I shook my head and just then the door opened again. A man, the butler, I thought, stood there. He was a big man, enormously dignified in his black coat, with intelligent, light-blue eyes. He didn’t come into the room but made a kind of gesture toward me, which was a nice blend of respect and authority. Drue said, “He wants you. I’ll stay.”
She was right. For when I had crossed to him the butler (William Fanshawe Beevens, age fifty-four, in the Brent employ for twenty-one years; so the record, later, ran) beckoned me into the hall.
“Mr. Brent,” said he, “wishes to speak to you. It will be only a moment.” Well, of course I could leave. Drue could stay with our patient. The butler added, “Will you come this way, please?” and started off down the hall.
We went downstairs, making almost no sound on the padded steps. The great hall with its black and white marble floor was empty, except for the butler and me. I thought fleetingly of the state trooper; if he had been about I believe now that I would have told him of my patient’s words, delirious though I thought-at least, I preferred to think-they were. But in any case the trooper was not about and, when I inquired (very casually), the butler said briefly that he had concluded his inquiry and gone.
“It was merely a matter of routine; customary when there is an accident with a gun,” said the butler. He gave me a fleeting look from those intelligent, light-blue eyes and led me to a door with carved, dark wood panels which looked extremely thick. Just as we reached it, it opened and a woman came out.
She was rather an extraordinary woman; very small and dark with dead black hair, done in a high pompadour after the fashion of thirty years ago; she wore a white starched blouse (the kind that used to be called a shirtwaist and had a starched stock collar) and a very full black skirt which all but touched the floor. She had a tiny waist with a big belt and extravagantly curved hips. On one shoulder a watch was pinned and she smelled of violet sachet. She wore pince-nez, rimless, with a gold chain fastened to a gold button on her other shoulder. She must have been fifty or more; it was difficult to tell. Altogether she was a page out of the past and a page that I may as well admit I am fully equipped to remember.
But the thing I noticed mainly was the bright, inquisitive way her dark eyes peered out of her small, sallow face. She gave a short kind of nod and went on and, as I am a truthful woman, petticoats rustled as she crossed the marble floor. Otherwise, however, Maud Chivery moved with an utter and complete silence which never ceased to astonish me. You had to have your eyes fixed rigidly upon her to be aware of her activities; you would be sitting in the very room with her and, if you didn’t watch and let your thoughts drift away and then turned to speak to her, she would be gone, vanished altogether from the room without a sound, unless there was that faint taffeta rustle and you couldn’t always hear that. An unnerving woman, really, but one I learned reluctantly to respect.
Naturally, I didn’t then know that it was Maud Chivery, Dr. Chivery’s wife and an intimate, indeed almost a member of the household-for she had been all but its mistress (ordering the household, hiring and training servants, getting Craig off to school and seeing that he went to the dentist, acting, even, as a hostess for Conrad Brent on occasion) during the long years of Conrad’s widowerhood. I checked her down then as another member of the Brent household and, candidly, one not likely to raise its level in point of general attractiveness. Then Beevens had opened the door and was ushering me into the presence. It was exactly that.
My first feeling was a wave of sheer self-amazement that I had had the enormous temerity to call him, flippantly to Drue, Papa Brent. My second was another kind of shock; for I found myself instantly, yes and seriously, on guard. Against what I didn’t know, unless it was some quality of incalculability in the man who stood there on the hearth-rug watching me.
I did know then, too, that Drue Cable’s position (or rather lack of position) in that household was not in any possible sense due to a mere misunderstanding between lovers that a word or two might have cleared up. It was nothing so trivial. When I saw Conrad Brent I sensed that. I also thought (queerly, unexpectedly) that there was danger somewhere in that house.
Naturally, one may say that where guns go off and shoot people there must be danger, and it doesn’t take any sixth sense to realize it. But it was more than that. It was something else entirely; something that had nothing to do with reason. In fact, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with me; it was just an intangible thing that hovered in the very air of that room. The queer part of it, of course, was that it should be intelligible to me. I am never prescient; I have a good stomach, no nerves and little imagination.
Beevens closed the door behind me, and Conrad Brent said, “My wife tells me that the nurse who accompanied you here is a woman who was once my son’s wife. I am sending her away at once. I expect you to care for my son yourself until I can make other arrangements.” He paused then, and added, “Mrs. Chivery will help you if you need her.”
4
IT IS EASY NOW to understand Conrad Brent; his strength and his weakness; his vanity and his consequent self-deception; his procrastination; his pride and his blind and obstinate prejudices; and, above all, his reluctance to admit a mistake. But then I only sensed that there was something wrong about him; something too hard and too bold which seemed to cover an inner uncertainty.
It was an odd impression. Certainly his outward behavior had no faint hint of uncertainty or secret uneasiness. Certainly, if my impression was a true one then, there was little hope of softening or changing his hatred for Drue; if his bold and arrogant front really concealed weakness then he would cling to a decision, once he made it, merely to keep up that front. I’ve seen it happen before; there is nothing like the obsessed obstinacy of a basically weak and uncertain nature.
He stood on the hearth-rug, waiting for me to say, “yes, sir” (and, unless I was wrong, a little afraid I wouldn’t). He was not a tall man, but he was rather muscular and thick; he had a brown face, a sharply aquiline nose and a bearded and thus equivocal chin. His eyes were heavily lidded and rather bright in color. He was a little bald; he wore, besides the somewhat stringy beard, a short gray mustache with two sharply waxed points at either side.
Just above him on the breast of the mantel was a coat of arms, carved and painted in somber, rich colors; it was an animal, an obese and unidentifiable creature which may have been a unicorn, standing sportively on one leg on a bit of green. The coat of arms was not quartered, which was unusual and showed me how old the direct line must be. It might have showed me too, but I didn’t think of it then, the deliberate casting away of all the hundreds of intermingling and intervening blood streams in order to cling with absurd stubbornness and self-deception to one chosen ancestral line.
I didn’t consciously think of anything however but Drue. I said, so emphatically that my voice rang out against the dark woods and books and red leather of that study, rather more loudly than I intended, “I’m afraid Miss Cable will have to stay.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said, although he couldn’t have helped hearing me.
I made it clearer but lower in tone. “You can’t send Miss Cable away. She is here as a nurse. We are both needed.”
“We can get another nurse up from New York by morning. Tell her to be ready to leave in half an hour.”
I suppose he was not often defied, so, whether his arrogance was assumed or real, obviously it worked. He just didn’t believe my own opposition. So I took a long breath and walked up nearer him. “Look here,” I said, “do you want your son to die?”