Death Has No Tongue by Joan A. Cowdroy

Author:Joan A. Cowdroy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2019-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIII

Mr. Hyde returned to Innisfree on Tuesday evening in a thoroughly disturbed state of mind. He candidly acknowledged in public that, like the majority of authors, he was an essentially lazy person who hated the necessary drudgery of his profession, and therefore the very thought that his sister—good old Plain Jane, as he called her jokingly, on whose patient and loyal co-operation in his arrangements he had depended for years—should declare her activities at an end was enough to upset him profoundly. It meant, if she carried out her threat, the utter bouleversement of his life, the absolute finish of his present comfort and ease. But he could not believe that she was serious, that she would stand out against his expressed wishes when he put them forcibly before her. Probably the foul nuisance of this affair at the next house had got on her nerves and upset her mental balance for a time.

Well, he could understand that. No one could wish more than he did that the fuss the newspapers were making could be allowed to die down. How many hundreds of murders happened in England every year over which not a tithe of this shrieking outcry was raised? Dismissed with a couple of lines, most of them; yet over this one, which was so beastly upsetting by its closeness to his interests and home, the papers were spreading themselves as violently as if it were the wife of the Prime Minister who was the victim!

And as if the fact itself weren’t bad enough, here were the unsettling results of all this rotten publicity penetrating his home and making Ella—he must drop that nickname if it annoyed her—threaten to break up the established routine of years. But he’d have to take a firm line with Ella, point out that she stood to lose as much as he did by dropping what was practically her sole means of earning her livelihood. He could not let her carry out such a senseless piece of folly. She’d have to be brought to see that. He’d have to make her see that this evening.

But his proposed talk with his sister was not too easy to arrange. While he ate the cold supper that was laid ready for him in the sitting-room Ella stayed in the garden pottering about in the walk with that queer little Chinese gardener who seemed to haunt the premises these days. She was watching him cut those white lilies that she adored so, by Jove! Every mortal stem of them? What on earth for? For a wild second he wondered if Ella’s brain were turned! Then a feasible explanation dawned on him, and he chuckled wryly. No doubt there was some festival on at the church and she was sending them down for decoration purposes. Yes, that must be it, for the fellow was trotting away at last, with his arms full of great white sheaves. Now, if Ella would come in. . . . But Eliza entered with his sweets—no use spoiling a perfect meal like this by argument.

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