"Yes," she gave back, without, however, stopping in her progress around the tall rocks which formed its boundary. "But if we took it we should be sure to meet Bevis. That is his especial playground, you know, and if he were to see his father and me we shouldn"t be able to get rid of him again. No! Don"t misunderstand, Mr. Cleek.
I am not one of those mothers who find their children a nuisance in their nursery stage. Bevis is the dearest little man! But he is so full of pranks, so full of questions, so full of life and high spirits--and I couldn"t stand that this morning. Besides, he has no one to play with him to-day. This is Miss Miniver"s half holiday.
Pardon? Yes--his nursery governess. She won"t be back until three. I only hope he will stay in the rock garden and amuse himself with his pirates" cave until then."
"His----"
"Pirates" cave. Miss Miniver took him to a moving-picture show one day. He saw one there and nothing would do him but his father must let him have one for himself; so the gardeners made one for him in the rock garden and he amuses himself by going out on what he calls "treasure raids" and carries his spoils in there."
"His spoils, eh? H"m! I see! Pardon me, Lady Leake, but do you think it is possible that this affair we are on may be only a wild goose chase after all? In other words, that, not knowing the value of the Ranee"s necklace, your little son may have made that a part of his spoils and carried it off to his pirates" cave?"
"No, Mr. Cleek, I do not. Such a thing is utterly impossible. For one thing, the boudoir door was locked, remember; and, for another, Bevis had been bathed and put to bed before the necklace was lost. He could not have got up and left his room, as Miss Miniver sat with him until he fell asleep."
"H"m!" commented Cleek. "So that"s "barking up the wrong tree" for a second time. Still, of course, the necklace couldn"t have vanished of its own accord. Hum-m-m! Just so! Another question, your ladyship: You spoke of running down to the foot of the stairs with the lint for Miss Eastman and running back in a panic when you remembered the necklace. How, then, did you get the lint to Miss Eastman, after all?"
"I sent it to her with apologies for not being able to do the bandaging for her."
"Sent it to her, your ladyship? By whom?"
"Jennifer--one of the servants."
"Oho!" said Cleek, in two different tones. "So then you _did_ unlock the door of your boudoir for a second time, and somebody other than Sir Mawson and your stepson _did_ see the inside of the room, eh?"
"Your pardon, Mr. Cleek, but you are wrong in both surmises.
Jennifer was the servant who was working in the lower hall at the time--the one who says he saw Henry leave the house at ten minutes past seven. The instant I reached the foot of the stairs and thought of the necklace, I called Jennifer to me, gave him the lint with orders to take it at once to Miss Eastman"s maid with the message mentioned, and then turned round and ran back to my boudoir immediately."
"H"m! I see. I suppose, your ladyship, it isn"t possible that this man Jennifer might, in going to carry that message----But no! I recollect: the door of your boudoir was locked. So even if he had managed to outstrip you by going up another staircase----"
"Oh, I see what you mean!" she declared, as they reached the edge of the lawn and set out across it. "But, Mr. Cleek, such a thing would not bear even hinting at, so far as Jennifer is concerned. He is the soul of honesty, for one thing; and, for another, he couldn"t have outstripped me, as you put it, had I returned at a snail"s pace. He is very old, and near-sighted. There! look! That is he, over there, sweeping the leaves off the terrace. You can see for yourself how impossible it would be for him to run upstairs."
Cleek did see. Looking in the direction indicated, he saw an elderly man employed as stated, whose back was bowed, and whose limping gait betokened an injury which had left him hopelessly lame.
"His leg had to be amputated as the result of being run over by an omnibus in the streets of London," explained her ladyship, "and, in consequence, he wears a wooden one. He has been in the employ of the family for more than forty years. Originally he was a gardener, and, after his accident, Sir Mawson was for pensioning him off so that he could end his days in quiet and comfort. But he quite broke down at the thought of leaving the old place, and as he wouldn"t listen to such a thing as being paid for doing nothing, we humoured his whim and let him stay on as a sort of handy man. I am sorry to say that Bevis, little rogue, takes advantage of his inability to run, and plays no end of pranks upon him. But he adores the boy, and never complains."
