by Grant Allen
A bland, autocratic martinet: smiling, inexorable! Poor, pale Ettie grew thinner and wanner under her law daily, while Maisie’s temper, naturally docile, was being spoiled before one’s eyes by persistent, needless thwarting.
As spring came on, however, I began to hope that things were really mending. Le Geyt looked brighter; some of his own careless, happy-go-lucky self came back again at intervals. He told me once, with a wistful sigh, that he thought of sending the children to school in the country — it would be better for them, he said, and would take a little work off dear Clara’s shoulders; for never even to me was he disloyal to Clara. I encouraged him in the idea. He went on to say that the great difficulty in the way was... Clara. She was SO conscientious; she thought it her duty to look after the children herself, and couldn’t bear to delegate any part of that duty to others. Besides, she had such an excellent opinion of the Kensington High School!
When I told Hilda Wade of this, she set her teeth together and answered at once: “That settles it! The end is very near. HE will insist upon their going, to save them from that woman’s ruthless kindness; and SHE will refuse to give up any part of what she calls her duty. HE will reason with her; he will plead for his children; SHE will be adamant. Not angry — it is never the way of that temperament to get angry — just calmly, sedately, and insupportably provoking. When she goes too far, he will flare up at last; some taunt will rouse him; the explosion will come; and... the children will go to their Aunt Lina, whom they dote upon. When all is said and done, it is the poor man I pity!”
“You said within twelve months.”
“That was a bow drawn at a venture. It may be a little sooner; it may be a little later. But — next week or next month — it is coming: it is coming!”
June smiled upon us once more; and on the afternoon of the 13th, the anniversary of our first lunch together at the Le Geyts, I was up at my work in the accident ward at St. Nathaniel’s. “Well, the ides of June have come, Sister Wade!” I said, when I met her, parodying Caesar.
“But not yet gone,” she answered; and a profound sense of foreboding spread over her speaking face as she uttered the words.
Her oracle disquieted me. “Why, I dined there last night,” I cried; “and all seemed exceptionally well.”
“The calm before the storm, perhaps,” she murmured.
Just at that moment I heard a boy crying in the street: “Pall mall Gazette; ’ere y’are; speshul edishun! Shocking tragedy at the West-end! Orful murder! ’Ere y’are! Spechul Globe! Pall Mall, extry speshul!”
A weird tremor broke over me. I walked down into the street and bought a paper. There it stared me in the face on the middle page: “Tragedy at Campden Hill: Well-known Barrister Murders his Wife. Sensational Details.”
I looked closer and read. It was as I feared. The Le Geyts! After I left their house, the night before, husband and wife must have quarrelled, no doubt over the question of the children’s schooling; and at some provoking word, as it seemed, Hugo must have snatched up a knife— “a little ornamental Norwegian dagger,” the report said, “which happened to lie close by on the cabinet in the drawing-room,” and plunged it into his wife’s heart. “The unhappy lady died instantaneously, by all appearances, and the dastardly crime was not discovered by the servants till eight o’clock this morning. Mr. Le Geyt is missing.”
I rushed up with the news to Nurse Wade, who was at work in the accident ward. She turned pale, but bent over her patient and said nothing.
“It is fearful to think!” I groaned out at last; “for us who know all — that poor Le Geyt will be hanged for it! Hanged for attempting to protect his children!”
“He will NOT be hanged,” my witch answered, with the same unquestioning confidence as ever.
“Why not?” I asked, astonished once more at this bold prediction.
She went on bandaging the arm of the patient whom she was attending. “Because... he will commit suicide,” she replied, without moving a muscle.
“How do you know that?”
She stuck a steel safety-pin with deft fingers into the roll of lint. “When I have finished my day’s work,” she answered slowly, still continuing the bandage, “I may perhaps find time to tell you.”
CHAPTER IV
THE EPISODE OF THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT COMMIT SUICIDE
After my poor friend Le Geyt had murdered his wife, in a sudden access of uncontrollable anger, under the deepest provocation, the police naturally began to inquire for him. It is a way they have; the police are no respecters of persons; neither do they pry into the question of motives. They are but poor casuists. A murder is for them a murder, and a murderer a murderer; it is not their habit to divide and distinguish between case and case with Hilda Wade’s analytical accuracy.
As soon as my duties at St. Nathaniel’s permitted me, on the evening of the discovery, I rushed round to Mrs. Mallet’s, Le Geyt’s sister. I had been detained at the hospital for some hours, however, watching a critical case; and by the time I reached Great Stanhope Street I found Hilda Wade, in her nurse’s dress, there before me. Sebastian, it seemed, had given her leave out for the evening. She was a supernumerary nurse, attached to his own observation-cots as special attendant for scientific purposes, and she could generally get an hour or so whenever she required it.
Mrs. Mallet had been in the breakfast-room with Hilda before I arrived; but as I reached the house she rushed upstairs to wash her red eyes and compose herself a little before the strain of meeting me; so I had the opportunity for a few words alone first with my prophetic companion.
“You said just now at Nathaniel’s,” I burst out, “that Le Geyt would not be hanged: he would commit suicide. What did you mean by that? What reason had you for thinking so?”
Hilda sank into a chair by the open window, pulled a flower abstractedly from the vase at her side, and began picking it to pieces, floret after floret, with twitching fingers. She was deeply moved. “Well, consider his family history,” she burst out at last, looking up at me with her large brown eyes as she reached the last petal. “Heredity counts.... And after such a disaster!”
She said “disaster,” not “crime”; I noted mentally the reservation implied in the word.
“Heredity counts,” I answered. “Oh, yes. It counts much. But what about Le Geyt’s family history?” I could not recall any instance of suicide among his forbears.
“Well — his mother’s father was General Faskally, you know,” she replied, after a pause, in her strange, oblique manner. “Mr. Le Geyt is General Faskally’s eldest grandson.”
“Exactly,” I broke in, with a man’s desire for solid fact in place of vague intuition. “But I fail to see quite what that has to do with it.”
“The General was killed in India during the Mutiny.”
“I remember, of course — killed, bravely fighting.”
“Yes; but it was on a forlorn hope, for which he volunteered, and in the course of which he is said to have walked straight into an almost obvious ambuscade of the enemy’s.”
“Now, my dear Miss Wade” — I always dropped the title of “Nurse,” by request, when once we were well clear of Nathaniel’s,— “I have every confidence, you are aware, in your memory and your insight; but I do confess I fail to see what bearing this incident can have on poor Hugo’s chances of being hanged or committing suicide.”
She picked a second flower, and once more pulled out petal after petal. As she reached the last again, she answered, slowly: “You must have forgotten the circumstances. It was no mere accident. General Faskally had made a serious strategical blunder at Jhansi. He had sacrificed the lives of his subordinates needlessly. He could not bear to face the survivors. In the course of the retreat, he volunteered to go on this forlorn hope, which might equally well have been led by an officer of lower rank; and he was permitted to do so by Sir Colin in command, as a means of retrieving his lost military character. He carried his point, but he carried it recklessly, taking care to be shot
through the heart himself in the first onslaught. That was virtual suicide — honourable suicide to avoid disgrace, at a moment of supreme remorse and horror.”
“You are right,” I admitted, after a minute’s consideration. “I see it now — though I should never have thought of it.”
“That is the use of being a woman,” she answered.
I waited a second once more, and mused. “Still, that is only one doubtful case,” I objected.
“There was another, you must remember: his uncle Alfred.”
“Alfred Le Geyt?”
“No; HE died in his bed, quietly. Alfred Faskally.”
“What a memory you have!” I cried, astonished. “Why, that was before our time — in the days of the Chartist riots!”
She smiled a certain curious sibylline smile of hers. Her earnest face looked prettier than ever. “I told you I could remember many things that happened before I was born,” she answered. “THIS is one of them.”
“You remember it directly?”
“How impossible! Have I not often explained to you that I am no diviner? I read no book of fate; I call no spirits from the vasty deep. I simply remember with exceptional clearness what I read and hear. And I have many times heard the story about Alfred Faskally.”
“So have I — but I forget it.”
“Unfortunately, I CAN’T forget. That is a sort of disease with me.... He was a special constable in the Chartist riots; and being a very strong and powerful man, like his nephew Hugo, he used his truncheon — his special constable’s baton, or whatever you call it — with excessive force upon a starveling London tailor in the mob near Charing Cross. The man was hit on the forehead — badly hit, so that he died almost immediately of concussion of the brain. A woman rushed out of the crowd at once, seized the dying man, laid his head on her lap, and shrieked out in a wildly despairing voice that he was her husband, and the father of thirteen children. Alfred Faskally, who never meant to kill the man, or even to hurt him, but who was laying about him roundly, without realising the terrific force of his blows, was so horrified at what he had done when he heard the woman’s cry, that he rushed off straight to Waterloo Bridge in an agony of remorse and — flung himself over. He was drowned instantly.”
“I recall the story now,” I answered; “but, do you know, as it was told me, I think they said the mob THREW Faskally over in their desire for vengeance.”
“That is the official account, as told by the Le Geyts and the Faskallys; they like to have it believed their kinsman was murdered, not that he committed suicide. But my grandfather” — I started; during the twelve months that I had been brought into daily relations with Hilda Wade, that was the first time I had heard her mention any member of her own family, except once her mother— “my grandfather, who knew him well, and who was present in the crowd at the time, assured me many times that Alfred Faskally really jumped over of his own accord, NOT pursued by the mob, and that his last horrified words as he leaped were, ‘I never meant it! I never meant it!’ However, the family have always had luck in their suicides. The jury believed the throwing-over story, and found a verdict of ‘wilful murder’ against some person or persons unknown.”
“Luck in their suicides! What a curious phrase! And you say, ALWAYS. Were there other cases, then?”
“Constructively, yes; one of the Le Geyts, you must recollect, went down with his ship (just like his uncle, the General, in India) when he might have quitted her. It is believed he had given a mistaken order. You remember, of course, he was navigating lieutenant. Another, Marcus, was SAID to have shot himself by accident while cleaning his gun — after a quarrel with his wife. But you have heard all about it. ‘The wrong was on my side,’ he moaned, you know, when they picked him up, dying, in the gun-room. And one of the Faskally girls, his cousin, of whom his wife was jealous — that beautiful Linda — became a Catholic, and went into a convent at once on Marcus’s death; which, after all, in such cases, is merely a religious and moral way of committing suicide — I mean, for a woman who takes the veil just to cut herself off from the world, and who has no vocation, as I hear she had not.”
She filled me with amazement. “That is true,” I exclaimed, “when one comes to think of it. It shows the same temperament in fibre.... But I should never have thought of it.”
“No? Well, I believe it is true, for all that. In every case, one sees they choose much the same way of meeting a reverse, a blunder, an unpremeditated crime. The brave way is to go through with it, and face the music, letting what will come; the cowardly way is to hide one’s head incontinently in a river, a noose, or a convent cell.”
“Le Geyt is not a coward,” I interposed, with warmth.
“No, not, a coward — a manly spirited, great-hearted gentleman — but still, not quite of the bravest type. He lacks one element. The Le Geyts have physical courage — enough and to spare — but their moral courage fails them at a pinch. They rush into suicide or its equivalent at critical moments, out of pure boyish impulsiveness.”
A few minutes later, Mrs. Mallet came in. She was not broken down — on the contrary, she was calm — stoically, tragically, pitiably calm; with that ghastly calmness which is more terrible by far than the most demonstrative grief. Her face, though deadly white, did not move a muscle. Not a tear was in her eyes. Even her bloodless hands hardly twitched at the folds of her hastily assumed black gown. She clenched them after a minute when she had grasped mine silently; I could see that the nails dug deep into the palms in her painful resolve to keep herself from collapsing.
Hilda Wade, with infinite sisterly tenderness, led her over to a chair by the window in the summer twilight, and took one quivering hand in hers. “I have been telling Dr. Cumberledge, Lina, about what I most fear for your dear brother, darling; and... I think... he agrees with me.”
Mrs. Mallet turned to me, with hollow eyes, still preserving her tragic calm. “I am afraid of it, too,” she said, her drawn lips tremulous. “Dr. Cumberledge, we must get him back! We must induce him to face it!”
“And yet,” I answered, slowly, turning it over in my own mind; “he has run away at first. Why should he do that if he means — to commit suicide?” I hated to utter the words before that broken soul; but there was no way out of it.
Hilda interrupted me with a quiet suggestion. “How do you know he has run away?” she asked. “Are you not taking it for granted that, if he meant suicide, he would blow his brains out in his own house? But surely that would not be the Le Geyt way. They are gentle-natured folk; they would never blow their brains out or cut their throats. For all we know, he may have made straight for Waterloo Bridge,” — she framed her lips to the unspoken words, unseen by Mrs. Mallet,— “like his uncle Alfred.”
“That is true,” I answered, lip-reading. “I never thought of that either.”
“Still, I do not attach importance to this idea,” she went on. “I have some reason for thinking he has run away... elsewhere; and if so, our first task must be to entice him back again.”
“What are your reasons?” I asked, humbly. Whatever they might be, I knew enough of Hilda Wade by this time to know that she had probably good grounds for accepting them.
“Oh, they may wait for the present,” she answered. “Other things are more pressing. First, let Lina tell us what she thinks of most moment.”
Mrs. Mallet braced herself up visibly to a distressing effort. “You have seen the body, Dr. Cumberledge?” she faltered.
“No, dear Mrs. Mallet, I have not. I came straight from Nathaniel’s. I have had no time to see it.”
“Dr. Sebastian has viewed it by my wish — he has been so kind — and he will be present as representing the family at the post-mortem. He notes that the wound was inflicted with a dagger — a small ornamental Norwegian dagger, which always lay, as I know, on the little what-not by the blue sofa.”
I nodded assent. “Exactly; I have seen it there.”
“It was blunt and rusty — a mere toy knife — not
at all the sort of weapon a man would make use of who designed to commit a deliberate murder. The crime, if there WAS a crime (which we do not admit), must therefore have been wholly unpremeditated.”
I bowed my head. “For us who knew Hugo that goes without saying.”
She leaned forward eagerly. “Dr. Sebastian has pointed out to me a line of defence which would probably succeed — if we could only induce poor Hugo to adopt it. He has examined the blade and scabbard, and finds that the dagger fits its sheath very tight, so that it can only be withdrawn with considerable violence. The blade sticks.” (I nodded again.) “It needs a hard pull to wrench it out.... He has also inspected the wound, and assures me its character is such that it MIGHT have been self-inflicted.” She paused now and again, and brought out her words with difficulty. “Self-inflicted, he suggests; therefore, that THIS may have happened. It is admitted — WILL be admitted — the servants overheard it — we can make no reservation there — a difference of opinion, an altercation, even, took place between Hugo and Clara that evening” — she started suddenly— “why, it was only last night — it seems like ages — an altercation about the children’s schooling. Clara held strong views on the subject of the children” — her eyes blinked hard— “which Hugo did not share. We throw out the hint, then, that Clara, during the course of the dispute — we must call it a dispute — accidentally took up this dagger and toyed with it. You know her habit of toying, when she had no knitting or needlework. In the course of playing with it (we suggest) she tried to pull the knife out of its sheath; failed; held it up, so, point upward; pulled again; pulled harder — with a jerk, at last the sheath came off; the dagger sprang up; it wounded Clara fatally. Hugo, knowing that they had disagreed, knowing that the servants had heard, and seeing her fall suddenly dead before him, was seized with horror — the Le Geyt impulsiveness! — lost his head; rushed out; fancied the accident would be mistaken for murder. But why? A Q.C., don’t you know! Recently married! Most attached to his wife. It is plausible, isn’t it?”
