For nearly a quarter of an hour I stood discussing the amazing affair with Redwood. I could see that he was both mystified and suspicious, therefore I extracted from him a pledge of secrecy, and promised to assist him towards a solution of the extraordinary problem. I made no mention to anybody of Asta’s message to me, which I intended should remain a secret.
At my earnest appeal he allowed me to creep on tiptoe into the darkened chamber, wherein still lay unconscious the woman I loved so profoundly—she who was all the world to me.
I bent over the poor white face that presented the waxen transparency of death, and touched the thin, soft hand that lay outside the coverlet. Then, with eyes filled with tears, and half choked by the sob which I was powerless to restrain, I turned away and left the room.
“Will she recover?” I managed to ask the doctor. But he merely raised his thick eyebrows in blank uncertainty.
What devil’s work had been accomplished within that locked room? Ay, what indeed?
Against the man Shaw, who had so cleverly misled her into the honest belief that he adored her, there arose within me a deep and angry hatred. Why was he not there, knowing Asta’s precarious condition? His excuse of enforced attendance at the Petty Sessions was no doubt an ingenious one. Little did he dream that before the occurrence Asta had summoned me, and for that reason I was there at her side.
So strange had been all the circumstances from that moment when the man of mystery—Melvill Arnold—had breathed his last, that I had become utterly bewildered. And this amazing occurrence in the night now staggered me. Only one person had solved the mystery of the shadowy hand, and he, alas I had not lived to reveal what, no doubt, was a terrible truth.
In the corridor I stood discussing my beloved’s condition in low, bated whispers with the fussy country practitioner, a man of the old fox-hunting school—for nearly every one rides to hounds in that grass-country. He had already telephoned for Doctor Petherbridge, in Northampton, to come for consultation, and was now expecting him to come over in his car.
“I have done all I can, Mr Kemball,” he said. “But as we don’t know the cause, the exact remedy is rather difficult to determine. Every symptom is of brain trouble through fright.”
“Exactly the same symptoms as those you observed in Nicholson!” I remarked. Whereat he slowly nodded in the affirmative, and again stroked his rosy, clean-shaven chin.