Arrest the Bishop?

by Peck,Winifred

  “But what about you, poor Mamma? You look so tired,” said Sue.

  “I’m just going to finish addressing some of those Christ mas cards till your father comes up. He is sure to want to talk to me. The list was in the drawing-room, wasn’t it?” The passages all lay still and dark before her as she left Sue’s warm sweet-scented room for the new wing. But she was so tired that really, she told herself, her reliable nerves were on edge for once. It seemed to her, as she passed the Bridge, that she heard footsteps retreat hastily up the stairs, as if some candidate had been lurking about, and when she reached the drawing-room she had the uncomfortable sensation that someone was in the big room, so dimly lit by the one far light which she now turned on, and by the embers of the dying fire. She, usually so imperturbable, only just managed to repress a scream as her instinct was proved right. A sudden squall and howl of wind blew over her desk as she retrieved her list and she swung round to the big west window to see Soames emerge from behind the dark velvet curtains. Was she never to be free from him to-night!

  “Soames! What are you doing here now?”

  “I was just closing the window, madam.”

  “But you opened it after I came into the room!”

  “I could not bolt this one properly, so I opened it to bring it down firmly, madam!”

  “But they should have been done long ago, before dinner!”

  “They were, madam, but I remembered I had difficulty with this bolt then, and came to make sure.”

  “I see. Is there anything the matter with you to-night?” Soames’ explanations were again perfectly plausible, but his voice was so squeaky, his face so sallow that Mrs. Broome’s thoughts flew to influenza at once.

  “No, thank you, madam. I may perhaps have been a bit upset over this here Ordination. I mean”—Soames pulled himself together after such a lapse into his native speech—“I mean that it was a new experience, and of course we had not Moira’s assistance in instructing us in the usual routine.”

  “Poor Moira!” said Mrs. Broome mechanically, considering what a pity it was that Moira always got on so much better with men than women servants, for of course most of the staff were women. “I hope we shall soon have her back quite well again.”

  “If the gentleman—Mr. Ulder—is going to the Hospital by the same ambulance, at what time shall I take up his breakfast, madam, and what would be suitable for him?”

  “I think perhaps nine o’clock,” said Mrs. Broome, reflecting, as so often before, on a household staff’s perfectly inexplicable means of gaining information. How should Soames know that Mr. Ulder was to be taken to hospital; except indeed by eavesdropping? “Yes, a light breakfast at nine o’clock—eggs, toast, tea, I think, and his things must be ready by nine o’clock.”

  “The Chaplain told me not to touch his bag, a big one, as it’s all ready for a voyage.”

  “I see—and Soames!” Mrs. Broome paused. It seemed an opportunity to speak to the butler of his shortcomings, of his holding dishes out to guests on the wrong side, blowing down the backs of their necks in an onion-scented hurricane, piling dishes up and banging the doors. But the poor fellow looked so wretched that she forbore and contented herself with a kindly “Good night.”

  At last she was back in her bedroom and could hope for peace at last. She had stolen on her way into the rooms of both her invalids, to find that all was still, and went to her window with that longing for even the frostiest air which any sick-room inspires. It was hard to hold the catch for the snow was coming in wild gusts now, but even as she looked one blast seemed to blow itself out, and for a moment she saw, across the white velvet of the lawns, the black spectral arms of the pillars and ragged walls of the ruins and the snow-tipped dark branches of the great elms beyond, raised as if in desperate appeal for the troubles surrounding the Palace. Then, shuddering, she returned to the fire and tried, in her own old-fashioned phrase, to say her prayers. It was not easy, for her ears were now over-sensitized to sound and the passages seemed full of steps and footfalls, however severely she told herself that it was only the wind playing havoc with old beams and panels, low windows and wide doors. It seemed an eternity before at last the Bishop entered.

  “My dear!” Mrs. Broome jumped up, alert and anxious anew. “You came from the Bridge, didn’t you? Don’t tell me you woke poor Mr. Ulder again! I settled him off to sleep a few minutes ago, and he has had far, far too many visitors! I don’t know what Dr. Lee would say.”

  “Dr. Lee telephoned Bobs to say he was caught by the storm attending a confinement at Mrs. Holt’s,” said the Bishop evasively. “As he is so near as that he hopes to look in to-morrow at nine to see his patients, for he doubts if the ambulance will ever get through the snow.”

  “How kind of him! But were you with Mr. Ulder again?”

  “I just looked in,” admitted the Bishop, “a second ago!”

  “And was he asleep?”

  “Yes, yes, he was sleeping when I left him. Don’t worry, my love! I am sure he will sleep well to-night.”

  “I only wish we could,” thought Mrs. Broome. A long miserable discussion about Judith was no good prelude, and far into the early hours she tossed and turned, knowing that her husband lay taut, silent and wakeful in his bed, while she herself listened still for sounds, listened and rebuked herself for her imagination, as she did so. Twice she was so sure that she heard a creak, and then a swish, in the distance that she crept to the door, but each time the passages lay before her as dark and inscrutable as the avenues of death itself. There was not a sound but the scuttle of mice and creak of woodwork, no cry nor whimper but the moan of the wind. “He must be asleep,” she was telling herself, when sleep came to her at last.

  IV

  THURSDAY MORNING (9-11)

  “So, assembled together for this most solemn moment of your lives of self-dedication, may you, and all of us here who are as it were spectators in this great Tourney, free our minds from all worldly troubles, cares and anxieties.”

  Mrs. Broome sighed restlessly in her seat in Chapel as her husband gave this exhortation. She was tired after a sleepless night, and the long early service which preceded the address: to be candid, she habitually found the daily prayers before breakfast the time when the programme for any day’s duties beset her. The Chapel, a small neo-Gothic excrescence of the 1850s, never seemed to her inspiring, and how could you help thinking of your household when you were all boxed up together, even on an ordinary morning? And now to-day, as she sat in the front pitch-pine pew of the tiny nave, here was the Chancellor beside her, fidgeting restlessly, his nerves evidently on edge, Sue pale and listless after the scene last night, Judith, present most of all by her absence, thought Mrs. Broome disconnectedly, a weight of such care to her stepmother as defied devotion. Behind her, having joined the congregation as Matins began, was a very poor showing from the servants’ hall, though the Bishop had urged their special attendance. Soames was presumably setting and carrying trays upstairs, leaving his self-righteous and rather hysterical helper, Doris, the parlour-maid, to take his place. They were short-handed, for after the last war the domestic situation was serious, though not as final as that of 1945. Mrs. Briggs would be coming from the lodge, fat, competent and serene, to help in the dining-room as usual, but she didn’t see her way to coming up in time for Chapel any longer, she explained, and Mabel and Irene, the upper and second housemaids were absent, leaving their place to their ultra-religious, sentimental ’tweeny with her adenoids. Cook refused attendance—“what with this miserable bacon and alligators’ eggs they say”—though her kitchen- and scullery-maid gladly evaded her to attend any service, but they really were of very inferior appearance and upbringing and so ready to titter in Chapel! These fell into the Bishop’s category of worries, but Mrs. Broome was to-day faced by more serious anxieties. There in the Choir sat the Bishop and Canon Wye, gaunt, miserable, haunted men, in their canopied stalls. Bobs’ cheerful face next the Bishop was haggard and strained, and little Mr. Stap
les, sallow and nervous, never stopped fidgeting. Dick, remote and absorbed, even the row of nice, young, chubby deacons seemed keyed up to some crisis in her imagination: even the rather repellently coloured and bearded evangelists in four narrow lancets above the altar seemed to look down with eyes of suspicion. How, when the names Ulder, Judith and Mark, her husband, repeated themselves in a dark pall of fear and dread in your mind, could you conceivably follow your dear husband’s mellifluous advice? “Anyhow, things could be worse,” she told herself, seeking the last ditch of the habitual optimist.

  She was only too right. As the Bishop laid down his papers and Bobs rose with his prayer book, the Chapel door was flung open and, heedless of that still solemn congregation which turned surprised at such violation, in hurried, nay rather bounced, Mabel, the head housemaid, every trace of her normal soft-footed propriety and decorum vanished.

  “Oh, madam,” she wailed in a whisper that rang through the Chapel, “please come! You must come at once! It’s Mr. Ulder! Soames took in his tray just now, and he gives such a call a minute later, and Irene and me rushes in, and oh, madam, we’re nearly sure—the poor gentleman!”

  Even as Mabel finished her speech by raising one hand to Heaven, in the dramatic manner common then to a class which dislikes the very name of death, Dick, for all his surprise and horror, found himself thinking that most of the congregation present would have hesitated to feel so sure of Thomas Ulder’s future destination. Then he caught Mrs. Broome’s glance of appeal, and in her horrified helplessness recalled himself from that enforced tolerant acceptance of death inevitably acquired in war, and followed her and Sue as quietly as possible out of the Chapel.

  “You said Dr. Lee was held up at the Holts’,” said Sue, shivering but capable. “I’d better ask him to come across at once if he can, hadn’t I?”

  “Certainly! I expect Soames was exaggerating! Servants always do!” Mrs. Broome’s role in life as a shock-absorber made her fling out the suggestion, though she spoilt the effect by adding—“And don’t come upstairs on any account!”

  The lights in the Chapel had been so dim that the Bridge staircase, under the snow-covered cupola on the roof, seemed as massively, glitteringly white as a heap of florists’ wreaths on a hearse. But in Mr. Ulder’s room everything was grey and still. Soames had not drawn the curtains, and the bright circle made by the bedside lamp only just revealed the dull, drab Victorian wallpaper, the massive furniture, the dead ashes in the grate; and that which lay upon the bed was wrapped in the greyest, darkest shadows of all.

  “Yes, he’s gone!” Dick answered the question which Mrs. Broome was too perturbed to ask. “But not long. I fancy that an hour ago we might have been some use, but I don’t know. No, no,” as Mrs. Broome began to reproach herself tearfully. “How could you tell? Obviously it was best to let him sleep as long as possible.”

  “He does not look as if it was that dreadful pain at least!” The Bishop’s wife pulled herself together and joined Dick by the bedside. “I suppose it was a sudden heart failure.”

  “Or that!” The two had paused for a minute’s viaticum over that poor lonely soul which had winged its flight so recently, but now Dick’s eyes were awake and keen as he pointed to a tumbler by the bed and sniffed it. “Didn’t the doctor say he must have no stimulant?”

  “But he hadn’t last night! He asked everyone for it, but I forbade Canon Wye and—and someone else to give it. And he had none, and no glass was here, when I settled him off for the night!”

  “Is the tray still there?” Dick looked out of the door. “Could he have helped himself?”

  “The tray wasn’t there first thing this morning,” said Mrs. Broome positively. “I listened at this door and Moira’s for a moment after my bath, and certainly I would have noticed such a slovenly bit of neglect. I am sure he could never have got to the door—every movement was liable to bring on that dreadful pain, and he made no attempt to stir from bed!”

  “Dr. Lee, madam!” Mrs. Broome turned at Soames’ entrance and announcement with as much relief as if she hoped the doctor might almost bring back the dead to life. It was left to Dick alone to note Soames’ movements.

  “Leave that glass!” The butler had picked it up as he passed the table after drawing the curtains and blind, and now, with the respectful surprise of one stopped in a mechanical duty, left the room.

  “Well, well, I feared as much!” The little doctor was as brisk and fresh as ever after his disturbed night, and shake down at the Holts’ farm, and his matter-of-fact manner was somehow a balm to poor Mrs. Broome. “Better so, indeed! I doubt if he’d ever have given up d—, I mean lived an orderly, quiet life. Alcohol’s a tremendous temptation to a man with a heart like that. He’d never have been able to do much at the best. I see, Dick, he couldn’t keep off the bottle even here. When did he get hold of it, Mrs. Broome?”

  “We don’t know. Was it that—?”

  “Oh no!” The doctor was bending over the bed now in a more thorough examination. “Very inadvisable after the injection I gave, but still—Besides he took it last night, I imagine, and it can’t be more than an hour or so since he actually went off—and peacefully too, from his looks. I should have expected signs of pretty acute pain, I must say.”

  “What about his eyes?” Dick asked as the doctor bent down again. He had a startling fear of his own from a cursory glance, and hoped the doctor would dispel it.

  “By Jove, yes!” At Dick’s words the doctor had put on his glasses, and looked more keenly—and why had he spoken, Dick was to wonder all that day, since his words alone had roused the doctor’s attention. “This is odd, very odd. Mrs. Broome, how many doses did you give Mr. Ulder?”

  “Just the one!” Mrs. Broome was more perturbed by the doctor’s flurried manner than his question. “That was at about—oh, half-past ten or eleven last night, and I never went into his room again as he did not ring his bell. The Bishop looked in and thought he was sleeping peacefully at about twelve o’clock, but I suppose by then—” She shuddered as she remembered the Bishop’s words to her, “He will sleep well to-night!” They had been only too true.

  “Then he got hold of it himself. You see the pupils narrowed to a pin-prick, Dick?” (It was precisely this which Dick had noted when he spoke.) “Sure sign of morphia poisoning. That explains why he looks so peaceful, poor chap. He must have had an attack and decided to end it all, for I warned him not to dose himself. Where is the phial I gave you, Mrs. Broome?”

  “Up on the top rung of that hideous dressing-table,” said Mrs. Broome agitatedly. “Oh dear! Oh dear! I should never have left it in the room. I do blame myself! Did he take it, doctor?”

  “Here we are!” The doctor unscrewed the cap, held it up to them, to show that only cotton-wool remained in the receptacle. “You gave him one, Mrs. Broome, so there were five tablets left. It was more than I usually would have given, but I feared you might be snowed up here for a few days so that I couldn’t get to you. Five’s a big dose, but whether it would have had this effect—”

  “I expect he was in agonizing pain and hardly knew what he was doing,” suggested Mrs. Broome.

  “No, you can see he wasn’t in any pain when he was last conscious. And I warned him very seriously of the danger of helping himself to morphia.”

  “I should never have left it in his reach!”

  “Now don’t blame yourself, Mrs. Broome, it’s hard to believe he could have reached it up there. In fact, it’s hard to believe he was just dosing himself—it looks to me far more as if he had intended to end his life.”

  “What about the whisky?” put in Dick.

  “We’d better not touch that glass, but I’d say there were grains of morphia in it—see that sediment? The drink wouldn’t finish him, of course. I only warned him of it because it would retard the effect of the morphia. If he’d decided to end everything he might well have put the dose in the whisky and gone to sleep for ever. But what perplexes me is that I doubt if it was a fatal dos
e!”

  “Suicide! Oh, how ghastly!” moaned Mrs. Broome.

  “He may have had a doctor’s prescription of his own,” suggested Dick. “And added that, if he meant to make sure. Shall we have a look at the room?”

  “He seems to have very few things about,” said Mrs. Broome, as the three explored the vast wardrobe and many drawers of the dressing-table. “I imagine Soames unpacked his night things. Mr. Ulder told us not to touch that big bag. He wouldn’t need it till he got to America.”

  “America? That fellow off to America in the state he was in?” cried Dr. Lee. “And Heavens, what a sporting outfit!” as Dick opened the bag to reveal flashy plus-fours and garish shirts. “This is all the oddest business! Nothing there, Dick, I’m sure!”

  “He must have had a hand-bag as well.” Dick was looking even more puzzled and perturbed than the doctor. Ulder would never have parted with the papers which incriminated his victims and these were nowhere to be seen. He went over to the fire and stirred the ashes gently.

  “Did you leave a big fire burning, Mrs. Broome, when you last visited him?”

  “No, indeed. I thought any light would worry him and made sure it was practically out. But what do you mean about another bag, Dick? His night things are out, you see, his brushes and so on.”

  “Those are all Bob’s—and his pyjamas. Bobs got them last night so as to put him to bed as soon as possible—and we’d no idea then that he’d brought any luggage, of course. Why did he?”

  “Soames reported that he said he never let his possessions out of his sight. He told the Bishop he meant to stay if—if he could not settle some question with him, but you know he was—well, hardly himself!”

  “Then there must be a hand-bag somewhere,” repeated Dick urgently.

  “But why does it matter so much?” Mrs. Broome spoke impatiently, for what did these things matter to poor Mr. Ulder? The other world was not a junction where you demanded your baggage.