by Ngaio Marsh
Ronald Jameson waited uncomfortably. At last he produced his lighter and advanced it towards O’Callaghan’s cigar.
“Thank you,” said O’Callaghan absently.
“Is there anything I can do, sir?”
“No, thank you.”
Jameson hesitated, looked uneasily at his employer’s white face, reflected that Sir John Phillips still awaited his message, and left the room.
For some time after the door had shut behind his secretary O’Callaghan sat and stared at the fire. At last, with an enormous effort, he forced himself to read through the letter. Jane Harden had written a frantic, bitter arraignment, rather than an appeal. She said she felt like killing herself. A little further on, she added that if an opportunity presented itself she would not hesitate to kill him: “Don’t cross my path. I’m warning you for my own sake, not for yours. I mean it, Derek, for you and all men like you are better out of the way. This is my final word.—Jane Harden.”
O’Callaghan had a swift mental picture of the letter as it would appear in the columns of the penny Press. Rather to his surprise O’Callaghan heard his wife speak to the secretary in the hall outside. Something in the quality of her voice arrested his attention. He listened.
“—something seems to be worrying him.”
“I think so too, Lady O’Callaghan,” Jameson murmured.
“—any idea—any letters?” The voice faded away.
“Tonight—seemed to upset—of course this Bill—”
O’Callaghan got up and strode across the room. He flung open the door.
His wife and Ronald Jameson stood facing each other with something of the air of conspirators. As he opened the door they turned their faces towards him. Jameson’s became very red and he looked swiftly from husband to wife. Lady O’Callaghan merely regarded Sir Derek placidly. He felt himself trembling with anger.
“Hitherto,” he said to Jameson, “I have seen no reason to suppose you did not understand the essentially confidential nature of your job. Apparently I have been mistaken.”
“I’m—I’m terribly sorry, Sir Derek—it was only because—”
“You have no business to discuss my letters with anyone. With anyone. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please don’t be absurd, Derek,” said his wife. “I asked Mr. Jameson a question that he could not avoid answering. We are both very worried about you.”
O’Callaghan jerked his head. Jameson made a miserable little bow and turned away. At the door of his own room he paused, murmured “I’m extremely sorry, sir,” and disappeared.
“Really, Derek,” said Lady O’Callaghan, “I think you are unreasonable. I merely asked that unfortunate youth if you had received any letter that might account for your otherwise rather unaccountable behaviour. He said a letter in this evening’s mail seemed to upset you. What was this letter, Derek? Was it another threat from these people—these anarchists or whatever they are?”
He was not so angry that he did not hear an unusual note in her voice.
“Such threats are an intolerable impertinence,” she said hastily. “I cannot understand why you do not deal with these people.”
“The letter had nothing whatever to do with them, and my ‘unaccountable behaviour,’ as you call it, has nothing to do with the letter. I am unwell and I’m worried. It may satisfy you to hear that John Phillips is coming in this evening.”
“I’m delighted to hear it.”
The front door bell sounded. They looked at each other questioningly.
“Ruth?” murmured Lady O’Callaghan.
“I’m off,” he said quickly. Suddenly he felt more friendly towards her. “You’d better bolt, Cicely,” he said.
She moved swiftly into his study and he followed her. They heard Nash come out and open the door. They listened, almost in sympathy with each other.
“Sir Derek and my lady are not at home, madam.”
“But there’s a light in the study!”
They exchanged horrified glances.
“Perhaps Mr. Jameson—” said Nash.
“Just the man I want to see.”
They heard Nash bleating in dismay and the sound of Miss Ruth O’Callaghan’s umbrella being rammed home in the ship’s bucket. With one accord they walked over to the fireplace. Lady O’Callaghan lit a cigarette.
The door opened, and Ruth came in. They had a brief glimpse of Nash’s agonised countenance and then were overwhelmed in embraces.
“There you are, darlings. Nash said you were out.”
“We’re only ‘not at home,’ Ruth darling,” said Lady O’Callaghan, very tranquilly. “Derek expects his doctor. It was too stupid of Nash not to realise you were different.”
“Ah-ha,” said Ruth, with really terrifying gaiety, “you don’t defeat your old sister like that. Now, Derry darling, I’ve come especially to see you, and I shall be very cross and dreadfully hurt if you don’t do exactly what I tell you.”
She rummaged in an enormous handbag, and fetched up out of its depths the familiar sealed white parcel.
“Really, Ruth, I can not swallow every patent medicine that commends itself to your attention.”
“I don’t want you to do that, darling. I know you think your old sister’s a silly-billy”—she squinted playfully at him-“but she knows what’s good for her big, famous brother. Cicely, he’ll listen to you. Please, please, persuade him to take just one of these teeny little powders. They’re too marvellous. You’ve only to read the letters—”
With eager, clumsy fingers she undid the wrapping and disclosed a round green box decorated with the picture of a naked gentleman, standing in front of something that looked like an electric shock.
“There are six powders altogether,” she told them excitedly, “but after the first, you feel a marked improvement. ‘Fulvitavolts.’ Hundreds of letters, Derry, from physicians, surgeons, politicians—lots of politicians, Derry. They all swear by it. Their symptoms were precisely the same as yours. Honestly.”
She looked pathetically eager. She was so awkward and vehement with her thick hands, her watery eyes, and her enormous nose.
“You don’t know what my symptoms are, Ruth.”
“Indeed I do. Violent abdominal seizures. Cicely—do read it all.”
Lady O’Callaghan took the box and looked at one of the folded cachets.
“I’ll give him one to-night, Ruth,” she promised, exactly as though she was humouring an excitable child.
“That’s topping!” Ruth had a peculiar trick of using unreal slang. “I’m most awfully bucked. And in the morning all those horrid pains will have flown away.” She made a sort of blundering, ineffectual gesture. She beamed at them.
“And now, old girl, I’m afraid you’ll have to fly away yourself,” said O’Callaghan with a desperate effort to answer roguishness with brotherly playfulness. “I think I hear Phillips arriving.”
“Come along, Ruth,” said his wife. “We must make ourselves scarce. Good night again, Derek.”
Ruth laid a gnarled finger on her lips and tiptoed elaborately to the door. There she turned and blew him a kiss.
He heard them greet Sir John Phillips briefly and go upstairs. In his relief at being rid of his sister, O’Callaghan felt a wave of good-fellowship for John Phillips. Phillips was an old friend. It would be a relief to tell him how ill he felt—to learn how ill he really was. Perhaps Phillips would give him something that would help him along for the time being. He already felt a little better. Very likely it was a trifling thing after all. Phillips would know. He turned to the door with an air of pleased expectancy. Nash opened the door and came in.
“Sir John Phillips, sir.”
Phillips entered the room.
He was an extremely tall man with an habitual stoop. His eyes, full-lidded and of a peculiarly light grey, were piercingly bright. No one ever saw him without his single eye-glass and there was a rumour that he wore it ribbonless while he operated. His nose was a bea
k and his under lip jutted out aggressively. He was unmarried, and unmoved, so it was said, by the general tendency among his women patients to fall extravagantly in love with him. Perhaps next to actors medical men profit most by the possession of that curious quality that people call “personality.” Sir John Phillips was, very definitely, a personage. His rudeness was more glamorously famous than his brilliant ability.
O’Callaghan moved towards him, his hand extended.
“Phillips!” he said, “I’m delighted to see you.”
Phillips ignored the hand and stood stockstill until the door had closed behind Nash. Then he spoke.
“You will be less delighted when you hear my business,” he said.
“Why—what on earth’s the matter with you?”
“I can scarcely trust myself to speak to you.”
“What the devil do you mean?”
“Precisely what I say. I’ve discovered you are a blackguard and I’ve come to tell you so.”
O’Callaghan stared at him in silence.
“Apparently you are serious,” he said at last. “May I ask if you intend merely to call me names and then walk out? Or am I to be given an explanation?”
“I’ll give you your explanation. In two words. Jane Harden.”
There was a long silence. The two men stared at each other. At last O’Callaghan turned away. A kind of mulish huffiness in his expression made him look ridiculous and unlikeable.
“What about Jane Harden?” he said at last.
“Only this. She’s a nurse at my hospital. For a very long time her happiness has been an important thing for me. I have asked her to marry me. She has refused, over and over again. To-day she told me why. It seems you made capital out of a friendship with her father and out of her present poverty. You played the ‘old family friend’ combined with the distinguished philanderer.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t lie, O’Callaghan!”
“Look here—”
“I know the facts.”
“What sort of tale have you listened to!”
“One that brought me here to-night angrier than I ever remember myself before. I know the precise history of your—your friendship with her. You amused yourself, evidently. I dislike overstatement but I believe it would be no overstatement if I said, as I do say, that you’ve ruined Jane’s life for her.”
“Damn’ sentimental twaddle!” said O’Callaghan breathlessly. “She’s a modern young woman and she knows how to enjoy herself.”
“That’s a complete misrepresentation.” Phillips had turned exceedingly white, but he spoke evenly. “If, by the phrase ‘a modern young woman,’ you mean a ‘loose woman’ you must know yourself it’s a lie. This is the only episode of the sort in her life. She loved you and you let her suppose she was loved in return.”
“Nothing of the sort. She gave me no reason to suppose she attached more importance to the thing than I did myself. You say she’s in love with me. If it’s true I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s true. What does she want? It’s not—” O’Callaghan stopped short and looked frightened. “It’s not that she’s going to have a child?”
“Oh, no. She has no actual claim on you. No legal claim. Evidently you don’t recognize moral obligations.”
“I’ve sent her £300. What more will she want?”
“I’m so near hitting you, O’Callaghan, I think I’d better go.”
“You can go to hell if you like. What’s the matter with you? If you don’t want to marry her there’s an alternative. It ought to be quite simple—I had no difficulty.”
“You swine!” shouted Phillips. “My God—” He stopped short. His lips moved tremblingly. When he spoke again it was more quietly. “You’d do well to keep clear of me,” he said. “I assure you that if the opportunity presented itself I should have no hesitation—none—in putting you out of the way.”
