Silent Nights (19 page)

The explosion which followed was stunning; but Sonia scarcely noticed it, in her terror.

The unearthly violet glare had revealed to her a figure which she had previously overlooked.

It was seated in a chair, its hand supporting its peaked chin, and its pallid, clean-shaven features nearly hidden by a familiar broad-brimmed felt hat, which—together with the black cape—gave her the clue to its identity.

It was Hubert Poke.

***

Three o'clock
.

Sonia heard it strike, as her memory began to reproduce, with horrible fidelity, every word of Poke's conversation on murder.

“Artistic strangulation.” She pictured the cruel agony of life leaking—bubble by bubble, gasp by gasp. It would be slow—for he had boasted of a method which left no tell-tale marks.

“Another death,” she thought dully. “If it happens everyone will say that the Waxworks have killed me. What a story…Only, I shall not write it up.”

***

The tramp of feet rang out on the pavement below. It might have been the policeman on his beat; but Sonia wanted to feel that young Wells was still faithful to his post.

She looked up at the window, set high in the wall, and, for a moment, was tempted to shout. But the idea was too desperate. If she failed to attract outside attention, she would seal her own fate, for Poke would be prompted to hasten her extinction.

“Awful to feel he's so near, and yet I cannot reach him,” she thought. “It makes it so much worse.”

She crouched there, starting and sweating at every faint sound in the darkness. The rain, which still pattered on the sky-light, mimicked footsteps and whispers. She remembered her dream and the nightmare spring and clutch.

It was an omen. At any moment it would come…

Her fear jolted her brain. For the first time she had a glimmer of hope.

“I didn't see him before the flash, because he looked exactly like one of the waxworks. Could I hide among them, too?” she wondered.

She knew that her white coat alone revealed her position to him. Holding her breath, she wriggled out of it, and hung it on the effigy of Charles II. In her black coat, with her handkerchief-scarf tied over her face, burglar fashion, she hoped that she was invisible against the sable-draped walls.

Her knees shook as she crept from her shelter. When she had stolen a few yards, she stopped to listen…In the darkness, someone was astir. She heard a soft padding ding of feet, moving with the certainty of one who sees his goal.

Her coat glimmered in her deserted corner.

In a sudden panic, she increased her pace, straining her ears for other sounds. She had reached the far end of the Gallery where no gleam from the window penetrated the gloom. Blindfolded and muffled, she groped her way towards the alcoves which held the tableaux.

Suddenly she stopped, every nerve in her body quivering. She had heard a thud, like rubbered soles alighting after a spring.

“He knows now.” Swift on the trail of her thought flashed another. “He will look for me. Oh,
quick
!”

She tried to move, but her muscles were bound, and she stood as though rooted to the spot, listening. It was impossible to locate the footsteps. They seemed to come from every quarter of the Gallery. Sometimes they sounded remote, but, whenever she drew a freer breath, a sudden creak of the boards close to where she stood made her heart leap.

At last she reached the limit of endurance. Unable to bear the suspense of waiting, she moved on.

Her pursuer followed her at a distance. He gained on her, but still withheld his spring. She had the feeling that he held her at the end of an invisible string.

“He's playing with me, like a cat with a mouse,” she thought.

If he had seen her, he let her creep forward until the darkness was no longer absolute. There were gradations in its density, so that she was able to recognize the first alcove. Straining her eyes, she could distinguish the outlines of the bed where the Virtuous Man made his triumphant exit from life, surrounded by a flock of his sorrowing family and their progeny.

Slipping inside the circle, she added one more mourner to the tableau.

***

The minutes passed, but nothing happened. There seemed no sound save the tiny gong beating inside her temples. Even the raindrops had ceased to patter on the sky-light.

Sonia began to find the silence more deadly than noise. It was like the lull before the storm. Question after question came rolling into her mind.

“Where is he? What will he do next? Why doesn't he strike a light?”

As though someone were listening in to her thoughts, she suddenly heard a faint splutter as of an ignited match. Or it might have been the click of an exhausted electric torch.

With her back turned to the room, she could see no light. She heard the half-hour strike, with a faint wonder that she was still alive.

“What will have happened before the next quarter?” she asked.

Presently she began to feel the strain of her pose, which she held as rigidly as any artist's model. For the time—if her presence were not already detected—her life depended on her immobility.

As an overpowering weariness began to steal over her a whisper stirred in her brain:

“The alderman was found dead on a bed.”

The newspaper account had not specified which especial tableau had been the scene of the tragedy, but she could not remember another alcove which held a bed. As she stared at the white dimness of the quilt she seemed to see it blotched with a dark, sprawling form, writhing under the grip of long fingers.

To shut out the suggestion of her fancy, she closed her eyes. The cold, dead air in the alcove was sapping her exhausted vitality, so that once again she began to nod. She dozed as she stood, rocking to and fro on her feet.

Her surroundings grew shadowy. Sometimes she knew that she was in the alcove, but at others she strayed momentarily over strange borders…She was back in the summer, walking in a garden with young Wells. Roses and sunshine…

She awoke with a start at the sound of heavy breathing. It sounded close to her—almost by her side. The figure of a mourner kneeling by the bed seemed to change its posture slightly.

Instantly maddened thoughts began to flock and flutter wildly inside her brain.

“Who was it? Was it Hubert Poke? Would history be repeated? Was she doomed also to be strangled inside the alcove? Had Fate led her there?”

She waited, but nothing happened. Again she had the sensation of being played with by a master mind—dangled at the end of his invisible string.

Presently she was emboldened to steal from the alcove, to seek another shelter. But though she held on to the last flicker of her will, she had reached the limit of endurance. Worn out with the violence of her emotions and physically spent from the strain of long periods of standing, she staggered as she walked.

She blundered round the Gallery, without any sense of direction, colliding blindly with the groups of waxwork figures. When she reached the window her knees shook under her and she sank to the ground—dropping immediately into a sleep of utter exhaustion.

***

She awoke with a start as the first grey gleam of dawn was stealing into the Gallery. It fell on the row of waxworks, imparting a sickly hue to their features, as though they were creatures stricken with plague.

It seemed to Sonia that they were waiting for her to wake. Their peaked faces were intelligent and their eyes held interest, as though they were keeping some secret.

She pushed back her hair, her brain still thick with clouded memories. Disconnected thoughts began to stir, to slide about…Then suddenly her mind cleared, and she sprang up—staring at a figure wearing a familiar black cape.

Hubert Poke was also waiting for her to wake.

He sat in the same chair, and in the same posture, as when she had first seen him, in the flash of lightning. He looked as though he had never moved from his place—as though he could not move. His face had not the appearance of flesh.

As Sonia stared at him, with the feeling of a bird hypnotized by a snake, a doubt began to gather in her mind. Growing bolder, she crept closer to the figure.

It was a waxwork—a libellous representation of the actor—Kean.

Her laugh rang joyously through the Gallery as she realized that she had passed a night of baseless terrors, cheated by the power of imagination. In her relief she turned impulsively to the waxworks.

“My congratulations,” she said. “You are my masters.”

They did not seem entirely satisfied by her homage, for they continued to watch her with an expression half-benevolent and half-sinister.

“
Wait!
” they seemed to say.

Sonia turned from them and opened her bag to get out her mirror and comb. There, among a jumble of notes, letters, lipsticks and powder-compresses, she saw the electric torch.

“
Of course!
” she cried. “I remember now, I put it there. I was too windy to think properly…Well, I have my story. I'd better get my coat.”

The Gallery seemed smaller in the returning light. As she approached Charles Stuart, who looked like an umpire in her white coat, she glanced down the far end of the room, where she had groped in its shadows before the pursuit of imaginary footsteps.

A waxwork was lying prone on the floor. For the second time she stood and gazed down upon a familiar black cape—a broad-brimmed conspirator's hat. Then she nerved herself to turn the figure so that its face was visible.

She gave a scream. There was no mistaking the glazed eyes and ghastly grin. She was looking down on the face of a dead man.

It was Hubert Poke.

The shock was too much for Sonia. She heard a singing in her ears, while a black mist gathered before her eyes. For the first time in her life she fainted.

When she recovered consciousness she forced herself to kneel beside the body and cover it with its black cape. The pallid face resembled a death-mask, which revealed only too plainly the lines of egotism and cruelty in which it had been moulded by a gross spirit.

Yet Sonia felt no repulsion—only pity. It was Christmas morning, and he was dead, while her own portion was life triumphant. Closing her eyes, she whispered a prayer of supplication for his warped soul.

Presently, as she grew calmer, her mind began to work on the problem of his presence. His motive seemed obvious. Not knowing that she had changed her plan, he had concealed himself in the Gallery, in order to poach her story.

