Helen Vardon's confession
hanging from a peg in a disused wardrobe. My grandfather hanged
himself from a beam in the loft. Perhaps there were others. At any
rate, there it is. The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the
children’s teeth are set on edge.”
He paused, and I sat looking with uneasy surprise at the unwonted
animation in his face: the faint flush, the awakening light in his
eyes, the suppressed eagerness of his manner. There was something
weirdly unpleasant about this new phase.
“You mustn’t allow these fancies to disturb you,” I said feebly.
“They are not fancies,” he retorted. “They are weighty realities. I
thought for a long time that the inheritance had passed me by. But
when the first of those letters came, I knew that the legacy had
fallen in. And every new menace sets the impulse working. Whenever one
of those letters come I feel it; I find myself thinking of my mother
and my brother, and wondering if they felt the same. Then I take a
stiff whisky, and the feeling goes off. But I don’t care, nowadays, to
go to bed until I have taken a dose of veronal.”
“Why not?” I asked.
He drew himself to the edge of the bed, and, thrusting his head out,
peered into a shadowy corner of the room with a sort of
half-terrified, half-exultant leer that seemed to stir the very marrow
of my bones.
“What is it, Mr. Otway?” I asked, staring into the corner but seeing
nothing.
“Do you see it, Helen?” he said, rolling his eyes at me and then
looking back into the corner, which was in a line with the bed-head;
“that great hook, or bent peg. I can’t imagine what it was put there
for; but there it is, like a great metal finger,
beckoning--beckoning.”
I looked at the object that he indicated--a massive curved peg or hook
fixed to the wall about seven feet from the floor--and shivered
slightly. Its appearance was horribly suggestive.
“When I used to lie awake,” Mr. Otway continued, still gazing into the
corner, “after the first letters came, I could lie on my left side,
because then it was behind me and I seemed to feel it drawing me. I
had to turn so that I could see it; and whenever I looked at it, it
seemed to beckon. And so it does now.”
“I should have it unscrewed and taken away,” said I.
“Yes,” he replied, reflectively, “perhaps it might be--and yet I don’t
know. Perhaps I might be more restless if it were not there. It is, in
a way, a satisfaction to know that--ah--that I hold a trump card that
I can play if--ah--if all the other cards are against me.”
As he spoke, he looked at me with that same curious half-frightened,
half-exultant expression that made me wonder whether perhaps his
inheritance included a dash of insanity. Then he rolled back to the
middle of the bed and lay staring at the ceiling; and by degrees the
excitement faded out of his face and he recovered his usual stolid
gravity of expression.
Presently he glanced at the little carriage clock that stood on the
table, and, turning to me, said: “I usually take my veronal about this
time. Would you mind giving me a glass of water and the tablets?”
I rose from my chair, and as I did so my little wrist-bag, which had
been reposing, forgotten, on my lap, slipped to the floor. I picked it
up and hung it on the knob of the chair-back, and then fetched the
water-bottle and tumbler from the wash-stand. Having filled the
tumbler and handed it to Mr. Otway, I picked up the veronal bottle,
and seeing that it was a new one, broke the seal, withdrew the cork
and pulled out the cotton-wool packing.
“Three tablets, please,” said Mr. Otway.
I handed him the bottle, and as he took it and shook out the three
tablets he smiled grimly.
“You are the most cautious woman I have ever met,” he remarked. “But
you are quite right to make me responsible for my own poison.”
He took the tablets one at a time, crunching each between his teeth
very thoroughly before washing it down with water. Then he mixed what
looked to me a very stiff allowance of whisky, with a very little soda
water, and swallowed it at a draught.
“I find that the stimulant makes the veronal act more rapidly,” he
explained. “I shall be asleep in about half-an-hour. Do you mind
staying with me until I drop off?”
I agreed to this, although it was getting late; but, conscious that it
was probably the last service I should ever render him, I did not feel
that I could refuse. So I sat down again in the chair and watched him,
noting that already--probably as a result of the stimulant--he was
quieter in manner and more peaceful in appearance. Even when he
reverted to the subject that had occasioned my visit, his manner was
quite calm.
“There is something very mysterious about that stick,” he remarked.
“Recalling the circumstances, I remember putting it down in the corner
by the writing-table. I never saw it again, and never gave its
whereabouts a thought. I assumed that you had taken it, but I now
realise that I was mistaken. Apparently it has got into undesirable
hands and we haven’t heard the last of it, I fear.”
“You had better not think any more about it, Mr. Otway,” I said.
“There is nothing to be done, and the less you worry the less harm
these people will be able to do you.”
“Yes,” he agreed; “that is good advice, and I can follow it now. But
if I should wake up in the small hours of the morning it will be very
different. That is the worst time, Helen. Then this persecution seems
beyond bearing. The horror of it makes me sweat with fear. I seem to
hear the police on the stairs. I find myself listening for the sound
of the bell. It is horrible--horrible! And then I think of that
wardrobe, unnoticed all those weeks, and the figure inside in the
dark. And then----”
He made a motion of his eyes towards the shadowy corner, and
involuntarily I glanced at the great peg high up on the wall.
