Gaslit Horror

by Lamb, Hugh; Hearn, Lafcadio ; Capes, Bernard

  I used to meet her at one time. She was always to be found in houses of a certain type. Her friends were women who took their views of life from one another, or from Society weekly papers. In the wake of Royalty they did no doubt achieve a certain amount of serviceable work for others, and at least it could be said of them that none of them seemed likely to scandalize the susceptibilities of their comfortable, if somewhat narrow, circle. Never twice would you meet a clever man, or a brilliant woman, at these feasts.

  If you will take the names of those who were present at Mrs. Rivers’s small dinner-party on 18 March, you will see exactly what I mean. Colonel Wyke was an old friend of her husband’s. He had a little place in the country in which he grew begonias very well, and was, I believed, writing the history of the parish, from such printed material as he could find in the library of the country town. Lady Alresford lent her name to every charity organization without discrimination or inquiry. She was a president of a rescue home in London, which probably did much harm to conventional morality. Mr. and Mrs. Richmond were a quiet, and somewhat colourless, little couple of considerable wealth, but without any real interest or purpose in life except that, if the truth must be told, of gossiping about their neighbours. I have never known Richmond at a loss for an inaccurate version of any scandal in London.

  I have set out the circumstances in which Mrs. Rivers lived at greater length than may be thought necessary. But I am inclined to think that it was very largely the facts of her surroundings, and the influence unconsciously exerted by her friends, that eventually led Mrs. Rivers into the most awful trouble. As I have said, I am a somewhat silent person, and I meditate more perhaps than talkative folk upon the reversals and eccentricities of fate. I think I could safely affirm that though I did not then know the real relations that existed between Mrs. Rivers and Cardyne—who, by the way, for all his density, was head and shoulders above this crowd—I still could never have dreamed that fate would have whetted her heaviest shaft to bring down such poor and uninteresting game as this. But, as a matter of fact, I did not know that Mrs. Rivers was nothing more than a close friend of Cardyne’s. On the face of it I thought that Cardyne could never be very long attracted by any one possessed of so little interest as Mrs. Rivers; but, against that, I admitted that Cardyne’s constancy was quite in keeping with his general simple loyalty; and, on the other hand, I was not sure that Mrs. Rivers might not be more interesting in that relation than she might have seemed likely to be to a mere outsider like myself. She might have been possessed, like many other women, of the two entirely distinct and mutually exclusive natures that Browning thanks God for.

  I came to know Cardyne pretty well in those months, and if any feeling of anger should be caused by the story I am going to tell with the help of Mrs. Rivers’s journal, it is only fair to say that Cardyne did all he could. It is a grim tale.

  Cardyne, as he had promised, went to the National Gallery at twelve o’clock on 20 May. It was a Friday, and in consequence there were very few present, except the young ladies in brown holland over-alls, who were painting copies of deceased masters in the intervals of conversation. But in the central room there was one industrious figure labouring away at a really important copy of the Bronzino at the other end of the room. Mrs. Rivers was sitting in a chair opposite the Michael Angelo—a picture, by the way, which she would certainly have relegated to a housemaid’s bedroom had she possessed it herself.

  Cardyne was punctual. But it was clear from the moment he entered the gallery that the interview was going to be unpleasant. He walked listlessly, and with a white face, up to where Mrs. Rivers was sitting.

  She was really alarmed at the sight of him, and, putting out a hand, said to him:

  “Good gracious, Dennis, don’t frighten me like this!”

  Cardyne sat down and said:

  “You’ve got to listen, Mary. It is a matter that concerns you.”

  Mrs. Rivers grew rather white, and said:

  “Nobody knows, surely? Nobody would believe. We are perfectly safe if we deny it absolutely?”

  Cardyne shook his head.

  “Listen,” he said wearily, “did you see the posters of the Star as you came along?”

  Mrs. Rivers thought that he was going mad.

  “Yes,” she said; “there was a speech by Roosevelt and a West End murder, but what has that got to do with us?”

  Dennis put his hand in front of his eyes for a moment, and then said:

  “Everything—at least the murder has.”

  Mrs. Rivers grew rather cross.

  “For Heaven’s sake tell me what you mean!” she said; “I don’t understand anything. What can this murder have to do with you and me?”

  Cardyne said, in a dull and rather monotonous voice:

  “A man called Harkness was murdered on the night of 18 May. He lived at No. 43 Addistone Place.”

  Mrs. Rivers began a remark, but Cardyne impatiently stopped her.

  “That house, as you know, is exactly opposite yours. The old man was found murdered yesterday, the police were making inquiries all day, the newspapers have just got hold of it, and an arrest has been made. They have taken into custody a maidservant called Craik, who had apparently one of the best of reasons for hating Harkness.”

  Cardyne broke off. Mrs. Rivers breathed again.

  “But what in the name of Heaven has all this to do with me or you?”

  Cardyne paused for thirty seconds before he answered:

  “The maidservant is innocent.” His sentences fell slowly and heavily. “The murder was committed by the manservant.”

  Mrs. Rivers was not a person of very quick imagination, but she vaguely felt that there was something horrible impending over her, and, after an indrawn breath, she said quickly:

  “Where did you see it from?”

