The Emperor's Snuff-Box Page 7

  The terrace was raised perhaps two or three feet above the level of the ground below, a graveled court dotted with little tables like those of the terrace. At a table close against the balustrade, her head about on a level with their feet, sat a girl whose dark dress and hat stood out sombrely against the color of La Bandelette. Her head was raised; Dermot was looking straight into her eyes.

  She was a pretty girl of twenty-two or three, he noticed. She had light red hair. How long she had been sitting there, concealed by sunlight, he could not guess. An untasted cocktail stood in front of her. Beyond her moved the humming, hooting cars of the Avenue de la Forêt, soothed by the lazier noise of open carriages which clopped and jingled past as though nothing had happened or could ever happen.

  Suddenly the girl jumped to her feet. Her side knocked against the little orange-topped table, upsetting the cocktail glass with a clatter into its saucer, and splashing its contents wide. The girl snatched up a handbag and a pair of openwork black gloves. She threw a five-franc piece on the table; then she turned and ran out into the street. Dermot stood staring after her, remembering the expression of her eyes.

  M. Goron spoke softly.

  “Curse and condemn to the eternal fires all conversations in public places!” he swore. “That was Miss Janice Lawes.”

  VII

  “NONSENSE, MY DEAR JANICE,” soothed Helena. “You’re hysterical.”

  The mildly shocked and harassed expression on the face of Uncle Ben, as he leaned over to ruffle the ears of the King Charles spaniel beside the tea wagon, was comment enough on his part.

  “I’m not hysterical,” returned Janice in a low, rapid voice which showed she was not far off it. She stripped off her gloves. “And I’m not dreaming and I’m not guessing and I’m not imagining things. I tell you,”—her voice went up; she glanced briefly at Eve without meeting her eye,—“they’re coming to arrest Eve!”

  Helena blinked.

  “But why?”

  “Mother dear, because they think she did it!”

  “What tiresome nonsense you do pick up,” sighed Helena. But there was a startled, wondering silence just the same.

  This couldn’t be happening, Eve thought to herself. It wasn’t possible. It was the one possibility she had never even dreamed of.

  Mechanically Eve put down her tea cup. The drawing room at the Villa Bonheur was long and spacious, with a polished hardwood floor. Its windows in front faced the rue des Anges; its windows at the rear admitted a green, cool twilight from the big garden. There was the tea wagon, and the shaggy golden-brown spaniel raising his big eyes to Uncle Ben. There was Uncle Ben himself, a middle-sized stocky man with short grizzled hair and a taciturn but smiling expression. There was Helena, stout and amiable and short of breath, her silver-white bobbed hair contrasting with the round rosy face which now wore a fixed and incredulous smile.

  And here was Janice, saying…

  Janice seemed to be nerving herself for a strong effort. She looked straight at Eve.

  “Listen, Eve,” she said piteously, and moistened her lips. Janice had rather a large mouth, which did not detract from the prettiness of her face. “We know you didn’t, of course.”

  She spoke with a sort of desperate apology. And she could not look at Eve any longer.

  “But why should they —” began Helena.

  “Suspect —” continued Uncle Ben.

  “All the same,” Janice continued, with her eyes fixed on the mirror over the mantelpiece, “you weren’t out that night, were you? You didn’t come back with—with blood all over you? And a key to this house in your pocket? And a piece of the—of the shiny stuff off that snuff-box sticking to your dressing robe? Thai’s not true, is it?”

  A paralysis held the kindly atmosphere of this drawing room. The big spaniel whined in its throat for more food. Helena Lawes slowly fumbled after a spectacle case; she took out a pair of rimless nose glasses, pinched them on, and stared through them. Her mouth remained half open.

  “Really, Janice!” she said severely.

  “What I’m saying,” retorted Janice, “I got from the prefect of police himself. I did, too!” she insisted, as they started to speak.

  Uncle Ben Phillips brushed crumbs off his lap. He absentmindedly and affectionately tweaked the ears of the spaniel. He reached into his pocket after the inevitable pipe. His worried forehead and gentle, ice-blue eyes showed a nagging of wonder which he instantly and shamefacedly covered up.

