He said in a voice both hoarse and feeble:
“But, doctor, I’m being poisoned.”
Professional curiosity and interest masked by genial incredulity instantly quickened the doctor’s attention.
“My dear sir,” he smiled, “poisoned by this nasty bout of ’flu you mean, I suppose—”
“No,” said the patient, faintly and wearily dropping both lids over his blank eyes, “by my wife.”
“That’s an ugly sort of fancy for you to get hold of,” replied the doctor instantly. “Acute depression—we must see what we can do for you—”
The sick man opened both eyes now; he even slightly raised his head as he replied, not without dignity:
“I fetched you from London, Dr. Holroyd, that you might deal with my case impartially—from the local man there is no hope of that, he is entirely impressed by my wife.”
Dr. Holroyd made a movement as if to protest but a trembling sign from the patient made him quickly subsist.
“Please let me speak. She will come in soon and I shall have no chance. I sent for you secretly, she knows nothing about that. I had heard you very well spoken of—as an authority on this sort of thing. You made a name over the Pluntre murder case as witness for the Crown.”
“I don’t specialize in murder,” said Dr. Holroyd, but his keen handsome face was alight with interest. “And I don’t care much for this kind of case—Sir Harry.”
“But you’ve taken it on,” murmured the sick man. “You couldn’t abandon me now.”
“I’ll get you into a nursing home,” said the doctor cheerfully, “and there you’ll dispel all these ideas.”
“And when the nursing home has cured me I’m to come back to my wife for her to begin again?”
Dr. Holroyd bent suddenly and sharply over the sombre bed. With his right hand he deftly turned on the electric lamp and tipped back the coral silk shade so that the bleached acid light fell full over the patient lying on his back on the big fat pillows.
“Look here,” said the doctor, “what you say is pretty serious.”
And the two men stared at each other, the patient examining his physician as acutely as his physician examined him.
Bevis Holroyd was still a young man with a look of peculiar energy and austere intelligence that heightened by contrast purely physical dark good looks that many men would have found sufficient passport to success; resolution, dignity, and a certain masculine sweetness, serene and strong, different from feminine sweetness, marked his demeanour which was further softened by a quick humour and a sensitive judgment.
The patient, on the other hand, was a man of well past middle age, light, flabby and obese with a flaccid, fallen look about his large face which was blurred and dimmed by the colours of ill health, being one pasty livid hue that threw into unpleasant relief the grey speckled red of his scant hair.
Altogether an unpleasing man, but of a certain fame and importance that had induced the rising young doctor to come at once when hastily summoned to Strangeways Manor House; a man of a fine, renowned family, a man of repute as a scholar, an essayist who had once been a politician who was rather above politics; a man whom Dr. Holroyd only knew vaguely by reputation, but who seemed to him symbolical of all that was staid, respectable, and stolid.
And this man blinked up at him and whimpered:
“My wife is poisoning me.”
Dr. Holroyd sat back and snapped off the electric light.
“What makes you think so?” he asked sharply.
“To tell you that,” came the laboured voice of the sick man, “I should have to tell you my story.”
“Well, if you want me to take this up—”
“I sent for you to do that, doctor.”
“Well, how do you think you are being poisoned?”
“Arsenic, of course.”
“Oh? And how administered?”
Again the patient looked up with one eye, seeming too fatigued to open the other.
“Cambric tea,” he replied.
And Dr. Holroyd echoed:
“Cambric tea!” with a soft amazement and interest.
Cambric tea had been used as the medium for arsenic in the Pluntre case and the expression had become famous; it was Bevis Holroyd who had discovered the doses in the cambric tea and who had put his finger on this pale beverage as the means of murder.
“Very possibly,” continued Sir Harry, “the Pluntre case made her think of it.”
“For God’s sake, don’t,” said Dr. Holroyd; for in that hideous affair the murderer had been a woman; and to see a woman on trial for her life, to see a woman sentenced to death, was not an experience he wished to repeat.
“Lady Strangeways,” continued the sick man, “is much younger than I—I over persuaded her to marry me, she was at that time very much attracted by a man of her own age, but he was in a poor position and she was ambitious.”
He paused, wiped his quivering lips on a silk handkerchief, and added faintly:
“Lately our marriage has been extremely unhappy. The man she preferred is now prosperous, successful, and unmarried—she wishes to dispose of me that she may marry her first choice.”
“Have you proof of any of this?”
“Yes. I know she buys arsenic. I know she reads books on poisons. I know she is eating her heart out for this other man.”
“Forgive me, Sir Harry,” replied the doctor, “but have you no near friend nor relation to whom you can confide your—suspicions?”
“No one,” said the sick man impatiently. “I have lately come from the East and am out of touch with people. Besides I want a doctor, a doctor with skill in this sort of thing. I thought from the first of the Pluntre case and of you.”
Bevis Holroyd sat back quietly; it was then that he thought of the situation as bizarre; the queerness of the whole thing was vividly before him, like a twisted figure on a gem—a carving at once writhing and immobile.
“Perhaps,” continued Sir Harry wearily, “you are married, doctor?”
“No.” Dr. Holroyd slightly smiled; his story was something like the sick man’s story but taken from another angle; when he was very poor and unknown he had loved a girl who had preferred a wealthy man; she had gone out to India, ten years ago, and he had never seen her since; he remembered this, with sharp distinctness, and in the same breath he remembered that he still loved this girl; it was, after all, a commonplace story.
Then his mind swung to the severe professional aspect of the case; he had thought that his patient, an unhealthy type of man, was struggling with a bad attack of influenza and the resultant depression and weakness, but then he had never thought, of course, of poison, nor looked nor tested for poison.
The man might be lunatic, he might be deceived, he might be speaking the truth; the fact that he was a mean, unpleasant beast ought not to weigh in the matter; Dr. Holroyd had some enjoyable Christmas holidays in prospect and now he was beginning to feel that he ought to give these up to stay and investigate this case; for he could readily see that it was one in which the local doctor would be quite useless.
“You must have a nurse,” he said, rising.
But the sick man shook his head.
“I don’t wish to expose my wife more than need be,” he grumbled. “Can’t you manage the affair yourself?”
As this was the first hint of decent feeling he had shown, Bevis Holroyd forgave him his brusque rudeness.
“Well, I’ll stay the night anyhow,” he conceded.
And then the situation changed, with the opening of a door, from the bizarre to the tragic.
This door opened in the far end of the room and admitted a bloom of bluish winter light from some uncurtained, high-windowed corridor; the chill impression was as if invisible snow had entered the shaded, dun, close apartment.
And against this background appeared a woman in a smoke-coloured dress with some long lace about the shoulders and a high comb; she held a little tray carrying jugs and a glass of crystal in
which the cold light splintered.
Dr. Holroyd stood in his usual attitude of attentive courtesy, and then, as the patient, feebly twisting his gross head from the fat pillow, said:
“My wife—doctor—” he recognized in Lady Strangeways the girl to whom he had once been engaged in marriage, the woman he still loved.
“This is Doctor Holroyd,” added Sir Harry. “Is that cambric tea you have there?”
She inclined her head to the stranger by her husband’s bed as if she had never seen him before, and he, taking his cue, and for many other reasons, was silent.
“Yes, this is your cambric tea,” she said to her husband. “You like it just now, don’t you? How do you find Sir Harry, Dr. Holroyd?”
There were two jugs on the tray; one of crystal half full of cold milk, and one of white porcelain full of hot water; Lady Strangeways proceeded to mix these fluids in equal proportions and gave the resultant drink to her husband, helping him first to sit up in bed.
“I think that Sir Harry has a nasty turn of influenza,” answered the doctor mechanically. “He wants me to stay. I’ve promised till the morning, anyhow.”
“That will be a pleasure and a relief,” said Lady Strangeways gravely. “My husband has been ill some time and seems so much worse than he need—for influenza.”
The patient, feebly sipping his cambric tea, grinned queerly at the doctor.
“So much worse—you see, doctor!” he muttered.
“It is good of you to stay,” continued Lady Strangeways equally. “I will see about your room, you must be as comfortable as possible.”
She left as she had come, a shadow-coloured figure retreating to a chill light.
The sick man held up his glass as if he gave a toast.
“You see! Cambric tea!”
And Bevis Holroyd was thinking: does she not want to know me? Does he know what we once were to each other? How comes she to be married to this man—her husband’s name was Custiss—and the horror of the situation shook the calm that was his both from character and training; he went to the window and looked out on the bleached park; light, slow snow was falling, a dreary dance over the frozen grass and before the grey corpses that paled, one behind the other, to the distance shrouded in colourless mist.
The thin voice of Harry Strangeways recalled him to the bed.
“Would you like to take a look at this, doctor?” He held out the half drunk glass of milk and water.
“I’ve no means of making a test here,” said Dr. Holroyd, troubled. “I brought a few things, nothing like that.”
“You are not so far from Harley Street,” said Sir Harry. “My car can fetch everything you want by this afternoon—or perhaps you would like to go yourself?”
“Yes,” replied Bevis Holroyd sternly. “I would rather go myself.”
His trained mind had been rapidly covering the main aspects of his problem and he had instantly seen that it was better for Lady Strangeways to have this case in his hands. He was sure there was some hideous, fantastic hallucination on the part of Sir Harry, but it was better for Lady Strangeways to leave the matter in the hands of one who was friendly towards her. He rapidly found and washed a medicine bottle from among the sick room paraphernalia and poured it full of the cambric tea, casting away the remainder.
“Why did you drink any?” he asked sharply.
“I don’t want her to think that I guess,” whispered Sir Harry. “Do you know, doctor, I have a lot of her love letters—written by—”
Dr. Holroyd cut him short.
“I couldn’t listen to this sort of thing behind Lady Strangeways’s back,” he said quickly. “That is between you and her. My job is to get you well. I’ll try and do that.”
And he considered, with a faint disgust, how repulsive this man looked sitting up with pendant jowl and drooping cheeks and discoloured, pouchy eyes sunk in pads of unhealthy flesh and above the spiky crown of Judas-coloured hair.
Perhaps a woman, chained to this man, living with him, blocked and thwarted by him, might be wrought upon to—
Dr. Holroyd shuddered inwardly and refused to continue his reflection.
As he was leaving the gaunt sombre house about which there was something definitely blank and unfriendly, a shrine in which the sacred flames had flickered out so long ago that the lamps were blank and cold, he met Lady Strangeways.
She was in the wide entrance hall standing by the wood fire that but faintly dispersed the gloom of the winter morning and left untouched the shadows in the rafters of the open roof.
Now he would not, whether she wished or no, deny her; he stopped before her, blocking out her poor remnant of light.
“Mollie,” he said gently, “I don’t quite understand—you married a man named Custiss in India.”
“Yes. Harry had to take this name when he inherited this place. We’ve been home three years from the East, but lived so quietly here that I don’t suppose anyone has heard of us.”
She stood between him and the firelight, a shadow among the shadows; she was much changed; in her thinness and pallor, in her restless eyes and nervous mouth he could read signs of discontent, even of unhappiness.
“I never heard of you,” said Dr. Holroyd truthfully. “I didn’t want to. I liked to keep my dreams.”
Her hair was yet the lovely cedar wood hue, silver, soft, and gracious; her figure had those fluid lines of grace that he believed he had never seen equalled.
“Tell me,” she added abruptly, “what is the matter with my husband? He has been ailing like this for a year or so.”
