CHAPTER XIV.BARBARA TAKES A HAND“No luck, Mr. Marigold,” said the Assistant Provost Marshal, “I’m sorry, but there it is! We’ve made every possible inquiry about this Private... er...” he glanced at the buff-colored leave pass in his hand, “... this Gunner Barling, but we can’t trace him so far. He should have gone back to France the afternoon before the day on which you found his pass. But he hasn’t rejoined his unit. He’s been posted as an absentee, and the police have been warned. I’m afraid we can’t do any more than that!”The detective looked at the officer with mild reproach in his eyes.“Dear, dear,” he replied, “and I made sure you’d be able to trace him with that pass!”He clicked his tongue against his teeth and shook his head.“Dear, dear!” he said again.“What’s the feller been up to?” asked the A.P.M. Detectives have a horror of leading questions, and Mr. Marigold shrank visibly before the directness of the other’s inquiry. Before replying, however, he measured the officer with his calm, shrewd eye. Mr. Marigold was not above breaking his own rules of etiquette if thereby he might gain a useful ally.“Well, Captain Beardiston,” he answered slowly, “I’ll tell you because I think that you may be able to help me a little bit. It’s part of your work to look after deserters and absentees and those sort o’ folk, isn’t it?”The A.P.M. groaned.“Part of my work?” he repeated, “it seems to be my whole life ever since I came back from the front.”“If you want to know what this young fellow has been up to,” said Mr. Marigold in his even voice, “it’s murder, if I’m not mistaken!”“Murder?” echoed the other in surprise. “Why, not the Seven Kings murder, surely?”The detective gave a brisk nod.“That’s it,” he replied, “I’m in charge of that case, if you follow me. I found that pass in the front garden of the Mackwayte’s house in Laleham Villas, half trodden into the earth of the flower-bed by a heavy boot, a service boot, studded with nails. There had been a lot of rain in the night, and it had washed the mosaic-tiled pathway up to the front door almost clean. When I was having a look round the garden, I picked up this pass, and then I spotted the trace of service boots, a bit faint, on the beds. You know the way the nails are set in the issue boots?”The officer nodded:“I ought to know that foot-print,” he said. “It’s all over the roads in northern France.”“We made inquiries through you,” the detective resumed, “and when I found that this Gunner Barling, the owner of the pass, was missing, well, you will admit, it looked a bit suspicious.”“Still, you know,” the A.P.M. objected, “this man appears to have the most excellent character. He’s got a clean sheet; he’s never gone absent before. And he’s been out with his battery almost since the beginning of the war.”“I’m not making any charge against him as yet,” answered the detective, picking up his hat, “but it would interest me very much, very much indeed, Captain Beardiston, to have five minutes’ chat with this gunner. And so I ask you to keep a sharp lookout for a man answering to his description, and if you come across him, freeze on to him hard, and give me a ring on the telephone.”“Right you are,” said the officer, “I’ll hold him for you, Mr. Marigold. But I hope your suspicions are not well-founded.”For a brief moment the detective became a human being.“And so do I, if you want to know,” he said. “One can forgive those lads who are fighting out there almost anything. I’ve got a boy in France myself!”A little sigh escaped him, and then Mr. Marigold remembered “The Yard.”“I’ll bid you good-day!” he added in his most official voice and took his leave.He walked down the steps by the Duke of York’s column and through the Horse Guards into Whitehall, seemingly busy with his own thoughts. A sprucely dressed gentleman who was engaged in the exciting and lucrative sport of war profiteering turned color and hastily swerved out towards the Park as he saw the detective crossing the Horse Guards’ Parade. He was unpleasantly reminded of making the acquaintance of Mr. Marigold over a bucketshop a few years ago with the result that he had vanished from the eye of his friends for eighteen months. He congratulated himself on thinking that Mr. Marigold had not seen him, but he would have recognized his mistake could he but have caught sight of the detective’s face. A little smile flitted across Mr. Marigold’s lips and he murmured to himself:“Our old friend is looking very prosperous just now. I wonder what he’s up to?”Mr. Marigold didn’t miss much.The detective made his way to the Chief’s office. Barbara Mackwayte, in a simple black frock with white linen collar and cuffs, was at her old place in the ante-room. A week had elapsed since the murder, and the day before, Mr. Marigold knew, the mortal remains of poor old Mackwayte had been laid to rest. He was rather surprised to see the girl back at work so soon.She did not speak to him as she showed him into the Chief, but there was a question lurking in her gray eyes.Mr. Marigold looked at her and gravely shook his head.“Nothing fresh,” he said.The Chief was unusually exuberant. Mr. Marigold found him surrounded, as was his wont, by papers, and a fearsome collection of telephone receivers. He listened in silence to Mr. Marigold’s account of his failure to trace Barling.