‘I don’t know whether we’re related to them,’ he answered importantly. ‘We may be, for our branch of the family comes from the Midlands.’
I give this talk at length, because I am so proud of my first attempt at detective work. When I left him, twenty minutes later, with instructions to move against the owner of Holmescroft, with a view to purchase, I was more bewildered than any Doctor Watson at the opening of a story.
Why should a middle-aged solicitor turn plovers’ egg colour and drop his jaw when reminded of so innocent and festal a matter as that no death had ever occurred in a house that he had sold? If I knew my English vocabulary at all, the tone in which he said the youngest sister ‘fell ill’ meant that she had gone out of her mind. That might explain his change of countenance, and it was just possible that her demented influence still hung about Holmescroft; but the rest was beyond me.
I was relieved when I reached M’Leod’s City office, and could tell him what I had done – not what I thought.
M’Leod was quite willing to enter into the game of the pretended purchase, but did not see how it would help if I knew Baxter.
‘He’s the only living soul I can get at who was connected with Holmescroft,’ I said.
‘Ah! Living soul is good,’ said M’Leod. ‘At any rate our little girl will be pleased that you are still interested in us. Won’t you come down some day this week?’
‘How is it there now?’ I asked.
He screwed up his face. ‘Simply frightful!’ he said. ‘Thea is at Droitwich.’
‘I should like it immensely, but I must cultivate Baxter for the present. You’ll be sure and keep him busy your end, won’t you?’
He looked at me with quiet contempt. ‘Do not be afraid. I shall be a good Jew. I shall be my own solicitor.’
Before a fortnight was over, Baxter admitted ruefully that M’Leod was better than most firms in the business: We buyers were coy, argumentative, shocked at the price of Holmescroft, inquisitive, and cold by turns, but Mr M’Leod the seller easily met and surpassed us; and Mr Baxter entered every letter, telegram, and consultation at the proper rates in a cinematograph-film of a bill. At the end of a month he said it looked as though M’Leod, thanks to him, were really going to listen to reason. I was many pounds out of pocket, but I had learned something of Mr Baxter on the human side. I deserved it. Never in my life have I worked to conciliate, amuse, and flatter a human being as I worked over my solicitor.
It appeared that he golfed. Therefore, I was an enthusiastic beginner, anxious to learn. Twice I invaded his office with a bag (M’Leod lent it) full of the spelicans needed in this detestable game, and a vocabulary to match. The third time the ice broke, and Mr Baxter took me to his links, quite ten miles off, where in a maze of tramway lines, railroads, and nurserymaids, we skelped our divoted way round nine holes like barges plunging through head seas. He played vilely and had never expected to meet anyone worse; but as he realised my form, I think he began to like me, for he took me in hand by the two hours together. After a fortnight he could give me no more than a stroke a hole, and when, with this allowance, I once managed to beat him by one, he was honestly glad, and assured me that I should be a golfer if I stuck to it. I was sticking to it for my own ends, but now and again my conscience pricked me; for the man was a nice man. Between games he supplied me with odd pieces of evidence, such as that he had known the Moultries all his life, being their cousin, and that Miss Mary, the eldest, was an unforgiving woman who would never let bygones be. I naturally wondered what she might have against him; and somehow connected him unfavourably with mad Agnes.
‘People ought to forgive and forget,’ he volunteered one day between rounds. ‘Specially where, in the nature of things, they can’t be sure of their deductions. Don’t you think so?’
‘It all depends on the nature of the evidence on which one forms one’s judgement,’ I answered.
‘Nonsense!’ he cried. ‘I’m lawyer enough to know that there’s nothing in the world so misleading as circumstantial evidence. Never was.’
‘Why? Have you ever seen men hanged on it?’
‘Hanged? People have been supposed to be eternally lost on it,’ his face turned grey again. ‘I don’t know how it is with you, but my consolation is that God must know. He must! Things that seem on the face of ’em like murder, or say suicide, may appear different to God. Heh?’
‘That’s what the murderer and the suicide can always hope – I suppose.’
‘I have expressed myself clumsily as usual. The facts as God knows ’em – may be different – even after the most clinching evidence. I’ve always said that – both as a lawyer and a man, but some people won’t – I don’t want to judge ’em – we’ll say they can’t – believe it; whereas I say there’s always a working chance – a certainty – that the worst hasn’t happened.’ He stopped and cleared his throat. ‘Now, let’s come on! This time next week I shall be taking my holiday.’
‘What links?’ I asked carelessly, while twins in a perambulator got out of our line of fire.
‘A potty little nine-hole affair at a hydro in the Midlands. My cousins stay there. Always will. Not but what the fourth and the seventh holes take some doing. You could manage it, though,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You’re doing much better. It’s only your approach shots that are weak.’
‘You’re right. I can’t approach for nuts! I shall go to pieces while you’re away – with no one to coach me,’ I said mournfully.
‘I haven’t taught you anything,’ he said, delighted with the compliment.
‘I owe all I’ve learned to you, anyhow. When will you come back?’
‘Look here,’ he began. ‘I don’t know, your engagements, but I’ve no one to play with at Burry Mills. Never have. Why couldn’t you take a few days off and join me there? I warn you it will be rather dull. It’s a throat and gout place – baths, massage, electricity, and so forth. But the fourth and the seventh holes really take some doing.’
‘I’m for the game,’ I answered valiantly; Heaven well knowing that I hated every stroke and word of it.
‘That’s the proper spirit. As their lawyer I must ask you not to say anything to my cousins about Holmescroft. It upsets ’em. Always did. But speaking as man to man, it would be very pleasant for me if you could see your way to –’
I saw it as soon as decency permitted, and thanked him sincerely. According to my now well-developed theory he had certainly misappropriated his aged cousins’ monies under power of attorney, and had probably driven poor Agnes Moultrie out of her wits, but I wished that he was not so gentle, and good-tempered, and innocent eyed.
Before I joined him at Burry Mills Hydro, I spent a night at Holmescroft. Miss M’Leod had returned from her Hydro, and first we made very merry on the open lawn in the sunshine over the manners and customs of the English resorting to such places. She knew dozens of hydros, and warned me how to behave in them, while Mr and Mrs M’Leod stood aside and adored her.
‘Ah! That’s the way she always comes back to us,’ he said. ‘Pity it wears off so soon, ain’t it? You ought to hear her sing “With mirth thou pretty bird”.’
We had the house to face through the evening, and there we neither laughed nor sung. The gloom fell on us as we entered, and did not shift till ten o’clock, when we crawled out, as it were, from beneath it.
‘It has been bad this summer,’ said Mrs M’Leod in a whisper after we realised that we were freed. ‘Sometimes I think the house will get up and cry out – it is so bad.’
‘How?’
‘Have you forgotten what comes after the depression ?’
So then we waited about the small fire, and the dead air in the room presently filled and pressed down upon us with the sensation (but words are useless here) as though some dumb and bound power were striving against gag and bond to deliver its soul of an articulate word. It passed in a few minutes, and I fell to thinking about Mr Baxter’s conscience and Agnes Moultrie, gone mad in the well-lit be
droom that waited me. These reflections secured me a night during which I rediscovered how, from purely mental causes, a man can be physically sick; but the sickness was bliss compared to my dreams when the birds waked. On my departure, M’Leod gave me a beautiful narwhal’s horn, much as a nurse gives a child sweets for being brave at a dentist’s.
‘There’s no duplicate of it in the world,’ he said, ‘else it would have come to old Max M’Leod;’ and he tucked it into the motor. Miss M’Leod on the far side of the car whispered, ‘Have you found out anything, Mr Perseus?’
I shook my head.
‘Then I shall be chained to my rock all my life,’ she went on. ‘Only don’t tell papa.’
I supposed she was thinking of the young gentleman who specialised in South American rails, for I noticed a ring on the third finger of her left hand.
