The fair woman’s blue eyes and white face seemed to glitter with anger, like a baleful lightning.
“I don’t understand your chaff,” she said, with a few ornamental epithets, which, in moments when she was deeply stirred, were apt to decorate her conversation.
“I grieve to be obscure,” he answered; “brevis esse laboro, the old story. But, as you say Miss Burnside is sleeping, and as, when she wakens, she may be feverish, will you kindly carry these oranges and leave them on a plate by her bedside? They are Jaffa oranges, and finer fruit, Alice, my dear, I have seldom tasted! After that, go to Cavendish Square, and leave this note at the doctor’s.”
“Oh, nothing’s too good for her!” growled the jealous woman, thinking of the fruit; to which he replied by offering her several of the oranges not used in his experiment.
Bearing these, she withdrew, throwing a spiteful glance and leaving the door unshut, so that her master distinctly heard her open Margaret’s door, come out again, and finally leave the house.
“Now, I’ll give her a quarter of an hour to waken,” said Mr. Cranley, and he took from his pocket a fresh copy of the Times. He glanced rather anxiously at the second column of the outer sheet “Still advertising for him,” he said to himself; and he then turned to the sporting news. His calmness was extraordinary, but natural in him; for the reaction of terror at the possible detection of his villainy had not yet come on. When he had read all that interested him in the Times, he looked hastily at his watch.
“Just twenty minutes gone,” he said. “Time she wakened—and tried those Jaffa oranges.”
Then he rose, went up stairs stealthily, paused a moment opposite Margaret’s door, and entered the drawing-room. Apparently he did not find any of the chairs in the dining-room comfortable enough; for he chose a large and heavy fauteuil, took it up in his arms, and began to carry it out In the passage, just opposite Margaret’s chamber, he stumbled so heavily that he fell, and the weighty piece of furniture was dashed against the door of the sick-room, making a terrible noise. He picked it up, and retired silently to the dining-room.
“That would have wakened the dead,” he whispered to himself, “and she is not dead—yet. She is certain to see the oranges, and take one of them, and then—”
The reflection did not seem to relieve him, as he sat, gnawing his mustache, in the chair he had brought down with him. Now the deed was being accomplished, even his craven heart awoke to a kind of criminal remorse. Now anxiety for the issue made him wish the act undone, or frustrated; now he asked himself if there were no more certain and less perilous way. So intent was his eagerness that a strange kind of lucidity possessed him. He felt as if he beheld and heard what was passing in the chamber of sickness, which he had made a chamber of Death.