When a human being has not slept for five or six nights, especially if
that human being is a woman of romantic temperament, many queer things
are bound to happen. The sensory nerves become susceptible to impression
from all influences that exist, and from many that do not. The head
swells to an enormous size with its unrelieved store. Bells and music
and the voice of an invisible person reading aloud an interminable
and unintelligible book throb on the tympanum. Men and women have an
uncomfortable way of growing suddenly large and then suddenly small
before the eyes. The flesh seems disintegrated into elemental and
quivering molecules. A sixth sense riotously develops, and makes the
sufferer aware of a murderous devil dogging the footsteps. Under these
conditions, to join in the small-talk of a family dinner table, do fancy
work in the drawing-room and play Grieg on the piano to a virtuoso,
argues a considerable reserve fund of moral power. And this is found
more commonly in women than in men.
Until the day of Hugh’s trial at the Old Bailey, Minna had successfully
concealed her state from the friendly eyes of the Bebros. She looked
wretchedly ill, but a cunning shade of carmine relieved her haggardness
and caused her to appear nothing more than interestingly afflicted. When
the pains of hell gat more closely round about her, she forced her lips
into a photographic smile, thereby impressing the motherly Mrs. Bebro
with a sense of her patience under tribulation. It was a gruesome
comedy.
At first pure terror and avarice, bitter resentment of the wrongs Hugh
had done her, and consequent blindness to the imminent peril in which
he stood, had paralysed the moral sense. But later, after she had given
evidence before the magistrates, she knew to the full that she was
playing the most desperate game that ever woman played for money. The
gambler’s instinct kept her mind clear; strength of will saved her from
collapse. Hugh acquitted, all her money would be her own. Everything
would be well. She would seek fresh scenes, blot this nightmare for ever
from her life. Hugh condemned, she would do some mad deed to save him,
summon Anna Cassaba from Syria, cast herself at the feet of the Home
Secretary, surrender her thousands, and--throw herself over Waterloo
Bridge. This was a doom, inevitable, meted out to her, rather than a
scheme which her brain had devised. All the passionate yet stubborn
racial energies of her nature were concentrated upon the supreme effort
of making her last bid for fortune.
It was a fixed idea, focussing the distempered mind and magnetising the
exhausted flesh.
Her last bid for fortune. She had made it. She found herself in Mrs.
Bebro’s carriage, with the motherly lady by her side. How she had been
transported thither from the swaying, reeling court, she did not know.
Mrs. Bebro, with veil raised above red eyes, was holding her hand. Yet
she had a vague knowledge that she had not fainted.
“There, there, it is over now, dear,” said her companion, kindly. “It
has been a trying time for you. We’ll soon get home, now, and a cup of
tea and a lie down will do you good.”
“Yes,” said Minna, hoarsely. “It will do me good.”
“Poor young man,” said Mrs. Bebro. “I nearly cried my eyes out over
him.”
“It is a terrible thing,” said the girl, with set teeth, clenching the
arm-strap with her free hand.
“And I’m sure he’s innocent--poor fellow. I met him once--you remember?
Such charming manners--like a prince. And your poor, dear father so fond
of him too. He can’t have done it.”
“I know he is innocent,” said Minna.
Hitherto Mrs. Bebro had been very considerate in her allusions to the
dreadful topic. But now human nature asserted itself. She was anxious to
sympathise, also to relieve pent-up emotions; for the fascination of
a murder upon those intimately connected with it is intense--it is
a splash of blood upon the grey veil of decorous life, and cannot be
hidden. She took up her parable, discoursed at length, in a hushed
voice, such as she considered reverend upon the Day of Atonement. And
as she talked, in the cramped space of the noiselessly gliding brougham,
the horrors gradually grew upon the girl.
“We must buy an evening paper to see what happened before we got there.
But I asked the policeman, and he said things were going very bad for
the poor fellow. When once I got in, I should have liked to have heard
it all from the beginning. But it would have been too painful for you,
poor dear child, to have done more than just given your evidence. I am
glad you were able to say what you did about him. It may help him.”
“Yes, I tried to help him,” said Minna.
The sides of the brougham seemed to be narrowing upon her, like the
Inquisition torture-chamber. She suddenly thrust out her arms to keep
them off.
“My dear child----?”
The question suddenly restored her balance. But she wanted to scream.
Instead, she uttered a short laugh.
“I was thinking what a screaming farce this would make in hell!” she
said, gutturally.
Mrs. Bebro looked at her enquiringly. The conception was beyond her.
“Yes, I am sure the Evil One must have a hand in it,” she said, at last,
in a tone of assent. “Circumstances are diabolically against him. Oh,
it gives me the horrors to think of it--and how proud and handsome he
looked standing there--as if everyone was the dirt under his feet. Do
you know, dear--about you and him--if he had been one of our people I
could have fancied----”
She broke off. The carriage was blocked at Piccadilly Circus. A
newspaper boy darted up to the open window, flourishing an evening
paper.