Cleek, who had been studying the man fixedly with his narrowed eyes--and remembering what had been said of Diamond Nick"s skill at impersonation, the while they were crossing the lawn--here twitched his head, as if casting off a thought which annoyed him, and turned a bland look upon Lady Leake.
"One last question, your ladyship," he said. "I think you said that Jennifer was cleaning the hall at the time your stepson left the house; and, as, presumably, you wouldn"t overwork a crippled old chap like that, how happened it that he was still at his labours at ten minutes past seven o"clock in the evening? That"s rather late to be cleaning up a hall, isn"t it?"
"Yes, much _too_ late," she acknowledged. "But it couldn"t be helped in the present instance. The gasfitters didn"t finish their work as early as we had hoped, and as he couldn"t begin until they _had_ finished, he was delayed in starting."
"The gasfitters, eh? Oho! So you had those chaps in the house yesterday, did you?"
"Yes. There had been an unpleasant leakage of gas in both the music room and the main hall, for two or three days, and as the men had to take down the fixtures to get to the seat of the trouble, Jennifer improved the opportunity to give the chandelier and the brackets a thorough cleaning, since he couldn"t of course start to clear up the mess the workmen made until after they had finished and gone.
But--Mr. Cleek! _They_ couldn"t have had anything to do with the affair, for they left the house at least ten minutes before the Ladder of Light came into it. So, naturally----This is the door of the music room, gentlemen. Come in, please."
The invitation was accepted at once, and in another half minute Cleek and Mr. Narkom found themselves standing in a wonderful white-and-gold room, under a huge crystal chandelier of silver and cut gla.s.s, and looking out through an arched opening, hung with sulphur-coloured draperies, into a sort of baronial hall equipped with armour and tapestries, and broad enough to drive a coach through without danger to its contents.
From this hall, as they discovered, when Lady Leake led them without delay toward the scene of the necklace"s mysterious vanishment, a broad, short flight of richly carpeted stairs led to a square landing, and thence another and a longer flight, striking off at right angles, communicated with the pa.s.sage upon which her ladyship"s boudoir opened.
"It was here that I stood, Mr. Cleek, when I recollected about the necklace as I called Jennifer to me," she explained, pausing on the landing at the foot of this latter flight of stairs just long enough to let him note, over the broad rail of the banister, that the great hall was clearly visible below. "He was there, just under you, drying the globes of the music-room chandelier when I called to him. Now come this way, please, and you will see how impossible it is for any one to have entered and left the boudoir during my brief absence without my seeing or hearing."
It was; for the door of the boudoir, which was entirely detached from the rest of the suite occupied by herself and her husband, was immediately opposite the head of the staircase and clearly visible from the landing at its foot.
She unlocked this one solitary door, and let them see that the only other means of possibly entering the room was by way of a large overhanging bay window overlooking the grounds. But this was a good twenty feet above the surface of the earth and there was not a vine nor a tree within yards and yards of it, and as the s.p.a.ce beneath was so large and clear that no one could have manipulated a ladder without the certainty of discovery, Cleek saw at a glance that the window might be dismissed at once as a possible point of entry.
Nor did anything else about the room offer a hint more promising.
All that he saw was just what one might have expected to see in such a place under such circ.u.mstances as these.
On the dressing-table, surrounded by a litter of silver and cut-gla.s.s toilet articles, lay the case which had once contained the famous necklace, wide open and empty. Over the back of a chair--as if it had been thrown there under the stress of haste and great excitement--hung a negligee of flowered white silk trimmed with cascades of rich lace, and across a sofa at the far end of the room, a dinner gown of gray satin was carefully spread out, with a pair of gray silk stockings and gray satin slippers lying beside it.
