Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  The car swung round the square and returned. On its eastern side the street is broken by a broad blind alley. On one side of this alley stretches a long and low-roofed chapel, on the other a great shop with its warehouse. At the bottom is a big gate behind which stretches a public garden, and in the corner, by the side of this gate, stands a small square, flat house like a doll’s house. It is painted white, and the door and the windows are picked out in black, and with the long empty chapel upon one side, and the empty warehouse on the other, and the empty locked garden behind, it was, at this hour of the morning, as lonely as a farm in the country. Strickland’s car swept into this blind alley and stopped as near as it could to the small black door. But the great length of its body prevented it from drawing up.

  “Give me your latch-key!” he said to Corinne.

  Corinne took it from her hand-bag and thrust it into his hand.

  “The switch in the hall is on the left-hand side by the door,” she said.

  Strickland shook his head.

  “I shan’t turn the light on until you are all in the house and the door closed.”

  Ariadne leaned forward.

  “Then you did see—” she began.

  “No one,” Strickland interrupted her. “But the door’s narrow. We can only enter one at a time. If I switch the light on, each one in turn will be outlined black against it like one of those old daguerreotypes. I shall leave the door of the car open. As soon as the door of the house is open, too, come as quickly as you can, one behind the other.”

  The two girls watched him descend, without haste and yet with remarkable speed. With the same neat celerity he crossed to the door, found the tiny keyhole, into which that thin Yale key fitted, and noiselessly opened it. For a moment he stared into the dark, narrow passage — immobile, listening. Ariadne’s eyes darted this way and that about the alley. It was curious how fear clutched suddenly at her heart and took her breath away as she watched Strickland standing upon the one shallow step, a target for the poorest of marksmen, whether hidden within the house or outside in the shadows of the alley; and how deep the relief which made her toss back her head with a low laugh, when he whispered, “Now,” and stepped within the door.

  “Run, Corinne!” she urged. “I’ll follow you.”

  Corinne needed no urging. She had nine or ten yards to traverse, and Strickland had a fancy that light itself could not have travelled more swiftly than Corinne. As soon as Ariadne had followed, he closed the door, but so smoothly that not the slightest click of the latch was heard, not the tiniest jar felt. For a few moments they stood together holding their breath, listening, with every sense alert, and hearing the darkness throb about them like the beat of their own hearts. Strickland felt Ariadne’s hand slip in under his elbow and tighten upon his arm.

  “Turn on the light, Corinne,” he said in a composed and quiet voice, and the crystal pendant shone bright above their heads. He gave back to her her latch-key.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she moved forward to a door upon the left hand. It was a narrow passage, with the walls distempered in white and the door which Corinne approached painted black. Strickland turned back to Ariadne.

  “You would,” he said, with a smile of appreciation.

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “Follow last of all, masking her, so that if there should be any danger, it must be you whom it would take.”

  Ariadne wrinkled her nose at him.

  “Be quiet, Strickland,” she said, and then with a change of voice, “Look!”

  Corinne had turned the handle of that left-hand door and had pushed it till it stood just a trifle ajar. She was hesitating now upon the threshold and threw a wavering glance back towards her companions.

  “The light-switch is across the room by the fireplace,” she faltered.

  “I’ll turn it on,” said Strickland.

  He drew Corinne away and opened the door wide, pressing it back against the wall of the room, lest anyone should be hiding there. Then he crossed to the fire-place and turned on the light. The room ran the depth of the house, a general living-room, with a smallish oval mahogany dining-table in the back part. Corinne picked up a match-box from the mantelshelf and knelt in front of the hearth.

  “I am cold,” she said, with a shiver.

  She struck a match and lit the fire, and sat back upon her heels watching the flames leap up. But she was listening, too, with her every fibre tense.

  “Shall I go over the house with you?” Strickland asked.

  Corinne sprang up gratefully.

  “Oh, thank you!”

  She turned to Ariadne. “Do you mind? You will be safe here.”

