I went straight from that house to Burry Mills Hydro, keen for the first time in my life on playing golf, which is guaranteed to occupy the mind.
Baxter had taken me a room communicating with his own, and after lunch introduced me to a tall, horse-headed elderly lady of decided manners, whom a white-haired maid pushed along in a bath-chair through the park-like grounds of the Hydro. She was Miss Mary Moultrie, and she coughed and cleared her throat just like Baxter. She suffered--she told me it was a Moultrie castemark--from some obscure form of chronic bronchitis, complicated with spasm of the glottis; and, in a dead, flat voice, with a sunken eye that looked and saw not, told me what washes, gargles, pastilles, and inhalations she had proved most beneficial. From her I was pa.s.sed on to her younger sister, Miss Elizabeth, a small and withered thing with twitching lips, victim, she told me, to very much the same sort of throat, but secretly devoted to another set of medicines. When she went away with Baxter and the bath-chair, I fell across a major of the Indian army with gout in his gla.s.sy eyes, and a stomach which he had taken all round the Continent. He laid everything before me; and him I escaped only to be confided in by a matron with a tendency to follicular tonsilitis and eczema. Baxter waited hand and foot on his cousins till five o"clock, trying, as I saw, to atone for his treatment of the dead sister. Miss Mary ordered him about like a dog.
"I warned you it would be dull," he said when we met in the smoking-room.
"It"s tremendously interesting," I said. "But how about a look round the links?"
"Unluckily damp always affects my eldest cousin. I"ve got to buy her a new bronchitis-kettle. Arthurs broke her old one yesterday."
We slipped out to the chemist"s shop in the town, and he bought a large glittering tin thing whose workings he explained.
"I"m used to this sort of work. I come up here pretty often," he said.
"I"ve the family throat too."
"You"re a good man," I said. "A very good man."
He turned towards me in the evening light among the beeches, and his face was changed to what it might have been a generation before.
"You see," he said huskily, "there was the youngest--Agnes. Before she fell ill, you know. But she didn"t like leaving her sisters. Never would." He hurried on with his odd-shaped load and left me among the ruins of my black theories. The man with that face had done Agnes Moultrie no wrong.
We never played our game. I was waked between two and three in the morning from my hygienic bed by Baxter in an ulster over orange and white pyjamas, which I should never have suspected from his character.
"My cousin has had some sort of a seizure," he said. "Will you come? I don"t want to wake the doctor. Don"t want to make a scandal. Quick!"
So I came quickly, and led by the white-haired Arthurs in a jacket and petticoat, entered a double-bedded room reeking with steam and Friar"s Balsam. The electrics were all on. Miss Mary--I knew her by her height--was at the open window, wrestling with Miss Elizabeth, who gripped her round the knees.
Miss Mary"s hand was at her own throat, which was streaked with blood.
"She"s done it. She"s done it too!" Miss Elizabeth panted. "Hold her!
Help me!"
"Oh, I say! Women don"t cut their throats," Baxter whispered.
"My G.o.d! Has she cut her throat?" the maid cried out, and with no warning rolled over in a faint. Baxter pushed her under the wash-basins, and leaped to hold the gaunt woman who crowed and whistled as she struggled toward the window. He took her by the shoulder, and she struck out wildly:
"All right! She"s only cut her hand," he said. "Wet towel quick!"
While I got that he pushed her backward. Her strength seemed almost as great as his. I swabbed at her throat when I could, and found no mark; then helped him to control her a little. Miss Elizabeth leaped back to bed, wailing like a child.
"Tie up her hand somehow," said Baxter. "Don"t let it drip about the place. She"--he stepped on broken gla.s.s in his slippers, "she must have smashed a pane."
Miss Mary lurched towards the open window again, dropped on her knees, her head on the sill, and lay quiet, surrendering the cut hand to me.
"What did she do?" Baxter turned towards Miss Elizabeth in the far bed.
"She was going to throw herself out of the window," was the answer.
"I stopped her, and sent Arthurs for you. Oh, we can never hold up our heads again!"
Miss Mary writhed and fought for breath. Baxter found a shawl which he threw over her shoulders.
"Nonsense!" said he. "That isn"t like Mary;" but his face worked when he said it.
"You wouldn"t believe about Aggie, John. Perhaps you will now!" said Miss Elizabeth. "I saw her do it, and she"s cut her throat too!"
"She hasn"t," I said. "It"s only her hand."
Miss Mary suddenly broke from us with an indescribable grunt, flew, rather than ran, to her sister"s bed, and there shook her as one furious schoolgirl would shake another.
"No such thing," she croaked. "How dare you think so, you wicked little fool?"
"Get into bed, Mary," said Baxter. "You"ll catch a chill."
She obeyed, but sat up with the grey shawl round her lean shoulders, glaring at her sister. "I"m better now," she panted. "Arthurs let me sit out too long. Where"s Arthurs? The kettle."
"Never mind Arthurs," said Baxter. "You get the kettle." I hastened to bring it from the side table. "Now, Mary, as G.o.d sees you, tell me what you"ve done."
His lips were dry, and he could not moisten. them with his tongue.
Miss Mary applied herself to the mouth of the kettle, and between indraws of steam said: "The spasm came on just now, while I was asleep.
I was nearly choking to death. So I went to the window I"ve done it often before, without, waking any one. Bessie"s such an old maid about draughts. I tell you I was choking to death. I couldn"t manage the catch, and I nearly fell out. That window opens too low. I cut my hand trying to save myself. Who has tied it up in this filthy handkerchief?
I wish you had had my throat, Bessie. I never was nearer dying!" She scowled on us all impartially, while her sister sobbed.
From the bottom of the bed we heard a quivering voice: "Is she dead?
Have they took her away? Oh, I never could bear the sight o" blood!"
"Arthurs," said Miss Mary, "you are an hireling. Go away!"
It is my belief that Arthurs crawled out on all fours, but I was busy picking up broken gla.s.s from the carpet.
Then Baxter, seated by the side of the bed, began to cross-examine in a voice I scarcely recognised. No one could for an instant have doubted the genuine rage of Miss Mary against her sister, her cousin, or her maid; and that a doctor should have been called in for she did me the honour of calling me doctor--was the last drop. She was choking with her throat; had rushed to the window for air; had near pitched out, and in catching at the window bars had cut her hand. Over and over she made this clear to the intent Baxter. Then she turned on her sister and tongue-lashed her savagely.
"You mustn"t blame me," Miss Bessie faltered at last. "You know what we think of night and day.".
"I"m coming to that," said Baxter. "Listen to me. What you did, Mary, misled four people into thinking you--you meant to do away with yourself."
"Isn"t one suicide in the family enough? Oh G.o.d, help and pity us! You couldn"t have believed that!" she cried.
"The evidence was complete. Now, don"t you think," Baxter"s finger wagged under her nose--"can"t you think that poor Aggie did the same thing at Holmescroft when she fell out of the window?"
"She had the same throat," said Miss Elizabeth. "Exactly the same symptoms. Don"t you remember, Mary?"
"Which was her bedroom?" I asked of Baxter in an undertone.
"Over the south verandah, looking on to the tennis lawn."
"I nearly fell out of that very window when I was at Holmescroft--opening it to get some air. The sill doesn"t come much above your knees," I said.
"You hear that, Mary? Mary, do you hear What this gentleman says? Won"t you believe that what nearly happened to you must have happened to poor Aggie that night? For G.o.d"s sake--for her sake--Mary, won"t you believe?"
There was a long silence while the steam kettle puffed.