ENTRAPPED!
When Rosalind's contemptuous eyes abandoned that silent interchange of
looks, they fell upon the envelope in Hylda Prout's hand, nor could she
help noticing that round the flap it was clumsily stained with gum. Yet
Osborne had written her saying that it had been unopened....
The other woman stepped to the door of the cab.
"Miss Marsh?" she inquired, with an assumed lack of knowledge that was
insolent in itself.
"Yes."
"Mr. Osborne left this for you, if you called."
"Thank you."
The business was ended, yet the lady-secretary still stood there,
staring brazenly at Rosalind's face.
"Drive on----"
Rosalind raised her gloved hand to attract the driver's attention.
"One moment, Miss Marsh," said Hylda, also raising a hand to forbid him
to move; "I want to tell you something--You are very anxious on poor Mr.
Osborne's behalf, are you not?"
"I thought he was rich? You are not to say 'poor Mr. Osborne.'"
"Is that why you are so anxious, because he is rich?" and those
golden-brown eyes suddenly blazed out outrageously.
"Driver, go on, please!" cried Rosalind again.
"Wait, cabman!" cried Hylda imperiously.... "Stay a little--Miss
Marsh--one word--I cannot let you waste your sympathies as you do. You
believe that Mr. Osborne is friendless; and you offer him your
friendship----"
"_I!_"
Rosalind laughed a little, a laugh with a dangerous chuckle in it that
might have carried a warning to one who knew her.
"Do you not say so in that letter? In it you tell him that since the
night at the sun-dial, when you were '_brutal_' to him----"
"You know, then, my letter--by heart?" said Rosalind, her eyes sparkling
and cheeks aflame. "That is quite charming of you! You have been at the
pains to read it?"
"No, of course, Mr. Osborne wouldn't exactly _show_ it to me, nor did I
ask him. But I think you guess that I am in Mr. Osborne's confidence."
"Mr. Osborne, it would seem, has--read it? He even thought the contents
of sufficient importance to repeat them to his typist? Is that so?"
"Mr. Osborne repeats many things to me, Miss Marsh--by habit. You being
a stranger to him, do not know him well yet, but I have been with him
some time, you see. As to his reading it, I know that you telegraphed
him not to, and he received the telegram before the letter, I admit;
but, the letter once in his hand, it became his private property, of
course. He had a right to read it."
A stone in Rosalind's bosom where her heart had been ached like a wound;
yet her lips smiled--a hard smile.
"But then, having read, to be at the pains to seal it down again!" she
said. "It seems superfluous, a contemptible subterfuge."
"Oh, well," sneered Hylda, with a pouting laugh, "he is not George
Washington--a little harmless deception."
"But you cry out all his secrets!"
"To you."
"Why to me?"
"I save you from troubling your head about him. He is not so friendless
as you have imagined."
"Happy man! And was it you who wrote me the anonymous information that
he was not Glyn but Osborne?"
"No, that was someone else."
And now Rosalind, blighting her with her icy smile, which no inward
fires could melt, said contemplatively:
"I am afraid you are not speaking the truth. I shall tell Mr. Osborne to
get rid of you."
The dart was well planted. The paid secretary's lips twitched and
quivered.
"Try it! He'll laugh at you!" she retorted.
"No, I think he will do it--to please me!"
Sad to relate, our gracious Rosalind was deliberately adding oil to the
fires of hate and rage that she saw devouring Hylda Prout; and when
Hylda again spoke it was from a fiery soul that peered out of a ghost's
face.
"Will he?--to please you?" she said low, hissingly, leaning forward. "He
has a record in a diary of the girls he has kissed, and the number of
days from the first sight to the first kiss. He only wanted to see in
how few days he could secure you."
This vulgarity astonished its hearer. Rosalind shrank a little; her
smile became forced and strained; she could only murmur:
"Oh, you needn't be so bourgeoise."
Hylda chuckled again maliciously.
"It's the mere truth."
"Still, I think I shall warn him against you, and have you
dismissed,"--this with that feminine instinct of the dagger that plunged
deepest, the lash that cut most bitterly.
