CHAPTER IX

Evelyn and Philip

Evelyn did not go downstairs again that evening; nor did she make any attempt to see Celia. She sent word that she was worn out, would just like some dinner brought her, and did not wish otherwise to be disturbed. She was very tired physically; mentally she was strained and harassed whichever way her thoughts turned. For some hours she tossed restlessly in the vain attempt to escape from them; several times she made up her mind to have nothing further to do with investigations. Each time she had played detective her reason had demanded of her more than her heart could yield. But she was in the grip of her mind; it would not let her leave bad alone, and always she continued to hope, to try and force herself to believe that, if she only had eyes to see it, some other and less terrible solution lay before her.

Already she had come upon two almost irreconcilable sets of facts. It was possible that John had been let in that night by Celia—she remembered that Celia had gone up early, pleading headache, and had said good-night, telling her not to come in again—but it did not seem possible that after the tragedy Celia could have let John out and then laid a false trail: it asked for greater resolution and coolness than Evelyn had ever seen Celia show.

Evelyn taxed her memory to recall exactly how Celia had looked and spoken when she broke the news to her. She had been, it seemed looking back, fearful, apprehensive; she had known something, enough to be afraid, not enough to know of what to be afraid. Yet John had been let out, the window had been barred, a false trail had been laid—by whom? Evelyn’s mind swung back in spite of her utmost resistance to the one other person who had admittedly been awake, Philip Castle. Suddenly she felt the whole truth was laid before her. Celia had known that John was coming that night to see his father—perhaps she had arranged it, hoping against hope no doubt that Sir Roger would find it at last in his heart to forgive—there had been a quarrel, John had killed his father, accidentally she was sure, and Philip—it was Philip who was doing all he could to screen him. At last on this thought, much less terrible than any yet she had found, she fell asleep.

She awoke the next morning in a calmer and more decided frame of mind. She was confident that she had hit upon the truth, and was only anxious to have it confirmed. One thought made her pause; Humblethorne knew of John and suspected Philip; his view of the affair corresponded rather closely with her own—only he read it as murder and she did not. How were they to prove that it was not? The broken window, clever as it was, had not thrown Humblethorne off the track, but he had missed its true significance. If he once grasped that, it might be hard, perhaps impossible, to prove that there had been no intention in the death. But there might be some fresh fact still to be discovered to help that proof. Evelyn smiled a little: wearily at her many resolutions to have nothing more to do with investigation: the spirit of it had caught hold of her. There was one thing now she did not understand, the first thing which had really set her feet towards discovery, and that was the shape of the stain on the bottom of the cigarette box. Why had Philip—or perhaps John—moved it? For moved it had been, she felt sure. Had one of them kicked it as they ran to Sir John? Probably it would not help at all to know, but it annoyed her; it was the one thing still concealed from her.

As soon as she had had breakfast, she got up, dressed, and went downstairs. No one was in the hall, but, recognizing what an enormity she had committed in lifting the sheet and fingering the cigarette box, she was specially careful to come down the further side of the stairs. The sheet which usually lay more to the right was now a little in the way of her passing: to steady herself more surely in stepping round she put her hand on the heavy wooden cornice which ran along the wall at approximately the same height as the balusters on the other side; and as she stepped round and rather dragged her hand, she ran a small splinter into her thumb. She had gone several steps along the hall towards the passage, when it suddenly struck her as odd that a polished cornice should have such a thing as a splinter. She walked back and carefully examined the cornice. Level with the third step, on the under side of the cornice she found that the wood had received a blow. The projection of the cornice above kept it in shadow and on the mahogany it was hardly noticeable unless the eye was actually looking for it, but direct examination revealed a dent about a third of an inch across and half an inch deep; the edges where the polish was crushed were fresh.

“Something else I don’t understand,” she muttered to herself; “now what in the world did that?”

She spent several minutes examining cornice and wall, both above and below, for some distance on either side of the dent, but found nothing, and finally decided that there was nothing more to find.

“Probably that has nothing whatever to do with it and I am vexing my brains to no purpose,” she thought as she desisted from her examination and went along, according to her original intention, to the study.

Here, as she hoped, she found Philip Castle, who was engaged in going through and docketing the dead man’s papers ready for the perusal of the family solicitor. His face brightened when he saw who his visitor was, and he rose from his chair with a cordial greeting—

“Why, Evelyn,” he exclaimed, “come in! I don’t feel as if I’d seen you for a hundred years.”

