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Title:      The Prisoner in the Opal
Author:     A. E. W. MASON
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Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          November 2002
Date most recently updated: December 2007

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Title:      The Prisoner in the Opal
Author:     A. E. W. MASON





I: RED WINE

WHEN Mr. Julius Ricardo spoke of a gentleman--and the word was perhaps a
thought too frequent upon his tongue--he meant a man who added to other
fastidious qualities a sound knowledge of red wine. He could not
eliminate that item from his definition. No! A gentleman must have the
great vintage years and the seven growths tabled in their order upon his
mind as legibly as Calais was tabled on the heart of the Tudor Queen. He
must be able to explain by a glance at the soil why a vineyard upon this
side of the road produces a more desirable beverage than the vineyard
fifty yards away upon the other. He must be able to distinguish at a
first sip the virility of a Chateau Latour from the feminine fragrance of
a Chateau Lafite. And even then he must reckon that he had only learnt a
Child's First Steps. He could not consider himself properly equipped
until he was competent to challenge upon any particular occasion the
justice of the accepted classification. Even a tradesman might contend
that a Mouton Rothschild was unfairly graded amongst the second growths.
But the being Mr. Ricardo had in mind must be qualified to go much
farther than that. It is probable indeed that if Mr. Ricardo were
suddenly called upon to define a gentleman briefly, he would answer: "A
gentleman is one who has a palate delicate enough and a social position
sufficiently assured to justify him in declaring that a bottle of a good
bourgeois growth may possibly transcend a bottle of the first cru."

Now Julius Ricardo was a man of iron conscience. The obligations which he
imposed upon others in his thoughts, he imposed in his life upon himself.
He made it a point of honour to keep thoroughly up to date in the matter
of red wine; and he mapped out his summers to that end. Thus, on the
Saturday of Goodwood week he travelled by the train to Aix-les-Bains.
There he found his handsome motor-car which had preceded him, and there
for five or six weeks he took his absurd cure. Absurd, for the only
malady from which he suffered was that he was a bad shot. He shot so
deplorably that his presence on a grouse-moor invariably provoked
ridicule and sometimes, if his host wanted a big bag, contumely and
indignation. Aix-les-Bains was consequently the only place for him
during the month of August. His cure ended, he journeyed with a leisurely
magnificence across France to Bordeaux, planning his arrival at that town
for the end of the second week of September. At Bordeaux he refitted and
reposed; and after a few days, on the eve of the vintage, he set out on a
tour through the hospitable country of the Gironde; moving by short
stages from chateau to chateau; enjoying a good deal of fresh air and
agreeable company; drinking a good deal of quite unobtainable claret from
the private cuvees of his hosts; and reaching early in October the
pleasant town of Arcachon with a feeling that he had been superintending
the viniculture of France. This was the curriculum. But as he was once
dipped amongst agitations and excitements at Aix, so on another occasion
he was shaken to the foundations of his being during his pilgrimage
through the vineyards. He was even spurred by the touch of the macabre in
these events to a rare poetic flight.

"The affair gave me quite a new vision of the world," he would declare
complacently. "I saw it as a vast opal inside which I stood. An opal
luminously opaque, so that I was dimly aware of another world outside
mine, terrible and alarming to the prisoner in the opal. It was what is
called a fire opal, for every now and then a streak of crimson, bright as
the flash of a rifle on a dark night, shot through the twilight which
enclosed me. And all the while I felt that the ground underneath my feet
was dangerously brittle just as an opal is brittle . . ." and so on and
so on. Mr. Ricardo, indeed, embroidered and developed and expounded his
image of an opal to a degree of tediousness which even in him was
phenomenal. However, the crime did make a stir far beyond the placid
country in which it ran its course. The records of the trial do stand
wherein may be read the doings of Mr. Ricardo and his friend Hanaud, the
big French detective, and all the other people who skated and slipped and
stumbled and shivered in as black a business as Hanaud could remember.



II: JOYCE WHIPPLE

FOR Mr. Ricardo, the trouble began in a London drawing-room during the
week which preceded Goodwood races. The men had just come up from the
dining-room and were standing, as is their custom, uncomfortably
clustered near to the door. Mr. Ricardo looked up and caught a distinct
smile of invitation from the prettiest girl in the room. She was seated
deliberately apart from her companions on a couch made for two, and no
less deliberately she smiled. Mr. Ricardo could not believe his eyes. He
certainly knew the young lady. She was a girl from California with a name
as pretty as herself, Joyce Whipple, and from time to time in London, and
in Paris, and in Venice, he had enjoyed the good fortune of being freshly
introduced to her. But what in the world had he, a mere person who would
never become a personage, the amateur of a hundred arts and the
practitioner of none of them, a retired tea-broker from Mincing Lane--
what qualities had he that could interest so radiant a creature during
the hours before a dinner-party could decently disperse? For radiant
she was from her sleek small head to her slender brocaded shoes. Her hair
was dark brown in colour, parted in the middle and curved in the neatest
of ripples over her ears. Her face was pale without being sallow; her
forehead low, and she had that space between her large grey eyes which
means real beauty; her nose was just a trifle tip-tilted, her upper lip
short, and her mouth if anything on the large side, her lips healthily
red. She had a small firm chin, and she was dressed in an iridescent
frock shot with pale colours which blended and separated with every
movement which she made. She was so trim and spruce that the first
impression which she provoked was not so much that she was beautiful as
that she was exquisitely finished down to the last unnoticeable detail.
She had apparently been sent straight to the house in a bandbox and set
on her feet by the most careful hands. Mr. Ricardo could not believe that
smile was meant for him. He had merely intercepted it, and was beginning
to look round for the fortunate youth for whom it was intended, when the
young lady's face changed. A look of indignation swept over it first,
that he should be so reluctant to approach her. The indignation was
succeeded by an eager appeal as his hostess bore down upon him. Mr.
Ricardo hesitated no longer. He slipped quickly across the room, and
Joyce Whipple at once made room for him on the couch by her side.

"We must talk very earnestly," she said. "Otherwise you will be snatched
away from me, Mr. Ricardo." She bent forward urgently and with the air of
one speaking of life and death babbled about the first thing which came
into her head.

"One of your great ladies, shrewd as your great ladies are, told me, when
I first came to England, that if I ever wanted particularly to speak to a
man, my moment would come when he and the other men joined the ladies.
She said that there were always a few seconds when they stood rather self
-conscious and embarrassed in a silly group, wondering to whom they'd be
welcome and to whom they would not. If at such a time a girl directed the
least tiny beckoning glance to one of them, he would be gratefully at her
feet for the rest of the evening. But the plan almost missed fire
tonight, although I gave you a ploughman's grin."

"I thought that there must be some Adonis just behind my shoulder," Mr.
Ricardo replied; and the hostess, who had not quite abandoned her chase,
hesitated.

Mr. Ricardo had a certain value of an evening. He had no wish to run away
and dance at night clubs. So he could be depended upon to play bridge
until the party broke up. And though, alas, he did occasionally say with
a giggle, "Now, where shall we go for honey?" or perpetrate some such
devastating jest, he played a sound, unenterprising game. But it was
evident to his hostess that tonight he was winged for higher flights. She
turned away, and Joyce Whipple drew a little breath of relief.

"You know a friend of mine, Diana Tasborough," she said.

"She is kind enough to nod to me across a ballroom when she remembers who
I am," Mr. Ricardo answered modestly.

Joyce Whipple betrayed a little impatience.

"But you are going to stay with her, of course, at the Chateau Suvlac
when you go wine-hunting in the autumn."

Mr. Ricardo winced. He could not have imagined a phrase so unsuitable to
his dignified pilgrimage through the Medoc and the Gironde.

"No," he replied rather coldly. "I shall be staying in the neighbourhood,
but with the Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol."

He is not to be blamed if he rolled the name rather grandly upon his
tongue. It belonged undoubtedly to the first cru among names, and had a
delicate fine flavour of the Crusades. However, Mr. Ricardo was honest
and, after only the slightest possible struggle with his vanity, he
added: "But I have not yet made the acquaintance of the Vicomte, Miss
Whipple. There is illness in the house where I was to have stayed and I
have been passed on in the hospitable way people have there."

"I see." Joyce Whipple was clearly disappointed and almost aggrieved. "I
made certain, since I have met you at Diana's house, that you would be
breaking your journey at Suvlac."

Mr. Ricardo shook his head. "But I shall be no more than a mile away, and
if I can do anything for you I certainly will. As a matter of fact, I
haven't seen either Miss Tasborough or her aunt for at least six months."

"No. They have been all the summer at Biarritz," said Joyce.

"I have never stayed at the Chateau Suvlac," Mr. Ricardo continued
naively, "though I should have liked to. For from the outside it is
charming. A rose-pink house of one story in the shape of a capital E,
with two little round towers in the main building and a great stone-
paved terrace at the back overlooking the river Gironde--"

But Joyce Whipple was not in the least interested in his description of
the rose-pink country house, and Mr. Ricardo broke off. Joyce Whipple
was leaning forward, her elbow on her knee and her chin propped in the
cup of her hand, and a look of anxiety upon her face.

"Yes--after all," said Mr. Ricardo on quite a new note of interest, "it
is a little odd."

"What's odd?" asked Joyce Whipple, turning her face to him.

"That the Tasboroughs should have spent the whole summer at Biarritz. For
if anywhere was anybody's spiritual home, London was Miss Diana's."

Rich by the inheritance of the Suvlac vineyards, and chaperoned by a
submissive aunt, Diana Tasborough was the heart and pivot of one of those
self-contained sets into which young London is sub-divided. A set of
people, youthfully middle-aged for the most part, who had already
reached distinction or were on the way to it. Diana, it is true, fished a
river in Scotland and hunted in the Midlands, but London was her home and
the headquarters of the busy company of her friends.

"She has been ill?" Mr. Ricardo suggested.

"No. She writes to me and there's never a word about any illness. All the
same, I am troubled. Diana was terribly kind to me when I first came over
to England and knew nobody at all. I should hate anything to happen to
her--anything, I mean--evil."

Joyce pronounced the word slowly, not because she had any doubt that it
was the right word to use, but so that Mr. Ricardo might not make light
of it. Mr. Ricardo, indeed, was startled. He looked about the room. The
banks of roses, the brightness of the illumination, the smartly dressed
people, were not in accord with so significant a word.

"Do you really think that something evil is happening to her?" he asked.
He was thrilled, even a little pleasurably thrilled.

"I am sure," Joyce Whipple declared.

"Why are you sure?"

"Diana's letters to me," said Joyce, and turning towards Mr. Ricardo, she
fixed her big grey eyes upon his face. "I tell you frankly that I can't
find in any one of them a single sentence, even a single phrase, which
taken by itself is alarming. I know that, for I have analysed them
carefully over and over again. And I want you to believe that I am not
imaginative, or psychic--no, not the least bit in the world. And yet I
never read a letter from Diana without going through the most horrible
experience. I seem to see"--and she broke off to correct herself--"no,
there's no seeming about it. I do see underneath the black-ink letters,
swinging backwards and forwards somehow between the written words and the
white paper they are written on, a chain of faces, grotesque, unfinished
and dreadful. And they are always changing. Sometimes they--how shall I
describe it?--flatten out into featureless, pink round discs with eyes
which are alive. Sometimes they quiver up again into distorted human
outlines. But they are never complete. If they were, I feel sure that
they would be utterly malignant. And they are never still. They float
backwards and forwards, like"--and she clasped her hands over her eyes
for a moment and shivered so that a big fire-opal on a plain gold
bracelet flamed against her wrist--"like the faces of drowned people who
have been swinging to and fro with the tides for months."

Joyce Whipple was no longer concerned with the effect of her narrative
upon Mr. Ricardo. She had almost forgotten his presence. Her eyes, too,
though they moved here and there from a bridge table to a group of people
talking, saw really nothing of the room. She was formulating her strange
experience for the hundredth time to herself, in the hope that somewhere,
in her story, by some chance word, she would be led to its explanation.

"And I am afraid," she continued in a low but--very distinct voice. "I
am afraid that sooner or later I shall see all those cruel dead faces
complete and alive, the faces of living people."

"Living people who are threatening Diana Tasborough," said Mr. Ricardo
gently, so that he might not break the train of Joyce Whipple's thoughts.

"More than threatening her," said Joyce. "Harming her--yes, now already
doing her harm which already it may be too late to repair. No doubt it
sounds mediaeval and--and--ridiculous, but I have a horrible dread that
utterly evil spirits--the elementals are fighting in the darkness for
her soul, that she herself isn't aware of it, but that by some
dispensation the truth is allowed to break through to me."

Joyce threw up her hands suddenly in a little gesture of despair. "But,
you see," she cried, "the moment I begin to piece my fears together into
a pattern of words, they just shred away into little wisps too elusive to
mean anything at all to anybody except myself."

"No," Mr. Ricardo objected. It was his proud thought that he was a
citizen of the world with a very open mind. There were thousands of
strange occurrences, of intuitions, for instance, subsequently justified,
which science could not explain and only the stupid could deride. "I
would never say that the shell of the world mightn't crack for any one of
us and let some streak of light come through, misleading perhaps, true
perhaps--a will-o'-the-wisp, or a sunbeam."

It seemed to him that to no one might this hint of a revelation be more
naturally vouchsafed than to this girl with the delicate, sensitive face
and the grey eyes to which her long silken eyelashes, with their upward
curve, lent so noticeable a look of mystery.

"After all," he continued. "Who knows enough to deny that there may come
messages and warnings?"

"Yes." Joyce Whipple caught at the word. "Repeated warnings. For if I put
the letters away, and after a time take them out and read them again, I
have just the same dreadful vision. I see just the same heave and surge
of water with the unfinished faces washing to and fro."

Mr. Ricardo began to rebuild his recollections of Diana Tasborough,
fitting one in here, and another in there, until he had a fairly clear
picture of the girl. She was tall, with hair of the palest gold, very
pretty but a trifle affected in strange company. She had a way of
fluttering her eyelids and pursing her mouth as she spoke, as if each
word that she dropped was a pearl of rarest price. There was another
quality too.

"She was always a little aloof," he said.

Joyce took him up at once. "Yes, but sedately aloof. Not as if she was
living some mysterious secret life of her own all the time. I know what
you mean. But it really only signified that she was just a little bit
more her own mistress than were most of her friends. She--what shall I
say?--she romped without romping. And don't you see that precisely that
extra hold she had upon herself increases my fears? She is the last
person for whose soul and body the powers of evil should be fighting in
the shadows."

A movement amongst the guests diverted Mr. Ricardo's thoughts. The
evening was growing late. One of the bridge tables had already broken up.
Mr. Ricardo was a practical man.

"But what in the world can I do about it?" he asked.

"You will be in the neighbourhood of the Chateau Suvlac in September?"

"Yes."

"And Diana always has a party for the vintage."

Mr. Ricardo smiled. Diana's parties were famous in the Gironde. For ten
nights or so the windows of that old rose-pink chateau of the sixteenth
century blazed out upon the darkness until dawn. The broad stone terrace
was gay with groups of young people dancing, and the music of their
dances and even their laughter were heard far out upon the river, by the
sailors in their gabares waiting upon the turn of the tide. The hour at
which the guests retired precluded early rising, except perhaps upon the
first day. But somewhere about twelve o'clock the next day they might be
seen picking grapes in attractive costumes and looking rather like the
chorus of a musical comedy whose action took place in a vineyard of
France.

"Yes, she certainly has a party for the vintage," he said.

"Well then, you see what I want you terribly to do," said Joyce, turning
again towards him and plying him--oh, most unfairly!--with all the
glamour of a lovely girl's confidences and appealing eyes. "If you will,
of course. It's a little prayer, of course. I have no claim. But I know
how kind you are--" Did she see the poor man flinch, that she must pile
flattery upon prayer and woo him with the most wistful, plaintive voice?
"I want you to spend as much time as you can at the Chateau Suvlac. You
will be welcome, of course"--she dismissed the ridiculous idea that he
could ever be unwelcome with a flicker of her fingers. "You could watch.
You can find out what is happening to Diana--whether there is anybody
really dangerous to her amongst her associates and then--"

"And then I shall write to you, of course," Mr. Ricardo said, as
cheerfully as these arduous duties so confidently laid upon him enabled
him to do. He was surprised, however, to discover that letters to Joyce
Whipple upon the subject were not to be included in his duties.

"No," she answered with a trifle of hesitation. "Of course I should love
to hear from you--naturally I should, and not only about Diana--but I
can't quite tell where I shall be towards the end of September. No, what
I want you to do is, once you have found out what's wrong, to jump in and
put a stop to it."

Mr. Ricardo sat back in his chair with a very worried expression on his
face. For all his finical ways and methodical habits he was at heart a
romantic. To play the god for five minutes so that a few young people
stumbling in the shadows might walk with sure feet in a serene light--he
knew no higher pleasure than this. But romance must nevertheless be
reasonable, even if it took the shape of so engaging a young lady as
Joyce Whipple. What she was proposing was work for heroes, not for middle
-aged gentlemen who had retired from Mincing Lane. And as he ran over in
his mind the names of more suitable champions, a tremendous fact leaped
into his mind.

"But surely," he stammered in his eagerness. "Diana Tasborough is
engaged. Yes, I am sure of it. To a fine young fellow too. He was in the
Foreign Office and went out of it and into the City, because he didn't
want to be the poor husband of a rich wife." Mr. Ricardo's memory was
working at forced draught, now that he saw the way of escape opening in
front of him, a passage between the Scylla of refusal and the Charybdis
of failure. "Bryce Carter! That's his name! That is his business. You
must describe your experiences to him, Miss Whipple, and--"

But Miss Whipple cut him short, very curtly, whilst the blood mounted
curiously over her throat and painted her cheeks pink. "Bryce Carter has
crashed."

Mr. Ricardo was shocked and disappointed. "In an aeroplane? I hadn't
heard of it. I am so sorry. Crashed? Dear me!"

"I mean," said Joyce patiently, "that Diana has broken off the
engagement. That's another reason why I think something ought to be done
about it. She was very much in love with him and it all went in a week or
two--she gave him no reason. So he's barred out, isn't he? I feel that I
can't really stand aside . . not, of course, that I have anything to do
with it. . . ." Joyce Whipple was rapidly becoming incoherent, whilst the
colour now flamed in her cheeks. "So unless you can help--"

But Mr. Ricardo felt that his position was more delicate than ever. He
was not at all attracted by his companion's confusion; and since the
hoped-for avenue of escape was closed for him, he cast desperately
about for another; and found it.

"I have got it," he said, shaking a finger at her triumphantly.

"What have you got?" Joyce asked warily. 

"The only possible solution of the problem." He was most emphatic about it.
There was to be no
discussion at all. His arrangement must just go through.

"You are the one person indicated to put the trouble right," he declared.
"You are Diana's friend. You know all her other friends. You can propose
yourself for her party at the Chateau Suvlac. You have influence with
her. If there is anyone--dangerous--wasn't that the word you used?--no
one is so likely as you to discover who it is--yes."

He looked her over. There was a vividness about her, a suggestion of
courage and independence which went very well with the straight, slim
figure and the delicate tidiness of her appearance. She seemed
purposeful. This was the age of young women. By all means let one of
them, radiant as Joyce Whipple, blow the trumpet and have the intense
satisfaction of seeing the walls of this new Jericho collapse. He himself
would look on without one pang of envy from the house of the nobleman
with the resonant name, the Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol.

"You! Of course, you!" he exclaimed admiringly.

Suddenly the positions were reversed. So great a discomfort was visible
in Joyce Whipple's movements and in her face that Mr. Ricardo was
astonished. He had chanced upon a quite unexpected flaw in her armoury.
It was she who now must walk delicately.

"No doubt," she admitted with a great deal of embarrassment. "Yes, and I
have been asked to Suvlac…and I shall go if--I can. But I don't think
that I can." She broke out passionately: "I wish with all my heart that I
could! But I shall probably be out of reach. In America. That's why I
said that it was of no use to write to me, and why I wanted to unload the
whole problem upon you. You see"--she looked at Mr. Ricardo shyly and
quickly looked away again--"you see, Cinderellas must be off the
premises by midnight," and with a hurried glance at the clock, "and it's
almost midnight now."

She rose quickly as she spoke, and with a smile and a pleasant word, she
joined a small cluster of young people by the flower-banked grate.
These had obviously been waiting for her, for they wished their hostess
good night and immediately went away.

Mr. Ricardo certainly had the satisfaction of knowing that he had not
committed himself to Joyce Whipple's purposes. But the satisfaction was
not very real. The odd story which she had told him was just the sort of
story which appealed to him; for he had a curious passion for the
bizarre. And even then he was less intrigued by the narrative than by the
narrator. He tried indeed to fix his mind upon the problem of Diana
Tasborough. But the problem of Joyce Whipple popped up instead. Almost
before he realized his untimely behaviour, he had got her dressed up like
some wilful beauty of the Second Empire. There she was, sitting in front
of him, as he drove back to his house in Grosvenor Square, her white
shoulders rising entrancingly out of one of those round, escalloped gowns
which kept up heaven knows how, and spread in voluminous folds about her
feet. Yet even so, with her thus attired before his eyes, as it were, he
began to doubt, to wonder whether he was not growing a trifle old-
fashioned and prejudiced. For after all, could Joyce Whipple, with her
straight, slender limbs, her wrists and hands and feet and ankles as
fragile seemingly as glass, have looked more lovely in any age than she
had looked in the short shimmering frock which she had worn that night?
Her voice certainly supported the argument that her proper period was the
Second Empire. For instead of the brisk high notes to which he was
accustomed, it was soft and low and melodious and had a curiously wistful
little drawl which it needed great strength of character to resist. There
were, however, other points which affected him less pleasantly. Why had
his two suggestions thrown her into so manifest a confusion? What had she
to do with Bryce Carter that she must blush so furiously over the rupture
of his engagement to Diana Tasborough? And--

"Bless my soul," he cried, in the solitude of his limousine, "what was
all this talk of Cinderella?" The glass-slipper portion of that pretty
legend was all very appropriate and suitable. But the rest of it? Miss
Joyce Whipple had come over from the United States with a sister a year
or two older than herself, and almost as pretty--yes. The sister had
married recently and had married well--yes. But before that event, for
two years wherever the fun of the fair was to be found, there also were
the Whipple girls. Deauville and Dinard had known them and the moors of
Scotland, from which Mr. Ricardo was excluded. He himself had seen Joyce
Whipple flaming on the sands of the Lido in satin pyjamas of burnt
orange. For Mr. Ricardo was one of those seemly people who from time to
time looked in at the Lido in order that they might preach sermons about
its vulgarities with a sound and thorough knowledge. Joyce Whipple had
certainly looked rather dazzling in her burnt orange pyjamas--but at
that moment Mr. Ricardo's car stopped at his front door and put an end to
his reflections. Perhaps it was just as well.



III: THE MAN WITH THE BEARD

A MONTH later chance, or destiny, if so large a word can be used in
connection with Mr. Ricardo, conspired with Joyce Whipple. Mr. Ricardo
was drinking his morning coffee at the reasonable hour of ten in his fine
sitting-room on the first floor of the Hotel Majestic, with his
unopened letters in a neat pile at his elbow, when the writing upon the
envelope of the top one caught and held his eye. It was known to him, but
he did not recognize it. He was in a vacuous mood. The sun was pouring in
through the open windows. It was more pleasant to sit and idly speculate
who was his correspondent than to tear open the envelope and find out.
But years ago he had received a lesson in this very room at Aix-les-
Bains on the subject of unopened letters, and, remembering it, he opened
the letter and turned at once to the signature. He was a little more than
interested to read the name of Diana Tasborough. He read the whole letter
eagerly now. The Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol did not, after all,
propose to bring his servants out of Bordeaux and open up his chateau for
the vintage. He would be amongst his vineyards himself for ten days or
so, with no more attendance than his valet and the housekeeper at the
chateau. Under these circumstances it would be more comfortable for Mr.
Ricardo if he put up at the Chateau Suvlac.

There will only be a small--party, and you will complete it, Diana wrote
very politely. You will meet Monsieur de Mirandol at dinner here, and I
shall look forward to your arrival on the 21st of September.

Mr. Ricardo had perused every word of this letter before he realized that
it had provoked in him no uncanny sensations whatever; and when he did
realize that disconcerting fact, he was not a little mortified. But there
it was. Not one dead drowned incomplete malignant face heaved on a tide
between the ink and the paper. No, not one! It is true that the ink was
purple instead of black; and for a moment or two Mr. Ricardo sought an
unworthy consolation in that difference. But his natural honesty made him
reject it. The colour of the ink could be only the most superficial
circumstance.

"Not one dead drowned face, not a suggestion of evil, not a pang of
alarm," Mr. Ricardo announced to himself as he nicked the letter away
with considerable indignation. "And yet I am no less sensitive than other
people."

It might be, of course, that if he suspended his mind more thoroughly he
in his turn might receive the thrill of a message from the world beyond.
It was certainly worth an experiment.

"My best plan," he argued, "will be to shut my eyes tight and think of
nothing whatever for five minutes. Then I will read the letter again."

He shut his eyes accordingly with the greatest determination. He was
modest. He did not ask for very much. If he saw something pink and round
like a jelly-fish when he opened his eyes, he would be content and his
pride quite restored. But he must give himself time. He allowed what he
took to be a space of five minutes. Then he opened his eyes, pounced upon
the letter--and received one of the most terrible shocks of his life. On
the table, by the letter, rested a hand, and beyond the hand an arm. Mr.
Ricardo with startled eyes followed the line of the arm upwards, and then
uttering a sharp cry like the bark of a dog he slid his chair backwards.
He blinked, as well he might do. For sitting over against him, on the
other side of the table, sprung silently; heaven knew whence, sat a
brigand--no less--a burly brigand of the most repulsive and menacing
appearance. A black cloak was wrapped about his shoulders in the Spanish
style, a big, unkempt, bristling beard grew like a thicket upon his face,
and crushed upon his brows he wore a high--crowned, broad--brimmed soft
felt hat. He sat amazingly still and gazed at Mr. Ricardo with lowering
eyes as though he were watching some obnoxious black beetle.

Mr. Ricardo was frightened out of his wits. He sprang up with his heart
racing in his breast. He found somewhere a shrill piercing voice with
which to speak.

"How dare you? What are you doing in my room, sir? Go out before I have
you flung into prison! Who are you?"

Upon that the brigand, with a movement swift as the shutter of a camera,
lifted up his beard, which hung by two bent wires upon his ears, until it
projected from his forehead, leaving the lower part of his face exposed.

"I am Hanaudski. The King of the Tchekas," said the alarming person, and
with another swift movement he nicked the beard back into its proper
position.

Mr. Ricardo sank down into his chair, exhausted by this second shock
which trod so quickly upon the heels of the first.

"Really!" was all that he had the breath or the wit to say. "Really!"

