Chapter VIII

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE WHICH MIGHT HAVE HANGED DANTON.

It was at this juncture that Nick called Doctor Pollock aside for a moment.

“Doctor,” he said, “I would appreciate it if you would consent to do me a small favor in this matter.”

“Very well, sir, what can I do?” replied the doctor.

“I wish you would appear to accept whatever verdict Doctor Jackson sees fit to give concerning the events that have happened here this morning, and that when he takes his departure you would ride away with him but that you would return almost immediately, if you can do so.”

“That is rather a strange request, is it not, sir?”

“Perhaps; but I have good reasons for making it, as you will discover later.”

“It would be scarcely a professional act on my part, sir.”

“Then call it the act of an expert. Doctor Pollock, I must be frank with you and rely upon your discretion also. I am not Mr. Parsons at all. I am a person of whom you have no doubt heard, a detective, named Nick Carter.”

“Indeed! Yes, sir, I have heard of you and I am glad to make your acquaintance. I will also be glad to serve you if you will tell me how I may do so.”

“In the first place, doctor, Ramon Orizaba was murdered. I have already discovered that much, but for important reasons I wish particularly that you should have the credit of the discovery.”

“Murdered! There is absolutely no outward evidence of a crime.”

“No; but I can show you much that will convince you; therefore will you do as I have requested?”

“Certainly I will.”

“Then in an hour if you will meet me in the room to which they are taking the body, I will talk with you there.”

“Very good; I will be there.”

Turning from the doctor, Nick motioned for young Danton to come to him.

“The servants already know that Orizaba is dead,” he said rapidly. “I think you had best carry the information to your mother yourself. Tell her only what the valet told you and what the doctor has said since he arrived. That will be enough for the present. I will take it upon myself to go into the rose-garden and break the news to your sister. Conduct yourself throughout exactly as you have done up to the present moment--if you think you can keep up under this awful strain.”

“I must keep up. There is no choice.”

“True. But don’t drop down in your tracks. Once in a while you look as if you were about to do that very thing.”

“I feel so, too. But I manage to pull myself together. If I drop, it will be because I am a dead one--like Orizaba.”

“Keep up your courage. Go to your mother, and when you have finished with her, follow me to the rose-garden where we left your sister. I remember that she said she had taken her coffee, and that after she had filled her lungs with the breath of the roses, she should sit under the arbor and read, so I have no doubt that I will find her there.”

And so while the servants, directed by the two doctors, were conveying all that was left of Ramon Orizaba to the rooms he had occupied in life, Reginald Danton sought the apartment of his mother, and Nick Carter went out of the house through the side door and started along the gravel walk toward the arbor where Mercedes had told him she would sit and read.

He crossed the lawn and passed among the wealth of roses toward the very spot where he had been presented to her; and there, where she had stood during the two or three moments they had conversed together, the ground was littered with the roses she had carried in her arms and upon her person; and from that spot toward the arbor, fifty feet away, there was a trail of roses and rose leaves in such proficiency as almost to suggest that she had played the game of hare-and-hounds with them, in order to lead her pursuer to her retreat.

He followed quickly, for there was something about that confused littering of the flowers along the pathway which suggested haste and excitement. He could almost imagine that she had flung them there in her excitement as she turned to fly from some real or fancied peril. The roses along the walk seemed to speak to him and to bid him hasten to her side, and he lost no time in making his way to the arbor.

At the entrance he halted abruptly.

Inside that rose-embowered place, screened effectually from view from the outside, Mercedes had fallen, and she was stretched at full length upon the ground; her face, now waxen in hue, was turned toward the canopy of roses over her, and her whole attitude told him that she had fainted the instant she crossed the threshold and knew that she had escaped from the view of others.

“Poor child,” murmured Nick, bending over her, and he began to chafe her hands and to wait patiently until nature should come to his assistance and revive her, for it was not at all to his purposes that he should call for assistance or seek restoratives, and thus betray a weakness which she had sought so strenuously to hide.

While he bent above her, and stroking her hands, looked down upon her exquisitely beautiful face, vaguely wondering that creation could have wrought so perfectly upon one human being, a shadow fell across them both, and, raising his eyes, he saw that Danton had followed him into the garden.

“What has happened to Mercedes?” he demanded, instantly falling upon his knees beside his sister.

“She has fainted, that is all,” replied Nick. “How is it that you are here?”

“My mother was already informed, it seems. She sent me to bring Mercedes to her.”

“Ah! Well, your sister is already reviving. It will be better, when she opens her eyes, that she should not discover a stranger. I will step to one side, out of her range of vision. When she is sufficiently recovered, you can break the news of Orizaba’s death to her.”

Nick passed outside the arbor, but he stood where he could not only observe, but also hear all that took place between brother and sister, and, for reasons of his own, the circumstance was one which entirely accorded with his wishes.

“Mercedes,” said Danton, in a low, eager tone. “It is I--Med.”

She sighed and seemed to make an effort to smile, but it was a failure.

“I fainted, did I not?” she whispered.

“Yes, dear. I think so. Why did you faint? What was the matter? You looked so well when I saw you in the garden only a little while ago. What happened to you, Mercedes?”

“Did I look well? Did I look happy? Oh, Meadows! How can you say that?”