With a horrid lurch of his heart that was usually so steady, Dr. Holroyd remembered the bottle of milk and water in his pocket.
“Why do you give him that cambric tea?” he counter questioned.
“He will have it—he insists that I make it for him—”
“Mollie,” said Dr. Holroyd quickly, “you decided against me, ten years ago, but that is no reason why we should not be friends now—tell me, frankly, are you happy with this man?”
“You have seen him,” she replied slowly. “He seemed different ten years ago. I honestly was attracted by his scholarship and his learning as well as—other things.”
Bevis Holroyd needed to ask no more; she was wretched, imprisoned in a mistake as a fly in amber; and those love letters? Was there another man?
As he stood silent, with a dark reflective look on her weary brooding face, she spoke again: “You are staying?”
“Oh yes,” he said, he was staying, there was nothing else for him to do.
“It is Christmas week,” she reminded him wistfully. “It will be very dull, perhaps painful, for you.”
“I think I ought to stay.”
Sir Harry’s car was announced; Bevis Holroyd, gliding over frozen roads to London, was absorbed with this sudden problem that, like a mountain out of a plain, had suddenly risen to confront him out of his level life.
The sight of Mollie (he could not think of her by that sick man’s name) had roused in him tender memories and poignant emotions and the position in which he found her and his own juxtaposition to her and her husband had the same devastating effect on him as a mine sprung beneath the feet of an unwary traveller.
London was deep in the whirl of a snow storm and the light that penetrated over the grey roof tops to the ugly slip of a laboratory at the back of his consulting rooms was chill and forbidding.
Bevis Holroyd put the bottle of milk on a marble slab and sat back in the easy chair watching that dreary chase of snow flakes across the dingy London pane.
He was thinking of past springs, of violets long dead, of roses long since dust, of hours that had slipped away like lengths of golden silk rolled up, of the long ago when he had loved Mollie and Mollie had seemed to love him; then he thought of that man in the big bed who had said:
“My wife is poisoning me.”
Late that afternoon Dr. Holroyd, with his suit case and a professional bag, returned to Strangeways Manor House in S
ir Harry’s car; the bottle of cambric tea had gone to a friend, a noted analyst; somehow Doctor Holroyd had not felt able to do this task himself; he was very fortunate, he felt, in securing this old solitary and his promise to do the work before Christmas.
As he arrived at Strangeways Manor House which stood isolated and well away from a public high road where a lonely spur of the weald of Kent drove into the Sussex marshes, it was in a blizzard of snow that effaced the landscape and gave the murky outlines of the house an air of unreality, and Bevis Holroyd experienced that sensation he had so often heard of and read about, but which so far his cool mind had dismissed as a fiction.
He did really feel as if he was in an evil dream; as the snow changed the values of the scene, altering distances and shapes, so this meeting with Mollie, under these circumstances, had suddenly changed the life of Bevis Holroyd.
He had so resolutely and so definitely put this woman out of his life and mind, deliberately refusing to make enquiries about her, letting all knowledge of her cease with the letter in which she had written from India and announced her marriage.
And now, after ten years, she had crossed his path in this ghastly manner, as a woman her husband accused of attempted murder.
The sick man’s words of a former lover disturbed him profoundly; was it himself who was referred to? Yet the love letters must be from another man for he had not corresponded with Mollie since her marriage, not for ten years.
He had never felt any bitterness towards Mollie for her desertion of a poor, struggling doctor, and he had always believed in the integral nobility of her character under the timidity of conventionality; but the fact remained that she had played him false—what if that had been “the little rift within the lute” that had now indeed silenced the music!
With a sense of bitter depression he entered the gloomy old house; how different was this from the pleasant ordinary Christmas he had been rather looking forward to, the jolly homely atmosphere of good fare, dancing, and friends!
When he had telephoned to these friends excusing himself his regret had been genuine and the cordial “bad luck!” had had a poignant echo in his own heart; bad luck indeed, bad luck—
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Page 63