Her Murderer

“Is she really firm with children?”

“I should not think so, but you are a better judge of character than I am.”

Conscience pricked as I said the words, but I had become inured to its prickings.

“I have, of course, studied human nature,” she said slowly, still looking at the pretty group on the lawn.

I have not yet met a fellow creature who does not think he has studied human nature. Yethow few turn the pages of that open book. And out of that few the greatest number scan it upside down.

“I could make a truer estimate,” she continued, “if I drew out her horoscope. I go by that more than by my own fallible judgment. I may err, but I have never known astrology to fail.”

Dulcie was duly engaged as governess on approval for three months, on the strength of her horoscope. Before she went to the Manor House I made a few remarks to her to which she listened decorously, her eyes reverently fixed on my face.

“You will leave with me that remarkably pretty lilac muslin you appeared in yesterday—and the sun-bonnet. You will make yourself look as like a district visitor as possible, thick where you ought to be thin, and thin where you ought to be thick. Don’t cry, Dulcie. I am endeavouring to help you. Be thankful you have an aunt like me. Who educated you?”

“You did.” Sob. Sob.

“Well, now I am finishing your education. You want to earn your living, I suppose. You know that I only have a small annuity, that I have not a farthing to leave you.”

“Yes, yes, Aunt Anne.”

“Well, then, don’t look prettier than that square Joan, and don’t let the wave in your hair show.”

The Alderney calf eyes brimmed anew with tears. Dulcie drooped her pin of a head. Like that defunct noodle, her mother, she lived solely for clothes and poetry and the admiration of the uncorseted sex. She had come into the world a little late. She conformed to the best Victorian ideals, but there are men still lurking in secluded rural districts if one could but find them, to whom her cheap appeal might be irresistible. I had hopes she might secure a husband if she took a country engagement. I proceeded with my discourse. It spread over Jimmy as well. I did not bid her pure eyes look into depths of depravity but I did make her understand that Mrs. Cross was becoming rather stout and middle-aged, and that if Mr. Cross blew soap bubbles in the schoolroom too frequently, she, Dulcie, might find that her French accent was not good enough for her young charges.

Dulcie has not the faintest gleam of humour, but she is docility itself.

She appeared next day staid, flat-figured, almost unpretty, her wonderful hair smoothed closely over her small ears.

I blessed her, and said as a parting word:

“Take an interest in astrology.”

And then the gardener wheeled her luggage on the barrow to the Manor, and Dulcie crept timidly behind it to her first situation.

In order that this tragic story, for it is atragedy, should not expand into a novel, I will say at once that she was a complete success. That was because she did exactly as I told her. As a rule, very silly people never will do what they are told. But in that one point Dulcie was no fool.

She was lamentably weak with the children. She had no art of teaching. She did not encourage Joan to preserve a burnished mind, but she took to astrology like a duck to water. From the first she was deeply interested in it, and believed in it with flawless credulity.

“Dulcie,” said Gertrude with approval, “has a very alert mind for one so young. Joan has never taken the faintest interest in astrology, but Dulcie shows an intelligent grasp of the subject. She studies it while the children are preparing their syntax. You, yourself, Anne, have never in all these years mastered even the elements of the science. I don’t believe you know whatan aspectmeans.”

“I don’t pretend to a powerful mind.”

“Your difficulty is the inertia that belongs to a low vitality,” said Gertrude, “and I rather think that is what is the matter with Joan. She hardly opens a book. She has not an idea beyond her chickens. She spends hours among her coops.”

“Dulcie’s horoscope,” continued Gertrude after a pause,“shows a marked expansion in her immediate future. The wider life which she has entered upon under our roof is no doubt the beginning of it. I feel it my duty to help her in every way I can.”

“Dear Gertrude,” I said. “Thank you.My poor motherless child, for whom I can do but little has found a powerful friend in you.”

Conscience jabbed me as with a knitting needle, but I paid no more attention to it than the Spartan boy to his fox.

“There is certainly a love affair in her near future,” continued Gertrude affably. “Shesays that astrologically she can’t see any such thing for several years to come, but I know better. I found him under Uranus, transiting her Venus. She is an extremely intelligent pupil, but she is certainly obstinate. Shewon’tsee it. But she can see Joan’s engagement and marriage quite clearly. We both see that. But I am convinced Dulcie has an opportunity of marrying as well as Joan. Her moon will shortly be going through the fifth house, the house of lovers which speaks for itself. I wondered whether it might possibly be Mr. Wilson. Most respectable—you know—Mr. Benson’s pupil. He’s always coming over on one pretext or another, to play tennis or see Joan’s chickens. I saw him walking back through the park with Dulcie and the children the other day.”

I pretended to be horrified.

“I will speak to her,” I mumbled, “most reprehensible.”

“I beg you will do nothing of the kind,” said Gertrude with asperity. “The world moves on, my dear Anne, while you sit dreaming in your cottage; and if you can’t raise a finger to help your own niece then don’t try to nullify the benevolent activities of those who can.”

“Of course, Gertrude, if you look at it in that way. But a governess!”

“I do look at it in that way; and allow me to tell you, Anne, that you dress her abominably, and I have advised her to revolt. And her hair! I spoke to her about it yesterday, and she said you liked her to plaster it down like that. The child has beautiful hair, very like mine at her age. It needs releasing. It is not necessary that she should imitate your severe coiffure.”

“Oh! Gertrude, I always brush my own hair back, and surely it is not too much to ask of my brother’s only child who owes everything to me to—” I became tearful.

“Itistoo much to ask. You are an egoist, Anne. The poor child looked quite frightened when I spoke to her yesterday. You mean well, but you have repressed her. I intend, on the contrary, to draw her out, to widen her narrowed, pinched existence.” Gertrude had said the same of Jimmy when she married him. Everyone had a pinched existence till she dawned on them,though it would have been difficult to say who had dared to pinch Jimmy.

Next day Dulcie came down half frightened, wholly delighted, to confer with me.

“My dear,” I said. “Do exactly what kind Mrs. Cross wishes about your hair and dress and general deportment. I can’t explain, it would take too long, and when I had explained you would not understand. You may now take back with you the lilac gown and the sun-bonnet. And, by the way, what is this Mr. Wilson like who is always coming over?”

“Very,verynice”—with fervour.

“And handsome?”

“Very,veryhandsome.”

“H’m! Now, Dulcie, no nonsense such as you ladled out to me about Herr Müller, the music master at Dresden. You needn’t cry. That is all past and forgotten. But I want a plain answer. Does this very handsome man care about chickens?”

“Yes, yes, Aunt Anne. He has taken several prizes.”

“Does he come to see you, or Joan?”

Dulcie cogitated.

“At first it was Joan,” she said.

Light broke in on me.That serpent Gertrude!She did not think the poultry fancier good enough for the stolid Joan, but quite good enough for my exquisite Dulcibella.

“I must go back now,” said Dulcie. “I’m dining down because Mr. Cross likes a game of patience in the evening. It keeps him from falling asleep. Mr. Wilson is staying to dinner. I’m going to wear my amber muslin, and Mr. Vavasour is coming to stay. We’ve seen a good deal of him lately. Mrs. Cross says he has had a very overshadowed life with his old mother, and she wants to help him to a wider sphere.”

I pricked up my ears.

“Is he Vavasour, of Harlington?”

“Yes, that’s his home, near Lee on the Solent.”

“But surely he is quite an infant.”

“I don’t know what you mean by an infant, Aunt Anne. He is two years older than me, and he simplylovespoetry.”

“And is he as nice as Mr. Wilson?”

“Very,verynice.”

Further lights were bursting in. The illumination momentarily staggered me.

“H’m. Dulcie, you will now attend to what I tell you.”

“Yes, yes, Aunt Anne. I always do.”

“Now, mind you don’t make eyes at Mr. Wilson, who is Joan’s friend. That is what horrid little cats of girls do, not what I expect ofyou. Chickens draw people together in a way, ahem! you don’t understand, but—you will later on.”

“Like poetry does?” Dulcie hazarded.

“Just like poetry. And one thing more. Don’t speak to Mr. Vavasour unless he speaks to you.”

“No, no, Aunt Anne. I never do.”

Once again I must compress. As the summer advanced, Gertrude, nose down in full cry on the track, unfolded to me a project which only needed my co-operation.

I reminded her that I never co-operated, but she paid no attention, and said she wished to send the children with Joan and Dulcie to the seaside for a month, while she watched over Jimmy during his annual visit to Harrogate. The children required a change.

I agreed.

She had thought of Lee on the Solent. (You will remember, reader, that Mr. Vavasour’s place was near Lee.)

“Why Lee?” I said, pretending surprise. “Expensive and only ten miles away. No real change of climate. Send them to Felixstowe or Scarborough.”

But Gertrude’s mind was made up. She poured forth batches of adequate reasons. It must be Lee. Would I accompany the party as their guest? Joan and Dulcie were rather too young to go into lodgings alone.

I saw at once that, under the circumstances, Lee was no place for me. I might get into hot water. I, so free now, might become entangled in the affairs of others, and might be blamed lateron. I might find myself acting with duplicity or, to be more exact, I might be found out to be doing so.

I declined with regretful gratitude. If it had been Felixstowe or Scarborough I would have taken charge with pleasure, but I always had rheumatism at Lee. Rheumatism was a very capricious ailment.

“It is, indeed,” said Gertrude coldly.

“Send your old governess,” I suggested, “the ancient Miss Jones who lives at Banff. You have her here every summer for a month. Kill two birds with one stone. Let her have her annual outing at Lee instead of here.”

Gertrude was undeniably struck by my suggestion, though she found fault with it. As she began to come round to it I then raised objections to it. I reminded her that Miss Jones was as blind as a bat: that when she accompanied them to Scotland the year before she had mistaken the footman bathing for a salmon leaping. But Gertrude was of the opinion that Miss Jones’s shortsightedness was no real drawback.

The expedition started, and I actually produced five pounds for Dulcie to spend on seaside attire. I considered it a good investment.

Before Gertrude departed with Jimmy for Harrogate she volunteered with a meaning smile that she understood Mr. Wilson bicycled over frequently to Lee.

“Ten miles is nothing,” I said, “to a high principled poultry fancier.”

“Now you know,” she said archly, “why I did not wish to remove Dulcie to a great distance at this critical moment in her young life. I hear from Miss Jones, who writes daily, that there are shrimping expeditions and picnics with the children, strolls by moonlight without them.”

Reader, I did not oblige that serpent to disgorge the fact that moonlight strolls are not taken by two women and one man. I knew as well as possible that Miss Jones had received a hint to give these two young men every opportunity. I thanked Providence that I had not got into thatgalère. I had been saved by the fixed principle of a life time to avoid action of any kind.

I had hardly begun to enjoy the month of solitude when it was over, and Gertrude and Jimmy returned from Harrogate, he very limp and depressed, as always after his cure, and sure that it had done him more harm than good.

The two girls came back from the Solent looking the picture of health; even Joan was almost pretty, beaming under her tan. Dulcibella, who did not tan, was ravishing. The children were a rich brown pink apparently all over, and the ancient Miss Jones was a jet-beaded mass of bridling gratitude and self-importance.

Then, of course, the storm burst.

You and I, reader, know exactly what had happened. Dulcie had got engaged to Mr. Vavasour, and Joan to Mr. Wilson.

Dulcie came skimming down in the dusk the first evening to announce the event to me, her soft cheek pressed to mine. She said she wanted me to be the first to know.

And Gertrude had said I could do nothing for her!

She told me that at that very moment the blissful Joan was announcing her own betrothal to her parents.

Next morning Jimmy came down to see me. He generally gravitated to me if anything went wrong.

“We are in a hat up at the house,” he said. “Joan has actually engaged herself to that oaf, Wilson. Infernal cheek on his part, I call it.”

“You have had him hanging about for months,” I said, “I expect he and Joan thought you approved.”

“They did. They do. But that doesn’t make it any better. Of course I said I would not allow it, and Joan was amazed and cried all night, and Gertrude is in a state of such nervous tension you can’t go near her, and poor old Jones, who came back preening herself, is bathed in tears—and Gertrude says I have got to speak to Wilson at once. She always says things have got to be done at once.”

He groaned, and sat down heavily on my low wall, crushing a branch of verbena.

“It’s not as if I hadn’t warned Gertrude,” he went on. “I said to her several times ‘I’m always catching my foot against Wilson,’ and yet she would have him about the place. She as good as told me she thought he and Dulcie might make a match of it. But it’s my opinion Dulcie never so much as looked at him. I told Gertrude so, but she only smiled, and said I was to leave it to her, and that it was in those confounded stars that Dulcie would marry almost at once. This is what her beastly stars have brought us to.”

“She did tell me there was an early marriage for Joan, too, in her horoscope,” I hazarded.

“Well, we had had thoughts, I mean Gertrude had, that young Vavasour came over oftener than he need. He’s rather a bent lily, but of course he’s an uncommonly good match. I should not have thought there was anything in it, myself, but Gertrude kept rubbing it in. That is why they went to Lee.”

“You don’t say so!”

“Yes, I do say so. But look how it has turned out.”

“I think I ought to tell you—I’m so astonished that even now I don’t know how to believe it—I only heard of it last night,—that Dulcie has accepted Mr. Vavasour.”

For a moment Jimmy stared at me, and then he burst into shouts of laughter.

“Well done, Anne!” he said, rolling on my poor verbena. “Well done, Dulcie. That little slyboots. Thirty thousand a year. What a score. Who would have thought it, Anne! You look so remote and unworldly in your grey hair, stitching away at your woolwork picture. But you’ve outwitted Gertrude. Well, I don’t care what she says. I’m glad of any luck happening to Dulcie. She is not fit to struggle for herself in this hard world. But Gertrude will never forgiveyou, Anne. You may make up your mind to that.”

“But what have I done?” I bleated. “Nothing. I’m as innocent as an unlaid egg.”

“You may be, but she will never forgive you all the same,” said Jimmy slowly rising, and brushing traces of verbena from his person. “Stupid people never forgive, and they always avenge themselves by brute force.”

Old Miss Jones, bewildered and tearful, toddled down to see me, boring me to death with plans for leaving Banff and settling in Bournemouth with a married niece. Joan rushed down, boisterously happy, and confident that her father would give in; Jimmy, weakening daily, came down. Mr. Wilson called, modest and hopeful; Dulcie, and the children came down,Mr. Vavasour, a stooping youth, with starling eyes, and an intense manner, motored over.

But Gertrude never came.

I consoled myself with Mr. Vavasour. There was no doubt he was in love with Dulcie, and I surmised that in the future, if she could not dominate him, his aunt by marriage might be able to do so. I can’t say whether Dulcie cared much about him, but I told her firmly that she was very much in love, and she said, “Yes, yes, Aunt Anne.”

That was what was so endearing about Dulcie.

She was so obliging; always ready to run upstairs for my spectacles, or to marry anybody.

One evening, when she was dining with me, she proceeded to draw out her Ronald’s horoscope.

She was evidently extraordinarily well up in the subject.

“I will ask, Mrs. Cross,” she said at last, after much knitting of white brows,“but I should say Ronald was certainly not going to marry at all at this moment with Mercury and Jupiter in opposition. But then I said the same about myself, and about your going on a long journey. I should have thought some great change was inevitable with your sun now sesquiquadrate to Uranus in Cancer. But Mrs. Cross said I was absolutely mistaken about both. She was very emphatic.”

“You don’t mean to say you believe a single word of it,” I said, amazed.

“Oh, yes, Aunt Anne, of course I do. Why, don’t you remember you yourself advised me to study it. I’msureit’s all true, only it’s difficult to disentangle.”

Jimmy came down next day, and a more crestfallen man I have never seen. I was dividing my white pinks, and he collapsed on a bench, and looked at me.

“You’ve given in about Mr. Wilson,” I said drily.

“I have. Gertrude came round to it quite suddenly last night.”

“Bear up,” I said “They will probably be very happy.”

“I don’t find I mind much now it’s decided on. And between ourselves Gertrude and Joan did not hit it off too well. I used to get a bit rattled between the two of them. It will be more peaceful when Joan is married.”

“Then I don’t see why you look so woe-begone.”

Jimmy shifted on his bench.

“Anne,” he said solemnly, “you made the great mistake of your life when you refused me.”

“You could not expect me to leave a brand new kitchen boiler for you. I told you that at the time.”

“We should have suited each other,” went on Jimmy, drearily, ignoring manlike, my reasonsfor celibacy. “We are both,” he paused and then added with dignity, “contemplatives by nature. We should have sat down in two armchairs for life. I should never have been a magistrate, and a chairman of a cursed Parish Council. I should just have been happy.”

“Ihavebeen happy,” I said, “Iamhappy.”

“You have had a beautiful life: one long siesta. That is so like you.Youhave fetched it off and I’ve missed it. Just as Gertrude has missed this match for Joan, and you have fetched it off for Dulcie. If I had married you you would never have wanted me to exert myself. That was why my higher nature turned to you like a sunflower to the sun. You ought to have taken me. After all, you are the only woman I have ever proposed to,” said the twice married man.

“I thought as much,” I said, pulling my white pinks apart.

“You might have known,” he said darkly, and a glint of malice momentarily shone in his kindly eyes, “that trouble would some day overtake you for your wicked selfishness in refusing me.”

I did not notice what he was saying so much as that alien expression in my old friend’s face. I stared at him.

“I’m putty in Gertrude’s hands,” he continued solemnly, “as I should have been in yours. It’s no kind of use saying I ought not to be putty.I know I ought not, but putty I am. You don’t know what marriage is like. No peace unless you give in entirely—no terms—no half-way house, no nothing except unconditional surrender.”

I had never heard Jimmy speak like this before. I put in a layer of pinks, and then looked at him again.

There were tears in his eyes.

“My dear old soul,” he burst out, “I can’t help it, Icannothelp it. She insisted on my coming down and telling you myself. She said it must come from me, as my own idea, and I’m not to mention her at all. The truth is—she has decided—and nothing will move her—that it will be best if Joan and Bobby Wilson lived quite near us for a time as they are both so young—in fact—” his voice became hoarse—“in this cottage.”

“Mycottage!” I said. “Here!”

He nodded.

For a moment I could neither see nor hear. My brain reeled. I clutched at something which turned out to be Jimmy’s hand.

“My own little house,” I gasped. “My garden, made with my own hands. The only place my rheumatism—” I choked.

“Don’t take on so, Anne,” but it was Jimmy who was crying, not I, “I’ll find something else for you. Miss Jones is leaving Banff. You shall have her house rent free. I hate it all just asmuch as you. It makes me sick to think of chicken hutches on your lawn; but, but—youshouldn’thave outwitted Gertrude.”

“She told me there was no movement, no journey of any kind in my horoscope,” I groaned.

“She says she made a mistake, and that she sees now there is a long journey. Dulcie told her so some time ago, but she would not hear of it. But now she has worked it out again, and she says Dulcie was right after all. You are plum in the thick of Uranian upheavals.”

“And is Dulcie’s marriage a mistake, too?”

“She said nothing about that. But, between ourselves, Anne, though I’m not an astrologer, I should not count on it too much, for I’ve been making a few enquiries about Vavasour, and I find he has been engaged four times already. It’s a sort of habit with him to get engaged, and his mother never opposes him, but she has a sort of habit of gently getting him out of it—every time.”

All this took place several years ago. I live in the suburbs of Banff now in Miss Jones’s old house. As there is no garden that kind Jimmy has built me a little conservatory sticking like a blister to the unattached wall of my semi-detached villa. He sends me a hamper of vegetables every week, and Joan presents mewith a couple of chickens now and then,reared on my lawn.

They come in handy when Dulcie and her Wilhelm are staying with me. Herr Müller has an appointment in Aberdeen now. They are dreadfully poor, and a little Müller arrives every year, but Dulcie is as happy as she is incompetent and impecunious. She adds to their small muddled away income by giving lessons in astrology. I have learned the rudiments of the science, in order when I stay with her to help her with her pupils. But I never stay long as I have rheumatism as severely in Aberdeen as in Banff.

“Thetruth is, I shall have to murder her!” said Mark gloomily. “I see no way out of it.”

“I could not be really happy with a husband whose hands were red with gore,” I remarked. “I’m super-sensitive, I know. I can’t help it. I was made so. If you murder her, I warn you I shall throw you over. And where would you be then?”

“Exactly where I am now, as far as marrying you is concerned. You may throw me over as much as you like. I shan’t turn a hair.”

He had not many hairs left to turn, and perhaps he remembered that fact, and that I held nothing sacred, for he hurried on in an aggrieved tone:

“You never give me credit for any imagination. I’m not going to spill her blood. I’m much too tidy. I’ve thought it all out. I shall take you and her on a picnic to the New Forest, and trot you both about till you’re nearly famished. And then for luncheon I shall produce a tin of potted lobster. I shall choose it very carefully with a bulging tin. Potted lobster is deadly when the tin bulges. And as the luncheon will be at my expense, she will eat more than usual. She will ‘partake heartily,’ as the newspapers will sayafterwards; at least, as I hope they will have occasion to say. And then directly the meal is over the lobster will begin to do its duty, and swell inside her, and she’ll begin struggling among the picnic things. I shan’t be there. I shall have gone for a little stroll. You will support her in her last moments. I don’t mind helping with the funeral. I’d do that willingly.”

I laughed, but I was near to tears.

“How long have we been engaged?” asked Mark.

“Twelve years. You know that as well as I do.”

“Well, as far as I can see, we shall be still affianced in twenty years’ time. Aunt Pussy will see us all out.”

“We may toddle to the altar yet,” I said hysterically, “when you are about eighty and I am seventy. And I shall give you a bath-chair, and you will present the bridesmaids, who must not be a day younger than myself, with rubber hot-water bottles. Rubber will be cheap again by then.”

He came back, and sat down by me.

“It’s damnable!” he said.

“It is,” I replied.

“And it isn’t as if the little ass couldn’t afford it!” he broke out, after a moment. “She can’t have less than thirty thousand a year, and she lives on one. And it will all come to you when she dies. And it’s rolling up, and rolling up, andthe years pass and pass. Our case is desperate. Janet, can’t you say something to her? Can’t you make a great appeal to her? Can’t you get hold of someone who has an influence over her, and appeal to them?”

I did not think it necessary to answer. He knew I had tried everything years ago.

It had been thought a wonderful thing for me when Aunt Pussy, my godmother, adopted me when I was fourteen. We were a large family, and I was the only delicate one, not fitted, so my parents thought, to “fend for myself” in this rough world. And I had always liked Aunt Pussy, and she me. And she promised my father, on his impecunious death-bed, that she would take charge of me and educate me. She further gratuitously and solemnly promised that she would leave me all her money. Her all was not much, a few hundreds a year. But that was a great deal to people like ourselves. She was our one rich relation, and it was felt that I was provided for, which eventually caused an estrangement between me and my brothers and sisters, who had to work for their living; while I always had pretty clothes and a little—a very little—pocket-money, and did nothing in the way of work except arrange flowers, and write a few notes, and comb out Aunt Pussy’s Flossy, being careful to keep the parting even down the middle of his back.

My sisters became workers, and they also became ardent Suffragists, which would have shocked my father dreadfully if he had been alive, for he was of opinion that woman’s proper sphere is the home, though, of course, if you have not got a home or any money it seems rather difficult for women to remain in their sphere.

I, being provided for, remained perfectly womanly, of the type that the Anti-Suffrage League, and the sterner sex especially, admire. I took care of my appearance, I dressed charmingly on the very small allowance which Aunt Pussy doled out to me, I was an adept at all the little details which make a home pleasant, I never wanted to do anything except to marry Mark.

