The place was growing stuffy. De Medici experienced a reaction. The adventure of the night, and the subsequent enigmas which he had pursued, began to take toll. He would wait a few more minutes and leave. The auction, despite his intuitions, was turning out a cut and dried business.
He turned to look at the crowd from a new angle, and his eyes lighted on a remarkable figure. An old woman with the face of a witch, her head covered by a black bonnet, her chin resting on the knob of a heavy cane that she clasped in her hands, sat within a few feet of him. Her face was a blur of wrinkles, the nose and chin coming almost together over a toothless mouth. Her little black eyes, however, appeared to be blazing with excitement.
“Hm,” De Medici murmured to himself, “a creature of sinister ugliness.”
He paused to study her. She was following each of the objects offered the crowd with a fanatical intensity.
“Cupidity,” he thought, losing track of the auctioneer’s chatter. “She’ll buy nothing. But the joy of possessing animates her. It’s a way people have of clinging to life—by developing hobbies, by achieving grotesque and concentrated enthusiasms for certain objects. Existence is less complicated for a stamp collector than a social philosopher.”
His vague musings were suddenly broken. The witch-like creature had risen from her chair and was brandishing her heavy cane in the air. She stood cackling in a strident voice.
“Forty dollars, Mr. Auctioneer, forty dollars....”
De Medici watched her push her way forward violently, her large body dislodging an amused and indignant line of men and women.
“Forty dollars,” she cried furiously as she moved to the auctioneer’s table, her cane still describing eccentric circles in the air.
De Medici turned to see what had aroused the creature. The narrow-faced Mr. Jones had paused deferentially in his harangue, holding an object in his hand ... an ornamental bronze candlestick. For a moment the scene remained a meaningless bit of excitement involving the grotesque old woman and the polite auctioneer. Then a warmth animated De Medici. His eyes shone. The thing had happened! The candlestick in the man’s hand was one of the pair. Yes, it or its mate had stood beside the head of Ballau on the night he was found murdered. And there had been a lighted candle beside his own head a few hours ago.