by G. Roy McRae
All these thoughts passed in a whirl through her brain as she tugged ineffectually at the drawer.
She must get rid of Alec—get him out of the room, if only for a few minutes, while she recovered that letter. She was trembling, nearly swooning. She must not let him see her like this. Oh, God, if he saw that letter it would mean the end of all things for her.
‘Can’t you get it open, dear—try hard.’ His pleasant voice maddened her.
She kept her head bent and tugged again at the drawer. It seemed to her for an awful moment that the lock was going to yield. Heavens! it must not do that while he was there. Her wealth of fair hair had tumbled a little, and she was aware that her breathing was uneven. She could have screamed with the tension and fear of that moment.
Agitation had her completely in its grip, and she was convicting herself by her own demeanour. Alec was looking at her curiously, and with growing concern. Somehow she must get rid of him—she must.
She remembered all at once the bunch of keys which the housekeeper had handed to her. It provided a way out.
‘Alec,’ she gasped. ‘Go up to the bedroom and get the keys. One of them may fit. Please—hurry!’
He stared at her, the concern growing in his eyes. What was all this fuss about a locked drawer? What was the matter with Eleanor, anyhow? He did not fail to notice the agitated rise and fall of her bosom, and he began to grow more alarmed.
‘Silly little darling,’ he said, trying to take her in his arms. ‘What does it matter, anyhow—a locked drawer? One of the servants will find the key and open it. Come, you mustn’t upset yourself over these trifles—why, I declare, you’re shaking!’
But she shook him off, her white face quite tragic, her eyes shining feverishly.
‘Alec … oh please,’ she said, with almost a moan. ‘Go and get the key … it’s only upstairs … just to please me.’
Loverlike he gave in to her. But his own face was uneasy as he went from the room. She heard him going up the stairs with quick steps, and she knew that she had only a little time … only a little time!
Frantically she tugged at the recalcitrant drawer now. For so slender a person she seemed endowed with superhuman strength. The whole desk shook, and a little moan broke from her as still the drawer resisted. Her white teeth clenched on her lower lip; she tugged again like one possessed, and at last with a snap, and a sound of splintering wood, the drawer flew open.
Almost sick with apprehension, she rummaged frantically amongst the few papers in the drawer. She pounced on one that was familiar—a folded sheet of notepaper—and opened it. Yes, it was her own letter to Derek Capel. Her eyes followed the few hastily scribbled lines, while her breath came sobbingly. An awful sick fear flooded her soul as the words danced before her, and she realised the full significance that could so easily be placed upon them.
She must destroy this letter—at once.
She was about to crunch it tightly in her hand, to tear it into minute fragments, when a voice, sharp with horror and accusation, fell upon her like a whip-lash.
‘Eleanor! My God!’
She whirled round, to see Alec standing there, grim and tight-mouthed, his eyes filled with a dawning horror and loathing. So close they were that they almost touched, but he fell a step back. She cried out like one in pain at that instinctive action, and flung out her hands blindly to him.
‘Alec … oh, my dear … forgive me!’
He had seen. She knew that. He had read the letter over her shoulder. Alarmed, and perhaps made suspicious by her strange agitation, he must have come down the stairs very quietly and almost crept into the room behind her.
‘My God, Eleanor, to think that you …’
‘No, no,’ she cried, stung to self-defence by his measured, horrified tone. ‘It’s not true, Alec, I swear it on my life. Don’t think that of me. Alec—oh my dear. I need you now. Hold me …’
But he deliberately retreated as her slim, lissom form swayed towards him. His handsome face was distorted, and a great loathing of her was in his face and eyes. To Alec Portal it seemed then that his world had come tumbling in ruins about his head. Very bitterly aloud he breathed the remaining part of his sentence …
‘To think that—you—are—a murderess!’
She went down on her knees at his feet, great agonised sobs shaking her frame. Her slim white arms wrapped around him, and words came from her quivering lips in little gasps.
‘No—no. Alec, you mustn’t say that. Have pity—have mercy on me! I was young—younger then—and life seemed Hell to me. I wrote that letter …’
She broke down, incapable of speech, great gulping sobs wrenched from her parted lips. Fear, like a red-hot knife, was stabbing in her heart, turning and twisting there. Whatever she said, there remained the incontrovertible fact that she had written that letter.
What view would the jury at her trial have taken of it if they had seen it? How different might their verdict have been!
‘Guilty!’
Alec looked down at her with that loathing in his eyes that nearly made her swoon with fright. Thoughts were searing his mind, thoughts of her who crouched at his feet, sobbing as if her heart would break; and they were not nice thoughts for a man to have of a woman. He stared at the wealth of fair hair, the slim white column of her neck, and for a moment he had a mad impulse to crush the life out of it. That lissom, sweet figure, the trimly arched ankles, they were used consciously to lure and cheat men. The Delilah! She had got his name, and his protection. She had cheated him!
Eleanor, shaking like a child that has been whipped, stretched up her arms to him. ‘Alec—oh, my dear boy,’ she whispered, closing her eyes, with tremors passing across her white face, ‘if you look at me like that I shall die. Won’t you try to believe—won’t you? I appeal to you see—’
She tried to rise to him, but he backed away in horror.
‘No, no—don’t touch me!’ he blazed. And then, picking up the letter that had fallen, he crossed to the mantelpiece, leaning on it and burying his head in his hands. While Eleanor stood as if a seismal shock were wreaking destruction all around her. Very white, very calm, and very strange she looked as she stood there in the centre of the room. Her lips were moving voicelessly, and had Alec looked at her then he might have had a fright.
But he did not look.
The telephone rang suddenly out in the hall. Both started as if the harsh buzz of it were the last trump. Then a trim parlourmaid came into the study.
‘If you please, sir,’ she said, suddenly scared at his grim face, ‘there’s an urgent call from Mrs Brown of No. 3 Acacia Cottages. She says that her lodger, Mr Quinny, seems very ill, and would you come at once, please sir.’
Glad of the distraction, Alec buttoned his jacket. He pushed the crumpled letter in one pocket, and pulled down the flaps, as a man will do unconsciously. Then, without a look at his wife, he hurried from the room.
Like a white ghost, Eleanor was at the window to see the last of him as he went off—the dear face and figure she loved so well. Tears would not come now. But inside of her she was breaking up.
CHAPTER X
THERE was no question but that Mr Quinny was ill. He was, indeed, a shuddering travesty of a man. His walk that morning, when he should have rested in bed, and his subsequent imbibitions at the village inn—which the landlord would bear witness had been exorbitant—had precipitated a crisis in the old gentleman.
On returning to his lodgings he had been seized by an attack. Mrs Brown, whose spirit was generally inexhaustible in emergencies of illness, had been appalled. Mr Quinny raved in delirium, and tore at his collar, gasping for air, and when Mrs Brown tried to get him to lie down, he fought with her. His wasted frame had been possessed of the strength of a tiger; his face had been a yellow mask of fury, a sight to make even his landlady quail.
At length she had sent a messenger hastily to the post office to ring up the doctor.
In his room Mr Quinny fought as he had never fough
t before the running fire that was in every vein of him, consuming him. Despairingly he tossed and turned on his bed, tearing at the bed-clothes, muttering and shrieking. He was trying to retain a last vestige of reason. He must fight through this attack.
By the time Doctor Alec Portal arrived he had almost emerged from it, his spirit indestructible and shining from his eyes like steel that has been forged in the furnace. Very kindly were those peering eyes behind the spectacles as he raised them at Doctor Alec Portal’s entrance. The man himself was limp, shuddering, with the perspiration streaming off his yellow face, but he radiated a feeble kind of geniality.
‘Ha! Good-afternoon, doctor. My profound apologies for troubling you at a time like this. You should never have come, sir. I understand your own private affairs command you just now, and—’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Alec Portal brusquely. ‘Let’s have a look at you—gently now.’
