Afterwards Part 46

"I say! What a tale--quite a Shakespearean ending, stage fairly littered with corpses," struck in Major Carstairs. "I wonder Tochatti didn't put the finishing touch by stabbing herself as well!"

"She did think of it, I believe," owned Chloe, "but the sound of quarrelling had brought other people on the scene, and Tochatti was of course arrested and the whole story investigated with more or less thoroughness. Being a pretty common story, however--for the Sicilians are a hot-blooded race--it was quite easy for the authorities to reconstruct the scene; and since Tochatti was innocent of any actual crime she was eventually released; only to fall ill with some affection of the brain which finally landed her in an asylum."

"An asylum!" Anstice whistled. "Yet one would have hesitated to call her insane----"

"Yes, now, but you must remember this is very many years ago. She recovered at length, and the only reminiscence of the tragedy was a marked aversion to using pen or pencil. She seemed to think that having wrought so much harm by her one attempt at letter-writing she would be wiser to avoid such things in future."

"Pity she didn't keep her resolve," commented Major Carstairs dryly; and Chloe nodded.

"Yes. We should all have been spared a good deal of trouble. Well, as you know, she entered my mother's service during her honeymoon in Italy, and was my nurse as a child. Now I come to the second half of the story.

Tochatti chose to adore me from my early youth"--she smiled faintly--"and she always bore a grudge against anyone who did not fall down and worship me too. And this peculiar att.i.tude of hers has a bearing on the affair of the letters. When Mrs. Ogden chose to quarrel with me, or at least evince a decided coldness, Tochatti's ready hatred flared up; and after the unlucky day when Mrs. Ogden cut me dead before half the county at a Flower Show, she determined to show the woman she could not be allowed to insult me with impunity."

"It certainly was a piece of unpardonable rudeness," said Major Carstairs warmly; and Chloe smiled.

"Yes--and at the moment I resented it very bitterly. But if Tochatti herself had not been there, in charge of Cherry, the matter would have dropped--and it was really unfortunate she should have seen the 'cut.'

Well, it seems that Tochatti brooded over the affair, wondering how best to get even with the person who dared to act insolently towards me."

Chloe's voice held just a tinge of mockery. "Twenty odd years of residence in England had taught her that one can't use daggers and knives with impunity, and I believe at first she was genuinely puzzled to know how to act. I suppose the thought of weapons turned her mind back to that Sicilian affair; and suddenly it flashed upon her that letters, after all, could be trusted to do a good deal of injury."

"So she wrote an anonymous letter calculated to do harm to the unlucky subject thereof?"

"Yes, and sent it to Sir Richard Wayne. Well, once having started she apparently couldn't leave off. Her venom grew, so to speak, by being fed in this manner; and she wrote one letter after another--you know her mother was English, and she was well versed in our tongue--until practically everyone in the parish knew a garbled version of Mrs.

Ogden's sordid little story."

"One moment, Chloe." Major Carstairs had a soldier's mind for detail.

"How did the woman know that story? I thought no one ever owned to having heard it?"

"No one ever did," said Chloe rather bitterly. "But the explanation is simple after all. Mrs. Ogden had, before I made my appearance on the scene, repeated the tale to another woman in the parish--the young wife of a solicitor whom she had 'taken up' with great fervour on her first arrival in Littlefield; and this woman had repeated the story to her French maid. The latter, being a stranger in England was pleased to make Tochatti's acquaintance; and one day told her the story, of course in strictest confidence. Well, the woman, the solicitor's wife, died, almost immediately after that, as the result of a motor accident; and her maid returned to her home somewhere in the valley of the Loire, without having, so far as one can conjecture, pa.s.sed on the tale to anyone else."

"Yes," said Anstice thoughtfully, as Chloe came to a stop. "Quite a simple explanation, as you say, yet one which might never have come to light."

"There is still a point puzzling me," said Carstairs meditatively. "I can understand Tochatti writing the letters, and thus seeking to injure a woman whom she considered to be the enemy of her mistress. But how did she ever bring herself to allow you to be suspected, Chloe?"

"Ah, that is where the mystery really comes in, and where, possibly, Dr.

Anstice's theory of the double personality may be considered." Chloe looked at them both rather dubiously. "I confess I can't understand that part of the story myself. Tochatti has a.s.sured me that she never for an instant dreamed I should be suspected--the slight similarity in some of the writing to some of mine was more or less accidental, though she admits she had tried to model her script on mine because she admired it ... as she admired all my poor faculties," said Chloe, with a little shrug of her shoulders. "I really believe she used my pens and paper without any idea of the harm she was doing me--in fact, if such a supposition could be entertained for a moment, I don't believe she had any very clear idea what she was doing beyond a fixed intention to work harm to the woman she detested."

"You mean that the idea of this Mrs. Ogden filled her mental horizon to the exclusion of any other thought?" It was Anstice who put the question.

"Yes. Honestly I believe she was incapable of looking, as one might say, all round the subject. You see"--Chloe hesitated, not sure how far the suggestion was permissible--"she had once been in an asylum, and possibly her brain had never worked quite normally since that tragedy on the cliffs."

"No, it is possible she was the victim of a sort of monomania," conceded Anstice. "In which case no other person would be connected in her mind with the affair save the one against whom the campaign was directed. It is a pretty lame explanation, I own, but then the workings of the human mind are so extraordinarily incomprehensible sometimes that I, for my part, have very nearly ceased being surprised at anything a man or woman may be disposed to do!"

"Tochatti tells me she grew very uneasy when things began to look really black," continued Chloe. "She had not understood when she started that letters of this kind rendered one liable to imprisonment sometimes; and she was horrified when she discovered that fact. I believe she would willingly have undone the harm she had done if it had been possible; for she couldn't help seeing, as the days went on, that I was in grave danger of incurring the penalty of her fault. Once, at least, I am sure she nerved herself to tell the whole truth----"

"Her good intentions evidently went to pave a place which shall be nameless," said Major Carstairs dryly. "After all, her affection for you seems to have been a very pinchbeck affair, Chloe, if she could calmly stand by and see you suffer for her wickedness. And for my part I don't see how you can be expected to forgive her."

For a second Chloe sat silently in her corner of the couch; and in her face were the traces of the conflicting emotions which made for a moment a battlefield of her soul.

After all Chloe Carstairs was a very human woman; and it is not in human nature to suffer a great wrong and feel no resentment against those who have inflicted that wrong. Had she been able to forgive Tochatti immediately, to condone her wickedness, to restore the woman to her old place in her esteem, Chloe had been something less--or more--than human; and that she was after all only mortal was proved by her answer to Carstairs' last speech.

"I don't think I have forgiven her--yet----" she said very quietly. "At the same time I don't care to doubt the genuineness of her affection for me. I would rather think that she turned coward at the notion of suffering punishment, and let me endure it in her place through a selfish terror which forbade her to own up and take the blame herself."

"Well--if you look at it like that----" Major Carstairs was evidently not satisfied; and Chloe, possibly feeling unable, or reluctant, to make any further excuse for Tochatti, hurried on with her tale.

"Another factor in Tochatti's determination not to suffer herself is to be found in her dread of a prison as a sort of asylum like that in which she had been confined abroad. I don't know what kind of inst.i.tution that had been, but she evidently retains to this day a very vivid recollection of the horrors she then endured; and her heart failed her at the bare thought of returning to such a frightful existence as she had then experienced. At any rate"--she suddenly abandoned her apologia--"she could not face it; and so she allowed me to take the blame; and by reiterating the fact that she could not write--a theory which the other servants held, in common with me----"

"But had you never seen her write? It seems odd, all the years she had been in your service!"

"No, I had never seen her write, for the simple reason that she never did write. It seems that the result of that fatal letter of hers had imprinted a horror of writing on her mind; and I really believe that until the day on which she penned the first anonymous letter she had never taken a pen or pencil in her hand...."

"Well, it's admitted she wrote those letters, and hoodwinked the world,"

said Carstairs briskly. "And though I confess I don't understand how she could reconcile her actions with her affection for you we will let that point pa.s.s. But now--what about those last letters? Is Dr. Anstice's supposition that she was jealous of him correct?"

"Quite." Chloe looked at Anstice rather apologetically. "You know Tochatti is of a horribly jealous disposition; and she could not bear to see Cherry growing fonder of you day by day. That unlucky accident was the crowning point, of course; and the fact that you appeared to slight her powers of looking after the child--you must forgive me for putting it like that--was too much for her. With the arrival of Nurse Trevor Tochatti seemed to lose all sense of decent behaviour; and her idea was to repeat her former experience and circularize the neighbourhood with a scandalous story which she hoped, as she has since owned to me, might succeed in driving you away."

"A very pretty plot," said Anstice quietly, "and one which deserved to succeed. But, Mrs. Carstairs, if you will allow me to repeat your husband's question--how did she learn my unhappy story?"

"I expected you to ask that," returned Chloe steadily, "and I made it my business to find out for you. Well, like the other explanation, it is very simple. While I was away"--in her new-born happiness Chloe would not distress her husband by speaking more plainly--"Tochatti took Cherry down to my old home, where my mother still lives, and of course it was only natural that she should there hear some version of the story as it affected my brother Bruce. She acknowledges she would never have connected you with the affair save for the unlucky fact that on the night you and Bruce met here he came to my room afterwards to tell me how and in what circ.u.mstances you had met before; and most unfortunately Tochatti, who was in an adjoining room, heard his explanation. She didn't think much of it at the time, but stored it up in her mind; and when, later, she wished to injure you, there was the means ready to hand."

"Like the proverbial Corsican who will carry a stone in his pocket for seven years, turn it, and carry it for another seven on the chance of being able to sling it at his enemy in the end," commented Carstairs.

"Well, thank G.o.d, the whole story is cleared up now; and the next thing to do is to set about making the matter public and seeing justice done at last."

"Quite so--and it should be easy now," concurred Anstice heartily. "With the letter you hold as evidence and the woman's full confession you should not have much trouble with the case."

Looking at Chloe as he spoke he saw a strange expression flit across her face. The next instant she rose and going across to her husband's chair stood looking down upon him with unfathomable blue eyes.

"Leo"--her voice was very low--"is it really necessary that the matter should be made public? So long as you know the truth--and Dr.

Anstice--and my dear friends Sir Richard and Iris, can't we let the subject drop? You know I don't care in the least for the opinion of the world, and it would mean so much trouble, so much raking up of things best forgotten. Couldn't we"--she hesitated--"couldn't we leave things alone, and just be thankful that _we_ know the truth at last?"

Major Carstairs looked up at his wife as she stood before him; and his voice was very gentle as he answered her.

"But, Chloe, what of Tochatti herself? She must not be allowed to go unpunished. Besides, there is another aspect of the case. You know these abominable letters have been scattered broadcast in the land, and it is only fair to Dr. Anstice that their authorship should be published and their lies refuted."

"Yes. I had forgotten that." She turned to Anstice, who had risen and was standing leaning against the mantelpiece, looking desperately uncomfortable. "Forgive me, please, Dr. Anstice! For the second time I had forgotten that you were the victim of this latest outrage of Tochatti's----"

"Mrs. Carstairs--please!" In his haste to explain himself Anstice spoke rather incoherently. "If you are willing to let this matter drop--why, so am I. For your own sake I think, while you are behaving n.o.bly, you are making a mistake--a most generous, chivalrous mistake--in not proving your entire innocence before all the world, but if you are really resolved on it, do let me make you understand that personally I am only too ready to let the whole thing slide into the oblivion it deserves!"

"My dear fellow"--Major Carstairs spoke warmly--"this is all very well, very Quixotic, very--well, what you call n.o.ble, chivalrous--but what about the moral side of the affair? Justice should be tempered with mercy, certainly; but it doesn't do to defraud justice altogether of her dues. The woman has committed a crime--I repeat it, a crime against society, against you, against my wife; and to let her go unpunished is to put a premium on wickedness; and leave both you and my wife to lie under a most undeserved, most cruel stigma."

For a moment Anstice hesitated; and before he could frame a reply Chloe spoke very quietly, yet with a decision there was no mistaking.

"Leo, I see your point of view plainly--a good deal more plainly, I think, than you see mine. Of course as a man you want your wife's name cleared; and if you insist on making the affair public, why then"--said Chloe with a little smile--"I suppose I must submit as a good wife should. But"--she was serious now--"if you knew how I dread the publicity of it all--the reports in the papers, the gossip, the talk--oh, it makes me shudder even to think of it! And if you imagine me revengeful enough to find satisfaction in the idea of Tochatti's punishment--well, I think you must have a quite mistaken notion of me after all!"

Major Carstairs hesitated, looking from his wife to Anstice in manifest perplexity.

"Well, really, Chloe, I don't know what to say. Of course you and Dr.

Anstice are the people chiefly concerned; and if you are both of you sufficiently superhuman to forego your legitimate revenge--well, I suppose it is not for me to interfere!"

"Suppose you think it over, sir." Anstice felt a sudden desire to get away, to be alone, to think over the revelation of the past half-hour.