She seated herself by the casement with a resigned air, as much as to say, “Are these young men never going?” Her long, thin fingers busied themselves in plucking the faded leaves from the pelargoniums which made a bank of colour on the broad window ledge.
“You were at home at the time of the murder, I suppose, Mrs. Porter?” said Cuthbert, after a pause, during which he had occupied himself in looking at the water-colour sketches on the walls, insignificant enough, but good of their kind, and arguing a cultivated taste in the person who collected them.
“I am never away from home.”
“And you heard and saw nothing out of the common course—you have no suspicion of any one?”
“Do you suppose if I had it would not have been made known to the police immediately after the murder? Do you think I should hoard and treasure up a suspicion, or a scrap of circumstantial evidence till you came to ask me for it?” she said, with suppressed irritation.
“Pray forgive me. I had no idea of offending you by my question. It is natural that any one coming to Cheriton Chase for the first time should feel a morbid interest in that mysterious murder.”
“If you had heard it talked about as much as I have you would be as weary of the subject as I am,” said Mrs. Porter, rather more courteously. “I have discussed it with the local police and the London police, with his Lordship, with the doctor, with Mr. Dalbrook’s father, with Lady Carmichael, with Lady Jane Carmichael, these having all a right to question me—and with a good many other people in the neighbourhood who had no right to question me. I answer you as I answered them. No, I saw nothing, I heard nothing on that fatal night—nor in the week before that fatal night, nor at any period of Lady Carmichael’s honeymoon. Whoever the murderer was he did not come in a carriage and summon my servant to unlock the gate for him. The footpath through the Park is open all night. There was nothing to hinder a stranger coming in and going out—and the chances were a thousand to one, I fancy, against his being observed—once clear of the house. That is all I know about it.”
“And as an old resident upon the property you have no knowledge of any one who had a grudge against Lord Cheriton or his daughter—such a feeling as might prompt the murder of the lady’s husband as a mode of retaliation upon the lady or her father?”
“I know no such person, and I have never considered the crime from such a point of view. It is too far-fetched a notion.”
“Perhaps. Yet where a crime is apparently motiveless the mainspring must be looked for below the surface. Only a far-fetched theory can serve in such a case.”