The doctor was coping with his Sunday meal when the telephone went off
in the next room. On his ears the imperious summons never fell without a
thrill; in his sight, the tulip-shaped receiver became a live thing
trumpeting for help; and he would answer the call himself, at any hour
of the day or night. It was necessary at night, with the Bartons asleep
in the basement like a family in a vault, but it was just the same when
they were all on duty, as at the present moment. Back went the
Cromwellian chair, at the head of the bare and solitary trestle table.
An excited personage, who might have been just outside the window, was
expeditiously appeased in monosyllables. And Dollar returned with an
appetite to what had been set before him.
"Send Bobby round to the garage, Barton, to order the car at once. He
can tell Albert I shall be ready as soon as he is, but to take his
headlights and fill up with petrol." This was repeated with paternal
severity in the wings. "Now, Barton, my little red road-book, and see if
you can find Pax Monktons in the wilds of Surrey. It can't be more than
a hamlet. Try the Cobham country if it's not in the index."
This took longer--took a survey map and two pairs of eyes before Pax
Monktons Chase was discovered in microscopic print, and the light green
peppered with dots signifying timber three hundred feet above sea-level.
"Never heard of it in my life before," said Dollar, as he laced brown
shoes before his coffee. "Or of the man either, or his double-barreled
name for that matter. You might see if there's a Dale-Bulmer in _Who's
Who_."
But again Barton was unsuccessful; and here his services ended, though
through no fault of his own, or failure of unselfish zeal for one of
those more than probable adventures which made him hate the chauffeur
who was always in them, and curse the duties that kept other people out.
"Will you take your flask, sir?"
"Lord, no! I'm not going to the North Pole."
"Or your--or one of those revolvers, sir?"
"What on earth for? Besides, they're not mine; they ought to be in the
Black Museum at Scotland Yard." The nucleus of a branch exhibition was
forming itself in Welbeck Street. "Don't you give way to nerves, Barton!
I'm only going down to see a man who seems anxious to see me, but I
shouldn't be going to him if we had anybody up-stairs. You three make an
afternoon of it somewhere; never mind if I'm back first; go out and
enjoy yourselves."
And he was off as if on a deliberate jaunt; but an involuntary chuckle
in the voice over the telephone, the hint of a surprise, the possibility
of a trick, made lively thinking after the doldrums of the dog-days; and
the fine September afternoon seemed expressly ordered for motorists with
time upon their hands. Dollar had only been thinking so when the call
came through, to supply just the object which gives a run its zest, and
nothing else mattered in the least. However frivolous the end and
errand, the means and the meantime were so much to the good on such a
day.
It was warm, yet delightfully keen at thirty miles an hour; clear as
crystal within rifle-shot, and deliciously hazy in the distance; the
bronze upon the trees seldom warming to a premature red, often lapsing
into the liquid greens of midsummer; but all the way an autumnal smear
of silver in the sunlight. Dollar divided his mind between a sensuous
savoring of the heavenly country, and more or less romantic speculations
on the case in store. Some people's notions of a crime doctor's
functions were so much wider even than his own; ten months out of the
twelve, he could not have afforded to come so far afield without a
distastefully definite foreword about fees.
This afternoon he was prepared to do almost anything for next to
nothing: and after twenty sedentary miles he was on his legs as often as
not in the next two or three, asking his way at likely lodges, or from
strolling bands of shaven yokels, all Sunday collars and cigarettes.
"Pax Monktons Chase?" at last said one who seemed to have heard the name
before. "Straight as ever you can go, and the first lodge on the left.
But there's no one there."
"No one there!" echoed Dollar. "Do you mean the place is empty?"
"I believe there's workmen there on week-days, but you won't find
anybody now, unless the chap that's bought it's motored over."
"Isn't he living there, then?"
"Not yet; there's alterations being made; and I don't know where he does
live, or anything at all about him, except that he motors over sometimes
on a Sunday."
Dollar felt dashed until he remembered to appreciate one of the few
possibilities for which he had not come quite prepared. There was some
promise in a surprise thus early and so complete. But it made Pax
Monktons Chase fall a little flat when found. It robbed the dreary lodge
of all its value as an eye-opener; it made the chase itself look vast
and desolate for nothing, and a noble pile of seasoned stone fling but
drab turrets and ineffective battlements against a silver sky, which the
sun had ceased to polish in the last tortuous mile.
It was all the pleasanter to find a ruddy, genial, bearded face, mounted
on a spotted tie that went twice round a nineteen-inch neck, smiling a
welcome under the entrance arch. The man introduced himself as
Dale-Bulmer, bolting a mouthful made for rolling on the tongue. Dollar
was much taken with the humor and simplicity of his address and bearing.
A smart chauffeur waited with a plutocratic car in the sweep of the
drive. And there was no third sign of life about the place.
"Awfully good of you to come," said Dale-Bulmer, with apologetic warmth.
"I thought you might, from what I'd heard of you, and you seemed to jump
at it when I rang you up. I haven't known anybody take so kindly to a
trip since I left the bush."
"An Australian?" asked the doctor, with all a doctor's readiness to make
talk; but he was more curious than ever to learn the secret of his
summons.
"Yes! I come from that enlightened land, where Labor runs the show and
Women have the Vote. In fact," the big man added, with the fat chuckle
heard over the telephone, "that's precisely why I _have_ come from
Australia--as I was fool enough to say the other night at a meeting in
these parts. But I seem to have jumped out of the frying-pan into the
fire."
[Illustration: There was no sign of life]
"I'm sorry to hear that," observed Dollar, with polite forbearance.
"Well, not quite into the fire, as it happens," said Dale-Bulmer,
chuckling again in his noble neck. "Come inside, and you'll see." He led
the way into a broad central corridor, choked with ladders and builders'
tools, pipes and tubing, curtain-rods, and a stack of boards; but a
model of order compared with the chaos visible through an open door at
which he paused. Here were more bare joists than navigable floor, and a
forest of scaffolding therefrom to the crisscrossed plaster ceiling.
"Look you here!" said the man from Australia, and pointed to a heap of
shavings on a remnant of the floor.
"The British workman's such a careless dog," sighed Dollar, shaking a
sententious head, for a box of vestas had been spilt about the place.
"British workman be hanged!" cried the other bluntly. "The British
workman's got a job here that will keep him in beer and betting-money
till Christmas, and as much longer as he can spin it out. This is the
little game of another sporting type--the British lady burning for the
vote!"
"So that's it! But are you sure?" asked Dollar, though he wanted to ask
if that was all.
"Certain. I met a flaming brace of 'em on bicycles, just outside my
boundary. This is what I was to get for speaking out about them the
other night."
"I don't see their literature, and I can't smell their paraffin."
"It's in that bottle on the mantelpiece. Something must have scared them
at the last moment--all but one sportswoman."
"What about her?"
"I've got her," said Dale-Bulmer, with sepulchral excitement.
"Got her prisoner?"
"I should hope so! Why, I caught her on the very point of setting fire
to that very heap of shavings--and me without a hose-pipe in the house!
Those are her matches on the floor; _she_ wasn't going to turn tail till
she'd done her job--and didn't till I nearly trod on it! You could
hardly expect me to bow her out of the front door after that!"
Dollar could only stare into the jovial face wreathed in rubicund grins,
but no longer free from a certain serio-comic compunction and concern.
"But, my dear sir----"
"Don't pitch into me!" pleaded Dale-Bulmer, pathetically. "I had to do
something; if I hadn't thought of you, and one or two things I've heard
about you, doctor, I should only have telephoned to the police; and
what's the good of putting these young women in the jug, to be poured
out again within a week? I heard you ran a nursing-home for criminals,
worth all the prisons in the world."
"But I don't run people into it," said the doctor; "they've got to come
in of their own free will. What have you done with this young woman?"
"I? Nothing; it's her own doing entirely. She chose her cover--I only
turned the key."
