THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER
"Are you waiting for some one, sir?"
That question, for all its veneer of respectfulness, was only too
patently a message of dismissal. And I resented it, not only because
it was an impertinence, but more because it had driven out of my drowsy
brain a very beautiful picture of Mary Lockwood as she stooped over an
old Italian table-cover embroidered with gold galloon.
"Are you waiting for some one?" repeated that newly arrived all-night
waiter, in no way impressed by my silence.
"I am," I announced as I inspected him with open disapproval. I was
dreamily wondering why, in the name of common sense, waiters always
dressed in such ridiculous and undecorative neckties.
This particular waiter, however, continued to regard me out of a fishy
and cynical eye. Then he looked at the clock. Then he looked at my
empty wine-cooler, plainly an advertisement of suspended circulation in
the only fluid that seemed vital to him.
"Was it a lady?" he had the effrontery to inquire.
I could see his eyes roam about the all but empty room. It was the
low-ebb hour when a trolley car is an event along the empty street, the
hour when chairs are piled on cafe tables, the white corpuscles of the
milk wagons begin to move through the city's sleepy arteries, and those
steel nerves known as telegraph wires keep languidly awake with the
sugary thrills of their night letters.
"Yes, it was a lady," I answered. That wall-eyed intruder knew nothing
of the heavenly supper I had stumbled on in that wicked French
restaurant, or of the fine and firm _Clos Vougeot_ that had been
unearthed from its shabby cellar, or of my own peace of mind as I sat
there studying the empty metal cooler and pondering how the mean and
scabby wastes of Champagne could mother an ichor so rich with singing
etherealities.
"Er--just what might she look like, sir?" my tormentor next asked of
me, blinking about in a loose and largely condoning matter-of-factness
as though in placid search of some plumed and impatient demirep
awaiting her chance to cross the bar of acquaintanceship on the
careless high tide of inebriacy.
"She moves very, very quietly, and has a star in her hair," I replied
to that fish-eyed waiter. "Her breath is soft and dewy, and her brow
is hooded. And in her hands she carries a spray of poppies."
The waiter looked down at me with that impersonal mild pity with which
it is man's wont to view the harmlessly insane.
"Surely," I said with a smothered yawn, "surely you have met her?
Surely you have been conscious of those soft and shadowy eyes gazing
into yours as you melted into her arms?"
"Quite so, sir," uneasily admitted my wall-eyed friend. Then I began
to realize that he was waking me up. I grew fearful lest his
devastating invasion should frighten away the timorous spirit I had
been wooing as assiduously as an angler seeking his first trout. For
one long hour, with a full body and an empty head, I had sat there
stalking sleep as artfully and as arduously as huntsman ever stalked a
deer. And I knew that if I moved from that spot the chase would be
over, for that night at least.
"But the odd thing about her," I languidly explained, "is that she
evades only those who seek her. She is coy. She denies herself to
those who most passionately demand her. Yet something tells me that
she is hovering near me at this moment, that she is about to bend over
me with those ineffable eyes if only I await the golden moment. And
so, my dear sir, if you will take this as a slight reward for your
trouble, and cover that exceedingly soiled-looking divan in that
exceedingly disreputable-looking alcove with a clean tablecloth, and
then draw that curtain which is apparently designed to convert it into
a _chambre particuliere_, you will be giving me a chance to consort
with an angel of graciousness more lovely than any meretricious head
that ever soiled its faded plush. And if I am left uninterrupted until
you go off in the morning, your reward will then be doubled."
His puzzled face showed, as he peered down at the bill in his hand,
that if this indeed were madness, there was a not repugnant sort of
method in it.
So he set about in a half dazed fashion draping that none too clean
divan with a table-cloth, making it, in fact, look uncomfortably like a
bier. Then he carried my hat and gloves and overcoat to a chair at the
foot of the divan. Then he took me by the arm, firmly and solicitously.
His face, as I made my way without one stagger or reel into that shabby
little quietude screened off from the rest of the world, was a study in
astonishment. It was plain that I puzzled him. He even indulged in a
second wondering glance back at the divan as he drew the portieres.
Then, if I mistake not, he uttered the one explanatory and
self-sufficient word--"Needle-pumper."
I heard him tiptoe in, a few minutes later, and decently cover my legs
with the overcoat from the chair. I did not speak, for bending over me
was a rarer and sweeter Presence, and I wanted no sound or movement to
frighten her away. Just when her hand touched mine I can not tell.
But I fell off into a deep and natural sleep and dreamed I was being
carried through Sicilian orange groves by a wall-eyed waiter with wings
like a butterfly.
