The China Governess
Page 28
Mr. Campion was still standing by the table, looking into the limpid mahogany.
‘The world is certainly going to hear about the Kinnit family and their governesses, alas!’ he said at last. ‘No one on earth can prevent that now, I’m afraid. There’ll be no more hushing up Miss Thyrza. She’s out of the grave. She wins after all.’
‘Murder doesn’t hush,’ Luke had moved over to the doorway. ‘My old copy-book was dead right. Murder will out. There’s something damn funny about it. The desire to pinpoint the blame gets out of the intellect and into the blood. I’ve known murderers give themselves away rather than leave it a mystery!’
Mr. Campion was thinking along other lines.
‘It’s very odd how the word “governess” is a guilty one in this particular history,’ he remarked. ‘Just before we came in here I had an account from Julia of the row in the kitchen tonight. Apparently Eustace Kinnit’s father tried to suppress the truth about a governess. Eustace himself went to considerable lengths to prevent the word Kinnit and the word Governess appearing together. Mrs. Telpher was responsible for a fearful accident whilst acting as a governess and she came over here, deceiving her relatives and bringing an assistant whom she said, quite unnecessarily, was a governess. To the Kinnits it has become an evil word which is always accompanied by trouble. Miss Thyrza is not so much a ghost as their minds playing the goat.’
Luke laughed briefly. ‘I know which one frightens me the most!’ he said. ‘Mr. Eustace and Miss Alison are going to need their adopted boy’s support. It’s a merciful thing he has a sound young woman.’
He went out into the corridor and when Mr. Campion joined him he was standing in the shadow by the balustrade.
They paused together, looking down at the curious scene which the old house presented with its open doors and lighted alcoves. It was strongly reminiscent of one of the early Netherlandish mystery paintings; little bright unrelated groups were set about in the dark and tortuous background of the carved staircase, and its several stages and galleries.
From where they stood they had a foreshortened view of a knot of men below in the hall. Munday was speaking to a constable and a plain-clothes man down there while a dejected black wand, bent like a question mark, wavered between them like some spineless overgrown plant.
On the next floor, through the open doorway of the drawing-room, they could see Julia talking to Eustace. She appeared to be comforting or reassuring him, for he was leaning back in one of the pink sofas looking up at her while she talked, emphasizing her words with little gestures. It was a very clear scene, the colours as vivid as if they were painted on glass.
On the upper floor, in the corridor to their right, Mrs. Broome was showing her coat to the probation officer. She had carried it to the baluster rail to catch the light from the candelabra, and the purple folds gleamed rich and warm out of the shadow. Miss Aicheson, wearing a plaid dressing-gown and carrying a tray with a white jug and a cup upon it, was coming up the kitchen staircase. And opposite them, across the well, the doctor, stepping out of Eustace’s bedroom, paused a moment to look across at Luke and give an affirmative sign.
Mr. Campion was comforted. It was a picture of beginnings, he thought. Half a dozen startings: new chapters, new ties, new associations. They were all springing out of the story he had been following, like a spray of plumes in a renaissance pattern springs up from a complete and apparently final feather.
The murmur of voices from the corridor directly below them caught his attention. Luke was already listening. Councillor Cornish was talking to Timothy.
‘It was very good of you and I know how you felt,’ he was saying earnestly. ‘But if you do happen to know where this glove weapon is I think we’d better go and pick it up and let the police have it. We’re not the judges, you see. That’s one of the very few things I’ve learned in the last twenty years. We’re simply not omniscient. That seems to me to be the whole difficulty. We haven’t got all the data, any of us. When we do gang up and make a concerted effort to try to get it, as in a trial of justice, that’s the thing which becomes most apparent. As I see it now, anything we suppress may turn out to be the one thing absolutely vital to the lad’s safety or salvation. We have absolutely no sure way of telling, that I can see. Life is not predictable.’
‘I wasn’t trying to hide anything.’ Timothy’s young voice, which possessed so much the timbre of the other was vehement. ‘I was merely not rushing at them with it. I didn’t want to be the one who damned him, that was all.’
‘Oh, my boy, don’t I know!’ The older voice was heartfelt. ‘That state of mind has dogged me all my life!’
There was a long pause before a laugh, curiously happy, floated up to the two men by the banisters.
‘We may not see much of each other,’ the Councillor was saying as he and his companion began to move away towards the lower floor, and his voice grew fainter and fainter. ‘You’re going to have your hands full with your commitments here, I can see that. But now that we have an opportunity there is just one thing I wanted to say to you. It – er – it concerns my first wife. She was just an ordinary London girl, you know. Very sweet, very brave, very gay, but when she smiled suddenly, when you caught her unawares, she was so beautiful. . . .’
The sound faded into a murmur and was lost in the general noises of the busy household.
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