A NERVE CURE
"Well, what a place!" Julia cried.
I had come to it because of an urgent need of change, because it was by the sea, because it was cheap, because the advertisement had caught my eye at a moment when I was weary of vainly protesting that I wished to go nowhere except to bed.
"To Let, during the months of November and December, a six-roomed cottage; desirable; furnished; free of charge, with exception of caretaker's wage."
"To Let, during the months of November and December, a six-roomed cottage; desirable; furnished; free of charge, with exception of caretaker's wage."
A couple of letters from me, a couple in reply from the owner, who was going for the winter months abroad, and the affair was settled.
Then my people who—although for ten years I have earned my own living, and helped to keep some of them who have not earned theirs, although I am five-and-thirty years of age and an absolutely dependable person—have never let me have my own way in any single matter, insisted that Julia should come with me. She is my youngest sister. I have not a word to say against her, of course; only I know that the things I am content to put up with are never good enough for Julia.
"Well,whata place!" Julia repeated; the shifting of the accent did not denote, I was sure, a more favourable view.
It certainly was not a pretty cottage. It was also quite out of the town, in which we had believed it to be situated, standing at the extremity of an unfinished road which led halfway across the sandy waste lying between the town of Starbay and the village of Starcliff.
"A garden, back and front," Miss Ferriman had promised me in one of her letters. There were the gardens, sure enough, but almost as unfinished as the road. "An airy situation and uninterrupted view of the sea," the description had continued, and was faithful as far as it went. The wind, which happened to be blowing a gale, without obstruction of any kind to break its force, buffeted us remorselessly as, having descended from the car which had brought us from the station, we struggled up the path to the door. Half a mile of blowing sand, with sparse, wiry grass sticking through, was between us and the breakers; yet the ocean, cold and lead-coloured, was beyond, and not so much as a finger-breadth of impediment to check the prospect.
"Well, what aplace!" said Julia again. "Let's go back, Isabella. Don't let us go in."
But, once inside, we found the sitting-room which was to be ours comfortable and prettily furnished; our two bedrooms—there were but three—were also all that was necessary. Mine faced the sea beyond the melancholy, level Denes, Julia, to my great content, choosing the one looking out upon the back. The little back garden with its stunted shrubs, the unmade road beyond, made a melancholy outlook, but one that suited Julia better than the sea-view.
"The sight of the sea at this time of year gives me the most awful feeling," she declared. She rounded her shoulders, and pressed her hands upon a chest made hollow for the occasion, and her knees gave way under her, to prove how strongly she was affected.
"Then, why did you come to the sea?" I asked, for I was a little tired of Julia's grumbling.
"I came to look after you and your nerves, Isabella," she reminded me; "and how could I possibly know I shouldn't like the sea in November till I had seen it?"
We had ordered tea to be ready for us, and after our long railway journey we were more than ready for the meal.
"The woman of the house is a most miserable, frightened-looking creature," Julia remarked. "It is to be hoped that, at any rate, she will provide us with decently cooked food."
On this score I had no misgivings. Miss Ferriman, in one of her letters, had laid special stress upon the fact that Mrs Ragg, the caretaker, was an excellent cook.
She offered us no solacing specimen of her culinary art, however. The round table in the bay-window of our sitting-room was spread simply with the materials for brewing tea and for cutting bread-and-butter.
Julia's eyes blazed with hunger and indignation. "This is your fault, Isabella!" she declared. "What did you order, pray?"
"Something substantial. It is very annoying," I could not help confessing.
Julia angrily jingled the little bell. "We want something to eat," she said, as the caretaker appeared. "Cook us two chops, please; as quickly as possible."
Mrs Ragg looked at us from the doorway with the same gaze of fascinated terror with which a half-starved crow might regard two wild cats taking possession of its cage. With her garments of shabby black, her black untidy hair, her long beak and startled eyes, she had something of the appearance of a bedraggled, ill-used bird of that species. Her trembling, clawlike fingers played with the buttons of her dress; her chin, a very long and pointed feature, seemed to elongate itself immensely as her mouth fell; she sucked in the sides of her thin cheeks, and looked with a helpless imploring gaze from Julia to me.
"You have no chops, I suppose?" I interpreted the beseeching gaze.
She had no chops, she confessed.
"What have you, then?" the unpitying Julia persisted. "What have you got for our breakfast tomorrow? for our dinner? You have provided something, no doubt?"
The hollows in each meagre cheek of the caretaker deepened, the effect of the still further elongating of her chin, the starting eyes turned from my sister to me.
"Julia," I said, with severity, "it will be better not to have two Richmonds in the field. I, myself, will, with your permission, give Mrs Ragg what orders are necessary."
Then, in a tone of severity which should have been at once an encouragement to Mrs Ragg and a reproach to my sister, I asked to have some eggs boiled for tea.
There were no eggs.
"Go and fetch some," the irrepressible Julia cried.
"I understood the two ladies were to do their shopping themselves," the caretaker tremblingly explained.
I said of course we would. "Press not a falling man (or woman) too far," I quoted to Julia, as, the unhappy Mrs Ragg having left us to ourselves, we sat down to our bread-and-butter.
Julia, although protesting in the finish that hunger still gnawed her vitals, ate half the loaf. I, who should have been content to put up with what remained of it for our morning meal, was unable to control my sister's raging determination to forage that night for food.
"I refuse to starve," she said.
There was, luckily for us, a full moon, or we might easily have lost the faintly indicated road, lightly strewn as it was with oyster-shells and broken bricks, and ploughed through the trackless waste of sandy desert all night. The outskirts of the town reached, there were several mean-looking streets to pass through, before we found a shop at which we thought it desirable to trade. As we walked, buffeted by the wind blowing in from the sea, Julia discoursed of the caretaker of Sea-Strand Cottage.
"That, mark my words, is a thoroughly bad woman," she declared. "She wouldn't be such a forbidding-looking creature unless she was wicked. It wouldn't be fair on the part of the Almighty to have made her so. I consider her aspect thoroughly sinister."
"Poor frightened, trembling old wretch!" I said.
"Exactly. Why does she tremble? What is she afraid of? In my opinion she is intending to murder us in our beds."
"You had better go home the first thing in the morning and leave me to my fate," I told her. To myself I said I did not believe the world contained another woman with the worrying capacity of Julia. It was because she was such a disturbing force in the family that they had been so eager for her to accompany me, I, not without bitterness, suspected.