“I’ve come—on business, Philip,” she said with some hesitation: he looked now so different from the white, excited man she had been recalling for so many troubled hours. He had recovered his self-possession, and, though still looking tired and a little shaken, was apparently much as usual.

“Oh!” he said with a slight frown of surprise. “Well, come in and sit down, won’t you?” He placed the armchair for her as he spoke.

She shut the door and sat down. Now that she was here she found words difficult; he saw that she was troubled, and sat down himself gravely to hear what it was she wanted to tell him.

“Philip,” she said at last, “we’ve known each other a long time.”

“Yes, indeed,” he assented warmly, wondering what was coming.

“Is there—is there anything about this horrible business you can tell me that you can’t tell anybody else?”

He started from his chair. “Evelyn!” he exclaimed, “What do you mean?”

His astonishment at her question sounded so genuine that she in her turn stared at him in blank surprise.

“Don’t you know who did it?” she asked, almost anxiously.

“Know who did it?” he repeated. “Know who did it? Evelyn!” Reproach, bewilderment was in his voice.

“You don’t?” she cried.

“What does such a question mean?” he asked, looking at her in a strange way. “Why should I know? Is it a way of saying you think I did it?”

“No, no!” she answered. “I don’t think you did it.”

“Thank heaven for that! But you think I know who did it?”

She looked at him miserably. “I did think so,” she said in a low voice; her theory, the one theory to which after hours of restless, unhappy doubt she could fit without too great pain the facts her reason had given her, was crumbling in ruins.

He began to walk in extreme agitation up and down the room; he was obviously cut to the heart by her thought. She watched him and could think of nothing except that she had been wretchedly wrong as usual. Presently he stopped in front of her and said quite quietly:

“Evelyn, as you said at first, we have known each other a long time; d’you mind telling me why you thought I knew?”

She felt herself placed by her own action in a dreadful dilemma: she could not tell him the torment of doubt through which she had passed, about Celia and about him; yet she recognized the justice of the question and the moderation with which he spoke.

“You have a right to know, Philip,” she said at length; “don’t imagine it was easy for me to think so; I’ve been suffering pretty acutely this last twenty-four hours. But partly by accident and partly by using my intelligence I have found out several things, and the only conclusion I could come to—a horrid one, but less horrid than some I’ve been fighting against—was that you knew and were trying to screen somebody.” She saw his lips forming into a question and added hurriedly, “Don’t ask me whom, Philip, please. I may be wrong, as I was about you. It isn’t anybody in the house.”

“It is difficult to understand,” he said slowly. “What can you have found out to make you conclude such a thing?”

She longed to tell him everything; but if he knew nothing—and all her faith in him now was regained—then she was back in her former doubt, and she could not utter a word to bring Celia’s name into such a thing. She might be utterly wrong, she hoped with her whole heart she was. But somebody knew, somebody had opened the shutters and closed them again afterwards. Whatever faith she had in her friends, she could not lay that irrefutable fact aside.

“I wish I felt I could tell you,” she said as these thoughts swept over her; “I hate evasions. But if it is not your secret, and I know now it is not, then, well, the less said about it the better, till it’s not guesswork but certainty.”

“You are very mysterious,” he said.

“Am I?” she answered wearily. “Yes, I’m afraid I am. And I am very worried; it is all so dreadful, I wish I could keep my mind quiet: it will fly round and round and try against my will to solve what it does not understand.”

“I didn’t expect you to doubt me, Evelyn,” he said, following out his own thought. “With others it’s different: that ass, Birts, for instance, is eyeing me this morning as if I were a rattlesnake.”

“Don’t be angry with me,” she exclaimed; “I believe you absolutely. If I did think you knew, I was sure you were acting from a generous motive in pretending you didn’t. I thought some one must have come in and then there had been a quarrel and an accident, and you wanted to save an unhappy man from consequences he never intended, and you could not tell me because it didn’t involve you alone. That would have been like you, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said a little awkwardly; “it doesn’t sound so bad, put that way.”

“And that is the way I did put it,” she answered quickly; “I know you. But, Philip, these men don’t, and it is natural, I suppose, that they should think differently. You have told them everything, I suppose?”

“They have questioned me to their heart’s content,” he replied.

“What I mean is—suppose they decide that you know, even that you helped the other escape, isn’t there some way to prove conclusively that you didn’t?”

He changed colour a little. “Good heavens, Evelyn!” he cried. “What a horrible question! No, there isn’t, I was quite alone. I can only say I found him as I told them; I can’t prove it.”

She became suddenly thoughtful. “No, I see that,” she said; “but as long as there is nothing to seem to prove the contrary, it doesn’t matter what they think. You didn’t,” she asked the question hesitatingly, “move the cigarette box or anything, did you?”

He looked at her blankly as he exclaimed, “Move the cigarette box! Evelyn, what on earth have you in your mind? Why do you ask?”

“Because it was moved and very soon after Sir Roger was killed.”

“How can you possibly know that?” he asked, taken aback at the quiet assertion.

“I have seen it since,” she answered, a little confused; “and the marks on it make me think that it was put down on the blood, after it had stopped flowing but before it dried.”

“What an extraordinary girl you are!” he said in a tone divided between admiration and amazement. “And that made you think I’d moved it? No, I didn’t touch it. I touched nothing till Birts and the doctor had come. Oh!” he cried, his face lighting up as if a sudden light had broken in upon him, “I think I understand why Birts is looking at me like that this morning. After he’d finished making his notes and all that, I asked if I couldn’t move the body into the smoking-room; it seemed so dreadful to have it lying there all day: I was afraid you would come down and see it. He was very doubtful, but I persuaded him at last to let me. And I expect that other fellow was annoyed he hadn’t seen it where I found it, and told Birts he oughtn’t to have allowed it, and Birts is working off his annoyance on me.”

Evelyn had listened intently, but now spoke with impatience:

“It was idiotic of you, Philip. What did it matter if I did see it?”

“It had upset me,” he said simply, “coming on it suddenly in the dark: and I couldn’t bear the idea of your receiving the same sort of impression.”

“It is just like you,” she said. “You never think things out. It was nice of you in a way, but the act of a——.” she stopped; then added with conviction, “an innocent man; no one else would have dared, there is that about it. Tell me,” she went on with a change of manner, “I wish you would, just what you told that inspector. I haven’t heard and I may think of something.”

He at first wished to refuse, but in response to her further request, told again what he had already told Humblethorne. She listened, all her mind absorbed, trying in vain to see whether it threw any new light on the facts of which she was in possession. When he finished she stayed silent a long while, leaning forward in her chair, her head on her hands.

“One thing puzzles me besides that point about the box,” she said at last as much to herself as to him. “If it had been thrown as apparently it was and came open enough to let any cigarettes fall out, why weren’t they all over the place instead of all more or less together?”

“They were,” he replied: “there were some on the floor, but most of them were on the stairs, scattered about. Birts let me move them, after he had counted them, so as to clear a way upstairs.”

“Scattered about on the stairs,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Where?”

“Oh, all over the place,” he replied vaguely.

“Yes, but where exactly? On which stairs? You must know, Philip.”

“I don’t see that it matters,” he answered.

“Nor do I, but I want to know.”

“Well, all over the stairs, most of them four or five steps up, some in the centre and some on the right, as you go up; that’s why they were so in the way. But really I can’t see that it’s of the least importance.” He spoke with a touch of impatience.

“No, probably it isn’t. Well, you’re tired of being asked questions; I can see that, and I don’t wonder. I’ll leave you in peace now. Don’t worry about anything I’ve said, Philip. It’s troubling me so, and I’m always wrong.”

As she turned out of the study and passed the back staircase she remembered going up it the evening before and finding Humblethorne in John’s room. She stopped. After all, she reflected, she did not know it was John who entered by the drawing-room window; she only suspected it because of Celia. Now that her thoughts about the one were in such confusion, she might be wrong about the other. She believed she was right, but she could turn belief into certainty. She slipped upstairs, entered John’s room, took a boot belonging to a left foot, since that, she remembered, was the clear impression, and went quietly downstairs and out of doors. No one was about; she went straight to the first drawing-room window, stooped down and, as lightly as possible so as not to break away the edges, placed the boot over the impression.

With a heavy heart she saw that it confirmed her fears; she could doubt no longer that John had been there on the evening of the tragedy, had waited to be let in, an obviously arranged meeting, and had been let out secretly—it could not be by Philip after what he had said; if it was by Celia, then she had indeed little knowledge of her friend.

It was a sorely puzzled investigator who went slowly, wearily back into the house and replaced the boot which she had prayed would give her thoughts the lie.