Joyce Whipple looked a little puzzled, but as Mr. Ricardo was delighted to observe, she was too well bred to pass any comment on the unexpected ejaculation.
XXIV
The Meaning of the Conference Room
A fortnight passed, however, before routine had finished its work and placed the woven pattern of the crime in the great detective’s hands. Hanaud then sought out once more Mr. Ricardo and his fine Rolls-Royce car, and an hour afterwards the two men stood at the top of the staircase outside the conference room. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, the sunlight pouring in through every window and lying in great splashes of gold upon the floor; and the house as still as a tomb. For the Vicomte, still at provisional liberty, had gone to his lodging in Bordeaux, and only the police occupied this château on the Gironde. The broad linen bands with the official seals had been removed, but the door was still locked, and Hanaud in his most vexatiously dramatic mood, took a portentous time to discover the key in his pockets.
“It was within this room, then, that Evelyn Devenish was murdered,” said Mr. Ricardo in a voice of awe.
“It was here,” said Hanaud. “Perhaps at the very moment when you were looking out towards the lighted windows from your bedroom.”
“I heard no cry,” said Mr. Ricardo, shaking his head. He had not forgotten the distance between the two houses, but he could not believe that so direful a crime had been committed in that bright room without some message floating across the night’s dark silence to call him out of his indifference.
“There was no cry,” Hanaud replied. From his sombre certitude he might have assisted at the scene. “A moan perhaps, a rattle in the throat, hardly even that—” and turning the key he threw open the door.
Like a good stage-manager he had prepared his effects. The long room was no longer a conference room though more than ever it was a place of assembly. For the leaves of the long table had been removed, and the table itself, dwarfed into insignificance, barely occupied a corner. On the other hand, the chairs which had lined the side wall were now ranged in orderly rows facing the dais, with a straight passage from the door dividing them like an aisle. But it was the aspect of the dais itself which riveted Mr. Ricardo’s attention and set his eyes blinking. The table had been set forward from the wall, and in place of the green baize it was draped now with a black coffin-pall bordered with white. Upon the pall were laid out three great books with broad markers of crimson silk and gold clasps which locked, a chalice and a box of gold inlay, and two big golden candelabra, each with six branches, and each branch holding a tall black candle compounded of sulphur and pitch. The candles were lit, and burned with a blue flame and an evil stench. And a great crucifix of ebony with an ivory Christ stood upside down. Mr. Ricardo realised with a shock of repulsion that he was gazing at a horrid parody of an altar.
He lifted his eyes above the dais. The cupboard was open, its doors rounded at the top lay flat on either side against the wall, and the white paint, so fresh and thickly bedaubed over the recess on his last visit, had now with infinite care been scraped away. He was gazing at an altar screen painted by a degenerate who had dipped his brush in nightmares. On one panel nude figures holding hands danced wildly back to back; on the other, deformities with white fat human faces to turn the heart sick, crawled and swarmed in a house of pain. The rewards here, the tortures there, and between them on the wall of the recess, a youth, a figure of sheer beauty, slender, erect, and white as a girl, with a face too delicate for a man’s, and blue lustrous eyes which seemed to claim all other eyes and burned with an unutterable sadness. With a shiver Ricardo averted his gaze. He turned to the windows and saw the good sunlight lying broad on green vines and brown river and the white sails of ships. But, even so, he felt those blue eyes intolerably bright burning into his back, and bidding him turn and share their immitigable misery.
“The room, then, was in this array that night when I looked across from my window in the Château Suvlac?” he asked in a low voice, as a man speaks in a chapel. But he spoke still looking from the window to the Gironde, and though he was unaware of it, his hands clung to the frame.
“There was one great difference,” said Hanaud behind him, and for once Mr. Ricardo’s curiosity was stilled. He shrank even from a guess as to wherein that difference had lain. With a movement of real violence, he unlatched and flung open the window and leaning out drank in the clean, fresh air. He was afraid now to know what had happened in that room. He had a glimpse into an abyss where loathsome creatures pullulated in a slime. He heard Hanaud move down the room and blow out the candles.
“Those three books?” he asked.
Hanaud answered with some pride, like a man who has just learnt a new thing.
“They are The Grimoire of Honorius, The Lemegeton or Lesser-Key of Solomon Rabbi, and The Grand Grimoire.”
Mr. Ricardo was no wiser.
“What do they contain?”
“Conjurations, rituals. This,” he said, touching The Grand Grimoire, “evokes the supreme Fly-the-Light by means of the Blasting Rod which drove Adam and Eve from Paradise. This,” and he touched The Lesser Key, “sets out the prayers by which the evil spirits can be conjured to harm one who is hated, and this,” his hand rested on The Grimoire of Honorius, “has
