Leaving the watchman staring speechlessly, they quickened their pace toward the Goddard house and were passing the entrance door of Orbit’s when it was flung open and Ching Lee appeared.
For once the Chinaman’s wooden impassivity had deserted him. His slant-eyes were rolling wildly, his yellow face distorted and his queue streaked out behind him like a tail as he plunged down the steps and seized McCarty with an iron grip of long-nailed, tapering fingers.
“The nurse-baby!” he babbled, his singsong voice high and shrill. “The Flench maid of next-door baby! Come quick!”
“Lucette, do you mean? The Bellamy child’s nurse?” McCarty halted. “Stop chattering like a monkey and tell me where is she, and what’s the matter?”
“Lucette!” Ching Lee nodded vigorously and pointed in at the open windows of the conservatory. “She is the next! She has breathed the breath of death!”
CHAPTER XIII
“THE HORROR DEEPENS!”
“‘The breath of death!’” Dennis repeated, awestruck. “God save us, what’s that? Are you trying to say that the French girl is in Orbit’s house, dead?”
“We’ll soon see!” Shaking off the Chinese butler’s grip McCarty dashed up the steps and in at the door, with Dennis just behind and Ching Lee bringing up the rear, chanting a weird refrain of lamentation.
The door of the huge conservatory also stood wide and its humid breath, heavy with fragrance, stole out to meet them, the silent organ with slender pipes gleaming softly like silver birches in moonlight looming up in the semi-gloom, but a group at the marble bench facing it stood out against the background of leafy palms and thorny cacti, holding their eyes irresistibly in dread fascination.
Orbit’s tall figure, the Bellamy baby clasped tightly in his arms, stood before it. Beside him Jean, the houseman, was bending forward while little Fu Moy knelt at its foot. On the bench itself a slender form lay relaxed as though in sleep, the head with its bright hair rippling from beneath the trim little bonnet resting against the high, white stone back, the small gloved hands limply extended at either side.