ALONE WITH THE DEAD.
“He’s poisoned; he’s dying!”
It was many a day before any one in that room forgot the sound of Lady
Levallion’s voice. She crouched on the floor, holding Levallion as she
had never done, and his face was ghastly against her white satin gown.
“Hush!” cried Chayter roughly. “For God’s sake, Scarsdale, send some
one for a doctor!” but some one had gone already.
In the horrid silence that had fallen on the room each rattling breath
Levallion drew sounded harder than the last. All the men were round
him, there was a bustle of servants, a calling for useless remedies;
but toward their hostess not one woman stirred. It was sinister,
ominous, to see them crowded together in their smart gowns; a wide
space between them and the overthrown liqueur-stand, and Ravenel
huddled on the floor with a dying man in her arms. So it was that
Doctor Houghton saw them, when at last he came. The bare floor, the
rucked-up rugs, the litter of broken glass and silver round Lady
Levallion--white as her gown, against which Levallion’s black clothes
stood out in horrible limpness; and behind them and the kneeling men
about them, that wall of silks and satins, of inimical women’s faces.
Even as he stooped and touched Levallion’s hand that picture stamped
itself on Houghton’s brain.
“They think she did it,” he thought, like lightning, as he wiped the
froth from the stiff lips.
“Clear the room!” he said. “Send the ladies away. No, not you!” as
Ravenel only clutched Levallion more fiercely. But when they were gone
he tried none of the remedies he had brought with him. Adrian Gordon,
Lord Levallion, had been dead this half-hour past. Very gently Houghton
laid the handsome, dark head back on Lady Levallion’s knees; and no
one, she least of all, saw it was the living face, and not the dead,
that he looked at so long and steadily.
“They hate her, and, if I’m not careful, she’ll be hanged because a
handful of women don’t like her,” he thought, after that long look at
the girl Levallion had married. It was part of his trade to read faces.
This one, if he knew anything, was innocent. For no guilty woman would
ever have been utterly unconscious of self as this girl was; or could
have sat clinging to the dead man as did she.
“If she’d done it, she’d be crying on a sofa,” he was thinking, even
while he listened to Lord Chayter’s story of what had happened. “Or if
she had nerve enough to touch him her face would show the strain. She’d
bare her lower teeth like they all do when they’re guilty.”
“Don’t whisper, Lord Chayter,” she said sharply. “You can’t wake
him! Doctor Houghton, it was I brought him the bottle--and owed him
everything! He was kind--to me.”
Every man in the room but Houghton knew that she and Levallion had
quarreled that very night; not one of them knew how they had made it up
again. But at the dreary, tearless voice, perhaps, only Jimmy Scarsdale
did not feel a lump in his throat.
“Don’t talk,” said Houghton gently. “Never mind us. You could not help
what was in the bottle.”
“I--Jacobs frightened me,” she said vaguely. “But, oh! why don’t you do
something?”
She looked up, caught Houghton’s eyes, and felt frantically at
Levallion’s heart, that was stone cold.
“It doesn’t beat!” she cried, like a frightened child. “I can’t feel
it. Levallion!” the cry rang out as it has done since the ages of ages;
the useless, desperate call of the living to the dead.
“Dear Lady Levallion,” said Houghton softly, “he can’t hear you! I got
here too late.”
She looked at him as if she were dazed.
“Too late,” she said; “it’s all too late.” She swayed forward till her
face lay on the Levallion’s breast that could shelter her no longer.
“Let her lie!” said Houghton savagely. “It’s the only kindness we can
do her. Good God, are there no women in this house to come to her, that
she is left to men? To me, who barely knows her?”
“You sent the women away,” said Scarsdale slowly.
“And if one of them had cared for her I might have ordered her out
till I was black in the face.” But he dared not say it aloud. He was
tall, young, and strong; and he lifted Lady Levallion in his arms as if
she had been a child. But, though he rang and rang her bedroom-bell,
it was minutes before any one answered it. But the strong face of the
Frenchwoman who came at last pleased him, also the little cry with
which she ran to her mistress.
“Your master’s dead,” he said bluntly, “and your mistress has fainted.
Help me to get her to bed. Where’s Sir Thomas?” for it had suddenly
come over him that Lady Levallion’s brother was nowhere to be seen.
“He ran out after his dog that came raging through the servants’ hall a
long time ago. He knew nothing.”
With quick fingers she was loosening Lady Levallion’s gown. “Oh,
Monsieur Houghton, I did go to the drawing-room door to help my lady,
but Lady Chayter say to me you would not let me in. So I run out of
doors to see if Sir Thomas is anywhere, and he is not.”
“Don’t try to rouse her too much,” Houghton returned, as if he were
thinking of something else. “I’ll give her something to make her sleep,
by and by.”
He strolled into the next room as though to give Celeste time to
put her mistress into bed, but he did not stay there. It was Lady
Levallion’s dressing-room, and opened, as he knew, into a passage that
led to her husband’s. Doctor Houghton went in quietly, perhaps to see
if it was there they were bringing Levallion. But the room was empty.
Levallion’s dressing-gown that he would never wear again lay waiting
for him, his half-read novel was on the table by his bed; the trivial
comforts of the room were dreadful to the man who had been Levallion’s
friend, perhaps his only real one, except the Duchess of Avonmore.
Houghton looked deliberately round the room.
There, over the bookcase, was the shelf from which Lady Levallion must
have taken the bottle--that bottle which lay in flinders down-stairs,
that not the cleverest detective on earth could say had been the one
Levallion owned or not. There were other bottles left, chiefly curios
in the way of drinks which Levallion had been too wise to try. Doctor
Houghton did not look at them, did not touch anything. He scarcely knew
why he had come there, except that there might be something that would
tell a tale. And there was not one earthly thing.
“There’s no doubt that he was poisoned, and with some preparation of
prussic acid,” he thought, staring idly before him. “And he did not do
it himself, for there never was a man who loved life better than he.
And he loved his wife, if ever I saw devotion in a human being. Now
what, I wonder, made those women behave like that to her to-night, just
as if they knew something to her discredit! I’ll lay odds,” grimly,
“that when five women get together against one, there’s nothing they
don’t think they know about her, especially when her looks beat them
all. And every one of those women behaved inhumanly to-night.” He
pursed his clean-shaven lips as he tried to remember just on what terms
Lady Levallion had been with her husband, and the only out-of-the-way
thing that came to his mind was the night a strange woman had come to
the door, and Lady Levallion had looked inwardly furious.
“She probably had good reason to, if any kind friend had aired poor
Levallion’s past to her,” he thought, with wrong-headed shrewdness.
“Anyhow, I’m going to do my best for her till I find out she’s guilty.
If Levallion were here,” with incongruous reasoning, “he’d like me to.
I believe,” tenderly, “he would have given even the devil fair play.
At any rate, he wouldn’t want his wife’s name dragged in the dust, and
it sha’n’t be, if I can help it. Though, perhaps, I’m a fool with my
foregone conclusions. No one’s breathed a word against her.” And yet he
had known the second he entered the drawing-room that every soul in it
thought Lady Levallion had murdered her husband.
“I don’t believe it was any one in the house who did it,” the man said
to himself, because he was cross-grained to begin with, and had been
rubbed the wrong way. “I’ll go and find Sir Thomas. He ought to be
with his sister instead of chasing dogs,” and he turned the handle of
the closed door that led into the corridor, instead of going back the
way he had come. The door stuck, and he gave it a vicious jerk. As it
swung forward something dark fell soundlessly on the floor, and the
man’s quick eye saw it. With it on the palm of his hand he moved close
to the electric light, and saw what it was. A tiny triangular rag of
tweed, thin, rather worn, a small, irregular check of fawn and brown,
with a red thread in it.
“Now, where,” said Houghton to himself, “have I seen the trousers that
came out of?” And the cloth was so familiar that it struck him it must
have come from Levallion’s own wardrobe.
“Well, the only thing that looks like a clue is disposed of!” he
thought, shrugging his shoulders. But he put the little rag carefully
away in a pocketbook. It seemed hopeless to prove when and how it had
caught in the door, but less things than that rag had saved women’s
lives.
He hurried down-stairs at a sound of bustle in the hall. There were
boxes and rug-straps being piled there, and it may be forgiven Doctor
Houghton if he thought there might be some one among the house-party
who could not get away fast enough.
“A band of robbers could not be in a greater hurry!” he thought
bitterly. And then his face lit up.
Some one inside the drawing-room door threw it open. A voice Houghton
knew said authoritatively:
“What’s this, gentlemen? Surely you understand no one and no luggage,”
emphatically, “is to leave this house till I hold my inquest.”
It was Doctor Aston, the coroner. But before Houghton could move toward
him a hand caught his arm.
“I went for him.” Sir Thomas Annesley looked fifty years old. “Was it
right?”
Houghton nodded. But it came over him suddenly that if there were
things he did not know the coming of the coroner would be the beginning
of the end for Lady Levallion.
“Go to your sister,” he said gently. “But, stop! What’s this about your
dog frightening her, and----”
“Nothing,” said Tommy drearily. “He went up with her, and I suppose he
saw a cat or something. I found him raising Cain in the kitchen, and
some one opened the door and let him out. I ran after him, but I lost
him. When I came back they said you were with Ravenel, and I thought
I’d get the coroner. How on earth, Doctor Houghton, did that bottle get
poisoned? Levallion gave me some of it only a little before dinner.”
Houghton could only shake his head.
Half a mile off the only soul who would have told him sat up on the
death-bed that till now she had only half-believed in.
“Get Miss Ravenel,” she cried clearly, loudly. “Get her, or they’ll
hang her.”
“Hush, my poor soul!” said the farmer’s wife pitifully.
“Lady Levallion, then!” the Umbrella clutched at the air as if to grasp
the life that was leaving her.
“I want to tell--I----” She turned suddenly rigid, a dreadful stiff
figure, only its eyes alive.
“Tell her they’ll murder him! they----”
She fell forward on the bed.