“It looks to me,” said Reeves, “a sad face—the face of a woman who’s had a good deal of trouble. I feel somehow that the serious pose of the mouth was natural to her.”
“I don’t think that’s the ordinary impression you’d get from her face,” put in Marryatt.
“How on earth do you know?” asked Reeves, staring.
“Well, you see, Campbell showed me this later photograph of her, and it wasn’t at all like that.”
“Well,” suggested Gordon, “it’s not much good discussing the portrait if Reeves is going to see the lovely original tomorrow. I want to know what’s wrong with a game of bridge?”
“Good idea,” said Marryatt, “it’ll take our minds off the murder. You know, I think you fellows are getting rather fanciful about the whole thing.”
“All right,” said Reeves, “my room, though, not downstairs. What’s the good of having one’s own fireplace if one can’t light a fire in October?”
Reeves’ room deserves, perhaps, a fuller description than it has hitherto been given. It had been the best bedroom of the old Dower-house, and for some reason had been spared when several smaller rooms had been divided up, at the time of the club’s installation. It was, consequently, a quite unspoiled piece of early Tudor architecture; there were latticed windows with deep recesses; dark, irregular beams supported the white-plastered ceiling; the walls were oak-panelled; the fireplace open and of genuine old brick. When the fire, reluctant after long desuetude, had been induced to crackle, and threw flickering reflections where the shade of the electric light gave subdued half tones, there was an air of comfort which seemed to dispel all thought of detective problems, of murderers stalking the world unpunished, of the open grave that waited in Paston Oatvile churchyard.
Gordon put down the photograph on a jutting cornice that went round the panelling. “There, Reeves,” he said, “you shall sit opposite the lady, and derive inspiration from her. I cannot ask you to hope that she will smile upon your efforts, but it ought to be an encouragement.”
They were soon immersed in that reverential silence and concentration which the game fosters: and if Miss Rendall-Smith’s portrait did not receive much of their attention, it is probable that the lady herself, had she been present, would have been treated with little more ceremony. Reeves, however, was bad at taking his mind off a subject, and when, as dummy, he was given a short interval of unrepose, his eyes strayed to the photograph anew. Was this the face, perhaps, that had lured Brotherhood to his strange doom? Was she even an accomplice, burdened now with the participation of a guilty secret? Or was she the sufferer by the crime; and did she wait vainly for news of Davenant, little knowing that it was Davenant who lay waiting for burial at Paston Whitchurch? Poor woman, it seemed likely in any case that she would have much to bear—was it decent to inflict on her a detective interview and a series of importunate questions? He crushed down the insurgent weakness: there was no other way for it, she must be confronted with the facts. The face looked even more beautiful as you saw it in the firelight, shaded from the glare of the lamp. He strolled over to look at it again just as the last trump was led.
“Good God!”
The others turned, in all the irritation of an interrupted train of thought, to find him staring at the photograph as if in horror. Then he stepped quickly across to the lamp, and turned it sideways so as to throw the light full on the wall. And then they too turned a little pale. The photograph had smiled.
There was, to be sure, only the faintest flicker of a smile on the lips; you could not give any formula of it or trace the lines of it. And yet it was the simultaneous impression of these four men that the whole character, the whole impression of the face before them had changed while they had played three hands of bridge. The whole face was indefinably more human and more beautiful; but you could not say why.
“Oh, for God’s sake let’s give the beastly thing up!” cried Marryatt. “It doesn’t do to meddle with these things; one doesn’t know what one’s up against. Reeves, I know it hurts your vanity to leave an inquiry half-finished, but I’m sure it’s a mistake to go on. Brotherhood, you know—he wasn’t quite canny; I always thought there was something uncanny about him. Do let’s give it up.”
“The thing isn’t possible,” said Reeves slowly. “It’s the difference of the light, I think; the light wasn’t so strong downstairs. It’s funny how one can imagine these things.”
“I was never in a haunted house myself,” said Carmichael, “but I remember very well the College used to own land at Luttercombe, where the De Mumfords lived, don’t you know, and our old Bursar always insisted that he heard screams in the night when he slept there. I don’t believe in these things myself, though; fancy can play such extraordinary tricks.”
“But look here, we all noticed the difference,” objected Marryatt.
“Well, there is such a thing as collective hallucination. Somebody tells us the face looks grave, and our imagination reads gravity into it; and then somebody says it’s changed, and we can’t see the gravity there any longer.”
“That’s it,” said Reeves, who was pouring himself out a stiff whisky-and-soda. “It’s collective hallucination. Must
