He smiled.
“That sounds as though you admire them,” he said. “Yes, I have heard of them. They are the men who, many years ago, set out to regularize the inconsistencies of the English law, to punish where no punishment is provided by the code. Strange I never associated them. …”
He meditated upon the matter in silence for a long while, and then: “I wonder,” he said, but did not tell her what he was wondering.
She walked down the garden path with him into the roadway and stood chatting about the country and the flowers that he had never seen, and the weather and such trivialities as people talk about when their minds are occupied with more serious thoughts which they cannot share, until the big limousine pulled up and he stepped into its cool interior. He had the independence which comes to the educated blind and gently refused the offer of her guidance, an offer she did not attempt to repeat, sensing the satisfaction he must have had in making his way without help. She waved her hand to the car as it moved off, and so naturally did his hand go up in salute that for a moment she thought he had seen her.
So he passed out of her sight, and might well have passed out of her life, for Mr. Oberzohn had decreed that the remaining hours of blind Johnson Lee were to be few.
But it happened that the Three Men had reached the same decision in regard to Mr. Oberzohn, only there was some indecision as to the manner of his passing. Leon Gonsalez had original views.
XIV
The Pedlar
The man with the pipe was standing within half a dozen paces of her. She was going back through the gate, when she remembered Aunt Alma’s views on the guardianship.
“Are you waiting here all day?” she asked.
“Till this evening, miss. We’re to be relieved by some men from Gloucester—we came from town, and we’re going back with the nurse, if you can do without her?”
“Who placed you here?” she asked.
“Mr. Gonsalez. He thought it would be wise to have somebody around.”
“But why?”
The big man grinned.
“I’ve known Mr. Gonsalez many years,” he said. “I’m a police pensioner, and I can remember the time when I’d have given a lot of money to lay my hands on him—but I’ve never asked him why, miss. There is generally a good reason for everything he does.”
Mirabelle went back into the farmhouse, very thoughtful. Happily, Alma was not inquisitive; she was left alone in the drawing-room to reconstruct her exciting yesterday.
Mirabelle harboured very few illusions. She had read much, guessed much, and in the days of her childhood had been in the habit of linking cause to effect. The advertisement was designed especially for her: that was her first conclusion. It was designed to bring her into the charge of Oberzohn. For now she recognized this significant circumstance: never once, since she had entered the offices of Oberzohn & Smitts, until the episode of the orangeade, had she been free to come and go as she wished. He had taken her to lunch, he had brought her back; Joan Newton had been her companion in the drive from the house, and from the house to the hall; and from then on she did not doubt that Oberzohn’s surveillance had continued, until …
Dimly she remembered the man in the cloak who had stood in the rocking doorway. Was that Gonsalez? Somehow she thought it must have been. Gonsalez, watchful, alert—why? She had been in danger—was still in danger. Though why anybody should have picked unimportant her, was the greatest of all mysteries.
In some inexplicable way the death of Barberton had been associated with that advertisement and the attention she had received from Dr. Oberzohn and his creatures. Who was Lord Evington? She remembered his German accent and his “gracious lady,” the curious click of his heels and his stiff bow. That was a clumsy subterfuge which she ought to have seen through from the first. He was another of her watchers. And the drugged orangeade was his work. She shuddered. Suppose Leon Gonsalez, or whoever it was, had not arrived so providentially, where would she be at this moment?
Walking to the window, she looked out, and the sight of the two men just inside the gate gave her a sense of infinite relief and calm; and the knowledge that she, for some reason, was under the care and protection of this strange organization about which she had read, thrilled her.
She walked into the vaulted kitchen, to find the kitchen table covered with fat volumes, and Aunt Alma explaining to the interested nurse her system of filing. Two subjects interested that hard-featured lady: crime and family records. She had two books filled with snippings from country newspapers relating to the family of a distant cousin who had been raised to a peerage during the war. She had another devoted to the social triumphs of a distant woman, Goddard, who had finally made a sensational appearance as petitioner in the most celebrated divorce suit of the age. But crime, generally speaking, was Aunt Alma’s chief preoccupation. It was from these voluminous cuttings that Mirabelle had gained her complete knowledge of the Four Just Men and their operations. There were books packed with the story of the Ramon murder, arranged with loving care in order of time, for chronology was almost a vice in Alma Goddard. Only one public sensation was missing from her collection, and she was explaining the reason to the nurse as Mirabelle came into the kitchen.
“No, my dear,” she was saying, “there is nothing about The Snake. I won’t have anything to do with that: it gives me the creeps. In fact, I haven’t read anything that has the slightest reference to it.”
“I’ve got every line,” said the nurse enthusiastically. “My brother is a reporter on the Megaphone, and he says this is the best story they’ve
