From Sir William McIntyre,Kirklamont.
From Sir William McIntyre,Kirklamont.
and underneath the familiar hand had set:
Von Schwarzenberg.
Von Schwarzenberg.
Below, in plain large capitals that caught the eye,
BOOTS
BOOTS
"Oh, that's why it's heavier than hats." Lady McIntyre held the label so all could see.
"It's heavy for boots," remarked Singleton. Grindley had sunk down on his haunches.
"This is it," he said.
"How do you know?" Napier asked.
"The lock," answered Grindley, picking over his hooks and twisted wires. He worked for some moments in his customary silence. Singleton strolled about, opening books.
"From Nan. From Nan. She might almost as well have had a stamp made."
Back to the lock-picking figure Napier's eyes came, from praying pardon of the girl with the plaits leaning out of the window. "Shame!" the girl cried.
"A case for cold chisel?" Singleton inquired, looking up from the libretto of Rosenkavalier. No answer from Grindley, but he put out his hand and felt under the corrugated paper in the attaché case. The hand came out with a chisel and a hammer.
"No! no!" cried Lady McIntyre on a note of firmness new to Napier's ears. "You said 'no forcing open.'"
"Unless we knew we were justified," amended Singleton. "We know now."
"Youcan'tknow."
"We have found enough to explain."
"Enough to explain what?"
"Why we are here. And why she shouldn't be."
Lady McIntyre turned, quivering, to Napier. "You know, don't you."
"I'm afraid,"—Napier interrupted—"whatIknow wouldn't help Miss Greta."
"What do youmean!"—her voice was hysterical. "Oh, everybody's mad!"
As the hammer was raised, Lady McIntyre flung out her hand toward the top of the chisel. Grindley, his shoulder against the box, pushed it a trifle to the left, and down fell the hammer in a resounding stroke. The lady wrung ineffectual fingers, as though they had succeeded in taking the blow aimed at Greta's lock. "Never, never shall I forgive myself! If she were to come in while we are at this horrible business—"
"She won't." But as it now struck Napier, Singleton hadn't once glanced out of the window.
Blow upon blow, till the lock fell to the floor. Grindley raised the lid. He said nothing, uttered no sound, but he smiled for the first and only time. A sheet of dull silvery metal had met his eye—the top of an inner box.
Lady McIntyre sat down in the solitary chair, as though her legs had suddenly given way.
By its two steel handles, which had fitted neatly into felt-lined sockets in the cane-and-canvas top, Grindley and Singleton lifted out the metal box. They laid it on its front. With those short, vicious hammer-strokes that seemed to shake the house, Grindley cut the hinges through. He and Singleton set the box upright and forced back the top.
After the first moment of stupefaction, Lady McIntyre's, "Oh—a—is that all?" resolutely proclaimed there was nothing out of the way in a governess having a box half full of ... books chiefly, weren't they?
The first thing Grindley took out was a roll of tracing-paper. He undid it. He smoothed it flat. He turned it over. He held it up to the light.
"Nothing! Not a thing!" breathed the lady.
Three pairs of eyes had fallen simultaneously on a letter which had been underneath the roll of paper—a letter unaddressed, in a sealed envelope. Grindley opened it. Singleton leaned over to read it, too. All that Napier could see was that the communication appeared to be in German script, not written compactly, as the national instinct for economy seems to inculcate. The lines were wide apart. Grindley's thick finger, traversing the blank space, seemed to emphasize this fact.
"Nothing there," said Singleton, dipping his hand in the box again.
"Nothing that jumps to the eye." Grindley laid letter and envelope on the floor by the tracing-paper. Out of a shallow cardboard box, full of numbered films, Singleton had briskly helped himself to one after another. He held each in turn up to the light—held the first two so that Grindley could see them.
"Tokeepsuch things! It's the kind of extraordinarily rash things they do." A look of understanding passed between the two secret-service men.
"They?" inquired Lady McIntyre, and as no one answered, "Rash?" She turned her helpless eyes on Napier. "What a world to live in, when to take a little picnic snap-shots is 'rash'!"
"You have a dark room? She develops her own photographs?"
Lady McIntyre swung her ear-rings.
While Singleton was running rapidly through the picture series, Grindley took out a book—a leather-covered book, with a lock.
"A diary, that is, just like mine," said Lady McIntyre. "Her diary had a lock, too," she said. But the fact did not save this one from desecration. Off came the lock at the edge of the chisel, and Grindley was bending his head over pages of exquisite writing. That it was German, seemed in no wise to disconcert Grindley. "Plain sailing," was his comment as he handed the book over to Singleton, who, with a kind of affectionate regret, put down the two films he had been studying side by side. "Very instructive, seenseriatim," he remarked, as he swept them toward the case, and took the diary.
Whether it was a fellow feeling for this private chronicle with the lock like hers, yet so ineffectual, certainly the sight of Greta's diary being passed from one strange hand to another made a sudden breach in Lady McIntyre's hard-won self-control.
"How youcan!" She leaned forward to cast the three words into the dull face again over Greta's box. Grindley's hand was about to close upon a little gray silk bag which had fallen out of an envelope. Lady McIntyre was before him.
"I'll see what that is!" she said.
Napier winced in anticipation of the undignified struggle to which Lady McIntyre's action had laid her open.
But not at all. Grindley's good manners suffered him to make only the most civil protest.
"I wouldn't, really. Please, take care!"
Too late. Lady McIntyre had untied the drawstring and opened the innocent-looking, feminine thing, only to draw back, choking. Then she sneezed loudly. She sneezed without intermission, as she held the bag out at arm's length.
"Wha-atchew! What-atchew—isit? Chew!"
Grindley, handling the bag with caution, returned it to the thick waxed envelope and added that to his collection. Singleton had looked up an instant from his reading, sympathy in his attitude, a gleam of entertainment in his eye at recognition of this new object lesson in the unadvisability of a lady's poking her nose where a secret-service man warns her not to.
Napier stood anxiously over Lady McIntyre during the final paroxysm.
"What was that stuff?" he demanded of the oblivious Grindley.
"Usually snuff and cayenne," Singleton answered for him. "Harmless, unless it's flung into the eyes."
"Flung in!" gasped Lady McIntyre, receiving, as it were, full in the face her first staggering suspicion.
"If you get only a whiff, the thing to do is to gargle and bathe the eyes," Singleton advised politely, and fell upon his book again, like some intrigued reader of romance.
Lady McIntyre declined to go away to bathe and gargle. She sat wiping her streaming eyes and letting loose an occasional sneeze.
There still remained in the boot box, as Napier had seen, two modest-sized receptacles to be examined. One was of nickel or silver; the other, a trifle larger, appeared, as Grindley lifted it out, to be an ordinary japanned cash-box, with the key sticking in the lock.
"Achew! chew! chew!" said Lady McIntyre, trying to clear her watery vision, the better to verify the fact that the box was full of English gold—most of it done up in amateur rouleaux of twenty pounds each, sealed at each end.
Surprising, but not criminal, Lady McIntyre's inflamed face seemed to say. "Maybe," she wedged the words in between a couple of less violent sneezes; already she was steadying herself after the shock of knowing that gray bag of devilment in Greta's possession—"maybe she is custodian—others'—savings—some refugee."
Grindley had tumbled the rouleaux and the loose gold into his handkerchief. He knotted it and threw it into his case.
"I shall tell her!" Lady McIntyre's still streaming eyes arraigned him. "She shall know you've got it."
"Of course," said Grindley.
"And now for the jewel case." Reluctantly Singleton closed the diary.
But it wasn't a jewel case. No close observer needed Singleton's, "This is what you were looking for," to recognize Grindley's satisfaction at discovering a spirit lamp and alcohol flask fitted neatly into the box.
"It's to heat curling-tongs," said Lady McIntyre in her rasped and clouded voice. "That's all it is. Nothing in this world but the arrangement to heat her tongs. Every woman—"
"Miss von Schwarzenberg doesn't curl her hair with tongs," said the astonishing Grindley, a man you wouldn't have expected to know if a woman's hair were green and dressed in pot-hooks.
"How do you know she doesn't use tongs?" Napier could not forbear asking. Grindley, working with the lamp, made no reply.
"Do we understand you to say she does curl her hair with tongs?" Singleton inquired politely of Lady McIntyre. It was clear to the pair that part of Singleton's affair was to transact his business with as little friction as possible, to establish coöperation in the most unlikely quarters. "Youcan'tsay she uses tongs," he said persuasively.
"I certainly cannot say she doesn't. Neither can you." Lady McIntyre stuck to her point as if she knew what hung upon it.
Grindley had unscrewed the wick cap. If she didn't use tongs, certainly she had used the lamp; the wick was charred. He lifted out the receiver and shook it. "Nearly full," he said.
Singleton was rapidly going through the few things left in the bottom of the safe. Several leather jewel cases. They revealed a truly astonishing store—chiefly diamonds.
"She can have these back at once," Singleton said, setting the cases down by Lady McIntyre's feet.
Grindley still hung over the alcohol lamp. He had found narrow metal bands folded down at the sides of the box. They were supports, as he proved by setting them upright, and in relation to yet others, with which they formed an overhead platform above that wired bed, which was so much more extensive than was necessary to supply the flame for the heating of tongs. But Grindley seemed to find no flaw in the arrangement. He made libation of alcohol, and felt for a match. As the wavering blue flame played along the wire mattress under the tester-like frame, Grindley put out a hand for the tracing-paper.
The conviction flashed across Napier's mind, bringing with it a twinge of acute distaste: Grindley's enjoying himself. Not that the vacant eyes achieved vision, nor the blunt features keenness. But Grindley was given up to a pleasureable absorption; an intentness that should not—considering his task—and yet somehow did insist on seeming less of the intellect than of the sensory nerves. It was the same look you will see on the face of the heavy feeder. A slight congestion; a gloss, as of a faint perspiration. Napier was sure that, apart from Grindley's professional stake in the issue of the hour, he was living through highly compensatory moments, as he watched the heat bringing out marks in the tracing paper. Very slowly the faint lines blackened.... Grindley showed no impatience; nothing but that gloating, with its suggestion of sensual abandonment. During those moments of waiting, Napier struggled against the injustice of his impression. What, after all, were they looking on at? Wasn't Grindley's satisfaction the same in its lesser degree as that Champollion felt when he forced the Rosetta Stone to yield the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics? Champollion used his wits to serve the ends of learning. Grindley was using his to serve his country. Why, then, did one feel a horrible kind of guilty excitement rather than honorable pride, as the heat of Grindley's lamp brought out clean and clear an outline drawing to scale of a new system of fortification on the northern coast?
