Burton E. Stevenson

“ Tremaine was saying, and though the voice was carefully repressed, it had in it a ring of savage earnestness. “In your heart you know it, or you wouldn’t stand there listening. I have come to you at once, boldly, because I’m sure that I shall win. He is not worthy of you—in your heart you know that, also. He cannot hold you; he is too weak; I shall wrench you away! You’re not the woman to be tied to a gilded mediocrity. You have fire—ah! I have studied you—you need a larger outlook upon life. You’ve been kept in a cage—you’ve never had a chance to be yourself. ”

“ In that instant a quick shiver ran through me, as though I had been suddenly imprisoned with a wild beast--a shiver that had in it something fearfully delightful. And let me add here that the emotion which Cecily, for so I came to know her, raised in me was not in the least admiration in the ordinary sense of the term, but rather an overpowering fascination, such as one sometimes feels in watching a magnificent tigress pacing back and forth in her cage; Such, I believe, was the feeling she inspired in most men; even in Tremaine himself. ”

“ I cried. “The bed!”
“Right!” agreed Godfrey incisively, and walked to the bedroom door. In an instant, the inner room was ablaze with light. He armed himself with one of Tremaine’s canes, and together we approached the bed.
“Ready, now,” he said, and with a sudden movement, stripped back the covers. But there was nothing under them.
“The pillow, perhaps,” he said, and turned it over.
There was a quick movement, a soft hissing, a vicious head raised itself, two eyes of orange fire glared at us...
I heard the swish of Godfrey’s cane, and the head fell. Fê-Fê would work no more evil. ”

“ I was forced to admit that, to look at Drysdale, no one would believe him capable of such a crime; but then, for that matter, to look at Tremaine, who would believe him capable of it? Put the two men before a jury, and Tremaine would come off victor every time. It becomes instinctive, in time, for a lawyer to try to look at his cases with an average jury’s eyes—he must see them as those twelve men in the box will see them—and applying that method now, it was very evident to me that the chance of clearing our client was very slim indeed. ”

“ Certainly Simmonds had no longer any doubt of it, to judge by his beatific expression of countenance.
It was over in an instant—Miss Croydon gripped back her self-control and the prisoner managed to remove his eyes from her; but Goldberg had perceived their agitation, and the gaze he bent upon the witness grew perceptibly more stern.
“Miss Croydon,” he began, “you have described the guilty man as short and heavy-set with a dark moustache turning up at the ends. Look at the prisoner before you—is he the man?” ”

“ Is there any virtue in dreams, I wonder? That night, while I slept, the tragedy in suite fourteen was re-enacted before me. I witnessed its every detail—I saw Tremaine snatch up the pipe and strike a heavy blow—then, suddenly, behind him, appeared a face dark with passion, a hand shot out, a pistol flashed, even as Tremaine tried to knock it aside, and Cecily looked down upon her victim with eyes blazing with hatred! ”

“ Drysdale ground his teeth together and struck himself a savage blow in the chest.
“Good God!” he groaned. “What a fool! What a perfect, muckle-headed fool!”
“Go on,” laughed Godfrey. “Do it again—sackcloth and ashes! You deserve it all!”
“Deserve it! Do you think she’ll ever forgive me?”
“I shouldn’t if I were in her place,” Godfrey assured him. “I’d think myself well rid of you. I shouldn’t want to marry an idiot.”
Drysdale cursed dismally to himself.
“Still,” Godfrey added, “there’s no accounting for the whims of women—there’s no telling what they’ll do. ”

“ Here would be an opportunity to unveil such secrets of his as Cecily might know—especially as to where they had been on the evening of the murder. Perhaps she even knew the victim; could give me a clew to the connection between him and Tremaine, if such a connection existed—there were unlimited possibilities. And yet, a feeling of shame held me back. To take advantage in this way of a man who trusted me, against whom there was nothing but the merest, most intangible suspicion... ”

“ So he took the little cylinder of paper as he returned the greeting, and sat down on the sill of his window.
“But how grey the sea is,” continued Tremaine. “It is not so in the tropics—it is blue—oh, such a blue!”
“You seem to be an early riser,” observed Drysdale, who had thought to find himself the first astir.
“It is a habit one learns at St. Pierre. The dawn is, there, the only pleasant portion of the day—one rises to burn incense to it.” ”

“ Godfrey leaned back in his chair with a long sigh of relief. He had won the battle.
“Miss Croydon,” he said, “I’m going to reward you for your frankness by telling you something which I had intended to keep secret a while longer, just to punish you. Your sister never was the wife of Tremaine and has nothing whatever to fear from him; he has no hold on her at all. She has never been anybody’s wife but Mr. Delroy’s.”
She was staring at him with widely opened eyes, her hands clasped above her heart. ”

“ He was the unexceptionable gentleman, the man of the world who had travelled far and tasted many things, a brilliant and witty talker—a personality, in a word, on the whole so fascinating and impressive that long before the evening was over I had dismissed as ridiculous my vague suspicions of an hour before. The story that Godfrey had built up was, I reflected, wholly hypothetical, flimsy with the flimsiness which always attaches to circumstantial evidence. ”

“ It reduced the mystery to a mere sordid crime. Godfrey wanted colour in his mysteries—and right there, he reminded himself again, was his great weakness. Yet Jimmy’s manner had not been that of a guilty man; to be sure, it had changed at the last moment, at the mention of Miss Croydon’s name. Why? What was this wide-stretching net of intrigue, woven in the dark, involving alike Fifth Avenue and the “Tenderloin”—the Delroy mansion, the Marathon, Magraw’s gilded saloon? ”

“ The place was crowded, and Cecily soon became again the centre of attraction. Men strolled past merely to look at her, and from more than one woman I caught a flash of the eye that said unutterable things. The advent of a new, incomparable siren could not pass unchallenged. At them all, Cecily glanced from time to time with admirable nonchalance; one would have sworn she had been reared in New York. ”

“ Delroy and Tremaine went at once to the Wall Street office where the conference concerning the railroad was to take place. Memories of that conference still survive in the Street; wild legends concerning it—how a company of conservative, cold-blooded, steel-gutted capitalists were worked upon, bamboozled, hypnotised, wrought up to enthusiasm over a project which was proved, by the subsequent reports of engineers, to be about as practicable as a bridge to the moon. ”

“ Tremaine was to leave in the afternoon for his week’s absence, and he came in before I left in the morning to say goodbye. He seemed strangely elated and triumphant; his eyes were even brighter than usual, the colour came and went in his cheeks—he presented, altogether, a most fascinating appearance. He lingered only a moment to shake hands and thank me again.
“Cecily is jealous of these last moments,” he said, with a laugh. “She’s a spoilt child—and like a child, her moods are only of the moment—she’ll be gay as a lark tomorrow. ”

“ But what possible reason could she have for wishing to rent the rooms? How could she nerve herself to enter them again? Was it the rooms and not the man that had brought her to the Marathon? Did they hold the key to the mystery? Did they contain some secret...
The car stopped. A man and woman were waiting to be taken up. At the man I did not even glance, for his companion held my eyes. Such fierce, dark, passionate beauty I had never seen before, and my nerves were still tingling with the sight of it as I left the building and turned westward toward my rooms. ”

“ I wish the chance was mine—Cecily, I’m sure, knows a good many interesting things about Tremaine. Besides, I haven’t got your high moral scruples—I believe in fighting fire with fire. However, do your best. I’ll look you up as soon as I get back. Good-bye.”
I watched him until the crowd hid him; then I turned toward my rooms a little miserably. Without Godfrey to back me, I felt singularly weak and helpless. If Tremaine were really the finished scoundrel we supposed him, what chance had I against him? ”

“ During a pause in the conversation, Delroy’s glance happened to fall upon the superb necklace of pearls which encircled his wife’s throat.
“Why, see there, Edith,” he cried, “how those pearls have changed. They seem absolutely lifeless.”
Mrs. Delroy picked up a strand with trembling fingers and looked at it.
“So they do,” she agreed, a little hoarsely. “That’s queer. They’ve changed since I put them on.”
“There’s a superstition, you know,” remarked Drysdale, “that pearls somehow possess an acute sympathy with their owner. ”

“ But in a moment he slipped it unopened into his pocket.
“A man is a fool to make promises,” he observed, with a wry smile, and sat down at the table. “Hello, what’s this?” he added suddenly, and, stooping, he fished from the waste-basket beside him the fragments of a cane.
It was a cane certainly of at least ordinary strength, and yet it had been broken into half a dozen pieces, and hurled into the basket.
Whistling softly to himself, Godfrey surveyed it for a moment; then he bent over the basket and examined the remainder of its contents, piece by piece. ”

“ For Godfrey wanted to be alone a few minutes with Miss Croydon. He was acutely conscious that here was a mystery much more puzzling than appeared on the surface; much more picturesque than the ordinary run of mysteries. Miss Croydon had said that her errand to suite fourteen had been on a private matter which did not concern the police, but Godfrey was not so sure of that. ”

“ I remember one evening he got fairly started upon this hobby of his and talked uninterruptedly for at least an hour—facts, details, descriptions at his finger-ends. Cecily, chin in hands, listened intent to every word, and I, with the remembrance of that evening still fresh upon me, can understand how he won the ear of even Wall Street’s suspicious denizens. And, indeed, it was a wonderful prospectus which he painted—broad sugar plantations with no market, the whole traffic of the island carried upon the heads of women; the great sand-heaps of the east coast ninety per cent. ”

“ I remarked, “to find a theory that fits all the facts.”
“Exceedingly difficult sometimes,” assented my companion, “because the facts often appear to be entirely contradictory. Really, facts are never contradictory—truth is always truth—the trouble is we can’t always tell what is fact and what is fiction. The hardest part of a detective’s work is to sift the wheat from the chaff—to get at the meaty, essential facts.
“Well, as you know, I started out with the theory of Tremaine’s guilt. ”

“ A gleam of triumph indescribable flashed into Tremaine’s eyes.
“That may explain it,” he said, with studied carelessness.
“Yes--but it doesn’t excuse it. If a man can’t keep his temper when he loses, he hasn’t any business to speculate. Hello, who’s that?”
Someone was pounding at the outer door. Delroy strode to it and threw back the bolt. It flew open and young Graham staggered rather than walked into the hall, hatless, coatless, soaked with rain, his eyes staring, his face rigid with horror.
“Good God, man; what is it?” cried Delroy. ”

“ As Godfrey paused to look at her, the door opened and Simmonds came in. He closed it and snapped the lock.
“There’s a policeman outside and one at each landing,” he announced. “We’ll look things over here, and then search the building. First, let’s look at the body.”
It was lying partly on its back, partly on its right side, with its legs doubled under it. The face was a bearded one, rough, coarse, and a little bloated-not a prepossessing face under any circumstances, and actively repulsive now, with its gaping mouth and widely staring eyes. ”

“ In an instant, I was in the hall. A red light streamed through the open door of the apartment opposite, silhouetting a woman’s figure, staring, with clasped hands...
I sprang past her, pulled down the burning curtains, and threw them into the hall, where Higgins, who had run up the stairs, stamped out the flames. The room was full of smoke, but it was evident that the fire had spread no farther. I opened the window, and the smoke was whirled away.
“That was lucky,” was Higgins’s comment, as he stood panting in the doorway. “By cricky! I’m all in a tremble. I thought it was another murder!” ”

“ Indeed, the sudden antagonism he had developed toward Delroy would have suggested a permanent return to town had not a point of honour, as it were, compelled him to stay. He could not, at this moment, desert Grace Croydon to the machinations of Tremaine; he must save her if he could, not only for his own sake, but for hers. ”

“ Half-blinded for an instant, we stood staring at each other, at the floor...
“For God’s sake,” gasped Simmonds, mopping the sweat from his face, “what is it?”
“It’s a snake,” said Godfrey tersely. “The deadliest in the world. If you don’t believe me, look yonder,” and he pointed to the huddled mass on the floor. ”