“Yet they were wonderful. The colour! The lustre! All the evening they tempted me. I was furious that a fat, coarse creature like that should have such exquisite things. Oh, I was mad.”

  She covered her face suddenly with her hands and swayed. Calladine sprang towards her. But she held out her hand.

  “No, I am all right.” And though he asked her to sit down she would not. “You remember when I stopped dancing suddenly?”

  “Yes. You had something hidden under your foot?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Her key!” And under his breath Calladine uttered a startled cry.

  For the first time since she had entered the room Joan Carew raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were full of terror, and with the terror was mixed an incredulity as though she could not possibly believe that that had happened which she knew had happened.

  “A little Yale key,” the girl continued. “I saw Mrs. Blumenstein looking on the floor for something, and then I saw it shining on the very spot. Mrs. Blumenstein’s suite was on the same floor as mine, and her maid slept above. All the maids do. I knew that. Oh, it seemed to me as if I had sold my soul and was being paid.”

  Now Calladine understood what she had meant by her strange phrase— “the safe daylight.”

  “I went up to my little suite,” Joan Carew continued. “I sat there with the key burning through my glove until I had given her time enough to fall asleep” — and though she hesitated before she spoke the words, she did speak them, not looking at Calladine, and with a shudder of remorse making her confession complete. “Then I crept out. The corridor was dimly lit. Far away below the music was throbbing. Up here it was as silent as the grave. I opened the door — her door. I found myself in a lobby. The suite, though bigger, was arranged like mine. I slipped in and closed the door behind me. I listened in the darkness. I couldn’t hear a sound. I crept forward to the door in front of me. I stood with my fingers on the handle and my heart beating fast enough to choke me. I had still time to turn back. But I couldn’t. There were those pearls in front of my eyes, lustrous and wonderful. I opened the door gently an inch or so — and then — it all happened in a second.”

  Joan Carew faltered. The night was too near to her, its memory too poignant with terror. She shut her eyes tightly and cowered down in a chair. With the movement her cloak slipped from her shoulders and dropped on to the ground. Calladine leaned forward with an exclamation of horror; Joan Carew started up.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  “I found myself inside the room with the door shut behind me. I had shut it myself in a spasm of terror. And I dared not turn round to open it. I was helpless.”

  “What do you mean? She was awake?”

  Joan Carew shook her head.

  “There were others in the room before me, and on the same errand — men!”

  Calladine drew back, his eyes searching the girl’s face.

  “Yes?” he said slowly.

  “I didn’t see them at first. I didn’t hear them. The room was quite dark except for one jet of fierce white light which beat upon the door of a safe. And as I shut the door the jet moved swiftly and the light reached me and stopped. I was blinded. I stood in the full glare of it, drawn up against the panels of the door, shivering, sick with fear. Then I heard a quiet laugh, and someone moved softly towards me. Oh, it was terrible! I recovered the use of my limbs; in a panic I turned to the door, but I was too late. Whilst I fumbled with the handle I was seized; a hand covered my mouth. I was lifted to the centre of the room. The jet went out, the electric lights were turned on. There were two men dressed as apaches in velvet trousers and red scarves, like a hundred others in the ballroom below, and both were masked. I struggled furiously; but, of course, I was like a child in their grasp. ‘Tie her legs,’ the man whispered who was holding me; ‘she’s making too much noise.’ I kicked and fought, but the other man stooped and tied my ankles, and I fainted.”

  Calladine nodded his head.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “When I came to, the lights were still burning, the door of the safe was open, the room empty; I had been flung on to a couch at the foot of the bed. I was lying there quite free.”

  “Was the safe empty?” asked Calladine suddenly.

