The Crimson Blind. Fred M. White
good enough to state the hour?”
“Certainly. I was here from one o’clock—say between one and two.”
“And I was here also. From eleven o’clock till two I was in this very room working out some calculations at this very table by the aid of my reading-lamp, no other light being in the room, or even in the house, as far as I know. It is one of my fads—as fools call them—to work in a large, dark room with one brilliant light only. Therefore you could not possibly have been in the house, to say nothing of this room, on the night in question.”
David nodded feebly. There was no combating Bell’s statement.
“I presume that this is No. 219?” he asked.
“Certainly it is,” Miss Gates replied. “We are all agreed about that.”
“Because I read the number over the fanlight,” Steel went on. “And I came here by arrangement. And there was everything as I see it now. Bell, you must either cure me of this delusion, or you must prove logically to me that I have made a mistake. So far as I am concerned, I am like a child struggling with the alphabet.”
“We’ll start now,” said Bell. “Come along.”
Steel rose none too willingly. He would fain have lingered with Ruth. She held out her hand; there was a warm, glad smile on her face.
“May you be successful,” she whispered. “Come and see me again, because I shall be very, very anxious to know. And I am not without guilt…. If you only knew!”
“And I may come again?” David said, eagerly.
A further smile and a warm pressure of the hand were the only reply. Presently Steel was standing outside in the road with Bell. The latter was glancing at the house on either side of 219. The higher house was let; the one nearest the sea—218—was empty. A bill in the window gave the information that the property was in the hands of Messrs. Wallace and Brown, Station Quadrant, where keys could be obtained.
“We’ll make a start straightaway,” said Bell. “Come along.”
“Where are you going to at that pace?” Steel asked.
“Going to interview Messrs. Wallace and Brown. At the present moment I am a gentleman who is in search of a house of residence, and I have a weakness for Brunswick Square in particular, especially for No. 218. Unless I am greatly mistaken I am going to show you something that will startle even the most callous novelist.”
VIII. HATHERLY BELL
The queer, misshapen figure striding along by Steel’s side would have attracted attention anywhere; indeed, Hatherly Bell had been an attractive personality from his schooldays. A strange mixture of vanity and brilliant mental qualities, Bell had almost as many enemies as friends. He was morbidly miserable over the score of his personal appearance despite the extraordinary beauty of his face—to be pitied or even sympathised with almost maddened him. Yet there were many women who would gladly have shared the lot of Hatherly Bell.
For there was strength in the perfectly moulded face, as well as beauty. It was the face of a man possessed of marvellous intellectual powers, and none the less attractive because, while the skin was as fair as a woman’s and the eyes as clear as a child’s, the wavy hair was absolutely white. The face of a man who had suffered fiercely and long. A face hiding a great sorrow.
Time was when Bell had promised to stand in the front rank of operative physicians. In brain troubles and mental disorders he had distinguished himself. He had a marvellous faculty for psychological research; indeed, he had gone so far as to declare that insanity was merely a disease and capable of cure the same as any ordinary malady. “If Bell goes on as he has started,” a great German specialist once declared, “he will inevitably prove to be the greatest benefactor to mankind since the beginning of the world.” Bell was to be the man of his time.
And then suddenly he had faded out as a star drops from the zenith. There had been dark rumours of a terrible scandal, a prosecution burked by strong personal influence, mysterious paragraphs in the papers, and the disappearance of the name of Hatherly Bell from the rank of great medical jurists. Nobody seemed to know anything about it, but Bell was ignored by all except a few old friends, and henceforth he devoted his attention to criminology and the evolution of crime. It was Bell’s boast that he could take a dozen men at haphazard and give you their vices and virtures point-blank. He had a marvellous gift that way.
A few people stuck to him, Gilead Gates amongst the number. The millionaire philanthropist had need of someone to pick the sheep from the goats, and Bell made no mistakes. David Steel had been able to do the specialist some slight service a year or two before, and Bell had been pleased to magnify this into a great favour.
“You are a fast walker,” David said, presently.
“That’s because I am thinking fast,” Bell replied. “Steel, you are in great trouble?”
“It needs no brilliant effort on your part to see that,” David said, bitterly. “Besides, you heard a great deal just now when you—you—”
“Listened,” Bell said, coolly. “Of course I had no intention of playing eavesdropper; and I had no idea who the Mr. Steel was who wanted to see Miss Gates. They come day by day, my dear fellow, garbed in the garb of Pall Mall or Petticoat Lane as the case may be, but they all come for money. Sometimes it is a shilling, sometimes £100. But I did not gather from your chat with Miss Gates what your trouble was.”
“Perhaps not, but Miss Gates knew perfectly well.”
Bell patted his companion, approvingly.
“It is a pleasure to help a lucid-minded man like yourself,” he said. “You go straight to the root of the sore and cut all the superfluous matter away. I was deeply interested in the conversation which I overheard just now. You are in great trouble, and that trouble is connected with 219, Brunswick Square—a house where you have never been before.”
“My dear chap, I was in that dining-room two nights ago. Nothing will convince me to the—”
“There you are wrong, because I am going to convince you to the contrary. You may smile and shake your head, but before an hour has passed I am going to convince you beyond all question that you were never inside No. 219.”
“Brave words,” David muttered. “Still, an hour is not a long time to wait.”
“No. But you must enlighten me if I am to assist you. I am profoundly interested. You come to the house of my friend on a desperate errand. Miss Gates is a perfect stranger to you, and yet the mere discovery of your identity fills her with the most painful agitation. Therefore, though you have never been in 219 before, you are pretty certain, and I am pretty certain, that Ruth Gates knows a deal about the thing that is touching you. On the contrary, I know nothing on that head. Won’t you let me into the secret?”
“I’ll tell you part,” Steel replied. “And I’ll put it pithily. For mere argument we assume that I am selected to assist a damsel in distress who lives at No. 219, Brunswick Square. We will assume that the conversation leading up to the flattering selection took place over the telephone. As a matter of fact, it did take place over the telephone. The thing was involved with so much secrecy that I naturally hesitated. I was offered £1,000 for my services; also I was reminded by my unseen messenger that I was in dire need of that money.”
“And were you?”
“My dear fellow, I don’t fancy that I should have hesitated at burglary to get it. And all I had to do was to meet a lady secretly in the dead of night at No. 219, and tell her how to get out of a certain difficulty. It all resolved itself round the synopsis of a proposed new story of mine. But I had better go into details.”
David proceeded to do so. Bell, with his arm crooked through