The Lark Read online

  ‘No present income or future prospects,’ said Lucilla.

  ‘No slavery!’ cried Jane.

  Every day they went down to the House. And (‘We were born fortunate, I told you so!’ whispered Jane) at last came the day when a change in lines and angles smote their eyes. One of the big gates was ajar. Going down the road was a retreating figure, stout, charlady like, bearing a basket and a jug.

  ‘We can get into the garden,’ breathed Lucilla, and on the tip-toes of conspirators, with the haste of hunted rabbits, they stole through the iron gates and up the weedy drive.

  ‘We can get into the house,’ said Jane, catching Lucilla’s hand. And indeed, beyond the wide, moss-green semi-circle of the front door steps the front door showed two dark inches beyond itself.

  Jane ran up the steps and pushed the heavy, sombre Georgian door, which swung back, revealing a dark hall – marble-floored. Tall portraits loomed from the walls. The dusky distance gave hints of shallow stairs and broad wooden balustrade. Close by the door stood pail and scrubbing-brush. And most of the floor was clean and damp.

  ‘Oh, Jane – don’t, she’ll be back directly!’

  ‘She won’t be back for half an hour. And if she does come back she can’t kill us. Come in – come in, I tell you! You outside and the door open are enough to give us away to the whole neighbourhood. Come in and don’t upset the pail. Now close the door. I say, it’s jolly dark! Where are you?’

  ‘Of course it’s dark, all the shutters are shut!’ said Lucilla impatiently.

  ‘Hold on, there’s a crack of light there!’

  There was. Jane pushed a door and the crack broadened to a parallelogram of soft yellow light. It came, they saw, from a candle burning on the long table of a noble kitchen, oak raftered, wide hearthed.

  ‘What a dream of a place!’ said Jane. ‘Come on, let’s explore.’

  ‘Better not,’ said Lucilla. ‘This will land us in trouble. I feel it in my bones.’

  ‘It’s the adventure of our lives,’ said Jane. ‘Come on,’ and she caught at the candle.

  ‘I should only like to know,’ Lucilla protested, ‘whether it’s burglary or just housebreaking.’

  ‘It’s neither,’ Jane told her, throwing open a door at the other end of the hall. ‘It’s what they call a youthful indiscretion. This is the drawing-room – it’s at the back; let’s open the shutters and have a peep.’

  The shutters creaked back and the spring sunshine flooded the room. The furniture was mellowed and faded in a perfect harmony, but its walls were a vivid, heartless pink.

  ‘Like cheap sweets,’ Lucilla gasped. ‘Shut it up again, do.’

  They found the dining-room, and perceived it to be furnished, but one could not see the furniture for the walls. Their colour was a fierce full blue.

  ‘Poor old gentleman, I really don’t blame him. But he might have got the walls scraped. Now let’s get out before she comes back. You see it’s miles too big for us – we couldn’t afford it even if he’d let it. Oh, Jane, don’t be an ass – do let’s get out of it!’

  ‘Not till I’ve seen all over it’; and Jane led the way up the dark, shallow stairs. ‘There must be any number of rooms up here.’

  There were – and all were furnished and all were dark; not a window but was close shuttered or boarded up. The two girls saw as much of the house as a candle carried hastily through room after darkened room can show.

  ‘I love it, I love it!’ Jane said at each new hint of curtain or panel. ‘I love it all.’

  ‘Hopelessly,’ said Lucilla. ‘I never thought you’d be one to love in vain. But we haven’t seen the yellow-painted room yet.’

  They found it – a round room, opening out of the drawing-room – and its yellow was even as the yellow of mustard.

  ‘But look at the shape of it,’ said Jane; ‘the lovely little bookcases rounded to the shape of the room – no books though, Luce. I’m going to put on my very nicest hat and go and call on that old gentleman.’

  ‘Vous en serez pour vos frais,’ said Lucilla.

  ‘What? Oh, I know, French idiotisms. How it brings it all back! Like yesterday. Whereas it is really to-day. All right, we’ll go now.’

  They carried the candle down and replaced it on the kitchen table and moved to the front door. Jane opened it cautiously, and instantly, with desperate caution, closed it again.

