“Poor Nell, how quickly she found out Macbeth was gone. She often howls at night-time. Her life is not happy.”
“Tell me the end of it,” I said. “What is at the bottom of it? What is the truth? Do you believe in the madness which resulted from the fall?”
“How do I know? It is possible, but I suspect the laboratory contains horrible things, the very sight of which would drive any one mad. Donovan had never been in it. He must have seen some ghastly things.”
I then remembered the chimpanzee, and the horrible impression its death had made upon me. Emma might be right. The incident of the monkey strongly supported her hypothesis, but instead of trying to find the answer to each riddle in detail, should I not have gone back four years, to that critical moment when so many problems had started? Should I not have studied closely the mysterious period when so many doors had closed, in order to find the key which should open them all?
A little foot peeped from the coverlet, and lay, white and pink, on the pale yellow cover; it was smooth, and like a strange jewel in its case.
“Good gracious, my dear, can you really walk with that pretty little thing, with its nails polished like Japanese corals—this living ticklish jewel—that a mustache drives away.”
The little foot went back into its cover, but however dainty and tender and quick it was, it recalled another one to me by contrast—the one in the forest clearing—that sinister thing, which I now felt sure was a piece of dead flesh in the old shoe.
Suddenly it seemed to me that I was wandering alone in a night full of ambushes.
“Emma, suppose we run away!”