It was not such dirty weather as McClintock the boatman had prophesied. Though the night was dark and the sky mantled in heavy cloud, the rain was hardly more than a Scotch mist. That is to say, it was no rain at all in the terms of the North. On the mainland the temperature was mild to mugginess. But once away and under full sail, a decent little breeze carried the boat smartly over the long rollers.
Napier had taken his place at the tiller. Half-way to the objective, which had not yet been named, he added to the sense of the importance of the expedition by proposing to double McClintock's fee as some compensation for doing without his pipe for an hour or two after landing.
Napier anticipated a tussle over this point. McClintock's grunt might mean anything from pig-headed refusal to whole-hearted agreement.
"Naturally," Napier went on, with an air of being a deal more easy than he felt, "when I wanted to overhaul Gull Island, I thought of the man who took Julian and me there when we were boys."
"Gairrmans!" remarked McClintock, careful to abstain from the rising inflection.
"What! Have you seen something?"
"Na, na; but I have na lookit." He took the pipe out of his mouth and knocked the ashes into the sea. "They'll be verra gude at smellin' oot." It was so he indorsed Napier's generalship, and accepted service.
The only notice taken of the observation seemed to hint at a further acuteness for McClintock to reckon with. "I'll tell you the plan in two words," Napier said, "and then we'd best not be talking for the next couple of hours." When he'd landed Napier, McClintock was to lie low in his boat, just offshore, for about an hour and a half, unless one of two things happened. If McClintock should see a light on the rocks at the top of the gorge, he might, if he liked, come and see what was up, but if he should hear a pistol-shot, whatever length of time he'd been left alone, he was to wait half an hour longer. If, by then, Napier had neither appeared nor shown a light, McClintock was to get along back to Kirklamont and raise the hue and cry—an extremity, he was to understand, which Napier particularly desired to avoid. And that was why he was going by himself, going with extreme caution, just to establish the fact that there was no reason why they shouldn't come back by daylight safely enough and go over the old ground together. For a last word, Napier remarked that he hadn't forgotten McClintock had taught him and Julian more than fishing and sailing, and here was a pistol he'd best keep handy.
The old man slipped the weapon into the pocket of his reefer as casually as though it had been another pipe. But he remarked that he was more at home in these days with a knife, whether for oysters "or whatever." There was no doubt that McClintock was not only enlisted, but interested at last.
He brought his boat softly up on the spit of sand left by the tide, sole landing-place of this nature on all the little rock-bound coast. The only sounds abroad were the shrillkeep, keep, of the sea-pie, and a swish of wings out of the cliff.
Without a word being exchanged, Napier went over the side, through a shallow ripple to the little beach, so narrow as to be hardly more than a window of gravel at the foot of the cliff. In a sense this was an advantage once he was piloted safely to the sand spit. He remembered he had only to hug the cliff till he came to that place—scene of many a wreck, where the cliff fell sharply in a chaos of boulders tumbling out to sea. By bearing inland, Napier would cross at its narrowest the neck of what he used to think looked like the wreckage of a pier. Quite suddenly he would come into a gentler region, a gradual acclivity that led through willow and heather and bracken up to the apex of the height which, midmost of the island, commanded all points of the compass. If there was an installation, it would be there masked from the mainland, among the rocks at the top of the gorge. And if the installation was there, Napier would find it, provided somebody did not first find him.
The night was warm for September, but till he landed, the wet breeze had struck cold. Here, on the island, summer seemed to linger. The air was still full of the sun-quickened scent of pines. The sweetness of thyme was stronger than the faint bitter of bracken. But these things reached Napier vaguely. Those admirable servants, his eyes, were well used by now to this half-darkness; but they could do little for him in comparison with the two other allies, his hearing and the quickened power of the humblest faculty of all. As he felt his way with foot and shoulder, the new significance in contact seemed to extend from living flesh and nerve to the rattan stick he carried. The soft alternate strokes, now right, now left advised him of the gorse clumps, of a solitary stone-pine, or an occasional rock half submerged in coarse grass and heather. Every few yards he stopped to listen. Yet he got over the ground with a quickness that brought him a jolt of surprise when, the ascent grown suddenly steeper and less verdured, he found himself near the top of the hangar. He had reached the place where the bony shoulders of the island rose naked above her mantle of green and heather-purple.
Though he could see virtually nothing of the wide prospect daylight opened out from this point, he was too well aware of the prodigies of vision possible to trained eyes for him to risk showing any faintest shadow moving on the sky-line. Before he came to the top he was making his progress bent nearly double; crouching to listen, and then creeping along on hands and knees.
The comparatively uniform surfaces of the mother-rock showed no sign yet of dropping down to chaos. But Napier knew where he was. The tinkle of water told him. In two minutes he was craning over the lip of the gorge, staring into the murk beneath him.
A mere gulf of shadow.
No man in his senses would venture farther on a night like this, unless he had in his memory one of those indelible maps that only youth knows the secret of engraving. It was such a map that Napier turned back to as he lay there in the dark, getting not only the detail, but the order, clear again in his head.
The remembered call of the water came up insistent. Almost Napier could imagine that he made it out, that nook, a few yards below, which had always been the boys' first stopping-place. In the driest summer a thread of pure fresh water trickled out of a fissure in the granite down there among the ferns. In spring the trickle would swell to a torrent. It would go boiling over the worn boulders till it plunged down that last lap in noise and foam into the tiny lake, the small rock basin of steel-blue water, smiling in the sunshine of memory, but even in that light set warningly about with nearly perpendicular walls on three sides. On this southern arc, more terribly furnished still, with rocks of sharper tooth, calved later from the mother in labor of heat and frost.
After quenching their thirst, the boys' next stopping-place would be Table Rock, a third of the way to the bottom. There they would lie stretched out to the sun and eat their sandwiches. Then they would crawl to the far edge and peer over for that dizzy view of the great boss, the outcrop of granite eighteen to twenty feet below them on the left. By virtue of place or special constitution, it had possessed a power to resist the forces of disintegration. It treated the very torrent cavalierly, for it butted the torrent aside with that Giant's Head, and then bent leisurely over to look at itself in the lake.
There were days when the jutting forehead, with its crown of heather and veil of creepers interlaced, was seen more clearly mirrored in the water than when looked straight down upon from Table Rock or from the opposite cliff across the lake. Neither point of view gave one the smallest inkling of what was under the veil, behind the brow of granite.
Napier sniffed the wet air for smoldering wood. No whiff, no sound.
What the devil had been in Greta's mind? The cause of her panic, whatever it was, no longer inhabited here. Napier would feel his way down as quickly as due caution would permit, and in less than forty minutes he'd be back in the boat with McClintock.
All he had to do was to steer clear of Table Rock and follow the watercourse till it bore away to the left. Any one who knew his ground and kept to the right could easily enough let himself down to that comfortable ledge under the Giant's Head. Sometimes you found bilberries there. Anyway, you found the niche that sheltered you from rain. And then you went on to the discovery that took your breath.
In the old days you waited for McClintock with beating hearts, even if there were two of you. Gavan eight and Julian seven, would follow behind the old sou'wester to the end of the curving gallery, where a drop of some four feet landed you in the irregular-shaped stone chamber where the smugglers long ago had hid the contraband. How did they get it round the Giant's Head? you asked, remembering the narrow way. They didn't get it round. They lowered it over the top. McClintock could show you the grooves worn in the granite. Good days, those!
Wet and a little chilled, but without misgiving, Napier let himself down among the rocks. He began the descent with a swing of the rattan to take his immediate bearings. Before he brought the stick full circle, he dropped the hand that held it. What was this against the side of his knee? He bent down and found his face a few inches from a steel cable, screwed taut, and straining aslant skyward. His eye followed the outline of the twisted strand till it met a slender rod planted discreetly among the rocks. Planted so discreetly that it was completely masked from observation on three points of the compass and would not easily be detected on the fourth. Napier could not make out the wire connecting the farther one of the antennæ onto this one above his head; but he knew that it was there. He knew that he had set his knee against one of the guys of a wireless. He moved only a couple of inches away from that significant companionship and stood quite still.
Was this installation a pre-war dodge, abandoned now? And if not abandoned—
He found himself making his way down with his right hand in his pistol-pocket. Gull Island was another place with that wand of magic set up among the rocks.
He started as violently as if a gun had gone off. Only the vicious snapping of a dry twig under foot; but, Lord, the racket! His caution redoubled.
With horror he remembered that old pastime—rolling the rocks down. How they bounded and crashed! Across the years he heard again the reverberant thunder of that long falling. What if he should displace one of these.... He drew his foot back, trembling from head to heel at the slight rocking of a boulder. Could he venture down in this darkness?
Wasn't, after all, the darkness an indispensable part of his plan? He stood and listened. Behind the sound of falling water there was nothing, not even a bird's note. The stillness was piercing. Under its penetrant impact he shrank inwardly.
What was that?
Something had sprung out of the shadow. Lord! Nothing but an infernal rabbit; and the damned fool had dislodged a few little stones.
Napier sat crouching in the gorge a good four or five minutes after the last of that pop-popping died. He had pulled off his cap and thrust it into his pocket. He wiped his forehead. Whew! nothing but a damned rabbit!
He listened an instant, and then went on down in the murk and the fine rain. Suddenly he stood still again. There wasn't a sound his ear could verify. But he held his breath, while horror moved like a wind in his hair.
He wasn't alone.
