Herbert saw her to the car, and came back, looking grave. We were standing together in the center of the dismantled room, with the lights going full now.
"Well," he said, "it is one of two things. Either we"ve been gloriously faked, or we"ve been let in on a very tidy little crime."
It was Mrs. Dane"s custom to serve a Southern eggnog as a sort of stir-up-cup--nightcap, she calls it--on her evenings, and we found it waiting for us in the library. In the warmth of its open fire, and the cheer of its lamps, even in the dignity and impa.s.siveness of the butler, there was something sane and wholesome. The women of the party reacted quickly, but I looked over to see Sperry at a corner desk, intently working over a small object in the palm of his hand.
He started when he heard me, then laughed and held out his hand.
"Library paste!" he said. "It rolls into a soft, malleable ball. It could quite easily be used to fill a small hole in plaster. The paper would paste down over it, too."
"Then you think?"
"I"m not thinking at all. The thing she described may have taken place in Timbuctoo. May have happened ten years ago. May be the plot of some book she has read."
"On the other hand," I replied, "it is just possible that it was here, in this neighborhood, while we were sitting in that room."
"Have you any idea of the time?"
"I know exactly. It was half-past nine."
III
At midnight, shortly after we reached home, Sperry called me on the phone. "Be careful, Horace," he said. "Don"t let Mrs. Horace think anything has happened. I want to see you at once. Suppose you say I have a patient in a bad way, and a will to be drawn."
I listened to sounds from upstairs. I heard my wife go into her room and close the door.
"Tell me something about it," I urged.
"Just this. Arthur Wells killed himself tonight, shot himself in the head. I want you to go there with me."
"Arthur Wells!"
"Yes. I say, Horace, did you happen to notice the time the seance began tonight?"
"It was five minutes after nine when my watch fell."
"Then it would have been about half past when the trance began?"
"Yes."
There was a silence at Sperry"s end of the wire. Then:
"He was shot about 9:30," he said, and rang off.
I am not ashamed to confess that my hands shook as I hung up the receiver. A brick house, she had said; the Wells house was brick. And so were all the other houses on the street. Vines in the back? Well, even my own house had vines. It was absurd; it was pure coincidence; it was--well, I felt it was queer.
Nevertheless, as I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all, a spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but intangible, sentient but tuned above our common senses?
I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the darkened recesses of the pa.s.sage. It seemed to my disordered nerves that back of the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the heavy curtains, in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy forms, invisible when I stared, but advancing a trifle from their obscurity when, by turning my head and looking ahead, they impinged on the extreme right or left of my field of vision.
I was shocked by the news, but not greatly grieved. The Wellses had been among us but not of us, as I have said. They had come, like gay young comets, into our orderly constellation, trailing behind them their cars and servants, their children and governesses and rather riotous friends, and had flashed on us in a sort of bright impermanence.
Of the two, I myself had preferred Arthur. His faults were on the surface. He drank hard, gambled, and could not always pay his gambling debts. But underneath it all there had always been something boyishly honest about him. He had played, it is true, through most of the thirty years that now marked his whole life, but he could have been made a man by the right woman. And he had married the wrong one.
Of Elinor Wells I have only my wife"s verdict, and I have found that, as is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own s.e.x are rather merciless. A tall, handsome girl, very dark, my wife has characterized her as cold, calculating and ambitious. She has said frequently, too, that Elinor Wells was a disappointed woman, that her marriage, while giving her social ident.i.ty, had disappointed her in a monetary way.
Whether that is true or not, there was no doubt, by the time they had lived in our neighborhood for a year, that a complication had arisen in the shape of another man.
My wife, on my return from my office in the evening, had been quite likely to greet me with:
"Horace, he has been there all afternoon. I really think something should be done about it."
"Who has been where?" I would ask, I am afraid not too patiently.
"You know perfectly well. And I think you ought to tell him."
In spite of her vague p.r.o.nouns, I understood, and in a more masculine way I shared her sense of outrage. Our street has never had a scandal on it, except the one when the Berringtons" music teacher ran away with their coachman, in the days of carriages. And I am glad to say that that is almost forgotten.
Nevertheless, we had realized for some time that the dreaded triangle was threatening the repute of our quiet neighborhood, and as I stood by the telephone that night I saw that it had come. More than that, it seemed very probable that into this very triangle our peaceful Neighborhood Club had been suddenly thrust.
My wife accepted my excuse coldly. She dislikes intensely the occasional outside calls of my profession. She merely observed, however, that she would leave all the lights on until my return. "I should think you could arrange things better, Horace," she added. "It"s perfectly idiotic the way people die at night. And tonight, of all nights!"
I shall have to confess that through all of the thirty years of our married life my wife has clung to the belief that I am a bit of a dog.
Thirty years of exemplary living have not affected this conviction, nor had Herbert"s foolish remark earlier in the evening helped matters. But she watched me put on my overcoat without further comment. When I kissed her good-night, however, she turned her cheek.
The street, with its open s.p.a.ces, was a relief after the dark hall. I started for Sperry"s house, my head bent against the wind, my mind on the news I had just heard. Was it, I wondered, just possible that we had for some reason been allowed behind the veil which covered poor Wells"
last moments? And, to admit that for a moment, where would what we had heard lead us? Sperry had said he had killed himself. But--suppose he had not?
I realize now, looking back, that my recollection of the other man in the triangle is largely colored by the fact that he fell in the great war. At that time I hardly knew him, except as a wealthy and self-made man in his late thirties; I saw him now and then, in the club playing billiards or going in and out of the Wells house, a large, fastidiously dressed man, strong featured and broad shouldered, with rather too much manner. I remember particularly how I hated the light spats he affected, and the glaring yellow gloves.
A man who would go straight for the thing he wanted, woman or power or money. And get it.
Sperry was waiting on his door-step, and we went on to the Wells house.
What with the magnitude of the thing that had happened, and our mutual feeling that we were somehow involved in it, we were rather silent.
Sperry asked one question, however, "Are you certain about the time when Miss Jeremy saw what looks like this thing?"
"Certainly. My watch fell at five minutes after nine. When it was all over, and I picked it up, it was still going, and it was 9:30."
He was silent for a moment. Then:
"The Wellses" nursery governess telephoned for me at 9:35. We keep a record of the time of all calls."
Sperry is a heart specialist, I think I have said, with offices in his house.
And, a block or so farther on: "I suppose it was bound to come. To tell the truth, I didn"t think the boy had the courage."
"Then you think he did it?"