"You mean—I'm responsible?" she asked in horror.
"No, no! But..."
"You don't honestly think so?"
"Cross my heart, no! But you knew Fred was meeting somebody in the cenotaph. Did he tell you who the person was?"
"No."
H.M. was growing desperate. "Didn't he give you any kind of indication? Or hint?"
"No." She swallowed, and swallowed again. "Oh! Except that it concerned a member of the family."
"Which member of the family?"
"I don't know. But Fred wasn't joking. He was horribly serious. After he met the person..."
"After that?"
"Fred said it wouldn't take long. Then he said he would walk along Fenimore Cooper Road to Larchmont, and catch the three-to-eight train here. Then we should meet."
More than a shade of change had crept over Elizabeth Manning. Her speech and manner were those of a girl about Jean's age. It was as though she were retreating into the past, and living there.
"We should meet," she repeated.
Suddenly Bob Manning, with a noise in his throat, leaned across the back of H.M.'s chair.
"What's the matter with her?" Bob asked, with restraint and tenderness. "There's something wrong!"
The woman rose to her feet, and looked slowly round at her children.
"I'm sorry," she said gently. "I didn't tell you what I really heard on the phone. Your father is dead."
It was the first time she had said, "your father."
Amid a paralyzed silence, she tried to walk steadily towards the painting of Frederick Manning, stretching out her hand as though to touch it. She did not quite reach it. Her knees gave way, and she fell heavily on her side in front of the easel.
"What's the matter with her?" Bob asked again. "Has she fainted?"
H.M., stung out of whatever stupor or mind wandering had possessed him, was kneeling beside her.
"No, son," he said. "She's poisoned."
There was a crash as Jean, backing away, upset a small table of magazines. Jean was white to the lips, but her whisper carried.
"'If he dies, I die,'" Jean quoted. "She had it all ready! By the telephone."
H.M., as he tested the pulse, opened the mouth for scrutiny, and gently lifted one eyelid, seemed to be cursing himself with inner fluency. Cy gave a hand to hoist him to his feet After this H.M. lumbered straight towards the screen curtains, blundering there to find an opening. Cy found it for him, and they both went in.
They were in a long, narrow, curtained cubicle, with another partition which evidently screened off the bathroom. One electric light glared over a trim cot and a chest of drawers.
"That's the feller, son!" H.M. muttered.
On the bedside table, near the telephone, stood a five-ounce bottle, the cork out and lying beside it It was labelled, Mother Meera's Mixture.
"But that stuffs made in England!" muttered Cy. "You're supposed to take it in very minute quantities with a lot of water, for a cold. What’s it doing here?"
"I dunno, son. But do you know what's in it? If s loaded with tincture of aconite."
"Aconite," said Cy.
"The stuff," grunted H.M., picking up the bottle, "isn't as quick actin' as your famous prussic acid, but if s deadlier. It don't burn, but you take far longer to die."
"Can't you do anyting?"
"Oh, son!" H.M. lifted both fists. "Without a stomach tube? Without atropine and (lemme think!) digitalis? Without—which we may need-oxygen? Burn it I don't suppose we can get a doctor in a railway station?"
"We can try," retorted Cy Norton, and picked up the phone.
It appeared that they could not only get one doctor, but several. Dr. Jacobs would be on his way at once. For the first time Cy realized the smooth-working, effortless efficiency of this labyrinth below. H.M. introduced himself to the doctor on the phone and gave a quick explanation.
Then he appeared in the studio.
"Carry her inside and put her on the bed," he ordered Cy and Bob. They carried her in gently.
"When the doctor gets here, all of you keep out of this 'bedroom.' The sight's not pretty, and you won't be needed.
"H.M.," Cy spoke in a fierce whisper, "how much of the stuff did she take?"
"Son, I can't tell whether the bottle was full to begin with! If it was, about an ounce and a half."
"And thaf s pretty bad?"
That's worse than bad."
In five minutes, which seemed like a gnawing hour, Dr. Jacobs arrived with a porter to bring what he needed. Low-voiced and efficient, he disappeared with H.M. behind the grey curtains.
Afterwards came the long period of waiting in the studio.
In actual point of time, Elizabeth Manning had collapsed at just on a quarter to. one in the morning. There it was, incredibly, on Cy's watch. But more than incredible seemed the time which followed.
Crystal, removing the satin coat, sat vivid and flamboyant in the gold gown, and stared at the floor. As so often happens after breakdown in nerve strain, Jean had fallen fast asleep on the sofa.
Bob paced up and down so restlessly that they yelled at him to stop. But he could not be still. Finding a self-portrait of Elizabeth Manning among the canvases, he carried it under his arm like a talisman.
"I suppose the old romantics would say," Crystal once remarked, "that it's better for them to go together."
But Mrs. Manning, for some reason, had got into Cy’s heart, and he only snapped at Crystal.
Cy, smoking cigarettes endlessly, looked at his watch so often that at last he unstrapped it and dropped it into his pocket.
From the first, the mere noises beyond those grey curtains...
The curtains would sway and bulge as Dr. Jacobs or H.M. passed behind them. Much later Cy could faintly hear the low, muttered, impersonal voices. "I don't like this; digitalis now." "How much, son?" "Hundredth of a grain." And much later, amid a vacuum of time: "Oxygen; but we'll keep up the artificial respiration too."
The suction noise of the oxygen, barely audible, nevertheless beat in Cy’s mind like a huge bellows. Leaning back and closing his eyes, he tried to work out the position of this studio at the top of Grand Central.
' The high windows must face out, from the back of the flattened roof curve, across Forty-second Street and down Park to Fourth Avenut. If you went some distance down Fourth Avenue, say about Twelfth Street, you found a host of those second-hand bookshops of which Manning was so fond and Cy was fond, too.
The proprietors of these bookshops—like those in Charing Cross Road—didn't bother you or ask questions. You browsed and browsed, amid dust and the sudden unexpected leap of a title you wanted. Or a passage somewhere, or a line of
O lyric love, half angel and half bird...
No, damn it, that was Browning again! Cy, glancing over at Crystal, saw that she was cold and lonely, and he felt ashamed of himself. He went over, plucked Crystal out of her chair, and sat her down in his lap.
She did not speak. She put her arms round his neck and her head against his shoulder. Thus they remained, while Jean slept and Bob paced with the canvas under his arm.
Once Bob stopped, hollow eyed.
"Half-past seven," he asked cryptically, "was the time you and H.M. started out for the field, wasn't it?"
Cy absently agreed without bothering to think about it.
Always the oxygen. On and on and on! Lights looked brighter, faces more sharply outlined, with the dwindling night. Those windows up there should be whitening with dawn. Cy could hear his watch ticking in his pocket
Then the oxygen dwindled away and stopped.
After a whispered conference of what seemed some hours, H.M. stepped out from behind the grey curtains. It shows the great man's state of mind that he gravely searched for his hat, put it on, and turned towards the door; then a recollection struck him, and he turned round.