Behold Here's Poison (2 page)

He was lying on his back in an uncomfortably rigid attitude, his arms tossed outside the bedclothes, the fingers gripping the sheet as though in a last convulsion. His eyes were open, the pupils contracted. Stella stood looking down at him, her face slowly whitening. She heard her aunt's querulous voice, her footstep in the hall, and moved towards the door. 'I say, Aunt Harriet!' she said jerkily. 'Don't come! It's beastly!'

Miss Matthews, however, fastening her pince-nez on her nose with trembling hands, pushed past her niece into the room, and walked up to the bed. 'Oh, he's dead!' she said superfluously, and recoiled. 'It's his blood pressure. I knew it would happen! He ought never to have eaten that duck, and it's no use anyone blaming me, because I ordered cutlets for him, and if he wouldn't eat them nobody can say it was my fault. Oh dear, oh dear, he does look dreadful! I wish he hadn't gone like that. We may have had our differences, but blood's thicker than water, say what you will! And you'd never think it, but he was a dear little boy! Oh, whatever are we going to do?'

'I don't know,' said Stella, taking her arm, and pulling her towards the door. 'Let's get out of this room, anyway. Oh aunt, don't, for God's sake!'

Miss Matthews allowed herself to be led away, but continued to weep. Stella, unable to feel that Gregory Matthews' nature when a little boy could compensate her aunt for all the subsequent years of strife, was impatient of this facile grief, and thankfully gave her into Mary's charge.

Rose, still gulping, quavered a message from Mrs Matthews: Miss Stella was to go to her mother at once.

Mrs Matthews was reclining against her pillows in a most becoming bed jacket, and had evidently had the presence of mind to wipe the expensive night-cream from her face, and apply a dusting of powder. She turned her head as Stella came into the room, and held out a wavering hand. 'Oh, my dear child!' she said in an extinguished voice. 'Poor Gregory! It has given me a terrible shock. I had a feeling when Rose brought my hot water.'

'Aunt Harriet says it must have been the duck he ate for dinner,' said Stella, still on the verge of a giggle.

Mrs Matthews gave a faint, pained sigh. 'No one knows dear Harriet's good points better than I do,' she remarked, 'but one can't help being a little sad that her first thoughts in face of a thing like this should be still of mundane things. Do you know, darling, that when Rose told me what had happened I could only think of those beautiful words: 'God's ways are—" '

'Yes, I know,' interrupted Stella hastily. 'But the point is what ought we to do? Aunt Harriet's having a sort of hysterical fit. Shall I call Guy?'

'Poor Guy!' said his mother. 'One would give one's all to keep tragedy away from the young. Somehow—'

'Well, if it comes to that I'm three years younger than Guy,' Stella pointed out. 'Not that I think he'll be much use, but—'

Mrs Matthews laid a hand on hers and pressed it. 'Dearest, not that flippant tone, please! Try to remember that the Shadow of Death is over this house. And Guy is far, far more highly-strung than you are, dear.'

'Oh mother, do stop!' implored Stella. 'Honestly, I don't want to have hysterics, but I shall in a minute. What ought we to do first?'

Mrs Matthews removed her hand. 'My practical little daughter! Where should we poor Marys of this world be, I wonder, without our Marthas? And yet one does somehow yearn for just a little time to be quiet, to face our loss, before we plunge into the sordid side of what ought not to be sordid at all, but very, very beautiful.'

Stella gave a gasp, and went off into a fit of strangled laughter. In the middle of this her brother walked into the room, looking tousled and a little dazed still with sleep. 'I s—say!' he stammered. 'Uncle's dead! Did you know? Beecher's locked the room, and gone to ring up Fielding. He says there's absolutely no doubt.'

'Hush, dear!' said Mrs Matthews. 'Stella, try to control yourself! A doctor should of course be sent for, but one shrinks, somehow, from the thought of Dr Fielding, whom your uncle disliked, coming at such a moment. Perhaps I am over-sensitive, and I suppose there is no help for it, but—'

'I can't see that it matters in the least,' said Guy. He grasped the rail at the foot of his mother's bed, and stood looking down at her with bright, uncomprehending eyes. 'I can't grasp it!' he announced. 'I mean, uncle's dying like that. Of course, everybody expected it in a way, I suppose. I mean, his blood-pressure. What do you think he died of? Do you suppose it was apoplexy? I always thought he'd have apoplexy sooner or later, didn't you, Stella? Will there have to be an inquest? I don't see why there should be, do you? I mean, everyone knows he had a weak heart. It's obvious he died of it.'

