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Page 7
When one read the yellow-backed court-record, the sense of old,
obscure, mysterious agencies moving in sinister menace,
invisibly, around Rodman could not be escaped from. You believed
it. Against your reason, against all modern experience of life,
you believed it.
And yet it could not be true! One had to find that verdict or
topple over all human knowledge - that is, all human knowledge as
we understand it. The judge, cutting short the criminal trial,
took the only way out of the thing.
There was one man in the world that everybody wished could have
been present at the time. That was Sir Henry Marquis. Marquis
was chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland
Yard. He had been in charge of the English secret service on the
frontier of the Shan states, and at the time he was in Asia.
As soon as Scotland Yard could release Sir Henry, it sent him.
Rodman's genius was the common property of the world. The
American Government could not, even with the verdict of a trial
court, let Rodman's death go by under the smoke-screen of such a
weird, inscrutable mystery.
I was to meet Sir Henry and come here with him. But my train
into New England was delayed, and when I arrived at the station,
I found that Marquis had gone down to have a look at Rodman's
country-house, where the thing had happened.
It was on an isolated forest ridge of the Berkshires, no human
soul within a dozen miles of it - a comfortable stone house in
the English fashion. There was a big drawing-room across one end
of it, with an immense fireplace framed in black marble under a
great white panel to the ceiling. It had a wide black-marble
hearth. There is an excellent photograph of it in the record,
showing the single andiron, that mysterious andiron upon which
the whole tragedy seemed to turn as on a hinge.
Rodman used this drawing-room for a workshop. He kept it
close-shuttered and locked. Not even this big, yellow, servile
creature who took exclusive care of him in the house was allowed
to enter, except under Rodman's eye. What he saw in the final
scenes of the tragedy, he saw looking in through a crack under
the door. The earlier things he noticed when he put logs on the
fire at dark.
Time is hardly a measure for the activities of the mind. These
reflections winged by in a scarcely perceptible interval of it.
They have taken me some time to write out here, but they crowded
past while the big Oriental was speaking - in the pause between
his words.
"The print," he continued, "was the first confirmation of
evidence, but it was not the first indicatory sign. I doubt if
the Master himself noticed the thing at the beginning. The
seductions of this disaster could not have come quickly; and
besides that, Excellency, the agencies behind the material world
get a footing in it only with continuous pressure. Do not
receive a wrong impression, Excellency; to the eye a thing will
suddenly appear, but the invisible pressure will have been for
some time behind that materialization."
He paused.
"The Master was sunk in his labor, and while that enveloped him,
the first advances of the lure would have gone by unnoticed - and
the tension of the pressure. But the day was at hand when the
Master was receptive. He had got his work completed; the
formula, penciled out, were on his table. I knew by the
relaxation. Of all periods this is the one most dangerous to the
human spirit."
He sat silent for a moment, his big fingers moving on the arms of
the chair.
"I knew," he added. Then he went on: "But it was the one thing
against which I could not protect him. The test was to be
permitted."
He made a vague gesture.
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