Bill Waring heard the half-hour strike from the village clock, two single notes so faint that if his ears had not been on the stretch he would not have heard them. The wind was setting that way, or he would not have heard them at all-a soft wind, rather high up. It drove the low cloud which darkened the face of the sky, and it moved and rustled the tree-tops, but down on the level of the drive, under the shadow of the pillared portico which screened the front door, the air scarcely stirred.
Bill stood in the shadow of the portico. He could see the front door, the windows of the rooms on either side of it, and the windows of the flanking wings to the east and to the west. None of these windows showed any light at all. If he crossed the wide sweep of the drive and stood back from the portico he could see the whole front of the house. There was not a light in any of the rooms, nor had there been since he came. He had left his car outside the gate because turning it on the gravel was going to make too much noise, and if he left it in the drive it wouldn’t be facing the right way.
He had been waiting a bare ten minutes, when the clock struck. It was a bit early for everyone to be asleep in a house like this, so he didn’t really expect Lila to be punctual.
His will was set to see her. It was a tough and obstinate will. It was set. But against it, and not for the first time, there moved a small, cold breath of doubt. It would not affect what he did, but quite insensibly it changed his thought about what he was doing. Adrian Grey’s sister Marian had said to him a year ago, speaking of Lila, ‘She’s very lovely, and she’s very sweet, but the man who marries her will have to be her father, and her brother, and her nursemaid, as well as her husband.’ He hadn’t cared then, but he wasn’t so sure that he didn’t care now. A vague daunted feeling of what life with Lila would be like had begun to tinge his thoughts. He had not been two months out of the country before she had let herself be pushed into saying she would marry Herbert Whitall. Well, he was here to see that she had fair play. If she wanted to marry the man she could marry him. If she didn’t want to marry him, he would take her to Ray. After that he supposed they would be married. The thought did not raise his spirits at all. They remained dark and clouded. He began to think about Ray, and found it a relief. She would know what to do, and she would look after Lila. He found himself wishing strongly that she was here.
It was about this time that he thought he heard something, or someone, moving. The sound came from the direction of the drive. Afterwards he was to be pressed as to just what kind of a sound it was, and for the life of him he couldn’t say. It wasn’t anything as definite as a footstep, and it was overlaid‘ by the continual soft stirring of the wind in the tops of the trees. It might have been someone coming up the drive on the grass verge and going off by the path which led round to the other side of the house, but neither he nor anyone else would have thought of that if every moment of the time when he stood waiting under the portico had not been sifted out again and again. And in the end all that you could say was that someone could have come up the drive in that way. What he heard was no evidence that anyone had done so. Any creature of the night could have been about its own secret business-cat, dog, fox, badger, owl.
He listened, but the sound didn’t come again. Four notes sounded faintly from the village clock, and then the twelve strokes of midnight. He waited a little longer and then began to walk along the front of the house, taking the left-hand turn. The gravel gave place to a wide paved walk. It was old and mossy, and his feet made no sound.
As he came round the corner and up on to the terrace he was quite out of the wind. It was not very dark. He could distinguish the stone balustrade and see how the ground dropped ledge by ledge. The woods on either side moved in the wind he could no longer feel. He turned from the prospect, and saw that there was a light in the corner room.
He did not know that the room was Herbert Whitall’s study. He had never been in the house in his life except that evening, when he had waited in the room to the left of the front door. That was where he had asked Lila to meet him. She was to come down, and she was to show a light, and he was to knock three times so that she would know it was he. There had been no light in the room outside which he had waited, but there was a light in this corner room. He wouldn’t put it past Lila to have muddled the whole thing up. He would have to investigate. There were two windows which showed a light. One of them was a long glass door. The real window showed only a dim glow, but the curtains of the door had been carelessly drawn. They left a two-inch gap, and a long, narrow streak of light came through it to lie in a crooked shaft on two descending steps and the damp stone beyond. The reason he had not seen it at once when he came round the corner was that there was a great dark bush of something on either side of the steps. As he passed between them, his sleeve brushed the right-hand bush and the smell of rosemary came out on the soft night Mr.
He looked through the gap in the curtains, and he saw Lila’s gold hair underneath the light. She was turned a little away, so that he did not see her face-only the hair, the line from cheek to chin, and her white neck a little bent as if she were looking down. She was wearing a long white dress.
He must have pressed on the door, because it moved under his hand. It had been ajar, opening towards him, and he had pushed it to. Well, that made everything quite simple. He groped for the handle, moved to avoid the swing of the door, and stepped into the lighted study.
Lila stood looking down at her right hand, which was red with blood. There was blood on her dress-a long smear. On the floor at her feet was a dagger with an ivory handle. It lay there as if it had just dropped from her hand. There was blood upon the hilt and upon the blade. And a couple of paces away Herbert Whitall lay dead in his evening clothes with blood on his shirt.
The eye may receive an impression too quickly for the brain to deal with it. The impact is too shocking. Reason and common sense rebel-the sense which is the common heritage from centuries of law and order. It is difficult immediately to believe in a violent breach of the common law.
Bill Waring stood where he was, his shoulder brushing the curtain which he had pushed aside. It came to him that Lila hadn’t moved or turned her head. He had pushed the curtain, the runners had gone swooshing back along the rail, but she hadn’t turned her head. He looked past her to the far side of the room and saw that the door stood open into a passage. There was a light in the passage, but not a bright one. The study light was very bright. It showed everything. It showed Adrian Grey in dressing-gown and pyjamas coming into the room and putting a hand behind him to shut the door. When he had shut it he said, ‘Lila-’ in just his quite usual way.
She moved for the first time, for the first time looked away from her bloodstained hand and the fallen dagger. A long, cold shudder ran over her. When Bill came forward, when he too said her name, she looked at him quite blankly, and looked away.
Adrian did not move. He put out his hand as he might have done to a child, and all at once she ran, crying and sobbing, to throw herself into his arms.