CHAPTER IICAUGHT IN THE WEB
Along-drawnsigh cut the stillness. Slowly Miriam Ward raised her head and struggled to a more upright position. Her limbs felt stiff and cramped and she moved with difficulty. Without comprehension she watched a beam of light creep from underneath a window curtain and extend across the floor, its radiance widening as the sun rose higher in the heavens. The current of air from the opened window blowing indirectly upon her overcame her sense of suffocation, but her wild stare about the bedroom did not bring recollection in its train. The first thing to fix her attention was the fireplace and the darkened hearth—no heat was given out by the dead embers. Suddenly conscious of the chill atmosphere, she involuntarily grasped her dress and dragged it closer about her neck. The touch of the starched linen caused her to glance downward. She was wearing her uniform, therefore she was on duty!
Miriam Ward’s dulled wits slowly adjusted themselves. She had reported for duty at the Registry;a call had come—from where? To attend whom? Roberts? No, that was the name of the physician. Ah, she had it—Paul Abbott. The chord of memory was touched at last and the events of the night crowded upon her. The man in the bed—
Stiffly Miriam scrambled to her feet and made a few halting steps to the bedside. It took all her will-power to pull aside the bed curtains and glance down. Paul Abbott lay partly turned upon his side, his fine profile outlined against the white pillowcase, and his right hand just showing outside the eiderdown quilt.
Miriam’s hand tightened its grasp on the curtain and she leaned weakly against the side of the bed; but for its support her trembling knees would have given way under her. She had been the victim of a nightmare! The midnight visit of Betty Carter and the clergyman, the substitution of a stranger for her patient—all had been a hallucination conjured up by a too vivid imagination. She had slept on duty. That, in itself, was an unpardonable offense.
Raising her arm she glanced at her wrist watch—the hands registered a quarter past eight. Then nearly nine hours had passed and she had lain asleep. A wave of color suffused her white face and she grew hot and cold by turns. Her heart was beating with suffocating rapidity as she hurried to the windowsand drew aside the long, heavy curtains and pulled up the Holland shades. The storm of the night before was over and the winter sunshine brought a touch of warmth to the room and a sense of comfort.
A glance at the fireplace convinced Miriam that it would require both time and fresh kindling wood to start a fire. It could wait until she had summoned the caretaker; the room was not so cold now that she had closed the window.
Retracing her footsteps she again paused by the bed and gazed at her patient. He still lay on his side, motionless. Miriam Ward caught her breath—motionless, aye, too motionless. A certain rigidity, a waxen pallor, indistinguishable in her first glimpse of him in the darkened room, held her eyes, trained to detect the slightest alteration in a patient’s condition. Her hand sought his wrist, then his heart, then dropped limply to her side. Paul Abbott lay dead before her.
Her low cry was smothered in the bed curtain, which she pressed against her mouth, and for a moment she swayed dizzily upon her feet. Paul Abbott had died while she lay asleep within a few feet of his bed. Overwhelming remorse deadened every other feeling and held her spellbound. Fullyfive minutes elapsed before a sense of duty aroused her to action.
Wheeling around, Miriam staggered rather than walked to the telephone standing on Abbott’s desk. She had jotted down Doctor Roberts’ ’phone call the night before, but it took her several seconds to get the central at Washington, and still others passed before a man’s voice told her that the physician was out making his morning rounds. At her urgent request the servant promised to locate Doctor Roberts and send him at once to Abbott’s Lodge.
As Miriam replaced the receiver on its hook she was conscious of a feeling of deadly nausea and she stumbled as she walked across the room and into the hall. She must have aid. Her repeated calls brought no response. What had become of the caretaker and his wife? A noise of some one moving in the hall below caused her to run down the staircase to the lower landing.
“Here—here, this way!” she gasped, and saw vaguely outlined a woman’s terrified face in front of her while the sound of a heavy tread coming down the staircase echoed in her ears. “Mr. Abbott—I—” Voice and strength failed her simultaneously, and before any one could reach her she lay in a crumpled heap on the landing, unconscious of the loud ringing of the gong over the front door.
It was approaching noon when a timid knock at her bedroom door brought Miriam Ward into the corridor and face to face with the caretaker’s wife.
“If you please, Miss, the doctor says do you feel better?” The question came in a gasp, characteristic of Martha Corbin. A gray ghost of a woman, timid to the verge of cowardice, she seldom spoke unless addressed.
“Much better,” replied the trained nurse. “Where is Doctor Roberts?”
“In there,” with a jerk of her thumb over her shoulder. “He wants to see ye.”
“Very well.” Miriam Ward closed her bedroom door with a firm hand. She had regained some hold upon her composure as her attacks of nausea ceased and the throbbing in her head lessened. Doctor Roberts had left her two hours before with the admonition to remain in bed until he saw her again, but her anxiety of mind had prevented her following his directions. She paused involuntarily outside of Paul Abbott’s bedroom, then, gathering courage, she stepped inside. Doctor Roberts turned at the sound of her approach and put down the telephone instrument.
