Read Ebook: The amateur crime by Berkeley Anthony

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Ebook has 1999 lines and 88204 words, and 40 pages

"As a very great treat, I think you might be allowed to, for once," she said, in a tender little voice that matched her smile, feeling like a mother, and a wife, and a lover, and a sister, and all sorts of other things as well towards this adorably helpless person, so infinitely inferior to herself and at exactly the same time so infinitely superior, whom she had elected to marry. "Now watch, and I'll show you what happens to sandy eyebrows when they get into my toils. It's supposed to be hopelessly bad policy, I know, but I have no secrets from you, darling; not even toilet ones."

"I won't have my wife's eyebrows insulted," Guy retorted, dropping his long, lean frame into an arm-chair. "They're not sandy, they never have been sandy, and they never will be sandy."

"My dear old Guy," laughed Cynthia, taking effective steps to clear the brows in question of any lingering imputations of sandiness, "you'd never notice if they were, so don't pretend you would. Why, I don't believe you could even say off-hand what colour my eyes are."

"My dear!" exclaimed her husband, with righteous indignation.

"Well--what colour are they then?"

Guy shifted a trifle uneasily in his chair. "A--a sort of greeny-brown," he said, somewhat defiantly.

"Commonly called hazel. Is that what you mean?"

"Hazel," Guy nodded with some relief. "Yes."

"Guy, you're hopeless!" Cynthia laughed. "What sort of a husband do you think you are? Really! Not to have the faintest idea of the colour of his own wife's eyes! Well, you might have said blue and been complimentary at any rate."

"Do you mean to say they're not hazel?" her husband inquired.

Cynthia nodded with emphasis. "I should hope I do! They're gray, my poor child. If you don't believe me, ask George to-night. I shouldn't call George a particularly observant man, but I think his powers will probably have carried him that far. Guy, I think you'd better begin rather hurriedly to talk about the weather."

Guy began to laugh instead. He had a curious and rather fascinating laugh. He laughed with a kind of guilty air, as if he knew he were doing something he shouldn't, but for the life of him could not help it. His laughter was subdued but hearty, and reminded one irresistibly of a small boy stealing jam.

"I meant gray," said Mr. Guy Nesbitt, stealing jam.

Cynthia became engrossed in the intricacies of her beautifying operations and the conversation languished.

Guy was the first to break the silence. "Looking forward to this evening, darling?" he asked.

"Mps," Cynthia murmured absently, busy with her comb. "Quite. I want to meet Dora's fianc?. I'd like to see her married, I must say; though when it's going to happen, goodness knows. In her last letter, she said quite cheerfully that Pat couldn't even raise the money for their furniture yet, and apparently she saw little chance of his ever doing so. Are you?"

"Very much. If Laura is anything like Dora we ought to have an amusing evening. This fellow Pat Doyle sounds quite an entertaining sort of chap, too. I've never met a journalist before, least of all an Irish journalist. The combination ought to prove remarkable."

Cynthia turned round to look at her husband. "You are a funny old thing, you know," she observed with a smile.

"So you frequently tell me, my dear. Why particularly in this instance?"

"Well, you're so unexpected. I should have expected you to hate meeting strangers, but you positively revel in it."

"Of course I do! I collect strangers. What you never seem to realise, my otherwise admirable Cynthia, is that I am profoundly interested in the human animal. I like to observe his little squirmings and watch his reactions to all the ordinary, and still more to the extraordinary things of life. And the more strangers I meet, the more I recognise what a lot there is still to learn."

"I'm glad I'm not a psychologist," Cynthia returned. "It must be awfully uphill work."

"All women are psychologists," retorted her husband sententiously. "They may not know it, but applied psychology is part of their stock-in-trade."

"Humph!" Cynthia did not encourage her husband to air his views upon women, about whom she considered he knew less than nothing. She allowed him to call himself a psychologist because she was a kind and tactful girl, but her own word for him so far as her sex was concerned would have been idealist; and she had enough sex-loyalty not to wish to shatter his illusions. "Well," she went on, changing the subject brightly, "hold the magnifying glass over Mr. Doyle as much as you like, but I'll just give you one word of advice before it's too late; beware of Laura, and beware of Dora, but above all, beware of Laura and Dora!"

"And now," said Guy, throwing the end of his cigarette carefully out of the window, "explain that somewhat cryptic remark."

"Well, you know Dora, don't you?"

"Fairly well, I thought. She's stayed with us--what was it?--three times during the last two years."

"Well, you know how demure and soulful she always looks, as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, when all the time it would disappear just as fast as you could put it in with a shovel?"

"I know that Dora's appearance is a little deceptive, yes," gravely agreed Guy, who knew all about his wife's ideas regarding his own views on her sex but would not have let her guess so for the world.

"Dora, if she wants to, can be a little demon," amplified Cynthia frankly. "Well, Laura is a worse edition of Dora, that's all. Apart, they're demons, but together they're positively diabolical. I warn you."

"Query," Guy murmured, "when is a demon not diabolical? When it's apart."

"And when should a purist cease to be pure?" smiled Cynthia. "In his wife's bedroom, I should have thought, at least."

"Mrs. Nesbitt, you shock me," Guy cackled in high glee. Cynthia's occasional lapses into pleasant vulgarity he privately considered one of the most delightful things about her. He uncurled his length from the chair. "Well, thank you for warning me. I'll be on my guard against this diabolical pair. Let us hope that the presence of her fianc? will be a restraining influence upon Dora's demoniacal tendencies."

"What a lot of long words my husband does know," confided Cynthia to her hair-brush. "Where are you off to now? They're not due for another twenty minutes."

"I must see about the wine," Guy replied reverently, and retired. Wine and his wife were about the only two things in this world which Guy really respected.

From Cocktails to Criminology

It has been said, no doubt with truth, that to make her mark in these overcrowded days a girl must adopt a line and stick to it like grim death. She may be languid, she may be sporting, she may be offensively rude, she may be appealing and doll-like, and she will find success, but she must never be purely and simply herself; that is the fundamental mistake. Such criticism could not be applied to the Misses Howard.

Our semi-civilised conventions have their disadvantages. In a more enlightened age the Misses Howard might have been compelled to go through life wearing horns and a barbed tail and a passable imitation of cloven hooves, as a timely warning to unsuspecting strangers not to take these two innocent-looking maidens at their face-value, charming as that was. Dissimulation, as practised by the Misses Howard, was more than a fine art; it was a hobby. The unsuspecting stranger , catching sight of one of the Miss Howards would swell his manly chest and pat his manly back, and say to himself in his manly tones: "Here is a poor, frightened little thing who looks at me as if I were a god. Who knows? Perhaps I am a god. I am very much inclined, when this helpless and pretty little thing looks at me like that, to think that I am. Out with the lance and armour! Are there any dragons about? Or, failing dragons, mice? At any rate, it is palpably up to me to protect this delectably timid small person from something, and that pretty quickly."

And twenty minutes later, if he had interested the timid little thing enough, he would be wondering ruefully if certain words of hers really meant what they had implied, or whether they were intended to convey something quite different and impossibly puncturing to the gallant balloon of manly self-esteem. If he did not interest her enough, he would be wondering still more ruefully how he could ever have imagined such a frigid block of sarcastic ice to be incapable in any conceivable way of looking after, not merely herself, but the entire universe as well. The Misses Howard may perhaps most politely be described as "stimulating."

Nevertheless, the family of Howard had done one good thing--it had brought Guy and Cynthia together. George Howard, the brother of the two demons, a large, solid person, as unlike his sisters as the elephant is unlike the mosquito, had been Guy's worshipping disciple at school and at Oxford; Dora and Cynthia had been "best friends." George had now taken for the summer the cottage at Duffley whose garden adjoined Guy's. He had moved in only three days before this story opens, and the fate of Duffley still hung in the balance.

Laura, younger than her sister by a couple of years, had shouldered the responsibilities of her lot and the family's orphanhood by accompanying her brother George about wherever he went and insisting upon keeping his house for him, much to that simple soul's sorrow; on the whole, George would rather have had his house kept for him by a combination of Catherine of Medici and Lucretia Borgia than by either of his sisters. George was the sort of person who likes to know where he is at any given moment, and has a rooted distaste for dwelling upon a volcano. Laura, therefore, was now wasting her gifts upon the rustic life of Duffley. Dora, investing her talents to better purpose, had gone on the stage, where she had confidently expected to multiply them sevenfold.

