“I got you — out again,” was what Lady Vera had begun to say, but something about him made her stop short of that. “I was doing my best for you,” she continued humbly. “I thought you were going to let me give you a fresh start in life.”
“A fresh start! I want a bit more than that, lidy!”
“Well, what do you want?”
He rolled his eyeballs over the racks laden with her hand-luggage.
“Your jewel-case,” said he promptly. “Which is it?”
“That one, in this corner, over my feet.”
Her equal alacrity might have been the mere measure of her eagerness to get rid of him; but Alfred Croucher was far too old in deception to be himself very easily deceived.
“Then you can keep it, with my love!” said he. “I’ll trouble you for them rings instead — and the rest wot you’re ‘idin’ be’ind ‘em!”
The girl turned paler in the electric light She was sitting up in her suspicious readiness to point out the jewel-case; the other hand, with most of her rings on it, had flown instinctively to her throat; for she was traveling, as ladies will, with her greatest treasures — her diamond necklace and pendant, and a string of pearls — on her neck for safety.
“Suppose I refuse and — —”
She glanced toward the bell.
“Then I’ll say what I know.”
“And what do you know?” Her back was to the wall.
“What I see that night! What I see an’ was mug enough not to twig till I come out an’ ‘eard all the talk! Is that good enough? If not, the rest’ll keep; but it’ll put you in the jug all right, I don’t care ‘oo’s on your side. It’s one law for the rich and one for the pore. ‘Ang me as never done it, an’ ‘ush you up, as did! But I’ve heard tell that murder will out, an’ you’ll find that murderers will in — to prison — even when they’re titled lidies with the King on ‘is throne be’ind ‘em! It’ll ruin you, if it does no more — ruin you an’ yours — an’ break all your ‘earts!”
It was enough. She stripped her neck, she stripped her fingers; rings and necklace, pearls and pendant, all lay in a shimmering heap in his capacious palm, held for a moment’s triumph under the electric light, reflected for that moment in a mirror which his bulky frame had hidden until now.
It was the mirror on the door of the miniature dressing-room between every two compartments in the train de luxe; but in the very moment of his exultation it ceased to reflect either Alfred Croucher or his ill-gotten spoil. The door had opened; it framed a sable figure crowned with silvery locks; lean hands flew out from the black shoulders, and met round the neck of Croucher with the fell dexterity of a professional garroter.
The pair backed together without a word. The one had murder in his set teeth, the other death in the bulging eyes and darkening face, with its collar of interlaced fingers white to the nails with their own pressure. Lady Vera watched the two men as the fawn might watch the python struck to timely death, until the communicating door shut upon them both, and only her own unearthly form remained in the mirror. And the train ran on and on, and the whole coach creaked and trembled, as coaches will even in a train de luxe, only in that particular compartment it had not been noticeable for some time.
Presently, as her nerve came back, one or two further observations of a negative order were gradually made by Vera Moyle. She may be said to have noticed that she did not notice one or two things she might have expected to notice by now. The chief thing was that there was no sound whatever from the compartment beyond the looking-glass door, no fuss or undue traffic in the corridor. What had happened? Only too soon she knew.
They had stopped at some nameless station between the tags of the Italian boot. It was a chance of peeping out, and out peeped the shaken girl from her window overlooking the line. And there, skipping on to the next low platform, bag in hand, went the loud trousers under Alfred Croucher’s equally new and noisy ulster; and there at his elbow went the venerable ecclesiastic, even holding him by the sleeve!
It was a long road to Rome for Lady Vera Moyle, but toward the end there came another stage in which the wagon-lit forgot to swing and sing like humbler coaches, and the pale Campagna swam past unseen. It began with a knock behind the drawn blind of her compartment — now but a mirrored divan of Utrecht velvet and stamped leather — as unsuggestive of a good night’s rest as the white face and the bright eyes behind the tiny table in the corner.
“Entrez!” she cried with nervous irritation.
The door opened and shut upon the somber face and long athletic limbs of John Dollar.
“Doctor Dollar! I had no idea you were in the train!”
Her voice had broken with very joy; her hand trembled pitifully during its momentary repose in his.
“You have never shown up, you see,” said he. “I have been in the next compartment all the way from Paris.”
“The next compartment on which side?”
He jerked his head at his own reflection in the looking-glass door.
“But there was a priest in there!” cried the girl.
“There was the high priest of a new religion in which you’ll never believe any more,” said Dollar with a wry smile. “May he sit down for a minute, Lady Vera?”
She looked at him with cooling eyes. “Certainly, Doctor Dollar, if it makes an explanation any easier.”
“I didn’t intend to explain at all,” he had the nerve to tell her. “I meant my ecclesiastical body to do that for me — but its wig was blown out of the window on the other side of Genoa. I’ve been hanging about all day in the hope of catching you. I couldn’t leave it any longer. I had to give you these.”
And he placed upon the table between them the diamond necklace and pendant, the string of pearls, and the handful of rings she had been wearing in the night.
“You made him give them up!” she cried, in thankful tears that never fell, but only softened and sweetened her indescribably.
“Naturally,” he laughed. “It wasn’t very difficult.”
“And I thought you were a confederate when I saw you crossing the line together!”
“I was putting the fear of a foreign jail upon him to the last. But he had a confederate in the train; he was in reserve outside your berth until I lured him into mine and laid him out. Otherwise I should have been with you sooner; but in one way it was better to take our man with your jewels on him — there was no getting out of it. The two of them were only too glad to be kicked out at the first station. And the other fellow was a man who broke into my house to see Croucher the first night we had him there.”
“Did they tell you so?”
“No. I knew it at the time. I heard the whole thing, even to fragments of a conversation from which it was possible to reconstruct the plan they actually brought off last night. I make it a rule not to listen at patients’ doors, any more than one would at other people’s, but I’m not going to blush for this particular exception.”
Her soft wet eyes were looking him through and through.
“Yet you kept him on — for my sake!”
“Not altogether, Lady Vera.” They were an honest couple. “It put me on my mettle; it gave me something to prevent. At first — as I’m afraid you knew — I really didn’t want to touch the fellow with a pole. He was an obvious incurable; he would have been better hanged — justly or unjustly.”
“Don’t speak of that — or do!” exclaimed the girl. “It makes me forgive him everything!”
“Well, my first idea was about right. He was beyond reclaim. But I never thought he would give me a definite move to block; that, as you know; is one’s chief job after all, and it put a new complexion on the case. It was as though — as though one took a man on for cancer and found him plotting to shoot the Chancellor of the Exchequer before he died! I apologize for the analogy, Lady Vera,” said Dollar, making the most of their laugh, “but the man became a new proposition on the spot. And the funny thing is that I believe I almost might have cured him af
ter all — done him some good, anyhow — but for the very thing that bucked me up!”
Lady Vera looked out at a flying brake of naked trees, the color of cigar-ash. He had lost her attention for the moment.
“I was a little fool,” she said at length. “I should have listened to you, and been content to help in some other way. I am sorry.”
“I’m not!” replied Doctor Dollar. “It was a very sporting folly — but everything you ever did was that!”
She shook her head sadly, as a brown river, girt with olives, flashed under the train like a child’s skipping-rope.
“I haven’t changed my opinions,” she said, just a trifle aggressively. “But I would give my life to undo many of my actions — not only that one — many, many!” and she looked him bravely and humbly in the eyes. “So the whole thing has served me right, and will if it happens all over again.”
“If what does?”
“This blackmailing of me by that poor man!”
“It won’t. I’ve frightened him.”
“He will think of some subtler way.”
“There’s no subtlety in him, no power, no initiative, no anything but mere brute force,” said Dollar, with a touch of that same strength and weakness in his unusually emphatic assertion. “The fellow is a deadly tool and nothing more. He knuckled under to me in a moment.”
Lady Vera shook her head again, but this time she was looking firmly in his face.
“I feel,” she said, with a stoical conviction, “that I shall be fair game to him as long as we are both in the world. And it’s what I deserve.”
Dollar abandoned his attempt at disingenuous disabuse; the extreme to which he flew instead was a little startling, but these two knew each other.
“You must marry, Lady Vera,” he was moved to say. But his manner was eminently uninspired. He might have been telling her she must hand her keys to the hotel porter at Rome. That was in fact the note he meant to take, only he sang it louder than he knew.
“I can never marry,” she answered calmly. “I have blood upon my hands.”
“You can marry a man who knows!”
And the unaltered note took on a tremolo of which he was both aware and ashamed; but still their eyes were frankly locked.
“I can marry nobody, Doctor Dollar.”
“The man I mean isn’t fit to black your boots! But he’d protect you, he’d help you, and you would be the making not only of him but of his dream — and not only his little dream — —”
It was her hand that stopped him. It had taken his across the little table.
“The man you mean is worth ten million of me! But I can never marry him or anybody. And you, and you alone, know why!”
She bent her brave eyes back on the Campagna; a pale tufted heath was swimming by; gum-trees hardly heightened the prevailing neutral tint; a modern corrugated roof, pinned in place by a few primeval boulders, held her attention on its swift course across the window-panes; and when she looked round, Lady Vera was all alone.
THE GOLDEN KEY
“Shelley was quite right!” exclaimed the young man at the book-shelf, with the prematurely bent back turned upon Doctor Dollar at his old oak desk.
“He was never wrong when he stuck to poetry,” said the doctor, looking up from an unfinished prescription on which the ink was nevertheless dry.
The other gave a guilty start. He was an immaculate young wreck, with the fashionable glut of hair plastered back from a good enough face, as if to make the most of its haggard pallor. And he was in full evening dress, for the crime doctor’s patients came at all hours.
“Did I say anything?” he asked with exaggerated embarrassment.
“You thought something aloud,” said Dollar, smiling. “Don’t let it worry you; that’s not one of the straws that shows an ill wind. What is it of Shelley’s, Mr. Edenborough?”
“Only a bit of one of his letters,” said the young man. “I just happened to open them at something that rather appealed to me.” And the book shot back into its place.
“Not the bit about the prussic acid, I hope?” suggested the doctor, for all the world as if in fun.
“What was that?” said Edenborough, with a face that would not have imposed upon an infant.
“A little commission from Shelley to Trelawny, for a small quantity of the ‘essential oil of bitter almonds,’ as he called it, so that he might ‘hold in his possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual peace.’”
“That was it,” said the youth at length. “I may as well be honest about it. But I don’t know how on earth you knew!”
The doctor gave a kindly little laugh.
“Only by knowing the book,” he assured the patient. “It’s rather a notorious passage — and you had just been clamoring for at least a silver key to some chamber of temporary peace!”
“You said you would give me one, Doctor Dollar.”
“And now I think I won’t,” said the doctor, rising from his aged chair. “No; you shall not go without hearing my reasons, and what I am going to propose to you instead. These keys, Mr. Edenborough” — and he tore the unfinished prescription into little bits— “gold or silver, they are not keys at all, but burglars’ jemmies that injure and vitiate the chambers they break into. It certainly is so with the night’s rest you want at any price; it may be the same with the perpetual peace that Shelley took for granted. Yet I happen to have a Chamber of Peace of sorts here in this house. It’s my latest fad. You’ve found it a name, and in return I should like to offer it to you for the night.”
“Do you mean a room that sends you off instead of drugs?”
“Did I say anything?”
