The Terriford mystery

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

And now let us concentrate on a little group of people in the pavilion, all obviously quite at ease with one another, and all bent on making the most of a memorable occasion. Very ordinary folk they are, typical inhabitants of almost any English village.

First, in order of precedence—the rector and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Cole-Wright, he kindly and far from clever, facts which make him popular, his wife clever and not over kindly, and therefore far less popular.

Then come Dr. and Mrs. Maclean. The wise physician, whose fame goes far beyond the confines of his practice, has snatched a day off from his busy life in order to be present at the closing scenes of the great match. Both he and his wife are Scotch, but they have lived for fifteen years very happily in this typical English village. They are a closely united couple, and the one lack in their joint life has lately been satisfied by their adoption of Mrs. Maclean’s niece, Jean Bower, an attractive, cheerful-looking, happy girl whose first introduction to the neighbourhood is taking place to-day in Harry Garlett’s cricket pavilion. Jean is only twenty-one, but she is not an idle girl. It is known that she did good work during the last part of the war, and she has lately been made secretary to the Etna China Company of which Harry Garlett is managing director.

As to the other people there, they include Colonel Brackbury, the Governor of Grendon Prison, his sharp-featured wife and two pretty daughters; Mr. Toogood, chief lawyer in Grendon, with his wife and daughter; Dr. Tasker, one of the few bachelors in the neighbourhood; and, last but not least in that little group who are all on intimate terms with one another, and whose affairs are constantly discussed in secret by their humble neighbours, is Mary Prince, true type of that peculiarly English genus unkindly called “old maid.”

Miss Prince is at once narrow-minded and tolerant, mean and generous, wickedly malicious, while yet, in a sense, exceedingly kind-hearted. Perhaps because her father was Dr. Maclean’s predecessor the village folk consult her concerning their ailments, grave and trifling, more often than they do the doctor himself.

There is one dark spot in the life of Harry Garlett. His devoted wife, to whom as an actual fact the whole of Terriford village belongs—or did belong till she made it over to him—is an invalid. Many months have gone by since she left the upper floor of the delightful Georgian manor house, which owes its unsuitable name of the Thatched House to the fact that it was built on the site of a medieval thatched building.

The Thatched House is a childless house, and Harry Garlett, though on the best of terms with his invalid wife, is constantly away, at any rate during the summer months, playing cricket here, there, and everywhere, all over England. So Agatha Cheale, Mrs. Garlett’s housekeeper, who is known to be a kinswoman of her employer, plays the part of hostess in the cricket pavilion. Even so, as the day wears on Miss Cheale disappears unobtrusively two or three times in order to see if Mrs. Garlett is comfortable and also to give her news of the cricket match and especially news of how Mr. Garlett is acquitting himself. Everything that concerns her husband is of deep moment to Mrs. Garlett, and she is exceedingly proud of his fame as a cricketer.

On this, the second day of the great match, the Australians have been set to make 234 runs in their second innings for victory. When the teams go in for lunch there are few, even among those to whom the finer shades of the game are as a sealed book, who doubt that they will do it pretty easily.

The pitch has worn wonderfully well, and Garlett feels a thrill of delight when he sees it roll out as true and plumb as on the first day. He thinks with intense satisfaction of all the patient care that he has devoted to this ground, of all the cunning devices of drainage lying hid beneath the level turf, and of the scientific treatment with which he has nursed the turf up to this acme of condition. Ah, money can do much, but money alone couldn’t have done that. He wants to win the match, but he emphatically does not want to owe victory to any defect of the pitch.

In such happy mood does Garlett lead his team out into the field after lunch, and the Australians start, full of confidence. But somehow, even from the beginning, they seem to find runs hard to get, harder than in their first knock.