A foolish whisper, as he patted her hand. Then somehow they were inside the door, in a small office with drawn blinds.
"I heard you come in," she said, in a low voice, "and I heard Mr. Saunders coming upstairs, and I couldn't talk to him; so I let Mrs. Bundle stop him — she'll talk his ears off — and came down the back stairs."
She sat down on an old horsehair sofa, her chin propped in the palm of her hand, her eyes heavy and dull. A silence. The closed, darkened room was thick with heat: When she started to speak again, with a little spasmodic movement of her hand, he touched her shoulder.
"If you'd rather not talk…"
"I've got to talk. It seems days since I've slept. And I must go in there, in a moment, and go over the whole thing again with Them."
His fingers tightened. She raised her head.
"You needn't look like that," she said, softly. "Would you — would you believe that I was never tremendously fond of Martin? It isn't that so much — his dying, I mean. He was never very close to any of us, you know. I ought to feel worse about it than I do."
"Well, then…"
"Either one of the two is just as bad!" she cried, her voice rising. "It's either — We can't help ourselves; we're haunted; we're damned, all of us, in the blood; retribution; I never believed it, I won't believe it; or else―"
"Steady! You've got to snap out of this."
"Or else-maybe it's both. How do we know what's in a person's blood? Yours or mine or anybody's? There may be a murderer's blood just as well as a ghost; more so. Is that door shut?"
"Yes."
"Any of us. Why" — her voice grew vague, and she put her hands together as though she were uncertain of their position, "I might kill you. I might take the gun out of that desk drawer, just because I couldn't help myself, and all of a sudden…" She shuddered. "Why, if all those old people weren't damned to suicide, or being thrown off the balcony by destiny — ghosts — I don't know — then somebody was damned to kill them — in the family…."
"You've got to stop this! Look here! Listen-!"
She nodded gently, touched her eyelids with her finger tips, and looked up. "Do you think Herbert killed Martin?"
"No! No, of course not. And it wasn't any foolery about ghosts, either. And-you know your cousin couldn't have killed Martin. He admired him; he was solid and dependable―"
"He talked to himself," the girl said, blankly. "I remember now; he talked to himself. It's the quiet people I'm afraid of. They're the ones who go mad, if it's tainted blood to begin with…. He had big red hands. His hair wouldn't stay down, no matter how much he slicked it. He was built delicately, like Martin, but his hands were too big. He tried to look like Martin. I wonder if he hated Martin?”
A pause, while she plucked at the edges of the sofa.
"And he was always trying to invent something that never worked. A new churn. He thought he was an inventor. Martin used to laugh at him… "
The dim room was full of personalities. Rampole saw two figures standing in the middle of a white road at dusk, so like in appearance and yet so vitally unlike. Martin, drunk, a cigarette hanging from his lips. Herbert gawky and blunt-featured, with a badly fitting hat set exactly high and straight on his head. You felt that if Herbert smoked a cigarette, too, it would protrude from the exact centre of his mouth, and waggle awkwardly.
"Somebody opened the wall safe in the library last night," said Dorothy Starberth. "That was something I didn't tell Dr. Fell last night. I didn't tell him so much that was important. I didn't tell him that at dinner Herbert was more flustered than Martin… It was Herbert who opened that library safe."
"But―"
"Martin didn't know the combination. He's been away two years, and he never had occasion to. The only ones who knew it were myself and Mr. Payne-and Herbert. I saw it standing open last night."
"Something was taken?"
"I don't think so. There was never anything valuable left in there. When father built this office here, he stopped using it. I'm sure he hadn't opened it for years, and none of the rest of us ever did. It was just full of some old papers for years back… It wasn't that anything had been taken; at least, anything I know of. It was something I found."
He wondered whether she were becoming hysterical. She rose from the sofa, opened a secretary-desk with a key hung round her neck, and took out a yellowed piece of paper. As she handed it to him, he fought down a desire to take her in his arms.
"Read it!" she said, breathlessly. "I trust you. I won't tell the others. I must tell somebody…. Read it."
He glanced down, puzzled. It was headed, "Feb. 3, 1895. My copy of the verses — Timothy Starberth," in faded ink. It read:
"Well," said Rampole, muttering over the lines, "it's very bad doggerel, and it doesn't make the slightest sense so far as I can see; but that's true of a lot of verse I've read…. What is it?"
She looked at him steadily. "Do you see the date? February 3 was father's birthday. He was born in 1870, so in 1895 he would have been―"
"Twenty-five years old," interposed Rampole, suddenly.
They were both silent, Rampole staring at the enigmatic words with a slow comprehension. All the wild surmises which he and Sir Benjamin had been making, and which Dr. Fell had so violently ridiculed, seemed to grow substantial before him.
"Now let me lead you on," he suggested. "If that's true, then the original of this paper — it says `my copy' — was in the vault in the Governor's Room. So?"
"It must be what the eldest sons were intended to see." She took the paper out of his hands as though she felt a rage against it, and would have crumpled it in her hand but that he shook his head. "I've thought about it, and thought about it, and that's the only explanation I can see. I hope it's true. I had fancied so many ghastly things that might be there. And yet this is just as bad. People still die."
He sat down on the sofa.
"If there was an original," he said, "it isn't there now."
Slowly, omitting nothing, he told her of their visit to the Governor's Room. "And that thing," he added, "is a cryptogram of some sort. It's got to be. Could anybody have killed Martin just to get at this?"
There was a discreet knock at the door, and they both started like conspirators. Putting her finger on her lips, Dorothy hastily locked the paper in the desk.
"Come in," she said.
Budge's smooth countenance floated in at the opening of the door. If he were surprised to find Rampole here, there was no sign of it.
"Excuse me, Miss Dorothy," he said. "Mr. Payne has just arrived. Sir Benjamin would like to see you in the library, if you please."
Chapter 10
There had been high words in the library a moment before; so much was plain from the constraint and tensity there, and the slight flush on Sir Benjamin's face. He stood with his back to the empty fireplace, his hands clasped behind him. In the middle of the room, Rampole saw, stood his own pet dislike — Payne, the lawyer.