“Exactly what you care to have it mean.” She paused. “Are you asking for it—my arrest?” There was no slightest trace of apprehension in her manner.
“No; not exactly. I’m asking for something far more necessary to my peace of mind.” He took her wrists suddenly and drew her towards him. “Kiss me.”
She twisted her hands free and turned away. But her lips were drawn a little, and her face very white.
“I think not,” she said. “The Devil’s in it I know, and Bertrand Whittaker. Possibly Cain, Orestes, Brutus, Hamlet’s mother and a few besides. But let’s keep Judas out of it if we can.”
XVI
Stebbins had departed. Headquarters needed him. And he had gone, warding off with both arms a hornet’s nest of reporters all down the drive to his parked car. He said he’d be back if he was wanted, or something turned up in the way of evidence. For all the help he was he might as well stay away, Julian said, but perhaps he was good camouflage. The house did somehow feel a little more exposed without him; although he left a substantial guard.
There was a tense, uncomfortable, haphazard meal in the nature of a buffet supper. The kitchen was so disorganized it was a miracle anything like food came out of it. No one was on the best of speaking terms with anyone else—unless perhaps Julian with Joel, and she was too distressed with weariness and fear to know what he was saying. So he had resigned himself to sitting near her where she lay on the library divan, her tear-darkened lids closed over her tired eyes. He tried to figure rhyme or reason into the events of the twenty-four hours. He traced patterns and followed clues to where they disappeared in storm and mist. He tried flying below the clouds, tried to get above them, and failed to make it either way. For all he knew he was flying upside down. And yet his mind seemed lucid, even brilliant. It was extraordinary how nearness to Joel had the power to heighten and stimulate whatever he was doing, talking, thinking, feeling, dreaming. If she now and then failed to catch his innuendoes, the stupid darling, yet it was her very presence that made him even half-way witty. And, if she didn’t quite understand music as he understood it, it was her closeness to his shoulder at a concert that lifted him beyond the appreciative to the creative listener. He leaned over now and kissed her cheek gently, not to disturb her.
He very much wished she would tell him what had been so upsetting her since she had seen that black figure eight in the wainscoting. Not that it wasn’t a strangely sinister and upsetting discovery—even Julian couldn’t control a shudder at the thought of it. But Joel’s upset condition had been chronic. It was just because she claimed it would upset her more to talk of it than to try to forget it (oh, if she only could forget it!) that he had decided not to urge her. Besides, she had said it was all a frightful nightmare, utterly impossible and false. She must, simply must, put it out of mind.
Julian, though, had been having a few weird and outrageous ideas himself; and he would have liked nothing better than to compare notes with Joel. Dorn was troubling him like a ghost or a vampire. The least stir of the curtains, the quietest footstep, went through his body with a needle-thrust of exquisite horror. Perhaps Belknap had not been alone in having a fleeting glimpse of the man—if man he still was. To Julian to be insane was to be inhuman. Something had happened when Joel was in the library, Julian felt convinced of that. By signs of a strained understanding between her and Belknap he came to the conclusion they both knew what it was. He could almost have said they shared a guilty secret, as if they were shielding someone, against the rules of the game. Why in the name of heaven should they shield Dorn? He might have been a friend of Whittaker’s, but as far as Julian knew Joel had scarcely met him; and Belknap, the night before, had shown a positive dislike for him.
It might be Mrs. Crawford they were combining to protect. There seemed to be an all-around conspiracy to spare Sydney. Well, who could wonder, really? After Whittaker’s unspeakable betrayal, and Neil’s and Romany’s, and the thought of the Diary with its ghastly story ever appearing in print, who could blame her for getting her hands on the Diary if it meant Hartley Blake’s life—for revenging her honor if it meant Romany’s life—or her husband’s honor if it meant Whittaker’s? Or perhaps Belknap and Berry were closing in on Sydney obliquely, by way of pressure brought to bear on Neil. That might break her to admission. Although the way she looked tonight, coming and going from the room where Neil lay ill and delirious, nothing short of death would break her.