Dr. Monk gave a malicious snort and rubbed his hands together.
“Then you suppose wrong, for I saw Car Fairfax.” He took a step down as he spoke, but Anna stood perfectly still above him, her hand on the banisters.
“Car? Car?” she said in a low voice.
“Car Fairfax,” said Dr. Monk, looking up at her with his small gray eyes. He had begun to feel distinctly less cross. He admired Anna a good deal, and was pleased at the effect of his speech.
“Car?” said Anna. “Car Fairfax -here!”
“Just outside Turner’s, holding a torch for a chauffeur who was doing something to a car. The man took the torch from him as I passed, and the light went right on Car’s face. It was Car all right.”
“Oh, don’t!” said Anna. She had begun to tremble very much, and the words were hardly audible.
“Why? What’s the matter?”
She shook her head.
They came down the rest of the flight into the hall.
“Dr. Monk-”
“What is it?”
“Do you think Car came here?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know if I ought-oh, I must tell some one.”
“What is it?”
“I told you I went out. I came in because the library window was open.”
“You mean you left it open.”
“No-I didn’t go out that way. I went out through the garden door. It has a spring lock, and I had the key. It was shut all right, because I tried it, but the library window was ajar.”
“Do you think Mr. Carthew-”
“I don’t know what to think. Suppose he came down and let some one in, or suppose he heard some one in the library and got up. His room is just above. I don’t know what to think.”
“The window was open. Was anything disturbed?”
She hesitated. Then without speaking she crossed the hall and opened a door. Dr. Monk followed. She touched a switch, and the library sprang into view-a heavy, handsome room with maroon curtains and old, comfortable leather chairs.
“The curtains were drawn, but the door was open,” said Anna slowly.
The room was high. There were two windows-long French windows, opening to the ground, as Dr. Monk well knew. Between the windows stood a large mahogany bureau with a cupboard above and three drawers below. The top drawer was not quite shut.
Dr. Monk walked across and looked at it.
“That drawer-”
“I know.”
“Did you look to see if anything’s missing?”
“I didn’t like to. I-I was frightened.”
“Well, you’d better see now.” He pulled out the drawer.
“Doesn’t keep valuables here, I suppose-does he? Hullo! Some one’s been rummaging!”
The papers in the drawer had been turned over. A check book lay open across them.
“Hullo!” said Dr. Monk again. “Hullo, hullo! Some one’s been up to something-yes, by Jove, they have!”
Anna tried to push the. drawer in, but her hand shook. She leaned against the desk and said in a choking voice,
“Oh-don’t!”
Dr. Monk glanced at her sharply.
“Would you know if anything had been taken?”
He pulled down the flap of the bureau and exposed more confusion. There was a row of pigeonholes above the desk. Everything had been bundled out of them-papers, a timetable, pencils, an old pen, a bunch of seals, stamps, and some neatly docketed bills; whilst, across the tangle, stretched a light chain ending in a bunch of keys.
Anna exclaimed and caught it up. The keys fell jangling against the wood.
Dr. Monk looked at her. Those big eyes of hers were brimming over with fear. Odd. He would never have suspected her of being easily frightened. She was as white as a sheet of paper. Those very beautiful lips of hers had lost all their red.
Dr. Monk admired Miss Lang more than a little. He was fifty, and a very comfortable bachelor. He didn’t want to marry any one, but Anna made him feel agreeably young. Her pallor and her distress moved him dangerously; he didn’t feel at all sure that he might not commit himself in some way if she went on looking at him like that. Dangerous- very dangerous. But how agreeable. Lovely woman. Midnight. Danger. The position of consoling friend-
“My dear Miss Anna-” said Dr. Monk. He said it warmly and with a slight tremor in his voice.
Anna’s eyes came to his face. Then suddenly her lashes fell; a shiver went over her. She gathered up the keys and, turning, shut the bureau top with a jerky movement. There was an awkward silence. She broke it at last, speaking in a low voice and not looking at him.
“You won’t-tell any one-will you?”
“My dear Miss Anna-” said Dr. Monk again.
“I shall have to tell my uncle,” she said. “I wish I needn’t, but I must.”
He felt more and more puzzled.
“Is anything missing here?” There must be some reason for this extraordinary agitation of hers.
“I don’t know.” Then, with an abrupt change of voice, “Are you sure that it was Car whom you saw?”
“Oh, quite sure.”
Was she changing the subject? Or did she mean-what did she mean? Some of her color had come back.
“I’m keeping you, and it’s most dreadfully late. Goodnight.”
This was dismissal. He accepted it with a sense of danger averted. He might have made a fool of himself in another minute. It was, somehow, disappointing not to have had the chance. He felt a little dashed as he said good-night and stepped out into the dark. But before he reached the car Anna called him back.
“Dr. Monk!”
He could see her only as a soft black shadow against the dimly lighted hall. She stood in the half open door and spoke quick and low.
“Did he look ill?”
“Who?”
“Car.”
“Bless me-no! Why should he? I only saw him for a moment. I thought he looked a bit thin.”
“You didn’t think he was ill?”
“Has he been ill?”
“I don’t know.” She opened the door wider and slipped across the step. “Dr. Monk-”
“What is it?”
“You won’t-you won’t tell any one you saw him?”
Now why should she ask him that?
Her hand touched his arm just for a moment.
“Please.”
“But why?”
“But I can’t tell you. You won’t tell any one-will you?”
Dr. Monk said he wouldn’t, and then went off wondering why she had asked him that, and what in the world Car Fairfax was doing in Linwood at that hour of night, or at any hour, if he wasn’t seeing his uncle. Then quite suddenly the keys, Mr. Carthew’s swoon, the ransacked bureau, and Anna’s frightened eyes rushed together in his protesting mind and supplied an answer which upset him a good deal.
XI
Mrs. Bell panted up the stair with a plate of hot meat pudding in one hand and a letter in the other. Both hands being occupied, she knocked on Mr. Fairfax’s door with the edge of the plate and then, taking the letter between her teeth, wrestled with the rather stiff handle for a moment and burst in.
Mr. Fairfax was standing at the window with his back to the room. As soon as she had retrieved the letter she burst into speech, at the same time setting down the plate with a bang calculated to attract the most absent-minded person’s attention.
“And if you please, sir”-it was Mrs. Bell’s way to start sentences in the middle-“and if you please, sir, there isn’t nothing nastier nor cold suet-or if there is, I haven’t come across it, not yet I haven’t.”
The meat pudding had a mound of potato on one side of it and a little hill of green cabbage on the other. There was plenty of gravy. Even cabbage smells good to a very hungry man.
Car turned round in a hurry.
“Mrs. Bell, you shouldn’t-I can’t,” he stammered.
Mrs. Bell slapped the letter down beside the plate. Her large round face was hot and red with cooking. Her large red hands were still steaming from the hot water in which she had just plunged them. Her apron was not very clean, and she had a smudge on her cheek. She spoke in a tone of angry authority that carried Car back to his nursery days: