CHAPTER XVI.

“OH! GREAT IS THE POWER OF WEALTH!”

Winifred never forgot those terrible moments she spent in Ventris Blake’s study in Park Lane. It was not so much the shame of being caught like a common thief with her arm bared to the shoulder, tightly wedged in a secret safe, although that was degrading and horrible enough in all conscience--no, it was the full and complete understanding that suddenly came to her that she had been tricked--that after all, Vera had written no compromising letters and that the millionaire had not got hold of a bundle of her cousin’s love effusions which he held over the Langfords with a threat of publication. This it was that burned into her heart and brain like molten metal, and wracked her soul so much that finally, with a great despairing cry, unconsciousness came to her mind’s salvation.

When she opened her eyes next it was to find herself released from the grip of iron that had clamped those fetters on her arm and wrist immediately she had striven to seize that bundle of letters tied with red tape at the back of the secret hiding place. Somebody had lifted her bodily from the wall, and placed her full length on a couch; and then, as her distracted gaze wandered round the apartment she noted too that even the safe had been again closed, and once more the monk of Florence was gazing at her with that strange expression of pity which she remembered now she had unconsciously observed when Vera made that excuse and fled back to the safety and refuge of her own room. How trifles like these come back to us all in life’s supreme crises! Somehow, to twist around a phrase:--

It isn’t the shame, And it isn’t the blame, That stings like a red-hot brand--

it is just these details that rise up and confront us and dance about us in some weird phantasmagoria of our own brains, only to vanish and leave us supremely conscious of the horror of the real thing that’s come upon us, and twisted our life like a tree struck out of the Unseen.

Some of the softest of the electric lights had been switched on since she last closed her eyes--but only one man was present now, a stout burly, not unkind-looking London policeman, who had taken off his helmet and seated himself in a tall, high-backed chair, evidently prepared to stay an hour, or a day, or even a week if occasion required, Suddenly, however, he observed her shudder, and rising he came and stood in front of her.

“Are you better now, miss?” he said, nodding his head in the direction of a huge bottle of smelling salts which stood on a dumb waiter near, and which he had evidently made most liberal use of.

“A little,” answered Winifred feebly, passing her hand over her forehead in a futile effort to recall the full possession of her faculties. “I--I don’t think though I could get up yet. I feel so weak and shaky and my arm aches so. Have you--would you send for my cousin, Vera?”

The policeman shook his head.

“No, I can’t do that,” he said. “Mr. Blake has been already and told her what has happened, and she, poor thing, was so horrified at your wickedness that she had an awful attack of hysterics, and it is now as much as Mrs. Gordon and two maids can do to soothe her and to assure her that whatever happens, nobody will be unduly harsh.”

Winifred literally turned her face to the wall. Of course, she had expected--nay, she had known this when she had just spoken, and yet, so queerly constituted are tender clinging creatures like herself, that she had suddenly resolved she would not think badly of her cousin. Yet what better proof of the girl’s duplicity, her direct intrigue with the millionaire, and her calm desertion of the friend who had tried to save her, could there be than that? Treachery was proved absolutely--and, try as she would, poor Winifred could not suppress a groan of anguish.

Somehow the policeman, rather policemanlike, took this for a sign of penitence.

“This is a bad business, miss,” he ventured to observe, drawing a handkerchief out of his sleeve and mopping his forehead. “Pardon me saying it but was you hard up or--”

“No,” said Winifred quickly with a faint smile. “I--I was nothing--only a fool.”

The worthy officer looked disappointed. He hadn’t any imagination, but he had a certain capacious kind of heart enlarged by beer and the sentiment of the West End area, and he had really spoken out of kindness, and not from any desire to secure admissions by which he might shine with his more crafty and less scrupulous superiors.

“Yes,” said he, meditatively stroking his chin. “They all says that when they’re caught. Somehow it doesn’t stop ’em though. The times they beat us seems to turn their brains. They always seem to expect that they’ll always have the luck!”

“I didn’t quite mean that,” protested poor Winnie helplessly, feeling herself rather swamped in a gulf of criminal philosophy through her own clumsiness. “I didn’t suggest I was silly just because I had been caught in the act. I only thought I was foolish because I did the thing for some one who was not worthy of it--who rather led me in it--and who has now deserted me.”

“Exactly,” answered the active and intelligent officer, once more growing keenly interested. “That’s precisely what I said to the butler, Mr. Fitzgerald. ‘Mr. Fitzgerald,’ says I, ‘this ain’t no ordinary case you’ve called me into. This is a plot. This ’ere young woman hasn’t gone into it with her eyes shut. She’s got someone behind her egging her on, and that’s why she’s abused Mr. Blake’s confidence and the hospitality of this noble house. Women allus has accomplices. They’re not like Charles Peace, believing in the might of a single brain.’”

“But I’ve no accomplices of that kind,” cried Winifred, her eyes dilated in pain and indignation. “You seem to think I am some ordinary thief, whereas--” She paused and then stopped. How indeed could she end that sentence? Was there anything she could say that would make this all too solid impersonation of British reticence and common sense understand the thousand and one complex motives upon which she had acted. “No wonder,” she muttered to herself, “Arthur’s pet hero is a don at Oxford, whose pet hobby is ‘the philosophy of mixed motives.’ Can I ever explain why I did this?” And she turned restlessly to and fro on the couch.

“There! never mind, miss,” put in the officer sympathetically, once again careeringly off wildly in the wrong track. “Don’t take on about any on ’em. They ain’t worth it. Some of these young men ’as harp about these swell houses is bad lots. We policemen sees ’em when they aren’t on show, and we knows a deal about ’em which the papers wouldn’t dare to print for fear they’d kick out and get the editors put in prison. No doubt you didn’t mean any harm at all at first. May be a pleasant bit of flirtation, and then perhaps he persuaded you to take something as didn’t belong to you--and then you got frightened and thought you’d come here and help yourself where there was a lot as wouldn’t be missed. Maybe I’d have thought the same myself had I been in your place. The Recorder at the Old Bailey is a nice kind sort of gentleman. You take my tip when you get there and speak out to him about it and tell him: ‘My lord’--(And mind always call him ‘my lord,’ because, he ain’t my lord really, but likes to think he is)--‘I am only a poor weak girl as has been deceived.’”

Winifred could stand it no longer. True, her tired numbed mind had only gathered one tithe of the meaning of the man’s conclusions--but even those were intolerably loathsome to her. His coarse kindness was worse than any brutality, and, while he spoke she felt as though some indignant fury had seized her, and, in spite of her most strenuous fighting, had dragged her bodily through miles and miles of thoroughfare inches deep in mud. Now, starting to her feet, she confronted him boldly:

“Why are you here at all?” she demanded hysterically. “What are you standing about here for, wasting your time in all this idle conversation? Why don’t you leave and go on your beat?”

The policeman’s face was a study in a kind of cloddish amazement and stupefaction. Twice he opened wide his extremely big mouth and twice he closed it, absolutely unable to speak. For a moment his resemblance to a stuffed fish was really quite alarmingly life-like. Then, however, he rallied the pride of his calling; and he spoke out with a good deal of fine official sternness.

“I am here on duty,” he said gravely taking up his helmet and placing it firmly on his head. “I was patrolling Park Lane just now when I heard Mr. Blake’s electric alarm ring. I dashed to the door, which was flung wide open by my friend Mr. Fitzgerald the butler, and I raced to the study to find you caught in the man-trap, in the act of robbing one of Mr. Blake’s secret safes. If I had had my way I should have whistled for the police ambulance, and had you taken off at once to Vine Street police-station, faint or no faint, only Mr. Blake himself suddenly appeared. ‘I am terribly upset about this, Stemp,’ meaning me, he said, ‘terribly upset.’ This young woman is a comparative stranger to me--I have only spoken to her three or four times in my life--but I am bound to recognise that she is a guest in my house. Perhaps it is all some hideous blunder. Perhaps she walks in her sleep, even though she’s got her clothes on. Just stand by her until she comes to her senses. You’re a father yourself, Stemp. Well, just give her a chance. Nobody must charge her with any offence in respect to this safe robbery until I have seen her--”

“That is so,” said a quiet voice at his elbow, and wheeling round swiftly the virtuously indignant Stemp found himself face to face with the millionaire, who bowed his head in the direction of the door. “You may go, Stemp,” he said firmly. “I want to speak first to Miss Pontifex in private, so just wait in the butler’s pantry, will you? and when I give you the word come back at once.”

Oh, great is the power of wealth! Stemp nodded and took himself off as though his dearest wish was to obey Blake. Still, that interview between Ventris Blake and Winifred Pontifex was destined to be in many ways remarkable.

In the first place, that was the first time since that memorable hunt ball at Stamford, when the millionaire fell so passionately in love with her, that these two had met face to face alone. Since then the man had engineered the whole of that astounding scheme of duplicity and crime against her lover and herself, so that that day they were both in the position of social outcasts, more or less--the one apparently guilty of a most loathsome form of social sin and murder, the other on the point of being branded a common but most dangerous felon.

Secondly, it was obvious that during the explanations which were about to ensue, Ventris Blake would be bound to show his hand. He had so skilfully contrived the present debacle that practically little appeared to remain for him to do save to dictate his terms. These terms might be taken, or they might be refused: but now they were meeting, full concealment would certainly be practically useless.

With an odd touch of hysteria, Winifred, however, did not find that her mind was troubling at all with the tremendous issues of that conversation. In spite of the keenness with which she mourned Vera’s treachery, and of the bitterness with which she resented this particular disgrace to herself, she caught herself wondering about a totally different object--the man’s dyed whiskers which seemed to hold her gaze and her mind absolutely fascinated.

Why did he wear whiskers at all? she asked herself with a queer little shudder. They were long ago out of fashion, and trimmed as they had been, they suggested nothing of a man of wealth or refinement. His clothes too, now she came to look at them, were last year’s clothes. That tweed jacket he had on was distinctly shabby; his waistcoat was stained by cigar-ash; even the trousers bagged at the knees while, as though the idea was they should also match the second-hand appearance of his outfit, the boots too had been re-soled.

In spite, though, of these things, the man’s figure was that of a man’s. He had sturdy shoulders, a deep well-proportioned chest, and strong square-fisted hands that looked as though, when they once seized a thing they were never shaken off--for even at the knuckles and backs were tufts of dark sinewy hair. His head, too, was set on a thick neck that suggested the same bull-dog tenacity evident in his fingers, and he walked this night with the long purposeful stride of a man of destiny who sees at the end of his journey a prize which he has toiled many many arduous weeks to win.

Away in the distance, the door clanged as the officer Stemp and his “friend Mr. Fitzgerald, the butler,” foregathered in the pantry to discuss that night’s strange happenings over an aristocratic whisky and soda, for, it will be always observed, extraordinary occurrences need extraordinary remedies. With something uncommonly like a moan, the girl steadied herself, and brought her mind back with a jump to its present environment. That look of passion in Ventris Blake’s eyes filled her with a sense of most desolate nausea--but she instantly resolved she would not show it. This was the moment to fight, not repine, and she would show herself worthy of the sturdy soldier-stock from which she had sprung.

On the man came till he reached her side, and looked deep into her face. His breath, too, was coming and going rather quickly, but that and the tell-tale glance were the only signs of his excitement. His tones were cool, calm and even, and he moved his hands and feet in a way most hideously precise.

“I am sorry to find you in circumstances like this,” he said, motioning her back to her place on the sofa, and handing her that huge bottle of smelling-salts as though it were a matter of course she would need them sorely before he had finished his lecture. “I had hoped that any little differences we might have had in the past would, when you came here to visit my aunt, Prudence Gordon, be buried--quite. It seems though I have been mistaken, and that you only took care to be in my house five or six hours before you took advantage of the fact to abuse my hospitality in the gravest fashion you could.” And he nodded significantly in the direction of the Monk of Florence painting behind which stood the safe she had been found tampering with.

“Just now,” he added, as he saw she had no present intention of interrupting him, “I am rather puzzled to know what I ought to do about this insult to me, indeed about this most tragic business generally. All my servants, of course, think it is only a matter of form, or shall I say kindness, my seeing you. They are certain that in a few minutes I shall call the policeman, Stemp, back to this room, and give you into custody on a charge of attempted theft which must, when proved, as it can be quite easily, land you at Portland or Dartmoor, or wherever they confine female convicts, on a term of ten years’ penal servitude and--and ten years late in your marriage with Arthur Hudson.”

Again he paused, but Winifred still kept her head bent low, apparently quite immoveable. Driven thus to go on he proceeded: “Naturally, knowing your uncle so well, having so great an affection for the memory of Colonel Pontifex, your father, I am loth to do this. Besides, it seems to me peculiarly revolting to shut you up in a prison into which no news of the outside world can penetrate during a time when Hudson must stand his trial and will, in all human probability, be condemned and hanged. For these reasons indeed I am pondering most deeply whether I cannot devise some other expedient to get us both out of these difficulties. It was for that reason I hastened to your cousin, Vera Langford. ‘My child,’ I said, ‘tell me at once what I ought to do to this unhappy girl, who has vainly tried to rob me? As a Christian now, ought I to forgive her, or ought I to stifle my feelings and give her up to justice?’”

“And what did your accomplice say?” queried Winifred, suddenly looking up and gazing at him with her eyes aflame with scorn.

“Accomplice! accomplice!” echoed the man, affecting to be greatly shocked. “How--what do you mean--that I am in league with her to do you some harm? Indeed, there is nothing of the sort afoot. On the contrary, I can assure you that she was most pained and disgusted at the turn of affairs, and before she broke down and gave way utterly to hysterics, she begged me that I should, before you did any other mischief to other less worthy friends than myself, have you locked up and dealt with as a merciful law might direct.”

“But that was ironical,” put in Winifred suavely. “She didn’t mean a word of it literally. On the contrary, it was a joke intended specially for you to gloat over--you who engineered this treacherous trick by which I was made to act the part of a thief.”

Secretly nonplussed, Blake bit his lip, and then took a stronger tone. “You must not bandy words like this with me,” he retorted with a quick stamp of the foot. “‘Bluff’ is useless--”

“Quite,” interrupted Winifred rising and facing him. “Now come to the point. What do you want?”

The man flushed, and looked uncomfortable. “I wish to be your friend, Miss Pontifex,” he murmured in a softer tone. “I came here anxious, if possible, to save you from the consequences of your own follies. I don’t like this feud between us any more than you do. Can’t we cease to give blow after blow and arrange an honourable peace? For instance, suppose I got Mr. Hudson released without a stain on his character--what then?”

“I should say that at last you had performed a very tardy act of justice!”

“But I am not a man of sentiment. I am a financier, and we financiers know no justice save the rough and ready justice of the person and thing stronger than ourselves to conquer and make their own wills prevail. Now look at my offer without a trace of personal passion. Hudson is in Scarborough police-station. In less than two months he is practically certain to be in York Castle, condemned to death, if not already hanged. Here also is yourself, caught in the act of a most daring robbery. I have only to lift my finger and press the button of that electric bell and in a minute you will be hurried off to Vine Street police-station, and in less than two months you too will be in one of our great penal establishments weighed down with the prospect of a long term of penal servitude.

“Now what is it I offer to do? I offer to pardon you, and to hush this matter up so effectually that not a word of scandal shall ever be breathed about it--the incident shall be turned to the credit of your great goodness and everybody will agree that the affair has been a most shocking and unforgiveable kind of blunder. And, more than that, I promise you Hudson shall get off scot free. Aren’t proffered pledges such as these worthy of careful reflection? Are you justified, since somebody else is concerned in the rejection of them, to push them aside with insults or with thinly veiled looks of contempt?”

“But justice?” began Winifred again, but once more she was stopped.

“I tell you again,” the man interjected fiercely, “when you are dealing with a man of millions like myself, London holds no such thing as justice, only opportunity--trick--power. Now listen to me, look at the matter from another standpoint. Women are said to be ambitious. Don’t you ever sigh to wield an influence like mine? Haven’t you felt enough of my power to be afraid of it? Think, suppose you too had it? What could you not do with it? Rank--position--wealth--stupendous favours all would be in your hands.

“Well, Winifred,” he went on, his voice thick with excitement, the veins standing out on his temples like knotted whipcord, “you know on what terms I will release you to-day and will procure the triumphant vindication of Hudson. They are not arduous. They do not call for any sensational exhibition. They don’t ask you to suffer in silence, to eat the bread of tears, to weep till you can weep no longer. They are the dictates of an overwhelming affection for you, I love you. Be mine!” And with a sudden rush of feeling he caught her convulsively by the waist and fixed his burning gaze on her as though he would force her to yield her consent.

Winifred, however, who had stood like one petrified during this amazing declaration, started to life immediately she found his fingers on her hand. With a scream she broke away from his grasp and raced to the half open door of the room.

“I loathe you, I loathe you,” she cried helplessly. And then all at once she saw that the street door also was ajar, and instantly seizing the opportunity it offered, she fled across the hall like a startled fawn, and tore madly down the steps that led to the pavement.

A moment later she found herself in the street, and running wildly in the direction of her uncle’s flat. “He must save me from this monster,” she gasped as she fled on swifter, ever swifter. “There is nobody else to do so. Oh! Mother of Heaven, pray with me that he may not now fail his sister’s only child.”

Meanwhile, however, Stemp had been alarmed, and he and the butler, furiously blowing a police-whistle, were now pounding after her. Looking over her shoulder, she caught sight of them and tried to increase her speed, but already she was worn with fatigue, and the extra effort seemed to strain her heart, and to send her reeling against a lamp-post, just as Blake too loomed up in the background and also took up the chase.

Another moment, and she would have most assuredly been a captive again in those vampire clutches, only deliverance came to her in the most extraordinary way.

And it happened thus.

Those whose business or profession takes them much about the streets of London in the night hours know that in the best thoroughfares the traffic is practically ceaseless. Even if there are no private carriages with shining lamps and jingling harness whirling hither and thither, there are always plenty of quick and hungry drivers of hansoms who patrol up and down the streets at a walking pace with wits so sharpened by days of lean experience that they seem able to detect a fare almost before the object is quite conscious of his determination himself.

The consequence was that as Winifred tore fleetly onward without hat or jacket, one of these vigilants chanced to catch sight of her. Now, whether he was half intoxicated or Irish, and so dearly loved a scene, or whether he had had serious cause in the past to have more sympathy with possible offenders against the law than the dread majesty of the law itself will never be known. The fact remains that immediately the chase began he set up a wild “Hurroo!” and flicking his mare viciously he put her to the gallop with the result that the three men were soon outpaced--their cries for a lift were disregarded--and he came with a crash level with Winifred.

By this time the poor girl’s breath was quite gone. Her limbs had given way beneath her, and she was swaying from one side of the pavement to the other with hand clasped to her heart, and the pulses within her temples throbbing like an engine.

“Here, miss, jump in, my mare’s quite fresh,” he cried in a kind of hoarse whisper, making play to suggest that he was not helping the girl at all but was having trouble with his steed. “Never mind those men behind you. Only get in and tell me where to drive to and we’ll lead them one of the finest chases in London.”

With a gigantic effort Winifred forced herself to the side of the hansom and giving one frantic tug she literally dragged herself into its friendly shelter.

“Go to Mr. Russell Langford’s, the lawyer, Emperor’s Gate,” she gasped--and in a flash the man let the infuriated mare have her head, and off she went at a wild gallop that meant death or destruction to everything that gathered in her path.

Luckily too, Winifred did not lose her senses. Now indeed that she realised that her prayer had been heard, and that she had been, in truth, delivered from that inhuman monster Blake, her natural courage reasserted itself; and she gripped on to the supports in the interior of the hansom, and, with set lips and flashing eyes, she watched the vehicle sway from side to side of the road like a ship in the storm, absolutely reckless of all possible consequences.

As it happened, the driver was a man who knew his business from the very bottom. Directly he had looked at Winifred he had recognised that the business he had taken in hand was not the rescue of an ordinary criminal from a peculiarly stodgy and unemotional policeman, but turned on some far reaching Romance of High Life which, though he might never know the secret of it, would none the less pay him exceedingly well for the part he took in it.

Again he plied the whip. Again the mare bucked and kicked out vigorously, only to get her head down and her feet well tucked under her and to speed past Hyde Park like a flash of lightning. “I don’t care miss if I smash the whole bag of tricks,” he shouted through the trap in the roof. “I’ll save you.” And as if to give colour to this vainglorious threat the hansom cannoned violently against a hand hose-cart in use by the St. George’s Borough Council and drove it clean through the windows of a small railway office at a corner.

Meanwhile, too, Blake had not been idle. His mind had taken fire with the fear that Winifred meant nothing less than suicide by her wild flight from his mansion, and, distracted by the possibility of the scandal that would follow, he signalled another hansom, and sprang inside with the butler, promising his driver £50 if he would overtake the fugitives.

This new ally of his was keen enough and so was the horse he drove; but they found a mighty antagonist in the wild exultant jehu in front. In vain Stemp ran a few yards and stopped and blew mighty blasts upon his police whistle. In vain constables sprang out from side streets and comfortable porticos, and shouted all the mad bad things they could think of, waving their arms like semaphores. Driver No. 1’s blood was at boiling point almost, and he waved his whip about, and he swore, and he urged his horse with such insane recklessness at everybody who shewed the slightest disposition to try conclusions with him on the “Hold! Enough!” principle, that Emperor’s Gate was reached in a few seconds; and a summons that would have aroused the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus battered on the great lawyer’s door.

Luckily, Russell Langford had sat up late that night to master the contents of a brief in a big Society Slander Action that was down to come before the Lord Chief Justice on the morrow. He heard the wild crash with which Winifred’s hansom made its appearance and its stoppage, and he had just got to the hall--to sally forth to see what had happened--when there came that terrific rat-tat with the butt handle of the driver’s whip.

A moment later Winnie was in his arms, sobbing out all her trouble to him, telling him in a quick, rather incoherent but in some intelligible fashion, all about the dreadful trap Vera had prepared for her and the terrible things that had happened when she had gone to the millionaire’s study and tried to rescue the packet of incriminating love-letters.

The lawyer himself was well accustomed to hiding his emotions--and he heard the girl’s story through with a face as immoveable as a piece of india-rubber which might be punched and punched, and punched and drawn and twisted and torn at--nothing could rob it of its set professional expression. None the less, his feelings of honour, of family pride, of loyalty to his womankind were stirred to the most profound depths by this account of Blake’s outrage on all the sacred laws of good breeding and hospitality. What common humanity and justice and right feeling could never have accomplished, these more superficial qualities of his caste wrought like magic. His craven fear of the millionaire and the mischief he could do to him in reference to the Three Glass eyes was banished for ever from him. He hated Blake now as much as he had been previously cowed by him--and all the forces of his nature cried out to him that he could never have peace again till this last crowning infamy of the financier’s was wiped out.

At the same time clever professional men of the world of the stamp of Langford move--however deeply their inmost feelings may have been roused--on in the grooves to which their daily experience has accustomed them. Indeed, they are more dangerous thus for they are trained to the use of these weapons and their blows are sharpened by their daily practice. Hence Langford said nothing committal on the subject--which was a bad sign in truth. Had he felt the indignity less he would certainly have said more. He simply let Winifred finish her story in peace; then he went to a decanter on the sideboard, and poured out a tablespoonful of brandy for her, which he insisted on her drinking with a like amount of water.

That done he went out to the driver, who was fumbling about on the doorstep, not quite knowing whether, after all, this job to which he had given so much moral earnestness was going to pay him quite so well as he had expected. The delay had made him distinctly nervous in the region of the pocket.

“I am very much obliged, coachman, for what you have done,” Langford said, pulling out a pocket book stuffed with Bank of England notes. “You have saved my niece from a scoundrel at the risk of your own life, and to the danger of your own horse and hansom. Work like this can’t be properly remunerated, but here are ten notes of £10 each for you, £100, and remember if ever you are in a difficulty and want a friend you will, if I am alive, find a helper in Russell Langford.”

The man tried to mutter his thanks--to shake the lawyer by the hand and bow at the same time to the ground--to laugh and look respectful; but he could succeed in nothing. He could only take the notes and scratch his head and mutter in a poor weak forlorn kind of voice, “Well, I’ll be blest!” when there was a sound of low shouting outside, and the millionaire’s hansom drew up with a crash close to the pavement.

Out sprang Blake, and tearing up the stairs of the mansion he found himself confronted with the calm set features of the lawyer, close to whom stood Winifred, quiet, cold, and defiant. For a moment even he drew back a step and looked awkward, but the man’s confidence was colossal, and almost immediately afterwards he recovered himself, and advanced with jovial laugh, and ringing voice and outstretched hand.

“Ah, Langford,” he cried, distorting his face with a grin that was meant to express pleasure. “So it is here that our little bird has flown is it? No doubt she has told you that we have had a little misunderstanding, hasn’t she? Of course I meant to forgive her alright, but she got so hysterical that she bolted before I could get the words out.”

Russell Langford’s expression never changed. Then he spoke at last.

“Ventris Blake,” said he slowly and deliberately, “You are an infernal scoundrel.”

The millionaire’s jaw dropped. He had not expected this, but he was game enough, and once again those lips parted, curled back, and there appeared those fang-like teeth that insensibly recalled the savagery of the fox.

“You mean that?” he asked quietly.

“Every word of it,” retorted the lawyer.

“Then I’ll make you a present of an old souvenir of yours,” proceeded Blake feeling in his revolver pocket and producing therefrom a case like a jewellers bracelet case, out of which he took a small velvet shield of black, bearing three miniature Glass Eyes.

Langford took this and tore it in half, and flung it down the steps.

Ventris Blake looked as though he could have slain Russell Langford. By this time, both cabs had driven off, and the two men stood in that hall alone with Winifred. Both were white. Both looked stern. Both seemed equally determined--but only the millionaire revealed the seething depths of baffled rage that had followed his defeat in what he had been morally certain would prove a gigantic coup for himself.

“So,” he said with a shrug, drawing back a step and buttoning up his coat, “you are quite resolved, are you? You have decided to be quite reckless; you have no fear of the consequences.”

“None!” returned the barrister. “You have put a light to a bonfire to-night that will spread until it reduces all your fortunes and your fine social fabric to ashes.”

“Well, so must it be,” Ventris Blake replied rather hoarsely. “After all,” with a painful effort to be light and buoyant, “I am not the one to fear the Three Glass Eyes. That is your own special and particular dread, Langford, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” observed the man calmly. “We shall see. Maybe you may find London hasn’t quite the same idea of you, you believe it to have. No doubt the young men in the City in-a-hurry-to-be-rich and the women who come to you, hotly eager to gamble to repair some private scandals of their own, have never stopped to analyse the vaguely unsatisfactory impression which you make upon each one of them, and upon everybody you chance to meet in fact. They are bewildered by the knowledge you possess of every one of their failings, through your system of paid spies, that would do credit to the French Government, and they stop at your pet-stage effect by which you fancy nobody is able to penetrate your thoughts, or to guess what peculiar diablerie you will practice on them some time through a series of artful moves in the future.

“Bah! I was not your intimate years ago,” added the lawyer, with an impressive sweep of the arms, “without understanding that practically since boyhood you had made your apparent good nature, your unfailing readiness to promise to oblige, (although you seldom did oblige anyone except yourself), your copious draughts of emotional protestations, into a barrier between yourself and your victims, for, in spite of it all, at times, you give glimpses of appalling depths of character.”

“Well, at all events, Miss Pontifex,” cut in the millionaire, who had grown restive under this scathing exposure, “I had nothing to do with the death of your father Colonel Pontifex, remember that.” And nodding his head significantly in the direction of the barrister, he seemed to suggest: “He had, ask him.”

“In due time, if you act as you no doubt will be driven to do by me, that will all be explained,” said Russell Langford, drawing Winifred proudly close to himself. “To-day understand I fear no one.”

“‘Explained’! Yes,” sneered Blake, pausing on the doorstep. “But how? answer me that?”

“The Three Glass Eyes shall explain,” returned the lawyer; and Blake was just about to utter another sardonic taunt, when a scuffle drew all three out on the landing of the flat to the top of the stairs, where they found the butler Fitzgerald, in his anxiety to reach them, had caught his foot in a pot containing a shrub and had fallen full length on the steps.

Now, however, he rose, his face purple with excitement. “Will you all please come to Park Lane at once,” he cried. “I have just met one of the footmen; Miss Vera Langford has just met with a dreadful accident.”

“Accident?” thundered Langford--“What?”

“I don’t know--I can’t tell--neither could the messenger whom Mrs. Gordon had sent after you. ‘Come at once’ were his words. ‘Come at once. Miss Vera is shouting and shrieking as though she had gone suddenly mad.’”

“My God, Blake, if this is any fresh devilry of yours, you shall pay for it with your life,” said the lawyer facing the millionaire, and repeating each word with slow, terrifying emphasis.

“It isn’t,” stammered Blake doggedly, and, truth to tell, he looked equally frightened and astounded. “I swear it isn’t. I--I know nothing about it.”

“That remains to be proved,” retorted Langford. “Come, Winnie, get your hat and cloak and come with me. I know Prudence Gordon, and can trust her all right. No doubt she will have acted promptly, and sent for medical assistance. Our great object now is--to lose no time.” And in another minute almost, fresh cabs had been chartered and all the party were racing back for dear life to Park Lane.

Luckily, too, at the door they were met by Mrs. Gordon herself, whose face bore quite plainly the mark of recent tears. “Oh, here you are,” she cried, as the cabs drew up with a crash in front of the portico. “Thank heaven, you have all come so soon. I feel nearly distracted.”

“But what has happened!” cried Winnie and Langford in a breath.

“I can’t really explain it,” protested the old lady tearfully, rocking herself in her folded arms. “All I know is--that I was sitting peaceably in front of the fire in my bedroom, saying a little prayer in the hope that all the terrible mischief between my nephew and Miss Pontifex there would be put right without any more trouble, when I heard Vera give a loud scream.

“At first I thought it was only a return of the hysterics she had had when she heard her cousin had been caught with her arm in the study safe and my nephew upbraided her for not looking better after her--but when she shrieked again--again--I grew frightened, and I slipped into her room.”

“Yes, yes,” put in Blake who had now joined the party. “Get on with your story more rapidly please. Tell us what did you see?”

“The poor girl, it seems, had been seated at a small writing-table finishing two letters--one was addressed to Mr. Jules Prendergast, the actor, and the other was to his future wife, Lady Desborough, who I understand he will marry to-morrow at St. George’s, Hanover Square.”

“Oh, do go on,” pleaded Winnie. “What was it--a fit, or had she set herself on fire, or what?”

“I really can’t tell you,” protested the old lady bursting into tears. “That is just why I am making such a long rigmarole of it. I want you or Ventris here to explain all this most bewildering mystery to me.”