Then the scene changed, as scenes have the habit of doing in dreams. I
seemed to be the center of a sub-cellar conference of highwaymen,
presided over by Latreille himself. Then the voices shifted and
changed, receded and advanced. I seemed to be threading that
buffer-state which lies between the two kingdoms of Sleep and
Wakefulness, the buffer-state that has no clear-cut outlines and twists
like a weevil between ever-shifting boundaries.
"Where's Sir 'Enery," said a voice from a mountain-top. Then an
answering murmur of voices buzzed about me like bees, only an
intelligible word or two seeming to reinforce the fabric of my
imaginings as iron rods reinforce concrete-walls. And I continued to
lie there in that pleasant borderland torpor, which is neither
wakefulness nor slumber. I seemed to doze on, in no ponderable way
disturbed by the broken hum of talk that flickered and wavered through
my brain.
"Then why can't Sir Henry work on the Belmont job?" one of the voices
was asking.
"I told you before, Sir Henry's tied up," another voice answered.
"What doing?" asked the first voice.
"He's fixing his plant for the Van Tuyl coup," was the answer.
"What Van Tuyl?"
"Up in Seventy-third Street. He's got 'em hog tied."
"And what's more," broke in a third voice, "he won't touch a soup case
since he got that safe-wedge in the wrist. It kind o' broke his nerve
for the nitro work."
"Aw, you couldn't break that guy's nerve!"
"Well, he knows he's marked, anyway."
Then came a lull, followed by the scratch of a match and the mumbling
of voices again.
"How'd he get through the ropes up there?" inquired one of these voices.
"Same old way. Butlering. Turk McMeekin doped him up a half-dozen
London recommends. That got him started out in Morristown, with the
Whippeny Club. Then he did the Herresford job. But he's got a peach
with this Van Tuyl gang. They let him lock up every night--silver and
all--and carry the keys to bed with him!"
"It's up to Sir 'Enery to make 'em dream he's the real thing," murmured
another of the voices.
"Sure!" answered still another voice that seemed a great distance away.
Then the mumble became a murmur and the murmur a drone. And the drone
became a sighing of birch tops, and I was stalking Big-Horn across
mountain peaks of _cafe parfait_, where a pompous English butler served
_peches Melba_ on the edge of every second precipice.
When I woke up it was broad daylight, and my wall-eyed waiter was there
waiting for his second bill. And I remembered that I ought to phone
Benson so he could have the coffee ready by the time I walked home
through the mellow November air.
It was two hours later that the first memory of those murmuring
midnight voices came back to me. The words I had overheard seemed to
have been buried in my mind like seeds in the ground. Then here and
there a green shoot of suspicion emerged. The more I thought it over,
the more disturbed I became. Yet I warned myself that I could be sure
of nothing. The one tangibility was the repeated word, "Van Tuyl."
And there at least was something on which I could focus my attention.
I went to the telephone and called up Beatrice Van Tuyl. Years before
we had played water polo and catboated on the Sound together. I
realized, as I heard that young matron's cheery voice over the
telephone wire, that I would have to pick my steps with care.
"I say, Beatrice, are you possibly in need of a butler?" I began as
offhandedly as I was able.
"Out of a place, Witter dear?" was the chuckling inquiry that came to
me.
"No, I'm not, but I know of a good man," was my mendacious reply. "And
I rather thought--"
"My dear Witter," said the voice over the wire, "we've a _jewel_ of a
man up here. He's English, you know. And I'm beginning to suspect
he's been with royalty. Jim's always wanted to stick pins in his legs
to see if he really isn't petrified."
"What's his name?"
"Just what it ought to be---the most appropriate name of Wilkins."
"How long have you had him?"
"Oh, weeks and weeks!" Only a New York householder could understand
the tone of triumph in that retort.
"And you're sure of him in every way?"
"Of course we're sure of him. He's been a Gibraltar of dependability."
"Where did you get him from?"
"From Morristown. He was at the Whippeny Club out there before he came
to us."
"The Whippeny Club!" I cried, for the name struck like a bullet on the
metal of memory.
"Don't you think," the voice over the wire was saying, "that you'd
better come up for dinner to-night and inspect the paragon at close
range? And you might talk to us a little, between whiles."
"I'd love to," was my very prompt reply.
"Then do," said Beatrice Van Tuyl. "A little after seven."
And a little after seven I duly rang the Van Tuyls' door-bell and was
duly admitted to that orderly and well-appointed Seventy-third Street
house, so like a thousand other orderly and well-appointed New York
houses hidden behind their unchanging masks of brown and gray.
Yet I could not help feeling the vulnerability of that apparently
well-guarded home. For all its walls of stone and brick, for all the
steel grills that covered its windows and the heavy scroll work that
protected its glass door, it remained a place munificently ripe for
plunder. Its solidity, I felt, was only a mockery. It made me think
of a fortress that had been secretly mined. Its occupants seemed
basking in a false security. The very instruments which went to insure
that security were actually a menace. The very machinery of service
which made possible its cloistral tranquillity held the factor for its
disruption.
As I surrendered my hat and coat and ascended to that second floor
where I had known so many sedately happy hours, I for once found myself
disquieted by its flower-laden atmosphere. I began to be oppressed by
a new and disturbing sense of responsibility. It would be no light
matter, I began to see, to explode a bomb of dissension in that
principality of almost arrogant aloofness. It would be no joke to
confound that smoothly flowing routine with which urban wealth so
jealously surrounds itself.
I suddenly remembered there was nothing in which I could be positive,
nothing on which I could with certainty rely. And my inward disquiet
was increased, if anything, by the calm and blithely contented glance
Beatrice Van Tuyl leveled at me.
"And what's all this mystery about our man Wilkins?" she asked me, with
the immediacy of her sex.
"Won't you let me answer that question a little later in the evening?"
"But, my dear Witter, that's hardly fair!" she protested, as she held a
lighted match for her husband's cigarette. "Do you know, I actually
believe you've spotted some one you want to supplant Wilkins with."
"Please--"
"Or did he spill soup on you some time when we didn't see it?"
"I imagine he's spilt a bit of soup in his day," I answered,
remembering what I had overheard as to the safe wedge. And as I spoke
I realized that my one hope lay in the possibility of getting a glimpse
of the mark which that wedge had left--if, indeed, my whole sand-chain
of coincidences did not split back into the inconsequentialities of
dreamland.
"You can't shake my faith in Wilkins," said the blue-eyed woman in the
blue silk dinner gown, as she leaned back in a protecting-armed and
softly padded library-chair which suddenly became symbolic of her whole
guarded and upholstered life. "Jim, tell Witter what a jewel Wilkins
really is."
Jim, whose thought was heavy ordnance beside his wife's flying column
of humor, turned the matter solemnly over in his mind.
"He's a remarkably good man," admitted the stolid and levitical Jim,
"remarkably good."
"And you've seen him yourself, time and time again," concurred his wife.
"But I've never been particularly interested in servants, you know,"
was my self-defensive retort.
"Then why, in the face of the Immortal Ironies, are you putting my
butler under the microscope?" was the return shot that came from the
flying column. The acidulated sweetness of that attack even nettled me
into a right-about-face.
"Look here," I suddenly demanded, "have either of you missed anything
valuable about here lately?"
The two gazed at each other for a moment in perplexed wonder.
"Of course not," retorted the woman in the dinner gown. "Not a thing!"
"And you know you have everything intact, all your jewelry, your plate,
your pocketbooks, the trinkets a sneakthief might call it worth while
to round up?"
"Of course we have. And I can't even resent your bracketing my
pocketbook in with the trinkets."
"But are you certain of this? Could you verify it at a moment's
notice?"
"My dear Witter, we wouldn't need to. I mean we're doing it every day
of our lives. It's instinctive; it's as much a habit as keeping moths
out of the closets and cobwebs out of the corners."
"What's making you ask all this?" demanded the heavy artillery.
"Yes, what's suddenly making you into a Holmes's watchman?" echoed the
flying brigade.
Still again I saw that it was going to be no easy thing to intimate to
persons you cared for the possibility of their sleeping on a volcano.
Such an intimation has both its dangers and its responsibilities. My
earlier sense of delight in a knowledge unparticipated in by others was
gradually merging into a consciousness of a disagreeable task that
would prove unsavory in both its features and its _finale_.
"I'm asking all this," I replied, "because I have good reason to
believe this paragon you call Wilkins is not only a criminal, but has
come into this house for criminal purposes."
"For what criminal purposes?"
"For the sake of robbing it."
Beatrice Van Tuyl looked at me with her wide-open azure eyes. Then she
suddenly bubbled over with golden and liquid-noted laughter. "Oh,
Witter, you're lovely!"
"What proof have you got of that?" demanded Jim.
"Of my loveliness?" I inquired, for Jim Van Tuyl's solidity was as
provocative as that of the smithy anvil which the idler can not pass
without at least a hammer-tap or two. Yet it was this same solidity, I
knew, that made him the safest of financiers and the shrewdest of
investors.
"No," he retorted, "proofs of the fact that Wilkins is here for other
than honest purposes."
"I've no proof," I had to confess.
"Then what evidence have you?"
"I've not even any evidence as yet. But I'm not stirring up this sort
of thing without good reason."
"Let's hope not!" retorted Jim.
"My dear Witter, you're actually getting fussy in your old age," said
the laughing woman. It was only the solemnity of her husband's face
that seemed to sober her. "Can't you see it's absurd? We're all here,
safe and sound, and we haven't been robbed."
"But what I want to know," went on the heavier artillery, "is what your
reasons are. It seems only right we should inquire what you've got in
the shape of evidence."
"What I have wouldn't be admitted as evidence," I confessed.
He threw down his cigarette. It meant as much as throwing up his hands.
"Then what do you expect us to do?"
"I don't expect you to do anything. All I ask is that you let me try
to justify this course I've taken, that the three of us dine quietly
together. And unless I'm greatly mistaken, before that dinner is over
I think I can show you that this man--"
I saw Beatrice Van Tuyl suddenly lift a forefinger to her lip. The
motion for silence brought me up short. A moment later I heard the
snap of a light-switch in the hallway outside and then the click of
jade curtain-rings on their pole. Into the doorway stepped a figure in
black, a calm and slow-moving and altogether self-assured figure.
"Dinner is served," intoned this sober personage, with a curate-like
solemnity all his own.
I had no wish to gape at the man, but that first glimpse of mine was a
sharp one, for I knew that it was Wilkins himself that I was
confronting. As I beheld him there in all the glory of his magisterial
assurance I felt an involuntary and ridiculous sinking in the
diaphragm. I asked myself in the name of all the Lares and Penates of
Manhattan, why I had suddenly gone off on a wild-goose chase to bag an
inoffensive butler about whom I had had a midnight nightmare?
Then I looked at the man more closely. He wore the conventional dress
livery of twilled worsted, with an extremely high-winged collar and an
extremely small lawn tie. He seemed a remarkably solid figure of a
man, and his height was not insignificant. Any impression of
fragility, of sedentary bloodlessness, which might have been given out
by his quite pallid face, was sharply contradicted by the muscular
heaviness of his limbs. His hair, a Kyrle-Bellewish gray over the
temples, was cut short. The well-powdered and close-shaven face was
bluish white along the jowls, like a priest's. The poise of the
figure, whether natural or simulated, was one marked for servitude.
Yet I had to admit to myself, as we filed out and down to the
dining-room, that the man was not without his pretended sense of
dignity. He seemed neither arrogant nor obsequious. He hovered midway
between the Scylla of hauteur and the Charybdis of considerate
patience. About the immobile and mask-like face hung that veil of
impersonality which marked him as a butler--as a butler to the
finger-tips. When not actually in movement he was as aloofly detached
as a totem-pole. He stood as unobtrusive as a newel-post, as impassive
as some shielding piece of furniture, beside which youth might whisper
its weightiest secret or conspiracy weave its darkest web.
I had to confess, as I watched his deft movements about that
china-strewn oblong of damask which seemed his fit and rightful domain,
that he was in no way wanting in the part--the only thing that puzzled
me was the futility of that part. There was authority, too, in his
merest finger-movement and eye-shift, as from time to time he signaled
to the footman who helped him in his duties. There was grave
solicitude on his face as he awaited the minutest semaphoric nod of the
woman in the blue silk dinner gown. And this was the man, with his
stolid air of exactitude, with his quick-handed movements and his alert
and yet unparticipating eyes, whom I had come into that quiet household
to proclaim a thief!
I watched his hands every course as I sat there talking against
time--and Heaven knows what I talked of! But about those hands there
was nothing to discover. In the first thing of importance I had met
with disappointment. For the cuffs that projected from the edges of
the livery sleeves covered each large-boned wrist. In the actual
deportment of the man there was nothing on which to base a decent
suspicion. And in the meanwhile the dinner progressed, as all such
dinners do, smoothly and quietly, and, to outward appearances,
harmoniously and happily.
But as it progressed I grew more and more perplexed. There was another
nauseating moment or two when the thought flashed over me that the
whole thing was indeed a mistake, that what I had seemed to hear in my
restless moments of the night before was only a dream projected into a
period of wakefulness. Equipped with nothing more than an echo from
this dream, I had started off on this mad chase, to run down a man who
had proved and was proving himself the acme of decorous respectability.
But if this thought was a sickening one, it was also a sickly one.
