A masked figure followed them noiselessly upstairs and slipped behind
the portières to observe them.
Sutton, face to face with his first real adventure, was fascinated by
the little Queen in Green--not prepared, perhaps, to encounter such
youthful shyness at Derring’s. And now he attempted to discover her
identity, rather roughly, but she evaded his curiosity and ardent
advances, and coaxed him to show her Derring’s quarters.
The masked man watched them out of narrow eye-slits. They visited the
further rooms; then, having satisfied her curiosity, the Queen in Green
turned on her dainty heel.
As the two retraced their steps, she prettily avoided Sutton’s
love-making. It was only after he unmasked, and they had stopped by
the portières--so close that the man behind them could have stabbed
them--that the girl turned impulsively to Sutton, put her arms around
his neck, and took his kiss as passionately as he gave it.
It lasted but a second. She stepped back against the portières. Both
seemed hotly embarrassed.
A second later the Queen in Green was readjusting her gilt crown and
laughing at some light jest he had made--he could not recall what it
was afterward.
Below, the orchestra had begun again. He looked at her; she nodded.
They waited to catch the beat of the music. She was still laughing when
she placed her smooth little hand in his. But as he encircled her waist
she drew a swift, agonised breath and lurched forward against him.
He reeled under the sudden impact; her silk-clad body sagged, her
masked head fell backward, and then, as he caught her, the Queen in
Green collapsed in his arms.
He half dragged her to an armchair. One of her slippers dropped off.
For a moment he stood helpless, looking down at her; then, anxious, and
having had no experience with people who faint, he hurried downstairs,
perplexed, to find Sadoul, who had brought the girl to the party.
After-supper-dancing was beginning again in the studio, and the music
seemed unusually noisy. He tried to discover Sadoul, shouted his name,
but everybody was still masked and Sutton hunted for him in vain.
Finally he continued on through the studio into the supper room to get
a glass of ice-water, and saw Harry Stayr still browsing there.
As Sutton left the table, carrying the water, he said to Stayr in a
worried voice:
“That Queen in Green--the one Sadoul brought--has fainted in Derring’s
quarters.”
“Is she soused?” inquired Stayr, busy with food.
“No.”
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. She wears a green mask. Casimir Sadoul brought her. If
you see him tell him she’s ill upstairs.”
“Put some ice down her back,” advised Stayr, reaching for the salad.
Sutton hastened on upstairs, hoping to find the lady better.
The Queen in Green lay face upward on the floor--a crumpled heap of
pale green silks. Her ruddy hair was dishevelled; her gilt crown had
rolled across the rug.
There was a day-bed beside the rose-shaded lamp. Sutton carried her to
it, laid her there and smoothed her clothing.
Under the mask her lips and skin were livid, but through the eye-slits
she seemed to be watching him.
He flushed, spoke to her, waited, then stripped off the green silk
mask. It shocked him to discover that her eyes were open.
“That’s a funny way to faint,” he thought. And he lifted the glass and
tipped it, spilling ice-water over the upturned face.
The water washed off some cosmetic but produced no other effect.
Scared, Sutton tried to find her pulse, and failed; tried to locate her
heart and couldn’t. There was nothing to loosen. He opened a window
and came back to her. Then he went out to the gallery and shouted down
through the clatter and music:
“Sadoul! Sadoul! Come up here!”
A masked figure in crown and crimson robes detached itself and came
forward under the gallery, looking up.
“Is that you, Sadoul?”
“Yes. What’s the trouble?”
“Your girl--the girl you brought with you--has fainted. She’s up here.
Bring Pockman, too.”
“What do you mean, my girl?” inquired Sadoul.
“The Queen in Green. You brought her, didn’t you?”
“Oh! _That_ girl? What’s the matter with her?”
“I don’t know. You’d better find Pockman and come up. _I_ don’t know
what ails her.”
Sutton went back to the day-bed and gazed nervously at the Queen in
Green. Robes, stockings, slippers, jewels, all were green. Even her
strangely open eyes seemed golden green as a cat’s.
Sadoul and Pockman, in gorgeous costumes but unmasked, entered together
in a few moments.
“She doesn’t seem to be breathing, and I can’t find any pulse,”
explained Sutton. “What on earth is the matter with her?”
Pockman bent over; Sadoul and Sutton watched him. She wore no
stays--there was not much to her bodice, anyway--only a trifle more of
her body visible when Pockman stripped off her waist than the waist
had already revealed.
The two men watched him; the leisurely certainty of everything he was
doing preoccupied Sutton.
“Why, she’s dead,” said Pockman coolly.
Sutton stared aghast.
Sadoul said: “Well, of all rotten luck!--What the devil was the matter
with her?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You mean--mean to say that this girl is dead!” faltered Sutton.
“She’s been dead for more than twenty minutes.... _I_ don’t know what
killed her----”
Sadoul glanced up at Pockman, who was staring intently at him.
Sutton said miserably: “Is there anything possible to do--any other and
surer test to be made?”
