The Last Night

Kessler was sitting by his fireside one evening after dinner when he was surprised to receive a visit from Doyle. The building manager came in with his hat in his two hands, and he would not sit down at first. "Bless me, Doyle, what brings you here?" cried the lawyer. And then, taking a second look at him, "What ails you? Is the doctor ill?"

"Mr. Kessler," said the man, "there is something wrong."

"Take a seat, and tell me plainly what you want."

"You know the doctor's ways, sir, and how he shuts himself up. Well, he is shut up again in the cabinet, and I don't like it, sir. I wish I may die if I like it. Mr. Kessler, sir, I am afraid."

"Now, my good man, be explicit. What are you afraid of?"

"I have been afraid for about a week," returned Doyle, doggedly disregarding the question, "and I can bear it no more." His appearance bore out his words. His manner was altered for the worse, and even now he sat with the glass of wine untasted on his knee, his eyes directed at a corner of the floor.

"I think there has been foul play," said Doyle, hoarsely.

"Foul play?" said the lawyer. "Against the doctor? Say what you mean, Doyle."

"I daren't say, sir. But will you come along with me and see for yourself?"

Kessler's only answer was to rise and get his coat; but he observed with wonder the greatness of the relief that appeared on the manager's face.

It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her. The wind flecked the blood into the face and seemed to have swept the streets bare of passengers, for there was borne in upon Kessler's mind a crushing anticipation of calamity. The square, when they reached it, was full of wind and dust, and the thin trees lashed themselves along the railing. Doyle pulled up in the middle of the pavement and took off his hat to mop his brow. But these were not the dews of exertion that he wiped away but the moisture of some strangling anguish, for his face was white and his voice, when he spoke, harsh and broken.

The door was opened on the chain, and a voice asked from within, "Is that you, Doyle?" The hall, when they entered it, was brightly lit, and about the hearth the whole of the staff stood huddled together like a flock of sheep. At the sight of Kessler the housekeeper broke into hysterical whimpering, and the cook, crying out, "Bless God! It's Mr. Kessler," ran forward as if to take him in her arms.

"What, what? Are you all here?" said the lawyer peevishly. "Very irregular, very unseemly. Your master would be far from pleased."

"They're all afraid," said Doyle. A blank silence followed, no one protesting. Only the housekeeper lifted her voice and wept loudly. "Hold your tongue!" Doyle said to her, with a ferocity that testified to his own jangled nerves. Then he begged Kessler to follow him, and led the way to the back garden.

"Now, sir," he said, "you come as gently as you can. I want you to hear, and I don't want you to be heard. And see here, sir, if by any chance he was to ask you in, don't go."

Kessler's nerves, at this unlooked-for termination, gave a jerk that nearly threw him off his balance. But he recollected his courage and followed Doyle into the annex through the great empty hall of the old mill, to the foot of the steel stair. There Doyle motioned him to stand on one side and listen, while he himself, setting down the lamp, mounted the steps and knocked on the red felt of the cabinet door.

"Mr. Kessler, sir, asking to see you," he called. And even as he did so he violently signed to the lawyer to give ear.

A voice answered from within. "Tell him I cannot see anyone," it said, complainingly.

"Thank you, sir," said Doyle, with a note of something like triumph in his voice; and taking up his lamp, he led Kessler back across the yard and into the great kitchen, where the fire was out and the beetles were leaping on the floor.

"Sir," he said, looking Kessler in the eyes, "was that my master's voice?"

"It seems much changed," replied the lawyer, very pale, but giving look for look.

"Changed? Have I been twenty years in this man's employ to be deceived about his voice? No, sir. My master has been made away with. He was made away with eight days ago, and I will tell you how the house knows it. It was Tuesday, near three in the afternoon, and the cabinet door was shut and locked. The cry came down through the floor into the front hall where three of us happened to be standing: one word, the name of God, drawn out and then cut off in the middle of it, as if a hand had been clapped over his mouth. We heard it twice more before dark, and each time shorter than the last, and after the third time nothing. The cook let go of the pan she was holding and would not go up the stair. I have heard my master call out of a nightmare and I have heard him shout across the court for a cab; this was neither. It came through a door locked on the inside, and it was his voice, and every one of us knew it for his, and not one of us would put a hand to the lock. And who is in there instead of him, and why it stays there, is a thing that cries to heaven, Mr. Kessler!"

"Well, Mr. Kessler, you are a hard man to satisfy, but I'll do it yet. All this last week him, or it, whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying night and day for some sort of compound, and nothing I have brought will serve. It was sometimes the master's way to write his orders on a sheet of paper and throw it on the stair, and we have had nothing else this week back. Every day I have been sent flying to all the chemical suppliers in the district, and every time I brought the stuff back, there would be another paper telling me to return it, because it was not pure, and another order to a different firm. That compound is wanted very badly, sir, whatever it is for."

"Have you any of these papers?" asked Kessler.

Doyle felt in his pocket and handed out a crumpled note, which the lawyer carefully examined. Its contents ran thus: "Dr. Voss presents his compliments to Halloran Chemical Supply. He assures them that their last lot is impure and quite useless for his present purpose. In the year of our first work, Dr. V. purchased a somewhat large quantity of the same reagent from Messrs. Halloran. He now begs them to search with the most sedulous care, and should any of that quality be left, forward it to him at once. Expense is no consideration." So far the letter had run composedly enough. But here, with a sudden splutter of the pen, the writer's emotion had broken loose. "For God's sake," he added, "find me some of the old."

"This is a strange note," said Kessler, and then sharply, "How do you come to have it open?"

"The man at Halloran's was very angry, sir, and he threw it back to me like so much dirt," returned Doyle. "And what does it matter whose hand wrote it? I have seen him. I came suddenly into the hall from the garden, and there he was at the far end of the room, digging among the crates. He looked up when I came in, gave a kind of cry, and whipped upstairs into the cabinet. It was but for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?"

"These are all very strange circumstances," said Kessler, "but I think I begin to see daylight. Your master is plainly seized with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer. Hence the alteration of his voice. Hence the mask and the avoidance of his friends. Hence his eagerness to find this compound, by means of which the poor soul retains some hope of ultimate recovery. God grant that he be not deceived."

"Sir," said the manager, turning to a sort of mottled pallor, "that thing was not my master, and there's the truth." Here he began to whisper. "My master is a tall, fine build of a man, and this was more of a dwarf. That thing in the mask was never Dr. Voss. And it is the belief of my heart that there was murder done."

"Doyle," replied the lawyer, "if you say that, it becomes my duty to make certain. I shall consider it my duty to break in that door."

"Ah, Mr. Kessler, that's talking!" cried the manager. "And who is going to do it?"

"Why, you and me, sir."

"There is a fire axe in the old mill, and you might take the kitchen poker for yourself. And you heard the voice just now, sir. When that masked thing like a monkey jumped from among the chemicals and whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine like ice. I give you my bible word it was Mr. Marsh."

"Ay, ay," said the lawyer. "My fears incline to the same point. I believe poor Adrian is killed, and I believe his murderer is still lurking in his victim's room. Well, let our name be vengeance. Call Rivera."

The young man came at the summons, very white and nervous.

"Pull yourself together, Rivera. Doyle here and I are going to force our way into the cabinet. If all is well, my shoulders are broad enough to bear the blame. Meanwhile, lest any malefactor seek to escape by the back, you and the boy must go round the corner with a pair of good sticks and take your post at the service door. We give you ten minutes to get to your stations."

As Rivera left, the lawyer looked at his watch. "And now, Doyle, let us get to ours," he said, and taking the poker under his arm, led the way into the yard. The scud had banked over the moon, and it was now quite dark. In the shelter of the mill they sat down silently to wait. Nearer at hand the stillness was broken only by the sound of a footfall moving to and fro along the cabinet floor.

"So it will walk all day, sir," whispered Doyle, "ay, and the better part of the night. Ah, it's an ill conscience that's such an enemy to rest! But hark again, a little closer. Put your heart in your ears, Mr. Kessler, and tell me, is that the doctor's foot?"

The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain swing, for all they went so slowly. It was different, indeed, from the heavy creaking tread of Adrian Voss. Kessler sighed. "Is there never anything else?" he asked.

Doyle nodded. "Once," he said. "Once I heard it weeping. Weeping like a woman or a lost soul. I came away with that upon my heart, that I could have wept too."

But now the ten minutes drew to an end. Doyle disinterred the fire axe from under a stack of packing straw, the lamp was set on the nearest table, and they drew near with bated breath to where that patient foot was still going up and down, up and down, in the quiet of the night.

"Voss," cried Kessler with a loud voice, "I demand to see you." He paused a moment, but no reply came. "I give you fair warning. Our suspicions are aroused, and I must and shall see you, if not by fair means, then by foul. If not of your consent, then by brute force!"

"Kessler," said the voice, "for God's sake, have mercy!"

"Ah, that's not Voss's voice. It's Marsh's!" cried Kessler. "Down with the door, Doyle!"

Doyle swung the axe over his shoulder. The blow shook the building, and the red felt door leaped against its lock and hinges. A dismal screech, as of mere animal terror, rang from the cabinet. Four times the blow fell, but the wood was tough and the fittings of excellent workmanship, and it was not until the fifth that the lock burst and the wreck of the door fell inward on the carpet.

Kessler, appalled by the riot of the last minute and by the stillness that had followed it, stood back a little from the wreck of the door and peered in, with Doyle at his shoulder. There lay the cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight: a good fire glowing on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, papers neatly set forth on the business table, and nearer the fire the things laid out for tea, the very sugar in the cup.