I went straight from that house to Burry Mills Hydro, keen for the first time in my life on playing golf, which is guaranteed to occupy the mind. Baxter had taken me a room communicating with his own, and after lunch introduced me to a tall, horse-headed elderly lady of decided manners, whom a white-haired maid pushed along in a bath-chair through the park-like grounds of the Hydro. She was Miss Mary Moultrie, and she coughed and cleared her throat just like Baxter. She suffered – she told me it was a Moultrie castemark – from some obscure form of chronic bronchitis, complicated with spasm of the glottis; and, in a dead, flat voice, with a sunken eye that looked and saw not, told me what washes, gargles, pastilles, and inhalations she had proved most beneficial. From her I was passed on to her younger sister, Miss Elizabeth, a small and withered thing with twitching lips, victim, she told me, to very much the same sort of throat, but secretly devoted to another set of medicines. When she went away with Baxter and the bath-chair, I fell across a major of the Indian army with gout in his glassy eyes, and a stomach which he had taken all round the Continent. He laid everything before me; and him I escaped only to be confided in by a matron with a tendency to follicular tonsillitis and eczema. Baxter waited hand and foot on his cousins till five o’clock, trying, as I saw, to atone for his treatment of the dead sister. Miss Mary ordered him about like a dog.
‘I warned you it would be dull,’ he said when we met in the smoking-room.
‘It’s tremendously interesting,’ I said. ‘But how about a look round the links?’
‘Unluckily damp always affects my eldest cousin. I’ve got to buy her a new bronchitis-kettle. Arthurs broke her old one yesterday.’
We slipped out to the chemist’s shop in the town, and he bought a large glittering tin thing whose workings he explained.
‘I’m used to this sort of work. I come up here pretty often,’ he said. ‘I’ve the family throat too.’
‘You’re a good man,’ I said. ‘A very good man.’
He turned towards me in the evening light among the beeches, and his face was changed to what it might have been a generation before.
‘You see,’ he said huskily, ‘there was the youngest – Agnes. Before she fell ill, you know. But she didn’t like leaving her sisters. Never would.’ He hurried on with his odd-shaped load and left me among the ruins of my black theories. The man with that face had done Agnes Moultrie no wrong.
We never played our game. I was waked between two and three in the morning from my hygienic bed by Baxter in an ulster over orange and white pyjamas, which I should never have suspected from his character.
‘My cousin has had some sort of a seizure,’ he said. ‘Will you come? I don’t want to wake the doctor. Don’t want to make a scandal. Quick!’
So I came quickly, and led by the white-haired Arthurs in a jacket and petticoat, entered a double-bedded room reeking with steam and Friar’s Balsam. The electrics were all on. Miss Mary – I knew her by her height – was at the open window, wrestling with Miss Elizabeth, who gripped her round the knees.
Miss Mary’s hand was at her own throat, which was streaked with blood.
‘She’s done it. She’s done it too!’ Miss Elizabeth panted. ‘Hold her! Help me!’
‘Oh, I say! Women don’t cut their throats,’ Baxter whispered.
‘My God! Has she cut her throat?’ the maid cried out, and with no warning rolled over in a faint. Baxter pushed her under the washbasins, and leaped to hold the gaunt woman who crowed and whistled as she struggled toward the window. He took her by the shoulder, and she struck out wildly: ‘All right! She’s only cut her hand,’ he said. ‘Wet towel quick!’
While I got that he pushed her backward. Her strength seemed almost as great as his. I swabbed at her throat when I could, and found no mark; then helped him to control her a little. Miss Elizabeth leaped back to bed, wailing like a child.
‘Tie up her hand somehow,’ said Baxter. ‘Don’t let it drip about the place. She’ – he stepped on broken glass in his slippers, ‘she must have smashed a pane.’
Miss Mary lurched towards the open window again, dropped on her knees, her head on the sill, and lay quiet, surrendering the cut hand to me.
‘What did she do?’ Baxter turned towards Miss Elizabeth in the far bed.
‘She was going to throw herself out of the window,’ was the answer. ‘I stopped her, and sent Arthurs for you. Oh, we can never hold up our heads again!’
Miss Mary writhed and fought for breath. Baxter found a shawl which he threw over her shoulders.
‘Nonsense!’ said he. ‘That isn’t like Mary;’ but his face worked when he said it.
‘You wouldn’t believe about Aggie, John. Perhaps you will now!’ said Miss Elizabeth. ‘I saw her do it, and she’s cut her throat too!’
‘She hasn’t,’ I said. ‘It’s only her hand.’