“Sunnington murder! latest details!”
Minna threw herself aside onto Mrs. Bebro with a piercing shriek. There
was a rush of startled and attracted bystanders. Mrs. Bebro stretched
across Minna and pulled up the glass. The carriage moved on. She
took the shaking girl in her arms and held her to her bosom, uttering
motherly words of soothing.
But that sudden shriek was the beginning of things. All the rest of
the drive home she lay quite still, continuing the comedy and the
mystification of the worthy, single-minded woman; but in order to do so,
she was forced to keep her gloved fingers between her teeth.
“There, there,” continued Mrs. Bebro, petting her. “Don’t take on so,
dear. We must bear all the afflictions that the Lord sends us. Bear up,
dear, under them, like a Jewish maiden. We will put you to bed, with
something hot and nice to take, and you will sleep and wake up strong
to-morrow.”
And so the good woman went on, seeking to heal the bayonetted body with
housewifely sticking-plaster.
But the girl was too far gone for heeding. The new horrors were upon
her. As soon as they reached the house and had entered, she fled
upstairs to her room, with the black things at her heels.
What passed then, when alone in her room she crouched before her terror,
it is neither profitable nor decent to say. She had been strong up to a
certain point--the goal to whose attainment she had set the marvellous
mechanism of nerves and fibres. It was of her sex not to have calculated
upon the beyond. She paid her sex’s penalty. The inevitable law of
inconsistency dragged her out, a wild, half-mad thing, an hour later
into the street. A hansom cab chanced to have just put down a fare
at the next house. She entered, flung an address at the driver, and a
moment later was being carried through whirling space.
*****
The first day of Hugh’s trial was over. The streets rang with it.
Reports were flashing through the kingdom on a thousand wires. It
was the theme of all men’s talk. A _cause célébré_ convulsing a vast
society. The attorney-general had delivered his opening address. One or
two witnesses had been called; Minna Hart the last.
The prisoner’s prospects were damnably black. His friends regarded each
other with pale lips. In the quiet Hertfordshire townlet two gentle
ladies clung together in awful anguish of soul. The man himself lay in
Holloway Gaol mailed in a pride of steel.
Irene and Gerard sat over their evening meal. She had been in court all
the gnawing day, and now, leaning back in her chair, dressed in a
pink wrapper, a pretty coquetry of happier times, she looked almost
diaphanous in her exhaustion.
“It is no use your not eating,” said Gerard, “you’ll make yourself ill.”
She shook her head.
“I can’t, Gerard. I’ll have some beef tea or something presently. You go
on. You are a man and have a big body to nourish.”
She helped him from the dish in front of her, choosing, in her wifely
fashion, the nicest-looking morsels, and then sat regarding him with her
great eyes, admiring the strength of will that could compel appetite on
so sorrowful an evening. She knew that rejection of food was silly. But
the thought of it turned her sick. “I feel ill,” she said. “I always
prided myself on being strong-minded and above affected, feminine
weaknesses. But now--” she shrugged her shoulders and her lips moved in
a wan smile.
“You had better not come to the court to-morrow, if you don’t feel up to
it,” said Gerard.
“Oh, I should go if I were dying!” said Irene. “It is the least thing we
can do--go and cheer and keep the brave heart in him. For with all your
efforts, dearest, you have been able to do nothing.”
“There was nothing to be done. I did what I could. Couldn’t even get
hold of your famous photograph. He must have destroyed that too. So I
couldn’t trace the original.”
That cold, cruel and exquisitely chiselled face, whose likeness she had
seen in Hugh’s rooms, had persistently assumed the identity of the woman
for whose sake he was maintaining this silence. Even when she doubted
the probability of her conjecture, the mysterious woman gradually
revealed herself as the possessor of those ophidian eyes. They haunted
her night and day. At last she doubted no longer. That was the woman;
she had the face of one who could well see the man that loved her die
before her eyes. As a forlorn hope Irene had set Gerard upon the track
of this photograph. But it had disappeared from Hugh’s rooms. The
disappearance, however, confirmed her certainty.
There was a silence. Gerard went on with his dinner with the steadiness
of a big-framed man who must eat. Irene pressed her hands over her
burning eyeballs and leant forward on the table. She was suffering
greatly.
“Will you be able to bear it--if the worst comes?” she asked, after a
while.
“The worst hasn’t come yet,” he replied, “so it’s no good talking about
it.”
His brow clouded. There was a deep note in his wife’s voice that
troubled him. She noticed the shadow.
“I must not pain you, Gerard. I have only known Hugh for a few years. He
has been your friend all your life. I can’t feel it all as you do.”
“We don’t mend matters by dwelling upon them,” he said. “Besides--if
there really is a woman----”
“Oh, she must be in hell-fire now!” exclaimed Irene, fiercely--“a
foretaste of the future.”
“Yes,” he assented-grimly, “I shouldn’t like to be in her shoes.”
Another silence. This time broken by the rattle and sudden drag of a
carriage drawing up at the front door. A moment later the faint whirr of
the electric bell downstairs.
“Who can that be?” cried Irene, nervously. “Hush, dear! Let me listen.”
She strained her ears, rather overwrought. “It is a woman--if it should
be _the_ woman!”
“Oh, nonsense, Renie,” said Gerard, with a man’s contempt for the
feminine-fanciful.
The maidservant entered.
“Miss Hart, sir, wishes to speak to you.”
“Miss Hart!” echoed Irene, with a shade of disappointment. Then
succeeded quick scorn for the silliness of her fluttering hope, and
natural interest in the visitor’s errand. “What can she want?”
Gerard rose from the table and went out into the hall. It was a broad
passage, softly carpeted, well warmed, furnished with oak settles and
tables, here and there a great indoor plant, all brightly lighted from a
great central cluster of electric globes.
Minna was standing near the door. As Gerard approached, she advanced
hurriedly to meet him--her veil off, her dark hair disordered over her
forehead, her fashionable, befeathered and beribboned hat awry.
“I have come--I want to----”
She stopped dead. Stared at him open-mouthed. He was somewhat
bewildered.
“Yes?” he said, in lame enquiry.
But she stood before him, trembling, uttering little sharp noises, like
a terrier wistful to make his wants known, a horror in her eyes.
“Good God--what is the matter?”
She could not reply. The horror faded into mere helpless fright. She
raised her hands and twitched her fingers, somewhat horridly, in the
air, and continued the little staccato moans.
“Renie!” cried Gerard, sharply. “Renie, come here!”
Irene started at her husband’s summons and ran out into the hall. But as
soon as the girl saw her, she uttered a long, shivering moan and shrank
against the wall.
“What is it?”
“The girl’s got a fit--hysterics or something. Said a couple of words
and then gasped at me.”
“Poor child,” said Irene, touched.
She approached her, but Minna waved her away with unreasoning terror,
and, edging backward, met an oak settle on which she instinctively sat,
and, crouching, continued her inarticulate cries.
“She evidently doesn’t want you, Renie,” said Gerard. “What the devil
shall I do with her?”
“I’ll go away for a minute--you must try and quiet her. I’ll send Jane
to you. Then I’ll come back and see if she’ll bear me to touch her. It’s
hysteria. The whole thing has been too much for her to-day--poor little
thing.”
Irene made one more attempt; but seeing that her ministrations would
perhaps render the girl violent, she retired and sent the maid in her
place. Irene gone, Minna grew less excited, but she trembled and moaned
and was apparently incapable of understanding words. Gerard arranged
some cushions, and the servant administered smelling-salts. On trying to
pull off her gloves, so as to chafe her hands, they found the fingers
of one hand swollen. The kid was cut, and bloody at the edges, where she
had bitten. Gerard left the two women, and, going into the dining-room,
explained matters hurriedly to Irene.
“What the deuce is the meaning of it?”
“She’s overwrought, poor child. Think what a terrible ordeal she went
through in the witness-box to-day. Hugh was very friendly at The
Lindens, you know.”
“Do you think she was in love with Hugh?”
“Perhaps,” said Irene, rather wearily. “But what did she want me for?”
“All hysterical, dear. She knew you were Hugh’s dearest friend. Came to
ask whether you thought him likely to be condemned. Then broke down. You
see what poor silly stuff we women are made of.”
“At any rate, you don’t fall to gibbering like a monkey at the sight of
a snake,” said Gerard, accepting his wife’s explanation. “And now, what
are we to do with her?”
“She won’t let me come near her, or else I would nurse her,” said Irene.
“What do you think?”
“Her cab is still waiting. I could take her home to her friends. Would
it hurt her?”
“No,” said Irene. “It might do her good--the drive; but you--you are so
tired, dear.”
“Oh, Lord, I’d sooner take her away than have her fooling about here,”
said Gerard. And he went back again to the hall.
Thus Minna was restored to the scared and anxious Bebros, who put her
to bed and sent for a doctor. The hysteria, on whose brink she had long
been trembling, had at last engulfed her, and hour by hour she sank
deeper into the abyss, where all the horrors fought for her. But the
significance of her foiled errand did not reach her consciousness.
And that night, as Gerard slept stertorously by her side, Irene lay
throbbingly awake, aching with suspense. The awful peril of the man
whom Gerard loved dulled her reminiscence of the strange visit of the
hysterical girl. It never crossed her mind that the Lord had delivered
her enemy into her hands.