When she looked back upon the experiences of that dreadful night, it seemed to Lexy that both she and her companion displayed almost incredible endurance. Since morning they had lived through a very lifetime of emotion, to end now in this tragedy more horrible than anything they could have feared.
Yet, not five minutes after his cry of agony, Captain Grey had recovered his self-control. He was able to speak quietly to Lexy, and she was able to answer him no less quietly.
“We’d better go,” he said. “We can do nothing here. It’s a case for the police now.”
“I’ve got to go back to the balcony,” Lexy told him. “There was something there.”
“Very well!” he agreed, and, without another word or a backward glance, he went up the ladder.
They returned through the house. He had left the lights burning and the doors open, so that there was a monstrous air of festivity in the emptiness. They went into Mrs. Quelton’s room again, and crossed through it to the balcony. He carried the lantern with him, and by its steady yellow flame they could see into every corner. There was the couch upon which she had lain—disarranged, as if she had just risen from it. There was a little table with medicine bottles on it. All the usual things were in the usual places.
“Nothing here,” said Captain Grey.
Lexy was sure, however, that there was. She stepped to the balcony railing, to look down into the garden below, and there, on the white paint of the railing, she found something.
“Look!” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “What’s this?”
He came to her side.
“It’s the print of a hand,” he said. “In blood, I should imagine.”
For a moment they stared at the ghastly mark, a strange evidence of pain and violence in this quiet place.
“We’d better look in the garden,” he suggested.
They went down. The grass beneath the balcony was beaten down in one place, but there was nothing else. Some one had come and gone. They could not even guess who it had been. They knew nothing.
“Come, Lexy!” the captain said.
They both turned for one last look at the accursed house, blazing with spectral lights. Then they set off, away from it, over that weary road again.
“There’s no police station in the village, is there?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen one, but I’ve heard Mrs. Royce talk about the constable. Anyhow, she can tell us.”
“Yes,” he said, and was silent for a moment. “Rather a pity, isn’t it,” he went on, “that there has to be—all that? Because it doesn’t matter now. It’s finished. Better if the house burned down to-night!”
In her heart Lexy agreed with him. She had no curiosity left, and scarcely any interest. As he had said, it was finished. She wanted to rest, not to speak, not to think, not to remember; but it couldn’t be so. They would both have to tell what they had seen, to answer questions. It wasn’t enough that two people lay dead in that house of horror. All the world, which knew and cared nothing about them, must have a full explanation.
“I suppose we couldn’t wait till morning?” she suggested.
He took her hand and drew it through his arm.
“You’re worn out,” he told her. “It’s altogether wrong. There’s no reason why you should be troubled any more, Lexy. Slip into the house quietly, and get to bed and to sleep. Nobody need know that you went there.”
“No!” she said. “We’ll see it through together.”
The thought of Charles Houseman came to her, but she disowned it with a listless sort of resentment. She felt, somehow, that he had failed her. He had not been there when she needed him. He had not taken his part in this ghastly and unforgettable sight.
There was a light in Mrs. Royce’s front parlor. Perhaps he was in there, waiting for her, cheerful and cool, a thousand miles away from the nightmare world in which she had been moving. She did not want to see him or speak to him just now. He hadn’t seen. He wouldn’t understand.
Captain Grey opened the gate, and they went up the flagged walk. Before they had mounted the veranda steps, the front door was flung wide, and Mrs. Royce appeared.
“Oh, my goodness!” she cried. “I thought you’d never come!”
Her tone and her manner were so strange that they both stopped and stared at her.
“Oh, my goodness!” she cried again.
“Oh, do come in! I don’t know what to do with her, I’m sure!”
“Who?” asked Lexy.
“Poor Mis’ Quelton. There she is, lyin’ upstairs—”
“Mrs. Quelton?”
“Joe, he brought her in his taxi, jest a little while after you’d gone.”
“Brought Mrs. Quelton here?”
“Brought her here and carried her up them very stairs,” declared Mrs. Royce impressively; “right up into the east bedroom, and there she lies!”
She stood aside, and Lexy and Captain Grey entered the house. The young man turned aside into the parlor, sank into a chair, and covered his face with his hands. Lexy stood beside him, looking down at his bent head, her face haggard and white.
“Why did Joe do that?” she asked.
“Don’t ask me, Miss Moran!” replied Mrs. Royce. “It beats me!”
There was a silence.
“But ain’t you going upstairs to see what she wants?” inquired Mrs. Royce anxiously.
Captain Grey sprang to his feet.
“Good God!” he shouted. “What are you talking about?”
Mrs. Royce backed into a corner, regarding him with alarm.
“I jest thought you’d like to talk to her,” she faltered.
“Do you mean she’s not dead?”
“Dead? Oh, my goodness gracious me!” cried Mrs. Royce. “I never—”
“Wait here,” Lexy told the captain.
“No!” he replied. “I must—”
But, disregarding him, Lexy turned to Mrs. Royce.
“Let me see her,” she said.
Mrs. Royce led the way upstairs. She went at an unusual rate of speed, so that she was panting when she reached the top.
“Kind of vi’lent!” she whispered, pointing downstairs, where Captain Grey was.
“This room?” asked Lexy. “Shall I go in?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Royce, “seems to me I’d knock, if I was you.”
Knock on the door of the room where Mrs. Quelton lay? Knock, and expect an answer from that voice? It seemed to Lexy, for a moment, that she could not raise her hand.
But she did. She knocked, and she was answered. She turned the handle and went in. An oil lamp stood on the bureau, and outside the circle of its mellow light, in the shadow, Mrs. Quelton was sitting on the edge of the bed; and it seemed to Lexy that she had never seen such a forlorn and pitiful figure.
“Oh, my dear!” she cried impulsively, and held out her arms.
Mrs. Quelton rose. She came toward Lexy, her hands outstretched—when a sudden cry from Mrs. Royce arrested her.
“But that ain’t Mrs. Quelton!” cried the landlady.