  “I didn’t look,” she answered. “Oh!” — and she covered her face spasmodically with her hands. “I looked at the bed. Someone was lying there — under a sheet and quite still. There was a clock ticking in the room; it was the only sound. I was terrified. I was going mad with fear. If I didn’t get out of the room at once I felt that I should go mad, that I should scream and bring everyone to find me alone with — what was under the sheet in the bed. I ran to the door and looked out through a slit into the corridor. It was still quite empty, and below the music still throbbed in the ballroom. I crept down the stairs, meeting no one until I reached the hall. I looked into the ballroom as if I was searching for someone. I stayed long enough to show myself. Then I got a cab and came to you.”

  A short silence followed. Joan Carew looked at her companion in appeal. “You are the only one I could come to,” she added. “I know no one else.”

  Calladine sat watching the girl in silence. Then he asked, and his voice was hard:

  “And is that all you have to tell me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are quite sure?”

  Joan Carew looked at him perplexed by the urgency of his question. She reflected for a moment or two.

  “Quite.”

  Calladine rose to his feet and stood beside her.

  “Then how do you come to be wearing this?” he asked, and he lifted a chain of platinum and diamonds which she was wearing about her shoulders. “You weren’t wearing it when you danced with me.”

  Joan Carew stared at the chain.

  “No. It’s not mine. I have never seen it before.” Then a light came into her eyes. “The two men — they must have thrown it over my head when I was on the couch — before they went.” She looked at it more closely. “That’s it. The chain’s not very valuable. They could spare it, and — it would accuse me — of what they did.”

  “Yes, that’s very good reasoning,” said Calladine coldly.

  Joan Carew looked quickly up into his face.

  “Oh, you don’t believe me,” she cried. “You think — oh, it’s impossible.” And, holding him by the edge of his coat, she burst into a storm of passionate denials.

  “But you went to steal, you know,” he said gently, and she answered him at once:

  “Yes, I did, but not this.” And she held up the necklace. “Should I have stolen this, should I have come to you wearing it, if I had stolen the pearls, if I had” — and she stopped— “if my story were not true?”

  Calladine weighed her argument, and it affected him.

  “No, I think you wouldn’t,” he said frankly.

  Most crimes, no doubt, were brought home because the criminal had made some incomprehensibly stupid mistake; incomprehensibly stupid, that is, by the standards of normal life. Nevertheless, Calladine was inclined to believe her. He looked at her. That she should have murdered was absurd. Moreover, she was not making a parade of remorse, she was not playing the unctuous penitent; she had yielded to a temptation, had got herself into desperate straits, and was at her wits’ ends how to escape from them. She was frank about herself.

  Calladine looked at the clock. It was nearly five o’clock in the morning, and though the music could still be heard from the ballroom in the Semiramis, the night had begun to wane upon the river.

  “You must go back,” he said. “I’ll walk with you.”

  They crept silently down the stairs and into the street. It was only a step to the Semiramis. They met no one until they reached the Strand. There many, like Joan Carew in masquerade, were standing about, or walking hither and thither in search of carriages and cabs. The whole street was in a bustle, what with drivers shouting and people coming away.

  “You can slip in unnoticed,” said Calladine as he looked into the thronged courtyard. “I’ll telephone to you in the morning.”

  “You will?” she cried eagerly, clinging for a moment to his arm.

  “Yes, for certain,” he replied. “Wait in until you hear from me. I’ll think it over. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thank you,” she said fervently.

  He watched her scarlet cloak flitting here and there in the crowd until it vanished through the doorway. Then, for the second time, he walked back to his chambers, while the morning crept up the river from the sea.

  * * * * *

  This was the story which Calladine told in Mr. Ricardo’s library. Mr. Ricardo heard it out with varying emotions. He began with a thrill of expectation like a man on a dark threshold of great excitements. The setting of the story appealed to him, too, by a sort of brilliant bizarrerie which he found in it. But, as it went on, he grew puzzled and a trifle disheartened. There were flaws and chinks; he began to bubble with unspoken criticisms, then swift and clever thrusts which he dared not deliver. He looked upon the young man with disfavour, as upon one who had half opened a door upon a theatre of great promise and shown him a spectacle not up to the mark. Hanaud, on the other hand, listened imperturbably, without an expression upon his face, until the end. Then he pointed a finger at Calladine and asked him what to Ricardo’s mind was a most irrelevant question.

