The night shuts down. A messenger comes to Lady Helena saying the squire is much better, and she makes up her mind to remain all night. Inez comes, pale and calm, and also takes her place by the stricken man's bedside, a great sadness and pity for the first time on her face. The White Room is locked—Lady Helena keeps the key—one pale light burns dimly in its glittering vastness. And as the night closes in blackness over the doomed house, one of the policemen comes in haste to Superintendent Ferrick, triumph in his face. He has found the dagger.
Mr. Ferrick opens his eyes rather—it is more than he expected.
"A bungler," he mutters, "whoever did it. Jones, where did you find this?"
Jones explains.
Near the entrance gates there is a wilderness of fern, or bracken, as high as your waist. Hidden in the midst of this unlikely place Jones has found the dagger. It is as if the party, going down the avenue, had flung it in.
"Bungler," Superintendent Ferrick says again. "It's bad enough to be a murderer without being a fool."
He takes the dagger. No doubt about the work it has done. It is incrusted with blood—dry, dark, and clotted up to the hilt. A strong, sure hand had certainly done the deed. For the first time the thought strikes him—could a woman's hand, strike that one strong, sure, deadly blow? Miss Catheron is a fragile-looking young lady, with a waist he could span, slim little fingers, and a delicate wrist. Could she strike this blow—it is quite evident only one has been struck.
"And besides," says Superintendent Ferrick, argumentatively to himself, "it's fifteen minutes' fast walking from the house to the gates. Fifteen minutes only elapse between the time Nurse Pool sees her come out of the nursery and Maid Ellen finds her mistress murdered. And I'll be sworn, she hasn't been out of the house to-day. All last night they say she kept herself shut up in her room. Suppose she wasn't—suppose she went out last night and tried to hide it, is it likely—come, I say! is it likely, she would take and throw it right in the very spot, where it was sure to be found? A Tartar that young woman is, I have no doubt, but she's a long way off being a fool. She may know who has done this murder, but I'll stake my professional reputation, in spite of Mrs. Pool, that she never did it herself."
A thin, drizzling rain comes on with the night, the trees drip, drip in a feeble melancholy sort of way, the wind has a lugubrious sob in its voice, and it is intensely dark. It is about nine o'clock, when Miss Catheron rises from her place by the sick-bed and goes out of the room. In the corridor she stands a moment, with the air of one who looks, and listens. She sees no one. The dark figure of a woman, who hovers afar off and watches her, is there, but lost in a shadowy corner; a woman, who since the murder, has never entirely lost sight of her. Miss Catheron does not see her, she takes up a shawl, wraps it about her, over her head, walks rapidly along the passage, down a back stairway, out of a side door, little used, and so out into the dark, dripping, sighing night.
There are the Chesholm constabulary on guard on the wet grass and gravel elsewhere—there are none here. But the quiet figure of Jane Pool has followed her, like her shadow, and Jane Pool's face, peers cautiously out from the half-open door.