In the hall we met cook, dirty: and unkempt, a wisp of greasy hair straggling across her pasty, unhealthy-looking face. She was on her way up-stairs to bed. The Tundish was as good as his word and asked her rather sharply why the dinner had been so badly cooked.
She folded her arms across her floppy ample bosom and leered at him offensively.
“Come, Grace, I want an answer to my question.”
She tilted back her ugly pasty face, half closed her beady eyes, and nodded slowly backward and forward, the greasy wisp of hair waving ludicrously with every movement that she made. The leer became an ugly smile, and then she laughed aloud—a low disturbing laugh. Fat red arms folded against her untidy dress, she looked revolting as she stood there nodding at us, leering and laughing in turns.
The doctor gazed at her solemnly, unmoved, showing neither annoyance nor the disgust that I felt myself. His steady eyes were disconcerting. Her laughing ceased. Then she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, stuck her head forward at the doctor, and whispered hoarsely, “I knows what I knows, Dr. Wallace.”
She waddled away unsteadily. I turned to The Tundish to see how he would take it. He was standing immovable, unseeing. Only that same morning had I seen him standing thus in the doorway as we were having breakfast—his brain so deep in thought that his eyes, while open wide, were blind, inanimate and uncontrolled. Then he had muttered, “I can’t have made a mistake. I simply can’t have made a mistake,” but now he whispered, nearly inaudibly, “I wonder what she knows, now I wonder what she knows.”
He came back to life with a start and a smile of amusement at his own abstraction, told me that he was going straight to bed as he half expected that he might be called out in the early hours to a case of indisputable first-aid, and then with one foot on the bottom stair, he turned to me and said, “And by the way, Jeffcock, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll lock your bedroom door to-night.”
Then he said, “Good night,” and was gone.
Chapter X.
I Analyze the Position
I moved across the hall into the drawing-room. The two boys, I learned, had already gone to bed, but Margaret was still curled up in a chair by the window placidly knitting. She looked pretty, I thought, with the fading evening light from the window shining on one tight little coil of golden hair, the graceful curve at the back of her head emphasized by the parting that ran down the middle. Her occupation, somehow, seemed proper to the setting and enhanced the pretty picture that she made. Ethel knitted jumpers too, but she went at them with a rush. With Margaret it was all leisurely movement and grace, and I imagined her feelings when knitting, as those of a cat, which sits in the sun and slowly and endlessly washes its face. She greeted me with a sleepy smile, stifled a yawn, and proceeded to gather her belongings together, but her scissors could not be found though we searched the floor together and felt down the hidy-hole between the back and the seat of her chair. Finally we had to give them up for lost, though she was sure that she had had them only five minutes before, and she bade me good night, and left me.