Five Fatal Words (19 page)

His sister interrupted. "You say your horoscope is based on the fact that you were born on February eighteenth?"

"Of course."

"Did you ever know you weren't?"

Melicent felt her nerves tingling. She saw Donald return his cup untasted to its saucer. A spoon dropped from Theodore Cornwall's hand.

"What do you mean?"

Hannah smiled coldly. "I suspected that you were never told. Funny. All these years you've had faith in a horoscope that wasn't even based on the right birthday."

Theodore reached across the table and gripped his sister's arm. His voice was quavering. "Don't trifle with me! What do you mean? What do you know about my birthday?"

"You celebrate it on the same day as father's; you always did."

"Yes; yes; of course."

Hannah shook her head. "But the day isn't right; it never was. No one ever told you, for it didn't seem to make any possible difference. But you weren't born on the eighteenth but on the seventeenth."

"What are you saying to me? How do you know?"

"Mother told me once. She just happened to mention it to me, years ago; a secret of no real importance, it seemed. It happened this way. Our father had to be away when you were born. You were expected, of course; and it seemed that you might be born on his birthday. He went out of town hoping that; the idea pleased him. So Mother hoped it, too. But you were born at four-fifteen in the afternoon of the day before. To please Father, Mother pretended you were born twelve hours later to bring it upon his birthday; she had everyone else say so; and it was started that way and the eighteenth has always been your birthday--but it never really was."

If Hannah Cornwall had meant to prepare a shock for her brother Theodore, she succeeded beyond any possible expectation. He stood up slowly as she talked. His eyes protruded. His lips dried and his tongue circled them. Sweat broke out on his forehead.

None of the others in the room could have realized what it meant to him, emotionally, to have the beliefs and hopes upon which he had based his life suddenly broken below him.

"Hannah," he whispered, scarcely able to speak. "You know this? You know of what you speak? Take thought and, if you ever loved me, tell me the truth and that only. You say I was born on the day before--the day before--not the day after the day we have always thought."

"The day before," repeated Hannah sternly. "Twelve hours exactly before the hour always given for your birth."

"Then that changes everything! That may kill me--kill me horribly. Do you understand? For Priscilla Loring--everyone--every astrologer who I have ever consulted has told me it is most fortunate that my birth fell on the day it did and not on the day before because it was only a few hours before my birth--that is, before the time I always gave as my hour of birth--that the aspect of the heavens changed from malign to beneficent. So how do you know this, Hannah Cornwall? How do you know this--by hearsay only or by your memory which might have failed you? How do you know--how can I know now this circumstance which means more than everything else in the world to me?"

Melicent watching Hannah saw her hand trembling. The old woman was sorry, she must be sorry now for this terrible effect of her announcement; yet she proceeded.

She produced from her dress the, letter out of the old tin box.

"Our mother, Theodore," Hannah said, "wrote everything that happened in our family to her sister Emily. When our mother died, Aunt Emily gave her letters to me for our family record which I have always kept. It occurred to me to-day that our mother would have written of the circumstances of your birth to Aunt Emily, so I looked through the letters and I found that she did." And Hannah extended to her brother a sheet of faded handwriting.

He seized it and gripped it before him while he read, and then tearing the page apart, he stared aghast at his sister.

"So I am not to die peacefully in bed after fifteen or twenty more years. I am not to—to--Oh, how about me now? How about me now, I say? I'm T, am I? And D and E and A are gone; killed; murdered! Now I'm T; it's come up to me. They'll come to me with their meaningless five-word messages. And I'm not to die peacefully in bed after twenty more safe, quiet years. My stars don't say so! My stars have ceased to say so! They were never my stars that said it! I'm T and they've reached me; and my stars can't save me! Can't save me--"

His eyes rolled. He fainted across the table.

DONALD jumped from his chair and gained the side of his uncle. He picked up the old man in his arms and carried him into the living room where he laid him down on a sofa. Melicent followed with a glass of water and a napkin, and while Donald moistened the lips of the old man, she slapped his hands and soon he began to revive.

Hannah came to the door. She seemed to have retained a grim sense of proportion.

"He's all right, isn't he?" she inquired.

"Soon will be," assured Donald.

"Something had to be done to bring him to his senses. He has been a perfect fool to depend on horoscopes as he has. And imagine--all the time they were based on the wrong day."

Donald wet the napkin again and applied it to his uncle's forehead. Theodore Cornwall drew in a tremulous breath.

A moment later, he opened his eyes. He was trembling and weak. "I fainted, did I? Please excuse me. It was the tremendous shock of learning that the facts upon which I had placed my reliance for all these years--"

Donald reassured him. "It's all right, Uncle. We can understand it. Just lie still. You don't have to explain."

Melicent moved away from the sofa and sat down in a chair. Theodore Cornwall breathed deeply several times, and Hannah took another chair. It was some minutes before the old man sat up on the couch. He made a nervous effort to compose himself but it was plain that he was battling with the fearful implications of the new fact which had caused him to faint.

The two parts of the torn page of the letter, in which his mother had mentioned the circumstances of his birth, had fallen from his fingers when he lost consciousness; now he motioned that he desired them; and Donald picked them up and handed them to him. They all watched him as he reread the handwriting. At last he looked up at his sister. "There seems to be no doubt of it, Hannah."

"There is none, Theodore."

"I recognize Mother's writing. There could have been no possible reason for her stating these facts to her sister, unless they occurred. Yet--yet all these years I have arranged my life to suit the stars of another man. My fates have never fitted myself. And who knows now what my fate may be?" His voice took on a quality of passionate indignation. "Why didn't you tell me all this before?"

"If I had realized the results of your ridiculous superstition, I would have," his sister replied. "But until this came upon us all, it never seemed to make any difference whether you went by the right stars or the wrong. It seemed to me totally absurd."

The man on the couch made a feeble gesture with his hand. "Call it absurd if you like. This is no time for argument. I know what I know and I must live my life by my knowledge. There is now only one thing to do--one thing left for me to do and I must be about it immediately."

Hannah spoke again, although Donald tried to make signs to her not to disturb Theodore any further. "Certainly, there is only one thing left to do. Get together all the horoscopes you have ever had cast, bum them up, forget them--and begin taking rational, reasoned safeguards against the threat that hangs over us."

"You told me," Theodore continued without reference to her remark, "that three messages have been sent to my brothers and sister, three messages that spelled death.

You told me that their names began with D, E and A, and mine begins with T. The old horoscope said I would live to be eighty. What will the new one say?"

"Surely you're not going to have another horoscope read?"

"To-night," Theodore Cornwall replied firmly. "Immediately. This one, based on the true day and hour of my birth, will tell me what to do."

Resolution coupled with anxiety had brought back some of his strength. He rose and left the room. From the hall they heard his voice calling a telephone number and asking urgently for Miss Priscilla Loring. He then identified himself and they heard his anxious explanation of his emergency. Apparently Miss Loring was greatly excited about these things and they could detect relief in Theodore Cornwall's voice when he told her to come over at once.

Hannah Cornwall had locked herself in her room before the astrologist arrived. It was her gesture of protest. But both Donald and Melicent waited to meet Miss Loring.

She was a middle-aged woman. She wore a dress which was very nearly a costume, long and flowing and of the shade known as midnight blue. The bodice of the dress, however, fitted tightly over her more than ample bosom and at the shoulders it became a sort of décolleté, exposing fat, short, pasty white arms. Her eyes were very dark and the pupils were so widely extended that one would have thought the phenomenon had been produced by the application of belladonna. Her hair was dark, copious and loosely piled on top of her head. She had a voice which she had obviously cultivated to a pitch lower than normal.

Theodore Cornwall was impatient to retire for the reading of his new horoscope immediately after he had introduced Melicent and Donald to Miss Loring but he was further delayed by Ahdi Vado who came deferentially into the room.

The Hindu gave no sign of having overheard any of the disturbance in this end of the apartment. He announced in his calm, resonant voice: "The Grand Duchess Strang wishes me to say that she will not appear to bid you a formal good-night, as she is very tired."

It was the custom of the Hindu always to refer to Lydia Cornwall as "The Grand Duchess," although in the 1890's the accuracy of that title had been a subject of considerable diplomatic debate. Whenever Melicent heard the title she was reminded of the Grand Duke who, aside from Donald's father, was the only relative of the Cornwall family she had not now met.

Theodore wanted to dispose of Ahdi Vado quickly and said to him merely, "All right."

But Priscilla Loring had fastened her eyes on the slight, dark-skinned man. "Who is this person ?"

Donald explained. "He is my Aunt Lydia's spiritual adviser."

A rapturous expression appeared on the face of the astrologer. "Ah-ah! A mystic!"

Ahdi Vado bowed. "In my humble way I serve the great soul of nature."

"Wonderful!" Priscilla Loring murmured. "Divine! You must become my friend. I must talk to you." She walked across the room with a tread that was light for a woman of her size and held out her right hand. Ahdi Vado took it and bowed. With her left hand Priscilla Loring made a mystic design in the air.

Theodore interrupted them. "Miss Loring, please. If you have any respect for my agony--"

She turned toward him. "Lead me," she said, "and we will convene with the secrets of the stars."

They left the room. Ahdi Vado went back to the suite occupied by Lydia Cornwall and her maid. Donald walked once or twice across the floor and stopped in front of Melicent. "What do you think of that?"

"I don't know. I honestly don't know."

"I know what you think of it and I'll tell you what you think of it. You think it is nutty, plain nutty. You think that Lydia is a fool to carry that Hindu with her baggage all over the world, and you think that Uncle Theodore is an idiot to be taken in by a pompous figure like this Loring creature. That's what you think."

"Well," Melicent answered, "I can't make them out."

"You mean you can't make out whether or not all this astrology and this yogi stuff is on the level or whether it's a cover for something else? Neither can I."

Donald walked back and forth in the room again. "Three of the generation are gone-have been killed; three remain. They are all under this roof. If only one of my aunts and uncles became impatient to inherit the whole fortune of the family and made some move to hasten the deaths of the others, it would seem that it must be one of the remaining three"--One of the three here with us now. Which is the one, would you say?"

Melicent shuddered. "I couldn't think of accusing any one of them."

Donald rubbed a hand across his head so that his red hair was pushed forward and wholly disheveled.

"Nor can I; but I must not let sentiment and natural feeling confuse me. I go over and over everything that's happened. I think about the terrible days in Guiana when I was trying to decide if I'd be justified in having my father's body examined. I think about the days afterwards when I found out that he might have been poisoned. Then I think over Uncle Everitt dying up there in Connecticut, and Aunt Alice--and the messages they all received. Any one murder might have a special, individual motive; but there is only one possible motive for the killing of the three--to hasten the family inheritance into the hands of Uncle Theodore or Aunt Lydia or Aunt Hannah." He paced the floor silently for a moment.

"Of course, the hastening might be done by intimates of one of three who are left. For instance, if Aunt Lydia inherited the money, the Grand Duke and his party would be pleased--to put it mildly; and I wouldn't put it past Ahdi Vado to look out for himself."

"Nor I," agreed Melicent.

"Then of course Professor Coleman has a very highly special interest in seeing that Aunt Hannah is the last survivor; would you put it past him?"

Melicent had to smile; she couldn't help it, as she recollected the timid, meticulous scholar who was Miss Cornwall's favorite. "I'm afraid I'd have to," she said.

"So would I."

"That brings us to Uncle Theodore--and Miss Priscilla Loring, whose precise place in his affairs I failed to appreciate until to-night. What do you think from what you have seen, of her hold on him?"

"She certainly seems to have a hold on him."

"She has him jumping through hoops for her and eating out of her hand. And did the lady impress you as stupid?"

"Far from it," said Melicent.

"Nor me. She is wholly and completely aware, I should say, of what would happen if Uncle Theodore proves to be the last survivor. Some of the millions undoubtedly would go to his grandiose schemes; but there would be many, many more besides for Priscilla Loring; and she wouldn't have to wait for him to leave it to her. If he gets it, Priscilla is fixed, I would say."