He hardly knew what he was saying, for his heart was torn with pity. He had longed for a natural explanation, never guessing that it would be one so terrible as this. He could see it all now. He had been far too graphic in his description of what had happened that evening at the Parkes’. She had evidently been fascinated by the story—fascinated by the abnormal in Miss Cornelius—until, unconsciously, she herself had been infected by this vile lust of deception and trickery, that turned folly into terror. These were the thoughts that jostled each other on the threshold of consciousness while he tried to comfort his wife.
‘We have both of us been brooding on this too much,’ he said. ‘My suggestion is that we get out of the groove of the last week and adopt a new routine. We’ll go in for picnic lunches.’
‘Things are pretty serious when Old Alfred suggests that,’ said Molly, with a wintry smile.
‘But not if we can laugh about it. You shall have all the picnic lunches that you want, and we’ll sit in a cold wood on damp stones and eat sardine sandwiches. And then each day we’ll have some people in for tea or supper. And I’ll go to the cinema.’
Molly kissed him. ‘I think your suggestions are very sensible. And now for mine. I believe we were wrong in not speaking of this to anyone. We’ve been too bottled up. I think we should each confide in someone. And, because you are a secretive old scientist, I want you to let me choose who your father confessor shall be.’
‘I draw the line at Miss Cornelius and parsons.’
‘No, it’s Dr Luttrell. I’ll ask him to tea tomorrow. You know you like him, and though we haven’t seen much of him lately, I can never forget how good he was to us that winter two years ago.’
‘All right,’ said Saxon, after a pause. ‘I agree. And now for your confidante. Not the vicar, and certainly not Mrs Saunderson. I’ve got it! The very thing; and we shall kill two birds with one stone. Your cousin Alice. Write and get her to stay a few days with us. She herself suggested a visit.’
Molly’s face brightened.
‘I believe she would come,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t like missionaries; but she is a medical missionary, and I think you would get on very well together. I’ll write to her today.’
As he listened to her talking, as he heard the old note of eager gaiety echoing again in her voice, Saxon found himself asking if he could not have been mistaken in what he had seen. If only he could believe that his senses had deceived him! If only he could persuade himself that there was something wrong with his eyes! If Luttrell came, he would get him to test his sight.
Molly went round with a note to the doctor that afternoon. He came next day a little later than they had expected. Saxon was working over in the laboratory, and when he got back to the house, he found Luttrell talking with Molly in the drawing-room. As soon as tea was over—he remembered afterwards the rather forced vivacity of his wife’s conversation—Andrew suggested that they should stroll over to his room in the science block, where they could talk and smoke undisturbed.
‘I shall come for you in half an hour then,’ said Molly, ‘because Dr Luttrell has promised to advise me on the rock garden before he goes.’
Andrew got a great deal into those thirty minutes. Luttrell made a good listener, and only interrupted him now and then with a question. He examined his eyes too.
‘And if you find my vision wholly defective, if you tell me that I can’t trust my sense of sight, God knows, doctor, that you will have taken an unbearable weight off my mind.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Luttrell, when he had finished his examination, ‘your vision isn’t exactly normal.’
‘Then what do you make of the whole confounded business? You’ve heard the plain, unvarnished facts, and remember that I’m not imaginative or given to overstatement. I’m a trained scientific observer.’
Luttrell rubbed a long forefinger thoughtfully over his gaunt cheek.
‘There are two things that arise out of what you have told me. The first is, what do I think of it? I’m not prepared at present to say. I should like myself to witness the phenomena you have described. The second and more important point relates to the immediate present and to Mrs Saxon. You are rightly anxious about her. I think you ought to have someone in the house whom you can trust. Not a nurse, I don’t suggest that for a moment, but a cheerful companion.’
Saxon told him of the invitation that had been sent to Miss Hordern, the medical missionary, who was a cousin of his wife. ‘Excellent!’ he said; ‘an admirable person to have with you at this juncture. When she comes, I should very much like to have a talk with her.’