How he knew, he couldn't have told. He plunged his hand into his revolver pocket, braced himself, and waited. Waited while the seconds passed. Waited till that first strong impression weakened, till he had silently called himself a few unpleasant names, and had drawn out of his pocket the cap he told himself his addled pate needed more than the protection of firearms. He went on in the act of settling the cap firmly on his head. He had heard nothing, seen nothing, when a blow on the back all but felled him. He saved himself from falling flat only by plunging a few paces down the gorge. He managed to recover, and wheeled about, his hand at his pocket. Before he could get at his pistol, that hand and the other arm were seized in a powerful grip. His hobnailed boot did him the instant service of bringing his assailant down on one knee. But Napier was dragged along with him in those arms of iron. It flashed over Napier that the aim of this dumb enemy was not so much to kill as to disarm him.
It was a battle for a pistol. The conviction grew in Napier's mind that he would already be lying dead there among the rocks but for the man's strange caution. He didn't want that pistol to go off; and so they wrestled in a nightmare of blind silence. Now one, and now the other, regained his footing and then lost it; and now they both went rolling down together till the rocks stopped them. And still no word was spoken.
Twice Napier had his fingers almost on the trigger, and twice his hand was wrenched away. The last time a thick voice whispered, "Dropit! Don't you know you're a dead man if you make a sound?" The voice of Bloom, Sir William's chauffeur! He had got Napier down again; the full weight of the assailant's body was on Napier's head; his left arm pinned under him. In that strangling darkness Napier told himself the end had come. He was dead already. Why was he resisting? He knew why, when he felt Bloom's teeth on his right forearm. He felt the pistol go from his bruised side. He heard the drop among the scant herbage of the rocks.
It was over. Resistance had been battered out of him. He was quite sure of that. Why didn't Bloom let him alone? Why was the fellow dragging him down?
It suddenly occurred to him that they couldn't be far from Table Rock.Bloom was going to throw him over!
He had loosed his hold on Napier's shoulder. Breathing heavily, he had come round and straddled across his victim's body. He fastened his hands in Napier's torn collar, pulled him up into a sitting posture, and dashed his head against a boulder. Not quite squarely, for Bloom's foot had slipped on the wet moss. He braced himself and took fresh hold. In that second the impotence passed out of Napier's body. His sinews hardened as he locked his maimed arms round the man. Before Bloom could recover from the disadvantage of his stooping posture, Napier, in a spasm of dying energy, had rolled with the chauffeur in his arms toward the edge of Table Rock. More angry than frightened by the suddenness of Napier's recovery, Bloom was striking wild.
"He doesn't know where he is!" Napier said to himself with exultation. In a very convulsion of insane strength he gripped the panting body of the German and flung it out over the edge of Table Rock.
He hung there listening.
But the blood flowed into his ears as well as into his eyes. No sound reached him. He tried to crawl back toward the stream. On the way unconsciousness, like an angel out of heaven, came down and covered him.
In spite of the tribute to McClintock's being able to do what he was told, the old man had no mind to go home at the end of the time stipulated without knowing something of what was keeping Mr. Gavan. And so, some three quarters of an hour after that body had shot out into the void, the fisherman, picking his way cannily down the gorge, slipped on something soft. His questing hands felt blood, new spilt. A match, lit in his sou'wester and instantly smothered, showed him enough. He drew back behind a rock and waited there several minutes, listening. When he got back to Napier, he had the sou'wester half full of water. He sprinkled it over Napier's face. He poured whiskey down his throat. Aye, that was better. Napier was presently able to say that a man who attacked him had been thrown over Table Rock. The question was, could McClintock get Napier back to the boat?
Oh, aye, McClintock could do that same. But Mr. Gavan had best bide there a little longer; and here was the whiskey-flask to keep him company.
Napier sent a whisper of remonstrance after him as the foolhardy old man went down the gorge. Too well Napier knew where McClintock would be going. And he hadn't warned him! Poor old McClintock! Napier lay there a few minutes, and then crawled to the water. He bathed his head and drank some more whiskey. He tried to stand but couldn't manage that, and went on hands and knees. He had no clear idea what he was doing. But McClintock was fumbling his way down there without a notion of the risk he ran.
Presently Napier found he could stand, after a fashion. So he staggered on till the stream turned to the left, and Napier, to the right, was making his way round the Giant's Head down to the ledge beneath.
"McClintock!" he whispered, and steadied himself against the rock wall to listen. McClintock must have gone in! Napier had no consciousness of making any decision. He merely found himself feeling the way along an inward-curving gallery when the pitch blackness in front of him opened on a wedge of light, fierce, intolerable. As suddenly, the light was gone.
If he had been quite clear in his head, Napier declared afterward, he would have prudently retraced his steps.
As it was, a sense of blind compulsion was on him. For in that dazzling instant he'd had a glimpse of McClintock. Poor old McClintock, whom Napier had inveigled into this trap; McClintock, his heavy shoulder, his sou'wester, and a bristle of beard stamped for an instant on that blinding, impossible light. Streaks of it still leaked through the blackness. Napier's outstretched hand came almost at once against something soft, yielding. A double-felted curtain. He grasped it and stared through, to find himself standing at the top of a carpeted incline, looking down into a luxurious room, flooded with high-power, electric light. In the glare McClintock, with a knife in his hand, stood not ten feet from a man in shirt-sleeves seated at a table. The back of the seated figure was turned partly away from the entrance; his head bent; a green shade over his eyes. He was taking down a message. A metal band over his crown, ear-caps set close to his head, held him oblivious to all sound save that which the mysterious forces of nature were ticking into his ears.
