“Well, Dyson, I must say that I think you have contrived to surround the whole thing with a mystery of your own making. I go for the doctor’s solution: Black murdered his wife, being himself in all probability an undeveloped lunatic.”
“What? Do you believe, then, that this woman was something too awful, too terrible to be allowed to remain on the earth? You will remember that the doctor said it was the brain of a devil?”
“Yes, yes, but he was speaking, of course, metaphorically. It’s really quite a simple matter if you only look at it like that.”
“Ah, well, you may be right; but yet I am sure you are not. Well, well, it’s not good discussing it any more. A little more Benedictine? That’s right; try some of this tobacco. Didn’t you say that you had been bothered by something—something which happened that night we dined together?”
“Yes, I have been worried, Dyson, worried a great deal. I—— But it’s such a trivial matter—indeed, such an absurdity—that I feel ashamed to trouble you with it.”
“Never mind, let’s have it, absurd or not.”
With many hesitations, and with much inward resentment of the folly of the thing, Salisbury told his tale, and repeated reluctantly the absurd intelligence and the absurder doggerel of the scrap of paper, expecting to hear Dyson burst out into a roar of laughter.
“Isn’t it too bad that I should let myself be bothered by such stuff as that?” he asked, when he had stuttered out the jingle of once, and twice, and thrice.
Dyson had listened to it all gravely, even to the end, and meditated for a few minutes in silence.
“Yes,” he said at length, “it was a curious chance, your taking shelter in that archway just as those two went by. But I don’t know that I should call what was written on the paper nonsense; it is bizarre certainly but I expect it has a meaning for somebody. Just repeat it again, will you, and I will write it down. Perhaps we might find a cipher of some sort, though I hardly think we shall.”
Again had the reluctant lips of Salisbury slowly to stammer out the rubbish that he abhorred, while Dyson jotted it down on a slip of paper.