For Bennett, her presence suddenly intensified the terror that was on this group. She was reality, she was the warmth and beauty he knew; any of the others might have been goblins behind a mask, and one of them was. That was the evil uncertainty which made grotesque this business of walking in to dinner, and (worse) of eating it. Of course they stumbled on the subject, which might have been accident, as soon as they went into the dim and draughty dining-hall.
'I have ordered,' said Maurice, nodding in the candlelight, 'an extra chair for the table…'
The scraping of footfalls seemed to change and waver.
'An extra place?' said Katharine.
'For Mr. Rainger, of course,' her uncle pointed out softly, 'in case he should feel well enough to come down. You did not misunderstand, Kate?' He nodded to Thompson, and he was smiling as he turned in mild surprise. 'Mr. Emery tells me that he is not in a condition to sit down with us tonight.
'You spoke, Sir Henry?' he added quickly.
'Did I' grunted H. M. 'Well, there, now! I must 'a' been thinkin' of something else. I was only thinkin', wonderful constitution that feller Rainger must have.'
Chairs scraped. 'Most extraordinary,' Maurice agreed. 'He would struggle to the end. Even to a rope's end, I should fancy.' His ghoulish high spirits seemed to whip him on. Somewhere at the table a spoon rattled against a plate. 'Come, Kate! You really must eat. I can recommend this soup. If you insist on coming undressed to the table, you must have something to keep you warm. Or perhaps that element has already been supplied? Our young friend from America seems-ah-to evince a similar lack of appetite, from which I seem to deduce material conclusions, may I say? Yes. But it is not flattering to a host. Surely-ah, my boy, you do not think you are dining with the Borgia?'
'No, sir,' said Bennett. He felt a small and undiplomatic hammer beginning to beat in his temple. He looked up. 'With the Borgia, you at least knew what to expect.'
'But surely,' said Maurice in a remonstrating tone, 'surely American — ah — 'push' and inventiveness would have found a quick way in matters culinary as well as amatory? Would you really have been afraid of poison; or would you not have found a way of giving the poison to the Borgia himself?'
'No, sir,' said Bennett. 'Only castor oil.'
'Do have some of your own soup, Uncle Maurice,' urged Katharine. She suddenly leaned back and began to laugh hysterically. It had a thin sound in the big room; and it was as though the draught that passed over the candle-flames symbolized a new presence there. Jervis Willard's heavy and sardonic gaze moved round the table.
'I say, Maurice,' he observed; 'I don't want to interrupt all this pleasant theorizing about soup and poison. But let's be sensible for a while, shall we? In the first place, all this can't be very pleasant hearing for-' He stopped. He seemed again heavy and bewildered, as he had been that afternoon; and now it was as though he were cursing himself for saying something he had not intended.
'I don't mind,' said Louise, in a thin but clear voice. She looked up from studying the table. 'I wasn't trying to poison myself, you know. Only to sleep. It's a curious thing, but I don't mind anything now. All I want is to get a train back to town, and see that father's all right, and isn't upset.'
They had not told her about the trouble with John Bohun even yet: so much was clear from her tone. But Bennett, glancing swiftly at Maurice, thought he could follow at least a part of the thought that twisted behind those flickering dead-gray eyes. Maurice weighed surgical knives, wondering which to apply. He chose the second knife.
'A train back to town?' he repeated. 'I feel sure we all applaud your solicitude, and so would my brother John if he were here. But I fear the police would not be so obliging. Perhaps nobody has heard? Ah! Well, we are to act our parts as of last night; we are to reenact the attempted murder of poor Marcia on the staircase in King Charles's Room. Sir Henry thinks it should be helpful: For the moment I will say no more. I should be deeply regretful if I were to spoil anyone's dinner.'
A start went round the table; more, it seemed, of surprise than any other feeling. Thompson moved in deftly, and, as though everybody became aware of his presence, there was a silence for a long time. The moving of the dishes seemed unnaturally loud. Although Bennett did not look up, he found himself watching hands. Hands against the dark polished oak of the table, moving, idle, shifting against the silver. Maurice's slender hands, with shadows hollowed along the backs, brushed together with a washing motion. Louise's pink-tinted nails making a faint scraping noise on the oak. Willard's big spatulate fingers, the forefinger tapping slowly on the line of spoons. Katharine's hands, as white as the laced linen circles for the dishes, clenched and motionless. Then Bennett glanced at Rainger's empty chair, and remembered a scene at the bottom of the stairs where somebody's hands had been busy..
'What's this nonsense?' demanded Willard.
'I trust,' said Maurice, 'nobody has any objection? It would look exceedingly odd to Sir Henry, you know.'
Katharine said in a clear voice: 'I think it's rather horrible. But if we must go on with it, we must. Still, I shouldn't think you would take much interest in reconstructing the scene of any attempt, Uncle Maurice, if Mr. Rainger couldn't be there.'
'I have my reasons,' Maurice answered, nodding meditatively. 'It is most interesting, even if Mr. Rainger's place must be taken by somebody else. I venture to assert that our young friend from America will have considerably more success in the part than Mr. Rainger. Let us say no more about it'
The dinner dragged on. It was, he supposed, a good dinner, but to Bennett the very steam was nauseous, and the bursts of conversation worse. Maurice lingered over every course, descanting. A clock struck eight-thirty. When Katharine and Louise tried to withdraw from the table as Thompson set out the decanters, Maurice's thin voice forbade them. H.M., who had not spoken throughout, sat back wooden and motionless. The sharp noise of Maurice cracking nuts sounded thin in the big room. Now the firelight had begun to die down, and the moon was high beyond one wall of windows.
Crack. A faint thump as the nut-cracker was put down. Bennett suddenly pushed his cold coffee away..
'I think,' said Maurice, 'that we are almost ready to proceed with the curious experiment Sir Henry has suggested. I may say that it will not, of course, lead us to anything that concerns the actual murderer of Miss Tait. Although at Sir Henry's express wish I have refrained from telling all of you the facts, nevertheless we ourselves have little doubt. But this reconstruction should be most interesting to some of us, particularly'-crack! the little steel jaws snapped again- 'my dear young friend Louise. Ha ha ha. Besides, I am always. willing to lecture on the beauties of the White Priory, as I did last night. Sir Henry, do you wish me to take all of you on a full round of the house, as last night?'
'No,' said H. M. They seemed a trifle startled to remember that he was there. 'Nothin' so elaborate as that. We'll start from here, and go up to the room. Humph. I got no objection to your lecturin', if you like. Besides, I shouldn't be much good in Tait's part, should I? Hey? No. We'll simply imagine she's here. It'll be easier, in the dark. Imagine she's walkin' between you and me. We'll go on ahead, and the others can follow in the order they did last night.'
Maurice rose. 'Quite so. Louise with my friend Jervis. Little Kate with Mr. Bennett in the role of our other absent guest. I should earnestly recommend that each person act as he or she did last night. As for myself, I have so often fancied I walked and talked with dead ladies in this house that it will scarcely be a strain on my imagination to see the latest of them walking beside me. Thompson, you may blow out all the candles except one.'
As each candle puffed out, it was like the driving of a nail into a door that shut them back into the past: even though it were only the equally irrevocable past of last night. The moonlight probed down through the wall of windows, touching silhouettes and the sides of faces turned the color of skim milk. Feet shuffled. The little yellow flame from the candle in Maurice's hand flickered as he raised it aloft. It touched a portrait, a darkened and paint- cracked portrait of a woman in a yellow gown, the semblance of whose inscrutable eyes they recognized an instant before the light lowered again.
'This way,' said Maurice.
Again the footsteps rasped on stone. The pin-point flame moved ahead. ' Bennett felt Katharine's arm trembling against his own. It was just when they moved out into the maze of passages that Maurice's thin voice began to speak smoothly and pleasantly.
'It is an interesting thing concerning this fleshly charmer,' he said, smirking down at an empty space under