"You've locked her up in some room?"
"Yes--more or less--rather more."
And Dale-Bulmer laughed a rather nervous, guilty laugh.
"Up-stairs somewhere?"
"Yes--look you here! She was picking up those matches when I spotted her
from this door, and out she streaked through that one over there. Come
and have a look at her line of country, doctor."
It led into an anteroom or inner hall, or the well of some staircase
still to come, with a lashed ladder towering in its midst, but not quite
reaching a skeleton landing of yawning joists. Dale-Bulmer gazed aloft,
wagging a horizontal beard.
"Surely she didn't go up there?" said Dollar.
"Like a lamplighter, doctor! I went the way we'll both go now, if it's
all the same to you."
A fine forked staircase bore them from the lower corridor to its
counterpart above. And here the leader trod gently, a finger laid across
his lips.
"That's the room," he whispered, pointing to a shut door in a side
passage. "I--I almost think I'll leave her to you, doctor. It's not
locked--not the door."
"I thought she was your prisoner?"
"Yes--but you'll see where she's hidden herself. I did turn _that_ key,
doctor, but that's all I did. Still, I think I'd rather you let her
out."
There was nothing facetious in his droll air of guilt; he seemed really
rather ashamed of his impetuous measures, as if long in doubt as to
their gallantry, and abashed by the unspoken criticisms of the man whom
he had brought so far afield on the spur of a flustering moment. But the
truth was that Dollar did not blame him in the least, as he turned the
handle softly, and heard a pusillanimous step retreating down the
corridor.
It was a light and lofty room, with a broad bay-window overlooking the
park; and in the bay a window-seat forming a coffer, which had been
broken open from within; and just clear of the splinters, her hands
raised to her disheveled hair, hat awry and country clothes begrimed, a
young woman risen like Aphrodite from the foam. She had been gazing out
as she put herself to rights; but at the opening of the door she turned
with a light disdain, and the pair of them stood rooted to the floor.
"Lady--Vera!" he could only gasp.
She made him an abrupt little bow; then her head went back to the
truculent angle necessitated by a jelly-bag hat worn almost as a mask;
and her eyes hung under the brim like great blue rain-drops, grim and
gleaming, but with little of his blank amazement, and nothing of the
shame that shook his soul.
"No wonder you would never see me!" he muttered more to himself than to
her. "Not a word even when I wrote--and I wondered what I'd done! I
thought of heaps of things--but I never thought of this!"
She shook her head as abruptly as she had bowed; the blue rain-drops
looked frozen where they hung, but the firm lips parted impulsively.
Instinct prepared him for something inconceivable. But her
self-restraint was a lesson and a reproof; and, in laying it to heart
and listening to what she did say he for the moment ceased from
wondering what it was that she had just kept back--what charge she had
deferred against him.
"Tell me one thing, Doctor Dollar." Her voice was all that it had been
in other emergencies, only colder by some degrees. "Have you been
following me, or is this pure chance?"
"Not chance--pure Fate!"
"Did you dog me down here, or did you not?"
"Not consciously. Do I look as if I had?"
"You look as if you'd seen a ghost," she told him, with a sudden twinkle
of the big blue drops.
"So I have!" he cried in passionate earnest. "I've seen the ghost of
everything I held most----"
"Thank you," she said quietly, when he had checked himself on her model.
"I know what you must think--what you really have a special right to
think--after two years ago. Do be generous and don't say it! This isn't
altogether fun for me, you know, much less after being buried alive for
hours!" She just turned her head toward the broken window-seat, and his
eyes devoured the light upon her profile. "What's going to happen to me?
Is my natural enemy a friend of yours? Has he sent for the police?"
"No--for me instead."
"Did he know who it was at sight?"
"He didn't, and he doesn't, and he never shall unless you tell him!"
exclaimed Dollar vehemently. "O Vera, when I was longing to see you, to
warn you against your enemies, that you should go the way to put
yourself more than ever in their power!"
A glitter under the tilted hat had unconsciously rebuked an unconscious
liberty; yet once this man had begged this woman to marry him, and once
she had practically said she would but for the burden on her soul.
Ceremony, at least, they had foregone of old. Was it merely her new
lease of error that had come between them of late months? He was
beginning to ask himself the question when she broke in with one of her
own:
"What enemies do you mean, Doctor Dollar?"
"We are not to speak of two years ago."
"Croucher!" She shuddered almost like a law-abiding lady. "I haven't
heard of him since that night in the train."
"I said you wouldn't But I also said, if you remember, that Croucher was
only deadly as a tool. Well, he has fallen into the deadliest hands I
know--that's all."
It was not, and Lady Vera knew that it was not. The angle of her hat was
all amicable attention now, and her eyes shone clear of the brim, with a
softer light that made her all at once incredible in her latest
incarnation. Dollar's feelings flew back into his face; she read them
with a smile that made him wince, by its cynical resemblance to one or
two that still enriched his dreams.
"You think I'm as bad as any of them," she divined aloud.
"I think the crime of arson is worse than most crimes," he made sturdy
answer, standing up to the little body with the strangest difficulty, as
though he were the culprit and she the man. "It's a thing absolutely
nothing on earth can possibly excuse. I think you'd have died rather
than descend to it--two years ago!"
He had heard a step behind him, and lowered his voice; but Lady Vera
raised hers as a burly form halted shyly on the threshold; and her tone
was like none that she had taken hitherto.
"Two years ago," she declaimed, "women had not been treated quite so
shabbily as they have been since. Then this miserable Government--"
"Look you here!" blustered Dale-Bulmer, striding out of his shyness into
the center of the stage.
"Two years ago," she reiterated for his benefit, "it wasn't war to the
handle of the knife! Now it would be fire and sword, if we were any good
with the sword; as we are not, it's simply fire!"
"You really think you can burn your way to political power?" cried the
man of extremes, with ungovernable indignation.
"Political existence is all we ask."
"As a first instalment! I know you! I come from a country where you
started just like that!"
"As you told your audience the other night, if you are Mr. Dale-Bulmer,"
said Lady Vera, with an explosive little sigh.
"I am; and for that I'm to have a house like this burned to the ground;
and you ladies think that's the way to advance your cause, to prove your
value to the State! Well, I suppose you know your own business best.
It's no use reasoning with you; but it really is enough to set one off,
after what I caught you doing down-stairs."
"I wish to goodness you hadn't caught me," cried Lady Vera, with quite
extraordinary simplicity.
But neither of them took her up; the doctor could only shake his head in
professional despair, while the injured householder recovered his
composure, and the little criminal looked as if she were trying not to
look the mistress of the situation.
"I only came," resumed Dale-Bulmer, rather as one who had no right in
the room, "to say that a run-about car has been found in the yard behind
one of the empty lodges. As I fancy your friends were on bicycles, it
struck me that the two-seater might perhaps be yours?"
Was it just the nature of the man to change his whole manner in a
moment, or had the quality of the woman something to do with it? He
seemed unconscious of the change himself--unaware that he had dropped
into a tone of courteous consideration bordering almost on the
apologetic. But the corners of her little mutinous mouth showed that
nothing was lost upon Lady Vera.
"It sounds like mine," she confessed without indecent amusement. "But I
hope you don't think, because there's room for two, that there's another
of us still concealed about the premises? I came down quite by myself,
in the car you have discovered. And who's to drive it back to town
again, I'm sure _I_ don't know!"
Dale-Bulmer glanced defiantly at Dollar, a flash-light in his eyes.
"I do," he cried. "Yourself!"
"Myself, Mr. Dale-Bulmer? In--handcuffs?"
And it was not her worst smile that was subdued in deference to the full
glow of his shamefaced magnanimity.
"Don't talk nonsense!" said he gruffly. "Your car is ready waiting for
you at the door."
"Not really?"
"Of course. I buried you alive, didn't I?" His eyes came from the
wrecked window-seat. "Won't that meet the immediate case for martyrdom?"
And he managed another twinkle after all.
It was a last amenity. He had been thanked, but without the smile which
had been ready enough when it was out of place; now that she had cause
to smile, the perversity of these women came out, as of course it would!
Not that this one took everything quite for granted; on the contrary,
she caused an explosion by offering to pay for the damage to the
window-seat. The militant party would have wished him to secure ample
compensation from his insurance people, she asserted, if the place _had_
been burned down. "Then I might have built the kind of house I really
want, instead of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear!" he
had retorted in his better manner, as though he had been a fool to
interfere.
But it was not his best manner; it was almost as unrepresentative as the
calm self-centered way in which the released prisoner spent the last
minutes looking for her gloves, and, when she failed to find them, held
out her bare hand with a brazen air of innocence, and no more thanks
than would have become a parting guest.
Even John Dollar felt a new pang of disappointment as the two-seater
shrank panting out of sight and ear-shot, beneath the bronzed timber of
the disappearing drive, and Dale-Bulmer turned on his heel under the
arch.
"Doesn't that take the cake?" he cried, when he had swallowed his pique
with a chastened chuckle. "A real well-bred 'un--if ever there was
one--playing the very devil, and carrying it off like a little angel of
light! That's what did me--the way she carried it off! I wanted to give
her a fatherly word, to tell her not to go on making such a wicked
little fool of herself. But she simply wouldn't look the part, would
she? I hadn't even the cheek to ask her name--had you?"
"No. I don't know why you let her off," said Dollar, irritably; but at
the moment he hated Dale-Bulmer for extorting his common gratitude at
the expense of his sacred flame.
"Why?" cried that cavalier. "Didn't you guess how I found out about her
car?"
"How?"
"Reported to me by the police!"
"The police? Were there any about?"
Dollar felt as cold down the back as though his sacred flame had never
flickered behind iron bars.
"Two blighters," said Dale-Bulmer. "I caught sight of 'em just after I
had left you to have it out with her. That's what they had to say for
themselves when I went out to let off steam; swore they were from
Scotland Yard, and trumped up the two-seater when I pretended not to
believe them. Nor did I till I'd run them down to the lodge and seen it
for myself."
"And then?"
"I swore it belonged to a friend, of course, and sent them both to the
devil."
"And--and you were man enough not to say a word about it to--to her?" It
was as much as Dollar could do to keep his enthusiastic respect within
bounds of discretion.
"Man enough? I wasn't going to have that sort of carrion coming in and
spoiling _your_ job!"
Then he perceived how he had spoilt it himself; hung his great head like
an elderly elephantine schoolboy; turned his broad back with an
inimitable shrug, and stood shaken to the pit with sobs of mirth. Dollar
joined him with a shout that relieved them both. And they roared
together until a gaunt caretaker appeared on the scene, with a face
expressive of such crass bewilderment that their poor clay quaked with a
second shock.
"He lives in the bowels of the house," moaned Dale-Bulmer. "He doesn't
know a thing that's happened. If he did I might have to double his
screw. And--and I'd much rather treble your fee!"
He was solemn once more in his remorse, but not so solemn as the doctor
had become within a minute.
"I would _pay_ a fee to take his place till to-morrow morning! I mean
it, my dear sir. If you think you owe me any little amends, let me do
this, for my own satisfaction!"
This from a Dollar at whom the other stared as though they had only just
met. It was the crime doctor come at last.
"Stay here for the night, Doctor Dollar?"
"Yes--alone."
"But why, my good fellow?"
"I can hardly tell you; only let me stay, if you can trust me!"
"You know it isn't that."
"Then do let me! It isn't so much for your sake--I won't pretend it
is--yet what if there should be a second attempt on the house? Then I
might even earn the fee you talk about; otherwise, not a brass farthing!
I wouldn't have missed the case for anything, even as it stands. And you
only took my treatment out of my mouth; you did the very thing I was
going to beg you to do, but not more earnestly than I beg of you now to
leave me in charge here to-night."
"But not without this man of mine to look after you?"
"Especially without that man of yours! He gave me the idea--he's my own
height and build--we can change places beautifully. I want him to put
on my cap and coat and goggles, and to drive away in my car, so that
anybody looking would think they had seen the last of me."
"But who should be looking? Surely not that little----"
"God forbid! But perhaps somebody on her side--or perhaps only somebody
on her tracks. Curious about those two detectives; but the whole
business bristles with curiosities, which I long to investigate in
peace, unknown to the whole outside world. This is the only way it can
be done; and this, my dear Mr. Dale-Bulmer, is the one and only thing
that you can do for me!"
The boy with the beard gave way by inches. As long as there was a dog's
chance of any further excitement, he did not see why he should be out of
it, much less in his own house, and after the humdrum life he had led
since Labor and the Ladies had driven him home from Australia. But the
man with the stronger will seemed perfectly sincere in his further
asservations that there were features in the case which he wanted to
study for his own private and professional ends; that he honestly
believed, they had no more to fear from their friends the enemy, but
that somebody ought to remain on guard, that he was the obvious man. All
this rang true enough; and but for Dollar's strange anxiety in the
matter, and Dale-Bulmer's sudden discovery that he squinted, the plan
might have gained earlier acceptance than it did. It was settled,
however, by a timely telephone call from the Australian's furnished
house at Esher, to ask if anything had happened to him, and was he never
going to tear himself away from Pax Monktons Chase?
Thus it was nearly five o'clock before the crime doctor was alone at
last, with certain plain quarters and plainer fare at his disposal, but
with every nook and cranny of a country mansion to himself until next
morning. The situation had the intrinsic charm of all lonely vigils;
even if nothing was likely to come of this one, it would at least afford
that continuous possibility of a thrill which becomes more thrilling
than the thrill itself. And the whole business was supremely after John
Dollar's heart; nothing could have been more congenial to him; and yet,
though he did look forward to the night, and whatever the night might
still bring forth, it was not for the night's sake that he had
maneuvered to remain in the empty house. It was for the residue of
daylight, and the systematic investigations it would enable him to make.
On these he started, with the precaution of a seaman marooned on a
desolate island, not indubitably uninhabited, as soon as the front door
shut upon Dale-Bulmer and the two chauffeurs, with the gaunt caretaker
his muffled image in his own car. And these motorists were not followed
out of sight or hearing, from the fading pile that looked so empty in
the drooping eye of heaven. But it very soon seemed to the man within as
if the whole house were a-hum with its own abysmal silence, and his
lightest breath a stertorous disturbance of its ponderous peace.
He began by searching the unfurnished room in which the fire would have
originated. There could be no doubt about the fell attempt so nearly
made. It would have been diabolically certain of success. The
scaffolding, like sticks in a gigantic grate; the draft through the
joists, where the floor had been taken up; the natural flue formed by
the adjoining well, so lofty that an ordinary ladder was too short to
reach the landing--all these were as bellows and chimney, and the best
of fuel ready laid for lighting. And here were the shavings, all nicely
swept together, and the matches spilled at the last moment; as Dollar
put them back into the box, his finger-tips ached for all they might
have learned from that which they held--for the whole truth about the
guilty hand which had let the match-box fall.
It was the whole truth, too, that he was seeking next upon his knees, in
the rubble down between the joists; some fresh fact, still inconceivable
as a concrete discovery, that he hoped against hope to find and to set
against the facts beyond dispute. Facts could not lie, but they might
exaggerate; somewhere, surely, there must be something to extenuate,
something to redeem even this atrocious attempt, if only the silent
walls could speak up for one who never made excuses for herself!
It was a childish instinct, a quite babyish yearning to undo what has
once been done, and yet this had been the spring of that dense desire to
be left behind in the house at all costs. Then he had only felt it, like
a dull ache; now it became a dear and poignant conviction that there was
some discovery still to make, and that he was the man to make it; that
one of these walls had a word to say to him, and to him alone.
