Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (62 page)

‘I warned you it would be dull,’ he said when we met in the smoking-room.

‘It’s tremendously interesting,’ I said. ‘But how about a look round the links?’

‘Unluckily damp always affects my eldest cousin. I’ve got to buy her a new bronchitis-kettle. Arthurs broke her old one yesterday.’

We slipped out to the chemist’s shop in the town, and he bought a large glittering tin thing whose workings he explained.

‘I’m used to this sort of work. I come up here pretty often,’ he said. ‘I’ve the family throat too.’

‘You’re a good man,’ I said. ‘Avery good man.’

He turned towards me in the evening light among the beeches, and his face was changed to what it might have been a generation before.

‘You see,’ he said huskily, ‘There was the youngest – Agnes. Before she fell ill, you know. But she didn’t like leaving her sisters. Never would.’ He hurried on with his odd-shaped load and left me among the ruins of my black theories. The man with that face had done Agnes Moultrie no wrong.

We never played our game. I was waked between two and three in the morning from my hygienic bed by Baxter in an ulster over orange and white pyjamas, which I should never have suspected from his character.

‘My cousin has had some sort of a seizure,’ he said. ‘Will you come? I don’t want to wake the doctor. Don’t want to make a scandal. Quick!’

So I came quickly, and led by the white-haired Arthurs in a jacket and petticoat, entered a double-bedded room reeking with steam and Friar’s Balsam. The electrics were all on. Miss Mary – I knew her by her height – was at the open window, wrestling with Miss Elizabeth, who gripped her round the knees. Her hand was at her throat, which was streaked with blood.

‘She’s done it. She’s done it too!’ Miss Elizabeth panted. ‘Hold her! Help me!’

‘Oh, I say! Woman don’t cut their throats,’ Baxter whispered.

‘My God! Has she cut her throat?’ the maid cried, and with no warning rolled over in a faint. Baxter pushed her under the washbasins, and leaped to hold the gaunt woman who crowed and whistled as she struggled towards the window. He took her by the shoulder, and she struck out wildly.

‘All right! She’s only cut her hand,’ he said. ‘Wet towel – quick!’

While I got that he pushed her backward. Her strength seemed almost as great as his. I swabbed at her throat when I could, and found no mark; then helped him to control her a little. Miss Elizabeth leaped back to bed, wailing like a child.

‘Tie up her hand somehow,’ said Baxter. ‘Don’t let it drip about the place. She’ – he stepped on broken glass in his slippers, ‘She must have smashed a pane.’

Miss Mary lurched towards the open window again, dropped on her knees, her head on the sill, and lay quiet, surrendering the cut hand to me.

‘What did she do?’ Baxter turned towards Miss Elizabeth in the far bed.

‘She was going to throw herself out of the window,’ was the answer. ‘I stopped her, and sent Arthurs for you. Oh, we can never hold up our heads again!’

Miss Mary writhed and fought for breath. Baxter found a shawl which he threw over her shoulders.

‘Nonsense!’ said he. That isn’t like Mary’; but his face worked when he said it.

‘You wouldn’t believe about Aggie, John. Perhaps you will now!’ said Miss Elizabeth. ‘I
saw
her do it, and she’s cut her throat too!’

‘She hasn’t,’ I said. ‘It’s only her hand.’

Miss Mary suddenly broke from us with an indescribable grunt, flew, rather than ran, to her sister’s bed, and there shook her as one furious schoolgirl would shake another.

‘No such thing,’ she croaked. ‘How dare you think so, you wicked little fool?’

‘Get into bed, Mary,’ said Baxter. ‘You’ll catch a chill.’

She obeyed, but sat up with the grey shawl round her lean shoulders, glaring at her sister. ‘I’m better now,’ she crowed. ‘Arthurs let me sit out too long. Where’s Arthurs? The kettle.’

‘Never mind Arthurs,’ said Baxter. ‘
You
get the kettle.’ I hastened to bring it from the side table. ‘Now Mary, as God sees you, tell me what you’ve done.’

His lips were dry, and he could not moisten them with his tongue.

Miss Mary applied herself to the mouth of the kettle, and between indraws of steam said: ‘The spasm came on just now, while I was asleep. I was nearly choking to death. So I went to the window. I’ve done it often before, without waking any one. Bessie’s such an old maid about draughts. I tell you I waschoking to death. I couldn’t manage the catch, and I nearly fell out. That window opens too low. I cut my hand trying to save myself. Who has tied it up in this filthy handkerchief? I wish you had had my throat, Bessie. I never was nearer dying!’ She scowled on us all impartially, while her sister sobbed.