At the shop where we bought our chops for breakfast and a chicken for dinner, I bethought me to enquire of the young woman at the entering desk if Mrs Ragg, the caretaker of Sea-Strand Cottage, was known to her. The reply was quite satisfactory. Their cart had always served the cottage; the woman in charge was a most respectable person; a couple of ladies who had taken the cottage in the summer had mentioned that she was also an excellent cook.
The chops were served to us the next morning charred black, uneatable. I pointed them out to Julia on her appearing, and, with a view to deprecating her inevitable wrath, frankly so described them. My sister regarded the lost hopes of our meal with a preoccupied stare; then turned upon me with the wide distending of her eyelids which I knew portended a new worry.
"What sort of a night had you?" she asked.
"Excellent. And you?"
"Frightful. My nerves are all on the stretch, in consequence. I give you warning, Isabella, if you drop your knife or chink your teacup and saucer I shall scream aloud."
"You didn't sleep?"
"Not a wink."
"Were there noises to disturb you?"
"Not a sound. That was it! Not a din, Isabella."
"That's all right, then."
"Is it? You know my room?—just a lath-and-plaster partition between it and hers—that woman's. I ought to have heard every movement, even if she turned in her bed."
"It was very thoughtful of Mrs Ragg to lie so still."
"She was not there, Isabella."
"Not there?"
"I'd stake my life on it. It worried me so at last—Ihadto listen, you know—that I got up and put my ear against the partition. The deadest stillness!"
"But even if she was not there, I don't see it is so very alarming."
"She says she was. I asked her just now if she was sleeping next to me, and she said yes."
"She was, then."
"She wasn't."
I poured out the tea with impatience. What a constant worry Julia was! Without appearing to cast a backward thought upon the chops, she buttered herself a piece of toast.
"Of course, at last, I did fall asleep," she admitted. "And that was the worst of all. Isabella, I dreamt of that horrible little room next to mine, and of the reason it was so still."
"Well?"
"I dreamt there was a dead woman in it."
I laughed at that, and Julia, pausing in the act of taking a bite from her toast, glared angrily at me.
"You are a nice, soothing sort of person to be sent away with one supposed to be in want of cheering influences!" I said. "You and your dream of a dead woman!"
"I dreamt one was there," Julia said, going on with her toast. "In my opinion onewasthere," she added, doggedly.
When she had finished her breakfast, and had withdrawn her thoughts from the engrossing subject of her dream sufficiently to grumble about the aching void where the chops should have been, she sprang up from the table and loudly tinkled the little bell.
"For Mrs Ragg to clear away," she explained to me. "While she is doing so, and you, Isabella, keep her attention engaged on things below, I am going upstairs to have a look at her bedroom."
"Absurd!" I ejaculated.
"Aren't you absurd?" Julia cried, and turned upon me with scorn. "To take up your abode in a little cut-throat hole like this and not to take the commonest precaution!"
She flew upstairs, then, and Mrs Ragg was in the room.
In order to obey my sister's injunction to keep the woman's attention I began to talk to her, asking her how long she had lived in Sea-Strand Cottage. I had just gathered from her grudging, mumbling speech that she had lived there since the cottage was built, when my sister was in the room again.
Julia watched the caretaker shovel the things on to the tray, and, sighing bitterly the while, drag wearily out of the room with them. She turned to me, then, with a nod eloquent.
"Locked," she enunciated. "The door was locked. Why—why should the woman want to lock her bedroom door when she is out of it?"
"She returns the compliment you have paid her, and thinks you not to be trusted," I suggested.
"If I have to climb on the roof and pull off the tiles, I'll see what is in that room before I go to bed tonight!" Julia declared.
Then Mrs Ragg came back for the tablecloth.
"I slept very badly last night, Mrs Ragg," said Julia.
Mrs Ragg sucked in her cheeks, sighed heavily, made no answer.
"And so did you, I'm afraid. You were very restless. You walked about half the night."
"Me, miss?" She had folded the cloth, but she dropped it from her shaking, awkward hands, stooped to recover it, dropped it again. "Begging your pardon, no, miss."
"Who, then?" Julia asked inflexibly.
The woman turned away with the cloth and shuffled hastily to the door.
"Wait," commanded Julia. "Who, then? There was no one else in your bedroom besides you, I suppose?"
Mrs Ragg hurriedly rejected the insinuation. She had had a pain in her chest, she remembered now, and had got up for remedies.
"Of course you heard me rapping on the wall and asking you to keep still? You heard that, at least, Mrs Ragg?"
"Yes," Mrs Ragg had heard that, certainly. She admitted the fact as if it had been a sin, with a look of actual horror upon her face.
"You heard?" asked Julia of me in a kind of triumph as we were alone. "There was not a sound through all the night. I never rapped upon the wall. Now, why is she lying? It may be nothing to you, but I mean to know."
Once more that morning, coming from our own rooms, dressed for walking, Julia tried the caretaker's door. Finding it fast, shook it, and turned from doing so to find Mrs Ragg, arrived on the scene in her felt shoes, standing behind her.
"Asking your pardon, miss, that is my room," the woman said; with a feeble kind of offence she went and put herself before the door.
"We have hired the cottage; I presume we have the right to look even into your room, if we deem it advisable," Julia said, with her haughtiest air. "So, you always keep your room locked, Mrs Ragg?"
"When strangers are about I do," Mrs Ragg replied; and although she was apparently afraid of us she gazed upon us with no goodwill.
As we left the house, Julia called my attention to the fact that the blind in the room next to her own was drawn. "All the same, I don't sleep again beneath your Mrs Ragg's roof till I've been into her bedroom," she declared.
I had come to Starbay for the benefit of the sea. Julia, however, would not allow me to make nearer acquaintance with it than that possible from my window, but dragged me into the town again. We put down our names at one of the circulating libraries, and, it coming on to rain, could think of no better than to go upstairs to the reading-room.
It happened to have only one other occupant. A man of early middle-age, who, with the marks of delicate health upon him, had a face which, like that of "my Uncle Toby's," invited confidence.
Julia, for a minute, as we settled to read, looked across the table at him with her direct, sea-green gaze; then turned to her paper and looked no more until she put the paper down and began to talk to him.
It was easy enough to begin with a question about a certain magazine. "Did they take it there?" and to follow on with half a dozen enquiries about the town, and the objects of interest in the neighbourhood. I listened for a minute or two, reflecting how to my young sister any human document, however casually picked up, exceeded in interest the finest book ever written, then went on with an article on Education in which I happened to be interested. I roused myself from my abstraction to hear Julia mentioning to the strange man the name of Sea-Strand Cottage as our abode, and describing in her exaggerated fashion its location and appearance.
"At the utmost end of Everywhere, and looking like secret assassination, nothing less, when you get there," my sister was saying.
The man, as it happened, knew the place well. "It was the advertisement of Sea-Strand Cottage which brought me to Starbay," he said. "But when I saw the place, I——"
"You didn't like it! No more did I!" Julia said.
"However, the caretaker seemed a comfortable sort of body, and I was assured an excellent cook," the man continued.
Julia, her hands in her coat-pockets, bent her supple body forward across the table, bringing her eager face nearer to the stranger's. "Did you see her?—Mrs Ragg?" she asked.
He had seen her.
"Well?"
"She seemed all right," he said; and Julia lay back, disappointed, in her chair again.
"To me she seems all wrong," she said.
When I thought the conversation had lasted long enough I took Julia away from the library. Mrs Ragg had declared herself unable to have our meal ready before three o'clock in the afternoon. We went into a pastry-cook's therefore, and Julia ate a fair supply of tarts and custards, and insisted on taking away with her a selection from the store. "You keep yourself in hand for the chicken cooked by Mrs Ragg; I intend to be independent of it," she said, and walked home with her indigestible provender.
As we neared Sea-Strand Cottage we saw, coming towards it from the opposite direction, our new acquaintance of the reading-room. We met by the gate.
"I have to do a constitutional of so many prescribed miles every morning," he said. "After our conversation just now, I naturally bent my steps in this direction."
"Do walk this way sometimes," Julia said, flashing her smile upon him. "If, after a few days, you should see nothing of us, you might bring a policeman with you and search for our remains."
He smiled too, and said he would certainly do so. "I saw two or three men here as I went by, just now," he said; "they might have been the assassins you are expecting, but they looked uncommonly like every-day carpenters and workmen."
"Coming out of the house, do you mean?Men?" Julia asked, instantly on the alert.
"Not from the house—from the outhouse," he corrected and nodded in its direction.
Julia and I had inspected this empty outhouse that morning, and had decided to have our travelling-cases moved there. As our eyes turned towards it now, Mrs Ragg came out from it and softly closed the door behind her.
"This is the Mrs Ragg about whose desirability we disagree," Julia told the stranger, who, with his hand to his hat, was bowing to us and moving on. He stopped for a moment, looked at the caretaker, looked back to us with a smile.
"The mystery is solved. Your Mrs Ragg and mine are not the same person," he said.
Julia, who had been round to the back of the house to make inspection, came running to me with the news that the blind was up in the caretaker's bedroom, and the window open.
"There is a ladder against the outhouse," she said. "You must come and help me to fix it, Isabella, and stand on the bottom rung while I climb to the window."
There was no need for such extreme measures, however. Going upstairs to escape from my sister's importunity, I found the door of the hitherto locked room invitingly open. This intelligence being communicated to Julia, she came rushing upstairs, and dragged me unwillingly into Mrs Ragg's bedroom with her.
A most commonplace, mean-looking room, the wind blowing through it from open window to open door. The bed still unmade, but the square box of a place otherwise clean and tidy.
"What a home of mystery!" I said, with fine sarcasm, to Julia. "Where's your corpse, my dear?"
Julia gazed with great eyes round the little depressing place. "It really is exactly like," she said slowly. "The bed stood just there. But on it, you know, Isabella—on it——"
She shuddered, and gripped my arm. "My teeth chatter. Come away," she said.
She was generous enough to share her confectionery with me, and her forethought in bringing it was amply justified. Mrs Ragg had been so much occupied all the morning that she had forgotten to put the chicken in the oven until she saw us at the gate, she told us.
"Of course we can't put up with this. We will leave to-morrow," Julia declared. But I, who had paid the caretaker a week's salary in advance, was of opinion we should have a little more for our money.
"Put the chicken back in the oven, and I will see to the cooking of it," Julia said, when we had sufficiently contemplated the more than half-raw carcase of the fowl. "My sister is an invalid," she continued; "I am anxious that she should not be quite starved. I will cook the chicken therefore, and you will be responsible, perhaps, for the bread-sauce, Mrs Ragg."
The woman, looking alarmedly at her, murmured the word "bread-sauce?" and sucked in her cheeks.
"You know how to make bread-sauce, Mrs Ragg?"
Mrs Ragg had to confess she did not.
"But how can you possibly have had a reputation as a cook!" my sister demanded. Her eyes continued to blaze forth the inquiry long after there was any hope of the woman making a reply.
"I'm afraid you are a helpless creature," Julia told her, with the stern pitilessness that belongs to youth. "I also do not know how to make bread-sauce, but I will make it. In the meantime, will you go up to our rooms, fetch down the empty packing-cases—you will find them extremely light—and place them in that shed across the yard we saw empty this morning."
Undoubtedly Mrs Ragg was a helpless creature. She stood uncertainly before us, her skinny hands playing tremblingly with the buttons of her dress, and did not attempt to move.
"Do you not hear me? Go at once," Julia commanded.
But I saw that the woman got no nearer to our rooms than the bottom of the staircase. She stood there, clinging to the rail, and looking aimlessly upward.
Running upstairs I brought the two light cases down myself.
"There is room for them in the kitchen," Mrs Ragg said. But, carrying one myself, I told her to bring the other across to the empty shed. Arrived there, however, we found the door of the shed locked.
"Fetch the key," I ordered.
She stood and looked at me, but did not move.
"Tell me where the key is, and let me fetch it."
The key was lost.
"Why have you taken the trouble to lock an absolutely empty shed?"
She had no reason to give. She had locked it, and the key was lost.
"She has some reason for not wishing us to go into that shed," Julia said, oracularly, when the circumstance was mentioned to her.
"Absurd!" I said, but I did begin to experience an uncomfortable suspicion of the woman.
"She has got those men locked up there," Julia continued, with her air of assurance.
"Nonsense! What for?"
"Murder," said Julia, laconically; and energetically crumbled bread for the sauce.