  But Strickland was not so lightly satisfied. For all that he knew, there might be danger in that house to-night for all of them.

  “No,” he said. “‘Well keep together.”

  They descended into the basement, the two girls following upon Strickland’s heels, whilst Corinne directed him to the various switches for the electric light. Strickland explored every cranny, even to the cellar across the area. Then, locking and bolting the door, he returned at the head of the tiny procession to the level of the street.

  “There are two floors above,” he said.

  Corinne explained the geography of the doll’s house.

  “Yes. On the top floor my maid and the cook sleep. Below them are my bedroom, bath-room, and a little drawing-room.”

  “Let us have a look at them,” said Strickland, and very quietly he led the way upstairs.

  Corinne’s bedroom was stretched across the front of the house. It was hung with pale blue silk, embroidered with gold, and with its head to the side of the house, stood a broad, low gold bed of ancient Italian make, mounted upon a dais. A coverlet of blue silk, brocaded with gold and hung with heavy golden tassels, lay upon it. A dressing-table of satinwood stood across the corner of the room by the windows, so gay with dainty implements of steel and ivory and tortoiseshell, with handles of gold and amber and jade; so loaded with little pots of rouge and big bowls of powder, with lipsticks and hare’s-feet, and brushes and combs; so encumbered with essences of every kind of perfume, and every kind of colour, from the deep indigo of chypre to the golden-brown of amber, treasured in adorable bottles of fantastic shapes; that surely the very Goddess of Beauty herself must slip down from the skies whilst Corinne slept, and tire and prink herself before that mirror. A thick blue carpet covered the floor; an exquisite praying-rug from Turkestan was spread before the dressing-table; another, of white angora, stood beside the dais.

  Whilst they were still standing in the doorway of this room Strickland asked Corinne to mount the final flight of stairs, and call her maid and her cook, to make sure that they occupied their rooms.

  “You will be within view of us,” he said.

  Corinne ascended and roused her servants. Each of them answered in turn, sleepily, and after an interval. During that interval Ariadne turned back into the bedroom.

  “It’s lovely, John, isn’t it?” she said in an enthusiastic undertone.

  “Yes,” John agreed dryly. “Elizabeth Clutter must have spent a small fortune on this room.”

  Ariadne jumped. Nothing was less expected by her than this retort.

  “John,” she whispered indignantly.

  John for once remained unawed by her indignation. He continued calmly, never raising his voice sufficiently for Corinne, talking with her servants on the staircase above, to hear him:

  “And if Elizabeth Clutter’s money had to be restored in a Hurry, all these pretty amenities would fetch at the most a fifth of what they cost.”

  Ariadne looked at him quickly. He had promised to help, and, without a doubt, would help to the last ounce of his blood. But there was a quiet note in his voice which warned her that he did not mean to help with a bandage over his eyes. Certainly he would have to know all that they knew. Already, indeed, — and she broke off in her reflections
to ask herself how much already he did know. She heard Corinne turn upon the stairs behind her.

  “Don’t ask any questions to-night!” she pleaded. “Corinne’s at the end of her wits with terror. There may be no reason for it. We shall know to-morrow, if you’ll do what she asks. Oh, a tiny thing Then, if there is reason, she shall tell you all that we have to tell you. I promise.”

  John Strickland accepted the compact at once. He had, indeed, hardly time for another word before Corinne rejoined them. They examined the bathroom behind the bedroom and the little drawing-room overlooking the gardens at the back of that. There was no intruder in the house that night; and they returned to the room on the level of the street. There the fire was now blazing cheerfully. Corinne was, so far as this night was concerned, reassured, and it was not within her nature to look very far ahead. She lit a cigarette, poured out a whisky and soda apiece, and said, with an attempt at gaiety as she dropped into a chair beside the fire:

  “Now, let us hold a council of war.”

  Strickland drank some of his whisky and soda.

  “No,” he returned quietly. “The council of war can wait until to-morrow. To-night I take my instructions.”

  Indeed, that was just all that Corinne intended. Ariadne’s friend was to take his instructions, although he was to be flattered by the illusion that his advice would be of enormous value. She was accustomed to a tribe of young men who bustled about for her on unimportant errands, without asking undesirable questions. She had nursed a conviction that Ariadne’s friend would fall into the same category; and a sullen look upon her face showed her disappointment.

  Ariadne smiled.

  “My dear, all the men who are of any use to us are very, very troublesome, aggravating people,” she said. “We have got to put up with that. Shall I tell him the little thing we want him to do?”

  “Please,” said Corinne sulkily.

  Ariadne turned to Strickland.

  “We want you to find out to-morrow morning that dreadful man who dined in the midst of us at the Semiramis.”

  Strickland nodded.

  “Mr. Ricardo.”

  “Yes. We want you to get from him precisely when and where he saw that big waiter ten years ago. In a word, you must make him tell you what he was on the point of telling us all, when the toast-master interrupted him by calling upon Julian.”

  Strickland glanced swiftly at Ariadne and as swiftly away again.

  It was the venomous little Frenchman, not the toast-master at all, who had frozen upon Mr. Ricardo’s tongue the story he was fluttering to tell. Ariadne had not noticed that. But there was nothing to be gained by adding to-night one new item of perplexity and fear to the burden they already had to carry. It would be time enough to-morrow to consider at what point the little Frenchman fitted into the puzzle.

  “I’ll try to make him tell me,” Strickland answered, and, at the admission that he might not succeed, Corinne clapped her hands together in a passion of entreaty.

  “But you must succeed, you must!” she cried. “You see, that man, our enemy — he’s in the dark, hidden away, moving at his pleasure. We are out in the daylight — Leon and I. We stand in full view, like people tied hand and foot to stakes and blindfolded — people to be executed, waiting helplessly to be executed,” and she wrung her hands together, whilst a wild light of terror glittered in her eyes.

  “I’ll do my very best for you, Corinne,” he said gravely. “We had better meet somewhere after I have seen this man.”

  “Will you and Ariadne lunch here?” Corinne suggested, and Strickland shook his head and cried, “No!” with a fervour which he instantly regretted.

  He was possessed suddenly by an overpowering reluctance to eat bread and salt in that house which had belonged to Elizabeth Clutter, with Corinne for his hostess, beautiful as she was, amusing, no doubt, as she could be. Antediluvian to be sure! But that outburst of Corinne’s, as of a woman in a panic, the working hands, the tortured look upon her face, the vision of herself bound to a stake — all had, to Strickland’s thinking, some uncomfortable semblance to a confession of guilt. There flashed through his mind a suggestion which had been made to him by Angus Trevor in the editorial office of The Flame, forgotten until this moment.

  “You won’t lunch here?”

  Corinne was looking at him with dismay. Happily he had a sound excuse ready to his hand.

  “If we have an enemy, let us not be in a hurry to tell him we are aware of it,” he argued. “If he’s in the dark, we’ll take to the shadows, too. That’s wisdom, isn’t it? Let me think for a moment!” He gazed for a little while into the fire.

  “This is the way. Each of you, at a quarter-past twelve, must pick up a taxi in the street, and not the first taxi that offers — and each one separately. You will drive across Putney Bridge, and there I’ll be waiting for you in a car. We’ll lunch in the country, and as we lunch I’ll make my report. Is that agreed?”

  Both Ariadne and Corinne said “Yes,” and Strickland rose at once to his feet.

  “It is late.”

  But Corinne moved more quickly to the door than he did. Terror again possessed her. She barred the way with arms outstretched, and one moment she commanded, and the next she pleaded, and her voice ran, wavering, up and down the scale of fear.

  “Don’t leave me yet You can’t! If you do, I shall crouch here till morning.”

  Strickland stepped to the window, tore the heavy curtains aside and raised the blind. The morning had come. A pure, clear light, without colour or radiance, welled into the room and made the lustres garish. Strickland threw up the sash, and such bustling melodies of blackbird and thrush crowded in through the open window, and rose to the ceiling and beat upon the walls, as made Ariadne fancy that the birds must be aware they had only an hour or so before the horns would begin to hoot and the roar of traffic to drown all their music.

  Corinne herself threw back her head and drew a long breath of relief.

  “Yes,” she said, a smile at last softening her face. “I have no right to keep you. It was kind of you both to have stayed with me so long.”

  She took up her cloak, whilst Strickland closed the window again.

  “You shall go upstairs,” he said. “We will wait until you have locked your door.”

  They heard her turn the key and let themselves out of the house. Ariadne hitched her cloak about her shoulders and throat with a shiver of cold, as she got into the car. But the car had hardly passed the end of the street before a shaft of sunlight suddenly struck down between the houses and the pavements shone like gold. Ariadne, who had not spoken a word since they had left Corinne’s house, now uttered a little cry of longing.

  “Oh, I should love—” she cried, and stopped dead with a rueful look in her eyes.

  “What?” Strickland asked eagerly.

  “To go straight on until we reached the sea,” she admitted.

  Strickland reached out his hand and took the speaking tube from its clip. But she laid her hand upon his arm.

  “It won’t do, my dear.”

  “Two hours, Ariadne! Less, indeed, with the roads clear!”

  “Yes, but two hours back also — and an hour there. I should be letting myself into my house at nine o’clock in the morning in gold shoes and an evening dress, whilst you, with a white tie round your throat, bade me good morning on the steps. My last little shred of character would be ripped into tatters.”

  She sat ruefully contemplating a calm sapphire sea rippling on a yellow beach in the gold and the stillness of a June morning. She stamped upon the floor of the car.

  “Oh, what a crashing bore!” she cried with a full heart.

  “He is,” said Strickland; and Ariadne laughed with a lively appreciation of his sally. It was apt enough, as she was well aware.

  A few months ago she would not have hesitated for a moment. In two hours’ time, gold shoes and ermine wrap and all, she would have been sitting on a beach, throwing pebbles into the water, or raidi
ng a bathing-machine for a swim in the sea. Now — ? She shrugged her shoulders.

  “No. I’ll go home,” she said.

  But when the car was stopped at the door, still she did not move. She sat looking straight in front of her, with a face thoughtful and grave. What dreams were stirring behind her quiet eyes Strickland had no guide to tell him, but as he watched her, his heart began to beat with an unexpected throb in the stupidest fashion.

  She dropped her hand upon his wrist with the lightest caress.

  “Thank you, Strickland,” she said, and in a second she was on the steps of her house with her latch-key in her hand; she turned, wrinkled her nose in a familiar grimace and kissed her hand to him. There was almost a studied carelessness in her manner, meant to reduce to its lowest terms a moment with a possibility of emotion. But with the door open, she stopped again for an appreciable time, but without turning her head. Then she shrugged her shoulders once more, stepped in over the threshold and closed the door behind her.

  XIII. THE AMATEUR OF THE HORRIBLe

  THERE WAS ANOTHER personage concerned in this story who sat up late that night. Upon reaching his home in Grosvenor Square, Mr. Ricardo went into his library and took down from a bookshelf a volume of folio size, bound in brown cloth. There was a long row of such volumes, and on the back of each the date of a year was printed in gold letters, but no other title. The particular volume which Mr. Ricardo laid upon his writing-table bore a date just a decade old. He drew up his chair and opened the book. It was filled with newspaper cuttings pasted on to the white leaves, and like everything else in Mr. Ricardo’s household, procedure, hours and way of life generally, most methodically arranged in order of time, with the names of the journals from which they had been cut, engrossed above each in an ornamental handwriting.

  “Let me see It was in March. Yes, the whole of the second week was occupied. And at Grenoble.”