"Everything is exactly as it was, Mr. Cleek, at the time the necklace disappeared," explained her ladyship, noting the manner in which his glances went flickering about the room, skimming the surface of all things but settling on none. "Everything, that is, but that negligee there."
"Wasn"t that in the room, then?"
"Oh, yes, but it wasn"t on the chair; it was on me. I had come up to dress for dinner a short time before Henry made his appearance--indeed, I had only just taken off my street costume and started to dress when he rapped at the door and implored me to let him come in and speak to me for a minute or two. "For G.o.d"s sake, mater!" was the way he put it, and as haste seemed to be of vital importance, I slipped on my negligee and let him in as quickly as I could. Afterward, when Sir Mawson came in with the wonderful necklace----"
She stopped abruptly, and her voice seemed to die away in her throat; and when she spoke again it was in a sort of panic.
"Mr. Cleek!" she cried, "_Mr. Cleek!_ What is it? What"s the matter?
Good heavens, Mawson, has the man gone out of his mind?"
In the circ.u.mstances the question was an excusable one. A moment before, she had seen Cleek walk in the most casual manner to the chair where the lace-clouded negligee hung, had seen him pick it up to look at the chair seat under it, and was collectedly proceeding with the account of the events of yesterday, when, without hint or warning, he suddenly yapped out a sound that was curiously like a dog that had mastered the trick of human laughter, flung the negligee from him, dropped on his knees, and was now careering round the room like a terrier endeavouring to pick up a lost scent--pushing aside tables, throwing over chairs, and yapping, yapping.
"Cleek, old chap!" It was Narkom that spoke, and the hard, thick hammering of his heart made his voice shake. "Good lud, man! in the name of all that"s wonderful----"
"Let me alone!" he bit in, irritably. "Of all the a.s.ses! Of all the blind, mutton-headed idiots!" then laughed that curious, uncanny laugh again, scrambled to his feet and made a headlong bolt for the door. "Wait for me--all of you--in the music room," he threw back from the threshold. "Don"t stir from it until I come. I want that fellow Jennifer! I want him _at once_!"
And here, turning sharply on his heel with yet another yapping sound, he bolted across the pa.s.sage, ran down the staircase like an escaping thief, and by the time the others could lock up the boudoir and get down to the music room, there wasn"t a trace of him anywhere.
CHAPTER XXIII
It was a full half hour later, and Sir Mawson and Lady Leake and Mr.
Maverick Narkom were in the throes of the most maddening suspense, when the door of the music room flashed open and flashed shut again, and Cleek stood before them once more--quite alone still, but with that curious crooked smile which to Narkom stood for so much, looping up the corner of his mouth and mutely foreshadowing the riddle"s spectacular end.
"Cleek, dear chap!" The superintendent"s voice was sharp and thin with excitement. "You"ve found out something, then?"
"I hope, Mr. Narkom, I have found out everything," he replied with a marked emphasis on the word hope. "But as we are told when in doubt or in difficulty to "look above" for a way out, permit me to follow that advice before proceeding any further with the subject."
Here he stepped to the centre of the room, twitched back his head, and, with chin upslanted and eyes directed toward the ceiling, moved slowly round in a narrow circle for a moment or two.
But of a sudden he came to a sharp standstill, rapped out a short, queer little laugh, and, altering these mysterious tactics, looked down and across the room at Sir Mawson Leake.
"I think the Ranee did not look to the security of those slim gold links a day too soon, Sir Mawson," he said. "It is too much to ask a man to risk his whole fortune on the tenacity of a bit of age-worn wire as you have done, and if I were in your shoes I"d tell the old girl"s _major domo_ when he comes for the necklace, to get it repaired somewhere else--and be dashed to him."
"Good! Wouldn"t I, in a twinkling, if I could only lay hands on the wretched thing again. But I haven"t it, as you know."