"But what is there to be got?" Jim asked impatiently.
"Something perhaps. Perhaps nothing," the detective returned with a shrug of the shoulders. "I have a second mission in Dijon, as I told you in Paris."
"The anonymous letters?"
"Yes. You were present yesterday when Mademoiselle Harlowe told me how she learned that I was summoned from Paris upon this case. It was not, after all, any of my colleagues here who spread the news. It is even now unknown that I am here. No, it was the writer of the letters. And in so difficult a matter I can afford to neglect no clue. Did Waberski know that I was going to be sent for? Did he hear that at the Prefecture when he lodged his charge on the Saturday or from the examining magistrate on the same day? And if he did, to whom did he talk between the time when he saw the magistrate and the time when letters must be posted if they are to be delivered on the Sunday morning? These are questions I must have the answer to, and if we at once administer the knock-out with your letters, I shall not get them. I must lead him on with friendliness. You see that."
Jim very reluctantly did. He had longed to see Hanaud dealing with Waberski in the most outrageous of his moods, pouncing and tearing and trampling with the gibes of a schoolboy and the improprieties of the gutter. Hanaud indeed had promised him as much. But he found him now all for restraint and sobriety and more concerned apparently with the authorship of the anonymous letters than with the righting of Betty Harlowe. Jim felt that he had been defrauded.
"But I am to meet this man," he said. "That must not be forgotten."
"And it shall not be," Hanaud assured him. He led him over to the door in the inner wall close to the observation window and opened it.
"See! If you will please to wait in here," and as the disappointment deepened on Jim's face, he added, "Oh, I do not ask you to shut the door. No. Bring up a chair to it—so! And keep the door ajar so! Then you will see and hear and yet not be seen. You are content? Not very. You would prefer to be on the stage the whole time like an actor. Yes, we all do. But, at all events, you do not throw up your part," and with a friendly grin he turned back to the table.
A shuffling step which merged into the next step with a curiously slovenly sound rose from the courtyard.
"It was time we made our little arrangements," said Hanaud in an undertone. "For here comes our hero from the Steppes."
Jim popped his head through the doorway.
"Monsieur Hanaud!" he whispered excitedly. "Monsieur Hanaud! It cannot be wise to leave those windows open on the courtyard. For if we can hear a footstep so loudly in this room, anything said in this room will be easily overheard in the court."
"But how true that is!" Hanaud replied in the same voice and struck his forehead with his fist in anger at his folly. "But what are we to do? The day is so hot. This room will be an oven. The ladies and Waberski will all faint. Besides, I have an officer in plain clothes already stationed in the court to see that it is kept empty. Yes, we will risk it."
Jim drew back.
"That man doesn't welcome advice from any one," he said indignantly, but he said it only to himself; and almost before he had finished, the bell rang. A few seconds afterwards Gaston entered.
"Monsieur Boris," he said.
"Yes," said Hanaud with a nod. "And will you tell the ladies that we are ready?"
Boris Waberski, a long, round-shouldered man with bent knees and clumsy feet, dressed in black and holding a soft black felt hat in his hand, shambled quickly into the room and stopped dead at the sight of Hanaud. Hanaud bowed and Waberski returned the bow; and then the two men stood looking at one another—Hanaud all geniality and smiles, Waberski a rather grotesque figure of uneasiness like one of those many grim caricatures carved by the imagination of the Middle Ages on the columns of the churches of Dijon. He blinked in perplexity at the detective and with his long, tobacco-stained fingers tortured his grey moustache.
"Will you be seated?" said Hanaud politely. "I think that the ladies will not keep us waiting."
He pointed towards a chair in front of the writing-table but on his left hand and opposite to the door.
"I don't understand," said Waberski doubtfully. "I received a message. I understood that the Examining Magistrate had sent for me."
"I am his agent," said Hanaud. "I am——" and he stopped. "Yes?"
Boris Waberski stared.
"I said nothing."
"I beg your pardon. I am—Hanaud."
He shot the name out quickly, but he was answered by no start, nor by any sign of recognition.
"Hanaud?" Waberski shook his head. "That no doubt should be sufficient to enlighten me," he said with a smile, "but it is better to be frank—it doesn't."
"Hanaud of the Sûrété of Paris."
And upon Waberski's face there came slowly a look of utter consternation.
"Oh!" he said, and again "Oh!" with a lamentable look towards the door as if he was in two minds whether to make a bolt of it. Hanaud pointed again to the chair, and Waberski murmured, "Yes—to be sure," and made a little run to it and sank down.
Jim Frobisher, watching from his secret place, was certain of one thing. Boris Waberski had not written the anonymous letter to Betty nor had he contributed the information about Hanaud to the writer. He might well have been thought to have been acting ignorance of Hanaud's name, up to the moment when Hanaud explained who Hanaud was. But no longer. His consternation then was too genuine.
"You will understand, of course, that an accusation so serious as the one you have brought against Mademoiselle Harlowe demands the closest inquiry," Hanaud continued without any trace of irony, "and the Examining Magistrate in charge of the case honoured us in Paris with a request for help."
"Yes, it is very difficult," replied Boris Waberski, twisting about as if he was a martyr on red-hot plates.
But the difficulty was Waberski's, as Jim, with that distressed man in full view, was now able to appreciate. Waberski had rushed to the Prefecture when no answer came from Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt to his letter of threats, and had brought his charge in a spirit of disappointment and rancour, with a hope no doubt that some offer of cash would be made to him and that he could withdraw it. Now he found the trained detective service of France upon his heels, asking for his proofs and evidence. This was more than he had bargained for.
"I thought," Hanaud continued easily, "that a little informal conversation between you and me and the two young ladies, without shorthand writers or secretaries, might be helpful."
"Yes, indeed," said Waberski hopefully.
"As a preliminary of course," Hanaud added dryly, "a preliminary to the more serious and now inevitable procedure."
Waberski's gleam of hopefulness was extinguished.
"To be sure," he murmured, plucking at his lean throat nervously. "Cases must proceed."
"That is what they are there for," said Hanaud sententiously; and the door of the library was pushed open. Betty came into the room with Ann Upcott immediately behind her.
"You sent for me," she began to Hanaud, and then she saw Boris Waberski. Her little head went up with a jerk, her eyes smouldered. "Monsieur Boris," she said, and again she spoke to Hanaud. "Come to take possession, I suppose?" Then she looked round the room for Jim Frobisher, and exclaimed in a sudden dismay:
"But I understood that——" and Hanaud was just in time to stop her from mentioning any name.
"All in good time, Mademoiselle," he said quickly. "Let us take things in their order."
Betty took her old place in the window-seat. Ann Upcott shut the door and sat down in a chair a little apart from the others. Hanaud folded up his newspaper and laid it aside. On the big blotting-pad which was now revealed lay one of those green files which Jim Frobisher had noticed in the office of the Sûrété. Hanaud opened it and took up the top paper. He turned briskly to Waberski.
"Monsieur, you state that on the night of the 27th of April, this girl here, Betty Harlowe, did wilfully give to her adoptive mother and benefactress, Jeanne-Marie Harlowe, an overdose of a narcotic by which her death was brought about."
"Yes," said Waberski with an air of boldness, "I declare that."
"You do not specify the narcotic?"
"It was probably morphine, but I cannot be sure."
"And administered, according to you, if this summary which I hold here is correct, in the glass of lemonade which Madame Harlowe had always at her bedside."
"Yes."
Hanaud laid the sheet of foolscap down again.
"You do not charge the nurse, Jeanne Baudin, with complicity in this crime?" he asked.
"Oh, no!" Waberski exclaimed with a sort of horror, with his eyes open wide and his eyebrows running up his forehead towards his hedge of wiry hair. "I have not a suspicion of Jeanne Baudin. I pray you, Monsieur Hanaud, to be clear upon that point. There must be no injustice! No! Oh, it is well that I came here to-day! Jeanne Baudin! Listen! I would engage her to nurse me to-morrow, were my health to fail."
"One cannot say more than that," replied Hanaud with a grave sympathy. "I only asked you the question because undoubtedly Jeanne Baudin was in Madame's bedroom when Mademoiselle entered it to wish Madame good night and show off her new dancing-frock."
"Yes, I understand," said Waberski. He was growing more and more confident, so suave and friendly was this Monsieur Hanaud of the Sûrété. "But the fatal drug was slipped into that glass without a doubt when Jeanne Baudin was not looking. I do not accuse her. No! It is that hard one," and his voice began to shake and his mouth to work, "who slipped it in and then hurried off to dance till morning, whilst her victim died. It is terrible that! Yes, Monsieur Hanaud, it is terrible. My poor sister!"
"Sister-in-law."
The correction came with an acid calm from an armchair near the door in which Ann Upcott was reclining.
"Sister to me!" replied Waberski mournfully and he turned to Hanaud. "Monsieur, I shall never cease to reproach myself. I was away fishing in the forest. If I had stayed at home! Think of it! I ask you to——" and his voice broke.
"Yes, but you did come back, Monsieur Waberski," Hanaud said, "and this is where I am perplexed. You loved your sister. That is clear, since you cannot even think of her without tears."
"Yes, yes," Waberski shaded his eyes with his hand.
"Then why did you, loving her so dearly, wait for so long before you took any action to avenge her death? There will be some good reason not a doubt, but I have not got it." Hanaud continued, spreading out his hands. "Listen to the dates. Your dear sister dies on the night of the 27th of April. You return home on the 28th; and you do nothing, you bring no charge, you sit all quiet. She is buried on the 30th, and after that you still do nothing, you sit all quiet. It is not until one week after that you launch your accusation against Mademoiselle. Why? I beg you, Monsieur Waberski, not to look at me between the fingers, for the answer is not written on my face, and to explain this difficulty to me."
The request was made in the same pleasant, friendly voice which Hanaud had used so far and without any change of intonation. But Waberski snatched his hand away from his forehead and sat up with a flush on his face.
"I answer you at once," he exclaimed. "From the first I knew it here," and he thumped his heart with his fist, "that murder had been committed. But as yet I did not know it here," and he patted his forehead, "in my head. So I think and I think and I think. I see reasons and motives. They build themselves up. A young girl of beauty and style, but of a strange and secret character, thirsting in her heart for colour and laughter and enjoyment and the power which her beauty offers her if she will but grasp it, and yet while thirsting, very able to conceal all sign of thirst. That is the picture I give you of that hard one, Betty Harlowe."
For the first time since the interview had commenced, Betty herself showed some interest in it. Up till now she had sat without a movement, a figure of disdain in an ice-house of pride. Now she flashed into life. She leaned forward, her elbow on her crossed knee, her chin propped in her hand, her eyes on Waberski, and a smile of amusement at this analysis of herself giving life to her face. Jim Frobisher, on the other hand, behind his door felt that he was listening to blasphemies. Why did Hanaud endure it? There was information, he had said, which he wanted to get from Boris Waberski. The point on which he wanted information was settled long ago, at the very beginning of this informal session. It was as clear as daylight that Waberski had nothing to do with Betty's anonymous letter. Why, then, should Hanaud give this mountebank of a fellow a free opportunity to slander Betty Harlowe? Why should he question and question as if there were solid weight in the accusation? Why, in a word, didn't he fling open this door, allow Frobisher to produce the blackmailing letters to Mr. Haslitt, and then stand aside while Boris Waberski was put into that condition in which he would call upon the services of Jeanne Baudin? Jim indeed was furiously annoyed with Monsieur Hanaud. He explained to himself that he was disappointed.
Meanwhile, Boris Waberski, after a little nervous check when Betty had leaned forward, continued his description.
"For such a one Dijon would be tiresome. It is true there was each year a month or so at Monte Carlo, just enough to give one a hint of what might be, like a cigarette to a man who wants to smoke. And then back to Dijon! Ah, Monsieur, not the Dijon of the Dukes of Burgundy, not even the Dijon of the Parliament of the States, but the Dijon of to-day, an ordinary, dull, provincial town of France which keeps nothing of its former gaieties and glory but some old rare buildings and a little spirit of mockery. Imagine, then, Monsieur, this hard one with a fortune and freedom within her grasp if only she has the boldness on some night when Monsieur Boris is out of the way to seize them! Nor is that all. For there is an invalid in the house to whom attentions are owed—yes, and must be given." Waberski, in a flight of excitement checked himself and half closed his eyes, with a little cunning nod. "For the invalid was not so easy. No, even that dear one had her failings. Oh, yes, and we will not forget them when the moment comes for the extenuating pleas. No, indeed," and he flung his arm out nobly. "I myself will be the first to urge them to the judge of the Assizes when the verdict is given."
Betty Harlowe leaned back once more indifferent. From an arm-chair near the door, a little gurgle of laughter broke from the lips of Ann Upcott. Even Hanaud smiled.
"Yes, yes," he said; "but we have not got quite as far as the Court of Assizes, Monsieur Waberski. We are still at the point where you know it in your heart but not in your head."
"That is so," Waberski returned briskly. "On the seventh of May, a Saturday, I bring my accusation to the Prefecture. Why? For, on the morning of that day I am certain. I know it at last here too," and up went his hand to his forehead, and he hitched himself forward on to the edge of his chair.
"I am in the street of Gambetta, one of the small popular new streets, a street with some little shops and a reputation not of the best. At ten o'clock I am passing quickly through that street when from a little shop a few yards in front of me out pops that hard one, my niece."
Suddenly the whole character of that session had changed. Jim Frobisher, though he sat apart from it, felt the new tension, and was aware of the new expectancy. A moment ago Boris Waberski as he sat talking and gesticulating had been a thing for ridicule, almost for outright laughter. Now, though his voice still jumped hysterically from high notes to low notes and his body jerked like a marionette's, he held the eyes of every one—every one, that is, except Betty Harlowe. He was no longer vague. He was speaking of a definite hour and a place and of a definite incident which happened there.
"Yes, in that bad little street I see her. I do not believe my senses. I step into a little narrow alley and I peep round the corner. I peep with my eyes," and Waberski pointed to them with two of his fingers as though there was something peculiarly convincing in the fact that he peeped with them and not with his elbows, "and I am sure. Then I wait until she is out of sight, and I creep forward to see what shop it is she visited in that little street of squalor. Once more I do not believe my eyes. For over the door I read the name, Jean Cladel, Herbalist."
He pronounced the name in a voice of triumph and sat back in his chair, nodding his head violently at intervals of a second. There was not a sound in the room until Hanaud's voice broke the silence.
"I don't understand," he said softly. "Who is this Jean Cladel, and why should a young lady not visit his shop?"
"I beg your pardon," Waberski replied. "You are not of Dijon. No! or you would not have asked that question. Jean Cladel has no better name than the street he very suitably lives in. Ask a Dijonnais about Jean Cladel, and you will see how he becomes silent and shrugs his shoulders as if here was a topic on which it was becoming to be silent. Better still, Monsieur Hanaud, ask at the Prefecture. Jean Cladel! Twice he has been tried for selling prohibited drugs."
Hanaud was stung at last out of his calm.
"What is that?" he cried in a sharp voice.
"Yes, twice, Monsieur. Each time he has scraped through, that is true. He has powerful friends, and witnesses have been spirited away. But he is known! Jean Cladel! Yes, Jean Cladel!"
"Jean Cladel, Herbalist of the street Gambetta," Hanaud repeated slowly. "But"—and he leaned back in an easier attitude—"you will see my difficulty, Monsieur Waberski. Ten o'clock is a public hour. It is not a likely hour for any one to choose for so imprudent a visit, even if that one were stupid."
"Yes, and so I reasoned too," Waberski interposed quickly. "As I told you, I could not believe my eyes. But I made sure—oh, there was no doubt, Monsieur Hanaud. And I thought to myself this. Crimes are discovered because criminals, even the acutest, do sooner or later some foolish thing. Isn't it so? Sometimes they are too careful; they make their proofs too perfect for an imperfect world. Sometimes they are too careless or are driven by necessity to a rash thing. But somehow a mistake is made and justice wins the game."
Hanaud smiled.
"Aha! a student of crime, Monsieur!" He turned to Betty, and it struck upon Jim Frobisher with a curious discomfort that this was the first time Hanaud had looked directly at Betty since the interview had begun.
"And what do you say to this story, Mademoiselle?"
"It is a lie," she answered quietly.
"You did not visit Jean Cladel in the street of Gambetta at ten o'clock on the morning of the 7th of May?"
"I did not, Monsieur."
Waberski smiled and twisted his moustache.
"Of course! Of course! We could not expect Mademoiselle to admit it. One fights for one's skin, eh?"
"But, after all," Hanaud interrupted, with enough savagery in his voice to check all Waberski's complacency, "let us not forget that on the 7th of May, Madame Harlowe had been dead for ten days. Why should Mademoiselle still be going to the shop of Jean Cladel?"
"To pay," said Waberski. "Oh, no doubt Jean Cladel's wares are expensive and have to be paid for more than once, Monsieur."
"By wares you mean poison," said Hanaud. "Let us be explicit."
"Yes."
"Poison which was used to murder Madame Harlowe."
"I say so," Waberski declared, folding his arms across his breast.
"Very well," said Hanaud. He took from his green file a second paper written over in a fine hand and emphasised by an official stamp. "Then what will you say, Monsieur, if I tell you that the body of Madame Harlowe has been exhumed?" Hanaud continued, and Waberski's face lost what little colour it had. He stared at Hanaud, his jaw working up and down nervously, and he did not say a word.
"And what will you say if I tell you," Hanaud continued, "that no more morphia was discovered in it than one sleeping-dose would explain and no trace at all of any other poison?"
In a complete silence Waberski took his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. The game was up. He had hoped to make his terms, but his bluff was called. He had not one atom of faith in his own accusation. There was but one course for him to take, and that was to withdraw his charge and plead that his affection for his sister-in-law had led him into a gross mistake. But Boris Waberski was never the man for that. He had that extra share of cunning which shipwrecks always the minor rogue. He was unwise enough to imagine that Hanaud might be bluffing too.
He drew his chair a little nearer to the table. He tittered and nodded at Hanaud confidentially.
"You say 'if I tell you,'" he said smoothly. "Yes, but you do not tell me, Monsieur Hanaud—no, not at all. On the contrary, what you say is this: 'My friend Waberski, here is a difficult matter which, if exposed, means a great scandal, and of which the issue is doubtful. There is no good in stirring the mud.'"
"Oh, I say that?" Hanaud asked, smiling pleasantly.
Waberski felt sure of his ground now.
"Yes, and more than that. You say, 'You have been badly treated, my friend Waberski, and if you will now have a little talk with that hard one your niece——'"
And his chair slid back against the bookcase and he sat gaping stupidly like a man who has been shot.
Hanaud had sprung to his feet, he stood towering above the table, his face suddenly dark with passion.
"Oh, I say all that, do I?" he thundered. "I came all the way from Paris to Dijon to preside over a little bargain in a murder case! I—Hanaud! Oh! ho! ho! I'll teach you a lesson for that! Read this!" and bending forward he thrust out the paper with the official seal. "It is the report of the analysts. Take it, I tell you, and read it!"
Waberski reached out a trembling arm, afraid to venture nearer. Even when he had the paper in his hands, they shook so he could not read it. But since he had never believed in his charge that did not matter.
"Yes," he muttered, "no doubt I have made a mistake."
Hanaud caught the word up.
"Mistake! Ah, there's a fine word! I'll show you what sort of a mistake you have made. Draw up your chair to this table in front of me! So! And take a pen—so! And a sheet of paper—so! and now you write for me a letter."
"Yes, yes," Waberski agreed. All the bravado had gone from his bearing, all the insinuating slyness. He was in a quiver from head to foot. "I will write that I am sorry."
"That is not necessary," roared Hanaud. "I will see to it that you are sorry. No! You write for me what I dictate to you and in English. You are ready? Yes? Then you begin. 'Dear Sirs.' You have that?"
"Yes, yes," said Waberski, scribbling hurriedly. His head was in a whirl. He flinched as he wrote under the towering bulk of the detective. He had as yet no comprehension of the goal to which he was being led.
"Good! 'Dear Sirs,'" Hanaud repeated. "But we want a date for that letter. April 30th, eh? That will do. The day Madame Harlowe's will was read and you found you were left no money. April 30th—put it in. So! Now we go on. 'Dear Sirs, Send me at once one thousand pounds by the recommended post, or I make some awkwardnesses——'"
Waberski dropped his pen and sprang back out of his chair.
"I don't understand—I can't write that.... There is an error—I never meant..." he stammered, his hands raised as if to ward off an attack.
"Ah, you never meant the blackmail!" Hanaud cried savagely. "Ah! Ha! Ha! It is good for you that I now know that! For when, as you put it so delicately to Mademoiselle, the moment comes for the extenuating pleas, I can rise up in the Court and urge it. Yes! I will say: 'Mr. the President, though he did the blackmail, poor fellow, he never meant it. So please to give him five years more,'" and with that Hanaud swept across the room like a tornado and flung open the door behind which Frobisher was waiting.
"Come!" he said, and he led Jim into the room. "You produce the two letters he wrote to your firm, Monsieur Frobisher. Good!"
But it was not necessary to produce them. Boris Waberski had dropped into a chair and burst into tears. There was a little movement of discomfort made by every one in that room except Hanaud; and even his anger dropped. He looked at Waberski in silence.
"You make us all ashamed. You can go back to your hotel," he said shortly. "But you will not leave Dijon, Monsieur Waberski, until it is decided what steps we shall take with you."
Waberski rose to his feet and stumbled blindly to the door.
"I make my apologies," he stammered. "It is all a mistake. I am very poor ... I meant no harm," and without looking at any one he got himself out of the room.
"That type! He at all events cannot any more think that Dijon is dull," said Hanaud, and once more he adventured on the dangerous seas of the English language. "Do you know what my friend Mister Ricardo would have said? No? I tell you. He would have said, 'That fellow! My God! What a sauce!'"
Those left in the room, Betty, Ann Upcott, and Jim Frobisher, were in a mood to welcome any excuse for laughter. The interdict upon the house was raised, the charge against Betty proved of no account, the whole bad affair was at an end. Or so it seemed. But Hanaud went quickly to the door and closed it, and when he turned back there was no laughter at all upon his face.
"Now that that man has gone," he said gravely, "I have something to tell you three which is very serious. I believe that, though Waberski does not know it, Madame Harlowe was murdered by poison in this house on the night of April the twenty-seventh."
The statement was received in a dreadful silence. Jim Frobisher stood like a man whom some calamity has stunned. Betty leaned forward in her seat with a face of horror and incredulity; and then from the arm-chair by the door where Ann Upcott was sitting there burst a loud, wild cry.
"There was some one in the house that night," she cried.
Hanaud swung round to her, his eyes blazing.
"And it is you who tell me that, Mademoiselle?" he asked in a curious, steady voice.
"Yes. It's the truth," she cried with a sort of relief in her voice, that at last a secret was out which had grown past endurance. "I am sure now. There was a stranger in the house." And though her face was white as paper, her eyes met Hanaud's without fear.
The two startling declarations, one treading upon the heels of the other, set Jim Frobisher's brain whirling. Consternation and bewilderment were all jumbled together. He had no time to ask "how," for he was already asking "What next?" His first clear thought was for Betty, and as he looked at her, a sharp anger against both Hanaud and Ann Upcott seized and shook him. Why hadn't they both spoken before? Why must they speak now? Why couldn't they leave well alone?
For Betty had fallen back in the window-seat, her hands idle at her sides and her face utterly weary and distressed. Jim thought of some stricken patient who wakes in the morning to believe for a few moments that the malady was a bad dream; and then comes the stab and the cloud of pain settles down for another day. A moment ago Betty's ordeal seemed over. Now it was beginning a new phase.
"I am sorry," he said to her.
The report of the analysts was lying on the writing-table just beneath his eyes. He took it up idly. It was a trick, of course, with its seals and its signatures, a trick of Hanaud's to force Waberski to a retraction. He glanced at it, and with an exclamation began carefully to read it through from the beginning to the end. When he had finished, he raised his head and stared at Hanaud.
"But this report is genuine," he cried. "Here are the details of the tests applied and the result. There was no trace discovered of any poison."
"No trace at all," Hanaud replied. He was not in the least disturbed by the question.
"Then I don't understand why you bring the accusation or whom you accuse," Frobisher exclaimed.
"I have accused no one," said Hanaud steadily. "Let us be clear about that! As to your other question—look!"
He took Frobisher by the elbow and led him to that bookshelf by the window before which they had stood together yesterday.
"There was an empty space here yesterday. You yourself drew my attention to it. You see that the space is filled to-day."
"Yes," said Jim.
Hanaud took down the volume which occupied the space. It was of quarto size, fairly thick and bound in a paper cover.
"Look at that," he said; and Jim Frobisher as he took it noticed with a queer little start that although Hanaud's eyes were on his face they were blank of all expression. They did not see him. Hanaud's senses were concentrated on the two girls at neither of whom he so much as glanced. He was alert to them, to any movement they might make of surprise or terror. Jim threw up his head in a sudden revolt. He was being used for another trick, as some conjurer may use a fool of a fellow whom he has persuaded out of his audience on to his platform. Jim looked at the cover of the book, and cried with enough violence to recall Hanaud's attention:
"I see nothing here to the point. It is a treatise printed by some learned society in Edinburgh."
"It is. And if you will look again, you will see that it was written by a Professor of Medicine in that University. And if you will look a third time you will see from a small inscription in ink that the copy was presented with the Professor's compliments to Mr. Simon Harlowe."
Hanaud, whilst he was speaking, went to the second of the two windows which looked upon the court and putting his head out, spoke for a little while in a low voice.
"We shall not need our sentry here any more," he said as he turned back into the room. "I have sent him upon an errand."
He went back to Jim Frobisher, who was turning over a page of the treatise here and there and was never a scrap the wiser.
"Well?" he asked.
"Strophanthus Hispidus," Jim read aloud the title of the treatise. "I can't make head or tail of it."
"Let me try!" said Hanaud, and he took the book out of Frobisher's hands. "I will show you all how I spent the half-hour whilst I was waiting for you this morning."
He sat down at the writing-table, placed the treatise on the blotting-pad in front of him and laid it open at a coloured plate.
"This is the fruit of the plant Strophanthus Hispidus, when it is ripening," he said.
The plate showed two long, tapering follicles joined together at their stems and then separating like a pair of compasses set at an acute angle. The backs of these follicles were rounded, dark in colour and speckled; the inner surfaces, however, were flat, and the curious feature of them was that, from longitudinal crevices, a number of silky white feathers protruded.
"Each of these feathers," Hanaud continued, and he looked up to find that Ann Upcott had drawn close to the table and that Betty Harlowe herself was leaning forward with a look of curiosity upon her face—"each of these feathers is attached by a fine stalk to an elliptical pod, which is the seed, and when the fruit is quite ripe and these follicles have opened so that they make a straight line, the feathers are released and the wind spreads the seed. It is wonderful, eh? See!"
Hanaud turned the pages until he came to another plate. Here a feather was represented in complete detachment from the follicle. It was outspread like a fan and was extraordinarily pretty and delicate in its texture; and from it by a stem as fine as a hair the seed hung like a jewel.
"What would you say of it, Mademoiselle?" Hanaud asked, looking up into the face of Ann Upcott with a smile. "An ornament wrought for a fine lady, by a dainty artist, eh?" and he turned the book round so that she on the opposite side of the table might the better admire the engraving.
Betty Harlowe, it seemed, was now mastered by her curiosity. Jim Frobisher, gazing down over Hanaud's shoulder at the plate and wondering uneasily whither he was being led, saw a shadow fall across the book. And there was Betty, standing by the side of her friend with the palms of her hands upon the edge of the table and her face bent over the book.
"One could wish it was an ornament, this seed of the Strophanthus Hispidus," Hanaud continued with a shake of the head. "But, alas! it is not so harmless."
He turned the book around again to himself and once more turned the pages. The smile had disappeared altogether from his face. He stopped at a third plate; and this third plate showed a row of crudely fashioned arrows with barbed heads.
