Part 2

“Splendid! Go on. This is too good to be true. It is really such a sweet reversal of form—expecting the bad eggs to hatch. Isn’t that Julian Prentice out there with Joel? Who did _he_ kill—his crippled grandmother or something?”

“Not so bad as that—or I wouldn’t have let him engage himself to Joel. No, he merely drowned a boy who was all but drowning him during the hazing of freshmen at the University. He pretended cramp to do it. Everything appeared accidental, and of course sympathy was with Julian anyway. There is one other, who makes the fourth man—irrespective of ourselves, and we don’t count. Milton Dorn I doubt whether you know. He is an able surgeon; but he also has a secret laboratory, or operating room, where he experiments on the conscious flesh to the point, but not beyond the point, where life still lingers. I should imagine that would be all you need know about him.”

“Absolutely! My only wonder is that you didn’t apply directly to him for release.”

“I thought of that. But then, as I’ve said, it’s a long row he hoes and I’m looking for a short one. There, Belknap, I guess that tells the tale in brief, doesn’t it?”

“No, not altogether, Judge. There is a point on which I need to be enlightened, with a bright, bright light. Where do I come in?”

“I thought I had made that clear. You are here to find good sport, but to be a spoil-sport.”

“I don’t mean that, Whittaker.”

“You mean the Diary—why, man alive, it makes something like a hero of you. My admiration is written all over it. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. _Have_ you committed murder?”

Belknap laughed. “It’s not the time to admit it exactly, is it?”

A silence fell between them. Belknap broke it with another question.

“When do you spring it?”

“I thought I might bring it up at dinner. Unobtrusively. Casualness will at first bewilder them. The horror of the situation will dawn on them gradually.”

“Has anyone an inkling?”

“No one. Except perhaps Nadia. I mentioned to her the other day that it would be fun to publish my Diary verbatim seeing what a number of things it contains. Her answer was, that if I proposed doing so I would probably never live to see it in print. That sounds hopeful. Oh, of course nothing at all may happen. They may decide to take their medicine for the old rather than be on with the new. I think that would be my solution provided I was in their shoes. And then again anything may happen. Psychologically it’s a pretty how-de-do. To throw half a dozen killers together, even civilized ones (in fact the more civilized the more interesting), makes for a strange medley.”

“Stranger than you know, I’m afraid. There is an interrelation of secret currents between your protagonists that is likely to be devastating. You may not even be the only casualty. What about the police?”

“Call them in at the drop of the hat of course. The Homicide Department would be delighted to send Berry along to help you if you suggested it, I’m sure. Well—what about dressing for dinner?”

“Suits me.” Belknap put a hand on Whittaker’s shoulder as they parted at the door.

“Whittaker,” he said gently, “I don’t know what to say exactly. I’ll have to reserve my judgement until later. But again let me say I sincerely regret the circumstances that have brought us to the present precarious position. For even I can’t see my way to withdrawing now. I can’t forego the chance of so much excitement, if nothing else,” he added, with the flicker of a smile.

“_Thought_ ye couldn’t, boy.” Whittaker stressed the shrewd, cunning accents of his Yankee ancestors.

IV

The luxurious ease, and quiet, well-oiled machinery of service at Thorngate gave no slightest indication of the worm at its heart. Up the long, winding, carpeted stairs the servants glided on their errands, and, in turn, the guests themselves came softly down by ones and twos, with a gleam of jewels, of colored silk, of white shirt-fronts in the halls dimly lit with candles.

Belknap had hastened his dressing in order to be first in the drawing-room. He felt that at any moment he might be needed in the front line, and that no time should be wasted under a shower or before a mirror. His trust in Whittaker was not so perfect as to assure him that he had been honest in saying no one was in the least aware of impending trouble. And there was just the chance that someone, being forehanded, would get away with murder!

Although he had been in the receiving room, which was also library and den, fifty times over, Belknap looked it over with awakened interest. Whittaker, it was apparent, had a leaning toward panelings and oil portraits, medieval tapestries and deep-napped carpets. Here tapestries formed the wall covering from floor to ceiling: none of exceptional value except the Gobelin over the mantel, but all equally lovely in colors and texture. An impulse, not so odd perhaps under the circumstances, prompted Belknap to test what lay immediately behind the surface of woven cloth and, as far as its stretching would yield to his hand, he found space. He tried it at various points and discovered it everywhere the same; and he recalled having heard that it was the safest way to hang tapestries against the rear attack of insects and dampness. Convenient to know, he thought. He was engaged in trying to locate the servants’ entrance to this interstitial passage when he became gradually aware that someone else had come into the room.

He turned about with elaborate sang-froid and met the gaze of a tall, strikingly handsome woman, who stood quizzically regarding him. She wore a black sheath gown with crimson accessories that included the oval nails of tapering fingers and the clear-cut lips of a willful mouth. The crimson handkerchief tied to her garnet bracelets floated lightly up and back at every slightest movement of her arm. The cigarette case of scarlet enamel which she opened with a deft flick of one hand to help herself with the other, gleamed like smoldering coal.

He had met Nadia Mdevani several times with Whittaker; and he had vaguely realized the relationship between them, but had given it little consideration; except that once he had instinctively withdrawn from a case in which her name had figured more or less conspicuously. The sense of her guilt had been conveyed to him on the wings of one of what he called his wild guesses, and he paid Whittaker the courtesy of letting well enough alone. As it happened, she had cleared herself easily.

Looking at her now he realized that she was inwardly disturbed at sight of him. Perhaps she saw in his mere presence a confirmation of the faint doubts she might be entertaining with respect to the week-end. But her poise held perfectly—in fact it was by a shade of its over-emphasis that he caught the inner tremor at all.

“Ah, Mr. Belknap!” she exclaimed, in her slow, husky contralto. “How ni-ice to see you here. Or should I call you Judge Belknap—or Detective Ordway Belknap? I am never sure of the term to your face. Behind your back I call you Belknap for short.”

“Let’s discard them, all four, and make it simply Ordway, to my face, as you put it, _and_ behind my back. And may I make it Nadia? Remember Bertrand is an equally dear friend to us both. You are looking divinely, Miss Nadia. Black is your color. Although I have seen you when I should have said the same of red, or white for the matter of that. Red and white are your contrasts. Tonight you are fused into a single vivid figure of black. Whistler would have liked you. You have a way, which most women have not, of lending distinction to a color instead of letting it create you. You have a like faculty with situations I am told.”

“I am not quite certain what you may mean by that, or whether it should entirely please me. But I have sufficient vanity to be flattered by your recollection of my gowns in view of how little attention you seemed to give them. Will you have one?”

She proffered her exquisite box and on his “Thank you, no,” crossed to the hearth where she lifted a crimson-slippered foot to the side bar of the fender, and for graceful balance (pose, Belknap thought it) laid a hand against the tapestried wall. It yielded enough to mar her picture.

“I had forgotten these tapestries are but the semblance of walls,” she murmured. “What a cosy place for rats. Although I suppose it was for the very purpose of perpetrating the Hamlet act against rats that the space was originally reserved.”

Belknap was pouring himself a thimbleful of Scotch at the tray standing in readiness on the divan table. He tossed it off, and turned over the after flavor on his tongue, as his mind turned over the possible subtleties of Nadia’s remark. She had made it piquant by a twist of inflection. A Polonius as well as a rat—or so the tone implied.

“We were speaking of Bertrand,” she continued abruptly. “Do you not consider him a little secretive about the week-end, conveying that there is a _reason_ why we are here? Why should there need be a reason?”

“There _should_ be none, Nadia, except our enjoyment of his unbounded hospitality. But I feel myself, now that you mention it,” Belknap pursued, willing to test where her guards were raised, “that Bertrand has something up his sleeve. Possibly an announcement; he likes to make any news impressive. He may have lost his shirt in the Market, or been left a fortune by his great-aunt Emma in Vermont. You know Bertrand well enough to know he’d celebrate either with equal pomp.”

He heard the little whispering sigh that Nadia suddenly drew.

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” she said, more to herself than Belknap. Then, quickly: “Is it the Diary?” she asked.

Belknap hesitated by the fraction of a second. By all accounts Nadia Mdevani was dangerous. Her intelligence, fearlessness and beauty were things that might throw dust in any man’s eyes. Her ability to ‘clinch,’ as she was doing now, with a power greater than her own, and cut her way free from within, had won her many a hand-to-hand encounter that if taken blow for blow would have seen her downed long ago. However, Belknap could see no better way at the moment than to close with her.

“Yes, it is the Diary,” he said quietly; and stood spellbound by the extreme beauty of her face as the color mounted under the ivory skin, accentuating the high, molded contours of the bones beneath it. He could not have said whether she were more angered or hurt.

“When?” Her low voice held its ground; not by a shade did it show disquiet. “How much time is granted us to deal with it?”

He was smitten with admiration at the serenity and ease of her apparent candor. With veteran coolness she took him on. He could do no less than to match her play for play.

“He intends letting the cat out of the bag tonight. But there will be nothing published for several days.”

“Thank you. I don’t know why, Mr. Detective, you are being so kind and telling me tales out of school.” She turned fully toward him and gave him one of her rare smiles, lifting her drooped eyelids enough to show two burning high-lights, like two stars under an edge of cloud. “I had to know how swift the sands were running away. Even you can’t speed them or retard them. And you wouldn’t if you could—for you have really seen me tonight for the first time,” she said, with the faint irony he was beginning to adore because in a more subtle and whimsical way, it counterbalanced his own. “May I?” She took a flower from a bowl on the table and broke it short for his buttonhole. At that moment he had regretfully to turn from her. Whittaker, at his elbow, was presenting the Crawfords.

V

ORDWAY BELKNAP O NADIA MDEVANI O O ROMANY MONTE VIDEO NEIL CRAWFORD O O MILTON DORN JULIAN PRENTICE O O HARTLEY BLAKE JOEL LACEY O O SYDNEY CRAWFORD O BERTRAND WHITTAKER

was the way they sat at dinner.

Belknap regretted Miss Video on his left. He was one of the few who had never been properly infatuated with the Romany patteran, as he privately named her for her continuous flow of inconsequential chatter, and had therefore never liked her. It was one thing or the other with Romany. She was a sylph-like creature with enormous eyes, an auburn Viennese bob, and a disingenuous manner. She ‘needed’ them, was the way men put it, first their friendship, then their protection, finally their passion. You couldn’t somehow let her down by disappointing her. They said she was weak and easily swayed, and each in turn flattered himself he could strengthen her philosophy against a bitter world (a world he helped to embitter, if he could but see it that way), and help her get on her feet. Yet somehow she had never mastered this art of walking alone!

Belknap, always irritated by willowy natures, now wished her in Kingdom Come. He wanted to renew the dangerous but charming intimacies that had swiftly and strangely sprung up between himself and Nadia Mdevani; and here would have been his opportunity, with Nadia beside him sending odd disturbing currents up the arm that almost brushed hers. He felt her mind being restive and wild, puzzled and angry, and above all keenly intent on a loophole of escape. If anyone else should succeed in silencing Whittaker forever it would not be because Nadia had yielded her designs but because she had delayed long enough to be cunning and intricate in their workmanship. She even seemed, now that the die was cast, rather to relish the added risk of having Belknap in the arena with her. Whittaker, asked for a description of Nadia, would have said the obvious things about raven locks and snowdrift skin, with eyes too revealing to go revealed. Belknap, after this evening, would have spoken of her in terms of a banked fire with a scent of brimstone. With less than half his exasperated attention given to Romany’s innumerable reasons, centering in jealousy, why she had not been assigned to lead in _After Midnight_, he glanced surreptitiously at Nadia. Her face, ivory white and immobile, signified nothing. He wondered whether he might be mistaken in thinking the atmosphere so heavily charged between them. His appraising eye passed down the table, appreciating beauty and distinction where he found it, and paused at Joel—dear Joel, not beautiful perhaps, but dear looking. Belknap, in his fashion, had loved her; but for his own bachelor’s sake (he was not an unselfish man), as well as for her youth’s sake, he had never spoken of it to her. Looking unwaveringly ahead into a night that might well be terrible for them all, he felt a particular pang for her. She was talking _sotto voce_ with Julian:

“Hush, dear, people are listening.”

