“We can go on.”
Ten more steps brought them to a tiny vaulted hall. From that a passage, bricked and paved, led into darkness. Frobisher led the way along the passage until the foot of another flight of steps was reached.
“Where do these steps lead, my friend?” Hanaud asked of Frobisher, his voice sounding with a strange hollowness in that tunnel. “You shall tell me.”
Jim, with memories of that night when he and Ann and Betty had sat in the dark of the perfumed garden and Ann’s eyes had searched this way and that amidst the gloom of the sycamores, answered promptly:
“Into the garden of the Maison Grenelle.”
Hanaud chuckled.
“And you, Mademoiselle, what do you say?”
Ann’s face clouded over.
“I know now,” she said gravely. Then she shivered and drew her cloak slowly about her shoulders. “Let us go up and see!”
Hanaud took the lead. He lowered a trapdoor at the top of the steps, touched a spring and slid back a panel.
“Wait,” said he, and he sprang out and turned on a light.
Ann Upcott, Jim Frobisher and Moreau climbed out of Simon Harlowe’s Sedan chair into the treasure room.
XXIII
The Truth About the Clock on the Marquetry Cabinet
To the amazement of them all Moreau began to laugh. Up till now he had been alert, competent and without expression. Stolidity had been the mark of him. And now he laughed in great gusts, holding his sides and then wringing his hands, as though the humour of things was altogether unbearable. Once or twice he tried to speak, but laughter leapt upon the words and drowned them.
“What in the world is the matter with you, Nicolas?” Hanaud asked.
“But I beg your pardon,” Moreau stammered, and again merriment seized and mastered him. At last two intelligible words were heard. “We, Girardot,” he cried, settling an imaginary pair of glasses on the bridge of his nose, and went off into a fit. Gradually the reason of his paroxysms was explained in broken phrases.
“We, Girardot!—We fix the seals upon the doors—And all the time there is a way in and out under our nose! These rooms must not be disturbed—No! The great Monsieur Hanaud is coming from Paris to look at them. So we seal them tight, we, Girardot. My God! but we, Girardot look the fool! So careful and pompous with our linen bands! We, Girardot shall make the laughter at the Assize Court! Yes, yes, yes! I think, we, Girardot shall hand in our resignation before the trial is over?”
Perhaps Moreau’s humour was a little too professional for his audience. Perhaps, too, the circumstances of that night had dulled their appreciation; certainly Moreau had all the laughter to himself. Jim Frobisher was driven to the little Louis Quinze clock upon the marquetry cabinet. He never could for a moment forget it. So much hung for Betty Harlowe upon its existence. Whatever wild words she might have used tonight, there was the incontrovertible testimony of the clock to prove that she had had no hand whatever in the murder of Mrs. Harlowe. He drew his own watch from his pocket and compared it with the clock.
“It is exact to the minute,” he declared with a little accent of triumph. “It is now twenty-three minutes past one—” and suddenly Hanaud was at his side with a curious air of alertness.
“Is it so?” he asked, and he too made sure by a comparison with his own watch that Frobisher’s statement was correct. “Yes. Twenty-three minutes past one. That is very fortunate.”
He called Ann Upcott and Moreau to him and they all now stood grouped about the cabinet.
“The key to the mystery about this clock,” he remarked, “is to be found in the words which Mademoiselle Ann used, when the seals were removed from the doors and she saw this clock again, in the light of day. She was perplexed. Isn’t that so, Mademoiselle?”
“Yes,” Ann returned. “It seemed to me—it seems to me still—that the clock was somehow placed higher than it actually is—”
“Exactly. Let us put it to the test!”
He looked at the clock and saw that the hands now reached twenty-six minutes past one.
“I will ask you all to go out of this room and wait in the hall in the dark. For it was in the dark, you will remember, that Mademoiselle descended the stairs. I shall turn the lights out here and call you in. When I do, Mademoiselle will switch the lights on and off swiftly, just as she did it on the night of the 27th of April. Then I think all will be clear to you.”
He crossed to the door leading into the hall, and found it locked with the key upon the inside.
“Of course,” he said, “when the passage is used to the Hôtel de Brebizart, this door would be locked.”
He turned the key and drew the door towards him. The hall gaped before them black and silent. Hanaud stood aside.
“If you please!”
Moreau and Frobisher went out; Ann Upcott hesitated and cast a look of appeal towards Hanaud. Her perplexities were to be set at rest. She did not doubt that. This man had saved her from death when it seemed that nothing could save her. Her trust in him was absolute. But her perplexities were unimportant. Some stroke was to be delivered upon Betty Harlowe from which there could be no recovery. Ann Upcott was not a good hater of Betty’s stamp. She shrank from the thought that it was to be her hand which would deliver that stroke.
“Courage, Mademoiselle!”
Hanaud exhorted her with a friendly smile and Ann joined the others in the dark hall. Hanaud closed the door upon them and returned to the clock. It was twenty-eight minutes past one.
“I have two minutes,” he said to himself. “That will just do if I am quick.”
Outside the three witnesses waited in the darkness. One of the three shivered suddenly so that her
