Murder in Stained Glass. Armstrong Margaret
another gloomy old lady in black and rather severe. And then you got out of the train, and you looked so smart. That hat is terribly pretty, and . . . . But here we are.”
The car had turned into a driveway. It stopped at the foot of a steep flight of steps that mounted between columns to a monumental front door. The door opened. A woman came down carrying a candle lantern.
“This is Minnie Clater, Miss Trumbull,” Phyllis said. “She’s our right-hand man. We’d just curl up and die without Minnie.”
Minnie gave me a parched New England smile, picked up my suitcases and led the way into a large square hall dimly lighted and paneled with black walnut. But its size and high ceiling gave it a certain Victorian elegance, and a wood fire burned on the hearth.
Footsteps sounded from somewhere in the rear of the house, a door opened and Charlotte appeared. Tall and dark and pale as ever, I thought. But she seemed glad to see me. We kissed. She made the usual polite remarks, and told Phyllis to show me to my room.
“I don’t go upstairs much,” she explained. “My heart is weak.”
“Is her heart bad?” I asked Phyllis as we went upstairs.
“She thinks it is. But the other day I left the car too close to one of her bird houses—she has a mad passion for birds—and she took off the brake and pushed it away as if it had been a baby carriage! This is your room. Pretty grim, isn’t it?”
“Old-fashioned spare rooms are all alike,” I said.
“They don’t all have a stuffed fox on the mantelpiece.”
“He’s horrid,” I sighed.
“If he gets on your nerves you can put him in the wardrobe.”
“It takes more than a stuffed fox to upset my nerves,” I laughed. “What time do we dine? Or is it supper?”
“At half-past six, and it’s supper. Don’t change—I adore that frock—unless you have something warmer to put on. The dining room is rather cold. You’ll find the bathroom at the end of the hall, tin tub and black marble washstand. It’s cold too.”
“Are you trying to scare me away?”
“Heavens no! You’re the first pleasant thing that’s happened for nearly two weeks.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“Cousin Charlotte has been having one of her bad turns, what Minnie calls ‘spells’. She’s over it now, thank goodness, and I’m a wretch to complain; she’s been so kind to me. But when she gets like that . . .”
“I know. It doesn’t mean anything,” I said cheerily. “She used to be like that at school. Moody. Up one day and down the next. The girls called her the ‘Spook’.”
“Did they? Well, I’m glad you’ve come. Thankful. But it’s horrid of me to talk like this. When Cousin Charlotte heard the aunt I was living with had died—I’m an orphan—just as I was finishing college, she asked me to stay with her until I wanted to take a job—I was rather run down—and I came and no one could have been kinder, and yet . . . Anyway, I’m frightfully glad you’ve come.”
“Good. Cheer up, darling!” I saw Charlotte’s recent “spell” had been too much for her. “I’m here and we’re going to forget the stuffed fox and everything he stands for and have a good time.”
Rather to my surprise, we did have a good time, for a while anyhow. The weather improved. It snowed a little that first night, and then the sun came out and woke us to a world of sparkling white and shining blue. Phyllis and I dashed out into the garden the minute breakfast was over. Before long Charlotte joined us and we all three started off to walk to the village.
We walked fast, talking and laughing; even Charlotte smiled now and then. We prowled around the village for a bit, and then turned towards home. As we passed the building which Phyllis had told me was the Ullathorne glass shop, the door opened and a young man, an extraordinarily handsome young man, bare-headed, and wearing a white linen smock, came running down the path.
“Good morning, Miss Charlotte!” he said. “Hello, Phyllis! Father’s compliments and the window is done and up, and if you’ll all come in you can see it. Miss Trumbull too, of course. This is Miss Trumbull?”
Charlotte introduced him, mumblingly, as “young Mr. Ullathorne.”
“Christened Leonardo da Vinci,” he added cheerfully. “Known as Leo. But it might have been worse. Mino da Fiesole was considered, I believe, and then I should have been Minnow. Come in, won’t you?”
To my surprise, Charlotte hesitated. “It’s rather late,” she began.
Leo took her fimly by the arm. She yielded, and we all went up the path.
I saw that the place had once been a garage. The wide front door was now boarded across and we entered by a small door, cut at one side, that opened into a large whitewashed space paved with cement. An oddly shaped furnace stood at one end, racks of glass were ranged along the walls and a confusion of tools, boards, coal, kindling, old boxes, and other odds and ends littered the floor.
A boy was kneeling in front of the furnace adjusting the drafts—it was burning fiercely—and peering anxiously into its red-hot heart. He looked up as we came in.
“Oven’s just right, Mr. Leo,” he said. “Will I tell Jake he can fire the Good Samaritan—the donkey will be a long job—or do we shove in Saint Peter first off?”
“How should I know, Clarence?” Leo said indifferently. “Ask Jake,” and he led us towards a dark rickety staircase with treads like a ladder, that mounted steeply to an upper floor. I half expected Charlotte to balk. But she didn’t. We all climbed up.
Leo opened a door, and we stepped into a blaze of color and light that came streaming down from an enormous circular stained glass window filling most of the opposite wall. I was dazzled, and didn’t see Frederick Ullathorne until he was beside me, smiling and holding out his hand.
But he was well worth looking at; even handsomer than Leo, reminding me of the bust of some Roman emperor. Nero, perhaps?
We shook hands, but I turned at once to the window. We stood gazing at it, Charlotte and Phyllis and I, in silence for a moment. Then I glanced at Ullathorne: his eyes were fixed on the window, and his face glowed with the rapture of an Orville Wright watching his first plane rise into the air. He started as I spoke.
“The subject rather puzzles me,” I ventured. “All those animals, whales and leopards and peacocks and a sun and moon, suggest the Creation. But there isn’t any Adam and Eve. Who are the three good-looking young persons in the center, with such a very red sky behind them?”
He glared at me. “Those young persons,” he said haughtily, “are the Three Holy Children, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, in the burning fiery turnace of King Nebuchadnezzar, singing the hymn known as ‘Benedicite.’ This is a Benedicite window.”
“Of course!” I cried. “I always liked those three, so plucky of them to go on praising ‘all the works of the Lord’ in such uncomfortable circumstances. Although, of course, singers will insist on singing in the most . . .” I broke off—he was glowering worse than ever—and went on hastily: “You have given them the most beautiful faces. As for the ‘works of the Lord,’ the intricate way they go weaving in and out of the border is marvelous. And the coloring! And the pattern! Why, it’s as fine as Chartres!”
I had hit the right note at last! He smiled with an unaffected satisfaction I found rather engaging.
“Glad you approve,” he purred. “And you, Phyllis?” He broke off, turned sharply. Phyllis and Leo had moved to a far corner of the room. “I see,” he remarked grimly. “She prefers the society of my young Leonardo!”
“She’ll be back in a minute,” Charlotte put in. “Leo wanted her to look at his painting.”