“And that’s all?”
“That’s enough, isn’t it?
The rest of him was sure to be around somewhere.
The said legs then ceased crouching and went upstairs. After that they vanished.”
He said nothing more, but walked back into the dining room and surveyed the mirror.
“That’s a tricky arrangement you have there, Elizabeth Jane,” he called.
He had adopted Judy’s habit.
“Go up the stairs, Judy, and let me see your legs.”
“Don’t be shameless!” she said.
“How’s this?”
“All right.
Yes, I see them, and very nice ones they are at that.”
When he came forward again Judy insisted on examining the stair rail for fingerprints, although Wallie said that it was nonsense; that all criminals wore gloves nowadays, and that with the increasing crime wave the glove factories were running night shifts.
But she departed for a candle nevertheless, and Wallie glanced up the staircase.
“Rather a blow for the divine Sarah, eh what?” he said.
“Sarah is out, fortunately.
She took the dogs.”
It struck me, as he stood there in the full light over his head, that he was looking even thinner then usual, and very worn.
He had much of his mother’s beauty, if one dare speak of beauty in a man, but he had also inherited her high-strung nervous temperament.
The war must have been hell for him, for he never spoke of it.
I have noticed that the men who really fought and really suffered have very little to say about it; whether because they cannot bear to recall it or because most of them are inarticulate I do not know.
While we stood there I told him about the sound I had heard, and he went back to the lavatory and looked up.
This lavatory is merely a small washroom opening from the rear portion of the hall, and lighted by an opaque glass ceiling, in the center of which a glass transom opens by a cord for ventilation.
The shaft above is rather like an elevator well, and light enters through a skylight in the roof.
Onto this well there is only one opening and this the window to the housemaid’s closet on the third floor.
As during the tornado of 1893 the entire skylight frame and all had been lifted and dropped end-on into the shaft, crashing through the glass roof below, my father had had placed across it some iron bars. These, four in number, were firmly embedded in the walls about six feet below the window sill.
“I suppose nobody has examined the shaft?”
“I really don’t know. Probably not.”
He continued to gaze upward.
“He might have swung into the shaft, and stood on the bars.”
“Provided he knew there were bars there,” I said drily.
Suddenly he turned and shot up the stairs, and a moment later he was calling from the third floor.
“Get a ladder, somebody.
There’s something on top of that skylight down there.”
“You mean—the man himself?”
He laughed at that.
“He’d have gone through the glass like a load of coal!
No. Something small. I can see it against the light beneath.”
He ran down, rushed into the library for matches, and when Robert had brought a ladder from the garage and placed it in the lavatory, he was on it and halfway through the transom in an instant.
We stood huddled in the door, Judy still holding the candle, and I—for some unknown reason—with a lighted cigarette in my hand which some one had thrust on me, and Robert and Joseph behind.
I don’t know what I had expected, but I know that I felt a shock of disappointment when Wallie said:
“Hello!
Here it is.
A pencil!”
He found nothing else, and came down in a moment looking dirty and rather the worse for wear, but extremely pleased with himself.
“A pencil!” he said exultantly.
“Now how about it?
Will Scotland Yard send for me or will it not?
That’s what you heard, you see.”
But Judy only took one glance at it.