Not McClintock's wary approach, but Napier's less cautious movement of the felted curtain, or some cooler air current penetrating the overheated chamber, was responsible for that slight turn of the harnessed head. It was Carl Pforzheim! His cry died on his lips as he tore off the shade. But he couldn't in that lightning instant wrench himself free of the apparatus, for the cord had become wound round his neck. He presented a sickening impression of one struggling in a man-trap, showing, as a wild animal might, a flash of bared teeth as he strained out across the table and seized a revolver. The shot went wild. For he had turned to face the descent of McClintock's knife. Pforzheim fell sidewise against the pink wall of petrol tins, still hung up by hisapparat, and dribbling scarlet over the pink.
They spent the night with the dead body.
There were two good beds, but only one was slept in. McClintock mounted guard. In the morning he went out and found the body of Sir William's chauffeur. He buried him with Pforzheim.
The den was stocked with supplies, wine, cigars, food, books, cards. There were very few papers, but they were worth coming for.
Antwerp, in flames from incendiary bombs, had fallen to the Germans, and hot fighting was in progress between Arras and Albert and from Laon to Rheims when Napier, not yet recovered from his shooting accident, returned from Scotland in October.
At his chambers in St. James' he was told that an urgent message had come for him from Lamborough. Would he please say nothing about it to Sir William, who must not be alarmed, but very particularly would he please ring up Lady McIntyre the moment he got back.
Before he opened a letter, or even took off his hat, he was listening to the agitated voice at the other end of the wire. It begged him to get a car and motor out instantly to Lamborough. "Without telling anybody,anybody at all," that he was coming.
"I hope nothing has happened to Sir William."
Sir William was all right, and he wasn't to know.
"Bad news from the front, is it?" he said with that already familiar turn of thought to the unintermitting tragedy across the Channel.
"No, no. Jim was all right. Colin and Neil, too." The distracted voice assured him, nevertheless, Mr. Gavan was urgently, cruelly needed at Lamborough.
"Tell me if anybody is hurt," he said with sudden horror upon him.
"N—not yet," came back the astonishing answer.
Everything depended upon his getting there in time.
All the way he tortured himself with pictures of Nan in some fearful trouble. By whom else at Lamborough could he, Gavan Napier, be "cruelly needed"?
He remembered Julian's speech about her that day of her arrival. "Did you ever see such faith in any pair of eyes? It's pathetic, a person like that. Think of the knocks she'll get."
He cursed the slowness of the car that was going fifty miles an hour.
"Nan! Nan! I'm coming!"
For the hundredth time he lived over those minutes among the rocks; that lightning stroke in the blood; the astonishment of the two victims; the shame; the silent, shared, effort at retrieval. Hardly two sentences had been exchanged between them afterward. Yet there had been no conscious abstention from the luxury of speech. A bewilderment possessed them, an aching too anguished not to be dumb.
He had gone away early the next morning without seeing her again. He had not written.
There was no sign of Nan or of any one else, as Napier drove up to the house toward four o'clock that afternoon. The quickening of his pulses on the way to the drawing-room seemed to say, "She is here." But the room was empty. All the house was strangely still, in that brief interval before word came down. Would Mr. Napier come up to Lady McIntyre's sitting room?
"Oh, Mr. Gavan!" As though she were the last survivor of some huge disaster, a woeful, haggard little lady came forward to greet him. "I thought you'd never get here. It has been the most dreadful time." She dropped among her sofa cushions, speechless for a moment. "Even up there in Scotland," tacitly she reproached him, "you've heard, I suppose, of the length this spy mania has gone.Everybodywith a foreign name is suspected. Any one who protests, even the most trusted official—openly insulted—"
"Oh, really, Lady McIntyre,"—he tried to enfold the poor little lady in his own reassurance. "I haven't heard anything to suggest—"
"Then you've forgotten how we lost our dear good Bloom. That was bad enough. But what has worried William a great deal more are the questions, though they are asked only in private—'as yet only in private,' William says,"—Lady McIntyre clasped her thin hands—"questions about Greta. William has been splendid, so has Julian. We have all tried to make it—" The delicate face crumpled suddenly. It seemed to shrivel as the picture of a face might at the touch of fire. The touch of trouble—consolidator of the strong, disintegrator of the weak—had found out Lady McIntyre in her safe and sheltered place in the world. She turned away the quivering little visage and went on: "There have been letters. Odious anonymous letters,"—she brought her eyes back to Napier again, the eyes of a hurt child—"about Greta! Poor William had been gettinghorridletters for a fortnight. He never said a word about them till the wretches began to write to me. And the neighbors—no, you can't think what we've been through!" The relief of tears eased the strain.
"The Scotland Yard people—I've only known that since Sunday week—they'd already been to William. With absolutely nothing that could be called proof. 'Suspicious circumstances'—'a girl going out to meet her lover under the rose.' She told William she was going to marry him—Ernst; yes.Iliked Carl best—such nice teeth. But anyway—William—they little knew, those Scotland Yard people."
From confused fragments of overcolored speech, Napier gathered that the growing epidemic of fear and detestation had only stiffened his chief's determination to protect the stranger within his gate.
"You wouldn't have called William a patient man, now, would you? Well, you ought to have heard how he explained, argued, said all the right things. You might as well suspect my daughter of being the wrong sort of person to live under my roof. The lady in question is one of us. Ivouchfor Miss von Schwarzenberg."
Even the child—even Meggy—came to know that people looked askance at her for having Greta at her side!
Even Meggy! Napier was ready to swear that "the child" was, after Miss Greta herself, by far the best-informed person in the house. She was, anyway, according to her mother, the most indignant. Meggy had made common cause with Nan Ellis and Mr. Grant in ridiculing and condemning the popular superstition that every German must needs be an enemy of England. Napier heard how those three had redoubled their watchful friendship, a self-constituted bodyguard to keep Miss Greta safe from any breath of discourtesy, from so much as a glance of unworthy suspicion.
A momentary comfort derived from the thought of these champions suddenly failed Lady McIntyre. The smoothness of her face was broken again, as, again on the brink of tears, she remembered the villain of the piece. "The local inspector—that creature who made Greta go to Newton Hackett without any tea—he came again. Simply wouldn't go till William had seen him. I haven't often known William so angry. I am afraid he was rude to the man. It never does to be rude to these people. I've tried being kind to him. I,"—the tear-faded eyes lifted with a look of conscious virtue—"I gave him all William's best cigars. Andstillhe hasn't given us a moment's peace. Of course William flatly refused to send Greta away. 'Not all the inspectors in England—'" \lady McIntyre stiffened her slight back a moment with borrowed resolution. Only for a moment. The next saw her wavering forward with: "Then two men came down from London to seeme! Oh, Mr. Gavan,"—she writhed her locked fingers—"they won't go!"
"Won't go?"
She shook her ear-rings, speechless a moment. Then in a whisper: "At the inn, since yesterday. What do you think ofthat?"
All that Napier thought was Nan! Nan! How much does she know? And how is she taking it?
"They must have found out I'd gone to give Boris and Ivan a run on the sands. Greta and the rest were up on the sea-wall. They neverdreamedthat those two dreadful young men, standing there as if they were friends, pretending to admire the boarhounds, were secret service people, sent down by the Intelligence Department. And what they were really saying—at least the one who does the talking! I was thinking only last night while Julia was brushing my hair—things often come to me like that—I suddenly remembered that I couldn't—not if I was to be hanged for it—I couldn't remember a syllable the fat young man had uttered. It's my belief he's a deaf mute. Well, the other one said, if something wasn't doneat once, if I didn't use my great influence with my husband to have the German lady sent out of England, there would be a scandal. Everybody would say we had harbored a suspect after we'd been warned. And when he saw I wasn't going to do what he wanted, what do you think he called Greta? A spy, who handed on official information to the enemies of the country! Things have got out that they blame poor Greta for. Oh, isn't it anawfulpenalty to pay for her loyalty in sticking to us as she's done through thick and thin!
"Well, these secret service men—oneveryworrying thing about them:Idon't know how to treat such people; theyseemto be quite superior to their disgusting work—well, they pretend that for her sake, for Greta's, I ought—Heavens above! here they are again!" Lady McIntyre collapsed against her cushions, breathing heavily and staring fascinated at the door opposite the one by which Napier had come in. Napier, too, could hear them now—those footsteps.
The knock on the door must have been expected and couldn't have been more discreet, yet at the sound Lady McIntyre lost her head. Instead of saying, "Come in!" she remarked in a smothered undertone, "I told McAndrews to bring them up the back stairs."
The door opened. "Mr. Singleton, Mr. Grindley, m'lady."
Two young men came in. Well groomed, wearing well-creased trousers, holding their hats and walking sticks. Singleton, taller, a year or two the older, was a well-set-up person, with dark mustache, and frank, hazel eyes. "Where have I seen the fellow?" Napier asked himself, reading recognition in the guarded smile. They both greeted the lady.
"Isn't, after all!" Lady McIntyre jerked out in a confidential aside to Napier, upon the supposed deaf-mute's audible salutation. Neither was Mr. Grindley so very fat either, merely inclined to stoutness. Fair, slow, slightly bored; his prominent, gray-green eyes seemed gently to seek vacuity. Whether dullard or dreamer, this was certainly the last person you would pick out of a crowd for the errand on which he had come. This plump young man looked at ease, for the reason that he didn't care, or had forgotten where he was; the other one seemed to be at ease because he had never, in any place, been anything else. During the pause, which Lady McIntyre found agitating, Mr. Singleton stood there a step in advance of his companion, the hands that held his hat, with gloves tucked in the brim, crossed on the knob of his walking stick. And suddenly Napier remembered. This frank-looking young man with the long chin had been sent down from Oxford in Napier's first year. He had done what he could to shield the culprit, though they had never been friends.
Napier was the first to move, after McAndrews had shut the door behind him. It was not mere restlessness on Napier's part, nor detestation of the business these fellows had come about. He felt he must go and look out into the front hall. If Nan were to come in suddenly—
There was no one. Napier leaned against the wall, standing where, through the door ajar, he could command the stairs.
"We heard,"—Singleton in his cheerful, cultivated tones was saying to Lady McIntyre—"we heard the gentleman you were waiting for had arrived."
"Yes, but I—I haven't yet had time to explain." That poor head, which Lady McIntyre had jerked to Singleton, she jerked now to Napier. "They want me," she told him, "to search Greta's things. What do you think ofthat?" As Napier didn't at once say what he thought of it, Lady McIntyre flung out, "While she's away!"
Instead of denouncing such a demand, Napier asked, "Where is she?"
"Oh, they've gone off to see some old church, or something, on the coast."
"You don't know where?"
She shook her head. "HowcanI remember all the places they go to? A fresh one every day."
"Has—a—" Napier caught his tongue back from articulating "Nan." "They'veallgone?"
"Yes; and they may be back any moment."
Napier seemed to read in the easy confidence in Mr. Singleton's eyes that he personally did not look for the immediate return of the party. But it occurred to Napier that "the party" meant, to the secret service men, only Greta von Schwarzenberg. It seemed quite possible to Napier's own fears that, by some perverse stroke, Nan Ellis might return alone. She might even at the last moment—Fate did play these tricks—have fallen out of the party. In one of the rooms overhead she might be meditating descent. How else could he account for that all-pervading sense of her presence which filled the house? And he was the only one who knew how much, how infinitely, worse it would be if Nan were to come in and find them—He glanced sharply through the crack of the door.
"I have been explaining,"—Mr. Singleton seemed to invite Mr. Napier's coöperation—"since Lady McIntyre is so sure the view held by the Intelligence Department is mistaken, that it's a kindness to the young lady to embrace this opportunity to clear the matter up."
"Imagine the shabbiness of such conduct!" Lady McIntyre appealed to the figure listening by the door. "I am to take advantage of her absence to rummage among her—"
"No, no," Mr. Singleton protested. "You take advantage of the one and only chance of proving her innocent without hurting her feelings. It can either be done quietly without the least scandal, or be done with a publicity much less considerate.Ishould say, if the lady were a friend of mine—"
"Yes, I've heard your view," said Lady McIntyre, with nervous asperity. "It is Mr. Napier's I have waited for. Can you,"—she stood up wavering, miserable—"can you see me giving permission to a strange man and his confederate"—she jerked a glance toward the silent, absent-minded individual at Singleton's side—"to break open Miss von Schwarzenberg's trunk and—"
Mr. Singleton, wholly unperturbed, assured Lady McIntyre there need be no breaking open. He had, as she said, "most fortunately, a—"—Mr. Singleton smiled pleasantly—"an assistant who was in his way a genius at avoidance of breakage or any sort of violence."
The fastidiousness with which he repudiated "any sort of violence" plainly gave Lady McIntyre pause. Even in the thick of a thousand agitations it was noticeable how great a part was played in the persuading of the lady by the voice and manner of the agent, particularly by the voice. Its natural timbre, its accent, its curve and fall, all connoted the moral decencies, as well as the external fitness and refinements, of good breeding. If you suspected this man of baseness, you simply gave away your own unworthy thoughts. The reticent dignity with which he uttered the phrase, "for the sake of the safety of the country," that of itself seemed to range him on the side of defenders in the field.
Helplessly, Lady McIntyre waited upon the guidance she had sent for.
"Have you had official warning of this visit?" Napier asked her.
"No."
"There are reasons," Mr. Singleton reminded him, "as you must see, why a warning would defeat the purpose of the visit."
"You have a warrant for this search?"
He had. He produced it. An order under the Official Secrets' Act. "If a mistake has been made, Mr. Grindley and I," he said, as he returned the document to his inside pocket, "can assure ourselves of the fact and be out of the house in half an hour. Unless Lady McIntyre should, unhappily, be too long in making up her mind,"—he glanced at the clock on the mantel-piece—"neither the German lady nor any one outside this room and the Intelligence Department will ever know of the investigation. Isn't that better than the alternative?—having it conducted in public?"
The bribe was great, yet great was poor Lady McIntyre's misgiving. Men of another class would have stood no chance of overcoming her scruples. Oh, the Intelligence Department was not so blundering as some would have us believe, since upon a presumably very minor case it could expend this patience and finesse.