Thus did Monsieur Hanaud, the big inspector of the Surete Generale, with
the blue chin of a comedian, renew after a year's interval his
incongruous friendship with Mr. Ricardo. It had begun a lustrum ago in
Aix-les-Bains, and since Hanaud took his holidays at a modest hotel
of this pleasant spa, each August reaffirmed it. Mr. Ricardo was always
aware that he must pay for this friendship.--For now he was irritated to
the limits of endurance by Hanaud's reticence when anything serious was
on foot; and now he was urged in all solemnity to expound his views,
which were then rent to pieces, and ridiculed and jumped upon; and again
he found himself as now the victim of a sort of schoolboy impishness
which Hanaud seemed to mistake for humour, and was in any event totally
out of place in a serious person. In return, Mr. Ricardo was allowed to
know the inner terrible truth of a good many strange cases which remained
uncomfortable mysteries to the general public. But there were limits to
the price he was prepared to pay, and this morning Monsieur Hanaud had
stepped beyond them.

"This is too much," said Mr. Ricardo, as soon as he had recovered his
speech. "You come into my room upon tiptoe and unannounced at a time when
I am giving myself up to thought-concentration. You catch me--I admit
it--in a ridiculous position, which is not half so ridiculous as your
own. You are, after all, Monsieur Hanaud, a man of middle age--" And he
broke off helplessly.

There was no use in making reproaches. Hanaud was not listening. He was
utterly pleased with himself. He was absorbed in that pleasure. He kept
lifting up his beard with that incredibly swift movement of his hand,
saying to himself with startling violence, "Hanaudski, the Tcheka King,"
and then nicking down the great valance of matted hair into its original
position.

"Hanaudski, the King of the Tchekas! Hanaudski from Moscow! Hanaudski,
the Terror of the Steppes!"

"And how long do you propose to go on with this grotesque behaviour?" Mr.
Ricardo asked. "I should really be ashamed, even if I were able to excuse
myself on the ground of Gallic levity."

That phrase restored to Mr. Ricardo a good deal of his self-esteem.
Even Hanaud recognized the shrewdness of the blow.

"Aha! You catch me one, my friend. A stinger. My Gallic levity. Yes, it
is a phrase which punishes. But see my defence! How often have you said
to me, and, oh, how much more often have you said to yourself: 'That poor
man Hanaud! He will never be a good detective, because he doesn't wear
false beards. He doesn't know the rules and he won't learn them.' So all
through the winter I grow sad. Then with the summer I shake myself
together. I say: 'I must have my dear friend proud of me. I will do
something. I will show him the detective of his dreams.'"

"And instead, you showed me a cut-throat," Mr. Ricardo replied coldly.

Hanaud disconsolately removed his trappings and folded them neatly in a
pile. Then he cocked his head at his companion. "You are angry with me?"

Mr. Ricardo did not demean himself to reply to so needless a question. He
returned to his letter; and for a little while the temperature of the
room even on that morning of sunlight was low. Hanaud, however, was
unabashed. He smoked black cigarette after black cigarette, taking them
from a bright blue paper packet, with now and then a whimsical smile at
his ruffled friend. And in the end Mr. Ricardo's curiosity got the better
of his indignation.

"Here is a letter," he said, and he took it across the room to Hanaud.
"You shall tell me if you find anything odd about it."

Hanaud read the address of an hotel in Biarritz, the signature and the
letter itself. He turned it over and looked up at Mr. Ricardo.

"You draw my leg, eh?" he said; and proud, as he always was, of his
mastery of English idioms, he repeated the phrase. "Yes, you draw my
leg."

"I don't draw your leg," Mr. Ricardo answered with a touch of his recent
testiness. "A most unusual expression."

Hanaud took the sheet of paper to the window and held it up to the light.
He felt it between his fingers, and he saw his companion's eyes brighten
eagerly. There could be no doubt that Mr. Ricardo was very much in
earnest about this simple invitation.

"No," he said at length. "I read nothing but that you are bidden to the
Chateau Suvlac for the vintage by a lady. I congratulate you, for the
Bordeaux of the Chateau Suvlac is amongst the most delicate of the second
growths."

"That, of course, I knew," said Mr. Ricardo.

"To be sure," Hanaud agreed hastily and with all possible deference. "But
I find nothing odd in this letter."

"You were feeling it delicately with the tips of your fingers, as though
some curious sensation passed from it into you."

Hanaud shook his head.

"A mere question in my mind whether there was anything strange in the
texture of the paper. But no! It is what a thousand hotels supply to
their clients. What troubles you, my friend?"

With even more hesitation than Joyce Whipple had used, Mr. Ricardo
repeated the account which she had given to him of her disquieting
reactions to letters written in that hand. Joyce had confessed that even
to herself, when she came to translate them into spoken words, they
shredded away into nothing at all. How much more elusive they must sound
related now at second hand to this hard-hearted trader in realities?
But Hanaud did not scoff. Indeed, a look of actual discomfort deepened
the lines upon his face as the story proceeded, and when Mr. Ricardo had
finished he sat for a little while silent and strangely disturbed.
Finally he rose and placed himself in a chair at the table opposite to
his friend.

"I tell you," he said, his elbows on the cloth and his hands clasped
together in front of him. "I hate such tales as these. I deal with very
great matters, the liberties and lives of people who have just that one
life in that one body. Therefore I must be very careful, lest wrong be
done. If through fault of mine you do worse than lose five years out of
your few, if you keep them, but keep them in hardship and penance,
nothing can make my fault up to you. I must be always sure--yes, I must
always know before I move. I must be able to say to myself, 'This man or
that woman has deliberately done this or that thing which the law
forbids,' before I lay the hand upon the shoulder. But a story like yours
--and I ask myself, 'What do I know? Can I ever be sure?'"

"Then you don't laugh?" cried Mr. Ricardo, at once relieved and
impressed.

Hanaud threw wide his hands. "I laugh--yes--with my friends, at my
friends, as I hope they laugh with me and at me. I am human--yes. But
stories like this one of yours make me humble too. I don't laugh at them.
I know men and women who have but to look into a crystal and they see
strange people moving in strange rooms, and all more vivid than scenes
upon a stage. But I? I see nothing--never! Never! It is I who am blind?
Or that other who is crazy? I don't know. But sometimes I am troubled by
these questions. They are not good for me. No! They make me uneasy about
myself--yes, I doubt Hanaud! Conceive that, if it is possible!"

He unclasped his hands and flung out his arms with something burlesque
and extravagant in the gesture. But Mr. Ricardo was not deceived. His
friend had confessed the truth. There were moments when Hanaud doubted
Hanaud--moments when he, like Mr. Ricardo, was aware of cracks in the
opal crust.

Hanaud bent his eyes again upon that handwriting which had so alarming a
message for just one person alone, and not an atom of significance for
the rest.

"She has broken off her engagement--this young lady. Miss Tasborough,"
he said, pronouncing the name as Tasbruff. "That is curious too." He sat
for a moment or two in an abstraction. "There are three explanations, my
friend, of which we may take our choice. One. Your Miss Whipple is
playing some trick on you, for some end we do not know of. To establish
her credit--after some-thing has happened. To be able to say: 'I
foresaw--I tried to avert it. I warned Mr. Ricardo.' Eh? Have you
thought of that?"

He nodded his head slowly and emphatically at his friend, who certainly
had not thought of anything of the kind. But the notion disturbed Mr.
Ricardo a little now. He had after all been troubled on his way home
after that conversation. Troubled by an excuse which Joyce Whipple had
given for her own inability to interfere. "Cinderellas must be off the
premises by midnight." What sort of an excuse was that for a young lady
with a pipe-well of oil in California? No, it certainly wouldn't do!

But Hanaud, reading his thoughts, raised a warning hand. "Let us not run
too fast. There are still two explanations. The second? Miss Whipple is
an hysterical--she must make excitements. She is vain, as the hysterical
invariably are."

Here Mr. Ricardo shook his head; as emphatically as a moment ago Hanaud
had nodded his. That spruce young lady with tidiness for her monomark
dwelt thousands of leagues away from the country of hysteria. Mr. Ricardo
preferred explanation number one. It was more likely and infinitely more
thrilling. But he must not be in a hurry.

"And your third explanation?" he asked. Hanaud pushed the letter back to
Ricardo and rose from his chair, slapping his hands against his hips.

"Why, simply that she was speaking the truth. That some warning came to
her through that handwriting, even though the writer knew nothing of the
warning she was sending."

Hanaud turned away to the window and stood for a while looking out over
the little pleasant spa, its establishment of baths down there by the
park, its gay casino over there, and its villas and hotels shining
amongst green streets. But he was deep in his own reflections. He might
have been gazing at a wall for all that he saw. Mr. Ricardo had seen him
in such a mood before, and he knew that this was a moment which it would
be definitely inadvisable to interrupt. A sensation of awe stole over
him. He felt the floor of the opal very brittle beneath his feet.

Hanaud turned his head towards his companion, without in any other way
relaxing his attitude.

"The Chateau Suvlac is thirty kilometres from Bordeaux?" he asked.

"Thirty-eight and a half," Mr. Ricardo replied helpfully. He was
nothing if not accurate.

Hanaud turned once again to the window. But a minute afterwards, with a
great heave of his shoulders, he shook his perplexities from him.

"I am on my holiday," he cried. "Let me not spoil it! Come! Your servant,
the invaluable Thomson, shall pack up my Hanaudski paraphernalia and send
it back at your expense to the Odeon Theatre from which I borrowed it
yesterday. You and I, we will motor in your fine car to the Lake Bourget,
where we will take our luncheon, and then like good wholesome tourists we
will make an excursion on the steamboat."

He was all gaiety and good-humour. But he had broken in upon the sacred
curriculum of his holiday; and all that day, as Mr. Ricardo was aware,
some grave speculations were with an effort held at bay.



IV: RIDDLES FOR MR. RICARDO

MR. RICARDO progressed in a leisurely fashion from Bordeaux, staying a
day here and a night there, and arrived at the Chateau Suvlac at six
o'clock on the evening of the twenty-first of September, a Wednesday.
The day of the week is important. For the last mile he had driven along a
private road which sloped gently upwards. On the top of this rise stood
the house, a deep quadrangle of rose-pink stone with its two squat
round turrets breaking the line of the main building at each end, and the
two long wings stretching out to the road. The front of the quadrangle
was open, and in the middle of this space rose a high arch completely by
itself, like some old triumphal arch of Rome. This side of the house
looked to the south-west, and the ground fell away from it in a slope
of vineyard to a long and wide level of pasture. At the end of this plain
of grass there rose a definite hill upon which, through a screen of
trees, a small white house could just be seen. As Mr. Ricardo stood with
his back to the Chateau Suvlac, stretching his legs after his long drive,
he saw that a secondary road struck off at the end of the sloping
vineyard, descended the incline, passed a group of farm buildings and a
garage just where the vineyard joined the pasture-land, but on the
opposite side of the road, and climbed again towards the small white
house.

No one of the house-party was at home except the aunt and chaperon,
Mrs. Tasborough, who was lying down. Mr. Ricardo was served with a cup of
tea by Jules Amadee, the young manservant, in the big drawing-room,
which opened on to the stone terrace and looked out over the wide Gironde
to the misty northern shore. Having drunk his tea he sauntered out on to
the terrace. Four shallow steps led down into a garden of lawns and
flowers, and on his right hand a closely planted avenue of trees sloped
almost to the hedge at the bottom of the garden, sheltering the house and
shutting out from its view the massive range of chais where the wine was
stored and the big vats were housed.

Mr, Ricardo walked down across the lawn to the hedge and, passing through
a gate on to a water meadow, saw a little to his right a tiny harbour
with a landing-stage to which a gabare, one of those sloop-rigged
heavy sailing boats which carry the river trade, was moored. A captain
and two hands were engaged in unloading stores for the house. Mr.
Ricardo, curious as ever, made his inquiries. The captain, a big black-
bearded man, was very willing to accept a cigarette and break off his
work.

"Yes, monsieur, these are my two sons. We keep the work in the family.
No, the gabare is not mine yet. Monsieur Webster, the agent of
mademoiselle, bought her and put me in charge, and when I pay off the
cost she will be mine. Soon?" The captain flung out his arms in a gesture
of despair. "It is difficult to grow rich on the Gironde. For half of our
lives we are waiting for the tide. See, monsieur! But for those cursed
tides, I could finish my work here, and start back for Bordeaux later in
the night. But no! I must wait for the flow and I shall not put out until
six o'clock in the morning. Ah, it is difficult for the poor to live,
monsieur." He had his full share of the French peasant's compassion for
himself, but he was sitting on the stout bulwark of the boat and he began
to stroke and caress the wood as though there were nothing nearer to his
heart. "The gabare is a good gabare," he continued. "She will last for
many years, and perhaps I shall own her sooner than a lot of people
think."

His little eyes, set too close together under heavy black eyebrows,
gleamed unpleasantly. He had not only the self-pity of his kind but its
avarice too. He was not, however, very clever, Mr. Ricardo inferred. No
man could be clever who paraded such an air of cunning before a stranger.
The captain, however, waked to the knowledge that his two sons had
stopped working too. He thumped upon the bulwark.

"Rascals and good-for-nothings, it is not to you that the gentleman
talks! To work!" he cried in a rage. "Bah! You are only fit to turn the
paddles of Le Petit Mousse in the public gardens."

Mr. Ricardo smiled. He had sauntered through the public gardens at
Bordeaux only yesterday. He had seen Le Petit Mousse, a little pleasure
boat shaped like a swan, floating on an ornamental water. It had two
little paddle wheels which were turned by two little boys, and on Sundays
and fete days it set out upon adventurous little voyages under the palms
and chestnuts.

The youths resumed their work, and Mr. Ricardo turned away from the
little dock. He noticed, without paying any particular attention to the
circumstance, the name upon her bows--La Belle Simone. He would probably
never have noticed it at all, but the first two words of it were
weathered and the third stood out glaringly in fresh white paint.
Inquisitiveness made him ask: "You have changed her name?"

"Yes. I named her La Belle Diane. A little compliment, you understand.
But Monsieur Webster said no, I must change it. For mademoiselle would
think she looked the fool if ever she perceived it. Not that mademoiselle
perceives very much these days," and his little black eyes glittered
between half-closed lids. "However, I changed it."

Mr. Ricardo turned away. He walked back along the broad avenue and saw
beyond the border of trees, on the far side from the house, a little
chalet of two storeys, which stood by itself in an open space, and was
approached by a small white gate and a garden bright with flowers. It was
now, however, seven o'clock, and without exploring it Mr. Ricardo
returned to the drawing-room. There was still no sign of the house-
party. He rang for Jules Amadee, and was conducted by him to his bedroom
at the very end of the eastern wing. It was a fine big room with two
windows, one in the front which commanded the sloping vineyard, the
pasture-land and the wooded hill opposite, the other at the side, looking
upon the avenue and affording a glimpse of the little chalet beyond. Mr.
Ricardo dressed with the scrupulous attention to his toilet which not for
the kingdom of Tartary would he have modified; and he was still giving
the final caress to the butterfly bow of his cravat when, over the top of
the looking-glass, he saw a youngish man in a dinner-jacket cross the
avenue towards the chateau. The reason for the chalet was now clear to
Mr. Ricardo.

"A guest-house for the younger bachelors," said he. "Thomson, my pumps
and the shoehorn, if you please."

He walked down the long corridor--he was astonished to notice what a
large tract of ground the house covered, and how many empty rooms stood
with their doors open--turned to the left at the end of it, and came to
the drawing-room, which was in the very centre of the main building. As
he stood at the door, the hall and the front door were just behind him. He
stood there for a few moments, listening to a chatter of voices and
invaded by an odd excitement. Was he to solve by one flash of insight the
mystery of Joyce Whipple's letters? Was he to look round the room and
identify by an inspiration the sinister figure of the person who had
detained Diana Tasborough in the seclusion of Biarritz throughout the
summer?

"Now," he said to himself firmly. "Now," and with a gesture of melodrama
he flung open the door and stepped swiftly within. He was a little
disappointed. Certainly there was a moment of silence, but the abruptness
of his entrance accounted for that. No one flinched, and the interrupted
conversations broke out again.

Diana Tasborough, looking as pretty as ever in a pale green frock,
hurried to him.

"I am so glad that you could come, Mr. Ricardo," she said pleasantly.
"You know my aunt, don't you, very well?"

Mr. Ricardo shook hands with Mrs. Tasborough.

"But--I am not sure--I think Mrs. Devenish is a stranger to you."

Mrs. Devenish was a young woman of about twenty-five years, tall, dark
of hair, with a bright complexion, and black liquid eyes. She was
brilliant rather than beautiful, big, and she suggested to Mr. Ricardo
storms and wild passions. It passed through his mind that if he ever had
to take a meal with her alone, it should be tea and not supper. She gave
him her right hand negligently, and by chance Mr. Ricardo's gaze fell
upon the other. Mrs. Devenish wore no wedding-ring, no jewels indeed of
any description.

"No, I don't think we have ever met," she said with a smile, and suddenly
--it was certainly not due to her voice, for he had never heard her utter
a word before, it may have been due to some gesture of her hand, or to
some movement of her body as she turned to resume her conversation, it
was probably due to the slowness of Mr. Ricardo's perceptions--anyway,
suddenly he was conscious of a thrill of triumph. So quickly had he
solved Joyce Whipple's problem. Mrs. Devenish was the dominating force
which menaced Diana Tasborough. She was the malignant one. It was true
that he had not met her before, but he had seen her, and in just those
morbid circumstances which settled the question finally.

"Yet, I saw you, I think, exactly nine days ago in Bordeaux," he said,
and he could have sworn that terror, sheer, stark naked terror, stared at
him out of the depths of her eyes. But it was there only for a moment.
She looked Mr. Ricardo over from his pumps to his neat grey hair and
laughed.

"Where?" she asked; and Mr. Ricardo was silent. It was an awkward, bold
question. He was more than a little shy of answering it. For he would be
accusing himself of a taste for morbidities if he did. He might look a
little puerile, too.

"Perhaps I was wrong," he said, and Mrs. Devenish laughed again and not
too pleasantly.

Mr. Ricardo was rescued from his uncomfortable position by his young
hostess, who laid her hand upon his arm.

"You must now make the acquaintance of your host that was to have been,"
she said. "Monsieur Le Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol."

Mr. Ricardo had been startled by the previous introduction. He was
shocked by this one. No doubt, he reflected, there were all sorts of
Crusaders, but he could not imagine this one storming the walls of Acre.
He was a tall, heavy, gross man with a rubicund childish face, round and
dimpled; he had a mouth much too small for him and fat red lips, and he
was quite bald.

"I shall look upon your visit to me as merely postponed, Mr. Ricardo," he
said in a thin, piping voice, and he gave Mr. Ricardo a hand which was
boneless and wet. Mr. Ricardo made up his mind upon the instant that he
would rather abandon altogether his annual pilgrimage than be the guest
of this link with the Crusaders. He had never in his life come across so
displeasing a personage. He should have been ridiculous, but he was not.
He made Mr. Ricardo uncomfortable, and the feel of his wet, boneless hand
lingered with the visitor as something disgusting. He could hardly
conceal his relief when Diana Tasborough turned him towards the man whom
he had seen crossing from the chalet.

"This is Mr. Robin Webster, my manager, and my creditor," said Diana with
a charming smile. "For I owe to him the prosperity of the vineyard."

Mr. Webster disclaimed the praise of his mistress very pleasantly. "I
neither made the soil nor planted the vines, nor work any miracles at
all, Mr. Ricardo. Mine is a simple humble office which Miss Tasborough's
kindness makes a pleasure rather than a toil."

The disclaimer might have sounded just a trifle too humble but for the
attractive frankness of his manner. He was of the average height with
quite white hair, and a pair of bright blue eyes. But the white hair was
in him no sign of age. Mr. Ricardo put him down at somewhere between
thirty-five and forty years of age, and could not remember to have seen
a man of a more handsome appearance. He was clean-shaven, fastidious in
his dress, with some touch of the exquisite. He spoke with a certain
precision in his articulation which for some unaccountable reason was
familiar to Mr. Ricardo; and altogether Mr. Ricardo was charmed to find
anyone so companionable and friendly.

"I shall look forward to seeing something of the vintage under your
guidance tomorrow, Mr. Webster," he said; and a voice hailed him from the
long window which stood open to the terrace.

"And not one word of greeting for me, Mr. Ricardo?"

Joyce Whipple was standing in the window relieved against the evening
light. Of the anxiety which had clouded her face the last time he had
seen her, there was not a trace. She was dressed in a shimmering frock of
silver lace, there was a tinge of colour in her face, and she smiled at
him joyously.

"So, after all, you put off your return to America," he said, advancing
eagerly towards her.

"For a month, which is almost ended," she replied. "I am leaving here
tomorrow for Cherbourg."

"If we let you go," said de Mirandol gallantly; a phrase which Mr.
Ricardo was to remember.

Mr. Ricardo was introduced to two young ladies from the neighbourhood and
two young men from Bordeaux, none of whose names were sufficiently
pronounced for him to distinguish them. But they were merely guests of
the evening, and Mr. Ricardo was not concerned with them.

"For whom do we wait now, Diana?" Mrs. Tasborough's voice broke in rather
pettishly.

"Monsieur l'Abbe, aunt," Diana answered.

"You should persuade your friends to be punctual," said the aunt, and
there was no gentleness in that rebuke. Mr. Ricardo had been startled and
shocked. Here was a third riddle to surprise him. He remembered Mrs.
Tasborough as the most submissive of pensioned relations, a chaperon who
knew that her duties did not include interference, a silent symbol of
respectability. Yet here she was interfering and talking with all the
authority in the world. No less surprising was Diana's meekness in reply.

"I am very sorry, aunt. The Abbe is so seldom late for his dinner that I
am afraid that he has met with an accident. I certainly sent the car for
him in good time."

Mrs. Tasborough shrugged her shoulders, and was not appeased. Mr. Ricardo
looked from one to the other. The old lady in her dowdy, old-fashioned
dress sitting throned in a great chair, the pretty niece in her modern
fineries humble as a village maid. There was a reversal of positions here
which thoroughly intrigued Mr. Ricardo. He glanced towards Joyce Whipple,
but the door was opening, and Jules Amadee announced:

"Monsieur l'Abbe Fauriel."

A little round man in a cassock, with a ruddy face, thick features and a
small pair of shrewd twinkling grey eyes, bustled into the room in a
condition of heat and perturbation. "I am late, madame. I express my
apologies upon my knees," he protested, raising Mrs. Tasborough's hand to
his lips. It was noticeable perhaps that he looked to her as his hostess.
"But when you hear of my calamity you will forgive me. My church has been
robbed."

"Robbed!" Joyce Whipple cried in a most curious voice. There was dismay
in it, but not surprise. The robbery was unexpected, and yet, now that it
had happened, not unlikely.

"Yes, mademoiselle. A sacrilege!" and the little man threw up his hands.

"You shall tell us about it at the dinner-table," said Mrs. Tasborough,
cutting him short. Mrs. Tasborough was a Protestant. At home she sat
under a man who preached in a Geneva gown. The robbery of a Roman
Catholic church was to her a very minor offence, and dinner should not be
delayed by it.

"It is true, madame; I forget my manners," said the Abbe Fauriel, and,
indeed, he had barely time to greet the rest of the party before dinner
was announced.

The rest of that evening passed apparently as uneventfully as most
evenings pass in country houses. But Mr. Ricardo, whose faculty of
observation was keyed up to a sharper pitch than usual, did notice during
the course of it some things which were odd. The Abbe Fauriel's
complaint, for instance. No money had been stolen, nor any sacred vessel
from his church, but a vestment of fine linen, the alb, which he wore
when he celebrated Mass, and a little scarlet cassock and white surplice
used by the young acolyte who swung the censer.

"It is unbelievable!" the old man cried. "They were of value, to be sure.
My dear Madame de Fontanges, now dead, presented them to the church. But
they must be cut up at once and then their value is gone. Who would
commit a sacrilege for so small a gain?"

"You have, of course, informed the police," said the Vicomte de Mirandol.

"But understand, Monsieur Le Vicomte, that it is only within the hour
that I discovered my loss. You would all realize"--and a twinkle of
humour lit up his face--"if you were not all heathens, as you are, that
tomorrow is the feast of Saint Matthew, a most sacred day in the Calendar
of the Church. I went to the sacristy to assure myself that those
garments of high respect were in order, and they are gone. However,
Madame Tasborough, I must not spoil your evening with too much of my
misfortune," and he swerved off into an amusing dissection of the foibles
of his parishioners.

A small interruption brought him in a moment or two to so abrupt a stop
that all eyes were turned on the interrupters. Mrs. Devenish was the
cause of the interruption. She had been taking no part in any of the
conversation, beyond answering at random when she was addressed, and sat
occupied by some secret thought of her own. But once she shivered, and so
violently that the little bubbling cry which people will utter
involuntarily when they are freezing, broke from her lips. The sound
recalled her to her environment, and she glanced guiltily across the
table. Her eyes encountered Joyce Whipple's, and Joyce suddenly exclaimed
in a queer, sharp, high-pitched voice:

"It's no use blaming me, Evelyn. It's not I who dispense the cold," and
then she caught herself up too late, her face flushed scarlet, and in her
turn she looked quickly from neighbour to neighbour. This was the first
sign which Mr. Ricardo got, that under the smooth flow of talk nerves
were strained to the loss of self-control by secret preoccupations. The
Abbe Fauriel was even quicker than Mr. Ricardo to notice it. His eyes
darted swiftly to Evelyn Devenish, and from her to Joyce Whipple. His
face, in spite of the long, drooping nose and the thick jaw, became alert
and birdlike.

"So, mademoiselle," he said slowly to Joyce, "it is not you who dispense
the cold. Who, then?"

He did not insist upon an answer, but a moment or two later, when, as if
to cover Joyce Whipple's confusion, the chatter in her neighbourhood
broke out afresh, Mr. Ricardo noticed that almost imperceptibly he made
the sign of the Cross upon his breast.

So far Mr. Ricardo was little more than curious and excited. But a
quarter of an hour afterwards he caught a momentary glimpse of passion
which shook him from its sheer ferocity. The men had retired from the
dinner-table with the ladies, in the French fashion, and had split up
into little groups. Joyce Whipple was sitting in a low chair at the side
of the hearth, her knees crossed and one slender foot in its silver
slipper swinging restlessly, whilst on a couch at her elbow Robin Webster
was talking to her in a low voice and with an attention so complete as to
make it clear that there was no one else in the room for him at that
moment. The Vicomte de Mirandol was chatting with Mrs. Tasborough and the
Abbe. Evelyn Devenish stood near the window in a group with Diana and the
two young Frenchmen. Suddenly from that group sprang a phrase which was
heard all over the room.

"The Cave of the Mummies."

It was one of the Frenchmen who uttered it, but Evelyn Devenish took it
up. The Cave of the Mummies is a famous show-place of Bordeaux. Under
the soaring tower of St. Michel in the open square in front of the church
there is an underground cavern where bodies, mummified by some rare
quality of the earth in which they were originally buried, stand mounted
in a row upon iron rests for all the world to see at a price of a few
pence.

"It is a scandal," cried the Abbe. "Those poor people should be put
decently away. It is a nightmare, that cavern, with that old woman
showing off the points of her exhibits by the light of a candle!" He
shrugged his shoulders with disgust and looked at Joyce Whipple. "Now I,
too, mademoiselle--yes, now I, too, feel the cold."

Evelyn Devenish laughed. "Yet we all go to that spectacle, Monsieur
l'Abbe. I plead guilty. I was there eight or nine days ago. It was there,
too, I think, that Mr. Ricardo saw me."

She challenged that unhappy gentleman, with a smile of amusement, to deny
the charge. But, alas, he could not. A taste for the bizarre was always
at odds with his respectability.

"It is true," he said lamely, shifting his weight from one foot on to the
other. "I had heard so much of it--I had so often passed through
Bordeaux without seeing it. But now that I have seen it, I take my stand
with Monsieur l'Abbe." He recovered his assurance and felt as virtuous as
he now looked. "Yes, a dreadful exhibition; it should be closed."

Evelyn Devenish laughed again, quizzing him. "A most unpleasant young
woman," said Mr. Ricardo to himself, "bold and without respect." He was
relieved when she averted her eyes from him. But he observed that they
travelled slowly round until they reached Joyce Whipple, and there for a
moment they stayed, half hidden by the eyelids; but not hidden enough to
conceal the hatred which grew slowly from a spark in the depths to a
blaze of devouring fire. Mr. Ricardo had never seen in his life the
evidence of a passion so raw. It was covetous to punish and hurt. The
dark eyes could not leave, it seemed, the girl radiant in her silvery
frock. They rested with a dreadful smile upon the foot swinging in its
gleaming slipper and ran up the slim leg in its silken sheath to the bent
knee. Mr. Ricardo understood by a flash of insight the cruel thought
behind the eyes and the smile. "Oh, certainly, it would have to be to tea
and not to supper," he said to himself, almost in an agony as he thought
of that imaginary meal alone with Evelyn Devenish which his fears had
conjured up.

Diana Tasborough crossed the room to him. "You will play whist, with my
aunt and the Abbe and de Mirandol, won't you?" she pleaded. "It must be
whist, for the Abbe has never played bridge"; and plaguing his brains to
recollect how the game of whist was played, he was led to the card-
table.

So far, then, Mr. Ricardo had undoubtedly earned some good marks, not so
much for putting two and two together as for discerning that there might
be two and two which would possibly want putting together afterwards. But
at this hour, half-past nine by the clock, he ceased to be meritorious,
and the most important circumstance of the whole evening completely
escaped his observation. He was really too much occupied in the effort to
revive his recollections of whist; which was made even more difficult by
the action of the younger members of the party.

The dining-room, drawing-room and library of the Chateau Suvlac were
arranged in a suite, the drawing-room being in the middle; and all of
these rooms had windows to the ground opening upon the broad terrace.
Diana, as soon as the elders were seated at the card-table, went into
the library and set a gramophone playing. Within the minute all the young
people were dancing upon the terrace. The connecting door between the
salon and the library was shut, it is true, but the night was warm and
all the windows stood open. So the music with its pleasant lilt floated
in to the card players, and joined with the rhythmical scuffle of the
dancing shoes upon the flags to distract Mr. Ricardo from his game. It
was the time of moonlight, but the moon was obscured by a thin fleece of
white clouds so that a pale silvery and rather unearthly light made the
garden and the wide river beyond a fairyland of magic. On the far shore a
light twinkled here and there through a mist, and close at hand, the long
avenue of trees, now black as yews and motionless as metal, protected the
terrace as though it was some secret and ancient place of sacrifice. But
instead of sacrifices, Mr. Ricardo saw the flash of white shoulders, the
sparkling embroideries upon the light frocks of the girls, the dancers
appearing, disappearing, gliding, revolving, and altogether he made so
many mistakes that his fellow players were delighted when the rubber came
to an end. Robin Webster came in from the terrace. "You will excuse me,
Mrs. Tasborough. The morning begins for me at daybreak, and I have still
a few preparations to make before I can go to bed."

"I too," said the Vicomte de Mirandol, rising from his chair, a trifle
abruptly perhaps. "The Mirandol wine will not compare with the Chateau
Suvlac, alas! Yet I must take just as much care of it." He looked out of
the window rather anxiously. "A good shower or two, not too violent, just
for a couple of hours during the night--that would help us, Monsieur
Webster. Yes, two hours of gentle rain--I beg you to pray for them,
Monsieur l'Abbe."

Mr. Robin Webster shook hands with Mr. Ricardo. "You said that you would
like to come round with me tomorrow," he said. "I live in the chalet
beyond the avenue. It is my office too. You will find me there or about
the chais."

He went out through the window, Monsieur de Mirandol through the door to
the front of the house, where his car waited for him. Jules Amadee
brought in a tray of refreshments, and Mrs. Tasborough lifted her voice
petulantly.

"Diana! Diana!" she cried. "Will you please come in at once and prepare
his nightcap for Monsieur l'Abbe!"

The Abbe, however, would by no means break in upon the girl's enjoyments.
"I can mix my grog very well for myself, madame. Let mademoiselle dance,
and so I can put a little more of your excellent whisky into my glass
than it would be seemly for me to allow mademoiselle to do."

As he moved towards the table Joyce Whipple stood in his way. "And I,"
she said, laughing, "since I know nothing of the proper proportions, will
in my ignorance put more whisky into your glass than you would."

Joyce Whipple, in a word, took possession of the buffet. It was in a
corner of the room and she stood with her back to the company. A lemonade
for Mrs. Tasborough, a whisky and soda for Mr. Ricardo, a hot grog for
Monsieur l'Abbe. The young people drifted back into the room. Joyce
Whipple served them all in their turn with beer and sirops and spirits,
laughing gaily all the while, and proclaiming that she had a future as a
barmaid. Diana came from the library and was the last to join the group.

"I shall have a brandy and soda with a lot of ice," she said, and again
Mr. Ricardo was conscious of an unsteady note in her voice, and a laugh
which threatened to rise out of gaiety into hysteria.

Joyce threw a quick glance backwards over her shoulder.

"So, after all, I do dispense the cold," she cried, and in her case, too,
the words and the laughter on which they were launched were edged with
excitement, and undoubtedly the glass which she held clattered against
the siphon when she filled it, as though her hands trembled.

The party, however, was already breaking up and within a very few minutes
the Chateau Suvlac was silent and Mr. Ricardo back in his own room. He
opened both of the windows. When engaged upon the side-window, he saw
that a light was still burning in a room upon the ground floor of the
chalet. Mr. Robin Webster was still then at work in his office. Looking
out from the front window his gaze wandered over the peaceful stretch of
empty country. The white house upon the hill might have been black for
all that he could make of it. Not a window glimmered anywhere. Mr.
Ricardo wound up his watch and went to bed. It was then ten minutes to
eleven.



V: HANAUD REAPPEARS

MR. RICARDO was not the man to sleep comfortably in a strange bed, and
though he did fall asleep quickly, he awaked whilst it was still dark;
and with a vague uneasiness. He reached up for the light-switch, which
in his house in Grosvenor Square was set into the wall above his head,
and was disconcerted not to find it there. Gradually, however, he
remembered. He was not at home. He was at the Chateau Suvlac, and
discovering the cause of his uneasiness in the unfamiliar environment,
his uneasiness itself departed. But he was now thoroughly awake.

He had his own remedies for this mischance. Sheep were of no use to him.
He had counted most of the sheep upon the South Downs upon an unhappy
night, but having missed one he had been forced to go back and count them
all over again; and his annoyance at his carelessness had kept him awake
till morning. His better plan was to throw open his curtains and raise
his blinds, and the inrush of fresh air through the open windows as a
rule quickly sent him off. He tried this cure now.

First of all he turned on his bedside lamp and looked at his watch. It
was a few minutes before two o'clock in the morning. Then he rose from
his bed and freed the side-window from all its coverings. He noticed
that a light was still burning even at that late hour in the chalet
beyond the avenue, but it was now upon the first floor and not in the
office.

"Mr. Webster has finished his work and is now going to bed," he reflected
with a warm approval of the young man's industry.

The next moment assured him that his judgment was correct. For whilst he
looked, the light flickered and went out. Mr. Ricardo wished the manager
a deeper repose than he was enjoying himself, and passed on to his front
window.

He threw the curtains wide open with a rattle of rings, and wound the
blind up with its roller. The country was spread wide in front of him
upon this side, and the air fresher. The moon had set, leaving the night
dark and clear and the sky gemmed with stars. But it was not the coolness
of the air nor the blaze above his head which kept Mr. Ricardo standing
in so fixed an attitude. When he had taken his last look from this window
before getting into bed more than three hours ago, not one light had been
burning in the white house upon the hill. Now the long range of windows
was ablaze from end to end, shining clear in little oblongs of light
where the front of the house was in full view, and throwing the trees
into relief at the two ends. The building was illuminated like a palace.

"Now, what is the meaning of that?" Mr. Ricardo was asking himself. "Who
in a country district would start the evening at so late an hour? It is
very, very odd."

No answer being forthcoming, and his feet growing cold upon the polished
boards of the floor, he retired to his bed and turned out his lamp. But
his curiosity was thoroughly roused. From his position upon his pillows,
he could see that golden blur upon the darkness. He could not but see it,
he could not but think of it.

"This will never do," he said to himself. "I must try recipe number two."

Recipe number two was a book. But it must be read for itself, not as the
gateway of dreams. If you put the thought of sleep altogether out of your
mind and settled down to your volume, presto! the trick was done. You are
aware suddenly of broad daylight, a cup of tea by your bedside and a lamp
extravagantly burning. Mr. Ricardo's trouble was that he hadn't a book in
his room. Very well then, he must go to the library and take one. So on
went his light again. He got out of bed and into his pumps, draped his
form in a Japanese dressing-gown of flowered silk, and with a box of
matches in his hand stole off along the corridors. He knew their
geography by now, and one match took him to the dining-room door. The
French windows of the three rooms en suite were undraped. He passed
therefore through that room and the salon and into the library without
having to strike a second match. He remembered that there was a light-
switch in the library, close to the long window and just within the door.
He was feeling for it when something dark on the terrace outside flicked
past the panes and vanished. Mr. Ricardo was so startled that he dropped
his box of matches on the floor. He stood in the dark, with his heart
pounding noisily in his breast, not daring to move. And in the silence,
even above the clamour of his heart, he heard a key grate in the lock.

The truth must be told. Mr. Ricardo's immediate impulse was precipitately
to retire. But with an effort he rejected it as unworthy. The thought of
the long corridor, too, through which he must return, daunted him. He
stood his ground, and in a little while the fluttering of panic subsided.
He was his own man again; and being so he could not leave things as they
were, select a book and go quietly back to his bed. For the prospect of
an adventure never failed to thrill him.

He opened the long window very cautiously and stepped out on to the
pavement of the terrace. Far away a star beam trembled on the water of
Gironde. Close to him upon his left the projecting round of the turret
loomed largely, and from the front of it some rays of light streamed out.
Mr. Ricardo moved cautiously forward from the angle made by the turret
and the house wall; the light slipped out at the edges of a curtain drawn
across a long window in the front of the turret. Someone was awake in the
room behind the window. Someone had slid with the swiftness of a snake
into that room and turned a key. Mr. Ricardo was in doubt what to do. He
had heard of strange doings in country houses, even in England. How much
more must he expect them in the gay atmosphere of France!

"I certainly don't want to butt into the middle of some highly illicit
affair," he argued. "On the other hand, who knows what trouble may be
occurring behind that curtained door? A sudden illness perhaps! Perhaps a
crime! At the worst I can be sent about my business. At the best I may be
of help."

Thus he stood and disputed. But his romantic disposition got the upper
hand. He advanced and rapped gently upon the framework of the glass door;
and at once the light went out. But with a speed so instantaneous that
the knock upon the door and the extinction of the light seemed to be not
so much two consecutive movements as two facets of the same one.

Mr. Ricardo had the most uncomfortable sensations. Someone in that room
had heard the sound of his pumps upon the stone slabs of the terrace.
That someone had been ever since half expecting and wholly dreading that
he would knock upon the window, had been ready then with ears alert and
fingers actually on the switch. But who? Mr. Ricardo's eyes could not
pierce those curtains; nor had he the least excuse to renew his signal.
He retired discreetly to his room without troubling to select a book from
the library at all. There he watched one by one the windows on the hill
recede into the night. But whether the emotions through which he had
passed were the cause, or the mere movement and fresh air, he fell at
once into a heavy sleep, and never stirred until the morning.

Indeed, although he dressed with the utmost expedition that he was
capable of, it was after ten o'clock before he was equipped to leave his
room. The vineyards were alive with the stooping figures of peasants
stripping the plants, the house itself as empty as on his arrival
yesterday. Mr. Ricardo walked to the chalet. The office opened directly
on to the little flower garden, but that was empty too. He crossed some
rough grass to the line of chais. The grapes were being brought to the
door in little hand-carts, and thence carried to the wine-presses
above the vats. Robin Webster was standing in the great room on the first
floor, watching the press move backwards and forwards on its rollers. He
looked up at Mr. Ricardo with a smile and extended his left hand, which
Mr. Ricardo took, or rather touched, a trifle haughtily. For he was
punctilious in such matters. He might be nobody of importance, but
youngish managers of vineyards must not behave to him as if they were
dukes and he a hireling.

"You must excuse my left hand," said Robin Webster the next moment. "You
see?"

His right hand was inside his double-breasted jacket, the wrist resting
upon one of the buttons. He drew the hand out and showed that it was
bandaged.

"I did you an injustice," said Mr. Ricardo.

"So I saw," Robin Webster replied with a smile.

"You are badly hurt?"

"A trifle. I came here early this morning, before anyone was about, to
make sure that everything was ready, and as I tried the press I caught my
hand in it. But it is not a wound which needs a doctor."

Once more the curiously precise articulation of the young man struck Mr.
Ricardo as familiar, and yet he could not define it.

"You were up before everyone, then. You had little sleep last night," he
said.

Robin Webster watched the great slab of iron move backwards and forwards
on its rollers, crushing the grapes beneath it. "Do you know we are the
only vineyard which uses machine-driven presses?" he said. "Yes, I was
late last night. No doubt you saw the light in my office when you went to
bed."

"And hours afterwards I saw the light in your bedroom," said Mr. Ricardo.

Once more the press rumbled backwards and forwards. "It must have been
nearly two o'clock in the morning when I put it out," Robin Webster
remarked.

"It was two o'clock to the minute," said Mr. Ricardo.

He strolled away and spent a pleasant morning wandering about the three
hundred and fifty acres of the estate. It was a day of bright sunshine,
with strips of white cloud streaming out here and there in the blue of
the sky. The broad water of the Gironde was dotted with sailing ships at
anchor waiting the turn of the tide to carry them to the river's mouth,
and every now and then a steamer with a fantail of tumbled foam and a
distant throb of engines rushed past towards the port of Bordeaux. Mr.
Ricardo wandered down to the little harbour. It was empty and that was
quite as it should be. The Belle Simone had sailed with the inward tide
at six in the morning. No doubt she was now nearing Bordeaux. But as he
turned away he had a flash of a suspicion that she was doing nothing of
the kind. For sailing merrily upwards from the lower reaches of the river
a gabare was at that moment passing the garden with the sunlight upon her
bows; and she was near enough to the bank for him to see that one word of
her name stood out in a brilliant relief upon the grimed timber. He was
puzzled. Of course, he argued, the Belle Simone might not be the only
boat upon the river which followed the practice of her sex and changed
her name. And yet--! Nothing was too trivial for Mr. Ricardo's
speculations. In a twinkling he scuttled back to the house; in another he
was back again with his expensive field-glasses lifted to his eyes. The
gabare was just opposite to him now. He could read the glistening name
Simone, and there were other words in front of it too discoloured for him
to make out. Undoubtedly this was La Belle Simone, whose captain had been
in such a pother yesterday because he could not start for Bordeaux until
six in the morning. Yet he had put out before the turn of the tide and
gone down with the ebb. What unexpected commission had taken him out in
the dead of night?

"It is all very odd," Mr. Ricardo reflected for the twentieth time since
he had arrived at the Chateau Suvlac. But the oddest thing of all was to
happen to him now.

He went to his room, washed, and brushed his hair. Luncheon was fixed for
half-past twelve. There were still twelve minutes. He walked down the
avenue, and as he returned he heard a motor-car approaching the front of
the house. He mounted on to the terrace and was joined there by Robin
Webster. Both men, thereupon, entered the drawing-room by the window.
Mrs. Tasborough, seated on her throne, was glancing through the newspaper
from Bordeaux which had just arrived. Diana at the centre table, with a
tray of glasses in front of her, was vigorously shaking cocktails. At
that moment the door opening on to the hall was flung open, and Jules
Amadee, with his eyes starting out of his head, broke into the room.

"Madame!" he cried, and again "Madame!" and then a quiet hand pushed him
aside.

A small, square man dressed in a morning coat, with a tricolour sash
about his waist and a bowler hat in his hand, stepped forward and bowed.

"Messieurs, mesdames, I am Herbesthal, the Commissaire of Police. I beg
of you as yet not to distress yourselves."

Spoken in the grave, cool voice of the Commissaire, no beginning could
have been more ominous. Yet it was not that which made Mr. Ricardo utter
a little shrill cry. To his stupefaction, through the doorway he saw
standing in the hall the burly figure of Hanaud. Only a few days ago he
had left the inspector sunning himself at Aix and practising his
deplorable humour upon his friends. Now he was here at the Chateau Suvlac
--on business. His smoothed-out expressionless face was sufficient
evidence of that. Hanaud could see Mr. Ricardo quite clearly, and yet
gave him no sign of recognition. It was all very well for the Commissary
Herbesthal to beg his audience not to distress itself. Mr. Ricardo knew
better. Since Hanaud was here on business, someone was certainly going to
distress himself very much. The Commissaire Herbesthal looked round the
room. He was obviously relieved. He turned towards the door and Hanaud,
in reply, stepped with his noiseless feet into the room. He, too, bowed,
but there was no relief visible upon his face.

"You see," said Herbesthal. "It is all a mistake. Nothing could be more
calm. It's not here that we must look!"

"Pardon me," Hanaud objected. He advanced and bowed again, rather
ridiculously, Mr. Ricardo thought, to Mrs. Tasborough. "Madame, I think,
does not drink the cocktails. She belongs to a more orderly world."

The old lady might have taken the words as a compliment, or as an
unnecessary reflection on her age. She chose the latter interpretation.
For she looked stonily at Hanaud and then turned to the Commissaire;
"And, pray, who is this gentleman?"

Herbesthal was a little shocked. "Madame," he protested, "this gentleman
is the famous Monsieur Hanaud of the Surete Generale of Paris."

The name meant nothing whatever to Mrs. Tasborough. It was known,
however, to Robin Webster. Mr. Ricardo heard him draw in his breath
sharply and ask in a wondering voice:

"What in the world does he want here?" and as Mr. Ricardo looked at him,
he added with a laugh, "Whenever I find myself in the presence of the
police, I begin to ask myself whether after all I have not committed some
crime."

Hanaud meanwhile had not taken his eyes from Mrs. Tasborough's face.

"I ask if madame drinks the cocktails for a reason," he said suavely.
"There are five glasses upon the tray, and if madame avoids the cocktail,
then two of her party are not yet here."

Mr. Ricardo just lifted his shoulders. This was his dear friend at his
worst. He must show off. Everyone must applaud the acuteness of his
observation. A simple question--"Is the whole party present?"--no, that
would not do at all. Mr. Ricardo coined a phrase and stored it for future
use. Hanaud must be on the spot. Diana was no more impressed than Mr.
Ricardo. She gave her cocktail mixer such a shaking that the ice
rattled within it like a handful of pebbles.

"That is so," she answered. "Two of the house-party are absent, but it
is not yet a crime to be late for luncheon. No doubt in time we shall
have inspectors to look after these things."

"Mademoiselle," the Commissaire interrupted quietly. "This is not the
moment for amusement. I beg you to remember that there are two parties to
a crime. The criminal and the victim."

Up to this moment, the two women had been disposed merely to resent the
visit of the police as an intrusion upon their privacy. But the
Commissaire's words were too disquieting to be taken lightly. Mrs.
Tasborough uttered a little cry of fear and sank back in her chair, her
tiny sceptre of authority struck out of her grasp in a second. Diana was
paralysed. She stood with the cocktail mixer still uplifted in her hand,
her eyes fixed in horror upon Hanaud, and the blood receded slowly from
her face until her very lips were white.

"A victim?" she repeated in a shaking voice.

"Let us not be too quick to assume that trouble has visited this house,"
said Hanaud compassionately. "There are two absentees--"

"Evelyn Devenish--" Diana began.

"A lady?" asked Hanaud.

"Yes."

"And the other?"

"Joyce Whipple."

Hanaud started ever so slightly. His eyes did not seek Ricardo's, but he
remained silent for a time. And his silence was more noticeable than his
movement had been.

"You know that young lady?" Robin Webster asked quickly, and Hanaud
looked at him curiously, as though he wondered why the question was put.

"No, monsieur. I have not that good fortune," he replied. "This gentleman
is--?"

"Mr. Robin Webster, my manager," Diana explained.

Hanaud nodded his head and bowed with a smile to Robin Webster.

"Now! Has anyone in this room seen either of these two ladies this
morning?"

At once Webster, Mr. Ricardo, Diana, even Mrs. Tasborough, began to look
quickly and anxiously at each other.

"Have you?"

"No!"

"And you?"

"No!"

No one had seen either of them; and on every face anxiety suddenly
deepened into alarm.

"Of course we have been all very busy this morning," said Diana
hurriedly. She had the air of one trying to convince herself that there
were no real grounds for apprehension. "This is the first day of our
vintage, and there has been, in consequence, an unusual bustle. The house
is awake early, the service disarranged."

"I understand that very well," said Hanaud. "It may well be that your two
friends are still amongst your vines. It is known that young ladies will
pursue a new pastime with an enthusiasm which scorns the hours of meals.
But they will hardly have left the house, bent upon so arduous a morning,
without taking first their little breakfast."

Diana Tasborough crossed the room at once and rang the bell. Jules Amadee
answered it with a suspicious celerity.

"Will you send Marianne to me?" Diana commanded; and Jules Amadee
disappeared.

"Aha! He listens at the door, that one," said Hanaud with a grin. "Yet so
do we all--each in our different way. We strain our ears for the little
private conversation a few feet away. I, Hanaud, if I see an open letter
on a table, I must read it, if I can manoeuvre myself near enough. No,
let us not blame Jules Amadee!"

He spoke lightly, and because of his very lightness Mr. Ricardo's heart
lost a beat. Both Hanaud and the Commissaire were too eager in their
encouragements, too delicate in their approach, to leave him in any doubt
that they were concealing to the very last possible moment some
unutterable horror.

"Marianne is your housemaid, I suppose," said Hanaud.

Mr. Ricardo reflected how curious it was that in a crisis the truth of
things should proclaim itself so naturally that not a soul was surprised
by the most sudden of changes. Hanaud addressed himself now altogether to
Diana. Mrs. Tasborough with her little reprimands and complaints was no
longer of any account whatsoever. She did not even resent her
dethronement. Diana, yesterday the dutiful ward, was now the unquestioned
mistress and chatelaine.

"Marianne is everything, Monsieur Hanaud," Diana answered with the
glimmer of a smile, "as only a Frenchwoman can be. She is the wife of
Jules Amadee, and since for the great part of the year the chateau is
empty, they are the only permanent servants we have. During this month or
two she gets some assistance from the village, but very reluctantly, and
hates everybody she engages and would never let any one of them approach
her patrons or any of their guests."

Hanaud bowed and smiled in the friendliest way. "Ah, mademoiselle, if
everyone whom I ask to help me could sketch for me a character with such
clear lines, I could have six months' holiday a year and yet do all the
work it takes me twelve months to do."

Compliments and compliments! When would these petty trappings be torn
aside and the shattering facts be disclosed? A sound of heavy shoes
clattering along the polished corridor was heard and Marianne marched
into the room, defiance in every stubborn line of her. She was a woman of
middle age with a full, freshly coloured face. She turned her back upon
Hanaud and the Commissaire Herbesthal. No one could doubt that Jules
Amadee had primed her with all he had learnt by his eavesdropping.

"Mademoiselle wants me?" she asked.

"Yes, Marianne. At what time this morning did you take their coffee to
Mrs. Devenish and Miss Whipple?" Diana asked.

"At seven o'clock," Marianne answered.

"They were both in their rooms?"

"See, mademoiselle! This is a special day, isn't it? People are up and
about early. Madame Devenish was already out of doors."

"And Miss Whipple?"

"That was a different thing. There was a notice pinned on that young
lady's door that she had not slept well and did not wish to be disturbed.
So I carried her coffee away, meaning to make some hot and fresh for her
when she rang for it."

"And has she rung?"

The question was asked gently enough, but Marianne was deaf to it. She
neither turned nor looked in Hanaud's direction. He repeated it
patiently; and suddenly Marianne's face grew crimson, and crossing her
arms upon her breast, she cried out in a sort of angry screech:

"Look, mademoiselle! I don't know what the police are doing in this
house. What affair is it of theirs, if one young lady gets up earlier
than usual and another has a migraine? Let them go away and find the poor
cure's stolen vestments! Aha! They will be at last of a utility."

"I ask you if Miss Whipple has yet rung her bell?" Hanaud repeated.

"And I, by my silences, have replied that I do not answer monsieur's
questions," said Marianne.

"That won't do, Marianne," Diana rebuked her gently. "You must answer
monsieur."

Marianne turned sullenly towards Hanaud.

"Well then, she has not rung," and Marianne broke out again in
exasperation: 'But--Saperlipopette--what questions to be asking when
mademoiselle's luncheon is all frizzling away to cinders--"

"And I ask you another question," Hanaud interrupted with authority now
rather than patience ringing in his voice. "Had the bed of Madame
Devenish been slept in?"

The question took all who were in the room aback, and no one more so than
Marianne. She looked at Hanaud with a little respect. She replied in a
humbler voice.

"See, monsieur! As I have told you already, this is a busy day for
everyone. It is very likely that Madame Devenish thought of it, knowing
what idle good-for-nothings all the young girls are today. She may
well have said: 'Ah, that poor Marianne, today I must help her.'"

"Which means that the bed had not been slept in," Hanaud insisted.

"No, monsieur, it does not," cried Marianne, beginning to get red again.
"It means that when I went into her room this morning the bed was made."

Hanaud accepted the correction meekly, but to Mr. Ricardo's thinking no
one who was at all acquainted with Evelyn Devenish could agree with
Marianne's explanation for a moment. Evelyn Devenish was not the kind of
person to give a thought as to whether Marianne's fingers were worked to
the bone or not. Nor could he imagine her springing out of her bed in the
early morning to help the peasants to strip the grapes. The story was
altogether too thin.

"It is enough, I think, that the bed was made," said Hanaud. He was very
grave, very reluctant to speak more openly. He looked at Herbesthal, and
Herbesthal, with an inclination of the head, returned the look.

"Yes," he said. "Yes. The fine feelings--we cannot all the time consider
them. I give you the word, Monsieur Hanaud!"

The Commissaire, magistrate though he was, was happy to pay deference to
the great man from Paris.

Diana made a restless movement. She was not only distressed; she was
puzzled too.

"I beg you not to keep us in suspense," she cried nervously. "Suspense is
worse than the worst of news."

Even then for a moment Hanaud hesitated. He was uneasy. It seemed that he
had a premonition that he was now being definitely committed to an
inquiry which would open up a pit of monstrous iniquity from which even
he shrank back.

"Very well," he said at length. "At seven o'clock this morning a large
dress-basket was seen floating up the Gironde on the flow of the tide
by two boys belonging to the village of St. Yzans-d'Houlette, Albert
Cordeau, aged fourteen, and Charles Martin, aged thirteen and five
months. The village of St. Yzans-d'Houlette lies on the same bank as
the Chateau Suvlac, but six miles nearer to the mouth of the river. These
details are important. The dress-basket was carried by a current nearer
and nearer to the shore, and the tide running then very slowly, the two
boys were easily able to keep up with it. It grounded gently in a tiny
bay in a lonely reach half a mile from the village. There were the low
slope of grass bank, a strip of meadow, a hedge of brambles behind the
meadow, and the village a hundred yards behind that. The two boys dragged
the basket out of the water with difficulty. For it was almost too heavy
for their strength. They found that it was fastened securely with a thick
rope, and that attached to the rope at the bottom of the basket was a
fragment of a small-meshed net--a sinister little circumstance, For it
looked as if a weight intended to sink the basket had proved too heavy
for the net and had torn itself free. The boys, excited at this
discovery, sawed through the rope with a pocket-knife and, raising the
lid, were horrified to see a body wrapped in a piece of fine linen. They
lifted the edge of the linen, and found a girl stark naked, with the
knees drawn up towards her chin. They were too frightened to make any
closer examination. They replaced the linen, and whilst one, Charles
Martin, ran to St. Yzans-d'Houlette with the news, Albert Cordeau
closed the basket and remained on guard beside it. The body still huddled
inside the basket was then taken to the mortuary at Villeblanche." He
mentioned the little town which was the seat of the local administration.
"It happens," he resumed, "that I was at Bordeaux engaged upon some
troublesome business, of which this affair of the basket may, or may not,
be a development." Hanaud at this point received such a glare of reproach
from Mr. Ricardo that he was at pains to soften down his neglect of his
friend's neighbourhood.

"Business, I should add, which forbids me seeking advice, however
valuable." And he had the satisfaction of seeing Mr. Ricardo's self-
esteem restored. "Monsieur Herbesthal did me the honour over the
telephone to inform me of this discovery and to invite my help. The
medical officer, the Doctor Brune, made his examination in our presence.
The body is that of a young lady, careful, even fastidiously careful, of
her beauty and appearance. There is no mistaking the evidence of a hand
in a matter of this kind. But everything--the delicate whiteness of her
skin, the gloss of her hair--indicated that she was one who had the time
and the inclination to give to herself the most meticulous attention."

"She was dead?" Diana interrupted in a low voice.

"According to the Doctor Brune, she had been dead for some six hours."

"Drowned? In that basket? Horrible!" said Diana, and with a shudder she
suddenly pressed her hands over her face.

"No, mademoiselle, not drowned," Hanaud answered. "She had been stabbed
through the heart. There was no mark of pain upon her face, nor any
contortion of fear. She cannot have known what was happening, so
completely was she at peace;" and having thrown all the emphasis of which
he was master into those consoling words, he went on slowly: "But there
is one perplexing and dreadful detail in this crime. For crime, of
course, it is. After she was dead, her right hand had been hacked off at
the wrist."

A wave of horror swept over everyone in that room. For what purpose could
mutilation have been added to murder? It spoke of a hatred at once
implacable and monstrous, a vengeance which sought to glut itself even
beyond the grave. A cry broke from the trembling lips of Diana. Mrs.
Tasborough was crying and moaning. Robin Webster, his face troubled and
disordered, exclaimed; "Why? In God's name, why?" Mr. Ricardo alone was
silent, with a horrid fear growing in his mind. He sank down into a chair
and sat and stared at the floor.

Meanwhile Hanaud went on. "There was no mark whatever by which this young
victim could be identified--not a bracelet on the wrist, not a chain
about the neck--nothing. But Monsieur Herbesthal and the Doctor Brune
thought it most likely that we should learn more at the Chateau Suvlac,
since it was the rule of mademoiselle to entertain a house-party for
the vintage. So we came here at once, and here we find that a guest is
missing. I shall beg Mr. Ricardo, whom I know, to drive back with me to
Villeblanche, and I shall hope, but without much confidence, that he will
not recognize her. Until he returns I must ask that none of you leaves
the house."

Mr. Ricardo, however, did not reply. He sat still and stared at the
floor, as though he had not heard.

"You will come?" Hanaud insisted. "It is a thankless office, I know very
well."

Still Ricardo never spoke, never changed his attitude. Robin Webster's
shoulders worked uncomfortably. Then he said reluctantly: "Of course, it
is my duty more than anyone's."

Before he could say more, Hanaud interrupted. "No! I thank you, but it is
Mr. Ricardo whom I want."

Then at last Mr. Ricardo found a voice to speak with, though it was a
dull one and toneless, and quite unrecognizable as his own.

"Before I go," he said, still staring at the floor, "I think that someone
should hammer at Miss Whipple's door and make very sure that she
answers."

At once Mr. Ricardo became the cynosure of all that sad company; and for
once he took no joy in his unusual position. But then the glances
directed at him were without any friendliness. No one had given a thought
to Joyce Whipple during the last tense minutes. Hanaud's story linked
itself so closely with Evelyn Devenish's disappearance that the proposed
journey to identify the body became the mere fulfilment of a formality.
Yet now suddenly here was a new suggestion, as vague as it was alarming.

"No--no!" Diana cried sharply. She was not so much opposing Mr.
Ricardo's demand, as refusing to allow that yet another mystery should
add to the torture of her nerves.

"I think so," said Mr. Ricardo, never lifting his eyes from the floor,
and his odd attitude somehow convinced everyone that he was right. Hanaud
turned towards Marianne, who all this while had been standing apart, and
nodded his head. Immediately she went out of the room, leaving the door
open, and no more words were spoken. Her shoes were heard ringing on a
flight of stone steps a short distance away, and then a loud rapping on a
door. In a dreadful suspense the assemblage in the drawing-room
listened for the opening of the door, for the welcome sound of Joyce
Whipple's clear voice. They heard only the rapping repeated, more
insistently; and again there was no answer.

Mr. Ricardo lifted his head now in a sort of listless bewilderment, and
broke the silence.

"Miss Whipple sleeps upstairs?"

"Yes," answered Diana.

In one of the two turret-rooms, then!

"And Mrs. Devenish?" he asked.

"In the wing opposite to yours."

"I see."

What window was it, then, which he had knocked upon at two o'clock that
morning, behind which he had seen the light so furtively extinguished? He
was very soon to know. Marianne was heard to knock again, to cry out
Joyce Whipple's name; and then she came clattering back to the room, her
bosom heaving, her face distorted with fear.

"Mademoiselle's door is locked, and there is no key in the lock," she
stammered.

Hanaud put a question to Diana: "Have you another key to that door?"

"Any key will open it. All the locks are upon one pattern."

"All of you, then, will stay here."

Hanaud whipped out of the room. They never heard his step upon the stone
stairs, but they did distinctly hear the grinding of a key as it shot
back a bolt; and again there was silence. But for once silence became
intolerable.

"Joyce! Joyce! Oh!"

The name broke from Robin Webster's lips in a long-drawn little cry of
utter misery. It was an appeal to her to answer, to appear in all her
radiant youth in the midst of them, and an expression of a belief that
she never would. Mr. Ricardo saw Diana slowly lift her eyes to Robin
Webster and let them dwell upon his twitching troubled face with a
curiously intent look; and in a moment Hanaud was back again in the
salon.

"Her room is empty," he said gravely. "Her bedclothes were tumbled and
dragging on the floor. But that had been done deliberately. Madame
Devenish, Mademoiselle Whipple--neither of them slept in her bed at the
Chateau Suvlac last night."

Suddenly his face changed. "Wait! Wait!" he cried, and sprang forward. He
had seen Diana Tasborough sway like a sapling in a wind. Her face took on
a sickly pallor. "It's horrible! Horrible!" she whispered. Hanaud was
only in time to break her fall. For she slipped through his arms and lay
quite still upon the floor.



VI: THE PICTURE ON THE WALL

HANAUD stooped, raised her shoulders, and finally stood erect, holding
her in his arms very tenderly, as though she were nothing more than a big
baby.

"I was rough--yes, you shall reproach me," he said remorsefully. "In my
profession, alas! one grows hard. One sees so much of the brute in man.
However, I make what amends I can for my clumsiness. I carry this young
lady to her room."

Mr. Ricardo was not moved by this remorse. He was never so suspicious of
that inspector of the Surete, as when he displayed his tenderer moods. He
slipped them on like a pair of gloves. He was so kind and so human and so
gentle up to the last grim moment when he towered, the avenger of broken
laws. Mr. Ricardo, accordingly, felt the prickliest sensations running up
and down his spine when he saw his large friend holding the dainty slip
of a girl within the prison of his strong arms. Was he a Samaritan or an
animal of prey? A friend or a jailer?

Marianne, however, cherished obviously none of Mr. Ricardo's doubts. She
crossed at once to the windows and opened them wide.

"This, monsieur, is the nearest way, if you will be so amiable. The poor
lamb! She has had enough for one day."

She stepped out on to the terrace with Hanaud upon her heels, and turned
to the left past the windows of the library. It was Diana's room, then,
which bowed out upon the terrace in the lower story of the turret. It was
upon her window that Mr. Ricardo had knocked. Mr. Ricardo hurried out
after Hanaud in a condition of extreme bewilderment. So many questions
rapped upon his brain for an answer, even as Marianne had rapped upon
Joyce Whipple's door. Joyce Whipple had occupied the room above Diana's,
and some time during the night Joyce Whipple had gone from her room and
vanished. It was in her room, then, if in any room, that a light might be
expected to burn at so unlikely an hour. And, after all, why had Diana
made not the least smallest inquiry as to who it was that had come
beating upon her window in the dark of the morning? Had she, too, been
away from the house last night?

Mr. Ricardo saw the tail of Hanaud's coat as he disappeared with his
burden between the glass doors of the turret-room. Mr. Ricardo was not
very sure that he would be civilly treated if he followed. But he simply
had to follow. He crept into the room timidly, just as Hanaud was gently
lowering Diana upon her bed at the back of the room; and he stood aside
out of the light at once, making himself very small.

"A glass of water, Marianne," said Hanaud, straightening his shoulders.
"There is no great harm done to mademoiselle, I think. Look, even now her
eyelids are fluttering."

Marianne hurried to the washstand and poured out a glass of water, whilst
Hanaud stood by the bedside, his eyes now looking down upon Diana
Tasborough, now sweeping the room with a careless glance which Mr.
Ricardo had long since learnt not to belittle. He gazed at the door of a
wardrobe, at a mirror, at Mr. Ricardo, at the carpet and the chairs. But
where his eyes rested, there as a rule there was nothing to see. Suddenly
he dropped upon his knee. Diana's lips were moving. But she only
murmured:

"I was a fool! . . . Nothing happened . . nothing .. or I should
remember." It seemed to Mr. Ricardo that Hanaud's head went forward, as
though he were about to whisper some question in Diana's ear, in the hope
that she would answer it, whilst still her mind was dim. But Marianne the
next second was at his side, and in the most natural manner he took the
glass from her and held it to Diana's lips.

"So .. so ... That is better," he said, rising to his feet. He came
across to Mr. Ricardo. "You and I, my friend, we are not wanted here,
whereas we are wanted at Villeblanche."

He took Ricardo by the arm and led him out again on to the terrace. But
there was a change in him now. He was quietly alert, with a bright
questioning glint in his eyes, and an odd little smile about his mouth.

"I tell you," he said in a low voice. "Very curious things have been
happening in this house. Miss Whipple and her letters. I am thankful that
I did not make light of her fears."

Mr. Ricardo raised his forefinger and announced: "You saw something in
that room."

"Yes. A bed, a young lady in a swoon, a servant, a glass of water."

"More than that."

Hanaud threw up his arms. "I was there but for a few seconds. During
those seconds I was occupied."

Mr. Ricardo shook his head sternly. "That won't do for me, I'm afraid."

Hanaud gave in with a gesture of despair and a look of regretful
admiration. "It is true. I, like this Miss Diana, confess that I was a
fool. I should have known better. A secret! Ha, ha! Conceal it if you
can! The cunning Mr. Ricardo is after it straight as the cock crows!"

Ricardo was in the habit of foolishly correcting his friend's admirable
English idioms, but preening himself upon this admission of his
perspicacity, he allowed the unfortunate form in which it was expressed
to pass. Hanaud took him by the arm and led him out of everyone's hearing
to the very edge of the terrace.

"Yes. I saw something in that room," he said in an important voice. "I
shall tell you what it is. A little picture. It hangs upon the wall above
the bed. I saw it as I laid that poor young lady down. You must look at
it when you get the chance. You will see just what I saw. Meanwhile,
however--" And he laid a finger meaningly upon his lips.

Mr. Ricardo was thrilled to his marrow at being made a participator in
this mystery. "I shall not say a word about it," he said reassuringly,
and Hanaud without a doubt was immensely relieved. He was turning away
when now Mr. Ricardo caught him by the arm.--"Before you continue your
work," he said with a new but tiny touch of patronage in his voice--he
was always anxious to reward one of Hanaud's rare confidences--"I must
warn you. You betray yourself, I think, a little more than you used to.
So far it is not very serious. But the defect will grow unless it is very
carefully watched."

Hanaud was aghast. "I betray myself!"

"Twice this morning."

"It is clear, then." The detective threw up his arms in despair. "Hanaud
grows old. Twice! Twice in one morning you catch me bowing."

"Bending," said Mr. Ricardo. "But, at the best, it is a vulgar phrase."

"Twice!"

"Yes."

"Once when I see the little picture on the wall?"

"Yes."

"And the other time?"

"Earlier--in the drawing-room. Your regrets that you had so terrible a
story to tell, your compassion--on the whole they were very well done."

"Thank you," said Hanaud meekly. "Praise from Sir Herbert!"

"Hubert," said Mr. Ricardo. "Yes, they were well done up to a point. The
point when you used one brutal word, and used it brutally, to describe
the severed hand."

All the mischief died out of Hanaud's eyes. He looked at Ricardo in the
oddest way; like some fencer when a despised antagonist slips through
beneath his guard.

"Go on!" he said, and Mr. Ricardo was only too pleased to go on. "The
sympathy, the gentle remorse that your rough world of crime must break in
upon the elegance of that drawing-room--and then suddenly the crude
word spoken violently, like a blow--'hacked'. 'Hacked off at the wrist.’
My friend, you looked for some reaction--yes--some definite reaction
from someone in that room."

Hanaud did not admit the intention. On the other hand, he did not deny
it. He remarked rather sulkily: "If I did, I didn't get it. Come! It is
high time that we went off to Villeblanche and identified this poor
Madame Devenish. You have your car, no doubt? Yes? Then you and I will go
in it and we will leave the police car to Monsieur Herbesthal the
Commissaire."

Yet once more during the passage of a morning, Mr. Ricardo was really to
astonish the detective. "We will use my car by all means," he said
slowly. "But I do not think that we shall identify Evelyn Devenish."

Hanaud's big frame stiffened. "Oho!" he murmured. "So that was it! Yes!
It was you who insisted that Miss Joyce Whipple should be roused from her
long sleep. Yes. From the moment when I finished my story, you were
troubled by a great fear. Even I, Hanaud, who grow old, could appreciate
that. For that reason I wished to drive alone with you to Villeblanche.
Yes! It is your little friend, the American, you expect to find in that
cold mortuary," and he shook his shoulders, as though the chill of that
place reached out and caught him here on the sunlit terrace. "Let us go!
You shall tell me why you fear this, as we go."



VII: THE CAVE OF THE MUMMIES

THE two men walked from that house of calamity down the hill to the farm
buildings and the garage; Hanaud lost in his own thoughts and Mr. Ricardo
a little surprised to see the peasants going about their daily labour,
and the world astir. "It seems somehow against nature," he said, and
Hanaud woke from his reflections to reply: "After all, we may both of us
be wrong. There are many houses along the Gironde." But it was clear that
he put no atom of faith into his words, and as soon as the great car was
running smoothly on the white road between the vineyards, he turned
briskly to his companion.

Mr. Ricardo began with some excuses. For he had at the back of his mind a
suspicion that his taste for what was odd and bizarre was not altogether
seemly in a man of his ripe years and honourable condition. But he had to
come to the Cave of the Mummies in the end.

"I had always meant to see it," he cried in an honest burst, "and ten
days ago I did."

He described how he walked to the high tower of St. Michel opposite to
the doors of the church in a great square. At the foot of the tower he
found a pay-box, which was closed, and by the side of it a winding
staircase descending into darkness. He peered down the staircase and from
the darkness, but surprisingly near to him, a woman's high voice cried
out: "Descend then, monsieur! You shall pay me afterwards. I am about to
begin."

He obeyed, feeling for the steps with his feet and for the side walls
with his hand. There were only a few treads to that old brick stairway,
but it twisted, and with his back to the daylight he could see nothing at
all.

"One more step, monsieur. So!"

He was taken by the elbow and guided for a few steps to his left. The
woman, with the thrift of her kind, did not light her tallow dip to
illumine her gruesome exhibition until she had gathered her little flock
of sightseers at the point of departure. Mr. Ricardo was vaguely aware
that he stood on the edge of a group. He had a sensation, too, of immense
space. But when the match was struck, and the red, smoky flame of the
cheap candle held aloft, he saw that the cabin was a tiny rough
excavation. It was too dark still for him to distinguish anything of the
rest of the party, except that they were of both the sexes. But the light
shone upon the face of the guide, and he was as disappointed by her
appearance as he had been by the cavern's tininess. He had expected an
old, witchlike crone. He beheld a practical, apple-faced, middle-
aged woman of the most respectable mien with a black shawl about her
shoulders.

She passed within an iron rail which guarded the line of her grim
exhibits, and delivered her preliminary lecture. There were mummies, of
course, in Egypt, but none of them, from Tutankhamen downwards, were a
patch upon hers. Egypt's mummies were the work of men, stuffed and cured
like animals for the table. Hers were the only real natural mummies in
the world, and a glory to the great city of Bordeaux.

"Gentlemen, ladies, they were found, just as you will see them, in an
ancient graveyard of the city close to this spot. A chemical ingredient
of the soil, which is nowhere else known to exist, has preserved them.
Attention, gentlemen! Ladies!"

Mr. Ricardo's eyes were popping out of his head in his effort to see over
the shoulders of the happy people who had got the front places. The
curator of this queer museum passed slowly along the line of the dead
people propped up on an eternal parade. They stood with loincloths about
their waists, their skin greenish in colour and of the texture of
parchment. The blackened tatters of their grave-clothes still hung to
them; wisps of matted hair dangled from their skulls, and here and there
a huge glaucous eye still stared at them from its socket. The guide
raised and lowered her candle, pointing out this or that noticeable
detail; and the red light, wavering unsteadily over the dead figures,
gave to them an eerie semblance of life and movement.

"Here is a woman with a child at her shoulder," said the guide in her
shrill, matter-of-fact voice. "They were buried together at the time
of epidemic! Here is a man who was killed by a sword-thrust"--the
candlelight disclosed a great gaping wound in his chest. "The lungs are
still there," she continued. "Listen!"

She thrust her hand through the wound and, under the tapping of her
fingers, the lungs rattled and rustled like dead leaves. Mr. Ricardo
shivered deliciously, he felt tremors up and down his spine and in the
soles of his feet.

"What now?" he asked himself, wondering whether he could really endure
more, when the guide stopped impressively beside the last figure in the
row. She had, good showman that she was, kept her extra special
supermummy for the last of the spectacle. And even before she had uttered
one word of explanation a curious uneasiness and discomfort stirred
amongst that little company; so vivid across all those centuries of
interment remained this dreadful epitome of pain.

Mr. Ricardo saw the figure of a youth. His mouth was wide open as though
he gasped for breath; his head was bent forward as though he sought by a
thrust of his shoulders to rise; and one knee was drawn tensely up
towards the chest as though it drove against a coffin-lid.

"The doctors are agreed," said the woman with a sort of pride. "It is
supposed that the boy was a cataleptic or the victim of a ferocious
cruelty. God be praised, we live in gentler days! He was buried alive,
and waked. He screamed, you see, and gasped for air. The leg drawn up to
lift all those feet of earth was so strained in agony that it could never
be straightened again. It is fixed so. The poor one!"

She moralized for a moment or two upon the advantage of living in the
gentler age of today, whilst up and down the red light of her candle
flickered over that tormented figure; until a man's rough voice cried out
sharply: "Enough, mother! That's enough!"

It was for some such tribute to the success of her show, it appeared,
that the woman waited. She snuffed out the candle between her forefinger
and her thumb, without a word, and for a little while, so still was
everyone and so silent in the pitch black cavern, that a new visitor
coming down those winding steps must have believed it empty. Then the
silence was broken, very faintly, at Mr. Ricardo's elbow, by a sigh; and
his blood turned cold as he heard it. There was neither pity in it, nor
horror, but a passionate longing that such a penalty could still be
exacted.

"Oh! Oh!"

It was a low cry of desire, savage and primitive, the desire to hurt as
no one had yet been hurt, to punish as no one had yet been punished, a
whisper of regret that no such punishment was possible.

Mr. Ricardo tried to figure out in his mind who it was that stood beside
him. He had an impression that it was a woman, but he could not be sure;
and whilst he still speculated the guide's voice was raised again.

"Gentlemen, ladies, that is all. If you turn you will see a gleam of
light from the steps. You, sir, who came last, the charge is fifty
centimes. I will give you a ticket at the pay-box."

The group of people stumbled with relief up the steps. Mr. Ricardo was
detained at the top of them whilst he paid his half-franc and received
his ticket. But his eyes were on the little group of people as they
dispersed, and amongst them he saw a girl separate herself from the
others and walk away alone. She was dressed with a quiet distinction
which surprised him in a visitor to this macabre exhibition. There was
something incongruous--he wondered whether it could be she who had
sighed. He would have very much liked to have cross-questioned her upon
the subject. He was none the less, however, a trifle disconcerted when
nine days later he was introduced to her in the drawing-room of the
Chateau Suvlac.

Evelyn Devenish? The contrast between that murky cavern with its grim
associations and this bright room overlooking the Gironde no doubt
affected Mr. Ricardo's judgment. That the woman who sighed in the cavern
could be this smartly-robed girl who made so pretty a picture in the
drawing-room was out of the question. He dismissed his suspicion from
his mind until a particular moment came immediately after dinner, when
she challenged him to deny that they had stood in the same group, in the
Cave of the Mummies. Her eyes had been withdrawn from him at once. Their
glance had wandered to where Joyce Whipple lay back in her low chair.
They had flashed with an implacable fury then, and they had moved up from
the slim foot in its slipper of silver brocade to the knee, with a
veritable hunger of hate. Oh, without a doubt Evelyn Devenish had been
thinking at that moment of the distorted figure of that youth in the Cave
of the Mummies! She had been putting Joyce Whipple in his place, had been
watching her knee pressed in a despairing agony against the coffin-lid.
Yes, it was Evelyn Devenish who had sighed. Therefore, since both the
girls had disappeared from the Chateau Suvlac, and one had been murdered
that one assuredly was Joyce Whipple.

This was the story which Mr. Ricardo told as he drove through the sunlit
country to Villeblanche. Hanaud gave to it all his attention, but at the
end he shook his head.

"No woman, my friend, hacked off that right hand, though all the hatred
in the world consumed her."

"But no doubt she had accomplices to help her," Mr. Ricardo answered with
a patient and condescending kindness. "You had not thought of that!"

Hanaud smote his forehead with a slight exaggeration of despair.

"It is terribly true!" he cried. "Hanaud is growing old. How ever should
I solve this mystery alone! Fortunately you are here, the Chief of the
Staff who tells the General what to do; the power behind the sofa. I lean
on you. So tell me this. You have just the time!"

The car was approaching the long street of Villeblanche, bordered by
small white and dusty houses.

"When Madame Devenish turned this ugly look upon the delicate Joyce
Whipple, who was beside Joyce Whipple? To whom was she talking?"

Mr. Ricardo rebuilt in his mind the drawing-room, its furniture and its
occupants. He set them all in their places, and exclaimed: "I know. He
was at the side of Joyce Whipple, a little behind her perhaps. Yes,
certainly a little behind her. For he was leaning forward over the back
of her chair--Robin Webster."

"Aha!" said Hanaud. "The good-looking young man with the white hair and
the little shade of pedantry in his speech. The Apollo and the school-
marm all in one, eh? So it was he. The same man who cried out suddenly
'Joyce! Joyce!' when it was discovered that she had disappeared. That is
curious--yes! Well, we shall know in a minute whether you are right."

For the car had stopped at the mortuary. And in a minute Mr. Ricardo knew
that he was entirely wrong. For stretched out upon the mortuary slab,
wrapped decently about in a clean linen sheet, her eyes closed, a look of
peace upon her face, lay Evelyn Devenish.

Mr. Ricardo's surprise was intense, but his relief even greater. Joyce
Whipple had wound herself about his heart a little more closely than he
had known. He put aside from him, for the moment at all events, all that
was enigmatic about her, and the possibility suggested by Hanaud at Aix
that she might have invented her queer story about Diana Tasborough's
letters for some unknown purpose of her own. He was content that she was
not lying there on the stone slab.

"It is Madame Devenish, then?" said Hanaud, reading his friend's face.

"Yes." Hanaud turned to the Commissaire Herbesthal, who had joined them,
"It is as you thought. Let us see what we have to see. For we keep Mr.
Ricardo from his luncheon."

Led by the attendant of the mortuary, they passed by a bare, whitewashed
passage to a room at the back. The room was filled with cupboards, and
the basket, still wet from the river, stood upon the floor.

"I want to see the piece of linen in which this poor woman was wrapped,"
said Hanaud.

The attendant unlocked one of his cupboards, and took it out and handed
it to Hanaud. Mr. Ricardo could see that one of its edges was torn from
top to bottom, and that it was stained with blood. Hanaud carried it
towards the window and turned it over and shook it out and gathered it
together again in a bundle. When he turned back to the room again his
face was quite changed. It was grave and discontented. Clearly he had no
liking for the task to which he was now committed.

"This, I think, will prove to be very important," he said, as he laid it
carefully down upon a chair.

He went over to the basket and opened it. Mr. Ricardo, from the place
where he stood, could not see the inside of it. He stole over on the tips
of his toes to Hanaud's side. It was lined with some sort of strong white
canvas, which was here and there smeared with blood. Hanaud bent down
into it swiftly, feeling the soaked lining at the corners.

"It has been torn here," he said, thrusting his fingers into the rent,
and then his face sharpened. He stood up, and turning the basket upon its
side bent over the wicker-work at one corner and close to the bottom.

"See!" he said to Herbesthal. He pointed to a tiny wedge of yellow metal
which projected between the withies of the wicker. He set the basket once
more upon its bottom, and plunging in his hands worked for a moment or
two with considerable exertion. When he stood up again he held in his
hand a narrow gold bracelet. It was open. A tiny wedge was made to slide
into a hollow, where a spring caught and fastened it, and at the catch
there was a large fire opal. Mr. Ricardo gasped incredulously as he
looked at it.

"May I see it?" he asked, and Hanaud, holding the two ends very
gingerly in the tips of his fingers, stretched it out to him.

"You know it?" he asked.

"I have seen it before," Mr. Ricardo replied, his face puckered in
bewilderment.

"Where?"

"In London."

Some part of Mr. Ricardo's perplexity now showed in