“I think that Dr. Baumgartner has the strangest power of any human being I ever heard of; he can make you do anything he likes, whether you like it yourself or not. The newspapers have been raking up this case in connection with—mine—and I see that one theory was that the man in this broken negative committed suicide. Well, if he did, I firmly believe that Dr. Baumgartner was there and willed him to do it!”
“He must have been there if he took the photograph.”
“Is there another man alive who tries these things? I’ve told you all he told me about it, but I haven’t told you all he said about the value of human life.”
“Nor need you! He makes no secret of his opinion about that!”
“Then put the two things together, and where do they lead you? To these murders committed with the mad idea of taking the spirit in its flight from the flesh; that’s his own way of putting it, not mine.”
“But I thought your case was an accident pure and simple?”
“On my part, certainly; but how do I know he couldn’t get more power over me in my sleep than at any other time? He saw me walking in my sleep with this wretched revolver. He said himself I’d given him the chance of a lifetime. You may be sure he meant before that poor man’s death, not after it.”
“It isn’t possible,” declared Phillida, as though she had laid hold of one solid certainty in a sea of floating hypotheses. “And I know he hasn’t a pistol of his own,” she added, lest he should simplify his charge.
But there they were agreed.
“He hadn’t one on him that morning; that I can swear,” said Pocket, impartially disposing of the idea. “Mine was the only one in that cape of his, because I once jolly nearly had it out again when he came back into the room. There was nothing of the sort in his other coat, or anywhere else about him, or I couldn’t have helped seeing it.” Phillida accepted this statement only too thankfully. She beamed on the boy, as if in recognition of a piece of downright magnanimity towards an enemy whom she could now understand his regarding in that light. If only he would go before the enemy returned! If her uncle had such a power over him as he himself seemed to feel, then that was all the more reason for him to go quickly. But Pocket was not the man to get up and run like that. Perhaps he enjoyed displaying his bravery on the point, and keeping his companion on tenter-hooks on his account; at any rate he insisted on finishing his breakfast, and gave further free expression to the wildest surmises as he did so. And yet he was even then on the brink of a discovery which was some excuse for the wildest of them all, while it demanded a fresh solution of the whole affair.