CHAPTER VI
THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER
"Are you waiting for some one, sir?"
That question, for all its veneer of respectfulness, was only toopatently a message of dismissal. And I resented it, not only becauseit was an impertinence, but more because it had driven out of my drowsybrain a very beautiful picture of Mary Lockwood as she stooped over anold Italian table-cover embroidered with gold galloon.
"Are you waiting for some one?" repeated that newly arrived all-nightwaiter, in no way impressed by my silence.
"I am," I announced as I inspected him with open disapproval. I wasdreamily wondering why, in the name of common sense, waiters alwaysdressed in such ridiculous and undecorative neckties.
This particular waiter, however, continued to regard me out of a fishyand cynical eye. Then he looked at the clock. Then he looked at myempty wine-cooler, plainly an advertisement of suspended circulation inthe only fluid that seemed vital to him.
"Was it a lady?" he had the effrontery to inquire.
I could see his eyes roam about the all but empty room. It was thelow-ebb hour when a trolley car is an event along the empty street, thehour when chairs are piled on cafe tables, the white corpuscles of themilk wagons begin to move through the city's sleepy arteries, and thosesteel nerves known as telegraph wires keep languidly awake with thesugary thrills of their night letters.
"Yes, it was a lady," I answered. That wall-eyed intruder knew nothingof the heavenly supper I had stumbled on in that wicked Frenchrestaurant, or of the fine and firm _Clos Vougeot_ that had beenunearthed from its shabby cellar, or of my own peace of mind as I satthere studying the empty metal cooler and pondering how the mean andscabby wastes of Champagne could mother an ichor so rich with singingetherealities.
"Er--just what might she look like, sir?" my tormentor next asked ofme, blinking about in a loose and largely condoning matter-of-factnessas though in placid search of some plumed and impatient demirepawaiting her chance to cross the bar of acquaintanceship on thecareless high tide of inebriacy.
"She moves very, very quietly, and has a star in her hair," I repliedto that fish-eyed waiter. "Her breath is soft and dewy, and her browis hooded. And in her hands she carries a spray of poppies."
The waiter looked down at me with that impersonal mild pity with whichit is man's wont to view the harmlessly insane.
"Surely," I said with a smothered yawn, "surely you have met her?Surely you have been conscious of those soft and shadowy eyes gazinginto yours as you melted into her arms?"
"Quite so, sir," uneasily admitted my wall-eyed friend. Then I beganto realize that he was waking me up. I grew fearful lest hisdevastating invasion should frighten away the timorous spirit I hadbeen wooing as assiduously as an angler seeking his first trout. Forone long hour, with a full body and an empty head, I had sat therestalking sleep as artfully and as arduously as huntsman ever stalked adeer. And I knew that if I moved from that spot the chase would beover, for that night at least.
"But the odd thing about her," I languidly explained, "is that sheevades only those who seek her. She is coy. She denies herself tothose who most passionately demand her. Yet something tells me thatshe is hovering near me at this moment, that she is about to bend overme with those ineffable eyes if only I await the golden moment. Andso, my dear sir, if you will take this as a slight reward for yourtrouble, and cover that exceedingly soiled-looking divan in thatexceedingly disreputable-looking alcove with a clean tablecloth, andthen draw that curtain which is apparently designed to convert it intoa _chambre particuliere_, you will be giving me a chance to consortwith an angel of graciousness more lovely than any meretricious headthat ever soiled its faded plush. And if I am left uninterrupted untilyou go off in the morning, your reward will then be doubled."
His puzzled face showed, as he peered down at the bill in his hand,that if this indeed were madness, there was a not repugnant sort ofmethod in it.
So he set about in a half dazed fashion draping that none too cleandivan with a table-cloth, making it, in fact, look uncomfortably like abier. Then he carried my hat and gloves and overcoat to a chair at thefoot of the divan. Then he took me by the arm, firmly and solicitously.
His face, as I made my way without one stagger or reel into that shabbylittle quietude screened off from the rest of the world, was a study inastonishment. It was plain that I puzzled him. He even indulged in asecond wondering glance back at the divan as he drew the portieres.Then, if I mistake not, he uttered the one explanatory andself-sufficient word--"Needle-pumper."
I heard him tiptoe in, a few minutes later, and decently cover my legswith the overcoat from the chair. I did not speak, for bending over mewas a rarer and sweeter Presence, and I wanted no sound or movement tofrighten her away. Just when her hand touched mine I can not tell.But I fell off into a deep and natural sleep and dreamed I was beingcarried through Sicilian orange groves by a wall-eyed waiter with wingslike a butterfly.
