Mrs. Balfame Part 5

"All right. Go ahead." His accents breathed profound relief, and although her brain was working at lightning speed, and her eyes were but a pale bar of light, she curled her lip scornfully at the childishness of man, as she hung up the receiver.

She made the gla.s.s of lemonade, added the usual allowance of aromatic spirits of ammonia and bromide--a bottle of each was kept in the sideboard ready for instant use--then ran upstairs and returned with the colourless liquid she had purloined from Dr. Anna's cupboard.

Her scientific friend had remarked that one drop would suffice, but being a mere female herself she doubled the dose to make sure; and then set the gla.s.s conspicuously in the middle of the table. The half opened can of sardines and the plate of bread were quite forgotten, and once more she ran upstairs, this time to pack his useless clothes.

She performed this wifely office with efficiency, forgetting nothing, not even the hair tonic he was administering to a spreading bald spot, a bottle of digestive tablets, a pair of the brown kid gloves he affected when dressed up, and a volume of detective fiction. Then she wrote a minute description of the newest fashion in hand bags and pinned it to his dinner jacket. The suitcase was an alibi in itself.

When she had packed it and strapped it and carried it down to the dining-room, returned to her room and locked the door, she realised that she had prolonged these commonplace duties in behalf of her nerves.

Those well-disciplined rebels of the human system were by no means driven to cover, and this annoyed her excessively.

She had no fear of not rising to precisely the proper pitch when she heard her husband fall dead in the dining-room, for she always had risen automatically to every occasion for which she was in any measure prepared, and to many that had caught her unaware. It was the ordeal of waiting for the climax that made her nerves jeer at her will, and she found that a series of pictures was marching monotonously through her mind, again, and again, and yet again: with that interior vision she saw her husband walk unsteadily up the street, swing open the gate, slam it defiantly, insert his latch-key; she saw his eye drawn to the light in the dining-room at the end of the dark hall, saw him drink the lemonade, drop to the floor with a fall that shook the house; she saw herself running down, calling out his name, shattering the gla.s.s on the floor, then running distractedly across the street to the Gifnings'--and again and still again.

She had been pacing the room. It occurred to her that she could vary the monotony by watching for him, and she put out her light and drew aside the sash curtain. In a moment she caught her breath.

Her room was on a corner of the house and commanded not only the front walk leading down to Elsinore Avenue, but the grounds on the left. In these grounds was a large grove of ancient maples, where, dressed in white, she pa.s.sed many pleasant hours in summer with a book or her friends. The trees, with their low thick branches still laden with leaves, cast a heavy shade, but her gaze, moving unconsciously from the empty street, suddenly saw a black and moving shadow in that black and almost solid ma.s.s of shadows.

She watched intently. A figure undoubtedly was moving from tree to tree, as if selecting a point of vantage, or restless from one of several conceivable causes.

Could it be her husband, summoning his courage to enter and face her?

She had known him in that mood. But she dismissed the suggestion. He had inferred from her voice that she was both weary and placated, and he was far more likely to come swaggering down the avenue singing one of his favourite tunes; he fancied his voice.

Frieda never returned before midnight, and then, although she entered by the rear hall door and stole quietly up the back stairs, she would be quite without shame if confronted.

Therefore, it must be a burglar.

There could not have been a more welcome distraction. Mrs. Balfame was cool and alert at once. As an antidote to rebellious nerves awaiting the consummation of an unlawful act, a burglar may be recommended to the most amateurish a.s.sa.s.sin.

Mrs. Balfame put on her heavy automobile coat, wrapped her head and face in a dark veil, transferred her pistol from the table drawer to a pocket, and went softly down the stairs. She left the house by the kitchen door, and, after edging round the corner stood still until her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Then, once, more, she saw that moving shadow.

She dared not risk crossing the lawn directly from the house to the grove, but made a long detour at the back, keeping on the gra.s.s, however, that her footsteps should make no noise.

A moment or two and she was within the grove. She saw the shadow detach itself again, but it was impossible to determine its size or s.e.x, although she inferred from its hard laboured breathing that the potential thief was a man.

He appeared to be making craftily for the house, no doubt with the intention of opening one of the lower windows; and she stalked him with a newly awakened instinct, her nostrils expanding. The original resolve to kill her husband had induced no excitement at all; even Dwight Rush's love-making had thrilled her but faintly; but this adventure in the night, stalking a house-breaker, presently to confront him with the command to raise his hands, cast a momentary light upon the emotional moments experienced by the highly organised.

Suddenly she heard her husband's voice. He was approaching Elsinore Avenue from one of the nearby streets, and he was singing, with physiological interruptions, "Tipperary," a song he had cultivated of late to annoy his political rival, an American of German birth and terrific German sympathies. He was walking quickly, as top-heavy men sometimes will.

She drew back and crouched. To make her presence known would be to turn over the burglar to her husband and detain the essential victim from the dining-room table.

She saw the shadow dodge behind a tree. Balfame appeared almost abruptly in the light shed by the street lamp in front of his gate; and then it seemed to her that she had held her breath for a lifetime before her ears were stunned by a sharp report, her eyes blinked at a spurt of fire, before she heard David Balfame give a curious sound, half moan, half hiccough, saw him clutch at the gate, then sink to the ground.

She was hardly conscious of running, far more conscious that some one else was running--through the orchard and toward the back fence.

Hours later, it seemed to her, she was in the kitchen closing the door behind her. Something curious had happened in her brain, so trained to orderly routine that it seldom prompted an erratic course.

She should have run at once to her husband, and here she was inside the house, and once more listening intently. It was the fancied sound that swung her consciousness back to its balance. She went to the front of the back stairs and called sharply:

"Frieda!"

There was no answer.

"Frieda," she called again. "Did you hear anything? I thought I heard some one trying to open the back door."

Again there was no answer.

Then, her lip curling at the idea of Frieda's return on Sat.u.r.day night at eight o'clock, she went rapidly into the dining-room, carried the gla.s.s containing the lemonade into the kitchen, rinsed it thoroughly, and put it away.

It was not until she reached her room that it occurred to her that she should have ascertained whether or not the key was on the inside of the rear hall door.

But this was merely a flitting thought; there were loud and excited voices down by the gate. In an instant she had hung up her automobile cloak and veil, changed her dress for a wrapper, let down her hair and thrown open the window.

"What is the matter?" Her tone was peremptory but apprehensive.

"Matter enough!" John Gifning's voice was rough and broken. "Don't come out here. Mean to say you didn't hear a shot?"

Two or three men were running about nearer the house. One paused under her window, and looked up, waving his hand vaguely.

"Shot? Shot? I heard--so many tires explode--What do you mean? What is it?--Who--"

"Here's the coroner!" cried one of the group at the gate.

"Coroner?"

She ran down stairs, threw open the front door and went as swiftly toward the gate, her hair streaming behind her.

"Who is it?" she demanded.

"Now--now." Mr. Gifning intercepted her and clasped her shoulder firmly.

"You don't want to go down there--and don't take on--"

She drew herself up haughtily. "I am not an hysterical woman. Who has been shot down at my gate?"

"Well," blurted out Gifning. "I guess you'll have to know. It's poor old Dave."

Mrs. Balfame drew herself still higher and stood quite rigid for a moment; then the coroner, one of her husband's friends, came up the path and said in a low tone to Gifning, "Take her upstairs. We're goin' to bring him in. He's gone, for a fact."

Mr. Gifning pushed her gently along the path, as the others lifted the limp body and tramped slowly behind. "You go up and have a good cry," he said. "I'll 'phone for the c.u.mmacks. I guess it was bound to come.

There's been hot times in Dobton lately--"

"Do you mean that he was deliberately murdered?"

"Looks like it, seeing that he didn't do it himself. The d.a.m.ned hound was skulking in the grove. Of course he's made off, but we'll get him all right."

Mrs. Balfame walked slowly up the stair, her head bowed, while the heavy inert ma.s.s so lately abhorrent to his wife and several politicians was laid on the sofa in the parlour whose evolutions had annoyed him.

Mr. Gifning telephoned to the dead man's brother-in-law, then for the police and the undertaker.

Mrs. Balfame sat down and awaited the inevitable bombardment of her privacy by her more intimate friends. Already shriller voices were mingling with the heavier tones down on the lawn and out in the avenue.