Hanaud glanced up over his shoulder at Jim.
"Do you understand now the importance of this book, Monsieur Frobisher?" he asked. "No? The seeds of this plant make the famous arrow-poison of Africa. The deadliest of all the poisons since there is no antidote for it." His voice grew sombre. "The wickedest of all the poisons, since it leaves no trace."
Jim Frobisher was startled. "Is that true?" he cried.
"Yes," said Hanaud; and Betty suddenly leaned forward and pointed to the bottom of the plate.
"There is a mark there below the hilt of that arrow," she said curiously. "Yes, and a tiny note in ink."
For a moment a little gift of vision was vouchsafed to Jim Frobisher, born, no doubt, of his perplexities and trouble. A curtain was rung up in his brain. He saw no more than what was before him—the pretty group about the table in the gold of the May morning, but it was all made grim and terrible and the gold had withered to a light that was grey and deathly and cold as the grave. There were the two girls in the grace of their beauty and their youth, daintily tended, fastidiously dressed, bending their shining curls over that plate of the poison arrows like pupils at a lecture. And the man delivering the lecture, so close to them, with speech so gentle, was implacably on the trail of murder, and maybe even now looked upon one of these two girls as his quarry; was even now perhaps planning to set her in the dock of an Assize Court and send her out afterwards, carried screaming and sobbing with terror in the first grey of the morning to the hideous red engine erected during the night before the prison gates. Jim saw Hanaud the genial and friendly, as in some flawed mirror, twisted into a sinister and terrifying figure. How could he sit so close with them at the table, talk to them, point them out this and that diagram in the plates, he being human and knowing what he purposed. Jim broke in upon the lecture with a cry of exasperation.
"But this isn't a poison! This is a book about a poison. The book can't kill!"
At once Hanaud replied to him:
"Can't it?" he cried sharply. "Listen to what Mademoiselle said a minute ago. Below the hilt of this arrow marked 'Figure F,' the Professor has written a tiny note."
This particular arrow was a little different from the others in the shape of its shaft. Just below the triangular iron head the shaft expanded. It was as though the head had been fitted into a bulb; as one sees sometimes wooden penholders fine enough and tapering at the upper end, and quite thick just above the nib.
"'See page 37,'" said Hanaud, reading the Professor's note, and he turned back the pages.
"Page 37. Here we are!"
Hanaud ran a finger half-way down the page and stopped at a word in capitals.
"Figure F."
Hanaud hitched his chair a little closer to the table; Ann Upcott moved round the end of the table that she might see the better; even Jim Frobisher found himself stooping above Hanaud's shoulder. They were all conscious of a queer tension; they were expectant like explorers on the brink of a discovery. Whilst Hanaud read the paragraph aloud, it seemed that no one breathed; and this is what he read:
"'Figure F is the representation of a poison arrow which was lent to me by Simon Harlowe, Esq., of Blackman's, Norfolk, and the Maison Crenelle at Dijon. It was given to him by a Mr. John Carlisle, a trader on the Shire River in the Kombe country, and is the most perfect example of a poison arrow which I have seen. The Strophanthus seed has been pounded up in water and mixed with the reddish clay used by the Kombe natives, and the compound is thickly smeared over the head of the arrow shaft and over the actual iron dart except at the point and the edges. The arrow is quite new and the compound fresh.'"
Hanaud leaned back in his chair when he had come to the end of this paragraph.
"You see, Monsieur Frobisher, the question we have to answer. Where is to-day Simon Harlowe's arrow?"
Betty looked up into Hanaud's face.
"If it is anywhere in this house, Monsieur, it should be in the locked cabinet in my sitting-room."
"Your sitting-room?" Hanaud exclaimed sharply.
"Yes. It is what we call the Treasure Room—half museum, half living-room. My uncle Simon used it, Madame too. It was their favourite room, full of curios and beautiful things. But after Simon Harlowe died Madame would never enter it. She locked the door which communicated with her dressing-room, so that she might never even in a moment of forgetfulness enter it. The room has a door into the hall. She gave the room to me."
Hanaud's forehead cleared of its wrinkles.
"I understand," he said. "And that room is sealed."
"Yes."
"Have you ever seen the arrow, Mademoiselle?"
"Not that I remember. I only looked into the cabinet once. There are some horrible things hidden away there"; and Betty shivered and shook the recollection of them from her shoulders.
"The chances are that it's not in the house at all, that it never came back to the house," Frobisher argued stubbornly. "The Professor in all probability would have kept it."
"If he could," Hanaud rejoined. "But it's out of all probability that a collector of rare things would have allowed him to keep it. No!" and he sat for a little time in a muse. "Do you know what I am wondering?" he asked at length, and then answered his own question. "I am wondering whether after all Boris Waberski was not in the street of Gambetta on the seventh of May and close, very close, to the shop of Jean Cladel the herbalist."
"Boris! Boris Waberski," cried Jim. Was he in Hanaud's eyes the criminal? After all, why not? After all, who more likely if criminal there was, since Boris Waberski thought himself an inheritor under Mrs. Harlowe's will?
"I am wondering whether he was not doing that very thing which he attributed to you, Mademoiselle Betty," Hanaud continued.
"Paying?" Betty cried.
"Paying—or making excuses for not paying, which is more probable, or recovering the poison arrow now clean of its poison, which is most probable of all."
At last Hanaud had made an end of his secrecies and reticence. His suspicion, winged like the arrow in the plate, was flying straight to this evident mark. Jim drew a breath like a man waking from a nightmare; in all of that small company a relaxation was visible; Ann Upcott drew away from the table; Betty said softly as though speaking to herself, "Monsieur Boris! Monsieur Boris! Oh, I never thought of that!" and, to Jim's admiration there was actually a note of regret in her voice.
It was audible, too, to Hanaud, since he answered with a smile:
"But you must bring yourself to think of it, Mademoiselle. After all, he was not so gentle with you that you need show him so much good will."
A slight rush of colour tinged Betty's cheeks. Jim was not quite sure that a tiny accent of irony had not pointed Hanaud's words.
"I saw him sitting here," she replied quickly, "half an hour ago—abject—in tears—a man!" She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of distaste. "I wish him nothing worse. I was satisfied."
Hanaud smiled again with a curious amusement, an appreciation which Frobisher was quite at a loss to understand. But he had from time to time received an uneasy impression that a queer little secret duel was all this while being fought by Betty Harlowe and Hanaud underneath the smooth surface of questions and answers—a duel in which now one, now the other of the combatants got some trifling scratch. This time it seemed Betty was hurt.
"You are satisfied, Mademoiselle, but the Law is not," Hanaud returned. "Boris Waberski expected a legacy. Boris Waberski needed money immediately, as the first of the two letters which he wrote to Monsieur Frobisher's firm clearly shows. Boris Waberski had a motive." He looked from one to the other of his audience with a nod to drive the point home. "Motives, no doubt, are signposts rather difficult to read, and if one reads them amiss, they lead one very wide astray. Granted! But you must look for your signposts all the same and try to read them aright. Listen again to the Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh! He is as precise as a man can be."
