owing to her half-delirious struggles this was very difficult; she was, however, I thought, likely to die, and of what malady I could not determine.
“There was a table nearby on which lay some papers – one I took to be a will – and a glass in which there had been milk. I do not remember seeing anything else in the room – the light was so bad. I endeavoured to question the man, whom I took to be the husband, but without any success. He merely repeated his monotonous appeal for me to save her. Then I was aware of a sound outside the room – of a woman laughing, perpetually and shrilly laughing. “Pray stop that,’ I cried to the man; ‘who have you got in the house – a lunatic?’ But he took no notice of my appeal, merely repeating his own hushed lamentations. The sick woman appeared to hear that demoniacal laughter outside, and, raising herself on one elbow, said, ‘You have destroyed me and you may well laugh!’
“I sat down at the table on which were the papers and the half-full glass of milk, and wrote a prescription on a sheet torn out of my note-book. The man snatched it eagerly. ‘I don’t know when and where you can get that made up,’ I said, ‘but it’s the only hope.’ At this he seemed wishful for me to depart, as wishful as he had been for me to come. ‘That’s all I want,’ he said. He took me by the arm and led me out of the house by the same back stairs. As I descended I still heard those two dreadful sounds – the thin laughter of the woman I had not seen, and the groans, becoming every moment fainter, of the young woman whom I had seen. The carriage was waiting for me and I was driven back by the same way I had come. When I reached the house and my room I saw the dawn just breaking. I rested till I heard the breakfast gong. I suppose some time had gone by since I returned to the house, but I wasn’t quite aware of it; all through the night I had rather lost the sense of time.”
When Dr Dilke had finished his narrative, which I give here badly – but, I hope, to the point – we all glanced at each other rather uncomfortably, for who was to tell a man like Dr Dilke that he had been suffering from a severe hallucination? It was, of course, quite impossible that he could have left the house and gone through the peculiar scenes he had described, and it seemed extraordinary that he could for a moment have believed that he had done so. What was even more remarkable was that so many points of his story agreed with what the medium, Mrs Mahogany, had said in her trance. We recognized the frock with the roses, the mauve velvet curtains, the glass of milk, the man who had fetched Dr Dilke sounded like the murderer, and the unfortunate woman writhing on the bed sounded like the victim; but how had the doctor got hold of these particulars? We all knew that he had not spoken to Mrs Mahogany and each suspected the other of having told him what the medium had said, and that this having wrought on his mind he had the dream, vision, or hallucination he had just described to us. I must add that this was found afterwards to be wholly false; we were all reliable people and there was not a shadow of doubt we had all kept our counsel about Mrs Mahogany. In fact, none of us had been alone with Dr Dilke the previous day for more than a moment or so save myself, who had walked with him home from the church, when we had certainly spoken of nothing except the black stone in the church and the chill which he had said emanated from it . . . Well, to put the matter as briefly as possible, and to leave out a great deal of amazement and wonder, explanation and so on, we will come to the point when Dr Dilke was finally persuaded that he had not left Verrall all the night. When his story was taken to pieces and put before him, as it were, in the raw, he himself recognized many absurdities; how could the man have come straight to his bedroom? How could he have left the house? – the doors were locked every night, there was no doubt about that. Where did the carriage come from and where was the house to which he had been taken? And who could possibly have known of his presence in the neighbourhood? Had not, too, the scene in the house to which he was taken all the resemblance of a nightmare? Who was it laughing in the other room? What was the mysterious illness that was destroying the young woman? Who was the black-browed man who had fetched him? And, in these days of telephone and motor-cars, people didn’t go out in old-fashioned one- horse carriages to fetch doctors from miles away in the case of dangerous illness.
