Apparently with no object, he lightly tripped into the dining-room. He observed on the table, among other things, a handsome decanter full of wine, and four green glasses—one at each place. He had not seen those glasses before, and he could not help looking at them with curiosity. There they stood: green, shining and elegant, neatly outlined on the white table-cloth, beautiful in form and colour, chaste, aristocratic and pleasing. He lifted the glass from the place at the head of the table—Robert’s place—and held it up to the light. Yes; a lovely colour. And then something startled him. He put the glass down again abruptly. Perhaps it was only an illusion after all. At any rate, he did not wish to investigate…
Back with Robert. The awful rubble.
“Yes. It’s a pretty series. Perhaps the periods are not clear in every case—”
At half-past six Bertha came in, looking very pale, to greet John, and then she went down to the kitchen. The old man came back soon afterwards and went upstairs. John said that he would like to wash his hands, and Robert conducted him to the bathroom.
After John had left the bathroom, Robert went there in his turn, and he was absent for about ten minutes. The time and order of these simple movements became later of considerable interest.
Bertha came upstairs at half-past seven to tell them that dinner was ready. Presently they were seated in the dining-room: Mr. and Mrs. Kewdingham, old Robert Kewdingham, and John Harrigall.
4
The dinner was not exactly cheerful. It seemed as if the company was affected by a feeling of high tension in the air, a sort of physical uneasiness, such as one may feel on the approach of a thunderstorm. They sat down in the warm, grey twilight.
Kewdingham was peevish. He grunted fiercely at the food, sighed, emitted his peculiar rasping groan, pushed about the morsels on his plate with a horrid squeaking and rattling of knife and fork. The old father attempted a literary conversation, which fluttered for a time in the close atmosphere, and was then asphyxiated. Bertha said little. As for John, looking at the tremulous, irascible, joggling head of Robert Arthur, he felt that something dreadful (he could not say what) was going to happen before the evening was over. He could not talk easily; the most that he could do was an occasional spurt of trivial chatter. It was an awful strain, a most unexpected and unaccountable strain.
“Have some burgundy?” said Robert, pushing the decanter towards John. “It’s all I can offer you. Pommard, though—a good vintage. I’m rather fond of a good burgundy myself.”
“Thank you,” said John.
The blood was tinkling in his ears, and he observed with dismay a perceptible tremor in his legs and arms, a prickle of cold moisture on his brow. What on earth was the matter? Why did he feel the presence of something uncanny in the room, the unseen threatening of something malignant?
He filled his green glass with a wobbling hand, and then passed the decanter to the old man. Bertha, he knew, did not drink wine. Father Kewdingham filled his glass, and the decanter came back to Robert, who filled his own.
And as Robert Arthur poured the wine into his glass, John and Bertha looked at him and then glanced at each other. Doubtless a freak of telepathy.
With a jerk of the head, Kewdingham raised his glass.
“Here’s health,” he said.
It seemed to John that Bertha started, and that she was trembling.
“Good health!” said John.
After a curious preliminary groan Robert sipped his burgundy.
“Ha!” he said, “that’s devilish bitter. It’s a very harsh wine for a good vintage year. Still, it helps one to wash down this filthy underdone beef. Eh? Switch on the light, Bertha.”
John also sipped his wine. It was bland, mellow and satisfying.
“I think it’s a very fine burgundy—very good indeed.”
The same opinion was expressed by the old father.
Robert grunted. He finished his glass but he did not have another. He muttered something about the wretched state of his digestion, a disordered palate, and so forth.
When dinner was over, Bertha cleared the table, the old man retired, while John and Robert carried on a flickering conversation in the drawing-room.
They were talking about family matters when John noticed that Robert was becoming exhilarated. Instead of drawling and groaning, as he usually did in those latter days, he began to shout in a hoarse, peculiar voice, somewhat unearthly. His eyes were fully open, dilated, brilliant. He was uncouthly jocular, and soon he was braying and laughing as if he had drunk a whole bottle of burgundy instead of one glass. It was a terrifying change. John was unprepared and rather frightened. He wondered if there was any danger of violence. He had never seen Robert in such a state before. The very character of the man appeared to have altered. Even in the prime of his life Robert had been dour, sedate, unemotional, avoiding demonstration or boisterous gaiety.
