Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three] Read online

  There was urgency in her tones, and unconsciously I began to yield to her insistence, and allow myself to be drawn towards the stoop.

  “Who is your grandpa?” I asked, satisfied from the imposing look of the house that he must be a man of some prominence. “If he is sick there are the servants”—But here her little foot came down in infantile impatience.

  “Grandpa never waits!” she cried, dragging me with her small hands up the stoop and into the open door. “If you don’t hurry he’ll think I didn’t do as he told me.”

  What man would not have yielded? The hall, as seen from the entrance, was wide and unusually rich. Indeed, an air of the highest respectability, as well as of unbounded wealth, characterised the whole establishment; and however odd the adventure appeared, it certainly offered nothing calculated to awaken distrust. Entering with her, I shut the door behind me. In an instant she was half-way down the hall.

  “Here! here!” she cried, pausing before a door near its end.

  The confidence with which she summoned me (I sometimes wonder if my countenance conveys more than the ordinary amount of good nature) and the pretty picture she made, standing in the flood of light which poured from the unseen apartment toward which she beckoned me, lured me on till I reached her side, and stood in full view of a scene which certainly justified her fear if not the demand she made upon a passing stranger.

  In the midst of a small room, plain as any office, I saw an elderly gentleman standing who, even to my unaccustomed eyes, seemed to be not simply ill, but in the throes of actual dissolution.

  Greatly disturbed, for I had anticipated nothing so serious, I turned to fly for assistance, when the little child, rushing by me, caught her grandfather by the knees and gave me such a look, I had not the heart to leave her.

  Indeed it would have been cruel to do so. The appearance and attitude of the sick man were startling even to me. Though in a state bordering on death, he was, as I have said, standing, not lying, and his tall figure swaying against the large table to which he clung, formed a picture of mental and physical suffering such as I had never before seen, and can never in all my life to come, forget. One hand was pressed against his heart, but the other, outspread in a desperate attempt to support his weight, had fallen on some half-dozen sheets or so of typewritten paper, which, slipping under the pressure put upon them, kept him tottering, though he did not fall. He was looking my way, and as I advanced into the room, his collapsing frame shook with sudden feeling, and the hand which he held clenched over his heart opened slightly, revealing a scrap of paper crushed between his fingers.

  Struck with compassion, for the contrast was pitiful between his naturally imposing appearance and his present helplessness, I murmured some words of sympathy and encouragement, and then supposing him to be alone in the house with his grandchild, inquired what I could do to serve him.

  He cast a meaning glance down at his hand, then seeing that I did not understand him, made a super human effort and held that member out, uttering some inarticulate words which I was able to construe into a prayer to take from him the paper which his stiffening clutch made it difficult for him to release.

  Touched by his extremity, and anxious to afford him all the solace his desperate case demanded, I drew the paper from between his fingers. As I did so I noted, first, that it was a portion of one of the sheets I saw scattered about on every side, and, secondly, that it was folded together as if intended for someone’s private perusal.

  “What shall I do with this?” I asked, consulting his eye over which a glaze was fast forming.

  He let his own glance wander eagerly till it fell upon some envelopes, then it became fixed, and I understood.

  Drawing out one, I placed the slip in it, and fastening the envelope, consulted his face with a smile.

  He answered with a look so full of thanks, appreciation, and confidence that I felt abashed. Something of more than ordinary significance was conveyed by that look, and I was about to ask what name I should write on the envelope, when the faint sounds with which he had been trying to express his secret wishes became articulate, and I heard these words:

  “To no one—no one else! To—to—”

  Alas! at this critical moment and just as the name was faltering on his lips, his utterance failed. He strove for expression, but no words would come.

  In a desperation, which was but the faint reflection of his own, I tried to help him.

  “Is it for your lawyer?” I suggested; then, as he made no sign, I hastily added: “For your doctor? For your wife? For anyone in the house?”

  He gave me one supreme look, raised his eyes, and for an instant stood in an attitude so expressive of joy and indefinable expectancy that I was astonished beyond words and forgot that I was in the presence of death. But only for a moment. While I was still marvelling at this sudden change in him, the child who was clinging to him uttered a terrified scream and unloosed her arms. Then I saw him sink, gasp, and fall forward, and, springing, caught him in my arms before his head could touch the floor. Alas! it was the last service I could render him. By the time I had laid him down he had expired, and I found myself, in no other company than that of a trembling child, bending above the dead body of a man who with his last breath had charged me with a commission of whose purport I understood nothing, save that under no circumstances and upon no pretext was I to deliver the letter he had entrusted to me, to anyone but the person for whom it was intended.

  But who was this person? Ah, that was the question! Certainly my position in this house of strangers was a most extraordinary one.

  II. The Young Doctor and the Old

  MEANWHILE the child had started down the hall, and up the stairs, calling:

  “Papa! Papa!”

  Startled by this intimation of another person’s presence in a house I had supposed to hold no one but ourselves, I hastily followed her till she reached the floor above and paused before a shut door. Here something seemed to restrain her.

  “Papa’s inside,” she whispered.

  If this was so, he was not alone. Laughter, quick exclamations, and the clink of glasses could plainly be heard through the door; and shocked at the contrast offered by this scene of mirth to the solemn occurrence which had just taken place below, I hesitated to enter, and looked about for some means of communicating with the servants who I now felt must be below. But here the terrified child, who was clinging to my knee, interposed:

  “I do not think papa is there. Papa does not like cards. Uncle George does. Come, let’s look for papa.”

  She dragged me toward the front of the house, entered another room, and seemed surprised to find the light turned down and her papa gone.

  “Perhaps he is with Uncle Alph,” she faltered, and, bounding up another flight of stairs, turned around to see if I was behind her.

  There seemed no alternative left but to follow her till I came upon someone; so I hastened up this second staircase. She had already entered a room.

  “O Uncle Alph!” I heard her cry. “Grandpa’s lying on the floor downstairs. I cannot find papa. I’m so frightened,” and she ran sobbing towards the young man, who rose to receive her in an abstraction which even these startling words failed to break.

  For this and other reasons I noticed him particularly notwithstanding the embarrassment of my own position. He was a handsome man of the luxury-loving type, whose characteristics it would be useless to de scribe, since they were of a nature to suggest, rather than explain the extent of his attractions. I afterwards heard from such of my friends as were in the habit of walking the avenue with him, that he never failed to draw the attention of passers-by; something in his features, his carriage, or the turn of his head and shoulders stamping him as a man worth looking at, not only once, but twice. At this moment, however, I was not so much impressed by his good looks, as by his uneasy and feverish expression.

  He had caught up a letter which he had been engaged in writing at our entrance, and as the child’s appeal
rang out, he crumpled it nervously in his hand, and dropped it into the waste-paper basket. As a certain furtive haste characterised this action, my attention was caught by it, and I found myself wondering whether it was a letter or memorandum he thus sacrificed to his surprise.

  Meanwhile he seemed to be trying to take in what the little one wanted. Evidently he had not as yet noticed me standing in the doorway, and I thought it best to introduce myself.

  “I beg your pardon,” said I, “I am Arthur Outhwaite of the firm of Robinson & Outhwaite, lawyers. I was passing by the house when this child called me in to the assistance of her grandfather whom, I am sorry to say, I found in a very precarious condition in his study downstairs. If he is your father, you have my sympathy for his sudden demise. He died in my arms a moment ago; and having been the witness of his last moments, I could not leave the house without explaining my position to his relatives.”

  “Dead! Father?”

  It was not grief, it was hardly astonishment which gave force to this brief and involuntary exclamation. It was something quite different, something which it shocked me to hear in his tones and see sparkle in his eye. But this expression, whatever it betokened, lasted but a moment. Catching up the child in his arms, he hid his face behind her and rushed towards the door. Me he hardly noticed.

  “Where is he?” he asked, ignoring or forgetting what I had told him.

  It was the child who answered.

  “In the den, Uncle Alph. Don’t take me there; I’m afraid. Set me down; I want to find Hope.”

  He hastily obeyed her, and the child ran away. Then, and only then, he seemed to take in my presence.

  “You were called in from the street?” he wonderingly observed; “I don’t understand it. Where were my brothers? They were near enough to render him assistance. Why should a stranger be called in?”

  This was a question for which I had no answer, so I made none. He did not seem to be struck by the omission.

  “Let us go down,” said he.

  I opened the door which the little one had closed behind her, and proceeded toward the stair-head. From certain indistinct noises which I had heard during the foregoing short interchange of words, I expected to find the house in a state of alarm and every one alert. But the card-players were still at their game on the floor below, and I was not surprised to see my companion pause and give an admonitory kick to the door through which such incongruous noises issued.

  “Father’s ill!” he shouted in a voice hoarse with many passions; and waiting for no reply, he rushed ahead of me downstairs, followed by some half-dozen partially sobered men.

  Among these latter I noticed one whom I took to be the elder brother of him whom the little one had addressed as Uncle Alph. He had the same commanding appearance, the same abstracted air, and woke, when he did wake, to the same curious condition of conflicting emotions. But I did not have time to dwell long upon this feature of the extra ordinary affair in which I had become thus curiously involved.

  The alarm which had been so slow in spreading above, had passed like wildfire through the lower part of the house, and we found some half-dozen servants standing in and about the small room where the master of the house lay stretched. Some were wringing their hands, some were crying, and some, rigid with terror, stared at the face they had so lately seen with the hue of health upon it.

  At our approach they naturally withdrew to the hall, and I presently found myself standing between the group thus formed and the three or four young gentlemen visitors who had not followed the brothers into the room. Amongst the latter I saw one whose face was not altogether unfamiliar, and it was from him that I gained my first information concerning the man to whose dying passion I had been witness, and from whom I had received the strange commission which, unknown to those about me, made my continued presence in this house a necessity from which the embarrassment of the occasion could not release me.

  The dead man was Archibald Gillespie, the well-known stockbroker and railroad magnate, whose name, as well as those of his three spendthrift sons, was in every man’s mouth since that big deal by which he had made two millions in less than two months.

  Meanwhile one of the gentlemen who had accompanied the two Gillespies into the room where their father lay, came out looking very pale. He was a doctor, though to all appearance not the family physician.

  “Will one of you go for Dr. Bennett?” he asked. “Bring him at once and at any cost; Mr. Gillespie cannot be moved till he comes.”

  Dr. Bennett evidently was the family physician.

  “Why can’t he be moved?” called out a voice near me. “Is there anything wrong? Mr. Gillespie was violently sick a month ago. I suppose he got around too quickly.”

  But the young doctor, without replying, stepped back into the room, leaving us all agog, though few of us ventured upon open remonstrance.

  In another minute one of the men near me slipped out in obedience to the request just made.

  “Is Mrs. Gillespie living?” I asked, after a moment spent in more or less indecision.

  “Where have you come from?” was the answer given, seasoned by a stare I bore with what equanimity I could. “Mrs. Gillespie has been dead these fifteen years.”

  So! the letter was not meant for his wife.

  Here I caught an eye fixed on mine. It was that of one of the servants who stood huddled about the doorway of what appeared to be a large dining-room on the opposite side of the hall. When this man, for it was a male servant, saw that he had attracted my attention, he made me an imperceptible sign. As he was old and grey-haired, I heeded the sign he made and stepped towards him. Instantly he greeted me with the whisper:

  “You seem to be the only sober man here. Don’t let them do anything till Mr. Leighton comes in. He is the saint of the family, sir.”

  “Is he the little girl’s father?” I asked.

  The man nodded. “And a good man, too,” he insisted. “A very good man.”

  Was this honest judgment or sarcasm? I had heard that each of Mr. Gillespie’s sons had given his father no end of trouble.

  Meantime a silence deeper than that of awe had spread throughout the house. Feeling myself out of place and yet strangely in place, I drew aside into as inconspicuous a corner as I could find, and waited as all the others did, for the family physician.

  While doing so I caught stray glimpses of my first acquaintance, Alfred Gillespie, who, fretted by some anxiety he could not altogether conceal, came more than once into the hall and threw furtive glances up the stairway. Was it the little girl he was concerned about? If so, I shared his anxiety.

  At last the bell rang. Instantly, so great was the strain upon us, we all moved, and one or two bounded towards the door. But it was opened by the butler with that mechanical habitude such old servants acquire, and, though nothing could shake the calm deference of this trained domestic, there was some thing in the bow with which he greeted the new comer which assured us that the man we so anxiously expected had arrived.

  I had seen Dr. Bennett more than once, but never before showing so much anxiety. Whether from shock or some secret cause not to be communicated to us, this old and capable physician seemed to be in a condition of as much agitation as ourselves, and obeyed the summons of the young doctor who stood beckoning to him from the threshold of the little den, with an appearance of alacrity that nevertheless had an odd element of hesitation in it. I might not have noticed this under other circumstances, and am quite sure that no one else detected any peculiarity in his manner, but to me, everything was important which offered anything like a clue to the proper understanding of a situation in which I found myself so deeply, yet so secretly involved.

  Mr. Gillespie’s physician remained for some minutes closeted with the sons of the deceased and their young medical friend; then he came out. Instantly I saw from his expression that our fears or rather, those of the young doctor, were not without foundation. Yet he was careful not to raise an alarm, and in addressing us, spoke
in strictly professional tones:

  “A sad case, gentlemen! Mr. Gillespie has taken an overdose of chloral. We will have to leave him where he is till the coroner can be called.”

  A gasp followed by the clink of breaking glass came from the dining-room behind me. The old butler had dropped a glass he had just lifted off the mantel shelf of the dining-room.

  The doctor was at his side in a moment.

  “What is that?” he demanded.

  The butler stooped for the pieces.

  “Only the glass Mr. Gillespie drank out of. He asked for wine a half hour ago. Your words frightened me, sir.”

  He did not look frightened; but old servants of his stamp possess a strange immobility.

  “I will pick up these pieces,” said the doctor, stooping beside the man.

  The butler drew back. Dr. Bennett picked up the pieces. They were all dry. Evidently the glass had been drained.

  As he came out he cast a keen but not unkindly glance at the group of young men drawn up in the doorway.

  “Which of you was the witness of Mr. Gillespie’s death?” he asked.

  I bowed. I dreaded his questions, yet saw no way of evading them. If only Mr. Gillespie had been able to articulate the one word which would have relieved me of all further responsibility in this matter!

  “You are the person who was called into the house by Mr. Gillespie’s grandchild?” the doctor now asked, meeting my eye with the same expression of instantaneous and complete confidence I had seen on the features of his unhappy patient.

  “I am,” I replied; and proceeded to relate the circumstances with all the simplicity the occasion required. Only I said nothing about the letter which had been entrusted to me for delivery to some unknown person. How could I? There had been no encouragement in Mr. Gillespie’s expression when I asked him if the note I had taken from him was meant for his doctor.

  The account I was able to give of the deceased broker’s last moments seemed to deepen the impression which had been made upon the physician by the condition in which he found him. Taking up the pieces of glass he had collected from the dining-room hearth, he sniffed them carefully, during which act the two sons of Mr. Gillespie watched him with starting eyes. When he laid them down again, we could none of us conceal our curiosity.