Gaslit Horror (22 page)

All this while Mrs. Rivers was steadily going out to dinners and dances, and in the afternoons she attended more regularly than anyone the committee meetings presided over by Royalty with which her name had been so long and honourably connected.

It is strange in the light of after events to remember Cardyne's life among us during the days which followed the trial of Martha Craik. I have never supposed, nor do I now suppose, that Cardyne had in him many of the necessary constituents of an actor, but I am perfectly sure that there were few among us, his friends, who noticed at that time anything in him except perhaps a certain absentmindedness and irritability. Perhaps the man's simple nature was its own salvation. To his mind there could be no two views as to his own personal duty. He was clearly bound to adopt Mrs. Rivers's decision in this matter, just as on a doubtful field of battle he would not have dreamed of disobeying his colonel's most desperate order. What must have made it doubly hard for him, however, was the feeling that though he was thus bound he was obliged to use every fair argument in his power to make Mrs. Rivers see that she had adopted a course which, to him, and I believe to any man, was almost unthinkable. Here his plain, blunt tactlessness served him poorly indeed. One afternoon, after an hour's conversation—if any discussion between a man and a woman of such a topic can rightly be called conversation—it happened that he blurted out what, in his simple soul, he had imagined Mrs. Rivers had understood from the beginning. To her incessant argument that death was better than dishonour he opposed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the remark: “But there is not the least reason why we should survive. Provided this woman's life is saved you will have done everything that is necessary, and I think you would be right. I will gladly die with you.”

Upon Mrs. Rivers's fevered brain and throbbing conscience this last suggestion had at least the effect of making the woman and the man understand each other at last. Disregarding, forgetting all that she had said, the haggard, red-eyed woman, dressed as it chanced in the most becoming of biscuit-coloured cloth gowns, turned upon Cardyne with a scream.

“Die!” she echoed. “Do you mean that I ought to get that woman off and then kill myself? Good God, what a brute you are!”

And then Cardyne understood what manner of woman wretched Mrs. Rivers was. Perhaps a clever man might have availed himself of her reaction, which set in the next day and which was necessarily great, but poor Cardyne had had neither the capacity nor the inclination to conceal from Mrs. Rivers, as he had left the house the previous day, that he detested and despised her. He never went back till the afternoon before the day set for Craik's execution.

Now and then, during the course of the next day, Mrs. Rivers saw things with Cardyne's eyes. So far, however, from this leading to any permanent change of her intentions, it merely made her suspect in abject cowardly terror that those considerations might, as the fatal day approached, prove too much for Cardyne, and that on his own initiative he would blurt out the story. The days went on. Mrs. Rivers still clung to the hope that though Craik had been sentenced to death, something would be done, something must happen to prevent the execution. What was God in His heaven for if not for this? She had a blind hope that somehow or other a wholly innocent person could not be allowed by God to suffer capital punishment in these days of modern civilization.

There had been a time in these miserable weeks when she attempted to persuade Cardyne that what he had seen would not, after all, make much difference to the fate of Martha Craik. But upon his point he was as clear as the ablest of barristers. He had seen the manservant in the house opposite, stripped to the skin, with a knife in his hand, moving about in Mr. Harkness's room at midnight. Cardyne was the only man in England who knew why it was that so barbarous a murder could have taken place without the murderer receiving even a splash or smear upon his or her clothes. Mere proof of the presence of a naked man moving about in the house that night would beyond all question have saved the unhappy maidservant.

Martha Craik had been sentenced to be hanged at eight o'clock on Monday morning, 30 July.

Cardyne spent Sunday afternoon with Mrs. Rivers.

Sunday evening he spent in his own rooms. He did not leave them for three months. I suppose if ever a man had an excuse for intentional and continuous self-intoxication, Cardyne was that man. He had done his best. He had used every argument, entreaty, and exhortation he knew of. He had failed completely, and his sense of honour bound him with a band of iron. Few men will dare to criticise him. He would have killed himself if he had been sober, I think.

Mrs. Rivers was in a state that night which clearly bordered on insanity. Twice over she wrote out a confession. Once she actually rang the bell and gave the letter, which was addressed to Cardyne, into her servant's hands, but she was at the door calling for it again before he had reached the bottom of the stairs. About one o'clock she got into a dressing-gown, and with dry, hot eyes and scorching brain she watched the small hours of the morning go by. She was up in her room alone. The servants had long gone to bed.

Daylight came small thin, and blue, between the crack of the curtains. Six o'clock. Mrs. Rivers was kneeling by the side of her bed with her face buried in the quilt. One hand dropped beside her, the other was stretched out and clutched a prettily designed Italian crucifix.

She had prayed at intervals all night long, and had even denounced the injustice of God that no mercy or comfort was extended to her in what she even then called her hour of trial. You will have grossly misunderstood the nature of Mrs. Rivers if you think that this was mere blasphemy. It was the solemn conviction in that poor little mind that God was treating her very hardly in not deadening the last appeals of her conscience against her own wickedness.

Dry-eyed and with aching brain she watched, with her chin on the quilt like a dog, the daylight grow. Seven o'clock. There was a clock on a church near which gave the chimes with astonishing clearness in the morning air. The milk-carts had ceased to rattle through the street. Vans took up their daily work, and the foot-passengers hurried by, sometimes with a low murmur of conversation, under the bright, ashy sky of a London July morning. She still knelt there unmoved. She could not have moved, I think, if she had wished; anyway she told herself that physically she could not do anything now, much as she wanted to. It was now too late.

In the curious half-light of her curtained room she could distinguish things pretty well, and one of the three slants of light fell upon herself. There was a glass between the windows, and as the light increased she could see herself in it. Even then she had time to pity the drawn and haggard misery which was stamped upon the face that met her own.

 

The first chime of eight o'clock struck from the church clock. With a shudder Mrs. Rivers drew her face down again and buried it in the side of the bed, convulsively clutching the crucifix. The four quarters tinkled out, and then the hour struck.

There was a light knock at the door.

Mrs. Rivers did not answer. With her face buried in the side of the bed, she was still trying to pray, but she heard it and she listened.

There was a step across the room, and someone was clearly standing at her side. She moved her eyes enough to look downwards, and she saw, three feet away from her, the end of a common skirt and two coarse boots. They did not belong either to her maid or to anyone else in the house. With a sudden icy hand at her heart, she turned back with shut eyes to the position she had occupied for so long. At last she let her eyes open. She fixed them horribly upon the reflection in the glass. And she has known little or nothing since.

 

Sometimes in sheer defence of Cardyne himself, I think that he
must
have lied to me about their relations. Sometimes I feel sure he did lie.