Colonel Wragge was the first to utter.
“My sister,” he said briefly, and moved off. In the yard I heard him sending the frightened servants about their business in an excellently matter-of-fact voice, scolding some one roundly for making such a big fire and letting the flues get over-heated, and paying no heed to the stammering reply that no fire had been lit there for several days. Then he dispatched a groom on horseback for the local doctor.
Then Dr. Silence turned and looked at me. The absolute control he possessed, not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture, change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as I well knew, over its very birth in his heart, the mask-like face of the dead he could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at any given moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. But now, when he turned and looked at me, there was no sphinx-expression there, but rather the keen, triumphant face of a man who had solved a dangerous and complicated problem, and saw his way to a clean victory.
“Now do you guess?” he asked quietly, as though it were the simplest matter in the world, and ignorance were impossible.
I could only stare stupidly and remain silent. He glanced down at the charred cauldron-lids, and traced a figure in the air with his finger. But I was too excited, or too mortified, or still too dazed, perhaps, to see what it was he outlined, or what it was he meant to convey. I could only go on staring and shaking my puzzled head.
“A fire-elemental,” he cried, “a fire-elemental of the most powerful and malignant kind——”
“A what?” thundered the voice of Colonel Wragge behind us, having returned suddenly and overheard.
“It’s a fire-elemental,” repeated Dr. Silence more calmly, but with a note of triumph in his voice he could not keep out, “and a fire-elemental enraged.”
The light began to dawn in my mind at last. But the Colonel—who had never heard the term before, and was besides feeling considerably worked-up for a plain man with all this mystery he knew not how to grapple with—the Colonel stood, with the most dumfoundered look ever seen on a human countenance, and continued to roar, and stammer, and stare.
“And why,” he began, savage with the desire to find something visible he could fight—“why, in the name of all the blazes——?” and then stopped as John Silence moved up and took his arm.