Wolf in Man's Clothing (7 page)

Well, I must say I was a little disconcerted. I turned to Conrad Brent and he had got out a handkerchief and was touching his bluish lips with it. “Look here,” I said abruptly. “I know that girl. She'd make anybody a good wife.”

“And a charming daughter-in-law,” said Conrad Brent, “threatening to murder me.”

“She didn't mean that; you know it. She …”

He interrupted me. “My dear Nurse. I have no doubt she would make an admirable wife for, as you aptly put it, anybody. But not”—he drew himself up and glanced up at the coat of arms and said in a different voice—“but not for
my
son. That's all, Nurse.” Without giving me another chance to speak he went to the door and opened it for me, and I was obliged to precede him into the hall.

The aspect of the great, solemn hall had changed. A fire had been lighted and there was a little group of people having tea there, with chairs and tables drawn up near the fire and Beevens hovering in the background. Alexia, sitting behind a lace-draped table, was pouring from an old silver service that was polished till it looked as soft as satin.

Conrad Brent asked me to have tea with them. The fact itself astonished me so I looked at him incredulously. But it was as if the opening of the library door had been the rising of a curtain and Conrad Brent had a scene to play. He was a different man—poised, urbane, gracious in a lordly way.

Well, naturally, I refused. I'd been too long away from my patient as it was. But he insisted upon introducing me to Maud Chivery, who nodded briefly and watched me brightly, to Nicky Senour whom I had already encountered and who remembered it for he was barely civil, and to another young man, tall and blond and nice-looking who arose at once from the bench before the fireplace and bowed, and answered to the name of Peter Huber. This then was Craig's friend and the man who had helped Nicky and the butler carry him to his room after the shooting.

Maud Chivery stirred her tea with a shriveled, brown little hand and said in a soft-as-silk voice, “I'll be glad to stay with you tonight, Nurse. When the other nurse leaves.”

Alexia's beautiful, pointed face turned seekingly toward her husband's. Conrad didn't look at her. “The other nurse will stay until morning,” he said.

Maud Chivery's eyes glistened with interest. Alexia's face stiffened, and she made a small quick motion as if to rise from her chair, but Conrad walked over to her and put his heavy hand on her shoulder. Alexia put one soft white hand caressingly over his own and instantly his face changed and softened. It was obvious that whatever had happened in the past Conrad Brent was almost fatuously in love with his young wife. The young wife who had been once, and not so long ago, his son's fiancée. “She goes tomorrow,” he said.

Alexia did not relax; her eyelids drooped a little but it seemed to me that under the soft shadow of her eyelashes she shot a demanding glance toward her brother Nicky. Nicky looked into his cup for an instant and said, “I wonder what Drue wants.”

Maud Chivery made a little shushing motion with one brown claw but glanced eagerly at Conrad. “That is not a name I or Alexia wish to hear uttered in this house,” said Conrad with really astonishing command and dignity. It argued sincerity on his part and a determination to control circumstances which seemed to me remarkable in this day when there are no medieval castles nor medieval rulers and no matter how much you hate anybody you really can't help hearing his name now and then. Nicky's pointed, elegant face and small crimson mouth looked fleetingly a little ugly; but he lifted his cup again without replying.

Rather abruptly I said that I had to get back to my patient and Peter Huber straightened suddenly, put down his cup and said something polite to Alexia who nodded. She hadn't said a word, yet she had made her will fully marked by her quick inquiring look at Conrad to know if Drue was to be sent away, no less than by her covert but imperative glance toward her brother which seemed to enlist his aid against Drue. Decidedly, Alexia held the reins of power in her pointed, soft, white hands. She didn't look at Peter Huber as she nodded to his polite murmur, and he walked across the hall beside me and started up the great stairway when I did.

At the curve I glanced down. Alexia was sitting perfectly still in her great chair, her crimson suit a spot of rich, soft color, her pearls reflecting a rosy glow from the fire. Her head was bent a little thoughtfully, and there was in her face again, despite its indubitable beauty, a hint of underlying cruelty. Perhaps it lay subtly in the shape of her mouth, small yet so crimson and so eager, or in her delicately pointed chin. Nothing she could help, certainly. I told myself that and then looked at Nicky and saw exactly the same thing, a subtle, indefinable twist of his red mouth, a brooding quality in the soft repose of his face, something you couldn't analyze and describe, and something cruel.

Maud Chivery's dark little face twisted over her white stock to watch us go up the stairway. Then we went above the landing and could no longer see the silent group below.

Peter Huber was still with me when I turned along the corridor toward my patient's room. Once we had passed beyond earshot of those in the hall below, he said, “Wait a minute, Miss—Nurse. I'd like to talk to you. It won't take a moment. Here's a chair.”

Well, I suppose it could have been called that, although it had almost certainly been culled from one of the bigger and better medieval torture chambers. A bulbous-legged cupid leered at me from a dark tapestry across the opposite wall, and Peter Huber said, “Is he going to die?”

“I hope not. I don't think so.”

He was a nice-looking fellow, as I've said; very blond and very big but not so boyish as my first impression led me to believe. He was tanned as Craig Brent was tanned. There were fine lines around his large blue eyes and around his squarish mouth; his features were large and rather blunt, his blond hair curly and strong-looking. He had rather good hands, long and muscular and was dressed in very British tweeds but was not British, although there was a slight flavor of something European about him; perhaps it was his enormous politeness. Anyway, he looked at me then, earnestly and worriedly, and said, “Has he told you who shot him? I'm sure he knows.”

T
ELLING PETER HUBER THE
things Craig had said was not like telling Conrad Brent. Conrad was Craig's father, his own flesh and blood; besides, he was in a position of authority. If there was the smallest grain of reality in Craig's muttered words, Conrad was the man to deal with it, no one else.

“It was accident,” I replied discreetly. “He was cleaning a gun.”

Peter Huber looked straight at me. “In the garden?” he said after a moment. “At night—no, Nurse. What really happened?”

I got up. “You should know more about it than I,” I said briskly. “I've got to get back to him now.”

“But—oh, all right.” He walked to the door and put his hand on the doorknob. “I won't bother you,” he said, smiling a little, “but if I can do anything …”

“Thank you.” He glanced in the room over my shoulder, and then, without attempting to enter, closed the door behind me.

Drue was standing beside the window.

It is strange, really, that women deck themselves in silks and jewels and furs. There is nothing that sets off beauty like the simplicity and whiteness of a nurse's uniform. The white, starched dress outlined the slender curves of Drue's figure. Her white cap rested lightly on her hair with its gold highlights, and framed her face like a coronet, stately and yet with a kind of piquance. Her eyes were very clear and intent below it, her lips scarlet. The whiteness brought out (in the way a reflecting light and its corollary shadows do bring out lines) the delicate hollows below her cheekbones, the white, generous temples. There was strength there and decision, and yet tenderness, too.

I went to my patient and there was no change. Drue said, watching the rain, “Thanks for what you said to Conrad Brent.”

“Perhaps in the morning …”

“No. He won't change his mind again. I've only tonight.”

Only tonight. And Craig Brent unconscious and drugged, and for that night hovering in the nebulous, incalculable margin between life and death.

There was nothing I could do or say. Presently, she said, “I'm going now. I'll try to sleep. I'll take over at twelve,” and went away.

It was then nearly six o'clock with rain coming now in gusty squalls against the windowpanes, and the house was very quiet.

I had plenty to think of as moments dragged along, and I must say I didn't at all fancy the sum total of my thoughts. For, any way I looked at it, Drue was fighting a losing battle and yet she was determined to fight it.

The trouble was, of course, Craig Brent had done nothing at all to find her again. In these days, I told myself, fathers don't deal out autocratic commands to their sons. The sons won't let them. They say, in effect, Okay, Pa, I'll go and dig ditches if I have to, but I'll marry my own wife and support her, too.

Craig Brent had done nothing like that. I was thinking that, watching him, when he moved a little, sighed, and tucked the hand Drue had kissed under his cheek. He did it without opening his eyes, without really waking. He sighed again like a contented child and dropped back into sleep. It only goes to show my feeling about Craig Brent when I say it exasperated me beyond words. I got up and went to the fire, and stared down at the dying coals.

But, if I didn't like Craig Brent, still less did I like the fact that he had been shot and I didn't think it was accident.

Well, time went on and I wished I had my knitting. Nobody came near me until Beevens silently brought my dinner tray and, half an hour later, returned as silently to carry it away again. Somehow, I half expected Alexia or Maud Chivery or even the doctor, but as far as I knew no one so much as approached the door. The night had turned stormy and colder, with gusts of wind and rain, and it wasn't very pleasant sitting there in the gloomy bedroom with the wind blowing wisps of smoke back down the chimney now and then, and a shutter somewhere flapping. I began to watch the clock a little nervously. Once, overcome by a distinct impression that everybody else had gone away, vanished mysteriously into the night, leaving me and my patient alone in the great and somehow forbidding house, I got up and looked into the corridor.

My first glimpse of the long, night-lighted corridor all but confirmed my fantastic notion, it was so completely empty. But, as I watched, Nicky came out of a door down toward the stairs and on the right, glanced along the corridor, saw me or my white cap, paused for a fractional second and slipped back into the room from which he had just emerged and closed the door. He wasn't wearing a dinner jacket; he was still in a checked coat and brown trousers; I was sure it was Nicky.

It was just then, by the way, that Delphine entered my life—and the bedroom. I felt something soft brush against my ankles and on suppressing a sharp cry and looking downward I discovered an enormous Maltese tomcat, with blazing green eyes and battle-scarred ears who stalked to the hearth-rug, turned around twice, sat down and looked at me.

He had apparently drifted silently along the shadows of the hall under chairs and tables and near the wall, so I hadn't seen what was a habitually stealthy approach. And I couldn't get rid of him. I held the door open invitingly and whispered, “Kitty, kitty,” and he merely looked disdainful. I went to him and swished with my skirt and he was only slightly entertained. I started to take him up in my hands and he simply lifted one solid gray paw and planted it upon my hand and firmly put out his claws. He didn't scratch or dig them in, but he gave me to understand then and there that he had little if any scruples.

So in the end I let him stay. He took a complete bath, paused to stalk something that was not under the couch and went to sleep in a tight gray ball. I moved to a chair, to the sofa, to the bed, to stare down at Craig, and then back to a chair. The trouble was, of course, I knew too much and still too little. It was an uneasy kind of night, wakeful, somehow, and troubled. But nothing happened. Nothing happened really, I mean, although once in a lull in the wind and rain I thought I heard quiet footsteps in the hall. The house seemed to sleep, yet there was a listening, sentient quality about it, too.

The cat didn't move. My patient slept heavily. The wind creaked the shutter outside and sighed down the chimney. Twelve o'clock came and Drue didn't come with it.

Twelve o'clock and twelve-ten, and still she was not there.

At twelve-fifteen two things happened. Delphine opened his eyes, opened them all at once without blinking, sat up and stared fixedly at the blank panels of the door to the hall. Just stared at it, for a long time. Then something bumped, hard and sharp, against the door.

A long silence followed. I must have got up, for I remember standing very still, listening. There was no other sound, no retreating footsteps, no movement, no voice.

Because of this, or because of something less easily accountable, a moment (perhaps two or three) elapsed before I went to the door and opened it. No one was in the hall; it stretched emptily away on either hand with the chairs here and there making heavy shadows. But no one was there.

I believe—indeed I know—that several moments passed, while I stood there. Long enough, at least, for me to discover the rather queer thing I did discover and that was a kind of dent, small and not deep but still a dent, in the waxed gleaming surface of one of the panels of the door I still held open.

It was as if someone had been carrying something (a ladder, fireplace tongs, perhaps a hammer) along the hall and had accidentally bumped it against the door. But people don't carry hammers, or ladders, through sleeping houses after midnight.

But I was looking at that little dent, touching it with my finger, when a woman somewhere screamed. It was a short, breathless little scream, cut off before it was more than begun. But I knew somehow that it was Drue.