The Lion's Mouse Part 24

"My heavens! Enough to pay off the mortgage. But you couldn't possibly accept it?"

"I said no. I swore that I'd done nothing to earn a cent: that wild horses wouldn't drag from me anything I'd seen, or heard, or even imagined, in his house. But Mr. Sands insisted. 'It will give me pleasure for you to have the money. It's little enough,' he said. Then he walked right out. He must have gone back to his own room instead of leaving the flat just then, for I saw him again later. I'll tell you about that. But do you think it was wrong to keep the money?"

"In the circ.u.mstances, no," Mrs. Blackburne decided. "It would have hurt his feelings to give it back. Oh, my dear, five hundred dollars! It's like a fairy gift, just when we're needing it so much!"

"Well, I'd got the bills tucked away when Mrs. Sands came running in.

She made for the table, the way a pointer goes for a shot bird. She hadn't a glance for the velvet case. She was searching for something else. Oh, Mother, it scared me to see her! She threw everything about.

She was out of her head. A tall vase of flowers tipped over, and splashed water on the books, and even on the velvet case. I don't think she knew it had happened. Books fell on the floor. She didn't see or care. Then she sank all of a heap into a big chair close by. 'The envelope?' she gasped, as if she were choked by a hand on her throat.

'It was there. Where is it now?'

"I told her I hadn't seen any envelope, which was perfectly true. She described it: quite a big, long envelope, made of linen, and sealed up with several red seals. I swore over again I hadn't seen an envelope of any description. At last she had to believe me. But the worst was to come. 'Did you leave the room, for so much as a second, after I left you?' she asked, with her eyes on my face. I told her I hadn't stirred outside the door; but what I was scared of came next: 'Did any one come in?'"

"Oh, lovey, I hope you didn't have to tell a falsehood?"

"That depends on what you call a falsehood," said Miss Blackburne. "I hate fibs as much as you do. But it was an awful fix!"

"It was," Mums agreed.

"You see," Ellen went on, to make her position clear, "I had asked Mr.

Sands not to let his wife know I'd called him in. Later, he pressed that money on me, and I accepted it. I felt as if it had bought me, body and soul. When he stood by the table, he must have seen that envelope, and taken it. Well, now, I ask you, could I give him away?"

"I don't see how you could," wailed the old lady.

"Neither did I. 'Did any one come in?' I echoed, when Mrs. Sands put the question. 'Wouldn't I have mentioned it to you the first thing, if any one had?' Was that a falsehood, or wasn't it?"

"It was a prevarication," answered Mrs. Blackburne, "and I think I should have done the same thing."

"Thank goodness!" sighed Ellen. "That's what I wanted to know. You don't blame me, then?"

"I feel you acted for the best. And it's done now!"

"Yes, it's done, and can't be undone," the pearl-stringer echoed.

XXIV

ROGER'S APPOINTMENT AT THE CLUB

Roger Sands dined alone at his club that night. Many men hailed him as he came in, very late, and in sixty seconds he received six invitations to dine. He refused them all, however.

It was with the hope of meeting a certain man that Roger had gone to the club. He had excused himself to Beverley on the plea of an appointment, because he had wanted to be alone, and had no intention of dining anywhere.

It was upon an impulse that he had taken the sealed envelope addressed to Justin O'Reilly. Afterward, he felt that his whole course of conduct, from the moment he had entered the room till the moment he had left the flat, was radically wrong. He ought, perhaps, to have shown himself to Beverley when she came in, despite Miss Blackburne's appeal. If he had done this, he would have learned the truth about that envelope. Seeing her husband at such a moment, Beverley must have betrayed herself, Roger thought, if there were anything to betray in connection with the envelope. Had its concealment been important, she would mechanically have sprung to hide it. Had it been left inadvertently by O'Reilly, for no concern of hers, Beverley's ignorance of his presence, or her indifference, would have cleared her in Roger's eyes.

He could not contemplate confessing to Beverley that he had hidden himself and then taken the envelope. She would probably say: "I never dreamed that you'd be mean enough to spy upon me! Why didn't you show yourself, like a brave man, instead of hiding?"

No, he would not tell Beverley that he had been a witness of the scene between her and the pearl-stringer; nor that he was responsible for the vanis.h.i.+ng of O'Reilly's envelope. Let her think what she liked about its loss, just as he--Roger--was free to think what he liked about the loss of the pearls! He would wait for Beverley to tell him that the pearls were gone. Her carelessness, to say the best of it, her ingrat.i.tude and disloyalty, to say the worst, gave him the right to keep his knowledge to himself. He would wait and see what Beverley meant to do. Then he decided to send back the sealed letter to O'Reilly. Ten minutes after leaving home he had given the envelope to a messenger, with directions to take it at once to the Dietz.

It was when he had thus disciplined himself, that Roger turned toward the club. A man who was an old acquaintance of Roger's, and a friend of O'Reilly's, often dropped in there on a Sunday evening. Possibly he would come that night. Roger had thought of a question to ask. He saw that there might be a way to getting even with O'Reilly, a way just as efficacious, and more open, than the one he had sacrificed.

While he pretended to dine and read an "evening edition," a hateful little voice in Roger's brain chirped suggestions to him. What if Beverley had somehow been in O'Reilly's power? What if she had written him love letters which afterward she wished to get back, and he refused to surrender? What if she had contrived to steal them, and O'Reilly had followed, for reprisals? What if, since then, the man had been torturing her, and Clodagh Riley (a poor relation of Justin O'Reilly's, perhaps) had been acting as a go-between? What if the girl had pretended illness as an excuse to bring O'Reilly into the flat, and the man had frightened Beverley into giving him the pearls?

He was sipping his demi ta.s.se, and had ceased to expect the man he wanted, when that man walked into the room. Before he could sit down at a neighbouring table Roger hailed him; a small, dark man of Jewish type, a man of forty-five, perhaps, with the brilliant eyes of a scientist and the arched brows of a dreamer.

"h.e.l.lo, Doctor Lewis! I've been hoping you'd blow in!" Sands said cordially. "Won't you dine with me?"

"But you've finished. I'd be keeping you."

"I want a talk with you, my dear chap," Roger a.s.sured him.

The doctor sat down at Sands' table.

"I'd have got here a long while ago," Doctor Lewis went on to explain, "but just as I was leaving the Dietz, where I have a patient, I was asked to stop and see--whom do you think?"

"Your friend, O'Reilly, perhaps. Someone mentioned to me that he was there."

"No," said Lewis, "not O'Reilly, but as it happens, a friends of O'Reilly's, in the same hotel, who suddenly collapsed."

"I can guess, then," replied Sands. "I know the Herons are at the Dietz.

Your patient was one of those two--Mrs. Heron, I should say. I don't somehow see Heron 'collapsing.'"

"My patient was Heron, not his wife. The attack was nothing serious, but Mrs. H---- was scared. You and Heron are as fast friends as ever, of course?"

"I admire John Heron in many ways," Roger answered, indirectly.

"And he ought to admire you, as certainly he does! A good many people thought you risked your life, throwing yourself into that business in California, the way you did, Sands. But you came out on top, and brought Heron out on top. Your reward was great!"

Roger smiled. He was thinking of the journey back, after his triumph, and of Beverley. She had been his reward. Once it had seemed great.

"Have you seen Heron since he got to New York?" said the doctor.

"Not yet," said Sands.

"Well, he's hardly more than just arrived. Heron's a wiry chap. It needs a good deal to knock him over. If it had happened last summer, or fall, when the big row was on, there'd have been plenty of excuse, as Mrs.

Heron remarked. It appears the two had been quietly sitting together down below, in the big hall, watching the crowd, and waiting for Justin O'Reilly to go in with them to dinner. Mrs. H---- sent Heron back to their bedrooms to find something she'd forgotten. She got scared at last when time pa.s.sed and neither Heron nor O'Reilly came down. She went to see for herself what was up, and found her husband in a fainting fit.

She 'phoned just as I was leaving my other patient, and by the time I arrived on the scene O'Reilly had floated in from the next-door suite.

He'd been out while the Herons thought he was dressing to dine with them. All's well that ends well. Heron will be as brisk as ever in a day or two."

"I'm glad to hear that," Roger said, gravely. "As you say, Heron's not a man to be knocked over easily. Last year, when I was in California, he came within an ace of being shot one night, and never turned a hair."

"His wife was asking him, when he came to, a lot of questions. Heron wouldn't want to worry her, naturally. Didn't she have some great shock last summer, or fall, while you were out West? A brother who was killed, or killed himself?"

"A brother who died suddenly. There was no proof of violence. The young man's death occurred the day I left, and not in California, but in New Mexico--near the town of Albuquerque, at a house belonging to Mrs.

Heron. The Herons haven't been married many years," Roger went on. "Not more than eight or ten. Mrs. Heron can't be much over thirty. I never saw the brother. He was something of an invalid, and lived always at the Albuquerque place. His handsome sister stayed with him sometimes. He was a few years younger than she."