Right in the middle lay the body of a man, sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back, and beheld the face of Mr. Marsh. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor's bigness. The cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone. And by the crushed phial in his hand and the strong smell of bitter kernels that hung upon the air, Kessler knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.

"We have come too late," he said sternly. "Marsh has gone to his account, and it only remains for us to find the body of your master."

The far greater part of the building was occupied by the old mill hall, and by the cabinet, which formed an upper story at one end and looked upon the court. A corridor joined the hall to the Mercer Row door, and with this the cabinet communicated separately by a second flight of stairs. There were besides a few dark closets and a spacious cellar, and all these they now thoroughly examined. Each closet needed but a glance, for all were empty and long unopened. The cellar was filled with crazy lumber, and even as they opened its door they were advertised of the uselessness of further search by the fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed the entrance. Nowhere was there any trace of Adrian Voss, dead or alive.

Doyle stamped on the flags of the corridor. "He must be buried here," he said, hearkening to the sound.

"Or he may have fled," said Kessler, and he turned to examine the door on Mercer Row. It was locked, and lying near by on the flags they found the key, already stained with rust.

"This does not look like use," observed the lawyer.

"Use!" echoed Doyle. "Do you not see, sir, it is broken? Much as if a man had stamped on it."

"Ay," continued Kessler, "and the fractures, too, are rusty." The two men looked at each other with a scare. "This is beyond me, Doyle. Let us go back to the cabinet."

They mounted the stair in silence, and proceeded more thoroughly to examine the contents of the room. At one table there were traces of chemical work, various measured heaps of some white salt laid out on glass saucers, as though for an experiment in which the unhappy man had been prevented. "That is the same compound I was always bringing him," said Doyle, and even as he spoke, the kettle, with a startling noise, boiled over.

This brought them to the fireside, where the tea things stood ready to the sitter's elbow. There were several books on a shelf. One lay beside the tea things open, and Kessler was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work for which Voss had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated in his own hand with startling blasphemies. The mask Doyle had spoken of lay beneath the table, face upward, with one of its strings torn. Next the searchers came to the cheval glass, into whose depths they looked with involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to show them nothing but the rosy glow playing on the ceiling and their own pale countenances stooping to look in.

"This glass has seen some strange things, sir," whispered Doyle.

"And surely none stranger than itself," echoed the lawyer in the same tones.

Next they turned to the business table. A large envelope was uppermost there, and it bore, in the doctor's hand, the name of Walter Kessler. The lawyer unsealed it, and several enclosures fell to the floor. The first was a will, drawn in the same eccentric terms as the one he had returned six months before, to serve as testament in case of death and deed of gift in case of disappearance; but in place of the name of Mr. Marsh the lawyer, with indescribable amazement, read the name of Walter Kessler. The hand was the same that had addressed the sealed envelope taken off Whitfield's body, the one thing in that business Kessler had never been able to account for.

"My head goes round," he said. "He has been all these days in possession of this room. He had no cause to like me. He must have raged to see himself displaced. And he has not destroyed this document."

He caught up the next paper. It was a brief note in the doctor's hand and dated at the top. "O Doyle!" the lawyer cried. "He was alive and here this very day. He must be still alive. He must have fled. And in that case, can we venture to declare this a suicide? O, we must be careful. I foresee that we may yet involve your master in some dire catastrophe."

"Because I fear," replied the lawyer solemnly. "God grant I have no cause for it." And with that he brought the paper to his eyes and read as follows:

"My dear Kessler, when this shall fall into your hands, I shall have disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee. But my instinct and all the circumstances of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and must be early. Go then, and first read the narrative which Reyes warned me she was to place in your hands. And if you care to hear more, turn to the confession of your unworthy and unhappy friend, Adrian Voss."

He thought of the journal he had seen open at Reyes's elbow, the writing shrinking down the page: it was this account she had been writing in her own hand, and the page he had looked at was where the hand had failed her, and all that followed had been set down by the nurse at her door from her dictation, in the weeks before she died. And the nurse, as he now understood, was one Voss had engaged and paid to say nothing about who had sent her.

"Was there a third enclosure?" asked Kessler.

"Here, sir," said Doyle, and gave into his hands a considerable packet sealed in several places.

The lawyer put it in his pocket. "I would say nothing of these papers. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save his credit. It is now ten o'clock. I must go home and read these documents in quiet, but I shall be back before midnight, when we shall send for the police. Cole has waited at the bank all winter and put out her bulletins, and nothing has come of either, for the man she wanted has been sitting behind that locked door the whole time."

Rivera and the boy had not stirred from the service door; nothing, they said when Kessler came up to them, had passed out that way all night, and he sent them in to the fire. Then they went out, locking the door of the mill behind them, and Kessler, once more leaving the staff gathered about the fire in the hall, trudged back to his house to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained.