Chapter XV.A Close CallAnd now I come to the one part of my story that it gives me real pleasure to write, and that is the full admission of my precipitate and headlong falling in love with Janet, and how in a single day my liking for her broadened out and deepened into adoration. She had arrived at Dalehouse on Thursday morning and by midday on Friday I knew that if I failed to hold and keep her I should have missed the one important sign-post on the highway of my life.True, I had already passed by this lane end and that, and, carelessly forgetting to examine the signs, I may have wandered down one here and there for an aimless mile or so, until, puzzled and disappointed, I retraced my steps. And other crossroads and branch roads doubtless lay ahead, some of them broad and safe and running in my direction. But this great road ahead of me here to the right, how clear it ran straight to the hilltops and the rising sun. What a road to tread with a friend at your side! What a clean straight climb to make with Janet!What was it that Margaret had said? That a pretty face, a shapely figure, and love, were one and the same to men? A lie! What a damnable lie! Was that really then an accepted valuation? I thought of some of the married couples I knew. Could they ever have been in love? Could this bright clear light so soon die down to a guttering smoky flame? Or had they missed their way and turned down some by-road before their proper time?And that other reason for marriage written down so inappropriately in the prayer-book service—an attribute of married love perhaps—but surely nothing to do with spiritual love and the plighting of troth in the church before God? What had such animal stuff to do with this hallowed uplifting ecstasy that filled my soul when Janet’s wide gray eyes met mine?A sentimental fool do you call me for writing thus? Then if already married, you, my friend, have married a friend, or a mistress, or perhaps fortune has smiled on you and the mistress you have married is also your friend, but friend, or mistress, or both, you know nothing whatever of love.Love at first sight then? Yes, of course it was, but doesn’t all true love come quick and sharp like that? Perhaps to friends whose friendship has stood stolid and unromantic through the years, there comes this sudden uplift, and the gray old tree has bloomed at last. Or perhaps the warm sun of a single day has rushed the growth through bud to flower.However it may have been, whether I had somehow skipped a stage, or whether the peculiarly harrowing circumstances in which we had met had quickened my perceptions—I knew with an exhilarating certainty that I was in love with Janet.Time stood still when I looked at Janet. The sunny garden became a drab uninteresting desert when Janet was away. Cut the rose from the tree and what an ungainly plant is left! Raze the great cathedral to the ground and what a mean little town of twisted narrow streets! Yes, I was in love with Janet. She was my rose and my shining tower.Five o’clock came floating down as I sat there dreaming. She must have been gone for far more than the five minutes she had mentioned, for nearly half an hour. I would go and try to find her. Or was she coming to me now? Would she look at me, could I hold her eyes with mine again? My pulses quickened at the thought. But it was only Margaret who came hurrying toward me across the lawn.“Mrs. Kenley wants you,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Jeffcock, please do come at once. We’ve found out something—something absolutely thrilling—it’s the end!”“Where? How do you mean?” I asked her.“I can’t tell you now, but Mrs. Kenley wants you up in the box-room where I found the paper this afternoon. She told me to come and find you. She said that you were to help her and would come.”So Janet had taken her into our partnership. I don’t know what line of argument I took, or why I arrived at such a conclusion, but I remembered having an instinctive feeling that the curtain had been rung up for the final scene. What, I wondered, would be the setting and who the villain of the piece? Ralph? Kenneth? Ethel? Or The Tundish? I visualized my table and the numbers I had set down against each. Margaret at any rate seemed to have been correctly assessed or Janet would never have given away the fact that she and Allport were working together. No single thought of suspicion disturbed my dull and stupid brain.As we made our way back to the house, she told me that I was to join her on the upper landing in a minute. If I met any of the others I was to pretend that I was going to my room. She was breathing quickly, and, looking at her sidewise, I could see how wildly excited and hot she was. She mopped her face as we walked along, and I could feel my own excitement welling up in sympathy with hers.There was no one about when we reached the house and I succeeded in joining her on the upper landing a minute later without having attracted attention to my movements. I was aglow with the thought that I was to help and work with my Janet. Margaret was waiting for me at the foot of the little stairway that leads to the disused attics. She was smiling and held her fingers to her lips enjoining silence. Yet again I was impressed with her utter lack of feeling and her unconquerable desire to attract. Even at such a time she was looking arch, enjoying the situation.