“Never mind, unlucky at cards, lucky in love,” Margaret giggled.
Kenneth scowled, but she seemed to be blissfully unconscious of having dropped a brick, and added sentimentally, “I sometimes wish that I wasn’t so lucky at cards.”
I murmured something inane about there being plenty of time for luck to change. Kenneth yawned openly and suggested bed.
“Where can Ethel be all this time?” Margaret asked, as we gathered up the cards. “The naughty girl hasn’t been near us all the evening.” I should not have been surprised had she come out with, “Best to be off with the old love before you are on with the new,” but that we were spared, and, having collected her knitting, she went off to the consulting-room, saying, “I shall scold Dr. Wallace for keeping her so much to himself.”
Janet came down-stairs as we were going up to bed, and I took time to caution her to lock her bedroom door.
She nodded emphatically: “I will, and more than that, Mr. Allport has given me a bolt, a set of screws, and the wherewithal to fix them.”
Chapter XIII.
Accident or——?
I undressed and pulled aside the curtains to admit the moon’s pale, haunting light. My bed had been moved close up to the window and again there was little fall from the daytime temperature—the condition of heat and drought seemed stable and set forever. I propped myself up with the pillows and lighted a cigarette. Outside I could just see the top of the garden wall at the front of the house—a ridge of steel blue where the moonlight caught the tiles aslant—a barrier of black beneath. Moonlight!—sunlight speeding through the years, flung wide of the earth, and caught by a dead world and killed. Sunlight with the life sucked out of it. Flowers and bees, sparkling waves, ruddy basking babies, hot desert sands, and the light and the glow of the sun! Graveyards, tombstones, rotten creaking doors, deserted, derelict old houses, and sad lovers’ sighs in the pale cold light of the moon. How it has always disturbed me—this shadow light—even its beauty filling my heart with an ache and a pain. It came slanting in obliquely through the window, picking out the crockery on the washstand in ghostly white, making long distorted shadows on the floor and up the walls. Only two nights ago just such another band of light had pierced the dark of Stella’s room, to find her dead, and kiss her kinky coppery hair. And to-night Mrs. Kenley perhaps was listening for the gentle turning of the handle to her door, and for some one moving stealthily outside it. I hated to think of her alone in the night, perhaps depending for her safety on a single bolt. I hated to think of her, a woman, little more than a girl, alone in this dreadful house, her wits pitted against those of one callous enough to murder and face it out and threaten dark doings again. I wished she had taken me further into her confidence; who and what did she fear? Last night, in spite of the doctor’s injunction to lock my door, I had felt little sense of reality, little sense of any immediate danger. But to-night it came upon me, that somewhere in this old house, death might still be lurking; that some one who had stolen soft-footed into Stella’s room and out again, the cowardly deed accomplished, was still at large and perhaps even now hatching further deviltry.
That there was real concrete danger I had no doubt, or why had Allport brought her a bolt to fix to her door? She had told me that he was married, but how closely, almost intimately, they had sat together on the bench behind the garage—partly to enable them to whisper, no doubt, but was it only that, or was there something more? I thought of her clear gray eyes and brave straight carriage, and there welled up in my feelings, half pity, half jealousy, that should have told me plainly enough whither I was heading. Oh, yes, I was greatly interested in Mrs. Kenley—Janet Player! Gray-eyed, fearless Janet; planted in the middle of this tragedy by that ugly little gargoyle of a man to do his dirty work. Janet, alone and fighting against Stella’s murderer, perhaps the placid doctor. And if it were he after all, then God, how I hated him! A hundred little scenes and gestures flashed across my vision, scenes of cold deceit and gestures of hypocrisy, scenes and gestures void of truth, killed and sucked dry of sincerity by his placid impassivity, like those ghost beams of reflected sunlight that had been rifled of color and warmth by the equally placid moon. The Tundish in the dining-room begging us to bury our suspicions, at Allport’s inquiry, flicking the ash from the end of his cigarette, Allport’s insinuations having as little effect as water on a greasy slope, baiting Kenneth, talking of the murderous activities of the anti-vaccinationists with a cool effrontery before us all, making love to Ethel—The Tundish, impassive and callous and cruel, with his mask of a face and twinkling unbetraying eyes, these and other little pictures rose before my sleepless eyes. And if it were he, what chance had a girl against him!
I recalled the rustling in the hedge as Janet and I came from our secret talk behind the garage—had some one overheard us then? Was some other member of our household aware of her true identity and purpose? Stella poisoned one night, “Dark deeds are done in Dalehouse at night,” stuck up against the landing wall the next, a cool hand and a callous must have been the one that cut those words from the daily paper. Which of us besides the doctor would have the nerve for the venture? Fool, fool I was; of course it was he. No wonder Janet was afraid, for I saw a look of fear, when she heard the rustle in the hedge and realized that we might have been overheard. And now she was all alone in her room, protected, perhaps, by nothing but a flimsy bolt.