Though it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with light, but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the roadway. The interiors were sharply clear. We could see swarms of black things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria of colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of red and yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands, instantaneous, glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm reflections of mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an agglutinated yet moving ma.s.s by the shop fronts, the inner stream a garish pink ribbon of faces, the outer a herd of subfuse brown. And in the roadway, through the translucent olive, the swirling traffic seemed like armies of ghosts mightily and dashingly charioted.

The darkness had deepened when we, at last, drew up at the mansions in St. John's Wood. No lights were lit in the vestibule, and the hall-porter emerged as from a cavern of despair. He opened the car-door and touched his peaked cap. I could see from the man's face that he had been expecting us. He knew us, of course, as constant visitors of the Bolderos.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Don't you know, sir?"

"No."

He glanced at Barbara, as if afraid to give her the shock of his news, and bent forward and whispered to me:

"Mr. Boldero's dead, sir."

I don't remember clearly what happened then. I have a vague memory of the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some unintelligible account of things. I was stunned. We had interpreted the ambiguous telegram in all other ways than this. Adrian was dead. That was all I could think of. The only coherent remark I heard the man make was that it was a dreadful thing to happen at Christmas. Barbara gripped my hand tight and did not say a word. The next phase I remember only too vividly. When the flat door opened, in a blaze of electric light, it was like a curtain being lifted on a scene of appalling tragedy. As soon as we entered we were sucked into it. A horrible hospital smell of anaesthetics, disinfectants--I know not what--greeted us.

The maid Ellen who had admitted us, red-eyed and scared, flew down the corridor into the kitchen, whence immediately afterwards emerged a professional nurse, who, carrying something, flitted into Doria's room.

From the spare room came for a moment an elderly woman whom we did not know. The study door was flung wide open--I noticed that the jamb was splintered. From the drawing-room came sounds of awful moaning. We entered and found Adrian's mother alone, helpless with grief. Barbara sat by her and took her in her arms and spoke to her. But she could tell us nothing. I heard a man's step in the hall and Jaffery and I went out.

He was a young man, very much agitated; he looked relieved at seeing us.

"I am a doctor," said he, "I was called in. The usual medical man is apparently away for Christmas. I'm so glad you've come. Is there a Mrs.

Freeth here?"

"Yes. My wife," said I.

"Thank goodness--" He drew a breath. "There's no one here capable of doing anything. I had to get in the nurse and the other woman."

Jaffery had summoned Barbara from her vain task.

"Mrs. Boldero is very ill--as ill as she can be. Of course you were aware of her condition--well--the shock has had its not very uncommon effect."

"Life in danger?" Jaffery asked bluntly.

"Life, reason, everything. Tell me. I'm a stranger. I know nothing--I was summoned and found a man lying dead on the floor in that room"--he pointed to the study--"and a woman in a dreadful state. I've only had time to make sure that the poor fellow was dead. Could you tell me something about them?"

So we told him, the three of us together, as people will, who Adrian Boldero was, and how he and his genius were all this world and a bit of the next to his wife. How I managed to talk sensibly I don't know, for beating against the walls of my head was the thought that Adrian lay there in the room where I had seen the strange woman, lifeless and stiff, with the laughing eyes forever closed and the last mockery gone from his lips. Just then the woman appeared again. The young doctor beckoned to her and said a few words. Jaffery and I followed her into the death-chamber, leaving the doctor with Barbara. And then we stood and looked at all that was left of Adrian.

But how did it happen? It was not till long afterwards that I really knew more than the scared maid-servant and the porter of the mansions then told us. But that little more I will set down here.

For the past few days he had been working early and late, scarcely sleeping at all. The night before he had gone to bed at five, had risen sleepless at seven, and having dressed and breakfasted had locked himself in his study. The very last page, he told Doria, was to be written. He was to come down to us for Christmas, with his novel a finished thing. At ten o'clock, in accordance with custom, when he began to work early, the maid came to his door with a cup of chicken-broth.

She knocked. There was no reply. She knocked louder. She called her mistress. Doria hammered ... she shrieked. You know how swiftly terror grips a woman. She sent for the porter. Between them they raised a din to awaken--well--all but the dead. The man forced the door--hence the splinters on the jamb--and there they found Adrian, in the great bare room, hanging horribly over his writing chair, with not a sc.r.a.p of paper save his blotting-pad in front of him. He must have died almost as soon as he had reached his study, before he had time to take out his ma.n.u.script from the jealous safe. That this was so the hara.s.sed doctor afterwards affirmed, when he could leave the living to make examination of the dead. Still later than that we heard the cause of death--a clot of blood on the brain... .

To go back ... They found him dead. And then arose an unpicturable scene of horror. It seems that the cook, a stolid woman, on the point of starting for a Christmas visit, took charge of the situation, sent for the doctor, despatched the telegram to us, and with the help of the porter's wife, saw to Adrian. The elder Mrs. Boldero collapsed, a futile ma.s.s of sodden hysteria. Much that was fascinating and feminine in Adrian came from this amiable and incapable lady.

We went into the dining-room and helped ourselves to whisky and soda--we needed it--and talked of the catastrophe. As yet, of course, we knew nothing of the clot of blood. Presently Barbara came in and put her hands on my shoulders.

"I must stay here, Hilary, dear. You must get a bed at your club.

Jaffery will take the car and bring us what we want from Northlands, and will look after things with Eileen. And put off Euphemia and the others, if you can."

And that was the Christmas to which we had looked forward with such joyous antic.i.p.ation. Adrian dead; his child stillborn: Doria hovering on the brink of life and death. I did what was possible on a Christmas eve in the way of last arrangements. But to-morrow was Christmas Day. The day after, Boxing Day. The day after that, Sunday. The whole world was dead. And all those awful days the thin yellow fog that was not fog but mere blight of darkness hung over the vast city.

G.o.d spare me such another Christmastide.

CHAPTER XI

The first stages of our grievous task were accomplished. We had buried Adrian in Highgate Cemetery with the yellow fog around us. His mother had been put into a train that would carry her to the quiet country cottage wherein she longed to be alone with her sorrow. Doria still lay in the Valley of the Shadow unconscious, perhaps fortunately, of the stealthy footsteps and m.u.f.fled sounds that strike a note of agony through a house of death. And it was many days before she awoke to knowledge and despair. Barbara stayed with her.

We had found Adrian's will, leaving everything to Doria and appointing Jaffery and myself joint executors and trustees for his wife and the child that was to come, among his private papers in the Louis XV cabinet in the drawing-room. We had consulted his bankers and put matters in a solicitor's hands with a view to probate. Everything was in order. We found his own personal bills and receipts filed, his old letters tied up in bundles and labelled, his contracts, his publisher's returns, his lease, his various certificates neatly docketed. It was the private desk of a careful business man, rather than that of our old unmethodical Adrian. There are few things more painful than to pry into the intimacies of those we have loved; and Jaffery and I had to pry alone, because Doria, who might have saved our obligatory search from impertinence, lay, herself, on the Borderland.

All that we required for the simple settlement of his affairs had been found in the cabinet. On the list of a.s.sets for probate we had placed the ma.n.u.script of the new book, its value estimated on the sales of "The Diamond Gate." We had not as yet examined the safe in the study, knowing that it held nothing but the ma.n.u.script, and indeed we had not entered the forbidding room in which our poor friend had died. We kept it locked, out of half foolish and half affectionate deference to his unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women, who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion, hated the door of the study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed, professed relief from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the living, the time now came for us to take the ma.n.u.script from the safe and hand it over to the publisher.

So, one dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and entered the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn apart, and the blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of unilluminating yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been laid since the morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered with dim grey ash. The stale smell of the week's fog hung about the place. I turned on the electric light. With its white distempered, pictureless walls, and its scanty office furniture, the room looked inexpressibly dreary. We went to the library table. A quill pen lay on the blotting pad, its point in the midst of a couple of square inches of idle arabesques. On three different parts of the pad marked by singularly little blotted matter the quill had scrawled "G.o.d. A Novel. By Adrian Boldero." On a bra.s.s ash-tray I noticed three cigarettes, of each of which only about an eighth of an inch had been smoked. Jaffery, who had the key that used to hang at the end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its heavy door swung back and revealed its contents: Three shelves crammed from bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign of the trim block of well-ordered ma.n.u.script.

"Pretty kind of hay," growled Jaffery, surveying it with a perplexed look. "We'll have our work cut out."

"It'll be all right," said I. "Lift out the top shelf as carefully as you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of method."

Onto the cleared library table Jaffery deposited three loose, ragged piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of the sheets unnumbered, unconnected one with the other, were pages of definite ma.n.u.script; these we put aside; others contained jottings, notes, fragments of dialogue, a confused mult.i.tude of names, incomprehensible memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one has stuck in my memory.

"Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah steps in." Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking over his work, and arabesques such as we found on the blotting pad.

"What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jaffery, his fingers in his beard.

"I can't make it out," said I. And then suddenly I laughed in great relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We were turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I explained Adrian's whimsy.

"What a funny devil the poor old chap was," said Jaffery, with a laugh at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even an incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. "Well, clear the rubbish away, and we'll look at the second shelf."

The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There were more pages of consecutive composition--of such we sorted out perhaps a couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the same incoherent scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of scenarios of a dozen stories.

"The whole d.a.m.n thing seems to be waste-paper basket," said Jaffery, standing over me. There was but one chair in the room--Adrian's famous wooden writing chair with the leathern pad for which Barbara had pleaded, the chair in which the poor fellow had died, and I was sitting in it, as I sorted the ma.n.u.script which rose in ma.s.ses on the table.

"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting together those found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can make of them."

We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the salvage. We could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless brow.

"It will take weeks to fix it up."

"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."

In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order, going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least a dozen headed "Chapter I."

"There's another shelf, anyhow," said Jaffery, turning away.

I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the more I examined the more did my brain reel. I could not find the nucleus of a coherent story. A great shout from Jaffery made me start in my chair.

"Hooray! At last! I've got it! Here it is!"