Читать книгу Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 7

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Aggie was really frightfully upset. Aggie is rather emotional at any time, and although she herself is a Methodist, her mother's only sister had been a believer in Spiritualism. (They dug her up ten years after she died, to make room for somebody else, and Aggie's mother said her hair had grown to be fully ten feet long, and was curly, whereas in life it had always been straight. We may sneer at Spiritualism all we want, but things like that are hard to account for.)

Well, of course, Aggie declared that no human hand had strung poor old Johnson to the chandelier by a roller towel around his neck, and although Tish ridiculed the idea, she had to admit that the fourth dimension had never been accounted for, and that table levitation was an accepted fact, and even known to the ancient.

We sat there gloomily enough while Miss Lewis fixed Tish's hair and massaged her knee. In the middle of the massage Tommy Andrews came in, whistling.

"Morning, Aunt Tish," he said. "Morning, Miss Aggie, morning. Miss Lizzie. How's the knee? Looks as handsome as ever."

"She's been walking on it," said Miss Lewis sourly, and giving the knee an extra jab.

Tommy gave Tish a ferocious frown over his glasses.

"Humph!" he said. "I told you to keep off it! Miss Lewis, if she is obstreperous again, just tie her down with a half-dozen roller towels."

"Roller towels!" Tish ejaculated. "Why, it was a roller towel that—that—"

"So you said," Aggie said somberly, and we stared at each other, we hardly knew why.

Tish told Tommy the whole story as he strapped her knee with adhesive plaster. He hadn't heard it, and he was as much puzzled as we were. It was Aggie who remarked afterward how his face changed when Tish mentioned Miss Blake.

"Blake!" he said, glancing up quickly, "not the little nurse with the dark hair?"

"Yes," Tish said.

"Damn!" said Tonuny. "To have left her alone, like that!" And to Miss Lewis: "Is she ill to-day?''

"She's in bed, but she's not sleeping," said Miss Lewis, with more feeling than I'd have expected. "I was going to ask you if you would see her. Doctor. Since the shake-up yesterday, we have no medical internes, and the surgical side is full up."

"She—she didn't ask for me!" said Tommy, with his brown eyes kindling. But Miss Lewis shook her head.

"She's hardly spoken at all. She just lies there with her eyes wide open and her face white, watching the door. An hour ago one of the nurses pushed it open quietly, for fear she was asleep. Miss Blake lay and watched it moving, and when Linda—Miss Smith went in, she fainted again."

Tommy took a turn up and down the room. "She's had a profound shock," he said. "I'm not afraid of it, unless—" He stopped at the window and stood looking out.

"Unless what?" said Tish, but he didn't answer. Instead, he stalked over and rang the bell.

I'll have the hall nurse relieve you. Miss Lewis," he said. "We can't leave my aunt alone, and somebody must see to Miss Blake. There's some natural explanation for what happened last night, and we must find it and tell her."

Aggie began to tell about the aunt with the hair, but before she had even buried her, the door opened and Miss Blake herself came in.

"Did you ring?" she asked. She was dead white, lips and all, with deep circles around her eyes, but her step was brisk and her voice cheerful. As Tish said, if you could only have heard her and not seen her, nobody would have believed what had happened.

Tommy gave her one look, and hauled a chair forward.

"Sit down," he ordered. "You are not fit to be on duty."

"Thank you, but—I am all right again," she said, hesitating.

"Please sit down," said Tommy, with a note in his voice which I never heard him use to Tish. And she took the chair, glancing around at all three of us and then at him.

"Miss Blake," he said, "I have decided to become your medical adviser!"

"Thanks very much!" she said, with the ghost of a smile.

"On one condition," he went off, polishing his glasses very hard with his handkerchief. 'Tfou will have to obey orders."

"That's the first lesson in the training school," she assented, the smile deepening. "Always obey the doctor's orders."

"Stuff!" said Tommy sternly. "If I order you to bed this minute, you'll not go! The trouble is. Aunt Tish and Honorary Aunts Lizzie and Aggie," he said, addressing us each in turn, "the trouble is that in a hospital medicine is a drug on the market. It's too accessible. So are doctors. They're always on tap, like city water, plentiful and free and therefore subject, like the said water, to the scorn and contumely of the beneficiaries."

"Indeed, Doctor," Miss Blake began, but he interrupted her.

"Now, Miss Blake," he said, "at your earnest solicitation I am about to undertake your case, and the first condition is—"

"Obedience?" She shot a glance at him from under her long, dark lashes, and Aggie raised her eyebrows across the bed at me.

"Exactly," he said. "The three aunts, actual and honorary, are witnesses. You have promised obedience. The first condition is— you are to leave the hospital immediately and go to a place I know just out of town, a nice place, with a dog and kittens—no. Aunt Tish, not a cat and kittens, a—"

But Miss Blake stood up suddenly, she was paler than before.

"Not that," she said almost wildly.

Tommy came over and put his hand on her shoulder. "We can dispose of the animals," he said gently. "Can't you see yourself, little girl, that you are about at the end of your string? Quiet nights, sleep, fresh milk—you won't know yourself in a week."

"I can not go," she said, and stood looking straight ahead with such misery in her face that Aggie's eyes filled up.

"You can take your vacation," Tommy persisted, gently, "I'll take you out myself in my machine."

"I don't want to go. Doctor; I—I can't be spared just now. Don't send me away! Don't!"

She began to cry, wildly, hysterically, with her shoulders quivering and her whole body tense. I was considerably upset, and Tommy looked dumbfounded. After all, it was Miss Lewis who knew what to do. She is a large woman, and she simply took the little nurse into her arms and petted her into quiet. Finally, she coaxed her into the hall, and as the door closed behind them, the four of us sat' silent.

Aggie was sniveling, and wiping her eyes, and Tish turned on her in a rage.

"What in the name of sense are you bleating, about?" she demanded.

"The child's in trouble,"said Aggie. "I—I never could see anybody cry, and you know it, Tish,"

"I know something else, too," said Tish grimly, sliding her feet out of bed carefully; and reaching for her cane. 'That young woman knows more than she's telling. Tommy Andrews.' We're not through with this yet."

Now Tommy will always have his joke with Tish, and they differ on a good many subjects, politics, for one thing, and religion. Tommy not believing very much in a future existence, and maintaining that no medical man ought to—it made them more saving of life in this. But he has a great respect for Tish's opinion.

"You may be right," he said. "There must be some reason—, but whatever it is—it's not to her discredit. I'll swear to that."

"Listen to the boy!" Tish sneered, picking up the traveling clock and putting it back on the bedside table again. "That's what a pretty face will do. Suppose it had been Lewis, who stood there, crying into a starched apron and saying she couldn't leave—don't, don't ask her?"

"Why should she leave when she has you, dear Aunt Letitia?" asked Tommy, and Tish reached for the clock again.

Well, we talked the thing over, but we couldn't come to any conclusion. There didn't seem to be any matter of doubt that Johnson, having died peaceably and in order, had been carried to the mortuary and laid on the table, there to await the final preparations for burial. And the fact was incontestable that shortly after, the said Johnson, as Tommy put it, was hanging by the neck to the chandelier in a room fifty feet away and down eight steps. We all agreed up to that point. As Tommy said, the Question then became simply, did he do it himself or was it done for him?

Aggie was confident that he had done it himself.

"Why not?" she demanded. "Isn't it the constant endeavor of the people who have—passed over, to come back and prove their continued existence on a spirit plane? Shall I ever forget that the third night after Mr. Wiggins died—" Aggie was once engaged to a roofer, who passed over' by falling off a roof—"can I ever forget that a light like a flame of a candle rose in one comer of the bedroom, crossed the ceiling and disappeared in my sewing basket, where I kept Mr. Wiggins' photograph? Why should not Mr. Johnson, before deserting the earth plane for the spirit world, have come back and proved his continued existence? Why?''

Tommy lighted a cigarette and puffed at it. "Well," he said, "I should call it indecent of him if he did, and bad taste, too. Maybe he didn't think much of his body, bat it had lasted pretty well and carried him around a good many years. And to have his spirit cast off its outer garment and hang it to a chandelier— it was heartless! Heartless!"