“Marigold,” he said, when the other had finished, “we must undoubtedly lay hold of this fellow. Let’s see now... ah! I have it!”He scribbled a few lines on a writing-pad and tossed it across to the detective.“If your friend’s innocent,” he chuckled, “that’ll fetch him to a dead certainty. If he murdered Mackwayte, of course he won’t respond. Read it out and let’s hear how it sounds!”The Chief leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette while the detective read out:“If Gunner Barling, etcetera, etcetera, will communicate with Messrs. Blank and Blank, solicitors, he will hear of something to his advantage. Difficulties with the military can be arranged.”“But I say, sir,” objected Mr. Marigold, “the military authorities will hardly stand for that last, will they?”“Won’t they, by Jove” retorted the Chief grimly. “They will if I tell ’em to. No official soullessness for me; thank you! And now, Marigold, just ask Matthews to fill in Barling’s regimental number and all that and the name and address of the solicitors who do this kind of thing for us. And tell him we’ll insert the ad. daily until further notice in theMail, Chronicle, Daily News, Sketch, Mirror, Evening News...”“AndStar,” put in Mr. Marigold who had Radical tendencies.“TheStar, too, by all means. That ought to cover the extent of your pal’s newspaper reading, I fancy, eh, Marigold! Right!”He held out a hand in farewell. But Mr. Marigold stood his ground. He was rather a slow mover, and there were a lot of things he wanted to discuss with the Chief.“I was very sorry to see poor Major Okewood in the casualty list this morning, sir,” he said. “I was going to ask you...”“Ah, terrible, terrible!” said the Chief. Then he added:“Just tell Miss Mackwayte I want her as you go out, will you?”The detective was used to surprises but the Chief still bowled him out occasionally. Before he knew what he was doing, Mr. Marigold found himself in the ante-room doing as he was bid.As soon as her father’s funeral was over; Barbara had insisted on returning to work. The whole ghastly business of the murder and the inquest that followed seemed to her like a bad dream which haunted her day and night. By tacit consent no one in the office had made any further allusion, to the tragedy. She had just slipped back into her little niche, prompt, punctual, efficient as ever.“No, it’s not for the letters,” the Chief said to her as she came in with her notebook and pencil. “I’m going to give you a little trip down to the country this afternoon, Miss Mackwayte... to, Essex... the Mill House, Wentfield... you know whom it is you are to see, eh? I’m getting a little restless as we’ve had no reports since he arrived there. I had hoped, by this, to have been able to put him on the track of Nur-el-Din, but, for the moment, it looks as if we had lost the scent. But you can tell our friend all we know about the lady’s antecedents—what we had from my French colleague the other day, you know? Let him have all the particulars about this Barling case—you know about that, don’t you? Good, and, see here, try and find out from our mutual friend what he intends doing. I don’t want to rush him... don’t let him think that... but I should rather like to discover whether he has formed any plan. And now you get along. There’s a good train about three which gets you down to Wentfield in just under the hour. Take care of yourself! See you in the morning!”Pressing a bell with one hand and lifting up a telephone receiver with the other, the Chief immersed himself again in his work. He appeared to have forgotten Miss Mackwayte’s very existence.At a quarter to five that evening, Barbara unlatched the front gate of the Mill House and walked up the drive. She had come on foot from the station and the exercise had done her good. It had been a deliciously soft balmy afternoon, but with the fall of dusk a heavy mist had come creeping up from the sodden, low-lying fields and was spreading out over the neglected garden of Mr. Bellward’s villa as Barbara entered the avenue.The damp gloom of the place, however, depressed her not at all. She exulted in the change of scene and the fresh air; besides, she knew that the presence of Desmond Okewood would dispel the vague fears that had hung over her incessantly ever since her father’s murder. She had only met him twice, she told herself when this thought occurred to her, but there was something bracing and dependable about him that was just the tonic she wanted.A porter at the station, who was very intelligent as country porters go, had told her the way to the Mill House. The way was not easy to find for there were various turns to make but, with the aid of such landmarks as an occasional inn, a pond or a barn, given her by the friendly porter, Barbara reached her destination. Under the porch she pulled the handle of the bell, all dank and glistening with moisture, and heard it tinkle loudly somewhere within the house.How lonely the place was, thought Barbara with a little shiver! The fog was growing thicker every minute and now seemed suspended like a vast curtain between her and the drive. Somewhere in the distance she heard the hollow gurgling of a stream. Otherwise, there was no sound.She rang the bell again rather nervously and waited. In her bag she had a little torch-light (for she was a practical young person), and taking it out, she flashed it on the door. It presented a stolid, impenetrable oaken front. She stepped out into the fog and scanned the windows which were already almost lost to view. They were dark and forbidding.Again she tugged at the bell. Again, with a groaning of wires, responded the hollow tinkle. Then silence fell once more. Barbara began to get alarmed. What had happened to Major Okewood? She had understood that there was no question of his leaving the house until the Chief gave him the word. Where, then, was he? He was not the man to disobey an order. Rather than believe that, she would think that something untoward had befallen him. Had there been foul play here, too?A sudden panic seized her. She grasped the bell and tugged and tugged until she could tug no more. The bell jangled and pealed and clattered reverberatingly from the gloomy house, and then, with a jarring of wires, relapsed into silence. Barbara beat on the door with her hands, for there was no knocker; but all remained still within. Only the dank mist swirled in ever denser about her as she stood beneath the dripping porch.“This won’t do!” said Barbara, pulling herself together. “I mustn’t get frightened, whatever I do! Major Okewood is very well capable of defending himself. What’s happened is that the man has been called away and the servants have taken advantage of his absence to go out! Barbara, my dear, you’ll just have to foot it back to the station without your tea!”She turned her back on the door and torch in hand, plunged resolutely into the fog-bank. The mist was bewilderingly thick. Still, by going slow and always keeping the gravel under her feet, she reached the front gate and turned out on the road.Here the mist was worse than ever. She had not taken four paces before she had lost all sense of her direction. The gate, the railways, were gone. She was groping in a clinging pall of fog.Her torch was worse than useless. It only illuminated swirling swathes of mist and confused her, so she switched it out. In vain she looked about her, trying to pick up some landmark to guide her. There was no light, no tree, no house visible, nothing but the dank, ghostly mist.To some temperaments, Nature has no terrors. Barbara, to whose imagination an empty house at dusk had suggested all kinds of unimaginable fears, was not in the least frightened by the fog. She only hoped devoutly that a motor-car or a trap would not come along behind and run her down for she was obliged to keep to the road; the hard surface beneath her feet was her only guide.She smiled over her predicament as she made her way along. She frequently found herself going off the road, more than once into patches of water, with the result that in a few minutes her feet were sopping. Still she forged ahead, with many vain halts to reconnoitre while the fog, instead of lifting, seemed to thicken with every step she took.By this time she knew she was completely lost. Coming from the station there had been, she remembered, a cross-roads with a sign-board set up on a grass patch, about a quarter of a mile from the Mill House. She expected every minute to come upon this fork; again and again she swerved out to the left from her line of march groping for the sign-post with her hands but she never encountered it.Few sounds came to break in upon the oppressive silence of the mist. Once or twice Barbara heard a train roaring along in the distance and, at one of her halts, her ear caught the high rising note of a motor engine a long way off. Except for these occasional reminders of the proximity of human beings, she felt she must be on a desert island instead of less than two score miles from London.Her wrist watch showed her that she had walked for an hour when she heard a dog barking somewhere on the left of the road. Presently, she saw a blurred patch of radiance apparently on the ground in front of her. So deceptive are lights seen through a fog that she was quite taken aback suddenly to come upon a long low house with a great beam of light streaming out of the door.The house was approached by a little bridge across a broad ditch. By the bridge stood a tall, massive post upon which a sign squeaked softly as it swayed to and fro. The inn was built round three sides of a square, the left-hand side being the house itself, the centre, the kitchen, and the right-hand side a tumble-down stable and some sheds.The welcome blaze of light coming from the open door was very welcome to Barbara after her, long journey through the mist. She dragged her wet and weary feet across the little bridge and went up to the inn-door.She stood for a moment at the entrance dazzled by the effect of the light on her eyes, which were smarting with the fog. She found herself looking into a long, narrow, taproom, smelling of stale beer and tobacco fumes, and lit by oil lamps suspended in wire frames from the raftered ceiling. The windows were curtained in cheerful red rep and the place was pleasantly warmed by a stove in one corner. By the stove was a small door apparently leading into the bar, for beside it was a window through which Barbara caught a glimpse of beer-engines and rows of bottles. Opposite the doorway in which she stood was another door leading probably to the back of the house. Down the centre of the room ran a long table.The tap-room was empty when Barbara entered but as she sat down at the table, the door opposite opened, and a short, foreign-looking woman came out. She stepped dead on seeing the girl: Her face seemed familiar to Barbara.