Beasts and Super Beasts

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"You don't mean to say he might be dangerous, do you?" asked Jane with
some anxiety.

"One can never be certain," said Clovis; "now and then he gets some idea
about a guest which might take an unfortunate turn. That is precisely
what is worrying me at the present moment."

"What, has he taken a fancy about some one here now?" asked Jane
excitedly; "how thrilling! Do tell me who it is."

"You," said Clovis briefly.

"Me?"

Clovis nodded.

"Who on earth does he think I am?"

"Queen Anne," was the unexpected answer.

"Queen Anne! What an idea. But, anyhow, there's nothing dangerous about
her; she's such a colourless personality."

"What does posterity chiefly say about Queen Anne?" asked Clovis rather
sternly.

"The only thing that I can remember about her," said Jane, "is the saying
'Queen Anne's dead.'"

"Exactly," said Clovis, staring at the glass that had held the Ella
Wheeler Wilcox, "dead."

"Do you mean he takes me for the ghost of Queen Anne?" asked Jane.

"Ghost? Dear no. No one ever heard of a ghost that came down to
breakfast and ate kidneys and toast and honey with a healthy appetite.
No, it's the fact of you being so very much alive and flourishing that
perplexes and annoys him. All his life he has been accustomed to look on
Queen Anne as the personification of everything that is dead and done
with, 'as dead as Queen Anne,' you know; and now he has to fill your
glass at lunch and dinner and listen to your accounts of the gay time you
had at the Dublin Horse Show, and naturally he feels that something's
very wrong with you."

"But he wouldn't be downright hostile to me on that account, would he?"
Jane asked anxiously.

"I didn't get really alarmed about it till lunch to-day," said Clovis; "I
caught him glowering at you with a very sinister look and muttering:
'Ought to be dead long ago, she ought, and some one should see to it.'
That's why I mentioned the matter to you."

"This is awful," said Jane; "your mother must be told about it at once."

"My mother mustn't hear a word about it," said Clovis earnestly; "it
would upset her dreadfully. She relies on Sturridge for everything."

"But he might kill me at any moment," protested Jane.

"Not at any moment; he's busy with the silver all the afternoon."

"You'll have to keep a sharp look-out all the time and be on your guard
to frustrate any murderous attack," said Jane, adding in a tone of weak
obstinacy: "It's a dreadful situation to be in, with a mad butler
dangling over you like the sword of What's-his-name, but I'm certainly
not going to cut my visit short."

Clovis swore horribly under his breath; the miracle was an obvious
misfire.

It was in the hall the next morning after a late breakfast that Clovis
had his final inspiration as he stood engaged in coaxing rust spots from
an old putter.

"Where is Miss Martlet?" he asked the butler, who was at that moment
crossing the hall.

"Writing letters in the morning-room, sir," said Sturridge, announcing a
fact of which his questioner was already aware.

"She wants to copy the inscription on that old basket-hilted sabre," said
Clovis, pointing to a venerable weapon hanging on the wall. "I wish
you'd take it to her; my hands are all over oil. Take it without the
sheath, it will be less trouble."

The butler drew the blade, still keen and bright in its well-cared for
old age, and carried it into the morning-room. There was a door near the
writing-table leading to a back stairway; Jane vanished through it with
such lightning rapidity that the butler doubted whether she had seen him
come in. Half an hour later Clovis was driving her and her
hastily-packed luggage to the station.

"Mother will be awfully vexed when she comes back from her ride and finds
you have gone," he observed to the departing guest, "but I'll make up
some story about an urgent wire having called you away. It wouldn't do
to alarm her unnecessarily about Sturridge."

Jane sniffed slightly at Clovis' ideas of unnecessary alarm, and was
almost rude to the young man who came round with thoughtful inquiries as
to luncheon-baskets.

The miracle lost some of its usefulness from the fact that Dora wrote the
same day postponing the date of her visit, but, at any rate, Clovis holds
the record as the only human being who ever hustled Jane Martlet out of
the time-table of her migrations.




THE OPEN WINDOW


"My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very self-possessed
young lady of fifteen; "in the meantime you must try and put up with me."

Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly
flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that
was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal
visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping
the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.

"I know how it will be," his sister had said when he was preparing to
migrate to this rural retreat; "you will bury yourself down there and not
speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from
moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people
I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice."

Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was
presenting one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice
division.

"Do you know many of the people round here?" asked the niece, when she
judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.

"Hardly a soul," said Framton. "My sister was staying here, at the
rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of
introduction to some of the people here."

He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.

"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?" pursued the
self-possessed young lady.

"Only her name and address," admitted the caller. He was wondering
whether Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An
undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine
habitation.

"Her great tragedy happened just three years ago," said the child; "that
would be since your sister's time."

"Her tragedy?" asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot
tragedies seemed out of place.

"You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October
afternoon," said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened
on to a lawn.

"It is quite warm for the time of the year," said Framton; "but has that
window got anything to do with the tragedy?"

"Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her
two young brothers went off for their day's shooting. They never came
back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they
were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been that
dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years
gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never recovered.
That was the dreadful part of it." Here the child's voice lost its self-
possessed note and became falteringly human. "Poor aunt always thinks
that they will come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that
was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they used to do.
That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is quite dusk.
Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her husband with
his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her youngest brother,
singing 'Bertie, why do you bound?' as he always did to tease her,
because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still,
quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will
all walk in through that window--"

She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when the
aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in
making her appearance.

"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.

"She has been very interesting," said Framton.

"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; "my
husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always
come in this way. They've been out for snipe in the marshes to-day, so
they'll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you men-folk,
isn't it?"

She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds,
and the prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely
horrible. He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to
turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his
hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes
were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond.
It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his
visit on this tragic anniversary.

"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental
excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical
exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread
delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the
least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure. "On
the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement," he continued.

"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the
last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention--but not
to what Framton was saying.

"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't
they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look
intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out
through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock
of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same
direction.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn
towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of
them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders.
A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they neared
the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: "I
said, Bertie, why do you bound?"

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-
drive, and the front gate were dimly-noted stages in his headlong
retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to
avoid an imminent collision.

"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming
in through the window; "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that
who bolted out as we came up?"

"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton; "could
only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye
or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."

"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly; "he told me he had
a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the
banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night
in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming
just above him. Enough to make anyone their nerve."

Romance at short notice was her speciality.




THE TREASURE SHIP


The great galleon lay in semi-retirement under the sand and weed and
water of the northern bay where the fortune of war and weather had long
ago ensconced it. Three and a quarter centuries had passed since the day
when it had taken the high seas as an important unit of a fighting
squadron--precisely which squadron the learned were not agreed. The
galleon had brought nothing into the world, but it had, according to
tradition and report, taken much out of it. But how much? There again
the learned were in disagreement. Some were as generous in their
estimate as an income-tax assessor, others applied a species of higher
criticism to the submerged treasure chests, and debased their contents to
the currency of goblin gold. Of the former school was Lulu, Duchess of
Dulverton.

The Duchess was not only a believer in the existence of a sunken treasure
of alluring proportions; she also believed that she knew of a method by
which the said treasure might be precisely located and cheaply
disembedded. An aunt on her mother's side of the family had been Maid of
Honour at the Court of Monaco, and had taken a respectful interest in the
deep-sea researches in which the Throne of that country, impatient
perhaps of its terrestrial restrictions, was wont to immerse itself. It
was through the instrumentality of this relative that the Duchess learned
of an invention, perfected and very nearly patented by a Monegaskan
savant, by means of which the home-life of the Mediterranean sardine
might be studied at a depth of many fathoms in a cold white light of more
than ball-room brilliancy. Implicated in this invention (and, in the
Duchess's eyes, the most attractive part of it) was an electric suction
dredge, specially designed for dragging to the surface such objects of
interest and value as might be found in the more accessible levels of the
ocean-bed. The rights of the invention were to be acquired for a matter
of eighteen hundred francs, and the apparatus for a few thousand more.
The Duchess of Dulverton was rich, as the world counted wealth; she
nursed the hope, of being one day rich at her own computation. Companies
had been formed and efforts had been made again and again during the
course of three centuries to probe for the alleged treasures of the
interesting galleon; with the aid of this invention she considered that
she might go to work on the wreck privately and independently. After
all, one of her ancestors on her mother's side was descended from Medina
Sidonia, so she was of opinion that she had as much right to the treasure
as anyone. She acquired the invention and bought the apparatus.

Among other family ties and encumbrances, Lulu possessed a nephew, Vasco
Honiton, a young gentleman who was blessed with a small income and a
large circle of relatives, and lived impartially and precariously on
both. The name Vasco had been given him possibly in the hope that he
might live up to its adventurous tradition, but he limited himself
strictly to the home industry of adventurer, preferring to exploit the
assured rather than to explore the unknown. Lulu's intercourse with him
had been restricted of recent years to the negative processes of being
out of town when he called on her, and short of money when he wrote to
her. Now, however, she bethought herself of his eminent suitability for
the direction of a treasure-seeking experiment; if anyone could extract
gold from an unpromising situation it would certainly be Vasco--of
course, under the necessary safeguards in the way of supervision. Where
money was in question Vasco's conscience was liable to fits of obstinate
silence.

Somewhere on the west coast of Ireland the Dulverton property included a
few acres of shingle, rock, and heather, too barren to support even an
agrarian outrage, but embracing a small and fairly deep bay where the
lobster yield was good in most seasons. There was a bleak little house
on the property, and for those who liked lobsters and solitude, and were
able to accept an Irish cook's ideas as to what might be perpetrated in
the name of mayonnaise, Innisgluther was a tolerable exile during the
summer months. Lulu seldom went there herself, but she lent the house
lavishly to friends and relations. She put it now at Vasco's disposal.

"It will be the very place to practise and experiment with the salvage
apparatus," she said; "the bay is quite deep in places, and you will be
able to test everything thoroughly before starting on the treasure hunt."

In less than three weeks Vasco turned up in town to report progress.

"The apparatus works beautifully," he informed his aunt; "the deeper one
got the clearer everything grew. We found something in the way of a
sunken wreck to operate on, too!"

"A wreck in Innisgluther Bay!" exclaimed Lulu.

"A submerged motor-boat, the _Sub-Rosa_," said Vasco.

"No! really?" said Lulu; "poor Billy Yuttley's boat. I remember it went
down somewhere off that coast some three years ago. His body was washed
ashore at the Point. People said at the time that the boat was capsized
intentionally--a case of suicide, you know. People always say that sort
of thing when anything tragic happens."

"In this case they were right," said Vasco.

"What do you mean?" asked the Duchess hurriedly. "What makes you think
so?"

"I know," said Vasco simply.

"Know? How can you know? How can anyone know? The thing happened three
years ago."

"In a locker of the _Sub-Rosa_ I found a water-tight strong-box. It
contained papers." Vasco paused with dramatic effect and searched for a
moment in the inner breast-pocket of his coat. He drew out a folded slip
of paper. The Duchess snatched at it in almost indecent haste and moved
appreciably nearer the fireplace.

"Was this in the _Sub-Rosa's_ strong-box?" she asked.

"Oh no," said Vasco carelessly, "that is a list of the well-known people
who would be involved in a very disagreeable scandal if the _Sub-Rosa's_
papers were made public. I've put you at the head of it, otherwise it
follows alphabetical order."

The Duchess gazed helplessly at the string of names, which seemed for the
moment to include nearly every one she knew. As a matter of fact, her
own name at the head of the list exercised an almost paralysing effect on
her thinking faculties.

"Of course you have destroyed the papers?" she asked, when she had
somewhat recovered herself. She was conscious that she made the remark
with an entire lack of conviction.

Vasco shook his head.

"But you should have," said Lulu angrily; "if, as you say, they are
highly compromising--"

"Oh, they are, I assure you of that," interposed the young man.

"Then you should put them out of harm's way at once. Supposing anything
should leak out, think of all these poor, unfortunate people who would be
involved in the disclosures," and Lulu tapped the list with an agitated
gesture.

"Unfortunate, perhaps, but not poor," corrected Vasco; "if you read the
list carefully you'll notice that I haven't troubled to include anyone
whose financial standing isn't above question."

Lulu glared at her nephew for some moments in silence. Then she asked
hoarsely: "What are you going to do?"

"Nothing--for the remainder of my life," he answered meaningly. "A
little hunting, perhaps," he continued, "and I shall have a villa at
Florence. The Villa Sub-Rosa would sound rather quaint and picturesque,
don't you think, and quite a lot of people would be able to attach a
meaning to the name. And I suppose I must have a hobby; I shall probably
collect Raeburns."

Lulu's relative, who lived at the Court of Monaco, got quite a snappish
answer when she wrote recommending some further invention in the realm of
marine research.




THE COBWEB


The farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as a matter of accident
or haphazard choice; yet its situation might have been planned by a
master-strategist in farmhouse architecture. Dairy and poultry-yard, and
herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed to lead by easy
access into its wide flagged haven, where there was room for everything
and where muddy boots left traces that were easily swept away. And yet,
for all that it stood so well in the centre of human bustle, its long,
latticed window, with the wide window-seat, built into an embrasure
beyond the huge fireplace, looked out on a wild spreading view of hill
and heather and wooded combe. The window nook made almost a little room
in itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as situation and
capabilities went. Young Mrs. Ladbruk, whose husband had just come into
the farm by way of inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner,
and her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz curtains
and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old china. The musty farm
parlour, looking out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within
high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily either to
comfort or decoration.

"When we are more settled I shall work wonders in the way of making the
kitchen habitable," said the young woman to her occasional visitors.
There was an unspoken wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed
as well as unspoken. Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm; jointly
with her husband she might have her say, and to a certain extent her way,
in ordering its affairs. But she was not mistress of the kitchen.

On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company with chipped sauce-
boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters, and paid bills, rested a worn and
ragged Bible, on whose front page was the record, in faded ink, of a
baptism dated ninety-four years ago. "Martha Crale" was the name written
on that yellow page. The yellow, wrinkled old dame who hobbled and
muttered about the kitchen, looking like a dead autumn leaf which the
winter winds still pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale;
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy. For longer than
anyone could remember she had pattered to and fro between oven and wash-
house and dairy, and out to chicken-run and garden, grumbling and
muttering and scolding, but working unceasingly. Emma Ladbruk, of whose
coming she took as little notice as she would of a bee wandering in at a
window on a summer's day, used at first to watch her with a kind of
frightened curiosity. She was so old and so much a part of the place, it
was difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing. Old Shep, the
white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for his time to die, seemed
almost more human than the withered, dried-up old woman. He had been a
riotous, roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was already
a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a blind, breathing carcase,
nothing more, and she still worked with frail energy, still swept and
baked and washed, fetched and carried. If there were something in these
wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with death, Emma used to think
to herself, what generations of ghost-dogs there must be out on those
hills, that Martha had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last good-
bye word to in that old kitchen. And what memories she must have of
human generations that had passed away in her time. It was difficult for
anyone, let alone a stranger like Emma, to get her to talk of the days
that had been; her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been
left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose feeding-time
was overdue, and the various little faults and lapses that chequer a
farmhouse routine. Now and again, when election time came round, she
would unstore her recollections of the old names round which the fight
had waged in the days gone by. There had been a Palmerston, that had
been a name down Tiverton way; Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow
flies, but to Martha it was almost a foreign country. Later there had
been Northcotes and Aclands, and many other newer names that she had
forgotten; the names changed, but it was always Libruls and Toories,
Yellows and Blues. And they always quarrelled and shouted as to who was
right and who was wrong. The one they quarrelled about most was a fine
old gentleman with an angry face--she had seen his picture on the walls.
She had seen it on the floor too, with a rotten apple squashed over it,
for the farm had changed its politics from time to time. Martha had
never been on one side or the other; none of "they" had ever done the
farm a stroke of good. Such was her sweeping verdict, given with all a
peasant's distrust of the outside world.

When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat faded away, Emma Ladbruk
was uncomfortably conscious of another feeling towards the old woman. She
was a quaint old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part and
parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once pathetic and
picturesque--but she was dreadfully in the way. Emma had come to the
farm full of plans for little reforms and improvements, in part the
result of training in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of
her own ideas and fancies. Reforms in the kitchen region, if those deaf
old ears could have been induced to give them even a hearing, would have
met with short shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region
spread over the zone of dairy and market business and half the work of
the household. Emma, with the latest science of dead-poultry dressing at
her finger-tips, sat by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed
the chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for nearly
fourscore years--all leg and no breast. And the hundred hints anent
effective cleaning and labour-lightening and the things that make for
wholesomeness which the young woman was ready to impart or to put into
action dropped away into nothingness before that wan, muttering,
unheeding presence. Above all, the coveted window corner, that was to be
a dainty, cheerful oasis in the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and
lumbered with a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal
authority, would not have dared or cared to displace; over them seemed to
be spun the protection of something that was like a human cobweb.
Decidedly Martha was in the way. It would have been an unworthy meanness
to have wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened by a few
paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was conscious that the wish
was there, disowned though it might be, lurking at the back of her mind.