Something in O’Callaghan’s face made him pause. The Home Secretary was looking beyond him, towards the door.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Nash quietly. He crossed the room with a tray holding glasses and a decanter. He put the tray down noiselessly and returned to the door.
“Is there anything further, sir?” asked Nash.
“Sir John Phillips is leaving. Will you show him out?”
“Certainly, sir.”
Without another word Phillips turned on his heel and left the room.
“Good night, Nash,” said O’Callaghan.
“Good night, sir,” said Nash softly. He followed Sir John Phillips out and closed the door.
O’Callaghan gave a sharp cry of pain. He stumbled towards his chair and bent over it, leaning on the arm. For a minute or two he hung on, doubled up with pain. Then he managed to get into the chair, and in a little while poured out half a tumbler of whiskey. He noticed Ruth’s patent medicine lying on the table beside him. With a tremulous hand he shook one of the powders into the glass and gulped it down with the whiskey.
CHAPTER THREE
Sequel to a Scene in the House
Thursday, the eleventh. Afternoon.
THE HOME SECRETARY paused and looked round the House. The sea of faces was blurred and nightmarish. They were playing that trick on him that he had noticed before. They would swim together like cells under a microscope and then one face would come out clearly and stare at him. He thought: “I may just manage it—only one more paragraph,” and raised the paper. The type swirled and eddied, and then settled down. He heard his own voice. He must speak up.
“In view of the extraordinary propaganda—”
They were making too much noise.
“Mr. Speaker—”
A disgusting feeling of nausea, a kind of vapourish tightness behind his nose.
“Mr. Speaker—”
He looked up again. A mistake. The sea of faces jerked up and revolved very quickly. A tiny voice, somewhere up in the attic, was calling: “He’s fainted.”
He did not feel himself pitch forward across the desk. Nor did he hear a voice from the back benches that called out: “You’ll be worse than that before you’ve finished with your bloody Bill.”
“Who’s his doctor—anyone know?”
“Yes—I do. It’s bound to be Sir John Phillips—they’re old friends.”
“Phillips? He runs that nursing-home in Brook Street, doesn’t he?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Somebody must ring Lady O’Callaghan.”
“I will if you like. I know her.”
“Is he coming round?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Tillotley went to see about the ambulance.”
“Here he is. Did you fix up for an ambulance, Tillotley?”
“It’s coming. Where are you sending him?”
“Cuthbert’s gone to ring up his wife.”
“God, he looks bad!”
“Did you hear that fellow yell out from the back benches?”
“Yes. Who was it?”
“I don’t know. I say, do you think there’s anything fishy about this?”
“Oh, rot!”
“Here’s Dr. Wendover—I didn’t know he was in the House.”
They stood back from O’Callaghan. A little tubby man, Communist member for a North Country constituency, came through the group of men and knelt down.
“Open those windows, will you?” he said.
He loosened O’Callaghan’s clothes. The others eyed him respectfully. After a minute or two he looked round.
“Who’s his medical man?” he asked.
“Cuthbert thinks it’s Sir John Phillips. He’s ringing his wife now.”
“Phillips is a surgeon. It’s a surgical case.”
“What’s the trouble, Dr. Wendover?”
“Looks like an acute appendix. There’s no time to be lost. You’d better ring the Brook Street Private Hospital. Is the ambulance there? Can’t wait for his wife.”
From the doorway somebody said: “The men from t
he ambulance.”
“Good. Here’s your patient.”
Two men came in carrying a stretcher. O’Callaghan was got on to it, covered up, and carried out. Cuthbert hurried in.
“Yes,” he said, “It’s Phillips. She wants him taken to Phillips’s nursing-home.”
“He’s going there,” said little Dr. Wendover, and walked out after the ambulance men.
O’Callaghan climbed up, sickeningly, from nowhere into semiconsciousness. Grandiloquent images slid rapidly downwards. His wife’s face came near and then receded. Somebody groaned close to him. Somebody was in bed beside him, groaning.
“Is the pain very bad?” said a voice.
He himself was in pain.
“Bad,” he said solemnly.
“The doctor will be here soon. He’ll give you something to take it away.”
He now knew it was he who had groaned.
Cicely’s face came close.
“The doctor is coming, Derek.”
He closed his eyes to show he had understood.
“Poor old Derry, poor old boy.”
“I’ll just leave you with him for a minute, Lady O’Callaghan. If you want me, will you ring? I think I hear Sir John.” A door closed.
“This pain’s very bad,” said O’Callaghan clearly.
The two women exchanged glances. Lady O’Callaghan drew up a chair to the bed and sat down.
“It won’t be for long, Derek,” she said quietly. “It’s your appendix, you know.”
“Oh.”
Ruth had begun to whisper.
“What’s Ruth say?”
“Never mind me, Derry-boy. It’s just silly old Ruthie.”
He muttered something, shut his eyes, and seemed to fall asleep.
“Cicely darling, I know you laugh at my ideas but listen. As soon as I heard about Derry I went and saw Harold Sage. He’s the brilliant young chemist I told you about. I explained exactly what was the matter and he gave me something that he says will relieve the pain at once and can do no harm at all. It’s an invention of his own. In a few months all the hospitals will use it.”