Bertram Mitford - The Heath Hover Mystery

“Here is your cheque, Miss Seward,” she said, “and there is the receipt form.” Then having seen this duly signed, she added stiffly – “And now, good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Mrs Carstairs. I’ll just repeat to you. There was no harm whatever in that letter. I did not feel justified in showing you – only on principle, mind. Good-bye, children.”

For the two girls had just come in. There was, as we said, nothing engaging about them. They were gawky plain girls, sallow faced and inclined to be hook-nosed too, with a skimpy black pigtail hanging down each of their backs. They showed no more feeling on parting with Melian than if she were just getting up from an afternoon call. They each stuck a limp bony paw into her palm, and there was an end of it.

She went downstairs. Her luggage – by no means the traditional, and feminine, “mountain of luggage” – was being stowed in and on a cab. A door on the ground floor opened into the hall. Within this stood the – nominal – master of the house.

“I hear you’re leaving us, Miss Seward. I’m sorry,” he began rather jerkily. “Will you kindly step in here for a moment?”

Melian wondered, but complied. Seen in the full light, he was a quiet looking, keen faced man, keen as to the upper part of his face – that represented his moderate success on the Stock Exchange – falling away in the lower – that represented his subsidiary position as merely nominal master in his own house.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “You’re very young, and I understand, alone in the world. This fuss, whatever it’s about, is clean outside my department, but remember, if ever you want a friend – either to speak a good word for you – or what not – remember me. Good-bye, child.”

She flashed a bright smile at him as she took the hand which jerkily shot forth at her. Then she went out.

“By gad, she’s lovely!” exclaimed Carstairs, staring after her, “and the very perfection of a lady too. What a fool Adelina is to have got rid of one like that.”

And Adelina, who from the upper landing was privily assisting auricularly at this scene, was for once, inclined to agree with the submissive one. Certainly it would not be easy to find an adequate substitute.

“Still – she’s too pretty,” she told herself with something of a sigh. “Too pretty, and – too proud. Yes – far too proud.”

And this reflection seemed to carry something of consolation as her mind went back to that scene in the forenoon, and how the girl had uncompromisingly declined to capitulate, while she herself had come out of it with far from flying colours.

The Carstairs abode was a large, dull, ugly villa in a large, dull, ugly suburb – one of those depressing suburbs that is neither town nor country but has the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. But it was cheerfulness itself compared with the locality through which Melian’s cab was now slowly jogging. The squalor of the greasy streets; the dank, thick atmosphere; the hoarse, scarcely human yells and the incessant rumble and clatter attendant on that sort of locality are too well known to need any describing.

Leaning back in the mouldy vehicle, she set her mind to go over the events of the last few hours. Had she been ill advised, hasty – she asked herself? Their behaviour at the very last had seemed to show they were not such ill-meaning people. Yet, as she looked back she knew that relations between them had been getting more and more strained. For some reason or other Mrs Carstairs had been growing more and more short in her manner towards her, and now she knew that reason. The old woman had had her suspicions all along, but the discovery of the climax brought things to a head. But the whole thing was ludicrous, and all about a little booby like that – Melian’s lip curled as she thus rather unjustly characterised the distant cause of all the bother.

The drive was long and the cab slow. She had time to let her thoughts go further back from her present troubles – the future was not a welcome subject, looked at sitting alone there in that mouldy box on wheels, and in the dark at that. Her earlier life had been a sufficiently happy one. She had seen a great deal of the world and developed her artistic instincts. Then had come losses; and speculations, instead of mending things, made them worse. Her father was lacking in the business capacity, while her other parent was under the impression that one pound sterling was endowed with the purchasing power of three, and acted consistently upon that conviction. So means dwindled till there was very little left.

Things had reached this point when one day her father started off on a railway journey to a place some hours distant. He was mysterious as to the object of it, but declared that they would none of them be the worse if it failed, whereas if it succeeded, they would be considerably the better. He seemed in a hopeful mood, and in fairly good spirits, and when at the big, dingy terminus, where she was seeing him off, he handed her a couple of accident insurance tickets, which he had just purchased; he seemed fairly bubbling over with fun.

“See these?” he had said. “All right. They cost a shilling apiece, and represent 1,000 pounds apiece if I’m – er – totally smashed up. So, you see, I’m more valuable to you dead than alive. I used to think it was the other way about. But take care of them, I’ve signed them, and all, so it’d be quite safe. Put them away carefully. Two thousand pounds, remember.”

“I’ve a great mind to tear them across and throw them on to the line,” the girl had answered, looking at him with filling eyes and quivering lips. But he laughed gaily.

“Don’t do that, little one. They cover minor injuries too, only those mean less dibs. You know. So much a leg, so much an arm, so much a finger – and so on. It’s a rum world – and you never can tell. So stick to those tickets till I come back. Now, good-bye, my darling little one. Here, let go – the train’s moving, by George!”

She was very nearly tightening her hold, so that it would be physically impossible for him to free himself until the train had gone, but she did not. With eyes blinded with tears she waved to him from the platform as he leaned half out of the window watching to see the last of her, and he was gone. Yet he would be back the day after to-morrow at the latest. She had often seen him off on such journeys before.

“I am a little fool,” she said to herself as she walked away.

About two hours later, when in the middle of its longest non-stop run, Marston Seward fell from the train.

There were headlines in the evening paper posters, but somehow or other Melian did not notice these. It was not until the next day, when they opened their morning paper, that the tragedy rose up and hit them between the eyes – name, description, everything, for by this time identification had been easily obtained. Melian hardly knew how she lived through that stunning blow – perhaps because it was a stunning one. But the shock was too much for her mother – the shock only, for there was little if any affection between her and the dead man. Brain fever supervened and she died.

Her illness made an alarming inroad into the scanty resources remaining to them. Hard material necessities had to be met. Hitherto the girl had shrunk with shuddering horror from turning to account those fatal insurance tickets, the price of her father’s blood. She could not claim it. Oh God! the thought of it? But she might have spared herself any qualms on this head. The railway company flatly and uncompromisingly repudiated all liability. The insurance was against accident not suicide. They were in a position to prove, and to prove indisputably that for any one to have fallen from the particular coach of which Seward was an occupant, and that by accident, was a sheer impossibility. The door handles were all in good order; if anything, rather stiff to turn than otherwise. They could prove too, that the said door handles were properly secured at the last station the train had passed through. And worst of all, they were in a position to produce a platform inspector who had passed the pair at the moment of the utterance of those fatal words: “You see, I’m more valuable to you dead than alive. I used to think it was the other way about.” The official had heard the words distinctly, and after the tragedy had himself voluntarily come forward with the information. At the time they had struck him as uttered jokingly, but in the light of the subsequent event they took on a far different aspect. In short, Seward had bungled the whole business. He died as he had lived, and his last act was one of perfectly inexcusable bungle. “More valuable to you dead than alive,” had been his words, and in the result his daughter was left alone in the world, as nearly as possible penniless.