Young Edenborough was looking puzzled, but for the moment taken out of himself. He had heard of Doctor Dollar as a rather eccentric consultant, but as the very man for him, from no less an authority than the Home Secretary of England, and no further back than that very evening at dinner. He had come straight round from Portman Square, foreseeing miracles and magic potions; but he had not foreseen John Dollar, or his unprofessional conversation, or the slight cast that actually added to his magnetic eyes, his cheery yet gentle confidence, or (least of all) a serious if casual invitation for the night.
“That’s exactly what I do mean,” said the author of these surprises. “It’s the most silent room in London, and there are other little points about it. I got our friend Topham to give it a trial during the bread strike. His verdict was that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would sleep the sleep of the just there!”
Edenborough had a laugh that turned him back into a schoolboy; but he checked it sharply, as though the sound put him to shame and pain.
“I would give anything for one decent night,” he said. “But you are far too good, sir, especially to a man you know nothing at all about.”
“I ought to know more in the morning, Mr. Edenborough, but it will keep very well till then. Enough for the night that you’re a friend of the Home Secretary, and at your worst at just the time when a man wants to be at his best.”
Edenborough smote his brow like a young man on the stage, but with a piteous spontaneity beyond all histrionic art.
“It’s on Thursday!” he cried, as one in exquisite dread. “My God, I’m to be married on Thursday, and this is Sunday night! How can I toe the mark unless I get some sleep? And how can I sleep — —”
“Leave that to me,” said Dollar, cutting a pregnant pause as short as possible; “leave everything to me, and come straight up-stairs. I keep the room in constant readiness; you shall be fitted with pajamas, and I’ll send a special messenger anywhere you like for whatever you may want in the morning. Come, my dear man! I am burning to give my Chamber of Peace a crucial test, because I know we shall all come out with flying colors!”
There was less confidence in the Doctor Dollar who ran down-stairs a little later and sat at his telephone with an urgent face. In another minute he had left the house, and in another two Mr. Topham Vinson was opening the
door to him in Portman Square.
“I call this too bad of you,” began the doctor, short of breath and shorter still of patience with his powerful friend.
“My dear fellow, I couldn’t help it,” vowed the Minister, with disarming meekness. “He would go straight to you, and just then I couldn’t have rung you up without giving him away at this end.”
“I can stay five minutes,” said Dollar, looking at his watch, “to hear as much as you can tell me in the time of what I ought to have known before I saw your neurotic friend.”
“Hasn’t he told you all about himself?”
“Hardly a word worth anything in a case like this, where the cause matters more than the effect. Of course I could have insisted, but that might have finished him off for the night. I gather, however, that he’s one of the First Lord’s secretaries, but a friend of yours, on the brink of being married, and in more than the normal state about it, or something to do with it.”
“I’ll take your points in order,” said Topham Vinson, who could be brisker than anybody when he chose. “George Edenborough is not only one of Stockton’s secretaries, but the most private and most confidential of the crowd. I don’t know about his being a friend of mine; I’ve been a friend to him for family reasons, and found him a nice enough fellow. But the girl he’s going to marry — if they do marry — is one of us.”
“If!” cried the doctor. “Do you mean to say she’d draw back in the last week?”
“She may not be able to help herself,” was the grave reply. “George Edenborough is under a cloud that may burst at any moment.”
“A sudden cloud?”
“Out of the blue for me. I only heard of it from Stockton on Friday night. But it’s no new thing to him. He might have told me sooner, I think, seeing it was through me that Edenborough ever went to him.”
“In some special capacity, I rather gather?”
“Yes; he can draw a bit — in fact, he’s not a secretary at all except in name, but the First Lord’s private draftsman. Stockton’s a whale for details but a dunce at technicalities. What he likes is the thing on paper, as he sees it with his own eyes; so he makes his inspections with Edenborough and a sketch-block, illustrated notes are taken at every turn, and all sorts of impossible improvements worked out in subsequent collaboration. I had that this evening from the boy himself. It will show you what chances he has had of giving things away — or — selling them!”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 506
