“She would not brook interference; she drank alone in her bedroom; she grew violent and threatening if anyone interfered. She would turn them all into the street. If she needed any help she could ring for the nurse, as indeed she sometimes, though rarely, did.” It was a dreadful and wearing life as Betty Harlowe described it for the two young sentinels.
“We were utterly in despair,” Betty continued. “For Madame, of course, was really ill with her heart, and we always feared some tragedy would happen. This letter which Ann was to write when I was at Monsieur de Pouillac’s ball seemed our one chance. It was to a doctor in England—he called himself a doctor at all events—who advertised that he had a certain remedy which could be given without the patient’s knowledge in her food and drink. Oh, I had no faith in it, but we had got to try it.”
Hanaud looked round at Frobisher triumphantly.
“What did I say to you, Monsieur Frobisher, when you wanted to ask a question about this letter? You see! These things disclose themselves in their due order if you leave them alone.”
The triumph went out of his voice. He rose to his feet and, bowing to Betty with an unaffected stateliness and respect, he handed her back the photographs.
“Mademoiselle, I am very sorry,” he said. “It is clear that you and your friend have lived amongst difficulties which we did not suspect. And, for the secret, I shall do what I can.”
Jim quite forgave him the snub which had been administered to him for the excellence of his manner towards Betty. He had a hope even that now he would forswear his creed, so that the secret might still be kept and the young sentinels receive their reward for their close watch. But Hanaud sat down again in his chair, and once more turned towards Ann Upcott. He meant to go on then. He would not leave well alone. Jim was all the more disappointed, because he could not but realise that the case was more and more clearly building itself from something unsubstantial into something solid, from a conjecture to an argument—this case against someone.
X
The Clock Upon the Cabinet
Ann Upcott’s story was in the light of this new disclosure intelligible enough. Standing in the darkness, she had heard, as she thought, Mrs. Harlowe in one of her violent outbreaks. Then with a sense of relief she had understood that Jeanne Baudin the nurse was with Mrs. Harlowe, controlling and restraining her and finally administering some sedative. She had heard the outcries diminish and cease and a final whisper from the nurse to her patient or even perhaps to herself, “That will do now.” Then she had turned and fled, taking care to attract no attention to herself. Real cowardice had nothing to do with her flight. The crisis was over. Her intervention, which before would only have been a provocation to a wilder outburst on the part of Mrs. Harlowe, was now altogether without excuse. It would once more have aroused the invalid, and next day would have added to the discomfort and awkwardness of life in the Maison Grenelle. For Mrs. Harlowe sober would have known that Ann had been a witness of one more of her dreadful exhibitions. The best thing which Ann could do, she did, given that her interpretation of the scene was the true one. She ran noiselessly back in the darkness to her room.
“Yes,” said Hanaud. “But you believe now that your interpretation was not correct. You believe now that whilst you stood in the darkness with the door open and the light beyond, Madame Harlowe was being murdered, coldly and cruelly murdered a few feet away from you.”
Ann Upcott shivered from head to foot.
“I don’t want to believe it,” she cried. “It’s too horrible.”
“You believe now that the one who whispered ‘That will do now,’ was not Jeanne Baudin,” Hanaud insisted, “but some unknown person, and that the whisper was uttered after murder had been done to a third person in that room.”
Ann twisted her body from this side to that; she wrung her hands.
“I am afraid of it!” she moaned.
“And what is torturing you now, Mademoiselle, is remorse that you did not step silently forward and from the darkness of the treasure-room look through that lighted doorway.” He spoke with a great consideration and his insight into her distress was in its way a solace to her.
“Yes,” she exclaimed eagerly. “I told you this morning I could have hindered it. I didn’t understand until this morning. You see, that night something else happened”; and now indeed stark fear drew the colour from her cheeks and shone in her eyes.
“Something else?” Betty asked with a quick indraw of her breath, and she shifted her chair a little so that she might face Ann. She was wearing a black coat over a white silk shirt open at the throat, and she took her handkerchief from a side pocket of the coat and drew it across her forehead.
“Yes, Mademoiselle,” Hanaud explained. “It is clear that something else happened that night to your friend, something which, taken together with our talk this morning over the book of arrows, had made her believe that murder was done.” He looked at Ann. “You went then to your room?”
Ann resumed her story.
“I went to bed. I was very—what shall I
