She was so out of breath that at first it seemed as if she could not speak. He could hear her hurried breathing, almost like the catch of a sob, and in the moonlight he could see fairly clearly her flushed face, under the hat, and her tall, rather imperious figure. But he could not make out the expression of her eyes. Nevertheless, as he peered curiously into them, the thought suddenly struck him: “She is angry with me.”
“Mr. Carpentaria, I want to have a word with you,” she said at length, stiffly.
“My dear Miss Dartmouth,” he answered in his courtly and elaborate manner, “I shall be delighted. What can I do for you? I regret very much that you should have had to run after me like this.”
“I’ve been following you up for quite a long time,” she remarked, in a more friendly tone. It appeared as if his attitude and greeting had made some impression on her, in spite of herself. “First I went to your office. Then to the strong-rooms, then to the garage, then to the strong-rooms again, and now I’m here. I saw you crossing the gardens. Nobody seemed to be inclined to give me any information about you.”
“No?” he murmured, in a cautious interrogative. “Now tell me; how can I be of service to you?”
She scanned his features. They were alone together in the midst of the immense gardens. A hundred yards away was the bandstand, the scene of the greatest triumphs of his life. And yet in that moment his triumphs seemed nothing to him as he stood under her gaze. Her personality affected him powerfully. He said to himself that no woman had ever looked at him like that. There was no admiration in her glance, no prejudice either for or against him; nothing but a candid and judicial inquiry. “I hope I shall come well out of this scrutiny,” his thoughts ran. And the masculine desire formed obscurely in his breast to make this girl think favourably of him, to make her admire him, love him, worship him. He felt that to see love in these calm, courageous, independent eyes of hers would be a recompense and a reward for all he had suffered in the forty years of his existence. In a word she piqued him. He little knew that up to that very evening she had worshipped him afar off as women do worship their heroes.
“Nobody ill, I hope,” he ventured.
She ignored the observation, and said:
“Mr. Carpentaria, what have you done with Cousin Ilam?”
“What?” he cried, amazed both by the question, and by the cold firmness with which it was put.
“I think you heard what I said,” she replied. “What have you done with Cousin Ilam? Where is he?”
“Miss Dartmouth, do you imagine for one instant that I know where Mr. Ilam is? I should only like to know where he is. I’m looking for him now. But I was not aware that the fact of his disappearance was known. Indeed, I meant it to be kept as secret as possible. I——”
“No, no,” she interrupted him. “I was hoping you would be frank. I thought you had an honest face, Mr. Carpentaria, and it is because of that that I have come—like this. I have just left your poor sister. She is in despair. She has told me all.” Carpentaria did not reply immediately. At last he repeated:
“Told you all? All what? You have soon become fast friends, you and Juliette.”
“It is possible,” said Pauline drily. “I have met your sister three times, but in seasons of distress we women are obliged to cling to each other. As for Miss D’Avray and me, we live next door to each other. What more natural than that I should call on her this evening? And finding her in a condition of—shall I say?—despair, what more natural than that I should ask her what was the matter, and what more natural, seeing that she has no women friends here, and is of a nature that demands sympathy, than that on the spur of the moment she should confide in me?”
“I assure you, Miss Dartmouth,” said Carpentaria, “that I was entirely unaware of my sister’s despair—as you call it. What precisely has she confided to you?”
“Why, about her engagement to Cousin Ilam, and your opposition.”
“Pardon me, there has been no engagement,” said Carpentaria.
“Pardon me,” said Pauline, “there has been an engagement, because my cousin and your half-sister made it. Is there anybody better qualified than them to make an engagement?”
She lifted her chin.
“Well,” said Carpentaria. “Let us assume that there was an engagement.”
“They were to be married to-morrow,” remarked Pauline calmly.
“To-morrow!” Carpentaria exclaimed, aghast. “Secretly?”
“Why do you pretend to be surprised? As for the secrecy, your opposition has forced them to secrecy, because your sister is afraid of you.”
“And now that your cousin has disappeared, of course, they can’t be married to-morrow,” mused Carpentaria. “Hence this woe.”