Like all sickly things, too, it tended to die young. It went down
before the crowding actualities of other circumstances which I could
not overlook. Coincidence, repeated often enough, became more than
fortuity. The thing was more than a nightmare. I had heard what I had
heard. There was still some method by which I could verify or
contradict my suspicion. My problem was to find a plan. And the
gravity of my dilemma, I suppose, was in some way reflected in my face.
"Well, what are you going to do about it?" asked Van Tuyl, with his
heavy matter-of-factness, at a moment when the room happened to be
empty.
"Don't you see it's a mistake?" added his wife, with a self-assuring
glance about the rose-shaded table and then a wider glance about the
room itself.
"Wait," I suddenly said. "What were his references?"
"He gave us a splendid one from the Whippeny Club. We verified that.
Then he had letters, six of them from some very decent people in
London. One of them was a bishop."
"Did you verify those?"
"Across the Atlantic, Witter? It really didn't seem worth while!"
"And it's lucky for him you didn't!"
"Why?"
"Because they're forgeries, every one of them!"
"What ground have you for thinking that?" asked the solemn Van Tuyl.
"I don't think it--I know it. And, I imagine, I can tell you the name
of the man who forged them for him."
"Well, what is it?"
"A worthy by the name of Turk McMeekin."
Van Tuyl sat up with a heavy purpose on his honest and unimaginative
face.
"We've had a nice lot of this mystery, Witter, but we've got to get to
the end of it. Tell me what you know, everything, and I'll have him in
here and face him with it. Now, what is there beside the Turk McMeekin
item?"
"Not yet!" murmured Beatrice Van Tuyl warningly, as Wilkins and his
mask-like face advanced into the room.
I had the feeling, as he served us with one of those delectable ices
which make even the epicureanism of the Cyrenaics tame in retrospect,
that we were deliberately conspiring against our own well-being, that
we were dethroning our own peace of mind. We were sitting there
scheming to undo the agency whose sole function was to minister to our
delights. And I could not help wondering why, if the man was indeed
what I suspected, he chose to follow the most precarious and the most
ill-paid of all professions. I found it hard to persuade myself that
behind that stolid blue-white mask of a face could flicker any wayward
spirit of adventure--and yet without that spirit my whole case was a
card house of absurdities.
I noticed that for the first time Beatrice Van Tuyl's own eyes dwelt
with a quick and searching look on her servant's immobile face. Then I
felt her equally searching gaze directed at me. I knew that my failure
to make good would meet with scant forgiveness. She would demand
knowledge, even though it led to the discovery of the volcano's
imminence. And after so much smoke it was plainly my duty to show
where the fire lay.
I seized the conversation by the tail, as it were, and dragged it back
into the avenues of inconsequentiality. We sat there, the three of us,
actually making talk for the sake of a putty-faced servant. I noticed,
though, that as he rounded the table he repeatedly fell under the
quickly questioning gaze of both his master and mistress. I began to
feel like an Iago who had willfully polluted a dovecote of hitherto
unshaken trust. It became harder and harder to keep up my pretense of
artless good humor. Time was flying, and nothing had as yet been found
out.
"Now," demanded Van Tuyl, when the room was once more empty, "what are
you sure of?"
"I'm sure of nothing," I had to confess.
"Then what do you propose doing?" was the somewhat arctic inquiry.
I glanced up at the wall where Ezekiah Van Tuyl, the worthy founder of
the American branch of the family, frowned reprovingly down at me over
his swathing black stock.
"I propose," was my answer, "having your great grandfather up there let
us know whether I am right or whether I am wrong."
And as Wilkins stepped into the room I rose from the table, walked over
to the heavy-framed portrait, and lifted it from its hook. I held it
there, with a pretense of studying the face for a moment or two. Then
I placed my table napkin on a chair, mounted it, and made an
unsuccessful effort to rehang the portrait.
"If you please, Wilkins," I said, still holding the picture flat
against the wall.
"A little higher," I told him, as I strained to loop the cord back over
its hook. I was not especially successful at this, because at the time
my eyes were directed toward the hands of the man holding up the
picture.
His position was such that the sleeves of his black service coat were
drawn away from the white and heavy-boned wrists. And there, before my
eyes, across the flexor cords of the right wrist was a wide and ragged
scar at least three inches in length.
I returned to my place at the dinner table. Van Tuyl, by this time,
was gazing at me with both resentment and wonder.
"Shall we have coffee up-stairs?" his wife asked with unruffled
composure. I could see her eye meet her husband's.
"Here, please," I interpolated.
"We'll have coffee served here," Beatrice Van Tuyl said to her butler.
"Very good, madam," he answered.
I wondered, as I watched him cross the room, if he suspected anything.
