‘What a dreadful thing for Marion Lane.’
‘Why?’ Jane asked.
‘Didn’t you know? She and Harry Chichester were the greatest friends. At one time it was thought—’
‘I live out of the world, I had no idea,’ said Jane quickly. Even in the presence of calamity, she felt a pang that her friend had not confided in her.
Her interlocutor persisted: ‘It was talked about a great deal. Some people said—you know how they chatter—that she didn’t treat him quite fairly. I hate to make myself a busybody, Mrs. Manning, but I do think you ought to tell her; she ought to be prepared.’
‘But I don’t know where she is!’ cried Jane, from whose mind all thought of her friend had been banished. ‘Have you seen her?’
‘Not since the sheet incident.’
‘Nor have I.’
Nor, it seemed, had anyone. Disturbed by this new misadventure far more than its trivial nature seemed to warrant, Jane hastened in turn to such of her guests as might be able to enlighten her as to Marion’s whereabouts. Some of them greeted her inquiry with a lift of the eyebrows but none of them could help her in her quest. Nor could she persuade them to take much interest in it. They seemed to have forgotten that they were at a party, and owed a duty of responsiveness to their hostess. Their eyes did not light up when she came near. One and all they were discussing the suicide, and suggesting its possible motive. The room rustled with their whispering, with the soft hissing sound of ‘Chichester’ and the succeeding ‘Hush!’ which was meant to stifle but only multiplied and prolonged it. Jane felt that she must scream.
All at once there was silence. Had she screamed? No, for the noise they had all heard came from somewhere inside the house. The room seemed to hold its breath. There it was again, and coming closer; a cry, a shriek, the shrill tones of terror alternating in a dreadful rhythm with a throaty, choking sound like whooping-cough. No one could have recognized it as Marion Lane’s voice, and few could have told for Marion Lane the dishevelled figure, mask in hand, that lurched through the ballroom doorway and with quick stumbling steps, before which the onlookers fell back, zigzagged into the middle of the room.
‘Stop him!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t let him do it!’ Jane Manning ran to her.
‘Dearest, what is it?’
‘It’s Harry Chichester,’ sobbed Marion, her head rolling about on her shoulders as if it had come loose. ‘He’s in there. He wants to take his mask off, but I can’t bear it! It would be awful! Oh, do take him away!’
‘Where is he?’ someone asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know! In Jane’s sitting-room. I think, He wouldn’t let me go. He’s so cold, so dreadfully cold.’
‘Look after her, Jane,’ said Jack Manning. ‘Get her out of here. Anyone coming with me?’ he asked, looking round. ‘I’m going to investigate.’
Marion caught the last words. ‘Don’t go,’ she implored. ‘He’ll hurt you.’ But her voice was drowned in the scurry and stampede of feet. The whole company was following their host. In a few moments the ballroom was empty.
Five minutes later there were voices in the ante-room. It was Manning leading back his troops. ‘Barring, of course, the revolver,’ he was saying, ‘and the few things that had been knocked over, and those scratches on the door, there wasn’t a trace. Hullo!’ he added, crossing the threshold, ‘what’s this?’
The ballroom window was open again; the curtains fluttered wildly inwards; on the boards lay a patch of nearly melted snow.
Jack Manning walked up to it. Just within the further edge, near the window, was a kind of smear, darker than the toffee-coloured mess around it, and roughly oval in shape.
‘Do you think that’s a footmark?’ he asked of the company in general.
No one could say.
A CHANGE OF OWNERSHIP
The motor-car felt its way cautiously up the little street that opened upon a field on one side, and somehow looked less suburban by night than it did by day.
‘Here?’ asked the driver, peering into the semi-rural darkness.
‘Just a little farther, if you don’t mind,’ said his friend. ‘Where you can see that black patch in the walclass="underline" that’s the gate.’
The car crept on.
‘Cold?’ demanded the man at the wheel. ‘These October nights are cold. Stuffy place, the theatre.’
‘Did I sound cold?’ asked his companion, the faint quiver renewing itself in his voice. ‘Oh, I can’t be, it’s such a little way. Feel that,’ he added, holding out his hand.
The driver applied his cheek to it and the car wobbled, bumping against the kerb.
‘Feels warm enough to me,’ he said, ‘hot, in fact. Whoa! Whoa! good horse. This it?’ he added, turning the car’s head round.
‘Yes, but don’t bother to come in, Hubert. The road is so twisty and there may be a branch down. I’m always expecting them to fall, and I’ve had a lot of them wired. You never know with these elm-trees.’
‘Jumpy kind of devil, aren’t you?’ muttered Hubert, extricating himself from the car and standing on the pavement. In the feeble moonlight he looked enormous; Ernest, fiddling with the door on his side, wondered where his friend went to when he tucked himself under the wheel. It must dig into him, he thought.
‘It’s a bit stiff, but you’re turning it the wrong way,’ said Hubert, coming round to Ernest’s side. ‘Easy does it. There you are.’ He held the door open; Ernest stumbled out, missed his footing and was for a moment lost to sight between the more important shadows of his friend and his friend’s car.
‘Hold up, hold up,’ Hubert enjoined him. ‘The road doesn’t need rolling.’ He set Ernest on his feet and the two figures, so unequal in size, gazed mutely into the black square framed by the gateway. Through the trees, which seemed still to bear their complement of boughs, they could just see the outlines of the house, which repeated by their rectangularity the lines of the gateway. It looked like a large black hat-box, crowned at one corner by a smaller hat-box that was, in fact, a tower. There was a tiny light in the tower, otherwise the house was dark, the windows being visible as patches of intense black, like eyeless sockets in a negro’s face.
‘You said you were alone in the house,’ remarked Hubert, breaking the silence.
‘Yes,’ his friend replied. ‘In a sense I am.’ He went on standing where he was, with the motor between him and the gateway.
‘In what sense?’ persisted his friend. ‘Queer devil you are, Ernest; you must either be alone or not alone. Do I scent a romance? In that room with the light in it, for instance——’
‘Oh, no,’ Ernest protested, fidgeting with his feet. ‘That’s only the gas in the box-room. I don’t know how it comes to be alight. It ought not to be. The least thing blows it out. Sometimes I get up in the night and go and see to it. Once I went four times, because it’s so difficult with gas to make sure it’s properly turned off. If you turn it off with your thumb you may easily turn it on again with your little finger, and never notice.’
‘Well, a little puff of gas wouldn’t hurt you,’ observed Hubert, walking to the front of the car and looking at it as though in a moment he would make it do something it didn’t like. ‘Make you sleep better. How’s the insomnia?’
‘Oh, so-so.’
‘Don’t want anyone to hold your hand?’
‘My dear Hubert, of course not.’
Ernest dashingly kicked a pebble which gyrated noisily on the metal surface. When it stopped all sound seemed to cease with it.
‘Tell me about this shadowy companion, Ernest,’ said Hubert, giving one of the tyres such a pinch that Ernest thought the car would scream out.