Napier could hardly repress an explosion of consternation at the sight. But the only audible sound, except a crackling of the tracing-paper, as Grindley held it up, was Lady McIntyre's bewildered, "What do you call that?"
Grindley had thrown it down for Singleton to deal with, and now the unaddressed letter was being laid on the grille. Here for some reason the invisible ink answered less reluctantly to the warmth of the blue flames' invitation. Between the wide-apart lines appeared like magic the second letter. Again that stillness, a kind of drunkenness of pleasure on Grindley's part; again Singleton's quick reaction to success; again, the instant the lamp had done the work, its abandonment by Grindley. He looked at his watch. "I suppose we mustn't go without—" He moved toward the screen.
Lady McIntyre had made no effort to read a syllable of the new writing. She sat intensely quiet, while Singleton folded the letter and blew out the lamp. All her exclamatory speech, all her fluttering motions, were as stilled as death would one day leave them. It was like the rest one takes after a prodigious journey. The distance traversed since the hat-box had been wrenched open was made as clear as though the last object in the box had been yet another lamp shedding an intenser ray. Singleton had brought out something rolled in a scarf of Roman silk. The two objects inside were a small box of cartridges and a revolver. It was then that Lady McIntyre, rising and steadying herself by the chair, showed how far she had come in these last moments. "At all events, you can't say you've found any bombs!"
"No! oh, no!" If anything could minimize the implications of tragedy evoked by the sight of a revolver among the personal possessions of a lady in England, it would be the even pleasantness of Mr. Singleton's voice. "Nothing ofthatsort."
Singleton was busy putting away a medley of things into the attaché case, while Grindley was churning up the contents of the drawers in the American wardrobe trunk with the energy that seemed so nearly passive and was so uncannily effectual. The great trunk held no papers and only the lesser trinkets. But the store of purple and fine linen! Lace and lawn, and cobweb silk, dribbled from half-open drawers. Brocade and cloth, chiffon and velvet, swung out to view on adjustable supports. And all that brave show the unappreciative Grindley dismissed with a single word, "Nothing," and back he went to La Motte's Dictionary.
Singleton picked up the jewels that had come out of the hat-box and held the cases out to Lady McIntyre.
She seemed, as she stood there steadying herself by the chair back, to have gone momentarily blind. Singleton suggested she should take care of the jewels.
"No; oh, no!" she shrank back, and then the poor soul broke into weeping. "UnderWilliam'sroof!"
Singleton slipped the jewels into the brown suit-case and led the way to the door. Grindley stood with La Motte open in the hollow of his arm. Now and then he made a note on a piece of paper, laid on the open page.
They waited for Lady McIntyre to master her tears.
"What are you meaning to do?" she demanded.
Singleton didn't hesitate an instant. The lady would be shown every consideration. Out of respect to Sir William.
"I suppose," said Lady McIntyre, with unexpected shrewdness, "it's his duty to tell me that." She turned from Napier to the man who stood there with that awful "body of conviction" in the brown suit-case.
"It will be terrible to have her here—terrible. But all the same you shall not take her to London to-night."
"I am afraid those are our instructions," Singleton answered deferentially.
"Instructions!" she echoed. "Sir William issues the instructions here. You cannot take her away till he comes home. Mr. Napier,"—she clutched at his arm—"will you ring up Sir William?"
On the other side of the threshold Grindley paused an instant and looked into the room again. Reluctantly he shut La Motte, and went back for his hat and stick.
"Oh, come away and shut the door!" wailed Lady McIntyre, casting a look of horror about the raided room. A few paces down the hall she loosed her hold on Napier and walked in front of the three men. Even before she got to her own room, she put out her hand like a blind person feeling for the door. She seemed to fall against it. It opened and hid the little figure from their sight.
Napier followed guiltily behind the brown case, glancing in at open doors, listening over the banister.
Nan! His heart suddenly stood still. There was the cap of Mercury on the chest in an angle of the lower hall.
"What is it?" asked the observant Singleton.
"She has—they have come back!" said Napier.
"Oh, no." He went on with the same light, swinging gait.
If Singleton was not, certainly the noiseless brown presence at Napier's side could not fail to be aware of the afternoon letters on a table in the hall below. The uppermost in one pile bore the American stamp. That would be addressed Miss Anne Ellis.
An undefined dread which had lurked in the dark of Napier's mind, masking itself as dislike of the man Singleton, betrayed more than a hint of its presence in an anxious speculation as to whether these men, licensed to break all laws of human dealing, ought to be left alone a moment in company with letters and telegrams, and God knew what, down there on the hall table.
"We'll go into Sir William's room and telephone him," Napier suggested.
Singleton looked at his watch.
"He's due here in about a quarter of an hour. Meanwhile, we'd better take these in out of the wet."
Napier could have sworn Singleton was studying the top letter on Miss Ellis's pile. The only ones he touched were Greta's. All the same, Napier had to put pressure on himself to avoid picking up Nan's letters and secreting them in his own pocket. He seriously considered the possibility of going out and heading off her return. He fixed an inimical eye on Grindley—Grindley, wandering about taking his bearings, La Motte still open on his arm. Now he was at the door, looking out—not for Sir William at all, as it seemed to Napier's mounting uneasiness. He was standing there looking out for Miss von Schwarzenberg's "ever loving" friend. Her "confederate," he might be capable of thinking.
Napier struggled with a vivid prevision of Nan coming back to find that ambiguous figure—Grindley—at the door. And when she knew what he stood there for, wouldn't she by every look and motion proclaim her share in the Schwarzenberg's fate?
Napier returned hastily to the man at the table.
"You have," Napier suggested, "some idea, perhaps, when Miss von Schwarzenberg is likely to be here?"
In the instant of Singleton's pause to enter a note in that little book of his, footsteps sounded on the gravel. Steps so quick and light, whose could they be but—Napier stood braced to meet the misery of this "coming back." To see her for the first time after that fleeting rapture among the rocks—to see her like this! He turned his head. Grindley put out a slow hand. "I'll take it," he said to a telegraph boy who stood there.
God!—the relief!
"You were saying, oh, yes,When." Singleton pocketed his note-book. "If nothing is altered, she'll be back with the others in an hour or so. Say, a little after six."
"From Sir William McIntyre's point of view mightn't it be better to—a—detach Miss von Schwarzenberg from the rest of the party? To get some of what can't fail to be—a very disagreeable business over without—a—"
Singleton eyed him.
"Not a bad suggestion." He pulled out a time-table. "What do you say, Grindley, to doing without another night in that beast of an inn?"
Grindley was at his elbow, holding the orange-brown envelope, superscription uppermost. "Schwarzenberg," all three read. Singleton dropped his time-table and laid hold of the envelope.
"No, you'd tear it." Grindley's thick soft thumb was already gently inserted under the flap. He persuaded it. He put the envelope in his side pocket and opened the paper slip. As the two secret-service men closed together to read the message, Napier made a movement for which he derided himself, an instinctive drawing out of range, as though the telegram were the private property of these men.
Singleton dropped his end of the paper with an impatient, "Just exactly as interesting as usual." He gathered Miss Greta's letters in a pile and opened the brown case to receive them. The case was now so full that, in order to include the dictionary abandoned for the moment by Grindley, Singleton opened the fat volume in the middle, and spatchcocked it face down on the journal and the jewel boxes. Even so, the case refused to shut. Singleton turned La Motte out.
"What's the good of it!"
"M'm." The sound Grindley made reminded one of a child mouthing a sweet. But his vacant eyes never left the telegram.
"You haven't told me,"—with difficulty Napier controlled his impatience—"I gather"—he went on—"that you know where to lay your hand on Miss von Schwarzenberg?"
"Tea telephoned for by Mr. Grant, Golden Lion, Newton Hackett," Singleton answered, still readjusting the contents of the case.
"Shall I see if I can get her on the telephone?"
Singleton hesitated. Over his shoulder he looked round at Napier with the faintest possible trace of a smile.
"Just as you like."
"Yes, it's I, Gavan Napier. Speaking from Lamborough."
She was surprised, greatly, you'd say pleasantly, surprised. Had Napier not stopped her, she would have been welcoming, in spite of the fact conveyed by that subtle inflection which tells the experienced ear that the speaker at the other end of the wire is not alone.
"Don't use names," Napier warned. "Could you get away from your party and return here at once?"
"What's happened?" the voice came sharply back.
"You might say Lady McIntyre wants you. She isn't ill. And she would specially like the party not to be broken up. The motor can go back for the others. One moment! Could you—use your influence to preventanybodycoming with you? Any one at all?"
After a second's pause the voice came pleasantly:
"The others have begun tea already.Famished.But I don't mind waiting to have mine with ... perhaps with you! Good-by, dear—"
Napier nearly dropped the receiver.
"—dearLady McIntyre."
Before he rang off, he stepped back as far as the cord on the receiver allowed him to go. To the very threshold of the telephone room. He had suddenly remembered Nan's letters. Had they dared—?
He could see the two quite plainly, Grindley with a glass at his eye, studying the telegram, with Greta's dictionary between them. The message was in French, then. A sharp pricking of curiosity brought Napier back into the hall.
Grindley folded Miss Greta's telegram, returned it to its envelope, and stuck down the flap. Then he laid it, address uppermost, in the empty space between Lady McIntyre's letters and those of Miss Ellis, picked up the brown case, and passed Singleton, with a murmured, "Back in time."
"Perishing for a pipe," was his companion's comment to Napier, as the stout figure turned off among the shrubberies. "Great person, Grindley!"
Singleton took a letter off Miss Ellis's pile.
"How much isshe—the American—in this, should you say?"
"You're too good at your job," retorted Napier, "to imagine she's within a thousand miles of being 'in it.'"
"Oh, you think that?"
His look drew a sudden stricture round Napier's heart.
Singleton stood there in the middle of the hall, facing the open door, and still, as though he had the smallest right to touch anything of hers, he held Miss Anne Ellis's letter in his hand.
"Something must have happened to Sir William," he said.
"Puncture," suggested Napier, all his energies concentrated for the moment on suppressing every outward sign of concern about the fate of the letter. He had forced his eyes away from it. Yet, wherever he looked, he was more aware of that white square in Singleton's hands than of anything else in the hall.
