“It’s a pity we can’t go through them all.”
“Why?”
“Because Mike is in one of them. Have you a match?”
“There’s a box before you, but here’s a cigar. How do you get that?”
“Through the process of elimination. If Mike is not dead, he must be somewhere. If he and Revell are in league, they must be in touch. Since Revell has no visitors, receives no mail, does not telephone, and goes nowhere, they are in the same hotel. You told me that Mike was a good mimic, did you not?”
“And a born actor.”
“Then he is masquerading there, and probably in the room next to Revell. Anyway, he’s at the St. Jasper. Glendenning, I’ll stake my reputation on that. Well, yes, since you insist, I’ll have another high ball.”
Darkly, for a while yet, the two men talked.
X
“Oh! Miss Marcy—”
At the cry, Camille, who was dressed for a run, stopped and turned.
In the hall, hurrying after her, was her maid, Margaret. As Camille stopped, she stopped also.
“What is it?”
But Margaret, her mouth working, made no reply.
“What is it?” Camille, perplexed at the mummery, impatiently repeated.
“Oh, Miss Marcy, Archibald’s on the floor. He—”
Camille hurried by her and on and beyond to the extreme end of the apartment. There, in a little room which she had not seen since she first took the flat, the withered servant lay in a heap, the eyes staring, the face mottled, one corner of the mouth lifted as a dog’s when about to bite, and with things wrapped in paper beside him.
Camille looked in and bit her lip. Her tender heart reproached her. Only a little since she had said—and crossly enough—that she would not be sorry to lose him and now she had, or at least she supposed so, but she could not be sure; it might be but a fit of some kind, and she hurried back to the other end of the apartment, where she telephoned and waited until at last Dix appeared.
Telling him what little she could, she sent him in with the maid for guide, and that only because she was young and, to those that are, death, instead of being the normal interruption that it is, always suggests something spectral.
She was still in the hall when Dix returned.
“Cerebral hemorrhage,” he told her, and together they entered the drawing room.
In the physician’s hands were two packages, which he put on the piano.
“I can’t say I did not expect it,” he resumed. “He has been in to see me several times. He had nephritis—and other things.”
Camille sighed.
“I am very sorry, He was queer, but he was faithful.”
“It’s difficult to be that and not the other,” Dix, with frank cynicism, replied. “I’ll have an undertaker come and—”
“You say he had things the matter with him?”
“Yes, his conscience was affected. It was that that made him what you describe as queer. For the last few months, he has lived in a panic, and there are few toxins more depressive than fear.”
“Why, what on earth had he to be afraid of?”
Dix seated himself on the piano stool.
“What have we, any of us, to be afraid of except danger, damp sheets, and our own misdeeds? There is nothing else.”
Camille flicked at her boots.
“Yes, but—”
Dix waved at her.
“An hour before your guardian died, I was with him; so was Archibald. Mr. Vulper was then apparently in his usual poor health. I was called away. When I returned, he was dead. You remember what occurred?”
“Yes, you sent for me. It was very painful.”
“I mean in regard to the safe.”
“You said that money was missing—money and papers.”
Dix indicated the packages.
“There they are. In one of those bundles is ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. In the other is ‘Alpha and Omega’—a manuscript that your guardian intended to leave to the British Museum.”
Camille, who had stopped flicking at her boots, sat down. A few minutes before, when, in answer to her call, Dix had come, she had not noticed the packages. Now she supposed that he must have brought them with him, though how and where he had got them she could not imagine.
“Well?”
Dix plucked at his beard.
“As Mike’s executor, I have impounded them. They are now part and parcel of the estate.”
“But where did they come from?” Camille, in a crescendo of surprise, exclaimed.
Dix glanced at her. Ordinarily he had thought her a bright young woman. At the moment, she seemed unfathomably stupid.
His arm shot out.
“From that room yonder. Where else?”
Camille stared and gasped.
“You mean Archibald’s? Then he took them! Then—Why, then it was he who killed Mr. Vulper!”
At the thought of it, she shuddered. The thought that, since then, the man had been with her, under her roof, serving her, throttled, and she gasped again.
“Nothing of the kind,” Dix irritably replied. “It was chloral. After I had gone, cardiac paralysis supervened and narcosis resulted. Then Archibald happened in on him, and realizing, not, perhaps, that he was dead, but that he was unconscious, he took the money. And thinking—very innocently—to lay it on that fantastic hallucination, Shri Shankira, took the manuscript also.”
Dix removed his eyeglasses. By nature and by profession he was modest, but he could not help saying it: “I always knew it.”
In annoyance, Camille shook her crop.
“Doctor Dix, you should have told me!”
But Dix was not afraid of her.
“Oh, when I say I knew it, I mean I took it for granted. But I had no evidence. Archibald was aware of that. At the same time, he was aware, too, that I suspected him and, though he lacked the courage to own up, it would have been a sheer relief to him if I had said: ‘Thou art the man.’ ”
“Yet always before that he had been honest,” Camille wonderingly put in.
“How do you know? Anyway, he had probably never been tempted before by such a bevy of beautiful bank notes. ‘Carry us off,’ they cried at him. At that, all the cells of his brain fell asleep, all except one, and that cell, vehemently active, incited
