“Later in the evening, when the children were sleepy and there was tissue paper scattered all over the house, the grown-ups began their games in earnest. Someone suggested Blind Man’s Bluff. They were mostly using the hall and this room here, as having more space than the dining room. Various members of the party were blindfolded with the men’s handkerchiefs, but there was a dreadful amount of cheating. Mr. Fenton grew quite annoyed about it, because the ladies almost always caught Mr. Wilkes when they could; Mr. Wilkes was laughing and perspiring heartily, and his great cravat with the silver pin had almost come loose.
“To make it certain nobody could cheat, Mr. Fenton, got a little white linen bag-like this one. It was the pillowcase off the baby’s cot, really; and he said nobody could look through that if it were tied over the head.
“I should explain that they had been having some trouble with the lamp in this room. Mr. Fenton said: ‘Confound it, Mother, what is wrong with that lamp? Turn up the wick, will you?’ It was really quite a good lamp, from Spence and Minstead’s, and should not have burned so dull as it did. In the confusion, while Mrs. Fenton was trying to make the light better, and he was looking over his shoulder at her, Mr. Fenton had been rather absently fastening the bag on the head of the last person caught. He has said since that he did not notice who it was. No one else noticed, either, the light being so dim and there being such a large number of people. It seemed to be a girl in a broad bluish kind of dress, standing over near the door.
“Perhaps you know how people act when they have just been blindfolded in this game. First they usually stand very still, as though they were smelling or sensing in which direction to go. Sometimes they make a sudden jump, or sometimes they begin to shuffle gently forward. Everyone noticed what an air of purpose there seemed to be about this person whose face was covered; she went forward very slowly, and seemed to crouch down a bit.
“It began to move towards Mr. Wilkes in very short but quick little jerks, the white bag bobbing on its face. At this time Mr. Wilkes was sitting at the end of the table, laughing, with his face pink above the beard, and a glass of our Kentish cider in his hand. I want you to imagine this room as being very dim, and much more cluttered, what with all the tassels they had on the furniture then; and the high-piled hair of the ladies, too. The hooded person got to the edge of the table. It began to edge along towards Mr. Wilkes’s chair; and then it jumped.
“Mr. Wilkes got up and skipped (yes, skipped) out of its way, laughing. It waited quietly, after which it went, in the same slow way, towards him again. It nearly got him again, by the edge of the potted plant. All this time it did not say anything, you understand, although everyone was applauding it and crying encouraging advice. It kept its head down. Miss Abbott says she began to notice an unpleasant faint smell of burnt cloth or something worse, which turned her half ill. By the time the hooded person came stooping clear across the room, as certainly as though it could see him, Mr. Wilkes was not laughing any longer.
“In the corner by one bookcase, he said out loud: ‘I’m tired of this silly, rotten game; go away, do you hear?’ Nobody there had ever heard him speak like that, in such a loud, wild way, but they laughed and thought it must be the Kentish cider. ‘Go away!” cried Mr. Wilkes again, and began to strike at it with his fist. All this time, Miss Abbott says, she had observed his face gradually changing. He dodged again, very pleasant and nimble for such a big man, but with the perspiration running down his face. Back across the room he went again, with it following him; and he cried out something that most naturally shocked them all inexpressibly.
“He screamed out: ‘For God’s sake, Fenton, take it off me!’
“And for the last time the thing jumped.
“They were over near the curtains of that bay window, which were drawn, as they are now. Miss Twigelow, who was nearest, says that Mr. Wilkes could not have seen anything, because the white bag was still drawn over the woman’s head. The only thing she noticed was that at the lower part of the bag, where the face must have been there was a curious kind of discoloration, a stain of some sort, which had not been there before: something seemed to be seeping through. Mr. Wilkes fell back between the curtains, with the hooded person after him, and screamed again. There was a kind of thrashing noise in or behind the curtains; then they fell straight again, and everything grew quiet.
“Now, our Kentish cider is very strong, and for a moment Mr. Fenton did not know what to think. He tried to laugh at it, but the laugh did not sound well. Then he went over to the curtains, calling out gruffly to them to come out of there and not play the fool. But after he had looked inside the curtains, he turned round very sharply and asked the rector to get the ladies out of the room. This was done, but Miss Abbott often said that she had one quick peep inside. Though the bay windows were locked on the inside, Mr. Wilkes was now alone on the window seat. She could see his beard sticking up, and the blood. He was dead, of course. But, since he had murdered Jane Waycross, I sincerely think that he deserved to die.”
For several seconds the two listeners did not move. She had all too successfully conjured up this room in the late ’seventies, whose stuffiness still seemed to pervade it now.
“But look here!” protested Hunter, when he could fight down an inclination to get out of the room quickly. “You say he killed her after all? And yet you told us he had an absolute alibi. You said he never went closer to the house than the windows…”
“No more he did, my dear,” said the other.
“He was courting the Linshaw heiress at the time,” she resumed; “and Miss Linshaw was a very proper young lady, who would have been horrified if she had heard about him and Jane Waycross. She would have broken off the match, naturally. But poor Jane Waycross meant her to hear. She was much in love with Mr. Wilkes, and she was going to tell the whole matter publicly: Mr. Wilkes had been trying to persuade her not to do so.”
“But-”
“Oh, don’t you see what happened?” cried the other in a pettish tone. “It is so dreadfully simple. I am not clever at these things, but I should have seen it in a moment, even if I did not already know. I told you everything so that you should be able to guess.
“When Mr. Wilkes and Dr. Sutton and Mr. Pawley drove past here in the gig that night, they saw a bright light burning in the windows of this room. I told you that. But the police never wondered, as anyone should, what caused that light. Jane Waycross never came into this room, as you know; she was out in the hall, carrying either a lamp or a candle. But that lamp in the thick blue-silk shade, held out there in the hall, would not have caused a bright light to shine through this room and illuminate it. Neither would a tiny candle; it is absurd. And I told you there were no other lamps in the house except some empty ones waiting to be filled in the back kitchen. There is only one thing they could have seen. They saw the great blaze of the paraffin oil round Jane Waycross’s body.
“Didn’t I tell you it was dreadfully simple? Poor Jane was upstairs waiting for her lover. From the upstairs window she saw Mr. Wilkes’s gig, with the fine yellow wheels, drive along the road in the moonlight, and she did not know there were other men in it; she thought he was alone. She came downstairs-