CHAPTER XXIV

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ALONE WITH THE DEAD.

“He’s poisoned; he’s dying!”

It was many a day before any one in that room forgot the sound of Lady Levallion’s voice. She crouched on the floor, holding Levallion as she had never done, and his face was ghastly against her white satin gown.

“Hush!” cried Chayter roughly. “For God’s sake, Scarsdale, send some one for a doctor!” but some one had gone already.

In the horrid silence that had fallen on the room each rattling breath Levallion drew sounded harder than the last. All the men were round him, there was a bustle of servants, a calling for useless remedies; but toward their hostess not one woman stirred. It was sinister, ominous, to see them crowded together in their smart gowns; a wide space between them and the overthrown liqueur-stand, and Ravenel huddled on the floor with a dying man in her arms. So it was that Doctor Houghton saw them, when at last he came. The bare floor, the rucked-up rugs, the litter of broken glass and silver round Lady Levallion--white as her gown, against which Levallion’s black clothes stood out in horrible limpness; and behind them and the kneeling men about them, that wall of silks and satins, of inimical women’s faces. Even as he stooped and touched Levallion’s hand that picture stamped itself on Houghton’s brain.

“They think she did it,” he thought, like lightning, as he wiped the froth from the stiff lips.

“Clear the room!” he said. “Send the ladies away. No, not you!” as Ravenel only clutched Levallion more fiercely. But when they were gone he tried none of the remedies he had brought with him. Adrian Gordon, Lord Levallion, had been dead this half-hour past. Very gently Houghton laid the handsome, dark head back on Lady Levallion’s knees; and no one, she least of all, saw it was the living face, and not the dead, that he looked at so long and steadily.

“They hate her, and, if I’m not careful, she’ll be hanged because a handful of women don’t like her,” he thought, after that long look at the girl Levallion had married. It was part of his trade to read faces. This one, if he knew anything, was innocent. For no guilty woman would ever have been utterly unconscious of self as this girl was; or could have sat clinging to the dead man as did she.

“If she’d done it, she’d be crying on a sofa,” he was thinking, even while he listened to Lord Chayter’s story of what had happened. “Or if she had nerve enough to touch him her face would show the strain. She’d bare her lower teeth like they all do when they’re guilty.”

“Don’t whisper, Lord Chayter,” she said sharply. “You can’t wake him! Doctor Houghton, it was I brought him the bottle--and owed him everything! He was kind--to me.”

Every man in the room but Houghton knew that she and Levallion had quarreled that very night; not one of them knew how they had made it up again. But at the dreary, tearless voice, perhaps, only Jimmy Scarsdale did not feel a lump in his throat.

“Don’t talk,” said Houghton gently. “Never mind us. You could not help what was in the bottle.”

“I--Jacobs frightened me,” she said vaguely. “But, oh! why don’t you do something?”

She looked up, caught Houghton’s eyes, and felt frantically at Levallion’s heart, that was stone cold.

“It doesn’t beat!” she cried, like a frightened child. “I can’t feel it. Levallion!” the cry rang out as it has done since the ages of ages; the useless, desperate call of the living to the dead.

“Dear Lady Levallion,” said Houghton softly, “he can’t hear you! I got here too late.”

She looked at him as if she were dazed.

“Too late,” she said; “it’s all too late.” She swayed forward till her face lay on the Levallion’s breast that could shelter her no longer.

“Let her lie!” said Houghton savagely. “It’s the only kindness we can do her. Good God, are there no women in this house to come to her, that she is left to men? To me, who barely knows her?”

“You sent the women away,” said Scarsdale slowly.

“And if one of them had cared for her I might have ordered her out till I was black in the face.” But he dared not say it aloud. He was tall, young, and strong; and he lifted Lady Levallion in his arms as if she had been a child. But, though he rang and rang her bedroom-bell, it was minutes before any one answered it. But the strong face of the Frenchwoman who came at last pleased him, also the little cry with which she ran to her mistress.

“Your master’s dead,” he said bluntly, “and your mistress has fainted. Help me to get her to bed. Where’s Sir Thomas?” for it had suddenly come over him that Lady Levallion’s brother was nowhere to be seen.

“He ran out after his dog that came raging through the servants’ hall a long time ago. He knew nothing.”

With quick fingers she was loosening Lady Levallion’s gown. “Oh, Monsieur Houghton, I did go to the drawing-room door to help my lady, but Lady Chayter say to me you would not let me in. So I run out of doors to see if Sir Thomas is anywhere, and he is not.”

“Don’t try to rouse her too much,” Houghton returned, as if he were thinking of something else. “I’ll give her something to make her sleep, by and by.”

He strolled into the next room as though to give Celeste time to put her mistress into bed, but he did not stay there. It was Lady Levallion’s dressing-room, and opened, as he knew, into a passage that led to her husband’s. Doctor Houghton went in quietly, perhaps to see if it was there they were bringing Levallion. But the room was empty.

Levallion’s dressing-gown that he would never wear again lay waiting for him, his half-read novel was on the table by his bed; the trivial comforts of the room were dreadful to the man who had been Levallion’s friend, perhaps his only real one, except the Duchess of Avonmore. Houghton looked deliberately round the room.

There, over the bookcase, was the shelf from which Lady Levallion must have taken the bottle--that bottle which lay in flinders down-stairs, that not the cleverest detective on earth could say had been the one Levallion owned or not. There were other bottles left, chiefly curios in the way of drinks which Levallion had been too wise to try. Doctor Houghton did not look at them, did not touch anything. He scarcely knew why he had come there, except that there might be something that would tell a tale. And there was not one earthly thing.

“There’s no doubt that he was poisoned, and with some preparation of prussic acid,” he thought, staring idly before him. “And he did not do it himself, for there never was a man who loved life better than he. And he loved his wife, if ever I saw devotion in a human being. Now what, I wonder, made those women behave like that to her to-night, just as if they knew something to her discredit! I’ll lay odds,” grimly, “that when five women get together against one, there’s nothing they don’t think they know about her, especially when her looks beat them all. And every one of those women behaved inhumanly to-night.” He pursed his clean-shaven lips as he tried to remember just on what terms Lady Levallion had been with her husband, and the only out-of-the-way thing that came to his mind was the night a strange woman had come to the door, and Lady Levallion had looked inwardly furious.

“She probably had good reason to, if any kind friend had aired poor Levallion’s past to her,” he thought, with wrong-headed shrewdness. “Anyhow, I’m going to do my best for her till I find out she’s guilty. If Levallion were here,” with incongruous reasoning, “he’d like me to. I believe,” tenderly, “he would have given even the devil fair play. At any rate, he wouldn’t want his wife’s name dragged in the dust, and it sha’n’t be, if I can help it. Though, perhaps, I’m a fool with my foregone conclusions. No one’s breathed a word against her.” And yet he had known the second he entered the drawing-room that every soul in it thought Lady Levallion had murdered her husband.

“I don’t believe it was any one in the house who did it,” the man said to himself, because he was cross-grained to begin with, and had been rubbed the wrong way. “I’ll go and find Sir Thomas. He ought to be with his sister instead of chasing dogs,” and he turned the handle of the closed door that led into the corridor, instead of going back the way he had come. The door stuck, and he gave it a vicious jerk. As it swung forward something dark fell soundlessly on the floor, and the man’s quick eye saw it. With it on the palm of his hand he moved close to the electric light, and saw what it was. A tiny triangular rag of tweed, thin, rather worn, a small, irregular check of fawn and brown, with a red thread in it.

“Now, where,” said Houghton to himself, “have I seen the trousers that came out of?” And the cloth was so familiar that it struck him it must have come from Levallion’s own wardrobe.

“Well, the only thing that looks like a clue is disposed of!” he thought, shrugging his shoulders. But he put the little rag carefully away in a pocketbook. It seemed hopeless to prove when and how it had caught in the door, but less things than that rag had saved women’s lives.

He hurried down-stairs at a sound of bustle in the hall. There were boxes and rug-straps being piled there, and it may be forgiven Doctor Houghton if he thought there might be some one among the house-party who could not get away fast enough.

“A band of robbers could not be in a greater hurry!” he thought bitterly. And then his face lit up.

Some one inside the drawing-room door threw it open. A voice Houghton knew said authoritatively:

“What’s this, gentlemen? Surely you understand no one and no luggage,” emphatically, “is to leave this house till I hold my inquest.”

It was Doctor Aston, the coroner. But before Houghton could move toward him a hand caught his arm.

“I went for him.” Sir Thomas Annesley looked fifty years old. “Was it right?”

Houghton nodded. But it came over him suddenly that if there were things he did not know the coming of the coroner would be the beginning of the end for Lady Levallion.

“Go to your sister,” he said gently. “But, stop! What’s this about your dog frightening her, and----”

“Nothing,” said Tommy drearily. “He went up with her, and I suppose he saw a cat or something. I found him raising Cain in the kitchen, and some one opened the door and let him out. I ran after him, but I lost him. When I came back they said you were with Ravenel, and I thought I’d get the coroner. How on earth, Doctor Houghton, did that bottle get poisoned? Levallion gave me some of it only a little before dinner.”

Houghton could only shake his head.

Half a mile off the only soul who would have told him sat up on the death-bed that till now she had only half-believed in.

“Get Miss Ravenel,” she cried clearly, loudly. “Get her, or they’ll hang her.”

“Hush, my poor soul!” said the farmer’s wife pitifully.

“Lady Levallion, then!” the Umbrella clutched at the air as if to grasp the life that was leaving her.

“I want to tell--I----” She turned suddenly rigid, a dreadful stiff figure, only its eyes alive.

“Tell her they’ll murder him! they----”

She fell forward on the bed.

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