He added a high compliment to the inspector's present position and past achievements, and then turned to Copplestone.
"Mr. Copplestone, when Tranter did not return to me at the appointed time this afternoon, I went to your house. I found great changes. I found it, as you say, upside down."
Copplestone was radiant with happiness. Every trace of the old gloom had left him. He was a new man.
"I should think you did!" he retorted. "And you'd have found the earth upside down as well, if I'd been able to turn it."
"I was puzzled," Monsieur Dupont admitted. "I could not understand it. But I knew this—that when the shadows roll away from a man's house, they roll away from his life. When he draws the blinds and throws open the windows of his house to the light and the air, he draws the blinds and throws open the windows of his soul. When he straightens his garden, he straightens himself. I knew that before you would lift the cloud from your house something must have lifted the cloud from you. You had been delivered——"
"There was a fellow in the Bible," said Copplestone—"I think he was a king—who was cured of leprosy by taking a dip in a river. I don't know what happened afterwards, but I am quite sure that he turned his palace upside down when he got back."
He sprang up, his face illuminated with all the wonder of his new birth.
"I am free!" he cried. "Free! That's what my house told you. I had been brought out into the light after half a life of darkness. I had been released after forty years of prison, of torment that all the tortures of the Inquisition at once couldn't have equalled!"
He stared about him, like an intoxicated man.
"This room is too small!" he almost shouted. "Everything is too small. I want to dance on the Universe. I want the world to be a football. I want to play enormous games with giants—" He checked himself abruptly, and sat down. "Forgive me," he said. "You would understand, if you knew what I have suffered."