"Sir," he began, getting his voice level after a vast throat clearing, "our friend Inspector Crawford has discovered how the trick of moving the coffins was worked in the vault"
'Yes. I know."
"You know?"
"Danvers Locke told him. Locke's here now."
Dr. Fell's eyes flashed open. "Here?"
"Not in these rooms, no. He's downstairs, buying masks, at a place called Sedgwick & Co. Or he was. Anyway, he told Crawford."
"So it seemed advisable," grunted Dr. Fell, drawing a hand across his forehead, "to spirit the young lady away from police questioning until we could, or could not prove something." He paused. "Mr. Hurst-Gore very kindly drove us to town. But he (harrumph) was compelled to drop us at Knightsbridge, and we have been more than an hour in getting here." Again Dr. Fell mopped his forehead, as though reluctant to approach what he must approach. "Well, my friend? What has been happening?" . Holden told them.
"Thorley," whispered Celia. "Thorley!"
"Celial Please don't go into the other room!"
"A-all right, Don. Whatever you say."
Dr. Fell listened without comment. Yet, though he seemed no less grave, relief radiated from him like steam from a furnace.
"Thank you," he said, lifting his hand to shade his eyeglasses. "You have done well. Now will you please wait here for a moment: both of you. Er—better leave this front door open. In addition to your nursing-home people, I'm expecting our friend Shepton."
Holden stared at him. "Dr. Shepton?"
"Yes. I practically kidnapped the good gentleman from Caswall village. At the moment he is buying tobacco downstairs."
And Dr. Fell, without a word more of explanation, moved into the inner room. Holden and Celia were looking at each other in the hot, airless semi-gloom of the waiting room. Then Celia spoke in a low voice, dropping her eyes.
"Don."
"Yes?"
"That letter in your hand. Dr. Fell's been telling me a good deal about this. Is the letter one of Margof s?" 'Yes."
"May I read it?" Celia extended her hand.
"Celia, I'd rather you didn't! I . . ."
The slow smile, with the twitch of weariness or mockery at one comer of the Up, crept up into the clear tenderness of her eyes.
"Do you, of all people," she said, "think I mustn't be told about such things? I'm Margof s sister, you know. I can fall in love terribly too; and I have. Oh, Don!"
"All right. Here you are."
Now there were two persons to watch, in the silence that followed.
Celia took the letter and went to the window. She drew back one set of curtains with a wooden rattle of rings. Yet she hesitated, eyelashes lowered, with the letter pressed against her side, before she began to read.
In the adjoining room, the black-draped room with the crystal, Dr. Fell's tread could be heard all this time like the tread of an elephant. First he had blinked carefully down, through glasses that wouldn't stay straight, at the black fragments Holden had raked out of the fireplace.
Next he approached the back of the room, where curtains screened two doors set side by side. Billowing among the curtains, Dr. Fell opened the left-hand door, snapped on a light, and glanced into the kitchenette by which Holden had entered. Then he unlocked the right-hand door: a bathroom, as Holden could now see for himself as Dr. Fell switched on the light
Celia began reading the letter. Her color rose and deepened, but her expression never changed and she did not raise her eyes.
Dr. Fell, after standing for some time in mountainous immobility at the door of the bathroom, switched off the light and closed the door. He wheeled round, his shaggy head lifted. And . . .
"Nol" cried Celia. "No, no, no!"
Holden, who had been trying to watch both of them at once, felt his flesh go hot and cold at the suddenness of that exclamation.
"I'm sorry," said Celia, controlling herself. "But this name!" "What name?"
"The man Margot was in love with." Amazement incredulity was there a slight disgust as well?) trembled in Celia's voice. " 'Sometimes I get pleasure just from repeating your name, over and over.' And here it is, about six times."
Celia stared at the past
"But that explains—oh, that explains everything! Don! Didn't you read this letter?"
"I started to read it yes. But that was when you and Dr. Fell knocked at the door. Who is the swine, anyway?"
Up the stairs out in the passage, with the effect of a competent quiet invasion, came a brisk young bachelor of medicine followed by two men carrying a folded stretcher. The young doctor made a feint of rapping on the inside of the open door.
"Emergency case?"
Holden nodded toward the back room. The deputation was met by Dr. Fell, who closed the door after them; and they could hear Dr. Fell's voice upraised in rapid speech as he did so.
Someone had followed the newcomers up the stairs. Old Dr. Eric Shepton, panting a little from the climb, his Panama hat in his hands and his white hair fluffed out round the bald head, loomed up big and stoop shouldered in the doorway. The kindly eye, the stubborn reticent jaw, had an air subtly different from his bearing in the playground.
"Celia, my dear!" he began.
Celia was paying no attention.
"At first it seems utterly incredible!" she said, taking a quick look at the letter and then folding it up into small creases. "And yet," she added, "is it so incredible? When you think of Margot? No. It's dreadfully right."
"Er—Celia, my dear!"
Celia woke up.
"You wouldn t speak to me," Shepton told her in a half-humorous tone, "all the way up in the car. And I hardly liked to speak in front of a stranger like Mr. Hurst-Gore. But I'm only a country g.p. I make more mistakes than I like to think, let alone admit If I've made a mistake in your case ..."
"Dr. Shepton!" Celia's eyes opened wide. "You don't think I'm holding that against you?"
The other looked startled. "Weren't you?"
"I told lies," said Celia, with a calmness which concealed misery. "What could you, or any decent person, possibly think? They'll probably arrest me; and heaven knows I shall deserve it" She put her hands over her eyes, and then flung them away again. "But why, oh, why couldn't you have told me about the other matter?"
"Because I was right not to do so," retorted the other, with a good deal of the kindliness vanishing under a hard shell. "And, London detectives or no London detectives, I still think I was right"
"Dr. Shepton, if you'd only told me!"
The door to the rear room opened.
Holden had no time to think about the meaning of the cryptic speeches he had just heard, though pain and anguish rang in Celia's voice.
Thorley Marsh, muffled to the head in a white covering, was gently and dexterously moved out on the stretcher. Thorley was still unconscious. But he was sobbing, in great gulping sobs which shook the white cloth.
The young physician from the nursing home, whose face was very grave, turned and addressed Dr. Fell.
"You understand, sir, that this will have to be reported to the police?"
"Sir," returned Dr. FelL "by all means. You also have my assurance that I will report it myself. Exactly—how is he?"
"Pretty bad."
"Oh, ahl But I mean . .. ?"
"About one chance in ten. Gently, boys!"
I can't, Holden was thinking to himself, I can't stand that sobbing much longer. Thorley might know nothing; might feel nothing; he wandered mindless in some dim hinterland. Yet even in unconsciousness there is no sobbing without rooted cause.
Celia, her hands again pressed over her eyes, turned her back as that cortege went downstairs. Nobody spoke. Up the stairs after it had passed, moving softly, but gazing down at Thorley, came Sir Danvers Locke.
Locke, fastidious in an admirably cut blue suit, carrying a gray Homburg hat, gray gloves, and a walking stick, stood in the doorway in silence. The flesh was strained tight over his cheek bones; his mouth looked uncertain
.
"If they'd only told me!" cried Celia. "If they'd only told me!"
Dr. Fell, so vast that he had to maneuver sideways through the door of the rear room and duck his head under it, now towered among them. His face was fiery.
"My friend," he said to Holden, "this has gone far enough. We are going to end it That contraption!" He pointed to the telephone with his cane.
'Yes?’'
"It is (harrumph) erratic and unreliable. It never gets me the number I dial. Will you be good enough to outwit the blighter," intoned Dr. Fell, running his hand through his hair, "and get me the number I want?"
"Certainly. What number?"
"Whitehall 1212."
A stir, as of a very slight shock of electricity tingling the muscles, ran through the group at mention of that famous phone number. Seven times the dial whirred and clicked back. Then Holden handed the phone to Dr. Fell.
"Metropolitan police?" roared Dr. Fell, his several chins thrown back and his eyes villainously squinted at a comer of the ceiling. "I want to speak to Superintendent Hadley. My name is ... oh, you recognize my voice? Yes; I’ll hold on."
As though she could endure the atmosphere of this room no longer, Celia raised the window by which she was stand' ing. A gust of cooler air, grateful and cleansing, swept out the brocade curtains.
"Hadley?" said Dr. Fell, holding up the phone as though it were a jug from which he was about to drink. "I say. About this Caswall business."
The telephone spoke rapidly from the other end,
"Sol" intoned Dr. Fell. "You got the order through and the post-mortem done in one day? What was it? Was it morphine and belladonna? Oh, ah. Good!"
Dr. Eric Shepton, staring at the floor, shook his head violently as though denying this. But Sir Danvers Locke was a picture of understanding.
"Well, look here," said Dr. Fell. "I'm now at 56b New Bond Street, top floor. Can you come over here straightaway?"
The telephone made angry protests, concluding with a single-word query.
"If you do," replied Dr. Fell, "I will present you with the murderer of Mrs. Marsh and the attempted murderer of Thorley Marsh."
Celia opened the other window, which ran up with a screech. Nobody else moved or spoke.
"No, of course I'm not jokingl" roared Dr. Fell. His eye wandered round. "I have with me a group of (harrumph) friends now. Perhaps others will join us. I propose to begin now, and tell them the whole story.—When may we expect you? Right!"
He set back the phone with a clatter on its cradle, and swung round.
"One Hadley," he said, "one arrest."
Sir Danvers Locke, uttering a small cough to attract attention, moved forward. Of all the persons here, Holden wished most he could read the thoughts in Locke's head. When he thought of Locke sitting before a mirror, in the sympathetic presence of Mademoiselle Frey, and talking in a wild way about the "callousness and ruthlessness" of his own daughter (why Doris?), Holden could fit together no decipherable pattern.
"Dr. Fell!" said Locke. He paused for a moment. "Do you indeed propose to tell—the whole story?"
Nerve tension, under this studious politeness, was steadily going up.
"Yes,' returned Dr. Fell.
"Do you mind, then, if I join you?"
"On the contrary, sir." Dr. Fell fumbled at his eyeglasses. "Your presence is almost a necessity." He paused. "I do not ask the obvious question."
"And yet," said Locke, "I will answer it"
Locke glanced sideways, through the doorway on his left into the black-draped room where the crystal glimmered on the desk.
"I did not know," he spoke with painful enunciation, "that these rooms were here. Perhaps I suspected they might be somewhere . . ."
"Somewhere?"
"In London. We overhear our children speaking, just as they overhear us. But that they were here," the ferrule of his walking stick thudded softly on the carpet "just over a place where I go two or three times a year to buy masks: this, on my oath, I did not know."
"Come into the next room," Dr. Fell said curtly. "Bring chairs."
As the group moved in, slowly and somberly, Celia hurried to Holden's side. She spoke in a whisper. "Don. What's going to happen?" "I wish I knew."
Celia reached out for his hands; and then drew back, her face whitening, as he flinched. She looked more closely. "Don! What have you done to your hand?"
"It’s only a burn. It isn't anything. Listen, Celia: I quite honestly and sincerely mean it isn't anything; and I'm ordering you not to make a fuss. Because this is no round-table discussion. Something's going to burst with a hell of a bang."
This appeared to be the opinion of Locke and Dr. Shepton, each of whom had carried a gray damask waiting room chair into the shrine.
They were watching Dr. Fell.
Dr. Fell, as though silently urging them to note everything he did, made another inspection of the black-covered room. He motioned Holden toward the secret drawer, which contained Margofs letters, at the bottom of the Florentine cabinet
Rightly interpreting this gesture, Holden took out the whole drawer, lifted it up, and put it on the side of the desk near the lamp. Into it Celia flung the letter she had been reading.
Dr. Fell picked up the letter, smoothed it out and read it
He glanced very rapidly through other sheets of blue note paper in the secret drawer. Then, after peering up at the covered skylight, and down at the carpet.as though seeking something, he lowered himself into the tall Jacobean chair behind the desk.
"Those letters—" Locke began.
Dr. Fell did not reply.
In front of him gleamed the big crystal, against the coffin pall, with the small green-jade ibis head on one side, and the little plaque of the sleeping sphinx on the other. He reached out and picked up the plaque.
" She also symbolizes,'" he read aloud, after a long pause, "'the two selves. The outer self which all the world may see—'" Dr. Fell stopped, and put down the plaque. "Yes, by thunder! That is the true application."
Slowly, while the others sat down, he fished out of his pockets an obese tobacco pouch and a curved meerschaum pipe. He filled the pipe, struck a match, and lit the tobacco with lingering care. The desk light, glimmering past the crystal, shone on his face.
"And now," said Dr. Fell, "hear the secret."
CHAPTER XIX
T ou mean," Locke asked quickly, "the murderer?
"Oh, no," said Dr. Fell and shook his head.
"But you have just been telling us ... !"
"That," continued Dr. Fell, blowing out more smoke, "can come later. I mean, at the moment, the carefully cherished secret which has sent so many persons wrong in this case."
Holden never afterward forgot their positions then.
He and Celia were sitting side by side on the huge velvet-covered divan, so sybaritic in that secret room. They saw Dr. Fell in profile, past smoke. Locke and Dr. Shepton were in chairs facing him, the former bending forward with his fingertips on the edge of the desk.
"It is all rooted, continued Dr. Fell, "in a tragic misunderstanding which has been going on for years. And it would all have been so simple, you know, if certain persons had only spoken out!”
"But, oh, no. This thing must not be discussed. This thing was very awkward, if not actually shameful. It must be hushed up. So it was hushed up. And out of it grew pain and disillusionment and more misunderstanding; and, finally, murder."
Dr. Fell paused, dispelling smoke with a wave of his hand. His eyes were fixed with fierce concentration on Sir Danvers Locke.
"Sir," inquired Dr. Fell, "do you know what hysteria is?" Locke, obviously puzzled, frowned. "Hysteria? You mean—?"
"Not," said Dr. Fell decisively, "the loose, inaccurate sense in which all of us use the term. We say a person is hysterical or behaving hysterically when he or she may only be very much upset. No, sir I referred to the nervous disease known to medical science as real hysteria.
"If I speak as a layman," he added apo
logeticaDy, "Dr. Shepton will (harrumph) doubtless correct me. But this hysteria, the group of associated symptoms called hysteria, may be comparatively mild. Or it may require serious treatment by a neurologist. Or it may end, and can end, in actual insanity."
Again Dr. Fell paused.
Celia, beside Holden, sat motionless with her hands on her knees and her head bent forward. But he could feel her soft arm tremble.
"Let me tell you," pursued Dr. Fell, "some of the milder symptoms of the hysteric. I repeat: the milder! Each one of them, taken by itself, is not necessarily evidence of hysteria. But you win never find the true hysteric, who may be either a woman or a man, without all of them."
"And we are dealing here—?" demanded Locke.
"With a woman," said Dr. Fen.
(Again Celia's arm trembled.)
'The hysteric is easily moved, by small things, to either laughter or tears. She is always blurting out something before realizing its meaning. The hysteric loves the limelight; she must have attention paid her; she must play the tragedy queen. The hysteric is an inordinate diary keeper, with pages and pages of events that are often untrue. The hysteric is always threatening to commit suicide, but never does it. The hysteric is unduly fascinated by the mystic or the occult The ..."
"Wait a minute" said Donald Holden. His voice exploded in that group with the effect of blast waves.
'You spoke?" inquired Dr. Fell, as though there had been some doubt of this.
"Yes; very much so. You're not describing Celia, yon know."
"Ah!" murmured Dr. Fell.
Holden swallowed hard to get his words in order.
"Celia loathes the limelight," he said, "or she'd have told her story all over the place instead of keeping it so dark. Celia never blurts out anything; she's almost too quiet. Celia can't even keep an ordinary diary, let alone the kind you're talking about. Celia admits she'd never have the courage to commit suicide. You're not describing Celia, Dr. Fell! But—"
"But?" prompted Dr. Fell.
"You've given a thunderingly accurate picture of Margot." "Got it," breathed Dr. Fell. "Do you all see the tragedy now?"
He sank back in the big chair, making a vague gesture with the pipe. There was a silence before he went on.
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