He pressed home his advantage. “You have not seen Malcolm. You believe that he is here and you believe he suffers. But you have not seen him. On your honour;—can you look at me and say, on your honour, that you have seen him?”
She looked at him. She stared. And it was with the eyes of the desperate child. “How could I not have seen him? How could I have known?”
“The table rapped it out for you, because you are a medium. It’s a mystery that such things should be; but you say yourself that, in life, your mind read Malcolm’s. In the same way, the other night, it read Tony’s. You saw what she saw. Everything is open to you.”
She had risen and, with a strange gesture, she put her hand up to her head. “No—no. It was more than that. It was more than that. Antonia did not know. I did not know. No one knew, till I saw it; how he died. I saw him. Half his head was shot away.”
He leaped to his triumph. “It was my mind that showed you that. I did know. I did know how he died. You read my mind as well as Tony’s. Our minds built up the picture for you.”
Her hand held to her head she stared at him. “It is not true! Not true! You say so now when I have told you.”
“Ask Tony if it’s not true. I told her what you’d seen before she told me. Miss Latimer—I appeal to you. Our lives hang on you. Tell me the truth—tell it to me now, and to Tony to-night. You did not see him. Not what we mean by seeing. Not as Tony believes you saw. You had your inner vision while you leaned there on the table, and it convinced you of the outer. I’ve shown you how you built it up. Every detail of our knowledge was revealed to you. It’s we who created Malcolm’s ghost.”
But she had turned away from him, and it was as if in desperate flight, blindly, pushing aside the chair against which she stumbled, still with her hand held as though to Malcolm’s wound. “Not true! Not true!” she cried, and she flung aside the hand he held out to arrest her. “He is here! He has saved her! I saw him! Beside the fountain!”
IX
SHE was gone and he need not pursue her. Her desperation had given him all that he had hoped for, and there was no recantation, no avowal to be wrested from that panic. He had followed her to the door and he watched her mount the stairs, running as she went and without one backward glance. And when, at the end of the corridor above, he heard her door shut, he still stood in the open doorway, his head bent, his hands in his pockets, and took, it seemed in long draughts of recovery, full possession of his almost miraculous escape.