“Good evening” said the latter, “I’ve lost my way in the fog and I’m very wet. Do you think I could have my shoes and stockings dried and get some tea? I...”“A moment! I go to tell Meester Rass,” said the woman with a very marked foreign accent and in a frightened kind of voice and slipped out by the way she came.“Where have I met that woman before?” Barbara asked herself, as she crossed to tile stove to get warm. The woman’s face seemed to be connected in her mind with something unpleasant, something she wanted to forget. Then a light dawned on her. Why, it was...A shrill cry broke in upon her meditations, a harsh scream of rage. Barbara turned quickly and saw Nur-el-Din standing in the centre of the room. She was transfigured with passion. Her whole body quivered, her nostrils were dilated, her eyes flashed fire, and she pointed an accusing finger at Barbara.“Ah!misérable!” she cried in a voice strangled with rage, “ah!misérable! Te voila enfin!”A cold chill struck at Barbara’s heart. Wherever she went, the hideous spectre of the tragedy of her father seemed to follow her. And now Nur-el-Din had come to upbraid her with losing the treasure she had entrusted to her.“Nur-el-Din,” the girl faltered in a voice broken with tears.“Where is it? Where is the silver box I gave into your charge? Answer me.Mais réponds, donc, canaille!”The dancer stamped furiously with her foot and advanced menacingly on Barbara.An undersized; yellow-faced man came quickly out of the small door leading from the bar and stood an instant, a helpless witness of the scene, as men are when women quarrel.Nur-el-Din rapped out an order to him in a tongue which was unknown to Barbara. It sounded something like Russian. The man turned and locked the door of the bar, then stepped swiftly across the room and bolted the outer door.Barbara recognized the threat that the action implied and it served to steady her nerves. She shrank back no longer but drew herself up and waited calmly for the dancer to reach her.“The box you gave me,” said Barbara very quietly, “was stolen from me by the person who... who murdered my father!”Nur-el-Din burst into a peal of malicious laughter.“And you?” she cried, “you are ’ere to sell it back to me,hein, or to get your blood money from your accomplice? Which is it?”On this Barbara’s self-control abandoned her.“Oh, how dare you! How dare you!” she exclaimed, bursting into tears, “when that wretched box you made me take was the means of my losing the dearest friend I ever had!”Nur-el-Din thrust her face, distorted with passion, into Barbara’s. She spoke in rapid French, in a low, menacing voice.“Do you think this play-acting will deceive me? Do you think I don’t know the value of the treasure I was fool enough to entrust to your safe keeping?Grand Dieu!I must have been mad not to have remembered that no woman could resist the price that they were willing to pay for it! And to think what I have risked for it! Is all my sacrifice to have been in vain?”Her voice rose to a note of pleading and the tears started from her eyes. Her mood changed. She began to wheedle.“Come,ma petite, you will help me recover my little box,n’est-ce pas?You will find me generous. And I am rich, I have great savings. I can...”Barbara put up her hands and pushed the dancer away from her.“After what you have said to me to-night,” she said, “I wouldn’t give you back your box even if I had it.”She turned to the man.“Will you tell me the way to the nearest station” she went on, “and kindly open that door!”The man looked interrogatively at Nur-el-Din who spoke a few words rapidly in the language she had used before. Then she cried to Barbara:“You stay here until you tell me what you have done with the box!”Barbara had turned to the dancer when the latter spoke so that she did not notice that the man had moved stealthily towards her. Before she could struggle or cry out, a hand as big as a spade was clapped over her mouth, she was seized in an iron grip and half-dragged, half-carried out of the taproom through the small door opposite the front entrance.The door slammed behind them and Barbara found herself in darkness. She was pushed round a corner and down a flight of stairs into some kind of cellar which smelt of damp straw. Here the grip on her mouth was released for a second but before she could utter more than a muffled cry the man thrust a handkerchief into her mouth and effectually gagged her. Then he tied her hands and feet together with some narrow ropes that cut her wrists horribly. He seemed to be able to see in the dark for, though the place was black as pitch, he worked swiftly and skillfully. Barbara felt herself lifted and deposited on a bundle of straw. In a little she heard the man’s heavy foot-step on the stair, there was a crash as of a trap-door falling to, the noise of a bolt. Then Barbara fainted.