  “You got back to your rooms, then, before five, Mr. Calladine, and it is now nine o’clock less a few minutes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you have not changed your clothes. Explain to me that. What did you do between five and half-past eight?”

  Calladine looked down at his rumpled shirt front.

  “Upon my word, I never thought of it,” he cried. “I was worried out of my mind. I couldn’t decide what to do. Finally, I determined to talk to Mr. Ricardo, and after I had come to that conclusion I just waited impatiently until I could come round with decency.”

  Hanaud rose from his chair. His manner was grave, but conveyed no single hint of an opinion. He turned to Ricardo.

  “Let us go round to your young friend’s rooms in the Adelphi,” he said; and the three men drove thither at once.

  II

  Calladine lodged in a corner house and upon the first floor. His rooms, large and square and lofty, with Adams mantelpieces and a delicate tracery upon their ceilings, breathed the grace of the eighteenth century. Broad high windows, embrasured in thick walls, overlooked the river and took in all the sunshine and the air which the river had to give. And they were furnished fittingly. When the three men entered the parlour, Mr. Ricardo was astounded. He had expected the untidy litter of a man run to seed, the neglect and the dust of the recluse. But the room was as clean as the deck of a yacht; an Aubusson carpet made the floor luxurious underfoot; a few coloured prints of real value decorated the walls; and the mahogany furniture was polished so that a lady could have used it as a mirror. There was even by the newspapers upon the round table a china bowl full of fresh red roses. If Calladine had turned hermit, he was a hermit of an unusually fastidious type. Indeed, as he stood with his two companions in his dishevelled dress he seemed quite out of keeping with his rooms.

  “So you live here, Mr. Calladine?” said Hanaud, taking off his hat and laying it down.

  “Yes.”

  “With your servants, of course?”

  “They come in during the day,” said Calladine, and Hanaud looked at him curiously.

  “Do you mean that you sleep here alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “But your valet?”

  “I don’t keep a valet,” said Calladine; and again the curious look came into Hanaud’s eyes.

  “Yet,” he suggested gently, “there are rooms enough in your set of chambers to house a family.”

  Calladine coloured and shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

  “I prefer at night not to be disturbed,” he said, stumbling a little over the words. “I mean, I have a liking for quiet.”

  Gabriel Hanaud nodded his head with sympathy.

  “Yes, yes. And it is a difficult thing to get — as difficult as my holiday,” he said ruefully, with a smile for Mr. Ricardo. “However” — he turned towards Calladine— “no doubt, now that you are at home, you would like a bath and a change of clothes. And when you are dressed, perhaps you will telephone to the Semiramis and ask Miss Carew to come round here. Meanwhile, we will read your newspapers and smoke your cigarettes.”

  Hanaud shut the door upon Calladine, but he turned neither to the papers nor the cigarettes. He crossed the room to Mr. Ricardo, who, seated at the open window, was plunged deep in reflections.

  “You have an idea, my friend,” cried Hanaud. “It demands to express itself. That sees itself in your face. Let me hear it, I pray.”

  Mr. Ricardo started out of an absorption which was altogether assumed.

  “I was thinking,” he said, with a faraway smile, “that you might disappear in the forests of Africa, and at once everyone would be very busy about your disappearance. You might leave your village in Leicestershire and live in the fogs of Glasgow, and within a week the whole village would know your postal address. But London — what a city! How different! How indifferent! Turn out of St. James’s into the Adelphi Terrace and not a soul will say to you: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’”

  “But why should they,” asked Hanaud, “if your name isn’t Dr. Livingstone?”

  Mr. Ricardo smiled indulgently.

  “Scoffer!” he said. “You understand me very well,” and he sought to turn the tables on his companion. “And you — does this room suggest nothing to you? Have you no ideas?” But he knew very well that Hanaud had. Ever since Hanaud had crossed the threshold he had been like a man stimulated by a drug. His eyes were bright and active, his body alert.

  “Yes,” he said, “I have.”

  He was standing now by Ricardo’s side with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the trees on the Embankment and the barges swinging down the river.

  “You are thinking of the strange scene which took place in this room such a very few hours ago,” said Ricardo. “The girl in her masquerade dress making her confession with the stolen chain about her throat — —”

  Hanaud looked backwards carelessly. “No, I wasn’t giving it a thought,” he said, and in a moment or two he began to walk about the room with that curiously light step which Ricardo was never able to reconcile with his cumbersome figure. With the heaviness of a bear he still padded. He went from corner to corner, opened a cupboard here, a drawer of the bureau there, and — stooped suddenly. He stood erect again with a small box of morocco leather in his hand. His body from head to foot seemed to Ricardo to be expressing the question, “Have I found it?” He pressed a spring and the lid of the box flew open. Hanaud emptied its contents into the palm of his hand. There were two or three sticks of sealing-wax and a seal. With a shrug of the shoulders he replaced them and shut the box.

  “You are looking for something,” Ricardo announced with sagacity.

  “I am,” replied Hanaud; and it seemed that in a second or two he found it. Yet — yet — he found it with his hands in his pockets, if he had found it. Mr. Ricardo saw him stop in that attitude in front of the mantelshelf, and heard him utter a long, low whistle. Upon the mantelshelf some photographs were arranged, a box of cigars stood at one end, a book or two lay between some delicate ornaments of china, and a small engraving in a thin gilt frame was propped at the back against the wall. Ricardo surveyed the shelf from his seat in the window, but he could not imagine which it was of these objects that so drew and held Hanaud’s eyes.

  Hanaud, however, stepped forward. He looked into a vase and turned it upside down. Then he removed the lid of a porcelain cup, and from the very look of his great shoulders Ricardo knew that he had discovered what he sought. He was holding something in his hands, turning it over, examining it. When he was satisfied he moved swiftly to the door and opened it cautiously. Both men could hear the splashing of water in a bath. Hanaud closed the door again with a nod of contentment and crossed once more to the window.

  “Yes, it is all very strange and curious,” he said, “and I do not regret that you dragged me into the affair. You were quite right, my friend, this morning. It is the personality of your young Mr. Calladine which is the interesting thing. For instance, here we are in London in the early summer. The trees out, freshly green, lilac and flowers in the gardens, and I don’t know what tingle of hope and expectation in the sunlight and the air. I am middle-aged — yet there’s a riot in my blood, a recapture of youth, a belief that just round the corner, beyond the reach of my eyes, wonders wait for me. Don’t you, too, feel something like that? Well, then—” and he heaved his shoulders in astonishment.

  “Can you understand a young man with money, with fastidious tastes, good-looking, hiding himself in a corner at such a time — except for some overpowering reason? No. Nor can I. There is another thing — I put a question or two to Calladine.”

  “Yes,” said Ricardo.

  “He has no servants here at night. He is quite alone and — here is what I find interesting — he has no valet. That seems a small thing to you?” Hanaud asked at a movement from Ricardo. “Well, it is no doubt a trifle, but it’s a significant trifle in the case of a young rich man. It is generally a sign that there is something strange, perhaps even something sinister, in his life. Mr. Calladine, some months ago, turned out of St. James’s into the Adelphi. Can you tell me why?”

  “No,” replied Mr. Ricardo. “Can you?”

  Hanaud stretched out a hand. In his open palm lay a small round hairy bulb about the size of a big button and of a colour between green and brown.

  “Look!” he said. “What is that?”

  Mr. Ricardo took the bulb wonderingly.

  “It looks to me like the fruit of some kind of cactus.”

  Hanaud nodded.

  “It is. You will see some pots of it in the hothouses of any really good botanical gardens. Kew has them, I have no doubt. Paris certainly has. They are labelled. ‘Anhalonium Luinii.’ But amongst the Indians of Yucatan the plant has a simpler name.”

 

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