The Best Crime Stories Ever Told (41 page)

She sat down again beside the doctor and whispered in his ear, and her words were like a breath of hot wind from some Gehenna of the soul.

“Oh, Doctor, I have borne it for six years, and I must speak. No other woman could bear what I have borne, and yet be alive! And I loved him so; you don’t know how I loved him! That was it—that was my crime—”

“Crime?” repeated the doctor.

“Yes, crime! It was impious, don’t you see? But I have been punished. Oh, Doctor, you don’t know what my life is! Listen! Listen! I must tell you. To live with a—At first before I guessed when I used to put my arms round him, and he merely submitted—and then it dawned on me what I was kissing! It is enough to turn a living woman into stone—for I am living, though sometimes I forget it. Yes, I am a live woman, though I live in a grave. Think what it is!—to wonder every night if you will be alive in the morning, to lie down every night in an open grave—to smell death in every corner—every room—to breathe death—to touch it. . . .”

The portière in front of the door shook, a hoopstick parted it, a round white clad bundle supported on a pair of mottled red legs peeped in, pushing a hoop in front of her. The child made no noise. Mrs. Arne seemed to have heard her, however. She slewed round violently as she sat on the sofa beside Dr. Graham, leaving her hot hands clasped in his.

“You ask Dolly,” she exclaimed. “She knows it, too—she feels it.”

“No, no, Alice, this won’t do!” the doctor adjured her very low. Then he raised his voice and ordered the child from the room. He had managed to lift Mrs. Arne’s feet and laid her full length on the sofa by the time the maid reappeared. She had fainted.

He pulled down her eyelids and satisfied himself as to certain facts he had up till now dimly apprehended. When Mrs. Arne’s maid returned, he gave her mistress over to her care and proceeded to Edward Arne’s new study in the basement.

“Morphia!” he muttered to himself, as he stumbled and faltered through gaslit passages, where furtive servants eyed him and scuttled to their burrows.

“What is he burying himself down here for?” he thought. “Is it to get out of her way? They are a nervous pair of them!”

Arne was sunk in a large arm-chair drawn up before the fire. There was no other light, except a faint reflection from the gas-lamp in the road, striking down past the iron bars of the window that was sunk below the level of the street. The room was comfortless and empty, there was little furniture in it except a large bookcase at Arne’s right hand and a table with a Tantalus on it standing some way off. There was a faded portrait in pastel of Alice Arne over the mantelpiece, and beside it, a poor pendant, a pen and ink sketch of the master of the house. They were quite discrepant, in size and medium, but they appeared to look at each other with the stolid attentiveness of newly married people.

“Seedy, Arne?” Graham said.

“Rather, today. Poke the fire for me, will you?”

“I’ve known you quite seven years,” said the doctor cheerfully, “so I presume I can do that . . . There, now! . . . And I’ll presume further—What have we got here?”

He took a small bottle smartly out of Edward Arne’s fingers and raised his eyebrows. Edward Arne had rendered it up agreeably; he did not seem upset or annoyed.

“Morphia. It isn’t a habit. I only got hold of the stuff yesterday—found it about the house. Alice was very jumpy all day, and communicated her nerves to me, I suppose. I’ve none as a rule, but do you know, Graham, I seem to be getting them—feel things a good deal more than I did, and want to talk about them.”

“What, are you growing a soul?” said the doctor carelessly, lighting a cigarette.

“Heaven forbid!” Arne answered equably. “I’ve done very well without it all these years. But I’m fond of old Alice, you know, in my own way. When I was a young man, I was quite different. I took things hardly and got excited about them. Yes, excited. I was wild about Alice, wild! Yes, by Jove! though she has forgotten all about it.”

“Not that, but still it’s natural she should long for some little demonstration of affection now and then . . . and she’d be awfully distressed if she saw you fooling with a bottle of morphia! You know, Arne, after that narrow squeak you had of it six years ago, Alice and I have a good right to consider that your life belongs to us!”

Edward Arne settled in his chair and replied, rather fretfully—

“All very well, but you didn’t manage to do the job thoroughly. You didn’t turn me out lively enough to please Alice. She’s annoyed because when I take her in my arms, I don’t hold her tight enough. I’m too quiet, too languid! . . . Hang it all, Graham, I believe she’d like me to stand for Parliament! . . . Why can’t she let me just go along my own way? Surely a man who’s come through an illness like mine can be let off parlour tricks? All this worry—it culminated the other day when I said I wanted to colonise a room down here, and did, with a spurt that took it out of me horribly,—all this worry, I say, seeing her upset and so on, keeps me low, and so I feel as if I wanted to take drugs to soothe me.”

“Soothe!” said Graham. “This stuff is more than soothing if you take enough of it. I’ll send you something more like what you want, and I’ll take this away, by your leave.”

“I really can’t argue!” replied Arne. “If you see Alice, tell her you find me fairly comfortable and don’t put her off this room. I really like it best. She can come and see me here, I keep a good fire, tell her. . . . I feel as if I wanted to sleep. . . .” he added brusquely.

“You have been indulging already,” said Graham softly. Arne had begun to doze off. His cushion had sagged down, the doctor stooped to rearrange it, carelessly laying the little phial for the moment in a crease of the rug covering the man’s knees.

