Now, all Peters’ preparations were made, mine not; and he had six days in which to recover himself. I therefore wrote to Clark, saying that the changed circumstances of course annulled my acceptance of his offer, though I had already incurred the inconvenience of negotiating with a locum tenens.
This decided it: Peters was to go, I stay. The fifth day before the departure dawned. It was a Friday, the 15th June. Peters was now in an armchair. He was cheerful, but with a fevered pulse, and still the stomach-pains. I was giving him three quarter-grains of morphia a day. That Friday night, at 11 p.m., I visited him, and found Clodagh there, talking to him. Peters was smoking a cigar.
“Ah,” Clodagh said, “I was waiting for you, Adam. I didn’t know whether I was to inject anything tonight. Is it Yes or No?”
“What do you think, Peters?” I said: “any more pains?”
“Well, perhaps you had better give us another quarter,” he answered: “there’s still some trouble in the tummy off and on.”
“A quarter-grain, then, Clodagh,” I said.
As she opened the syringe-box, she remarked with a pout:
“Our patient has been naughty! He has taken some more atropine.”
I became angry at once.
“Peters,” I cried, “you know you have no right to be doing things like that without consulting me! Do that once more, and I swear I have nothing further to do with you!”
“Rubbish,” said Peters: “why all this unnecessary heat? It was a mere flea-bite. I felt that I needed it.”
“He injected it with his own hand …” remarked Clodagh.
She was now standing at the mantelpiece, having lifted the syringe-box from the night-table, taken from its velvet lining both the syringe and the vial containing the morphia tablets, and gone to the mantelpiece to melt one of the tablets in a little of the distilled water there. Her back was turned upon us, and she was a long time. I was standing; Peters in his armchair, smoking. Clodagh then began to talk about a Charity Bazaar which she had visited that afternoon.
She was long, she was long. The crazy thought passed through some dim region of my soul: “Why is she so long?”
“Ah, that was a pain!” went Peters: “never mind the bazaar, aunt—think of the morphia.”
Suddenly an irresistible impulse seized me—to rush upon her, to dash syringe, tabloids, glass, and all, from her hands. I must have obeyed it—I was on the tip-top point of obeying—my body already leant prone: but at that instant a voice at the opened door behind me said:
“Well, how is everything?”
It was Wilson, the electrician, who stood there. With lightning swiftness I remembered an under-look of mistrust which I had once seen on his face. Oh, well, I would not, and could not!—she was my love—I stood like marble …
Clodagh went to meet Wilson with frank right hand, in the left being the fragile glass containing the injection. My eyes were fastened on her face: it was full of reassurance, of free innocence. I said to myself: “I must surely be mad!”
An ordinary chat began, while Clodagh turned up Peters’ sleeve, and, kneeling there, injected his forearm. As she rose, laughing at something said by Wilson, the drug-glass dropped from her hand, and her heel, by an apparent accident, trod on it. She put the syringe among a number of others on the mantelpiece.
“Your friend has been naughty, Mr. Wilson,” she said again with that same pout: “he has been taking more atropine.”
“Not really?” said Wilson.
“Let me alone, the whole of you,” answered Peters: “I ain’t a child.”
These were the last intelligible words he ever spoke. He died shortly before 1 a.m. He had been poisoned by a powerful dose of atropine.
From that moment to the moment when the Boreal bore me down the Thames, all the world was a mere tumbling nightmare to me, of which hardly any detail remains in my memory. Only I remember the inquest, and how I was called upon to prove that Peters had himself injected himself with atropine. This was corroborated by Wilson, and by Clodagh: and the verdict was in accordance.
And in all that chaotic hurry of preparation, three other things only, but those with clear distinctness now, I remember.
The first—and chief—is that tempest of words which I heard at Kensington from that big-mouthed Mackay on the Sunday night. What was it that led me, busy as I was, to that chapel that night? Well, perhaps I know.
There I sat, and heard him: and most strangely have those words of his peroration planted themselves in my brain, when, rising to a passion of prophecy, he shouted: “And as in the one case, transgression was followed by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, I warn the entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a lowering sky, and thundery weather.”
And this second thing I remember: that on reaching home, I walked into my disordered library (for I had had to hunt out some books), where I met my housekeeper in the act of rearranging things. She had apparently lifted an old Bible by the front cover to fling it on the table, for as I threw myself into a chair my eye fell upon the open print near the beginning. The print was very large, and a shaded lamp cast a light upon it. I had been hearing Mackay’s wild comparison of the Pole with the tree of Eden, and that no doubt was the reason why such a start convulsed me: for my listless eyes had chanced to rest upon some words.
“The woman gave me of the tree, and I did eat. …”
And a third thing I remember in all that turmoil of doubt and flurry: that as the ship moved down with the afternoon tide a telegram was put into my hand; it was a last word from Clodagh; and she said only this:
