CHAPTER VIII.

We are at Linden Villa, a pretty little detached house, standing in its own grounds, in one of the north-western suburbs of London, and the time is the morning of the day after the murder of the Baron von Rosenberg. Two people are seated at breakfast--George Crofton and his wife Stephanie. For, Mr. Crofton's protestations and objurgations notwithstanding at the interview between himself and Clara Brooke, he had thought fit within a month after that date to make an offer of his hand and heart to Mademoiselle Stephanie Lagrange, an offer which had been duly accepted. And, in truth, the ex-queen of the _Haute Ecole_ was a far more suitable wife for a man like George Crofton than Clara Brooke could possibly have been.

Mr. Crofton presented a somewhat seedy appearance this morning; there was a worn look about his eyes, and his hand was scarcely as steady as it might have been. His breakfast consisted or a tumbler of brandy-and-soda and a rusk: it was his usual matutinal repast. Mrs. Crofton, who was one of those persons who are always blessed with a hearty appetite, having disposed of her cutlet and her egg, was now leaning back in an easy-chair, feeding a green and gold parakeet with tiny lumps of sugar, and sipping at her chocolate between times. She was attired in a loose morning wrapper of quilted pale blue satin, with a quantity of soft lace round her throat, and looked exceedingly handsome.

"Steph, I think I have told you before," said Mr. Crofton in a grumbling tone, "that I don't care to have any of your old circus acquaintances calling upon you here. I thought you had broken off the connection for good when you became my wife."

"Que voulez-vous, cher enfant?" answered Steph without the least trace of temper. "You introduce me to no society; you scarcely ever take me anywhere; four or five times a week you don't get home till past midnight--this morning it was three o'clock when you crept upstairs as quietly as a burglar. What would you have?"

George Crofton moved uneasily in his chair, but did not reply. "Besides," resumed his wife, "it was only dear old Euphrosyne Smith who came to see me. She looks eighteen when she is on the _corde_, but she's thirty-four if she's a day. I've known her for five years, and many a little kindness she has done me. And then, although, of course, I shall never want to go back to the old life, I must say that I like to hear about it now and again and to know how everybody is getting on. Can you wonder at it, now that you leave me so much alone?"

"For all that, Steph, I wish you would break off the connection." Then, after a pause: "I know that of late I have seemed to neglect you a little; but if I have done so, it has been as much for your sake as my own."

"Ah, yes, I know: cards, cards, always cards."

"What would you have?--as a certain person sometimes says. I know a little about cards; I know nothing about anything else that will bring grist to the mill. I bought my experience in the dearest of all schools, and if I try to profit by it, who shall blame me?"

"Which means, that you are teaching others to buy their experience in the same way."

"Why not?" he answered with a laugh. "It is a law of the universe that one set of creatures shall prey on another. _I_ was very nice picking for the kites once on a time; now I am a kite myself. The law of metempsychosis in such cases is a very curious one."

"I don't know what you mean when you make use of such outlandish words," said Stephanie with a pout.

"So much the better; learned women are an abomination."

At this juncture a servant brought in the morning papers. Crofton seized one of them, a sporting journal, and pushed the other across the table. He was deep in the mysteries of the latest odds, when a low cry from his wife caused him to glance sharply at her. "What's up now, Steph?" he asked. "It would be a libel to say you had touched the rouge-pot this morning, because there isn't a bit of colour in your cheeks."

"What is the name of that place in the country where your uncle used to live?" she asked.

"Beechley Towers."

"And the name of that cousin to whom your uncle left his property?"

"Gerald Brooke--confound him!--But why do you ask?"

For sole reply she handed him the newspaper, marking a certain passage with her finger as she did so. If Mrs. Crofton was startled by something which caught her eye in the paper, her feelings were as nothing in comparison with those of her husband as his keen glance took in the purport of the paragraph in question. It was, in fact, little more than a paragraph in the form of a brief telegram, forwarded at a late hour by a country correspondent.

What the public were told in the telegram was that the Baron von Rosenberg had been found in his own grounds, shot through the heart, about seven o'clock in the evening; that strong circumstantial evidence pointed to the supposition that Mr. Gerald Brooke, a near neighbour of the Baron, was the murderer; that he had disappeared immediately after the perpetration of the crime, and that, although he was still at large, the police had little doubt they would succeed in arresting him in the course of the next few hours.

For a little while, speech seemed powerless to express a tithe of what George Crofton felt when the words of the telegram had burned themselves into his brain. What a sea of conflicting emotions surged round his heart as his mind drank in the full purport of the message and all the possibilities therein implied! What a vista of the future it opened out!

"A little rouge, _mon cher_, would improve _your_ complexion," said his wife at length, who had been watching him curiously out of her half-veiled eyes. "If one were to judge by your looks, you might have committed the crime yourself."

Her words served to rouse him. "Stephanie, the day of my revenge is dawning at last!" He ground out the words between his set teeth. "This Gerald Brooke--this well-beloved cousin of mine--is the man who came between my uncle and me and defrauded me out of my inheritance."

"And the man who robbed you of the woman you loved, whom you hoped one day to make your wife."

"How do you know that?" he gasped. "I never said a syllable to you about it."

"It matters not how I know it, so long as I do know it," she answered, looking him steadily in the face as she did so, and beginning to tap her teeth with her long pointed nails.

"Well, whoever told you, told you no more than the truth. I did love Clara Danby, and I hoped to make her my wife. But all that was past and gone long; before I met you."

She did not reply, but only went on tapping her teeth the more.

"Putting aside my own feelings towards Brooke," went on Crofton presently, "who has done me all the harm that one man could possibly do to another, don't you see that if he should be arrested and found guilty of this crime, what a vast difference it would make in your fortunes and mine?"

"Expliquez-vous, s'il vous plait."

"Should Gerald Brooke die without issue, by the terms of my uncle's will Beechley Towers and all the estates pertaining to it, including a rent-roll of close on six thousand a year, come absolutely to me--to me--comprenez-vous? Ah, what a sweet revenge mine will be!"

"Yes; I should think it would be rather nice to live at a grand place like Beechley Towers and have an income of six thousand a year," answered Mrs. Crofton quietly. "So, if this cousin of yours is really guilty, let us hope for our own sakes that he will be duly caught and hanged."

Crofton turned to the table, and having poured out nearly half a tumbler of brandy, he drank it off at a draught. Excitement had so far unnerved him that the glass rattled against his teeth as he drank.

"But what could possibly induce a man in Mr. Brooke's position to commit such a crime?" asked Stephanie presently.

"That's more than we know at present; we must wait for further particulars.--By the way, I wonder who and what the murdered man was? The Baron von Rosenberg they call him. I never heard the name before."

"_I_ knew the Baron von Rosenberg some years ago--in Paris," answered Stephanie with just a trace of heightened colour in her cheeks. "He was a man between forty and fifty years old, and said to be very rich.--I never liked him. Indeed, I may say that I had every reason to hate him. And now he's dead! C'est bien--c'est très bien."

Her husband was only half heeding her. "Stephanie," he said, "I never hated any one as I hate that man. Should the evidence at the inquest, which will no doubt be held in the course of to-day, go to prove, or go far to prove, that Brooke is the assassin, and should the police not succeed in arresting him in the course of the next forty-eight hours, do you know what I have made up my mind to do?"

"How is it possible that I should know?"

"I have made up my mind not to trust to what the regular police may or may not be able to do in this matter, but to employ a private detective on my own account. I happen to be acquainted with a man who is nothing less than a sleuth-hound in such a case as this. He has succeeded more than once when Scotland Yard has failed ignominiously. His services I shall secure; and if it cost me the last sovereign I have in the world, I will do all that man can do to bring Gerald Brooke to the bar of justice."

He spoke with a concentrated malignity of purpose such as he had never exhibited in his wife's presence before. There was an eager, cruel gleam in his eyes, like that of some carnivorous animal which scents its prey from afar. He set his teeth hard when he had done speaking, so that the gash in his lip showed with startling distinctness, and lent to his features an unmistakably wolfish expression.

Stephanie looked at him and wondered. She had flattered herself, as many wives do, that she had read and thoroughly understood her husband; but in this man there were evidently smouldering volcanic forces which might burst into activity at any moment, chained tempests of rage and ferocity which might not always be kept in check, the existence of which she had never suspected before. From that day forward, although her husband knew it not, she regarded him with somewhat different eyes.

He rose abruptly and rang the bell. "Let a hansom be fetched at once," he said to the servant.

"For what purpose do you require a hansom?" asked his wife.

"To drive me to the terminus. I shall go down to King's Harold by the first train. I want to hear for myself the evidence at the inquest on the Baron von Rosenberg."