“He was in the Hall of Horrors at first,” she thought, remembering the opened door. “When he came out he hid at this end. We never saw each other, because of the waxworks between us; but we heard each other.”

She realized that the sounds which had terrified her had not all been due to imagination, while it was her agency which had converted the room into a whispering gallery of strange murmurs and voices. The clue to the cause of death was revealed by his wrist-watch, which had smashed when he fell. Its hands had stopped at three minutes to three, proving that the flash and explosion of the thunderbolt had been too much for his diseased heart—already overstrained by superstitious fears.

***

Sonia shuddered at a mental vision of his face, distraught with terror and pulped by raw primal impulses, after a night spent in a madman's world of phantasy.

She turned to look at the waxworks. At last she understood what they seemed to say.

“
But for Us, you should have met—at dawn
.”

“Your share shall be acknowledged, I promise you,” she said, as she opened her notebook.

***

Eight o'clock. The Christmas bells are ringing and it is wonderful just to be alive. I'm through the night, and none the worse for the experience, although I cracked badly after three o'clock. A colleague who, unknown to me, was also concealed in the Gallery has met with a tragic fate, caused, I am sure, by the force of suggestion. Although his death is due to heart-failure, the superstitious will certainly claim it is another victory for the Waxworks.

Cambric Tea

Marjorie Bowen

Marjorie Bowen was one of the pen-names used by Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long (1885–1952). She wrote her first novel,
The Viper of Milan
, in her teens, and the need to earn money for her impoverished family caused her to become exceptionally productive. Eventually, she became so prolific that she found it necessary to adopt a string of (predominantly male) pseudonyms, including George R. Preedy, John Winch and Robert Paye.

Bowen's output was varied, both in content and quality, but much of the best work published under her own name touched on the supernatural. She had the knack of creating an atmosphere of gothic horror, and Graham Greene cited her as an influence. “Cambric Tea” is a well-known story, and one of her finest.

***

The situation was bizarre; the accurately trained mind of Bevis Holroyd was impressed foremost by this; that the opening of a door would turn it into tragedy.

“I am afraid I can't stay,” he had said pleasantly, humouring a sick man; he was too young and had not been long enough completely successful to have a professional manner but a certain balanced tolerance just showed in his attitute to this prostrate creature.

“I've got a good many claims on my time,” he added, “and I'm afraid it would be impossible. And it isn't the least necessary, you know. You're quite all right. I'll come back after Christmas if you really think it worth while.”

The patient opened one eye; he was lying flat on his back in a deep, wide-fashioned bed hung with a thick, dark, silk-lined tapestry; the room was dark for there were thick curtains of the same material drawn half across the windows, rigidly excluding all save a moiety of the pallid winter light; to make his examination Dr Holroyd had had to snap on the electric light that stood on the bedside table; he thought it a dreary unhealthy room, but had hardly found it worth while to say as much.

The patient opened one eye; the other lid remained fluttering feebly over an immobile orb.

He said in a voice both hoarse and feeble:

“But, doctor, I'm being poisoned.”

Professional curiosity and interest masked by genial incredulity instantly quickened the doctor's attention.

“My dear sir,” he smiled, “poisoned by this nasty bout of 'flu you mean, I suppose—”

“No,” said the patient, faintly and wearily dropping both lids over his blank eyes, “by my wife.”

“That's an ugly sort of fancy for you to get hold of,” replied the doctor instantly. “Acute depression—we must see what we can do for you—”

The sick man opened both eyes now; he even slightly raised his head as he replied, not without dignity:

“I fetched you from London, Dr Holroyd, that you might deal with my case impartially—from the local man there is no hope of that, he is entirely impressed by my wife.”

Dr Holroyd made a movement as if to protest but a trembling sign from the patient made him quickly subsist.

“Please let me speak.
She
will come in soon and I shall have no chance. I sent for you secretly, she knows nothing about that. I had heard you very well spoken of—as an authority on this sort of thing. You made a name over the Pluntre murder case as witness for the Crown.”

“I don't specialize in murder,” said Dr Holroyd, but his keen handsome face was alight with interest. “And I don't care much for this kind of case—Sir Harry.”

“But you've taken it on,” murmured the sick man. “You couldn't abandon me now.”

“I'll get you into a nursing home,” said the doctor cheerfully, “and there you'll dispel all these ideas.”

“And when the nursing home has cured me I'm to come back to my wife for her to begin again?”

Dr Holroyd bent suddenly and sharply over the sombre bed. With his right hand he deftly turned on the electric lamp and tipped back the coral silk shade so that the bleached acid light fell full over the patient lying on his back on the big fat pillows.

“Look here,” said the doctor, “what you say is pretty serious.”

And the two men stared at each other, the patient examining his physician as acutely as his physician examined him.

Bevis Holroyd was still a young man with a look of peculiar energy and austere intelligence that heightened by contrast purely physical dark good looks that many men would have found sufficient passport to success; resolution, dignity and a certain masculine sweetness, serene and strong, different from feminine sweetness, marked his demeanour which was further softened by a quick humour and a sensitive judgment.

The patient, on the other hand, was a man of well past middle age, light, flabby and obese with a flaccid, fallen look about his large face which was blurred and dimmed by the colours of ill health, being one pasty livid hue that threw into unpleasant relief the grey speckled red of his scant hair.

Altogether an unpleasing man, but of a certain fame and importance that had induced the rising young doctor to come at once when hastily summoned to Strangeways Manor House; a man of a fine, renowned family, a man of repute as a scholar, an essayist who had once been a politician who was rather above politics; a man whom Dr Holroyd only knew vaguely by reputation, but who seemed to him symbolical of all that was staid, respectable and stolid.

And this man blinked up at him and whimpered:

“My wife is poisoning me.”

Dr Holroyd sat back and snapped off the electric light.

“What makes you think so?” he asked sharply.

“To tell you that,” came the laboured voice of the sick man. “I should have to tell you my story.”

“Well, if you want me to take this up—”

“I sent for you to do that, doctor.”

“Well, how do you think you are being poisoned?”

“Arsenic, of course.”

“Oh? And how administered?”

Again the patient looked up with one eye, seeming too fatigued to open the other.

“Cambric tea,” he replied.

And Dr Holroyd echoed:

“Cambric tea!” with a soft amazement and interest.

Cambric tea had been used as the medium for arsenic in the Pluntre case and the expression had become famous; it was Bevis Holroyd who had discovered the doses in the cambric tea and who had put his finger on this pale beverage as the means of murder.

“Very possibly,” continued Sir Harry, “the Pluntre case made her think of it.”

“For God's sake, don't,” said Dr Holroyd; for in that hideous affair the murderer had been a woman; and to see a woman on trial for her life, to see a woman sentenced to death, was not an experience he wished to repeat.

“Lady Strangeways,” continued the sick man, “is much younger than I—I overpersuaded her to marry me, she was at that time very much attracted by a man of her own age, but he was in a poor position and she was ambitious.”

He paused, wiped his quivering lips on a silk handkerchief, and added faintly:

“Lately our marriage has been extremely unhappy. The man she preferred is now prosperous, successful and unmarried—she wishes to dispose of me that she may marry her first choice.”

“Have you proof of any of this?”

“Yes. I know she buys arsenic. I know she reads books on poisons. I know she is eating her heart out for this other man.”

“Forgive me, Sir Harry,” replied the doctor, “but have you no near friend nor relation to whom you can confide your—suspicions?”

“No one,” said the sick man impatiently. “I have lately come from the East and am out of touch with people. Besides I want a doctor, a doctor with skill in this sort of thing. I thought from the first of the Pluntre case and of you.”

Bevis Holroyd sat back quietly; it was then that he thought of the situation as bizarre; the queerness of the whole thing was vividly before him, like a twisted figure on a gem—a carving at once writhing and immobile.

“Perhaps,” continued Sir Harry wearily, “you are married, doctor?”

“No.” Dr Holroyd slightly smiled; his story was something like the sick man's story but taken from another angle; when he was very poor and unknown he had loved a girl who had preferred a wealthy man; she had gone out to India, ten years ago, and he had never seen her since; he remembered this, with sharp distinctness, and in the same breath he remembered that he still loved this girl; it was, after all, a commonplace story.

Then his mind swung to the severe professional aspect of the case; he had thought that his patient, an unhealthy type of man, was struggling with a bad attack of influenza and the resultant depression and weakness, but then he had never thought, of course, of poison, nor looked nor tested for poison.

The man might be lunatic, he might be deceived, he might be speaking the truth; the fact that he was a mean, unpleasant beast ought not to weigh in the matter; Dr Holroyd had some enjoyable Christmas holidays in prospect and now he was beginning to feel that he ought to give these up to stay and investigate this case; for he could readily see that it was one in which the local doctor would be quite useless.

“You must have a nurse,” he said, rising.

But the sick man shook his head.

“I don't wish to expose my wife more than need be,” he grumbled. “Can't you manage the affair yourself?”

As this was the first hint of decent feeling he had shown, Bevis Holroyd forgave him his brusque rudeness.

“Well, I'll stay the night anyhow,” he conceded.

And then the situation changed, with the opening of a door, from the bizarre to the tragic.

This door opened in the far end of the room and admitted a bloom of bluish winter light from some uncurtained, high windowed corridor; the chill impression was as if invisible snow had entered the shaded, dun, close apartment.

And against this background appeared a woman in a smoke-coloured dress with some long lace about the shoulders and a high comb; she held a little tray carrying jugs and a glass of crystal in which the cold light splintered.

Dr Holroyd stood in his usual attitude of attentive courtesy, and then, as the patient, feebly twisting his gross head from the fat pillow, said:

“My wife—doctor—” he recognized in Lady Strangeways the girl to whom he had once been engaged in marriage, the woman he still loved.

“This is Doctor Holroyd,” added Sir Harry. “Is that cambric tea you have there?”

She inclined her head to the stranger by her husband's bed as if she had never seen him before, and he, taking his cue, and for many other reasons, was silent.

“Yes, this is your cambric tea,” she said to her husband. “You like it just now, don't you? How do you find Sir Harry, Dr Holroyd?”

There were two jugs on the tray; one of crystal half full of cold milk, and one of white porcelain full of hot water; Lady Strangeways proceeded to mix these fluids in equal proportions and gave the resultant drink to her husband, helping him first to sit up in bed.

“I think that Sir Harry has a nasty turn of influenza,” answered the doctor mechanically. “He wants me to stay. I've promised till the morning, anyhow.”

“That will be a pleasure and a relief,” said Lady Strangeways gravely. “My husband has been ill some time and seems so much worse than he need—for influenza.”

The patient, feebly sipping his cambric tea, grinned queerly at the doctor.

“So much worse—you see, doctor!” he muttered.

“It is good of you to stay,” continued Lady Strangeways equally. “I will see about your room, you must be as comfortable as possible.”

She left as she had come, a shadow-coloured figure retreating to a chill light.

The sick man held up his glass as if he gave a toast.

“You see! Cambric tea!”

And Bevis Holroyd was thinking: does she not want to know me? Does he know what we once were to each other? How comes she to be married to this man—her husband's name was Custiss—and the horror of the situation shook the calm that was his both from character and training; he went to the window and looked out on the bleached park; light, slow snow was falling, a dreary dance over the frozen grass and before the grey corpses that paled, one behind the other, to the distance shrouded in colourless mist.

The thin voice of Harry Strangeways recalled him to the bed.

“Would you like to take a look at this, doctor?” He held out the half drunk glass of milk and water.

“I've no means of making a test here,” said Dr Holroyd, troubled. “I brought a few things, nothing like that.”

“You are not so far from Harley Street,” said Sir Harry. “My car can fetch everything you want by this afternoon—or perhaps you would like to go yourself?”

“Yes,” replied Bevis Holroyd sternly. “I would rather go myself.”

His trained mind had been rapidly covering the main aspects of his problem and he had instantly seen that it was better for Lady Strangeways to have this case in his hands. He was sure there was some hideous, fantastic hallucination on the part of Sir Harry, but it was better for Lady Strangeways to leave the matter in the hands of one who was friendly towards her. He rapidly found and washed a medicine bottle from among the sick room paraphernalia and poured it full of the cambric tea, casting away the remainder.

“Why did you drink any?” he asked sharply.

“I don't want her to think that I guess,” whispered Sir Harry. “Do you know, doctor, I have a lot of her love letters—written by—”

Dr Holroyd cut him short.

“I couldn't listen to this sort of thing behind Lady Strangeways' back,” he said quickly. “That is between you and her. My job is to get you well. I'll try and do that.”

And he considered, with a faint disgust, how repulsive this man looked sitting up with pendant jowl and drooping cheeks and discoloured, pouchy eyes sunk in pads of unhealthy flesh and above the spiky crown of Judas-coloured hair.

Perhaps a woman, chained to this man, living with him, blocked and thwarted by him, might be wrought upon to—