Then the scene changed, as scenes have the habit of doing in dreams. Iseemed to be the center of a sub-cellar conference of highwaymen,presided over by Latreille himself. Then the voices shifted andchanged, receded and advanced. I seemed to be threading thatbuffer-state which lies between the two kingdoms of Sleep andWakefulness, the buffer-state that has no clear-cut outlines and twistslike a weevil between ever-shifting boundaries.
"Where's Sir 'Enery," said a voice from a mountain-top. Then ananswering murmur of voices buzzed about me like bees, only anintelligible word or two seeming to reinforce the fabric of myimaginings as iron rods reinforce concrete-walls. And I continued tolie there in that pleasant borderland torpor, which is neitherwakefulness nor slumber. I seemed to doze on, in no ponderable waydisturbed by the broken hum of talk that flickered and wavered throughmy brain.
"Then why can't Sir Henry work on the Belmont job?" one of the voiceswas asking.
"I told you before, Sir Henry's tied up," another voice answered.
"What doing?" asked the first voice.
"He's fixing his plant for the Van Tuyl coup," was the answer.
"What Van Tuyl?"
"Up in Seventy-third Street. He's got 'em hog tied."
"And what's more," broke in a third voice, "he won't touch a soup casesince he got that safe-wedge in the wrist. It kind o' broke his nervefor the nitro work."
"Aw, you couldn't break that guy's nerve!"
"Well, he knows he's marked, anyway."
Then came a lull, followed by the scratch of a match and the mumblingof voices again.
"How'd he get through the ropes up there?" inquired one of these voices.
"Same old way. Butlering. Turk McMeekin doped him up a half-dozenLondon recommends. That got him started out in Morristown, with theWhippeny Club. Then he did the Herresford job. But he's got a peachwith this Van Tuyl gang. They let him lock up every night--silver andall--and carry the keys to bed with him!"
"It's up to Sir 'Enery to make 'em dream he's the real thing," murmuredanother of the voices.
"Sure!" answered still another voice that seemed a great distance away.
Then the mumble became a murmur and the murmur a drone. And the dronebecame a sighing of birch tops, and I was stalking Big-Horn acrossmountain peaks of _cafe parfait_, where a pompous English butler served_peches Melba_ on the edge of every second precipice.
When I woke up it was broad daylight, and my wall-eyed waiter was therewaiting for his second bill. And I remembered that I ought to phoneBenson so he could have the coffee ready by the time I walked homethrough the mellow November air.
It was two hours later that the first memory of those murmuringmidnight voices came back to me. The words I had overheard seemed tohave been buried in my mind like seeds in the ground. Then here andthere a green shoot of suspicion emerged. The more I thought it over,the more disturbed I became. Yet I warned myself that I could be sureof nothing. The one tangibility was the repeated word, "Van Tuyl."And there at least was somethin
g on which I could focus my attention.
I went to the telephone and called up Beatrice Van Tuyl. Years beforewe had played water polo and catboated on the Sound together. Irealized, as I heard that young matron's cheery voice over thetelephone wire, that I would have to pick my steps with care.
"I say, Beatrice, are you possibly in need of a butler?" I began asoffhandedly as I was able.
"Out of a place, Witter dear?" was the chuckling inquiry that came tome.
"No, I'm not, but I know of a good man," was my mendacious reply. "AndI rather thought--"
"My dear Witter," said the voice over the wire, "we've a _jewel_ of aman up here. He's English, you know. And I'm beginning to suspecthe's been with royalty. Jim's always wanted to stick pins in his legsto see if he really isn't petrified."
"What's his name?"
"Just what it ought to be---the most appropriate name of Wilkins."
"How long have you had him?"
"Oh, weeks and weeks!" Only a New York householder could understandthe tone of triumph in that retort.
"And you're sure of him in every way?"
"Of course we're sure of him. He's been a Gibraltar of dependability."
"Where did you get him from?"
"From Morristown. He was at the Whippeny Club out there before he cameto us."
"The Whippeny Club!" I cried, for the name struck like a bullet on themetal of memory.
"Don't you think," the voice over the wire was saying, "that you'dbetter come up for dinner to-night and inspect the paragon at closerange? And you might talk to us a little, between whiles."
"I'd love to," was my very prompt reply.
"Then do," said Beatrice Van Tuyl. "A little after seven."
And a little after seven I duly rang the Van Tuyls' door-bell and wasduly admitted to that orderly and well-appointed Seventy-third Streethouse, so like a thousand other orderly and well-appointed New Yorkhouses hidden behind their unchanging masks of brown and gray.
Yet I could not help feeling the vulnerability of that apparentlywell-guarded home. For all its walls of stone and brick, for all thesteel grills that covered its windows and the heavy scroll work thatprotected its glass door, it remained a place munificently ripe forplunder. Its solidity, I felt, was only a mockery. It made me thinkof a fortress that had been secretly mined. Its occupants seemedbasking in a false security. The very instruments which went to insurethat security were actually a menace. The very machinery of servicewhich made possible its cloistral tranquillity held the factor for itsdisruption.
As I surrendered my hat and coat and ascended to that second floorwhere I had known so many sedately happy hours, I for once found myselfdisquieted by its flower-laden atmosphere. I began to be oppressed bya new and disturbing sense of responsibility. It would be no lightmatter, I began to see, to explode a bomb of dissension in thatprincipality of almost arrogant aloofness. It would be no joke toconfound that smoothly flowing routine with which urban wealth sojealously surrounds itself.
I suddenly remembered there was nothing in which I could be positive,nothing on which I could with certainty rely. And my inward disquietwas increased, if anything, by the calm and blithely contented glanceBeatrice Van Tuyl leveled at me.
"And what's all this mystery about our man Wilkins?" she asked me, withthe immediacy of her sex.
"Won't you let me answer that question a little later in the evening?"
"But, my dear Witter, that's hardly fair!" she protested, as she held alighted match for her husband's cigarette. "Do you know, I actuallybelieve you've spotted some one you want to supplant Wilkins with."
"Please--"
"Or did he spill soup on you some time when we didn't see it?"
"I imagine he's spilt a bit of soup in his day," I answered,remembering what I had overheard as to the safe wedge. And as I spokeI realized that my one hope lay in the possibility of getting a glimpseof the mark which that wedge had left--if, indeed, my whole sand-chainof coincidences did not split back into the inconsequentialities ofdreamland.
"You can't shake my faith in Wilkins," said the blue-eyed woman in theblue silk dinner gown, as she leaned back in a protecting-armed andsoftly padded library-chair which suddenly became symbolic of her wholeguarded and upholstered life. "Jim, tell Witter what a jewel Wilkinsreally is."
Jim, whose thought was heavy ordnance beside his wife's flying columnof humor, turned the matter solemnly over in his mind.
"He's a remarkably good man," admitted the stolid and levitical Jim,"remarkably good."
"And you've seen him yourself, time and time again," concurred his wife.
"But I've never been particularly interested in servants, you know,"was my self-defensive retort.
"Then why, in the face of the Immortal Ironies, are you putting mybutler under the microscope?" was the return shot that came from theflying column. The acidulated sweetness of that attack even nettled meinto a right-about-face.
"Look here," I suddenly demanded, "have either of you missed anythingvaluable about here lately?"
The two gazed at each other for a moment in perplexed wonder.
"Of course not," retorted the woman in the dinner gown. "Not a thing!"
"And you know you have everything intact, all your jewelry, your plate,your pocketbooks, the trinkets a sneakthief might call it worth whileto round up?"
"Of course we have. And I can't even resent your bracketing mypocketbook in with the trinkets."
"But are you certain of this? Could you verify it at a moment'snotice?"
"My dear Witter, we wouldn't need to. I mean we're doing it every dayof our lives. It's instinctive; it's as much a habit as keeping mothsout of the closets and cobwebs out of the corners."
"What's making you ask all this?" demanded the heavy artillery.
"Yes, what's suddenly making you into a Holmes's watchman?" echoed theflying brigade.
Still again I saw that it was going to be no easy thing to intimate topersons you cared for the possibility of their sleeping on a volcano.Such an intimation has both its dangers and its responsibilities. Myearlier sense of delight in a knowledge unparticipated in by others wasgradually merging into a consciousness of a disagreeable task thatwould prove unsavory in both its features and its _finale_.
"I'm asking all this," I replied, "because I have good reason tobelieve this paragon you call Wilkins is not only a criminal, but hascome into this house for criminal purposes."
"For what criminal purposes?"
"For the sake of robbing it."
Beatrice Van Tuyl looked at me with her wide-open azure eyes. Then shesuddenly bubbled over with golden and liquid-noted laughter. "Oh,Witter, you're lovely!"
"What proof have you got of that?" demanded Jim.
"Of my loveliness?" I inquired, for Jim Van Tuyl's solidity was asprovocative as that of the smithy anvil which the idler can not passwithout at least a hammer-tap or two. Yet it was this same solidity, Iknew, that made him the safest of financiers and the shrewdest ofinvestors.
"No," he retorted, "proofs of the fact that Wilkins is here for otherthan honest purposes."
"I've no proof," I had to confess.
"Then what evidence have you?"
"I've not even any evidence as yet. But I'm not stirring up this sortof thing without good reason."
"Let's hope not!" retorted Jim.
"My dear Witter, you're actually getting fussy in your old age," saidthe laughing woman. It was only the solemnity of her husband's facethat seemed to sober her. "Can't you see it's absurd? We're all here,safe and sound, and we haven't been robbed."
"But what I want to know," went on the heavier artillery, "is what yourreasons are. It seems only right we should inquire what you've got inthe shape of evidence."
"What I have wouldn't be admitted as evidence," I confessed.
He threw down his cigarette. It meant as much as throwing up his hands.
"Then what do you expect us to do?"
"I
don't expect you to do anything. All I ask is that you let me tryto justify this course I've taken, that the three of us dine quietlytogether. And unless I'm greatly mistaken, before that dinner is overI think I can show you that this man--"
I saw Beatrice Van Tuyl suddenly lift a forefinger to her lip. Themotion for silence brought me up short. A moment later I heard thesnap of a light-switch in the hallway outside and then the click ofjade curtain-rings on their pole. Into the doorway stepped a figure inblack, a calm and slow-moving and altogether self-assured figure.
"Dinner is served," intoned this sober personage, with a curate-likesolemnity all his own.
I had no wish to gape at the man, but that first glimpse of mine was asharp one, for I knew that it was Wilkins himself that I wasconfronting. As I beheld him there in all the glory of his magisterialassurance I felt an involuntary and ridiculous sinking in thediaphragm. I asked myself in the name of all the Lares and Penates ofManhattan, why I had suddenly gone off on a wild-goose chase to bag aninoffensive butler about whom I had had a midnight nightmare?
Then I looked at the man more closely. He wore the conventional dresslivery of twilled worsted, with an extremely high-winged collar and anextremely small lawn tie. He seemed a remarkably solid figure of aman, and his height was not insignificant. Any impression offragility, of sedentary bloodlessness, which might have been given outby his quite pallid face, was sharply contradicted by the muscularheaviness of his limbs. His hair, a Kyrle-Bellewish gray over thetemples, was cut short. The well-powdered and close-shaven face wasbluish white along the jowls, like a priest's. The poise of thefigure, whether natural or simulated, was one marked for servitude.
Yet I had to admit to myself, as we filed out and down to thedining-room, that the man was not without his pretended sense ofdignity. He seemed neither arrogant nor obsequious. He hovered midwaybetween the Scylla of hauteur and the Charybdis of consideratepatience. About the immobile and mask-like face hung that veil ofimpersonality which marked him as a butler--as a butler to thefinger-tips. When not actually in movement he was as aloofly detachedas a totem-pole. He stood as unobtrusive as a newel-post, as impassiveas some shielding piece of furniture, beside which youth might whisperits weightiest secret or conspiracy weave its darkest web.
I had to confess, as I watched his deft movements about thatchina-strewn oblong of damask which seemed his fit and rightful domain,that he was in no way wanting in the part--the only thing that puzzledme was the futility of that part. There was authority, too, in hismerest finger-movement and eye-shift, as from time to time he signaledto the footman who helped him in his duties. There was gravesolicitude on his face as he awaited the minutest semaphoric nod of thewoman in the blue silk dinner gown. And this was the man, with hisstolid air of exactitude, with his quick-handed movements and his alertand yet unparticipating eyes, whom I had come into that quiet householdto proclaim a thief!
I watched his hands every course as I sat there talking againsttime--and Heaven knows what I talked of! But about those hands therewas nothing to discover. In the first thing of importance I had metwith disappointment. For the cuffs that projected from the edges ofthe livery sleeves covered each large-boned wrist. In the actualdeportment of the man there was nothing on which to base a decentsuspicion. And in the meanwhile the dinner progressed, as all suchdinners do, smoothly and quietly, and, to outward appearances,harmoniously and happily.
But as it progressed I grew more and more perplexed. There was anothernauseating moment or two when the thought flashed over me that thewhole thing was indeed a mistake, that what I had seemed to hear in myrestless moments of the night before was only a dream projected into aperiod of wakefulness. Equipped with nothing more than an echo fromthis dream, I had started off on this mad chase, to run down a man whohad proved and was proving himself the acme of decorous respectability.
But if this thought was a sickening one, it was also a sickly one.Like all sickly things, too, it tended to die young. It went downbefore the crowding actualities of other circumstances which I couldnot overlook. Coincidence, repeated often enough, became more thanfortuity. The thing was more than a nightmare. I had heard what I hadheard. There was still some method by which I could verify orcontradict my suspicion. My problem was to find a plan. And thegravity of my dilemma, I suppose, was in some way reflected in my face.
"Well, what are you going to do about it?" asked Van Tuyl, with hisheavy matter-of-factness, at a moment when the room happened to beempty.
"Don't you see it's a mistake?" added his wife, with a self-assuringglance about the rose-shaded table and then a wider glance about theroom itself.
"Wait," I suddenly said. "What were his references?"
"He gave us a splendid one from the Whippeny Club. We verified that.Then he had letters, six of them from some very decent people inLondon. One of them was a bishop."
"Did you verify those?"
"Across the Atlantic, Witter? It really didn't seem worth while!"
"And it's lucky for him you didn't!"
"Why?"
"Because they're forgeries, every one of them!"
"What ground have you for thinking that?" asked the solemn Van Tuyl.
"I don't think it--I know it. And, I imagine, I can tell you the nameof the man who forged them for him."
"Well, what is it?"
"A worthy by the name of Turk McMeekin."
Van Tuyl sat up with a heavy purpose on his honest and unimaginativeface.
"We've had a nice lot of this mystery, Witter, but we've got to get tothe end of it. Tell me what you know, everything, and I'll have him inhere and face him with it. Now, what is there beside the Turk McMeekinitem?"
"Not yet!" murmured Beatrice Van Tuyl warningly, as Wilkins and hismask-like face advanced into the room.
I had the feeling, as he served us with one of those delectable iceswhich make even the epicureanism of the Cyrenaics tame in retrospect,that we were deliberately conspiring against our own well-being, thatwe were dethroning our own peace of mind. We were sitting therescheming to undo the agency whose sole function was to minister to ourdelights. And I could not help wondering why, if the man was indeedwhat I suspected, he chose to follow the most precarious and the mostill-paid of all professions. I found it hard to persuade myself thatbehind that stolid blue-white mask of a face could flicker any waywardspirit of adventure--and yet without that spirit my whole case was acard house of absurdities.
I noticed that for the first time Beatrice Van Tuyl's own eyes dweltwith a quick and searching look on her servant's immobile face. Then Ifelt her equally searching gaze directed at me. I knew that my failureto make good would meet with scant forgiveness. She would demandknowledge, even though it led to the discovery of the volcano'simminence. And after so much smoke it was plainly my duty to showwhere the fire lay.
I seized the conversation by the tail, as it were, and dragged it backinto the avenues of inconsequentiality. We sat there, the three of us,actually making talk for the sake of a putty-faced servant. I noticed,though, that as he rounded the table he repeatedly fell under thequickly questioning gaze of both his master and mistress. I began tofeel like an Iago who had willfully polluted a dovecote of hithertounshaken trust. It became harder and harder to keep up my pretense ofartless good humor. Time was flying, and nothing had as yet been foundout.
"Now," demanded Van Tuyl, when the room was once more empty, "what areyou sure of?"
"I'm sure of nothing," I had to confess.
"Then what do you propose doing?" was the somewhat arctic inquiry.
I glanced up at the wall where Ezekiah Van Tuyl, the worthy founder ofthe American branch of the family, frowned reprovingly down at me overhis swathing black stock.
"I propose," was my answer, "having your great grandfather up there letus know whether I am right or whether I am wrong."
And as Wilkins stepped into the room I rose from the table, walked overto the heavy-framed portrait, and lift
ed it from its hook. I held itthere, with a pretense of studying the face for a moment or two. ThenI placed my table napkin on a chair, mounted it, and made anunsuccessful effort to rehang the portrait.
"If you please, Wilkins," I said, still holding the picture flatagainst the wall.
"A little higher," I told him, as I strained to loop the cord back overits hook. I was not especially successful at this, because at the timemy eyes were directed toward the hands of the man holding up thepicture.
His position was such that the sleeves of his black service coat weredrawn away from the white and heavy-boned wrists. And there, before myeyes, across the flexor cords of the right wrist was a wide and raggedscar at least three inches in length.
I returned to my place at the dinner table. Van Tuyl, by this time,was gazing at me with both resentment and wonder.
"Shall we have coffee up-stairs?" his wife asked with unruffledcomposure. I could see her eye meet her husband's.
"Here, please," I interpolated.
"We'll have coffee served here," Beatrice Van Tuyl said to her butler.
"Very good, madam," he answered.
