Complete Works of a E W Mason

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Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 35

by A. E. W. Mason


  Betty was upon her feet like a flash of lightning. Hanaud stopped and swung round upon her, swiftly, with his eyes very challenging and hard.

  “You are going to break those seals now?” she asked with a curious breathlessness. “Then may I come with you — please, please! It is I who am accused. I have a right to be present,” and her voice rose into an earnest cry.

  “Calm yourself, Mademoiselle,” Hanaud returned gently. “No advantage will be taken of you. I am going to break no seals. That, as I have told you, is the right of the Commissaire, who is a magistrate, and he will not move until the medical analysis is ready. No, what I was going to propose was that Mademoiselle here,” and he pointed to Ann, “should show me the outside of those reception-rooms and the rest of the house.”

  “Of course,” said Betty, and she sat down again in the window-seat.

  “Thank you,” said Hanaud. He turned back to Ann Upcott. “Shall we go? And as we go, will you tell me what you think of Boris Waberski?”

  “He has some nerve. I can tell you that, Monsieur Hanaud,” Ann cried. “He actually came back to this house after he had lodged his charge, and asked me to support him”; and she passed out of the room in front of Hanaud.

  Jim Frobisher followed the couple to the door and closed it behind them. The last few minutes had set his mind altogether at rest. The author of the anonymous letters was the detective’s real quarry. His manner had quite changed when putting his questions about them. The flamboyancies and the indifference, even his amusement at Betty’s ill-humour, had quite disappeared. He had got to business watchfully, quietly. Jim came back into the room. He took his cigarette-case from his pocket and opened it.

  “May I smoke?” he asked. As he turned to Betty for permission, a fresh shock brought his thoughts and words alike to a standstill. She was staring at him with panic naked in her eyes and her face set like a tragic mask.

  “He believes me guilty,” she whispered.

  “No,” said Jim, and he went to her side. But she would not listen.

  “He does. I am sure of it. Don’t you see that he was bound to? He was sent from Paris. He has his reputation to think of. He must have his victim before he returns.”

  Jim was sorely tempted to break his word. He had only to tell the real cause which had fetched Hanaud out of Paris and Betty’s distress was gone. But he could not. Every tradition of his life strove to keep him silent. He dared not even tell her that this charge against her was only an excuse. She must live in anxiety for a little while longer. He laid his hand gently upon her shoulder.

  “Betty, don’t believe that!” he said, with a consciousness of how weak that phrase was compared with the statement he could have made. “I was watching Hanaud, listening to him. I am sure that he already knew the answers to the questions he was asking you. Why, he even knew that Simon Harlowe had a passion for collecting, though not a word had been said of it. He was asking questions to see how you would answer them, setting now and then a little trap, as he admitted—”

  “Yes,” said Betty in trembling voice, “all the time he was setting traps.”

  “And every answer that you gave, even your manner in giving them,” Jim continued stoutly, “more and more made clear your innocence.”

  “To him?” asked Betty.

  “Yes, to him. I am sure of it.”

  Betty Harlowe caught at his arm and held it in both her hands. She leaned her head against it. Through the sleeve of his coat he felt the velvet of her cheek.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, Jim,” and as she pronounced the name she smiled. She was thanking him not so much for the stout confidence of his words, as for the comfort which the touch of him gave to her.

  “Very likely I am making too much of little things,” she went on. “Very likely I am ungenerous, too, to Monsieur Hanaud. But he lives amidst crimes and criminals. He must be so used to seeing people condemned and passing out of sight into blackness and horrors, that one more or less, whether innocent or guilty, going that way, wouldn’t seem to matter very much.”

  “Yes, Betty, I think that is a little unjust,” Jim Frobisher remarked gently.

  “Very well, I take it back,” she said, and she let his arm go. “All the same, Jim, I am looking to you, not to him,” and she laughed with an appealing tremor in the laugh which took his heart by storm.