“So you are up,” he said gruffly. “Well, how are you? Feeling stronger?”
“Yes; thank you, Doctor.” In spite of her determinedeffort to keep her voice expressionless, Miriam was conscious that it was not quite steady. “I—oh, Doctor, I don’t know what to say.” Her pent-up emotion was gaining the upper hand. “How to tell you—”
“What?” as she paused.
“That—that—I slept on duty.”
Doctor Roberts eyed her steadily for what seemed an interminable minute. “So that was it,” he remarked dryly. “Well, what then?”
The nurse’s pallor was intensified, but her eyes did not falter in their direct gaze.
“I was asleep when Mr. Abbott died,” she admitted, her hands clenching themselves in the pockets of her uniform.
Doctor Roberts’ stare grew prolonged. “And this was your first case in Washington?” he asked, with marked emphasis.
“Yes.” Miriam Ward moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue.
“Hardly a successful début,” commented Roberts. His glance strayed beyond the nurse to a man standing in the shadow of a window curtain. “Give Miss Ward a chair, Alan.”
Somewhat startled by the presence of a third person, Miriam accepted the proffered seat with relief; she was weaker than she had at first realized.
“Miss Ward,” continued Doctor Roberts, “this is Mr. Alan Mason, of the WashingtonPost. He arrived here in time to carry you to your bedroom and then summoned me.”
Miriam glanced upward and encountered the gaze of a pair of deep blue eyes fixed upon her in concern.
“You should not have gotten up,” Alan declared, and the human sympathy in his voice brought a lump in her throat. She saw his clear-cut features, wavy dark hair, and whimsical mouth through a mist which she strove to wink away. “I’m afraid you have overdone things a bit.”
Miriam shook her head. “I could not rest in my bedroom,” she said. “There must be something that I can do, Doctor Roberts; unless you distrust me too much.” Her voice shook with feeling, and she paused abruptly, unable to go on.
The two men exchanged glances, then Roberts rose. “There, there!” he exclaimed, a trifle awkwardly. “Just take things quietly, Miss Ward, while Alan asks you a few questions. It is his business, you know.”
“Just so.” Alan Mason nodded reassuringly. “I’m a reporter and also a cousin of Paul’s; in fact, his nearest relative. How did Paul seem last night—before you fell asleep?”
“He—” Her pause was infinitesimal. “He appeared much excited, even irrational, but at times his mind was perfectly clear. He took a little nourishment.” She stopped and passed one hand before her eyes. Her dreams still haunted her. Could she truthfully say where imagination had dovetailed with reality? Was Betty Carter’s visit, her marriage to Paul Abbott but a figment of her overcharged brain? Would her hearers think her a lunatic as well as criminally negligent if she went into details?
Doctor Roberts broke the pause. “I have looked over your chart,” he stated, “and find that the last entry was made soon after midnight. You made no record of any marked change in his condition.”
Miriam swallowed hard. “The collapse must have come suddenly,” she said. “At what time do you think he died?”
Roberts eyed her in silence for a minute. “Come over to the bed,” he directed, and not waiting for her, turned on his heel.
The long side curtains of the four-post bedstead were stretched across it, and as Miriam laid her hand on one of them to draw it aside, Alan Mason checked her.
“I found this wad of cotton under the bed,” he began. “Had you any occasion last night to use chloroform?”
“No.” Miriam looked at him in startled wonder. “No.”
“Then,” Roberts scanned her closely, “how comes it that you, a trained nurse, are unaware that you were chloroformed?”
Slowly Miriam took in the meaning of his words. “Chloroformed?” she gasped. “I?”
It was Alan Mason who answered and not Doctor Roberts. “I detected the odor of chloroform when I carried you to your bedroom,” he said. “So then I came in here—found my cousin, Paul, dead—and this cotton under the bed.”
Miriam stared at her companions in dumbfounded silence for a moment. “My attack of nausea—” she faltered.
“Was the result of the chloroform,” declared Doctor Roberts. His voice deepened. “We also detected its odor about Paul Abbott.”
“Good God!” Miriam drew back. “Was Mr. Abbott anesthetized?”
Roberts’ gaze never left her face in the lengthened pause.
“In Heaven’s name, why don’t you answer?” Miriam looked piteously from one man to the other. “Was Mr. Abbott chloroformed?”
“No,” replied Roberts. “He was stabbed in the back.”
Dragging aside the curtains, Miriam gazed in horror at the bed. The bedclothes had been pulled back and Paul Abbott lay upon his face. Under his left shoulder blade was a dark and sinister bloodstain.