“Now we must be very quiet. You mustn’t speak a word. At first you won’t be able to understand what has happened, but Mrs. Kenley will explain it when she comes. Remember that it’s her instructions which you’re obeying.”We went up the creaking disused stairs to the narrow attic passage under the roof, and I followed her as quietly as I could. The passage runs the length of the house, and rises sheer to the tiles at their apex. It is lighted by an odd glass tile or two. Mortar droppings covered the floor and the hot unventilated atmosphere was heavy with the dry musty smell of accumulated dust. The attics themselves open out of the passage to left and right, but the doors were shut and we passed them all. I was following close behind her and she turned her head and giggled at me as we made our way along.“Francis, you’ll be simply thrilled,” she whispered. She had never called me Francis before, and she lingered on the word, somehow drawing it out and caressing it as she spoke. Fr-an-cis, she said, and it made me feel uncomfortable.There is a low door at the end of the passage, and she stopped in front of it, her hand on the knob.“This is the box-room,” she whispered. “It’s pitch dark inside and you’ll have to let me guide you. Mrs. Kenley will join us in a minute. You mustn’t say a word though, for if you do, you’ll spoil the whole of the scheme she has made.”She was a-quiver with excitement and I could feel her trembling like a leaf as she put her hand in mine when we got inside the stuffy darkened room. What fresh mystery was lurking here, I wondered. God, had I only known in time! She closed and shut the door behind us.“You’ll have to stoop,” she whispered again, “for the roof slopes down in places, but you must follow me for Mrs. Kenley’s, for clever Mrs. Kenley’s sake.” I could feel her hot breath on my face, so close to me she stood. Not understanding what was afoot, but full of a vague uneasiness, I followed where she led. What else, I ask, was there that I could have done?She still held me by the hand and we moved slowly across the room. First we went straight forward for a little way, and then we seemed to turn, but the blackness was so dense, and I so busy with conjecture, that soon I had lost my bearings. She told me when to stoop, and finally we drew up against what felt like a wooden partition. There she turned me round and told me to wait.I heard her go back across the room again, and to my amazement she was laughing gently to herself—a low contralto throaty laugh, a laugh that so long as I live I shall never forget—a laugh that somehow filled me with dismay and foreboding as it came gurgling to my ears across the darkened air.Suddenly she switched on an electric torch and I could see her dim outline some fifteen paces or so away from where I stood. What I had thought was a wooden partition was a chest of drawers, and I found myself wedged in a corner between it and a pile of trunks and the sloping roof. As my eyes became accustomed to the light I could make out a broken-down old bedstead on the floor between us. The bottom end was missing and it sloped from head to foot, the top end canting forward at an angle to the floor. A dirty dust-sheet covered it and on an upturned box at the side of it away from where I stood I saw a large glass beaker. Margaret was playing her light on it. It was three parts full of liquid.“Now, Francis, remember that you’re not to stir and soon you’ll understand how clever Mrs. Kenley trapped the wicked doctor.” She began to laugh again—cruel and low—and then she continued in a singsong sort of drone, “You can see the beaker, Francis?”“Yes, of course I can.”“Francis, do you know what’s in it? Can you guess?”“No, of course I can’t. But where is Mrs. Kenley, and what’s it all about?” I felt a growing anger. Every time she spoke my name she fondled it. I can’t explain it, but it seemed almost that she knew how I longed to hear Janet call me so, and that she was jeering at me for it. It angered me and hurt.“Vitriol, Francis! Beautiful, burning, biting vitriol. I wonder if you know exactly how it blinds and corrodes?”“In God’s name,” I cried, thoroughly disturbed at last, “what is all this foolery about?”“Hush! Not so loud. And remember that you’re not to move any nearer. See what a nice lot of it there is. If I threw it: all over any one wouldn’t it blind them quickly! I emptied it out of the bottle into the glass so that I could throw it quickly all at once. Wasn’t that thoughtful of me, Francis? And, Francis, if you call out or move a single step, I will, Francis. Over your Janet, Francis. Just look at her, isn’t she a picture? You and your woman detective, you blundering fool!”She stooped and jerked the dust-sheet from the iron bed.