So he went to bed, and, so well had he recovered from his fit of excitement, he fell asleep almost at once. But, for all that, the jangled nerves had their revenge. He who commonly slept like the dead, without the slightest disturbance, dreamed a strange dream. It seemed to him that he stood spent and weary in a twilit place, a waste place at the foot of a high hill. At the top of the hill She sat upon a sort of throne, golden in a beam of light from heaven—serene, very beautiful, the end and crown of his weary labours. His feet were set to the ascent of the height whereon she waited, but he was withheld. From the shadows at the hill's foot a voice called to him in distress, anguish of spirit—a voice he knew, but he could not say whose voice. It besought him out of utter need, and he could not turn away from it.
Then from those shadows eyes looked upon him, very great and dark eyes, and they besought him too; he did not know what they asked, but they called to him like the low voice, and he could not turn away.
He looked to the far height, and with all his power he strove to set his feet towards it—the goal of long labour and desire—but the eyes and the piteous voice held him motionless, for they needed him.
From this anguish he awoke trembling. And after a long time, when he was composed, he fell asleep once more, and once more he dreamed the dream.
So morning found him pallid and unrefreshed. But by daylight he knew whose eyes had besought him, and he wondered, and was a little afraid.
CHAPTER IX
STE. MARIE GOES UPON A JOURNEY AND
RICHARD HARTLEY PLEADS FOR HIM
It may as well be admitted at the outset that neither Ste. Marie nor Richard Hartley proved themselves to be geniuses, hitherto undeveloped, in the detective science. They entered upon their self-appointed task with a fine fervour, but, as Miss Benham had suggested, with no other qualifications in particular. Ste. Marie had a theory that when engaged in work of this nature you went into questionable parts of the city, ate and drank cheek by jowl with questionable people; if possible got them drunk while you remained sober (difficult feat), and sooner or later they said things which put you on the right road to your goal, or else confessed to you that they themselves had committed the particular crime in which you were interested. He argued that this was the way it happened in books, and that surely people didn't write books about things of which they were ignorant.
Hartley, on the other hand, preferred the newer or scientific methods. You sat at home with a pipe and a whisky and water—if possible in a long dressing-gown with a cord round its middle. You reviewed all the known facts of the case, and you did mathematics about them with Xs and Ys and many other symbols, and in the end, by a system of elimination, you proved that a certain thing must infallibly be true. The chief difficulty for him in this was, he said, that he had been at Oxford instead of at Cambridge, and so the mathematics was rather beyond him.
In practice, however, they combined the two methods, which was doubtless as well as if they hadn't, because for some time they accomplished nothing whatever, and so neither one was able to sneer at the other's stupidity.