But Napier had pulled himself together with a strong hand. He mustn't lose an instant; he shied away from formulating even in secret the idea of which Singleton's mind must be disabused. He got only as far as to ask himself, with a ghastly inner sinking, just what danger was there—could there conceivably be—of Nan's being inadvertently caught in the net he, Gavan Napier, had helped to spread?Nan!He leaned hard against the table. Of course—he told himself—of course, they'd find nothing, nothing in the world to implicate Nan. But the shock, the wound! How she'd loathe this England! He sat down heavily.
Singleton came sauntering back, the long chin in one hand, the overbrilliant eyes on Napier. To make an enemy of this man, in the present universal instability of equilibrium, wouldn't it be a stupid as well as dangerous mistake?
"Smoke?" suggested Napier. He felt for his cigar case.
Singleton didn't mind if he did. As he sat down on the other side of the table, he dropped Miss Ellis's letter on the pile.
Oh, but the letter looked well on the table! It suddenly occurred to Napier, lightly slapping his pockets—what had he done with those cigars?—there was something not only attractive about Singleton, but downright likeable.
"It must be a curious life, yours," he said.
"Well, you know how it is yourself."
"I know?" It was one thing to leave off hating him, quite another to ally Gavan Napier with the underground work of the world of spies.
"Nous pêchons aujourd'hui des plus gros poissons, surtout à,"—he dropped out as lightly as a smoke-ring the final words, "Gull Island."
Napier, leaning forward to take back the burning match, very nearly fell off his chair.
"What doyouknow about—"
"Oh, Gull Island is one of our secret-service pets," Singleton went on, still in French—though it seemed the height of improbability that, had he spoken in English, any unseen listener could have distinguished words falling in the voice you would say was low by nature rather than by caution. "Jolly little place, Gull Island. I was there last month."
"Comment!" Napier said, accepting the medium chosen by his interlocutor. "You mean before I—"
"Oh, yes, two weeks before you reported. You didn't, so far as I remember,"—he seemed to indicate a flaw or even a suspicious circumstance—"you didn't connect this woman with it."
"What woman?"
"Oh, then thereismore than one?"
"Oh, see here,"—Napier's patience, perhaps even his self-control, was wearing thin—"what's the use of going on like this? You know there's only one suspicious person hereabouts. What you couldn't know is that I wrote from Scotland a full and complete statement."
"Who to?"
"To Sir William!"
"That was before you were warned?"
"Warned?"
"To keep the Gull Island business to yourself."
Before Napier could bring out his slightly annoyed defense, Singleton went on: "I wouldn't have dreamed of broaching the matter, if I hadn't just got my instructions to meet you in London for the express purpose of telling you that the importance of Gull Island isn't a thing of the past." He waited while Napier digested the news in a wondering silence.
"In your report to headquarters you didn't, I gather, mention the lady," Singleton persisted.
"Why should I? So far as she was concerned I had only my unsupported suspicions to go on. I thought it only fair to Sir William to leave the initiativethereto him."
"I see. It was perhaps the more convenient thing to do."
"It wasn't at all convenient," Napier assured him with asperity. "I got into such particularly hot water over my case against the lady that I don't at this moment know whether I am still private secretary to Sir William McIntyre or not."
"Why is that?"
"She persuaded him that I was, to put it mildly, salving my wounded feelings. Oh, she's—" Napier jumped up, and went to the door.
"Yes, she is," Singleton's voice sounded an amused agreement.
"Whatis she?" Napier demanded, turning round. "Does anybody know?"
"Well, what do you think we're for?"
Napier stood there, an embodied interrogation. How closely did it touch Nan Ellis, the knowledge this man had?
"We've kept an eye on her for some time. She has been unconsciously—" Singleton flicked his cigar-ash—"of considerable use to us. Oh, she's well known. Devils for Pforzheim and Engleberg."
"Engleberg? Who is Engleberg?"
"The older one, who called himself Carl Pforzheim. A slim pair, those two!"
"He got away?"
Singleton smiled. "One got away—Carl. Ernst is—extremely safe."
The thought of Lady McIntyre came to Napier, along with the horror of the picture Singleton had evoked; intimates of Kirklamont, donors of Boris and Ivan; Mr. Ernst, in prison waiting for the firing squad; Mr. Carl showing his "nice teeth" in a rictus of terror before turning to take McClintock's knife in his throat.
"There's no call to make a mystery of this little Schwarzenberg affair," Singleton was saying. "The woman is better known in Brussels. Better known still in Cincinnati, Ohio." Singleton smiled. "She has a great reputation in a certain suburb of that semi-German city. The good people of New Bonn are proud of her. She has come on so."
"Come on?"
"Oh, she began to 'come on' from the moment she arrived, twenty years ago, at the age of twelve."
"You don't mean she's thirty-two?"
"Thirty-three, to be exact. She came from a suburb of Berlin with an older sister, to help in the patriarchal family of the Cincinnati uncle and aunt."
"The millionaire uncle?"
Singleton's nod of pleasant indulgence accompanied the more exact information.
