We listened to him with relief. It was some way good for our spirits to have one of us speak out what we had all been thinking and had strained so hard to hide. Nor did we think less of him for his frankness. We knew at first, and we knew now, that Nopp’s nerve was as good or better than any man in the gathering, and he had never showed it better than in speaking frankly now.
“Bunk, Nopp,” Van Hope answered. “You’re mixing coincidence up with atmosphere. It was a strange and a devilish thing that those two crimes should have happened two nights running, but it will work out perfectly plausible—mark my words. And coincidences don’t happen three times in a row.”
Nopp lifted his face to the starlit skies. “My boy,” he said, rather superciliously, “anything could happen at Kastle Krags.”
CHAPTER XIX
After I went to my room I worked for an hour on the cryptogram, found beside Florey’s body. The mysterious column of four-letter words, however, did not respond to any methods of translation that I knew. For another hour thereafter I lay awake in my bed beside the window.
It was one of the few spots in the house that offered a fairly clear glimpse of the lagoon. The trees opened, like curtains: I could see the water darkly blue in the starlight, and the faint, gray line, like a crayon mark, that was the natural rock wall. The tide was coming in now: I could see the white manes of the sea-horses as they charged over the barrier. The whole surface of the lagoon was fretted by them.
Had Nopp spoken true—could there be a recurrence of last night’s tragedy? Could any situation arise in human affairs that would result in three murders, one after another, all under practically the same and the most mysterious conditions? It was possible, by a long stretch of the imagination, to conceive of two such crimes occurring on successive nights—the murderer striking again, through some unknown movement of events, to hide his first crime—but coincidences do not happen thrice! If indeed these disappearances could be wholly attributed to human activities, human designs and human passions, there was no need of lying awake and expectant this third night. Surely no super-criminal had declared remorseless war against all of the occupants of that house. Certainly we could sleep in peace to-night!
But I couldn’t get away from the same thought that haunted me before—that these crimes lay somehow without the bourne of human event and circumstance, that they were some way native to this strange, old manor-house beside the sea. It wasn’t easy to lose one’s self in sleep. I felt no shame at my own uneasiness. It was true that the crimes had both occurred, evidently, on the shore of or near the lagoon, but could the curse that lay upon the old estate extend its baleful influence into the house itself? Anything could happen at Kastle Krags, Nopp had said, and it became increasingly difficult to disbelieve him.