“No luck, Mr. Marigold,” said the Assistant Provost Marshal, “I’m sorry, but there it is! We’ve made every possible inquiry about this Private... er...” he glanced at the buff-colored leave pass in his hand, “... this Gunner Barling, but we can’t trace him so far. He should have gone back to France the afternoon before the day on which you found his pass. But he hasn’t rejoined his unit. He’s been posted as an absentee, and the police have been warned. I’m afraid we can’t do any more than that!”
The detective looked at the officer with mild reproach in his eyes.
“Dear, dear,” he replied, “and I made sure you’d be able to trace him with that pass!”
He clicked his tongue against his teeth and shook his head.
“Dear, dear!” he said again.
“What’s the feller been up to?” asked the A.P.M. Detectives have a horror of leading questions, and Mr. Marigold shrank visibly before the directness of the other’s inquiry. Before replying, however, he measured the officer with his calm, shrewd eye. Mr. Marigold was not above breaking his own rules of etiquette if thereby he might gain a useful ally.
“Well, Captain Beardiston,” he answered slowly, “I’ll tell you because I think that you may be able to help me a little bit. It’s part of your work to look after deserters and absentees and those sort o’ folk, isn’t it?”
The A.P.M. groaned.
“Part of my work?” he repeated, “it seems to be my whole life ever since I came back from the front.”
“If you want to know what this young fellow has been up to,” said Mr. Marigold in his even voice, “it’s murder, if I’m not mistaken!”
“Murder?” echoed the other in surprise. “Why, not the Seven Kings murder, surely?”
The detective gave a brisk nod.
“That’s it,” he replied, “I’m in charge of that case, if you follow me. I found that pass in the front garden of the Mackwayte’s house in Laleham Villas, half trodden into the earth of the flower-bed by a heavy boot, a service boot, studded with nails. There had been a lot of rain in the night, and it had washed the mosaic-tiled pathway up to the front door almost clean. When I was having a look round the garden, I picked up this pass, and then I spotted the trace of service boots, a bit faint, on the beds. You know the way the nails are set in the issue boots?”
The officer nodded:
“I ought to know that foot-print,” he said. “It’s all over the roads in northern France.”
“We made inquiries through you,” the detective resumed, “and when I found that this Gunner Barling, the owner of the pass, was missing, well, you will admit, it looked a bit suspicious.”
“Still, you know,” the A.P.M. objected, “this man appears to have the most excellent character. He’s got a clean sheet; he’s never gone absent before. And he’s been out with his battery almost since the beginning of the war.”
“I’m not making any charge against him as yet,” answered the detective, picking up his hat, “but it would interest me very much, very much indeed, Captain Beardiston, to have five minutes’ chat with this gunner. And so I ask you to keep a sharp lookout for a man answering to his description, and if you come across him, freeze on to him hard, and give me a ring on the telephone.”
“Right you are,” said the officer, “I’ll hold him for you, Mr. Marigold. But I hope your suspicions are not well-founded.”
For a brief moment the detective became a human being.
“And so do I, if you want to know,” he said. “One can forgive those lads who are fighting out there almost anything. I’ve got a boy in France myself!”
A little sigh escaped him, and then Mr. Marigold remembered “The Yard.”
“I’ll bid you good-day!” he added in his most official voice and took his leave.
He walked down the steps by the Duke of York’s column and through the Horse Guards into Whitehall, seemingly busy with his own thoughts. A sprucely dressed gentleman who was engaged in the exciting and lucrative sport of war profiteering turned color and hastily swerved out towards the Park as he saw the detective crossing the Horse Guards’ Parade. He was unpleasantly reminded of making the acquaintance of Mr. Marigold over a bucketshop a few years ago with the result that he had vanished from the eye of his friends for eighteen months. He congratulated himself on thinking that Mr. Marigold had not seen him, but he would have recognized his mistake could he but have caught sight of the detective’s face. A little smile flitted across Mr. Marigold’s lips and he murmured to himself:
“Our old friend is looking very prosperous just now. I wonder what he’s up to?”
Mr. Marigold didn’t miss much.
The detective made his way to the Chief’s office. Barbara Mackwayte, in a simple black frock with white linen collar and cuffs, was at her old place in the ante-room. A week had elapsed since the murder, and the day before, Mr. Marigold knew, the mortal remains of poor old Mackwayte had been laid to rest. He was rather surprised to see the girl back at work so soon.
She did not speak to him as she showed him into the Chief, but there was a question lurking in her gray eyes.
Mr. Marigold looked at her and gravely shook his head.
“Nothing fresh,” he said.
The Chief was unusually exuberant. Mr. Marigold found him surrounded, as was his wont, by papers, and a fearsome collection of telephone receivers. He listened in silence to Mr. Marigold’s account of his failure to trace Barling.
“Marigold,” he said, when the other had finished, “we must undoubtedly lay hold of this fellow. Let’s see now... ah! I have it!”
He scribbled a few lines on a writing-pad and tossed it across to the detective.
“If your friend’s innocent,” he chuckled, “that’ll fetch him to a dead certainty. If he murdered Mackwayte, of course he won’t respond. Read it out and let’s hear how it sounds!”
The Chief leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette while the detective read out:
“If Gunner Barling, etcetera, etcetera, will communicate with Messrs. Blank and Blank, solicitors, he will hear of something to his advantage. Difficulties with the military can be arranged.”
“But I say, sir,” objected Mr. Marigold, “the military authorities will hardly stand for that last, will they?”
“Won’t they, by Jove” retorted the Chief grimly. “They will if I tell ’em to. No official soullessness for me; thank you! And now, Marigold, just ask Matthews to fill in Barling’s regimental number and all that and the name and address of the solicitors who do this kind of thing for us. And tell him we’ll insert the ad. daily until further notice in theMail, Chronicle, Daily News, Sketch, Mirror, Evening News...”
“AndStar,” put in Mr. Marigold who had Radical tendencies.
“TheStar, too, by all means. That ought to cover the extent of your pal’s newspaper reading, I fancy, eh, Marigold! Right!”
He held out a hand in farewell. But Mr. Marigold stood his ground. He was rather a slow mover, and there were a lot of things he wanted to discuss with the Chief.
“I was very sorry to see poor Major Okewood in the casualty list this morning, sir,” he said. “I was going to ask you...”
“Ah, terrible, terrible!” said the Chief. Then he added:
“Just tell Miss Mackwayte I want her as you go out, will you?”
The detective was used to surprises but the Chief still bowled him out occasionally. Before he knew what he was doing, Mr. Marigold found himself in the ante-room doing as he was bid.
As soon as her father’s funeral was over; Barbara had insisted on returning to work. The whole ghastly business of the murder and the inquest that followed seemed to her like a bad dream which haunted her day and night. By tacit consent no one in the office had made any further allusion, to the tragedy. She had just slipped back into her little niche, prompt, punctual, efficient as ever.
“No, it’s not for the letters,” the Chief said to her as she came in with her notebook and pencil. “I’m going to give you a little trip down to the country this afternoon, Miss Mackwayte... to, Essex... the Mill House, Wentfield... you know whom it is you are to see, eh? I’m getting a little restless as we’ve had no reports since he arrived there. I had hoped, by this, to have been able to put him on the track of Nur-el-Din, but, for the moment, it looks as if we had lost the scent. But you can tell our friend all we know about the lady’s antecedents—what we had from my French colleague the other day, you know? Let him have all the particulars about this Barling case—you know about that, don’t you? Good, and, see here, try and find out from our mutual friend what he intends doing. I don’t want to rush him... don’t let him think that... but I should rather like to discover whether he has formed any plan. And now you get along. There’s a good train about three which gets you down to Wentfield in just under the hour. Take care of yourself! See you in the morning!”
Pressing a bell with one hand and lifting up a telephone receiver with the other, the Chief immersed himself again in his work. He appeared to have forgotten Miss Mackwayte’s very existence.
At a quarter to five that evening, Barbara unlatched the front gate of the Mill House and walked up the drive. She had come on foot from the station and the exercise had done her good. It had been a deliciously soft balmy afternoon, but with the fall of dusk a heavy mist had come creeping up from the sodden, low-lying fields and was spreading out over the neglected garden of Mr. Bellward’s villa as Barbara entered the avenue.
The damp gloom of the place, however, depressed her not at all. She exulted in the change of scene and the fresh air; besides, she knew that the presence of Desmond Okewood would dispel the vague fears that had hung over her incessantly ever since her father’s murder. She had only met him twice, she told herself when this thought occurred to her, but there was something bracing and dependable about him that was just the tonic she wanted.
A porter at the station, who was very intelligent as country porters go, had told her the way to the Mill House. The way was not easy to find for there were various turns to make but, with the aid of such landmarks as an occasional inn, a pond or a barn, given her by the friendly porter, Barbara reached her destination. Under the porch she pulled the handle of the bell, all dank and glistening with moisture, and heard it tinkle loudly somewhere within the house.