"He'd laid by money enough to start a little beer garden. The older sister soon went out to service. This one insisted on going to school. But she helped in the beer garden between whiles. Made a friend of one of the habitués, a fiddler in the local band. She sang for the beer garden customers, and they threw her dimes. At fourteen she got an engagement at the little German theater. She sent home the passage money for a brother. Instead of putting him to a trade, she put him to school. This girl of fifteen. The next year she sent for another brother.Même jeu.Oh, she's been very decent to her family. But the voice of great souls appears always to have been Miss Schwarz's undoing. Her voice was unformed. She forced it. Broke it. At eighteen an end to hopes of great operatic career. A year or so later she went on the stage. Played in German a couple of seasons. Graduated into English. Then there's a goodish interval which we haven't yet filled. Nearly six years, I make it. When she next comes to the surface, she had fallen in with Pforzheim at Washington, and was falling out with him in Paris. The Brussels' Secret Service had employed him on that Duc de Berry case.Shedid the work. Pforzheim, as usual, got the credit, and naturally most of the cash. She needs an awful lot to keep her going—this woman. They quarreled over the amount. She washed her hands of the job and of him, and back she goes to America. Out of the glare and excitement of Paris and a partnership in Pforzheim's plottings, to—what do you suppose? To teach music, of all things! In San Francisco, of all places! In a private family!" Singleton laughed. "These Ellises!" He nodded at Miss Anne's letters. "Again and again we've traced Greta Schwarz doing this and that for the International Bureau, being successful and well paid, and suddenly chucking the whole thing and going back to respectability and dullness. An inversion of the desire of the moth for the flame. The desire of the butterfly to labor, to store honey and esteem!"
Napier brought him back to the point. "Now that you've landed Pforzheim, any more use for her?"
"None on earth."
"But if in this case she's been only Pforzheim's tool, is the evidence enough—?"
Singleton nodded.
"Her neck's in the noose. You don't believe her neck's in the noose?"
The smile was ugly. It gave a certain sportsman's pleasure to Napier's reply.
"She's a very clever person—is Miss von Schwarzenberg."
"Well, my experience with all these people," returned Singleton, easily, "is that the cleverest do the rashest things. Who takes care of Pforzheim's tracery of fortifications? Pforzheim? Not he. This woman, with twice his wits. And what do you think of her setting down in that idiotic diary full reports of conversations among officials? Some at dinner, some overheard. And do you think Number Eighteen—that is Pforzheim—do you think he was going to run the risk of having code messages traced to him? Not a bit of it. The compromising messages come to her."
"How do you know?"
Singleton dropped his long fingers on the orange envelope and played a brief tattoo.
"We stopped another of the same sort, signed in her name, this morning at the local post-office."
"And you could read it?"
"Anybody could read it. Order on an Amsterdam broker to buy Tarapaca nitrates."
"And what did that tell you?"
"Absolutely nothing. We've tapped messages of the same sort before."
"Then you are no forrader."
"We weren't when we got here this afternoon." Although the conversation had been carried on in low-voiced French, Singleton leaned over the table and dropped out the next sentence in a tone that barely escaped the suspicion-stirring whisper, "Grindley found a French dictionary in her writing-table."
"What good did that do you?"
"All the good in the world." Singleton's face shone with the good it did him. "You see," he went on, in that careless-sounding undertone, "the hitch was we couldn't hit on the code. That's why we've been giving her rope."
"And now?"
"Now—?" In a flash of pantomime Singleton with one hand suggested the knotting round the throat. His quick fingers carried the invisible cord above his head. He dangled the phantom felon in the air. "And the beauty of it is, she's done it herself."
"I wonder," said Napier.
"You wouldn't if you knew Grindley!" Singleton smiled comfortably as he lay back in the high carved chair. "Frightfully intelligent boy, Grindley. You see,"—suddenly he bent over the table again—"it's like this. They send about a devilish lot of their information in the form of brokers' orders. I dare say, if you've noticed, she'll pretend to read the 'Financial Times.'"
He waited only a second for the verification Napier withheld. But the familiar picture sprang up at call: Miss Greta half coquettish, half girlishly—appealing, "I must see what's happened to my poor little earnings." Sir William amused, pleasantly malicious, "As if you'd know, even if they told you! You'd far better ask me."
"Thank you immensely, but women oughtn't to be so dreadfully dependent. I'd like tomakemyself understand. Perhaps in time—"
And Sir William's laughter: "When rivers run uphill and kittens cry to-whitt, to-whoo!"
Singleton had taken out a note-book and scribbled two or three lines.
"She'll telegraph something like that." He held the book open on the table under Napier's eyes. "She wouldn't care a button if the post-office people gave that up or whose hands it fell into."
Certainly in Napier's hands it would have made Miss Greta no trouble.
"You might call it stupid," was his comment.
"Exactly. Nobody could be expected to see danger to the state in an order to buy Nepaul rice or Sumatra cigars. It's all right and runs on greased rails, till Grindley comes along. He turns over that La Motte of hers, till he notices some minute pencil-marks on one of the green advertisement pages at the back. The marks were so small that no eyes but Grindley's would have noticed them at all. And even Grindley couldn't read them without a magnifying glass." Singleton leaned over suddenly till he could command the avenue, stretching, sun-flecked, empty to the gates.
"Do you always hear the motor before it gets to the plantation?"
"Always."
"Well, the kind of thing that came out under the glass was: 'Market dull—Ascertain R—activity.' R," interpreted Singleton, "meaning Hosyth, of course. 'Prices falling—Leaving Southampton. Advise purchase—Report to Seventy-Six.'
"Seventy-six is the number of the German agent at Amsterdam. We've learned a good deal since we discovered that is where seventy-six hangs out. This message, for instance,"—he nodded at the one between them on the table—"says, 'Advise immediate purchase Erie at 22-1/4—3/4 and steel 129-5/8, market rising.' It's clear, according to the La Motte code, that something's got to be reported instantly to the German secret service agent at Amsterdam. The question is what? Even if we intercepted the message, we shouldn't be any the wiser. Or, rather, we shouldn't have been, if Grindley hadn't gone juggling with the numbers of the stock quotations till it occurred to him, after trying the thing twenty other ways." He stopped.
"Yes," Napier threw in. "I've been wondering why you tell me all this."
His smile was slightly abstracted.
"It's all right, I thought I heard a motor," said Singleton. He met Napier's eyes. "It's my business to know men, and before it was my business I knew you." That was the sole reference made to the Oxford episode. "Grindley's got an idea," Singleton went on and his face reflected the brilliance of it, "that the consonants in the occasional short-code words interpolated into some of the messages—words like Tubu, and so on—stand for the class of ship the submarines are to look out for. Tubu equals Torpedo boat. Kreuzer, Kleinkreuzer, Zerstorer, and so on, are indicated, we think now, in the same way."
Napier made no pretense at sharing Singleton's delight in these speculations.
"All this information," he exclaimed, "going back and forth with absolute impunity!"
"Until to-day," Singleton breathed out from full lungs. "Great day this for the service!"
But Napier sat appalled. No ship to leave our harbors, but its character and course might be known to the enemy lying in wait! He began to believe things he'd scoffed at. It was true, then, the Germans had coded in their secret-service ciphers every naval base, every ammunition center, every camp, every war-vessel of the British fleet. He said as much, with raging in his heart.
"And while ship after ship, crew after crew, goes down, what isoursecret service doing!"
One member of it was blowing smoke-rings. Not till the supply of smoke gave out, did Singleton fall back on words:
"You hear very little about the English secret service, and you hear a lot about the German. That, to begin with, is an advantage, greater than you can appreciate. I don't propose to subtract from it. But there's no law against my talking about the German system. Their greatest technical flaw is that they lose themselves in a wilderness of detail. Their men will know all about the trajectory and penetration of the fourteen-inch gun, and they'll understand so little the men who make the guns that our quarrels among ourselves, our industrial unrest, is taken to mean that we're ready to consent to 'a German peace.' They'll report reams—we've seen 'em, got 'em docketed in our drawers—reams about the ordnance factories of the Argyle works. But as for the new projectile we're turning out a few hundred yards away, they'll have no more idea ofthat—till it goes whistling and roaring through their compact formations—than they have that the money they're still secretly supplying to Pforzheim comes straight to our Intelligence Department. All the same, where the Germans fail isn't in brains. Trouble with the ruck of 'em is, they go from the extreme of sentimentality at one end, to the extreme of brutality at the other. Pforzheim! A sort of modern Werther, with a capacity for cruelty that would turn a South Sea cannibal sick. This woman, too. Risk her own life and lose Pforzheim his, colossal business in hand, and goes on like the heroine of a shilling shocker. Can't resist collecting all the silly 'properties.' Simply dotes on the paraphernalia, pistol, and what not. One of the unwritten rules of the service: 'Make no memoranda. Carry no documents; only by rare exception carry arms.' She goes putting down compromising details, in a letter, for the amateurish pleasure of airing her 'inside knowledge' of the British Cabinet, and making use of invisible ink. No self-respecting British spy would be caught dead with most of the truck she'd collected in that box."
Napier had the very soundest conviction that, however poorly Singleton thought, or pretended to think, of Miss Greta's qualifications, he had set a guard of some sort at every possible avenue of escape. The woman was already as much a prisoner as any badger in the bottom of a bag. "If she's a specimen of the amateur," Napier said, "Heaven save us from the professional!"
Singleton laughed. "Heaven would need to look lively. I'd hate to be the custodian of damaging secrets with a fellow like Grindley about. You'll see." He struck his fist on the table. "A hundred pound sterling to a German pfennig, Grindley'll come back with that message from the Dutch agent neatly decoded. Oh, Grindley's immense!" Singleton rolled one long leg over the other, luxuriating in Grindley's immensity. "We aren't supposed to know each other—Grindley and I. But who wouldn't know Grindley! As a matter of fact, I introduced him to the chief, and the chief luckily isn't a stickler for the continental rules in this business. We English humanize it. What's the result? We totally mystify the rule-ridden Hun, and we've got the most efficient secret service in the world."
"Have we?" Napier started involuntarily at the sound of the motor turning off the high road and running now through the plantation with a muffled hum. "Here comes the—amateur!"
No acumen was required to read the fact that, in Napier's opinion, Singleton underestimated the noxious power of the amateur agent.
"I don't deny,"—the secret-service man stood up, but he dropped his voice to a lower register, as though the invisible comer were already at the door—"I'm not for a moment denying that this woman can do a certain amount of harm. She's got to be suppressed. But think of what shemightdo! She's had every opportunity, and she'll always fall short."
"Not ruthless enough?"
"Oh, she can be as ruthless as you please,"—Singleton for some reason had crossed the hall. He stood leaning against the wall near the billiard-room. "She could put a bullet in you nicely, after she'd blinded you with cayenne. But,"—Singleton shook his head—"she hasn't the right standards."
"Oh, standards?" echoed Napier. It seemed a queer word.