He did not speak again for some time, and I sat silently watching him
and thinking--thinking of his dreadful heritage and all that it might
mean. Was it a reality, this legacy of death that he saw coming to
him? Was it true that even now the black cap hung over his bed?
Supposing it were? Supposing that this very night, in the chilly
middle watch, he should wake with all his terrors clutching at his
heart! Should creep out of his bed and---- Here my glance stole into
the shadowy corner, and, as I looked, my mind seemed to picture a dim
shape filling the wall space below the big, massive peg. There were no
details and hardly any form; it was just a shape, vague and rather
horrible. I shivered slightly, but I did not try to blot out the
mental picture. It was a gruesome thing, that dim, elongated shape,
but it did not disturb me much; for it set going other associated
trains of thought. There was the ceremony to-morrow evening, the
witnesses with their doubtful rights of attestation, protesting that
all was in order--and protesting in vain. There were two Ishmaelites
going forth hand-in-hand into the wilderness, ready to meet scorn with
defiance--but still Ishmaelites. And at the thought, the shape upon
the wall space below the peg seemed to grow less dim, to loom out more
distinctly. That shape was Mr. Otway--dead. The late Mr. Otway. No
longer a legal impediment, but just a fiction that had ceased to
exist.
From the dark corner I turned my eyes on to the living man as he lay
motionless, breathing softly with an occasional faint snore, and now
and again puffing out his cheeks. He was not asleep, for I could see
his eyes open and close at intervals; but he was evidently growing
somnolent. I watched him with deep interest, almost with fascination,
as one might look on a condemned man making his last journey in the
hangman’s cart. This was a condemned man, too: a potential suicide. At
any moment he might set forth on his last journey; and his arrival at
his destination would set the Ishmaelites free. He was ready to go;
but he awaited the determining influence that would start him on his
journey. What form would that final cause take? Would it be some
sudden shock of alarm? Or the cumulative effect of prolonged, abiding
fear?
I leaned forward and spoke softly to him.
“Do you know, Mr. Otway, what caused your brother----”
He opened his eyes and looked at me, dully. “What did you say, Helen?”
he asked.
“I was wondering if you knew--if there was anything in particular that
caused your brother to take his life.”
He cogitated sleepily for a while before replying. At length he
answered, in a drowsy voice: “I am not very clear about it. He had had
a good deal of worry of one kind and another, financial and domestic.
I don’t know that anything unusual had occurred; but he had been in a
nervous, depressed state for some time.”
Having made this reply, Mr. Otway closed his eyes and took a deep
breath; and I reflected on the significance of his answer. There had
apparently been no specific cause of his brother’s suicide, but just
the accumulating effects of nervousness and depression, which exploded
when they reached a certain degree of intensity. His condition, in
fact, seemed to have been almost identical with Mr. Otway’s present
condition.
Once more my eyes wandered away to the shadowy corner; and again the
wall space below the great hook-like peg became occupied by that
elongated shape. Now I seemed to visualise it more completely. It was
no longer a mere shape. It had parts--recognisable members. There were
the limp-dangling arms, the downward-pointing toes, the shadowy head
lolling sideways. It was very horrible, yet I found myself viewing it
without horror, but rather with a certain detached interest. I was
getting used to it, and was disposed to consider it in terms of its
significance.
It was not a person. It was a thing which had replaced a person who
had ceased to exist. That person had had a wife. But the wife had
ceased to exist, too. In her place was a widow--a free, unattached
woman in whom were vested all the rights and liberties of
spinsterhood, including the power to contract a valid and regular
marriage. The shape was an ugly and forbidding thing; but it held
precious and desirable gifts.
From the shape projected by my own imagination my eyes turned to the
actual man--the man who was convertible into such a shape. He was fast
asleep now; lying on his back, breathing a little stertorously and
blowing out his cheeks at each breath. He was an unpleasant spectacle,
and the sound of his breathing was disagreeable. He ought not to be
lying on his back; for sleepers who lie on their backs are apt to
dream, and dreams are not good for men with a tendency to suicide. And
sleepers who breathe stertorously are apt to dream ugly dreams.
This consideration set my thoughts working afresh. Supposing this man
should have a dream presenting his waking terrors with all the added
intensity and vividness of a nightmare; the heavy footfalls of the
police upon the stairs, the hands groping in the darkness of the
landing for the bell-pull! Or if his dream should show him that
wardrobe with its dreadful occupant! What would happen? And even as I
put the question to myself my imagination supplied with startling
vividness the answering picture. I saw the affrighted sleeper suddenly
awaken in uncontrollable panic, scramble from his bed and shuffle
hurriedly towards the corner under the peg.
The mental construction of the scene was singularly complete and
orderly. I even found myself filling in the details of the means.
There, indeed, was the peg. But a man cannot hang himself without some
means of suspension. And these must be immediately available or the
impulse might die away before they were found. I glanced around the
room to see what means were to hand; and at once my eye lighted on an
old-fashioned bell-rope that hung beside the head of the bed. Its