Their conversation was brought to an end by the entrance of Mrs Saxon, who reminded Luttrell that he must not go without seeing her garden.
‘And what about the new addition to my lab?’ said Andrew. ‘We’ll go back that way. It won’t take us more than a few minutes.’
The minutes, however, lengthened out, as Andrew dilated on the beauties of his new equipment, half-forgetful in his enthusiasm of the dark cloud which hung over him. He was busy explaining a rather complicated piece of apparatus to Luttrell, when they were startled by the noise of something falling and the sound of broken glass.
‘I’m awfully sorry, my dear fellow,’ said Luttrell. ‘It was inexcusably clumsy of me. I knocked it off the bench in turning.’
‘Richard,’ shouted Saxon, and there was something curiously hard in his voice, ‘leave that job you are doing at once, and come and clear up this mess. A bottle of sulphuric acid has broken on the floor. Molly, dear, you go on. We’ll be with you in a minute. I just want to see that the boy knows what to do.’
‘Luttrell,’ he said, when they were alone, ‘you lied like a gentleman. But she threw that vitriol. You couldn’t see her from where you were, but I could. The bottle came from there,’ and he pointed to an empty place in the shelf at the farther end of the bench where they were standing. ‘We must get her out of this, Luttrell; you must get her out of it, or I shall go mad myself.’
‘It’s more serious than I had thought,’ said the doctor. ‘Has she a mother she could go to for a few days?’
‘Yes, but she lives up in town—a kind, fussy woman, not the sort of person who would be much help in an emergency.’
‘Never mind! She’s her mother. Your wife must go off tonight. I give you my most solemn assurance that away from this place she will be all right. I can’t explain now, but I’m absolutely sure of it. She can pack her bag at once, and I’ll see her to the station and into the 6.20. No, I wouldn’t come with her, if I were you. It might only disturb her. You can write out a telegram to her mother and I’ll send it off on my way back, because I’m coming back to see you. I shall bring you a stiff sleeping-draught. You’ve had about as much as a man can stand. Leave me to settle things with Mrs Saxon. And mind, she shall come back as soon as that missionary friend of hers can come and stay with you.’
‘Luttrell, you’re a true friend,’ said Saxon with emotion. ‘I don’t know what—’
‘Pooh! my dear fellow, you would do the same for me, if I were in your place. It’s all in the day’s work. Just leave it all to Mrs Saxon and me.’
Saxon went to bed that night with a feeling of relief. Decisions, and wise decisions too, had been made for him, and in the making of them he was conscious of events being controlled by one in whom he could put implicit trust. He drank his sleeping-draught, nor had he long to wait before the kindly mists of oblivion blotted out the memories of that eventful day.
Mrs Saxon was away for nearly a week. She wrote nearly every day, long and cheerful letters, which Andrew only half succeeded in answering in the same spirit. He spent the hours of daylight in the laboratory, trying to forget himself in the completion of a long-delayed piece of research work. But at night he found it impossible to concentrate, and paced the garden for hours together, hoping that the tired body would lull to rest the tired mind. He looked back on that fatal evening with horror. If only he had never met Miss Cornel
ius, had never crossed her path! He had not seen her since his visit to the Parkes’; but one afternoon when he was out she called and left a card. The idea of anything approaching intimacy between her and Molly filled him with loathing, but, unwilling to risk an open rupture, he contented himself by writing a formal note, explaining that his wife was away from home and that the date of her return was uncertain.
One step he took in Molly’s absence after long consideration, and that was to write to Bestwick, whom he had known at Oxford, and who was now second-in-command at the Raddlebarn Asylum, asking him if in his opinion Molly should undergo psycho-analysis. The reply he received—he locked the letter in a drawer in his desk—asked for further particulars, and suggested that Bestwick should be put in touch with their private practitioner.
Molly came on the same day that Alice Hordern arrived. His first impression of Molly’s cousin was of a sad-faced woman of about fifty, with an attractive smile. She was silent and reserved, but the two felt in her presence the spirit of peace that had for so long eluded them.
There had been no outward cause of alarm since the happenings which Luttrell had witnessed in the laboratory; and Saxon had almost begun to hope that they were waking from a ghastly dream, when Miss Cornelius again called at the house and spent an hour or more alone with Molly.
‘I didn’t invite her, and I didn’t want her,’ she said, when Saxon asked her about it, ‘but I couldn’t tell her so. I had to be civil.’
‘There’s no need to go stroking vipers,’ he broke out excitedly. ‘All our troubles are due to that woman. You had better write to her and tell her that her acquaintance is not desired.’
‘I shall do no such thing, Andrew. How can you be so foolish? She’s more to be pitied than anything else. But for heaven’s sake don’t let’s wrangle about it. It’s not worth it.’
No, they were too tired to quarrel; too tired, rather, to go through all the emotion-wearying processes of reconciliation that would be bound to follow. Saxon, however, had made his decision. On the following afternoon, without saying anything to Molly about it, he called on Miss Cornelius.
‘I rather expected that you would be coming to see me, Mr Saxon,’ she said, when he was shown into the drawing-room. ‘Pray sit down.’
‘I am afraid—’ he began.
Miss Cornelius laughed.
‘That’s quite obvious; you are horribly afraid of me. But I interrupt.’
‘What I came to say,’ Andrew went on, ‘was to—’
‘Was to ask me not to call and to drop your wife’s acquaintance. That was the sum and substance of it, wasn’t it? And why, may I ask, should a request from you carry any weight?’
He hesitated for a moment, not knowing what to reply.
‘Your difficulty,’ she went on, ‘and part of your fear too, is that you don’t know what to make of me. A fortnight ago I was a poor old lady of the boarding-house type, with itching fingers and a passion for creating interesting situations. Now you are not quite so sure. But cheer up, Mr Saxon. We live in a rational world. There is not the slightest need for you to suppose that I am a witch. Telepathy will explain most things, and I don’t see why the things that have been troubling you recently should not be explained on those lines. I can well understand what a relief it would be to have those troubles explained away. But if I were you, I should write to some psycho-analyst and suggest that he should treat your wife. There is a man at the Raddlebarn Asylum, I think, who goes in for that sort of thing.’
Saxon sat staring at her with horror-struck eyes.
‘Yes, it must be fearfully confusing to you,’ she went on. ‘I know just what you must feel like, and the dilemma is awful. Either I have an altogether uncanny power of reading your thoughts, Mr Saxon, and of knowing what passes in your house, or else your good little wife has played false to you and has rifled the drawer of your desk, read that letter, and betrayed its contents to your enemy. No wonder you hardly know what to think.
‘And the dilemma is even worse than I supposed it to be,’ she went on, ‘because, granted you have the courage to ask Mrs Saxon if she broke into that locked drawer, and granted that she indignantly declares that she has done no such thing, in view of what has happened in the last fortnight, you will never absolutely be certain that she is not lying.’
Miss Cornelius burst into a fit of laughter.
‘What the devil do you mean by all this?’ he cried, in a transport of fury.
She rang the bell.
‘Chalmers,’ she said to the maid, ‘show Mr Saxon out, and please remember that when he calls again I am not at home.’
Saxon said nothing to his wife about that visit. He was haunted by the weary look in her eyes and the forced gaiety of her smile. She had more than she could bear already. But on the following evening, when Molly had gone early to bed, he had a long talk with Alice Hordern. The evening was chilly and the fire which had been lighted in the study invited confidence. Miss Hordern, who neither knitted nor sewed embroidery, echoed the invitation by asking Saxon if he had such a thing as a cigarette.
‘I beg pardon,’ he said with a smile, ‘I am afraid I never associated women medical missionaries with tobacco.’
‘You do quite right, Andrew, but I’m a woman first, doctor second, and missionary third; and number three, you must remember, is on furlough. You look worried. It’s not Molly, is it? Because I don’t think you have any immediate cause to be worried about her. Tell me about it.’
And so he told her everything, while his wife’s cousin looked at him through the blue cigarette-smoke with wise and kindly eyes.
‘And so, you see, it’s no use your telling me not to mind,’ he said, when he finished. ‘Black hate like this, that strikes at you through the one you love, is devilish. You’ve got to mind.’
‘Granted, though, that Miss Cornelius is all that you think she is—’
‘I daren’t think what she is,’ he groaned; but Alice Hordern took no notice of the interruption.
‘Surely you only play her game by reciprocating her black hatred.’
‘It’s the missionary who is speaking now, I suppose,’ he said bitterly.
‘No, it’s just me. You can’t hate a person without always thinking of them. Hatred is like love in that. People use the expression to forget and forgive; but they put the cart before the horse. Until you have forgiven, you cannot forget. It is necessary for your peace of mind to forget Miss Cornelius. And so you must forgive her.’
‘It could only be juggling with words. How can I, when I know what she has done and is doing? And what right have I to forgive; when it is not me she is injuring so much as Molly?’
‘I am not sure of that,’ said Miss Hordern. ‘You can but try. Remember this, though. If you ask Molly whether she opened that drawer and read that letter and she says no, believe her. Not even Miss Cornelius can break the truth in Molly. She cannot touch you there.’
The clock had struck eleven when they rose to go to bed. They went upstairs together, but on the landing Saxon stopped for a minute to close the window.
‘Good God!’ he exclaimed. ‘She’s there in the garden, standing in the shadow of the yew-tree, looking up at the house.’
Miss Hordern hurried to his side.
‘Where?’ she said. ‘I don’t see anyone.’
‘She’s gone now, but she was there a moment ago. I saw her face.’
‘Come with me,’ said Miss Hordern. ‘We’ll go into the garden. If Miss Cornelius is indeed there, it is a matter for the police.’
Bur they searched the garden in vain.
‘My fancy, I suppose,’ said Saxon wearily, ‘my cursed fancy. Unless,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘it was an example of the attractive power of hate.’
Once more and once only was he to see Miss Cornelius before that fatal motor accident liberated him by her death from a life of daily torture and nightly despair.
Dr Luttrell, at Saxon’s request, had written to Bestwick, who in his reply fix
ed a date for an interview with Molly. Luttrell himself was unable to go with the Saxons, but he arranged for his car to take them over, and Miss Hordern came with them for the sake of the ride. He was grateful for the consideration which made her choose the seat by the driver, for he could see that Molly was depressed and in no mood to introduce the countryside to her guest. He did his best to comfort her, explaining how a frank talk with Bestwick might help them both to see things in proper perspective, and assuring her that she would find him an easy man to get on with.
As they drew near their destination, he saw that she was crying.
‘Andrew,’ she said, ‘dear Old Alfred, you do trust me, don’t you? You’ll never believe that I ever plotted against you or did anything to hurt or injure you? Promise me that.’
‘Of course I trust you, my darling. I trust you implicitly and always will do.’
‘And I’d like Alice to be with me when I talk to Dr Bestwick. You don’t mind, do you? You see, she’s been my father confessor and knows all about it.’
‘I think it is an excellent idea,’ he said. ‘I have a very high opinion of your cousin.’
And so, when they had met and shaken hands with Bestwick, Saxon was left in a rather sombre reception-room, while the doctor took the two ladies off to his study for a preliminary talk. After ten minutes he returned alone.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘I want to hear your statement of things from the beginning. Don’t hurry. Take your time over it, but tell me everything, however trivial it may seem.’
‘Saxon,’ he said, when Andrew had finished, ‘I am afraid what I am going to say to you will come as a great shock. But you can set your mind at rest over one thing, and I believe that for you it is the most important thing. There is nothing the matter with your wife. There is no need to examine her.’
The slight emphasis that he placed on the last word startled Saxon. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.
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