Lady McIntyre fluttered to the guarded door. "I couldn't let them do it with no one here." She clung an instant to Napier's arm.
He and Singleton glanced up and down corridor and stair, as the three men followed Lady McIntyre's lead into a room at the end of a passage.
The first thing noticeable about the little room was its air of distinction, bred only in part by the taste shown in the choice of certain articles of furniture, culled, Napier was sure, from other parts of the house during that week Miss Greta had spent alone here. Not her knowledge of values inMöbelnalone, but something less obvious, in the serene, uncrowded aspect, in the exquisite orderliness, lent the little room its special air.
Singleton walked straight to the window. It commanded the approach to the house and looked upon the sea. It wasn't till a moment later that Napier verified this fact. On the dressing table, which stood out two feet or so in front of the window, his eyes had found a faded photograph. It showed a girl in her teens at another window. Two long plaits fell over the sill as the eager figure leaned out to greet, with all that joy and affection, the woman whom Napier was here to convict of felony and to cover with disgrace. No need of the signature under the sill to say the girl was "Miss Greta's ever loving Nan."
That first cursory glance about the room had seemed both to please and intrigue Singleton. His face wore the look of intentness, of subdued satisfaction, with which your sportsman addresses himself to a game he knows he's good at.
"He likes ferreting things out! Helikesit!" Napier said to himself, as Singleton swung back with one of his easy movements and turned the key in the door.
"What will Greta think when she tries it and finds it locked, andmein here!" Lady McIntyre bemoaned to Napier.
"Oh, but she won't," answered Singleton. He nodded toward the window. "You'll see her coming." He laid down hat, stick, and gloves on the small table by the bed, and picked up a book lying there. He read aloud the title, "Pilgerfahrt by Gerhard," for Grindley's benefit, apparently, for he looked at that person interrogatively. "With Nan's love," he added, as though that might fetch Grindley.
But Grindley seemed to have neither literary nor sentimental curiosity. By the tall gilt screen set against the angle of the opposite wall Grindley halted, as if he had forgotten why he was there and felt unequal to the mental effort of recalling. You'd say he no more realized that the leaves of the screen were turned back so as almost to meet the angle described by the wall, than that the panels were composed of exquisite engravings after Fragonard, set in old gilt. Even when he moved a pace or two, you would say that he was speculating whereabouts in a room so scantily, albeit so charmingly, furnished as to boast only a single chair, should he find a place whereon to lay hat and stick, and the small despatch-case of the same color as the brown clothes he wore. Whether for that reason, or because of the inconspicuous way in which it was carried, Napier had not noticed the case till Grindley set it down against the skirting of the wall, along with hat and stick.
For those first moments, glued to the window, Lady McIntyre alternately watched the avenue leading to the house and watched the two strange men. She made no effort to disguise her perturbation at not having two pairs of eyes, the better to keep her poor little watch upon "dear Greta's things." "You don't, I suppose, expect to find anything contraband on her dressing-table," she said, as Singleton paused to run his eye over the glittering array. "You may know that's all right when I tell you Sir William and I gave her the toilet set last Christmas."
Singleton stooped to the faded photograph, an act as offensive in Napier's eyes as the next was in Lady McIntyre's—his attempt to open the little, inlaid bureau.
"That is her writing-table," said the lady, with dignity. "Of course it's locked. An engaged girl always locks her—"
"Yes; this, Grindley," Singleton said. And Grindley, moving like a soft brown shadow, was there with some bits of iron hanging keywise on a ring. Some of these slender "persuaders" were notched and some were hooked. There were also one or two pieces of wire.
Lady McIntyre identified these objects instantly in a horrified whisper as, "Burglar's tools!"
"Or that, first?" Singleton interrupted, with a nod at the screen.
"Yes, it's her box behind there," Lady McIntyre said, and clasped her hands. "But if you breakthat—a most queer lock—you can never mend it. And she'll know what we've—"
Mr. Grindley gave a slow head-shake. "American wardrobe trunk," he said, as though he had been tall enough to see over the close-set screen, and took no interest in what it hid. He inserted a steel object in the lock of the writing-table, and opened a flap as easily as if he'd had the key; more easily than if Lady McIntyre had had it.
"Her private letters!" she murmured with horror. "Love letters!"
Far more offensive, Napier was sure, than if Grindley had fallen upon the neat packets and loose papers with greedy curiosity, was the bored cursoriness, as it looked, of the inspection. Perhaps the other man was really going to read them through when he had—heavens above! What was he doing in Greta's cupboard?
"Disgraceful!" said Lady McIntyre under her breath. Singleton was passing his hands along the row of skirts neatly hung at the side. The investigating fingers reached those other garments suspended at a greater height. From supports, hooked upon a bar set overhead, depended afternoon and evening gowns—the pink cotton, the black and gold, the lemon-colored—all of familiar aspect, and yet in this collapsed state odd-looking, defenseless, taken at disadvantage. Napier with some difficulty recognized the apple-green silk, all its sauciness gone, as dejected now as a deflated balloon. And this stranger's hand upon them!
