Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 1, 1960

Rufus King Ride With the Wind

Meet vital, homely, lovable Dr. Colin Starr, general practitioner in an average, small-sized American town, who uses his medicolegal knowledge to detect crime and his Lincolnesque understanding to solve the mysteries of the human heart...

The house was old, and Madam Tuffman was old too. Her title fell under the curious and stilted reaching for correctness which her circle in the community considered so important, perhaps, because they were not quite sure of themselves. As it was, she was a widow, and her son Ernest had married a Bertha Wollodon, who had become Mrs. Tuffman; and Mrs. Tuffman had been dowagered into Madam.

This amused her considerably, and her alive dark eyes would become more lively still at its use, because she would remember the days that were not (to her) so very far ago, when she and her pioneer contemporaries were so active with the processes of rearing and feeding and living that straining after social minutiae was scoffed at.

She had had two daughters and four sons; and all of them were dead except Ernest, who was the one black sheep of the lot: a charming and lowering example of the truism that the good die young.

Her house was a roomy and authentic specimen of the clapboard-and-fretwork blight and had originally possessed extensive grounds, the largest portion of which had since been absorbed by the Laurel Falls Country Club, and appropriately greened and hazarded into links. It retained, however, several acres of this hilled and valleyed section of Ohio, and you could have a charming view of the town itself, and segmentary glimpses of the Onega River, from either of its frightening turrets.

Its furnishings had not advanced with the day. Its lighting fixtures were still amazed to find their pipes wired to terminals which flowered into the black magic of incandescent bulbs, and as an offshoot from the parlor, it possessed that extinct adjunct to the wooden Indian, a cozy corner.

Slight twinges in her joints had made Madam Tuffman feel — she had said — that she was getting on. They had started shortly under a year ago, and she had instigated a series of monthly professional calls on the part of Dr. Colin Starr: a comfort she could well afford, for Edgar, her late husband, had left her enormously rich, from a knack on his part in the manufacture of box-toed shoes. Colin’s father had been Madam Tuffman’s physician until his death, following which she had called upon Colin during the rare moments when she had not felt quite well.

When the dangerous turn of events forced him to look back over his files, Starr later remembered his first visit for this specific ailment of Madam Tuff man very clearly. She had received him in dark bombazine in her private upstairs living-room, which was freighted with shadow-boxed landscapes and tufted plush.

The afternoon had been a Wednesday, the 11th of September, and leaves were tending toward their first dark flush of autumn. Madam Tuffman had thought of Starr as a vigorous breath of the outdoor air as he crossed the stuffy room toward the large bay window where she sat; and she had caught his electric vitality as he joined her. She experienced, too, a tonic quality just from his bodily strength and homely features, and she regretted the necessity of withdrawing her fragile fingers from his comforting hand.

She said, “It’s nothing but twinges, Doctor,” and gestured tentatively toward several anatomical locations.

Starr smiled at her reassuringly and talked nonessentials while he took her blood-pressure and listened to her heart and gravely requested permission to examine her tongue.

All was as it should be for a woman of her age, which he knew to be seventy-four. He thought: “I wonder why she really sent for me, what she really wants?” He discussed her diet, or rather her total lack of any, and suggested that she cut down a little on wine: a dry Tokay she was partial to, having found its use less deleterious than water. She accepted the suggestion reservedly. He wrote out an innocuous prescription for the tweaks and began the courteous preliminaries of taking his leave; but he did not stand up, because he suddenly caught a sense of anxiety on her part for him to stay.

She said: “Have I told you that Ernest is home?”

“I had heard.”

“Then you know that he got married while in Hawaii? I like her: Bertha. She’s a little thing. Not anemic, but, well, not robust. She was born in Honolulu. Her parents were English, and ranched either pineapples or sugar.”

Madam Tuffman’s lively eyes grew veiled. She grimaced faintly and made a small deprecatory gesture; then she said: “My presence at the wedding was entirely by cable. I expected something exotic. I suppose you always do in connection with places like Hawaii. Not at all the sort of girl that Bertha really is. I prepared.”

“Prepared?”

“For the homecoming.” Madam Tuffman leaned forward and said: “I wanted to keep him here. To keep both of them here. I tried to arrange their room as a bridge, as a link.”

“Between the Islands and Ohio?”

“Yes, Doctor. After Edgar made his money, we did a little looting of Europe. That was a long time ago, before the turn of the century. It was a magpie rather than a grand tour. The attic is still cluttered with cases that have never been opened. I remembered certain things, and thought that they would fit.”

“For the room?”

“Yes. There were some good lacquer pieces, an excellent China rug, all very vivid in vermillions and heady tones. Then there was the paper for contrast.”

“Wallpaper?”

“A hand-blocked, lush design done by an artist in London’s Soho. I think he was mad. Both of them — Edgar to buy it, and the artist to make it in the first place. The design is a plethora of fantastic huge leaves of the most vivid green. I remember that the color glowed from a single candle lighted in the studio. The artist was especially proud of the fact that he had mixed the pigments himself.” Madam Tuffman grimaced again, adding: “So we unpacked the rolls from their case and put it up.”

“It was not a — success?”

She stared at Starr for a thoughtful moment.

“I don’t know. Bertha was very kind. She professed to be delighted. Well — I suppose it will require a certain amount of time for her to get acclimated. They’ve only been here a few weeks.”

“Then they have decided to stay?”

“I think yes. I hope yes. But I still find it somewhat unbelievable in Ernest, this sudden urge toward nesting. He resembles his Great-uncle Stuart. Both of them ran away from home at the age of sixteen. Stuart rolled on straight through his seventies, eventually dying of exhaustion at the Hotel Bruschini in Tamave, Madagascar. Well, Ernest is only thirty, and still — well, here he is.”

“Perhaps because he is married?”

“Yes, Madam Tuffman said, there might be an answer there. Great-uncle Stuart had shied at altars like a sensitive colt. But marriage, just as marriage, scarcely seemed ponderable enough as an anchor for such a rolling-stone as Ernest. She knew Ernest so very well. She loved him so much, perhaps because he was her youngest and, for his sins, the only one of her children who was left. She supposed that with time she would grow to love Bertha a good deal too. Her lively dark eyes fixed Starr sharply, and she said: ‘I feel no jealousy, Doctor. It isn’t that.’ ”

“I’m sure it isn’t, Mrs. Tuffman.”

“And it isn’t that Bertha doesn’t want to love me. I think she does. I think she is uncertain about something — about happiness. Will you meet her before you go?”

“I should like to very much.”

Madam Tuffman stood up.

“We will join them in the cellar.”

And Madam Tuffman explained, as they walked down waxed walnut stairs carpeted with an imperishable Turkey red, that Ernest was currently absorbed with photography, and was planning to open a studio in Laurel Falls and make it his life work.

Ernest had had, she went on, so many life works, starting as a boy with raising squabs, birds which had gradually been consumed by the family circle in ratio as his interest in the pursuit had waned. Chemistry, magic, portrait-painting, a bewildering and swift succession of interests that had culminated in a passion for the sea at sixteen, when he had run away and had shipped out of Boston on an Atlantic Fruit Company freighter for the West Indies. He had seemed to tire of his enthusiasms so quickly, which was why Madam Tuffman didn’t know about this one.

The darkroom occupied a portion of the large cellar usually reserved as a storage place for winter vegetables. Pale lemon light through a safety filter left it vague, as things are vague when you open your eyes while swimming under the sea. The faces of both of them were washed with the tint lightly, both bending over a tray. Starr had never met either, and Ernest Tuffman’s good looks and magnificent build registered immediately, distracting his attention from Bertha, whom Ernest’s appearance and the safety filter rendered wraithlike and ethereally obscure.

It was a strange meeting, strange beyond even its setting, and brief. Ernest was glad to be home, very satisfied at settling down with a wife, with a background, with a mother, and with an ancestral estate, at last. Starr sensed that all this gladness was implied by Ernest, rather than being baldly stated, as if it were a wish rather than a reality: a generally benign condition of affairs which Ernest hoped, very much, would come true.

In contrast, Bertha seemed impelled by a peculiar eagerness, a directness, to impress Starr and (through him) Madam Tuffman and Ernest as well. She was emphatic that she did not miss Hawaii at all, that this absolute uprooting of her life — her years couldn’t, Starr decided, have been more than twenty — and a subsequent transplanting several thousands of miles away with a continent and a vast space of Pacific Ocean in between, was entirely to her liking.

She touched with earnest graciousness on the link: the room which Madam Tuffman had so considerately arranged with its bright lacquers and hand-blocked wallpaper leaves so lush in their vivid green. The thoughtfulness of it. The consoling accuracy of its effect. A home away from home. To awake every morning and lie there absorbing that brilliant emerald paradise. Had Doctor Starr heard that an artist in London had conceived it ages ago? Doctor Starr had.

She was, too, insistently enchanted with Laurel Falls; shortly, she said, Ernest would renew his boyhood ties and they would get around a little socially, and would start to entertain, as Ernest’s mother wished them to. Then she showed Starr a print, lifting it from the fixing-bath, of a portrait which Ernest had taken, Starr reflectively observed, on an eight-by-ten sheet, of an eye, a wen, an ear.

Ernest said brusquely, “Our gardener,” and Starr said, “Remarkable,” and Bertha said brightly, “It settles so, don’t you think, on the things that are really important?”

Madam Tuffman said nothing except (in reply to Starr) goodbye.

A month later Madam Tuffman phoned again. She told Starr’s secretary, Miss Wadsworth, that the tweak seemed still to be there and she would appreciate it if Dr. Starr would call. On his way to this second visit Starr still considered that a mild arthritic or rheumatic condition might be setting in, but when he heard again a listing of the twinges and their obscure locations, he dismissed the probability from his thoughts. He wanted, as was his custom, to be perfectly frank and tell Madam Tuffman that she was wasting both her money and his time, but the strength of some deep emotion which lay beneath the liveliness of her dark eyes prevented him.

So he suggested that she give his former prescription a further chance, being uncomfortably aware that she appreciated its pathetic innocuity but was grateful for its value as an excuse (yes, he thought, that was it) to bring him into the house. He realized later that it was then, at that moment, when a tacit understanding sprang up between them that the twinges would remain, and that he would dose Madam Tuffman with the most shameless simples whenever she wanted him to come.

She said after this arrangement was so psychically settled upon: “You will think me a doting parent, Doctor. Unfortunately, I am. A man once read the bumps on Ernest’s head when he was a child, and said that there was nothing that Ernest couldn’t do. Sort of a Carlylean possession of a fixed capacity which could be turned with equal success into any channel Ernest might choose. The latest proof seems to be golf. Ernest never played before, but he has practically lived on the links during the past month — he and Bertha.”

“And photography? The studio in town?”

“Oh, that! At least we can store winter apples and potatoes in the cellar again. It seems that Ernest is already much better at the game than Bertha, who has golfed for years in Honolulu.”

“Evidently a natural talent. I wish I possessed it.”

“In fact, Ernest is almost as good as that Mabel Hoplin divorcée; and she, I understand, approaches being professional. I continue to refer to golf.”

“They play together?”

Madam Tuffman looked vague.

“Bertha tells me so.” Her eyes were once more penetratingly lively. “Bertha wanted him to. It seems that the change in climate has made her tire easily.”

“That’s a comforting thing about climates. You can attribute any ailment whatever to them.”

“So I have found.” Madam Tuffman fingered an inconsequential handkerchief deeply bordered with Brussels lace. “Are you by any chance golfing at the club this afternoon, Doctor?”

He said, after a moment: “Yes, Mrs. Tuffman. I am.”

Starr did some telephoning after he left, and managed to arrange a foursome for five o’clock. He reached the clubhouse shortly before four. He found Bertha Tuffman seated on its glass-enclosed southern veranda reading a book for which she had made a plain paper dust-cover. He suggested cocktails or tea.

“Tea, if you don’t mind, Doctor.” Starr gave the order to a waiter, and Bertha said: “I simply don’t drink. It’s a habit that’s missing in me constitutionally... I do like your course here.”

“Have you finished for the day?”

“I found nine holes enough.” Her voice stayed charmingly bright. “I’m continually expecting Ernest to divorce me for a dynamo. He’s indefatigable.”

Starr equably shook out the climatic change between Honolulu and Ohio, and Bertha gratefully agreed that her lessening spryness was, of course, due to that. Shortly, on almost any tomorrow, she would be feeling herself again. Not that she was ill. Her laughter at this absurdity was gay and clear. She would concede brief moments of nostalgia, moments when she would lie on the rattan chaise longue of their bedroom and fancy, while her eyes played among the wallpaper’s tropical pattern of strong green leaves, that she was back in her childhood of Hawaii. But such moments swiftly passed. No, it wasn’t any illness it was simply that she wanted to live as fully as Ernest did, to be not only a helpmeet but a teammate as well, while Ernest sprinted with his boundless bravura along his kaleidoscopic succession of tracks.

Bertha said, again, that she wanted to live. Leaving the statement, this time, quite flat. Then she stood up abruptly and said, while her smile grew set and strained, that she would be right back.

Starr sat and observed through glass panes the eighteenth hole, toward which Ernest Tuffman and Mabel Hoplin (the amateur in divorces) were so springily walking, trailed by their flushed and sweated caddies. Then the club’s perennial debutante paused at his table — an Ethel Sweetloss, starved down into the Misses and eye-shadowed into a mauve version of Mimi’s penultimate gasp in La Bohème.

Miss Sweetloss said, huskily: “Why the dust-cover, Doctor? Brushing up on some extracurricular techniques with the knife?”

Starr broke loose from his abstraction and stood up. He saw that Miss Sweetloss had opened the book which Bertha had been reading. He recognized the work as one of the better anthologies on famous real-life murders. He managed to smile back at Miss Sweetloss as he took the book from her hand.

“Just a busman’s holiday, Miss Sweetloss — among the cyanides and the more scarlet fields of human behavior...”

The successive visits did not, at the time, seem significant. Starr missed meeting Bertha or Ernest during all of them, as both were involved in a full swing of social activities. Over and above their fictional base of twinges, a précis of the visits simply bulked largely with Madam Tuffman’s opinion that Bertha was quite definitely very deeply in love with Ernest.

Madam Tuffman pointedly made something special of the fact, as if she wanted Starr to realize that it was not an ordinary love in just an affectionate or a biological sense, but that it had a devotional flavor, like a half-portion of the more notable examples such as Romeo and Juliet: a half-portion in that Madam Tuffman didn’t seem so sure about Ernest as a prototype for the party of the first part. And neither, she had sensed, did Bertha.

But then, you never could tell about Ernest. Madam Tuffman had never been able to and she doubted whether anyone else ever could, even a wife. He lowered so, like thunder, and then could be gentle as a zephyr-ean coo from a dove. She supposed it was the trouble with having loose dynamite in his veins instead of blood The lamb!

Golf, of course, had long been discarded as an accomplished fact, and Mabel Hoplin had as cavalierly been discarded with it. The latest flame on the horizon was a sloop. Something in the nature of Jack London’s Sea Wolf, in which Ernest would install Bertha and (if Madam Tuffman washed — but she didn’t) his mother, and away with it all to some black-flied tropical hell in the South Atlantic...

It was a midsummer visit which definitely served as an overture to the affair’s desperate end.

Madam Tuffman believed that Bertha was going to have a child. She intended to bring Bertha to Starr’s office on the following day, for his opinion. From her own exhaustive fund of personal experience Madam Tuffman was satisfied with the symptoms, which included, among other trivia, moody fits of a temperamental melancholy. Bertha had increasingly kept to her room, the complimentary papering of which Madam Tuffman now considered a mistake, for it seemed to be getting on Bertha’s nerves. She had overheard Bertha muttering fiercely to herself: “The leaves — the twining leaves.”

Oddest, she thought, was Bertha’s fixity of diet (again the temperamental quirk) which leaned almost exclusively toward eggs, boiled, and served at the table in their shells. These Bertha ate with bread; and as for liquids, the girl drank nothing at all during meals, but would refresh herself afterward (Madam Tuffman had determined this from observation) with plain water from a tap.

Finally, when not involved with one of her fits of melancholia, Bertha would swing to an extreme of hectic gayety, or would disclose her devotion for Ernest with depths that were embarrassingly uncomfortable both for Ernest and for Madam Tuffman. As for what a baby would do — well, what would it do? Would it bind Ernest to his wife, to his home? To any sort of normal regularity? Or would it gall as a second chain?

Starr did, on this occasion, meet Bertha. She was standing on the porch as he left the house, with her attractive small face very clear in the light of a declining sun. He was shocked at her appearance. It had a subtly unhealthy look which was significant to his practiced eye. Bertha brightened as she saw him.

“It’s good to see you again, Doctor.”

“Thank you. I’ve missed you, too.”

“We’ve been involved. In full swing. I know now what the tail of a comet must feel like.”

“I’m told that a sloop is the very latest.”

“It was — but always, Doctor, something new; now it is dancing. Ernest never danced in Honolulu.”

“What changed his mind?”

“The ties of his youth changed it for him, I suspect. All blondes.”

“All blondes?”

Bertha brightly ran through a brief roster, all of whom Starr knew, and all of whom were definitely blondes. She shook her russet hair and said: “It has made me thoughtful on the subject of peroxide.”

“Too permanent, I’d say. I’d favor a wig. Remember that you’re dealing with a highly changeable substance.”

“Yes, I do remember, Doctor.”

“You’re coming to my office tomorrow?”

He had rarely, he reflected, seen such a swift, evanescent flash of fear.

“Ernest’s mother knows about the baby, Doctor?”

“She suspects. Does Ernest?”

“No. And please — I shall ask his mother to say nothing, and let me ask it of you, Doctor — to say nothing to him.”

“Of course.”

“Thank you, Doctor...”

Starr assured Bertha gravely as to the baby, while he thought: “There is a horror in this that strikes more deeply than I can see. I think she knows. That is the truly damnable part about it — I think she knows.” He felt Madam Tuffman’s lively old eyes turned on him watchfully from her armchair beside a window in the office. They were as deliberate in their fixity as Bertha’s eyes were evasive.

He said to Bertha: “Concerning your diet—”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“I understand you lean somewhat exclusively toward eggs?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

He studied her averted face for a while.

“Served, I believe, in their shells?”

“A habit of childhood, Doctor.”

“You eat just eggs?”

“No — plain bread — no butter, Doctor.”

Starr smiled at Madam Tuffman and said: “You have kept your house so much in period that I suppose even the butter is still molded with wooden presses into individual pats?”

Madam Tuffman’s eyes grew impersonal.

“Rosettes, a clover, and one rather rare one, Doctor, of a little cow.”

Starr turned again to Bertha.

“How long have you been restricting yourself to this diet?”

“I think since I’ve known about the baby.”

Madam Tuffman said sharply: “No, longer — much longer.”

“Perhaps. Yes, Doctor, for a while longer.”

“Hasn’t the monotony of it affected your appetite?”

“I’m never really hungry.”

(Faint fever, lassitude, small appetite, a failure of the general health, a slight wasting of the body — it could be any one of a number of known diseases, any of the impressionable eccentricities precedent on having a child. And still he knew, and she knew — Starr felt it imperative to talk with her alone. It was well within the bounds of reason that his intuition should be entirely wrong, although he did not believe so for a minute. There had been Ernest’s interest in photography — the inclusion of chemistry among his earlier hobbies.)

“I’m going to suggest that you go to the hospital for observation, Mrs. Tuffman.”

“But Doctor — I mean, surely it won’t be for many months?”

“No, but I am dissatisfied with your general condition.”

Bertha looked at Starr suddenly with a strange hostility.

“I think that I prefer not to. You mustn’t think me rude. I think I would prefer to stay at home, Doctor.”

He observed her thoughtfully for quite a while.

“Naturally, the decision rests with you.”

Her hostility faded slowly. Relief took its place. Then fright...

Starr’s chance came later in the afternoon of the same day. The Bucklands were giving a garden party for their dahlias, or rather Nina Buckland was (Jock thought them an overblown bore), and the occasion was one of the town’s inescapable yearly events.

The garden was charming and filled with dahlias and people. Starr found Bertha in a distant corner, sitting alone in a yew niche on a marble bench beneath the perpetual smirk of a cast bronze faun.

He said: “I’m glad I found you.”

For an instant he thought that she was going to leave him; but her smile came shortly, more artificial than he had ever noticed it to be, and she said: “Sit down, Doctor.”

“Thank you. I’ve just left Ernest looking speculatively at the dahlias. Do you suppose they’ll supplant the dancing as his newest life’s work?”

“Possibly. Although I’m afraid they’re not instantaneous enough.”

“Results must spring full-blown?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“You’re twenty years old, Mrs. Tuffman. I’m forty-three. That gives me the edge on you, not only as a physician, for I can exert the paternal touch. I do it rather well.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Starr could feel her hardening against him swiftly, and hostility again setting in beneath her pleasant outer manner.

“There is this about life, Mrs. Tuffman: We so frequently defeat our own ends by the very methods which we use to attain them. You cannot be a constant mirror, and remain yourself. And men tire rapidly of their own reflections.”

“Echoes at last become hollow?”

“Yes. We’re putting it in fancy language, but I know that you know what I mean. I’d like to be frank. I am your physician. I want to help you.”

