THE BRIDE OF DEATH
Time had long ceased to have any significance for Maisie White. There
was daylight and nightlight. She seemed to remember that she had made a
great fight on the day she arrived at this strange house when the
hard-faced nurses had strapped her to the bed, and an old man, with
trembling fingers, had pushed a needle into her arm. She remembered it
hurt, and then she remembered very little else. She viewed life with a
dull apathy and without much understanding. She ceased to resent the
presence of the women who came and went, and even the uncleanly old
doctor no longer filled her with a sense of revulsion. She just wanted
to be left alone to sleep, to dream the strangest dreams that any girl
had ever had. She did not know that this was the action of bromide of
potassium, consistently administered in every drink she took, in every
morsel of food she ate. Bromide in bread, in coffee, in mashed potatoes,
in rice, in all the vehicles by which the drug could be administered.
Sometimes by reason of her sheer vitality she flung off the effects of
the dope, and was keenly conscious of her surroundings. There was one
girl who came and went, a pretty girl with fluffy golden hair, who
looked at her dispassionately and made no reply to the questions with
which Maisie plied her. And once she had seen Pinto and would have
screamed, but they stopped her in time. One night the old doctor had
come into the room very drunk. He was crying and moaning in a maudlin
fashion about some mysterious position which he had lost, and he had sat
on the bed and, cursed his passion for strong drink with such vehemence
that she, in her half-dazed state of mind, had found herself interested
against her will.
In one of her lucid intervals she had realised a vital fact, that she
was under the influence of a drug, and instinctively knew that she was
becoming more and more immune to its action. She formed a vague plan,
which she had almost forgotten the next morning. She must always be
sleepy, almost dazed; she must never show signs of returning
consciousness. She had been a week in the "nursing home" before she made
this plan. She could lie now with her eyes shut, picking up the threads.
She heard somebody talk of a ship and of a passport, and learned that
she was to be removed in another week. She could not find where, but it
was somewhere on a ship. She tried once, when the nurses were out of the
room, to get out of bed and walk to the window. Her legs gave way
beneath her, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she managed to
crawl back to bed.
There was no escape that way. There was no help either from the nurses
who were not nurses at all, nor from the maudlin little doctor, nor from
the pretty girl who came sometimes and looked down on her with
undisguised contempt--or was it pity? Then one night she woke in a
fright. Two people were talking. She half turned her head and saw that
Pinto was in the room, and his face was a flaming fury. She had seen
that look before, but now his rage was directed at somebody else, and
with a start she recognised the pretty girl that the nurses called
Lollie.
"You're not in this, Lollie," said the man, and she laughed.
"That's just where you're wrong, Silva," she replied. "I'm very much in
it. What happens to this girl when she leaves here heaven only knows--I
guess it's up to the colonel. But while she's here I'm looking after
her."
"You are, are you?" he said between his teeth. "Well, now you can go and
take a walk."
"I can also take a seat too," she said.
He walked over to her and glowered down at the girl, and she puffed a
cloud of cigarette smoke in his face.
"I'm a crook because it pays me to be a crook," said the girl calmly.
"If it's jollying along one of the colonel's blue-eyed innocents, or
keeping a watchful eye upon Mr. King, or acting trustful maiden to some
poor fool from the country--why, I'm ready and willing, because that's
my job. But this is a different matter altogether. If the colonel says
she's got to go abroad, why, I suppose she's got to go. But she's not
going to be on my conscience, that's all," said Lollie.
They passed through the door into a smaller room where the night
watchers sat. She made as though to sit at the table when he gripped her
arm and swung her round. She put up her hands to defend herself, but was
thrown against the wall, and his grip was on her throat.
"Do you know what I'll do for you?" he hissed.
"I don't care what you do," she said. She was on the verge of tears.
"You're not going into that room--you're _not_ going!"
She sprang at him, but with a snarl like a wild beast, he turned and
struck her, and she fell against the wall.
"Now get out"--he pointed to the door--"get out and don't show your face
here again. And if you've got any information, you can report it to the
colonel and see what he's got to say to you!"
She slunk from the room. Pinto went back to the room where the girl lay.
"Cover your head with a blanket, my pretty?" he said. "Pinto must not
see that pretty face, eh?"
He laid hold of the blanket's edge and pulled it gently down. But the
blanket would not come away. It was being clutched tightly. With a jerk
he wrenched it down, then stumbled backwards to the floor, a grotesque
and ludicrous figure, for the white silk mask of Jack o' Judgment
confronted him and the hateful voice of his enemy shrilled:
"I'm Death! Jack o' Judgment! Poor old Jack! Jack, the hangman! You'll
meet him one day, Pinto--meet him now!"
Pinto collapsed--he had fainted.