"A whip," he whispered. As my fear grew, so his lessened. Then the queer unremembered look came to his face again, and he changed his tone completely. His grasp of my shoulder was transformed from a menace into a coax.
"Well, well, we will say no more about it, we will say no more about. We," he repeated meaningly. (With anybody else I should not have noticed the word, which fell strangely from his lips. "One will say no more," was his natural phrase.) "If you hold your tongue and don't tell your Aunt Martha I found you here—there'll be no flogging." It was a tacit pact. He descended the staircase, and I followed him.
I thought perhaps I might learn something by pumping Albert.
"What is there in your father's study?" I asked him casually on a walk.
"Oh, some old bottles and books; nothing much, father lets me go in sometimes, but there's nothing special to see."
This was a genuinely casual reply. It puzzled me. If the room was so mysterious, why did Uncle Simeon take Albert there, yet forbid me entrance with such obvious fear? "He thinks I'm sharper," I flattered myself. This was true, but it explained very little. My curiosity grew. I rehearsed every detail: the green box, the hole in the wall, Uncle Simeon's original veto, and his extreme fear the day he caught me.
And that look? Where had I seen it? I racked my brains without success. Then one night in bed, with a mad suddenness it flashed into my mind as these things do. It was the self-same look I had noticed at Bear Lawn on Aunt Jael's seventieth birthday when we were talking about his brother and how he died and I had said artlessly: "Perhaps it was Poison?" The expression on his face that day was the same as when he clutched me on the staircase.
The dead brother was part of the same mystery as the attic.
Wild ideas coursed through my head. The so-called study was one vast poison-den. The dead brother's skeleton was lying there, the bones were strewn about the floor. Or he had been pushed through the strange black hole in the wall—where did that hole lead to? or his body had been squashed into the green box.
I resolved to raise the poison topic in front of him, and to watch the effect. I would mention it as though quite by accident, and look as artless as I could. Necessity which sharpens all things, had equipped me with a special cunning to achieve the chief aim of my existence: the smallest possible number of beatings. But all my cunning never reduced the least little bit in the world my extreme timidity. Thus while I was quite equal to preparing beforehand a seemingly offhand question for Uncle Simeon as to Poison, I quailed at the thought of actually putting it. I simply dared not talk to him direct, nor should I be able to look at him so closely if I did. I decided to introduce the topic to Aunt Martha one day when he should also be present. Should I begin talking about the dead brother, or more specifically about poisoning? The latter was more difficult to introduce, but a more crucial test. How could I begin a conversation about poison? I prepared a hundred openings, none of which seemed natural. As usual the opportunity came unexpectedly. Thanks to my scheming I was not quite unprepared.