by E. Nesbit
‘I hate you,’ said Amelia gently, ‘and I am going to see what has happened. Come or not, as you like.’
She caught up the silver candlestick and he followed its wavering gleam down the terrace steps and across the grey dewy grass.
Halfway she paused, lifted the hand that had been hidden among her muslin flounces, and held it out to him with a big Indian dagger in it.
‘I got it out of the hall,’ she said. ‘If there’s any real danger. Anything living. I mean. I thought … But I know I couldn’t use it. Will you take it?’
He took it, laughing kindly.
‘How romantic you are,’ he said admiringly and looked at her standing there in the mingled gold and grey of dawn and candlelight. It was as though he had never seen her before.
They reached the steps of the pavilion and stumbled up them. The door was closed but not locked. And Amelia noticed that the trails of creeper had not been disturbed, they grew across the doorway, as thick as a man’s finger, some of them.
‘He must have got in by one of the windows,’ Frederick said. ‘Your dagger comes in handy, Miss Davenant.’
He slashed at the wet sticky green stuff and put his shoulder to the door. It yielded at a touch and they went in.
The one candle lighted the pavilion hardly at all, and the dusky light that oozed in through the door and windows helped very little. And the silence was thick and heavy.
‘Thesiger!’ said Frederick, clearing this throat. ‘Thesiger! Hullo! Where are you?’
Thesiger did not say where he was. And then they saw.
There were low seats to the windows, and between the windows low stone benches ran. On one of these something dark, something dark and in places white, confused the outline of the carved stone.
‘Thesiger,’ said Frederick again in the tone a man uses to a room that he is almost sure is empty. ‘Thesiger!’
But Amelia was bending over the bench. She was holding the candle crookedly so that it flared and guttered.
‘Is he there?’ Frederick asked, following her; ‘is that him? Is he asleep?’
‘Take the candle,’ said Amelia, and he took it obediently. Amelia was touching what lay on the bench. Suddenly she screamed. Just one scream, not very loud. But Frederick remembers just how it sounded. Sometimes he hears it in dreams and wakes moaning, though he is an old man now and his old wife says: ‘What is it, dear?’ and he says: ‘Nothing, my Ernestine, nothing.’
Directly she had screamed she said: ‘He’s dead,’ and fell on her knees by the bench. Frederick saw that she held something in her arms.
‘Perhaps he isn’t,’ she said. ‘Fetch someone from the house, brandy – send for a doctor. Oh, go, go, go!’
‘I can’t leave you here,’ said Frederick with thoughtful propriety; ‘suppose he revives?’
‘He will not revive,’ said Amelia dully, ‘go, go, go! Do as I tell you. Go! If you don’t go,’ she added suddenly and amazingly, ‘I believe I shall kill you. It’s all your doing.’
The astounding sharp injustice of this stung Frederick into action.
‘I believe he’s only fainted or something,’ he said. ‘When I’ve roused the house and everyone has witnessed your emotion you will regret …’
She sprang to her feet and caught the knife from him and raised it, awkwardly, clumsily, but with keen threatening, not to be mistaken or disregarded. Frederick went.
When Frederick came back, with the groom and the gardener (he hadn’t thought it well to disturb the ladies), the pavilion was filled full of white revealing daylight. On the bench lay a dead man and kneeling by him a living woman on whose warm breast his cold and heavy head lay pillowed. The dead man’s hands were full of the green crushed leaves, and thick twining tendrils were about his wrists and throat. A wave of green seemed to have swept from the open window to the bench where he lay.
The groom and the gardener and the dead man’s friend looked and looked.
‘Looks like as if he’d got himself entangled in the creeper and lost ’is ’ead,’ said the groom, scratching his own.
‘How’d the creeper get in, though? That’s what I says.’ It was the gardener who said it.
‘Through the window,’ said Doricourt, moistening his lips with his tongue.
‘The window was shut, though, when I come by at five yesterday,’ said the gardener stubbornly. ‘’Ow did it get all that way since five?’
They looked at each other, voicing, silently, impossible things.
The woman never spoke. She sat there in the white ring of her crinolined dress like a broken white rose. But her arms were round Thesiger and she would not move them.
When the doctor came, he sent for Ernestine who came, flushed and sleepy-eyed and very frightened, and shocked.
‘You’re upset, dear,’ she said to her friend, ‘and no wonder. How brave of you to come out with Mr Doricourt to see what happened. But you can’t do anything now, dear. Come in and I’ll tell them to get you some tea.’
Amelia laughed, looked down at the face on her shoulder, laid the head back on the bench among the drooping green of the creeper, stooped over it, kissed it, and said quite quietly and gently: ‘Goodbye, dear, goodbye!’ – took Ernestine’s arm and went away with her.
The doctor made an examination and gave a death-certificate. ‘Heart failure,’ was his original and brilliant diagnosis. The certificate said nothing, and Frederick said nothing, of the creeper that was wound about the dead man’s neck, nor of the little white wounds, like little bloodless lips half-open, that they found about the dead man’s neck.
‘An imaginative or uneducated person,’ said the doctor, ‘might suppose that the creeper had something to do with his death. But we mustn’t encourage superstition. I will assist my man to prepare the body for its last sleep. Then we need not have any chattering woman.’
‘Can you read Latin?’ Frederick asked. The doctor could, and, later, did.
It was the Latin of that brown book with the Doricourt arms on it that Frederick wanted read. And when he and the doctor had been together with the book between them for three hours, they closed it, and looked at each other with shy and doubtful eyes.
‘It can’t be true,’ said Frederick.
‘If if is,’ said the more cautious doctor, ‘you don’t want it talked about. I should destroy that book if I were you. And I should root up that creeper and burn it. It is quite evident, from what you tell me, that your friend believed that this creeper was a man-eater, that it fed, just before its flowering time, as the book tells us, at dawn; and that he fully meant that the thing when it crawled into the pavilion seeking its prey should find you and not him. It would have been so, I understand, if his watch had not stopped at one o’clock.’
‘He dropped it, you know,’ said Doricourt, like a man in a dream.
‘All the cases in this book are the same,’ said the doctor, ‘the strangling, the white wounds. I have heard of such plants; I never believed.’ He shuddered. ‘Had your friend any spite against you? Any reason for wanting to get you out of the way?’
Frederick thought of Ernestine, of Thesiger’s eyes on Ernestine, of her smile at him over her blue muslin shoulder.
‘No,’ he said, ‘none. None whatever. It must have been an accident. I am sure he did not know. He could not read Latin.’ He lied, being, after all, a gentleman, and Ernestine’s name being sacred.
‘The creeper seems to have been brought here and planted in Henry the Eighth’s time. And then the thing began. It seems to have been at its flowering season that it needed the … that, in short, it was dangerous. The little animals and birds found dead near the pavilion … But to move itself all that way, across the floor! The thing must have been almost conscient,’ he said with a sincere shudder. ‘One would think,’ he corrected himself at once, ‘that it knew what it was doing, if such a thing were not plainly contrary to the laws of nature.’
‘Yes,’ said Frederick, ‘one would. I think if I can’t do anything mo
re I’ll go and rest. Somehow all this has given me a turn. Poor Thesiger!’
His last thought before he went to sleep was one of pity.
‘Poor Thesiger,’ he said, ‘how violent and wicked! And what an escape for me! I must never tell Ernestine. And all the time there was Amelia … Ernestine would never have done that for me.’ And on a little pang of regret for the impossible he fell asleep.
Amelia went on living. She was not the sort that dies even of such a thing as happened to her on that night, when for the first and last time she held her love in her arms and knew him for the murderer he was. It was only the other day that she died, a very old woman. Ernestine who, beloved and surrounded by children and grandchildren, survived her, spoke her epitaph:
‘Poor Amelia,’ she said, ‘nobody ever looked the same side of the road where she was. There was an indiscretion when she was young. Oh, nothing disgraceful, of course. She was a lady. But people talked. It was the sort of thing that stamps a girl, you know.’
THE HOUSE OF SILENCE
The thief stood close under the high wall, and looked to right and left. To the right the road wound white and sinuous, lying like a twisted ribbon over the broad grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road turned sharply down towards the river; beyond the ford the road went away slowly in a curve, prolonged for miles through the green marshes.
No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There were no travellers at such an hour on such a road.
The thief looked across the valley, at the top of the mountain flushed with sunset, and at the grey-green of the olives about its base. The terraces of olives were already dusk with twilight, but his keen eyes could not have missed the smallest variance or shifting of their lights and shadows. Nothing stirred there. He was alone.
Then, turning, he looked again at the wall behind him. The face of it was grey and sombre, but all along the top of it, in the crannies of the coping stones, orange wall-flowers and sulphur-coloured snapdragons shone among the haze of feathery-flowered grasses. He looked again at the place where some of the stones had fallen from the coping – had fallen within the wall, for none lay in the road without. The bough of a mighty tree covered the gap with its green mantle from the eyes of any chance wayfarer; but the thief was no chance wayfarer, and he had surprised the only infidelity of the great wall to its trust.
To the chance wayfarer, too, the wall’s denial had seemed absolute, unanswerable. Its solid stone, close knit by mortar hardly less solid, showed not only a defence, it offered a defiance – a menace. But the thief had learnt his trade; he saw that the mortar might be loosened a little here, broken a little there, and now the crumbs of it fell rustling onto the dry, dusty grass of the roadside. He drew back, took two quick steps forward, and, with a spring, sudden and agile as a cat’s, grasped the wall where the gap showed, and drew himself up. Then he rubbed his hands on his knees, because his hands were bloody from the sudden grasping of the rough stones, and sat astride on the wall.
He parted the leafy boughs and looked down; below him lay the stones that had fallen from the wall – already grass was growing upon the mound they made. As he ventured his head beyond the green leafage, the level light of the sinking sun struck him in the eyes. It was like a blow. He dropped softly from the wall and stood in the shadow of the tree – looking, listening.
Before him stretched the park – wide and still; dotted here and there with trees, and overlaid with gold poured from the west. He held his breath and listened. There was no wind to stir the leaves to those rustlings which may deceive and disconcert the keenest and the boldest; only the sleepy twitter of birds, and the little sudden soft movements of them in the dusky privacy of the thick-leaved branches. There was in all the broad park no sign of any other living thing.
The thief trod softly along under the wall where the trees were thickest, and at every step he paused to look and listen.
It was quite suddenly that he came upon the little lodge near the great gates of wrought iron with the marble gate-posts bearing upon them the two gaunt griffins, the cognisance of the noble house whose lands these were. The thief drew back into the shadow and stood still, only his heart beat thickly. He stood still as the tree trunk beside him, looking, listening. He told himself that he heard nothing – saw nothing – yet he became aware of things. That the door of the lodge was not closed, that some of its windows were broken and that into its little garden, straw and litter had drifted from the open door: and that between the stone step and the threshold grass was growing inches high. When he was aware of this he stepped forward and entered the lodge. All the sordid sadness of a little deserted home met him here – broken crocks, and bent pans, straw, old rags, and a brooding, dusty stillness.
‘There has been no one here since the old keeper died. They told the truth,’ said the thief; and he made haste to leave the lodge, for there was nothing in it now that any man need covet – only desolation and the memory of death.
So he went slowly among the trees, and by devious ways drew a little nearer to the great house that stood in its walled garden in the middle of the park. From very far off, above the green wave of trees that broke round it, he could see the towers of it rising black against the sunset; and between the trees came glimpses of its marble white where the faint grey light touched it from the east.
Moving slowly – vigilant, alert, with eyes turning always to right and to left, with ears which felt the intense silence more acutely than they could have felt any tumult – the thief reached the low wall of the garden, at the western side. The last redness of the sunset’s reflection had lighted all the many windows, and the vast place blazed at him for an instant before the light dipped behind the black bar of the trees, and left him face to face with a pale house, whose windows now were black and hollow, and seemed like eyes that watched him. Every window was closed; the lower ones were guarded by jalousies; through the glass of the ones above he could see the set painted faces of the shutters.
From far off he had heard, and known, the plash-plash of fountains, and now he saw their white changing columns rise and fall against the background of the terrace. The garden was full of rose bushes trailing and unpruned; and the heavy, happy scent of the roses, still warm from the sun, breathed through the place, exaggerating the sadness of its tangled desolation. Strange figures gleamed in the deepening dusk, but they were too white to be feared. He crept into a corner where Psyche drooped in marble, and, behind her pedestal, crouched. He took food from his pockets and ate and drank. And between the mouthfuls he listened and watched.
The moon rose, and struck a pale fire from the face of the house and from the marble limbs of the statues, and the gleaming water of the fountains drew the moonbeams into the unchanging change of its rise and fall.
Something rustled and stirred among the roses. The thief grew rigid: his heart seemed suddenly hollow; he held his breath. Through the deepening shadows something gleamed white; and not marble, for it moved, it came towards him. Then the silence of the night was shattered by a scream, as the white shape glided into the moonlight. The thief resumed his munching, and another shape glimmered after the first. ‘Curse the beasts!’ he said, and took another draught from his bottle, as the white peacocks were blotted out by the shadows of the trees, and the stillness of the night grew more intense.
In the moonlight the thief went round and about the house, pushing through the trailing briers that clung to him – and now grown bolder he looked closely at doors and windows. But all were fast barred as the doors of a tomb. And the silence deepened as the moonlight waxed.
There was one little window, high up, that showed no shutter. He looked at it; measured its distance from the ground and from the nearest of the great chestnut trees. Then he walked along under the avenue of chestnuts with head thrown back and eyes fixed on the mystery of their interlacing branches.
At the fifth tree he stopped; leaped to the lowest bough, missed it; leaped again, caught it, and drew up his body. Then c
limbing, creeping, swinging, while the leaves, agitated by his progress, rustled to the bending of the boughs, he passed to that tree, to the next – swift, assured, unhesitating. And so from tree to tree, till he was at the last tree – and on the bough that stretched to touch the little window with its leaves.
He swung from this. The bough bent and cracked, and would have broken, but that at the only possible instant the thief swung forward, felt the edge of the window with his feet, loosed the bough, sprang, and stood, flattened against the mouldings, clutching the carved drip-stone with his hands. He thrust his knee through the window, waiting for the tinkle of the falling glass to settle into quietness, opened the window, and crept in. He found himself in a corridor: he could see the long line of its white windows, and the bars of moonlight falling across the inlaid wood of its floor.
He took out his thief’s lantern – high and slender like a tall cup – lighted it, and crept softly along the corridor, listening between his steps till the silence grew to be like a humming in his ears.
And slowly, stealthily, he opened door after door; the rooms were spacious and empty – his lantern’s yellow light flashing into their corners told him this. Some poor, plain furniture he discerned, a curtain or a bench here and there, but not what he sought. So large was the house, that presently it seemed to the thief that for many hours he had been wandering along its galleries, creeping down its wide stairs, opening the grudging doors of the dark, empty rooms, whose silence spoke ever more insistently in his ears.
‘But it is as he told me,’ he said inwardly: ‘no living soul in all the place. The old man – a servant of this great house – he told me; he knew, and I have found all even as he said.’
Then the thief turned away from the arched emptiness of the grand staircase, and in a far corner of the hall he found himself speaking in a whisper because now it seemed to him that nothing would serve but that this clamorous silence should be stilled by a human voice.
