5
TELLING PETER HUBER THE things Craig had said was not like telling Conrad Brent. Conrad was Craig’s father, his own flesh and blood; besides, he was in a position of authority. If there was the smallest grain of reality in Craig’s muttered words, Conrad was the man to deal with it, no one else.
“It was accident,” I replied discreetly. “He was cleaning a gun.”
Peter Huber looked straight at me. “In the garden?” he said after a moment. “At night-no, Nurse. What really happened?”
I got up. “You should know more about it than I,” I said briskly. “I’ve got to get back to him now.”
“But-oh, all right.” He walked to the door and put his hand on the doorknob. “I won’t bother you,” he said, smiling a little, “but if I can do anything…”
“Thank you.” He glanced in the room over my shoulder, and then, without attempting to enter, closed the door behind me.
Drue was standing beside the window.
It is strange, really, that women deck themselves in silks and jewels and furs. There is nothing that sets off beauty like the simplicity and whiteness of a nurse’s uniform. The white, starched dress outlined the slender curves of Drue’s figure. Her white cap rested lightly on her hair with its gold highlights, and framed her face like a coronet, stately and yet with a kind of piquance. Her eyes were very clear and intent below it, her lips scarlet. The whiteness brought out (in the way a reflecting light and its corollary shadows do bring out lines) the delicate hollows below her cheekbones, the white, generous temples. There was strength there and decision, and yet tenderness, too.
I went to my patient and there was no change. Drue said, watching the rain, “Thanks for what you said to Conrad Brent.”
“Perhaps in the morning…”
“No. He won’t change his mind again. I’ve only tonight.”
Only tonight. And Craig Brent unconscious and drugged, and for that night hovering in the nebulous, incalculable margin between life and death.
There was nothing I could do or say. Presently, she said, “I’m going now. I’ll try to sleep. I’ll take over at twelve,” and went away.
It was then nearly six o’clock with rain coming now in gusty squalls against the windowpanes, and the house was very quiet.
I had plenty to think of as moments dragged along, and I must say I didn’t at all fancy the sum total of my thoughts. For, any way I looked at it, Drue was fighting a losing battle and yet she was determined to fight it.
The trouble was, of course, Craig Brent had done nothing at all to find her again. In these days, I told myself, fathers don’t deal out autocratic commands to their sons. The sons won’t let them. They say, in effect, Okay, Pa, I’ll go and dig ditches if I have to, but I’ll marry my own wife and support her, too.
Craig Brent had done nothing like that. I was thinking that, watching him, when he moved a little, sighed, and tucked the hand Drue had kissed under his cheek. He did it without opening his eyes, without really waking. He sighed again like a contented child and dropped back into sleep. It only goes to show my feeling about Craig Brent when I say it exasperated me beyond words. I got up and went to the fire, and stared down at the dying coals.
But, if I didn’t like Craig Brent, still less did I like the fact that he had been shot and I didn’t think it was accident.
Well, time went on and I wished I had my knitting. Nobody came near me until Beevens silently brought my dinner tray and, half an hour later, returned as silently to carry it away again. Somehow, I half expected Alexia or Maud Chivery or even the doctor, but as far as I knew no one so much as approached the door. The night had turned stormy and colder, with gusts of wind and rain, and it wasn’t very pleasant sitting there in the gloomy bedroom with the wind blowing wisps of smoke back down the chimney now and then, and a shutter somewhere flapping. I began to watch the clock a little nervously. Once, overcome by a distinct impression that everybody else had gone away, vanished mysteriously into the night, leaving me and my patient alone in the great and somehow forbidding house, I got up and looked into the corridor.
My first glimpse of the long, night-lighted corridor all but confirmed my fantastic notion, it was so completely empty. But, as I watched, Nicky came out of a door down toward the stairs and on the right, glanced along the corridor, saw me or my white cap, paused for a fractional second and slipped back into the room from which he had just emerged and closed the door. He wasn’t wearing a dinner jacket; he was still in a checked coat and brown trousers; I was sure it was Nicky.
It was just then, by the way, that Delphine entered my life-and the bedroom. I felt something soft brush against my ankles and on suppressing a sharp cry and looking downward I discovered an enormous Maltese tomcat, with blazing green eyes and battle-scarred ears who stalked to the hearth-rug, turned around twice, sat down and looked at me.
He had apparently drifted silently along the shadows of the hall under chairs and tables and near the wall, so I hadn’t seen what was a habitually stealthy approach. And I couldn’t get rid of him. I held the door open invitingly and whispered, “Kitty, kitty,” and he merely looked disdainful. I went to him and swished with my skirt and he was only slightly entertained. I started to take him up in my hands and he simply lifted one solid gray paw and planted it upon my hand and firmly put out his claws. He didn’t scratch or dig them in, but he gave me to understand then and there that he had little if any scruples.
So in the end I let him stay. He took a complete bath, paused to stalk something that was not under the couch and went to sleep in a tight gray ball. I moved to a chair, to the sofa, to the bed, to stare down at Craig, and then back to a chair. The trouble was, of course, I knew too much and still too little. It was an uneasy kind of night, wakeful, somehow, and troubled. But nothing happened. Nothing happened really, I mean, although once in a lull in the wind and rain I thought I heard quiet footsteps in the hall. The house seemed to sleep, yet there was a listening, sentient quality about it, too.
The cat didn’t move. My patient slept heavily. The wind creaked the shutter outside and sighed down the chimney. Twelve o’clock came and Drue didn’t come with it.
Twelve o’clock and twelve-ten, and still she was not there.
At twelve-fifteen two things happened. Delphine opened his eyes, opened them all at once without blinking, sat up and stared fixedly at the blank panels of the door to the hall. Just stared at it, for a long time. Then something bumped, hard and sharp, against the door.
A long silence followed. I must have got up, for I remember standing very still, listening. There was no other sound, no retreating footsteps, no movement, no voice.
Because of this, or because of something less easily accountable, a moment (perhaps two or three) elapsed before I went to the door and opened it. No one was in the hall; it stretched emptily away on either hand with the chairs here and there making heavy shadows. But no one was there.
I believe-indeed I know-that several moments passed, while I stood there. Long enough, at least, for me to discover the rather queer thing I did discover and that was a kind of dent, small and not deep but still a dent, in the waxed gleaming surface of one of the panels of the door I still held open.
It was as if someone had been carrying something (a ladder, fireplace tongs, perhaps a hammer) along the hall and had accidentally bumped it against the door. But people don’t carry hammers, or ladders, through sleeping houses after midnight.