Miss Arnott's Marriage

by Richard Marsh

"What can Mrs Plummer have been doing? She appears to have been preparing for a flitting. And where can she be? She seems to have undressed. Those are her clothes, and there's the dress she wore at dinner. She can't be in such a state of déshabille as those things seem to suggest; and yet-- I don't think I'll wait till she comes back. I wonder if she's left that book lying about. If I can find it I'll sneak off at once, and tell her all about it in the morning."

On a table in the centre was piled up a heterogeneous and disorderly collection of odds and ends. Miss Arnott glanced at it to see if among the miscellanea was the volume she was seeking. She saw that a book which looked like it was lying underneath what seemed to be a number of old letters. She picked it up, removing the letters to enable her to do so. One or two of the papers fell on to the floor. She stooped to pick them up. The first was a photograph. Her eyes lighted on it, half unwittingly; but, having lighted on it, they stayed.

The room seemed all at once to be turning round her. She was conscious of a sense of vertigo, as if suddenly something had happened to her brain. For some seconds she was obsessed by a conviction that she was the victim of an optical delusion, that what she supposed herself to see was, in reality, a phantom of her imagination. How long this condition continued she never knew. But it was only after a perceptible interval of time that she began to comprehend that she deluded herself by supposing herself to be under a delusion, that what she had only imagined she saw, she actually did see. It was the sudden shock which had caused that feeling of curious confusion. The thing was plain enough.

She was holding in her hand the photograph of her husband--Robert Champion. The more she looked at it the stronger the conviction became. There was not a doubt of it. The portrait had probably been taken some years ago, when the man was younger; but that it was her husband she was certain. She was hardly likely to make a mistake on a point of that kind. But, in the name of all that was inexplicable, what was Robert Champion's photograph doing here?

She glanced at another of the articles she had dropped. It was another portrait of the same man, apparently taken a little later. There was a third--a smaller one. In it he wore a yachting cap. Although he was no yachting man--so far as she knew he had never been on the sea in his life; but it was within her knowledge that it was a fashion in headgear for which he had had, as she deemed, a most undesirable predilection. He had worn one when he had taken her for their honeymoon to Margate; anyone looking less like a seaman than he did in it, she thought she had never seen. In a fourth photograph Robert Champion was sitting in a chair with his arm round Mrs Plummer's waist; she standing at his side with her hand upon his shoulder. She was obviously many years older than the man in the chair; but she could not have looked more pleased, either with herself or with him.

What did it mean?--what could it mean?--those photographs in Mrs Plummer's room?

Returning to the first at which she had glanced, the girl saw that the name was scrawled across the right-hand bottom corner, which had hitherto been hidden by her thumb, in a hand which set her heart palpitating with a sense of startled recognition. "Douglas Plummer." The name was unmistakable in its big, bombastic letters; but what did he mean by scrawling "Douglas Plummer" at the bottom of his own photograph? She suddenly remembered having seen a visiting card of Mrs Plummer's on which her name had been inscribed "Mrs Douglas Plummer." What did it mean?

On the back of the photograph in which the man and the woman had been taken together she found that there was written--she knew the writing to be Mrs Plummer's--"Taken on our honeymoon."

When she saw that Miss Arnott rose to her feet--for the first time since she had stooped to pick up the odds and ends which she had dropped--and laughed. It was so very funny. Again she closely examined the pair in the picture and the sentence on the back. There could be no doubt as to their identity; none as to what the sentence said, nor as to the hand by which it had been penned. But on whose honeymoon had it been taken? What did it mean?

There came to her a feeling that this was a matter in which inquiries should be made at once. She had forgotten altogether the errand which had brought her there; she was overlooking everything in the strength of her desire to learn, in the shortest possible space of time, what was the inner meaning of these photographs which she was holding in her hand. She saw the letters which she had disturbed to get at the book beneath. In the light of the new discoveries she had made, even at that distance she recognised the caligraphy in which they were written. She snatched them up; they were in a bundle, tied round with a piece of pink baby ribbon. To use a sufficiently-expressive figure of speech, the opening line of the first "hit her in the face,"--"My darling Agatha."