It was most strange. Surely Dr Knowles would not put anything into the brandy without informing her? He might have done so, not thinking it of sufficient importance to bother her, or to call her. But then it might not have been the doctor at all!
Again the icy shaft swept up her back to tingle her scalp. Suppose. … Well, suppose the man had been an enemy? It seemed impossible, but then …
Thoughtfully, she returned to the bed and gave her patient the coffee without adding the teaspoonful of brandy. She was half-inclined to call Dr Knowles, but he might think her nervous or incapable of nursing his patient. No, it were better to wait until the morning, and then, when the doctor came in, casually to mention it.
Presently a cock crowed, and when she drew aside the window curtains she found the new day arrived. As she stepped out on to the veranda to inhale the clear, cool air, she heard the bright screeches of a flock of galah parrots among the gums bordering the creek which carried floodwater down to the river channels.
It was five o’clock when she heard Hetty talking with Ruth, the fat and happy aboriginal cook. Hetty was up and supervising the breakfasts and lunches for Nettlefold and Sergeant Cox. She expected Dr Knowles, but he did not appear, and at six o’clock, almost to the minute, she heard them leave in her father’s car for Emu Lake.
Shortly after they had gone, Hetty came in to say that she had set out Elizabeth’s breakfast in the morning-room.
“You must be so tired!” cried Hetty in her dove-like voice.
“Thank you, Hetty. I will run along and have something to eat,” Elizabeth said. “The patient is all right. If the doctor should call while I am breakfasting, please tell him where I am.”
She was engaged with bacon and eggs when she first heard the low humming of distant aeroplane engines. Steadily the hum rose in pitch until, aeroplanes still being a novelty, she left the room and walked the length of the corridor to step out on to the east veranda, and from there to walk down to the short metalled strip of road.
And there all silvered by the rising sun sailed the big passenger-carrying biplane belonging to the air circus. It was coming to fly directly over the house and so low was it that she clearly saw a man’s head thrust out of a window and then his hand waving a handkerchief to her. Waving up to him she watched the machine until it disappeared beyond the house roof, humming on its way to Emu Lake.
“Captain Loveacre must have made an early start, Miss Nettlefold,” called Dr Knowles from the veranda. Arrayed in a black silk dressing-gown trimmed with silver facings, he was smoking a cigarette. “Good morning!” he added.
“Good morning, Doctor!” she returned, the thrill of that man-made bird still in her blood.
“How is the patient this morning?”
“I have seen no change in her. I suppose you wondered where I was when you peeped in?”
“Peeped in, Miss Nettlefold? But Hetty said you were at breakfast.”
He spoke nonchalantly, and into her mind swept the suggestion of evil which before day broke had touched her heart with an icy finger.
“Oh! I mean before daylight, you know,” she told him coolly.
By now she had joined him on the veranda, and she noted the perplexity in his eyes.
“But I did not go into the patient’s room before day broke,” he said evenly, and yet evidently puzzled. “I trust you did not fall asleep and dream that I did.”
“No, I was not sleeping,” she told him with conviction, and then explained how she had seen a person whom she thought to be the doctor, standing at the little table beside the bed.
Knowles laughed shortly. “So you did fall asleep!”
“But I did not,” Elizabeth protested.
“But I did not visit the patient’s room after we were talking last night until just now, when I found Hetty in charge.”
Elizabeth regarded him with troubled eyes. She recalled the mystery concerning the brandy. Knowles became serious.
“You are quite sure that you saw me, or someone like me, in the room last night? What time was it?”
“Just after four o’clock,” she replied. “Yes, I am sure a man was in the room when I looked into the mirror, and that he was closing the door after him as I walked into the bedroom. He did something to the brandy. I am sure of that, too.”
“Took some, you mean?” the doctor demanded sharply.
“No, he put something into the bottle. There is more in it now than when I took out the teaspoonful at one o’clock.”
“Come! Did you give her any of the brandy at four o’clock as I ordered?”
“No. After what I had seen I was doubtful what to do.”
“That’s good. When in doubt do nothing, as Bonaparte used to say. Let’s have a look at that brandy.”
Throwing away his cigarette, he hurried before her to the patient’s room. There he snatched up the bottle of brandy and gazed at it earnestly.
“How much have you taken out of this bottle, Miss Nettlefold?” he asked.
“One teaspoonful, Doctor.”
“What about you, Hetty?”
“Oh, Doctor! Only one teaspoonful, Doctor!” fluttered Hetty.
“Well, more than two teaspoonfuls have been put back, or I have never opened a bottle of spirits in my life,” he said slowly.
Chapter Six
Elizabeth Is Determined
It was like a sand cloud that comes from the west, rolling over the ground with very little wind behind it, to plunge the brilliant noon-day world into utter darkness. Weary from her all-night vigil, Elizabeth lay down on the bed in the dressing-room only to find that, despite the urgent need for sleep, sleep could not master her aching brain.
Carrying the bottle of brandy, Dr Knowles had led her to the morning-room, where, at his request, she had brought the other two half-bottles of brandy supplied, with the open bottle, by the hotel at Golden Dawn. In each of the unopened bottles the vacant space between the bottom of the cork and the spirit was approximately one inch, but the spirit in the opened bottle—when two teaspoonfuls had been taken out for the patient—reached the bottom of the cork before it could be pushed right to its original position.
“Something wrong, evidently,” the doctor had said. “But what it is we shall have to discover through analysis. Now to bed, or I shall be having two patients at Coolibah on my hands.”
Now convinced that it was not Dr Knowles she had seen standing before the bed table, alarmed by the sinister import provided by the opened bottle of brandy, Elizabeth tossed and turned and suffered the dull brain ache resultant from want of habitual sleep.
Yes, it was as though the sun had been obliterated by a sand cloud, this sudden terrible suspicion. Here at Coolibah, which had gone on and on for eighty years with nothing to disturb its serenity save floods and storms, droughts and the cattle tick, the shadow fell of some black conspiracy of evil men …
Poison! Suppose the night visitor to the sickroom had poured poison into the brandy bottle? The doctor had not voiced his grave suspicions, but she had been able clearly to see and understand them. Who was that man? She reviewed in turn the station hands and could recall not one whose back resembled that of the man she had seen. He had stood in the shadow, and she could not say definitely what kind of clothes he was wearing excepting that they were of dark material.
Without warning, slumber overtook her,