  “Luckily,” said he, “you don’t have to look to anyone,” and he had hardly finished the sentence before Ann Upcott came back alone into the room. She was about Betty’s height and Betty’s age and had the same sort of boyish slenderness and carriage which marks the girls of this generation. But in other respects, even to the colour of her clothes, she was as dissimilar as one girl can be from another. She was dressed in white from her coat to her shoes, and she wore a big gold hat so that one was almost at a loss to know where her hat ended and her hair began.

  “And Monsieur Hanaud?” Betty asked.

  “He is prowling about by himself,” she replied. “I showed him all the rooms and who used them, and he said that he would have a look at them and sent me back to you,”

  “Did he break the seals on the reception-rooms?” Betty Harlowe asked.

  “Oh, no,” said Ann. “Why, he told us that he couldn’t do that without the Commissaire.”

  “Yes, he told us that,” Betty remarked dryly.

  “But I was wondering whether he meant what he told us.”

  “Oh, I don’t think Monsieur Hanaud’s alarming,” said Ann. She gave Jim Frobisher the impression that at any moment she might call him a dear old thing. She had quite got over the first little shock which the announcement of his presence had caused her. “Besides,” and she sat down by the side of Betty in the window-seat and looked with the frankest confidence at Jim— “besides, we can feel safe now, anyway.”

  Jim Frobisher threw up his hands in despair. That queer look of aloofness had played him false with Ann Upcott now, as it had already done with Betty. If these two girls had called on him for help when a sudden squall found them in an open sailing-boat with the sheet of the sail made fast, or on the ice-slope of a mountain, or with a rhinoceros lumbering towards them out of some forest of the Nile, he would not have shrunk from their trust. But this was quite a different matter. They were calmly pitting him against Hanaud.

  “You were safe before,” he exclaimed. “Hanaud is not your enemy, and as for me, I have neither experience nor natural gifts for this sort of work” — and he broke off with a groan. For both the girls were watching him with a smile of complete disbelief.

  “Good heavens, they think that I am being astute!” he reflected; “and the more I confess my incapacity the astuter they’ll take me to be.” He gave up all arguments. “Of course I am absolutely at your service,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Betty. “You will bring your luggage from your hotel and stay here, won’t you?”

  Jim was tempted to accept that invitation. But, on the one hand, he might wish to see Hanaud at the Grande Taverne; or Hanaud might wish to see him, and secrecy was to be the condition of such meetings. It was better that he should keep his freedom of movement complete.

  “I won’t put you to so much trouble, Betty,” he replied. “There’s no reason in the world that I should. A call over the telephone and in five minutes I am at your side.”

  Betty Harlowe seemed in doubt to press her invitation or not.

  “It looks a little inhospitable in me—” she began, and the door opened, and Hanaud entered the room.

  “I left my hat and stick here,” he said. He picked them up and bowed to the girls.

  “You have seen everything, Monsieur Hanaud?” Betty asked.

  “Everything, Mademoiselle. I shall not trouble you again until the report of the analysis is in my hands. I wish you a good morning.”

  Betty slipped off the window-seat and accompanied him out into the hall. It appeared to Jim Frobisher that she was seeking to make some amends for her ill-humour; and whe
n he heard her voice he thought to detect in it some note of apology.

  “I shall be very glad if you will let me know the sense of that report as soon as possible,” she pleaded. “You, better than anyone, will understand that this is a difficult hour for me.”

  “I understand very well, Mademoiselle,” Hanaud answered gravely. “I will see to it that the hour is not prolonged.”

  Jim, watching them through the doorway, as they stood together in the sunlit hall, felt ever so slight a touch upon his arm. He wheeled about quickly. Ann Upcott was at his side with all the liveliness and even the delicate colour gone from her face, and a wild and desperate appeal in her eyes.

  “You will come and stay here? Oh, please!” she whispered.

  “I have just refused,” he answered. “You heard me.”

  “I know,” she went on, the words stumbling over one another from her lips. “But take back your refusal. Do! Oh, I am frightened out of my wits. I don’t understand anything. I am terrified!” And she clasped her hands together in supplication. Jim had never seen fear so stark, no, not even in Betty’s eyes a few minutes ago. It robbed her exquisite face of all its beauty, and made it in a second haggard and old. But before he could answer, a stick clattered loudly upon the pavement of the hall and startled them both like the crack of a pistol.

  Jim looked through the doorway. Hanaud was stooping to pick up his cane. Betty made a dive for it, but Hanaud already had it in his hands.

  “I thank you, Mademoiselle, but I can still touch my toes. Every morning I do it five times in my pyjamas,” and with a laugh he ran down the couple of steps into the courtyard and with that curiously quick saunter of his was out into the street of Charles-Robert in a moment. When Jim turned again to Ann Upcott, the fear had gone from her face so completely that he could hardly believe his eyes.

  “Betty, he is going to stay,” she cried gaily.

  “So I inferred,” replied Betty with a curious smile as she came back into the room.

  CHAPTER 7

  EXIT WABERSKI

  JIM FROBISHER NEITHER saw nor heard any more of Hanaud that day. He fetched his luggage away from the hotel and spent the evening with Betty Harlowe and Ann Upcott at the Maison Grenelle. They took their coffee after dinner in the garden behind the house, descending to it by a short flight of stone steps from a great door at the back of the hall. And by some sort of unspoken compact they avoided all mention of Waberski’s charge. They had nothing to do but to wait now for the analyst’s report. But the long line of high, shuttered windows just above their heads, the windows of the reception-rooms, forbade them to forget the subject, and their conversation perpetually dwindled down into long silences. It was cool out here in the dark garden, cool and very still; so that the bustle of a bird amongst the leaves of the sycamores startled them, and the rare footsteps of a passer-by in the little street of Charles-Robert rang out as though they would wake a dreaming city. Jim noticed that once or twice Ann Upcott leaned swiftly forward and stared across the dark lawns and glimmering paths to the great screen of tall trees, as if her eyes had detected a movement amongst their stems. But on each occasion she said nothing and with an almost inaudible sigh sank back in her chair.

  “Is there a door into the garden from the street?” Frobisher asked, and Betty answered him.

  “No. There is a passage at the end of the house under the reception-rooms from the courtyard which the gardeners use. The only other entrance is through the hall behind us. This old house was built in days when your house really was your castle, and the fewer the entrances, the more safely you slept.”

  The clocks of that city of clocks clashed out the hour of eleven, throwing the sounds of their strokes backwards and forwards above the pinnacles and roof-tops in a sort of rivalry. Betty rose to her feet.

  “There’s a day gone, at all events,” she said, and Ann Upcott agreed with a breath of relief. To Jim it seemed a pitiful thing that these two girls, to whom each day should be a succession of sparkling hours all too short, must be rejoicing quietly, almost gratefully, that another of them had passed.

  “It should be the last of the bad days,” he said, and Betty turned swiftly towards him, her great eyes shining in the darkness.

  “Good night, Jim,” she said, her voice ever so slightly lingering like a caress upon his name; and she held out her hand. “It’s terribly dull for you, but we are not unselfish enough to let you go. You see, we are shunned just now — oh, it’s natural! To have you with us means a great deal. For one thing,” and there came a little lilt in her voice, “I shall sleep tonight.” She ran up the steps and stood for a moment against the light from the hall. “A long-legged slip of a girl, in black silk stockings” — thus Mr. Haslitt had spoken of her as she was five years ago, and the description fitted her still.

  “Good night, Betty,” said Jim, and Ann Upcott ran past him up the steps and waved her hand.

  “Good night,” said Jim, and with a little twist of her shoulders Ann followed Betty. She came back, however. She was wearing a little white frock of crepe de Chine with white stockings and satin shoes, and she gleamed at the head of the steps like a slender thing of silver.

  “You’ll bolt the door when you come in, won’t you?” she pleaded with a curious anxiety considering the height of the strong walls about the garden,

  “I will,” said Jim, and he wondered why in all this business Ann Upcott stood out as a note of fear. It was high time indeed that the long line of windows was thrown open and the interdict raised from the house and its inmates. Jim Frobisher paced the quiet garden in the darkness with a prayer at his heart that that time would come tomorrow. In Betty’s room above the reception-rooms the light was still burning behind the latticed shutters of the windows, in spite of her confidence that she would sleep — yes, and in Ann Upcott’s room too, at the end of the house towards the street. A fury against Boris Waberski flamed up in him.

  It was late before he himself went into the house and barred the door, later still before he fell asleep. But once asleep, he slept soundly, and when he waked, it was to find his shutters thrown wide to the sunlight, his coffee cold by his bedside, and Gaston, the old servant, in the room.

  “Monsieur Hanaud asked me to tell you he was in the library,” he said.

  Jim was out of bed in an instant. “Already? What is the time, Gaston?”

  “Nine o’clock. I have prepared Monsieur’s bath.” He removed the tray from the table by the bed. “I will bring some fresh coffee.”

  “Thank you! And will you please tell Monsieur Hanaud that I will not be long.”

  “Certainly, Monsieur.”

  Jim took his coffee while he dressed and hurried down to the library, where he found Hanaud seated at the big writing-table in the middle of the room, with a newspaper spread out over the blotting-pad and placidly reading the news. He spoke quickly enough, however, the moment Jim appeared.

  “So you left your hotel in the Place Darcy, after all, eh, my friend? The exquisite Miss Upcott! She had but to sigh out a little prayer and clasp her hands together, and it was done. Yes, I saw it all from the hall. What it is to be young! You have those two letters which Waberski wrote your firm?”

  “Yes,” said Jim. He did not think it necessary to explain that though the prayer was Ann Upcott’s, it was the thought of Betty which had brought him to the Maison Grenelle.

  “Good! I have sent for him,” said Hanaud.

  “To come to this house?”

  “I am expecting him now.”

  “That’s capital,” cried Jim. “I shall meet him, then! The damned rogue! I shouldn’t wonder if I thumped him,” and he clenched his fist and shook it in a joyous anticipation.

  “I doubt if that would be so helpful as you think. No, I beg of you to place yourself in my hands this morning, Monsieur Frobisher,” Hanaud interposed soberly. “If you confront Waberski at once with those two letters, at once his accusation breaks down. He will withdraw it. He will excuse himself. He will bu
rst into a torrent of complaints and reproaches. And I shall get nothing out of him. That I do not want.”

  “But what is there to be got?” Jim asked impatiently.

  “Something perhaps. Perhaps nothing,” the detective returned with a shrug of the shoulders. “I have a second mission in Dijon, as I told you in Paris.”

  “The anonymous letters?”

  “Yes. You were present yesterday when Mademoiselle Harlowe told me how she learned that I was summoned from Paris upon this case. It was not, after all, any of my colleagues here who spread the news. It is even now unknown that I am here. No, it was the writer of the letters. And in so difficult a matter I can afford to neglect no clue. Did Waberski know that I was going to be sent for? Did he hear that at the Prefecture when he lodged his charge on the Saturday or from the examining magistrate on the same day? And if he did, to whom did he talk between the time when he saw the magistrate and the time when letters must be posted, if they are to be delivered on the Sunday morning? These are questions I must have the answer to, and if we at once administer the knock-out with your letters, I shall not get them. I must lead him on with friendliness. You see that.”

  Jim very reluctantly did. He had longed to see Hanaud dealing with Waberski in the most outrageous of his moods, pouncing and tearing and trampling with the gibes of a schoolboy and the improprieties of the gutter. Hanaud indeed had promised him as much. But he found him now all for restraint and sobriety and more concerned apparently with the authorship of the anonymous letters than with the righting of Betty Harlowe. Jim felt that he had been defrauded.

  “But I am to meet this man,” he said. “That must not be forgotten.”

  “And it shall not be,” Hanaud assured him. He led him over to the door in the inner wall close to the observation window and opened it.

  “See! If you will please to wait in here,” and as the disappointment deepened on Jim’s face, he added, “Oh, I do not ask you to shut the door. No. Bring up a chair to it — so! And keep the door ajar so! Then you will see and hear and yet not be seen. You are content? Not very. You would prefer to be on the stage the whole time like an actor. Yes, we all do. But, at all events, you do not throw up your part,” and with a friendly grin he turned back to the table.

 

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