The Best Crime Stories Ever Told (38 page)

A few moments ago Dr. Graham had relinquished his hold on the pulse of Edward Arne with the hopeless movement of the eyebrows that meant—the end.

The nurse had made the little gesture of resignation that was possibly a matter of form with her. The young sister-in-law had hidden her face in her hands. The wife had screamed a scream that had turned them all hot and cold—and flung herself on the bed over her dead husband. There she lay; her cries were terrible, her sobs shook her whole body.

The three gazed at her pityingly, not knowing what to do next. The nurse, folding her hands, looked towards the doctor for directions, and the doctor drummed with his fingers on the bed-post. The young girl timidly stroked the shoulder that heaved and writhed under her touch.

“Go away! Go away!” her sister reiterated continually, in a voice hoarse with fatigue and passion.

“Leave her alone, Miss Kate,” whispered the nurse at last; “she will work it off best herself, perhaps.”

She turned down the lamp as if to draw a veil over the scene. Mrs. Arne raised herself on her elbow, showing a face stained with tears and purple with emotion.

“What! Not gone?” she said harshly. “Go away, Kate, go away! It is my house. I don’t want you, I want no one—I want to speak to my husband. Will you go away—all of you. Give me an hour, half-anhour—five minutes!”

She stretched out her arms imploringly to the doctor.

“Well . . .” said he, almost to himself.

He signed to the two women to withdraw, and followed them out into the passage. “Go and get something to eat,” he said peremptorily, “while you can. We shall have trouble with her presently. I’ll wait in the dressing-room.”

He glanced at the twisting figure on the bed, shrugged his shoulders, and passed into the adjoining room, without, however, closing the door of communication. Sitting down in an arm-chair drawn up to the fire, he stretched himself and closed his eyes. The professional aspects of the case of Edward Arne rose up before him in all its interesting forms of complication . . .

It was just this professional attitude that Mrs. Arne unconsciously resented both in the doctor and in the nurse. Through all their kindness she had realised and resented their scientific interest in her husband, for to them he had been no more than a curious and complicated case; and now that the blow had fallen, she regarded them both in the light of executioners. Her one desire, expressed with all the shameless sincerity of blind and thoughtless misery, was to be free of their hateful presence and alone—alone with her dead!

She was weary of the doctor’s subdued manly tones—of the nurse’s commonplace motherliness, too habitually adapted to the needs of all to be appreciated by the individual—of the childish consolation of the young sister, who had never loved, never been married, did not know what sorrow was! Their expressions of sympathy struck her like blows, the touch of their hands on her body, as they tried to raise her, stung her in every nerve.

With a sigh of relief she buried her head in the pillow, pressed her body more closely against that of her husband, and lay motionless.

Her sobs ceased.

The lamp went out with a gurgle. The fire leaped up, and died. She raised her head and stared about her helplessly, then sinking down again she put her lips to the ear of the dead man.

“Edward—dear Edward!” she whispered, “why have you left me? Darling, why have you left me? I can’t stay behind—you know I can’t. I am too young to be left. It is only a year since you married me. I never thought it was only for a year. ‘Till death us do part’ Yes, I know that’s in it, but nobody ever thinks of that! I never thought of living without you! I meant to die with you . . .

“No—no—I can’t die—I must not—till my baby is born. You will never see it. Don’t you want to see it? Don’t you? Oh, Edward, speak! Say something, darling, one word—one little word! Edward! Edward! are you there? Answer me for God’s sake, answer me!

“Darling, I am so tired of waiting. Oh, think, dearest. There is so little time. They only gave me half-an-hour. In half-an-hour they will come and take you away from me—take you where I can’t come to you—with all my love I can’t come to you! I know the place—I saw it once. A great lonely place full of graves, and little stunted trees dripping with dirty London rain . . . and gas-lamps flaring all round . . . but quite, quite dark where the grave is . . . a long grey stone just like the rest. How could you stay there?—all alone—all alone—without me?

“Do you remember, Edward, what we once said—that whichever of us died first should come back to watch over the other, in the spirit? I promised you, and you promised me. What children we were! Death is not what we thought. It comforted us to say that then.

“Now, it’s nothing—nothing—worse than nothing—don’t want your spirit—I can’t see it—or feel it—I want you, you, your eyes that looked at me, your mouth that kissed me—”

She raised his arms and clasped them round her neck, and lay there very still, murmuring, “Oh, hold me, hold me! Love me if you can. Am I hateful? This is me! These are your arms . . .”

The doctor in the next room moved in his chair. The noise awoke her from her dream of contentment, and she unwound the dead arm from her neck, and, holding it up by the wrist, considered it ruefully.

“Yes, I can put it round me, but I have to hold it there. It is quite cold—it doesn’t care. Ah, my dear, you don’t care! You are dead. I kiss you, but you don’t kiss me. Edward! Edward! Oh, for heaven’s sake kiss me once. Just once!

“No, no, that won’t do—that’s not enough! that’s nothing! worse than nothing! I want you back, you, all you . . . What shall I do? . . . I often pray . . . Oh, if there be a God in heaven, and if He ever answered a prayer, let Him answer mine—my only prayer. I’ll never ask another—and give you back to me! As you were—as I loved you—as I adored you! He must listen. He must! My God, my God, he’s mine—he’s my husband, he’s my lover—give him back to me!”

—“Left alone for half-an-hour or more with the corpse! It’s not right!”

The muttered expression of the nurse’s revolted sense of professional decency came from the head of the staircase, where she had been waiting for the last few minutes. The doctor joined her.

“Hush, Mrs. Joyce! I’ll go to her now.”

The door creaked on its hinges as he gently pushed it open and went in.

“What’s that? What’s that?” screamed Mrs. Arne. “Doctor! Doctor! Don’t touch me! Either I am dead or he is alive!”

“Do you want to kill yourself, Mrs. Arne?” said Dr. Graham, with calculated sternness, coming forward; “come away!”

“Not dead! Not dead!” she murmured.

“He is dead, I assure you. Dead and cold an hour ago! Feel!” He took hold of her, as she lay face downwards, and in so doing he touched the dead man’s cheek—it was not cold! Instinctively his finger sought a pulse.

“Stop! Wait!” he cried in his intense excitement. “My dear Mrs. Arne, control yourself!”

But Mrs. Arne had fainted, and fallen heavily off the bed on the other side. Her sister, hastily summoned, attended to her, while the man they had all given over for dead was, with faint gasps and sighs and reluctant moans, pulled, as it were, hustled and dragged back over the threshold of life.

“Why do you always wear black, Alice?” asked Esther Graham. “You are not in mourning that I know of.”

She was Dr. Graham’s only daughter and Mrs. Arne’s only friend. She sat with Mrs. Arne in the dreary drawing-room of the house in Chelsea. She had come to tea. She was the only person who ever did come to tea there.

She was brusque, kind, and blunt, and had a talent for making inappropriate remarks. Six years ago Mrs. Arne had been a widow for an hour! Her husband had succumbed to an apparently modal illness, and for the space of an hour had lain dead. When suddenly and inexplicably he had revived from his trance, the shock, combined with six weeks’ nursing, had nearly killed his wife. All this Esther had heard from her father. She herself had only come to know Mrs. Arne after her child was born, and all the tragic circumstances of her husband’s illness put aside, and it was hoped forgotten. And when her idle question received no answer from the pale absent woman who sat opposite, with listless lack-lustre eyes fixed on the green and blue flames dancing in the fire, she hoped it had passed unnoticed. She waited for five minutes for Mrs. Arne to resume the conversation, then her natural impatience got the better of her.

“Do say something, Alice!” she implored.

“Esther, I beg your pardon!” said Mrs. Arne. “I was thinking.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, of course you don’t. People who sit and stare into the fire never do think, really. They are only brooding and making themselves ill, and that is what you are doing. You mope, you take no interest in anything, you never go out—I am sure you have not been out of doors today?”

“No—yes—I believe not. It is so cold.”

“You are sure to feel the cold if you sit in the house all day, and sure to get ill! Just look at yourself!”

Mrs. Arne rose and looked at herself in the Italian mirror over the chimney-piece. It reflected faithfully enough her even pallor, her dark hair and eyes, the sweeping length of her eyelashes, the sharp curves of her nostrils, and the delicate arch of her eyebrows, that formed a thin sharp black line, so clear as to seem almost unnatural.

“Yes, I do look ill,” she said with conviction.

“No wonder. You choose to bury yourself alive.”

“Sometimes I do feel as if I lived in a grave. I look up at the ceiling and fancy it is my coffin-lid.”

“Don’t please talk like that!” expostulated Miss Graham, pointing to Mrs. Arne’s little girl. “If only for Dolly’s sake, I think you should not give way to such morbid fancies. It isn’t good for her to see you like this always.”

“Oh, Esther,” the other exclaimed, stung into something like vivacity, “don’t reproach me! I hope I am a good mother to my child!”

“Yes, dear, you are a model mother—and model wife too. Father says the way you look after your husband is something wonderful, but don’t you think for your own sake you might try to be a little gayer? You encourage these moods, don’t you? What is it? Is it the house?”

She glanced around her—at the high ceiling, at the heavy damask portières, the tall cabinets of china, the dim oak panelling—it reminded her of a neglected museum. Her eye travelled into the farthest corners, where the faint filmy dusk was already gathering, lit only by the bewildering cross-lights of the glass panels of cabinet doors—to the tall narrow windows—then back again to the woman in her mourning dress, cowering by the fire. She said sharply—

“You should go out more.”

“I do not like to—leave my husband.”

“Oh, I know that he is delicate and all that, but still, does he never permit you to leave him? Does he never go out by himself?”

“Not often!”

“And you have no pets! It is very odd of you. I simply can’t imagine a house without animals.”

“We did have a dog once,” answered Mrs. Arne plaintively, “but it howled so we had to give it away. It would not go near Edward. . . . But please don’t imagine that I am dull! I have my child.” She laid her hand on the flaxen head at her knee.