Afternoon Tea Mysteries, Volume One: A Collection of Cozy Mysteries (Three thrilling novels in one volume!)

by Anne Austin

  “My dear,” he began, and stopped. “I feel—” here he again came to a pause—“that you should know—”

  “What?” I managed to ask.

  “That I do not like Mr. Durand and—that others do not like him.”

  “Is it because of something you knew about him before to-night?”

  He made no answer.

  “Or because he was seen, like many other gentlemen, talking with that woman some time before—a long time before—she was attacked for her diamond and murdered?”

  “Pardon me, my dear, he was the last one seen talking to her. Some one may yet be found who went in after he came out, but as yet he is considered the last. Mr. Ramsdell himself told me so.”

  “It makes no difference,” I exclaimed, in all the heat of my long-suppressed agitation. “I am willing to stake my life on his integrity and honor. No man could talk to me as he did early this evening with any vile intentions at heart. He was interested, no doubt, like many others, in one who had the name of being a captivating woman, but—”

  I paused in sudden alarm. A look had crossed my uncle’s face which assured me that we were no longer alone. Who could have entered so silently? In some trepidation I turned to see. A gentleman was standing in the doorway, who smiled as I met his eye.

  “Is this Miss Van Arsdale?” he asked.

  Instantly my courage, which had threatened to leave me, returned and I smiled.

  “I am,” said I. “Are you the inspector?”

  “Inspector Dalzell,” he explained with a bow, which included my uncle.

  Then he closed the door.

  “I hope I have not frightened you,” he went on, approaching me with a gentlemanly air. “A little matter has come up concerning which I mean to be perfectly frank with you. It may prove to be of trivial importance; if so, you will pardon my disturbing you. Mr. Durand—you know him?”

  “I am engaged to him,” I declared before poor uncle could raise his hand.

  “You are engaged to him. Well, that makes it difficult, and yet, in some respects, easier for me to ask a certain question.”

  It must have made it more difficult than easy, for he did not proceed to put this question immediately, but went on:

  “You know that Mr. Durand visited Mrs. Fairbrother in the alcove a little while before her death?”

  “I have been told so.”

  “He was seen to go in, but I have not yet found any one who saw him come out; consequently we have been unable to fix the exact minute when he did so. What is the matter, Miss Van Arsdale? You want to say something?”

  “No, no,” I protested, reconsidering my first impulse. Then, as I met his look, “He can probably tell you that himself. I am sure he would not hesitate.”

  “We shall ask him later,” was the inspector’s response. “Meanwhile, are you ready to assure me that since that time he has not intrusted you with a little article to keep—No, no, I do not mean the diamond,” he broke in, in very evident dismay, as I fell back from him in irrepressible indignation and alarm. “The diamond—well, we shall look for that later; it is another article we are in search of now, one which Mr. Durand might very well have taken in his hand without realizing just what he was doing. As it is important for us to find this article, and as it is one he might very naturally have passed over to you when he found himself in the hall with it in his hand, I have ventured to ask you if this surmise is correct.”

  “It is not,” I retorted fiercely, glad that I could speak from my very heart. “He has given me nothing to keep for him. He would not—”

  Why that peculiar look in the inspector’s eye? Why did he reach out for a chair and seat me in it before he took up my interrupted sentence and finished it?

  “—would not give you anything to hold which had belonged to another woman? Miss Van Arsdale, you do not know men. They do many things which a young, trusting girl like yourself would hardly expect from them.”

  “Not Mr. Durand,” I maintained stoutly.

  “Perhaps not; let us hope not.” Then, with a quick change of manner, he bent toward me, with a sidelong look at uncle, and, pointing to my gloves, remarked: “You wear gloves. Did you feel the need of two pairs, that you carry another in that pretty bag hanging from your arm?”

  I started, looked down, and then slowly drew up into my hand the bag he had mentioned. The white finger of a glove was protruding from the top. Any one could see it; many probably had. What did it mean? I had brought no extra pair with me.

  “This is not mine,” I began, faltering into silence as I perceived my uncle turn and walk a step or two away.

  “The article we are looking for,” pursued the inspector, “is a pair of long, white gloves, supposed to have been worn by Mrs. Fairbrother when she entered the alcove. Do you mind showing me those, a finger of which I see?”

  I dropped the bag into his hand. The room and everything in it was whirling around me. But when I noted what trouble it was to his clumsy fingers to open it, my senses returned and, reaching for the bag, I pulled it open and snatched out the gloves. They had been hastily rolled up and some of the fingers were showing.

  “Let me have them,” he said.

  With quaking heart and shaking fingers I handed over the gloves.

  “Mrs. Fairbrother’s hand was not a small one,” he observed as he slowly unrolled them. “Yours is. We can soon tell—”

  But that sentence was never finished. As the gloves fell open in his grasp he uttered a sudden, sharp ejaculation and I a smothered shriek. An object of superlative brilliancy had rolled out from them. The diamond! the gem which men said was worth a king’s ransom, and which we all knew had just cost a life.

  III. Anson Durand

  With benumbed senses and a dismayed heart, I stared at the fallen jewel as at some hateful thing menacing both my life and honor.

