She came on like an uncaptured spirit, feeling delicately along the paneled wall, a creature of body and flesh, but directed by some mysterious influence beyond human ken. She did not look toward the window but paused for a moment to survey the portrait with an unearthly and profound recognition. From this she turned to the desk, leaning over it, her dangling ropes of hair rendered semi-luminous against the lamp, peering, peering, till at length the long, questing fingers found what they sought, and poised, quivering above the stain.
Now she swayed, leaning ever a little more forward, till at last her head drooped, her arms stretched out, and her lips touched that darkened patch where they rested in a mute and desperate caress.
“Master,” she pleaded, “master, where are you now? Why did you go; why are you not here where you used to be? The evil waits still, and all is empty and cold and dead without you, all dead, all dead!”
The voice ceased like a wail in the night, drowned in silence. Her lips pressed close to the stain till they seemed to infuse into it the message of her own blood, while the blind fingers groped and groped for that they could not find. Then with a sigh that hung tremulous in the throbbing air she moved to the portrait, made a slow, despairing gesture of farewell, and glided back to the door and out of sight.
Derrick, rooted where he stood, thrilled to a new light that began to flicker in his brain. The fabric of his imagination was becoming more substantial. He had seen the soul of a woman stripped of all disguise, and heard a voice that was robbed of all powers of concealment. The essential meaning of this danced before his mind’s eye.
CHAPTER V
THE PAPER-KNIFE
THE VILLAGE of Bamberley lay about two miles from Beech Lodge, a homelike nest of buildings gathered in a wrinkle of the Sussex hills. It was well removed from any main road, and its thatched roofs and crooked cobbled streets had fortunately escaped the demoralizing finger of progress. It was, in fact, just as it had always been in the memory of its oldest inhabitant. A village green, with the pens of the cattle market just across the road, a rambling public house, whose swinging sign creaked cheerily when the wind was high, a few diminutive shops, the contents of which were huddled in the meadows, perhaps a hundred cottages, a dozen more pretentious buildings dominated by the village institute—and then the encircling hills, velvet and brown and wide, patched with irregular coverts and dotted as far as the eye could reach with farm-house and barn.
Bamberley happened to be the most important of four adjoining villages; so here were the police headquarters of that utterly rural district. It was a neat brick building with the local jail immediately behind, standing where the cross-roads provided the main interest in life.
The road from Beech Lodge climbs the crown of a low hill ere it dips into the village; and Derrick, as he strolled toward the station and looked down on all this, thought he had never seen anything so peaceful.
The sergeant, a large, ruddy-faced, cylindrical man, greeted him with undisguised interest, and Derrick lost no time in getting to the point. They talked in the tiny office, which seemed filled by the other man’s bulk. Derrick knew what he wanted, for this visit had occasioned him much thought. He was aware, too, that minor officials in isolated places were apt to regard with a jealous eye anything that might infringe on their position and privilege. It was at once obvious that the sergeant felt an added sense of responsibility when the visitor asked if he might read the official documents in the Millicent case.