“Don’t stir,” she laughed, “or I’ll spill it right away over her bloody face.”Her laughter held her again as she stood holding the beaker over Janet. It was so big that she could barely span it, and her hand shook as she herself was shaken by her demoniac mirth. I stood helplessly looking at her from my dark corner, in an agony of apprehension.And Janet! She was unconscious and lay gagged and strapped and bound to the bed. Her arms had been pulled back cruelly, her wrists tied behind her to the iron top. Her legs had been bound to the sides. A strap from one of the trunks passed over her waist and under the bed, and even in the dim light of the torch, I could see from where I stood how cruelly tight it had been pulled. Rags which had been stuffed into her mouth were held in position by a piece of cord, wound round her head and cutting across her mouth, pulling down her lower jaw.“Do you know what she said, Francis, when I chloroformed her? Would you like to know? She said, ‘Fran-cis, where’s Fran-cis?’ And here you are to see her. Isn’t it shameless of her to let you look at her lying there like that?”“You she-devil, take it away,” I cried, tortured beyond discretion.“Ah! You would, would you? Fool, see what you’ve made me do. I’ve spilt some of it and missed her by a hair. Talk like that or move again and——”Then she laughed and blasphemed in turns, while I stood horrified, peering out of my dark corner over the chest of drawers, perspiration gathering in beads on my forehead and streaming down my face. How short was the time since I had sat in the garden, breathing God’s free air, at the foot of God’s great church, the pleasant garden noises striking my listless ears as I dreamed and pondered of my love! And now I stood, trapped and tortured in this dark little chamber of hell, free yet afraid to move, while the dear one I loved lay helpless before me on the brink of blindness and death. On the sloping roof just over my head I could hear the sparrows chirping in the sun, while the dark stagnant attic air was filled with the jeers and obscenities of Satan—Heaven and Hell with a layer of tiles between them.She tortured me. My God, how she tortured me!She tilted the beaker till the liquid quivered on the lip.I don’t know what I could have done. I thought of pushing over the chest of drawers and making a dash for it round the end of the bed, but nothing could prevent her if she really intended to carry out her fiendish threat.I tried remonstrance and persuasion, but my efforts were met with nothing but laughter and jeers.“That’s better, Francis, darling, now you begin to understand how clever stupid Margaret is. Why not try to enjoy the fun with me! Just think how it will burn her, death and decay all at once! With her face turned up like that, little pools of it will gather in the corners of her eyes. When the lids burn away how weird and funny they’ll look. And, Francis, think of the rags in her mouth! But the really priceless part of it all is, Francis, darling, that you haven’t yet seen the point of the joke!”My one hope was for delay, and I thought that if only I could keep her in conversation, we might perhaps be missed and discovered by the others. Little Allport was to have arrived at four, and he would be sure to inquire for Janet.“Yes, of course it’s only a joke, Margaret. Now do stop joking and tell me what it’s all about!”“You poor silly fool,” she jeered. “They’ll think it was you; that’s the joke. I’ve arranged it all beautifully. What a joy it will be when I see you being handcuffed and taken away. Now it’s time we stopped this pleasant chatter. Janet wouldn’t like you being alone in the dark with me like this, you know. So here goes. One to be ready. Two to be ste——”I could bear no more. Whether I did the right thing or not I have never been able to decide, but I had a heavy bunch of keys in my pocket, and before she could pour, I hurled them as hard as I could at her face.And I missed my aim, may God forgive me, and how like me it was, but I missed her by an inch.She gave a little chuckle, tipped the vitriol—a full quart of it or more there must have been—over Janet’s face and breasts, and was out of the room almost before I had time to stir.I gave one agonized cry, and dashed round the end of the chest of drawers, only to collide full tilt with one of the beams in the roof. It caught me straight across the forehead and I fell like a log with a crash to the floor.How long I lay there I don’t know—perhaps for only a matter of seconds—but when I did come round I was dazed and confused. Neither door nor bed could I find. I crawled dazed and helpless about the floor, colliding first with the sloping tiles and then with a pile of boxes. Almost as though it were some other person in distress I could hear myself whimpering and muttering a mixture of imprecation and prayer. How damnably dark it was. Christ, if I could but see!After what seemed like an eternity of futile searching, I found the door at last, and it was locked. I banged on it weakly and tried to shout, but my head was singing so that I could hardly stand or raise my voice above a whisper. Then I crawled to the broken bed on which my poor tortured darling lay. With hands that shook I found the sheet and mopped her poor disfigured face and body. She was covered with a kind of filthy slime. Death and decay. Death—and decay.I believe that I must have fainted. There was a crash and the room seemed to fill with a crowd of angry men. The Tundish, angry and fierce, was shaking me to and fro.“You! Jeffcock, you! You infernal lying Judas!” he cried, and hurled me from him right across the floor. I fell against the wall and lay there weakly repeating again and again, “It was Margaret. Vitriol. She’s mad and threw vitriol. It was Margaret.”At last I attracted their attention, and Ralph came and stood beside me. He stooped to hear what it was that I said. Then Kenneth and Margaret stood above me too.“She did it. She chloroformed her and then threw vitriol over her,” I gasped, half sitting up on the floor.“Oh, you liar—you wicked liar—how can you say such a wicked thing. Why, you were caught in here with the door locked!”Even to me she sounded quite convincing. Then she bent down over me suddenly and putting her hand into the side pocket of my coat she pulled out a key.“Why, here’s the key of the door in his pocket! Now what have you to say for yourself?” she cried.Ralph stooped and picked something up from the floor. “And this, I think, is your knife, Mr. Jeffcock,” he said very coldly.Margaret shrugged her shoulders and turned away toward the doctor, who was kneeling by the bed.Numb with my grief, I sat propped against the wall, my head athrob, my soul sick with the horror of what I had felt and heard. Through the broken door the light from the passage showed up the dusty floor, with its scattered papers and boxes and its derelict household lumber. Our movements had filled the air with dust, which the pallid passage light turned to a ghostly beam, and through it like some distorted figure in a dream, the doctor loomed gigantic as he knelt by Janet’s side.This then was to be the final scene to the drama of this devil’s week, with myself the villain, bludgeoned and broken, a murderer and a Judas, spurned by my friends and accepted by all as the hell fiend who had defiled beauty and truth in the person of my darling. This was the hilltop to which my broad straight road of love and life had led me. In this dismal attic was I to part from the woman I loved with my love barely born and wholly unconfessed.The doctor looked up at last, and, without hope, I waited for the verdict—there were death and decay in the dust-laden air.“What’s all this nonsense about vitriol?” he cried with amazement on his face. His words came cool and clear like a breeze from the northern snows.Margaret answered him, “Mr. Jeffcock said that I threw vitriol; of course that’s absurd, and so I thought that it must have been vitriol and that he’d thrown it himself. The door was locked and we’ve just found the key in his pocket. Oh, it’s all too dreadful!”“Well, we shall hear what Mrs. Kenley has to say about it in a minute when she comes round.”“Comes round? Why, she can’t recover, can she—after all that—she must be burned to death?” There was a catch in her voice and from where I sat I could see her clasping and unclasping her hands nervously behind her back.The doctor got up from his knees. He said not a word, but stood towering above her, looking sternly down.“It wasn’t vitriol,” he said at length, in a slow measured voice. “As far as I can tell, it was medicinal paraffin, or something of the kind, and has done her no harm whatever.”I dropped forward on my knees gazing at the doctor. A Judas he had called me, but I could have blessed him where he stood. Like some diver who has dived too deep and fills his bursting lungs with painful breath, my relief was almost more than I could bear.There was a little time of silence, and then like some echo from the lost, came Margaret’s gentle laugh. Low at first, it grew in volume to an uncontrolled and piercing shriek that went reverberating through the empty attics, through the roof, and into the sunlit air. “I tell you it was vitriol,” she cried between her shouts of laughter. Then quite suddenly she ceased, while the doctor and the others stood looking at her aghast.“Or else that harlot Hilda Summerson has tricked me, after all,” she burst out again, and before the doctor and the two boys could recover from their surprise, she darted through the door and went racing down the narrow passage, her arms waving wildly as she shouted and shrieked, “Hilda, you harlot, you harlot, I’m coming for you now.”She ran like one demented, and in her madness overlooked the stair top when she reached it. But the stairs would not be ignored. We saw her disappear—there was a louder shriek and then a crash—a moan and then silence.The Tundish, with Kenneth and Ralph close behind, hurried after her.I dragged myself to where Janet lay. The Tundish had released her bonds and had covered her once more with the sheet. She turned and opened her dear gray eyes to find me kneeling by her side.My hour of torture was over, but as I knelt, that other great doubt that, only lovers unconfessed can know, came surging round me.
