The Mystery of the Skeleton Key

I had to let him go. Any further obstruction from me, and I knew that his temper would have gone to pieces. I gave his message to Orsden, and we two continued the shoot without him. But it was a joyless business, and we were not very long in making an end of it. We parted in the road—Orsden for the Bit and Halter and the turning to Leighway, and I for the gates of Wildshott. It was near five o’clock, and a grey still evening. As I passed the stables, a white-faced groom came hurrying to stop me with a piece of staggering news. One of the maids, he said, had been found murdered, shot dead, that afternoon in the Bishop’s Walk.

CHAPTER VI (#ulink_616955bf-71dd-5de7-93dc-2e82386d536f)

‘THAT THUNDERS IN THE INDEX’ (#ulink_616955bf-71dd-5de7-93dc-2e82386d536f)

LE SAGE, in the course of a pleasant little drive with Audrey, asked innumerable questions and answered none. This idiosyncrasy of his greatly amused the young lady, who was by disposition frankly outspoken, and whose habit it never was to consider in conversation whether she committed herself or anyone else. Truth with her was at least a state of nature—though it might sometimes have worn with greater credit to itself a little more trimming—and states of nature are relatively pardonable in the young. A child who sees no indecorum in nakedness can hardly be expected to clothe Truth.

‘This Sir Francis,’ asked the Baron, ‘he is an old friend of yours?’

‘O, yes!’ said Audrey; ‘quite an old friend.’

‘And favourite?’

‘Well, he seems one of us, you see. Don’t you like him yourself?’

‘I suppose he and your brother are on intimate terms?’

‘We are all on intimate terms; Hugh and Frank no more than Frank and I.’

‘And no less, perhaps; or perhaps not quite so much?’

‘O, yes they are! What makes you think so? ’

‘Not quite so intimate, I will put it, as your brother and Mr Bickerdike?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know. Hugh is great friends with them both.’

‘Tell me, now—which would you rather he were most intimate with?’

‘How can it matter to me?’

‘You have a preference, I expect.’

‘I certainly have; but that doesn’t affect the question. It was Hugh you were speaking of, not me.’

‘Shall I give your preference? It is for Mr Bickerdike.’

‘Well guessed, Baron. Am I to take it as a compliment to my good taste?’

‘He is a superior man.’

‘Isn’t he? And always wishes one to know it, too.’

‘Aha! Then the Baronet is the man?’

‘How absurd you are! Do you value your friends by preference? Nobody is the man, as you call it. Because I don’t much like Mr Bickerdike, it doesn’t follow that I particularly like anybody else.’

‘Why don’t you like him?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps because he likes himself too much.’

‘Conceited, is he?’

‘Not quite that: a first-rate prig I should call him—always wanting to appear cleverer than he really is.’

‘Isn’t he clever?’

‘O, yes! Clever after a sort; but frightfully obtuse, too. I wouldn’t trust him with a secret. He’s so cocksure of himself that he’d always be liable to give it away with his blessing. But I oughtn’t to speak like that of him. He’s a great friend of Hugh’s, and he does really like to help people, I think, only it must be in his own way and not theirs. Do you like him?’

‘I am rather surprised that he and your brother should be on such close terms of friendship.’

‘Are you? Why?’

‘Is not Mr Hugo, now, without offence, a rather passionate, self-willed young gentleman?’

‘Very, I should say.’

‘Balance and instability—there you are.’

‘You mean they are not at all alike. I should have thought that was the best reason in the world for their chumming. One of oneself is quite enough for most people. Fancy the horror of being a Siamese twin!’

‘Is that why you and Sir Francis are on such good terms—because there is nothing in common between you?’

‘Isn’t there? What, for instance?’

‘He presents himself to me, from what little I have seen and heard of him, as a rather gentle, spiritual young man, with a taste for books and the fine arts, and a preference in sport, if any, for angling. In aere piscari.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I should fancy him a fisherman, by choice, of ideas rather than of streams.’

‘And me, I suppose, a cross-tempered, empty-headed country hoyden, who thinks of nothing but dogs and stables?’ But she laughed as she bent to Le Sage, looking mockingly into his smiling eyes. ‘M. le Baron, what a character!’

‘It is not of my giving,’ he said. ‘A spirited Diana should have been my antithesis.’

‘But why should you contrast us at all? Frank and I are not going to live together.’

‘You are bearing in mind, I hope,’ he said, ‘that I promised your father to be back at Wildshott by half-past two?’

‘For chess again? What can you find in it?’ She pulled up the pony, and, halting in the road, determinedly faced her companion. ‘Do you know you never answer anything that’s asked of you? Why don’t you?’

‘I didn’t know I didn’t.’

‘Don’t fib, sir.’

He chuckled aloud. ‘You are a frank young lady.’ He took her slim left hand between his cushiony palms, and patted it paternally. ‘When a suspected man is arrested, my dear, the first warning he receives from the police is that anything he says may be used in evidence against him. Supposing we apply that rule to common converse? Then at least we shall avoid self-committal.’

‘But are we all, every one of us, suspected people?’