The de Bercy Affair

"I don't see it, see any puzzle, I mean. It might have appeared on any other letter, say to his bankers, or to a friend. It was a mere accident. There is nothing in that."

"Quite right," grinned Furneaux. "And it was a sister's name, of course. 'Rosalind.' A pretty name. Poor girl, she will be anxious about her fond and doting brother."

"It may be another woman's name," said Clarke sagely – "though, for that matter, he'd hardly be on with a new love before the other one is cold in her grave, as the saying is."

Furneaux laughed a low, mysterious laugh in his throat. It had a peculiar sound, and rang hard and bitter in the ears of the other.

"I'll keep this, if you don't mind," he said, lapsing into the detective again.

Meantime, Furneaux knew that there were other papers of Janoc's in Clarke's pocket, and he lingered a little to give his colleague a chance of exhibiting them. Clarke made no move, however, so he put out his hand, saying, "Well, good luck," and disappeared southward, while Clarke walked northward toward his residence, Hampstead way. But in Southampton Row an overwhelming impatience to see the other Janoc papers overcame him, and he commenced to examine them as he went.

Two were bills. A third was a newspaper cutting from the Matin commenting on the murder in Feldisham Mansions. The fourth had power to arrest Clarke's steps. It was a letter of three closely-written pages – in French; and though Clarke's French, self-taught, was not fluent, it could walk, if it could not fly. In ten minutes he had read and understood…

St. Petersburg says that since the secret meeting, a steady growth of courage in the rank-and-file is observable. As for the Nevski funds, an individual highly placed, whose name is in three syllables, is said to be willing to come to the rescue. Lastly, as to the traitress, you will see to it that she to whose hands vengeance has been intrusted shall fail on the 3rd.

This was in the letter; and as Inspector Clarke's eyes fell on the date, "the 3d," his clenched hand rose triumphantly in air. It was on July the 3d that Rose de Bercy had been done to death!

When Clarke again walked onward his eyes were alight with a wild exultation. He was thinking:

"Now, Allah be praised, that I didn't show Furneaux this thing, as I nearly was doing!"

He reached his house with a sense of surprise – he had covered so much ground unconsciously, and the dominant thought in his mind was that the race was not always to the swift.

"Luck is the thing in a man's career," he said to himself, "not wit, or mere sharpness to grasp a point. Slow, and steady, and lucky – that's the combination. The British are a race slower of thought than some of the others, just as I may be a slower man than Furneaux, but we Britons rule the world by luck, as we won the battle of Waterloo by luck. Luck and prime beef, they go together somehow, I do believe. And what I am to-day I owe to luck, for it's happened to me too often to doubt that I've got the gift of it in my marrow."

He put his latch-key into the door with something of a smile; and the next morning Mrs. Clarke cried delightedly to him:

"Well, something must have happened to put you in this good temper!"

At that same hour of the morning Furneaux, for his part, was at Osborne's house in Mayfair, where he had an appointment with Mrs. Hester Bates, Osborne's housekeeper. He was just being admitted into the house when the secretary, Miss Prout, walked up to the door – rather to his surprise, for it was somewhat before the hour of a secretary's attendance. They entered together and passed into the library, where Hylda Prout invited him to sit down for a minute.

"I am only here just to collect and answer the morning's letters," she explained pleasantly. "There's a tree which I know in Epping Forest – an old beech – where I'm taking a book to read. See my picnic basket? – tomato and cress sandwiches, half a bottle of Chianti, an aluminum folding cup to drink from. I'll send for Mrs. Bates in a moment, and leave her to your tender inquiries. But wouldn't you prefer Epping Forest on a day like this? Do you like solitude, Inspector Furneaux? Dreams?"

"Yes, I like solitude, as boys like piracy, because unattainable. I can only just find time to sleep, but not time enough to dream."

Hylda lifted her face beatifically.

"I love to dream! – to be with myself – alone: the world in one compartment, I in another, with myself; with silence to hear my heart beat in, and time to fathom a little what its beating is madly trying to say; an old tree overhead, and breezes breathing through it. Oh, they know how to soothe; they alone understand, Inspector Furneaux, and they forgive."

Furneaux said within himself: "Well, I seem to be in for some charming confidences"; and he added aloud: "Quite so; they understand – if it's a lady: for Nature is feminine; and only a lady can fathom a lady."

"Oh, women!" Hylda said, with her pretty pout of disdain, – "they are nothing, mostly shallow shoppers. Give me a man – if he is a man. And there have been a few women, too – in history. But, man or woman, what I believe is that for the greater part, we remain foreigners to ourselves through life – we never reach that depth in ourselves, 'deeper than ever plummet sounded,' where the real I within us lives, the real, bare-faced, rabid, savage, divine I, naked as an ape, contorted, sobbing, bawling what it cannot speak."

Furneaux, who had certainly not suspected this blend of philosopher and poet beneath that mass of red hair, listened in silence. For the second time he saw this strange girl's eyes take fire, glow, rage a moment like a building sweltering in conflagration, and then die down to utter dullness.

Though he knew just when to speak, his reply was rather tame.

"There's something in that, too – you are right."

She suddenly smiled, with a pretty air of confusion.

"Surely," she said. "And now to business: first, Mrs. Bates – "

"One moment," broke in Furneaux. "Something has caused me to wish to ask you – do you know Mr. Osborne's relatives?"

"I know of them. He has only a younger brother, Ralph, who is at Harvard University – and an aunt."

"Aunt's name Rosalind?"

"No – Priscilla – Priscilla Emptage."

"Who, then, may 'Rosalind' be?"

"No connection of his. You must have made some mistake."

Furneaux held out the note of Rupert Osborne to Janoc intended for Clarke, holding it so folded that the name of the hotel was not visible – only the transferred word "Rosalind."

And as Hylda Prout bent over it, perplexed at first by the seeming scrawl, Furneaux's eye was on her face. He was aware of the instant when she recognized the handwriting, the instant when reasoning and the putting of two-and-two together began to work in her mind, the instant when her stare began to widen, and her tight-pressed lips to relax, the rush of color to fade from her face, and the mask of freckles to stand out darkly in strong contrast with her ivory white flesh. When she had stared for a long minute, and had had enough, she did not say anything, but turned away silently to stand at a window, her back to Furneaux.

He looked at her, thinking: "She guesses, and suffers."

Suddenly she whirled round. "May I – see that letter?" she asked in a low voice.

"The whole note?" he said; "I'm afraid that it's private – not my secret – I regret it – an official document, you know."

"All right," she said quietly. "You may come to me for help yet" – and turned to the pile of letters on the desk.

"Anyway, Rosalind is not a relative, to your knowledge?" he persisted.

"No."

She stuffed the letters into a drawer, bowed, and was gone, leaving him sorry for her, for he saw a lump working in her throat.

Some minutes after her disappearance, a plump little woman came in – Mrs. Hester Bates, housekeeper in the Osborne ménage. Her hair lay in smooth curves on her brow as on the upturned bulge of a china bowl. There was an apprehensive look in her upward-looking eyes, so Furneaux spoke comfortingly to her, after seating her near the window.

"Don't be afraid to speak," he said reassuringly. "What you have to say is not necessarily against Mr. Osborne's interests. Just state the facts simply – you did see him here on the murder night, didn't you?"

She muttered something, as a tear dropped on the ample bosom of her black dress.

"Just a little louder," Furneaux said.

"Yes," she sobbed, "I saw his back."

"You were – where?"

"Coming up the kitchen stairs to talk to Mr. Jenkins."

"Don't cry. And when you reached the top of the kitchen stairs you saw his back on the house stairs – at the bottom? at the top?"

"He was nearer the top. I only saw him a minute."

"A moment, you mean, I think. And in that one moment you became quite sure that it was Mr. Osborne? Though it was only his back you saw?"

"Yes, sir…"

"No, don't cry. It's nothing. Only are you certain sure – that's the point?"

"Yes, I am sure enough, but – "

"But what?"

"I thought he was the worse for drink, which was a mad thing."

"Oh, you thought that. Why so?"

"His feet seemed to reel from side to side – almost from under him."

"His feet – I see. From side to side… Ever saw him the worse for drink before?"

"Never in all my life! I was amazed. Afterwards I had a feeling that it wasn't Mr. Osborne himself, but his spirit that I had seen. And it may have been his spirit! For my Aunt Pruie saw the spirit of her boy one Sunday afternoon when he was alive and well in his ship on the sea."

