Chapter VII.I Argue with KennethUp to this point in my story, while, as was only natural, I had some doubts about The Tundish, he certainly had all my sympathy. If Ethel was his most outspoken champion, I was more than ready to endorse her opinions. While she showed by every possible action and by every look that she was sure of his innocence, desolated by his awful plight, and ready to take his part against those of our party who were less inclined to ignore the evidence against him, I was less demonstrative and I think more tolerant of the opinions held by Kenneth and, to a less degree, by Margaret and Ralph. But I was quite eager to feel as sure as she was about his innocence. I was ready to set down the finding of the key in his coat pocket, his unsatisfactory account of his dealings with Stella’s father, and all the other evidence that indicated his guilt so strongly, as nothing more than a string of coincidences, mere unfortunate accidents of circumstances, that time and patience would be sure to explain away.Indeed, when I look back, I am always astonished at the way the doctor dominated our little party. He made no effort to clear himself—he accepted all the damning facts that told so heavily against him, without either attempting to belittle or explain them away—and then he simply ignored the whole uncomfortable position. Kenneth and Ethel quarreled openly, Margaret, Ralph and I were worried and ill at ease; he, in danger of immediate arrest and the end of his medical career, alone remained calm and undisturbed.But somehow, I did not like the idea of his falling in love with Ethel or at any rate making any open declaration of his feelings. It was not only that I felt that it added yet another note to the general discord. It was unseemly and inopportune—it was deliberately inconsiderate. And it was from this time that I began to wonder if Kenneth’s attitude were not more reasonable than I had at first supposed it, and that my admiration for the doctor began to be more troubled in its quality. I admired him still, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that just conceivably my admiration might be misplaced.I returned to the dining-room and reported on Ethel’s condition. Kenneth sat at the end of the table in the chair that little Allport had been occupying. His own still lay on the floor where he had hurled it. He was looking straight before him, a picture of glum despair.It has often occurred to me that people of a quick and ready temper must be altogether lacking so far as any sense of humor is concerned—that these hot bursts of passion must leave such a feeling of ridicule and shame that only those insensible to both could afford to indulge. Kenneth, however, was not of the hot-tempered type, and as I saw him seated morosely at the end of the table, I was both sorry and concerned; sorry for him, whole-heartedly sorry, concerned for the future. How were we to get through the next few days, I wondered, with the doctor and Ethel and Kenneth all confined within the ten-foot wall that circled Dalehouse and its secluded sun-baked garden? Barely six hours had passed since Ethel had left the breakfast table to waken Stella, and yet here we were, all at loggerheads and enmity—Ethel’s and Kenneth’s engagement broken, probably beyond repair; the doctor making love to Ethel, if my hearing had not played me a trick; Kenneth giving way to violence and the hurling of chairs; each one of us busy with his own dark thoughts and conjectures. How were we to get through the hours that lay ahead?Allport was writing up some notes in his note-book, and looked up as I made my statement. “Well, that’s a mercy, at any rate,” he grumbled; and with a glance over his shoulder at the clock, “Will the doctor be long before he is back? I want to see him again, and I must leave the house by three o’clock; would you mind telling him, and ask Miss Summerson to bring me the statement she has been writing out.”I had forgotten all about Miss Summerson, but I hurried back along the passage to the consulting-room to give The Tundish the detective’s message. Ethel was still on the couch, lying on her back with the lower part of her face heavily bandaged. She raised her eyebrows by way of a smile of greeting—it was all she could do, poor girl—and in answer to my question as to the doctor’s whereabouts she pointed to the door of the dispensary.I found him standing against the desk, holding a sealed envelope in one hand. To my astonishment he was humming a gentle air. “Here is Miss Summerson’s report,” he laughed, “but where, oh, where, is Miss Summerson herself? I don’t think our little friend will be overpleased, will he?”“Do you mean to say she has gone?”“Yes, and after all she wasn’t definitely told to stay. However, let us take her report to Allport and hear what he has to say.”We found the little man, watch in hand. “Oh, here you are at last,” he said. “I’ve got exactly five minutes left, and these are my instructions:“You, Dr. Wallace, can go on your rounds as usual—it might appear too extraordinary did you not—but one of my men is to act as chauffeur. I’ve already arranged it with Inspector Brown. If any one asks questions, as no doubt they will, you are to say that Miss Palfreeman died in her sleep and that the police are arranging for a post-mortem to find out the cause if they can. You can say it’s a mystery—as indeed it is—and you need mention neither suicide nor murder. ‘I don’t know,’ will be your best answer to most of the questions you are likely to be asked.“Apart from the doctor, none of you is to leave the house and garden, and you are not to make any mention of Miss Palfreeman’s death either over the telephone or by letter. Miss Hanson, for instance, is not to write to her father or mother about it. There will be a formal inquest the day after to-morrow which you will have to attend, but I am arranging it so that practically no questions at all will be asked you. It will be a purely formal affair, postponed until after my return.” Then he added after a brief pause, “I have been wondering whether you should like one of my men to sleep in the house—what do you say, Miss Hunter?”Margaret looked at him wide-eyed. “Surely that is hardly necessary,” she said.“It shall be as you wish, if Miss Hanson and the others agree. I will ask Miss Hanson myself. How do you feel about it, Mr. Dane?”Kenneth looked stonily ahead and refused to answer.Allport shrugged his shoulders, saying, “Well, if you feel safe, and the doctor here agrees as well, Miss Hunter shall have her way. I don’t imagine you are likely to have any more trouble, at least no trouble that any man of mine could prevent. And now where is Miss Summerson?”“She has gone,” said The Tundish. “I found this addressed to you on the desk in the dispensary just now.”“The devil she has.” He tore open the envelope and hastily read the contents, a sarcastic smile twisting his sloppy mouth. Then he included us all in a stiff formal little bow and left the room. A few minutes later we heard the front door bang, and we were alone once more and left to our own resources. Another devastating silence—a silence which, awkward and uncomfortable as it was, it seemed yet more awkward to break—settled down on us. Kenneth made no movement, and we four stood tongue-tied looking first at him and then at one another.The doctor was the first to speak. “A cold bath and a change is the proper prescription for all of us, I fancy, but if the inspector can lend me a body-guard I have one or two patients who will be feeling neglected! Ethel ought to go to her room and lie down; Margaret, will you try to persuade her to? She is to keep the bandage on until I come back, then a piece of plaster will be all that is required. You needn’t feel that she is badly hurt, Kenneth.”“Go to hell!” was Kenneth’s comment.“I’ll go to my patients first,” The Tundish replied pleasantly. “I’ll order tea for half past four, and as this room is so hot I’ll tell Annie to set it in the garden.”I was glad when he was gone. I could see that his good-tempered tolerance acted like a red rag to a bull as far as Kenneth was concerned, and I feared another explosion. Margaret departed to see after Ethel, and I went to the telephone to explain my lengthened holiday as well as I might to Brenda. I got through promptly, but I found my talk more difficult than I had anticipated. The line was clear and she was full of awkward questions.“Are you in the finals, then?” she queried in a jesting voice that was anything but complimentary.“No, but I am staying on over Thursday and perhaps until the end of the week.”“But I thought you were to be in London on Friday?”“That will have to be postponed. I can’t help myself. I shall get back as soon as I can, but it may not be till Saturday.”“You do sound mysterious and not a bit as if you were enjoying yourself. What on earth’s the matter?”“There’s nothing the matter and I’ll let you know more exactly when I shall be home as soon as I can. You must hold your curiosity in check until you see me.”“Oh! I say,” and then with a giggle that sounded doubly inane over the wire, “have you gone and done it at last?”I put the receiver down with a bang. Why on earth did Brenda always imagine that I was on the brink of a matrimonial adventure? She was nearly as bad as the diminutive Allport.A bath and a change of clothes brought some relief from the depressing heat, but I had an encounter with Kenneth which went very far to nullify it, and I came to the conclusion that I had better leave matters alone and that peace would be attained only if those of us who differed could keep apart. He was coming out of the bathroom as I came out of my bedroom to go down-stairs, his dark blue dressing-gown open at the throat, and showing the splendid proportions of his chest. I asked if I could come along with him and have a chat while he dressed.“Why, yes, of course,” he answered pleasantly enough. He found me cigarettes and matches, and pulled out a wicker armchair.“Look here, how are we going to get through the time until Allport releases us?” I began with some little hesitation. “Can’t we arrange some sort of a compromise?”“Surely we have compromised—at any rate we have agreed to put up with him for a couple of days.”“Yes, but that’s not much good if you and he are going to quarrel whenever you meet,” I ventured. “Won’t you try to believe that he may be innocent until Allport has gone into it a little further?”“No, I won’t. You mean well, Jeffcock, I know, but it’s no good. You think I’m unreasonable, but just ask yourself how you would like it if you were in my place. He commits a cold-blooded murder and then takes advantage of Ethel’s absurd hero-worship to persuade her to break off her engagement with me. Ever since I first knew her she has been singing his praises.”“But you can’t be as certain as all that,” I insisted, “and I don’t believe he has said a single thing to try to persuade Ethel to break away from you. In fact he asked me to do my best to keep you together—to prevent your falling out over him, and besides that, even if most of the evidence points to him, we are all of us pretty well tarred with the same brush. I knew all about the poison and so did Ethel. The key of the bedroom door was found under your pillow, you know,” I added rather maliciously.“Yes, and who put it there?” he burst in. “Why, he did. Of course he did. And the rest of you are willing to believe every word he says. He’s only to ask you ‘to keep Ethel and me together,’ damn his impudence, and you immediately believe that he is a paragon of unselfish piety—a sort of martyr sacrificing himself for others. Do you honestly mean to tell me that you have no doubts about the man yourself?”“I can’t conceive it possible that either he or you or any of the others could have done such a thing.”“But Stella was murdered, you know. You simply can’t get away from it. Opportunity, motive, everything points as clearly as it can to the doctor. It’s impossible to overlook what he said, or rather what he didn’t say, about his quarrel with her father—and then she’s found poisoned the day after her arrival. And quite apart from all that, the way he allows Ethel to slop over him is sufficient to damn him in my opinion. No real man would encourage it when she was engaged to me. Then he puts the key under my pillow so that she may begin to have doubts about me.”“Nonsense!” I cried. “Ethel hasn’t any ideas of the kind. Even I know her well enough for that. As for the key, any one of us could have put it under your pillow, and after all we have only the detective’s word for it that it was found there at all.”“Oh, don’t be a fool, of course it was found there. You can talk about it until you are blue in the gills, but I shall still believe him a poisoning——”He was lacing up his shoes, and one of the laces broke with a snap. It was the last straw. “Curse him,” he cried. “You say how are we going to get through the time till Allport comes back? He’ll be damned lucky if he gets through without a broken neck.”“And in heaven’s name what good would that do you?” I asked.“Good, why the same sort of good that it does me to tell you that you’re nothing but a blinking fool. Clear out!”I went. I felt that I was doing more harm than good, and that I almost deserved his description. My original estimate of his character had been correct. There were no grays for Kenneth.On the landing I stood for a moment considering whether I would go back to my room and sit there till tea-time, or try to find some shady spot in the garden. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think. But there was another little surprise awaiting me. As I stood I heard a swishing noise on the stairs leading up to the floor above. It was too intermittent to have been made by one of the maids sweeping down. A shuffle and then a gentle pad-pad-pad and then another shuffle. My curiosity was aroused. I couldn’t make it out. I tiptoed along the landing to the foot of the stairs. It was Margaret; she was down on her hands and knees searching for something. She was patting the pile of the stair carpet and that had made the padding noise that had attracted my attention. There was a something feverish and urgent about the way she searched.“Hello! lost anything?” I called out.She stopped her search quite suddenly, and did not answer me at once. The pause was perhaps no longer than a second—but it was there. “Why, yes, I’ve dropped a sixpence—it’s so unlucky on the stairs, you know—and I think it must have rolled into a crack. I’ve just been up to tell Annie that Ethel wants her tea in her room. Never mind it, I’ll tell Annie to keep her eyes open for it.”We went down-stairs, she to her bedroom, and I to the hall below, where I nearly ran full tilt into Annie at the top of the basement stairs.I sauntered out into the garden and lighted my pipe. I had paced once along the lawn in the shade of the cedar and was retracing my steps toward the house, when Margaret came to meet me. “Have you seen Annie anywhere?” she queried.“Yes, she came up the basement stairs as I came down just now.”“Oh, did you tell her about Ethel’s tea?”“No, I thought you had been up to the top landing to tell her that.”“I did but she wasn’t in her room. I’ll just run in and tell her and then come back to you. I do so want a quiet talk with some one sensible and sane.”She hurried back to the house and I opened a couple of deck-chairs and sat down to await her return. How I wanted an opportunity for an hour’s quiet thought! But the heat and the midges were terrible. They were all-pervading; they swamped thought and everything else.There must be, I thought, some pernicious influence at work. On my previous visits I had always been impressed with the calm and ordered life at Dalehouse. I had enjoyed sitting out in this lovely sheltered garden after dinner with Hanson, pipes going, conversation natural and unlabored, while the light faded away, to leave the great cathedral silhouetted in black against the sky. The cathedral still towered up above the garden wall but that was all of calm and peace that remained.Even before the awful discovery of Stella’s death I had sensed an uncomfortable restraint in the air; and now every little incident and every simple conversation seemed fraught with some hidden meaning and double purpose. I could not even accept Margaret’s simple assertion that she had lost a sixpenny bit on the stairs without wondering why she should have been handling money on the way to speak to Annie. Could she have pulled it out with her handkerchief? I began to ponder on how and where girls carried them. I found that I was very vague about it, but I had a general impression that pockets no longer existed and that even if they carried purses at all, they did not have to extract them when a handkerchief was required. What did they do with their money? No, it somehow did not seem natural and reasonable that she should have dropped a sixpence on those stairs, but why she should lie to me about it, or for what else she could have been looking so urgently if she had lied, I could not guess.Thinking over our conversation, I found that I could not remember whether she told me she had actually given Annie her message or not, but I most certainly had the impression that Annie was up-stairs in her room, or why should I have been so surprised when I ran into her a moment later at the top of the basement stairs?Margaret came and sat down in the deck-chair beside me. She had brought out a red parasol with her, and as she lay back in her chair, it heightened the rosy color in her pink and white cheeks, and tinted her golden hair a ruddy bronze. She heaved a little sigh of satisfaction as she settled down against the cushions. Rather like a cat she was, I thought, where cushions and comfort were concerned—she made a luxury of them.“I wonder how long this is going to last,” she said pensively, and then after a pause, “You know, I have a sort of feeling that it’s this awful heat that is making things so terrible. It gives to everything a feverish unnatural kind of air. I am so glad to hear they’re having prayers for rain in the cathedral.”I assented and continued to puff away silently at my pipe. Annie came out with a tray and began to set out the tea things on a little table in the shade of the house. The cathedral chimed the quarter after four, and so hot and still was it that the last fading note left the air pregnant with unvoiced vibrations. The clash of clapper on hot metal in the high cathedral tower—the dull boom of the note—and then the air thick with the ghosts of sound. It came to me that there was some similar quality in the embarrassed silences that seemed to stand out so sharply from all our conversations. The air was full of the thoughts we were all afraid to voice.“Mr. Jeffcock,” she continued, after a time, “I want you to promise not to be vexed, but I do so long to ask you a question.”I nodded.“You are sure you won’t mind—promise?” she repeated, holding up one finger with a coquettish air.“I promise I won’t show it, anyhow,” I returned.“Well,” she continued, “you remember—tell me—did you put the key under Kenneth’s pillow?”I was aghast. There was a little puzzled frown on her face. I looked at her closely, but she gave me look for look. “I did no such thing, what on earth made you think that I did?” I replied, trying to keep my voice pleasant and unconcerned.“Why, I have been thinking it over, and it simply can’t have been any one else—oh, it is all so thrilling! You remember, just before Dr. Wallace went out to see his patient this morning, I came up from the basement with some things for Ethel, and met you in the hall?”“Yes, I remember that.”“Well, you know how the basement stairs go down under the main staircase up from the hall to the first landing? I don’t know if you have noticed how plainly you can hear any one on the stairs just above, but I could swear that as I came up from the kitchen, I heard some one tiptoeing down them over my head. I did really, Mr. Jeffcock. Then I found you in the hall. Wasn’t it queer? Do you really mean to say that it wasn’t you?”“No, it most certainly was not I. I was at the telephone until just before you appeared, and I never left the hall at all.”I hesitated whether to tell her how I too had fancied that I heard a stealthy tread on the stair. But a good five minutes must have passed between what I heard and the time when she came up from the basement, for I had continued to speak to the police station, and then I had spoken to The Tundish after that. Could the noise I thought I had heard have been some one creeping up the stairs—not down them? But in that case who could it possibly have been? Every one, including The Tundish, could then be accounted for. I decided to say nothing at all about it. Instead, I asked her as pleasantly as I could:“And have you conveyed your rather unkind suspicions to any of the others?”“No, oh no,” she replied, “and I really did not mean to be unkind. But the whole affair is so puzzling. Things happen and there’s no one to make them happen. There’s no good solid reason for anything.”Then after a little pause, she added, “Do you think, then, that Kenneth threw away the medicine glass? I suppose that he must have done it, and then have locked the door to Stella’s room and put the key under the pillow in his own, meaning to throw it away as well a little later on! But why, oh, why, should he do it?”“He can’t have done it,” I reminded her, “he was in the dining-room with Ethel and Ralph all the time. Don’t worry your head about it. Leave it to Allport. Here is Annie with the tea.”Annie put the tea-pot on the table, and was just on the point of returning to the house, when she turned round and called out good-naturedly, “Oh, please, miss, I found your sixpence.”“Thank you so much, Annie, where was it?”“On the landing, miss.”“Oh! It must have rolled down then after all. I am so glad—it is so unlucky on the stairs.”It was the first time I had heard the theory that ill luck followed the dropping of money on a staircase, but Margaret was famous for such quaint little superstitions, about ladders, umbrellas, the moon, and so forth, and she was continually throwing salt over her shoulders, or doing something equally silly, to save herself from catastrophe. She was half a generation behind the times, I think, but she was so good-natured and simple over it all, that we readily forgave her absurdities and the many conversational bricks she dropped.Anyhow, I thought to myself, that solves the mystery of “The girl who searched the stairs in fevered haste,” and I wondered how many of the other little incidents on which I had pondered, and how many of the intriguing remarks I had overheard, might not be capable of explanation in a similarly simple manner.We found that the table had been laid for three, Kenneth and Ralph, doubtless with a view to avoiding the doctor, having decided to stay indoors for their tea. We moved the little table from the back of the house to the shade of the cedar tree, and The Tundish joined us just as we were sitting down. I envied the easy way in which he kept the conversation going, without once touching or obviously appearing to avoid, the unhappy subject of all our thoughts. There had been a stack fire at the Cattersons’ farm, a mile or two out of the city. A horse had been burned to death. Canon Searle had been nearly drowned on holiday at Bournemouth—cramp when he was swimming out of his depth. So on and so forth, for a full twenty minutes. It was a relief to hear some one talking naturally and lightly about nothing in particular. And then he pulled up sharply in the middle of a sentence.I looked up to see what had caught his attention. Two men were coming in through the door in the wall at the end of the surgery wing. Each held one end of a ladder. They proceeded to rear it up against the coping of the flat-topped roof on to which Stella’s bedroom window looked. Then they produced a pair of shears and a small saw and began to clip the tangled mass of the large-leaved ivy.“Are they gardeners?” Margaret asked.“Police,” The Tundish replied laconically, and added, “pruning for glass.”Margaret emitted a little “Oh!” We heard the telephone ring faintly in the hall, and the doctor left us. We two continued to watch the “gardeners.” The “thing” that we longed to forget was back with us again.
Up to this point in my story, while, as was only natural, I had some doubts about The Tundish, he certainly had all my sympathy. If Ethel was his most outspoken champion, I was more than ready to endorse her opinions. While she showed by every possible action and by every look that she was sure of his innocence, desolated by his awful plight, and ready to take his part against those of our party who were less inclined to ignore the evidence against him, I was less demonstrative and I think more tolerant of the opinions held by Kenneth and, to a less degree, by Margaret and Ralph. But I was quite eager to feel as sure as she was about his innocence. I was ready to set down the finding of the key in his coat pocket, his unsatisfactory account of his dealings with Stella’s father, and all the other evidence that indicated his guilt so strongly, as nothing more than a string of coincidences, mere unfortunate accidents of circumstances, that time and patience would be sure to explain away.
Indeed, when I look back, I am always astonished at the way the doctor dominated our little party. He made no effort to clear himself—he accepted all the damning facts that told so heavily against him, without either attempting to belittle or explain them away—and then he simply ignored the whole uncomfortable position. Kenneth and Ethel quarreled openly, Margaret, Ralph and I were worried and ill at ease; he, in danger of immediate arrest and the end of his medical career, alone remained calm and undisturbed.
But somehow, I did not like the idea of his falling in love with Ethel or at any rate making any open declaration of his feelings. It was not only that I felt that it added yet another note to the general discord. It was unseemly and inopportune—it was deliberately inconsiderate. And it was from this time that I began to wonder if Kenneth’s attitude were not more reasonable than I had at first supposed it, and that my admiration for the doctor began to be more troubled in its quality. I admired him still, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that just conceivably my admiration might be misplaced.
I returned to the dining-room and reported on Ethel’s condition. Kenneth sat at the end of the table in the chair that little Allport had been occupying. His own still lay on the floor where he had hurled it. He was looking straight before him, a picture of glum despair.
It has often occurred to me that people of a quick and ready temper must be altogether lacking so far as any sense of humor is concerned—that these hot bursts of passion must leave such a feeling of ridicule and shame that only those insensible to both could afford to indulge. Kenneth, however, was not of the hot-tempered type, and as I saw him seated morosely at the end of the table, I was both sorry and concerned; sorry for him, whole-heartedly sorry, concerned for the future. How were we to get through the next few days, I wondered, with the doctor and Ethel and Kenneth all confined within the ten-foot wall that circled Dalehouse and its secluded sun-baked garden? Barely six hours had passed since Ethel had left the breakfast table to waken Stella, and yet here we were, all at loggerheads and enmity—Ethel’s and Kenneth’s engagement broken, probably beyond repair; the doctor making love to Ethel, if my hearing had not played me a trick; Kenneth giving way to violence and the hurling of chairs; each one of us busy with his own dark thoughts and conjectures. How were we to get through the hours that lay ahead?
Allport was writing up some notes in his note-book, and looked up as I made my statement. “Well, that’s a mercy, at any rate,” he grumbled; and with a glance over his shoulder at the clock, “Will the doctor be long before he is back? I want to see him again, and I must leave the house by three o’clock; would you mind telling him, and ask Miss Summerson to bring me the statement she has been writing out.”
I had forgotten all about Miss Summerson, but I hurried back along the passage to the consulting-room to give The Tundish the detective’s message. Ethel was still on the couch, lying on her back with the lower part of her face heavily bandaged. She raised her eyebrows by way of a smile of greeting—it was all she could do, poor girl—and in answer to my question as to the doctor’s whereabouts she pointed to the door of the dispensary.
I found him standing against the desk, holding a sealed envelope in one hand. To my astonishment he was humming a gentle air. “Here is Miss Summerson’s report,” he laughed, “but where, oh, where, is Miss Summerson herself? I don’t think our little friend will be overpleased, will he?”
“Do you mean to say she has gone?”
“Yes, and after all she wasn’t definitely told to stay. However, let us take her report to Allport and hear what he has to say.”
We found the little man, watch in hand. “Oh, here you are at last,” he said. “I’ve got exactly five minutes left, and these are my instructions:
“You, Dr. Wallace, can go on your rounds as usual—it might appear too extraordinary did you not—but one of my men is to act as chauffeur. I’ve already arranged it with Inspector Brown. If any one asks questions, as no doubt they will, you are to say that Miss Palfreeman died in her sleep and that the police are arranging for a post-mortem to find out the cause if they can. You can say it’s a mystery—as indeed it is—and you need mention neither suicide nor murder. ‘I don’t know,’ will be your best answer to most of the questions you are likely to be asked.
“Apart from the doctor, none of you is to leave the house and garden, and you are not to make any mention of Miss Palfreeman’s death either over the telephone or by letter. Miss Hanson, for instance, is not to write to her father or mother about it. There will be a formal inquest the day after to-morrow which you will have to attend, but I am arranging it so that practically no questions at all will be asked you. It will be a purely formal affair, postponed until after my return.” Then he added after a brief pause, “I have been wondering whether you should like one of my men to sleep in the house—what do you say, Miss Hunter?”
Margaret looked at him wide-eyed. “Surely that is hardly necessary,” she said.
“It shall be as you wish, if Miss Hanson and the others agree. I will ask Miss Hanson myself. How do you feel about it, Mr. Dane?”
Kenneth looked stonily ahead and refused to answer.
Allport shrugged his shoulders, saying, “Well, if you feel safe, and the doctor here agrees as well, Miss Hunter shall have her way. I don’t imagine you are likely to have any more trouble, at least no trouble that any man of mine could prevent. And now where is Miss Summerson?”
“She has gone,” said The Tundish. “I found this addressed to you on the desk in the dispensary just now.”
“The devil she has.” He tore open the envelope and hastily read the contents, a sarcastic smile twisting his sloppy mouth. Then he included us all in a stiff formal little bow and left the room. A few minutes later we heard the front door bang, and we were alone once more and left to our own resources. Another devastating silence—a silence which, awkward and uncomfortable as it was, it seemed yet more awkward to break—settled down on us. Kenneth made no movement, and we four stood tongue-tied looking first at him and then at one another.
The doctor was the first to speak. “A cold bath and a change is the proper prescription for all of us, I fancy, but if the inspector can lend me a body-guard I have one or two patients who will be feeling neglected! Ethel ought to go to her room and lie down; Margaret, will you try to persuade her to? She is to keep the bandage on until I come back, then a piece of plaster will be all that is required. You needn’t feel that she is badly hurt, Kenneth.”
“Go to hell!” was Kenneth’s comment.
“I’ll go to my patients first,” The Tundish replied pleasantly. “I’ll order tea for half past four, and as this room is so hot I’ll tell Annie to set it in the garden.”
I was glad when he was gone. I could see that his good-tempered tolerance acted like a red rag to a bull as far as Kenneth was concerned, and I feared another explosion. Margaret departed to see after Ethel, and I went to the telephone to explain my lengthened holiday as well as I might to Brenda. I got through promptly, but I found my talk more difficult than I had anticipated. The line was clear and she was full of awkward questions.
“Are you in the finals, then?” she queried in a jesting voice that was anything but complimentary.
“No, but I am staying on over Thursday and perhaps until the end of the week.”
“But I thought you were to be in London on Friday?”
“That will have to be postponed. I can’t help myself. I shall get back as soon as I can, but it may not be till Saturday.”
“You do sound mysterious and not a bit as if you were enjoying yourself. What on earth’s the matter?”
“There’s nothing the matter and I’ll let you know more exactly when I shall be home as soon as I can. You must hold your curiosity in check until you see me.”
“Oh! I say,” and then with a giggle that sounded doubly inane over the wire, “have you gone and done it at last?”
I put the receiver down with a bang. Why on earth did Brenda always imagine that I was on the brink of a matrimonial adventure? She was nearly as bad as the diminutive Allport.
A bath and a change of clothes brought some relief from the depressing heat, but I had an encounter with Kenneth which went very far to nullify it, and I came to the conclusion that I had better leave matters alone and that peace would be attained only if those of us who differed could keep apart. He was coming out of the bathroom as I came out of my bedroom to go down-stairs, his dark blue dressing-gown open at the throat, and showing the splendid proportions of his chest. I asked if I could come along with him and have a chat while he dressed.
“Why, yes, of course,” he answered pleasantly enough. He found me cigarettes and matches, and pulled out a wicker armchair.
“Look here, how are we going to get through the time until Allport releases us?” I began with some little hesitation. “Can’t we arrange some sort of a compromise?”
“Surely we have compromised—at any rate we have agreed to put up with him for a couple of days.”
“Yes, but that’s not much good if you and he are going to quarrel whenever you meet,” I ventured. “Won’t you try to believe that he may be innocent until Allport has gone into it a little further?”
“No, I won’t. You mean well, Jeffcock, I know, but it’s no good. You think I’m unreasonable, but just ask yourself how you would like it if you were in my place. He commits a cold-blooded murder and then takes advantage of Ethel’s absurd hero-worship to persuade her to break off her engagement with me. Ever since I first knew her she has been singing his praises.”
“But you can’t be as certain as all that,” I insisted, “and I don’t believe he has said a single thing to try to persuade Ethel to break away from you. In fact he asked me to do my best to keep you together—to prevent your falling out over him, and besides that, even if most of the evidence points to him, we are all of us pretty well tarred with the same brush. I knew all about the poison and so did Ethel. The key of the bedroom door was found under your pillow, you know,” I added rather maliciously.
“Yes, and who put it there?” he burst in. “Why, he did. Of course he did. And the rest of you are willing to believe every word he says. He’s only to ask you ‘to keep Ethel and me together,’ damn his impudence, and you immediately believe that he is a paragon of unselfish piety—a sort of martyr sacrificing himself for others. Do you honestly mean to tell me that you have no doubts about the man yourself?”
“I can’t conceive it possible that either he or you or any of the others could have done such a thing.”
“But Stella was murdered, you know. You simply can’t get away from it. Opportunity, motive, everything points as clearly as it can to the doctor. It’s impossible to overlook what he said, or rather what he didn’t say, about his quarrel with her father—and then she’s found poisoned the day after her arrival. And quite apart from all that, the way he allows Ethel to slop over him is sufficient to damn him in my opinion. No real man would encourage it when she was engaged to me. Then he puts the key under my pillow so that she may begin to have doubts about me.”
“Nonsense!” I cried. “Ethel hasn’t any ideas of the kind. Even I know her well enough for that. As for the key, any one of us could have put it under your pillow, and after all we have only the detective’s word for it that it was found there at all.”
“Oh, don’t be a fool, of course it was found there. You can talk about it until you are blue in the gills, but I shall still believe him a poisoning——”
He was lacing up his shoes, and one of the laces broke with a snap. It was the last straw. “Curse him,” he cried. “You say how are we going to get through the time till Allport comes back? He’ll be damned lucky if he gets through without a broken neck.”
“And in heaven’s name what good would that do you?” I asked.
“Good, why the same sort of good that it does me to tell you that you’re nothing but a blinking fool. Clear out!”
I went. I felt that I was doing more harm than good, and that I almost deserved his description. My original estimate of his character had been correct. There were no grays for Kenneth.
On the landing I stood for a moment considering whether I would go back to my room and sit there till tea-time, or try to find some shady spot in the garden. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think. But there was another little surprise awaiting me. As I stood I heard a swishing noise on the stairs leading up to the floor above. It was too intermittent to have been made by one of the maids sweeping down. A shuffle and then a gentle pad-pad-pad and then another shuffle. My curiosity was aroused. I couldn’t make it out. I tiptoed along the landing to the foot of the stairs. It was Margaret; she was down on her hands and knees searching for something. She was patting the pile of the stair carpet and that had made the padding noise that had attracted my attention. There was a something feverish and urgent about the way she searched.
“Hello! lost anything?” I called out.
She stopped her search quite suddenly, and did not answer me at once. The pause was perhaps no longer than a second—but it was there. “Why, yes, I’ve dropped a sixpence—it’s so unlucky on the stairs, you know—and I think it must have rolled into a crack. I’ve just been up to tell Annie that Ethel wants her tea in her room. Never mind it, I’ll tell Annie to keep her eyes open for it.”
We went down-stairs, she to her bedroom, and I to the hall below, where I nearly ran full tilt into Annie at the top of the basement stairs.
I sauntered out into the garden and lighted my pipe. I had paced once along the lawn in the shade of the cedar and was retracing my steps toward the house, when Margaret came to meet me. “Have you seen Annie anywhere?” she queried.
“Yes, she came up the basement stairs as I came down just now.”
“Oh, did you tell her about Ethel’s tea?”
“No, I thought you had been up to the top landing to tell her that.”
“I did but she wasn’t in her room. I’ll just run in and tell her and then come back to you. I do so want a quiet talk with some one sensible and sane.”
She hurried back to the house and I opened a couple of deck-chairs and sat down to await her return. How I wanted an opportunity for an hour’s quiet thought! But the heat and the midges were terrible. They were all-pervading; they swamped thought and everything else.
There must be, I thought, some pernicious influence at work. On my previous visits I had always been impressed with the calm and ordered life at Dalehouse. I had enjoyed sitting out in this lovely sheltered garden after dinner with Hanson, pipes going, conversation natural and unlabored, while the light faded away, to leave the great cathedral silhouetted in black against the sky. The cathedral still towered up above the garden wall but that was all of calm and peace that remained.
Even before the awful discovery of Stella’s death I had sensed an uncomfortable restraint in the air; and now every little incident and every simple conversation seemed fraught with some hidden meaning and double purpose. I could not even accept Margaret’s simple assertion that she had lost a sixpenny bit on the stairs without wondering why she should have been handling money on the way to speak to Annie. Could she have pulled it out with her handkerchief? I began to ponder on how and where girls carried them. I found that I was very vague about it, but I had a general impression that pockets no longer existed and that even if they carried purses at all, they did not have to extract them when a handkerchief was required. What did they do with their money? No, it somehow did not seem natural and reasonable that she should have dropped a sixpence on those stairs, but why she should lie to me about it, or for what else she could have been looking so urgently if she had lied, I could not guess.
Thinking over our conversation, I found that I could not remember whether she told me she had actually given Annie her message or not, but I most certainly had the impression that Annie was up-stairs in her room, or why should I have been so surprised when I ran into her a moment later at the top of the basement stairs?
Margaret came and sat down in the deck-chair beside me. She had brought out a red parasol with her, and as she lay back in her chair, it heightened the rosy color in her pink and white cheeks, and tinted her golden hair a ruddy bronze. She heaved a little sigh of satisfaction as she settled down against the cushions. Rather like a cat she was, I thought, where cushions and comfort were concerned—she made a luxury of them.
“I wonder how long this is going to last,” she said pensively, and then after a pause, “You know, I have a sort of feeling that it’s this awful heat that is making things so terrible. It gives to everything a feverish unnatural kind of air. I am so glad to hear they’re having prayers for rain in the cathedral.”
