The Crime Doctor Part 10

She was in decent company: a moderately well-known man and wife in one adjoining compartment, a white-haired ecclesiastic in the other. She wove a romance about the venerable gentleman, and speculated on the well-being of the other pair. In such innocent ways could she amuse herself when out of muddle-headed mischief in the name of G.o.d knows what. In all else she was sweet and sane enough--unless it was just one tiny matter that annoyed her memory before she fell asleep to the renewed lullaby of the express. It was the utterly unimportant matter of a youngish man in a loud suit, one of a brace of incredibly common Englishmen, who had nevertheless been staying at the hotel in Paris, had "pa.s.sed a remark" to Esther in the lift, and certainly stared with insolence at Esther's mistress, not only in Paris but in pa.s.sing along the corridor of this very train, before and after the hour for dinner.

To Vera Moyle there seemed no time at all between her pa.s.sing thought of this creature and the vile glare that woke her up. At first it blinded her, for she was in the upper berth, within inches of the excruciating blaze. It came almost as a relief when a head bobbed between the glare and her eyes.

Lady Vera blinked her indignation. She was too sleepy to do more at first, and too old a traveler to make much fuss about a mere piece of stupidity. She could not see the man's face, but his head was of the type which occasions the inevitable libel on the bullet, and its hideousness hardly mitigated by the Rembrandtesque effect of the electric light behind it. She conceived it to belong to some blundering official, and ordered him out in pretty sharp French. But the man did not move. And in another short moment Vera Moyle had become aware of three very horrible things: it was the creature in the loud suit, and he had shut the door behind him, and was holding an automatic pistol to her breast.

"One syl'ble that anybody else can 'ear," he muttered as her mouth opened, "an' it's yer larst in life! 'Old yer noise an' I won't be 'ard on you--not 'alf as 'ard as you been on me!"

"It isn't--oh, surely it isn't Croucher?" cried the girl, with an emotion made up of every element but fear.

"It is Croucher," said he in brutal mimicry. "That bein' just so, I puts away the barker--see?--no decepshun!" The pistol dropped into a loud tweed pocket. "I reckon I can do me own bit o' barkin'--yuss! an'

bitin', too!" concluded Croucher, with an appropriate snarl.

"Will you please go out?" said Lady Vera, still with sorrow in her steady eyes.

"No, I will not please. I'll see you d.a.m.ned first!" said Croucher, with sudden ferocity--"like you very near seen me! If we're over'eard, you'll be thought no better'n you ought to be; but by Gawd they won't think you as bad as wot you are!"

Lady Vera took no advantage of a studious pause. The ruffian was making his points with more than merely ruffianly effect; the whole thing might have been carefully rehea.r.s.ed. But to the girl in the upper berth it was now no more than she deserved. It was a light enough punishment for the dreadful deed by her committed--no matter how unconscious, in how fine a frenzy or how just a cause--and on him visited with all but the last dread vengeance of the criminal law. He had a right to say what he liked to her after that, even to say it then and there, with all his natural and acquired brutality. Was it not she who had done most of all to brutalize him?

"That is, until I tell 'em," added Croucher, with crafty significance.

His hearer had to recall the words before the pause; when she had done so, he was again requested to leave the compartment, and there was a harder light in her eyes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Surely it isn't Croucher?"]

"I'll see you in the morning," she promised. "I'm going on to Rome."

He laughed scornfully. "You needn't tell _me_ where you're goin'! I know all about you, and 'ave done for some time. I been on yer tracks, my dear! You seen me. It's your own fault we didn't 'ave it out before.

This ain't quite the pitch--but it's a better place than the one you got me into!"

"I got you--out again," was what Lady Vera had begun to say, but something about him made her stop short of that. "I was doing my best for you," she continued humbly. "I thought you were going to let me give you a fresh start in life."

"A fresh start! I want a bit more than that, lidy!"

"Well, what do you want?"

He rolled his eyeb.a.l.l.s over the racks laden with her hand-luggage.

"Your jewel-case," said he promptly. "Which is it?"

"That one, in this corner, over my feet."

Her equal alacrity might have been the mere measure of her eagerness to get rid of him; but Alfred Croucher was far too old in deception to be himself very easily deceived.

"Then you can keep it, with my love!" said he. "I'll trouble you for them rings instead--_and_ the rest wot you're 'idin' be'ind 'em!"

The girl turned paler in the electric light She was sitting up in her suspicious readiness to point out the jewel-case; the other hand, with most of her rings on it, had flown instinctively to her throat; for she was traveling, as ladies will, with her greatest treasures--her diamond necklace and pendant, and a string of pearls--on her neck for safety.

"Suppose I refuse and----"

She glanced toward the bell.

"Then I'll say what _I_ know."

"And what do you know?" Her back was to the wall.

"What I see that night! What I see an' was mug enough not to twig till I come out an' 'eard all the talk! Is that good enough? If not, the rest'll keep; but it'll put you in the jug all right, I don't care 'oo's on your side. It's one law for the rich and one for the pore. 'Ang me as never done it, an' 'ush you up, as did! But I've heard tell that murder will out, an' you'll find that murderers will in--to prison--even when they're t.i.tled lidies with the King on 'is throne be'ind 'em! It'll ruin you, if it does no more--ruin you an' yours--an' break all your 'earts!"

It was enough. She stripped her neck, she stripped her fingers; rings and necklace, pearls and pendant, all lay in a s.h.i.+mmering heap in his capacious palm, held for a moment's triumph under the electric light, reflected for that moment in a mirror which his bulky frame had hidden until now.

It was the mirror on the door of the miniature dressing-room between every two compartments in the _train de luxe_; but in the very moment of his exultation it ceased to reflect either Alfred Croucher or his ill-gotten spoil. The door had opened; it framed a sable figure crowned with silvery locks; lean hands flew out from the black shoulders, and met round the neck of Croucher with the fell dexterity of a professional garroter.

The pair backed together without a word. The one had murder in his set teeth, the other death in the bulging eyes and darkening face, with its collar of interlaced fingers white to the nails with their own pressure.

Lady Vera watched the two men as the fawn might watch the python struck to timely death, until the communicating door shut upon them both, and only her own unearthly form remained in the mirror. And the train ran on and on, and the whole coach creaked and trembled, as coaches will even in a _train de luxe_, only in that particular compartment it had not been noticeable for some time.

Presently, as her nerve came back, one or two further observations of a negative order were gradually made by Vera Moyle. She may be said to have noticed that she did not notice one or two things she might have expected to notice by now. The chief thing was that there was no sound whatever from the compartment beyond the looking-gla.s.s door, no fuss or undue traffic in the corridor. What had happened? Only too soon she knew.

They had stopped at some nameless station between the tags of the Italian boot. It was a chance of peeping out, and out peeped the shaken girl from her window overlooking the line. And there, skipping on to the next low platform, bag in hand, went the loud trousers under Alfred Croucher's equally new and noisy ulster; and there at his elbow went the venerable ecclesiastic, even holding him by the sleeve!

It was a long road to Rome for Lady Vera Moyle, but toward the end there came another stage in which the _wagon-lit_ forgot to swing and sing like humbler coaches, and the pale Campagna swam past unseen. It began with a knock behind the drawn blind of her compartment--now but a mirrored divan of Utrecht velvet and stamped leather--as unsuggestive of a good night's rest as the white face and the bright eyes behind the tiny table in the corner.

"_Entrez!_" she cried with nervous irritation.

The door opened and shut upon the somber face and long athletic limbs of John Dollar.

"Doctor Dollar! I had no idea you were in the train!"

Her voice had broken with very joy; her hand trembled pitifully during its momentary repose in his.

"You have never shown up, you see," said he. "I have been in the next compartment all the way from Paris."

"The next compartment on which side?"

He jerked his head at his own reflection in the looking-gla.s.s door.

"But there was a priest in there!" cried the girl.

"There was the high priest of a new religion in which you'll never believe any more," said Dollar with a wry smile. "May he sit down for a minute, Lady Vera?"

She looked at him with cooling eyes. "Certainly, Doctor Dollar, if it makes an explanation any easier."

"I didn't intend to explain at all," he had the nerve to tell her. "I meant my ecclesiastical body to do that for me--but its wig was blown out of the window on the other side of Genoa. I've been hanging about all day in the hope of catching you. I couldn't leave it any longer. I had to give you these."

And he placed upon the table between them the diamond necklace and pendant, the string of pearls, and the handful of rings she had been wearing in the night.

"You made him give them up!" she cried, in thankful tears that never fell, but only softened and sweetened her indescribably.

"Naturally," he laughed. "It wasn't very difficult."

"And I thought you were a confederate when I saw you crossing the line together!"