But it was none of the new bricks and mortar, wanting even their first
coat of plaster; it was nothing under the lofty rafters of a quiet
baronial hall where the builder had not been turned loose, nor any
intruder left a trace; it was not in the round room, filled with a first
instalment of the Dale-Bulmer furniture, nor yet anywhere else
down-stairs, in spite of the shrill tale told by the scullery window.
There the Amazons had entered, after breaking a pane like journeymen
burglars. They had fled incontinently by the door. But what else had
they done, and where else had they been, within those sardonically
silent walls?
Had they been up-stairs before Vera Moyle ran up the ladder? Dollar
returned to that speaking spot, and climbed up gingerly, in an agony of
enthusiasm for her misused pluck. The gap between the top rung and the
new landing was unpleasant even for him, and he was at least a foot
taller than the little fool. The little fool! A pretty way to think of
her, even now; but there was a worse way; and still there was a better,
vaguely haunting him all the time, but almost ceasing to be vague in the
room where he had found her in the flesh. He could see her there again.
She had not faced him like a little fool, but a little heroine, God
forgive her! Not so much as a pout about her horrible imprisonment under
the window-seat! Not a moment's loss of dignity, even after that; not a
moment's loss of temper. Head up, and eyes shining in the shadow of her
wicked little hat!
Here, to an inch, he had caught her gazing out of that window, out and
down into the chase--rolling right up to the house on this side--beating
against a breakwater of a sunk fence just underneath, and dotted with
leafy sail. Deer in the distance, and swallows darting across and across
the window, like shuttles weaving the scene in silk, brought the picture
back to good dry land. But the wide sky was still rather like a sea-sky;
and it had lightened again with the approach of evening; there were
silver rims to the clouds, as John Dollar tore himself from the
enchanted scene.
[Illustration: "Now look at this one"]
It was nearly dark when he returned unsteadily, with a face like a
cheer--with a face that would have lighted up a tomb. In his hands he
clasped a pair of innocent little gloves, that anybody might have found,
and somebody traced to their beloved little owner. But that was not all.
A wall had spoken, in certain handwriting hastily rubbed out, and a
whole bathroom had told a yet more eloquent tale!
Hours later they were speaking still, wafting sweet music through the
corridors, filling the honored room with strains of joy for the
enchanted man on the broken window-seat, all in the dark at dead of
night. There might have been a moon; he did not know. There might have
been a stealthy advance, in very open order--a taking of cover behind
trees wide apart--a joining of forces down there in the dark, that was
not so dark if one was used to it. But Dollar had been for hours gazing
into his own heart, and that was still so dazzlingly alight that he
might not have seen anything if he had looked out; it still sang so loud
that he heard nothing down-stairs until there was noise enough to wake a
deeper dreamer out of actual sleep.
Even then he scarcely knew what had brought him so suddenly to feet
grown numb, but not more numb than the whole outer man in the endless
inner joy of that which he believed himself to have discovered along
with his dear lady's gloves. Those sacred relics he still clasped in his
hands, and that fond belief he was still hugging in his heart, when a
louder sound pricked his undertaking to the quick. It was the sound of
voices in the empty house. He tore off his shoes, limped over to the
door, opened it as softly, and stood listening in a heavy horror. They
were women's voices, accompanied by the scuttle of women's feet!
In an instant, but still with an instinctive stealth, he was out on the
landing at the head of the stairs. And there, but only there, his fond
dream ended in an awakening as terrible as any nightmare; for one woman
stood on the half-landing between the two prongs of the forked
staircase; all attention she stood, as if on guard; hair silvered by a
shaft of moonshine through the staircase window, shoulders hunched
intently, but the head itself just tilted as if in sudden alarm, and
full in the moonlight the wicked unmistakable little hat of Lady Vera
Moyle.
