“As for me, I am haunted in the same manner.”
“I am like a man who is hypnotised--I am no longer a free agent. I am ordered to do this, and I do it. As for this accursed Book of Extracts”--he laid his hand upon the abomination--“I am forced to go through it over and over again. Every time I sit down I am prompted by a kind of assurance that something will be discovered. Every time I rise up, it is with disgust that nothing has occurred to me.”
“Are we to go on all our lives looking for what we can never find?”
“We know the whole contents by heart. Yet every day there is the feeling that something will start into light. It is madness, Constance. I am going mad--like my grandfather, who killed himself. That will end the family tale of woes, so far as I am concerned.”
He shook his head. “I know it all. That will be no use.”
“No use. I should be made to write it all out again.”
“I dropped an envelope in your letter-box last night. Have you opened it?”
“I don’t think I have read a single letter for the last three weeks.”
“Then it must be among the pile. What a heap of letters! Oh, Leonard, you are indeed occupied with this business. I found last night three letters from Langley Holme to his wife. They were written from Campaigne Park; but on what occasion I do not know. I thought at first that I might have found something that would throw a little light upon the business. But of course, when one considers, how could he throw light upon his own tragic end?”
He took the packet carelessly. “Do the letters tell us anything?”
“Nothing important, I believe. They show that he was staying at the Park.”
“We know that already. It is strange how we are continually mocked by the things we learn. It was the same with the letter from Australia.”
“That was an interesting letter--so are these--even if they tell us nothing that we do not know already.”
He opened the envelope, and took out the packet of letters. There were three: they were written on square letter paper: the folds had been worn away, and the letters were now dropping to pieces. The ink was faded as becomes ink of the nineteenth century. Leonard laid them on the table to read because they were in so ragged a condition. “The date,” he said, “is difficult to make out, but the last letter looks like ‘6’--that would make it 1826. You say that there is nothing important in them.”