The Paliser case

by Edgar Saltus

Then absently she found herself looking in the garden where the aproned man was at work. But it was Lennox that she saw. Again and again since the wedding-evening, when Paliser had told her of the unscrambled eggs, she had wondered about the broken engagement. On that evening she had felt that she had taken the wrong road and had lost her way. The feeling was momentary. If Lennox had never been engaged, the result would have been the same. Not once had he so much as said boo! He had not even looked it. At table, on the wedding-evening, the unscrambled eggs had not tasted very good, but reflection had salted them and since then, in reviewing the matter, it had occurred to her that it was none of her business.

Now as she looked out on the garden she wondered whether he had cared very greatly for this girl, for if he had, what then did she mean by throwing over a man who was too good for her, too good for anybody?

She sighed and absently looked again at the gardener. He was bending down, occupied in planting something. Since she had first noticed him he had half-circled a parterre and she was about to telephone and ask if the car were ready when he straightened, turned, extracted a pipe and attempted to light it.

The air was very still, there was no breeze, but the match was ineffective. On his trousers, with a backward movement, he struck another match and raised it to the bowl. The flame, faintly blue, mounted and, with it, a curl of smoke. But it was not Cassy or, more exactly, it was not her objective self, that saw it. It was her subjective self that registered and afterward reproduced that momentary and entirely commonplace incident. What the objective Cassy saw was not the flame or the smoke or the pipe, but the hand that held the match. It was thumbless. Many hands are. From the hand she looked at the man's face and gave a little scream, instantly suppressed.

But her mouth twitched, she tried to swallow and she experienced, what was new to her, an odd sensation in the epiglottis. She did not remember that she had ever been what is called sick at the stomach, none the less she realised that she was on the point of becoming so. Like the little scream, she choked it back. But the immanence of nausea stifled her, and she sat down on a brocade-covered chair.

Her hand had gone to her throat and though almost at once the sensation subsided, she held it there. The gold bands of the rings that were pressed against her throat cooled it, but the palm of the hand was wet. Unconscious of that, she was unaware that she could not think. A crack on the head makes you dizzy and into her dizziness a somnolence had entered. The somnolence dulled all the cells of the brain save one and that one cell, vehemently active, was inciting her to some effort, though to what she did not know.

"I must get up," she presently told herself and told it once more.

In the repetition of the words there was the effect of a spray. The irritability of the one active cell subsided, that of the others was aroused. Somnambulism ceased. The entire brain awoke. But the truth had not yet fully permeated all the cerebral convolutions and the fact that it had not, manifested itself in the melodramatic phrase which, a week previous, Lennox had uttered, which all have uttered, all at least before whom the unforseen has sprung.

"It is impossible!"

She got up, went to the window, looked again. There was no impossibility there, no doubt even, or the peradventure of one. There was only the ineluctable truth. The aproned man disclosed it. His thumbless hand had held the book. From his mouth, in which there was a pipe, had come the benediction. He was Dr. Grantly. That was the ineluctable truth, the truth which already perhaps she had intercepted in the land of Beauty and Horror.