Murder by an Aristocrat

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  “The thing is, can we believe Emmeline?” said Hilary at last breaking into that heavy, thoughtful, anxious silence. “I say no. She would shield Dave with her last breath.”

  “You don’t want to believe Emmeline,” said Adela coldly. “As usual, you prefer not to face the truth. You know as well as I that in all the years Emmeline has been with us we have never known her to lie. Which is more than I can say for my own family. Oh, there, there, Hilary! I know you are going to say you did it with the best of intentions. So did I — I had the best of intentions when I concealed what I knew of the time of Bayard’s death. When I tried to draw attention from my family.”

  “Well, the truth is out now,” said Hilary. “And I don’t see that we have accomplished anything. Unless we are to agree that it must have been Dave and let the whole thing drop. Forget it as soon as we may. Aren’t you going to read your telegrams, Adela?”

  Adela looked bleakly at the telegrams and put them on the table, where they remained, a vivid yellow patch on the polished table top.

  “Not now,” she said. “I can’t bear to read them yet. We must decide what to do. I can’t go on like this much longer. I am not afraid of the truth, but the physical strain of indecision is almost more than I can bear.”

  “Miss Keate,” said Allen directly, “you can see how matters stand. Do believe me when I say that we are not keeping some fact from you. You know as much as we know about this affair. In your career as a nurse you must have seen various family skeletons exposed, and you must have kept sad and tragic secrets. If I were to consider only myself I would prefer digging away at this thing until we proved that Dave did it, rather than assume that he did it in the face of what seems to be proof to the contrary. Perhaps we would all prefer that except Janice, and we know why Janice does not want it proved that Dave was a murderer. But I believe that we can go no farther, as things stand. I think it is best to do as Hilary suggests. Forget the whole thing. Is it too much to ask you to forget it, too?”

  I hesitated. They were all watching me anxiously, and in the little waiting silence Adela leaned forward.

  “Is there still something unanswered, Miss Keate?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said promptly. “Who was Nita Thatcher, and why did Bayard talk of Nita’s grave in his sleep, and why did I meet Dave in the cemetery right at the foot of a grave marked Nita Thatcher?”

  There was another silence. Adela looked at me steadily, and while I could feel the gaze of the others, I could not tell what their expressions were. I was sure, however, that Adela knew the answer to my question, and I was surprised and incredulous when she replied with just a tinge of her former blandness:

  “Can anyone answer Miss Keate?” And as no one spoke she said in a faintly disapproving manner, “If Bayard was talking in his sleep his mention of Nita Thatcher’s grave could mean nothing. And your meeting Dave at that place in the cemetery was merely accident, I imagine, Miss Keate.”

  I resisted an impulse to ask her if it was merely accident that she roused herself so early the morning after Bayard’s murder and walked to the cemetery.

  “Nita Thatcher’s been dead and gone for years,” said Hilary. “She had nothing to do with this, Miss Keate, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “This means nothing at all to me, Mr. Thatcher,” I said with spirit. “If I had known what I was to be involved in when I came here, do you think I would have set foot in this house? But I’ve ears and eyes and can’t help seeing and hearing —”

  “Have you tried very hard not to?” interrupted Hilary rudely, and Adela said swiftly, “You must forgive my brother, Miss Keate. This has been a great strain to him, and he is not himself. I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything about Nita’s grave, although it does not seem exactly an important point to me. I realize that I made a mistake in undertaking this informal inquiry, but I thought we could at least settle our minds about Bayard’s death. As Allen says, it begins to look hopeless. But can you think of anything else, Miss Keate, that you believe might bring the truth to light?”

  I could. There was one thing yet that must be answered, and I was convinced that one of them could answer it.

  But I paused for a long moment before speaking. The strain of the prolonged talk was beginning to be felt by everyone. Even Evelyn was looking tired and anxious, her brown features sharp and taut below her smooth gold hair, and she had taken a red rose from the bowl on the table and was pulling it absently to pieces between her strong brown fingers, staring at the thing without seeing it.

