St. Peter's Finger

flap-jack from which she had powdered her nose some three minutes previously.

“I can’t understand it,” she said. Mr. Grogan, who had always regarded Mrs. Bennett’s remarks about the entail as giving a very fair view of women’s general incapability of grasping even the less abstruse points of testamentary law, shook his fine head sympathetically.

“Well, there it is,” he said. He smiled, and made a joke. “You would have to prove that the young lady murdered her cousin before you could justly claim the estate for your stepdaughter, my dear lady.”

Mrs. Maslin went home very thoughtful. As soon as dinner was over, and the servants had cleared, and coffee was on the table, she said to her husband:

“I’ve been thinking about the death of poor little Ursula.”

“Seen Grogan this afternoon?”

“Well, yes, I did see him. He wasn’t particularly helpful.”

“Well, face the facts, my dear. How could he be?”

“Percival,” said Mrs. Maslin, laying down her coffee spoon and speaking with great distinctness, “do you think there’s anything at all in Grogan’s suspicion that Ulrica killed her little cousin?”

“Good Lord, no! Why, Nessa, what a terrible idea! Damn’ silly, too. Surely Grogan couldn’t have said such a thing?”

“Didn’t he, though? And, you know, there might be something in it! A most extraordinary girl!”

“What nonsense, my dear! Face the facts! The girl’s got religion. You told me so yourself.”

“I know, and that’s just what I mean.”

“Look here, Nessa,” said Mr. Maslin, for once asserting himself, “I don’t believe it, and I won’t have you suggest it. Grogan must be mad. I’d as soon believe you killed the child yourself!” ( 5 )

Thursday

To say that Mrs. Waterhouse loved her work would be not so much to contradict facts as to avoid them. Her work was a refuge, and she buried herself in it much as an ostrich will bury its head in sand. But it had always been understood, except by the victims themselves, that primary school teachers loved their work, and Mrs. Waterhouse, far from being irritated by the assertion (which had been made in her hearing by her former headmistress and by various committee members, as they were called), fostered it. It gave her, in the eyes of those who supervised and employed her, a palpable raison d‘etre which she felt she was the safer for possessing.

The truth was that she neither loved nor hated her work; she merely did it. To her it was a job, like other jobs; a good deal more tiresome, perhaps, and a little better paid (not at the convent, certainly, but in the old days, before her marriage) than other jobs she might have got, but a job, nevertheless; not a vocation, a hobby, a life- work or a missionary enterprise; merely a job, and one that she did very well.

When Mrs. Bradley discovered Mrs. Waterhouse— on the Thursday, the day following that upon which she had dined with the school—it was turned ten minutes past twelve, and Mrs. Waterhouse was in the middle of a weltering democracy of four- and five-year-old children, some of them orphans, some of them of noble and one of royal blood. She was taking (like and unlike Miss Bonnet) a physical training lesson. Little mats were laid upon the netball court, but the children had abandoned these, and, when Mrs. Bradley first saw them, were fiendishly scrumming for a small light football, of the kind known as a handball. All were shrieking their heads off.

Mrs. Waterhouse clapped her hands, picked up the only naughty child to prevent her from grabbing the ball when everyone else had obediently let it alone, and turned to Mrs. Bradley.

“Good morning,” she said, and as she said it she suffered a sudden, unceremonious return of a peculiar feeling she had always experienced in the old days when she knew that His Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools had arrived on the premises and were seeking whom they might devour.

“My name is Bradley. I am the mother of Ferdinand Lestrange,” said Mrs. Bradley equably. Mrs. Waterhouse went white. Mrs. Bradley could see a vein throbbing in her temple. She said, in the voice of one speaking from a parched, constricted throat:

“Oh—yes? I’m—I’m glad to meet you. Would you like me to take you over to Mother Saint Francis?”

“No. I’ve seen her. I’ve been here since Monday afternoon. I heard you were here, and I thought my son would be interested to know that I had seen you,” Mrs. Bradley went on, in a false, district-visitor voice.

“It’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. Waterhouse. “It’s—I owe your son a great deal—in fact, my life.”

“I know. He always believed you innocent, of course.”

“Yes, but I wasn’t,” said Mrs. Waterhouse suddenly. “He couldn’t have thought so really.” She put down the only naughty child, and it immediately ran to another little girl and pulled her hair.

“That’s what she’d have loved to have done to me while I had her close enough,” Mrs. Waterhouse remarked more naturally.

“Is she an orphan?”

“Oh, lor’, no. She’s the Grand Duchess Natalie —well, over here we call her Smith, because nobody’s supposed to know her name. There’s a rumour that her family know all about the disappearance of that wonderful pearl, the —what’s-it-called?—the—I don’t know—began with P—a French name, somebody told me. It was worth about forty thousand pounds before the war, and got lost from a Russian museum.”

She looked at Mrs. Bradley with the expression of one who seeks feverishly to postpone an evil moment, and then flew to separate the two children, who were now screaming and fighting.

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Bradley, when Mrs. Waterhouse came back again with Natalie whilst the others played nicely together with the ball and two or three hoops which they dumbly gave up to one another on demand (as they had been taught, Mrs. Bradley supposed), “that you never let these children out of your sight?”

“That I do not,” Mrs. Waterhouse replied. “Why, that Natalie would tear the hair off little Pamela, if I left them, and the orphans would teach the others naughty words.”