With his left hand, then, John Recklow took McKay's gaunt hand, and stood so, mute, looking at him and at the girl beside him.
"God!" he said blankly. Then, with no emphasis: "It's rather more than a year!... They sent me two fire-charred skulls--the head of a man and the head of a woman.... That was a year ago.... After your pigeon arrived... I found the scorched skulls wrapped in a Swiss newspaper-lying inside the garden wall--over there on the grass!... And the swine had written your names on the skulls...."
Into Evelyn Erith's eyes there came a vague light--the spectre of a smile. And as Recklow looked at her he remembered the living glory she had once been; and wrath blazed wildly within him. "What have they done to you?" he asked in an unsteady voice. But McKay laid his hand on Recklow's arm: "Nothing. It is what they have not done--fed her. That's all she needs--and sleep."
Recklow gazed heavily upon her. But if the young fail rapidly, they also respond quickly.
"Come into the house," Perhaps it was the hot broth with wine in it that brought a slight colour back into her ghastly face--the face once so youthfully lovely but now as delicate as the mask of death itself.
Candles twinkled on the little table where the girl now lay back listlessly in the depths of an armchair, her chin sunk on her breast.
Recklow sat opposite her, writing on a pad in shorthand. McKay, resting his ragged elbows on the cloth, his haggard face between both hands, went on talking in a colourless, mechanical voice which an iron will alone flogged into speech: "Killed two of them and took their clothes and papers," he continued monotonously; "that was last August--near the end of the month.... The Boche had tens of thousands working there. AND EVERY ONE OF THEM WAS INSANE."
"What!"
"Yes, that is the way they were operating--the only way they dared operate. I think all that enormous work has been done by the insane during the last forty years. You see, the Boche have nothing to dread from the insane. Anyway the majority of them died in harness. Those who became useless--intractable or crippled--were merely returned to the asylums from which they had been drafted. And the Hun government saw to it that nobody should have access to them.
"Besides, who would believe a crazy man or woman if they babbled about the Great Secret?"
He covered his visage with his bony hands and rested so for a few moments, then, forcing himself again: "The Hun for forty years has drafted the insane from every asylum in the Empire to do this gigantic work for him. Men, women, even children, chained, guarded, have done the physical work.... The Pyramids were builded so, they say.... And in this manner is being finished that colossal engineering work which is never spoken of among the Huns except when necessary, and which is known among them as The Great Secret.... Recklow, it was conceived as a vast engineering project forty-eight years ago--in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war. It was begun that same year.... And it is practically finished. Except for one obstacle."