by Grant Allen
‘For the present, madam,’ he said, in a very formal voice, ‘I think your grace had better not enter the Duke’s room. He’s best left alone just now with the regular nurse. Understand, this is urgent. To disturb him may imperil your husband’s life. I forbid you to go in to him. I’m seeing after his food and medicine myself. I’ll call round again to watch the further effect of the tonic the very first thing to-morrow morning.’
Linda sank down on her sofa in a perfect paroxysm of horror, suspense, and misery. What on earth could it all mean? Why was Bertie so strange? And why did Sir Frederick forbid her so strictly to wait at such a crisis upon her own dying husband?
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
A NIGHT OF TERRORS.
She sat there alone for an hour or two, each minute of which lengthened itself out to an eternity.
From time to time sounds came from the next room. First, as she judged, Sir Frederick arrived back with the medicine, and entrusted it to the nurse. That Linda rather resented, for so far she had given her husband everything with her own hands, and it seemed hard indeed she should be debarred from waiting upon him now at this final crisis. Then a fit of coughing came on, and Bertie seemed worse. Overwhelmed with grief and terror, she rushed to the door. There, a new horror awaited her. A fresh nurse, just brought in by Sir Frederick, met her on the threshold as she tried to enter with the stern words:
‘Sir Frederick’s orders are, we’re not to let anyone but ourselves come near him for the present.’
So Linda, unnerved at the moment — a rare thing indeed with her — staggered back again, with a dumb sense of injury, to her own boudoir, and waited, her heart almost standing still with awe, for some other token of life in that mysterious sick-room.
Presently she heard Sir Frederick’s foot on the stairs. Then he was still in the house!
‘I’ll leave him for the present,’ he was saying to a servant. ‘I’m going down to get an hour or two’s sleep on the library sofa. If the nurse should ask for me, just step down and wake me.’
Then all was silence again — a long, long silence.
At last, about ten o’clock, new sounds broke in upon the stillness of that lonely boudoir. One nurse left her husband’s bedroom for a moment, and then another. Could they have left Bertie alone, ill as he was, she wondered breathlessly to herself, even for a single second? Oh no; impossible! They would never be so careless! She listened again. Well, it couldn’t be so, but she fancied she heard sounds through the wall; sounds as of somebody moving softly and stealthily over the floor. Footsteps of one going on tip-toe, she almost imagined. Could he be so very ill? Were they walking so not to wake him? Or didn’t it sound more like the soft fall of bare feet on the velvety carpet? Either way, the noise frightened and puzzled her exceedingly.
As she stood there, irresolute, devoured by a fierce impulse to force her way into her husband’s room, and wondering with a vague terror why Sir Frederick had insisted on keeping her so long away from him, another small incident occurred that still further perturbed and bewildered her agitated mind. The houses in Onslow Gardens, as every visitor to the square behind them must have noticed, have a sort of continuous ledge or terrace formed along their second floor back by the roofs of the great square bows built out into the garden from the drawing-rooms behind, so that a person can pass without much difficulty along the top of the ledge from one house to another. Indeed, the whole space is regularly laid out as a long promenade. On to this open terrace the windows both of Linda’s boudoir and the Duke’s bedroom gave, and Linda, looking out now — for she hadn’t allowed the servants to come in to draw the blind — fancied she saw a dim figure glide, ghost-like, along outside, from the direction of Bertie’s room towards the houses to the left of her. It was but a momentary fancy, for when, a minute later, she mustered up courage to fling open the sash and glance out along the terrace, she saw nobody there; but the very weirdness of the suspicion gave point to her lonely vigil in that empty room, and she felt in her heart she could stand it no longer.
With a wild burst of impulse she rushed out into the passage. A footman was standing there to bar the way.
‘You mustn’t go into his grace’s room,’ he said, with a strange undertone of severity alloying the wonted deference of the trained upper servant’s manner. ‘That’s Sir Frederick’s orders!’
Linda brushed past him with her grand commanding air.
‘Stand aside, sir!’ she said imperatively. ‘How dare you interfere with me?’ And she waved him away with her outstretched hand like a queen in her wifely dignity.
The man hesitated a moment — and then let her pass on. Even with Sir Frederick’s authority to back him up, he was too true a flunkey at heart to lay forcible hands on the sacred person of a Duchess.
Linda opened Bertie’s door, and rushed into the room. There her worst fear was realized. Her husband was alone — alone and ghastly pale, lying back with his eyes shut, exhausted, upon his pillow. Then both the nurses must have left the room at once, as she feared, and heaven only could say what Bertie might have done meanwhile, being mad and dangerous in his delirium. He lay breathless now, like a man who has spent his little remaining strength in vain on some wild endeavour.
Linda darted across to the bedside, and felt his fevered brow. The Duke opened his eyes for a second and smiled at her contentedly. He seemed quite happy. His face was like that of one gloating over some accomplished success. Linda couldn’t tell why, but that smile of his filled her with a deeper horror than the sternest repulse. In her agony she almost cried out with an exceeding loud voice. All at once a strange feeling of endless separation between him and her had come over her unawares. Bertie was dying; but do what she could, she couldn’t find it in her heart to stoop down and kiss him.
That last smile he had given her seemed to freeze up the very fountains of love in her marrow. It was a smile of triumph, but ghastly in its malevolence.
As she stood there, leaning over him, her heart fluttering wildly, and her lips parched with horror, the door opened once more, and the first nurse entered. At sight of Linda, bending over her husband’s bed and smoothing the sheet with her hand, she rushed up, apparently terrified.
‘You here, Duchess!’ she cried in a voice of astonishment, not unmixed with repugnance, almost pushing her aside in her haste with her trembling arms. ‘I thought Sir Frederick had forbidden your grace the room! You have no place here. Go back to your boudoir at once, if you know what’s best for you. My assistant and I have sole charge of the patient.’
The Duke opened his eyes dreamily once more, and looked up at the nurse with another ghastly smile and something very like malicious triumph.
‘It’s no matter now,’ he said in a small faint voice. ‘I think she may stop, nurse. Nothing will make much difference to me after this, I expect. Give me some drink. I’m so thirsty — thirsty.’
Linda snatched up a glass that lay on the table by the bedside, and poured him out at once a draught of barley-water from the jug that stood beside it. The nurse, darting forward with a little cry of alarm, almost wrenched it from her hands; but Linda was firm now. She was mistress in her own house, and nobody should thwart her.
‘Sir Frederick or no Sir Frederick,’ she cried passionately, ‘I shall take care of my own husband in such straits as this. Let me alone, I tell you; I shall not leave the room. How do I know whether you two are treating him rightly or wrongly? When I came in here just now, you’d both of you left him entirely by himself — a sick man in his condition! How could you! How dare you! I shall stop here henceforth and watch over him till the end — till he gets well or doesn’t get well. I shall never leave him. I shall sit here night and day. I can’t go away from him.’
‘As your grace pleases,’ the nurse answered, in a very cold voice, watching her suspiciously with cat-like eyes as she held the glass to the Duke’s lips; ‘but my assistant and I will stop here to look after our patient. We’ve orders not to leave him alone with your grace one m
oment.’
Amazed and blinded, Linda took her seat by the bed, and answered nothing. What it could all mean she hardly dared to realize, but, come what might, she would stop there still and do her duty. Not even Bertie’s awful smile should deter her from that. He had dozed off into a comatose sleep now. His breathing was heavy, long, and stertorous.
Presently the second nurse came back with some things in her hand she had taken down to wash. The moment her eye fell on Linda she started back in surprise, and looked inquiringly at her pale companion. Linda could almost see her lips form into the half-unspoken words, ‘Not the Duchess, surely?’ The first nurse nodded a sullen acquiescence, accompanied by a gesture of deprecation, as who should say, ‘I couldn’t help it; not my fault; but let her be now. Anything to avoid making a noise to disturb the patient.’ Linda glanced up and gave the new-comer a nod of polite recognition. The new nurse answered only by a remote inclination of her head and a stolid stare. Never in her life had Linda been treated with such cold contumely before. She felt these women were shunning her like some deadly thing; she felt Bertie by her side was dying, without forgiving her.
The strain of the situation was too terrible for tears. She sat there, mute, like one dazed, her hands folded on her lap, and waited for what she felt was the inevitable end with parched eyes and mouth, and heart that stood still with the intensity of its horror.
By-and-by the first nurse rose suddenly, as if struck by an idea, poured out a drop or two of the barley-water into a glass, tasted it, rolled it on her palate, pursed up her lips judicially, and finally poured back the remainder, undrunk, into the jug, which she regarded for a few seconds with deep deliberation. Then she lifted it in her hands, put it carefully into a corner cupboard, where several other jugs and bottles were already standing, locked the cupboard, and stuck the key in her pocket, and, last of all, touched the knob of the electric bell by the Duke’s bedside.
A housemaid answered the bell immediately.
‘Is any of the men-servants out there?’ the nurse asked under her breath.
‘Yes, miss; there’s a footman a-waiting in the passage by Sir Frederick’s order,’ the girl answered, in the same low tone, darting a compassionate glance at Linda in the corner by the bed-head.
‘Send him in,’ the nurse said laconically. And the man entered. It was the same who had tried to prevent the Duchess from entering.
‘I want you to stop here with me while the other nurse goes downstairs to Sir Frederick,’ the first speaker went on, addressing the footman in a scarcely audible whisper. ‘I mustn’t be left alone with the Duke and Duchess under these circumstances, for fear of consequences. Now, Emily, you go down and get some more barley-water yourself and bring it up straight. When Sir Frederick comes up he’ll want to look at it.’
Linda glanced up hastily, and saw the second nurse depart with a nod of intelligence. The footman, eyeing her hard, stood there respectfully, still as a statue, after the wont of his kind. The chief nurse kept her gaze fixed steadily on Linda. By her side, Bertie was still breathing in the same laboured way, and the bed-clothes were heaving and falling slowly and regularly.
The hours passed away, and no change came. Once, there was a slight murmur at the door, and Linda looked up inquiringly. Somebody had come in? Yes, Sir Frederick stood by her side, and gazed down with his wrinkled small eyes at the patient. But he said nothing. He merely took a chair, and joined her in watching. It was a long, long watch, and all around was deathly silence.
One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock. At half-past four in the morning the doctor watched more anxiously.
‘It generally comes about now in these cases, if it comes at all,’ he whispered to the nurse at his side, utterly ignoring the sick man’s wife, who sat there still at her post, all pale and trembling. ‘The effect gets strongest when the bodily functions are at their lowest ebb. I think he looks worse now. Breath comes and goes feebly.... H’m, I thought so. Pulse scarcely distinguishable.’
Linda looked closer as he spoke, and saw that Bertie’s breath hardly stirred the feather the nurse was holding to his lips. A minute later there came a very faint gasp, a rattle in the throat, a fierce clutch at the bed-clothes. Then the mouth fell open suddenly with an ominous relaxation. Linda leant forward and clasped her hands convulsively upon her strained bosom.
‘Dead!’ she cried with a terrible burst of horror to think he should have died without even having spoken one last kind word to her.
‘Oh yes; he’s dead, sure enough, madam,’ Sir Frederick answered, gazing hard at her. ‘You need be under no apprehensions at all on that score. He’s quite, quite dead.... And now I think your grace had better go back to your own boudoir.’
At his words a second doctor, not seen till then, stepped out from behind the curtain.
‘We’ll take charge of the body,’ he said, with marked gravity. ‘This is my affair. Sir Frederick has called me in to assist him. And we can dispense with your grace’s further attendance.’
CHAPTER XXXIX.
WHAT THE WORLD SAID.
Linda listened as in a dream. His words fell dead upon her. Now all was over, a strange reaction set in. Wearied out with watching, she allowed herself to be led to her own room, and let her maid put her to bed like an overworn child, with passive unresistance. She was dazed with the horror and incomprehensibility of the situation. Her very senses seemed to fail her. She sank at once upon her pillow, in a sort of dreamy, unconscious listlessness: in a few minutes, strange to say, she was sleeping heavily. The barley-water she had supped in Bertie’s room to moisten her parched tongue must have made her drowsy.
When she woke up, it was broad daylight; there were noises in the house of much stir and commotion. She awoke with a start, hardly realizing just at first the full extent of her misfortune. What had happened? Let her think! She was conscious only of a dull aching sense of loss and misery. Something had gone from her life. Something vague and dim. Then she remembered, with a flash, it was Bertie — and more than Bertie.
She rose hurriedly, and, putting on her dressing-gown, moved over to the window and looked out through the blind. She hardly knew why; perhaps it was mere want of fresh air that prompted her; but something made her stand there a minute with her hand hard pressed on her throbbing forehead. As she stood gazing idly, two men, skulking as before, passed one another opposite, with just the same mute look of mutual recognition in their eyes as that she had noticed in the private detectives’. They were not the same two men, however; their faces and dress were totally different; but she remarked at once an extraordinary similarity of type, and build, and walk, and manner about them. Like all detectives, in fact, they were obtrusively unobtrusive in appearance and style. They seemed to proclaim aloud to all the world that they desired nobody to take the slightest notice of their presence.
Many other people were lounging around the street; in fact, a little crowd had gathered near the door, discussing the Duke’s death and its attendant circumstances. But these two were quite different in bearing from all the other loungers; they wore the unmistakable impress of men who lounge for professional purposes. It was their trade to hang about loose and keep a careless eye on people and things without seeming to observe them. The sickening truth came home to Linda’s mind at once. They were watching the house; they were spies — police agents — closely noting the movements of all the inmates.
Her heart sank within her: yet, even so, she hardly admitted to herself the full truth about the situation.
Moving dreamily back, she rang the bell for her maid, and dressed mechanically. The maid preserved a most unwonted silence; scarcely a word was spoken while she combed out her mistress’s hair. A deadly stillness prevailed in the room, made more oppressive by the gloom of the blinds drawn down out of respect to the dead. Linda felt she could hardly bear up against this blow of fate. But for very womanhood’s sake, she bore up and steadied herself.
As soon as she was dressed, some
strange impulse led her afresh to the opposite window, that looked out upon the gardens at the back of the house — the window of her boudoir, where she fancied last night she saw a draped figure pass, crouching and ghost-like, just before she burst wildly into Bertie’s bedroom. Gazing out of it, two men once more riveted her attention in the garden behind. They were dressed like gentlemen, and they walked up and down on the path as if the gardens belonged to them. But they were not inhabitants of the houses around; the same stamp was upon them in unmistakable ways as on the men in front. She knew they, too, were a couple of police detectives.
The house was being watched, then, both front and back. The police were taking note of every man, woman, or child who either entered or left it.
She flung herself on her couch in silent horror and agony.
The day wore away in the same weary, dreary, desolate way as days always do wear away when there’s death in a house. There were the same tedious, distasteful details to look to; the same ill-timed questions of dress and mourning; the same hateful necessity for eating and drinking. Nobody came near her to lighten her sorrow. Linda bore up through it all alone, save for the servants; and even the very servants seemed to shun and mistrust her.
At last, after lunch, a newspaper boy, running hastily down the street, broke the awful silence of the room by bawling, in a half-inaudible shout:
‘Evenin’ Standard, Speshul Edition! Suspicious death of the Dook of Powysland! The Doctor’s Account! Curious Conduck of her grace the Duchess!... Supposed Murder of the Dook of Powysland. ’Ere y’are. Evenin’ Standard, Speshul Edition!’