demanded. Her eyes continued to blaze forth the inquiry long after
there was any hope of the woman making a reply.
"I'm afraid you are a helpless creature," Julia told her, with the
stern pitilessness that belongs to youth. "I also do not know how to
make bread-sauce, but I will make it. In the meantime, will you go up
to our rooms, fetch down the empty packing-cases--you will find them
extremely light--and place them in that shed across the yard we saw
empty this morning."
Undoubtedly Mrs Ragg was a helpless creature. She stood uncertainly
before us, her skinny hands playing tremblingly with the buttons of her
dress, and did not attempt to move.
"Do you not hear me? Go at once," Julia commanded.
But I saw that the woman got no nearer to our rooms than the bottom of
the staircase. She stood there, clinging to the rail, and looking
aimlessly upward.
Running upstairs I brought the two light cases down myself.
"There is room for them in the kitchen," Mrs Ragg said. But, carrying
one myself, I told her to bring the other across to the empty shed.
Arrived there, however, we found the door of the shed locked.
"Fetch the key," I ordered.
She stood and looked at me, but did not move.
"Tell me where the key is, and let me fetch it."
The key was lost.
"Why have you taken the trouble to lock an absolutely empty shed?"
She had no reason to give. She had locked it, and the key was lost.
"She has some reason for not wishing us to go into that shed," Julia
said, oracularly, when the circumstance was mentioned to her.
"Absurd!" I said, but I did begin to experience an uncomfortable
suspicion of the woman.
"She has got those men locked up there," Julia continued, with her air
of assurance.
"Nonsense! What for?"
"Murder," said Julia, laconically; and energetically crumbled bread for
the sauce.
"What were two men doing here this morning?" I asked, with assumed
carelessness, of Mrs Ragg when next we encountered.
She mumbled the words "two men?" and stared at me by way of answer.
"We were told two men were here this morning. This is a very lonely
situation, Mrs Ragg. I suppose you would admit no one you don't know
all about?"
She was, she said, always most particular.
"Then, who were these two men, and what were they doing here?"
She did not know.
"Two men here, Mrs Ragg, and you not know it?"
"They weren't here," she said; and I had to leave it so.
I offered to change beds with Julia that night, but she would not hear
of it. "Your room is the more comfortable; keep it," she said. "While
you insist on staying here at the peril of our lives, I will sleep as
well as I can with a dead woman laid forth on the bed next mine, and
two murderers shut up in the shed across the way."
Julia's talk is ever more extravagant even than her notions, but it was
of a disquieting kind. Many of the absurd things she had said in the
day recurred to me in the night, assuming a quite different value. So
that, although I had longed for bed, I found myself, arrived there,
quite disinclined for sleep.
Surreptitiously I watched the caretaker up to bed. She came upstairs,
clinging to the balusters for support, a tired, worn-looking, elderly
woman, with a lank, frail body, and a care-lined, miserable face. How
ridiculous were Julia's suspicions! She not only did not lock her door
to-night, but left it ajar. At intervals I peeped through mine to see
if her light was extinguished; she had not--so poorly dressed she
was--the appearance of one who would indulge in the extravagance of a
candle burning all night. Yet, long after I knew by the creaking of the
spring mattress Mrs Ragg had lain down, I saw the streak of light
shining through the unclosed door.
Fears of fire were added to my other disquietudes. Standing on the
landing, I was hesitating if to knock at her door, and remind her she
had not put out her light, when I was conscious of a movement behind
me. Starting round with a muffled cry, I encountered a tall white
figure, which, with an answering cry, grabbed me by both shoulders.
"What _are_ you doing here, Isabella?"
"How _could_ you frighten me so, Julia!"
We clung together and scolded each other for a minute, then each
returned to her own room. But I not to sleep. Listening acutely for
every sound, yet shrinking from every sound as it came, I tossed and
turned with wide-open, feverish eyes. Suspicious circumstances at which
I had been disposed to laugh in the day, took on a sinister complexion
in the watches of the night. The loneliness of the place, its distance
from every habitation--details to which I held no special distaste
before--got hideously upon my nerves at last. Supposing anything
happened, in what a position did we three women stand! What chance was
there of help?
In my mind I surveyed the prospect from my window. The trackless Denes,
the wild, unfriendly sea. Shuddering, I turned mentally to the outlook
from Julia's room. What of reassuring was there in the rudiments of an
unlighted road across a desert of ugly waste lands?
I was thinking of the road, I suppose, when at last I fell on sleep;
for my dream was a nightmare of toiling over it with Julia, in a
frantic attempt to escape from some horror, none the less terrible for
being undefined, ever close upon our heels.
It was some disturbing but uncertain sound that wakened me from this
dreaming to an inner dream. Just a vision, seen in a flash and gone, of
two men standing in a light thrown from an upper window, and looking up
to it.
From this apparition so vividly presented to my brain, I was awakened
by a repetition of the disturbing sound, soft but distinct now. I flew
up in bed with a beating heart and the certainty that someone,
somewhere, had thrown a clod of earth at a window--not mine; at the
back of the house; Julia's, or Mrs Ragg's.
A minute, and I was out of my bed and into Julia's room. I laid a hand
on my sister's shoulder. "Julia," I whispered, "wake up. I've had such
horrible dreams."
The candle I held in a shaking hand showed the glinting green of
Julia's eyes within their half-opened lids. "I'm so comfy," she
muttered; "I'm having such a lovely sleep. Go back to bed, Isabella."
But I crept into Julia's bed, instead, and clasped her close for the
comfort of her presence.
"I dreamt two men were looking up at a window," I said, "--do keep
awake, Julia. I don't know why it seemed so horrid--nothing has ever
seemed so horrid before. And--you're going off to sleep again,
Julia!--you must listen!--someone flung something at a window. That was
not a dream. I heard it quite distinctly."
"It wasn't at this window," Julia declared, in muffled tones. "What a
nuisance you are, Isabella."
Then in an instant she flung off her sleep and was out of bed. "It must
have been at Mrs Ragg's," she said. "I am going to see."
Shivering, I followed to the landing. The light no longer showed from
Mrs Ragg's door, but the door itself was still ajar. Julia rapped
sharply upon it and called the caretaker's name. When no one answered,
she pushed the door wide, and we saw, by the light of the candle I
carried, that the room was empty.
I scarcely knew why the fact that it was so filled us both with such
dismay. Our faces were white in the candlelight as we looked blankly at
each other; then, seizing hands, we scurried back to Julia's room. A
rush of cold air met us on the landing and our light went out.
"An outer door is open," Julia said.
We shut and locked our own door and stood together in the darkness,
gripping each other, intently listening.
Julia's senses are sharper than mine. "Someone is in the garden--at the
back," she whispered. "I can hear footsteps--footsteps of more than one
person. What shall we do, Isabella? I don't know yet what we ought to
do."
Presently we were kneeling at the window. The moon had set, the night
was quite dark. By degrees, straining our eyes in desperate anxiety, we
made out the stunted form of a shrub or two planted opposite the house;
we knew that the blackness of shadow at our left was the shed whose key
had been lost.
As we looked, the shed door opened. We knew it by the light which
suddenly streamed upon the night. It was the light from a lantern held
high, a light flickering and uncertain. It blinked and trembled and
swayed as if held in a shaking hand. We knew whose was the lean, lank
figure, fitfully revealed, which held it.
"What can she be doing there?" we asked of each other, with chattering
teeth, simultaneously.
Neither answered. There was no need. Too well we knew she was letting
out the men whom, to have them handy for our murder at night, she had
locked in, earlier in the day.
They came presently. The fluttering light gave us unsteady glimpses of
them, and of some large and heavy burden they carried.
"_What_ is it?" I demanded of Julia. My arm ached with her grip of it,
but she did not answer. All her senses were merged in the sense of
seeing. She could not hear, nor feel, nor speak.
Mrs Ragg, holding the lantern high, walked ahead of the obscure group,
which slowly followed. The light illumined her stooping, meagre figure
as she made her way down the path across the back garden to the gate.
Only now and again, by the chance swaying of the lantern, a ray lit the
heavy blackness of the mass moving in her wake.
She stopped with her lantern at the gate. For the minute it took for
them to pass her we saw more plainly the figures of the men going
heavily beneath their burden.
"_What_ is it?" I found myself asking again, expecting no answer,
needing none.
Very softly Julia pushed up the sash of the window, hung her head with
its loose flowing hair into the night.
Presently, the form of Mrs Ragg came slowly back again, down the garden
path. The lantern hung at her side now; its light streaming upward
showed us her white and frightened face. Julia drew in her head, gently
closed the window, turned to me.
"They have driven off--for the present," she said. "I heard the wheels.
Before they return--perhaps--we shall have time to escape."
We had risen to our feet now, but we clung together still. "Julia, what
_was_ it?" I asked, for the third time, quite senselessly. For my eyes
are as good as Julia's, and our opportunities of sight and judgment had
been the same.
"It was a coffin," Julia said, and I knew that through the darkness her
eyes glared with hardly maintained courage upon my face, and that she
shut down her lips firmly over chattering teeth.
Space fails to tell of the remainder of that night: of how we dressed
in feverish haste to escape, and then were afraid to go; of how, having
assured ourselves--by the sense of hearing only, for we thought it best
not to light a candle--of Mrs Ragg's return, and of her retirement for
the second time to bed, and this time to slumber--we depended on our
hearing also for the establishment of the latter fact--we sat and
watched, shivering with cold and apprehension, through the endless
hours for the reappearance of Mrs Ragg's accomplices, straining our
eyes to stare in the direction of the garden path down which we
believed they would come. Of how with the first faint light of dawn
courage came to us to escape.
* * * * *
Julia remembered the name of the hotel at which our chance acquaintance
of the reading-room had mentioned he was staying. As we did not know
his name, it was by good luck that we encountered him on the steps of
the Royal George setting forth on his before-breakfast constitutional.
He showed himself politely sceptical of our story. How Julia's eyes
blazed upon him in surprised and angry reproach for his want of faith,
he has assured her many times since, he can never forget. We insisted
that he should go at once to the police station and fetch constables to
arrest Mrs Ragg on the charge of murder. The alternative course he
proposed appeared to us weakly inadequate. However, he being a man and
we being women, he had his way. We returned with him at once to
Sea-Strand Cottage, the only concession he made to our fears being to
take a policeman with him, to wait outside the house in case he should
be wanted.
"The lonely situation has worked upon your nerves. You have dreamt a
little and imagined the rest," he said, by way of overcoming our
natural repugnance to return.
Julia gave him a scathing glance. "You will see," she said. She
vouchsafed no further word to him, but with an indignant head held
high, walked ahead of him and me as, side by side, we toiled over the
uneven road, the policeman bringing up the rear.
The caretaker, characteristically oblivious of the fact that her
lodgers, who, she had every reason to believe, were still in their
bedrooms, would presently call for their breakfast, was leisurely
eating her own over the newly-lit kitchen fire.
At sight of us, unexpectedly appearing before her, of our protector
with his air of authority, of the policeman, who, contrary to
instructions, introduced himself at the open door, Mrs Ragg rose with a
wavering cry that was like a whine, from her seat. She sucked in her
cheeks till they met, and with her claw-like hands grabbed her shabby
frock where it loosely covered her bosom.
"You are not Mrs Ragg," our companion said.
She grabbed more convulsively at her dress, and made no reply.
"Where is Mrs Ragg?"
"She is dead, sir. Dead," the woman said, and sat down and began to
cry. "She died the very afternoon the ladies came. I had the doctor to
her. You can ask the doctor if you don't believe me. I'd have kept her
alive if I could. She was my dear sister. I had only what she gave
me----"
"And you undertook to impersonate her?"
The poor creature gazed at us with imploring eyes. "'Twas my sister
that ordered it," she said, gasping with terror. "'Twas a pity the
fifteen shillings a week the ladies were to pay should be lost to the
family, my sister said. She put it in my head--she laid her orders on
me before she died; she----"
"And she was laid forth in the bedroom next to mine?" Julia said; "and
moved from there next morning to the shed in the garden."
"And from the shed taken at night to our brother's house, where she is
waiting burial," the woman, now anxious to unburden herself, explained.
But what need is there to set forth any more of such talk? The rest of
the story tells itself. And we have had perhaps more than enough of the
pseudo Mrs Ragg.
Julia and I decided we had had enough also of Sea-Strand Cottage. We
took up our abode temporarily at the Royal George. Our new-made
friend--for after this adventure we could but look on him as a
friend--had lived there for a month and could recommend it. It was in a
busy thoroughfare of the town, houses on either side, at the back, over
the way; men and women passing and repassing; plentiful gas-lamps,
policemen within call. Ah, the blessed feeling of companionship and
security! We had had enough of solitude, darkness, mystery, to last us
for the rest of our lives.
However, the cost of living at the Royal George was greatly more than
the cost of living at the Cottage.
"It is all very well for this man, who evidently has money to live in
such a place," I said to Julia. "But we should quickly become bankrupt.
At the end of a fortnight we will go."
"Make it three weeks," Julia said, "and I shall be engaged to the man
with the money."
I scouted the idea, but stayed--perhaps to prove it impossible.
Or perhaps at my age I knew well that to the young and the confident
nothing is impossible.
THE PRIVATE WARD
He had been seized with sudden illness in the suburban hotel in which
he was staying, and being unknown there, had been removed to the
Princess Mary Cottage Hospital. The dozen beds of the men's ward were
full, and he had been placed in the private ward. He lay now on the
narrow bed, sleeping heavily, the white, bright light of the spring
morning showing mercilessly the havoc selfishness and reckless
self-indulgence had wrought upon a once sufficiently handsome face. The
emaciation of his long form was plainly seen through the single scarlet
blanket which covered it.
The visiting doctor and the nurse stood, one on either side, looking
down on him.
"What sort of night?" asked the doctor.
"Pretty bad," answered the nurse. The patient had been admitted the
previous day, and she had watched by him through the night. "He was
awake till three, and very restless."
"You repeated at three the dose I ordered?"
"Yes. He has lain like this since. When he wakes is he to have it
again?"
"H'm!" said the doctor, deliberating, his eyes on the patient's face.
"We will, I think, halve the dose. We mustn't overdo it; he seems
susceptible to the drug."
He lifted his eyes from the unconscious face of the patient to the
weary face of the nurse, and, as if struck by what he saw there,
studied it with attention.
"You are more than usually tired this morning, sister," he said. "You
must go at once to bed when I leave."
"It is always difficult for me to sleep in the daytime. I shall not
sleep to-day," she said.
"But you are tired?"
"Dead tired."
The doctor observed her in a minute's silence. Her fine, almost regal
form, at which few men looked and turned away, drooped a little this
morning, seemed--but that was impossible--to have faded and shrunk
since yesterday. There was, however, no sinking of the white eyelids
over the pale blue eyes which, set in her darkly tinted face, were a
surprise and a joy to the beholder. The eyelids were reddened now, and
held wide apart, the eyes shining with a dry feverishness painful to
see.
"If you go on night-duty and do not sleep in the day you will be ill,"
said the doctor, gently.
"Not I," said the nurse, roughly.
He was not, perhaps, sorry to miss in that handsome woman the show of
extreme deference with which it was usual for the nurses to treat the
doctors, but her brusqueness a little surprised him. Imagining that she
resented the personal note, he turned, after a minute's quiet perusal
of her face, to the patient.
Having given briefly his directions for his treatment and moved away,
he stopped, looking at him for a minute still.
"His friends been communicated with?" he asked.
She shook her head. "By the look of him should you think he has got any
friends who would care to hear?" she enquired.
Pityingly the doctor threw up his head. "Poor wretch!" he sighed. "What
is his history, I wonder!"
To which Sister Marion made no reply. For she knew.
* * * * *
For the rest of the day she would be off duty. As a rule she took a
brisk walk through the suburban town, passed the rows upon rows of neat
little one-patterned houses, the fine, scattered villa-residences, with
their spotless gardens, reached the common where the goats and the
donkeys were tethered, the geese screamed with stretched necks, the
children rolled and played. Plenty of good air there to fill lungs
atrophied by long night hours in the sick atmosphere of the wards.
Then, at a swinging pace home again to her welcome bed and a few hours'
well-earned sleep.
To-day, beyond the white walls of the hospital, the sun danced
invitingly, the spring breezes were astir. Sister Marion heeded them
not at all. Having left the patient in the private ward to the nurse
who succeeded her, she lingered listlessly in the wide, white corridor
upon which all the wards opened, too preoccupied to remember that she
was doing anything unusual.
There the doctor, having made the round of the wards, found her
lingering still.
"Go to bed!" he said to her, authoritatively. "You will make yourself
ill."
"Not I."
"Go to bed!" he said again, and, although his tone was not less
authoritative, he smiled.
The feverish, pale blue eyes looked at him strangely with a regretful,
wistful gaze, and he melted in a moment into unmixed gentleness. "Why
are you being obstinate to-day? Go and lie down and get to sleep," he
begged her.
"What does it matter if I do not?"
"It matters very much, to you, to your patients, to me. Will you go?"
She said yes, turned slowly away, and, passing down a passage leading
from the central corridor, went to her tiny room. Arrived, she did not
trouble to undress, but throwing off the cap which was tied beneath her
chin, flung herself upon her bed.
"It is the last thing he will ask of me and I shall do it," she said.
She had known that she could not sleep. She put her hand above her
burning eyes and forcibly closed the lids that remained so achingly
open. In the darkness so achieved she must think out her plans; she
must think how to get away from this place without attracting
observation, leaving no trace of her removal, giving no clue to her
destination. It was imperative that the step she decided on should be
taken soon; she must form her project clearly, and there must be no
blundering or mistake. But her overtired brain, refusing to work as she
willed, presented only before her feverish eyes a picture of the young
doctor coming in the spring sunshine down the hospital ward, a bunch of
violets in his coat. How clean, and strong, and helpful he looked! And
his voice--was it not indeed one to obey? It must be her fancy only
that of late it had taken on a softer tone for her.
Her fancy! Her vain, mad fancy!
She flung over upon her bed and forced herself to contemplate what it
was she had to do: To get away from the man who lay in the private
ward; and from the place in which she had found a refuge till her evil
angel had set him upon her track again.
Since the day, ten years ago, when she had married him, what a ruin her
life had been! There had been, again and again, thank Heaven! periods
of peace, periods of regained self-respect, of the enjoyment of the
respect of others. These had been secured by flight only, by
concealment of her whereabouts, and were of varying lengths of
duration. Two years ago, with her hard-earned savings, she had paid his
passage out to Africa. She had not believed him likely to earn the
money to return, and had looked upon him as happily dead to her. Dead,
indeed, perhaps. Until yesterday, when she had helped to lay him,
unconscious, in the bed of the private ward. She guessed easily that he
had learnt she was in the place, and had been about to seek her when he
had been struck down.
If he should mercifully die!
Not he! she said, bitterly. Men sometimes died in _delirium tremens_.
In every kind of illness, by every sort of accident, men died every
day. Good and useful men, husbands of adoring wives, loving fathers of
families, men needed by their country, by humanity, were swept
mercilessly away. Only such carrion as this was left to fester upon the
earth, to poison the lives of decent men and women. The doctor,
standing above him, looking on the defaced image of what God, for some
mysterious purpose, had made, had no thought but to restore to this
foully-damaged frame the spirit and strength to do its evil work.
Nurses, gentle and dutiful women, would give themselves to revive in
all its corrupt activity the temporarily dormant mind and body.
Ought this to be? Where was the righteousness of it--the sense? Since
that drug to which he was "so susceptible" was a deadly one, would it
not be better to give him more of it? To rid society of a pest
dangerous to its peace, to restore to one suffering, striving,
blameless woman the happiness he had cost her?
"Would that be a crime?" she asked, and set her teeth and cried, "No,
no," with hatred in her heart. Then, horrified at herself, flung
herself over on her pillow, and, burying her face from the light of
day, sobbed long with a tearless sobbing, bringing no relief; and so at
last lay still.
* * * * *
She did not know if she had slept or only lain in the quiet and blank
of mercifully deadened misery when, roused by the sound of her name,
she lifted her head to find the matron of the little hospital standing
beside her bed.
"We are having so much trouble with the D.T. patient, sister," she
said. "He must not be left for a moment. I am sorry to wake you so
soon, but will you go to him?"
She was so used to being alert and ready at the call of duty, that she
forgot her plan had been to escape from the hospital at once, and in a
minute was again in the private ward. The doctor was standing beside
the bed, and Sister Marion saw he had been recalled because of the
urgency of the case. For whatever reason, it was such a pleasure to see
him again, to let her eyes rest upon the strong and kind and clever
face--
And then, looking at him, she saw that down the broad brow and the
clean-shaven cheek red blood was streaming.
He put up his hand to wipe the blood from his eyes, and the hand too,
she saw, was gashed and bleeding.