Late that same evening, Dr. Maclean, his wife, and their adopted
daughter, were all sitting together in the dining room of Bonnie Doon.
The Macleans had bought the charming old house soon after the doctor had
taken over the practice of Miss Prince’s father, and they had renamed it
after Mrs. Maclean’s birthplace.
To-night, his wife and niece being by the table, the doctor sat close to
the fire smoking his pipe.
“Dr. Tasker popped in to tea to-day,” observed Mrs. Maclean. As her
husband said nothing she went on: “He waited quite a long while in the
hope of seeing you. I’m doubting, Jock, whether we’ve been quite fair to
that young man. He spoke very handsomely of you—he did indeed.”
“I’ve no need of his praise,” said the doctor dryly.
“I didn’t say you had. All the same I hope you’ll not scold me for
having asked him to supper to-morrow night. He says Sunday is such a
dull day in Grendon.”
“I can’t promise to stay in for him if I’m sent for,” said Dr. Maclean,
in a voice which his wife thought somewhat tiresome.
There had been a time, not so very long ago, when it was she, rather
than her husband, who had disliked the young medical man who had
suddenly “put up his plate,” as the saying is, on the door of almost the
last house in Grendon. But Dr. Tasker had spoken to her very pleasantly
at the cricket match. He had made friends, too, with Jean, and so Mrs.
Maclean was now prepared to take him, at any rate in a measure, to her
kindly Scots heart.
For a few moments there was silence in the room. Dr. Maclean turned
himself round, and his eyes rested with appreciative affection on the
bent head of the girl who even in a few weeks had so much brightened and
enlivened his own and his wife’s childless home.
Jean’s hair was the colour of spun gold, and she had a delicately clear
skin, giving depth to her hazel eyes. But her generous-lipped mouth was
too large for beauty, and her features were irregular. Yet she looked so
happy-natured, intelligent, and healthy, that the general impression
produced by her appearance was that of a pretty, as well as that of a
very agreeable girl.
Perhaps she felt her uncle’s grateful, kindly glance, for suddenly she
looked up and smiled.
“Well, Uncle Jock?” she exclaimed, “a penny for your thoughts!”
“I wonder if I’d really better tell you my thoughts,” he answered rather
soberly.
“Of course you must!” cried his wife.
She, too, put down her work for a moment on the table and looked at him.
“I’m thinking,” he said quietly, “that we won’t be keeping our pretty
Jean here for long. It’s all very well her being boxed up every day in
that china factory. There are always half Saturdays and Sundays, to say
nothing of holidays, and young men will soon come courting at Bonnie
Doon.”
Jean burst out laughing, but Mrs. Maclean felt vexed.
“Really, Jock,” she exclaimed, “what are you after saying now? I’ve no
liking for that sort of joke.”
“He wouldn’t say it if he thought it true,” said her niece merrily.
“I’ve been much disappointed in Terriford as regards the supply of young
men.”
“Bide a wee, bide a wee,” said the doctor dryly. “A young woman never
knows when she’s going to meet Mr. Right; he’s a way of appearing in the
most unlikely places.”
Again his wife looked at him severely. “Jock, I’m surprised at you!”
“You’d often be surprised if you could look straight into my mind,
woman,” said the doctor waggishly, tapping his pipe against the side of
the fireplace. And then, as her aunt was still looking annoyed, Jean
tactfully changed the subject.
“I wish you would tell me what you think of Agatha Cheale, Uncle Jock?”
“I wonder what you think of her?” he parried.
“I hardly know her. I liked her the day of the cricket match.”
“Is that the only time you’ve seen her?” asked Mrs. Maclean.
“I saw her to-day,” said Jean slowly, “Mr. Garlett overtook me after I
had started walking home the field way. He suggested I should go through
his garden—and then such a horrid thing happened!”
“What happened?” asked the husband and wife together.
“We were going across the lawn when we suddenly heard the sound of
crying. It was coming, it seems, from Miss Cheale’s sitting room. Mr.
Garlett thought it was a child who had hurt itself, and asked me to go
into the house. And then we found that it was Lucy Warren who was
crying—and that there was such a horrid scene going on! I’ve never seen
any one look as angry as Miss Cheale looked. I thought her such a quiet
person.”
Mrs. Maclean asked eagerly: “Why was she angry?”
“From what I could make out,” said Jean, “Mrs. Garlett heard the French
window of the drawing room open in the middle of last night. She thought
it was a burglar, and she insisted on going downstairs; so she and Miss
Cheale went downstairs together, and there was Lucy Warren with a man!
But he escaped by the window out into the garden before they could see
who it was.”
“I don’t wonder Miss Cheale was angry!” exclaimed Jean’s aunt. “I can
hardly believe such a tale of Lucy Warren. She’s such a superior-looking
girl, such a pet, too, of Miss Prince’s. Miss Prince was saying to me
the other day how sorry she was she had ever allowed Mrs. Garlett to
have Lucy, but she felt the Thatched House situation was such a good one
that she ought not to keep the girl from it.”
“Lucy will go back to her now. Miss Prince isn’t the woman to let a good
maid go begging,” observed Dr. Maclean. “They didn’t say a word of all
that to me this morning.” He added, “I couldn’t think what had upset
Mrs. Garlett.”
“When we came in, Miss Cheale was trying to get out of Lucy who the man
was,” went on Jean eagerly. “But all she would say was that she didn’t
see why she shouldn’t have a talk with a friend anywhere she chose. She
actually appealed to Mr. Garlett to say if she wasn’t right!”
“What did he say?” asked Mrs. Maclean.
“In a way he took Lucy’s part, for he reminded Miss Cheale that the
drawing room was never used. But of course that only made her more
angry—in fact, she was shaking with rage, her face was livid.”
“It was foolish of him to interfere,” observed the doctor.
“Of course I slipped away as quickly as I could,” went on the girl, “but
as I went down the passage I heard Lucy call out: ‘I hate you, Miss
Cheale! I hate Mrs. Garlett! I hate everybody in this house!’ Oh, it was
dreadful—and I felt so sorry for them all.”
Five hours later Jean Bower lay asleep in the big, comfortable bedroom
which had been made so pretty for her by her kind aunt. The girl stirred
uneasily, for she was dreaming a strange, a terrible, and most vivid
dream.
She was at the Etna China factory taking down letters from the dictation
of her employer, Mr. Garlett. Though she had been at the factory for a
full month Jean had seen very little of the managing director. But they
had made friends during their walk from Grendon to Terriford, and in her
dream she was enjoying the change of taking down dictation from a man
who knew exactly what he wanted to say instead of from weary-brained,
hesitating old Mr. Dodson. And then, suddenly looking up, she saw that,
pressed against the central pane of the window behind Mr. Garlett was a
face convulsed with hatred—and the face was that of Agatha Cheale!
A feeling of icy terror crept over her, for the managing director’s room
was on the first floor of the building, far above the ground of the
stone-paved courtyard round which the Etna China factory had been built
close on seventy years ago.
With a stifled cry the girl awoke and sat up in bed, the horror of her
nightmare still so vividly real that her teeth were chattering and her
hands trembling in the darkness.
Then there gradually came to her the reassuring knowledge as to why she
had dreamed that strange, unnatural dream. It was of course owing to her
having seen Agatha Cheale, her face distorted with anger, dismissing
Lucy Warren at the Thatched House yesterday morning!
But her feeling of reassurance and relief did not last long, for
suddenly a stone came crashing in through the window nearest to her.
Jumping out of bed she rushed across the room and threw up the lower
sash of the window.
“Who’s there?” she called out, and then, “What do you want?”
To her amazement it was Harry Garlett’s voice that called back, “Please
forgive me, Miss Bower. I’ve come for the doctor. My wife has been taken
seriously ill. I rang the night bell, but could get no answer.”
“The night bell’s gone wrong. I’ll run and tell Uncle Jock at once——”
Leaving the window open, she hustled on a dressing gown and ran down the
passage.
“Uncle Jock!” she knocked on the door as hard as she could. “Mr. Garlett
has come to fetch you, for Mrs. Garlett has been taken ill——”
Mrs. Maclean opened the bedroom door. “Go back to bed, child; I’ll see
to Harry Garlett.”
Reluctantly the girl did as she was bid, for she had the natural desire
of youth to be in the middle of anything exciting that is going on.
To Jean Bower Mrs. Garlett was still a mere name, for she had never seen
the invalid. But already, though she had only been working on and off
with him for a very short time, she had come to like the man every one
called Harry Garlett. She was a simple, straightforward, old-fashioned
girl. From her point of view all ordinary married people love one
another, and she believed her employer to be exceptionally devoted to
his ailing wife. There had been a note of extreme anxiety and urgency in
the now familiar voice which had come up from the garden just now.
As Dr. MacLean hurried by Harry Garlett’s side along the road leading to
the Thatched House he felt a good deal disturbed. Though he had thought
his patient more ailing than usual the day before, there had been
nothing to indicate anything in the nature of a sudden seizure.
“D’you know exactly when your wife was taken ill?” he asked, aware that
his companion’s bedroom was in quite another part of the Thatched House,
some way from the rooms occupied by the ailing woman and Agatha Cheale.
“She was taken ill early in the night. But Miss Cheale thought she’d be
able to manage without calling me, and then, suddenly, Emily seemed to
collapse! So I dressed and hurried along to fetch you.”
They walked on in silence till they turned in through the gate of the
delightful garden which surrounded the house for which they were bound,
and as they hastened up the avenue, Dr. Maclean noticed that there were
no lights in any of the windows. Agatha Cheale had evidently not seen
fit to rouse the servants.
The two men hurried together through the dark hall into the broad
corridor which ran through the spacious old house; but at the foot of
the staircase the master of the house hung back.
“I don’t think I’ll go up with you,” he exclaimed. “I’ll wait in my
study, Maclean. I can’t do any good up there, and it unnerves me to see
Emily suffer.”
“All right!” cried the doctor hastily; and he hastened on, familiar with
every inch of the way, till he reached the upstairs corridor, which,
unlike the lower part of the house, was brilliantly lighted.
All at once he started back—for from behind a big wardrobe there had
suddenly emerged an odd-looking figure clad in a drab-coloured ulster.
“It’s only me, sir.” The reassuring words were uttered in a frightened
whisper; and with astonishment Dr. Maclean recognized Lucy Warren, the
pretty parlour-maid who had got into such trouble the night before.
“Mrs. Garlett’s been moaning something awful,” she murmured, “but she’s
left off now. You won’t tell her that you’ve seen me, sir, will you?”
“Not if you’ll go straight back to bed!”
The little incident made an unpleasant impression on the doctor. He told
himself that the young woman might at least have gone and seen if she
could do anything to help relieve her sick mistress.
And then, as he approached his patient’s room, Dr. Maclean
half-unconsciously slackened his footsteps and listened.
But no sound fell on his ear; indeed the silence brooding over the
brilliantly lit corridor seemed almost uncanny.
Yet the bedroom door was ajar, and, hearing his footsteps, Agatha Cheale
opened the door wide, and came out into the passage, a finger to her
lips.
She was dressed in a big white coverall. It accentuated the intense
pallor of her face and made her slender figure look thicker than usual.
“Mrs. Garlett is asleep now,” she whispered, “but she’s been in awful
pain, and I’m sorry I didn’t send for you before. I’ve always been able
to manage her in her previous night attacks, but this time she’s been
really very bad! I do hope—oh, I do _hope_, Dr. Maclean, that you won’t
think I was to blame not to send for you at once?”
She was so unlike her usual quiet sensible self that the doctor felt
alarmed, in spite of himself.
“I don’t suppose I could have done any good if I had come an hour ago,”
he said soothingly. “I take it she overate herself last night?”
“She did indeed—that’s what upset her, of course.”
As he moved toward the now open door he told himself, not for the first
time, that it was strange that Agatha Cheale, in this one matter of
diet, seemed powerless to control his patient. But there it was! Like so
many people with delicate digestions, Mrs. Garlett had always had a
fanciful, queer, greedy kind of appetite. Sometimes she would eat hardly
anything for days together, and then she would grossly overeat herself.
“I suppose,” he said in a low voice, “that you’ve given her brandy?”
“Yes, I have—but it hasn’t done her any good.”
Agatha Cheale still spoke in an agitated, almost hysterical, whisper.
And then, for no particular reason, though he remembered doing so
afterwards, Dr. Maclean asked Agatha Cheale a casual question: “Has her
husband seen her?”
“No, he thought it best to go off at once for you.”
At last, together, they walked through into the sick woman’s room.
Mrs. Garlett’s bedchamber was the largest in the house, and, like the
drawing room below, was somewhat overcrowded with heavy early Victorian
mahogany furniture.
Coming out of the brightly lit corridor Dr. Maclean, for a moment, saw
nothing, for the one electric lamp which was turned on was heavily
shaded. But for the fact that he knew where every chair and table stood,
he would have knocked into something.
“Do turn on another light,” he whispered rather crossly. “I can’t see at
all!”
Obediently she turned on the two naked lights hanging above the
dressing-table, but the big curtained four-post bed in which the sick
woman lay remained in deep shadow.
“Before I see her, tell me exactly what she ate last night,” said the
doctor in a low voice.
Standing opposite Dr. Maclean, just under the two bright naked lights,
Agatha Cheale, her face pale and strained, told her story.
“About seven last evening I went to see Miss Prince for a few minutes
and, while I was away, from what I can make out Mr. Garlett came up to
sit with Mrs. Garlett before dressing for dinner. Unfortunately some
forced strawberries which Miss Prince had brought in the morning had
been taken up and left in the corridor outside. Mr. Garlett seems to
have brought them in here—I suppose to show them to Mrs. Garlett. She
said she would like to eat some of them then, before her supper. He
stupidly allowed her to do so, and she ate them all—a plateful—with
probably a lot of sugar added. So of course I wasn’t surprised when she
called out to me about two hours ago that she felt ill!”
“Did she take anything after the strawberries?” asked the doctor.
“Of course she did. She began to feel hungry about 8.30 and then she had
her supper—a nice bit of grilled fish and some stewed apples. But her
supper didn’t do her any good on the top of the strawberries——”
“I don’t suppose it did,” agreed the doctor dryly. “And now let me have
a look at her——”
As he took a step toward the bed Agatha Cheale suddenly put her right
hand on his arm.
Surprised, he stopped, and she whispered hesitatingly: “I’ve been
wondering—I suppose you wouldn’t like to have a second opinion?”
He shook his head decidedly, secretly very much surprised that her nerve
should so far have given way. What good could a second opinion do in a
case of severe indigestion? Why, the idea was absurd! Then he reminded
himself that Agatha Cheale was not a trained nurse—in spite of her war
experiences.
He walked quickly across to the sick woman’s four-post bed, lifted the
heavy, stiff, silk-lined calendered chintz curtain, and then turned on
the light in a reading lamp which stood on a small pedestal table.
Mrs. Garlett was lying on her back in the middle of the big bed, and Dr.
Maclean, taking up the lamp, leant for a long, long moment over his
patient.
Then he turned, with a blanched face, and still unconsciously holding
the lamp in his hand, to the woman who stood waiting over by the
dressing-table, the light beating down on her tired drawn face.
“She’s not asleep—she’s dead,” he said quietly.
“Dead! Not dead? Oh, don’t say she’s dead!”
Agatha Cheale’s voice rose into a kind of shriek.
The doctor put the lamp down. He took her hand and held it firmly in
his.
“Hush!” he exclaimed, kindly and yet authoritatively. “I’m sorry to have
given you such a shock, Miss Cheale, but I’m not so surprised as you
seem to be. Her heart was in a very bad state. You have nothing to
reproach yourself with—you have been wonderfully good and patient with
her, poor soul.”
“Can nothing be done?”
She was looking at him with an extraordinary expression of horror and of
pleading on her face.
“Nothing,” he answered gravely.
There was a pause; the doctor dropped the hand he had been holding in so
firm a clasp.
“Miss Prince’s dish of strawberries killed this poor woman as surely as
if she had taken a dose of poison,” he said grimly.
“You will never let Mr. Garlett know that, will you?” she whispered.
He made no answer, and perhaps she saw by his expression that he was
telling himself that even the most sensible women are sometimes
foolishly sentimental, for a little colour came back into her face.
“Shall I go down and tell him—or will you?” she asked, in a voice that
had suddenly become composed.
“I’ll tell him, of course.”
To his relief he saw her eyes become suffused with tears.
“We little thought yesterday morning that this would be the solution of
your problem,” he said feelingly.
“It’s a horrible, horrible solution!” she exclaimed violently.
Again Dr. Maclean made no answer, for he did not, could not, agree with
her. To his mind, the death of Mrs. Garlett was bound to turn out a
blessing, not only to the young woman who had tended her so faithfully,
if unlovingly, for over a year, but also to the dead woman’s husband.
Hard cases make bad law; Dr. Maclean was no advocate of easy divorce,
but to his mind there was something intensely repellent in the marriage
of a strong healthy man to a hopeless invalid. Deep down in his heart
the honest Scotsman knew what would have happened to himself had he been
in the shoes of Harry Garlett. He knew that his flesh and blood would
not have borne such a difficult, unnatural situation, and he had long
admired the young man’s straight, simple, clean way of life. Thanks to
that dish of early strawberries, Harry Garlett would now be able to
remake his life on happy, natural lines.
Slightly ashamed of such thoughts coming at such a time, he glanced at
the young woman before him. Would she now become the real mistress of
this delightful house? The doctor suspected she would make a try for it.
But he could not help hoping that the newly made widower would in time
meet with a happier fate than marriage with this secretive and, he
suspected, very jealous-natured woman. Dr. Maclean liked Harry Garlett
well enough to hope that, after a decent interval, this now mournful
house would be filled with gay, wholesome, girlish laughter, and the
patter of little feet.
And while these secret thoughts were rushing through his brain Agatha
Cheale was standing motionless, a look of stark terror on her bloodless
face.
“Go into your room,” he said at last, “and try and get a little rest.”
Together they left the room of death, and the doctor quickly made his
way downstairs through the still, silent house.
Rather unreasonably, it gave Dr. Maclean somewhat of a shock to find
Harry Garlett comfortably stretched out in an easy chair, reading a
novel. But as the doctor advanced into the room the master of the
Thatched House leaped to his feet.
“Well!” he exclaimed, “I hope you’ve made her more comfortable, Maclean?
I’m sorry to have dragged you out like this, but Miss Cheale was so very
much upset and worried——”
Then something in the gravity of the doctor’s face pulled the speaker up
short. He added quickly: “Isn’t she so well? Would you like me to get
Tasker?”
Dr. Maclean took a step forward; he put his hand on the younger man’s
shoulder:
“Garlett, I’ve a sad thing to break to you, man——”
He waited a moment, then said quietly: “Your poor wife is dead—an
obvious case of heart failure following an attack of acute indigestion.”
“Dead?”
As Harry Garlett repeated the word his face became deeply, deeply
troubled. “She seemed so well, for her, last evening,” he said slowly.
The doctor answered in a low voice: “You should have resisted her wish
for those strawberries.”
Harry Garlett looked puzzled.
“I never gave her any strawberries, Maclean. There are no strawberries
yet—it’s much too early.”
It was the doctor’s turn to be surprised.
“I understood from Miss Cheale that you had shown your wife a dish of
forced strawberries brought her by Miss Prince, and that then she had
insisted on having them before her supper.”
“I never saw any strawberries, and I was only with her for a very few
minutes.”
“Then one of the maids must have given them to her,” observed the
doctor. “But if it hadn’t been that dish of strawberries, it would have
been something else. It’s clear from the state she was in that anything
might have caused her death.”
As if hardly knowing what he was doing, Harry Garlett sat down again.
“I—I can’t believe it,” he muttered.
“As far as the poor soul could be made happy, you made her happy,
Garlett,” said Dr. Maclean feelingly.
“I wonder if I did—I wonder if I did! You must have often thought it
strange that I was away so much, Maclean. But honestly—it was poor
Emily’s own wish.”
He was speaking with deep emotion now, staring down at the floor.
“After I left the army, it took me some time to realize how really
ailing she was, though, as you may remember, I did at that time stay at
home a good deal. And then one day she sent me a note by hand to the
factory——”
He looked up. “That note, Maclean, was my order of release! I have kept
it, and I should like you to see it some day. In it she said that she
wanted me to be happy—that Dodson was quite up to looking after the
business, and that she did not want me ever to feel that I couldn’t do
anything which would add to my innocent pleasure in life—because of her
state.”
Dr. Maclean was more touched than he would have thought possible.
“Dear me,” he exclaimed, “that was very decent of her!”
“It was,” agreed the other, “it was indeed, Maclean. And she meant every
word of what she wrote. It was only yesterday, our thirteenth
wedding-day, that she said to me, ‘I don’t like your spending a week-end
at home. It doesn’t seem natural, my dear.’ Thank God I did—thank God I
did!”
“I think everything has gone very much better here this last year,” said
the doctor thoughtfully.
“How d’you mean?”
“I mean because of Miss Cheale.”
The other did not answer for a moment, and then he said in a low voice:
“That’s true in a way, though I don’t think Emily liked Miss Cheale. I
have at times regretted having agreed that she should come.”
“They weren’t the kind of women who would naturally take to one
another,” answered Dr. Maclean.
“And yet my wife quite liked that worthless brother of Miss Cheale’s. He
actually came to tea with her the other day.”
“Mrs. Garlett always liked men better than women,” said the doctor
dryly. He had at once guessed the identity of Lucy Warren’s drawing-room
visitor, and it had amused him to picture “poor Emily’s” wrath had she
even dimly suspected the fact.
He added, after a pause: “Your wife was a generous sort, Garlett—I mean
about money.”
“Yes, she was that, certainly.”
Both men remained silent for a moment. It was true that the poor woman
now lying dead upstairs had always shown herself generous about money,
though not, excepting to her husband, about anything else. But now was
not the moment to recall her cantankerous and narrow outlook on life.
“Well,” said the doctor at last, “I must be going now. I’ll leave a note
in her letter-box for Miss Prince as I go by. It will be just as well
for Agatha Cheale to have a friend with her this morning; she has had a
terrible shock.”
“She must have had,” said Harry Garlett; but he did not speak with his
usual hearty kindliness.
The doctor looked at him rather hard. Then he again put his hand on the
younger man’s shoulder.
“Look here, my friend, I know you’ve been a good husband to that poor
soul. But you’re still a young man, and a new chapter of your life has
begun.”
“I don’t feel like that,” muttered Harry Garlett in a low voice.
“Of course you don’t! But still it’s the truth.”
He added, measuring his words: “If I were you I should go away at once,
as soon as the funeral is over, for a real holiday—such a holiday as
you’ve never had. Don’t come back here till Christmas! Dodson’s getting
a very old man; you’ll soon either have to manage the business yourself
or get another partner, so take a holiday while you can get one.”