“Now really, Mr. Cotton!” cried Caroline, and rose to her feet. “Do you imagine, if Frank had been what you say, that he would have dared show his face anywhere? That he would not have been shunned and despised, if his friends had known?”
“My lady, they did not know.”
“Not know, sir?”
“That was the reason for the mystery, the black silk mask he wore when he faced his clients, the false name and signature he used, even the false teeth removed to change his voice.”
Though the Rev. Horace did not wear his black gown and white bands, nevertheless gown and bands were visible to the imagination as his chest swelled out.
“Our Church of England, what the vulgar are pleased to call the High Church, has no seal of confession. But shall I ever betray confidence from a prisoner? No!—except it be life and death. It seemed to me, when Lord Darwent began to speak to me …”
“That it was life and death?” asked Caroline.
The Rev. Horace nodded.
“What I learned of Lord Francis Orford,” he went on with an effort, “I learned from a debtor whose name I need not speak. But he knew the real name of the moneylender; he knew the moneylender’s wheedles and tricks. When I was upon the point of belief in Lord Darwent’s story …”
Darwent struck the back of the chair.
“I told you a tale, Padre, of a room which had grown thick overnight with dust and cobwebs two years old! And you thought me mad.”
The parson inclined his head and spread out his hands.
“For a time, God help me, I did.” He faltered. “Afterwards (who shall say why?) I felt in my heart you must be guiltless. I hastened to the Sheriff’s lodgings, in what I thought was the vain hope of a reprieve. The reprieve had already arrived. I had need to say nothing. But now …”
“Now, Mr. Cotton,” interposed Caroline, with perplexity and wretchedness tempering her air of coldness, “you merely speak in riddles!”
“Riddles, my lady?”
“Truly. You talk somewhat wildly of a room grown with cobwebs overnight. You attack poor Frank; you attack the Kinsmeres; I won’t have it. How could there be such a room, pray?”
“That, my lady, is beyond my knowledge. But I can guess at the reason for it.”
“Then do!”
“Why,” replied the Rev. Horace, uneasy at so much temporal thinking, “Lord Francis must surely guard against the possibility of being betrayed? Should one of his friends learn the true identity of the moneylender… penetrate the disguise …”
“That’s it, Padre!” said Darwent. His voice was exultant. “That’s it!”
Caroline, even as she whirled, round toward him, did not forget her formal style of address in public.
“My lord!” she protested.
“I knew Frank,” said Darwent, staring at a dead face. “I knew his cursed superciliousness. Suppose someone threatened to denounce him to his friends? Oh, indeed?’ Frank would say, ‘I loaned you such-and-such monies at such a place and such a time? Come; view the premises; then remain silent or be called out.’”
“And the dupe,” cried the Rev. Horace, “would see a dead room of cobwebs. His tale would sound …”
“As mine sounded to you, Padre,” supplied Darwent. “It was a trick, Padre! But how was the trick managed?”
“There was no trick,” pleaded Caroline. “Lord Francis Orford? Oh, fie? No man of gentle birth would stoop to …”
“You observe, Padre,” Darwent inquired dryly, “how safe Frank was? My wife cannot doubt your word. But she still won’t believe. —Now how was that managed?”
“There was no trick!”
“How was it managed?”
They were interrupted by a low, hoarse, boozy chuckle.
Weil over a quart of ale had remained in the immense glass bowl. Mr. Mulberry, leisurely seizing the opportunity, had disposed of it by the simple process of lifting the bowl to his lips and tilting it up.
He stood watching them, licking his lips, with the empty bowl in his hands. Though his eye was somewhat bleary, he retained loftiness because he was much distended with dignity as well as with ale.
“Pah!” he said. “I listen to the prattle of children.”
Darwent swung round. “Do you know how the trick was managed?”
“Ay. Didn’t I tell you I did?”
“Was I taken to some other room in that place?”
Mr. Mulberry’s eye looked cunning. “No,” he said.
“Were the dust and cobwebs true dust and cobwebs, gathered a long time?”
“They were.”
“Then how…?”
“Damme, I’ll not tell you,” said Mr. Mulberry, putting back the glass punch bowl with a crash on its glass holder.
“Sir,” exclaimed the Rev. Horace Cotton, “you are not yourself!”
“I’ll not tell you,” pursued Mr. Mulberry, ignoring this remark, “for two reasons. First, Dick, because you ought to see for yourself what’s as plain as the evidence of the polished boot soles and the writing desk. Second, because you now know Bert Mulberry’s got more up his sleeve than shows on the card table. Good, then! You’re not to, be afeared if your enemy, your secret enemy …”
“If he does what?”
“If he tries to have you indicted for perjury.”
In Darwent’s mind had mingled so many hags and hungry goblins that he heard this with what seemed (at first) a shock of relief.
“Perjury! Is that all?”
“‘Is that all?’ he says,” mimicked the lawyer, yanking the carving knife out of the beef. “I daresay he thinks, because perjury’s a misdemeanor and not a felony, it can’t be punished worse than a felony?”
“Bert, I know nothing whatever about it.”
“By the present law, laid down 2 Geo. II. c.25, s.2, damme, it can mean seven years aboard the hulks or in an airless hole at Newgate, with no privilege of the State side. How’s that?”
Another raindrop stung the window, then a spatter of them. Outside, a carriage rattled past at a quickening canter. The four persons in the dining room stood motionless round the table.
“I won’t go back to Newgate,” Darwent said quietly. “I’ll cut my throat first.”
“And you needn’t go back, as I tell you! De minimis,” said Mr. Mulberry, raising the carving knife, “non curat lex. If you can show the perjury was forced on you (which I can show, mind!), then you’re out of danger. What’s more, Dick, I’d lay you a small wager …”
“Yes,” agreed Darwent, and gave him an odd glance. “This enemy of mine, the ‘gentleman in fashionable lodgings,’ won’t reopen the case.”
“Eh, and so you’re the lawyer now! Why won’t he?”
“Because he daren’t. If I judge correctly, he was an accomplice of Frank Orford in the moneylending trade. He’s afraid of what I know, or may know.”
“True as the almanac! But what will he do, Dick?”
Darwent did not reply. He was pacing up and down the room, once more trying Jo conceal his thoughts even from himself.
“Yesterday,” persisted Mr. Mulberry, “he fired a barker at you through a window. That’s your true danger, Dick. This enemy—whoever he is; and I don’t know him!—why, he’ll go on trying to kill you until he’s got you.”
“Or until I’ve got him. That’s fair enough.”
“Stop!” protested Caroline.
Darwent stopped short in front of her. Caroline’s hand was half raised; her eyes, very seldom wide open under the long upper lids, were open and pleading.
“A while ago,” she said, “you promised there would be no more …”
“How can I help it, my dear? What choice have I?”
That almost absent-minded “my dear” was reflected in Caroline’s eyes, and he saw it. Briefly they looked into each I other’s minds, or thought they did, with an intimacy like a I physical touch. Then Darwent addressed Mr. Mulberry.
“In my own bumbling way, I’ve considered the evidence too. You
maintain Tillotson Lewis had an appointment to meet the blue coach; he failed to appear; and I was mistaken for him?”
“That’s it, lad, ‘Indigent circumstances’!” sneered the other. “Fine fancy words for saying he was hard up.”
Darwent pressed his hands against his forehead.
“Much of it,” he admitted, “I understand. The secrecy, and the secret appointment. The coachman hidden to the eyes in a muffler, the bandages over my own eyes and ropes on me. But why the ear stoppings? Why the hammock? Above every thing, why was I knocked on the head? Surely Frank didn’t treat all his clients like that?”
Mr. Mulberry uttered a whistling sigh of satisfaction.
“There’s a good answer to every one of those questions, Dick,” he replied With great intensity, “If you think deep enough. Hold hard! Except … the knock over the head. Ah! There you’ve got me! It’s no way of doing business; and that’s a fact.”
“May I put a question?” asked the Rev. Horace, his rich voice over-powering them. Darwent nodded. “Doubtless,” said the clergyman, “you told the learned gentleman here. But you did not tell me, though I wondered. It was another circumstance which made me … made me …”
“Doubt my sanity?”
