Stramer stared.

  “It’s the only name on her monument. The wife of Peregrine Vincent Theobald, who perished of the plague at Aleppo in 1828. Perhaps she was very fond of him, and this was painted when she was an inconsolable widow.”

  “They didn’t dress like that as late as 1828.” Stramer, holding the lamp closer, deciphered the inscription on the border of the lady’s India scarf: Juliana, Viscountess Thudeney, 1818. “She must have been inconsolable before his death, then.”

  Lady Jane smiled. “Let’s hope she grew less so after it.”

  Stramer passed the lamp across the canvas. “Do you see where she was painted? In the blue parlour. Look: the old panelling; and she’s leaning on the citron-wood desk. They evidently used the room in winter then.” The lamp paused on the background of the picture: a window framing snow-laden paths and hedges in icy perspective.

  “Curious,” Stramer said—“and rather melancholy: to be painted against that wintry desolation. I wish you could find out more about her. Have you dipped into your archives?”

  “No. Mr. Jones—”

  “He won’t allow that either?”

  “Yes; but he’s lost the key of the muniment-room. Mrs. Clemm has been trying to get a locksmith.”

  “Surely the neighbourhood can still produce one?”

  “There was one at Thudeney-Blazes; but he died the week before I came.”

  “Of course!”

  “Of course?”

  “Well, in Mrs. Clemm’s hands keys get lost, chimneys smoke, locksmiths die . . .” Stramer stood, light in hand, looking down the shadowy length of the saloon. “I say, let’s go and see what’s happening now in the blue parlour.”

  Lady Jane laughed: a laugh seemed easy with another voice near by to echo it. “Let’s—”

  She followed him out of the saloon, across the hall in which a single candle burned on a far-off table, and past the stairway yawning like a black funnel above them. In the doorway of the blue parlour Stramer paused. “Now, then, Mr. Jones!”

  It was stupid, but Lady Jane’s heart gave a jerk: she hoped the challenge would not evoke the shadowy figure she had half seen that other day.

  “Lord, it’s cold!” Stramer stood looking about him. “Those ashes are still on the hearth. Well, it’s all very queer.” He crossed over to the citron-wood desk. “There’s where she sat for her picture—and in this very armchair—look!”

  “Oh, don’t!” Lady Jane exclaimed. The words slipped out unawares.

  “Don’t—what?”

  “Try those drawers—” she wanted to reply; for his hand was stretched toward the desk.

  “I’m frozen; I think I’m starting a cold. Do come away,” she grumbled, backing toward the door.

  Stramer lighted her out without comment. As the lamplight slid along the walls Lady Jane fancied that the needlework curtain over the farther door stirred as it had that other day. But it may have been the wind rising outside . . .

  The saloon seemed like home when they got back to it.

  •

  “There is no Mr. Jones!”

  Stramer proclaimed it triumphantly when they met the next morning. Lady Jane had motored off early to Strawbridge in quest of a mason and a locksmith. The quest had taken longer than she had expected, for everybody in Strawbridge was busy on jobs nearer by, and unaccustomed to the idea of going to Bells, with which the town seemed to have had no communication within living memory. The younger workmen did not even know where the place was, and the best Lady Jane could do was to coax a locksmith’s apprentice to come with her, on the understanding that he would be driven back to the nearest station as soon as his job was over. As for the mason, he had merely taken note of her request, and promised half-heartedly to send somebody when he could. “Rather off our beat, though.”

  She returned, discouraged and somewhat weary, as Stramer was coming downstairs after his morning’s work.

  “No Mr. Jones?” she echoed.

  “Not a trace! I’ve been trying the old Glamis experiment—situating his room by its window. Luckily the house is smaller . . .”

  Lady Jane smiled. “Is this what you call locking yourself up with your work?”

  “I can’t work: that’s the trouble. Not till this is settled. Bells is a fidgety place.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Well, I wasn’t going to be beaten; so I went to try to find the head-gardener.”

  “But there isn’t—”

  “No. Mrs. Clemm told me. The head-gardener died last year. That woman positively glows with life whenever she announces a death. Have you noticed?”

