Was It Murder? Read Online Free PDF Page A

tall, perhaps in his early thirties, with dark eyes and hair and a curious half-melancholy carelessness in the way he nodded and smiled.  He was dressed, if not perhaps definitely unconventionally, at least in a way that was not quite expected of an Oakington master on a Sunday morning; in fact, Revell decided, liking him a little on sight, there was nothing about him that was either schoolmasterly or sabbatical.
    “We were talking,” said Daggat, puffing away at a huge briar pipe, “about poor Marshall.  Revell knew his brother—the one who was killed in the War.”
    Lambourne inclined his head, but made no comment.
    “I must say I feel dashed sorry for the present Marshall,” Daggat continued.  “He’s here now, you know, Revell—our head prefect.  The only one left out of three brothers, and both the others killed.  Frightful bad luck, you know, and his parents both dead, too.  The poor fellow was pretty badly cut up, I can tell you.  The Head wanted to give him leave of absence for the rest of Term, but of course there was nowhere for him to go.  His guardian’s in India.”
    “How about his holidays, then?”
    “I think he spends most of them with other fellows’ people.  He’s very popular.”
    “Once he had a fortnight with Cousin Thomas,” put in Lambourne.  “Did you know, by the way, that Ellington was his cousin?  They toured the Lake District, anyhow, caught terrible colds, and finished up with a very bourgeois week-end at a seaside hydro near Blackpool.”
    “Yes, he’s very popular,” Daggat reiterated.  “Jolly good at all games, but swimming especially.  Quite the best swimmer Oakington ever had, I believe.  Different in almost every way from his brother, poor chap.”
    Revell gathered somehow that Daggat had not greatly cared for the younger Marshall.  “You knew HIM quite well too, I suppose?” he queried.
    “Oh, fairly well.  He was in my junior form for English.  Quiet sort of fellow—imaginative, I daresay—read queer kinds of books.  Not bad at his work.  I expect he’d have taken his School Certificate.”
    Revell felt that the epitaph on the deceased had, from the schoolmasterly point of view, been fitly and finally pronounced.  As if to clinch the matter, Daggat added:  “Ah well, the only way to look at these things is to believe that somehow or other they’re providential.”
    Lambourne smiled.  “I’m afraid you view Providence a shade too indulgently, Daggat.  Even an insurance company would hardly dare to call a falling gas-fitting an act of God.”
    Just then the chapel bell began to ring for morning service.  “Must dash away,” cried Daggat, picking up his gown.  “You two chaps stay here and chin-wag as long as you like.”
    When he had gone, Lambourne poked up the fire and dragged his chair nearer to it.  “I wish Daggat, as a believer in hell-fire, would use a little more coal,” he remarked.  “It would prevent his visitors from envying the warmth of the lower regions.”  He dug into the coal-scuttle with the shovel.  “Empty, of course.  We call him ‘the Cherub’, by the way.  Decent fellow, except when he’s preaching.  Then he makes you feel you want to wring his neck.  I warn you, you’ll have him to-night, if you go.”
    “I know.  He told me.”
    “You’re staying at the Head’s, aren’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Just for the week-end?”
    “That’s all.”
    “Pity.  You might have come along to dine with me one night at the local pub.  I like a change from school dinners now and again.”  He went on, after a pause, and with disconcerting abruptness:  “Like the Head?”
    “Pretty well, I think.”
    “I suppose you mean that you can’t quite make him out?”
    “No, I wouldn’t say that I meant that.”  Revell was a little resentful of the other’s interpretative air.
    “You must remember he’s been other things besides a schoolmaster.  Lived abroad a good deal—America and the