Her gloves dropped out of his hands. Did she hear them fall? She looked
as if she had; he had not the heart to make sure. He had nothing like
the heart to confront and shame her first--at her worst a passive party
to the crime--when her guiltier companions were even then at their vile
work lower down. The ladder was the thing! Then he could scare those
others first, and she and he need never meet at all. Better never again
than at this hideous juncture! And as for him, better death itself than
such a death to such a dream!
It was a sheer stampede the man made now, back along the landing with
great heavy strides, even shouting as he went to put the she-devils to
flight. It was what he called them as he ran; had they not dragged an
angel into this. And they heard him, and he heard them--scuttling and
clucking in headlong flight.
This time they could afford to fly; their second attempt was no failure
like the first. The little new landing was like a gridiron over a
flickering glare from the well beneath. Dollar flung his full length on
the brink--hung dangling from the armpits--hung lashing out for the
ladder like a boy on a horizontal bar with a mattress just underneath.
The top rung took some finding in his reckless haste; and then his
hands had to change places with his feet; and it was all a pretty
desperate business for no light-weight, in a frenzy of excitement, at
the tip-top of a tremulous ladder that leaned against thin air. But his
very recklessness saw him down somehow with unbroken bones, and on the
threshold of the burning room before the fire had really taken hold. And
there he stopped, instead of dashing in; there he stood shrinking from
the red light within.
For again one of the women had stayed behind the rest; and through a
forest of scaffolding poles, and a swirl of smoke and steam, he beheld
her in a glow already dying by her hand, under a hissing stream flung
right and left, in glittering coils and spirals, as coolly as a gardener
waters the grass. It was his very dream, come true in the end! And
Dollar stood there because he was ashamed to look Vera Moyle in the
face--after fearing for one moment that it was nothing but a dream!
But last of all the stream played through the darkness and the smoke,
upon the threshold even at his feet, and a dry voice cried:
"I see you all right! I saw you up-stairs; come round and tell me why
you ran away."
[Illustration: The little landing was like a gridiron]
But it was no moment for going round. He went to her through sparks and
splinters in his socks, and felt the pain no more than the relief when
he stood beside her on the cool flags of the corridor, with both her
hands in his.
"I might have known!" he spluttered through the smoke. "I might have
known it even from the first!"
"It's jolly bad luck that you should know it at all," said Lady Vera, in
the same dry little voice. "I'm not proud of it, I can tell you."
"Not of stopping an absolutely wanton crime?"
"Not of turning against my old lot--and I haven't, either!" cried Lady
Vera, with more passion than he had ever heard from her. "I feel
everything I said up-stairs. I think we've all been treated more
abominably than ever. I don't blame them a bit for all this sort of
thing----"
"Vera, you do--you know you do!"
"I don't; how can I? Haven't I done worse? I may think they're going
rather far, and I may put in my spoke----"
"This is not the first time!" he exulted, still only with her hands in
his, yet little knowing how he hurt them.
"That's my business," she said, with a sudden laugh that broke her
voice. "It's the least I can do--after two years ago."
"And I knew you'd done it!" he was quick to cry. "I knew it hours back,
though you did frighten me again just now. I found the hose-pipe in the
bathroom with your gloves, and their rotten message rubbed out on the
wall! I knew the hose was yours, because I'd just been told there wasn't
such a thing in the house. But I was looking for something of the kind.
I knew there was something to be found, that the whole thing wasn't what
it seemed. And ever since it's been the happiest night of my life, on
top of my most miserable hour!"
"I'll motor you back to town for that," said Lady Vera, with another
poor little laugh. "I--I'm sorry I didn't tell you this afternoon."
"I'm not!"
"Somehow it didn't seem quite the game by the others, though of course I
hoped you would guess that I had only come in after them as a kind of
scarecrow. Of course I don't know if it will make you the least bit less
miserable----" But there she stuck.
"If what will?"
And now it was she who held his hands the faster--only across a gulf of
darkness like a solid wall--only with a kindness that reminded him it
was nothing else--only with a glow more dear than an embrace.
"If it makes you the very least bit happier," she whispered, "why, of
course it was only just your own game, doctor, that I was trying to
play!"