“Dozens. I’ve not counted them for years. There’s a list somewhere.”
“You need two more,” he said softly—and went.
The jade Joss had the room to himself. There was little enough light and no fire. Gray shadows hung thick in the place, palpable and dreary. The blinds were down and the curtains all drawn. It was late afternoon in January—a cold, forbidding day; and the room itself, once the heart of the house, was even colder, more ghoul-like. Only one or two thin shafts of sickly light crept in, penetrating the gloom—but not lifting it, intensifying it rather.
Joss looked cold, neglected and alien. The rose-colored lotus looked pinched, gray and frozen—poor exiled pair, and here and so they had been since a few days after Richard Bransby’s death, when Helen had left the room, locking it behind her, and pronounced it taboo to all others.
But now a key turned in the door, creaking and stiffly, as if long unused to its office.
In the hall, Mrs. Leavitt drew back with a shiver and motioned imperatively to Stephen to precede her. “How dark it is,” she said, and not very bravely, following him in not ungingerly.
“Yes,” he answered crisply. He had not come there to talk. And, like her, he was intensely nervous; but from a very different cause. Dead men, and the places of their last earthly resting, meant nothing to him.
“And cold. Stephen, light the fire while I draw the curtains. Have you matches?”
“Of course.” He knelt at the fireplace and set a match to the gas logs. Mrs. Leavitt drew the curtain aside and raised the blinds. The winter sunlight came streaming through the windows, a chilled unfriendly sunshine, but it flooded the room. Pryde looked about quickly, and the woman did too.
She was much affected. “Oh, Stephen, how this room does bring it all back to me! It seems as if it were only yesterday that Richard was here—poor Richard.” Then her eyes caught their old prey—dust—and dust—dust everywhere. She pulled open a drawer under the bookshelves and caught up a little feather duster that had always been kept there.
But Stephen checked her abruptly. “Don’t touch that table—don’t touch anything on any of the tables,” he said sharply.
“That no one should lay hand on even one thing, no one but myself, and that I would touch as little as possible—just to find the papers.”