Mrs. Arne in her mourning dress was crossing the hall as he came to the top of the basement steps and pushed open the swing door. She was giving some orders to Foster, the butler, who disappeared as the doctor advanced.

“You’re about again,” he said, “good girl!”

“Too silly of me,” she said, “to be hysterical! After all these years! One should be able to keep one’s own counsel. But it is over now, I promise I will never speak of it again.”

“We frightened poor Dolly dreadfully. I had to order her out like a regiment of soldiers.”

“Yes, I know. I’m going to her now.”

On his suggestion that she should look in on her husband first she looked askance.

“Down there!”

“Yes, that’s his fancy. Let him be. He is a good deal depressed about himself and you. He notices a great deal more than you think. He isn’t quite as apathetic as you describe him to be. . . . Come here!” He led her into the unlit dining-room a little way. “You expect too much, my dear. You do really! You make too many demands on the vitality you saved.”

“What did one save him for?” she asked fiercely. She continued more quietly, “I know. I am going to be different.”

“Not you,” said Graham fondly. He was very partial to Alice Arne in spite of her silliness. “You’ll worry about Edward till the end of the chapter. I know you. And”—he turned her round by the shoulder so that she fronted the light in the hall—“you elusive thing, let me have a good look at you. . . . Hum! Your eyes, they’re a bit starey. . . .”

He let her go again with a sigh of impotence. Something must be done . . . soon . . . he must think. . . . He got hold of his coat and began to get into it. . . .

Mrs. Arne smiled, buttoned a button for him and then opened the front door, like a good hostess, a very little way. With a quick flirt of his hat he was gone, and she heard the clap of his brougham door and the order “Home.”

“Been saying good-bye to that thief Graham?” said her husband gently, when she entered his room, her pale eyes staring a little, her thin hand busy at the front of her dress.

“Thief? Why? One moment! Where’s your switch?”

She found it and turned on a blaze of light from which her husband seemed to shrink.

“Well, he carried off my drops. Afraid of my poisoning myself, I suppose?”

“Or acquiring the morphia habit,” said his wife in a dull level voice, “as I have.”

She paused. He made no comment. Then, picking up the little phial Dr. Graham had left in the crease of the rug, she spoke—

“You are the thief, Edward, as it happens, this is mine.”

“Is it? I found it knocking about; I didn’t know it was yours. Well, will you give me some?”

“I will, if you like.”

“Well, dear, decide. You know I am in your hands and Graham’s. He was rubbing that into me today.”

“Poor lamb!” she said derisively; “I’d not allow my doctor, or my wife either, to dictate to me whether I should put an end to myself, or not.”

“Ah, but you’ve got a spirit, you see!” Arne yawned. “However, let me have a go at the stuff and then you put it on top of the wardrobe or a shelf, where I shall know it is, but never reach out to get it, I promise you.”

“No, you wouldn’t reach out a hand to keep yourself alive, let alone kill yourself,” said she.“That is you all over, Edward.”

“And don’t you see that is why I did die,” he said, with earnestness unexpected by her. “And then, unfortunately, you and Graham bustled up and wouldn’t let Nature take its course. . . . I rather wish you hadn’t been so officious.”

“And let you stay dead,” said she carelessly. “But at the time I cared for you so much that I should have had to kill myself, or commit suttee like a Bengali widow. Ah, well!”

She reached out for a glass half-full of water that stood on the low ledge of a bookcase close by the arm of his chair. . . . “Will this glass do? What’s in it? Only water? How much morphia shall I give you? An overdose?”

“I don’t care if you do, and that’s a fact.”

“It was a joke, Edward,” she said piteously.

“No joke to me. This fag end of life I’ve clawed hold of, doesn’t interest me. And I’m bound to be interested in what I’m doing or I’m no good. I’m no earthly good now. I don’t enjoy life, I’ve nothing to enjoy it with—in here—” he struck his breast. “It’s like a dull party one goes to by accident. All I want to do is to get into a cab and go home.”

His wife stood over him with the half-full glass in one hand and the little bottle in the other.

Her eyes dilated . . . her chest heaved.

“Edward!” she breathed. “Was it all so useless?”

“Was what useless? Yes, as I was telling you, I go as one in a dream—a bad, bad dream, like the dreams I used to have when I overworked at college. I was brilliant, Alice, brilliant, do you hear? At some cost, I expect! Now I hate people—my fellow creatures. I’ve left them. They come and go, jostling me, and pushing me, on the pavements as I go along, avoiding them. Do you know where they should be, really, in relation to me?”

He rose a little in his seat—she stepped nervously aside, made as if to put down the bottle and the glass she was holding, then thought better of it and continued to extend them mechanically.

“They should be over my head. I’ve already left them and their petty nonsense of living. They mean nothing to me, no more than if they were ghosts walking. Or perhaps, it’s I who am a ghost to them? . . . You don’t understand it. It’s because I suppose you have no imagination. You just know what you want and do your best to get it. You blurt out your blessed petition to your Deity and the idea that you’re irrelevant never enters your head, soft, persistent, High Church thing that you are! . . .”