When, next morning, Major Burnham-Seaforth announced the dilemma in
which, through his own house being temporarily closed, he found himself
owing to the proposed visit of Lieutenant Rupert St. Aubyn, son of an
old army friend, Zuilika was the first to suggest the very thing he was
fishing for.
"Ah, let him come here, dear friend," she said in that sad, sweetly
modulated voice which so often wrung this susceptible old heart. "There
is plenty of room!--plenty, alas now--and any friend of yours can only
be a friend of mine. He will not annoy. Let him come here."
"Yes, let him," supplemented young Burnham-Seaforth, speaking with his
eyes on Señorita Rosario, who seemed nervous and ill-pleased by the news
of the expected arrival. "He won't have to be entertained by us if he
only comes to see the pater; and we can easily crowd him aside if he
tries to thrust himself upon us--a fellow with a name like 'Rupert St.
Aubyn' is bound to be a silly ass." And when, in the late afternoon,
"Lieutenant Rupert St. Aubyn," in the person of Cleek, arrived with his
snubnosed manservant, a kit-bag, several rugs and a bundle of golf
sticks, young Burnham-Seaforth saw no reason to alter that assertion.
For, a "silly ass"--albeit an unusually handsome one with his fair,
curling hair and his big blonde moustache--he certainly was; a lisping
"ha-ha-ing" "don't-cher-knowing" silly ass, whom the presence of ladies
seemed to cover with confusion and drive into a very panic of shy
embarrassment.
"_Dios!_ but he is handsome, this big, fair lieutenant!" whispered the
Spaniard to young Burnham-Seaforth. "A great, handsome fool--all beauty
and no brains, like a doll of wax!" Then she bent over and murmured
smilingly to Zuilika: "I shall make a bigger nincompoop of this big,
fair sap-head than Heaven already has done before he leaves here, just
for the sake of seeing him stammer and blush!"
Only the sad expression of Zuilika's eyes told that she so much as
heard, as she rose to greet the visitor. Garbed from head to foot in the
deep violet-coloured stuff which is the mourning of Turkish women, her
little pointed slippers showing beneath the hem of her frock, and only
her dark, mournful eyes visible between the top of the shrouding yashmak
and the edge of her sequined snood, she made a pathetic picture as she
stood there waiting to greet the unknown visitor.
"Sir, you are welcome--you are most welcome," she said in a voice whose
modulations were not lost upon Cleek's ears as he put forth his hand and
received the tips of her little, henna-stained fingers upon his palm.
"Peace be with you, who are of his people--he that I loved and mourn!"
Then, as if overcome with grief at the recollection of her widowhood,
she plucked away her hand, covered her eyes, and moved staggeringly out
of the room. And Cleek saw no more of her that day; but he knew when she
performed her orisons before the mummy case--as she did each morning and
evening--by the strong, pungent odour of incense drifting through the
house and filling it with a sickly scent.
Her absence seemed to make but little impression upon him, however; for,
following up a well-defined plan of action, he devoted himself wholly to
the Spanish woman, and both amazed her and gratified her vanity by
allowing her to learn that a man may be the silliest ass imaginable and
yet quite understand how to flirt and to make love to a woman. And so it
fell out that instead of "Lieutenant Rupert St. Aubyn" being elbowed out
by young Burnham-Seaforth, it was "Lieutenant St. Aubyn" who elbowed
_him_ out; and without being in the least aware of it, the flattered
Anita, like an adroitly hooked trout, was being "played" in and out and
round about the eddies and the deeps until the angler had her quite
ready for the final dip of the net at the landing point.
All this was to accomplish exactly what it _did_ accomplish, namely, the
ill temper, the wrath, the angry resentment of young Burnham-Seaforth.
And when the evening had passed and bedtime arrived, Cleek took his
candle and retired in the direction of the rooms set apart for him, with
the certainty of knowing that he had done that which would this very
night prove beyond all question the guilt or innocence of one person at
least who was enmeshed in this mysterious tangle. He was not surprised,
therefore, at what followed his next step.
Reaching the upper landing he blew out the light of his candle, slammed
the door to his own room, noisily turned the key, and shot the bolt of
another, then tiptoed his way back to the staircase and looked down the
well-hole into the lower hall.
Zuilika had retired to her room, the Major had retired to his, and now
Anita was taking up her candle to retire to hers. She had barely touched
it, however, when there came a sound of swift footsteps and young
Burnham-Seaforth lurched out of the drawing-room door and joined her. He
was in a state of great excitement and was breathing hard.
"Anita--Miss Rosario!" he began, plucking her by the sleeve and
uplifting a pale, boyish face--he was not yet twenty-two--to hers with a
look of abject misery. "I want to speak to you--I simply must speak to
you. I've been waiting for the chance, and now that it's come--Look
here! You're not going back on me, are you?"
"Going back on you?" repeated Anita, showing her pretty white teeth in
an amused smile. "What shall you mean by that 'going back on you'--eh?
You are a stupid little donkey, to be sure. But then I do not care to
get on the back of one--so why?"
"Oh, you know very well what I mean," he rapped out angrily. "It is not
fair the way you have been treating me ever since that yellow-headed
bounder came. I've had a night of misery--Zuilika never showing herself;
you doing nothing, absolutely nothing, although you promised--you _know_
you did!--and I heard you, I absolutely heard you persuade that St.
Aubyn fool to stop at least another night."
"Yes, of course you did. But what of it? He is good company--he talks
well, he sings well, he is very handsome and--well, what difference can
it make to you? You are not interested in _me, amigo_?"
"No, no; of course I'm not. You are nothing to me at all--you--Oh, I beg
your pardon; I didn't quite mean that. I--I mean you are nothing to me
in that way. But you--you're not keeping to your word. You promised, you
know, that you'd use your influence with Zuilika; that you'd get her to
be more kind to me--to see me alone and--and all that sort of thing. And
you've not made a single attempt--not one. You've just sat round and
flirted with that tow-headed brute and done nothing at all to help me
on; and--and it's jolly unkind of you, that's what!"
Cleek heard Anita's soft rippling laughter; but he waited to hear no
more. Moving swiftly away from the well-hole of the staircase he passed
on tiptoe down the hall to the Major's rooms, and, opening the door,
went in. The old soldier was standing, with arms folded, at the window
looking silently out into the darkness of the night. He turned at the
sound of the door's opening and moved toward Cleek with a white,
agonised face and a pair of shaking, outstretched hands.
"Well?" he said with a sort of gasp.
"My dear Major," said Cleek quietly. "The wisest of men are sometimes
mistaken--that is my excuse for my own short-sightedness. I said in the
beginning that his was either a case of swindling or a case of murder,
did I not? Well, I now amend my verdict. It is a case of swindling _and_
murder; and your son has had nothing to do with either!"
"Oh, thank God! thank God!" the old man said; then sat down suddenly and
dropped his face between his hands and was still for a long time. When
he looked up again his eyes were red, but his lips were smiling.
"If you only knew what a relief it is," he said. "If you only knew how
much I have suffered, Mr. Cleek. His friendship with that Spanish woman;
his going with her to identify the body--even assisting in its hurried
burial! These things all seemed so frightfully black--so utterly without
any explanation other than personal guilt."
"Yet they are all easily explained, Major. His friendship for the
Spanish woman is merely due to a promise to intercede for him with
Zuilika. She is his one aim and object, poor little donkey! As for his
identification of the body--well, if the widow herself could find points
of undisputed resemblance, why not he? A nervous, excitable, impetuous
boy like that--and anxious, too, that the lady of his heart should be
freed from the one thing, the one man, whose existence made her
everlastingly unattainable--why, in the hands of a clever woman like
Anita Rosario such a chap could be made to identify anything and to
believe it as religiously as he believes. Now, go to bed and rest easy,
Major. I'm going to call up Dollops and do a little night prowling. If
it turns out as I hope, this little riddle will be solved to-morrow."
"But how, Mr. Cleek? It seems to me that it is as dark as ever. You put
my poor old head in a whirl. You say there is swindling; you hint one
moment that the body was not that of Ulchester, and in the next that
murder has been done. Do, pray, tell me what it all means--what you make
of this amazing case."
"I'll do that to-morrow, Major; not to-night. The answer to the
riddle--the answer that's in my mind, I mean--is at once so simple and
yet so appallingly awful that I'll hazard no guess until I'm sure. Look
here"--he put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a gold piece--"do
you know what that is, Major?"
"It looks like a spade guinea, Mr. Cleek."
"Right; it is a spade guinea--a pocket piece I've carried for years.
You've heard, no doubt, of vital things turning upon the tossing of a
coin. Well, if you see me toss this coin to-morrow, something of that
sort will occur. It will be tossed up in the midst of a riddle, Major;
when it comes down it will be a riddle no longer."
Then he opened the door, closed it after him, and, before the Major
could utter a word, was gone.