The three glass eyes
Date: 2025-12-08T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Detective and mystery stories; London (England) -- Fiction; Murder -- Investigation -- Fiction

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Title: The three glass eyes

A story of to-day

Author: William Le Queux

Release date: December 8, 2025 [eBook #77426]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Anthony Treherne & Co., Ltd, 1903

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THREE GLASS EYES ***

THE
THREE GLASS EYES

A Story of To-day

BY
WILLIAM LE QUEUX
AUTHOR OF “THE GAMBLERS,” “THE UNDER-SECRETARY,”
“HER MAJESTY’S MINISTER,” ETC.

London
ANTHONY TREHERNE & CO., Ltd.
3 Agar Street, Strand, W.C.

FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER

Many readers of newspapers who have been accustomed to follow the reports of those magnificent proceedings of Ventris Blake, the noted American financier, in London, may be surprised to find so vivid a searchlight as the following thrown on the private life of a millionaire who, in his time, has made several British industries tremble.

Most public men, however, have two, if not more, selves—the self they shew to the world at large, which is generally fair and clean to look upon, and the self which in secret they hide from their best friends, and, if possible, keep out of their tell-tale features.

It is, therefore, good sometimes for the public to get away from the phantasmagoria of a princely residence in Park Lane and the brilliant evolution of the descriptive reporter, and, in the privacy of their own rooms, to take as it were, one of these creatures of Fortune to pieces—to see the stuff he is made of, to follow the effect of wealth upon his humanity, and to learn whether the beautiful principles he espouses with so much unwelcome vocal violence in the open are really in use in his every-day existence, or, are like the carpet he rolls across the pavement when giving some stately dinner party—often on show, but seldom trodden on!

This, of course, in another sense, is only a simple love story—the story of Winifred Pontifex and of her mysterious vicissitudes, temptations and dangers, but in as much as it unmasks men of the stamp of Ventris Blake it must always stand for something more than fiction, and may well serve to explore but little-known regions of crooked London life. Some cynics assert that every man has a skeleton in his cupboard. Certainly Ventris Blake had—and hence this narrative of “The Three Glass Eyes.”

WILLIAM LE QUEUX.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. WHICH RECORDS AN ODD TRANSACTION

CHAPTER II. CONCERNS A MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE

CHAPTER III. REVEALS A SECRET

CHAPTER IV. EXPLAINS WHAT VERA LEARNED

CHAPTER V. RECORDS THE APPEARANCE OF THREE GLASS EYES

CHAPTER VI. CONCERNS THE HOLE IN THE WALL

CHAPTER VII. RECOUNTS A STRANGE SCENE IN CHURCH

CHAPTER VIII. WHICH TELLS OF AN EVENTFUL NIGHT

CHAPTER IX. WHY THEY WORE A DISGUISE

CHAPTER X. WHEREIN VENTRIS BLAKE FAILS

CHAPTER XI. AGAIN—IN PARK LANE

CHAPTER XII. WHAT THE SERGEANT KNEW

CHAPTER XIII. CERTAIN LOVE LETTERS

CHAPTER XIV. TURNS ON THE LETTER “K”

CHAPTER XV. RECOUNTS PAUL’S DEFEAT

CHAPTER XVI. “OH! GREAT IS THE POWER OF WEALTH!”

CHAPTER XVII. THE STRANGE HOUSE AT SCALBY

CHAPTER XVIII. ALL ABOUT THOSE GLASS EYES

CHAPTER XIX. THE PARTING OF THE CLOUDS

CONCLUSION

THE THREE GLASS EYES

CHAPTER I.
WHICH RECORDS AN ODD TRANSACTION

“That strange-looking gentleman has called again, sir. He will not be put off with any excuse. What had I better say to him?”

Arthur Hudson, who had been busily writing at his desk in his solidly-furnished office in Cheapside, looked up, a slight expression of annoyance on his handsome clear-cut features. The clerk who had thus addressed him, a slight, middle-aged man of fifty, with a bald head, and grey moustache, and a nervous, furtive manner, coughed, and began to move his feet uneasily, for he knew he had exceeded his instructions.

“This isn’t business, Perkins,” his employer answered impatiently, laying down his pen and rising from his chair. “Don’t you see it only wants a few minutes to post-time, and I’ve not finished my letter?”

“Yes, sir,” said Perkins submissively, “but he would not take any refusal. He is so persistent; he kind of compelled me to come to you, and to ask you whether you would not see him.”

Hudson looked at the weak vapid chin and watery blue eyes of his inquiry clerk, and unconsciously sighed. He could well understand any man of strong resolute pulse making Perkins, even against his feeble flabby nature, do something which he had been distinctly ordered by his superior to refuse.

None the less, he, too, had a curious instinctive aversion from meeting and talking to this mysterious millionaire who for the past three weeks had been the torment of all the principal house and office agents in the City and the West End of London. He could not, however, just then analyse the reason of his reluctance; hence his own illogical position made him the more readily annoyed.

“But didn’t you tell him,” he proceeded as he picked up the poker and, in the last sad refuge of the average man, began to poke vigorously at the fire, “that we have searched our books, and have sent round one of our inspectors, and that we have nothing whatever to suit him?”

“Certainly. I even assured him that we had lost, at least, five pounds in trouble over our enquiries, but the only thing he did was to hand me a £5 note and say he knew how to repay trouble. Then it was he declared he must see you.”

“Well, all right,” said Hudson desperately, realising that it might save more time to see this man than to nerve Perkins to dismiss him. “If he must see me, he must, I suppose. Shew him in!” And he threw down the poker and drew forward a chair for this unwelcome client who, truth to tell, he had hitherto always done his best to avoid.

A moment later a brisk step was heard in the passage, and there entered a man about thirty-eight years of age, clad in the ordinary frock coat and light trousers of City life, and carrying a black silk hat and umbrella. At first sight one would have regarded him as a sharp, shrewd, successful, but not unkind broker. Then, as his features came to be examined in detail it would have been seen that there was some good reason why he wore those long black but obviously dyed whiskers of his—they concealed a cruel-looking jaw and mouth. His habit of frowning, too, was not unstudied. It served to take away that certain resolute look in his eyes that somehow made men and women against whom it was directed feel that they would rather brave any unseen terror than fail him in what he had commanded them to do. In the way also he took the chair which Hudson had placed for him he shewed that, in spite of all his apparent courtesy, there was deadly deliberation behind him—a deliberation that any day would have worn down better opposition than Perkins, and now made even Hudson shrink, for it seemed to suggest to him that this was a man who would not stick at any crime to extricate himself from a difficult or a dangerous position.

“Let me see,” began the house agent slowly, pretending to search his papers for a certain description of premises which he had long since learned by heart, “you are Mr. Ventris Blake, the American financier, of Park Lane, I believe.”

The stranger nodded, and waited. At times his supreme gift was silence.

“You are anxious, I understand to get a small room, twenty feet wide by twenty-five, with a sloping roof, a single casement window, with a north aspect, and certain traverse beams which you have set out in your specifications. Well, we have gone over all the property in our care, and although of course you offer an absolutely ridiculously high rent, we are sorry to say we can find nothing suitable for you. We have many vacant offices, it is true, but none that fulfils exactly your demands.”

“That is a pity,” the newcomer observed vaguely. “Luckily, the search has not been so fruitless as you think!”

For an instant there was an awkward pause—and then, as the stranger intended, Hudson himself was compelled to go on. “Ah then,” said he with an uneasy little laugh. “I must congratulate you. Of course, I heard you had been to all the principal house agents in London; for, with the help of the telephone, there is considerable freemasonry amongst us. Your requirements are so odd—so fantastic it is thought. Still, what is the good of being a millionaire if you can’t get even a room to suit you?” And he smiled again and rose, but Ventris Blake did not stir.

“Quite so,” observed the financier, now looking steadily at Hudson. “Happily I have found exactly the kind of place that I want—in Queen Victoria Street, No. 375, right at the top of the premises. I have spoken to the care-taker who now occupies the room, and he has agreed to give up its possession to me, if you will permit him, at the rent I have offered everywhere else—£250 a year.”

Again there was a pause.

Curiously enough, although the amount was preposterous, Arthur Hudson’s first impulse was to refuse the offer, although he could not exactly define the reason. Somehow the idea had slowly formed itself in his mind that trouble would come to him from this transaction. Yet all the while Ventris Blake’s eyes were fixed on his with that strong compelling look which so few could resist; and Hudson found himself, almost magnetised, muttering formal words of promise to send on the agreement, of hope that the place would answer all his client’s purposes, although he had really intended only to temporize, to gain time.

Ventris Blake now rose in his slow powerful way, and buttoned his gloves. “Thanks,” he replied. “I am certain that the room will suit me, Mr. Palamountain, and I have made a note that the matter is settled. Good-day;” and he held out his hand.

“Good-day,” repeated Hudson, somehow pleased that the interview was at length over. “Only I am not Mr. Palamountain, who died last year as a matter of fact. My name is Hudson—Arthur Hudson—”

The millionaire gave a slight start. “Hudson?” he returned reflectively as though he were seeking some forgotten mental note. “Arthur Hudson! Surely not the Arthur Hudson who goes to the flat of my old friend Russell Langford at Emperor’s Gate, and is betrothed to Miss Winifred Pontifex?”

“The same,” answered Arthur, with a boyish blush now looking down, with the result that he did not see the sudden but cruel set of the millionaire’s mouth.

“Ah! then we are destined to see a lot of each other, and I am glad to make your acquaintance!” And Ventris Blake gripped his fingers in a grasp like iron, but there was no friendliness in his touch, no cordiality in his tone, no sympathy in his glance, and the young lover saw him stride out of the office with a feeling of relief, which, try as he would, he could not account for.

“Bah! he assumes a good deal if he thinks I am going out of my way to meet him,” muttered Hudson, with an impatient shrug of the shoulders, as he now resumed his place at his desk, and once again took up his letters. “I don’t like the fellow, and I am sure Winifred won’t like him, for there is something almost satanic about those cold eyes of his—they seem to go to the bottom of all your nature, to read all your thoughts, all hopes, all secrets, all emotions, and yet to betray no kind of soul in return.

“Odd though,” he mused, “I never heard Russell Langford mention him! I thought I knew all the friends of the family at 99a Emperor’s Gate, yet, here is one who speaks as though he has the entrée of the place every day of his life. Oh! confound it, I am making another mystery about this wretched business already. It will turn me quite stupid if I go on and—and I must work.”

And setting his lips firmly, he bent over his desk and for the next quarter of an hour contrived to be so busy with his correspondence that he did not bestow another thought on this strange and irritating client.

As a matter of fact, Palamountain, Limited, was the finest estate agency in the city of London, and as the man on whom the entire burden of the business had fallen through the unexpected death of his uncle, Allen Palamountain, Hudson’s work was difficult and arduous. Eventually, however, the last letter for the night mail was finished, and then, following his usual custom, he hastened to a private dressing-room upstairs where he put on evening clothes and took the next hansom to Emperor’s Gate, to dine with Russell Langford and his daughter Vera and niece, Winifred, who lived in the same flat with them, and to whom, as Blake had remarked, he was engaged.

Half way through Fleet Street, however, Arthur suddenly recollected that he had promised to bring a friend of his to dine with them, and he turned the cab in a new direction. As a matter of fact, the man in question, Paul Renishaw, was his most intimate companion. They had gone from the same public school—Oundle—to Oxford; and they had both started life together in London, almost the same week—the one in the old and respected business of Palamountain, Limited, the other in the stormy waters of cheap chambers in the Temple and a precarious livelihood extracted from unattached journalism.

After a longer period of storm and stress than falls to the lot of most poor but ambitious ’Varsity men, Hudson had secured a firm footing in his career by a partnership in his uncle’s firm, while Renishaw had finally climbed into one of the sub-editorial chairs in a new London evening paper known as The Moon, famous for the excellent salaries it paid to its staff. None the less, different though their careers were, they still retained their old and deep comradeship which even Hudson’s engagement to Winifred Pontifex had been powerless to determine; and the result was that Renishaw now was almost as popular a guest with Russell Langford and his daughter as their future relative, hence the invitation.

Hudson, too, was well known to the sturdy old soldier who guarded the editorial precincts of The Moon, and no sooner had he sprung out of the hansom, than, with a bright nod, he slipped up past the inquiry box at the foot of the stairs, and bounded to the top, heedless of the printers in aprons and shirt sleeves and troops of messenger and telegraph boys who were clattering noisily up and down.

Outside a door marked “Sub-Editors,” however, he paused and knocked. A cheery call to “come in” followed, and, pushing open this entrance, he found himself in a large, bare, white-washed apartment. In the middle stood a table laden with letters, manuscripts, newspapers, and telegrams, which two men were sitting busily revising under green shaded lights from a gas pendant in the centre. One of them was Paul Renishaw—and he looked up and smiled.

“Just let me put the finishing touch to this murder yarn,” he said. “It’s got to appear in full in our last edition, and has only just come through by wire from Scarborough. Everywhere they could possibly spell the name of the victim differently they have done, as is their custom. Thus I’ve got Black—Block—Bleak—Blink—everything they could think of except the proper name with which they started.”

“And what’s that?” queried Hudson with a pleasant nod to Paul’s table companion, who was also trying to make sense out of some “liner’s” verbose nonsense, and, irritated by the task, cordially wished Hudson at Jericho, or further.

“Oh! Blake, of course,” retorted Renishaw, without looking up.

“Blake,” repeated Hudson, vaguely thinking of his recent visitor. “No relative—I mean—nobody of consequence.”

“Oh, isn’t it though,” said Renishaw, dashing off to a corner where stood a little box attached to a wire, into which receptacle he thrust his telegrams. Then he touched an electric-bell, and in an instant the box shot upward to the compositors. “Why, it’s no less a personage than the wife of Ventris Blake, the great American financier—”

“Never!” cried Hudson, falling back in amazement.

“Indeed it is, I can tell you. The Moon, never had such a ‘scoop’ as this. I’ll tell you how it occurred. One of our reporters happened to be on sick leave near the spot where the poor soul was found, three miles out of Scarborough; and, like a sensible man, he got up the facts, and rode off promptly to the post-office, and wired the exclusive information through to us. Then he went to the nearest local daily paper office, and, on consideration that they didn’t let the news go out of the office for two hours at least, he gave them the same yarn as he sent to us. As a consequence, we have now the start of all the other London evening journals and of the rival press agencies, and must sell this edition like wildfire, for next to the King and Pierpoint Morgan I doubt if any man is more in the public eye just now than Ventris Blake!”

“And yet,” said Hudson slowly, mechanically, almost unconsciously repeating his own secret thoughts; “only half-an-hour ago that man came to me—came to my office—and did business with me in the most ordinary fashion.”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Renishaw and the other sub-editor in unison.

“Why this is most important,” proceeded the former. “You must let me interview you. Do you mean to say that the police haven’t communicated with the husband yet? By George, another police scandal too.” And with the zeal and promptitude of the born journalist, he drew a chair towards the table and, seating himself therein, began to write rapidly:—

A TRAGEDY INDEED!
WEALTH POWERLESS AGAINST DEATH!
THE POOR HUSBAND KNOWS NOTHING AT PRESENT
BUT WANDERS ABOUT THE CITY INTENT ONLY ON
BUSINESS—AND GOLD.

By this time, however, Hudson had recovered his composure, and, advancing towards Renishaw, he said quickly: “No, no, you must not write that. In the first place, I may get dragged into it and accused of wanting to advertise myself and my business by methods which neither I nor indeed any public-spirited citizen could approve of. In the second—” he paused and reflected, and the importance of the mysterious information he possessed rose up like a phantom in front of him. Then he added lamely, “in the second you must not.”

“Well! What is the second?” demanded Paul, keenly. “I see your point and will just say Mr. Ventris Blake was in the City this afternoon, and we have private information to the effect that at 4.45 this evening he knew nothing about the shocking occurrence.”

“In the second,” said Hudson slowly after a moment’s consideration, “if you like to do a bit of private detective business with me I think I can put you on the track of something really astounding that will make The Moon boom again like mad.”

“About Ventris Blake,” cried both sub-editors, most excited.

“About Blake of course,” affirmed Hudson, although why he said this so positively he could not for the life of him imagine.

“Good,” answered Renishaw, adding the few lines he had mentioned and again hurrying his message up the lift. “You see,” he went on excitedly, “this tragedy will be the talk of London for the next week at least. I’m good for any crime business you like. You and I, old chap, have worked up murder specials before, haven’t we?” And in a few rapid but graphic sentences he recalled how they had spent whole nights and troublous days ferreting out theories and facts about some of London’s most sensational crimes in those hard times when the extra guineas meant something more than comfort—they meant rent and food.

Luckily, by the time Renishaw had finished, a boy had arrived with his suit-case, and he had to leave to change while the other sub-editor went down to the machine-room and brought back one of the first papers printed so that Hudson could read for himself how Aimée Blake had been done to death on a lonely road between Filey and Scarborough.

The murderer, it seemed, from the report to hand, must have sprung at her as she passed and felled her with a great hedge stake that had been purchased close to the scene of the crime. How she got to the spot it was impossible to explain. All the porter of the chief hotel in Scarborough, where she had had a magnificent suite of rooms, could inform the reporter was that she received a telegram late the previous night, told him she must go out even at that hour to see a relative, and never came back, although her maid sat up all the night.

As usual, too, the police had “a clue” but as it led them in the direction of the railway, and a junction with easy access to Leeds and York and Hull and King’s Cross, The Moon man evidently didn’t believe much in it, for he hinted at blackmail, secret tragedies in the lives of all considered fortune’s favourites, and other endless possibilities of intrigue and romance calculated to set the public imagination feverishly ablaze.

Unfortunately, Arthur had barely time to digest the facts in the story of the crime, which was written with a good deal of literary power and effect, before Renishaw returned ready to accompany him. Anxious not to be late, both men hurried to the hansom that was waiting for them, and were soon quickly bowling westward, in happy ignorance of the terrible surprise in store for them.

Indeed their one topic of conversation was Ventris Blake’s strange renting of the peculiarly-shaped room, but as their plan of attack on this mystery will be fully explained in subsequent chapters, we had perhaps better go on in advance of them to the flat at Emperor’s Gate where they were momentarily expected.

CHAPTER II.
CONCERNS A MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE

By many readers of the present narrative, of course, the name of Russell Langford must still be regarded with a large amount of respect and gratitude. For some years, it is true, he was, like thousands of other men in the neighbourhood of Chancery Lane, nothing better than a briefless and a hungry barrister, but, unlike most of his rivals, he got his chance suddenly one day in a theatrical breach of promise case in which a certain noble lord had been more literary than discreet, and from that time work was showered upon him from all directions—and he now boasted of one of the biggest common-law practices in London.

Unkind critics, of course, said that this success was in no sense due to his merits. One set of them, the really weak and helpless and hopeless, contended that he had been the victim of luck, and owed everything he had to nothing lower than the stars which seemed to fight in their courses for him. The other set, the die-hards of legal life they might be called, contended that just before the Gaiety action came to a hearing he had inherited a fortune which had been spent largely amongst solicitors in need of pecuniary assistance in the most crafty yet effective fashion with the result that these debtors had been compelled to send all their business to him, and with the success seen.

At all events, it is tolerably clear that Russell Langford was in no sense a real popular favourite. His face was against him in that respect, for he had small beady black eyes that might, and did, often look cunning enough but never shone with any frankness or enthusiasm. His dark hair had turned to grey early in his career, but his bearing and words never suggested the man of character, only a certain set legal kind of cleverness that might have been picked up in the Hall of the Middle Temple as he dined with other and more resourceful companions.

In time his wife, who had been the daughter of the rector of a small village in Berkshire, died, and left him with a girl Vera, who now presided over the magnificent flat he had taken in Emperor’s Gate. At first sight Vera Langford suggested the wild vengeful kind of Jewish beauty, for her movements were quick and tempestuous, and her brown eyes and raven tresses shone with a fire that only gathered a glow from contrast with the slow carefully-calculated looks of her father.

In age she was just twenty-three, whereas her cousin, Winifred Pontifex, who had come to reside with her father when Colonel Pontifex of the Guards died and left his girl whom he had always loved most devotedly, most unexpectedly unprovided for, was only just twenty-one. Winifred, however, was a tall, stately-looking girl with golden hair and eyes of the most wonderful blue, sometimes soft and elusive like the most delicate forget-me-nots, at other times large and lustrous like the blue sky above them, and often as unfathomable.

Arthur Hudson who was dark, of middle height, with a long moustache, and, in many ways, a strong contrast to her in looks, had met her first of all at the Hunt Ball in Stamford, and had promptly fallen in love with her. Happily, in this instance, the course of true affection ran quite smoothly; on both sides the match was considered very suitable; and a formal engagement had been entered on, with the result that the date fixed for the marriage was now only three months distant—in the week after Easter.

Altogether it was a charming picture which Winifred presented that night as Arthur and Paul crossed the drawing-room to greet her, clad as she was in a soft girlish gown of dove-grey with black ribbon, and bending playfully over a King Charles spaniel, the pet of the household. Her voice, too, was low and soft, and yet so clear that it seemed instinct with sincerity, purity and truth.

Accustomed as he was to these meetings, even Paul turned away his head as he saw the fervent hand clasp of the two lovers, and the great affection that shone so proudly from the eyes of both. Something in his own heart seemed to stand still just then; almost a feeling of awe came upon him; and then a knowledge of his own desolation so keen, so poignant that, as Winifred turned to him, his boyish features became suddenly quite haggard and drawn.

Another moment, and he was again the smooth-spoken, careless, cynical man of the world, rallying Russell Langford about a case in which he had that day vainly tried to get £1,000 damages against a newspaper for a man who admitted he had done “a bit of dog stealing,” but didn’t see “any call” for anybody to mention it in public!

Vera came in soon afterwards, and a move was made to the dining-room, but not until the three men sat together over their wine did Arthur mention his strange visitor, and then he did it like this:

“By the way, Langford,” he said raising his glass and slowly sipping his port, “I had a curious client to-day, a man who has searched all London over for a particularly shaped room, and has got one at last in Queen Victoria Street of all places in the world, practically a garret for which he will pay nearly £5 a week rent. Says he knows you too, and is coming to see you!”

“Indeed,” observed Langford also lifting his glass; “is it on business, for which a meeting with a madman like that will be rather novel, or on friendship?”

“Oh, on friendship. True to tell, he rather boasted of his intimacy with you.”

“Well, he needn’t. I have no intimates, not one,” retorted the barrister rather pompously. “A man in my position, the repository of a thousand secrets affecting the good names of a thousand persons, cannot afford the luxury of an intimate.”

“Well, at all events, Ventris Blake thinks he’s on those terms with you. Indeed, he is coming to see you!”

To Arthur and Paul’s intense astonishment, the wine-glass fell from the lawyer’s hand with a crash, and he rose from the table, his face deathly white.

“That company promoter Ventris Blake coming to see me as a friend,” he muttered. “Oh! nonsense! nonsense!”

Then catching the look of surprise on his guests’ faces, he tried to recover himself. “I mean,” he added lamely, “I don’t want him to come. It—it must be a mistake. We knew each other once—yes, but we agreed that we would never meet again. We have killed the past. Friendship now is impossible!” And, as though to assure himself of the truth of his own words, he lifted the brandy-decanter, poured out a stiff dose and, without waiting to add any water, gulped the fiery draught down.

“Well, perhaps, he spoke in jest,” said Arthur flushing, for all this mystery had begun to weigh rather heavily upon him. “He may have done it to get my good opinion. I knew he was very anxious that I should do as he wanted.”

“Then don’t,” said Langford sharply. “I can tell you this from five years’ hard and bitter and cruel experience of this man, that nobody ever did him a favour who did not regret it most bitterly. Everything he touches is fortunate for himself; for all others it spells ruin, stark, staring ruin.”

“It certainly did for his wife,” cut in Paul quietly, “for we had a telegram at The Moon offices this afternoon to say that she had been murdered on an open road midway between Filey and Scarborough.”

Russell Langford’s face now was a study in horror. He tried to speak—but the shock had been too much. He could not articulate. Luckily just then a tap on the door made itself heard, and a servant entered, and with a great effort he recovered the semblance of his composure.

“A gentleman, sir, to see you,” the maid announced, “most important. He apologises, but says the affair is so urgent he can’t wait,” and she handed her master a card on which Arthur and Paul saw at a glance was inscribed the hated name of Ventris Blake.

“Tell him I won’t see him,” gasped the lawyer, livid with rage and astonishment. “Tell him we have killed the past, friendship is impossible,” and he pushed out his hands helplessly—as though he would save himself from a meeting he much dreaded by the mere repetition of that mystic formula.

“Very good, sir,” said the maid, and she turned to leave, but just then the door was thrust open and Ventris Blake himself marched in.

“I heard what you said, Langford,” he said coldly, “but you know well enough it’s all no use. A trifle like that won’t stop me. I have need of you, and you have got to answer me fairly and help me frankly.

“No doubt,” he went on calmly, “these gentlemen here have told you that my wife has been found murdered. It is quite true. The police have been to me already, and have made of me all manner of impertinent enquiries, not as to a possible criminal but as to what I do, and have done, so much so, in fact, that I took one of them by the scruff of the neck, and shot him through the window into the area.

“Now you’ve got to stand up for me,” Blake concluded. “The fact is, I want you to go down with me to-night by the late train to York to attend the inquest at Scarborough to-morrow to represent me and other relatives of the deceased, and to show these official ruffians that I am a citizen of a great Republic and they must treat me with respect.”

“Oh that’s absurd. It’s a solicitor’s work. The entire legal profession would laugh at me,” spluttered Langford as he motioned the servant to leave. “It’s—it’s like taking a Nasmyth hammer to crack a walnut. I really can’t do it.”

“Well, you must,” persisted Blake, fixing two cold dark scrutinising eyes on his. “I have decided you must—and you must!”

“That’s hardly the way to talk to a gentleman of the legal eminence of Mr. Langford, is it?” chivalrously struck in Arthur Hudson, who saw that for some utterly inexplicable reason his betrothed’s uncle was now absolutely frightened and nerveless. “Believe me, barristers are not to be approached even by financial magnates like yourself in the rough and ready fashion of the miners’ camp.”

“Indeed!” said Ventris Blake, with an open sneer. “However the business is between Mr. Langford and myself, and it calls for no outside interference.”

“Yes, yes, it does,” eagerly interposed the lawyer. “Hudson explain to him that his demand is preposterous. Shew him out.” And he attempted to slip past the financier, but the man turned swiftly and barred his way to the door.

“No, no, Russell Langford,” he said in those full, deep, decisive tones of his. “You musn’t go until I have finished. No doubt this young man Hudson doesn’t want you to hear my story, but you shall: you must, for it affects him quite as much as it does myself!”

“What the deuce do you mean, Blake?” put in Paul, who had often interviewed the magnate for The Moon, and knew him exceedingly well. “Has your trouble turned your head? Have you gone mad? Why you know you have never seen Hudson in your life prior to this afternoon.”

“I admit I haven’t seen him before this day,” returned Ventris Blake meaningly, “but somebody else has—my wife!”

“Your wife,” stammered Arthur, crushing down the horror that had again risen unbidden in his heart. “Never! Never, I swear!”

“Then look at that, Russell Langford,” said the millionaire, quietly placing a hand in an inner pocket and producing a carefully-sealed document which Renishaw took and unfolded and then passed to the lawyer. “Read it, and let me explain to you how I found it. At the request of the police and with their assistance I have just searched my wife’s private desks and boxes, including her jewel case. In a secret drawer of the last I have discovered that,” and he pointed significantly to the paper.

“What is it?” muttered Hudson hoarsely. “Tell me quickly—how can it concern me, a stranger.”

“I am afraid it does though,” said Paul Renishaw gently, yet he too was sorely stricken, “for it is a copy of a certificate of a marriage between you, Arthur Hudson, house and estate agent of Cheapside and of 7a Kensington Gore, where you live, and Aimée Lucille Fausta Burgoyne of Meissonier Studios, Peterborough, artist, which was celebrated at the Registry Office in Peterborough five years ago!”

“But who was this Aimée Lucille Fausta Burgoyne?” gasped Langford, with a great effort recovering himself.

“That lady was the one who has just been killed,” replied Ventris Blake. “I thought she was my wife but clearly she was the wife of the man in front of me, your bosom friend, Arthur Hudson.”

“The whole business is an abominable lie,” Hudson cried, throwing back his shoulders and boldly facing his persecutor. “I swear by all that I hold most sacred that I have never spoken to, never even seen, this Aimée Blake or Burgoyne. Some cruel fiend must have personated me.”

“Prove it,” said Ventris Blake coldly, but his tones exhibited all the scorn and incredulity of a man who had no doubt of his guiltiness.

“Yes, prove it,” repeated Russell Langford, like all weak men turning on the friend who had made a fruitless effort to save him to divert all attack from himself. “Remember I owe a duty to society and to my own household, and until you have clearly established your innocence it will be impossible for you to have further communication with my niece Winifred Pontifex.”

Winifred Pontifex! The mere sound of that dearly-loved name brought back to Arthur’s mind all the charm and the magic of the sweet intercourse he had held with her since that fateful ball at Stamford, and with a great groan he could not stifle, he suddenly realised how terrible a barrier would be raised between them now Ventris Blake had produced this document and dragged him right into the centre of a most squalid murder mystery.

For a minute even doubts of Winifred—or her faith in him in this terrible hour of perplexity and shame and darkness, of her love, aye, even of her constancy under this cloud of misunderstanding and suspicion—caught his heart in a grip like iron, and made his lips white and his cheeks tremble.

“Oh Langford,” he wailed, in a voice broken in emotion, “you cannot mean that! Think for an instant. It suggests I am a villain!”

“And if he does,” quietly cut in Paul Renishaw who had not hitherto spoken, “I can inform him that, although you and I, dear old chap, will soon make him eat his words, he is still a mean cur!”

“Enough of this,” retorted Langford hotly. “I am not to be brow-beaten. I have said what I have said, and I am not the man to depart from it.”

“No, you’re not,” sneered Paul, moving towards the door, “unless Ventris Blake wants it. Still, I tell you flatly Arthur Hudson is not going under whatever the pair of you may contrive to fix upon him at the inquest on that poor creature at Scarborough. He has got a straight life and a clear conscience on his side, and it will be odd to me if those don’t win, even in a wretched commercial Yankee driven country like this!

“Come Arthur,” he went on more gently, stretching out a hand and drawing his old friend towards him. “I believe in you. I know that all this business is some put-up job on somebody’s part which only needs time and patience to unravel. At first, I admit, even my stout and clear faith in you was shaken—but a moment’s reflection told me that the charge was absurd.”

“Even though I know the two witnesses to the ceremony, and can put my hands on them any day I like,” taunted Ventris Blake.

“Aye, even though you do know the two witnesses,” snapped Paul, “for that is just the reason why I should not believe a thing they uttered.”

Without a word, however, Arthur turned and marched out of the drawing-room. The shock of this awful accusation seemed to have left him cold and numb, so that he did not perceive how Paul slipped into the drawing-room and beckoned Winifred out, and finally got the poor girl (who was still unconscious of the dreadful blow that was to be dealt at her happiness) to put on a shawl and to follow him into the square in front of the flats. Then however he brought the two of them face to face, and with something uncommonly like a muttered prayer for their good understanding and happiness, he slipped behind some bushes and was instantly lost to sight.

Then, and only then—did Arthur rally under the weight of the accusation that had been aimed against his reputation so swiftly and so mysteriously, and, pressing Winifred’s arm in his, he told her bravely and simply of this foul treacherous thing that had risen up out of the unknown to ruin him. When, however, he first mentioned Ventris Blake’s name, he felt Winifred start and tremble and then she tried to speak, then checked herself, obviously to wait until he had drawn to an end.

Marvelling, but now quite self-contained, he went on with the terrible disclosures of the millionaire, and he did not stop once until he had faithfully repeated to her all that had passed between them up to the point of his following Paul out of the room.

Still who can measure the capacity of a woman’s heart for suffering, and for sympathy, and for a brave unswerving loyalty that not even a charge that strikes at the root of their own honour can pierce or soften? Surely it is a special gift of the Divine to men, to help them bear the burden and the anguish of the day’s task, and fail not under their own load! Certainly even Arthur, who knew Winifred so well, expected that his tale would momentarily shake her faith in him, and that, for some good and sweet and gracious reason, it might be necessary to submit himself for a time to some gentle cross-examination on her part as to the past, and the possibilities of error.

Only, as it was, nothing of the sort happened. In some extraordinary, even miraculous fashion, Winifred seemed to divine the truth of his position, and to appreciate points that he had only dimly indicated in his hot and eager and impetuous account of the terrible interview which he had just had with the barrister and the financier.

“Indeed, darling,” said she slowly and simply. “I quite understand that this marriage never took place, that you have never met this poor creature, Aimée Burgoyne, and that it is all some hideous error which will have to be disentangled in God’s own good time. Truth to tell, that is not giving me any real concern in the matter, except that my whole heart goes in sympathy to you for what you have suffered this night, and may still have to suffer before you stand out before the world as a most sorely-tried and wronged man. No, my mind runs in another direction. Why has this plot been put upon you at all? I have thought and thought whilst you have spoken, and it has just occurred to me that perhaps I can supply the reason!”

“I would to heaven that you could, dearest,” replied Arthur earnestly, but his voice shewed no real belief in her words for, bachelor like, he had yet to learn the wonderful spaces to be bridged by a woman’s intuition.

“Arthur,” proceeded Winifred slowly, “did I ever tell you that I too have met this man Ventris Blake?”

“By Jove, you didn’t,” he cried, instantly all eagerness.

“Well, I did—that time I saw you first at the Hunt Ball at Stamford you must know that a lot of private dances were given during that fortnight, and at one of them, given by Lady Desborough at The Towers, Ventris Blake was present, and paid me so much odious attention that I went to my uncle, Russell Langford, who was present, and complained of being ill and so was promptly driven home.”

“But the brute was married!” exclaimed Arthur, clenching his hands tightly to keep down his rage and excitement. “He had no right to pay you any attention.”

“I know, dearest,” said Winifred sadly. “Unfortunately, men of the stamp of Ventris Blake don’t trouble about sacred obligations like those. They are rich, and they fancy with wealth they can do anything they like. There are too many men of that stamp in the ball rooms of England.

“As it turned out though,” she proceeded swiftly, “he was not content with the snubbing I gave him during the dance. He ventured to call at the Stamford Hotel where we were staying, and asked to see me on the plea that he was an old friend of my father, and then, when I refused, he actually sent me a lot of flowers which I took to my uncle who returned them at once!”

“I should think so! I wonder he didn’t give him a horse-whipping in the bargain,” hotly ejaculated Arthur. Then all at once he remembered Russell Langford’s own craven fear of this adventurer, and bit his lip.

“He took more stringent measures than those even,” added poor Winifred, who little knew the extent of the intrigue into which both of them had fallen. “He gave orders for us all to pack at once, and so we came straight away to Emperor’s Gate. My cousin Vera, I remember, was horribly annoyed at this, and that reminds me of another thing I ought to confide to you. Do you know that this man Ventris Blake and Vera are very intimate friends?”

“Intimate friends!” repeated Arthur incredulously. “Are you quite certain?”

“Quite,” persisted Winifred with a grave inclination of the head. “They meet very often at Lady Desborough’s town house in Prince’s Gate, and once when Vera wanted to make quite a lot of money on the Stock Exchange he helped her to do so, for she shewed me the cheque; it was for £3,500.”

“But he has not troubled you again?”

“Not personally,” said Winifred reluctantly, “but indirectly. You see with Vera such a staunch champion of his, I am bound to hear a lot about him, and indeed she has done her best to make me go round to Lady Desborough’s to meet him again on the plea that he is ‘such fun,’ but I have always stoutly refused to encounter him. Then when he sent me a diamond bracelet worth quite a lot of money with a card ‘From an old friend of Colonel Pontifex,’ I wrote him the sharpest letter I could pen, and told him that you as my future husband could provide me with all or any jewellery I might need. But Vera has been very nasty since, and,” with something uncommonly like a sob, “I have—have looked forward eagerly to the time when I was no longer dependent on her and could leave Emperor’s Gate in peace!”

“Please God the time won’t be long now,” returned Arthur gravely, bending over her hand and pressing it, for this news of Ventris Blake’s villainy had steadied him like nothing else, and now he saw stretched out before him a conflict in which no quarter of any kind could be given. “For the present I fear I must obey your uncle’s command and hold no communication with you until my good name is quite clear, for if I do, injury may be inflicted on you.

“None the less, dear heart,” he added quickly, “it cannot be long before this scoundrel will be unmasked. Let us both be brave and patient, and I am certain all will come right in the end. Now, run in before your absence is discovered. Good-bye! Good-bye!”

And so with a quick embrace they parted—Winifred to hide her grief in the seclusion of her bedroom, Arthur to find Paul, and to drive rapidly homeward to concert plans to meet the scheme that now, alas! threatened to ruin very quickly and completely the happiness and good name of both lovers.

CHAPTER III.
REVEALS A SECRET

An hour later Vera Langford sat alone in her father’s study.

At first, it is true, the lawyer had made a very stout fight with Ventris Blake, declaring that no power on earth would compel him to make himself so ridiculous in the eyes of his colleagues as to attend the opening of an inquest in the north of Yorkshire; but, suddenly, the millionaire had bent down and whispered something threatening in his ear, and, all at once, the barrister had collapsed like a pricked balloon, and, in a comparatively few minutes afterwards, had got his bag packed and taken Blake’s own carriage to catch the late train down to York and Scarborough.

In doing this, he had only made one stipulation:

“If you, Blake,” said he, “are going to come out of this scandal with any degree of propriety you must not shew yourself in public like this. Go home to your place in Park Lane, and play the part of the bereaved and distracted widower to the life. To-morrow you will not be required at the inquest at all, or you would have been warned by the police. As a matter of fact, only evidence of identification of this poor creature will be given, and that can well be supplied by one of her maids. Just wait. At the right dramatic moment we’ll produce the certificate of her marriage with Hudson, and, if necessary, we’ll bring up the witnesses of the ceremony, but if you put in the document before, the public will not believe that you only discovered it by accident the night of the murder, but will fancy that you have known about it all the time and have preferred to blind your eyes to it for some wicked or sinister purpose of your own. Therefore be persuaded by me—and just for a day or two let things go on as they were before the crime.”

“I will,” Blake had answered. “You know more about the British character no doubt than I do. Half my life has been spent in the rough mining life of Australia and the Transvaal, and there, when we had to hit a man between the eyes, we got up and did so, and afterwards picked up and reckoned the pieces. Here, it seems to me, one can do all the same kind of hammering and get all the public sympathy right enough, only one musn’t be in a hurry, musn’t strike before the ground has been well baited, and even then must observe all the old snug conventions with which our grand-mothers used to delude themselves.”

“And a jolly good thing too,” interposed Langford, who was above all things a stickler for the proprieties, and also a rank opportunist. “It gives the men who know the game their right advantage. Otherwise everybody would be equally matched, and then what would the poor lawyers do?” And, with this cheap piece of cynicism, he had made his exit, closely followed by Blake, who, when he had found Vera was not in the drawing-room, had taken his way home on foot.

At that precise moment, as a matter of fact, Vera herself was with Winifred who was telling her frankly and simply the terrible blow that had fallen on her happiness. The lawyer’s daughter, however, was obviously distracted by other thoughts, and so had contented herself with a vague expression of her sorrow, and then had quickly slipped away to the study and, carefully locking the door, had gone to her father’s telephone, the bell of which communicating with the public exchange she had rung sharply.

“59769a Gerrard,” she told the operator, and, as the lines were fairly clear at that late hour, she soon got the answer she sought.

“Is that the Belsize Theatre?” she queried, and on receiving the reply in the desired affirmative she went on:—“Has Mr. Jules Prendergast come off the stage yet? No? The curtain not run down yet? Well, directly it is, ask him to come round and see Mr. Russell Langford, will you? Tell him not to delay though. He is wanted on a matter of business;” and, with a quick impatient shrug, she replaced the receiver and sat down at her father’s writing table to await with all the fortitude she could command the arrival of the man who, truth to tell, she loved better than honour itself.

How slowly the minutes crept by after that! At first she tried to occupy her mind by thinking of Winifred, but her mind would not fix itself on any troubles but her own. Then she started drawing grotesque forms and faces on the blotting paper in front of her but somehow nothing seemed to go right—the lines, the pen, or the figures; and soon, with a deep exclamation of disgust, she threw the quill aside, and began to pace impatiently up and down the room.

Once again her wild gipsy blood appeared in the ascendant. Indeed, there was something almost panther-like in her movements as she stepped backward and forward, backward and forward in a costume of black and gold that, emblazoned as it was with diamonds, showed every line of her superb figure to advantage.

At one time, as she stopped to listen to the bell of an approaching hansom, she reminded one almost irresistibly of Cleopatra. And then, as the soft tinkle died away in the distance, her features and her bearing changed, and she was just a woman racked by jealousy, torn by emotion, with mouth distorted, and fingers pressed cruelly into the palms of her hand to save herself from rushing into the street to see for herself why he did not come.

Nobody, unfortunately, who knew Jules Prendergast at all well would have thought that he was worth this attention.

Two years ago he had been an obscure but tolerated member of a well-known touring Shakesperean Company that had an earnest, a gifted, and a painstaking actor at its head. By chance, it happened that they had come to town, to do a brief season at one of the least-known West-End theatres; and Vera had gone to one of their performances with Lady Desborough, who rather tried to play the part of the Lady Bountiful to the crowd in question. Quite unexpectedly Vera had fallen passionately in love with this tall, dark, and romantic-looking actor, Prendergast. He had quickly, with Lady Desborough’s help, followed up this advantage, and, as Vera had a small fortune of her own from an aunt long since deceased, nobody who knows the way plays are financed in London will be surprised to hear that after this Jules Prendergast quickly became a welcome performer in some uncommonly “fat” parts at the best houses—and finally blossomed out as an actor-manager himself at the Belsize Theatre.

His first appearance in his own house, of course, had been as “Hamlet,” and, strange to say, he had scored quite a success with this, and yet, in a way, it was not strange, for he had simply taken all the ideas and study of his old chief in the touring company and had passed them off on the fashionable crowd that had flocked to the Belsize as his own.

“A new reading of ‘Hamlet’,” cried the mob and the critics, and yet if one of them had gone to the small theatres in towns like Leeds, or York, or Sheffield, or Plymouth, they would have found that Prendergast’s conception was not new—was not original—but, on the contrary, was much better done by in the provinces.

Luckily or unluckily, the West End knows little or nothing of theatrical things outside the metropolis, and so Prendergast flourished until the time came for him to change the bill, and he invoked the assistance of a “star” actress named Flora Kaufmann, and put on “with a scale of magnificence never hitherto seen on any stage,” etc., etc., the old but eternally young “Romeo and Juliet.”

For that time certainly Shakespeare lived up to his name in the dramatic world and spelt “ruin” to Jules Prendergast and his financier. In vain were the public coaxed and cajoled and derided. In vain were the old press notices served in a style as hot as any that had come from the theatrical press. The public literally would not look at Flora Kaufmann as “Juliet,” and, had not Ventris Blake thought fit, for his own private reasons, to allow Vera to make that £3,500 out of him in the most childish way after she had unbosomed herself of her real difficulties, Jules Prendergast’s season would, certainly, long ago have ended.

As it was, things had again come to a very bad financial pass owing to the heavy expenditure necessary for Jules’ next mammoth production of “Othello,” and this, too, was complicated by Vera’s insane jealousy of Flora Kaufmann, who had got a very strictly drawn contract with Jules and could not be easily got rid of.

Beset by difficulties on all sides, Prendergast himself had that day made another appeal for money to Vera, and had been repulsed with some scorn and a good deal of quite unnecessary bitterness. As a consequence, the girl was not at all sure he would obey her summons, which, by custom, had been couched in her father’s name, and yet she felt she must see him that night, if only to assure herself that he was as true to her as he had sworn to be in the old days when he had neither position nor reputation, and they had never had squalid squabbles like the one of that afternoon.

At last, however, she heard a hansom stop outside the flats; a moment later an electric bell sounded, and, in accordance with her directions, the actor, who was clad in an opera cloak and carried a crush-hat, with the make-up still thick upon his features, hastened into the room.

For some reason, for the first time in her experience, his manner was openly sulky and inwardly defiant. No sooner, indeed, had he thrown off his cloak than he turned on her almost with a snarl.

“Well, and what is the matter now, Vera?” he demanded. “Haven’t we said sufficient hideous things to each other to-day without you ringing me up and sending for me unexpectedly like this, and wanting to go over them again and count them?”

“Yes. That is not my reason. How was business to-night?”

“Bad, deuced bad. There wasn’t a ten pound note in all parts.”

“Then you must get rid of Kaufmann. She is ruining you!”

The man paused and pretended to feel in his pockets for a cigarette. Instinctively he knew that he was on dangerous ground.

“I can’t,” he declared with a pitiful attempt at being light and airy. “The lawyers forbid it. Pressed too far, she might even shut up the shop altogether by an injunction.”

“Then let her,” cried Vera fiercely, sweeping forward and facing the actor. “I am sick of her airs, her graces, her tricks to ensnare your affections,” and then playing her trump card she went on:

“Let the whole thing go, and let us be married as we had arranged next week. My father is, as lawyers go, a very wealthy man. He could easily spare us twenty-five thousand pounds to run a season at the Lyceum, or the Haymarket, or even the Garrick. If he saw we were man and wife he could not refuse us! He really loves me with all the force of his nature. He has never refused me a thing in my life.”

“Oh, couldn’t he though,” snapped Jules. “That’s all you know. He might be delighted at what you had done, disown you, and marry again!”

Vera’s eyes blazed. “That is untrue, Jules,” she gasped, “and you know it’s untrue! more than that, it is rude—it is cruel to me. You speak now under that woman’s influence. I see it in every word—look—gesture. You never dreamt of talking to me like this before you met her. I demand that you shall never act with her again!”

The man swung round with a smothered oath, and for a second it looked as though he would repay her defiance with defiance, scorn by scorn. Then a crafty avaricious look came into his face, and his tone changed.

“Come, Vera,” he said gently, trying to put an arm round her waist, “don’t drive me in a corner like this! Just be reasonable. I simply can’t damn myself and my whole career to please you or anybody else. Just now it’s money I want and must have. If you can’t get it—”

“Flora Kaufmann will, I suppose!” exclaimed Vera passionately, although she didn’t believe her words for an instant.

“Yes,” said the hypocrite, snatching at so good a pretext. “You have guessed it. Flora Kaufmann believes in me and my future, and has offered to finance me!”

For a moment Vera looked as though she would kill him. A bottle marked “Chloroform; Poison,” which she had been using earlier in the day for toothache stood on the mantelpiece, and gripping this she made a movement as though she would pour the spirit on her handkerchief and smother him.

Then her mood changed. A reckless laugh broke from her lips, and, with the strange fatuity of many women in love, she set out deliberately to hoodwink herself.

“I—I am glad you have told me,” she stammered. “As a matter of fact, I was only testing you. Never mind about Flora Kaufmann or her finances. I—I can assist you to-morrow to the extent of five thousand pounds if you like!”

“You angel!” cried the actor ecstatically, dropping on one knee and theatrically pressing the hem of her garment to his lips; and the fervour of his movement was not lessened by the fact that he knew Flora Kaufmann was a most extravagant, if fascinating woman, and had nothing to her name except some £1,500 worth of debts. “Tell me how you have managed it?”

“Ah, that is my secret,” said Vera archly, now bending down and kissing him passionately on the forehead. “Just meet me at the Bond Street tea room as usual about half past three to-morrow and you shall have the money easily enough!”

“And you will keep its source from me,” said the humbug reproachfully. “Surely you do not feel now you cannot trust me!”

“Perhaps,” said Vera evasively; “but, of course, I shall stipulate Flora Kaufmann must go!”

“Even if it costs a bribe of £1,000!”

“Even if we have to pay her £2,000 to tear up her agreement,” repeated the girl firmly; and to support her she raised the bottle of chloroform, the contents of which she inhaled.

“Very well,” declared Jules pretending to assent, and rising he kissed Vera with a great show of fervour. Then having pulled out his watch and declared the hour was disgracefully late, he drew his cloak over his shoulders and seized his hat.

Vera accompanied him to the door of the flat, but just as he was going to leave he remembered something he had previously forgotten and his face clouded.

“Oh! by the way, Vera,” said he. “I told them at the theatre to send on here a certain telegram which I expected. I won’t wait for it now but directly it comes I want you to ask the boy to bring it on to me to the Green Room Club in Leicester Square!”

“All right!” Vera replied, and waving him adieu, she hurried back to the study to be alone and to think.

Now, however, she was seated alone in her father’s room, she had more than scope to recollect what she had promised in a moment of intense mental anguish. £5,000 to-morrow afternoon at 3.30! And her account at Coutts’ was already over-drawn to the extent of £250! Where—where was so big a sum to come from?

Her father, she knew, was away in Scarborough. He could not possibly return before mid-night the next day, and, even if she knelt in front of him and begged this favour from him, she had no reason to believe he would grant it. He did not like actors or the theatres. He had only seen Jules Prendergast once—and then he called him “a forcibly-feeble copyist!”

As for having any idea that in about seven days’ time this man would be—for better or worse—his son-in-law and that no power on earth could keep him out of the position, he had none, absolutely none. Had he any suspicion of the truth Vera now was certain that his rage would be terrible and his obstinacy insurmountable. Looked at from whatever point she chose, there was no hope of £5,000 from him.

Lady Desborough was equally impossible. True, she was rich, but she was also very mean, and would cheerfully spend £500 in hospitality to get the run of a theatre for three months for nothing. No, there only remained one chance of success, the one chance she had clutched at when she saw it was, in sober truth, but the toss of a coin whether she or Flora Kaufmann would triumph in that insane undignified struggle for the affection of Jules Prendergast. That chance personified itself in Ventris Blake—and even Vera shivered at the awful alternative which passion and fate had combined together to force her to take.

For, as a matter of fact, Vera knew well enough why Ventris Blake went out of his way to make her indebted to him. It wasn’t from kindness—respect—or affection. It was simply because he had become the victim of a wild devouring passion for Winifred Pontifex, and she perfectly understood that if he advanced her this sum, it would be only on terribly harsh conditions—that she would assist him in his schemes to make her poor tortured cousin his—to any extent he chose to dictate.

Was it worth it?

To be quite fair to her—Vera recognised it was not. True, she had no real affection for Winifred. The girl had often caused her acute pangs of jealousy, and in nature and habit and outlook was totally opposed to herself. Still, she also knew Ventris Blake—and she could not conceive a worse fate than to fall into the power of so desperate and resourceful a scoundrel who indeed she knew, from Winifred’s confidences of that night, had already spread his net of treachery and lies in front of her and her sweetheart.

And then again, would it answer?

All at once her jealousy broke into flame again and she thought of her rival Flora Kaufmann. Suppose, after all, Jules broke his word to her, and let that creature remain in the company and assume the part of “Desdemona”? Why the piece might even succeed—might even make a very big hit. It would be in vain for her to storm or to threaten then. Jules would be free from his financial embarrassments, and would certainly pursue a selfish line of his own, for had he not often told her that art had no room for old-fashioned principles, but was ever a law unto itself—and its followers?

Then, as the torture increased, she asked herself, what was the mystery behind the telegram which the actor had said must go on to him at once? Why couldn’t it wait until the morning when business would be resumed, or until the afternoon when she could have the childish pleasure of bringing it with her, and of handing it to him herself?

After all, by one method or another, she decided suddenly she must see that telegram. Horrible though the suspicion was, it might even be from some feminine friend of Jules whom she had never heard him mention; and she leaped to her feet as though a red hot cinder had darted out of the fire against her breast, and scorched her close to the heart.

Then came the expected ring at the bell—the sound of voices—and Vera clasped her medicine-bottle tightly to suppress all traces of her anguish.

A servant entered. “A telegraph boy has come with a telegram for Mr. Jules Prendergast,” he said. “Did he leave any message?”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Shew the lad in!”

A bright-looking lad clad in the regulation uniform entered, closed the door behind him and touched his cap.

“I have a message for Mr. Prendergast, Miss,” he said. “They sent me on here from the Belsize Theatre. Is he in?”

“No,” said Vera sweetly. “He asked me to take it up for him. Please give it to me!” and she held out her hand.

The boy’s face clouded. “I am afraid, miss, I can’t do that,” he muttered. “It’s against the regulations.”

“Nonsense,” persisted Vera lightly, treating the affair as one of small concern. “Give the telegram to me, I tell you. Nobody will know a word about it. And look here, here’s a shilling for your trouble!” And she took a coin off her father’s desk and displaying it temptingly before the youngster’s gaze.

“I can’t, miss, indeed I can’t. It’s more than my place is worth I—I should have to go to prison if I did,” he stammered, his cheeks going white with fear. “Please let me go and report the matter to my superintendent.”

“And betray me,” hissed Vera, now all at once realising her own peril. “Oh, you viper. You shall not do it,” and her eye catching sight of the chloroform bottle a fiendish idea took possession of her.

With one bound she caught the boy by the throat. Then in a flash she smashed the bottle against the desk even as the lad kicked and struggled to free himself, and, pouring the chloroform on her handkerchief she stuffed the spirit into the poor boy’s face until with a moan he sank to the floor utterly senseless.

CHAPTER IV.
EXPLAINS WHAT VERA LEARNED

Just, however, as Vera was starting to her feet to read the telegram for which she had dared so much, the door of the study was opened with great swiftness but stealth.

The handle, it appeared, had been turned quite noiselessly, but, instantly on the alert, the girl rose and pushed the envelope into the bodice of her dress, and turned to face the intruder who proved to be no other than a footman named Judson to whom she had only that morning given notice because he was under suspicion of theft, although nothing could be proved against him.

For a moment—but only for a moment—her heart seemed to stand quite still in horror. All that this man had disguised in his years of service with Russell Langford—his cunning, his cupidity, his unscrupulousness—now, under the stress of this success of his, stood out with painful clearness and distinctness. Inevitably their eyes met—and they understood. Then habit asserted itself, and the servant looked down, feigning a respect he would never feel for her again.

“I thought I heard you call, miss,” said the man, recognising the necessity of explaining his presence although he had listened to all the proceedings from the far side of the door. “Has the telegraph-boy fainted? He looked to me when he came to the door as though he had been running much too fast,” and he bent over the lad’s prostrate form and affected to feel his pulse.

“Yes, that is it; he fainted quite suddenly,” returned Vera, clutching wildly at this feeble excuse. “Do you mind running up to my sitting-room and fetching my smelling salts? Don’t trouble about a doctor or other servants. I don’t think his attack really serious. These post-office people pay their servants so badly. Perhaps he has had to run about all day on a little bread and milk.”

“No doubt,” assented Judson who was busy laying the boy out quite flat. “Smelling salts, I always find, are the best cure for cases like this.” And he rose and stepped nimbly out of the room; but never once did he dare to look Vera in the face for fear she should take alarm too soon.

This time, however, the girl took care that she was not observed. With a quick movement she turned and pretended to follow him. But, as she saw him disappear up the staircase, she hastened back to the study, thrust the now empty chloroform-bottle into a drawer, and then, with fingers trembling with excitement she attacked the envelope which contained the telegram.

As it happened, it was sealed just as carelessly as are most of these important messages, and, almost in an instant, the flap parted in her fingers and permitted her to withdraw the pink form on which she saw written the very message she had dreaded: from the actress Flora Kaufmann:—

“TO JULES PRENDERGAST, BELSIZE THEATRE, ST. MARTIN’S LANE, W.C.

“Supper Scott’s postponed till to-morrow night. Blake will come alright. Give him a hint about your prospective marriage—Langford girl. Think he will stand 1,000. Much love. FLORA.”

As these horrible and insulting words formed themselves before her eyes, Vera stood torn by the most insane passion. Rage, jealousy, hatred, swept over her in one wild desolating gust so that one second murder flamed to her hands, then came a terrible sense of loneliness, helplessness and nausea, followed the next instant by deadly deliberation and calm.

“Oh! She shall not. She shall not. She shall not,” she caught herself muttering as she pressed the telegram back into the envelope which she rapidly sealed and replaced in the boy’s sachet. “Never, never shall she take Jules Prendergast from me. I would sooner kill him,” and she drew herself up to her full height, pressing the palms of her hands together as, in imagination, she raced over the events of the past few hours, and sought where she could foil the actress who was now actually carrying the war amongst her own friends, to the very man she had resolved to bleed on Prendergast’s behalf—Ventris Blake.

“I will not wait. The first thing to-morrow I will go and see him,” she decided almost in a flash. “I will stop this supper party even if I have to go down on my knees to him. Never will I let this creature triumph.”

Yet, inwardly, she knew that the price she would have to pay for her victory over the actress would be dearer than an open act of abject humility, degrading in itself, no doubt, but, what was best, but a temporary expedient and quickly forgotten. Blake, she was aware, had no feeling for her except that of a master for a possibly useful servant. It was the pure, cold beauty of Winifred Pontifex that had led him captive; and only inasmuch as she assisted his schemes to win this girl for himself, could she hope to make the large sum of money which she required to finance Prendergast and the Belsize Theatre.

Just then, however, a low moan from the telegraph boy and a quick step on the stairs, warned her of the dangers of her present situation, and with a long deep sigh she thrust all these painful bewildering thoughts out of her mind, and threw open the door to meet Judson. Once again she was a cold, calm, collected woman. Without a word, she took the smelling salts from the man’s hand, and throwing herself on her knees beside the lad, she laboured for some minutes to restore him to consciousness.

Finally he sat up, his eyes wild and defiant. “I cannot let you have the telegram,” he exclaimed incoherently throwing his arms about as though he would protect himself from some unseen assailant.

“What telegram?” she asked innocently but soothingly. “Mr. Prendergast’s? Of course you cannot. See! Here it is in your pouch! It has never left your possession!

“Come,” she went on slowly but sweetly. “You have over-excited yourself and fainted. Look! You gave me such a start you made me smash my neuralgia mixture! There, don’t dream any more nonsense. Just look after him, Judson, will you? Put him in a hansom and drive him back to the post-office. Explain to the chiefs there his mind must be a little touched and beg them to soothe him, not to blame him.”

And with a gentle pat on the boy’s cheeks she rose and swept out of the room, leaving even the magnificent Judson for a time dumb with astonishment and admiration for her audacity.

“Well,” he muttered at length as he raised the boy in his powerful arms. “I have seen some clever ones in my time, but, hang it, she can beat the lot of them! Lucky for me though I saw all that she did to this poor little chap! It was a prison job that was, and at the right moment I will tell her so. It will be odd to me then if I ever have to do another stroke of work in my ‘natural.’ But then I never did like work!” And as he passed into the street and beckoned a hansom he caught himself chuckling like a man who had done a good, honest night’s work, and was to be congratulated on the result.

Meanwhile, however, Vera had gone to her room, the door of which she carefully locked and bolted after curtly dismissing her maid. For once she did not attempt to disrobe, but, drawing a chair up to the fire she sat crouched over the grate, turning over in her mind the day’s bitter disillusions and trials, and deciding she must go through with the course she had decided on in such dread and haste.

Finally, worn out, she stretched herself on the bed, and snatched a few hours’ troubled sleep—only to wake again when the hour of eight struck, and to perform a hurried toilet, after which she set out boldly for Park Lane, where she knew she would find Ventris Blake alone.

None the less, in spite of her naturally strong nerve the contents and bills of the morning papers gave her an ugly shock. Whereas one would discreetly announce “Tragedy at Scarborough,” another would throw all reserve to the winds, and in letters several inches deep would narrate: “A Millionaire’s Wife Murdered. Gay Seaside Resort in Panic. Park Lane in Mourning. A Railway Hue and Cry.”

It was easy enough, of course, for her to tell herself that this was no affair of hers. Somehow her conscience was not quite dead, and that morning it seemed to stir uneasily; and to warn her that the money she was after was in one sense blood money, and to ask who was she to sacrifice a good strong love like Arthur Hudson’s to Winifred Pontifex so that she might win the man of her choice, and defeat a creature of the stamp of Flora Kaufmann.

“It will do you no good,” the voice seemed to whisper to her, and the passing cabs and carts appeared to take up the refrain, and every jolt of the wheels ground out the words “no good! no good! no good!” until, with a great gulp of relief, she hastened up the steps of the millionaire’s residence and gave a long sonorous peal on the bell.

Every blind in the windows of Ventris Blake’s house was tightly drawn. In some miraculous fashion an air of almost sepulchral gloom had been imparted to its exterior, and this was rather heightened than lessened by the fact that two or three police constables were apparently hanging about, somehow lending a suggestion of a pictured scene of a crime.

Early as it was, Ventris Blake consented to see her and received her in his study, the shutters of which were bolted, hiding the flood of electric light that poured over the interior, and also the fact that he was busily engaged with his Hebrew secretary, Israel Sawdry, transacting his ordinary business.

Thus, seated face to face alone with the man on whose word so much of her happiness depended, even Vera’s courage failed, and she found herself taking refuge in the most obvious commonplaces. There was indeed something almost snakelike in the way he fixed his eyes on hers, waiting for her to begin a story that, rich man that he was, he must have known by heart. Eventually, she plucked up her courage, and began slowly and timidly.

“Do you remember your goodness to me, Mr. Blake, when you enabled me to make over £3,000 on the Stock Exchange? Well,” now more hurried, “I am in instant need of money again. I—I can’t even wait to make it. I must have £5,000,” and then she stopped and bit her lips. After all, what power was it in this sphinx-like creature who said nothing but only looked, and yet made her talk like an anxious, over-driven school girl?

“I remember perfectly,” he said, but his tones were cold and even. It was impossible to tell what he felt.

Again she reddened as she realised Ventris Blake was bent on compelling her to ask him bolt outright for what she sought.

“I thought,” she went on lamely, “that you might be disposed to advance that sum to me!”

“On what security?” he queried softly, knowing there was none.

“On—on my request,” struck in Vera plucking up courage. “I want to finance Mr. Prendergast further. I have not the means.”

“And do you propose to make me any return for my assistance?” proceeded Blake.

“Yes—anything I can,” said Vera eagerly.

“Well let us see where we stand—whether our minds run in unison. There is your cousin, for instance, Winifred Pontifex,” he suggested. “Don’t you agree with me it is absurd for her to think of marrying Arthur Hudson?”

“Yes,” replied Vera lamely, feeling she was now caught in a trap, and would be taken wherever the millionaire wished.

“That being so you will, of course, now do all you can to break the match off.”

“Of course!” But the tone was weak and Blake’s eyes flashed.

“There must be no hesitation, no half lights about this,” he snapped. “Arthur Hudson must be broken. Your cousin Winifred must be mine. On those conditions I am willing to spend any amount of money—but on those conditions alone.”

Vera bowed, not trusting herself to speak, and he went on: “I am, as a matter of fact, glad that you came. I have given a good deal of thought to this same subject this morning, and I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way in which you and I can bring this most desirable result about. First of all you must quarrel with your cousin. You must make your home at Emperor’s Gate impossible to her. You must drive her to earn a livelihood for herself!”

“That is impossible,” interjected Vera. “She will marry Hudson.”

“Not at all,” said the millionaire calmly. “Leave Arthur Hudson to me. I can ruin him. It’s Miss Pontifex I can’t manage, and I look to you when I have advanced you this £5,000, to make her feel it is essential for her to stay in Emperor’s Gate no longer, but that she must seek some situation where she can be free. That situation I have already secured for her. You do your part, and drive her to it, and, in the end, we shall win easily enough.”

“But what kind of situation is it?” stammered Vera feeling herself cornered hopelessly. “Really I don’t think I ought to do this.”

None the less she was over-persuaded, and departed £5,000 the richer it is true, but pledged to carry out Ventris Blake’s scheme.

CHAPTER V.
RECORDS THE APPEARANCE OF THREE GLASS EYES

To be told in a most solemn fashion that you are married when you know you are single is a fate more often the subject of jest than of experience in real life. To be brought face to face, however, with the actual marriage certificate which seems to prove in a most explicit fashion that you were married five years ago, is a disclosure so terrifying in its possibilities that a man may be well excused for breaking down completely under the strain.

Certainly for two or three hours after they left the barrister’s flat in Emperor’s Gate Arthur Hudson seemed a complete wreck. In vain Paul Renishaw told him that a mere piece of paper was not the best evidence to be found in the world—that an upright life would always stand higher than a couple of perjured witnesses—that it needed but a word to his friends to have rallied about him a mass of conflicting evidence that would assuredly put Ventris Blake and his scheme to complete extinction.

Somehow Arthur was filled with a great forboding that he was in no sense at an end of his knowledge of the millionaire’s villainies. “Mark my words,” said he, “Ventris Blake has not sprung this mine upon me simply to ruin me. For good or for ill he has conceived a wild and insane passion for Winifred Pontifex; and he will not rest until he succeeds in entangling her within the net he has so cleverly woven about me.”

“What if he does?” asked Paul, with that stout and loyal commonsense of his. “Winifred knows what a scoundrel he is, and she is no more likely to falter in her love for you than she is to yield to Vera Langford’s persuasion to give him just the mere colour of encouragement. No, I don’t think at this point you need trouble very much on that score. Just rouse yourself, and let us be practical, and consider the bearing of our present dangers. The real trouble is this—we don’t quite see how the attack will come upon us. Of course, it would be a fine thing for me if I could sit down right here and write one of our own sensational accounts of that terrible interview at Emperor’s Gate for The Moon. It would be talked about from one end of England to the other; and it would arouse and alarm all your friends. But I am not quite sure whether at this point it would be wise to do this.”

“It would certainly put Ventris Blake on the alert,” remarked Arthur slowly. “I don’t myself see why we should let out a fact before we are compelled.”

“On the whole,” pursued Paul, “I think it would be well if you and I work very slowly and very steadily in the dark. Directly we make any fuss we shall find all our movements and enquiries hampered. The police, for instance, would pounce upon the disclosures, and before we could stir a step they would be telegraphing and working all over the country anxious, in default of anybody better, to affix the guilt of that poor woman’s murder upon yourself. Well now, we don’t want any interference like that; we don’t want them to shadow every move we make, and to be as wise, if not wiser, than ourselves. No, on the whole it would be better to leave the police to look after Mr. Ventris Blake.”

For some minutes the two men sat in Hudson’s rooms in Kensington Gore and thought deeply. Then, after another quick and eager discussion, they arrived at certain very important decisions.

In the first place, they decided that it would be best for Paul to get special leave of absence from The Moon by telegraph, and to go down by one of the first trains to Peterborough where he could investigate the facts of Arthur’s supposed marriage for himself. Unfortunately, the names of the two witnesses on the certificate “Israel Sawdry” and “Rebecca Charlton” afforded absolutely no indication of their position or their residence. More than that, it was not likely that the Registrar would be of much serious assistance; but Paul took one of Arthur’s photographs to show this official, and promised that he would spare neither pains nor expense in his search for facts about the murdered woman who had, it will be remembered, given her address as Meissonier Studios, Peterborough.

In the second place, it was agreed that Arthur should do nothing at this point to direct public attention to matters. The part he was to assume was that of the passive accused—but he also arranged to go down very early to Queen Victoria Street, and, if possible, to discover the reason why Ventris Blake had taken that mysterious garret at the top of No. 375.

“There is some tremendous mystery attached to the taking of that room, I am certain,” declared Arthur, as he passed in review the extraordinarily painstaking search which the millionaire had conducted before he secured the exact kind of room he required. “For my own part, I do not believe it turns on the death of his wife, but rather, on some particular conspiracy he has engineered against me. Perhaps, if that is so, the caretaker may be able to throw some light on his manœuvres.”

“At all events, old chap,” put in Paul, “you can claim, as landlords’ agent, to inspect the premises whenever you think fit. If you take my advice, you will seize an opportunity of doing this when Mr. Blake and his assistant are absent. Then don’t have too nice a sense of honour about the accident that you are in a stranger’s room. Just institute a most careful search—and understand that if you don’t expose this man he will ruin you.”

Dawn was climbing up the wall as Paul uttered this farewell injunction, and realising that if they were to be prepared for the troubles of the morrow, they must have some rest, the two men turned into their rooms and were soon fast asleep.

Blessed by a good conscience, Arthur did not, like Vera Langford, toss restlessly to and fro, but soon dropped into a deep and peaceful slumber, which it needed all Paul’s efforts to break when Arthur’s man came for the third time and declared that the trap was ready to take them to King’s Cross to catch the early train for Peterborough.

No sooner, however, had Arthur seen Paul safely started on his journey North than he turned his horse’s head in the direction of Cheapside. The fresh clear morning air had revived his spirits, and nobody who saw him spring from his trap and hurry into his counting house, would have guessed how terrible a load of shame and trouble was pressing upon him. Indeed, he went through the routine work of his letters with his old promptness and precision. In due course too, the agreement with Ventris Blake for the tenancy of the Queen Victoria Street garret, came before him, but there it must be admitted he did hesitate for a little while, and asked himself anxiously whether he should sign it and settle it, or whether it would not be wiser even at this last moment to repudiate his bargain.

For fully ten minutes indeed, he toyed with the idea. Some strong impelling power of custom drove him almost irresistably forward to do as he had promised. At the same time another intuition within him clamoured for expression. “Stop,” it seemed to urge him. “Or, you will regret this contract. It is quite true that you do not know for what this mysterious room is intended, but do not the suggestive circumstances in which it was taken warn you that it is not meant for good?”

Finally he did a weak thing—he compromised. One moment he bent down and signed the agreement with a bold defiant flourish. Another moment—telling his secretary that he must make no more appointments for him that day—he seized his hat and went off to inspect the interior of No. 375 for himself.

The premises in question proved to be one of those large towering blocks of buildings which are situated a few yards distant from the Salvation Army Head Quarters, and opposite the Civil Service Stores. The first three floors were occupied by a dealer in gas stoves; the fourth and fifth by two firms of Commission Agents in the Nottingham Lace trade; and the sixth, the top, contained the odd shaped room that had exercised so potent a fascination upon Ventris Blake.

Now excited, Arthur toiled up the different flights of steps until at length he reached to the top where he found himself faced by four doors, all of which seemed tightly locked and only one suggested any sign of human habitation—and in the woodwork of that was inlet a small electric bell.

In answer to his summons, however, the caretaker appeared—a small, thick-set man of about fifty with shifty blue eyes and a mass of red whiskers and cheeks puffed out and reddened by lack of exercise and drink. His manner was surly if not actually defiant, and for some time, Arthur had difficulty in making any headway with him at all.

At first, like most of the uneducated class from which he sprang, this man affected complete ignorance. He did not know that one of the garrets had been taken. He had not heard the name of any Mr. Ventris Blake. The gentleman in front of him might be the agent, Mr. Arthur Hudson, who employed him. He didn’t say he was—and he didn’t say he wasn’t. He had never seen Mr. Hudson himself, and if he listened to every fairy story that was told him by every stranger that came there, his place wouldn’t hold him another five minutes.

Finally, Arthur lost patience, “Look here,” he said very sternly, “I don’t come here to waste words with men of your stamp. Either you do as I tell you, and shew me round these rooms pretty sharp, or I’ll clear you out of these rooms and your berth here before the day is finished. I tell you frankly, I don’t like the obstacles you are putting in my path. You have made me distinctly suspicious. Now, just make up your mind pretty sharp what you are going to do. Here is my card. You can see for yourself who I am. It is your own fault that you don’t recognise my face. I remember yours perfectly well, and I can assure you it will be a good time before I forget it, so just hurry up and decide.”

The man snarled for a few seconds longer, but, directly Arthur looked angry, it was clear that he was beaten. Taking down a bunch of keys from the wall he consented to shew Arthur over the room Ventris Blake had taken. Curiously enough, the millionaire had already gone in possession of it. His things had actually arrived and been arranged an hour previous, and hearing this Arthur resolved on a bold move. He took the keys from the hands of the caretaker and dispatched the man to his office to await his return. Thus, freed from all observation, he advanced to his promised examination of the garret in question—but as he threw open the door, even he was astounded at the extraordinary transformation Ventris Blake had wrought in the appearance of the room.

Contrary to his expectations, Ventris Blake had made no effort whatever to use the place as an office or a storehouse. As a matter of fact indeed, he seemed to have done his best to destroy entirely the original character of the room; and the result was that the first impression that Arthur got on crossing the threshold was of passing into another world, remote altogether from London—to a world of early Victorian time, into a curiously shaped old drawing-room, at the period when drawing-rooms were stiff and scented and full of quaint dimity hangings and furniture that was solid enough no doubt but never exhibited any pretence to comfort.

“What on earth has the man done this extraordinary thing for?” he cried aloud in his astonishment. Then quickly recovering himself, he stepped swiftly round the apartment till suddenly his eyes were caught and held by the most extraordinary object in the whole of the apartment. This was a huge shield of black velvet fixed on the wall above the fireplace, from which, by a cunning arrangement of the lights in the casement, there gleamed three huge half-human eyes of glass, so life-like indeed, that they seemed to dominate and radiate across the entire length of the room.

“Good heavens,” he muttered, half paralysed with horror at this fearful object. “Although I know they are made by the hand of man, I am half afraid to look at them, they are so startling, so lifelike.”

In spite of himself he fell back a step, covering his eyes with his hands. Even as he did so, however, he became conscious of another presence in the room besides his own. Looking round fearfully and hurriedly, he was astounded to see behind him the man he hated most in the world—Ventris Blake.

With a keen sense of chivalry, that was strangely out of place in dealing with so polished a trickster, Arthur however did not attempt to make capital out of this visit. Most other men would, by a skilful series of questions and manœuvres, have sought to elucidate the meaning and the object of that grim startling device on the huge black shield over the mantlepiece.

Arthur, on the contrary, affected that he had no interest in his surroundings, and contented himself by giving the millionaire a curt nod and the explanation that he had merely come to see that everything was in order for Blake’s tenancy to begin. Then, with another curt nod, he passed quite calmly out of the room, leaving, it must be confessed, Ventris Blake somewhat puzzled by his gentlemanly reticence.

No sooner, however, had he got back to his private room in Cheapside, than he rang the bell and directed that the caretaker of No. 375 should be brought before him. A moment later, the man entered, his temper in no sense improved by the time he had been detained in the outer office, without a word of explanation; and here Arthur made the greatest mistake in tactics that he ever made in his life.

Instead of trying to manage this man—of making him feel that he had done a certain amount of wrong which only good behaviour in the future could wipe out—that in order to win his way back, he must be loyal, courteous and exact in the future—he took the tone of a justly aggrieved master. Unhappily, the fellow had none of the feelings of a servant, and instantly he hated Arthur like poison, whereas tact might have turned him into a most valuable detective.

“I suppose,” Arthur began, “you know you were very rude to me when I called at your rooms this morning! Obviously, I can’t have this kind of thing in an important set of offices like those at No. 375. You must, therefore, move at once down to that new block of flats that we are building at Hammersmith. Go back at once, and be ready to start at four o’clock, when the cart will call for your things.” And thinking the matter was settled, he bent down and started to write—but the man stood his ground.

“Well now, Mr. Hudson,” he began in a tone that was meant to be nasty, very nasty indeed, “suppose I don’t choose to career off to a forsaken jerry-built hole like that beautiful property of yours at Hammersmith, how then?”

Arthur’s brow clouded. “You will be turned out.”

The man coughed, then advanced to the grate and spat viciously in the fire. “Oh! and I shall be turned out shall I.”

“You will be turned out,” repeated Arthur firmly.

“Then I will be turned out. Indeed, I would like to be turned out now I know what a kind of gentleman you are—who simply wants to get rid of a clean, honest caretaker, like the Missis and myself, so that you can get hold of my rooms and act the part of a spy and eavesdropper on a rich and openhanded gent like Mr. Ventris Blake. You think, of course, I didn’t see through your ikey little trick, but I did first time—and, I tell you to your face, you ain’t no class.”

Long before this tirade was finished, Arthur had sprung to his feet, his face crimson with passion. To be absolutely fair to him, he had absolutely no idea of keeping any watch on Ventris Blake’s movements, and his first impulse was to take this beer-sodden rascal by the scruff of the neck and kick him down the passage. Happily, he remembered the squalid row that would follow, and the disgrace of an appearance at the Mansion House, on a charge of common assault, particularly at this serious crisis in his affairs: and wisely, he refrained from soiling his hands.

“You blackguard,” he said, with a quick shrug of the shoulders, “tell me your name, and I will have your money sent to you.”

The man snorted, “My name’s as good as yours any day, Mr. Arthur Hudson,” he growled. “Better, as you may discover, one of these days, and much sooner than you imagine. Indeed, I shouldn’t be surprised, if you hadn’t to come to me, and beg me to forgive you your rude remarks this afternoon. But I shan’t—I shan’t,” and he banged his fist vigorously on the table.

Arthur took this threat as a mere piece of drunken bravado, and persisted in his demand. “Tell me your name,” he enquired again.

“George Charlton,” the fellow answered: and into his eyes there came a look of strange cunning and satisfaction.

Charlton! Somewhere in the dim recesses of Arthur’s memory, a faint recollection stirred, as though this name possessed some odd significance to him—but not until he put the next question did the hideous truth break upon him.

“Charlton,” he repeated slowly, trying in vain to remember the lost connection. “Let me see, I have heard your name before, in other circumstances, haven’t I! What is the name of the Charwoman—your wife?”

“Rebecca Charlton,” the man faltered, and enraged though he was with Arthur, even he dare not look in his face.

Rebecca Charlton! All at once the real importance of this name burst upon Arthur’s mind like a lightning flash; and he could have cursed his folly, in thus early, making an enemy of one whose hostility might prove so deadly to him. For Rebecca Charlton was no other than the witness of his alleged marriage! Her name appeared plainly on the copy of the certificate, which Ventris Blake had shewn to Russell Langford at the flat that fatal night at Emperor’s Gate, and which, no doubt, would be produced when the real circumstances of that murder at Scarborough came before the magistrate.

Realising the uselessness of appealing to a drink-stained creature like this, however, Arthur mastered his agitation, and nodding his head in the direction of the door, he told the man to go, and never appear on his premises again.

For a moment, the fellow hesitated. He opened his mouth, as though he would speak—and say something, even more surprising than he had done. Then, all at once, he checked himself; the old crafty look came back into his face; and, with a smile of derision, he stepped out and disappeared from sight.

For two or three minutes after he had left, Arthur paced up and down his room, and thought deeply. Dearly he would have liked to recall the whole of that conversation with George Charlton, but he saw at once that it was too late, and so, like a wise man, he did not waste time in useless regrets, but tried to discover the best way to repair his blunder. One duty certainly stood out clear, above all others. He must keep in touch with this man and this man’s wife; and finally, he, perhaps, took the best course that was available to any man in the same bewildering set of circumstances—he sat down and wrote as under, to a famous firm of private detectives, that chanced to have offices near his own:—

Dear Sirs,—(he began) please send an officer to shadow two caretakers named Charlton, at No. 375, Queen Victoria Street. They will leave their position early this afternoon; and I am particularly anxious to find out where they move to, who they see, what they do, and any particulars of their past lives you can put your hands on. Pray do not spare any expense in presenting a full and exhaustive report daily, of their proceedings, visitors and conversations, and treat each one of them as equally important to the issues I have in hand. With compliments,

Yours faithfully,
Arthur Hudson.

A moment later, this note was despatched to its destination, and Arthur found himself free to consider what was, perhaps, the most puzzling of all that morning’s adventures—the mystery of The Three Glass Eyes.

Why, he asked himself again and again, until his brain seemed to reel under the problem, did Ventris Blake ever erect such a weird looking object as that in a garret in the very heart of London? To all intents and purposes it had no meaning, no use, no value. Yet, there it was, pregnant with mystery and suggestion, so prominently placed, as though the whole scheme of the room had been designed to throw it into baleful, sinister relief.

Once, he was disposed to think, that the device formed a medium by which Ventris Blake could mesmerise any persons that looked upon it. The next second he recognised this theory as absurd, for the successful mesmerist uses his own powers, and does not trust to the medium of manufactured force. Another time, he got the idea that that terrible looking shield might serve to frighten nervous women—then, he had to ask himself, why should nervous women be frightened at all, when there are any number of ruffians ready for hire in London for this kind of loathsome service. Besides, why should the room be specially fitted up in that early Victorian fashion, if the furniture had not also some peculiar significance—if Ventris Blake had not intended even the chairs and the tables and the hangings, to play some part in this weird drama of his, the key to which seemed to disappear entirely the more eagerly it was sought.

Eventually, he had to confess himself absolutely beaten at that point, and to own that after all Charlton may have been right in his suggestion, that if he wanted to know what Ventris Blake was doing in that particular room, he would have to act the part of spy upon him, although that character was one for which he had no manner of qualifications.

“I will wait until Paul Renishaw returns from Peterborough,” poor Arthur decided at last, distracted beyond measure by his reflections. “Perhaps his enquiries to-day, may make all this fuss of mine absolutely needless. Perhaps, he may even find that this supposed marriage of mine with Ventris Blake’s wife, was some silly drunken freak of some ‘friends’ I have long since forgotten, and was never properly worked off upon me at the time it was intended it should be. After all, let me be quite fair, I have great faith in Paul, and I am certain that if anybody can ferret out the heart of this mystery, he will do so for me.”

And he let his mind dwell pleasantly on the idea of Paul’s cleverness and the circumstances that once one of the heads of Scotland Yard had complimented his friend’s cleverness in working up the details of a mysterious murder in Whitechapel, and had declared that Paul would be an ornament to any detective force. Reassured by these reflections, he turned to his work again with a light heart. Somehow, no day seems so dark when we think that the evening may bring relief.

Poor Arthur! Little did he know the forces of ill that were arrayed against him, or the many dark, weary, heart-breaking days he would have to pass through, ere the whole of the circumstances of that supposed marriage of his at Peterborough came to be known. Little did he realise that a man of millions, unscrupulous like Blake, was not accustomed to work clumsily in affairs where his worst passions were concerned, or to build up houses of crime to hold his enemies, at the first touch on which they would fall to pieces.

Poor Arthur! let him hug his fond delusions as long as the fate that was pressing him so hard would permit. Soon, all too soon, he was to discover how bitter life can be for the best and the wisest in certain dark crisis which no good power on earth seems able to avert.

Alas! he was this time to receive a fresh blow to his peace of mind, only an hour later, when a clerk came in hurriedly and announced “Miss Winifred Pontifex.”

This was the first time that Winifred had visited him since they had become engaged, and as he knew she disliked the idea of a call at the office very much, he realised that only some terrible and unexpected difficulty had driven her to adopt this course.

“I have left,” she now muttered to him brokenly, as she crept into his room like some creature sorely wounded—all the joyousness gone from her young fair face, and in place of the glad, smiling look that had hitherto appeared part of her bright sunny nature, she carried an expression of sadness so poignant, that it was hard to believe that she had ever lived and loved with such touching and complete devotion.

Pieced together, the facts she had to relate were sad enough to break down any spirit, even of a girl so fresh and trustful as Winifred Pontifex. At first, it was true, she refused to tell him the whole of them for fear that she should wound him beyond recall, at a time when he needed all his own enthusiasm and power to enable him to carry safely his own load that had of late grown so intolerable. But, as he took her hands in his, with that characteristic, quick, impetuous movement of his, and looked into her eyes with so much courage and pain, all her reserve seemed to ebb from her—and in place of a girl wounded almost to death, beneath a blow of shame and defeat, there appeared a sad-faced resourceful girl, in whose eyes shone the light of a brave, unselfish, upbearing love. Then—and only then—Winifred spoke to him from the bottom of her heart.

“It has been but a sad and a weary time at Emperor’s Gate since I bade you good-bye last night,” she explained, crossing her hands nun-like on her lap and looking far into the fire. “The shadow of a great impalpable terror seems to have brooded over us, so that at times, I have felt some terrible avalanche of woe would fall upon us. And yet,” she went on, still more slowly, “I had no idea it would come upon us like this.”

Once again she sighed, and then, catching the deepening look of anxiety, which Arthur tried in vain to repress, she roused herself with an effort, and went on with her story: “Of course, Vera came to me almost immediately after I went to my room last night, too distracted to see or to speak to anybody that might chance to call. Somehow, I felt that it was only right that I should confide to her all that had happened to us since that terrible man Ventris Blake had come to the flat and had shown Uncle that sham marriage certificate. In one way, of course, she was very sweet to me—she bent down and she played with the ornaments upon my neck and kept murmuring ‘Oh, you poor thing, you poor thing.’ None the less, I saw that her mind was not really fixed on what we were talking about, and so I quickly gave up trying to make her understand all that you and I felt about this vile and treacherous accusation, and I just contented myself by expressing to her how intolerable it was you, who had led such a good and upright life, should be suddenly plunged into a whirlpool of crime and treacheries.”

“Never mind me, darling,” said Arthur gently, “after all, a man isn’t much good if he can’t take a bit of trouble now and then and find his way through it the better and stronger for the experience. Just tell me about yourself, you know, dearest, it is really you that matter just now, and not me at all.”

A word of protest rose to Winifred’s lips, but then, seeing that she was straining Arthur’s anxiety by her reticence, she pressed the palms of her hands more tightly together and proceeded. “Well, it was just as I expected. Directly I gave Vera an opening, she slipped away, with a careless kiss, and a vague suggestion that if I really cared for you, all things of course, must come right in the end. Poor Vera! If I really cared. Sometimes Arthur, do you know, I often really wonder, whether Vera’s heart has ever been really touched yet! I know she has fallen under the domination of that man Jules Prendergast, but I don’t somehow think that infatuations for actors of that type are really love at all; and if they were, wouldn’t Vera understand now that it only needs trouble and danger to make true lovers cling together more closely.”

For a second the lovers’ eyes exchanged a look of eager, irresistible confidence, and once again, Winifred took up the thread of the tale.

“The real trouble occurred this morning, when I came down to breakfast. Vera had been out on some curious errand and had returned hot and excited—so hot and excited indeed, that we had not been in the room five minutes together, before the change in her thoughts about us, burst on me like a torrent. ‘So,’ said she, with an ever-rising inflection of scorn, ‘you still mean to stick to this married man that wooed you under the pretence he was single, do you?’ And as I rose to my feet, overcome with confusion, she went on with ever increasing bitterness to declare, that she was ashamed of my weakness and want of proper pride, and finished by calling on me, if I valued my good name and self-respect, to write and give you up there and then, and never to see your face again.

“Oh, dearest,” stammered Winifred, tears now falling unchecked over her clasped hands on her knees. “I really cannot bear to tell you all the wicked things she said about you—about me—about us both. Do let me hurry over this awful scene. Do believe that the things she said were so cruel, so false, so heartless that I felt I could not stay in the flat another day, and that whatever flight might mean, misery, poverty, almost disgrace, I must go, otherwise, I knew, I would have died for sheer shame that such words should be spoken unchallenged, about you.”

“I am sure, dearest, whatever you did was right,” said Arthur stoutly. “Nevertheless, there must be some strong reason for this very sudden change of front, don’t you think—this alteration from affection to harshness, this rapid movement from sympathy to intolerance.”

“No doubt,” agreed Winifred, with a grave shake of the head. “Indeed, when I came to think the conversation over, I got a strong impression that she must have been to see Ventris Blake, and he had put her up to this as a part of some diabolical scheme of his own, although of course, this is only intuition. I don’t possess an atom of proof.”

“Certainly, there is some treachery somewhere,” observed Arthur, who, unfortunately, could not realise to what depth a distracted but hot-headed girl will descend for the sake of a worthless lover. “I know of course, Vera did not like me, but I had no idea she was not fairly well disposed towards me, and certainly I did not think she would ever act in open hostility to me.”

“Happily,” said Winifred with one of her rare, fleeting smiles, “I chanced to find one friend in distress, and in a person, I have no reason to believe, held me in any particular esteem—no other than Melita, who, perhaps you may remember, is Vera’s maid. In my haste, I got her to put some of my things together, and not knowing where to take them to, I asked her if she knew of some cheap comfortable rooms. Then it was that she gave me a piece of splendid advice. ‘Why waste your money on landladies, miss,’ said she, with a knowing look. ‘Why not look out for a situation, where you would be treated as a lady, given a nice comfortable home, and have twenty or thirty pounds a year for yourself.’ I told her, of course, that I knew of no such opening, but oddly enough, she did, for she happens to go to that fashionable church, St. Sepulchre’s, in Piccadilly, and belongs to a Bible class conducted by the clergyman’s wife, who had happened to mention to her quite casually the other day, that she was in want of a nursery governess for her little girl aged seven.”

“A nursery governess,” repeated Arthur blankly; and even he could not hide a certain look of disappointment.

“Yes, a nursery governess,” repeated Winifred brightly. “If I have to work, I think I would sooner spend my days with a child than with anybody else. As a matter of fact, I jumped at the chance, and taking a hansom, I set off at once to the Vicarage, which adjoins the church, and in less than five minutes I was engaged for the position.”

“That was very quick work, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” admitted Winifred, “only, you see, the clergyman’s wife wasn’t in, I saw the man, the Reverend Duncan Kilroy, and he told me he was sure his wife would like any relation of so famous and trustworthy a lawyer as Russell Langford, and then engaged me to come in on the spot. True, I don’t quite like the clergyman—he is too oily somehow, perhaps a bit familiar, but Melita assured me that Mrs. Kilroy was ‘a perfect angel,’ and certainly the little girl, Monica, was as sweet a little child as I have ever seen.”

“Oh, but this is impossible,” protested Arthur hotly. “When you consider how well provided I am it is preposterous for you to turn yourself into a servant maid for any parson of that sort. Why not let us get married at once—” and then, all at once he stopped again. What right had he to ask any woman to share a name on which rested so terrible a load of suspicion as there did upon his?

Somehow, too, Winifred guessed he had already repented of his rash utterance, for rising from the chair upon which she had been seated, she looked gaily into his face, and tried to rally him. “Do you know, dear, you are not at all grateful for the good things that happen to you? Don’t you understand that this arrangement is much better for you and for me than the one we had agreed to accept at Emperor’s Gate? In St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage I shall at least be free to receive any letters I like from you, and to meet you in the Green Park at least once a week. Do not, therefore, repine. Let us try to look on the bright side of this separation, and trust that somehow things will soon right themselves again, and then in the face of the whole world, and without a single fear, we can become man and wife.”

In an instant, Arthur saw how selfish his objection was, and how ridiculous was the pride that had dictated his opposition. Indeed, pressed forward by his own frank and open nature, he strove eagerly to equal the heights reached by poor Winifred in the prompt sacrifice of herself.

“All right, dearest,” he cried quickly, bending down and kissing her fondly, “I am awfully sorry, I said such a selfish thing like that. Please forget I said it, and believe that I will never say another word like it again.”

A few minutes later he took her to a cab, and directed the driver to convey her to St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. Then, seeing the clock nearly pointed to the hour of five, he called another hansom and made his way as rapidly as possible to King’s Cross, for he saw that the train by which he had arranged to meet Paul Renishaw on his return from Peterborough, was very shortly due. As it happened, the horse he had hired was a remarkably quick one, and he reached King’s Cross, ten minutes at least, before the time advertised for Paul’s train to arrive.

CHAPTER VI.
CONCERNS THE HOLE IN THE WALL

Not until the two friends were rumbling along in a first-class carriage on the underground railway, bound for South Kensington station, did Paul Renishaw say a word about his experiences at Peterboro’ in search of the truth about the certificate of that sham marriage, which was destined to prove that five years ago, Arthur Hudson had been something worse than a bigamist. Then his accents were so low, so grave, so full of sympathetic affection, that poor Arthur realised instinctively, that little good had resulted from the day’s efforts. And so indeed, it proved.

“I turned up at the Registry Office all right,” said Paul, pretending to busy himself with the shape and colour of the cigarette he was smoking, the more readily to hide his mortification. “But I confess I was very quickly nonplussed. You see, the Registrar, who it was alleged to have performed the ceremony, died about a year after. The marriage is entered in the proper books safe enough, and no doubt, some ceremony of the kind indicated, did actually take place. Unfortunately, the only person I could strike, who pretended at all to have any knowledge of the actual marriage, was an old woman who used to clean the office of the Registrar of Marriages, and who declares that she was present at the time your so-called wedding was solemnized. Naturally, I did not want to give her any clue as to what I was after, and so I merely contented myself by asking her to describe the kind of man the so-called ‘Arthur Hudson’ was. Confound it, the crazy old soul gave me a magnificent description of your personal appearance five years ago. Why, she even described that old-pepper-and-salt suit you were so fond of wearing about that period—and, when I produced the actual photograph, she took a solemn oath to me that you were the man who married Aimée Lucille Fausta Burgoyne on the date given.”

“But surely,” gasped Arthur, “that was enough to shake your faith in me!”

“No! it was not enough, nothing could do that, old chap,” responded Paul, very gently, although the lines on his features betrayed the deep anxiety he had passed through. “As a matter of fact, I had a small satisfaction of my own, at the Registry Office, before I saw this old beldame. You must know that during the discussion, the present Registrar produced the actual certificate of your marriage for my inspection, and I had a good look at the signature that purported to be written by yourself. Now, of course, old man, I know your writing quite as well as I know my own, and although this particular signature was amazingly like the one you are accustomed to use, I know enough of your characteristics to know that the thing was a clever but not a convincing forgery.”

“Thank heaven for that,” muttered Arthur fervently. “In truth, I had just begun to wonder, if, after all, I am not the villain these people have made out—whether after all, I had not fallen into some extraordinary trance five years ago, like those people you read of in the newspaper, and had completely lost all knowledge of my own identity for a few weeks during which, of course, I might have met this poor, ill-fated Aimée Burgoyne, and married her quite unknown to myself and my own companions; and then after a spell of married happiness, suddenly recovered my sanity and returned to my own self and my old way of life,” and checking the depression that was stealing over him, he broke into a low and mirthless laugh.

“Not a bit of it,” responded Paul cheerily. “The whole circumstances of the marriage are too shady, too suggestive to admit of any remote contingency like that. I soon found out when I came to enquire for Meissonier Studios, which I found to be a kind of greenhouse fixed at the end of an old garden, and formerly used by travelling photographers, what a base use had been made of a high sounding address, so as to gull the authorities! Indeed, the landlady of the place told me, that within the last six years, no fewer than thirty different people had tried to make a living in that shanty, and had failed, but as she kept no books, and only charged half-a-crown a week rent, ‘payment in advance, and leave at the end of seven days if you are not satisfied,’ I quickly saw that it was useless for me to attempt to pursue any enquiries in that direction.”

“But the witnesses,” queried Arthur, anxiously, “how about those?” And he suddenly recollected the facts of his encounter with the drunken caretaker, Charlton.

“Oh,” said Paul lightly, “I could make nothing out of those. I consulted a lot of old local directories—I stood a lot of free drinks to a lot of intelligent loafers—and, finally, I went to the police station, where I happened to meet a friend in the Chief Constable; and he worked like a nigger to help me. Nothing was known about ‘Israel Sawdry’ or ‘Rebecca Charlton’—not a word, so I concluded that they, like the bride and bridegroom, were all imported for the occasion, for the particular purpose of the fraud.”

“Well, luckily, old chap, I do know something about one of them.” And in a few quick and concise sentences, Arthur told Paul not only how, in this beer-sodden care-taker, George Charlton, he had discovered the husband of the very woman they were after, Rebecca Charlton, and had put detectives on the track of them both, but also how he had gone himself to that extraordinary garret Ventris Blake had taken at 375 Queen Victoria Street, and what he had seen there, including the strange device of The Three Glass Eyes.

Paul listened very quietly while all these facts were recounted to him, his brow growing every moment more and more cloudy. For fully ten minutes he sat back in the carriage, as they clattered through station after station on the Inner Circle, and he spoke not a word.

Indeed, it was only when they sat in Arthur’s own sitting-room in Kensington Gore, that he made any attempt to gauge the value of Arthur’s new and suggestive experiences. Then he tossed the end of his cigarette viciously into the fire, and throwing himself into an armchair, told Arthur to listen very carefully to him.

“It is like this, old man,” he declared. “You did exactly the right thing in putting the detectives on the track of those two wretches, the Charltons. You mark my words, we shall get some most valuable discovery from that source.

“In my opinion, however, you did quite wrong in walking out of that room Ventris Blake has taken so easily, when you had once obtained admission to it. If that huge black shield, bearing The Three Glass Eyes, gave you such an ugly turn as you tell me it did, why on earth didn’t you go up to it, and find out what it was made of!

“Personally, I am a peaceable man, with a great respect for the laws of property, but I could tell you, that if I had seen that beastly-looking object, I should have seized the first chair that came to my hand, and smashed the whole contrivance to atoms. If you had, I am sure you would have learned a great deal more than you did.

“As it is, however,” he went on very firmly, “there is only one thing for us both to do. We must both go at once to Queen Victoria Street ourselves, and, taking yet another advantage of that dear sainted Ventris Blake’s absence, we must go over his garret in a more systematic fashion than you ever attempted to do.”

“But how the dickens are we to get in? I didn’t wait to get the keys from the caretaker. All the doors on that top floor are sure to be locked as tight as a drum.”

“Oh, fiddle-de-dee,” muttered Paul, irritably. “Have you so soon forgotten the lessons that old burglar gave me in Seven Dials, by which he swore there wasn’t a common door lock in Christendom that could defy the tricks in picking he had put me up to? Why, those must be only common or garden locks you’ve got on those doors, mustn’t they? Well, well, don’t say another word about them. Come along with me now—and I’ll take my chance.”

Overborne by his friend’s persuasion, Arthur quickly yielded to this new suggestion, and, snatching a hurried dinner, they again went to an underground station—to Mansion House Station—and before eight o’clock had struck, they found themselves walking down Queen Victoria Street, stealing like burglars up the staircase of No. 375. Luckily, somebody had left a light burning on the topmost floor, and, taking a hint from Arthur, who never to this day can tell why he gave it, although it proved singularly providential, Paul undertook his first essay in house-breaking on the door of the caretaker’s room.

Well indeed it was that he did so, for no sooner had they got this lock properly picked and the door pushed wide open, than they were startled by the sound of voices—the voices, too, of Ventris Blake and of Russell Langford.

“What the deuce are those two men doing, coming here at this unearthly hour?” whispered Arthur excitedly to Paul; but the next moment he found himself gripped tightly by the arm by his companion, who dragged him inside the care-taker’s apartments, and noiselessly closed the door upon them both.

“Hush! If you value your life,” he muttered thickly. “Quick! Take my hand and lead me in the direction in which you fancy Blake’s room to be. We have only a second to spare. Act at once, for they are coming up the stairs now, yet, if we can only get a few slits made in the wall, we may very possibly discover more than we shall ever find out again, about a pair of men who I regard as equal in rascality and wickedness.”

Stirred to the uttermost, Arthur dragged Paul through the empty rooms, now lit only by feeble reflections from the huge electric lights in the silent street beneath. Fortunately, he had a good brain for locality, and almost in a flash, he was able to indicate the partition that divided Blake’s garret from the care-taker’s.

“Now for it,” gasped Paul, hoarse with excitement, and tapping the wall gently, he was overjoyed to find, as he had expected, that it was made of the flimsiest lath and plaster.

With the cunning of the skilled burglar he attacked this partition, and almost in a second, he had managed to dissect two or three inches towards two or three places which commanded a complete view of the interior of the apartment.

As it happened, no time was wasted by the millionaire or by the lawyer when they had once got the door of the apartment open. In response to a rather florid bow from Blake, Russell Langford was the first to enter, and this was a set contrivance, for no sooner had the barrister put his foot across the threshold than the financier stepped quickly after him, and turned and locked the door upon them both. The next instant he struck a light, and before Langford had time to recover the use of his eyes, he had lit three or four of the burners in the gas-chandelier that depended from the centre of the ceiling. Then, as the light streamed over the apartment, a curious thing happened.

All at once, Russell Langford seemed to take in the entire sense of that quaintly arranged apartment—to realise that this was no ordinary office or warehouse to which he had been invited by this friend, for which he entertained such peculiar dread—but was, on the contrary, a diabolically arranged trap to frighten and to conquer him.

With what exceeding bitterness did he remember every aspect, every turn, every corner of that room, in the counterfeit presentiment of which, he now found himself! With what marvellous cunning that fiend, Ventris Blake, had managed to reproduce every detail of the original place that was fraught with a thousand heartbreaking recollections for him! Why, there, even at his feet, the carpet had been tampered with—and yes, just where the light fell from the chandelier in a vivid circle in front of him, just like it had happened to do in the old days, was that dark vengeful-looking stain of blood.

“My God! this is awful!” he gasped; and more like a man in a trance than a creature possessed of all his senses, he felt his way towards the mantelpiece, from the huge black shield above which there glowered down upon him the Three Glass Eyes!!

Oddly enough though, this symbol did not excite half the terror within him that his unseen watchers, Paul Renishaw and Arthur Hudson, had expected. Long he gazed at it as though he would drink to the full the cup of bitterness that had been prepared for him with such fiendish ingenuity and precision—but only by the ghastly pallor of his cheeks, by the twitching of his nerves about the temples, and by that drawn grey look we see sometimes in the faces of people doomed to early death, did he show any signs of the awful anguish that had now taken possession of his soul and heart.

All the time Ventris Blake’s eyes were fixed upon him, with that hungry, strained, compelling look, that seemed to read right through the lawyer’s pale, thin, envelope of flesh to the black shrivelled up heart he so successfully concealed from the world.

At last, even he, the arch-fiend that had so cunningly devised this staggering lesson for his companion, could bear the tense, drawn silence no longer.

“Well,” said he eagerly, “are you satisfied?” and with a swift gesture he pointed to those three brilliant but immoveable eyes above him. And there was a moment’s pause, and then across the room came ringing the answer: “I am satisfied.”

With a long sighing sound, Russell Langford turned away at length from the hideous object that confronted him, but like a man who has suddenly grown old, in an hour of the most frightful anguish, he threw out his hands helplessly, and tottered rather than walked towards the door.

“Your price, man,” he quavered irritably, seizing Blake by the lappet of his coat. “You fiend in human shape, you have done this with some object—now then, tell me your price.”

Ventris Blake broke into a laugh that was hard as the mask he always wore over his features. “You’re a funny chap, Langford,” said he, “and I don’t half like being dragged about as though I were a marionette, but you shall have your answer all the same. ‘My price,’ as you call it, won’t hurt you a scrap; it doesn’t even affect you, for all I ask is that you should just link up your forces with mine and help me to compel your niece, Winifred Pontifex, to be mine.”

“And if I refuse,” snarled the old man, swaying around fiercely, and glaring balefully at his tormentor. “What then? Have you not done enough injury to me and mine without putting this extra load of iniquity upon my shoulders? What, Ventris Blake, are you—man, fiend or devil—that you should so torture me and rend me, that I have felt for years past, were I not such a pitiably poor kind of coward I would take the only refuge that is left for me, and blow out my brains.”

“Oh, but you mustn’t talk like that,” said Ventris Blake soothingly, realising that he had pressed this feeble will as far as it was politic, and that it might be better to go easy for a time if he wished to gain his ultimate purpose. “After all, it is not a very difficult task I put before you. Really, as a price of my silence, it is ridiculously small. Why, even your daughter Vera has promised to aid me—”

“Vera!” exclaimed the old man passionately, “I have no daughter Vera, for I have discovered she has played me false, and that in a few days she proposes to marry that wretched creature of an actor, Jules Prendergast.”

“Never mind about that,” persisted Blake, “I can soon stop any folly of that description. I have got that precious mummer under my thumb, and if I tell him to give Vera up, he will be precious glad to do so, careless whether he breaks her heart or not, for all he cares for is that he should get her cash. But who told you about Prendergast at all?” he added with a sudden access of suspicion, fearful lest some servant of his own had tried to blackmail the barrister.

“Oh, a scoundrel named Judson, a footman of mine, that I intended to discharge, but who seems to have got to know a great deal too much of what is bad for me, to enable me to part with him, and I have had to pension him off with an annuity of fifty pounds a year, just to keep his mouth shut.”

“Well, you have got out of it cheaply,” retorted his cynical companion, beginning to turn out the lights in the chandelier. “Still, whilst you are here, you had better give me an answer to my question—Do you intend to go in with me, heart and soul, and to help me to win Winifred Pontifex for myself?”

Russell Langford affected to think for a moment, but the two watchers in the next room could see that he was already beaten. Now that the first shock of the mystery of the Three Glass Eyes had passed over his head, it was easy to see that his old craven fear for his own safety and well-being had re-asserted itself; and almost before Blake could turn and give him one of those searching, compelling glances of his, he had mumbled forth the required promise.

Another moment, and all the lights in the grim looking garret were extinguished. Taking Langford firmly by the arm, the millionaire conducted him to the top of the staircase, and after locking the door carefully behind them, led the way for them both down the stairs into the street.

Meanwhile, Paul and Arthur were left to themselves, staring at each other in blank amazement. It was quite true they had witnessed the entire interview between Langford and Blake, and had heard every word that was exchanged between them, but somehow they seemed to be no nearer solving the mystery of the Three Glass Eyes than they had been at the time previous.

Of course, they had discovered that the millionaire had some curious, far-reaching hold over the lawyer,—but that Russell Langford had himself practically admitted when they first mentioned Ventris Blake’s name to him, and now they were no nearer to the discovery of its character than was represented by a knowledge of the two prime factors—a shield, bearing Three Glass Eyes, and an early Victorian carpet, stained with blood.

Could Russell Langford have been guilty of any crime of violence of which Ventris Blake alone knew the secret? Could some tragedy in the early life of the lawyer have been hushed up without exposure, and could disgrace hang upon any disclosures that the millionaire might choose to make at any critical moment?

These, and a hundred such like questions, flashed like lightning through the minds of the two comrades as they felt their way out of the darkened rooms hitherto occupied by the drunken caretaker, Charlton, and made once again for the open street.

Swinging off to the right in the direction of New Bridge Street, they soon found themselves near the Bridewell Police Station, from under the shadow of which two men, who had been standing in eager conversation, suddenly started forward.

By the light of a lamp, Paul and Arthur saw that one man was attired in the uniform of the ordinary police inspector; the other, although he wore plain clothes, was obviously a detective.

“By the way,” said the former, pretending to treat the matter as a light one, “do you mind telling me which of you two gentlemen is Mr. Arthur Hudson?”

“I am,” replied Arthur promptly.

“Then,” broke in the detective, suddenly gripping him by the arm, “it is my duty to arrest you, sir, on a charge of the wilful murder of your wife at Scarborough some two days ago.”

“My wife!” gasped Arthur, dumbfounded. “Why, I have no wife!”

“Oh yes, you have,” repeated the detective confidently. “You can’t fool me, for your wife’s name was Aimée Lucille Fausta Hudson.”

Now almost any other man but Paul Renishaw would have broken into a storm of fury when he saw his friend seized by a police inspector and detective and bundled off to the police station without a word of explanation.

As it turned out, however, Paul Renishaw knew the police-methods almost as well as did the police themselves: and in an instant, he recognised the melancholy truth that any demonstration at that point which might be made against this sudden attack, was bound to tell against Arthur himself, even though he might be, (as indeed he was,) perfectly innocent of the charge preferred against him. Therefore, summoning all his powers of persuasion, he begged Arthur very earnestly to allow himself to be taken quite quietly into custody, and also to say no more than was absolutely necessary about the extravagant charge of wife-murder that had been preferred against him.

“Don’t make a fuss, old chap,” he pleaded, taking up a position alongside the detective. “Remember, it is not these men’s fault that you are seized and arrested. Understand, they are simply doing their duty, even though everybody will admit in time that they are grossly mistaken. Recollect also that if you treat them with consideration, they, when they get their chance, will not only be considerate, but also fair and obliging to yourself.”

For a moment, but only for a moment, Arthur was sorely tempted to resist this advice, There is something peculiarly obnoxious to an Englishman to find that he has been laid violent hands upon: and terrible though the confession may seem, we’re bound to record that Arthur’s first impulse was to knock down the man that had touched him, and to tell the inspector that he must be nothing less than mad to prefer so outrageous a charge against him.

Paul, however, had, when he chose to exert it, a curiously soothing effect upon the mind of his highly-strung friend: and almost before Arthur quite understood what had happened, the entire quartette found themselves in the police-station—in front of a long counter, at which an inspector was seated, busily writing in a huge ledger, every page of which was adorned by the photograph of some more or less illustrious criminal.

For at least a couple of minutes, this official went on steadily writing, while the party awaited in a kind of breathless silence. Then he looked up, and, turning to the inspector, he gruffly enquired what had happened.

“Oh!” replied the chief officer, whose name turned out to be Lawton, “we have just arrested the man for whom the Scarborough police telegraphed that long description—Mr. Arthur Hudson, the house-agent, of Cheapside. He has made no statement to us except one he made immediately we took charge of him: and then he denied that the murdered woman was his wife.”

The station inspector smiled cynically, and then turned and looked at the fourth member of the party, Paul Renishaw, whom he recognised. “Hullo, Mr. Renishaw,” he said, in tones that were meant to be very severe, “what are you doing here at a moment like this? You know you have no right to enter the police station when we are charging prisoners, particularly in an important matter like that of wilful murder. Would you please leave, as we don’t wish any particulars of this arrest to leak out at present.”

“I don’t quite see how I can do that,” said Paul slowly, feeling that his position was a difficult and dangerous one. “You see, Mr. Arthur Hudson is my most intimate friend, and he was arrested while we were walking along New Bridge Street together, intent on paying a visit to my chief, the Editor of The Moon. Naturally, I could not see him bundled off to the police-station without coming with him, and I am only waiting now to hear the charge, so that I may go about and tell his friends what a terrible blunder you have made.”

The station inspector looked very severe. “Your presence here is quite against the regulations,” he reiterated; and he pointed significantly in the direction of the open door.

“No, it isn’t,” snapped Inspector Lawton, who much appreciated the tact which Paul had shown in the difficult business of the arrest.

“Then you call me a liar!” exclaimed the other officer fiercely; and for a moment the two men glared fiercely at each other, all the hatred of years of bitter and broken rivalry, flaming forth from the eyes of them both.

For once the detective acted as peacemaker. “I don’t think,” he said slowly, “that scenes like this, rebound to the credit of the police force, particularly in the presence of so distinguished a journalist as Mr. Paul Renishaw, who has every opportunity of showing us up in an exceedingly unpleasant light in the columns of The Moon. In the circumstances, don’t you think it would be better to waive any difference as to any question of official rule, and to treat the matter as one between gentlemen, and not as between potent police officials and potential criminals. Thus, why should we not tell Mr. Renishaw and Mr. Hudson quite frankly what our instructions are—and leave to the one his honour not to make use of his newspaper for the publication of any facts of this arrest, that might prejudice the police investigations, and to the other his good sense to understand that in arresting him, we have simply obeyed our instructions, and the whole gravity of the situation falls upon the North-East Riding Police.”

By this time both inspectors’ anger had considerably cooled; and, with something approaching a sigh of relief, the station inspector now turned and picked up some telegrams that lay on the desk at the far end of the counter.

“I think that is a very good suggestion,” he said with a certain air of pomposity, “and so, if Inspector Lawton is willing, I will tell Mr. Hudson, or rather the prisoner, as we must now call him, that half-an-hour ago we received a long message from Scarborough, in common with all the other Metropolitan police-stations which said that information had come to hand that the murderer of that poor woman on the Filey Road, answered the description of himself, and that evidence had been forthcoming that he had married her five years ago at Peterborough, and would we please use every diligence in arresting him.

“It is now therefore, my duty,” he went on in a tone of increasing earnestness, “to formally charge you with the wilful murder of your wife, Aimée Lucille Fausta Hudson, and to warn you that any reply you may make to this charge will be taken down in writing against you, and may be used against you at the trial, notwithstanding any pretext that may have been holden out to you to now make any confession or admission of your guilt.”

Paul drew in a deep breath of anxiety, fearful lest his friend should make some remark that might mean mischief to him in the future—but, luckily, Arthur was not the kind of man to lose his self-possession in a critical juncture like that, and he answered quite boldly:—“My reply to this is, the Scarborough police have made some preposterous mistake. I am not guilty. The woman you mentioned was not my wife. I have never been married. I have never been to Scarborough in my life.”

These answers were duly recorded by all the three police officers present; and then came the bitterest blow of all—Arthur was told that he would have to surrender his liberty; that no bail was allowed in the case of a murder charge; and that the best thing that he could do was to go quietly to a cell in the police-station with all the fortitude he could command, and await the morning, when he would no doubt be brought before a magistrate and formally remanded until the police at Scarborough would be in a position to send some officer to take him to that far distant part of Yorkshire.

Very sad, and in a sense, tragic, was the parting between these two old friends. Once or twice indeed, Paul Renishaw was on the point of breaking down altogether, but the sight of Arthur’s brave and honest look steadied him like nothing else; and finally, he prevailed upon the officials to let him see Arthur safely ensconced in his cell, and then, with a heart over-full with anxiety, he set off to Emperor’s Gate to see Russell Langford, in the hope he might discover from the lawyer, who had been present at the inquest, and had no doubt had long consultations with the Scarborough police, why this extraordinary action had been resolved upon.

When, however, he actually arrived at the door of the lawyer’s flat, he was surprised to see that apparently every light was extinguished, and realising that something untoward must have happened he went reluctantly home.

CHAPTER VII.
RECOUNTS A STRANGE SCENE IN CHURCH

Unfortunately life does not stand still for any one of us; and since she had left Arthur’s office, poor Winifred Pontifex had been carried through a maze of bewildering incidents, some of them, no doubt, trivial in themselves, but others of prime importance to the proper understanding of this narrative.

It is, of course, easy enough to resolve on a course of heroic action, when hope beats high within us and self sacrifice stands out before us irradiated by the glories of all its early brilliancy and beauty. It is, unfortunately, quite another thing to pursue it when the cold night has passed, when the early glow has worn off, and when, in the end, we see nothing stretch out before us but a long clear path of duty and renunciation.

For the first few hours, Winifred found life at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage exceedingly pleasant. The Reverend Duncan Kilroy’s wife was all that Vera’s maid had led her to expect—a gentle, quiet, dove-like little woman, who never seemed to have got over the wonderful and beautiful thing that had happened to her when she married the loud-voiced and pompous Duncan. At first sight, it was obvious that she had no more an opinion of her own on household matters than she had on the Church and religion—the greasy, ever-perspiring Duncan ruled those with as much assiduity as he toadied to the richer members of his congregation. Happily, she took at once to poor tear-stained Winifred, and, for the first night, at least, the poor distracted girl’s lot was as tolerable as, perhaps, it well could be in such melancholy circumstances.

Next morning at breakfast a change came over the household—or rather over the seemingly exceedingly shallow and preposterous mind of the Reverend Duncan Kilroy. The day happened to be a Sunday; and at first Winifred was inclined to attribute this change of his to the weight of an exceedingly heavy undischarged amount of eloquence, that, as the day wore on, would naturally right itself.

As the meal progressed, however, Mr. Kilroy seemed to forget her presence, and extracted from an inner pocket a letter and a folded newspaper, the former of which he began to read carefully. Some day some subtle psychologist will explain why, when a communication like this affects ourselves, our eyes are drawn irresistibly towards it. For the moment it may be enough to record that in some curious way, Winifred felt that this letter had an important bearing on her own comfort: and when the Reverend Duncan turned over the note-paper with a heavy frown, she was startled to see a signature which she had very good reason to fear—that of Ventris Blake.

“Humph!” said Mr. Kilroy to his wife finally laying down the letter and removing his eye-glasses with a good deal of deliberation. “This is very curious, my dear Matilda Jane, very curious. I really don’t know what to say to it. I suppose I must do what the man asks, but really, with such an aristocratic congregation as mine, it is quite unusual to resort to sensational methods, better suited to the Church Army and our dear lamented brother Mr. Haweis.”

The little brow-beaten woman looked anxiously in the direction of her lord and master. “To what do you refer, Duncan darling?” she cooed, sympathetically. “I saw you had a letter from our good friend Mr. Ventris Blake, but, of course, I have no idea what he had to say to you.”

Mr. Kilroy coughed furtively. Then, with a quick glance from under his hairless eyebrows at Winifred, he cleared his voice ostentatiously and began: “Perhaps my dear Matilda Jane, the fairest thing for me to do, is to read you this rather puzzling communication. It runs as follows:—

“My Very Dear Friend,—

“In an hour of darkness and affliction like mine, it may seem rather worldly and thoughtless of me to write to you on such a purely earthly matter as the maintenance of my own good name. Yet, when I come to recollect those long and intimate talks we had in happy days doomed alas! it seems never to return again, I feel I shall not be misunderstood by you at least—nay, even more, I might have helped by your prayers, your advocacy, and your advice.”

For a second an indescribable sense of nausea seized poor Winifred, as she heard this horrible hypocrisy from a man she knew to be a most unutterable scoundrel. A wild longing started up within her to cry aloud and denounce him; but a quick glance at the fat pendulous jaw of the Reverend Duncan, whose voice now seemed broken with emotion, and at the silent flood of tears that were flowing from the poor, sympathetic little Mrs. Kilroy warned her how useless would be her protest, and with a great effort she restrained herself, and heard the clergyman proceed:—

“As no doubt you have seen from the daily papers, my poor, dear wife, has been cruelly killed at Scarborough. Indeed, I remember now, what a beautiful letter you wrote to me about this most awful occurrence. What, however, you cannot have seen, is the Saturday-night edition of the Sunday paper which I enclose with this, and from which you will gather, that as the days wear on, the mysteries connected with this terrible crime will only deepen. Please read the report with great care, and if you can, in your sermon, say something strong and kind and helpful about the great bereavement that has made my home and my heart desolate, no friend in London will be more thankful to you to-day than

“Your devoted,
“Ventris Blake.”

“Poor man! poor man!” muttered Mrs. Kilroy, directly the reading of this extraordinary effusion came to an end, and the Reverend Duncan laid down the note beside his plate, and once again exchanged a look with Winifred, whose face now looked cold and stern. “Do tell me what the cheap Sunday paper says about the crime. I remember poor, darling Mrs. Blake very well, and I always thought she was a very nice and sweet woman.”

Mr. Kilroy blew his nose vigorously with the large red pocket handkerchief which he always scrupulously affected, and, picking up one of the least known of the Sunday papers—which, truth to relate, was practically the sole property of Mr. Ventris Blake, and always directly inspired by him, with all his little nasty personalities, innuendoes and suggestions, against which even the best people were powerless, because the concern was so heavily encumbered with mortgage debentures—he read aloud as follows:—

“THE TERRIBLE AFFAIR AT SCARBOROUGH.
“MYSTERY UPON MYSTERY.

“At a late hour last night, news of the most surprising nature reached this office, about the murder of Aimée Blake, which it is not too much to say, has stirred fashionable London to the most profound depths since the intelligence was first flashed across England by our youthful but ever enterprising contemporary, The Moon.

“Naturally, at this point, we have to speak with a great deal of reserve, for up to the present the police have made no move in the direction indicated, and by our informant, it is thought doubtful whether Scotland Yard is acquainted with the extraordinary development we show, as under:—

“We are assured, on very good authority, that the murdered woman was not really the wife of Ventris Blake, the beneficent millionaire of Park Lane. But, some five years ago, when she was a poor and struggling artist in Northamptonshire—when her pictures would not sell in the provincial town in which she had taken up her quarters, and where, like most provincial towns, the art of Portraiture was very largely at a discount—she was married secretly to a certain wealthy house-agent in the city of London, who promptly deserted her and later gave out that he was dead, whereas, he was very much alive and betrothed to a very charming girl, whose beauty was the talk of last year’s Drawing-Room.

“Next week we hope to have more to say about this Romance in High Life. Meanwhile, we venture to offer our sympathies to Mr. Ventris Blake, who seems to us to have been very cruelly used all the way round.”

The Reverend Duncan Kilroy, folded the paper up very carefully and restored it to his pocket. Then he took up his cup of coffee and drained it slowly. “Of course,” said he reflectively. “I see what Mr. Blake wishes me to do—it is to make some allusion to this event in the course of my sermon, and to beg his friends amongst the congregation to withhold any judgment they might be inclined to form until at least these new particulars leak out. The thing he proposes is irregular, very irregular, but when I recollect the thousands of pounds the poor dear fellow has spent in the parish, I can well understand his anxiety to be put right with my people.”

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Kilroy stoutly. “Really Duncan, you ought to waive a point in this matter, and oblige him, for you know he once obliged you.” And even the Reverend Duncan had the grace to blush at this reminder of how he bled Ventris Blake of two thousand pounds to get himself out of the clutch of a certain unscrupulous money-lender.

“Well, well,” he said quickly, “I must trust to the words that are given me at the time to say the right thing and to make a right impression. I suppose, Miss Pontifex,” he went on, turning to where sat Winifred, too disgusted to raise even a word of protest against the foul calumnies on her sweetheart, “you will honour us with your presence in the Vicarage pew this morning. I am sure my friend Mr. Langford would wish that a niece of his should take advantage of all spiritual occasions that present themselves to her—and even my poor little address may do something to assist you in realising the importance of the new career you have undertaken in this household, and give you strength to bear all the afflictions that are the common lot of we poor mortals.” And with something between a groan and a grunt he applied himself to the huge plateful of porridge in front of him, and left poor Winifred alone with her troubles.

Luckily Monica soon distracted her attention, with her little childish wants—and almost before the girl had time to realise the hideous trial she was destined to bear, she found herself in the front pew in the fashionable church of St. Sepulchre, listening to a sweet-voiced young curate, who read the beautiful morning service of the English Church, with all the fiery passion of a boy who has been recently ordained, and who feels very keenly the sacred responsibility of his calling. As the minutes slipped on too, the organ notes that rose and fell in the Gregorian setting of the psalms, brought balm to her troubled spirits, and for a time, the weight of anxiety seemed to press no longer upon her, and she found herself joining with strange prayerful earnestness, in that eternal cry of the stricken Psalmist:—

Lord I cry unto thee; make haste unto me; give ear
Unto my voice, when I cry unto thee.

Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense;
And the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

Mine eyes are unto Thee, oh God the Lord: in Thee is my
Trust; leave not my soul destitute.

Hence, by the time the sermon was reached, her mood was one of peace, yet exaltation, and almost without a tremor she saw the Reverend Duncan Kilroy climb into the pulpit and begin his discourse.

As usually happened at St. Sepulchre’s, there was a rustle of skirts and the shuffle of feet, as the fashionable crowd settled themselves down for a meditation that would be totally undisturbed by any of the Reverend Duncan’s laboured commonplaces. This time, however, he had got a genuine surprise for them, for, without waiting to give out his text, he leaned impressively over the front of the pulpit, and spoke apparently with great feeling:—

“My dear friends,—I cannot begin this discourse without I express to you the profound detestation and horror felt by the terrible calamity that has fallen upon our good parishioner, Mr. Ventris Blake. Happily, by the latest reports, I see that the shame and the horror of the tragedy of his wife may to some degree be removed from him. Pray heaven it is indeed so, and that the story I read to-day that Mrs. Blake was not really his wife at all—”

He stopped suddenly. Somebody had risen in front of him.

“That is a wicked lie,” suddenly cried a woman’s voice at the back of the church; and before the congregation could recover from the profound astonishment into which they had fallen by Mr. Kilroy’s own innovation, they were horrified to see the young woman, clad from head to foot in black, run swiftly down the aisle and up the stairs of the pulpit, when she caught the clergyman tightly by the surplice.

“That’s a lie,” she repeated fiercely, “and you, Duncan Kilroy, know it. How dare you stand there. Come down at once!”

Of course the sensation created by this strange woman’s sudden appearance on the pulpit-stairs at a fashionable church like St. Sepulchre’s, at the height of a Sunday morning’s service, was tremendous. Half the congregation rose, horrified, to their feet—there was a sound of shrieks and of cries, during which several ladies, including Mrs. Kilroy, fainted—then a hub-bub of eager, excited conversation, followed by a rush of church-wardens and sidesmen to the East-end, to secure the offender.

The strange woman, however, did not lose her self-possession, but, with a look of some wild creature, she turned away from the cowering wretch in the pulpit above her, and faced the noisy little crowd of fat and prosperous-looking church officials, that puffed and panted about her.

“Do not touch me,” she cried, with an imperious wave of her arm. “I have done no more than my duty, and I am not ashamed of one word I have said to you. That is the man,” pointing to the cowering clergyman, whose face now was horribly grey with fear; “that is the scoundrel you ought to drag to judgment. He knows he lies to you, when he says that poor Aimée Blake was not the wife of Ventris Blake at all. He knows when he gets your sympathy for that man in Park Lane, he is taking part in a crime to ruin a fellow creature that never did him a moment’s harm. Look at him!” her voice now rising to a shriek, “he dare not deny my words, he cannot; call on him, not me, to explain.” And with a magnificent gesture as of an outraged queen, she swept all the startled crowd away from her path, and, before anybody could stretch out a finger, she had stepped swiftly out of the church.

No doubt, she would have been followed, and questioned, if not given into custody, had not the condition of poor Duncan Kilroy at this point claimed the entire congregation’s attention. By this time, he had recovered some semblance of his composure; and advancing to the front of the pulpit, he had raised his arm and attempted to offer some words of explanation, but although his mouth moved, and his muscles twitched, his flock were terrified to see he could not utter a single word.

Of course Winifred had started to her feet with the rest of the congregation, immediately the woman sprang so fiercely at her employer, but when she found herself swept down the main aisle by the pressure of the crowd, who ran in various directions to fetch water and chairs for different terrified old ladies and their own minister, an irresistible desire seized her to follow this strange creature herself and to learn what mystery it was that had driven her to so outrageous a course as to denounce the Reverend Duncan Kilroy in his own church.

“After all,” she reasoned quickly, “it is my duty to follow up this clue for the sake of the man I love. To me it is quite obvious that this woman has not risked so much as this without some remarkable motive. Certainly she must know a great deal more about Ventris Blake and Mr. Kilroy than she has just told the congregation. At all events, she spoke out very nobly and bravely for Arthur, and maybe, when she sees who I am, she may show me how I could help Arthur too.”

While these thoughts were flashing like lightning through Winifred’s brain, her feet were carrying her almost unconsciously in the direction of the open street, so that, by the time she had reached this last conclusion, she was rejoiced to discover herself in Piccadilly, where, away in the direction of the Circus she could see the strange woman she wanted to speak to, hurrying out of sight.

Just at that moment too a hansom happened to pass, and signalling the driver, Winifred, careless of what Mrs. Kilroy or the world might say of her, jumped into this cab and told the driver to track down this stranger—and she would give him half a sovereign.

Encouraged by the bribe, the man lashed his horse, and, in two or three minutes, had succeeded in coming upon the strange woman in Shaftesbury Avenue, where she was evidently intent on finding some street she had been told about, but had never previously been to—in Soho.

Luckily the driver proved to be a discreet whip, and, as soon as he drew level with the person he had been sent in search of, he allowed his horse’s gallop to drop into a walk; and thus, until the Palace Theatre was reached, the two women—the one so eager to escape attention, the other so anxious to learn her secret—proceeded on the same path. No sooner, however, did they get level with Compton Street, than the strange woman made a quick turn to the left, and, advancing rapidly towards the end of the street, she drew up in front of a cheap-looking Italian café, decked out in white paint and gold that had long since grown dirty and faded, on which, in bold staring letters was inscribed the name of the Café Faustina.

For a moment, but only for a moment, she hesitated at the entrance, then without looking round, she pushed her way through the swing doors, and disappeared entirely from sight.

Now, intensely eager to bring the affair to a conclusion, Winifred sprang out of the hansom and handed the driver the half sovereign she had promised him. At any other time, in any other circumstances, her natural reserve would have prevented her taking any strong line like this, and she would have stood for some time on the pavement, faltering helplessly. As it was, however, she realised what tremendous issues hung upon her dexterity and promptness, and, nerved by the thought that she was doing this for the man whom she loved more dearly than her own life, she too pushed open the swing doors and entered the café.

As chance would have it, the woman she had followed so eagerly was seated at a small marble-topped table, her face buried in her hands, apparently sobbing violently. Far away, at the end of the restaurant, could be seen two or three foreign-looking waiters, busily preparing in a recess,—and only Winifred could see that this strange creature was in tears.

With a tense movement of the hands and shoulders, Winifred advanced to the place where this woman was seated, and sat down in front of her. For several minutes, the stranger did not seem conscious of her presence, but, bit by bit, her sobs grew less violent, and finally, when a waiter advanced with a tray full of tea things, which she had evidently ordered the instant she entered the café, she recovered her composure with an effort and sat up and faced Winifred.

Curiously enough, she betrayed no excitement on seeing the girl in front of her, looking at her with great, anxious pleading eyes. On the contrary, her expression seemed softened, and she stretched out a caressing hand and touched Winifred gently on the arm.

“Ah! Miss Pontifex,” she said, in a low penetrating voice, that revealed at once the owner was a trained actress, “so it was you who followed me all the way from St. Sepulchre’s this morning, was it? I knew somebody had come after me, but, truth to tell, I was too upset to worry about you, or even to look who you were.

“Ah!” she went on, after another pause, “we women are strange creatures, aren’t we? First we resolve that nothing on earth shall prevail on us to pursue a certain line of action. Then the mere fact that we have resolved not to do it makes the idea burn and burn within us, until we feel we must do this thing, or perish. Lastly, in one mad moment, we do it—do it with all the power and passion we are capable of; and what happens? Why we sit down and cry, like tired children, when their toys, like men’s love, have proved mere folly and they wonder how they ever came to see any beauty in those painted figures.”

“Perhaps,” put in Winifred gently, “it is not all so black as you think. Somehow, it always seems to me that when a person does a thing that is right, the thing itself brings its own consolation, however tired or upset you may be as the result of your effort to do good.”

The strange woman raised her face to Winifred’s and smiled faintly. It was not what the world might call a pretty face—perhaps, there was too much fire in those dark brown eyes, too much passion about the finely chiselled mouth and chin—too much breadth and depth in the forehead, over which the hair had been arranged with many a dainty touch and artifice. But, notwithstanding that the features spoke of the artificial life on the stage and a heart too quickly torn by wild whirling gusts of affection and emotion, it was a face which another woman would instinctively trust; and even as she looked, Winifred felt that in this strange wild creature she had found a very sincere friend.

“We must stop these idle speculations, though,” said the woman softly, “after all, you did not come here to talk to me of the Higher Moralities, did you, Miss Pontifex? You wanted to hear something personal and immediate, that I could tell you, didn’t you? Now, what is it, let us come to the point.” And she gave the girl in front of her, a quick, enquiring look.

“I quite admit that,” returned Winifred promptly, bravely encountering the scrutinising look that had been cast upon her. “As you seem to know my name, no doubt you will know that I am very keenly interested in the case Mr. Kilroy mentioned, for I am engaged to Mr. Arthur Hudson.”

“I know, I know,” repeated the woman slowly, and then she added, in an accent that was almost a prayer: “Poor girl, poor girl.”

Winifred’s lips trembled, but she went on steadily with the conversation. “Do you mind,” she said, still very gently, “telling me, in confidence, why you got up in the church just now and openly accused Mr. Kilroy of telling a falsehood? He is not a strong man, perhaps, maybe he is not a good man, but I didn’t think that he was quite a bad man.”

“He is—a very bad man,” snapped the woman fiercely. “He is one of Ventris Blake’s most dangerous puppets. Take my advice, get out of that house as soon as you can; the place is accursed, and sooner or later that man’s sins will rise to judgment.”

“But can’t you tell me precisely what he has done wrong in connection with this murder of Mrs. Blake,” persisted Winifred, half terrified by the tornado of denunciation she had brought upon herself. “After all, nobody can do any good unless you give them the facts.”

“There is really no need to give anybody any facts,” declaimed the woman fiercely, “let them look into that man’s private life, and they will discover all that there is to be known. But they won’t, I know they won’t, for a millionaire is behind him, and what money can do in London to-day is enough to make the heart of every good woman break, for practically not even the best and wisest seem free from its influence.”

“But,” queried Winifred, still more puzzled, “how is it you know that Mr. Kilroy’s statement, that this poor woman was not the wife of Ventris Blake, was a lie?”

“Well, I do, and that is sufficient,” the strange woman rejoined sharply. “What is more, at the right moment, I intend to prove it, so neither you nor Mr. Hudson need have any fears about that certificate of that sham marriage at Peterborough. I will take care that you are cleared of all the odium that may arise from that.”

The woman spoke with such intense conviction that even Winifred felt that her words could be absolutely relied upon, and almost before she knew what she was doing, she had caught up her hands and pressed them warmly as an earnest of her heartfelt gratitude.

Then, unconscious of the fact that over an hour had passed since she sped out of the church in hot pursuit of this woman who had dared to go right to the pulpit-steps to denounce the vicar, poor Winifred stepped out quickly in the direction of St. Sepulchre’s gates. By this time, however, all the excitement had died down, the congregation had dispersed to their homes, there to discuss the scandal and shame of this remarkable occurrence, and on a conspicuous board had been written the warning-notice:—“In consequence of the sudden and regrettable indisposition of the Vicar, the Reverend Duncan Kilroy, M.A., D.D., there will be no service this evening in this church.”

Even in the Vicarage there was externally no reminder of the turbulent scene that had so recently engulfed at least one of its principal inmates. On the contrary, everything seemed to be managed so as to give the impression that the incident had practically no lasting importance. Thus, when Winifred entered, Mrs. Kilroy and Monica were just sitting down to dinner, and when Winifred herself took her place at the table, Mrs. Kilroy simply contented herself by saying her husband was not at all well, and then fell to discussing such commonplaces of life as the weather, cookery, and the difficulty of getting good voices in a London church choir.

Nevertheless, although everything appeared on the surface to go forward very much as usual, Winifred was conscious of a certain difference in Mrs. Kilroy’s attitude towards her. The old frank trust and good humour seemed to have vanished, and, in their place had come a subtle suggestion of resentment—a suggestion that in some vague, mysterious way, Winifred herself had been responsible for the trouble that had all at once fallen upon that household, and that sooner the black cloud was removed by the agency of the girl herself, the more tolerable would the domestic atmosphere become.

Winifred herself, however, was plunged in a series of melancholy reflections of her own. For one thing, she was genuinely concerned that she had heard no recent news of Arthur, and the paragraph which Mr. Kilroy had read that morning about his being linked up with the murdered woman, filled her mind with a score of serious misgivings. More than that, try how she would, she could not rid herself of the vivid impression which the strange woman had made upon her mind; and again and again, she asked herself whether she ought not to take careful notice of the advice that had been given to her, and to flee altogether from that roof, under which Ventris Blake appeared to exercise so potent a spell.

It was therefore, with a feeling of positive relief, that she saw a maid appear, and go to Mrs. Kilroy with a request from the Vicar that she should ask Miss Pontifex to come to him to his library for a few minutes’ private conversation. True, she had now conceived the greatest distrust and dislike of this smug greasy-looking parson, but nevertheless she recognised that he had considerable influence upon her future, and that it might be unwise to make an open enemy of him before she got to know exactly how much he could do to clear the good name of her sweetheart.

When she entered his room, she found him huddled up in a great armchair, close to the fire, a great red Turkish rug wrapped about his knees and the set expression of an early Christian martyr going resignedly to the stake, about his face.

With a feeble little plaintive cough, which seemed to rack his frame in inverse ratio to its loudness, he motioned her to a seat on the other side of the fireplace. For two or three minutes they sat thus, without a word being spoken. Then, he passed a fat flabby hand dramatically across his forehead, and in imagination, threw back a long curling lock that might years ago have been long enough to fall across his temples.

“This is a sad business, Miss Pontifex,” he murmured at length, carefully pumping up a sigh. “Very sad business. Can you explain it?”

Winifred looked puzzled. “I don’t quite understand,” said she. “Do you refer to the incident in Church, or,” she added maliciously, “to the bereavement sustained by Mr. Ventris Blake?”

The man winced. “I mean,” he exclaimed, slowly “your connection with that terrible depraved creature that dared this morning to defame the sanctuary of the Most High.”

“My connection,” repeated Winifred incredulously, “why I have never seen the woman before in my life.”

“Indeed,” exclaimed Mr. Kilroy cynically, “then perhaps you will explain how it came about that you were seen by my verger to race out of the church after that abandoned creature, to jump into a hansom, and to follow her up Shaftesbury Avenue, and finally to sit closeted with her for some fifteen or twenty minutes in a dirty little café in Soho.”

Winifred’s blood boiled at the tone the man had adopted towards her. There was something hidden in its depths that seemed to rouse all the latent pride and delicacy of feeling and sense of right treatment that is instinctive in every good woman’s nature; and for once she ceased to be the quiet, gentle, self-sacrificing girl, ever ready to lay aside her own prejudices to help a suffering fellow mortal, and became the quiet and resolute woman, quick, condemnatory, eager, critical.

“Are we not both labouring under some misapprehension, Mr. Kilroy,” she began, in that low, penetrating voice of hers, that somehow made the man in front of her writhe unconsciously. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think there is any necessity for me to explain anything that happened this morning to you, and certainly, I shall not do so unless you give me a certain amount of satisfaction. First and foremost, I should like to ask you what you mean by taking up the cause of a scoundrel like Ventris Blake, in the manner you have done? It is all very well to pretend the man has been rich and beneficent in his church offerings—there are hundreds of men like that in London, yet decent members of your cloth, wouldn’t soil their fingers with shaking the hand of such creatures, who would be better employed paying back their ill-gotten thousands to the countless widows and children they have ruined.”

“Mr. Ventris Blake is a friend of mine,” the man answered feebly, “he is misunderstood, of course. So are heaps of other noble and charitable souls. I believe in him, I know his worth.”

“That may be,” proceeded Winifred steadily. “That does not say that when he calls upon you to take as governess, a girl you have never seen before, you should do so, and simply turn yourself into a cheap vehicle for conveying insults from this very noble and self-sacrificing creature direct to her, when she is powerless to avenge them.”

“What do you mean,” gasped the clergyman, going very white.

“I mean,” proceeded Winifred steadily, “that I know very well all that has happened between you and Mr. Ventris Blake. I mean, I know that he ordered you to give me this situation, and that you dared not refuse him. I mean, I know that he sent that letter to you this morning, and that cruel paragraph in the newspaper, purposely that you should read them aloud to me at the breakfast table, which you did, without a thought of the terrible pain which you might inflict upon me. Now, I want to ask, how does this stand with your prayers and litany, when you call upon your God to defend the fatherless children and widows. I am a fatherless child—and I am not receiving from you the common consideration that I might expect from the ordinary man of the world, who has been bruised and battered by commercial life, but who still retains some recollection of the early lessons in chivalry he learned at his mother’s knee.”

“It is false,” Mr. Kilroy whimpered—but the girl was now standing over him, and her indignation was something terrible to witness.

“It is true,” she repeated firmly, “quite, quite true, and you know it, only you are such a pitiful coward that you dare not admit it even to me. Nor is that the worst of the questions I have to put to you. What did that woman in the church mean when she denounced you in public, as one who knew Ventris Blake was married to that poor murdered woman, and yet for some private sinister purpose of his own, did not scruple to pretend that this was not the fact?”

“I refuse to answer,” snapped Duncan Kilroy, rising too, and feeling that he had stood more than he could stand again.

“Go to your room at once, and think over the vile and wicked things you have said to me, and remember that although I may forgive you, and not avenge myself, your punishment will come sure and swift and complete enough.”

“It is like you to threaten,” sneered Winifred, now roused to fever heat, “threats like these are the stock-in-trade of men of your kind, but to anybody who knows as I do that the world is founded on right and justice, and that in the long run good always triumphs over evil, they are both futile and foolish. I will go to my room as you tell me, but it will not be to meditate on the home truths I have told to you, for I see it is useless to hope for any good out of you. Understand, I will not stay in this house to be made a target for Mr. Blake’s brutal witticisms. I shall go upstairs and pack my things, and leave the house at once.” Saying which she swept out of the room, and marched up to the nursery where she flung herself on her knees in front of her trunks, and began in a quick and methodical fashion, to pack away her things.

Thus engaged in an exercise that soothed her overwrought nerves and brought back to her mind the peace and dignity she had lost in the library, she did not hear a stealthy footstep ascending the stairs of the nursery, from the floor beneath. Indeed it was only when the Reverend Duncan Kilroy himself stood in the doorway, that she was conscious that she had been followed, and then she turned swiftly and found herself faced by a man almost beside himself with mortification and rage.

“You think,” he hissed, his face purple with passion. “You think I shall permit you, Miss Pontifex, to go out into the world and sow any falsehoods you like about me amongst the people I have a right to regard as my friends. In that, I can assure you, you are much mistaken. I have no intention of permitting you to play ducks and drakes with my good name, even if you choose to do so with your own—so please consider yourself a prisoner until you come to a better frame of mind.” And saying that, he suddenly shut the door, turned the key, and fled down the stairs, leaving Winifred fast under lock and key in a room, the windows of which, were tightly barred with iron.

Meanwhile, the Sunday papers had hurried out a special edition. Even then, the newsboys were tearing up and down Piccadilly, shouting: “The Murder of a Millionaire’s Wife! Extraordinary development! Arrest of a well-known London house-agent. A terrible scandal in high-life feared.” Meanwhile too, Paul Renishaw was knocking vainly at the door of the Vicarage in the hope of seeing Miss Pontifex. Winifred was a prisoner, and was doomed to undergo some very bitter experiences before she escaped from the clutches of the Reverend Duncan Kilroy, M.A., D.D.

CHAPTER VIII.
WHICH TELLS OF AN EVENTFUL NIGHT

Left alone in a police-station cell the night but one following his arrest, Arthur Hudson fell a victim to the most profound dejection. It was all very well to keep up a brave face before Paul Renishaw, the detective, and the two inspectors, when the charge was new, had been suddenly sprung upon him, and he did not realise its dire importance; but here, in the silence of the gloomy white-washed corridor, in a bare apartment only eight or nine feet square, in which a single gas-jet burned but feebly, the horror of it all smote him with a sense of insufferable shame.

In vain he forced himself to sit upon the narrow truckle bed that had been allotted to him, and to affect an interest in the dull-looking objects with which his cell was furnished—the iron toilet set, the tiny mirror, the roughly used brush and comb, and a copy of the police-station regulations, that had been glued upon a card, glazed and hung upon the blue-washed wall. All the forces of his manhood seemed to rise in hot rebellion against a calm acquiescence in these indignities, and finally, he sought relief in pacing up and down the narrow cell, a prey to a thousand grave terrors.

Now and then, however, the deathly silence would be disturbed by the advent of some fresh prisoner,—once a boy sobbing piteously; next, a drunken woman, shouting snatches of ribald songs, alternated with bursts of frightful blasphemies; and occasionally, some strong man, who sternly resisted capture and who seemed to fight every inch of the way from the street to the cell. The clang of the iron doors upon these poor wretches had, however, a curiously soothing effect upon them. Once or twice, it is true, they tried to plead for release, or to beg piteously that some relative or friend should be sent for, but the gruff voices of their gaolers soon put an end to their appeals, and as hour after hour boomed from the great clock of St. Paul’s, great silence took possession of the building.

Then it was indeed, that poor Arthur’s brain gave him the most poignant torture. In spite of his strong will, it would travel back to the memories of happier times, would recall how only yesterday all the world seemed to smile upon him and his fortunes, and not a trouble threatened him. With a deep groan, which he could not repress, he recalled how he loved one of noblest and sweetest of girls, and how everything was hastening gaily forward to his marriage—hastening like the sunny days of summer, when they rush pell-mell to the rosy fulfilment of a gorgeous autumn—and then it seemed impossible that any blow should affect his heart’s best happiness.

How strangely, how softly, and yet, how irresistibly the change had come about! Somehow, it seemed that in one tiny hour at the office in Cheapside, the whole face of life had changed for him. Somehow, all his plans and hopes had seemed to get out of joint from that particular moment on which Ventris Blake had crossed his threshold. To all outward appearances, it was only a plain matter of business on which the millionaire had called—the transaction had been concluded without any hitch—the usual friendly courtesies had been exchanged at the close,—and yet, look what a terrible network of crime, intrigue and bitterness had thrown its folds around him ever since!

Winifred had been forced to flee from her home. Mrs. Blake had been found beaten to death on a lonely road near Scarborough. Russell Langford had been reduced to a state of abject terror. He, Arthur, had been branded as a man who had secretly married a woman in a far off town in Northamptonshire, and then deserted her, and then posed as a single man to win another young girl’s affection. Even that was not sufficient to satisfy the malignity of the unscrupulous fate that had attacked them, for now, to crown all, he had been seized on this awful charge of murder—the murder of a woman he had never seen, of a woman he had never even heard of, yet who would be held out to the world as his own distracted and deserted wife.

At first it seemed impossible to believe that all these things could follow from an hour’s association with one man, even such a man as Ventris Blake. With a touch of childish ingenuity he tried to imagine that all this catalogue of trouble was so much imagination, and that he had simply to rub his eyes to wake up again in the dear old flat at Emperor’s Gate, to see Winifred in her favourite attitude, nestling by the side of the fire. He did shut his eyes, and he did open them, but it was not to the bright homelike scene his memory had painted: it was to the four bare walls of a police-station cell, and to the moan of some drunken ruffian turning uneasily in his sleep.

Finally, worn out with the horror of it all, the futility, the ever deepening sense of tragedy that seemed to mock all his puny efforts to free himself from the march of ironic circumstances, he felt it was useless to struggle further.

“I can’t escape this awful thing that has fastened its poisonous fangs about me,” he moaned, as worn out with the night’s terrors, he flung himself on to his narrow bedstead, and buried his face in his hot and feverish hands. “The whole world seems arrayed in force against me; everywhere I turn I see some pit dug for my feet. Why need I go to any more anxiety or worry in the matter? I am marked for ruin; now let ruin come.” And his frame shook with a storm of dry impetuous sobs.

A few minutes later his brave, reliant nature asserted itself, and throwing back his shoulders, he rose once again to his feet—maybe a little ashamed of his previous weakness.

“Bah! what a coward I am,” he told himself, with well simulated fierceness. “Here am I, wasting hours of pity and anguish over my own wretched fortunes, whereas I ought not to think of myself at all—all my mind ought to be fixed on the terrible trouble this last blow will prove to poor driven, distracted Winifred.”

Throwing out his arms with a gesture of infinite weariness, he recommenced to promenade the cell. Somehow, the mere thought of Winifred brought back to him all his early faith and courage. His eyes too, caught a glimpse of the day-light breaking over the distant buildings, now dull and leaden, as though fearful of breaking entirely through the blackness, and, anon, white and clear, as though the true victorious forces of life must always be the forces of light.

This, it is true, was only one of nature’s simple object lessons, and perhaps, only those who have spent long hours of heartbreaking misery in the deep, dull silence of a black winter night, can ever fully understand all that it meant to Arthur at this particular moment. Certainly, it brought back to him hopes that had long vanished, and a belief that, although his path was so dark he saw nowhere an avenue of escape, there still remained to him a faith he had too long forgotten; and, throwing himself on his knees, his overcharged heart found refuge in a deep and impassioned prayer.

A few minutes later, he had crept into his bed and slept so soundly that it needed the constable in charge to come and shake him by the shoulder, before he could be brought back to a sense of the dull threatening realities that awaited him. Then, with a merry laugh, he sprang up and threw on his clothes, and soon found himself busily discussing a breakfast of ham and eggs, and steaming hot coffee, which the officials, at his request, had thoughtfully provided for him out of the money they took from him when they searched him.

Shortly afterwards, there was a sound of a well-remembered tread in the corridor, and Paul Renishaw bustled into the cell, accompanied by one of the smartest solicitors he had been able to secure at such short notice. For at least an hour, these three men engaged in a long and earnest conversation, and, accustomed as he was to all manner of cases and defences, even the solicitor, Mr. Spencer Holmes, was forced to admit this charge against Arthur was one of the most extraordinary he had ever heard in his experience.

Time moved forward very quickly after this, and long before he expected the summons, Arthur found a constable call to him to follow him into the presence of a magistrate, who had undertaken to deal with the formal evidence of the case, prior to the removal of the prisoner to Scarborough.

With a bright step and confident air, poor Arthur marched off in the wake of his guide, along a series of corridors, and up two or three flights of stairs, until at length he reached the yard of the police station, where he found an old and dingy four wheeled cab in waiting for him. Into this he was thrust, with two or three pleasant jests and much good humour, and finally driven off to Bow Street, in the company of his acquaintances of the previous night—Inspector Lawton and the Detective, an officer named Dawson.

Unfortunately, the news of his arrest had been published in the morning papers, and a seething, excited mob had gathered in the vicinity of Drury Lane, so that although the cab was driven with remarkable swiftness, Arthur did not fail to hear the storm of hisses and coarse oaths with which the mob greeted his appearance. At first, indeed, he could hardly believe that this loathsome demonstration was specially intended for him, but as the officers in plain clothes formed a cordon round the vehicle, and constables in uniform pressed forward to their comrades’ assistance, he realised, with an awful sense of desolation, that at one bound, as it were, he had reached the position of a notorious suspect.

The scene, when he reached the police court itself, was also in no sense designed to restore his lost dignity and pride. True, there, seated at the solicitor’s table, right in front of him, was his own advocate, Mr. Spencer Holmes and Paul Renishaw, but the rest of the court was filled by a mob of curious sight-seers and press-men and artists, who fixed their eyes upon him, as though he were some extraordinary wild beast just let loose from a cage.

The crowning indignity came, when a road was cleared through a gangway, and before he actually realised what had happened, he found himself thrust into the dock.

The dock! Never never would he have believed that such a horrible degradation as this would have been his, and as the door closed upon him with a thud, he reeled and for a moment might have fallen, had not a sturdy warder caught him roughly by the arm, and thinking he had stumbled over a step, told him roughly to stand up. Those hundreds of eyes that watched him so pitilessly, so curiously, so relentlessly, however, brought him quickly back to his senses, and setting his teeth tightly together, he advanced to the front of the dock and bowed courteously to the magistrate.

Almost immediately after this the proceeding began, and Inspector Lawton went into the box and told how he had arrested the prisoner the previous night in New Bridge Street, on instructions received by telegraph from the Scarborough police, and how one of their detectives had come down from the North to take the prisoner back with him on a charge of having murdered his wife.

Hereupon Mr. Spencer Holmes got up and protested against this course of action. He declared the arrest was some hideous blunder on the part of the Scarborough police, and that it would be monstrous for the magistrate, simply on the mere word of some country officer, to take one of the most prominent men in the City of London, and to send him half across England to meet a charge which he did not hesitate to describe as some most preposterous hallucination on the part of some demented eye-witness.

Just then a faint rustle was heard at the far end of the court, and all at once appeared the well-known figure of Russell Langford, who hastened as quickly as he could, clad in barrister’s wig and gown, and bearing a huge brief, in the direction of the seat specially reserved for Counsel.

“Excuse me, your Worship,” said he, “but I have an important application to make to you in this matter.

“I am sorry to appear so late before your Worship,” he began with a low bow to the presiding magistrate, but keeping his eyes steadily all the while out of the way of the hot and scornful glances Arthur shot at him from the dock. “The fact is, I have only just been instructed to appear in this case on behalf of the relatives of the deceased, including her supposed husband, Ventris Blake, who unfortunately cannot be here to-day as he is simply prostrated with grief by this tragic end of what he always regarded as a perfect life of married confidence and happiness.”

For a moment, the eminent advocate paused, and, pulling out his handkerchief, pretended to blow his nose vigorously, as though he himself felt a little overcome by this contemplation of a poor martyred husband’s sufferings.

“What an infernal humbug you are,” Paul muttered sotto voce. “You know you are talking the veriest piffle.” But, although Langford distinctly caught every word his friend said, he did not think it wise to take any notice of it. Then the journalist, too, shrugged his shoulders. “After all,” he reasoned swiftly, “this shoddy emotionalism is not the only humbug in public life.”

“Luckily,” proceeded Langford, fixing his eyes upon the magistrate, “I was in time, just now, to catch the gist of the speech of my learned friend, Mr. Spencer Holmes, who appears, I take it, on behalf of the accused. From it, I gather, he has taken practically a unique line in defending the case at the outset, and has even gone so far as to suggest that these proceedings are an absolute travesty of justice. In those circumstances, and as the Treasury have not yet had time to be fully communicated with, I trust you will allow me to step a little out of the usual course, so that we can avoid any appearance of a miscarriage of justice in this matter. The concession I suggest is not a very important one: it is merely to call two or three witnesses who have just arrived from Scarborough, but who can, I venture to think, put a totally different complexion to that indicated by my learned friend.”

“That would certainly give me satisfaction,” replied the magistrate, slowly. “I own that I too was considerably startled at the line the prisoner’s advocate thought fit to adopt.”

“Well,” proceeded Langford, “I will first of all call Martha Shacklock.”

An old country woman of about sixty, clad in a rusty black silk dress, a shawl, and a bonnet that had probably done duty for the last half century, now stepped forward, and with a low curtsey to the magistrate, the solicitors, and even poor Arthur himself, she entered the witness box and was duly sworn. Her evidence was clear, and certainly not a little astounding to all the friends of the accused. She deposed that she kept a small refreshment house in a small hamlet, about one mile distant from Scarborough. When the town was crowded, it was quite a common thing for her to let beds to visitors, which she was able to do at a very cheap rate. As a consequence, she was not surprised when a man whom she deliberately swore was no other than the man standing in the dock, came to her house the night before the murder, and arranged to take a room, which he promptly took possession of and did not leave until the following evening about six. His behaviour was so curious, she admitted, that even if he had not gone then, she would have turned him out. He had nothing to eat all the time he was in the house, and so far as she knew, he was not seen by a single person belonging to her household, except herself.

It was in vain that Mr. Spencer Holmes cross-examined her very closely on this question of the identity of Arthur and the man who stayed at her house. Her evidence remained unshaken, while even poor Arthur was left wondering whether, after all, something extraordinary had not happened to him, and he had really temporarily lost his memory and his senses.

This sense of confusion was only deepened by the next witness, a bright, intelligent lad of fifteen, who gave the name of Peter Brian, and said that he was employed as errand boy at a gardener’s and florist’s, on some land and greenhouses adjoining the house occupied by the last witness. He took up the tale of the prosecution at a point an hour later than the murder was alleged to have been committed. He explained that he was stopping late that night to bank up some fires in a distant portion of his employer’s grounds, when he was startled to see a man run hurriedly through the gloom, in the direction of a greenhouse that stood by itself, and was, as a rule, not used for any purpose at all. A moment later, a bright light appeared in the interior of this place, and creeping stealthily towards it, he reached the end farthest from the door, and peered through the glass. There he saw a man bending over a sink, washing some blood off his hands and waistcoat. That man, he would swear positively, was the prisoner in the dock, Arthur Hudson. He saw his face distinctly by the light of a candle that had been fixed in a beer bottle on one of the ledges.

A candle by the way, that was subsequently proved to have been removed from Mrs. Shacklock’s. For nearly ten minutes, the witness declared that he watched this man remove traces of his guilt. Amongst other things, he said, the man changed his clothes, and put on a suit which he had brought in a bundle in an old copy of a Scarborough paper, “The Scarborough Daily Post.”

Finally, the boy asserted, just as he had finished putting on a fresh suit, the prisoner happened to turn round and catch sight of his face peering through the glass, closely watching his movements. With a savage oath, the man made one wild grab at the candle and the beer-bottle, and without a moment’s hesitation, he flung it full smash at the glass, at the point where he stood.

Witness ducked level with the stonework, and the splinters of glass and the bottle passed harmlessly over his back, but terrified, he did not stay in that position any longer, but ran as hard as he could, in the direction of some apple trees, one of which he climbed, but was so terrified at what had happened, that he dared not come down again until his master appeared in the garden the next morning, at eight o’clock, when he told him about the murder.

Together they searched the garden, but of course, they got no sign of the prisoner. Later, they entered the greenhouse, and took up the clothes that had been cast aside by the man, after he had washed the bloodstains off his hands. These bore the name of Arthur Hudson, Esq., on a small label, on the band of the trousers, and the inside pocket of the jacket. Also a number, and the name and address of a firm of tailors in Bond Street, London.

Unfortunately, cross-examination failed to shake the testimony of this witness—and with something like an expression of despair, Arthur heard the next witness called. This proved to be a cattle-drover of the name of Benjamin Smearthwaite, who swore that he was a cattle-drover, employed on a farm on the far side of Filey. He remembered the day of the murder exceedingly well. He was engaged in driving sheep to a market at Scarborough.

About two miles out of that town, he found the flock rather troublesome, and his dog rather lazy, so he pulled up a great stake, out of the hedge, and made use of that, particularly when the sheep were frightened by the passage through their midst of several exceedingly noisy motor cars. Finally, the flock quieted down, and the dog took up his work as usual, and he was just about to throw the stick away, when a man, he would swear positively was the prisoner, appeared over a hedge and asked him if he would mind selling him the stake he was carrying.

He admitted he thought the request was an odd one, but thinking he might as well get a pot of beer for nothing, as well as anybody else, he took threepence for the stake, and wishing the stranger good-night, he went on his way rapidly towards Scarborough. Not until he saw a report of the murder in the Scarborough paper did he think any more of the occurrence. Then he made a point of getting to see the stick with which the woman had been beaten, and he could swear most solemnly that that stick was the one he had sold to the prisoner for threepence.

“There is only one more witness, your worship,” now explained Russell Langford, bending down, and turning over the pages of his brief, very quickly, “that is, Mr. Israel Sawdry:” and he beckoned to a smart-looking man of about thirty-five, with a strong, Hebrew cast of countenance, who had been seated on one of the benches reserved for witnesses, and who now stepped eagerly into the box.

“You are,” said Langford, addressing the witness, “the private secretary of Mr. Ventris Blake, who was usually considered the husband of the dead woman.”

“I am,” returned Sawdry, “I have been so for the last forty-eight months.”

“Look at that photograph,” proceeded Langford, handing the Jew a beautifully executed cabinet photograph of the murdered woman. “Do you recognise it?”

“Yes,” said the witness, after a careful inspection of the portrait, which was subsequently handed to the magistrate. “I do recognise it. I recognise it as the portrait of a girl I knew very well when I was employed at Peterborough as clerk in the offices of a large firm of brickmakers. For a time, she tried to make a living painting portraits and selling pictures, but it was a very up-hill fight, and I was not surprised when one day she came to me and told me that she was going to be married to a Mr. Arthur Hudson, who was very well off, and was in business with his uncle, a house-agent, in Cheapside. As a matter of fact, I congratulated her very warmly, and then it was she asked me to be a witness of her marriage the next morning before the Superintendent Registrar of Marriages in Peterborough. To this I consented, and the next morning I attended, as she had requested, and saw her wedded in true legal form to this Mr. Arthur Hudson, who I will swear is positively the same man as the man in the dock.”

“That, I think,” said Russell Langford triumphantly, “will dispose of any question as to whether the deceased was really married to the prisoner or not.”

“Indeed it won’t,” suddenly exclaimed a woman’s voice at the back of the court, “you wait. At the right moment you will see as this will prove to be one of the wickedest conspiracies ever engineered against an innocent man.”

Unfortunately, although the court was searched high and low by the officers connected with the case, not a trace of the woman who had made that startling declaration could be found. Everybody, it is true, heard the voice. Everybody was agreed as to the exact words she had made use of when she shouted that Arthur was innocent and that the case was founded on a diabolical conspiracy: but nobody in the whole of that crowded assembly could turn and say definitely that the words had been spoken by any woman or girl who happened to be standing near them.

Indeed, after several minutes’ quick and vigilant search, the only satisfactory piece of evidence on the point that proved to be forthcoming was that of a constable; and curiously enough, this man had not been in the court at the time the interruption had occurred. On the contrary, he had been stationed outside the door by which the general public were admitted to a kind of rough pen at the back of the building, but he was able to explain, that just when he caught the hum of suppressed excitement that followed this extraordinary interruption, the door of the public gallery was suddenly snatched open, and a woman in black stepped hurriedly out of the court, and with a muttered explanation that she had suddenly turned faint, stepped swiftly out of sight, down the corridor. He could not, however, give any description of her features or her clothes.

“She was just a woman in black,” he mumbled confusedly when he was pressed rather closely by the magistrate. “In age, she might have been anything between twenty-five and thirty-five. The impression she gave me was that she was an actress who had just lost her husband, but I was really so interested in getting to hear what was going on inside the court to cause all that hub-bub, that I didn’t really take much notice of her. I am sure I couldn’t identify her if she were put before me this very moment.” And, with this final shot, the poor badgered officer was permitted to leave the box.

The magistrate, however, looked exceedingly grave, “I feel it my duty,” he said with great seriousness, “to complain that there has been a good deal of improper matter introduced into this case at this early stage. I do not, of course, know what facts are in possession of my friend, Mr. Spencer Holmes, but he has certainly taken a most singular line in proceedings that are only formal, and can have no more bearing on the actual result of the case than the merest formalities connected with the arrest of any prisoner, even on a simple charge of being drunk.

“As for that interruption, to which we have just listened with so much grief and astonishment, I can only say, that I regard it as most improper. Never in the whole of my judicial experience have I known anybody dare to make so odious a reflection in an open court. English justice is not the travesty of justice one sees in other civilised countries; it is pure, it is fair, it is free to all. The prosecution of this man in the dock will not be conducted by any partizan of the murdered woman, or by any secret enemy of his, but by that most impartial body, the Treasury, who will have no interest in securing his conviction, or in the triumph of false evidence, but who will approach the matter from an absolutely impartial stand-point, anxious only that a very brutal crime, which has been committed in our midst should be traced to the wrong-doer.

“As for that wretched woman who spoke hysterically of conspiracy and so forth,” added the magistrate, shaking a warning finger in the direction of the public, “I can only assure her that the Treasury will welcome any evidence she may give to prove her own most amazing contention. She need not fear that any blame will be attached to her in connection with the contempt of court she has shown this afternoon. I am quite willing to overlook that gross breach of decorum, if she will make the only amend for it that is in her power—that is, by going secretly to the law officers of the Crown, and telling them, in plain and unmistakable terms what she knows that has induced her to make so amazing a declaration.”

He stopped, and turning to his note-book again, he motioned to Arthur’s solicitor, Mr. Spencer Holmes, to make any observations he felt necessary, before the proceedings terminated.

There was a pause, during which the advocate held a quick but animated discussion with his client in the dock, and then the lawyer turned and briefly addressed the magistrate. He said that he had to admit quite frankly that he could not resist such an overwhelming flood of sworn testimony as that which had been presented that day, to prove that his client had been in Scarborough at the time of the crime; had taken a bed in the neighbourhood; had purchased the bludgeon with which the murder had been committed; and had been finally observed to wash his hands free from some fatally incriminating blood-stains, and to leave behind him a suit of clothes, plainly marked with his name.

“None the less,” he proceeded, “I shall, I believe, at the right moment, be prepared with a perfect alibi. Strange as it may sound, I could at this moment, offer equally overwhelming testimony that my client at the time he has been sworn to have been in Scarborough was actually here in London, indeed, at the very house occupied by the learned counsel for the prosecution. More than that, I could at this very moment put into the box this distinguished journalist who is sitting by my side and instructing me Mr. Paul Renishaw, who was actually with the prisoner here in town when the man was supposed to be lurking about some lonely roads and gardens near Scarborough.

“The matter, however, is one that is bound to be thrashed out in a superior court to this, and so I will not occupy any further time, except to say with all the impressiveness I can, that this is in truth one of the most extraordinary cases ever heard at Bow Street, and that it will prove to be either one of the most shameless attempts to evade a well-merited punishment, or,” and here his voice sank into a low whisper, “as that woman has just told us, one of the foulest conspiracies ever engineered against an honest and upright man on either side of the Atlantic.”

The magistrate looked up and frowned, but made no further protest. “The prisoner will be remanded to the care of the Scarborough police,” he said gruffly. “The next case, please.” And the next moment, Arthur found himself caught by the arm, and conducted by the warder who was seated next to him, to the cells beneath, where, as a special favour, he was quickly joined by Paul and his solicitor.

“There is nothing to be done,” the latter said, “until the case comes up before the bench in Yorkshire. I think I possess now all the main features of the defence, and I will get to work on them at once. Meanwhile, you must keep up a stout heart,” and with a bright nod, he hurried off and left the two friends alone.

Directly he did so, Arthur turned impetuously to Paul. “There is one thing, old chap,” he said very earnestly, “that has worried me during those proceedings in the court, more than anything I can tell you. It isn’t a matter that concerns myself at all, as it happens. It is just the safety of poor Winifred. Who, for instance, has told her that I have been seized by the police, and forced to take my trial on the most awful charge that can be preferred against any man, that of wife murder? And, is it not rather curious, that ever since she visited me at my office in Cheapside, and told me that she was going to take that situation at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage, I have not heard a word from her? Remember, that there she is under none of the restrictions she was when she was staying with the Langfords’. Practically any hour she could send a message to me, or a telegram, and yet, I have had nothing from her, not even one hurriedly penned little note.”

“It is indeed most curious,” agreed Paul, commencing to stride up and down the cell. “I confess, I can’t make it out. I certainly expected that when the news of your arrest leaked out, she would have got leave of absence from Mrs. Kilroy, and would have insisted on coming down here and comforting you herself, and would certainly have strained every nerve to be present at the proceedings in court. I forgot though, to tell you, that I went myself to St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage, when you were arrested to break the news to her.”

“And what did she say?” cried Arthur eagerly. “Wasn’t she sure it was all some hideous trap of Ventris Blake?”

“Alas! I didn’t see her. I rang several times at the door, and finally a disagreeable housemaid came and told me sharply that Miss Pontifex was engaged in the nursery, and had left word that she must on no account be interrupted.”

“That sounds odd,” remarked Arthur, rather startled.

“Very odd,” echoed Paul, and the strange character of his reception assumed a much more unfavourable aspect than it had done when he had turned and left Mr. Kilroy’s house.

“Well, at all events, our duty is quite clear,” proceeded Arthur firmly. “We must make a point of seeing her for ourselves, and telling her precisely how black everything looks, but none the less, she has got to keep up a stout heart. Somehow, I have got a terrible feeling that some danger is threatening her. I can’t explain it—I can’t understand it—no, I can’t even realise it myself, but there it is, hanging on my mind with a weight like lead, and I am sure I shall never rest until I find out it is groundless, or you help me to take steps to get this sense of calamity removed.

“As you know, Ventris Blake has set his mind on marrying Winifred. He is not the man to have any nice sense of honour, to feel that because his wife is only just three or four days dead he should have his mind set on thoughts other than marrying and giving in marriage again. No, he is just that cold, determined brute that he will set to work at once to force the poor girl to repudiate me and to accept him. Indeed, he is not likely to let anything stand in his way to accomplish this almost at once, particularly as he has now got me safe under lock and key, and he feels that Winifred herself has not a friend in the world.”

“Don’t worry, old chap,” said Paul, warmly. “I quite appreciate all the difficulties of her position, and of yours; and I can quite understand what a grave, ever-increasing load of anxiety this ominous silence of hers must prove to you. Never mind, I will go and see her myself, directly I leave Bow Street.

“For the time, let me beg you not to harass yourself about it, but to think very seriously for the next few days how it has come about that the Scarborough police have been able to present so concise, so complete, and withal so utterly damning a case against you. Surely, if you will only get your mind free of its present troubles, you will be able to pierce the heart of this mystery, and will be able to find out who it is that has got some extraordinary grudge against you, or who it is that so nearly resembles you, that without much effort, he can make up to deceive ninety-nine people out of a hundred that he is not the man he really is but none other person than yourself.”

“I will try,” said Arthur, now looking very grave. “I will try very hard, indeed. But like every other man in my position, I have made dozens of friends and acquaintances during the last few years—and maybe, dozens of enemies.” Then, somehow, a sudden light seemed to break upon him.

“By Jove,” he said quickly, “I had forgotten one man, who just five years ago warned me he would do me the ugliest turn that ever one man did to another, and yes, now I come to think of it, he is a brother of the very man poor Winifred is staying with at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage.”

CHAPTER IX.
WHY THEY WORE A DISGUISE

Unfortunately, before Arthur could confide to Paul any further particulars about the deadly vendetta which Duncan Kilroy’s brother had sworn against him, years ago, when both of them were in very much the same position in old Allen Palamountain’s business and both were rivals, running neck and neck to inherit the old man’s wealth, they were interrupted by the sound of a rattle of keys in the door of the cell. Another moment, and a burly police sergeant entered, and told Arthur that the time allowed by the authorities had come to an end, and that, not only must all conversation cease, but that Paul must leave the station at once, and Arthur must prepare himself for that long and tiresome journey to Scarborough.

As a consequence, the two comrades had barely time to exchange farewell greetings, but, as they were wishing each other good-bye, they did contrive to arrange that Paul would travel specially down to Scarborough, and again interview his friend if he should chance to be detained in the local police station, or would even travel to York Castle, if that should be selected as his friend’s place of confinement. Meanwhile, both recognised that they had one most urgent duty to perform at once—that was, to find out Winifred, and to learn from the girl herself the reason of her utterly inexplicable silence.

Strangely enough, as the minutes had slipped on, Paul Renishaw had grown to share Arthur’s fears that something must have gone very seriously wrong indeed to cause so long and so suggestive a break between them. Indeed, it was with a heart weighed down with forebodings, that he clasped the hand of his old companion for the last time, and, although he did his best to make Arthur think as lightly of the circumstance as possible, and to look forward to the time when he should be released with honour, and should be able to go and find Winifred for himself, he did not succeed in disguising from himself, that things looked exceedingly black for both of the two lovers.

Almost immediately afterwards, the heavy iron door of the cell closed with a clang behind him, and, passing quickly through the bare white-washed walls of the station for which he had now conceived the most violent dislike, Paul took his way in the direction of the Strand and soon scrambled on one of the red buses that run from Liverpool Street, through Piccadilly, and westwards. At the Circus he dismounted and stepped briskly towards St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage, where he discovered one of the maids hard at work, whitewashing the steps.

No doubt his old failure and his new fears for the actual safety of Winifred lent him quite a fresh reserve of caution. For, this time, he did not make the mistake of asking for Miss Pontifex at all, but simply sent in his card as the special commissioner for The Moon, who had called on Mr. Kilroy himself, “with reference to the malicious reports that had appeared in some of the papers about the scene in St. Sepulchre’s Church, in the hope that the clergyman would enable him to publish the exact facts of the affair, and so put both church and press right with the public.”

Now, clergymen of the stamp of the Reverend Duncan Kilroy—who depend so entirely on an utterly fictitious popularity to keep together their congregation, can’t, as Paul had foreseen, afford to flout any mighty engine of popular opinion, like The Moon undoubtedly was.

Hence, almost before he had crossed the threshold, Paul had the satisfaction of hearing that Mr. Kilroy would be very glad indeed to see him. Two or three minutes later, he was formally ushered into the library, where he found the Reverend Duncan apparently most busy in the preparation of his next discourse for the Sabbath. Once, however, he had got him neatly cornered like this, Paul did not hesitate.

“The Moon,” said he, with a fine intuition of what was passing in the minds of that enterprising journal’s conductors, “has sent me to get an utterly impartial account as to the scene that followed when that woman attacked you in the pulpit. Some mutual friends have told us that, close to the steps at the time the woman rushed forward, was your governess Miss Winifred Pontifex, who, it is understood, is a niece of that eminent barrister, Mr. Russell Langford. As a consequence, any statement of hers will be received with considerable respect, so before I put any question to you, you will greatly oblige me by sending for Miss Pontifex, so that I can get from her the main outlines of her story first.”

“I am exceedingly sorry to say,” retorted the Reverend Duncan who, sad to relate, was never at a loss for any excuse, “Miss Pontifex was so dreadfully upset by the woman’s violence, and so fearful lest she should do me some mischief, that she has been made quite ill by the incident, and has had to take to her bed.”

“Dear me,” retorted Paul sympathetically, although he guessed at once that the man was telling him a falsehood. “That is indeed unfortunate, perhaps, however, you would let me send up a little sealed note to Miss Pontifex, and she could write, herself, an account of what she witnessed.”

“Scarcely that,” replied the Reverend Duncan. “I don’t think I should like to disturb her. You see the doctor has only just left her, and without his sanction, I fear it would be inhuman of me to give her brain and nerves any fresh shock, such as the enquiry you suggest.”

It is wonderful how easy lies like these rise to the lips of unprincipled scoundrels such as the Vicar of St. Sepulchre’s! Happily, Paul was now on his guard, and determined to meet artifice by artifice, a course that has much to commend it when one is compelled to fight people like the Reverend Duncan, who are utterly destitute of honour or of truth. As a consequence, he did not reply for some seconds, but contented himself by looking very grave, and then, as though some sudden resolution had come to him, he pushed his hand into an inside pocket and produced therefrom the bulky letter-case which he always carried.

“It is exceedingly unpleasant for me to have to say, Mr. Kilroy,” he went on, letting a perplexed frown gather upon his forehead, “but The Moon has another reason in requesting you to let me see Miss Pontifex. As it happens, they have received two or three very extraordinary letters, marked ‘private and confidential’ from servants in your own house, alleging that you had a most terrible quarrel with that young lady, and in collusion with Mr. Ventris Blake, you have actually made her a prisoner.”

Duncan Kilroy’s face went suddenly very white. “It—it is preposterous,” he spluttered, starting excitedly to his feet and advancing towards the door, “The Moon has been tricked. Tell me the names of the servants, and I will bring them before you, and show you that the whole story is absurd.”

Here, unfortunately, Paul made his great mistake. Instead of telling the Reverend Duncan that the names of the servants had nothing whatever to do with the allegation, that the point was, was Winifred Pontifex a prisoner or not, he attempted to bluff the Reverend Duncan just one point further—and failed.

“The Moon,” he said grandiloquently, “is not accustomed to act on communications upon which it cannot place the utmost reliance. I therefore demand, sir, that you should produce Miss Pontifex to me, and that I should thus be given an opportunity of finding out for myself how this extraordinary report was set about.”

“And I absolutely decline,” snarled the Reverend Duncan, seizing the only genuine opportunity he had had of bringing the interview to an end. “Indeed I am astounded now at the patience with which I have listened to you. I consider your charges both malicious and impertinent—and I beg you to instantly leave my house.” And throwing open the library door he called one of the servants that happened to be passing, and directed the girl to show Mr. Renishaw off the premises.

Inwardly cursing his own stupidity, Paul left the Vicarage and paced moodily down Piccadilly, realising that on two occasions this unscrupulous parson had been too much for him. For a time too, he could not see how he could get level with his victorious adversary; but none the less, he felt more certain than ever that all was not well with Winifred, and it behoved him now, more than ever, to see her and to find out precisely what indignities had been put upon her.

Baffled and perplexed, he thought at one time of slipping down to Scotland Yard, and of seeing some of the heads of the departments there, whom he knew from old experience, were good and reliable friends. On second thoughts, however, he felt that it would be unwise to make any scandal just at present, and that difficult though it might prove, he must trust to his native wit to extricate him from this new reproach of his own blundering failure.

Suddenly, a brilliant idea occurred to him. All at once he recollected how he had managed to inspect the scene of a notorious murder, by pretending to be a workman employed to repair the line belonging to the National Telephone Company; and instantly he resolved to adopt the same expedient for gaining admission to any rooms he wished to enter in St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage.

Now, as everyone who is acquainted with the crooked life of London knows perfectly well, the men who are the best hands at fitting up a disguise are not, as is generally supposed, the men who make a business of supplying wigs and false noses and impossible-looking beards, and wildly extravagant fancy dresses to the public. As a rule, indeed, they are usually men who follow some other more peaceable, and, perhaps, more law-abiding occupation.

One of the best of these in the entire metropolis at the present moment, is a gentleman who answers to the name of “Larry Owen,” but who speaks with the strongest French accent, has an unmistakable French figure and countenance, and, when he is not pottering about Scotland Yard, disguising some of our best detectives, who is to be found in a dirty little shop off Seven Dials, where you can purchase anything from a white mouse, a lizard, a green parrot, up to the most repulsive-looking bull-dog. Long ago Paul had been able to do this man some slight service in The Moon, when a gang of Hooligans, who had got wind of his popularity with the police, turned up in force and put all his pets to death, and smashed every breakable thing in his shop; and so no sooner did he decide to disguise himself, than he decided to avail himself of the services of the redoubtable Larry Owen.

Luckily too, when he reached the Dials, he found this master of disguises playing dominoes with an ugly little son in the back parlour of his shop. Luckily too, Larry was not the kind of man on whom it is necessary to waste many words of explanation, but with the pride of a genuine artist, he set to work, and turned Paul into as disreputable looking a telephone man as one could wish to meet west of the Tower Bridge.

A few minutes’ reflection while this work was in progress, showed Paul that he was perhaps risking too much in going to St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage alone. Hence, he decided to take Larry himself with him, as a brother workman, and this, it need hardly be said, was quietly arranged directly an extra sovereign had passed. Larry too, did not waste much time in making himself up, and punctually by five o’clock, the two confederates found themselves in Piccadilly, with all the paraphernalia of itinerant telephone men, knocking at the door of St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage.

This time, Larry undertook to act as spokesman, and so well did he play his part, that without a moment’s hesitation, the maid told them to go upstairs, and to get through their work as quickly as possible, as she was busy and hadn’t time to bother to show them the ins and outs of their own business.

Naturally, Paul and Larry did not require a second permission. Almost as soon indeed as the girl opened the door to them, they stalked up the stairs, and, with the skill of practised burglars, they tried door after door, as they mounted steadily upward.

Only one door defied their efforts, on the topmost floor, and behind that they caught the sound of two voices raised in excited argument. One was Winifred’s! The other the voice of the clergyman!

This time Paul did not waste any time on useless ceremony. Directly he found that the door was closed and locked, he pressed his shoulder against the woodwork, and with such good effect, that he himself went tumbling headlong into the room where the Reverend Duncan and Winifred were standing.

“Rescue me, rescue me,” she cried, in a voice charged with emotion, and then, worn out by the hours of torture and imprisonment she had been through, she sank into a chair near the fireplace, and began to sob hysterically.

The Reverend Duncan Kilroy turned and cast an angry glance in her direction. His first impulse, evidently, was to say something cutting and stern to her, but suddenly he became afraid of what might follow, and he swung round and faced the intruders.

“Go outside,” he said, raising his arm in the direction of the door, “you have no right, my men, in this room at all. If you want the telephone wires you should go up the ladder at the top of the staircase, and that will give you access to the roof. There is no passage through here. As for this poor girl, who has just been talking that rubbish to you, I am sorry to say she is not quite compos mentis. We must leave her alone, and then she will quickly recover.”

“Not a bit of it, guv’nor,” stolidly interjected Larry Owen, who, guessing at once that this was the girl Paul had risked so much to save, put down the coil of wire and brazier he was carrying, and placed his arms defiantly akimbo. “Just you understand this we ain’t the kind of men to swallow any fairy tale that may be told to us. We know enough of life to know that blood ain’t a nice thing to see on a young gal’s face, like this, and I ain’t agoin’ to leave the young lady, until I know what made you knock her about.”

And Paul whose first impulse had been to seize this greasy, overfed parson by the scruff of his neck, and throw him headlong down his own stairs, choked down his rising indignation, and struck in with a sentiment most suitable to his assumed station: “Them’s my opinions to a T.” And with a good deal of unnecessary noise, he flung his bag of tools upon the floor with a loud thud.

The worthy Duncan’s expression of disgust at this unexpected attack was really so patent, so complete, that it was almost ludicrous. For a moment he puffed out his cheeks like a grampus, and seemed to dance half way across the room in a series of bewildering little storms of rage.

“ ‘Knock her about,’ you vulgar fellow,” he spluttered clawing the air with his hands. “Did I hear you aright; did you say ‘knock her about’.”

“You heard what I said, guv’nor, right enough,” observed Larry, in a tone of the most irritating condescension. “So just chuck out your chest and explain.” And he folded his arms in the attitude of his favourite hero, Napoleon, as that Emperor appeared in a gaily coloured chromo-lithograph he treasured in a little room at the back of his shop.

Mr. Kilroy was now spluttering like some swimmer, who had overtaxed his strength, and was trying vainly to reach the land. “Don’t you see I am a clergyman,” he cried, his voice growing hysterically feminine under the pressure of his continued astonishment, and sweeping his arms about like a windmill, he tried to call the imperturbable Larry’s attention to his collar and to the cut of his clothes.

“Indeed, I do,” Larry assured him. “And I don’t mind telling you, that is why I am so keen about it. After all, parsons ain’t no better than other people. Often indeed they are worse, so you needn’t work any of that game on my mate and myself. A gal’s a gal, bless her! and if she wants to walk out of this place, that there sweet young lady by the table can do it, and we’ll stand by, and if you interfere, Mr. Parson, we’ll just knock your bloomin’ head off.”

And again Paul felt nothing better to do than to act the part of the chorus, and to chime in with a very fervent “hear, hear!”

The Reverend Duncan did not, however, lack a certain amount of magnificent assurance, and he turned round and relied on this in speaking to Winifred.

“You hear what these rude fellows have said, Miss Pontifex. Please ask them to go away, so that I may tell you very fully the important news I have got for you, direct from Mr. Hudson.” And his cunning little eyes gleamed, as he uttered this last little invention. It was an artistic little touch of his own, and he did not see how it could fail to succeed.

Indeed, as poor Winifred rose unsteadily to her feet, she did indeed waver. True, she had suffered cruelly since this unscrupulous man had made her a prisoner—but woman-like, she feared the Unknown; and then, what would she not risk to receive a message from Arthur himself?

Paul saw what was passing through her mind, and, elbowing his way past the astonished clergyman, (with a good deal of unnecessary roughness, we regret to add, for he gave the gentleman quite unnecessarily a violent punch in the ribs, that sent him in turn spinning against the bookcase,) he made his way to Winifred’s side, and bent down and whispered quickly in her ear:—“Don’t take any notice of him, he is lying as usual. Don’t look surprised either, but I am Paul Renishaw, come in this disguise to rescue you,” and then pretending that Winifred had been talking to him, he again faced the Reverend Duncan.

“I have spoken to the young lady,” he said in rough workmanlike tones, “and she tells me she ain’t agoin’ to stay here, so if you don’t want my mate to go and fetch a policeman, you had better let her go quietly with us—”

“Or,” put in the repressible Larry, who was beginning to feel his conversational powers being silent were being wasted, “we’ll knock your ugly face in.” And indeed he looked, for a moment, so capable of doing this, that with a snarl, Mr. Kilroy turned and hurried precipitately down the staircase, with the avowed intention of consulting his wife. “As poor Miss Pontifex must really have gone quite mad.”

Winifred, however, was so overjoyed at the prospect of this speedy release, that she soon managed to staunch some blood that was flowing from her cheek, and to draw the wound together by the aid of some flesh-coloured sticking-plaster. Then she seized her hat and her cloak, and hastened down the staircase, Paul going in front, and Larry followed behind her, to see that she was not seized again and immured in any other room in the Vicarage.

Fortunately, Piccadilly was reached without any interruption, and seeing how upset Winifred was, Paul forebore to question her, but insisted on taking her to some tea rooms in Bond Street, realising that half an hour spent in quiet surroundings like those would do more for the poor distracted girl than even a brief visit to a doctor. As a consequence, he and Larry, heedless of what the fashionable people they met might chance to think, escorted her to this retreat, and then they chartered a cab and hastened back to the Dials, so that Paul could change his things and return and explain all that had happened to Winifred.

Punctually, at the time agreed, Paul returned to the tea-rooms in the ordinary garb of civilisation, and was delighted to find that Winifred had recovered most of the obvious effects of the shock she had experienced during her imprisonment, and was keen to hear how Arthur had fared since she last saw him in his office in Cheapside.

It was a long and melancholy story that Paul had now to relate to her, but he did it with such kind earnestness and consideration, that somehow the horror of it all seemed to vanish, and, in place of that, he made it appear that all the consequences, tragic though they might seem at first, were inevitable, and yet only led to the complete vindication of Arthur and his swift and complete triumph.

By this means, he got Winifred interested in the network of crime and intrigue into which he had fallen, from quite a new standpoint—interested, as all good women like to be interested, in the best way she could help the man that she loved—and so, almost before she herself realised what a wonderful change had come over her attitude, she found herself planning and contriving how best both she and Paul could work for Arthur’s speedy deliverance.

In this change of mind her experience with the woman who had made that terrible scene in St. Sepulchre’s Church proved a most wonderful aid. Paul at once pounced on this circumstance as one that might prove most momentous in its issues; and, almost as soon as he had got the whole facts before him, he insisted that they ought to set out to work at once to discover the identity of this creature, and see whether they could not persuade her to tell them all that she knew about Ventris Blake’s villainies.

Determining to lose no time, they made their way at once to the Belsize Theatre in St. Martin’s Lane, first to satisfy themselves whether the woman, who Winnie now remembered, produced a card bearing the name of Flora Kaufmann the actress, was, in reality, Flora Kaufmann, or was simply somebody authorised to act in her behalf.

On arrival at the stage door, however, they discovered that the actress had not put in an appearance at the theatre, and was not expected for another hour at least. A judicious bribe of half a crown luckily produced her private address in Hart Street, Bloomsbury; but on calling there, they found themselves again foiled. The landlady explained that a gentleman with a carriage and a pair of horses had called twenty minutes earlier for the other Miss Kaufmann, who alone resided there then—she believed it was Mr. Ventris Blake, the millionaire—and that he had taken this Miss Eleanor Kaufmann to see some curious works of his in Queen Victoria Street, at number three hundred and something, but she had forgotten the exact figures.

Thanking her for her information, Paul and Winifred re-entered the coupé they had chartered, and the driver was told to make his way too in the direction of Queen Victoria Street. Personally, Paul would have preferred to have let the chase stand over at this point until the morrow; but his promise to go to Scarborough that day to see Arthur and report about Winifred was sacred to him, and he insisted on them holding on their course. None the less, try as he would, he could not conceal his fears from Winifred.

“I tell you frankly, Miss Pontifex,” he said in that quick and decisive way of his, “I don’t like this sudden friendship between such deadly enemies as Ventris Blake and this strange woman, who has worked so hard to ruin him. When the lion and the lamb lie down together, as the Old Book promises us, I will believe that good can come from a sudden alliance like this, but not earlier. It seems to me that the millionaire has got wind somehow of the tremendous efforts that this woman has been making to unmask him, and that he has decided he must take some very strong and resolute measures to stop her tongue.”

The coupé drew up with a jerk outside No. 375. With a hurried glance, Paul inspected all the people passing up and down the pavement, and satisfying himself that the millionaire was not approaching, he stepped quickly out of the carriage and assisted Winifred to alight. Then, dismissing the driver, he hurriedly whispered to his companion the course of action he had resolved on, as they had driven down from the rooms in Hart Street where the strange woman lodged. Receiving her promise that she would bravely carry out his instructions, he turned and led the way into the building so swiftly and silently that, before anybody in the place was aware of their presence, they had reached and entered the caretaker’s rooms at the top, the door of which Arthur had, luckily, left unfastened on his previous visit.

Strangely enough, however, they heard no sound of voices raised in the apartment in which they expected to find Ventris Blake and the woman who had made that dramatic scene in St. Sepulchre’s Church. On the contrary, indeed, when they took their places at the holes which had been made in the walls the last time Paul acted as spy on the doings of the millionaire, they perceived that nobody was in the garret except Ventris Blake, who was seated in an arm-chair apparently plunged in the most profound melancholy.

For a moment they suffered themselves to become the prey of a sense of bitter disappointment; but as the seconds slipped on, and the man did not move at all from his position, and at times looked as though he were listening intently for some visitor who had not arrived, they decided that the strange woman had left him for some reason on the way down, but had promised to follow him to his room.

To Paul also, the period of waiting was relieved by his observations of the changes that had been made in the disposition of the different objects in the apartment. For instance, as his glance travelled round almost irresistibly to the mantlepiece he saw that some heavy curtains had been hung over the fireplace, and that no longer there glowered down from the wall that sombre looking Shield of Black, but that in its place had been hung two long crimson curtains. What had become of those Three terrible-looking Glass Eyes?

In vain he scanned every likely object in the room. He could not discover a sign of their presence—unless indeed, they had never been taken down at all, but had been simply masked by the heavy crimson curtains. A moment later, he saw that the old-fashioned gas-chandelier that hung from the centre of the ceiling had also been tampered with, and that the ordinary burners had been removed to allow a kind of arc-light to be fixed at the bottom of the pendant, flanked by a reflector that shone with a glint of polished steel.

Near the chair, too, on which Blake was seated stood a small gate-table, bearing a red mahogany box, attached to which were a number of wires that looked as though they communicated with some invisible electrical apparatus. Paul, indeed, was just wondering what the object of these lines were, when they caught the sound of a woman’s step on the stairs, and later the rustle of some silken skirts, and almost immediately afterwards, the strange woman they were seeking so eagerly entered the apartment. As she did so, she looked around the place with a certain obvious curiosity, as though it recalled some half forgotten memories. Then the millionaire rose and for a time her mind was absorbed by the conversation.

For once the iron audacity of the man seemed to have vanished, and his manner towards this strange creature was timid and differential. With an air as though he were apologising for the severity of the furniture, he drew a chair for her opposite the fire. Then he too seated himself in the chair he had previously occupied, and whether by accident or by design, he rested his arm upon the table, in a position that hid the small mahogany box completely from sight. There was a pause, and then unconsciously, he raised his voice a little louder, so that Paul and Winifred could hear quite plainly all that he said.

“How long, Eleanor, is this to go on?” he asked in a tone he meant to be light, but betrayed in every accent that he was consumed by anxiety and fear. “Haven’t you pursued me enough? Haven’t you become satiated with the revenge you have already had?”

The woman did not deign to answer his question, but put another to him: “Why haven’t you mended your ways, Ventris Blake?” she asked in a low, weary kind of way, as though the subject had haunted her so long that there only remained in her a sense of intolerable fatigue. “Perhaps, one might have forgiven you in those early days, when you were younger, and poor Helen had only just died—but you have never really altered, and so it has become a kind of religion with me now to track you down and to expose you.”

“But,” said the millionaire eagerly, “Flora has forgiven me; she thinks the best not the worst of me.”

“Flora,” repeated the woman bitterly, “what does Flora care about anything or anybody, so long as she makes a successful appearance on the stage, and turns the heads of weak fools like Russell Langford and that latest dupe of hers, Jules Prendergast, who I see has just managed to push her out of the star part she had at the Belsize Theatre? Of course, Flora won’t take any trouble for anybody except herself—but there! she never cared for poor Helen like I did! she never had a true sister’s feelings towards her; and when the poor child was on her deathbed, she never realised what a sacred legacy of hate Helen bequeathed to us when she called upon us to give you no peace, until we had avenged her murder.”

“Murder is an ugly word, Eleanor,” repeated the millionaire, with a shiver.

“A very ugly word,” agreed his companion, “but it’s a true word, and therefore I don’t think you ought to mind my use of it.”

“But won’t even money do anything to atone for the past?” pursued Blake softly. “I am not, as you know, particular to a few thousands, even tens of thousands; I just want to be left in peace.”

“No,” said the woman firmly, “the prospect of being rich doesn’t appeal to me. As a matter of fact, I shall never live to make any use either of my vengeance or of your wealth. It was only yesterday I went and saw Dr. Carpenter, the great heart-specialist in Harley Street, and then he told me quite frankly that the heart disease I am suffering from has made almost incredible progress, and that there is a positive certainty that directly I get any extraordinary fatigue, my heart may break down, and I shall go out like the flare of a candle.”

Was it fancy, or was it really a fact, that, as the woman revealed this dark fate by which she was haunted, Ventris Blake’s eyes flashed for a second, but only for a second, with the light of malignant triumph? When they came to compare notes afterwards, both of those two unseen watchers, Paul and Winifred, agreed that they did, and certainly from that moment, Ventris Blake dropped altogether his soft whining tones, and spoke out with a new air of power and earnestness.

“That being so,” he proceeded, “why do you interfere in my life, on behalf of a scoundrel like this Arthur Hudson?”

“For three reasons,” declared the woman coldly. “In the first place, he is not a scoundrel. In the second place, he was wonderfully good to me when I was taken ill outside his office in Cheapside, when to all appearances, I was a poor, weak, hungry-looking woman, without a friend in the world. He couldn’t have been earning much himself, but I remember he fetched and paid a doctor for me, and finally insisted on hiring a cab and driving me to my rooms. No! you needn’t look cynical like that,” she went on with a sudden burst of fierceness, “he didn’t flirt with me, he didn’t try to make love to me, he is not that sort of man. He was just that bright, strong, frank, helpful kind of boy, we women, who are so weary of the noxious attentions of all sorts and conditions of people, admire most. Perhaps,” she went on more softly, “it is the latent instinct of motherhood within us all. At all events, I felt my heart go out to him and, when I discovered that he was the object of yet another of your diabolical plots, I made it my business to speak out boldly for him, both at the church and in the Police Court.”

The millionaire shifted about uneasily, and finally looked down. “But,” he said with a nervous little cough, “you haven’t told me yet your third reason. Is this some other equally heroic and equally quixotic prompting of your feelings, or do we this time come a bit nearer a solid foundation of a hard business fact?”

“We come upon a question of absolute fact,” returned the woman, and now her face grew exceedingly stern. “That third reason you ask me about is probably the most convincing reason of all. It is this I am making this grim fight for poor Arthur Hudson, because I happen to know who it is that did that murder of the poor creature on the Filey road near Scarborough.”

“You know!” gasped the millionaire, suddenly sitting upright and grasping the table with both hands, to hide the trembling of his muscles.

“Yes, I know,” repeated the woman, “and at the right moment I shall speak.” And so, as though she were desirous to end the conversation, she rose and pretended to re-examine the different objects in the room.

Then, as the millionaire did not speak, she began to talk in a desultory kind of way, as though she would distract his attention. “Dear me,” said she, “now I come to look at it, this room has a strangely familiar appearance to me.

“Every object in it seems to remind me of something—some place—some incident that I have almost completely forgotten.” Then she looked as though a sudden light had broken upon her: “Surely,” she cried, “this cannot be the actual room where poor old Colonel Pontifex and that skulk Russell Langford——”

With a muffled oath, Ventris Blake sprang to his feet. “Enough of that,” he said roughly. “Let us stick to the matter we were discussing first. We can deal with this room and what it suggests afterwards. What I want you to tell me about is the murder of my poor Aimée.”

The woman’s eyes flashed. “Your poor Aimée,” she sneered. “You were not wont to talk of her like that, when she was alive, and I am sure that this is almost the first time you have so spoken of her since she had been dead. None the less, why try to come over me, with this cheap theatrical bluff? After all, I know who murdered Aimée Blake, it’s true—but so do you,” and she swept round with a quick movement and gazed fixedly at the millionaire, who could not stand her scrutiny, and with a fumbling kind of movement dropped again into the armchair.

