CHAPTER XXVII.

“JOHN DEARBORN IS NOT BLIND”

They carried the injured man into the sitting room and laid him on a couch. There was a doctor living in the flat above and luckily he had not gone to bed, and was down in a few minutes.

“He is badly injured,” he reported. “There are one or two knife wounds, and the wound in the head looks as though there were a fracture of the skull.”

“The man must have been attacked outside my door,” said Larry. “He couldn’t have walked far in this condition.”

“No,” said the doctor, shaking his head. “He might have walked two or three yards, but the chances are, as you found him outside the door, that he was there when the attack was made on him. Do you know him?”

“Yes,” said Larry, “he is an old acquaintance of mine. Is there any danger of his dying?”

“A very big danger,” replied the doctor gravely. “That concussion may be anything. I should send him straight away to hospital, where he can be thoroughly examined and, if necessary, operated upon.”

The ambulance had come and gone, and the only evidence of Flash Fred’s visit was a few dark stains about the door, before Larry began to think consecutively.

The nurse who had arrived fulfilled all his telephoned requirements. She was stout and jovial and matronly, and the first use Larry made of his freedom from distraction was to tell her in a few words just why she had been sent for.

“Obviously I could not allow Miss Ward to go back to Charing Cross Road after her terrible experience to-day,” he said, and Nurse James, who was by no means dissatisfied with having so easy a “case,” agreed.

She exercised her authority to the extent of ordering Diana to bed immediately, and the girl meekly obeyed. But she could not sleep. At two o’clock Larry, writing at his table, heard the creak of an opening door and looked up to see her. She was in her dressing-gown, and her hair was braided in a long golden plait.

“I can’t sleep,” she said restlessly, almost irritably, and he saw that she was overstrung and rose to get an armchair for her.

She neither apologized for her attire nor her visitation, and these circumstances struck Larry as curious. But that which was on Diana Ward’s mind was of so great an importance that the thought of decorum did not occur to her. She sat there, her hands folded on her lap, and there was no sound save the tick of a clock on the mantelpiece and the squeak of Larry’s chair as it turned.

“What is troubling you, Diana?” he asked.

She looked up at him quickly.

“Do you think I’m troubled?” she said.

“If you’re not, you’re a wonderful girl,” said Larry gently. “You’ve had an awful time to-day, my dear, but somehow I do not think that that is what is on your mind.”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t,” and added, “it is the woman upstairs.”

“The woman upstairs? Oh, you mean the woman that Jake spoke about? But, Diana, there was no ‘upstairs.’ You were on the top floor of that building, which is a story lower than Todd’s Home.”

But still she was not satisfied.

“Besides,” he went on quietly, “if she had been there, the woman may have been--as bad a character as any of the other occupants of that house. The fact that she was unpleasant to look at, as Jake suggested, does not make her innocent.”

“Poor soul, poor soul!” said the girl, and then to Larry’s horror she began to weep softly. “I can’t sleep for thinking of her,” she sobbed. “They will keep her, they dare not let her go!”

“Why,” he gasped suddenly, “you don’t suggest that she is Clarissa Stuart?”

She looked up at that, her face stained with tears.

“Clarissa Stuart?” she repeated slowly. “No, I don’t think she is Clarissa Stuart.”

“Then who is she?” he asked. “At any rate, who do you think she is?”

“I don’t think--I am sure,” she said, speaking with painful slowness. “That woman was Emma, the charwoman of the boarding house,” and Larry jumped to his feet.

“The charwoman,” he said slowly. “You’re right!”

Again the tick of the little clock asserted itself as they sat, busy with their own thoughts.

“You connect this terrible gang with the Stuart mystery?” he said.

She nodded.

“I also connect them,” said Larry, “for very excellent reasons. And yet I cannot see what they gained by Stuart’s death, unless they were in league with this girl who calls herself Clarissa Stuart?”

She made a hopeless little gesture and rose.

“I can connect them all,” she said. “They are very distinct in their relationships, but then,” with a faint smile, “I have an advantage over you.”

“You have many advantages over me,” said Larry, humouring her. “And now, dear, you must go back and sleep.”

But she did not heed him.

“There is only one I did not connect,” she went on, “and you have made his case understandable.”

“Who is that?”

“Flash Fred,” she replied. “He is just a criminal who has touched the fringe of the conspiracy and has been in it without knowing he was in it.” She nodded as though she had only at that moment decided her point of view. “But the others? Blind Jake who works for an unknown master; the charwoman, the greatest victim of them all; poor Lew, with his deaf ears and his blistered fingers--you didn’t see those. I should have told you, only the doctor interrupted us.”

“Blistered fingers?” said Larry in amazement. “No, I didn’t see them.”

“I felt them,” she shuddered, “when he touched my face. His fingers and thumbs have been blistered at the tops.”

“But why?”

“So that he shall not read Braille or write Braille,” said the girl quietly.

“It’s impossible, impossible!” said Larry in horror. “There cannot be such villainy in the world. My child, I have been acquainted with some of the worst crimes that have ever been committed in Europe. I have seen the victims, I have tracked and hanged the criminals. Men are cruel, vicious, unscrupulous, and bloody-minded, but they do not commit such cold-blooded deeds as you say have been committed upon that poor blind man.”

She smiled again.

“I don’t think you realize just how bad these people are,” she said. “For if you did, you would never say that it was impossible. For Dearborn----” she began, and he laughed outright.

“Diana, dear, you’ve reached the stage which we always reach, when you’re suspicious of everybody! Not of poor John Dearborn, working for the good of humanity in that slum, and amidst those fearful people?”

She nodded.

“I shook hands with John Dearborn when I went there. I shook hands with him when I came away,” she said.

“That doesn’t make him a criminal,” he smiled.

“And when I offered my hand he took it,” she said. “Please remember that I was a nurse in a blind asylum for two years--when I offered my hand he took it.”

“Well, why shouldn’t he?” asked Larry in surprise.

“He shouldn’t have seen it,” said the girl, “if he was blind. And John Dearborn is no more blind than you or I!”