"That's what father's always saying," she exploded angrily. "He's always telling me to examine myself. The fact is, I know too much about myself. I know exactly the kind of girl it is who's going to leave this house.

Exactly!"

"Audrey, you frighten me. Where are you going to?"

"London."

"Oh! That's all right then. I am relieved. I thought perhaps you waited to come to _my_ house. You won't get to London, because you haven't any money."

"Oh, yes, I have. I've got a hundred pounds."

"Where?"

"Remember, you've sworn.... Here!" she cried suddenly, and drawing her hand from behind her back she most sensationally displayed a crushed roll of bank-notes.

"And who did you get those from?"

"I didn't get them from anybody. I got them out of father's safe. They're his reserve. He keeps them right at the back of the left-hand drawer, and he's so sure they're there that he never looks for them. He thinks he's a perfect model, but really he's careless. There's a duplicate key to the safe, you know, and he leaves it with a lot of other keys loose in his desk. I expect he thought n.o.body would ever dream of guessing it was a key of the safe. I know he never looked at this roll, because I've been opening the safe every day for weeks past, and the roll was always the same. In fact, it was dusty. Then to-day I decided to take it, and here you are! He finished himself off yesterday, so far as I'm concerned, with the business about the punt."

"But do you know you're a thief, Audrey?" breathed Miss Ingate, extremely embarra.s.sed, and for once somewhat staggered by the vagaries of human nature.

"You seem to forget, Miss Ingate," said Audrey solemnly, "that Cousin Caroline left me a legacy of two hundred pounds last year, and that I've never seen a penny of it. Father absolutely declined to let me have the tiniest bit of it. Well, I've taken half. He can keep the other half for his trouble."

Miss Ingate's mouth stood open, and her eyes seemed startled.

"But you can't go to London alone. You wouldn't know what to do."

"Yes, I should. I've arranged everything. I shall wear my best clothes.

When I arrive at Liverpool Street I shall take a taxi. I've got three addresses of boarding-houses out of the _Daily Telegraph_, and they're all in Bloomsbury, W.C. I shall have lessons in shorthand and typewriting at Pitman's School, and then I shall get a situation. My name will be Vavasour."

"But you'll be caught."

"I shan't. I shall book to Ipswich first and begin again from there. Girls like me aren't so easy to catch as all that."

"You're vehy cunning."

"I get that from mother. She's most frightfully cunning with father."

"Audrey," said Miss Ingate with a strange grin, "I don't know how I can sit here and listen to you. You'll ruin me with your father, because if you go I'm sure I shall never be able to keep from him that I knew all about it."

"Then you shouldn't have sworn," retorted Audrey. "But I'm glad you did swear, because I had to tell somebody, and there was n.o.body but you."

Miss Ingate might possibly have contrived to employ some of that sagacity in which she took a secret pride upon a very critical and urgent situation, had not Mrs. Moze, with a white handkerchief wrapped round her forehead, at that moment come into the room. Immediately the study was full of neuralgia and eau-de-Cologne.

When Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate at length recovered from the tenderness of meeting each other after a separation of ten days or more, Audrey had vanished like an illusion. She was not afraid of her mother; and she could trust Miss Ingate, though Miss Ingate and Mrs. Moze were dangerously intimate; but she was too self-conscious to remain in the presence of her fellow-creatures; and in spite of her faith in Miss Ingate she thought of the spinster as of a vase filled now with a fatal liquor which by any accident might spill and spread ruin--so that she could scarcely bear to look upon Miss Ingate.

At the back of the house a young Pomeranian dog, which had recently solaced Miss Ingate in the loss of a Pekingese done to death by a spinster's too-nourishing love, was prancing on his four springs round the chained yard-dog, his friend and patron. In a series of marvellous short bounds, he followed Audrey with yapping eagerness down the slope of the garden; and the yard-dog, aware that none but the omnipotent deity, Mr. Moze, sole source of good and evil, had the right to loose him, turned round once and laid himself flat and long on the ground, sighing.

The garden, after developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if anybody was watching her.

Flank Hall, which for a hundred years had been called "the new hall," was a seemly Georgian residence, warm in colour, with some quaint woodwork; and like most such buildings in Ess.e.x, it made a very happy marriage with the landscape. Its dormers and fine chimneys glowed amid the dark bare trees, and they alone would have captivated a Londoner possessing those precious attributes, fortunately ever spreading among the enlightened middle-cla.s.ses, a motor-car, a cultured taste in architecture, and a desire to enter the squirearchy. Audrey loathed the house. For her it was the last depth of sordidness and the commonplace. She could imagine positively nothing less romantic. She thought of the ground floor on chill March mornings with no fires anywhere save a red gleam in the dining-room, and herself wandering about in it idle, at a loss for a diversion, an ambition, an effort, a real task; and she thought of the upper floor, a mainly unoccupied wilderness of iron bedsteads and yellow chests of drawers and chipped earthenware and islands of carpets, and her mother plaintively and weariedly arguing with some servant over a slop-pail in a corner. The images of the interior, indelibly printed in her soul, desolated her.

Mozewater she loved, and every souvenir of it was exquisite--red barges beating miraculously up the shallow puddles to Moze Quay, equinoctial spring-tides when the estuary was a tremendous ocean covered with foam and the sea-wall felt the light lash of spray, thunderstorms in autumn gathering over the yellow melancholy of deathlike sunsets, wild birds crying across miles of uncovered mud at early morning and duck-hunters crouching in punts behind a waving screen of delicate gra.s.ses to wing them, and the mysterious shapes of steamers and warships in the offing beyond the Sand.... The sail of the receding yacht gleamed now against the Sand, and its flashing broke her heart; for it was the flashing of freedom. She thought of the yachtsman; he was very courteous and deferential; a mild creature; he had behaved to her as to a woman.... Oh! To be the petted and capricious wife of such a man, to nod commands, to enslave with a smile, to want a thing and instantly to have it, to be consulted and to decide, to spend with large gestures, to be charitable, to be adored by those whom you had saved from disaster, to increase happiness wherever you went ... and to be free!....

The little dog jumped up at her because he was tired of being ignored, and she caught him and kissed him again and again pa.s.sionately, and he wriggled with ecstasy and licked her ears with all the love in him. And in kissing him she kissed grave and affectionate husbands, she kissed the lovely scenery of the Sound, and she kissed the magnificent ideal of emanc.i.p.ation.

But the dog had soon had enough of her arms; he broke free, sprang, alighted, and rolled over, and arose sniffing, with earth on his black muzzle....

He looked up at her inquiringly.... Strange, short-frocked blue figure looking down at him! She had a bulging forehead; her brown eyes were tunnelled underneath it. But what living eyes, what ardent eyes, that blazed up and sank like a fire! What delicate and exact mirrors of the secret traffic between her soul and the soul of the world! She had full cheeks, and a large mouth ripe red, inviting and provocative. In the midst, an absurd small unprominent nose that meant nothing! Her complexion was divine, surpa.s.sing all similes. To caress that smooth downy cheek (if you looked close you could see the infinitesimal down against the light like an aura on the edge of the silhouette), even to let the gaze dwell on it, what an enchantment!... She considered herself piquant and comely, and she was not deceived. She had long hands.

The wind from afar on her cheek reminded her poignantly that she was a prisoner. She could not go to the cl.u.s.tered village on the left, nor into the saltings on the right, nor even on to the sea-wall where the new rushes and gra.s.ses were showing. All the estuary was barred, and the winding road that mounted the slope towards Colchester. Her revolt against injustice was savage. Hatred of her father surged up in her like glittering lava. She had long since ceased to try to comprehend him. She despised herself because she was unreasonably afraid of him, ridiculously mute before him.

She could not understand how anybody could be friendly with him--for was he not notorious? Yet everywhere he was greeted with respect and smiles, and he would chat at length with all manner of people on a note of mild and smooth cordiality. He and Miss Ingate would enjoy together the most enormous talks. She was, however, aware that Miss Ingate's opinion of him was not very different from her own. Each time she saw her father and Miss Ingate in communion she would say in her heart to Miss Ingate: "You are disloyal to me." ...

Was it possible that she had confided to Miss Ingate her fearful secret?

The conversation appeared to her unreal now. She went over her plan. In the afternoon her father was always out, and to-morrow afternoon her mother would be out too. She would have a few things in a light bag that she could carry--her mother's bag! She would put on her best clothes and a veil from her mother's wardrobe. She would take the 4.5 p.m. train. The stationmaster would be at his tea then. Only the booking-clerk and the porter would see her, and neither would dare to make an observation. She would ask for a return ticket to Ipswich; that would allay suspicion, and at Ipswich she would book again. She had cut out the addresses of the boarding-houses.

She would have to buy things in London. She knew of two shops--Harrod's and Shoolbred's; she had seen their catalogues. And the very next morning after arrival she would go to Pitman's School. She would change the first of the 5 notes at the station and ask for plenty of silver. She glanced at the unlimited wealth still crushed in her hand, and then she carefully dropped the fortune down the neck of her frock.... Stealing? She repulsed the idea with violent disdain. What she had accomplished against her father was not a crime, but a vengeance.... She would never be found in London. It was impossible. Her plan seemed to her to be perfect in each detail, except one. She was not the right sort of girl to execute it. She was very shy.

She suspected that no other girl could really be as shy as she was. She recalled dreadful rare moments with her mother in strange drawing-rooms.

Still, she would execute the plan even if she died of fright. A force within her would compel her to execute it. This force did not make for happiness; on the contrary, it uncomfortably scared her; but it was irresistible.

Something on the brow of the road from Colchester attracted her attention.

It was a handcart, pushed by a labourer and by Police Inspector Keeble, whom she liked. Following the handcart over the brow came a loose procession of villagers, which included no children, because the children were in school. Except on a Sunday Audrey had never before seen a procession of villagers, and these villagers must have been collected out of the fields, for the procession was going in the direction of, and not away from, the village. The handcart was covered with a tarpaulin.... She knew what had happened; she knew infallibly. Skirting the boundary of the grounds, she reached the main entrance to Flank Hall thirty seconds before the handcart. The little dog, delighted in a new adventure, yapped ecstatically at her heels, and then bounded onwards to meet the Inspector and the handcart.

"Run and tell yer mother, Miss Moze," Inspector Keeble called out in a carrying whisper. "There's been an accident. He ditched the car near Ardleigh cross-roads, trying to avoid some fowls."

Mr. Moze, hurrying too fast to meet the Bishop of Colchester, had met a greater than the Bishop.

Audrey glanced an instant with a sick qualm at the outlines of the shape beneath the tarpaulin, and ran.

In the dining-room, over the speck of fire, Mrs. Moze and Miss Ingate were locked in a deep intimate gossip.

"Mother!" cried Audrey, and then sank like a sack.

"Why! The little thing's fainted!" Miss Ingate exclaimed in a voice suddenly hoa.r.s.e.

CHAPTER III

THE LEGACY

Audrey and Miss Ingate were in the late Mathew Moze's study, fascinated--as much unconsciously as consciously--by the thing which since its owner's death had grown every hour more mysterious and more formidable--the safe.

It was a fine afternoon. The secondary but still grandiose enigma of the affair, Mr. Cowl, could be heard walking methodically on the gravel in the garden. Mr. Cowl was the secretary of the National Reformation Society.

Suddenly the irregular sound of crunching receded.

"He's gone somewhere else," said Audrey.

"I'm so relieved," said Miss Ingate. "I hope he's gone a long way off."