"Certainly," said Mrs. Hastings severely; "I have only one brother, and it has been three years since I have seen him."
"Pardon me, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "this may be most important. Will you tell me when you last heard from him and where he was?"
"I should have to look up the place," she answered, "I couldn"t begin to p.r.o.nounce the name, I dare say. It was somewhere in the South Atlantic, ten months or more ago."
"Ah," St. George quietly commented.
"Well, and now this frightful creature," resumed Mrs. Hastings, "do, pray, tell me what it was she wrote."
St. George produced the paper.
"That is it," he said. "I fancy you will not know the street. It is 19 McDougle Street, and the name is simply Tabnit."
"Yes. And is it a letter?" his hostess demanded, "and whatever does it say?"
"It is not a letter," St. George explained patiently, "and this is all that it says. The name is, I suppose, the name of a person. I have made sure that there is such a number in the street. I have seen the house. But I have waited to consult you before going there."
"Why, what is it you think?" Mrs. Hastings besought him. "Do you think this person, whoever it is, can do something? And whatever can he do? Oh dear," she ended, "I do want to act the way poor dear Mr.
Hastings would have acted. Only I know that he would have gone straight to Bitley, or wherever she is, and held a revolver at that mulatto creature"s head, and _commanded_ her to talk English. Mr.
Hastings was a very determined character. If you could have seen the poor dear man"s chin! But of course I can"t do that, can I? And that"s what I say to Olivia. "Olivia, one doesn"t _need_ a man"s judgment if one will only use judgment oneself." What is it you think, Mr. St. George?"
Before St. George could reply there entered the room, behind a low announcement of his name, a man of sixty-odd years, nervous, slightly stooped, his smooth pale face unlighted by little deep-set eyes.
"Ah, Mr. Frothingham!" said Mrs. Hastings in evident relief, "you are just in time. Mr. St. John was just telling me horrible things about this frightful mulatto creature. This is Mr. St. John. Mr.
Frothingham is my lawyer and my brother Otho"s lawyer. And so I telephoned him to come in and hear all about this. And now do go on, Mr. St. John, about this hideous woman. What is it you think?"
"How do you do, Mr. St. John?" said the lawyer portentously. His greeting was almost a warning, and reminded St. George of the way in which certain brakemen call out stations. St. George responded as blithely to this name as to his own and did not correct it. "And what," went on the lawyer, sitting down with long unclosed hands laid trimly along his knees, "have you to contribute to this most remarkable occurrence, Mr. St. John?"
St. George briefly narrated the events of the morning and placed the slip of paper in the lawyer"s hands.
"Ah! We have here a communication in the nature of a confession,"
the lawyer observed, adjusting his gold pince-nez, head thrown back, eyebrows lifted.
"Only the address, sir," said St. George, "and I was just saying to Mrs. Hastings that some one ought to go to this address at once and find out whatever is to be got there. Whoever goes I will very gladly accompany."
Mr. Frothingham had a fashion of making ready to speak and soliciting attention by the act, and then collapsing suddenly with no explosion, like a bad Roman candle. He did this now, and whatever he meant to say was lost to the race; but he looked very wise the while. It was rather as if he discarded you as a fit listener, than that he discarded his own comment.
"I don"t know but I ought to go myself," rambled Mrs. Hastings, "perhaps Mr. Hastings would think I ought. Suppose, Mr. Frothingham, that we both go. Dear, dear! Olivia always sees to my shopping and flowers and everything executive, but I can"t let her go into these frightful places, can I?"
There was a rustling at the far end of the room, and some one entered. St. George did not turn, but as her soft skirts touched and lifted along the floor he was tinglingly aware of her presence. Even before Mrs. Hastings heard her light footfall, even before the clear voice spoke, St. George knew that he was at last in the presence of the arbiter of his enterprise, and of how much else he did not know.
He was silent, breathlessly waiting for her to speak.
"May I come in, Aunt Dora?" she said. "I want to know to what place it is impossible for me to go?"
She came from the long room"s boundary shadow. There was about her a sense of white and gray with a knot of pale colour in her hat and an orchid on her white coat. Mrs. Hastings, taking no more account of her presence than she had of St. George"s, tilted back her head and looked at the primroses in the window as closely as at anything, and absently presented him.
"Olivia," she said, "this is Mr. St. John, who knows about that frightful mulatto creature. Mr. St. George," she went on, correcting the name entirely unintentionally, "my niece, Miss Holland. And I"m sure I wish I knew what the necessary thing to be done _is_. That is what I always tell you, you know, Olivia. "Find out the necessary thing and do it, and let the rest go.""
"It reminds me very much," said the lawyer, clearing his throat, "of a case that I had on the April calendar--"
Miss Holland had turned swiftly to St. George:
"You know the mulatto woman?" she asked, and the lawyer pa.s.sed by the April calendar and listened.
"I went to the Bitley Reformatory this morning to see her," St.
George replied. "She gave me this name and address. We have been saying that some one ought to go there to learn what is to be learned."
Mr. Frothingham in a silence of pursed lips offered the paper. Miss Holland glanced at it and returned it.
"Will you tell us what your interest is in this woman?" she asked evenly. "Why you went to see her?"
"Yes, Miss Holland," St. George replied, "you know of course that the police have done their best to run this matter down. You know it because you have courteously given them every a.s.sistance in your power. But the police have also been very ably a.s.sisted by every newspaper in town. I am fortunate to be acting in the interests of one of these--the _Sentinel_. This clue was put in my hands. I came to you confident of your cooperation."
Mrs. Hastings threw up her hands with a gesture that caught away the chain of her eye-gla.s.s and sent it dangling in her lap, and her side-combs tinkling to the tiled floor.
"Mercy!" she said, "a reporter!"
St. George bowed.
"But I never receive reporters!" she cried, "Olivia--don"t you know? A newspaper reporter like that fearful man at Palm Beach, who put me in the Courtney"s ball list in a blue silk when I never wear colours."
"Now really, really, this intrusion--" began Mr. Frothingham, his long, unclosed hands working forward on his knees in undulations, as a worm travels.
Miss Holland turned to St. George, the colour dyeing her face and throat, her manner a bewildering mingling of graciousness and hauteur.
"My aunt is right," she said tranquilly, "we never have received any newspaper representative. Therefore, we are unfortunate never to have met one. You were saying that we should send some one to McDougle Street?"
St. George was aware of his heart-beats. It was all so unexpected and so dangerous, and she was so perfectly equal to the circ.u.mstance.
"I was asking to be allowed to go myself, Miss Holland," he said simply, "with whoever makes the investigation."
Mrs. Hastings was looking mutely from one to another, her forehead in horizons of wrinkles.
"I"m sure, Olivia, I think you ought to be careful what you say,"
she plaintively began. "Mr. Hastings never allowed his name to go in any printed lists even, he was so particular. Our telephone had a private number, and all the papers had instructions never to mention him, even if he was murdered, unless he took down the notice himself. Then if anything important did happen, he often did take it down, nicely typewritten, and sometimes even then they didn"t use it, because they knew how very particular he was. And of course we don"t know how--"
St. George"s eyes blazed, but he did not lift them. The affront was unstudied and, indeed, unconscious. But Miss Holland understood how grave it was, for there are women whose intuition would tell them the etiquette due upon meeting the First Syndic of Andorra or a n.o.ble from Gambodia.
"We want the truth about this as much as Mr. St. George does," she said quickly, smiling for the first time. St. George liked her smile. It was as if she were amused, not absent-minded nor yet a prey to the feminine immorality of ingratiation. "Besides," she continued, "I wish to know a great many things. How did the mulatto woman impress you, Mr. St. George?"
Miss Holland loosened her coat, revealing a little flowery waist, and leaned forward with parted lips. She was very beautiful, with the beauty of perfect, blooming, colourful youth, without line or shadow. She was in the very noon of youth, but her eyes did not wander after the habit of youth; they were direct and steady and a bit critical, and she spoke slowly and with graceful sanity in a voice that was without nationality. She might have been the cultivated English-speaking daughter of almost any land of high civilization, or she might have been its princess. Her face showed her imaginative; her serene manner rea.s.sured one that she had not, in consequence, to pay the usury of lack of judgment; she seemed reflective, tender, and of a fine independence, tempered, however, by tradition and unerring taste. Above all, she seemed alive, receptive, like a woman with ten senses. And--above all again--she had charm. Finally, St. George could talk with her; he did not a.n.a.lyze why; he only knew that this woman understood what he said in precisely the way that he said it, which is, perhaps, the fifth essence in nature.
"May I tell you?" asked St. George eagerly. "She seemed to me a very wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world. She is not mulatto--her features are quite cla.s.sic; and she is not a fanatic or a mad-woman. She is, of her race, a strangely superior creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some tremendous secret. I think we must find out what that is, first, for your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth while."
"Ah," cried Miss Holland, "delightful. I begin to be glad that it happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did make me wonder, but I hardly believed that."
"The newspapers," Mr. Frothingham said acidly, "became very much involved in their statements concerning this matter."
"This "Tabnit,"" said Miss Holland, and flashed a smile of pretty deference at the lawyer to console him for her total neglect of his comment, "in McDougle Street. Who can he be?--he _is_ a man, I suppose. And where is McDougle Street?"