"You try!" hissed Hylda sharply, as it were secretly, with a nod of
menace. "I am not anybody! I am not some defenseless housemaid, the only
rival you have experienced hitherto, perhaps. I am--at any rate, you
try! You dare! Touch me, and I'll wither your arm----"
"Drive on!" cried Rosalind almost in a scream.
"Wait!" shrilled Hylda--"you _shall_ hear me!"
"Cabman, please----!" wailed Rosalind despairingly.
And now at last the cab was off, Hylda Prout running with it to pant
into it some final rancor; and when it left her, she remained there on
the pavement a minute, unable to move, trembling from head to foot,
watching the vehicle as it sped away from her.
When she re-entered the library the first thing that she saw was
Rosalind's cross-folded note to Osborne, and, still burning inwardly,
she snatched it up, tore it open, and read:
I will write again. Meantime, high hope! _I_ have discovered
that your purloined dagger has been in the possession of the
late lady's-maid, Pauline. "A small thing but mine own." I am
now taking it to Inspector Furneaux's.
R. M.
Hylda dashed the paper to the ground, put her foot on it, then catching
it up, worried it in her hands to atoms which she threw into a
waste-paper basket. Then she collapsed into a chair at her desk, her
arms thrown heedlessly over some documents, and her face buried between
them.
"I have gone too far, too far, too far----"
Now that her passion had burnt to ashes this was her thought. A crisis,
it was clear, had come, and something had to be done, to be decided,
now--that very day. Rosalind would surely tell Osborne what she, Hylda,
had said, how she had acted, and then all would be up with Hylda, no
hope left, her whole house in ruins about her, not one stone left
standing on another. Either she must bind Osborne irrevocably to her at
once, or her brain must devise some means of keeping Osborne and
Rosalind from meeting--or both. But how achieve the apparently
impossible? Osborne, she knew, was at that moment at Rosalind's
residence, and if Rosalind was now going home ... they would meet! Hylda
moved her buried head from side to side, woe-ridden, in the grip of a
hundred fangs and agonies. She had boasted to Rosalind that she was not
a whimpering housemaid, but of a better texture: and if that was an
actual truth, the present moment must prove it. Yet she sat there with a
buried head, weakly weeping....
Suddenly she thought of the words in Rosalind's note to Osborne, which
she had thrown into the basket: "I have discovered that your purloined
dagger has been in the possession of the late lady's-maid, Pauline.... I
am now taking it to Inspector Furneaux's...."
That, then, was the person who had the dagger which had been so sought
and speculated about--Pauline Dessaulx!
And at the recollection of the name, Hylda's racked brain, driven to
invent, invented like lightning. Up she sprang, caught at her hat, and
rushed away, pinning it on to her magnificent red hair in her flight,
her eyes staring with haste. In the street she leapt into a
motor-cab--to Soho.
She was soon there. As if pursued by furies she pelted up two foul
staircases, and at a top back room, rapped pressingly, fiercely, with
the clenched knuckles of both hands upon the panels. As a man in his
shirt-sleeves, his braces dropped, smoking a cigarette, opened the door
to her, she almost fell in on him, and the burning words burst from her
tongue's tip:
"Antonio!--it's all up with Pauline--the dagger she did it with--has
been found--by a woman--the same woman from Tormouth whom you and I
tracked to Porchester Gardens--Pauline is in her employ probably--tell
Janoc--he has wits--he may do something before it is too late--the woman
has the dagger--in a motor-cab--in a long, narrow box--she is this
instant taking it to Inspector Furneaux's house--if _she_ lives, Pauline
hangs--tell Janoc that, Antonio--don't stare--tell Janoc--it is _she_ or
Pauline--let him choose----"
"_Grand Dieu!_"
"Don't stare--don't stand--I'm gone."
She ran out; and almost as she was down the stair Antonio had thrown on
a coat and was flying down behind her.
He ran down three narrow streets to Poland Street, darted up a stair,
broke into a room; and there on the floor, stretched face downwards, lay
the lank length of Janoc's body, a map of Europe spread before him, on
which with an ivory pointer he was marking lines from town to town. He
glanced at the intruder with a frowning brow, yet he was up like an
acrobat, as the tidings leapt off Antonio's tongue.
"Found!" he whispered hoarsely, "Pauline found!"
"Yes, and the dagger found, too!"
"Found! dearest of my heart! my sweet sister!"
Janoc clasped to his bosom a phantom form, and kissed thrice at the air.
"Yes, and the dagger found that she did it with----"
"The dagger?"
"Yes, and the lady is this minute taking it to Inspector Furneaux----"
"Lady?--Oh, found! found! dear, sweet sister, why didst thou hide
thyself from me?"
Janoc spread his arms with a face of rapture. He could only assimilate
the one great fact in his joy.
"But Janoc--listen--the lady----"
"Lady?"
"The lady who has the dagger! Listen, my friend--she is on the way to
Inspector Furneaux with Pauline's dagger----"
"_Mille diables!_"
"Janoc, what is to be done? O, arouse yourself, _pour l'amour de
Dieu_--Pauline will be hanged----"
"Hanged? Yes! They hang women, I know, in England--the only country in
Europe--this ugly nest of savages. Yes! they hang them by the neck on
the gallows here--the gallant gentlemen! But they won't hang _her_,
Antonio! Let them touch her, and _I_, I set all England dancing like a
sandstorm of the Sahara! Furneaux's house No. 12?"
"Yes."
"And the lady's address?"
"Porchester Gardens--unfortunately I did not notice the number of the
house."
"Pity: weak. What is she like, this lady?"
"Middle-size--plentiful brown hair--eyes blue--beautiful in the cold
English way, elegant, too--yes, a pretty woman--I saw her in
Tormouth----"
"Come with me"--and Janoc was in action, with a suddenness, a fury, a
contrast with his previous stillness of listening that was very
remarkable--as if he had waited for the instant of action to sound, and
then said: "Here it is! I am ready!"
Out stretched his long leg, as he bent forward into running, catching at
his cap and revolver with one sweep of his right arm, and at Antonio
with a snatch of the left; and from that moment his motions were in the
tone of the forced marches of Napoleon--not an instant lost in the
business he was at.
He took Antonio in a cab to Furneaux's house in Sinclair Street. There
he was nudged by Antonio, as they drove up, with a hysterical sob of
"See! There she is!"
Rosalind was driving away at the moment. She had, then, seen Furneaux?
told Furneaux? given Furneaux the dagger? In that case, the battle would
lie between Furneaux and Janoc that day. Janoc's flesh was pale, but it
was the paleness of iron, his eyes were full of fire. In his heart he
was a hero, in brain and head an assassin!
He alighted at the detective's house, letting Rosalind go. But the
landlady of the flat told him that Furneaux had not been at home for two
hours, and was not expected for another hour. Rosalind, then, had not
seen him; and the battle swung back to its first ground as between
Rosalind and Janoc. Had the lady who had just called left any parcel, or
any weapon for Mr. Furneaux? The answer was "No." He hurried down into
his cab, to make for Rosalind's boarding-house.
But Antonio had not noted the number, and, to discover it, Janoc started
off to Osborne's house, to ask it of Miss Prout.
Now, Rosalind was herself driving to the same place. On learning that
Furneaux was not at home, she had paced his sitting-room a little while,
undecided whether to wait, or to leave a message and go home. Then the
new impulse had occurred in her to go to Osborne's in the meantime, and
then return to Furneaux. Hylda Prout had contrived to put a lump in her
throat and a firebrand in her bosom, an arrogance, a hot rancor. How
much of what the hussy had said against Osborne might contain some truth
she did not know; it had so scorched her, and inflamed her gorge, and
kindled her eyes, that she had not had time to question its probability
in her preoccupation with the gall and smart of it. But that Osborne
should have opened the letter, and then written to say he had not--this
was a vileness that the slightest reflection found to be incredible. The
creature with the red hair certainly knew what was in the letter,
but--might she not have opened it herself? And if any part of her
statements were false, _all_ might be false. An impatience to see
Osborne instantly seized and transported Rosalind. He had honest
eyes--had she not whispered it many a time to her heart? She hurried off
to him.... And by accident Janoc went after her.
Osborne himself had arrived home some ten minutes before this, after a
very cold reception from Mrs. Marsh at Porchester Gardens.
As he entered the library, he saw Hylda Prout standing in the middle of
the room with a face of ecstasy which astonished him. She, lately
arrived back from her visit to the Italian, had heard him come, and had
leapt up to confront him, her heart galloping in her throat.
"Anything wrong?" he asked with a quick glance at her.
"Miss Marsh has been here."
"Ah?... Miss Marsh?"
She made a mad step toward him. The words that she uttered rasped
harshly. She did not recognize her own voice.
"I told her straight out that it is not the slightest good her running
after you."
"You told her _what_?"
Amazement struggled with indignation in his face. All the world seemed
to have gone mad when the pale, studiously sedate secretary used such
words of frenzy.
"I meant to stop--her pursuit of you.... Mr. Osborne--hear me--I--I...."
Excessive emotion overpowered her. In attempting to say more she panted
with distress.
"What is it all about, Miss Prout? Calm yourself, please--be quiet"--he
said it with some effort to express both his resentment and his
authority.
"Mr. Osborne--I warn you--I cannot endure--any rival----"
"Who can't? you speak of a _rival_!"
"Oh, Heaven, give me strength--words to explain. Ah!..."
She had been standing with her left hand resting on a table, shivering
like a sail in the wind, and now the hand suddenly gave way under her,
and she sank after it, falling to the ground in a faint, while her head
struck the edge of the table in her descent.
"Well, if this isn't the limit," muttered Osborne, as he ran to her,
calling loudly for Jenkins. He lifted her to a sofa, and, in his flurry,
not knowing what else to do, wet her forehead with a little water from a
carafe. Jenkins had not heard his call, and by the time he looked round
for a bell to summon help, her eyes unclosed themselves, and she smiled
at him.
"You are there...."
"You feel better now?" He sat on a chair at her head, looking down on
her, wondering what inane words he should use to extricate both himself
and her from an absurd position.
"It is all right.... I must have fainted. I have undergone a great
strain, a dreadful strain. You should be sorry for me. Oh, I have
loved--much."
"Miss Prout----"
"No, don't call me that, or you kill me. You should be sorry for me, if
you have any pity, any shred of humanity in your heart. I have--passed
through flames, and drunk of a cup of fire. Ten women, yes, ten--have
hungered and wailed in me. I tell _you_--yet to whom should I tell it
but to you?"
She smiled a ravished smile of pain; her hand fell upon his heavily; her
restless head swung from side to side.
"Well, I am very sorry," said Osborne, forced to gentleness in spite of
the anger that had consumed him earlier. "It is impossible not to
believe you sincere. But, you will admit, all this is very singular and
unexpected. I am afraid now that I shall have to send you on a trip
to--Switzerland; or else go myself. Better you--it is chilling there, on
the glaciers."
Yet the attempt at humor died when he looked at her face with its
languishing, sick eyes, its expression of swooning luxury. She sighed
deeply.
"No, you cannot escape me now, I think, or I you," she murmured. "There
are powers too profound to be run from when once at work, like the
suction of whirlpools. If you don't love me, my love is a force enough
for two, for a thousand. It will draw and compel you. Yes, I think so.
It will either warm you, or burn you to ashes--and myself, too. Oh, I
swear to Heaven! It will, it shall! You shouldn't have pressed my hand
that night."
"Pressed your hand! on which night?" asked Osborne, who had now turned
quite pale, and wanted to run quickly out of the house but could not.
"What, have you _forgotten_?" she asked with tender reproach, gazing
into his eyes; "the night I was going to see my brother nine months ago,
and you went with me to Euston, and in saying good-by you----"
She suddenly covered her eyes with her fingers in a rapture at the
memory.
Osborne stared blankly at her. He recalled the farewell at Euston, which
was accidental, but he certainly had no memory of having pressed her
hand.
"I loved you before," her lips just whispered in a pitiful assumption of
confidence, "but timidly, not admitting it to myself. With that pressure
of your hand, I was done with maidenhood, my soul rushed to you. After
that, you were mine, and I was yours."
The words almost fainted on her bitten under lip, and in Osborne, too, a
rush of soul, or of blood, took place, a little flush of his forehead.
It was a bewitching woman who lay there before him, with that fair
freckle-splashed face couched in its cloud of red hair.
