“You’d have found it yourself to-night, but I couldn’t let you go blundering in unwarned. Ember might be there—any one might be there. It’s damnable, Henry, but I believe she’s up to her neck in it.”
Henry was silent. There seemed to be nothing to say. He also believed that Raymond Heritage was up to her neck in whatever secret enterprise was being developed at Luttrell Marches. He remembered the passion in her voice when she said, “I should like to smash it all,” and he remembered how she had sung, “Would we not shatter it to bits, and then re-mould it nearer to the heart’s desire?” Whatever the thing was, he believed she was in it up to her neck. So he was silent, and Anthony was grateful for his silence.
The silence was broken by a tapping, and a rustling, and the turning of a handle. The door opened very abruptly, and Mrs. de Luttrelle March made a precipitous entrance. She wore a pink silk négligé and a boudoir cap embroidered in forget-me-nots, also an expression of extreme terror—the cook’s description of their early visitor having prepared her to find Henry’s corpse stretched upon the hearth-rug. When a living and annoyed Henry confronted her, she clung to his arm and gazed round-eyed at the long, thin man who had swung round at her entrance. Uncertainty succeeded fear. Henry was saying, “Do go back to your room, Mother,” but it is doubtful whether she heard him.
Gradually her grasp of his arm relaxed. She walked slowly across the room, and stared with horrified amazement at Anthony.
He looked over her head at Henry, shrugged his shoulders just perceptibly, and made as if to turn back to the window again. Either that shrug, or the faintly sarcastic lift of the eyebrows that accompanied it, brought a sort of broken gasp to Mrs. March’s lips. She put out her hand, touched his coat sleeve with her finger-tips, and said:
“Anthony—it’s Anthony—oh, Henry, it’s Anthony!”
She backed a little at each repetition of the name, looked wildly round, and sinking on to the nearest chair, burst into tears.
“Henry—oh, please somebody speak,” she sobbed.
“It’s all right, Aunt Rosa. I’m not a ghost,” said Anthony in his driest voice.
Henry experienced a cold dread of what his mother would say next. She had talked so much and thought so incessantly of Luttrell Marches. Latterly she had been so sure of Henry’s ownership, and so proud of it. What would she say now—as she dropped her hands from her face and gazed with streaming eyes at Anthony, who regarded her quizzically?