How lonely the place was, thought Barbara with a little shiver! The fog was growing thicker every minute and now seemed suspended like a vast curtain between her and the drive. Somewhere in the distance she heard the hollow gurgling of a stream. Otherwise, there was no sound.
She rang the bell again rather nervously and waited. In her bag she had a little torch-light (for she was a practical young person), and taking it out, she flashed it on the door. It presented a stolid, impenetrable oaken front. She stepped out into the fog and scanned the windows which were already almost lost to view. They were dark and forbidding.
Again she tugged at the bell. Again, with a groaning of wires, responded the hollow tinkle. Then silence fell once more. Barbara began to get alarmed. What had happened to Major Okewood? She had understood that there was no question of his leaving the house until the Chief gave him the word. Where, then, was he? He was not the man to disobey an order. Rather than believe that, she would think that something untoward had befallen him. Had there been foul play here, too?
A sudden panic seized her. She grasped the bell and tugged and tugged until she could tug no more. The bell jangled and pealed and clattered reverberatingly from the gloomy house, and then, with a jarring of wires, relapsed into silence. Barbara beat on the door with her hands, for there was no knocker; but all remained still within. Only the dank mist swirled in ever denser about her as she stood beneath the dripping porch.
“This won’t do!” said Barbara, pulling herself together. “I mustn’t get frightened, whatever I do! Major Okewood is very well capable of defending himself. What’s happened is that the man has been called away and the servants have taken advantage of his absence to go out! Barbara, my dear, you’ll just have to foot it back to the station without your tea!”
She turned her back on the door and torch in hand, plunged resolutely into the fog-bank. The mist was bewilderingly thick. Still, by going slow and always keeping the gravel under her feet, she reached the front gate and turned out on the road.
Here the mist was worse than ever. She had not taken four paces before she had lost all sense of her direction. The gate, the railways, were gone. She was groping in a clinging pall of fog.
Her torch was worse than useless. It only illuminated swirling swathes of mist and confused her, so she switched it out. In vain she looked about her, trying to pick up some landmark to guide her. There was no light, no tree, no house visible, nothing but the dank, ghostly mist.
To some temperaments, Nature has no terrors. Barbara, to whose imagination an empty house at dusk had suggested all kinds of unimaginable fears, was not in the least frightened by the fog. She only hoped devoutly that a motor-car or a trap would not come along behind and run her down for she was obliged to keep to the road; the hard surface beneath her feet was her only guide.
She smiled over her predicament as she made her way along. She frequently found herself going off the road, more than once into patches of water, with the result that in a few minutes her feet were sopping. Still she forged ahead, with many vain halts to reconnoitre while the fog, instead of lifting, seemed to thicken with every step she took.
By this time she knew she was completely lost. Coming from the station there had been, she remembered, a cross-roads with a sign-board set up on a grass patch, about a quarter of a mile from the Mill House. She expected every minute to come upon this fork; again and again she swerved out to the left from her line of march groping for the sign-post with her hands but she never encountered it.
Few sounds came to break in upon the oppressive silence of the mist. Once or twice Barbara heard a train roaring along in the distance and, at one of her halts, her ear caught the high rising note of a motor engine a long way off. Except for these occasional reminders of the proximity of human beings, she felt she must be on a desert island instead of less than two score miles from London.
Her wrist watch showed her that she had walked for an hour when she heard a dog barking somewhere on the left of the road. Presently, she saw a blurred patch of radiance apparently on the ground in front of her. So deceptive are lights seen through a fog that she was quite taken aback suddenly to come upon a long low house with a great beam of light streaming out of the door.
The house was approached by a little bridge across a broad ditch. By the bridge stood a tall, massive post upon which a sign squeaked softly as it swayed to and fro. The inn was built round three sides of a square, the left-hand side being the house itself, the centre, the kitchen, and the right-hand side a tumble-down stable and some sheds.
The welcome blaze of light coming from the open door was very welcome to Barbara after her, long journey through the mist. She dragged her wet and weary feet across the little bridge and went up to the inn-door.
She stood for a moment at the entrance dazzled by the effect of the light on her eyes, which were smarting with the fog. She found herself looking into a long, narrow, taproom, smelling of stale beer and tobacco fumes, and lit by oil lamps suspended in wire frames from the raftered ceiling. The windows were curtained in cheerful red rep and the place was pleasantly warmed by a stove in one corner. By the stove was a small door apparently leading into the bar, for beside it was a window through which Barbara caught a glimpse of beer-engines and rows of bottles. Opposite the doorway in which she stood was another door leading probably to the back of the house. Down the centre of the room ran a long table.
The tap-room was empty when Barbara entered but as she sat down at the table, the door opposite opened, and a short, foreign-looking woman came out. She stepped dead on seeing the girl: Her face seemed familiar to Barbara.
“Good evening” said the latter, “I’ve lost my way in the fog and I’m very wet. Do you think I could have my shoes and stockings dried and get some tea? I...”
“A moment! I go to tell Meester Rass,” said the woman with a very marked foreign accent and in a frightened kind of voice and slipped out by the way she came.
“Where have I met that woman before?” Barbara asked herself, as she crossed to tile stove to get warm. The woman’s face seemed to be connected in her mind with something unpleasant, something she wanted to forget. Then a light dawned on her. Why, it was...
A shrill cry broke in upon her meditations, a harsh scream of rage. Barbara turned quickly and saw Nur-el-Din standing in the centre of the room. She was transfigured with passion. Her whole body quivered, her nostrils were dilated, her eyes flashed fire, and she pointed an accusing finger at Barbara.
“Ah!misérable!” she cried in a voice strangled with rage, “ah!misérable! Te voila enfin!”
A cold chill struck at Barbara’s heart. Wherever she went, the hideous spectre of the tragedy of her father seemed to follow her. And now Nur-el-Din had come to upbraid her with losing the treasure she had entrusted to her.
“Nur-el-Din,” the girl faltered in a voice broken with tears.
“Where is it? Where is the silver box I gave into your charge? Answer me.Mais réponds, donc, canaille!”
The dancer stamped furiously with her foot and advanced menacingly on Barbara.
An undersized; yellow-faced man came quickly out of the small door leading from the bar and stood an instant, a helpless witness of the scene, as men are when women quarrel.
Nur-el-Din rapped out an order to him in a tongue which was unknown to Barbara. It sounded something like Russian. The man turned and locked the door of the bar, then stepped swiftly across the room and bolted the outer door.
Barbara recognized the threat that the action implied and it served to steady her nerves. She shrank back no longer but drew herself up and waited calmly for the dancer to reach her.
“The box you gave me,” said Barbara very quietly, “was stolen from me by the person who... who murdered my father!”
Nur-el-Din burst into a peal of malicious laughter.
“And you?” she cried, “you are ’ere to sell it back to me,hein, or to get your blood money from your accomplice? Which is it?”
On this Barbara’s self-control abandoned her.
“Oh, how dare you! How dare you!” she exclaimed, bursting into tears, “when that wretched box you made me take was the means of my losing the dearest friend I ever had!”
Nur-el-Din thrust her face, distorted with passion, into Barbara’s. She spoke in rapid French, in a low, menacing voice.
“Do you think this play-acting will deceive me? Do you think I don’t know the value of the treasure I was fool enough to entrust to your safe keeping?Grand Dieu!I must have been mad not to have remembered that no woman could resist the price that they were willing to pay for it! And to think what I have risked for it! Is all my sacrifice to have been in vain?”
Her voice rose to a note of pleading and the tears started from her eyes. Her mood changed. She began to wheedle.
“Come,ma petite, you will help me recover my little box,n’est-ce pas?You will find me generous. And I am rich, I have great savings. I can...”
Barbara put up her hands and pushed the dancer away from her.
“After what you have said to me to-night,” she said, “I wouldn’t give you back your box even if I had it.”
She turned to the man.
“Will you tell me the way to the nearest station” she went on, “and kindly open that door!”
The man looked interrogatively at Nur-el-Din who spoke a few words rapidly in the language she had used before. Then she cried to Barbara:
“You stay here until you tell me what you have done with the box!”
Barbara had turned to the dancer when the latter spoke so that she did not notice that the man had moved stealthily towards her. Before she could struggle or cry out, a hand as big as a spade was clapped over her mouth, she was seized in an iron grip and half-dragged, half-carried out of the taproom through the small door opposite the front entrance.
The door slammed behind them and Barbara found herself in darkness. She was pushed round a corner and down a flight of stairs into some kind of cellar which smelt of damp straw. Here the grip on her mouth was released for a second but before she could utter more than a muffled cry the man thrust a handkerchief into her mouth and effectually gagged her. Then he tied her hands and feet together with some narrow ropes that cut her wrists horribly. He seemed to be able to see in the dark for, though the place was black as pitch, he worked swiftly and skillfully. Barbara felt herself lifted and deposited on a bundle of straw. In a little she heard the man’s heavy foot-step on the stair, there was a crash as of a trap-door falling to, the noise of a bolt. Then Barbara fainted.