The Burning Court (10 page)

Mark did not shut him off, but was looking at him curiously. Henderson, with a blank and profound expression on his face, was looking steadily at the edge of the table, and rocking in a slow pontifical manner. Whether he believed more in danger from the dead or the living, it was plain that he had got a bad fright just the same.

“I want to ask you something,” said Mark, quickly. “Did Mrs. Henderson tell you the same story she told me?”

“About the woman in Mr. Miles’s room the night he died?” asked the other, not taking his eyes from the edge of the table.

“Yes.”

Henderson seemed to reflect. “Yes, she did,” he admitted.

“I told you a while ago,” Mark went on, turning to the other two, “that I wouldn’t begin with that story, or you might not believe me. But I can tell you now, now that I don’t know what to believe, myself.

“The important thing about the first part of it was (as I think I told you) that Mrs. Henderson had been away for a week, and didn’t get back home that night until we had already left for the masquerade. Consequently, she didn’t know what sort of costume either Lucy or Edith was wearing. … Wait a minute!” He looked at Henderson. “Unless you told her. Did you tell her, when she got back?”

“Me? No,” growled the other. “I didn’t even know what they were wearing, myself. I knew they was working on fancy-dress costumes. But fancy dress is fancy dress, and it all looks alike to me. No,
I
didn’t say anything.”

Mark nodded.

“So this is the story she told me. That night, the Wednesday night, she got back from the station about twenty-five minutes to ten. First of all she took a trip through the house, just to see that everything was in place. Everything was. She knocked at Miles’s door, and, though he didn’t open it, he answered her through it. Like Edith, she was worried. Clear out there at the back of the house—where we are now—nobody would be able to hear him unless he opened a window and shouted. Like Edith, she wanted to come and sit in the hall, or at least downstairs. Miles wouldn’t hear of it; apparently he was annoyed. He said something like ‘What the devil do you think I am, a helpless invalid? I keep telling everybody I’m quite all right. Go back to your own place.’ Which surprised her, because he was usually punctiliously polite to a point of the comic. She said: ‘Well, anyway, I’ll come back again at eleven o’clock and see how you are.’

“Now, she was coming back at eleven o’clock, in any case, and there hangs the story.

“For a good year, ever since it’s been on the air, there’s a certain radio-program which she’s listened to every Wednesday evening at eleven o’clock precisely. It’s called, I believe,” said Mark, with sardonic and full-blown hatred rather than amusement, “ ‘the Ingelford Soothing Hour of Sweet Music,’ being in fact half an hour, being anything but soothing, and advertising some sort of soothing syrup——”

Henderson blinked, looking genuinely shocked. “It’s nice music,” he said, with warmth. “It’s mighty nice music, and don’t you forget it. Sort of restful.” He appealed to the others. “What he means is, I’ve got a radio down here, and it’s a good one. But it’s been on the blink for a couple of weeks, and the Mrs. asked whether she could listen in to the Ingelford Soothing Hour on the radio up at the house.”

“That’s it,” said Mark. “And I think we’d better emphasize the Ingelford Soothing Hour, just to show there was no idea of—well, of the dark world, of anything wrong. Do you see? Suppose the powers of hell really could lay hold, suppose they could run on our smooth rails and get into our steam-heated lives past such a shower of banalities as Ingelford’s Soothing Hour… then I tell you the powers of hell must be strong and terrible. We huddle together in cities, we make bonfires of a million lights, we can get a voice from across the ocean to sing to us so that we needn’t feel lonely; it’s a sort of charmed circle, with no heaths to walk at night in the wind. But suppose you, Ted, in your apartment in New York; or you, Part, in your flat in London; or John Smith in his house anywhere in the world—suppose you went home at night, and opened the ordinary door, and heard another kind of voice. Suppose you didn’t want to look behind the umbrella-stand, or go down to attend to the furnace at night, because you might see something climbing up?”

“That,” said Partington, very distinctly, “is what I meant by brooding.”

