“They found out this afternoon,” said the American girl, “and Mr. Salt scratched off a few details for me. The mantelpiece is as old as the castle, and looks and feels sound enough, but it swings down by means of an invisible hinge. The claw operates it. The claw must be articulated in some way with a shaft driven from a water-wheel in the wall below. The purring sound from the clash of the teeth would draw anyone toward the fireplace, just in the path of the flying bar as he stooped to find where the noise came from. The blow was so terrific it drove Sean through the opening of the french windows, to crawl a yard or two—and die. Heatheringham was already dead when he was hurled against the glass, and his arm striking upward and through the pane that way caused the revolver he was carrying cocked to explode. I think—that’s all.”
She had recited all this with the most studied coolness and precision, this account of the machine—a device surely the creation of a haunted and tortuous brain. The account completed, the driving-force which had sustained her was gone, and she looked weary almost to haggardness. Pity and shame and grief wrenched me for the part I had played in the fatal story. When Mrs. Belvoir ended her close-lipped listening of an hour with a querulous question, I heard someone, Alfred Bannerlee, speaking as if from far away.
“I’ll tell you about that. It was the cats’ heads stuck everywhere about here that made me wonder if I hadn’t dropped into Cwm Melin, as it was called in the parchment account. ‘Hear the cat purring under the perfidious tree’ was fresh in my mind. There was a cat’s head on the firearch, and there had been a cross above. I can’t say that, er, gave the show away, but it stirred me up a bit. Upstairs, though, when I saw the bracket on the wall and thought of ‘no more trouble than snuffing a night-light,’ an idea seemed spread out as plain as an open book. I never thought of the mechanism as a certainty, only as a possibility—barely that. I swear that when I tugged with my razor strop and brought the wretched bracket down, I had no idea what might happen. From what I hear, there must be some sort of weighted valve controlling the flow from the cistern to the water-wheel. A chain from the bracket operates the valve and sets the whole damned business in motion. But I didn’t understand that then. It was all like a dream—what happened—”
The faces passed into a blur again, jerking up and down. Voices roared and voices were thin echoes shivering into silence. Everything was moving, even the sisters Delambre. One strode across the room like a tempest, tossing her garments this way and that. The other came waddling after, and was engaged in a mighty struggle with her hood. The hood came away, revealing a goodly beard.
A comic-opera transformation had taken place. Suddenly it was Salt who was standing before me, Salt and a giant of a man with beefy face. Salt’s expression was ridiculous, for he was doing his best to make it stern and menacing. The words in the air seemed to come from his lips:
“Quietly, Mr. Bannerlee.”
Then I thought that I had fainted. But I had not; instantaneous, utter darkness had swept into the Hall.
XXIX.
Rescue
Like an imbecile, I waited stock-still in the darkness for the light to return. The sudden eclipse, however, had checked my foes as well. I heard their footsteps cease like those of men who had walked over a cliff.
Not a gleam penetrated the murk. There were cries for light, and someone tried to scratch a match, ineffectually. I began to move.