From the bottom of the bed we heard a quivering voice: ‘Is she dead? Have they took her away? Oh, I never could bear the sight o’ blood!’

‘Arthurs,’ said Miss Mary, ‘you are an hireling. Go away!’

It is my belief that Arthurs crawled out on all fours, but I was busy picking up broken glass from the carpet.

Then Baxter, seated by the side of the bed, began to cross-examine in a voice I scarcely recognised. No one could for an instant have doubted the genuine rage of Miss Mary against her sister, her cousin, or her maid; and that the doctor should have been called in – for she did me the honour of calling me doctor – was the last drop. She was choking with her throat; had rushed to the window for air; had near pitched out, and in catching at the window bars had cut her hand. Over and over she made this clear to the intent Baxter. Then she turned on her sister and tongue-lashed her savagely.

‘You mustn’t blame me,’ Miss Bessie faltered at last. ‘You know what we think of night and day.’

‘I’m coming to that,’ said Baxter. ‘Listen to me. What
you
did, Mary, misled four people into thinking you – you meant to do away with yourself.’

‘Isn’t one suicide in the family enough? Oh God, help and pity us! You
couldn’t
have believed that!’ she cried.

‘The evidence was complete. Now, don’t you think,’ Baxter’s finger wagged under her nose – ‘
can’t
you think that poor Aggie did the same thing at Holmescroft when she fell out of the window?’

‘She had the same throat,’ said Miss Elizabeth. ‘Exactly the same symptoms. Don’t you remember, Mary?’

‘Which was her bedroom?’ I asked of Baxter in an undertone.

‘Over the south verandah, looking on to the tennis lawn.’

‘I nearly fell out of that very window when I was atHolmescroft – opening it to get some air. The sill doesn’t come much above your knees,’ I said.

‘You hear that, Mary? Mary, do you hear what this gentleman says? Won’t you believe that what nearly happened to you must have happened to poor Aggie that night? For God’s sake – for her sake – Mary,
won’t
you believe?’

There was a long silence while the steam kettle puffed.

‘If I could have proof – if I could have proof,’ said she, and broke into most horrible tears.

Baxter motioned to me, and I crept away to my room, and lay awake till morning, thinking more specially ofthe dumb Thing at Holmescroft which wished to explain itself. I hated Miss Mary as perfectly as though I had known her for twenty years, but I felt that, alive or dead, I should not like her to condemn me.

Yet at mid-day, when I saw Miss Mary in her bath-chair, Arthurs behind and Baxter and Miss Elizabeth on either side, in the park-like grounds of the Hydro, I found it difficult to arrange my words.

‘Now that you know all about it,’ said Baxter aside, after the first strangeness of our meeting was over, ‘it’s only fair to tell you that my poor cousin did not die in Holmescroft at all. She was dead when they found her under the window in the morning. Just dead.’

‘Under that laburnum outside the window?’ I asked, for I suddenly remembered the crooked evil thing.

‘Exactly. She broke the tree in falling. But no death has ever taken place
in
the house, so far as we were concerned. You can make yourself quite easy on that point. Mr M’Leod’s extra thousand for what you called the “clean bill of health” was something towards my cousins’ estate when we sold. It was my duty as their lawyer to get it for them – at any cost to my own feelings.’

I know better than to argue when the English talk about their duty. So I agreed with my solicitor.

‘Their sister’s death must have been a great blow to your cousins,’ I went on. The bath-chair was behind me.

‘Unspeakable,’ Baxter whispered. ‘They brooded on it dayand night. No wonder. If their theory of poor Aggie making away with herself was correct, she was eternally lost!’

‘Do you believe that she made away with herself?’

‘No, thank God! Never have! And after what happened to Mary last night, I see perfectly what happened to poor Aggie. She had the family throat too. By the way, Mary thinks you are a doctor. Otherwise she wouldn’t like your having been in her room.’

‘Very good. Is she convinced now about her sister’s death?’

‘She’d give anything to be able to believe it, but she’s a hard woman, and brooding along certain lines makes one groovy. I have sometimes been afraid for her reason – on the religious side, don’t you know. Elizabeth doesn’t matter. Brain of a hen. Always had.’

Here Arthurs summoned me to the bath-chair and the ravaged face, beneath its knitted Shedand wool hood, of Miss Mary Moultrie.

‘I need not remind you, I hope, of the seal of secrecy – absolute secrecy – in your profession,’ she began. ‘Thanks to my cousin’s and my sister’s stupidity, you have found out—’ she blew her nose.

‘Please don’t excite her, sir,’ said Arthurs at the back.

‘But, my dear Miss Moultrie, I only know what I’ve seen, of course, but it seems to me that what you thought was a tragedy in your sister’s case, turns out, on your own evidence, so to speak, to have been an accident – a dreadfully sad one – but absolutely an accident.’

‘Do you believe that too?’ she cried. ‘Or are you only saying it to comfort me?’

‘I believe it from the bottom of my heart. Come down to Holmescroft for an hour – for half an hour – and satisfy yourself.’

‘Of what? You don’t understand. I see the house every day – every night. I am always there in spirit – waking or sleeping. I couldn’t face it in reality.’

‘But you must,’ I said. ‘If you go there in the spirit the greater need for you to go there in the flesh. Go to your sister’s room once more, and see the window – I nearly fell out of itmyself. It’s – it’s awfully low and dangerous. That would convince you,’ I pleaded.

‘Yet Aggie had slept in that room for years,’ she interrupted.

‘You’ve slept in your room here for a long time, haven’t you? But you nearly fell out of the window when you were choking.’

‘That is true. That is one thing true,’ she nodded. ‘And I might have been killed as – perhaps – Aggie was killed.’

‘In that case your own sister and cousin and maid would have said you had committed suicide, Miss Moultrie. Come down to Holmescroft, and go over the place just once.’

‘You are lying,’ she said quite quietly. ‘You don’t want me to come down to see a window. It is something else. I warn you we are Evangelicals. We don’t believe in prayers for the dead. “As the tree falls—” ’

‘Yes. I daresay. But you persist in thinking that your sister committed suicide—’

‘No! No! I have always prayed that I might have misjudged her.’

Arthurs at the bath-chair spoke up: ‘Oh, Miss Mary! you
would
’ave it from the first that poor Miss Aggie ’ad made away with herself; an’, of course, Miss Bessie took the notion from you. Only Master – Mister John stood out, and – and I’d ’ave taken my Bible oath
you
was making away with yourself last night.’

Miss Mary leaned towards me, one finger on my sleeve.

‘If going to Holmescroft kills me,’ she said, ‘you will have the murder of a fellow-creature on your conscience for all eternity.’

‘I’ll risk it,’ I answered. Remembering what torment the mere reflection of her torments had cast on Holmescroft, and remembering, above all, the dumb Thing that filled the house with its desire to speak, I felt that there might be worse things.

Baxter was amazed at the proposed visit, but at a nod from that terrible woman went off to make arrangements. Then I sent a telegram to M’Leod bidding him and his vacate Holmescroft for that afternoon. Miss Mary should be alone with her dead, as I had been alone.

I expected untold trouble in transporting her, but to do her justice, the promise given for the journey, she underwent it without murmur, spasm, or unnecessary word. Miss Bessie, pressed in a corner by the window, wept behind her veil, and from time to time tried to take hold of her sister’s hand. Baxter wrapped himself in his newly-found happiness as selfishly as a bridegroom, for he sat still and smiled.

‘So long as I know that Aggie didn’t make away with herself,’ he explained, ‘I tell you frankly I don’t care what happened. She’s as hard as a rock – Mary. Always was.
She
won’t die.’

We led her out on to the platform like a blind woman, and so got her into the fly. The half-hour crawl to Holmescroft was the most racking experience of the day. M’Leod had obeyed my instructions. There was no one visible in the house or the gardens; and the front door stood open.

Miss Mary rose from beside her sister, stepped forth first, and entered the hall.

‘Come, Bessie,’ she cried.

‘I daren’t. Oh, I daren’t.’

‘Come!’ Her voice had altered. I felt Baxter start. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Baxter. ‘She’s running up the stairs. We’d better follow.’

‘Let’s wait below. She’s going to the room.’

We heard the door of the bedroom I knew open and shut, and we waited in the lemon-coloured hall, heavy with the scent of flowers.

‘I’ve never been into it since it was sold,’ Baxter sighed. ‘What a lovely restful place it is! Poor Aggie used to arrange the flowers.’

‘Restful?’ I began, but stopped of a sudden, for I felt all over my bruised soul that Baxter was speaking truth. It was a light, spacious, airy house, full of the sense of well-being and peace – above all things, of peace. I ventured into the dining-room where the thoughtful M’Leods had left a small fire. There was no terror there, present or lurking; and in the drawing-room, which for good reasons we had never cared to enter, the sunand the peace and the scent of the flowers worked together as is fit in an inhabited house. When I returned to the hall, Baxter was sweetly asleep on a couch, looking most unlike a middle-aged solicitor who had spent a broken night with an exacting cousin.