why I came to you, Sir Henry tells me you know all this group? You've travelled with 'em, know what they're like… What? No?'
'I've travelled with them. I'm not at all sure I know what they're like.'
Masters said that was better yet; he shook hands cordially, and said he must go to see how Inspector Potter was handling matters. When he had gone, Bennett considered Masters' suggestion about John Bohun, and knew that it was absurd. But it worried and depressed him. Finding a bell-cord beside the fireplace, he summoned a flurried Thompson and suggested that he would like to find his room.
After more crooked passages and one magnificent low staircase, he found himself sitting on the bed of a very large and very cold room opening off a broad gallery on the second floor of the house. The whole place had the usual disconsolate early-morning look. What was worse, as they passed along the dusky gallery he could have sworn he heard somebody sobbing in one of the rooms. Thompson had obviously noticed it, though he pretended otherwise. He said that there would be breakfast in half an hour. The man's swollen jaw (hadn't Bohun said something about a toothache?) was paining him, and the news of the murder must clearly have torn the last rags of his self-possession. When he heard that faint sobbing, he began speaking loudly as though to drown it out; stabbing his finger towards a door at the end of the gallery, and repeating, 'King Charles's room, sir. King Charles's room. Now occupied by Mr. John!' in the fashion of a hysterical guide. The gallery ran the width of the house, and King Charles's room was just opposite the one to which Bennett had been shown.
Sitting now on a bed with a shaky-looking tester bulking overhead, Bennett scowled at a pitcher of hot water in a washbowl nearby. Damn their water in pitchers and their asthmatic fires and their open windows. Sybaritic American, eh? Well, why not? At least his bags had been deftly unpacked. He found his shaving-tackle, and over the wash-stand discovered a small mirror hung at a neck-breaking angle, out of which a hideous Coney-Island reflection leered at him from the wavy glass. This was worse than waking up with a hangover. Where was the old sense of humor? Hunger, loss of sleep, horrors: and across the hallway was a room where somebody had tried to throw Marcia Tait down a flight of stone stairs
Then he heard it. He heard the sound, the cry, whatever it was, that trembled somewhere along the gallery outside. The razor slipped out of his fingers. For a moment he felt sheer unreasoning terror.
A scuffling noise, and then silence.
He had to do something as an outlet for anger, or fear, or both. Groping after a dressing-gown, he twisted himself into it. The thing would squeeze up like a rolled umbrella when you tried to jam your hands through the armholes; you stepped on the trailing end of the waist-cord and pulled the whole thing out. He got it over his shoulders somehow, and opened the door to peer into the gallery.
Nothing at least, nothing of visual fear or danger. He was at the end of the gallery, where there was a big latticed window looking down on the roof of the porte-cochere. Smoky light showed him the faded red runner of carpet stretching away fifty feet to the head of the stairs, the line of doors in low oaken walls, the gilt frames and claw-footed chairs. He looked across at the door directly opposite. There was no reason to suppose the noise had come from King Charles's room, except that he associated it with all the stealth moving in this house. It was Bohun's room; but Bohun could not be there. He moved across and knocked. Then the big door creaked under his hand.
In a twilight of curtains that were nearly drawn across deep embrasures, he saw its vastness. He saw a glimmer of silver vases, a tall hearse of a bed-canopy, and the reflection of his own face in a mirror. The bed was made, but Bohun's clothes were flung about on chairs and bureau-drawers hung drunkenly open. Instinctively he was peering round for that hidden door to the staircase.. This room occupied the angles of the house that looked down on the drive and the lawns towards the rear. The staircase, then, would be in the wall at his left hand; probably, between those two windows. That was where —.
He heard the noise again. It was behind him; it was in the gallery somewhere; behind one of those doors that locked up the White Priory's secrets. He moved a little way up the gallery, and a door opened almost in his face. It opened as quietly as the girl who came out, although she was breathing hard and her hands fumbled at her throat.
She did not see him. From the room behind her he heard a curious mutter and stir, as of a sick person, before she closed the door. She bent her head forward, slid against the wall, and then straightened up.
As she took her hands away, just before they looked at each other in the gloom, he saw the bruises on her throat. And he saw Marcia Tait's face.
CHAPTER SIX
'Who Walked, but Left no Footprint'
He stood a little to one side, loosing down at her, so that the gray light should fall on her face. Curiously enough, in the first utter blankness of the shock, he did not think of ghosts or even of a hallucination whereby he saw Marcia's face everywhere. He only thought, with a dazed feeling of relief, that the whole farce of a murder was a monstrous joke after all, a hoodwinking and a premeditated nightmare; and he wanted to laugh.
Then he saw that it was not Marcia, which was even a worse shock. In the next moment he wondered that he had seen any resemblance at all in these white features crossed by the shadow of the lattice. This girl was smaller and slighter; her dark hair was caught back carelessly behind her ears; and she wore a careless gray jumper and black skirt. Yet for one instant an outline of her cheek, a trick of gesture, a heavy liddedness of the dark eyes — it had been there.
But he forgot that in the knowledge that she was hurt. He heard her voice, which was not Marcia Tait's.
'Jo-' she said, and swallowed hard. She was looking up eagerly. 'John? You haven't been to see- No what am I saying? About Louise. It's all right; really it is. It was the shock. I've quieted her. She didn't know me. She was hysterical, after last night. She tried to. ' Speaking hurt her. The hands went to her throat again; she fought down nausea, and tried to smile. 'But I wish you'd get Dr. Wynne to come up and-'
A pause.
'You're not my uncle! Who are you?'
'Steady,' Bennett urged, and felt somehow guilty. 'It's all right. Word of honor, it's all right! I'm a friend of your uncle. My name's Bennett. Look here, you're hurt. Let me..’
'No. I'm all right. It's Louise. Oh! Bennett! Yes, I know who you are. Louise spoke about you. You're the man who took her father round New York. What are you doing?' She moved swiftly in front of the door. 'I say, you mustn't go in there! Really you mustn't. She's got her nightgown on.'
'Well, what of it?' said Bennett, so startled that he pulled short. 'Anybody who goes berserk and tries to strangle.. that's what she did, wasn't it?'
Impossible to imagine this. He remembered that freckled, rather dowdy, mechanically-smiling girl who was always the background for Lord Canifest; who was quietly efficient, who expertly managed his correspondence and was not permitted a second cocktail.
'Berserk?' repeated Katharine Bohun, although it hurt her to speak. She tried to laugh, weakly. 'Louise? She can't help it; she's hysterical. After what happened last night oh, please don't be a fool! I don't feel especially well myself. '
'I know you don't,' said the other grimly, and bent forward as she tried to support herself against the wall. 'What on earth are you doing now? Let me down! Let me down, do you hear?'
He carried a rather dazed and somewhat frightened young lady, who asked him if he had gone mad, straight to his own room, and pushed open the door with his foot. Then, because it was comfortable and also because he wanted a look at her in better light, he put her down on the cushions of the window-seat in its deep embrasure. Without looking at her he rummaged in a suitcase after the bottle of brandy he found it advisable to carry in England as preparedness against the inexorable earliness of closing-hour. When he returned she was leaning back against the comer of the window with an expression in which weariness blurred out even anger or relief.
'No,' she said, rather quickly. 'I'm all right. No brandy, thanks.'
'Drink it! — Why not?'
It was, he thought, probably utter exhaustion that made her tell the truth then; she spoke involuntarily, and in spite herself.
