Some Must Watch - Ethel Lina White (best book club books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Ethel Lina White
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“You’ve very keen hearing,” said Helen, while she tried to think of some
explanation.
“I can see—hear—smell—feel—taste,” snapped Lady Warren, “and better
than you. Can you tell the difference between an underdone steak—and one
that is rare?”
“No,” replied Helen,
The next question raised a more unpleasant issue. “Could you aim at the
whites of a man’s eyes, and pot them?… What was that knocking?”
“It was the postman,” explained Helen, lying to meet the Professor’s
instructions. “Oates has been sent out, for fresh oxygen, as you know,
and I was somewhere else; so no one heard him, at first.”
“Disgraceful organization in my house,” stormed Lady Warren. “You
needn’t stare. It’s still my house. But I had servants in
livery… Only they all left… Too many trees…”
The whimper in her voice was not assumed, and Helen knew that the past
had gripped her again.
But even while she sympathized with this derelict of time, Lady Warren
became several degrees more vital than herself; for she heard footsteps
on the stairs which had been in audible to Helen, and her eyes
brightened in anticipation.
The door swung open, and the Professor entered the bedroom.
Helen was interested to notice how the sex-instinct triumphed, even on
the threshold of the grave, for Lady Warren’s reception of her stepson
was very different from her treatment of any woman.
“So, at last, you condescend to visit me?” she exclaimed. “You’re late,
tonight, Sebastian.”” “I’m sorry, madre,” apologized the Professor. He
stood—a tall, formal figure—at the foot of the bed—in the shadow of
the blue canopy.
“Don’t go,” he whispered to Helen. “I’m not remaining long.”
“But the post was late, too,” remarked Lady Warren, casually.
Helen’s respect for the Professor’s intelligence was in creased by his
immediate grasp of her subterfuge.
“He was delayed by the storm,” he explained.
“Why didn’t he push the letters through the slit?”
“There was a registered letter.”
“Hum… I want a cigarette, Sebastian.”
“But your heart? Is it wise?”
“My heart’s no worse than yesterday, and you didn’t make a dirge about
it then. Cigarette.”
The Professor opened his case. Helen watched the pair, as he leaned over
the bed, a lighted match in his fingers. The flame lit up the hollow of
his bony hand, and Lady Warren’s face.
Helen could tell that she was an experienced smoker, by the way she
savored her smoke before blowing it out in rings.
“News,” she commanded. In his dry voice, the Professor gave her a
summary, which reminded Helen of the Times leading article chopped up
into mincemeat.
“Politicians are all fools,” remarked Lady Warren. “Any murders?”
“I must refer you to Mrs, Oates. They are more in her line than mine,”
replied the Professor, ‘turning away, “If you will excuse me, madre, I
must get back to my work.”
“Don’t overdo it,” she advised. “You look very old fashioned about the
eyes.”
“I’ve not slept well.” The Professor smiled bleakly.
“Were it not that I know it to be a popular fallacy, I should say I had
not a single minute of sleep, during the night. But I must have lost
consciousness, for minutes at a stretch, for there was a gap in the
chimes of the clock.”
“Ah, you’re a clever man, Sebastian. The fools of nurses pretend that
they wake if one of my hairs falls out—but they sleep like pigs. I could
roll about, on wheels, and they wouldn’t stir. Blanche, too. She dropped
off, in her chair, when it was growing dusk, but she’d never admit it.”
“Then you couldn’t use her to establish an alibi,” said the Professor
lightly.
Helen wondered why the speech affected her disagreeably. Whenever she
was inside the blue room, its atmosphere seemed to generate poison-cells
in her brain.
“Where’s Newton?” asked the old lady.
“He’ll be coming up to see you, soon.”
“He’d better. Tell him life is short, so he’d better not be late for the
Grand Good Night.”
The Professor shook her formally by the hand and wished her a restful
night. In obedience to his glance, Helen followed him outside the door.
“Impress on the nurse, when she returns, not to let Lady Warren know
about—what happened tonight.”
“Yes, I understand,” nodded Helen.
When she came back, Lady Warren was watching her intently, with black
crescent eyes. “Come here,” she said. “Another murder has just been
committed. Have they found the body?”
THE SECOND GAP
As Helen listened, a herd of vague suspicions and fearsgalloped through
her mind. Lady Warren spoke with the ring of authority. She was not
guessing blindly; sheknew something—but not enough.
It was this half-knowledge which terrified Helen. Had any of Dr. Parry’s
audience told her about the murder she would naturally have heard, also,
about the discovery of the body in Captain Bean’s garden.
Nurse Barker, alone, stood outside the circle of informed listeners.
That fact did not necessarily assume the most sinister significance. To
use the Professor’s phrase, her alibi was established. When Ceridwen was
being done to death, she was bumping, in the old car, towards the
Summit, in Oates’ company.
Yet—if she had told her patient—she must have possessed some horrible
specialized knowledge of the movements, or intentions of the
maniac—which stopped short with the commission of the murder.
As Lady Warren gripped her wrist, Helen realized that it was useless to
lie.
“How do you know?” she asked.
The old woman did not reply. She gave a hoarse gasp. “Ah! Then they’ve
found her. That knocking was the Police. I knew it… Tell me all.”
“It was Ceridwen,” Helen said. “You remember? She used to dust under
your bed, and you objected to her feet. She was strangled in the
plantation, about tea-time, and carried afterwards to Captain Bean’s
garden. He found her.”
“Any clue?”
“One. She tore out a handful of fringe from the murderer’s white silk
scarf.”
“That’s all… Go away,” commanded Lady Warren. She pulled up the
sheet, and covered her face entirely, as though she were already dead.
On her guard against foxing, Helen sat by the fire, where she could
watch the bed. Although one fear had swallowed up the other—like two
large snakes snatching at the same play—she had an instinctive dread of
exposing her back to Lady Warren.
To steady her nerves, she made a mental inventory ef the situation
“There’s the Warren family—four; Mrs. Oates, Nurse Barker, Mr. Rice and
me. Eight of us. We ought to be more than a match for one man, even if
he’s as clever and cunning as the Professor says.”
Then her mind slipped back to a former situation, as nursery-governess
in the house of a financier. With her phonographic memory for phrases,
she reproduced one o his remarks to his wife.
“We want a merger. Separate interests are destructive.” Her face grew
graver as she thought of heated passions rising to boiling-point, and
the strangling complications of the triangle. Had she known of the
actual situation in the drawingroom, she would have been still more
worried.
Stephen was affected most adversely by the confinement. He was not only
specially rebellious against closed windows, ut he was nervous of
Simone. Her ardent glances made him uncomfortable, as he remembered the
Oxford episode, when he had been made the goat in another undergraduate
amour.
He remembered that when the wretched girl had screamed, Newton had been
first to come to her alleged rescue, and that he had always been
censorious in his judgment, and his refusal to believe in Stephen’s
innocence. Even then, the seeds of jealousy had been sown, although
Simone had only expressed vague admiration for a regular profile.
It had been perversity on his part which made him become the Professor’s
pupil, in order that his son might feel some sense of obligation—an
impulse which he had repented, since the visit of the young couple to
the Summit. He stopped his ceaseless pacing of the carpet, to address
Newton.
“With due respect, and all that sort of bilge, to your worthy father,
Warren, he doesn’t get our angle. Our generation isn’t afraid of any old
thing—dead, alive, or on the go. It’s being cooped up together, like
rats in adrain, that gets me.”
“But I’m adoring it,” thrilled Simone. “It’s like a lot of
married-couples being snow-bound, in one hut. When they come out, just
watch how they’ll pair off.”
She seemed lost to all sense of convention, as she staredat Stephen with
concentrated eagerness, as though they were together on a desert island.
Completely unselfconscious, she never realized the presence of an
audience. A spoilt brat, who’d been given the run of the toyshop to
sack, she simply could not understand why her desire for any special
plaything should not be instantly gratified.
“What are your plans, Stephen?” she asked.
“First of all,” he told her, “I shall fail in my Exam.”
“Fine advertisement for the Chief,” remarked Newton.
“After that,” continued Stephen, “I shall probably go to Canada, and
fell timber.”
“Your dog will have to go into quarantine,” Newton reminded him
spitefully.
“Then I’ll stay in England, just to please you, Warren. And I’ll come
and have tea with Simone, every Sunday afternoon, when you’re having
your nap.”
Newton winced, and then glanced at the clock.
“I must go up to Gran. Any use asking you to come with me, Simone? Just
to say ‘Good night’?”
“None.”
Raising his high shoulders, Newton shambled from the room.
When he had gone, Stephen made an instinctive movement towards the door.
Before he could reach it, however, Simone barred his way.
“No,” she cried. “Don’t go. Stay and talk… You were telling me
your plans—and they’re pathetic. Supposing you had money, what would you
do?”
“Supposing?” Stephen laughed. “I’d do the usual things. Sport. A spot of
travel. A flutter at Monte.”
“Does it appeal?”
“You bet. A fat lot of good it is talking about it.”
“But I have money.”
“How nice for you,” he said.
“Yes. I can do anything. It makes me secure.”
“No woman should feel too secure.” Stephen strained desperately to keep
the scene on a light level. “It makes her despise Fate.”
Simone appeared not to hear him, as she came closer and laid her hands
upon his shoulders.. “Steve,” she said, “when you go away, tomorrow,
I’m coming with you.”
“Oh, no, you’re not, my dear,” he said quickly.
“Yes,” she insisted. “I’m mad about you.”
Stephen licked his lips desperately.
“Look here,” he said, “you’re jumpy and all worked-up. You’re delirious.
You don’t mean one word. To begin with—there’s old Newton.”
“He can divorce me. I don’t care. If he doesn’t, I still don’t care.
We’d have lots of fun together.”
Stephen cast a hunted glance towards the door. Fright made him brutal.
“I don’t care for you,” he said.
The repulse had only the effect of making her more ardent.
“I’ll soon make you care for me,” she said confidently.
“You’re just a silly boy with inhibitions.”
Exultantly, she raised her face to his, her lips expectant of his kiss.
When he shook her off, the first shade of doubt crept into her eyes.
“There’s another woman,” she said. “That’s why.”
Desperation made him lie.
“Of course,” he told her. “There always is.”
He was both startled and relieved by her
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