  “I was at the Donjon Hotel,” explained Janice. “Having a drink.”

  “Janice, dear.” Helena spoke mechanically. “I wish you wouldn’t go to those —”

  “I overheard Goron talking to a doctor, an awfully big shot in criminal psychology. He’s English; I mean, the doctor is, not Goron; I’ve seen his picture somewhere. Goron said that Eve came in that night all over blood, with a piece of the snuff-box sticking to her.”

  Still Janice looked away from everybody. Shock was passing. Horror had come in instead.

  “He says they’ve got two witnesses, Yvette and Célestine, who saw her. The police have got her negligée; there was blood on it….”

  Eve Neill was sitting back in her chair, rigidly. She stared at Janice without seeing her. Eve wanted to burst out laughing, and go on laughing, to drown out the ominous and evil noises in her head.

  Accusing her of murder! It should have been funny, if it hadn’t taken her like a blow under the heart. It was funny, in a way. But that incredible part about a “piece of the snuff-box” sticking to her—the one thing she could not understand in a whirl of ugly absurdities—wasn’t funny at all. It must be some misunderstanding, or else malice was following her to shut her into a corner and kill her. Of course, she told herself, she needn’t be afraid of the police. That last monstrosity, the accusation of killing poor old Papa Lawes, could easily be disproved. She could always explain about Ned Atwood, and he would confirm her.

  She could prove she hadn’t murdered anybody. But to explain about Ned….

  “This is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of!” she cried. “Please, at least, let me get my breath!”

  “It isn’t true, is it?” Janice was persisting.

  Eve made a fierce gesture.

  “No, of course it isn’t true!” said Eve. “That is —”

  A desperate hesitation struck at her. Her voice wavered, and the wavering was as palpable, as suggestive, as a comment.

  “No, of course not,” said Uncle Ben firmly. He cleared his throat.

  “No, of course not!” echoed Helena.

  “Then why,” persisted Janice, “did you say, ‘that is?’”

  “I—I don’t understand.”

  “You started off all right,” Janice said. “Then you sort of chewed at your lip, and your eyes got all funny, and you qualified it by ‘that is’ as though there’d really been something else after all.”

  (Oh, God, what am I going to say?)

  “None of it’s true, is it?” asked Janice feverishly. “It can’t be partly true and partly untrue, now can it?”

  “There is certainly,” observed Uncle Ben, clearing his throat again and speaking with some reluctance, “something in what the girl says.”

  Three pairs of eyes, kindly eyes, eyes which no doubt meant well towards her, were fastened on Eve. For a second she had difficulty in getting her breath.

  If realization came slowly, it came with none the less certainty. All these things were lies and misunderstandings. Or worse, like that “bit off the snuffbox” which danced in her mind with such tantalizing and terrifying repetition. But some of these things were facts. The police could prove them. It was no earthly good denying them.

  “Tell me,” Eve said, trying to reach firm ground. “Do you honestly think that I, of all people, would ever want to … well, hurt… him, of all people?”

  “No, dear, of course not,” Helena assured her. The near-sighted eyes grew pleading. “Just tell us there’s no truth in this. That’s all
we want to know.”

  “Eve,” Janice said quietly, “what kind of a life were you leading before you met Toby?”

  It was the first personal question of any kind which had ever been asked her in this house.

  “Now, really, Janice!” Helena protested, and grew more fussed than ever.

  Janice paid no attention. Janice came over softly and sat down in a low upholstered chair facing Eve. The fair, almost transparent skin which so often accompanies red hair can, in moments of emotion, assume an unpleasantly bluish tinge. Janice’s large brown eyes were fixed on Eve. Their expression was a mixture of admiration and repulsion.

  “Don’t think I’m blaming you for it!” she said, with the off-handed grandeur of twenty-three. “I rather admire you for it, really. I always have. I’m only talking about it now because the prefect of police was talking about it. I mean, the reason why you might have wanted to hurt Daddy. I don’t say you did, mind! I don’t even think you did. That is, necessarily. Only…”

  Uncle Ben coughed.