Bertha’s voice grew older:

“It is true that I have tried to be all things to Ernest, in the way that he is all things to himself. There are some things you cannot cage. Birds and wild beasts, yes, if you wish. Bars will hold them. But not Ernest. He’s the wind. You must ride with the wind, Doctor.” She reached her hand out suddenly, and he was surprised at its strength as she closed it over his. “Ride for as long as, and wherever, it may blow. I’ve no longer any foothold on the ground. From the moment when Ernest asked me to be his wife, I’ve had none. I want none, Doctor. Believe that, please — I want none.”

Starr found himself up against as complete a frustration here, as earlier in his office. The ripe old wisdom of Madam Tuffman recurred to him, and he thought how clearly she had cut to the matter’s root when she had remarked that Bertha’s love for Ernest had surpassed all affectionate or mere biological bounds, and that it was swamped in devotional seas of the more notably classical sorts.

He could understand this very well, under a fabled twist of a mouse being courted and wedded by a handsome lion: a state of affairs that was bound to upset not only the mouse’s head but her entire emotional fabric too. She would try every song in her meager repertory to make last, for a little longer, that strange initial enchantment, while living in the most desperate sort of fear that her melodies would be recognized in their true categories as mouselike squeaks.

He said absently: “It is not always good to love so much.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know you don’t. You can’t help it.”

“I’ll never try to hold him.”

“You have a good deal of wisdom, Mrs. Tuffman.”

“And you have a lot of understanding, Doctor. I couldn’t be more commonplace, for anyone like Ernest, and still he chose me. He chose me literally, Doctor, from all the world.” She thought this over broodingly for a moment, and then she said: “I suppose the Islands helped.”

“The general setting? Romance? No, I think he must have known plenty of that. I imagine he’s pretty well dulled to pale moons and the scents of strange flowers.”

She said fiercely: “Sometimes I lie up there in that travesty and wonder.”

“Travesty?”

“Our room. Its walls mock me. Every vivid painted leaf on them seems to cry out: ‘But for me, but for me, you never would have got him.’ There are such things as obsessions, Doctor?”

“Plenty of them. They’re easily got rid of.”

“I’ve torn at it. Torn at that wallpaper with my fingernails — and then found myself doing it, and stopped doing it!”

He said to her earnestly: “Will you grant me permission to give you a more complete examination than I did today? I sha’n’t suggest hospitalization again, believe me. Just in my office.”

Bertha’s voice, after a frightened second, was explosive in its sharpness: “No.”

It was impossible to efface her from his thoughts. Starr drove more slowly, then more slowly still. He felt compelled to return to her and have it out. To use force, if need be, if there were no end in persuasion. He turned the car back toward the Bucklands’. He saw the roadster leaving their entrance gates as he neared them. He recognized Bertha in the driving-seat, alone.

She did not go in the direction of the Tuffman estate, but headed north along the highway with a speed which Starr clocked at seventy. Seven miles out of town, she forked toward the right onto a country road which led to the river. Starr decreased his distance and forked too. A half mile of abominable ruts through a copse of white oak opened suddenly on a clearing, at the farther edge of which a dilapidated inn sat on weary haunches by the river-bank. Bertha’s roadster was parked near the door.

Starr was dimly aware of having heard of the place: a late-at-night rendezvous of somewhat indifferent character. He thought that someone had once told him that you could go there and they didn’t bother you, about names, about who was with you, about anything at all like that. Also (it was coming back) a small public dining-room was rarely used. More intimate rooms-for-two were, among other things, a solace for the inn’s general inaccessibility.

It was intensely quiet; and curtained windows stared across the clearing at Starr blankly. The rendezvous (if it were a rendezvous) was the last thing in the world which he had expected. Still, there was no other car, and Bertha had been alone. More than anything else, this circumstance added a note to the case which absorbed him, and frightened him too. From the speed with which Bertha had driven here, Starr expected another car momentarily, with that other member without whom no rendezvous can be complete.

Fifteen minutes passed, but no other car came. The hush continued with only the faint sound of the river and the whispered stirring of restless insects. Starr crossed the clearing on foot and opened the inn’s front door. An empty foyer of the dreariest nature faced him, with shut doors to right and left, and a steep narrow stairway leading to the floor above. He opened doors, and found an empty dining-room, and a taproom where a moth-eaten deer’s head above the bar alone suggested life.

He went up the narrow stairs. Doors lined either side of a hall, all closed but the farthest on the left, which stood ajar. He walked to it.

Bertha, seated at a table, was eating steak. Almost with the ferocity of a starving animal, she was lifting it from the plate to her mouth: large pieces of the red meat. No bread, no vegetables, nothing else at all on the table, except a pitcher of rich milk.

Starr’s throat constricted harshly as he watched her, and as he thought: “She’s stuffing herself, alone in this dismal place, believing herself loveless, loving so much, in the face of a death at the hands of the one whom she loves, or of his mother — far from home, savoring nothing, just filling her stomach up in order to be with him for a little longer.”

Starr stood it for a moment, that wolf-like, desperately urgent quality in the way she ate, then he entered the room.

“All this is ended, Mrs. Tuffman.”

Her reaction was instinctive, clouded by the depths into which she had fallen.

“I must get back before he misses me.”

“Mrs. Tuffman! We are going back together. Ernest will come with us.”

Bertha saw him now, and said fiercely: “Why do you persecute me? Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“Come with me, please.”

Bertha stood up, and her frailness seemed to stiffen into steel, strengthening her into a replica in miniature of the magnificent animal who had married her.

“Doctor Starr, if you say anything about having found me here, I shall call you a liar.”

“You are making this very difficult.”

“You know the character of this place, Doctor. If you voice your conclusions to anyone — anyone — I shall say I have never been here.”

Starr went to her and placed his hands upon her shoulders, feeling their stiffness, the faint shivering trembles that ran through them.

“You have fought enough. Your rendezvous here was with food. Steak is no antidote for poison.”

The word was out. Stark between them. Stripped of further conjecture or evasions. Bertha’s strength had a bubble quality about its swift collapse, and she was limp. Starr could scarcely hear her as she said: “Doctor — what shall I do—”

He still held her, warming her coldness, her sudden utter indifference to anything left in living. A cough was coughed discreetly behind them in the doorway; and a voice, surprisingly soft when you realized the hulk that it came from, said: “Excuse me, lady. Just consider ’at I di’n’t come.” The waiter, like a gentle gorilla, closed the door.

Starr smiled down at her and said: “I can promise you again, Mrs. Tuffman, that all this is ended. We must return at once to the house. There is a certain thing which I must know.”

Bertha refused to smile back.

“No matter which one it is, no matter if it’s Ernest’s mother, Doctor, I don’t want to live.”

“That decision is no longer in your hands.”

He refused to let Bertha drive alone; he left his car parked at the inn and got into her roadster, taking the wheel. He wanted to say to Bertha definitely, to say it now: “Here is what I think. Here is this damnable thought that has always been in the back of my mind, and which has just crystallized into a possible fact. Let me tell you of a waiting murderer, who slept, and who waited for your coming to wake up.” But he dared not — not until he was sure. For always, in the back of his head, was Madam Tuffman’s dictum: “You never could tell about Ernest.”

There remained, because of this dictum, a grimness to Starr’s thoughts, and he drove in silence to the Bucklands’, where Nina Buckland told him that Ernest had left. With one of the (dancing) blondes. Nina’s friendly eyes showed plainly that she thought it a trifle queer: Bertha’s solitary departure, Ernest’s not so solitary departure, then Bertha’s return with Starr. But she smiled socially, and swam back among her guests and dahlias.

They found Ernest waiting with Madam Tuffman in the full nightmare of her parlor. Early dinner guests were imminent, and Madam Tuffman was in wine velvet, complete with bosom and train, while a broad diamond choker concealed the valleys of her throat. She rose and held out a hand.

“So good of you to bring her back, Doctor.” Her lively dark eyes turned upon Bertha. “We were worried, dear.”

Ernest said heavily: “Better dress, Bertha. You knew we were dining early.”

Bertha looked at Starr, and he said: “Yes, do. I have some things to discuss with Ernest and his mother.” He watched her leave the room; then he said to Madam Tuffman: “May I use the telephone, please?”

“Certainly, Doctor.”

He left them in their curious silence and went into the hall. He called his office.

He said to his secretary, Miss Wadsworth, that if she didn’t mind, he would like to return to the Middle Ages, or at least to some points somewhat back. Would she gather some hydrogen sulphide T.S., some litmus — yes, litmus — and the small charcoal grill that was used for steak? Would she embark at once with them in a taxi and hurry to the Tuffmans’? He wanted to make an immediate if primeval test, without the use of tubes and retorts. For what? For a mixture of arsenite and acetate of copper... Yes.

He rejoined Madam Tuffman and her son in the parlor, and they sat on satin and gilt beneath the unshaded bulbs of a vast ormulu chandelier. He said without preamble: “Mr. Tuffman, your wife is suffering from chronic poisoning. I believe its nature to be arsenite and acetate of copper. Her condition is serious, but not necessarily fatal. We are in time.”

For a moment Ernest looked stunned, and then he said savagely: “Are you suggesting an attempt at murder, Doctor? The murder of my wife?”

“Yes, Mr. Tuffman. That’s right.”

Madam Tuffman broke suddenly: “I have known it all along! It has been my horror — all these months. But I would not believe it. Even against my common sense, I kept telling myself it could not be true. There are but the three of us — my son, and Bertha, and me. I would say again and again that Bertha would not take her own life, because by doing so she would also be taking the life of her child. I knew it was no doing of mine. I would not, I do not, believe that it is Ernest. Doctor, the murderer cannot be here!”

“The murderer is here, Mrs. Tuffman.”

“Mother—”

“No, Ernest, you must let me finish. For the past year this has been on my heart like a stone. I love you, but I do not know you. Bertha loves you, but she does not know you. Whatever I have gone through, she has gone through more. She is young. I am too old to know about her sort of love any longer — the infinite variety of its sacrifices. I understand none other than my feeling for you.”

“Mother—”

“Wait, Ernest. Bertha has kept silent. She has suffered this poison to bring her slowly closer to death with every day. She has refused to be examined by Doctor Starr, in dread that the finger would be pointed to you, whom she loves; or to me, whom you love. She has been prepared to face death all these terrible months, Ernest, if you wanted it that way.”

“That’s a lie!” Ernest blazed with rage. “I love her. I love her more than anything.”

Starr said quietly: “I must ask your patience until Miss Wadsworth gets here. She is bringing certain things.”

Minutes passed, while Starr, with oblique pointers, prepared Madam Tuffman and her son with documented precedents for his belief. Bertha’s case, he said, was not unique, although today it was so rare as to offer no other existent probable parallel. He touched first upon the idiosyncrasy of certain people to certain poisons, their allergy to them: many men could stand a medicinal dose of a given poison which would prove dangerous, if not fatal, to anyone who was allergic to it.

In Bertha’s case, Starr believed the idiosyncrasy to be strong. The mixture of arsenite and acetate of copper had, if his thoughts were correct, been administered to her in the form of dust, and also as an arseniureted hydrogen gas which had been emitted into the air. He spoke of a Dr. G. Kirchgasser, of Coblenz, who had collected twenty-one cases of such poisoning, some of which had proven fatal. Dr. Kirchgasser’s paper on the subject was still on record. Dr. Kirchgasser had stressed the fact that his cases were all of people who were allergic to the poison. Many others had lived and come under its influence in similar conditions, and had not been affected at all.

Miss Wadsworth arrived, laden, and Starr suggested that they all go upstairs. He rapped on the door of Bertha’s and Ernest’s room, and asked whether they might come in.

The colors of the room struck him like a blow. They alone seemed to make any sound in the deathlike stillness. With a penknife he scraped a strip of vivid green from a hand-blocked leaf of the lurid wallpaper. He immersed a piece in a glass of water. He lit charcoal. He touched litmus into the glass and considered the reaction faintly acid. Some drops of hydrogen sulphide T.S. turned the solution a pale yellow. The vapor from a piece of the paper thrown on the burning charcoal suggested an odor of garlic.

He said to Madam Tuffman: “Your artist in London’s Soho had the misfortune, or ignorance, to select one of the most poisonous pigments of his day. The commercial variety of this particular pigment was known to have contained fifty-nine per cent of arsenic, and I believe that in his own mixing the artist must have used even a more lavish hand. As I have said, the known cases of chronic poisoning at that period from wallpaper of this type were noted. These particular rolls were kept through the years in your attic, cased, so its lethal properties remained intact until the rolls were opened, put up, and its poison disseminated in the form of a fine dust and a gas.”

Bertha was suddenly radiant, with a whole world that was hers again. “Then the murderer, Doctor—”

“Exactly. From now on, you have nothing to fear, because the source has been traced: The murderer is — this room!”