Hanaud's eyes fell again upon the description of Figure F in the treatise still open upon the table in front of him.
"The arrow was the best specimen of a poison arrow which he had ever come across. The poison paste was thickly and smoothly spread over the arrow head and some inches of the shaft. The arrow was unused and the poison fresh, and these poisons retain their energy for many, many years. I tell you that if this book and this arrow were handed over to Jean Cladel, Herbalist, Jean Cladel could with ease make a solution in alcohol which injected from a hypodermic needle, would cause death within fifteen minutes and leave not one trace."
"Within fifteen minutes?" Betty asked incredulously, and from the arm-chair against the wall, where Ann Upcott had once more seated herself, there broke a startled exclamation.
"Oh!" she cried, but no one took any notice of her at all. Both Jim and Betty had their eyes fixed upon Hanaud, and he was altogether occupied in driving his argument home.
"Within fifteen minutes? How do you know?" cried Jim.
"It is written here, in the book."
"And where would Jean Cladel have learnt to handle the paste with safety, how to prepare the solution?" Jim went on.
"Here! Here! Here!" answered Hanaud, tapping with his knuckles upon the treatise. "It is all written out here—experiment after experiment made upon living animals and the action of the poison measured and registered by minutes. Oh, given a man with a working knowledge of chemicals such as Jean Cladel must possess, and the result is certain."
Betty Harlowe leaned forward again over the book and Hanaud turned it half round between them, so that both, by craning their heads, could read. He turned the pages back to the beginning and passed them quickly in review.
"See, Mademoiselle, the time tables. Strophanthus constricts the muscles of the heart like digitalis, only much more violently, much more swiftly. See the contractions of the heart noted down minute after minute, until the moment of death and all—here is the irony!—so that by means of these experiments, the poison may be transformed into a medicine and the weapon of death become an agent of life—as in good hands, it has happened." Hanaud leaned back and contemplated Betty Harlowe between his half-closed eyes. "That is wonderful, Mademoiselle. What do you think?"
Betty slowly closed the book.
"I think, Monsieur Hanaud," she said, "it is no less wonderful that you should have studied this book so thoroughly during the half-hour you waited for us here this morning."
It was Hanaud's turn to change colour. The blood mounted into his face. He was for a second or two quite disconcerted. Jim once more had a glimpse of the secret duel and rejoiced that this time it was Hanaud, the great Hanaud, who was scratched.
"The study of poisons is particularly my work," he answered shortly. "Even at the Sûrété we have to specialise nowadays," and he turned rather quickly towards Frobisher. "You are thoughtful, Monsieur?"
Jim was following out his own train of thought.
"Yes," he answered. Then he spoke to Betty.
"Boris Waberski had a latch-key, I suppose?"
"Yes," she replied.
"He took it away with him?"
"I think so."
"When are the iron gates locked?"
"It is the last thing Gaston does before he goes to bed."
Jim's satisfaction increased with every answer he received.
"You see, Monsieur Hanaud," he cried, "all this while we have been leaving out a question of importance. Who put this book back upon its shelf? And when? Yesterday at noon the space was empty. This morning it is filled. Who filled it? Last night we sat in the garden after dinner behind the house. What could have been easier than for Waberski to slip in with his latch-key at some moment when the court was empty, replace the book and slip out again unnoticed? Why——"
A gesture of Betty's brought him to a halt.
"Unnoticed? Impossible!" she said bitterly. "The police have asergent-de-villeat our gates, night and day."
Hanaud shook his head.
"He is there no longer. After you were good enough to answer me so frankly yesterday morning the questions it was my duty to put to you, I had him removed at once."
"Why, that's true," Jim exclaimed joyfully. He remembered now that when he had driven up with his luggage from the hotel in the afternoon, the street of Charles-Robert had been quite empty. Betty Harlowe stood taken aback by her surprise. Then a smile made her face friendly; her eyes danced to the smile, and she dipped to the detective a little mock curtsy. But her voice was warm with gratitude.
"I thank you, Monsieur. I did not notice yesterday that the man had been removed, or I should have thanked you before. Indeed I was not looking for so much consideration at your hands. As I told my friend Jim, I believed that you went away thinking me guilty."
Hanaud raised a hand in protest. To Jim it was the flourish of the sword with which the duellist saluted at the end of the bout. The little secret combat between these two was over. Hanaud, by removing the sergeant from before the gates, had given a sign surely not only to Betty but to all Dijon that he found nothing to justify any surveillance of her goings out and comings in, or any limitations upon her freedom.
"Then you see," Jim insisted. He was still worrying at his solution of the case like a dog with a bone. "You see Waberski had the road clear for him last night."
Betty, however, would not have it. She shook her head vigorously.
"I won't believe that Monsieur Boris is guilty of so horrible a murder. More," and she turned her great eyes pleadingly upon Hanaud, "I don't believe that any murder was committed here at all. I don't want to believe it," and for a moment her voice faltered.
"After all, Monsieur Hanaud, what are you building this dreadful theory upon? That a book of my Uncle Simon was not in his library yesterday and is there to-day. We know nothing more. We don't know even whether Jean Cladel exists at all."
"We shall know that, Mademoiselle, very soon," said Hanaud, staring down at the book upon the table.
"We don't know whether the arrow is in the house, whether it ever was."
"We must make sure, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud stubbornly.
"And even if you had it now, here with the poison clinging in shreds to the shaft, you still couldn't be sure that the rest of it had been used. Here is a report, Monsieur, from the doctors. Because it says that no trace of the poison can be discovered, you can't infer that a poison was administered which leaves no trace. You never can prove it. You have nothing to go upon. It's all guesswork, and guesswork which will keep us living in a nightmare. Oh, if I thought for a moment that murder had been committed, I'd say, 'Go on, go on'! But it hasn't. Oh, it hasn't!"
Betty's voice rang with so evident a sincerity, there was so strong a passion of appeal, for peace, for an end of suspicion, for a right to forget and be forgotten, that Jim fancied no man could resist it. Indeed, Hanaud sat for a long while with his eyes bent upon the table before he answered her. But when at last he did, gently though his voice began, Jim knew at once that she had lost.
"You argue and plead very well, Mademoiselle Betty," he said. "But we have each of us our little creeds by which we live for better or for worse. Here is mine, a very humble one. I can discover extenuations in most crimes: even crimes of violence. Passion, anger, even greed! What are they but good qualities developed beyond the bounds? Things at the beginning good and since grown monstrous! So, too, in the execution. This or that habit of life makes natural this or that weapon which to us is hideous and abnormal and its mere use a sign of a dreadful depravity. Yes, I recognise these palliations. But there is one crime I never will forgive—murder by poison. And one criminal in whose pursuit I will never tire nor slacken, the Poisoner." Through the words there ran a real thrill of hatred, and though Hanaud's voice was low, and he never once raised his eyes from the table, he held the three who listened to him in a dreadful spell.
"Cowardly and secret, the poisoner has his little world at his mercy, and a fine sort of mercy he shows to be sure," he continued bitterly. "His hideous work is so easy. It just becomes a vice like drink, no more than that to the poisoner, but with a thousand times the pleasure drink can give. Like the practice of some abominable art. I tell you the truth now! Show me one victim to-day and the poisoner scot-free, and I'll show you another victim before the year's out. Make no mistake! Make no mistake!"
His voice rang out and died away. But the words seemed still to vibrate in the air of that room, to strike the walls and rebound from them and still be audible. Jim Frobisher, for all his slow imagination, felt that had a poisoner been present and heard them, some cry of guilt must have rent the silence and betrayed him. His heart stopped in its beats listening for a cry, though his reason told him there was no mouth in that room from which the cry could come.
Hanaud looked up at Betty when he had finished. He begged her pardon with a little flutter of his hands and a regretful smile. "You must take me, therefore, as God made me, Mademoiselle, and not blame me more than you can help for the distress I still must cause you. There was never a case more difficult. Therefore never one about which one way or the other I must be more sure."
Before Betty could reply there came a knock upon the door.
"Come in," Hanaud cried out, and a small, dark, alert man in plain clothes entered the room.
"This is Nicolas Moreau, who was keeping watch in the courtyard. I sent him some while ago upon an errand," he explained and turned again to Moreau.
"Well, Nicolas?"
Nicolas stood at attention, with his hands at the seams of his trousers, in spite of his plain clothes, and he recited rather than spoke in a perfectly expressionless official voice.
"In accordance with instructions I went to the shop of Jean Cladel. It is number seven. From the Rue Gambetta I went to the Prefecture. I verified your statement. Jean Cladel has twice appeared before the Police Correctionelle for selling forbidden drugs and has twice been acquitted owing to the absence of necessary witnesses."
"Thank you, Nicolas."
Moreau saluted, turned on his heel, and went out of the room. There followed a moment of silence, of discouragement. Hanaud looked ruefully at Betty.
"You see! I must go on. We must search in that locked cabinet of Simon Harlowe's for the poison arrow, if by chance it should be there."
"The room is sealed," Frobisher reminded him.
"We must have those seals removed," he replied, and he took his watch from his pocket and screwed up his face in grimace.
"We need Monsieur the Commissary, and Monsieur the Commissary will not be in a good humour if we disturb him now. For it is twelve o'clock, the sacred hour of luncheon. You will have observed upon the stage that Commissaries of Police are never in a good humour. It is because——" But Hanaud's audience was never to hear his explanation of this well-known fact. For he stopped with a queer jerk of his voice, his watch still dangling from his fingers upon its chain. Both Jim and Betty looked at once where he was looking. They saw Ann Upcott standing up against the wall with her hand upon the top rail of a chair to prevent herself from falling. Her eyes were closed, her whole face a mask of misery. Hanaud was at her side in a moment.
"Mademoiselle," he asked with a breathless sort of eagerness, "what is it you have to tell me?"
"It is true, then?" she whispered. "Jean Cladel exists?"
"Yes."
"And the poison arrow could have been used?" she faltered, and the next words would not be spoken, but were spoken at the last. "And death would have followed in fifteen minutes?"
"Upon my oath it is true," Hanaud insisted. "What is it you have to tell me?"
"That I could have hindered it all. I shall never forgive myself. I could have hindered the murder."
Hanaud's eyes narrowed as he watched the girl. Was he disappointed, Frobisher wondered? Did he expect quite another reply? A swift movement by Betty distracted him from these questions. He saw Betty looking across the room at them with the strangest glittering eyes he had ever seen. And then Ann Upcott drew herself away from Hanaud and stood up against the wall at her full height with her arms outstretched. She seemed to be setting herself apart as a pariah; her whole attitude and posture cried, "Stone me! I am waiting."
Hanaud put his watch into his pocket.
"Mademoiselle, we will let the Commissary eat his luncheon in peace, and we will hear your story first. But not here. In the garden under the shade of the trees." He took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. "Indeed I too feel the heat. This room is as hot as an oven."
When Jim Frobisher looked back in after time upon the incidents of that morning, nothing stood out so vividly in his memories, no, not even the book of arrows and its plates, not Hanaud's statement of his creed, as the picture of him twirling his watch at the end of his chain, whilst it sparkled in the sunlight and he wondered whether he should break in now upon the Commissaire of Police or let him eat his luncheon in quiet. So much that was then unsuspected by them all, hung upon the exact sequence of events.
The garden chairs were already set out upon a lawn towards the farther end of the garden in the shadow of the great trees. Hanaud led the way towards them.
"We shall be in the cool here and with no one to overhear us but the birds," he said, and he patted and arranged the cushions in a deep arm-chair of basket work for Ann Upcott. Jim Frobisher was reminded again of the solicitude of a doctor with an invalid and again the parallel jarred upon him. But he was getting a clearer insight into the character of this implacable being. The little courtesies and attentions were not assumed. They were natural, but they would not hinder him for a moment in his pursuit. He would arrange the cushions with the swift deft hands of a nurse—yes, but he would slip the handcuffs on the wrists of his invalid, a moment afterwards, no less deftly and swiftly, if thus his duty prompted him.
"There!" he said. "Now, Mademoiselle, you are comfortable. For me, if I am permitted, I shall smoke."
He turned round to ask for permission of Betty, who with Jim had followed into the garden behind him.
"Of course," she answered; and coming forward, she sat down in another of the chairs.
Hanaud pulled out of a pocket a bright blue bundle of thin black cigarettes and lit one. Then he sat in a chair close to the two girls. Jim Frobisher stood behind Hanaud. The lawn was dappled with sunlight and cool shadows. The blackbird and the thrush were calling from bough and bush, the garden was riotous with roses and the air sweet with their perfume. It was a strange setting for the eerie story which Ann Upcott had to tell of her adventures in the darkness and silence of a night; but the very contrast seemed to make the story still more vivid.
"I did not go to Monsieur de Pouillac's Ball on the night of April the 27th," she began, and Jim started, so that Hanaud raised his hand to prevent him interrupting. He had not given a thought to where Ann Upcott had been upon that night. To Hanaud, however, the statement brought no surprise.
"You were not well?" he asked.
"It wasn't that," Ann replied. "But Betty and I had—I won't say a rule, but a sort of working arrangement which I think had been in practice ever since I came to the Maison Crenelle. We didn't encroach upon each other's independence."
The two girls had recognised from their first coming together that privacy was the very salt of companionship. Each had a sanctuary in her own sitting-room.
"I don't think Betty has ever been in mine, I only once or twice in hers," said Ann. "We had each our own friends. We didn't pester each other with questions as to where we had been and with whom. In a word, we weren't all the time shadows upon each other's heels."
"A wise rule, Mademoiselle," Hanaud agreed cordially. "A good many households are split from roof to cellar by the absence of just such a rule. The de Pouillacs then were Mademoiselle Betty's friends."
"Yes. As soon as Betty had gone," Ann resumed, "I told Gaston that he might turn off the lights and go to bed whenever he liked; and I went upstairs to my own sitting-room, which is next to my bedroom. You can see the windows from here. There!"
They were in a group facing the back of the long house across the garden. To the right of the hall stretched the line of shuttered windows, with Betty's bedroom just above. Ann pointed to the wing on the left of the hall and towards the road.
"I see. You are above the library, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud.
"Yes. I had a letter to write," Ann continued, and suddenly faltered. She had come upon some obstacle in the telling of her story which she had forgotten when she had uttered her cry in the library. She gasped. "Oh!" she murmured, and again "Oh!" in a low voice. She glanced anxiously at Betty, but she got no help from her at all. Betty was leaning forward with her elbows upon her knees and her eyes on the grass at her feet and apparently miles away in thought.
"Yes, Mademoiselle," Hanaud asked smoothly.
"It was an important letter," Ann went on again, choosing her words warily, much as yesterday at one moment in her interrogatory Betty herself had done—concealing something, too, just as Betty had done. "I had promised faithfully to write it. But the address was downstairs in Betty's room. It was the address of a doctor," and having said that, it seemed that she had cleared her obstacle, for she went on in a more easy and natural tone.
"You know what it is, Monsieur Hanaud. I had been playing tennis all the afternoon. I was pleasantly tired. There was a letter to be written with a good deal of care and the address was all the way downstairs. I said to myself that I would think out the terms of my letter first."
And here Jim Frobisher, who had been shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, broke in upon the narrative.
"But what was this letter about and to what doctor?" he asked.
Hanaud swung round almost angrily.
"Oh, please!" he cried. "These things will all come to light of themselves in their due order, if we leave them alone and keep them in our memories. Let Mademoiselle tell her story in her own way," and he was back at Ann Upcott again in a flash.
"Yes, Mademoiselle. You determined to think out the tenor of your letter."
A hint of a smile glimmered upon the girl's face for a second. "But it was an excuse really, an excuse to sit down in my big arm-chair, stretch out my legs and do nothing at all. You can guess what happened."
Hanaud smiled and nodded.
"You fell fast asleep. Conscience does not keep young people, who are healthy and tired, awake," he said.
"No, but it wakes up with them," Ann returned, "and upbraids at once bitterly. I woke up rather chilly, as people do who have gone to sleep in their chairs. I was wearing a little thin frock of pale blue tulle—oh, a feather-weight of a frock! Yes, I was cold and my conscience was saying, 'Oh, big lazy one! And your letter? Where is it?'
"In a moment I was standing up and the next I was out of the room on the landing, and I was still half dazed with sleep. I closed my door behind me. It was just chance that I did it. The lights were all out on the staircase and in the hall below. The curtains were drawn across the windows. There was no moon that night. I was in a darkness so complete that I could not see the glimmer of my hand when I raised it close before my face."
Hanaud let the end of his cigarette drop at his feet. Betty had raised her face and was staring at Ann with her mouth parted. For all of them the garden had disappeared with its sunlight and its roses and its singing birds. They were upon that staircase with Ann Upcott in the black night. The swift changes of colour in her cheeks and of expression in her eyes—the nervous vividness of her compelled them to follow with her.
"Yes, Mademoiselle?" said Hanaud quietly.
"The darkness didn't matter to me," she went on, with an amazement at her own fearlessness, now that she knew the after-history of that evening. "I am afraid now. I wasn't then," and Jim remembered how the night before in the garden her eyes had shifted from this dark spot to that in search of an intruder. Certainly she was afraid now! Her hands were clenched tight upon the arms of her chair, her lips shook.
"I knew every tread of the stairs. My hand was on the balustrade. There was no sound. It never occurred to me that any one was awake except myself. I did not even turn on the light in the hall by the switch at the bottom of the stairs. I knew that there was a switch just inside the door of Betty's room, and that was enough. I think, too, that I didn't want to rouse anybody. At the foot of the stairs I turned right like a soldier. Exactly opposite to me across the hall was the door of Betty's room. I crossed the hall with my hands out in front of me," and Betty, as though she herself were crossing the hall, suddenly thrust both her hands out in front of her.
"Yes, one would have to do that," she said slowly. "In the dark—with nothing but space in front of one—— Yes!" and then she smiled as she saw that Hanaud's eyes were watching her curiously. "Don't you think so, Monsieur Hanaud?"
"No doubt," said he. "But let us not interrupt Mademoiselle."
"I touched the wall first," Ann resumed, "just at the angle of the corridor and the hall."
"The corridor with the windows on to the courtyard on the one side and the doors of the receptions on the other?" Hanaud asked.
"Yes."
"Were the curtains drawn across all those windows too, Mademoiselle?"
"Yes. There was not a glimmer of light anywhere. I felt my way along the wall to my right—that is, in the hall, of course, not the corridor—until my hands slipped off the surface and touched nothing. I had reached the embrasure of the doorway. I felt for the door-knob, turned it and entered the room. The light switch was in the wall at the side of the door, close to my left hand. I snapped it down. I think that I was still half asleep when I turned the light on in the treasure-room, as we called it. But the next moment I was wide awake—oh, I have never been more wide awake in my life. My fingers indeed were hardly off the switch after turning the light on, before they were back again turning the light off. But this time I eased the switch up very carefully, so that there should be no snap—no, not the tiniest sound to betray me. There was so short an interval between the two movements of my hand that I had just time to notice the clock on the top of the marquetry cabinet in the middle of the wall opposite to me, and then once more I stood in darkness, but stock still and holding my breath—a little frightened—yes, no doubt a little frightened, but more astonished than frightened. For in the inner wall of the room, at the other end, close by the window, there,"—and Ann pointed to the second of those shuttered windows which stared so blankly on the garden—"the door which was always locked since Simon Harlowe's death stood open and a bright light burned beyond."
Betty Harlowe uttered a little cry.
"That door?" she exclaimed, now at last really troubled. "It stood open? How can that have been?"
Hanaud shifted his position in his chair, and asked her a question.
"On which side of the door was the key, Mademoiselle?"
"On Madame's, if the key was in the lock at all."
"Oh! You don't remember whether it was?"
"No," said Betty. "Of course both Ann and I were in and out of Madame's bedroom when she was ill, but there was a dressing-room between the bedroom and the communicating door of my room, so that we should not have noticed."
"To be sure," Hanaud agreed. "The dressing-room in which the nurse might have slept and did when Madame had a seizure. Do you remember whether the communicating door was still open or unlocked on the next morning?"
Betty frowned and reflected, and shook her head.
"I cannot remember. We were all in great trouble. There was so much to do. I did not notice."
"No. Indeed why should you?" said Hanaud. He turned back to Ann. "Before you go on with this curious story, Mademoiselle, tell me this! Was the light beyond the open door, a light in the dressing-room or in the room beyond the dressing-room, Madame Harlowe's bedroom, or didn't you notice?"
"In the far room, I think," Ann answered confidently. "There would have been more light in the treasure-room otherwise. The treasure-room is long no doubt, but where I stood I was completely in darkness. There was only this panel of yellow light in the open doorway. It lay in a band straight across the carpet and it lit up the sedan chair opposite the doorway until it all glistened like silver."
"Oho, there is a sedan chair in that museum?" said Hanaud lightly. "It will be interesting to see. So the light, Mademoiselle, came from the far room?"
"The light and—and the voices," said Ann with a quaver in her throat.