Part 46 (1/2)
”I say! What a tale--quite a Shakespearean ending, stage fairly littered with corpses,” struck in Major Carstairs. ”I wonder Tochatti didn't put the finis.h.i.+ng touch by stabbing herself as well!”
”She did think of it, I believe,” owned Chloe, ”but the sound of quarrelling had brought other people on the scene, and Tochatti was of course arrested and the whole story investigated with more or less thoroughness. Being a pretty common story, however--for the Sicilians are a hot-blooded race--it was quite easy for the authorities to reconstruct the scene; and since Tochatti was innocent of any actual crime she was eventually released; only to fall ill with some affection of the brain which finally landed her in an asylum.”
”An asylum!” Anstice whistled. ”Yet one would have hesitated to call her insane----”
”Yes, now, but you must remember this is very many years ago. She recovered at length, and the only reminiscence of the tragedy was a marked aversion to using pen or pencil. She seemed to think that having wrought so much harm by her one attempt at letter-writing she would be wiser to avoid such things in future.”
”Pity she didn't keep her resolve,” commented Major Carstairs dryly; and Chloe nodded.
”Yes. We should all have been spared a good deal of trouble. Well, as you know, she entered my mother's service during her honeymoon in Italy, and was my nurse as a child. Now I come to the second half of the story.
Tochatti chose to adore me from my early youth”--she smiled faintly--”and she always bore a grudge against anyone who did not fall down and wors.h.i.+p me too. And this peculiar att.i.tude of hers has a bearing on the affair of the letters. When Mrs. Ogden chose to quarrel with me, or at least evince a decided coldness, Tochatti's ready hatred flared up; and after the unlucky day when Mrs. Ogden cut me dead before half the county at a Flower Show, she determined to show the woman she could not be allowed to insult me with impunity.”
”It certainly was a piece of unpardonable rudeness,” said Major Carstairs warmly; and Chloe smiled.
”Yes--and at the moment I resented it very bitterly. But if Tochatti herself had not been there, in charge of Cherry, the matter would have dropped--and it was really unfortunate she should have seen the 'cut.'
Well, it seems that Tochatti brooded over the affair, wondering how best to get even with the person who dared to act insolently towards me.”
Chloe's voice held just a tinge of mockery. ”Twenty odd years of residence in England had taught her that one can't use daggers and knives with impunity, and I believe at first she was genuinely puzzled to know how to act. I suppose the thought of weapons turned her mind back to that Sicilian affair; and suddenly it flashed upon her that letters, after all, could be trusted to do a good deal of injury.”
”So she wrote an anonymous letter calculated to do harm to the unlucky subject thereof?”
”Yes, and sent it to Sir Richard Wayne. Well, once having started she apparently couldn't leave off. Her venom grew, so to speak, by being fed in this manner; and she wrote one letter after another--you know her mother was English, and she was well versed in our tongue--until practically everyone in the parish knew a garbled version of Mrs.
Ogden's sordid little story.”
”One moment, Chloe.” Major Carstairs had a soldier's mind for detail.
”How did the woman know that story? I thought no one ever owned to having heard it?”
”No one ever did,” said Chloe rather bitterly. ”But the explanation is simple after all. Mrs. Ogden had, before I made my appearance on the scene, repeated the tale to another woman in the parish--the young wife of a solicitor whom she had 'taken up' with great fervour on her first arrival in Littlefield; and this woman had repeated the story to her French maid. The latter, being a stranger in England was pleased to make Tochatti's acquaintance; and one day told her the story, of course in strictest confidence. Well, the woman, the solicitor's wife, died, almost immediately after that, as the result of a motor accident; and her maid returned to her home somewhere in the valley of the Loire, without having, so far as one can conjecture, pa.s.sed on the tale to anyone else.”
”Yes,” said Anstice thoughtfully, as Chloe came to a stop. ”Quite a simple explanation, as you say, yet one which might never have come to light.”
”There is still a point puzzling me,” said Carstairs meditatively. ”I can understand Tochatti writing the letters, and thus seeking to injure a woman whom she considered to be the enemy of her mistress. But how did she ever bring herself to allow you to be suspected, Chloe?”
”Ah, that is where the mystery really comes in, and where, possibly, Dr.
Anstice's theory of the double personality may be considered.” Chloe looked at them both rather dubiously. ”I confess I can't understand that part of the story myself. Tochatti has a.s.sured me that she never for an instant dreamed I should be suspected--the slight similarity in some of the writing to some of mine was more or less accidental, though she admits she had tried to model her script on mine because she admired it ... as she admired all my poor faculties,” said Chloe, with a little shrug of her shoulders. ”I really believe she used my pens and paper without any idea of the harm she was doing me--in fact, if such a supposition could be entertained for a moment, I don't believe she had any very clear idea what she was doing beyond a fixed intention to work harm to the woman she detested.”
”You mean that the idea of this Mrs. Ogden filled her mental horizon to the exclusion of any other thought?” It was Anstice who put the question.
”Yes. Honestly I believe she was incapable of looking, as one might say, all round the subject. You see”--Chloe hesitated, not sure how far the suggestion was permissible--”she had once been in an asylum, and possibly her brain had never worked quite normally since that tragedy on the cliffs.”
”No, it is possible she was the victim of a sort of monomania,” conceded Anstice. ”In which case no other person would be connected in her mind with the affair save the one against whom the campaign was directed. It is a pretty lame explanation, I own, but then the workings of the human mind are so extraordinarily incomprehensible sometimes that I, for my part, have very nearly ceased being surprised at anything a man or woman may be disposed to do!”
”Tochatti tells me she grew very uneasy when things began to look really black,” continued Chloe. ”She had not understood when she started that letters of this kind rendered one liable to imprisonment sometimes; and she was horrified when she discovered that fact. I believe she would willingly have undone the harm she had done if it had been possible; for she couldn't help seeing, as the days went on, that I was in grave danger of incurring the penalty of her fault. Once, at least, I am sure she nerved herself to tell the whole truth----”
”Her good intentions evidently went to pave a place which shall be nameless,” said Major Carstairs dryly. ”After all, her affection for you seems to have been a very pinchbeck affair, Chloe, if she could calmly stand by and see you suffer for her wickedness. And for my part I don't see how you can be expected to forgive her.”
For a second Chloe sat silently in her corner of the couch; and in her face were the traces of the conflicting emotions which made for a moment a battlefield of her soul.
After all Chloe Carstairs was a very human woman; and it is not in human nature to suffer a great wrong and feel no resentment against those who have inflicted that wrong. Had she been able to forgive Tochatti immediately, to condone her wickedness, to restore the woman to her old place in her esteem, Chloe had been something less--or more--than human; and that she was after all only mortal was proved by her answer to Carstairs' last speech.