“This is the bell into what was the maid’s bedroom, I suppose,” he said, turning towards Betty.
“Yes.”
Hanaud stooped and minutely examined the cord. But there was no sign that it had ever been tampered with. He stood up again.
“Mademoiselle, will you take Monsieur Girardot into Jeanne Baudin’s bedroom and close the door. I shall press this button, and you will know whether the bell rings whilst we here shall be able to assure ourselves whether sounds made in one of the rooms would be heard in the other.”
“Certainly.”
Betty took the Commissary of Police away, and a few seconds later those in Mrs. Harlowe’s room heard a door close in the corridor.
“Will you shut our door now, if you please?” Hanaud requested.
Bex, the notary, closed it.
“Now, silence, if you please!”
Hanaud pressed the button, and not a sound answered him. He pressed it again and again with the same result. The Commissary returned to the bedroom.
“Well?” Hanaud asked.
“It rang twice,” said the Commissary.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders with a laugh.
“And an electric bell has a shrill, penetrating sound,” he cried. “Name of a name, but they built good houses when the Maison Grenelle was built! Are the cupboards and drawers open?”
He tried one and found it locked. Monsieur Bex came forward.
“All the drawers were locked on the morning when Madame Harlowe’s death was discovered. Mademoiselle Harlowe herself locked them in my presence and handed to me the keys for the purpose of making an inventory. Mademoiselle was altogether correct in so doing. For until the funeral had taken place the terms of the will were not disclosed.”
“But afterwards, when you took the inventory you must have unlocked them.”
“I have not yet begun the inventory, Monsieur Hanaud. There were the arrangements for the funeral, a list of the properties to be made for valuation, and the vineyards to be administered.”
“Oho,” cried Hanaud alertly. “Then these wardrobes and cupboards and drawers should hold exactly what they held on the night of the twenty-seventh of April.” He ran quickly about the room trying a door here, a drawer there, and came to a stop beside a cupboard fashioned in the thickness of the wall. “The trouble is that a child with a bent wire could unlock anyone of them. Do you know what Madame Harlowe kept in this, Monsieur Bex?” and Hanaud rapped with his knuckles upon the cupboard door.
“No, I have no idea. Shall I open it?” and Bex produced a bunch of keys from his pocket.
“Not for the moment, I think,” said Hanaud.
He had been dawdling over the locks and the drawers, as though time meant nothing to him at all. He now swung briskly back into the centre of the room, making notes, it seemed to Frobisher, of its geography. The door opening from the corridor faced, across the length of the floor, the two tall windows above the garden. If one stood in the doorway facing these two windows, the bed was on the left hand. On the corridor side of the bed, a second smaller door, which was half open, led to a white-tiled bathroom. On the window side of the bed was the cupboard in the wall about the height of a woman’s shoulders. A dressing-table stood between the windows, a great fireplace broke the right-hand wall, and in that same wall, close to the right-hand window, there was yet another door. Hanaud moved to it.
“This is the door of the dressing-room?” he asked of Ann Upcott, and without waiting for an answer pushed it open.
Monsieur Bex followed upon his heels with his keys rattling. “Everything here has been locked up too,” he said.
Hanaud paid not the slightest attention. He opened the shutters.
It was a narrow room without any fireplace at all, and with a door exactly opposite to the door by which Hanaud had entered. He went at once to this door.
“And this must be the communicating door which leads into what is called the treasure-room,” he said, and he paused with his hand upon the knob and his eyes ranging alertly over the faces of the company.
“Yes,” said Ann Upcott.
Jim was conscious of a queer thrill. He thought of the opening of some newly-discovered tomb of a Pharaoh in a hillside of the Valley of Kings. Suspense passed from one to the other as they waited, but Hanaud did not move. He stood there impassive and still like some guardian image at the door of the tomb. Jim felt that he was never going to move, and in a voice of exasperation he cried:
“Is the door locked?”
Hanaud replied in a quiet but a singular voice. No doubt he, too, felt that strange current of emotion and expectancy which bound all in the room under a spell, and even gave to their diverse faces for a moment a kind of family similitude.
“I don’t know yet whether it’s locked or not,” he said. “But since this room is now the private sitting-room of Mademoiselle Harlowe, I think that we ought to wait until she rejoins us.”
Monsieur Bex just had time to remark with approval, “That is very correct,” before Betty’s fresh, clear voice rang out from the doorway leading to Mrs. Harlowe’s bedroom:
“I am here.”
Hanaud turned the handle. The door was not locked. It opened at a touch—inwards towards the group of people and upwards towards the corridor. The treasure-room was before them, shrouded in dim light, but here and there a beam of light sparkled upon gold and held out a promise of wonders. Hanaud picked his way daintily to the windows and fastened the shutters back against the outside wall. “I beg that nothing shall be touched,” he said as the others filed into the room.
XIII
Simon Harlowe’s Treasure-Room
Like the rest of the reception-rooms along the corridor, it was longer than