“This girl is _dead_,” repeated Pockman, still looking significantly at
Sadoul. Then he shrugged his bony shoulders, went over to the telephone
and called his laboratory. While waiting, he said to Sadoul: “Here’s my
chance, by God! It will take about three hours,” he added, “--and half
an hour more----” His connection interrupted; he asked for somebody
named Stent, got him immediately, talked to him unhurriedly.
When he came back he asked Sutton to go into Derring’s bedroom and get
a sheet from the bed.
Sutton brought it; Pockman covered the recumbent figure decently,
concealing the face also.
He said to Sutton: “Sadoul and I realise that this is a good
opportunity for me to try something I am interested in.... It can’t
harm her, anyway----”
“Do you mean that there is any chance of reviving her?” asked Sutton,
his voice still hoarse from shock.
“Well--she’s dead.... Figure it out for yourself, Sutton.” And to
Sadoul: “This is a damned unpleasant episode for old Derring and his
party----”
... “Who was that girl?” interrupted Sutton, harshly.
“Her name was Gilda Greenway,” replied Sadoul, with composure; but his
long fingers were working at the gilt fringe on his robe.
“Has she any family?” inquired Pockman.
“No, I believe not----”
“Well--what the devil!--She had a home somewhere, I suppose!”
Sadoul shook his head: “Possibly. I don’t know where she lived.”
Sutton opened the telephone directory. There were only two Greenways in
the book. He called them up. Neither knew anything of Gilda Greenway.
Pockman turned to Sutton: “What were _you_ doing with her up here?” he
enquired with one of his pallid smirks.
“We were dancing--or going to. She wanted to look down at the floor
from the gallery when they began throwing confetti.”
“Oh, sure,” said Pockman, but his pasty, flat features bore no trace of
the sneer in his voice.
“We came up to the gallery,” continued Sutton, “and watched the battle
of confetti and flowers. Then she peeped into Derring’s quarters and
desired to inspect them.
“It was harmless curiosity--no matter what you’re thinking, Pockman.
She looked the place over; we were standing over there by the
portières. She was laughing; and then the music began downstairs--and
we were starting to dance up here.... And then--good God!----”
“Just like that,” nodded Pockman, softly.
There was something subtly horrible about the vernacular as he used
it in the dim room where death was. But death had become an old story
to Pockman, and there were for him neither thrills nor shocks in the
spectacle of human dissolution--nothing to awe or subdue or arouse
emotion--only a fact of routine interest to a student preoccupied by
original research.
He had a pale, flat, fat face, smoothly shaven; washed-out eyes; a
tall, ill-made figure with very wide, square shoulders, and scanty,
untidy hair of a faded hue.
He looked almost stealthily at Sutton, now, who, quite overcome by the
tragedy, sat staring at the sheeted figure of the girl he had been
laughing with half an hour ago.
“If you don’t feel like dancing,” said Pockman pleasantly, “stay here
until my man Stent arrives. Sadoul and I are going down.”
“You don’t mean you are going to dance?”
“Sure,” replied Pockman, adjusting his mask. “Why not?”
Sadoul said nothing. After a moment he slowly put on his mask.
“Aren’t you going to tell Derring?” demanded Sutton.
“I’m no crape-hanger,” replied Pockman. “Why spoil Derring’s party? If
you insist on staying here until Stent comes, you’d better lock the
door or some of those fair young things downstairs will get the shock
of their variegated lives.”
He started downstairs in his crown and fluttering yellow robes. Sadoul,
in flamboyant crimson, followed him. After a moment Sutton got up
and locked the door behind them, stood by it, looking back over his
shoulder at the form on the day-bed, then he slowly returned to his
chair.
* * * * *
The decency that kept him beside a dead stranger was purely emotional.
He gazed miserably at the shrouded figure. After a long while he rose,
picked up her gilded crown and the little green slipper. The silken
crescent which had masked her still lay beside her bed. This also he
recovered, and then reseated himself, holding her toys in his lap, his
boyish eyes full of tears.
It was all very well for a graduate physician like Pockman to exhibit
callousness--and for the saturnine Sadoul--he of the long, horse face
and black eyes and Vandyke--he of the murderous, mocking pen--the
literary vivisectionist and jester at all lovable human frailties--it
was well enough for him to remain obtuse.
But a plain young man, like Sutton, continues to be emotional, whatever
garments of experience still clothe him.
He was horribly, profoundly upset.
* * * * *
Several times an unseen clock in a farther room struck a treble note in
the stillness.
Faintly, too, came music and tumult from the gaiety below. Even the
odour of roses penetrated the locked room.
Sutton, staring at the covered form, was thinking it rotten hard luck
to be dead so young. He wondered who she could have been; who were her
people, her friends; what hearts were going to break for such an ending
as this.
He wondered whether she had been respectable--was fiercely inclined to
believe so--wondered why she had consented to come to Derring’s party
with Sadoul.
When again the silvery treble of the unseen clock sounded twice, Sutton
glanced at his own timepiece. It lacked a few minutes of two o’clock.
Gilda Greenway had been dead three hours and a half.
He rose and lifted a corner of the sheet. Her lower jaw had dropped.
Horrified, he covered the dead face and went back to his chair,
trembling.