There was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by street noises
filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the ticking of the Sheraton
grandfather clock, and the breathing of two people. Saxham glanced at
Major Bingo with eyes that seemed to have been bleached of colour, and
laid the second calligraphic specimen beside the first, and took up No. 3,
and read in the same large nourishing round hand:
"W. BOUGH,
"Free State Hotel,
"50 m. from Driepoort,
"Orange Free State."
After that the silence was intense. The clock ticked, and the faint,
far-off street noises came through the intervening screens, but only one
of the men in the room seemed to be breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips
moved. He said in a horrible clicking whisper:
"Van Busch and Bough are--one?"
Major Wrynche's large face nodded in the affirmative. But it was as
expressionless as the grandfather clock's.
"One man!--and that's what I may call the pith of my verbal Despatch for
you!"
Saxham said with hard composure:
"Van Busch is a Dutch surname that, as you say, is common in South Africa.
With the name of Bough, as the Chief is aware, I have--associations. It
was, in fact, one of the many aliases used by the witness for Regina in an
Old Bailey case in which I was concerned nearly seven years ago."
The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity:
"Same man!"
Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was the same man. The
tense muscles of his face told nothing. Bingo added:
"--But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough amount to little compared
with the wrong and injury inflicted upon Mrs. Saxham! That---- Good Lord!
what's the matter?"
For Saxham, with a madman's face, had leapt to his feet, knocking over his
chair, and stuttered with foam on his blue lips:
"What wrong? What injury? What--what are you hinting at?----"
"Hinting!" The astonishment in the Major's round light blue eyes was so
palpably genuine that the crazy flame died out of the Doctor's, and his
clenched hand dropped. "I didn't hint. I referred to the murder of your
wife's adopted mother by this Bough, or Van Busch, that's all!"
"I beg your pardon, Major!" Saxham picked up his chair and sat down on it,
inwardly cursing his lack of self-control. "My nerves have been giving
trouble of late."
Going by the evidence of the haggard face and fever-bright eyes, the
Doctor looked like that--uncommonly like that! And the big Major,
remembering Alderman Brooker's revelation, wondered, as he screwed at the
stiff, blunt ends of his sandy moustache, whether Saxham might not have
reverted to the old vice? "Bad for the girl he's married if he has!" he
thought, even as he said:
"Overworked. Get away for a bit. Nothin' like relievin' the tension, don't
you know? Norway in June, or the Higher Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind
and go!"
"I have made up my mind," Saxham answered, smiling bitterly, as he
remembered the little phial with the yellow label that lay beside the
whisky-flask in the drawer beneath his hand. "I shall go very soon now!"
"But not immediately?"
"Not immediately." There was something strange, almost exalted, in the
look that accompanied the words. Saxham added: "If you could give me an
approximate date as regards the finding of that--needle in the haystack of
South Africa, it would--facilitate my departure more than you can guess!"
"Would it, by George!" Bingo slipped the thumb and forefinger of the
useful hand into his waistcoat-pocket. Something sparkled in the big pink
palm he extended to Saxham--something sparkled, and spurted white and
green and scarlet points of fire from a myriad of facets. The something
was an oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold chain, broken, dangled from
its enamelled bow. From within a rim of brilliants the lovely, wistful
face of a young, refined, high-bred woman looked out, and with all his
iron self-control Saxham could not restrain a sudden movement and a
stifled exclamation of mingled anger and surprise.
For at the first glance the face was Lynette's.
With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an unspeakable rage and
horror seething in him, he took the portrait from the Major's palm, and
held it with a steady hand, in a favourable light.
Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face!
The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey, the
squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth sensuous
as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been a few years under
thirty; the arrangement of the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have
indicated the height of the latest fashion--say, twenty-two or even three
years back. Some delicately fine inscription was upon the dull gold of the
inner rim of the miniature-frame, within the diamonds that surrounded it.
Saxham deciphered: "Lucy, to Richard Mildare. For ever! 1879."
* * * * *
The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's opaque skin had
given place to pallor. His face was sharp and thin, and of waxen
whiteness, like the face of one newly dead. His blue eyes burned ominously
in their caves under the heavy bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice
was very quiet as he asked: "How did you come by this?"
"It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo measuredly, "with the
bits of evidence I've told you of, and a few others, when the big stone
chimney at Haargrond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits
of evidence were bits of a man--two men you might call him! And, by the
Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the rest of the
rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch!"
"He had this upon him? He--wore it round his neck?" Saxham asked the
question in a grating whisper, dropping the clenched hand that held the
diamond-set miniature upon the arm of his chair.
"I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, "when he had a
neck to boast of." He added, as he got up to take his leave: "The thing
has been carefully cleaned. The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked
in one place, but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd
hand it over to--anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled many
professional appointments. Remember me to Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully!
So long!"