I wondered, as I watched him cross the room, if he suspected anything.I also wondered how hare-brained the man and woman seated at the tablethought me.
"Listen," I said, the moment we were alone; "have you a servant hereyou can trust, one you can trust implicitly?"
"Of course," answered my hostess.
"Who is it?"
"Wilkins," was the answer.
"Not counting Wilkins?"
"Well, I think I can also trust my maid Felice--unless you know herbetter than I do."
I could afford to ignore the thrust.
"Then I'd advise you to send her up to look over your things at once."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because now I know this man Wilkins is a criminal of the worst type!"
"You know it?"
"Yes, I know it as well as I know I'm sitting at this table. And I canprove it."
"How?" demanded Van Tuyl.
"I'll show you how in a very few moments. And, on second thoughts, I'dhave that maid Felice bring what you regard as valuable right to thisdining-room--I mean your jewels and things."
"But this sounds so silly," demurred my still reluctant hostess.
"It won't sound half so silly as a Tiffany advertisement of a rewardand no questions asked."
Beatrice Van Tuyl intercepted a footman and sent him off for the maidFelice. A moment later Wilkins was at our side quietly serving the_cafe noir_ in tiny gold-lined cups.
"This method of mine for identifying the real pearl, as you will see,"I blandly went on, "is a very simple one. You merely take a match endand dip it in clear water. Then you let a drop of water fall on thepearl. If the stone is an imitation one the water-drop will spread andlie close to the surface. If the stone is genuine the drop will standhigh and rounded, like a globe of quicksilver, and will shake with theminute vibrations which pass through any body not in perfectequilibrium."
Before I had completed that speech the maid Felice had stepped into theroom. She was a woman of about thirty, white-skinned, slender offigure, and decidedly foreign-looking. Her face was a clever one,though I promptly disliked an affectation of languor with which shestrove to hide a spirit which was only too plainly alert.
"I want you to fetch my jewel case from the boudoir safe," her mistresstold her. "Bring everything in the box."
I could not see the maid's face, for at that moment I was busy watchingWilkins. From that worthy, however, came no slightest sign ofdisturbance or wonder.
"Here, madam?" the maid was asking.
"Yes, here and at once, please," answered Beatrice Van Tuyl. Then sheturned to me. "And since you're such a jewel expert you'll be able totell me what's darkening those turquoises of mine."
I dropped a lump of sugar into my coffee and sipped it. Wilkins openeda dark-wooded buffet humidor before me, and I picked out aslender-waisted Havana corseted in a band of gold. I suddenly lookedup at the man as he stood at my side holding the blue-flamed littlealcohol lamp for the contact of my waiting cigar end.
"Wilkins, how did you get that scar?" I asked him, out of a clear sky.The wrist itself was covered by its cuff and sleeve end, but underthem, I knew, was the telltale mark.
"What scar, sir?" he asked, his politeness touched with an indulgentpatience which seemed to imply that he was not altogether unused tofacing gentlemen in unaccountably high spirits.
"This one!" I said, catching his hand in mine and running the cuff backalong the white forearm. Not one trace of either alarm or resentmentcould I see on that indecipherable countenance. I almost began toadmire the man. In his way he was superb.
"Oh, that, sir!" he exclaimed, with an almost offensively condoningglance at the Van Tuyls, as though inquiring whether or not he shouldreply to a question at once so personal and at the same time so out ofplace.
"Tell him where you got it, Wilkins," said Beatrice Van Tuyl, sosharply that it practically amounted to a command.
"I got it stopping Lord Entristle's brougham, madam, in London, sevenyears ago," was the quiet and unhesitating answer.
"How?" sharply asked the woman.
"I was footman for his lordship then, madam," went on the quiet andpatient-noted voice. "I had just taken cards in when the horses werefrightened by a tandem bicycle going past. They threw Siddons, thecoachman, off the box as they jumped, and overturned the vehicle. Hislordship was inside. I got the reins as one of the horses went down.But he kicked me against the broken glass and I threw out one hand, Ifancy, to save myself."
"And the coach glass cut your wrist?" asked Van Tuyl.
"Yes, sir," replied the servant, moving with methodic slowness on hisway about the table. His figure, in its somber badge of livery, seemedalmost a pathetic one. There was no anxiety on his face, no shadow offear about the mild and unparticipating eyes. I was suddenly consciousof my unjust superiority over him--a superiority of station, of birth,of momentary knowledge.
The silence that ensued was not a pleasant one. I felt almost gratefulfor the timely entrance of the maid Felice. In her hands she carried ajapanned tin box, about the size of a theatrical makeup box. This sheplaced on the table beside her mistress.
"Is there anything else, madam?" she asked.
"That is all," answered Beatrice Van Tuyl as she threw back the lid ofthe japanned box. I noticed that although the key stood in it, it wasunlocked. Then my hostess looked up at the waiting butler. "And,Wilkins, you can leave the cigars and liqueur on the table. I'll ringif I want anything."
The carefully coiffured blonde head was bent low over the box as theservants stepped out of the room. The delicate fingers probed throughthe array of leather-covered cases. I could see by her face, evenbefore she spoke, that the box's contents were intact.
"You see," she said, ladling handful after handful of glitteringjewelry out on the white table-cloth between her coffee-cup and mine,"everything is here. Those are my rings. There's the dog collar.There's angel Jim's sunburst. Here's the ordinary family junk."
I sat for a moment studying that Oriental array of feminine adornment.It was plainly an array of evidence to discountenance me. I felt adistinct sense of relief when the woman in blue suddenly dropped hereyes from my face to her jewel box again. It was Van Tuyl's persistentstare that roweled me into final activity.
"Then so far, we're in luck! And as from now on I want to beresponsible for what happens," I said, as I reached over and gatheredthe glittering mass up in a table napkin, "I think it will simplifythings if you, Van Tuyl, take possession of these."
I tied the napkin securely together and handed it to my wondering host.Then I dropped a silver bon-bon dish and a bunch of hothouse grapesinto the emptied box, locking it and handing the key back to BeatriceVan Tuyl.
That lady looked neither at me nor the key. Instead, she sat staringmeditatively into space, apparently weighing s
ome question in which therest of that company could claim no interest. It was only after herhusband had spoken her name, sharply, that she came back to herimmediate surroundings.
"And now what must I do?" she asked, with a new note of seriousness.
"Have the maid take the box back to where it came from," I told her."But be so good as to retain the key."
"And then what?" mocked Van Tuyl.
"Then," cut in his wife, with a sudden note of antagonism which I couldnot account for, "_the sooner we send for the police the better_."
An answering note of antagonism showed on Van Tuyl's face.
"I tell you, Kerfoot, I can't do it," he objected, even as his wiferang the bell. "You've got to show me!"
"Please be still, Jim," she said, as Wilkins stepped into the room.She turned an impassive face to the waiting servant. "Will you askFelice to come here."
None of us spoke until Felice entered the room. Wilkins, I noticed,followed her in, but passed across the room's full length and went outby the door in the rear.
"Felice," said the woman beside me, very calmly and coolly, "I want youto take this box back to the safe."
"Yes, madam."
"Then go to the telephone in the study and ring up police headquarters.Tell them who you are. Then explain that I want them to send anofficer here, at once."
"Yes, madam," answered the attentive-faced maid.
"Felice, you had better ask them to send two men, two--"
"Two plain-clothes men," I prompted.
"Yes, two plain-clothes men. And explain to them that they are toarrest the man-servant who opens the door for them--at once, andwithout any fuss. Is that quite clear?"
"Yes, madam, quite clear," answered the maid.
"Then please hurry."
"Yes, madam."
I looked up at Van Tuyl's audible splutter of indignation.
"Excuse me," he cried, "but isn't all this getting just a littlehighhanded? Aren't we making things into a nice mess for ourselves?Aren't we moving just a little too fast in this game, calling out thereserves because you happen to spot a scar on my butler's wrist?"
"I tell you, Jim," I cried with all the earnestness at my command, "theman's a thief, a criminal with a criminal's record!"
"Then prove it!" demanded Jim.
"Call him in and I will."
Van Tuyl made a motion for his wife to touch the bell.
Her slippered toe was still on the rug-covered button when Wilkinsentered, the same austere and self-assured figure.
"Wilkins," said Van Tuyl, and there was an outspoken and deliberatesavagery in his voice even as his wife motioned to him in what seemed asignal for moderation, "Wilkins, I regard you as an especially goodservant. Mr. Kerfoot, on the other hand, says he knows you and saysyou are not."
"Yes, sir," said Wilkins with his totem-pole abstraction.
There was something especially maddening in that sustained calmness ofhis.
"And what's more," I suddenly cried, exasperated by that play-actingrole and rising and confronting him as he stood there, "your name's notWilkins, and you never got that wrist scar from a coach door."
"Why not, sir?" he gently but most respectfully inquired.
"Because," I cried, stepping still nearer and watching the immobileblue-white face, "in the gang you work with you're known as Sir Henry,and you got that cut on the wrist from a wedge when you tried to blowopen a safe door, and the letters of introduction which you brought tothe Whippeny Club were forged by an expert named Turk McMeekin; and Iknow what brought you into this house and what your plans for robbingit are!"
There was not one move of his body as he stood there. There was notone twitch of his mask-like face. But on that face, point by point,came a slow suffusion of something akin to expression. It was notfear. To call it fear would be doing the man an injustice. It beganwith the eyes, and spread from feature to feature, very much, Iimagine, as sentient life must have spread across the countenance ofPygmalion's slowly awakening marble.
For one fraction of a moment the almost pitiful eyes looked at me witha quick and imploring glance. Then the mask once more descended overthem. He was himself again. And I felt almost sure that in themellowed light about us the other two figures at the table had not seenthat face as I did.
There was, in fact, something almost like shame on Van Tuyl's heavyface as the calm-voiced servant, utterly ignoring me and my words,turned to him and asked if he should remove the things.
"You haven't answered the gentleman," said Beatrice Van Tuyl, in avoice a little shrill with excitement.
"What is there to answer, madam?" he mildly asked. "It's all the younggentleman's foolishness, some foolishness which I can't understand."
"But the thing can't stand like this," protested the ponderous Van Tuyl.
There must have been something reassuring to them both in the methodiccalmness with which this calumniated factor in their domestic Edenmoved about once more performing his petty domestic duties.
"Then you deny everything he says?" insisted the woman.
The servant stopped and looked up in mild reproof.
"Of course, madam," he replied, as he slowly removed the liqueurglasses. I saw my hostess look after him with one of her long andabstracted glances. She was still peering into his face as he steppedback to the table. She was, indeed, still gazing at him when themuffled shrill of an electric bell announced there was a caller at thestreet door.
"Wilkins," she said, almost ruminatively, "I want you to answer thedoor--the street door."
"Yes, madam," he answered, without hesitation.
The three of us sat in silence, as the slow and methodic steps crossedthe room, stepped out into the hall, and advanced to what at least oneof us knew to be his doom. It was Van Tuyl himself who spoke up out ofthe silence.
"What's up?" he asked. "What's he gone for?"
"The police are there," answered his wife.
"Good God!" exclaimed the astounded husband, now on his feet. "Youdon't mean you've sprung that trap on the poor devil? You--"
"Sit down, Jim," broke in his wife with enforced calmness. "Sit downand wait."
"But I won't be made a fool of!"
"You're not being made a fool of!"
"But who's arresting this man? Who's got the evidence to justifywhat's being done here?"
"I have," was the woman's answer.
"What do you mean?"
She was very calm about it.
"I mean that Witter was right. _My Baroda pearls and the emeraldpendant were not in the safe. They're gone._"
"They're gone?" echoed the incredulous husband.
"Listen," I suddenly cried, as Van Tuyl sat digesting his discovery.We heard the sound of steps, the slam of a door, and the departing humof a motor-car. Before I realized what she was doing Beatrice VanTuyl's foot was once more on the call bell. A footman answered thesummons.
"Go to the street door," she commanded, "and see who's there."
We waited, listening. The silence lengthened. Something about thatsilence impressed me as ominous. We were still intently listening asthe footman stepped back into the room.
"It's the chauffeur, sir," he explained.
"And what does he want?"
"He said Felice telephoned for the car a quarter of an hour ago."
"Send Felice to me," commanded my hostess.
"I don't think I can, ma'am. _She's gone in the car with Wilkins_."
"With Wilkins?"
"Yes, ma'am. Markson says he can't make it out, ma'am, Wilkins drivingoff that way without so much as a by-your-leave, ma'am."
The three of us rose as one from the table. For a second or two westood staring at one another.
Then Van Tuyl suddenly dived for the stairs, with the napkin full ofjewelry in his hand. I, in turn, dived for the street door. Butbefore I opened it I knew it was too late.
I suddenly stepped back into the hallway, to confront Beatrice Van Tuyl.
&
nbsp; "How long have you had Felice?" I asked, groping impotently about thehall closet for my hat and coat.
"She came two weeks before Wilkins," was the answer.
"Then you see what this means?" I asked, still groping about for myovercoat.
"What _can_ it mean?"
"They were working together--they were confederates."
Van Tuyl descended the stairs still carrying the table napkin full ofjewelry. His eyes were wide with indignant wonder.
"It's gone!" he gasped. "He's taken your box!"
I emerged from the hall closet both a little startled and a littlehumiliated.
"Yes, and he's taken my hat and coat," I sadly confessed.