“Can’t—can’t we come to terms?” he stammered, playing nervously with a little red box at his elbow, and taking care all the time to keep the wires connected with it closely concealed.

Again the woman seated herself and gazed fixedly into the fire.

“Can you bring the dead to life?” she replied, and there was no passion now in her voice, but her face wore a look of grim determination.

“I can atone,” he murmured.

“Repentance is not the quality that suits men of your stamp, Ventris Blake,” she answered with a slow shake of the head. “No! I have sworn my oath and I shall keep my word. So far as I am concerned, this conversation is now ended.”

“And so far as I am concerned,” he snarled suddenly, “the business of this meeting between us, after five years’ vendetta, has only just begun.” And sweeping round again, in the direction of the table, he threw open the lid of the box and pressed some knobs connected with the wires.

There was a rustle as the draperies over the fireplace slowly began to revolve, coiling themselves upward.

Again he pressed a button—and this time the light seemed to shift, the reflector fell, and some vivid rays depressed themselves on the huge Black Shield that had again become visible.

This time the woman shrieked and pressed her hands convulsively to the side of the chair, as though, by catching sight of The Three Glass Eyes, she had suddenly become paralysed.

CHAPTER X.
WHEREIN VENTRIS BLAKE FAILS

It was then that both Paul and Winifred recognised that, if ever they were to learn the secret of the Three Glass Eyes, that was the psychological moment. Everything, indeed, was favourable to them. Their presence on the far side of the wall was in every sense a complete secret. They could move freely without a sound betraying their appearance, and they had only to keep their gaze fixed on the holes that had been cut in between the laths and the plaster to command a perfect view of the interior of the millionaire’s garret.

None the less, when the strange woman’s shriek broke out with such startling suddenness directly the curtains rolled aside, and those Three Terrible Eyes began to turn with a quick rhythmic movement up and down, they looked instinctively to each other—dumb with horror and apprehension. After all, this weird creature, they were certain, from the blue, pinched look about her nostrils, was suffering, as she had explained to Blake, from serious heart-mischief, and had spoken the truth when she warned the financier that it needed but a small shock to bring about her death. Was it kind, therefore—was it right—aye, even was it human to let Ventris Blake torture her so sorely, even though the result might be they might learn enough from this diabolical ordeal to save Arthur Hudson from all that intolerable burden of shame that was being foisted on him?

They paused. There was, indeed, just one moment of absolute irresolution when their decision for good or for ill hung evenly in the balance, and when there came sharp cracking sounds like the noise of electric sparks flying to and fro, and of whizzing whirling batteries in use in the next apartment, and they caught the hum of a suppressed excitement as though they stood near the curtains of the operating theatre of a vast London hospital when the surgeons were busy with the knife and Death hovered closely over their heads. Then the sense of common humanity triumphed—as indeed it always does where the tempted are leal and loyal of soul.

“We must stop him,” interjected Winifred in a little, broken, tense whisper, and nodding assent, Paul was just about to step noiselessly through the caretaker’s empty rooms on to the landing where he could effect a surprise-appearance in the garret when both of them were astounded to hear the mysterious sounds cease with alarming suddenness, and yet a third voice in the next apartment—that of some bright, eager and impetuous lad!

Hastily they turned and peered again through the holes in the wall.

This time, to their intense surprise, they found that all at once an extraordinary transformation had been effected in the garret, the crimson curtain had once again fallen over that huge Shield of Black, and the reflector on the gas had now swung into its original position, leaving the room lighted on all sides with a soft yellow glow. Even the little red mahogany box stood closed and useless in its old place on the little gate-table, while the wires which connected it with some unseen but diabolical contrivance had dropped to the floor, and were now lying curled in a confused heap by the side of the fireplace.

And Blake—and the strange woman?

Blake had, it was seen, moved from his seat and was now standing near the doorway with his arm upraised, but this time his fury was not directed against the woman at all, who seemed to have sunk on her knees in front of her chair, burying her face in the cushions whilst her frame was distorted by convulsive sobs. It was the newcomer, a boy, that had excited his wrath—one of those sharp, intelligent news-lads of London who had come in covered with snow with a great bundle of papers under his arm, and who now gazed up fearlessly at the millionaire as though he knew him well, and, knowing him, defied him.

“How dare you?” began Ventris Blake hotly; “how dare you come into this room? I have half a mind to send for a policeman and to give you into custody, for you have not come to trade but to rob I am certain.”

“Oh, stow that,” said the boy carelessly shifting the burden of his papers from one arm to the other. “I ain’t dun anythin’ that matters. I jest ’ears a woman hollar, and in I pops, to find you a kind o’ magic lantern ghost show and a Mr. Sequah rolled into one. Besides, I ’ad a right to cum in. I am a friend o’ Miss Kaufmann there—”

“Nonsense,” retorted Blake, and he was just about to catch the lad by the collar and fling him out when he was stayed by the woman herself, who now rose from the chair, her face drawn and swollen with pain.

“He is quite right,” said she, as she stepped feebly towards the boy and tremblingly but confidingly took his arm. “He is a friend of mine, and a very good friend too.” Then turning to the millionaire: “You know we Kaufmanns, as a family, don’t trust you, Ventris Blake. You may have thought when I came here with you so willingly from Hart Street that I was fooled by your smooth tongue and oily promises. But I wasn’t—although I admit that you have just now given me a very terrible surprise.

“The fact is,” she added, moving still closer to the door, “I have always someone to watch over me these days, and this lad here, George Heritage, happens to be the one, for he has no doubt just arrived to relieve the private detective that always ‘shadows’ me. The detective agency I employ believes in the London street gamin, and with good reason, I think, don’t you?” And giving the millionaire a look charged with very deep meaning, she passed out of the garret and slowly descended the stairs to Queen Victoria Street, closely followed by Paul and Winifred who promptly took a hansom.

For a time, it is true, it seemed as though these two last would have to go the whole distance to Hart Street to come upon her and her sturdy juvenile protector. For one thing, snow had begun to fall rapidly, in thick, heavy flakes that shut out the faces of pedestrians from their sight and lay in solid masses on the pavement and on the clothes of the men and women they passed, rendering all more or less indistinguishable. For another, a biting wind had also sprung up, whirling the flakes madly up and down, but, as the hansom rattled into Holborn, Winifred clapped her hands with excitement for just then the breeze seemed to die down, the throng in the street to lessen, and, away near the top of Fetter Lane, she caught sight of Eleanor Kaufmann walking steadily onward.

A word to the driver, and the horse was whipped up, and a few moments later they succeeded in reaching a point level with the strange woman. They got out and paid off the hansom, and, taking her courage in both hands, as it were, Winifred Pontifex went and accosted the millionaire’s bitterest enemy—closely shadowed by Paul on the one hand and on the other by the news lad employed by the firm of private detectives.

“Have you forgotten me, Miss Kaufmann?” she asked, holding out her hand as though she would compel the other to be her friend. “If so, I at least remember you, and I want to thank you for your good advice about the people in St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage.”

The woman stopped and gazed searchingly at her. “It is a pity then that you did not take it, Miss Pontifex,” she returned, but all the same she fell into step with her. “If you had, you would have saved yourself that ugly spell of imprisonment you went through. As it was, just when I had arranged for one of the servants to be bribed to bring you to me, Mr. Renishaw slipped in and got you out. Although you must admit you did not deserve it.”

“I admit that freely,” retorted Winifred bravely. “Only I want you to understand my position. The truth is, I am absolutely bewildered by the network of crime and intrigue and duplicity into which I have fallen. Just three days ago I was one of the happiest girls in London. As far as I knew, I hadn’t an enemy—hadn’t a care—and yet look to-night where I stand? People tell me that the man I love has not only been married when he professed to be single, but has murdered the poor creature he is supposed to have wedded and deserted. My uncle and my cousin have turned against me, and I have been driven from the only home and friends I have, to a refuge which, after all, most friendless girls would take—the house of a clergyman who you tell me is a scoundrel and, while knowing Arthur is innocent, will not say the word that will clear his good name. Can you wonder, therefore, that I have fumbled and hesitated—”

“I don’t,” the woman cut in quietly but sweetly. “Only this business of the wedding and murder of poor Aimée Blake is so terribly far-reaching in its evil consequences that none of us could afford to look at the sentiment of our position but the fact. And the grisly fact is like the natural law of the spiritual world; evil sows evil, mistakes are mistakes, and bring in their train injustice as well as pain, and if you fail—well, your lover will be hanged,” and she threw out her hands with a gesture of complete certainty and finality.

“Indeed, I will not fail,” gasped poor Winifred choking down her terror and emotion. “I will be brave. I will be strong. I will do whatever I am bidden. Let me tell you that I was a witness of your recent interview with Ventris Blake.”

“And what did you discover?” cried the woman excitedly, stopping at once and facing her companion.

“It was all too bewildering, too incomplete,” muttered Winifred with a low wail. “I learned this much—Ventris Blake has a past of crime the facts of which you are acquainted with and which he would risk his fortune and his life to hide from the world that simply thinks he is one of the most wonderful financial magnates that ever sprang up in America and came to London to solidify their paper riches. What that past is I cannot even guess at. But oh! I do beg you in that we two are women, born to love and therefore alas! it seems to me born to carry the burdens of life and to suffer with our newly sensitised hearts, to tell me at least one thing you seem to know the truth of: who did that cruel crime on the Filey Road for which Arthur has been arrested?”

“And would you act on my word? Would you take up this pursuit of the guilty one for me? Would you explain to Mr. Renishaw how important it is not to lose another moment over the Three Glass Eyes, as we, who know, call them, but go at once to—”

Apparently, but only apparently, alas! in the excitement of the moment poor Eleanor Kaufmann stepped off the pavement on to the horse-road. By this time the snow had fallen to a depth of nearly an inch in thickness and had quite deadened the sounds of all passing cabs and omnibuses. The flakes too were continuing to descend so that the drivers had much difficulty in seeing any distance in front of them—and hence, before Winifred could stretch out a hand to drag her back, the woman swayed and was suddenly caught by the shaft of a quick-trotting hansom and hurled against the old-world entrance to Gray’s Inn.

In an instant Paul rushed up and raised her in his arms.

In an instant the inevitable crowd surged up and closed about them.

Some stranger struck a light and held it close to the woman’s features.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I am a doctor and I am anxious to render all the assistance I can to the poor sufferer.”

But even he drew back with a shudder. “Poor thing,” he cried. “I can do nothing here. She is quite dead.”

“Dead,” repeated a tall man in a whisper to himself, looking from his semi-military bearing like a policeman in plain clothes, but who was really a spy of Blake’s. “That is good. Then her secret dies with her.” And with a quick turn of the elbow he forced a passage through the crowd of terrified onlookers and tore off as hard as he could in the direction of the nearest telegraph office.

None the less Paul again bent over her and tried to find some sign of life in the frame that lay so still in the snow that continued falling lightly over her. Again there was a movement in the crowd, and another medical man appeared, and examined the corpse and shook his head. Only the gruff voice of a police sergeant raised Renishaw from his painful reverie. “Does anybody know the deceased?” he queried as, throwing off his waterproof cape, he bent down and reverently covered up those wide, staring drawn features of the dead.

The newsboy employed by the firm of private detectives, officiously pushed his way forward, and, taking advantage of the movement of the mob who pressed to hear what the lad had to say, Paul caught Winifred by the arm, and deftly drew her on one side, out of the shadow of the street lamps.

“It will never do for us to be mixed up in this accident,” he said in a low tone as they struck out in the direction of the Inns of Court Hotel. “We should have to give our names and addresses and to hang about London until the inquest is over, and, if police court proceedings follow, we might be detained over the business quite a fortnight, to say nothing of the unwelcome publicity we should get from the different newspapers that report the affair. The fact is—I must run down to Scarborough to-night as I promised. Arthur is there alone, without a friend, and hard as it may seem, we may have to pursue independent investigations about the murder of Aimée Blake. If this poor creature and Ventris Blake really discovered who killed her, we ought to be able to find out too: and, with that charge clear and Arthur free, the establishment of the poor old fellow’s innocence in the widest sense, may be easy enough.”

“But may I not come with you to help you?” Winifred queried with a sudden resolution. “It is true I am not Arthur’s wife yet, but in three months I should have been—and I might, loving him so dearly, be able to aid him much.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” said Paul eagerly, anxious that she should not realise how difficult a task lay before them; “but I do not think you could really do anything there just now, except provoke your uncle. My idea was to leave detective matters to detective minds, and now that your situation at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage has proved such a delusion, you should return to Emperor’s Gate.”

“I can’t,” moaned Winifred, clasping her hands tightly to check her sobs, and then she stopped. All at once she saw the part Paul would have her play in this grim contest for her lover’s life—the part of a girl who loved and suffered and waited on, in hope that nothing could quench. Perhaps, in spite of Vera even, it might succeed; it might turn her uncle from an active partisan of Ventris Blake to a friend of the man she loved, one who was determined to rescue him and to put him right with the world.

Was it worth it? she asked herself. Could she not do more with her freedom? Then she caught Paul’s eyes fixed on her with a pleading expression that she felt she could not resist—but, womanlike, she temporised. “Then you think I did wrong to leave the flat when Vera said such dreadful things about Arthur?” she retorted, bending down to hide her face and pretending to brush some snow flakes off her cloak.

“Not wrong,” corrected Paul, “but I fear it wasn’t wise. You see in life none of us can afford to do what other people want. If we did, we should be in a series of endless difficulties, that inevitably would end in our ruin. That is true indeed, in matters of common, honest, every-day existence, and, if it is so in those affairs, how much more is it in manœuvres where you expect treachery and falsehood, and perhaps positive villainies?”

“Then, to apply your maxims,” pursued Winifred, “you believe Vera got up that quarrel specially with me to get rid of me for some ulterior, but wicked motive of her own.”

“I do,” returned Paul promptly.

“And if I had stayed I should have defeated that wickedness?”

“I hope so,” observed Paul gravely, “why not try it and see? At present, unkind as it may seem of me to remind you of it, you have no home. You have no relations to go to. Now, why not return to your uncle, and try to soften his heart towards Arthur and to nerve his brain to resist the infamous promptings of Blake, and the sly treachery of your cousin Vera?”

“And you think I could do good by that ruse?”

“I am certain of it.”

Winifred appeared to waver for a moment, but she had been won. “I will do it,” she cried brightly, holding out her hand.

Paul took the pledge. “And I,” he added, “will help you now, at once.” And turning sharply to the left, he led the way through Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the direction of The Temple Station, from which point, they were rapidly whirled to South Kensington.

Luckily, as Winifred entered the flat, her uncle happened to be crossing the hall. Now, if the reader has got the idea that this man was wholly bad, one object of this story has not been gained. Russell Langford was bad, but he was not wholly bad; he was more weak than wicked. Indeed, had his career taken a turn for success at the start—had he not had to wait until his heart was sick and his principles had died from starvation—he might have been a creditable member of the Middle Temple. But, as it was, he had seen shady tactics pay and shady tactics answer, and so perhaps whilst he was never exactly immoral, his life was non-moral, and he would never have grieved at his sister’s child being turned adrift had not Vera played him false afterwards.

As it was, however, his mind was softened now towards Winifred, and, with almost a creditable show of emotion, he now advanced towards her and took both her hands in his. “My child, welcome home,” he said with great graciousness. “And you too, Mr. Renishaw, I am glad to see you too, because you have brought her, and in spite of the hard things we said to each other on that fated night you came here to dine!”

“And my cousin?” questioned Winifred quietly removing her wraps. “Where is she?”

The lawyer’s face clouded. “Vera is out at present,” he said, “but left a note to say she would not be more than ten minutes late for dinner, but that I was to begin without her. Now you, my child, hurry up and come and take her place. I suppose you heard about that Jules Prendergast business,” he added, turning to them both, the gloom on his brow deepening, “most persons, I find, did. That is how rogues flourish—the right people never hear of their villainies until it is too late. Luckily, the man showed himself in his true colours before much harm was done, and is, I see from to-night’s papers, to marry that old curmudgeon, Lady Desborough, at an early date. But Vera deceived me about it, and relations between us are now very strained, so if Mr. Renishaw will stay to dinner, he may do us both a favour—greater than he can guess.”

“I wish I could,” said Paul frankly, “but the truth is, I am just off to Scarborough to back up Arthur Hudson.” And he looked the barrister straight between the eyes.

Almost instantly, the professional mask fell and hid all the man’s true feelings and expression—but not before Paul had seen something that made his heart give a sudden bound of joy. Just for one second he had caught a look of terror in the eyes of Russell Langford, real, sheer physical terror of the future and the revelations it might hold for them both! Then habit asserted itself, and he was once again the cool calculating man of the world.

CHAPTER XI.
AGAIN—IN PARK LANE

There was something intolerably strained and anxious in the looks of Ventris Blake as he sat that night in his study in Park Lane. As a matter of fact, he had only just left that garret in Queen Victoria Street after his encounter with Eleanor Kaufmann, yet, no sooner had he reached the secrecy of his own room, than the bold aggressive front which he had presented to Paul and Winifred, and later still to the people in the streets as he drove in his carriage through the West End, dropped from him like an ill-fitting mask. Now he crouched over the fire, in the evening clothes which he had hastily donned, a prey to a low but intense nervous excitement.

Every uncommon sound that penetrated the thickly-curtained and carpeted apartment seemed to set his nerves on edge. Again and again he would spring up and advance towards the bell that communicated with his secretary’s office, but each time he would choke down his fears and irresolution, and clenching his teeth hard would grimly set himself to wait.

For what?

Five—ten—fifteen minutes passed thus without the arrival of the expected intelligence.

Finally, strained it appeared almost beyond endurance by the silence and the inaction, he rose, and producing from his watch chain a tiny curiously wrought master key, that at first might be taken for an ordinary gold-charm, he went towards a corner of the room. Here, where certain lines of water-colour paintings that had been let into the wainscot converged was a panel in oils that he had picked up once in Florence, and which formed a study of one of the most gruesome objects in Italian street-life—a member of the misericordia who goes about in a habit like a mediæval Inquisitor, and attends to the sick, the dying, and the dead.

For a time he gazed at this as though this particular figure had some strange inward significance to him. Then a hoarse kind of chuckle broke involuntarily from his lips, and, shrugging his shoulders, he tapped the corners of the panel with a curious movement as though he would thus release some hidden finely wrought spring. Indeed, this was precisely what he was doing, for no sooner had he struck the fourth blow, than the panel fell forward noiselessly, revealing a small iron door, which not more than a foot square, yielded to a turn of the key he was still carrying.

Placing his hand and arm in this safe right up to the shoulder, he groped about for some seconds until at length his fingers closed over the object he sought. Then he withdrew his hand with a tiny book, also heavily locked.

His movements afterwards were quick and decided.

With a touch he shut both door and panel, and then, stepping swiftly across the room, he locked and bolted both the doors that communicated with the rest of the house. The next moment he turned to his desk, and, seating himself thereat, he switched on the light of a small reading lamp, and then unfastened the locks of the volume and eagerly glanced at the entries of the pages which had been made in thick bold characters in red ink.

At first the onlooker would have fancied the different items had been written by some doctor, for the pages had been ruled as though the book were a doctor’s case-book with full information in dates and times as to the progress of various diseases. But, as Ventris Blake feverishly turned over leaf after leaf, and on each stood out in startling distinctness the word “Died,” one saw that he was looking at a register, it was true—a Register of Death! And each page was stamped with a sign—Three Glass Eyes!

Strangely enough, however, he seemed at length fully satisfied with the result of his enquiries, for he closed and locked the book, and leaned back in his chair, thinking deeply, aided by his own watch and some figures which he had extracted from the register and scribbled on the flap of an old envelope.

“I think I’m right,” he muttered to himself at last throwing the paper on the back of the fire. “Twenty minutes is the average time for the thing to work. Then allow the man five minutes to get to the telegraph office; give the telegram itself forty minutes to reach Park Lane. Now if ever I ought to receive the news.” And, replacing the volume in the safe, he went and unlocked the doors again and marched into Israel Sawdry’s room.

Sawdry himself was busily engaged just then writing at a table, but against the walls stood a number of tape telegraph machines which were recording the news of the world, as gathered by the different news agencies, and also any private information which his head man in the City thought it wise to wire through to his principal’s home.

This particular instrument was silent as he approached it, but, as he had previously calculated, he had not to stand there many seconds before it began with a wheeze and a whirr to click out this message to him:

“Grover reports sad affair in Holborn. Outside Gray’s Inn, old friend of the firm, Eleanor Kaufmann, swayed off the pavement into middle of the road, was knocked down by cab, and picked up dead.”

“Picked up dead!”

Almost unconsciously the millionaire found himself repeating these words as all at once his demeanour changed completely, the cloud of doubt and suspicion seemed to lift from his face like magic and once again he was the quick alert man of affairs.

“Curious thing those Three Glass Eyes!” he went on in the same monotone. “Somehow, its friends always are picked up dead, but it’s not often they oblige by swaying first against some passing vehicle. Well, well, Eleanor was foolish only to herself this time. I certainly did my best with her, but she would not listen to reason. Now—”

“Now you are safe,” cut in Sawdry, who had crept up unperceived beside him, and had read the message and overheard his half-whispered remarks.

Ventris Blake started, but quickly recovered himself.

“Safe!” he repeated with a little touch of scorn, “Is anybody safe in this cursed London? You know the saying at Scotland Yard, that any man’s life can be taken, sacrificed here, for a sovereign! Well, it’s all very well for us to beat down our enemies like this,” tapping the message on the instrument, “but suppose they try the same tactics on us, what then?”

“They mustn’t,” returned the Jew firmly, “we must not let them.

“Remember,” he proceeded gravely, “your old faith that ‘money can do anything.’ Well, haven’t you proved its truth? Where other great financiers have trusted to bribes and gossip, and failed, you have never waited for news or action second-hand. If you have wanted to know what any man, woman, or child was up to you never inquired from anyone else, you have simply had them watched. Their steps have been dogged, their servants suborned. All they have said and done you have collated so that at the right moment you could strike or hold your hand. Look at Arthur Hudson, for instance, how you are managing him! look at your own huge fortune. No, this secret service idea you struck years ago has, in my opinion, been the secret of your business success—”

“And also The Three Glass Eyes,” put in Blake with a hollow little laugh.

“And The Three Glass Eyes,” echoed Sawdry nervously, but even he glanced apprehensively over his shoulder, as though he were fearful the millionaire had been overheard.

Curiously enough, too, just then there did come an interruption to the conversation. A footman tapped at the door and entered, and announced that Vera Langford had called and wished to see Blake on particular business.

“Shew her into the study,” said Blake, and in a few moments he had followed the man and entered into conversation with Vera.

This time, however, his manner to her was far from cordial. Underneath all his words was a deep tone of resentment against her, as though she had done him some serious injury he was in no sense prepared to overlook.

“What is it now, Miss Langford?” he asked in a quick commanding voice as, ignoring her hand, he thrust forward a chair for her to sit upon, and unpleasantly emphasised the word “now.”

“Something important,” said Vera calmly, although her face was swollen and her eyes were red as with shed tears. “I happened to be in the Belsize Theatre this afternoon when you were talking to Mr. Prendergast about me.”

“Well,” put in the man roughly as though he were anxious to provoke her, “then there is little doubt you heard something you didn’t like.”

“That is quite true,” she rejoined. “I learned the man whom I believed in and loved most ardently was false to me and was intent on marrying quickly, an old woman, a friend of mine, Lady Desborough, so that when some atrocious scandal came out about him in the Divorce Courts he should not be ruined.”

“Well, and what of that? Weren’t you thankful that it wasn’t you he proposed to make a victim of? Weren’t you glad that the friend who was playing you false was going to be ruined and not yourself?”

“No, that didn’t occur to me,” said Vera reflectively, “my feeling was quite different to that.”

“Humph,” growled the millionaire, now seating himself and gazing curiously at Vera. “You girls who are baulked in ruining your lives are odd creatures. Instead of being thankful that you had been saved from social ruin and personal degradation, you turn sometimes on the persons who have saved you, and tear them to tatters. Tell me now—what is your idea? Do you still love this silly, brainless poseur, Prendergast?”

“I hate him,” Vera flashed out.

“ ‘Scorn! to be scorned by one I scorn.

“ ‘Is that a matter to make me fret!’ ” quoted the millionaire, with a sardonic turn of the lip. “Well, and you hate! Good! It’s a nice, healthy, invigorating feeling to have. But what then?”

“I wish to be revenged,” said Vera thickly, and now her eyes filled with tears.

“Revenge!” mused Blake swinging round his chair and looking earnestly into the fire. “Yes, I understand. Revenge! It’s a most powerful force I know in this poor weak tottering human mechanism of ours.

“But why should you come to me about it?” he turned again and snapped—“You have already made nearly £10,000 out of me. I have let you do it—for what? That you should make Winifred Pontifex mine! How have we fared over that? The girl left your flat and went to that old toady of mine at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage, it is true, but she has just slipped off from there, and now we’re worse off than before.”

“But I can go after her and find her. I can persuade her to live with me again,” protested Vera eagerly. “I always could manage her. I have got the knack of appealing to what people call ‘the better feelings’ in her. I can turn her round my little finger with a show of tears, and an appeal to her loyalty and unselfishness.”

“Could you at a pinch bring her and come yourself, to live here in this house,” said Blake suddenly, but hardened scoundrel as he was, even he dared not look at the other girl fully in the face.

“Yes,” replied Vera unblushingly, “but I repeat—I must have revenge.”

“Oh, that is easy enough,” returned Blake rising and facing his companion. “The day Winifred Pontifex comes to live here with you, that day Jules Prendergast and Lady Desborough will begin to rue the day they were led to play you false.”

“Then it shall be this very day,” cried Vera, “if you will set to work and will find out at once where Winifred is!”

And she returned home to find two surprises—one that Winifred had arrived already, and the other that Paul Renishaw too had called and had gone.

Now, as a matter of fact, Paul was painfully anxious to be alone—to get time to think. A quick passage of arms with Langford had aroused a new source of interest in him, no other than the identity of the man who had a better reason for seeing Aimée Blake removed from his path than had Arthur Hudson. Even indeed as he had launched this chance shot at Russell Langford, one name of a possible assassin had hammered itself at his brain clamouring as it were for consideration, although it seemed so impossible a clue that he had not dared even in imagination to follow it up.

Now, however, he was alone. There, in the whirl of London’s ceaseless traffic, his thoughts could not stray and move either in treason to the man he suspected, or fatally suggestive to the release of his own friend. Then—and only then, did he seriously ask himself a series of questions which he realised that once put to himself in that form, he could never rest until it was settled beyond all doubt or hesitation.

(1) Did Ventris Blake, by some foul strategy, gain possession of the Register of Marriages at Peterborough, and place within it pages a false dummy page containing an entry of a ceremony that had never occurred?

(2) Or had he absolutely personated Arthur Hudson years ago in that quaint old Northamptonshire city, and been found out by his wife, and made to take his proper name and place in their married life?

(3) And had he, when his mind was fired with that wild, insane passion for Winifred Pontifex, again personated Arthur Hudson, and luring the poor woman, first to Scarborough, and then off to the Filey Road, cruelly fallen on her and beaten her to death with a hedge stake?

Like a man in a dream Paul paid his driver and taking his ticket for Scarborough, climbed into a first-class carriage and found himself quickly whisked along the Great Northern Main Line in the direction of Grantham, the first stoppage, and Doncaster. To a wonderful degree he had, by the aid of his work as a sub-editor, sharpened his power of concentration; and so for nearly two hours his face made no sign of the terrible mental processes he was passing through, from doubt to hesitation, from half conviction to theories to be tested and worked on.

None the less, all that time he was marshalling all that he knew about this strange case of Arthur Hudson’s. Fact by fact he pieced the truth together—not as it might seem to prejudiced parties like the Scarborough police or to Mr. Russell Langford, but as it might be presented to the mind of a trained expert who was perfectly impartial. And in the end he was bound to confess to himself that, after all, this man of millions with the coarse mind of an American ranchman yet the touch of a Monte Christo, was the one person for the defence to suspect—to inquire about—and, if necessary, to bend every energy they possessed to convict!

Exhausted by the conflict, Paul fell asleep, and not until he was roused at York by the guard, and told that he must change there and cross to another platform to get into a North-Eastern train for Scarborough, did he pursue the matter further. Then, finding he had an hour or so to spare, he went into the refreshment rooms, and only over a steaming hot supper, in which some fragrant draughts of perfectly made coffee figured prominently, did he go back to the problem: Was Ventris Blake the real criminal?

Strangely enough, the more that he pondered over this theory, the more convinced was he of its probable truth. For one thing, the motive so supplied was obvious. At the stroke an impediment was removed in the shape of a wife, and a rival was taken off in the person of Arthur Hudson. The whole plot of the crime, of course, seemed more than human—fiendish in fact—but then, as Paul had often observed from the comparative quiet seclusion and remoteness of the office of a responsible newspaper, men who dabbled in City finance were never men who stuck at trifles. There seemed something in the handling of huge sums of money that contaminated—unless the virus were let off by bewildering outbursts of quixotism, philanthropy, or speculative pomp and foolishness—and, as he knew, Ventris Blake had never spent a copper except for his own aggrandisement and personal satisfaction, and then he had never stuck at thousands.

“Altogether this idea is well worth following up,” said he as the slow local train rumbled off at break of day towards the coast: “I am sure to have two or three days to spare in Scarborough waiting for the inquest to finish and the police-court proceedings to be adjusted, and I am certain that I can’t do better than to start an inquiry of my own into the crime, not with the intention of proving Arthur innocent, that will be the business of Mr. Spencer Holmes, his lawyer, but with the hope that I can show Mr. Ventris Blake is the real criminal. After all, my mind has not quite forgotten its cunning when I had to write special accounts of mysterious crimes about which the police would vouchsafe no line of information. I can, I do believe, see as far as most detectives: and in this I should be sharpened by my affection for the poor old fellow they have got in their clutches!” And again his face grew hard and stern, for, manlike, he would not even admit to himself how cut to the heart he was by Arthur’s miseries.

His close mental review of the case had, however, reminded him of one omission. That was the report from the private inquiry agency who had been instructed to watch the Charltons when they removed from the garret in Queen Victoria Street, and particularly to learn the antecedents of the wife—Rebecca Charlton—who was supposed to have witnessed the marriage at Peterborough. He now saw how vital these investigations might prove, and, blaming himself for his own foolishness in not getting possession of the documents before, he hurried out of the carriage directly the train stopped at Scarborough, and went to the platform telegraph office and wired to Arthur’s inquiry clerk, Perkins, with whom he had a nodding acquaintance:—

“Please have all Mr. Hudson’s letters opened. Send on to me any bearing on this dreadful charge, particularly the report of the private detectives who are engaged in watching the caretakers, named Charlton. Register, as matter is important.

“Paul Renishaw,
“Crown Hotel, Scarborough.”

Arthur’s solicitor, Spencer Holmes, was the first man Paul met as he stepped out of the station into the bleak, eager, January air, fresh from the Yorkshire sea and moors.

“Ah!” said he, warmly grasping his hand, “I thought somehow you would catch this train, so I got the boots of my hotel to call me early and hurried up to meet you.”

“No fresh news, I suppose?” asked Paul, throwing back his shoulders and marching out sturdily in the direction of the South Cliff, where he was told his hotel would be found.

His companion’s face clouded.

“I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘fresh,’ ” said he, with a nervous little cough. “Only things could not be well darker than they are. That wretch Blake, not content with the evidence he’s got, has actually imported the cleverest detective they have in New York—a man who happened to be seeing him on business in London—a loud-mouthed, boastful, and aggressive Yankee, who answers to the name of Silas Q. Pinkerton.”

“Well, and what has he accomplished?” queried Paul lightly. “I should have thought the cut of his clothes, to say nothing of the vile character of his accent, would have paralysed every decent Yorkshireman!”

“Not a bit of it,” returned Holmes, sharply, but catching sight of a man in the distance he stopped. “Ah, as I guessed. He’s shadowed me. The fact is, he has done little else since I’ve been down here now. I’ll introduce you to him, and then you’ll know him and his ugly carriage, and you’ll be able to steer clear of him.” And raising his voice he shouted, “Pinkerton! Pinkerton!”

The man stopped, pretended to fumble with a boot-lace, then came towards them. As he drew nearer and his features became more distinct, Paul started violently, muttered something, then caught Holmes excitedly by the arm.

“Here,” he cried in a hoarse whisper, “who did you tell me that was?”

“Why, Silas Q. Pinkerton, the great New York detective,” responded the solicitor.

“Rubbish,” energetically returned Paul. “Why, I know that man as well as I know myself, and he’s no more a New Yorker or a detective, or a creature named Pinkerton, than he is His own Most Gracious Majesty, King Edward the VII.”

CHAPTER XII.
WHAT THE SERGEANT KNEW

Unfortunately, before Paul and the solicitor could come quite face to face with the redoubtable Silas Q. Pinkerton of New York, the great detective (who wore glasses and really looked short-sighted) got a good chance of scrutinising the London journalist’s features. The effect, too, was certainly electrical. No sooner did he do so than all his bold swagger and impudent stare seemed to vanish.

Almost instantly he stopped with a gesture of confusion. Then recovering himself he bent down and again fumbled with his boot-laces. Finally, sheer panic got him in her clutches, and, dropping all pretence, he cried out suddenly, “Excuse me, I’ve forgotten something,” and tore off down a street leading to The Crescent as though he were pursued by a ghost.

Spencer Holmes, the lawyer, stopped half petrified with astonishment. “Now what’s up?” he asked helplessly, and then he caught sight of Paul, who was simply holding both his sides with laughter, quite heedless of appearance.

“That’s good indeed,” chuckled Paul. “The mighty Silas has forgotten something, I can see, but it’s only his own name!”

“Then he’s not a detective at all,” questioned Holmes, giving a low whistle. “He’s down here under false pretences. He’s not even a Yankee!”

“No more than I am,” replied Paul. “He is simply a loafer in the streets of the city, glad to run here and there for anyone who will give him a glass of beer and a sandwich and an occasional half-a-crown. Two years ago, I remember, he attached himself to Ventris Blake. Everything that Blake saw, said, thought, or felt, or imagined he said, saw, thought or ought to feel, he threw into the form of a paragraph and carted it about from newspaper office to newspaper office in the hope that some particularly weak and good-natured sub-editor would buy the news from him at a rate of a penny or three half-pence a line. At that time I was on a smart, almost brilliant sheet that had made a reputation for the pungency and accuracy of its financial criticism, and he simply haunted our city editor, who never took a line from him on principle, but used him as a study for a play he was writing—a study of a species of financial parasite often found, it is true, but seldom so completely developed in the epidermis.”

“And what was his name then if it wasn’t Pinkerton?”

“His nick-name, I remember very well,” returned Paul. “That was ‘Sawdust.’ The boys about the place gave it to him for some obscure reason that he was ‘comfortable for the feet.’ His real name, I know, had some association with that because I remember telling the youngsters that their jest was not as clever as it looked. Now what was the connection?” He paused and thought. Then he seemed to recollect. “Yes, I know now,” he went on. “His right name always loomed up when you spoke to him, from the bottom of his shirt front. Whether his landlady was afraid she would lose him—or the shirt, I don’t know, but there it was in very big letters—Josiah Sawdry!”

“The same surname as that of Ventris Blake’s private secretary, the ugly little Jew, who gave evidence against Mr. Hudson at Bow Street, and declared he actually witnessed the sham marriage at Peterborough.”

“By Jove, I never thought of that,” cried Paul. “Then he’s down here for no good, we may be quite certain. He means mischief to Arthur for some personal reason of Blake’s. Can’t we get him nabbed for going about with a wrong name and falsely pretending to be a private detective?”

Spencer Holmes shook his head. “No, I think not,” he replied. “Anybody can call themselves what they like in name so long as they don’t commit a fraud in doing so,—for instance, obtain goods by false pretences. As for being a private detective, we can all call ourselves that. It’s the proper official police detectives that are the real persons that matter, and to personate one of these is certainly a crime punishable by imprisonment, but he has never held himself out to be one of these.”

“Then he can spy on us and shadow us just as much as he pleases?”

“I am afraid so. At all events, I know nothing in the law to prevent him if he does it quietly and peaceably, and doesn’t create any fuss. None the less, he doesn’t seem over anxious to come close to you, does he?”

And both of the men laughed as they recalled his ignominious flight.

“Well,” said Paul finally, “if we can’t get him one way we may manage to catch him another. I remember the last time he called at my old office very well, for I had put my old silver watch on my desk to see I didn’t get late with any of the editions, and sure enough, when my back was turned it had gone and old ‘Sawdust’ with it. The lad who runs errands for me swore he saw ‘Sawdust’ nip it up and slip it into his pocket, but from that time to this I have never thought of worrying about the matter further. Might not we, however, use this as a weapon against him, and, without threatening him, let him see if he doesn’t desert Ventris Blake and come over on our side, we will have him arrested on the spot for robbery from a newspaper office?”

“Yes,” said Spencer Holmes thoughtfully, “I think with care and tact we can manage that. But what can we gain out of it?”

“Many things,” responded Paul cheerfully. “First and foremost, it will stop his espionage on you. Secondly, he will supply Ventris Blake with all the false information we chose to submit to him, and so won’t cover the ground with any more spies, less scrupulous perhaps, certainly more dangerous. Thirdly—and this is the most important—he will reveal to us why he was sent here, and all that the millionaire said to him when he posted him off from London.”

“Splendid!” returned the ever-cautious Holmes. “Luckily, I know where he puts up. It’s at the Grand—the same hotel as I do. Now, whilst you go and take your room at the Crown, and then run along to the police-station to see Hudson, I’ll slip up there, to his bedroom and nab him. Otherwise, he may take fright altogether and leave Scarborough, whereas, if we can only fix him right he’s much more useful selling his employer’s secrets to us!” And swinging off in the direction of the Spa Bridge, he soon disappeared from sight.

At first Paul was sorry that he had not confided more to this shrewd but kind-hearted advocate. Somehow, he got the idea that if he had only told him exactly his suspicion that the real murderer of Aimée Blake was no less a personage than the millionaire himself, that the lawyer might have turned his interview with the supposed detective to better advantage. Against this, he had to set the fact that up to the present he had nothing but his own belief to go upon. That belief might be worth little or it might be worth much—only patient, persistent investigation would prove, but certainly the lawyer himself was better employed thwarting the prosecution, proving an alibi, and conducting the defence from its strong and obvious stand-point.

“No, I must carry through this crusade against Blake alone,” Paul argued in the end. “If I succeed, well and good—if I fail, dear old Arthur won’t be injured: for his own innocence will then have a chance, although I alas! know too much of the so-called courts of justice, to expect that innocence in itself is bound to triumph.”

A few hours later he entered the police-station and, as soon as he revealed his identity and his object, he was permitted to interview his friend in the presence of a burly sergeant who had been told off to watch the prisoner for fear he should commit suicide!

Luckily he found Arthur bold, quiet, but resolute. The first shock of the charge had worn off, and now he had risen to face the ordeal, strong in a knowledge of his own freedom from stain. Very patiently but eagerly he listened to all Paul had to tell him about Winifred—about her flight from St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage—their adventures with those Three Glass Eyes, which culminated in that terrible scene outside Gray’s Inn, when Eleanor Kaufmann had reeled against a trotting horse and had been picked up dead. True, his face clouded at first when he heard that later Winifred had decided to seek a refuge once again in her uncle’s home—he could not easily believe that any good could come from association with a man like Russell Langford—but when Paul had argued the matter out as one of tactics and comparative safety from Ventris Blake’s persecution, he acquiesced in the course that had been adopted.

The consultation, however, was broken into rather suddenly by the police officer.

“I don’t want to hurry you, gentlemen,” said he, “but it’s my duty to remind you that in a few minutes the prisoner here will have to go before the magistrates, and you both had better prepare your minds for it.”

“It’s purely formal, I suppose,” queried Paul rising from the truckle bed on which he had been seated with Arthur and nodding pleasantly to the sergeant.

The man pursed up his mouth and looked mysterious. “I did hear,” he muttered slowly, “that it won’t be formal, as you call it, by no manner of means. Indeed, a man in the office as ought to know (he’s a detective they’ve borrowed for this job from Leeds) whispered to me that they’ve got a most tremendously important witness to produce this time, that will knock the stuffin’ out of all of you!”

“And who is that pray?” cried Arthur rising and advancing to form the group.

“Why it’s a telegraph clerk at the post-office at Scarborough, who will say you stopped him on the street the night of the murder and offered him a heavy bribe to tell you how to ‘tap’ the wires!”

“What a thundering lie!” interjected Paul.

“No it ain’t,” sturdily contended the sergeant, pulling out a box of snuff which he held invitingly in the direction of Paul. “It’s true enough, and don’t get your hair off about it, or you’ll go bald and catch cold and die from water on the brain.”

And, in spite of themselves as it were, both men had to laugh heartily. The next minute the expected summons came.

As at Bow Street, the place was packed with press-men and artists and friends of the sitting magistrates; but the buzz of excitement died down as the magistrates’ clerk said very gravely: “Put forward Arthur Hudson,” and with a white set face Arthur strode to the dock and bowing to the Bench, stood close against the rail.

This time, the Treasury were represented, and Ventris Blake was not. A Mr. Scarth rose and said he appeared to prosecute, but as it would be necessary to ask for a still further remand, all he would do would be to call, in addition to those who had appeared at Bow Street, one more witness—Henry Drummond, a telegraph clerk, engaged at Scarborough.

After this, the proceedings became formal for a time, as the old witnesses practically repeated their evidence to the effect that Arthur had stayed a night at the refreshment house near the scene of the crime: had bought the stick with which the poor woman was done to death: and had been seen in a greenhouse washing the blood off his hands. Only when the new witness, Drummond, a telegraph operator, put in an appearance, did the excitement sensibly increase. He proved to be a fair young fellow of twenty-five, with blue eyes and a bluff straightforward manner that made a most favourable impression on the court.

His story, too, had elements of the dramatic. He told how on the night of the murder he had gone for a walk along the Filey Road, and was just returning home when he was met by an anxious and haggard man, who first of all asked him for a match, which he gave him, and who then insisted on getting into conversation with him. Finally the stranger led the conversation round to the case with which any dishonest person could “tap” the wires belonging to the Government, and could take on an instrument of his own a record of any message that passed over that section.

At first witness fell into the trap and discussed the problem as though he were talking to a fellow operator anxious if possible to do away with the overhead wire system, and to substitute wireless telegraphy in its place. The man too posed at first as an amateur, anxious to discuss theories of transmission more than practices, but finally he seemed to throw prudence to the winds—talked darkly of a plot to ruin him by doctors and asylum attendants at York, which he must prevent at all hazards—and offered witness five hundred pounds, in a bundle of bank-notes, which he produced, to tell him how “to do the trick,” so that he could foil these villains, whom he alleged, sought his life.

Confused and bewildered by his earnestness, witness tried to slip off with a half-promise that he would give the offer his best consideration. That was useless. By this time they had reached a lonely part of the road against an overhanging cliff, and seeing that he was prevaricating, the stranger became most furious—caught him by the silk muffler he was wearing—and threatened to strangle him unless he yielded the information he sought.

Finally, witness told him how the thing was done, but at the suggestion of the Mayor who presided, and was a Post-office official himself, it was agreed between the prosecution and Mr. Spencer Holmes who defended, that the explanation should not be stated in public.

“Nearly all crimes are imitated,” said the mayor wisely. “I am practically certain if Mr. Drummond reveals the way the telegraph-wires can be ‘tapped’ and their secrets taken off, dozens of bold and resolute criminals will act on the information, and will telegraph messages for purposes of Stock Exchange frauds, absolute thefts, and the fouler uses of blackmail. Only the other day I read of a gang of scoundrels that chartered a vessel and went off the West Coast of Africa, and fished up the cable to South Africa, purposely to doctor messages from members of the London Stock Exchange to Johannesburg, so that the market could be ‘rigged’ in their interest. Luckily, a patriotic Englishman came forward and stopped them before they’d done any harm, but if those pranks can be played with a cable, what cannot be done to the great trunk wires, as they pass over some of our most lonely roads? As a matter of fact, public servants cannot be too careful!” And, forgetting that poor Arthur’s guilt was not proved yet, he actually turned and frowned at the prisoner as though he were a very daring and dangerous malefactor.

A moment later the witness went on with his story explaining how when he had given the desired information, the stranger released his hold on him, gruffly apologised for the force with which he had advanced his arguments, and, thrusting a bundle of Bank of England notes into his pocket, had torn off across a field, where, owing to the darkness, he was almost instantly lost to sight. At first, witness admitted he pinched himself to be sure he had not been the victim of some extraordinary hallucination—some bad dream. Then he imagined the affair was some stupid practical joke on the part of his colleagues, but when on reaching a gas lamp he inspected the supposed bundle of bank notes, he found they were genuine enough—and exactly of the amount of five hundred pounds.

“It is the freak of some lunatic who has escaped from one of the York Asylums,” he said to himself then. But finally growing nervous and apprehensive that all was not as straightforward as it might be, and that the maniac or criminal might actually put into practice the information about the “tapping” of telegraph wires which he had got possession of, he took to his heels and ran as hard as he could to the police-station on the north side of Scarborough.

Unfortunately, he excited himself so much that the bundle of notes must have jumped out of his pocket, for he could not find them when he recounted his adventures to the police-superintendent in charge. In fact, the officer in question, because he could not shew the notes, ridiculed his story altogether, and seemed half inclined to lock him up on a charge of being drunk and disorderly. Luckily, just then, the news of the crime reached the officer; his story was believed; and he and three or four constables were despatched to search for the missing notes.

“And did you find them?” put in Mr. Scarth with a fine air of not leading his witness, but of leaving him free to make any answer he chose.

“No,” said Drummond frankly. “We were up all night looking for them, but we could not discover any traces of them; and although I made many inquiries in Scarborough, I could hear of no one who had discovered them afterwards.”

“Look round the court,” proceeded the counsel impressively. “Do you see the man who accosted you that night and had that violent altercation with you?”

Drummond swung round from the magistrates whom he had been addressing hitherto, and looked long and anxiously at Arthur who, however, returned his gaze with a glance as keen but as non-criminal as his own.

There was an awkward pause—and counsel grew irritated at what seemed to all in that crowded court-room a purposeless delay. “Now then, Mr. Drummond,” he added impatiently, “you don’t, perhaps, understand that waits like this may cause a certain amount of misconception. Please rouse yourself, and tell me—can you see the mysterious stranger who asked you about ‘tapping’ those wires and bribed you with five hundred pounds, now present in this court?”

“I can’t,” broke out from the clerk at length. “When I saw the prisoner amongst ten or twelve others in that dirty, narrow, ill-lighted passage an hour ago, I was certain he was the man. Now, however, the light is stronger, and I will swear that that man in the dock is not the one who asked me for a match and seized me by the throat.”

For a moment there was absolute consternation in the court-house. Mr. Scarth dropped to his seat and gazed at his opponent, Mr. Spencer Holmes, almost dumbfounded. The latter fortunately, was on his feet in a second, asking the magistrate’s clerk to make a special and full note of the answer, and begging the reporters present to preserve their shorthand records for fear any controversy should arise as to the exact words employed.

“There is really no need to do so,” put in the witness who seemed the least disturbed of all the parties involved. “I have not spoken at random, I have not made up my mind without careful examination of the prisoner. It may be out of order, but would he mind speaking to me so that I can see if I can identify his voice even?”

“Certainly not,” began Holmes; but this time Arthur waved him aside.

“I shall be very glad to do as the witness asks me,” he returned. “I know I am innocent, and that until last night I had never set foot in this town. As for inquiring for a match from Mr. Drummond or discussing possible frauds on the General Post Office, I did nothing of the sort.”

“I am sure you didn’t,” put in Drummond impulsively. “I am convinced the police and I have blundered over you. The man who accosted me the night of the murder, was exactly like you to look at—but now I come to examine your hair, your eye-brows, and the shape of your chin and mouth, I see that yours are natural looking, whereas his were artificial.”

“In a word,” said Spencer Holmes blandly. “Your idea is that the man you saw was merely made up to resemble the prisoner?”

“That is so,” replied the witness. “It was a very clever make up, but it was a make up all the same. It wasn’t the genuine article at all. I remember I remarked his theatrical looks at the time, and when he caught me by the throat, I seized him by the chin—with the result that I actually got some grease paint on my fingers.”

“Why didn’t you tell the Court this earlier?” asked Mr. Scarth rising and glowering at the witness.

“Because you didn’t ask me,” promptly responded Drummond. “I told the police superintendent about it at the time, but he said it wasn’t material—and indeed it wasn’t until I saw I had been led away by a series of accidental resemblances to half swear away an innocent man’s life.”

