The Best Crime Stories Ever Told (40 page)

“I suppose so, but then—she had no husband. He died, she told me, years ago. She had adored him, she said—”

“Is she pretty?”

“Pretty! Well, I hardly noticed. Let me see! Oh, yes, I suppose she was pretty—no, now I think of it, she would be too worn and faded to be what you call pretty.”

Esther smiled.

“Well, we sat there together for quite an hour, then the clock of Chelsea church struck eleven, and she got up and said ‘Good-bye,’ holding out her hand quite naturally, as if our meeting and conversation had been nothing out of the common. There was a sound like a dead leaf trailing across the walk and she was gone.”

“Didn’t you ask if you should see her again?”

“That would have been a mean advantage to take.”

“You might have offered to see her home.”

“I saw she did not mean me to.”

“She was a lady, you say,” pondered Esther. “How was she dressed?”

“Oh, all right, like a lady—in black—mourning, I suppose. She has dark crinkly hair, and her eyebrows are very thin and arched—I noticed that in the dusk.”

“Does this photograph remind you of her?” asked Esther suddenly, taking him to the mantelpiece.

“Rather!”

“Alice! Oh, it couldn’t be—she is not a widow, her husband is alive—has your friend any children?”

“Yes, one, she mentioned it.”

“How old?”

“Six years old, I think she said. She talks of the ‘responsibility of bringing up an orphan.’”

“George, what time is it?” Esther asked suddenly.

“About nine o’clock.”

“Would you mind coming out with me?”

“I should like it. Where shall we go?”

“To St. Adhelm’s! It is close by here. There is a special late service tonight, and Mrs. Arne is sure to be there.”

“Oh, Esther—curiosity!”

“No, not mere curiosity. Don’t you see if it is my Mrs. Arne who talked to you like this, it is very serious? I have thought her ill for a long time; but as ill as that—”

At St. Adhelm’s Church, Esther Graham pointed out a woman who was kneeling beside a pillar in an attitude of intense devotion and abandonment. She rose from her knees, and turned her rapt face up towards the pulpit whence the Reverend Ralph Bligh was holding his impassioned discourse. George Graham touched his cousin on the shoulder, and motioned to her to leave her place on the outermost rank of worshippers.

“That is the woman!” said he.

“Mem.: to go and see Mrs. Arne.” The doctor came across this note in his blotting-pad one day six weeks later. His daughter was out of town. He had heard nothing of the Arnes since her departure. He had promised to go and see her. He was a little conscience-stricken. Yet another week elapsed before he found time to call upon the daughter of his old tutor.

At the corner of Tite Street he met Mrs. Arne’s husband, and stopped. A doctor’s professional kindliness of manner is, or ought to be, independent of his personal likings and dislikings, and there was a pleasant cordiality about his greeting which should have provoked a corresponding fervour on the part of Edward Arne.

“How are you, Arne?” Graham said. “I was on my way to call on your wife.”

“Ah—yes!” said Edward Arne, with the ascending inflection of polite acquiescence. A ray of blue from his eyes rested transitorily on the doctor’s face, and in that short moment the latter noted its intolerable vacuity, and for the first time in his life he felt a sharp pang of sympathy for the wife of such a husband.

“I suppose you are off to your club?—er—good bye!” he wound up abruptly. With the best will in the world he somehow found it almost impossible to carry on a conversation with Edward Arne, who raised his hand to his hat-brim in token of salutation, smiled sweetly, and walked on.

“He really is extraordinarily good-looking,” reflected the doctor, as he watched him down the street and safely over the crossing with a certain degree of solicitude for which he could not exactly account. “And yet one feels one’s vitality ebbing out at the finger-ends as one talks to him. I shall begin to believe in Esther’s absurd fancies bout him soon. Ah, there’s the little girl!” he exclaimed, as he turned into Cheyne Walk and caught sight of her with her nurse, making violent demonstrations to attract his attention. “She is alive, at any rate. How is your mother, Dolly?” he asked.

“Quite well, thank you,” was the child’s reply. She added, “She’s crying. She sent me away because I looked at her. So I did. Her cheeks are quite red.”

“Run away—run away and play!” said the doctor nervously. He ascended the steps of the house, and rang the bell very gently and neatly.

“Not at—” began Foster, with the intonation of polite falsehood, but stopped on seeing the doctor, who, with his daughter, was a privileged person. “Mrs. Arne will see you, Sir.”

“Mrs. Arne is not alone?” he said interrogatively.

“Yes, Sir, quite alone. I have just taken tea in.”

Dr. Graham’s doubts were prompted by the low murmur as of a voice, or voices, which came to him through the open door of the room at the head of the stairs. He paused and listened while Foster stood by, merely remarking, “Mrs. Arne do talk to herself sometimes, Sir.”

It was Mrs. Arne’s voice—the doctor recognised it now. It was not the voice of a sane or healthy woman. He at once mentally removed his visit from the category of a morning call, and prepared for a semi-professional inquiry.

“Don’t announce me,” he said to Foster, and quietly entered the back drawing-room, which was separated by a heavy tapestry portière from the room where Mrs. Arne sat, with an open book on the table before her, from which she had been apparently reading aloud. Her hands were now clasped tightly over her face, and when, presently, she removed them and began feverishly to turn page after page of her book, the crimson of her cheeks was seamed with white where her fingers had impressed themselves.

The doctor wondered if she saw him, for though her eyes were fixed in his direction, there was no apprehension in them. She went on reading, and it was the text, mingled with passionate interjection and fragmentary utterances, of the Burial Service that met his ears.

“‘For as in Adam all die!’ All die! It says all! For he must reign . . . The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death. What shall they do if the dead rise not at all! . . . I die daily! . . . Daily! No, no, better get it over . . . dead and buried . . . out of sight, out of mind . . . under a stone. Dead men don’t come back . . . Go on! Get it over. I want to hear the earth rattle on the coffin, and then I shall know it is done. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit!” Oh, what did I do? What have I done? Why did I wish it so fervently? Why did I pray for it so earnestly? God gave me my wish—”

“Alice! Alice!” groaned the doctor.

She looked up. “‘When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption—’ ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth—’ Yes, that is it. ‘After death, though worms destroy this body—’”

She flung the book aside and sobbed.

“That is what I was afraid of. My God! My God! Down there—in the dark—for ever and ever and ever! I could not bear to think of it! My Edward! And so I interfered . . . and prayed . . . and prayed till . . . Oh! I am punished. Flesh and blood could not inherit! I kept him there—I would not let him go . . . I kept him . . . I prayed . . . I denied him Christian burial. . . . Oh, how could I know. . . .”

“Good heavens, Alice!” said Graham, coming sensibly forward, “what does this mean? I have heard of schoolgirls going through the marriage service by themselves, but the burial service—”

He laid down his hat and went on severely, “What have you to do with such things? Your child is flourishing—your husband alive and here—”

“And who kept him here?” interrupted Alice Arne fiercely, accepting the fact of his appearance without comment.

“You did,” he answered quickly, “with your care and tenderness. I believe the warmth of your body, as you lay beside him for that halfhour, maintained the vital heat during that extraordinary suspension of the heart’s action, which made us all give him up for dead. You were his best doctor, and brought him back to us.”

“Yes, it was I—it was I—you need not tell me it was I!”

“Come, be thankful!” he said cheerfully. “Put that book away, and give me some tea, I’m very cold.”

“Oh, Dr. Graham, how thoughtless of me!” said Mrs. Arne, rallying at the slight imputation on her politeness he had purposely made. She tottered to the bell and rang it before he could anticipate her.

“Another cup,” she said quite calmly to Foster, who answered it. Then she sat down quivering all over with the suddenness of the constraint put upon her.

“Yes, sit down and tell me all about it,” said Dr. Graham good-humouredly, at the same time observing her with the closeness he gave to difficult cases.

“There is nothing to tell,” she said simply, shaking her head, and futilely altering the position of the tea-cups on the tray. “It all happened years ago. Nothing can be done now. Will you have sugar?”

He drank his tea and made conversation. He talked to her of some Dante lectures she was attending; of some details connected with her child’s Kindergarten classes. These subjects did not interest her. There was a subject she wished to discuss, he could see that a question trembled on her tongue, and tried to lead up to it.

She introduced it herself, quite quietly, over a second cup. “Sugar, Dr. Graham? I forget. Dr. Graham, tell me, do you believe that prayers—wicked unreasonable prayers—are granted?”

He helped himself to another slice of bread and butter before answering.

“Well,” he said slowly, “it seems hard to believe that every fool who has a voice to pray with, and a brain where to conceive idiotic requests with, should be permitted to interfere with the economy of the universe. As a rule, if people were long-sighted enough to see the result of their petitions, I fancy very few of us would venture to interfere.”

Mrs. Arne groaned.

She was a good Churchwoman, Graham knew, and he did not wish to sap her faith in any way, so he said no more, but inwardly wondered if a too rigid interpretation of some of the religious dogmas of the Vicar of St. Adhelm’s, her spiritual adviser, was not the clue to her distress. Then she put another question—“Eh! What?” he said. “Do I believe in ghosts? I will believe you if you will tell me you have seen one.”

“You know, Doctor,” she went on, “I was always afraid of ghosts—of spirits—things unseen. I couldn’t ever read about them. I could not bear the idea of some one in the room with me that I could not see. There was a text that always frightened me that hung up in my room: ‘Thou, God, seest me!’ It frightened me when I was a child, whether I had been doing wrong or not. But now,” shuddering, “I think there are worse things than ghosts.”

“Well, now, what sort of things?” he asked good-humouredly. “Astral bodies—?”

She leaned forward and laid her hot hand on his.

“Oh, Doctor, tell me, if a spirit—without the body we know it by—is terrible, what of a body”—her voice sank to a whisper, “a body—senseless—lonely—stranded on this earth—without a spirit?”

She was watching his face anxiously. He was divided between a morbid inclination to laugh and the feeling of intense discomfort provoked by this wretched scene. He longed to give the conversation a more cheerful turn, yet did not wish to offend her by changing it too abruptly.

“I have heard of people not being able to keep body and soul together,” he replied at last, “but I am not aware that practically such a division of forces has ever been achieved. And if we could only accept the theory of the de-spiritualised body, what a number of antipathetic people now wandering about in the world it would account for!”

The piteous gaze of her eyes seemed to seek to ward off the blow of his misplaced jocularity.

He left his seat and sat down on the couch beside her.

“Poor child! poor girl! you are ill, you are over-excited. What is it? Tell me,” he asked her as tenderly as the father she had lost in early life might have done. Her head sank on his shoulder.

“Are you unhappy?” he asked her gently.

“Yes!”

“You are too much alone. Get your mother or your sister to come and stay with you.”

“They won’t come,” she wailed. “They say the house is like a grave. Edward has made himself a study in the basement. It’s an impossible room—but he has moved all his things in, and I can’t—I won’t go to him there. . . .”

“You’re wrong. For it’s only a fad,” said Graham, “he’ll tire of it. And you must see more people somehow. It’s a pity my daughter is away. Had you any visitors today?”

“Not a soul has crossed the threshold for eighteen days.”

“We must change all that,” said the doctor vaguely. “Meantime you must cheer up. Why, you have no need to think of ghosts and graves—no need to be melancholy—you have your husband and your child—”

“I have my child—yes.”

The doctor took hold of Mrs. Arne by the shoulder and held her a little away from him. He thought he had found the cause of her trouble—a more commonplace one than he had supposed.

“I have known you, Alice, since you were a child,” he said gravely. “Answer me! You love your husband, don’t you?”

“Yes.” It was as if she were answering futile prefatory questions in the witness-box. Yet he saw by the intense excitement in her eyes that he had come to the point she feared, and yet desired to bring forward.

“And he loves you?”

She was silent.

“Well, then, if you love each other, what more can you want? Why do you say you have only your child in that absurd way?”

She was still silent, and he gave her a little shake.

“Tell me, have you and he had any difference lately? Is there any—coldness—any—temporary estrangement between you?”

He was hardly prepared for the burst of foolish laughter that proceeded from the demure Mrs. Arne as she rose and confronted him, all the blood in her body seeming for the moment to rush to her usually pale cheeks.

“Coldness! Temporary estrangement! If that were all! Oh, is every one blind but me? There is all the world between us!—all the difference between this world and the next!”