CHAPTER SIX

I didn’t know as much about the geography of the Trents’ house then as I do now, after all that happened there. But I did know that after I got up the wide staircase, past the knights, I had to turn out of the big dimly lighted hall, with the balcony overlooking the foyer downstairs, into a corridor that was still longer and dimmer and even more spacious. My door was the third on the right. I hurried past the oak highboys and the carved chests, very glad to close the heavy door behind me and be alone.

I’ve wondered a number of times since then whether the course of Queen Elizabeth’s long reign would have been a little smoother if she’d had a different bed. It was an enormous bed, heavily carved, with heavy tapestry curtains drawn closely round the head; and it was harder than I’d thought it possible for a bed to be. When I got into it I was very sleepy. After I’d turned off my light, and lay there looking up at the dark curtains all around, I was as wide awake as I’d ever been in my life. At first I thought the bed was entirely responsible. Then I realized that it wasn’t. The chief thing I missed was the familiar sound of the L-trains and the honking taxis. I closed my eyes and listened. All I could hear was the loud croaking of the frogs, and when that stopped, in one of those concerted silences, I could hear the far-off lapping of the waves on the beach, and all the tiny unfamiliar country sounds that the frogs drowned out the minute they began to croak again.

I lay there trying to get my city tempo down to the point of sleep, and I got to thinking about the people downstairs, and wondering whether Michael Spur was really dangerous. Or was it just special pleading on Dr. Sartoris’s part? After all, I thought, he’d never seen Michael before. He’d probably got everything he knew from Mrs. Trent, and she was cer tainly both a very prejudiced and a very foolish informant. Then I began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t Dr. Sartoris’s influence that had convinced Mrs. Trent. Then what Mr. Trent had said came into my thoughts with a rush: Michael’s illness could be a powerful weapon in the hands of somebody who could control him.

It all seemed so unusual and complicated. Violent death, or the idea of it, seemed so familiar to all these people, like something they lived with daily, not something remote and horrible. I put the whole matter out of my head, and tried to think about Duncan Trent and how I’d begin a story about him. That wasn’t successful, since he’d already warned me that this was going to be a new kind of success story. At last I tried to count sheep jumping over a fence; but after a bit the sheep began to smile a Mona Lisa smile. When the larger ones turned into bundles of red velvet fretfully bleating something about psychology, I sat up and turned on the light.

I reached for one of the two thin white books lying on my bedside table. I’d noticed them before I went down to dinner, observed that they didn’t look very exciting, and thought of getting something in the library. But I hadn’t done it. The one I now took up was bound in vellum, and was inscribed on the fly-leaf, in a fine flowing hand, “To the future and Emily Trent.” The title-page was printed in gold in Old English type. It read “A Way of Life. An Experiment. By Victor Paul Sartoris, M.D., Ph.D. Privately Printed.”

I thought it would at least have something to tell me about Dr. Sartoris, and settled down to have a look at it. I was wrong. When I’d got halfway through, not having understood a single paragraph, I came to this line: “The erotic-narcissistic-compulsive is therefore, friends and, fellow-seekers, the ideal harmonology of the libido.” That finished me. I closed the book and put it respectfully down, thinking I could almost see Agnes Hutton’s smile.

The second book was as bad. It was called A Way of Love, and apparently was not an experiment, for it was only inscribed “To Mrs. Trent,” and seemed to have nothing to say about the future or the past.

After that I tried to go to sleep again, and when that failed I got up. I thought I’d write a letter to Mr. McCrae about Dr. Sartoris, and tell him also about Perry Bassett, since Mr. McCrae grows smilax in a box in his office window over the radiator. I poked up the fire and settled down with a piece of Mrs. Trent’s very expensive stationery. But it was no go. My fountain pen was dry, and I knew before I looked that the dish of shot with the quill in it on the prie-dieu had never had any ink in it.