I also wondered how hare-brained the man and woman seated at the table
thought me.
"Listen," I said, the moment we were alone; "have you a servant here
you can trust, one you can trust implicitly?"
"Of course," answered my hostess.
"Who is it?"
"Wilkins," was the answer.
"Not counting Wilkins?"
"Well, I think I can also trust my maid Felice--unless you know her
better than I do."
I could afford to ignore the thrust.
"Then I'd advise you to send her up to look over your things at once."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because now I know this man Wilkins is a criminal of the worst type!"
"You know it?"
"Yes, I know it as well as I know I'm sitting at this table. And I can
prove it."
"How?" demanded Van Tuyl.
"I'll show you how in a very few moments. And, on second thoughts, I'd
have that maid Felice bring what you regard as valuable right to this
dining-room--I mean your jewels and things."
"But this sounds so silly," demurred my still reluctant hostess.
"It won't sound half so silly as a Tiffany advertisement of a reward
and no questions asked."
Beatrice Van Tuyl intercepted a footman and sent him off for the maid
Felice. A moment later Wilkins was at our side quietly serving the
_cafe noir_ in tiny gold-lined cups.
"This method of mine for identifying the real pearl, as you will see,"
I blandly went on, "is a very simple one. You merely take a match end
and dip it in clear water. Then you let a drop of water fall on the
pearl. If the stone is an imitation one the water-drop will spread and
lie close to the surface. If the stone is genuine the drop will stand
high and rounded, like a globe of quicksilver, and will shake with the
minute vibrations which pass through any body not in perfect
equilibrium."
Before I had completed that speech the maid Felice had stepped into the
room. She was a woman of about thirty, white-skinned, slender of
figure, and decidedly foreign-looking. Her face was a clever one,
though I promptly disliked an affectation of languor with which she
strove to hide a spirit which was only too plainly alert.
"I want you to fetch my jewel case from the boudoir safe," her mistress
told her. "Bring everything in the box."
I could not see the maid's face, for at that moment I was busy watching
Wilkins. From that worthy, however, came no slightest sign of
disturbance or wonder.
"Here, madam?" the maid was asking.
"Yes, here and at once, please," answered Beatrice Van Tuyl. Then she
turned to me. "And since you're such a jewel expert you'll be able to
tell me what's darkening those turquoises of mine."
I dropped a lump of sugar into my coffee and sipped it. Wilkins opened
a dark-wooded buffet humidor before me, and I picked out a
slender-waisted Havana corseted in a band of gold. I suddenly looked
up at the man as he stood at my side holding the blue-flamed little
alcohol lamp for the contact of my waiting cigar end.
"Wilkins, how did you get that scar?" I asked him, out of a clear sky.
The wrist itself was covered by its cuff and sleeve end, but under
them, I knew, was the telltale mark.
"What scar, sir?" he asked, his politeness touched with an indulgent
patience which seemed to imply that he was not altogether unused to
facing gentlemen in unaccountably high spirits.
"This one!" I said, catching his hand in mine and running the cuff back
along the white forearm. Not one trace of either alarm or resentment
could I see on that indecipherable countenance. I almost began to
admire the man. In his way he was superb.
"Oh, that, sir!" he exclaimed, with an almost offensively condoning
glance at the Van Tuyls, as though inquiring whether or not he should
reply to a question at once so personal and at the same time so out of
place.
"Tell him where you got it, Wilkins," said Beatrice Van Tuyl, so
sharply that it practically amounted to a command.
"I got it stopping Lord Entristle's brougham, madam, in London, seven
years ago," was the quiet and unhesitating answer.
"How?" sharply asked the woman.
"I was footman for his lordship then, madam," went on the quiet and
patient-noted voice. "I had just taken cards in when the horses were
frightened by a tandem bicycle going past. They threw Siddons, the
coachman, off the box as they jumped, and overturned the vehicle. His
lordship was inside. I got the reins as one of the horses went down.
But he kicked me against the broken glass and I threw out one hand, I
fancy, to save myself."
"And the coach glass cut your wrist?" asked Van Tuyl.
"Yes, sir," replied the servant, moving with methodic slowness on his
way about the table. His figure, in its somber badge of livery, seemed
almost a pathetic one. There was no anxiety on his face, no shadow of
fear about the mild and unparticipating eyes. I was suddenly conscious
of my unjust superiority over him--a superiority of station, of birth,
of momentary knowledge.
The silence that ensued was not a pleasant one. I felt almost grateful
for the timely entrance of the maid Felice. In her hands she carried a
japanned tin box, about the size of a theatrical makeup box. This she
placed on the table beside her mistress.
"Is there anything else, madam?" she asked.
"That is all," answered Beatrice Van Tuyl as she threw back the lid of
the japanned box. I noticed that although the key stood in it, it was
unlocked. Then my hostess looked up at the waiting butler. "And,
Wilkins, you can leave the cigars and liqueur on the table. I'll ring
if I want anything."
The carefully coiffured blonde head was bent low over the box as the
servants stepped out of the room. The delicate fingers probed through
the array of leather-covered cases. I could see by her face, even
before she spoke, that the box's contents were intact.
"You see," she said, ladling handful after handful of glittering
jewelry out on the white table-cloth between her coffee-cup and mine,
"everything is here. Those are my rings. There's the dog collar.
There's angel Jim's sunburst. Here's the ordinary family junk."
I sat for a moment studying that Oriental array of feminine adornment.
It was plainly an array of evidence to discountenance me. I felt a
distinct sense of relief when the woman in blue suddenly dropped her
eyes from my face to her jewel box again. It was Van Tuyl's persistent
stare that roweled me into final activity.
"Then so far, we're in luck! And as from now on I want to be
responsible for what happens," I said, as I reached over and gathered
the glittering mass up in a table napkin, "I think it will simplify
things if you, Van Tuyl, take possession of these."
I tied the napkin securely together and handed it to my wondering host.
Then I dropped a silver bon-bon dish and a bunch of hothouse grapes
into the emptied box, locking it and handing the key back to Beatrice
Van Tuyl.
That lady looked neither at me nor the key. Instead, she sat staring
meditatively into space, apparently weighing some question in which the
rest of that company could claim no interest. It was only after her
husband had spoken her name, sharply, that she came back to her
immediate surroundings.
"And now what must I do?" she asked, with a new note of seriousness.
"Have the maid take the box back to where it came from," I told her.
"But be so good as to retain the key."
"And then what?" mocked Van Tuyl.
"Then," cut in his wife, with a sudden note of antagonism which I could
not account for, "_the sooner we send for the police the better_."
An answering note of antagonism showed on Van Tuyl's face.
"I tell you, Kerfoot, I can't do it," he objected, even as his wife
rang the bell. "You've got to show me!"
"Please be still, Jim," she said, as Wilkins stepped into the room.
She turned an impassive face to the waiting servant. "Will you ask
Felice to come here."
None of us spoke until Felice entered the room. Wilkins, I noticed,
followed her in, but passed across the room's full length and went out
by the door in the rear.
"Felice," said the woman beside me, very calmly and coolly, "I want you
to take this box back to the safe."
"Yes, madam."
"Then go to the telephone in the study and ring up police headquarters.
Tell them who you are. Then explain that I want them to send an
officer here, at once."
"Yes, madam," answered the attentive-faced maid.
"Felice, you had better ask them to send two men, two--"
"Two plain-clothes men," I prompted.
"Yes, two plain-clothes men. And explain to them that they are to
arrest the man-servant who opens the door for them--at once, and
without any fuss. Is that quite clear?"
"Yes, madam, quite clear," answered the maid.
"Then please hurry."
"Yes, madam."
I looked up at Van Tuyl's audible splutter of indignation.
"Excuse me," he cried, "but isn't all this getting just a little
highhanded? Aren't we making things into a nice mess for ourselves?
Aren't we moving just a little too fast in this game, calling out the
reserves because you happen to spot a scar on my butler's wrist?"
"I tell you, Jim," I cried with all the earnestness at my command, "the
man's a thief, a criminal with a criminal's record!"
"Then prove it!" demanded Jim.
"Call him in and I will."
Van Tuyl made a motion for his wife to touch the bell.
Her slippered toe was still on the rug-covered button when Wilkins
entered, the same austere and self-assured figure.
"Wilkins," said Van Tuyl, and there was an outspoken and deliberate
savagery in his voice even as his wife motioned to him in what seemed a
signal for moderation, "Wilkins, I regard you as an especially good
servant. Mr. Kerfoot, on the other hand, says he knows you and says
you are not."
"Yes, sir," said Wilkins with his totem-pole abstraction.
There was something especially maddening in that sustained calmness of
his.
"And what's more," I suddenly cried, exasperated by that play-acting
role and rising and confronting him as he stood there, "your name's not
Wilkins, and you never got that wrist scar from a coach door."
"Why not, sir?" he gently but most respectfully inquired.
"Because," I cried, stepping still nearer and watching the immobile
blue-white face, "in the gang you work with you're known as Sir Henry,
and you got that cut on the wrist from a wedge when you tried to blow
open a safe door, and the letters of introduction which you brought to
the Whippeny Club were forged by an expert named Turk McMeekin; and I
know what brought you into this house and what your plans for robbing
it are!"
There was not one move of his body as he stood there. There was not
one twitch of his mask-like face. But on that face, point by point,
came a slow suffusion of something akin to expression. It was not
fear. To call it fear would be doing the man an injustice. It began
with the eyes, and spread from feature to feature, very much, I
imagine, as sentient life must have spread across the countenance of
Pygmalion's slowly awakening marble.
For one fraction of a moment the almost pitiful eyes looked at me with
a quick and imploring glance. Then the mask once more descended over
them. He was himself again. And I felt almost sure that in the
mellowed light about us the other two figures at the table had not seen
that face as I did.
There was, in fact, something almost like shame on Van Tuyl's heavy
face as the calm-voiced servant, utterly ignoring me and my words,
turned to him and asked if he should remove the things.
"You haven't answered the gentleman," said Beatrice Van Tuyl, in a
voice a little shrill with excitement.
"What is there to answer, madam?" he mildly asked. "It's all the young
gentleman's foolishness, some foolishness which I can't understand."
"But the thing can't stand like this," protested the ponderous Van Tuyl.
There must have been something reassuring to them both in the methodic
calmness with which this calumniated factor in their domestic Eden
moved about once more performing his petty domestic duties.
"Then you deny everything he says?" insisted the woman.
The servant stopped and looked up in mild reproof.
"Of course, madam," he replied, as he slowly removed the liqueur
glasses. I saw my hostess look after him with one of her long and
abstracted glances. She was still peering into his face as he stepped
back to the table. She was, indeed, still gazing at him when the
muffled shrill of an electric bell announced there was a caller at the
street door.
"Wilkins," she said, almost ruminatively, "I want you to answer the
door--the street door."
"Yes, madam," he answered, without hesitation.
The three of us sat in silence, as the slow and methodic steps crossed
the room, stepped out into the hall, and advanced to what at least one
of us knew to be his doom. It was Van Tuyl himself who spoke up out of
the silence.
"What's up?" he asked. "What's he gone for?"
"The police are there," answered his wife.
"Good God!" exclaimed the astounded husband, now on his feet. "You
don't mean you've sprung that trap on the poor devil? You--"
"Sit down, Jim," broke in his wife with enforced calmness. "Sit down
and wait."
"But I won't be made a fool of!"
"You're not being made a fool of!"
"But who's arresting this man? Who's got the evidence to justify
what's being done here?"
"I have," was the woman's answer.
"What do you mean?"
She was very calm about it.
"I mean that Witter was right. _My Baroda pearls and the emerald
pendant were not in the safe. They're gone._"
"They're gone?" echoed the incredulous husband.
"Listen," I suddenly cried, as Van Tuyl sat digesting his discovery.
We heard the sound of steps, the slam of a door, and the departing hum
of a motor-car. Before I realized what she was doing Beatrice Van
Tuyl's foot was once more on the call bell. A footman answered the
summons.
"Go to the street door," she commanded, "and see who's there."
We waited, listening. The silence lengthened. Something about that
silence impressed me as ominous. We were still intently listening as
the footman stepped back into the room.
"It's the chauffeur, sir," he explained.
"And what does he want?"
"He said Felice telephoned for the car a quarter of an hour ago."
"Send Felice to me," commanded my hostess.
"I don't think I can, ma'am. _She's gone in the car with Wilkins_."
"With Wilkins?"
"Yes, ma'am. Markson says he can't make it out, ma'am, Wilkins driving
off that way without so much as a by-your-leave, ma'am."
The three of us rose as one from the table. For a second or two we
stood staring at one another.
Then Van Tuyl suddenly dived for the stairs, with the napkin full of
jewelry in his hand. I, in turn, dived for the street door. But
before I opened it I knew it was too late.
I suddenly stepped back into the hallway, to confront Beatrice Van Tuyl.
"How long have you had Felice?" I asked, groping impotently about the
hall closet for my hat and coat.
"She came two weeks before Wilkins," was the answer.
"Then you see what this means?" I asked, still groping about for my
overcoat.
"What _can_ it mean?"
"They were working together--they were confederates."
Van Tuyl descended the stairs still carrying the table napkin full of
jewelry. His eyes were wide with indignant wonder.
"It's gone!" he gasped. "He's taken your box!"
I emerged from the hall closet both a little startled and a little
humiliated.
"Yes, and he's taken my hat and coat," I sadly confessed.