The de Bercy Affair

"Driver, go on, please!" cried Rosalind again.

"Wait, cabman!" cried Hylda imperiously… "Stay a little – Miss Marsh – one word – I cannot let you waste your sympathies as you do. You believe that Mr. Osborne is friendless; and you offer him your friendship – "

"I!"

Rosalind laughed a little, a laugh with a dangerous chuckle in it that might have carried a warning to one who knew her.

"Do you not say so in that letter? In it you tell him that since the night at the sun-dial, when you were 'brutal' to him – "

"You know, then, my letter – by heart?" said Rosalind, her eyes sparkling and cheeks aflame. "That is quite charming of you! You have been at the pains to read it?"

"No, of course, Mr. Osborne wouldn't exactly show it to me, nor did I ask him. But I think you guess that I am in Mr. Osborne's confidence."

"Mr. Osborne, it would seem, has – read it? He even thought the contents of sufficient importance to repeat them to his typist? Is that so?"

"Mr. Osborne repeats many things to me, Miss Marsh – by habit. You being a stranger to him, do not know him well yet, but I have been with him some time, you see. As to his reading it, I know that you telegraphed him not to, and he received the telegram before the letter, I admit; but, the letter once in his hand, it became his private property, of course. He had a right to read it."

A stone in Rosalind's bosom where her heart had been ached like a wound; yet her lips smiled – a hard smile.

"But then, having read, to be at the pains to seal it down again!" she said. "It seems superfluous, a contemptible subterfuge."

"Oh, well," sneered Hylda, with a pouting laugh, "he is not George Washington – a little harmless deception."

"But you cry out all his secrets!"

"To you."

"Why to me?"

"I save you from troubling your head about him. He is not so friendless as you have imagined."

"Happy man! And was it you who wrote me the anonymous information that he was not Glyn but Osborne?"

"No, that was someone else."

And now Rosalind, blighting her with her icy smile, which no inward fires could melt, said contemplatively:

"I am afraid you are not speaking the truth. I shall tell Mr. Osborne to get rid of you."

The dart was well planted. The paid secretary's lips twitched and quivered.

"Try it! He'll laugh at you!" she retorted.

"No, I think he will do it – to please me!"

Sad to relate, our gracious Rosalind was deliberately adding oil to the fires of hate and rage that she saw devouring Hylda Prout; and when Hylda again spoke it was from a fiery soul that peered out of a ghost's face.

"Will he? – to please you?" she said low, hissingly, leaning forward. "He has a record in a diary of the girls he has kissed, and the number of days from the first sight to the first kiss. He only wanted to see in how few days he could secure you."

This vulgarity astonished its hearer. Rosalind shrank a little; her smile became forced and strained; she could only murmur:

"Oh, you needn't be so bourgeoise."

Hylda chuckled again maliciously.

"It's the mere truth."

"Still, I think I shall warn him against you, and have you dismissed," – this with that feminine instinct of the dagger that plunged deepest, the lash that cut most bitterly.

"You try!" hissed Hylda sharply, as it were secretly, with a nod of menace. "I am not anybody! I am not some defenseless housemaid, the only rival you have experienced hitherto, perhaps. I am – at any rate, you try! You dare! Touch me, and I'll wither your arm – "

"Drive on!" cried Rosalind almost in a scream.

"Wait!" shrilled Hylda – "you shall hear me!"

"Cabman, please – !" wailed Rosalind despairingly.

And now at last the cab was off, Hylda Prout running with it to pant into it some final rancor; and when it left her, she remained there on the pavement a minute, unable to move, trembling from head to foot, watching the vehicle as it sped away from her.

When she re-entered the library the first thing that she saw was Rosalind's cross-folded note to Osborne, and, still burning inwardly, she snatched it up, tore it open, and read:

I will write again. Meantime, high hope! I have discovered that your purloined dagger has been in the possession of the late lady's-maid, Pauline. "A small thing but mine own." I am now taking it to Inspector Furneaux's.

    R. M.

Hylda dashed the paper to the ground, put her foot on it, then catching it up, worried it in her hands to atoms which she threw into a waste-paper basket. Then she collapsed into a chair at her desk, her arms thrown heedlessly over some documents, and her face buried between them.

"I have gone too far, too far, too far – "

Now that her passion had burnt to ashes this was her thought. A crisis, it was clear, had come, and something had to be done, to be decided, now – that very day. Rosalind would surely tell Osborne what she, Hylda, had said, how she had acted, and then all would be up with Hylda, no hope left, her whole house in ruins about her, not one stone left standing on another. Either she must bind Osborne irrevocably to her at once, or her brain must devise some means of keeping Osborne and Rosalind from meeting – or both. But how achieve the apparently impossible? Osborne, she knew, was at that moment at Rosalind's residence, and if Rosalind was now going home … they would meet! Hylda moved her buried head from side to side, woe-ridden, in the grip of a hundred fangs and agonies. She had boasted to Rosalind that she was not a whimpering housemaid, but of a better texture: and if that was an actual truth, the present moment must prove it. Yet she sat there with a buried head, weakly weeping…

Suddenly she thought of the words in Rosalind's note to Osborne, which she had thrown into the basket: "I have discovered that your purloined dagger has been in the possession of the late lady's-maid, Pauline… I am now taking it to Inspector Furneaux's…"

That, then, was the person who had the dagger which had been so sought and speculated about – Pauline Dessaulx!

And at the recollection of the name, Hylda's racked brain, driven to invent, invented like lightning. Up she sprang, caught at her hat, and rushed away, pinning it on to her magnificent red hair in her flight, her eyes staring with haste. In the street she leapt into a motor-cab – to Soho.

She was soon there. As if pursued by furies she pelted up two foul staircases, and at a top back room, rapped pressingly, fiercely, with the clenched knuckles of both hands upon the panels. As a man in his shirt-sleeves, his braces dropped, smoking a cigarette, opened the door to her, she almost fell in on him, and the burning words burst from her tongue's tip:

"Antonio! – it's all up with Pauline – the dagger she did it with – has been found – by a woman – the same woman from Tormouth whom you and I tracked to Porchester Gardens – Pauline is in her employ probably – tell Janoc – he has wits – he may do something before it is too late – the woman has the dagger – in a motor-cab – in a long, narrow box – she is this instant taking it to Inspector Furneaux's house – if she lives, Pauline hangs – tell Janoc that, Antonio – don't stare – tell Janoc – it is she or Pauline – let him choose – "

"Grand Dieu!"

"Don't stare – don't stand – I'm gone."

She ran out; and almost as she was down the stair Antonio had thrown on a coat and was flying down behind her.

He ran down three narrow streets to Poland Street, darted up a stair, broke into a room; and there on the floor, stretched face downwards, lay the lank length of Janoc's body, a map of Europe spread before him, on which with an ivory pointer he was marking lines from town to town. He glanced at the intruder with a frowning brow, yet he was up like an acrobat, as the tidings leapt off Antonio's tongue.