Let Him Lie by Ianthe Jerrold Page B

believing the best of her even then, or pretending to. But everybody in the village knew what she was, Miss. A bad lot, that’s what she was. Her and her artist! An actress she’d been and you could see it all over her!”
    â€œAn artist?”
    â€œYes, staying down here at the ‘White Lion’ he was that summer. A chap with a beard, more like a nanny-goat than a human being.”
    â€œ Not Hubert Southey!”
    â€œSome such name.”
    â€œWell, I’m blowed!”
    Jeanie reflected how little one knew of the characters and strange private lives of those from whom one learns painting in art schools. Who would have suspected Hubert Southey, that dry and circumspect man, of an entanglement with an ex-actress in red gloves?
    â€œPainted her picture, he did, sitting among the buttercups. And then off he goes, and off she goes. Buttercups!” said Mrs. Barchard, in a tone of extraordinary satire. “And she said her father was a clergyman.”
    Jeanie smiled.
    â€œWhy not? Well, I must get up, Mrs. Barchard.”
    Startlingly assuming a falsetto drawl as she prepared to leave the room, Mrs. Barchard remarked languidly:
    â€œWhen mai fawther werz rector of Hunsley!”
    Jeanie started.
    â€œRector of where ?”
    â€œHunsley, or some such place, Miss. She was always on about it. Couldn’t have gone on more about it if her father’d been a duke. Showed what a guilty conscience she’d got!”
    â€œNot Hunsley in Yorkshire?”
    â€œYes, it was. On the beeyootiful moors.”
    â€œBut how extraordinary !”
    Agnes’s father had been Rector of Hunsley, in Yorkshire, on the beautiful moors. Jeanie wondered if the two so very different daughters of two Hunsley rectors had ever become aware of the link between them—the only link, Jeanie imagined, from what she knew of Agnes and had heard of Miss Valentine Frazer!
    It was nearly noon when she arrived at Cleedons, and Tamsin Wills met her on the stairs. Agnes, it seemed, was in her bath. She would soon be up and dressed. Meanwhile, if Jeanie cared to come to the Tower room where Miss Wills was arranging some flowers, Miss Wills would do her poor best to entertain her.
    Jeanie, who found Miss Wills’s ponderous pawkiness almost more embarrassing than her sulks, agreed with what, she knew, was over-effusiveness.
    â€œWhere’s Sarah?”
    â€œReading in the school-room. Oddly enough, Sarah’s lessons don’t seem the most important thing in the world just at the moment!”
    Jeanie tried hard not to feel abashed, and followed Sarah’s governess up the newel staircase into the octagonal gun-room which, with the two rooms and the cellar below, was all that remained of the Norman tower. The high raftered ceiling, the stone walls with their gunracks and cupboards were formidable and chill. But the big sixteenth-century mullioned window which filled three sides of the octagon, and the cushioned window-seat below it, had a reassuring, kindly, civilised effect, saying that Black Ellen had been dust for centuries, and that those days were no more than a memory when men built strong towers and hid themselves therein, and that the guns in this armoury were used only for shooting coneys and wild birds. Standing by that peaceable, beautiful window, her knee on the soft cushion, Jeanie looked out. Looking down the lawn she could see, across the two low hedges, the orchard, and Molyneux’s ladder still leaning against the tree. She could imagine she saw Molyneux himself lying in the grass, complaining that the broad peaceful windows lied! She turned, and met Tamsin’s eyes fixed on her in a cold stare above the vases on the table.
    â€œI’ve been wanting to ask you— Don’t you think it was my duty, Miss Halliday?” 
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhy, to tell the superintendent that one can see the orchard from this window. And that I saw Mr. Fone sitting on that