“It may be difficult,” I remembered saying to him. How difficult it was to be, I had not foreseen!
“Surely,” she said, and her soft voice held no note of anger, “the risk is mine?”
Mrs. Petrie bent again over the pillow. She was on the point of resting those slender, indolent hands on Petrie’s shoulders.
She intended, I surmised, to kiss his parched lips....
chapter eighth
“BEWARE...”
As those languorous ivory hands almost rested on Petrie’s shoulders, and the full red lips were but inches removed from the parched blue lips of the unconscious man, I threw my arms around Mrs. Petrie and dragged her away!
She was light and resilient as a professional dancer. I had been forced to exert considerable strength because of her nearness to the doctor. She was swept back, lying against my left arm and looking up at me in a startled yet imperious way, which prepared me to expect an uncomfortable sequel.
During one long moment she remained motionless, our glances meeting. Her cloak had slipped, exposing a bare arm and shoulder. I was partly supporting her and trying fren-ziedly to find words to excuse my apparent violence, when, still looking up at me, she turned slightly.
“Why did you do that?” she asked. “Was it...to save me from contagion?”
The cue was a welcome one; I seized it gladly.
“Of course!” I replied, but knew that my assurance rang false. “I warned you that I should not allow you to touch him.”
She continued to watch me, resting in the crook of my arm;
and I had never experienced such vile impulses as those which goaded me during those few seconds. The most singular promptings were dancing in my brain. I thought she was offering me her lips, or, rather, challenging me to reject the offer. With a movement so slight that it might have been accidental, she seemed to invite me to caress her.
Yes, most utterly damnable thing, I, in whose blood there runs a marked streak of Puritanism, I, with poor Petrie lying there in the grip of a dread disease, suddenly wanted to crush this woman—his wife—in my arms!
It was only a matter of hours since I had met Fleurette on the beach of Ste Claire de la Roche and had become so infatuated with her beauty and charm that I had been thinking about her almost continuously ever since. Yet here I stood fighting against a sudden lawless desire for the wife of my best friend—a desire so wild that it threatened to swamp everything—friendship, tradition, honour!
Perhaps I might have conquered—unaided. I am not prepared to say. But aid came to me, and came in the form of what I thought at the time to be a miracle. As I looked down into those enigmatical, mocking eyes, in a silence broken only by the hushing of the pines outside the window—a voice—a groaning, hollow voice, a voice that might have issued from a tomb—spoke.
“Beware...of her,” it said.
Mrs. Petrie sprang back. A fleeting glimpse I had of stark horror in the long, narrow eyes. My heart, which had been beating madly, seemed to stop for a moment.
I twisted my head aside, staring down at Petrie.
Was it imagination—or did I detect a faint quivering of those swollen eyelids? Could it be he who had spoken? That slight movement, if it had ever been, had ceased. He lay still as the dead.
“Who was it?” Mrs Petrie whispered, her patrician calm ruffled at last. “Whose voice was that?”
I stared at her. The spell was broken. The glamour of those bewitched moments had faded—dismissed by that sepulchral voice. Mrs. Petrie’s eyelashes now almost veiled her long, brilliant eyes. One hand was clenched, the other hidden beneath her cloak. My ideas performed a complete about-turn. Some sudden, inexplicable madness had possessed me, from the consequences of which I had been saved by an act of God!
“I don’t know,” I said hoarsely. “I don’t know...”
chapter ninth
FAH LO
SUEE
the end of that interview is hazy in my memory. Concerning one detail, however, I have no doubt: Mrs. Petrie did not again approach the sick man’s bed. Despite her wonderful self-discipline, she could not entirely hide her apprehension. I detected her casting swift glances at Petrie and—once—upwards towards the solitary window.
That awful warning, so mysteriously spoken— could have related only to her....
I rang for Sister Therese and arranged that the night concierge should conduct the visitor to her car. I suspected that the neighbourhood was none too safe.
Mrs. Petrie gave me the address of a hotel in Cannes, asking that she be kept in touch. She would return, she said, unless summoned earlier, at eight in the morning. She had fully regained her graceful composure by this time, and I found myself wondering what her true nationality could be. Her languid calm was hard to reconcile with wifely devotion:
indeed, I had expected her to insist upon remaining.
And when, with a final glance at Petrie and an enigmatical smile to me, she went out with Sister Therese, I turned and stared at the doctor. I could detect no change whatever, except that it seemed to me that the purple shadow on his brow was not so dark.
Could it be he who had spoken?
His face was dreadfully haggard, looking almost emaciated, and his lips dry and cracked, were slightly parted so as to expose his teeth. In that unnatural smile I thought I saw the beginning of the death grin which characterized this ghastly pestilence.
He did not move, nor could I detect him breathing. I glanced at the window, high above my head, where not so long before I had seen those crooked yellow fingers. But it showed as a black patch in the dull white mass of the wall.
The pines began whispering softly again: “Fleurette— Derceto....”
If Petrie had not spoken—and I found it hard to believe that he had—whose was the voice which had uttered the words, “Beware...of her?”
I had ample time to consider the problem and many others as well which had arisen in the course of that eventful day. Dr. Cartier looked in about eleven o’clock, and Sister Therese made regular visits.
There was no change to be noted in Petrie’s condition.
It was a dreary vigil; in fact, an eerie one. For company I had an apparently dead man, and some of the most horrible memories which one could very well conjure up as a background for that whispering silence.
At some time shortly after midnight I hard swift footsteps coming along the passage which led to Petrie’s room. The door opened, and Nayland Smith walked in.
One glance warned me that something was amiss.
He crossed and stared down at Petrie in silence, then turning to Sister Therese, who had entered behind him:
“I wonder, Sister,” he said rapidly, “if I might ask you to remain here until Dr. Cartier arrives, and allow Mr. Sterling and myself the use of your room?”
“But of course, with the greatest pleasure,” she replied, and smiled in her sweet, patient way.
Together we went along the narrow corridor and presently came to that little room used by the nurse on duty. It was very simple and very characteristic.
There was a glass-fronted cabinet containing medicines, dressings, and surgical appliances. Beside a little white table was placed a very hard white enamelled chair. An open book lay on the table; and the only decoration was a crucifix on the distempered wall.
Sir Denis did not speak for a moment, but paced restlessly to and fro in that confined space twitching at the lobe of his ear—a habit which I later came to recognize as indicative of deep thought.
Suddenly he turned and faced me.
“Sir Mansion Rorke died early yesterday morning,” he said, “from an overdose of heroin or something of that kind!”