The de Bercy Affair

"Why, precisely?" she asked.

"I want to warn you. I had warned you before: for I had given a certain girl whose love Mr. Osborne has inspired a hint of what was going on, and I felt sure that she would not fail to tell you who 'Mr. Glyn' was. Was I not right?"

Rosalind bent her head a little under this unexpected thrust.

"I received a note," she said. "Who, then, is this 'certain girl, whose love Mr. Osborne has inspired,' if one may ask?"

"I may tell you – in confidence. Her name is Prout. She is his secretary."

"He is – successful in that way," observed Rosalind coldly, looking down at a spray of flowers pinned to her breast.

"Too much so, Miss Marsh. Now, I felt confident that the warning given by Miss Prout would effectually quash any friendship between a lady of your pride and quality and Mr. Glyn – Osborne. But then, through your thick veil I noticed you at the inquest: and I said to myself, 'I am older than she is – I'll speak to her in the tone of an old and experienced man, if she will let me.'"

"You see, I let you. I even thank you. But then you notice that Mr. Osborne is just now vilified and friendless."

"Oh, there is his Miss Prout."

Rosalind's neck stiffened a little.

"That is indefinite," she said. "I know nothing of this lady, except that, as you tell me, she is ready to betray her employer to serve her own ends. Mr. Osborne is my friend: it is my duty to refuse to credit vague statements made against him. It is not possible – it cannot be – "

She stopped, rather in confusion. Furneaux believed he could guess what she meant to say.

"It is possible, believe me," he broke in earnestly. "Since it was possible, as you know, for him to turn his mind so easily from the dead, it is also possible – "

"Oh, the dead deceived him!" she protested with a lively flush. "The dead was unworthy of him. He never loved her."

"He deceived her," cried Furneaux also in an unaccountable heat – "he deceived her. No doubt she was as fully worthy of him as he of her – it was a pair of them. And he loved her as much as he can love anyone."

"Women are said to be the best judges in such matters, Inspector Furneaux."

"So, then, you will not be guided by me in this?" Furneaux said, standing up.

"No. Nevertheless, I thank you for your apparent good intent," answered Rosalind.

He was silent a little while, looking down at her. On her part, she did not move, and kept her eyes studiously averted.

"Then, for your sake, and to spite him, I accuse him to you of the murder!" he almost hissed.

She smiled.

"That is very wrong of you, very unlike an officer of the law. You know that he is quite innocent of it."

"Great, indeed, is your faith!" came the taunt. "Well, then," he added suddenly, "again for your sake, and again to spite him, I will even let you into a police secret. Hear it – listen to it – yesterday, with a search-warrant, I raided Mr. Osborne's private apartments. And this is what I found – at the bottom of a trunk a suit of clothes, the very clothes which the driver of the taxicab described as those of the man whom he took from Berkeley Street to Feldisham Mansions on the night of the murder. And those clothes, now in the possession of the police, are all speckled and spotted with blood. Come, Miss Marsh – what do you say now? Is your trust weakened?"

Furneaux's eyes sparkled with a glint of real hatred of Osborne, but Rosalind saw nothing of that. She rose, took an unsteady step or two, and stared through the window out into the street. Then she heard the door of the room being opened. She turned at once. Before a word could escape her lips, Furneaux was gone.

One minute later, she was scribbling with furious speed:

Do not read my letter. I will call for it – unopened – in person.

Rosalind Marsh.

She tugged at the bell-rope. When Pauline appeared, she whispered: "Quickly, Pauline, for my sake – this telegram." And as Pauline ran with it, she sank into a chair, and sat there with closed eyelids and trembling lips, sorely stricken in her pride, yet even more sorely in her heart.

Now, if her letter had gone by the post by which she had sent it, Osborne would have read it two hours or more before the telegram arrived. But it had been kept back by Pauline: and, as it was, the letter only arrived five minutes before the telegram.

At that moment Osborne was upstairs in his house. The letter was handed to Hylda Prout in the library. She looked at it, and knew the writing, for she had found in Osborne's room at Tormouth a note of invitation to luncheon from Rosalind to Osborne, and did not scruple to steal it. A flood of jealousy now stabbed her heart and inflamed her eyes. It was then near five in the afternoon, and she had on a silver tripod a kettle simmering for tea, for she was a woman of fads, and held that the servants of the establishment brewed poison. She quickly steamed open the letter – which had been already steamed open by Pauline – and, every second expecting Osborne to enter, ran her eye through it. Then she pressed down the flap of the envelope anew.

Two minutes afterwards Rupert made his appearance, and she handed him the letter.

He started! He stared at it, his face at one instant pale, at the next crimson. And as he so stood, flurried, glad, agitated, there entered Jenkins with a telegram on a salver.

"What is it?" muttered Osborne with a gesture of irritation, for he was not quite master of himself in these days. Nevertheless, to get the telegram off his mind at once before rushing upstairs to read the letter in solitude, he snatched at it, tore it open, and ran his eye over it.

"Do not read my letter. I will call for it unopened…"

He let his two hands drop in a palsy of anger, the letter in one, the telegram in the other – bitter disappointment in his heart, a wild longing, a mad temptation…

He lifted the letter to allow his gaze to linger futilely upon it, like Tantalus… In spite of his agitation he could not fail to see that the envelope was actually open, for, as a matter of fact, the gum had nearly all been steamed away…

It was open! He had but to put in his finger and draw it out, and read, and revel, like the parched traveler at the solitary well in the desert. Would that be dishonest? Who could blame him for that? He had not opened the envelope…

"Miss Prout, just give me the gum-pot," he said, for he could see that the gum on the flap was too thin to be of any service.

Hylda Prout handed him a brush, and he pasted down the flap, but with fingers so agitated that he made daubs with the gum on the envelope, daubs which anyone must notice on examination.

Meantime, he had dropped the telegram upon the table, and Hylda Prout read it.

CHAPTER X

THE DIARY, AND ROSALIND

Strange as a process of nature is the way in which events, themselves unimportant, work into one another to produce some foredestined result that shall astonish the world.

The sudden appearance of Inspector Clarke before Pauline Dessaulx at the front door of Mrs. Marsh's lodgings produced by its shock a thorough upset in the girl's moral and physical being. And in Clarke himself that diary of Rose de Bercy which Pauline handed him produced a hilarity, an almost drunken levity of mind, the results of which levity and of Pauline's upset dovetailed one with the other to bring about an effect which lost none of its singularity because it was preordained.

To Clarke the diary was a revelation! Moreover, it was one of those sweet revelations which placed the fact of his own wit and wisdom in a clearer light than he had seen those admitted qualities before, for it showed that, though working in the dark, he had been guided aright by that special candle of understanding that must have been lit within him before his birth.

"Well, fancy that," cried he again and again in a kind of surprise. "I was right all the time!"

He sat late at night, coatless and collarless, at a table over the diary, Mrs. Clarke in the next room long since asleep, London asleep, the very night asleep from earth right up to heaven. Four days before a black cat had been adopted into the household. Surely it was that which had brought him the luck to get hold of the diary! – so easily, so unexpectedly. Pussie was now perched on the table, her purr the sole sound in the quietude, and Clarke, who would have scoffed at a hint of superstition, was stroking her, as he read for the third time those last pages written on the day of her death by the unhappy Frenchwoman.

… I so seldom dream, that it has become the subject of remark, and Dr. Naurocki of the Institute said once that it is because I am such a "perfect animal." It is well to be a perfect something: but that much I owe only to my father and mother. I am afraid I am not a perfect anything else. A perfect liar, perhaps; a perfect adventuress; using as stepping-stones those whose fond hearts love me; shallow, thin within; made of hollow-ringing tin from my skin to the tissue of my liver. Oh, perhaps I might have done better for myself! Suppose I had stayed with Marguerite and le pre Armaud on the farm, and helped to milk the two cows, and met some rustic lover at the stile at dusk, and married him in muslin? It might have been as well! There is something in me that is famished and starved, and decayed, something that pines and sighs because of its utter thinness – I suppose it is what they call "the soul." I have lied until I am become a lie, an unreality, a Nothing. I seem to see myself clearly to-day; and if I could repent now, I'd say "I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him 'Father.'"

Too late now, I suppose. Marguerite would draw her skirts away from touching me, though the cut of the skirt would set me smiling; and, if the fatted calf was set before me on a soiled table-cloth, I should be ill.

Too late! You can't turn back the clock's hands: the clock stops. God help me, I feel horribly remorseful. Why should I have dreamt it? I so seldom dream! and I have never, I think, dreamt with such living vividness. I thought I saw my father and Marguerite standing over my dead body, staring at me. I saw them, and I saw myself, and my face was all bruised and wounded; and Marguerite said: "Well, she sought for it," and my father's face twitched, and suddenly he sobbed out: "I wish to Heaven I had died for her!" and my dead ears on the bed heard, and my dead heart throbbed just once again at him, and then was dead for ever.