“Be quick about it,” Nadia screamed in a whisper.
“I tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The effort by which Sydney moved her limbs and went to Neil’s side was painful to watch, like the first steps of a Frankenstein conception. She bent over him a little and laid her hand across his eyes.
“It’s all right, Neil. There is nothing wrong. I didn’t mean there was. It has been so hard for you. So bad I can’t remember how bad. If I remembered I’d die. Perhaps you are remembering. Don’t let it kill you, dear. For you and I have so much to do. We are going to go on from where we laid our story down—was it a year ago? I’m sure we can find the very page, paragraph and sentence where we left off.”
Neil smiled. It was the smile of a blind person, sweet and helpless. He moved a little nearer Sydney, and lay perfectly still. How long the three in the room remained speechless and motionless it would have been hard to say. It was Belknap who disturbed two of them; the third was beyond all further disturbance.
“What have we here—a séance?” Belknap asked from the door.
Nadia quivered and shrank back against the wall as she turned to face Belknap. Her hands, with spread fingers, formed a spidery white pattern against the room’s daring modernistic wall-paper of black shot with gold. Her eyes wavered, and Belknap saw them consider the open window leading to the roof of the porte-cochère.
“Your humble servant.” Belknap closed the door, turned its key and pocketed the key, and crossed to the bed.
He thrust Sydney Crawford aside with an arm that would have brooked no interference had there been any. He looked down at Crawford; then bent over him; and then, quickly, felt for the heart. His face darkened.
“This man is dead,” he said, straightening and turning toward Nadia Mdevani.
“Thank God!” Sydney cried, and Belknap swung to her.
“Another Strange Death of President Harding, is that it?”
“That’s for you to say, Mr. Detective,” Sydney answered with unexpected fire. “But this is the second time today you have accused me of murder; and I should have thought, unless you can make your point better than you made it this morning, you might exercise a greater professional restraint.”
By a blazing light in Sydney’s transparent face it was clear things no longer mattered a tinker’s dam: life, death, love, hatred were all one to her, which was nothing. Belknap regarded her with merciless, puckered eyes, and turned again to her husband. He touched a light forefinger to the powder on Crawford’s corroded lips.