“Then darling, more darling, most darling.”

“Don’t, _please_!”

“I want to see your amber eyes, not the back of a leaf-brown head.”

“Don’t say things like that at the table. Speak when you are spoken to.”

“Can’t you say something nice to me?”

She looked around at him, half tearful, half laughing, under her lashes.

“Oh, my dearest one, is it as bad as all that?”

“Worse, Joel, much worse.”

Of course it must be a dream, and a very bad one, that Whittaker had been saying things about cancer and murder and murderers. The more so when one looked at Whittaker himself, sitting genially, though perhaps with an extra dash of grey pallor, at the head of his board, lifting his champagne to touch glasses with Sydney Crawford: “To the lips, to the eyes.” The Stein song again! Would its revival never die? Yet it quite applied at Whittaker’s table tonight. Every woman in her way was as fair, as vital, as more than willing to play up, as any man could ask. Even Sydney, with a flash of challenging laughter at her husband, was returning Hartley Blake’s sallies in kind. Sydney was obviously fey tonight, with a heightened color, brighter eyes, and a recklessness of sentiment that might mean trouble. Had Neil and Romany failed in discretion?

Blake was in his usual excellent form; and it was plain to see thought his wit of too good a flavor to be entirely spent on a woman, even the excited Sydney. So he was tossing it by means of a slightly lifted voice up over his right shoulder at Dorn. Dorn however looked darkly unresponsive, and, being a man of few words, it seemed probable Blake would never know whether his delightful flippancies and exaggerations were being appreciated. Then, suddenly, he knew:

“As for myself,” Dorn remarked to his side-partners in particular, and to the table tangentially, “I have recently resolved to remain silent unless I feel that I can definitely contribute something worth while to the conversation. Time and energy are indiscriminately wasted in the futile, the repetitive, and the platitudinous. If we could hold our tongues until they were loosed by the real idea, the absolute necessity of speech, there would at least be a deal less noise, and quite possibly a return to the art of thinking which at present is a lost one.”

It was an insulting and uncalled for remark under the circumstances. Romany, who looked positively crestfallen for a change, perhaps needed a blunt rebuke (she wasn’t suppressed in a day), but Blake, though an inveterate talker, was a brilliant one. His high color showed such anger that the control of his first words was surprising.

“I should not only hold it, Dorn, I should bite it if I were you.”

The silence that fell in the room was deep and ominous. But in it was Whittaker’s opportunity, not only to distract Dorn and Blake, but to call attention to himself. Here, like Jason, he could cast his stone among the dragon’s teeth.

“I believe I _have_ a contribution to make to the conversation, to the evening’s pastime, and I hope to posterity.”

Belknap, without looking her way, knew that Nadia stiffened and straightened at the words. As for the others, their eyes turned to Whittaker expectantly, but with no premonitory awakening.

“I had planned letting you learn of what I intend when it had ceased to be an intention and become an actuality. In other words, you were only to know of the publication of my memoirs when you saw them in print. But I really can’t resist a little boasting in advance, and I thought I might read scraps of them after dinner to the assembled gathering, before we get down to bridge.”

“Oh, how wonderful of you, Uncle Bertrand,” Joel exclaimed, eager to help him, as she thought, tide over the embarrassing moment. “I didn’t know you were writing. You have so many irons in the fire, how _did_ you find time to do a book? But it must have been pretty good fun, so much has happened to you.”

“It isn’t recent, Joel; it’s been written at odd moments over a period of twenty years. In other words, it’s my Diary. But it _is_ packed full of material, and all sorts of things. Everybody’s in it. Oh yes, you are all there, my dears.”

“You talk like Red Riding Hood’s wolf, Bertrand,” Nadia said with cold acidity, and at her tone the first chill, like the first autumn frost, fell on them all. “Just what do you mean when you say we are in it?”

“Exactly that, Nadia darling. I hope you are in it to the life, as I’m sure I am.”

“You mean it is a character portrayal of your friends and foes as well as a revelation of your own nature—you sinner,” she added with bitter lightness.

“You express it in a nutshell.”

Blake spoke.

“By what right does one betray one’s friends—even in the cause of literature; and you will excuse me, Whittaker, if I doubt the literary merits of your pen.”

“By the modern right of giving the public what it craves and pays for: the revelation of evil, the worse the merrier. It used to be how I found the true light; now it is how I went plumb to Hell.”

“How you did perhaps, but not how I did.”

“In most instances one touches close upon the other, I’m afraid. It is a platitude of course (I ask your pardon, Dorn) to remark that we none of us can sin alone, but it is true nevertheless. Even the person that hears the tale of a crime is somehow affected. I feel the need of clearing my decks, of things heard and committed.”

“I doubt it would earn you a free pass through the pearly gates, supposing your proposed act comes off. Mark I say proposed.”

“Is that your glove, Blake? You must be able to get gloves at a discount.”

“My glove, yes, but not concealing the dagger beneath.”

“I’ll meet you where and when you please.”

“With Ordway Belknap as your second, I suppose? No, thank you; there are safer ways.”

“Then make it fast, man,” Whittaker cried in a suddenly broken voice as the dew of intense pain stood out on his forehead and he drooped a little forward over the table. “The time is short for both of us.”

“Quick, Mr. Belknap,” Nadia exclaimed, “Romany is fainting.”

It _would_ be Romany who took things the hardest.

VI

Half an hour later found the atmosphere of the library anything but comfortable—indeed strained almost to the breaking point. Whittaker’s slow poison was beginning to take effect. Ignoring the ominous rolling up of clouds, he had quietly but firmly gone ahead with the plan to read aloud a few pages of the Diary. With malicious casualness he had suggested the withdrawal of anyone who felt more in the mood for billiards or bridge: “You know the billiard room, Blake. Do get up a game if it suits you. There’s nothing particularly thrilling about an old man mumbling over his memories of other days. I merely thought one or two of you might prefer a moment’s pause in the day’s occupation that I could beguile, even if I put you asleep.” But, aside from Dorn who had excused himself directly after dinner with, “Doctors, you know, Whittaker. Frightfully sorry. I’ll try to get back tomorrow,” there was not one that had had the strength to keep away from the spider’s parlor. Though for a moment it had appeared that Belknap might follow Dorn’s example: “Come now, don’t tell me you’re off, too?” Whittaker’s tone half-mocked, half-threatened him as he stood indecisively in the hall toying with the door-latch. “Oh no,” Belknap had answered with impatient asperity. “Hardly that! I have a small contribution to make to the evening’s pleasure. It’s in the car. I’ll be back.” He was, in a jiffy, with several bottles of what he said was ’11 champagne, and which, as Whittaker knew, came from one of the finest cellars in New York.

But no one else turned even an attentive eye to the gift which Belknap was arranging with exaggerated care on the tray of crystal-bright decanters and dark-bright bottles. Curiosity, dread, and sheer hypnotism, combined to magnetize them into a rigid ensemble about Whittaker’s reading lamp. But it was a brittle, surface rigidity—like the first thin ice formed over moving water. Beneath it the twisting, roiling currents of agonized apprehension wore through and disturbed the dangerous stillness of the room. Nadia Mdevani’s puffs at her cigarette were too brief, and she flicked unformed ash too often. Blake in the corner ferociously over-shuffled a pack of cards. At the piano Romany’s fingers lacked control, and the snatches of song she attempted lost themselves in broken pitch. But she had at least recovered from her faintness, which she had apologetically laid to a week’s indulgence in late hours, and to cocktails for tea at Sands Point. Crawford was turning the leaves of _The Sportsman_, but with such erratic rapidity that he must have been unaware of what he saw. Only Julian and Joel, looking worlds at each other, plus suns and moons and stars, still seemed a little stupidly blind to what was happening.