And now I come to the one part of my story that it gives me real pleasure to write, and that is the full admission of my precipitate and headlong falling in love with Janet, and how in a single day my liking for her broadened out and deepened into adoration. She had arrived at Dalehouse on Thursday morning and by midday on Friday I knew that if I failed to hold and keep her I should have missed the one important sign-post on the highway of my life.
True, I had already passed by this lane end and that, and, carelessly forgetting to examine the signs, I may have wandered down one here and there for an aimless mile or so, until, puzzled and disappointed, I retraced my steps. And other crossroads and branch roads doubtless lay ahead, some of them broad and safe and running in my direction. But this great road ahead of me here to the right, how clear it ran straight to the hilltops and the rising sun. What a road to tread with a friend at your side! What a clean straight climb to make with Janet!
What was it that Margaret had said? That a pretty face, a shapely figure, and love, were one and the same to men? A lie! What a damnable lie! Was that really then an accepted valuation? I thought of some of the married couples I knew. Could they ever have been in love? Could this bright clear light so soon die down to a guttering smoky flame? Or had they missed their way and turned down some by-road before their proper time?
And that other reason for marriage written down so inappropriately in the prayer-book service—an attribute of married love perhaps—but surely nothing to do with spiritual love and the plighting of troth in the church before God? What had such animal stuff to do with this hallowed uplifting ecstasy that filled my soul when Janet’s wide gray eyes met mine?
A sentimental fool do you call me for writing thus? Then if already married, you, my friend, have married a friend, or a mistress, or perhaps fortune has smiled on you and the mistress you have married is also your friend, but friend, or mistress, or both, you know nothing whatever of love.
Love at first sight then? Yes, of course it was, but doesn’t all true love come quick and sharp like that? Perhaps to friends whose friendship has stood stolid and unromantic through the years, there comes this sudden uplift, and the gray old tree has bloomed at last. Or perhaps the warm sun of a single day has rushed the growth through bud to flower.
However it may have been, whether I had somehow skipped a stage, or whether the peculiarly harrowing circumstances in which we had met had quickened my perceptions—I knew with an exhilarating certainty that I was in love with Janet.
Time stood still when I looked at Janet. The sunny garden became a drab uninteresting desert when Janet was away. Cut the rose from the tree and what an ungainly plant is left! Raze the great cathedral to the ground and what a mean little town of twisted narrow streets! Yes, I was in love with Janet. She was my rose and my shining tower.
Five o’clock came floating down as I sat there dreaming. She must have been gone for far more than the five minutes she had mentioned, for nearly half an hour. I would go and try to find her. Or was she coming to me now? Would she look at me, could I hold her eyes with mine again? My pulses quickened at the thought. But it was only Margaret who came hurrying toward me across the lawn.
“Mrs. Kenley wants you,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Jeffcock, please do come at once. We’ve found out something—something absolutely thrilling—it’s the end!”
“Where? How do you mean?” I asked her.
“I can’t tell you now, but Mrs. Kenley wants you up in the box-room where I found the paper this afternoon. She told me to come and find you. She said that you were to help her and would come.”
So Janet had taken her into our partnership. I don’t know what line of argument I took, or why I arrived at such a conclusion, but I remembered having an instinctive feeling that the curtain had been rung up for the final scene. What, I wondered, would be the setting and who the villain of the piece? Ralph? Kenneth? Ethel? Or The Tundish? I visualized my table and the numbers I had set down against each. Margaret at any rate seemed to have been correctly assessed or Janet would never have given away the fact that she and Allport were working together. No single thought of suspicion disturbed my dull and stupid brain.
As we made our way back to the house, she told me that I was to join her on the upper landing in a minute. If I met any of the others I was to pretend that I was going to my room. She was breathing quickly, and, looking at her sidewise, I could see how wildly excited and hot she was. She mopped her face as we walked along, and I could feel my own excitement welling up in sympathy with hers.
There was no one about when we reached the house and I succeeded in joining her on the upper landing a minute later without having attracted attention to my movements. I was aglow with the thought that I was to help and work with my Janet. Margaret was waiting for me at the foot of the little stairway that leads to the disused attics. She was smiling and held her fingers to her lips enjoining silence. Yet again I was impressed with her utter lack of feeling and her unconquerable desire to attract. Even at such a time she was looking arch, enjoying the situation.
“Now we must be very quiet. You mustn’t speak a word. At first you won’t be able to understand what has happened, but Mrs. Kenley will explain it when she comes. Remember that it’s her instructions which you’re obeying.”
We went up the creaking disused stairs to the narrow attic passage under the roof, and I followed her as quietly as I could. The passage runs the length of the house, and rises sheer to the tiles at their apex. It is lighted by an odd glass tile or two. Mortar droppings covered the floor and the hot unventilated atmosphere was heavy with the dry musty smell of accumulated dust. The attics themselves open out of the passage to left and right, but the doors were shut and we passed them all. I was following close behind her and she turned her head and giggled at me as we made our way along.
“Francis, you’ll be simply thrilled,” she whispered. She had never called me Francis before, and she lingered on the word, somehow drawing it out and caressing it as she spoke. Fr-an-cis, she said, and it made me feel uncomfortable.
There is a low door at the end of the passage, and she stopped in front of it, her hand on the knob.
“This is the box-room,” she whispered. “It’s pitch dark inside and you’ll have to let me guide you. Mrs. Kenley will join us in a minute. You mustn’t say a word though, for if you do, you’ll spoil the whole of the scheme she has made.”
She was a-quiver with excitement and I could feel her trembling like a leaf as she put her hand in mine when we got inside the stuffy darkened room. What fresh mystery was lurking here, I wondered. God, had I only known in time! She closed and shut the door behind us.
“You’ll have to stoop,” she whispered again, “for the roof slopes down in places, but you must follow me for Mrs. Kenley’s, for clever Mrs. Kenley’s sake.” I could feel her hot breath on my face, so close to me she stood. Not understanding what was afoot, but full of a vague uneasiness, I followed where she led. What else, I ask, was there that I could have done?
She still held me by the hand and we moved slowly across the room. First we went straight forward for a little way, and then we seemed to turn, but the blackness was so dense, and I so busy with conjecture, that soon I had lost my bearings. She told me when to stoop, and finally we drew up against what felt like a wooden partition. There she turned me round and told me to wait.
I heard her go back across the room again, and to my amazement she was laughing gently to herself—a low contralto throaty laugh, a laugh that so long as I live I shall never forget—a laugh that somehow filled me with dismay and foreboding as it came gurgling to my ears across the darkened air.
Suddenly she switched on an electric torch and I could see her dim outline some fifteen paces or so away from where I stood. What I had thought was a wooden partition was a chest of drawers, and I found myself wedged in a corner between it and a pile of trunks and the sloping roof. As my eyes became accustomed to the light I could make out a broken-down old bedstead on the floor between us. The bottom end was missing and it sloped from head to foot, the top end canting forward at an angle to the floor. A dirty dust-sheet covered it and on an upturned box at the side of it away from where I stood I saw a large glass beaker. Margaret was playing her light on it. It was three parts full of liquid.
“Now, Francis, remember that you’re not to stir and soon you’ll understand how clever Mrs. Kenley trapped the wicked doctor.” She began to laugh again—cruel and low—and then she continued in a singsong sort of drone, “You can see the beaker, Francis?”
“Yes, of course I can.”
“Francis, do you know what’s in it? Can you guess?”
“No, of course I can’t. But where is Mrs. Kenley, and what’s it all about?” I felt a growing anger. Every time she spoke my name she fondled it. I can’t explain it, but it seemed almost that she knew how I longed to hear Janet call me so, and that she was jeering at me for it. It angered me and hurt.
“Vitriol, Francis! Beautiful, burning, biting vitriol. I wonder if you know exactly how it blinds and corrodes?”
“In God’s name,” I cried, thoroughly disturbed at last, “what is all this foolery about?”
“Hush! Not so loud. And remember that you’re not to move any nearer. See what a nice lot of it there is. If I threw it: all over any one wouldn’t it blind them quickly! I emptied it out of the bottle into the glass so that I could throw it quickly all at once. Wasn’t that thoughtful of me, Francis? And, Francis, if you call out or move a single step, I will, Francis. Over your Janet, Francis. Just look at her, isn’t she a picture? You and your woman detective, you blundering fool!”
She stooped and jerked the dust-sheet from the iron bed.
“Don’t stir,” she laughed, “or I’ll spill it right away over her bloody face.”
Her laughter held her again as she stood holding the beaker over Janet. It was so big that she could barely span it, and her hand shook as she herself was shaken by her demoniac mirth. I stood helplessly looking at her from my dark corner, in an agony of apprehension.
