I should have preferred to maintain a thoughtful, experiencing silence
throughout our walk home. I had plenty of material for reflection. I
wanted, now, to look at all this disappearing Brenda business from a new
angle. I had a sense of the weaving of plots, and of the texture of them;
such a sense as I imagine a blind man may get through sensitive
finger-tips. Two new characters had come into my play, and I knew them
both for principals. That opening act without Brenda, Arthur Banks, or his
sister was nothing more than a prologue. The whole affair had begun again
to fascinate my interest. Moreover, I was becoming aware of a stern,
half-tragic background that had not yet come into proper focus.
And the circumstances of our walk home were of a kind that I find
peculiarly stimulating to the imagination. The sky was clearing. Above us,
widening pools of deep sky, glinting here and there, with the weak
radiance of half-drowned stars, opened and closed again behind dispersing
wreaths of mist. While in the west, a heaped indigo gloom that might in
that light have been mistaken for the silhouette of a vast impending
forest, revealed at one edge a thin haze of yellow silver that stretched
weak exploring arms of light towards the mysterious obscurity of the upper
clouds. I knew precisely how that sky would look at sunset, but at moonset
it had a completely different quality that was at once more ethereal and
more primitive. It seemed to me that this night-sky had the original,
eternal effect of all planetary space; that it might be found under the
leaping rings of Saturn or in the perpetual gloom of banished Neptune.
Compared to the comprehensible, reproducible effects of sunlight, it was
as the wonder of the ineffable to the beauty of a magnificent picture.
But I was not left for many minutes to the rapture of contemplation. Even
the primitive had to give place to the movement of our tiny, civilised
drama. Jervaise and I were of the race that has been steadily creating a
fiction of the earth since the first appearance of inductive science in
the days of prehistoric man; and we could not live for long outside the
artificial realism of the thing we were making. We were not the creatures
of a process, but little gods in a world-pantheon.
* * * * *
I made no attempt to check him when he began to talk. I knew by the raised
tone of his voice--he was speaking quite a third above his ordinary
pitch--that he was pleasantly excited by our interview with Anne: an
excitement that he now wished either to conceal, or, if that were
impossible, to attribute to another cause.
"It occurs to me that there are one or two very puzzling points about that
visit of ours, Melhuish," he began.
"At least two," I agreed.
"Which are?" he asked.
"I'd prefer to hear yours first," I said, having no intention of
displaying my own.
He was so eager to exhibit his cleverness that he did not press me for my
probably worthless deductions.
"Well, in the first place," he said, "did it strike you as a curious fact
that Miss Banks, and she alone, was apparently disturbed by that dog's
infernal barking?"
"It hadn't struck me," I admitted; and just because I had not remarked
that anomaly for myself, I was instantly prepared to treat it as unworthy
of notice. "I suppose her father and mother and the servants, and so on,
heard her let us in," I said.
Jervaise jeered at that. "Oh! my good man," he said.
"Well, why not?" I returned peevishly.
"I put it to you," he said, "whether in those circumstances the family's
refusal to make an appearance admits of any ordinary explanation?"
I could see, now, that it did not; but having committed myself to a point
of view, I determined to uphold it. "Why _should_ they come down?" I
asked.
"Common curiosity would be a sufficient inducement, I should imagine,"
Jervaise replied with a snort of contempt, "to say nothing of a reasonable
anxiety to know why any one should call at two o'clock in the morning. It
isn't usual, you know--outside the theatrical world, perhaps."