For across the even tenor of our lives, in a little villa in Kensington, as even as the parting down Flossie’s back, presently came two great events. Aunt Pussy inherited an enormous fortune, and the following year, I being then twenty, fell in love with Mark and accepted him. I can’t tell you whether he, poor dear, was quite disinterested at first. It was, of course, known that I should inherit all my aunt’s money. He was rather above me in the social scale. I have sometimes thought that his old painted, gambling Jezebel of a mother prodded him in my direction.

But if he was not disinterested at first, he became so. We were two perfectly ordinaryyoung people. But we were meant for each other, and we both knew it.

We never for a moment thought there would be any real difficulty in the way of our marriage. Aunt Pussy was, of course, exasperatingly niggardly, but she was now very wealthy, and she approved of Mark, partly because he was not without means. He was an only child with a little of his own, and with expectations from his mother. He had had a sunstroke in Uganda, which had forced him to give up his profession, but he was independent of it. Aunt Pussy, however, though she was most kind and sentimental about us, could not at first be induced to say anything definite about money.

When, after a few months, I began to grow pale and thin, she went so far as to say that she would give me an allowance equal to his income. I fancy even that concession cost her nights of agony. If he could make up five hundred a year she would make up the same.

Was this the moment, I ask you, for his wicked old mother to gamble herself into disgrace and bankruptcy? My poor Mark came, swearing horribly, to her assistance. But when he had done so, and had given her a pittance to live on, there was nothing left for himself.

Even then neither of us thought it mattered much. Aunt Pussy would surely come round. But we had not reckoned on the effect that a largefortune can make on a miserly temperament. She clutched at the fact that Mark was penniless as a reason to withdraw her previous promise. She would not part with a penny. She did not want to part with me. She put us off with one pretext after another. After several years of irritation and anger and exasperation, we discovered what we ought to have known from the first, that nothing would induce her to give up anything in her life-time, though she was much too religious to break her promise to my father. She intended to leave me everything. But she was not going to part with sixpence as long as she could hold on to it.

We tried to move her, but she was not to be moved. On looking back I see now that she was more eccentric than we realised at the time. In the course of twelve years Mark and I went through all the vicissitudes that two commonplace people deeply in love do go through if they can’t marry.

We became desperate. We decided to part. We urged each other to marry someone else. We conjured each other to feel perfectly free. We doubted each other. He swore. I wept. He tried to leave me and he couldn’t. I did not try. I knew it was no use. We each had opportunities of marrying advantageously if we could only have disentangled ourselves from each other. I learned what jealousy can be of a woman,younger and better looking, and sweeter-tempered and with thicker hair than myself.

He asseverated with fury that he was never jealous of me. If that was so, his outrageous behaviour to his own cousin, a rich and blameless widower in search of a wife, was inexplicable. And now, after twelve years, we had reached a point where we could only laugh. There was nothing else to be done. He was growing stout, and I was growing lean. If only middle-aged men could grow thin, and poor middle-aged women a little plump, life would be easier for them. But we reversed it. Aunt Pussy alone seemed untouched by time. Even Mark’s optimistic eye could never detect any sign of “breaking up” about her.

And throughout those dreary years we had one supreme consolation, and a very painful consolation it was. We loved each other.

“It’s damnable!” said Mark again. “Well, if I’m not to murder her, if you’re going to thwart me in every little wish just as if we were married already, I don’t see what there is to be done. I’ve inquired about a post obit.”

“Oh, Mark!”

“It’s no use saying ‘Oh, Mark’! I tell you I’ve inquired about a post obit, and if you had a grain of affection for me you would have done the same yourself years ago. But it seems you can’t raise money on a promise which may be broken.As I said before, there is no way out of it except by bloodshed. I shall have to murder her, and then you can marry me or not as you like. You will like, safe enough, if I am handy with the remains.”

The door opened, and Aunt Pussy hurried in. She was always in a hurry. We did not start away from each other, but remained stolidly seated side by side on the horsehair dining-room sofa with anger in our hearts against her. She had never given me a sitting-room. I always had to interview Mark in the dining-room with a plate of oranges on the sideboard, like a heroine in “The Quiver.”

Aunt Pussy was a small, dried-up woman of between fifty and sixty, with a furtive eye and a perpetually moving mouth, who looked as if she had been pinched out of shape by someone with a false sense of humour and no reverence. She was dressed in every shade of old black—rusty black, green black, brown black, spotted black, figured black, plain black. Mark got up slowly, and held out his hand.

“How do you do, Mark?” she said nervously. “I will own I’m somewhat surprised to see you here,” ignoring his hand, and taking some figs out of a string bag, and placing them on an empty plate (the one that ought to have had oranges in it) on the sideboard.“I have brought you some figs, Janet; you said you liked them. I thought it was agreed that until Mark had some reasonable prospect of being able to support a wife his visits here had better cease.”

“I never agreed,” said Mark, “I was always for their continuing. I’ve been against a long engagement from the first.”

“Well, in any case, you must have a cup of tea now you are here,” continued Aunt Pussy, taking off her worn gloves, which I had mended for her till the fingers were mere stumps. “Ring the bell, Janet. We will have tea in here as there isn’t a fire in the drawing-room.”

She put down more parcels on the table, and then her face changed.

“My bag!” she gasped, and collapsed into a chair like one felled by emotion. “My bag!”

We looked everywhere. Mark explored the hall and the umbrella-stand. No handbag was to be seen.

“I knew something would happen if the month began with a Friday!” moaned Aunt Pussy.

“Had it a great deal in it?” I asked.

“Twenty pounds!” said Aunt Pussy, as if it were the savings of a lifetime. “I had drawn twenty pounds to pay the monthly books.” And she became the colour of lead.

I flew for her salts, and made tea quickly, and presently she recovered sufficiently to drink it. But her hand shook.

“Twenty pounds!” she repeated, below her breath.

We questioned her as to where she last remembered using the bag, and at length elicited the information that she had no recollection of its society after visiting Brown and Prodgers, the great shop in Baskaville Road, where she recalled eating a meat lozenge, drawn from its recesses. Mark offered to go round there at once, and see if it had been found.