And Janet! She was unconscious and lay gagged and strapped and bound to the bed. Her arms had been pulled back cruelly, her wrists tied behind her to the iron top. Her legs had been bound to the sides. A strap from one of the trunks passed over her waist and under the bed, and even in the dim light of the torch, I could see from where I stood how cruelly tight it had been pulled. Rags which had been stuffed into her mouth were held in position by a piece of cord, wound round her head and cutting across her mouth, pulling down her lower jaw.
“Do you know what she said, Francis, when I chloroformed her? Would you like to know? She said, ‘Fran-cis, where’s Fran-cis?’ And here you are to see her. Isn’t it shameless of her to let you look at her lying there like that?”
“You she-devil, take it away,” I cried, tortured beyond discretion.
“Ah! You would, would you? Fool, see what you’ve made me do. I’ve spilt some of it and missed her by a hair. Talk like that or move again and——”
Then she laughed and blasphemed in turns, while I stood horrified, peering out of my dark corner over the chest of drawers, perspiration gathering in beads on my forehead and streaming down my face. How short was the time since I had sat in the garden, breathing God’s free air, at the foot of God’s great church, the pleasant garden noises striking my listless ears as I dreamed and pondered of my love! And now I stood, trapped and tortured in this dark little chamber of hell, free yet afraid to move, while the dear one I loved lay helpless before me on the brink of blindness and death. On the sloping roof just over my head I could hear the sparrows chirping in the sun, while the dark stagnant attic air was filled with the jeers and obscenities of Satan—Heaven and Hell with a layer of tiles between them.
She tortured me. My God, how she tortured me!
She tilted the beaker till the liquid quivered on the lip.
I don’t know what I could have done. I thought of pushing over the chest of drawers and making a dash for it round the end of the bed, but nothing could prevent her if she really intended to carry out her fiendish threat.
I tried remonstrance and persuasion, but my efforts were met with nothing but laughter and jeers.
“That’s better, Francis, darling, now you begin to understand how clever stupid Margaret is. Why not try to enjoy the fun with me! Just think how it will burn her, death and decay all at once! With her face turned up like that, little pools of it will gather in the corners of her eyes. When the lids burn away how weird and funny they’ll look. And, Francis, think of the rags in her mouth! But the really priceless part of it all is, Francis, darling, that you haven’t yet seen the point of the joke!”
My one hope was for delay, and I thought that if only I could keep her in conversation, we might perhaps be missed and discovered by the others. Little Allport was to have arrived at four, and he would be sure to inquire for Janet.
“Yes, of course it’s only a joke, Margaret. Now do stop joking and tell me what it’s all about!”
“You poor silly fool,” she jeered. “They’ll think it was you; that’s the joke. I’ve arranged it all beautifully. What a joy it will be when I see you being handcuffed and taken away. Now it’s time we stopped this pleasant chatter. Janet wouldn’t like you being alone in the dark with me like this, you know. So here goes. One to be ready. Two to be ste——”
I could bear no more. Whether I did the right thing or not I have never been able to decide, but I had a heavy bunch of keys in my pocket, and before she could pour, I hurled them as hard as I could at her face.
And I missed my aim, may God forgive me, and how like me it was, but I missed her by an inch.
She gave a little chuckle, tipped the vitriol—a full quart of it or more there must have been—over Janet’s face and breasts, and was out of the room almost before I had time to stir.
I gave one agonized cry, and dashed round the end of the chest of drawers, only to collide full tilt with one of the beams in the roof. It caught me straight across the forehead and I fell like a log with a crash to the floor.
How long I lay there I don’t know—perhaps for only a matter of seconds—but when I did come round I was dazed and confused. Neither door nor bed could I find. I crawled dazed and helpless about the floor, colliding first with the sloping tiles and then with a pile of boxes. Almost as though it were some other person in distress I could hear myself whimpering and muttering a mixture of imprecation and prayer. How damnably dark it was. Christ, if I could but see!
After what seemed like an eternity of futile searching, I found the door at last, and it was locked. I banged on it weakly and tried to shout, but my head was singing so that I could hardly stand or raise my voice above a whisper. Then I crawled to the broken bed on which my poor tortured darling lay. With hands that shook I found the sheet and mopped her poor disfigured face and body. She was covered with a kind of filthy slime. Death and decay. Death—and decay.
