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.
Chapter VIII.
Dr. Hanson’s Case-Book
For pleasure or comfort of any sort it was too hot in the wall-girt garden, but merely to be away from the house brought a certain sense of ease and rest. Sitting under the old shady cedar it was easier to keep dark thoughts away, and difficult to realize that the homely looking red-brick house was a shelter for murder and crime. Difficult to realize that at some hour during the previous night the little Chinese flagon had been secretly lifted from its place on the shelf among its almost equally deadly little neighbors. Lifted, oh! so gently, and the queer flat stopper quietly removed from its fragile slender neck. Then just a tilt, and drip, drip, drip, a few drops added to the contents of a tapering glass, and at some hour of the hot still night, poor Stella had slipped out of sleep into death.
Whose hand, I wondered, had set that murderous little bottle back in its place? Was it a hand that trembled and shook? Or was it steady and deft like the hands I had seen so swiftly busy with the bandages round a small boy’s face?