“My dear Duchess,” Rochester answered, “I certainly did not shoot myself. I have every confidence in my guests, and so far as we have been able to ascertain, there wasn’t another soul in the neighborhood. Shall we say that I was shot by the act of God? There really doesn’t seem to be any other explanation.”
The Duchess was not altogether satisfied.
“To-night I am going to offer you a great privilege,” she said. “I am going to give you a chance of finding out the answer to your riddle.”
Rochester looked perplexed, and Lady Mary blandly curious. Pauline alone seemed as though by instinct to realize what lay beneath their hostess’s words. Her face seemed suddenly to grow tense. She shrank back—a slight, involuntary movement, but significant enough under the circumstances.
“An answer to my riddle,” Rochester remarked, smiling. “Really, I did not know that I had propounded one.”
“Only a moment ago,” the Duchess reminded him, “you spoke of being shot by the act of God. That, of course, was a form of speech. You meant that you did not know who did it. Perhaps we shall be able to solve that little mystery for you.”
Rochester looked at his hostess as though for a moment he doubted her sanity. Tall and slim in his immaculate clothes, standing before the great wood fire which burned in the open grate, he leaned a little forward upon his stick, with knitted brows. Then his eyes caught Pauline’s, and something which he was about to say seemed to die away upon his lips.
“Of course, you are unbelievers, all of you,” the Duchess said, calmly, “but some day—perhaps even to-night—you may become converts. Did I tell you, Mary,” she continued, turning away from Rochester, “that I met that extraordinary man Naudheim in London? He told me so many interesting things, and since then I have been reading. He introduced me to—to one of his most brilliant pupils—a young man, he assured me, whose insight was more highly developed, even, than his own. Of course, you understand that in these matters, insight and perception take the place almost of brains.”
“My dear Duchess,” Rochester interrupted, “what are you talking about?”