I believe that I must have fainted. There was a crash and the room seemed to fill with a crowd of angry men. The Tundish, angry and fierce, was shaking me to and fro.
“You! Jeffcock, you! You infernal lying Judas!” he cried, and hurled me from him right across the floor. I fell against the wall and lay there weakly repeating again and again, “It was Margaret. Vitriol. She’s mad and threw vitriol. It was Margaret.”
At last I attracted their attention, and Ralph came and stood beside me. He stooped to hear what it was that I said. Then Kenneth and Margaret stood above me too.
“She did it. She chloroformed her and then threw vitriol over her,” I gasped, half sitting up on the floor.
“Oh, you liar—you wicked liar—how can you say such a wicked thing. Why, you were caught in here with the door locked!”
Even to me she sounded quite convincing. Then she bent down over me suddenly and putting her hand into the side pocket of my coat she pulled out a key.
“Why, here’s the key of the door in his pocket! Now what have you to say for yourself?” she cried.
Ralph stooped and picked something up from the floor. “And this, I think, is your knife, Mr. Jeffcock,” he said very coldly.
Margaret shrugged her shoulders and turned away toward the doctor, who was kneeling by the bed.
Numb with my grief, I sat propped against the wall, my head athrob, my soul sick with the horror of what I had felt and heard. Through the broken door the light from the passage showed up the dusty floor, with its scattered papers and boxes and its derelict household lumber. Our movements had filled the air with dust, which the pallid passage light turned to a ghostly beam, and through it like some distorted figure in a dream, the doctor loomed gigantic as he knelt by Janet’s side.
This then was to be the final scene to the drama of this devil’s week, with myself the villain, bludgeoned and broken, a murderer and a Judas, spurned by my friends and accepted by all as the hell fiend who had defiled beauty and truth in the person of my darling. This was the hilltop to which my broad straight road of love and life had led me. In this dismal attic was I to part from the woman I loved with my love barely born and wholly unconfessed.
The doctor looked up at last, and, without hope, I waited for the verdict—there were death and decay in the dust-laden air.
“What’s all this nonsense about vitriol?” he cried with amazement on his face. His words came cool and clear like a breeze from the northern snows.
Margaret answered him, “Mr. Jeffcock said that I threw vitriol; of course that’s absurd, and so I thought that it must have been vitriol and that he’d thrown it himself. The door was locked and we’ve just found the key in his pocket. Oh, it’s all too dreadful!”
“Well, we shall hear what Mrs. Kenley has to say about it in a minute when she comes round.”
“Comes round? Why, she can’t recover, can she—after all that—she must be burned to death?” There was a catch in her voice and from where I sat I could see her clasping and unclasping her hands nervously behind her back.
The doctor got up from his knees. He said not a word, but stood towering above her, looking sternly down.
“It wasn’t vitriol,” he said at length, in a slow measured voice. “As far as I can tell, it was medicinal paraffin, or something of the kind, and has done her no harm whatever.”
I dropped forward on my knees gazing at the doctor. A Judas he had called me, but I could have blessed him where he stood. Like some diver who has dived too deep and fills his bursting lungs with painful breath, my relief was almost more than I could bear.
There was a little time of silence, and then like some echo from the lost, came Margaret’s gentle laugh. Low at first, it grew in volume to an uncontrolled and piercing shriek that went reverberating through the empty attics, through the roof, and into the sunlit air. “I tell you it was vitriol,” she cried between her shouts of laughter. Then quite suddenly she ceased, while the doctor and the others stood looking at her aghast.
“Or else that harlot Hilda Summerson has tricked me, after all,” she burst out again, and before the doctor and the two boys could recover from their surprise, she darted through the door and went racing down the narrow passage, her arms waving wildly as she shouted and shrieked, “Hilda, you harlot, you harlot, I’m coming for you now.”
She ran like one demented, and in her madness overlooked the stair top when she reached it. But the stairs would not be ignored. We saw her disappear—there was a louder shriek and then a crash—a moan and then silence.
The Tundish, with Kenneth and Ralph close behind, hurried after her.
I dragged myself to where Janet lay. The Tundish had released her bonds and had covered her once more with the sheet. She turned and opened her dear gray eyes to find me kneeling by her side.
My hour of torture was over, but as I knelt, that other great doubt that, only lovers unconfessed can know, came surging round me.