The Four Corners of the World Part 13

"Elsie, wake up! Don't be ridiculous!"

He slipped an arm under her waist, and lifting her, turned her towards him. The girl's head rolled upon her shoulders, and there was a look of such deadly horror upon her face that no pen could begin to describe it. Endicott caught her to his breast.

"Oh, my G.o.d," he cried hoa.r.s.ely. "My poor girl! My poor girl!"

Mrs. Tyson had come up behind him.

"It was he," she whispered, "the man who was here. He killed her!" And as Endicott turned his head towards the woman, some little thing slipped from the chair on to the floor with a tiny rattle. Endicott laid her down and picked up a small, yellow, round tablet.

"No, he didn't," he said with a queer eagerness in his voice. The tablet came from a small bottle on the table at the end of his row of chemicals. It was labelled, "Intensifier" and "Poison," and the cork was out of the bottle. The bottle had been full that afternoon. There was more than one tablet missing now.

"No, she killed herself. Those tablets are cyanide of pota.s.sium. He never touched her. Look!"

Upon the boards of the floor the wet and muddy feet of the Asiatic had written the history of his movements beyond the possibility of mistake. Here he had stood in front of her--not a step nearer. Mrs.

Tyson heard him whisper in her daughter's ear. "Oh, my dear, I thank G.o.d!" He sank upon his knees beside her. Mrs. Tyson went out, and, closing the door gently, left him with his dead.

She sat and waited in the kitchen, and after a while she heard him moving. He opened the door into the hall and came out and went slowly and heavily up the stairs into Elsie's room. In a little while he came down again and pushed open the kitchen door. He had aged by twenty years, but his face and his voice were calm.

"You found the lamp in the hall?" he said, in a low voice. "Beside the letters? Come! We must understand this. My mind will go unless I am quite sure."

She followed him into the living-room and saw that his dead daughter was no longer there. She stood aside whilst, with a patience which wrung her heart, Endicott worked out by the footprints of the intruder and this and that sure sign the events of those tragic minutes, until there was no doubt left.

"Elsie wrote eight letters," he said. "Seven are in the hall. Here is the eighth, addressed and stamped upon the table where she wrote."

The letters had to be sent down the valley to the inn early in the morning. So when she had finished, she had carried them into the hall--all of them, she thought--and she had taken the lamp to light her steps. Whilst she was in the hall, and whilst all this side of the house was in darkness Ahmed Ali had slipped into the room from the lane by the brook. There were the marks of his feet coming from the door.

"But was that possible?" Endicott argued. "I was on the hillside, the moon shining from behind my shoulders on to the house. There were no shadows. It was all as clear as day. I must have seen the man come along the little footpath to the door, for I was watching the house. I saw the light in this room disappear. Wait a moment! Yes. Just after the light went out I struck a match and lit my pipe."

He had held the match close to his face in the hollow of his hands, and had carefully lit the pipe; and after the match had burned out, the glare had remained for a few seconds in his eyes. It was during those seconds that the Asiatic had crossed the lane and darted in by the door.

The next step then became clear. Elsie, counting her letters in the hall, had discovered that she had left one behind, she knew where she had left it. She knew that the moonlight was pouring into the room; and, leaving the lamp in the hall, she had returned to fetch it. In the moonlit room she had come face to face with the Asiatic.

He had been close to the screen when she met him, and there he had stood. No doubt he had begun by asking her for opium. No doubt, too--perhaps through some unanswered cry of hers, perhaps because she never cried out at all, perhaps on account of a tense att.i.tude of terror not to be mistaken even in that vaporous silvery light--somehow, at all events, he had become aware that she was alone in the house; and his words and his demands had changed. She had backed away from him against the wall, moving the screen and the chair, and upsetting a book upon the table there. That was evident from the disorder in this corner. Upon the table stood Endicott's chemicals for developing his photographs. Endicott saw the picture with a ghastly distinctness--her hand dropping for support upon the table and touching the bottles which she had arranged herself.

"Yes, she knew that that one nearest, the first she touched was the poison, and meant--what? Safety! It's awful, but it's the truth. Very probably she screamed, poor girl. But there was no one to hear her."

The noise of the river leaping from rock pool to rock pool had drowned any sound of it which might else have reached to Endicott's ears. The scream had failed. In front of her was a wild and desperate Pathan from the stokehold of a liner. Under her hand was the cyanide of pota.s.sium. Endicott could see her furtively moving the cork from the mouth of the bottle with the fingers of one hand, whilst she stood watching in horror the man smiling at her in silence.

"Don't you feel that that is just how everything happened? Aren't you sure of it?" he asked, turning to Mrs. Tyson with a dreadful appeal in his eyes. But she could answer it honestly.

"Yes, sir, that is how it all happened," and for a moment Mr. Endicott was comforted. But immediately afterwards he sat down on a chair like a tired man and his fingers played upon the table.

"It would all be over in a few seconds," he said lamentably to Mrs. Tyson. "But, oh, those seconds! They would have been terrible--terrible with pain." His voice trailed away into silence. He sat still staring at the table. Then he raised his head towards Mrs.

Tyson, and his face was disfigured by a smile of torment. "Hard luck on a young girl, eh, Mrs. Tyson?" and the very ba.n.a.lity of the sentence made it poignant. "Everything just beginning for her--the sheer fun of life. Her beauty, and young men, and friends and dancing, the whole day a burst of music--and then suddenly--quite alone--that's so horrible--quite alone, in a minute she had to----" His voice choked and the tears began to run down his face.

"But the man?" Mrs. Tyson ventured.

"Oh, the man!" cried Endicott. "I will think of him to-morrow."

He went up the stairs walking as heavily as when he had carried his daughter in his arms; and he went again into Elsie's room. Mrs. Tyson blew out the candles upon his writing-table and arranged automatically some disordered sheets of foolscap. They were notes on the great principle of the Minimum Wage.

ONE OF THEM

ONE OF THEM

At midnight on August 4th, Poldhu flung the news out to all ships, and Anthony Strange, on the _Boulotte_, took the message in the middle of the West Bay. He carried on accordingly past Weymouth, and in the morning was confronted with the wall of great breakers off St. Alban's Head. The little boat ran towards that barrier with extraordinary swiftness. Strange put her at a gap close into the sh.o.r.e where the waves broke lower, and with a lurch and a shudder she scooped the water in over her bows and clothed herself to her bra.s.s gunwale-top in a stinging veil of salt. Never had the _Boulotte_ behaved better than she did that morning in the welter of the Race, and Strange, rejoicing to his very finger-tips, forgot the news which was bringing all the pleasure-boats, great and small, into the harbours of the south, forgot even that sinking of the heart which had troubled him throughout the night. But it was only in the Race that he knew any comfort. He dropped his anchor in Poole Harbour by mid-day, and fled through London to a house he owned on the Berkshire Downs.

There for a few days he found life possible. It was true there were sentries under the railway bridges, but the sun rose each day over a country ripe for the harvest, and the smoke curled from the chimneys of pleasant villages; and there was no sign of war. But soon the nights became a torture. For from midnight on, at intervals of five to ten minutes, the troop-trains roared along the Thames Valley towards Avonmouth, and the reproach of each of them ceased only with the morning. Strange leaned out of his window looking down the slopes where the corn in the moonlight was like a mist. Not a light showed in the railway carriages, but the sparks danced above the funnel of the engine, and the glare of the furnace burnished the leaves of the trees. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers on the road to France. Then there came a morning when, not a hundred yards from his house, he saw a string of horses in the road and others being taken from the reaping-machines in a field. Strange returned to town and dined with a Mrs. Kenway, his best friend, and to her he unburdened his soul.

"I am ashamed ... don't know how to look people in the face.... I never thought to be so utterly unhappy. I am thirty and useless. I c.u.mber the ground."

The look of surprise with which his friend turned to him hurt him like the cut of a whip. "Of course you can't help," it seemed to say. "The world is for the strong, this year and the next, and for how many more?"

Strange had to lie on his back for some hours each day, and he suffered off and on always. But that had been his lot since boyhood, and he had made light of his infirmity and grown used to it until this 4th of August. He had consoled himself with the knowledge that to the world he looked only rather delicate. He was tall, and not set apart from his fellows.

"Now," he said. "I wish that everybody knew. Yes, I wish that I showed that service was impossible. To think of us sitting here round a dinner-table--as we used to! Oh, I know what you'll think! I have the morbid sensitiveness of sick men. Perhaps you are right."

"I don't think it at all," she said, and she set herself to comfort him.

Strange went from the dinner-party to his club. There was the inevitable crowd, fighting the campaign differently, cutting up the conquered countries, or crying all was lost. Some of them had written to the papers, all were somehow swollen with importance as though the war was their private property. Strange began to take heart.

"They are not ashamed," he thought. "They speak to me as if they expected I should be here. Perhaps I am a fool."

A friend sat down by his side.

"Cross went yesterday," he said. "George Crawley was killed at Mons.

Of course you have heard."

Strange had not heard, and there rose before his eyes suddenly a picture of George Crawley, the youngest colonel in the army, standing on the kerb in St. James's Street and with uplifted face blaspheming to the skies at one o'clock in the morning because of a whiskered degenerate dandy with a frilled shirt to whom he had just before been introduced. But his friend was continuing his catalogue.

"Chalmers is training at Grantham. He's with the new army. Linton has joined the Flying Corps. Every day someone slips quietly away. G.o.d knows how many of them will come back."

Strange got up and walked out of the club.

"I shall see you to-morrow," his friend cried after him.

"No, I am going back to my boat."

"For how long?"

"Till the war's over."