Chapter 11: In the One Room—and the Other

Edwin Lawrence was one of the most finical men I had ever met on the subject of draughts. A properly ventilated apartment set him shivering, even in the middle of summer. The faintest suspicion of a healthy current of air made him turn up the collar of his coat. No room could be too stuffy for him. All his doors and windows he screened with heavy hangings. Behind the curtains which veiled the entrance into his dining-room I lingered, for a moment, to glance between the voluminous folds. Miss Moore was standing about the centre of the room. Something in the expression of her face, and in her attitude, caused me to hesitate. I checked the advance of Miss Adair and Hume, who pressed on me behind.

“Wait!” I whispered. “I want to see what she is going to do.”

I would rather have been unaccompanied; Hume’s society in particular I could have done without. But I could hardly induce him to withdraw without disturbing the girl within. That, all at once, I felt indisposed to do. At any and every risk I wanted light; to bring her back into the full possession of her reason. It needed but a brief glance to perceive that, in her present environment, she might pass through some sort of crisis which would bring about the result I so ardently desired. The constable had followed us into the room. He showed a disposition to require our retreat. I took him by the shoulder.

“Be still, man; you will do your duty best by holding your tongue.”

He perceived that there was reason in what I said. He held his tongue, and I held his shoulder.

Miss Moore was looking round as if something in the appearance of the room struck a chord in her memory, and she was endeavouring to discover what it was. She put her hand up to her forehead with the gesture with which I had become familiar.

“I have been in this room before—surely I have. I seem to know it all quite well; but I can’t think when I saw it, or how. I can’t make it out at all.”

She was glancing about her with bewildered eyes, as if seeking for some familiar object which would serve as a clue towards the solution of the puzzle. At last something arrested her attention; it was the tell-tale stain upon the carpet. She was standing within a yard or two of the spot on which I had discovered Lawrence lying. His body was gone, but his blood remained behind—a lurid disfigurement of the handsome floorcloth. She started at it.

“What is it?” She stooped down; she touched it with her finger tips; an odd little tremor seemed to come into her voice. “It—it’s dry. Why shouldn’t it be dry? What—what is it?” Still stooping, she covered her face with her hands, as if struggling to rouse her dormant memory. “It seems to bring something back to me. Something—something horrid. What can it be? Oh!”

She started upright, with a little exclamation. A new look came on her face; a suggestion of fear, of horror. She was all at once on the alert, as if in expectation of something of which she had cause to be afraid.

“This is where Mr. Edwin Lawrence was killed—killed!” Again that look of puzzlement. “That means that he was—murdered! Murdered! He fell like that.”

She made a sudden movement, as if to hurl herself headlong to the floor, which was so realistic that I started forward to save her from a fall. It was only a feint; in an instant she was back in her original position.

“Let me see how it was. He was here, and I was there.”

She moved from one place to another, as if endeavouring to recall a scene in which she had taken part. It seemed to come back to her in fragments.

“I said, ‘I’ll kill you;’ because I felt like killing him. And then—then he laughed. He said, ‘Kill me! How will you be better off for that?’ And that made me worse. I made up my mind that—that I’d kill him.”

She paused. I shuddered, clutching the curtains tighter. Although I did not turn to look at them, I knew that there was something strange on the faces of Miss Adair and Hume; that even the constable was moved to a display of unusual interest. A faint whisper reached me from the lady: