The Terriford Mystery/Chapter 3

ATE that same evening, Dr. Maclean, his wife, and their adopted daughter, were all sitting together in the dining room of Bonnie Doon.

The Macleans had bought the charming old house soon after the doctor had taken over the practice of Miss Prince's father, and they had renamed it after Mrs. Maclean's birth-place.

To-night, his wife and niece being by the table, the doctor sat close to the fire smoking his pipe.

“Dr. Tasker popped in to tea to-day,” observed Mrs. Maclean. As her husband said nothing she went on: “He waited quite a long while in the hope of seeing you. I'm doubting, Jock, whether we've been quite fair to that young man. He spoke very handsomely of you—he did indeed.”

“I've no need of his praise,” said the doctor dryly.

“I didn't say you had. All the same I hope you'll not scold me for having asked him to supper to-morrow night. He says Sunday is such a dull day in Grendon.”

“I can't promise to stay in for him if I'm sent for,” said Dr. Maclean, in a voice which his wife thought somewhat tiresome.

There had been a time, not so very long ago, when it was she, rather than her husband, who had disliked the young medical man who had suddenly “put up his plate,” as the saying is, on the door of almost the last house in Grendon. But Dr. Tasker had spoken to her very pleasantly at the cricket match. He had made friends, too, with Jean, and so Mrs. Maclean was now prepared to take him, at any rate in a measure, to her kindly Scots heart.

For a few moments there was silence in the room. Dr. Maclean turned himself round, and his eyes rested with appreciative affection on the bent head of the girl who even in a few weeks had so much brightened and enlivened his own and his wife's childless home.

Jean's hair was the colour of spun gold, and she had a delicately clear skin, giving depth to her hazel eyes. But her generous-lipped mouth was too large for beauty, and her features were irregular. Yet she looked so happy-natured, intelligent, and healthy, that the general impression produced by her appearance was that of a pretty, as well as that of a very agreeable girl.

Perhaps she felt her uncle's grateful, kindly glance, for suddenly she looked up and smiled.

“Well, Uncle Jock?” she exclaimed, “a penny for your thoughts!”

“I wonder if I'd really better tell you my thoughts,” he answered rather soberly.

“Of course you must!” cried his wife.

She, too, put down her work for a moment on the table and looked at him.

“I'm thinking,” he said quietly, “that we won't be keeping our pretty Jean here for long. It's all very well her being boxed up every day in that china factory. There are always half Saturdays and Sundays, to say nothing of holidays, and young men will soon come courting at Bonnie Doon.”

Jean burst out laughing, but Mrs. Maclean felt vexed.

“Really, Jock,” she exclaimed, “what are you after saying now? I've no liking for that sort of joke.”

“He wouldn't say it if he thought it true,” said her niece merrily. “I've been much disappointed in Terriford as regards the supply of young men.”

“Bide a wee, bide a wee,” said the doctor dryly. “A young woman never knows when she's going to meet Mr. Right; he's a way of appearing in the most unlikely places.”

Again his wife looked at him severely. “Jock, I'm surprised at you!”

“You'd often be surprised if you could look straight into my mind, woman,” said the doctor waggishly, tapping his pipe against the side of the fireplace. And then, as her aunt was still looking annoyed, Jean tactfully changed the subject.

“I wish you would tell me what you think of Agatha Cheale, Uncle Jock?”

“I wonder what you think of her?” he parried.

“I hardly know her. I liked her the day of the cricket match.”

“Is that the only time you've seen her?” asked Mrs. Maclean.

“I saw her to-day,” said Jean slowly, “Mr. Garlett overtook me after I had started walking home the field way. He suggested I should go through his garden—and then such a horrid thing happened!”

“What happened?” asked the husband and wife together.

“We were going across the lawn when we suddenly heard the sound of crying. It was coming, it seems, from Miss Cheale's sitting room. Mr. Garlett thought it was a child who had hurt itself, and asked me to go into the house. And then we found that it was Lucy Warren who was crying—and that there was such a horrid scene going on! I've never seen any one look as angry as Miss Cheale looked. I thought her such a quiet person.”

Mrs. Maclean asked eagerly: “Why was she angry?”

“From what I could make out,” said Jean, “Mrs. Garlett heard the French window of the drawing room open in the middle of last night. She thought it was a burglar, and she insisted on going downstairs; so she and Miss Cheale went downstairs together, and there was Lucy Warren with a man! But he escaped by the window out into the garden before they could see who it was.”

“I don't wonder Miss Cheale was angry!” exclaimed Jean's aunt. “I can hardly believe such a tale of Lucy Warren. She's such a superior-looking girl, such a pet, too, of Miss Prince's. Miss Prince was saying to me the other day how sorry she was she had ever allowed Mrs. Garlett to have Lucy, but she felt the Thatched House situation was such a good one that she ought not to keep the girl from it.”

“Lucy will go back to her now. Miss Prince isn't the woman to let a good maid go begging,” observed Dr. Maclean. “They didn't say a word of all that to me this morning.” He added, “I couldn't think what had upset Mrs. Garlett.”

“When we came in, Miss Cheale was trying to get out of Lucy who the man was,” went on Jean eagerly. “But all she would say was that she didn't see why she shouldn't have a talk with a friend anywhere she chose. She actually appealed to Mr. Garlett to say if she wasn't right!”

“What did he say?” asked Mrs. Maclean.

“In a way he took Lucy's part, for he reminded Miss Cheale that the drawing room was never used. But of course that only made her more angry—in fact, she was shaking with rage, her face was livid.”

“It was foolish of him to interfere,” observed the doctor.

“Of course I slipped away as quickly as I could,” went on the girl, “but as I went down the passage I heard Lucy call out: 'I hate you, Miss Cheale! I hate Mrs. Garlett! I hate everybody in this house!' Oh, it was dreadful—and I felt so sorry for them all.”

Five hours later Jean Bower lay asleep in the big, comfortable bedroom which had been made so pretty for her by her kind aunt. The girl stirred uneasily, for she was dreaming a strange, a terrible, and most vivid dream.

She was at the Etna China factory taking down letters from the dictation of her employer, Mr. Garlett. Though she had been at the factory for a full month Jean had seen very little of the managing director. But they had made friends during their walk from Grendon to Terriford, and in her dream she was enjoying the change of taking down dictation from a man who knew exactly what he wanted to say instead of from weary-brained, hesitating old Mr. Dodson. And then, suddenly looking up, she saw that, pressed against the central pane of the window behind Mr. Garlett was a face convulsed with hatred—and the face was that of Agatha Cheale!

A feeling of icy terror crept over her, for the managing director's room was on the first floor of the building, far above the ground of the stone-paved courtyard round which the Etna China factory had been built close on seventy years ago.

With a stifled cry the girl awoke and sat up in bed, the horror of her nightmare still so vividly real that her teeth were chattering and her hands trembling in the darkness.

Then there gradually came to her the reassuring knowledge as to why she had dreamed that strange, unnatural dream. It was of course owing to her having seen Agatha Cheale, her face distorted with anger, dismissing Lucy Warren at the Thatched House yesterday morning!

But her feeling of reassurance and relief did not last long, for suddenly a stone came crashing in through the window nearest to her. Jumping out of bed she rushed across the room and threw up the lower sash of the window.

“Who's there?” she called out, and then, “What do you want?”

To her amazement it was Harry Garlett's voice that called back, “Please forgive me, Miss Bower. I've come for the doctor. My wife has been taken seriously ill. I rang the night bell, but could get no answer.”

“The night bell's gone wrong. I'll run and tell Uncle Jock at once”

Leaving the window open, she hustled on a dressing gown and ran down the passage.

“Uncle Jock!” she knocked on the door as hard as she could. “Mr. Garlett has come to fetch you, for Mrs. Garlett has been taken ill”

Mrs. Maclean opened the bedroom door. “Go back to bed, child; I'll see to Harry Garlett.”

Reluctantly the girl did as she was bid, for she had the natural desire of youth to be in the middle of anything exciting that is going on.

To Jean Bower Mrs. Garlett was still a mere name, for she had never seen the invalid. But already, though she had only been working on and off with him for a very short time, she had come to like the man every one called Harry Garlett. She was a simple, straightforward, old-fashioned girl. From her point of view all ordinary married people love one another, and she believed her employer to be exceptionally devoted to his ailing wife. There had been a note of extreme anxiety and urgency in the now familiar voice which had come up from the garden just now.

As Dr. MacLean hurried by Harry Garlett's side along the road leading to the Thatched House he felt a good deal disturbed. Though he had thought his patient more ailing than usual the day before, there had been nothing to indicate anything in the nature of a sudden seizure.

“D'you know exactly when your wife was taken ill?” he asked, aware that his companion's bedroom was in quite another part of the Thatched House, some way from the rooms occupied by the ailing woman and Agatha Cheale.

“She was taken ill early in the night. But Miss Cheale thought she'd be able to manage without calling me, and then, suddenly, Emily seemed to collapse! So I dressed and hurried along to fetch you.”

They walked on in silence till they turned in through the gate of the delightful garden which surrounded the house for which they were bound, and as they hastened up the avenue, Dr. Maclean noticed that there were no lights in any of the windows. Agatha Cheale had evidently not seen fit to rouse the servants.

The two men hurried together through the dark hall into the broad corridor which ran through the spacious old house; but at the foot of the staircase the master of the house hung back.

“I don't think I'll go up with you,” he exclaimed. “I'll wait in my study, Maclean. I can't do any good up there, and it unnerves me to see Emily suffer.”

“All right!” cried the doctor hastily; and he hastened on, familiar with every inch of the way, till he reached the upstairs corridor, which, unlike the lower part of the house, was brilliantly lighted.

All at once he started back—for from behind a big wardrobe there had suddenly emerged an odd-looking figure clad in a drab-coloured ulster.

“It's only me, sir.” The reassuring words were uttered in a frightened whisper; and with astonishment Dr. Maclean recognized Lucy Warren, the pretty parlour-maid who had got into such trouble the night before.

“Mrs. Garlett's been moaning something awful,” she murmured, “but she's left off now. You won't tell her that you've seen me, sir, will you?”

“Not if you'll go straight back to bed!”

The little incident made an unpleasant impression on the doctor. He told himself that the young woman might at least have gone and seen if she could do anything to help relieve her sick mistress.

And then, as he approached his patient's room, Dr. Maclean half-unconsciously slackened his footsteps and listened.

But no sound fell on his ear; indeed the silence brooding over the brilliantly lit corridor seemed almost uncanny.

Yet the bedroom door was ajar, and, hearing his footsteps, Agatha Cheale opened the door wide, and came out into the passage, a finger to her lips.

She was dressed in a big white coverall. It accentuated the intense pallor of her face and made her slender figure look thicker than usual.

“Mrs. Garlett is asleep now,” she whispered, “but she's been in awful pain, and I'm sorry I didn't send for you before. I've always been able to manage her in her previous night attacks, but this time she's been really very bad! I do hope—oh, I do hope, Dr. Maclean, that you won't think I was to blame not to send for you at once?”

She was so unlike her usual quiet sensible self that the doctor felt alarmed, in spite of himself.

“I don't suppose I could have done any good if I had come an hour ago,” he said soothingly. “I take it she overate herself last night?”

“She did indeed—that's what upset her, of course.”

As he moved toward the now open door he told himself, not for the first time, that it was strange that Agatha Cheale, in this one matter of diet, seemed powerless to control his patient. But there it was! Like so many people with delicate digestions, Mrs. Garlett had always had a fanciful, queer, greedy kind of appetite. Sometimes she would eat hardly anything for days together, and then she would grossly overeat herself.

“I suppose,” he said in a low voice, “that you've given her brandy?”

“Yes, I have—but it hasn't done her any good.”

Agatha Cheale still spoke in an agitated, almost hysterical, whisper.

And then, for no particular reason, though he remembered doing so afterwards, Dr. Maclean asked Agatha Cheale a casual question: “Has her husband seen her?”

“No, he thought it best to go off at once for you.”

At last, together, they walked through into the sick woman's room.

Mrs. Garlett's bedchamber was the largest in the house, and, like the drawing room below, was somewhat overcrowded with heavy early-Victorian mahogany furniture.

Coming out of the brightly lit corridor Dr. Maclean, for a moment, saw nothing, for the one electric lamp which was turned on was heavily shaded. But for the fact that he knew where every chair and table stood, he would have knocked into something.

“Do turn on another light,” he whispered rather crossly. “I can't see at all!”

Obediently she turned on the two naked lights hanging above the dressing-table, but the big curtained four-post bed in which the sick woman lay remained in deep shadow.

“Before I see her, tell me exactly what she ate last night,” said the doctor in a low voice.

Standing opposite Dr. Maclean, just under the two bright naked lights, Agatha Cheale, her face pale and strained, told her story.

“About seven last evening I went to see Miss Prince for a few minutes and, while I was away, from what I can make out Mr. Garlett came up to sit with Mrs. Garlett before dressing for dinner. Unfortunately some forced strawberries which Miss Prince had brought in the morning had been taken up and left in the corridor outside. Mr. Garlett seems to have brought them in here—I suppose to show them to Mrs. Garlett. She said she would like to eat some of them then, before her supper. He stupidly allowed her to do so, and she ate them all—a plateful—with probably a lot of sugar added. So of course I wasn't surprised when she called out to me about two hours ago that she felt ill!”

“Did she take anything after the strawberries?” asked the doctor.

“Of course she did. She began to feel hungry about 8.30 and then she had her supper—a nice bit of grilled fish and some stewed apples. But her supper didn't do her any good on the top of the strawberries”

“I don't suppose it did,” agreed the doctor dryly. “And now let me have a look at her”

As he took a step toward the bed Agatha Cheale suddenly put her right hand on his arm.

Surprised, he stopped, and she whispered hesitatingly: “I've been wondering—I suppose you wouldn't like to have a second opinion?”

He shook his head decidedly, secretly very much surprised that her nerve should so far have given way. What good could a second opinion do in a case of severe indigestion? Why, the idea was absurd! Then he reminded himself that Agatha Cheale was not a trained nurse—in spite of her war experiences.

He walked quickly across to the sick woman's four-post bed, lifted the heavy, stiff, silk-lined calendered chintz curtain, and then turned on the light in a reading lamp which stood on a small pedestal table.

Mrs. Garlett was lying on her back in the middle of the big bed, and Dr. Maclean, taking up the lamp, leant for a long, long moment over his patient.

Then he turned, with a blanched face, and still unconsciously holding the lamp in his hand, to the woman who stood waiting over by the dressing-table, the light beating down on her tired drawn face.

“She's not asleep—she's dead,” he said quietly.

“Dead! Not dead? Oh, don't say she's dead!”

Agatha Cheale's voice rose into a kind of shriek.

The doctor put the lamp down. He took her hand and held it firmly in his.

“Hush!” he exclaimed, kindly and yet authoritatively. “I'm sorry to have given you such a shock, Miss Cheale, but I'm not so surprised as you seem to be. Her heart was in a very bad state. You have nothing to reproach yourself with—you have been wonderfully good and patient with her, poor soul.”

“Can nothing be done?”

She was looking at him with an extraordinary expression of horror and of pleading on her face.

“Nothing,” he answered gravely.

There was a pause; the doctor dropped the hand he had been holding in so firm a clasp.

“Miss Prince's dish of strawberries killed this poor woman as surely as if she had taken a dose of poison,” he said grimly.

“You will never let Mr. Garlett know that, will you?” she whispered.

He made no answer, and perhaps she saw by his expression that he was telling himself that even the most sensible women are sometimes foolishly sentimental, for a little colour came back into her face.

“Shall I go down and tell him—or will you?” she asked, in a voice that had suddenly become composed.

“I'll tell him, of course.”

To his relief he saw her eyes become suffused with tears.

“We little thought yesterday morning that this would be the solution of your problem,” he said feelingly.

“It's a horrible, horrible solution!” she exclaimed violently.

Again Dr. Maclean made no answer, for he did not, could not, agree with her. To his mind, the death of Mrs. Garlett was bound to turn out a blessing, not only to the young woman who had tended her so faithfully, if unlovingly, for over a year, but also to the dead woman's husband.

Hard cases make bad law; Dr. Maclean was no advocate of easy divorce, but to his mind there was something intensely repellent in the marriage of a strong healthy man to a hopeless invalid. Deep down in his heart the honest Scotsman knew what would have happened to himself had he been in the shoes of Harry Garlett. He knew that his flesh and blood would not have borne such a difficult, unnatural situation, and he had long admired the young man's straight, simple, clean way of life. Thanks to that dish of early strawberries, Harry Garlett would now be able to remake his life on happy, natural lines.

Slightly ashamed of such thoughts coming at such a time, he glanced at the young woman before him. Would she now become the real mistress of this delightful house? The doctor suspected she would make a try for it. But he could not help hoping that the newly made widower would in time meet with a happier fate than marriage with this secretive and, he suspected, very jealous-natured woman. Dr. Maclean liked Harry Garlett well enough to hope that, after a decent interval, this now mournful house would be filled with gay, wholesome, girlish laughter, and the patter of little feet.

And while these secret thoughts were rushing through his brain Agatha Cheale was standing motionless, a look of stark terror on her bloodless face.

“Go into your room,” he said at last, “and try and get a little rest.”

Together they left the room of death, and the doctor quickly made his way downstairs through the still, silent house.

Rather unreasonably, it gave Dr. Maclean somewhat of a shock to find Harry Garlett comfortably stretched out in an easy chair, reading a novel. But as the doctor advanced into the room the master of the Thatched House leaped to his feet.

“Well!” he exclaimed, “I hope you've made her more comfortable, Maclean? I'm sorry to have dragged you out like this, but Miss Cheale was so very much upset and worried”

Then something in the gravity of the doctor's face pulled the speaker up short. He added quickly: “Isn't she so well? Would you like me to get Tasker?”

Dr. Maclean took a step forward; he put his hand on the younger man's shoulder:

“Garlett, I've a sad thing to break to you, man”

He waited a moment, then said quietly: “Your poor wife is dead—an obvious case of heart failure following an attack of acute indigestion.”

“Dead?”

As Harry Garlett repeated the word his face became deeply, deeply troubled. “She seemed so well, for her, last evening,” he said slowly.

The doctor answered in a low voice: “You should have resisted her wish for those strawberries.”

Harry Garlett looked puzzled.

“I never gave her any strawberries, Maclean. There are no strawberries yet—it's much too early.”

It was the doctor's turn to be surprised.

“I understood from Miss Cheale that you had shown your wife a dish of forced strawberries brought her by Miss Prince, and that then she had insisted on having them before her supper.”

“I never saw any strawberries, and I was only with her for a very few minutes.”

“Then one of the maids must have given them to her,” observed the doctor. “But if it hadn't been that dish of strawberries, it would have been something else. It's clear from the state she was in that anything might have caused her death.”

As if hardly knowing what he was doing, Harry Garlett sat down again.

“I—I can't believe it,” he muttered.

“As far as the poor soul could be made happy, you made her happy, Garlett,” said Dr. Maclean feelingly.

“I wonder if I did—I wonder if I did! You must have often thought it strange that I was away so much, Maclean. But honestly—it was poor Emily's own wish.”

He was speaking with deep emotion now, staring down at the floor.

“After I left the army, it took me some time to realize how really ailing she was, though, as you may remember, I did at that time stay at home a good deal. And then one day she sent me a note by hand to the factory”

He looked up. “That note, Maclean, was my order of release! I have kept it, and I should like you to see it some day. In it she said that she wanted me to be happy—that Dodson was quite up to looking after the business, and that she did not want me ever to feel that I couldn't do anything which would add to my innocent pleasure in life—because of her state.”

Dr. Maclean was more touched than he would have thought possible.

“Dear me,” he exclaimed, “that was very decent of her!”

“It was,” agreed the other, “it was indeed, Maclean. And she meant every word of what she wrote. It was only yesterday, our thirteenth wedding-day, that she said to me, 'I don't like your spending a week-end at home. It doesn't seem natural, my dear.' Thank God I did—thank God I did!”

“I think everything has gone very much better here this last year,” said the doctor thoughtfully.

“How d'you mean?”

“I mean because of Miss Cheale.”

The other did not answer for a moment, and then he said in a low voice:

“That's true in a way, though I don't think Emily liked Miss Cheale. I have at times regretted having agreed that she should come.”

“They weren't the kind of women who would naturally take to one another,” answered Dr. Maclean.

“And yet my wife quite liked that worthless brother of Miss Cheale's. He actually came to tea with her the other day.”

“Mrs. Garlett always liked men better than women,” said the doctor dryly. He had at once guessed the identity of Lucy Warren's drawing-room visitor, and it had amused him to picture “poor Emily's” wrath had she even dimly suspected the fact.

He added, after a pause: “Your wife was a generous sort, Garlett—I mean about money.”

“Yes, she was that, certainly.”

Both men remained silent for a moment. It was true that the poor woman now lying dead upstairs had always shown herself generous about money, though not, excepting to her husband, about anything else. But now was not the moment to recall her cantankerous and narrow outlook on life.

“Well,” said the doctor at last, “I must be going now. I'll leave a note in her letter-box for Miss Prince as I go by. It will be just as well for Agatha Cheale to have a friend with her this morning; she has had a terrible shock.”

“She must have had,” said Harry Garlett; but he did not speak with his usual hearty kindliness.

The doctor looked at him rather hard. Then he again put his hand on the younger man's shoulder.

“Look here, my friend, I know you've been a good husband to that poor soul. But you're still a young man, and a new chapter of your life has begun.”

“I don't feel like that,” muttered Harry Garlett in a low voice.

“Of course you don't! But still it's the truth.”

He added, measuring his words: “If I were you I should go away at once, as soon as the funeral is over, for a real holiday—such a holiday as you've never had. Don't come back here till Christmas! Dodson's getting a very old man; you'll soon either have to manage the business yourself or get another partner, so take a holiday while you can get one.”