And it did seem that Ernest the window cleaner was likely to be more successful than Ernest the policeman. Crouching like an animal, his hands hanging down in front of him, keeping close to the wall, brushing himself against creepers, scratched by thorns and blackened by soot, at last he reached the drawing-room window and flung himself on his face beneath the sill. The sill was a low one. Half kneeling, half supporting himself on his elbows, he raised himself till his eyes were level with the glass. The fitful moonlight played on this side of the house; a treacherous light, but it served to show him that the Puck of Stithies was occupied elsewhere. With extreme caution, holding his breath, he negotiated the difficult preliminaries; then he stood up straight, and heaved with all his might. The window rushed up a foot and then stuck. Involuntarily he glanced down: yes, there was the hand, flattened on the frame: there was another hand, holding back the blind, and there was a face, not very distinct, but certainly a face.
It was the hand that Ernest, cowering under the thick umbrage of the drooping-ash, remembered best. The face was anybody’s face, not really unlike Hubert’s: a ruddy, capable face: not exactly angry, but stern, official-looking. But the odd thing about the hand was that it didn’t seem like the hand of another person. It was larger than Ernest’s, yet he had felt, for the moment that it was presented before his eyes, that it would respond to his volition, move as he wanted it to move. He had been too frightened, at the moment, to act upon this fantastic notion; but couldn’t he act upon it next time? Next time. But why not? Imagine a man of average capabilities, physically none too robust, but with a good headpiece on him. He can afford to spare himself; even when he takes on a job that is strange to him he will find out the easiest way, will know just the right moment to bring to bear what little strength he has. Many a slenderly built chap, at the bidding of necessity, has transformed himself into a passable coal-heaver. But to carry a sack of coal or a sack of anything one needs a knack: it’s no good taking the load into your arms, you must hoist it on to your back. And when you’ve carried a sack or two like that, who knows that your luck mayn’t change? Many a man who carried a sack in his time, in later life has supped with princes.
Ernest scrambled up the slates, slithered down a gully and grasped the balustrade of the battlement. He had found his way instinctively, or did he remember it? If he hadn’t been familiar with the lie of the roofs, even to the point of knowing what slates were loose and would crack or, worse, creak when you trod, how could he have avoided a sprained ankle or a serious fall? Yes, certainly he knew his way about the leads and slates; who wouldn’t, if they had lived in a house from childhood, and loved it, though it frightened them, and wanted to have it, and meant to have it, and what went with it, though by a slip of the pen it belonged to someone else?
The window of the Blue Room was just round the corner. Imagine yourself a steeplejack. How delicious to know, while you went about your work with a crowbar or a hammer or whatever heavy, unwieldy instrument it might be, that there was a railing of stone and mortar, two feet high and six inches thick, between you and the ground! The steeplejack would feel he wasn’t earning his pay when his life was safeguarded like that. Well, here’s a foolproof job! Like putting a grown man in a child’s cot, with a high brass chevaux-de-frise round it. But nevertheless, rounding the bend, Ernest was overtaken by nausea and lay for some moments stretched out upon the leaden gully, twitching.
But supposing a man was kept out by force from his possessions, or what should have been his? Who would blame him, who would not applaud him, if he went to any reasonable length to recover his property? Should he consult his own safety, or anyone’s safety, when he was engaged upon such an undertaking?
Ernest dragged himself to the window. His head was level with the upper sash which was fast in the wall, and looked as if it was fixed there. But the lower sash was about six inches open, with the fold of a blue blind projecting from it.
Up went the sash a long, long way as it seemed, much farther than the others. But as he lifted it there was a whirring sound; the tegument of the blind vanished. The new proprietor was standing there. Ernest stared at him. Was it the face of the poor man who had come into money and acquired Stithies? Or of the coward who owned it? Or of the policeman who protected it, or of the man who cleaned its windows? Or of the coal-heaver or of the steeplejack or of the man who wouldn’t let anything stand in his way? It seemed in turn to be all these, yet its essential character never changed. Dazed as he was, Ernest remembered to drop his hands. The apparition dropped his; the window was unguarded. Slowly Ernest lowered and advanced his head. But he had not reckoned on his enemy’s faculty for imitation. The simulacrum bowed, leant forward, pressed its face to within three inches of Ernest’s. And as it hung there the last expression faded out of it, and was replaced by a featureless oval, dimly phosphorescent. Yet something began to take shape in that mobile, almost fluid tract. Ernest did not wait for it to declare itself, this new visage whose lines he could almost see graven in the air before they settled and bit deep into the flesh.
He was on the dripstone of the tower now, clinging with his fingers to the sham machicolations. Suppose a man meant to commit a murder, did he shrink from risking his own life? Wasn’t anything easy to him, in the presence of such a determination? Hadn’t it been easy to him, Ernest, when he stood, some ten years ago, on this same dizzy ledge and found, after three failures, the one vulnerable point of Stithies, the box-room window?
Sweating and gasping he reached the window and clung to the stanchion, his back, weak with exhaustion, bending outwards like a bow. But his prescient tormentor had outstripped him. This time the face did not alter. It was Ernest’s own face, a hateful face, and the face of a murderer.
Punctually at half-past six, in the gathering light, Mrs. Playward passed through the open gateway into the garden of Stithies Court. ‘Bless me,’ she thought. ‘What with the maids away and the young gentleman in bed I shan’t be able to get in.’ The suspicion that she had made the journey for nothing weighed heavily on Mrs. Playward. ‘It’s not as if I am as young as I was,’ she told herself. But, having come so far, it was worth while to make sure that none of the doors was unlocked. The front door seemed to open of itself, such was her amazement at finding it unfastened. ‘Well, I never,’ she declared. ‘And he always said to be so fidgety about robbers.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘Best to get it over,’ she muttered. ‘If there’s one step there’s eighty.’ Having collected the machinery of her profession she mounted the spiral staircase that led to the box-room. Her eyesight was defective, a fact to which, when reproached for apparent negligence, she often drew the attention of her clients. The staircase was lighted by a couple of slit windows, set deep in the wall. At the second of them she paused, partly to recover her breath, partly to relieve her eyes from the strain of peering into the gloom. By leaning forward she could just see the road below. ‘Well, I declare,’ she muttered, ‘if Polkin hasn’t been and left his overcoat out on the path all night. That good black one he told me he was promised by Mr. Ernest. Some men don’t know when they’re well off.’ Breathing heavily she resumed her journey. The condition of this box-room was heart-breaking, trunks, cardboard boxes, gas-rings, fenders, disused furniture all covered with a layer of dust. But she hardly noticed that because a stranger sight claimed her attention. The casement window was wide open.