Stranway halted his men to listen. Meers' footsteps, crunching on what was presumably a gravel walk, came to them now distinctly. The next minute, they heard the man mount some steps, and, from the sound, cross a verandah; then a door opened and closed.
With his men behind him, and keeping to the border of the driveway to deaden the sound of their footsteps on the turf, Stranway broke into a run. It took him scarcely a minute to reach what was evidently, in the season, a large and well-kept lawn. He checked his pace here; and, proceeding more cautiously, crossed the lawn and passed around the side of the building, which he could now see was a large, spacious, and many-windowed wooden structure.
Once at the rear, he led the way unhesitatingly toward a low stoop which loomed up in the darkness, and, with his men still close behind him, went up the steps and tried the door. It was open, as the Orchid had said it would be.
At Stranway's whispered directions, and imitating his example, the others removed their shoes; and then, stepping noiselessly inside, Stranway's pocket flashlight came into play for an instant, located the swinging door across the room in which they found themselves—and went out. In another instant he had led the way into the hallway that the Orchid had described. Here, light coming from the farther end, he could see the screen to which she had referred; and now he caught, too, the sound of a voice in a mingled snarl and sneer, which he recognised as that of Dr. Meers.
Silently the three men stole along the short hallway until within a few feet of the screen. Here, Stranway motioned his companions to take a position one on each side of the wall behind him, edged forward himself to the screen, and, finding it to be cloth-covered, quickly cut a slit in it with his penknife. He peered through the opening—and for a moment stood like a man dazed; then his eyes grew dark with passion and his hands clenched fiercely at his sides. What he had expected to see he could not have told in any tangible way: Charlebois, yes; but Charlebois the master; Charlebois, in whatever strange way the little old gentleman might have seen fit to bring it about, holding the whiphand; Charlebois, certainly—but not like this!
Before him was a large apartment that ran the width of the building—a sick ward, evidently somewhat dismantled now for the winter when it was not in use. Near the right-hand windows and quite close together were two single beds. Upon each of these lay a man bound and roped by many lashings that passed around and around their bodies and the beds themselves. One of the two, and it was only too grimly obvious that there was no impersonation here, was Charlebois; the other's identity Stranway could guess at well enough—Minter.
Standing before the beds was Dr. Hadley Meers; and beside Meers stood a short, grey-haired, roughly dressed man—the old servant Minter had referred to in his statement, undoubtedly.
Stranway's first impulse was to spring forward upon the two; and then the Orchid's words, "let him play out his game," came to him, and he checked himself. Meers was speaking.
"Well, Dr. Minter," he jeered, "I trust you are thoroughly pleased with the result of your—let us call it—original research work. I had the pleasure of reading enough of your conclusions to congratulate you on your discovery. You have—I am sure you will appreciate the inevitableness of it—very little longer to live under the circumstances, and if it will sweeten these last few minutes any to know it, I am glad to assure you that you are quite correct in your deductions. I only regret that time prevents my disposing of you by the same method you so meticulously described, and that in your case I shall have to resort to speedier, if somewhat cruder means."
"Ah!" Charlebois spoke suddenly. "You admit, then, that you murdered the Loud brothers by deliberately inoculating them with typhoid germs?"
Meers wheeled on Charlebois, and laughed gratingly:
"I'll get around to you in a moment! But, meanwhile, since you have chosen to interfere in what does not concern you, and will share what I have in store for Minter, I admit it quite freely."
"And this man"—Charlebois indicated the servant with a bob of his head—"does he die, too, that you make a confession in his presence?"
Again Meers laughed unpleasantly.
"Coming from you," he sneered, "I can well understand your question. If you were a little more careful about those who surround you, you would not be drawing your last few breaths at this moment. Don't worry yourself any on my behalf. Jacques and I understand each other, as you will learn to your cost. I keep those who are faithful to me. He has been in my employ for twenty years."
"And he has been in mine"—Charlebois' tones rang suddenly tense and stern—"for twenty-one!" The corded ropes over the bed seemed to give way as if by magic. With a quick jerk, Charlebois was in an upright position, his hand leapt swift as thought from beneath the bedspread, and a revolver covered Dr. Hadley Meers.
