The Seeds of Enchantment | Page 7

the table on its legs and commenced to re-arrange the papers.
"I should like the fan started. Full speed, please," called Beamish's voice, coldly professional. De Gys stepped to the switch by the door, clicked it on. The wooden ceiling-fan began to revolve, gathered speed. A breath of cooling air circulated down through the heat of the room, quivering the papers on the table, the muslin curtains round the bed.
"You!" ordered de Gys to his servant, "wait outside the door."
Phu-nan salaamed; withdrew. Beamish finished his examination, closed the curtains, and turned to de Gys.
"Elle est morte--" he whispered.
"Dead!" For a moment the Frenchman's eyes gazed blank incredulity. Then rage blazed in their red-brown depths. "Liar!" the voice, keyed to frenzy, seemed torn from the huge frame. "Liar! she cannot be dead. It is impossible."
"Elle est morte," repeated Beamish, and felt himself tossed aside so that he staggered against a long rattan chair, only just recovered balance in time to see de Gys' hands, grown suddenly gentle as a girl's, pulling apart the flimsy muslin round the bed.
"Yes, she is dead. Poor, poor little woman," thought de Gys. All the quick rage in him was extinct. He knew only infinite pity, infinite sorrow, and deep down in his wanderer's heart, pain. For though he had known many women, this one he had loved.
She lay there so quietly; alabaster-white in death. Death had smoothed all terror from her face: her face showed like a waxen magnolia-bloom against the spread gold of her hair. Death had smoothed all movement from her long limbs, from her impulsive hands: her hands rested on her bosom like two fallen petals of some great white flower.
"But this is not Melie," he thought, "this is only the husk of Melie, the beautiful husk of a soul I hardly knew."
Very reverently he bent and kissed the gold hair, the white forehead, the two hands lying petal-like on the rounded breasts. Very quietly he drew the mosquito-curtains; turned to Beamish.
"Your pardon, doctor."
Beamish took the outstretched hand; murmured awkwardly: "C'est triste, Sympathie" And the Frenchman understood. ' Dicky, too, his long friend, the Colonel Smith of old days, was beside him; he could feel Dicky's hand on his shoulder. "Courage, mon vieux, we have seen death before, you and I."
The Frenchman came to himself. "Yes," he said a hint of the old gasconade in his tone "we are old friends, you and I and death. Only..." The voice quivered. A sob shook the great shoulders. "Doctor, of what did she die?"
Without a word Beamish walked over to the outer door; locked it. Then, "Where do these lead?" he asked, pointing to a flight of wooden steps in the far corner of the room.
"Only to the bath-room."
"And the sitting-room? Is it safe? Can we talk there without being overheard?"
"Yes."
De Gys led way through the "chik" curtain; closed the folding doors which divided the apartment; closed the shutters; clicked on light and fan; arranged cane chairs round the cheap European table. The three sat down. "Of what did she die?" repeated de Gys. For answer, Beamish fumbled in his coat-pocket, drew out and laid on the table a flat case set with white stones that glinted like diamonds in the shadeless glare of the pendent electric.
"If he will tell me what is in that box" Beamish spoke in English to Dicky, and his voice was a pregnant suspicion "I may be able to tell him the cause of his wife's death. She was his wife, I suppose," the doctor went on.
"Your pardon, doctor," interrupted the Frenchman, "but I am not quite ignorant of your language. Nor do I like mysteries. Be frank, please."
Beamish hesitated; blushed; began: "I found the box when I undid her blouse. She was clutching it to her breast as she died. Afterwards, I looked in the box." He hesitated again. "Your wife died of heart failure, Monsieur, but before I can certify her death as due to natural causes, you must answer one question. Did your wife take drugs?"
"Not drugs," answered the Frenchman. "A drug. And only sometimes."
"Was this drug prescribed by a proper medical man?"
"I do not know. I do not even know the name of the drug. But it is quite harmless. Of that, I can assure you; because I have partaken of it myself."
Beamish reached out a hand for the glittering bauble on the table; and Dicky faculties still benumbed with the shock of Melie's passing saw it to be an enamelled snuffbox of obvious eighteenth-century work, the lid flowerdecorated in conventional design and garlanded with a truelover's knot of paste stones. "French," thought Dicky, "Louis the Sixteenth"... but already the doctor's spatulate fingers had found the catch, pressed the case open, revealing two small compartments, each lined with a curious fibre, wall-flower-brown in colour and silky