She Came Back Read online

  “He’d no right to be angry!”

  “My angel child, when married people begin to talk about their rights, it means something has gone pretty far wrong between them.”

  Lyndall said,

  “Did they make it up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It would be dreadful if they didn’t.”

  Milly Armitage had her own ideas about that. Philip had certainly not been in any mood for reconciliation when he left England. She had never seen an angrier man in her life.

  It would have been better if she had kept her thoughts to herself, but she was really incapable of doing so. She said,

  “He was in a most frightful rage-and for the lord’s sake, why are we talking about it? It was a horrid tragic business, and it’s over. Why don’t we leave it alone instead of screwing our heads round over our shoulders and looking back like Lot ’s wife? Uncomfortable, useless things, pillars of salt. And I’ve dropped about fifty stitches with you glaring at me like a vulture.”

  “Vultures don’t glare-they have horrid little hoods on their eyes.”

  Milly Armitage burst out laughing.

  “Come and pick up my stitches, and we’ll have a nice calming talk about natural history!”

  CHAPTER 3

  Philip Jocelyn rang up at eight o’clock. “Who’s that?… Lyn?… All right, tell Aunt Milly I’ll be down to lunch tomorrow-or perhaps not till after lunch. Will that disorganize the rations?”

  Lyn gurgled.

  “I expect so.”

  “Well, I shan’t know until the last minute. Anyhow I can’t make it tonight.”

  “All right. Just wait a second-someone rang you up this morning.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t give any name-only asked if you were here, and when I said you were up in London she wanted to know when you would be back. I said perhaps tonight but most probably not till tomorrow, and she rang off. It was a long distance call and the line was awfully faint.”

  She heard him laugh.

  “The Voice on the Telephone-our great serial mystery- to be continued in our next! Don’t be apologetic-I expect she’ll keep. Give Aunt Milly my love. I kiss your hands and your feet.”

  “You don’t do anything of the sort!”

  “Perhaps not-it’s a sadly unpicturesque age. Goodbye, my child. Be good.” He hung up.

  Lyndall put down the receiver and came back to the fire. She had changed into a warm green housecoat, and Mrs. Armitage into a shapeless garment of brown velveteen with a fur collar which was rather the worse for wear.

  Lyndall said, “That was Philip.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “He doesn’t know whether he’ll be down for lunch tomorrow.”

  Things like that never worried Mrs. Armitage. She nodded, and said with what appeared to be complete irrelevance,

  “What a good thing you and Philip are not really cousins.”

  Lyndall bent forward to put a log on the fire, her long, full skirt flaring out from a childish waist. The glow from the embers stung her cheeks. She murmured,

  “Why?”

  “Well, I just thought it was a good thing. Jocelyns are all very well, and poor Louie was very happy with Philip’s father-he was a most charming man. But that’s what it is with the Jocelyns-they’re charming. But you can have too much of them-they want diluting.”

  It was at this moment that the front door bell rang.

  Anne Jocelyn stood on the dark step and waited for someone to come. The taxi which had brought her from Clayford turned noisily behind her on the gravel sweep. Then it drove away. The sound receded and was gone. She stood in the dark and waited for someone to come. Presently she rang again, but almost at once the key turned in the lock. The door opened a little way and a young girl looked round it. When she saw that it was a woman standing there she stepped back, opening the door wide open.

  Anne Jocelyn walked in.

  “Is Sir Philip back?”

  Ivy Fossett was a little bit flustered. Visitors didn’t just walk in like that after dark, not these days they didn’t. But it was a lady all right, and a lovely fur coat. She stared her eyes out at it and said,

  “No, ma’am, he isn’t.”

  The lady took her up sharp.

  “Who is here then? Who answered the telephone this morning?”

  “Mrs. Armitage, and Miss Lyndall-Miss Lyndall Armitage. It would be her answered the phone.”

  “Where are they?… In the parlour? You needn’t announce me-I’ll go through.”

