“But he was not entirely quiet in his mind about it. He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and his soft rubber nose worked.
“'Now, Governor,' he said, 'I'm leery about jokers—I gotta be. I don't want any string to this money. If I git it I want to go and blow it in. I don't want you to hand me a roll an' then start any reformin' stunt—a-holdin' of it in trust an' a probation officer a-pussyfootin' me, or any funny business. I want the wad an' a clear road to the bright lights, with no word passed along to pinch me. Do I git it?'
“'It's a trade!' I said.
“'O. K.,' he answered, and he took up the bucket. He began at the door and poured the water carefully on the hard tramped earth. When the bucket was empty he brought another and another. Finally about midway of the floor space he stopped.
“'Here it is!' he said.
“I was following beside him, but I saw nothing to justify his words.
“'Why do you think the plates are buried here?' I said.
“'Look at the air bubbles comin' up, Governor,' he answered.”
Walker stopped, then he added:
“It's a thing which I did not know until that moment, but it's the truth. If hard-packed earth is dug up and repacked air gets into it, and if one pours water on the place air bubbles will come up.”
He did not go on, and I flung at him the big query in his story.
“And you found the plates there?”
“Yes, Sir Henry,” he replied, “in the false bottom of an old steamer trunk.”
“And the hobo got the money?”
“Certainly,” he answered. “I put it into his hand, and let him go with it, as I promised.”
Again he was silent, and I turned toward him in astonishment.
“Then,” I said, “why did you begin this story by saying the hobo faked you? I don't see the fake; he found the plates and he was entitled to the reward.”
Walker put his hand into his pocket, took out a leather case, selected a paper from among its contents and handed it to me. “I didn't see the fake either,” he said, “until I got this letter.”
I unfolded the letter carefully. It was neatly written in a hand like copper plate and dated Buenos Aires.
DEAR COLONEL WALKER: When I discovered that you were planting an agent on every ship I had to abandon the plates and try for the reward. Thank you for the five thousand; it covered expenses.
Very sincerely yours,
D. Mulehaus.
It was a remark of old Major Carrington that incited this adventure.
“It is some distance through the wood—is she quite safe?”
It was a mere reflection as he went out. It was very late. I do not know how the dinner, or rather the after-hours of it, had lengthened. It must have been the incomparable charm of the woman. She had come, this night, luminously, it seemed to us, through the haze that had been on her—the smoke haze of a strange, blighting fortune. The three of us had been carried along in it with no sense of time; my sister, the ancient Major Carrington and I.
He turned back in the road, his decayed voice whipped by the stimulus of her into a higher note.
“Suppose the village coachman should think her as lovely as we do—what!”
He laughed and turned heavily up the road a hundred yards or so to his cottage set in the pine wood. I stood in the road watching the wheels of the absurd village vehicle, the yellow cut-under, disappear. The old Major called back to me; his voice seemed detached, eerie with the thin laugh in it.
“I thought him a particularly villainous-looking creature!”
It was an absurd remark. The man was one of the natives of the island, and besides, the innkeeper was a person of sound sense; he would know precisely about his driver.
I should not have gone on this adventure but for a further incident.
When I entered the house my sister was going up the stair, the butler was beyond in the drawing-room, and there was no other servant visible. She was on the first step and the elevation gave precisely the height that my sister ought to have received in the accident of birth. She would have been wonderful with those four inches added—lacking beauty, she had every other grace!
She spoke to me as I approached.
“Winthrop,” she said, “what was in the package that Madame Barras carried away with her tonight?”
The query very greatly surprised me. I thought Madame Barras had carried this package away with her several evenings before when I had put her English bank-notes in my box at the local bank. My sister added the explanation which I should have been embarrassed to seek, at the moment.
“She asked me to put it somewhere, on Tuesday afternoon.... It was forgotten, I suppose.... I laid it in a drawer of the library table.... What did it contain?”
I managed an evasive reply, for the discovery opened possibilities that disturbed me.
“Some certificates, I believe,” I said.
My sister made a little pretended gesture of dismay.
“I should have been more careful; such things are of value.”
Of value indeed! The certificates in Madame Barras' package, that had lain about on the library table, were gold certificates of the United States Treasury—ninety odd of them, each of a value of one thousand dollars! My sister went:
“How oddly life has tossed her about.... She must have been a mere infant at Miss Page's. The attachment of incoming tots to the older girls was a custom.... I do not recall her.... There was always a string of mites with shiny pigtails and big-eyed wistful faces. The older girls never thought very much about them. One has a swarm-memory, but individuals escape one. The older girl, in these schools, fancied herself immensely. The little satellite that attached itself, with its adoration, had no identity. It had a nickname, I think, or a number.... I have forgotten. We minimized these midges out of everything that could distinguish them.... Fancy one of these turning up in Madame Barras and coming to me on the memory of it.”
“It was extremely lucky for her,” I said. “Imagine arriving from the interior of Brazil on the invitation of Mrs. Jordan to find that lady dead and buried; with no friend, until, by chance, one happened on your name in the social register, and ventured on a school attachment of which there might remain, perhaps a memory only on the infant's side.”
My sister went on up the stair.
“I am glad we happened to be here, and, especially, Winthrop, if you have been able to assist her.... She is charming.”
Charming was the word descriptive of my sister, for it is a thing of manner from a nature elevated and noble, but it was not the word for Madame Barras. The woman was a lure. I mean the term in its large and catholic sense. I mean the bait of a great cosmic impulse—the most subtle and the most persistent of which one has any sense.
The cunning intelligences of that impulse had decked her out with every attractiveness as though they had taken thought to confound all masculine resistance; to sweep into their service those refractory units that withheld themselves from the common purpose. She was lovely, as the aged Major Carrington had uttered it—great violet eyes in a delicate skin sown with gold flecks, a skin so delicate that one felt that a kiss would tear it!
I do not know from what source I have that expression but it attaches itself, out of my memory of descriptive phrases, to Madame Barras. And it extends itself as wholly descriptive of her. You will say that the long and short of this is that I was in love with Madame Barras, but I point you a witness in Major Carrington.
