The Mystery at Stowe. Vernon Loder

Barley was fat, and fat-pursed. Rumour had it that he was extremely vulgar, but he was in reality a good-natured man who had not enjoyed a decent education, and was well aware of it. By sedulous cultivation he had picked up all his aitches, and learned to swallow those unnecessary ones that occasionally rose to his lips. He liked society, and though he never ranged in the higher branches, he was able to fill his house with decent people of the upper middle-classes, who could enjoy his hospitality without feeling or showing too open scorn for the humble upbringing of their host. Some of the younger guests did indeed call him ‘Old Barley,’ but most of them liked him, and some were not averse from accepting the tips he gave them with regard to finance.

      At the moment when Mrs Gailey and Miss Sayers were playing a game of billiards, the house had only a few guests. Chief among them was Elaine Gurdon. Single, handsome, known as the heroine of an expedition into the wilds of Patagonia, and an enterprise which had penetrated the Chaco, she was sufficiently famous to secure a pretty regular place in the photographic galleries of the illustrated weeklies, and the chairmanship of gatherings at women’s clubs, when travel was the topic.

      Associated with her, occasionally in scandal of an ill-natured kind, which had originated in his offer to finance her next trip, was Edward Tollard. He was thirty years of age, a vital, good-looking fellow, fond of exercise and all open-air sports, and a junior partner in a banking firm. He came of a family that had enjoyed money for several generations, a kin that was neither bookish nor artistic, and his marriage, three years before, to Margery the daughter of Gellis, the impressionist artist, had surprised most of his friends.

      Those who set store by Old Masters said that Margery was a Botticelli come to life; others said she had never really come to life at all. She was pretty, in a pale way, with very fair hair, blue eyes, a sensitive mouth, a long oval face. She looked excessively fragile, though she was rarely ill, and was in every way a strong contrast to her athletic husband.

      There were also in the house, the two billiard players; a Mr and Mrs Head, who were inseparable, and had only one thought between them—bridge. Last came Ortho Haine, a young fellow who was much nicer than his unusual Christian name; and a little old lady reputed cousin to Mr Barley, called Minever. Mrs Gailey’s husband was coming down for the week-end with several other people.

      It is perhaps the fate of Botticellis come to life to look reproachful in a gentle way. That set of countenance in Margery Tollard, combined with the fact that her husband was proposing to finance Elaine Gurdon’s next trip into the wilds, had given rise to gossip.

      Margery did not hunt, or go out with the guns in the season; she did not care for walking, or yachting, or games. Her function in life was ornamental. She pleased the artists, and made sportsmen furious. This necessarily made a kind of breach between her and her husband, not an open breach it seemed. But, as he needed exercise and enjoyed it, there were a good many days when they were apart.

      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!’

       CHAPTER II

       WHAT