Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (20 page)

London was deep in the
whirl of a snow storm and the light that penetrated over the grey roof tops to
the ugly slip of a laboratory at the back of his consulting rooms was chill and
forbidding.

Bevis Holroyd put the
bottle of milk on a marble slab and sat back in the easy chair watching that
dreary chase of snow flakes across the dingy London pane.

He was thinking of past
springs, of violets long dead, of roses long since dust, of hours that had
slipped away like lengths of golden silk rolled up, of the long ago when he had
loved Mollie and Mollie had seemed to love him; then he thought of that man in
the big bed who had said:

“My wife is poisoning me.”

Late that afternoon Dr.
Holroyd, with his suit case and a professional bag, returned to Strangeways
Manor House in Sir Harry’s car; the bottle of cambric tea had gone to a friend,
a noted analyst; somehow Doctor Holroyd had not felt able to do this task
himself; he was very fortunate, he felt, in securing this old solitary and his
promise to do the work before Christmas.

As he arrived at
Strangeways Manor House which stood isolated and well away from a public high
road where a lonely spur of the weald of Kent drove into the Sussex marshes, it
was in a blizzard of snow that effaced the landscape and gave the murky outlines
of the house an air of unreality, and Bevis Holroyd experienced that sensation
he had so often heard of and read about, but which so far his cool mind had
dismissed as a fiction.

He did really feel as if
he was in an evil dream; as the snow changed the values of the scene, altering
distances and shapes, so this meeting with Mollie, under these circumstances,
had suddenly changed the life of Bevis Holroyd.

He had so resolutely and
so definitely put this woman out of his life and mind, deliberately refusing to
make enquiries about her, letting all knowledge of her cease with the letter in
which she had written from India and announced her marriage.

And now, after ten years,
she had crossed his path in this ghastly manner, as a woman her husband accused
of attempted murder.

The sick man’s words of a
former lover disturbed him profoundly; was it himself who was referred to? Yet
the love letters must be from another man for he had not corresponded with
Mollie since her marriage, not for ten years.

He had never felt any
bitterness towards Mollie for her desertion of a poor, struggling doctor, and
he had always believed in the integral nobility of her character under the
timidity of conventionality; but the fact remained that she had played him
false—what if that
had
been “the little rift within the lute” that had now indeed silenced the music!

With a sense of bitter
depression he entered the gloomy old house; how different was this from the
pleasant ordinary Christmas he had been rather looking forward to, the jolly
homely atmosphere of good fare, dancing, and friends!

When he had telephoned to
these friends excusing himself his regret had been genuine and the cordial “bad
luck!” had had a poignant echo in his own heart; bad luck indeed, bad luck—

She was waiting for him
in the hall that a pale young man was decorating with boughs of prickly stiff
holly that stuck stiffly behind the dark heavy pictures.

He was introduced as the
secretary and said gloomily:

“Sir Harry wished
everything to go on as usual, though I am afraid he is very ill indeed.”

Yes, the patient had been
seized by another violent attack of illness during Dr. Holroyd’s absence; the
young man went at once upstairs and found Sir Harry in a deep sleep and a
rather nervous local doctor in attendance.

An exhaustive discussion
of the case with this doctor threw no light on anything, and Dr. Holroyd,
leaving in charge an extremely sensible looking housekeeper who was Sir Harry’s
preferred nurse, returned, worried and irritated, to the hall where Lady
Strangeways now sat alone before the big fire.

She offered him a belated
but fresh cup of tea.

“Why did you come?” she
asked as if she roused herself from deep reverie.

“Why? Because your
husband sent for me.”

“He says you offered to
come; he has told everyone in the house that.”

“But I never heard of the
man before to-day.”

“You had heard of me. He
seems to think that you came here to help me.”

“He cannot be saying that,”
returned Dr. Holroyd sternly, and he wondered desperately if Mollie was lying,
if she had invented this to drive him out of the house.

“Do you want me here?” he
demanded.

“I don’t know,” she
replied dully and confirmed his suspicions; probably there was another man and
she wished him out of the way; but he could not go, out of pity towards her he
could not go.

“Does he know we once
knew each other?” he asked.

“No,” she replied
faintly, “therefore it seems such a curious chance that he should have sent for
you, of all men!”

“It would have been more
curious,” he responded grimly, “if I had heard that you were here with a sick
husband and had thrust myself in to doctor him! Strangeways must be crazy to
spread such a tale and if he doesn’t know we are old friends it becomes
nonsense!”

“I often think that Harry
is crazy,” said Lady Strangeways wearily; she took a rose silk lined work
basket, full of pretty trifles, on her knee, and began winding a skein of rose
coloured silk; she looked so frail, so sad, so lifeless that the heart of Bevis
Holroyd was torn with bitter pity.

“Now I am here I want to
help you,” he said earnestly. “I am staying for that, to help you—”

She looked up at him with
a wistful appeal in her fair face.

“I’m worried,” she said
simply. “I’ve lost some letters I valued very much—I think they have been
stolen.”

Dr. Holroyd drew back;
the love letters; the letters the husband had found, that were causing all his
ugly suspicions.

“My poor Mollie!” he
exclaimed impulsively. “What sort of a coil have you got yourself into!”

As if this note of pity
was unendurable, she rose impulsively, scattering the contents of her work
basket, dropping the skein of silk, and hastened away down the dark hall.

Bevis Holroyd stooped
mechanically to pick up the hurled objects and saw among them a small white
packet, folded, but opened at one end; this packet seemed to have fallen out of
a needle case of gold silk.

Bevis Holroyd had pounced
on it and thrust it in his pocket just as the pale secretary returned with his
thin arms most incongruously full of mistletoe.

“This will be a dreary
Christmas for you, Dr. Holroyd,” he said with the air of one who forces himself
to make conversation. “No doubt you had some pleasant plans in view—we are all
so pleased that Lady Strangeways had a friend to come and look after Sir Harry
during the holidays.”

“Who told you I was a
friend?” asked Dr. Holroyd brusquely. “I certainly knew Lady Strangeways before
she was married—”

The pale young man cut in
crisply:

“Oh, Lady Strangeways
told me so herself.”

Bevis Holroyd was
bewildered; why did she tell the secretary what she did not tell her
husband?—both the indiscretion and the reserve seemed equally foolish.

Languidly hanging up his
sprays and bunches of mistletoe the pallid young man, whose name was Garth
Deane, continued his aimless remarks.

“This is really not a
very cheerful house, Dr. Holroyd—I’m interested in Sir Harry’s oriental work or
I should not remain. Such a very unhappy marriage! I often think,” he added
regardless of Bevis Holroyd’s darkling glance, “that it would be very
unpleasant indeed for Lady Strangeways if anything happened to Sir Harry.”

“Whatever do you mean,
sir?” asked the doctor angrily.

The secretary was not at
all discomposed.

“Well, one lives in the
house, one has nothing much to do—and one notices.”

Perhaps, thought the
young man in anguish, the sick husband had been talking to this creature,
perhaps the creature
had
really noticed something.

“I’ll go up to my patient,”
said Bevis Holroyd briefly, not daring to anger one who might be an important
witness in this mystery that was at present so unfathomable.

Mr. Deane gave a sickly
grin over the lovely pale leaves and berries he was holding.

“I’m afraid he is very
bad, doctor.”

As Bevis Holroyd left the
room he passed Lady Strangeways; she looked blurred, like a pastel drawing that
has been shaken; the fingers she kept locked on her bosom; she had flung a
silver fur over her shoulders that accentuated her ethereal look of blonde,
pearl and amber hues.

“I’ve come back for my
work basket,” she said. “Will you go up to my husband? He is ill again—”

“Have you been giving him
anything?” asked Dr. Holroyd as quietly as he could.

“Only some cambric tea,
he insisted on that.”

“Don’t give him
anything—leave him alone. He is in my charge now, do you understand?”

She gazed up at him with
frightened eyes that had been newly washed by tears.

“Why are you so unkind to
me?” she quivered.

She looked so ready to
fall that he could not resist the temptation to put his hand protectingly on
her arm, so that, as she stood in the low doorway leading to the stairs, he
appeared to be supporting her drooping weight.

“Have I not said that I
am here to help you, Mollie?”

The secretary slipped out
from the shadows behind them, his arms still full of winter evergreens.

“There is too much
foliage,” he smiled, and the smile told that he had seen and heard.

Bevis Holroyd went
angrily upstairs; he felt as if an invisible net was being dragged closely
round him, something which, from being a cobweb, would become a cable; this air
of mystery, of horror in the big house, this sly secretary, these
watchful-looking servants, the nervous village doctor ready to credit anything,
the lovely agitated woman who was the woman he had long so romantically loved,
and the sinister sick man with his diabolic accusations, a man Bevis Holroyd
had, from the first moment, hated—all these people in these dark surroundings
affected the young man with a miasma of apprehension, gloom and dread.

After a few hours of it
he was nearer to losing his nerve than he had ever been; that must be because
of Mollie, poor darling Mollie caught into all this nightmare.

And outside the bells
were ringing across the snow, practising for Christmas Day; the sound of them
was to Bevis Holroyd what the sounds of the real world are when breaking into a
sleeper’s thick dreams.

The patient sat up in
bed, fondling the glass of odious cambric tea.

“Why do you take the
stuff?” demanded the doctor angrily.

“She won’t let me off,
she thrusts it on me,” whispered Sir Harry.

Bevis Holroyd noticed,
not for the first time since he had come into the fell atmosphere of this dark
house that enclosed the piteous figure of the woman he loved, that husband and
wife were telling different tales; on one side lay a burden of careful lying.

“Did she—” continued the
sick man, “speak to you of her lost letters?”

The young doctor looked
at him sternly.

“Why should Lady
Strangeways make a confidante of me?” he asked. “Do you know that she was a
friend of mine ten years ago before she married you?”

“Was she? How curious!
But you met like strangers.”

“The light in this room
is very dim—”

“Well, never mind about
that, whether you knew her or not—” Sir Harry gasped out in a sudden snarl. “The
woman is a murderess, and you’ll have to bear witness to it—I’ve got her
letters, here under my pillow, and Garth Deane is watching her—”

“Ah, a spy! I’ll have no
part in this, Sir Harry. You’ll call another doctor—”

“No, it’s your case, you’ll
make the best of it—My God, I’m dying, I think—”