"Come, now," he said, valiantly striving after the commonplace, "you are
ill--you hardly know yet what you are saying."
She half sat up suddenly, bending eagerly toward him.
"Is it pity? Is it 'yes'?"
"Please, please, let us forget that this has ever----"
"It _would_ be 'yes' instantly but for that Tormouth girl! Oh, drive her
out of your mind! That cannot be--I could never, never permit it! For
that reason alone--and besides, you are about to be arrested----"
"I!"
"Yes: listen--I know more of what is going on than you know. The man
Furneaux, who, for his own reasons, hates you, and is eager to injure
you, has even more proofs against you than you are aware of. _I_ happen
to know that in his search of your trunks he has discovered something or
other which he considers conclusive against you. And there is that
housemaid at Feldisham Mansions, who screamed out 'Mr. Osborne did
it!'--Furneaux only pretended at the inquest that she was too ill to be
present, because he did not want to produce the whole weight of his
evidence just then. But he has her, too, safe up his sleeve, and _she_
is willing to swear against you. And now he has got hold of your Saracen
dagger. But don't you fear _him_: I shall know how to foil him at the
last; I alone have knowledge that will surely make him look a fool.
Trust in me! I tell you so. But I can't help your being arrested--that
must happen. Believe me, for I know. And let that once take place, and
that Tormouth girl will never look at you again. I understand her class,
with its prides and prejudices--she will never marry you--innocent or
guilty--if you have once stood in the dock at an assize court. Such as
she does not know what love is. _I_ would take you if you were a
thousand times guilty--and I only can prove you innocent--even if you
were guilty--because I am yours--your preordained wife--oh, I shall die
of my love--yes, kiss me--yes--now----"
The torrent of words ended in a fierce fight for breath. Her eyes were
glaring like two lakes of conflagration, her cheeks crimson, her
forehead pale. Unexpectedly, eagerly, she caught him round the neck in
an embrace from which there was no escape. She drew him almost to his
knees, and pressed his lips to hers with a passion that frightened and
repelled him.
And he was in the thick of this unhappy and ridiculous experience when
he heard behind him an astonished "Oh!" from someone, while some other
person seemed to laugh in angry embarrassment.
It was Jenkins who had uttered the "Oh!" and when the horrified Osborne
glanced round he saw Rosalind's eyes peering over Jenkins's shoulder.
She it was who had so lightly, so perplexedly, laughed.
Before he could free himself and spring up she was gone. She had
murmured to Jenkins: "Some other time," and fled.
As she ran out blindly, and was springing into the cab, Janoc, in
pursuit of her, drove up. In an instant he was looking in through the
door of the cab.
"Miss Marsh?" he inquired.
"Yes."
His hands met, wringing in distress.
"You are the lady I am searching for, the mistress of the young girl
Pauline Dessaulx, is it not? I am her brother. You see--you can see--the
resemblance in our faces. She threatens this instant to commit the
suicide----"
Rosalind was forced to forget her own sufferings in this new terror.
"Pauline!" she cried, "I am not her employer. Moreover, she is ill--in
bed----"
"She has escaped to my lodging during your absence from home! Something
dreadful has happened to her--she speaks of the loss of some weapon--one
cannot understand her ravings! And unless she sees you--her hands cannot
be kept from destroying herself--Oh, lady! lady! Come to my sweet
sister----"
Rosalind looked at him with the scared eyes of one who hears, yet not
understands. There was a mad probability in all this, since Pauline
_might_ have discovered the loss of the daggers; and, in her present
anguish of spirit, the thought that the man's story might only be a
device to lure her into some trap never entered Rosalind's head. Indeed,
in her weariness of everything, she regarded the mission of succor as a
relief.
"Where do you live? I will go with you," she said.
"Lady! Lady! Thank God!" he exclaimed. "It is not far from here, in
Soho."
"You must come in my cab," said Rosalind.
Janoc ran to pay his own cabman, came back instantly, and they started
eastward, just as Osborne, with the wild face of a man falling down a
precipice, rushed to his door, calling after them frantically: "Hi,
there! Stop! Stop! For Heaven's sake----"
But the cab went on its way.