Part 9

"You have no chops, I suppose?" I interpreted the beseeching gaze.

She had no chops, she confessed.

"What have you, then?" the unpitying Julia persisted. "What have you got for our breakfast tomorrow? for our dinner? You have provided something, no doubt?"

The hollows in each meagre cheek of the caretaker deepened, the effect of the still further elongating of her chin, the starting eyes turned from my sister to me.

"Julia," I said, with severity, "it will be better not to have two Richmonds in the field. I, myself, will, with your permission, give Mrs Ragg what orders are necessary."

Then, in a tone of severity which should have been at once an encouragement to Mrs Ragg and a reproach to my sister, I asked to have some eggs boiled for tea.

There were no eggs.

"Go and fetch some," the irrepressible Julia cried.

"I understood the two ladies were to do their shopping themselves," the caretaker tremblingly explained.

I said of course we would. "Press not a falling man (or woman) too far," I quoted to Julia, as, the unhappy Mrs Ragg having left us to ourselves, we sat down to our bread-and-butter.

Julia, although protesting in the finish that hunger still gnawed her vitals, ate half the loaf. I, who should have been content to put up with what remained of it for our morning meal, was unable to control my sister's raging determination to forage that night for food.

"I refuse to starve," she said.

There was, luckily for us, a full moon, or we might easily have lost the faintly indicated road, lightly strewn as it was with oyster-shells and broken bricks, and ploughed through the trackless waste of sandy desert all night. The outskirts of the town reached, there were several mean-looking streets to pass through, before we found a shop at which we thought it desirable to trade. As we walked, buffeted by the wind blowing in from the sea, Julia discoursed of the caretaker of Sea-Strand Cottage.

"That, mark my words, is a thoroughly bad woman," she declared. "She wouldn't be such a forbidding-looking creature unless she was wicked. It wouldn't be fair on the part of the Almighty to have made her so. I consider her aspect thoroughly sinister."

"Poor frightened, trembling old wretch!" I said.

"Exactly. Why does she tremble? What is she afraid of? In my opinion she is intending to murder us in our beds."

"You had better go home the first thing in the morning and leave me to my fate," I told her. To myself I said I did not believe the world contained another woman with the worrying capacity of Julia. It was because she was such a disturbing force in the family that they had been so eager for her to accompany me, I, not without bitterness, suspected.

At the shop where we bought our chops for breakfast and a chicken for dinner, I bethought me to enquire of the young woman at the entering desk if Mrs Ragg, the caretaker of Sea-Strand Cottage, was known to her. The reply was quite satisfactory. Their cart had always served the cottage; the woman in charge was a most respectable person; a couple of ladies who had taken the cottage in the summer had mentioned that she was also an excellent cook.

The chops were served to us the next morning charred black, uneatable. I pointed them out to Julia on her appearing, and, with a view to deprecating her inevitable wrath, frankly so described them. My sister regarded the lost hopes of our meal with a preoccupied stare; then turned upon me with the wide distending of her eyelids which I knew portended a new worry.

"What sort of a night had you?" she asked.

"Excellent. And you?"

"Frightful. My nerves are all on the stretch, in consequence. I give you warning, Isabella, if you drop your knife or chink your teacup and saucer I shall scream aloud."

"You didn't sleep?"

"Not a wink."

"Were there noises to disturb you?"

"Not a sound. That was it! Not a din, Isabella."

"That's all right, then."

"Is it? You know my room?—just a lath-and-plaster partition between it and hers—that woman's. I ought to have heard every movement, even if she turned in her bed."

"It was very thoughtful of Mrs Ragg to lie so still."

"She was not there, Isabella."

"Not there?"

"I'd stake my life on it. It worried me so at last—I had to listen, you know—that I got up and put my ear against the partition. The deadest stillness!"

"But even if she was not there, I don't see it is so very alarming."

"She says she was. I asked her just now if she was sleeping next to me, and she said yes."

"She was, then."

"She wasn't."

I poured out the tea with impatience. What a constant worry Julia was! Without appearing to cast a backward thought upon the chops, she buttered herself a piece of toast.

"Of course, at last, I did fall asleep," she admitted. "And that was the worst of all. Isabella, I dreamt of that horrible little room next to mine, and of the reason it was so still."

"Well?"

"I dreamt there was a dead woman in it."

I laughed at that, and Julia, pausing in the act of taking a bite from her toast, glared angrily at me.

"You are a nice, soothing sort of person to be sent away with one supposed to be in want of cheering influences!" I said. "You and your dream of a dead woman!"

"I dreamt one was there," Julia said, going on with her toast. "In my opinion one was there," she added, doggedly.

When she had finished her breakfast, and had withdrawn her thoughts from the engrossing subject of her dream sufficiently to grumble about the aching void where the chops should have been, she sprang up from the table and loudly tinkled the little bell.

"For Mrs Ragg to clear away," she explained to me. "While she is doing so, and you, Isabella, keep her attention engaged on things below, I am going upstairs to have a look at her bedroom."

"Absurd!" I ejaculated.

"Aren't you absurd?" Julia cried, and turned upon me with scorn. "To take up your abode in a little cut-throat hole like this and not to take the commonest precaution!"

She flew upstairs, then, and Mrs Ragg was in the room.

In order to obey my sister's injunction to keep the woman's attention I began to talk to her, asking her how long she had lived in Sea-Strand Cottage. I had just gathered from her grudging, mumbling speech that she had lived there since the cottage was built, when my sister was in the room again.

Julia watched the caretaker shovel the things on to the tray, and, sighing bitterly the while, drag wearily out of the room with them. She turned to me, then, with a nod eloquent.

"Locked," she enunciated. "The door was locked. Why—why should the woman want to lock her bedroom door when she is out of it?"

"She returns the compliment you have paid her, and thinks you not to be trusted," I suggested.

"If I have to climb on the roof and pull off the tiles, I'll see what is in that room before I go to bed tonight!" Julia declared.

Then Mrs Ragg came back for the tablecloth.

"I slept very badly last night, Mrs Ragg," said Julia.

Mrs Ragg sucked in her cheeks, sighed heavily, made no answer.

"And so did you, I'm afraid. You were very restless. You walked about half the night."

"Me, miss?" She had folded the cloth, but she dropped it from her shaking, awkward hands, stooped to recover it, dropped it again. "Begging your pardon, no, miss."

"Who, then?" Julia asked inflexibly.

The woman turned away with the cloth and shuffled hastily to the door.

"Wait," commanded Julia. "Who, then? There was no one else in your bedroom besides you, I suppose?"

Mrs Ragg hurriedly rejected the insinuation. She had had a pain in her chest, she remembered now, and had got up for remedies.

"Of course you heard me rapping on the wall and asking you to keep still? You heard that, at least, Mrs Ragg?"

"Yes," Mrs Ragg had heard that, certainly. She admitted the fact as if it had been a sin, with a look of actual horror upon her face.

"You heard?" asked Julia of me in a kind of triumph as we were alone. "There was not a sound through all the night. I never rapped upon the wall. Now, why is she lying? It may be nothing to you, but I mean to know."

Once more that morning, coming from our own rooms, dressed for walking, Julia tried the caretaker's door. Finding it fast, shook it, and turned from doing so to find Mrs Ragg, arrived on the scene in her felt shoes, standing behind her.

"Asking your pardon, miss, that is my room," the woman said; with a feeble kind of offence she went and put herself before the door.

"We have hired the cottage; I presume we have the right to look even into your room, if we deem it advisable," Julia said, with her haughtiest air. "So, you always keep your room locked, Mrs Ragg?"

"When strangers are about I do," Mrs Ragg replied; and although she was apparently afraid of us she gazed upon us with no goodwill.

As we left the house, Julia called my attention to the fact that the blind in the room next to her own was drawn. "All the same, I don't sleep again beneath your Mrs Ragg's roof till I've been into her bedroom," she declared.

I had come to Starbay for the benefit of the sea. Julia, however, would not allow me to make nearer acquaintance with it than that possible from my window, but dragged me into the town again. We put down our names at one of the circulating libraries, and, it coming on to rain, could think of no better than to go upstairs to the reading-room.

It happened to have only one other occupant. A man of early middle-age, who, with the marks of delicate health upon him, had a face which, like that of "my Uncle Toby's," invited confidence.

Julia, for a minute, as we settled to read, looked across the table at him with her direct, sea-green gaze; then turned to her paper and looked no more until she put the paper down and began to talk to him.

It was easy enough to begin with a question about a certain magazine. "Did they take it there?" and to follow on with half a dozen enquiries about the town, and the objects of interest in the neighbourhood. I listened for a minute or two, reflecting how to my young sister any human document, however casually picked up, exceeded in interest the finest book ever written, then went on with an article on Education in which I happened to be interested. I roused myself from my abstraction to hear Julia mentioning to the strange man the name of Sea-Strand Cottage as our abode, and describing in her exaggerated fashion its location and appearance.

"At the utmost end of Everywhere, and looking like secret assassination, nothing less, when you get there," my sister was saying.

The man, as it happened, knew the place well. "It was the advertisement of Sea-Strand Cottage which brought me to Starbay," he said. "But when I saw the place, I—"

"You didn't like it! No more did I!" Julia said.

"However, the caretaker seemed a comfortable sort of body, and I was assured an excellent cook," the man continued.

Julia, her hands in her coat-pockets, bent her supple body forward across the table, bringing her eager face nearer to the stranger's. "Did you see her?—Mrs Ragg?" she asked.

He had seen her.

"Well?"

"She seemed all right," he said; and Julia lay back, disappointed, in her chair again.

"To me she seems all wrong," she said.

When I thought the conversation had lasted long enough I took Julia away from the library. Mrs Ragg had declared herself unable to have our meal ready before three o'clock in the afternoon. We went into a pastry-cook's therefore, and Julia ate a fair supply of tarts and custards, and insisted on taking away with her a selection from the store. "You keep yourself in hand for the chicken cooked by Mrs Ragg; I intend to be independent of it," she said, and walked home with her indigestible provender.

As we neared Sea-Strand Cottage we saw, coming towards it from the opposite direction, our new acquaintance of the reading-room. We met by the gate.

"I have to do a constitutional of so many prescribed miles every morning," he said. "After our conversation just now, I naturally bent my steps in this direction."

"Do walk this way sometimes," Julia said, flashing her smile upon him. "If, after a few days, you should see nothing of us, you might bring a policeman with you and search for our remains."

He smiled too, and said he would certainly do so. "I saw two or three men here as I went by, just now," he said; "they might have been the assassins you are expecting, but they looked uncommonly like every-day carpenters and workmen."

"Coming out of the house, do you mean? Men?" Julia asked, instantly on the alert.

"Not from the house—from the outhouse," he corrected and nodded in its direction.

Julia and I had inspected this empty outhouse that morning, and had decided to have our travelling-cases moved there. As our eyes turned towards it now, Mrs Ragg came out from it and softly closed the door behind her.

"This is the Mrs Ragg about whose desirability we disagree," Julia told the stranger, who, with his hand to his hat, was bowing to us and moving on. He stopped for a moment, looked at the caretaker, looked back to us with a smile.

"The mystery is solved. Your Mrs Ragg and mine are not the same person," he said.

Julia, who had been round to the back of the house to make inspection, came running to me with the news that the blind was up in the caretaker's bedroom, and the window open.

"There is a ladder against the outhouse," she said. "You must come and help me to fix it, Isabella, and stand on the bottom rung while I climb to the window."

There was no need for such extreme measures, however. Going upstairs to escape from my sister's importunity, I found the door of the hitherto locked room invitingly open. This intelligence being communicated to Julia, she came rushing upstairs, and dragged me unwillingly into Mrs Ragg's bedroom with her.

A most commonplace, mean-looking room, the wind blowing through it from open window to open door. The bed still unmade, but the square box of a place otherwise clean and tidy.

"What a home of mystery!" I said, with fine sarcasm, to Julia. "Where's your corpse, my dear?"

Julia gazed with great eyes round the little depressing place. "It really is exactly like," she said slowly. "The bed stood just there. But on it, you know, Isabella—on it—"

She shuddered, and gripped my arm. "My teeth chatter. Come away," she said.

She was generous enough to share her confectionery with me, and her forethought in bringing it was amply justified. Mrs Ragg had been so much occupied all the morning that she had forgotten to put the chicken in the oven until she saw us at the gate, she told us.

"Of course we can't put up with this. We will leave to-morrow," Julia declared. But I, who had paid the caretaker a week's salary in advance, was of opinion we should have a little more for our money.

"Put the chicken back in the oven, and I will see to the cooking of it," Julia said, when we had sufficiently contemplated the more than half-raw carcase of the fowl. "My sister is an invalid," she continued; "I am anxious that she should not be quite starved. I will cook the chicken therefore, and you will be responsible, perhaps, for the bread-sauce, Mrs Ragg."

The woman, looking alarmedly at her, murmured the word "bread-sauce?" and sucked in her cheeks.

"You know how to make bread-sauce, Mrs Ragg?"

Mrs Ragg had to confess she did not.

"But how can you possibly have had a reputation as a cook!" my sister demanded. Her eyes continued to blaze forth the inquiry long after there was any hope of the woman making a reply.

"I'm afraid you are a helpless creature," Julia told her, with the stern pitilessness that belongs to youth. "I also do not know how to make bread-sauce, but I will make it. In the meantime, will you go up to our rooms, fetch down the empty packing-cases—you will find them extremely light—and place them in that shed across the yard we saw empty this morning."

Undoubtedly Mrs Ragg was a helpless creature. She stood uncertainly before us, her skinny hands playing tremblingly with the buttons of her dress, and did not attempt to move.

"Do you not hear me? Go at once," Julia commanded.

But I saw that the woman got no nearer to our rooms than the bottom of the staircase. She stood there, clinging to the rail, and looking aimlessly upward.

Running upstairs I brought the two light cases down myself.

"There is room for them in the kitchen," Mrs Ragg said. But, carrying one myself, I told her to bring the other across to the empty shed. Arrived there, however, we found the door of the shed locked.

"Fetch the key," I ordered.

She stood and looked at me, but did not move.

"Tell me where the key is, and let me fetch it."

The key was lost.

"Why have you taken the trouble to lock an absolutely empty shed?"

She had no reason to give. She had locked it, and the key was lost.

"She has some reason for not wishing us to go into that shed," Julia said, oracularly, when the circumstance was mentioned to her.

"Absurd!" I said, but I did begin to experience an uncomfortable suspicion of the woman.

"She has got those men locked up there," Julia continued, with her air of assurance.

"Nonsense! What for?"

"Murder," said Julia, laconically; and energetically crumbled bread for the sauce.

"What were two men doing here this morning?" I asked, with assumed carelessness, of Mrs Ragg when next we encountered.

She mumbled the words "two men?" and stared at me by way of answer.

"We were told two men were here this morning. This is a very lonely situation, Mrs Ragg. I suppose you would admit no one you don't know all about?"

She was, she said, always most particular.

"Then, who were these two men, and what were they doing here?"

She did not know.

"Two men here, Mrs Ragg, and you not know it?"

"They weren't here," she said; and I had to leave it so.

I offered to change beds with Julia that night, but she would not hear of it. "Your room is the more comfortable; keep it," she said. "While you insist on staying here at the peril of our lives, I will sleep as well as I can with a dead woman laid forth on the bed next mine, and two murderers shut up in the shed across the way."

Julia's talk is ever more extravagant even than her notions, but it was of a disquieting kind. Many of the absurd things she had said in the day recurred to me in the night, assuming a quite different value. So that, although I had longed for bed, I found myself, arrived there, quite disinclined for sleep.

Surreptitiously I watched the caretaker up to bed. She came upstairs, clinging to the balusters for support, a tired, worn-looking, elderly woman, with a lank, frail body, and a care-lined, miserable face. How ridiculous were Julia's suspicions! She not only did not lock her door to-night, but left it ajar. At intervals I peeped through mine to see if her light was extinguished; she had not—so poorly dressed she was—the appearance of one who would indulge in the extravagance of a candle burning all night. Yet, long after I knew by the creaking of the spring mattress Mrs Ragg had lain down, I saw the streak of light shining through the unclosed door.

Fears of fire were added to my other disquietudes. Standing on the landing, I was hesitating if to knock at her door, and remind her she had not put out her light, when I was conscious of a movement behind me. Starting round with a muffled cry, I encountered a tall white figure, which, with an answering cry, grabbed me by both shoulders.