He had the same impressions, and he had but one passion in his life, a distant worship of my sister that burned steadily even here at the end of life. During the few evenings that Madame Barras had been in to dinner with us, he sat in his chair beyond my sister in the drawing-room, perfect in his early-Victorian manner, while Madame Barras and I walked on the great terrace, or sat outside.
One had a magnificent sweep of the world, at night, from that terrace. It looked out over the forest of pines to the open sea.
Madame Barras confessed to the pull of this vista. She asked me at what direction the Atlantic entered, and when she knew, she kept it always in her sight.
It had a persisting fascination for her. At all times and in nearly any position, she was somehow sensible of this vista; she knew the lights almost immediately, and the common small craft blinking about. To-night she had sat for a long time in nearly utter silence here. There was a faint light on the open sea as she got up to take her leave of us; what would it be she wondered.
I replied that it was some small craft coming in.
“A fishing-boat?”
“Hardly that,” I said, “from its lights and position it will be some swifter power-boat and, I should say, not precisely certain about the channel.”
I have been drawn here into reminiscence that did not, at the time, detain me in the hall. What my sister had discovered to me, following Major Carrington's remark, left me distinctly uneasy. It was very nearly two miles to the village, the road was wholly forest and there would be no house on the way; for my father, with an utter disregard for cost, had sought the seclusion of a large acreage when he had built this absurdly elaborate villa on Mount Desert Island.
Besides I was in no mood for sleep.
And, over all probability, there might be some not entirely imaginary danger to Madame Barras. Not precisely the danger presented in Major Carrington's pleasantry, but the always possible danger to one who is carrying a sum of money about. It would be considered, in the world of criminal activities, a very large sum of money; and it had been lying here, as of no value, in a drawer of the library table since the day on which the gold certificates had arrived on my check from the Boston bank.
Madame Barras had not taken the currency away as I imagined. It was extremely careless of her, but was it not an act in character?
What would such a woman know of practical concern?
I spoke to the butler. He should not wait up, I would let myself in; and I went out.
I remember that I got a cap and a stick out of the rack; there was no element of selection in the cap, but there was a decided subconscious direction about the selection of the stick. It was a heavy blackthorn, with an iron ferrule and a silver weight set in the head; picked up—by my father at some Irish fair—a weapon in fact.
It was not dark. It was one of those clear hard nights that are not uncommon on this island in midsummer; with a full moon, the road was visible even in the wood. I swung along it with no particular precaution; I was not expecting anything to happen, and in fact, nothing did happen on the way into the village.
But in this attitude of confidence I failed to discover an event of this night that might have given the whole adventure a different ending.
There is a point near the village where a road enters our private one; skirts the border of the mountain, and, making a great turn, enters the village from the south. At this division of the road I heard distinctly a sound in the wood.
It was not a sound to incite inquiry. It was the sound of some considerable animal moving in the leaves, a few steps beyond the road. It did not impress me at the time; estrays were constantly at large in our forests in summer, and not infrequently a roaming buck from the near preserves. There was also here in addition to the other roads, an abandoned winter wood-road that ran westward across the island to a small farming settlement. Doubtless I took a slighter notice of the sound because estrays from the farmers' fields usually trespassed on us from this road.
At any rate I went on. I fear that I was very much engrossed with the memory of Madame Barras. Not wholly with the feminine lure of her, although as I have written she was the perfection of that lure. One passed women, at all milestones, on the way to age, and kept before them one's sound estimates of life, but before this woman one lost one's head, as though Nature, evaded heretofore, would not be denied. But the weird fortune that had attended her was in my mind.
Married to Senor Barras out of the door of a convent, carried to Rio de Janeiro to an unbearable life, escaping with a remnant of her inheritance in English bank-notes, she arrives here to visit the one, old, persisting friend, Mrs. Jordan, and finds her dead! And what seemed strange, incredible beyond belief, was that this creature Barras had thought only of her fortune which he had depleted in two years to the something less than twenty thousand pounds which I had exchanged for her into our money; a mere fragment of her great inheritance.
I had listened to the story entranced with the alluring teller of it; wondering as I now wondered, on the road to the village, how anything pretending to be man could think of money when she was before his eye.
What could he buy with money that equaled her! And yet this curious jackal had seen in her only the key to a strong-box. There was behind it, in explanation, shadowed out, the glamor of an empire that Senor Barras would set up with the millions in his country of revolutions, and the enthusiasms of a foolish mother.
And yet the jackal and this wreckage had not touched her. There was no stain, no crumpled leaf. She was a fresh wonder, even after this, out of a chrysalis. It was this amazing newness, this virginity of blossom from which one could not escape.
The word in my reflection brought me up. How had she escaped from Barras?
I had more than once in my reflections pivoted on the word.
The great hotel was very nearly deserted when I entered.
There was the glow of a cigar where some one smoked, at the end of the long porch. Within, there was only a sleepy clerk.
Madame Barras had not arrived... he was quite sure; she had gone out to dinner somewhere and had not come in!
I was profoundly concerned. But I took a moment to reflect before deciding what to do.
I stepped outside and there, coming up from the shadow of the porch, I met Sir Henry Marquis.
It was chance at its extreme of favor. If I had been given the selection, in all the world, I should have asked for Sir Henry Marquis at that decisive moment.
The relief I felt made my words extravagant.
“Marquis!” I cried. “You here!”
“Ah, Winthrop,” he said, in his drawling Oxford voice, “what have you done with Madame Barras; I was waiting for her?”
I told him, in a word, how she had set out from my house—my concern—the walk down here and this result. I did not ask him at the moment how he happened to be here, or with a knowledge of our guest. I thought that Marquis was in Canada. But one does not, with success, inquire of a C.I.D. official even in his own country. One met him in the most unexpected places, unconcerned, and one would have said at leisure.
But he was concerned to-night. What I told brought him up. He stood for a moment silent. Then he said, softly, in order drat the clerk behind us might not overhear.
“Don't speak of it. I will get a light and go with you!”
He returned in a moment and we went out. He asked me about the road, was there only one way down; and I told him precisely. There was only the one road into the village and no way to miss it unless one turned into the public road at the point where it entered our private one along the mountain.
He pitched at once upon this point and we hurried back.
We had hardly a further word on the way. I was decidedly uneasy about Madame Barras by now, and Marquis' concern was hardly less evident. He raced along in his immense stride, and I had all I could manage to keep up.
It may seem strange that I should have brought such a man as Sir Henry Marquis into the search of this adventure with so little explanation of my guest or the affair. But, one must remember, Marquis was an old acquaintance frequently seen about in the world. To thus, on the spot so to speak, draft into my service the first gentleman I found, was precisely what any one would have done. It was probable, after all, that there had been some reason why the cut-under had taken the other road, and Madame Barras was quite all right.
It was better to make sure before one raised the village—and Marquis, markedly, was beyond any aid the village could have furnished. This course was strikingly justified by every after-event.
I have said that the night was not dark. The sky was hard with stars, like a mosaic. This white moonlight entered through the tree-tops and in a measure illumined the road. We were easily able to see, when we reached the point, that the cut-under had turned out into the road circling the mountain to the west of the village. The track was so clearly visible in the light, that I must have observed it had I been thinking of the road instead of the one who had set out upon it.
I was going on quickly, when Marquis stopped. He was stooping over the track of the vehicle. He did not come on and I went back.
“What is it?” I said.
He answered, still stooping above the track.
“The cut-under stopped here.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, for it seemed hardly possible to determine where a wheeled vehicle had stopped.
“It's quite clear,” he replied. “The horse has moved about without going on.”
I now saw it. The hoof-marks of the horse had displaced the dust where it had several times changed position.
“And that's not all,” Marquis continued. “Something has happened to the cut-under here!”
I was now closely beside him.
“It was broken down, perhaps, or some accident to the harness?”
“No,” he replied. “The wheel tracks are here broadened, as though they had skidded on a turn. This would mean little if the cut-under had been moving at the time. But it was not moving; the horse was standing. The cut-under had stopped.”
He went on as though in a reflection to himself.
“The vehicle must have been violently thrown about here, by something.”
I had a sudden inspiration.
“I see it!” I cried. “The horse took fright, stopped, and then bolted; there has been a run-away. That accounts for the turn out. Let's hurry!”
But Marquis detained me with a firm hand on my arm.
“No,” he said, “the horse was not running when it turned out and it did not stop here in fright. The horse was entirely quiet here. The hoof marks would show any alarm in the animal, and, moreover, if it had stopped in fright there would have been an inevitable recoil which would have thrown the wheels of the vehicle backward out of their track. No moving animal, man included, stopped by fright fails to register this recoil. We always look for it in evidences of violent assault. Footprints invariably show it, and one learns thereby, unerringly, the direction of the attack.”
He rose, his hand still extended and upon my arm.
“There is only one possible explanation,” he added. “Something happened in the cut-under to throw it violently about in the road, and it happened with the horse undisturbed and the vehicle standing still. The wheel tracks are widened only at one point, showing a transverse but no lateral movement of the vehicle.”
“A struggle?” I cried. “Major Carrington was right, Madame Barras has been attacked by the driver!”
Marquis' hand held me firmly in the excitement of that realization. He was entirely composed. There was even a drawl in his voice as he answered me.
“Major Carrington, whoever he may be,” he said, “is wrong; if we exclude a third party, it was Madame Barras who attacked the driver.”
His fingers tightened under my obvious protest.
“It is quite certain,” he continued. “Taking the position of the standing horse, it will be the front wheels of the cut-under that have made, this widened track; the wheels under the driver's seat, and not the wheels under the guest seat, in the rear of the vehicle. There has been a violent struggle in this cut-under, but it was a struggle that took place wholly in the front of the vehicle.”
He went on in his maddeningly imperturbable calm.
“No one attacked our guest, but some one, here at this precise point, did attack the driver of this vehicle.”
“For God's sake,” I cried, “let's hurry!”
He stepped back slowly to the edge of the road and the drawl in his voice lengthened.
“We do hurry,” he said. “We hurry to the value of knowing that there was no accident here to the harness, no fright to the horse, no attack on the lady, and no change in the direction which the vehicle afterwards took. Suppose we had gone on, in a different form of hurry, ignorant of these facts?”
At this point I distinctly heard again the sound of a heavy animal in the wood. Marquis also heard it and he plunged into the thick bushes. Almost immediately we were at the spot, and before us some heavy object turned in the leaves.
Marquis whipped an electric-flash out of his pocket. The body of a man, tied at the hands and heels behind with a hitching-strap, and with a linen carriage lap-cloth wound around his head and knotted, lay there endeavoring to ease the rigor of his position by some movement.
We should now know, in a moment, what desperate thing had happened!
I cut the strap, while Marquis got the lap-cloth unwound from about the man's head. It was the driver of the cut-under. But we got no gain from his discovery. As soon as his face was clear, he tore out of our grasp and began to run.
He took the old road to the westward of the island, where perhaps he lived. We were wholly unable to stop him, and we got no reply to our shouted queries except his wild cry for help. He considered us his assailants from whom, by chance, he had escaped. It was folly to think of coming up with the man. He was set desperately for the westward of the island, and he would never stop until he reached it.
We turned back into the road:
Marquis' method now changed. He turned swiftly into the road along the mountain which the cut-under had taken after its capture.
I was at the extreme of a deadly anxiety about Madame Barras.
It seemed to me, now, certain that some gang of criminals having knowledge of the packet of money had waylaid the cut-under. Proud of my conclusion, I put the inquiry to Sir Henry as we hurried along. If we weren't too late!
He stopped suddenly like a man brought up at the point of a bayonet.
“My word!” He jerked the expression out through his tightened jaws. “Has she got ninety thousand dollars of your money!” And he set out again in his long stride. I explained briefly as I endeavored to keep his pace. It was her own money, not mine, but she did in fact have that large sum with her in the cut-under on this night. I gave him the story of the matter, briefly, for I had no breath to spare over it. And I asked him what he thought. Had a gang of thieves attacked the cut-under?
But he only repeated his expression.
“My word!... You got her ninety thousand dollars and let her drive away with no eye on her!.... Such trust in the honesty of our fellow creatures!... My word!”
I had to admit the deplorable negligence, but I had not thought of any peril, and I did not know that she carried the money with her until the conversation with my sister. There was some excuse for me. I could not remember a robbery on this island.
Marquis snapped his jaws.
“You'll remember this one!” he said.
It was a ridiculous remark. How could one ever forget if this incomparable creature were robbed and perhaps murdered. But were there not some extenuating circumstances in my favor. I presented them as we advanced; my sister and I lived in a rather protected atmosphere apart from all criminal activities, we could not foresee such a result. I had no knowledge of criminal methods.
“I can well believe it,” was the only reply Marquis returned to me.
In addition to my extreme anxiety about Madame Barras I began now to realize a profound sense of responsibility; every one, it seemed, saw what I ought to have done, except myself. How had I managed to overlook it? It was clear to other men. Major Carrington had pointed it out to me as I was turning away; and now here Sir Henry Marquis was expressing in no uncertain words how negligent a creature he considered me—to permit my guest, a woman, to go alone, at night, with this large sum of money.
It was not a pleasant retrospect. Other men—the world—would scarcely hold me to a lesser negligence than Sir Henry Marquis!
I could not forbear, even in our haste, to seek some consolation.
“Do you think Madame Barras has been hurt?”
“Hurt!” he repeated. “How should Madame Barras be hurt?”
“In the robbery,” I said.
“Robbery!” and he repeated that word. “There has been no robbery!”
I replied in some astonishment.
“Really, Sir Henry! You but now assured me that I would remember this night's robbery.”
The drawl got back into his voice.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “quite so. You will remember it.”
The man was clearly, it seemed to me, so engrossed with the mystery that it was idle to interrogate him. And he was walking with a devil's stride.
Still the pointed query of the affair pressed me, and I made another effort.
“Why did these assailants take Madame Barras on with them?”
Marquis regarded me, I thought, with wonder.
“The devil, man!” he said. “They couldn't leave her behind.”
“The danger would be too great to them?”
“No,” he said, “the danger would be too great to her.”
At this moment an object before us in the road diverted our attention. It was the cut-under and the horse. They were standing by the roadside where it makes a great turn to enter the village from the south. There is a wide border to the road at this point, clear of underbrush, where the forest edges it, and there are here, at the whim of some one, or by chance, two great flat stones, one lying upon the other, but not fitting by a hand's thickness by reason of the uneven surfaces.
What had now happened was evident. The assailants of the cut-under had abandoned it here before entering the village. They could not, of course, go on with this incriminating vehicle.
The sight of the cut-under here had on Marquis the usual effect of any important evidential sign. He at once ceased to hurry. He pulled up; looked over the cut-under and the horse, and began to saunter about.
This careless manner was difficult for me at such a time. But for his assurance that Madame Barras, was uninjured it would have been impossible. I had a blind confidence in the man although his expressions were so absurdly in conflict.
I started to go on toward the village, but as he did not follow I turned back. Marquis was sitting on the flat stones with a cigarette in his fingers:
“Good heavens, man,” I cried, “you're not stopping to smoke a cigarette?”
“Not this cigarette, at any rate,” he replied. “Madame Barras has already smoked it.... I can, perhaps, find you the burnt match.”
He got the electric-flash out of his pocket, and stooped over. Immediately he made an exclamation of surprise.
I leaned down beside him.
There was a little heap of charred paper on the brown bed of pine-needles. Marquis was about to take up this charred paper when his eye caught something thrust in between the two stones. It was a handful of torn bits of paper.
Marquis got them out and laid them on the top of the flat stones under his light.
“Ah,” he said, “Madame Barras, while she smoked, got rid of some money.”
“The package of gold certificates!” I cried. “She has burned them?”
“No,” he replied, “Madame Barras has favored your Treasury in her destructive process. These are five-pound notes, of the Bank of England.”
I was astonished and I expressed it.
“But why should Madame Barras destroy notes of the Bank of England?”
“I imagine,” he answered, “that they were some which she had, by chance, failed to give you for exchange.”
“But why should she destroy them?” I went on.
“I conclude,” he drawled, “that she was not wholly certain that she would escape.”
“Escape!” I cried. “You have been assuring me all along that Madame Barras is making no effort to escape.”
“Oh, no,” he replied, “she is making every effort.”
I was annoyed and puzzled.
“What is it,” I said, “precisely, that Madame Barras did here; can you tell me in plain words?”
“Surely,” he replied, “she sat here while something was decided, and while she sat here she smoked the cigarette, and while she smoked the cigarette, she destroyed the money. But,” he added, “before she had quite finished, a decision was made and she hastily thrust the remaining bits of the torn notes into the crevice between these stones.”
“What decision?” I said.
Marquis gathered up the bits of torn paper and put them into his pocket with the switched-off flash.
“I wish I knew that,” he said.
“Knew what?”
“Which path they have taken,” he replied; “there seem to be two branching from this point, but they pass over a bed of pine-needles and that retains no impression.... Where do these paths lead?”
I did not know that any paths came into the road at this point. But the island is veined over with old paths. The lead of paths here, however, was fairly evident.
“They must come out somewhere on the sea,” I said.
“Right,” he cried. “Take either, and let's be off... Madame's cigarette was not quite cold when I picked it up.”
I was right about the direction of the paths but, as it happened, the one Marquis took was nearly double the distance of the other to the sea; and I have wondered always, if it was chance that selected the one taken by the assailants of the cut-under as it was chance that selected the one taken by us.
Marquis was instantly gone, and I hurried along the path, running nearly due east. There was light enough entering from the brilliant moon through the tree-tops to make out the abandoned trail.
And as I hurried, Marquis' contradicting expressions seemed to adjust themselves into a sort of order, and all at once I understood what had happened. The Brazilian adventurer had not taken the loss of his wife and the fortune in English pounds sterling, lying down. He had followed to recover them.
I now saw clearly the reason for everything that had happened: the attack on the driver, and my guest's concern to get rid of the English money which she discovered remaining in her possession; this man would have no knowledge of her gold certificates but he would be searching for his English pounds. And if she came clear of any trace of these five-pound notes, she might disclaim all knowledge of them and perhaps send him elsewhere on his search, since it was always the money and not the woman that he sought.
This explanation was hardly realized before it was confirmed.
I came out abruptly onto a slope of bracken, and before me at a few paces on the path were Madame Barras and two men; one at some distance in advance of her, disappearing at the moment behind a spur of the slope that hid us from the sea, and I got no conception of him; but the creature at her heels was a huge foreign beast of a man, in the dress of a common sailor.
What happened was over in a moment.
I was nearly on the man when I turned out of the wood, and with a shout to Madame Barras I struck at him with the heavy walking-stick. But the creature was not to be taken unaware; he darted to one side, wrenched the stick out of my hand, and dashed its heavy-weighted head into my face. I went down in the bracken, but I carried with me into unconsciousness a vision of Madame Barras that no shadow of the lengthening years can blur.
She had swung round sharply at the attack behind her, and she stood bare-haired and bare-shouldered, knee-deep in the golden bracken, with the glory of the moon on her; her arms hanging, her lips parted, her great eyes wide with terror—as lovely in her desperate extremity as a dream, as, a painted picture. I don't know how long I was down there, but when I finally got up, and, following along the path behind the spur of rock, came out onto the open sea, I found Sir Henry Marquis. He was standing with his hands in the pockets of his loose tweed coat, and he was cursing softly:
“The ferry and the mainland are patroled... I didn't think of their having an ocean-going yacht....”
A gleam of light was disappearing into the open sea.
He put his hand into his pocket and took out the scraps of torn paper.
“These notes,” he said, “like the ones which you hold in your bank-vault, were never issued by the Bank of England.”
I stammered some incoherent sentence; and the great chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard turned toward me.
“Do you know who that woman is?”
“Surely,” I cried, “she went to school with my sister at Miss Page's; she came to visit Mrs. Jordan....”
He looked at me steadily.
“She got the data about your sister out of the Back Bay biographies and she used the accident of Mrs. Jordan's death to get in with it... the rest was all fiction.”
“Madame Barras?” I stuttered. “You mean Madame Barras?”
“Madame the Devil,” he said. “That's Sunny Suzanne. Used to be in the Hungarian Follies until the Soviet government of Austria picked her up to place the imitation English money that its presses were striking off in Vienna.”
I shall not pretend that I knew the man in America or that he was a friend of my family or that some one had written to me about him. The plain truth is that I never laid eyes on him until Sir Henry Marquis pointed him out to me the day after I went down from here to London. It was in Piccadilly Circus.
“There's your American,” said Sir Henry.
The girl paused for a few moments. There was profound silence.
“And that isn't all of it. Nobody presented him to me. I deliberately picked him up!”
Three persons were in the drawing-room. An old woman with high cheekbones, a bowed nose and a firm, thin-lipped mouth was the central figure. She sat very straight in her chair, her head up and her hands in her lap. An aged man, in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, stood at a window looking out, his hands behind his back, his chin lifted as though he were endeavoring to see something far away over the English country—something beyond the little groups of Highland cattle and the great oak trees.
Beside the old woman, on a dark wood frame, there was a fire screen made of the pennant of a Highland regiment. Beyond her was a table with a glass top. Under this cover, in a sort of drawer lined with purple velvet, there were medals, trophies and decorations visible below the sheet of glass. And on the table, in a heavy metal frame, was the portrait of a young man in the uniform of a captain of Highland infantry.
The girl who had been speaking sat in a big armchair by this table. One knew instantly that she was an American. The liberty of manner, the independence of expression, could not be mistaken in a country of established forms. She had abundant brown hair skillfully arranged under a smart French hat. Her eyes were blue; not the blue of any painted color; it was the blue of remote spaces in the tropic sky.
The old woman spoke without looking at the girl.
“Then,” she said, “it's all quite as”—she hesitated for a word—“extraordinary as we have been led to believe.”
There was the slow accent of Southern blood in the girl's voice as she went on.
“Lady Mary,” she said, “it's all far more extraordinary than you have been led to believe—than any one could ever have led you to believe. I deliberately picked the man up. I waited for him outside the Savoy, and pretended to be uncertain about an address. He volunteered to take me in his motor and I went with him. I told him I was alone in London, at the Ritz. It was Blackwell's bank I pretended to be looking for. Then we had tea.”
The girl paused.
Presently she continued: “That's how it began: You're mistaken to imagine that Sir Henry Marquis presented me to this American. It was the other way about; I presented Sir Henry. I had the run of the Ritz,” she went on. “We all do if we scatter money. Sir Henry came in to tea the next afternoon. That's how he met Mr. Meadows. And that's the only place he ever did meet him. Mr. Meadows came every day, and Sir Henry formed the habit of dropping in. We got to be a very friendly party.”
The motionless old woman, a figure in plaster until now, kneaded her fingers as under some moving pressure. “At this time,” she said, “you were engaged to Tony and expected to be his wife!”
The girl's voice did not change. It was slow and even. “Yes,” she said.
“Tony, of course, knew nothing about this?”
“He knows nothing whatever about it unless you have written him.”
Again the old woman moved slightly. “I have waited,” she said, “for the benefit of your explanation. It seems as—as bad as I feared.”
“Lady Mary,” said the girl in her slow voice, “it's worse than you feared. I don't undertake to smooth it over. Everything that you have heard is quite true. I did go out with the man in his motor, in the evening. Sometimes it was quite dark before we returned. Mr. Meadows preferred to drive at night because he was not accustomed to the English rule of taking the left on the road, when one always takes the right in America. He was afraid he couldn't remember the rule, so it was safer at night and there was less traffic.
“I shall not try to make the thing appear better than it was. We sometimes took long runs. Mr. Meadows liked the high roads along the east coast, where one got a view of the sea and the cold salt air. We ran prodigious distances. He had the finest motor in England, the very latest American model. I didn't think so much about night coming on, the lights on the car were so wonderful. Mr. Meadows was an amazing driver. We made express-train time. The roads were usually clear at night and the motor was a perfect wonder. The only trouble we ever had was with the lights. Sometimes one, of them would go out. I think it was bad wiring. But there was always the sweep of the sea under the stars to look at while Mr. Meadows got the thing adjusted.”
This long, detailed, shameless speech affected the aged soldier at the window. It seemed to him immodest bravado. And he suffered in his heart, as a man old and full of memories can suffer for the damaged honor of a son he loves.
Continuing, the girl said: “Of course it isn't true that we spent the nights touring the east coast of England in a racer. It was dark sometimes when we got in—occasionally after trouble with the lights—quite dark. We did go thundering distances.”
“With this person, alone?” The old woman spoke slowly, like one delicately probing at a wound.
“Yes,” the girl admitted. “You see, the car was a roadster; only two could go; and, besides, there was no one else. Mr. Meadows said he was alone in London, and of course I was alone. When Sir Henry asked me to go down from here I went straight off to the Ritz.”
The old woman made a slight, shivering gesture. “You should have gone to my sister in Grosvenor Square. Monte would have put you up—and looked after you.”
“The Ritz put me up very well,” the girl continued. “And I am accustomed to looking after myself. Sir Henry thought it was quite all right.”
The old woman spoke suddenly with energy and directness. “I don't understand Henry in the least,” she said. “I was quite willing for you to go to London when he asked me for permission. But I thought he would take you to Monte's, and certainly I had the right to believe that he would not have lent himself to—to this escapade.”
“He seemed to be very nice about it,” the girl went on. “He came in to tea with us—Mr. Meadows and me—almost every evening. And he always had something amusing to relate, some blunder of Scotland Yard or some ripping mystery. I think he found it immense fun to be Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. I loved the talk: Mr. Meadows was always interested and Sir Henry likes people to be interested.”
The old woman continued to regard the girl as one hesitatingly touches an exquisite creature frightfully mangled.
“This person—was he a gentleman?” she inquired. The girl answered immediately. “I thought about that a good deal,” she said. “He had perfect manners, quite Continental manners; but, as you say over here, Americans are so imitative one never can tell. He was not young—near fifty, I would say; very well dressed. He was from St. Paul; a London agent for some flouring mills in the Northwest. I don't know precisely. He explained it all to Sir Henry. I think he would have been glad of a little influence—some way to meet the purchasing agents for the government. He seemed to have the American notion that he could come to London and go ahead without knowing anybody. Anyway, he was immensely interesting—and he had a ripping motor.”
The old man at the window did not move. He remained looking out over the English country with his big, veined hands clasped behind his back. He had left this interview to Lady Mary, as he had left most of the crucial affairs of life to her dominant nature. But the thing touched him far deeper than it touched the aged dowager. He had a man's faith in the fidelity of a loved woman.
He knew how his son, somewhere in France, trusted this girl, believed in her, as long ago in a like youth he had believed in another. He knew also how the charm of the girl was in the young soldier's blood, and how potent were these inscrutable mysteries. Every man who loved a woman wished to believe that she came to him out of the garden of a convent—out of a roc's egg, like the princess in the Arabian story.
All these things he had experienced in himself, in a shattered romance, in a disillusioned youth, when he was young like the lad somewhere in France. Lady Mary would see only broken conventions; but he saw immortal things, infinitely beyond conventions, awfully broken. He did not move. He remained like a painted picture.
The girl went on in her soft, slow voice. “You would have disliked Mr. Meadows, Lady Mary,” she said. “You would dislike any American who came without letters and could not be precisely placed.” The girl's voice grew suddenly firmer. “I don't mean to make it appear better,” she said. “The worst would be nearer the truth. He was just an unknown American bagman, with a motor car, and a lot of time on his hands—and I picked him up. But Sir Henry Marquis took a fancy to him.”
“I cannot understand Henry,” the old woman repeated. “It's extraordinary.”
“It doesn't seem extraordinary to me,” said the girl. “Mr. Meadows was immensely clever, and Sir Henry was like a man with a new toy. The Home Secretary had just put him in as Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. He was full of a lot of new ideas—dactyloscopic bureaus, photographie mitrique, and scientific methods of crime detection. He talked about it all the time. I didn't understand half the talk. But Mr. Meadows was very clever. Sir Henry said he was a charming person. Anybody who could discuss the whorls of the Galton finger-print tests was just then a charming person to Sir Henry.”
The girl paused a moment, then she went on
“I suppose things had gone so for about a fortnight when your sister, Lady Monteith, wrote that she had seen Sir Henry with us—Mr. Meadows and me—in the motor. I have to shatter a pleasant fancy about that chaperonage! That was the only time Sir Henry was ever with us.
“It came about like this: It was Thursday morning about nine o'clock, I think, when Sir Henry, popped in at the Ritz. He was full of some amazing mystery that had turned up at Benton Court, a country house belonging to the Duke of Dorset, up the Thames beyond Richmond. He wanted to go there at once. He was fuming because an under secretary had his motor, and he couldn't catch up with him.
“I told him he could have 'our' motor. He laughed. And I telephoned Mr. Meadows to come over and take him up. Sir Henry asked me to go along. So that's how Lady Monteith happened to see the three of us crowded into the seat of the big roadster.”
The girl went on in her deliberate, even voice
“Sir Henry was boiling full of the mystery. He got us all excited by the time we arrived at Benton Court. I think Mr. Meadows was as keen about the thing as Sir Henry. They were both immensely worked up. It was an amazing thing!”
“You see, Benton Court is a little house of the Georgian period. It has been closed up for ages, and now, all at once, the most mysterious things began to happen in it.
“A local inspector, a very reliable man named Millson, passing that way on his bicycle, saw a man lying on the doorstep. He also saw some one running away. It was early in the morning, just before daybreak.
