My brain was in a whirl. I am safe to say that at this precise moment
there was nobody completely sane in the house. Setting apart Therese and
Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions, all the moral economy
of Doña Rita had gone to pieces. Everything was gone except her strong
sense of life with all its implied menaces. The woman was a mere chaos
of sensations and vitality. I, too, suffered most from inability to get
hold of some fundamental thought. The one on which I could best build
some hopes was the thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything.
I whispered this into the ear of Doña Rita, into her precious, her
beautifully shaped ear.
But she shook her head, very much like an inconsolable child and very
much with a child’s complete pessimism she murmured, “Therese has told
him.”
The words, “Oh, nonsense,” never passed my lips, because I could not
cheat myself into denying that there had been a noise; and that the noise
was in the fencing-room. I knew that room. There was nothing there that
by the wildest stretch of imagination could be conceived as falling with
that particular sound. There was a table with a tall strip of
looking-glass above it at one end; but since Blunt took away his
campaigning kit there was no small object of any sort on the console or
anywhere else that could have been jarred off in some mysterious manner.
Along one of the walls there was the whole complicated apparatus of solid
brass pipes, and quite close to it an enormous bath sunk into the floor.
The greatest part of the room along its whole length was covered with
matting and had nothing else but a long, narrow leather-upholstered bench
fixed to the wall. And that was all. And the door leading to the studio
was locked. And Therese had the key. And it flashed on my mind,
independently of Doña Rita’s pessimism, by the force of personal
conviction, that, of course, Therese would tell him. I beheld the whole
succession of events perfectly connected and tending to that particular
conclusion. Therese would tell him! I could see the contrasted heads of
those two formidable lunatics close together in a dark mist of whispers
compounded of greed, piety, and jealousy, plotting in a sense of perfect
security as if under the very wing of Providence. So at least Therese
would think. She could not be but under the impression that
(providentially) I had been called out for the rest of the night.
And now there was one sane person in the house, for I had regained
complete command of my thoughts. Working in a logical succession of
images they showed me at last as clearly as a picture on a wall, Therese
pressing with fervour the key into the fevered palm of the rich,
prestigious, virtuous cousin, so that he should go and urge his
self-sacrificing offer to Rita, and gain merit before Him whose Eye sees
all the actions of men. And this image of those two with the key in the
studio seemed to me a most monstrous conception of fanaticism, of a
perfectly horrible aberration. For who could mistake the state that made
José Ortega the figure he was, inspiring both pity and fear? I could not
deny that I understood, not the full extent but the exact nature of his
suffering. Young as I was I had solved for myself that grotesque and
sombre personality. His contact with me, the personal contact with (as
he thought) one of the actual lovers of that woman who brought to him as
a boy the curse of the gods, had tipped over the trembling scales. No
doubt I was very near death in the “grand salon” of the Maison Dorée,
only that his torture had gone too far. It seemed to me that I ought to
have heard his very soul scream while we were seated at supper. But in a
moment he had ceased to care for me. I was nothing. To the crazy
exaggeration of his jealousy I was but one amongst a hundred thousand.
What was my death? Nothing. All mankind had possessed that woman. I
knew what his wooing of her would be: Mine—or Dead.
All this ought to have had the clearness of noon-day, even to the veriest
idiot that ever lived; and Therese was, properly speaking, exactly that.
An idiot. A one-ideaed creature. Only the idea was complex; therefore
it was impossible really to say what she wasn’t capable of. This was
what made her obscure processes so awful. She had at times the most
amazing perceptions. Who could tell where her simplicity ended and her
cunning began? She had also the faculty of never forgetting any fact
bearing upon her one idea; and I remembered now that the conversation
with me about the will had produced on her an indelible impression of the
Law’s surprising justice. Recalling her naïve admiration of the “just”
law that required no “paper” from a sister, I saw her casting loose the
raging fate with a sanctimonious air. And Therese would naturally give
the key of the fencing-room to her dear, virtuous, grateful,
disinterested cousin, to that damned soul with delicate whiskers, because
she would think it just possible that Rita might have locked the door
leading front her room into the hall; whereas there was no earthly
reason, not the slightest likelihood, that she would bother about the
other. Righteousness demanded that the erring sister should be taken
unawares.
All the above is the analysis of one short moment. Images are to words
like light to sound—incomparably swifter. And all this was really one
flash of light through my mind. A comforting thought succeeded it: that
both doors were locked and that really there was no danger.
However, there had been that noise—the why and the how of it? Of course
in the dark he might have fallen into the bath, but that wouldn’t have
been a faint noise. It wouldn’t have been a rattle. There was
absolutely nothing he could knock over. He might have dropped a
candle-stick if Therese had left him her own. That was possible, but
then those thick mats—and then, anyway, why should he drop it? and, hang
it all, why shouldn’t he have gone straight on and tried the door? I had
suddenly a sickening vision of the fellow crouching at the key-hole,
listening, listening, listening, for some movement or sigh of the sleeper
he was ready to tear away from the world, alive or dead. I had a
conviction that he was still listening. Why? Goodness knows! He may
have been only gloating over the assurance that the night was long and
that he had all these hours to himself.
I was pretty certain that he could have heard nothing of our whispers,
the room was too big for that and the door too solid. I hadn’t the same
confidence in the efficiency of the lock. Still I . . . Guarding my lips
with my hand I urged Doña Rita to go back to the sofa. She wouldn’t
answer me and when I got hold of her arm I discovered that she wouldn’t
move. She had taken root in that thick-pile Aubusson carpet; and she was
so rigidly still all over that the brilliant stones in the shaft of the
arrow of gold, with the six candles at the head of the sofa blazing full
on them, emitted no sparkle.
I was extremely anxious that she shouldn’t betray herself. I reasoned,
save the mark, as a psychologist. I had no doubt that the man knew of
her being there; but he only knew it by hearsay. And that was bad
enough. I could not help feeling that if he obtained some evidence for
his senses by any sort of noise, voice, or movement, his madness would
gain strength enough to burst the lock. I was rather ridiculously
worried about the locks. A horrid mistrust of the whole house possessed
me. I saw it in the light of a deadly trap. I had no weapon, I couldn’t
say whether he had one or not. I wasn’t afraid of a struggle as far as
I, myself, was concerned, but I was afraid of it for Doña Rita. To be
rolling at her feet, locked in a literally tooth-and-nail struggle with
Ortega would have been odious. I wanted to spare her feelings, just as I
would have been anxious to save from any contact with mud the feet of
that goatherd of the mountains with a symbolic face. I looked at her
face. For immobility it might have been a carving. I wished I knew how
to deal with that embodied mystery, to influence it, to manage it. Oh,
how I longed for the gift of authority! In addition, since I had become
completely sane, all my scruples against laying hold of her had returned.
I felt shy and embarrassed. My eyes were fixed on the bronze handle of
the fencing-room door as if it were something alive. I braced myself up
against the moment when it would move. This was what was going to happen
next. It would move very gently. My heart began to thump. But I was
prepared to keep myself as still as death and I hoped Doña Rita would
have sense enough to do the same. I stole another glance at her face and
at that moment I heard the word: “Beloved!” form itself in the still air
of the room, weak, distinct, piteous, like the last request of the dying.
With great presence of mind I whispered into Doña Rita’s ear: “Perfect
silence!” and was overjoyed to discover that she had heard me, understood
me; that she even had command over her rigid lips. She answered me in a
breath (our cheeks were nearly touching): “Take me out of this house.”
I glanced at all her clothing scattered about the room and hissed
forcibly the warning “Perfect immobility”; noticing with relief that she
didn’t offer to move, though animation was returning to her and her lips
had remained parted in an awful, unintended effect of a smile. And I
don’t know whether I was pleased when she, who was not to be touched,
gripped my wrist suddenly. It had the air of being done on purpose
because almost instantly another: “Beloved!” louder, more agonized if
possible, got into the room and, yes, went home to my heart. It was
followed without any transition, preparation, or warning, by a positively
bellowed: “Speak, perjured beast!” which I felt pass in a thrill right
through Doña Rita like an electric shock, leaving her as motionless as
before.
Till he shook the door handle, which he did immediately afterwards, I
wasn’t certain through which door he had spoken. The two doors (in
different walls) were rather near each other. It was as I expected. He
was in the fencing-room, thoroughly aroused, his senses on the alert to
catch the slightest sound. A situation not to be trifled with. Leaving
the room was for us out of the question. It was quite possible for him
to dash round into the hall before we could get clear of the front door.
As to making a bolt of it upstairs there was the same objection; and to
allow ourselves to be chased all over the empty house by this maniac
would have been mere folly. There was no advantage in locking ourselves
up anywhere upstairs where the original doors and locks were much
lighter. No, true safety was in absolute stillness and silence, so that
even his rage should be brought to doubt at last and die expended, or
choke him before it died; I didn’t care which.
For me to go out and meet him would have been stupid. Now I was certain
that he was armed. I had remembered the wall in the fencing-room
decorated with trophies of cold steel in all the civilized and savage
forms; sheaves of assegais, in the guise of columns and grouped between
them stars and suns of choppers, swords, knives; from Italy, from
Damascus, from Abyssinia, from the ends of the world. Ortega had only to
make his barbarous choice. I suppose he had got up on the bench, and
fumbling about amongst them must have brought one down, which, falling,
had produced that rattling noise. But in any case to go to meet him
would have been folly, because, after all, I might have been overpowered
(even with bare hands) and then Doña Rita would have been left utterly
defenceless.
“He will speak,” came to me the ghostly, terrified murmur of her voice.
“Take me out of the house before he begins to speak.”
“Keep still,” I whispered. “He will soon get tired of this.”
“You don’t know him.”
“Oh, yes, I do. Been with him two hours.”
At this she let go my wrist and covered her face with her hands
passionately. When she dropped them she had the look of one morally
crushed.
“What did he say to you?”
“He raved.”
“Listen to me. It was all true!”
“I daresay, but what of that?”
These ghostly words passed between us hardly louder than thoughts; but
after my last answer she ceased and gave me a searching stare, then drew
in a long breath. The voice on the other side of the door burst out with
an impassioned request for a little pity, just a little, and went on
begging for a few words, for two words, for one word—one poor little
word. Then it gave up, then repeated once more, “Say you are there,
Rita, Say one word, just one word. Say ‘yes.’ Come! Just one little
yes.”
“You see,” I said. She only lowered her eyelids over the anxious glance
she had turned on me.
For a minute we could have had the illusion that he had stolen away,
unheard, on the thick mats. But I don’t think that either of us was
deceived. The voice returned, stammering words without connection,
pausing and faltering, till suddenly steadied it soared into impassioned
entreaty, sank to low, harsh tones, voluble, lofty sometimes and
sometimes abject. When it paused it left us looking profoundly at each
other.
“It’s almost comic,” I whispered.
“Yes. One could laugh,” she assented, with a sort of sinister
conviction. Never had I seen her look exactly like that, for an instant
another, an incredible Rita! “Haven’t I laughed at him innumerable
times?” she added in a sombre whisper.
He was muttering to himself out there, and unexpectedly shouted: “What?”
as though he had fancied he had heard something. He waited a while
before he started up again with a loud: “Speak up, Queen of the goats,
with your goat tricks. . .” All was still for a time, then came a most
awful bang on the door. He must have stepped back a pace to hurl himself
bodily against the panels. The whole house seemed to shake. He repeated
that performance once more, and then varied it by a prolonged drumming
with his fists. It _was_ comic. But I felt myself struggling mentally
with an invading gloom as though I were no longer sure of myself.
“Take me out,” whispered Doña Rita feverishly, “take me out of this house
before it is too late.”
“You will have to stand it,” I answered.
“So be it; but then you must go away yourself. Go now, before it is too
late.”
I didn’t condescend to answer this. The drumming on the panels stopped
and the absurd thunder of it died out in the house. I don’t know why
precisely then I had the acute vision of the red mouth of José Ortega
wriggling with rage between his funny whiskers. He began afresh but in a
tired tone:
“Do you expect a fellow to forget your tricks, you wicked little devil?
Haven’t you ever seen me dodging about to get a sight of you amongst
those pretty gentlemen, on horseback, like a princess, with pure cheeks
like a carved saint? I wonder I didn’t throw stones at you, I wonder I
didn’t run after you shouting the tale—curse my timidity! But I daresay
they knew as much as I did. More. All the new tricks—if that were
possible.”
While he was making this uproar, Doña Rita put her fingers in her ears
and then suddenly changed her mind and clapped her hands over my ears.
Instinctively I disengaged my head but she persisted. We had a short
tussle without moving from the spot, and suddenly I had my head free, and
there was complete silence. He had screamed himself out of breath, but
Doña Rita muttering: “Too late, too late,” got her hands away from my
grip and slipping altogether out of her fur coat seized some garment
lying on a chair near by (I think it was her skirt), with the intention
of dressing herself, I imagine, and rushing out of the house. Determined
to prevent this, but indeed without thinking very much what I was doing,
I got hold of her arm. That struggle was silent, too; but I used the
least force possible and she managed to give me an unexpected push.
Stepping back to save myself from falling I overturned the little table,
bearing the six-branched candlestick. It hit the floor, rebounded with a
dull ring on the carpet, and by the time it came to a rest every single
candle was out. He on the other side of the door naturally heard the
noise and greeted it with a triumphant screech: “Aha! I’ve managed to
wake you up,” the very savagery of which had a laughable effect. I felt
the weight of Doña Rita grow on my arm and thought it best to let her
sink on the floor, wishing to be free in my movements and really afraid
that now he had actually heard a noise he would infallibly burst the
door. But he didn’t even thump it. He seemed to have exhausted himself
in that scream. There was no other light in the room but the darkened
glow of the embers and I could hardly make out amongst the shadows of
furniture Doña Rita sunk on her knees in a penitential and despairing
attitude. Before this collapse I, who had been wrestling desperately
with her a moment before, felt that I dare not touch her. This emotion,
too, I could not understand; this abandonment of herself, this
conscience-stricken humility. A humbly imploring request to open the
door came from the other side. Ortega kept on repeating: “Open the door,
open the door,” in such an amazing variety of intonations, imperative,
whining, persuasive, insinuating, and even unexpectedly jocose, that I
really stood there smiling to myself, yet with a gloomy and uneasy heart.
Then he remarked, parenthetically as it were, “Oh, you know how to
torment a man, you brown-skinned, lean, grinning, dishevelled imp, you.
And mark,” he expounded further, in a curiously doctoral tone—“you are in
all your limbs hateful: your eyes are hateful and your mouth is hateful,
and your hair is hateful, and your body is cold and vicious like a
snake—and altogether you are perdition.”
This statement was astonishingly deliberate. He drew a moaning breath
after it and uttered in a heart-rending tone, “You know, Rita, that I
cannot live without you. I haven’t lived. I am not living now. This
isn’t life. Come, Rita, you can’t take a boy’s soul away and then let
him grow up and go about the world, poor devil, while you go amongst the
rich from one pair of arms to another, showing all your best tricks. But
I will forgive you if you only open the door,” he ended in an inflated
tone: “You remember how you swore time after time to be my wife. You are
more fit to be Satan’s wife but I don’t mind. You shall be my wife!”
A sound near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: “Don’t
laugh,” for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to
me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move a mountain.
Suddenly suspicion seized him out there. With perfectly farcical
unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: “Oh, you deceitful wretch! You won’t
escape me! I will have you. . . .”
And in a manner of speaking he vanished. Of course I couldn’t see him
but somehow that was the impression. I had hardly time to receive it
when crash! . . . he was already at the other door. I suppose he thought
that his prey was escaping him. His swiftness was amazing, almost
inconceivable, more like the effect of a trick or of a mechanism. The
thump on the door was awful as if he had not been able to stop himself in
time. The shock seemed enough to stun an elephant. It was really funny.
And after the crash there was a moment of silence as if he were
recovering himself. The next thing was a low grunt, and at once he
picked up the thread of his fixed idea.
“You will have to be my wife. I have no shame. You swore you would be
and so you will have to be.” Stifled low sounds made me bend down again
to the kneeling form, white in the flush of the dark red glow. “For
goodness’ sake don’t,” I whispered down. She was struggling with an
appalling fit of merriment, repeating to herself, “Yes, every day, for
two months. Sixty times at least, sixty times at least.” Her voice was
rising high. She was struggling against laughter, but when I tried to
put my hand over her lips I felt her face wet with tears. She turned it
this way and that, eluding my hand with repressed low, little moans. I
lost my caution and said, “Be quiet,” so sharply as to startle myself
(and her, too) into expectant stillness.
Ortega’s voice in the hall asked distinctly: “Eh? What’s this?” and then
he kept still on his side listening, but he must have thought that his
ears had deceived him. He was getting tired, too. He was keeping quiet
out there—resting. Presently he sighed deeply; then in a harsh
melancholy tone he started again.
“My love, my soul, my life, do speak to me. What am I that you should
take so much trouble to pretend that you aren’t there? Do speak to me,”
he repeated tremulously, following this mechanical appeal with a string
of extravagantly endearing names, some of them quite childish, which all
of a sudden stopped dead; and then after a pause there came a distinct,
unutterably weary: “What shall I do now?” as though he were speaking to
himself.
I shuddered to hear rising from the floor, by my side, a vibrating,
scornful: “Do! Why, slink off home looking over your shoulder as you
used to years ago when I had done with you—all but the laughter.”
“Rita,” I murmured, appalled. He must have been struck dumb for a
moment. Then, goodness only knows why, in his dismay or rage he was
moved to speak in French with a most ridiculous accent.
“So you have found your tongue at last—_Catin_! You were that from the
cradle. Don’t you remember how . . .”
Doña Rita sprang to her feet at my side with a loud cry, “No, George,
no,” which bewildered me completely. The suddenness, the loudness of it
made the ensuing silence on both sides of the door perfectly awful. It
seemed to me that if I didn’t resist with all my might something in me
would die on the instant. In the straight, falling folds of the
night-dress she looked cold like a block of marble; while I, too, was
turned into stone by the terrific clamour in the hall.
“Therese, Therese,” yelled Ortega. “She has got a man in there.” He ran
to the foot of the stairs and screamed again, “Therese, Therese! There
is a man with her. A man! Come down, you miserable, starved peasant,
come down and see.”
I don’t know where Therese was but I am sure that this voice reached her,
terrible, as if clamouring to heaven, and with a shrill over-note which
made me certain that if she was in bed the only thing she would think of
doing would be to put her head under the bed-clothes. With a final yell:
“Come down and see,” he flew back at the door of the room and started
shaking it violently.
It was a double door, very tall, and there must have been a lot of things
loose about its fittings, bolts, latches, and all those brass
applications with broken screws, because it rattled, it clattered, it
jingled; and produced also the sound as of thunder rolling in the big,
empty hall. It was deafening, distressing, and vaguely alarming as if it
could bring the house down. At the same time the futility of it had, it
cannot be denied, a comic effect. The very magnitude of the racket he
raised was funny. But he couldn’t keep up that violent exertion
continuously, and when he stopped to rest we could hear him shouting to
himself in vengeful tones. He saw it all! He had been decoyed there!
(Rattle, rattle, rattle.) He had been decoyed into that town, he
screamed, getting more and more excited by the noise he made himself, in
order to be exposed to this! (Rattle, rattle.) By this shameless
“_Catin_! _Catin_! _Catin_!”
He started at the door again with superhuman vigour. Behind me I heard
Doña Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading
glow. I called out to her quite openly, “Do keep your self-control.”
And she called back to me in a clear voice: “Oh, my dear, will you ever
consent to speak to me after all this? But don’t ask for the impossible.
He was born to be laughed at.”
“Yes,” I cried. “But don’t let yourself go.”
I don’t know whether Ortega heard us. He was exerting then his utmost
strength of lung against the infamous plot to expose him to the derision
of the fiendish associates of that obscene woman! . . . Then he began
another interlude upon the door, so sustained and strong that I had the
thought that this was growing absurdly impossible, that either the
plaster would begin to fall off the ceiling or he would drop dead next
moment, out there.
He stopped, uttered a few curses at the door, and seemed calmer from
sheer exhaustion.
“This story will be all over the world,” we heard him begin. “Deceived,
decoyed, inveighed, in order to be made a laughing-stock before the most
debased of all mankind, that woman and her associates.” This was really
a meditation. And then he screamed: “I will kill you all.” Once more he
started worrying the door but it was a startlingly feeble effort which he
abandoned almost at once. He must have been at the end of his strength.
Doña Rita from the middle of the room asked me recklessly loud: “Tell me!
Wasn’t he born to be laughed at?” I didn’t answer her. I was so near
the door that I thought I ought to hear him panting there. He was
terrifying, but he was not serious. He was at the end of his strength,
of his breath, of every kind of endurance, but I did not know it. He was
done up, finished; but perhaps he did not know it himself. How still he
was! Just as I began to wonder at it, I heard him distinctly give a slap
to his forehead. “I see it all!” he cried. “That miserable, canting
peasant-woman upstairs has arranged it all. No doubt she consulted her
priests. I must regain my self-respect. Let her die first.” I heard
him make a dash for the foot of the stairs. I was appalled; yet to think
of Therese being hoisted with her own petard was like a turn of affairs
in a farce. A very ferocious farce. Instinctively I unlocked the door.
Doña Rita’s contralto laugh rang out loud, bitter, and contemptuous; and
I heard Ortega’s distracted screaming as if under torture. “It hurts!
It hurts! It hurts!” I hesitated just an instant, half a second, no
more, but before I could open the door wide there was in the hall a short
groan and the sound of a heavy fall.
The sight of Ortega lying on his back at the foot of the stairs arrested
me in the doorway. One of his legs was drawn up, the other extended
fully, his foot very near the pedestal of the silver statuette holding
the feeble and tenacious gleam which made the shadows so heavy in that
hall. One of his arms lay across his breast. The other arm was extended
full length on the white-and-black pavement with the hand palm upwards
and the fingers rigidly spread out. The shadow of the lowest step
slanted across his face but one whisker and part of his chin could be
made out. He appeared strangely flattened. He didn’t move at all. He
was in his shirt-sleeves. I felt an extreme distaste for that sight.
The characteristic sound of a key worrying in the lock stole into my
ears. I couldn’t locate it but I didn’t attend much to that at first. I
was engaged in watching Señor Ortega. But for his raised leg he clung so
flat to the floor and had taken on himself such a distorted shape that he
might have been the mere shadow of Señor Ortega. It was rather
fascinating to see him so quiet at the end of all that fury, clamour,
passion, and uproar. Surely there was never anything so still in the
world as this Ortega. I had a bizarre notion that he was not to be
disturbed.
A noise like the rattling of chain links, a small grind and click
exploded in the stillness of the hall and a voice began to swear in
Italian. These surprising sounds were quite welcome, they recalled me to
myself, and I perceived they came from the front door which seemed pushed
a little ajar. Was somebody trying to get in? I had no objection, I
went to the door and said: “Wait a moment, it’s on the chain.” The deep
voice on the other side said: “What an extraordinary thing,” and I
assented mentally. It was extraordinary. The chain was never put up,
but Therese was a thorough sort of person, and on this night she had put
it up to keep no one out except myself. It was the old Italian and his
daughters returning from the ball who were trying to get in.
Suddenly I became intensely alive to the whole situation. I bounded
back, closed the door of Blunt’s room, and the next moment was speaking
to the Italian. “A little patience.” My hands trembled but I managed to
take down the chain and as I allowed the door to swing open a little more
I put myself in his way. He was burly, venerable, a little indignant,
and full of thanks. Behind him his two girls, in short-skirted costumes,
white stockings, and low shoes, their heads powdered and earrings
sparkling in their ears, huddled together behind their father, wrapped up
in their light mantles. One had kept her little black mask on her face,
the other held hers in her hand.
The Italian was surprised at my blocking the way and remarked pleasantly,
“It’s cold outside, Signor.” I said, “Yes,” and added in a hurried
whisper: “There is a dead man in the hall.” He didn’t say a single word
but put me aside a little, projected his body in for one searching
glance. “Your daughters,” I murmured. He said kindly, “_Va bene_, _va
bene_.” And then to them, “Come in, girls.”
There is nothing like dealing with a man who has had a long past of
out-of-the-way experiences. The skill with which he rounded up and drove
the girls across the hall, paternal and irresistible, venerable and
reassuring, was a sight to see. They had no time for more than one
scared look over the shoulder. He hustled them in and locked them up
safely in their part of the house, then crossed the hall with a quick,
practical stride. When near Señor Ortega he trod short just in time and
said: “In truth, blood”; then selecting the place, knelt down by the body
in his tall hat and respectable overcoat, his white beard giving him
immense authority somehow. “But—this man is not dead,” he exclaimed,
looking up at me. With profound sagacity, inherent as it were in his
great beard, he never took the trouble to put any questions to me and
seemed certain that I had nothing to do with the ghastly sight. “He
managed to give himself an enormous gash in his side,” was his calm
remark. “And what a weapon!” he exclaimed, getting it out from under the
body. It was an Abyssinian or Nubian production of a bizarre shape; the
clumsiest thing imaginable, partaking of a sickle and a chopper with a
sharp edge and a pointed end. A mere cruel-looking curio of
inconceivable clumsiness to European eyes.
The old man let it drop with amused disdain. “You had better take hold
of his legs,” he decided without appeal. I certainly had no inclination
to argue. When we lifted him up the head of Señor Ortega fell back
desolately, making an awful, defenceless display of his large, white
throat.
We found the lamp burning in the studio and the bed made up on the couch
on which we deposited our burden. My venerable friend jerked the upper
sheet away at once and started tearing it into strips.
“You may leave him to me,” said that efficient sage, “but the doctor is
your affair. If you don’t want this business to make a noise you will
have to find a discreet man.”
He was most benevolently interested in all the proceedings. He remarked
with a patriarchal smile as he tore the sheet noisily: “You had better
not lose any time.” I didn’t lose any time. I crammed into the next
hour an astonishing amount of bodily activity. Without more words I flew
out bare-headed into the last night of Carnival. Luckily I was certain
of the right sort of doctor. He was an iron-grey man of forty and of a
stout habit of body but who was able to put on a spurt. In the cold,
dark, and deserted by-streets, he ran with earnest, and ponderous
footsteps, which echoed loudly in the cold night air, while I skimmed
along the ground a pace or two in front of him. It was only on arriving
at the house that I perceived that I had left the front door wide open.
All the town, every evil in the world could have entered the
black-and-white hall. But I had no time to meditate upon my imprudence.
The doctor and I worked in silence for nearly an hour and it was only
then while he was washing his hands in the fencing-room that he asked:
“What was he up to, that imbecile?”
“Oh, he was examining this curiosity,” I said.
“Oh, yes, and it accidentally went off,” said the doctor, looking
contemptuously at the Nubian knife I had thrown on the table. Then while
wiping his hands: “I would bet there is a woman somewhere under this; but
that of course does not affect the nature of the wound. I hope this
blood-letting will do him good.”
“Nothing will do him any good,” I said.
“Curious house this,” went on the doctor, “It belongs to a curious sort
of woman, too. I happened to see her once or twice. I shouldn’t wonder
if she were to raise considerable trouble in the track of her pretty feet
as she goes along. I believe you know her well.”
“Yes.”
“Curious people in the house, too. There was a Carlist officer here, a
lean, tall, dark man, who couldn’t sleep. He consulted me once. Do you
know what became of him?”
“No.”
The doctor had finished wiping his hands and flung the towel far away.
“Considerable nervous over-strain. Seemed to have a restless brain. Not
a good thing, that. For the rest a perfect gentleman. And this Spaniard
here, do you know him?”
“Enough not to care what happens to him,” I said, “except for the trouble
he might cause to the Carlist sympathizers here, should the police get
hold of this affair.”
“Well, then, he must take his chance in the seclusion of that
conservatory sort of place where you have put him. I’ll try to find
somebody we can trust to look after him. Meantime, I will leave the case
to you.”