THE TAKING OF MAISIE WHITE
A week passed without anything exceptional happening, and Maisie White
had ceased even to harbour doubts as to her own safety--doubts which had
been present, in spite of the courageous showing she had made before
Stafford King. Undeterred by her previous experience, she had made
arrangements with another and a more responsible detective agency and
had chosen a new watcher, though she had small hopes of obtaining
results. She knew his task was one of almost insuperable difficulty, and
she was frank in exposing to him what those difficulties were. Still,
there was a faint chance that he might discover something, and moreover
she had another purpose to serve.
She had seen Pinto Silva once. He had called, and she had noticed with
surprise that the debonair, self-confident man she had known, whose air
of conscious superiority had been so annoying to her, had undergone a
considerable change. He was ill-at-ease, almost incoherent at moments,
and it was a long time before she could discover his business.
This time she received him in her tiny sitting-room, for Pinto was
somehow less alarming to her than he had been. Perhaps she was conscious
that at the corner of the street stood a quietly dressed man doing
nothing particular, who was relieved at the eighth hour by an even less
obtrusive-looking gentleman from Scotland Yard.
She waited for Pinto to disclose his business, and the Portuguese was
apparently in no hurry to do so. Presently he blurted it out.
"Look here, Maisie," he said, "you've got things all wrong. Things are
going to be very rotten for you unless--unless----" he floundered.
"Unless what?" she asked.
"Unless you make up with me," he said in a low voice. "I'm not so bad,
Maisie, and I'll treat you fair. I've always been in love with you----"
"Stop," she said quietly. "I dare say it is a great honour for a girl
that any man should be in love with her, but it takes away a little of
the compliment when the man is already married."
"That's nothing," he said eagerly. "I can divorce her by the laws of my
country. Maisie, she hates me and I hate her."
"In those circumstances," she smiled, "I wonder you wait until you fall
in love again before you get divorced. No, Mr. Silva, that story doesn't
convince me. If you were single or divorced, or if you were ever so
eligible, I would not marry you."
"Why not?" he demanded truculently. "I've got money."
"So have I," she said, "of a sort."
"My money's as clean as yours, if it is Solomon White's money."
She nodded.
"I'm well aware of that, too," she said. "It is Gang money, isn't
it--loot money. I don't see what good I shall get out of exchanging mine
for yours, anyway. It is just as dirty. The money doesn't come into it
at all, Mr. Silva, it is just liking people well enough--for marriage.
And I don't like you that way."
"You don't like me at all," he growled.
"You're very nearly right," she smiled.
"You're a fool, you're a fool!" he stormed, "you don't know what's
coming to you. You don't know."
"Perhaps I do," she said. "Perhaps I can guess. But whatever is coming
to me, as you put it, I prefer that to marrying you."
He started back as though she had struck him across the face, and he
turned livid.
"You won't say that when----"
He checked himself and without another word left the room, and she
heard his heavy feet blundering down the stairs.
And then she met him again. It was two nights after. She met him in a
horrible dream. She dreamt he was flying after her, that they were both
birds, she a pigeon and he a hawk; and as she made her last desperate
struggle to escape, she heard his hateful voice in her ear:
"Maisie, Maisie, it is your last chance, your last chance!"
She had gone to bed at ten o'clock that night, and it seemed that she
had hardly fallen asleep before the vision came. She struggled to sit up
in bed, she tried to speak, but a big hand was over her mouth.
Then it was true, it was no dream. He was in the room, his hand upon her
mouth, his voice in her ear. The room was in darkness. There was no
sound save the sound of his heavy breathing and his voice.
"They'll be up here in five minutes," he whispered. "I can save you from
hell! I can save you, Maisie! Will you have me?"
She summoned all the strength at her command to shake her head.
"Then keep quiet!"
There was a note of savagery in his voice which made her turn sick.
For a second she filled her lungs to scream, but at that instant a mass
of cotton-wool was thrust over her face, and she began to breathe in a
sickly sweet vapour. Somebody else was in the room now. They were
holding her feet. The voice in her ear said:
"Breathe. Take a deep breath!"
She sobbed and writhed in an agony of mind, but all the time she was
breathing, she was drawing into her lungs the chloroform with which the
wool was saturated.
At two o'clock in the morning a uniformed constable, patrolling his
beat, saw an ambulance drawn up outside a house in Doughty Street. He
crossed the road to make inquiries.
"A case of scarlet fever," said the driver.
"You don't say," said the sympathetic constable.
The door opened and two men walked out, carrying a figure in a blanket.
The policeman stood by and saw the "patient" laid upon a stretcher and
the back of the ambulance closed. Then he continued his walk to the
corner of the street, where he found, huddled up in a doorway, the
unconscious figure of a Scotland Yard detective, whose observation had
been interrupted by a well-directed blow from a life preserver.