Vernon Loder - The Mystery at Stowe

People said he was indulgent enough, would even accompany her to private views, where the pictures must have made him bite his tongue; to artistic functions, of a social kind, where he looked like a healthy tree among sickly saplings.

Then Elaine came back from her last pilgrimage, full of new plans. He had known her since she was a mere school-girl. He was interested in exploration, and in the country she had visited. He discussed the next trip with great interest, and, hearing that its success depended on finance, offered to help.

She had written a book, and was giving a series of lectures. If the proceeds of both left a deficit on the sum needed for the future, he was to make it up. Margery objected. She did not tell her friends, but she objected very much even to a Platonic partnership between her husband and the explorer.

Elaine Gurdon instinctively felt this trouble. She knew Margery, and never failed to call to see her when she was in town. They were at opposite poles in thought and action. Margery disliked her; Elaine had sometimes an impulse to shake the pale, shadowy, young woman she felt to be such a drag on Ned Tollard.

‘If she even made an effort, I could forgive her,’ she had told Nelly Sayers, ‘but she won’t move. She’s the most selfish woman I know.’

That was indiscreet, but she was a woman who spoke out on occasion, and Nelly laughed.

‘She certainly might buck up.’

The projected expedition was one to the hinterland of Matta Grosso, and as it was planned out, the expenses necessary to success seemed to mount daily. Elaine confessed that she would need five thousand more than her book and her lectures were likely to earn, and Tollard was willing to give that sum. But, first, they went into it together, to see where expenses could be cut down. Elaine insisted on that.

‘I haven’t much of a business brain, Ned,’ she said to him. ‘I know what I might spend, but I don’t know what I need not. Then I want your advice about the route. I could cut out the last bit of the trip if necessary.’

At first it was decided that the consultations should take place at his house, but that was not a success. Margery was a sulky third, visibly impatient with their consultations, and ended by suggesting to her husband that they might be held elsewhere.

Mr Barley, having never been out of England in his life, had a fancy to be a patron of some foreign enterprise which should bring him into the public eye. He had heard some of the prevalent gossip, and asked Elaine down to stay with him, with two motives. She was lecturing at Elterham, and he had to be chairman. He had asked her as a favour to bring with her some of the many curios she had acquired in the trip through the Chaco, good-naturedly saying that he might be disposed to invest in some of the rarer objects for the adornment of his hall and library.

It was in part his second motive, an altruistic one, that had led him to invite Margery and Ned Tollard at the same time. A bachelor himself, he hated to see married people uncomfortable, or at loggerheads, and was preparing a plan to ease what he had heard was the tension in Tollard’s menage.

Just about the moment when Mrs Gailey went out into the garden, and Miss Sayers went up to her room to write a letter, he intercepted Elaine Gurdon in the hall.

‘Tollard gone out, Miss Gurdon?’ he asked, beaming on her in his fat way, ‘or have you another consultation on?’

She returned his smile. ‘I think he and Margery drove over to Elterham. She wanted to order some book.’

‘Good. Then I can annex you, Miss Gurdon, and have a little chat, if you don’t mind.’

‘Not a bit,’ she said, her brown eyes twinkling, ‘I am becoming quite a good saleswoman, you see. But, really, I find you are not such a shrewd buyer as I imagined.’

‘I don’t bring that home here,’ he said, opening a door off the hall. ‘Come along into the library, and have a cigarette with me. I have a little scheme I have been worrying out, and I’d like to hear what you think of it.’

She followed him, and he drew forward a comfortable chair for her, then closed the door, and came to stand with his hands behind his back in front of the empty fire-place.

‘Now those curios I bought from, you are most interesting,’ he began, when he had seen that her cigarette was alight. ‘They mean a lot more to me than to you, for I never had the chance to go abroad when I was young, and I am too old for it now. It’s a great thing that you can get about to all these strange places, and extend our knowledge, so to speak. Jography I have always been interested in, and now, it seems to me, I have a chance to get connected with it more directly.’

‘I’ll be glad to have you with me, Mr Barley,’ she laughed, ‘if that is what you mean.’

He smiled admiringly. What a fine woman she was, he thought. ‘No, that isn’t it exactly,’ he said. ‘I was thinking more of money. You want it, we have it, as the advertisements say!’

FOR a few moments Elaine looked at him in silence. A little twitch showed itself at the corner of her mouth, and was gone. Her lips tightened a little, her gaze became speculative.

‘What does that mean exactly?’ she asked, when her silence had made him fidget, and uneasily stir his coat-tails behind his back.

He cleared his throat nervously. ‘Nothing more than what I say, I assure you, Miss Gurdon. I hear that a good deal of money will be wanted for your new expedition. I’d like to have a hand, if not a name, in it.’

‘You are suggesting financing me?’ she said bluntly.

He nodded, relieved. ‘That’s it. I should like to. Name your figure, and I’m on. It would be a pity to spoil the ship for the sake of a hap’orth of tar.’

She considered that for a moment. She knew that the trip would be an expensive one. Barley had plenty of funds.

‘Perhaps you haven’t heard that Mr Tollard is backing me?’

He coloured a little, and she knew at once that someone had been talking. Her glance became slightly hostile. He fidgeted again, puffed gustily at his cigarette, threw it behind him into the fire-place, and smiled apologetically.

‘Well, I understood so. Yes, decidedly I knew that. At least, I was aware that he was standing some of the expense.’

‘What then?’ said Elaine, and now she held his eyes, and her own had grown hard and challenging.

‘My dear girl,’ said Mr Barley, with symptoms of discomfort in voice and manner, ‘now we come to a point that has been causing me some distress.’

‘But does not directly concern you, perhaps?’ she demanded.

‘Not directly—no. But we are all friends here. I hope we are, and, er—’

‘You think it unwise of me to accept financial help from Mr Tollard?’ she interrupted fiercely.

‘That is more or less what I meant to say,’ remarked the kind old man. ‘It may sound crude to you, the more so, Miss Gurdon, because I am not sure that you realise what people have been saying.’

‘Or don’t care?’ she fired out.

‘In this world we have to care,’ he said gently. ‘I’m old enough to be your father, my dear, and I tell you that we have to pay some attention to what others say, even if we have given them no cause to say it.’

‘That simply isn’t true!’

‘Excuse me if I say it is. If not for oneself, there are others concerned. We never live quite alone and detached in this world. I was thinking of Mrs Tollard. She may be a weak woman, and a foolish, but I feel sure her husband’s interest in this expedition gives her pain. Then she is aware of the gossip. There are always people about who are anxious to tell young wives what others say of their husbands.’