Poison In The Pen by Patricia Wentworth Read Free Book Online

the more elderly of his two known suits, was understood to say that he thought that would do nicely— very nicely indeed. Since he used a subterranean whisper, no one could be quite sure of the words. He beamed upon Valentine in very much the same way as he had done at her christening, and added more or less audibly,
    “You won’t care to be walking up to the altar rails by yourself, so that’s about as far as we can go. He’ll be turning up any time now, and you’ll be laughing at whatever it is that has kept him. Anyhow it’s all quite foolproof, my dear, so you needn’t fret yourself. I’ve married too many couples to let either of you put a foot wrong, so never give it another thought.”
    She had seldom felt less like laughing. There was a numbness in her mind. Her thoughts were dark, and cold, and still. Only every now and then there were flashes of light, of pain, of something that was terribly like hope. It couldn’t be hope. Tommy was smiling like an indiarubber gargoyle. He was a kind old pet and she loved him, but he saw too much. She didn’t want him to be sorry for her. She smiled back at him and said in quite a natural voice,
    “Oh, yes, it will be all right.”
    Roger Repton swung round with a gruff “Well, that’s done! Ridiculous rubbish if you ask me! Modern craze! Wedding’s quite bad enough without dragging everyone through a rehearsal first!”
    The two bridesmaids moved apart, Connie awkward and abstracted, Daphne Hollis pretty and poised.
    Valentine said, “Thank you so much, Tommy darling,” and turned from the chancel. When she took that step tomorrow she would be Gilbert’s wife, she would be Mrs. Gilbert Earle. Unless—
    There was one of those flashes in the darkness of her mind. It came and went, and the numbness closed down again. The door at the end of the church was pushed open and Gilbert Earle came in. His fair hair was ruffled, there was a smear of mud on his cheek, and a three-cornered tear half way down his left sleeve. He wore a charming rueful expression, and it was plain that he expected a general indulgence. Miss Eccles declared afterwards that he was limping a little, but no one else appeared to have noticed the fact. He came straight to Valentine and said in his agreeable voice,
    “Darling, you’ll have to forgive me. John tried to take the hedge into Plowden’s field. He’ll be coming along as soon as they’ve patched him up a bit. I, as you can see, am only the worse for a little mud.”
    CHAPTER 7
    The old rooms at the Manor lighted up well. The dining-room with its panelled walls and its portraits, its draw-table and its high-backed chairs, the drawing-room with its French carpet and the brocaded curtains which might look shabby in the daytime but whose ageing beauty preserved a lamplit splendour. Fifty years before their tints of peach and gold would have been repeated in the coverings of chairs and couches, but to-day the patched remnants were hidden under loose chintz covers too often cleaned to do more than hint that they had once displayed pale wreaths of flowers. There were portraits here too—a charming graceful creature with a look of Valentine, Lady Adela Repton in the dress she had worn at the famous Waterloo ball—her husband Ambrose, shot down by the Duke’s side next day and painted with an empty sleeve pinned up where the arm had been. He had a lean face and an irked, angry look.
    Roger Repton resembled him strongly, even to the expression. It was Scilla’s idea to give this party, and in the two years that they had been married it had been borne in upon him that when Scilla wanted anything he might just as well let her have it and be done with it. But that wasn’t to say that he was prepared to look as if he was enjoying himself, because he wasn’t. The house was upside down, and there had been that damned silly business of the rehearsal in the afternoon. He wanted to sit down peaceably by the fire and read the Times, and if he went to