Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

But the Greek, pretending to be afraid that the supposed lunatic was going to attack him, uttered an admirable yell of fear, opened the door close at his hand, rushed through, slammed it behind him, and fled up the dark stairs.

  The detective lost no time, and followed in hot pursuit, his two companions tearing up after him into the darkness. Then Griggs quietly turned the key in the lock, for he was sure that Logotheti had reached the top in time to fasten the upper door, and must be already barricading it. Griggs proceeded to do the same, quietly and systematically, and the great strength he had not yet lost served him well, for the furniture in the room was heavy. In a couple of minutes it would have needed sledge-hammers and crowbars to break out by the lower entrance, even if the lock had not been a solid one.

  Griggs then turned out the lights, and went quietly back through the library to the other part of the house to find Lady Maud.

  Logotheti, having meanwhile made the upper door perfectly secure, descended by the open staircase to the hall, and sent the first footman he met to call the butler, with whom he said he wished to speak. The butler came at once.

  ‘Lady Maud asked me to see those three men,’ said Logotheti in a low tone. ‘Mr. Griggs and I are convinced that they are lunatics escaped from the asylum, and we have locked them up securely in the staircase beyond the study.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the butler, as if Logotheti had been explaining how he wished his shoe-leather to be treated.

  ‘I think you had better telephone for the doctor, and explain everything to him over the wire without speaking to Lord Creedmore just yet.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How long will it take the doctor to get here?’

  ‘Perhaps an hour, sir, if he’s at home. Couldn’t say precisely, sir.’

  ‘Very good. There is no hurry; and of course her ladyship will be particularly anxious that none of her friends should guess what has happened; you see there would be a general panic if it were known that there are escaped lunatics in the house.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps you had better take a couple of men you can trust, and pile up some more furniture against the doors, above and below. One cannot be too much on the safe side in such cases.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll do it at once, sir.’

  Logotheti strolled back towards the gallery in a very unconcerned way. As for the warrant, he had burnt it in the empty fireplace in Griggs’ room after making all secure, and had dusted down the black ashes so carefully that they had quite disappeared under the grate. After all, as the doctor would arrive in the firm expectation of finding three escaped madmen under lock and key, the Scotland Yard men might have some difficulty in proving themselves sane until they could communicate with their headquarters, and by that time Mr. Van Torp could be far on his way if he chose.

  When Logotheti reached the door of the drawing-room, Margaret was finishing Rosina’s Cavatina from the Barbiere di Siviglia in a perfect storm of fireworks, having transposed the whole piece two notes higher to suit her own voice, for it was originally written for a mezzo-soprano.

  Lady Maud and Van Torp had gone out upon the terrace unnoticed a moment before Margaret had begun to sing. The evening was still and cloudless, and presently the purple twilight would pale under the summer moon, and the garden and the lawns would be once more as bright as day. The friends walked quickly, for Lady Maud set the pace and led Van Torp toward the trees, where the stables stood, quite hidden from the house. As soon as she reached the shade she stood still and spoke in a low voice.

  ‘You have waited too long,’ she said. ‘Three men have come to arrest you, and their motor is over there in the avenue.’

  ‘Where are they?’ inquired the American, evidently not at all disturbed. ‘I’ll see them at once, please.’

  ‘And give yourself up?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Why not? Do you suppose I am going to run away? A man who gets out in a hurry doesn’t usually look innocent, does he?’

  Lady Maud asserted herself.

  ‘You must think of me and of my father,’ she said in a tone of authority Van Torp had never heard from her. ‘I know you’re as innocent as I am, but after all that has been said and written about you, and about you and me together, it’s quite impossible that you should let yourself be arrested in our house, in the midst of a party that has been asked here expressly to be convinced that my father approves of you. Do you see that?’

  ‘Well—’ Mr. Van Torp hesitated, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets.

  Across the lawn, from the open window, Margaret’s voice rang out like a score of nightingales in unison.

  ‘There’s no time to discuss it,’ Lady Maud said. ‘I asked her to sing, so as to keep the people together. Before she has finished, you must be out of reach.’

  Mr. Van Torp smiled. ‘You’re remarkably positive about it,’ he said.

  ‘You must get to town before the Scotland Yard people, and I don’t know how much start they will give you. It depends on how long Mr. Griggs and Logotheti can keep them in the old study. It will be neck and neck, I fancy. I’ll go with you to the stables. You must ride to your own place as hard as you can, and go up to London in your car to-night. The roads are pretty clear on Sundays, and there’s moonlight, so you will have no trouble. It will be easy to say here that you have been called away suddenly. Come, you must go!’

  Lady Maud moved towards the stables, and Van Torp was obliged to follow her. Far away Margaret was singing the last bars of the waltz song.

  ‘I must say,’ observed Mr. Van Torp thoughtfully, as they walked on, ‘for a lady who’s generally what I call quite feminine, you make a man sit up pretty quick.’

  ‘It’s not exactly the time to choose for loafing,’ answered Lady Maud. ‘By the bye,’ she added, ‘you may as well know. Poor Leven is dead. I had a telegram a few minutes ago. He was killed yesterday by a bomb meant for somebody else.’

  Van Torp stood still, and Lady Maud stopped with evident reluctance.

  ‘And there are people who don’t believe in Providence,’ he said slowly. ‘Well, I congratulate you anyway.’

  ‘Hush, the poor man is dead. We needn’t talk about him. Come, there’s no time to lose!’ She moved impatiently.

  ‘So you’re a widow!’ Van Torp seemed to be making the remark to himself without expecting any answer, but it at once suggested a question. ‘And now what do you propose to do?’ he inquired. ‘But I expect you’ll be a nun, or something. I’d like you to arrange so that I can see you sometimes, will you?’

  ‘I’m not going to disappear yet,’ Lady Maud answered gravely.

  They reached the stables, which occupied three sides of a square yard. At that hour the two grooms and the stable-boy were at their supper, and the coachman had gone home to his cottage. A big brown retriever on a chain was sitting bolt upright beside his kennel, and began to thump the flagstones with his tail as soon as he recognised Lady Maud. From within a fox-terrier barked two or three times. Lady Maud opened a door, and he sprang out at her yapping, but was quiet as soon as he knew her.

  ‘You’d better take the Lancashire Lass,’ she said to Van Torp. ‘You’re heavier than my father, but it’s not far to ride, and she’s a clever creature.’

  She had turned up the electric light while speaking, for it was dark inside the stable; she got a bridle, went into the box herself, and slipped it over the mare’s pretty head. Van Torp saw that it was useless to offer help.

  ‘Don’t bother about a saddle,’ he said; ‘it’s a waste of time.’

  He touched the mare’s face and lips with his hand, and she understood him, and let him lead her out. He vaulted upon her back, and Lady Maud walked beside him till they were outside the yard.

  ‘If you had a high hat it would look like the circus,’ she said, glancing at his evening dress. ‘Now get away! I’ll be in town on Tuesday; let me know what happens. Good-bye! Be sure to let me know.’r />
  ‘Yes. Don’t worry. I’m only going because you insist, anyhow. Good-bye. God bless you!’

  He waved his hand, the mare sprang forward, and in a few seconds he was out of sight amongst the trees. Lady Maud listened to the regular sound of the galloping hoofs on the turf, and at the same time from very far off she heard Margaret’s high trills and quick staccato notes. At that moment the moon was rising through the late twilight, and a nightingale high overhead, no doubt judging her little self to be quite as great a musician as the famous Cordova, suddenly began a very wonderful piece of her own, just half a tone higher than Margaret’s, which might have distressed a sensitive musician, but did not jar in the least on Lady Maud’s ear.

  Now that she had sent Van Torp on his way, she would gladly have walked alone in the park for half an hour to collect her thoughts; but people who live in the world are rarely allowed any pleasant leisure when they need it, and many of the most dramatic things in real life happen when we are in such a hurry that we do not half understand them. So the moment that should have been the happiest of all goes dashing by when we are hastening to catch a train; so the instant of triumph after years of labour or weeks of struggling is upon us when we are perhaps positively obliged to write three important notes in twenty minutes; and sometimes, too, and mercifully, the pain of parting is numbed just as the knife strikes the nerve, by the howling confusion of a railway station that forces us to take care of ourselves and our belongings; and when the first instant of joy, or victory, or acute suffering is gone in a flash, memory never quite brings back all the happiness nor all the pain.

  Lady Maud could not have stayed away many minutes longer. She went back at once, entered by the garden window just as Margaret was finishing Rosina’s song, and remained standing behind her till she had sung the last note. English people rarely applaud conventional drawing-room music, but this had been something more, and the Craythew guests clapped their hands loudly, and even the elderly wife of the scientific peer emitted distinctly audible sounds of satisfaction. Lady Maud bent her handsome head and kissed the singer affectionately, whispering words of heartfelt thanks.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THROUGH THE MISTAKEN efforts of Isidore Bamberger, justice had got herself into difficulties, and it was as well for her reputation, which is not good nowadays, that the public never heard what happened on that night at Craythew, how the three best men who had been available at headquarters were discomfited in their well-meant attempt to arrest an innocent man, and how they spent two miserable hours together locked up in a dark winding staircase. For it chanced, as it will chance to the end of time, that the doctor was out when the butler telephoned to him; it happened, too, that he was far from home, engaged in ushering a young gentleman of prosperous parentage into this world, an action of which the kindness might be questioned, considering that the poor little soul presumably came straight from paradise, with an indifferent chance of ever getting there again. So the doctor could not come.

  The three men were let out in due time, however, and as no trace of a warrant could be discovered at that hour, Logotheti and Griggs being already sound asleep, and as Lord Creedmore, in his dressing-gown and slippers, gave them a written statement to the effect that Mr. Van Torp was no longer at Craythew, they had no choice but to return to town, rather the worse for wear. What they said to each other by the way may safely be left to the inexhaustible imagination of a gentle and sympathising reader.

  Their suppressed rage, their deep mortification, and their profound disgust were swept away in their overwhelming amazement, however, when they found that Mr. Rufus Van Torp, whom they had sought in Derbyshire, was in Scotland Yard before them, closeted with their Chief and explaining what an odd mistake the justice of two nations had committed in suspecting him to have been at the Metropolitan Opera-House in New York at the time of the explosion, since he had spent that very evening in Washington, in the private study of the Secretary of the Treasury, who wanted his confidential opinion on a question connected with Trusts before he went abroad. Mr. Van Torp stuck his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets and blandly insisted that the cables should be kept red-hot — at international expense — till the member of the Cabinet in Washington should answer corroborating the statement. Four o’clock in the morning in London was only eleven o’clock of the previous evening, Mr. Van Torp explained, and it was extremely unlikely that the Secretary of the Treasury should be in bed so early. If he was, he was certainly not asleep; and with the facilities at the disposal of governments there was no reason why the answer should not come back in forty minutes.

  It was impossible to resist such simple logic. The lines were cleared for urgent official business between London and Washington, and in less than an hour the answer came back, to the effect that Mr. Rufus Van Torp’s statement was correct in every detail; and without any interval another official message arrived, revoking the request for his extradition, which ‘had been made under a most unfortunate misapprehension, due to the fact that Mr. Van Torp’s visit to the Secretary of the Treasury had been regarded as confidential by the latter.’

  Scotland Yard expressed its regret, and Mr. Van Torp smiled and begged to be allowed, before leaving, to ‘shake hands’ with the three men who had been put to so much inconvenience on his account. This democratic proposal was promptly authorised, to the no small satisfaction and profit of the three haggard officials. So Mr. Van Torp went away, and in a few minutes he was sound asleep in the corner of his big motor-car on his way back to Derbyshire.

  Lady Maud found Margaret and Logotheti walking slowly together under the trees about eleven o’clock on the following morning. Some of the people were already gone, and most of the others were to leave in the course of the day. Lady Maud had just said good-bye to a party of ten who were going off together, and she had not had a chance to speak to Margaret, who had come down late, after her manner. Most great singers are portentous sleepers. As for Logotheti, he always had coffee in his room wherever he was, he never appeared at breakfast, and he got rid of his important correspondence for the day before coming down.

  ‘I’ve had a letter from Threlfall,’ he said as Lady Maud came up. ‘I was just telling Miss Donne about it. Feist died in Dr. Bream’s Home yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Rather unfortunate at this juncture, isn’t it?’ observed Margaret.

  But Lady Maud looked shocked and glanced at Logotheti as if asking a question.

  ‘No,’ said the Greek, answering her thought. ‘I did not kill him, poor devil! He did it himself, out of fright, I think. So that side of the affair ends. He had some sealed glass capsules of hydrocyanide of potassium in little brass tubes, sewn up in the lining of a waistcoat, and he took one, and must have died instantly. I believe the stuff turns into prussic acid, or something of that sort, when you swallow it — Griggs will know.’

  ‘How dreadful!’ exclaimed Lady Maud. ‘I’m sure you drove him to it!’

  ‘I’ll bear the responsibility of having rid the world of him, if I did. But my share consisted in having given him opium and then stopped it suddenly, till he surrendered and told the truth — or a large part of it — what I have told you already. He would not own that he killed Miss Bamberger himself with the rusty little knife that had a few red silk threads sticking to the handle. He must have put it back into his case of instruments as it was, and he never had the courage to look at it again. He had studied medicine, I believe. But he confessed everything else, how he had been madly in love with the poor girl when he was her father’s secretary, and how she treated him like a servant and made her father turn him out, and how he hated Van Torp furiously for being engaged to marry her. He hated the Nickel Trust, too, because he had thought the shares were going down and had risked the little he had as margin on a drop, and had lost it all by the unexpected rise. He drank harder after that, till he was getting silly from it, when the girl’s death gave him his chance against Van Torp, and he manufactured the evidence in the diary he kept, and went
to Bamberger with it and made the poor man believe whatever he invented. He told me all that, with a lot of details, but I could not make him admit that he had killed the girl himself, so I gave him his opium and he went to sleep. That’s my story. Or rather, it’s his, as I got it from him last Thursday. I supposed there was plenty of time, but Mr. Bamberger seems to have been in a hurry after we had got Feist into the Home.’

  ‘Had you told Mr. Van Torp all this?’ asked Lady Maud anxiously.

  ‘No,’ Logotheti answered. ‘I was keeping the information ready in case it should be needed.’

  A familiar voice spoke behind them.

  ‘Well, it’s all right as it is. Much obliged, all the same.’

  All three turned suddenly and saw that Mr. Van Torp had crept up while they were talking, and the expression of his tremendous mouth showed that he had meant to surprise them, and was pleased with his success in doing so.

  ‘Really!’ exclaimed Lady Maud.

  ‘Goodness gracious!’ cried the Primadonna.

  ‘By the Dog of Egypt!’ laughed Logotheti.

  ‘Don’t know the breed,’ answered Van Torp, not understanding, but cheerfully playful. ‘Was it a trick dog?’

  ‘I thought you were in London,’ Margaret said.

  ‘I was. Between one and four this morning, I should say. It’s all right.’ He nodded to Lady Maud as he spoke the last words, but he did not seem inclined to say more.

  ‘Is it a secret?’ she asked.

  ‘I never have secrets,’ answered the millionaire. ‘Secrets are everything that must be found out and put in the paper right away, ain’t they? But I had no trouble at all, only the bother of waiting till the office got an answer from the other side. I happened to remember where I’d spent the evening of the explosion, that’s all, and they cabled sharp and found my statement correct.’

  ‘Why did you never tell me?’ asked Lady Maud reproachfully. ‘You knew how anxious I was!’

  ‘Well,’ replied Mr. Van Torp, dwelling long on the syllable, ‘I did tell you it was all right anyhow, whatever they did, and I thought maybe you’d accept the statement. The man I spent that evening with is a public man, and he mightn’t exactly think our interview was anybody else’s business, might he?’