A Graveyard to Let

15

How long they stood there, stunned and incapable of speech, Cy could never afterwards compute. It seemed a very longtime, since his own wits took time to accept the situation.

Yet on his first glance at the woman, in the grey-draped studio with the one lamp burning, Cy had sensed a resemblance to somebody he knew. Now he saw it plainly. It was a resemblance to Crystal.

The same dark brown hair. The same dark blue eyes. Irene Stanley (to call her that) was taller than Crystal. Crystal's maturity was only a maturity of body. This woman, in her early forties, had that same quality together with a deeper, perhaps more attractive maturity.

And, of all the persons there, she was the most frightened and shy. She wore a plum-coloured silk dress, and a painter's smock was thrown over the back of the sofa. Through Cy's mind darted a remark Crystal had once made about her mother:

"Her hobby was painting." Irene Stanley, instinctively touching her left cheek and darting back her hand again, sat up on the sofa.

The book spilled out of her hands.

"I—I don't know what to say," she told them in her fine voice, helplessly. Hesitantly she looked from one to the other. "I'm terribly ashamed. And I'm terrified of you. Please! Won't any of you help me by saying you're embarrassed too?"

Something seemed bound to explode. And yet it -did not.

"I just don't understand," muttered Bob.

It was Jean, white as a ghost, who acted first. She turned round and pointed her finger at H.M.

"You knew it!" she cried. "You knew it all the time! You had no right to do this!"

H.M., who was standing there in modest pride with one fist on his hip, opened his little eyes wide.

"Well, lord love a duck," he breathed.

Whereupon, with an expression of acute martyrdom on his face, H.M.'s powerful voice rose as though from the dock.

"Will you just tell me " he bellowed, "why it is that I'm the one who's always being persecuted? I try to help people, so help me I do. Just a little. And then, when I do, they look at me sort of surprised-like, and they say, 'The old so-and-so! What's he doin' here? Kick him in the pants!

"Now I'm mad," said H.M., seizing his Panama hat. "I'm good and mad. I'm not going to stay here and..."

They were all, of course, taking it out on H.M. because they had to take it out on somebody, and they sensed that in his heart he probably wouldn't mind as much as he said. But it was Irene Stanley who stopped him. "Sir Henry!" she said.

Again she looked round at her children with that uneasiness, as though a touch would make her shy away. Cy Norton realized that in her own way she was dangerously more attractive than Crystal herself.

"I—want to show you something," she said. "It may help you to understand."

Irene Stanley paused for a moment, moistening her lips.

"You've seen the right side of my face," she added. "Now look at the left side."

Slowly, fearfully, she began to turn her neck, so that the lamplight on her right brought the other side of the face fully out of shadow. She was like an invalid who dares not try her first step. But it was anticlimax. The others looked puzzled.

"Well, what about it?" asked Bob. "What’s wrong?"

She whipped her head round.

"You don't see anything wrong?" she asked.

"No!" said Crystal. Yet Crystal was watching, watching steadily, restraining her feeling of sympathy.

A film of tears came over Irene Stanley's eyes. In her soul, if such a thing should happen to exist, she might have been laughing—and bleeding.

"They tell me, some of them," she hurried on, "that even in full daylight they don't notice it-much. Of course," she laughed, "they're just being kind. But three months ago you wouldn't have come near me. Oh, no! You think you would; but you couldn't have!"

Jean spoke softly, as though fitting together the past

"Plastic surgery," Jean murmured, and Cy too caught an echo of remembered words.

"I—I can't tell all this," the woman said, clasping her fingers together. "Especially since I'd be 'dead' to this day if Fred hadn't found me. Sir Henry!" she pleaded. "You're the only one who guessed. Tell them!"

H.M., about to fold his arms in aloofness, ended by adjusting his spectacles, glaring, and sitting down in an easy chair.

His look at the Manning children was ferocious.

"Well, my fatheads," he said, "it was the longest shot I ever made. I was scared green for fear it wouldn't come off. Because, d'ye see, I hadn't got the absolute smacking evidence I've got about the swimming-pool business. All I had was a kind of certainty, based on Manning's character, with a few other bits you've heard yourselves.

"Last night when he was reelin' off a fine oration in the library," continued H.M., "I had. rather a sour face. I did, for a fact I thought to myself, especially after hearin' about that conference in his office, I thought 'Son, this is all wrong. You're telling some truths mixed up with an awful lot of eyewash.'

"And the eyewash, I thought was mostly about his love affair.

"Mind, now!" H.M. continued. "I'm not saying any man, for eighteen years, could keep up a Browningesque devotion to a dead wife in all ways. He'd have an eye out, occasionally, for a neat bit o' goods. Oh, my fatheads! That happens"—H.M. coughed—"to the finest kind of men with—hem!—the best characters and the loftiest minds."

"But, "continued H.M., suddenly coming off the high horse and becoming reasonably human again, "I can tell you what Fred Manning wouldn't have done. This idealization of his, this Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, was a holy thing. It had burning sincerity. He lived for it. Ma'am," said H.M., "what's your real first name?"

The so-called Irene Stanley was sitting with her eyes closed. Tears trickled under the eyelids. "Elizabeth," she said.

Again emotions swirled, as palpably as currents. Jean sat down in an easy chair, putting her head in her hands.

"So I'll tell you," said H.M., "what Manning wouldn't have done—unless it was all hoo-haa intended to deceive. He wouldn't have made a splash, in front of his own family, by saying he was running away (probably forever) with a floozie whose vulgarity stimulated him so much. Who told you her name was Irene Stanley and all about her flooziness? He did. But do you remember his twisty smile when he said it last night? Oh, no! Fred Manning wouldn't have done that, unless it was hoo-haa. It simply wasn't in his character."

Jean, shaking with sobs, would not look up.

"Would anybody have thought it was in his character," she asked, "for him to—to embezzle money from that Foundation?"

"We-el! Regardin' that" H.M. frowned mildly, as though at some slight technical matter. "Has the District Attorney proved he did embezzle money?"

Again dead silence.

"Are you saying...?" Jean began.

"Shut up," said H.M.

"And last night," he went on, "he quoted Browning. He quoted Browning when he was (apparently) referring to his merry trollop. What's more, he quoted "The Flight of the Duchess.' That's the poem young Browning wrote, before he was married, to persuade Elizabeth Barrett to elope with him; and she did. Holy ground!

"And what had we just heard," inquired H.M., "about Fred Manning's dead wife? Only that there'd been a boiler-explosion aboard an old river boat; and she'd been drowned. The body, apparently, had never been recovered.

"But what does happen on one of those old boats, when a boiler explodes? What makes the boat go down? If s fire, y’see. If s fire. Now just suppose, for a minute, that Manning's wife isn't dead? Suppose the fire...

"Well, next day our little Jean handed me a walloper. Her father's been going to see a plastic surgeon. She thinks it means he’ll alter his appearance after he does a bunk. But that won't do, as I told you. Nobody, not even Ferguson of Edinburgh or Richter of Vienna, can quite manage that. Besides, he'd have to lie up after the operation, and the coppers would get him for certain.

"No, no, no! That’s miles wide of the mark. But what plastic surgery can do, if somebody's been burned..."

Jean sat up straight.

"Then that's why you told me," she said, "that I hadn't given anything away?" "Uh-huh."

"And why," Jean persisted relentlessly, "you said you'd bet Dad would never go near a plastic surgeon, and the police would never have a chance?"

"Sure, my dolly. If it had happened, it would have been all over. But you handed me the real wallop when you turned up in the graveyard tonight, and I was tryin' to keep you from seeing your old man on that grave mound."

"I didn't say anything at all!"

"Ho! Didn't you? You said you'd followed him when he 'went to that place where they trace people.' Trace people! That could only mean a big private firm, say Pursuit, Incorporated, whose record of failure is so small you could balance it on a pin point Suppose Manning had felt his wife wasn't dead? Suppose he'd been tryin', off and on, to trace her? And suppose, some months ago, they found her?"

H.M. shook his head, and gave a sniff of finality.

"That's all," he said apologetically. "It wasn't evidence. It was only supposition. But stab me, I had to try a shot at goal!"

"You made it," replied the present Irene Stanley, with a faint smile. "You were quite right As for what happened... no, please!"

Everybody had started talking at once. Irene Stanley lowered her eyes, from which all trace of tears had been surreptitiously removed. Then she looked up again.

"Please think of me as a stranger!" she begged. "I'm trying to think of you as strangers. We can't be at ease unless we do. Can you see that?"

"I think I can," Crystal murmured, "and from my heart I sympathize."

"When Fred and I were married"—never once did she use the words "your father"—"I was only eighteen. When that explosion occurred, "I was still very young. Perhaps foolish too. The fire, along the whole left side of my face..."

Swiftly she slipped her hand down between a parting in the sofa cushions, brought out a hand mirror, and held it to the right side of her face where the light could fall. She gave a faint gasp of reassurance. Back went the mirror, quickly. That mirror, Cy guessed, was always near.

"I don't mind discussing it," continued the woman, who clearly did mind, "because it was so long ago. One mustn't grow morbid. But, when they dragged me out of the water and I was in the hospital, I made a decision."

Jean cried out "You don't have to tell us..."

"Please, Jean."

"I'm sorry," said Jean, and lowered her head. The woman who was so like Crystal, yet who through years had developed at once a passion and a gentleness beyond Crystal's, hesitated again.

"I thought men value us (and perhaps it's true; I don't know) only for—physical charms. I thought I should be only horror to Fred. I couldn't face him. I couldn't!" Her voice went high, but she controlled it. "So I did what other women have done before me. I let it be known I was drowned."

She lifted her shoulders. She glanced down at the sofa, showing the fine line of neck and the dark brown hair.

"Older years," she said, "tell me that what I did was foolish and even cruel. King David knew that all is vanity. But I would do it again.

"I won't bore you with the middle years. I had to get work, but not in public, that is, where anyone could see my face. They wouldn't have my face. So it had to be in private: laundering, sewing, dressmaking; I was rather good at that. I took up my hobby of painting. After a long time—and I was very lucky, at that—I had a little success.

"Well!" smiled Irene Stanley, getting up from the sofa like a hostess at a cocktail party. "There's not much else, is there?"

"There's a great deal else," said Crystal. "But, please! Don't upset yourself!"

Her mother, a little taller, looked at Crystal steadily.

"I came to New York three years ago. A few of my paintings 'took' at the galleries. But I was (and am) a commercial artist; though I didn't dare ask for work at an agency because:.." She touched her left cheek. Her self-control began to shake again.

"Anyway," she added, "I'm a commercial artist. That's why I can rent this studio here. Do you like it?"

Seeing an opportunity to change the subject, they all jumped at it. They knew it could be for only a moment; they knew the devil was there, but they tried to screen him away with loud talk.

This studio, Cy reflected, might be bare white ribs and concrete underneath. But from ceiling to floor—except for two high and broad windows set very high up—the grey-velvet draperies swept down and round the windows on every side. The carpet was soft and dark. One wall of curtains swayed a little, suggesting that it made a partition with another room.

There were painting materials for both oils and water colour. Cy saw a number of canvases stacked along two walls. He saw the model's throne near the easel, and a commercial artist’s photographic equipment. Here you were in the middle of New York, with a faint white shimmer beyond the windows; yet it seemed as remote as some valley in the stars.

"I mean," Bob was asking, "do you actually live here?"

Irene Stanley laughed.

"Technically, no. For heaven's sake don't try to get an apartment here. They don't exist. But"— she nodded towards the unsteady wall of curtains—"I have a bed behind there, and a telephone in the name of Stanley Studio, and some primitive arrangements for a bathroom. If I want to sleep here, nobody bothers."

"But what about eating?"

"Oh, I'm not allowed to cook. That's against all the laws. But in the first months here..."

"Yes?" prompted Crystal.

"It was wonderfully lonely. Beautifully lonely! You could slip downstairs for a meal in a lunchroom, with some kind of odd veil across your cheek as though you meant it to be there. If s a great, thundery, hurrying city. Nobody noticed."

"But didn't you ever think of plastic surgery before?" cried Jean.

"Of course! In the old days I couldn't afford it Later—I thought the scars had been there too long to be treated."

Then Jean, the well-meaning, blurted out the one tactless question of all.

"While you were away from us, did you ever miss...?"

Jean stopped abruptly.

Irene Stanley, Cy always remembered afterwards, was just picking up one of the canvases against the left-hand wall—the picture a bright Venetian scene out of the sixteenth century. Irene Stanley, graceful and supple in her plum-coloured dress, straightened up against the grey drapery.

"Yes!" she said in a strange voice. "Yes, I did!"

The canvas dropped with a faint wooden rattle.

"Sometimes I could forget him, and you too, of course," she added hastily, "for six or seven months on end. Once it was nearly a year. And then something, the least little thing, would remind me. And I was in agony, sheer agony, as though I were doubled up with pain."

"Wait! Stop! I didn't mean ..."

"And shall I tell you," the woman went on, "what happened here, in this studio, when I met Fred—again? I didn't know his private-detective people had traced me. I was sitting here, cleaning some brushes, with the scarred side of my face to the door. And the door opened, and Fred walked in.

"He didn't hurt me worse by pretending not to notice what was there. He just said, 'Is this all that’s been troubling you, Betty? We'll have that gone in a week or two.' And I—I started to cry."

If heretofore there had been any anger in the voice of Irene Stanley, or Elizabeth Manning, it was gone now. She spoke simply, as of small matters.

"That was months ago. From then I began to live. Awhile ago, Sir Henry, you mentioned Richter of Vienna."

H.M., piled into the chair with his chin in his fist, merely nodded.

"Fred," she explained, "had him flown over here in a special plane. He"—she touched her left cheek-"did this."

"I was still thinkin', ma'am, that only two men in the world could have done it"

"As for Fred..." She stopped. Quickly she brought out, from behind the stacked canvases, one carefully hidden. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait of Manning, as vivid and alive as the man himself had been.

"He hadn't seemed to have grown a day older," said the woman, whipping the empty canvas off the easel and substituting Manning's portrait, "except that his hair was prematurely grey. His arms and shoulders and torso were like those of a man twenty years younger. He had grown up, but he was still as wildly romantic and—and foolish"—she smiled—"as when I new him last."

Slowly she looked round the group.

"You know, I think," she said, "what we intended to do. We were going away for a second honeymoon. We had all our plans made."

And then the devil jumped in, and would not be kept out.

"Y'see, that's just it," interposed the heavy voice of Sir Henry Merrivale. "We've got to hear all those plans before the coppers do. Will you tell me about 'em?"

Cy held his breath. Irene Stanley gave him a strange look. She moved over to the sofa again, and sat down and clasped her hands.

"It won't matter," she told H.M.

"Won't matter?"

"No. Tonight, Sir Henry, you came up here at not much later than half-past ten. You told me— with delicacy, I thank you—what had happened. Before that, I had seen the afternoon and evening papers, and only smiled at Fred's vanishing trick. Now you told me that someone had tried to kill him, with two stab wounds in his side. You asked me to wait for the children, and I did."

"All right, ma'am. Why do you say 'it won't matter?"

The dark blue eyes remained inscrutable. "If s gone on too long," she said simply. "If Fred dies, I die."

A suppressed cry, Cy could not tell from whom, rose up and was instantly stopped. H.M. stood up.

"Are you goin' to stop talkin' tommyrot?" demanded H.M.

"You wouldn't call it that"—she raised her eyes briefly—"if you knew my life."

"But this person who tried to kill him: don't you want that person caught and punished?"

"That person," she replied, "will never be caught or punished."

A cold chill seemed to settle in the studio, as though the grey draperies resembled the colour of Frederick Manning's face. Manning's portrait, with the amused eyes and the grey hair worn long but cropped up short under the ears, seemed to regard them in a different way.

"When you left here tonight, Sir Henry, I was frantic." Irene Stanley clasped her fingers more tightly. "I had to phone and find out how he was. I knew the servants wouldn't believe I was his wife. Then I thought of Stuffy. Stuffy's been there for twenty-one years: did he tell you?"

‘Yes," Cy Norton muttered inaudibly.

"Stuffy, at first, wouldn't believe me either. I convinced him by reminding him of things—well, an imposter couldn't have know."

"I see. And so?"

"Fred has been conscious several times tonight, detective, a Lieutenant Somebody, has been with him all the time."

Blood rushed into her face, despite her self-control, and now, for the first time, you saw a faint reddish mark at the corner of her left eye. There was another near the chin.

"Fred," she said, "refuses to name the person who attacked him. Or, rather, he says he doesn't know and swears to it. You see now? He's protecting somebody? Which of course means..."

Slowly she turned round. She looked first at Crystal, then at Jean, and finally at Bob.

Through the quiet studio, from behind that partition of a curtain wall, the telephone began to ring stridently.