Murder On Christmas Eve

by G. K. Chesterton

  ‘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 Sir 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 –

  She was waiting for him in the hall that a pale young man was decorating with boughs of prickly stiff holly that stuck stiffly behind the dark heavy pictures.

  He was introduced as the secretary and said gloomily:

  ‘Sir Harry wished everything to go on as usual, though I am afraid he is very ill indeed.’

  Yes, the patient had been seized by another violent attack of illness during Dr Holroyd’s absence; the young man went at once upstairs and found Sir Harry in a deep sleep and a rather nervous local doctor in attendance.

  An exhaustive discussion of the case with this doctor threw no light on anything, and Dr Holroyd, leaving in charge an extremely sensible-looking housekeeper who was Sir Harry’s preferred nurse, returned, worried and irritated, to the hall where Lady Strangeways now sat alone before the big fire.

  She offered him a belated but fresh cup of tea.

  ‘Why did you come?’ she asked as if she roused herself from deep reverie.

  ‘Why? Because your husband sent for me.’

  ‘He says you offered to come; he has told everyone in the house that.’

  ‘But I never heard of the man before today.’

  ‘You had heard of me. He seems to think that you came here to help me.’

  ‘He cannot be saying that,’ returned Dr Holroyd sternly, and he wondered desperately if Mollie was lying, if she had invented this to drive him out of the house.

  ‘Do you want me here?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied dully and confirmed his suspicions; probably there was another man and she wished him out of the way; but he could not go, out of pity towards her he could not go.

  ‘Does he know we once knew each other?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she replied faintly, ‘therefore it seems such a curious chance that he should have sent for you, of all men!’

  ‘It would have been more curious,’ he responded grimly, ‘if I had heard that you were here with a sick husband and had thrust myself in to doctor him! Strange-ways must be crazy to spread such a tale and if he doesn’t know we are old friends it becomes nonsense!’

  ‘I often think that Harry is crazy,’ said Lady Strange-ways wearily; she took a rose silk-lined work basket, full of pretty trifles, on her knee, and began winding a skein of rose-coloured silk; she looked so frail, so sad, so lifeless that the heart of Bevis Holroyd was torn with bitter pity.

  ‘Now I am here I want to help you,’ he said earnestly. ‘I am staying for that, to help you –’

  She looked up at him with a wistful appeal in her fair face.

  ‘I’m worried,’ she said simply. ‘I’ve lost some letters I valued very much – I think they have been stolen.’

  Dr Holroyd drew back; the love letters; the letters the husband had found, that were causing all his ugly suspicions.

  ‘My poor Mollie!’ he exclaimed impulsively. ‘What sort of a coil have you got yourself into!’

  As if this no
te of pity was unendurable, she rose impulsively, scattering the contents of her work basket, dropping the skein of silk, and hastened away down the dark hall.

  Bevis Holroyd stooped mechanically to pick up the hurled objects and saw among them a small white packet, folded, but opened at one end; this packet seemed to have fallen out of a needle case of gold silk.

  Bevis Holroyd had pounced on it and thrust it in his pocket just as the pale secretary returned with his thin arms most incongruously full of mistletoe.

  ‘This will be a dreary Christmas for you, Dr Holroyd,’ he said with the air of one who forces himself to make conversation. ‘No doubt you had some pleasant plans in view – we are all so pleased that Lady Strangeways had a friend to come and look after Sir Harry during the holidays.’

  ‘Who told you I was a friend?’ asked Dr Holroyd brusquely. ‘I certainly knew Lady Strangeways before she was married –’

  The pale young man cut in crisply:

  ‘Oh, Lady Strangeways told me so herself.’

  Bevis Holroyd was bewildered; why did she tell the secretary what she did not tell her husband? – both the indiscretion and the reserve seemed equally foolish.

  Languidly hanging up his sprays and bunches of mistletoe the pallid young man, whose name was Garth Deane, continued his aimless remarks.

