“It is outside belief,” he wrote. “Nothing has she left to her so attentive brother. There is something here I do not much like. It must be one thousand pounds now, by the recommended post. ‘You have always had the world against you, my poor Boris,’ she say with the tears all big in her dear eyes. ‘But I make all right for you in my will.’ And now nothing! I speak, of course, to my niece—ah, that hard one! She snap her the fingers at me! Is that a behaviour? One thousand pounds, mister! Otherwise there will be awkwardnesses! Yes! People do not snap them the fingers at Boris Waberski without the payment. So one thousand pounds by the recommended post or awkwardnesses”; and this time Boris Waberski did not invite Mr. Haslitt to agree any salutations, distinguished or otherwise, but simply signed his name with a straggling pen which shot all over the sheet.
Mr. Haslitt did not smile over this letter. He rubbed the palms of his hands softly together.
“Then we shall have to make some awkwardnesses too,” he said hastily, and he locked this second letter away with the first. But Mr. Haslitt found it a little difficult to settle to his work. There was that girl out there in the big house at Dijon and no one of her race near her! He got up from his chair abruptly and crossed the corridor to the offices of his junior partner.
“Jim, you were at Monte Carlo this winter,” he said.
“For a week,” answered Jim Frobisher.
“I think I asked you to call on a client of ours who has a villa there—Mrs. Harlowe.”
Jim Frobisher nodded. “I did. But Mrs. Harlowe was ill. There was a niece, but she was out.”
“You saw no one, then?” Jeremy Haslitt asked.
“No, that’s wrong,” Jim corrected. “I saw a strange creature who came to the door to make Mrs. Harlowe’s excuses—a Russian.”
“Boris Waberski,” said Mr. Haslitt.
“That’s the name.”
Mr. Haslitt sat down in a chair.
“Tell me about him, Jim.”
Jim Frobisher stared at nothing for a few moments. He was a young man of twenty-six who had only during this last year succeeded to his partnership. Though quick enough when action was imperative, he was naturally deliberate in his estimates of other people’s characters; and a certain awe he had of old Jeremy Haslitt doubled that natural deliberation in any matters of the firm’s business. He answered at length.
“He is a tall, shambling fellow with a shock of grey hair standing up like wires above a narrow forehead and a pair of wild eyes. He made me think of a marionette whose limbs have not been properly strung. I should imagine that he was rather extravagant and emotional. He kept twitching at his moustache with very long, tobacco-stained fingers. The sort of man who might go off at the deep end at any moment.”
Mr. Haslitt smiled.
“That’s just what I thought.”
“Is he giving you any trouble?” asked Jim.
“Not yet,” said Mr. Haslitt. “But Mrs. Harlowe is dead, and I think it very likely that he will. Did he play at the tables?”
“Yes, rather high,” said Jim. “I suppose that he lived on Mrs. Harlowe.”
“I suppose so,” said Mr. Haslitt, and he sat for a little while in silence. Then: “It’s a pity you didn’t see Betty Harlowe. I stopped at Dijon once on my way to the South of France five years ago when Simon Harlowe, the husband, was alive. Betty was then a long-legged slip of a girl in black silk stockings with a pale, clear face and dark hair and big eyes—rather beautiful.” Mr. Haslitt moved in his chair uncomfortably. That old house with its great garden of chestnuts and sycamores and that girl alone in it with an aggrieved and half-crazed man thinking out awkwardnesses for her—Mr. Haslitt did not like the picture!
“Jim,” he said suddenly, “could you arrange your work so that you could get away at short notice, if it becomes advisable?”
Jim looked up in surprise. Excursions and alarms, as the old stage directions have it, were not recognised as a rule by the firm of Frobisher & Haslitt. If its furniture was dingy, its methods were stately; clients might be urgent, but haste and hurry were words for which the firm had no use. No doubt, somewhere round the corner, there would be an attorney who understood them. Yet here was Mr. Haslitt himself, with his white hair and his curious round face, half-babyish, half-supremely intelligent, actually advocating that his junior partner should be prepared to skip to the Continent at a word.
“No doubt I could,” said Jim, and Mr. Haslitt looked him over with approbation.
Jim Frobisher had an unusual quality of which his acquaintances, even his friends, knew only the outward signs. He was a solitary person. Very few people up till now had mattered to him at all, and even those he could do without. It was his passion to feel that his life and the means of his life did not depend upon the purchased skill of other people; and he had spent the spare months of his life in the fulfilment of his passion. A half-decked sailing-boat which one man could handle, an ice-axe, a rifle, an inexhaustible volume or two like The Ring and the Book—these with the stars and his own thoughts had been his companions on many lonely expeditions; and in consequence he had acquired a queer little look of aloofness which made him at once noticeable amongst his fellows. A misleading look, since it encouraged a confidence for which there might not be sufficient justification. It was just this look which persuaded Mr. Haslitt now. “This is the very man to deal with creatures like Boris Waberski,” he thought, but he did not say so aloud.
What