“We will have more patience then, Mrs. Gordon,” interposed the lawyer kindly. “Pray proceed.”

“Well,” said the old lady now reassured, “I noticed that the letters she had written were letters of congratulation, and in each one she had planned to enclose two curiously wrought rings as wedding presents. Oddly enough, they were both of exactly the same pattern--although, of course, they differed in size--with blood red stones almost as large as the old-fashioned signets, and with a great deal of scroll work on the gold itself, which was usually heavy and thick. Directly, however, I got into the room she rallied. ‘Something dreadful has happened,’ she cried. ‘Send for my cousin Winifred at once.’ ‘But what is it, dearie?’ I asked for she looked so ill and wild I feared she was going mad. ‘Never mind. Send for Winifred,’ she answered. ‘It’s something dreadful about these rings although it’s quite an accident--so go for her at once if you don’t care to send, but understand I won’t see anybody else.’”

“Then, of course, I will do as she asks,” put in Winifred, loyal and forgiving as ever and without a thought of self.

“And I will run for a doctor,” added the millionaire who suddenly had gone ghastly grey. “It looks to me as though something terrible has happened.”

And Blake sped off quickly towards Piccadilly, while Winifred hastened up the stairs of the mansion, and, turning down the old corridor, entered her cousin’s bedroom.

By this time Vera had stretched herself on the bed, but no sooner did Winnie enter than she started up wild eyed with two great hectic spots burning evilly on each cheek.

“Ah! thank heaven you’ve come, darling,” she cried excitedly. “Of course you hate me. You do right to do so, for I am a treacherous viper, and I deserve neither sympathy nor love!”

“Indeed, I can’t feel like that,” protested Winnie throwing herself on her knees by the bed and attempting to enfold the distracted girl in an affectionate embrace.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me as you value your life,” cried Vera drawing herself up into a corner against the wall, “I am accursed. I brought you into this home of horror by the wickedest of ruses, and I got you to go to the safe by the most treacherous of lies--but now my punishment has come.”

“Let me help you bear it then,” said Winnie bravely, holding out her arms. “You are upset now, soon all will be well. Let me take you in hand.”

“You cannot. Nobody can,” gasped the girl half choking. “The word has gone forth. I am doomed.”

“How can anybody be that? God is good!” interposed Winnie, feeling herself powerless to stem this tide of terror that threatened to engulf her cousin completely.

“Yes,” replied Vera fiercely, “God is good, that is why He has saved you. But God also is just, and that is why I am writhing here, waiting for a horror that is stalking towards me from far distant centuries when men and women hated, like they never do in these tepid days of civilisation, and when they dared, and did, to the most profound depths of pain.

“Listen,” she went on, suddenly becoming calm. “I will tell you why I lured you into this snare. I was mad with jealousy and rage because Jules Prendergast had flung me over, jilted me for that painted traitor, Lady Desborough, and because that vampire Ventris Blake promised if I did so he would help me to get my revenge on them--even ‘poison or death.’ It was Blake who devised that diabolical scheme about the safe and the man-trap. It was I who first invented about the love-letters and then egged you on to go into the study and steal them. So consumed with rage was I that I could not let you stay even the first night here in peace. I worried you till you went downstairs for me, having previously got that master key from Blake himself and no sooner did you commit yourself as the wretch wished than I sent to Blake. ‘Revenge!’ I panted. ‘Revenge on Jules Prendergast and the false-hearted creature he would make his wife.’”

“But how could he give it to you?” queried Winnie, feeling half distracted.

“Easily enough,” snapped Vera. “He has never let a soul--man’s, woman’s, or child’s--stand in his path. He has always removed everyone who opposed his plans. That is why he understood me and that is why he produced those two rings you see on the table--Abyssinian Poison Rings, they call them, because if you press the sides of them, they discharge a small milky-like fluid which penetrates the pores of the skin and inflicts you with the most deadly leprosy of the Far East now known to medical science. ‘Make them a wedding present of one each,’ he said with a diabolical grin. ‘Not either of them will be able to resist the pleasure of trying one on--and then pouf! they will rot away before each other’s eyes till they become most loathsome to look on, and every doctor will agree that they are better dead!’ Unfortunately I forgot the deadly significance of the gift in the satire I poured into the accompanying notes, with the result that, in an absent-minded moment, when I was gloating over the sneers I had written to Lady Desborough, I slipped one of the rings unconsciously on my finger and pressed it--”

“And made yourself a leper,” screamed Winnie, starting madly to her feet.

“Yes, look, the poison has begun to work.” And she pointed to the hectic spots on her cheeks.