The Witch of the Low Tide by John Dickson Carr

Author:John Dickson Carr [Carr, John Dickson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

IF MARION HAD NOT laughed…

Garth felt no relish for what he must say to her. Case-histories are one thing. In no stranger should any bodily or psychic illness move the physician’s emotions lest it trouble his judgement. He must not deal with what too closely touches his own life.

But it was a startling laugh, callous and with a touch of brutality. Marion sat bolt upright, hair elaborately dressed and gleaming. The whole room reeked of her personality and of the perfume she wore.

She was in a chair with a ladder back, against a white plaster wall between two latticed windows. The small candle-flame was reflected in her eyes. Stretching up both arms behind her head, elbows out, and seizing the supports of the chair at either side, Marion leaned back with a feline grace and crossed her knees.

“What’s the matter, David? Why don’t you tell me not to speak so loudly? Why don’t you tell me to whisper? Why don’t you tell me there are people all about, just dying to make a scandal?”

“That would be true, wouldn’t it?”

It was as though Marion’s impatience at such a notion ached so deeply that it could be expressed only by a curse or a prayer.

“You needn’t worry. Nobody can hear us; these walls are too thick. Nobody saw me slip in here. Or are you thinking about Vince?”

“I wonder, Marion, if you can guess what I am really thinking.”

“Vince is asleep. I poured chloral in his whisky.” At once nagging and coaxing, at once storming at him and yet wheedling in unconvincing tenderness, Marion had lowered her voice. But she still seemed to be crying out that all things were unfair. “Don’t be stupid, David. I want to be nice to you. I’m trying to be nice to you. But you don’t make it easy, do you? There are times when I could kill some of the men I know!”

“Whereas in actual fact,” Garth said, “you only tried to kill one woman.”

Marion dropped her arms and sat up straight.

In one corner of the room a deep-voiced grandfather clock seemed to rustle rather than tick. Garth went back to the door. There was a new bolt, but the latch was of wood. He stood looking down at it.

Even the Stag and Glove, he supposed, was not really old as time went in this island. They had built it more than a century after England’s life began to depend on the wool that must be sent in ships and the ships that must be guarded against pirates; and Fulke de Raven, first Deputy Warden of the Cinque Ports, kept watch from his tower above the Narrow Seas.

But these reflections could become dangerous. If you stood motionless in the stream of time, listening to crying voices out of the past, you might presently believe that your feelings or your neighbour’s were of puny significance because they had been experienced so often before and would be experienced again when you had gone. Whereas they did matter; they were the only reality; there was no shame in feeling the hurt.

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