“I’ve never lost anything before,” she said when he had gone, “but I felt this morning that some misfortune was going to happen. There was a black cat on the leads when I looked out. As sure as fate, if I see a black cat something goes wrong. Last time I saw one, two of my handkerchiefs were missing from the wash.”

As Aunt Pussy bought her handkerchiefs in the sales for less than sixpence each, I felt that the black cat made himself rather cheap.

Mark returned with the cheering news that a bag had been found at Brown and Prodgers, and one of the principal shopwalkers had taken charge of it. And if Aunt Pussy would call in person to-morrow, and accurately describe its contents, it would be returned to her.

Aunt Pussy was so much relieved that she actually smiled on him, and offered him a second cup of tea. But next morning at breakfast I saw at once that something was gravely amiss.

Had she slept?

Yes.

Had she seen the black cat?

No.

“The truth is, Janet,” she said, “I have had a most terrible dream. I feel sure it was a warning, and I really don’t know whether I ought to call for it or not.”

“Call for what?”

“The bag.”

“Was the dream about the bag?”

“What else could it be about? I took one of my little bromides last night, for I knew I had not a chance of sleep after the agitation of the day. And I fell asleep at once. And I dreamed that it was morning, and I was in my outdoor things going to Brown and Prodgers for the bag. And the black cat walked all the way before me with its tail up. But it did not come in. And when I got there I told a shopwalker who was standing near the door what I had come about. He was a tall, dark man with a sort of down look. He bowed and said, ‘Follow me, madam.’ And I followed him. And we went through the—ahem! the gentlemen’s underclothing, which I make a point of never going through, I always go round by the artificial flowers, until we came to a glass door near the lift. And he unlocked the door and I went in, and there on the table lay my bag. I was so delighted I ran to take it.But he stopped me, and I saw then what an evil-looking man he was. And he said, ‘Look well at this bag, madam. Do you recognise it as yours?’ And I looked and I said I did. There was the place where you had mended the handle.

“Then he took it up, and put it in my hand, and said, ‘Look well at the contents, madam, and verify that they are all there.’

“So I looked at them, and they were all there, the tradesmen’s books and everything. And I counted the money and it came right. The only thing I could not be sure about was the number of the meat lozenges. I thought one might have been stolen.

“Then when I had finished he said, ‘Look well at me, madam, for I am your murderer.’ And I was so terrified that I dropped the bag and woke with a scream. Now, Janet, don’t you think it would be flying in the face of Providence to go there this morning? Dreams like that are not sent for nothing.”

“Well, perhaps it would be better not,” I said maliciously, for I knew very well that Aunt Pussy would risk any form of death rather than lose twenty pounds.

“I thought perhaps you would not mind getting it for me. The danger would not be the same for you.”

“I should not mind in the least, but they will only give it up to you.”

Aunt Pussy’s superstition struggled with her miserliness throughout her frugal breakfast. Need I say her miserliness won. Had it ever sustained one defeat in all her life! But she remained agitated and nervous to an extreme degree. I offered to go with her, but she felt that was not protection enough. So I telephoned to Mark, and presently he arrived and Aunt Pussy solemnly recapitulated her dream, and we all three set out together, she walking a little ahead, evidently on the look-out for the black cat.

Mark whispered to me that the portent about the black cat was being verified for us, not her, and that the shopwalker was evidently a very decent fellow, and that if he did his duty by us he should certainly ask him to be best man at our wedding. He had not made up his mind how deep his mourning ought to be for a murdered aunt-in-law, and was, to use his own expression, still poised like a humming-bird between a grey silk tie and a black one with a white spot, when we reached the shop.

It was early, and there were very few customers about. A tall dark man was walking up and down. Aunt Pussy instantly clutched my arm, and whispered, “It’s him!”

He saw us looking at him, and came up to us, a melancholy downcast, unprepossessing-looking man. As Aunt Pussy could only stare at him, Mark, who had spoken to him the day before,told him the lady had come to identify the bag lost on the previous afternoon. The man bowed to Aunt Pussy, and said, “Follow me, madam,” and we followed him through several departments.

“Gentlemen’s outfitting!” hissed Aunt Pussy suddenly in my ear, pointing with a trembling finger at a line of striped and tasselled pyjamas which she had avoided for many years.

Presently we came to a glass door, and the man took a key from his pocket, opened the door, and ushered us in. And there on a small table lay a bag—thebag—Aunt Pussy’s bag, with the mended handle. She groaned.

The man fixed his eyes on her and said:

“Look well at this bag, madam. Do you recognise it as yours?”

“I do,” said Aunt Pussy, as inaudibly as a bride at the altar.

He then asked her what the contents were, and she described them categorically. He then took up the bag, put it into her hand, and said, “Look well at the contents, madam, and verify that they are all there.”

They were all there. As Aunt Pussy was too paralysed to utter another word I said so for her.

There was a long pause. The man looked searchingly from one to the other of us, and sighed. If he expected a tip he was disappointed. After a moment he moved towards Aunt Pussy to openthe door behind her. As he did so she gave a faint scream, and subsided on the floor in a swoon.

When we had resuscitated and conveyed her home, and Mark had gone, she said in a hollow voice:

“Wasn’t it enough to make anybody faint?”

I said cheerfully that I did not see any cause for alarm; that the man no doubt always used exactly the same formula whenever lost property had to be identified.

“But why should he have said just at the last moment, ‘Look well at me, madam, I am your murderer?’”

“Dear Aunt Pussy, of course he never said any such thing!”

“He did! I heard him! That was why I fainted.”

It was in vain I assured her that she was mistaken. She only became hysterical and said I was deceiving her; that she saw I had heard it, too. She had been eccentric before, but from this time onwards she became even more so. She would not deal at Brown and Prodgers any more. She would not even pass the shop. She became more penurious than ever.

We could hardly persuade servants to stay with us so rigid was she about the dripping. It was all I could do to obtain the necessary money for our economical housekeeping. As the lease of our house was drawing to a close, she decidedto move into a flat, thinking it might be cheaper. But when it was all arranged and the lease signed, she refused to go in, because the man who met us there with a selection of wallpapers was, she averred, the same man whom she always spoke of as her murderer.

And I believe she was right. I thought I recognised him myself. I asked him if he had not formerly been at Brown and Prodgers, and he replied that he had; but was now employed by Whisk and Blake. After this encounter nothing would induce Aunt Pussy to enter her new home. She had to pay heavily for her changeableness, but she only wrung her hands and paid up. The poor little woman had a hunted look. She evidently thought she had had a great escape.

Mark, who did not grow more rational with increasing years, said that this was obviously the psychological moment for us to marry, and drew a vivid picture of the group at the altar—the blushing bridegroom and determined bride, and how when Aunt Pussy saw her murderer step forward as the best man, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, she would die of shock on the spot. And after handsomely remunerating our benefactor, he and I should whisk away in a superb motor, with a gross of shilling cigars on an expensive honeymoon.

Six months passed, and there was no talk ofany honeymoons. And then the lease of our house came to an end, and Aunt Pussy, having refused to allow any other house or flat to be taken, she was forced to warehouse her furniture, and we had recourse to the miseries of hotel life. Needless to say, we did not go to a quiet residential hotel, but to one of those monster buildings glued on to a railway station, where the inmates come and go every day.

Strangely enough, the galvanised activity of hotel existence pleased Aunt Pussy. She called it “seeing life.” She even made timid advances to other old ladies, knitting and dozing in the airless seclusion of the ladies’ drawing-room, for, of course, we had no sitting-room. I saw plainly enough that we should live in those two small adjoining bedrooms under the roof, looking into a tiled air-shaft, for the remainder of Aunt Pussy’s life.

Three months we lived there, and then at the cheapest time in the year, when the hotel was half empty and the heat of our rooms appalling, she consented to move for a short time into the two rooms exactly below ours, which looked on the comparatively balmy open of the August thoroughfare, and had a balcony.

I had realised by this time that Aunt Pussy was no longer responsible for her long cruelty to Mark and me, and my old affection for her revived somewhat with her pathetic dependenceon me. She could hardly bear me out of her sight.

A certain Mrs. Curtis, a benevolent old Australian widow, living in rooms next ours on this lower floor, showed us great kindness. She grasped at once what Aunt Pussy was, and she would sit with her by the hour, enabling me to go out in the air. She took me for drives. She soon discovered there was a Mark in the background, and often asked us to dine at her table, and invited him too.

She was said to be enormously wealthy, and she certainly wore a few wonderful jewels, but she was always shabbily dressed. Aunt Pussy became very fond of her, and must have been a great trial to her, running in and out of her rooms at all hours. She gave us tea in her sitting-room next door to us, and this gave Aunt Pussy special satisfaction, as we, having no sitting-room, could not possibly, as she constantly averred, return the civility.

Towards the end of September the hotel began to fill again, and the prices of the lower rooms were raised. So we moved back to our old quarters, and Mrs. Curtis, who had a noisy bedroom, took for herself and her son the two we had vacated. Her son was expected, and I have never forgotten her face of joy when she received a telegram from him during dinner saying he had reached Calais, and should arrive next morning.

We were dining early, for the kind old woman was taking Mark and me to the play. The play was delightful, and he and I, sitting together laughing at it, forgot our troubles, forgot that our youth was irretrievably gone, and that we were no nearer happiness than we had been thirteen years before. Our little friend in her weird black gown, with her thin fingers covered with large diamonds clutching an opera glass, looked at us with pained benevolence.

Mark saw us back to the door of our hotel, and after he was gone Mrs. Curtis took my arm as we mounted the steps and said gently:

“You and that nice absurd man must keep your courage up. I waited seventeen years for my husband, and when it was over it was only like a day.”

The night porter appeared at the lift door, and we got in. He stood with his back to me, and I did not look at him till he said: “What floor?” The servants knew us so well that I was surprised at the question, and glanced at him. It was Aunt Pussy’s murderer. I recognised him instantly, and I will own my first thought was one of self-congratulation.

“Now we shall leave this horrible place,” I thought. “She will never stay another day if he is here.”

But my second thought was for her. She might go clean out of her mind if she weresuddenly confronted with him. What would it be best to do?

When he had put down Mrs. Curtis at Floor 7, and we were rumbling towards Floor 8, he volunteered, as we bumped with violence against the roof that he was new to the work. I asked him what hours he came on and went off at. He said, “Heleven p.hem. to hate hay-hem.” He did not recognise me—as, indeed, why should he?—but he looked more downcast and villainous than ever. It was evident that life had not gone well with him since he had been foreman at Brown and Prodgers.

“Lady’s son from Horsetralia just arrived,” he remarked conversationally, jerking his thumb towards the lower landing. “Took ’im up ’arf an hour ago.”

I was surprised that Mr. Curtis should have already arrived, but in another moment I forgot all about it, for the first object that met my eyes as I opened my door was Aunt Pussy in a state of great agitation, sitting fully dressed on my bed. It seemed that after we had started for the play she had stood a moment in the hall looking after us, and she had seen her murderer pass, and not only had he passed, but he had exchanged a few words with the hall porter airing himself on the hotel steps.

“We must leave. We must leave to-morrow, Janet,” she repeated, in an agony of terror. “Iknow he’ll get in and kill me. That’s why he spoke to the porter. Let’s go and live at Margate. No, not Margate; it’s too public. But I saw a little house at Southwold once; tumbling down it was, with no road up to it. Such a horrid place! We might go and livethere. No one would ever think I should go there. Promise me you will take me away from London to-morrow, Janet.”

I promised, I realised that we must go at once, and I calculated that if Aunt Pussy, who always breakfasted in her room, only left it at ten o’clock to enter a cab to take her to the station it was impossible she should run across the new night porter, who went off duty several hours earlier. She must never know that he was actually in the house.

I tried to calm her, but dawn was already in the sky, or rather reflected on the tiles of our air-shaft, before she fell asleep, and I could go to my room and try to do the same.

I did it so effectually that it was nearly ten o’clock before I went down to breakfast, leaving Aunt Pussy still slumbering.

