Mr. Sutton-Cornish made ineffectual motions towards a chair and when they were ignored he leaned resignedly against the mantelpiece. He said he supposed that was so.
“Perhaps it has escaped your attention that I am still comparatively a young woman. And these are modern days, James.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish smiled wanly and glanced at the bronze door. She hadn’t noticed it yet. Then he put his head on one side and wrinkled his nose and said mildly, without much interest:
“You’re thinking of a divorce?”
“I’m thinking of very little else,” she said brutally.
“And you wish me to compromise myself in the usual manner, at Brighton, with a lady who will be described in court as an actress?”
She glared at him. Teddy helped her glare. Their combined glare failed even to perturb Mr. Sutton-Cornish. He had other resources now.
“Not with that dog,” he said carelessly, when she didn’t answer.
She made some kind of furious noise, a snort with a touch of snarl in it. She sat down then, very slowly and heavily, a little puzzled. She let Teddy jump to the floor.
“Just what are you talking about, James?” she asked witheringly.
He strolled over to the bronze door, leaned his back against it and explored its rich protuberances with a fingertip. Even then she didn’t see the door.
“You want a divorce, my dear Louella,” he said slowly, “so that you may marry another man. There’s absolutely no point in it—with that dog. I shouldn’t be asked to humiliate myself. Too useless. No man would marry that dog.”
“James—are you attempting to blackmail me?” Her voice was rather dreadful. She almost bugled. Teddy sneaked across to the window curtains and pretended to lie down.
“And even if he would,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said with a peculiar quiet in his tone, “I oughtn’t to make it possible. I ought to have enough human compassion—”
“James! How dare you! You make me physically sick with your insincerity!”
For the first time in his life James Sutton-Cornish laughed in his wife’s face.
“Those are two or three of the silliest speeches I ever had to listen to,” he said. “You’re an elderly; ponderous and damn dull woman. Go out and buy yourself a gigolo, if you want someone to fawn on you. But don’t ask me to make a beast of myself so that he can marry you and throw me out of my father’s house. Now run along and take your miserable brown beetle with you.”
She got up quickly, very quickly for her, and stood a moment almost swaying. Her eyes were as blank as a blind man’s eyes. In the silence Teddy tore fretfully at a curtain, with bitter, preoccupied growls that neither of them noticed.
She said very slowly and almost gently: “We’ll see how long you stay in your father’s house, James Sutton-Cornish—pauper.”
She moved very quickly the short distance to the door, went through and slammed it behind her.
The slamming of the door, an unusual event in that household, seemed to awaken a lot of echoes that had not been called upon to perform for a long time. So that Mr. Sutton-Cornish was not instantly aware of the small peculiar sound at his own side of the door, a mixture of sniffing and whimpering, with just a dash of growl.
Teddy. Teddy hadn’t made the door. The sudden, bitter exit had for once caught him napping. Teddy was shut in—with Mr. Sutton-Cornish.
For a little while Mr. Sutton-Cornish watched him rather absently, still shaken by the interview, not fully realizing what had happened. The small, wet, black snout explored the crack at the bottom of the closed door. At moments, while the whimpering and sniffing went on, Teddy turned a reddish brown out-jutting eye, like a fat wet marble, toward the man he hated.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish snapped out of it rather suddenly. He straightened and beamed. “Well, well, old man,” he purred. “Here we are, and for once without the ladies.”
Cunning dawned in his beaming eye. Teddy read it and slipped off under a chair. He was silent now, very silent. And Mr. Sutton-Cornish was silent as he moved swiftly along the wall and turned the key in the study door. Then he sped back toward the alcove, dug the key of the bronze door out of his pocket, unlocked and opened that—wide.
He sauntered back toward Teddy, beyond Teddy, as far as the window. He grinned at Teddy.
“Here we are, old man. Jolly, eh? Have a shot of whiskey, old man?”
Teddy made a small sound under the chair, and Mr. Sutton-Cornish sidled toward him delicately, bent down suddenly and lunged. Teddy made another chair, farther up the room. He breathed hard and his eyes stuck out rounder and wetter than ever, but he was silent, except for his breathing. And Mr. Sutton-Cornish, stalking him patiently from chair to chair, was as silent as the last leaf of autumn falling in slow eddies in a windless copse.
At about that time the doorknob turned sharply. Mr. Sutton-Cornish paused to smile and click his tongue. A sharp knock followed. He ignored it. The knocking went on sharper and sharper and an angry voice accompanied it.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish went on stalking Teddy. Teddy did the best he could, but the room was narrow and Mr. Sutton-Cornish was patient and rather agile when he wanted to be. In the interests of agility he was quite willing to be undignified.
The knocking and calling out beyond the door went on, but inside the room things could only end one way. Teddy reached the sill of the bronze door, sniffed at it rapidly, almost lifted a contemptuous hind leg, but didn’t because Mr. Sutton-Cornish was too close to him. He sent a low snarl back over his shoulder and hopped that disastrous sill.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish raced back to the room door, turned the key swiftly and silently, crept over to a chair and sprawled in it laughing. He was still laughing when Mrs. Sutton-Cornish thought to try the knob again, found the door yielded this time, and stormed into the room. Through the mist of his grisly, solitary laughter he saw her cold stare, then he heard her rustling about the room, heard her calling Teddy.
Then, “What’s that thing?” he heard her snap suddenly. “What utter foolishness Teddy! Come; mother’s little lamb! Come, Teddy!”
Even in his laughter Mr. Sutton-Cornish felt the wing of a regret brush his cheek. Poor little Teddy. He stopped laughing and sat up, stiff and alert. The room was too quiet.
“Louella!” he called sharply.
No sound answered him.
He closed his eyes, gulped, opened them again, crept along the room staring. He stood in front of his little alcove for long time, peering, peering through that bronze portal at the innocent little collection of trivia beyond.
He locked the door with quivering hands, stuffed the key down in his pocket, poured himself a stiff peg of whiskey.
A ghostly voice that sounded something like his own, and yet unlike it, said out loud, very close to his ear:
“I didn’t really intend anything like that…never…never…oh, never…or…”—after a long pause—”did I?”
Braced by the Scotch he sneaked out into the hall and our of the front door without Collins seeing him. No car waited outside. As luck would have it she had evidently come from Chinverly by train and taken a taxi. Of course the could trace the taxi—later on, when they tried. A lot of good that would do them.
Collins was next. He thought about Collins for some time glancing at the bronze door, tempted a good deal, but final shaking his head negatively.
“Not that way,” he muttered. “Have to draw the line somewhere. Can’t have a procession—”
He drank some more whiskey and rang the bell. Collins made it rather easy for him.
“You rang, sir?”
“What did it sound like?” Mr. Sutton-Cornish asked, little thick-tongued. “Canaries?”
Collins’ chin snapped back a full two inches.
“The dowager won’t be here to dinner, Collins. I think I dine out. That’s all.”
Collins stared at him. A grayness spread over Collins’ face with a little flush at the cheekbones.
“You allude to Mrs. Sutton-Cornish,
sir?”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish hiccuped. “Who d’you suppose? Gone back to Chinverly to stew in her own juice some more. Ought to be plenty of it.”
With deadly politeness Collins said: “I had meant to ask you, sir, whether Mrs. Sutton-Cornish would return here—permanently. Otherwise—”
“Carry on.” Another hiccup.
“Otherwise I should not care to remain myself, sir.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish stood up and went close to Collins and breathed in his face. Haig & Haig. A good breath, of the type.
“Get out!” he rasped. “Get out now! Upstairs with you and pack your things. Your check will be ready for you. A full month. Thirty-two pounds in all, I believe?”
Collins stepped back and moved towards the door. “That will suit me perfectly, sir. Thirty-two pounds is the correct amount.” He reached the door, spoke again before he opened it, “A reference from you, sir, will not be desired.”
He went out, closing the door softly.
“Ha!” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said.
Then he grinned slyly, stopped pretending to be angry or drunk, and sat down to write the check.
He dined out that night, and the next night, and the next. Cook left on the third day, taking the kitchenmaid with her. That left Bruggs and Mary, the housemaid. On the fifth day Bruggs wept when she gave her notice.
“I’d rather go at once, sir, if you’ll let me,” she sobbed. “There’s something creepylike about the house since cook and Mr. Collins and Teddy and Mrs. Sutton-Cornish left.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish patted her arm. “Cook and Mr. Collins and Teddy and Mrs. Sutton-Cornish,” he repeated. “If only she could hear that order of precedence.”
Bruggs stared at him, red-eyed. He patted her arm again. “Quite all right, Bruggs. I’ll give you your month. And tell Mary to go, too. Think I’ll close the house up and live in the south of France for a while. Now don’t cry, Bruggs.”
“No, sir.” She bawled her way out of the room.
He didn’t get to the south of France, of course. Too much fun being right where he was—alone at last in the home of his fathers. Not quite what they would have approved of, perhaps, except possibly the general. But the best he could do.
Almost overnight the house began to have the murmurs of an empty place. He kept the windows closed and the shades down. That seemed to be a gesture of respect he could hardly afford to omit.
6
Scotland Yard moves with the deadly dependability of a glacier, and at times almost as slowly. So it was a full month and nine days before Detective-sergeant Lloyd came back to No. 14 Grinling Crescent.
By that time the front steps had long since lost their white serenity. The apple-green door had acquired a sinister shade of gray. The brass saucer around the bell, the knocker, the big latch, all these were tarnished and stained, like the brass work of an old freighter limping around the Horn. Those who rang the bell departed slowly, with backward glances, and Mr. Sutton-Cornish would be peeping out at them from the side of a drawn window shade.
He concocted himself weird meals in the echoing kitchen, creeping in after dark with ragged-looking parcels of food. Later he would slink out again with his hat pulled low and his overcoat collar up, give a quick glance up and down the street, then scramble off around the corner. The police constable on duty saw him occasionally at these maneuvers and rubbed his chin a good deal over the situation.
No longer a study even in withered elegance, Mr. Sutton-Cornish became a customer in obscure eating houses where draymen blew on their soup on naked tables in compartments like horse stalls; in foreign cafes where men with blue-black hair and pointed shoes dined interminably over minute bottles of wine; in crowded, anonymous tea shops where the food looked and tasted as tired as the people who ate it.
He was no longer a perfectly sane man. In his dry, solitary, poisoned laughter there was the sound of crumbling walls. Even the pinched loafers under the arches of the Thames Embankment, who listened to him because he had sixpences, even these were glad when he passed on, stepping carefully in unshined shoes and lightly swinging the stick he no longer carried.
Then, late one night, returning softly out of the dull-gray darkness, he found the man from Scotland Yard lurking near the dirty front steps with an air of thinking himself hidden behind the lamp-post.
“I’d like a few words with you, sir,” he said, stepping forth briskly and holding his hands as though he might have to use them suddenly.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish chuckled. “Trot right in.”
He opened the door with his latchkey, switched the light on, and stepped with accustomed ease over a pile of dusty letters on the floor.
“Got rid of the servants,” he explained to the detective. “Always did want to be alone some day.”
The carpet was covered with burned matches, pipe ash, torn paper, and the corners of the hall had cobwebs in them. Mr. Sutton-Cornish opened his study door, switched the light on in there and stood aside. The detective passed him warily, staring hard at the condition of the house.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish pushed him into a dusty chair, thrust a cigar at him, reached for the whiskey decanter.
“Business or pleasure this time?” he inquired archly.
Detective-sergeant Lloyd held his hard hat on one knee and looked the cigar over dubiously. “Smoke it later, thank you, sir…Business, I take it. I’m instructed to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of Mrs. Sutton-Cornish.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish sipped whiskey amiably and pointed at the decanter. He took his whiskey straight now. “Haven’t the least idea,” he said. “Why? Down at Chinverly, I suppose. Country place. She owns it.”
“It so ‘appens she ain’t,” Detective-sergeant Lloyd said, slipping on an “h,” which he seldom did any more. “Been a separation, I’m told,” he added grimly.
“That’s our business, old man.”
“Up to a point, yes, sir. Granted. Not after her solicitor can’t find her and she ain’t anywhere anybody can find her. Not then, it ain’t just your business.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish thought it over. “You might have something there—as the Americans say,” he conceded.
The detective passed a large pale hand across his forehead and leaned forward.
“Let’s ‘ave it, sir,” he said quietly. “Best in the long run. Best for all. Nothing to gain by foolishness. The law’s the law.”
“Have some whiskey,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said.
“Not tonight I won’t,” Detective-sergeant Lloyd said grimly.
“She left me,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish shrugged. “And because of that the servants left me. You know what servants are nowadays. Beyond that I haven’t an idea.”
“Oh yus I think you ‘ave,” the detective said, losing a little more of his West End manner. “No charges have been preferred, but I think you know all right, all right.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish smiled airily. The detective scowled at him and went on:
“We’ve taken the liberty of watching you, and for a gentleman of your position—you’ve been living a damn queer life, if I may say so.”
“You may say so, and then you may get to hell out of my house,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said suddenly.
“Not so farst. Not yet I won’t.”
“Perhaps you would like to search the house.”
“Per’aps I should. Per’aps I shall. No hurry there. Takes time. Sometimes takes shovels.” Detective-sergeant Lloyd permitted himself to leer rather nastily. “Seems to me like people does a bit of disappearin’ when you ‘appen to be around. Take that Skimp. Now take Mrs. Sutton-Cornish.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish stared at him with lingering malice. “And in your experience, sergeant, where do people go when they disappear?”
“Sometimes they don’t disappear. Sometimes somebody disappears them.” The detective licked his strong lips, with a slightly cat-like expression.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish slowly raised his arm and pointed to the bronze do
or. “You wanted it, sergeant,” he said suavely. “You shall have it. There is where you should look for Mr. Skimp, for Teddy the Pomeranian, and for my wife. There—behind that ancient door of bronze.”
The detective didn’t shift his gaze. For a long moment he didn’t change expression. Then, quite amiably, he grinned. There was something else behind his eyes, but it was behind them.
“Let’s you and me take a nice little walk,” he said breezily. “The fresh air would do you a lot of good, sir. Let’s—”
“There,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish announced, still pointing with his arm rigid, “behind that door.”
“Ah-ah.” Detective-sergeant Lloyd waggled a large finger roguishly. “Been alone too much, you ‘ave, sir. Thinkin’ about things. Do it myself once in a while. Gets a fellow balmy in the crumpet like. Take a nice little walk with me, sir. We could stop somewhere for a nice—”The big, tawny man planted a forefinger on the end of his nose and pushed his head back and wiggled his little finger in the air at the same time. But his steady gray eyes remained in another mood.
“We’ll look at my bronze door first.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish skipped out of his chair. The detective had him by the arm in a flash. “None of that,” he said in a frosty voice. “Hold still, you.”
“Key in here,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said, pointing at his breast pocket, but not trying to get his hand into it.
The detective got it out for him, stared at it heavily.
“All behind the door—on meathooks,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said. “All three. Little meathook for Teddy. Very large meathook for my wife. Very large meathook.”
Holding him with his left hand, Detective-sergeant Lloyd thought it over. His pale brows were drawn tight. His large weathered face was grim—but skeptical.
“No harm to look,” he said finally.
He marched Mr. Sutton-Cornish across the floor, pushed the bronze key into the huge antique lock, twisted the ring, and opened the door. He opened both sides of it. He stood looking into that very innocent alcove with its cabinet of knickknacks and absolutely nothing else. He became genial again.