Death and Letters

by Elizabeth Daly

  This generation of Coldfields took its time; the family was evidently studying his card. After something of a wait the folding-doors were pushed open, and a small, slender, greying man stood between them. He said: “Mr. Gamadge: do come in.”

  Gamadge advanced into a handsome library; there were plenty of books in glassed cases, there was a fire burning in a wide hearth, there were comfortable chairs and sofas and a carved oak table. A man and two women sat in the chairs that faced him as he came in; the man rose—a tall, big, ruddy man: Ira Coldfield.

  Ames was pale, with pale blue eyes. He held out his hand. “Mr. Gamadge,” he said in his high, carefully accented voice, “I find I know you by reputation. Your books. We are all so much interested. We had no idea.” He looked greatly amused.

  Gamadge shook hands and said he was gratified.

  “Since I do know you, after a fashion,” continued Ames, “I’d better introduce you and the family. I myself am Ames Coldfield. That is my sister-in-law Georgette, and the young woman is my niece Susan. And there, scowling at you, though he knows better than to do it, is my brother Ira.”

  Gamadge nodded amiably to the others. Mrs. Ira bowed in a formal way, Susan smiled faintly at him, Ira’s face did not change.

  “Had we but known!” said Ames with his giggle. “And had you but known that your name was a passport into this house at any time.”

  “That wasn’t exactly the idea.” Gamadge, now completing the wide circle in front of the fire, with the others opposite him and Ames on his left, had the big oak table on his right. He leaned against a corner of it, and spoke amiably. “The idea was to get Mrs. Glendon Coldfield out, passport or no passport.”

  “And you succeeded,” chuckled Ames, “in the most romantic way. It was comical, too, from one point of view. Mine, in fact; I saw the strategy from the dining-room, and the departure when I got out on the doorstep. Adventure in the home. I haven’t been so stimulated since my Anthony Hope days. I can read him yet.”

  Gamadge wasn’t paying much attention to this highly civilized approach. He let his eyes wander over the others—Ira Coldfield, with his clipped blond moustache and his angry blue eyes; Mrs. Ira, handsome in her red dress and her gold jewelry. She had hazel eyes, bright bronze hair, plenty of make-up, a good figure verging on heaviness, a hard stare. The hazel eyes were a little prominent, and they looked frightened.

  Susan Coldfield had the hazel eyes, and the bronze hair—but it was the bronze that her mother’s had been long ago. Her coloring was natural and beautiful, her features fine, her bones smaller than Georgette Coldfield’s. She was in a dark-green dress, very smart and plain. Her expression was one of mortification.

  Ira put a stop to his brother’s speech. He said furiously: “There’s no occasion for all this.”

  “None,” agreed Gamadge. “You can’t want me in the house longer than necessary. I shall deliver your sister-in-law’s message, collect her luggage, and go.”

  Ira said loudly: “I don’t want to hear her message—I know well enough what it will be. I tell you and I tell her that I don’t give an inch, and neither does my wife or my brother. She was in a crazy, dangerous state of mind, and we shouldn’t have been safe in the house with her if she hadn’t been restrained—in the most humane, kindest way. Ask her doctor.”

  “I should like to,” said Gamadge. “I was looking forward to it. But I don’t see him.”

  There was a short pause. Then Ira burst out: “He was to be here.”

  “But he drove out of town,” said Susan dryly. “Very important call, you know.”

  Her mother turned on her sharply: “Susan, this affects you. That’s why you’re here now. Please remember it.”

  Gamadge said equably: “Let me deliver the message; it will make a difference in your point of view. Mrs. Glendon Coldfield withdraws her statement.”

  The pause was longer this time; even Susan looked stupefied. Ames put his hand up to his little clipped moustache, Ira stood as if frozen to the carpet, his wife, her eyes on Gamadge, swallowed hard on nothing.

  At last Ames spoke—tentatively. “You mean she now says she was mistaken?”

  “Quite mistaken,” replied Gamadge. “Nobody went mad and poisoned her husband, nobody went mad and tried to poison her. She sees that clearly.”

  Ames said after a moment: “But this is a miracle. I assure you, Mr. Gamadge—but you can’t know, of course, what she’s put us through. Not in detail.”

  Ira asked in a flat voice: “What made her change her mind?”

  “Well, I may say I argued her out of the idea,” said Gamadge.

  Another pause, but nobody asked the obvious question. Susan, looking triumphant, was smiling; perhaps the answer to the question was so clear to all but one of them that there was no reason to ask it. One of them would never ask it.

  “In that case,” said Ames, astonishment giving way to what certainly resembled relief, “let’s all sit down. You must hear our side of it, Mr. Gamadge—you really must. You’ve earned our eternal gratitude, we now regard you as our dearest friend. A miracle!” He looked at the others. “How shall we reward him?”

  “We might ask him,” said Susan dryly, “what Sylvia would like.”

  “Oh—well, Mrs. Coldfield did suggest an adjustment,” said Gamadge, taking the chair Ames pushed towards him. Ira slowly sank down on the one he had risen from when Gamadge came in, and Ames settled himself beside the fire. Mrs. Ira got a cigarette out of a gold box and nervously held it for her husband to light. She said: “I don’t know what you mean—adjustment. Surely she hasn’t the nerve to expect damages, or something?”

  Susan said: “Oh Mother,” and turned her head away.

  “Don’t let such words sully the air,” begged Ames, laughing, but Gamadge wasn’t laughing. He said: “She’s quite safe now, of course, and with friends who can protect her physically; but she’d like an assurance that insanity won’t at any time in the future be imputed to her.”

  “We deserve that,” said Susan.

  “But why on earth,” asked Mrs. Ira pettishly, “should there be any question of such a thing now, since she’s come to her senses?”’

  “Or at least we hope so,” grumbled Ira. “We hope there’ll be no relapse.”

  “Oh stuff and nonsense,” said Ames. “Sylvia was in a wrought-up state, that’s all. And in any case, she’s out of our hands.” He smiled at Gamadge. “Don’t say thanks to you! Really we’re not so formidable.” He glanced up at a side door which evidently led into the back hall. “Yes? Who’s that? Come in, come in. Oh, Miss Beal.”

  “She isn’t wanted now,” said Ira hurriedly.

  But Miss Beal had come in and stood planted, her short, thick, muscular figure encased in its nursing whites, a sweater over her shoulders. She fixed alert eyes on Gamadge.

  “This is Sylvia’s nurse, Mr. Gamadge,” said Ames, rising to smile at her. “Doctor Smyth’s representative, since he couldn’t come himself.”

  Ira said with some annoyance: “It’s not necessary. Mrs. Glendon has withdrawn her statements, Miss Beal. Apparently she’s responsible again. That’s all.”

  Miss Beal, looking squarely at Gamadge, said sharply: “It isn’t all. I want you to know I never thought she was crazy, and I never knew what statements she’d made. These people wouldn’t believe it, but she didn’t talk. I say she never would have talked. But it wasn’t my business—I was paid to take care of her and keep her from annoying people writing letters and on the telephone, and a nurse does what the doctor says. If she don’t, she’s blacklisted with the agencies and the hospitals.”

  Ames said sweetly: “This comes a little late, Miss Beal, but we’re delighted to hear it. And no blame attaches to you, I’m sure, in this gentleman’s mind. But I must remind you that your patient”—he glanced smiling at Gamadge—“must have sent out at least one message.”

  “She certainly did not,” said Miss Beal. “Somebody in the family must have talked, that’s all.” But her eyes
were still on Gamadge’s, and he thought they held appeal.

  He said blandly: “The secrets of the prison-house will remain secrets between Mrs. Glendon Coldfield and myself.”

  Susan said wearily: “I wish we could stop this. I feel like one of those hideous people that ran the concentration camps.”

  “You needn’t,” snapped her mother. “For all the help you ever were…” She turned to Miss Beal. “All right, nurse,” she said. “We shan’t complain of you, and you won’t talk about us; Mrs. Glendon Coldfield was Doctor Smyth’s patient, and you seem to know already that there’s professional etiquette involved. You can go home as soon as you pack.”

  “I am packed,” said Miss Beal, “and I packed up for my patient, too. Her bags are ready; I put her summer things in her trunk. I’m glad she’s getting a change. This case was on my nerves.”

  She walked out, closing the door smartly behind her.

  Mrs. Coldfield sat looking at the closed door and smoking. She said: “I detest that woman.”

  “My dear,” said Ames, “she’s Smyth’s responsibility, and I must say I think it was very feeble of him not to be here at any cost to talk to Mr. Gamadge.”

  “He didn’t know,” remarked Susan in her clipped young voice, “that Mr. Gamadge would be so polite.”

  Mrs. Ira turned to Gamadge, and asked: “Won’t you smoke? There are cigarettes on the table beside you.”

  “Thank you.” Gamadge got out his own and lighted one. Ames and Ira lighted cigarettes too, and they all relaxed a little. It was raining hard again—driving against the long windows, streaming down. Ames got up and drew the curtains.

  Mrs. Coldfield said: “Mr. Gamadge, I’d like you to understand. Sylvia takes it back; but she wouldn’t before, and how could we believe that she wasn’t going to talk? She’s talked to you.”

  “Quite different,” said Gamadge. “You hadn’t accepted her terms.”

  “Terms?”

  “You kept her here as a prisoner.”

  “Mr. Gamadge,” she said, her handsome face a mask of rage, “do you realize that she might have ruined Susan’s life and disgraced us all?”

  “We were trying,” said Ames, “to keep a colossal scandal in the family. We adopted strong measures, yes, but I ask you—what could we have done? Call in Dalgren, let him have the story? Our own man, Smyth—he’s a G.P., but a good man—thought she ought to be put away until she came to her senses—literally. You know yourself that doctors disagree. Smyth thought she was deteriorating, dangerous to herself. Damn it, we were at our wits’ end.”

  Susan’s voice cut sharply across these plaintive words: “Don’t include me, Uncle Ames. I wanted to tell Jimmie all about it—he’d merely have laughed.”

  “The young,” murmured Ames, “have a solution to everything.”

  “They don’t know everything.” Georgette Coldfield’s face, turned away from her daughter’s now, was a study in exasperation. “They don’t know anything. No experience, no judgment, nothing but a lot of Old School sentiment. ‘Jimmie wouldn’t think this, Jimmie would think that.’ Jimmie has parents,” she finished, looking back at Susan with a threatening smile, “and they’re thinking of their grandchildren already. They’ve talked enough about all those future splendid trusts. Are you crazy?”

  “I don’t think Sylvia was, just because she forgot she’d taken those capsules.”

  So here was somebody stepping up to the danger line as if it wasn’t even there! At last! And, by Jove, thought Gamadge, stepping over it. “Mr. Gamadge,” asked Susan, “how did you ever persuade Sylvia to remember?”

  Through the stillness in the room Gamadge could hear the rain against the windows—even through the thick glass and the drawn velvet of the curtains. He put out his cigarette. “Well, I didn’t,” he said, “I just persuaded her that it’s a very unusual thing—that sort of mania breaking out in a family without any premonitory signals, and nothing whatever in past history to account for it.”

  This line of discussion was broken by Ira Coldfield. He suddenly clapped his hands on his knees, got up as if he had come to a decision, and walked over to the fireplace. He put his hand on the mantel shelf, stood for a moment looking down into the flames, and then turned and faced Gamadge as man to man. “Mr. Gamadge,” he said, “I feel that on the whole we’ve been very fortunate.”

  Gamadge looked inquiring. “You put an end to an impossible situation,” Ira went on in a friendly tone. “If your methods were unorthodox—”

  “They had to be,” said Gamadge cheerfully, “to match yours.”

  “I know, I know,” said Ira, “it looks brutal now. But how do you think we felt—while it was going on? It wore us all down. If Sylvia was a prisoner, so were we—terrible state of anxiety.”

  “But was it comparable to hers?”

  “She might have known us well enough to know that nothing very terrible was impending. After all she only suspected one of us of being a lunatic. You’re welcome to hear exactly what we were arranging, and I may assure you that everybody was kind and friendly to her—Smyth was most kind. He couldn’t be anything else. She was being treated as a mentally sick person, you know—psychotic.”

  “Mr. Coldfield,” asked Gamadge gently, “have you ever been subject to physical coercion?”

  “She had only to withdraw her statement, and she has withdrawn it.”

  Gamadge looked at him quietly, then he turned to look at the others. His eyes remained on Mrs. Coldfield.

  “She was told,” he said, “that it was too late to withdraw her statement.”

  “Mr. Gamadge,” said Ira, “could we have believed after her original obstinate behavior about it that she meant what she said? Just try to believe me now, and assume that we were all acting in good faith.”

  “Glad to assume it,” said Gamadge, “for the sake of argument.”

  “Well, you ought to know what we were trying to do about my sister-in-law. There’s a non-judicial procedure in these cases, as Smyth found out for us; and it’s a good thing, too—saves the patient embarrassment and distress of mind. No going into court, no publicity.”

  “Nicer for the relatives, too,” said Gamadge.

  “Yes,” agreed Ira shortly, “nicer for the relatives—for everybody concerned. By that procedure, which is absolutely legal, a patient can be committed on petition of a relative or friend, and the certificate of one reputable physician. But—here’s the hitch, if the relative wasn’t acting in good faith—committed for only thirty days.”

  Gamadge said: “That’s a good law. Of course a period of thirty days in some kinds of proprietary hospital might settle the question of the patient’s sanity for all time.” He added: “But I was to assume that you were acting in good faith.”

  “And so was Smyth,” said Ira violently. “He was looking into the whole thing most carefully; I should have gone to the place myself. All we wanted—”

  “I know.”

  “You might tell Sylvia. No use talking to her here—she wouldn’t even listen.”

  “She didn’t dare listen. She was bending all her faculties to the job of keeping calm. Try it sometime, Mr. Coldfield—try living in those conditions, with a nurse watching to see whether you won’t show even normal reactions to them.”

  “But you won’t look at our point of view.”

  “I’m looking at it. The situation was tough all round.” He rose, and looked at Mrs. Coldfield. “I’d better be getting back to New York—if I might have that luggage to put in the car?”

  She had been watching him narrowly during the last few minutes. Now, her face cleared of everything but polite concern, she got up too. “Mr. Gamadge, it’s pouring; there’ll be floods along the line. Won’t you at least have your dinner before you go?”

  Ames chimed in delightedly: “Georgy, I was hoping you’d suggest it! Gamadge, we won’t take no for an answer.”

  “And you’ll meet my young man,” said Susan.

  Ira said: “Hope you can
manage it. And by the way, I meant to explain—as Sylvia knows, Ames and I are Glendon’s executors. She inherits everything; I’m afraid it’s not much. If she doesn’t care to meet us, you could send along that lawyer to meet ours.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Gamadge. “Thanks for mentioning it. Our man is Robert Macloud.”

  “Ours is Dunham. Well, that’s settled, and you’re having dinner.” Ira seemed relieved and cheerful now. “There’s a good half hour yet, isn’t there, Georgy?”

  “Oh, more,” said Mrs. Coldfield.

  “Cloakroom downstairs, everything you need,” said Ames, bustling forward. “Come in afterwards for a drink—my little study back here; I’m really looking forward very much to a talk with a first-class writing man.”

  “If I might telephone?”

  “That’s out here too,” said Susan. “I’ll show you.”

  CHAPTER NINEFrustrated

  THE SIDE DOOR OF THE LIBRARY came out towards the rear of the hall; there was a telephone stand under the stairs to the right, and to the left a dressing-room had been built in and panelled to match the older woodwork. It cut the hall in half lengthwise, and extended to the partition that contained the baize door of last night’s adventure.

  “You’ll find it all rather out of date in there,” said Susan, indicating the door of the dressing-room, “but quite complete.”

  “Modern improvement, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was put in when they spoiled the rest of the house.”

  She smiled up at Gamadge, and he returned the smile. About twenty-five, full of life, delightful to look at she was. He sat down at the telephone. She was turning to go away, but he said: “Don’t go. I’ll only be a minute, but I mustn’t keep the lady in suspense.”

  Half amused, half disturbed, she asked: “Did Sylvia think something awful would happen to you?”

  “She didn’t quite know what to think.”

  “I don’t blame her.” Susan frowned. “I may not sound very loyal to the family, but in her place—”

  “You’d never be in her place, Miss Coldfield.”