The Twenty-Six Clues/Chapter 12

'VE had enough and to spare of the workings of science!" Dennis announced as he and his companion trudged homeward through the crisp night air. "It's small use the Inspector has for it either, if you believe in signs."

"Well, the Inspector has one theory of the case and Terhune has another, and I have mine," McCarty responded noncommittally. "No two of them are alike and all of them may be away off the truth, but the Inspector is right in one thing, to my way of thinking; even if the murder was not a direct outcome of the blackmailing the two are connected, and I'd not be surprised if the same hand that pasted those macaroni letters tightened the scarf about the poor woman's throat. Terhune figured it out as I did that she came to the Norwood house and to the museum of her own free will, but right there our ideas of what actually happened don't tally, in spite of the fact that I don't know what she went there for, if 'twas not to see Captain Marchal."

"And what is the Inspector's notion?" asked Dennis. "Who does he think did the murder?"

McCarty shook his head.

"If he suspects anyone in particular, 'tis not the Frenchman," he replied evasively. "'Twas just to talk the case over with me in a general way that he came to the engine house for me yesterday."

"And what about your trip to the movies last night?" Dennis demanded in swift after-thought. "I've not seen hide nor hair of you all day. Did that Etta come across with any dope?"

"Not yet, but, Denny, 'twas a real hunch I had! She knows something, all right, but she's too scared to breathe it. She's the gabby kind, and a murder like that happening in the family she worked for would, in the ordinary course of things, give her a topic to talk about to the end of her days; she would be so full of it now that you'd not be able to get a word in edgeways about anything else, if she took you for a friend and had nothing to hide. As it was, she was ready enough with her conversation on any other subject, but every time I went back to the murder she shut up like a clam. I don't want to be rushing her too much and get her suspicious, but I'm going to keep on the job till I find out what's on her mind."

"Look out you don't let yourself in for breach of promise while you're doing it," Dennis cautioned forebodingly. "To my mind, there's only one way that either the Inspector or Mr. Terhune will make headway and that's by finding out what it was Mrs. Jarvis was being blackmailed for and who sent her the cake and those crazy letters."

"There's that," McCarty conceded. "But 'twould be a long step toward the truth if we knew why she went to the Norwood house at all, that afternoon."

The ex-Roundsman had invested the inheritance from his uncle in an installment-plan colony known as Homevale and thither business called him the next morning. His pride and satisfaction at becoming a landed proprietor had long since been dampened by the insatiable demands of his tenants and a& he boarded the train for his estate he was in a mood of dull resentment against his deceased relative. Had it not been for the money he would still be on the force; a captain by now, perhaps, or high in the detective bureau. He might have had an official hand in the Jarvis case, instead of being as now, a mere looker-on; tantalized by its possibilities, engrossed in the problem and yet destined to stand aside.

His negotiations with the luckless householder who had summoned him were brief and of an all but violent nature, and he returned fuming to his apartments. There, thrust under the door, he found a torn and not over-clean scrap of paper which swiftly altered his mood.

"Mr. McCarty please call at once on Mr. Norwood. Most important. Billings,"

For a moment he stared at the roughly penciled message, glanced at the telephone, hesitated, then clapped on his hat and made for the street once more.

He found Calvin Norwood pacing the floor of his drawing-room with wrathful indignation in every line of his small, immaculate figure.

"Well, McCarty, this is a pretty state of things!" he exclaimed as they shook hands. "I sent for you because you seem to be the only one concerned with this mysterious affair who has an open mind and a grain of common sense left. The police have ridiculed me and derided my efforts to assist them in the past, but now they have surpassed even their former record of stupidity and insolence! Do you know that I am actually under surveillance? I, and every member of my household, even to my niece and her fiancé? It is monstrous, insufferable!"

"Is that so, sir?" McCarty observed innocently. "I'd not be concerned about it, Mr. Norwood. The department follows a regular routine in every case and it's no sign that you're under suspicion of the murder; it's just because the body was found here in your home. Belike they'll shadow everyone connected with Mrs. Jarvis till they've found out who killed her."

"But it is a direct imputation of suspicion!" the little elderly man fumed. "Evelyn Jarvis was like a daughter to me, my niece loved her as a sister, and as to Mr. Vivaseur, he never even laid eyes on her! He is generous enough to appear merely amused at the espionage to which he has been subjected in entering and leaving this house, but it is a hideously embarrassing position for both my niece and myself. He is a member of one of the oldest noble houses in England; in fact, there are only three lives between him and a dukedom, and although I am not a snob, I was delighted that my little girl and the inheritance which will be hers are to be allied to such a distinguished family. It is infamous that in addition to her grief for her friend she should be subjected to such indignity; it is enough that the very threshold of her romance should be clouded by tragedy! And now, to add to my general distress of mind, Victor is down!"

"Down?" McCarty repeated.

"He is desperately ill; some sort of fever, I think. I was afraid of it from the first, I thought that the shock of the murder would be too much for him in his weakened condition. It is a great pity, for he was rallying so bravely from the horrors he has been through and the crushing blow of his own affliction." Norwood glanced nervously about him and then bent forward confidentially. "When we returned last night from Mr. Terhune's ghastly experiment I saw that it had affected him, but good heavens! we were all wrought up about it. It was the most harrowing exhibition of chicanery imaginable! However, I was so concerned about Oliver that I gave little thought to Victor and he retired to his room almost at once..

"This morning when he did not appear at breakfast, I sent up to inquire about him and Billings reported that he paid no attention to the knock upon his door, but seemed to be talking to someone in the room with him. I went up immediately myself and found the poor lad tossing upon his bed, muttering deliriously and in a high fever. I gave him an opiate to quiet him and he is sleeping now, but I do not know what his condition will be when he wakes."

"You didn't send for a doctor, sir?"

Norwood hesitated.

"No," he replied at length. "It will be necessary, of course, if he grows worse, but I think I can bring him around all right. A doctor would insist upon installing a nurse at once, and just now I want no intruders in the house. Besides, in his delirium, poor Victor's mind is naturally dwelling on the crime and he utters rambling sentences which might sound strange to an outsider's ears; I should not care to have even the servants hear him, for they are an excitable, hysterical lot. That is really why I sent for you, McCarty. We are all due at the funeral this after- noon, of course, and I thought that perhaps you wouldn't mind sitting with him until I can return and relieve you."

McCarty's pulse gave a sudden leap, but he responded quietly:

"I'll be glad to, sir. I'm sorry for the poor young man."

"And you'll keep whatever you may hear to yourself?" Norwood continued in nervous haste. "He seems to be living over again in his feverish brain that hideous farce we were forced to listen to last night, and Inspector Druet or Mr. Terhune in their frantic endeavors to fasten the crime on the first unfortunate person to give them a shadow of an excuse would seize upon his senseless, incoherent words as evidence upon which to base an odious suspicion. You know as well as I do, McCarty, that the boy is utterly innocent, but after last night's travesty of an experiment and my discovery that the Inspector has deemed it necessary to place us all under surveillance I would believe them capable of anything!"

"They'll get nothing from me," McCarty promised. "You know, sir, I've no connection with the investigation, but I'm mighty interested in the case, all the same. What do you think about it yourself, Mr. Norwood?"

"I don't know. I scarcely dare to let my mind dwell on it." He passed a shaking hand across his eyes. "When I remember Evelyn as we have always known her; tender, sweet, gentle, open-hearted and open-minded as a child, and then remember those sinister letters and that anonymous Christmas gift—that cake which she preserved so carefully and so secretly—I shrink from facing the possibilities of the truth. How little we know, after all, of the innermost depths of those about us! Understand, McCarty, I am not taking it for granted that her secret was necessarily of a heinous or disgraceful sort, but the very fact that she did not take her husband into her confidence when the first threatening letter reached her, that she submitted tamely to the blackmail imposed upon her, is evidence enough that a secret existed which she was compelled to guard at all costs. A week ago I would have scorned such a suggestion; even now I cannot realize it, I cannot reconcile it with my conception of the girl's character. It's like a nightmare!"

"It is certain, then, that Mrs. Jarvis did pay the money demanded from her?" asked McCarty. "Have they found out yet how much was gotten out of her?"

"No, but the letters speak for themselves. The tone of the last one shows that she must have communicated with the blackmailer in some way, protesting against the sum required and stating her inability to comply; she probably put a note to that effect with whatever money she placed under the rose bush on that night last May. Do you remember how that last letter in macaroni paste was worded?"

"I have a copy of all three of them here," McCarty produced his wallet. "The last one begins: 'Lady can and will. 1000 under bush 26 each month small price safety.' The one before that, the second one, asks: 'Does lady forget date of next Saturday night?' That must have meant the twenty-sixth of the month. It must have been on that date years gone that whatever it was happened about which Mrs. Jarvis had to pay for silence."

Norwood shuddered.

"Poor child I Why did she not let the truth be known and brave the consequences? I am as sure as I am of my own Joan that Evelyn had been guilty of nothing her husband could not fully and freely have forgiven. She must have gone through untold suffering and suspense last year! I wonder that I did not notice the change in her which her maid described, but I was engrossed in my own affairs. It was just before my departure for France."

"Was it a criminal case that took you over, sir?"

"The greatest in history." Norwood smiled slightly. "I went to inspect the devastation in certain areas in France for a relief committee of which I am a director. I sailed in June and returned in August, bringing Victor with me to act as my secretary. He is the last of a very old family, aristocratic but impoverished, and I became greatly interested in him."

"It was in September that Mrs. Jarvis first began talking of going to France, wasn't it?" asked McCarty.

"Yes. Oliver is barred from active service because of a concussion of the brain which he suffered in a football game at the university some years ago, but I think my description of what I had seen in France influenced them both in their decision to take up reconstruction work there. Poor Evelyn was so happy in anticipation of it, so filled with plans—" he broke off and added after a pause: "That was why she took so deep and sympathetic an interest in Victor and it is only natural that her terrible death should have been such a shock to him. Last night's ghastly business was the final straw laid upon his overwrought nerves."

"I'll go up to him now, Mr. Norwood; shall I?" suggested McCarty. "He might wake up and need something or start raving again."

"It would be best, perhaps, if you don't mind," Norwood assented with obvious relief. "Your lunch will be brought up to you on a tray and I'll show you what medicine to give him if the delirium continues; that is all that can be done for him, to try to keep him absolutely quiet until the fever has run its course. I'm afraid it will be a long vigil for you, McCarty, but I'm grateful to you for undertaking it."

He led the way up one flight of stairs to a small but cheerful room on the second floor.

"I put Victor in here, next to my own dressing-room because it is nearest the head of the stairs," he explained. "I wanted to save him as much groping about as possible. Come in. See, he is still asleep."

In the semi-gloom of the drawn curtains the figure on the bed lay motionless save for the spasmodic rise and fall of the coverlet across his breast. As McCarty bent over him a broken sigh fluttered from the parted lips and they twitched but no words came.

Norwood whispered instructions about the medicine and withdrew and the volunteer nurse settled down to his vigil.

The face of the unconscious man, relaxed and shorn of the mask of stern repression and control which it habitually wore, was haggard and tragic in its revelation of suffering. All the agony, mental and physical, of his affliction and the inferno through which he had passed was written there, and for the first time McCarty realized the weight of the burden which the proud, self-contained young man had borne in mute resignation, and must continue to bear while he lived. He felt a sense of shame as though he were intruding upon a privacy that was almost sacred, but even as he averted his eyes the sick man stirred upon his pillow and a hoarse mutter issued from his lips.

"That voice! If I could be sure! But no, it is impossible"

He lapsed into a rapid staccato murmur of French unintelligible to McCarty, but the latter had heard enough to turn his thoughts into a new channel.

The "voice" must mean, of course, the phonographic record made by the woman now dead but what doubt was it that thrust its way uppermost in Marchal's mind, even in the throes of his delirium? What question was it that haunted him?

The murmuring gradually died away and for a space there was silence save for the irregular breathing of the sick man. Then one of the thin hands clenched and fell across his breast as though he would have struck himself a blow but that his strength failed.

"If I had waited! Dieu, if only I had waited one little minute longer! But how could I know?" His tones had risen in a sort of wail and then as swiftly changed.

"The dead!" It was a mere toneless whisper. "Back from the dead!"

McCarty's superstitious mind recoiled, but the whisper ceased and the steadying, rhythmic breath told that the sufferer had sunk once more into profound slumber. Had he been living over again the horror of the previous night's experiment, or had his disordered brain conjured up a vision of the woman whom in life his sightless eyes had never beheld?

The speculations of the watcher were interrupted by a low knock upon the door.

"HI've put your lunch h'on a table in Mr. Norwood's dressing-room, sir," Billings announced. "'Ow is the Captain, h'if I may arsk?"

"He's coming along all right, Billings." McCarty tip-toed ponderously from the room and closed the door behind him. "Rest is all he needs now, and plenty of it."

"He was right bad this morning, sir. Gave me a turn, it did and no mistake, to 'ear 'im talking to 'imself when h'I came to call 'im. H'I would 'ave taken my h'oath there was two of them in 'ere, sir!"

The butler's manner was full of portentous gravity, and McCarty drew him into the dressing-room.

"What was he saying?" he demanded.

"Well, sir, h'I've said nothing to Mr. Norwood, but the poor young gentleman was ravin' first in that foreign lingo and then in h'English and he kept sayin' h'over and h'over: 'Blind! Who would believe? I cannot speak!' And then, sir, 'e cried h'out in quite a terrible voice that turned my blood cold in my veins: 'It is you who killed her!' 'Ow I got downstairs, sir, is more than I know for my legs give under me"

"Is that all?" McCarty turned to the table with affected indifference. "He didn't know what he was saying, of course. That's only the murder on his mind, like it is on all of us. He's got a touch of fever, and dreaming all kinds of things about it, but he'll wake up himself again and none the worse."

McCarty ate a hasty luncheon and returned to the sick-room with the butler's words ringing in his ears. Was the accusation which had issued from the lips of the unconscious man mere idle raving, or had he indeed some secret knowledge of the crime which he dared not divulge for lack of proof?

Victor Marchal still lay as he had left him, but after an interval his sleep became troubled once more. Strange visions peopled his wandering mind, past horrors returned and for a nerve-racking hour McCarty listened with bated breath while the other, now in English and now in French, made graphic by his tone and expression, led his men once more into the battle which had cost him his sight and lived again the hours of his Gethsemane in No Man's Land.

Then the cause of his delirium changed. A softer expression stole over his worn features, a faint smile of ineffable pathos hovered about his lips and he murmured so softly that the words were scarcely audible:

"Mais je t'aime! It cannot harm thee for thou wilt never know. In thy divine pity and kindliness thou art as blind as I to the worship in my heart which I may not speak! Only to myself may I whisper thy dear name. Evelyn! Evelyn!"

McCarty stiffened in his chair. Terhune had been right! There was no mistaking the note of hopeless love in those faint tremulous tones, but the words themselves belied the criminalist's theory. Here was no eager, jealous, destroying passion, but a humble adoration. Abashed, the watcher drew back as again the feeling of honest shame possessed him for the part which he was playing and in that moment the smile faded from Victor Marchal's lips and a spasm of grief contorted his face.

"Dead! But I shall not speak! That one service I may render, that the secret shall never be known. Only when I am sure of that other, then it shall be between us!"