“Why, what is the matter, child-sister? Why do you look so frightened? Your eyes----”

“Hush, hush! Tell me what the doctor said. What did he say?”

“That is what I came here to tell you, Mercedes. Ramon is--dead.”

Not a trace of surprise manifested itself in her face as she looked up into her brother’s eyes. Then she slowly raised herself to her elbow, thence to a sitting posture, and thus she leaned against the rustic bench, still looking into her brother’s eyes.

“Did the doctor find--does the doctor know--did he discover what it was--that killed--Ramon?” she asked hesitatingly.

“Why, yes,” replied Danton. “He said that death was due to heart failure.”

“Thank God!”

“Why, Mercedes, what do you mean?”

“What do I mean? You ask me that?”

“Do you mean to tell me----”

“Hush, my brother. Did you think I did not know?”

“Know what, Mercedes?”

“That Ramon was dead. Did you think I did not know? Oh, my God! I wish that I might have died a thousand times before I did know--before I saw what I did see.”

“Good Heaven! Mercedes, tell me what you mean!”

“Hush, Reginald. I have never called you by that name before, have I? But it seems as if I could never again address you by the name I have loved to use. Oh, my brother, my brother, why did you not kill me also, instead of condemning me to live on, with this horrible secret in my keeping? Instead of forcing me to be the one person in all the world who knows that you have committed a--murder! Oh, God help me!”

Young Danton started back in terror, and his sister buried her face in her arms against the rustic bench and burst into a passion of sobs.

But the young man pulled himself together wonderfully well, and he forced himself to ask quite calmly:

“Mercedes, I have feared that you would fear that I had a hand in the death of Orizaba, but somehow I had disabused my mind of that fear so utterly that I had, for the moment, forgotten it. Do you mean to say that you think I killed him?”

“I know that you killed him, Reginald.”

“You--know--that--I--killed--him? Good God, Mercedes, what do you mean? How can you know a thing which is not true?”

“I saw you.”

Danton started back with a cry that seemed to him loud enough to have reached to the river, but which in reality was scarcely heard by the detective a few feet away, and then he stood there as if paralyzed, staring into the face of his sister with glassy, unseeing eyes. “You saw me!” he whispered shrilly. “Then it is true after all. I did it without knowing that I did it, and all the assurances given me by Mr. Carter, were wrong. I did it, you say, and you saw me. Oh, God! Oh, God! I did it after all, and I did it without knowing it!”

Mercedes raised her eyes again and fixed them coldly upon her brother.

“Reginald,” she said slowly, “you are dearer to me than anybody in all the world, and I will keep your secret so well that all the tortures in the world shall never draw it from me--so well that the keeping of it will kill me, for I feel as if I were dying even now; but, Reginald, do not think that I shall hold you guiltless. Do not suppose that I can be made to believe that you did not commit that awful deed with deliberation and after full premeditation. I saw you, I say. I saw every motion that you made, everything you did.”

“Tell me what you saw,” he said slowly.

“You did not latch the door when you entered the room, and a draft had swung it partly ajar. I stood in the hallway. I saw you approach the chair in which Ramon was seated, asleep. You held a bottle in your hand, and I saw you hold it under his nostrils so that he might inhale the fumes of whatever it contained--and then I became conscious of the odor of chloroform.”

“But there is no chloroform in the room. I have never in my life had chloroform in my possession,” groaned Danton, whose only thought then was to convince himself that his sister might be mistaken. Still, she paid no heed to what he said.

“Wait,” she said. “I saw you hold the chloroform under his nose. Then you crossed the room to your desk. You found the casket and opened it, and I knew then what you were going to do. I tried to cry out. I tried to rush into the room, but I could neither speak nor move. All power of sound and motion had been taken from me. I was as a dead body, standing there, chained, compelled to witness the most terrible sight the eyes can behold--the infamy of my own brother. You opened the casket and you took from it that terrible instrument you have shown to me. I recognized it by the cork handle, and again I tried to call out to you and stop you--but I could not make a sound. I could not move.”

“And then----” asked Danton tensely.

“Then? Then you passed behind the chair in which he was seated; you pushed his head forward until his chin rested upon his breast, for the chloroform had stupefied him so that there was no fear that he would awaken; and then, while you held his head forward with your left hand, you did something with your right, and I saw a shudder like a spasm shoot through Ramon’s figure--and I knew that you had killed him, even as that terrible man, Cadillac, had murdered his victims in Paris.”

She broke out into sobbing again, and he made no effort to stop her; presently she recovered sufficiently to continue.

“I would not have cried out then if I could have done so,” she said, “for it was too late. I knew that Ramon was dead. I saw you replace his head back against the cushion of the chair. I saw that you smoothed his coat, as if to obliterate any traces you might have left there of the crime you had committed. I saw you hold up the cork handle of the instrument you had used, and I saw that it was empty--that the terrible needle was gone from it. I saw you take it back to the desk and drop it again into the casket where you kept it, and then I fled to my room, entered it, locked the door, and fell into a swoon from which I did not recover until the sun was shining into my room. Then I dressed and came out here. I steeled myself to act the part you saw me play, but when you went into the house, taking your friend with you to visit the scene of your crime, it was too much for me. I ran here to the arbor, and then--then I opened my eyes and found you beside me.”