“That’s more than I can tell you. When I came from the cellar she seemed mazed with fright, and kept pointing to the ceiling. All I could make out from her was that there’d been a great crash upstairs. When I came down again after trying the door she was lying on the floor in a faint, and I carried her in to her bed. It’s floored her wits.”
“She’s had a very bad shock,” said Barrant gravely. He regarded her attentively, her vacant eyes, mouthing lips, trembling hands, her uncanny fixed glance which seemed to behold something unseen. Strange suspicions flowed through his brain as he watched her. What terrible experience had befallen her? What did she know of the mysterious events that had happened in that silent house? He endeavoured to follow the direction of her gaze, but it seemed to be fixed on the row of bells behind the kitchen door. Then, like a half-awakened sleeper released from the horror of a nightmare, she sank back in her previous listless attitude, and fell to muttering again.
As Barrant watched her, Thalassa watched them both with an anxiety which would have aroused Barrant’s suspicions if he had seen it. But Thalassa’s face was again closely guarded when he did look up.
“You’ll get neither rhyme nor reason out of her,” said Thalassa, as their glances met.
“I’ll try once more,” murmured Barrant, almost to himself. He turned to her again, but this time he did not lay his hand on her arm. “Mrs. Thalassa”—he spoke more gently—“will you try and understand me?”
“Red on black … black on red.” Her hands moved restlessly.
In a sudden recognition of the futility of trying to gather anything from that clouded brain, Barrant turned abruptly away without another word. And the black gaze of Thalassa followed him through the door and out into the darkness of the night.
Chapter XVII
The bell in the darkened chambers rang with the insistent clamour of mechanism responding with blind obedience to a human hand, but Mr. Anthony Brimsdown suffered it to pass unnoticed. As an elderly bachelor, living alone, he was sufficiently master of his own affairs to disregard the arrival of the last post, leaving the letters as they were tumbled through the slit in the door downstairs until he felt inclined to go and get them.