I looked at my watch. It was just twelve o’clock. I didn’t of course know what time the Trents went to bed, or whether I could risk going downstairs after some ink, or a book if I could find one. They probably had reading books somewhere; the ones in the library were obviously just decoration. Then I thought of the magazine on the sofa in the living room. I might get hold of it until I could manage something better in the morning.

So I got up, and looked out of the long leaded window. My room was near the center of the long vista to the shimmering bay. The seat where Michael Spur had knelt, the spot where his father had fallen, was white and ghostly, almost phosphorescent in the moonlight. I leaned out. There were no paths of light across the lawn from the open windows downstairs, and I decided I could risk it. I put on my dressing gown and slipped out into the hall. It was absolutely dark. Apparently when the Trents went to bed they believed in turning out the lights.

However, I knew that if I kept in the middle of the hall, and made my way carefully, I could probably get downstairs without knocking over a knight. If I hit a chest or a chair or a highboy it was just my hard luck, but the knights were concentrated on the landing. There were two windows in this end of the hall, and there would be a little light from the rose window. I decided to risk it.

Ordinarily it would have been simple to turn on a light; but I had no notion where or how you did it. The switches were all carefully concealed behind old pieces of tapestry, or under chair rails, and it was pretty confusing until you got the hang of it.

So I went on in the dark. I got to the balcony without bumping into anything. There was light enough from the rose window for me to make out the glint of polished steel, and then the figures of all three knights, standing like ghostly sentinels on the landing. I stood looking down into the hall below; and I became aware then that I had a curious feeling, a sort of uneasiness, vague and indefinable, that something was wrong. And because I haven’t any sympathy for vagueness of any sort I promptly put that sensation down to pure funk, brought on by the dark eeriness of a misplaced cathedral window and various skeletons in armor, and proceeded quietly but firmly down the stairs after my magazine.

Just at that point, I’ll admit, I should have been glad to have fled back to my room; but it had got to be a point of honor not to let myself be scared out by anything as immaterial as gray shadows.

On the bottom step I came to an abrupt halt.

Someone was still in the library. The door was closed, but there was a faint dim edge of light along the floor, and I could hear someone speaking. At least, I heard a sort of mumbling. I didn’t want to get caught prowling around at that hour, and I think I should have gone back then, except that I was wider awake than ever and the living room door wasn’t more than twenty feet away. Furthermore, it was open. I decided to make a dash for it, get my magazine and slip upstairs before anybody came out. But it wasn’t that easy. I don’t mean that anyone came out—at least no one came out into the hall.

I got inside the living room. The heavy gold curtains had been drawn aside, and the moonlight lay in long barred panels across the room. In the instant that I stood there, looking down, a tall dark shadow moved into the white oblong, and fell across my feet, and the shadow of a man’s head was blocked against the hem of my nightdress. I looked up, frozen with terror.

A man was standing motionless in the window. For a moment I thought he was inside the room. Then he moved, and I realized that he was outside, and that he did not know that I was behind him, inside the room. I crouched down instinctively, I suppose, behind a chair and waited.

In a minute or two I peered out again. He was still standing there, his back to the window, looking down towards the water. He raised his left hand, and slowly, almost painfully, ran his fingers from his forehead through his hair to the nape of his neck.

I drew a long breath of relief and got up. I didn’t mind Michael Spur—which, I suppose, was a tacit admission that I did mind somebody else. Although I don’t know just who I thought it was out there. I realized too that the reason I hadn’t recognized him was that the moonlight and shadows played tricks with his bulk, so that he seemed thicker than he was.

He didn’t look around, and when I reached over the back of the sofa and found somebody had been ahead of me and the magazine was gone, he was still there. There were a couple of decks of cards on the table. I turned to get one of them, and as I did so the shadow on the floor disappeared; Michael Spur had gone as silently as he had come. I put the pack of cards in my pocket and got out of the room.