"But a spirit the worse for drink?" murmured Furneaux; "a spirit whose feet seemed to reel?"

She dropped her eyes, and presently wept a theory.

"A spirit walks lighter-like than a Christian, sir."

"Did you, though," asked Furneaux, making shorthand signs in his notebook, "did you have the impression that it might be a spirit at the time, or was it only afterwards?"

"It was only afterwards when I thought matters over," said Mrs. Bates. "Even at the time it crossed my mind that there was something in it I didn't rightly understand."

"Now, what sort of something? – can't you say?"

"No, sir. I don't know."

"And when you saw Mr. Jenkins immediately afterwards, did you mention to him that you had seen Mr. Osborne?"

"No, I didn't say anything to him, nor him to me."

"Pity… But the hour. You have said, I hear, that it was five minutes to eight. Now, the murder was committed between 7.30 and 7.45; and at five to eight Mr. Osborne is said by more than one person to have been at the Ritz Hotel. If he was there, he couldn't have been here. If he was here, he couldn't have been there. Are you sure of the hour – five to eight?"

As to that Mrs. Bates was positive. She had reason to remember, having looked at the clock à propos of the servants' supper. And Furneaux went away from her with eyes in which sparkled a light that some might have called wicked, and all would have called cruel, as when the cat hears a stirring, and crouches at the hole's rim with her soul crowded into an unblinking stare of expectation.

He looked at his watch, took a cab to Waterloo, and while in the vehicle again studied that scrawled "Rosalind" on Osborne's letter to Janoc.

"A trip to Tormouth should throw some light on it," he thought. "If it can be shown that he is actually in love – again – already – " and as he so thought, the cab ran out of St. James's Street into Pall Mall.

"Look! quick! There – in that cab!" hissed a man at that moment to a girl with whom he was lurking in a doorway deep under the shadow of an awning near the corner. "Look!"

"That's him!"

"Sure? Look well!"

"The very man!"

"Well, of all the fatalities!"

The cab dashed out of sight, and the man – Chief Inspector Winter – clapped his hand to his forehead in a spasm of sheer distraction and dismay. The woman with him was the murdered actress's cook, Bertha Seward, the same whom Inspector Clarke had one morning seen in earnest talk with Janoc under the pawnbroker's sign in St. Martin's Lane.

Winter walked away from her, looking on the ground, seeking his lost wits there. Then suddenly he turned and overtook her again.

"And you swear to me, Miss Seward," he said gravely, "that that very man was with your mistress in her flat on the evening of the murder?"

"I would know him anywhere," answered the slight girl, looking up into his face with her oblique Chinese eyes that were always half shut as if shy of light. "I thought to myself at the time what a queer, perky person he was, and what working eyes the little man had, and I wondered who he could be. That's the very man in that cab, I'm positive."

"And when you and Pauline went out to the Exhibition you left him with your mistress, you say?"

"Yes, sir. They were in the drawing-room together; and quarreling, too, for her voice was raised, and she laughed twice in an angry way."

"Quarreling – in French? You didn't catch – ?"

"No, it was in French."

Inspector Winter leant his shoulder against the house-wall, and his head slowly sank, and then all at once dropped down with an air of utter abandonment, for Furneaux was his friend – he had looked on Furneaux as a brother.

Furneaux, meantime, at Waterloo was taking train to Tormouth, and his fixed stare boded no good will to Rupert Osborne.

CHAPTER VII

AT TORMOUTH

Furneaux reached Tormouth about three in the afternoon, and went boldly to the Swan Hotel, since he was unknown by sight to Osborne. It was an old-fashioned place, with a bar opening out of the vestibule, and the first person that met his eye was of interest to him – a man sitting in the bar-parlor, who had "Neapolitan" written all over him – a face that Furneaux had already marked in Soho. He did not know the stranger's name, but he would have wagered a large sum that this queer visitor to Tormouth was a bird of the Janoc flock.

"What is he doing here?" Furneaux asked himself; and the only answer that suggested itself was: "Keeping an eye on Osborne. Perhaps that explains how Janoc got hold of the name 'Glyn.'"

When he was left alone in the bedroom which he took, he sat with his two hands between his knees, his head bent low, giving ten minutes' thought by the clock to the subject of Anarchists. Presently his lips muttered:

"Clarke is investigating the murder on his own account; he suspects that Anarchists were at the bottom of it; he has let them see that he suspects; and they have taken alarm, knowing that their ill repute can't bear any added load of suspicion. Probably she was more mixed up with them than is known; probably there was some quarrel between them and her; and so, seeing themselves suspected, they are uneasy. Hence Janoc wrote to Osborne in Clarke's name, asking how much Osborne knew of her connection with Anarchists. He must have managed somehow to have Osborne shadowed down here – must be eager to have Osborne proved guilty. Hence, perhaps, for some reason, the presence of that fellow below there in the parlor. But I, for my part, mustn't allow myself to be drawn off into proving them guilty. Another, another, is my prey!"

He stood up sharply, crept to his door, and listened. All the upper part of the house was as still as the tomb at that hour. Mr. Glyn – Osborne's name on the hotel register – was, Furneaux had been told, out of doors.

He passed out into a corridor, and, though he did not know which was Osborne's room, after peering through two doorways discovered it at the third, seeing in it a cane with a stag's head which Osborne often carried. He slipped within, and in a moment was everywhere at once in the room, filling it with his presence, ransacking it with a hundred eyes.

In one corner was an antiquated round table in mahogany, with a few books on it, and under the books a copper-covered writing-pad. In the writing-pad he found a letter – a long one, not yet finished, in Osborne's hand, written to "My dear Isadore."

The first words on which Furneaux's eyes fell were "her unstudied grace…"

… her walk has the undulating smoothness that one looks for in some untamed creature of the wild… You are a painter, and a poet, and a student of the laws of Beauty. Well, knowing all that, I still feel sure that you would be conscious of a certain astonishment on seeing her move, she moves so well. I confess I did not know, till I knew her, that our human flesh could express such music. Her waist is small, yet so willowy and sinuous that it cannot be trammeled in those unyielding ribs of steel and bone in which women love to girdle themselves. For her slimness she is tall, perhaps, what you might think a little too tall until you stood by her side and saw that her freedom of movement had deceived you. Nor is she what you would call a girl: her age can't be a day under twenty-three. But she does not make a motion of the foot that her waist does not answer to it in as exact a proportion as though the Angel of Grace was there with measuring-tape and rod. If her left foot moves, her waist sways by so much to the left; if her right, she sways to the right, as surely as a lily on a long stalk swings to the will of every wanton wind. But, after all, words cannot express the poetry of her being. With her every step, I am confident her toe in gliding forward touches the ground steadily, but so zephyr-lightly, that only a megaphone could report it to the ear. And not only is there a distinct forward bend of the body in walking, but with every step her whole being and soul walks – the mere physical movements are the least of it! And her walk, I repeat, has the security, the lissome elegance of a leopard's – her eyes, her mouth, her hair, her neck, those of a Naiad balanced on the crest of a curling wave…

"Ah-h-h!.." murmured Furneaux on a long-drawn breath, "'A Naiad'! Something more fairy-like than Rose de Bercy!"

He read on.

Soon I shall see her dance – dance with her! and then you shall hear. There's a certain Lord Spelding a little way from here whom I know through a local doctor, and he is giving a dance at his Abbey two evenings hence – she and her mother are to be there. She has promised me that she will dance, and I shall tell you how. But I expect nothing one whit more consummate in the way of charm from her dancing than from her ordinary motions. I know beforehand that her dancing will be to her walking what the singing of a lovely voice is to its talking – beauty moved to enthusiasm, but no increase of beauty; the moon in a halo, but still the moon. What, though, do you think of me in all this, my dear Isadore? I have asked myself whether words like "fickle," "flighty," "forgetful," will not be in your mind as you read. And if you are not tolerant, who will be? She, the other, is hardly cold yet in her untimely tomb, and here am I … shall I say in love? say, at any rate, enraptured, down, down, on my two bended knees. Certainly, the other was bitter to me – she deceived, she pitilessly deceived; and I see now with the clearest eyes that love was never the name of what I felt for her, even if she had not deceived. But, oh, such a fountain of pity is in me for her – untimely gone, cut off, the cup of life in her hand, her lips purple with its wine – that I cannot help reproaching this wandering of my eye from her. It is rather shocking, rather horrible. And yet – I appeal to your sympathy – I am no more master of myself in this than of something that is now happening to the Emperor of China, or that once happened to his grandfather.

The corners of Furneaux's lips turned downward, and a lambent fire flamed in his eyes. He clutched the paper in his hand as if he would strangle its dumb eloquence. Still he glowered at the letter, and read.

But imagine, meanwhile, my false position here! I am known to her and to her mother as Mr. Glyn; and thrice has Osborne, the millionaire, the probable murderer of Rose de Bercy, been discussed between us. Think of it! – the misery, the falseness of it. If something were once to whisper to Mrs. Marsh, "this Mr. Glyn, to whom you are speaking in a tone of chilly censure of such men as Osborne, is Osborne himself; that translucent porcelain of your teacup has been made impure by his lips; you should smash your Venetian vases and Satsuma bowl of hollyhocks, since his not-too-immaculate hands have touched them: beware! a snake has stolen into your dainty and Puritan nest" – if some imp of unhappiness whispered that, what would she do? I can't exactly imagine those still lips uttering a scream, but I can see her lily fingers – like lilies just getting withered – lifted an instant in mild horror of the sacrilege! As it is, her admittance of me into the nest has been an unbending on her part, an unbending touched with informality, for it was only brought about through Richards, the doctor here, to whom I got Smythe, one of my bankers, who is likewise Richards' banker, to speak of a "Mr. Glyn." And if she now finds that being gracious to the stranger smirches her, compromises her in the slightest, she will put her thin dry lips together a little, and say "I am punished for my laxity in circumspection." And then, ah! no more Rosalind for Osborne forever, if he were ten times ten millionaires…

"'Rosalind,'" murmured Furneaux, "Rosalind Marsh. That explains the scribble on the back of the Janoc letter. He calls her Rosalind – breathes her name to the moon – writes it! We shall see, though."

At that moment he heard a step outside, and stood alert, ready to hide behind a curtain; but it was only some hurrying housemaid who passed away. He then put back the letter where he had found it; and instantly tackled Osborne's portmanteaux. The larger he found locked, the smaller, lying half under the bed, was fastened with straps, but unlocked. He quickly ransacked the knicknacks that it contained; and was soon holding up to the light between thumb and finger a singular object taken from the bottom of the bag – a scrap of lace about six inches long, half of it stained with a brown smear that was obviously the smear of – blood.

It was a peculiar lace, Spanish hand-made, and Furneaux knew well, none better than he, that the dressing-gown in which Rose de Bercy had been murdered, which she had thrown on preparatory to dressing that night, was trimmed with Spanish hand-made lace. He looked at this amazing bit of evidence with a long interest there in the light from the window, holding it away from him, frowning, thinking his own thoughts behind his brow, as shadow chases shadow. And presently he muttered the peculiar words:

"Now, any detective would swear that this was a clew against him."

He put it back into the bag, went out softly, walked downstairs, and passed out into the little town. A policeman told him where the house of Mrs. Marsh was to be found, and he hastened half a mile out of Tormouth to it.

The house, "St. Briavels," stood on a hillside behind walls and wrought-iron gates and leafage, through which peeped several gables rich in creepers and ivy. Of Osborne, so far, there was no sign.

Furneaux retraced his steps, came back to Tormouth, sauntered beyond the town over the cliffs, with the sea spread out in the sunlight, all sparkling with far-flung sprightliness. And all at once he was aware of a murmur of voices sounding out of Nowhere, like the hum of bumble-bees on a slumbrous afternoon. The ear could not catch if they were right or left, above or below. But they became louder; and suddenly there was a laugh, a delicious low cadence of a woman's contralto that seemed to roll up through an oboe in her throat. And now he realized that the speakers were just below him on the sands. He stepped nearer the edge of the cliff, and, craning and peering stealthily through its fringe of grasses, saw Osborne and a lady walking westward over the sands.

Osborne was carrying an easel and a Japanese umbrella. He was not looking where he was going, not seeing the sea, or the sands, or the sun, but seeing all things in the lady's face.

Furneaux watched them till they were out of sight behind a bend of the coast-line; he saw Osborne once stumble a little over a stone, and right himself without glancing at what he had stumbled on, without taking his gaze from the woman by his side.