I don’t think I ever felt so like a hypocrite in my life before. But I realised at least that even if Jane’s lodgings were discomfort embodied, I must take them and stop in them, while I remained there, now. Nothing else was possible. I COULDN’T go elsewhere.
Fortunately, however, the rooms turned out to be as neat as a new pin, and as admirably kept as any woman in England could keep them. I gathered from the very first, of course, that Jane had been one of the servants at The Grange in the days of my First State; and while I drank my cup of tea, Jane herself came in and talked volubly to me, disclosing to me, parenthetically, the further fact that she was the parlour-maid at the time of my father’s murder. That gave me a clue to her identity. Then she was the witness Greenfield who gave evidence at the inquest! I made a mental note of that, and determined to look up what she’d said to the coroner, in the book of extracts the Inspector gave me, as soon as I got alone in my bedroom that evening.
After dinner, however, Jane came in again, with the freedom of an old servant, and talked to me much about the Woodbury Mystery. Gradually, as time went on that night, though I remembered nothing definite of myself about her, the sense of familiarity and friendliness came home to me more vividly. The appropriate emotion seemed easier to rouse, I observed, than the intellectual memory. I knew Jane and I had been on very good terms, some time, somewhere. I talked with her easily, for I had a consciousness of companionship.
By-and-by, without revealing to her how little I could recollect about her own personality, I confessed to Jane, by slow degrees, that the whole past was still gone utterly from my shattered memory. I told her I knew nothing except the Picture and the facts it comprised; and to show her just how small that knowledge really was, I showed her (imprudently enough) the photograph the Inspector had left with me.
Jane looked at it long and slowly, with tears in her eyes. Then she said at last, after a deep pause, in a very hushed voice:
“Why, how did you get this? It wasn’t put in the papers.”
“No,” I answered quietly, “it wasn’t put in the papers. For reasons of their own, the police kept it unpublished.”
Jane gazed at the proof still closer. “They oughtn’t to have done that,” she said.
“They ought to have sent it out everywhere broadcast—so that anybody who knew the man could tell him by his back.”
That seemed to me such obvious good sense that I wondered to myself the police hadn’t thought long since of it; but I supposed they had some good ground of their own for holding it all this time in their own possession.