Sydney had been wandering the house like one possessed. From her room
where she stood inanimate motionless beside Neil’s bed, to the East Room
where she mechanically extended her hands to the fire Nadia had herself
built on the enormous hearth, to the kitchens where she blindly prepared
things for Neil’s comfort, she made the rounds with frozen face and
rigid body. The spirit was stricken—only the form of Sydney went on
living and doing. Meeting far too many emotional crises within far too
short a space of time had destroyed her receptivities; whether
temporarily or permanently remained to be seen.
Nadia was in the East Room, smoking furiously, picking up and laying
down bric-a-brac, books, pictures, a glass of water, with indiscriminate
and hasty distraction. Seeing the ghost of Sydney pass through for the
sixth time her nerves were stung to remonstrance.
“For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter, Mrs. Crawford? One would think
you were the only one in trouble around here. Is it as bad as all that
with your husband? Can’t he buck up?”
Sydney halted in her tracks and stood gazing straight through Nadia,
through the walls, through the outer fog, for several seconds.
“He’s worse,” she said in a dragging voice. “I don’t understand it.”
“I’ll come up with you.” Nadia’s bomb of angry impatience burst in air
and came softly down. “There may be something I can do.”
Again there was an appreciable interval before Sydney answered, her eyes
distantly intent, as though, a creature of another world, she listened
for echoes of this.
“You may come,” she murmured.
They went up together to the Crawfords’ room, passing in the lower hall
a policeman sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed chair against the
wall near the door. A high-low light was turned low above the
mirror-table beside him. It was all the light for the hall and stairway.
At the head of the stairs another policeman, equally immobile and
disinterested, sat in a straight-backed chair against the wall.
“It feels like a hotel after 2 A.M., or a funeral parlor at midday,”
Nadia cried at Sydney. “Let’s turn up the lights and dance on the
graves—throw a celebration with horns and cymbals.”
But Sydney was deaf to her. And even Nadia’s bitter laughter died away
when she had taken one look at Crawford, felt his pulse, and listened to
his breathing. There was a horrid whitish edge of something, like dried
foam at a tide-mark, along his upper lip. The lids of his eyes were
neither up nor down, but remained fixed half across the pupils. His
Adam’s apple shifted a little, spasmodically. Nadia swung on Sydney.
“You little damn fool,” she hissed. “What do you think you’re
doing—playing with death? As if we hadn’t had enough of it about. Did
that frightful idiot of a Dr. Giles go off duty?”
“What’s the matter?” Sydney asked stonily.
“Did you give him the sedative I gave you?”
“What?”
“I said, _did you give him the sedative I gave you_?”
“I did.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. Some tea, I think. And bicarbonate. And—and water of
course.”
“Is that all?”
“I don’t know. I tell you I don’t know. What are you driving at? Answer
me! What do you mean?”
“Keep quiet.”
“Are you trying to make out I’ve—?”
“_Shut_ up, or I’ll make you.”
Sydney Crawford’s eyes seemed to return at last from the cosmic
universe. They contracted and shivered to points of horror. Everything
about her, from her clinched hands to her vivid chalk-white face, put
itself headlong into one word:
“_Murderer!_”
And Nadia Mdevani was looking all too ready to be one when Julian,
standing in the door, interrupted them.
“Don’t tell me anything’s wrong,” he said with a thin sarcasm.
Poised against each other as the two women were, it took them both
several breaths to withhold their momentum and divert it to new
channels. Nadia was the first to recover.
“We need a doctor, Mr. Prentice,” she said quietly. “And we need him
soon.” She threw a glance in Crawford’s direction and, in a low voice,
risked more: “I’ve seen a few poisons in my day, and this _is_ a poison!
Arsenic. You know how rapid that is.”
Sydney sprang toward Julian.
“Don’t go, Mr. Prentice! I tell you if you go—”
But Julian had fled; down the corridor, down the dim stairs, and out
into the fog. They heard the door close loudly behind him. Sydney
dropped her hands loosely, resignedly, at her sides. “That’s that,” she
said quietly. “Not that it really matters. I am completely at your
mercy, Miss Mdevani. You may think it makes a difference. It doesn’t.
There are others now who care as little as Bertrand Whittaker cared.”
Nadia looked her up and down with cold contempt and a colder pity.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Crawford. Your time is not yet. Not _quite_ yet.” She
pushed back her shining ebony hair with her two hands. “It appears I
must be the one to do it at that—the chosen of the Lord. For the
mortification of the flesh.” She was speaking to herself, not to Sydney.
Crawford shifted a little, and moaned.
“I am in pain,” he said. “Sydney.”
“Yes?” Sydney neither stirred, nor looked toward him.
“I am in pain.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Yes, something is wrong.”
Neil seemed to be considering that. Beads of perspiration stood out on
his forehead, and on the backs of his hands lying weakly on the
coverlid. His dry lips thinned perceptibly. Then, on a breath, he only
said again:
“Sydney.”
“Yes?”
“Sydney.”
“I said, what is it?”
“It’s up to you, Mrs. Crawford,” Nadia cried softly.
“What do you mean?”
“Sydney.” Crawford’s monotonous, sad repetition of her name was the
tragic undertone in the room.
“Be quick about it,” Nadia screamed in a whisper.
“I tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sydney.”
“You know as well as I do what I mean.”
“Sydney.” His voice was weaker.
The effort by which Sydney moved her limbs and went to Neil’s side was
painful to watch, like the first steps of a Frankenstein conception. She
bent over him a little and laid her hand across his eyes.
“It’s all right, Neil. There is nothing wrong. I didn’t mean there was.
It has been so hard for you. So bad I can’t remember how bad. If I
remembered I’d die. Perhaps you are remembering. Don’t let it kill you,
dear. For you and I have so much to do. We are going to go on from where
we laid our story down—was it a year ago? I’m sure we can find the very
page, paragraph and sentence where we left off.”
Neil smiled. It was the smile of a blind person, sweet and helpless. He
moved a little nearer Sydney, and lay perfectly still. How long the
three in the room remained speechless and motionless it would have been
hard to say. It was Belknap who disturbed two of them; the third was
beyond all further disturbance.