Читать книгу The Craig Poisoning Mystery - A. Fielding - Страница 3

Table of Contents

"YOU say you're going up to town, Bob, as soon as you've left here. Anywhere near Pont Street? Good. Then do you mind wheeling that nearer to me?" The sick man waved a thin, but still brown hand, to where a little writing cabinet, shaped like a miniature roll-top desk, stood on a swing table.

"Thanks," he went on. "Just wait a minute, will you, while I write a note. If you'll drop it in Houghton's letter-box, or hand it in yourself, I shall be much obliged." He hesitated. "Yourself," he repeated. "It's most important, and I don't want to wait for the post."

"You write it and I'll deliver it within the hour." Dr. Lindrum, after swinging the table up and across the bed as requested, went to one of the windows.

"Without fail?" persisted the man in bed, unlocking the cabinet.

"Let's see. I must look in for a moment at home...within an hour and a half without fail. You can count on that as the outside time limit unless some accident happens to me or the car," Lindrum assured him.

His good figure, crisply curly hair and fresh coloring gave the doctor an air of vitality and strength which made him a pleasant enough young man to look at, though his features summed up to a rather indeterminate whole. He spoke without turning around, his attention riveted by something outside. That something was a girl walking along the path below. Very slender, she was dressed in green with white muslin at the open throat. On her feet were sandals. Her slim, well-shaped legs, like her arms, were bare and brown as a Neapolitan baby's. They suggested sunshine and summer, just as her buoyant walk suggested youth.

Behind him a pen could have been heard traveling swiftly over a sheet of paper, but he did not hear it. He only heard the crunch of gravel under light, small feet, the feet of Countess Alexandra Ivanoff, the Russian girl to whom the sick man behind him was engaged to be married.

Ronald Craig wrote for nearly five minutes, and not once did Lindrum take his eyes off the figure in the green frock that swayed and swung about her like the calyx of a tossing flower as she strolled on, moving with a rhythm that suggested that she was humming as she walked.

Finally the pen stopped. Craig read over what he had written. It ran:

Dear Guy,

I am being slowly poisoned. I found part of a letter this morning which proves it, though who the confederate is, and how it is being put into my food, are beyond my present brain capacity to unravel. I will go into that when I am better. Be here tomorrow morning at nine, in a car, and take me away. I shall never leave this room alive unless you get me out of it. If I were to try and go by myself they would prevent me, on the plea that I am too ill to get up. Lindrum, of course, is all right, only he is a silly ass and would make a fearful fuss if I told him why none of his medicine is helping me. And there must not be a fuss. Not here. I am getting him to wait while I write this, and drop it, himself, into your box. Telephone me that it has reached you. Be careful what you say, as I shall be. Until you come, I shall touch nothing that is not opened before me. If by any chance you are delayed, I shall arrange with Match. He, too, can be trusted. I can write no more. I feel very tired.

Your affectionate cousin,

Ronald Craig.

He addressed this staggering note to Guy Houghton, Esq., Pont Street, London, S.W.I.; sealed it, and then held it out with evident effort.

"I suppose I can rely on you, Bob?" His eyes seemed to search the young doctor's very soul.

Bob Lindrum was the son of a former rector of Woodthorp, and this was Woodthorp Manor. He and Ronald Craig, though the latter was fifteen years the elder, had known each other, off and on, since the days when Bob toddled about in pinafores, though they met rarely of late years, for the Craigs had left the place some time ago, and only kept on the manor, shorn of land and rights, as their dower house.

"You certainly can, Craig," the other assured him, as he tried to put the big, square envelope into an inner pocket. It was too big and he held it in his hand.

The door of the sick room opened and the nurse came in. She was a woman in early middle age, with a firm chin and firmer eyes. Something in the way Craig looked at her suggested dislike, or possibly—to anyone who knew what he had just written—suspicion. She carried a tray with a bottle of Vichy on it.

"Where's Match?" Craig asked in a weak voice. He was a man of a little over forty, with a rather rugged face, the face of a man of the people, which he was not. Just now he was blanched to a pallor that seemed to extend to his eyes, but he had evidently been an out-of-door man, big of frame and powerfully built.

"The butler is away at the moment." The nurse had a lady's voice, but not one that suggested great tenderness for her patient. "He is expected back in time to serve lunch," she added.

Craig nodded. Then he glanced down at the tray. "I asked for an unopened bottle of Vichy," he said, with a twitch of his white lips.

"I have just this moment opened it," the nurse assured him with smiling urbanity.

"By God!" Craig raised himself on an elbow and actually clenched his fingers. "By God, nurse, you'll bring me an unopened bottle when I ask for it, or you'll leave the house!"

His eyes might be faded by illness, but they could still flash with fire. He looked for a brief second what he was when well—a man whom it was next to impossible to placate should he be really roused.

The nurse bit her lip.

"Get another bottle and open it in here." Lindrum's tone was low and almost apologetic. "It's apt to taste flat unless opened at the moment of drinking."

She went out silently.

"How I loathe that woman!" Craig spoke with energy. He bit back an "I don't trust her," and said instead, "By the way, just hand me back that letter I gave you, will you? I want to add a postscript."

Lindrum handed it to him and Craig levered up the flap with a touch from a paper knife, added a couple of lines and refastened it. The gum was still damp.

"I'm sorry you don't like the nurse," Lindrum said while this was being done. "She's very capable. However, you won't have any need of her much longer."

"You think not?" Craig asked slowly, handing him the letter again, while his eyes lingered on the doctor's face with a probing, searching stare.

There was a moment's silence. Usually' Craig had a string of complaints, the complaints of a man not used to being ill, and a stream of impatient wonder that, after nearly a month's illness, he was no better. But today there was a cold, bleak withdrawal, quite different from anything that he had shown before.

Lindrum broke the silence by asking for a rubber band, as the letter entrusted to him partly slipped from the papers he held.

"I haven't any bands to spare," was the reply.

"My dear chap!" Lindrum's eyes looked meaningly and reproachfully at the roll-top writing cabinet. "Look in there."

"You can get some at the shop just outside." Craig made no move toward the table in question.

"Hope I shall never be in need of a life-line with you on shore," Lindrum said laughingly. "You'd shout to me to get one in Davy Jones's locker." He held out his hand to his patient. "Cheer up, and don't feel so doubtful of your progress. Malaria is a tricky thing. So is summer cholera, as the people call it. And when you get both together, you get a trying combination."

Craig nodded almost contemptuously.

"Look here!" Lindrum said suddenly, looking at him in his turn rather hard, his finger on the other's pulse. "What about a consultation? I've tried all the usual treatments; let's see if there isn't something fresh. When I'm in town this afternoon I'll look in at—"

"I'll talk that over with you tomorrow afternoon," Craig said in a weary but very decided voice. "I think I shall sleep a little now." There was a tap on the door, a light tap that changed both men's faces. Into each came a brightness, a glow, as though the sun himself stood without. Craig lost his sleepy look.

"Come in!" His voice was clearer than a moment ago, his face seemed to fill out as the door opened.

Countess Alexandra—Jura, as she was called—came in with a sprig of mignonette in her long Byzantine hands. Ronald Craig seemed to drink her in as she stepped to the bed and stood looking down at the man whom she was to marry in a couple of months with a grave, speculative look in her young face.

Of its claim to beauty there were two quite opposite opinions. Some people considered her plain, but for her clear creamy complexion. While some, on the other hand, thought her very lovely, and to this group belonged the two men in the room.

To Lindrum, as he looked at her, his heart thumping, she seemed like a beautiful tea-rose. The comparison was not inapt as far as tints went. A tea-rose's soft creams, and yellows, and shell-pinks were all reproduced in her. In her pale honey hair, her pale ivory skin, her cheeks but faintly streaked with color. Even her lips were but a shade deeper. Nothing about her was vivid. To Craig she was like a wash-drawing on vellum come alive, a drawing made by some Byzantine artist, with her eyes that suggested a slanted setting, her high cheek-bones, her slender, almost attenuated, body. To him, as to Lindrum, she was fragile and perfect.

Her long narrow eyes, in color they suggested amber seen through smoke, were bent on the sick man as she gently tapped one of his hands, the hand that would have clasped hers, with the mignonette spray.

"You should be out in the sunshine." Her voice was faintly hard. A hardness of accent, Lindrum thought, rather than of actual timbre.

"I hope to be soon," Craig said eagerly.

"Bravo!" applauded the doctor. "That's the spirit." The other had not spoken so hopefully during the whole interview this morning.

"Stay and talk to me!" urged her fiance. She shook her head, not smiling. Jura rarely smiled.

"I am going to write a letter and then I am going to try on a dress." She spoke without any accent, yet not as an English girl would have run the words together.

She looked around for a tumbler, found one, and put the sprig in water.

"It's the only flower you have ever picked for me," Craig said sentimentally.

"Lady Craig picked it," Jura said flatly, "together with some sweet peas."

Lady Craig was the widow of the former owner of the house, a knight who had been the sick man's cousin. She was the only dowager in the family, so Woodthorp Manor was hers to live in during her lifetime. Ronald Craig had been taken ill over three weeks ago now while on a week-end visit. As for Countess Jura, the Russian was an orphan, and Lady Craig was bringing her out.

"But one must not put mignonette in with sweet peas," Jura went on. "One cannot have the two together," she said again, as though the fact interested her and might interest him. "One can have either alone—but not both."

"Why not?" Craig asked, as he pulled the stem through a buttonhole of his creased pyjama jacket. Craig was not a fastidious man, as his crumpled appearance showed, in spite of all the efforts of the nurse to smarten him up.

"The one or the other will die." She still looked dreamily at the flower. Lindrum left them and said a word to the nurse outside.

"I don't like the way this thing, or these things, are dragging on. Craig is losing strength, not gaining any. He seemed so much better for a while after you came, but these last days..."

Countess Jura came out. She had caught the last sentences, and motioned him to follow her to a distant window.

"Do you think he is going to die?" she asked under her breath, but without a tremor.

"Certainly not!" Lindrum said explosively.

She met his expostulatory gaze with a blank look.

"It is not a sin to die. People do it all the time. Especially sick people." And turning, she passed on to her room, her skirt swaying to her steps.

Lindrum was very white when he rejoined the nurse, who also stood watching the Russian girl.

"I'm always so sorry for Countess Jura." She spoke very quietly. "Of course, a nurse is supposed to have neither eyes nor ears except for her patient—and the doctor," she added, a trifle sardonically. "But, as I told you when I came, I think it's very pitiful about Countess Jura."

He said nothing.

"She's so helpless. And she's being forced into a marriage, as we both know. However, perhaps something will turn up to prevent it." Her eyes were carefully on some notes she was making of what he had ordered for her patient.

As for Lindrum, he only shot her a swift, uneasy glance. He should have made some scathing reply, but, though a nurse, Mrs. Kingsmill was also a doctor's daughter, and his sister's friend.

"Why not take her out for a spin this afternoon?" she suggested.

He shook his head. "Too much to do; besides, Craig wants me to drop a very important letter in the letterbox as I pass Pont Street. A letter to a cousin of his."

"Well, why not take Countess Jura? Pont Street means Sloane Street, which in its turn means Brompton Road, which in its turn means shopping, which in its turn means Countess Jura." Mrs. Kingsmill was laughing a little now under her breath, but her tone was insistent.

For a second he hesitated then he shook his head firmly. "No, no!" And, so saying, he went slowly down the stairs.

In the lounge hall below, the figure of a woman could be seen standing. The figure of a young woman. A fact which cost the figure's owner, Lady Craig, resolute massage, iron dieting, and much expense. Vaguely Lindrum wondered, as he had often done before, why she went to so much trouble, for, as she turned her face toward him, its years showed as fifty in some magical way, in spite of smoothed skin and red-brown hair. She was very nearly an ugly woman, but she looked as though she had plenty of that quality we call character.

"Is anything the matter, Robert?" she asked quickly. She had known Lindrum as a tow-headed baby. "You're not really anxious about him, are you?"

"Yes, I am, this morning," he said gravely. "No remedies of mine seem to help him for more than a day or two. That was a bad relapse he had last week, and it looks to me as if it might be about to repeat itself."

"You don't think he is going to die, do you?" She spoke in hushed tones. Her eyes, cool and emotionless, were fixed on him.

"Of course he isn't!" he almost snapped. "Why should he?"

"Jura fears the worst," she said quietly. "I don't know why—but I think she is nerving herself to lose him." This time her eyes were on the floor.

"There's no reason whatever why he shouldn't recover—none!" Lindrum spoke forcefully.

"That's good news." She gave him one of her meaningless smiles. "Jura is over-anxious, doubtless. Just as we all are."

But it struck him that her whole manner was much more indifferent than it had been when Ronald Craig first fell ill. Then, her concern had been undeniable and very great. Yet at first his illness had only seemed to be a passing chill.

"I think you ought to press the arsenic in his tonic." She spoke idly, with no imperative in her voice. Emily Craig had traveled much in Africa, and like many another, she had found that arsenic often helped where quinine was of little use.

II

Lindrum knew this, and murmured some vague assent. He said good-by and walked out to his car. He was just climbing in, when he thought of Craig's letter. For a second he could not recollect what he had done with it. Then he remembered laying it down on the landing table while he made some alteration in the nurse's diet list. He ran up the stairs in search of it. The door of the nurse's bedroom was open. She was standing in the room, the letter was in her hand. Catching sight of the doctor she came out quickly, holding it up.

"You dropped this, didn't you? Countess Jura found it lying on the landing. I thought I saw you lay it down a moment ago, and was just going to run after you with it."

He thanked her, took it, and hurried down to his car again. He drove as if he were practising to break the record—or his neck. At his gate he stopped, left the machine to look after itself, and leaning his arms on the top of his gate, stood looking at the building as though he had never seen it before.

It was a pretty house. Roses surrounded it, roses climbed up on it, virginia creeper covered it from end to end. Yes, it was charming. But, could it find favor in the eyes of Countess Jura? Though she did not remember them, the houses where she had lived as a baby—before 1917—had been palaces. Alexandra Alexandrowna, penniless though she was, was a cousin of the Kalkoffs, kin by marriage to the dead tsar himself. She was about to make a very wealthy marriage, though not a smart one. She was no wife for a doctor. Even if—even supposing...

The nurse's words stung him afresh. They were only a repetition, aloud, and by an independent witness—for what motive could bias her?—of what he had not dared to tell himself explicitly, but what he had known since he first saw them together, and that was that the Russian girl did not care for Ronald Craig. That she really disliked him. But that, in spite of that dislike, she was going to marry him. Unless something intervened...Lindrum tried to whip up some scorn for the girl who was prepared to sell herself with her eyes open. Those enigmatic long eyes of amber seen through smoke. But Lindrum could not find any scorn in his heart for Jura. He knew that with her lack of training, her fragile build, she could no more support herself than can a young canary turned out of its gilded cage. He told himself that generations of cage-birds had gone to her making, and that she must find another cage or die. And a gilded cage, of course...yet Lindrum felt that in her heart of hearts, in the center of that wayward, difficult-to-understand complexity that was Alexandra Ivanoff, she really cared for him—Bob Lindrum.

The nurse could have told him that Jura no more loved him than she did Ronald Craig, or at best only substituted a tepid liking for an active dislike. Lindrum would not have believed her. He felt sure that if Jura were free, she would choose him. But she was not free.

He flung the gate open, and stormed into the morning room. Lunch was laid in the deep bay window that opened onto the lawn. Two beds of roses almost encircled it. In the space between, across the grass, a clump of delphiniums seemed like a part of the deep-blue sky above them. On the dull ebony table, sprays of Dorothy Perkins, in a bowl of the same soft azure, nodded their heads to their luckier sisters outside. The mats were blue and green raffia. The cream china was flecked with blue. A little silver, a little glass, all very ordinary but brightly shining, made up a most attractive picture. Lindrum eyed it moodily. The ebony of the table was painted deal. The silver was plate; the glass, just glass. Craig was said to have bought some of the imperial china for his bride to be...

His sister came in. Agatha Lindrum was a handsome girl, but with something rather bitter in her face. Good at every game; keen rider to hounds, first-class dancer, she was intensely interested in the women's work of the village. With her many interests, she seemed to radiate vitality, and yet it struck the doctor that she looked very tired. For the first time he noticed that she had artificially touched up cheeks that used to be as fresh as a rose. Well, small wonder if she felt cabined. And, unfortunately, there was now no leaving for her. Drivng her mother in town, she had had a bad smash, and since then Mrs. Lindrum walked only with the help of a stick and a supporting arm. Agatha had wasted no words in self-reproach; she took her mother home when she was able to be moved, and was her constant companion.

"If I put up a bottle for Craig, Agatha, will you see about it at once? I'm trying something different."

"I'll take it up myself. The boy has started on his rounds."

She went to put her things on. Or, rather, she started toward the door. Something heavy moved outside. A stick could be heard thumping along. Mrs. Lindrum came in, leaning heavily on the arm of the servant, her cane in her other hand. She was a handsome woman, with a rather imperious air. Catching her eye, one did not wonder at the signs of good housekeeping on every side. It was a most autocratic eye.

"Dearest, you should have waited for me!" her daughter scolded her affectionately, as she hurried off.

"Is anything wrong?" Mrs. Lindrum asked, turning to her son. He was surprised at the question.

"Wrong? With Agatha? Not that I know of. Why?"

"She looked—worried, I thought." The reply was guarded.

"You're thinking of me," he retorted. "I look worried. I am worried. Over Craig."

"Is he very ill? You don't think he's going to die, do you? I mean—I mean—" She stopped with an expression that showed that she had not meant to phrase her thought in just those words.

"Certainly not!" her son said with energy. "Only his illness is a bit baffling." This was the third time this morning that the question of Craig's death had been mentioned. And the third time that in refuting the suggestion as absurd, he had had a vague, most uncomfortable feeling that the vehemence of his denial gave no pleasure. Mrs. Lindrum took his arm and grasped her stick.

"I'll sit out in the garden for a while," she murmured, and he placed her carefully in her favorite deck-chair.

In about ten minutes he hurried back to the morning room, where Agatha sat reading the paper.

"Looking for a situation?" he asked, for that was the page before her. She only smiled and took the-bottle from him.

"Now then, I'm off," he murmured, half to himself. "I'll lunch at my club. Where's that letter I promised Craig to drop in Houghton's box?" He saw it as he spoke lying on top of his coat, where he had placed it so as to be sure and catch his eye.

"It seems to've come pretty well unstuck." Reaching for a bottle of gum, he gave a dexterous sweep of the brush under the loosening flap, then he hurried off.