'Yes, dear, but we won't talk of it now,' Mrs Matthews said repressively. 'You are upset, and you let your tongue run away with you. You must try and realise what it all means to me. I sometimes think poor Gregory was fonder of me than of his own sisters. I do try always to see only the good in everybody, and Gregory responded to me in a way that makes me very happy to look back upon.'

'Oh Gawd!' said Guy rudely.

Mrs Matthews compressed her lips for a moment, but replied almost at once in an extremely gentle voice: 'Go and dress, Guy dear. A dark suit, of course, and not that orange pull-over. You too, Stella.'

'Actually, I hadn't thought of the orange pull-over,' said Guy loftily. 'But I utterly agree with Nigel about mourning. It's a survival of barbarism, and, as he says—'

'Darling, I know you don't mean to hurt me,' said Mrs Matthews sadly, 'but when you treat sacred things in that spirit of—'

'You've simply got to realise that I'm a Pure Agnostic,' replied Guy. 'When you talk about things like death being sacred it means absolutely nothing to me.'

'Oh, shut up!' interrupted Stella, giving him a push towards the door. 'Nobody wants to listen to your views on religion.'

'They're not particularly my views,' said Guy, 'but the views of practically all thinking people today.'

'Oh yeah?' said Stella inelegantly, and walked off to her own room.

Mary's surmise that Dr Fielding had been called out before breakfast was proved to be correct. He had not returned to his house when Beecher rang up, and it was not until both Stella and Guy had bathed and dressed that he arrived at the Poplars. By that time Miss Matthews, recovering from her fit of crying, had also dressed, and had not only telephoned to her elder sister, Gertrude Lupton, but had found time to give a great many orders to Mrs Beecher for the subsequent using-up of the fish and the eggs already cooked for a breakfast she felt sure no one could think of eating. These orders were immediately cancelled by Stella and Guy, who were feeling hungry, and an altercation was in full force when Dr Fielding walked into the house.

He was a tall man in the middle-thirties, with very wide-set grey eyes, and a humorous mouth. As he stepped into the hall he exchanged a glance with Stella, who at once went forward to greet him. 'Oh Deryk, thank God you've come!' she said, taking his hand.

'Stella, not with your uncle lying dead upstairs!' begged Miss Matthews distractedly. 'Not that I disapprove, because I'm sure dear Dr Fielding—But after all Gregory said—though I daresay he feels quite differently now that he's passed on: I believe they do, though I've never been able to understand why. Oh dear, how very confusing it all is! If I'd ever dreamed it would all be so difficult and unpleasant I should have been the last person in the world to have wanted Gregory to die. It was the duck, doctor. I implored him not to eat it, but he would go his own way, and now he's dead, and there are two beautiful lamb cutlets gone to waste. Eaten in the kitchen! English lamb!'

Dr Fielding, returning the pressure of Stella's fingers, broke in on this monologue to request that he might be taken at once to Gregory Matthews' room.

'Oh yes!' said Miss Matthews, looking round in a flustered way. 'Of course! I should take you up myself, only that I feel I never want to enter the room again. Guy, you are the man of the house now!'

'No one need take me up,' replied Dr Fielding. 'I know my way.'

Beecher coughed, and stepped forward to the foot of the stairs. 'If you please, sir, I will escort you to the Master's room.'

The doctor looked at him. 'You were the one who found Mr Matthews, I think? By all means come up.'

At the head of the stairs he was met by Mrs Matthews. She was dressed in a becoming black frock, and greeted him in a voice rather more fading than usual. She was not a patient of his, because she mistrusted all General Practitioners, but as a man (as she frequently observed) she liked him very well. Now that Gregory Matthews' opposition had been cut short in this summary fashion she was even prepared to accept the doctor as a son-in-law. So there was just a suggestion of sympathetic understanding in the smile she bestowed on him, and she said: 'I expect Stella has told you. We can't realise it yet—perhaps mercifully. And yet, when I woke this morning, I had a sort of presentiment. I can hardly describe it, but I think that people who are rather highly-strung, which I'm afraid I am, are more sensitive than others to—what shall I call it?—atmosphere.'

'Undoubtedly,' replied the doctor, who knew her of old.

'It was of course a heart-attack, following on acute indigestion,' stated Mrs Matthews. 'My poor brother-in-law was sometimes very headstrong, as I expect you know.'

'Yes,' agreed the doctor, edging his way past her. 'Very headstrong, I'm afraid.'

She let him go, and proceeded on her way downstairs while Beecher unlocked the door of Gregory Matthews' room, and ushered the doctor in.

He did not say anything when he saw the body lying on the bed, but bent over it with his brows drawn close. Beecher stood watching him while he made his examination, and presently said: 'I suppose it was a natural death, sir?'

Dr Fielding looked up quickly. 'Have you any reason to think that it was not?'

'Oh no, sir, only that he does look awful, and his eyes being open like that don't look right, somehow.'

'Is that all! If you take my advice you won't spread that kind of rumour about. It might get you into trouble.' Dr Fielding transferred his attention to the bed again, finished his examination, and straightened himself.

Beecher, opening the door for him, volunteered the information, in a rather offended tone, that the body had been cold when he had found it at eight o'clock. The doctor nodded, and passed out of the room to the head of the stairs.

Below, in the hall, the party had been augmented by the arrival of Mrs Lupton and her husband, who had motored over from their house on the other side of the Heath. The presence of Henry Lupton, a little, sandy moustached man with weak, worried blue eyes, was generally felt to be insignificant, but Gertrude Lupton's personality made her a formidable and unwelcome visitor. She was a massively built woman of about fifty-five, extremely upright, and reinforced wherever possible with whalebone. She even wore it inserted into the net fronts which invariably encased her throat. Her hats always had wide brims and very high crowns, and her face-powder was faintly tinted with mauve. She had been the nearest to Gregory Matthews in age of all his family, and the most like him in temperament. Both resembled nothing so much as steam-rollers in their dealings with their fellow creatures, but the difference between them had lain in the fact that whereas Gregory Matthews had been subject to awe-inspiring rages no one had ever seen Gertrude lose one jot of her implacable calm.

She was perfectly calm now, though evidently in the grip of some powerful emotion. She stood resting one hand on the gateleg table in the middle of the hall while she delivered herself of various forceful statements. Dr Fielding, pausing on the top stair, heard her quell Harriet's volubility with a stern admonition to the unfortunate lady to control herself; and annihilate Mrs Matthews, who had unwisely repeated the history of her premonition, by saying: 'I have the greatest dislike for that kind of foolish talk, and I must say that I consider it quite uncalled—for in one who was no relation of my poor brother whatsoever. I sincerely trust, Zoë, that you will abandon any attempt to make yourself the central figure in this appalling affair, though I am bound to confess from my knowledge of you that it would be extremely like you to try to focus the limelight on yourself.'

The candour (and indeed thee blunt truth) of this speech came as near to confounding Mrs Matthews as anything could. The doctor, descending the stairs, thought that it said much for her control that she was able to reply, with unimpaired charity: 'Ah, my dear Gertrude, I'm afraid that you strong-minded women don't always understand us highly-strung creatures.'

'I understand you perfectly, and I may say that I always have,' replied Mrs Lupton crushingly. She became aware of the doctor's approach, and wheeled round to confront him. 'Dr Fielding, I believe. I have heard of you from my brother.'

Her tone implied that she had heard no good of him. He answered somewhat stiffly: 'I have been attending Mr Matthews for some time, so I imagine you might.'

She looked him over. 'And what,' she demanded, 'was, in your opinion, the cause of my unfortunate brother's death?'

'In my opinion,' replied Fielding with a touch of sarcasm, 'your brother died from syncope.'

'What on earth's that?' inquired Stella, who had come out of the dining-room as soon as she had heard his voice.

'You will oblige me,' said Mrs Lupton, ignoring her niece, 'by being more precise.'

'Certainly,' said Fielding. 'Your brother, as no doubt you know, suffered from a high blood-pressure, coupled with a slight valvula affection of the—'

'I am quite aware of the fact that you have been treating my brother for heart-trouble,' interrupted Mrs Lupton, 'but I can only say that if he had a weak heart he was the only one of our family thus afflicted. I never believed in it. We come of extremely healthy stock. I am sure that such a thing as a weak heart was never dreamed of in our family.'

'Possibly not,' said Fielding. 'But the fact remains that your brother had — as you call it — a weak heart. I repeatedly warned him against over-excitement and injudicious diet, and as he invariably disregarded my advice I have very little doubt that his death was due to syncope, produced, in all probability, by an attack of acute indigestion.'