"What can you have to say to Mr. Hale alone, Miss Crofton?" she asked.
"It is about herself, perhaps," said the doctor kindly. "I have told her all along that she would be knocked up by this nursing; and now I daresay she begins to find I am right."
"Yes," I said, "it is about myself I want to speak."
Mrs. Darrell went to one of the windows, and stood with her face turned away from us, looking out. I followed Mr. Hale into the dressing-room.
I unlocked the wardrobe, took out the medicine-bottle, and told the doctor my suspicions of the previous night. He listened to me with grave attention, but with an utterly incredulous look.
"A nervous fancy of yours, no doubt, Miss Crofton," he said; "however, I"ll take the medicine back to my surgery and a.n.a.lyse it."
"I have something more to tell you, Mr. Hale."
"Indeed!"
I repeated, word for word, what Peter had told me about Mrs. Darrell"s visit to his grandmother.
"It is a very extraordinary business," he said; "but I cannot imagine that Mrs. Darrell would be capable of such a hideous crime. What motive could she have for such an act?"
"I do not feel justified in speaking quite plainly upon that subject, Mr. Hale; but I have reason to know that Mrs. Darrell has a very bitter feeling about her stepdaughter."
"I cannot think the thing you suspect possible. However, the medicine shall be a.n.a.lysed; and we will take all precautions for the future. I will send you another bottle immediately, in a sealed packet. You will take notice that the seal is unbroken before you use the medicine."
He showed me his crest on a seal at the end of his pencil-case, and then departed. The medicine came a quarter of an hour later in a sealed packet. This time I brought the bottle into the sick-room, and placed it on the mantelpiece, where it was impossible for any one to touch it.
When Mr. Hale came for his second visit, there was a grave and anxious look in his face. He was very well satisfied with the appearance of the patient, however, and p.r.o.nounced that there was a change for the better--slight, of course, but quite as much as could be expected in so short a time. He beckoned me out of the room, and I went down-stairs with him, leaving Susan Dodd with Milly.
"I am going to speak to Mrs. Darrell, and you had better come with me,"
he said.
She was in the library. Mr. Hale went in, and I followed him. She was sitting at the table, with writing materials scattered before her; but she was not writing. She had a strange preoccupied air; but at the sight of Mr. Hale she rose suddenly, and looked at him with a deadly white face.
"Is she worse?" she asked.
"No, Mrs. Darrell; she is better," he answered sternly. "I find that we have been the dupes of some secret enemy of this dear child"s. There has been an attempt at murder going on under our very eyes. Poison has been mixed with the medicine sent by me--a slow poison. Happily for us the poisoner has been a little too cautious for the success of the crime. The doses administered have been small enough to leave the chance of recovery. An accident awakened Miss Crofton"s suspicions last night, and she very wisely discontinued the medicine. I have a.n.a.lysed it since she gave it me, and find that a certain portion of irritant poison has been mixed with it."
For some moments after he had finished speaking Mrs. Darrell remained silent, looking at him fixedly with that awful death-like face.
"Who can have done such a thing?" she asked at last, in a half-mechanical way.
"You must be a better judge of that question than I," answered Mr.
Hale. "Is there any one in this house inimical to your stepdaughter?"
"No one, that I know of."
"We have two duties before us, Mrs. Darrell: the first, to protect our patient from the possibility of any farther attempt of this kind; the second, to trace the hand that has done this work. I shall telegraph to Leeds immediately for a professional nurse, to relieve Miss Crofton in the care of the sick-room; and I shall communicate at once with the police, in order that this house may be placed under surveillance."
Mrs. Darrell said not a word, either in objection or a.s.sent, to this.
She seated herself by the table again, and began trifling idly with the writing materials before her.
"You will do what is best, of course, Mr. Hale," she said, after a long pause; "you are quite at liberty to act in this matter according to your own discretion."
"Thanks; it is a matter in which my responsibility ent.i.tles me to a certain amount of power. I shall telegraph to Dr. Lomond, asking him to come down to-morrow. Whatever doubt you may entertain of my judgment will be dispelled when I am supported by his opinion."
"Of course; but I have not expressed any doubt of your judgment."
We left her immediately after this--left her sitting before the table, with her restless hands turning over the papers.
The servant who went in search of her at seven o"clock that evening, when dinner was served, found her sitting there still, with a sealed letter lying on the table before her; but her head had fallen across the cushioned arm of the chair--she had been dead some hours.
There was a post-mortem examination and an inquest. Mrs. Darrell had taken poison. The jury brought in a verdict of suicide while in a state of unsound mind. The act seemed too causeless for sanity. Her strange absent ways had attracted the attention of the servants for some time past, and the evidence of her own maid respecting her restlessness and irritability for the last few months influenced the minds of coroner and jury.
The letter found lying on the table before her was addressed to Angus Egerton. He declined to communicate its contents when questioned about it at the inquest. Milly progressed towards recovery slowly but surely from the hour in which I stopped the suspected medicine. The time came when we were obliged to tell her of her stepmother"s awful death; but she never knew the attempt that had been made on her own life, or the atmosphere of hatred in which she had lived.
We left Thornleigh for Scarborough as soon as she was well enough to be moved, and only returned in the early spring, in time for my darling"s wedding.
She has now been married nearly seven years, during which time her life has been very bright and happy--a life of almost uncheckered sunshine.
She has carried out her idea of our friendship to the very letter; and we have never been separated, except during her honeymoon and my own visits home. Happily for my sense of independence, there are now plenty of duties for me to perform at c.u.mber Priory, where I am governess to a brood of pretty children, who call me auntie, and hold me scarcely second to their mother in their warm young hearts. Angus Egerton is a model country squire and master of the hounds; and he and his wife enjoy an unbroken popularity among rich and poor. Peter is under-gardener at the Priory, and no longer lives with his grandmother, who left her cottage soon after Mrs. Darrell"s suicide, and is supposed to have gone to London.