Edith got up with unmistakable decision. She was evidently feeling herself again.
“Good night, Jack. Perkins, please bring my hot water now.”
Derrick followed her with his eyes but said nothing. When he was alone, he seated himself again at his desk and looked musingly at his manuscript. How thin and unprofitable was all he had written, these doings of characters so obviously fictitious, so utterly divorced from the stinging realities of life. They saw little and felt less, being framed in paper and not flesh and blood. His long hand stole to the edge of the desk, avoiding that discolored patch, and clasped the solid frame as though to draw from it something like real inspiration. He now touched the shadow of Millicent’s life-blood. His glance traveled then automatically to the portrait. Blood and paint! Between them they held the key of mystery. He scanned the composed features, feeling that the essence of what had once been Millicent was close by. Then it came to him that this essence of the murdered man had its own part to play and was no doubt playing it at this very moment, moving in mysterious channels and in league with mysterious powers. Recurrent and voiceless questions crowded upon him. What could Millicent mean to Perkins, that lank woman with the forbidding eyes? It seemed after a few moments that the painted lips quivered and tried to speak, and the quiet gaze took on something more than the mere flicker of firelight. What was it that Millicent was trying to convey?
“What have you absorbed?” murmured Derrick, half aloud. “What is it you would tell me? You suffered here death and the fear that was perhaps worse than death, but why did you pay the price?” He began to write unconsciously, capturing the words as they came; strange words, unlinked with anything that had gone before, but pregnant with clouded suggestion. “You believed as I do that we are not the masters of things, but that each of us builds up around him invisible towers of influence, by which in time we are dominated. We store the air with records that the air cannot discard or obliterate, eloquent—yet having no voice; strong—yet casting no shadow. And behind it all are Things. We cry for them as children, and when the end comes it is hard to let them go.”
He was staring, puzzled, at what he had written, when Perkins came in, her face grave.
“If you please, sir, the gardener is here.” Her voice was a little breathless.
“What gardener? I thought you told me just a moment ago that you knew of no one.”
“It’s Mr. Millicent’s gardener,” she replied steadily.
“The man who has not been heard of for two years?”
“Yes, sir. He has just returned.”