It was yet another Lady Vera who brought her own sunshine out of the
weeping dusk of that October morning. To veil embarrassment on either
side, Dollar had switched off the light by which he had just read the
line scribbled on her card; but there was no sanction for his nervous
sensibility in the little picture he beheld next moment. An audacious
study in Venetian red--a tripping fashion-plate with a practical
waist--it was only Vera by virtue of the radiant face between the
donkey-eared toque and the modish modicum of fur. And though the
radiance was lovely as ever in his eyes, and lovelier still as a
surprise, this frivolous modernity was pain and puzzledom to Dollar
until their hands met, and the one in the tight glove trembled.
"It's no use beating about the bush," said Vera Moyle, and there was no
sort of tremor in her voice. "Do you mind telling me exactly what you
know of a Mr. Mostyn Scarth?"
"Mostyn Scarth!" cried Dollar. "Do _you_ know him?"
"Only too well!"
"I was afraid of it."
"But I want your opinion and experience of him first. I believe you saw
something of each other in Switzerland?"
"We did," replied Dollar weightily. "He was supposed to be looking after
a young temporary lunatic, who was of age, rich, and not irresponsible
in the eye of the law. Scarth induced the boy to leave him vast sums of
money in a will, and then made two distinct attempts to murder him."
"No!"
"He did. You ask what I know of this man, and I make no bones about
telling you. It's a thing the whole world ought to know for its
protection. He made two separate attempts on the lad's life, the last
more ingenious than the first; first he tried to poison him by means of
a forged prescription, and next to break his neck by tampering with his
toboggan."
"In Switzerland, when you were there?"
"I was sent for after the first effort; the second was made under my
nose."
"And yet you did nothing?"
Lady Vera's indignation was not confined to the absent miscreant; her
demigod came in for his share.
"There was not much to be done," he protested humbly. "We were in a
foreign country; the evidence wouldn't have been overwhelming under our
own law. I let Scarth know that I had found him out, got the boy out of
his clutches--pulled _him_ together all right--and laid the whole case
before Topham Vinson when I came home. He consulted his law officers;
they thought I had so little to go upon that our man wasn't even marked
down for surveillance by the police. I had to keep my own eye on him
when he turned up in town again. Scarth made that easy by immediately
getting on my tracks, and discovering in Mr. Croucher another old friend
who had his knife in me. They tried between them to pervert my
chauffeur; then I lost sight of them; and it was then I wanted to put
you on your guard, but you were never in, and my letters seemed to
miscarry."
"They didn't," said Lady Vera, with frank contrition. "I am ashamed to
tell you why I never answered them; but I will in a minute. So it was
Mr. Scarth you meant when you told me the other day that poor Croucher
had fallen into such bad hands?"
"Poor Croucher! Yes, it was; and there really is no comparison between
them. One was born in the scarlet, so to speak, but the other's the only
really educated and quite cold-blooded villain I have ever met."
Vera Moyle sat forward in the patient's chair, in the very attitude of
two years before, with the same firelight illumining the same steadfast
look of moral and intellectual honesty; and the fuller health upon her
cheek, the deeper wisdom in her eyes, made no more difference to Dollar
than her superfluous smartness now. She was the same utterly candid
creature, about to tell him the whole truth about some fresh trouble,
and extenuate nothing that concerned herself.
"I don't want to waste many words on Mr. Scarth," she began, in the
least vindictive of human voices; "but I ought to tell you that I quite
liked him until the other day. I met him first at a country house where
he was supposed to be tutoring the boys, but was really the life and
soul of the whole party. It was extraordinary how he ran everything and
everybody for those people; we were all devoted to him, and he says I
asked him to come and see us in town, but he certainly never came until
near the end of this last season. Then he made up for lost time; he's
capital company, as you know, and we had him to dinner, and my eldest
brother asked him down to stay in August when I was there. That was when
we saw most of each other, and Mr. Scarth asked me to marry him----"
"Good God!"
"Of course I didn't like him well enough for that, though he _had_ put
me against _you_!"
"How?" said Dollar grimly. She was still peering into the fire; but he
flattered himself there was more than firelight in the flush that almost
rivaled the Venetian red still nearer to the bars.
"He knows what I did two years ago."
"Croucher, of course?"
"He said it was you--that you gave me away to him in Switzerland!"
"And you believed him?"
"He made it just credible. He said you told him in confidence; he showed
me a letter in which you reminded him not to let it go any further."
"A forgery!"
"I see that now; but it was a very good one, written on your club
paper."
"The man's an expert forger. Anybody can go into a club to write a note
and steal some stationery. If only you had tackled me about it!"
"I promised I wouldn't. I could hardly believe it of you, all the
same--not that you were the first to tell him. But--but it did put me
off--in spite of everything--and that was only in July."
"Just when I was trying to see you, to put you on your guard!"
She gave him her eyes at last, and they were wet but beaming. "I doubted
it still more from one or two things he said when we had our little
scene in the country; but I _knew_ there wasn't a word of truth in it
before _you_ said a dozen words to me the other Sunday! It was all a
plot to keep us apart--to get me under his thumb."
"Did he threaten you when you--had your little scene?"
"Not in so many words."
"He will. That's where I shall come in."
"His position was that I and my secret would only be safe with him."
"As it never was with me?"
"That was it; but now he knows that I don't believe him. I told him so
when he called last week."
"So you have had another little scene?"
"I cut it short at that."
"And there the matter ended?"
"Between him and me."
"Don't make too sure. You don't know your Mostyn Scarth as well as I do.
I wonder what his next move will be!"
The wonder lit the doctor's face with eager interest, but brighter still
was the answering light under the toque with the ass's ears of watered
silk.
"I don't know about his next, but I can tell you what his latest move
is," said Lady Vera. "He has taken to dogging me all over the place, to
see if I don't commit another crime! He was one of the alleged
detectives at Pax Monktons Chase!"
"Never!" cried Dollar, taken fairly by surprise. He had forgot almost
every feature of the affair in question, except how magnificently Vera
Moyle had come out of it. The episode remained in his mind only as the
one great dream of his that had come true as yet; the details had
disappeared like those of any other dream.
"I happen to know it," said Lady Vera, with some little embarrassment.
"I had it from--the other detective."
"Not--" and Dollar stopped to frown--"not Croucher himself?"
"Yes."
"He has dared to speak to you!"
"For the very first time since that night in the train; now do listen,
and be fair to the poor fellow. He never was as bad as you thought him;
you say yourself that he's a saint compared with Mr. Scarth." Dollar was
too savage to smile at this free version of what he had said. "Well,
they have fallen out, and Croucher's in a bad way altogether; and he
has turned to me for a helping hand--not for money or anything of that
kind."
"Not the least little hint of blackmail?"
"Not a word or a sign of anything of the sort, except that he asked me
to forgive him for the other time, and of course I did."
"Of course you would, though he actually robbed you under arms!" cried
Dollar, as sardonically as he felt he must.
But he was let off with the caution of a frown that would have escaped
attention on a face less consistently serene than Lady Vera Moyle's.
"You forget what he had been through first," said she, gently. "Within
forty-eight hours of execution, for something he had never done!
Thinking what he thought, and I neither denied nor admitted, then or at
any time, the wonder is not that he behaved as badly as he did that
night, but as well as he has ever since. However much you frightened him
at the time, he might have gone on blackmailing me without your
knowledge, and that's the last thing he's trying to do now. But I want
to do something for him! You say yourself that he has fallen into the
worst of hands--well, I want to get him out of them. You once told me
that, when you had him here before, you found yourself trying to make a
decent being of him, and beginning to feel that you might almost
succeed. Doctor, I want you to try again, for my sake! He is frightfully
sorry for what he did before, and he has been very badly used by Mostyn
Scarth. He looks ill. I want you to save his life, and more than his
life! He has told me with tears in his eyes that he was never so happy
as when you had him here before. Dear man, do take him in again, and
give him one more chance, to please me!"
Her voice had broken, and for once her eyes had played her false as
well, and Dollar had waited grimly while she recovered her voice or
dried her eyes. But he could not answer grimly when in her turn she
waited for him to speak. In her frivolous little blazing skirt, in the
toque that he liked even less; over-dressy as he dared to think her in
his simple heart of hearts, she appealed to him the more profoundly for
those very vanities, so far from vanity were the letter and the spirit
of her intercession.
"So you really came to see me about Alfred Croucher?" said Dollar, but
very gently, without the faintest accent of reproach.
"It was about both of them, but chiefly about him," she admitted. "Of
course I wanted to check his account of Mr. Scarth. If you had given him
a good character, that would have been the end; but you gave him a much
worse one than I expected. Croucher seems almost immaculate by
comparison; honestly, I shouldn't wonder if he were less lost to decency
through his very association with a man so much worse than himself."
"Did he tell you so?"
"He said it had brought him up with a round turn."
"It's possible," said Dollar, not more dryly than he could help. "The
psychology is all right." He was smiling and nodding now. "And where is
Mr. Croucher at the moment?"
"Walking up and down outside."
"Until we call him in?"
"If only you will let me!"
She was on her feet, to take him at his word as soon as spoken; but he
said that was Barton's job, and, wondering aloud how Barton would like
it, went out presumably to see. He was not gone long, and in another
minute Alfred Croucher was cringing before them like a beaten cur.
But few curs whine as this one did that morning, while the crime doctor
listened and their little lady winced. She was right about one thing. He
did look ill; his cough was not altogether put on. He had been "tret
somefink crool," he declared, but without entering into particulars, for
which Dollar did not press; but on the character of Mostyn Scarth there
were no such reservations. Croucher denounced that monster with the
white hatred of a holy warrior, casting up his eyes with all manner of
passionate and pious invocations.
"Only take me away from 'im, before it's too late!" he implored,
reluctant murder in the whites of his rolling eyes. "'E's a bad man, a
very bad man 'e is! The 'appiest days o' me life was wot I spent in 'ere
eighteen munf ago. It seems more like eighteen years--'ard. I never
should've quit but for Shod, wot's got a good long stretch for 'is
pines. 'E's another bad man; but for 'im you 'ad me in the 'oller of yer
'and, and might 've made a man o' me in no time."
"Yet you went straight from me to threaten and rob the lady who sent you
here!"
It was a dangerous opening, but Croucher did not take it. In ignoble
emotion he fell upon the knees of a flash pair of trousers, which still
showed the track of an ineradicable crease, and once more sued for the
mercy and forgiveness already vouchsafed to him. And Lady Vera turned
from the sly, leering, blinking, darting eyes to a pair turned hard as
nails, and the harder for an oblique inner twinkle all their own.
"All right!" snapped Dollar, to her intense relief. "I'll take you in,
Croucher, for better or worse. Well make it for better, if we can; but
do get to your two legs, man, instead of fawning on all four! Are you
free to stop as you are, or is there anything you want to settle up
first?"
"There's me rooms," said Croucher, eagerly. "There's nuffink worth
fetching, but I shouldn't like to bilk the people, 'speshly w'en 'er
lidyship's gawn an' give me the money, Gawd bless 'er!"
Dollar precipitated the creature's exit, on the verge of fresh saurian
tears, of which there were further signs for his benefit on the mat. He
might be a bad man, too, might Mr. Croucher, but he wasn't as bad as
Mostyn Scarth. And in that modest claim, at least, there was a bitter
sincerity which received its due in a nod of keen acknowledgment.
"I never did think you were more than a second murderer, Croucher!"
"Wot's that?"
The whites of those quick, furtive eyes were showing quite horribly in a
moment.
"Only a technical expression, Croucher, meaning the minor malefactor."
And he returned rather slowly into the eager presence of Lady Vera
Moyle.
"I suppose I mustn't fawn, either," she said, in the softened tone of
one of her rare rebukes. "But--_do_ you think you can make anything of
him--this time?"
"I hope so; but I shall be very glad to have him back, even if I fail
again."
"Why?"
The crime doctor gave her another of his oblique smiles.
"I shall be all the better able to watch Scarth's latest move," he
said.