Miss Mary suddenly broke from us with an indescribable grunt, flew, rather than ran, to her sister’s bed, and there shook her as one furious schoolgirl would shake another.
‘No such thing,’ she croaked. ‘How dare you think so, you wicked little fool?’
‘Get into bed, Mary,’ said Baxter. ‘You’ll catch a chill.’
She obeyed, but sat up with the grey shawl round her lean shoulders, glaring at her sister. ‘I’m better now,’ she panted. ‘Arthurs let me sit out too long. Where’s Arthurs? The kettle.’
‘Never mind Arthurs,’ said Baxter. ‘You get the kettle.’ I hastened to bring it from the side table. ‘Now, Mary, as God sees you, tell me what you’ve done.’
His lips were dry, and he could not moisten. them with his tongue.
Miss Mary applied herself to the mouth of the kettle, and between indraws of steam said: ‘The spasm came on just now, while I was asleep. I was nearly choking to death. So I went to the window I’ve done it often before, without waking anyone. Bessie’s such an old maid about draughts. I tell you I was choking to death. I couldn’t manage the catch, and I nearly fell out. That window opens too low. I cut my hand trying to save myself. Who has tied it up in this filthy handkerchief? I wish you had had my throat, Bessie. I never was nearer dying!’ She scowled on us all impartially, while her sister sobbed.
From the bottom of the bed we heard a quivering voice: ‘Is she dead? Have they took her away? Oh, I never could bear the sight o’ blood!’
‘Arthurs,’ said Miss Mary, ‘you are an hireling. Go away!’
It is my belief that Arthurs crawled out on all fours, but I was busy picking up broken glass from the carpet.
Then Baxter, seated by the side of the bed, began to cross-examine in a voice I scarcely recognised. No one could for an instant have doubted the genuine rage of Miss Mary against her sister, her cousin, or her maid; and that a doctor should have been called in for she did me the honour of calling me doctor – was the last drop. She was choking with her throat; had rushed to the window for air; had near pitched out, and in catching at the window bars had cut her hand. Over and over she made this clear to the intent Baxter. Then she turned on her sister and tongue-lashed her savagely.
‘You mustn’t blame me,’ Miss Bessie faltered at last. ‘You know what we t
hink of night and day.’.
‘I’m coming to that,’ said Baxter. ‘Listen to me. What you did, Mary, misled four people into thinking you – you meant to do away with yourself.’
‘Isn’t one suicide in the family enough? Oh God, help and pity us! You couldn’t have believed that!’ she cried.
‘The evidence was complete. Now, don’t you think,’ Baxter’s finger wagged under her nose – ‘can’t you think that poor Aggie did the same thing at Holmescroft when she fell out of the window?’
‘She had the same throat,’ said Miss Elizabeth. ‘Exactly the same symptoms. Don’t you remember, Mary?’
‘Which was her bedroom?’ I asked of Baxter in an undertone.
‘Over the south verandah, looking on to the tennis lawn.’
‘I nearly fell out of that very window when I was at Holmescroft – opening it to get some air. The sill doesn’t come much above your knees,’ I said.
‘You hear that, Mary? Mary, do you hear What this gentleman says? Won’t you believe that what nearly happened to you must have happened to poor Aggie that night? For God’s sake – for her sake – Mary, won’t you believe?’
There was a long silence while the steam kettle puffed.
‘If I could have proof – if I could have proof,’ said she, and broke into most horrible tears.
Baxter motioned to me, and I crept away to my room, and lay awake till morning, thinking more specially of the dumb Thing at Holmescroft which wished to explain itself. I hated Miss Mary as perfectly as though I had known her for twenty years, but I felt that, alive or dead, I should not like her to condemn me.
Yet at midday, when I saw Miss Mary in her bath-chair, Arthurs behind and Baxter and Miss Elizabeth on either side, in the park-like grounds of the Hydro, I found it difficult to arrange my words.
‘Now that you know all about it,’ said Baxter aside, after the first strangeness of our meeting was over, ‘it’s only fair to tell you that my poor cousin did not die in Holmescroft at all. She was dead when they found her under the window in the morning. Just dead.’
Strange Tales (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 18
