He began putting out all lights but the table-lamp.
"I fancied, at first, the mother had followed, for she lied about going to Europe. We've had every steamship and railway line watched since long before she left, so she's not beyond the scope of trolleys. But she'd only be a nuisance to the girl, nor is she one to pursue risks—more likely, she just skipped out early to avoid the rush. All sorts of intimidating things have happened lately; then, last night, Christina threatened her with some exposure, this morning she was frightened by an Italian, and the climax has been capped by whatever it was Deutch told her—Don't jump! No, I'm no mind-reader. But I had, of course, the Deutch apartment, as well as yours, wired for a dictograph. Useful thing a dictograph—especially when there are ladies about!"
With a happy indifference to the effect of this statement upon Herrick he cast about the room, appearing to sniff up its suggestions and to compare them with a vision in his mind's eye. Absorbed, elate, on edge, tingling with some suspended energy, as he raised the blind and peered out he radiated a good humor somehow inhuman.
"That wasn't a taxi? I'm expecting a couple of my boys and," he grinned, "poor Ten Euyck!" He disappeared, bent on examining the bedroom.
Herrick still stood, dumb and raging, with his back against the door. In his impotent rebellion against Kane's inferences he had been almost indifferent to the fateful setting of the new scene in that night's hurrying kinetoscope. But slowly this had begun to assume its natural imaginative sway. There were the dim blue walls framed in their outline of smooth, black wood. There before him was the long white blind; to his left the piano where Ingham had sat playing; by stretching out his right hand he could touch the portières of the room in which they had found Ingham's body. It was all in order now. The cushions of the couch had been smoothed and set up. The chair that had lain overturned beside the table had been stood in its proper place, at the edge of the portières, near the door. The newspapers and ashes, the siphon and half-empty glass had been cleared away. The little puddle by the piano stool, too, was gone. All was in order; Ingham's hand might have been about to draw those portières, he might have stepped between them to tell—what? What, the poor fellow persisted, was there to tell? He knew the secret of the shadow on the blind, the secret of the shot in Ingham's breast. Only the one thing was unknown—Who had contrived to bolt the door? That he had always felt the puzzle's essence and its answer; there stole through him again that sense of a skeleton still locked within those walls to be discovered with some recognizing shock; once more his fancy began to search through those hollow rooms in desperate hope, driven by that superstition, by the obstinate unreason with which a starving hand continues to fumble in an empty pocket. Futilest of occupations! The sense of shamed stupidity, of failure in Christina's cause, warned him with a squelching sneer that he was the merest pawn in Kane's hand and that the room would yield its secret, if it had one, to Kane and not to him. At any rate, how could that secret find Christina? And, if he were not looking for Christina, what was he doing there?
As he turned to go it was Kane who came back through the portières and said, "Sit down, for heaven's sake! Don't stand there glaring at me as if I were Ingham's corpse!"
The sharpness of his entrance suggested something.
Herrick answered with his hand on the knob, "I'm virtually a prisoner, I suppose?"
"Oh, don't you care to sit out the show?"
"If I left here should I be arrested?"