"Yes, I think I would know him again. I can at least describe his
appearance. He wore a checked suit, very natty, and was more than
usually tall and fine-looking. But his chief peculiarity lay in his
expression. I never saw on any face, no, not on the stage, at the climax
of the most heart-rending tragedy, a greater accumulation of mortal
passion struggling with the imperative necessity for restraint. The
young girl whose blond head lay on his shoulder looked like a saint in
the clutch of a demon. She had seen death, but he--But I prefer not to
be the interpreter of that expressive countenance. It was lost to my
view almost immediately, and probably calmed itself in the face of the
throng he entered, or we would be hearing about him to-day. The girl
seemed to be devoid of almost all feeling. I should not remember her."
"And was that all? Did you just look at that recumbent man and vanish?
Didn't you encounter the butler? Haven't you some definite knowledge to
impart in his regard which will settle his innocence or fix his guilt?"
"I know no more about him than you do, sir, except that he was not in
the room by the time I reached it, and did not come into it during my
presence there. Yet it was his cry that led me to the spot; or do you
think it was that of the bird I afterward heard shouting and screaming
in the cage over the dead man's head?"
"It might have been the bird," admitted Mr. Gryce. "Its call is very
clear, and it seems strangely intelligent. What was it saying while you
stood there?"
"Something about Eva. 'Lovely Eva, maddening Eva! I love Eva! Eva!
Eva!'"
"Eva? Wasn't it 'Evelyn? Poor Evelyn?'"
"No, it was Eva. I thought he might mean the girl I had just seen
carried out. It was an unpleasant experience, hearing this bird shriek
out these cries in the face of the man lying dead at my feet."
"Miss Butterworth, you didn't simply stand over that man. You knelt down
and looked in his face."
"I acknowledge it, and caught my dress in the filagree of the cross.
Naturally I would not stand stock still with a man drawing his last
breath under my eye."
"And what else did you do? You went to the table----"
"Yes, I went to the table."
"And moved the inkstand?"
"Yes, I moved the inkstand, but very carefully, sir, very carefully."
"Not so carefully but that I could see where it had been sitting before
you took it up: the square made by its base in the dust of the table did
not coincide with the place afterwards occupied by it."
"Ah, that comes from your having on your glasses and I not. I endeavored
to set it down in the precise place from which I lifted it."
"Why did you take it up at all? What were you looking for?"
"For clews, Mr. Gryce. You must forgive me, but I was seeking for clews.
I moved several things. I was hunting for the line of writing which
ought to explain this murder."
"The line of writing?"
"Yes. I have not told you what the young girl said as she slipped with
her companion into the crowd."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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