The British stage is a mass of curious contradictions. It lives upon humbug, it exploits humbug, and it is itself more taken in by humbug than any other institution. If a penniless actress lays out her last ten shillings in a pair of new gloves and a taxi-fare to the stage-door, the stage will say to itself as often as not: "Ha! Trixie Two-shoes is going about everywhere in taxis now, is she? She must be getting on, that girl. There is evidently more in her than I thought. I must have her for my next show, at double the salary she's getting now. Good!" The stage then buys four cigars at five times the price it usually pays, in order to impress the financial magnate after lunch with the strength of its own position.

But when humbug was offered to it of such rare and golden quality that its exploitation should have been repaid a hundred times over, the stage would have none of it. Dora had been unable to penetrate further into the legitimate drama which she felt herself called upon to enrich, than the stage-door-keeper's box. Refusing to be beaten , Dora had abandoned the idea of legitimate drama for the time being and expressed her willingness to adorn the chorus of a revue, comforting herself with the reflection that not a few great stars have risen from the musical ranks to legitimate heights. She had at once obtained the position to which her face and figure entitled her and, after a year in the provinces, had for the last six months been adorning the front row of the Mammoth Chorus at the Palladeum. She was now rehearsing a production which was to open the following week, and so was at liberty to present herself, with her fianc?, at a Saturday to Monday housewarming for George.

Only once had either of the Miss Howards met their match, and that was when a certain Mr. Doyle irritably besought Dora five months ago, within twenty minutes of the opening of their acquaintance, "for Heaven's sake not to try and pull that moon-eyed, baby-voiced stuff on him. He wasn't born yesterday, and he didn't like it. In short, her artless behaviour left Mr. Doyle not only cold but weary." Dora was so taken aback that for the first time in her life she became perfectly natural with a complete stranger.

The sequel was inevitable. When four days later the volatile Mr. Doyle, touched apparently by this complimentary change of front, besought her hand in marriage, she kept her whirling head long enough to accept him on the spot; she felt she had at last met her master, and the sensation though novel was by no means disagreeable. Since then they had remained engaged, in spite of all expectations to the contrary, their own included; indeed, Mr. Doyle had gone so far as to inform his fianc?e with engaging candour that this was the longest period he had ever been engaged to any one girl. They were now even beginning to think quite seriously of the possibility of really getting married some day if Mr. Doyle could scrape together the capital on which to do so.

In spite of Cynthia's assurances, Guy Nesbitt was not on hand when the quartet arrived. With a face like a high priest's he was performing solemn rites in the dining-room over a bottle of port and a decanter, and Cynthia had to welcome her guests in the drawing-room alone.

She cast a somewhat anxious eye at the sisters as they marched decorously into the room on the heels of the maid's announcement, their faces both ornamented with the same shy smile. Although she had known them most of her life and Dora was her closest friend, Cynthia never felt she knew quite where she was with them. In their rear walked Mr. Doyle, and behind him George Howard. Where Cynthia cast one anxious eye, George cast two. In spite of his elder years George knew even less where he was with his sisters than Cynthia did.

"Hallo, Lawks!" smiled their hostess. "Hallo, Dawks!" To be admitted to the circle of those permitted to address them by these pseudonyms, which George had invented with simple pride at the age of eight, was the highest privilege the two had to bestow. The number so allowed was, for each sister, twelve, and no one fresh could be received within the magic circle until a suitable vacancy occurred. Cynthia did not know Laura nearly so well as her sister , but was permitted the honour in view of her position as Dora's Best Friend.

Laura smiled her greeting, and Dora motioned Mr. Doyle forward. "This is my appendage, Cynthia," she remarked frankly.

"He isn't much to look at perhaps," Laura amplified, "but his heart's in the right place; at least Dora says it is, we haven't had him vetted yet. His name's Henry Aloysius Frederick Doyle, but never mind about that; he answers much better to the name of Pat. He's Irish."

Mr. Doyle, a slightly-built, clean-shaven young man with black hair, turned in the act of bowing to Cynthia. "I'm not!" he said indignantly.

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