WE SEEK "THE REFUGE"
We (Mr. Jessop and I) drove slowly to the first post-office.
There we both alighted. And I in my impatience fairly flung myself against the long counter with its wirework screen that fenced off the post-office girls.
They stared curiously at the anxious-looking young woman in black and the grey-clad, unmistakably American young man, who both at once began to make inquiries about a certain telegram which had been handed in there at half-past seven o'clock the evening before.
"Are you the person to whom the telegram was addressed?" one of the girls asked almost suspiciously.
"Yes. I am Miss Smith. You see! Here is an envelope addressed to me at the Hotel Cecil," I said, feverishly producing that envelope (it belonged to Mr. Brace's last note to me). "Can you tell me who handed in this message?"
"I couldn't, I'm sure," said the girl who had spoken suspiciously. "I was off last evening before six."
"Can you tell me who was here?" I demanded, fuming at the delay.
The girls seemed blissfully unaware that this was a matter of life and death to me.
"Miss Carfax was here, I believe," volunteered one of the other girls, in the "parcels" division of the long counter.
I asked eagerly: "Which is Miss Carfax, please?"
"Just gone to her lunch," the two girls replied at once. "Won't be back until two o'clock."
"Oh, dear!" I fretted. Then a third girl spoke up.
"Let's have a look at that wire, dear, will you?" she said to the parcels girl. "I think I remember Miss Carfax taking this in. Yes. That's right. 'Why ever don't you send my clothes, Miss Million?' I remember us passing the remark afterwards what an uncommon name 'Million' was."
"Oh, do you! How splendid!" I said, all eagerness at once. "Then you remember the young lady who telegraphed?"
"Yes——"
"A small, rather stumpy young lady," I pursued. "Nice-looking, with bright grey eyes and black hair? She was dressed in a cerise evening frock with a——"
The post-office girl shook her head behind the wire screen.
"No; that wasn't the one."
"How stupid of me; no, of course, she wouldn't be still wearing the evening frock," I amended hastily. "But she was dark-haired, and short——"
Again the post-office girl shook her head.
"Shouldn't call her short," she said. "Taller than me."
"Dark, though," I insisted. "Black hair."
"Oh, no," said the post-office girl decidedly. "That wasn't her. Red hair. Distinctly red."
"Are you sure," I said, in dismay, "that you haven't made a mistake?"
"Oh, no," said the post-office girl, still more decidedly. "I've seen her about, often. I know the colour of her hair. You know, Daisy," turning to another of the girls, "that one from the 'Refuge.'"
"There's so many from the 'Refuge' come in here," said the maddening girl she had called Daisy.
"Yes, but you know the one. Rather strikingly dressed always. Lots of scent, makes herself up. Her with the hair. The one we call 'Autumn Tints.'"
"'Autumn Tints'—oh, yes, I know her——"
"Yes, we know her," chorused the other girls, while I fidgeted, crumpling Million's baffling wire in my hand. "That's the lady who sent off the telegram. I couldn't be mistaken."
Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, at my side, interposed.
"Well, now, will you young ladies be so kind as to tell us where she resides? The 'Refuge'—what'll that be?"
We had, it seemed, still some distance to go. We must take the road that went so, then turn to the right, then to the left again. Then about a mile further down we'd see a red brick house in a clump of trees, with a big garden and green palings on to the road. It had "The Refuge" painted up on a board nailed to a big oak tree in the garden. We shouldn't be able to mistake it, said the girls.
"Certainly you won't mistake it if you see any of the 'Refugees' in the garden when you come up," hazarded the most talkative of the post-office girls.
"It's a case of 'Once seen, never to be forgotten,' there!"
As we went out of the office I found myself wondering more and more anxiously what all this might mean. What sort of a place had Million got herself into the middle of?
"What do you think it all means?" I turned again appealingly to the young man who was driving me.
He shook his grey-hatted head. His face was rather graver than before.
Mercy! What were we going to find? What did he think? Evidently he wasn't going to tell me.
Only when we got clear of the straggling outskirts of Lewes he crammed on speed. Up the gradual hills we flew between the bare shoulders of the downs where the men and horses working in the fields afar off looked as small as mechanical toys. The whole country was gaunt and gigantic, and a little frightening, to me. Perhaps this was because my nerves were already utterly overstrained and anxious. I could see no beauty in the wideswept Sussex landscape, with the little obsolete-looking villages set down here and there, like a child's building of bricks, in the midst of a huge carpet.
There seemed to me something uncanny and ominous in the tinkling of the sheep-bells that the fresh breeze allowed to drift to our ears.
On we whizzed, and by what miracle we escaped police-traps I do not know.... We took the turns of our directions, and at last I heard a short, relieved sort of exclamation from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop.
"Here we are. This'll be it, I guess." For here were the dark-green towers of elms set back from the road. A red roof and old-fashioned chimney-stacks showed among them. There was a garden in front, with tall Mary-lilies and pink-and-white phlox and roses and carnations and thrift that grew down to the palings.
And close up beside those palings there was drawn a pale-blue car that I knew well—too well!
It was the car with the silver-winged Victory as mascot! The car in which we'd been followed and shadowed for so much of our journey by the Honourable Jim Burke.
He was here, then! He was before us!
What had he to do with the "Refuge"?
Sounds of singing greeted us as we left the car, pushed open the green-palinged gate, and walked up the pebbled path between the flower-beds of the garden. Some one behind the lilac bushes was singing, in a very clear, touching voice, a snatch of the ballad: "Oh, ye'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road, and I'll be in Scotland before ye...."
A turn in the garden path brought us full upon the singer. A wonderful apparition indeed she was! As tall as any woman I had seen (excepting the long-limbed cobra-lady), and the June sun shone on a head of hair that was as bright as a bed of marigolds—red hair, but not all the same kind of red. It was long and loose in the breeze, and it fell to the singer's waist in a shower of red-gold, covering her face and hiding most of her bodice, which appeared to be a sort of flimsy muslin dressing-jacket. Her skirt was very makeshift and of brown holland. The stockings she wore were white thread, and her shoes were just navy-blue felt bedroom slippers, with jaeger turn-overs to them. In fact, her whole appearance was négligée in the extreme. Who—what could she be? She looked a cross between a mermaid and a scarecrow. She was holding one hank of red-gold out against her arm, as a shop assistant measures silk, and she crunched along the garden path, still singing in that delicious voice: "But I and my true love will never meet again, on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond!" Blinded by her hair and the stream of sunlight, she nearly walked straight into us before she discovered that there was any one there on the path at all.
"I beg your pardon," began Mr. Hiram P. Jessop with his usual politeness. "Could you inform us——"
The singing mermaid gave a little "ow" of consternation, and tossed back some of the hair from her face.
It was a disappointing sight, rather, for what we saw was a round, full-mooney, rather foolish face, with a large pink mouth, but no other definite features. The eyes were pale blue, the cheeks were paler pink, and the eyebrows and eyelashes looked as if they had been washed away in a shower of rain.
Altogether, a thoroughly weird apparition it was who stared at us, and giggled, and said, in a very Cockney accent: "Oh, good Gollywog! another man! There's no getting away from them in this place this morning. And there was I thinking I had found a quiet spot to dry my hair in!"
"I am very sorry to intrude," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop in his most courteous voice. "Could you inform me, Madam, if this is the house they call The Refuge?"
"That's right," said the woman with the hair. And I found myself suddenly wondering if she were the lady that those post-office girls had nicknamed "Autumn Tints."
It was most appropriate, with those reds and golds and bronzes of the hair that must have been sufficiently striking had it not been "treated" with henna, as it had.
So I said eagerly, and without further preamble: "Oh, then, could you tell me if Miss Million is here?"
"I couldn't, dear, really," said the woman, who looked all washed-out excepting her hair. "There is such a lot of them that keep coming and going here! Like a blessed beehive, isn't it? Bothered if I can keep track of all their names!"
She paused a moment before she went on.
"Miss Million—now which would she be?"
I felt a chill of despair creeping over my heart.
What did she mean by saying that "so many of them" kept coming and going in this place?
This, combined with the comments of those post-office girls at Lewes, awoke in my mind one terrifying conclusion. This place with the peaceful garden and the pretty name——! There was something uncanny about it.... This place was a lunatic asylum!
Yes, I did not see what else on earth it could possibly be! And then this woman with the vacuous face and the wild hair, and still wilder kind of attire, she, without doubt, was one of the patients!
What in the world was my poor little Million doing in this galley, provided she was here at all?
And who brought her here? And what was the Honourable Jim's car doing out there? Could he have been so disgraceful as to have got her brought here for the purpose of rescuing her himself, and of earning her undying gratitude as well as the riches of her uncle? Oh, what a horrible trick....
Rather than that I felt that I would gladly see the money all go over to Miss Million's cousin! That big young man stood there looking as puzzled as I did, glancing doubtfully, almost apprehensively, at the woman with the wild attire.