With a sharp intake of breath, his blood tingling, Stranway watched the scene. Meers staggered back—the taunt, the sneer, the vindictive, malicious triumph was gone from him; there was only fear now in a face grown suddenly livid.
Charlebois' orders came crisp and sharp:
"Jacques, disarm him, and guard the door leading to the front hall! Minter, you would better take your place there, too, with Jacques."
He was obeyed on the instant. Minter, with as little difficulty as Charlebois had experienced, cast off the cords and rose from the bed. Jacques stepped coolly to the dazed and shaken man, felt quickly over the other's clothing, and, finding a revolver, transferred it to his own pocket.
Charlebois, too, now rose, and advanced a step toward Meers; and then, rapidly, in cold, unemotional tones, he began to speak!
"Twenty-one years—I have watched you all that time—waiting until by some act or deed of your own volition, by your own inherent evil nature, you would bring your own destruction upon yourself, and I should pay the debt I owe you. It has been a long time in coming, that hour of settlement—but it has come now! Two lives have gone out at your hands. I could not save them, because I had no slightest suspicion of your purpose, but you shall answer for them before the law and before your God. Jacques, set as jailor by you over Minter, found Minter's statement, made himself known to Minter, and sent the statement to me. A certain woman—another of the faithless ones who surround me—whom you know through her having been an inmate here, came to you and told you that I, her employer—you understood that her occupation was that of confidential secretary to some one—had received a document under strange circumstances, the tenor of which she did not know. She told you that a servant of mine, out on a day's boating holiday on the Sound, had landed at an island; that the envelope had been thrown to him from the window of a large house, the only one on the island; that a man from the window had begged him to deliver it in all haste to the police, instead of which he had brought it first to me; that I at once left my house after locking the document in the safe and telling her that I would be away for a day, during which her services would not be required; that she had seen the signature to the paper, Dr. Minter's, and knowing that he was your associate, she had come to you without an instant's delay to tell you what had happened.
"It was very plausible, was it not? You had no reason to suspect anything. I did not intend that you should. The inference was plain. Your secret was out—Minter knew it—and it was now known to another besides Minter. Also the inference was that I had gone to the island—to Minter. This inference became a certainty when Jacques went to the mainland and telephoned you that I was here. We were both then, the only two men who knew of your crime—except that scoundrel nephew, who will be met by an officer from Scotland Yard when he lands at Southampton the day after to-morrow—practically within your power. You instructed Jacques to manage in some way to drug us, and then to make us prisoners and hold us until you were ready to deal with us finally. My continued absence—and I permitted no news of my whereabouts to escape, despite the anxiety I knew it was occasioning—was to substantiate in your mind, beyond the possibility of any doubt, Jacques' assurance to you that he had succ
eeded.
"There remained, then, only Minter's statement. Once you had that, the game was all in your own hands. But you must have that first—make sure of that, cover your trail behind you as you went along, before you disposed of us. The plan you adopted to obtain the statement was originated by me, and 'suggested' to you by the same young woman as before. You seized upon it eagerly, did you not, since it even provided you with an alibi for yourself when the time came to get rid of Minter and myself? I believe from your instructions to Jacques that it was your humane intention to leave us here, bound, and with a time-fuse connected to the pile of combustibles you ordered him to gather together in the cellar, so that, say, at four o'clock in the morning, long enough after your visit to prevent any suspicion attaching itself to you, the sanatorium would burn to the ground—and Minter and I would burn with it. That Minter, who had laboratory business here, might perish, would, it is quite evident, not seem suspiciously strange; but your visit here in my yacht in the face of my disappearance was quite another matter. In reality, though, or so it seemed to you, it made the very point in your favour that you required, for every man aboard the yacht would testify that I, Henri Raoul Charlebois, had returned to New York—and another disappearance following the first one concerned you not a whit, so that your hands appeared to be unquestionably clean.
"You wonder why I came here, why I lured you here, why I did not at once on receipt of Minter's statement, turn to the police, cause your arrest without more ado, and let the law deal with you alone. I will tell you why: I was afraid you might even then escape the penalty you deserve. I did not dare depend on Minter's statement alone to assure your conviction without corroborative evidence to back it up, and I gave you credit for having destroyed the hypodermic syringe and all results of his tests. It was necessary that you should admit your guilt before witnesses. But you would only do that when you were absolutely sure you were safe, when the statement was destroyed, and when the only ones who knew of your guilt were in your power. But you would do it then, and do it in a taunting, gloating way—all men of your stamp do! You did it more readily than I anticipated, and——"
"You, in God's name, who are you?" The words, in a wild cry, burst from Meers' twitching lips. His eyes, full of haunting terror, swept once around the room, then came back, as if fascinated, to rivet themselves on Charlebois.
"I am the man," Charlebois answered in the same stern tones, "that once you tempted to face his Maker with his own blood upon his hands; the man that, in his despair and misery, you, with your brutal, inhuman cynicism, almost succeeded in taunting to his death, to suicide. You have forgotten the occasion, perhaps? I will try to recall it to your memory. It is long ago, long before the past twenty years during which I have watched you. It was an afternoon on the Battery. You sat down on a bench beside a man who was miserably clothed. He made no advances to you; but you, for your amusement, began to draw him out. Believing that sympathy prompted you, he told you his story, told you of his illness, his inability to work—and perhaps then he hoped, and God knows no human being ever needed it more desperately or deserved it more, that you would give him a little help, or at least say a kindly word to cheer him on, for, in his despair, there seemed nothing left in life for him that afternoon. Do you begin to recall the scene? Do you remember your words when you had heard his story and rose callously to go away? They ate into his soul—I remember them—I am that man. 'There are too many like you,' you said. 'You are a putrid lot, running sores on the face of the earth, cringing, whining lepers, worthless to yourselves and to everybody else—it would be a boon to society if you would do away with yourself. If you're as miserable as you say you are, you ought to be glad enough to do it—only you are all cowards. I advise you to try it to-night. Jump off there'—you pointed to the river—'it is the only commendable and decent act you'll ever perform.' That night"—a spasm crossed Charlebois' features, and his voice dropped into a low, tense whisper—"that night I was very near my death."
It was very still in the room as Charlebois ceased speaking, so still that the pounding of his own heart seemed audible to Stranway, as he watched the scene before him. Near the door, Minter and Jacques were strained a little forward, still in the intent attitude they had assumed while hanging on Charlebois' words. In the centre of the room, Meers' form swayed with a curious jerky movement backward and forward; the grey in his face had deepened to a still more sickly pallor; his eyes, wide, haunted, were again sweeping the room in every direction, only to fix at every alternate second upon Charlebois' grave face, and upon the revolver in Charlebois' hand. Suddenly this changed. Startling, discordant, jarring, a peal of unnatural laughter came from the wretched man's lips.
"Suicide, eh?" he cried. "Did I advise that? Ha, ha! Well, it was good advice; I advise it yet—and my own advice is good enough for me, good enough for——"
"Stop him!" Charlebois cried out sharply, as he made a sudden rush toward the other.
With a shove, Stranway sent the screen crashing to the floor, and leapt forward; from the other side of the room, Minter and Jacques sprang for Meers—all of them too late. With a movement too swift for any intervention, Meers' hand had shot to his pocket, whipped out a vial and carried it to his lips, and even as the others reached him, the vial tinkled into splinters at their feet, the man reeled into Dr. Minter's arms—and a strong, penetrating odour resembling that of peach-blossoms seemed suddenly to permeate the room.
Minter laid Meers down, and for a minute or two worked over him, then he looked up and shook his head.
"Hydrocyanic acid," he said tersely.
Dr. Hadley Meers was dead.
Chapter XVIII.
The Art of Piquet
Table of Contents
One of those long intervals that Stranway had come to term "comparative tranquillity" had passed since the night at Dr. Meers' Sanatorium—not that Dominic Court in the meanwhile had been void of activity, for on the contrary, many entries in the Red Ledger had been balanced during that time, but the "payments" had been made at a distance, some of them even abroad, and at none of them had the little old gentleman or Stranway been present in person. And now it was early afternoon in the Red Room of 2½ Dominic Court, and that "comparative tranquillity" was obviously at an end, for, during the last fifteen minutes, Stranway had been listening to instructions from Charlebois which within the next few hours, he knew, would plunge him headlong into "active service" again. From the bookshelf, he had just pulled down a volume indicated by the little old gentleman, and now, turning the pages rapidly to the reference asked for, he glanced inquiringly across the room to where Charlebois sat at the antique mahogany desk with the Red Ledger open before him.
"Well?" said the little old gentleman briskly. "What do you find?"
Stranway began to read from the book in his hand:
"'De Moreau, Leopold Pascal Joseph Emile—Count; sixth of his line; direct descendant——'"
"Yes, yes," interrupted Charlebois, with a jerk of his head that set the tassel bobbing on his red skullcap. "Of course! The young man is certainly possessed of a pedigree. It recites it all, does it not, like a chapter in Genesis? Well, then, since we have been over all our records together, you know all there is to know about Count Leopold Pascal Emile De Moreau. Is it not so?"
Stranway nodded gravely.
"Yes," he said.
For a moment Charlebois was silent, then he laid his hand on the open page of the Ledger.
"Little Marjorie Dorothy Blaine—and now the little girl has grown to womanhood! Wonderful, wonderful!" he said softly. "The account goes back to the time when she was a very little tot of four or five, my boy, and I owe her more, perhaps, than to all the rest of those whose names are here. I have never seen her in all these years, but"—he waved toward the huge filing cabinet beside the safe—"I have watched over her. She has grown to be a very beautiful woman, rich, charming, well educated. I have never had an opportunity to do her a service commensurate with my debt. She has ne
ver wanted anything until now—and now she wants to marry Count De Moreau, at whom all the wealthy New York families with eligible daughters are setting their caps while they bid frantically against each other for the prize." Charlebois paused and smiled quizzically. "Human nature is strangely curious and complex and mystifying, isn't it? What a diversity of longings, tastes, ambitions and desires! I set my heart upon one thing, you upon another, and to some in this democratic land of ours a title is the summum bonum of all earthly happiness." Charlebois closed the Red Ledger suddenly and stood up. "Marjorie Blaine wants to be the Countess De Moreau—well, well, we must pay our debt, and it seems now that the time has arrived. Well, my boy, I think there is nothing further to be said—everything is quite understood?"
"Quite," said Stranway.
"Money?" inquired Charlebois. "You have taken plenty of money? The Count, I fear, is—er—perhaps embarrassed in that respect, and you play a very poor hand at piquet—very poor."
"Wretched," admitted Stranway, with a comical air of despair.
The old gentleman's face softened and he came suddenly to Stranway, laying his hand on the younger man's shoulder.
"Ah, my boy," he said, "I do not know what I should do without you. All of those who surround me are faithful, and I would trust them all with my life as I do day after day, but you"—his voice broke a little—"it is, indeed, as though God had given me a son, and——" He stopped, then pushed Stranway gently toward the door. "No, no!" he smiled, as Stranway was about to speak. "It is not necessary. I know what is in your heart, too. I read it long ago. And now you have no time to lose. You will be expected within the next hour or so." He was still pushing Stranway toward the door. "Go now—hurry, my boy!"
Stranway's destination was the Long Island estate of Henry Blaine, the multi-millionaire—and at five o'clock that afternoon he was idly watching a game of cards in the so-called gun-room of Mr. Blaine's palatial mansion. He had met Mrs. Blaine, Mr. Blaine, Marjorie Blaine, a dozen ladies, a dozen men—and the Count De Moreau. He was, in short, an integral part of a fashionable house party, and one of the invited guests. Stranway smiled a little to himself as the origin of the invitation he had received intruded itself now suddenly upon his mind. He had not known the Blaines, the Blaines had not known him; but, none the less, an invitation had reached him three days before. He remembered the half amused, half whimsical light in Charlebois' eyes when it had arrived. "They had heard"—so Mrs. Blaine wrote—"from their very dear friend, Mr. Justin Overholt of Chicago, that he (Stranway) was visiting New York, and he must be sure and come to them in Long Island—just a little house party—and be sure and come not later than Tuesday as they were giving a small ball that evening in honour of Count De Moreau, etc., etc." Stranway's smile broadened into one quite natural as the man behind whose chair he was standing suddenly screwed around, held up his hand, exhibited a poverty-stricken pair of deuces, and raked in a not immodest pot. They were playing poker, a half dozen of his fellow guests, and Stranway had politely refused to join the circle, laughingly declaring that a seventh hand was little less than sacrilege to the national game and that he would much prefer to look on.
The Red Ledger Page 14