“Well, at all events the prisoner is remanded,” said the Mayor whose rising was a signal for a general break up of the court, and Arthur was hurried off to the adjacent cells, while Spencer Holmes and Paul drew together and held a whispered consultation.

“At last we have won a move,” put in Paul, with a nod in the direction of Drummond. “Now tell me how you got on with Silas Q. Pinkerton.”

“Splendidly,” answered the lawyer with a quiet chuckle. “First of all, of course, he wanted to throw me through the window, but when he saw I had got the ‘drop’ on him he collapsed and begged abjectly for mercy.”

“But what is he doing down here?” queried the journalist.

“He has been sent hither by Ventris Blake as you suspected. His instructions are to ‘shadow’ me and to report all that I discover. Apart from this, however, he has got some wonderful secret of his own which he wants to sell to us. He swears it will clear Arthur Hudson from all these dreadful charges, and will convict a party we have never even spoken to yet—of the murder of poor Aimée Blake and the personation of our friend Arthur at Peterborough.”

“Does he mean Ventris Blake?”

“No, I asked him that, and he not only assured me it was not he, but he actually laughed at the idea!”

“Then—who can it be?” cried Paul half in despair.

“All the same,” he continued, “I don’t attach much importance to his clue. He may have stumbled on something the police have missed since he has been in Scarborough, but that is not very likely, I think. My own impression to-day is that when we have probed to the bottom we shall find Ventris Blake is the real criminal, for he, and he alone, had the best interest in seeing that poor woman in her grave!”

“That is where I differ from you,” Holmes answered. “On the face of it, of course, it looks the likeliest course to work on, but in crimes like murder, you get many and strange surprises. For instance, Aimée Blake may have had some clandestine love affair, some other dark passage in her life that neither you nor I nor the millionaire could ever hope to guess at.”

“Then,” said Paul in some surprise, “you don’t think old ‘Sawdust,’ as the boys dubbed him, is a colossal humbug!”

“Not altogether,” replied the lawyer. “Only take your time over him. Don’t appear to jump at the secret he has to sell you. Busy yourself about something else for a time, and let him come to you. After all, he is not in this beautiful sea-side resort for his health. He wants money like the rest of us—and, if he has failed to get it out of Blake, as he seems to have done, judging by what you tell me about the paragraphs he used to hawk about concerning the millionaire, he’ll not be likely to lose sight of us when he’s in touch with possible wealth.”

“At all events, I shan’t upset my plan of campaign for him. You can believe in him if you like. I consider I have a more pressing duty to go over the scene of the crime, and to sift the evidence of residents on the Filey road which the police have rejected.”

And with a quick word of farewell, Paul took his way out of the police court. Already indeed his mind was made up and course of action decided upon. In fact, he had barely gone thirty or forty yards in the direction of the main thoroughfare before he came upon one of the principal places he sought—a cheap and quick jobbing printer’s. This he entered and begging the loan of a pencil (a thing by the way your true journalist seldom possesses), and a large piece of paper, he drew out the following poster, of which he ordered a thousand copies should be posted over all the best boardings in Scarborough and Filey:—

WILFUL MURDER.
£500 REWARD.

WHEREAS it has come to the knowledge of the lawyer engaged for the defence of Arthur Hudson who now stands charged of the wilful murder of Aimée Blake, that certain residents in this district are withholding certain information that will tend to prove the innocence of the accused.

This, therefore, is to invite them to come forward, and to put all the facts they are acquainted with relating to the sad affair before the undersigned, who will give £500 reward to the man, woman, or child who supplies such information as will lead to the arrest of the real criminal other than Arthur Hudson.

(Signed) Paul Renishaw,
Crown Hotel,
Scarborough

GOD SAVE THE KING!

“I don’t know whether this is illegal or not,” Paul mused as he paid the man for the printing and the posting, “but, if it is, I must stand the racket. It’s too good a chance to get hold of the information which the police must have had and rejected, judging by their treatment of the telegraph operator, Drummond, to miss through any craven fear of consequences. Leastways, I can plead my zeal outran my discretion, and, the better to suggest this, I’ll engage a small army of fifty sandwichmen to parade the streets of Scarborough bearing this notice of mine in a prominent position every day for at least next week.” And striking a bargain for this unique display also, Paul, feeling he had made a very good start with his efforts to prove Arthur innocent, set off on another coup.

Now it is a curious thing, but it is none the less true, that men use the materials of life very much according to their professions. Thus if a member of the Stock Exchange wants anything organised it is the most natural thing for him to appeal to members of his own profession—whether it is to get up a sweep-stake for a job lot of hats which he has picked up cheap, or to form a society of glee singers. The same holds good of the theatrical world. Let a prominent actor desire to do anything out of the common—to feed a lot of hungry children, to give some handsome present to a church, or to compile a book of recitations—he never dreams of approaching the general public. It’s always his brother professionals he victimises; and so it was with Paul in his present sea of trouble.

He was, as it happened, most anxious that a properly organised search should be made for that missing bundle of bank notes, which the mysterious stranger had foisted on Drummond as the payment for his tips about how telegraph wires could be tapped. Somehow he felt convinced that, could he but get hold of this the rest of his task would be easy enough, for, after all, Bank of England notes when they are passed from hand to hand in England, and not on foreign racecourses, are the most dangerously tell-tale things in the world. The trouble was, there he was in a strange town without a friend and without an idea as to what source he could rightly look for assistance. In the circumstances most men would have raced hither and thither begging advice.

Not so Paul. He was a journalist, and he knew the value of the news lad as a factor of prime common sense; and hence, no sooner did he get through his interview with the printer, than he walked into the office of the local evening paper, the Daily Post, as it happened just at the time when the special edition of the paper, with an account of the murder trial, was destined to appear. There was gathered a motley crowd of about 40 of the shrewdest urchins in the town, and, without a word of introduction, he called out to them just as he had heard the publisher of The Moon do scores of times:—“Who wants to earn five shillings cash down!”

“I do,” cried half a dozen voices promptly.

“Then form yourselves into a brigade and march two by two to the Filey road. I want you to search the streets from the spot where the poor woman Blake was killed right to the police station for the bundle of bank notes Mr. Drummond has lost. To who ever finds it I will give a reward of £5. But anyway you are each of you sure of 5s. for three hours’ work.”

And, sad to relate not one boy was left to sell the special murder edition. “The papers can wait until we get back,” they brutally agreed,—and something like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Paul found himself followed by the entire staff of newslads.

Now, in every company of boys, there are three or four born leaders. It proved so in this case, and so he had no difficulty in explaining his plan of campaign to this mob of workers through these self constituted lieutenants who first of all gathered around him and heard his wishes, then slunk off and explained to their own particular set the work expected of them, and who when anybody showed any sign of independent thinking promptly cuffed them into subjection.

The district they had to search was quickly split into sections. At the far end of each, a number of lads were left under the charge of a self-elected captain, and realising that he could not even pretend to keep a look-out on this miniature brigade’s operations, Paul told these members of his autocratic executive to direct all of their followers to work towards the town, and when they had covered the part given them to search, to meet him outside the Crown Hotel and report the results. He himself proceeded beyond the farthermost point, the exact spot of the murder, to that little group of houses, in one of which it was alleged Arthur had spent a night prior to the crime.

As it happened, the inevitable crowd of morbid sight-seers had drifted into the town, to the streets adjacent to the police-station, in the hope that, if they did not catch sight of the prisoner, they might, at least, gaze unchecked at the other actors in this crime-drama. As a consequence, the road was comparatively deserted, and he found himself able to survey the ground without any unnecessary interruption.

The object, however, that fascinated him most was not the refreshment-house, where Arthur was supposed to have taken a bed, but the garden into which he was alleged to have retreated after the commission of the crime itself. This place was really dark and forbidding, and suggestive of mystery; and, almost before he quite realised what he was doing, he had lifted the latch of the gate, and strolled along three or four of the paths that wound away from the high road.

CHAPTER XIII.
CERTAIN LOVE LETTERS

For a time, however, we must leave Paul hard at work on his investigations in that tiny hamlet outside Scarborough. True, important results are to follow his labours, although those results are not precisely of the kind he had expected when he had decided so rapidly that Ventris Blake, and nobody else, was responsible for the death of that poor woman on the Filey Road. Unfortunately, the tide of events will not stand still for any of us. We may be the principal actors in the little pitiable tragedies that are enacted in our midst, or we may play quite second-rate insignificant parts. The moment comes when we must all step forward and bear our share, great or little—and so it happened to Winifred and Vera the day after the former returned to the shelter of her uncle’s roof in Emperor’s Gate.

Bold, unscrupulous scoundrels of the type of Ventris Blake strike quickly and deeply when once they see a chance of success has come. Indeed, no sooner did one of his spies report to him that Winifred was safe again in Russell Langford’s flat than he despatched his secretary, Israel Sawdry, to remind Vera of her promise to bring the girl to Park Lane, and at the same time he delicately forwarded a cutting from that evening’s papers, which set out:

“A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between Mr. Jules Prendergast, the popular and gifted actor manager of the Belsize Theatre, and The Lady Desborough of Prince’s Gate, W., Illowen, Stamford, and Breakly, Co. Galway. The approach of this happy event, it need, perhaps, hardly be added, has caused quite a flutter in those smart circles where both Mr. Prendergast and Lady Desborough are interesting and inevitable figures.”

As the millionaire had guessed, this cruel goad, although not very delicate, was certainly highly effective; and with heart aflame with rage, Vera made her way to the morning room, and had her first long talk with Winifred since her cousin’s return. Winifred herself chanced to be seated writing at a small table that stood within a recess close to the window, but she rose quickly as the girl entered, some subtle feminine instinct warning her that fresh trouble was astir.

“I want to talk to you seriously, Winnie,” Vera began, as she dragged an arm chair to the fire and seated herself in it. “Do sit down yourself and listen to me, or you will get upon my nerves. First of all, I suppose you have heard that all is over between Jules Prendergast and myself.”

“Yes,” said Winifred, dropping into a chair opposite to her cousin. “I have. Your father told me about it at dinner last night!”

“That is just the mischief. Father has heard of it, and I doubt if he will ever speak kindly to me again. I don’t,” she went on with a gulp and a convulsive twist of the handkerchief she was toying with, “mind about the break with Jules. It’s the pater I am worrying about.”

“Why should you?” queried Winifred, kindly. “He’s not really an ogre. Only give him time and a little thoughtful consideration, and he will come round fast enough, you will find!”

“If it were only the matter between Jules and myself no doubt he would. That, unfortunately, is not the worst aspect of the business. You see Mr. Blake is in it too.”

“But how?” questioned Winnie sternly, with a sudden tightening of the heart strings. “I know, of course, you let him do a little speculation for you—but what of that? You fairly risked your money and won. That’s all, and that’s an end of it. He can’t blame you for it.”

“No, but there are other transactions,” proceeded Vera, who thought the time had now come for a few crocodile tears to drop unchecked from her eyes, and accordingly she made no effort to suppress any sign of emotion: “you don’t know about them, of course, but they occurred when Jules was absolutely on the point of bankruptcy, when his production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ had been a most ghastly failure, and he was at his wits’ end to find cash to produce ‘Othello.’ ”

“And you took money from a man of such an awful reputation as Blake’s, took it as a gift,” cried Winnie, startled and disgusted. “Oh, Vera! how could you?”

“Not exactly a gift,” the girl returned guiltily, “but to do things I ought not to have promised I would. One promise was—that I should use my influence with you on his behalf.”

“That is useless, quite. I consider the man a most diabolical mischief maker, thief and rogue.”

“I know,” answered Vera, eagerly. “I told him so—but he would make me give my word to do all that he asked. He has a great idea that, if he could only see you, he could make you think better of him. As a consequence, he induced me to enter into another bond with him—that I should bring you to his house in Park Lane to stay for a few days there at the same time as I did.”

“Never,” cried Winifred, springing to her feet, her eyes flashing with anger. “Never, understand that. I know this Ventris Blake better than you think! I know it is he who has brought all this cruel, dreadful trouble on Arthur and on myself. I know what his reason is, to separate me from the man I love, and to make me his; but he shall never do it—never. Therefore you can return to him and tell him the truth, and warn him that his persecution of me had better cease before it is too late. Of course, he thinks that, with his millions behind him, he can do anything in London. So alas! he can up to a point, but only to a point. Heaven won’t desert Arthur or myself, you see—”

“I do, I do,” put in Vera soothingly, artfully realising that after an outburst like this Winifred would be spent and broken, and emotionally all the easier to manage. “Indeed, I don’t think I should have shown you the ghastly skeleton in my cup-board at all, but would have borne it all had I not thought one good thing might come of the visit both to Arthur and yourself.”

“And what good thing could come from Ventris Blake!” queried Winifred scornfully.

“What you yourself suggested,” said her treacherous cousin. “The absolute stoppage of his persecution of Arthur Hudson and yourself.”

“I will make no terms with him,” retorted Winifred hotly. “That would be treachery to Arthur and to my better self.”

“For my sake!” pleaded Vera sinking to her knees in front of her cousin and looking at her with streaming eyes.

“No, not even for your sake.”

“But you don’t realise how terribly harsh your decision will prove to me,” Vera wailed, now genuinely alarmed lest her strategy should fail, and determined to stop at no falsehood to effect her purpose; “after all, you have not yet heard the whole of my wretched plight. I would have spared you if I could, but I see I must drain my cup of bitterness before you to the very dregs before you will be melted. Oh! you can’t have any soft place in your heart to humiliate me like this! You must almost hate me, not to be content with a hint but to probe and probe until you bring out to the light of day the terror that haunts me every hour I live!”

“Vera,” cried Winifred bewildered and astounded; “never have I known you talk wildly like this! What can have happened to you?” And she flung her arms impulsively around the girl and pressed her tightly to her breast. “Don’t tell me a thing more if you don’t want,” she went on soothingly. “I am sure you can’t mean any of the terrible things you suggest. After all, I know you better than you know yourself, and I am sure you have never done a thing you have really and truly cause to bewail in so grievous a fashion as this.”

“I haven’t,” whispered Vera, “but Jules has.”

“Jules,” repeated Winifred. “Again—I don’t understand.”

“Oh, it’s easy enough,” returned her cousin in hard and bitter tones. “Jules Prendergast never cared for me you see—but only for the money I could find for him. When my little fortune ran out, and he had squandered the sum I had got from Ventris Blake he was still in financial difficulties—and so, like the cad he is, he too went to the Park Lane millionaire, and sold all my love letters to him!”

“Sold your love letters,” repeated Winifred too horrified to move. “But they were yours. He should have returned them. What use can Ventris Blake make of them!”

“Ah, you don’t know London, I see,” recklessly proceeded Vera who had no feeling of modesty or compunction now that she had once started on a career of falsehood, and only thought of frightening her cousin and of achieving a great emotional triumph. “There are scores of ways in which a man of wealth and fashion can make use of a packet of a well known girl’s love letters, particularly if they are so full of silly girlish outpourings of sentiment and jealousy as mine are! He can, for instance, shew them his friends at the club. He can publish them in a novel, with the identity only thinly veiled. He can even hand them to some scurrilous Society paper which he has financed himself, and which would dish them up as the latest scandal and sensation under some catch-penny title like ‘An English Girl’s Love Letters to a Popular Actor-Manager; Puzzle: Why was the match broken off!’ ” And the better to heighten the effect Vera flung her cousin from her and began to move hysterically up and down the room.

For a moment Winifred did not know what to do, but stood with hands clenched and face blanched with horror. “Oh! it’s monstrous!” she murmured half to herself and half to Vera. “Oh, that we had some man now who would go to this creature Blake and horse-whip him—horse-whip him within an inch of his life, and literally force him to disgorge love letters that should have been sacred from all sickening barter such as this!” And then, as she realised her own bereavement, her eyes filled, and she too gave way to tears.

“Don’t cry,” said Vera savagely, stopping suddenly and banging the table. “Don’t! I can’t stand it! Just listen to me. Now you understand why I want you to go with me to Ventris Blake’s—to find out where those letters are and to take them. Now, will you be a true cousin to me, and go with me and help me to get them?”

“I will,” cried Winifred, holding out her hands impetuously.

So it came about the very next day that visit was paid to that luxurious home of Ventris Blake in Park Lane. Indeed it all happened precisely as the millionaire had arranged. In some miraculous fashion, not perhaps wholly unconnected with the mystery of The Three Glass Eyes, the permission of Russell Langford was obtained for the experiment—and, in order to satisfy the proprieties, Blake produced a venerable aunt of his, with the sweet name of Prudence Gordon, who duly wrote the two girls and begged them “to give a lonely old woman the pleasure of their young, bright, cheering society for a week.”

Of course, it would be folly to pretend that Winifred had no misgivings about the effect of her visit. As a matter of fact, the very night she had acquiesced in her cousin’s scheme to obtain possession of the stolen love-letters, she was haunted by doubts as to the wisdom of the course she had agreed on, and beset by suspicions—but Vera herself seemed so hopeful as to the result of the experiment, so buoyant that the danger which threatened would now pass over, that Winifred felt it would be cruel to put any new obstacles in her path.

Thus, indeed, it is that most good women are turned to base account by bad. It is really never hard for any evilly-disposed person to appeal to, and to traffic in, the higher motives that dominate feminine nature—and so long as the good fear to give pain, are slow to think evil, and believe that perfection comes from the sacrifice of self, such wicked triumphs as this of Vera Langford’s will not only be possible but also frequent.

If, however, Winifred had been more suspicious, an incident that occurred just as the Langford’s carriage drew up outside Ventris Blake’s home, would have certainly placed her on her guard. It chanced that, just as the brougham drew to a standstill, the door suddenly opened, and no less a personage than her old much-disliked employer, the Reverend Duncan Kilroy, the vicar of St. Sepulchre’s Church, Piccadilly, came quickly down the steps. Apparently he was labouring under considerable excitement, for his face looked hot and flushed and his movements were spasmodic and anxious. When, however, he caught sight of Winifred he drew himself together, and in place of returning her quiet stare of contempt, his face broke into an insolent grin.

“Ah, Miss Pontifex,” he cried with a wave of his soft-brimmed hat. “So we meet again, do we? Well it is not for the last occasion. Next time though, let us hope we can have a little explanation, and a little chance of clearing up a lot of disagreeable differences. For the present I can only assure you I look forward to a tête-à-tête with you with considerable eagerness!” And, with another wave of the hat, he, still smiling, turned and disappeared down the street.

Was that an apology, or a threat?

For some seconds, indeed, Winifred sat like a statue of stone, beset by a chain of perplexing conjectures, Had she only listened to that inward monitor that had never ceased to strive with her ever since she had resolved on this rash venture, she would have, even at that eleventh hour, broken away from Vera’s sophistries. As it was, however, she argued with herself that she must have grown very selfish since her engagement, that all her impulses were to think of Arthur and herself, and not at all of her cousin who, if she had had more of her time and love, might never have landed herself in this trouble—and thus goading herself on to the wrong path, she permitted Vera to lead her into Ventris Blake’s presence without a word of protest.

Blake himself received them in his drawing room, but to all appearances, his manner was cold, quiet and dignified. He apologised for the absence of Mrs. Gordon, who, he said, was detained in her room by a sick headache, but who would appear shortly and pour tea for them. He went on to explain that he had placed an entire wing at the disposal of them both, and he trusted that if they didn’t find everything quite satisfactory they would speak quite plainly to his aunt, who was most anxious to make their stay in Park Lane happy and memorable.

“Miss Pontifex won’t believe me, I know,” he went on with an added touch of pathos, “but we men who are reputed to be wealthy, have few people about us we dare really rely on. I don’t know how it is, but if you ever want to find anybody who is really lonely, cut off from the best unselfish friendship, and doomed to battle with his worse self daily, because, being rich, he has the means of gratifying his worst instincts, take the present-day millionaire. Really, when you come to see us as we are, you will say with me, we are a depressed, spiritless lot. Most of us have drained life’s pleasures to the dregs, and realised they are but the lees of the best vintages that can never be ours. Many of us who have sprung from the ranks, as it were, would be glad to be poor again with the honest joy of a day’s toil if—if we were sure we should never come to see the inside of a work-house.”

With a pensive smile he rose and opened the door wide for his aunt—Prudence Gordon, a dainty little figure in black silk and lace, who came rustling in, all aglow with excitement at the girls’ arrival. A moment later he had vanished—but all the good impression he had made was obliterated as he walked off, by his treatment of a cat that came purring towards him on the edge of an ottoman.

“What a nuisance these domestic animals are,” he said half to himself and half to his companions, and before even he could realise the significance of his own act, he shot out an arm and knocked it headlong to the floor.

Winifred and Vera exchanged glances—but no words. Vera, however, was now on her best behaviour, and the message she telegraphed was plain enough:—“I know the man is a brute, but remember he has those love letters, and we must put up with him until we have got them, lest worse may happen to us.” With this, Winifred had perforce to be content, but she was unaffectedly glad when night came, and that when she had retired to her room, Vera was able to tell her she had discovered where the precious package was hidden, through some unguarded words of Blake’s, and that all they had to do was to slip down when everybody had retired to rest, and to seize them.

“You are quite sure you have hit on the right spot?” asked Winifred anxiously. “Remember, we don’t want to figure as common thieves in this matter.”

“Of course not,” answered Vera reassuringly. “I am too keen on the recovery of the letters to make any error about their whereabouts. I lured Ventris Blake on to talk about them, and, in the excitement of a discussion as to the ethics of his retaining them, he actually pointed to the place where they were—in a small safe behind a picture of a Florentine monk, and assured me that if I didn’t annoy him, they would never see the light of day again.

“Ugh! of course, I pretended to be satisfied by his promise, but I know exactly what his word is worth, and so later, I came down to him in a panic and pretended I had lost the key of my jewel case, and got him to lend me the master key of all his doors and safes, which he carried on his watch chain. Luckily too, I had a key very like his, and so, when I returned it, I substituted his master key for mine, with the result that unless he has occasion to try it to-night, he will never ‘spot’ the difference. If he does, I shall say I suddenly found mine, and in my excitement, I muddled the two up together!” And she held out the stolen key for Winifred to inspect.

Winifred, however, was too sick at heart to take much heed of her preparations, and only waited feverishly for the time to come when they both might make the attempt to recover the fatal love-letters. One—two—three hours thus crept on with feet of lead. They heard doors slam in the distance. They noted the steps of the servants as, one after another, they straggled past the end of the corridor up to their quarters at the top of the mansion. Finally a profound silence seemed to sink over the household—and taking advantage of this, the girls stealthily opened the bedroom door, and each carrying a candle (the flame of which they covered with a hand), they started to descend the darkened staircase, treading as softly as though they had previously bared their feet.

At first Vera took the lead of the expedition, and piloted the way towards the millionaire’s study with an almost unerring instinct. Even the precise picture of the monk of Florence, which marked the safe from the public gaze, she indicated almost as soon as they crept noiselessly into the apartment, but when this panel had been swung backwards on its secret hinges and the master key had been fitted into the lock, she gave a convulsive little start.

“Oh! Winnie,” she cried, “this excitement is too much for me. I feel I can’t breathe. I’m afraid I’m going to faint!”

“Never mind, dear,” replied the unsuspicious and generous Winifred. “Be brave. We are nearly through our task. Another minute—”

“And I shall drop,” the girl declared. “Oh! do excuse me. I really can’t stand this. You bring the letters to me to my room. I know they will be safe with you!” And without waiting to hear her cousin’s permission, she snatched up her candle and raced back as hard as she could to her own apartment.

“Poor girl!” commented Winifred trustful as ever, in spite of what looked now what it really was, a most obvious trick. “No wonder she is a bit upset. Success or failure in this quest means so much to her. Well, I, at least, won’t fail her. I will strike for her letters for her,” and twisting round the key, she drew back the door of the safe, which was in diameter about two feet square, but was also in interior quite four or five feet deep.

Right at the end she espied a small bundle tied with red tape, that looked like a bundle of a girl’s correspondence—and, baring her arm to the elbow, she thrust her hand forward to seize this when she found herself caught in a trap—by iron bracelets inside the safe that pinned her where she stood and instantly set ringing a score of electric burglar alarms all over the house.

CHAPTER XIV.
TURNS ON THE LETTER “K”

We must now, however, return to Paul and his search in the mysterious garden.

At first there seemed nothing out of the common to attract his attention. From right to left his quick glance wandered, noting a thousand things that would escape the ordinary policeman, and yet might yield an expert some clue to the identity of the wild frantic creature who tore amongst those trees at midnight with hands crimson with the blood of a fellow creature but newly slain.

Eventually he reached the green-house where, it was supposed, the criminal had washed himself clear of the stains of his guilt, and, thrusting open the door, he marched inside and narrowly examined the interior. Of course, the detectives had been there before him, but Paul knew enough of their methods to believe that it was just possible some fine object had escaped them that might turn completely the burden of proof from the shoulders of his wretched and unfortunate friend.

For a few minutes, however, he could discover nothing, but just as he was about to step into the open air again, his eyes caught the glint of gold on the floor.

“Ah!” said he with a chuckle, “this is a find I am certain—” but just as he was about to bend down and seize it, a long hairy hand was thrust out from behind the hot-water pipes; the object was seized; and a familiar voice cried out tauntingly: “Mine, Mr. Renishaw, I think!”

Luckily, Paul did not lose his presence of mind.

Quick as lightning he realised that a false move at this point might do the poor prisoner at Scarborough Police Station almost irreparable damage—so, drawing back a step, he glanced hurriedly round to see whether he could not at a touch checkmate his unseen foe.

As he did so, one fact made itself clear to him—that the man was not concealed in the greenhouse at all, or of course, he would have discovered him as soon as he had started to make his examination. As a matter of fact, the fellow had only just put in an appearance at all, and, oddly enough, he had arrived through an opening few would have utilised or expected—the long but square flue that communicated with a furnace-like grate built out some few feet from the outside wall of the greenhouse.

To slip round and close the door that led to this was the work of an instant. Then Paul bolted back to the interior again, and was just about to drop the iron slide that shut off the flue from the inside of the greenhouse and to catch the knave in his own trap as it were, when again that mysterious hand was thrust forward, only this time it exhibited the object which had been the cause of all the mischief.

“Here take it,” said the same familiar voice he had heard first. “I admit that I have been fairly ‘euchred’! Only let me get out of this poisonous hole. Phew! I feel as though I should never be able to breathe anything but carbonic acid again.” And, as Paul fell backward, to take the precaution to snap the key in the door lock, no less a personage than Josiah Sawdry—variously, the “far-famed Silas Q. Pinkerton, the great New York detective,” or “old Sawdust,” just as one happened to frequent the public-houses of Scarborough or Fleet Street—emerged, covered from head to foot in soot.

So distressful indeed were his fits of coughing and his general aspect of grime and dirt, that even Paul could not avoid breaking into a hearty laugh. “Good heavens, man,” he said, “you’re no good as a detective. Only an idiot would get himself in a mess so frightful that the first person he spoke to would run away from him for fear of catching the Black Plague!”

“I know,” said Sawdry, with a pathetic effort to shake off some of the soot and ashes. “I feel myself that I have been a bit of an ass—only I was anxious that you should not get any particular ‘bulge’ on me before you and I came to terms. None the less, I ain’t the man to run off my word. Here take the thing that caused me to shew up before I wanted.” And he passed over to Paul the object that had been discovered on the floor of the greenhouse, and overlooked by the market gardener to whom the place belonged and the police—the broken half of a gold link.

With fingers he could scarcely control, Paul took the glittering fragment of jewellery and inspected it with great care. It had evidently been newly broken off its stem. No doubt when the criminal had frantically torn off his incriminating garments, he had caught his sleeve in one of the iron supports of the greenhouse shelves and fractured the connecting gold band in pieces, with the result that this portion had dropped away unseen. Probably it would never have been discovered at all had not Paul kicked away a piece of matting by accident, for it had been entangled in the folds of this, and had only just dropped out with its freshness quite untarnished.

What, however, excited the journalist more than anything was the design on the face of the link itself. It was a very simple one, it was true—it was just one ordinary letter of the alphabet, neatly engraved, but free from an extravagant flourish, but it was the letter itself that spoke volumes.

That was the letter “K.”

Of course, with the childish, almost pathetic confidence of youth, Paul had expected it would bear a pattern totally different. Had he indeed been asked to guess first what monogram ought by common right and justice to have been written in indelible characters on this damning piece of gold, he would have unhesitatingly answered, “V.B.”

Of course, too, if the object had been handed first to the police, they would have guessed something totally different to either of these two things. They, with the childish, almost pathetic confidence of men who had made up their minds to believe one person guilty, and one person alone, (though the heavens might open and reveal something exactly different), would have sworn that the monogram must have been “A.H.” when the link was first lost.

As it was, however, it was simply the letter “K.”

Poor Paul’s face dropped as he turned the thing over between his fingers. He was so sure that the millionaire had done away with Aimée Blake, to leave himself free to win Winifred Pontifex, that the discovery of this link afflicted him with a sense of keen personal disappointment. In a flash, as it were, it had upset all his plans—all his theories, for how could he connect an object like this with Ventris Blake?

“You are disappointed, I see,” put in Sawdry who had been narrowly watching the expression on Paul’s face. “You had got your brain fixed on the idea that you would discover somebody else to be the real criminal.”

“I admit it,” said the journalist brokenly, and he began to move about with quick nervous gestures, peering here and there in the hope that he might still discover something else that the authorities had overlooked.

Sawdry paused and watched him for a few moments, for he saw Paul was too mortified then to engage either in pleasantries, recriminations, or business. Finally, however, he said: “When you’ve quite finished, Renishaw, come and have a chat with me. I know a tap where I can rid myself of some of this grime. First then I’ll do it—but afterwards, I will go and smoke a pipe in that little arbour between the laurel trees near the gate. Find me there, entirely at your own convenience.”

Paul did not vouchsafe any answer, but as soon as the man had taken himself off he redoubled his exertions, shifting and scrutinising narrowly pots, boxes of earth, tins of seeds, twine and dressings, until he could safely say there was not an inch of the entire greenhouse that had escaped his examination. Only one other find rewarded his patience and his persistence. That was a piece of linen which had been thrust between the sash and the frame of one of the lights in the top of the structure. Seen first, it merely appeared a piece of dirty rag half covered with earth and cob-webs, but taken down and examined it turned out, first that it had not been in use in that direction many days, and second, that it was no ordinary piece of rag, but was actually a dainty cambric handkerchief, small enough for use by a woman of ease and refinement.

And in the corner was the same significant letter that was emblazoned on that link of gold—no other than the letter “K.”

This time, Paul put his pride and his prejudice on one side, and went promptly and consulted Sawdry who was stretched on a rustic seat, a carefully studied image of insouciance and patience.

“Look here,” said the journalist bluntly, “I have found another confounded clue, only it is no more valuable than that piece of gold we picked up. It also bears the letter ‘K.’ ”

“Quite so,” replied the pseudo-detective. “What else can you expect?” And he pursed up his mouth, looked very mysterious, and nodded his head thrice.

“Well?” said Paul, now coming to the point the man had aimed at. “Can you throw any light on the mystery at all?”

“Yes,” he responded with a sigh by which he would suggest, like Romeo’s apothecary, his poverty and not his will consented. “I can, but on terms.”

“Oh, of course, on terms?” echoed Paul irritably. “But what terms?”

“Well, it’s like this,” said Sawdry, suddenly sitting up and facing his cross-examiner. “I am thoroughly tired of being a rogue. It doesn’t pay either in purse, in physical comfort, or in peace of mind. Honesty, in my opinion, is the best policy, because honesty is the more profitable—and so I have to-day one object in life and really one object alone, to become honest.”

“Well that’s easy enough,” returned Paul with a laugh.

“Is it?” said the man bitterly. “You try it. You try it when all your life, more or less, has been crooked. Why, it’s worse than trying to keep water in a sieve! The Old Book says the road to the other place—hell, isn’t it?—is broad and smooth. So it may be at the start, but it winds and winds till it becomes a veritable morass full of treacherous bogs, dotted by sunken reefs and trees that trip you up when you seek to turn and that stretch out long detaining vice-like branches which suck you down into their foul miasmatic depths till your frame reeks of poison and you haven’t the strength to get on your feet again, much less retrace your steps. Oh! I know it, man. I have tried it till I am sick—I have got too far to free myself of my own strength.

“Of course,” he went on in a different key. “I stole your watch. It is not the only thing I have stolen in my life by many a score. But I am sick of it, dead. The devil is the worst paymaster the scheme of creation ever invented. Help me to get out of his clutches—to free myself from the bond of servitude into which I have fallen with Ventris Blake; and I’ll serve you true and faithfully and honourably as long as God gives me breath.”

“But what can I do?” queried Paul helplessly, borne down by the man’s fierceness. “I am not an employer myself. I am only a sub-editor, a servant on a great newspaper. I have no situations in my gift.”

“Mr. Hudson has,” said Sawdry quickly. “Promise me, in his name, a berth worth £250 a year just as long as I run straight, and I’ll tell you all I know about this awful business of the murder of Aimée Blake.”

“Very well,” replied Paul, after a second’s thought.

For a moment there was an interval of strained silence between the two men.

Paul seated himself at the end of the bench in the rustic arbour, his attitude one of patient if not indulgent expectation. The Jew, on the other hand, took three or four deep-lunged pulls at his pipe before he moved at all. Then he laid his pipe gently on the ledge near his elbow, and gathering himself up into a kind of heap—in which the most distinct things were two piercing black eyes and two white hands unstained by toil, but now clasped nervously over his knees—he began his strange and dramatic story.

“First of all,” said he, “you must get quite clearly fixed in your mind who I am and with whom I am connected. Thus always remember I am Josiah Sawdry, a Hebrew who once stood high in his own faith, and who has had access to all the magic Freemasonry that binds Jews in prominent positions in all great cities together, first for mutual helpfulness in times of difficulty and danger, and second for purposes of aggression against the Gentiles. This fact alone has put me in a more favourable position for many things than most Scotland Yard detectives, and had I only gone straight in the early days and won the good opinion of our rabbis, there is no doubt I should have been one of the rich and honoured citizens of London.

“As it was, however, I preferred devious courses—but ‘blood is thicker than water,’ and so when my brother Israel got the position of private secretary to Ventris Blake, the millionaire, I determined to worm myself into their plans and their confidences, and, if necessary, become rich at one stroke by means of blackmail. Mind, I am not now defending this course, I couldn’t even if I tried. Crime is crime, and yet, believe me, if you knew your city as well as I do you’d be astonished at the amount of blackmail that is paid there every year.

“Of course, I don’t mean by this a man goes to a rich operator and says, ‘pay me so-and-so, or I will go and tell all your friends that you put your old landlady’s savings in a rotten Company of yours and lost all her money for her, and then let her die in the gutter starving and penniless.’ That would be obtaining money by threats; there are laws that deal with slander; and such a thing as a fuss is not wanted by any one. No, in London it is quite enough to let a man know that you know something discreditable about him. It may not be true even. It may be the most wicked invention Satan ever put it into the heart of man to conceive—but as long as it has a certain dirty colour about it that will make it stick on the poor wretch against whom it is projected, well, you are all right. All you can consider is:—

“Is it worth it to have a scandal? Ten to one, if I crush it utterly, there are some kind Christians who will believe that I am not as innocent as the Judge made me out to be. And then what will become of the baronetcy I am fighting for—the membership of the yacht club—that appointment as Chairman of the Hospital—or even my seat as a Member of Parliament? Well, it’s gone and all the thousands I have spent on it to gain it?

“What indeed does it benefit anyone to fight with a sweep? One simply gets covered with soot, while though you may roll him in the mud, still he may rise just as clean as when he started. These, in brief, are the conclusions forced on every wealthy man whether he be wise or foolish; and so the aim of thousands of people in London with more brains than cash is to trade on these facts, and to terrorise those who are better off than themselves.

“But to return to myself, I had early discovered this as the secret of many shady unscrupulous people’s fortunes, and no sooner did Israel make headway with Blake, than I made it my business to make headway with Israel and to spy about on Blake’s private life. Then I soon learned that Blake had a skeleton in his cupboard, like most other folks. At that time he was married to a girl named Kaufmann.”

“What,” cried Paul, forgetting himself for a moment. “The sister of Flora Kaufmann the actress, and of Eleanor Kaufmann who died the other day in Gray’s Inn Road!”

“Yes,” returned Sawdry, “and also the sister of Rebecca Kaufmann, the eldest girl, who married that drunken little sweep, Charlton, who finished up as a caretaker in some offices in Queen Victoria Street.”

“No!” interjected Paul, still more amazed. “The woman who professed that she witnessed the marriage between Arthur Hudson and the woman who called herself Aimée Lucille Fausta Burgoyne?”

“Certainly,” responded the Jew, slowly rubbing his hands, “Rebecca witnessed that marriage on the strength of a series of falsehoods from Blake. She thought the thing had been arranged to gratify some private spleen of the millionaire’s against the woman, but when she discovered later that it was just part of some diabolical plot the end of which was the infatuation of Blake for the Burgoyne creature, she nearly went mad with rage.”

“Why?” queried Paul helplessly. “What concern was it of hers?”

“This,” returned the Jew with great earnestness, laying a finger in the palm of his hand to punctuate each word. “She had a very genuine love for her sister. She delighted to think of her in a prosperous and luxurious position, even though she herself drudged at the wash tub in a squalid court off the Blackfriars road. Later, however, she found that she had been chiefly instrumental in patching up things between Blake and the Burgoyne, and that on the strength of this wild passion Blake poisoned her sister, and subsequently married Burgoyne. That was the fact that dethroned her reason.

“For some years, indeed, she was confined in a mad house—I believe at Brentwood, the affair preyed so terribly on her mind. Of course the other sisters, Flora and Eleanor, could not prove anything against Blake, although both were morally certain he was the murderer of their sister. Flora, as perhaps you know, went on the stage then, and Blake financed her till she got on her feet and was strong enough to command a decent sum every year. Eleanor hated Blake forthwith, and swore to be avenged on him—but her health was always feeble; and I could never see where she was hitting at him to do him much damage.

“Both, of course, repudiated their sister Rebecca, who became simply a pauper maniac. Some months ago however, she made a sudden and a marvellous recovery, and when her husband got into that caretaker’s place in Queen Victoria Street he took her out of the asylum. None the less, she never lost sight of her original intention—to wreak her vengeance on the Burgoyne woman. Again and again during the last few weeks when I used to drop into her rooms and chat to her about days long since dead and gone, she would talk to me about Blake and his wife, and womanlike, it was never the man she blamed—always the woman. Every time, indeed, she spoke about the affair her eyes would light up with that fire of insanity there is no mistaking, and every day her looks grew wilder and wilder until at length I heard without surprise from her husband one night late when I called that she had suddenly taken all their savings and disappeared.

“My first impression was, that the strain of freedom had been too much for her, and that she had slipped down in the night hours to the Embankment and dropped herself into the Thames. The next day, however, I saw an account of Mrs. Blake’s murder, and I said to myself with a great gasp of horror: ‘That is the work of Rebecca Charlton, I’ll swear.’ ”

“But,” cried Paul absolutely staggered, “we know for a fact that the crime was done by a man—and a man got up to resemble Arthur Hudson!”

“What of that?” said Sawdry coolly. “Remember Rebecca and her sisters in the early days were well known amateur actresses, and knew how to make up almost as well as Gustave or Clarkson. Besides, she had already had some experience of how people made up to resemble your poor friend. Wasn’t she present at the wedding of the Burgoyne woman and the supposed Arthur Hudson? What more natural, when she pined for a disguise, her poor demented brain turned at once to the very last disguise she had had hand in?”

“But this link—marked ‘K’ what of that?”

“It was hers. I will swear it. I have seen her wear its companion often. It was the one relic of her prosperous days to which she clung.”

“And this handkerchief marked ‘K.’ Can you identify that too?”

“No, I can’t. There is nothing distinctive about it except the initial, and yet it is quite plain enough and old enough in pattern to have belonged once to the Kaufmann girls; whatever, however, convinced me that hers was the hand that committed the crime was this—look how insanely the real criminal went on! Would anybody in possession of their senses behave as this man is supposed to have done? Would any person who had their reason, yet meditated murder, take a bed-room at a refreshment house in a lonely hamlet like this, and shut himself up in it—and not go out of it, and refuse to take any meals? More, would he buy quite openly the weapon with which he intended to strike down his victim so that it was childishly simple for him to be identified later? Then all that mad race to a greenhouse, where any passer-by could see the light and come up and peer through the glass and watch him washing off the blood-stains and changing his clothes for fear of detection! I ask you, would anybody with a grain of sense—aye would anybody except poor, demented, Rebecca Charlton dream of giving themselves away so frantically as that?”

CHAPTER XV.
RECOUNTS PAUL’S DEFEAT

Again there was silence in that rustic arbour, broken only by the sighing of the wind amidst the trees and the soft splash of the waves as they rolled against the cliffs of clay that mark the boundary of the Yorkshire coast between Filey and Scarborough. This time it was Paul Renishaw who had to think deeply of the problem under discussion—to think too, free from any personal bitterness against the millionaire, to bring as it were an open but also a keen, alert mind to a consideration of Josiah Sawdry’s astounding story, so that he could dissect the man’s tale for himself, and see where it appeared truthful and where it might be, however cleverly framed, unreliable or false.

The Jew himself now seemed little concerned about the issue. For his part, he had placed his cards fully, frankly, and freely on the table; he was no longer a player; it rested with the journalist to make use of his hand, or to throw it on one side as useless. Leaning back there, however, puffing his pipe and immersed in a maze of hazy speculation, he was none the less conscious of the quick scrutiny to which Paul now and again subjected him, but oddly enough, these rapid surveys, which would have offended the pride of some men to such a pitch that they would have risen and protested hotly against them, caused him no confusion. Somehow he seemed to recognise that he stood in a parlous position in this matter of the murder of Aimée Blake—half-way, as it were, between the prosecution and the prisoner—at that moment untrusted by either side, but both equally sincere in their anxiety to turn him to their own account.

At length Paul sighed deeply, and roused himself from his reverie.

“I must admit,” he said, “that you have given me a bit of a shock, and almost enough food for speculation to last me a twelve month. Your story, of course, is plausible enough, particularly as you tell it with the background of your own blunders, your own failures, your own lurid experiences to get money somehow, anyhow, but at all events to get rich.

“At first sight, too, those points of yours about the disappearance at the time of the crime, and this discovery of the gold link and the insane desire for revenge—they are in a way conclusive, and one is tempted to jump at them, and to adopt them as the main clues in the future investigations. At the same time I am sure you will yourself admit there are some very extraordinary incongruities—to use no stronger term—in this theory that must sooner or later be accounted for. First and foremost I should like to ask you to explain how could a woman of the type of Rebecca Charlton personate a man of refinement and wealth of the stamp of Arthur Hudson?”

“Not easily, I admit, if she were an ordinary person,” retorted Sawdry, speaking in a quiet level tone as though he had no real concern in the issue of that conversation. “Only you have strangely misconceived my words if you think Rebecca is in any way normal. First, unlike her sisters, she is tall, fair, good figure, with bright blue eyes and a strong expressive face. Then for some reason or other—she may indeed have done it herself—her hair was clipped quite close, like a man’s, in the asylum. Ever since I knew her, she affected masculine traits, and not once, but scores of times before she was married, she played men’s parts in the private theatricals which the Kaufmanns used to get up in their own homes! Her presentation of young men about town, indeed, was almost perfect. She studied them first hand—and there wasn’t a characteristic trick of any of her subjects she couldn’t mimic either with natural complacency or quite a grotesque spirit of fun.”

“Well, I will concede that point—and now we come to another and, to my mind, a more difficult question. It is this: How could an office-cleaner like she was, admittedly disowned by her relatives, earning at the most not more than twelve or fifteen shillings a week, how could she get the money to procure a wig and other materials for disguise, to travel to Scarborough, to take a room here, and then in one wild burst at the end, hand out five hundred pounds to the telegraph-clerk, Drummond, on some wild cock and bull story as to the secret of tapping the Post-office wires?”

“But did she do that?”

“Certainly, she did. The man swore to it in his evidence at the police court this morning.”

“Of that I am perfectly aware—but that is not what I refer to. I asked, was it she who gave Drummond that five hundred pounds?”

“If she came down here, personated Hudson and murdered Aimée Blake as you assert,—then she did it, there can be no question,” returned Paul, rather nettled at finding himself suddenly the subject of cross-examination. “To me, it is as clear as daylight.”

“I am sorry,” answered Sawdry softly, “that it is not quite so obvious to me. In the first place, you must recollect that Drummond specifically swore that Arthur Hudson was not the man he had that encounter with, and hence, if Rebecca Charlton were got up to resemble Arthur Hudson, then he didn’t either have that scene with the person we are speaking of. In the second place, Drummond said quite frankly he thought the person he spoke to was a madman escaped from a York Asylum. Now have the police troubled to enquire whether a patient with possibilities of wealth has recently escaped from any of the York Asylums? Not a bit of it. They waved it aside, because it might prove an inconvenient clue—and yet it might supply the gist of the telegraph-tapping mystery and cut off Drummond’s evidence at one stroke, for understand, there are several important private asylums at York in which are taken very rich patients. In the third and last place, you must ask yourself what motive had Rebecca Charlton for troubling her distracted brain about the Post-office at all: and also that, knowing she was a woman and enmeshed in a disguise that any moment might be pierced, was it likely she would run the risk of attacking a powerfully-built and determined-looking man like this telegraph clerk?”

“She was mad. She would do anything,” observed Paul stolidly. “The commission of a brutal murder like that was sufficient to dethrone her reason absolutely, and to send it careering wildly through space. So that she would seize on the first object that attracted her gaze—in this case the telegraph wires running alongside of the road.”

“Well, I will concede you that victory,” said the Jew, suddenly shifting his ground. “We will say you are prepared to believe Rebecca might have done the deed if you had satisfactory evidence that she could gain possession of a big sum over five hundred pounds. At this moment you contend the assertion is preposterous, simply because she was a poor cleaner of City offices, earning at the most not more than twelve or fifteen shillings a week.”

“I do; I don’t see how you can get over it.”

“That is because you will not look deep enough,” retorted Sawdry quietly and confidently. “Clear your mind for a second of all prejudice, and consider in an unbiased way the trust that most merchants and solicitors place in the women who clean their office. As a matter of fact, in the best regulated establishments in the City of London it is impossible to lock everything up. A great deal of property, millions of pounds worth of property I should think, is bound to be left within reach of these poorly-paid, half-starved creatures. More than that, reflect how the best managers and assistants are not perfect—how a moment of blank forgetfulness overtakes the wisest, the cleverest, the most trusted of us! Then ask yourself quite seriously if it may not have been possible for Rebecca Charlton to have found the safe or cash-box open one morning early when she went to clean one of the offices entrusted to her charge—whether the sight of so much wealth may not have suggested to her: ‘Ah! here at last are the means of gratifying the revenge I have hugged to myself all those weary years of confinement in an asylum.’ Surely, I assert, there is nothing wonderful in the fact that she might have seized the chance so offered and have gone off to Scarborough, careless of what happened so long as she met Aimée Blake and extracted ‘a life for a life’!”

Paul paused for a few seconds and pondered deeply. Then he nodded his head. “It is quite possible I admit,” he said. “Almost thou persuadest me to believe it was not Ventris Blake who did the deed after all, but this woman Charlton.”

“My entire future depends on the truth of what I have stated,” added Sawdry. “If I prove to be wrong I am doubly unfortunate, for I shall have offended the millionaire beyond redemption, and I shall have missed my way entirely with you and Mr. Hudson.”

“Well, I have a certain amount of opportunity of learning even more about the Charltons than you can tell me,” said Paul guardedly. “As it happens, Mr. Hudson has already got certain suspicions of them, and so, before he was arrested, he set a firm of private detectives to work on their past and present proceedings. As a consequence, to-morrow morning I shall receive a report from this agency as to what they have done of late. If it confirms what you have stated, I am not sure we should not act on your information.”

“Unfortunately, to-morrow morning may be too late,” replied the man. “Look here. I received this telegram just as I left Scarborough.” And he pushed his band into his pocket and handed Paul a telegram.

“There is not a minute to spare,” he said.

The telegram itself however seemed frank enough. It had been, it appeared, despatched by the man Charlton to Sawdry’s private address at Islington, from whence it had been re-transmitted to the Grand Hotel, Scarborough, and it set out:—

“The wife been gone some days now. This morning she writes to me from The Retreat, Scalby, just three miles out of Scarborough. Begs me to forgive her. Says she has come into a fortune. Will you go and see her about it to-morrow afternoon certain, as it will pay you? Depend on me to pay expenses.

Charlton.”

Paul read and re-read this message several times before he vouchsafed any remark. There were a good many things about it that were not very clear, particularly the reference to the fortune, and the request that Sawdry, and not her own husband should go and look after the woman. But, apart from those defects, the story, such as it was, seemed reasonable enough.

“At all events,” said Paul quite frankly, “this will give me a very good opportunity of testing what you have told me. I’ll own at once I am impressed by it, but not convinced.”

“At present you don’t know how far you dare trust me,” put in the man, rising and shrugging his shoulders. “I quite understand that. You can’t forget that I stole your watch: I came here at the bidding of your arch enemy, Ventris Blake; I have gone about under a false name and description, as Silas Q. Pinkerton, the great New York detective. Were I in your place, I should feel very much as you feel.”

“Indeed you would,” answered the journalist, “and I will tell you the reason. Because it was not your own piece of mind, your own innocence, or your own security you were fighting for! You see, I am here in Scarborough as the one reliable friend and representative of that poor fellow who has been so unjustly arrested and detained in the local police-station here, on the gravest of charges—murder. Any mistake I make now I shall not pay for—he will. A slip on my part, a failure to stick to the right track, a waste of precious time on a wild-goose chase—and he may be brought up at York Assizes and condemned to death before I could lift one little finger to help him—I, the one man in the wide world whom he has trusted to vindicate his good name and to save him.”

“I quite appreciate the gravity of the situation,” replied the Jew earnestly, knocking the ashes out of the bowl of his pipe and giving Paul a steady straightforward look. “Indeed, that is why I have not tried to force your hand unduly; and I am sure if you quietly review the conversation we have just had, you will see that all through I have tried to be scrupulously fair to yourself.”

“There is, however, one other question I should like to put to you before we return to the town,” proceeded Paul, rising too and walking by the side of Sawdry in the direction of the market gardener’s gate. “It is this. You know, of course, that Arthur Hudson is alleged to have married Aimée Blake at the Registry Office at Peterborough. Do you believe he did so?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you believe that he had any part, or lot, or knowledge of that ceremony?”

“I am sure he had not.”

“Then who was the scoundrel who got himself up to resemble him, made use of his name, and passed himself off as the genuine man?”

“I don’t know, I only wish I did,” replied Sawdry. “As I told you when I started my story to you this afternoon, my first idea when I got to know Blake was to blackmail him. Oddly enough too, I discovered about this marriage of his wife’s to Hudson; and read some private memoranda in a diary of the millionaire’s that suggested the whole affair was a gigantic imposture—but never could I get farther than that. In the course of my inquiries into the mystery, however, I picked up with the Charltons, but, press how I would, tempt how I would, I could never persuade Rebecca to say one word on the subject. Indeed, whenever I mentioned it to her, her face would go ghastly pale and she looked, as no doubt she really felt, absolutely terrified.”

“But do you think that she really learned who it was who was pretending to be Hudson?”

“I am certain she did. Once I got her so far as to tell me she could make ten thousand pounds any day she cared to open her mouth about it, but she dared not for fear of the consequences!”

“Why? She was very poor. She had little to lose.”

“True, that was another thing about her I could not make out. Put in a corner, she would almost always relapse into a kind of gibberish, out of which I could make nothing coherent except the words: ‘Three Glass Eyes.’ It was in vain I tried to chaff her and to say, why ‘three,’ why ‘glass,’ and whose ‘eyes’? At those times she seemed to have a kind of shivering fit of horror, and, if I carried the joke too far, she would go into convulsions—froth at the mouth—and finish with a long spell of insensibility.”

Paul, who had seen something of those three terrible moving eyes in operation in the millionaire’s garret did not wonder at the poor creature’s terror, particularly when he recalled the awful effect a glimpse of them had had on her own sister, Eleanor Kaufmann. Nevertheless he said nothing of his weird experiences with them to Sawdry, but once again attacked the critical point in dispute:—“Could, or could not, they hope to get the information as to the man who carried off the sham marriage now Rebecca Charlton was away from London and apparently out of the radius of Ventris Blake’s baleful influence?”

The Jew thought a moment before he answered. Then he raised his head and his face brightened. “Honestly,” said he, “I think we can get it. Let us frighten her with a story that her husband has been suspected of it, and has been arrested for it. Nothing else on this earth, I am sure, would force her to speak, but that will—for, blackguard though he is, she still recognises that she is married to him, and owes him certain duties as his wife.”

“Very well,” replied Paul firmly, “we will go to her after I have called at my hotel and settled up with my news-lads.”

They turned into the high road and set their faces northward, but they had not proceeded many yards before they were conscious of the hurried tramp of many feet in their direction, and all at once there burst into view a howling mob of men and boys who immediately they caught sight of them, doubled their speed and redoubled their cries.

“What the deuce can have happened?” queried the Jew anxiously, for his conscience, not being of the easiest, was ever a prey to a thousand unformed apprehensions. “Can your friend Hudson have escaped—”

“Or been set free?” corrected Paul, his own face flushed with excitement.

“Or can Rebecca Charlton have been found by the police, and have made a full confession of the murder?” suggested Sawdry, nervously increasing his speed.

Luckily, he had not long to wait for an answer to his question. Just then the breathless leaders of the crowd arrived, dragging a small newsboy, aged about twelve, along with them.

“The Notes! The Notes!” they cried, shrill with pleasurable anticipation. “This youngster has done the trick. Here are the Notes. Five hundred pounds worth as promised. Congratulate you, sir. Where is the reward?”

Paul promptly produced a five pound Bank of England note and handed it to the youngster, also the crown he had promised him for taking part originally in the search. Then, yielding to the hint of a bystander he cordially passed over a sovereign wherewith the crowd generally might have the opportunity of drinking his health and the poor prisoner’s health, and of also wishing him good luck. A few minutes later the whole of the newsboys he had borrowed from the Scarborough Daily Post office arrived on the scene. They had heard too that the notes had been found and given over to their temporary employer, and all they cared about now was to draw their own payments, which they did, and to hasten pell-mell back to the town to take up the “special murder edition” which was awaiting their return.

Paul himself carefully bestowed the precious bundle of notes, having previously counted them, inside his breast pocket and buttoned up his coat. Josiah Sawdry watched him do this in silence, but as they fell into step again, he turned and asked his companion what he intended to do with them.

“Why, take them up to London and trace the Bank they were paid from, and the person they were paid to, of course,” rejoined Paul, his heart beating with pleasurable anticipation of the chase.

“I shouldn’t if I were you,” said Sawdry quietly. “It would only be a waste of time!”

“Why—how—what do you mean?” spluttered Paul.

“Well, first of all, the police of Scarborough could claim them and take them from you? No doubt, when they hear of the find they will, for they are most valuable material evidence, and they don’t even belong to you. Now why not make a virtue of necessity and let them have them? After all, they are bound to handle the matter honestly, and to find out who got them—where they came from—and what the original owner was doing with them in so large a sum. Any evidence they get on these points will be more valuable than any you could procure, for theirs will be held to be fairly impartial, whereas, at the best, yours must be ex parte. As a matter of fact, you can much better employ your time looking up Rebecca Charlton. I have a great idea as to the wonderful results that will accrue from this visit of ours. Hence don’t let us waste any time, but let us go to her at once.”

Paul hesitated—but all the same the Hebrew had won.

As a consequence the notes were forwarded to the Chief Constable of Scarborough by the first policeman they met, when they reached Ramshill Road; and then these two oddly assorted companions turned off the South Cliff, and made their way as rapidly as they could across the Valley to Scalby.

CHAPTER XVI.
“OH! GREAT IS THE POWER OF WEALTH!”

Winifred never forgot those terrible moments she spent in Ventris Blake’s study in Park Lane. It was not so much the shame of being caught like a common thief with her arm bared to the shoulder, tightly wedged in a secret safe, although that was degrading and horrible enough in all conscience—no, it was the full and complete understanding that suddenly came to her that she had been tricked—that after all, Vera had written no compromising letters and that the millionaire had not got hold of a bundle of her cousin’s love effusions which he held over the Langfords with a threat of publication. This it was that burned into her heart and brain like molten metal, and wracked her soul so much that finally, with a great despairing cry, unconsciousness came to her mind’s salvation.

When she opened her eyes next it was to find herself released from the grip of iron that had clamped those fetters on her arm and wrist immediately she had striven to seize that bundle of letters tied with red tape at the back of the secret hiding place. Somebody had lifted her bodily from the wall, and placed her full length on a couch; and then, as her distracted gaze wandered round the apartment she noted too that even the safe had been again closed, and once more the monk of Florence was gazing at her with that strange expression of pity which she remembered now she had unconsciously observed when Vera made that excuse and fled back to the safety and refuge of her own room. How trifles like these come back to us all in life’s supreme crises! Somehow, to twist around a phrase:—

It isn’t the shame,
And it isn’t the blame,
That stings like a red-hot brand—

it is just these details that rise up and confront us and dance about us in some weird phantasmagoria of our own brains, only to vanish and leave us supremely conscious of the horror of the real thing that’s come upon us, and twisted our life like a tree struck out of the Unseen.

Some of the softest of the electric lights had been switched on since she last closed her eyes—but only one man was present now, a stout burly, not unkind-looking London policeman, who had taken off his helmet and seated himself in a tall, high-backed chair, evidently prepared to stay an hour, or a day, or even a week if occasion required, Suddenly, however, he observed her shudder, and rising he came and stood in front of her.

“Are you better now, miss?” he said, nodding his head in the direction of a huge bottle of smelling salts which stood on a dumb waiter near, and which he had evidently made most liberal use of.

“A little,” answered Winifred feebly, passing her hand over her forehead in a futile effort to recall the full possession of her faculties. “I—I don’t think though I could get up yet. I feel so weak and shaky and my arm aches so. Have you—would you send for my cousin, Vera?”

The policeman shook his head.

“No, I can’t do that,” he said. “Mr. Blake has been already and told her what has happened, and she, poor thing, was so horrified at your wickedness that she had an awful attack of hysterics, and it is now as much as Mrs. Gordon and two maids can do to soothe her and to assure her that whatever happens, nobody will be unduly harsh.”

Winifred literally turned her face to the wall. Of course, she had expected—nay, she had known this when she had just spoken, and yet, so queerly constituted are tender clinging creatures like herself, that she had suddenly resolved she would not think badly of her cousin. Yet what better proof of the girl’s duplicity, her direct intrigue with the millionaire, and her calm desertion of the friend who had tried to save her, could there be than that? Treachery was proved absolutely—and, try as she would, poor Winifred could not suppress a groan of anguish.

Somehow the policeman, rather policemanlike, took this for a sign of penitence.

“This is a bad business, miss,” he ventured to observe, drawing a handkerchief out of his sleeve and mopping his forehead. “Pardon me saying it but was you hard up or—”

“No,” said Winifred quickly with a faint smile. “I—I was nothing—only a fool.”

The worthy officer looked disappointed. He hadn’t any imagination, but he had a certain capacious kind of heart enlarged by beer and the sentiment of the West End area, and he had really spoken out of kindness, and not from any desire to secure admissions by which he might shine with his more crafty and less scrupulous superiors.

“Yes,” said he, meditatively stroking his chin. “They all says that when they’re caught. Somehow it doesn’t stop ’em though. The times they beat us seems to turn their brains. They always seem to expect that they’ll always have the luck!”

“I didn’t quite mean that,” protested poor Winnie helplessly, feeling herself rather swamped in a gulf of criminal philosophy through her own clumsiness. “I didn’t suggest I was silly just because I had been caught in the act. I only thought I was foolish because I did the thing for some one who was not worthy of it—who rather led me in it—and who has now deserted me.”

“Exactly,” answered the active and intelligent officer, once more growing keenly interested. “That’s precisely what I said to the butler, Mr. Fitzgerald. ‘Mr. Fitzgerald,’ says I, ‘this ain’t no ordinary case you’ve called me into. This is a plot. This ’ere young woman hasn’t gone into it with her eyes shut. She’s got someone behind her egging her on, and that’s why she’s abused Mr. Blake’s confidence and the hospitality of this noble house. Women allus has accomplices. They’re not like Charles Peace, believing in the might of a single brain.’ ”

“But I’ve no accomplices of that kind,” cried Winifred, her eyes dilated in pain and indignation. “You seem to think I am some ordinary thief, whereas—” She paused and then stopped. How indeed could she end that sentence? Was there anything she could say that would make this all too solid impersonation of British reticence and common sense understand the thousand and one complex motives upon which she had acted. “No wonder,” she muttered to herself, “Arthur’s pet hero is a don at Oxford, whose pet hobby is ‘the philosophy of mixed motives.’ Can I ever explain why I did this?” And she turned restlessly to and fro on the couch.

“There! never mind, miss,” put in the officer sympathetically, once again careeringly off wildly in the wrong track. “Don’t take on about any on ’em. They ain’t worth it. Some of these young men ’as harp about these swell houses is bad lots. We policemen sees ’em when they aren’t on show, and we knows a deal about ’em which the papers wouldn’t dare to print for fear they’d kick out and get the editors put in prison. No doubt you didn’t mean any harm at all at first. May be a pleasant bit of flirtation, and then perhaps he persuaded you to take something as didn’t belong to you—and then you got frightened and thought you’d come here and help yourself where there was a lot as wouldn’t be missed. Maybe I’d have thought the same myself had I been in your place. The Recorder at the Old Bailey is a nice kind sort of gentleman. You take my tip when you get there and speak out to him about it and tell him: ‘My lord’—(And mind always call him ‘my lord,’ because, he ain’t my lord really, but likes to think he is)—‘I am only a poor weak girl as has been deceived.’ ”

Winifred could stand it no longer. True, her tired numbed mind had only gathered one tithe of the meaning of the man’s conclusions—but even those were intolerably loathsome to her. His coarse kindness was worse than any brutality, and, while he spoke she felt as though some indignant fury had seized her, and, in spite of her most strenuous fighting, had dragged her bodily through miles and miles of thoroughfare inches deep in mud. Now, starting to her feet, she confronted him boldly:

“Why are you here at all?” she demanded hysterically. “What are you standing about here for, wasting your time in all this idle conversation? Why don’t you leave and go on your beat?”

The policeman’s face was a study in a kind of cloddish amazement and stupefaction. Twice he opened wide his extremely big mouth and twice he closed it, absolutely unable to speak. For a moment his resemblance to a stuffed fish was really quite alarmingly life-like. Then, however, he rallied the pride of his calling; and he spoke out with a good deal of fine official sternness.

“I am here on duty,” he said gravely taking up his helmet and placing it firmly on his head. “I was patrolling Park Lane just now when I heard Mr. Blake’s electric alarm ring. I dashed to the door, which was flung wide open by my friend Mr. Fitzgerald the butler, and I raced to the study to find you caught in the man-trap, in the act of robbing one of Mr. Blake’s secret safes. If I had had my way I should have whistled for the police ambulance, and had you taken off at once to Vine Street police-station, faint or no faint, only Mr. Blake himself suddenly appeared. ‘I am terribly upset about this, Stemp,’ meaning me, he said, ‘terribly upset.’ This young woman is a comparative stranger to me—I have only spoken to her three or four times in my life—but I am bound to recognise that she is a guest in my house. Perhaps it is all some hideous blunder. Perhaps she walks in her sleep, even though she’s got her clothes on. Just stand by her until she comes to her senses. You’re a father yourself, Stemp. Well, just give her a chance. Nobody must charge her with any offence in respect to this safe robbery until I have seen her—”

“That is so,” said a quiet voice at his elbow, and wheeling round swiftly the virtuously indignant Stemp found himself face to face with the millionaire, who bowed his head in the direction of the door. “You may go, Stemp,” he said firmly. “I want to speak first to Miss Pontifex in private, so just wait in the butler’s pantry, will you? and when I give you the word come back at once.”

Oh, great is the power of wealth! Stemp nodded and took himself off as though his dearest wish was to obey Blake. Still, that interview between Ventris Blake and Winifred Pontifex was destined to be in many ways remarkable.

In the first place, that was the first time since that memorable hunt ball at Stamford, when the millionaire fell so passionately in love with her, that these two had met face to face alone. Since then the man had engineered the whole of that astounding scheme of duplicity and crime against her lover and herself, so that that day they were both in the position of social outcasts, more or less—the one apparently guilty of a most loathsome form of social sin and murder, the other on the point of being branded a common but most dangerous felon.

Secondly, it was obvious that during the explanations which were about to ensue, Ventris Blake would be bound to show his hand. He had so skilfully contrived the present debacle that practically little appeared to remain for him to do save to dictate his terms. These terms might be taken, or they might be refused: but now they were meeting, full concealment would certainly be practically useless.

With an odd touch of hysteria, Winifred, however, did not find that her mind was troubling at all with the tremendous issues of that conversation. In spite of the keenness with which she mourned Vera’s treachery, and of the bitterness with which she resented this particular disgrace to herself, she caught herself wondering about a totally different object—the man’s dyed whiskers which seemed to hold her gaze and her mind absolutely fascinated.

Why did he wear whiskers at all? she asked herself with a queer little shudder. They were long ago out of fashion, and trimmed as they had been, they suggested nothing of a man of wealth or refinement. His clothes too, now she came to look at them, were last year’s clothes. That tweed jacket he had on was distinctly shabby; his waistcoat was stained by cigar-ash; even the trousers bagged at the knees while, as though the idea was they should also match the second-hand appearance of his outfit, the boots too had been re-soled.

In spite, though, of these things, the man’s figure was that of a man’s. He had sturdy shoulders, a deep well-proportioned chest, and strong square-fisted hands that looked as though, when they once seized a thing they were never shaken off—for even at the knuckles and backs were tufts of dark sinewy hair. His head, too, was set on a thick neck that suggested the same bull-dog tenacity evident in his fingers, and he walked this night with the long purposeful stride of a man of destiny who sees at the end of his journey a prize which he has toiled many many arduous weeks to win.

Away in the distance, the door clanged as the officer Stemp and his “friend Mr. Fitzgerald, the butler,” foregathered in the pantry to discuss that night’s strange happenings over an aristocratic whisky and soda, for, it will be always observed, extraordinary occurrences need extraordinary remedies. With something uncommonly like a moan, the girl steadied herself, and brought her mind back with a jump to its present environment. That look of passion in Ventris Blake’s eyes filled her with a sense of most desolate nausea—but she instantly resolved she would not show it. This was the moment to fight, not repine, and she would show herself worthy of the sturdy soldier-stock from which she had sprung.

On the man came till he reached her side, and looked deep into her face. His breath, too, was coming and going rather quickly, but that and the tell-tale glance were the only signs of his excitement. His tones were cool, calm and even, and he moved his hands and feet in a way most hideously precise.

“I am sorry to find you in circumstances like this,” he said, motioning her back to her place on the sofa, and handing her that huge bottle of smelling-salts as though it were a matter of course she would need them sorely before he had finished his lecture. “I had hoped that any little differences we might have had in the past would, when you came here to visit my aunt, Prudence Gordon, be buried—quite. It seems though I have been mistaken, and that you only took care to be in my house five or six hours before you took advantage of the fact to abuse my hospitality in the gravest fashion you could.” And he nodded significantly in the direction of the Monk of Florence painting behind which stood the safe she had been found tampering with.

“Just now,” he added, as he saw she had no present intention of interrupting him, “I am rather puzzled to know what I ought to do about this insult to me, indeed about this most tragic business generally. All my servants, of course, think it is only a matter of form, or shall I say kindness, my seeing you. They are certain that in a few minutes I shall call the policeman, Stemp, back to this room, and give you into custody on a charge of attempted theft which must, when proved, as it can be quite easily, land you at Portland or Dartmoor, or wherever they confine female convicts, on a term of ten years’ penal servitude and—and ten years late in your marriage with Arthur Hudson.”

Again he paused, but Winifred still kept her head bent low, apparently quite immoveable. Driven thus to go on he proceeded: “Naturally, knowing your uncle so well, having so great an affection for the memory of Colonel Pontifex, your father, I am loth to do this. Besides, it seems to me peculiarly revolting to shut you up in a prison into which no news of the outside world can penetrate during a time when Hudson must stand his trial and will, in all human probability, be condemned and hanged. For these reasons indeed I am pondering most deeply whether I cannot devise some other expedient to get us both out of these difficulties. It was for that reason I hastened to your cousin, Vera Langford. ‘My child,’ I said, ‘tell me at once what I ought to do to this unhappy girl, who has vainly tried to rob me? As a Christian now, ought I to forgive her, or ought I to stifle my feelings and give her up to justice?’ ”

“And what did your accomplice say?” queried Winifred, suddenly looking up and gazing at him with her eyes aflame with scorn.

“Accomplice! accomplice!” echoed the man, affecting to be greatly shocked. “How—what do you mean—that I am in league with her to do you some harm? Indeed, there is nothing of the sort afoot. On the contrary, I can assure you that she was most pained and disgusted at the turn of affairs, and before she broke down and gave way utterly to hysterics, she begged me that I should, before you did any other mischief to other less worthy friends than myself, have you locked up and dealt with as a merciful law might direct.”

“But that was ironical,” put in Winifred suavely. “She didn’t mean a word of it literally. On the contrary, it was a joke intended specially for you to gloat over—you who engineered this treacherous trick by which I was made to act the part of a thief.”

Secretly nonplussed, Blake bit his lip, and then took a stronger tone. “You must not bandy words like this with me,” he retorted with a quick stamp of the foot. “ ‘Bluff’ is useless—”

“Quite,” interrupted Winifred rising and facing him. “Now come to the point. What do you want?”

The man flushed, and looked uncomfortable. “I wish to be your friend, Miss Pontifex,” he murmured in a softer tone. “I came here anxious, if possible, to save you from the consequences of your own follies. I don’t like this feud between us any more than you do. Can’t we cease to give blow after blow and arrange an honourable peace? For instance, suppose I got Mr. Hudson released without a stain on his character—what then?”

“I should say that at last you had performed a very tardy act of justice!”

“But I am not a man of sentiment. I am a financier, and we financiers know no justice save the rough and ready justice of the person and thing stronger than ourselves to conquer and make their own wills prevail. Now look at my offer without a trace of personal passion. Hudson is in Scarborough police-station. In less than two months he is practically certain to be in York Castle, condemned to death, if not already hanged. Here also is yourself, caught in the act of a most daring robbery. I have only to lift my finger and press the button of that electric bell and in a minute you will be hurried off to Vine Street police-station, and in less than two months you too will be in one of our great penal establishments weighed down with the prospect of a long term of penal servitude.

“Now what is it I offer to do? I offer to pardon you, and to hush this matter up so effectually that not a word of scandal shall ever be breathed about it—the incident shall be turned to the credit of your great goodness and everybody will agree that the affair has been a most shocking and unforgiveable kind of blunder. And, more than that, I promise you Hudson shall get off scot free. Aren’t proffered pledges such as these worthy of careful reflection? Are you justified, since somebody else is concerned in the rejection of them, to push them aside with insults or with thinly veiled looks of contempt?”

“But justice?” began Winifred again, but once more she was stopped.

“I tell you again,” the man interjected fiercely, “when you are dealing with a man of millions like myself, London holds no such thing as justice, only opportunity—trick—power. Now listen to me, look at the matter from another standpoint. Women are said to be ambitious. Don’t you ever sigh to wield an influence like mine? Haven’t you felt enough of my power to be afraid of it? Think, suppose you too had it? What could you not do with it? Rank—position—wealth—stupendous favours all would be in your hands.

“Well, Winifred,” he went on, his voice thick with excitement, the veins standing out on his temples like knotted whipcord, “you know on what terms I will release you to-day and will procure the triumphant vindication of Hudson. They are not arduous. They do not call for any sensational exhibition. They don’t ask you to suffer in silence, to eat the bread of tears, to weep till you can weep no longer. They are the dictates of an overwhelming affection for you, I love you. Be mine!” And with a sudden rush of feeling he caught her convulsively by the waist and fixed his burning gaze on her as though he would force her to yield her consent.

Winifred, however, who had stood like one petrified during this amazing declaration, started to life immediately she found his fingers on her hand. With a scream she broke away from his grasp and raced to the half open door of the room.

“I loathe you, I loathe you,” she cried helplessly. And then all at once she saw that the street door also was ajar, and instantly seizing the opportunity it offered, she fled across the hall like a startled fawn, and tore madly down the steps that led to the pavement.

A moment later she found herself in the street, and running wildly in the direction of her uncle’s flat. “He must save me from this monster,” she gasped as she fled on swifter, ever swifter. “There is nobody else to do so. Oh! Mother of Heaven, pray with me that he may not now fail his sister’s only child.”

Meanwhile, however, Stemp had been alarmed, and he and the butler, furiously blowing a police-whistle, were now pounding after her. Looking over her shoulder, she caught sight of them and tried to increase her speed, but already she was worn with fatigue, and the extra effort seemed to strain her heart, and to send her reeling against a lamp-post, just as Blake too loomed up in the background and also took up the chase.

Another moment, and she would have most assuredly been a captive again in those vampire clutches, only deliverance came to her in the most extraordinary way.

And it happened thus.

Those whose business or profession takes them much about the streets of London in the night hours know that in the best thoroughfares the traffic is practically ceaseless. Even if there are no private carriages with shining lamps and jingling harness whirling hither and thither, there are always plenty of quick and hungry drivers of hansoms who patrol up and down the streets at a walking pace with wits so sharpened by days of lean experience that they seem able to detect a fare almost before the object is quite conscious of his determination himself.

The consequence was that as Winifred tore fleetly onward without hat or jacket, one of these vigilants chanced to catch sight of her. Now, whether he was half intoxicated or Irish, and so dearly loved a scene, or whether he had had serious cause in the past to have more sympathy with possible offenders against the law than the dread majesty of the law itself will never be known. The fact remains that immediately the chase began he set up a wild “Hurroo!” and flicking his mare viciously he put her to the gallop with the result that the three men were soon outpaced—their cries for a lift were disregarded—and he came with a crash level with Winifred.

By this time the poor girl’s breath was quite gone. Her limbs had given way beneath her, and she was swaying from one side of the pavement to the other with hand clasped to her heart, and the pulses within her temples throbbing like an engine.

“Here, miss, jump in, my mare’s quite fresh,” he cried in a kind of hoarse whisper, making play to suggest that he was not helping the girl at all but was having trouble with his steed. “Never mind those men behind you. Only get in and tell me where to drive to and we’ll lead them one of the finest chases in London.”

With a gigantic effort Winifred forced herself to the side of the hansom and giving one frantic tug she literally dragged herself into its friendly shelter.

“Go to Mr. Russell Langford’s, the lawyer, Emperor’s Gate,” she gasped—and in a flash the man let the infuriated mare have her head, and off she went at a wild gallop that meant death or destruction to everything that gathered in her path.

Luckily too, Winifred did not lose her senses. Now indeed that she realised that her prayer had been heard, and that she had been, in truth, delivered from that inhuman monster Blake, her natural courage reasserted itself; and she gripped on to the supports in the interior of the hansom, and, with set lips and flashing eyes, she watched the vehicle sway from side to side of the road like a ship in the storm, absolutely reckless of all possible consequences.

As it happened, the driver was a man who knew his business from the very bottom. Directly he had looked at Winifred he had recognised that the business he had taken in hand was not the rescue of an ordinary criminal from a peculiarly stodgy and unemotional policeman, but turned on some far reaching Romance of High Life which, though he might never know the secret of it, would none the less pay him exceedingly well for the part he took in it.

Again he plied the whip. Again the mare bucked and kicked out vigorously, only to get her head down and her feet well tucked under her and to speed past Hyde Park like a flash of lightning. “I don’t care miss if I smash the whole bag of tricks,” he shouted through the trap in the roof. “I’ll save you.” And as if to give colour to this vainglorious threat the hansom cannoned violently against a hand hose-cart in use by the St. George’s Borough Council and drove it clean through the windows of a small railway office at a corner.

Meanwhile, too, Blake had not been idle. His mind had taken fire with the fear that Winifred meant nothing less than suicide by her wild flight from his mansion, and, distracted by the possibility of the scandal that would follow, he signalled another hansom, and sprang inside with the butler, promising his driver £50 if he would overtake the fugitives.

This new ally of his was keen enough and so was the horse he drove; but they found a mighty antagonist in the wild exultant jehu in front. In vain Stemp ran a few yards and stopped and blew mighty blasts upon his police whistle. In vain constables sprang out from side streets and comfortable porticos, and shouted all the mad bad things they could think of, waving their arms like semaphores. Driver No. 1’s blood was at boiling point almost, and he waved his whip about, and he swore, and he urged his horse with such insane recklessness at everybody who shewed the slightest disposition to try conclusions with him on the “Hold! Enough!” principle, that Emperor’s Gate was reached in a few seconds; and a summons that would have aroused the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus battered on the great lawyer’s door.

Luckily, Russell Langford had sat up late that night to master the contents of a brief in a big Society Slander Action that was down to come before the Lord Chief Justice on the morrow. He heard the wild crash with which Winifred’s hansom made its appearance and its stoppage, and he had just got to the hall—to sally forth to see what had happened—when there came that terrific rat-tat with the butt handle of the driver’s whip.

A moment later Winnie was in his arms, sobbing out all her trouble to him, telling him in a quick, rather incoherent but in some intelligible fashion, all about the dreadful trap Vera had prepared for her and the terrible things that had happened when she had gone to the millionaire’s study and tried to rescue the packet of incriminating love-letters.

The lawyer himself was well accustomed to hiding his emotions—and he heard the girl’s story through with a face as immoveable as a piece of india-rubber which might be punched and punched, and punched and drawn and twisted and torn at—nothing could rob it of its set professional expression. None the less, his feelings of honour, of family pride, of loyalty to his womankind were stirred to the most profound depths by this account of Blake’s outrage on all the sacred laws of good breeding and hospitality. What common humanity and justice and right feeling could never have accomplished, these more superficial qualities of his caste wrought like magic. His craven fear of the millionaire and the mischief he could do to him in reference to the Three Glass eyes was banished for ever from him. He hated Blake now as much as he had been previously cowed by him—and all the forces of his nature cried out to him that he could never have peace again till this last crowning infamy of the financier’s was wiped out.

At the same time clever professional men of the world of the stamp of Langford move—however deeply their inmost feelings may have been roused—on in the grooves to which their daily experience has accustomed them. Indeed, they are more dangerous thus for they are trained to the use of these weapons and their blows are sharpened by their daily practice. Hence Langford said nothing committal on the subject—which was a bad sign in truth. Had he felt the indignity less he would certainly have said more. He simply let Winifred finish her story in peace; then he went to a decanter on the sideboard, and poured out a tablespoonful of brandy for her, which he insisted on her drinking with a like amount of water.

That done he went out to the driver, who was fumbling about on the doorstep, not quite knowing whether, after all, this job to which he had given so much moral earnestness was going to pay him quite so well as he had expected. The delay had made him distinctly nervous in the region of the pocket.

“I am very much obliged, coachman, for what you have done,” Langford said, pulling out a pocket book stuffed with Bank of England notes. “You have saved my niece from a scoundrel at the risk of your own life, and to the danger of your own horse and hansom. Work like this can’t be properly remunerated, but here are ten notes of £10 each for you, £100, and remember if ever you are in a difficulty and want a friend you will, if I am alive, find a helper in Russell Langford.”

The man tried to mutter his thanks—to shake the lawyer by the hand and bow at the same time to the ground—to laugh and look respectful; but he could succeed in nothing. He could only take the notes and scratch his head and mutter in a poor weak forlorn kind of voice, “Well, I’ll be blest!” when there was a sound of low shouting outside, and the millionaire’s hansom drew up with a crash close to the pavement.

Out sprang Blake, and tearing up the stairs of the mansion he found himself confronted with the calm set features of the lawyer, close to whom stood Winifred, quiet, cold, and defiant. For a moment even he drew back a step and looked awkward, but the man’s confidence was colossal, and almost immediately afterwards he recovered himself, and advanced with jovial laugh, and ringing voice and outstretched hand.

“Ah, Langford,” he cried, distorting his face with a grin that was meant to express pleasure. “So it is here that our little bird has flown is it? No doubt she has told you that we have had a little misunderstanding, hasn’t she? Of course I meant to forgive her alright, but she got so hysterical that she bolted before I could get the words out.”

Russell Langford’s expression never changed. Then he spoke at last.

“Ventris Blake,” said he slowly and deliberately, “You are an infernal scoundrel.”

The millionaire’s jaw dropped. He had not expected this, but he was game enough, and once again those lips parted, curled back, and there appeared those fang-like teeth that insensibly recalled the savagery of the fox.

“You mean that?” he asked quietly.

“Every word of it,” retorted the lawyer.

“Then I’ll make you a present of an old souvenir of yours,” proceeded Blake feeling in his revolver pocket and producing therefrom a case like a jewellers bracelet case, out of which he took a small velvet shield of black, bearing three miniature Glass Eyes.

Langford took this and tore it in half, and flung it down the steps.

Ventris Blake looked as though he could have slain Russell Langford. By this time, both cabs had driven off, and the two men stood in that hall alone with Winifred. Both were white. Both looked stern. Both seemed equally determined—but only the millionaire revealed the seething depths of baffled rage that had followed his defeat in what he had been morally certain would prove a gigantic coup for himself.

“So,” he said with a shrug, drawing back a step and buttoning up his coat, “you are quite resolved, are you? You have decided to be quite reckless; you have no fear of the consequences.”

“None!” returned the barrister. “You have put a light to a bonfire to-night that will spread until it reduces all your fortunes and your fine social fabric to ashes.”

“Well, so must it be,” Ventris Blake replied rather hoarsely. “After all,” with a painful effort to be light and buoyant, “I am not the one to fear the Three Glass Eyes. That is your own special and particular dread, Langford, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” observed the man calmly. “We shall see. Maybe you may find London hasn’t quite the same idea of you, you believe it to have. No doubt the young men in the City in-a-hurry-to-be-rich and the women who come to you, hotly eager to gamble to repair some private scandals of their own, have never stopped to analyse the vaguely unsatisfactory impression which you make upon each one of them, and upon everybody you chance to meet in fact. They are bewildered by the knowledge you possess of every one of their failings, through your system of paid spies, that would do credit to the French Government, and they stop at your pet-stage effect by which you fancy nobody is able to penetrate your thoughts, or to guess what peculiar diablerie you will practice on them some time through a series of artful moves in the future.

“Bah! I was not your intimate years ago,” added the lawyer, with an impressive sweep of the arms, “without understanding that practically since boyhood you had made your apparent good nature, your unfailing readiness to promise to oblige, (although you seldom did oblige anyone except yourself), your copious draughts of emotional protestations, into a barrier between yourself and your victims, for, in spite of it all, at times, you give glimpses of appalling depths of character.”

“Well, at all events, Miss Pontifex,” cut in the millionaire, who had grown restive under this scathing exposure, “I had nothing to do with the death of your father Colonel Pontifex, remember that.” And nodding his head significantly in the direction of the barrister, he seemed to suggest: “He had, ask him.”

“In due time, if you act as you no doubt will be driven to do by me, that will all be explained,” said Russell Langford, drawing Winifred proudly close to himself. “To-day understand I fear no one.”

“ ‘Explained’! Yes,” sneered Blake, pausing on the doorstep. “But how? answer me that?”

“The Three Glass Eyes shall explain,” returned the lawyer; and Blake was just about to utter another sardonic taunt, when a scuffle drew all three out on the landing of the flat to the top of the stairs, where they found the butler Fitzgerald, in his anxiety to reach them, had caught his foot in a pot containing a shrub and had fallen full length on the steps.

Now, however, he rose, his face purple with excitement. “Will you all please come to Park Lane at once,” he cried. “I have just met one of the footmen; Miss Vera Langford has just met with a dreadful accident.”

“Accident?” thundered Langford—“What?”

“I don’t know—I can’t tell—neither could the messenger whom Mrs. Gordon had sent after you. ‘Come at once’ were his words. ‘Come at once. Miss Vera is shouting and shrieking as though she had gone suddenly mad.’ ”

“My God, Blake, if this is any fresh devilry of yours, you shall pay for it with your life,” said the lawyer facing the millionaire, and repeating each word with slow, terrifying emphasis.

“It isn’t,” stammered Blake doggedly, and, truth to tell, he looked equally frightened and astounded. “I swear it isn’t. I—I know nothing about it.”

“That remains to be proved,” retorted Langford. “Come, Winnie, get your hat and cloak and come with me. I know Prudence Gordon, and can trust her all right. No doubt she will have acted promptly, and sent for medical assistance. Our great object now is—to lose no time.” And in another minute almost, fresh cabs had been chartered and all the party were racing back for dear life to Park Lane.

Luckily, too, at the door they were met by Mrs. Gordon herself, whose face bore quite plainly the mark of recent tears. “Oh, here you are,” she cried, as the cabs drew up with a crash in front of the portico. “Thank heaven, you have all come so soon. I feel nearly distracted.”

“But what has happened!” cried Winnie and Langford in a breath.

“I can’t really explain it,” protested the old lady tearfully, rocking herself in her folded arms. “All I know is—that I was sitting peaceably in front of the fire in my bedroom, saying a little prayer in the hope that all the terrible mischief between my nephew and Miss Pontifex there would be put right without any more trouble, when I heard Vera give a loud scream.

“At first I thought it was only a return of the hysterics she had had when she heard her cousin had been caught with her arm in the study safe and my nephew upbraided her for not looking better after her—but when she shrieked again—again—I grew frightened, and I slipped into her room.”

“Yes, yes,” put in Blake who had now joined the party. “Get on with your story more rapidly please. Tell us what did you see?”

“The poor girl, it seems, had been seated at a small writing-table finishing two letters—one was addressed to Mr. Jules Prendergast, the actor, and the other was to his future wife, Lady Desborough, who I understand he will marry to-morrow at St. George’s, Hanover Square.”

“Oh, do go on,” pleaded Winnie. “What was it—a fit, or had she set herself on fire, or what?”

“I really can’t tell you,” protested the old lady bursting into tears. “That is just why I am making such a long rigmarole of it. I want you or Ventris here to explain all this most bewildering mystery to me.”

“We will have more patience then, Mrs. Gordon,” interposed the lawyer kindly. “Pray proceed.”

“Well,” said the old lady now reassured, “I noticed that the letters she had written were letters of congratulation, and in each one she had planned to enclose two curiously wrought rings as wedding presents. Oddly enough, they were both of exactly the same pattern—although, of course, they differed in size—with blood red stones almost as large as the old-fashioned signets, and with a great deal of scroll work on the gold itself, which was usually heavy and thick. Directly, however, I got into the room she rallied. ‘Something dreadful has happened,’ she cried. ‘Send for my cousin Winifred at once.’ ‘But what is it, dearie?’ I asked for she looked so ill and wild I feared she was going mad. ‘Never mind. Send for Winifred,’ she answered. ‘It’s something dreadful about these rings although it’s quite an accident—so go for her at once if you don’t care to send, but understand I won’t see anybody else.’ ”

“Then, of course, I will do as she asks,” put in Winifred, loyal and forgiving as ever and without a thought of self.

“And I will run for a doctor,” added the millionaire who suddenly had gone ghastly grey. “It looks to me as though something terrible has happened.”

And Blake sped off quickly towards Piccadilly, while Winifred hastened up the stairs of the mansion, and, turning down the old corridor, entered her cousin’s bedroom.

By this time Vera had stretched herself on the bed, but no sooner did Winnie enter than she started up wild eyed with two great hectic spots burning evilly on each cheek.

“Ah! thank heaven you’ve come, darling,” she cried excitedly. “Of course you hate me. You do right to do so, for I am a treacherous viper, and I deserve neither sympathy nor love!”

“Indeed, I can’t feel like that,” protested Winnie throwing herself on her knees by the bed and attempting to enfold the distracted girl in an affectionate embrace.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me as you value your life,” cried Vera drawing herself up into a corner against the wall, “I am accursed. I brought you into this home of horror by the wickedest of ruses, and I got you to go to the safe by the most treacherous of lies—but now my punishment has come.”

“Let me help you bear it then,” said Winnie bravely, holding out her arms. “You are upset now, soon all will be well. Let me take you in hand.”

“You cannot. Nobody can,” gasped the girl half choking. “The word has gone forth. I am doomed.”

“How can anybody be that? God is good!” interposed Winnie, feeling herself powerless to stem this tide of terror that threatened to engulf her cousin completely.

“Yes,” replied Vera fiercely, “God is good, that is why He has saved you. But God also is just, and that is why I am writhing here, waiting for a horror that is stalking towards me from far distant centuries when men and women hated, like they never do in these tepid days of civilisation, and when they dared, and did, to the most profound depths of pain.

“Listen,” she went on, suddenly becoming calm. “I will tell you why I lured you into this snare. I was mad with jealousy and rage because Jules Prendergast had flung me over, jilted me for that painted traitor, Lady Desborough, and because that vampire Ventris Blake promised if I did so he would help me to get my revenge on them—even ‘poison or death.’ It was Blake who devised that diabolical scheme about the safe and the man-trap. It was I who first invented about the love-letters and then egged you on to go into the study and steal them. So consumed with rage was I that I could not let you stay even the first night here in peace. I worried you till you went downstairs for me, having previously got that master key from Blake himself and no sooner did you commit yourself as the wretch wished than I sent to Blake. ‘Revenge!’ I panted. ‘Revenge on Jules Prendergast and the false-hearted creature he would make his wife.’ ”

“But how could he give it to you?” queried Winnie, feeling half distracted.

“Easily enough,” snapped Vera. “He has never let a soul—man’s, woman’s, or child’s—stand in his path. He has always removed everyone who opposed his plans. That is why he understood me and that is why he produced those two rings you see on the table—Abyssinian Poison Rings, they call them, because if you press the sides of them, they discharge a small milky-like fluid which penetrates the pores of the skin and inflicts you with the most deadly leprosy of the Far East now known to medical science. ‘Make them a wedding present of one each,’ he said with a diabolical grin. ‘Not either of them will be able to resist the pleasure of trying one on—and then pouf! they will rot away before each other’s eyes till they become most loathsome to look on, and every doctor will agree that they are better dead!’ Unfortunately I forgot the deadly significance of the gift in the satire I poured into the accompanying notes, with the result that, in an absent-minded moment, when I was gloating over the sneers I had written to Lady Desborough, I slipped one of the rings unconsciously on my finger and pressed it—”

“And made yourself a leper,” screamed Winnie, starting madly to her feet.

“Yes, look, the poison has begun to work.” And she pointed to the hectic spots on her cheeks.

CHAPTER XVII.
THE STRANGE HOUSE AT SCALBY

To pretend that Paul Renishaw and the sham detective, Josiah Sawdry, were not tremendously excited by the prospect of their visit to Scalby would be both useless and foolish. Naturally enough, the two men looked forward to this interview with poor demented Rebecca Charlton with the greatest anxiety and eagerness, though no doubt each was urged forward by a totally different reason.

Thus, the journalist, for example, only cared that the innocence of his friend, Arthur Hudson, should be proved and set above the suspicion of the censorious. If that act implicated Ventris Blake—good. The man was a rogue, and it was only right that the mask of a respectable life should be torn from his features, and that he should stand revealed to the whole world as the impudent satyr he undoubtedly was. If, on the contrary, the millionaire escaped his just deserts, and some other figure loomed forward as the murderer of Aimée Blake, the venture would answer equally well. Arthur would be released. His marriage with Winifred Pontifex would be hurried forward. The girl, too, would be saved.

On the other hand, Josiah Sawdry’s thoughts were all for himself. He had mixed much too deeply in the shady throng that flit goblin-like through the dirty bye-paths of city life to care seriously whether one more innocent man was hanged, or a true love hopelessly ruined and broken. To his mind, indeed, the one factor in that expedition was his own cleverness. Had he not been the one to see that the criminal could be no other than this wild, weird creature freshly released from Brentwood Asylum? And on the principle of “to the vulture, the carcase,” or, perhaps, more politely still, “to the victor, the spoils,” was he not entitled to claim his own payment out of it? In this case, commercial and social rehabilitation and a life appointment in the snug and comfortable offices of “Palamountains Limited” that meant ease and a certain five pound a week? Consequently, his feelings were not very far different to those he had experienced in his early days in the city, when he had, to use the vernacular of the Stock Exchange, tried to “pull a good thing off.” This alliance with Paul was “a good thing,” he was certain. By hook or by crook, it must be cemented by success.

So that strangely assorted pair, the optimist and the opportunist, stepped forward briskly in the crisp January air. Maybe, neither of them was quite right in his mental outlook—maybe, the absolutely unselfish man is as foolish as the man who cannot see anything except that precise gap where he “comes in,” but from the point of view of accomplishing what they had set themselves to do, the alliance was a good one enough, and few of us to-day have any doubt as to the one person with whom we would have exchanged places had we been proffered the chance.

Very soon, too, they reached the house they sought—a picturesque but deserted looking farm residence, built about the time of Queen Elizabeth and set back some fifty yards from the road on a raised lawn which was dominated by a huge Crimean cannon. The first plot of land reached, on passing through the familiar white gate, was also grass laid, with trees running along the side, fringed by a deep, dank, stagnant pool. To this succeeded another gate, and a drive, and then the house itself, over which a strange silence and melancholy seemed to brood. The place, in point of fact, was too remote from the road for any sounds of passing traffic to penetrate, and as the farm buildings were deserted, and no fowls wandered about the yards or the orchard, there was over all a sense of infinite mystery and desolation.

“What a dreadful place for a born Londoner like Rebecca Charlton to take refuge in,” whispered Sawdry. “If she wasn’t mad when she came here, the gloom and oppressive atmosphere of this ancient pile are quite enough to wear out every nerve and sound thought she could ever have, away from her dear murky Thames and the ceaseless roll and boom of the traffic up and down Queen Victoria Street.”

“I am only afraid this may have so preyed on her mind that she will be too far gone to be of any practical use to us,” added Paul. “After all, we want something coherent out of her, remember. We shan’t be able to produce her as the real criminal unless we can more or less prove her guilt in open court.”

Sawdry took the old rust-eaten, weather-beaten knocker in his hand, and gave a knock that seemed to go reverberating through empty galleries and dozens of deserted furnitureless rooms. There followed some scuffling, scratching sounds, almost immediately afterwards. “Rats, only rats,” explained Paul, whose hearing was more acute than his companion’s, and he drew back a step and gazed up at the windows in front of the house. All were closed and shuttered, the glass being stained mud colour with storm and dust and rain.

Not a sign, indeed, showed that the place was inhabited. Not a shutter moved. The chimneys remained smokeless. Sawdry bent down and applied both ear and eye to the keyhole. Everything appeared as still and as desolate as a tomb.

“It’s no good,” he said at length rising and facing the journalist. “We can’t stay here all day when such momentous results depend on our action. We must strike at once, or the poor creature may get some other crazy notion in her head and take herself off to sea—to Holland or some God-forsaken country like that, and may never be heard of again, for her thoughts might turn to suicide and she might even plunge into the Scheldt.”

“Well, let us break in then,” returned Paul calmly. “I am no advocate of sitting down and waiting like those poor creatures did in the Bible for an angel to come down and a miracle to happen. After all, you have plenty of excuse for doing so. The woman wrote to her husband and asked him to send you up here to her at once. Well, you’ve come, that’s all.” And the Jew nodded and looked round for some suitable object with which he could smash in the panels of the door.

“Stop! Stop! don’t let us be violent,” said Paul with a shudder as he saw Sawdry’s crude preparations.

“ ‘Gently go-ee
Monkey catch-ee,’

as ‘B.P.’ told his comrades at Mafeking. After all, a loud noise might frighten her so much that she would throw herself from an upstairs window to escape our attentions. Besides, I don’t think it will be necessary to make any real noise over the business. I forgot to tell you that once I had a lesson in housebreaking from one of the cleverest men that ever used a ‘jemmy’,” smiling, as he recalled how his experiences in this line had already proved of service to Arthur when they wished to spy on “The Three Glass Eyes” in the millionaire’s garret, and it was necessary to break into the caretaker’s deserted rooms.

A moment later Renishaw had dropped to his knees, and gently pressed his shoulder against the woodwork. As he had suspected, he now proved from the way in which the door gave in places, that no bolts had been shot in their sockets. All that stood against them indeed, was simply an antiquated lock—but as the key had been conveniently left in it, all that was necessary for any cracksman, amateur or professional, to do was to take a miniature pair of pincers (which he always carried in his revolver pocket) and to fix them on the shaft of the key and turn it, which as a matter of fact, he did with one turn of the wrist.

“Now we can enter,” he cried with a smile of gratification, and springing to his feet again he twisted round the handle of the door, which yielded, and both men stepped swiftly across the threshold.

A damp, musty smell like that of newly turned earth assailed their nostrils immediately they did so. It shewed, at all events, that the door had not been opened very recently, but as the hall was so dark, it was difficult to see very far beyond the doorway; and when the door itself was closed, so that no chance passers by might become suspicious, they found themselves completely enveloped in blackness.

Luckily, Paul carried a box of wax vestas, and lighting one of these they pressed forward to one of the rooms the door of which stood open. As they had surmised, this was bare of all decoration or furniture, but the Jew’s quick eyes caught a glimpse of an empty beer bottle containing a piece of candle in the fireplace—and instantly he pounced on this and lit the candle which was three or four inches in length.

