Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (19 page)

And this man blinked up
at him and whimpered:

“My wife is poisoning me.”

Dr. Holroyd sat back and
snapped off the electric light.

“What makes you think so?”
he asked sharply.

“To tell you that,” came
the laboured voice of the sick man. “I should have to tell you my story.”

“Well, if you want me to
take this up—”

“I sent for you to do
that, doctor.”

“Well, how do you think
you are being poisoned?”

“Arsenic, of course.”

“Oh? And how administered?”

Again the patient looked
up with one eye, seeming too fatigued to open the other.

“Cambric tea,” he
replied.

And Dr. Holroyd echoed:

“Cambric tea!” with a
soft amazement and interest.

Cambric tea had been used
as the medium for arsenic in the Pluntre case and the expression had become
famous; it was Bevis Holroyd who had discovered the doses in the cambric tea
and who had put his finger on this pale beverage as the means of murder.

“Very possibly,” continued
Sir Harry, “the Pluntre case made her think of it.”

“For God’s sake, don’t,” said
Dr. Holroyd; for in that hideous affair the murderer had been a woman; and to
see a woman on trial for her life, to see a woman sentenced to death, was not
an experience he wished to repeat.

“Lady Strangeways,” continued
the sick man, “is much younger than I—I over persuaded her to marry me, she was
at that time very much attracted by a man of her own age, but he was in a poor
position and she was ambitious.”

He paused, wiped his
quivering lips on a silk handkerchief, and added faintly:

“Lately our marriage has
been extremely unhappy. The man she preferred is now prosperous, successful and
unmarried—she wishes to dispose of me that she may marry her first choice.”

“Have you proof of any of
this?”

“Yes. I know she buys
arsenic. I know she reads books on poisons. I know she is eating her heart out
for this other man.”

“Forgive me, Sir Harry,” replied
the doctor, “but have you no near friend nor relation to whom you can confide
your—suspicions?”

“No one,” said the sick
man impatiently. “I have lately come from the East and am out of touch with
people. Besides I want a doctor, a doctor with skill in this sort of thing. I
thought from the first of the Pluntre case and of you.”

Bevis Holroyd sat back
quietly; it was then that he thought of the situation as bizarre; the queerness
of the whole thing was vividly before him, like a twisted figure on a gem—a
carving at once writhing and immobile.

“Perhaps,” continued Sir
Harry wearily, “you are married, doctor?”

“No.” Dr. Holroyd
slightly smiled; his story was something like the sick man’s story but taken
from another angle; when he was very poor and unknown he had loved a girl who
had preferred a wealthy man; she had gone out to India, ten years ago, and he
had never seen her since; he remembered this, with sharp distinctness, and in
the same breath he remembered that he still loved this girl; it was, after all,
a common-place story.

Then his mind swung to
the severe professional aspect of the case; he had thought that his patient, an
unhealthy type of man, was struggling with a bad attack of influenza and the
resultant depression and weakness, but then he had never thought, of course, of
poison, nor looked nor tested for poison.

The man might be lunatic,
he might be deceived, he might be speaking the truth; the fact that he was a
mean, unpleasant beast ought not to weigh in the matter; Dr. Holroyd had some
enjoyable Christmas holidays in prospect and now he was beginning to feel that
he ought to give these up to stay and investigate this case; for he could
readily see that it was one in which the local doctor would be quite useless.

“You must have a nurse,”
he said, rising.

But the sick man shook
his head.

“I don’t wish to expose
my wife more than need be,” he grumbled. “Can’t you manage the affair yourself?”

As this was the first
hint of decent feeling he had shown, Bevis Holroyd forgave him his brusque
rudeness.

“Well, I’ll stay the
night anyhow,” he conceded.

And then the situation
changed, with the opening of a door, from the bizarre to the tragic.

This door opened in the
far end of the room and admitted a bloom of bluish winter light from some
uncurtained, high windowed corridor; the chill impression was as if invisible
snow had entered the shaded, dun, close apartment.

And against this
background appeared a woman in a smoke coloured dress with some long lace about
the shoulders and a high comb; she held a little tray carrying jugs and a glass
of crystal in which the cold light splintered.

Dr. Holroyd stood in his
usual attitude of attentive courtesy, and then, as the patient, feebly twisting
his gross head from the fat pillow, said:

“My wife—doctor—” he
recognized in Lady Strangeways the girl to whom he had once been engaged in
marriage, the woman he still loved.

“This is Doctor Holroyd,”
added Sir Harry. “Is that cambric tea you have there?”

She inclined her head to
the stranger by her husband’s bed as if she had never seen him before, and he,
taking his cue, and for many other reasons, was silent.

“Yes, this is your
cambric tea,” she said to her husband. “You like it just now, don’t you? How do
you find Sir Harry, Dr. Holroyd?”

There were two jugs on
the tray; one of crystal half full of cold milk, and one of white porcelain
full of hot water; Lady Strangeways proceeded to mix these fluids in equal
proportions and gave the resultant drink to her husband, helping him first to
sit up in bed.

“I think that Sir Harry
has a nasty turn of influenza,” answered the doctor mechanically. “He wants me
to stay. I’ve promised till the morning, anyhow.”

“That will be a pleasure
and a relief,” said Lady Strangeways gravely. “My husband has been ill some
time and seems so much worse than he need—for influenza.”

The patient, feebly
sipping his cambric tea, grinned queerly at the doctor.

“So much worse—you see,
doctor!” he muttered.

“It is good of you to
stay,” continued Lady Strangeways equally. “I will see about your room, you
must be as comfortable as possible.”

She left as she had come,
a shadow-coloured figure retreating to a chill light.

The sick man held up his
glass as if he gave a toast.

“You see! Cambric tea!

And Bevis Holroyd was
thinking: does she not want to know me? Does he know what we once were to each
other? How comes she to be married to this man—her husband’s name was
Custiss—and the horror of the situation shook the calm that was his both from
character and training; he went to the window and looked out on the bleached
park; light, slow snow was falling, a dreary dance over the frozen grass and
before the grey corpses that paled, one behind the other, to the distance
shrouded in colourless mist.

The thin voice of Harry
Strangeways recalled him to the bed.

“Would you like to take a
look at this, doctor?” He held out the half drunk glass of milk and water.

“I’ve no means of making
a test here,” said Dr. Holroyd, troubled. “I brought a few things, nothing like
that.”

“You are not so far from
Harley Street,” said Sir Harry. “My car can fetch everything you want by this
afternoon—or perhaps you would like to go yourself?

“Yes,” replied Bevis
Holroyd sternly. “I would rather go myself.”

His trained mind had been
rapidly covering the main aspects of his problem and he had instantly seen that
it was better for Lady Strangeways to have this case in his hands. He was sure there
was some hideous, fantastic hallucination on the part of Sir Harry, but it was
better for Lady Strangeways to leave the matter in the hands of one who was
friendly towards her. He rapidly found and washed a medicine bottle from among
the sick room paraphernalia and poured it full of the cambric tea, casting away
the remainder.

“Why did you drink any?”
he asked sharply.

“I don’t want her to
think that I guess,” whispered Sir Harry. “Do you know, doctor, I have a lot of
her love letters—written by—”

Dr. Holroyd cut him
short.

“I couldn’t listen to
this sort of thing behind Lady Strangeways’s back,” he said quickly. “That is
between you and her. My job is to get you well. I’ll try and do that.”

And he considered, with a
faint disgust, how repulsive this man looked sitting up with pendant jowl and
drooping cheeks and discoloured, pouchy eyes sunk in pads of unhealthy flesh
and above the spiky crown of Judas-coloured hair.

Perhaps a woman, chained
to this man, living with him, blocked and thwarted by him, might be wrought
upon to—

Dr. Holroyd shuddered
inwardly and refused to continue his reflection.

As he was leaving the
gaunt sombre house about which there was something definitely blank and
unfriendly, a shrine in which the sacred flames had flickered out so long ago
that the lamps were blank and cold, he met Lady Strangeways.

She was in the wide
entrance hall standing by the wood fire that but faintly dispersed the gloom of
the winter morning and left untouched the shadows in the rafters of the open
roof.

Now he would not, whether
she wished or no, deny her; he stopped before her, blocking out her poor
remnant of light.

“Mollie,” he said gently,
“I don’t quite understand—you married a man named Custiss in India.

“Yes. Harry had to take
this name when he inherited this place. We’ve been home three years from the
East, but lived so quietly here that I don’t suppose anyone has heard of us.”

She stood between him and
the firelight, a shadow among the shadows; she was much changed; in her
thinness and pallor, in her restless eyes and nervous mouth he could read signs
of discontent, even of unhappiness.

“I never heard of you,” said
Dr. Holroyd truthfully. “I didn’t want to. I liked to keep my dreams.”

Her hair was yet the
lovely cedar wood hue, silver, soft and gracious; her figure had those fluid
lines of grace that he believed he had never seen equalled.

“Tell me,” she added
abruptly, “what is the matter with my husband? He has been ailing like this for
a year or so.”

With a horrid lurch of
his heart that was usually so steady, Dr. Holroyd remembered the bottle of milk
and water in his pocket.

“Why do you give him that
cambric tea?” he counter questioned.

“He will have it—he
insists that I make it for him—”

“Mollie,” said Dr.
Holroyd quickly, “you decided against me, ten years ago, but that is no reason
why we should not be friends now—tell me, frankly, are you happy with this man?”

“You have seen him,” she
replied slowly. “He seemed different ten years ago. I honestly was attracted by
his scholarship and his learning as well as—other things.”

Bevis Holroyd needed to
ask no more; she was wretched, imprisoned in a mistake as a fly in amber; and
those love letters? Was there another man?

As he stood silent, with
a dark reflective look on her weary brooding face, she spoke again:

“You are staying?”

“Oh yes,” he said, he was
staying, there was nothing else for him to do.

“It is Christmas week,” she
reminded him wistfully. “It will be very dull, perhaps painful, for you.”

“I think I ought to stay.”

Sir Harry’s car was announced;
Bevis Holroyd, gliding over frozen roads to London, was absorbed with this
sudden problem that, like a mountain out of a plain, had suddenly risen to
confront him out of his level life.

The sight of Mollie (he
could not think of her by that sick man’s name) had roused in him tender
memories and poignant emotions and the position in which he found her and his
own juxtaposition to her and her husband had the same devastating effect on him
as a mine sprung beneath the feet of an unwary traveller.