“What do you mean by coming here alone?” I demanded.
“The phone rang—in the upper corridor,” she told me almost breathlessly. “The negroes were afraid to answer it. I went—and it was a telegram for you. I thought I’d better bring it—it was only two hundred yards, and four men here. You’re not angry, are you?”
No man could be angry at such a time; and she handed me a written copy of the message she had received over the wire. I scratched a match, saw her pretty, sober face in its light and read:
Am sending picture of George Florey, brother of murdered man. Watch him closely. Am writing.
It wasn’t an urgent message. The picture would have reached me, just the same, and I had every intention of watching closely the man I believed was the dead butler’s brother. Yet I was glad enough she had seen fit to bring it to me. We would have our moment together, after all.
What was said beside that craggy, mysterious margin, what words were all but obscured by the sound of the tide-waves breaking against the natural wall of rock, what oaths were given, and what breathless, incredible happiness came upon us as if from the far stars, has little part in the working out of the mystery of Kastle Krags. Certain moments passed, indescribably fleet, and certain age-old miracles were reënacted. Life doesn’t yield many such moments. But then—not many are needed to pay for life.
After a while we told each other good-night, and I scratched a match to look again into her face. Some way, I had expected the miraculous softening of every tender line and the unspeakable luster in her blue eyes that the flaring light revealed. They were merely part of the night and its magic, and the joy I had in the sight was incomparable with any other earthly thing. But what surprised me was a curious look of intentness and determination, almost a zealot’s enthusiasm in her face, that the match-light showed and the darkness concealed again.
She went away, as quietly as she had come. Whether Weldon had seen her I did not know. There was something else I didn’t know, either, and the thought of it was a delight through all the long hours of my watch. Edith Nealman had worlds of common sense. I wondered how she had been able to convince herself that the message was of such importance that she needs must carry it through the darkness of the gardens to me at once.