Bertha, when she came up from the kitchen, with coffee on a tray, was immediately alarmed. She gave John a dark interrogative glance, as much as to say—“Can you explain this? What have you been doing?”
“Old Muriel, eh?—Ha, ha-a-a!” Robert was husky but garrulous and full of demonic merriment. “Why, she fell in love with a missionary—ha, ha, ha!—a proper prayer-book missionary—blue glasses and a golden cross and all the rest of it! Yes—that’s a fact—didn’t you know it? Ha-a-a-a! And the best of it is, he fell in love with her. Incredible—what? Now then—why didn’t she marry this proper prayer-book missionary, eh? Why—he’d got a wife in the Solomon Islands! Ha, ha! So there was poor old Muriel—” He went off into a sputtering cackle of merriment, a choking, rasping, agonising laugh, with tears of real pain in his eyes. This horrid laughter was uncontrollable. A dusky flush came over his twitching face; the veins of his neck, temples and brow looked as if they would burst under the tight skin.
All at once, the laughter came to an end. He made a diving, clutching movement with his hand.
“Ah, ha!” he cried, unclosing his fingers. “Did I get him?”
“Get what?” said John, feeling shivery.
“Why, that little green what’s-a-name. You saw him, didn’t you? One of those little green—ha, ha-a-a!”
And again there came a shrill, whinnying laugh.
“Well, I could have sworn I’d got him. There—there!—That’s him, isn’t it?—down on the hearth-rug.”
Robert was chuckling with a dry throaty rattle, but the sound must have been automatic. He stared at the hearthrug with an expression of utter dismay. Then he shot out his foot over the carpet with a movement so powerful and spasmodic that he nearly pitched himself on to the floor.
“There!—He’s gone!”
He bounced back on the chirruping springs of the chair, a pitiful, uncanny sight.
Then he began to chatter again. He paid no attention to the others. It was a stuttering flow of sheer nonsense, broken by shrill neighs of laughter. Family matters and family characters, all fearsomely distorted, were jumbled up in a shocking phantasmagoria.
This went on for some time, John and Bertha sitting as pale as corpses. Bertha, with a shaking hand, endeavoured to pour out some coffee for John.
Abruptly, for no apparent reason, the flow ceased.
“Bobby—hadn’t I better send for Doctor Bagge?”
For a moment, the name recalled him.
“Bagge? Bagge? No, of course not. Why should I want to see Bagge? He’s coming to-morrow.”
Then he went off again. He was looking with his dilated eyes at the space in the middle of the room. He was looking, not with terror, but with insane curiosity. There was an intermittent giggling cluck in his throat, like a dry gargle.
“How very strange!” he whispered. “It must be an illusion. I say it must be an illusion. There’s nothing there, is there? You see where I mean? Just there—” He wagged a shaking hand vaguely. “It can’t
be anything but an illusion, mere illusion.” The hand fell and he sagged back loosely in the chair. “Of course it is, my dear fellow. I know that as well as you do. You needn’t think you’re so clever. To begin with, no such thing could possibly have got into the room. How could it—eh?”
“No!” said John soothingly. “It would be impossible.”
“Impossible. That’s the word. Quite impossible.”
His mood was changing. He was getting drowsy, and he talked in a thin husky whisper.
“Obviously quite impossible,” he observed gravely. “I should be sorry if you thought I was drunk or anything of that sort, but I could have sworn there was a—”
“John,” said Bertha, “I wish you would run round for Doctor Bagge. I’m frightened.” There was no telephone in the house.
“Is it safe to leave you?” said John. “Wouldn’t it be better if you went yourself?”
But the scene was nearly over. Robert got up on his feet, swaying, as though he was trying to balance himself on a moving surface like the sliding deck of a ship in a heavy sea.
“It was there—”
He shuffled unsteadily forward, lifting his feet high and stretching his arms.
“Why—why—confound it! Look! It is there. It’s there all the time. No!—it’s impossible. Look—look out! It’s moving. Oh, good Lord!—it’s moving. I tell you, I saw it move quite distinctly. Stop it, can’t you? Give me a—”
John rose; he was nearly as unsteady as the other.
“I don’t think you are very well, Bobby. Hadn’t you better go to bed?”
Robert stared at him. A sudden gust of rage blew up into the hollows of his tottering mind. It was a final rallying of energy. He raised his fluttering hands above his head.
“You damned little Dutchman! You’re trying to frighten me. You, with your dirty little tricks! Crocodiles, eh? But I know it’s an illusion. It’s a dirty trick—dirty—”
Those were the last words of that sad automatism Athu-na-Shulah in his Kewdingham form. He fell crash on the floor in a sprawling bunch.
5
Fortunately, Doctor Bagge’s house was not far from Wellington Avenue. It was about ten o’clock when John rang furiously the doctor’s bell.
“John Harrigall. You remember me, doctor? Please come round at once to see Kewdingham. He’s gone down in a fit or something. It looks pretty bad. We’ve put him on the sofa—”
“I’m not surprised to hear that,” said Doctor Bagge, snatching up a grey felt hat. “Poisoned, I should think.”
“What!”
“Well, you know his habits, don’t you? Always fooling about with drugs that he ought never to have had in his possession. Come along—this way—through the dispensary. I shall need one or two things, though I doubt if there’s much to be done.”
When Doctor Bagge saw the patient he shook his head and said that he must have a nurse at once. He gave John the necessary particulars and John went off and presently returned with Nurse Cundle. Between them, they put Robert to bed; and then, seeing that he could do nothing more, John returned to Uncle Richard with his alarming news.
Kewdingham died at one o’clock in the morning. He had lapsed into coma, and death was due to failure of the heart.
The old man, who had been disturbed by the noise in the house, was ominously calm. He wandered about in a heavy overcoat, as if he was looking for something, but nobody observed his movements. His air was not so much sorrowful as grim and inquisitive. Bertha gave him a cup of tea, which he took without a word.
Doctor Bagge left the house at two o’clock. He returned at half-past ten.
The doctor, like the old man, was evidently looking for something. He was puzzled. He had a long talk with Bertha about the circumstances of the previous night, and he asked her many questions. She was pale, though steady.
“Very painful, Mrs. Kewdingham,” said the doctor, “very painful indeed. I had not anticipated anything of the sort. There is no doubt as to the cause of death, none at all. But there are one or two things I should like to know before I give the certificate. Do you happen to know if he was taking the mixture? The bottle used to be on the table in the bedroom, but I can’t see it anywhere. If you could get hold of it for me—” He did not explain his request.
“I will have a look for it,” said Bertha, not paying much attention to him. “He was taking the stuff regularly, as far as I know.”
“You have communicated with the members of the family?”
“Yes. Mr. Harrigall has just been here and he is going to inform the members of the family in Shufflecester. He is also going to send a telegram to Phoebe Kewdingham.”
There were some more questions, and then the doctor wrote out the certificate:
(1) Cardiac failure due to acute gastro-enteritis.
(2) Chronic nephritis.
Chapter XI
1
Phoebe Kewdingham arrived at Shufflecester on Friday afternoon. She had put on a black dress which suited both her and the occasion extremely well; but she caused inexpressible offence to the Poundle-Quaintons by her brightly incarnadined lips. “It might be all right for those nasty detrimentals in London,” they said, “but she ought to show more respect for her poor brother—and, indeed, for the Family.”
Phoebe, who knew perfectly well that Robert and his wife had lived in perpetual discord, assumed an air of sorrow and reserve tempered by vigilance. She did not dislike Bertha and had always appreciated her dramatic qualities, but she did feel that poor Robert had not been altogether in the wrong.
The family assembled in gloomy conclave. Uncle Richard was impenetrably neutral. Father Kewdingham looked as though he was brooding over a secret: he mumbled furtively into Phoebe’s ear. Mrs. Poundle-Quainton was a model of bereaved respectability. Mrs. Pyke glowered at Bertha in a way that was definitely suspicious. Bertha herself was tired, resigned and a little irritable; she could not even affect an overwhelming sorrow.
John had returned to London. He would, of course, come back for the funeral.
It was arranged that Phoebe should spend the next few melancholy days with Mrs. Pyke. Michael would arrive on Saturday afternoon and the funeral was to take place on Monday.
When she was over at Number Six, helping Bertha, Phoebe could not help being surprised by her father’s manner. He kept on shaking his head and muttering, avoided conversation as much as possible, and appeared to be occupied with some problem of an intricate nature. He did not emerge from his rooms, except when it was necessary for him to do so.
Phoebe was also puzzled by the demeanour of Martha Tuke, the maid. This demeanour was not unlike that of the old man. Martha had a strange air of preoccupation; she looked as if she was trying to make up her mind to say something.
But there was a lot to be done, and Phoebe could not give much attention to the vagaries of others.
By the day of the funeral, suspicion was on the point of begetting rumour.
As for the funeral, it was an exclusive family affair, carried out in the best possible taste. Miss Phoebe Kewdingham was greatly admired. John was also a distinguished figure, easily the smartest of the men. Doctor Bagge, so well known at the cemetery, looked as neat as a pin, though when you compared him with John you saw that he was decidedly provincial. They were all there except the old man, who stayed at home.
Michael, in his little black suit, was proud to find himself, for the first time, in a position of some importance. He could not regard the experience as wholly disagreeable. His only embarrassment was caused by his gloves—they were too large, and he was continually trying to push back the tips of the fingers.
The curious march of events, totally unexpected by everyone concerned, does not allow us to record the impressions and manoeuvres of the family after their return from the ceremony. Some of them were obviously relieved and others were still unsettled
. There was a certain amount of regret, and there was a great deal of unaccountable whispering.
2
On Tuesday morning, while she was having breakfast with Mrs. Pyke, Phoebe was astonished to hear that Martha Tuke was at the front door, and requested to have a word with her. Phoebe was leaving by an afternoon train, but she would naturally call at Number Six before going to the station. She could only imagine that Bertha had sent an urgent message.
But Martha, standing in the hall, begged for a private interview. Evidently she had been crying. Phoebe, after apologising to Mrs. Pyke, took Martha into the morning-room and closed the door.
“I’m leaving Mrs. Kewdingham,” said Martha. “I’ve been up since four getting my things ready. My boy’s coming round at dinner-time to fetch my box, and I’m going home by the bus this afternoon. I can’t stay there no longer.”
“But, good gracious!—Why?” asked Phoebe, recalling with sudden alarm Martha’s odd behaviour at Number Six.
“I tell you, Miss Kewdingham, there’s things been going on at that house as people ought to know about—and they will know about ’em, too, before long.”
“Please tell me what you mean.”
“I’m not educated like you are, Miss Kewdingham, but I can’t help seeing what’s going on; and maybe I can think a bit.” Martha, knowing that she might be severely rebuked, was inclined to be defiant, after the manner of such people.
Phoebe, whose gravity was not assumed, understood her.
“If you have anything to say, please be quite frank with me. I am not criticising you.”
“I’m an honest girl,” said Martha, feeling more confident, “and I try to do my duty, and I think it’s my duty to tell you as I don’t believe Mr. Kewdingham come to a natural end.”
“What makes you believe such a thing?”
“It’s a scandal, the way Mrs. Kewdingham has been carrying on with Mr. Harrigall all this time—kissing, and that sort of thing. And running round to Doctor Bagge, until the whole town’s talking about it. Well, the less said the better! There’s many as think Doctor Bagge a very proper sort of gentleman, I know. But see here, Miss Kewdingham—”
Family Matters Page 15