  Dennis turned round and looked at her straight in the eyes and did not say a word. Mrs. Rivers felt the whole gallery swinging and swirling round her. She seemed to be dropping through space, and the only certain things were Dennis Cardyne’s two straight grey eyes fixed in mingled despair and misery upon her own. A moment later the girl at the other end of the room looked up with a start, and went quickly across the gallery to ask if she could be of any use. Mrs. Rivers, in a high falsetto that was almost a scream, had said, “What are you going to do?” and fallen forward out of her chair. She pulled herself together as the girl came up, and muttered a conventional excuse, but she hardly knows how it was that she got home and found herself lying on her own bed, vaguely conscious that Cardyne had just left the room after giving her the strictest instructions as to what she was to do to keep well, and assuring her that there might not be the slightest risk or trouble of any kind. And he added that he would return about six o’clock in the evening, and tell her all there was to be known.

  II

  I heard this story some time afterwards, but I remember, as if it were yesterday, the remark which some one made to me about Mrs. Rivers during the season of 1904.

  “The woman’s going mad. She goes to every lighted candle she can scrape up an invitation to, and last week, to my certain knowledge, she—she, poor dear!—went to two Primrose League dances.”

  Right enough this feverish activity was regarded as a sign and portent, for Mrs. Rivers was one of those people who thought that her social position was best secured by kicking down her ladders below her. I confess that a night or two later I was amazed indeed at finding her at my poor old friend Miss Frankie’s evening party. Miss Frankie was the kindest and dullest soul in London. She was also the only real conscientious Christian I have ever known. She refrained from malicious criticism of those around her. This perhaps made her duller than ever, and I will admit that there was a curious species of mental exercise associated with visits to her house. As a rule, one found the earnest district visitor sitting next one at dinner, or it might be some well-intentioned faddist with elastic-sided boots, bent on the reformation of the butterflies of society, or the Hou
se of Lords. But among those who really understood things, there were many who used to put up with the eccentricities of a night out at Miss Frankie’s if only because of the genuine pleasure that it obviously gave to the little lady to entertain her old friends. I twice met San Iguelo the painter there, and for the first time began to like the man, if only for going. Now this was particularly, I fancy, the social level from which Mrs. Rivers had herself risen; but precisely therefore was it the social level which she took particular pains now to ignore. A year ago Mrs. Rivers would have regarded an evening with Miss Frankie as an evening worse than wasted.

  That night, I was sitting in a corner of the room. I was talking to a young artist who had not yet risen in the world, and probably never will; still, she had a sense of humour, and knew Mrs. Rivers by sight. She watched her entrance and, without a touch of malice, she turned to me and said:

  “What on earth has made Mrs. Rivers honour us with her presence to-night?”

  I did not know, and said so, but I watched Mrs. Rivers for some minutes. Of course it was Mrs. Rivers, but I doubt if any one who knew her in a merely casual way would have been quite sure. I am perfectly certain that the woman was painted. Now Mrs. Rivers never painted in old days. Moreover, she never stopped talking, which was also unlike her. (The woman had her good points, you see.) However, there she was. Once, our eyes met, and probably neither of us liked to define the uneasiness that I am sure we both felt.

  She had a way of leaving her mouth open and allowing the tip of a very pink tongue to fill one corner of it. I knew it well in the old days. Somebody must have told her that it was arch. It was a touch of vulgarity of just that sort of which no one could very well break her after she had once started climbing the society ladder, and in time it grew to be a trick. At one moment, when Miss Frankie was occupied with a newcomer, Mrs. Rivers’s face fell into a mask that convinced me that the woman was ill. As soon as her forced vivacity left her, the whole face fell away on to the bones, the eyes became unnaturally bright, and there was a quick, hunted look about them. She was evidently quite oblivious for the moment, and I saw her tongue go up into the corner of her mouth. It was a small matter, but the contrast between the expression of her face, and this silly little affectation no one could fail to notice.

  She stayed for half an hour and went on somewhere, I suppose to a dance. She was alone, and as I happened to be at the foot of the stairs as she came down, I thought it was only civil, as I was myself hatted and coated for going away, to ask if she had her servant there to call the carriage. It was all rather awkward. I moved across the floor to her with the conventional offer so obviously on my lips and even in my gait, that I could not well be stopped going on with my part, even though at the last moment, almost after she might have recognized me, she shut her eyes and said in a tone of broken helplessness: “O my God, have mercy upon me!” She opened her eyes again a moment afterwards, saw me with a start, recovered herself, and pressed me almost hysterically to be dropped somewhere by her, she did not seem to care where. But I refused. I did not much want to be dropped by Mrs. Rivers, and I am quite sure that my humble diggings did not lie anywhere on the route to her next engagement that evening.

  A few days after that I met Cardyne, and with the usual fatuity of any one who tries with all his might to keep off a subject, I said to him that I had seen Mrs. Rivers, and that she seemed to me to be strangely upset and unlike herself. He looked at me rather hard for a moment and said:

  “Oh, I know all about that: she is worried about her people.”

