Juggernaut Part 43

At last, about four o'clock, she set out in a taxi-cab to execute a number of small commissions for Miss Clifford, at whose desire she was to remain on in the house till after the funeral. The other nurse had already gone. Her errands finished, she stopped the taxi at a small chemist's shop which she had noticed before, not the one usually patronised by the Cliffords, but a smaller one about a mile away. It was neat and old-fashioned in appearance, with a row of majolica jars in the window. She went in briskly, resolved to show no nervousness and to state her request with perfect sang-froid. At any cost she must avoid the suspicion of anything out of the ordinary.

"What can I do for you, mademoiselle?"

She was relieved to find the a.s.sistant spoke English, it made it easier to explain what she wanted done. The man was a blond, pink-skinned Frenchman with half his face hidden by a curly fair beard. He eyed her indifferently while she undid the tissue-paper wrappings of her little parcel and displayed the hypodermic needle.

"I wonder if you could get this a.n.a.lysed for me?" she said, looking straight into his eyes with great frankness of manner. "You see there is a tiny drop of the stuff left. The doctor I am working with has reason to believe the mixture may not be quite the same he is accustomed to using."

She had prepared her speech carefully, but now she trembled within for fear it had not sounded plausible. However, the blond young man took the instrument and turned it about, examining it casually enough.

"Ah, yes, I understand. We do not ourselves make these a.n.a.lyses, mademoiselle, but we can of course have it done for you."

"How long will it take?"

He shrugged his shoulders expressively.

"That I cannot tell you, but I will try to get it for you soon as possible. What is your address?"

She told him, being careful to give her own name, not the doctor's.

Then she thought that it might not be wise to have the report sent to the house at all. One never knew.

"If you can give me some idea of when it will be done, I will call for it myself."

"Shall we say, then, five o'clock to-morrow afternoon, mademoiselle?

Although, of course, I cannot promise."

With a sigh of relief to have this particular ordeal safely over, she walked out of the shop door--and straight into the arms of Captain Holliday! She pulled herself up abruptly, almost speechless with astonishment.

"Why--you!" was all she could e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e.

The sudden encounter with him, when she had confidently believed him miles away, took the wind out of her sails, upsetting her calculations completely. She continued to stare at him so stupidly that she could see he was beginning to wonder what was the matter. His car, travel-stained and looking as though it had seen hard service, stood close to the curb. He had been in the act of entering a tobacconist's next door to the chemist's shop.

"I'm not quite a ghost," he informed her with a short laugh, "although I admit I feel rather like one."

He paused uncertainly, rubbing his hand over a day's growth of beard.

"But I--we--thought you'd gone to South America," she blurted out, then was sorry she had said it. "That is, we saw it in the Paris paper."

"Not yet; my boat sails in a few days. As a matter of fact"--here he shifted his gaze and glanced about in every direction except at her--"I felt I ought to come back here for the funeral, even though it made a bit of a rush. Old friend of the family and all that."

"Funeral!"

She could not keep her amazement out of her voice.

"But I don't understand. How did you find out...."

She broke off, colouring up to the edge of her nurse's veil. To tell the truth, she could not see how, since Sir Charles only died at four o'clock this morning, Holliday had received the news in time to be here in Cannes now, by car, too, all the way from Paris. It seemed incredible; if he had flown he couldn't have done it.

He shot her a shrewd glance, surmising her reason for being astonished.

"How did I find out Sir Charles was dead? I didn't, at least, not till a little while ago when I arrived in Cannes and rang up the house. But I knew he wasn't expected to live more than a day or two. You see, I've been in communication with--Chalmers more or less during the past few days. I asked him to keep me posted in case the old man got worse or anything. Yesterday he telephoned me that there was absolutely no hope. I hopped into the car and burnt up the road a bit."

He cast an approving glance at his somewhat battered Fiat.

"Fourteen hours from door to door," he remarked with satisfaction. "I didn't believe she could do it. By the way, I hear the funeral is arranged for the day after to-morrow. Is that right?"

"I believe so."

"I needn't have broken my neck to get here, after all. Still, there may be something I can do for the family, as I hear Clifford is on the sick list.... Is Sartorius still at the house?"

She replied that he was and, bidding a hasty good-bye, got into her waiting taxi. Once alone, the thoughts stirred up by the young man's unexpected appearance on the scene buzzed turbulently inside her brain.

She could not get over the surprise of seeing him, nor could she help remarking how remarkably jovial and carefree he appeared, in spite of his lowered voice and studious air of reverence when speaking of the dead man. Moreover, there seemed to her something almost indecent in the haste with which he had arrived on the spot. It had less the appearance of solicitude for the sorrowing relatives than the eagerness of a vulture swooping down upon a good square meal it had long been hoping for. Had Chalmers really telephoned him? Somehow she could not believe it, apart from Holliday's very slight hesitation before p.r.o.nouncing the butler's name. Whoever it was who gave the information must have been quite confident of Sir Charles's death, had indeed timed it with extraordinary accuracy--or so it seemed to her somewhat stimulated imagination.

Another disturbing idea now occurred to her. Would Holliday by any chance mention to the doctor that he had run into her coming out of a chemist's shop? It did not seem at all likely, and, of course, if her suspicions were wrong and she was doing the doctor a gross injustice, then the information would mean nothing at all. Still, if she was not mistaken...

"Oh, I must be mistaken!" she exclaimed vehemently in the seclusion of her taxi. "It is utterly absurd! I have made up the whole story out of whole cloth. In all that household no one but me has a thought of anything wrong. How ashamed I should be if they knew!"

Still, when on arriving at the house Chalmers opened the door for her, she could not resist saying to him:

"Chalmers, I ran into Captain Holliday in the town--such a surprise.

He's hurried back to be here for Sir Charles's funeral. He says you telephoned him yesterday that Sir Charles was sinking very fast."

There was no mistaking the blank look on the old butler's face.

"Me telephone the Captain, miss? Oh, you must have misunderstood him!

I never even knew where he was stopping in Paris, miss."

So it was Lady Clifford herself who had done it! She felt sure on that point. Not that it meant anything in itself. Yet all the rest of that day and the next as well Esther found herself watching faces covertly, most of all the doctor's. In the midst of all the subdued but busy preparations for the funeral--undertakers coming and going, messengers with flowers and telegrams, strangers arriving on this errand and that--she was acutely aware of the heavy, silent man who, without doing anything in particular, gave her the almost morbid impression of dominating the scene. As an actual fact he almost effaced himself, but to her excited fancy he was omnipresent, overpowering. She thought of him now not so much as a python as in the form of a huge bloated spider in the middle of an invisible web, spinning, watching, closing in. She was ready to believe he was always watching her, spying on her movements, reading her secret thoughts. There were moments when she had a wild desire to scream aloud, so tense had her nerves become with the strain put upon them.

Then common sense came to the rescue, she realised the calm normality of the household life about her and, with an effort, was able to pull herself together. She had not long to wait, she told herself, before knowing the truth. Until then, she must remain perfectly cool.

At five o'clock in the afternoon she managed to slip out of the house and hasten to the chemist's shop, where a disappointment awaited her.

"I am extremely sorry, mademoiselle," the blond a.s.sistant made apology, "but the report has not yet come in. I am afraid now we shall not get it before to-morrow."

CHAPTER XXVI

Twenty-four hours after this Esther slammed down the lid of her steamer trunk and sat upon it. If her breath came quickly it was less from her exertions than from the stinging memory of her curt dismissal half an hour agone. Whenever her thoughts recurred to it her eyes flashed and her lips tightened into a thin line. It was the second time since she had entered this house that she had been extremely angry, although perhaps in the present instance it might be foolish of her to be so sensitive. She knew she ought to consider the source of the affront, yet all she could think of was the fact that never before had she been treated with such scant courtesy.

The funeral was over. The family, including the doctor, the old butler and herself, as well as Captain Holliday, had followed the body to its interment in the British Cemetery, and had then returned to the house for a late lunch. Immediately after this Miss Clifford, in the presence of Lady Clifford, had taken her hand very simply and said, "Thank goodness, my dear, you don't have to leave us at once. I am afraid now my poor nephew is going to want looking after, and it will be such a comfort having you." This had touched and pleased Esther, who had nodded understandingly, more than glad to be of use. She recalled later that Lady Clifford had not spoken, but at the time she had not thought of it. As far as Esther was concerned, it was in no way a question of money, she would have been delighted to remain as a friend as long as the family needed her. She felt decidedly troubled about Roger. He still refused to give up, but his temperature rose regularly each afternoon towards nightfall--not very high, yet high enough to cause alarm. He undoubtedly had "walking typhoid," which, though apparently mild, had sometimes disastrous results. She wanted to have a word with him about himself, but there was no opportunity.

He had disappeared directly after lunch, she suspected because he resented the presence of Holliday. Thinking she was sure to see him later in the day, she busied herself in a variety of ways, doing all she could to be useful.

About half-past four she went to her own room to put herself tidy for tea. As she was in the act of brushing her hair before the mirror, Lady Clifford's maid, Aline, entered after a perfunctory knock and informed her briefly that her ladyship wished to speak with her in the boudoir.

"Certainly, I'll come at once," she replied, laying down the brush, and not altogether liking the sidelong glance the woman bestowed upon her out of her close-set eyes, nor the way she lingered unnecessarily inside the door.