“Now by all that’s holy or unholy, you have overstepped the bounds, Bertrand Whittaker—”
Whether he ever reached Whittaker remained in doubt for at that moment the room was plunged in total darkness. Someone screamed—a woman. There was a scuffle and a thud. A man groaned. Belknap cried out: “Stay where you are as you value your lives.” They heard him feeling the wall for the switch, and then there was light.
In it Whittaker lay back half conscious in his chair, bleeding at the forehead. The others stood in oddly arrested positions like the players of ten-step on the count of ten. And the Diary was gone.
VII
As a ditch drains at the opening of a sluice, leaves and twigs sucked one by one, slow at first then rapidly, down the outward current, the library drained of guests, silently, furtively, slow almost to the door, swift as the need to escape the room, the others, and their own astounding collapse under sudden stress, dragged them away. When the last of them had disappeared, Belknap, with John’s aid, helped Bertrand Whittaker to his room. They paused at his threshold. For the moment there seemed nothing to say. Both perhaps felt the effects of a certain, for them, anti-climax to the evening’s events—something rather hollow, almost something ridiculous, in the situation. Whittaker felt let down. Belknap ugly and impatient.
“How’s the head?” Belknap asked stiffly.
“Quite all right, thanks,” Whittaker answered with equal stiffness. “Won’t you come in?”
“No. Not now. There’s too much in the affrighted air. Get some sleep if you can. Though perhaps you think you’ll get plenty of that soon enough. Well, you’ve started the ball rolling with a vengeance, haven’t you? Satisfied? God, Whittaker, hadn’t you better cry quits? It isn’t too late. Tell ’em it was a practical joke; and ask Crawford’s pardon on the side. You see for yourself it isn’t going to be so daisy simple. A murder! We’ll be lucky if it’s only half a dozen. There was no lovelight in any one’s eyes this evening, except in that poor little goose of a Joel’s. And she went upstairs looking withered. Slice this house from garret to cellar right now and it would make as pretty a Desire Under the Elms cross-section as you could find in a day’s journey.”
“The desire being to get me, huh?” Whittaker asked grimly.
“Exactly. If only whoever gets you would just please make a thorough job of it. Who do you think tried it?”