FullReads

I went straight from that house to Burry Mills Hydro, keen for the first time in my life on playing golf, which is guaranteed to occupy the mind. Baxter had taken me a room communicating with his own, and after lunch introduced me to a tall, horse-headed elderly lady of decided manners, whom a white-haired maid pushed along in a bath-chair through the park-like grounds of the Hydro. She was Miss Mary Moultrie, and she coughed and cleared her throat just like Baxter. She suffered–she told me it was a Moultrie castemark–from some obscure form of chronic bronchitis, complicated with spasm of the glottis; and, in a dead, flat voice, with a sunken eye that looked and saw not, told me what washes, gargles, pastilles, and inhalations she had proved most beneficial. From her I was passed on to her younger sister, Miss Elizabeth, a small and withered thing with twitching lips, victim, she told me, to very much the same sort of throat, but secretly devoted to another set of medicines. When she went away with Baxter and the bath-chair, I fell across a major of the Indian army with gout in his glassy eyes, and a stomach which he had taken all round the Continent. He laid everything before me; and him I escaped only to be confided in by a matron with a tendency to follicular tonsilitis and eczema. Baxter waited hand and foot on his cousins till five o’clock, trying, as I saw, to atone for his treatment of the dead sister. Miss Mary ordered him about like a dog.

“I warned you it would be dull,” he said when we met in the smoking-room.

“It’s tremendously interesting,” I said. “But how about a look round the links?”

“Unluckily damp always affects my eldest cousin. I’ve got to buy her a new bronchitis-kettle. Arthurs broke her old one yesterday.”

We slipped out to the chemist’s shop in the town, and he bought a large glittering tin thing whose workings he explained.

“I’m used to this sort of work. I come up here pretty often,” he said. “I’ve the family throat too.”

“You’re a good man,” I said. “A very good man.”

He turned towards me in the evening light among the beeches, and his face was changed to what it might have been a generation before.

“You see,” he said huskily, “there was the youngest–Agnes. Before she fell ill, you know. But she didn’t like leaving her sisters. Never would.” He hurried on with his odd-shaped load and left me among the ruins of my black theories. The man with that face had done Agnes Moultrie no wrong.

We never played our game. I was waked between two and three in the morning from my hygienic bed by Baxter in an ulster over orange and white pyjamas, which I should never have suspected from his character.

“My cousin has had some sort of a seizure,” he said. “Will you come? I don’t want to wake the doctor. Don’t want to make a scandal. Quick!”

So I came quickly, and led by the white-haired Arthurs in a jacket and petticoat, entered a double-bedded room reeking with steam and Friar’s Balsam. The electrics were all on. Miss Mary–I knew her by her height–was at the open window, wrestling with Miss Elizabeth, who gripped her round the knees.

Miss Mary’s hand was at her own throat, which was streaked with blood.

“She’s done it. She’s done it too!” Miss Elizabeth panted. “Hold her! Help me!”

“Oh, I say! Women don’t cut their throats,” Baxter whispered.

“My God! Has she cut her throat?” the maid cried out, and with no warning rolled over in a faint. Baxter pushed her under the wash-basins, and leaped to hold the gaunt woman who crowed and whistled as she struggled toward the window. He took her by the shoulder, and she struck out wildly:

“All right! She’s only cut her hand,” he said. “Wet towel quick!”

While I got that he pushed her backward. Her strength seemed almost as great as his. I swabbed at her throat when I could, and found no mark; then helped him to control her a little. Miss Elizabeth leaped back to bed, wailing like a child.