A light flashed on somewhere at the rear of the room. And Holden, peering through the long crack between the hinges of the door, now understood.
The premises of Sedgwick & Co. comprised two rooms set in a line from front to back. In the rear room beyond an open door, someone was seated in front of a triple mirror—-his back to the communicating door; and a light had just been switched on above him.
The front room was heavily carpeted. Holden slipped in without noise, and looked.
Facing him in the mirror, past the shoulder of the person who sat in the rear room, was a countenance of fat repulsiveness: high colored, yet pock marked and heavy jowled, sagging of eye, leering like a satyr under the white court wig.
The face admired itself. It tilted up its chin, turning from side to side, pleased with the puffy cheeks. It cocked its head like a bird's. Repeated in the triple mirrors, its moppings and mowings flashed, slyly, from every angle. Then it elongated itself when hands appeared on either side; the eyes were punched out into black holes.
It was a mask. Out of it emerged the thoughtful face of Sir Danvers Locke.
"Not bad," Locke commented. "But the price is too high."
"The price'" murmured another voice, in tones faintly shocked and reproachful. "The price!"
It was a woman's voice, pleasant, between youth and middle-age, and unmistakably French.
"These masks," the woman said, "are the work of Joyet."
"Yes. Quite."
"They are his best work. They are the last work he has done before he died." Her voice grew more reproachful. "I have sent you a special telegram to come quickly and see them."
"I know. And I'm grateful." Locke drummed his fingers on the table of the mirrors. He glanced up, past the light shining on his gray hair, at the invisible woman. His tone changed. "May I say, Mademoiselle Frey, that it is a great relief to come here and talk to you sometimes?"
"But it is a compliment!"
"You know nothing of me or my affairs. Beyond making sure my check is good, you don't want to know anything."
In the mirror above his head there was the shadow of a shrug. Abruptly, as though this made matters easier, Locke spoke in French.
"I am not," he said, "a man who speaks easily at home or even among his friends. And I am much troubled."
"Yes," Mademoiselle Frey agreed quietly, also in French. "One comprehends that. But monsieur was not serious about these . . . coffins?"
"Yes. Very serious."
"I myself," cried the woman, "have interred my brother. It was an interment of the first class. The coffin—"
"The coffin of the lady in question," said Locke, with his eye on a corner of the mirror, "was an inner coffin of wood, an outer casing of lead, then an outer wooden shell. Massive, airtight, good for years against corruption. So also was the coffin of one John Devereux, a cabinet minister under Lord Palmerston, the coffin made in mid-nineteenth century. Each of them: eight hundred pounds."
The woman's voice went up shrilly.
"You speak of the price?"
"No. I speak of the weight"
"Mais c'est incroyable. No, no, no! You are mocking me!" "I assure you I am not"
"Such a formidable weight is moved about in this tomb; it would require six men; yet no footprint is in the sand? It is impossible!"
On the contrary. It would not require six men. And this joke is very simple, when you learn the secret of it" The old, aching riddle!
Holden, who knew he could not be seen beyond that down-shining light over the minors, stood rigid and motionless.
"I claim no credit, you comprehend," Locke went on, "for knowing this. It has happened before, twice in England, and once perhaps at a place called Oese! in the Baltic. In the library at Cas—at a certain place; forgive me if I do not mention names—there is a book giving all details.
"For myself," he declared in his smooth finely enunciated French, "I hear nothing of this at an interview early this morning with a certain Dr. Fe—a certain doctor of philosophy. No! I hear it only when I am entering the train, with a friend of mine, from a certain police inspector. I told him how the trick was done. He shook hands with me, this Crawford, and said it would enable them to arrest somebody."
Arrest "somebody"?
Arrest Celia! Holden, feeling that some fragile shield hitherto guarding Celia had been broken to bits, started to back toward the door over the soft thick carpet. Yet Locke's face in the mirror still kept him there, because its expression was so strained and more thoroughly human than he had ever seen it.
"And yet" Locke said, "this is not what troubles me."
"Indeed?" his companion murmured coldly. "Will it please you to see some more of Joyce's masks?"
"You think I am mocking you over this matter of the coffins?"
"Monsieur buys here. It is his privilege, within limits, to say what he likes." "Mademoiselle, for God's sake!"
Locke struck the table. His urbane countenance was pitted with wrinkles. His pale eyes, over the high cheekbones, were turned up pleadingly.
"I was not a young man," he said, "when I married. I have a daughter, now age nineteen."
His companion's voice softened immediately. This was something understandable.
"And you are concerned about her?"
"Yes!"
"Without doubt she is a young girl of good character?"
"Good character? What is that? I don't know. As good, I suppose, as that of most, girls who run the streets nowadays.— Give me another of the masks."
"Come, monsieur!" Mademoiselle Prey's voice was laughing and chiding at once; all asparkle. "Come, now! You must not speak like that!"
"No?"
"It is cynical. It is not nice."
"Young people," said Locke, "are utterly callous. You agree?"
"Come, now!"
"And sometimes utterly ruthless. This is not out of any brutality. It is because they cannot see the effect of their actions on any person except themselves."
Briefly Locke held up another mask before his face without putting it on. The features of a young girl, exquisitely tinted, as real as a living face, serene and innocent even to the long eyelashes, appeared in the glass.
"They are blind," the eyes in the mirror closed, "to any consideration except self-interest They want something. They must have it. Point out to them that this is wrong; they will agree with you, perhaps sincerely, and in the next moment forget it Youth is a cruel time."
The mask dropped.
"Now I will tell you, a stranger, what I would not tell my own wife."
"Monsieur," said the woman, "you frighten me."
"I beg your pardon. Most humbly. I will stop talking."
"No, no, no! I wish to hear! And yet .. ."
"Yesterday evening," said Locke, "when a group of us were being questioned by the doctor of philosophy in question, there occurred to me suddenly a new and unpleasant idea. I could not credit it I cannot credit it even now."
"It occurred to me because of a question asked by this Dr. Fell. He suddenly asked, for no apparent reason, whether the lady who died—a handsome lady, in the full strength of her beauty—had visited my house on the afternoon of the twenty-third of December.
"I answered, truthfully, that she had. I did not add something else. I dared not add it I will not add it But shortly after she left my house I saw her, through my study window, walking in the frost-covered fields. There was someone with her."
Again Locke held up a mask to his eyes; and the face that sprang out of the glass was the face of a devil.
"I will deny this if I am asked. I can laugh at it But the person in question handed to her something which I now half-believe to have been a small brown bottle. A bottle that..."
"One moment, monsieur," the woman said. "I believe the outer door of our shop is now open."