  “I hope we’re all broad-minded,” said Helena. “That is, all except Toby and perhaps poor Maurice—a bit. But, really, Janice!”

  Janice ignored this.

  “You were married to that Atwood man, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Eve. “Of course I was.”

  “He’s back in La Bandelette, you know.”

  Eve moistened her lips.

  “Is he?”

  “Yes. A week ago today he was in the back bar of the Donjon, talking. Among other things, including the fact that you were still in love with him, he said he was going to get you back even if he had to tell our family everything about you.”

  Eve sat motionless. Her heart seemed briefly to stop, and then to assume an enormous, pounding rhythm. The sheer injustices of this kept her dumb.

  Janice craned her neck round.

  “Do you remember,” she went on, “the afternoon of the—the night Daddy died?”

  Helena’s eyes squeezed up.

  “How he came back here,” Janice pursued, “looking frightfully queer and quiet, and in a temper? And how he refused to go to the theatre with us? But wouldn’t say why? And only the art dealer’s calling up about the snuff-box put him in a good temper afterwards? Also, he said something to Toby before we went to the theatre? And Toby’s been acting queerly ever since?”

  “Well?” prompted Uncle Ben, carefully examining the bowl of a pipe.

  “Nonsense,” said Helena. But the tears started to her eyes at mention of that night, and her round face lost all its laughter lines and some of its color. “Toby was only behaving so stuffily that night because Mrs. Warren’s Profession is a play about—well, about prostitution.”

  Eve sat up straight.

  “Daddy’s favorite afternoon walk,” said Janice, “was in the Zoological Gardens at the back of the Donjon Hotel. Suppose this Mr. Atwood went after him, and told him something about…”

  Janice did not complete the sentence. She nodded her head towards Eve without looking round.

  “Then Daddy came home in that queer white way. He said something to Toby. Toby wouldn’t believe him. Just suppose this, that’s all! But Toby, you remember, couldn’t sleep that night. He called Eve up at one o’clock in the morning. Suppose he told her what Daddy had said? Then suppose Eve came over here to fight it out with Daddy, and …”

  “Just one moment, please,” Eve said very quietly.

  She allowed her quickened breathing to slow down before she spoke again.

  “What have you really been thinking about me, all this time?” she asked.

  “Nothing, dear! Nothing!” cried Helena, fumbling at her noseglasses, and taking them off. “There’s never been anybody like you! Oh, dear, I never can find a handkerchief when I want one! Only, when Janice starts talking about blood and heaven knows what other things, and you don’t come straight out and deny it…”

  “Yes,” said Uncle Ben.

  “But that’s not the only thing,” persisted Eve. “I honestly want to know. What are all these cross currents and hints, and all the things you’ve never said until now? Are you intimating that ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ ought to be ‘Mrs. Neill’s Profession?’ Is that it?”

  Helena was shocked.

  “No, dear. Good heavens, no!”

  “Then what is it? I know what people say about me, or at least what they used to say. It isn’t true. But, if I hear it very much longer, I’m jolly well going to make it true!”

  “What about murder, though?” Janice asked quietly.

  Janice had the simplicity of a child. She was no longer the bouncing, swaggering girl who aped a dry sophistication and turned up her nose at the amusements of those of her own age. She sat in the low chair with her arms cradled round her knees. The shiny-looking lids winked over the brown eyes. Her lips were unsteady.

  “You see,” she explained, “it’s just because we did idealize you so much that…”

  Again her gesture completed the sentence. Eve, whose heart went out to these people, found herself in a still more difficult position.

  “Are you still in love with Mr. Atwood?” Janice demanded.

  “No!”

  “And have you been playing the hypocrite all this week? Is there something you haven’t told us?”

  “No. That is —”

  “I thought,” muttered Uncle Ben, “she’d been looking a bit peaky. But then we all have.” He had taken out a clasp knife and was scraping the inside of the pipe bowl. Now his heavy, harassed face lifted. He looked at Helena. “Do you remember, dolly?”

  “Remember what?” said Helena.

  “I was working on the car. All I did was reach out and touch her with my glove, those brown leather work gloves, and she almost fainted. It wasn’t a very clean glove, I admit.”

  Eve put up her hands to her eyes.

  “Nobody believes the stories about you,” Helena was saying gently. “But this other thing is different.” She wheezed a little. “You still haven’t answered Janice’s question. Were you out of the house that night?”

  “Yes,” said Eve.

  “And was there blood on you?”

  “Yes. A little.”

  Now in the big drawing room, where the afterglow of sunset still lingered against the windows, there was no sound except the snuffling of the spaniel, who scratched the hardwood floor and lay down drowsily with his ears flopping between his paws. Even the small, sharp noise of Uncle Ben’s knife scraping the pipe bowl had stopped. Three persons in sombre clothes, the two women in black and the man in dark gray, stared back at Eve with varying degrees of shock or incredulity.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” Eve almost screamed. “It isn’t true. I hadn’t anything to do with killing him. I was fond of him. It’s nothing but a misunderstanding; only it’s a frightful kind of misunderstanding that I can’t seem to get out of.”

  Janice was white to the lips. “Did you come over here that night?”

  “No. I swear I didn’t!”

  “Then why was there a k-key to this house in the pocket of your pajamas?”

  “It wasn’t a key to this house. It was a key to my house. It hadn’t anything to do with your house! I wanted to tell you what really happened that night. I’ve been wanting to tell you ever since then. Only I didn’t dare tell you.”

  “Oh?” said Helena. “Why couldn’t you tell us?”

  Even before she spoke, Eve realized the twisted and not altogether mirthful irony of what she must say. But many people would consider it funny. If there were ironic deities presiding over her destiny, they must be splitting their sides now. You could hear brazen laughter clanging at every word.

  “I didn’t dare tell you,” she replied, “because Ned Atwood was in my bedroom.”

  VIII

  M. ARISTIDE GORON AND Dr. Dermot Kinross walked into the rue des Anges at a faster pace than the tubby prefect liked.

  “This is luck!” he was fuming. “This is the
luck of the devil! The little Miss Janice, no doubt, will have gone straight to Madame Neill with her story.”

  “I consider it very likely,” agreed Dermot.

  The prefect of police wore a bowler hat which accentuated his bulbousness, and carried a malacca stick. He stumped along with spatted feet beside Dermot’s long stride, and growled in his throat.

  “If you are to do me the favor of speaking to Madame Neill, and giving me your candid impression, it had better be done now. The examining magistrate will be furious. I telephoned to him, but he was out. When he hears, I know what he will do. He will send the salad basket immediately, and Madame Neill will sleep tonight in the violin.”

  Dermot blinked at him.

  “Salad basket? Violin?”

  “Ah! I forgot! The salad basket is …” M. Goron groped for words. He made elaborate illustrative gestures, not very clearly.

  “Black Maria?” hazarded Dermot.

  “That’s it! That’s it! I have heard the term. And this violin is what you call in English the clink or show-kee.”

  “Chokey. Hard ‘ch’ sound.”

  “I make a note of it,” said M. Goron, producing his microscopic memorandum book. “But I flatter myself that I speak English rather well, eh? Always I speak it to the Lawes family.”

  “You speak English very well. Only I entreat you not to say ‘intercourse’ when you mean ‘interview.’ ”

  M. Goron inclined his head. “It is not the same thing?”

  “It is not at all the same thing. But…”

  Dermot stopped on the pavement. He glanced round that quiet street, swept and domestic and provincial in the evening light. A few chestnut trees showed their leaves over gray garden walls.

  Not many of his colleagues in London would have recognized Dr. Kinross then. It was partly the effect of holiday clothes, a baggy sports suit and comfortably disreputable hat. Since his stay in La Bandelette he looked less tired, less powerfully geared to a work that never let him go. There was more of a twinkle in his eye and more animation in the dark face which only in certain lights showed any trace of plastic surgery. That is, there had been this loosening or relaxing until he had heard M. Goron’s story of the murder told in detail.