“Millson saw only the man's back, but he could distinguish the color of his clothes. He was wearing a blue coat and reddish-brown trousers. Millson said he could hardly make out the blue coat in the darkness, but he could distinctly see the reddish brown color of the man's trousers. He was very positive about this. Mr. Meadows and Sir Henry pressed him pretty hard, but he was firm about it. He could make out that the coat was blue, and he could see very distinctly that the trousers were reddish-brown.
“But the extraordinary thing came a little later. Millson hurried to a telephone to get Scotland Yard, then he returned to Benton Court; but when he got back the dead man had disappeared.
“He insists that he was not away beyond five minutes, but within that time the dead man had vanished. Millson could find no trace of him. That's the mystery that sent us tearing up there with Mr. Meadows and Sir Henry transformed into eager sleuths.
“We found the approaches to the house under a patrol from Scotland Yard. But nobody had gone in. The inspector was waiting for Sir Henry.”
The old man stood like an image, and the aged woman sat in her chair like a figure in basalt.
But the girl ran on with a sort of eager unconcern: “Sir Henry and Mr. Meadows took the whole thing in charge. The door had been broken open. They examined the marks about the fractures very carefully; then they went inside. There were some naked footprints. They were small, as of a little, cramped foot, and they seemed to be tracked in blood on the hard oak floor. There was a wax candle partly burned on the table. And that's all there was.
“There were some tracks in the dust of the floor, but they were not very clearly outlined, and Sir Henry thought nothing could be made of them.
“It was awfully exciting. I went about behind the two men. Sir Henry talked all the time. Mr. Meadows was quite as much interested, but he didn't say anything. He seemed to say less as the thing went on.
“They went over everything—the ground outside and every inch of the house. Then they put everybody out and sat down by a table in the room where the footprints were.
“Sir Henry had been awfully careful. He had a big lens with which to examine the marks of the bloody footprints. He was like a man on the trail of a buried treasure. He shouted over everything, thrust his glass into Mr. Meadows' hand and bade him verify what he had seen. His ardor was infectious. I caught it myself.
“Mr. Meadows, in his quiet manner, was just as much concerned in unraveling the thing as Sir Henry. I never had so wild a time in all my life. Finally, when Sir Henry put everybody else out and closed the door, and the three of us sat down at the table to try to untangle the thing, I very nearly screamed with excitement. Mr. Meadows sat with his arms folded, not saying a word; but Sir Henry went ahead with his explanation.”
The girl looked like a vivid portrait, the soft colors of her gown and all the cool, vivid extravagancies of youth distinguished in her. Her words indicated fervor and excited energy; but they were not evidenced in her face or manner. She was cool and lovely. One would have thought that she recounted the inanities of a curate's tea party.
The aged man, in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, remained in his position at the window. The old woman sat with her implacable face, unchanging like a thing insensible and inorganic.
This unsympathetic aspect about the girl did not seem to disturb her. She went on:
“The thing was thrilling. It was better than any theater—the three of us at the old mahogany table in the room, and the Scotland Yard patrol outside.
“Sir Henry was bubbling over with his theory. 'I read this riddle like a printed page,' he said. 'It will be the work of a little band of expert cracksmen that the Continent has kindly sent us. We have had some samples of their work in Brompton Road. They are professional crooks of a high order—very clever at breaking in a door, and, like all the criminal groups that we get without an invitation from over the Channel, these crooks have absolutely no regard for human life.'
“That's the way Sir Henry led off with his explanation. Of course he had all that Scotland Yard knew about criminal groups to start him right. It was a good deal to have the identity of the criminal agents selected out; but I didn't see how he was going to manage to explain the mystery from the evidence. I was wild to hear him. Mr. Meadows was quite as interested, I thought, although he didn't say a word.
“Sir Henry nodded, as though he took the American's confirmation as a thing that followed. 'We are at the scene,' he said, 'of one of the most treacherous acts of all criminal drama. I mean the “doing in,” as our criminals call it, of the unprofessional accomplice. It's a regulation piece of business with the hard-and-fast criminal organizations of the Continent, like the Nervi of Marseilles, or the Lecca of Paris.
“'They take in a house servant, a shopkeeper's watchman, or a bank guard to help them in some big haul. Then they lure him into some abandoned house, under a pretense of dividing up the booty, and there put him out of the way. That's what's happened here. It's a common plan with these criminal groups, and clever of them. The picked-up accomplice would be sure to let the thing out. For safety the professionals must “do him in” at once, straight away after the big job, as a part of what the barrister chaps call the res gestae.'
“Sir Henry went on nodding at us and drumming the palm of his hand on the edge of the table.
“'This thing happens all the time,' he said, 'all about, where professional criminals are at work. It accounts for a lot of mysteries that the police cannot make head or tail of, like this one, for example. Without our knowledge of this sinister custom, one could not begin or end with an affair like this.
“'But it's simple when one has the cue—it's immensely simple. We know exactly what happened and the sort of crooks that were about the business. The barefoot prints show the Continental group. That's the trick of Southern Europe to go in barefoot behind a man to kill him.'
“Sir Henry jarred the whole table with his big hand. The surface of the table was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers.
“'The thing's clear as daylight,' he went on: 'One of the professional group brought the accomplice down here to divide the booty. He broke the door in. They sat down here at this table with the lighted candle as you see it. And while the stuff was being sorted out, another of the band slipped in behind the man and killed him.
“'They started to carry the body out. Millson chanced by. They got in a funk and rushed the thing. Of course they had a motor down the road, and equally of course it was no trick to whisk the body out of the neighborhood.'
“Sir Henry got half up on his feet with his energy in the solution of the thing. He thrust his spread-out fingers down on the table like a man, by that gesture, pressing in an inevitable, conclusive summing up.”
The girl paused. “It was splendid, I thought. I applauded like an entranced pit!
“But Mr. Meadows didn't say a word. He took up the big glass we had used about the inspection of the place, and passed it over the prints Sir Henry was unconsciously making in the dust on the polished surface of the table. Then he put the glass down and looked the excited baronet calmly in the face.
“'There,' cried Sir Henry, 'the thing's no mystery.'
“For the first time Mr. Meadows opened his mouth. 'It's the profoundest mystery I ever heard of,' he said.
“Sir Henry was astonished. He sat down and looked across the table at the man. He wasn't able to speak for a moment, then he got it out: 'Why exactly do you say that?'
“Mr. Meadows put his elbows on the table. He twiddled the big reading glass in his fingers. His face got firm and decided.
“'To begin with,' he said, 'the door to this house was never broken by a professional cracksman. It's the work of a bungling amateur. A professional never undertakes to break a door at the lock. Naturally that's the firmest place about a door. The implement he intends to use as a lever on the door he puts in at the top or bottom. By that means he has half of the door as a lever against the resistance of the lock. Besides, a professional of any criminal group is a skilled workman. He doesn't waste effort. He doesn't fracture a door around the lock. This door's all mangled, splintered and broken around the lock.'”
“He stopped and looked about the room, and out through the window at the Scotland Yard patrol. The features of his face were contracted with the problem. One could imagine one saw the man's mind laboring at the mystery. 'And that's not all,' he said. 'Your man Millson is not telling the truth. He didn't see a dead body lying on the steps of this house; and he didn't see a man running away.'
“Sir Henry broke in at that. 'Impossible,' he said; 'Millson's a first-class inspector, absolutely reliable. Why do you say that he didn't see the dead man on the steps or the assassin running away?'
“Mr. Meadows answered in the same even voice. 'Because there was never any dead man here,' he said, 'for anybody to see. And because Millson's 'description of the man he saw is scientifically an impossible feat of vision.'
“Impossible?' cried Sir Henry.
“'Quite impossible,' Mr. Meadows insisted. 'Millson tells us that the man he saw running away in the night wore a blue coat and reddish-brown trousers. He says he was barely able to distinguish the blue coat, but that he could see the reddish-brown trousers very clearly. Now, as a matter of fact, it has been very accurately determined that red is the hardest color to distinguish at night, and blue the very easiest. A blue coat would be clearly visible long after reddish-brown trousers had become indistinguishable in the darkness.'
“Sir Henry's under jaw sagged a little. 'Why, yes,' he said, 'that's true; that's precisely true. Gross, at the University of Gratz, determined that by experiment in 1912. I never thought about it!'
“'There are some other things here that you have not, perhaps, precisely thought about,' Mr. Meadows went on.
“'For example, the things that happened in this room did not happen in the night. They happened in the day.'
“He pointed to the half-burned wax candle on the table. 'There's a headless joiner's nail driven into the table,' he said, 'and this candle is set down over the nail. That means that the person who placed it there wished it to remain there—to remain there firmly. He didn't put it down there for the brief requirements of a passing tragedy, he put it there to remain; that's one thing.
“'Another thing is that this candle thus firmly fastened on the table was never alight there. If it had ever been burning in its position on the table, some of the drops of melted wax would have fallen about it.
“'You will observe that, while the candle is firmly fixed, it does not set straight; it is inclined at least ten degrees out of perpendicular. In that position it couldn't have burned for a moment without dripping melted wax on the table. And there's none on the table; there has never been any on it. Your glass shows not the slightest evidence of a wax stain.' He added: 'Therefore the candle is a blind; false evidence to give us the impression of a night affair.'
“Sir Henry's jaw sagged; now his mouth gaped. 'True,' he said. 'True, true.' He seemed to get some relief to his damaged deductions out of the repeated word.
“The irony in Mr. Meadows' voice increased a little. 'Nor is that all,' he said. 'The smear on the floor, and the stains in which the naked foot tracked, are not human blood. They're not any sort of blood. It was clearly evident when you had your lens over them. They show no coagulated fiber. They show only the evidences of dye—weak dye—watered red ink, I'd say.'
“I thought Sir Henry was going to crumple up in his chair. He seemed to get loose and baggy in some extraordinary fashion, and his gaping jaw worked. 'But the footprints,' he said, 'the naked footprints?' His voice was a sort of stutter-the sort of shaken stutter of a man who has come a' tumbling cropper.
“The American actually laughed: he laughed as we sometimes laugh at a mental defective.
“'They're not footprints!' he said. 'Nobody ever had a foot cambered like that, or with a heel like it, or with toes like it. Somebody made those prints with his hand—the edge of his palm for the heel and the balls of his fingers for the toes. The wide, unstained distances between these heelprints and the prints of the ball of the toes show the impossible arch.'
“Sir Henry was like a man gone to pieces. 'But who—who made them?' he faltered.
“The American leaned forward and put the big glass over the prints that Sir Henry had made with his fingers in the white dust on the mahogany table. 'I think you know the answer to your question,' he said. 'The whorls of these prints are identical with those of the toe tracks.'
“Then he laid the glass carefully down, sat back in his chair, folded his arms and looked at Sir Henry.
“'Now,' he said, 'will you kindly tell me why you have gone to the trouble of manufacturing all these false evidences of a crime?”'
The girl paused. There was intense silence in the drawing-room. The aged man at the window had turned and was looking at her. The face of the old woman seemed vague and uncertain.
The girl smiled.
“Then,” she said, “the real, amazing miracle happened. Sir Henry got on his feet, his big body tense, his face like iron, his voice ringing.
“'I went to that trouble,' he said, 'because I wished to demonstrate—I wished to demonstrate beyond the possibility of any error—that Mr. Arthur Meadows, the pretended American from St. Paul, was in fact the celebrated criminologist, Karl Holweg Leibnich, of Bonn, giving us the favor of his learned presence while he signaled the German submarines off the east coast roads with his high-powered motor lights.'”
Now there was utter silence in the drawing-room but for the low of the Highland cattle and the singing of the birds outside.
For the first time there came a little tremor in the girl's voice.
“When Sir Henry doubted this American and asked me to go down and make sure before he set a trap for him, I thought—I thought, if Tony could risk his life for England, I could do that much.”
At this moment a maid appeared in the doorway, the trim, immaculate, typical English maid. “Tea is served, my lady,” she said.
The tall, fine old man crossed the room and offered his arm to the girl with the exquisite, gracious manner with which once upon a time he had offered it to a girlish queen at Windsor.