"What were two men doing here this morning?" I asked, with assumed carelessness, of Mrs Ragg when next we encountered.
She mumbled the words "two men?" and stared at me by way of answer.
"We were told two men were here this morning. This is a very lonely situation, Mrs Ragg. I suppose you would admit no one you don't know all about?"
She was, she said, always most particular.
"Then, who were these two men, and what were they doing here?"
She did not know.
"Two men here, Mrs Ragg, and you not know it?"
"They weren't here," she said; and I had to leave it so.
I offered to change beds with Julia that night, but she would not hear of it. "Your room is the more comfortable; keep it," she said. "While you insist on staying here at the peril of our lives, I will sleep as well as I can with a dead woman laid forth on the bed next mine, and two murderers shut up in the shed across the way."
Julia's talk is ever more extravagant even than her notions, but it was of a disquieting kind. Many of the absurd things she had said in the day recurred to me in the night, assuming a quite different value. So that, although I had longed for bed, I found myself, arrived there, quite disinclined for sleep.
Surreptitiously I watched the caretaker up to bed. She came upstairs, clinging to the balusters for support, a tired, worn-looking, elderly woman, with a lank, frail body, and a care-lined, miserable face. How ridiculous were Julia's suspicions! She not only did not lock her door to-night, but left it ajar. At intervals I peeped through mine to see if her light was extinguished; she had not—so poorly dressed she was—the appearance of one who would indulge in the extravagance of a candle burning all night. Yet, long after I knew by the creaking of the spring mattress Mrs Ragg had lain down, I saw the streak of light shining through the unclosed door.
Fears of fire were added to my other disquietudes. Standing on the landing, I was hesitating if to knock at her door, and remind her she had not put out her light, when I was conscious of a movement behind me. Starting round with a muffled cry, I encountered a tall white figure, which, with an answering cry, grabbed me by both shoulders.
"Whatareyou doing here, Isabella?"
"Howcouldyou frighten me so, Julia!"
We clung together and scolded each other for a minute, then each returned to her own room. But I not to sleep. Listening acutely for every sound, yet shrinking from every sound as it came, I tossed and turned with wide-open, feverish eyes. Suspicious circumstances at which I had been disposed to laugh in the day, took on a sinister complexion in the watches of the night. The loneliness of the place, its distance from every habitation—details to which I held no special distaste before—got hideously upon my nerves at last. Supposing anything happened, in what a position did we three women stand! What chance was there of help?
In my mind I surveyed the prospect from my window. The trackless Denes, the wild, unfriendly sea. Shuddering, I turned mentally to the outlook from Julia's room. What of reassuring was there in the rudiments of an unlighted road across a desert of ugly waste lands?
I was thinking of the road, I suppose, when at last I fell on sleep; for my dream was a nightmare of toiling over it with Julia, in a frantic attempt to escape from some horror, none the less terrible for being undefined, ever close upon our heels.
It was some disturbing but uncertain sound that wakened me from this dreaming to an inner dream. Just a vision, seen in a flash and gone, of two men standing in a light thrown from an upper window, and looking up to it.
From this apparition so vividly presented to my brain, I was awakened by a repetition of the disturbing sound, soft but distinct now. I flew up in bed with a beating heart and the certainty that someone, somewhere, had thrown a clod of earth at a window—not mine; at the back of the house; Julia's, or Mrs Ragg's.
A minute, and I was out of my bed and into Julia's room. I laid a hand on my sister's shoulder. "Julia," I whispered, "wake up. I've had such horrible dreams."
The candle I held in a shaking hand showed the glinting green of Julia's eyes within their half-opened lids. "I'm so comfy," she muttered; "I'm having such a lovely sleep. Go back to bed, Isabella."
But I crept into Julia's bed, instead, and clasped her close for the comfort of her presence.
"I dreamt two men were looking up at a window," I said, "—do keep awake, Julia. I don't know why it seemed so horrid—nothing has ever seemed so horrid before. And—you're going off to sleep again, Julia!—you must listen!—someone flung something at a window. That was not a dream. I heard it quite distinctly."
"It wasn't at this window," Julia declared, in muffled tones. "What a nuisance you are, Isabella."
Then in an instant she flung off her sleep and was out of bed. "It must have been at Mrs Ragg's," she said. "I am going to see."
Shivering, I followed to the landing. The light no longer showed from Mrs Ragg's door, but the door itself was still ajar. Julia rapped sharply upon it and called the caretaker's name. When no one answered, she pushed the door wide, and we saw, by the light of the candle I carried, that the room was empty.
I scarcely knew why the fact that it was so filled us both with such dismay. Our faces were white in the candlelight as we looked blankly at each other; then, seizing hands, we scurried back to Julia's room. A rush of cold air met us on the landing and our light went out.
"An outer door is open," Julia said.
We shut and locked our own door and stood together in the darkness, gripping each other, intently listening.
Julia's senses are sharper than mine. "Someone is in the garden—at the back," she whispered. "I can hear footsteps—footsteps of more than one person. What shall we do, Isabella? I don't know yet what we ought to do."
Presently we were kneeling at the window. The moon had set, the night was quite dark. By degrees, straining our eyes in desperate anxiety, we made out the stunted form of a shrub or two planted opposite the house; we knew that the blackness of shadow at our left was the shed whose key had been lost.
As we looked, the shed door opened. We knew it by the light which suddenly streamed upon the night. It was the light from a lantern held high, a light flickering and uncertain. It blinked and trembled and swayed as if held in a shaking hand. We knew whose was the lean, lank figure, fitfully revealed, which held it.
"What can she be doing there?" we asked of each other, with chattering teeth, simultaneously.
Neither answered. There was no need. Too well we knew she was letting out the men whom, to have them handy for our murder at night, she had locked in, earlier in the day.
They came presently. The fluttering light gave us unsteady glimpses of them, and of some large and heavy burden they carried.
"Whatis it?" I demanded of Julia. My arm ached with her grip of it, but she did not answer. All her senses were merged in the sense of seeing. She could not hear, nor feel, nor speak.
Mrs Ragg, holding the lantern high, walked ahead of the obscure group, which slowly followed. The light illumined her stooping, meagre figure as she made her way down the path across the back garden to the gate. Only now and again, by the chance swaying of the lantern, a ray lit the heavy blackness of the mass moving in her wake.
She stopped with her lantern at the gate. For the minute it took for them to pass her we saw more plainly the figures of the men going heavily beneath their burden.
"Whatis it?" I found myself asking again, expecting no answer, needing none.
Very softly Julia pushed up the sash of the window, hung her head with its loose flowing hair into the night.
Presently, the form of Mrs Ragg came slowly back again, down the garden path. The lantern hung at her side now; its light streaming upward showed us her white and frightened face. Julia drew in her head, gently closed the window, turned to me.
"They have driven off—for the present," she said. "I heard the wheels. Before they return—perhaps—we shall have time to escape."
We had risen to our feet now, but we clung together still. "Julia, whatwasit?" I asked, for the third time, quite senselessly. For my eyes are as good as Julia's, and our opportunities of sight and judgment had been the same.
"It was a coffin," Julia said, and I knew that through the darkness her eyes glared with hardly maintained courage upon my face, and that she shut down her lips firmly over chattering teeth.
Space fails to tell of the remainder of that night: of how we dressed in feverish haste to escape, and then were afraid to go; of how, having assured ourselves—by the sense of hearing only, for we thought it best not to light a candle—of Mrs Ragg's return, and of her retirement for the second time to bed, and this time to slumber—we depended on our hearing also for the establishment of the latter fact—we sat and watched, shivering with cold and apprehension, through the endless hours for the reappearance of Mrs Ragg's accomplices, straining our eyes to stare in the direction of the garden path down which we believed they would come. Of how with the first faint light of dawn courage came to us to escape.
Julia remembered the name of the hotel at which our chance acquaintance of the reading-room had mentioned he was staying. As we did not know his name, it was by good luck that we encountered him on the steps of the Royal George setting forth on his before-breakfast constitutional. He showed himself politely sceptical of our story. How Julia's eyes blazed upon him in surprised and angry reproach for his want of faith, he has assured her many times since, he can never forget. We insisted that he should go at once to the police station and fetch constables to arrest Mrs Ragg on the charge of murder. The alternative course he proposed appeared to us weakly inadequate. However, he being a man and we being women, he had his way. We returned with him at once to Sea-Strand Cottage, the only concession he made to our fears being to take a policeman with him, to wait outside the house in case he should be wanted.
"The lonely situation has worked upon your nerves. You have dreamt a little and imagined the rest," he said, by way of overcoming our natural repugnance to return.
Julia gave him a scathing glance. "You will see," she said. She vouchsafed no further word to him, but with an indignant head held high, walked ahead of him and me as, side by side, we toiled over the uneven road, the policeman bringing up the rear.
The caretaker, characteristically oblivious of the fact that her lodgers, who, she had every reason to believe, were still in their bedrooms, would presently call for their breakfast, was leisurely eating her own over the newly-lit kitchen fire.
At sight of us, unexpectedly appearing before her, of our protector with his air of authority, of the policeman, who, contrary to instructions, introduced himself at the open door, Mrs Ragg rose with a wavering cry that was like a whine, from her seat. She sucked in her cheeks till they met, and with her claw-like hands grabbed her shabby frock where it loosely covered her bosom.
"You are not Mrs Ragg," our companion said.
She grabbed more convulsively at her dress, and made no reply.
"Where is Mrs Ragg?"
"She is dead, sir. Dead," the woman said, and sat down and began to cry. "She died the very afternoon the ladies came. I had the doctor to her. You can ask the doctor if you don't believe me. I'd have kept her alive if I could. She was my dear sister. I had only what she gave me——"
"And you undertook to impersonate her?"
The poor creature gazed at us with imploring eyes. "'Twas my sister that ordered it," she said, gasping with terror. "'Twas a pity the fifteen shillings a week the ladies were to pay should be lost to the family, my sister said. She put it in my head—she laid her orders on me before she died; she——"
"And she was laid forth in the bedroom next to mine?" Julia said; "and moved from there next morning to the shed in the garden."
"And from the shed taken at night to our brother's house, where she is waiting burial," the woman, now anxious to unburden herself, explained.
But what need is there to set forth any more of such talk? The rest of the story tells itself. And we have had perhaps more than enough of the pseudo Mrs Ragg.
Julia and I decided we had had enough also of Sea-Strand Cottage. We took up our abode temporarily at the Royal George. Our new-made friend—for after this adventure we could but look on him as a friend—had lived there for a month and could recommend it. It was in a busy thoroughfare of the town, houses on either side, at the back, over the way; men and women passing and repassing; plentiful gas-lamps, policemen within call. Ah, the blessed feeling of companionship and security! We had had enough of solitude, darkness, mystery, to last us for the rest of our lives.
However, the cost of living at the Royal George was greatly more than the cost of living at the Cottage.
"It is all very well for this man, who evidently has money to live in such a place," I said to Julia. "But we should quickly become bankrupt. At the end of a fortnight we will go."
"Make it three weeks," Julia said, "and I shall be engaged to the man with the money."
I scouted the idea, but stayed—perhaps to prove it impossible.
Or perhaps at my age I knew well that to the young and the confident nothing is impossible.
THE PRIVATE WARD
He had been seized with sudden illness in the suburban hotel in which he was staying, and being unknown there, had been removed to the Princess Mary Cottage Hospital. The dozen beds of the men's ward were full, and he had been placed in the private ward. He lay now on the narrow bed, sleeping heavily, the white, bright light of the spring morning showing mercilessly the havoc selfishness and reckless self-indulgence had wrought upon a once sufficiently handsome face. The emaciation of his long form was plainly seen through the single scarlet blanket which covered it.
The visiting doctor and the nurse stood, one on either side, looking down on him.
"What sort of night?" asked the doctor.
"Pretty bad," answered the nurse. The patient had been admitted the previous day, and she had watched by him through the night. "He was awake till three, and very restless."
"You repeated at three the dose I ordered?"
"Yes. He has lain like this since. When he wakes is he to have it again?"
"H'm!" said the doctor, deliberating, his eyes on the patient's face. "We will, I think, halve the dose. We mustn't overdo it; he seems susceptible to the drug."
He lifted his eyes from the unconscious face of the patient to the weary face of the nurse, and, as if struck by what he saw there, studied it with attention.
"You are more than usually tired this morning, sister," he said. "You must go at once to bed when I leave."
"It is always difficult for me to sleep in the daytime. I shall not sleep to-day," she said.
"But you are tired?"
"Dead tired."
The doctor observed her in a minute's silence. Her fine, almost regal form, at which few men looked and turned away, drooped a little this morning, seemed—but that was impossible—to have faded and shrunk since yesterday. There was, however, no sinking of the white eyelids over the pale blue eyes which, set in her darkly tinted face, were a surprise and a joy to the beholder. The eyelids were reddened now, and held wide apart, the eyes shining with a dry feverishness painful to see.
"If you go on night-duty and do not sleep in the day you will be ill," said the doctor, gently.
"Not I," said the nurse, roughly.
He was not, perhaps, sorry to miss in that handsome woman the show of extreme deference with which it was usual for the nurses to treat the doctors, but her brusqueness a little surprised him. Imagining that she resented the personal note, he turned, after a minute's quiet perusal of her face, to the patient.
Having given briefly his directions for his treatment and moved away, he stopped, looking at him for a minute still.
"His friends been communicated with?" he asked.
She shook her head. "By the look of him should you think he has got any friends who would care to hear?" she enquired.
Pityingly the doctor threw up his head. "Poor wretch!" he sighed. "What is his history, I wonder!"
To which Sister Marion made no reply. For she knew.
For the rest of the day she would be off duty. As a rule she took a brisk walk through the suburban town, passed the rows upon rows of neat little one-patterned houses, the fine, scattered villa-residences, with their spotless gardens, reached the common where the goats and the donkeys were tethered, the geese screamed with stretched necks, the children rolled and played. Plenty of good air there to fill lungs atrophied by long night hours in the sick atmosphere of the wards. Then, at a swinging pace home again to her welcome bed and a few hours' well-earned sleep.
To-day, beyond the white walls of the hospital, the sun danced invitingly, the spring breezes were astir. Sister Marion heeded them not at all. Having left the patient in the private ward to the nurse who succeeded her, she lingered listlessly in the wide, white corridor upon which all the wards opened, too preoccupied to remember that she was doing anything unusual.
There the doctor, having made the round of the wards, found her lingering still.
"Go to bed!" he said to her, authoritatively. "You will make yourself ill."
"Not I."
"Go to bed!" he said again, and, although his tone was not less authoritative, he smiled.
The feverish, pale blue eyes looked at him strangely with a regretful, wistful gaze, and he melted in a moment into unmixed gentleness. "Why are you being obstinate to-day? Go and lie down and get to sleep," he begged her.
"What does it matter if I do not?"
"It matters very much, to you, to your patients, to me. Will you go?"
She said yes, turned slowly away, and, passing down a passage leading from the central corridor, went to her tiny room. Arrived, she did not trouble to undress, but throwing off the cap which was tied beneath her chin, flung herself upon her bed.
"It is the last thing he will ask of me and I shall do it," she said.
She had known that she could not sleep. She put her hand above her burning eyes and forcibly closed the lids that remained so achingly open. In the darkness so achieved she must think out her plans; she must think how to get away from this place without attracting observation, leaving no trace of her removal, giving no clue to her destination. It was imperative that the step she decided on should be taken soon; she must form her project clearly, and there must be no blundering or mistake. But her overtired brain, refusing to work as she willed, presented only before her feverish eyes a picture of the young doctor coming in the spring sunshine down the hospital ward, a bunch of violets in his coat. How clean, and strong, and helpful he looked! And his voice—was it not indeed one to obey? It must be her fancy only that of late it had taken on a softer tone for her.
Her fancy! Her vain, mad fancy!
She flung over upon her bed and forced herself to contemplate what it was she had to do: To get away from the man who lay in the private ward; and from the place in which she had found a refuge till her evil angel had set him upon her track again.
Since the day, ten years ago, when she had married him, what a ruin her life had been! There had been, again and again, thank Heaven! periods of peace, periods of regained self-respect, of the enjoyment of the respect of others. These had been secured by flight only, by concealment of her whereabouts, and were of varying lengths of duration. Two years ago, with her hard-earned savings, she had paid his passage out to Africa. She had not believed him likely to earn the money to return, and had looked upon him as happily dead to her. Dead, indeed, perhaps. Until yesterday, when she had helped to lay him, unconscious, in the bed of the private ward. She guessed easily that he had learnt she was in the place, and had been about to seek her when he had been struck down.
If he should mercifully die!
Not he! she said, bitterly. Men sometimes died indelirium tremens. In every kind of illness, by every sort of accident, men died every day. Good and useful men, husbands of adoring wives, loving fathers of families, men needed by their country, by humanity, were swept mercilessly away. Only such carrion as this was left to fester upon the earth, to poison the lives of decent men and women. The doctor, standing above him, looking on the defaced image of what God, for some mysterious purpose, had made, had no thought but to restore to this foully-damaged frame the spirit and strength to do its evil work. Nurses, gentle and dutiful women, would give themselves to revive in all its corrupt activity the temporarily dormant mind and body.
Ought this to be? Where was the righteousness of it—the sense? Since that drug to which he was "so susceptible" was a deadly one, would it not be better to give him more of it? To rid society of a pest dangerous to its peace, to restore to one suffering, striving, blameless woman the happiness he had cost her?
"Would that be a crime?" she asked, and set her teeth and cried, "No, no," with hatred in her heart. Then, horrified at herself, flung herself over on her pillow, and, burying her face from the light of day, sobbed long with a tearless sobbing, bringing no relief; and so at last lay still.
She did not know if she had slept or only lain in the quiet and blank of mercifully deadened misery when, roused by the sound of her name, she lifted her head to find the matron of the little hospital standing beside her bed.
"We are having so much trouble with the D.T. patient, sister," she said. "He must not be left for a moment. I am sorry to wake you so soon, but will you go to him?"
She was so used to being alert and ready at the call of duty, that she forgot her plan had been to escape from the hospital at once, and in a minute was again in the private ward. The doctor was standing beside the bed, and Sister Marion saw he had been recalled because of the urgency of the case. For whatever reason, it was such a pleasure to see him again, to let her eyes rest upon the strong and kind and clever face—
And then, looking at him, she saw that down the broad brow and the clean-shaven cheek red blood was streaming.
He put up his hand to wipe the blood from his eyes, and the hand too, she saw, was gashed and bleeding.
He laughed at her look of surprise and horror. "This gentleman had a penknife under his pillow," he explained. "I have taken care that he does not do any more mischief."
