“Why, just look at that hand!” she cried, with a tremor of surprise. “Don’t you see what it is? Don’t you think it’s a woman’s?”
I gazed back at her incredulously.
“Impossible,” I answered, shaking my head. “It belongs as clear as day to the man you see in the photograph. How on earth could his hand be a woman’s then, I’d like to know? I can see the shirt-cuff.”
“Why, yes,” Jane answered, with simple common-sense: “it’s DRESSED like a man, of course, and it’s a man to look at; but the hand’s a woman’s, as true as I’m standing here. Why mightn’t a woman dress in a man’s suit on purpose? And perhaps it was just because they were so sure it was a man as did it, that the police has gone wrong so long in trying to find the murderer.”
I looked hard at the hand myself. Then I shut my eyes, and thought of the corresponding object in my mental Picture. The result fairly staggered me. The impression in each case was exactly the same. It was a soft and delicate hand, very white and womanlike. But was it really a woman’s? I couldn’t feel quite sure in my own mind about that; but the very warning Jane gave me seemed to me a most useful one. It would be well, after all, to keep one’s mind sedulously open to every possible explanation, and to take nothing for granted as to the murderer’s personality.
CHAPTER VII. — THE GRANGE AT WOODBURY
I stopped for three weeks in Jane’s lodgings; and before the end of that time, Jane and I had got upon the most intimate footing. It was partly her kindliness that endeared her to me, and her constant sense of continuity with the earlier days which I had quite forgotten; but it was partly too, I felt sure, a vague revival within my own breast of a familiarity that had long ago subsisted between us. I was coming to myself again, on one side of my nature. Day by day I grew more certain that while facts had passed away from me, appropriate emotions remained vaguely present. Among the Woodbury people that I met, I recognised none to say that I knew them; but I knew almost at first sight that I liked this one and disliked that one. And in every case alike, when I talked the matter over afterwards with Jane, she confirmed my suspicion that in my First State I had liked or disliked just those persons respectively. My brain was upset, but my heart remained precisely the same as ever.
On my second morning I went up to The Grange with her. The house was still unlet. Since the day of the murder, nobody cared to live in it. The garden and shrubbery had been sadly neglected: Jane took me out of the way as we walked up the path, to show me the place where the photographic apparatus had been found embedded in the grass, and where the murderer had cut his hands getting over the wall in his frantic agitation. The wall was pretty high and protected with bottle-glass. I guessed he must have been tall to scramble over it. That seemed to tell against Jane’s crude idea that a woman might have done it.