He paused, and extended his hand in a hopeless gesture.
“Think of the situation. That old, lonely, spacious house, exuding the musty atmosphere of dead generations, faded inside and out, run down, dingy, filled with ghosts of another day, standing there in its ill-kept grounds, lapped by the dirty waters of the river. . . . And then think of those six ill-sorted, restless, unhealthy beings compelled to live there in daily contact for a quarter of a century—such was old Tobias Greene’s perverted idealism. And they’ve lived there, day in and day out, in that mouldy miasma of antiquity—unfit to meet the conditions of any alternative, too weak or too cowardly to strike out alone; held by an undermining security and a corrupting ease; growing to hate the very sight of one another, becoming bitter, spiteful, jealous, vicious; wearing down each other’s nerves to the raw; consumed with resentment, aflame with hate, thinking evil—complaining, fighting, snarling. . . . Then, at last, the breaking-point—the logical, ineluctable figuration of all this self-feeding, ingrowing hatred.”
“All of that is easy to understand,” agreed Markham. “But, after all, your conclusion is wholly theoretic, not to say literary.—By what tangible links do you connect last night’s shooting with the admittedly abnormal situation at the Greene mansion?”
“There are no tangible links—that’s the horror of it. But the joinders are there, however shadowy. I began to sense them the minute I entered the house; and all this afternoon I was reaching for them blindly. But they eluded me at every turn. It was like a house of mazes and false passages and trapdoors and reeking oubliettes: nothing normal, nothing sane—a house in a nightmare, peopled by strange, abnormal creatures, each reflecting the subtle, monstrous horror that broke forth last night and went prowling about the old hallways. Didn’t you sense it? Didn’t you see the vague shape of this abomination continually flash out and disappear as we talked to these people and watched them battling against their own hideous thoughts and suspicions?”
Markham moved uneasily and straightened a pile of papers before him. Vance’s unwonted gravity had affected him.
“I understand perfectly what you mean,” he said. “But I don’t see that your impressions bring us any nearer to a new theory of the crime. The Greene mansion is unhealthy—that’s granted—and so, no doubt, are the people in it. But I’m afraid you’ve been oversusceptible to its atmosphere. You talk as if last night’s crime were comparable to the poisoning orgies of the Borgias, or the Marquise de Brinvilliers affair, or the murder of Drusus and Germanicus, or the suffocation of the York princes in the Tower. I’ll admit the setting is consonant with that sort of stealthy, romantic crime; but, after all, housebreakers and bandits are shooting people senselessly every week throughout the country, in very much the same way the two Greene women were shot.”
“You’re shutting your eyes to the facts, Markham,” Vance declared earnestly. “You’re overlooking several strange features of last night’s crime—the horrified, astounded attitude of Julia at the moment of death; the illogical interval between the two shots; the fact that the lights were on in both rooms; Ada’s story of that hand reaching for her; the absence of any signs of a forced entry——”
“What about those footprints in the snow?” interrupted Heath’s matter-of-fact voice.
“What about them, indeed?” Vance wheeled about. “They’re as incomprehensible as the rest of this hideous business. Some one walked to and from the house within a half-hour of the crime; but it was some one who knew he could get in quietly and without disturbing any one.”
“There’s nothing mysterious about that,” asserted the practical Sergeant. “There are four servants in the house, and any one of ’em could’ve been in on the job.”