“Now you’ve got your hands free,” he said to Paul. “Just draw your shooting iron, will you? I don’t expect for a moment that you will have to use it—that anybody will dare to molest us—but it is just as well to show even Mrs. Charlton (if she has got any glimmering of reason left) that we are quite prepared if she desires to be nasty, to be nasty too.”

Paul nodded and took out his revolver, altering the trigger to full cock. He had no sentimental objection to the use of a weapon—and he had no intention of offering himself for a target to unseen, unknown enemies without a fair chance of making himself objectionable to an equal degree in return.

A door at the far end of this room led into a passage that communicated with the kitchens, but just as he was about to open it he was certain he heard a sound like a groan come from some space beneath his feet. Instantly he stopped and listened again. Yes, there was no doubt about it. He had heard aright. There was somebody in the cellar, groaning, apparently in great distress.

Sawdry now caught the same sound, and nodding to his companion, enjoining stealth and silence, he crept softly through the doorway into the passage where he came upon a few steps that led downward to another door which evidently communicated with the cellars.

Down these he crept like a shadow, Paul following him closely. Away in the distance now they caught sight of some rays of artificial light curiously like those of their own candle, and, guided by these, they came quickly to an arched-in cellar brilliantly illuminated by candles stuck in certain beer-bottles, hundreds of which had been scattered about and literally covered the floor of the place almost to the depths of their knees.

And in the centre of these, squatted the woman they sought, Rebecca Charlton, who was seated on a truss of straw and fondling a big black rat which she had evidently only recently tamed.

For a few seconds nobody uttered a word. That strange creature remained where she was, seated on a pile of straw, crooning meaninglessly over her pet rat, and rocking herself to and fro with her eyes fixed on a piece of blank white-washed wall in front of her. At a sign from the Jew, Paul Renishaw himself quietly pocketed his revolver, and took a seat too on an upturned empty case beside Josiah Sawdry, who now did nothing but nurse the empty beer bottle bearing a lighted candle. And all about them were strewn the signs of the woman’s wild debauch—of a woman who had gone to the task with all the frenzy and delirium of the born dipsomaniac and had smashed or drunk all that she could lay her hands on.

At that moment, however, it was obvious she was sober enough. There was a steadiness about the swing of her body and the way she used her fingers and her eyes when her pet, alarmed by the presence of strangers, tried to make its escape, that showed her brain was not much out of its normal balance. Just then too she spoke—and her tones were clear and bell-like, and she came in a most unfeminine way straight to the point.

“I am glad to see you, Josiah,” she said, twisting round and facing Sawdry who contented himself with bowing. “Very glad. Somehow though I knew that you would come. It seems to me now the time never was when you were not a true friend of mine. Leastways now I need your assistance.”

“Very good,” said the Jew briskly. “I shall be very glad to give it to you. I may be blunt—but I can be relied on.” And quite unconscious of his own hypocrisy, he put the bottle he was nursing down on the floor and patted himself approvingly on the chest.

“That is so,” the woman returned, but there was no emotion or suggestion of gratitude in her voice. “You always were true where truth paid you. Why, however did you bring a gentleman, a stranger, with you? How did you know that the business I wanted you for was not quite private or confidential?”

“I couldn’t help it,” Sawdry answered quickly. “I wasn’t really equal to finding you alone. Besides, Mr. Renishaw here is a gentleman. Anything he hears now won’t be shouted all over Scarborough.”

“Very well,” replied Rebecca Charlton listlessly. “First of all, I want you to take charge of these Bank of England notes.” She fumbled in an old petticoat she was wearing, and then took therefrom a package exactly similar to the one which the newsboy had found on the Filey road and which it was supposed had been given to the telegraph-operator Drummond by Aimée Blake’s murderer, but it was considerably larger. “Count them,” she added. “In all, they ought to total two thousand. And, perhaps, after all, it is well as that gentleman came with you. He will see nobody robs you—or me!” And she gave a low mirthless laugh.

Sawdry bent down and did as he had been directed. Yes, in all they reached the respectable total of £2,000, and were also obviously genuine. Paul also checked their number and narrowly inspected each one for proof that they were not false. He had to agree they certainly stood for a very solid and positive £2,000.

“The point is, what do you want me to do with them?” said Sawdry finally, placing two very distinctive india-rubber bands around them and thrusting them into his pocket. “Open an account at some good bank for you, and invest the balance in good dividend-earning bank shares? Or would you rather I bought you some gilt-edged securities like consols or colonial inscribed stock, stuff that can’t break or melt and will be always there when you want to lay your hands on the solid?”

“Neither,” said the woman shortly. “If I had, I wouldn’t have sent for you. I’d have gone to the bank or the stockbroker myself. No, I’ll tell you what I want you to do for me. Split that two thousand into two sums of a thousand each. Take the first thousand and buy a Post Office annuity for my husband. He’ll probably drink himself to death just like I shall, but then he’ll die happy if young, and nobody will be the poorer for his loss.”

“And the other thousand?” queried the Jew greedily, moistening his lips unconsciously in the hope that after all some pickings in this unexpected windfall might come in his direction.

“Take it to the best detective that has ever chucked up his job at Scotland Yard in disgust at the wooden way they there treat men with brains. Give it to him and tell him to find the murderer of Aimée Blake.”

“My!” The candle he had taken up again almost dropped from the hands of Josiah Sawdry at the same moment as this expression of absolute stupefaction fell from his lips. There was something indeed almost ludicrous now in his looks of profound amazement. Either this woman was the most finished actress he had ever seen or, what appeared more likely, she had no hand in the doing to death of Ventris Blake’s wife—in which event where would be his promised £5 a week?

For a second his reason quite deserted him. “Oh, talk to her Renishaw,” he gasped. “I can’t. I’m stumped!” And he sprang to his feet and began to pace up and down the cellar. Paul smiled indulgently, but at the bottom he too began to fear that that house of speculation they had built in that arbour off the Filey road after they had found that gold link stamped “K” was perilously near destruction. With an effort, nevertheless, he rallied himself.

“You wish them to find the murderer of Aimée Blake!” he said turning and looking keenly at Rebecca Charlton. “But there is no need to spend any more money on that quest. They have found the criminal. It was the work of a wretch named Arthur Hudson, who is now safe enough in Scarborough police station.”

“Don’t you believe it,” retorted the woman, with a cunning shake of the head. “I know better than that. Arthur Hudson is no more guilty of the crime than I am.”

Paul’s heart gave a great leap! After all, then, his theory that Ventris Blake had really killed his wife to be free to win Winifred Pontifex might not be so far out as Sawdry had contended. He would move with caution. He seemed on the brink of great far-reaching, startling discoveries.

“But how can you be so sure of it?” he questioned. “There are plenty of witnesses against Hudson. The matter doesn’t seem to me to admit of any doubt he did it, and fled at once back to London.”

“None the less, you are wrong,” persisted the woman; and then, catching sight of Sawdry’s look of incredulity, which he had purposely made as irritating as he could, she added: “And you, Josiah, needn’t twist up your face in scorn like that. I haven’t forgotten what I said to you in our old rooms in Queen Victoria Street. I did hate Aimée Blake. I would willingly have given half my life to see her stretched dead in front of me. Only I didn’t kill her.”

“What are you doing here in Scarborough then?”

The words came from Paul—and behind them seemed a clash of steel.

“I am hiding myself as I promised a certain party.”

“Who was that party?”

“Why the real murderer of Aimée Blake of course.”

Paul and Sawdry exchanged glances. By this time they had come to have very grave doubts of the speaker’s sanity. Her replies were prompt enough and clear enough, it was true—but they led to nothing and to nowhere. Everything indeed that she said seemed to make the confusion more confounded.

The Jew now took up the conversation.

“Look here, Rebecca,” he said sharply, taking up a position straight in front of her; “put that wretched rodent you are hugging down for a moment and talk quite plainly to me. What the deuce have you been up to since you did that moonlight flit from your home? And where in this bleak, desolate, deserted hole of a house did you raise a big sum like this two thousand pounds.”

The woman gave a hoarse chuckle. “Money as ever, Josiah,” she replied tauntingly. “Always money with you gentlemen of the crooked noses—and consciences. That twist was placed on you Jews’ phizzes by your Maker to shew plainly to everyone that clapped eyes on you, that you had a twist in your mind as well. The mere sight of money sends you all demented or frantic or consumed with covetousness!”

“Well, answer my questions that’s all,” said Sawdry sullenly. “Don’t beat any more about the bush. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

“All right,” said the woman changing her tone. “I won’t chaff you any further. As a matter of fact, you annoyed me by your denseness. I will, however, be patient and explain to you more fully so that there can be no excuse for you not understanding me this time. Well, as you ought to have guessed, I did come to Scarborough to kill Aimée Blake. I bought a knife in Gray’s Inn Road for that precise purpose, and also a return tourist ticket for a sovereign at the office at King’s Cross, feeling sure that I should be able to drop on her when she took her walks abroad, and to plunge it in her and to slip off before anybody dared lift a finger to detain me.

“When I got to Scarborough I made a point of enquiring at all the principal hotels, and I soon spotted the one she was at. For some hours I hung about outside, but at length I was rewarded for she came out when it was dark and late! and quite unattended, she set off at a brisk walk along the Filey road. I followed her. My plan of action was perfected. ‘When you turn to come home again I will spring out of the shadow and bury this steel in your foul and treacherous heart,’ I told myself, ‘I will not do it a moment sooner. I will not fail a moment later.’

“For several miles she walked on. Apparently she was very excited and very determined. I too had made up my mind, and so although I got some fine chances to slip up behind her and to finish her off, I wouldn’t do it. ‘A bargain’s a bargain even to yourself;’ said I. ‘Keep it, and you will be all right.’ Only as it happened I wasn’t. The man she had gone to meet was before me, and just as she reached a lonely spot he sprang out from behind a hedge and dashed out her brains with a hedge stick.”

“A man?” queried both her hearers dumbfounded. “What man?”

“A man you ought both of you to know very well. He’s a big public character in London although this time he was made up to resemble Arthur Hudson exactly.”

“His name, his name,” cried both hearers, distracted.

“Why, the Rev. Duncan Kilroy, of course, the man at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. He it was who gave me the two thousand to shut my mouth and to come here to lie low until all the hue and cry was over.”

At first Paul could scarcely restrain a strong inclination to laugh aloud. Rebecca Charlton’s assertion appeared so preposterous. Then he chanced to turn and look at his companion. Instead of Josiah Sawdry’s face expressing incredulity and amazement, another and totally different feeling seemed struggling for expression—as though the Jew had been recalled suddenly, by a chance phrase or name, to a series of events which he had long since forgotten, and was now searching helplessly in and out amongst them—intent only on piecing them together to construct a new, a certain, and an absolutely reliable clue.

“Surely,” the journalist began irritably, “you don’t credit this amazing statement! Why, it knocks the bottom out of your own theory completely. It starts a totally new chain of surmise—the end of which might even land us in a bishop’s palace before we had finished with it!” And again he shrugged his shoulders and laughed scornfully.

“I am not so sure that I have not been in the wrong,” replied Sawdry, passing his hand nervously across his forehead. “After all, Mrs. Charlton’s words are not such a surprise as they ought to be in the circumstances. They have recalled to me a lot of things about Ventris Blake’s past which I had dismissed as absolutely irrelevant.”

“But what about your own clue?” cried Paul triumphantly, “the gold link?”

“Yes,” said the Jew, slowly, “what about that gold cuff link you lost, Mrs. Charlton? Have you any idea where you dropped it?”

“Of course I have—I let it fall in that garden off the Filey road, where the murderer of Aimée Blake washed the blood-stains off his hands. I went into the exact greenhouse he took refuge in, and, in poking about, the sleeve of my blouse caught on a rusty nail, and snapped the gold band in half. I looked everywhere for it, but I could not see it. Have you got it?” And she stretched out her fingers for it with the most natural air in the world.

Paul hesitated—but only for a second. Then he resolved to play an entirely different role with her—to appear to believe every word that she uttered; and he gave her the tiny piece of gold marked “K” without any demur. “I wish you would tell us in your own words,” he said kindly, “all that you know about the Reverend Duncan Kilroy’s association with the Blakes and my friend Arthur Hudson. At present we don’t doubt what you assert—but without more particulars, we find it very hard to understand why this well-known London clergyman should be mixed up at all in a squalid crime such as this?”

“Then you need not be,” answered Rebecca Charlton. “First and foremost, you must get fixed in your mind this fact—Duncan Kilroy and his twin-brother, who used to be employed in the same office as Mr. Hudson, namely ‘Palamountains Limited,’ and Ventris Blake have been intimate friends for a number of years. Naturally, Duncan Kilroy resented Mr. Hudson’s triumph over his twin-brother, for he had expected that his brother would not only feather his nest out of old Allen Palamountain, and would succeed to that fine business in Cheapside as a matter of course, and become one of the richest house agents in the City of London, but also that he would get the old man to leave him a nice snug fortune by which he might buy his way to very high preferment in the Church.

“As a consequence, when his twin-brother came to him, broken, despairing and hopeless, a confirmed dipsomaniac, his hatred grew beyond all bounds. Just as the brother sank lower and lower, passing through the Triple Chambers of the Drunkard’s Doom—beer, whiskey, brandy—so his determination to be revenged on Hudson grew from the plain desire to the burning wish, and then on to positive mania.

“Finally, the brother died a raving drink-maniac in a top-room of St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. By his deathbed Duncan swore to pay Arthur Hudson one even if it cost him his position in the Church. Now, in matters like this, the form which the revenge takes turns very much on the nature of the man who pants to be avenged. For instance, some cannot rest by day or by night until they have set about their task and either demolished their opponent utterly, or been propelled themselves to their own destruction. Others can wait—wait one year, two years, aye, even twenty years if necessary—and these are the most dangerous, for they go on adding blow to blow, trap to trap, torture to torture, and never, never let themselves be beaten.

“As it happened, however, chance favoured Duncan in a very curious fashion in his desire to ruin Mr. Hudson. As no doubt you have gathered by this time, this clergyman is a bad lot in every sense—and particularly where it turns upon questions of women. In the course of his nocturnal wanderings about this time, he came upon Aimée Burgoyne—in point of fact, during a visit he had paid to a fellow vicar in Peterborough. His desire to make love to her overcame every other impulse, good and bad. He hastened back to London, to my little cottage in Blackfriars Road, and, on some petty pretexts, he got some well-known costumier and wig-maker to come there and make him up so that he resembled Arthur Hudson exactly.

“Then he went back to Peterborough, and, taking rooms at the Angel Hotel, he soon managed to contrive to call on the woman on a matter of business connected with the painting of a portrait—and that acquaintanceship rapidly ripened into the marriage we have heard so much of lately. I, as you know, was one of the witnesses, and I got fifty pounds for my trouble, but it went very rapidly in drink, alas! Israel Sawdry was the other witness, and, as he stated, he went at the request of the bride, but, growing suspicious, he started later to make mischief; and so, to save his friend from exposure, Ventris Blake gave the man a berth in his office in London, and then, finding him utterly unscrupulous, he quickly promoted him to the confidential position he now occupies.

“Unfortunately, the millionaire’s curiosity was aroused as to the kind of woman for which his friend, Duncan Kilroy, had dared so much. In return for saving him from the machinations of Israel Sawdry, he stipulated that Duncan Kilroy should introduce him to the woman with whom he had contracted this bigamous alliance. Fearful but powerless, Kilroy did so. As the clergyman had dreaded, Aimée Burgoyne was fascinated by Blake, particularly by his wealth. Indeed she loathed the secrecy, the mystery, and the poverty, in which she was kept by Kilroy, and finally the pair of them made Kilroy own his perfidy, and then, to crown all, to marry them, which he did in some out of the way village I can’t remember just now, but which act certainly brought him many large gifts of money, both from the millionaire, and the woman who had thrown him over for a better and a lawful union.

“At the same time it must not be supposed that Kilroy took to this arrangement with any particular grace. As a matter of fact he did not. He was inarticulate with rage over it—but, as I said at first, he was the kind of man who could wait, and he waited, and finally evolved this peculiarly diabolical scheme by which he confounded both his enemies, Blake and Hudson, in one huge cataclysm of crime and ill-starred passion. Of course, his initial difficulty was to get Blake interested in Winifred Pontifex, but so curiously are the lives of all of us mingled together, that he had a certain strand of a connection to work upon in the fact of Russell Langford’s complicity over a thing they call The Three Glass Eyes, and an old association with her father, Colonel Pontifex. As it happened, too, Blake very quickly wearied of his wife, and so he drank in greedily Kilroy’s accounts of Winifred’s beauty and suggestions, how easy it would be for him to terrorise Russell Langford and so get the niece entirely at his mercy.

“When he had sufficiently inflamed Blake’s imagination, Kilroy took the millionaire to a ball at Stamford, with the result you are probably aware of. The girl’s charm but aloofness worked on the wretched man like newly made wine, and, as Kilroy told me after the murder, even Satan seemed at this point, to make a big move for him. Not only was he able to produce that sham marriage certificate that socially ostracised Arthur Hudson, but Aimée Blake herself suddenly determined to get rid of Ventris and to make the clergyman take up with her again. In vain Duncan Kilroy wriggled—procrastinated—promised—protested. She was adamant; all at once the woman seems to have realised what a terrible vampire she was bound to and to have determined to free herself from him by the agency of the very man who had led her into this pit of evil.

“For this precise purpose she went to Scarborough. From this place she despatched telegram after telegram to St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage. The burden of each one was the same. ‘Come to me. Go with me. Fail me, and I expose you. But, I beseech you, go with me.’ In his despair, Kilroy went to Blake and told him all about it. He begged him that just as he had helped him over Israel Sawdry, he would assist him over this.

“But, of course, Blake did nothing of the sort. In the first place, he told the wretched man that he never helped any lame dog more than once over any critical stile. In the second, he suggested that it would pay them both to see Mrs. Blake nicely interred in a freshly turfed grave, and as he, Kilroy, was the one who was in danger from the woman it was obviously Kilroy’s duty to take this little job in hand and to remove the woman from their path for ever.

“Frantic and despairing Kilroy made that fatal appointment with Aimée Blake on the Filey Road. As in the early Peterborough days, he had only one idea—to use Arthur’s name and personality, and he did so in this instance, so that when she scornfully rejected his appeal to leave him alone, he fell on her without compunction, and killed her as we have seen—certain that he would never be discovered.”

CHAPTER XVIII.
ALL ABOUT THOSE GLASS EYES

Rebecca Charlton finished her strange story with a sigh; and for a few moments that oddly-assorted trio sat in the cellar of that deserted house at Scalby without exchanging a word.

On both Paul Renishaw and Josiah Sawdry indeed the effect of her recital had been little short of marvellous. At first they had listened to her laborious explanations as to Kilroy and his twin brother with something like looks of indulgent good nature. Then, as the dramatic character of the plot began to unfold itself, and they saw how clearly she had pieced in all those different and opposing elements in the lives and fortunes of the persons involved in this exceedingly modern tragedy of love and hate and passion until at last the whole hideous mystery stood out boldly and distinctly as it had been conceived in the minds of the monster who had originated it, their faces changed like magic. Open scepticism gave way to doubt—for several minutes their convictions hung nicely poised in the balance, midway between absolute rejection and acceptance—until finally she reached the most baffling point of all. “Why did some absolute stranger personate Arthur Hudson in that sham marriage at Peterborough?”

That was the real crux—and when that was solved in the perfect complete way it was, they looked at each other, both convinced that this woman spoke the truth, and nodded. For the rest of her story they were plain level-headed yet sympathetic and unbiassed auditors. No longer did they seek to persuade themselves that she was not a most daring and cunning adventuress. They were her keen and eager partisans and they simply tested each statement as she put it forth to assure themselves that when it came before a judge and assize, and was torn to pieces by the most acute legal minds they could find a way to prop it up and make it emerge unshaken from the ordeal.

“We won’t trouble to discuss all the remarkable but convincing facts you have put before us,” said Paul, rising at length and taking up one of the lighted candles preparatory to making an ascent into the daylight. “If we did we should sit here all night, and one of the greatest scoundrels existing—Duncan Kilroy I mean—might escape from justice. There is, however, one matter I don’t understand quite as plainly as I ought to do. It is this. In what state of mind did you leave Kilroy after the murder?”

“Distracted,” said the woman quietly. “Up to a point, of course, everything went splendidly with him. His disguise was perfect. He shewed himself about so that everybody might give such a description of the murderer as would tally with the exact personal appearance of Arthur Hudson, but when he went into the greenhouse whilst I waited for him he got an ugly shock that quite turned his brain. A boy’s face suddenly appeared at the glass! True, he threw something at it and dashed out into the open, but, when he reached my side, his mind seemed to have gone quite. At that time a bit of wind was playing through the telegraph wires; and the doleful dirge-like sound racked his nerves to such a degree that he could think of nothing else. ‘Listen to the law’s sleuth hounds’ he kept saying, stopping suddenly and pointing to the lines over our heads. ‘How they whisper! How they hate me! What dark evil things they will do to me when they get the chance.’ ”

“No wonder he conceived that mad idea of tapping them,” rejoined Sawdry, who had been quietly turning over the woman’s story to see if he could find any weak point in it too, but could discover none. “Mrs. Charlton has certainly disposed of the only difficulty which I could see in the way of an arrest of the unworthy clergyman of St. Sepulchre’s—that was the explanation of his gift of £500 to the telegraph clerk Drummond. I have also just been glancing over the bundle of bank notes she gave me, and which were handed to her by Kilroy as a price of his silence. What do you think I have found stamped on them? Why the same mark as I saw on the pile that were given to Drummond—the mark of the Piccadilly branch of the London and Westminster Bank, where doubtless we shall learn the Rev. Duncan Kilroy, M.A., D.D., as he delights to call himself, has his private account.”

“If that be so, the police will have got on his track before this for, as you must remember, I sent what I will call the Drummond package of Bank of England notes down to the Scarborough police station by a local constable before we started to go to Scalby at all. Doubtless the local detectives would at once wire that branch of the London and Westminster Bank, and are now puzzling their brains to know why the manager has wired back they were issued to a respectable West End clergyman, and not, as they were certain, to my poor friend Arthur Hudson.”

“Still,” remarked the Jew diplomatically, “we shan’t do much good in confronting these Yorkshire Sherlock Holmeses unless we have something pretty substantial to back up our opinions. What do you say, Mrs. Charlton? You see, everything turns on you. Are you prepared to go down with us to the Scarborough police station, and to make a clean breast of all you have heard and known and suffered? If so, you needn’t employ a firm of private detectives and spend a thousand pounds on proving poor Hudson’s innocence. The police will do that for you free?”

“But,” said the woman craftily, “suppose they insist on my giving up the other thousand, what then? Poor Charlton will be as poor as ever and maybe neither of us will get a cent.”

“I will promise in Mr. Hudson’s name to make good any loss like that,” interposed Paul promptly. “Just leave it to me. You shall only gain in pocket by speaking the truth.”

“And what’s going to happen to me,” queried the Jew with a comical little grin. “I was promised a berth at Palamountain’s, worth £5 a week for life, if a little theory of mine came off. It didn’t—but still if it hadn’t been for it you might never have discovered Mrs. Charlton and this little retreat of hers at Scalby and got, at a bound as it were, right on top of the track.”

“My promise holds good still whoever is convicted,” said Paul, holding out his hand which was shaken warmly by both his companions in turn. “I only ask Mrs. Charlton to give me her word in one other little matter. It is this—that until Mr. Hudson is liberated she will not go on a drunken burst like this again;” and he pointed very gravely to the hundreds of beer bottles that littered the floor of the cellar.

The woman flushed and hung down her head. “I promise,” she said. “You can trust me. Had I not been mad indeed I would never have done it. As it happened though it proved my salvation. It enabled me to forget—everything—even my insensate rage against Aimée Blake. When next I came to my senses I was a changed woman. I saw things in a totally different light—in a word, I became quite sane again. And so I shall remain. I shall touch no more drink.”

“Good,” said Paul gaily, secretly overjoyed. “Now we all understand each other perfectly, we had better get off.” And waving the light he carried, he advanced towards the cellar steps, and a few moments later all three were soon stepping briskly along the road towards the village.

Luckily just then an empty cab rumbled up to them. The driver had been taking a well-known Scarborough tradesman to his home in this suburb, to dine and was only too glad to get a fare on the return journey which, spurred by the promise of double payment, he performed in an incredibly short time.

Inside and outside the police station things had assumed their normal appearance. The crowd that had listened to the proceedings with breathless interest and attention when Arthur had been brought before the local magistrates, had vanished now, and the street on the north side were as quiet and deserted as though “The Romantic Affair at Scarborough” was a story nine days old. Darkness, too, had set in that January night. A cold wind swept past the Castle and went whistling hungrily in and out of the doors and windows of the police station, making the fat old sergeant who was dozing over the fire draw his stool a little nearer and grunt a little more than was even his custom when duty interfered with comfort.

“May I see the Chief Constable?” said Paul suddenly, looming up against the counter flanked by his two companions.

The old fellow started up. “Certainly,” he replied, and before he quite realised what he was doing he shewed the three of them into the private office of the Chief Constable, who happened to be talking very excitedly to two keen-looking men in plain clothes, detectives.

Naturally all three recognised Paul, and, gathering from his manner that he had something important to communicate, they dropped the bundle of bank notes and series of telegrams that had caused them all this commotion, and let him take a chair and tell his story through from beginning to end without any interruption.

Even the journalist felt that there was something strangely uncanny, unnatural, in the way they took his disclosures. All their faces might have been made of wax, so little emotion did they exhibit. Even when he pushed forward Rebecca Charlton, and she filled in a complete account of how she had talked and reasoned with Kilroy just after the commission of the crime, and then advanced Josiah Sawdry and produced the other bundle of notes, similar to those they had on the table in front of them, the officers expressed neither surprise, dissent, nor pleasure. They just let all three run themselves down before they shewed a sign of the tremendous surprise they had in store for these self-invited investigators who were actually prepared with evidence to knock all their card castles to pieces. Then the Chief Constable rose, and standing with his back to the fire, spoke:

“I am sure we are very much obliged to you for all the trouble you have taken, Mr. Renishaw, and for this most valuable evidence which you have put into our possession; also, I want to thank you for that bundle of notes you sent down to me by one of our officers on the South Cliff. They enabled me to wire to Scotland Yard, who sent one of their best inspectors to the bank they came from. He quickly heard that they had been given to Mr. Duncan Kilroy, but when he went to St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage he found himself just five minutes too late.”

“Too late,” cried Paul. “Too late. What do you mean?”

“That this wretched man five minutes earlier had stabbed Ventris Blake to the heart and then blown out his own brains.”

The consternation that followed the Chief Constable’s announcement was simply appalling. The poor woman, Rebecca Charlton, was carried out of the police office in a fit of raving hysteria, while even Paul and Sawdry turned sick and white with the horror of it all, and the suddenness, and then the sense of its awful justice and completeness.

“How can it have happened?” they asked the two detectives who, it appeared, had the case against Arthur Hudson in hand. “So far as we are aware, not one of them had any suspicion that he was in danger. To all intents and purposes, everything was prospering with their crimes. All they had to do was to sit tight, and in the end the man they hated so much would be ruined, if not hanged.”

“That no doubt was so,” said the Chief Constable, “only you forget two circumstances. The first is—that Kilroy despatched a large number of telegraphic messages to Aimée Blake. True, they were in the name of Arthur Hudson, but, as we discovered several days ago, they were not in Hudson’s handwriting, and were presumably in Kilroy’s own. That, I am certain, made him so fearful of the telegraphic communication which he saw everywhere about him and which was in all probability the cause of his crazy bribe to the telegraphic clerk, Drummond. Secondly, you must remember that almost immediately after the crime the man’s brain gave way. In a word, he went mad, and, being mad, he must have thrown all idea of prudence to the wind, and have gone with a knife for the man whom, rightly enough, he may have blamed for the wretched tragic pass to which he had come.”

“Then you have no actual particulars of the crimes through yet?” queried Sawdry, steadying himself with an effort. “You don’t know whether the thing was done in public or in private.”

“Not at all,” said the Chief Constable quickly. “I wired for further information, but none has come through yet, except an intimation that one of the officers from Scotland Yard who was early on the scene of the tragedies is now travelling down to consult with me, and will give me every information and assistance.”

“Then I shall go to the office of the local daily newspaper, the Daily Post,” said Paul, suddenly rising and taking up his hat. “That editor will get the news through sooner than anyone, I am certain; and he is just the kind to oblige a brother journalist.”

“And I will go with you,” added Sawdry, stepping closely after his companion. “The atmosphere of the police station never does agree with me. It is too suggestive of what I have missed to make me breathe quite easily, or to cause me to feel a longing to rest there and be thankful that even on a bleak day like this I’ve got a Government roof over my head and a Government fire whereat I may warm myself.”

As it chanced, too, they were lucky enough to find the editorial offices of the paper open, and, at a word, the entire resources of the organisation were placed at their disposal, and telegrams of enquiry for full details were despatched to the three great newsgathering organisations of the country—the Press Association, the Central News, and the Exchange Telegraph Company, while the editor himself pieced together a graphic, yet incisive account of the extraordinary discovery that had been made and hurried out a special edition which took Scarborough by storm from end to end.

The Press Association was the first to wire any fresh facts about the crime at St Sepulchre’s, and it did so in the following terms:—

TERRIBLE TRAGEDY AT A LONDON VICARAGE.
A POPULAR PREACHER GOES MAD
AND STABS HIS BEST FRIEND.

At a late hour this afternoon the news became known of a shocking occurrence at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage, Piccadilly, the home of that highly popular and successful preacher and parish worker, the Rev. Duncan Kilroy, M.A., D.D.

The Rev. gentleman, it seems, had recently returned from the briefest of visits to a well-known Yorkshire watering place for the benefit of his health. His wife has noticed that ever since his behaviour was distinctly curious, but, thinking that the recent scene in his church, when a mad woman rushed forward just before he started his sermon and denounced him, had slightly unhinged the balance of a naturally highly strung and imaginative intellect, she contented herself with leaving him free to do as he thought best.

Whether his most intimate friend, Mr. Ventris Blake, the famous Park Lane millionaire, heard of his sad condition and simply called to condole with him, or whether he was drawn thither by some specious but evilly designed letter or message, is not yet known. This much is clear: Mr. Blake called at the Vicarage about four o’clock this afternoon, and, according to the housemaid’s story, went at once to the unfortunate gentleman’s study. A moment later, the servant heard the sound of a violent altercation, combined with maniacal ravings and screams and then gibberish laughter. This she declares must have gone on for fully ten minutes when suddenly the door of the study was flung open and Ventris Blake rushed out with his face stricken with horror, his eyes rolling fearfully and a knife plunged to the hilt in his back.

“I am stabbed, I am stabbed,” he shouted in tones that struck horror to the brains of all that heard them, and in a flash he had flung out his arms wildly to grab furiously at the air, and then he collapsed, and lay on the floor quite dead.

Almost instantly afterwards, Duncan Kilroy appeared attired only in his shirt and trousers. “Where is the biggest scoundrel that ever walked the earth gone to?” he yelled in a voice of thunder. “Take me to him that I may complete the beneficent work I have begun!” And he waved a revolver about wildly and cut some mad capers around the corpse at his feet.

A moment later his mood changed. His looks altered. All at once the expression on his face grew strangely grim and tense. “There is only one thing in the wide world that is absolutely true. It is this,” he screamed. “The wages of sin is death. So perish the last of the Three Glass Eyes,” and he placed the weapon to his head and blew out his brains, his body falling rigidly across the corpse of his friend whom he had just slain.

Paul and Sawdry read this terrifying story through with dry eyes it is true, but with fingers that trembled and hearts torn with emotion. After all, they had not really expected so tragic and awful a finish to their quest for the murder of Aimée Blake as this was—and for some time they did not know what to do or what to say, so full seemed the future of alarming possibilities.

Fortunately a few minutes later there came a second message from the Press Association; and then they realised that Arthur Hudson would indeed be cleared of the terrible odium that had fallen upon him, for the following facts were now telegraphed:—

A MAN WITH A DOUBLE LIFE.
APPALLING CONFESSION OF THE PICCADILLY CLERGYMAN.
A NEW PERIL TO SOCIETY—“THE THREE GLASS EYES.”

Later inquiries into that dreadful affair at St. Sepulchre’s Vicarage disclose a most appalling state of things. The Vicar who murdered Ventris Blake, the millionaire, and then shot himself, left, it seems, a long written confession which seems almost too horrible to be true.

Briefly the Rev. Duncan Kilroy was a man with a double life. He had, he asserts, most vicious and depraved tastes, which he gratified in secret, and so had Ventris Blake, whom he also accuses of poisoning his first wife, a girl named Kaufmann. The second wife, Aimée Kilroy, he admits he went to Scarborough to kill, and also that he managed to do so. The reason for this crime is not very clear from his statement but this much is evident—Kilroy had years ago at Peterborough personated Mr. Arthur Hudson, who now is under arrest on the capital charge—and he in that character had contracted a bigamous marriage with Aimée Blake, who was then known as Burgoyne. Is it not time that our marriage laws are altered, and that registrars take proofs of the identity of the parties before they permit this sacred and far-reaching ceremony to be solemnised?

The most thrilling of these awful disclosures, however, turn on what the unhappy man calls “The Three Glass Eyes.” This, it appears, was a band of three men who swore to each other they would never respect any human life except each other’s, but would remove anybody they disliked from their path by the use of a secret poison of which Blake alone knew the secret. They had a kind of ritual and a horrible symbol of a huge shield of black with three great staring rolling eyes of glass.

The Mystic Three, as they dubbed themselves were Blake, Kilroy and a twin brother of Kilroy’s (now deceased) and their method of settling their intended victims was to invite them to become the members of a far-reaching and powerful Secret Society which they pretended had relations with financial magnates all over the world. Many as time went on consented—but in each case the procedure was the same.

The condemned wretch was conducted to a quaint looking old fashioned garret in front of some draped curtains and made to sit in a certain easy chair in the arms of which pins innoculated with this deadly poison were hidden. The curtains then were rolled aside by the aid of electricity, which also compelled those Three Terrible Eyes to revolve at a tremendous rate until at last the victim, sick and dizzy, and almost mesmerised, frantically caught hold of the arms of the chair. Then instantly his hand would be pricked and the deadly poison would be received into his system. Probably too he screamed.

At all events, the ceremony of initiation would be stopped, and the poor doomed novice would be hurried off to his home, but he never lived more than thirty to fifty minutes after the moment he actually received the pin-point into his flesh. Usually he tried to walk to recover from an apparent attack of faintness, and, the death register kept by Blake which was found open in the study after the murder, discloses one curious fact, that he nearly always fell under the feet of some approaching horse; and an intelligent coroner’s jury invariably returned a verdict of “Accidental Death,” varied sometimes by a rider to the effect that the driver ought to be cautioned for not having been more careful!!!

CHAPTER XIX.
THE PARTING OF THE CLOUDS

Very full of stress and excitement were the days that followed this tragic end of the Vicar of St. Sepulchre’s and of Ventris Blake the millionaire. The British police, being British no doubt, are very slow to move where it is a case of the proof of the innocence of a prisoner whom they have taken in charge, and not of his guilt—and for several days after the news of the murder and suicide had leaked out Arthur Hudson had to content himself with his lot in that tiny cell in Scarborough police-station.

Paul Renishaw, of course, stuck loyally to him, and visited him daily. Nor, as the reader may perhaps guess, was he the only visitor who braved those wild easterly gales that sweep over that Yorkshire coast in the early days of the year. Winifred quickly followed the officer sent down from Scotland Yard to confer with the local Chief Constable—and while these two wise heads were deep in the technicalities of criminal law and lunacy, and the discussion of how far they were justified in accepting an admitted madman’s confession as correct, these two young hearts found joy and brightness and solace in each other; and once again hope beat high within their breasts.

In the longest lane, too, comes the inevitable turning, and, perhaps, it was as well Arthur did not regain his liberty at once, for there was much of shame and scandal and intolerable suspicion to lift from his shoulders, which only Time—the greatest healer of all—could be trusted to do with any effect. Happily, just as the details of the murder at Scarborough and his arrest had been published broadcast, so the news of his innocence, his sufferings and his fortitude were now printed, with the result that public opinion swung round once again in his favour; and he was hailed as a man who had been the victim of one of the cruellest conspiracies known in fashionable London life. Indeed, it is a mistake to suppose that all this sensationalism of the Press makes for evil. It cleanses the hidden sewers of crime—and it is almost the only instrument we possess that sets the innocently-accused up securely on their public seats.

In the sunshine of Winifred’s love too, Arthur quickly forgot all the terrible hours of anguish that had been meted out to him. Young hearts like his are intensely recuperative, and to-day he often recalls with a merry laugh the conversation they had when he was finally released from the police-station one morning early, to avoid any popular demonstration, and they strolled almost at break of day through the Valley, down to the sea with its ceaseless message of high purpose and great endeavour, and of the undying dignity of breadth and freedom and resistless power.

“Do you grieve, dearest,” questioned Winnie suddenly, turning on him two eyes that shone with devotion and trust, “that we did not find the course of true love smooth? Is there any bitterness in your heart that all at once, through no apparent fault of our own, we were called on to suffer so much shame and hurt?”

For a full minute he paused, and thought deeply. Then, just as the yellow sun came steering out from behind a mass of billowy cloud, so did the eternal instinct of the creature towards the Creator, arise in him and call him, as it calls each one of us in our several fashions, to the great act of renunciation of self.

“I do not grieve, dearest,” he answered slowly, simply, reverently. “Nay, I am thankful that I have been tried as by fire in a furnace, and that neither you nor I have sunk down under it, but have arisen the better, the wiser, the stronger, may I say, the sweeter for our day of affliction.” Then slowly lifting his hat he looked far out across the sea, and there came floating into his mind the one triumphant prayer of the Catholic Church, when its greatest service and mystery have moved in all their majestic splendour to that crowning act on Calvary, so intensely symbolical of the Divine Life as well as the Human.

“Benedicamus Domino,” he said in his clear purposeful tones.

“Deo Gratias,” responded Winifred with a great sigh of thankfulness—and their eyes involuntarily filled with tears.

CONCLUSION

Now if you, my reader, go to Scarborough to-day and wander in and out amongst those quaintly designed mansions on the South Cliff that are the pride of the inhabitants, and the wonder of all the visitors, for in the most cunning fashion they recall all the beauty and strength of dead-and-gone masters, you will assuredly pause before St. Michael’s Mount, the most artistic and delightful of them all. Should you inquire of any passer-by who it is lives there, he will tell you it is owned by the famous Mr. Arthur Hudson and his charming wife—and he will be of a peculiarly garrulous type almost unknown to Yorkshire if he ever tells you anything further about the Filey Road murder, for Scarborough people feel as keenly the injustice of Arthur’s and Winifred’s sufferings as though they had been their own. Arthur, indeed, could never bear the idea of returning to London again, and so they made their home in this, one of the most beautiful spots on our coast, and no longer is he a partner in the firm of Palamountains, but one who frankly and freely spends his life and wealth simply in “doing good.”

As Vera had foreseen, the Eastern leprosy of the Abyssinian Ring ate quickly into her system—and, although her father, who suddenly became intolerably grey and broken, threw up his practice at the Bar and chartered a private yacht to take them out to Abyssinia in the hope of discovering some antidote from the natives, she never rallied. The hideous thing made its fearsome inroads quite unchecked, and as they journeyed home again she took advantage of one dark night and her attendant’s sleepiness in the tropics to throw herself from the side of the yacht, and was never seen again.

As for Ventris Blake’s wealth, that went to his gentle old aunt, Prudence Gordon. For a time it was feared the shock of the exposure of her nephew’s villainies would kill her outright, but she rallied, although frailer than ever, and after she had purchased an annuity for Mrs. Kilroy and her daughter, she found her main delight in appearing mysteriously at the offices of different charities like Dr. Barnado’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital, and in handing the secretary of each a Bank of England note for one thousand pounds, and then disappearing, unknowing and unknown. Long may she be spared to practise this unselfish form of good work!

The caretaker, Charlton, was killed the same week as Blake, in a drunken brawl in Seven Dials—and rumour whispers that the good wife Rebecca, who is now quite comfortably off, does not regret him quite as bitterly as one might have expected. I think, too, I know the reason. I called the other day on her in that bright little house which she has taken in Ravenscourt Park, and I was startled to find that she had one lodger with whom I, for one, had a certain amount of acquaintance—Josiah Sawdry, who blushed furiously when I was shewn in, and only his landlady and himself were present. Can it be that they have loved each other years longer than they care to remember? Does it portend an alliance between the one thousand pounds she got from Arthur, and the annuity of five pounds a week which Arthur purchased for him in full redemption of Paul’s promise? I wonder, yet I don’t wonder very much. Do you?

And the mention of Paul’s promise reminds me of Paul himself. I wish I could, as a last word, tell you something new and startling and strange of Paul himself. Only I can’t. As a matter of fact, Paul went quietly, and loyally, and simply back to his sub-editorial work on The Moon, his heart perhaps a little more sensitive to the sufferings of “a world bursting with sin and sorrow,” his brain perhaps, a little more eager to think the better of people and not the worse. Such men as he are the salt and sweetness of journalism. I tremble to think what might happen if my old craft were given over entirely to clever young men, and men who had never felt the pinch of want or known what it was to sit by the bedside of a dying child.

A little voice and a little bird, it is true, sometimes whispers to me that Paul did love once, and that the little locket which the sentimental fellow wears around his neck does not contain the portrait of his grandmother who found a mighty cure for rheumatism, as he pretends, at all: but of Winifred herself.

Only sometimes I am not quite sure little birds are so simple and innocent as they appear. I know for a fact Paul started a terribly fierce correspondence in The Moon, with a column-letter on “Do Journalists Really Love?” in which he made out nobody who cared for journalism in the big sense and had that great aching love of humanity which characterises all who pursue that craft, could content himself with the love of one simple silly girl when an entire people clamoured for sympathy and comprehension at the doors of his heart.

Only I must see inside that locket before I really decide. Perhaps though it only contains a duplicate of that Shield of Black which was published in The Moon and which gave a most startling presentiment of The Three Glass Eyes.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. armchair/arm-chair, tea-rooms/tea rooms, unbiased/unbiassed, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

Add ToC.

Adjust the chapter numbering—the source text skipped XVI.

Change two instances of “Reverend Duncan Kilroy, M.A., B.D.” to D.D.

Change five instances of Aimeé, and one of Aimee, to Aimée.

Punctuation: fix some quotation mark pairings/nestings and some missing periods and commas.

[Chapter I]

Change “came to my office—aud did business with me” to and.

[Chapter III]

“repulsed with some scorn aud a good deal of quite unnecessary” to and.

[Chapter IV]

(discreetly announce “Tragedy at Scarborongh,”) to Scarborough.

“I have given a gool deal of thought to this same subject” to good.

[Chapter V]

“end of his knowledge of the millionaire’s villanies” to villainies.

“Tbe man snarled for a few seconds longer, but” to The.

[Chapter VI]

“depression that was stealing over him. he broke into a low” change the period to a comma.

“smashed the whole contrivanee to atoms” to contrivance.

“eyes were fixed upon him, with that huugry, strained” to hungry.

“let him see Arthur safely ensconsed in his cell” to ensconced.

“and had no donbt had long consultations” to doubt.

[Chapter VII]

“For a second an indiscribable sense of nausea seized” to indescribable.

“provincial town in which she had taken np her quarters” to up.

(“you will hononr us with your presence in the Vicarage”) to honour.

they were horrified to see the young women, clad from head to foot” to woman.

“and on a conspicious board had been written the warning-notice” to conspicuous.

[Chapter VIII]

“the Scarborough paper did he think any more of the occurence” to occurrence.

(“As yon know, Ventris Blake has set his mind) to you.

(“By jove,” he said quickly, “I had forgotten one) to Jove.

[Chapter IX]

“before Arthur could confide to Paul any fnrther particulars” to further.

“scrambled on one of the red busses that run from Liverpool Street” to buses.

“is a neice of that eminent barrister, Mr. Russell Langford” to niece.

“another reason in requesting you to let me see Miss Pohtifex” to Pontifex.

(“and she tells me she ain’t agoin to stay here) to agoin’.

“taking her to some tea rooms in Bond Steeet” to Street.

(“the prospect of being rich dosen’t appeal to me) to doesn’t.

[Chapter X]

“to save Arther Hudson from all that intolerable burden” to Arthur.

(“You know we, Kaufmanns, as a family, don’t trust you) delete the comma after we.

“in the widest sense, may be easy enongh” to enough.

“grieved at his sister’s child heing turned adrift” to being.

(“Vera is out at present,” hs said, “but left a note to say) to he.

[Chapter XI]

“a member of the misercordia who goes about in a habit” to misericordia.

“the cloud of douht and suspicion seemed to lift from his face” to doubt.

“aroused a new source of interest n him, no other than” to in.

“seclusion and remoteness of the office of of a responsible newspaper” delete one of.

(“Why, Silas Q. Pinkerton, the great New York dectective,”) to detective.

[Chapter XII]

(“First and foremost. it will stop his espionage on you) change the period to a comma.

“certainly more dangerous, Thirdly—and this is the most important” change the comma to a period.

“against a trotting horse and had heen picked up dead” to been.

“but finally he seemcd to throw prudence to the winds” to seemed.

“unless he yielded the information he sougbt” to sought.

“and exactly of the amount of Five hundred pounds” to five.

“about how telegraph wires conld be tapped” to could.

[Chapter XIII]

“but all the good impression he he had made was obliterated” delete one he.

[Chapter XIV]

“I feel as though I should never be able to breath anything” to breathe.

(“Quite so,” replied the psuedo-detective. “What else) to pseudo.

(“What of that?” said Sawdry cooly. “Remember Rebecca) to coolly.

“her sisters in the early days were well known amateur actressess” to actresses.

[Chapter XV]

“soft splash of the waves as they rolled against she cliffs” to the.

“Clear your mind for a second of all prejndice, and consider” to prejudice.

(“Unfortunately, to-morrow morning may be to late,”) to too.

“Paul promptly produced a Five pound Bank of England note” to five.

[Chapter XVI]

“his feelings of honour, of family pride, of loyality” to loyalty.

“althongh you seldom did oblige anyone except yourself” to although.

“who I understand he will marry to-morrow at St. Georges, Hanover Square” to George’s.

“I was mad with jealously and rage because Jules Prendergast” to jealousy.

[Chapter XVII]

“that meant ease and a certain Five pound a week” to five.

“his thoery that Ventris Blake had really killed his wife” to theory.

“put that wretched rodent you are hugging, down for a moment” delete the comma after hugging.

[Chapter XVIII]

“unbiassed auditors, No longer did they seek to persuade” change the comma to a period.

“bundle of notes, similiar to those they had on the table” to similar.

“the officers expressed neither surprise. dissent, nor pleasure” change the period to a comma.

“The poor woman, Rebeccca Charlton, was carried out” to Rebecca.

[Chapter XIX]

“quickly forgot all the terrible hours of auguish” to anguish.

[Conclusion]

“she took advantage of of one dark night and her” delete one of.

“tell you something new and startling and strange of Paul him-himself” to himself.

[End of text]

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Table of Contents

- THE THREE GLASS EYES
- FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
- CONTENTS

- THE THREE GLASS EYES

- CHAPTER I. WHICH RECORDS AN ODD TRANSACTION
- CHAPTER II. CONCERNS A MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE
- CHAPTER III. REVEALS A SECRET
- CHAPTER IV. EXPLAINS WHAT VERA LEARNED

- CHAPTER V. RECORDS THE APPEARANCE OF THREE GLASS EYES

- CHAPTER VI. CONCERNS THE HOLE IN THE WALL

- CHAPTER VII. RECOUNTS A STRANGE SCENE IN CHURCH

- CHAPTER VIII. WHICH TELLS OF AN EVENTFUL NIGHT

- CHAPTER IX. WHY THEY WORE A DISGUISE
- CHAPTER X. WHEREIN VENTRIS BLAKE FAILS
- CHAPTER XI. AGAIN—IN PARK LANE
- CHAPTER XII. WHAT THE SERGEANT KNEW
- CHAPTER XIII. CERTAIN LOVE LETTERS
- CHAPTER XIV. TURNS ON THE LETTER “K”
- CHAPTER XV. RECOUNTS PAUL’S DEFEAT

- CHAPTER XVI. “OH! GREAT IS THE POWER OF WEALTH!”

- CHAPTER XVII. THE STRANGE HOUSE AT SCALBY
- CHAPTER XVIII. ALL ABOUT THOSE GLASS EYES
- CHAPTER XIX. THE PARTING OF THE CLOUDS
- CONCLUSION

- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE