Chapter IX.Kenneth and the TundishEthel did not come down to dinner, and altogether it was an unsatisfactory, unsatisfying meal! Jaded and worn out, we were really in need of food. But the meat was neither hot nor cold—the potatoes uncooked and uneatable—cook being evidently too overcome to attend to such every-day affairs. Annie, poor girl, looked tired out and not a little ashamed at having to set such dishes before us. Indeed she nearly broke down altogether when she informed us that she was sorry but cook had made no pudding.“Why on earth not, Annie? Whatever is she thinking of?” The Tundish exclaimed.“She says she’s all of a flutter, sir. You know how she goes on. I’d have made you something or other myself, only she told me nothing about it until it was too late.”“You’re a good girl, Annie, and it’s no fault of yours. I’ll see cook afterward.”Margaret looked her amusement, and as usual managed to bring in one of her proverbial sayings. This time it was passably apt, however. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” she said, glancing round the table brightly.Kenneth’s lips curled. The doctor was interfering again.The telephone bell rang a good half-dozen times before we had finished, and each time The Tundish got up to answer it without murmur or protest. I could hear his end of the conversation, which ran almost word for word alike on each occasion.“I’m sorry, but she’s gone to lie down and I don’t want to disturb her.”“Yes, very sad indeed.”“Sorry, but I can’t hear what you are saying. This line is very indistinct. Hello! I’ll let her know that you rang her up.”Then the receiver was put up and he would return looking amused. “It’s easy work on the telephone,” he laughed.“It’s all far too easy,” was Kenneth’s comment.After dinner we sat about uncomfortably, Margaret curling herself up like some large cat in one of the big armchairs and busying herself with her interminable knitting. I felt that, somehow, it would have been in keeping with her had she produced black wool, but it was still a pink jumper which had appeared at many odd moments before that engaged her attention. The two boys strolled up and down the garden for a time, and then they tried a game of chess.I went out into the garden with a book and sat under the cedar with The Tundish. We hardly spoke. He was really reading, I think, from the regular way he turned the pages of his book, but try as I might, my own thoughts would wander from the printed page and revert to the day’s events. But I could not think consecutively. Ethel had set the seal of terror on us all when she had burst in on us at breakfast time with her “Do come. I’m afraid,” and from that moment, while the sun had blazed and scorched, we had passed from distress to distress. Now the shadow under the garden wall was broadening out across the lawn toward us. Would that darker shadow, that seemed to threaten this unruffled man reading so calmly and so peacefully at my side, with its steady inexorable encroachment, darken his life and then blot him out forever? Or would a door in the high wall open, slashing the shadow with a path of light down which he would pass?Perched high on the center post of the arch that spans the garden walk where it pierces the hedge of yew, a thrush was filling the air with its limpid song, and when the deeper notes of the chimes came booming down from the cathedral tower, he would stop a while, bright head cocked, alert and listening. Then as they died away he would throw himself back, and with throbbing throat, fill the air again with pure ecstasy. The long hot day of death and horror was closing on a note of peace.That was my hope, as I sat in the mellowing evening light, but the sun was not to set before I witnessed yet another angry scene between Kenneth and the doctor.He and Ralph came round the end of the house as the thought crossed my mind. Catching sight of us, they halted, talking urgently together. Even from where I sat, I could see that Kenneth was obstinately overriding advice that Ralph was giving. He stood with his legs wide apart, his hands thrust deep into his trousers pockets, his chin stuck out, stolid and determined to have his own way! Then they hurried toward us, Ralph lagging behind a little, half reluctant. I wondered what new trouble had arisen.It was the medicine The Tundish had given to Ethel. Margaret had told them about it.Kenneth was furious. “I say, is it true about your giving some medicine to Ethel?” he asked, planting himself straight in front of the doctor’s chair.“Yes, quite true. Have you any objection?” The Tundish replied, gently closing his book, keeping his place with inserted finger, and looking up with a slow smile and a twinkling eye.“Objection! I should think I damned well have! I, for one, don’t care for your way of making up prescriptions.”“No? Well, if you should be taken ill, Kenneth, and I have to prescribe, the medicine shall be made up at a chemist’s and delivered in a sealed bottle. Now, if you will excuse me, I should like to get on with my book.”“But Margaret says she has just been up-stairs to find out if Ethel wanted anything, and her bedroom door is locked and there was no reply when she knocked,” Ralph urged, looking anxiously up at Ethel’s bedroom window, in which the blinds were drawn.“My dear young friend, I told her to lock it myself. I do hope that Margaret hasn’t waked her up. Now please be sensible and let the poor girl have what rest she can get. You can do no earthly good by making any bother. If I have poisoned Ethel’s medicine—which I take it is the friendly suggestion you are both of you making—she is dead by now, and nothing that you or any one else could do would save her. If I haven’t, then isn’t it rather a pity to wake her up merely to satisfy your curiosity? That’s the logic of the position, but if you feel it to be your duty, go and have a word with Inspector Brown about it. He is just packing up his treasures prior to departure.”This, I felt, was taking things a little too calmly, and I could understand the frown that had gathered on Ralph’s dark face while the doctor was speaking. Could not his behavior, which I had described to myself as calm and unruffled, perhaps be more aptly labeled callous and cold-blooded? And if so, what revision of ideas and estimates of possibilities might not then be necessary? Kenneth had turned round and called out to the inspector at once as he was on the point of opening the door into Dalehouse Lane. Ralph was hesitant, but Kenneth took him by the arm and dragged him across the lawn.While I watched them talking to the inspector, wondering with interest what that stolid individual would advise them to do, The Tundish had returned to his book. He was absorbed immediately—lost to the world. He had given them his advice and that apparently was the end of it as far as he was concerned.After a few minutes’ conversation Inspector Brown departed. A brief consultation between the two boys followed, and then Kenneth came back to us alone.“We have decided to do as you asked us,” he said tersely.“Thank you. I’m very glad to hear it.”Kenneth came a step nearer. “But if anything happens to Ethel—I’ll—I’ll kill you.” He spoke very slowly and leaned over toward the doctor. His fists were clenched, and for a moment I thought that he was going to strike. The Tundish never moved a muscle.“Do the hangman out of one job, and give him another? That the idea?” he laughed pleasantly, and returned once more to his interrupted reading.Kenneth controlled himself with difficulty and strode away. A boy went whistling down the lane. The doctor continued his reading. I looked at him slyly as he sat quietly engrossed by my side.“I can’t help sympathizing with Kenneth and Ralph, you know,” I said. “It isn’t that I suspect you of having had anything to do with Stella’s death, but——”“But——?” he interrupted quizzically.I did not know how to finish my sentence; how to put into words that would not offend, the feeling I had that there was something foreboding, something suggestive, in his having made up medicine for Stella one night, and then again after the terrible disaster for Ethel. The circumstances were too much alike. Two taper glasses. Two——“Come, Jeffcock,” he said kindly, when he saw my hesitation, “for heaven’s sake don’t let the hot weather get on your nerves too.”“That’s all very well,” I reminded him, “but you must have had some very similar feelings yourself, or why did you want us to witness your making up of Ethel’s prescription?”He looked at me and laughed outright. “Wrong again, I never felt a qualm. I wanted you and Margaret in the dispensary for a very different reason.”I am sure that my astonishment was obvious, but he ignored my surprise and closed his book saying, “Now I’m going to bed. Thank God, this awful day is over.”It was evident that I should get no further information from him as to his real reasons for our presence in the dispensary, even if I pressed him. The subject was closed. We walked slowly across the brown scorched lawn and back to the house.In the hall we met cook, dirty: and unkempt, a wisp of greasy hair straggling across her pasty, unhealthy-looking face. She was on her way up-stairs to bed. The Tundish was as good as his word and asked her rather sharply why the dinner had been so badly cooked.She folded her arms across her floppy ample bosom and leered at him offensively.“Come, Grace, I want an answer to my question.”She tilted back her ugly pasty face, half closed her beady eyes, and nodded slowly backward and forward, the greasy wisp of hair waving ludicrously with every movement that she made. The leer became an ugly smile, and then she laughed aloud—a low disturbing laugh. Fat red arms folded against her untidy dress, she looked revolting as she stood there nodding at us, leering and laughing in turns.The doctor gazed at her solemnly, unmoved, showing neither annoyance nor the disgust that I felt myself. His steady eyes were disconcerting. Her laughing ceased. Then she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, stuck her head forward at the doctor, and whispered hoarsely, “I knows what I knows, Dr. Wallace.”She waddled away unsteadily. I turned to The Tundish to see how he would take it. He was standing immovable, unseeing. Only that same morning had I seen him standing thus in the doorway as we were having breakfast—his brain so deep in thought that his eyes, while open wide, were blind, inanimate and uncontrolled. Then he had muttered, “I can’t have made a mistake. I simply can’t have made a mistake,” but now he whispered, nearly inaudibly, “I wonder what she knows, now I wonder what she knows.”He came back to life with a start and a smile of amusement at his own abstraction, told me that he was going straight to bed as he half expected that he might be called out in the early hours to a case of indisputable first-aid, and then with one foot on the bottom stair, he turned to me and said, “And by the way, Jeffcock, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll lock your bedroom door to-night.”Then he said, “Good night,” and was gone.
Ethel did not come down to dinner, and altogether it was an unsatisfactory, unsatisfying meal! Jaded and worn out, we were really in need of food. But the meat was neither hot nor cold—the potatoes uncooked and uneatable—cook being evidently too overcome to attend to such every-day affairs. Annie, poor girl, looked tired out and not a little ashamed at having to set such dishes before us. Indeed she nearly broke down altogether when she informed us that she was sorry but cook had made no pudding.
“Why on earth not, Annie? Whatever is she thinking of?” The Tundish exclaimed.
“She says she’s all of a flutter, sir. You know how she goes on. I’d have made you something or other myself, only she told me nothing about it until it was too late.”
“You’re a good girl, Annie, and it’s no fault of yours. I’ll see cook afterward.”
Margaret looked her amusement, and as usual managed to bring in one of her proverbial sayings. This time it was passably apt, however. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” she said, glancing round the table brightly.
Kenneth’s lips curled. The doctor was interfering again.
The telephone bell rang a good half-dozen times before we had finished, and each time The Tundish got up to answer it without murmur or protest. I could hear his end of the conversation, which ran almost word for word alike on each occasion.
“I’m sorry, but she’s gone to lie down and I don’t want to disturb her.”
“Yes, very sad indeed.”
“Sorry, but I can’t hear what you are saying. This line is very indistinct. Hello! I’ll let her know that you rang her up.”
Then the receiver was put up and he would return looking amused. “It’s easy work on the telephone,” he laughed.
“It’s all far too easy,” was Kenneth’s comment.
After dinner we sat about uncomfortably, Margaret curling herself up like some large cat in one of the big armchairs and busying herself with her interminable knitting. I felt that, somehow, it would have been in keeping with her had she produced black wool, but it was still a pink jumper which had appeared at many odd moments before that engaged her attention. The two boys strolled up and down the garden for a time, and then they tried a game of chess.
I went out into the garden with a book and sat under the cedar with The Tundish. We hardly spoke. He was really reading, I think, from the regular way he turned the pages of his book, but try as I might, my own thoughts would wander from the printed page and revert to the day’s events. But I could not think consecutively. Ethel had set the seal of terror on us all when she had burst in on us at breakfast time with her “Do come. I’m afraid,” and from that moment, while the sun had blazed and scorched, we had passed from distress to distress. Now the shadow under the garden wall was broadening out across the lawn toward us. Would that darker shadow, that seemed to threaten this unruffled man reading so calmly and so peacefully at my side, with its steady inexorable encroachment, darken his life and then blot him out forever? Or would a door in the high wall open, slashing the shadow with a path of light down which he would pass?
Perched high on the center post of the arch that spans the garden walk where it pierces the hedge of yew, a thrush was filling the air with its limpid song, and when the deeper notes of the chimes came booming down from the cathedral tower, he would stop a while, bright head cocked, alert and listening. Then as they died away he would throw himself back, and with throbbing throat, fill the air again with pure ecstasy. The long hot day of death and horror was closing on a note of peace.
That was my hope, as I sat in the mellowing evening light, but the sun was not to set before I witnessed yet another angry scene between Kenneth and the doctor.
He and Ralph came round the end of the house as the thought crossed my mind. Catching sight of us, they halted, talking urgently together. Even from where I sat, I could see that Kenneth was obstinately overriding advice that Ralph was giving. He stood with his legs wide apart, his hands thrust deep into his trousers pockets, his chin stuck out, stolid and determined to have his own way! Then they hurried toward us, Ralph lagging behind a little, half reluctant. I wondered what new trouble had arisen.
It was the medicine The Tundish had given to Ethel. Margaret had told them about it.
Kenneth was furious. “I say, is it true about your giving some medicine to Ethel?” he asked, planting himself straight in front of the doctor’s chair.
“Yes, quite true. Have you any objection?” The Tundish replied, gently closing his book, keeping his place with inserted finger, and looking up with a slow smile and a twinkling eye.
“Objection! I should think I damned well have! I, for one, don’t care for your way of making up prescriptions.”
“No? Well, if you should be taken ill, Kenneth, and I have to prescribe, the medicine shall be made up at a chemist’s and delivered in a sealed bottle. Now, if you will excuse me, I should like to get on with my book.”
“But Margaret says she has just been up-stairs to find out if Ethel wanted anything, and her bedroom door is locked and there was no reply when she knocked,” Ralph urged, looking anxiously up at Ethel’s bedroom window, in which the blinds were drawn.