“Why have you taken such extreme measures, such cruel measures, such wicked measures?” asked Pauline, full of indignation. “I can understand well enough that you, as a great artist, cannot be expected to behave like other people; I can understand you doing mad things, original things. I can understand you defying the law, and taking the most serious risks on yourself. But I can’t understand you being so cruel to your sister, and so utterly beside yourself, as to carry off Mr. Ilam by force.”
Her cheeks had flushed.
“By force?” murmured Carpentaria.
Then he laughed loudly, violently, magnificently, after his manner. His laugh resounded through the deserted gardens.
“Juliette thinks I have removed her betrothed by force?” he queried.
“Naturally she does!” said Pauline. “The most extraordinary rumours are about. It is even said that you have had a quarrel and killed him.”
“Tut-tut!” said Carpentaria, and after clearing his throat he proceeded: “Miss Dartmouth, will you kindly fix your eyes on mine. I tell you I have had nothing whatever to do with your cousin’s disappearance, and that I was entirely unaware of his intention to marry Juliette to-morrow.”
She gazed at him doubtfully.
“On your honour?”
“No,” he said proudly, “not on my honour. When I talk to a person as I am talking to you, if I say a thing is so, it is so. I decline to back my assertions with my honour.”
“I believe you,” she whispered softly, and her eyes fell.
“Thanks!” he said. “Will you shake hands?”
And she gave him her hand loyally. And he thought it was a very slim and thrilling hand to shake.
“Do you know,” he said, “it was exceedingly naughty of you to go and credit me with being such a monster.”
“Well,” she replied, “perhaps I never did really believe it.” She smiled at him courageously. “But I was angry with you for objecting to the match. I suppose you won’t deny that you have objected to the match.”
“No,” he said, “I shan’t deny that.”
“And your reasons?”
“I could not disclose them to Mr. Ilam’s cousin,” he answered. “And perhaps they are not as strong as they were. I am beginning to think that just as you accused me wrongly, so I have accused your cousin wrongly. But I can assure you I had better reason than you. Ah, Miss Dartmouth,” he added, “it may well occur that you will infinitely regret ever having come into the City.”
“Never!” she said positively.
“That’s very polite,” he commented.
“We are getting away from the point,” she remarked in a new tone. “I have left your sister in a pitiable state. If you have not had anything to do with the disappearance of Cousin Ilam, who has?”
“He may have disappeared voluntarily,” said Carpentaria.
“Impossible!” she replied.
“I think so too.” Carpentaria agreed. “At first I was capable of believing that he had played an enormous comedy in order to disappear in the most effective manner. But really the comedy grows too enormous to be any longer a comedy. It may be a tragedy by this time.”
“And whom do you suspect?” queried Pauline impatiently.
“If I were you,” was Carpentaria’s strange response, “I should ask your sister, Miss Rosie.”
“Rosie!”
“Rosie.”
“Mr. Carpentaria, what on earth do you mean?”
“I mean that your sister probably knows something of the affair. Where is she at the present moment?”
“She is watching Mrs. Ilam, in place of the nurse.”
“I gravely doubt it,” said Carpentaria with firmness.
“But I have seen her there.”
“It is conceivable,” said Carpentaria. “But I gravely doubt if she is still there.”
“I shall be compelled to think that after all you are a little mad,” Pauline observed coldly.
“We are all more or less mad,” said Carpentaria. “Otherwise your sister, for instance, would not hold long conversations with a highly suspicious character every night from the window of her room.”
Pauline, in the light of her knowledge of what had taken place in and about the Ilam bungalow on the first night of her residence there, could scarcely affect not to understand, at any rate partially, Carpentaria’s allusion.
“I don’t quite——” she began, lamely.
“Do you mean to say,” he interrupted her at once, “do you mean to say, dear lady, that you are entirely unaware of the surreptitious visits of a certain mysterious person to Mr. Ilam’s house?”
“I am not entirely unaware of them,” she said frankly! “I saw the man myself one night. I spoke to him. My sister also—also spoke to him. But I have not seen nor heard of him since. Nor has Rosie.”
“Of that you are sure?”
“Yes, I think I may say I am sure.”
“Then I must undeceive you,” Carpentaria spoke firmly. “I also have acquired a certain curiosity as to that strange individual. And to satisfy my curiosity I have kept a considerable number of vigils. And I am in a position to state that, not only on the first night of your arrival, but every night your sister has had speech with that person from the window of her room.”
