Mortmain Part 6

"Well?" returned the other. "It's plain enough, isn't it? What more do you want?"

"It is not plain, you blackguard."

"Maiming is a felony. You know that. Amputation is maiming. Flynt told you so. The fellow that sold you that hand of yours died of it, didn't he?"

Mortmain uttered an exclamation of horror. He looked down at the fearful thing and it seemed to him to be the color of death. "They can never prove it!" he cried faintly. "They can't prove it! They cannot!"

"Yes, they can! I saw it done," remarked Flaggs. "I saw him buried in the garden. He is there yet--minus his hand."

"You villain!" gasped Mortmain. The room reeled, and Flaggs danced before him, gibbering with glee. The light darkened and brightened again and seemed to swing in circles.

"Pull yourself together, Sir Richard!" remarked Flaggs mockingly. "Pull yourself together! Isn't it worth ten thousand pounds or one hundred thousand pounds? But I'm reasonable. Only ten thousand pounds! Come, come! Let me have it!"

"_No!_" shouted Mortmain. "Not if I die for it."

"Then you _will_ die for it," said Flaggs.

The sound of the fiddles came through the closed door of the study. The cries of the lackeys and the roll of carriages arriving and departing could be heard in the front.

"You will die for it, as there is a G.o.d in heaven, if I choose!"

Mortmain stood silent. He had a presentiment of what Flaggs was going to say.

"A word from me," continued the clerk, "and you hang for the _murder of Lord Russell_. Everyone knows you hated him. Flynt, Joyce, and I heard you say you would kill him. You owed him seventy-five thousand pounds and it was two days overdue. He would have ruined you next day. The officer saw you outside his window within five minutes of the murder, and so did I. There was nothing taken but the notes--nothing. They were found in your possession the next morning. How did they get there? The case is complete. The notes convict you. I've got them. They are yours for ten thousand pounds--only ten thousand pounds."

"You villain," shouted Mortmain, springing toward him.

The door from the hall opened and Joyce entered letting in the warm breath of roses and the loud strains of a waltz.

"Lady Bella has arrived, Sir Richard," he announced.

"Tell her I am coming," said Mortmain, starting for the door.

"Wait!" shrieked Flaggs, his face horribly distorted. "Wait!" Joyce had retired.

Mortmain paused with clinched fists.

"Isn't it worth ten thousand pounds to save a guilty man--a man who can't escape?"

"Why, you fool!" cried Mortmain, suddenly regaining his self-control.

"Such evidence is valueless. My word is worth _yours_ ten times over, and I deny that you found the notes in my house. I say that _you_ are the murderer. And I believe you are!"

"Not so fast! Not so fast!" leered Flaggs. "You know I was 'in quod' at the time. Don't forget that! And there's one more bit of evidence that nails you. You can't escape. You're done. I've got you--_the murderer's thumb marks on the gla.s.s_!"

"The devil take you!" yelled Mortmain, the blood suffusing his eyes.

"The devil has _you_ already!" retorted Flaggs. "He's part of you. You _are_ the devil. Whose hand is that? Tell me that! _Whose hand is that?_"

Mortmain turned an agonized face toward his tormentor. His spirit was gone. He was ready to fall upon his knees, but he could not move. He raised his left hand pitifully as if to shield himself from the coming blow, and yet his parched lips uttered the soundless word:

"Whose?"

Flaggs gave a dry laugh.

"_It belonged to Saunders Leach!_"

With a sickening of the heart the baronet realized for the first time the terrible alternative which confronted him.

His selfish willingness to violate the law and mutilate a fellow human being merely to gratify his own vanity had plunged him into an abyss from which there seemed no escape. "Murder in the first degree defined: the taking of the life of a human being by another with malice prepense _or in the commission of a felony_." By a cruel yet extraordinary chance he, the needless yet deliberate lawbreaker, had purchased the very hand which had slain his enemy--from the murderer himself, who was only too anxious to get rid of it. By an equally hideous but astonishing coincidence this devil's contract had proved in fact the death warrant of the murderer, and Mortmain had been his involuntary executioner.

Saunders Leach had paid the penalty of his crime, but Mortmain carried dangling at the end of his dexter forearm the living evidence that he, and not Leach, was the a.s.sa.s.sin. The coil of the rope of fate, at one end of which hung the limp body of the common criminal, had fallen upon the neck of his aristocrat brother, and it needed but a word from Flaggs to send him spinning from the gallows. Should he seek to show that the finger prints upon the window of Lord Russell's library were not his own, and by this means to creep from beneath the meshes of the net of circ.u.mstantial evidence in which he was entangled, he would, in the same breath, be forced to confess that he was guilty of the murder of Saunders Leach--murder, as the result of the latter's mutilation--murder under the literal interpretation of the statute. Was ever rat so nicely trapped? The horror of the thing turned Mortmain into a madman. He sprang at the clerk in a delirium of rage, his right hand clutched Flaggs tightly by the throat, and its blunt fingers twisted into the flesh deeper and deeper. It was done so quickly that the clerk was unable to escape. His eyes started forward, his tongue protruded, and his mouth frothed as he made ineffectual attempts to break the baronet's hold.

"You've got me, eh?" muttered Mortmain, gritting his teeth. "I think not, Mr. Flaggs!"

The door opened and Joyce entered in much agitation. The orchestra had burst into a triumphant march and the sounds of many footsteps echoed in the hall outside.

"Everybody is arrivin', Sir Richard!" exclaimed the butler, "an' Lady Bella has gone into the music room. His Grace of Belvoir was just askin'

for you. Here are two gentlemen who wish to see you important, sir." He held the door open and two men in Inverness coats entered and stood irresolutely near the door.

Mortmain released his grasp upon the neck of Flaggs, who lurched toward the corner and fell motionless behind a table.

"Sir Richard Mortmain?" inquired the taller of the two, a man of ma.s.sive build and with iron-gray mustache and hair.

"The same," replied Mortmain, his fingers still twitching from the ferocity of his clutch upon the clerk.

The two strangers bowed.

"We have a card to you from Lieutenant Foraker--a friend of yours, I believe. Permit me," and the tall man stepped forward and extended a card to the baronet.

Mortmain mechanically took it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It felt like celluloid and a trifle slippery. But the stranger did not release his own hold upon it.

"Pardon me, I have given you the wrong card," he exclaimed apologetically, and withdrawing the bit of board from Mortmain's fingers he opened a wallet and fumbled with the contents. As he did so he handed the first card to his companion, who stepped into the light of the lamp, and examined it carefully through a small microscope which he drew from his pocket.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "His blunt fingers twisted into the flesh deeper and deeper."]

"They are _the same_," remarked the stranger of the microscope to the iron-gray man.

"What is all this?" cried Mortmain in an unnatural voice. His head swam.

On the mantel the verdigris-covered dragon's face grinned mockingly at him--it was the face of Flaggs.

"Sir Richard," replied the iron-gray man gravely, "I am Inspector Murtha, of Scotland Yard."

Mortmain started back and his right hand twitched again. Through the silence came the measures of "The Flower Song."

"I regret to say," continued the other, "that it is my most unpleasant duty to arrest you for the murder of Lord Gordon Russell."

At the same instant the veil of Sir Richard's mental temple was rent in twain; out of a blackness so intense that it seemed substantive he saw the two inspectors from Scotland Yard fleeing away and diminishing in size until they seemed but puppets gesturing at the edge of an infinity of white desert; then with equal velocity they were carried forward again, growing bigger and bigger until they loomed like giants in his immediate foreground swinging huge scimitars and waving their arms frantically; the strains of the violins changed to voices shouting so sharply that they pained his ears, and waves of light and cosmic darkness over which scintillated a dazzling aurora followed one another in startling succession, until suddenly his soul, shot out of a tunnel, as it were, landed abruptly in a warm meadow covered with daisies, which dissolved before his eyes into the familiar chamber on Milbank Street. A gray mist floated hissing up through the ceiling, the chairs rocked with a strange rotary swing, and the two inspectors smiled cheerfully at him through a broad and painful band of London sunshine. He swallowed rapidly, and a horrible faintness seized him which gave place to a queer sort of anger.

"There's--some--mistake!" he stuttered. The chairs anch.o.r.ed themselves and the ceiling a.s.sumed its normal tint.