“May we not all go up, Miss Valmond?” interposed Cleek. “I should like, if you do not mind, to get a view of the garden of Lemmingham House from the window where you were standing that night, and to have you explain the positions of the two men if you will.”
“Yes, certainly—come, by all means,” she replied, and led the way forthwith. They had scarcely gone halfway down the passage to the staircase, however, when they came abreast of the open doorway of a room, dimly lit by a shaded lamp, wherein an elderly woman sat huddled up in a deep chair, with her shaking head bowed over hands that moved restlessly and aimlessly—after the uneasy manner of an idiot’s—and the shape of whose face could be but faintly seen through the veil of white hair that fell loosely over it.
Cleek had barely time to recall Narkom’s statement regarding the semi-imbecile mother, when Miss Valmond gave a little cry of wonder and ran into the room.
“Why, mother!” she said in her gentle way, “whatever are you doing down here, dearest? I thought you were still asleep in the oratory. When did you come down?”
The imbecile merely mumbled and muttered, and shook her nodding head, neither answering nor taking any notice whatsoever.
“It is one of her bad nights,” explained Miss Valmond, as she came out and rejoined them. “We can do nothing with her when she is like this. Horace, you will have to come home earlier than usual to-night and help me to get her to bed.” Then she went on, leading the way upstairs, until they came at length to a sort of sanctuary where Madonna faces looked down from sombre niches, and wax lights burnt with a scented flame on a draped and cushioned prie dieu. Here Miss Valmond, who was in the lead, went in, and, taking a paper-wrapped parcel from beside the little altar, came back and put it in her brother’s hand and sent him on his way.
“Was it from there you saw the occurrence, Miss Valmond?” asked Cleek, looking past her into “the dim religious light” of the sanctuary.
“Oh, no,” she made reply. “From the window of my bedroom, just on the other side of the wall. In here, look, see!” And she opened a door to the right and led them in, touching a key that flashed an electric lamp into radiance and illuminated the entire room.
It was a large room furnished in dull oak and dark green after the stately, sombre style of a Gothic chapel, and at one end there was a curtained recess leading to a large bow window. At the other there was a sort of altar banked high with white flowers, and at the side there was a huge canopied bed over the head of which hung an immense crucifix fastened to the wall that backed upon the oratory. It was a majestic thing, that crucifix, richly carved and exquisitely designed. Cleek went nearer and looked at it, his artistic eye captured by the beauty of it; and Miss Valmond, noting his interest, smiled.
“My brother brought me that from Rome,” she said. “Is it not divine, Mr. Headland?”