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It was horrible! It was incredible! The blow was so crushing that it left my faculties numb, and for a while I seemed unable even to think intelligibly. I was aroused by Thorndyke's voice calm, business-like, composed: "Time will show, indeed! But meanwhile we must go warily. And don't be unduly alarmed, Berkeley. Go home, take a good dose of bromide with a little stimulant, and turn in.
It continued until the lane fell into the main road, but beyond this he had been unable to distinguish it from the marks of the traffic in general. "You found no footprints whatever near the foot of the ladder, or anywhere else round the house?" "None whatever, sir." "There were no signs of any other window or door save that of Mr. Thorndyke's room being attempted?" "None at all, sir."
But it won't be possible for several days, because I've got a job that takes up all my spare time and that I ought to be at work on now," I added, with a sudden qualm at the way in which I had forgotten the passage of time in the interest of Thorndyke's analysis.
"But confound it!" roared Winwood, "you have, yourself, heard him say that the will is a forgery, but that he doesn't dispute the signatures; which," concluded Winwood, banging his fist down on the table, "is damned nonsense." "May I suggest," interposed Stephen Blackmore, "that we came here to receive Dr. Thorndyke's explanation of his letter.
"A capable man, that Barton," observed Thorndyke "ready, plausible, and ingenious, but spoilt by prolonged contact with fools. I wonder if the police will perceive the significance of this little affair." "They will be more acute than I am if they do," said I. "Naturally," interposed Anstey, who loved to "cheek" his revered senior, "because there isn't any. It's only Thorndyke's bounce.
I assumed that he had seized the opportunity of leaving me in charge, and I dimly surmised that he was acting as Thorndyke's private inquiry agent, as he seemed to have done in the case of Samuel Wilkins. On the evening of the second day Thorndyke came home in obviously good spirits, and his first proceedings aroused my expectant curiosity.
Thus Mark Thorndyke's lessons lasted but two or three hours a day, and the school term was a movable period, according to the season of the year and the engagements of the Squire and Mark. In winter the evening was the time, so that the boy shot with his father, or rode to the hounds, or, as he got older, joined in shooting parties at the houses of neighbors.
The captain bowed and went away. Thorndyke's hand trembled as he refilled his friend's glass. "I thought I was gone up," he said, "I never had such a choky sensation in my life; you are still purple in the face." "Eat of what is before you," said the captain, looking in at the door; "you cannot stand the increasing pressure unless you do."
The shabby gate in the wall closed behind me and hid her from my sight; but the light of her love went with me and turned the dull street into a path of glory. It came upon me with something of a shock of surprise to find the scrap of paper still tacked to the oak of Thorndyke's chambers. So much had happened since I had last looked on it that it seemed to belong to another epoch of my life.
The circumstance should have been encouraging. But somehow it was not. What was possible to Thorndyke was, theoretically, possible to me or to anyone else. But the possibility did not realize itself in practice. There was the personal equation. Thorndyke's brain was not an ordinary brain.
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