While I drank my coffee I looked out the trains for Southwold, and noted down the name of a quiet hotel there, and then went to the manager’s office to give up our rooms. When I got there a tired, angry young man, with a little bag, was interviewing the manager, who was eyeing himdoubtfully, while a few paces away the hall porter, all gold braid and hair-oil and turned-out feet, was watching the scene.

“Surely Mrs. Curtis told you she was expecting me, her son,” he was saying as I came up.

“Yes, sir,” said the manager, civil but suspicious. “No doubt, sir. Mrs. Curtis said as you were expected this morning, but, begging your pardon, you arrived last night, sir. Mr. Gregory Curtis arrived last night just after I retired for the evening.”

“Impossible,” said the young man, impatiently. “There is some mistake. Take me to Mrs. Curtis’s room at once.”

The manager hesitated.

“This certainly is Mr. Gregory Curtis,” I said, coming forward. “He is exactly like the photograph of her son which stands on Mrs. Curtis’s table, and which I have seen scores of times.”

The young man looked gratefully at me. And then, in a flash, as it were, we all took alarm.

“Then whodidyou take up to my mother’s rooms last night?” said her son. “And who took him up?”

“Not me, sir,” said the hall porter promptly. “I was off duty. Clarke, the new night porter, must have took him up.”

“WhereisClarke?” asked the manager, seizing down a key from a peg on the wall.

“Gone to bed, sir. Not been gone five minutes.”

“Bring him to me at once. And take this gentleman and me up in the lift first.”

“This lady also,” said Gregory, indicating me.

A horrible sense of guilt was stealing over me. Why hadn’t I waited to see the fragile little old woman safely into her rooms?

The manager and Gregory did not speak. I dared not look at them. The lift came to a standstill, and in a moment the manager was out of it, and fitting his master key into the lock of No. 10, almost knocking over a can of hot water on the mat. The door opened, and we all went in.

The room was dark, and as the manager went hastily forward to draw the curtain his foot struck against something and he drew back with an exclamation. I, who was nearest the door, turned on the electric light.

Mrs. Curtis was lying with outstretched arms on her face on the floor. Her widow’s cap had fallen off, revealing on the crown of the head a dark stain. Her small hands, waxen white, were spread out as if in mild deprecation. There were no rings on them. The despatch box on the dressing table had been broken open, and the jewel cases lay scattered on the floor.

After a moment of stupor, Gregory and I raised the little figure and laid it on the bed. It was obvious that there was nothing to be done.As we did so the door opened and the day porter dragged in the new lift man, holding him strongly by the arm.

They both looked at the dead woman on the bed. And then the lift man began to shake as with an ague, and his face became as ashen as hers.

“You saw her last alive,” said the manager, “and you took up the party to her room last night.”

The lift man was speechless. The drops stood on his forehead. He looked the image of guilt.

And as we stood staring at him Aunt Pussy ambled in in her dressing-gown, with her comb in her hand, having probably left something in the room she had only yesterday vacated.

Her eyes fell first on the dead body, and then on the lift man.

I expected her to scream or faint, but she did neither. She seemed frozen. Then she raised a steady comb and pointed it at the lift man.

“He is her murderer,” she said solemnly. “He meant to murder me. He told me so a year ago. He has followed me here to do it. But he did not know I had changed my rooms, and he has killed her instead.”

I don’t know what happened after that, for I was entirely taken up with Aunt Pussy. I put my hand over her mouth, and hustled her back to her rooms.

“He will be hanged now,” she said over and over again throughout that awful day. “He iscertainto be hanged, and when he is really dead I shall feel safe. Then I shall take a house, and you shall have a motor, and anything you like, Janet. He’s in prison now, isn’t he?”

“Yes, poor creature. He is under arrest. A policeman has taken him away.”

“Safe in prison now, and hanged very soon. I shan’t be easy otherwise. And then I shall sleep peacefully in my bed.”

She was better than she had been for the last year. She ate and slept, and seemed to have taken a new lease of life. She was absolutely callous about Mrs. Curtis’s death, and suggested that half-a-guinea was quite enough to give for a wreath.

“If you’re thinking of the number of times she gave us tea,” she said, “it could not possibly, with tea as cheap as it is now—Harrod’s own only one and seven—come to more than eight and six.” And she opened her “Daily Mail” and pored over it. She had of late ceased to take in any paper, but now she took in the “Daily Mail” and the “Evening Standard,” and read the police news with avidity, looking for the trial of “her murderer.”

Mark and I went to the funeral, and he was very low all the way home. He was really distressed about Mrs. Curtis and Gregory, but ofcourse he would not allow it, and accounted for his depression by saying that he had been attending thewrongfuneral. He said he did not actually blame Clarke (the lift man), for he had shown good intentions, but the man was evidently a procrastinator and a bungler, who had deceived the confidence he (Mark) had reposed in him, and on whom no one could place reliance. Such men, he averred, were better hanged and out of the way.

When I got back to our rooms I found Aunt Pussy leaning back in her armchair near the window, with the “Evening Standard” spread out on her knee. A large heading caught my eye:

“SENSATIONAL ARREST OF THEMURDERER OF MRS. CURTIS.”“Release of Clarke.”

It had caught Aunt Pussy’s eye too. And her sheer terror had been too much for her. She would never be frightened any more. She had had her last shock. She was dead.

A month later Mark came to see me in the evening. We did not seem to have much to say to each other, perhaps because we were to be married next day. But I presently discovered that he was suffering from a suppressed communication.

“Out with it,” I said. “You’ve got a wife and five small children at Peckham. There is still time to counter-order the motor and the wedding and the shilling cigars and—me.”

He took no notice.

“I’ve seen Clarke,” he said. “Poor devil! They won’t have him back at the hotel, think he’s unlucky, a sort of Jonah. His face certainly isn’t his fortune, is it? And I hope you won’t mind, Janet, I—”

“You’ve asked him to be best man instead of Gregory?”

“Well, no, I haven’t. But I was sorry for him, and I gave him fifty pounds. Your money of course. I felt we owed him something for bringing us together. For you know, in a way, he reallyhas, though he has been some time about it.”

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