Five Fatal Words (17 page)

Melicent waited.

"He is exceedingly upset over my discharging Granger," Miss Cornwall continued. "Exceedingly. But I am sure that I did right; don't you feel I did right?"

"I guess so," said Melicent.

"What?"

"I said," repeated Melicent, "I guess so."

ON the evening after Alice Cornwall's funeral, Melicent found Lester sitting in the library with a drink at his side. Lester had just put his sister on the train. She had preferred to go back to school and the family had decided that, although such a return was unconventional, it would perhaps be best. Melicent welcomed the opportunity of seeing Lester alone. During her first few days in Belgium, she had thought of him as an errant fop. Now she thought differently. He was sitting silently and moodily near a log fire.

"Do you mind if I talk to you?" she said.

"Not a bit. Delighted. Have a drink?"

"No, thanks." Melicent took a chair. "I haven't much to say and what I can say will be no real expression of the way I feel. I know that the blow of your mother's death was great but we will be going back to the States fairly soon and I will have to speak now or not at all."

Lester swallowed some of his drink and said nothing.

"It wasn't much," Melicent continued. "It was only--thanks. You came back in the house in that mist the other night and you got me off the floor and down to the hospital when you were almost blue from choking yourself. There's nothing I can ever do to repay you, but I do want you to know that I think it was pretty grand. Grand's not the word. It was brave, and gritty, and generous--"

His bland eyes looked at her with something like feeling. "Oh, that."

It was all he said. For an instant Melicent was embarrassed and then she realized that his training had been English. He was brought up to appear to be a silly man and the fiber of character inside him was never allowed to show. At a time like this, when a deep emotion was being expressed to him, he could only say "Oh, that." It made her want to cry. It made her realize that someone who knew Lester and understood him could grow very fond of him. Long afterwards she remembered the scene in the library and she supposed that learning such things about people was part of becoming something more than a provincial person.

But at the moment Lester seemed embarrassed. She changed the subject. "You ought to come back with us to America."

He shook his head. "I'll be going to England next week, but some day I'll have a shot at America. Like to see you over there."

"I'd like to see you, too."

There was a long pause. At last Melicent said: "Has your cousin Donald told you our feeling about the three deaths that have occurred in your family?"

Lester looked up quietly. "Yes; he's told me quite a lot."

"What do you think, then?"

"I think it's too much for me," said Lester. "Donald's taking it on; he's more fit for that sort of thing. Of course I'm on call, if needed." There was another silence. At the end of it, Melicent rose, smiled almost timidly at Lester, who returned the expression, and left the room. She went slowly upstairs. She knocked on Hannah Cornwall's door and was admitted. Hannah was packing and Lydia sat beside her in the wheel-chair. It was Lydia who spoke to Melicent.

"Good evening, Miss Waring."

"Good evening."

Lydia glanced at Hannah somewhat nervously and then returned her attention to Melicent. "My sister tells me that you are familiar with the horrible circumstances which surround our family."

"Yes," Melicent answered.

"I suppose you are aware that I am going to accompany you back to America."

"I didn't know it."

"I think it is my duty. Hannah has told me the whole story of the messages and the deaths. I am inclined to believe that they have no connection with each other, and so is Ahdi Vado."

"Ahdi Vado?" Melicent asked the question before she realized that it contained a considerable element of surprise.

"Nothing in my life takes place without his knowledge. It is his belief that the messages preceding the deaths were sent by some one who is psychic, or by some one who has perceived the order of the names and wishes to point it out. It would be difficult for me to explain his theory with any brevity, because it depends on his knowledge of the function of the mind and its relation to matter. However, he has made clear to me how fates can follow a pattern unconsciously made in the mind. It may be that our parents, in naming us, unconsciously gave us names which would merely describe our destinies. It was then ordained in what order we would, in the end, leave the earth; and, without knowing this fact and yet responding to it, our parents chose names with corresponding initials.

"No human hand needs to intervene to carry out what was always ordained. Therefore, the three deaths were not murders. The messages, as I have said, may well have been warnings sent by some person, with faculties far above the ordinary, who perceived the pattern of our lives and who wanted to warn each of us, a little before the end."

"I see," Melicent answered. Internally she experienced a strong resentment against Lydia Cornwall's belief in what she felt to be rubbish, but she noticed that whenever Lydia mentioned the Hindu her voice held almost a reverence.

Abruptly, however, Hannah Cornwall lifted her head from the trunk which she was filling with clothes and spoke in a strained, unnatural voice. "Ahdi Vado may be all you say he is, Lydia. His knowledge of the universe may be great." She stepped toward the huge woman in the wheel-chair and lowered her voice. "But what would you say if Theodore got a message and Theodore was killed?" The last word was whispered almost in Lydia's face.

She shrank away from her sister and moved her head to one side. "Hannah--gently! This thing is driving you out of your mind."

Hannah's eyes remained fixed on the face of her sister. "Driving me out of my mind?" She laughed without mirth. "Driving me out of my mind? And how would you feel in your mind, even with all your synthetic Yogi calm, if your name began with an H? How would you feel?"

"I think I will excuse myself. Would you help me, Miss Waring?"

Melicent looked at her employer, but Hannah Cornwall appeared to have forgotten that there was anyone in the room but herself. The girl pushed the chair toward the door, unlocked it and went out.

That night, when she changed rooms with Hannah, Melicent learned a little more of the family plans.

"We are going to open the house on the Palisades."

"House on the Palisades?"

Hannah nodded. "Yes, the old house. That's the one that my father lived in and his father before him. My father built it--it's a copy of a Spanish castle. I lived there when I was a child." For an instant Miss Cornwall's eyes were reminiscent. "It seems to me we were happy then. I have almost forgotten what it was to be happy. I have forgotten. Are you happy?"

"Well--"

"Not now. You couldn't be happy now, with this frightful affair hanging over us like a stone on a string. You're not happy now, but you were happy and you will be happy again in a year, in less than a year, won't you?"

"I think--"

"Never mind. Forget about it. We are going to Father's house. But first we will stop to see Theodore. I'd like to persuade him to join us there. Three of us--Lydia, Theodore and myself. We could make our stand against death together. The house is suited for it. It is as grim as an old fort and as well protected. Maybe you've seen it. It's just this side of Highland. You can see it from the road. I will find some new servants, some strong ones, and we will all wait together."

If Melicent had been told two months before that she was to go to a castle on the Palisades and wait there with three fantastic and morbid old people for the coming of unnatural fates, she would have said that under no circumstances would she dream of doing anything like that. So quickly does the mind adapt itself to any such circumstances, however, that Melicent nodded in agreement. "All right."

"Are you packed?"

"Yes, almost completely."

"Good."

Miss Cornwall went to the door of her room and unlocked it. She entered Melicent's room and turned. "Good night."

Just before she closed the door Miss Cornwall spoke again. "Donald says that you and he discussed the fact that Lydia is not in the five-word sequence."

"We did."

"So I don't believe we will need to contemplate giving her any special protection."

The door closed.

Donald Cornwall stood beside Melicent on the deck of the ship. Around them was a fog, padding the sound of shipping. The liner was feeling its way into the upper harbor of New York. It was quite cold. The rail was opaque until one put one's hand upon it and then it glistened with moisture. Donald was speaking m a matter-of-fact tone. "Glad to be getting back?"

"Yes."

"Uncle Theodore cabled us last night. We are going to stop at his place for a few days."

"He lives in town, doesn't he?"

"Yes, on 73rd Street."

"Seventy-third Street." Melicent thought about that. She could not make herself believe that in a few hours she would be on Seventy-third Street in New York City.

Seventy-third Street--with taxicabs and limousines and delivery wagons. With Fifth Avenue buses running not far away and Central Park. With everything familiar. With subways shaking the ground and elevated trains roaring overhead. In New York! Her mind was incapable of visualizing the fact. They had come to an oasis in the long Cornwall nightmare. It would be good, ineffably good. It would be reassuring. It would give her the courage to go on up the Hudson with these people who had become like the walking dead. He read something of her thought. "I can imagine how you will feel. New York's your home."

"I can hardly imagine how I will feel myself."

There was an interval of silence. "It is almost impossible for me to understand why you stick to Aunt Hannah under the circumstances."

That was a question which she had asked herself a thousand times, and she had never found a wholly satisfactory answer for it. She made no reply.

"Are you fond of my aunt?"

"I like her," Melicent said.

He shook his head. "You have me completely bewildered, at any rate. I always thought that beautiful girls were--"

"Dumb?"

"Not dumb. Frivolous."

"If that's a definition, then I'm certainly not beautiful."

He smiled in appreciation. "Perhaps you're the exception to prove the rule. Do you want flattery?"

"It's unnecessary."

At the pier, Mr. Reese met them but his function, for the time being, consisted chiefly in aiding them with the customs examination. He had a few words, apart from the others, with Miss Cornwall and Lydia, but he merely shook hands with Melicent and congratulated her upon her safe return. The subject of Granger's dismissal was not mentioned in Melicent's hearing.

Mr. Reese reported, however, that he had not only sent Melicent's letter to Helen but had looked her up and, finding her still out of a job, he had repaid to her for Melicent the money owing to Helen. Now, he said, Helen had a job.

He returned to his office and an automobile which had been sent by Theodore Cornwall took the rest to Seventy-third Street. Melicent's emotions, while she drove through the heart of New York City, were inexpressible. She thought about her old roommate and she passed within a block of the offices where she had worked so contentedly and for such a long time. Hannah and Lydia sat together on the back seat.

Melicent and Donald occupied the side seats. The car turned into Fifth Avenue and moved with traffic to Seventy-second Street, where it went around the block in order to stop at the door of the apartment building in which Theodore Cornwall lived.

An elevator took them to the top floor. They rang the bell of the apartment on that floor and were admitted by a butler. After leaving their wraps, they were ushered into a large living-room, from the windows of which a long stretch of the skyline of New York could be seen. Theodore Cornwall rose to greet them.

He seemed even more thin and angular than Melicent remembered from his short visit to his sister in Connecticut. Now Melicent had seen all the family and she found Theodore most nearly resembling Hannah. He had the same indominability and an identical nervous tension. His eyes were as hard and his nose long and sharp. He had the Cornwall chin, and although his manner of living had been different from Hannah's, one would have easily guessed that they were brother and sister.

His demeanor as they came into the room was irritable. Melicent thought immediately that he was not at all happy to see his two sisters and that he was receiving them only under suppressed protest. Hannah came first and Lydia after her. Lydia's wheel-chair had not yet arrived from the ship and she walked, heavily and unsteadily.

"How do you do, Hannah," Theodore said, and took the hand of his sister. He moved to Lydia and surveyed her for a considerable period. "You've changed, Lydia. We've all changed. And this is Donald. How do you do, Donald?"

Everyone took chairs. Melicent was introduced. Before any conversation commenced she was able to survey the room. It was very simply, almost austerely, furnished. The wall was bare of pictures or any other decorations and on the floor there were no rugs.

Lydia was replying to Theodore. "It's been a good many years since I've seen you, but you haven't changed. You are the youngest looking one of us."

"And I intend to stay young," Theodore answered. "I've devoted my life to that.

Early rising. Early retiring. Baths. Exercise. Ultra-violet treatment and no meat. Every month for the last forty years I have had a complete medical examination. I have a doctor who lives near me, whose sole purpose it is to watch my health. You will notice, for example, that my apartment, which comprises this entire floor, is designed with an idea of sanitation. No rugs and pictures. They collect and breed germs. The air that enters this apartment is filtered."

He seemed suddenly to realize that he had embarked upon the one subject which interested him--his health--at a time when a discussion of himself was perhaps not quite appropriate. He collected his thoughts and sighed. "But I didn't mean to burden you with my personal views. I meant to apologize for the barrenness of my household."