“No, no! Yet you woke up half-dazed in that coach, on the way to Kinsmere House in Bucks. You were not gagged, but you were tied and blindfolded. True?”
“Very true.”
“Notwithstanding,” said the Rev. Horace, “you swore you knew where you were, and where you were going. How could you have known that?”
“By the simple method. Padre, of working my eye bandage partly loose against the side of the hammock. Didn’t I say I knew that countryside well?”
“You did; I allow it.”
“Well! When I had one glimpse of a cluster of finger posts, with KINSMERE in reversed letters; when I felt myself carried up the broad steps of the only country house of its kind within fifty miles: what did I know? The coachman adjusted my eye bandages often, but I saw enough. And it brings us to Kinsmere House, and my final query. —Who was the woman?”
“Woman?” repeated Mr. Mulberry, opening bleared eyes.
“What woman?” asked Caroline quickly.
“I stood in front of a door, you remember. The door of the room where Frank was stabbed, before I was pushed inside. And a woman screamed. Who was she?”
Again a dry satisfaction shook Mr. Mulberry.
“Lad,” said the lawyer, a bitter misogynist because he had had three wives, “there was no woman.”
“So? You credit that? Perhaps I credit it too.”
“On the oath of my wits,” swore Mr. Mulberry, “no woman was in any way connected with the murder of Orford.”
Seeing that there was no ale left, Mr. Mulberry somewhat unsteadily put down the carving knife and took up an apple from the large bowl of fruit near the ale bowl.
“But I’ll tell you what it is, Dick,” he snapped, when his teeth had crunched into the apple and he swallowed the first bite whole. “Rot my guts! There are two wenches under this roof who’ll give you more trouble than your enemy.”
Caroline looked at him in disgust. The Rev. Horace was outraged.
“Mr. Mulberry,” he said, “you forget yourself. You are drunk, sir. Yet I confess …” Angry, perplexed, he fumbled for the sleeves of an invisible black gown.
“Let us hear you, sir,” said Caroline, who was furious. “You confess?”
The Rev. Horace turned ponderously.
“My lady,” he said, “I should put the matter in less vulgar terms than our friend here. But I am of much the same opinion.”
“How dare you,” Caroline said flatly, her head back and eyelids drooping.
“I dare, Lady Darwent, because I am the humble personage who united you in marriage to your husband. When I first entered the house this morning, it seemed to me that in some way you had … had altered. Have you altered?”
“To the world, no. To my husband—yes.”
“Do you love him?”
Caroline’s face was becoming pink, though she gave him a sweet smile.
“Really, sir,” she chided him, with all the archness and coquetry and battery glances of her day. “You forget that what you ask is not a question one puts to any lady of sensibility. Or do you forget your manners?”
“Here, now, stop!” protested Mr. Mulberry, obviously alarmed at what he had set rolling. For the Rev. Horace Cotton would do his duty, or what he conceived to be his duty, if he smashed the whole house.
“I forget neither, my lady,” said the Rev. Horace. “On the contrary, I recall only that you married him, when we all knew he was deeply in love with another lady. It was pitiful, my lady, to see those fifty pounds gained for her legacy.”
Darwent intervened wildly. “Padre, for God’s sake!”
“Yes,” said the Rev. Horace, “for God’s sake!” Again he looked at Caroline, and spoke quietly. “Do you love him?”
Caroline had turned her head away. “Yes,” she answered.
“That would be a happy circumstance,” continued the inflexible clergyman, “if I did not know, from Mr. Mulberry, that the other lady is now upstairs in this house.”
Whereupon he swung round to Darwent, and nodded toward Caroline.
“Do you love your wife, my lord?”
“She was one of my enemies, Padre. And yet you yourself …”
“I bade you use charity. Not lust. It is in your eyes.”
“Oh, this is intolerable!” cried Caroline—which in very truth it was. But she made no move to leave them.
“Do you love her?” repeated the Rev. Horace.
“Padre,” said Darwent, “I …”
“Let me remind you that the other lady now lies ill above-stairs!”
He had no further need of reminder. The door to the foyer opened slowly. Mr. Samuel Hereford, the portly surgeon, his jowls unshaven and with the look of one who has kept vigil all night, closed the door slowly and bowed.
“Lord Darwent,” he said, “I bring you final news of the patient.”
The rain, in a fine shower, pattered against the windows; it depressed the foliage and made forlorn the statue of King William the Third in St. James’s Square; it shadowed the brownish-tinted dining room.
Mr. Hereford shook his head to rouse himself.
“Last night,” he went on, “I told you I believed I had discovered some remedy, though I worked only on feeling and logic against the unknown.”
“Yes. But it didn’t …?”
“Hear me!” interrupted Mr. Hereford. “Have the kindness not to speak until I tell you. My diagnosis, as you heard, was indigestion; what we call, in a general term for many illnesses, inflammation of the bowel. Miss Spencer, I think, drinks a tolerable amount of wine?”
“Well, so do I! So do most of us.”
The surgeon lifted his hand.
“Yesterday, in Lewknor Lane, I was about to do what it is our practice to do. That is, apply very hot cloths round the affected place so as to ease pain. At this point I recalled from my experience one or two cases—one or two, I say!—when the pain was right side of the abdomen in that place. We applied hot cloths; it, was no doubt a coincidence, but the patient died.
“I decided, mad as you may think me, to try precisely the opposite. That is, extreme cold. I sent to the Clarendon Hotel, where we most easily find iced punch and sherbets and the like, for large quantities of ice …”
“Ice?” repeated Darwent. The rustle of the shower deepened.
Mr. Hereford nodded.
“Mr. Raleigh and I,” he said, “contrived to smash it in pieces and fit a kind of cloth belt tightly round the abdomen. The ice melts swiftly; we renewed it, and renewed it, and renewed it; for the symptoms were better …”
“But your ‘remedy’ failed,” snapped Mr. Mulberry, “and the girl died.”
The surgeon roused himself, blinking.
“Died?” He spoke reproachfully to Darwent. “My lord, I
can’t say why it happened. But I had hoped to receive your thanks.” A wry smile crossed his unshaven face. “My lord, the patient is—fairly well.”
The half-eaten apple slipped from Mr. Mulberry’s fingers, bumped on the floor, and rolled across the carpet.
“Not only is she convalescent, but you may visit her at any time. I remained so secret and even secretive because I failed to credit the good results; not the bad. Let her rest quietly for one day more; keep the ice tightly pressed; and I think she will be cured. But only a short visit now, I warn you!”
Only the rain broke that long silence afterwards.
Darwent, without speaking, grasped Mr. Hereford’s hand and wrung it violently until Mr. Hereford protested.
And the surgeon—who never dreamed he had been dealing with a case of appendicitis, and went to his grave without knowing it; or that his guess against the unknown had found the only way to save Dolly—begged Caroline’s leave to sit down. He sat with his head in his hands, puzzling at a problem which would not completely be resolved by surgery until eighty-one years afterward.
For it was now the bright-colored, careless present day of ’15, with living people who touched real chairs or tables.
“I thank you,” Darwent said at length. Bowing to the rest of them, he went quickly to the door, opened it, and closed it behind him.
Caroline’s face was as pale as her white muslin dress with the flower sprigs. Disregarding the others, she moved carelessly toward the door; but she followed Darwent with some haste.
Once more Mr. Mulberry uttered his low, hoarse, boozy chuckle.
“Padre!”
“Y-yes?”
“Dick’s in love with one of ’em,” said Mr. Mulberry dryly. “But rot him if he knows which.”
Chapter XIV
Of Dolly, and Fond Memory
WHEN DARWENT OPENED THE door of the Amber Room, he knew they were awaiting him, even before the cough which answered his knock.
Hangings of amber-colored silk, attire the style of Louis the Well-Beloved in France fifty years ago, were draped in folds from the ceiling and covered the walls except at the two windows opposite the door. The big ornate bedstead, its canopy weighted with more hangings of amber silk, had its head set between the two windows and its foot toward the door.
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