by Edith Nesbit
He opened the door and stood listening to the silence.
Then again, from the silence of the empty house, the sigh.
“Ah — be wise — stay here,” the chauffeur said. “ I’ll see what it is. It’s burglars, probably, I1 ne manquait que cela.”
But “ No,” she said, and “ No “ again. And she held his arm tightly. The touch of something that was alive and friendly seemed to be the best thing in the world — the only thing.
“I must go, you know,” he said with gentle reasonableness.
“Me, too,” said she, childishly.
“Very well — I will go first. You can come after me if you like.”
“No,” she said again. “ Something might come behind me. Let me go first. Everything’s easier if you face it.”
“Be good, and stay here,” he tried again. But it was useless.
“Then let us go together — as we did when we fetched the letters,” he said.
“I shall go first,” she insisted. “ And you will see that nothing comes creeping up behind me, won’t you?”
That something might so creep was possible. He yielded.
Thus for the second time they went up the stairs, for it was from above that the sound had seemed to come.
The electric lights still glowed steadily. They looked into every room on the first landing. It was near the top of the second flight that she stopped suddenly, as an electric light stops when you turn off the switch. She was three steps ahead of him, so that she could see the landing, and he could not.
“I am not at all afraid now,” she said in a cool, new voice. “ Turn round. Look downstairs. I want to say something to you.”
He turned, in obedience.
“Now,” she said, “ will you trust me?”
“You know I do.”
“Well — don’t look round. I’ve just seen something that changes everything — something that makes me quite brave — something I don’t want you to see. Will you go back and wait for me at the bottom of the stairs?”
“You’re asking a very hard thing,” he said. “ No — nonsense, I can’t let you go alone.”
“You must,” she said. “ You think because I’ve been so frightened to-night that I’m not brave — but I am. When there’s anything to be done I never break down — never. It’s only when you can’t do anything.”
“You know who is up there?”
“Yes. — Let me go.”
“No,” he said, “ I can’t let you go alone. It’s not safe.”
“Ah,” she said, “that’s only because you don’t understand. Go down. You’re thinking of madmen and murderers — it’s not that. If I call out you can be up there with me in half a moment. Oh, for pity’s sake, for God’s sake, do as I tell you.”
Then he went down.
“God forgive me if I’m a fool,” he said as he went. He stood at the stair foot, his hand on the broad balustrade, his foot on the third step, ready to spring up to her if she should call.
He heard movements overhead, heard a door open, heard her voice in low passionate tones of pain and pity — heard another voice. . . . And he stood still. It will be counted to him when the time comes for counting things that he stood still, and waited, loyally; curiosity, excitement, and something deeper and stronger, warring sickeningly in him.
Then she came down the stairs, leaned down towards him, and said: “ It’s all right. Come down.”
Arrived in the parlour, she spoke.
“I am not afraid at all now. I have trusted you, and I am going to trust you more. I trust you as I trust myself. What I found up there . . . it’s someone I love very much, and he’s . . . Oh, it’s no use pretending about it. He is ... he has . . . oh, how odd it is when words go away and hide like this. He killed my husband. ... I don’t know why, yet, nor how ... he was mad — you were quite right — but he’s not mad now — and he’s shot himself. I think he’s dying. You must go for the doctor. And get a nurse — a Catholic sister. They don’t blab.”
“The police,” said the chauffeur for the twentieth time that night; and yet he was not at all a stupid man.
“Ah,” cried Sandra in a note of indescribable anguish, “ don’t you desert me — don’t you try to do ‘ the proper thing.’ You can have as many police as you like presently. Oh! — I know he won’t live long — my dear, my poor — he did it for me . . . Oh, it’s not fair — it’s not fair. Will you go for the doctor or must I go?” She stamped her foot.
“Can you trust the doctor?”
“He’s Uncle Mosenthal’s slave. Uncle Mosenthal saved him in some trouble or other. He’s always attended all of us. Oh, go — go 1”
“I don’t like to leave you.”
She came closer to him.
“Why do you keep on saying the same things over and over again?” she said. “ Don’t you understand? I thought you weren’t stupid. But one never knows. Don’t you see? This real thing — that he’s done it — it wipes out all that silly horror. What’s a dead man’s head in a cupboard compared with him dying in that awful pain because he loved me? Don’t you see it’s my fault — my doing? Don’t you see that nothing in the world counts except what I can do for him — now he’s done this terrible thing for me? And you think I’m afraid to be left!”
She turned with a rush almost winged to the cabinet, unlocked it, took out the head, and set it on the table.
“There!” she said, “it’s nothing to me. Less than nothing. I’d sit and hold it in my lap all night if it would do him any good.”
“How you love him,” said the chauffeur in a low voice. “ Let me put that thing away. Yes — I’ll go.”
He replaced the horror in the cabinet, locked it, and put the key in his pocket.
“You’ll not stay here?”
“No — I shall be with him. Give me the brandy — that little goldy-decanter. Now go. Oh, thank God I’ve a man to help me tonight. Go — go — go — Thirty-seven Harley Street. Don’t leave a message. If he’s not in, find out where he is and bring him home. Yes — take the brougham, of course. He knows all about it.”
When he had gone she flew up the stairs and into an attic room. On the bed lay a man, in shirt and trousers. The white of the shirt was” brownly stained, and through the sash that she had tied round it five minutes before fresh red was already oozing.
She threw herself on her knees beside the bed, kissing the pale cheek and closed eyes — laying her own cheek, warm now and red, against the cold lips tightly closed.
“Oh, my dear — my dear,” she said again and again; “ my poor love — my darling.”
The heavy lids lifted an instant and the pale lips moved.
“I oughtn’t to have come here. It was for you — I think. — But everything’s so odd. If you could get the doctor and put me together a little — I should like ... to ... tell you how it happened. It does hurt . . . I thought it didn’t hurt ... I thought it just ended . . . Sandra . . . darling . . . darling.”
CHAPTER XVI. THE SERVING MAN
There was no sunlight in the garden-courtyard where the pink geraniums were, and the Pot of Basil urns, and the little fountain, forgotten these many hours, yet still industriously playing, rising and falling conscientiously and plashing on its dingy stone basin. But the morning light was there — the light that makes all things new.
John Smith, standing at the window of the bare sitting-room with the Middle Victorian trimmings of The House With No Address, looking down at the fountain and the ferns and the trailing pink flowers. There were pink flowers from that garden in a Venice glass on the table, a white cloth, a chocolate service of Dresden china, pink too, with dainty panels of impossible shepherds and shepherdesses, coquetting amid incredible landscapes — silver — the pretty equipage of the first breakfast of a Stage Marquise. In the little kitchen, a kettle was spurting and spilling on the gas stove.
The man by the window turned now and then to glance at a something curled up in the corner of a sofa —
something covered by an Indian shawl that rose and fell to soft breathing. He glanced, but he did not look. Because he knew, as well as you or I do, that if you look at a sleeping person long enough you wake it.
He had had adventures — a many — being one of those to whom adventures come as the commonplaces of life do to other men. But yesterday, and the night that followed yesterday, these surpassed all that had ever happened to him. As adventures were natural to him, so, it seemed, was romance natural to Sylvia. She attracted it, as the magnet attracts needles. And now the poor little magnet — bristling with steel points, undesired and unsought — slept — but metaphors are silly beasts anyhow, and why should a story-teller take any pride in training them to run on all fours?