  ‘There’s a man coming up the drive!’ she said, and at once the instinct of flight caught at them both. Noiseless flying feet skimmed the stairs; they clung together on the landing. Then Lucilla pulled her friend into a dark cupboard.

  ‘Hush!’ she whispered, quite unnecessarily. ‘It’s a man – he’ll think we’re burglars. Be quiet.’

  ‘Be quiet yourself,’ said Jane intensely. And they held their breath, listening.

  Firm footsteps sounded below – of feet that said at every step, ‘Why should I go quietly? I have every right to be here.’ ‘How different!’ thought Jane, comparing his footsteps with their own light, terror-stricken escalade.

  Then there were voices. A woman’s voice. A man’s voice. One excusing, the other reproaching. The clink of a pail’s handle against a pail. More words, but undistinguishable. ‘Let me go – I want to listen; he’s scolding her for leaving the door open,’ said Jane, struggling in Lucilla’s grasp.

  ‘No, no, no, no!’ said Lucilla fervently. ‘He’ll come up here to see that no burglars have got in.’

  ‘Better be found on the landing than hiding in a cupboard. I won’t be made a fool of – let go!’

  But Lucilla did not let go.

  ‘Oh, don’t!’ she said. ‘It would be hateful if we were sent to prison – if he thought we were thieves.’

  ‘It would be trying, certainly,’ Jane answered. ‘Listen!’

  They listened. All was silent. And then, suddenly, echoing through the great empty house came the heavy bang of a door. The front door. Footsteps on gravel. Silence.

  ‘There,’ said Jane, ‘now you’ve done it! What absolute asses we are! …’

  ‘Well, thank goodness you haven’t,’ said Lucilla. ‘We’re not branded as burglars, anyhow.’

  ‘A was an absolute ass, B was a branded burglar,’ said Jane, pushing open the cupboard door. ‘And now we’ve to get out somehow.’

  ‘Does it occur to you,’ said Lucilla sweetly, ‘that their going away may be a ruse? They may be watching the house.’

  ‘My hat!’ said Jane briefly. And stood stock still.

  ‘I think we ought to wait a little, don’t you?’

  ‘We ought to get out of it,’ Jane insisted. ‘If we’re caught in the garden it’s nothing to being caught in the house. There must be a window somewhere that we can get out by.’

  Holding each other, still in nervous tenseness, they stole out into the gallery – dark, dark, very dark. But at the long gallery’s end green light showed, a small square window, almost covered with ivy, but not shuttered.

  ‘Let’s,’ said Jane. ‘Oh, what was that?’

  ‘That’ was a sound in the house below, very faint but very distinct. The creaking of a board that is trodden on.

  ‘It’s the stairs,’ whispered Jane. ‘Fly – under that window. It’s always darkest under the lamp.’

  ‘I can’t fly,’ said Lucilla. ‘I put my bag down on the shelf of that cupboard. You fly. I’ll get it.’

  Jane fled – and Lucilla, returning as in a flash with the bag, was just in time to hear a scrambling clatter-crash, and to see Jane’s head, a moment ago clear between her and the window, disappear suddenly. She was also just in time to save herself from the black treachery of the stairs down which Jane had fallen.

  She felt her way down the stairs to meet a small whisper.

  ‘Don’t walk on me – I can’t move.’

  She reached down and touched a shoulder. Jane was lying in a crumpled bunch at the foot of the stairs. Lucilla got past her and crouched by her side.

  ‘Are you much hurt? Have you broken anything?’

  ‘You said it would land us! You felt it in your bones. Well – I’ve landed! And I feel it in mine! I didn’t scream, did I?’

  ‘You might just as well have done. You made a noise like a factory chimney coming down.’

  ‘Well, anyhow,’ said Jane, ‘it shows that creaking board was only rats or mice or owls or something. Anything human would have been on to us like a shot. Look here, old angel. I don’t want to make a fuss – but I think I’ve broken my leg. And I don’t quite see how we’re going to get out of this.’

  ‘If we only had a light!’ moaned Lucilla.

  ‘Just so,’ said Jane. ‘You’ll have to go and get the candle. There are matches in the candlestick. Feel your way carefully. It’s perfectly straight from the top of these hateful stairs to the top of the other ones. Then the kitchen’s the first door on the left. And the table’s right before you.’