I assented and continued to puff away silently at my pipe. Annie came out with a tray and began to set out the tea things on a little table in the shade of the house. The cathedral chimed the quarter after four, and so hot and still was it that the last fading note left the air pregnant with unvoiced vibrations. The clash of clapper on hot metal in the high cathedral tower—the dull boom of the note—and then the air thick with the ghosts of sound. It came to me that there was some similar quality in the embarrassed silences that seemed to stand out so sharply from all our conversations. The air was full of the thoughts we were all afraid to voice.
“Mr. Jeffcock,” she continued, after a time, “I want you to promise not to be vexed, but I do so long to ask you a question.”
I nodded.
“You are sure you won’t mind—promise?” she repeated, holding up one finger with a coquettish air.
“I promise I won’t show it, anyhow,” I returned.
“Well,” she continued, “you remember—tell me—did you put the key under Kenneth’s pillow?”
I was aghast. There was a little puzzled frown on her face. I looked at her closely, but she gave me look for look. “I did no such thing, what on earth made you think that I did?” I replied, trying to keep my voice pleasant and unconcerned.
“Why, I have been thinking it over, and it simply can’t have been any one else—oh, it is all so thrilling! You remember, just before Dr. Wallace went out to see his patient this morning, I came up from the basement with some things for Ethel, and met you in the hall?”
“Yes, I remember that.”
“Well, you know how the basement stairs go down under the main staircase up from the hall to the first landing? I don’t know if you have noticed how plainly you can hear any one on the stairs just above, but I could swear that as I came up from the kitchen, I heard some one tiptoeing down them over my head. I did really, Mr. Jeffcock. Then I found you in the hall. Wasn’t it queer? Do you really mean to say that it wasn’t you?”
“No, it most certainly was not I. I was at the telephone until just before you appeared, and I never left the hall at all.”
I hesitated whether to tell her how I too had fancied that I heard a stealthy tread on the stair. But a good five minutes must have passed between what I heard and the time when she came up from the basement, for I had continued to speak to the police station, and then I had spoken to The Tundish after that. Could the noise I thought I had heard have been some one creeping up the stairs—not down them? But in that case who could it possibly have been? Every one, including The Tundish, could then be accounted for. I decided to say nothing at all about it. Instead, I asked her as pleasantly as I could:
“And have you conveyed your rather unkind suspicions to any of the others?”
“No, oh no,” she replied, “and I really did not mean to be unkind. But the whole affair is so puzzling. Things happen and there’s no one to make them happen. There’s no good solid reason for anything.”
Then after a little pause, she added, “Do you think, then, that Kenneth threw away the medicine glass? I suppose that he must have done it, and then have locked the door to Stella’s room and put the key under the pillow in his own, meaning to throw it away as well a little later on! But why, oh, why, should he do it?”
“He can’t have done it,” I reminded her, “he was in the dining-room with Ethel and Ralph all the time. Don’t worry your head about it. Leave it to Allport. Here is Annie with the tea.”
Annie put the tea-pot on the table, and was just on the point of returning to the house, when she turned round and called out good-naturedly, “Oh, please, miss, I found your sixpence.”
“Thank you so much, Annie, where was it?”
“On the landing, miss.”
“Oh! It must have rolled down then after all. I am so glad—it is so unlucky on the stairs.”
It was the first time I had heard the theory that ill luck followed the dropping of money on a staircase, but Margaret was famous for such quaint little superstitions, about ladders, umbrellas, the moon, and so forth, and she was continually throwing salt over her shoulders, or doing something equally silly, to save herself from catastrophe. She was half a generation behind the times, I think, but she was so good-natured and simple over it all, that we readily forgave her absurdities and the many conversational bricks she dropped.
Anyhow, I thought to myself, that solves the mystery of “The girl who searched the stairs in fevered haste,” and I wondered how many of the other little incidents on which I had pondered, and how many of the intriguing remarks I had overheard, might not be capable of explanation in a similarly simple manner.
We found that the table had been laid for three, Kenneth and Ralph, doubtless with a view to avoiding the doctor, having decided to stay indoors for their tea. We moved the little table from the back of the house to the shade of the cedar tree, and The Tundish joined us just as we were sitting down. I envied the easy way in which he kept the conversation going, without once touching or obviously appearing to avoid, the unhappy subject of all our thoughts. There had been a stack fire at the Cattersons’ farm, a mile or two out of the city. A horse had been burned to death. Canon Searle had been nearly drowned on holiday at Bournemouth—cramp when he was swimming out of his depth. So on and so forth, for a full twenty minutes. It was a relief to hear some one talking naturally and lightly about nothing in particular. And then he pulled up sharply in the middle of a sentence.
I looked up to see what had caught his attention. Two men were coming in through the door in the wall at the end of the surgery wing. Each held one end of a ladder. They proceeded to rear it up against the coping of the flat-topped roof on to which Stella’s bedroom window looked. Then they produced a pair of shears and a small saw and began to clip the tangled mass of the large-leaved ivy.
“Are they gardeners?” Margaret asked.
“Police,” The Tundish replied laconically, and added, “pruning for glass.”
Margaret emitted a little “Oh!” We heard the telephone ring faintly in the hall, and the doctor left us. We two continued to watch the “gardeners.” The “thing” that we longed to forget was back with us again.