room, and David saw that she was wearing violets, the large pale double violets which smell so sweet.