  Yes: Lady Jane had.

  “Well—I said to myself that if there wasn’t a head-gardener there must be an underling; at least one. I’d seen somebody in the distance, raking leaves, and I ran him down. Of course he’d never seen Mr. Jones.”

  “You mean that poor old half-blind Jacob? He couldn’t see anybody.”

  “Perhaps not. At any rate, he told me that Mr. Jones wouldn’t let the leaves be buried for leaf-mould—I forget why. Mr. Jones’s authority extends even to the gardens.”

  “Yet you say he doesn’t exist!”

  “Wait. Jacob is half blind, but he’s been here for years, and knows more about the place than you’d think. I got him talking about the house, and I pointed to one window after another, and he told me each time whose the room was, or had been. But he couldn’t situate Mr. Jones.”

  “I beg your ladyship’s pardon—” Mrs. Clemm was on the threshold, cheeks shining, skirt rustling, her eyes like drills. “The locksmith your ladyship brought back; I understand it was for the lock of the muniment-room—”

  “Well?”

  “He’s lost one of his tools, and can’t do anything without it. So he’s gone. The butcher’s boy gave him a lift back.”

  Lady Jane caught Stramer’s faint chuckle. She stood and stared at Mrs. Clemm, and Mrs. Clemm stared back, deferential but unflinching.

  “Gone? Very well; I’ll motor after him.”

  “Oh, my lady, it’s too late. The butcher’s boy had his motor-cycle . . . Besides, what could he do?”

  “Break the lock,” exclaimed Lady Jane, exasperated.

  “Oh, my lady—” Mrs. Clemm’s intonation marked the most respectful incredulity. She waited another moment, and then withdrew, while Lady Jane and Stramer considered each other.

  “But this is absurd,” Lady Jane declared when they had lunched, waited on, as usual, by the flustered Georgiana. “I’ll break in that door myself, if I have to—Be careful please, Georgiana,” she added; “I was speaking of doors, not dishes.” For Georgiana had let fall with a crash the dish she was removing from the table. She gathered up the pieces in her tremulous fingers, and vanished. Jane and Stramer returned to the saloon.

  “Queer!” the novelist commented.

  “Yes.” Lady Jane, facing the door, started slightly. Mrs. Clemm was there again; but this time subdued, unrustling, bathed in that odd pallor which enclosed but seemed unable to penetrate the solid crimson of her cheeks.

  “I beg pardon, my lady. The key is found.” Her hand, as she held it out, trembled like Georgiana’s.

  VI

  “It’s not here,” Stramer announced, a couple of hours later.

  “What isn’t?” Lady Jane queried, looking up from a heap of disordered papers. Her eyes blinked at him through the fog of yellow dust raised by her manipulations.

  “The clue—I’ve got all the 1800 to 1840 papers here; and there’s a gap.”

  She moved over to the table above which he was bending. “A gap?”

  “A big one. Nothing between 1815 and 1835. No mention of Peregrine or of Juliana.”

  They looked at each other across the tossed papers, and suddenly Stramer exclaimed: “Someone has been here before us—just lately.”

  Lady Jane stared, incredulous, and then followed the direction of his downward pointing hand.

  “Do you wear flat heelless shoes?” he questioned. “And of that size? Even my feet are too small to fit into those foot-prints. Luckily there wasn’t time to sweep the floor!”

  Lady Jane felt a slight chill, a chill of a different and more inward quality than the shock of stuffy coldness which had met them as they entered the unaired attic set apart for the storing of the Thudeney archives.

  “But how absurd! Of course when Mrs. Clemm found we were coming up she came—or sent someone—to open the shutters.”

  “That’s not Mrs. Clemm’s foot, or the other woman’s. She must have sent a man—an old man with a shaky uncertain step. Look how it wanders.”

  “Mr. Jones, then!” said Lady Jane, half impatiently.

  “Mr. Jones. And he got what he wanted, and put it—where?”

