The Paliser case Part 36

"I told you, because I am a fool. There was a clergyman and a ceremony.

Afterwards I found that the clergyman was not a clergyman and that the ceremony was a sham."

"When was that?"

"This afternoon."

"What did you do?"

"What was there for me to do? I left him."

"Where is he now?"

Ca.s.sy put down the bundle. She had no idea. But she said: "This evening we were to go to the opera. I hardly fancy he will miss it on my account." She paused and with a little catch in her voice continued: "I know it is all my fault, I ought to have known better and I shall be so unhappy if you mind. Won't you try not to?"

As she spoke, he stood up and she thought that the delayed volcano of his wrath was about to burst. To smother it, she touched him. "Of course you will mind. But I would not have been such a fool if I had not believed that everything would be so much nicer for you. Can't you see that and, if you do, can't you forgive me?"

He had moved from her to the piano; there he turned and looked. "There is nothing to forgive, Ca.s.sy. You have been a good girl always. I am sorry, of course I am sorry, but you are not to blame."

Understanding instead of maledictions! Sympathy in lieu of abuse! Such things are affecting. The tears swam to her eyes and wretchedly and yet thankfully she wept.

He did not seem to notice. In the narrow s.p.a.ce he was moving about, shifting things on the piano, displacing and replacing a score, which, finally, he let fall. He stooped for it. As he raised it, Ca.s.sy saw through her tears that his hand was shaking. He, too, may have seen it.

He left the room and she heard him pottering in the kitchen.

She wiped her eyes. Across the court was another kitchen in which were a woman and a child. Often she had seen them there, but if she had seen them elsewhere she would not have recognised them. They were but forms, the perceptions of a perceiver, and though Ca.s.sy had never read Fichte and was unacquainted with Berkeley, the idea visited her that they had no real existence, that, it might be, she had none either, that all she had endured was a dream drifting by, with nothing past which to drift.

It was her father's att.i.tude that had induced these metaphysical hysterics. She had expected that some demon within him would spring out and gibber. Instead of which he had told her, and so gently, that she was not to blame. It is words like these that bring tears swiftest. The tears had come, but the words had also sufficed to reduce the people across the way into baseless appearances, in which, for the moment, she included herself.

But now at least her father was actual. He was coming in with gla.s.ses and a bottle which he put on the table.

"You are tired," he said. "Have a little."

Seating himself, he drank and Ca.s.sy feared that if the liquor exerted the authority that liquor has, he might go back into it and exact from her details which it would revolt her to supply. In helping himself, he had poured a gla.s.s for her. She did not want it. What she wanted was bed and the blanket of long, dreamless sleep. It could not be too long. She was tired, as he had said, but more so than he knew, tired with the immense fatigue that emotions and their crises create.

She moved over to where he sat. Several minutes had gone since he spoke yet it seemed to her but the moment before.

"Yes, I am tired, but you're a good daddy and I love you."

She bent over him, went to the kitchen, got a gla.s.s of milk and a biscuit, which she carried to her room, where she opened the window and closed the door.

Long later, when she awoke, it was with the consciousness of something there, something waiting, something evil, something that had jeered and pummelled her in her sleep. But what? Then, instantly, she knew. A palace of falsehoods had tumbled about her and the lies had laughed and bruised her as they fell. They had been laughing and falling the whole night through.

The light distracted her. In the morning, because of the building opposite, her room was dark. Now it was bright. The sun had scaled the roof. A gleam looked in and told her it was noon.

How could I have slept so long? she wondered. She put some things on and opening the door smelled coffee. The poor dear! she thought, he had to make it himself.

She went on into the living-room. There her father sat. On the table before him was a paper.

Without speaking he pointed at a headline. The letters squirmed. They leaped and sprang at her. From before them she backed. But what nonsense! It was impossible. She could not believe it. Yet there it was!

Abruptly there also was something else. An electric chair, the man of all men in it!

From before the horror of that she reeled, steadied herself, looked at her father, looked without seeing him.

"G.o.d of G.o.ds! And I did it!"

XXVIII

In high red boots, wide purple breeches and a yellow mandarin jacket, Jones entered the workshop.

His appearance did not alarm him. He was invisible. Lloyd George and Clemenceau might have called. Mr. Ten Eyck Jones was not at home, sir.

If necessary he was dead. Always, while he dressed, his servant put, unseen, a tray on the workshop table and, still unseen, disappeared.

With the tray was the morning paper and the usual letters, which Jones never read. Morning in the workshop meant work. No interruptions permitted. On one occasion the house got on fire. His servant did not venture to tell him, though the firemen did. Apart from such outrages, necessarily infrequent, the only intrusion was the morning paper and the cat that talked in her sleep. The cat had many privileges, the paper had few. Sometimes it was briefly considered, more often it was not even looked at, but its great privilege consisted in being stacked.

On this morning Jones did look, but quite involuntarily, and only because a headline caught his eye. It was the same headline from before which Ca.s.sy backed. The leaping words shouted at the girl. They shouted at the novelist, a circ.u.mstance which did not prevent him from breakfasting.

The fruit, the crescents, the coffee he consumed, not as was customary, with his thoughts on his own copy, but on that which the paper supplied.

It was very colourful. At the opera, the night before, Monty Paliser had been killed.

In New York, many men are killed, but not so many are murdered and of those that are murdered, few are millionaires and fewer still have a box at the Metropolitan, where, apart from stage business, no one up to then had been done for. The case was therefore unique and, save for the a.s.sa.s.sination of Abraham Lincoln, without a parallel. In the circ.u.mstances, the leaded line of leaping words was justified.

According to the story that followed and which, Jones realised, must have reached the city editor just as the paper was going to press, an attendant, whose duty it was to visit the boxes after the performance and see what, if anything, the occupants had forgotten, had, on entering Paliser's box, found him at the back of it, unconscious, on the floor.

There were no external marks of violence, but a commandeered physician p.r.o.nounced him dead and, on examination, further p.r.o.nounced that death was due to internal hemorrhage, superinduced by heart-puncture, which itself had been caused by some instrument, presumably a stiletto.

A picturesque detail followed. The box at the right was owned by the Leroy Thompsons. The box at the left was the Harriwells'. At the late hour, an attempt to communicate with the former had failed, but over the wire, Mr. Legrand Harriwell stated that the deceased had come in during the third act, that he had spoken to Mrs. Harriwell, after which he had moved back and had either gone, or remained in the rear of the box. Mr.

Harriwell knew nothing else, he had been unaware of anything occurring, he was not in the habit of spying about and he wished it distinctly understood that he must not be mixed up in the matter, or Mrs. Harriwell either.

The dear thing! thought Jones, who saw him, a tall, thin-lipped beast of a brute, with a haw-haw manner and an arrogant air. G.o.d bless him!

But, Jones resumed to himself, voyons! The opera was Ada. Paliser came in during the third act. The house then is brilliant. But during the fourth--the duo in the crypt--it is dark. It was then that he was done for and with what is a.s.sumed to have been a stiletto.

To cut out the account, Jones turned in search of a dagger, long, thin, wicked, which, one adventurous night in Naples, he had found--just in time--in his back. On the blade was inscribed a promise, Penetrabo. Now his eyes roamed the table. He lifted the tray, lifted his copy, looked on the floor. Yet only the evening before, when Lennox was there and Ca.s.sy Cara had come, he had seen it. Since then it had gone.

The disappearance did not disturb him. Occasionally, in hunting for an object, he found it in his hand. It is somewhere, he cogently reflected and, taking a pencil, set to work.

But the muse was timorous as a chicken. The metaphor is entirely metaphorical. Jones had no faith in the wanton. He believed in regular hours, in silence and no interruptions. No intrusions of any kind. A letter was an intrusion, so also was the news of the day. These things he considered, when he did consider them, after his work was done.

Sometimes he ignored them entirely. Usually he had a bushel of letters that he had not opened, a bale of papers at which he had not looked. Of such is the life known as literary or, at any rate, such was the life led by Jones.

On this morning, his copy, ordinarily fluent enough, would not come.

Ideas fluttered away just out of reach. The sequence of a chapter had been in his head. Like the dagger, it had gone. He could not account for that disappearance, nor did he try. It would turn up again. So, ultimately, would the ousted sequence. For the latter's departure he did not try to account either. The effort was needless. He knew. An interruption had occurred. The news of the day had intruded itself upon him. A headline had entangled his thoughts.

Abandoning the pencil, he lit a cigarette. Across the room, above the bookcase, was a stretch of silk, a flight of dragons that he had got in Rangoon. Above the silk was an ivory mask, the spoil of a sarcophagus, which he had found in Seville. He looked at them. The dragons fled on, the mask fell asleep. Something else took their place.

On the wall was the scene at the opera.

In the golden gloom of the darkened house, it showed Paliser, sitting back in his box, presumably enjoying the _Terra addio_, for which Caruso had, as usual, been saving himself. Without, in the corridor, a figure furtively peering at the names on the doors. Then the voice of the soprano blending with that of the tenor and, during the divine duo, the door of the box opening, letting in a thread of light; Paliser turning to look and beholding that figure and a hand which, instantly descending, deepened the gloom forever.