"I wrote it in the hurry and excitement of the moment; it was incorrect."
"Why did you lie?" (_Pourquoi avez vous menti?_)
Maitland made an irritable movement
"You threaten Justice. Your att.i.tude is deplorable. You are consigned _au secret_, and will have an opportunity of revising your situation, and replying more fully to the inquiries of Justice."
So ended Maitland"s first and, happily, sole interview with a Juge d"Instruction. Lord Walter Brixton, his old St Gatien"s pupil, returned from the country on the very day of Maitland"s examination. An interview (during which Lord Walter laughed unfeelingly) with his old coach was not refused to the _attache_, and, in a few hours, after some formalities had been complied with, Maitland was a free man. His _pieces justificatives_, his letters, cards, and return ticket to Charing Cross, were returned to him intact.
But Maitland determined to sacrifice the privileges of the last-named doc.u.ment.
"I am going straight to Constantinople and the Greek Islands," he wrote to Barton. "Do you know, I don"t like Paris. My attempt at an investigation has not been a success. I have endured considerable discomfort, and I fear my case will get into the _Figaro_, and there will be dozens of "social leaders" and "descriptive headers" about me in all the penny papers."
Then Maitland gave his banker"s address at Constantinople, relinquished the quest of Margaret, and for a while, as the Sagas say, "is out of the story."
CHAPTER XI.--The Night of Adventures.
A cold March wind whistled and yelled round the twisted chimneys of the _Hit or Miss_. The day had been a trial to every sense. First there would come a long-drawn distant moan, a sigh like that of a querulous woman; then the sigh grew nearer and became a shriek, as if the same woman were working herself up into a pa.s.sion; and finally a gust of rainy hail, mixed with dust and small stones, was dashed, like a parting insult, on the windows of the _Hit or Miss_.
Then the shriek died away again into a wail and a moan, and so _da capo_.
"Well, Eliza, what do you do now that the pantomime season is over?"
said Barton to Miss Gullick, who was busily dressing a doll, as she perched on the table in the parlor of the _Hit or Miss_.
Barton occasionally looked into the public-house, partly to see that Maitland"s investment was properly managed, partly because the place was near the scene of his labors; not least, perhaps, because he had still an unacknowledged hope that light on the mystery of Margaret would come from the original centre of the troubles.
"I"m in no hurry to take an engagement," answered the resolute Eliza, holding up and examining her doll. It was a fashionable doll, in a close-fitting tweed ulster, which covered a perfect panoply of other female furniture, all in the latest mode. As the child worked, she looked now and then at the ill.u.s.trations in a journal of the fashions.
"There"s two or three managers in treaty with me," said Eliza. "There"s the _Follies and Frivolities_ down Norwood way, and the _Varieties_ in the "Ammersmith Road. Thirty shillings a week and my dresses, that"s what I ask for, and I"ll get it too! Just now I"m taking a vacation, and making an honest penny with these things," and she nodded at a little basket full of the wardrobe of dolls.
"Do you sell the dresses to the toy-shops, Eliza?" asked Barton.
"Yes," said Eliza; "I am doing well with them. I"m not sure I shan"t need to take on some extra hands, by the job, to finish my Easter orders."
"Pm glad you are successful," answered Barton. "I say, Eliza!"
"Yes, Doctor."
"Would you mind showing me the room up-stairs where poor old Shields was sitting the night before he was found in the snow?"
It had suddenly occurred to Barton--it might have occurred to him before--that this room might be worth examining.
"We ain"t using it now! Ill show you it," said Eliza, leading the way up-stairs, and pointing to a door.
Barton took hold of the handle.
"Ladies first," he said, making way for Eliza, with a bow.
"No," came the child"s voice, from half-way down the stairs; "I won"t come in! They say he walks, I"ve heard noises there at night."
A cold stuffy smell came out of the darkness of the unused room. Barton struck a match, and, seeing a candle on the table, lit it The room had been left as it was when last it was tenanted. On the table were an empty bottle, two tumblers, and a little saucer stained with dry colors, blue and red, part of Shields" stock-in-trade. There were, besides, some very sharp needles of bone, of a savage make, which Barton recognized.
They were the instruments used for tattooing in the islands of the Southern Seas.
Barton placed the lighted candle beside the saucer, and turned over the needles. Presently his eyes brightened: he chose one out, and examined it closely. It was astonishingly sharp, and was not of bone like the others, but of wood.
Barton made an incision in the hard brittle wood with his knife, and carefully felt the point, which was slightly crusted with a dry brown substance.
"I thought so," he said aloud, as he placed the needle in a pocket instrument-case: "the stem of the leaf of the coucourite palm!"
Then he went down-stairs with the candle.
"Did you see him?" asked Eliza, with wide-open eyes.
"Don"t be childish, Eliza: there"s no one to see. Why is the room left all untidy?"
"Mother dare not go in!" whispered the child. Then she asked in a low voice, "Did you never hear no more of that awful big Bird I saw the night old Shields died in the snow?"
"The Bird was a dream, Eliza. I am surprised such a clever girl as you should go on thinking about it," said Barton, rather sternly. "You were tired and ill, and you fancied it."
"No, I wasn"t," said the child, solemnly. "I never say no more about it to mother, nor to n.o.body; but I did see it, ay, and heard it, too. I remember it at night in my bed, and I am afraid. Oh, what"s that?"
She turned with a scream, in answer to a scream on the other side of the curtained door that separated the parlor from the bar of the _Hit or Miss_.
Someone seemed to fall against the door, which at the same moment flew open, as if the wind had burst it in. A girl, panting and holding her hand to her breast, her face deadly white and so contorted by terror as to be unrecognizable, flashed into the room. "Oh, come! oh, come!" she cried. "She"s killing her!" Then the girl vanished as hurriedly as she had appeared. It was all over in a moment: the vivid impression of a face maddened by fear, and of a cry for help, that was all. In that moment Barton had seized his hat, and sped, as hard as he could run, after the girl. He found her breaking through a knot of loafers in the bar, who were besieging her with questions. She turned and saw Barton.
"Come, doctor, come!" she screamed again, and fled out into the night, crossing another girl who was apparently speeding on the same errand.
Barton could just see the flying skirts of the first messenger, and hear her footfall ring on the pavement. Up a long street, down another, and then into a back slum she flew, and, lastly, under a swinging sign of the old-fashioned sort, and through a doorway. Barton, following, found himself for the first time within the portals of _The Old English Bun-house_.
The wide pa.s.sage (the house was old) was crowded with girls, wildly excited, weeping, screaming, and some of them swearing. They were pressed so thick round a door at the end of the hall, that Barton could scarcely thrust his way through them, dragging one aside, shouldering another: it was a matter of life and death.
"Oh, she"s been at the drink, and she"s killed her! she"s killed her!
I heard her fall!" one of the frightened girls was exclaiming with hysterical iteration.
"Let me pa.s.s!" shouted Barton; and reaching the door at last, he turned the handle and pushed. The door was locked.
"Give me room," he cried, and the patrons of _The Bun-house_ yielding place a little, Barton took a little short run, and drove with all the weight of his shoulders against the door. It opened reluctantly with a crash, and he was hurled into the room by his own impetus, and by the stress of the girls behind him.
What he beheld was more like some dreadful scene of ancient tragedy than the spectacle of an accident or a crime of modern life.
By the windy glare of a dozen gas-jets (red and shaken like the flame of blown torches by the rainy gusts that swept through a broken pane), Barton saw a girl stretched bleeding on the sanded floor.
One of her arms made a pillow for her head; her soft dark hair, unfastened, half hid her, like a veil; the other arm lay loose by her side; her lips were white, her face was bloodless; but there was blood on the deep-blue folds about the bosom, and on the floor. At the further side of this girl--who was dead, or seemingly dead--sat, on a low stool, a woman, in a crouching, cat-like att.i.tude, quite silent and still. The knife with which she had done the deed was dripping in her hand; the noise of the broken door, and of the entering throng, had not disturbed her.
For a moment even Barton"s rapidity of action and resolution were paralyzed by the terrible and strange vision that he beheld. He stared with all his eyes, in a mist of doubt and amazement, at a vision, dreadful even to one who saw death every day. Then the modern spirit awoke in him.
"Fetch a policeman," he whispered, to one of the crowding frightened troop of girls.