‘I felicitate you upon a charming and beautiful wife,’ gasped Mr Quinny as he was being examined.
Alec glanced at him sharply. The compliment could scarce be termed an impertinence, considering the whole village had turned out to give the newly married couple a reception. Indeed, half an hour ago Alec would have received it in the spirit in which it was given.
Now his blue eyes bored into Mr Quinny’s face; grimness pursed his mouth. ‘Thank you,’ he snapped. ‘It is more to the point, however, that you are a very sick man. Why, good heavens alive, I feel sorry for you, sir. You must know the state you’re in.’
‘I do,’ said Mr Quinny softly. ‘Wasn’t it Wendy in Peter Pan who said that to die would be a very great adventure’?’
Alec, standing at the table, looked again at this queer, pleasant-voiced stranger, and commiseration was in his glance.
‘You have courage, Mr Quinny,’ he said. ‘I understand you have been out in the fever swamps of Africa.’
Mr Quinny’s mouth twitched, and he shuddered convulsively.
‘But you must remember that you have contributed towards your present condition,’ Alec said gently, roused to infinite pity at the contemplation of this human wreck. You should have treated yourself scientifically, Mr Quinny. Good lord, man, this idea that the whisky bottle is the cure for all ills will kill you if you go on.’
Mr Quinny merely shook his bent head, too apathetic to care, or listen, apparently.
Alec stood at the table, concocting a dose of medicine. But he suddenly paused and looked up, staring into vacancy. All in a moment the young doctor had lost sight of his case. He was back again in the study with Eleanor, going over again those brief moments of drama. His face betrayed his emotions. His forehead glistened with sweat, and one hand clenched and unclenched. An exclamation was forced softly, huskily, from his lips.
‘God, to think that she—’
He stopped, controlling himself, and glanced sharply at his patient. Mr Quinny, who had been so apathetic a moment before, was now turned half-way towards him, and was peering at him with a surprisingly shrewd gleam through his spectacles. A moment the queer tableau endured, and Alec, with a hot flush of shame and anger on his face, took a step forward, with the medicine in his hand.
Mr Quinny took it, and slowly drained the black, thick fluid. He looked up.
‘You are not happy, doctor?’ he said very softly.
Alec started. But after a second his bent brows relaxed. There was something about this human derelict—an innate understanding and sympathy—that seemed to disarm resentment.
‘Who is happy in this world?’ asked the young doctor shortly. ‘We wail with terror when we come into it, and our subsequent experience generally goes to justify this first instinct.’
‘A very nasty aphorism,’ said Mr Quinny with a grim little chuckle. As that mirthless sound passed his trembling lips, his right foot, encased in a rough, ill-fitting boot, moved out stealthily two yards, perhaps, over the linoleum. Mr Quinny’s head was bent apathetically, but his eyes were very keen, and they were fixed on a white piece of paper on the floor.
The sole of Mr Quinny’s boot came down on the piece of paper, and he drew his foot in with the piece of paper under it.
It had fallen from Alec Portal’s pocket. In the secret agitation that swayed him, he had indulged in a little mannerism peculiar to him in moments of stress; that of thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets, and then drawing them out again and smoothing down the flaps. In the course of this operation the piece of paper had been brushed out of his pocket and fluttered to the floor.
Now it was under the sole of Mr Quinny’s right boot, and it became evident he had no intention of giving it up, or mentioning the matter. He sat shuddering and shrunken, and he said:
‘You ask who is happy in this world, doctor. Why, I shall be before I die.’
The doctor started at something almost of prophecy in the human derelict’s tone. ‘You!’ he echoed.
‘Why not?’ said Mr Quinny, staring moodily into space. ‘I have lived long enough, been through sufficient misery for my one moment of happiness. I hope I am not to be cheated of it now.’
‘What is your idea of the supreme height of happiness?’ asked the doctor curiously.
Mr Quinny jerked his head and peered at him.
‘To see the love-light shining from the eyes of a woman,’ he said simply.