  ‘All right,’ said Lucilla. ‘Can’t I do anything before I go? To make you more comfortable, I mean – lift you, or anything?’

  ‘For pity’s sake don’t try to lift me,’ said Jane; ‘that really would be the last straw. At least, I mean I feel safer where I am. There may be another flight of stairs, or a well, or an oubliette.’

  ‘Oh, Jane – this is awful!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Jane bravely. ‘It’s an adventure; but I can’t really enjoy it till we get a light. Does my leg hurt? Yes – it hurts damnably.’

  ‘Oh, Jane!’ said Lucilla.

  ‘Damn damnably,’ said Jane with firmness. ‘Oh, go and get that candle, do. I wish you’d fallen down instead of me. I should have gone straight for the candle. At least, of course, I don’t wish it was you – but go, go, go!’

  Lucilla went. And Jane, alone in the darkne
ss, set her teeth and cautiously felt her ankle; she could not find any pointed bits sticking through her stocking, which was, she supposed, the attitude a broken bone would take up. But she could find pain, pain, and more pain, at every touch of her finger-tips.

  What a very long time it did take some people to go up one flight of stairs and down another and come back with a candle! She leaned her head back against the wall at the stair-foot and strained her eyes at the dark cavity of the staircase above her. No light – only the faint, false, green gleam of the ivy-masked window that had betrayed her. No light – no sound of returning footsteps. Only darkness and silence.

  Then suddenly, cutting the darkness like a knife, a wild shriek echoed through the hollow emptiness of that closed house. Then silence again. Silence and darkness.

  CHAPTER V

  It is pleasant to be able to record that Jane, alone in the dark with a wildly painful ankle at the foot of the stairs down which she had just pitched head first, on hearing that scream and knowing all too well the accents of Lucilla in terror, did, in spite of the pain and the ankle and the darkness, hoist herself on hands and one knee, the other foot dragging red-hot behind her, to the top of the stairs. Just so, and not otherwise, had Lucilla screamed one night at school when Daisy Simmons, the school’s incomparable ninny, had put a sheet over her head and pretended to be a ghost, gliding up to a sponge-and-towel-laden Lucilla coming all glowing and fearless from the bathroom. After that Lucilla had fainted. Suppose she fainted now – alone in that dark house? The thought was enough to nerve our Jane to effort. But at the top of the stairs the most extraordinary sensation caught her. A curious feeling like flying – a creeping sensation at the back of the neck – a fancy that the ivy-green window was going round slowly but indubitably – these warned her. She sat down on the top step and shut her eyes.

  ‘If you think,’ she spoke silently to the universe, ‘if you think that I’m going to faint, I’m not. I must find out what has happened to Lucy. I shall shut my eyes and go on in a minute.’ So she shut her eyes. But she did not go on.

  What had happened to Lucilla is soon told. With her heart, as they say, in her mouth, she climbed the steep stairs, went along the corridor, and, feeling her way, went more slowly, though she did not mean to go more slowly, down the wide, shallow steps of the front staircase.

  ‘The first door to the left,’ she kept saying to herself. ‘The first door to the left.’

  And so reached the lowest step, turned to the left, felt for the door and pushed it open. And, even as she did so, something leaped at her. Before she knew whether she was assailed by the claws of a wild beast, or merely by the iron arm of the law, she found her two wrists clasped. By hands, not by fangs, she noted, after she had sent that one wild scream echoing through the house.

  She felt her left wrist transferred to the same strong fingers that held her right, and a low voice said: ‘Don’t scream – it’s no use. Come along,’ and she was being urged, quite gently, towards the front door.

  With his free right hand her captor opened the door, and the bright spring sunshine struck at her eyes, blindingly. She closed them – and before she could open them again she felt that her wrists were released. She opened her eyes and found herself on the moss-greened door-step, leaning against the heavy doorpost, trembling, shivering, decontrolled, and facing her, very deeply and obviously discountenanced, a young man – a handsome young man – the very exactly and beyond any doubt same young man who had thrust himself among the remnants of their arbour breakfast to ask the way to Leabridge.

  ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘I’m …’

  ‘I know you are,’ said Lucilla breathlessly. ‘Of course you would be, but we’re not burglars. We’re just … well, you remember we had breakfast at the Rose and Crown?’

  ‘Yes,’ said he, and as she seemed to advance, so he seemed to accept, this certificate of respectability.

  ‘But why? …’ he asked. ‘How? … Are you,’ he added, breathing more freely in the clear air of a sudden enlightenment, ‘a party with an order to view?’

  Lucilla hesitated. ‘No,’ she said, ‘how could we, with that insane board? It doesn’t let you have orders to view.’

  The young man threw his head back and laughed.

  ‘Come!’ he said, ‘what have you been up to? Tell me all about it.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lucilla, who had slowly been recovering her wind and her sang-froid, ‘the first thing to tell you is that my friend has pitched head first down your treacherous back-stairs and broken her leg.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said the young man. ‘And you’re standing here talking to me about boards!’

  ‘I’m only just recovering from your catching hold of me like a ghost,’ said Lucilla. ‘And before we go any further, do you mind defining the situation?’

  ‘Defining? …’

  ‘Yes. Are you arresting us for burglars, or –’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ said the young man, with a lamentable want of polish.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Lucilla, coldly and carefully explanatory, ‘my friend has fallen down the back-stairs of this hateful house. She thinks she’s broken her leg. Will you help me?’

  ‘What do you take me for?’ he said. ‘Where is she? Come on!’

  ‘You won’t send us to prison?’ Lucilla insisted.

  ‘Don’t be so extremely silly,’ said the young man. (‘No manners,’ said Lucilla to herself.) ‘Where is she? Come on.’

  So it happened that Jane in that shivery strange borderland that lies between you as you are and you as you are in mad dreams, heard footsteps coming near, and voices.

  ‘Look out,’ said Lucilla, ‘you’ll tread on her!’

  ‘But you said she was at the bottom of the stairs.’

  ‘I heard … you … scream … and … I … came … as … far … as … I … could,’ said Jane very carefully, not opening her eyes.

  ‘Help me to get hold of her – that’s right,’ said the young man. ‘Now cut along down and open the shutters in the dining-room. No, the kitchen will be best. Yes – you can take the candle.’

  He had Jane in his arms by now – quite easily, for Jane was thin and slight.

  It was no fine figure of a woman that he laid on the long kitchen table, but a small, slender, brown-haired person with a white, sharp-chinned, elfish face, which she instantly covered with an arm.

  The young man took off his coat and rolled it up and laid it under her head.

  Then, very matter of fact, ‘Which foot?’ he said.

  ‘The other one,’ said Jane, kicking slightly with the uninjured leg.

  He took off her shoe and felt the ankle. ‘Oh, don’t!’ said Jane. But he took no notice. Presently he said:

  ‘No bones broken, thank goodness. Now look here,’ he went on; ‘there’s a copper full of hot water in here – the char was charing. Get a basin or something on this chair, and bathe her foot – as hot as you can bear your hands in it. Keep on with that, and don’t let the water get cold. I’ll go and get some brandy and a carriage.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t want brandy – I hate brandy.’

  ‘Go ahead with the hot water,’ he said to Lucilla. ‘Yes, that’s the scullery in there. But I’ve just thought …’ He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket. ‘There might be something in the cellar – it’s just worth trying.’

  ‘Anyhow, we haven’t stolen anything,’ Lucilla comforted herself as she lifted pails and jugs and copper-lids. ‘If he steals things out of the cellar he can’t have the face to give us up to justice.’

  She had set a clean pail of hot water on a chair augmented by a hassock, had got Jane’s stocking off and was bathing the swollen ankle before he came back – the keys clinking against a bottle.

  ‘Where,’ he asked sternly, ‘where do people keep corkscrews – kitchen corkscrews?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lucilla. ‘I never have corkscrews to keep anywhere. Is that brandy?’

  ‘No – old port; well, there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with butter.’

  He retreated to the scullery, and they heard the tinkle of broken glass. He came back with the beheaded bottle and two tea-cups.

  ‘Here,’ he said to Lucilla, ‘you first. Oh, don’t be silly. Think what a shock you’ve had.’

  ‘I thought you were a ghost – or pretending to be; it’s just as bad. I don’t like wine.’