"They say so," he said grimly. And added,--irritably: "Good heavens, Horace, we must keep that other fool thing out of our minds."
"Yes," I agreed. "We must."
Although the Wells house was brilliantly lighted when we reached it, we had difficulty in gaining admission. Whoever were in the house were up-stairs, and the bell evidently rang in the deserted kitchen or a neighboring pantry.
"We might try the servants" entrance," Sperry said. Then he laughed mirthlessly.
"We might see," he said, "if there"s a key on the nail among the vines."
I confess to a nervous tightening of my muscles as we made our way around the house. If the key was there, we were on the track of a revelation that might revolutionize much that we had held fundamental in science and in our knowledge of life itself. If, sitting in Mrs. Dane"s quiet room, a woman could tell us what was happening in a house a mile or so away, it opened up a new earth. Almost a new heaven.
I stopped and touched Sperry"s arm. "This Miss Jeremy--did she know Arthur Wells or Elinor? If she knew the house, and the situation between them, isn"t it barely possible that she antic.i.p.ated this thing?"
"We knew them," he said gruffly, "and whatever we antic.i.p.ated, it wasn"t this."
Sperry had a pocket flash, and when we found the door locked we proceeded with our search for the key. The porch had been covered with heavy vines, now dead of the November frosts, and showing, here and there, dead and dried leaves that crackled as we touched them. In the darkness something leaped against, me, and I almost cried out. It was, however, only a collie dog, eager for the warmth of his place by the kitchen fire.
"Here"s the key," Sperry said, and held it out. The flash wavered in his hand, and his voice was strained.
"So far, so good," I replied, and was conscious that my own voice rang strange in my ears.
We admitted ourselves, and the dog, bounding past us, gave a sharp yelp of grat.i.tude and ran into the kitchen.
"Look here, Sperry," I said, as we stood inside the door, "they don"t want me here. They"ve sent for you, but I"m the most casual sort of an acquaintance. I haven"t any business here."
That struck him, too. We had both been so obsessed with the scene at Mrs. Dane"s that we had not thought of anything else.
"Suppose you sit down in the library," he said. "The chances are against her coming down, and the servants don"t matter."
As a matter of fact, we learned later that all the servants were out except the nursery governess. There were two small children. There was a servants" ball somewhere, and, with the exception of the butler, it was after two before they commenced to straggle in. Except two plain-clothes men from the central office, a physician who was with Elinor in her room, and the governess, there was no one else in the house but the children, asleep in the nursery.
As I sat alone in the library, the house was perfectly silent. But in some strange fashion it had apparently taken on the attributes of the deed that had preceded the silence. It was sinister, mysterious, dark.
Its immediate effect on my imagination was apprehension--almost terror.
Murder or suicide, here among the shadows a soul, an indestructible thing, had been recently violently wrenched from its body. The body lay in the room overhead. But what of the spirit? I shivered as I thought that it might even then be watching me with formless eyes from some dark corner.
Overwrought as I was, I was forced to bring my common sense to bear on the situation. Here was a tragedy, a real and terrible one. Suppose we had, in some queer fashion, touched its outer edges that night? Then how was it that there had come, mixed up with so much that might be pertinent, such extraneous and grotesque things as Childe Harold, a hurt knee, and Mother Goose?
I remember moving impatiently, and trying to argue myself into my ordinary logical state of mind, but I know now that even then I was wondering whether Sperry had found a hole in the ceiling upstairs.
I wandered, I recall, into the realm of the clairvoyant and the clairaudient. Under certain conditions, such as trance, I knew that some individuals claimed a power of vision that was supernormal, and I had at one time lunched at my club with a well-dressed gentleman in a pince nez who said the room was full of people I could not see, but who were perfectly distinct to him. He claimed, and I certainly could not refute him, that he saw further into the violet of the spectrum than the rest of us, and seemed to consider it nothing unusual when an elderly woman, whose description sounded much like my great-grand-mother, came and stood behind my chair.
I recall that he said she was stroking my hair, and that following that I had a distinctly creepy sensation along my scalp.
Then there were those who claimed that in trance the spirit of the medium, giving place to a control, was free to roam whither it would, and, although I am not sure of this, that it wandered in the fourth dimension. While I am very vague about the fourth dimension, I did know that in it doors and walls were not obstacles. But as they would not be obstacles to a spirit, even in the world as we know it, that got me nowhere.
Suppose Sperry came down and said Arthur Wells had been shot above the ear, and that there was a second bullet hole in the ceiling? Added to the key on the nail, a careless custom and surely not common, we would have conclusive proof that our medium had been correct. There was another point, too. Miss Jeremy had said, "Get the lather off his face."
That brought me up with a turn. Would a man stop shaving to kill himself? If he did, why a revolver? Why not the razor in his hand?
I knew from my law experience that suicide is either a desperate impulse or a cold-blooded and calculated finality. A man who kills himself while dressing comes under the former cla.s.sification, and will usually seize the first method at hand. But there was something else, too. Shaving is an automatic process. It completes itself. My wife has an irritated conviction that if the house caught fire while I was in the midst of the process, I would complete it and rinse the soap from my face before I caught up the fire-extinguisher.
Had he killed himself, or had Elinor killed him? Was she the sort to sacrifice herself to a violent impulse? Would she choose the hard way, when there was the easy one of the divorce court? I thought not. And the same was true of Ellingham. Here were two people, both of them careful of appearance, if not of fact. There was another possibility, too.
That he had learned something while he was dressing, had attacked or threatened her with a razor, and she had killed him in self-defence.
I had reached that point when Sperry came down the staircase, ushering out the detectives and the medical man. He came to the library door and stood looking at me, with his face rather paler than usual.
"I"ll take you up now," he said. "She"s in her room, in bed, and she has had an opiate."
"Was he shot above the ear?"
"Yes."
I did not look at him, nor he at me. We climbed the stairs and entered the room, where, according to Elinor"s story, Arthur Wells had killed himself. It was a dressing-room, as Miss Jeremy had described. A wardrobe, a table with books and magazines in disorder, two chairs, and a couch, const.i.tuted the furnishings. Beyond was a bathroom. On a chair by a window the dead mans"s evening clothes were neatly laid out, his shoes beneath. His top hat and folded gloves were on the table.
Arthur Wells lay on the couch. A sheet had been drawn over the body, and I did not disturb it. It gave the impression of unusual length that is always found, I think, in the dead, and a breath of air from an open window, by stirring the sheet, gave a false appearance of life beneath.
The house was absolutely still.
When I glanced at Sperry he was staring at the ceiling, and I followed his eyes, but there was no mark on it. Sperry made a little gesture.
"It"s queer," he muttered. "It"s--"
"The detective and I put him there. He was here." He showed a place on the floor midway of the room.
"Where was his head lying?" I asked, cautiously.
"Here."
I stooped and examined the carpet. It was a dark Oriental, with much red in it. I touched the place, and then ran my folded handkerchief over it.
It came up stained with blood.
"There would be no object in using cold water there, so as not to set the stain," Sperry said thoughtfully. "Whether he fell there or not, that is where she allowed him to be found."
"You don"t think he fell there?"
"She dragged him, didn"t she?" he demanded. Then the strangeness of what he was saying struck him, and he smiled foolishly. "What I mean is, the medium said she did. I don"t suppose any jury would pa.s.s us tonight as entirely sane, Horace," he said.
He walked across to the bathroom and surveyed it from the doorway. I followed him. It was as orderly as the other room. On a gla.s.s shelf over the wash-stand were his razors, a safety and, beside it, in a black case, an a.s.sortment of the long-bladed variety, one for each day of the week, and so marked.
Sperry stood thoughtfully in the doorway.
"The servants are out," he said. "According to Elinor"s statement he was dressing when he did it. And yet some one has had a wild impulse for tidiness here, since it happened. Not a towel out of place!"
It was in the bathroom that he told me Elinor"s story. According to her, it was a simple case of suicide. And she was honest about it, in her own way. She was shocked, but she was not pretending any wild grief.
She hadn"t wanted him to die, but she had not felt that they could go on much longer together. There had been no quarrel other than their usual bickering. They had been going to a dance that night. The servants had all gone out immediately after dinner to a servants" ball and the governess had gone for a walk. She was to return at nine-thirty to fasten Elinor"s gown and to be with the children.
Arthur, she said, had been depressed for several days, and at dinner had hardly spoken at all. He had not, however, objected to the dance. He had, indeed, seemed strangely determined to go, although she had pleaded a headache. At nine o"clock he went upstairs, apparently to dress.