IN THE ONE ROOM--AND THE OTHER
Edwin Lawrence was one of the most finical men I had ever met on the
subject of draughts. A properly ventilated apartment set him
shivering, even in the middle of summer. The faintest suspicion of a
healthy current of air made him turn up the collar of his coat. No
room could be too stuffy for him. All his doors and windows he
screened with heavy hangings. Behind the curtains which veiled the
entrance into his dining-room I lingered, for a moment, to glance
between the voluminous folds. Miss Moore was standing about the centre
of the room. Something in the expression of her face, and in her
attitude, caused me to hesitate. I checked the advance of Miss Adair
and Hume, who pressed on me behind.
“Wait!” I whispered. “I want to see what she is going to do.”
I would rather have been unaccompanied; Hume’s society in particular I
could have done without. But I could hardly induce him to withdraw
without disturbing the girl within. That, all at once, I felt
indisposed to do. At any and every risk I wanted light; to bring her
back into the full possession of her reason. It needed but a brief
glance to perceive that, in her present environment, she might pass
through some sort of crisis which would bring about the result I so
ardently desired. The constable had followed us into the room. He
showed a disposition to require our retreat. I took him by the
shoulder.
“Be still, man; you will do your duty best by holding your tongue.”
He perceived that there was reason in what I said. He held his tongue,
and I held his shoulder.
Miss Moore was looking round as if something in the appearance of the
room struck a chord in her memory, and she was endeavouring to
discover what it was. She put her hand up to her forehead with the
gesture with which I had become familiar.
“I have been in this room before--surely I have. I seem to know it all
quite well; but I can’t think when I saw it, or how. I can’t make it
out at all.”
She was glancing about her with bewildered eyes, as if seeking for
some familiar object which would serve as a clue towards the solution
of the puzzle. At last something arrested her attention; it was the
tell-tale stain upon the carpet. She was standing within a yard or two
of the spot on which I had discovered Lawrence lying. His body was
gone, but his blood remained behind--a lurid disfigurement of the
handsome floorcloth. She started at it.
“What is it?” She stooped down; she touched it with her finger tips;
an odd little tremor seemed to come into her voice. “It--it’s dry. Why
shouldn’t it be dry? What--what is it?” Still stooping, she covered
her face with her hands, as if struggling to rouse her dormant memory.
“It seems to bring something back to me. Something--something horrid.
What can it be? Oh!”
She started upright, with a little exclamation. A new look came on her
face; a suggestion of fear, of horror. She was all at once on the
alert, as if in expectation of something of which she had cause to be
afraid.
“This is where Mr. Edwin Lawrence was killed--killed!” Again that look
of puzzlement. “That means that he was--murdered! Murdered! He fell
like that.”
She made a sudden movement, as if to hurl herself headlong to the
floor, which was so realistic that I started forward to save her from
a fall. It was only a feint; in an instant she was back in her
original position.
“Let me see how it was. He was here, and I was there.”
She moved from one place to another, as if endeavouring to recall a
scene in which she had taken part. It seemed to come back to her in
fragments.
“I said, ‘I’ll kill you;’ because I felt like killing him. And
then--then he laughed. He said, ‘Kill me! How will you be better off
for that?’ And that made me worse. I made up my mind that--that I’d
kill him.”
She paused. I shuddered, clutching the curtains tighter. Although I
did not turn to look at them, I knew that there was something strange
on the faces of Miss Adair and Hume; that even the constable was moved
to a display of unusual interest. A faint whisper reached me from the
lady:
“Stop her! Don’t let her go on!”
I was conscious of a weakness in my throat, which made my voice sound
as if I were hoarse, as I whispered a reply.
“I shan’t attempt to stop her. I shall let her say all that she has to
say. I’m not afraid.”
I felt her pull at my coat sleeve, as a dog might do to show its
sympathy.
The girl within continued. She had put her hands up to her brow again,
and seemed battling with her torpid faculties. Through all that
followed, in spite of the emotion which sometimes would grip me by the
throat, I was conscious of the singular quality of her beauty, which
caused it to increase as her agitation grew. Strangely out of keeping
with the dreadful nature of some of the things she said was the air of
innocence which accompanied them. She depicted herself as playing a
leading part in a hideous tragedy, with the direct simplicity of a
little child who confesses to faults of whose capital importance it
has not the faintest notion.
“Did I kill him? Did I? Not then--no, not then. Then he came in, and
it began all over again, right from the beginning; and--we quarrelled.
We both said we would kill him, both of us; and he laughed. The more
we said that we would kill him the more he laughed. And that--that
made us worse. Then--then it came in. It! It!”
She shuddered. A look of abnormal terror came on her face. She covered
her hands, uttering cries of panic fear.
“Don’t! Don’t! I won’t! I won’t! You mustn’t make me, you mustn’t!
Don’t let it come near me! Don’t let it touch me! I can’t bear to
think of its touching me! Oh!”
With a gasp, uncovering her eyes, she stared, affrightedly, at
something which she seemed to see in front of her.
“What is it? I’m not afraid. Why should I be afraid? There is nothing
the matter. I am not so easily frightened. I said I would kill him,
but not like that, not like that. Did I say I’d kill him? Yes. And I
did! I did! But I didn’t mean to. Did I mean to? I don’t know. Perhaps
I meant to. He says I meant to, and perhaps he knows.”
She stood staring in front of her, with blank, unmeaning gaze. Then,
giving herself a little shake, she seemed to wake out of a sort of
dream; and to be surprised at finding herself where she was.
“What is the matter with me? Am I going mad? This is the room, and
yet, although I know it, I can’t think what room it is. Something
happened to me here which haunts me; and though I’m afraid to try to
think what it was, I can’t help trying. Why did I come here? It was
very silly. It was because he--he told me that--Edwin Lawrence was
killed here.
“Edwin Lawrence? What had that man to do with me? Lawrence? I feel as
if I ought to know the name. There were two of them, and one--one was
killed. Oh, I remember all! I can hear that horrid noise. I can see
the knives--the knives! And I can see the blood, as he falls right
down upon his face, and the hack, hack, hacking! I didn’t do it! I
didn’t do it! Did I--do it?”
She looked about her with an agony of appeal which it was terrible to
witness. My heart sank within my breast. At that moment I could not
have gone to her even had I tried.
“Let me see--how did it happen? He stood here, and--the other laughed;
and then there came the knife--the long, gleaming knife--and struck
him in the back; and he looked round, and--I saw his face. His face!
What a face! It was as if he were looking into hell. Don’t look at
me--not like that. I can’t help you! It’s too late! Turn your face
away; don’t let me see it; it isn’t fair. It was the devil did it--the
devil! It wasn’t I. And then it took him by the throat with a dozen
hands, and with a hundred knives cut at his face, until, before my
eyes, I saw him losing his likeness to a man. And then it loosed him,
and the great knife struck him from the back, and he fell on his
face--what was his face, and then the hack, hack, hacking! And all the
time that horrid noise.”
She held up her arms in an anguish of supplication.
“Oh Lord, in what have I offended that this thing should come upon me?
If I have sinned, surely my punishment is greater than my sin. That
you should lay this burden on me, to bear for ever, and for ever, and
for ever! Take it from me, let me wake to find it is a dream--the
nightmare of a haunted night! For if it should be true, if it should
be true, what is there for me but the torture fires of an eternal
hell? Have mercy on me, Lord, have mercy!”
She broke into a paroxysm of sobbing. She shed no tears, hers were dry
sobs; but it seemed as if they were tearing her to pieces. Then they
ceased. Again a shudder went all over her, and again she seemed to
come back to a curious wakefulness, out of a fevered dream.
“I’m not well; I can’t be; I wish I were. It is as if I were two
persons, and each keeps losing the other. Can there be two persons in
one body? My brain seems blurred--as if it were in two parts. When I
am using one part, the other--the other’s all confused. It’s not as it
should be. I feel sure that I haven’t always been like this; something
must have happened to make me so. When I try to think what it is, I’m
afraid; and yet I can’t help trying. I know--I know it was in this
room it happened; but what could it have been? What brought me to this
room at all? When was it that I came?
“There’s something in my head that I can’t catch hold of--it keeps
eluding me. If I only could get hold of it, I’d understand--I’m sure I
should.--What would it be that I should understand? I’m afraid to
think! It’s awful that I should be afraid of what would come to me if
understanding came, especially as I want it so much to come. I seem to
be haunted; is it by a vision, or by something which really happened?
I wish I could sit down and quietly think it out. If I could put the
pieces of the puzzle together I might know what it means. But I can’t;
I’m all restless; I can’t keep still.
“Why is it that I am always seeing this man lying dead upon the floor?
Why do I seem to be striking at his back? It is so strange. It is not
a knife I’m striking with, not a common knife; it is something
different--and worse. It comes out of nothing; and, all the time,
there’s the noise. It is not I who make the noise, no, I don’t
speak--I can’t--I daren’t--it’s It. But it keeps on strike, strike,
striking, and the blood all comes upon my cloak. I know I had a cloak
on, I remember how it kept getting in my way. And then--he falls. And
that’s all--until it begins all over again, and I am standing in a
room, in the moonlight, and he sits up in bed and looks at me--he, my
friend.”
She held out her hands in front of her, with a pleasant inflection on
the final word.
“And I can’t think of what took place before. I feel that I ought to
know who I am, and what brought me here; but I can’t quite lay my hand
on it. The people are there, but I can’t quite make out their faces,
or who they are, or what they want with me. They all look at me, and I
can hear them clapping. Then it all comes back to the man lying dead
upon the floor; that’s where it all seems to begin and end. I wonder
if I killed him. I wish I knew. It is so strange that I may have
killed him and yet not know. I know that he deserved to be killed, but
did I do it?”
Glancing round, her eyes rested on the door in the opposite corner
which led into Lawrence’s bedroom. She crossed to it.
“What’s in here?”
She turned the handle and went in. I was at the door within five
seconds of her passing through it; Miss Adair, Hume, and the constable
still at my heels. We must have presented a spectacle which was not
without its comic side as we went scurrying across the carpet. But
what I saw as I looked into that bedchamber banished from my mind all
thoughts of the incongruous; it must, for the time being, have
paralysed the muscles of the body; or I do not think that I should
have remained for even so long as I did a silent witness of that
piteous scene.
One of the first things I realised was the presence in the room of
Inspector Symonds. He, in company with a colleague, was submitting the
contents of the apartment to an official examination. As Miss Moore
entered the two men turned and stared--as well they might. She, on her
part, paid them no attention; they were at her back, in an alcove,
formed by the bay of the window, in which stood a bureau, whose
drawers they were ransacking. Her eyes saw one thing, and one thing
only--something which lay under a sheet upon the bed.
“What’s that?” she asked herself. “What’s under the sheet?”
She went towards the bed doubtfully, as if uncertain as to the
direction which her adventure might be taking. We watched her, silent.
The officials, I take it, were for the moment too much taken aback by
her appearance to know what to make of her. While for me, that was one
of the occasions in my life on which I lost my presence of mind. If I
had known what to do I could not have done it; my nerves were all in a
flutter, like so many loose strings. She went close up to the bed;
then stood still, looking down at the something whose shape she saw
outlined.
“What is it under the sheet?”
She lifted up a corner, then let it fall. “It’s the man I saw lying
dead.” I saw her tremble. A new look came on her face--half curiosity,
half awe. “I wonder if I should know him if I saw him now? If it would
all come back to me? I wonder if it would?”
She turned down the sheet so as to expose the dead man’s head and
face. She stared at him with looks of growing horror. The terror of
the sight seemed to be gradually forcing itself upon her brain.
Stooping a little forward, she began to move farther and farther from
the bed. Her voice became husky.
“I killed him; it hacked, hacked, hacked; his blood is on my cloak and
hands; the dead man lying on the floor.”
She stopped. The something on the bed apparently had for her a
dreadful fascination. She seemed to be in two minds as to whether or
not to go close to it again, as if she would, and yet would not. Miss
Adair touched me on the arm.
“Stop! Don’t let her go to it! Don’t!”
Her words and touch woke me from a sort of trance. I awoke to a clear
realisation of the full horror of the situation--the young girl, with
her poor, numbed brain, trying experiments on the man just murdered.
“You go to her,” I said. “See if she knows you.”
It was time some friendly hand was interposed. Inspector Symonds and
his colleague showed signs of intervention on their own account, and
on lines of their own. Miss Moore began to turn slowly towards the
bed.
“I wonder if I could make out where I struck him, and where it
hacked.”
Miss Adair moved forward.
“Bessie!” she cried.
The girl turned and saw her, and appeared to struggle with the
darkness which was in her brain. The contest seemed physical as well
as mental; she swayed to and fro; I thought that she would fall. Then
reason got the upper hand; a wave of consciousness swept over her. She
drew herself upright, and she ran to Miss Adair.
“Florrie!” she exclaimed.
She burst into tears--real tears this time, not the dry sobs which, a
few minutes before, seemed to be tearing her to pieces. She cried like
a child.