“And you found him. How was that?”
She made an indefinite gesture. “They sent for me.”
Again he felt nothing of surprise. “Yes, because they had seen and knew. But why did you stay here after it happened?”
Perkins took one long, uncertain breath. “I did go away for a week, but I couldn’t stay. It was all silent in London where I went. Then I knew that it—that they would not let me remain away, so I had to come back.” She gazed round this well-remembered room and seemed to signal that she acknowledged its potency.
Derrick looked at the littered desk and into the mask-like face. Her eyes were alight now, and not those of a lonely woman. She was, as it were, surrounded by friends. He wondered if they would ever be his friends.
“Do you mind talking like this? I think I understand, but most people wouldn’t.”
“It makes me happier. For two years there have been no living words about it. I could never find any one who understood at all since it happened, and Miss Millicent would not speak.” She hesitated, and sent him the faintest smile. “For the last two days the house has been amused.”
“How?” he demanded. Beech Lodge seemed to be stirring about him, and with slow palpitations of a monstrous life, throbbing in one vast pulse on which Perkins kept a cool, knowledgeable finger. It moved and breathed.
“It was at the men who came to take the inventory. They were such children; though one of them, and he was quite old, guessed at something in a general way. The other could never hear or see anything.”
He nodded and, turning, caught a yellow flicker that touched the portrait into a strange similitude of life. Millicent’s eyes were speaking now, strange things to which he had no key. But only for a little while. The key was not far away. There came over Derrick the profound conviction that this was all arranged. It belonged to the cycle of appointed things. The stage was all set. If he could but keep his ears tuned to the elusive vibrations that permeated this solitary dwelling, he might decipher its mystery. And Perkins was part of it.