"Wait! I tell you to wait, Benham! I must have a word with you. I
come from your family--from Helen!" To his amazement the lad turned
about and began to run towards where the girl stood waiting; and so,
without a moment's hesitation Ste. Marie threw himself across the top of
the wall, hung for an instant by his hands, and dropped upon the soft
turf. Scarcely waiting to recover his balance he stumbled forward,
shouting--
"Wait! I tell you, wait! Are you mad? Wait, I say! Listen to me!"
Vaguely, in the midst of his great excitement, he had heard a whistle
sound as he dropped inside the wall. He did not know then from whence
the shrill call had come, but afterwards he knew that Coira had blown
it. And now, as he ran forward towards the two who stood at a distance
staring at him, he heard other steps and he slackened his pace to look.
A man came running down amongst the black-boled trees, a strange, squat,
gnome-like man, whose gait was as uncouth as his dwarfish figure. He
held something in his two hands as he ran, and when he came near he
threw this thing with a swift movement up before him, but he did not
pause in his odd scrambling run.
Ste. Marie felt a violent blow upon his left leg between hip and knee.
He thought that somebody had crept up behind him and struck him, but, as
he whirled about, he saw that there was no one there, and then he heard
a noise, and knew that the gnome-like running man had shot him. He
faced about once more towards the two young people. He was very angry,
and he wished to say so, and very much he wished to explain why he had
trespassed there, and why they had no right to shoot him as if he were
some wretched thief. But he found that in some quite absurd fashion he
was as if fixed to the ground. It was as if he had suddenly become of
the most ponderous and incredible weight like lead--or like that other
metal, not gold, which is the heaviest of all. Only the metal,
seemingly, was not only heavy but fiery hot, and his strength was
incapable of holding it up any longer. His eyes fixed themselves in a
bewildered stare upon the figure of Mlle. Coira O'Hara, he had time to
observe that she had put up her two hands over her face, then he fell
down forward, his head struck upon something very hard, and he knew no
more.
*CHAPTER XV*
*A CONVERSATION AT LA LIERRE*
Captain Stewart walked nervously up and down the small inner
drawing-room at La Lierre, his restless hands fumbling together behind
him, and his eyes turning every half-minute with a sharp eagerness to
the closed door. But at last, as if he were very tired, he threw
himself down in a chair which stood near one of the windows, and all his
tense body seemed to relax in utter exhaustion. It was not a very
comfortable chair that he had sat down in, but there were no comfortable
chairs in the room--nor for that matter in all the house. When he had
taken the place--about two months before this time--he had taken it
furnished, but that does not mean very much in France. No French
country houses--or town houses either--are in the least comfortable, by
Anglo-Saxon standards, and that is at least one excellent reason why
Frenchmen spend just as little time in them as they possibly can. Half
the cafes in Paris would promptly put up their shutters if Parisian
homes could all at once turn themselves into something like English or
American ones. As for La Lierre it was even more dreary and bare and
tomb-like than other country houses, because it was after all a sort of
ruin, and had not been lived in for fifteen years, save by an ancient
caretaker and his nearly as ancient wife. And that was perhaps why it
could be taken, on a short lease, at a very low price.
The room in which Captain Stewart sat was behind the large drawing-room,
which was always kept closed now, and it looked out by one window to the
west, and by two windows to the north, over a corner of the
kitchen-garden, and a vista of trees beyond. It was a high-ceiled room
with walls bare, except for two large mirrors in the Empire fashion,
which stared at each other across the way with dull and flaking eyes.
Under each of these stood a heavy gilt and ebony console with a top of
chocolate-coloured marble, and in the centre of the room there was a
table of a like fashion to the consoles. Further than this there was
nothing save three chairs, upon one of which lay Captain Stewart's
dust-coat and motoring cap and goggles.
A shaft of golden light from the low sun slanted into the place through
the western window, from which the Venetians had been pulled back, and
fell across the face of the man, who lay still and lax in his chair,
eyes closed and chin dropped a little so that his mouth hung weakly
open. He looked very ill, as indeed any one might look after such an
attack as he had suffered on the night previous. That one long moment
of deathly fear before he had fallen down in a fit had nearly killed
him. All through this following day it had continued to recur until he
thought he should go mad. And there was worse still. How much did Olga
Nilssen know? And how much had she told? She had astonished and
frightened him when she had said that she knew about the house on the
road to Clamart, for he thought he had hidden his visits to La Lierre
well. He wondered rather drearily how she had discovered them, and he
wondered how much she knew more than she had admitted. He had a
half-suspicion of something like the truth, that Mlle. Nilssen knew only
of Coira O'Hara's presence here, and drew a rather natural inference.
If that was all, there was no danger from her--no more, that is, than
had already borne its fruit; for Stewart knew well enough that Ste.
Marie must have learned of the place from her. In any case Olga Nilssen
had left Paris--he had discovered that fact during the day--and so for
the present she might be eliminated as a source of peril.
The man in the chair gave a little groan, and rolled his head wearily to
and fro against the uncomfortable chair-back; for now he came to the
real and immediate danger, and he was so very tired and ill, and his
head ached so sickeningly, that it was almost beyond him to bring
himself face to face with it.
There was the man who lay helpless upon a bed upstairs! And there were
the man's friends, who were not at all helpless or bedridden or in
captivity!
A wave of almost intolerable pain swept through Stewart's aching head,
and he gave another groan which was almost like a child's sob. But at
just that moment the door which led into the central hall opened, and
the Irishman O'Hara came into the room. Captain Stewart sprang to his
feet to meet him, and he caught the other man by the arm in his
eagerness.
"How is he?" he cried out. "How is he? How badly was he hurt?"
"The patient?" said O'Hara.--"Let go my arm! Hang it, man, you're
pinching me!--Oh, he'll do well enough. He'll be fit to hobble about in
a week or ten days. The bullet went clean through his leg and out again
without cutting an artery. It was a sort of miracle. And a damned
lucky miracle for all hands, too! If we'd had a splintered bone or a
severed artery to deal with I should have had to call in a doctor. Then
the fellow would have talked, and there'd have been the devil to pay.
As it is I shall be able to manage well enough with my own small skill.
I've dressed worse wounds than that in my time. By Jove, it was a
miracle though!" A sudden little gust of rage swept him. He cried out:
"That confounded fool of a gardener, that one-eyed Michel, ought to be
beaten to death. Why couldn't he have slipped up behind this fellow and
knocked him on the head, instead of shooting him from ten paces away?
The benighted idiot! He came near upsetting the whole boat!"
"Yes," said Captain Stewart with a sharp hard breath, "he should have
shot straighter or not at all."
The Irishman stared at him with his bright blue eyes, and after a moment
he gave a short laugh.
"Jove, you're a bloodthirsty beggar, Stewart!" said he. "That would
have been a rum go, if you like! Killing the fellow! All his friends
down on us like hawks, and the police and all that! You can't go about
killing people in the outskirts of Paris, you know--at least not people
with friends. And this chap looks like a gentleman, more or less, so I
take it he has friends. As a matter of fact his face is rather
familiar. I think I've seen him before somewhere. You looked at him
just now through the crack of the door; do you know who he is? Coira
tells me he called out to Arthur by name, but Arthur says he never saw
him before, and doesn't know him at all."
Captain Stewart shivered. It had not been a pleasant moment for him,
that moment when he had looked through the crack of the door and
recognised Ste. Marie.
"Yes," he said half under his breath. "Yes, I know who he is. A friend
of the family." The Irishman's lips puckered to a low whistle. He
said--
"Spying then, as I thought. He has run us to earth." And the other
nodded.
O'Hara took a turn across the room and back.
"In that case," he said presently, "in that case then we must keep him
prisoner here so long as we remain. That's certain." He spun round
sharply, with an exclamation.
"Look here!" he cried in a lower tone, "how about this fellow's friends?
It isn't likely he's doing his dirty work alone. How about his friends
when he doesn't turn up to-night? If they know he was coming here to
spy on us, if they know where the place is, if they know--in short, what
he seems to have known, we're done for. We'll have to run, get out,
disappear. Hang it, man, d'you understand? We're not safe here for an
hour."
Captain Stewart's hands shook a little as he gripped them together
behind him, and a dew of perspiration stood out suddenly upon his
forehead and cheek bones, but his voice when he spoke was well under
control.
"It's an odd thing," said he, "another miracle, if you like; but I
believe we are safe--reasonably safe. I--have reason to think that this
fellow learnt about La Lierre only last evening, from some one who left
Paris to-day to be gone a long time. And I also have reason to believe
that the fellow has not seen the one friend who is in his confidence
since he obtained his information. By chance I met the friend, the
other man, in the street this afternoon. I asked after this fellow whom
we have here, and the friend said he hadn't seen him for twenty-four
hours, was going to see him to-night."
"By the Lord!" cried the Irishman with a great laugh of relief. "What
luck! What monumental luck! If all that's true, we're safe. Why, man,
we're as safe as a fox in his hole. The lad's friends won't have the
ghost of an idea of where he's gone to....
"Wait though! Stop a bit! He won't have left written word behind him,
eh? He won't have done that--for safety?"
"I think not," said Captain Stewart; but he breathed hard, for he knew
well enough that there lay the gravest danger.
"I think not," he said again. He made a rather surprisingly accurate
guess at the truth--that Ste. Marie had started out upon impulse,
without intending more than a general reconnaissance, and therefore
without leaving any word behind him. Still, the shadow of danger
uplifted itself before the man and he was afraid. A sudden gust of weak
anger shook him like a wind.
"In Heaven's name," he cried shrilly, "why didn't that one-eyed fool
kill the fellow while he was about it? There's danger for us every
moment while he is alive here. Why didn't that shambling idiot kill
him?" Captain Stewart's outflung hand jumped and trembled, and his face
was twisted into a sort of grinning snarl. He looked like an angry and
wicked cat, the other man thought.
"If I weren't an over-civilised fool," he said viciously, "I'd go
upstairs and kill him now with my hands--while he can't help himself.
We're all too scrupulous by half."
The Irishman stared at him and presently broke into amazed laughter.
"Scrupulous!" said he. "Well, yes, I'm too scrupulous to murder a man
in his bed, if you like. I'm not squeamish, but----Good Lord!"
"Do you realise," demanded Captain Stewart, "what risks we run while
that fellow is alive--knowing what he knows?"
"Oh yes, I realise that," said O'Hara. "But I don't see why _you_
should have heart failure over it."
Captain Stewart's pale lips drew back again in their cat-like fashion.
"Never mind about me," he said. "But I can't help thinking you're
peculiarly indifferent in the face of danger."
"No, I'm not!" said the Irishman quickly. "No, I'm not. Don't you run
away with that idea!" For the first time his hard face began to show
feeling. He turned away with a quick nervous movement, and stood
staring out of the window into the late sunlight.
"I merely said," he went on, "I merely said that I'd stop short of
murder. I don't set any foolish value on life--my own or any other.
I've had to take life more than once, but it was in fair fight or in
self-defence, and I don't regret it. It was your cold-blooded joke
about going upstairs and killing this chap in his bed that put me on
edge. Naturally, I know you didn't mean it." He swung back towards the
other man.
"So don't you worry about me!" said he after a little pause. "Don't you
go thinking that I'm lukewarm or that I'm indifferent to danger. I know
there's danger from this lad upstairs, and I mean to be on guard against
it. He stays here under strict guard until--what we're after is
accomplished--until young Arthur comes of age.
"If there's danger," said he, "why we know where it lies and we can
guard against it. That kind of danger is not very formidable. The
dangerous dangers are the ones that you don't know about--the hidden
ones." He came forward a little, and his lean face was as hard and as
impassive as ever, and the bright blue eyes shone from it steady and
unwinking. Stewart looked up to him with a sort of peevish resentment
at the man's confidence and cool poise. It was an odd reversal of their
ordinary relations. For the hour the duller villain, the man who was
wont to take orders and to refrain from overmuch thought or question,
seemed to have become master. Sheer physical exhaustion and the
constant maddening pain had had their will of Captain Stewart.
A sudden shiver wrung him so that his dry fingers rattled against the
wood of the chair arms.
"All the same," he cried, "I'm afraid. I've been confident enough until
now. Now I'm afraid. I wish the fellow had been killed."
"Kill him then!" laughed the Irishman. "I won't give you up to the
police." He crossed the room to the door, but halted short of it and
turned about again, and he looked back very curiously at the man who sat
crouched in his chair by the window. It had occurred to him several
times that Stewart was very unlike himself. The man was quite evidently
tired and ill, and that might account for some of the nervousness; but
this fierce malignity was something a little beyond O'Hara's
comprehension. It seemed to him that the elder man had the air of one
frightened beyond the point the circumstances warranted.
"Are you going back to town?" he asked, "or do you mean to stay the
night?"
"I shall stay the night," Stewart said. "I'm too tired to bear the
ride." He glanced up and caught the other's eyes fixed upon him.
"Well," he cried angrily. "What is it? What are you looking at me like
that for? What do you want?"
"I want nothing," said the Irishman a little sharply. "And I wasn't
aware that I'd been looking at you in any unusual way. You're precious
jumpy, to-day, if you want to know... Look here!" He came back a step,
frowning.
"Look here," he repeated. "I don't quite make you out. Are you keeping
back anything? Because if you are for Heaven's sake have it out here and
now! We're all in this game together, and we can't afford to be
anything but frank with each other. We can't afford to make
reservations. It's altogether too dangerous for everybody. You're too
much frightened. There's no apparent reason for being so frightened as
that."
Captain Stewart drew a long breath between closed teeth, and afterwards
he looked up at the younger man coldly.
"We need not discuss my personal feelings, I think," said he. "They
have no--no bearing on the point at issue. As you say, we are all in
this thing together and you need not fear that I shall fail to do my
part, as I have done it in the past... That's all, I believe."
"Oh, as you like! As you like!" said the Irishman in the tone of one
rebuffed. He turned again and left the room, closing the door behind
him. Outside on the stairs it occurred to him that he had forgotten to
ask the other man what this fellow's name was--the fellow who lay
wounded upstairs. No, he had asked once, but, in the interest of the
conversation, the question had been lost. He determined to inquire
again that evening at dinner.
But Captain Stewart, left thus alone, sank deeper in the uncomfortable
chair, and his head once more stirred and sought vainly for ease against
the chair's high back. The pain swept him in regular throbbing waves
that were like the waves of the sea--waves which surge and crash and
tear upon a beach. But between the throbs of physical pain there was
something else that was always present while the waves came and went.
Pain and exhaustion, if they are sufficiently extreme, can wellnigh
paralyse mind as well as body, and for some time Captain Stewart
wondered what this thing might be which lurked at the bottom of him,
still under the surges of agony. Then at last he had the strength to
look at it, and it was fear, cold and still and silent. He was afraid
to the very depths of his soul.
True, as O'Hara had said, there did not seem to be any very desperate
peril to face; but Stewart was afraid with the gambler's unreasoning,
half-superstitious fear, and that is the worst fear of all. He realised
that he had been afraid of Ste. Marie from the beginning, and that, of
course, was why he had tried to draw him into partnership with himself
in his own official and wholly mythical search for Arthur Benham. He
could have had the other man under his eye then. He could have kept him
busy for months running down false scents. As it was, Ste. Marie's
uncanny instinct about the Irishman O'Hara had led him true--that and
what he doubtless learned from Olga Nilssen.
If Stewart had been in a condition and mood to philosophise, he would
doubtless have reflected that seven-tenths of the desperate causes, both
good and bad, which fail in this world, fail because they are wrecked by
some woman's love or jealousy (or both). But it is unlikely that he was
able just at this time to make such a reflection, though certainly he
wondered how much Olga Nilssen had known, and how much Ste. Marie had
had to put together out of her knowledge and any previous suspicions
which he may have had.
The man would have been amazed if he could have known what a mountain of
information and evidence had piled itself up over his head all in twelve
hours. He would have been amazed and, if possible, even more frightened
than he was; but he was without question sufficiently frightened, for
here was Ste. Marie in the very house, he had seen Arthur Benham, and
quite obviously he knew all there was to know, or at least enough to
ruin Arthur Benham's uncle beyond all recovery or hope of
recovery--irretrievably.
Captain Stewart tried to think what it would mean to him--failure in
this desperate scheme, but he had not the strength or the courage. He
shrank from the picture as one shrinks from something horrible in a bad
dream. There could be no question of failure. He had to succeed at any
cost, however desperate or fantastic. Once more the spasm of childish
futile rage swept over him and shook him like a wind.
"Why couldn't the fellow have been killed by that one-eyed fool!" he
cried, sobbing. "Why couldn't he have been killed? He's the only one
who knows--the only thing in the way. Why couldn't he have been
killed?"
Quite suddenly Captain Stewart ceased to sob and shiver, and sat still
in his chair, gripping the arms with white and tense fingers. His eyes
began to widen and they became fixed in a long strange stare. He drew a
deep breath.
"I wonder!" he said aloud. "I wonder, now."
*CHAPTER XVI*
*THE BLACK CAT*
That providential stone or tree-root, or whatever it may have been,
proved a genuine blessing in disguise to Ste. Marie. It gave him a
splitting headache for a few hours, but it saved him a good deal of
discomfort the while his bullet wound was being more or less probed, and
very skilfully cleansed and dressed by O'Hara. For he did not regain
consciousness until this surgical work was almost at its end, and then
he wanted to fight the Irishman for tying the bandages too tight.
But when O'Hara had gone away and left him alone he lay still--or as
still as the smarting burning pain in his leg and the ache in his head
would let him--and stared at the wall beyond his bed, and, bit by bit,
the events of the past hour came back to him and he knew where he was.
He cursed himself very bitterly, as he well might do, for a bungling
idiot. The whole thing had been in his hands, he said with perfect
truth--Arthur Benham's whereabouts proved, Stewart's responsibility, or
at the very least complicity, and the sordid motive therefor. Remained,
had Ste. Marie been a sane being instead of an impulsive fool, remained
but to face Stewart down in the presence of witnesses, threaten him with
exposure, and so, with perfect ease, bring back the lost boy in triumph
to his family.
It should all have been so simple, so easy, so effortless! Yet now it
was ruined by a moment's rash folly, and Heaven alone knew what would
come of it. He remembered that he had left behind him no indication
whatever of where he meant to spend the afternoon. Hartley would come
hurrying across town that evening to the Rue d'Assas and would find no
one there to receive him. He would wait and wait and at last go home.
He would come again on the next morning, and then he would begin to be
alarmed and would start a second search--but with what to reckon by?
Nobody knew about the house on the road to Clamart but Mlle. Olga
Nilssen, and she was far away.
He thought of Captain Stewart, and he wondered if that gentleman was by
any chance here in the house, or if he was still in bed in the Rue du
Faubourg St. Honore, recovering from his epileptic fit.
After that he fell once more to cursing himself and his incredible
stupidity, and he could have wept for sheer bitterness of chagrin.
He was still engaged in this unpleasant occupation when the door of the
room opened and the Irishman O'Hara entered, having finished his
interview with Captain Stewart below. He came up beside the bed and
looked down not unkindly upon the man who lay there, but Ste. Marie
scowled back at him, for he was in a good deal of pain and a vile
humour.
"How's the leg--_and_ the head?" asked the amateur surgeon--to do him
justice he was very skilful indeed through much experience.
"They hurt," said Ste. Marie shortly. "My head aches like the devil,
and my leg burns."
O'Hara made a sound which was rather like a gruff laugh, and nodded.
"Yes, and they'll go on doing it too," said he. "At least the leg will.
Your head will be all right again in a day or so. Do you want anything
to eat? It's near dinner-time. I suppose we can't let you
starve--though you deserve it."
"Thanks, I want nothing!" said Ste. Marie. "Pray don't trouble about
me!" The other man nodded again indifferently, and turned to go out of
the room, but in the doorway he halted and looked back.
"As we're to have the pleasure of your company for some time to come,"
said he, "you might suggest a name to call you by. Of course I don't
expect you to tell your own name, though I can learn that easily
enough."
"Easily enough, to be sure," said the man on the bed. "Ask Stewart. He
knows only too well."