  Allen was standing near Janice as if he dared not leave her, and Janice, weary and sad, yet somehow with her beauty poignantly in flame, was huddled in a corner of the large chair in which she sat. Dr. Bouligny was rubbing his chin with his heavy hand, back and forth nervously; watching me, watching Adela, watching us all. Adela looked older but was still dignified, unapproachable, determined. Those two long talks with me as an alien audience, and with their frequent lapses into ugly bickering and hideous accusation and — which were probably even more trying to her — occasional harrowing self-revelations, must have been inexpressibly painful to her.

  “Well, what is it, Nurse?” asked Hilary impatiently.

  But I took my time to look at every one of them; perhaps my question would bring at least some illuminating change of expression.

  “Who,” I said, “closed Bayard’s eyes?”

  There was a complete silence. Dr. Bouligny stopped rubbing his chin, and no one else moved.

  And no one spoke.

  “You see,” I went on, after searching those still, masked faces in vain, “a burglar or any outsider would not have stopped to close his eyes. It must have been some member of the family.”

  “Take care, Nurse,” said Hilary. “Don’t go too far.”

  “Don’t be silly, Hilary,” said Evelyn, looking up suddenly from her shattered rose. “Miss Keate knows very well you all think it was Dave. She undoubtedly thinks so, too. And since no one of us here closed Bayard’s eyes, then it must have been Dave who did it.”

  Again there was silence in that long room. That long, quiet room with its ancestral portraits and its books and its secrets. I had reached a complete impasse. It was like groping blindly along a stone wall; at every turn I reached that wall and could never penetrate its thickness.

  I could, of course, bring the matter as it stood to the proper authorities, but that would be only to involve Janice. To give her up for arrest for the murder of Bayard Thatcher. To drag her through the ignominy of trial. To publish and forever tarnish her love for Allen. It would ruin her life, and there was no reason to believe that it would result in the proof that someone else had murdered Bayard.

  Every inquiry I had made had led to exactly nothing so far as solving the mystery of Bayard’s death was concerned. It was not a matter of surrender on my part; it was simply that I could go no further.

  They had proved that Dave had not entered that quiet, shadowy house the afternoon of Bayard’s death. And illogically, driven by their instinct rather than their reason, they yet believed that Dave had killed Bayard.

  Well, let them believe so. And if any of them ever doubted, no one would know. After all, most families have their secrets.

  “I am only too ready to forget this,” I said slowly. “I am a nurse and I am accustomed to holding my tongue. I will finish out my day and night and then leave. And I promise you,” I paused, conscious of Hilary’s eager yet skeptical eyes, “I promise you that the whole affair will remain a secret so far as I am concerned.”

  It seemed to take them a moment or two to comprehend that I really meant what I had said. It was strange to hear the singular kind of sigh that went over the room. Much as I knew of their feeling toward me, I had not perceived until then the real depth and extent of their urgent fear. Evelyn and Adela came to me and took my hand, and Dr. Bouligny murmured something approving, and Janice’s dark eyes looked gratefully into mine. Allen said briefly that they were in my debt. O
nly Hilary remained in the background, his eyes still wary and guarded.

  It was done, then, the Thatcher case. Tomorrow I would be out of that silent, secretive house with its darkly polished spaces and its air of knowledge; out of the house and gone. Probably I should never see the Thatchers again. And I would never know the truth of that murder; it would remain an unsolved mystery and an ugly and harrowing memory.

  I remember that, as I took their hands and heard their thanks, something back in my mind was saying, “Which hand? Which hand? Everyone of you had a motive for wishing Bayard dead.”

  Finally I escaped to my own room. I remember ascending those wide, gleaming stairs and thinking of my first night in that silent house, and being glad that I was leaving, inexpressibly eager to get away. To return to the hospital where shadows did not threaten and night noises meant nothing.