"Disgusting familiarity,Icall it. He'll be feeling in her pockets next," Lady McIntyre whispered tremulously. "I don't know how I can bear to be here."
Napier himself was too aware of a Peeping-Tom unseemliness in looking in upon these privacies to stand there watching. He turned again to the glittering dressing table and the treasure it enshrined. What wouldn't he give to be able to slip that photograph in his pocket? Nan looked at him out of her window with unsullied trust.
Napier glanced nervously out of the other, the window behind the dressing-table. While he had been watching Singleton and looking at the pictured face, Nan might easily have come into the house; for Lady McIntyre, too, had clean forgotten that side of her sentinelship.
Napier turned round, so palpably listening, that even Lady McIntyre in the midst of her agitations saw what must be in his mind.
"Yes,anymoment they'll be in upon us!" She fled again to the window.
"Grindley, here!" Singleton called from the cupboard.
But Grindley had found something, at last, which, though it seemed not to interest him, had proved itself worthy to be abstracted. Not one of the love letters, as Lady McIntyre plainly feared. It was nothing more exciting than Greta's French dictionary. Grindley came away from the littered bureau, holding the flat volume open in his hand, and turning the leaves at random.
Singleton joined him. "What have you got there?"
"La Motte's Dictionary."
"Is that all?" Singleton dismissed it.
Not so Grindley. He stooped, and laid the book on the floor beside his brown case.
Singleton was obviously disappointed. He glanced back at the open writing-table. "Nothing else?" he said.
"Only this," Grindley took a ball-nibbed pen out of the tray.
Singleton examined it carefully, "Yes." He, too, appeared to think the pen worthy of all care. He opened Grindley's nearly empty attaché case and laid the pen on top of a piece of brown paper, which covered something at the bottom. "And the ink?" He seemed to wait for it.
Grindley was understood to say, "Not yet." Lady McIntyre pointed out the twin pots on the silver tray engravedG. v. S. from N. E. Christmas 1913. "This is the ink," she said. Nobody seemed to hear. Grindley had gone to the dressing-table, leaving behind him open drawers and Greta's papers in confusion.
Lady McIntyre followed. "I must trouble you," she said, with dignity, "to put the writing-table as you found it."
"It isn't necessary," murmured the outrageous Grindley.
"But that is monstrous! You promised—at least, the other one—" She looked round. The other one, lost to view, was pursuing his nefarious course in the hanging cupboard.
"You heard him, Mr. Napier?" She spoke with tremulous bitterness.
"If I let them investigate quietly, no one need ever know."
"Yes,ifwe found we were mistaken,"—Singleton stuck his head out of the cupboard to say. "But, you see, we find we are not mistaken." He disappeared amongst folds of apple-green silk and lemon chiffon.
"Not mistaken!" cried Lady McIntyre.
"What have you discovered?" Napier called to Singleton.
It was Grindley, ludicrously inadequate, who answered, "The pen."
Lady McIntyre ran to the open attaché case and took it out. Grindley, at the dressing table, fingering Greta's toilet set, kept a vacant eye on Lady McIntyre.
"What could be more innocent than a perfectly new pen? Look, Mr. Napier. It's never been used, not even once!" She thrust the pen into Napier's hand.
"Look at the point," advised Grindley.
"Well,lookat it. Perfectly clean. If itmatters," Lady McIntyre said, "that pen has nevertouchedink. And how can you write with a pen if you don't write with ink?"
"We might—ask the lady," suggested Grindley, who was actually opening and unscrewing Greta's silver toilet things, holding bottles up to the light, smelling at corks and stoppers. He slipped out of its silver shell a small bottle of thick blue glass. He uncorked it and applied it gingerly to his nose.
"This is it," he said.
Lady McIntyre, with the dive of a dragon-fly, was at his side. "You think because that's labelled 'Poison,' there's something suspicious about her having it. It just shows! That bottle is part of the manicure set. Read what it says above the label," she commanded.
"Pour les ongles," the obliging young man pronounced with impeccable accent. "Yes." And he took the bottle over to the attaché case.
Lady McIntyre made a motion to arrest, to retrieve. As Napier laid a hand on her arm, trembling, she stood still.
"We must let them go through with it," he said.
She looked at him. With an effort Napier could only partly gage. Lady McIntyre recovered herself. "Go through with it? Of—of course. How else,"—she flicked her ear-rings with her drawing-room air—"how else could we convince them?"
Singleton, with some display of muscle, had dragged out from behind the pendent draperies a square, canvas box.
"Ah, that,"—Lady McIntyre went forward, maintaining valiantly the recovered, drawing-room manner—"thatis her hat-box. What they can want with her hat-box!" She tried to smile at Napier.
"Heavy for hats," remarked Singleton, in a tone of subdued pleasure. The box was furnished not only with the usual leather handle on the top, but with one on each side. To the top handle the label was still tied. It bore across the upper end the printed legend,