"Then for God's sake tell me. Where has she gone?"
His answer came like the spring of an animal on its prey:
"To join her lover, Johnston Barker."
If he expected to have it strike with an impact he was not disappointed. She fell back as if threatened by a blow, and for a second stood transfixed, aghast, her lower jaw dropped, staring at him. Amazement isn't the word for the look on her face, it was a stupefaction, a paralysis of astonishment. The shock was so violent it swept away all anxiety for her daughter, but it also snapped the last frail remnant of her nerve. From her pale lips her voice broke in a wild, hysterical cry:
"Her lover! He was her father!"
[CHAPTER XVIII]
JACK TELLS THE STORY
In the moment of silence which followed that sentence you could hear the fire snap and the tick of the clock on the mantel. I saw the men's faces held in expressions of amazement so intense they looked like caricatures. I saw Mrs. Whitehall try to say something, then with a rustle and a broken cry crumple up in a chair, her face hidden, stuttering, choked sounds coming from behind her hands.
That broke the tension. Like a piece of machinery momentarily out of gear, the group adjusted itself and snapped back into action. All but me—I stood as I had been standing when Mrs. Whitehall spoke those words. My outward vision saw their moving figures, their backs as they crowded round her, a hand that held a glass to her lips, her face bent toward the glass, ashen and haggard. I saw but realized nothing. For a moment I was on another plane of existence, seemed to be shot up into it. I don't tell it right—a fellow who doesn't know how to write can't explain a feeling like that. You've got to fill it in out of your imagination. A man who's been in hell gets suddenly out—that's the best way I can describe it.
I didn't get back to my moorings, come down from the clouds to the solid ground, till the scene by the table was over. Mrs. Whitehall was sitting up, a little color in her cheeks, mistress of herself again. They'd evidently said something to lull her fears about Carol for the distraction of her mood was gone. It wasn't till I saw the narrowed interest of George's eyes, the hungry expectation of O'Mally's watching face, that I remembered they were still on the scent of a murder in which Barker's daughter was as much involved as Barker's fiancée. That brought me back to the moment and its meaning like an electric shock.