Gaslight

by William Drummond

  “Some months ago, something happened which caused me to revive my interest in that long-forgotten case. I pursued my inquiries through you and through other channels. I did not tell you what my theories and suspicions were because I did not want to color your thoughts.

  “By last week, I had in my view enough evidence to consult my old friend, Sir George. As I feared, he was reluctant to reopen a case which had, in its day, caused public outcry but was now forgotten. He demanded cast-iron proof, and rightly so. But at least I secured his promise that once given that proof, the force would move immediately into action.

  “That is how matters stood until this evening; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, until this morning. I had waited twenty years and I thought that I could wait as many days or even weeks in order to make certain of my man.”

  Mr. Rough paused to refresh himself with whisky, then he leaned forward and wagged his pipe at Albert Booker. “But what you have told me, my boy, makes me realize that time is not on our side. Now this is what I want you to do. I want you, if you can, without Nancy’s knowledge, to ask Elizabeth to call on me. Find out her partialities; macaroons or muffins. Then promise them.”

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I see that you have a letter from York, my dear,” observed Mr. Manningham at breakfast the next morning. “Are you not going to open it?”

  Bella had bidden it beneath her side plate, but it had not escaped her husband’s notice. She cursed herself for her stupidity. If only she had sliced the envelope open and then offered to read it to him, Jack would have said coldly, “I think I can spare myself Mrs. Jameson’s newsy missives.” As it was, his suspicions were aroused. Bella pretended not to have heard, but her involuntary blushing gave her away.

  “It would be sad if to your other infirmities was added deafness.” Mr. Manningham turned to Nancy. “Have you found, Nancy, that Mrs. Manningham does not hear what you say to her?” There was a twinkle in his eyes, though his voice sounded gravely solicitous.

  “I heard very well what you said,” Bella answered. “But the reading of correspondence at the breakfast table is not the most sociable way of behaving.”

  “I detect a reproof to the busy man of affairs,” her husband said, contriving to be as acidulous to his wife as he was at the same time affable to the undermaid. “Yet in all the years of our marriage I do not remember your having voiced that objection before. We live and learn. Who can say that marriage becomes monotonous, when suddenly thousands of mornings after their blissful wedding day, having opened tens of thousands of letters at the breakfast table in the interim, a wife can inform her husband that he has been unsociable?”

  “Must we make such a mountain out of a molehill?” entreated Bella.

  “Indeed,” Manningham persisted, “I am merely mending my ways. I am resisting the temptation of opening these fascinating requests from tradesmen for prompt payment, these heartrending appeals to contribute to charities for distressed gentlewomen, ragged schools or the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—to which I should merely reply that this last-named charity should begin at home. Instead, I am being conversational in the most sociable way I know. And now perhaps you will be sociable, while I eat my breakfast.”

  Bella sipped her tea. Her appetite, such as it had been, was destroyed by the play of his vindictive wit. She would like to have risen and gone to her bedroom, as she would have done, if there had been no servant present. But appearances had to be kept up; or rather, perhaps, the appearance of keeping appearances up.

  “It could not be, I suppose,” asked Mr. Manningham, after a bout of thorough mastication, “that the letter which you have decided it would be unsociable to open contains matter which you would prefer your husband not to see?”

  “From Mrs. Jameson?” Bella pretended to laugh. “Mrs. Jameson never wrote a word you’d deign to read!”

  “Having mended my manners, then, dear girl, let me prove it by deigning.” He stretched out his hand and snapped the fingers impatiently. “Let me read it to you. It could be a sociable substitute for conversation.”

  Mr. Manningham had so overstepped the boundaries of what was decorous before a servant that Bella found a new realm of courage. “I do not ask my husband if I can read his correspondence. Indeed I did not dream until this morning that it consisted in dunning letters from tradespeople. But if my husband insists on the ‘conjugal right’ of being privy to my correspondence, at least I claim the right to read the letter first.”

  “It is bulky,” Mr. Manningham said.

  “Your bills may be thin,” Bella said slitting the envelope, “but they seem many.” She nodded. “You have my license to be unsociable.”

  She unfolded the wad of paper, scrawled so large and indefinite that it would have been difficult to decipher even if Mrs. Jameson had not then economized by writing over what she had previously written at right angles. Bella began reading:

  Dear Bella,

  I venture to call you that, not Mrs. Manningham, because this is how I think of you, dear Bella, even if you cannot yet think of me as Minty. Mr. J and I hold you constantly in our prayers, not just night and morning but during the day. It is not for us to judge. “Judge not and ye shall not be judged.” (Mat. VII. 1.) but it is clear to Mr. J and me that you are in dire need of God’s guidance and His Word. “For what knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife.” (I Cor. VII. 16)

  It greatly distressed us, dear Bella, that you and Mr. Manningham had not had the blessing of finding Jesus, the Saviour and Redeemer of us all. But in the Good Book, you will find all. (Tit. II. 4 and 5) Remember I Peter III, 1 and 2. “Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that if any obey not the word, they may also without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; while they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.” Perhaps this adversity (Eccl. VII. 14) is a blessing in disguise to bring you both closer to Him. Meditate on this, please, dear.

  There is at the great City Temple in Holborn Viaduct, Dr. Joseph Parker who, though a Congregationalist, Mr. J thinks might do much for you, since he is a very forthright man and yet rooted in the Holy Scriptures.

  However puzzled you may be, remember that God moves in a mysterious way.

  Mr. J joins with me to wish you and Mr. M the happy outcome of your distress.

  Ever yours affectionately in Our Lord,

  Araminto Jameson (Minty)

  It is difficult to describe the problem which Bella had in deciphering the letter under the scrutiny of her husband, or of the relief that her cry for help had been met by a response so conventional.

  “Well?” asked her husband.

  Bella turned to Nancy. “Could you pass this to Mr. Manningham? Perhaps he can make more of it than I can. At least he is anxious to.”

  Jack looked at the letter, the march and counter-march of the gross, illegible words across the pages. He did not trouble to scrutinize fully. He had already made his offensive by attacking her secrecy in trying to hide it under her side plate. “I can’t understand why you find this so puzzling, my dear,” he said. “I don’t know what Tit Two, Four and Five is. But One Peter Three, One and Two is surely divinely inspired. ‘Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your husbands; that if any obey not the word, they may also without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; while they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.’ I hope, my dear, that you’ll couple your chaste conversation with fear.”

  With a flash of her old spirit she answered, “I have learned to couple my fear with chaste conversation.”

  He did not hear what she said. “Where’s your fob watch?” he asked with sudden interest.

  At that moment she realized that the whole of the scene which he had built up so far during breakfast had been merely a diversion to prepare for the main attack. “I don’t know,” she said. To assume that this was
the main attack was wrong. It might just be another feint, to be followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth.

  “Don’t you think that we have finished breakfast?” she asked.

  “I agree,” he said, rising, “but not our business. That watch belonged to someone very close to me. I hope that you have not mislaid it.”

  As they went upstairs to the drawing room, Bella recognized that in wanting to be rid of the humiliating witness of the undermaid, she had lost her only independent testimony. Anything they said alone was his word against hers, and his was the more convincing because he wasn’t bound by truth. She felt half-persuaded to be in subjection to her husband because to be in opposition would end in the same insanity, but after a longer and more debilitating struggle. It would be better to withdraw into an asylum intact more or less rather than utterly shattered.

  “Please sit down!” Jack said.

  Bella knew that she ought to stand, but even if she did, her husband would tower above her. So she chose the lowest chair in order to relax the furthest away from his aggression. If only she could respect him as an adversary, she felt that she might preserve some vital root which could put up new shoots of love. But he was only an overweight, middle-aged bully, whom she was contracted in marriage to love, honor and obey. As a wife, she ought to want to defend him from himself, but as a woman she only wanted to defend herself from him. “I am getting tired of your tricks, Jack,” she said. “I went down to the bathroom, leaving my watch as usual beside my bed. I came back and it was gone. You have given me the great liberty of a bolt inside my door. But not of a key. I would like one. Or rather I would prefer a new lock, of which I have the only key.”

  He lit his after-breakfast cheroot. “So that if you are taken ill we shall be forced to break the door down?”

  “I shan’t be taken ill.”

  He laughed. “My dear, forgive me! But already you are not well. Or so it would appear to me. Dr. Frost must wait on you today. I would not have you think that I am trying to persuade you into illness, any more than into an illusion of good health. Meanwhile, where is that watch?”

  She saw him flagging like an actor whose lines though not forgotten had become meaningless. And with sudden sharpness, she called, “Jack!”

  “What?” He was startled out of his routine.

  “Something is wrong,” she said. “What is it? You should tell me. I am your wife, for better or for worse.”

  It seemed to Bella for a moment he was poised in some indecision, that this gigantic, looming husband might shrink to a scared child, weeping at her knee. Jack looked at her, but instead of finding someone whose love encompassed everything, he saw a woman almost frightened out of her wits. “You are very clever, crazy though you may be. Where is that watch?” His face became ugly.

  “Jack,” she said, thinking of his magnificence when he released her from the bondage of Holly Place and the sadness of his coarsening. “Darling!” She caught a response from that word which she had not used or been able to use for years. “The watch. You gave it to me, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did!”

  “Then does it matter, if I don’t mind, that it cannot be found at the moment? Is it so important?”

  He looked pained. “It is not, of course, the watch that matters. It is the mislaying of it and then the denial of responsibility, or rather the mental decline of which these are only two of many symptoms. You would not have me be, I hope, so unfeeling a husband as to stand idly by, watching this progressive deterioration.”

  “Yet you can be so unfeeling as to deny me the companionship of Cerberus.”

  “What better example could there be,” he exclaimed, “of the manner in which your poor, sick brain takes the most innocent of actions and invests it with a diabolical intent. No one could have a greater concern than me for that poor little dog, so crazily named; certainly not you, my girl. If it had been you that released him from that trap, if you had seen how near he had come to losing his paw— And we still do not know whether sepsis may not set in; Nancy told me that the vet was not sanguine, though today’s report, pray God, may be more hopeful—if, as I say, you had seen that poor, dumb creature’s plight, you would have vowed as I did that never must the risk be run of a repetition of such an incident. I thought at first that perhaps it would be best to lodge him in some kennels against his recovery and then find him a good home. But then, out of consideration for you, my girl, I assure you purely out of consideration, I thought, ‘No! Let the little dog remain at Number Thirteen, protected by the servants.’ ”

  “Whatever your motives, I can think of no course better calculated to humiliate and torment me.”

  It seemed as if this was precisely what her husband had wanted to provoke her into saying. His response was immediate. “That can soon be remedied, my girl,” he said. “I shall arrange for his accommodation in kennels with immediate dispatch. If you would only tell me when I have unwittingly, but with the best will in the world, caused you distress, you should know that I will always make other dispositions. I shall see Mr. Grass myself.”

  “No! No!” However humiliating Jack’s ban was, while Cerberus was in the house there were ways and means of being with him. On Nancy’s half day out, Bella had spent the whole afternoon helping Elizabeth with the work that Nancy should have done if it hadn’t been for the sewing lesson. No word was spoken about the puppy, but they had both known that this was the secret reason. “You must not do that, Jack!”

  Mr. Manningham opened his eyes wide with astonishment. “But this is unbelievable. At one moment you accuse me of deliberately humiliating and tormenting you by keeping the puppy in the house, and in the next breath, you are begging me to let him stay. This is carrying feminine indecision to the point of mental instability! Which would you have me do, in the name of goodness?”

  Bella did not answer. She could not. The control which she had exercised upon herself snapped, and once she began to weep, she could not stop.

  Her husband had at least the delicacy not to attempt to staunch the tears which he had provoked. If he had so much as touched her, she would have screamed the house down. Instead he left the room closing the door softly behind him.

  He must have spoken to Elizabeth on the way out because immediately after the front door slammed, the cook came quietly into the room. She stood for some time at a few paces distance. Then she came over and put her hand on the back of Mrs. Manningham’s neck as she sat with her head in her hands. “Mr. Manningham’s gone to fetch Dr. Frost, madam,” she said. “Would you feel better in bed?”

  Bella shook her head and with one hand waved to her to go away.

  When Nancy came back from Mr. Grass, she brought Cerberus up to Bella. Ridiculous though it might sound, the puppy was the only creature on earth that gave her the will to continue living. Without his dependence and affection, there was nothing that would have stopped her going up to her bedroom and flinging herself out of the window except perhaps the fear that she could not jump far enough to avoid the balcony below and would survive so maimed that she could not even attempt to do away with herself again.

  “Mr. Grass says Cerberus is doing nicely,” Nancy said, “and to bring ’im back in three days’ time and then maybe the splints can come off.”

  Bella ran her hands tenderly through the puppy’s curly hair, holding her head back, laughing, despite her recent tears, at the lavish licking of her face, the scrabbling of his front paws, bound and free, about her chest. “Shall I leave ’im with you, ma’am?” Nancy asked.

  The girl’s suggestion was, Bella thought, spontaneous, but it might not be. If ever it came to a choice of loyalties between her and Jack, Nancy would choose Jack, because he was a man; and poor Nancy did not know he was diseased.

  Bella wondered whether she could warn Nancy, and Elizabeth too, that her husband was diseased. They ran some risk—drinking from a chipped glass, for example. But then they both might give notice to leave; or worse still, Nancy might ask Jack if it
were true as he made some advances to her. He was bound to do so sooner or later, if he hadn’t done so already. The risk was too great.

  So was the risk of accepting Nancy’s suggestion. Supposing that Jack returned, bringing Dr. Frost with him and she was trapped upstairs alone with Cerberus! It was appalling, the bondage of married women in Imperial Britain in this so-called century of progress. If Bella went to any stranger for advice, it would be not to the forthright Dr. Parker but to some courageous woman such as Mrs. Annie Besant, the social reformer.

  “No, Nancy,” Bella said, “we must accept Mr. Manningham’s decisions, whatever they may be. But let us both go down to the kitchen. As I must wait for Dr. Frost, will you oblige me by doing the shopping? With Elizabeth, I shall compile the list for you.”

  So, with a little guile, Bella had Cerberus to herself until Dr. Frost arrived. By that time, with aid of a flannel and much cold water, she had composed the ravages to her face caused by weeping. She had also devised a campaign to contain the doctor.

  When the doorbell rang, Bella cleaning the silver with Goddard’s Plate Powder. She was wearing an apron and her sleeves were rolled up. She allowed Elizabeth to open the front door, but she arrived from below stairs while the doctor was still in the hall. Cerberus followed at her heels.

  Dr. Frost looked at her in some surprise. The ailing ladies he was used to visit reclined usually in beds or on couches. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Bella said, “I had no idea when you would visit. So I have been deputizing for the maid, whom I had to send abroad to do my shopping.” She undid her apron strings. “Perhaps you would show Dr. Frost into the dining room, Elizabeth?” She rolled down her sleeves while Dr. Frost disappeared from view. Then she tidied her hair in the looking glass and gave Cerberus such an exciting caress that he came bounding into the dining room after her.