“Ye-es, I imagine it is,” agreed Mark, nodding and grinning. He drew a deep breath. “All right. I’ll go back to the story. Here’s Mrs. H. hurrying up to the house, to be in time for her radio-program at eleven o’clock. I ought to explain that the radio is in a sun porch on the second floor. I won’t go into much detail, because I’m going to take you over the ground. I’ll just say that at one end of the sun porch there’s a French door opening on Miles’s room. We always asked him why he didn’t use it as a private sun porch of his own—we never used it a great deal, ourselves—but he never liked it, for some reason. As a rule he kept a thick curtain across the glass door. It’s an ordinary sort of porch, a whole lot more modern and modern-furnished than the rest of the house—wicker furniture, bright covers, plants, and the rest of it.

“So she went upstairs. She was afraid she was going to be late for the beginning of the program, so she didn’t loiter outside Miles’s door in the outer hall; she just knocked, and said, ‘All right?’ and when he answered, ‘Yes, yes, everything’s fine,’ she went on round the turn of the passage into the sun porch. Miles, I should mention, never objected to the radio being used; very often, again for some reason peculiar to himself, he said he liked it; so she had no scruples about that. She turned on the bridge lamp by the radio—which is at the end farthest away from Miles’s glass door—and sat down. And, in the few seconds’ interval while the set was warming up, she heard a woman’s voice speaking behind Miles’s glass door.

“Now, she was startled a good deal. She knew Miles’s usual dislike of having anybody in his room when he could avoid it; and, furthermore, she knew everybody in the house was out… or was supposed to be out. The first thought that came into her head (she told me next morning) was a strong suspicion of Margaret, the maid. She knew Miles’s reputation as an old rip. Margaret’s a good-looking girl; and Mrs. Joe swears she’s often thought Miles was casting an eye in her direction; and Margaret was sometimes allowed in the room when nobody else was. (That’s excluding the nurse, but then Miss Corbett wasn’t what you’d call a good-looker or inclined towards dalliance.) So there sat Mrs. Joe while the radio began to tinkle, glaring at it and putting together in a rush every suspicious circumstance: Miles’s anxiety to be left alone that night, his bad temper when somebody knocked at the door, and she—didn’t like it.”

Mark hesitated, and glanced shrewdly at Henderson before he spoke the last three words. Henderson was fidgeting.

“So she got up, as quietly as she could, and went over to the glass door. There was a faint sound as though the voice were still speaking, but the radio was on now, and she couldn’t make out anything at all. And then she saw a vantage-point. A heavy brown-velvet curtain was drawn close over the door, but it had been pulled a little crookedly when it was closed. At the extreme left of the door, rather high up, there was a chink where the curtain made a bulge; and another at the right of the door, lower down. By straining, you could see through either of them with one eye. She looked first through the left-hand one, and then moved across and peeped through the other. There was no light in the sun porch except that bridge lamp at the other end, so there wasn’t much chance of her being seen from the other side. … Well, what she saw put her moral scruples at rest and convinced her that nothing of sexual luridness was going on. She had expected to find an appropriate through-the-keyhole drama, on patterned lines of wifely horror; maybe it was a let-down, but somehow the lines had got all crooked. …

“Through the chink to the left, she could see nothing except the wall directly opposite her across the room, rather high up. In that wall (which is the rear wall of the house) there are two windows. Between the windows stands a very high-backed curious Carolean chair; and on the wall, which is panelled in walnut, hangs a small Greuze head of which Uncle Miles was fond. She could see the chair and had a good view of the painting; but no human beings. Then she looked through the chink at the right.

“This time she saw Miles and some one else. There was the bed, its head against the wall on her right-hand, its side facing her. The only light in the room was that same dim shaded light over the head of the bed. Miles was sitting up in bed, in his dressing-gown, with an open book face downwards on his lap; and he was looking straight towards the glass door in the direction of Mrs. Joe—but not at her.

“Facing him, her back to the glass door, stood a small woman. Remember that the light was dim, and she was in silhouette against it. She did not move; she was a kind of cloud; but it seemed a trifle strange that she did not move
at all.
Still, Mrs. Joe was close enough to make out every detail of her costume. And she describes it simply as ‘just exactly like that one in the gallery… you know.’ She explained which one she meant, that picture supposed to be the Marquise de Brinvilliers, but yet she would not mention it directly by name; just as you”—he looked at Henderson—”will never say, ‘the crypt.’ but only ‘that place.’

“Now, what puzzled me for a second was why she should have thought there was
anything
queer about it, anything at all. She knew that both Lucy and Edith had gone to a masquerade that night, even though she didn’t know what costumes they wore: the natural thing would be to think immediately it was one of them. And, she admitted to me, she did think it presently, and realized what it must have been. What I want to emphasize is that it didn’t strike her as at all weird, but only with some momentary idea that ‘it looked awful funny, somehow.’ And when I tried to discover what this funniness consisted in, she thought it might partly have been Miles’s expression. And that expression, distinct where he sat back by the dim light, was fear.”

There was a pause, and through the open windows they could hear the vast rustle of the trees.

“But, my God! man,” said Stevens, keeping his voice down as well as he could, “what about the woman? What else about her? Couldn’t Mrs. Henderson see anything else about her? For instance—was she blonde or brunette?”

“That’s it, you see. She couldn’t even tell that,” Mark replied in an even voice. He clasped his hands in front of him. “It appears that she had on her head some kind of thing made of a gauze material… not to cover her face, but to go over her hair and hang down the back a little way… not very big. It went down as far as the back of the square-cut dress, which was medium low. And again (mind you, I’m only quoting Mrs. H’s own hazy ideas) there seemed ‘something awful funny’ about that. It didn’t seem like any right kind of head covering; more like a misplaced scarf. All these, I should judge from the narrative, were quick ideas: for it also struck her that there was something also funny about the woman’s neck. I had to drag it out of the witness, and it wasn’t till several days afterwards that she came round and hinted at it.

“The idea was that the woman’s neck might not have been completely fastened on.”

Stevens was conscious of all things sharply: of the dingy-papered room and the once-fine leather furniture with brown seams, which he supposed had formerly been used at the house; of the many domestic photographs; of their coffee-cups, and the pile of gardening catalogues on the table; above all, of Mark’s clean hook-nosed face and light-blue eyes, with the sandy brows meeting in the middle, at the head of it. The lace curtains blew a little at the windows. It was fine weather.

He was also conscious that Henderson’s face had gone a muddy color, and that Henderson’s rocking-chair was nearly over against the radio.

“Greatgoddalmighty,” said Henderson, not above a whisper. “She didn’t tell me that.”

“No, you can bet she didn’t,” said Partington, viciously. “Mark,” he went on, “for your own good, I ought to hit you in the jaw. For your own good, to stop this poisonous rubbish——”

“Look out for squalls if you do,” Mark said, mildly. He did not now seem under so great a nervous strain; he was calm and puzzled and a little tired. “It may be rubbish, Part. As a matter of fact, I think it is, myself. I’m only telling you what was told and suggested to me, and trying to make it as unemotional as a case-history: if I can. Because, whatever it is, I’ve got to find a way out of it. … Shall I keep on going? Or, if you prefer, shall I get it all out of my system?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose you’d better,” Partington told him. He sat down again. “And you’re right about one thing. If you had told us this story early in the evening, it’s a question whether you’d have got help.”

“I know that.—Again, to soften this business a little, we must all understand that it didn’t hit Mrs. Henderson, or me, with such a complete shock as my telling it may do. I mean that it wasn’t so bald as that. Things grow. Now you can say, if you want to, that I’m spinning a yarn because Lucy herself wore a dress like that; and if the police ever took this thing up they would have only one idea. Yes, you can say it, but I don’t think you’ll believe it.

“As I say, Mrs. Henderson saw the woman there: an ordinary figure, whom she thought to be Lucy or Edith. She didn’t think much more than that, except about the funniness. So she walked away, and went back to her chair by the radio to listen to the Soothing Hour. After all, she couldn’t admit she’d been peeping through a curtain, by rapping on the glass and singing out, ‘Is that you, Mrs. Despard?’ Still, I gather that she wasn’t altogether soothed. So when the quarter-hour interval came, for the advertising, and somebody began extolling the benefits of Ingelford’s Soothing Syrup, she went back to the glass door again, and looked through the right-hand chink.

“The woman in the Marquise de Brinvilliers dress had moved, yes. But she seemed to have moved only six inches forward, towards the bed, and she was motionless again. It was as though she were making a slow progress; and the watcher had not
seen
her move. Also, she was turned just a trifle more to the right, so that her right hand could be seen. This hand held a silver cup, presumably the one I
later found in the cupboard, and held it still. Mrs. Joe thought that there was no longer an expression of fear on Miles’s face, which reassured her: she says there was no expression at all.