  “Ah, that—! I’m freezing, you know; let’s give this up for the present.” She rose, and Stramer followed her without protest; the muniment-room was really untenable.

  “I must catalogue all this stuff some day, I suppose,” Lady Jane continued, as they went down the stairs. “But meanwhile, what do you say to a good tramp, to get the dust out of our lungs?”

  He agreed, and turned back to his room to get some letters he wanted to post at Thudeney-Blazes.

  Lady Jane went down alone. It was a fine afternoon, and the sun, which had made the dust-clouds of the muniment-room so dazzling, sent a long shaft through the west window of the blue parlour, and across the floor of the hall.

  Certainly Georgiana kept the oak floors remarkably well; considering how much else she had to do, it was surp—

  Lady Jane stopped as if an unseen hand had jerked her violently back. On the smooth parquet before her she had caught the trace of dusty foot-prints—the prints of broad-soled heelless shoes—making for the blue parlour and crossing its threshold. She stood still with the same inward shiver that she had felt upstairs; then, avoiding the foot-prints, she, too, stole very softly toward the blue parlour, pushed the door wider, and saw, in the long dazzle of autumn light, as if translucid, edged with the glitter, an old man at the desk.

  “Mr. Jones!”

  A step came up behind her: Mrs. Clemm with the post-bag. “You called, my lady?”

  “I . . . yes . . .”

  When she turned back to the desk there was no one there.

  She faced about on the housekeeper. “Who was that?”

  “Where, my lady?”

  Lady Jane, without answering, moved toward the needlework curtain, in which she had detected the same faint tremor as before. “Where does that door go to—behind the curtain?”

  “Nowhere, my lady. I mean; there is no door.”

  Mrs. Clemm had followed; her step sounded quick and assured. She lifted up the curtain with a firm hand. Behind it was a rectangle of roughly plastered wall, where an opening had visibly been bricked up.

  “When was that done?”

  “The wall built up? I couldn’t say. I’ve never known it otherwise,” replied the housekeeper.

  The two women stood for an instant measuring each other with level eyes; then the housekeeper’s were slowly lowered, and she let the curtain fall from her hand. “There are a great many things in old houses that nobody knows about,” she said.

  “There shall be as few as possible in mine,” said Lady Jane.

  “My lady!” The housekeeper stepped quickly in front of her. “My lady, what are you doing?” she gasped.

  Lady Jane had turned back to the desk at which she had just seen—or fancied she had seen—the bending figure of Mr. Jones.

  “I am going to look through these drawers,” she said.

  The housekeeper still stood in pale immobility between her and the desk. “No, my lady—no. You won’t do that.”

  “Because—?”

  Mrs. Clemm crumpled up her black silk apron with a despairing gesture. “Because—if you will have it—that’s where Mr. Jones keeps his private papers. I know he’d oughtn’t to . . .”

  “Ah—then it was Mr. Jones I saw here?”

  The housekeeper’s arms sank to her sides and her mouth hung open on an unspoken word. “You saw him?” The question came out in a confused whisper; and before Lady Jane could answer, Mrs. Clemm’s arms rose again, stretched before her face as if to fend off a blaze of intolerable light, or some forbidden sight she had long since disciplined herself not to see. Thus screening her eyes she hurried across the hall to the door of the servants’ wing.

  Lady Jane stood for a moment looking after her; then, with a slightly shaking hand, she opened the desk and hurriedly took out from it all the papers—a small bundle—that it contained. With them she passed back into the saloon.

  As she entered it her eye was caught by the portrait of the melancholy lady in the short-waisted gown whom she and Stramer had christened “Also His Wife.” The lady’s eyes, usually so empty of all awareness save of her own frozen beauty, seemed suddenly waking to an anguished participation in the scene.

  “Fudge!” muttered Lady Jane, shaking off the spectral suggestion as she turned to meet Stramer on the threshold.

