MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES - British Murder Mysteries Collection: 17 Books in One Edition. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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manner so gentle and so kind.
When at last Jervis Lexton came in, he found his wife playing patience in the pretty sitting-room where she spent so little of her time.
He felt a little surprised, for unless she happened to be out, as was the case six nights out of seven, Ivy always went to bed early.
“Thank God, I’m safe home again!” he exclaimed. “It was the most awful show. The grub wasn’t bad, but the champagne was like syrup. I’ve ‘some thirst,’ I can tell you!”
“Wait a minute, and”—she smiled a gay little smile—“I’ll mix you a highball, old boy. Would you like a Bizzy Izzy, just as a treat?”
“The answer, ma’am, is ‘yes’!”
She went off into the dining-room, and took from the fine old mahogany brass-bound wine-cooler a bottle of rye whisky and a bottle of sherry. Then, carefully, she poured a small wineglass of each into a tall glass.
With the glass in her hand she hurried down the passage, and so into the bright, clean, empty kitchen. There she soon found some ice, and, after having chipped off a number of small pieces, she waited a moment and listened intently, for she did not want to be surprised in what she was about to do.
But the old cook was lying sound asleep in the bedroom which lay beyond the kitchen. Ivy could even hear her long, drawn-out snores.
Opening a cupboard door very, very quietly, she found a syphon, and filled up the glass almost to the top with soda-water. Then, quickly, she mixed in with a clean wooden spoon a good pinch of the powder she had secreted in the pochette of her bag.
“A perfect Bizzy Izzy!” Ivy called out gaily as she swiftly went down the corridor, holding in her steady hand the tall glass, now full almost to the brim.
Through the hall and back into the sitting-room she hurried, and then she watched, with an odd sensation of excitement, her husband toss off the delicious iced drink.
“This soda fizz has got a bitter tang to it,” he exclaimed, “but it’s none the worse for that!”
Ivy stayed awake for a long time that night. She had suddenly begun to feel afraid, she hardly knew of what. But at last she dropped off to sleep.
At nine o’clock the next morning she awoke. What was it that had happened last night? Then she remembered.
Leaping out of bed she rushed across the dressing-table, on which there lay the mother-of-pearl bolster bag she had had out with her last night. Opening it she took out her handkerchief, her powder puff, and her purse. Then she put the bag, now quite empty save for the white powder the tiny white leather-lined inner recess contained, into an old despatch-box which had belonged to her father.
It was the only “lock up” Ivy Lexton possessed; at no time of her life had she been so foolish as to keep dangerous love-letters more than a very short time. She put the despatch-box in what was the empty half of a huge Victorian inlaid wardrobe. Then she got into bed again, and rang the bell.
A moment later the day-maid opened the bedroom door.
“Mr. Lexton was ill in the night, ma’am. He thinks he ate something last evening that didn’t agree with him. He asked me to tell you that he’s not going to the office this morning.”
Chapter six
It was the eighth of November, a day which, though she never realised it, altered the whole of Ivy Lexton’s life. And this was the more extraordinary because she was usually quick enough to realise the importance of everything that concerned herself.
But on this day she was feeling secretly excited, anxious, and what to herself she called “nervy,” for her husband’s illness, though it had only lasted just over a week, seemed to her intolerably long-drawn-out.
Jervis Lexton, poor devil, was putting up a grim, instinctive fight for life. Coming of a long line of sporting, out-of-door, country squires and their placid wives, he was magnificently healthy, hard-bitten, and possessed of reserves of physical strength on which he was now drawing daily larger and larger drafts.
On the morning when she had first been told that Jervis had been taken ill in the night, Ivy had gone down to Rushworth’s city office. There, as she put it afterwards when telling the invalid of her interview with Mr. James, the man he called his boss, “red carpets had been put down for her,” and no difficulty at all had been made as to Lexton’s staying away.
As a matter of fact, the young man had very soon been sized up as being, from a business point of view, hopeless. But his pleasant, easy manners, and his inexhaustible fund of small talk and of good stories, amused the boss. Also—and that, naturally, was the one thing that mattered—Jervis Lexton was a pet of Miles Rushworth.
After Mrs. Jervis Lexton’s visit to the office, however, what had seemed a mystery had been at any rate partially explained. What man, so Rushworth’s London agent asked himself smiling, could resist that deliciously pretty and sweet-mannered little woman? No wonder a job had been invented for her husband, who was, after all, a decent chap.
A day was to come when Mr. James would try to remember how Ivy Lexton had impressed him, and when all he would succeed in remembering, very vividly, was how agreeable that impression had been, and how touchingly the lovely lady had revealed her devotion to her husband, fortunate Jervis Lexton.
On the second day Jervis had said he felt so queer that he would like to see their old friend, Dr. Lancaster. And by now, after five days, that genial general practitioner, though utterly unsuspicious of the truth, was nevertheless becoming slightly uneasy at the persistence of the illness.
He had insisted, much against Ivy’s will, on sending in a nurse, a placid, kindly woman named Bradfield, who had often nursed for the doctor before.
Small wonder that the patient’s wife was also becoming just a little fretful, and more than a little anxious. How long, she often asked herself restlessly, was her ordeal going to last?
Yet another fact added to Ivy Lexton’s discomfort during those long days of waiting.
That fact, or rather problem, concerned Roger Gretorex. She found it increasingly difficult to prevent him from coming to the flat. When alone with her he made no secret of his dislike of meeting her husband on “Hail fellow, well met!” terms, and yet he longed to be with her every moment of his scanty leisure.
At times she felt she almost hated him, for by now her whole mind was filled with the thought of Rushworth, and of all that she felt convinced Rushworth was going to mean in her life. But she could not yet afford to break with Gretorex. Afford, indeed, was still the right word, for again he was supplying her with what had always been to Ivy the staff of life—petty cash.
But she came to one great resolution, and that was to go no more to the humble little house in the Westminster slum with which she had now a secret, terrifying association. And so, as her slightest wish was law to Gretorex, the two began meeting now in a picture gallery, or, when it was a fine day, in Kensington Gardens, which was conveniently near the charming flat the Lextons owed to the generous kindness of Miles Rushworth.
So far Ivy had managed to conceal her husband’s illness from Gretorex. With regard to that mysterious illness, it was of her lover, and of her lover alone, that up to now she had felt afraid.
As a matter of fact Roger Gretorex had already completely forgotten that idle talk of theirs concerning the Branksome poisoning mystery. But every word that had been uttered during the evening when she had had supper at Ferry Place, and every moment that she had spent in the surgery, remained uncannily present to Ivy’s mind.
And now, on this eighth of November, she had been out for an hour, looking into the shop windows which line Kensington High Street. She had even gone into one famous emporium and bought a new, and very expensive, black