Out our way that means something!”
Chapter Sixteen
IT WAS THAT EVENING, Tuesday the seventeenth, at dinner, that I received one of Katherine’s characteristic terse telegrams.
“Arriving tonight eleven o’clock train.”
The telegram was not only unexpected but ominous.
That Katherine, sunk in grief as she was, should leave her house and come to me at that time seemed almost incredible.
I could think of only two things; either that Jim had told her of the danger in which he stood, or that something had aroused her suspicions as to Howard’s death.
In any event her coming was certainly significant, and I am not ashamed to say that I took a small glass of sherry before I left for the station.
Nor did the sight of Katherine in her widow’s weeds, with that white cold face of hers set like a mask, improve matters.
She offered me her cheek, and as I offered mine at the same moment, what resulted was rather like the nose rubbing of the Africans, or whoever it is.
Not then, nor later when I showed her her room and the Frenchwoman, Elise, began to lay out her toilet things, did she offer any explanation of her visit.
Judy, she said, was all right and would come with Jim the next morning.
She herself had come on business.
And then very politely she put me out and left me to lie awake most of the night, wondering.
It was not until ten the next morning that I got my explanation, and then it was clear enough, and worrying enough, in all conscience.
At ten o’clock the door bell rang, and it was Jim, accompanied by Judy and, to my intense surprise, Alex Davis.
Judy looked odd and uncomfortable, but she was irrepressible, as always.
“It’s not a convention,” she said. “It’s merely a delegation.”
She went upstairs to Katherine and the two men waited in the library, Jim moving about restlessly, Alex Davis glancing over some notes in his hand.
In five minutes or so the bell rang again, and Joseph announced Mr. Waite.
I was practically beyond speech by that time. I listened dumbly while Mr. Waite made his apologies; he had just got off the train; he had been taking the sun cure in Arizona for his arthritis and was much better, thanks.
Then his eyes fell on the black band on Jim’s sleeve, and he said something polite about Howard’s death.
But it all seemed unreal to me, and when Joseph ushered in Doctor Simonds I was not surprised to see Alex Davis rise and clear his throat, as though he were about to address a meeting.
“I believe that completes us,” he said, as though he had announced that there was a quorum present.
“And now, if Joseph will notify Mrs. Somers—”
Bewildered as I was, I had to admire Katherine as she came in, in her long black gown and with her fine head high in the air.
There was a superb dignity about her, a refusal to make any concessions to the expected, so unlike my own fluttering as to make me self-conscious.
She shook hands with no one, smiled at no one.
She simply sat down and looked at Alex Davis.
“Very well,” she said. “I believe we are all ready.”
And then Alex Davis did indeed make a speech.
He referred to his late dear friend, Howard Somers, and to the grieving woman who sat there, finding herself in a position which it was difficult for her to accept.
“In all their conversations together, this husband and this wife, she was led to believe that the bulk of his fortune would come to her.
Now she is confronted with a new will, a will she cannot explain and does not accept.”
I saw Mr. Waite frown slightly.
“A will in which a wastrel son receives one half of this large estate.
It is to discuss, not the validity of this will”—he glanced at Mr. Waite—“but the circumstances under which it was drawn, that she has asked you to meet her here today.”
He sat down, and Mr. Waite took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief.
“Am I to speak?” he inquired.
“I presume, since the integrity of the document is not in question, that it is really up to the doctor.”
Urbane as he was, I saw that he was irritated.
Under Alex’s fine words he must have seen, as I did, that it was the will itself which was under fire.
“I actually know nothing,” the doctor said.
“Walter Somers told me, during his father’s illness here last summer, that he was thinking of changing his will.
He asked my opinion of his father’s mental condition, and I said I wished mine were as good.
Later on he asked me to give him a note to that effect, and I did so.”
He sat back, smoothing a small Van Dyke beard with a hand deeply stained from cigarettes.
Katherine eyed him and spoke for the first time.
“You had given him no drugs, Doctor?”
“Drugs?” he said rather testily.