  ‘This is really not a very cheerful house, Dr Holroyd – I’m interested in Sir Harry’s oriental work or I should not remain. Such a very unhappy marriage! I often think,’ he added regardless of Bevis Holroyd’s darkling glance, ‘that it would be very unpleasant indeed for Lady Strange-ways if anything happened to Sir Harry.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean, sir?’ asked the doctor angrily.

  The secretary was not at all discomposed.

  ‘Well, one lives in the house, one has nothing much to do – and one notices.’

  Perhaps, thought the young man in anguish, the sick husband had been talking to this creature, perhaps the creature had really noticed something.

  ‘I’ll go up to my patient,’ said Bevis Holroyd briefly, not daring to anger one who might be an important witness in this mystery that was at present so unfathomable.

  Mr Deane gave a sickly grin over the lovely pale leaves and berries he was holding.

  ‘I’m afraid he is very bad, doctor.’

  As Bevis Holroyd left the room he passed Lady Strange-ways; she looked blurred, like a pastel drawing that has been shaken; the fingers she kept locked on her bosom; she had flung a silver fur over her shoulders that accentuated her ethereal look of blonde, pearl, and amber hues.

  ‘I’ve come back for my work basket,’ she said. ‘Will you go up to my husband? He is ill again –’

  ‘Have you been giving him anything?’ asked Dr Holroyd as quietly as he could.

  ‘Only some cambric tea, he insisted on that.’

  ‘Don’t give him anything – leave him alone. He is in my charge now, do you understand?’

  She gazed up at him with frightened eyes that had been newly washed by tears.

  ‘Why are you so unkind to me?’ she quivered.

  She looked so ready to fall that he could not resist the temptation to put his hand protectingly on her arm, so that, as she stood in the low doorway leading to the stairs, he appeared to be supporting her drooping weight.

  ‘Have I not said that I am here to help you, Mollie?’

  The secretary slipped out from the shadows behind them, his arms still full of winter evergreens.

  ‘There is too much foliage,’ he smiled, and the smile told that he had seen and heard.

  Bevis Holroyd went angrily upstairs; he felt as if an invisible net was being dragged closely round him, something which, from being a cobweb, would become a cable; this air of mystery, of horror in the big house, this sly secretary, these watchful-looking servants, the nervous village doctor ready to credit anything, the lovely agitated woman who was the woman he had long so romantically loved, and the sinister sick man with his diabolic accusations, a man Bevis Holroyd had, from the first moment, hated – all these people in these dark surroundings affected the young man with a miasma of apprehension, gloom, and dread.

  After a few hours of it he was nearer to losing his nerve than he had ever been; that must be because of Mollie, poor darling Mollie caught into all this nightmare.

  And outside the bells were ringing across the snow, practising for Christmas Day; the sound of them was to Bevis Holroyd what the sounds of the real world are when breaking into a sleeper’s thick dreams.

  The patient sat up in bed, fondling the glass of odious cambric tea.

  ‘Why do you take the stuff?’ demanded the doctor angrily.

  ‘She won’t let me off, she thrusts it on me,’ whispered Sir Harry.

  Bevis Holroyd noticed, not for the first time since he had come into the fell atmosphere of this dark house that enclosed the piteous figure of the woman he loved, that husband and wife were telling different tales; on one side lay a burden of careful lying.

  ‘Did she –’ continued the sick man, ‘speak to you of her lost letters?’

  The young doctor looked at him sternly.

  ‘Why should Lady Strangeways make a confidante of me?’ he asked. ‘Do you know that she was a friend of mine ten years ago before she married you?’

  ‘Was she? How curious! But you met like strangers.’ ‘The light in this room is very dim –’

  ‘Well, never mind about that, whether you knew her or not –’ Sir Harry gasped out in a sudden snarl. ‘The woman is a murderess, and you’ll have to bear witness to it – I’ve got her letters, here under my pillow, and Garth Deane is watching her –’

  ‘Ah, a spy! I’ll have no part in this, Sir Harry. You’ll call another doctor –’

  ‘No, it’s your case, you’ll make the best of it – My God, I’m dying, I think –’

  He fell back in such a convulsion of pain that Bevis Holroyd forgot everything in administering to him. The rest of that day and all that night the young doctor was shut up with his patient, assisted by the secretary and the housekeeper.

  And when, in the pallid light of Christmas Eve morning, he went downstairs to find Lady Strangeways, he knew that the sick man was suffering from arsenic poison, that the packet taken from Mollie’s work box was arsenic, and it was only an added horror when he was called to the telephone to learn that a stiff dose of the poison had been found in the specimen of cambric tea.

  He believed that he could save the husband and thereby the wife also, but he did not think he could close the sick man’s mouth; the deadly hatred of Sir Harry was leading up to an accusation of attempted murder; of that he was sure, and there was the man Deane to back him up.

  He sent for Mollie, who had not been near her husband all night, and when she came, pale, distracted, huddled in her white fur, he said grimly:

  ‘Look here, Mollie, I promised that I’d help you and I mean to, though it isn’t going to be as easy as I thought, but you have got to be frank with me.’

  ‘But I have nothing to conceal –’

  ‘The name of the other man –’

  ‘The other man?’

  ‘The man who wrote those letters your husband has under his pillow.’

  ‘Oh, Harry has them!’ she cried in pain. ‘That man Deane stole them then! Bevis, they are your letters of the olden days that I have always cherished.’

  ‘My letters!’

  ‘Yes, do you think that there has ever been anyone else?’

  ‘But he says – Mollie, there is a trap or trick here, someone is lying furiously. Your husband is being poisoned.’

  ‘Poisoned?’

  ‘By arsenic given in that cambric tea. And he knows it. And he accuses you.’

  She stared at him in blank incredulity, then she slipped forward in her chair and clutched the big arm.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she muttered in panic terror. ‘He always swore that he’d be revenged on me – because he knew that I never cared for him –’

&nb
sp; But Bevis Holroyd recoiled; he did not dare listen, he did not dare believe.

  ‘I’ve warned you,’ he said, ‘for the sake of the old days, Mollie –’

  A light step behind them and they were aware of the secretary creeping out of the embrowning shadows.

  ‘A cold Christmas,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘A really cold, seasonable Christmas. We are almost snowed in – and Sir Harry would like to see you, Dr Holroyd.’

  ‘I have only just left him –’

  Bevis Holroyd looked at the despairing figure of the woman, crouching in her chair; he was distracted, over-wrought, near to losing his nerve.

  ‘He wants particularly to see you,’ cringed the secretary.

  Mollie looked back at Bevis Holroyd, her lips moved twice in vain before she could say: ‘Go to him.’

  The doctor went slowly upstairs and the secretary followed. Sir Harry was now flat on his back, staring at the dark tapestry curtains of his bed.

  ‘I’m dying,’ he announced as the doctor bent over him.

  ‘Nonsense. I am not going to allow you to die.’

  ‘You won’t be able to help yourself. I’ve brought you here to see me die.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve a surprise for you too, a Christmas present. These letters now, these love letters of my wife’s – what name do you think is on them?’

  ‘Your mind is giving way, Sir Harry.’

  ‘Not at all – come nearer, Deane – the name is Bevis Holroyd.’

  ‘Then they are letters ten years old. Letters written before your wife met you.’

  The sick man grinned with infinite malice.

  ‘Maybe. But there are no dates on them and the envelopes are all destroyed. And I, as a dying man, shall swear to their recent date – I, as a foully murdered man.’

  ‘You are wandering in your mind,’ said Bevis Holroyd quietly. ‘I refuse to listen to you any further.’

  ‘You shall listen to me. I brought you here to listen to me. I’ve got you. Here’s my will, Deane’s got that, in which I denounced you both, there are your letters, every one thinks that she put you in charge of the case, every one knows that you know all about arsenic in cambric tea through the Pluntre case, and every one will know that I died of arsenic poisoning.’