“Ah! That is what puzzles the doctors so. Each evening, just as it grows dark, she sits down and is silent for half an hour, with eyes downcast as though thinking deeply. Then she will suddenly start up and cry, ‘Ah! I see—I see—yes—that terrible red, green and gold! Oh! it’s horrible—bewildering—fascinating—red, green and gold!’ The three colours seem to obsess her always at nightfall. That is what Doctor Moroni told me.”
I paused for a few moments.
“You’ve never heard her speak of Mr. De Gex? You’re quite sure?”
“Quite,” was Mrs. Alford’s reply. “My young mistress was studying singing at the Royal Academy of Music. Hark! You hear her now! Has she not a beautiful voice? Ah, sir—it is all a great tragedy! It has broken her mother’s heart. Only to think that to-day the poor girl is without memory, and her brain is entirely unbalanced. ‘Red, green and gold’ is all that seems to matter to her. And whenever she recollects it and the words escape her drawn lips she seems petrified by horror.”
What the woman told me was, I realized, the actual truth. And yet when I recollected that I had seen the dark-eyed victim lying dead in that spacious room in the house of Mr. De Gex in Stretton Street, I became utterly bewildered. I had seen her dead there. I had held a mirror to her half-open lips and it had not become clouded. Yet in my ears there now sounded the sweet tuneful strains of that bird-song from “Joy Bells.”
Truly, the unfortunate girl possessed a glorious voice, which would make a fortune upon the concert platform or the stage.
I did my level best to obtain more information concerning the Italian doctor and the man De Gex, but the woman could tell me absolutely nothing. She was concealing nothing from me—that I knew.
It was only when I mentioned the French banker, Monsieur Suzor, that she started and became visibly perturbed.