CHAPTER IV
Standing in the doorway, grasping the portière tightly with her right hand, while her left was pressed against her breast, was a tall, thin woman, dressed from head to foot in white. Seen thus in the dim light of the darkened room, her clinging draperies of some soft, semi-transparent material swathed round her slight form and forming billows of white foam about her feet, her pale face, out of which two great eyes shone like lamps in the darkness, the slow, swaying movement of her body in the opening between the two rooms, all combined to give her an uncanny appearance, to suggest a ghostly vision rather than a woman of flesh and blood.
Even the hoarse laugh she uttered when Audrey sprang up and turned to face her, sounded like the unearthly, weird cry of a lost soul rather than an utterance of living human lips.
Audrey was struck dumb. She saw at once that the strange visitor had come with hostile intent, she read anger, spiteful, bitter anger in her thin face, in the convulsive movements of her gloved fingers.
Was she a madwoman? There was nothing indeed of the disorder of madness about her. From the great white hat, loaded with long white ostrich feathers, which crowned her golden hair, down to the long white gloves which hung in wrinkles on her arms, and the graceful draperies which half-hid, half-revealed, her sinuous and slender figure, the stranger showed every sign of that studied elegance and calculated attractiveness which comes only from taste, care and the long experience of a characteristic but keen feminine intellect.
Audrey, having of late had to study dress as a fine art, acknowledged herself in the presence of a past mistress of it.
No. The lady in the white draperies was not mad, wild as were her eyes, and weirdly alarming as was her mocking laughter.
There was a moment of dead, uncanny silence, when, her laughter having died away on her lips, the stranger, still grasping the dark curtain as if for support, and leaning forward to fix the gaze of her terrible dark eyes on Audrey, stood like a tigress ready to spring, panting, struggling for the breath that came only in painful gasps, preparing herself for an encounter which Audrey felt would be a terrible one.
Audrey looked round her fearfully, wondering whether she could escape the trying ordeal with which she knew herself to be threatened. This woman had, she knew, come to see her, come with some accusation, unguessed at but evidently serious, ready on her lips as it was already burning in her eyes.
There was a door nearly opposite to where Audrey stood by the couch; but it was shut, and there were dress stands and lounges between it and her.
She had a feeling that, if she were to attempt to fly, the tiger-like stranger would spring at her, tear her to pieces with those long, lean, white-gloved hands, that looked claw-like as they moved nervously with every breath she drew.
And Audrey was encumbered with the weight of a magnificent black train, glittering with paillettes and voluminous in its folds, which she put on when she arrived at the showrooms in the morning, and exchanged for a quiet little tailor-made gown to return at night to her two modest rooms on the top floor over a small chemist’s shop in a street off Oxford Street.
This handsome black gown increased the effect of a strong contrast between her and her weird visitor. The lady in white was tall, thin; from golden hair and whitened face to sinuous figure, a work of finished art.
Audrey was in the first freshness of her striking natural beauty, easy and graceful of carriage, well developed of figure, with golden hair that lay in natural rings on her forehead, and in a twisted coil, untidy and loose, on the top of her head.
The contrast was between natural and artificial loveliness, and the glaring, panting stranger seemed to appreciate this fact.
Long as the time seemed, it was in truth but a few moments that they both stood silently watching each other, neither ready to utter the first word.
Then, so quickly that it seemed all to take place in the twinkling of an eye, there came a rapid step in the inner room, a hand dragged the white-clad woman roughly away, and at the same time and by the same movement the curtain was drawn across the opening between the rooms, shutting Audrey out into the twilight of the darkened room.
Then she heard the woman’s voice, savage, passionate, full of an emotion so strong that it seemed to strangle her, weak and ill as she evidently was.
“Madame Rocada! Madame Rocada!” she cried, gasping out the name in withering tones, hoarse and broken, yet eloquent of rage and scorn. “Let me see her, let me speak to her, let me see what she has to say for herself. Do you think you can stop me, you!”
Audrey, bewildered and alarmed, wondering who it was that had seized the stranger and dragged her away from the door, crept close to the curtain to learn more of this intrusion and the cause.
She had fancied herself alone in the long suite of rooms; for Marie Laure, who slept on the premises in a tiny room at the back, had gone out to do some shopping, and it was in her absence that poor Audrey, broken down and miserable, had indulged in the fit of tears which had been so strangely interrupted.
Whose then was the hand that had seized the stranger? A strong one it must have been, to do so much so quickly!
Surely, thought Audrey, it must be the hand of a man. She crept nearer and nearer to the curtain, making ready to pull it sharply back, and to take the two persons within by surprise.
But even as she advanced, she heard by the fainter sound of the woman’s voice that she was being drawn away, and that she was being gagged.
The last words that Audrey caught sounded to her listening ears like the calling of a man by his name:—
“Oh, Eugène, Eugène!”
