CHAPTER I
What Happened in Suite Fourteen
I WAS conscious, in a dim way, that the end was at hand, that we were about to penetrate the mystery. Indeed, I already had a vague inkling of the truth—too vague to be put into words, too obscure to be discerned clearly. I was trembling with eagerness; I endeavoured to string upon a common thread the bits of evidence which had seemed to Godfrey so important—the bottle, the scratches on the wall, the coat-rack, the broken cane, the note; but for the life of me I could see no connection between them. Yet I knew there must be, or Godfrey would not now be walking up and down the room with a face so beaming, so triumphant…
“Miss Croydon will see you at once, sir,” announced Thomas from the threshold, and we followed him to the farther end of the corridor, where he tapped at a door. A voice bade us enter.
She was standing by a window, looking out across the waters of the bay, and she did not turn for an instant—not, indeed, until Godfrey had closed the door carefully behind him. I have seen few women more regal, more magnificent, yet there was about her—in her face, in the droop of her figure—such an air of utter misery, of exquisite suffering, that, after the first moment, one forgot to admire her in the desire to be of service.
“You wished to see me?” she asked, in a low voice.
“Yes, Miss Croydon,” replied Godfrey, more gently perhaps than he had intended to speak. “This is Mr. Lester,” he added, “who has been engaged to defend Mr. Drysdale.”
She acknowledged the introduction with the faintest of bows.
“I hope Mr. Lester will be successful,” she said, in the coldest of tones. One would have thought her a mere chance acquaintance of my client.
I saw Godfrey looking at her with searching eyes, and his face hardened.
“We mean to be successful,” he said curtly. “You may as well ask us to sit down, Miss Croydon, because our business here will take some time and I am sure it will tire you to stand.”
She raised her eyebrows with a little gesture of astonished disdain.
“Really,” she began; then her eyes met his, burning with meaning. “Oh, very well,” she said faintly, and sank into the chair nearest her.
I felt my cheeks flush with indignation at Godfrey’s manner; surely this woman had enough to bear already! I opened my lips to protest, but he silenced me with a glance.
“Now, Miss Croydon,” he continued, in the same coldly imperative tone, “I intend to speak to you bluntly and directly. We have beaten about the bush too long already. I see that you are not inclined to deal frankly with us—you have not been frank with us from the first—you have sought to blind us, to throw us off the track. Therefore I shall tell you what we already know, in order that you may realise how useless it is for you to try to hold us off. We’re going to see that the guilty man is punished, not for this crime alone, but also for that other one at the Marathon, of which you were the only witness. You shall not be permitted to keep him from justice a day longer.”
She raised her head and looked at him, her face white as marble and as immobile; but she did not speak. She grew livid and more livid as he continued, watching him with starting eyes, and at one moment I thought she would collapse; but I did not know her strength of will.
“In the first place,” went on Godfrey evenly, never removing his eyes from hers, “we know that this man Tremaine inveigled your sister into a school-girl elopement and marriage; she was rescued from him; she thought him dead; she married Delroy; came to New York; Tremaine followed her and attempted the extortion of blackmail; you met him at the Marathon; while you were talking, Thompson interfered and Tremaine killed him, escaping before the officers arrived. You did not know Thompson, but you saw Simmonds and me take out his pocket-book; you heard me read a line or two from one of a packet of clippings we found there, and while we were in the bedroom, you took those clippings from the body and hid them under the edge of the carpet”
She breathed a long sigh and sat erect again.
“Ah,” she said, with a little smile, “I was beginning to fear you, all that seemed so supernatural. But now I see where your information came from.”
“It is correct, then?” asked Godfrey, a gleam of triumph flashing across his face.
She glanced at him in surprise.
“Oh, I understand; it was merely theorising. Well, it was very cleverly done, Mr. Godfrey.”
“And it is correct?” he persisted.
She hesitated yet a moment, but there was no denying the importunity of his gaze.
“Yes,” she answered; “yes.”
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.
“Oh, if it were really so!” she cried. “If it were really so!”
“It is so,” repeated Godfrey, and took a little yellow envelope from his pocket. “Read this,” and he unfolded a sheet of paper and held it toward her.
She took it with trembling hand and read the message written upon it; but seemingly without understanding it.
“It is a cable,” he explained, “from the Record’s correspondent at Dieppe. Your pardon, Lester,” he added with a fleeting smile; “I forgot to show it to you on the trip out. Please read it aloud, Miss Croydon.”
“‘The widow of Victor Charente’” she read in a low voice, “‘died here February 21, 1901. Had never married again.’” She looked up, her brows still knitted. “Well?” she asked.
“Well,” said Godfrey, “Victor Charente is the real name of Tremaine. He married that girl many years before he met your sister. She was his legal wife. Your sister never was. She was never the legal wife of anyone except Richard Delroy.”
She understood now, and the glad tears burst forth unrestrainable. Indeed, she made no effort to restrain them, but only rocked back and forth, pressing the message against her heart.
“Thank God!” she sobbed, “Thank God!” and then she started up from her chair. “I must tell her,” she said, “at once. If you knew how she has suffered! She must not be left in that cruel position an instant longer.”
“Very well,” agreed Godfrey. “We will wait for you here.”
She disappeared through a door at the farther end of the room, but in a moment came softly back again.
“She is asleep,” she said. “I will wait until she wakes. What a joyful awaking it will be!” and she sat down again. She wiped away the tears, but her eyes were still shining. Godfrey gazed at her with a face full of emotion.
“Now, Miss Croydon,” he began, “you’ve told me that my theory’s correct, but there are three or four points I should like you to help me clear up, if you will.”
“I shall be glad to if I can,” she answered, and smiled at him, her eyes brimming again. “You’ve lifted such a load from me, Mr. Godfrey, that I’d do almost anything to show my gratitude.”
Why, looking at her, did his face change—soften, harden? Why did his hands tremble so? It was over in an instant; yet I had caught a glimpse of his secret, I understood…
“It was nothing,” he said; “I was glad to do it—I was deeply pleased when that message came this morning.”
“You’ve been kinder to me than I deserved,” she said; and I more than half agreed with her. How, with his eyes before her, could she fail to understand? Perhaps she did understand—I was never sure.
“In the first place, then, Miss Croydon,” he went on, in a different tone, “how did your father succeed in getting your sister away from Tremaine?”
“They had gone to Paris,” she answered, “and in two or three days, Edith had awakened from her dream—she saw something in the man which terrified her, and she wrote a pitiful letter to father, who went over to Paris at once, and finally succeeded in buying the man off. Father paid him fifty thousand francs, I believe—perhaps it was the fact that he knew he was not really Edith’s husband—that he himself had committed a crime—which made him take it. He agreed to leave the country, and in the following December he wrote father that he was about to sail for Martinique in a ship called the Centaur. He said he intended to buy a plantation at Martinique and make that his home. In February, we learned that the Centaur had been lost, with all on board. After eight years, it seemed certain that he was dead, and Edith felt free to marry again.”
“Was Mr. Delroy informed of this early indiscretion?”
“Certainly—and forgave it, as any good man would.”
“Pardon me for asking the question, Miss Croydon; but it was necessary. When was it you first learned that Tremaine was still alive?”
“One night nearly two months ago, Edith brought his letter to me. She was wild, distracted, ready to kill herself—that is what I have feared every day since. She loves Mr. Delroy, Mr. Godfrey; and yet she believed herself the wife of another man. He demanded that she meet him in that apartment house. I knew she could not bear such a meeting, and yet he must be seen. I offered to go in her stead; I had some wild idea of appealing to his better nature, of persuading him”
She stopped, silenced by her own emotion.
“That, of course, would not have altered the fact that your sister was his wife,” observed Godfrey.
“No; that was the terrible part of it; nothing could alter that. There must, of course, be a separation; but we thought we would solve that problem after we had settled the other. So I went. He opened the door for me. I had never seen him, and I confess his appearance and manner were not at all what I expected. He did not look in the least like a scoundrel, nor did he act like one. He listened to me with attention and seeming respect. He even appeared moved. Oh, I know now what a hypocrite he was; I know that he was laughing at me; that he was planning something deeper, more villainous. I had brought twelve hundred dollars with me,—all that we could gather together at the moment,—and I pressed it upon him, urging him to take it and go away and we would send him more. He pretended to refuse the money, to protest that that was not in the least what he wanted, but I compelled him to take it. And just as I was hoping that I had prevailed with him, the door of the bedroom opened and a horrible drunken man staggered out.
“‘Well, Vic,’ he cried, ‘so this is th’ gal, is it? She’s a likely piece. I wouldn’t give her up, Vic, no, not fer ten thousand’
“‘Go back to bed, you drunken brute!’ cried Tremaine, and took him roughly by the arm.
“But the other shook him off.
“‘Don’t lay your hands on me, Vic!’ he cried. ‘Don’t dare lay your hands on me!’
“I saw a very devil spring into Tremaine’s face. He looked about him for some weapon, and picked up a piece of pipe that lay beside the radiator. Thompson saw the action and lurched heavily toward him.
“‘Goin’ t’ use that on me, Vic?’ he asked. ‘You’d better try it,’ and he made a pass at Tremaine and tried to snatch the pipe away. ‘You try it on an’ I’ll blow your game like I did once before down at Sydney.’
“He struck at Tremaine again, but the latter sprang away and in an instant had brought the pipe down upon his head. Thompson fell like a log; then that fiendish look flashed into Tremaine’s face a second time; he snatched out a revolver—I dimly understood what was coming—indeed, I had my own revolver in my hand—and I fired at him; but my shot went wild, while his”
She stopped and buried her face in her hands, overcome for the moment by the terrible spectacle her words had evoked.
She controlled herself by an effort; took down her hands…
“He put his pistol away and stepped over very close to me.”
“‘Miss Croydon,’ he said rapidly, ‘it will be well for you to say you did not know me. I have committed no crime—he was the aggressor—what I did was done in self-defence. One thing more—your sister has nothing to fear from me—I shall never bother her again—I promise you that.’
“He was gone in an instant and then the janitor came and you and the detectives.”
Godfrey nodded thoughtfully.
“That supplies the motive, Lester,” he said. “I have felt that my explanation of the crime was not quite adequate. But it was not only desire for revenge that urged Tremaine on—it was also the knowledge that Thompson knew of his first marriage and threatened, with a word, to wreck his plans a second time.”
“Yes,” I agreed, and sat silent, pondering the story.
“Why did you take the clippings, Miss Croydon?” asked Godfrey after a moment.
“From what you read of them, I suspected how vitally they concerned my sister. That was a secret, I felt, which must be kept at any hazard. It was done without consideration, on the spur of the moment, or I should never have had the courage to do it at all.”
“And why did you hide them under the carpet?”
She laughed outright—the load was lifted—she was fast becoming her usual self.
“I had a wild idea that you were going to search me. I saw that loose place in the carpet the instant I arose with the clippings in my hand. Once I had put them there, I had no chance at all to get them again.”
Godfrey nodded.
“You tried to get them the day after the inquest, didn’t you?”
“Yes; but the janitor was so afraid of me that he wouldn’t even let me go upstairs.”
“And there weren’t any papers?”
“No; that was a lie. I saw I must invent one—that I must offer some explanation of my presence there.”
“Did Tremaine keep his promise?”
“Not to bother my sister? Yes; he mentioned it again only to assure me that the past was dead—that he would never revive it.”
“But how could you admit his presence here?”
“How could we prevent it? It was Mr. Delroy who brought him. We weren’t strong enough to tell him the whole story.”
“You mean you told him part of it?”
“There has been a virtual separation ever since Mr. Tremaine appeared.”
Godfrey paused reflectively.
“Why were you so agitated,” he continued finally, “when you were asked to identify Jimmy the Dude at the inquest?”
“Because I did identify him.”
“You did?”
“Yes—as the man I had seen talking to the janitor in the lower hall. Let me explain, Mr. Godfrey. When I was asked suddenly for a description of the murderer, I was taken aback; I endeavoured to think, to collect myself—and I remembered the man I had passed in the hall. Without stopping to consider—wishing only to disarm suspicion—I described him roughly as I remembered him. When I was confronted with him at the inquest next day, I instantly realised what I had done—I had implicated an innocent man—and it turned me a little faint for a moment.”
“Had you ever met him?”
“Met him?” she repeated in surprise. “Why, no.”
“But he seemed to know you.”
“Oh!” and she laughed again. “I had a letter from him next day—a letter filled with gratitude—touching even. It seems that my sister and I had helped his family—a mother and sister—without knowing it, while he was away”
“At Sing-Sing—he’s the most expert burglar in New York, but he’s got his good points, too—witness his taking Thompson home that night.”
“Yes—he wanted to do anything he could to help me. I intend to look up Jimmy.”
“Do—if you can reform him, the New York police force will be mighty grateful.”
“I’m going to try,” she said, and I rather envied Jimmy.
Godfrey leaned back in his chair with a sigh of satisfaction.
“I think that clears up that affair pretty well,” he said; “and that brings us to the second and more serious one. And first, Miss Croydon, I want to ask you if you think it was just the right thing to let them march Jack Drysdale off to prison when a single word from you might have saved him?”