I attacked her again, with more firmness this time.
"I think Miss Million must be here," I said. "She sent me a telegram, and they told me at the post-office place that it was——"
"Oh! her that sent the telegram, was it? That's the young lady you want? I know, I took the telegram myself," said the woman with the autumn-foliage hair. "It was a girl who turned up here with nothing but an evening gown and a light coat the day before yesterday; a dark girl, short."
"That would be the one," I cried with the utmost eagerness. "Is she——Oh, is she still here?"
"She's here, all right," said the woman with the hair. "My word! She wasn't half in a paddy, I can tell you, because she could not get her maid or whoever it was to send down her things from London. Nothing but what she stood up in, and having to borrow, and no one with a thing to fit her! She is here, all right!" Relieved, but not completely relieved until I should have heard more of Million's adventures, I said: "I am her maid. I have brought down her things. Would you be so kind as to tell me where I should find Miss Million?"
"She will be in the house, having her dinner now," said the poor red-haired lunatic quite kindly. "You will excuse me coming in with you myself, dear, won't you? There is a strange gentleman in there come in that other car, and I have not had time to go and get myself dressed yet. I made sure I should have all the morning to myself to get my hair done. Such a time it does take me," she added, shaking it out with an air of vanity, and, indeed, she had something to be vain of. "It isn't everybody I like to see me like this. I am never one to be careless about my appearance when there are gentlemen about. They never think any more of a girl" (poor creature, she was at least forty) "for things of that kind. I am sure I had no more idea that there was another gentleman coming in, and me with my hair like this! Of course, as I always say, well! it's my own hair! Not like some girls that have to have a haystack on their heads before they're fit to look at, as well as a switch all round...."
It really seemed as if she was going on with this "mildly mental" chatter for as long as we chose to listen.
So I gave one glance at Miss Million's cousin, meaning, "Shall we go?" He nodded gravely back at me. Then, leaving the red-haired lunatic on the path, shaking her tresses in the sun, we went on between the lilac bushes with their undergrowth of lilies and stocks and pinks until we came to the house.
The house was a regular Sussex farm sort of looking place that had evidently been turned into a more modern dwelling-house place. There were bright red curtains at all the white-sashed windows, which were wide open. There were window-boxes with lobelia and canary-creeper and geraniums. As I say, all the windows were flung wide open, and from out of them I heard issuing such a babble of mixed noises as I don't think I had ever heard since I was last in the parrot-house at the Zoo. There were shrill voices talking; there was clattering of knives and forks against crockery. These sounds alternated with such bursts of unrestrained laughter that now I was perfectly certain that my suspicion outside in the garden had been a correct one. Yes! This place could be nothing but some institution for the mentally afflicted.
And this—and this was where Million had been spirited off to!
Setting my teeth, and without another glance at the increasingly grave face of my companion, I ran up the two shallow stone steps to the big open front door, and rang the bell. The tinkling of it was quite drowned by the bursts of hysterical merriment that was issuing from the door on the left of us.
"They can't hear us through that Bedlam," was Mr. Jessop's very appropriate comment. "See here, Miss Smith, as it appears to be mostly ladies I shan't be wanted, I guess. Supposing you go easy into the porch and knock on that door while I wait out here on the steps?"
This I did.
I knocked hard in my desperation. No answer but fresh bursts of laughter, fresh volumes of high-pitched talk. Suddenly I seemed to catch through it a deep-voiced masculine murmur with an intonation that I knew—the caressing Irish inflection of Mr. James Burke.
"What divilment is he up to now, I wonder?" I thought exasperatedly, and my annoyance at the very thought of that man nerved me to knock really peremptorily on the sturdy panels of the door.
Then at last I got an answer.
"Don't stand knocking there like an idiot, come in," shrieked the highest-pitched of all the parrot voices. Giving myself a mental shake, in I went.
I found myself in a big brown distempered room, with a long white table running down the centre of it. The place seemed full to overflowing with two elements—one, the overpowering smell of dinner, i. e., pork and greens and boiled potatoes, and stout; two, a crowd of girls and women who looked to me absolutely numberless. They were all more or less pretty, these girlish faces. And they were all turned to me with wide-open eyes and parted lips. Out of this sea of faces there appeared to be just two that I recognised as I gazed round. One was the laughing, devil-may-care face of the Honourable Jim, who sat with a long peg glass in front of him, at the bottom of the table.