CHAPTER XI

“Is out, I know,” said he, “but as the affair is urgent, I am here. You know that I am the tenant of No. 7, Eddystone Mansions, and you know also, that, without seeking it, I have some knowledge of your history. I wish to ask whether, without troubling your mind with a lot of details, you care to authorize me to spend at once, in your interests, a sum of one hundred pounds.”

She scrutinized him with a certain furtiveness, weighing him.

“In my interests?” said she.

“Yours and your mother’s.”

“One hundred pounds?”

“Yes.”

“It seems a strange request.”

“It isn’t a request. If you haven’t confidence in me to the extent of one hundred pounds, I am not deeply concerned.”

“But you come like a storm, and speak like one.”

“On a purely business matter of your own—remember.”

“You were at the pains to come,” she said with a smile. “You cannot both care and not care.”

“I used the word ‘concern,’ you know.”

“Is it a gracious way to approach me?”

“Is it charming to be mistrusted?”

“Did I say that I mistrusted you?”

“With your eyes.”

“Well, I say now with my lips that I do not. Which will you believe?”

“No doubt they can both deceive.”

“Oh, now you are verging on rudeness.”

“There are worse things than rudeness, when one thinks of it.”

“I have no idea to what you refer.”

“That may be because I know more about you than you think.”

At this she started guiltily, visibly, and at that start again she appeared before the eye of David’s memory gliding through the moonlight at three in the morning, a ghost hastening back to the tomb. Yet, in her presence, the resentment which rankled in him softened to pity. A look of appeal came into her dark eyes, and a certain essence of honesty and purity in her being communicated itself to his instincts, putting it out of his power to think any ill of her for the moment.

He said hurriedly: “I fear I have begun badly. All this is neither here nor there.”

She sat down, slung a knee between her clasped fingers in her habitual manner, and said: “Please tell me, what do you mean?” Then she looked up at him again with a troubled light in her eyes.

He walked quickly nearer to her, saying: “Now, don’t let that get into your head as a serious statement. It was a mere manner of speaking, what I said, and of no importance. Moreover, there’s this question of one hundred pounds, and time is a vital consideration.”

“Nevertheless, you were definite enough, and must have had some meaning,” she went on. “Did I not hear you say that you know more about me than I think? Well, then, have the goodness to tell me what.”

“Now I have put my foot in it, I suppose,” said David, “and you will never rest till I find something to tell you. But not now, if you will bear with me. In a few days I shall, perhaps, call on your mother, or see you again at a place which you no doubt visit pretty often at about the same hour, and to which I, too, somehow am strangely drawn. The question now before us is whether I am to spend the one hundred pounds for you.”

“As to that, what can one say? You tell me nothing of your reason, my mother is out, and I am afraid that I have not at the moment one hundred pounds of my own. I am about to be married, and—”

“Married?”

“I am myself rather surprised at it. Yet I fail to see why you should be immoderately surprised.”

“I? Surprised?” said he in a dazed way, still standing with one foot drawn back a step. “I was merely taken aback, because—”

“Well?”

“Because—nothing. I was simply taken aback, that’s all. Or rather because I had not heard of it before.”

“It was only fully decided upon yesterday,” said she, bending down over her knee.

“Oh, only yesterday. And the happy event takes place when? for I am at least interested.”

“Soon. Within two or three weeks. I don’t quite know when.”

“And the happy man?”

“The same whom you saw come to take me from Kensal Green.”

“Mr. Van Hupfeldt?”

“Oh, you know his name. Yes; Mr. Van Hupfeldt.”

David chuckled grimly.

“Why do you laugh?” she asked.

“But whatever is your motive?” he cried sharply.

“You are strange to venture to inquire into my motive,” she said, with downcast eyes. Then her lip trembled, and she added in a low voice: “My motive is known only to the dead.”

“Ah, don’t cry!” he almost shouted at her, with a sudden brand of red anger across his brow. “There’s no need for tears! It shan’t ever happen, this thing!”

“What do you mean?” she asked, glancing tremulously at him.

“What I say. This marriage can’t happen. I’ll see to that. But stop—perhaps I am talking too soon. ‘Let not him boast that putteth his armor on as he that taketh it off.’ Good-day, Miss Mordaunt. I shall not trouble you any more about the one hundred pounds. I will spend it out of my own pocket pocket—”

“Please stay!” she cried after him. “Everything that you say bewilders me! How am I to believe you honest when you say such things?”

“What things? Honest? You may believe me honest or not, just as you will. I told you before that I am not greatly concerned. If I bewilder you, you anger me.”

“I am sorry for that. But how so?”

“What, is it nothing for a man to hear it doubted whether he is honest or not? And, apart from that, admit that your sister is not very long dead, and that you have been easily drawn into this engagement—”

“But what can all this matter to you?” she asked, with a wrinkled brow. “Why should my private conduct anger you at all? I have not, in fact, as you think, been so easily won into this engagement; yet, if I had, it is amazing that you should lecture me. If it was any one but you, I should be cross.”

“What, am I in special favor, then?”

“You have an honest face.”

“Then why is my poor honesty constantly doubted.”

“Because you say extraordinary things. It is not, for instance, usual for people to pay one hundred pounds for the benefit of a casual acquaintance as you just volunteered to do. Either you have some trick or motive in view, or you are very wonderfully disinterested.”

“Which do you think?”

“I may think one thing now, and the other after you are gone.”

“Well, it is useless arguing. I should be here all day, if I let myself. We were not made to agree, you see. Some people are like that. I shall just pay the one hundred pounds out of my own pocket—”

“You are not to do that, please.”

“Then, will you?”

“I think not.”

“You have no idea what is in question!”

“Then, give me some idea.”

“And lose more time. However, you may as well hear. It is this: that the tenant in the flat before me, one Miss L’Estrange, found concealed in a picture a certificate of a marriage and one of a birth, and I wish to buy them for you from Miss L’Estrange’s servant, who has them.”

Violet sprang upright with an adoring face, murmuring: “Heaven be thanked!”

“I didn’t tell you before,” said David, “because I haven’t secured the papers yet. I have left the girl in my flat—”

“But where—where do you say she found them?” she asked, with a keener interest than the question quite seemed to call for.

“It was in a picture-frame, between the picture and the boards at the back,” he answered. “The picture dropped, and the certificates fell out.”

“Heaven be praised!” she breathed again. “Was there nothing else that fell out?”

“Nothing else, apparently.”

“That was enough. Why should I want more? Oh, get them for me quickly, will you?” she cried, all animated and pink. “With these in my hand everything will be different. Even your prophecy against my marriage, which you seemed not to desire, will very likely come true.”

“So now I have your authority to spend the one hundred pounds?” he asked, with a smile.

“Of course! Ten times as much!”

“But blessed is she who has not seen, and yet has believed!”

“Forgive me! I do thank and trust you!” She put out her hand. He took it, and bent some time over it.

“Good-by, Miss Mordaunt.”

“Not for long—an hour—two?”

“I am glad to have pleased you. I shall always remember how the brunette type of angels look when they thank Providence.”

“It is not fair to flatter when one is highly happy and deeply thankful, for then one hears everything as music. Tell me of it some other time, when I shall have a sharper answer ready. But stay—one word. It is of these certificates that Mr. Van Hupfeldt, too, must somehow have got wind. Does the girl say that any one else knows of them?”

“A man named Strauss knows of them.”

At that name her eyelids fell as if her modesty had been hurt. “Does not Mr. Van Hupfeldt know of them?” she asked, with face averted.

“I cannot tell you—yet,” he answered, turning a little from her lest she caught the grim smile on his lips. “Why do you think that he may know?”

“Because some days ago he wrote me a note—it is this. It can refer only to these certificates, I suppose.”

She handed to David his own note—“It is now a pretty certain thing that your sister was a duly wedded wife”—and David, looking at it, asked with something of a flush: “Did Mr. Van Hupfeldt say that it was he who sent you this? I see that it has no signature.”

“Yes, it was he,” said Violet.

“Ah!” murmured David, and said no more.

“If it was these certificates which he had in his mind when he wrote that note,” said she, “then he, too, as well as you, must have a chance of securing them from the girl. So you had better be careful that he is not beforehand with you.”

David looked squarely at her. “So long as you obtain them, what does it matter from whom they come?”

“Of course,” she replied, with her eyes on the ground, “I shall owe much gratitude to the person who hands them to me.”

He took a step forward, whispering: “Must I be the winner?”

He received no answer from her; only, a wave of blood, a blush that flooded her being from her toes to the roots of her hair all of a sudden, suffused Violet, while he stood awaiting her reply. He put out his hand with a fine self-control. “Well, I must try,” he cried lightly. She just touched his fingers with hers, and the next moment he was striding from her.

His cab was waiting outside. Calling, “Quick as you can!” to the driver, he sprang in, and they started briskly away. He was well content inwardly. Something bird-like seemed new-fledged and fluttering a little somewhere inside. He had tasted the sweet poison of honey-dew.

As for doubt, he had none at the moment. Jenny he had left safe with Mrs. Grover; he was sure that she had the certificates with her. But when he reached the middle of Oxford-St., he saw that which made him start—Van Hupfeldt in a landau driving eastward, and, sitting beside the coachman, the valet Neil. What spurred David’s interest was the pace at which the landau’s horses were racing through the traffic, and also the face of the man in the carriage, so gaunt and wild, leaning forward with his two hands clenched on his knees, as if to press the carriage faster forward by the strain of his soul.

At once a host of speculations crowded upon David’s mind. Now, for the first time, it occurred to him that Neil may have shadowed him and the girl to the flat, that Van Hupfeldt might have the daring to be on the way to the flat to win Jenny from him. He felt that he could hardly prevail against Van Hupfeldt with Jenny—Van Hupfeldt being rich—and the two high-steppers in the landau were fast leaving the cab-horse behind. An eagerness to be quickly at his flat rose in David, so without stopping his cab he stood out near the splash-board and cried to his amazed driver: “I say! You come inside, and let me drive.”

“Mustn’t do that, sir. It is more than my place is worth,” began the cabman.

“Two pounds for you, and I pay all fines—quick now!” said David.

The driver hesitated, but pulled up. He climbed down, went into the cab, and David was on the perch, reins in hand. Though some persons were astonished, luckily no policeman saw them. The horse, as if conscious of something from Wyoming behind him, began to run. David bolted northward out of the traffic, and careered through the emptier streets, while the old cab-horse wondered what London was coming to when such things could be, and praised the days of his youth. When David drew up at Eddystone Mansions, there was no sign of the landau. He ran up the stairs three at a time. He would not await the tardy elevator. In moments of stress we return to nature and cast off the artificial. Opening his door with his key, he made straight into the drawing-room where he had left Jenny. Then his heart sank miserably, for she was not there.

“Mrs. Grover!” he called, and when Mrs. Grover hurried from the kitchen, her hands leprous with pastry-dough, David looked at her so thunderously that she drew back.

“Where’s the girl, Mrs. Grover?” he growled.

“She’s gone, sir.”

“I see that. You let her go, Mrs. Grover?”

“Why, sir, a man came here, saying he had a message from you for the girl, and I let him in. They had a talk together, then she said she must be going. I couldn’t stop her.”

David groaned.

The man who had called was Neil, who, on hurrying to tell his master where Jenny was, had been sent back with instructions to try and induce her to leave the flat and come to Hanover Square. Neil had accomplished this to the extent of getting Jenny to leave Eddystone Mansions; but she would not go to Strauss, for David’s threat of the police if she disposed of the papers to any one else than their lawful owner was in her mind, and she now feared to sell the papers to Strauss, as she knew that she would certainly do if she once went to his rooms. Yet she was sorely tempted to sell to the lavish rich man rather than to the bargainer, and so, making a compromise between her fears and her temptation, she had told Neil that she would wait in a certain café, and there discuss the matter with Strauss, if Strauss would come to her. She was waiting there, and Strauss was going to her, led by Neil, when David had seen him in the landau.

At any rate, the girl was gone. David felt as if he had lost all things. He had promised the certificates; and Violet had said: “I shall owe much gratitude to the person who hands them to me.”

Now Van Hupfeldt had, or would have, them. While he had been dallying and bandying words in Porchester Gardens, Van Hupfeldt had been acting, and he groaned to himself in a pain of self-reproach: “Too much Violet, David!”

He strode to and fro in the dining-room with a quick step, pacing with the lightness of a caged bear, his fists clenched, keen to act, yet not knowing what to do. The girl was gone, the certificates gone with her.

One thing, however, he had gained by the adventure, namely, the almost certainty that Van Hupfeldt was Strauss—for he had seen the valet, Neil, who at Piccadilly Circus had declared that he was Strauss’s servant, sitting on the box-seat of the landau in which was the man whom David had heard Violet at the grave call “Mr. Van Hupfeldt.” This seemed a sort of proof that Van Hupfeldt and Strauss were one. The same man who had been so bound up with the one sister, and had somehow brought her to her death, was now about to marry the other! The thought of such a thing struck lightning from David’s eyes.

“Never that!” he vowed in his frenzy. “However it goes, not that!”

And then he was angry afresh with her, thinking: “He can’t be much good, this man—she must be easily won.”

He could not guess that Van Hupfeldt had promised to clear her sister’s name six months after the marriage, and that this was her motive, and not love, for being won. He did not realize that the certificates now lost by him would have freed Violet from Van Hupfeldt. He believed that she was entering lightly into marriage with a man of great wealth. Again, in this unreasoning mood, he saw her in her nocturnal wanderings.

But bitterness and regrets could not bring back the certificates, in the gaining of which her honor was almost at stake. If he had known where Van Hupfeldt lived, he would have gone straight there. Nevertheless, Van Hupfeldt was not at home, was hurrying away from home, in fact. Here, then, was another point. Jenny had clearly not gone to Van Hupfeldt’s on leaving the flat, or why should Van Hupfeldt be racing eastward? It seemed that Jenny and Van Hupfeldt were to meet somewhere else, perhaps somewhere not far from the mansions. If David had only kept the landau in sight, he might have tracked Van Hupfeldt to that meeting! He felt now that, if he could come upon them, then, by the mere force and whirlwind of his will, he should have his way. On a sudden he went out again into the streets.

He ran southward at a venture. If there was a conference going on in any house near by, and if the landau was waiting outside, he should recognize it by the horses and by Neil on the box. But, as it turned out, even this recognition was not necessary, for, running down Bloomsbury-St., toward a carriage of which he caught sight standing before a French chocolate-shop at the Oxford-St. corner, he saw a man and a girl come out of the shop. The man lifted his hat and nodded toward the girl with his foot on the carriage-step, and then was driven off westward. Half a minute afterward David had overtaken the girl.

“You wretched creature!” he said, in the fierce heat of his anger and haste: “Hand me those certificates, and be quick about it!”

“I haven’t the faintest idea which certificates you mean,” said Jenny, as bold now as brass, for she had no doubt been strengthened by the interview in the shop, and assured of Van Hupfeldt’s protection.

This was enough for David. He understood from her words that the papers were now in Van Hupfeldt’s hands; whereat a flood of rage surged within him, and, without any definite purpose, he rushed after the carriage. It had not gone far, because of a block of traffic near Tottenham Court Road, and his hot face was soon thrust over the carriage-door. Van Hupfeldt shrank back into the farthest corner with a look of blank dismay.

“Yes, you can have them, Mr. Strauss—” began David, hotly.

“What is it?” muttered Van Hupfeldt, crouching, with his hand on the opposite door-handle. “That is not my name.”

“Whatever your name, or however many names you may own, you can have those papers now; but there may be other things where they came from, and if they’re there, I’m the man in possession, mark you, and I’ll be finding them—”

“Papers! What papers? Find what?” asked Van Hupfeldt, with a scared face that belied his words.

“You cur!” cried David, his heart burning hot within him; “make amends for your crimes while you may. If you don’t, I tell you, I shall have no mercy. Soon I shall have my hands on you—”

“Drive on!” screamed Van Hupfeldt to his coachman, and, the block of traffic having now cleared, the horses trotted on, and left David red-faced with fury, in imminent danger of being run over by the press of vehicles behind.

CHAPTER XII

Then, with his flower-pot of violets on each hand, he was soon in the thick of the cow-boy and prairie-flower history which he had on hand. His stories were already known on this side by the whiff of reality they brought from the States, and were in some demand. Already the postman handed him printers’ proofs, and he had proved to himself that he possessed some of the wisdom of the serpent in choosing a reputable abode, because the men whom he entertained went away saying: “Harcourt has private means. He has taken to literature as a hobby,” an idea which made him popular. If certain editors, on the strength of it, wished to pay him half-rates, they were soon undeceived. David was much too hard a nut to crack in that easy way.

Meantime, neither by sight nor sound had he been reminded of the eery experience of his first night in No. 7. True, there were noises during the still hours, such as had twice thrilled Miss L’Estrange and Jenny. But they seemed quite natural to him. The dryness of the interior of the block of flats had loosened flooring-boards and dislocated cross-beams, until the mere movement of an article of furniture overhead, or the passing of a next-floor tenant from one room to another, would set going creaks enough to give rise to half a dozen ghost-panics.

That night he had to be at the Holborn Restaurant for an annual dinner of internationals, so he struck work soon after four, seeing that by then Mrs. Grover’s task of taking down and dusting was ended, and the pictures now lay in a pile by the dining-room sideboard. David procured himself a quantity of brown paper, with gum and pincers, sat on the floor by the pile, and, with an effort to breathe no faster than usual, set himself to work. It was not so slight a task as it looked, some of the pictures being elaborately fastened with brown paper, tacks, and bars; and, since they were not his own, he had to leave them not less trim than he found them. He was resolved to trust not even a workman in this search. However, being handy, a Jack of all trades, he had got some half dozen unfastened and again fastened before six o’clock.

His gum failing, he called upon Mrs. Grover, received no answer, called again, went searching, but could not find her in the flat. Wondering at this, he stepped outside the front door to invoke the services of the lift-man, when a little way down the stairs he caught a sound of voices in low talk. His ready ear seemed to detect the particular accent of his housekeeper, and he went downward, spying out who it might be. He wore slippers, and for this reason, perhaps, approached near the speakers before he was seen. They were Mrs. Grover and a young man. The latter, the moment he was aware of David’s presence, was gone like a thief, so David did not see his face—it was dark there at that hour—but he had an impression that it was Neil, Van Hupfeldt’s valet, and his legs of themselves started into chase; but he checked himself.

“Who was the man?” he asked Mrs. Grover, when they had gone back into the flat.

“I’m sure I don’t know his name, sir,” was her answer.

“You know him, perhaps. Is it the same who came here to speak with the girl I left in your charge?”

“I believe it is the same,” said Mrs. Grover, “though I didn’t see him well.”

“Oh, you believe. What on earth does he want of you?”

“He kept asking me questions. I told him to go about his business—”

“What did he want to know?”

“Whether I was satisfied with my place, and whether I didn’t think that a woman like me could better herself, considering the wages I’m getting—”

“That all he wanted to know?”

“That’s about all—things like that.”

David, looking at her, said: “I am sure he was quite right. You deserve five times the wages I am giving you; so if I pay you a month’s wages in advance now—”

“But, sir!”

“No, it’s no use, Mrs. Grover. You were born for greater things than this. Yet, wherever you go next, do be loyal to the man from whom you earn your bread against all the world. Here’s your money.”

In vain Mrs. Grover protested. The place was good enough for her, the flat not fit to be left as it was, things not washed, something on the fire. It was of no avail. As David’s servant she was suddenly dead. He saw her out with a hearty hand-shake at the door, and his best wishes.

Only after she was well gone did he remember that she had forgotten to deliver up the front door-key.

As it was now nearly time to dress for the dinner, he left his work on the pictures for the day. In the half dozen or so which he had taken to pieces he had found nothing, and was disillusioned, cross-tempered, disturbed by many things.

He sat down and wrote to Miss Violet Mordaunt: “I am sorry to say that I have failed to receive the documents of which I had the honor to speak to you. I have reason, however, to believe that your fiancé, Mr. Van Hupfeldt, has bought them, and from his hand you will perhaps receive them.”

But his conscience felt this letter to be hard, ironical, and not sincere; for if, as he suspected, Van Hupfeldt’s name was on the certificates as the husband of dead Gwendoline, Violet was little likely to receive them from Van Hupfeldt’s hand. So he tore up the note, and wrote another which equally reflected his ill-humor. Nor did this go through the post. In the end, though he knew that she must be anxiously awaiting a word of news from him, he shirked for the present the task of announcing his failure to her, and rushed out to the dinner.

He came home late, and as he stepped from the lift to the landing, something—a light or a fancy—caused him to start. It seemed to him that through the opaque glass of his door he had seen a light. Certainly, the impression was gone in one instant, but he had it. He went in with some disquiet of the nerves. All was dark, all still, within. He turned on three or four of the lights in rapid succession, and his eyes pierced here and there without discerning anything save familiar articles of furniture.

The flat was lonely to him that night. Though Mrs. Grover would not in any case have been there at that hour, yet the fact that she would not come in the morning as usual, the fact that he was now the only life in the little home, made him as solitary in London as a castaway in mid-sea. The fires were dead. He sat a little while in his overcoat by the dining-room fireplace, glanced at the heap of pictures, at the face of Gwendoline. And now again he started. Something in the aspect of the heap struck him as new, as not perhaps the same as when he had gone out.

But here again he seemed to himself the prey of his own fancies. He asked himself angrily if he was losing his memory and his grip of facts. He thought that he had left only two of the pictures in pieces; now three of them were without their backs. As he sat looking at them, the clock on the mantelpiece all at once ceased ticking, and this small thing again, due solely to his omission to wind the clock, had an effect upon his mood. He seemed to hear the sudden silence, as it were the ceasing of a heart-beat, and the “all is over” of the bereaved when the last breath passes. He rose and stretched himself and yawned, and took in with him to his bed-room one of the pots of violets, so that, if he scented violets, he should know whence the scent came. And he took care to turn on the light in his bed-room before turning off all the other lights. Could this be David, the man who used to sleep beneath the stars?

Now he lay down in the dark, and all was quiet. Only, from far away, from some other polygon in the hive of flats, came a tinkling, the genteel sound of the piano, very faint, as remote from him as was the life of her who played it. He was listening to it, thinking of the isolation in which all souls are more or less doomed to live, when the question occurred to him incidentally: “Am I really alone in this flat? As a matter of fact, is not some one with me?” He had seemed to hear a definite click, and if it was not in the flat, then, he thought, his ears must be losing their old trick of exactness.

He stole out of bed, and, without making the faintest sound, peeped out along the corridors. Nothing seemed to stir. Minute after minute he stood patiently, hearing only that shell-music which the tympanum of the ear gives out in deep silence. Once he caught a Lilliputian rush, and a screech, an escapade in mouseland. Behind him a small clock ticked in his bed-room, and presently there was yet another sound, low, but prolonged, as if paper was being very cautiously torn somewhere.

Instantly the instinct to grip his six-shooter in his hand rose in David. His former experience in the flat had caused him to have the weapon ready. Great is that moment when awe rises into indignation and action, as now with him. Silently, with every nerve strung, and each muscle nimble for the encounter, he stepped backward into his bed-room, and drew the weapon from beneath his pillow. No longer careful about hiding the fact that he was awake, he made a rush along the longer corridor into the hall, caught up the hall chair and table and threw them against the door, heaved up the hat-stand and placed it also against the door, thus blocking the enemy’s retreat. And he said to himself: “Be it ghost, or be it mortal man, let there be a fight to a finish this time!”

But he kept himself in the dark for safety’s sake, and, bold as his heart was, it beat fast, as he now stood in the farthest corner of the hall near the door, listening for his life. And anon he sniffed with his nostrils for a scent of violets, for a wafture from the grave, which came not.

But this waiting for he knew not what was not long to be borne. Wounds are not so grisly to the mind as the touch of a hand which cannot be grasped. He crept back in the dark along the wall, again noiselessly, into the corridor, into his bed-room, locked the door, and, with finger on trigger, switched on the light. Keeping his ear alert for whatever might happen outside, he searched the room. No one was under the bed, or anywhere there. He turned off the light, went out, and, in a similar manner, searched behind a locked door, wherever he found a key in the lock, each of the other two bed-rooms, and the bath-room. In that end of the flat there was no one, nor a scent of anything, save the perfume of the violets in his bed-room. And again he began to think that he must surely be the plaything of his fancies.

Along the corridor he crept again, and entered the drawing-room, locked the door, turned on the light, looked round to search. At that instant he heard, he felt, the flight of steps in the flat. It was the merest sign of something detected by some sixth sense acquired by him in harkening to the whispers of the jungle. These were steps as light and swift as a specter’s might be. But he had the notion that they fled out of the dining-room down the short passage between the kitchen and the servant’s room, and, quick as thought, he had out the drawing-room light, and was after them.

The door of the servant’s bed-room was on the left of the cross passage, that of the kitchen on the right, just opposite the other. He went like a cat which sees in the night, swift and soft, along the left wall, his breast pressed to it, until, coming to the servant’s bed-room door, he gave a twist to the handle to go in.

The handle turned a little, but not much. The door would not open. It seemed to be held by some one within, for it was not locked, since there happened to be no key in it.

Here, at any rate, was something tangible at last. And, when it came to be a question of main force, natural or supernatural, David was in his element. He set himself to get that door-handle round, and it turned. He put himself into the effort to press that door open, and it opened a little. But, all at once, it opened too much! and he plunged staggering within. At the same time he was aware of something rushing out; he had just time to snatch his revolver from the waist of his pajamas and fire, when his silent adversary was gone, and had vehemently slammed the door upon him. Almost at the same moment another door slammed—the kitchen-door. Then all was still again.

It was as when a mighty momentary wind seizes upon a house in the dead of night, slams two doors, causes something to bark, and passes on its way. The two slammings and the bark of the revolver were almost simultaneous—and silence swallowed them together.

David flew after the thing which had evaded him to the kitchen-door. His blood was up. During his first experience of something queer in the flat he had had an impression of a woman, perhaps on account of the scent of violets. But this time there seemed to be no such scent, and this latest impression was of a man—an impression hardly perhaps due to sight, for the servant’s room was about the darkest spot in the flat, its one small window being shrouded with tapestry curtains, and the outer night itself dark. But he somehow believed now that it was a man, and he flung himself again and again against the kitchen-door with no good meaning toward that man. For there could be no doubt that whoever or whatever it was, his visitant was now in the kitchen, since the door would not open.

After some vain effort to force it, he stopped, panting, thinking what he should do. There was a little pointed poker in the dining-room by which he might pick the lock; but before deciding upon this he again tried his power of shoulder and will against the door, and this time felt something give within. The door, too, was not really locked, having no key in it, as, in general, the keys of old flats become displaced. It was apparently only fastened, if it were fastened at all, by some catch or hook, for, after two or three more thumps, it flew wide.

David, catching the handle, held it a little ajar, and now again the stillness of the night was outraged by his shout through the slit: “Hands up! or I fire!” At the same instant he rushed in, and flooded the kitchen with light.

But no one was there! A pallor struck from the corners of his mouth to his cheek, even while his brow was flushed, and he stood aghast, with an astounding question in his eyes and in his heart.

CHAPTER XIII

There were, however, the pictures. Unless he was dancing mad, the fact was certain that he had left only three of them with their backs undone, and now there were five—and he refused to believe that he was indeed moonstruck.

So, then, a man had been in the flat, since no ghost could materialize to the extent of picking tacks out of picture-frames. And, if there had been a man, that man was Van Hupfeldt, and no other. Van Hupfeldt’s motive would be clear enough. Miss L’Estrange had told Van Hupfeldt that the certificates had fallen out of the back of a picture. David himself had had the rashness, in his rage at the loss of the certificates, to say over the door of Van Hupfeldt’s landau that there “might be other things where the certificates came from.” Mrs. Grover had been seen that afternoon talking to Van Hupfeldt’s servant. She was evidently in process of being bribed and won over to the enemy. She may have told how David had had all the pictures taken down and was at work on them, and how he was to be out at an annual dinner that night. She may possibly have handed over to Van Hupfeldt the key of the flat, and Van Hupfeldt, in a crazy terror lest anything should be found by David in the pictures, may have come into the flat to search for himself.

All this seemed plausible enough. But, then, how had Van Hupfeldt got away? Had he a flying-machine? Was he a griffin? Were there holes in the wall?

But if, as a matter of fact, he or some other had been in the flat, and had some way got out other than by the front door, here was a new thought—that Gwendoline Mordaunt may not, after all, have committed suicide. Suicide had been assumed simply because of the locked and bolted front door. But how if there existed some other mysterious exit from the flat? In that case she might have been done to death—by Strauss, by Van Hupfeldt, if Van Hupfeldt was Strauss.

David, no doubt, was all too ready to think evil of this man. Nevertheless the question confronted him. Why, he asked himself, should Gwendoline have committed suicide? She was a married woman—the certificate, seen by Miss L’Estrange, proved that. True, Gwendoline had received some terrible letter four days before her death, as her servant had told David, and she had said to the girl: “I am not married. You think that I am; but I am not.” Still, a doubt arose now as to her suicide. Her sister Violet did not believe in the suicide. Nothing was certain.

However, this new theory of the tragedy put David upon writing to Violet the first thing in the morning. Vague as his doubt, it was a set-off against his shame of defeat in the matter of the certificates. It was something with which to face her. He resolved to tell her at once all that was in his mind, even his shocking suspicion that Van Hupfeldt was Strauss, and he wrote:

“Mr. David Harcourt has unfortunately not been able to secure the certificates of which he had the honor of speaking to Miss Mordaunt, but believes that her fiancé, Mr. Van Hupfeldt, may be in a position to give her some information on the subject. However, Mr. Harcourt has other matters of pressing importance to communicate to Miss Mordaunt for her advantage, and, in case she lacks the leisure to be alone in the course of the day, he will be pleased to be at her sister’s grave this evening about five, if she will write him a line to that effect.”

He posted this before eight in the morning, went off to seek his old charwoman in Clerkenwell, breakfasted outside, came home, and set to work afresh upon the pictures.

And that proved a day of days for him. For, before noon, on opening the back of a mezzotint of the “Fighting Temeraire,” he found a book, large, flat, and ivory-white. Its silver clasp was locked. He could not see within, yet he understood that it was no printed book, but in manuscript, and that here was the diary of Gwendoline Mordaunt. He was still exulting over it, searching now with fresh zeal for more treasure, when he received a note: “Miss Mordaunt hopes to lay some flowers on her sister’s grave this evening about five.”

Her paper had a scent of violets, and David, in putting it to his nostrils, allowed his lips, too, to steal a kiss;—for happy men do sometimes kiss scented paper. And he was happy, thinking how, when he presented the diary to her, he would see her glad and thankful.

At the very hour, however, when he was thus rejoicing, Van Hupfeldt was going up the stairs at 60A, Porchester Gardens. He was limping and leaning on his valet, and his dark skin was now so much paler than usual that on his entrance into the drawing-room Mrs. Mordaunt cried out:

“Why, what is the matter?”

“Do not distress yourself at all,” said Van Hupfeldt, limping on his stick toward her. “Only a slight accident—a fall off a stumbling horse in the park this morning—my knee—it is better now—”

“Oh, I am so sorry! But you should not have come; you are evidently still in pain. So distressing! Sit here; let me—”

“No, really,” said he, “it is nearly all right now, dear Mrs. Mordaunt. I have so much to say, and so little time to say it in. Where is Violet?”

“She is in her bed-room; will soon be down. Let me place this cushion—”

“She is well, I hope?”

“Yes; a little strange and restless to-day, perhaps.”

“What is it now?”

“Oh, some little fall of the spiritual barometer, I suppose. She has not mentioned anything specific to me.”

“You received my telegram of this morning?”

“Saying that you would come at half-past one? Yes.”

“Well, I am lucky to have found you alone, for in what I have now to suggest to you, I do not wish my influence to appear—let it seem to be done entirely on your own impulse—but I have to beseech you, Mrs. Mordaunt, to return to Rigsworth this very day.”

“To-day? Rigsworth? But there are still a host of things to be seen to before the wedding—”

“I know, I know. Even at the cost of putting off the wedding for a week, if you will do all that is to be done from Rigsworth instead of in London, you will profoundly oblige me. I had hoped that you would this do for me without requiring my reason, but I see that I must give it, and without any beating about the bush. Only give me first your assurance that you will breathe not one word to Violet of what I am forced to tell you.”

“Good gracious! What has happened?”

“Promise me this.”

“Well, I shall be discreet.”

“Then, I have to tell you that Violet has made an undesirable acquaintance in London, one whom it is of supreme importance, if our married life is to be a success, that she should see not once again. It is a man—No, don’t be unduly alarmed—I don’t for a moment suspect that their intimacy has proceeded far, but it has proceeded too far, and must go no farther. I may tell you that it is my belief that letters, or notes, have passed between them, and, to my knowledge, they have met at least once by appointment in Kensal Green cemetery, for I have actually surprised them there. Now, pray, don’t be distressed. Don’t, now, or I shall regret having told you. Certainly, it is a serious matter, but don’t think it more serious than it is—”

“Violet?” breathed Mrs. Mordaunt, with a long face.

“The facts are as I have stated them,” proceeded Van Hupfeldt, “and when the knowledge of them came to me, I was at some pains to make inquiries into the personality of the man in question. He turns out to be a man named Harcourt.”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Harcourt, the occupier of the flat in Eddystone Mansions? Why, he was here yesterday. Violet herself told me—”

“Here? Yesterday?” Van Hupfeldt turned suddenly greenish. “But why so? What did the man say?”

“Violet did not seem to wish to be explicit,” answered Mrs. Mordaunt; “but I understood from her that he is interested in Gwendoline’s fate.”

“He? By what right does he dare? He is interested in Violet! That is whom the man is interested in, Mrs. Mordaunt, I tell you! And do you know what this man is? I have been at the pains to discover—a scribbler of books, a man of notoriously bad character who has had to fly from America—”

“How awful! But Mr. Dibbin, the agent, had references—”

“References are quite useless. It is as I say, and I am not guessing when I assert to you that Violet has a penchant for this man—a most dangerous penchant, which can lead to nothing but disaster, if it be not now scotched in the bud. I demand it as my right, and I beseech it as a friend, that she never see him again.”

“Yet it is all most strange. I think you exaggerate. Violet’s fancies are not errant.”

“Well, say that I exaggerate. But you will at least sympathize, Mrs. Mordaunt, with my sense of the acute danger of your further stay in London at present—”

“I think you make a mountain of a molehill, Mr. Van Hupfeldt,” said Mrs. Mordaunt with some dryness, “and I am sorry now that I have promised not to speak with Violet on the subject. Of course, I recognize your right to have your say and your way, but as for leaving London to-day at a moment’s notice, really that can’t be done.”

“Not to oblige me? not to please me?” said he, grasping the old lady’s hand with a nervous intensity of gesture that almost startled her.

“We might go to-morrow,” she admitted.

“But if they correspond or meet to-night?”

“Well, you are a lover, of course; but you shouldn’t start at shadows. Here is Violet herself.”

“Leave us a little, will you?” whispered Van Hupfeldt, rising to meet the girl in his impulsive foreigner’s way, but, forgetting his wounded leg, he had to stop short with a face of pain.

“Are you ill?” asked Violet, and a certain aloofness of manner did not escape him.

“A small accident—” he told over again the history of his fall from a horse which had never borne him. Mrs. Mordaunt went out. Violet stood at a table, turning over the leaves of a book, while Van Hupfeldt searched her face under his anxious eyes, and there was a silence between them, until Violet, taking from her pocket David’s first unsigned note to her, held it out, saying: “It was you who sent me this?”

“I have told you so,” answered Van Hupfeldt, gray to the lips. “Why do you ask again?”

“Because I am puzzled,” she answered. “I have this morning received a note in this same handwriting, unless I am very much mistaken, a note from a certain Mr.—”

“Yes. Harcourt—Christian name David.”

“Quite so. David Harcourt—I can say it,” she answered quietly. “But how, then, comes it that your note and his are in the same handwriting?”

Van Hupfeldt’s lips opened and shut, his eyes shifted, and yet he chuckled with the uneasy mirth of a ghoul: “The solution of that puzzle doesn’t seem difficult to me.”

“You mean that you got Mr. Harcourt to write your note for you?” asked Violet.

“You are shrewdness itself,” answered Van Hupfeldt.

“I did not know that you even knew him.”

“Ah, I know him well.”

“Well, then, have you brought the certificates?” she asked keenly.

“Which certificates?”

“Which? You ask that? Surely, surely, you know that a certificate of marriage and one of birth were found in the flat by a Miss L’Estrange?”

“No, I didn’t know. How could I know?”

“But am I in a dream? I have made sure that it was upon some knowledge of them that you relied when you wrote in the unsigned note, ‘It is now a pretty certain thing that your sister was a duly wedded wife.’” And she looked at David’s letter again.

“No, I had other grounds. I needn’t tell you what, since they are not yet certain—other grounds. I have not heard yet of any certificates—”

“Well, God help me, then!” she murmured, half-crying. “What, then, does Mr. Harcourt mean? He says in the note of this morning: ‘Mr. Harcourt has not been able to secure the certificates, but believes that Miss Mordaunt’s fiancé, Mr. Van Hupfeldt, may be in a position to give her some information on the subject.’ What does that mean when you never even heard of the certificates?”

Van Hupfeldt, looking squarely now at her, said: “It means nothing at all. You may take it from me that no certificates have been found.”

Violet flushed angrily. “Some one is untrue!” she cried out.

“I fear that that is so,” murmured Van Hupfeldt, dropping his eyes from her crimsoned face.

There was silence then for a while.

“With what object did this Harcourt come to you yesterday, Violet?” asked Van Hupfeldt.

“He wished to obtain my mother’s authorization for him to spend one hundred pounds in buying the certificates from Miss L’Estrange’s servant.”

“Ah, that was what he said was his object. But his real object was slightly different, I’m afraid. I know this man, you see. He is poor, and not honest.”

“Not honest?”

“No, not honest.”

“You say such a thing?”

“But what is it to you? Why do you care? Why are you pale? Yes, I say it again, not honest! the miserable ruffian.”

“If he heard you, I think he might resent it with some vigor,” she said quietly.

“Why do you speak so strangely? What is it? Do you doubt what I tell you?” asked Van Hupfeldt.

“I neither doubt nor believe. What is it to me? I only feel ashamed to live in the same world with such people. If it was not to obtain my authorization to spend the one hundred pounds for the certificates, why did he come?”

“There were no certificates!” cried Van Hupfeldt, vehemently. “The certificates were an invention. What he really wanted was, not your authorization, but the one hundred itself. He hoped that when he asked for your authorization, you, in your eagerness to have the certificates, would produce the one hundred pounds, which to a man in his position is quite a large sum, whereupon he would have decamped, and you would have heard no more either of him or of your one hundred pounds. But, as you did not hand him the money, he now very naturally writes to say that he can’t get the certificates. I know the fellow very well. I have long known him. He comes from America, where he has played such ingenious pranks once too often.”

Violet sighed with misery, like one who hears the unfavorable verdict of a doctor. “Oh, don’t!” she murmured.

“I am sorry to offend your ears,” said Van Hupfeldt, looking with interest at his nails, for they had nearly dug into the palms of his hands a few minutes earlier, “but it was necessary to tell you this. This is not the sort of man who ought ever to have entered your presence. How, by the way, did you come to know him?”

“I met him by chance at my sister’s grave. He told me that he is the tenant of the flat. He seemed good. I don’t know what to do!” She let herself fall into a chair, leaned her head on her hand, and stared miserably into vacancy, while Van Hupfeldt, limping nearer, said over her:

“You ought to promise me, Violet, never again to allow yourself to hold any sort of communication with this person. You will hardly, indeed, be able to see him again, for Mrs. Mordaunt has just been telling me of her sudden resolve to go down to Rigsworth to-morrow morning.”

“To-morrow?”

“So she says; and perhaps on the whole it is best, don’t you think?”

Violet shrugged hopeless shoulders. “I don’t care one bit either way,” she said.

“So, then, that is agreed between us. You won’t ever write to him again.”

“I don’t undertake anything of that kind,” she retorted. “I must have time to think. Are you quite sure that all this infamy is the God’s truth? It is as if you said that mountain streams ran ink. The man told me that there were certificates. They fell out of a picture-frame, he said. He looked true, he seemed good and honest; he is a young man with dark-blue eyes—”

“He is a beast!”

“I don’t know that yet, I have no certain proof. I was to see him this evening.”

“To see him? Ah, but never again, never again! And would you now, after hearing—”

“I am not sure. I must have time to think, I must have proof. I have no proof. It is hard on me, after all.”