"She can have these back at once," Singleton said, setting the cases down by Lady McIntyre's feet.
Grindley still hung over the alcohol lamp. He had found narrow metal bands folded down at the sides of the box. They were supports, as he proved by setting them upright, and in relation to yet others, with which they formed an overhead platform above that wired bed, which was so much more extensive than was necessary to supply the flame for the heating of tongs. But Grindley seemed to find no flaw in the arrangement. He made libation of alcohol, and felt for a match. As the wavering blue flame played along the wire mattress under the tester-like frame, Grindley put out a hand for the tracing-paper.
The conviction flashed across Napier's mind, bringing with it a twinge of acute distaste: Grindley's enjoying himself. Not that the vacant eyes achieved vision, nor the blunt features keenness. But Grindley was given up to a pleasureable absorption; an intentness that should not—considering his task—and yet somehow did insist on seeming less of the intellect than of the sensory nerves. It was the same look you will see on the face of the heavy feeder. A slight congestion; a gloss, as of a faint perspiration. Napier was sure that, apart from Grindley's professional stake in the issue of the hour, he was living through highly compensatory moments, as he watched the heat bringing out marks in the tracing paper. Very slowly the faint lines blackened.... Grindley showed no impatience; nothing but that gloating, with its suggestion of sensual abandonment. During those moments of waiting, Napier struggled against the injustice of his impression. What, after all, were they looking on at? Wasn't Grindley's satisfaction the same in its lesser degree as that Champollion felt when he forced the Rosetta Stone to yield the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics? Champollion used his wits to serve the ends of learning. Grindley was using his to serve his country. Why, then, did one feel a horrible kind of guilty excitement rather than honorable pride, as the heat of Grindley's lamp brought out clean and clear an outline drawing to scale of a new system of fortification on the northern coast?
Napier could hardly repress an explosion of consternation at the sight. But the only audible sound, except a crackling of the tracing-paper, as Grindley held it up, was Lady McIntyre's bewildered, "What do you call that?"
Grindley had thrown it down for Singleton to deal with, and now the unaddressed letter was being laid on the grille. Here for some reason the invisible ink answered less reluctantly to the warmth of the blue flames' invitation. Between the wide-apart lines appeared like magic the second letter. Again that stillness, a kind of drunkenness of pleasure on Grindley's part; again Singleton's quick reaction to success; again, the instant the lamp had done the work, its abandonment by Grindley. He looked at his watch. "I suppose we mustn't go without—" He moved toward the screen.
Lady McIntyre had made no effort to read a syllable of the new writing. She sat intensely quiet, while Singleton folded the letter and blew out the lamp. All her exclamatory speech, all her fluttering motions, were as stilled as death would one day leave them. It was like the rest one takes after a prodigious journey. The distance traversed since the hat-box had been wrenched open was made as clear as though the last object in the box had been yet another lamp shedding an intenser ray. Singleton had brought out something rolled in a scarf of Roman silk. The two objects inside were a small box of cartridges and a revolver. It was then that Lady McIntyre, rising and steadying herself by the chair, showed how far she had come in these last moments. "At all events, you can't say you've found any bombs!"
"No! oh, no!" If anything could minimize the implications of tragedy evoked by the sight of a revolver among the personal possessions of a lady in England, it would be the even pleasantness of Mr. Singleton's voice. "Nothing of that sort."
Singleton was busy putting away a medley of things into the attaché case, while Grindley was churning up the contents of the drawers in the American wardrobe trunk with the energy that seemed so nearly passive and was so uncannily effectual. The great trunk held no papers and only the lesser trinkets. But the store of purple and fine linen! Lace and lawn, and cobweb silk, dribbled from half-open drawers. Brocade and cloth, chiffon and velvet, swung out to view on adjustable supports. And all that brave show the unappreciative Grindley dismissed with a single word, "Nothing," and back he went to La Motte's Dictionary.
Singleton picked up the jewels that had come out of the hat-box and held the cases out to Lady McIntyre.
She seemed, as she stood there steadying herself by the chair back, to have gone momentarily blind. Singleton suggested she should take care of the jewels.