  VII

  The missing papers were all there. Stramer and she spread them out hurriedly on a table and at once proceeded to gloat over their find. Not a particularly important one, indeed; in the long history of the Lynkes and Crofts it took up hardly more space than the little handful of documents did, in actual bulk, among the stacks of the muniment-room. But the fact that these papers filled a gap in the chronicles of the house, and situated the sad-faced beauty as veritably the wife of the Peregrine Vincent Theobald Lynke who had “perished of the plague at Aleppo in 1828”—this was a discovery sufficiently exciting to whet amateur appetites, and to put out of Lady Jane’s mind the strange incident which had attended the opening of the cabinet.

  For a while she and Stramer sat silently and methodically going through their respective piles of correspondence; but presently Lady Jane, after glancing over one of the yellowing pages, uttered a startled exclamation.

  “How strange! Mr. Jones again—always Mr. Jones!”

  Stramer looked up from the papers he was sorting. “You, too. I’ve got a lot of letters here addressed to a Mr. Jones by Peregrine Vincent, who seems to have been always disporting himself abroad, and chronically in want of money. Gambling debts, apparently . . . ah, and women . . . a dirty record altogether . . .”

  “Yes? My letter is not written to a Mr. Jones; but it’s about one. Listen.” Lady Jane began to read. “‘Bells, February 20th, 1826 . . .’ (It’s from poor ‘Also His Wife’ to her husband.) ‘My dear Lord, Acknowledging as I ever do the burden of the sad impediment which denies me the happiness of being more frequently in your company, I yet fail to conceive how anything in my state obliges that close seclusion in which Mr. Jones persists—and by your express orders, so he declares—in confining me. Surely, my lord, had you found it possible to spend more time with me since the day of our marriage, you would yourself have seen it to be unnecessary to put this restraint upon me. It is true, alas, that my unhappy infirmity denies me the happiness to speak with you, or to hear the accents of the voice I should love above all others could it but reach me; but, my dear husband, I would have you consider that my mind is in no way affected by this obstacle, but goes out to you, as my heart does, in a perpetual eagerness of attention, and that to sit in this great house alone, day after day, month after month, deprived of your company, and debarred also from any intercourse but that of the servants you have chosen to put about me, is a fate more cruel than I deserve and more painful than I can bear. I have entreated Mr. Jones, since he seems all-powerful with you, to represent this to you, and to transmit this my last request—for should I fail I am resolved to make no other—that you should consent to my making the acquaintance of a few of your friends and neighbours, among whom I cannot but think there must be some kind hearts that would take pity on my unhappy situation, and afford me such companionship as would give me more courage to bear your continual absence . . .’”

  Lady Jane folded up the letter. “Deaf and dumb—ah, poor creature! That explains the look—”

  “And this explains the marriage,” Stramer continued, unfolding a stiff parchment document. “Here are the Viscountess Thudeney’s marriage settlements. She appears to have been a Miss Portallo, daughter of Obadiah Portallo Esqre, of Purflew Castle, Caermarthenshire, and Bombay House, Twickenham, East India merchant, senior member of the banking house of Portallo and Prest—and so on and so on. And the figures run up into hundreds of thousands.”

  “It’s rather ghastly—putting the two things together. All the millions and—imprisonment in the blue parlour. I suppose her Viscount had to have the money, and was ashamed to have it known how he had got it . . .” Lady Jane shivered. “Think of it—day after day, winter after winter, year after year . . . speechless, soundless, alone . . . under Mr. Jones’s guardianship. Let me see: what year were they married?”

  “In 1817.”

  “And only a year later that portrait was painted. And she had the frozen look already.”

  Stramer mused: “Yes; it’s grim enough. But the strangest figure in the whole case is still—Mr. Jones.”

  “Mr. Jones—yes. Her keeper,” Lady Jane mused. “I suppose he must have been this one’s ancestor. The office seems to have been hereditary at Bells.”

  “Well—I don’t know.”

  Stramer’s voice was so odd that Lady Jane looked up at him with a stare of surprise. “What if it were the same one?” suggested Stramer with a queer smile.

  “The same?” Lady Jane laughed. “You’re not good at figures, are you? If poor Lady Thudeney’s Mr. Jones were alive now he’d be—”