The House of the Whispering Pines

Was this review instantaneous, or the work of many minutes? Forced by the doubt to open my eyes, I met Clifton's full look turned watchfully on me. The result was calming; even to my apprehensive gaze it betrayed no new enlightenment. My struggle had been all within; no token of it had reached him.

This he showed still more plainly when he spoke.

"There will be a close sifting of evidence at the inquest. You will not enjoy this; but the situation, hard as it may prove, has certainly improved so far as you are concerned. That should hasten your convalescence."

"Poor Arthur!" burst from my lips, and the cry was echoed in my heart. Then, because I could no longer endure the pusillanimity which kept me silent, I rose impulsively into a sitting posture, and, summoning all my faculties into full play, endeavoured to put my finger on the one weak point in the evidence thus raised against Carmel's brother.

"What sort of a man would you make Arthur out to be, when you accuse him of robbing the wine-vault on top of a murderous assault on his sister?"

"I know. It argues a brute, but he—"

"Arthur Cumberland is selfish, unresponsive, and hard, but he is not a brute. I'm disposed to give him the benefit of my good opinion to this extent, Charlie; I cannot believe he first poisoned and then choked that noble woman."

Clifton drew himself up in his turn, astonishment battling with renewed distrust.

"Either he or you, Ranelagh!" he exclaimed, firmly. "There is no third person. This you must realise."

XXI

CARMEL AWAKES

One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow.

    Hamlet.

Later, I asked myself many questions, and wandered into mazes of speculation which only puzzled me and led nowhere. I remembered the bottles; I remembered the ring. I went back, in fancy, to the hour of my own entrance into the club-house, and, recalling each circumstance, endeavoured to fit the facts of Arthur's story with those of my own experience.

Was he in the building when I first stepped into it? It was just possible. I had been led to prevaricate as to the moment I entered the lower gateway, and he may have done the same as to the hour he left by the upper hall window. Whatever his denials on this or any subject, I was convinced that he knew, as well as I, that Carmel had been in the building with her sister, and was involved more or less personally in the crime committed there. Might it not be simply as his accessory after the fact? If only I could believe this! If my knowledge of him and of her would allow me to hug this forlorn hope, and behold, in this shock to her brain, and in her look and attitude on leaving the club-house, only a sister's horror at a wilful brother's crime!

But one fact stood in the way of this—a fact which nothing but some predetermined, underhanded purpose on her part could explain. She had gone in disguise to The Whispering Pines, and she had returned home in the same suspicious fashion. The wearing of her brother's hat and coat over her own womanly garments was no freak. There had been purpose in it—a purpose which demanded secrecy. That Adelaide should have accompanied her under these circumstances was a mystery. But then the whole affair was a mystery, totally out of keeping, in all its details, with the characters of these women, save—and what a fearful exception I here make—the awful end, which, alas! bespoke the fiery rush and impulse to destroy which marked Carmel's unbridled rages.

Of a less emotional attack she would be as incapable as any other good woman. Poison she would never use. Its presence there was due to another's forethought, another's determination. But the poison had not killed. Both glasses had been emptied, but—Ah! those glasses. What explanation had the police, now, for those two emptied glasses? They had hitherto supposed me to be the second person who had joined Adelaide in this totally uncharacteristic drinking.

To whom did they now attribute this act? To Arthur, the brother whose love for liquor in every form she had always decried, and had publicly rebuked only a few hours before? Knowing nothing of Carmel having been on the scene, they must ascribe this act either to him or to me; and when they came to dwell upon this point more particularly—when they came to study the exact character of the relations which had always subsisted between Adelaide and her brother—they must see the improbability of her drinking with him under any circumstances. Then their thoughts would recur to me, and I should find myself again a suspect. The monstrous suggestion that Arthur had brought the liquor there himself, had poured it out and forced her to drink it, poison and all, out of revenge for her action at the dinner-table a short time before, did not occur to me then, but if it had, there were the three glasses—he would not bring three; nor would Adelaide; nor, as I saw it, would Carmel.

Chaos! However one looked at it, chaos! Only one fact was clear—that Carmel knew the whole story and might communicate the same, if ever her brain cleared and she could be brought to reveal the mysteries of that hour. Did I desire such a consummation? Only God, who penetrates more deeply than ourselves into the hidden regions of the human heart, could tell. I only know that the fear and expectation of such an outcome made my anguish for the next two weeks.

Would she live? Would she die? The question was on every tongue. The crisis of her disease was approaching, and the next twenty-four hours would decide her fate, and in consequence, my own, if not her brother Arthur's. As I contemplated the suspense of these twenty-four hours, I revolted madly for the first time against the restrictions of my prison. I wanted air, movement, the rush into danger, which my horse or my automobile might afford. Anything which would drag my thoughts from that sick room, and the anticipated stir of that lovely form into conscious life and suffering. Her eyes—I could see her eyes wakening upon the world again, after her long wandering in the unknown and unimaginable intricacies of ungoverned thought and delirious suggestion. Eyes of violet colour and infinite expression; eyes which would make a man's joy if they smiled on him in innocence; but which, as I well knew, had burned more than once, in her short but strenuous life, with fiery passions; and might, at the instant of waking, betray this same unholy gleam under the curious gaze of the unsympathetic ones set in watch over her.

What would her first word be? Whither would her first thought fly? To Adelaide or to me; to Arthur or to her own frightened and appalled self? I maddened as I dwelt upon the possibilities of this moment. I envied Arthur; I envied the attendants; I envied even the servants in the house. They would all know sooner than I. Carmel! Carmel!

Sending for Clifton, I begged him to keep himself in communication with the house, or with the authorities. He promised to do what he could; then, perceiving the state I was in, he related all he knew of present conditions. No one was allowed in the sick room but the nurse and the doctor. Even Arthur was denied admission, and was wearing himself out in his own room as I was wearing myself out here, in restless inactivity. He expected her to sink and never to recover consciousness, and was loud in his expressions of rebellion against the men who dared to keep him from her bedside when her life was trembling in the balance. But the nurse had hopes and so had the doctor. As for Carmel's looks, they were greatly changed, but beautiful still in spite of the cruel scar left by her fall against the burning bars of her sister's grate. No delirium disturbed the rigid immobility in which she now lay. I could await her awakening with quiet confidence in the justice of God.

Thus Clifton, in his ignorance.

The day was a bleak one, dispiriting in itself even to those who could go about the streets and lose themselves in their tasks and round of duties. To me it was a dead blank, marked by such interruptions as necessarily took place under the prison routine. The evening hours which followed them were no better. The hands on my watch crawled. When the door finally opened, it came as a shock. I seemed to be prepared for anything but the termination of my suspense. I knew that it was Clifton who entered, but I could not meet his eye. I dug my nails into my palms, and waited for his first word. When it came, I felt my spirits go down, down—I had thought them at their lowest ebb before. He hesitated, and I started up:

"Tell me," I cried. "Carmel is dead!"

"Not dead," said he, "but silly. Her testimony is no more to be relied upon than that of any other wandering mind."

XXII

"BREAK IN THE GLASS!"

This inundation of mistempered humour
Rests by you only to be qualified.

    King John.

It was some time before I learned the particulars of this awakening.

It had occurred at sunset. A level beam of light had shot across the bed, and the nurse had moved to close the blind, when a low exclamation from the doctor drew her back, to mark the first faint fluttering of the snowy lids over the long-closed eyes. Afterwards she remembered what a picture her youthful patient made, with the hue of renewed life creeping into her cheeks, in faint reflection of the nest of roseate colour in which she lay.

Carmel's hair was dark; so were her exquisitely pencilled eye-brows, and the long lashes which curled upward from her cheek. In her surroundings of pink—warm pink, such as lives in the heart of the sea-shell—their duskiness took on an added beauty; and nothing, not even the long, dark scar running from eye to chin could rob the face of its individuality and suggestion of charm. She was lovely; but it was the loveliness of line and tint, just as a child is lovely. Soul and mind were still asleep, but momentarily rousing, as all thought, to conscious being—and, if to conscious being, then to conscious suffering as well.

It was a solemn moment. If the man who loved her had been present—or even her brother, who, sullen as he was, must have felt the tie of close relationship rise superior even to his fears at an instant so critical,—it would have been more solemn yet. But with the exception of the doctor and possibly the nurse, only those interested in her as a witness in the most perplexing case on the police annals, were grouped in silent watchfulness about the room, waiting for the word or look which might cut the Gordian knot which none of them, as yet, had been able to untangle.

It came suddenly, as all great changes come. One moment her lids were down, her face calm, her whole figure quiet in its statue-like repose; the next, her big violet eyes had flashed open upon the world, and lips and limbs were moving feebly, but certainly, in their suddenly recovered freedom. It was then—and not at a later moment when consciousness had fully regained its seat—that her face, to those who stood nearest wore the aspect of an angel's. What she saw, or what vision remained to her from the mysterious world of which she had so long been a part, none ever knew—nor could she, perhaps, have told. But the rapture which informed her features and elevated her whole expression but poorly prepared them for the change which followed her first glance around on nurse and doctor. The beam which lay across the bed had been no brighter than her eye during that first tremulous instant of renewed life. But the clouds fell speedily and very human feelings peered from between those lids as she murmured, half petulantly:

"Why do you look at me so? Oh, I remember, I remember!"

And a flush, of which they little thought her weakened heart capable, spread over her features, hiding the scar and shaming her white lips. "What's the matter?" she complained again, as she tried to raise her hands, possibly to hide her face. "I cannot move as I used to do, and I feel—I feel—"

"You have been ill," came soothingly from the doctor. "You have been in bed many days; now you are better and will soon be well. This is your nurse." He said nothing of the others, who were so placed behind screens as to be invisible to her.

She continued to gaze, first at one, then at the other; confidently at the doctor, doubtfully at the nurse. As she did so, the flush faded and gave way to an anxious, troubled expression. Not just the expression anticipated by those who believed that, with returning consciousness, would come returning memory of the mysterious scene which had taken place between herself and sister, or between her sister and her brother, prior to Adelaide's departure for The Whispering Pines. Had they shared my knowledge—had they even so much as dreamed that their patient had been the companion of one or both of the others in this tragic escapade—how much greater would have been their wonder at the character of this awakening.

"You have the same kind look for me as always," were her next words, as her glance finally settled on the doctor. "But hers—Bring me the mirror," she cried. "Let me see with my own eyes what I have now to expect from every one who looks at me. I want to know before Lila comes in. Why isn't she here? Is she with—with—" She was breaking down, but caught herself back with surprising courage, and almost smiled, I was told. Then in the shrill tones which will not be denied, she demanded again, "The mirror!"

Nurse Unwin brought it. Her patient evidently remembered the fall she had had in her sister's room, and possibly the smart to her cheek when it touched the hot iron.

"I see only my forehead," she complained, as the nurse held the mirror before her. "Move it a little. Lower—lower," she commanded. Then suddenly "Oh!"

She was still for a long time, during which the nurse carried off the glass.

"I—I don't like it," she acknowledged quaintly to the doctor, as he leaned over her with compassionate words. "I shall have to get acquainted with myself all over again. And so I have been ill! I shouldn't have thought a little burn like that would make me ill. How Adelaide must have worried."

"Adelaide is—is not well herself. It distressed her to have been out when you fell. Don't you remember that she went out that night?"

"Did she? She was right. Adelaide must have every pleasure. She had earned her good times. I must be the one to stay home now, and look after things, and learn to be useful. I don't expect anything different. Call Adelaide, and let me tell her how—how satisfied I am."

"But she's ill. She cannot come. Wait till tomorrow, dear child. Rest is what you need now. Take these few drops and go to sleep again, and you'll not know yourself to-morrow."

"I don't know myself now," she repeated, glancing with slowly dilating eyes at the medicine glass he proffered. "I can't take it," she protested. "I forget now why, but I can't take anything more from a glass. I've promised not to, I think. Take it away; it makes me feel queer. Where is Adelaide?"

Her memory was defective. She could not seem to take in what the doctor told her. But he tried her again. Once more he spoke of illness as the cause of Adelaide's absence. Her attention wandered while he spoke of it.