ladies were a drug in the market. She had enjoyed some months of enforced leisure, and was only too grateful for the security of any home, after weeks of stringent economy—since "starvation" is a word not found in a lady's vocabulary. Apart from the essential loneliness of the locality, it was an excellent post, for she had not only a nice room and good food, but she took her meals with the family.
The last fact counted, with her, for more than a gesture of consideration, since it gave her the chance to study her employers. She was lucky in being able to project herself into their lives, for she could rarely afford a seat at the Pictures, and had to extract her entertainment from the raw material of life.
The Warren family possessed some of the elements of drama. The Professor, who was a widow, and his sister and housekeeper—Miss Warren—were middle-aged to elderly. Helen classified them as definite types, academic, frigid, and well-bred, but otherwise devoid of the vital human interest.
Their step-mother, however, old Lady Warren—the invalid in the blue room—was of richer mould. Blood and mud had been used in her mixture, and the whole was churned up, thrice daily, by a dose of evil temper. She was the terror of the household; only yesterday, she had flung a basin of gruel at her nurse's head.
It had been her natural and ladylike protest against this substitute for the rare steak, which she preferred, but was unable to chew. As her aim was excellent, it had achieved the desired result; that morning Oates had driven the departing nurse into the town, and was coming back, in the evening, with a fresh target.
Helen, who had not yet been brought into contact with the old lady, rather admired her spirit. The household was waiting for her to die, but she still called the tune. Every morning, Death knocked politely on the door of the blue room; and Lady Warren saluted him in her customary fashion, with a thumb to her nose.
Besides this low-comedy relief, Helen suspected the triangle situation, as represented by the Professor's son, his daughter-in-law, and the resident pupil, whom the Professor was coaching for the Indian Civil Service. The son—a clever, ugly youth—was violently and aggressively in love with his wife, Simone. She was an unusually attractive girl, with money of her own, and a wanton streak in her composition.
To put it mildly, she was an experimentalist with men. At present, she was plainly trying to make sentimental history with the pupil, Stephen Rice—a good-looking casual young sprig, rejected of Oxford. Helen liked him instinctively, and hoped he would continue to resist the lady.
Although her curiosity hovered around the Summit and its inmates, her duties were her chief interest. The reminder that she had a new job to hold down made her pull a face as she glanced at her watch.
Already the first shadows were beginning to stir, as prelude to the short interlude between the lights. Very soon it would be dark.
A long walk stretched between her and the Summit. She could see it, in the distance, blocked with solid assurance, against the background of shrouded hills. But, dividing them, yawned a bowl of empty country, which dipped down for about a mile, into a tree-lined hollow, before it climbed up a corresponding slope, to the young plantation on its crest.
In spite of her stoicism, Helen's heart sank faintly at the prospect of re-passing through that choked dell. Since she had come to the Summit, she had been struck by the density of the surrounding undergrowth. When she looked out of the windows, at twilight, the evergreen shrubs on the lawn seemed actually to move and advance closer to the walls, as though they were pioneers in a creeping invasion.
Feeling secure as in a fortress, she enjoyed the contrast between the witched garden and the solid house, cheerful with lights and voices. She was inside and safe. But now, she was outside, and nearly two miles away.
"Idiot" she told herself, "it's not late. It's only dark. Scram."
As she was denied the employer's privilege of abuse, she got even by saying exactly what she liked to herself. She whipped up her courage by calling herself a choice collection of names, as she began to run cautiously, slipping on the slimy camber of the lane, since the rutted middle was too stony for safety.
She kept her eyes fixed on her goal, which seemed to be sinking gradually into the ground, as she dipped lower and lower. Just before she lost sight of it, a light gleamed out in the window of the blue room.
It seemed to her a signal, calling her back to a special duty. Every evening, at twilight, she had to go around the house, locking the doors and putting the shutters over the windows. Hitherto, she had derided the job as the limit of precaution; but, here, in the tenebrous solitude, it assumed an unpleasant significance.
There was a connection between it and a certain atmosphere of tension—excitement in the kitchen, whispers in the drawing-room—which emanated from a background of murder.
Murder. Helen shied instinctively at the word. Her mind was too healthy to regard crime other than fiction, which turned newspapers into the sensational kind of reading-matter, which is sold on Railway Station bookstalls. It was impossible to believe that these tragedies happened to real people.
She forced herself to think of a safer subject.
"Suppose I won the Irish Sweep."
But, as the lane dropped deeper, its steep banks shutting out the light, she discovered that she had a mind above mere supposititious wealth. Simple pleasures appealed to her more at that moment—the safety of the kitchen at the Summit, with Mrs. Oates and the ginger cat for company, and dripping-toast for tea.
She made another start.
"Suppose I won the Irish Sweep. Someone's got to win. Out of all the millions of people in the world, a few people are marked out to win fortunes. Staggering."
Unfortunately, the thought introduced another equally stupendous.
"Yes. And out of all the millions of people who die in their beds, a few are marked out to be murdered."
She switched off the current of her thoughts, for before her, crouched the black mouth of the hollow.
When she had crossed it, earlier in the afternoon, she had been chiefly concerned in picking out a fairly dry passage over the rich black mould formed by leaf-deposits. She had only marked it down as a sheltered spot in which to search for early primroses.
But the promise of spring was now only a mockery. As she advanced, the place seemed an area of desolation and decay, with wind-falls for crops. In this melancholy trough—choked with seasonal litter—sound was reduced to furtive rustles; light was shrunken to a dark miasma, through which trees loomed with the semblance of men.
Suddenly, murder ceased to be a special fiction of the Press. It became real—a menace and a monstrosity.
Helen could no longer control her thoughts, as she remembered what Mrs. Oates had told her about the crimes. There were four of them—credibly the work of some maniac, whose chosen victims were girls.
The first two murders were committed in the town, which was too far away from the Summit for the inmates to worry. The third took place in a village, but still comfortably remote. The last girl was strangled in a lonely country-house, within a five-mile radius of Professor Warren's residence.
It was an uncomfortable reminder that the maniac was growing bolder with success. Each time he penetrated closer into the privacy of his victim.
"The first time, it was just a street-murder," thought Helen. "Then, he hid in a garden. After that, he went inside a house. And then—right upstairs. You ought to feel safe there."
Although she was determined not to yield to panic, and run, she ceased to pick her way between cart-ruts tilled with water, but plunged recklessly into muddy patches, whose suction glugged at the soles of her shoes. She had reached the densest part of the grove, where the trees intergrew in stunting overcrowding.
To her imagination, the place was suggestive of evil. Tattered leaves still hung to bare boughs, unpleasantly suggestive of rags of decaying flesh fluttering from a gibbet. A sluggish stream was clogged with dead leaves. Derelict litter of broken boots and rusty tins cropped out of a rank growth