Johnny Ludlow, Third Series

Madame seemed quite taken aback at the implication. Her voice had a sound of tears in it.

“Do you suppose I could be capable of such a thing, sir? I did think you had a better opinion of me. Such a child as Mina! We were both on our knees, looking for the song, when Captain Collinson came in; and he must needs go down on his great stupid knees too. He but called to inquire after Lady Jenkins.”

“Very thoughtful of him, of course. He is often up here, I fancy; at the next house, if not at this.”

“Certainly not often at this. He calls on Lady Jenkins occasionally, and she likes it. I don’t encourage him. He may be a brave soldier, and a man of wealth and family, and everything else that’s desirable; but he is no especial favourite of mine.”

“Well, Sam Jenkins has an idea that he would like to get making love to Mina. Sam was laughing about it in the surgery last night with Johnny Ludlow, and I happened to overhear him. Sam thinks they meet here, as well as next door: and you heard Mina say just now that she was singing to him here yesterday afternoon. Stay, my dear lady, don’t be put out. I am sure you have thought it no harm, have been innocent of all suspicion of it. Mistaken, you tell me? Well, it may be I am. Mina is but a child, as you observe, and—and perhaps Sam was only jesting. How is our patient to-day?”

“Pretty well. Just a little drowsy.”

“In bed, or up?”

“Oh, up.”

“Will you tell her I am here?”

Madame St. Vincent, her plumage somewhat ruffled, betook herself to the floor above, Mr. Tamlyn following. Lady Jenkins, in a loose gown of blue quilted silk and a cap with yellow roses in it, sat at the window, nodding.

“Well,” said he, sitting down by her and taking her hand, “and how do you feel to-day?”

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. Better, she thought: oh yes, certainly better.

“You are sleepy.”

“Rather so. Getting up tired me.”

“Are you not going for a drive to-day? It would do you good.”

“I don’t know. Ask Patty. Patty, are we going out to-day?”

The utter helplessness of mind and body which appeared to be upon her as she thus appealed to another, Mr. Tamlyn had rarely seen equalled. Even while listening to Madame St. Vincent’s answer—that they would go if she felt strong enough—her heavy eyelids closed again. In a minute or two she was in a sound sleep. Tamlyn threw caution and Dr. Knox’s injunction to the winds, and spoke on the moment’s impulse to Madame St. Vincent.

“You see,” he observed, pointing to the sleeping face.

“She is only dozing off again.”

“Only! My dear, good lady, this perpetual, stupid, lethargic sleepiness is not natural. You are young, perhaps inexperienced, or you would know it to be not so.”

“I scarcely think it altogether unnatural,” softly dissented madame, with deprecation. “She has really been very poorly.”

“But not sufficiently so to induce this helplessness. It has been upon her for months, and is gaining ground.”

“She is seventy years of age, remember.”

“I know that. But people far older than that are not as she is without some cause: either of natural illness, or—or—something else. Step here a minute, my dear.”

Old Tamlyn walked rapidly to the other window, and stood there talking in low tones, his eyes fixed on Madame St. Vincent, his hand, in his eagerness, touching her shoulder.

“Knox thinks, and has imparted his opinion to me—ay, and his doubts also—that something is being given to her.”

“That something is being given to her!” echoed Madame St. Vincent, her face flushing with surprise. “Given to her in what way?”

“Or else that she is herself taking it. But I, who have known her longer than Knox has, feel certain that she is not one to do anything of the sort. Besides, you would have found it out long ago.”

“I protest I do not understand you,” spoke madame, earnestly. “What is it that she could take? She has taken the medicine that comes from your surgery. She has taken nothing else.”

“Knox thinks she is being drugged.”

“Drugged! Lady Jenkins drugged? How, drugged? What with? What for? Who would drug her?”

“There it is; who would do it?” said the old doctor, interrupting the torrent of words poured forth in surprise. “I confess I think the symptoms point to it. But I don’t see how it could be accomplished and you not detect it, considering that you are so much with her.”

“Why, I hardly ever leave her, day or night,” cried madame. “My bedroom, as you know, is next to hers, and I sleep with the intervening door open. There is no more chance, sir, that she could be drugged than that I could be.”

“When Knox first spoke of it to me I was pretty nearly startled out of my senses,” went on Tamlyn. “For I caught up a worse notion than he meant to convey—that she was being systematically poisoned.”

A dark, vivid, resentful crimson dyed madame’s face. The suggestion seemed to be a reproof on her vigilance.

“Poisoned!” she repeated in angry indignation. “How dare Dr. Knox suggest such a thing?”

“My dear, he did not suggest it against you. He and I both look upon you as her best safeguard. It is your being with her, that gives us some sort of security: and it is your watchfulness we shall have to look to for detection.”

“Poisoned!” reiterated madame, unable to get over the ugly word. “I think Dr. Knox ought to be made to answer for so wicked a suspicion.”

“Knox did not mean to go so far as that: it was my misapprehension. But he feels perfectly convinced that she is being tampered with. In short, drugged.”

“It is not possible,” reasoned madame. “It could not be done without my knowledge. Indeed, sir, you may dismiss all idea of the kind from your mind; you and Dr. Knox also. I assure you that such a thing would be simply impracticable.”

Mr. Tamlyn shook his head. “Any one who sets to work to commit a crime by degrees, usually possesses a large share of innate cunning—more than enough to deceive lookers-on,” he remarked. “I can understand how thoroughly repulsive this idea is to you, my good lady; that your mind shrinks from admitting it; but I wish you would, just for argument’s sake, allow its possibility.”

But madame was harder than adamant. Old Tamlyn saw what it was—that she took this accusation, and would take it, as a reflection on her care.

“Who is there, amidst us all, that would attempt to injure Lady Jenkins?” she asked. “The household consists only of myself and the servants. They would not seek to harm their mistress.”

“Not so sure; not so sure. It is amidst those servants that we must look for the culprit. Dr. Knox thinks so, and so do I.”

Madame’s face of astonishment was too genuine to be doubted. She feebly lifted her hands in disbelief. To suspect the servants seemed, to her, as ridiculous as the suspicion itself.

“Her maid, Lettice, and the housemaid, Sarah, are the only two servants who approach her when she is ill, sir: Sarah but very little. Both of them are kind-hearted young women.”

Mr. Tamlyn coughed. Whether he would have gone on to impart his doubt of Lettice cannot be known. During the slight silence Lettice herself entered the room with her mistress’s medicine. A quick, dark-eyed young woman, in a light print gown.

The stir aroused Lady Jenkins. Madame St. Vincent measured out the physic, and was handing it to the patient, when Mr. Tamlyn seized the wine-glass.

“It’s all right,” he observed, after smelling and tasting, speaking apparently to himself: and Lady Jenkins took it.

“That is the young woman you must especially watch,” whispered Mr. Tamlyn, as Lettice retired with her waiter.

“What! Lettice?” exclaimed madame, opening her eyes.

“Yes; I should advise you to do so. She is the only one who is much about her mistress,” he added, as if he would account for the advice. “Watch her.”

Leaving madame at the window to digest the mandate and to get over her astonishment, he sat down by Lady Jenkins again, and began talking of this and that: the fineness of the weather, the gossip passing in the town.

“What do you take?” he asked abruptly.

“Take?” she repeated. “What is it that I take, Patty?” appealing to her companion.

“Nay, but I want you to tell me yourself,” hastily interposed the doctor. “Don’t trouble madame.”

“But I don’t know that I can recollect.”

“Oh yes, you can. The effort to do so will do you good—wake you out of this stupid sleepiness. Take yesterday: what did you have for breakfast?”

“Yesterday? Well, I think they brought me a poached egg.”

“And a very good thing, too. What did you drink with it?”

“Tea. I always take tea.”

“Who makes it?”

“I do,” said madame, turning her head to Mr. Tamlyn with a meaning smile. “I take my own tea from the same tea-pot.”

“Good. What did you take after that, Lady Jenkins?”

“I dare say I had some beef-tea at eleven. Did I, Patty? I generally do have it.”

“Yes, dear Lady Jenkins; and delicious beef-tea it is, and it does you good. I should like Mr. Tamlyn to take a cup of it.”

“I don’t mind if I do.”

Perhaps the answer was unexpected: but Madame St. Vincent rang the bell and ordered up a cup of the beef-tea. The beef-tea proved to be “all right,” as he had observed of the medicine. Meanwhile he had continued his questions to his patient.

She had eaten some chicken for dinner, and a little sweetbread for supper. There had been interludes of refreshment: an egg beaten up with milk, a cup of tea and bread-and-butter, and so on.

“You don’t starve her,” laughed Mr. Tamlyn.

“No, indeed,” warmly replied madame. “I do what I can to nourish her.”

“What do you take to drink?” continued the doctor.

“Nothing to speak of,” interposed madame. “A drop of cold brandy-and-water with her dinner.”

“Patty thinks it is better for me than wine,” put in Lady Jenkins.

“I don’t know but it is. You don’t take too much of it?”

Lady Jenkins paused. “Patty knows. Do I take too much, Patty?”

Patty was smiling, amused at the very idea. “I measure one table-spoonful of brandy into a tumbler and put three or four table-spoonfuls of water to it. If you think that is too much brandy, Mr. Tamlyn, I will put less.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said old Tamlyn. “It’s hardly enough.”

“She has the same with her supper,” concluded madame.

Well, old Tamlyn could make nothing of his suspicions. And he came home from Jenkins House and told Knox he thought they must be both mistaken.

“Why did you speak of it to madame?” asked Dr. Knox. “We agreed to be silent for a short time.”

“I don’t see why she should not be told, Arnold. She is straightforward as the day—and Lettice Lane seems so, too. I tasted the beef-tea they gave her—took a cup of it, in fact—and I tasted the physic. Madame says it is impossible that anything in the shape of drugs is being given to her; and upon my word I think so too.”

“All the same, I wish you had not spoken.”

And a little time went on.

III

The soirée to-night was at Rose Villa; and Mrs. Knox, attired in a striped gauze dress and the jangling ornaments she favoured, stood to receive her guests. Beads on her thin brown neck, beads on her sharp brown wrists, beads in her ears, and beads dropping from her waist. She looked all beads. They were drab beads to-night, each resting in a little cup of gold. Janet and Miss Cattledon went up in the brougham, the latter more stiffly ungracious than usual, for she still resented Mrs. Knox’s former behaviour to Janet. I walked.

“Where can the people from next door be?” wondered Mrs. Knox, as the time went on and Lady Jenkins did not appear.

For Lady Jenkins went abroad again. In a day or two after Mr. Tamlyn’s interview with her, Lefford had the pleasure of seeing her red-wheeled carriage whirling about the streets, herself and her companion within it. Old Tamlyn said she was getting strong. Dr. Knox said nothing; but he kept his eyes open.

“I hope she is not taken ill again? I hope she is not too drowsy to come!” reiterated Mrs. Knox. “Sometimes madame can’t rouse her up from these sleepy fits, do what she will.”

Lady Jenkins was the great card of the soirée, and Mrs. Knox grew cross. Captain Collinson had not come either. She drew me aside.

“Johnny Ludlow, I wish you would step into the next door and see whether anything has happened. Do you mind it? So strange that Madame St. Vincent does not send or come.”

I did not mind it at all. I rather liked the expedition, and passed out of the noisy and crowded room to the lovely, warm night-air. The sky was clear; the moon radiant.

I was no longer on ceremony at Jenkins House, having been up to it pretty often with Dan or Sam, and on my own score. Lady Jenkins had been pleased to take a fancy to me, had graciously invited me to some drives in her red-wheeled carriage, she dozing at my side pretty nearly all the time. I could not help being struck with the utter abnegation of will she displayed. It was next door to imbecility.

“Patty, Johnny Ludlow would like to go that way, I think, to-day may we?” she would say. “Must we turn back already, Patty?—it has been such a short drive.” Thus she deferred to Madame St. Vincent in all things, small and great: if she had a will or choice of her own, it seemed that she never thought of exercising it. Day after day she would say the drives were short: and very short indeed they were made, upon some plea or other, when I made a third in the carriage. “I am so afraid of fatigue for her,” madame whispered to me one day, when she seemed especially anxious.

“But you take a much longer drive, when she and you are alone,” I answered, that fact having struck me. “What difference does my being in the carriage make?—are you afraid of fatigue for the horses as well?” At which suggestion madame burst out laughing.

“When I am alone with her I take care not to talk,” she explained; “but when three of us are here there’s sure to be talking going on, and it cannot fail to weary her.”

Of course that was madame’s opinion: but my impression was that, let us talk as much as we would, in a high key or a low one, that poor nodding woman neither heard nor heeded it.

“Don’t you think you are fidgety about it, madame?”

“Well, perhaps I am,” she answered. “I assure you, Lady Jenkins is an anxious charge to me.”

Therefore, being quite at home now at Jenkins House (to return to the evening and the soirée I was telling of), I ran in the nearest way to do Mrs. Knox’s behest. That was through the two back gardens, by the intervening little gate. I knocked at the glass-doors of what was called the garden-room, in which shone a light behind the curtains, and went straight in. Sitting near each other, conversing with an eager look on their faces, and both got up for Mrs. Knox’s soirée, were Captain Collinson and Madame St. Vincent.

“Mr. Ludlow!” she exclaimed. “How you startled me!”

“I beg your pardon for entering so abruptly. Mrs. Knox asked me to run in and see whether anything was the matter, and I came the shortest way. She has been expecting you for some time.”

“Nothing is the matter,” shortly replied madame, who seemed more put out than the occasion called for: she thought me rude, I suppose. “Lady Jenkins is not ready; that is all. She may be half-an-hour yet.”

“Half-an-hour! I won’t wait longer, then,” said Captain Collinson, catching up his crush hat. “I do trust she has not taken another chill. Au revoir, madame.”

With a nod to me, he made his exit by the way I had entered. The same peculiarity struck me now that I had observed before: whenever I went into a place, be it Jenkins House or Rose Villa, the gallant captain immediately quitted it.

“Do I frighten Captain Collinson away?” I said to madame on the spur of the moment.

“You frighten him! Why should you?”

“I don’t know why. If he happens to be here when I come in, he gets up and goes away. Did you never notice it? It is the same at Mrs. Knox’s. It was the same once at Mrs. Hampshire’s.”

Madame laughed. “Perhaps he is shy,” said she, jestingly.

“A man who has travelled to India and back must have rubbed his shyness off, one would think. I wish I knew where I had met him before!—if I have met him. Every now and again his face seems to strike on a chord of my memory.”

“It is a handsome face,” remarked madame.

“Pretty well. As much as can be seen of it. He has hair enough for a Russian bear or a wild Indian.”

“Have wild Indians a superabundance of hair?” asked she gravely.

I laughed. “Seriously speaking, though, Madame St. Vincent, I think I must have met him somewhere.”

“Seriously speaking, I don’t think that can be,” she answered; and her jesting tone had become serious. “I believe he has passed nearly all his life in India.”

“Just as you have passed yours in the South of France. And yet there is something in your face also familiar to me.”

“I should say you must be just a little fanciful on the subject of likenesses. Some people are.”

“I do not think so. If I am I did not know it. I–”

The inner door opened and Lady Jenkins appeared, becloaked and beshawled, with a great green hood over her head, and leaning on Lettice Lane. Madame got up and threw a mantle on her own shoulders.

“Dear Lady Jenkins, I was just coming to see for you. Captain Collinson called in to give you his arm, but he did not wait. And here’s Mr. Johnny Ludlow, sent in by Mrs. Knox to ask whether we are all dead.”

“Ay,” said Lady Jenkins, nodding to me as she sat down on the sofa: “but I should like a cup of tea before we start.”

“A cup of tea?”

“Ay; I’m thirsty. Let me have it, Patty.”

She spoke the last words in an imploring tone, as if Patty were her mistress. Madame threw off her mantle again, untied the green hood of her lady, and sent Lettice to make some tea.

“You had better go back and tell Mrs. Knox we are coming, though I’m sure I don’t know when it will be,” she said aside to me.

I did as I was told; and had passed through the garden-gate, when my eye fell upon Master Richard Knox. He was standing on the grass in the moonlight, near the clump of laurels, silently contorting his small form into cranks and angles, after the gleeful manner of Punch in the show when he has been giving his wife a beating. Knowing that agreeable youth could not keep himself out of mischief if he tried, I made up to him.

“Hush—sh—sh!” breathed he, silencing the question on my lips.

“What’s the sport, Dicky?”

“She’s with him there, beyond the laurels; they are walking round,” he whispered. “Oh my! such fun! I have been peeping at ’em. He has his arm round her waist.”

Sure enough, at that moment they came into view—Mina and Captain Collinson. Dicky drew back into the shade, as did I. And I, to my very great astonishment, trod upon somebody else’s feet, who made, so to say, one of the laurels.

“It’s only I,” breathed Sam Jenkins. “I’m on the watch as well as Dicky. It looks like a case of two loviers, does it not?”

The “loviers” were parting. Captain Collinson held her hand between both his to give her his final whisper. Then Mina tripped lightly over the grass and stole in at the glass-doors of the garden-room, while the captain stalked round to the front-entrance and boldly rang, making believe he had only then arrived.

“Oh my, my!” repeated the enraptured Dicky, “won’t I have the pull of her now! She’d better tell tales of me again!”

“Is it a case, think you?” asked Sam of me, as we slowly followed in the wake of Mina.

“It looks like it,” I answered.

Janet was singing one of her charming songs, as we stole in at the glass-doors: “Blow, blow, thou wintry wind:” just as she used to sing it in that house in the years gone by. Her voice had not lost its sweetness. Mina stood near the piano now, a thoughtful look upon her flushed face.

“Where did you and Dicky go just now, Sam?”

Sam turned short round at the query. Charlotte Knox, as she put it, carried suspicion in her low tone.

“Where did I and Dicky go?” repeated Sam, rather taken aback. “I—I only stepped out for a stroll in the moonlight. I don’t know anything about Dicky.”

“I saw Dicky run out to the garden first, and you went next,” persisted Charlotte, who was just as keen as steel. “Dick, what was there to see? I will give you two helpings of trifle at supper if you tell me.”

For two helpings of trifle Dick would have sold his birthright. “Such fun!” he cried, beginning to jump. “She was out there with the captain, Lotty: he came to the window here and beckoned to her: I saw him. I dodged them round and round the laurels, and I am pretty nearly sure he kissed her.”

“Who was?—who did?” But the indignant glow on Lotty’s face proved that she scarcely needed to put the question.

“That nasty Mina. She took and told that it was me who eat up the big bowl of raspberry cream in the larder to-day; and mother went and believed her!”

Charlotte Knox, her brow knit, her head held erect, walked away after giving us all a searching look apiece. “I, like Dicky, saw Collinson call her out, and I thought I might as well see what he wanted to be after,” Sam whispered to me. “I did not see Dicky at all, though, until he came into the laurels with you.”

“He is talking to her now,” I said, directing Sam’s attention to the captain.

“I wonder whether I ought to tell Dr. Knox?” resumed Sam. “What do you think, Johnny Ludlow? She is so young, and somehow I don’t trust him. Dan doesn’t, either.”

“Dan told me he did not.”

“Dan fancies he is after her money. It would be a temptation to some people,—seven thousand pounds. Yet he seems to have plenty of his own.”

“If he did marry her he could not touch the money for three or four years to come.”

“Oh, couldn’t he, though,” answered Sam, taking me up. “He could touch it next day.”

“I thought she did not come into it till she was of age, and that Dr. Knox was trustee.”

“That’s only in case she does not marry. If she marries it goes to her at once. Here comes Aunt Jenkins!”

The old lady, as spruce as you please, in a satin gown, was shaking hands with Mrs. Knox. But she looked half silly: and, may I never be believed again, if she did not begin to nod directly she sat down.

“Do you hail from India? as the Americans phrase it,” I suddenly ask of Captain Collinson, when chance pinned us together in a corner of the supper-room, and he could not extricate himself.

“Hail from India!” he repeated. “Was I born there, I conclude you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Not exactly. I went there, a child, with my father and mother. And, except for a few years during my teens, when I was home for education, I have been in India ever since. Why do you ask?”

“For no particular reason. I was telling Madame St. Vincent this evening that it seemed to me I had seen you before; but I suppose it could not be. Shall you be going back soon?”

“I am not sure. Possibly in the autumn, when my leave will expire: not till next year if I can get my leave extended. I shall soon be quitting Lefford.”

“Shall you?”

“Must do it. I have to make my bow at a levée; and I must be in town for other things as well. I should like to enjoy a little of the season there: it may be years before the opportunity falls to my lot again. Then I have some money to invest: I think of buying an estate. Oh, I have all sorts of business to attend to, once I am in London.”

“Where’s the use of buying an estate if you are to live in India?”

“I don’t intend to live in India always,” he answered, with a laugh. “I shall quit the service as soon as ever I can, and settle down comfortably in the old country. A home of my own will be of use to me then.”

Now it was that very laugh of Captain Collinson’s that seemed more familiar to me than all the rest of him. That I had heard it before, ay, and heard it often, I felt sure. At least, I should have felt sure but for its seeming impossibility.

“You are from Gloucestershire, I think I have heard,” he observed to me.

“No; from Worcestershire.”

“Worcestershire? That’s a nice county, I believe. Are not the Malvern Hills situated in it?”

“Yes. They are eight miles from Worcester.”

“I should like to see them. I must see them before I go back. And Worcester is famous for—what is it?—china?—yes, china. And for its cathedral, I believe. I shall get a day or two there if I can. I can do Malvern at the same time.”