A chill seized Audrey, and she drew back, frightened, asking herself in a wild impulse of suspicion and dread whether this “Eugène” were some evil genius, the same that had cast his blighting hand upon the fate of Gerard and herself?
Then she heard a door shut, and peering through behind the portière into the inner room, she saw that no one was there.
The building of which this first floor formed a part had been extended at the back, and behind this second large showroom there were two or three smaller rooms, one of which was that of Mademoiselle Laure, and another a private fitting-room. It was this room the door of which Audrey had heard close, and trying it, she now found that it was locked.
She heard voices within, subdued, angry, the whispering voices of a man and a woman, speaking some language which Audrey could not understand.
She knocked, but there was no reply.
Hurriedly withdrawing, therefore, without speaking a word, Audrey went out upon the staircase, and into her own private room, where she kept her walking dress. Changing quickly into this, she had just put on her hat, with the intention of going downstairs to meet Mademoiselle Laure on her return and to consult with her as to what she had better do, when she was startled by the sound of the unlocking of a door, and then by footsteps running rapidly down the stairs.
She flew to the door and looked out; but she was too late to see more than this: that the person who was dashing down the stairs and disappearing by the side door into the street was a man.
Who was it?
And why was not the white-clad lady with him?
Audrey hesitated only one moment, and then, full of fears she could not have defined, ran up to the fitting-room and went in.
The room was quite dark, but she touched the electric button, and at once a flood of soft light filled the apartment.
A cry of horror broke from her lips when, turning her eyes at once towards a big divan which stood under the window, she saw lying at full length upon it the body of the woman in the white dress.
Her white hat was crushed and bent under her poor lifeless head; one hand, still in its long wrinkled white kid glove, was outstretched as if in a last convulsion; one white kid, high-heeled walking shoe lay on the floor. The white ostrich feather boa which had floated round her shoulders when Audrey saw her alive was twisted round her thin throat. The clinging white dress was bound round her motionless limbs.
And over all, dress, gloves, boa, in startling and awful contrast to the white clothes, were marks of blood: blood which had gushed out from her mouth and streamed over everything.
Audrey was aghast. Was this a murdered woman upon whose body she was looking? She could not tell. For the haggard cheeks, the glassy eyes, the laboured breath, the feeble though passionate movements, all of which signs she had noticed in the living woman, the husky voice, the occasional cough, had betrayed unmistakably the fact that the poor woman was in the last stage of consumption, and her death might well have resulted from the bursting of a blood-vessel in a moment of wild excitement.
On the other hand, the sudden disappearance of the man who had met her and dragged her away from the doorway was horribly suggestive. And the feather boa which appeared to be bound round the poor woman’s thin and wasted throat might, Audrey thought with horror, have been the means of her death.
One long look she gave before she went to call assistance. And in that look she ascertained that the dead woman must have been of surpassing beauty, for the features were regular and perfectly formed; that she was between forty and fifty years of age appeared equally certain, now that powder and paint could hide the marks of time no longer. And Audrey crept downstairs shuddering, and wondering what fate was upon her, that a second and horrible calamity should happen in her experience within little more than six weeks.
At the foot of the private staircase which led out into the street she was lucky in meeting Mademoiselle Laure, to whom she related, in faltering accents, the terrible experience she had just gone through. By this time, however, poor Audrey, giddy and faint with the scene she had gone through, could scarcely articulate, scarcely make herself intelligible to Mademoiselle Laure, who could or would speak no English.
Audrey, indeed, spoke French well. But excitement either confused her utterance or affected her voice, for it was a long time before the Frenchwoman gathered the gist of her words.
Then Mademoiselle laughed at her.
“You dream, Madame,” she answered in her rapid French. “Such things do not happen. The busy day has got on your nerves, and you have imagined horrors which have no existence! Bah! A dead woman—all in white—lying upstairs! No, no. You want your dinner. That is all.”
And she laughed, actually laughed, while poor Audrey, stupefied by this unexpected reception of her dreadful news, leaned back against the wall of the narrow passage for a few moments, unable to speak.
At last, seeing that the Frenchwoman remained looking at her in a far from sympathetic manner, she roused herself, and staggering towards the door, said in a whisper:—
“I—I shall go for the police!”
“For what?” echoed Mademoiselle Laure incredulously. “The police! A nice thing for the business that would be, ma foi! To have the police here, to hunt and turn the place upside down in their search for the effects of Madame’s weak nerves! The police! Oh, no. We will have no police here, be sure of that!”
And the voluble Frenchwoman, with the same expression of mocking incredulity on her thin features, seized Audrey by the arm and held her as she would have gone out.
But the younger woman had a will of her own too.
“Mademoiselle,” said she, “you forget that I am the head of this business, the tenant of these premises, and that I have a right to do as I please.”
“And I,” retorted the Frenchwoman, always using her native language, and speaking fast and with determination, “have a duty to do in protecting you from your own folly. Look here, Madame. I knew when I went out that something would happen to you. You looked as white as a ghost, you were trembling, and on the verge of tears. The worry and fatigue of the busy day, during which you have eaten and drunk nothing, has made you ill. I see the marks of tears upon your face; your hair is in disorder; your hat is not pinned on properly. You are not yourself. I did not like to leave you, and I wish to Heaven I had not done so. You are nervous, unstrung. Come across the road with me, to the confectioner’s opposite. You shall drink a glass of wine and swallow a mouthful of food, and then we will come back together.”
“Back! Oh, no, no,” cried Audrey, shuddering.
The reaction after intense excitement had set in, and she was weak, tremulous and almost hysterical. Still, with all this, she knew what she had to do, what she must do.
“Well,” said Mademoiselle Laure, speaking with more kindliness as her companion showed signs of increasing weakness, “will you promise me to stay quietly at the shop while I go for a doctor?”
“A doctor! Oh, yes, yes,” said Audrey.
“Come then, quickly. I’m afraid of your fainting on the way.”
Audrey shook her head. Supported by her companion’s arm, she was now outside, and the fresh air of the evening revived her. They were only just in time, for the shop opposite was closing. They begged permission to enter, and Audrey drank a glass of wine and obediently tried, though she did not succeed in the attempt, to eat a biscuit. For on no other terms would Mademoiselle Laure consent to leave her.
“I will be back, Madame,” said the Frenchwoman, with an encouraging smile, as she went quickly to the door, “in five minutes. There is a doctor round the corner. I will fetch him. Wait for me.”
Audrey was indeed thankful to have the task of taking the necessary steps transferred to the shoulders of another. At first, in the dazed state which succeeded her first white heat of excitement, she had almost let herself be persuaded by the Frenchwoman into wondering whether she had not been the victim of her own imagination. But before Mademoiselle Laure left her, she had recovered her wits, and recognised that, in fetching a doctor, which was, after all, the most sensible thing that could be done, the woman was acknowledging the fact that there was something in what her employer had said.
The time seemed very long while she waited, but she dared not go back alone to the showrooms, and she now realised that it was not her place to send for the police, but the doctor’s.
The woman in charge of the shop grew impatient too, and they both watched the clock until five, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes had passed.
Then Mademoiselle Laure suddenly appeared at the side-door, on the opposite side of the street, which led to the showrooms. She ran across the road, and beckoned excitedly to Audrey.
She was laughing.
Audrey trembled and could scarcely stand as Mademoiselle Laure took her by the arm and, without a word of explanation, beyond saying that the doctor was there, led the trembling woman back and up the stairs.
“Don’t take me in again, don’t, don’t,” whispered Audrey, whose nerve had given way completely under the long and terrible strain.
“But you must come, you must. Don’t you want to see the doctor?” said Mademoiselle Laure, whose voice and manner was as derisive as ever.
Audrey let herself be led, reluctant indeed, but submissive as a child, up the stairs and into the first of the two big, handsomely furnished showrooms.
The doctor, an elderly man of strictly professional aspect, who wore gold spectacles and spoke in a quiet and authoritative manner, bowed to her with a keen but kindly look.
At once he offered her a chair, and making a sign to Mademoiselle Laure to draw back the muslin curtain that veiled the nearest of the electric lights, he took Audrey by the wrist.
She drew a breath of amazement. Evidently he looked upon her as a patient.
“Oh, there’s—there’s nothing the matter with me, doctor,” said she breathlessly. “All I want to know is whether the—the poor woman died naturally, or—or was——”
Before she could get any further, she saw the doctor look up and exchange a grave glance with Mademoiselle Laure. Perceiving at once that he appeared to doubt her sanity, angry with the Frenchwoman, and determined to put an end to the misunderstanding, Audrey darted across the room towards the door of the fitting-room. “You have been misinformed, doctor,” said she quickly. “It is not to see me that you were called in, but an unhappy woman who——”
She had tried the door of the fitting-room, and it had opened in her hand. Audrey looked in, stopped short, turned giddy, fell back. Then, passing her hand across her eyes, and waiting a moment to recover herself, she went boldly into the room.
For a whole minute she stood staring round her, clenching her hands, trying to understand, to believe the evidence of her eyes.
Not only was the white-clad lady no longer there, but not a sign of her presence, a trace of a tragedy, was to be seen.
“Where—where is she? Where have you put—the body?” hissed she in a hoarse, peremptory whisper.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders, and spoke soothingly.
“Madame,” said he, “there has been nobody there. It is the result of an overactive imagination, upon a stomach left too long without food, and an overwrought system. I will write you out a little prescription; you must take a sleeping draught, and I will come and see you in the morning.”
And he looked round for paper and a pen.