Mark Aldridge - The Passing of Mr Quinn

On tiptoe she sped down the stairs, the letter in her hand. The broad staircase turned rather abruptly to face Professor Appleby’s study door. She had expected the door to be closed as usual, but as she came round a blaze of light struck her like a blow.

It seemed to Eleanor Appleby then that her heart stopped beating.

For seated at the table with an ugly look on his white face was her husband, and kneeling at his side, pleading with him with tears in her eyes was a woman.

THE silence that had fallen a few minutes earlier in the house had been occasioned by the cessation of Professor Appleby’s playing, and his strolling into his study next door. He closed the door very carefully, and turned to find Vera, with flushed face, regarding him with an odd light of triumph in her brown eyes.

She crossed to him with a peculiar feline grace that had once attracted him, and placed her arms round his neck.

‘My dear—oh, my dear!’ she whispered. ‘I’ve wanted to see you alone—oh, so much. And you’ve kept me at arm’s length. You’ve been so cruel.’

He suffered her caresses, and his vanity was pleased by the mad heaving of her bosom against his shirt front. The girl was evidently distrait. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, and whereas, at their first wooing, she had given herself timidly, fearfully, she now sought for his caresses with wanton eagerness.

Professor Appleby did not at once repulse her: nevertheless there was a cruel glint in his eyes. He had brought her to the dust, and he was fully determined to deal the final blow.

Together they crossed to his desk, and the professor sat down, while she knelt beside him, talking to him excitedly and a little incoherently. Formerly she had been rather like the slave girl who suffers her master’s caresses in silence. But now her stress of mind—her very real need—engendered in her a new boldness.

‘You do love me a little—just a little?’ she said repeatedly. ‘Say you do. Hold me in your arms like you used to.’

Professor Appleby sat with broad, stooping shoulders, staring through his monocle, and wondering. It baffled his ingenuity to guess what she wanted from him.

He turned to her at last, and asked her point-blank.

The false gaiety dropped from her, and her hand went up instinctively to her bosom. Now that the crucial moment had come she was afraid. But she had to speak to him—she must.

‘It’s something very important, sir,’ she said, and her voice sounded like a voice in an empty cathedral. ‘If you don’t help me, I’ll—oh, it’ll be my ruin.’

Professor Appleby started.

Before he could speak the woman threw her arms around his neck and whispered something. It confirmed the professor’s suspicion, and he struggled to throw her arms from him, his face thunderous in its rage.

‘What! You dare to tell me it is I, you—you you—’ He stopped for a word. Rising to his feet he shook her off, and crossed savagely to the door. ‘Get out! Pack your things and get out, you wanton. Don’t let me see your face again.’

She faced him, and now she was a virago with flashing eyes and white-streaked face, albeit her voice was pitched low.

‘You made me what I am. You! You—no one else! Oh, yes; you pretend not to believe me. But will that doll-faced wife of yours believe? Will the world believe when they see your—’

He turned with a hiss, his hand upraised to check her, his face black as thunder.

She fell to whimpering, awed and frightened by his aspect.

After a pause Professor Appleby crossed to his chair again and slumped into it. The first thunder-struck surprise was giving way to ferocious cruelty. He’d make her suffer for it. She threw herself to her knees and clasped her arms round him, pleading, cajoling, bursting alternately into fresh sobs.

‘Won’t you—come away with me?’ she begged almost in a whisper. ‘I’ll work for you—slave for you all my life. I’ll do what that doll-faced wife of yours could never do; I’ll make you love me. It’s not money I want, it’s—’

He burst into a ferocious laugh at that, and shook her off.

‘It’s neither that you’ll get from me, my dear Vera,’ he said in his coldest tones. ‘Not a penny piece—nothing, except orders to quit at the end of the week.’

With a terrified gasp she looked at him.

And in his leering eyes she read the truth. He meant it, every word. She struggled to her feet and backed away, staring at him almost fearfully. This was the man to whom she had given herself. And he was as remorseless now in his hatred of her as he had been in his desire.

‘You—you can’t send me out with nothing,’ she whispered.

‘I can, and will,’ he said in his coldest tone. ‘You will leave at the end of the week with a week’s wages.’

‘But what shall I do?’ she gasped. ‘I can’t face the disgrace, I—’ And then suddenly rage transfigured her, and she stamped her foot.

‘You monster! You vile brute!’ she cried in low, tense tones. ‘I’d like to kill you. Oh, if only I could see you die before my eyes now—dying in agonies, I’d be satisfied. Such men as you shouldn’t be allowed to live. I—’

Her voice trailed off in a sob. There was a gathering storm in Professor Appleby’s eyes that caused her to quail a little. Then all at once he started, fancying he heard a sound in the passage, and holding up his hand to her, he crossed on tip-toe to the door.

As he peered out he fancied he heard a flurry of white disappearing up the staircase. He was not quite certain, and he tiptoed up them, but as he peered in his wife’s room he saw that she was in bed and apparently asleep.

Satisfied, he returned.

Down in his study Vera, the house parlourmaid, was glancing around her wildly. She was a little mad. All sorts of thoughts were seething in her head. She hated this man who had betrayed her—hated him with an intensity of feeling that knew no bounds. And in her veins flowed a little gipsy blood. A dangerous mixture. She was not the type of woman to suffer a wrong calmly.

Her eyes espied the medicine cabinet on the right side of the room, and she crossed to it with a rustle of her silk petticoat. There was one bottle on the highest shelf, a little, blue-black bottle marked ‘Poison,’ and her hand went out to it quickly.

Then she started as she heard Professor Appleby’s softly returning footsteps.

When he re-entered the room, she stood at the far end of the room, near the French windows, and near the little round mahogany table that held the professor’s wine decanters and a syphon of soda. Professor Appleby had made it a habit of taking a glass of port before retiring to bed.

Vera held her small useless lace apron to her eyes, and her form was shaking with dry, pent-up sobs. But Professor Appleby was in no mood for further hysterics. He crossed to her and grasped her shoulder in a cruel grip.

‘Leave this room,’ he said in a low voice of menace. She turned with one last defiance, and there was so much deadly earnestness in her tone that it might well have warned Professor Appleby.

‘All right; I’m going,’ she said stormily. ‘I never want to see you again, you monster. But depend upon it, you’ll be sorry. You’ll be sorry!’

Professor Appleby’s lips twitched in a sneering smile as he watched her go with shaking shoulders.

He sat down at his desk again, and for some time engrossed himself in work. He was preparing an important paper to be read at a conference a week hence. But though Professor Appleby did not guess it, forces over which he had no control were shaping to engulf him that night. He was never to read that paper at the medical conference.

Though everything was quiet, save for the ticking of the grandfather clock in Professor Appleby’s study, over the house there seemed to hang a brooding threat.