The Oldest Flame (4 page)

In a few moments Mark’s eyelashes flickered,
and he moved one arm slightly. He coughed, turning on one side with
the convulsive motion, and then lay still for a moment, blinking
dazedly up at the flaming spectacle that towered over them.

His eyes found Mrs. Meade’s face bending
solicitously above him, and he made a confused effort at speech.
“Where—what did I—”

“You’re all right, dear. You were overcome by
the smoke—Mr. Emery had to carry you out.”

“And Rose—and Mother—”

“They’re safe.”

Mark gave a bitter laugh, which turned into a
strangled cough. He tipped his head back and shut his eyes. “My
grand chance!” he said thickly. “It couldn’t have been planned any
better. And all I do is get made a fool of—again.”

A loud crack from somewhere overhead made
Mrs. Meade look up. There were shouts from over near the house and
several men dashed out from the front door as if pursued—in the
brief second her glance went in their direction Mrs. Meade thought
she recognized Steven Emery among them. A broad sheet of flame went
up from the corner of the roof immediately above Miss Parrish’s
room. With a hundred smaller flames flicking out from it in all
directions, the section of roof sank slowly inwards in a seething
mass of cinders, and then finally went down with a rush as that
whole side of the top story collapsed with a fiery crash.

* * *

On the following morning, when the sun’s
earliest rays were not yet warm enough to dry the dew from the
grass, a buckboard drove up to one of the houses on the slope of
the hill and stopped, and a man with a large battered hat and a
large grey moustache got down and looked about for somewhere to tie
the team.

Mrs. Meade stood looking out of an upstairs
window, clad in a black silk dress that did not fit her too well—a
hasty loan from the neighbor who had opened her home to a portion
of the Lansburys’ guests; a lady whose name Mrs. Meade could not
even remember. The black dress made her face, already a little
paler than usual, look tired and older as she gazed down toward the
mist-shrouded bend in the road beyond which the tragedy had taken
place. But when the rattle of the approaching buckboard attracted
her attention and she looked down to see the driver descend, she
gave an inadvertent little exclamation and left the window to go
downstairs and meet him.

Sheriff Andrew Royal was already in the hall
when she reached it, his hat in his hand and his coarse grey hair
looking a little more unkempt than usual, as if he had gotten out
of bed to come. He cleared his throat twice in a businesslike way
before speaking.

“I heard you were up here,” he said gruffly,
“so I came up to see if there was—anything I could (erhm!) do for
you.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. Meade.
She was more touched than she could very well express without
terribly embarrassing the gruff sheriff. She had not expected it of
him to come all this way just to see that she was all right.

There was a short pause. “It’s all so
dreadful,” said Mrs. Meade. “That poor Miss Parrish—I can’t help
feeling there ought to have been
something
I could have
done.”

“That the woman who was killed?” said Royal.
Mrs. Meade nodded. Andrew Royal gave a brief, decisive shake of the
head. “Whoever’s fault it was, it couldn’t have been yours.”

He inspected the brim of his hat, then
cleared his throat grimly again. “You’re sure there isn’t anything
I can do?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, there is,” said
Mrs. Meade, whose practical side never deserted her for long. “At
the first alarm last night I threw my satchel out of the window. If
you have a moment, you might go round back of where the house was
and see if by any chance it escaped the flames. I felt—it would be
rather insensitive to ask anyone connected with the house to do
it.”

Royal looked surprised, but acquiesced
willingly enough. Perhaps he had not expected such a literal
acceptance of his offer, but since his idea of “doing something” to
help was very vague indeed, it may have been better for him that he
was asked for a favor he could easily perform.

No sooner had he gone out than Mrs. Meade
heard another familiar voice speaking in the entryway to the maid
who answered the door, and a moment later Mrs. Lansbury came in.
She, like Mrs. Meade, was attired in borrowed clothes, and the dark
shadows under her eyes betrayed how dreadfully she had been tried
over the past twelve hours.

She greeted Mrs. Meade quietly, with a quick
clasp of her hand. “How are all of you here?” she asked.

“The others are still in bed,” said Mrs.
Meade. “Mrs. Grey’s nerves are quite in pieces, and poor little
Rose is just worn out.”

“Then I had better not disturb them,” said
Mrs. Lansbury.

“And Mark?”

Mrs. Lansbury drew a slightly unsteady
breath, but managed a smile. “He’s fine. He was a little bit shaken
up, so I’ve made him stay in bed too.” She added in a lower tone,
“I can only thank God it—wasn’t worse.”

She turned abruptly and walked across the
room. “And yet how can I feel thankful for anything, or begin to
regret anything—with Eloisa dead in this way. I feel I ought not to
be able to even
think
of anything else.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself for that,” said
Mrs. Meade firmly.

Mrs. Lansbury shook her head. “It was in my
home, it was I who asked her here; it was—” She paused, and bit her
lip. “It was my responsibility.”

After a few moments of silence, Mrs. Meade
said, “Have you lost—everything?”

“Very nearly everything, yes,” said Mrs.
Lansbury with a sigh. “The men moved out a few pieces of furniture
from downstairs, but the rest is gone. I caught up my little
jewel-case on my way out of my room. But the earrings I wore last
evening I’d laid down on my bureau instead of putting them in the
case, so they’re gone too—and I feel such a fool for even thinking
of them at all.” She drew herself up a bit more resolutely. “The
house doesn’t matter so much. We’re insured—rather well insured—so
we won’t suffer in the long run. It’s only the family keepsakes and
valuables that can’t be replaced that one regrets.”

She added, “Mr. Emery has been very kind and
helpful. He’s gone to telegraph to Denver for me…and he is going to
attend to the funeral arrangements.”

Before Mrs. Meade could reply, there was an
explosion of sound in the entryway—loud footsteps and voices, and
then Andrew Royal strode into the room, a somewhat singed carpetbag
in his hand and his moustache bristling.

“If I had any patience,” he said, “I wouldn’t
spend it on a stiff-backed, mule-headed windbag like this one!
Where’s his right, I’d like to know!”

“Why, Andrew! Is something the matter?” said
Mrs. Meade.

Royal huffed with immense scorn. “I’ll say
there is. I went round to look for your bag like you asked, and I
found it, stuck in a bush outside of the ashes. Just as I was
pulling it out, a fellow pops up from nowhere and asks me what I
think I’m doing. I tell him it’s none of his business” (Mrs. Meade
could picture this exchange quite vividly) “but I’m taking the bag
to the lady it belongs to. This fellow doesn’t believe me and says
he won’t let me off with it till he does. And he announces his
intentions to stick to me like Missouri mud until it gets proved to
him that it
does
belong to a lady, and that the lady exists
at all!” Royal came to a stop, hot, red, and out of breath.

“But who was he?” said Mrs. Lansbury. “This
sounds extraordinary. What was he doing around our house—and why
should he be so concerned about the bag?”

“He’s out there,” said Sheriff Royal, jerking
a thumb over his shoulder toward the entry. “Had to bring him up
here—only way I could shake him off, short of arresting him. Here,
you—get in here!”

He stomped back through the door and prodded
into the ladies’ presence, much to their astonishment, the
dignified butler who had waited upon the Lansburys’ table at dinner
the evening before.

The butler was a broad-shouldered,
heavily-built man of no great height, with short-cropped hair
thinning on the top of his head. At the moment he was a shade less
dignified than usual, bearing a suspicious spark in his eye and the
general air of simmering wrath that most people exhibited following
a dispute with Andrew Royal.

“Why, Chalmers!” said Mrs. Lansbury, too
surprised to think of anything else to say.

“Yes, ma’am,” said (or rather retorted)
Chalmers.

Sheriff Royal pointed at Mrs. Meade. “You see
this lady?”

Chalmers nodded.

“You recognize her?”

Another short nod. “A guest at the
Lansburys’.”

“This is Mrs. Lansbury,” Mrs. Meade
interposed for Royal’s benefit, with an indicative gesture.

The sheriff nodded. “Right. And this is the
lady that belongs to this bag. D’you recognize the bag, Mrs.
Meade?”

“Yes, that is mine.”

“It’s yours?” said Chalmers rather
suspiciously.

“Certainly.”

“Satisfied?” demanded Royal.

Chalmers looked slightly disgruntled, but
indicated that he was.

He turned and addressed Mrs. Lansbury. “I beg
pardon for causing a commotion, ma’am. But when I see a strange
gentleman removing a bag from your premises in a suspicious manner,
I’m naturally bound to see that there’s nothing wrong about it,
aren’t I?”

“Yes—quite naturally, Chalmers,” said Mrs.
Lansbury rather faintly. “You may go now.”

Chalmers bowed with all his accustomed
dignity and withdrew, without a glance for Sheriff Royal (who had
nearly had an apoplectic fit at the words “a suspicious
manner”).

When the front door had closed, betokening
that the butler was definitely out of earshot, the sheriff
exploded. “Natural my foot! I’ll be keeping my eye on that fellow,
I can tell you that!” He appeared to recollect the presence of the
carpetbag in his hand for the first time, and thumped it down on
the seat of a nearby chair. “If you ask me,
he’s
the most
likely one to suspect.”

“Suspect! Suspect him of what?” said Mrs.
Meade.

“Good Lord, what do you suppose I’m here
for?” said Andrew Royal crossly.

Mrs. Meade heard a quick intake of breath
before Mrs. Lansbury spoke. “Do you mean that there is
something—”

Royal, who abhorred anything like a “scene,”
interrupted her brusquely, determined to diffuse any vestige of
suspense or drama that might lead to such. “A couple of the men who
helped fight that fire saw some things that struck them as funny.
They talked it over and decided to call me in to take a look at
it.”

A chill ran through Mrs. Meade. “They think
the fire was deliberately set?”

Royal spoke brusquely. “When there’s bonfires
built up in the corners of a room made out of the books off the
shelves and the cushions off the sofas, it doesn’t exactly look
like an accident.”

* * *

Sheriff Andrew Royal never wasted any time in
getting down to business once fairly launched on an investigation.
He attacked any possible witnesses with a promptitude and
efficiency that frequently left them gasping as if a tornado had
hit them. In consequence of this, shortly after noon Mrs. Meade
received a frantic summons upstairs to the bedroom from which Mrs.
Grey had not yet emerged, and guessed quite accurately the reason
why.

Mrs. Grey was in bed still, half propped up
against the pillows, with nervous eyes and anxiously drawn forehead
and hands that could not keep still upon the coverlet. When she saw
Mrs. Meade she stretched out a hand to her in a distressed way, and
Mrs. Meade took it reassuringly in both of her own as she sat down
on the edge of the bed. Rose, who had brought Mrs. Meade the
message from her mother, closed the bedroom door and came to stand
by the foot with her arm linked around the bedpost.

“Letitia, what on earth is going
on
?”
implored Mrs. Grey. “There was a sheriff up here a little while
ago, and he was asking us all sorts of questions about the
fire—where we were when it started, and who we saw, and—everything.
What does he mean by it?”

“It isn’t anything to do with you, really,”
said Mrs. Meade; “he is only questioning anyone who happened to be
in the house.”

“But why? What is it all about?”

Mrs. Meade hesitated just a little, choosing
her words carefully in her desire to be truthful without
distressing Mrs. Grey any further. Evasion was worth nothing, but
she wished to make the affair sound as insignificant as possible.
“He is only trying to discover just how the fire started. Some of
the men who helped to fight it were puzzled by the way things
looked downstairs, so the sheriff wants to clear the matter up
directly.”

She was looking at the other woman’s face as
she spoke, and saw that Mrs. Grey, in spite of her nerves, could
still understand what this meant. A look of amazement momentarily
overcame the fearfulness in her eyes. “Do you mean—they think the
fire was not an accident?”

“From what I understand, yes.”

“But—why would anyone want to
start
a
fire?” said Rose.

“I don’t know, dear. Let us just hope the
sheriff will be able to find that out soon. At any rate, I don’t
think he will be troubling you again.” Mrs. Meade gave her friend’s
hand another comforting pat before she released it and stood up.
“If there is anything else you need, be sure to call me. I won’t be
far away.”

“Yes—yes, of course,” said Mrs. Grey, who
seemed to be thinking of something else, her troubled eyes
wandering about the room. “I will. Thank you very much, Letitia.”
She looked back up at Mrs. Meade and managed a tired smile.

Rose accompanied Mrs. Meade to the door and
opened it for her. Mrs. Meade paused in the doorway, and looked
back toward the bed.