“Who is he? What can he want?” demanded Pauline, nervously.
“That is a question that I meant to put to you,” said Carpentaria in reply.
“As for me, I know nothing.”
“When you spoke to him, as you admit you did, did he not ask you to do something?”
“Yes, and I refused his request.”
“But your sister? What did she do?”
“Oh! Mr. Carpentaria,” murmured Pauline, “can I trust you?”
“You know that you can.”
She related to him all the details of the episode of the black box.
“And after that,” Carpentaria commented, “your sister continues to have stolen interviews with this man.”
“I can’t help thinking you are mistaken. Rosie would never keep such a secret from me.”
“It will be very easy to throw some light on the matter,” said Carpentaria. “Let us go to your house and see whether Miss Rosie is in Mrs. Ilam’s room as you imagine her to be, and as I imagine her not to be. I may tell you quite openly my opinion that Miss Rosie has had something to do with the disappearance of Mr. Ilam. I am convinced, indeed I know, that he has been spirited away, together with a trifling amount of money, by our mysterious visitor, and since our mysterious visitor talks to Miss Rosie each night, she on her balcony and he beneath it—well, I leave the inference to yourself.”
Pauline started back.
“Yes,” she said, in a low voice, “let us go and see.”
And they went, walking side by side in silence across the gardens.
“I will wait here,” said Carpentaria, when they arrived at the side-door of the Ilam bungalow. “You can ascertain whether anything unusual has occurred in the house, and particularly if your sister is still at her post, and then you will be kind enough to come back and report to me. I will watch here.” Without replying Pauline passed into the house. In a few minutes she returned. Tears stood in her eyes.
“Well?” queried Carpentaria.
“Rosie is not in the house,” she answered. “Mrs. Ilam is alone. Happily she is asleep. Everything is quiet. But Rosie——!”
A sob escaped her.
Carpentaria and Pauline continued to stand motionless outside the house, both of them hesitant, recoiling before the circumstances which faced them. The night remained clear, almost brilliant.
“The entire situation is changed,” said Carpentaria at length. “A new factor has entered into it.”
“What factor?” Pauline demanded.
“Why, your sister, of course!” he replied, with a slight smile that disclosed momentarily the quizzical male person in him. “Consider how it complicates the affair. If I had to deal only with the mysterious individual with grey hair and a blue suit—perhaps you do not know that he calls himself Jetsam?—I could go to work in a simple masculine fashion, and in the end one of us would suffer, probably he. But with a woman in the case——”
“How can you be sure,” Pauline interrupted him, “that Rosie is in the case?”
“Can you doubt it?”
“I cannot understand why she should behave so!”
“Perhaps she knew him before,” Carpentaria hazarded.
“Never,” said Pauline positively—“never.”
“Then he has certainly been able to exercise a most remarkable influence over her.”
“Not a hypnotic influence, or anything of that kind?”
“Perhaps an influence of quite another kind—quite another kind.”
“But Rosie is scarcely half his age.”
“Do these things depend on age?” cried Carpentaria. “They depend on glances, sympathies, and trifles even more subtle than sympathies. Besides, she is more than half his age.”
“Oh,” murmured Pauline, with a sudden wistful appeal in her voice, “I shall trust you to help me, Mr. Carpentaria. Rosie may be in danger; she may be doing something very foolish, mixing herself up like this in the kidnapping of poor Cousin Ilam. What is to be done?”
“She is decidedly doing something very foolish,” said Carpentaria, “foolish, that is, from a mere ordinary common-sense point of view. But I don’t think she is in any danger. I don’t think that either she or you are the sort of woman that gets into danger without very good cause. As to what is to be done, I have an idea. Mrs. Ilam will be all right alone?”
“Yes; for a few hours, at any rate.”
“Then will you come with me to the river? I have some investigations to make.”
“Certainly,” said Pauline.
And as they crossed the Oriental Gardens for the second time that night, he told her what he knew about the use, or rather the abuse, of the automobile.
The marble parapet of the immense terrace of the gardens stood a dozen feet above the level of high tide. The terrace was continuous from end to end, but in several places it formed a viaduct over paths that ran from the gardens at a steep slope down to the bed of the river. It was one of these paths, a specially clayey one, at the point where it ran under the terrace, that Carpentaria suspected the automobile of having taken. Assuming his suspicion to be correct, the automobile could only have descended to the Thames, and then, if the tide gave room, turned round and returned; or, if the tide did not give room, backed out without turning.
“Its sole purpose,” said Carpentaria, as they talked the matter over, “could have been to pass something to a boat. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” Pauline agreed, and then she added, “unless they merely wanted to throw something into the river.”
“What!” He cried; “a corpse?”
“No,” she said calmly. “I was thinking of the two thousand five hundred pounds in gold that you told me had been stolen.”
He paused.
“This is really very clever of you,” he said. “But why should they throw it into the river.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s high tide, or rather it was, about an hour and a half ago. They might have sunk the money, intending to recover it at their leisure during the night when the tide sank.”
“Yes, I must repeat,” he said; “this is really very clever of you.”
They were already beginning to descend the broadest of the three paths which led from the level of the gardens to the level of the river, and the wheelmarks of an automobile were clearly visible thereon, when Carpentaria halted.
“Suppose,” he whispered, “they are there now?”
“Who? Mr. Jetsam and my sister?”
“No, not your sister. Mr. Jetsam and his—other accomplices—whoever they may be. I do not imagine that your sister has been concerned in the actual—er—affair. Indeed, she was at home with you at the time. But if Jetsam, for instance, should be down there now, alone or with others, there might be a row on my appearance. I will therefore ask you to stay where you are, Miss Dartmouth.”
She shook her head.
“I have begun,” she said, “and I will go through with it. Besides, what danger could there be? People don’t go shooting and killing promiscuously like that.”
“Oh, don’t they!” Carpentaria exclaimed.
“Moreover, I have no fancy to be left alone here now,” she added. “And most likely there isn’t anyone there at all.”
“Hush!” said Carpentaria. “Can’t you hear the splash of an oar? Listen!”
They listened.
“Yes,” she murmured. “And is not that the noise of a boat crunching on the beach?”
The path disappeared mysteriously before them under the terrace; they could not see the end of it. But the sound-waves came clearly enough through the little tunnel.
“We will go back,” said Carpentaria, “and slip on to the terrace. Behind the parapet we can see anything that may happen to be going on. But quietly, quietly, dear lady.”
In a few moments they were creeping across the broad terrace. Simultaneously they bent down, side by side, under the parapet and looked between its squat, rounded pillars at the water below.
Pauline gave a slight smothered cry, which Carpentaria, with an imperious gesture, bade her check.
“Not a word,” he whispered in her ear.
Rosie—Rosie and no other—was manoeuvring a boat off the shore. Her face, her dress, her hat, were plainly visible in the moonlight. She stood up in the boat, and by means of a boat-hook hooked to a large oblong stone, drew the boat to the shore. She then seized the painter and jumped lightly out.
The curious thing was that she went directly to the large oblong stone, and with a great effort, lifted it up in her arms, tottered with it to the boat, and deposited it therein. Carpentaria perceived then that the stone was not a stone, but one of the coffers in which was kept the gold of the City of Pleasure. He perceived also that, attached to the coffer, was a dozen feet or so of rope with a cork float at the end. Rosie followed the coffer into the boat, pushed off, and then, at a distance of a few yards from the shore, pitched the coffer into the river. This done, she landed, made fast the painter of the boat to an iron ring in the wall of the embankment and departed; and she did it all rather neatly.
Immediately she had disappeared under the terrace, Pauline cried, starting up:
“I must go to her—I must ask her what she means by doing such things.”
“Pardon me,” said Carpentaria; “you must do nothing of the kind. I most seriously beg you to do nothing of the kind. By interfering now you may spoil the coup which we may ultimately make.”
“I don’t quite comprehend you,” Pauline observed. “Miss Dartmouth,” he addressed her excitedly, “there can be no doubt in your mind now that your sister is concerned in this plot, whatever it is. I am perfectly convinced that her motives are good, honourable, kind-hearted. But she is concerned in it. We must, therefore, so far as we can, treat her as one of the conspirators——”
“But surely——”
“Always with profound respect,” said Carpentaria. “Had the person in the boat been any other than your sister, should we have revealed ourselves? Certainly not! We should have followed the plot to its next development, with this advantage—that we knew something which the conspirators imagined to be a secret. The fact that the person in the boat was your sister must not alter our course of conduct. And permit me to add, Miss Dartmouth, that you first approached me on behalf of my sister. We owe something to her, do we not?”
“Yes,” said Pauline in a low voice. “Then what do you mean to do next?”
“I suggest that we go back to your house, to see whether your sister has returned. May I ask whether, when you last spoke to her, she gave you to understand that she meant to stay with Mrs. Ilam?”
Pauline breathed a reluctant affirmative.
“No hint that she was going out?”
“None. And——”
“And what?”
“Oh, dear!” Pauline sighed. “Must I tell you? Yes, I must! I’m sure Rosie is acting for the best, but really it was not her turn to watch Mrs. Ilam to-night.”
“Whose turn was it?”
“The nurse’s.”
“And your sister changed the rotation?”
“Yes. She said the nurse needed a holiday, and told her she could go away for twenty-four hours, and that she would take her place.”
“What time was that?”
“About six o’clock this evening, I think.”
“And where has the nurse gone?”
“The nurse has gone to a concert at Queen’s Hall, and will sleep at the house of some friends at Islington.”
“And does your sister imagine you to be in bed?”
“I expect so,” said Pauline.
They slowly returned to the neighbourhood of the bungalows. Carpentaria wanted to hurry, but it seemed as though Pauline was being held back by some occult force. As a matter of fact, she dreaded the moment when she should re-enter the house. But at length, they stood once again by the doorstep of Josephus Ilam.
“What am I to do?” Pauline demanded sadly. “What do you think will be the best thing to do?”
“We have not seen your sister in the gardens,” said Carpentaria. “She has most probably returned. She would not be likely to leave Mrs. Ilam for very long, would she? Go and see if she has returned, if she is in Mrs. Ham’s room. And if she is, question her.”
“But how? What am I to say? Am I to ask her if she has been out?”
“By no means!” said Carpentaria promptly. “You are to pretend that you know nothing. You must approach her diplomatically. Either she will tell the truth or she will——”
“Lie! Lie!” cried Pauline. “Say it openly! Say the word! Admit that you are persuading me to behave despicably to the creature who is dearest to me in all the world.”
“If there is duplicity,” Carpentaria answered, “you, at any rate, did not begin it. We are convinced of your sister’s good intentions. What else matters? In a few days, perhaps to-morrow, all will be explained. Let me entreat you to go at once. I will await your report.”
She shook her head sadly, opened the door with her latchkey, and was just about to shut it when Carpentaria stopped her.
“One moment,” he said. “You have told me your sister believes you to be in bed.”
“I say ‘probably.’”
“It is important that she should not be undeceived. I need not insist. You can easily make it appear that, having been awakened by some noise, you have got up. Eh?” And he smiled.
She tried to smile in return, and disappeared from his view. Within the house, she crept upstairs, and into her bedroom, feeling like a thief. When she emerged therefrom she had put on a peignoir, and her coiffure was disarranged. She went to the door of Mrs. Ham’s room, and listened intently. There was not a sound. If she was to obey Carpentaria she must enter, and she must wear a false mask: to that sister to whom she had all her life been as sincere as it is possible for one human being to be to another. Well, she could not enter—she could not enter! Her legs would not carry her through the doorway. And so, instead of going in, she called:
“Rosie!”
But her voice was so weak that she scarcely even heard it herself.
No reply came from the interior. And she called again, this time quite loudly:
“Rosie, dear!”
Then she opened the door an inch or two. There was a rush of skirts across the room, and Rosie appeared. She was evidently in a state of extreme excitement.
“What’s the matter? Are you ill?” asked Rosie.
“I—I was wakened by some noise or other,” said Pauline painfully, and it appeared to her that Carpentaria was whispering in her ear the words that she must say. “And—and—I—I thought perhaps something had gone wrong here.”
“No,” was Rosie’s reply. “But how queer you look, darling! You must have had a nightmare. You have quite startled me.”
Pauline did not answer at once.
“You aren’t undressed! You haven’t lain down,” she said at length. “I thought you could always sleep very well on that sofa.”
“So I can,” said Rosie. “But I’ve been reading. And besides—it’s rather upsetting about Cousin Ilam. I wonder where he can be.”
“Oh!” Pauline remarked summarily, “he’s pretty certain to turn up to-morrow. I expect he’s gone into town.”
Rosie yawned.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Well, good-night, darling,” said Pauline, and took Rosie’s hand. .
“Good-night.”
“How cold your hand is!” Pauline observed, with an inward tremor. “Have you been out?”
“Been out? What do you mean?”
“Outside on to the balcony?”
“No. I haven’t stirred from my chair, darling. Bye-bye.”
They stared at each other for an instant, each full of dissimulation, and yet also of love, and then they kissed one another passionately, and Pauline departed. They were women.
Having retired to her bedroom and divested herself of the deceitful peignoir, Pauline made her way, with all the precautions of secrecy, downstairs again, and so to the door which gave on the avenue. Carpentaria was not in view when she timorously put her head out of the door, and she was in a mind to rush back to her sister in order to confide in her absolutely, and to demand in return her entire confidence. She allowed herself to suspect for a brief instant that, after all, Carpentaria had not been behaving openly with her; but just then the musician arrived—he had evidently been watching the other side of the house.
“You were right,” she whispered, before he had time to ask a question.
“Your sister denies that she has been out?”
Pauline nodded.
“Does this help us?” she inquired, as it were, bitterly. “Are we any better off, now that I have lied to Rosie, and forced Rosie to lie to me?”
“I think so,” he said.
“I don’t,” Pauline retorted. “And I have passed the most dreadful five minutes of all my life.”
She seemed to be desolated, to be filled with grief.
“I’m so sorry, so very sorry,” he murmured.
“No, no,” she said quickly. “You have been quite right. We find ourselves in the centre of a mystery, and I have no excuse for being sentimental. My trust in Rosie remains what it always was. Still, facts are facts, and I am ready to do whatever you instruct me to do.”
“Well,” he said, “your sister must have had some reason for insisting on watching Mrs. Ilam out of her turn; and that reason is not connected with the little matter of the boat. If she had merely wished to go unobserved to the boat she would have gone to bed as usual and said nothing, wouldn’t she?”
Pauline nodded.
“It is obvious, therefore, that there is something else to be done, or to occur—probably in Mrs. Ilam’s bedroom. For if it is not to happen in Mrs. Ilam’s bedroom, why should your sister have voluntarily tied herself up there?”
“But what could possibly happen in Mrs. Ilam’s bedroom?” demanded Pauline, with a nervous start of apprehension.
“How do I know?” Carpentaria replied. “I can only point to certain indications, which lead to certain conclusions. You will oblige me by watching, Miss Dartmouth.”
“Where?”
“The landing and the stairs of your house. Is there a view of the stairs from your room?”
“Yes,” said Pauline.
“Then you can watch from there. Do not burn a light.”
“And if anything strange does occur?”
“Go to your balcony, and tie a white handkerchief to the railings.”
“And you?” queried Pauline.
At that moment there was the sound of a window opening in Carpentaria’s bungalow across the avenue, and a voice called plaintively:
“Carlos, is that you?”
“It is I,” he answered, as low as he could.
“Go to her. Comfort her,” Pauline enjoined him.
“I am coming to you,” he obediently called in the direction of the window.
Both of them could see the vague figure of Juliette, framed in the window.
“Poor thing!” murmured Pauline.
“Afterwards,” said Carpentaria hurriedly, “I shall come out again and watch the outside of your house. With you inside and me outside, it will be very difficult for anything peculiar to occur without our knowledge.”
And he left her, impressed by her common sense and her self-control, and withal her utter womanliness.
The hall of his own house was dark, and all the rooms of the ground-floor deserted. He mounted to the upper story. Juliette, hearing his footsteps, had come to the door of the study, from whose window she had hailed him, and she stared at him with a fixed and almost stony gaze as he approached. Her figure was silhouetted against the electric light in the study.
“Turn that light out instantly,” he said, with involuntary sternness.
She did not move, and, obsessed by the importance of giving to anyone who might be spying the impression that all the occupants of the house had retired for the night, he pushed past her and turned off the switch.
“Oh, Carlos,” Juliette sighed, “how cruel you are?”
He now saw her indistinctly in the deep gloom of the chamber, and her form seemed pathetic to him, and her sad, despairing voice even more pathetic. He went up to her impulsively and took her hand.
“Juliette,” he said, “can you believe it of me?”
“Miss Dartmouth has spoken to you?” she asked, a glimmer of hope in her tone.
“Yes,” he said. “Can you believe that I have—have caused anything to be done to Ilam?”
“Have you not?” she demanded eagerly.
And he told her what he had previously told Pauline.
She thanked him with an affectionate kiss.
“Carlos,” she said, and the words fell in a little torrent from her mouth, “I told you a falsehood this morning. I acted a part. He was in my sitting-room all the time. Can you forgive me?”
“I was sure of it,” said Carpentaria calmly, “and I can forgive you,” he added.
“You do not know what it is to love,” she said. “You have never cared for anyone—in that way. I hadn’t—until I met——”
“Who says I don’t know what it is to love!” he stopped her. “Perhaps I am learning. But tell me, when did you last see Ilam? Have you seen him since this morning?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Where?”
“At his offices this evening.”
“He gave no hint that he was in any danger?”
“No immediate danger. Oh, Carlos, he is not what you think him to be. He is an honest man, and I am so sorry for him, and I love him. Where is he? What has happened to him?”
“I can’t tell you now,” was Carpentaria’s reply, “but before morning we shall know more, or I am mistaken.”
“It is for the crimes of others that he is suffering,” said Juliette.
“He told you so?”
“No, but I guess; I am sure. I know all his faults—all of them. I do not hide one of them from myself. Why should I, since he loves me and I love him?”
“My child,” said Carpentaria abruptly, “you might have trusted me more.”
“I should have trusted you absolutely,” answered Juliette, “but he is afraid of you. He would not let me. I could not disobey him. Sometime, somehow, you must have said something to frighten him and, though he is so big and strong, he is timid; he has timid eyes. It was because of his eyes that I first began to like him. Carlos, what are you going to do?”
“I am going to watch,” was the response.
“A man came to the back-door not long since, and asked whether you were at home.”
“A man came to the back-door?” repeated Carpentaria sharply, every nerve suddenly on the strain. “Who was it? What did you say to him?”
“At first I thought it was one of the night-staff, and then the man’s face made me suspicious; I imagined it might be a thief—you know what a state I am in, Carlos—and so I told him you had just gone to bed, and I shut the door in his face. I didn’t want him to think there were only women in the house. But, of course, it couldn’t have been a burglar—here——”
“That is the wisest thing you have done this day, Juliette,” Carpentaria remarked; and then he questioned her as to the appearance of the mysterious inquirer.
“Are you going to leave me?” cried Juliette, when Carpentaria picked up his hat, which had fallen from a chair to the floor.
“Yes,” he said; “you must try to rest.”
And then they were both startled by a strange noise on the window-pane. They listened. The noise was repeated.
“Is it rain?” asked Juliette.
“No,” said Carpentaria, “it’s gravel.”
He went out on to the balcony. A form was discernible in the avenue below.
“Is that you, Miss Dartmouth?” he whispered.
“Yes,” came the reply. “I——”
“Hush!” he warned her. “I’ll be with you in a second.”
With a brief explanation to Juliette, he hastened downstairs and let himself out of the house. Pauline was already standing at the door.
“Anything happened?” he questioned her.
“Nothing has happened,” said Pauline, “but there is something extremely curious, all the same, in our house. It is a most singular thing that the housemaid, who never forgets anything, forgot just to-night to leave some milk in my room—a thing which I had specially reminded her to remember, so I rang the bell for her. There is a bell that communicates direct with her room—it used to be in Mrs. Ilam’s bedroom, but we have had it changed—there was no answer. I rang again. No answer. You know, I’m the sort of person that can’t stand that sort of thing from servants, so I went upstairs to her. She was not in her room. There are two beds in that room, the second one for the cook. Both beds were empty; they had neither of them been slept in. I went into the rooms of the other servants. They are all empty. Rosie and I and Mrs. Ilam are alone in the house.”
Carpentaria paused.
“Did you tell your sister?”
“No, I came straight here.”
“That was very discreet of you,” said Carpentaria.
“I am beginning to get frightened,” Pauline added. “What can it mean? All the servants gone——”