The Hand in the Dark

by Arthur J. Rees

"I suppose there is nobody upstairs in the left wing?" he added.

"Nobody but the corpse," responded Milly, with a slight shiver. "Miss Heredith's had her bedroom shifted. Last night she slept downstairs, but this morning she gave orders for the white bedroom in the right wing to be prepared for her. I reckon she wants to get as far away from it as possible, and I don't blame her."

Caldew proceeded upstairs, and entered the death-chamber in the silent wing. On his way back from Chidelham he had picked up a round stone, which he now took from his pocket, intending to throw it from the window, and mark the spot where it fell into the moat. He opened the window, and looked out across the garden. The distance to the moat was much farther than he had imagined; so great, indeed, that his own shot at the water fell short by several feet. It was impossible that Miss Heredith could have accomplished such a remarkable feat as to hurl a revolver across the intervening space between the window and the moat. No woman could throw so far and so straight.

This unforeseen obstacle rather disconcerted Caldew at first, but on looking out of the window again it seemed to him, by the lay of the house, that the window of Miss Heredith's bedroom was closer to the moat than the window at which he was standing. As Miss Heredith had transferred her bedroom to the other wing, he decided to go into the room and see if he were right. He still clung to his new idea that the revolver had been thrown into the moat, although his altered view that it might have been thrown from Miss Heredith's window meant the abandonment of his other assumption that the disposal of the revolver by that means accounted for the open window in Mrs. Heredith's bedroom. Caldew realized as he left the room that the question of the open window still remained to be solved. What he did not realize was that he was distorting the facts of the case in order to establish the possibility of his own theory.

The door of the room which Miss Heredith had occupied was ajar. He pushed it open and entered. There was within that deserted and desolate air which a room so quickly takes on when the occupant has vacated it. The heavier furniture and the bed remained to demonstrate the ugliness of utility after the accessories and adjuncts of luxury had been carried away.

The blind was down and the room in partial darkness. Caldew went to the window, raised the blind, and looked out. The distance to the moat was appreciably nearer, compared with the window of the room he had just left, but the distance was still considerable.

As Caldew turned from the window, with the reluctant conviction that he had been nursing an untenable theory, a last ray of sunshine shot through the open window, causing the dust he had raised by his entrance to quiver and gyrate like a host of mad bacilli dancing a jig. The shaft of light, falling athwart the dismantled toilet-table, brought something else into view—a tiny fragment of gold chain dangling from the polished satinwood drawer.

Caldew pulled the drawer open. Inside was a lady's thin gold neck chain, with a bundle of charms and trinkets attached to the end, which had evidently been left behind and forgotten. He glanced at the chain carelessly, and was about to replace it in the drawer, when his eye was arrested by one of the trinkets. It was a small image, not much over an inch in length; a squatting heathen god, with crossed arms and a satyr's face—a wonderful example of savage carving in miniature.

It was not the perfection of the carving or the unusual nature of the ornament which attracted Caldew's attention, but the material, of which it was composed, a clear almost transparent stone, with the faintest possible tinge of green. Holding it in the sunlight, Caldew was able to detect one or two minute black flecks in the stone. There was no doubt about it—the image was of the same peculiar material as the trinket he had seen in the murdered woman's room the previous night.

As he stood there examining the charm, the murmur of voices not far away fell on his ears. Looking cautiously out of the window, he saw Musard and Miss Heredith walk round the side of the house to the garden, deep in earnest conversation. Caldew backed away to an angle where he was not visible from beneath, and watched them closely. Musard was talking, occasionally using an impressive gesture, and Miss Heredith was listening attentively, with a downcast face, and eyes which suggested recent tears. As she passed underneath the window at which he was watching, she raised a handkerchief to her face and sobbed aloud. Caldew wondered to see the proud and reserved mistress of the moat-house show her grief so freely in the presence of Musard, until he remembered what his sister had told him of their supposed early love for each other. And with that thought came another. It must have been Musard, the explorer, the man who had wandered afar in strange lands in search of precious stones, who had brought to the moat-house the peculiar stone of which the missing brooch and the little image had been fashioned.