“No, no,” the girl whispered exultantly, clearly. “I know—I can’t tell you anything, but that I know, I know, I know.”
There was a power in the girl-voice that reached and subdued Stephen. He was impressed, almost convinced.
“You know,” he said slowly, wonderingly. “Did this message—did it indicate some paper—tell you where to look for it?” For his soul, for his life, for his whole future at stake, he could not keep the words back. They were forced from him, as the hand of the player plucks the melody from a harp—the melody, or the discord. Something stronger than he ever had been, or ever could be, commanded and he obeyed, bowed to the infinite; his own conscience turned traitor and linked against him, linked with some nameless mightiness he had scoffed at and denied and defied.
“Paper?” Helen said. “What paper do you mean?”
He rushed on, goaded and driven. “I don’t know—only if there were some evidence here that would clear Hugh, it would be in the shape of a paper that—that——” His tongue clove thick in his mouth, clotted and mumbled with nervousness. He could scarcely enunciate; he could not enunciate clearly—“that seems reasonable, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, of course,” Helen agreed. “No—nothing of that sort came to me—the whole thing was so vague—so indistinct. But I am sure now; it will come back to me—and help me—I am sure it will.” The glow on her face, the great light in her eyes, grew brighter and brighter.
Stephen Pryde was almost in the state he had been in when he had dropped his glass on the fender and cried, “Who’s there? Uncle Dick!” While Helen spoke he kept looking over his shoulder. He was tremblingly conscious of a something in the room, a something that he felt was a some one—a presence. It almost overpowered him, the conviction, the chill, and the unprecedented sensation, but, summoning his iron will, he resolved to fight on; and with a flash of chicanery that was nothing short of genius, and nothing less than satanic, he determined even to take advantage of the dead man’s message. For it had come to that with him now. That Richard Bransby was in the room, and trying “to communicate,” he now no more doubted than Helen herself did. Well! let it be so. Let the dead man get the message through, if he could! He—he, Stephen—would take it, twist it, turn it, use it, seize it—destroy it, if need were. He had defied God and His angels, his own conscience, fate, the law of the land, and now he defied the soul and the consciousness and all the craft of one old man dead—dead and returned.
He turned to Helen impressively. “If—if it would only come to you now.”
“What?” the girl said uncomprehendingly.
“If I could find whatever it is—if you would help me to find it,” he insinuated earnestly.