As Philip Pennycomequick came next day to the house of mourning—mourning, because three dress-makers were engaged in making it—he saw that all the blinds were down. In the hall he met Salome, who was there, evidently awaiting him. She looked ill and anxious, and her eyes were bright with a feverish lustre. She had not slept for two nights.
The extraordinary delicacy of her complexion gave her a look as of the finest porcelain, a transparency through which her doubting, disturbed and eager spirit was visible. Her pallor contrasted startlingly at this time with the gorgeous tone of her luxuriant hair. Her eyes were large, the irises distended as though touched with belladonna, and Philip felt his mistrust fall away from off him, as in some fairy tale the armour of a knight loosens itself, drops, and leaves him unharnessed before an enchantress. But the enchantment which dissolved his panoply of suspicion was an innocent one, it was the manifestation of real suffering. He could see that the girl was rendered almost ill by the mental distress caused by the loss of her friend and guardian. That she had loved him, and loved him with an innocent, unselfish affection, seemed to him undoubted.
'I beg your pardon for waylaying you, Mr. Pennycomequick,' she said, in a timid voice; one white hand lifted, with an uncertain shake in it, touching her lips. 'But I very much desire to have a word with you in private before you go upstairs to Mrs. Sidebottom.'
'I'm at your service.'
She led the way into the breakfast-room, recently cleared of the meal. She went to the window, and stood between the glass and the curtain, with her left hand entangled among the cords of the Venetian blind. In her nervousness it was necessary for her to take hold of something. Her delicate fingers ran up the green strings and played with them, as though they were the strings of a harp on which she was practising, and, strangely enough, Philip felt within him every touch; when she twanged a cord, some fibre in him quivered responsive, and was only lulled when she clasped the string and stopped its vibration.
A faint tinge rose in her white face to the cheek-bones and temples, touching them with more than colour, an apparent inner light, like the Alpine glow after sundown on the white head of the Jungfrau. As she spoke she did not look at Philip, but with eyes modestly lowered on the ground, or out of the window looking sideways down the street.
'What I wished to say to you, Mr. Pennycomequick, will soon be said. I shall not detain you long. I am sorry to differ from Mrs. Sidebottom, but I cannot share her conviction that the body found last night is that of your uncle.'
'You do not dispute that he is dead?'
'No,' she sighed; 'I think there can be no question about that.'
'Or that he was last seen on the canal bank at no great distance from where the discovery was made?'