These conventional answers seemed to put an end to the interview: if she had not spoken again, with that strange look of apprehension and terror rising to her eyes, I would have bowed and turned away. But her voice trembled as she moved toward me timidly and said, “Will you leave a message? Will you call again? Will you say—will you say—”
Her sentence failed like that. As it did, words sprang to my mouth. I looked at her accusingly.
“Yes,” I snapped. “On the second story of the Marburys’ house there is, of course, a partition. I called to ask Mrs. Estabrook what was on her side of that wall.”
This information acted like dynamite. You would have said that it had blown to pieces some vital organ of the old servant. The color ran out of her face as if her head had lost its connection with her body.
“This is terrible,” she choked. “Oh, ’tis awful! Who are you? Who can you be? Somebody has sent you.”
She caught the edge of the door and pushed it toward me.
“I know who you are,” she exclaimed. “You are somebody that is sent by him!”
With a final shove, then, she closed the crack which had remained, the locks moved again, the light in the vestibule went out, and I was alone on the step.
Such was the success of my first attempt to find an answer to MacMechem’s question—to solve the riddle of the blue wall. But I realized, as I stood there, looking up into the gray sky of night with its wind-driven clouds, that the presence of some peculiar form of good or evil was no longer in doubt; that little Virginia, with the sensitive receptiveness of childhood, of suffering, and of her own endearing, unworldly personality, had not been wrong; that MacMechem, like a true physician, had not excluded the unknown and now was vindicated, and that there are sometimes strange affairs that baffle our feeble diagnosis of mankind....
This is merely a recital of the facts. I am not attempting to prove anything. I merely state that, as I descended the Estabrook steps and struck off into the park, the detective instinct which lies in every one of us had wakened in me. It may have been the reason for my turning around, after I had crossed the street, between the whirr and lights of two automobiles, and stood at the opening of one of the paths of the park.