On the bottom step I hesitated. I could still hear the rumbling sound of voices in the library, and for a moment I thought of looking in and telling Mr. Trent or whoever was there that Michael Spur was out in the garden. But I didn’t. I can’t help even now, when it’s all over, wondering what difference it would have made to everybody—especially to Michael Spur—if I had.

Back upstairs in my room I closed the door and locked it. Then I stood there, wondering if I really ought not to do something about Michael. I decided at last that it was absolutely none of my business, and I’d better go to bed. So I took the stiff red morocco desk pad off the prie-dieu, got into bed, with the help of a pillow on my lap made myself an adequate card table, and dealt out the set-up for a game of patience. Just how long I played I don’t know. I heard the muffled but distinct report of the gunshot just as I’d figured out that by Monte Carlo standards I’d lost about $105, had laid down the first seven cards for a new game, and was in the middle of the row of six.

The report was followed by a moment’s dull reverberation, and then, instantly, all sounds stopped, even the frogs’ croaking, and there was a complete and profound silence.

I sat there motionless, hardly breathing, expecting to hear people rushing around in the hall. There was no sound. I glanced at my watch. It was just two o’clock. I pushed my card table aside and slipped out of bed. It was incredible that no one else in the house should have heard what I had heard. I put on my slippers and dressing gown, unlocked my door and peered out into the hall. The corridor was dark; no one was in it. I listened. There was no sound except for the quick merry note of a clock somewhere striking two.

Then abruptly, almost as if they were reassuring me, the frogs started their loud chorus again.

My first impulse had been to wake someone and tell him I’d heard a shot; but standing there in the dark it flashed across my mind that I’d better be sure before I did anything.

For some reason, I wasn’t frightened at all. The blind flash of terror I’d had when Michael’s shadow fell across my feet downstairs was gone. In fact, I distinctly remember having a sort of pious sense of being very firm and resolute; and that held up until I got to the balcony and looked down in the eerie grayish light from the rose window. The motionless figures on the landing seemed to have grown suddenly more shadowy and sinister. The long black shadows downstairs seemed to shield moving forms. I felt my heart shrinking, and I looked back to where the shaded light from my bedside threw a dim bar across the black channel of the hall.

I clenched my teeth, assured myself it was too late to turn back, and went downstairs, holding tightly to the banister, and listening for any sound in the gray overwhelming silence. The light in the library was still on; I could see the faint glow under the door; and I ran to it, seized the knob, turned it, and threw the door open with a great wave of relief. “Oh, Mr. Trent!” I gasped.

He was sitting there at the table, just where I had left him, with a pile of papers in front of him. But he did not look up, and I stopped short.

Something stark and primitive laid an icy hand on my heart and drained all power of movement out of my body. It wasn’t Mr. Trent who was sitting there at the table—it was death. Death with a head sagging forward, and hand stretched out in front of him, and creeping blood dyeing the starched white bosom of his shirt a living red—like the blossom of the Judas Tree in the waxen banks of the dogwood.

It seemed to me that the pulse of time stopped while I stood there and only the creeping blood moved and swelled. It seemed an eternity, then, but it couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds that I stared, speechless, horribly fascinated, at his sagging head, the gaping wound in his breast, his arms and hands flung out on the table, the papers around them, and the small blueblack revolver lying there among the papers. It was the sight of it that brought me to life. I stepped forward.

And just as I did there was a sharp click, and the library was plunged into total darkness.

For one instant the hard bright image of that terrible scene in front of me stayed in my vision, and even now I can close my eyes and see it—Mr. Trent, the papers, the gun. If only I could have screamed, someone might have come. But I’ve never screamed in my life. I ran blindly across the room and out into the other hall, and then blundered upstairs, and called, panic-stricken, desperate.

Oddly enough, it was Dr. Sartoris I called. Even odder than that, it was Agnes Hutton who appeared first out of the door next to mine. Then other doors opened, until the dark channel had five more bars of light across it. Perry Bassett, Major Ellicott, Dr. Sartoris, Agnes Hutton and Michael Spur were all out there.