“My dear young friend, I told her to lock it myself. I do hope that Margaret hasn’t waked her up. Now please be sensible and let the poor girl have what rest she can get. You can do no earthly good by making any bother. If I have poisoned Ethel’s medicine—which I take it is the friendly suggestion you are both of you making—she is dead by now, and nothing that you or any one else could do would save her. If I haven’t, then isn’t it rather a pity to wake her up merely to satisfy your curiosity? That’s the logic of the position, but if you feel it to be your duty, go and have a word with Inspector Brown about it. He is just packing up his treasures prior to departure.”
This, I felt, was taking things a little too calmly, and I could understand the frown that had gathered on Ralph’s dark face while the doctor was speaking. Could not his behavior, which I had described to myself as calm and unruffled, perhaps be more aptly labeled callous and cold-blooded? And if so, what revision of ideas and estimates of possibilities might not then be necessary? Kenneth had turned round and called out to the inspector at once as he was on the point of opening the door into Dalehouse Lane. Ralph was hesitant, but Kenneth took him by the arm and dragged him across the lawn.
While I watched them talking to the inspector, wondering with interest what that stolid individual would advise them to do, The Tundish had returned to his book. He was absorbed immediately—lost to the world. He had given them his advice and that apparently was the end of it as far as he was concerned.
After a few minutes’ conversation Inspector Brown departed. A brief consultation between the two boys followed, and then Kenneth came back to us alone.
“We have decided to do as you asked us,” he said tersely.
“Thank you. I’m very glad to hear it.”
Kenneth came a step nearer. “But if anything happens to Ethel—I’ll—I’ll kill you.” He spoke very slowly and leaned over toward the doctor. His fists were clenched, and for a moment I thought that he was going to strike. The Tundish never moved a muscle.
“Do the hangman out of one job, and give him another? That the idea?” he laughed pleasantly, and returned once more to his interrupted reading.
Kenneth controlled himself with difficulty and strode away. A boy went whistling down the lane. The doctor continued his reading. I looked at him slyly as he sat quietly engrossed by my side.
“I can’t help sympathizing with Kenneth and Ralph, you know,” I said. “It isn’t that I suspect you of having had anything to do with Stella’s death, but——”
“But——?” he interrupted quizzically.
I did not know how to finish my sentence; how to put into words that would not offend, the feeling I had that there was something foreboding, something suggestive, in his having made up medicine for Stella one night, and then again after the terrible disaster for Ethel. The circumstances were too much alike. Two taper glasses. Two——
“Come, Jeffcock,” he said kindly, when he saw my hesitation, “for heaven’s sake don’t let the hot weather get on your nerves too.”
“That’s all very well,” I reminded him, “but you must have had some very similar feelings yourself, or why did you want us to witness your making up of Ethel’s prescription?”
He looked at me and laughed outright. “Wrong again, I never felt a qualm. I wanted you and Margaret in the dispensary for a very different reason.”
I am sure that my astonishment was obvious, but he ignored my surprise and closed his book saying, “Now I’m going to bed. Thank God, this awful day is over.”
It was evident that I should get no further information from him as to his real reasons for our presence in the dispensary, even if I pressed him. The subject was closed. We walked slowly across the brown scorched lawn and back to the house.
In the hall we met cook, dirty: and unkempt, a wisp of greasy hair straggling across her pasty, unhealthy-looking face. She was on her way up-stairs to bed. The Tundish was as good as his word and asked her rather sharply why the dinner had been so badly cooked.
She folded her arms across her floppy ample bosom and leered at him offensively.
“Come, Grace, I want an answer to my question.”
She tilted back her ugly pasty face, half closed her beady eyes, and nodded slowly backward and forward, the greasy wisp of hair waving ludicrously with every movement that she made. The leer became an ugly smile, and then she laughed aloud—a low disturbing laugh. Fat red arms folded against her untidy dress, she looked revolting as she stood there nodding at us, leering and laughing in turns.
The doctor gazed at her solemnly, unmoved, showing neither annoyance nor the disgust that I felt myself. His steady eyes were disconcerting. Her laughing ceased. Then she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, stuck her head forward at the doctor, and whispered hoarsely, “I knows what I knows, Dr. Wallace.”
She waddled away unsteadily. I turned to The Tundish to see how he would take it. He was standing immovable, unseeing. Only that same morning had I seen him standing thus in the doorway as we were having breakfast—his brain so deep in thought that his eyes, while open wide, were blind, inanimate and uncontrolled. Then he had muttered, “I can’t have made a mistake. I simply can’t have made a mistake,” but now he whispered, nearly inaudibly, “I wonder what she knows, now I wonder what she knows.”
He came back to life with a start and a smile of amusement at his own abstraction, told me that he was going straight to bed as he half expected that he might be called out in the early hours to a case of indisputable first-aid, and then with one foot on the bottom stair, he turned to me and said, “And by the way, Jeffcock, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll lock your bedroom door to-night.”
Then he said, “Good night,” and was gone.