“This,” he announced, “is a photograph of Miss Fay Seton. It was done in colour, not crudely either, by my friend Coco Legrand. The manuscript is an account of this case, which I have specially written for the archives of the Murder Club. But look, please, at the photograph!”
He pushed it across the table cloth, brushing away crumbs as he did so.
A soft face, a disturbingly haunting face, looked out past the shoulder of the beholder. The yes were wide-spaced, the brows thin; the nose was short; the lips were full and rather sensual though this was contradicted by the grace and fastidiousness about the carriage of the head. Those lips just avoided the twitch of a smile at their outer corners. The weight of dark red hair, smooth as fleece, seemed almost too heavy for the slender neck.
It was not beautiful. Yet it troubled the mind. Something about the yes―was it irony, was it bitterness under the faraway expression?―at once challenged you and fled from you.
“Now tell me!” said Professor Rigaud, with the proud satisfaction of one who believes himself to be on sure ground. “Can you see anything wrong in that face?”
Chapter III
“Wrong?” echoed Barbara Morell.
Georges Antoine Rigaud seemed convulsed by some vast inner amusement.
“Exactly, exactly, exactly! Why do I designate her as so very dangerous a woman?”
Miss Morell had been following this narrative with the utmost absorption, and a faintly contemptuous expression. Once or twice she had glanced at Miles, as though about to speak. She watched Professor Rigaud as he picked up his dead cigar from the edge of a saucer, took a triumphant puff at it, and put it down again.
“I’m afraid,”―suddenly her voice went high, as though she were somehow personally concerned in this―I’m afraid we must get back to a matter of definition. How do you mean, dangerous? So attractive that she . . . Well, turned the head of every man she met?”
“No!” said Professor Rigaud with emphasis.
Again he chuckled.
“I admit, mark you,” he hastened to add, “that with many men this might well be the case. Look at the photograph there! But I was not what I meant.”
“Then in what way dangerous?” persisted Barbara Morell, a luster of intentness, even slight anger, coming into her grey yes. She shot out the next question as something like a challenge. “You mean―a criminal?”
“My dear young lady! No, no, no!”
“An adventuress, then?”
Barbara struck her hand against the edge of the table.
“A trouble-maker of some kind, is that it?” she cried. “Malicious? Or spiteful? Or tale-bearing?”
“I say to you,” declared Professor Rigaud, “that Fay Seton was none of those things. Forgive me if I, the old cynic, insist that in her puritanical way she was altogether gentle and goodhearted.”
“Then what’s left?”
“What is left, mademoiselle, is the real answer to the mystery. The mystery of the unpleasant rumours that began to creep through Chartres and the surrounding country. The mystery of why our sober, conservative Mr. Howard Brooke, her prospective father-in-law, cursed her aloud in a public place like the Credit Lyonnais Bank . . .”
Under her breath Barbara uttered a curious sound which was either incredulity or contempt, either disbelieving this or dismissing it as of no importance whatever. Professor Rigaud blinked at her.
“You doubt me, mademoiselle?”
“No! Of course not!” Her colour went up. “What do I about it?”
“And you, Mr. Hammond: you say little?”
“Yes,” Miles replied absently. “I was―
“Looking at the photograph?”
“Yes. Looking at the photograph.”
Professor Rigaud opened his eyes delightedly.
“You are impressed, eh?”
“There’s a kind of spell about it,” said Miles, brushing his hand across his forehead. “The eyes there in the picture! And the way she’s got her head turned. Confound the photograph!”
“He, Miles Hammond, was a tired man only recently recovered from a very long illness. He wanted peace. He wanted to live in seclusion in the New Forest, among old books, with his sister to keep house for him until her marriage. He didn’t want to have his imagination stirred. Yet he sat staring at the photograph, staring at it under the candlelight until its subtle colours grew blurred, while Professor Rigaud went on.
“These rumours about Fay Seton . . .”
“What rumours?” Barbara asked sharply.
Blandly, Professor Rigaud ignored this.
“For myself, blind bat and owl that I am, I had heard nothing of them. Harry Brooke and Fay Seton became engaged to be married in the middle of July. Now I must tell you about the twelfth of August.
“On that day, which seemed to me like any other day, I am writing a critical article for the Revue de Deux Mondes. morning I write in my pleasant hotel room, as I have been doing for nearly a week. But after lunch I step across the Place des Epars to get my hair cut. And while I am there, i think to myself, I will just go into the Credit Lyonnais and cash a cheque before the bank closes.
“It was very warm. All morning the sky had been heavy and dark, with fits of vague prowling thunder and sometimes spatters of rain. But nothing more than a drizzle; no cloudburst; nothing to let the heat out and give us peace. So I went into the Credit Lyonnais. And the first person I saw, coming out of the manager’s office, was Mr. Howard Brooke.
“Odd?
“Rather odd, yes! For I had imagined he would be at his office, like the conscientious fellow he was.
“Mr. Brooke regarded me very strangely. He wore a raincoat and a tweed cap. Over his left arm was hung the crook of a cane, and in his right hand he carried an old black-leather brief-case. It seemed to me even then that his light-blue eyes looked strangely watery; nor had I ever noticed before, in a man so fit, that there was sagging flesh under his chin.
“’My dear Brooke!’ I said to him, and shook hands with him in spite of himself. His hand felt very limp. ‘My dear Brooke,’ I said, ‘this is an unexpected pleasure! How is everyone at home? How is your good wife, and Harry, and Fay Seton?’
“’Fay Seton?’ he said to me. ‘Damn Fay Seton.’
“Ouf!
“He had spoken in English, but so loudly that one or two persons in the bank glanced round. He flushed with embarrassment, this good man, but he was so troubled that he did not really seem to care. He marched me to the front of the bank, beyond hearing of anyone else. Then he opened the brief-case, and showed me.
“Inside, in solitary state, were four slender packets of English banknotes. Each packet contained twenty-five twenty-pound notes: two thousand pounds.
“’I had to send to Paris for these,’ he told me, and his hands were trembling. ‘I thought, you know, that English notes would be more tempting. If Harry won’t give the woman up, I must simply buy her off. Now you must excuse me.’
“and he straightened his shoulders, shut up the brief-case, and walked out of the bank without another word.
“My friends, have you ever been hit very hard in the stomach? So that your eyesight swims, and your stomach rises up, and you feel suddenly like a rubber toy squeezed together? That was how I felt then. I forgot to write a cheque. I forgot everything. I walked back to my hotel, through a drizzling rain that was turning black and greasy the cobblestones of the Place des Epars.
“But it was impossible to write, as I discovered. About half an hour later, at a quarter past three, the telephone rang. I think I guessed what it might be about, though I did not guess what it was. It was Mama Brooke, Mrs. Georgina Brooke, and she said: