Wolf in Man's Clothing (2 page)

And Anna finally followed me. As I turned at the wide landing and looked back, I saw her coming after me, her footsteps soft on the thickly carpeted stairway, round face lifted anxiously and faintly purple as she passed below a band of purple light from the stained glass window above the landing.

When I reached the top of the stairway, Drue was already halfway down a long wide corridor which seemed to run the length of the house and was intersected once by a narrow corridor which seemed to go toward a servants' wing. Along the main corridor toward the north end of the house a man—the workman who had met us at the train—seemed to be sorting my bags from Drue's by examining the initials and tags. Our rooms then were to be where he left our bags. I made a mental note of the door he opened and went along the hall southward, in Drue's wake. Anna followed me.

Halfway along it Drue stopped. The hall was gloomy, for it was a dark day in the early spring with a fine, cold rain falling. But I could see her pause for an instant with her hand on a doorknob; then she opened the door and disappeared. The maid, Anna, who by that time was just behind me, said, “Holy Mother of God! But I could do nothing …” And wrung her hands again.

Probably I had some idea of clarifying the situation and my own confused state of mind at the same time. For I stated my position then, in a loud clear voice. “You don't understand. I am a nurse. My name is Sarah Keate. Miss Cable is a nurse, too. Your local doctor, Dr. Chivery, sent for us last night. I was sent here to nurse a Mr. Craig Brent. …” I stopped, for the maid didn't hear a word I said. She, too, opened the door and went into the room beyond and naturally, again, I followed.

It was a large bedroom, dusky, so the big, canopied four-poster in the middle of it was outlined bulkily against the gray light from the windows along the opposite wall. There was a fireplace with a couch drawn up before it; and the massive shapes of too much and too heavy furniture. Then I saw Drue, and she was kneeling at the side of the bed with her head down.

Anna gave a wavering little sound, a kind of angry moan. She went to a table and turned on the light in a lamp that stood there. Then I could see more clearly; a man lay on the bed, looking very long under the white blanket cover, and Drue had her face on his hand which lay outside.

Anna stepped toward the kneeling, slender figure and said softly, “Oh, you mustn't. If his father finds you here …”

Drue lifted her head. She had flung off her hat, so her light brown hair, brushed upward from her temples and breaking into short curls on the top of her small head, shone softly, like gold, in the light and looked disheveled, like a child's. Her face was very pale; she looked upward beseechingly at Anna and whispered, “Is he going to die?”

“No, no,” cried Anna. “No, please God.”

There was a moment of complete silence, with only the fine rain whispering against the windowpanes. Then Drue said, “No. I won't let him die. I'm a nurse. I know what to do. …” Her fingers were on his pulse. “Where is the chart? The doctor must have left orders. Give them to me …”

Anna went back to a table, and Drue rose in a swift motion and followed her. I went closer to the bed and stood there looking down at my patient—Craig Brent. He was asleep.

Obviously it was a drugged sleep. I didn't know, then, what was wrong, and I didn't like the drawn look in his face, young and lean, with good bones, a rather stern, brown profile, and deeply hollowed eyes. I didn't like his pulse either when I put my fingers lightly on his wrist.

Whatever this man, this house and the people in it meant to Drue, to me then, the main thing was my patient. Drue and the maid had withdrawn with the chart to a curtained doorway which seemed to lead to a dressing room. I followed. It was a small room, with windows along one side and cupboards lining the other; at the other end of it was another door leading into a bathroom. Drue was reading the doctor's orders intently, and Anna was close beside her, watching Drue's face and knotting her fingers nervously in her apron. Drue was white, and the upward gleam of the light outlined the clean line of her chin and cheekbones, and cast a soft shadow around her eyes. She looked up directly at me with a poignant appeal in her eyes and her mouth. She thrust the tablet into my hands and said to Anna in a whisper that was as chilled and cold as the rain outside, “Anna, who shot him?”

Well, that gave me a real and most unwelcome start; it was the first I'd known of that. They had said at the registry office (or rather, I remembered suddenly, Drue had said when she persuaded me to take the case with her) only that there'd been an accident. Not that it was a shooting accident. I don't like shootings. I held the tablet in a hand suddenly gone stiff.

Anna shook her head. “They said accident,” she whispered. In fact, our whispers and the dreary day, the silence in the great, thick-walled house and the whisper of rain against the windows gave the whole thing a kind of eeriness. Drue's small hands caught Anna's shoulders.

“Anna, you must tell me. What happened?”

“I don't know, Miss Drue. I swear I don't know. They found him in the garden, there by the hedge …”

“In the garden? When?”

“Last night. About eleven. They carried him into the house and sent for the doctor.”

“But what did they say? How could there have been an accident?”

“They said he was cleaning a gun.” Anna's eyes wavered and went back to Drue's.

“At eleven o'clock at night?” said Drue. “In the garden?
Craig
!”

Anna said nothing. The rain swished gently against the window behind her. It was then perhaps three o'clock in the afternoon, but it seemed later because of the dark day. Finally, Drue said, “Who brought him in? Who found him?”

The maid swallowed. “Beevens—you remember him—the butler …”

“Beevens! Yes, I remember. Who else?”

“Mr. Nicky and Mr. Peter Huber. You wouldn't know him. He's a friend, an old school friend of Mr. Craig's.”

“I don't remember him.” Drue was frowning. “Is he here, do you mean? Staying in the house?”

“Yes, Miss Drue. He and Mr. Nicky and Beevens heard the shot; they were in the morning room, and Beevens was locking up for the night. Mr. Craig called for help, and they found him—he'd fainted by that time. The doctor was called at once. Mr. Brent—
oh, you must go
! You can't stay.”

Drue paid no attention to the maid's pleading. “Who's been taking care of him? You?”

“Yes, Miss Drue. And Mrs. Chivery. She came right away—as she always does when we need her. She stayed all night. She helped the doctor get the bullet out.”

“Bullet …” whispered Drue after a moment and seemed to shiver a little, and I looked at the tablet in my hand.

Drue waited while I read it. I knew she was watching me to see what I thought of what I read there and I knew, too, that she was counting on my skill and experience. That was why she had made me come with her.

Well, it was serious enough but not necessarily fatal. The bullet had entered his shoulder; they had got it out, without benefit of x-ray or operating room. It must have been a fairly ticklish task for the local doctor. I frowned, reading and weighing my patient's chances. Drue said whispering, “Will he live?”

“I hope so. I'll take night watch.”

“That's the hardest,” she said. She put her hands on my arm and, with pleading in her eyes, said, “Let me take it. I'll call you if anything goes wrong.”

“All right. I'll sleep with one eye open. There's really nothing we can do now except watch his pulse and his breathing. If he takes a bad turn …” I stopped. In that case there would be plenty to do and that quickly. I said to Anna, “Stay with him, please, while I get into my uniform.”

Anna nodded and I turned into the bedroom and a woman had quietly entered the room and was standing beside the bed, leaning over the unconscious man, and she had placed one white pointed hand upon his forehead.

Well, of course that particular gesture has much the same effect upon me that a red rag is said to have upon a bull. Soothing the fevered brow is a peculiarly revolting idea of nursing. I said in a low but perfectly clear voice, “I'll have to ask you not to disturb my patient,” and the woman looked up, coolly, at me. “Oh,” she said. “You're the nurse.”

She was a young woman of about medium height and beautiful; she had a pointed, delicate face, a slender, fine nose, and a small yet deeply curved mouth with a full underlip which looked, oddly, both sensitive and cruel. Her hair was a misty, dark cloud, very short, so it molded her small, fine head in a way that made me think of a Greek statue of a boy. Her eyelashes shaded her eyes softly, so you caught only the lights back of them, not a full candid glimpse of her eyes. She reminded me then irresistibly and always after that of a medieval portrait beside a Greek statue, which sounds confusing, but may have been a slight indication of our Alexia's rather remarkable versatility; but there was the same fineness and the same fragile beauty and the same lurking comprehension of cruelty that one catches a faint chilling glimpse of below the beauty and satins and pearls of ancient portraits. Italian, I should say—certainly there was no buxom old-time Flemish or German beauty here. But there was beauty. A watchful, wary beauty. She wore a crimson suit and a white blouse and a string of real pearls. And I didn't like her.

Having looked me up and down, she turned again, deliberately, to the bed and straightened the bed clothing a little and put her hand against Craig Brent's brown cheek for an instant. She did it very possessively, intending, clearly, to put me in my place. Before I could reciprocate (for if it was my case, it was my case), Drue walked out of the dressing room, followed closely by the little terrier and by Anna. The first thing I noticed was that the terrier ducked swiftly back into the dressing room, and Anna made an abortive motion to do so too but misjudged direction and brought up with a bump against the wall.

The woman in the red suit was looking at Drue. Drue stopped. It was rather curious I suppose that they faced each other over Craig. Quite slowly the woman's white, pointed hand went to her long, white throat, and she said in a clear and imperative voice, “Drue Cable! How dare you enter my house?”

D
RUE WHISPERED, “ALEXIA
…”

Well, I didn't know who Alexia was (unless, by the look on her face, a descendant of one of the more expert Borgias), but it looked as if she might leap straight across the bed, tigerlike, for Drue's throat instead of her own, where her lovely hand still clung to her pearls quite as if one of us intended to snatch them.

I disliked her even more strongly. I said abruptly, “Be quiet!”

Neither woman looked at me and neither spoke or moved, although Anna got a good three inches smaller and made an earnest but unsuccessful attempt to shrink into the wall. I went across to the door into the hall, opened it and made a sweeping gesture which must have been rather imperative, for Drue walked toward me, and the woman, Alexia, her eyes still fixed upon Drue, came too. There was an instant when it looked as if they would meet at the door with something of the effect of gasoline and a match in careless juxtaposition, but they didn't, for Drue came quickly into the hall and Alexia followed. I closed the door (it seemed to be my only function so far in the Brent house) and, possibly with some further idea of clarifying things, I said as I had said to Anna, “I am Nurse Sarah Keate. Miss Cable and I were sent here …”

The woman in red interrupted, still looking at Drue. “Oh, yes,” she said, with a little scorn in her voice, “I'd forgotten you were a nurse. So that's the way you got into the house. These seem to be your tactics. Craig was sick when you got hold of him in the first place, wasn't he? It will be different this time. I'm here and this is my house.”

Drue went as white as paper. “But he didn't marry you. I watched the papers. He didn't marry anyone.”

There was a gleam of triumph in Alexia's eyes. She said, “You didn't read them thoroughly enough. I'm Mrs. Brent.” She added slowly, smiling, watching Drue, “Now you know how I felt the night you came back here with Craig.”

“Alexia …” Drue said stiffly, and stopped. And Alexia, still smiling, said, “But I'm not Mrs. Craig Brent. I married Conrad, instead. It was a very quiet wedding—Conrad wished it so. But now, you see, this is my house, and I have every right to protect Craig from you now …”

“
Conrad
!” cried Drue. “
Craig's father
!” Color came back into her lips.

Alexia said sharply, “Naturally. For your own good I'm telling you you'd better leave. Craig doesn't want you. Conrad won't have you here.”

Up to that point the interview had been candid to an embarrassing degree. But just then there was a kind of secret shifting of the emotions which had been hurtling around my defenseless (but I must say heartily listening) ears. Drue said slowly and thoughtfully, “I came here, Alexia, because they said Craig might die. But now that I'm here, if I can, I—I'm going to find out what really happened.”

Alexia's eyes sharpened.

“What do you mean?”

“I believe you know what I mean,” said Drue rather slowly, watching Alexia.

“I haven't the faintest idea,” said Alexia swiftly, too swiftly.

There was a moment's silence. Then Drue said, still very quietly, “Perhaps not. But I'm going to talk to Craig.”

“He's—he's too sick,” said Alexia quickly. “You can't. Besides, Conrad won't let you.”

“Conrad can't stop me,” said Drue.

“Oh,
can't
he!” cried Alexia. “You'll see.”

Again Drue seemed to consider for a moment. Then she said with something very honest and appealing in her voice and face, “Alexia, you are Conrad's wife. It's nothing to you—what happened in the past. I don't suppose we can be friends …”