The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, Catherine Louisa Pirkis [world best books to read TXT] 📗

would be hard to say. Where she goes to church in Brighton, no one knows. She drives over with Mrs. Turner every Sunday, but everyone knows nothing would induce her to go near the candles and images. Thomas—that’s the coachman—says he puts her down at the corner of a dirty little street in mid-Brighton, and there he picks her up again after he has fetched Mrs. Turner from her church. No, there’s something very queer in her ways.”

Maria passed in through the lodge gates of the vicarage. She walked with her head bent, her eyes cast down to the ground.

“Something very queer in her ways,” repeated Mrs. Brown. “She never speaks to a soul unless they speak first to her, and gets by herself on every possible opportunity. Do you see that old summer-house over there in the vicarage grounds—it stands between the orchard and kitchen garden—well, every evening at sunset, out comes Maria and disappears into it, and there she stays for over an hour at a time. And what she does there goodness only knows!”

“Perhaps she keeps books there, and studies.”

“Studies! My daughter showed her some new books that had come down for the fifth standard the other day, and Maria turned upon her and said quite sharply that there was only one book in the whole world that people ought to study, and that book was the Bible.”

“How pretty those vicarage gardens are,” said Loveday, a little abruptly. “Does the Vicar ever allow people to see them?”

“Oh, yes, miss; he doesn’t at all mind people taking a walk round them. Only yesterday he said to me, ‘Mrs. Brown, if ever you feel yourself circumscribed’—yes, ‘circumscribed’ was the word—‘just walk out of your garden-gate and in at mine and enjoy yourself at your leisure among my fruit-trees.’ Not that I would like to take advantage of his kindness and make too free; but if you’d care, ma’am, to go for a walk through the grounds, I’ll go with you with pleasure. There’s a wonderful old cedar hard by the pond people have come ever so far to see.”

“It’s that old summer-house and little bit of orchard that fascinate me,” said Loveday, putting on her hat.

“We shall frighten Maria to death if she sees us so near her haunt,” said Mrs. Brown as she led the way downstairs. “This way, if you please, ma’am, the kitchen-garden leads straight into the orchard.”

Twilight was deepening rapidly into night now. Bird notes had ceased, the whirr of insects, the croaking of a distant frog were the only sounds that broke the evening stillness.

As Mrs. Brown swung back the gate that divided the kitchen-garden from the orchard, the gaunt, black figure of Maria Lisle was seen approaching in an opposite direction.

“Well, really, I don’t see why she should expect to have the orchard all to herself every evening,” said Mrs. Brown, with a little toss of her head. “Mind the gooseberry bushes, ma’am, they do catch at your clothes so. My word! what a fine show of fruit the Vicar has this year! I never saw pear trees more laden!”

They were now in the “bit of orchard” to be seen from the cottage windows. As they rounded the corner of the path in which the old summer-house stood, Maria Lisle turned its corner at the farther end, and suddenly found herself almost face to face with them. If her eyes and not been so persistently fastened on the ground, she would have noted the approach of the intruders as quickly as they had noted hers. Now, as she saw them for the first time, she gave a sudden start, paused for a moment irresolutely, and then turned sharply and walked rapidly away in an opposite direction.

“Maria, Maria!” called Mrs. Brown, “don’t run away; we sha’n’t stay here for more than a minute or so.”

Her words met with no response. The woman did not so much as turn her head.

Loveday stood at the entrance of the old summer-house. It was considerably out of repair, and most probably was never entered by anyone save Maria Lisle, its unswept, undusted condition suggesting colonies of spiders and other creeping things within.

Loveday braved them all and took her seat on the bench that ran round the little place in a semi-circle.

“Do try and overtake the girl, and tell her we shall be gone in a minute,” she said, addressing Mrs. Brown. “I will wait here meanwhile. I am so sorry to have frightened her away in that fashion.”

Mrs. Brown, under protest, and with a little grumble at the ridiculousness of “people who couldn’t look other people in the face,” set off in pursuit of Maria.

It was getting dim inside the summer-house now. There was, however, sufficient light to enable Loveday to discover a small packet of books lying in a corner of the bench on which she sat.

One by one she took them in her hand and closely scrutinized them. The first was a much read and pencil-marked Bible; the others were respectively, a “congregational hymn-book,” a book in a paper cover, on which was printed a flaming picture of a red and yellow angel, pouring blood and fire from out a big black bottle, and entitled “The End of the Age,” and a smaller book, also in a paper cover, on which was depicted a huge black horse, snorting fire and brimstone into ochre-coloured clouds. This book was entitled “The Year Book of the Saints,” and was simply a ruled diary with sensational mottoes for every day in the year. In parts, this diary was filled in with large and very untidy handwriting.

In these books seemed to lie the explanation of Maria Lisle’s love of evening solitude and the lonely old summer-house.

Mrs. Brown pursued Maria to the servants’ entrance to the house, but could not overtake her, the girl making good her retreat there.

She returned to Loveday a little hot, a little breathless and a little out of temper. It was all so absurd, she said; why couldn’t the woman have stayed and had a chat with them? It wasn’t as if she would get any harm out of the talk; she knew as well as everyone else in the village that she (Mrs. Brown) was no idle gossip, tittle-tattling over other people’s affairs.

But here Loveday, a little sharply, cut short her meanderings.

“Mrs. Brown,” she said, and to Mrs. Brown’s fancy her voice and manner had entirely changed from that of the pleasant, chatty lady of half-an-hour ago, “I’m sorry to say it will be impossible for me to stay even one night in your pleasant home, I have just recollected some important business that I must transact in Brighton tonight. I haven’t unpacked my portmanteau, so if you’ll kindly have it taken to your garden-gate, I’ll call for it as we drive past—I am going now, at once, to the inn, to see if Mr. Clampe can drive me back into Brighton tonight.”

Mrs. Brown had no words ready wherewith to express her astonishment, and Loveday assuredly gave her no time to hunt for them. Ten minutes later saw her rousing Mr. Clampe from a comfortable supper, to which he had just settled himself, with the surprising announcement that she must get back to Brighton with as little delay as possible; now, would he be good enough to drive her there?

“We’ll have a pair if they are to be had,” she added. “The road is good; it will be moonlight in a quarter of an hour; we ought to do it in less than half the time we took coming.”

While a phaeton and pair were being got ready, Loveday had time for a few words of explanation.

Maria Lisle’s diary in the old summer-house had given her the last of the links in her chain of evidence that was to bring the theft of the cheque home to the criminal.

“It will be best to drive straight to the police station,” she said; “they must take out three warrants, one for Maria Lisle, and two others respectively for Richard Steele, late Wesleyan minister of a chapel in Gordon Street, Brighton, and John Rogers, formerly elder of the same chapel. And let me tell you,” she added with a little smile, “that these three worthies would most likely have been left at large to carry on their depredations for some little time to come if it had not been for that ridiculous ghost in Fountain Lane.”

More than this there was not time to add, and when, a few minutes later, the two were rattling along the road to Brighton, the presence of the man, whom they were forced to take with them in order to bring back the horses to East Downes, prevented any but the most jerky and fragmentary of additions to this brief explanation.

“I very much fear that John Rogers has bolted,” once Loveday whispered under her breath.

And again, a little later, when a smooth bit of road admitted of low-voiced talk, she said:

“We can’t wait for the warrant for Steele; they must follow us with it to 15, Draycott Street.”

“But I want to know about the ghost,” said Mr. Clampe; “I am deeply interested in that ‘ridiculous ghost.’”

“Wait till we get to 15, Draycott Street,” was Loveday’s reply; “when you’ve been there, I feel sure you will understand everything.”

Church clocks were chiming a quarter to nine as they drove through Kemp Town at a pace that made the passers-by imagine they must be bound on an errand of life and death.

Loveday did not alight at the police station, and five minutes’ talk with the inspector in charge there was all that Mr. Clampe required to put things en train for the arrest of the three criminals.

It had evidently been an “excursionists’ day” at Brighton. The streets leading to the railway station were thronged, and their progress along the bye streets was impeded by the overflow of traffic from the main road.

“We shall get along better on foot; Draycott Street is only a stone’s throw from here,” said Loveday; “there’s a turning on the north side of Western Road that will bring us straight into it.”

So they dismissed their trap, and Loveday, acting as cicerone still, led the way through narrow turnings into the district, half town, half country, that skirts the road leading to the Dyke.

Draycott Street was not difficult to find. It consisted of two rows of newly-built houses of the eight-roomed, lodging-letting order. A dim light shone from the first-floor windows of number fifteen, but the lower window was dark and uncurtained, and a board hanging from its balcony rails proclaimed that it was “to let unfurnished.” The door of the house stood slightly ajar, and pushing it open, Loveday led the way up a flight of stairs—lighted halfway up with a paraffin lamp—to the first floor.

“I know the way. I was here this afternoon,” she whispered to her companion. “This is the last lecture he will give before he starts for Judaea; or, in other words, bolts with the money he has managed to conjure from other people’s purses into his own.”

The door of the room for which they were making, on the first floor, stood open, possibly on account of the heat. It laid bare to view a double row of forms, on which were seated some eight or ten persons in the attitude of all-absorbed listeners. Their faces were upturned, as if fixed on a preacher at the farther end of the room, and wore that expression of rapt, painful interest that is sometimes seen on the faces of a congregation of revivalists before the smouldering excitement bursts into flame.

As Loveday and her companion mounted the last of the flight of stairs, the voice of the preacher—full,