Dr Dilke was finally silenced, uneasy, but not convinced. I could see that he disliked intensely the idea that he had been the victim of an hallucination, and that he equally intensely regretted the impulse which had made him relate his extraordinary adventure of the night. I could only conclude that he must have done so while still, to an extent, under the influence of his delusion, which had been so strong that never for a moment had he questioned the reality of it. Though he was forced at last to allow us to put the whole thing down as a most remarkable dream, I could see that he did not intend to let the matter rest there, and later in the day (out of good manners we had eventually ceased discussing the story) he asked me if I would accompany him on some investigation in the neighbourhood.
“I think I should know the house,” he said, “even though I saw it in the dark. I was impressed by the fish- pond and the low doorway through which I had to stoop in order to pass without knocking my head.”
I did not tell him that Mrs Mahogany had also mentioned a fish-pond and a low door.
We made the excuse of some old brasses we wished to discover in a nearby church to take my car and go out that afternoon on an investigation of the neighbourhood in the hope of discovering Dr Dilke’s dream house.
We covered a good deal of distance and spend a good deal of time without any success at all, and the short day was already darkening when we came upon a row of almshouses in which, for no reason at all that I could discern, Dr Dilke showed an interest and insisted on stopping before them. He pointed out an inscription cut in the centre gable, which said that these had been built by a certain Richard Carwithen in memory of Philadelphia, his wife.
“The people whose tablet you sat next to in the church,” I remarked.
“Yes,” murmured Dr. Dilke, “when I felt the chill,” and he added, “when I
We stopped in the little village, which was a good many miles from Verrall, and after some tedious delays because everything was shut up for the holidays we did discover an old man who was willing to tell us something about the almshouses, though there was nothing much to be said about them. They had been founded by a certain Mr Richard Carwithen with his wife’s fortune. He had been a poor man, a kind of adventurer, our informant thought, who had married a wealthy woman; they had not been at all happy. There had been quarrels and disputes, and a separation (at least, so the gossip went, as his father had told it to him). Finally, the Carwithens had taken a house here in this village of Sunford – a large house it was, and it still stood. The Carwithens weren’t buried in this village though, but at Verrall, she had been a Verrall by birth – perhaps that’s why they came to this neighbourhood – it was the name of a great family in those days you know . . . There was another woman in the old story, as it went, and she got hold of Mr Carwithen and was for making him put his wife aside; and so, perhaps, he would have done, but the poor lady died suddenly, and there was some talk about it, having the other woman in the house at the time, and it being so convenient for both of them . . . But he didn’t marry the other woman, because he died six months after his wife . . . By his will he left all his wife’s money to found these almshouses.
Dr Dilke asked if he could see the house where the Carwithens had lived.
“It belongs to a London gentleman,” the old man said, “who never comes here. It’s going to be pulled down and the land sold in building lots; why, it’s been locked up these ten years or more. I don’t suppose it’s been inhabited since – no, not for a hundred years.”
“Well, I’m looking for a house round about here. I don’t mind spending a little money on repairs if that house is in the market.”
The old man didn’t know whether it was in the market or not, but kept repeating that the property was to be sold and broken up for building lots.
I won’t bother you with all our delays and arguments, but merely tell you that we did finally discover the lodge-keeper of the estate, who gave us the key. It was not such a very large estate, nothing to be compared to Verrall, but had been, in its time, of some pretension. Builders’ boards had already been raised along the high road frontage. There were some fine old trees, black and bare, in a little park. As we turned in through the rusty gates and motored towards the house it was nearly dark, but we had our electric torches and the powerful head-lamps of the car. Dr Dilke made no comment on what we had found, but he reconstructed the story of the Carwithens whose names were on that black stone in Verrall church.
“They were quarrelling over money, he was trying to get her to sign a will in his favour; she had some little sickness perhaps – brought on probably by rage – he had got the other woman in the house, remember. I expect he was no good. There was some sort of poison about – perhaps for a face wash, perhaps as a drug. He put it in the milk and gave it to her.”
Here I interrupted: “How do you know it was in the milk?”
The doctor did not reply to this. I had now swung the car round to the front of the ancient mansion – a poor, pretentious place, sinister in the half-darkness.
