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<h2>CHAPTER XXV THE STORY OF MARY GRAINGER</h2> At White Towers we found the family party assembled, apparently awaiting our coming, though old Lady Clevedon, grim, forbidding and unbelieving, flung up her hands as I approached. “And what may you be doing here, Mr. Detective?” she said.  “This is a family council, and strangers—besides, what have you to do with this?  It is the other mystery you are engaged on, and you might as well not have been, for all the good it has done.” “It is all right,” Billy Clevedon interposed, a little brusquely.  “Holt is here at my suggestion.” “If we might all sit down—” I began. “Do you know who killed Sir Philip Clevedon?” the old lady demanded. “Yes,” I said, “I do know who killed Sir Philip Clevedon, and before this evening is out I shall probably tell you.” p. 287“Has this—this other business anything to do with it?” the old lady asked. “Everything to do with it,” I replied.  “But, now, let us straighten this out first.  I will tell you what I know as fact, and Thoyne can supply any embroidery that may be necessary.  In the first place, Miss Grainger—that is Robert Grainger’s daughter—and Thoyne were in the hospital at Bristol at the same time.  They left within a few days of each other, Thoyne first and the girl a day or two later.  That is fact.  Then comes a long interval.  When next Mary Grainger is seen she is living in Long Burminster with her baby girl.  Whether Thoyne was actually keeping her then, I don’t know, but after her death he paid her debt to her landlady and all the funeral expenses, and since then he has paid two pounds a week for the child.” “Not much if she is his daughter,” the old lady interposed bitingly. “But a good deal if she isn’t,” I retorted. “You mean you think she is.” “I don’t mean anything except what I have told you, I deal only in facts.” “But why should he keep a baby girl if she isn’t his daughter?” “If that is a conundrum—” p. 288“It isn’t.” “Then if it is a suspicion—” “It isn’t—it is merely a question.” “Good!  Then Thoyne himself will, sooner or later, supply the answer.  But I have not finished my record yet.  Just before she died, Mary Grainger wrote to her father, telling him she had secretly married an American soldier, who was in hospital in Bristol, only to find later that he had already a wife—” “Ronald Thoyne is an American,” old Lady Clevedon muttered. “I have heard so,” I rejoined.  “But that is the story.  Those are the ascertained facts.  It is Thoyne’s turn now.” “But before he says anything,” Kitty Clevedon interposed suddenly, “I want to tell you all that I don’t believe a word of it.” “The detective man said they were facts,” the old lady remarked dryly. “Perhaps,” Kitty retorted, flushing hotly. “I don’t remember that there was any perhaps about it,” old Lady Clevedon replied. “The story, as far as Holt has told it, is perfectly true,” Thoyne said slowly.  “But now there is one other person who knows the whole truth, and I want you to ask her.” “Her!  Who?” Lady Clevedon demanded. p. 289“Nora Lepley.” “Nora—Lepley, but—” “She was a V.A.D. in the hospital where Miss Grainger was a nurse,” I interposed.  “Yes, she may know—if we could send for her—” “She is in the house now,” the younger Lady Clevedon chimed in, speaking for the first time.  “I will ring for her.” Nora came, and I handed her a chair.  For a moment she hesitated, then sat down with a glance round the semicircle of perhaps not very friendly faces.  I sat back watching the girl closely. “Now then, Mr. Detective, ask her what you want to know,” old Lady Clevedon rasped.  “Oh, yes, it’s your job.  You’ve got to fill in your interval, you know.” I glanced at Thoyne, who nodded affirmatively, and then I turned to Nora Lepley. “You served as a V.A.D. in a hospital in Bristol,” I said.  “Mary Grainger was there as a nurse.  Then Mr. Thoyne came in as a patient.  You remember all that?” “Yes—what of it?” “You were there when Mary left, and—” “No, I wasn’t.  I had come home.  I turned up ill and they sent me home.” p. 290“Then you were not at Bristol when Miss Grainger ran away with Mr. Thoyne and—” “Ran away!” she cried.  “With Mr. Thoyne!” She sat straight up in her chair and laughed in my face. “Mary didn’t run away,” she went on.  “She was married.  I was there as her bridesmaid.  I met them in London specially for it, and Mr. Thoyne was there, too, as best man.  She married an American named Blewshaw.  He was a patient in the hospital, like Mr. Thoyne.  The marriage had to be kept secret because Mr. Blewshaw’s father would object.  I didn’t like it, neither did Mr. Thoyne.  He told me so.  But it was Mary’s business, not ours, and she had agreed.  They took a flat in London—oh, I know what you mean.  When she died, Mr. Thoyne was paying for her, and he has kept her baby since.  But that was because he had introduced Blewshaw to her, and Blewshaw had let her down.  He thought he was in some sort of way responsible.  I didn’t see it myself but he did.  Blewshaw went off to America, and she followed him, only to find that he had a wife there already.  When she discovered that she came back to England—she wouldn’t touch the money Blewshaw offered p. 291her—and tried to earn her living.  But she didn’t tell anyone, not me, not her father.  Mr. Thoyne found her just as she was almost at her last gasp, and he looked after her.  Her father would have nothing to do with her nor with her baby.  Mr. Thoyne found her quite accidentally, and he told me about her.  I went down to Long Burminster to see her.  That is the whole story.” “Thoyne comes well out of it, anyway,” I said cheerfully. Kitty went to him and kissed him, and I think with very little provocation would have kissed me too.  She had loyally asserted her belief in him, and possibly had actually persuaded herself that it was genuine.  But it was easy to see that she was enormously relieved when she heard Nora Lepley’s corroboration.  After all, Mary Grainger had been a very pretty girl, and Thoyne was only a man. When Nora had gone, Thoyne told us Mary Grainger’s story in more detail, though I can summarise it here in a few lines.  It was just as she had recounted it to him, with annotations where necessary, from Mr. and Mrs. Job Greentree.  Mary found work at first in Liverpool, where she landed on her return to England, and then, when that failed her, she left her baby p. 292with the people with whom she had been lodging, and set out to walk to London, a mad project, as it seemed, though she did better than one might expect. Many helped her on the way, and eventually she reached a little Midlands village, still over sixty miles from her destination.  It had grown dark, and was raining heavily; and as she stood in the shadow, gazing rather longingly at a warmly lighted inn, the door of which stood invitingly open, revealing an interior that seemed to be all bright reds and warm browns, and which, at all events, promised shelter, a heavy motor-van, on the sides and back of which was painted, in big, white letters, “Job Greentree, Carrier,” drew up, and from it descended a big man muffled in enormous coats, and sporting a huge beard.  He lifted three or four parcels from the interior of the van, and strode into the inn, leaving the door of the vehicle a few inches open. Mary crept forward.  Here, at all events, was shelter and a means of covering a few more miles.  That it might be going in an opposite direction did not occur to her.  She clambered easily into the car, and, creeping into the shadows at the far end, lay down on something soft, warm, and comfortable, though whether sacks or rugs, she did not know.  What happened thereafter was a total blank to her.  She lapsed straightway into a stupor that was more unconsciousness than sleep, and lay thus, oblivious to everything. When she came to herself she was seated, swathed in blankets, before a wood fire that roared and crackled half-way up the chimney of an old-fashioned grate, while, bending over her, with a mug of steaming brandy in one hand and a spoon in the other, was the motherly, anxious face of a woman. The carrier—he combined the office with those of village wheelwright, blacksmith and undertaker, and was known far and wide as Job—had drawn up with a rattle at the door of the cottage that stood alongside the smithy, had dismounted and lumbered round to the back of his van. “By gum!” he said slowly.  “That’s a rum un—it is an’ all.” The door of the cottage was open, sending a shaft of warm light across the roadway. “Hallo! hallo! Mother, come here and look at this,” the big man shouted. The woman standing in the porch caught a wrap from one of the hooks behind the door and flung it over her head, then went to the car, where her husband stood with the light of his electric lantern blazing upon Mary, who lay wet through and motionless from utter weariness and exhaustion. “A girl!  Who is she, Job?” the woman asked. “I don’t know,” the bearded man replied.  “I never saw her before.  I wonder where she got in.” “Well, pick her up and bring her through,” the woman said.  “She can’t lie there—she’s terrible wet, poor dear!” The bearded man stooped down, and, lifting Mary as if she had been a doll, strode with her into the house and placed her in an easy chair before a roaring fire in the warm, well-lighted kitchen, and there she lay, with the water dripping from her skirts and forming tiny rills on the hitherto spotless floor. “Poor dear, she’s worn out!” the woman said.  “Now you go and look after your van, and I’ll see to her.  It’s bed she wants, and something hot to drink.  You keep out of the way for a bit, and I’ll get those clothes off her and some warm blankets round her.” She ran bustling upstairs, returning in a minute or two with an armful of blankets and some big towels.  In three or four minutes she p. 295had Mary stripped and then, after a vigorous rubbing, wrapped her in half a dozen blankets, until there was nothing visible save a small, white face peering out from what looked like a bale of woollen goods in a furniture store. But the exposure and suffering had had their effect, and Mary fell into an illness from which she emerged—it was a surprise to those who nursed and tended her that she came out at all—but a wreck of her former self, with her mind a confused tangle, and her memory gone. Physically, she made a little, very slow progress, but mentally, she seemed to be at a standstill.  And thus it was that Ronald Thoyne found her. She was seated on the long, wooden bench that flanked the porch of the cottage, when a motor-car drew up suddenly, and Thoyne, leaping therefrom, came towards her with long strides. “Mary!” he cried.  “Is it really yourself, Mary?” For a moment or two the girl’s brows were knit in a puzzled frown, and then she shook her head.  A woman came running from the cottage and laid a hand on his arm. “Do you know her?” she asked. In a few, rather incoherent sentences, she told him the story of Mary’s arrival and of her subsequent illness.  But she had hardly finished her story—had not, in fact, completed it—when Mary almost sprang at her, shaking her roughly by the arm. “My baby!” she cried.  “Where is my baby?” They soothed her gradually and when they had heard her story Thoyne took her to Liverpool himself, where they found the child safe and well cared for, a matter on which those responsible had good cause to congratulate themselves when they received Thoyne’s very handsome present.  Thoyne took Mary back to the home of the carrier and his wife and there the girl remained until she died. “And that,” Thoyne concluded, “is the whole story, which I never intended to tell, never should have told, but for the suspicions that seem to have arisen out of it.” “You were a fool,” Lady Clevedon the elder said tartly.  “You had better have told me or Kitty all about it and left it to us.  We would have looked after the baby.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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