He flicked his cigarette away. And now he laughed—laughed with the same evil joy, the same savage triumph, but magnified a hundredfold now, with which he had laughed a little while ago in the boathouse back there. Only the laughter was silent now—it was his soul that rocked with mirth. The gods were very good! The black of the night had brought a dawn of incomparable radiance! That was poetic! Ha, ha! Well, why not poetry? He was in exquisite humour. It was like wine in his head—that, too, was poetry, wasn't it?—somebody had said it was—or something like it. Nor God, nor man, nor the devil could stay him now! He had only to be circumspect in the house of death—and help himself. Almost poetry again! Excellent! The old fool dead! Even the trouble and annoyance of staging an accident was now removed. The old fool dead—with his secret. They would hunt a long time—and it would forever be a secret.
Except to Shadow Varne!
—III—
THE WARP AND THE WOOF
Howard Locke stood leaning with his shoulder against one of the verandah pillars. Behind him, in the house, he was conscious of a sort of hushed commotion. Out on the lawn in front of him little groups of negroes stood staring at the house with strained, uplifted faces, or moved across his line of vision in frightened, pathetically humorous efforts to keep an unobtrusive silence—walking on tiptoes in their bare feet on the velvet lawn. Queer how the black faces were mellowed into softer colours in the early morning light!
Mr. Marlin was dead. Locke's eyes half closed; his lips drew together, compressed in a hard line. Strange! In one sense, he seemed still dazed with the events of the last hour; in another sense, his mind was brutally clear. He was dazed because even yet it seemed impossible to grasp the fact that so sorrowful, and dire, and unrecallable a tragedy was an actual, immutable, existent truth. It was not that Mr. Marlin in a sudden paroxysm of demented frenzy should have done what he had—even to the extent that the old man's attack should have been directed against his, Locke's, person. He could quite understand that. In the aquarium, only a few hours before, the old man had used identically the same words that he had shouted as he had burst in the bedroom door and had begun firing wildly: "You are one of them! ... You are one of them!" And then, apart from what had transpired in the aquarium, there had been the shock of the attack on the path almost immediately afterward. The old man had not lost his money, but he had gone back to the house—he, Locke, had seen that too—and, instead of sleeping, these things had probably preyed and preyed upon his mind until he had lost the little reason that had been left to him and a homicidal mania had developed. All that was quite easily understood. As Polly had said, the specialist had predicted it if the old man became over-excited—and Miss Marlin had feared it. It was not this phase, so logically explainable, of what had happened that affected him still in that dazed, numbed way; it was the fact, so much harder to understand, that quick and sudden, in the passing of a moment, old Mr. Marlin was gone.
He straightened up a little, easing the position of his shoulder against the pillar. On the other hand, from an entirely different aspect, that of the consequences as applied to his own course of action, his mind had been clear, irrevocable, settled in its purpose almost from the instant that—first to reach the old madman's side—he had found Mr. Marlin dead. It was the end! He was waiting now for Captain Francis Newcombe to return—from wherever the man had taken himself to.
The sight of the awed, grief-stricken figures on the lawn stirred him suddenly with keen emotion. The girls were upstairs in Dora Marlin's room together and— He wrenched his mind away from the course toward which it was trending. For the moment it would do neither them nor himself any good; for the moment he was waiting for—Captain Francis Newcombe.
A queer smile came and twisted at his lips. Was it defeat—or victory?