He nodded in the direction of the patient, and Sister Marion, glancing that way, saw that the man lying on his back had his hands tied to the iron bed-rail above his head. In the reaction from the late attack he was lying absolutely still, and she saw, to her surprise, that in the eyes fixed on her face there was recognition.
"He is conscious," she whispered. "Come outside and let me attend to you."
He followed her to the ward kitchen, the room used by the nurses for the preparation of the patients' food, but empty now.
The doctor smiled and jested, but the blood flowed, the wound smarted, he was a little pale.
"Hemeantto hurt you?" she asked, through her set teeth.
"He meant to murder me, the brute!" the doctor said.
"Never mind," she soothed him; "I am accountable for him now. I will see to it he never hurts you again."
She felt herself to be a different woman; in some curious way emancipated. It had needed just the wounding of this man to change her. She was ashamed no longer to show him what she felt, nor had she any more a shrinking from doing what she now believed it right to do.
She stood above him as he sat in a new docility before her, and bathed the cut upon his temple, with lingering, tender touch, pushing back the hair to get at it. She knelt before him and dressed the cut upon his hand.
"I managed to do this myself in trying to get the knife away from him," the doctor explained.
With his unwounded hand he took an ivory-handled penknife, stained red with blood, from his pocket, and held it before her eyes. It had been a gift from her to the man who was now her husband in the early days of their acquaintance, before the thought of marriage had risen between them. With all the valuables he had pawned and lost and thrown away, strange that this worthless gift of the girl whose life he had ruined should have stuck to him; stranger still that after all those years she should be able to recognise it beyond possibility of doubt! He held it towards the basin of water as though to rinse it, but she took it from him and laid it aside.
"Let it be!" she said. "I shall know what to do with the knife."
The doctor's outside patients might be crying aloud for him; it was more than noontide, and he should long have been about his work; the patient in the private ward should have had Sister Marion at his side; but the pair lingered in the little red-and-white tiled ward kitchen, bathed in the warm rays of the golden afternoon sun. The dressing of the wounds was a long business, and to the ministering woman heavenly sweet.
Over the cut upon his forehead the short, dark hair had to be combed. By altering the place of parting this was easily done. And Sister Marion, looking down upon him to see the effect, thrilled to find eyes, usually cold and preoccupied, fixed in a rapture of adoration upon her face.
"No woman in the world has such a tender touch as you," he said. "My mother used to kiss my hurts to make them well. Will you do that too for me?"
Then the woman with murder in her heart stooped and kissed him tenderly as a mother upon his brow, knelt for an instant before him, and kissed his hand.
"Good-bye," she said, "Good-bye;" and without another word left him and went upon her business to the private ward.
The recognising eyes were upon her as she opened the door. "I did not have much trouble to find you, this time," the man said. "I didn't even come here of my own accord. I don't know anything about it, except that I feel infernally bad. Can't you give me something, Marion?"
"I will give you something presently," she said. "I wish to talk to you a little first."
"Not until you've untied my hands. What are they tied up for, pray?"
"To keep you from working mischief."
"Have I done anything to that long chap that went out with you? If so I'll make amends—I'll make any amends in my power."
"You shall make amends. Don't be afraid."
"You speak as if you had not a particle of pity in you; you are as hard and cold as a stone, as you always were——"
"Not always," she said, grimly—"unluckily for me."
"Any woman who had a grain of pity in her would pity me now. I feel so frightfully bad, Marion; I believe I am going to die."
"I believe you are."
He called on the name of God at that, and tried ineffectually to rise, and tugged frantically at the bandages which bound him. She watched him, standing at the foot of his bed, and could smile as she watched.
"You are afraid to die," she said; "I knew you would be. You were always a coward."
He cursed her then. His voice was feeble now; it had lost the strength of delirium. There was something awful in the sound of such words in such trembling, exhausted tones; yet Marion, listening, smiled on.
"I will not be nursed by you!" he cried. "I won't have you near me, glaring at me with your Gorgon stare. Send another nurse to me—send the doctor. Get out of my sight, Gorgon! Don't look at me. Go away!"
The door behind her had been standing a little ajar; she turned round and shut it. The window was open to the spring air; she closed and locked it. "Help yourself," she said.
"I'll rouse the place," he threatened, and tried to cry aloud, but his voice died weakly in his throat. He broke down at that, and began to whine a little.
"Have some pity," he wept. "I'm a suffering man, and you're a woman, and I'm in your hands. It's only decent, it's only human, to be sorry for me—to do something for me. My tongue's like leather; give me something to drink. A drop of water, even. Why should you begrudge me a drop of water?"
"There's none in the room," she said; "and I won't leave you to fetch it. There's only this." She held up to his eyes the quieting mixture the doctor had ordered. "There is only one dose, unfortunately. If the bottle had been full, I should have given you the lot, and there would have been no further trouble. As it is, you can drink what there is. The time has not come round for it; but time is not going to be of much matter to you, henceforth; we need not wait for it."
He cursed her in his fainting voice again, and again faintly struggled. But she held the bottle steadily to his lips, and he drained it to the last drop.
"That will quiet you," she said, and sat beside him on the bed. From the pocket of her apron she drew the penknife with which the doctor had been wounded. "Do you remember this?" she asked him. "There is blood upon it, but that is going to be wiped out."
He looked at her with eyes from which the consciousness was dying, and did not struggle any more.
"Do you remember it?" she asked again. "You had cut your name and mine on a tree in the garden of my home, and you asked for the penknife as a memento. Is it possible you can have forgotten?"
She spoke to him with great deliberation, holding the penknife before his eyes, and watching the drooping of the heavy lids.
"Strange, isn't it, that, so much having been flung away, you should have kept this miserable little keepsake with you till to-day? I suppose its small blade is its sharp blade still?"
Slowly she opened it, and stood up.
With an effort he opened his eyes upon her. "I am dead with sleep," he said, in a hollow, far-away voice; "but I can't sleep with my hands tied. Set me free, Marion! Set me free!"
"It is that I am going to do," she said.
She leant above him then, and, with fingers that never trembled, unbuttoned the wrists of his flannel shirt and rolled the sleeves back to his shoulders. How thin the arms were; how plainly the veins showed up in the white, moist skin. Across one that rose like a fine blue cord from the bend of the arm she drew the sharp blade of the knife. He gave but the slightest start, so heavy was he with sleep. She knelt upon his pillow, leant across him, and in the other arm severed the corresponding vein.
She had thought that the blood would flow quietly—how it spurted and spouted and ran! Before she could untie his hands and lay them beneath the blanket at his sides the white, lean arms were crimson with blood. At this rate, it would not take him long to die! She rinsed the blood from the little penknife in a basin of water, and turning down the blanket, laid it upon his breast.
"You have kept it a good many years," she said, mockingly. "Keep it still."
Some blood was on her own hands—how could she have been so clumsy! They were all smeared with blood; they—horrible!—smeltof blood.
She flew towards the basin to rinse them, but before she could reach it, without a warning sound the door opened, and the matron was in the room.
With the tell-tale hands behind her back, Sister Marion stood before her, intervening between her and the bed.
"Your patient is strangely quiet all at once," the matron said.
"He is sleeping," said the nurse.
In spite of herself she had to give way before the matron, who now stood by the bed.
"It does not seem a healthy sleep," she said. "He has a very exhausted look. And why is his blanket tucked so tightly round his arms?" She waited for no explanations, but smoothed the man's ruffled hair and looked down pityingly upon him. "Even now he has a handsome face," she said. "Ten years ago he must have been as handsome as a god."
Ten years ago! Who knew how handsome he had been then better than Sister Marion? In an instant how vivid was the picture of him that rose before her eyes! The picture of a young man's laughing face—gay, winning, debonair. A dancing shadow was on his face of the leaves of the tree by which he stood, and on which he had carved two names—
With an involuntary movement she was beside him, looking down upon the unconscious face; and wonderful it was to see that all its lines were smoothing out, and all the marks of years of debauchery. Even the sallow hue of them seemed to be changing in his cheeks. Extraordinary that the healthy colour of early manhood should reappear in the cheeks of a dying man!
In her surprise she called him by his name. Looking up, fearful that she had betrayed herself to the matron, she found that she was alone with him again, the door closed. There was absolute silence in the room, except a soft, drip-dripping from the bed to the floor. No need to look; she knew what it was. How short a time before the two streams from the veins, emptying themselves of the life-blood, met beneath the bed and trickled, trickled to the door! She flung a towel down to sop up the tiny flood, and saw it swiftly crimson before her eyes. She turned back to the bed, a great horror upon her now, and saw that the eyes of the dying man were open and upon her face.
"I loved you," he said. "Once I loved you, Marion!"
The words were like a knife in her heart. She groaned aloud, but could not speak.
"I have been bad—bad," he went on; "but I will atone. Give me time, Marion, and I will atone. Save me! Don't send me before my God like this, without a chance. You are my wife. You swore—swore to stick to me. Save me!"
In his extremity power had come back to his voice. He struggled desperately, half raised himself. "Save me!" he shrieked. "Don't send my soul to perdition!"
She flung the blanket off him, and tried with fingers, that only shook and helplessly fumbled now, to bind a ligature above the opened vein.
Misunderstanding, he tried to fling her off. "You are tying me again! Fiend! Fiend!" he cried. He dashed his arms about, fighting for life. Her enveloping white apron was splashed and soaked with blood. Even on her face it fell. As it rained, warm and crimson, upon her, she shrieked aloud.
In an instant the little room was full of surprised and frightened faces. "She has killed me!" the man screamed. "Killed me! She is tying me down to see me die!"
"I want to save him—now," Sister Marion strove to say above the clamour. No one heeded.
"She did this, and this," the man said, showing his wounded arms. "Ask her! Ask her!"
"It is true," Marion gasped. Oh, the difficulty of getting her tongue to form words! "But I want to save him—now."
"Too late," the matron said; and hers and all the faces—the room seemed full of them—looked at her with loathing, shrinking from her, as she stood before them, spattered with her husband's blood. "The man is dying fast."
At that instant one of the younger nurses who had been ministering to the figure upon the bed, lifted up a warning hand. "He is dead!" she said.
How the faces glared at her! Strange as well as familiar ones—crowds upon crowds of faces. Faces of the nurses who had been her friends, who had loved her; faces from out the past—how came they there with their heart-remembered names!—her mother's face—her mother who was with the angels of God! All the forces of Heaven and earth testifying against her who had done the unspeakable deed.
Was there no one on her side—no one who would shield her from the accusing eyes?
The cry with which she called upon the doctor's name in its frantic expression of utmost need must have had power to annihilate time and space, for while the sound of it still thrilled upon the ear the young doctor was in the room. She turned to him with the joy of one who finds his saviour.
Standing before her, his hands pressed firmly upon her shoulders, he bent his head till the strong, kind face almost touched her own.
"Murderer!" he whispered in her ear, and flung her from him.
She lay where he had thrown her; but someone's hands were still pressed upon her shoulders, a voice was still whispering "Murderer!" in her ear—or was it—was it "Marion" the voice whispered?
"Marion, how soundly you have slept—and not even undressed! It is eight o'clock, and time for you to go on night-duty. Doctor is going his evening rounds."
Only half-awakened, the horror of her dream still holding her, Sister Marion pushed the nurse away from her, threw herself from her bed, and flew along the corridor. From the door of the private ward the doctor was issuing; he stared at her wild, white look, her tumbled, uncovered hair. She seized him by the arm. "Doctor!" she sobbed. "The man in there has been cruel to me, but I want to nurse him—I want to save him! Never, never could I have done him any harm!"
"Why should you have done him any harm?" the doctor asked, soothingly. "Who would have harmed the poor fellow? Come and see."
He softly opened the door of the private ward, and with his hand upon her arm, led her in.
The matron and one of the nurses stood on either side of the bed, from which the scarlet blanket had been removed. The long white sheet which had replaced it was pulled up over the face of the recumbent form.
"He died an hour ago in his sleep," the matron said. "He did not regain consciousness after you left him. I have been with him all the time."
Sister Marion, with dazed eyes, looked down upon her hands—slowly, from one to the other. Clean, clean, thank Heaven! Looked at her spotless apron, at the sheet showing the sharp outline of the figure on the bed.
"Was there, upon his breast, a little ivory-handled penknife?" she asked.
But before they had told her, wonderingly, no, she had fallen on her knees beside the quiet figure and was sobbing to herself a prayer of thanksgiving.
"A sensitive, imaginative woman—she has been wakened too suddenly," the doctor said.
His gaze dwelt lingering upon her bent, dark head as slowly he turned away.