  “I have had nothing to do with it,” I vehemently declared. “I did not put the gloves in my bag, nor did I know the diamond was in them. I fainted at the first alarm, and—”

  “There! there! I know,” interposed the inspector kindly. “I do not doubt you in the least; not when there is a man to doubt. Miss Van Arsdale, you had better let your uncle take you home. I will see that the hall is cleared for you. Tomorrow I may wish to talk to you again, but I will spare you all further importunity tonight.”

  I shook my head. It would require more courage to leave at that moment than to stay. Meeting the inspector’s eye firmly, I quietly declared,

  “If Mr. Durand’s good name is to suffer in any way, I will not forsake him. I have confidence in his integrity, if you have not. It was not his hand, but one much more guilty, which dropped this jewel into the bag.”

  “So! so! do not be too sure of that, little woman. You had better take your lesson at once. It will be easier for you, and more wholesome for him.”

  Here he picked up the jewel.

  “Well, they said it was a wonder!” he exclaimed, in sudden admiration. “I am not surprised, now that I have seen a great gem, at the famous stories I have read of men risking life and honor for their possession. If only no blood had been shed!”

  “Uncle! uncle!” I wailed aloud in my agony.

  It was all my lips could utter, but to uncle it was enough. Speaking for the first time, he asked to have a passage made for us, and when the inspector moved forward to comply, he threw his arm about me, and was endeavoring to find fitting words with which to fill up the delay, when a short altercation was heard from the doorway, and Mr. Durand came rushing in, followed immediately by the inspector.

  His first look was not at myself, but at the bag, which still hung from my arm. As I noted this action, my whole inner self seemed to collapse, dragging my happiness down with it. But my countenance remained unchanged, too much so, it seems; for when his eye finally rose to my face, he found there what made him recoil and turn with something like fierceness on his companion.

  “You have been talking to her,” he vehemently protested.
“Perhaps you have gone further than that. What has happened here? I think I ought to know. She is so guileless, Inspector Dalzell; so perfectly free from all connection with this crime. Why have you shut her up here, and plied her with questions, and made her look at me with such an expression, when all you have against me is just what you have against some half-dozen others,—that I was weak enough, or unfortunate enough, to spend a few minutes with that unhappy woman in the alcove before she died?”

  “It might be well if Miss Van Arsdale herself would answer you,” was the inspector’s quiet retort. “What you have said may constitute all that we have against you, but it is not all we have against her.”

  I gasped, not so much at this seeming accusation, the motive of which I believed myself to understand, but at the burning blush with which it was received by Mr. Durand.

  “What do you mean?” he demanded, with certain odd breaks in his voice. “What can you have against her?”

  “A triviality,” returned the inspector, with a look in my direction that was, I felt, not to be mistaken.

  “I do not call it a triviality,” I burst out. “It seems that Mrs. Fairbrother, for all her elaborate toilet, was found without gloves on her arms. As she certainly wore them on entering the alcove, the police have naturally been looking for them. And where do you think they have found them? Not in the alcove with her, not in the possession of the man who undoubtedly carried them away with him, but—”

  “I know, I know,” Mr. Durand hoarsely put in. “You need not say any more. Oh, my poor Rita! what have I brought upon you by my weakness?”

  “Weakness!”

  He started; I started; my voice was totally unrecognizable.

  “I should give it another name,” I added coldly.

  For a moment he seemed to lose heart, then he lifted his head again, and looked as handsome as when he pleaded for my hand in the little conservatory.

  “You have that right,” said he; “besides, weakness at such a time, and under such an exigency, is little short of wrong. It was unmanly in me to endeavor to secrete these gloves; more than unmanly for me to choose for their hiding-place the recesses of an article belonging exclusively to yourself. I acknowledge it, Rita, and shall meet only my just punishment if you deny me in the future both your sympathy and regard. But you must let me assure you and these gentlemen also, one of whom can make it very unpleasant for me, that consideration for you, much more than any miserable anxiety about myself, lay at the bottom of what must strike you all as an act of unpardonable cowardice. From the moment I learned of this woman’s murder in the alcove, where I had visited her, I realized that every one who had been seen to approach her within a half-hour of her death would be subjected to a more or less rigid investigation, and I feared, if her gloves were found in my possession, some special attention might be directed my way which would cause you unmerited distress. So, yielding to an impulse which I now recognize as a most unwise, as well as unworthy one, I took advantage of the bustle about us, and of the insensibility into which you had fallen, to tuck these miserable gloves into the bag I saw lying on the floor at your side. I do not ask your pardon. My whole future life shall be devoted to winning that; I simply wish to state a fact.”

  “Very good!” It was the inspector who spoke; I could not have uttered a word to save my life. “Perhaps you will now feel that you owe it to this young lady to add how you came to have these gloves in your possession?”

  “Mrs. Fairbrother handed them to me.”

  “Handed them to you?”

  “Yes, I hardly know why myself. She asked me to take care of them for her. I know that this must strike you as a very peculiar statement. It was my realization of the unfavorable effect it could not fail to produce upon those who beard it, which made me dread any interrogation on the subject. But I assure you it was as I say. She put the gloves into my hand while I was talking to her, saying they incommoded her.”

  “And you?”

  “Well, I held them for a few minutes, then I put them in my pocket, but quite automatically, and without thinking very much about it. She was a woman accustomed to have her own way. People seldom questioned it, I judge.”

  Here the tension about my throat relaxed, and I opened my lips to speak. But the inspector, with a glance of some authority, forestalled me.

  “Were the gloves open or rolled up when she offered them to you?”

  “They were rolled up.”

  “Did you see her take them off?”

  “Assuredly.”

  “And roll them up?”

  “Certainly.”

  “After which she passed them over to you?”

  “Not immediately. She let them lie in her lap for a while.”

  “While you talked?”

  Mr. Durand bowed.

  “And looked at the diamond?”

  Mr. Durand bowed for the second time.

  “Had you ever seen so fine a diamond before?”

  “No.”

  “Yet you deal in precious stones?”

  “That is my business.”

  “And are regarded as a judge of them?”

  “I have that reputation.”

  “Mr. Durand, would you know this diamond if you saw it?”

  “I certainly should.”

  “The setting was an uncommon one, I hear.”

  “Quite an unusual one.”

  The inspector opened his hand.

  “Is this the article?”

  “Good God! Where—”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I do not.”

  The inspector eyed him gravely.

  “Then I have a bit of news for you. It was hidden in the gloves you took from Mrs. Fairbrother. Miss Van Arsdale was present at their unrolling.”

  Do we live, move, breathe at certain moments? It hardly seems so. I know that I was conscious of but one sense, that of seeing; and of but one faculty, that of judgment. Would he flinch, break down, betray guilt, or simply show astonishment? I chose to believe it was the latter feeling only which informed his slowly whitening and disturbed features. Certainly it was all his words expressed, as his glances flew from the stone to the gloves, and back again to the inspector’s face.

  “I can not believe it. I can not believe it.” And his hand flew wildly to his forehead.

  “Yet it is the truth, Mr. Durand, and one you have now to face. How will you do this? By any further explanations, or by what you may consider a discreet silence?”

  “I have nothing to explain,—the facts are as I have stated.”

  The inspector regarded him with an earnestness which made my heart sink.

  “You can fix the time of this visit, I hope; tell us, I mean, just when you left the alcove. You must have seen some one who can speak for you.”

  “I fear not.”

  Why did he look so disturbed and uncertain?

  “There were but few persons in the hall just then,” he went on to explain. “No one was sitting on the yellow divan.”

  “You know where you went, though? Whom you saw and what you did before the alarm spread?”

  “Inspector, I am quite confused. I did go somewhere; I did not remain in that part of the hall. But I can tell you nothing definite, save that I walked about, mostly among strangers, till the cry rose which sent us all in one direction and me to the side of my fainting sweetheart.”

  “Can you pick out any stranger you talked to, or any one who might have noted you during this interval? You see, for the sake of this little woman, I wish to give you every chance.”

  “Inspector, I am obliged to throw myself on your mercy. I have no such witness to my innocence as you call for. Innocent people seldom have. It is only the guilty who take the trouble to provide for such contingencies.”

  This was all very well, if it had been uttered with a straightforward air and in a clear tone. But it was not. I who loved him felt that it was not, and consequently was more or less prepared for the change which now took place
in the inspector’s manner. Yet it pierced me to the heart to observe this change, and I instinctively dropped my face into my hands when I saw him move toward Mr. Durand with some final order or word of caution.

  Instantly (and who can account for such phenomena?) there floated into view before my retina a reproduction of the picture I had seen, or imagined myself to have seen, in the supper-room; and as at that time it opened before me an unknown vista quite removed from the surrounding scene, so it did now, and I beheld again in faint outlines, and yet with the effect of complete distinctness, a square of light through which appeared an open passage partly shut off from view by a half-lifted curtain and the tall figure of a man holding back this curtain and gazing, or seeming to gaze, at his own breast, on which he had already laid one quivering finger.

  What did it mean? In the excitement of the horrible occurrence which had engrossed us all, I had forgotten this curious experience; but on feeling anew the vague sensation of shock and expectation which seemed its natural accompaniment, I became conscious of a sudden conviction that the picture which had opened before me in the supper-room was the result of a reflection in a glass or mirror of something then going on in a place not otherwise within the reach of my vision; a reflection, the importance of which I suddenly realized when I recalled at what a critical moment it had occurred. A man in a state of dread looking at his breast, within five minutes of the stir and rush of the dreadful event which had marked this evening!

  A hope, great as the despair in which I had just been sunk, gave me courage to drop my hands and advance impetuously toward the inspector.

  “Don’t speak, I pray; don’t judge any of us further till you have heard what I have to say.”

  In great astonishment and with an aspect of some severity, he asked me what I had to say now which I had not had the opportunity of saying before. I replied with all the passion of a forlorn hope that it was only at this present moment I remembered a fact which might have a very decided bearing on this case; and, detecting evidences, as I thought, of relenting on his part, I backed up this statement by an entreaty for a few words with him apart, as the matter I had to tell was private and possibly too fanciful for any ear but his own.