The Crime Doctor Part 26

"Yes--look you here! She was picking up those matches when I spotted her from this door, and out she streaked through that one over there. Come and have a look at her line of country, doctor."

It led into an anteroom or inner hall, or the well of some staircase still to come, with a lashed ladder towering in its midst, but not quite reaching a skeleton landing of yawning joists. Dale-Bulmer gazed aloft, wagging a horizontal beard.

"Surely she didn't go up there?" said Dollar.

"Like a lamplighter, doctor! I went the way we'll both go now, if it's all the same to you."

A fine forked staircase bore them from the lower corridor to its counterpart above. And here the leader trod gently, a finger laid across his lips.

"That's the room," he whispered, pointing to a shut door in a side pa.s.sage. "I--I almost think I'll leave her to you, doctor. It's not locked--not the door."

"I thought she was your prisoner?"

"Yes--but you'll see where she's hidden herself. I did turn _that_ key, doctor, but that's all I did. Still, I think I'd rather you let her out."

There was nothing facetious in his droll air of guilt; he seemed really rather ashamed of his impetuous measures, as if long in doubt as to their gallantry, and abashed by the unspoken criticisms of the man whom he had brought so far afield on the spur of a fl.u.s.tering moment. But the truth was that Dollar did not blame him in the least, as he turned the handle softly, and heard a pusillanimous step retreating down the corridor.

It was a light and lofty room, with a broad bay-window overlooking the park; and in the bay a window-seat forming a coffer, which had been broken open from within; and just clear of the splinters, her hands raised to her disheveled hair, hat awry and country clothes begrimed, a young woman risen like Aphrodite from the foam. She had been gazing out as she put herself to rights; but at the opening of the door she turned with a light disdain, and the pair of them stood rooted to the floor.

"Lady--Vera!" he could only gasp.

She made him an abrupt little bow; then her head went back to the truculent angle necessitated by a jelly-bag hat worn almost as a mask; and her eyes hung under the brim like great blue rain-drops, grim and gleaming, but with little of his blank amazement, and nothing of the shame that shook his soul.

"No wonder you would never see me!" he muttered more to himself than to her. "Not a word even when I wrote--and I wondered what I'd done! I thought of heaps of things--but I never thought of this!"

She shook her head as abruptly as she had bowed; the blue rain-drops looked frozen where they hung, but the firm lips parted impulsively.

Instinct prepared him for something inconceivable. But her self-restraint was a lesson and a reproof; and, in laying it to heart and listening to what she did say he for the moment ceased from wondering what it was that she had just kept back--what charge she had deferred against him.

"Tell me one thing, Doctor Dollar." Her voice was all that it had been in other emergencies, only colder by some degrees. "Have you been following me, or is this pure chance?"

"Not chance--pure Fate!"

"Did you dog me down here, or did you not?"

"Not consciously. Do I look as if I had?"

"You look as if you'd seen a ghost," she told him, with a sudden twinkle of the big blue drops.

"So I have!" he cried in pa.s.sionate earnest. "I've seen the ghost of everything I held most----"

"Thank you," she said quietly, when he had checked himself on her model.

"I know what you must think--what you really have a special right to think--after two years ago. Do be generous and don't say it! This isn't altogether fun for me, you know, much less after being buried alive for hours!" She just turned her head toward the broken window-seat, and his eyes devoured the light upon her profile. "What's going to happen to me?

Is my natural enemy a friend of yours? Has he sent for the police?"

"No--for me instead."

"Did he know who it was at sight?"

"He didn't, and he doesn't, and he never shall unless you tell him!"

exclaimed Dollar vehemently. "O Vera, when I was longing to see you, to warn you against your enemies, that you should go the way to put yourself more than ever in their power!"

A glitter under the tilted hat had unconsciously rebuked an unconscious liberty; yet once this man had begged this woman to marry him, and once she had practically said she would but for the burden on her soul.

Ceremony, at least, they had foregone of old. Was it merely her new lease of error that had come between them of late months? He was beginning to ask himself the question when she broke in with one of her own:

"What enemies do you mean, Doctor Dollar?"

"We are not to speak of two years ago."

"Croucher!" She shuddered almost like a law-abiding lady. "I haven't heard of him since that night in the train."

"I said you wouldn't But I also said, if you remember, that Croucher was only deadly as a tool. Well, he has fallen into the deadliest hands I know--that's all."

It was not, and Lady Vera knew that it was not. The angle of her hat was all amicable attention now, and her eyes shone clear of the brim, with a softer light that made her all at once incredible in her latest incarnation. Dollar's feelings flew back into his face; she read them with a smile that made him wince, by its cynical resemblance to one or two that still enriched his dreams.

"You think I'm as bad as any of them," she divined aloud.

"I think the crime of arson is worse than most crimes," he made st.u.r.dy answer, standing up to the little body with the strangest difficulty, as though he were the culprit and she the man. "It's a thing absolutely nothing on earth can possibly excuse. I think you'd have died rather than descend to it--two years ago!"

He had heard a step behind him, and lowered his voice; but Lady Vera raised hers as a burly form halted shyly on the threshold; and her tone was like none that she had taken hitherto.

"Two years ago," she declaimed, "women had not been treated quite so shabbily as they have been since. Then this miserable Government--"

"Look you here!" bl.u.s.tered Dale-Bulmer, striding out of his shyness into the center of the stage.

"Two years ago," she reiterated for his benefit, "it wasn't war to the handle of the knife! Now it would be fire and sword, if we were any good with the sword; as we are not, it's simply fire!"

"You really think you can burn your way to political power?" cried the man of extremes, with ungovernable indignation.

"Political existence is all we ask."

"As a first instalment! I know you! I come from a country where you started just like that!"

"As you told your audience the other night, if you are Mr. Dale-Bulmer,"

said Lady Vera, with an explosive little sigh.

"I am; and for that I'm to have a house like this burned to the ground; and you ladies think that's the way to advance your cause, to prove your value to the State! Well, I suppose you know your own business best.

It's no use reasoning with you; but it really is enough to set one off, after what I caught you doing down-stairs."

"I wish to goodness you hadn't caught me," cried Lady Vera, with quite extraordinary simplicity.

But neither of them took her up; the doctor could only shake his head in professional despair, while the injured householder recovered his composure, and the little criminal looked as if she were trying not to look the mistress of the situation.

"I only came," resumed Dale-Bulmer, rather as one who had no right in the room, "to say that a run-about car has been found in the yard behind one of the empty lodges. As I fancy your friends were on bicycles, it struck me that the two-seater might perhaps be yours?"

Was it just the nature of the man to change his whole manner in a moment, or had the quality of the woman something to do with it? He seemed unconscious of the change himself--unaware that he had dropped into a tone of courteous consideration bordering almost on the apologetic. But the corners of her little mutinous mouth showed that nothing was lost upon Lady Vera.

"It sounds like mine," she confessed without indecent amus.e.m.e.nt. "But I hope you don't think, because there's room for two, that there's another of us still concealed about the premises? I came down quite by myself, in the car you have discovered. And who's to drive it back to town again, I'm sure _I_ don't know!"

Dale-Bulmer glanced defiantly at Dollar, a flash-light in his eyes.