  Ivy gaped, and watched her go. “Walked right past me as if I wasn’t there,” she told them in the kitchen, and was reproved by Mrs. Ramage, the rather more than elderly cook.

  “You should have asked her name.”

  Ivy tossed her head.

  “She never give me a chanst!”

  Anne crossed the hall. The parlour looked out to a terrace at the back. The name came down, with the white panelling, from the reign of good Queen Anne. The first Anne Jocelyn had been her god-daughter.

  She put her hand on the door-knob and stood for a moment, loosening her coat, pushing it back to show the blue of the dress beneath. Her heart beat hard against her side. It isn’t every day that one comes back from the dead. Perhaps she was glad that Philip wasn’t there. She opened the door and stood on the threshold looking in.

  Light overhead, the blue curtains drawn at the windows, a wood fire glowing bright, and over it the white mantelshelf with The Seasons looking down, and over The Seasons, The Girl with a Fur Coat. She looked at her steadily, critically, as she might have looked at her own reflection in the glass. She thought the portrait might very well have been a mirror reflecting her.

  There were two people in the room. On the right of the hearth Milly Armitage with a newspaper on her lap and another sprawling beside her on the blue carpet. Untidy, tiresome woman. Never her friend. Of course she would be here. Well dug in. Nous allons changer tout cela. Down on the hearthrug, curled up with a book, that brat Lyndall.

  The paper rustled under the sudden heavy pressure of Milly Armitage’s hand, the book pitched forward on to the white fur rug. Lyndall sprang up, stumbling on the folds of her long green skirt, catching at the arm of the empty chair against which she had been leaning. Her eyes widened and darkened, all the colour went out of her face. She stared at the open door and saw Anne Jocelyn stepped from the portrait behind her-Anne Jocelyn, bare-headed, with her gold curls and her tinted oval face, pearls hanging down over the thin blue dress, fur coat hanging open.

  In the same moment she heard Milly Armitage gasp. She herself did not seem to be breathing at all. Everything stopped while she looked at Anne. Then irrepressibly, incongruously, there zigzagged into her mind the thought, “Amory painted her better than that.” When this came back to her later it shocked her horribly. After more than three years of privation, suffering, and strain, who wouldn’t look different- older? A rush of feeling blotted out everything except the realization that this was Anne and she was alive. She ran forward with a half articulate cry, and Anne opened her arms. In a moment Lyndall was hugging her, saying her name over and over, the tears running down her cheeks.

  “Anne-Anne-Anne! We thought you were dead!”

  “I very nearly thought so myself.”

  They came across the room together.

  “Aunt Milly! How good to see you! Oh, how very, very good to be here!”

  Milly Armitage was embraced. Struggling with a horrid rush of completely disorganized emotions, she kissed a cheek which was thinner and considerably more made-up than it had been three years ago. She couldn’t remember ever having been embraced by Anne before. A cool kiss on the cheek was as far as they had ever got or wanted to get. She stood back with a transient feeling of relief and endeavoured to find words. It wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of things to say, but even in this moment of shock she had a feeling that she had better not say them. Philip-she mustn’t say or do anyth
ing which would hurt Philip. A sense of immeasurable disaster hovered. Three and a half years was a long time to be dead. Anne had come back. Awful to come back and feel that you weren’t wanted any more. “The living close their ranks.” Who said that? It was true-you had to. Under this high-flown strain, something quite homely and commonplace. “Gosh! Why did she have to come back?”

  Lyndall was saying, “Anne darling-oh, Anne darling! How lovely that you are alive!”

  Mrs. Armitage remembered that she had been brought up to be a gentlewoman. With grim determination she set herself to behave like one.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was getting on for four o’clock of the following day before Philip Jocelyn came home. He was intercepted in the hall by Milly Armitage.

  “Philip-come here-I want to speak to you.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  She had him by the arm, drawing him down the hall towards the study, which balanced the parlour on the opposite side and was comfortably far away from it. Like most rooms of the name it had never been much studied in, but the walls were lined with books and it had a pleasant lived-in air, with its rust-red curtains and deep leather chairs.

  When the door was shut, Philip looked curiously at his Aunt Milly. He was very fond of her, but he wished she would come to the point. Something had obviously happened, but instead of getting on with it and telling him what it was, she was just beating about the bush.

  “We tried to get on to you, but they said you’d left the club.”

  “Yes-Blackett asked me to go down to his place. What’s the matter? Where’s Lyn? It’s not got anything to do with Lyn?”

  “No.”

  Milly Armitage said to herself in a distraught manner, “You see-he thought about her at once. He’s fond of her-he’s been getting fonder of her every day. What’s the good of it now? I’m a wicked woman… Oh, lord-what a mix-up!” She rubbed her chin with a shaking hand.

  “Aunt Milly, what is it? Anyone dead?”

  Mrs. Armitage restrained herself from saying, “Worse than that.” By making a tremendous effort she contrived merely to shake her head.

  He said with some impatience, “What is it then?”

  Milly Armitage blurted it right out.

  “Anne’s come back.”

  They were standing close together beside the writing-table. Philip had his coat over his arm and his hat in his hand. He stood there, fair and tall like all the Jocelyns, his face longer and sharper than the type, his eyes the same dark grey as Anne’s, the eyebrows marked like hers but crooked where hers were arched, his hair burnt almost flaxen by the Tunisian sun. After a moment he turned, dropped his hat into a chair, laid his coat across the back, and said softly,

  “Would you mind saying that again?”

  Milly Armitage felt as if she were going to burst. She said it again, separating the words as if she were speaking to a child,

  “Anne-has-come-back.”

  “I thought that was what you said-I just wanted to be sure. Would you mind telling me what it means?”

  “Philip-don’t! I can’t tell you if you’re like that.”

  His crooked brows went up.

  “Like what?”

  “Inhuman. She’s alive-she’s come back-she’s here.”

  His voice grated for the first time as he said,

  “Have you gone out of your mind?”

  “Not yet, but I expect I shall.”

  He said quietly, “Anne’s dead. What makes you think she isn’t?”

  “Anne. She walked in on us last night. She’s here-she’s in the parlour with Lyndall now.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Philip, if you go on saying that sort of thing to me, I shall scream! I tell you she’s alive-I tell you she’s in the parlour with Lyndall.”

  “And I tell you that I saw her die, and I saw her buried.”

  Milly Armitage checked an involuntary shudder. She said in an angry voice,

  “What’s the good of saying that?”

  “Meaning I’m telling lies?”

  “She’s in the parlour with Lyndall.”

  Philip walked over to the door.

  “Then suppose we join them.”

  “Wait! It’s no good taking it like that. It’s happened-better let me tell you. Someone rang up in the morning-yesterday morning. Lyn told you on the telephone.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was Anne. She had just landed from a fishing-boat. She didn’t say who she was-only asked if you were here. Last night at about half-past eight she walked in. It was a most frightful shock. I don’t wonder you can’t believe it. Lyn had been looking at Amory’s picture of her only a little time before, and when the door opened, there she was, just as if she had stepped out of it-the blue dress, the pearls, the fur coat. It was the most frightful shock.”

  He turned away and opened the door.

  “Anne’s dead, Aunt Milly. I think I’d like to go and see who it is in the parlour with Lyn.”

  Neither of them spoke as they went across the hall. It was Philip who opened the door and went in. He saw Lyndall first. She was sitting on the arm of one of the big chairs on the left-hand side of the hearth. She jumped up, and he saw behind her in the chair the blue dress of the portrait-Anne Jocelyn’s going-away dress-Anne Jocelyn’s pearls hanging down over the stuff, Anne Jocelyn’s curled gold hair, the oval face, the dark grey eyes, the arching brows. He stood looking for a time that none of them could have counted. Then he came forward in a quiet, deliberate manner.

  “Very well staged,” he said. “Let me congratulate you on your make-up and your nerve, Miss Joyce.”

  CHAPTER 5

  She got out of her chair and stood facing him. “Philip!”

  He nodded briefly.

  “Philip. But not Anne-or at least not Anne Jocelyn. I suppose Annie Joyce was christened Anne.”

  “Philip!”

  “That doesn’t get us anywhere, does it? May I ask how you thought you could get away with a fraud of this kind? Very ingenuous of you, but perhaps you thought I’d be abroad-or better still a casualty, in which case I suppose you might have brought it off. It seems to have gone down with Lyn and Aunt Milly, but it doesn’t go down with me, and I’ll tell you why. When Anne was hit I picked her up and I got her into the boat. She died there. I brought her body home.”

  She kept her eyes on his face.

  “You brought Annie Joyce home. You buried Annie Joyce.”

  “And why am I supposed to have done that?”

  She said, “I think you made a mistake-it was Annie who was hit, but I screamed. She was holding on to my arm. You had gone ahead towards the boat. The bullet went between us-I felt it go by. Annie let go of me and fell down. I screamed. Then you came back and picked her up. You may have thought it was I. You may have made a mistake in the dark-I don’t know-I don’t want to say. It was dark, and they were firing at us-you could have made a mistake. I thought you would come back for me, but you didn’t.”

  Philip said softly, “So that’s your story-I left you on the beach?”

  “I think-no, I am sure-you only thought that you were leaving Annie Joyce.”

  “That’s a pretty damnable thing to say-” He checked himself. “This is what happened. I carried Anne to the boat. There were those other people who tacked on-the Reddings.” He turned to face Lyndall. When he went on speaking it was to her. “Murdoch and I took his motor-boat over. When we got there Theresa Jocelyn was dead and buried and the Germans were in the village. I went to the château whilst Murdoch stayed with the boat. I gave Anne and Miss Joyce half an hour to get any valuables together, and Anne said there were some other English people hiding at a farm, couldn’t I take them too? She said Pierre would go and tell them. I said how many were there, and she wasn’t sure- she thought two of them were children. She sent for Pierre – he was Theresa’s butler and factotum-and he said there was Monsieur and Madame, and a son and daughter not quite grown up. The farm belonged to his cousin, and
he seemed to know all about them. I said all right, they could come, but they must be down on the beach within the hour. Well, they were late-they were the sort of people who would always be late for everything. We waited, and by the time they turned up the Boche had spotted us and the balloon was going up. I was a little way ahead, when Anne screamed. I went back and managed to get her into the boat. It was pitch dark and there was a lot of shooting. I called out to Annie Joyce, and got no answer. Murdoch and I went to look for her. By this time the Reddings were calling out to us. Murdoch came past me carrying someone-I thought it was Miss Joyce. When we’d got everyone in we counted heads. There was Murdoch, and myself, a man, a boy, and four women. And that was right-another of the women had been hit. We pushed off. Anne never recovered consciousness. She was shot through the head. We were half-way over before I found out that Miss Joyce wasn’t there. We’d got our six passengers all right, but the Reddings had brought their French governess along. She had a bullet in the chest and she was pretty bad. We couldn’t go back. It wouldn’t have been any good if we had. Anyone on the beach would have been picked up by the Boche long ago-he’s thorough. Well, there you have it.” He turned back to Anne. “That is what happened, Miss Joyce.”

  She was standing against the mantelshelf, her left arm carelessly laid along it, the hand drooping. There was a platinum wedding-ring on the third finger, and, overlapping it, the big diamond-set sapphire that had been Anne Jocelyn’s engagement ring. She said in a frank voice,

  “I am very glad to know. It has hurt all this time not knowing how you could have left me. Because it wasn’t Annie Joyce you left-it was me. You can imagine what I felt like when you didn’t come back. I couldn’t understand it, but now I see that it could have been the way you say-you could have mistaken Annie for me in the dark. I believe you when you say that you thought it was I whom you carried to the boat. I don’t know how long you went on thinking that. I suppose you could have gone on for a long time-in the dark. I suppose-” She broke off, dropped her voice, and said with distress, “Was she-much disfigured?”