“Yes, Ortega.  Well, what of it?” I whispered with immense assurance.

CHAPTER VII

My brain was in a whirl.  I am safe to say that at this precise moment there was nobody completely sane in the house.  Setting apart Therese and Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions, all the moral economy of Dona Rita had gone to pieces.  Everything was gone except her strong sense of life with all its implied menaces.  The woman was a mere chaos of sensations and vitality.  I, too, suffered most from inability to get hold of some fundamental thought.  The one on which I could best build some hopes was the thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything.  I whispered this into the ear of Dona Rita, into her precious, her beautifully shaped ear.

But she shook her head, very much like an inconsolable child and very much with a child’s complete pessimism she murmured, “Therese has told him.”

The words, “Oh, nonsense,” never passed my lips, because I could not cheat myself into denying that there had been a noise; and that the noise was in the fencing-room.  I knew that room.  There was nothing there that by the wildest stretch of imagination could be conceived as falling with that particular sound.  There was a table with a tall strip of looking-glass above it at one end; but since Blunt took away his campaigning kit there was no small object of any sort on the console or anywhere else that could have been jarred off in some mysterious manner.  Along one of the walls there was the whole complicated apparatus of solid brass pipes, and quite close to it an enormous bath sunk into the floor.  The greatest part of the room along its whole length was covered with matting and had nothing else but a long, narrow leather-upholstered bench fixed to the wall.  And that was all.  And the door leading to the studio was locked.  And Therese had the key.  And it flashed on my mind, independently of Dona Rita’s pessimism, by the force of personal conviction, that, of course, Therese would tell him.  I beheld the whole succession of events perfectly connected and tending to that particular conclusion.  Therese would tell him!  I could see the contrasted heads of those two formidable lunatics close together in a dark mist of whispers compounded of greed, piety, and jealousy, plotting in a sense of perfect security as if under the very wing of Providence.  So at least Therese would think.  She could not be but under the impression that (providentially) I had been called out for the rest of the night.