She came close to me, still speaking, and I yielded a step before the accusations she flung out like weapons. “You destroyed the manuscript you yourself had made. You hurled the stone from the rockery into the earth from the balcony outside your room. And at the same time you dropped the placard the wind carried down to the corner of the House, and it was you who left the earlier placard in Sean’s room that morning when everyone else was downstairs.”
My voice sounded horribly ineffective in its attempt at surprise. “You accuse me! You accuse me—of—?”
“I do, I do! Haven’t I been putting you on your guard all morning and all afternoon—ever since I showed you the campstool? Haven’t I been telling you what I know and hinting what I’ve guessed? Haven’t I done enough—?”
My laugh, to show contempt, was also a failure. “Preposterous. It’s a—vertebrate without a skeleton: your theory. I didn’t want to kill your lover. What motive could I have had?”
Those blue eyes could be as sharp as steel. She seemed to be the embodiment of intellect become passionate. “Motive? Something overwhelmed you stronger than any motive: impulse. If you had thought two minutes, Sean would be alive to-day. You had motive, yes, though I’m ashamed to describe it, but the impulse dwarfed the cause behind it, for once. You had been thinking about it, hadn’t you, ever since the night before, and all day long, or there would have been no threatening message in Sean’s room—but it was that chance, that chance in a thousand that settled it. I understand now what has always seemed to me the greatest mystery of all: the motive you had for the diary and the tremendous trouble you took in writing five thousand words overnight.”
“I set down the reason plainly: I wanted to clear up the muddle we all were in.”
“That may have been so when you took up your pen, but before you laid it down the diary had become a greater thing than any mere alignment of facts; it had become your defence! You were someone else, Mr. Bannerlee; the bright and cheery, affable, not-too-scholarly, antiquarian and athlete—all that part of you subservient now to something else: Iago!”
“Who was Iago?” asked Mrs. Bartholomew with troubled mouth. “Something in Shakes—”
“The spider spins its web with all its cunning bound up in instinct. While you spun your web, Mr. Bannerlee, all your cunning was bound up in intellect, and you loved each shrewd knot and strand. Yes, that was it; you came to be in love with artifice, you laughed in your sleeve at Salt and Doctor Aire and Heatheringham and me—all people who were trying to break through your web.”
I had hold of myself now, in spite of the tumult of my heart, and could return blow for blow. “What nonsense! What a fool I’d be if I killed a man to preen myself for intellectual superiority. I tell you again, I never wanted to kill your lover. What reason had I?”