She clattered the receiver down on its hook and stood back.
'I'm so sorry to have to deceive you,' said Mina, looking up at him after a pause. 'But I told them they couldn't keep me away from the telephone for ever. As soon as they'd. gone, I came down here. I was waiting. They'd have stopped me.'
Sanders also stood back.
'That's quite all right, Mrs Constable.'
'Now you're annoyed.'
(Of course I'm annoyed. Who the hell wouldn't be annoyed?)
'That's quite all right, Mrs Constable. If I want to make a fool of myself, that's my affair.' He remembered himself shouting all over the house, betraying his state of mind with every word. 'But will you tell me how you manage to be so spry after that dose of morphia ?'
'I didn't take it,' retorted Mina, with the desperate and triumphant cunning of a genuinely ill woman. He saw that hysterical cunning, and relented. 'I only pretended to take it, you see. And now I've got back at Pennik; I've got back at him. They wouldn't print all I told them, because they said it was slander or libel or something; but there's enough, there's enough, there's enough. He'll look a proper fool, M. Vaudois will. Did you know? A professor aboard our ship used to call Pennik M. Vaudois; I don't know why; but it made him look like fire. And now I've done it. I'm going upstairs now and take my medicine, then I shall be all right,'
‘You certainly are. Off you go, now!'
‘But you'll come up with me, won't you? I'm alone, and it seems worse to be alone now than it did during the day. All the rats have left the ship. Except you.'
'It's all right, Mrs Constable. Come along.'
On the landing above them the great clock rang with fluid chimes, echoing, and began to strike ten. It was twenty minutes past ten before he had got her to bed again, had seen to it that this time she swallowed the tablet, had tucked the dressing-gown round her, and heard the dull mutter of exhaustion as the drug took effect. With her head under a pillow, she crumpled up and slept.
Without dreams, he hoped. He took her pulse, studied her for a time with his watch in his hand, and turned out the light. Yet this apparently sincere woman, he reflected as he went downstairs, had lied up-hill-down-dale over every place where she could possibly have lied.
One thing, however, the sharp edge of that disappearance scare had done for him. It had cured him (or he thought it had cured him) of nervous disturbances without foundation. Once was enough. It only left him restless and strung up beyond any hope of sleep. He knew that he ought to turn in, for he had work to do to-morrow, but he also knew that it would be useless. He prowled or sat, always coming back to the dining-room. One interval he filled up by going round and locking every door or window on the ground floor, another by glancing over a rather dull collection of books in the library. Ten-thirty rang from, the clock on the stairs; then a quarter to eleven, then the hour itself.
It was close to eleven-thirty when he thought he saw Herman Pennik's face looking at him through the glass door to the conservatory.
Sanders afterwards remembered that the tumbler, from which he had been drinking the last of the beer in the flagon, slipped through his fingers and smashed in a star of brown froth on the dining-room table. He had simply looked round, and there it was.
For some time he had been conscious of a faint noise: a noise, in fact, so dim as to be rather a vibration, a pressure on the ears, than a sound. He vaguely associated it with water, and then realized that it must be the miniature fountain in the conservatory, soberly falling after Sam Constable's death as before it. Turning round in his chair to see, he looked at the glass door of the conservatory - and Pennik looked back at him.
He was across the room so quickly that he did not remember leaving his chair. For a second he thought it might have been his own reflexion, in gleams of light against a door to a dark room, until he saw Pennik's nose and fingers pressed against and flattened out in greyish-white blobs on the glass. Then Pennik bolted. Sanders threw open the door, to meet a rush of hot over-scented air from the plants - and silence.
He stood in the doorway. No light, no noise, no movement of any kind, until he blundered forward and set moving a jungle-brush of sound by walking into plants. He could not remember the position of the light-switch. Groping through the aisles, he knew that to search here was useless; and for another reason. One of the long stained-glass windows, which he had locked a while ago, was now open: a way of escape.
Mina Constable?
Mina Constable, upstairs and half-drugged?
He tried not to run when he went upstairs and hurried into the dark room, only to find another false alarm. She was no more dead or hurt than he was: breathing quietly and regularly in sleep. Yet this time he took no chances. He locked the door to the bathroom, saw that the windows were locked, and, when he went out into the hall again, locked the door on the outside and kept the key.
These continued false alarms were worse than a real happening. Yet he had seen Pennik - or hadn't he? Suddenly he knew that he was not sure. It had been no more than a flash across the tail of the eye, an image conjured out of his own imagination, or (he boggled at the thought) a projected image. But the open window? He might have left that open himself; now that he reflected, he was almost sure he had.
That was a little better. However, he did not go far away from Mina's bedroom; he sat down on the top step of the stairs. His breathing quietened; his thoughts revolved round the ease with which phantoms could be evoked; he lighted another cigarette and watched the smoke. The clock chimed the quarter to midnight. Feeling easy again, he wandered downstairs.. .
The telephone was ringing again.
Better answer it.
'Hello?' said a pleasant voice. 'Grovetop three-one? This is the Daily Trumpeter -
Sanders wearily started to lower the receiver. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'very-sorry-no-statement-to-make-this -'
'Hold on!' said the voice, with such urgency that he stopped in spite of himself. 'Don't ring off, will you? I don't want any story. I want to give you one.'
'What?'
'Is Miss Mina Shields all right? You know what I mean.' 'No, I don't know what you mean. Of course she's all right. Why?' 'Who is this speaking, please?'
'My name is Sanders. I'm a friend of the family. Why did you ask whether she is all right?'
'Dr Sanders ?' asked the voice, quickly. 'Doctor, you ought to know this. Mr Herman Pennik has just rung up this office.'
'Yes?' said Sanders - knowing what was coming.
'He said that Miss Shields would probably die before midnight to-night. He wants us to make clear that he doesn't promise it, or say that it's certain, but he thinks he'll have succeeded in killing her by then. Naturally, we don't pay much attention to his claims, but we thought we'd better give you the opportunity to contra . ..'
'Wait! Where was he phoning from, do you know?'
Slight pause. 'Place called the Black Swan Hotel, about four miles away from you.'
'You're sure of that ?' 'Yes..I checked back.' 'How long ago did he ring?'
'About ten minutes. We're considering what's best to be done about it, Doctor, and if you would care to assist us by making a state ...'
'There is no truth in it. Mrs Constable is comfortably asleep with her door locked, and nobody can get near her. She is absolutely all right. Please accept that from me.'
He put down the receiver with jingling finality; he stared at the bay windows, and fingered the key in his pocket.
Was she all right?
Shatteringly, at his elbow, the telephone rang again.
'Grovetop three-one? This is the News-Record. Sorry to trouble you, but some remarkable claims were made to us this morning by a man named Herman Pennik. Now he has just rung up this office to say ...'