The Lost Million Part 38

"Thank you, Mrs Howard," I said. "I'll go up and find the doctor. I know my way." Then, in quick anxiety, I breathlessly ascended the broad, thickly carpeted oak staircase, and a few moments later was in the room which I knew, by the door, was the apartment in which the weird occurrence had taken place.

I recollected only too vividly my own terrible experience, and by those e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns which had so puzzled everybody, I knew that she had again witnessed that claw-like hand.

The room, cosy, well-furnished and upholstered in pretty cretonne, was in great disorder. The bed--a bra.s.s one, with cretonne hangings over the head to match the furniture--was tumbled with half the clothes upon the floor, while the green satin down-quilt had been tossed some distance away. A chair lay overturned, and water and towels were about, showing the attempts at restoration.

Upon a little wicker-table near the bed stood a shaded electric light, and a novel which my love had evidently been reading on the previous night, lay open. Yet though I investigated the room with careful deliberation, fearing every moment lest Shaw should return, I could detect nothing to account for the singular phenomenon.

The window stood slightly open, but Mrs Howard had explained how it had been unlatched by herself.

I examined the lock of the door. The key was still on the inside, while the hasp was broken; while the hasp of a small bra.s.s safety-bolt above had also been forced off. Hence the door must have been both locked and bolted. Certainly there could have been no intruder in that room.

One object caused me curiosity, and my heart beat quickly. Upon the mantelshelf was a little framed snapshot of myself and her father which she had one day taken outside the Casino at Aix.

But what had she seen within that room to cause her such a shock--nay, to produce upon her almost exactly the same symptoms which in the case of Guy Nicholson had terminated fatally?

I heard a footstep in the corridor, and emerging from the room came face to face with the fussy old doctor in his rough tweeds.

My unexpected appearance caused him to utter an exclamation of surprise, but when I asked breathlessly for news of his patient, he looked very grave and said--

"A weak heart, and brain trouble, my dear Mr Kemball. To tell you frankly, alas! I fear the worst."

"Come here a moment," I said, taking him by the arm and pulling him into the disordered bedroom. "Now," I added, as I pushed the door to as well as it would go. "Tell me truthfully. Doctor Redwood, what do you make of this affair?"

"Nothing at present," he replied with a peculiar sniff, a habit of his, "Can't make it out at all. But I don't like the symptoms. Only once she has spoken. In her delirium she whispered something about a hand.

She must have _seen_ something or other--something uncanny, I think.

And yet what can there be here?" he asked, gazing amazedly round the apartment.

"Look here, Redwood," I exclaimed firmly, "the facts are very similar to those at t.i.tmarsh. Poor Nicholson saw _Something_, you'll recollect.

And he had locked himself in--just as Miss Seymour did."

The doctor stroked his ruddy, clean-shaven chin.

"I quite admit that in many of the details it is quite a parallel case.

But I am hoping to get the young lady round sufficiently to describe what happened. The servants say that the screams were loud piercing ones of horror and terror. Shaw himself told me that he had the greatest difficulty in breaking down the door. They found her crouched down in fear--yonder, behind the ottoman. And she shrieked out something about a hand. To what could she have referred, do you think?

She's quite sane and of perfectly sound mind, or I should attribute the affair to some hallucination."

"It was more than hallucination," I a.s.sured him, recollecting my own experience, yet determined not to a.s.sist him towards the elucidation of the mystery. The dead man had evidently made a discovery immediately, before his fatal seizure. I recollected that brief urgent note of Asta's. Had she, too, made a similar discovery?

Yes. There could be no evasion of the fact. The two cases were in every way identical.

For nearly a quarter of an hour I stood discussing the amazing affair with Redwood. I could see that he was both mystified and suspicious, therefore I extracted from him a pledge of secrecy, and promised to a.s.sist him towards a solution of the extraordinary problem. I made no mention to anybody of Asta's message to me, which I intended should remain a secret.

At my earnest appeal he allowed me to creep on tiptoe into the darkened chamber, wherein still lay unconscious the woman I loved so profoundly-- she who was all the world to me.

I bent over the poor white face that presented the waxen transparency of death, and touched the thin, soft hand that lay outside the coverlet.

Then, with eyes filled with tears, and half choked by the sob which I was powerless to restrain, I turned away and left the room.

"Will she recover?" I managed to ask the doctor. But he merely raised his thick eyebrows in blank uncertainty.

What devil's work had been accomplished within that locked room? Ay, what indeed?

Against the man Shaw, who had so cleverly misled her into the honest belief that he adored her, there arose within me a deep and angry hatred. Why was he not there, knowing Asta's precarious condition? His excuse of enforced attendance at the Petty Sessions was no doubt an ingenious one. Little did he dream that before the occurrence Asta had summoned me, and for that reason I was there at her side.

So strange had been all the circ.u.mstances from that moment when the man of mystery--Melvill Arnold--had breathed his last, that I had become utterly bewildered. And this amazing occurrence in the night now staggered me. Only one person had solved the mystery of the shadowy hand, and he, alas I had not lived to reveal what, no doubt, was a terrible truth.

In the corridor I stood discussing my beloved's condition in low, bated whispers with the fussy country pract.i.tioner, a man of the old fox-hunting school--for nearly every one rides to hounds in that gra.s.s-country. He had already telephoned for Doctor Petherbridge, in Northampton, to come for consultation, and was now expecting him to come over in his car.

"I have done all I can, Mr Kemball," he said. "But as we don't know the cause, the exact remedy is rather difficult to determine. Every symptom is of brain trouble through fright."

"Exactly the same symptoms as those you observed in Nicholson!" I remarked. Whereat he slowly nodded in the affirmative, and again stroked his rosy, clean-shaven chin.

"Well, doctor," I said, "I intend to make it my business to investigate the cause of this peculiar phenomenon."

And I sat down and wrote an urgent telegram to Cardew, who was, I knew, now stationed at Aldershot.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.

ANOTHER REVELATION.

The dark anxious hours of that dismal autumn morning went slowly by.

Doctor Petherbridge arrived in hot haste from Northampton, and had a long and earnest consultation with Redwood. Both men were greatly puzzled. I met them after a long and eager wait, when they emerged in silence from the sick-room.

"We are doing all we can, Mr Kemball," declared Petherbridge. "The young lady is, I regret to say, in a most precarious condition--in fact, in a state of collapse."

I begged him to remain, and he did so. For several hours they were constantly at her bedside, while Mrs Howard, anxious and solicitous for the welfare of her young mistress, expressed surprise that Mr Shaw did not return.

My own suspicion was that he had already fled, yet it proved ungrounded, for at half-past two he arrived in eager haste, in a hired carriage, his car having broken down. Both doctors came forward and explained that the condition of Miss Asta had in no way improved. She was suffering from some obscure malady which they had diagnosed as affecting both heart and brain.

"Poor girl! Poor girl!" he cried, tears welling in his eyes. "Do your best for her, I pray of you both," he added. "She's all the world to me. Can't we summon a specialist?"

"Sir George Mortimer, in Cavendish Square, might see her," remarked the doctor from Northampton.

"Let's wire to him at once," urged Shaw, eagerly. "I accept your diagnosis entirely, yet I would like to have a specialist's opinion."

Both medical men acquiesced, and a telegram was dispatched to the great specialist on brain trouble.

As Redwood, seated at the library table, wrote the telegram, his close-set eyes met mine. The glance we exchanged was significant.

"How did you know of this terrible affair, Kemball?" asked Shaw, abruptly, a little time afterwards.

"I came over to invite you both to dine next Wednesday," I said, of course concealing the secret message I had received from the woman I had grown to love.

In response, he gave a grunt of dissatisfaction, and walked down the hall in hasty impatience. Was his impatience an eagerness to hear of the poor girl's end?

Surely that could not be, for was he not utterly devoted to her! And yet her seizure and her symptoms were exactly similar to those of poor Guy Nicholson!

The whole day I remained there, watching closely Shaw's demeanour and his movements.