The Wishing Moon Part 36

Neil broke through the trees and stood and looked at it, straight ahead, seen through the frame of the trellised entrance to the garden, upstanding and ugly and arrogant.

"You've beat me," he said to the Colonel's house. "You've beat me; you and him. I hate you!"

His voice had a hollow sound in the empty garden. Garden and lawn and house had the same look that the whole deserted town had caught to-day; the look of suddenly empty rooms where much life has been, a breathless strangeness that holds echoes of what has happened there, and even hints of what is to happen; haunted rooms. It is not best to linger there.

Neil turned uneasily toward the path again.

He turned, then he turned back, stood for a tense minute listening, then broke through the rose garden and began to run across the lawn. Very faint and small, so that he could not tell whether it was in a man's voice or a woman's, but echoing clearly across the deserted garden, he had heard a scream from the house.

It came from the house somewhere, though as Neil ran toward it the house still looked tenantless. The veranda was without its usual gay litter of cushions and books and serving trays. At the long windows that opened on it all the curtains were close drawn--or at all but one.

As Neil reached the house he saw that the middle window was thrown high and the long, pale-coloured curtain was dragged from its rod and dangling over the sill. Just then he heard a second scream from the house. It was so choked and faint that he barely heard it. Neil ran up the steps and slipped through the open window into the Everards'

library.

Little light came through the curtained windows. The green room, spa.r.s.ely scattered with furniture in summer covers of light chintz that glimmered pale and forbidding, looked twice its unfriendly length in the gloom. There was a heavy, dead scent of too many flowers in the air. On a table across the room a bowl of hothouse hyacinths, just overturned, crushed the flowers with its weight and dripped water into the sodden rug.

Neil, at the window looking uncertainly into the half-dark room, saw the bowl and the white ma.s.s of crushed flowers, and then something else, something that shifted and stirred in a far corner of the room. He saw it dimly at first, a dark, struggling group. There were two men in it.

One was a man who had screamed, but he was not screaming now. It would hardly have been convenient for him to scream, for the other, the smaller and slighter man of the two, was clutching him by the throat, gripping it with a hand that he could not shake off as the two figures swayed back and forth.

"Who's there?" Neil cried.

n.o.body answered him. n.o.body needed to, for just then the two men who seemed to be fighting swung into the narrow strip of light before the uncurtained window and he could see their faces. He could see, too, that they were not fighting now, though they had seemed to be. The bigger man was choked into submission already. No sound came from him and he hung limp and still in the little man's hold. Just in the centre of the strip of light the little man relaxed his grip, and let him fall. He dropped to the floor in a limp, untidy looking heap, and lay still there, with the light full on his face, closed eyes and grinning mouth. The man was Colonel Everard, the man who stood over him was Charlie Brady.

As Neil looked Brady dropped on his knees beside the Colonel, felt for his heart, and found it. He knelt there, motionless, holding his hand pressed over it and peering intently into his face. Presently he got to his feet deliberately, gave a deep sigh of entire content with himself, and looked about him. Then and not until then he saw Neil. He saw him without surprise, if without much pleasure, it appeared.

"You're late," he remarked.

"You drunken fool," Neil began furiously, then stopped, staring at his cousin. Whatever the meaning of this exhibition was, Charlie was not drunk. The excitement that possessed him was excitement of some other kind. It possessed him entirely, though it was under control for the moment. His muscles twitched with it. His shoulders shifted restlessly.

His hands closed and unclosed. His eyes were strangely lit, and there was an absent, exalted look about them. Whatever the excitement, it was strong--stronger than Charlie. Neil, his eyes now used to the half-light, could see no weapon in the room, dropped on the floor or discarded. Mr. Brady, normally a coward in his cups and out of them, had attacked his enemy with his bare hands.

"Charlie, what's got you?" Neil said. "What's come to you?"

"What's come to him, there?" Charlie said, in a voice that was changed, too, and was as remote and as strange as his eyes, a low voice, with the deceptive, terrible calm of gathering hysteria about it.

"Look what's come to him," the voice went on. "Don't he deserve it, and worse? How did I find him to-day when I broke in through the window there? At his old tricks again. There was a woman with him in the library there, when he came out to me. He locked the door. She's there now. Neil, you'd better get away from here. I don't know what you're doing here, but you'd better go, and go quick."

He had given this advice indifferently. He made his next observation indifferently, too, with his furtive, absent eyes on the library door.

"I've killed him."

"What's got you? Are you crazy?"

"No--not now. You'd better go. I want to take a look in there first. The key's in the door."

"Charlie, come back here."

The note of command that he was used to responding to in his young cousin's voice reached and controlled Mr. Brady even now; he obeyed and swung round and stood still, looking at Neil. Neil's dark eyes, just above the level of his own, and so like them, were unrecognizable now.

They were dull with anger, and they were angry with him.

"What's the matter?" he quavered. "What's the matter, Neil?"

Between the two cousins, as they stood facing each other, the Colonel lay ominously still. The cruel eyes did not open, and the distorted mouth did not change.

"Look! You can see for yourself. Feel his heart," Mr. Brady offered, but his cousin's dark, disconcerting eyes did not leave his face. "What's the matter, Neil? What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to make you talk out to me," Neil said. "You'll tell me what's got you, and why you did this, which will be the ruin of you and me, too, but first you'll tell me something else. You'll tell me what you've hid from me for a year, you who can tell me the truth when you're drunk and lie out of it when you're sober, till you've worn me out and I'm sick of trying to get the truth from you. I'll be getting it now too late, but I'll get it. Have you or have you not been living on this man's money?"

"Yes."

"Was it hush money?"

"Yes," Mr. Brady said. "Neil, I'll tell you everything. You've guessed most of it, but I'll tell you the rest. I can prove it. I can prove everything I know. I did take hush money. It was dirty money, but I didn't care. I didn't care what happened. I didn't care till to-day."

"To-day?"

"I got--a letter."

"Go on," Neil said.

As he spoke Mr. Brady's face began suddenly to change, lighting again with that strange excitement which had gripped him, revived, and burning through its thin veneer of control. His eyes blazed with it, and his voice shook with it. He waved a trembling hand toward the library door.

A sound had come from the library, the faintest of sounds, a low, frightened cry. It was like the ghost of a cry, but he heard. Neil heard it, too, and was at the door before him, trying to unlock it, fumbling with the key.

"She's there yet," Mr. Brady cried; "whoever she is. Well, she'll be the last of them. I had a letter, I tell you, a letter from Maggie. She's coming home, what's left of her--what he's left of her--Everard. I never thought he was to blame. I said he was, but I was talked out of it. If I'd thought so, if I'd suspected it, would I have touched a penny of his dirty money? But she's coming home. Maggie's coming home."

For the moment Neil was not concerned with the fact. Graver revelations might have pa.s.sed over him unheeded. The key had turned at last. Then Neil felt the door being pushed open from inside. He stepped back and waited. The door opened cautiously for an inch or two, then swung suddenly wide. Standing motionless, framed in the library door, was Judith.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The two cousins, Mr. Brady shocked into sudden silence, stood with Colonel Everard's unconscious body behind them, unregarded, like any other bulky and motionless shape in the dim room, and stared at the girl who had come from the locked library.

"Not you," Neil's voice said dully. "Not here."

But the girl was Judith.

Bare-headed, slender in soft-falling white, she stood in the library door with both hands behind her, clasping her big, limp hat by its flaring brim. Her lightly poised, blond head was fluffy with small, escaping curls, her clear-coloured cheeks were warmly flushed, and between her red, slightly parted lips her breath came too quickly, but softly, still. A sheer, torn ruffle trailed from her skirt. One rose-coloured bow hung from her girdle awry and crushed, and looked the softer for that, like a crumpled flower.

About her dress and her whole small self there was a drooping and crumpled look. It was the look of a child that has played too hard.

Surely the most incongruous and pathetic little figure that had ever appeared from a room where a distressed or designing lady was suspected of hiding, she stood and returned Neil's look, but there was blank panic in her eyes.

They turned from Neil to Mr. Brady, wild eyed and pale beside him, to the disordered room, and back to Neil again, with no change of expression at all. They were wide and dilated and dark, intent still on some picture that they held and could not let go. Judith came an uncertain step or two forward into the room, stiffly, as if she were walking in her sleep, and stood still.

"Neil, what did you come here for?" she said. "I'm glad you came."

Her voice was sweet and expressionless, like her eyes, and though she had called Neil by name, she looked at him as if she had never seen him before. One small hand reached out uncertainly, pulled at his sleeve, and then, as he made no move to take it, dropped again, and began to finger the big hat that she held, and pluck at the flowers on it, but her eyes did not leave his face.