“Yes, indeed. There are legends of this Vale—none more appalling. Did they tell you—but they could not—of the Lord Aidenn’s arm that would not die?”
“The arm that would not die?”
“You know the man’s picture, for you examined it in the gallery. And there”—he motioned toward the portrait—“is the other representation of that orgulous, cruel man.”
I stared again at the pitiless, thin face with a slight and enjoyable stir of nervousness.
“It is a dreadful legend,” averred Maryvale. “They never found—” He turned his head, saw something, and ceased.
For now came a new interruption, and one that I was right glad of, since Maryvale just then was too remote and metempirical for comfort. Of his grisly story of the arm of Sir Pharamond Kay, whatever the fable was, I had no dread; but in the baffling Maryvale himself now was something unapproachable that moved a mild antipathy in me.
The interruption came in the form of a small, hoydenish, vivid-lipped creature called Lib Dale. The last to remain in the Hall, save those who had spoken with me, she and Bob Cullen had been engaged beneath the musicians’ gallery in a tense-toned division of ideas. Even while Maryvale had been drawing near me, I caught a glimpse from the heel of my eye of Bob shuffling his feet in loathness to depart at the hest of Lib. At length, apparently in disgrace, he had passed limply through the farther entrance into the corridor. “Go out and soak your head,” was Lib’s parting tenderness, which I overheard. Then, spying me with Maryvale, the startling little thing came to interrupt. The man of business had checked himself in the midst of his sentence; he seemed to withdraw into some inner chamber of himself; a darkness enveloped the peaked soul in his eyes. He was gone, and I was left alone to encounter the sprightly bit of femininity.
“How do you do?” she asked. “Shake. You’re you and I’m me. We know each other’s names, or else they shouldn’t let us out.”
“No, they shouldn’t,” I retorted feebly, without knowing what I said, save that it was idiotic.
“Well, don’t shed tears about it. Don’t be so vulgarly emotional. Can’t you dig me up a real live saint, Mr. Bannerlee—something I can take home maybe and show the folks?”