Chapter XXX: Lord Stratharden Begins

Lord Stratharden rose with unusual alacrity the next morning. He had thought out all he meant to do and he had best do it. In the gray dawn he had had a sudden uncomfortable idea that he would have done better to fall in with Mrs. Keith’s theory that the red-haired girl was what the turquoise-studded heart--and other things--made likely. The sham Lady Barnysdale could have been made accountable, then, for her pseudo half-sister’s disappearance; she would have had good reason to be rid of her.

“I could not have exposed her, though,” he reflected and was comforted.

His line was right after all. Yesterday had been a hard day; the hardest thing in it to have those two boxes cleverly abstracted from the pile Dolly had left in charge of a porter. Lord Stratharden’s nerve had served him well while he held the man in conversation, and knew that behind his back those two boxes were going into a cab.

Dolly Barnysdale, in her desperate hurry to get home, never noticed that her luggage receipt was for three boxes and not five. But Lord Stratharden knew.

He was an utterly desperate man this morning as he tied his immaculate necktie. No one knew better than he what the woman whose money he had borrowed would do if he did not give her the return he had promised for it. But a desperate man is bad to fight and Stratharden knew it. He looked in silent consultation at his own face in the glass.

“The girl is--not likely to turn up!” thought he serenely. “My supposed sister-in-law will suspect no--no under currents--when she learns that a lady claimed those boxes. She will think of some man I feel assured. I will go first, then, to my lady; and put any thoughts beyond her own welfare out of her head. As for Buff----” He paused with a certain uneasiness. What Buff had had to do with that dark-eyed girl he could not get at unless it was the--usual thing.

“For Buff, the less he knows of the affair the better,” he concluded. “Thanks to neat whisky on top of exhaustion, our good Keith has had something very like a fit. I must send the doctor to see the old woman and explain to him about her harmless hallucinations. But I don’t know! She’s canny; she won’t be apt to talk. I’ll merely suggest that he suggests rest and nursing. So that our old and faithful servant won’t find it so easy to get out of my house and scour London to confide in Buff. There’s no one else to tell him. Gad, for all I know, he may be in love with the girl. Or else he’s more like me than I thought;” but this smile was less like smiling than ever.

He left the house so quietly on his important day’s work that James was too late to open the door for him.

That excellent servant was nonplused for a moment when he found his master gone, but his face cleared as he decided that what he had meant to tell him was probably of no importance.

“Anyhow, I couldn’t help it,” thought he, and turned back to his morning paper.

And Lord Stratharden, with a mind at ease, mounted Dolly Barnysdale’s stairs. He was more annoyed than polite when his fourth ring at the bell brought no answer. The fifth was more successful, since it nearly brought the house down.

Dolly, white as death, opened the door.

Stratharden eyed her up and down in silence.

“What do you want?” she demanded, and he realized he had never heard the real Dolly speak before. “What have you done with Magdalen?”

If Keith’s raging had not forewarned him he could never have let the second question pass as if unheard.

“I want to say unpleasant things,” said he softly. “My dear, foolish little woman, I--well, believe me, I feel for you!”

“How?” asked Dolly. She never moved an inch. “You did it. Keith said so. Tell me what you’ve done with Magdalen or I’ll tell,” and her tongue was venomous, “the whole town about Ardmore and what you tried to do to me--and Ronald.”

“I don’t,” said he slowly, “know what you mean. Who is Magdalen? And what has Keith to do with this matter? My good girl you’re dreaming! Poor Keith is in bed at my house, suffering from the fits to which she is subject. She came there last night quite irresponsible. Do you mean she had been here?”

“You know she was here.” Dolly spoke up bravely, but in spite of herself she was the least bit shaken. He looked so absolutely, politely puzzled. “And you know Magdalen is my stepsister and that you took her away.”

Lord Stratharden had in that one second of her recoil from him came into the little hall without either haste or pushing. He glanced about him before he answered perfunctorily.

“I never to my knowledge saw your stepsister in my life, except once from the window of Keith’s lodgings. If Keith, with an epileptic fit coming on her, told you any such nonsense as that I should wish to carry off your sister--though, of course, I don’t doubt she’s charming”--with a bow--“you must see for yourself that it is untenable. I should have no reason.”

“Keith said you had.”

“Ah! What was it?”

“She wouldn’t--I won’t tell you.”

“She wouldn’t say? Precisely. Her poor brain could not invent a reason. What, in common sense, should I want with your sister? I came, my good girl, on far other business.” The insolence in his voice was unmistakable.

“How dare you call me that?” Dolly cried. “No, hold your tongue! I don’t care what you call me. All I care for is that Magdalen’s gone--and I know she never left me of her own accord. She went to Marlow, and when I followed she wasn’t there.”

“So you think she’s with me. I confess I hardly see the connection.”

“You, or your son, who lied to her and called himself Lovell,” she hotly replied. “It’s all one. Keith said you’d both a hand in it.”

Stratharden’s eyebrows came down. He would have a score to settle with Keith.

“My son,” he said, and it had been a knock-down blow to him to find Buff in the thing so heavily, “has five names. It’s immaterial to me which one he uses. I confess I should have liked to have changed my own name when I found how much mud had been thrown at it. But I don’t think you’ll find your sister with my son,” and he said it confidently.

“But she’s with some one,” Dolly flashed out. “Her boxes are gone from the station where I left them.”

Stratharden smiled.

“Did her sister never go off with anyone in haste and without leave?” he asked calmly. “That sort of thing usually runs in families.”

Dolly looked at him.

“It’s better than murder,” she said with her cat’s teeth showing, “and that runs in families, too. I don’t believe a word you say to me. Come here.”

She cast a hasty glance at the locked door of the dining-room as she passed it and prayed Ronald would not find out he was shut in.

Stratharden followed her with a shrug. He was keen enough to see all there was.

“Look there,” said Dolly, in the kitchen, where that strand of hair was darkly red on the rough chair. “And there”--in Magdalen’s bedroom, where a tiny pile of gray ashes was on the floor. “That was something your Chinaman brought--Keith said so. I don’t know why you sent him nor what Magdalen was to you, but she was taken out of this house by you. And I’ll tell that, and all I know, to the police. Do you think I didn’t know you tried to kill us at Ardmore?”

Stratharden drew a long breath, held it, and looked her in the eyes. It is a useful trick if you lower your head at the same time.

“I think,” said he, “that you are playing a very foolish game. It is nothing to me that you choose to invent lies about your stay at Ardmore--the whole countryside will know you for a liar in a day or two. But it is something to me that you should put your sister’s bolting with some man, on my, or my son’s, shoulders. I know nothing about the girl; she may be anywhere in London for all I know”--which was absolutely true--“and as for my Chinaman, as you call him, he left my service a month ago. For that,” he flicked contemptuously at the heap of ashes, “it is the remnant of a pastille, neither more nor less. You buy them at the chemist’s.”

“You needn’t try so hard to scatter it,” said Dolly, watching his stick moving in the gray ashes. “I’ve more. And I’m going to tell. No one, I don’t care who they are, shall play tricks with Magdalen.” She shook with rage, but her eyes were fearless.

“Oh, of course not!” Stratharden assented with evil slowness. “Personally I should not, in your case, talk of tricks, since----I confess, if your sister knows all that I do, I can’t wonder she left you in some haste! Did you never, Lady Barnysdale,” with a stress on the name, “hear of a man called Churchill?”

“No,” said Dolly. But her face was gray.

“Then I think we will let him recall himself to your memory,” he quietly remarked, “in court. It was a clever plan, my good girl, but not workable. If I were you I should say very little indeed about your sister having left you; and as for your wild accusations--how much credence do you suppose a jury will put in a woman who never was Lady Barnysdale at all? Your son----”

Dolly was swaying like a fainting woman, but she leaped toward him at that word.

“Is Barnysdale’s son!” she cried. “His own son.”

“You and Churchill can prove it,” said Stratharden. And Dolly Barnysdale winced from the blow. Churchill could prove it, indeed. And Magdalen--if Magdalen knew, no wonder she left a woman who was found out.

When Dolly lifted her beaten head Stratharden was smiling at her; just as if he knew that the one thing that would tell in her favor before a jury was something that--knowing him--she would have died rather than use.