CHAPTER XV THE LIKENESS OF PHILIP MALTABAR
We stood looking at them in wonder. Her face had seemed suddenly to light up in some mysterious way, so that for the moment one quite forgot that she was plain at all.
“It is really you!” she murmured. “How wonderful!” She held out both her hands. Bruce Deville took them a little awkwardly. It was easy to see that her joy at this meeting was not altogether reciprocated. But she seemed utterly unconscious of that. There was quite a becoming pink flush on her sallow cheeks, and her dark eyes were wonderfully soft. Her lips were parted with a smile of welcome, and showed all her teeth—she had gleaming white teeth, beautifully shaped and regular.
“To think that we should meet again like this,” she continued, parting with his great brown hand with some evident reluctance.
“We were bound to meet again some day,” he answered, deprecatingly. “After all, there is nothing very extraordinary about it. The world is a small place.”
“You never kept your promise,” she reminded him, reproachfully. “You never came near our hotel. I waited for you a week.”
“I could not; I was leaving Baeren that same afternoon.”
She turned to us at last.
“This is the most delightful meeting in the world, so far as I am concerned,” she declared, still a little breathlessly. “Mr. Deville once saved my life.”
He made some sort of a protest, but she took no notice. She was determined to tell her story.
“I was traveling with a friend through the Italian lakes, and we were out for a drive near Baeren. We were coming down a terrible hill, with a precipice on one side and the sheer mountain on the other. The road was only just wide enough for our carriage, and suddenly a great bird flew out from a hole in the mountain and startled our horses. The driver must have been half asleep, and when they plunged he lost his balance and was thrown off. The horses started galloping down the hill. It was almost like the side of a house, and just in front was a sharp turn, with only a little frail palisading, and the precipice just below. We must have gone straight over. He could not possibly have turned at the pace they were going. If they had the carriage must have swung over. We were clinging to one another, and I am afraid we were dreadful cowards. It was like certain and fearful death, and just then Mr. Deville came round the corner. He seemed to see it all in a moment, and ran to meet us. Oh, it was horrible!” she cried, throwing her hands up with a little shiver. “I shall never forget it until I die. Never!”
She paused for a moment. Adelaide Fortress and I had been hanging over her every word. There was something very thrilling about the way she told her story. Mr. Deville alone seemed uninterested, and a little impatient. He was turning over the pages of a magazine, with a restless frown upon his strong, dark face.
“It seemed to me,” she continued, lowering her shaking voice, “that he was down under the horses, being dragged——”
Bruce Deville closed the magazine he had been reading with a bang. He had evidently been a passive auditor as long as he was able to endure it. “Let me finish,” he said, shortly. “I am blessed with strong arms, and I stopped the horses. It was not a particularly difficult task. The ladies walked back to the hotel, and I went to look for the driver, who had broken his leg.”
“And I have never seen him since!” she exclaimed, breathlessly.
“Well, I couldn’t help that,” he continued. “I believe I promised to come to the hotel and call upon you, but when I thought it over it really didn’t seem worth while. I was on my way to Geneva, walking over the hills, and I was rather anxious to get there, and as I found some men to take the carriage and the driver back, I thought I might as well continue my journey. I wanted to get to Geneva for my letters.”
She laughed quietly. Her eyes continually sought his, soft with admiration and pleasure.
“You are like all the men of your country, who are brave and noble,” she said. “You will do a great deed, but you do not like to be thanked. Yet we waited there for days, hoping to see you. I have looked for you wherever I have been since then, and to think that now—on this very saddest journey I have ever been forced to take—that I should call here, by accident, and the door should open, and you should walk in. Ah!”
“It is quite a romance,” Adelaide Fortress remarked, with a faint smile upon her lips. “How grateful you must be that you came to see me this afternoon, Bruce! By the by, do you mind ringing the bell—unless you prefer stewed tea?”
He got up and rang it with avidity.
“I am glad you recognize the fact that we have come to tea,” he remarked. “Miss Ffolliot and I met at the gate. You ought to give us something specially good for venturing out on such a day.”
“I will give you some Buszard’s cake,” she answered, laughing; “some kind friend sent it to me this morning. Only you mustn’t eat it all up; it has to last me for a week.”
“How is your father, Miss Ffolliot?” the girl asked, turning to me abruptly.
“I am sorry to say that he is very unwell,” I answered, “and he is obliged to keep to his room. And I am afraid that he will not be able to leave it for several days.”
She did not appear much concerned. I watched her closely, and with much relief.
“I am sorry,” she remarked, politely. “However, so far as I am concerned, I suppose after all there would be very little object in my seeing him. I have been to most of the oldest residents round here, and they all seem certain that they have never heard of the name Maltabar.”
I saw Bruce Deville start, and the hand which held his teacup shook. Adelaide Fortress and he exchanged swift glances. The girl, whose eyes were scarcely off him for a moment, noticed it too, although I doubt if she attached the same significance to it.
“You do not know—you have not heard recently of any one of that name?” she asked him. “Please tell me! I have a reason for being very much interested.”
He shook his head.
“If I have ever heard the name at all it must have been very long ago,” he said; “and certainly not in connection with this part of the world.”
She sighed.
“I suppose you do not know who I am, or why I am here,” she said. “My name I told you once, although I daresay you have forgotten it. It is Berdenstein. The man who was found dead, who was killed close to here, was my brother.”
He murmured a few words of sympathy, but he showed no surprise. I suspected that he had known who she was and of her presence here before.
“Of course I came here directly I heard of it,” she continued, ignoring us altogether, and talking only to him. “It is a terrible trouble to me, and he was the only relative I had left in the world. You cannot wonder, can you, that I want to find out all about it?”
“That is a very hard task,” he said. “It is a task best left, I think, in the hands of the proper authorities.”
“They do not know as much as I know,” she answered. “He had an enemy.”
“The man Maltabar, of whom you spoke?”
“Yes. It was for him I inquired at once. Yet I suppose I must conclude that he is not at any rate a resident around here. I thought that he might have changed his name, and I have described him to a great many people. Nobody seems to recognize him.”
“Don’t you think,” Adelaide Fortress said, quietly, “that you have done all that it is possible for any one to do? The police are doing their utmost to solve the mystery of your brother’s death. If I were you I should leave it to them.”
She shook her head.
“I am not satisfied to do nothing,” she said. “You cannot imagine what it feels like to lose some one very dear to you in such a terrible way. I think of it sometimes until I tremble with passion, and I think that if I could meet the man who did it face to face, I would stab him to the heart myself, with my own hands. I am weak, but I feel that I could do it. I cannot go away from here if I would. Something seems to tell me that the key to the whole mystery lies here—just at hand. No, I cannot go away. I must watch and wait. It may come to me at any moment.”
No one answered her. She was conscious of a certain antagonism to her, betrayed by our lack of response to that little outburst and our averted faces. She looked from one to the other of us, and finally at Bruce Deville.
“At least, you must think that I am right,” she cried, appealingly. “You are a man, and you would feel like that. I am sure of it. Isn’t it natural that I should want justice? He was all I had in the world.”
“He is dead,” Bruce Deville said, gently. “Nothing can bring him back to life. Besides——”
He hesitated. The girl leaned forward, listening intently.
“Besides what?”
“Hasn’t it ever occurred to you,” he said, slowly, “that if a man hated your brother so much as to follow him down here and kill him, that so great a hatred must have sprung from some great cause? I know nothing, of course, of your brother’s life, or of the manner of his life. But men do not strike one another without provocation. They do not kill one another without very great provocation.”
“I see what you mean,” she said, slowly. “You mean that my brother must first have been the sinner.”
“I am not taking that for granted,” he said, hastily; “only one cannot help thinking sometimes that it might have been so.”
“He was my brother,” she said, simply. “He was all that I had in the world. My desire for justice may be selfish. Yet I hate the man who killed him, and I want to see him punished. I do not believe that any sin of his could ever have deserved so terrible a retribution.”
“Perhaps not,” he said; “yet there is so little that you can do. To search for any one by the name of Maltabar around here you have proved a hopeless task; and that is your only clue, is it not?”
“I am sending,” she said, “for a London detective. I shall remain here until he arrives, at any rate.”
Again we looked at one another questioningly, and our silence was like a fresh note of antagonism to her avowed purpose. She could not fail to notice it, and she commenced to talk of other things. I believe but for Mr. Deville’s presence she would have got up and left us. Open war with us women could not have troubled her in the least. Already I could tell that she had contracted a dislike to me. But for his sake she was evidently anxious—oppressively anxious—to keep friendly.
She tried to draw him into more personal conversation with her, and he seemed quite ready to humor her. He changed his seat and sat down by her side. Adelaide Fortress and I talked listlessly of the Bishop’s visit and our intending removal from the neighborhood. We studiously avoided all mention of my last visit to her and its sensational ending. We talked as ordinary acquaintances might have talked, about trifles. Yet we were both of us equally conscious that to a certain extent it was a farce. Presently there was a brief silence. The girl was talking to Mr. Deville, evidently of her brother.
“He was so fond of collecting old furniture,” she was saying. “So am I. He gave me a little cabinet, the image of this one, only mine was in black oak.”
She bent over a little piece of furniture by her side, and looked at it with interest.
“Mine was exactly this shape,” she continued; “only it had a wonderful secret spring. You pressed it just here and the top flew up, and there was space enough for a deed or a photograph.”
She touched a portion of the woodwork idly as she spoke, and there was a sort of click. Then she sprang to her feet with a little tremulous cry.
A portion of the back of the cabinet had rolled back at the touch of her fingers. A cabinet photograph was disclosed in the niche. She was bending over it with pale cheeks and bloodless lips.
“What is it?” I cried, with a sudden pain at my heart. “What have you found there?”
She turned around and faced Adelaide Fortress. Her eyes were flashing fire.
“You are all deceiving me,” she cried, passionately. “I was beginning to suspect it. Now I know.”
“What do you mean?” I cried.
She pointed to the photograph with trembling fingers.
“You have all declared that the name of Maltabar is strange to you. It is a lie! That is the likeness of the man I seek. It is the likeness of Philip Maltabar.”