Yesterday had been wonderful. And the night of it more than wonderful. There had been the terror of the child — and his soothing of that terror, his sense that he was able to control her soul, to master her terrors. There had been that sound on the stairs — her advance — his inaction. Then the sudden incursion of competent science and calm devotion into that strange house. There had been things to do — things to fetch. Then, when the nurse was established beside the man in the room upstairs, and the doctor had gone — having made Sylvia swallow a sleeping draught and bidden her rest—” to be well and strong to look after him to-morrow” — the house had grown quiet again, and he and she had been alone in that room with a third — a dominant, insistent presence — intense wakefulness — not the mere absence of sleep, but a living, possessing force. The results of sleeping draughts are not calculable even by the supreme physician whose address is Harley Street. And the opiate had only served to quicken every nerve, to excite every thought which it was meant to soothe.
Sylvia had sat in the deep chair and talked. The chauffeur had wondered now and again through the hours, whether she realised at all that it was to her chauffeur that she was talking. When in the slate-grey beginnings of dawn shivering came to her, and he made her lie down, and covered her with the Indian shawl, he knew that he knew her heart and soul as no other man had ever known them. And he had felt that that heart and soul would never thus be known by any other man in this world. She told him everything — happenings of her childhood — her youth. She told him the tale of her marriage. She told him the little, poor, sad life-story of Pan — the dreams and hopes that her lips had never before had words for — all these she laid before him as a child lays before its friend the treasures of shell and seaweed it has picked up on the fringe of the sea. Only one thing she did not tell him. She said nothing of her lover. She did not breathe the name of the man who lay between life and death in the room upstairs. Of all else she had spoken, frankly, confidingly, as one certain that her listener will understand.
He stood by the window, thinking the absolutely conventional thoughts: “I wish I had been a better man.” “ I wish I had met her years ago.” “I wish I hadn’t been such a beast.” “I wish . . .” There was nothing original in his reflections. There never is anything original in the reflections of a man in love. No — nor in those of a woman either, gentle reader, so do not flatter yourself.
He thought these things: what he said was “Damn!”
The remembrance of it all, sweeping suddenly, like a searchlight, over the chauffeur’s soul, turned him a little giddy. “ Poor child,” he said, “ poor, brave, pretty child. And now her lover’s killed her husband — and — where’s it all to end — where are we going?”
His eye fell on the Buhl cabinet. “ That — at least,” he said, “ shall go.” He took the key from his pocket, opened the door, and lifted the misshapen bundle from the velvet shelf. But as he turned towards the door, he saw that the Indian shawl was stirring; an arm came out from it — two arms, stretching sleepily.
Instantly he replaced the head and came to stand by the sofa, saying quietly and strongly: “ Don’t be frightened. Everything’s all right.” In moments of stress one is a little apt to repeat oneself.
She sat up, her black hanks of hair slipping loosened to her shoulders, her eyes vacant and wondering.
“Ah,” she sighed; “yes — I remember.”
Her feet found the floor.
“How good of you,” she said, “ to be here when I woke. The nurse hasn’t been down? He hasn’t roused? Hasn’t asked for me? No — or of course you’d have waked me. I must go and see.”
She went out. When she came back, hair bound up and hands and face fresh from cold water, he was in the kitchen.
“You must have breakfast,” he said. “ I’m quite a fair cook. I shall make you scrambled eggs.”
He insisted, and she yielded, though breakfast seemed a silly, useless convention that she had once admitted and now saw through. She found it pleasant to be taken care of. It gave her the sensation of warmth to the heart which you feel when you come in out of the cold and find the fire burning redly and the curtains drawn — by someone who has thought your coming long. Besides . . .
“If ever you needed your pluck you need it now,” she told herself, and was wise enough to see that courage is more nourishingly fed on eggs and chocolate than on the empty need of it. But . . .
“You, too,” she said. “ I shan’t eat unless you do.”
“When you’ve finished ...?” he said. She laughed bitterly.
“Do you want to teach me my place?” she said. “Don’t let’s pretend anymore.”
Then he in turn was wise, and did not ask her what she meant.
When the meal was eaten and the table cleared, only its pink flowers remaining, he came and stood before her.
“And what,” he said, “ are the orders for the day?”
She looked at him blankly. But the blank gave way to a look that thrilled him. Because it said: “Why do you ask me? You are the master. It is you who must tell me what to do.”
Her eyes were years older than Sylvia’s eyes of yesterday — and she was very pale. There were purple settings to the Irish eyes, but her dress was neat as always. There was in her air no trace of what novelists call “the disorder of the past night.”
“Well,” he said, “ what’s to be done? “ Will you be advised, and let me go for the police?” I am sorry he was so one-ideaed, but such was the fact.
“No,” she said; but he knew that if he chose he could make her say “Yes.” He did not choose. And what he knew she admitted. Fob she went on, and her voice was pleading: “ Not yet. Not to-day. You won’t make me do it to-day?”
“I am your servant,” he said: “it is for you to give the orders.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“Well then? “said he.
“I think I want Aunt Dusa. Will you telegraph for her? And you’d better telegraph to Denny, too. Denis, Wood House, Hadloc.”
He went out to do it. When he came back he brought a slab of newspapers under his arm.
“I didn’t wire,” he said. “ They’ve found the . . . .They’ve found your husband, dead,” he added unnecessary. “Mrs. Mosenthal’s been got at. She’s told everything she knows. But she doesn’t seem to have given this address. But everything else — yes. If you wire for her someone else will see the wire before she does — and follow her — and the game will be up. So I didn’t wire.”
“Thank you,” she said, “and I’ve been thinking while you’ve been away. You see — it isn’t safe. To have that thing in the cabinet when we’re both away. Someone might get in. And now they’ve found the body — what you tell me about Aunt Dusa. She’s a silly dear. She might think she was doing me a service by bringing people here. You never know. If even you can think of nothing but police, be sure it’s the only thing she’d think of. If you could stay here it would be all right. But you’ve got to drive me to the theatre and bring me back. While we’re away anything might happen.”
“Well?”
“So I’ve decided what to do. I shall take the Head to the theatre and dance with it again. That’s the only way of making everything perfectly safe.”
A w
eaker man would have urged her weakness. This man said:
“You’re strong enough to do it. But why torture yourself? Let me get the wax head from Clarkson’s. It’s sure to be ready now. And I’ll take the other in the brougham if you like. There it will be safe enough.”
“No,” she said. “ Your precious police that you’re so fond of — they might search the brougham — you never know. Now that they’ve found the body, they’ll look for the head. And the one place where they won’t look for it is in my hands. — Have they . . . they don’t know who did it? They don’t know that”
“The police say they have a clue — or I think we may be sure they know nothing.”
“All the same I’m afraid of the police,” she said. “ They think of things, sometimes. You never know. I shall take it to the theatre, — and arrange the dance so that it never leaves my hands. It’s the only safe way.”
Her voice was sullen, stupid, obstinate.
He said what he could. The scheme was a mad one. But he saw that her sanity was bound up in it. And she resisted his entreaties, knowing that if he chose to command she would not resist. But he did not choose. Instead, he suddenly yielded.
“Very well,” he said, “have it your own way. Now I must go out. My lady must be fed — and not merely on eggs. I will go to Appenroot’s and get things for you to eat.”
“You, too,” she said.
“Thank you. You’ll be all right — just for a little while.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I want you to be here. But go just for a little. And you’ll come back here after you’ve driven me to the theatre to-night. And if anything — if he — if anything happens come and tell me. You see I must dance,” she explained carefully; “ if I don’t, everybody will be asking questions. And there are no answers to the questions they’ll ask. You see that — don’t you?”
“I see,” he said. What he saw was that the idea of this supreme martyrdom of dancing, on that night of all nights, with the Head, would “keep her up,” as they say — make her strong to bear what would have to be borne. Whereas if she yielded to all the impulses that bade her stay with the beloved — the bandaged bloody thing that lay upstairs — she might yield also to the whole inrushing tide of feminine emotion and be swept, who knew where . . . to the mad-house, perhaps.