“Nor anywhere else,” I encouraged her, with a laugh; and her confidences opened another notch:
“You’re likely right in that, too, sir. As I’ve said to poor Mr. Sarston, many a time, ‘It’s all well enough,’ says I, ‘to have bugs for a hobby. You can afford it; and being a bachelor and by yourself, you don’t have to consider other people’s likes and dislikes. And it’s all well enough if you want to,’ says I, ‘to keep thousands and thousands o’ them in cabinets, all over the place, the way you do. But when it comes to pinnin’ them on the walls in regular armies,’ I says, ‘and on the ceiling of your own study; and even on different parts of the furniture, so that a body don’t know what awful thing she’s a-goin’ to find under her hand of a sudden when she does the dusting; why, then,’ I says to him, ‘it’s drivin’ a decent woman too far.’ ”
“And did he never try to reform his ways when you told him that?” I asked smiling.
“To be frank with you, Mr. Robinson, when I talked like that to him, he generally raised my pay. And what was a body to do then?”
“I can’t see how Lucy Lawton stood the place as long as she did,” I observed, watching Mrs. Malkin’s red face very closely.
She swallowed the bait, and leaned forward, hands on knees.
“Poor girl, it got on her nerves. But she was the quiet kind. You never saw her, sir?”
I shook my head.
“One of them slim, faded girls, with light hair, and hardly a word to say for herself. I don’t believe she got to know the next-door neighbor in the whole year she lived with your uncle. She was an orphan, wasn’t she, sir?”
“Yes,” I said. “Godfrey Sarston and I were her only living relatives. That was why she came from Australia to stay with him, after her father’s death.”
Mrs. Malkin nodded. I was hoping that, by-putting a check on my eagerness, I could lead her on to a number of things I greatly desired to know. Up to the time I had induced the housekeeper to show me through this strange house of my Uncle Godfrey’s, the whole affair had been a mystery of lips which closed and faces which were averted at my approach. Even the coroner seemed unwilling to tell me just how my uncle had died.
“Did you understand she was going to live with him, sir?” asked Mrs. Malkin, looking hard at me.
I confined myself to a nod.
“Well, so did I. Yet, after a year, back she went.”
“She went suddenly?” I suggested.
“So suddenly that I never knew a thing about it till after she was gone. I came to do my chores one day, and she was here. I came the next, and she had started back to Australia. That’s how sudden she went.”
“They must have had a falling-out,” I conjectured. “I suppose it was because of the house.”
“Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.”
“You know of other reasons?”
“I have eyes in my head,” she said. “But I’m not going to talk about it. Shall we be getting on now, sir?”
I tried another lead:
“I hadn’t seen my uncle in five years, you know. He seemed terribly changed. He was not an old man, by any means, yet when I saw him at the funeral—” I paused, expectantly.
To my relief, she responded readily: “He looked that way for the last few months, especially the last week. I spoke to him about it, two days before — before it happened, sir — and told him he’d do well to see the doctor again. But he cut me off short. My sister took sick the same day, and I was called out of town. The next time I saw him, he was—”
She paused, and then went on, sobbing: “To think of him lyin’ there in that awful place, and callin’ and callin’ for me, as I know he must, and me not around to hear him!”
As she stopped again, suddenly, and threw a suspicious glance at me, I hastened to insert a matter-of-fact question:
“Did he appear ill on that last day?”
“Not so much ill, as—”
“Yes?” I prompted.
She was silent a long time, while I waited, afraid that some word of mine had brought back her former attitude of hostility. Then she seemed to make up her mind.
“I oughtn’t to say another word. I’ve said too much, already. But you’ve been liberal with me, sir, and I know somethin’ you’ve a right to be told, which I’m thinkin’ no one else is a-goin’ to tell you. Look at the bottom of his study door a minute, sir.”
I followed her direction. What I saw led me to drop to my hands and knees, the better to examine it.
“Why should he put a rubber strip on the bottom of his door?” I asked, getting up.
She replied with another enigmatical suggestion: “Look at these, if you will, sir. You’ll remember that he slept in this study. That was his bed, over there in the alcove.”
“Bolts!” I exclaimed. And I reinforced sight with touch by shooting one of them back and forth a few times. “Double bolts on the inside of his bedroom door! An upstairs room, at that. What was the idea?”
Mrs. Malkin portentously shook her head and sighed, as one unburdening her mind.
“Only this can I say, sir: He was afraid of something — terribly afraid, sir. Something that came in the night.”
“What was it?” I demanded.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“It was in the night that — it happened?” I asked.
She nodded; then, as if the prologue were over, as if she had prepared my mind sufficiently, she produced something from under her apron. She must have been holding it there all the time.
“It’s his diary, sir. It was lying here on the floor. I saved it for you, before the police could get their hands on it.”
I opened the little book. One of the sheets near the back was crumpled, and I glanced at it, idly. What I read there impelled me to slap the covers shut again.
“Did you read this?” I demanded.
She met my gaze, frankly.
“I looked into it, sir, just as you did — only just looked into it. Not for worlds would I do even that again!”
“I noticed some reference here to a slab in the cellar. What slab is that?”
“It covers an old, dried-up well, sir.”
“Will you show it to me?”
“You can find it for yourself, sir, if you wish. I’m not goin’ down there,” she said, decidedly.
“Ah, well, I’ve seen enough for today,” I told her. “I’ll take the diary back to my hotel and read it.”
I did not return to my hotel, however. In my one brief glance into the little book, I had seen something which had bitten into my soul; only a few words, but they had brought me very near to that queer, solitary man who had been my uncle.
I dismissed Mrs. Malkin, and remained in the study. There was the fitting place to read the diary he had left behind him.
His personality lingered like a vapor in that study. I settled into his deep morris chair, and turned it to catch the light from the single, narrow window — the light, doubtless, by which he had written much of his work on entomology.
That same struggling illumination played shadowy tricks with hosts of wall-crucified insects, which seemed engaged in a united effort to crawl upward in sinuous lines. Some of their number, impaled to the ceiling itself, peered quiveringly down on the aspiring multitude. The whole house, with its crisp dead, rustling in any vagrant breeze, brought back to my mind the hand that had pinned them, one by one, on wall and ceiling and furniture. A kindly hand, I reflected, though eccentric; one not to be turned aside from its single hobby.
When quiet, peering Uncle Godfrey went, there passed out another of those scientific enthusiasts, whose passion for exact truth in some one direction has extended the bounds of human knowledge. Could not his unquestioned merits have been balanced against his sin? Was it necessary to even-handed justice that he die face-to-face with Horror, struggling with the thing he most feared? I ponder the question still, though his body — strangely bruised — has been long at rest.