“Here she is,” I said as the door-bell pealed.
Ethel dabbed her eyes hastily and ran indoors, and I heard her greet the guest in her usual pretty way. She took her up-stairs to her room and I remember even then noticing the tones of Mrs. Kenley’s voice and thinking to myself that they promised well.
A few moments later Ethel was bringing her to us across the lawn. I looked with interest to see what manner of person it was that fate had added to our unhappy household. Would she be capable of rising to the situation, or would she add yet another wrong note to our strident discords? Mrs. Hanson had spoken well of her in her letter, but Mrs. Hanson, I knew—and I don’t say it unkindly—would have found some traits to praise in the devil himself. True, he did put the best silver sugar-tongs in his pocket, but with what an air he had passed the sugar! I was reassured, however, as Ethel brought her guest toward us. I liked her at once. In a couple of hours I was definitely impressed, and—but I am going too fast. Now I don’t mind admitting that as a general rule, and quite apart from any question of sexual attraction, I greatly prefer girls to men, and there is a certain section of the sex—a stratum lying somewhere in between the fussy and the fast—that to me seems to contain the salt of the earth. How clean they can be, these gay good girls—clean in mind and body—their dainty clothes barely hiding their intriguing beauty in a way that causes my forty-year-old heart to thump in its cage to see. And why, I ask, should the good and the beautiful be hidden away? God bless their shapely pink silk legs. How brave and bright they can be. Look at them in the tram or the train on their way to work. Look at them coming home again at night. Look at them I say, and then look at a crowd of unshaved sheepfaced men with their fusty, dust-clogged, hideous and idiotic clothes!
Mrs. Kenley, I could see at a glance, was neither fussy nor fast. She was younger than I expected. Whether she had bought her clothes from Paquin, or through the week-end advertisement columns of the Daily Mail I do not know, but to my male inexperience she seemed to be beautifully, fittingly dressed. I had an impression of a short skirt and slim gray legs, then a pair of gray and extraordinarily wide-awake eyes held me mesmerized and I found myself being introduced. Was she beautiful? At the time I am sure I could not have answered that question, but I knew at once that she was brave and true.
The gong sounded before we had time for conversation, and we went in to lunch. Margaret and the boys followed and were introduced. I sensed at once that the presence of a stranger went far to lessen the feeling of awkward restraint that seemed to engulf us when we were all together. No reference was made to the tragedy during the meal, and we had as yet no idea whether Mrs. Kenley knew of it or not. I was dreading that she would ask some question about the tournament; she must have been rather surprised, I thought, to find us all at home for lunch and not in our tennis kit. The Tundish, however, seemed to have anticipated the difficulty, and guided the conversation with subtle skill to her life in Rhodesia and the voyage to England. She told us that she was not South-African born and had spent most of her life in England.
So the meal passed pleasantly enough. When it was over the doctor announced his intention of taking, if possible, a couple of hours’ sleep, and he advised us all to do the same. Ethel and Margaret retired to their rooms, Kenneth and Ralph to the drawing-room to play chess, and it fell to my lot to entertain Mrs. Kenley—a fate which I welcomed with secret enthusiasm. I took her to my favorite spot—the shade of the cedar—and Annie brought us our coffee there. We smoked cigarettes and for a time talked of nothing in particular. She was entirely at her ease, but I still felt the disturbance of that first look that had passed between her eyes and mine as Ethel had brought her to us across the lawn, and while I regarded her as closely as I could without appearing to be rude, I added little to the conversation. She smoked her cigarette in pensive contentment and I fell to wondering why one look from a pair of clear gray eyes should have set my blood a-tingle and made me wish for all manner of unpleasant happenings to overtake the unoffending Cousin Bob. Certainly Mrs. Kenley was charming, but I had met plenty of charming girls before. Margaret and Ethel were both that, and they both looked you straight in the eye without these disturbing results. Disturbing but very refreshingly disturbing, and I think that for the first time since the murder my thoughts wandered contentedly in pleasant places.
Mrs. Kenley put down her coffee cup on the grass by her chair, and hitching it round to face me more squarely, asked me in her low-pitched voice, “Now, Mr. Jeffcock, will you please tell me all about this terrible affair? Of course I saw it in the papers on my way here this morning, and one paper mentioned that Miss Palfreeman was staying with a Dr. Hanson. I can see that things are in a bad way here—you would naturally all have gone home by now if you could—so I suppose it means that you are being detained by the police, is that so?” I nodded and she continued.
“I wondered if I ought to change my plans and go elsewhere, but I remembered that Mrs. Hanson really seemed to want me to come and chaperon Ethel, and so I thought I would come on for one night at any rate, to see how things were. Tell me now, honestly, what do you think I ought to do?”
“I hope you’ll stop, Mrs. Kenley,” I answered promptly. “It would be a real kindness to Ethel if you will. I am sure she will ask you to stay when she gets a chance to have a talk with you.”
With that, I told her about the whole miserable affair from beginning to end: Stella’s tragic death, Ethel’s rupture with Kenneth, the ugly suspicion that had fastened on The Tundish and more or less shadowed us all; of the feeling of subtle distrust that seemed to fill the air, and all the wretched series of events of the past two days. True, Little Allport had instructed us to be reticent, but Inspector Brown had surprisingly agreed to our visitor, and if she were going to stay in the house, there seemed nothing to lose by telling her the facts, and little possibility of keeping them secret.