She nodded, and at that moment the nurse came in.
Summoned to the sick-room, Eunice found her employer looking more feeble than she had appeared before she was stricken down. The old woman’s eyes smouldered their hate, as the girl came into the room. She guessed it was Eunice who had discovered the will and loathed her, but fear was the greater in her, and after the few letters had been formally answered, Mrs. Groat stopped the girl, who was in the act of rising.
“Sit down again, Miss Weldon,” she said. “I wanted to tell you about a will of mine that you found. I’m very glad you discovered it. I had forgotten that I had made it.”
Every word was strained and hateful to utter.
“You see, my dear young woman, I sometimes suffer from a curious lapse of memory, and—and—that will was made when I was suffering from an attack—”
Eunice listened to the halting words and was under the impression that the hesitation was due to the old woman’s weakness.
“I quite understand, Mrs. Groat,” she said sympathetically. “Your son told me.”
“He told you, did he?” said Jane Groat, returning to her contemplation of the window; then, when Eunice was waiting for her dismissal, “Are you a great friend of my son’s?”
Eunice smiled.
“No, not a great friend, Mrs. Groat,” she said.
“You will be,” said the woman, “greater than you imagine,” and there was such malignity in the tone that the girl shuddered.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
JIM loved London, the noise and the smell of it. He loved its gentle thunders, its ineradicable good-humour, its sublime muddle. Paris depressed him, with its air of gaiety and the underlying fierceness of life’s struggle. There was no rest in the soul of Paris. It was a city of strenuous bargaining, of ruthless exploitation. Brussels was a dumpy undergrown Paris, Berlin a stucco Gomorrah, Madrid an extinct crater beneath which a new volcanic stream was seeking a vent.
New York he loved, a city of steel and concrete teeming with sentimentalists posing as tyrants. There was nothing quite like New York in the world. Dante in his most prodigal mood might have dreamt New York and da Vinci might have planned it, but only the high gods could have materialized the dream or built to the master’s plan. But London was London—incomparable, beautiful. It was the history of the world and the mark of civilization. He made a detour and passed through Covent Garden.
The blazing colour and fragrance of it! Jim could have lingered all the morning in the draughty halls, but he was due at the office to meet Mr. Salter.
Almost the first question that the lawyer asked him was:
“Have you investigated Selengers?”
The identity of the mysterious Selengers had been forgotten for the moment, Jim admitted.
“You ought to know who they are,” said the lawyer. “You will probably discover that Groat or his mother are behind them. The fact that the offices were once the property of Danton rather supports this idea—though theories are an abomination to me!”
Jim agreed. There were so many issues to the case that he had almost lost sight of his main object.
“The more I think of it,” he confessed “the more useless my search seems to me, Mr. Salter. If I find Lady Mary, you say that I shall be no nearer to frustrating the Groats?”
Mr. Septimus Salter did not immediately reply. He had said as much, but subsequently had amended his point of view. Theories, as he had so emphatically stated, were abominable alternatives to facts, and yet he could not get out of his head that if the theory he had formed to account for Lady Mary Danton’s obliteration were substantiated, a big step would have been taken toward clearing up a host of minor mysteries.
“Go ahead with Selengers,” he said at last; “possibly you may find that their inquiries are made as much to find Lady Mary as to establish the identity of your young friend. At any rate, you can’t be doing much harm.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AT twelve o’clock that night Eunice heard a car draw up in front of the house. She had not yet retired, and she stepped out on to the balcony as Digby Groat ascended the steps.
Eunice closed the door and pulled the curtains across. She was not tired enough to go to bed. She had very foolishly succumbed to the temptation to take a doze that afternoon, and to occupy her time she had brought up the last bundle of accounts, unearthed from a box in the wine-cellar, and had spent the evening tabulating them.
She finished the last account, and fixing a rubber band round them, rose and stretched herself, and then she heard a sound; a stealthy foot upon the stone of the balcony floor. There was no mistaking it. She had never heard it before on the occasion of the earlier visits. She switched out the light, drew back the curtains noiselessly and softly unlocked the French window. She listened. There it was again. She felt no fear, only the thrill of impending discovery. Suddenly she jerked open the window and stepped out, and for a time saw nothing, then as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she saw something crouching against the wall.
“Who is that?” she cried.
There was no reply for a little time; then the voice said:
“I am awfully sorry to have frightened you, Eunice.”
It was Jim Steele.
“Jim!” she gasped incredulously, and then a wave of anger swept over her. So it had been Jim all the time and not a woman! Jim, who had been supporting his prejudices by these contemptible tricks. Her anger was unreasonable, but it was very real and born of the shock of disillusionment. She remembered in a flash how sympathetic Jim had been when she told him of the midnight visitor and how he had pretended to be puzzled. So he was fooling her all the time. It was hateful of him!
“I think you had better go,” she said coldly.
“Let me explain, Eunice.”
“I don’t think any explanation is necessary,” she said. “Really, Jim, it is despicable of you.”
She went back to her room with a wildly beating heart. She could have wept for vexation. Jim! He was the mysterious Blue Hand, she thought indignantly, and he had made a laughing-stock of her! Probably he was the writer of the letters, too, and had been in her room that night. She stamped her foot in her anger. She hated him for deceiving her. She hated him for shattering the idol she had set up in her heart. She had never felt so unutterably miserable as she was when she flung herself on her bed and wept until she fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
“Damn!” muttered Jim as he slipped out of the house and strode in search of his muddy little car. An unprofitable evening had ended tragically.
“Bungling, heavy-footed jackass,” he growled savagely, as he spun perilously round a corner and nearly into a taxi-cab which had ventured to the wrong side of the road. But he was not cursing the cab-driver. It was his own stupidity which had led him to test the key which had made a remarkable appearance on his table the night before. He had gone on to the balcony, merely to examine the fastenings of the girl’s window, with the idea of judging her security.
He felt miserable and would have been glad to talk his trouble over with somebody. But there was nobody he could think of, nobody whom he liked well enough, unless it was—Mrs. Fane. He half smiled at the thought and wondered what that invalid lady would think of him if he knocked her up at this hour to pour his woes into her sympathetic ears! The sweet, sad-faced woman had made a very deep impression upon him; he was surprised to find how often she came into his thoughts.
Halfway up Baker Street he brought his car to a walking pace and turned. He had remembered Selengers, and it had just occurred to him that at this hour he was more likely to profit by a visit than by a daytime call. It was nearly two o’clock when he stopped in Brade Street and descended.