Wolf in Man’s Clothing

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  It left me alone again in that big gloomy bedroom with the rain whispering against the window and a sick man, a man who’d been shot, on the bed.

  I was a little shaken. Shootings, guns and bullets. Police and a doctor who wouldn’t look at me.

  To complicate it, Drue with her loveliness and her honesty linked so strongly with that dreary, secretive house and everybody in it. Especially the man who had been shot.

  The dark panels of the door reflected a dreary light from the windows opposite. My patient gave a kind of weak chuckle and said quite clearly, “Nice going.”

  It gave me rather a start. I hurried to the bed. His eyelids fluttered and opened; there was a gleam of laughter in his eyes and the corners of his mouth twitched. Otherwise he hadn’t moved. He made a great effort and said, “Nurse…”

  “Yes. You’d better not talk.”

  But there was something he had to say. I watched him struggle for the words, his bright eyes seeking into mine. “Thought-there was a girl. Here…” he said laboriously, and waited for me to reply. I hesitated. His hand still lay outside the cover and it moved a little and he said, watching me intently, “Somebody I know…”

  “There is another nurse,” I said then. “You must sleep now.”

  “Another-nurse…” he said and, as a wave of drugged sleep caught and engulfed him again, his voice drifted away. I waited. He’d gone back to sleep, I thought; but as I started to move away he spoke again. And he said quickly, in a jumbled rush of words, something that ended with the words “-yellow gloves.” That was all I could understand, for the rest was only a blurred mumble and he was overtaken by sleep like an avalanche while I stood there watching him and wondering what yellow gloves had to do with anything at all.

  Well, in the end I decided he was rambling and it meant nothing. Although his recognition of Drue had been sensible enough, unless it was merely deeply instinctive.

  That, when I thought of it, was queer-that he’d known she was there.

  As I have indicated, my encounter with the doctor and the state trooper was not exactly conducive to a quiet state of mind; there was also the matter of the missing gun, and the bullet that had been thrown out. I am a sensible woman. It is my nature, and I see no reason to hide my light under a bushel, to enjoy a certain poise. Master of my fate and captain of my destiny, under even the most untoward circumstances. But I won’t say I didn’t feel uneasy, for I did. And the story Drue had told me, naturally, added to my uneasiness.

  For when I had considered everything I had heard and observed (not much, perhaps, but enough), it all summed up to just one conclusion. I’m not sentimental or unduly sympathetic; quite the contrary. But I liked Drue Cable and even if I hadn’t it was obvious that she had no friends in that household. It was as obvious that she was determined to stay.

  And I didn’t like the look of things.

  So I had to stay with her. There simply wasn’t anything else for me to do. And if they sent her away I still had to stay. No question of that.

  While I was very reluctantly reaching that conclusion, Craig Brent continued to sleep heavily, without stirring or saying anything more. After a while, finding it difficult to sit still, I drifted to the deeply recessed bay windows and looked out through the streaming rain. That was how it happened that I saw Drue go to the garden and return.

  It was by that time fairly late in the afternoon. The room and the whole great house seemed perfectly still, except for the rain. Once somewhere away off in the distance a radio was turned on-apparently for a news bulletin. I wondered what fresh turn the war had taken, and wished, as I’d wished so many times, that they would take me. I nursed all through the other war. I am twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier but, as they say of an old work horse, I’m sound in wind and limb. And I want to go to war. In a swift poignant wave of memory I could see the mud of France, feel the rain and cold, and smell the sweet, sickly odors of ether (until it ran out) and of antiseptics-all of it in the past these twenty years. I thought of that-and of Bataan and Corregidor, and the nurses who were there and what they did.

  My heart gave a kind of bow of homage. But it was heavy with longing, too. So I tried to put the war out of my mind and looked out at what I could see of the landscape from the window.

  The Brent house stood on the very edge of a little town called Balifold; it was not quite country and not quite suburb. It was, I believe, among the outlying hills of the Berkshires, not far from Lenox and Stockbridge, although we had changed trains, I think, at Springfield. It had once been, and indeed still was, a rather elegant neighborhood. The Brent house itself was enormous, solid and ugly, except where ivy had crept over the chimneys and around the stone balustrades, softening their rather grim outlines.

  The grounds were extensive and were enclosed with a very high and solid stone wall. There were tall, grilled iron gates, formal lawns, thick, clipped shrubs, old trees and, directly below me, a wide slope of lawn, bordered by a tall thick hedge. This hedge was broken at one end by steps and another gate which led. I guessed (and correctly) to the garden, where my patient was said to have been cleaning a gun-at eleven o’clock of a dark February night.

  I was looking down at the lawn and steps when there was a flutter of a blue cape and Drue came hurriedly from somewhere out of my range of vision and crossed the lawn. She was running, so the red lining of her long blue nurse’s cape fluttered, and I could see the hem of her starched white skirt. Her hood was pulled up over her head but still I was perfectly sure it was Drue. She disappeared down the steps and behind the hedge and was there for a long time, for I watched.

  Indeed when she did finally emerge it was perceptibly darker with the fall of an early, dreary twilight. She came directly toward the house and she was carrying something under her cape. I was sure of it because of the way she held the edges of the cape together, the crook of her elbow beneath the heavy folds, and the oddly surreptitious way she hurried toward some side door.

  However, it wasn’t more than ten minutes after that that she came, all fresh and crisp in her white uniform and cap, with only the color in her lips and in her cheeks to prove that she’d been, not a quarter of an hour ago, running across the lawn in what I could only describe as a surreptitious way. She came in quietly, closed the door behind her and went at once to stand beside the bed. Her eyelids were lowered, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could see her mouth and the passion of anxiety in the lines of her slender figure.

  Young Brent moved a little and spoke again. He said, “But that’s murder. Murder. Tell Claud. There’ll be murder done.”

  He said it clearly; he said it imperatively; he said it with a complete, forceful conviction. He was drugged and unconscious and did not know what he was saying, at least, I sincerely hoped he didn’t know.

  But Drue cried, “Craig!” in a sharp whisper. “Craig-what do you mean?”

  She waited and I waited, and he didn’t move, or speak.

  “Delirium,” I said finally, my voice sounding unnaturally high.

  “Delirium?” She seemed to weigh it, still watching him fixedly, and to arrive at some secret rejection. “Why would he say that? If it’s delirium.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?” My voice was still a little high. “They say anything in delirium. Who’s Claud?”

  “That’s Dr. Chivery,” she said. “The Chiverys are very close friends.”

  It didn’t help much; if there was any remote and fantastic grain of truth in Craig Brent’s words, which Heaven forbid, Dr. Chivery wasn’t the man to do anything decisive and prohibitive about it. My one encounter with that gentleman was sufficient to convince me of that.

  Drue was leaning over the bed again. “Craig.” Her voice was low, but clear and urgent. “What do you mean? What murder?” After a long pause, she said, “Who?”

  There was no answer, and I had had time to pull myself together.

  “He spoke in delirium,” I said again but more positively. “If there was going to be a mur
der, I don’t think the murderer would take anybody into his confidence beforehand. It isn’t done.”

  She turned that over in her mind and smiled a little and looked at me. “No. You’re right, of course. It was silly of me to think of anything else. There isn’t any change, is there?”

  I shook my head and just then the door opened again. A man, the butler, I thought, stood there. He was a big man, enormously dignified in his black coat, with intelligent, light-blue eyes. He didn’t come into the room but made a kind of gesture toward me, which was a nice blend of respect and authority. Drue said, “He wants you. I’ll stay.”

  She was right. For when I had crossed to him the butler (William Fanshawe Beevens, age fifty-four, in the Brent employ for twenty-one years; so the record, later, ran) beckoned me into the hall.

  “Mr. Brent,” said he, “wishes to speak to you. It will be only a moment.” Well, of course I could leave. Drue could stay with our patient. The butler added, “Will you come this way, please?” and started off down the hall.

  We went downstairs, making almost no sound on the padded steps. The great hall with its black and white marble floor was empty, except for the butler and me. I thought fleetingly of the state trooper; if he had been about I believe now that I would have told him of my patient’s words, delirious though I thought-at least, I preferred to think-they were. But in any case the trooper was not about and, when I inquired (very casually), the butler said briefly that he had concluded his inquiry and gone.

  “It was merely a matter of routine; customary when there is an accident with a gun,” said the butler. He gave me a fleeting look from those intelligent, light-blue eyes and led me to a door with carved, dark wood panels which looked extremely thick. Just as we reached it, it opened and a woman came out.

  She was rather an extraordinary woman; very small and dark with dead black hair, done in a high pompadour after the fashion of thirty years ago; she wore a white starched blouse (the kind that used to be called a shirtwaist and had a starched stock collar) and a very full black skirt which all but touched the floor. She had a tiny waist with a big belt and extravagantly curved hips. On one shoulder a watch was pinned and she smelled of violet sachet. She wore pince-nez, rimless, with a gold chain fastened to a gold button on her other shoulder. She must have been fifty or more; it was difficult to tell. Altogether she was a page out of the past and a page that I may as well admit I am fully equipped to remember.

  But the thing I noticed mainly was the bright, inquisitive way her dark eyes peered out of her small, sallow face. She gave a short kind of nod and went on and, as I am a truthful woman, petticoats rustled as she crossed the marble floor. Otherwise, however, Maud Chivery moved with an utter and complete silence which never ceased to astonish me. You had to have your eyes fixed rigidly upon her to be aware of her activities; you would be sitting in the very room with her and, if you didn’t watch and let your thoughts drift away and then turned to speak to her, she would be gone, vanished altogether from the room without a sound, unless there was that faint taffeta rustle and you couldn’t always hear that. An unnerving woman, really, but one I learned reluctantly to respect.

  Naturally, I didn’t then know that it was Maud Chivery, Dr. Chivery’s wife and an intimate, indeed almost a member of the household-for she had been all but its mistress (ordering the household, hiring and training servants, getting Craig off to school and seeing that he went to the dentist, acting, even, as a hostess for Conrad Brent on occasion) during the long years of Conrad’s widowerhood. I checked her down then as another member of the Brent household and, candidly, one not likely to raise its level in point of general attractiveness. Then Beevens had opened the door and was ushering me into the presence. It was exactly that.

  My first feeling was a wave of sheer self-amazement that I had had the enormous temerity to call him, flippantly to Drue, Papa Brent. My second was another kind of shock; for I found myself instantly, yes and seriously, on guard. Against what I didn’t know, unless it was some quality of incalculability in the man who stood there on the hearth-rug watching me.

  I did know then, too, that Drue Cable’s position (or rather lack of position) in that household was not in any possible sense due to a mere misunderstanding between lovers that a word or two might have cleared up. It was nothing so trivial. When I saw Conrad Brent I sensed that. I also thought (queerly, unexpectedly) that there was danger somewhere in that house.

  Naturally, one may say that where guns go off and shoot people there must be danger, and it doesn’t take any sixth sense to realize it. But it was more than that. It was something else entirely; something that had nothing to do with reason. In fact, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me; it was just an intangible thing that hovered in the very air of that room. The queer part of it, of course, was that it should be intelligible to me. I am never prescient; I have a good stomach, no nerves and little imagination.

  Beevens closed the door behind me, and Conrad Brent said, “My wife tells me that the nurse who accompanied you here is a woman who was once my son’s wife. I am sending her away at once. I expect you to care for my son yourself until I can make other arrangements.” He paused then, and added, “Mrs. Chivery will help you if you need her.”