  Somehow my last day in the Thatcher house dragged along. I saw little of the family; I suppose they all felt exhausted with the continued strain and perhaps had relaxed with the assurance of my silence. Evelyn, I believe, undertook the arrangements Dave’s death had made necessary, and she and Hilary conferred for a long time with Adela, in Adela’s little morning room, and more briefly with Janice.

  It was warm that day and very quiet. There seemed to be only a few callers. Sometime during the afternoon Florrie, chastened and pale from her experience, but perfectly well and able to be about the house again, brought me a note from Adela. It enclosed a check and a brief and formal word of thanks. The check, I was glad to see, was for not one penny more than the amount of my professional services.

  They believed in my promise, then, and were willing to let me leave. Either that or they knew that they, too, had reached a place whence they could go no further.

  Somehow I ate my last dinner in that stately dining room. Somehow I listened to Adela’s occasional word and Evelyn’s efforts to prevent the meal from being a ghastly, silent horror. How well I remember, even now, the gentle flicker of the tall candles, the heavy fragrance of the roses and Janice’s face above the soft white lace of her gown and the way her eyes kept going to Allen.

  For the Thatchers kept up the pretense to the last. To the last they preserved the surface of things. And to the last they were — and how well I remember Bayard’s bitter word — aristocrats.

  I went directly from dinner to my own room. I don’t know just when Hilary evolved his brilliant idea. I was packing uniforms when Emmeline summoned me again to the library. They were all there when I entered, obviously waiting for me. Hilary was holding Dave’s revolver in his hand.

  “Miss Keate,” said Evelyn at once, “Hilary thinks he can prove that it was not Dave’s revolver that killed Bayard, in spite of the circumstances that seem to prove it. He says it is too large a caliber to have been fired even in a soundproof room and not heard. He has asked us to remain here in the library while he goes into Dave’s study and, with the door closed, fires the revolver. He thinks we will be able to hear it very plainly.”

  “Not only that, Evelyn. I think you can hear it out on the lawn. But you can judge something of that from here. If you can’t hear it, we are still in the position in which we have left things. If we can hear the sound as loudly as I predict, we shall be obliged to reconsider the whole thing on the basis that Dave’s gun had nothing to do with the murder. That it was, after all, an intruder with a revolver of smaller caliber than this one.”

  “That will involve a rather belated autopsy, Hilary,” said Dr. Bouligny rather wearily. “You don’t want that, do you?”

  “We’ll do that, of course, if there’s a chance to prove it was not Dave,” said Adela.

  “Go ahead, Hilary,” said Allen dryly.

  We all watched while Hilary walked to the study, entered it, and closed the door.

  The lamp cast long shadows into the corners of the long old room. Adela’s gray chiffon trailed on the polished floor; her face was in shadow, but I could see the long strand of bright turquoise beads which hung from her blunt white fingers and caught sharp blue high lights. Janice shrank closer to Allen, and I think, in the shadow by the window curtain, his arm went protectingly around her. Evelyn was sitting directly under the light, and her firm brown profile was in sharp relief. Dr. Bouligny rubbed his chin and watched the door to the study.

  Then we heard the muffled sound of the detonation. We heard it distinctly enough to recognize it for what it was. But out on the lawn with the whirring sound of the lawn-mower it could not have been heard. I was sure of that. The situation, then, was left unchanged.

  There was a frenzied sound of scratching at the study door. Hilary opened it, and a brown and white streak catapulted between his ankles and hurled itself out of the door and fled through the library and into the hall. It was Pansy, of course, ears hugging her head, legs flying, tail hidden.

  “Confound that dog!” cried Hilary. “She’s nearly upset me. I didn’t see her there on the couch. She nearly goes crazy when she hears a gunshot. Did you hear it?”

  “Pansy still gunshy?” asked Dr. Bouligny. “I thought she’d get over that when she grew so old. Yes, Hilary, we heard it. But it was too muffled to be heard on the lawn. You’ve not proved anything at all. Of course, if you want an autopsy after all this time — but I don’t advise it.”

  I heard no more of their futile discussion. I was moving rather dazedly toward the door. For I knew who killed Bayard Thatcher.

  Adela approached me. She started to speak, but my face must have told her what I knew, for she checked the words on her lips and leaned forward to search my face. At that instant Dr. Bouligny came forward.

  “Well, Miss Keate,” he said, extending his hand, “I must say good-bye for a time. I won’t see you again before you leave in the morning. But as a member of the Thatcher family I must thank you for your —” He stopped. He could not say silence, I suppose, nor promise. While he hesitated Adela said, “Good-night, Miss Keate.”

  I don’t believe I took Dr. Bouligny’s hand. I murmured something and escaped.

  I ran up the stairs. I whirled into my own room and locked the door.

  That long night will never leave my memory.

  After a time I roused to the realization that the house had sunk into its familiar night quiet. Perhaps if I busied myself I could escape the horror that had clutched me. I remember that I packed my things and then deliberately took them out of the bag and repacked them. How silent the house was!

  It was shortly after midnight, though it seemed much later, when something at the door caught my eyes. It was a bit of white. It moved almost imperceptibly. Became larger and larger. Finally lay there, a square white envelope. I heard no sound in the hall outside; there was not a whisper of motion. But I waited a long time before I moved and approached that envelope and finally took it in my shrinking fingers. It was not addressed, and I slipped out the paper it held, and read it. Read it there in that silent, waiting house that had guarded its secret so well.

  “Dear Miss Keate,” it began. It was written very neatly in a small, delicate handwriting.

  “You know, now, who killed Bayard. I want you to know the whole truth as I know it. I think it likely you are in some doubt as to what to do with your knowledge, and I want you to know all of it rather than the bare fact. You will understand that I am in great anxiety as to what your decision will be after reading this letter. You will not, I believe, think it too hasty if I ask you to tell me at the breakfast table if you have decided to keep this dreadful thing a secret or to bring Bayard’s murderer to justice. That gives you until morning to decide, and I can wait no longer to know. I am sure you will understand the strain I am under and why I make this request.

  “First, let me answer your two questions. Dave kept his supply of veronal in a small, hollowed-out place under the headstone of Nita Thatcher’s grave; he did it because in a house like ours it is impossible to keep anything concealed for long. If I hadn’t discovered it, someone else would have. Bayard would leave the dru
g there when he didn’t give it to Dave directly. If I had known it earlier I might have saved Dave, but I knew nothing of it until Bayard mentioned it the night Dave shot him. I went to the grave early in the morning after Bayard’s death in the hope of removing any drug that might have been left there. I did not tell you this when you asked, because it seemed to me the last drop of humiliation in the story of Dave’s sad affliction.

  “And your other question: I myself closed Bayard’s eyes. I had to do that much for him.

  “What you know of Bayard’s death is the whole truth. We have kept nothing back. When Pansy — poor old Pansy, who would never betray her friend if she knew — ran out of the study tonight and I met your eyes I remembered. I knew then that you knew exactly what had happened. Pansy was on the couch in Dave’s study. When she heard the sound of the shot she nearly went mad with fright. I opened the door, and she ran outdoors, and of course you saw her.

  “But I must tell you why.

  “Dave was murdered as surely as Bayard. Bayard murdered him; deliberately debauched him; cold-bloodedly and intentionally led poor weak Dave into the habit that ended in his death. Bayard threatened all I held dear. There was no use in trying any longer to pay for peace. He had to die to save Dave, and then it was too late. There was no saving for Dave. Dave took the last dose of veronal, as Dr. Bouligny has said. But actually and really Bayard murdered him. So I have no pity for Bayard.

  “And I have none for Bayard’s murderer, whose remaining life — which as your trained eyes must have seen will not be long — can only serve to uphold and preserve for others that family tradition which has meant so much to generations of Thatchers.

  “How difficult it is for me to say it openly and frankly — yet my hand was very steady when I took that revolver from Janice’s desk and went downstairs and leveled it at Bayard’s wicked heart. It was only when I had pulled the trigger and sent the bullet that my hand weakened and dropped the revolver and Bayard, dying, fell upon it.