  Now that is absurd, for nobody ever is worried to that extent about her people, or at least she doesn’t say, “O my God, have mercy upon me!” if she is. However, it was no business of mine, and I went on in my humble way of life, though from time to time I heard some notice taken of Mrs. Rivers’s hysterical behaviour during that season.

  Cardyne told me afterwards that at the moment when I had noticed Mrs. Rivers’s behaviour, she was almost determined to make the sacrifice by which alone, as it was now too clear, could the unfortunate maidservant at No. 43 be cleared from the charge against her. The excitement caused by the murder had died down somewhat since the middle of May when it had taken place, but every one was looking forward with gladiatorial interest to the trial. It was appointed to begin on 30 June at the Old Bailey, and though, as I have said, from a legal point of view the case looked very black against Martha Craik, the servant, it was still felt that something more was needed before the jury would accept as proved a crime which for some reasons a woman seemed hardly likely to carry out. Cardyne told me that, of course, his first duty was to reassure Mrs. Rivers. This he did at first with such effect that the woman regarded the likelihood of any serious issue to the trial as most improbable, and eagerly hugged to herself the relief which her lover thus held out to her.

  “On Thursday afternoon,” said Cardyne to me, “after our meeting in the National Gallery, the unhappy woman had so convinced herself that there was nothing really to fear, that she went down on her knees in her own drawing-room beside the tea-table and made me kneel with her.” Cardyne’s face, as he said this, almost made me smile, though it was hardly an occasion for mirth. “She rose, gave me tea, and all the time asked me to see in it the kindness and tenderness of God, and hoped it would be a warning to me.” Of what, I really hardly think either Cardyne or myself knew. “But at any rate,” said Cardyne, “I had cheered her up for the time being. But I lied like a trooper.”

  As a matter of fact, the case against Craik grew blacker and blacker every day. She was the only servant who slept alone in the house, and all the others were ready to swear, with unanimity, that neither they nor their stable-companions had left their rooms all night. To this I ought to have attached little importance, as servants, when frightened, are always ready to swear that they did not sleep a wink all night. But it made a very great impression on the public.

  The knife with which the murder was done was found in rather a curious way. The police inspector was asking some questions of the manservant in the passage outside Mr. Harkness’s bedroom door. Another servant came by, and both men took a step inwards to allow room for him to pass. The manservant, whose name was Steele, in taking a sharp pace up to the wall, actually cut his boot upon the knife, which was stuck upright in the floor, blade outwards, between the jamb of the door and the wainscoting, where it had escaped notice. It was an ordinary kitchen table-knife, worn and very sharp, and the fact that Steele cut his boot upon it was taken as proof beyond all hesitation or question that Steele at least was totally ignorant of everything connected with the crime. But Steele was the man whom Cardyne had seen in Harkness’s room.

  To return to Mrs. Rivers. Cardyne found that it was impossible to conceal from her much longer the fact that things were going badly indeed against Craik. One afternoon, about a fortnight before the trial opened, he found it his terrible duty to make Mrs. Rivers see that unless his evidence was forthcoming, an innocent woman might be condemned to death. For a long time Mrs. Rivers had understood that all was not well. Perhaps if all had been well she would have had just the same nervous breakdown. The woman was at her tether’s end, and there is no doubt that in spite of her hysterical attempts to distract her thoughts, she was coming to realize what the position was.

  Here are some extracts from her diary at different times:—

  “June 20th. All going as well as possible. D. tells me that he still thinks there may be no real reason for alarm. He hears at the club that the verdict at the inquest is thought unreasonable by people in town.”

  (Let every woman remember that there is no more worthless authority for any statement than that a man has heard it at his club. As a rule, it is worth no more than her maid’s opinion as she does her hair that evening.)

  “July 1st. Lady Garrison came across this afternoon and upset me a good deal. D. never told me about the door of 43 having been chained all night. Will see him about this tomorrow.

  “June 10th.
[This was about the time when I saw Mrs. Rivers.] Worse and worse. Of course everything must go right, but I would give five years of my life to be over the next two months. All might be right. D. tells me so. The suspense is awful.

  “July 14th. Sampson gave me warning this morning. I was horribly frightened when he actually told me, and I’m rather afraid that he noticed it. He says he is going to his brother in Canada, and of course he has always told me that he would go as soon as he could. He said nothing to make me uneasy, spoke very respectfully, and offered to suit his convenience to mine at any time. I don’t know what to do. I must ask D. Perhaps it would be better if he left at once.”

  I am sure it passed through that wretched woman’s brain that if her butler could, so to speak, be made to look as if he had bolted from the country a week before the trial took place, some suspicion would be aroused which might, perhaps, cause a postponement of the sentence, if the worst came to the worst. More than that, she was, of course, anxious to get rid thus easily of some one who, for all her precautions, might have known about Cardyne’s visit, and finally, in the event of her having to go through a great nervous strain at the time of the trial, she hardly knew whether it would be better to have a new butler who might simply look upon her with unpleasant inquisitiveness as an hysterical subject, or the old one who, for all his discretion and sympathy, could hardly fail to see that something very new, very odd, and very wrong was going on in her life.