"At heart," said Singleton, "she has longings, as I read per record—ineradicable longings—for, what do you think? Respectability!" He smiled and then shook his fine head. "To be any good as a spy you must be either aristocrat—a perfectly satisfying law unto yourself, or you must becanaille. This woman—she'sbourgeoiseto the core, and a Romantic to boot. There doesn't exist a more fatal combination. I tell you,"—he stood erect—"Greta Schwarz is done for.Kaput!"
"She doesn't look it." Napier, leaning over, had caught sight of the car.
Gliding round the drive, the handsome occupant visibly luxuriating in the comfort and elegance of Lady McIntyre's limousine, Greta von Schwarzenberg lay back against the dove-colored cushions, with only her heightened color to show her the least stirred by the unexpected summons. Or was the color there, like a couple of flags, hung out in honor of Napier's return?
"Ecoutez!" Singleton's head appeared an instant out of the drawing-room door. "There's just one thing missing in that box of tricks upstairs—pinch of white powder. You must look out for that if we don't want a corpse on our hands."
"Imust look out? See here—"
Singleton's head vanished.
Greta smiled at him.
"What has happened?" another would have demanded, on sight of Napier's face; not Miss Greta. She paused on the step of the motor, calmly giving the chauffeur directions about going back for the others. "Nice to see you home again." She held out her hand to Napier.
He led the way into the hall.
"You look rather disturbed," she commented drily.
Disturbed, indeed! Who wouldn't at finding such a business shifted on his shoulders? "We expected Sir William before this,"—Napier's hesitation was only outward. Inwardly he was cursing with extreme fluency. "The train service is horribly disorganized."
"Everything is disorganized," responded Miss Greta, drawing off her glove. She caught sight of her telegram. The heavy, white fingers paused in the act of opening it. A change, quick, subtle, came over her face. "Some one has been tampering with this!" She spoke in a sudden, harsh voice, Napier had never heard before. He was conscious that guilt was printed large on his countenance.
"Yes, it's been tampered with." He in his turn spoke loud enough for the words to reach Singleton.
"Hush!" said Miss Greta, to his astonishment. "Come—" she led the way across the hall, toward the drawing-room.
"I must wait here, for Sir William," said Napier, lamely.
Miss Greta stood looking at him an instant, then she took the telegram out of the envelope and glanced at it. After a moment's reflection she folded it up, replaced it in the envelope, folded the envelope small, and thrust it in her belt.
"You'd better tell me," she said in an undertone, "what has been going on." As Napier hesitated, her growing uneasiness got the better of her. "I'll ask Lady McIntyre." She went quickly toward the staircase.
"No, no, come back." He waited till she turned. "There's been some one—some one was sent down from London to—look into things."
Wide and innocent, the china-blue eyes were on him. "To look into what things?"
"Yours."
"Mine? What on earth for?" She smiled, divided, it would seem, between diversion and stark bewilderment.
For a second, Napier forgot the man in the next room. "I'm afraid it's all up, Miss Greta." He had never called her "Miss Greta" before, never spoken so gently.
She came over to the table. "And why," she asked in a level voice, "do you thinkthat, Mr. Gavan?" She had never used his Christian name before.
"They've found—what they were looking for."
"And what were they? Not"—she drew herself up suddenly—"not thatthatmatters," she said with a towering contempt. "The thing thatdoesmatter isn't that in these terrible timesallforeigners are suspect. The thing that matters is that Lady McIntyre and you—youshould allow strange people to—" Her quivering lips could form no more for the moment. She pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. "Were you present when they—"
He nodded.
"How youcould!" From a great height she dropped contempt on him. And she had scorn to spare for the men of the secret service. "They must be easily satisfied! What do they think they have found in my poor solitary trunk?"
It was perhaps better to go through with the odious business and get it over. "They found your journal."
"What of that?"
"Transcripts of conversations at official dinners—"
"What of that?AlwaysI set down what interesting people say. Every diarist has done that since diaries began. Nan does it. Your friend, Julian Grant, does it. I've done it since I was twelve."
An effect of poise about her, a delicate effrontery in her tone, steeled Napier to ask: "And have you also, since you were twelve, made a practice of photographing fortifications?"
"Fortifications!Oh, this is the very lunacy of suspicion!"
"There was also a tracing of the most important of our new coast defenses."
"Tracing? What is tracing?" As Napier did not answer, she went on, "I have never seen such a thing."
"No, you wouldn't see it, not till you had heated the paper."
"You mean,"—she gasped—"something in what they call invisible ink? Who has put that among my papers?" The pink in her face had not so much faded as deepened to a sickly bluish magenta, like the discoloration of certain roses before the petals fall. Napier looked away. She stood there, pouring her cautious, low-voiced scorn on some secret enemy. It wasn't the first time in history this kind of villainy had been practised on an innocent person, a person whomsomebody—who was it?—(she clutched his arm)—whom somebody wanted to get into trouble, to get out of the way. The congested face looked swollen and patchy. Minute bubbles of saliva frothed at one corner of the mouth. Suddenly she faced about and made a rush for the stairs. But Napier, at her flying heels, caught her half-way up. He seized her by the shoulder, and he did it roughly, anticipating a struggle.
Instantly she was still. She dropped her cheek against his ungentle fingers. "Oh, Gavan, save me!"