  4

  IT IS EASY NOW to understand Conrad Brent; his strength and his weakness; his vanity and his consequent self-deception; his procrastination; his pride and his blind and obstinate prejudices; and, above all, his reluctance to admit a mistake. But then I only sensed that there was something wrong about him; something too hard and too bold which seemed to cover an inner uncertainty.

  It was an odd impression. Certainly his outward behavior had no faint hint of uncertainty or secret uneasiness. Certainly, if my impression was a true one then, there was little hope of softening or changing his hatred for Drue; if his bold and arrogant front really concealed weakness then he would cling to a decision, once he made it, merely to keep up that front. I’ve seen it happen before; there is nothing like the obsessed obstinacy of a basically weak and uncertain nature.

  He stood on the hearth-rug, waiting for me to say, “yes, sir” (and, unless I was wrong, a little afraid I wouldn’t). He was not a tall man, but he was rather muscular and thick; he had a brown face, a sharply aquiline nose and a bearded and thus equivocal chin. His eyes were heavily lidded and rather bright in color. He was a little bald; he wore, besides the somewhat stringy beard, a short gray mustache with two sharply waxed points at either side.

  Just above him on the breast of the mantel was a coat of arms, carved and painted in somber, rich colors; it was an animal, an obese and unidentifiable creature which may have been a unicorn, standing sportively on one leg on a bit of green. The coat of arms was not quartered, which was unusual and showed me how old the direct line must be. It might have showed me too, but I didn’t think of it then, the deliberate casting away of all the hundreds of intermingling and intervening blood streams in order to cling with absurd stubbornness and self-deception to one chosen ancestral line.

  I didn’t consciously think of anything however but Drue. I said, so emphatically that my voice rang out against the dark woods and books and red leather of that study, rather more loudly than I intended, “I’m afraid Miss Cable will have to stay.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, although he couldn’t have helped hearing me.

  I made it clearer but lower in tone. “You can’t send Miss Cable away. She is here as a nurse. We are both needed.”

  “We can get another nurse up from New York by morning. Tell her to be ready to leave in half an hour.”

  I suppose he was not often defied, so, whether his arrogance was assumed or real, obviously it worked. He just didn’t believe my own opposition. So I took a long breath and walked up nearer him. “Look here,” I said, “do you want your son to die?”

  That touched him. Something flinched and moved back of his bright eyes and one hand reached out toward the tall back of a chair near him. He said,
“He’s not going to die,” and looked at me as if daring me to deny it, but it had frightened him all the same.

  “Twenty-four hours-thirty-six at the most will tell the tale. If things go well, there’s not much for us to do, only routine. If things go wrong, that’s different. I’d advise you to let her stay. Besides, he knows she’s here.” That told on him too; I saw it again in the flash away back in his eyes.

  “I thought he was unconscious. Chivery told me he would be unconscious for some time.”

  “He roused a little, said a few words and then went back to sleep.”

  “Said…” he began quickly, checked himself, and then resumed in a more deliberate way. “What did he say?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m a nurse. Dr. Chivery reminded me just now of my oath. Florence Nightingale, you know,” I said gently, and watched the purple come up into his cheeks and lips. Too much purple, in fact, in his lips. I couldn’t help making a brief professional note of it.

  “Florence Nightingale blazes,” he said. “I’m paying you. I’m his father. What did he say?”

  He glared at me and I looked back at him and said, “Sorry. Is that all?” and made a motion toward the door.

  “Wait a minute,” he said abruptly when I touched the doorknob. There was a short pause. Somewhere a clock was ticking in a measured way. It was almost dark by then and heavy red curtains had been drawn over the windows and one or two table lamps had been lighted. A cannel coal fire was burning in the hearth below the queerly contemptuous coat of arms; a lump cracked open and sputtered; blue sparks shot upward and Conrad Brent said, “Did he say anything about the accident?” and lifted his light eyes to watch me.

  Well, there he had me. In spite of the antagonism Conrad Brent had instantly roused in me, it was clearly my duty to tell someone in authority of the thing Craig had said. So I did.