In a minute or two Jonathan came in. He nodded, and Miss du Mugne, raising her voice a little, invited Athelstan to ‘go home’ and wished them good night. Mrs Bradley still had not appeared, and just as she was leaving the hall, Miss Mathers, the senior student of Athelstan, was called back.
‘Not very pleasant for you, my dear,’ said Miss du Mugne, ‘but we want you to help us. Miss Cloud, you had better return to Athelstan, I think, with the students. Somebody ought to be over there. Perhaps, Mr Bradley, you would accompany Miss Cloud, and I will see that Miss Mathers returns as soon as possible.’
Miss Mathers, her sensible, homely countenance not even having an expression of surprise, went with the Principal and Miss Crossley to the Board Room, next door to the Secretary’s office.
Miss Rosewell was in the Board Room, looking thoroughly ill-at-ease, and there also were Mrs Bradley and a faded-looking woman with fair hair going grey and an expression of intense malice lighting her grey-green eyes. It was the senior student who spoke first.
‘Miss Murchan!’ she exclaimed. Then she looked suddenly horrified, for Miss Murchan’s wrists were tied together and her thin ankles were similarly confined.
‘Yes, Miss Murchan,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘At least…’ she looked at Miss du Mugne, ‘so I supposed. Do you, too, identify her?’
‘Without a doubt,’ the Principal replied, ‘but I cannot believe my eyes.’
That I can imagine,‘ said Mrs Bradley. ’My nephew and I had some difficulty in bringing her over here, but that is nothing compared with the difficulty I have had in accounting for her disappearance, locating her hiding-place, and bringing her back to the world. Miss Mathers, my dear, go back to Hall, and not a word of this to anyone. You understand?’
‘But — but what made you do it, Miss Murchan? What were you afraid of?’ inquired the Principal, gazing perplexedly at the one-time member of her staff, as soon as Miss Mathers had gone. ‘Surely it was not like you to give us all so much anxiety!’
The greyish woman in the chair began to laugh. It was not the laughter of hysteria, but it had such an odd, unnatural sound that the Principal recoiled from it as she might have recoiled had someone spat at her. She recovered herself in an instant, and went up to Miss Murchan and laid a hand on her shoulder.
‘Please tell me all about it,’ she said steadily, with her air of authority.
‘Tell you all about it?’ said the prisoner. ‘Yes, I’ll tell you. I lectured in English, didn’t I? Didn’t I?’
‘Yes, certainly, but…’
‘Then I can tell you all about it.’
‘Is she mad?’ whispered the Principal. Mrs Bradley shrugged.
‘In your view and in mine, certainly,’ she replied. ‘According to the law, poor soul, I strongly doubt it.’
‘According to the law? But, surely, there’s no question of that?’
It was impossible to proceed, for Miss Murchan, fixing her eyes on a cupboard in the corner of the room, an unused cupboard which had one door swinging open as though to display the emptiness within, was already declaiming, in a horrid monotone, some stanzas from Swinburne.
‘Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,
How can thine heart be full of the spring?
A thousand summers are over and dead.
What hast thou found in the spring to follow?
What hast thou found in thine heart to sing?
What wilt thou do when the summer is fled?
‘Swallow, my sister, O singing swallow,
I know not how thou hast heart to sing.
Hast thou the heart? Is it all past over?
Thy lord the summer is good to follow,
And fair the feet of thy lover the spring:
But what wilt thou say to the spring thy lover?
‘O swallow, sister, O rapid swallow,
I pray thee sing not a little space.
Are not the roofs and the lintels wet?
The woven web that was plain to follow,
The small slain body, the flower-like face,
Can I remember if thou forget?
‘O sister, sister, thy first-begotten !
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
Who hath remember’d me? Who hath forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.’
The monotone moaned itself away, and the speaker appeared to have lulled herself asleep. Suddenly she straightened up, tried to make a gesture with her bound hands, managed to get them to her lips, swallowed, smiled, dropped her hands, gazed at them, it seemed perplexedly, and then dropped her head back against the padded head of the chair. Mrs Bradley went across to her and released her hands and ankles.
There was a sound of heavy footsteps outside.
‘That will be the police,’ she said. ‘They will have to take charge of her now. She has given us the last clue, but it will, I think, mean nothing at all to them.’
‘Oh, dear, I do hate this! I do hope they won’t hurt her, poor thing,’ said the Principal, becoming suddenly and demonstrably human. Mrs Bradley again walked over to the still figure. She straightened herself and shook her head.
‘They won’t hurt her,’ she answered, ‘for she has disappeared again.’ Then, to the Principal’s surprise, she crossed herself, muttering what sounded like a spell but which must have been a prayer.
Chapter 19
ITYLUS
« ^
‘Well, it seems,’ said Laura, ‘that although the skeleton not turning up trumps settled the thing more or less, Mrs Croc. had had her suspicions for some time previous to that that Miss Murchan wasn’t dead. She thought Cook being murdered proved it The only reason for murdering Cook seemed to be that she had recognized somebody she wasn’t supposed to recognize, and that couldn’t have been Cornflake because Cornflake could always pull that gag that old Cartwright produced among the Edgar Allans — say she was somebody else. That, being as how she was a student of the College, would more or less let her out. And, anyway, Cook couldn’t have had anything on her about former doings, because she didn’t know her.
‘Then, the disposal of Cook’s body, as discovered by the police, followed by us finding the corsets. The difficulty about bringing that home to Cornflake simply was — when could she have done it? I mean, I know, theoretically, we each have our own room, and all that, but it actually takes some doing to slide out at night from one of these Halls, even if you used the communal passage and hopped it on to the wide open spaces from a Hall not actually your own. And then you’d have the dickens of a job to slide back. Of course, it wasn’t impossible, but it had all the earmarks of wild improbability, says Mrs Croc.
‘In fact, if you go all through the rags and other things, you can pretty well deduce that only somebody very close at hand could have carried out most of the stunts. The snakes were one thing that didn’t seem to fit, but Cartwright has come clean about those, so they can be disregarded in the final summing-up. I mean, you can say what you like, but actually, as I once pointed out, it isn’t really feasible to suppose that Cornflake could have run the gauntlet of Hall after Hall like that, right along that passage. Much more likely to be somebody who had direct access to the bakehouse and could operate from there. And who so likely to have access as Miss Murchan herself? After all, she’d had all the keys in her possession when she was Warden.