Whereat Doctor Alec Portal bit his lip, and after giving brief but definite instructions that his patient should take certain medicines, he went outside and conferred with Mrs Brown.
The landlady learned that her lodger was very ill, and must be taken strict care of. In particular, it was important that he should not touch alcohol, that he should go to bed and have careful nursing.
And in the hall where he sat in an alcove, Mr Quinny was reaching down steadily, but with laboured breathing, for the piece of paper he had secreted under his foot. He got it in his hand at last, opened it, and peered at it through his spectacles.
A spasm crossed Mr Quinny’s face—a spasm of ineffable sorrow.
‘It is as I thought,’ he said very quietly. ‘The time has come, and I must unmask the murderer of Professor Appleby.’
For he held in his hand the letter that Eleanor had written to Derek Capel two and a half years before; the letter in which she begged Derek to come over, saying that if she had the courage she would kill her husband herself.
It was a damning piece of evidence.
CHAPTER XI
CAPEL MANOR was a cairngorm of lights. Outside in the stabling, motor-cars clustered like great slinky animals crouched on the leash; servants in livery and maids in white aprons and caps hurried to and fro; from the house came the strains of a dreamy waltz.
The ballroom was lit like a silvery cave. Chandeliers composed of thousands of pieces of finely cut glass shed down their lights, and the polished flooring winked them back in a flashing pool. Everywhere laughter and gay chatter mingled with the strains of the orchestra; the sombre black and white of the men’s figures were like so many sharp silhouettes against the riot of colour made by the women’s toilets. Laughing faces and bright eyes, the sauve gleam of pearls, and over it all the subtle, intoxicating waft of scent. The ballroom was like a fairy top, slowly spinning.
A man who had come through the dark shrubberies of the grounds stopped to peer through the french windows at the scene.
He had the air almost of a gaunt wolf who has been ostracised from the pack and must needs roam alone. His movements were furtive, but fear did not govern them. He crept closer, adjusting his spectacles hanging on their black ribbon that gave him, somehow, an air of sombre distinction, and he peered into the room, peered with a grim, haggard and despairing face.
‘My God!’ he suddenly whispered; and he turned away and stared with bleak eyes into nothingness.
He had just seen Eleanor Portal floating by in the arms of a cavalier who looked extremely pleased with himself.
Such a dazzling picture of sad loveliness! The peering stranger had caught
her off her guard. If his own face had been despairing, hers had been infinitely more so. Cold, cold as marble! And her tragic brown eyes mirrored her thoughts.
The unseen watcher had been able to read and understand them. Understanding came like a tearing pain, a flash of summer lightning; he clenched and unclenched his hands.
Unable to endure the sight of her again, he sought the man now as he peered once more through the windows. And he glimpsed him through the throng, taller than most men there, standing at the curtained threshold to the ballroom, and looking on moodily while he smoked a cigarette.
Alec Portal’s eyes were narrowed, his face dominated by jutting chin and those shining slits as his gaze followed his wife almost savagely all the time; and he was consuming his cigarette immoderately, so that its tip glowed as if with menace.
The man outside in the darkness studied him with peering earnestness.
It was more than the guests in the ballroom dared do. There was not one who was Ajax amongst them to defy the quivering fury that radiated from the man. It would scarce be adequate to say that their host cast a cloud on the festivities. He did more than that. He charged the atmosphere with electricity.
Every one was expectant—excited. Laughter trilled out, chatter hummed dynamically. Forced and false was the gaiety, as if the dancers with shifting feet were whirling gunpowder in a heap and waiting recklessly for the fusion.
The music stopped at the end of the dance. There were some fifty guests, who mainly grouped themselves near the banking of flowers and ferns that screened the orchestra, or stood clapping discreetly for the music to continue.
Alec Portal turned his back contemptuously on the scene and strode out into the hall.
A little group of men gathered together and exchanged meaning sentences. They were mainly country gentlemen who hunted and lived hard, and were outright and direct in their methods. Moreover, they really liked Alec Portal, and if anything was wrong with the old fellow and they could help him—