Part 3

As Whittaker arranged his stage setting—chair and lamp just so, and a pillow at his back—the ritual of after-dinner coffee proceeded with its usual calm and efficiency. A robot maid, pretty and slim-figured in black and white, brought the service, and John passed the cups. He then quietly opened the windows of the terrace to the warm May night, asked his master was there anything further, and retired.

Whittaker cleared his throat; and the sound startled the room as thoroughly as though it had been a shot. It drew the line at conversation and movement. Across the stillness Whittaker’s first words assumed an enlarged importance.

“As I’ve told you, this is a day to day record of my life for the past twelve or fifteen years.” By a motion of his hand he indicated to them a thick, flexible, thin-paper notebook, bound in tooled suède. “Tonight I am taking a leaf from a day two years ago, June 19, 1929. I recall the day vividly; and I can quite imagine that Markham does. (We’ll say Markham—the real name needn’t figure until we go into print.)

“‘Markham called me early this evening to say he must see me immediately. I was engaged for a theatre party, and did not wish to disappoint my hostess, but Markham was obstinate and I yielded. He lives only a matter of minutes from Thorngate. When he appeared it was more than obvious that something was wrong. He was pale, his eyes bloodshot, and his voice somewhere in his shoes. It seems he is being blackmailed on two counts, an old one and a new one; the new one being a mistress, and therefore dangerous to his family; the old one being a strange case of murder, and therefore more dangerous to himself. It is the murder that I consider worth recounting.

“‘Markham is the son, only son, of old Markham who once broke the bank at Monte Carlo. There is wildness in the family. The boy grew up higgledy-piggledy in a part of New York that was rapidly changing from good to bad and bad to worse. Watched with less than half an eye by a succession of uninvestigated nurses and governesses, when they could be afforded at all, Markham naturally and easily became a member of a boy’s gang in the block; and this gang of children grew up to be the real thing. He was not able to break with them, even if he had cared to do so. They bled his father by way of him. They led him by gradual stages into mischief, into badness and into sin. The day came when, owing one too many grand to some card racketeers working the steamship lines to Havana, he was ready to accept payment for murder.

“‘A jet-black night in midwinter found him entering an apparently abandoned shack in a lonely curve of the Hackensack on the barren flats outside Newark. Nothing for miles but snow-drifted meadows and a black river turgidly rolling seaward.’”

“A style worthy of the American Institute,” Julian murmured to Joel, “where vocabulary counts—I mean wordiness.”

“Hush, Julian! Your uncle’s a member.”

“That’s how I know.”

“‘The single room, into which Markham crept upward by way of a loose floor board, reeked of stale tobacco smoke, soiled clothes, and an odd sweet odor that he had long ago learned to recognize as opium. Knife in hand, he settled against the wall near the locked door to await his victim’s home-coming. There were mice about. He identified mice. And a branch blowing against the window-pane. That was easy. But there was another sound, persistent and regular—like, like breathing. Breathing! Good God, it _was_ breathing. The smuggler wasn’t abroad smuggling, according to plan. The cold sweat broke out on Markham’s palms and forehead. Were they each crouching in the dark waiting the other’s move? The next scuttle of a mouse shattered his flesh and bones like a blow. He was goose-flesh from head to foot, including his scalp which pained him with its effort to lift his hair.’”

“You see he thought his goose was cooked,” was Julian’s next aside to Joel. Something was at last beginning to take place in Julian. Belknap saw a little sleepy devil waking in him that might not always prove easy to deal with.

“‘The man on the bed moved; lay still; shifted again. There was nothing for it but to strike. He sprang and struck: and drove the little knife up to his hand in something soft. He was saying tonight that a knife murder is not so good for the murderer whatever it may be to the murdered. He says the physical sensations will last him for life: the scraping of the blade on a bone, its spongy sinking home in a vital part, the sudden sagging of the body under one’s own tensity, and the last gasping gurgling breath against the face. Markham had never seen this man’s face, never would see it; but he would remember the feeling of the unshaven chin and the small, fat body; and the smell of sweated clothes mingling with the warm smell of fresh blood——’”

“If you don’t mind, Whittaker,” Crawford said in an inhuman voice, “I should like a glass of water. May I ring?” He tried to rise, staggered, and said, “Help me, Sydney.”

It seemed that Sydney had not heard him or was unable to move. She didn’t stir, or move her eyes. But Romany, from a huddled, shivering figure on the divan, came to life and ran to him.

“Durian, Neil, my beloved, my only love. What is he doing to you? I can’t bear it. I won’t let him do things like this—I don’t care—”

Romany didn’t finish—Sydney had heard, and had struck Romany a blow that threw her against the table. Nadia was laughing terribly as Blake came across toward Whittaker with murder on his face.

“Now by all that’s holy or unholy, you have overstepped the bounds, Bertrand Whittaker—”

Whether he ever reached Whittaker remained in doubt for at that moment the room was plunged in total darkness. Someone screamed—a woman. There was a scuffle and a thud. A man groaned. Belknap cried out: “Stay where you are as you value your lives.” They heard him feeling the wall for the switch, and then there was light.

In it Whittaker lay back half conscious in his chair, bleeding at the forehead. The others stood in oddly arrested positions like the players of ten-step on the count of ten. And the Diary was gone.

VII

As a ditch drains at the opening of a sluice, leaves and twigs sucked one by one, slow at first then rapidly, down the outward current, the library drained of guests, silently, furtively, slow almost to the door, swift as the need to escape the room, the others, and their own astounding collapse under sudden stress, dragged them away. When the last of them had disappeared, Belknap, with John’s aid, helped Bertrand Whittaker to his room. They paused at his threshold. For the moment there seemed nothing to say. Both perhaps felt the effects of a certain, for them, anti-climax to the evening’s events—something rather hollow, almost something ridiculous, in the situation. Whittaker felt let down. Belknap ugly and impatient.

“How’s the head?” Belknap asked stiffly.

“Quite all right, thanks,” Whittaker answered with equal stiffness. “Won’t you come in?”

“No. Not now. There’s too much in the affrighted air. Get some sleep if you can. Though perhaps you think you’ll get plenty of that soon enough. Well, you’ve started the ball rolling with a vengeance, haven’t you? Satisfied? God, Whittaker, hadn’t you better cry quits? It isn’t too late. Tell ’em it was a practical joke; and ask Crawford’s pardon on the side. You see for yourself it isn’t going to be so daisy simple. _A_ murder! We’ll be lucky if it’s only half a dozen. There was no lovelight in any one’s eyes this evening, except in that poor little goose of a Joel’s. And she went upstairs looking withered. Slice this house from garret to cellar right now and it would make as pretty a Desire Under the Elms cross-section as you could find in a day’s journey.”

“The desire being to get me, huh?” Whittaker asked grimly.

“Exactly. If only whoever gets you would just please make a thorough job of it. Who do you think tried it?”

“Haven’t a ghost; have you? Thought it was going to be the Colonel somehow. But the blow didn’t quite come from his direction. Still, he may have swung around me in the dark. It was a nasty knock, I think with metal, but glancing. That’s what saved me.”

“Whittaker, you _are_ a cool one. Wish I could match you tonight. But there are moments when I don’t like it. Change your mind?”

“_Never!_ No, as I said before, if you don’t like the game, get out. I’ll find a detective to whom it _will_ be a challenge to the best work that’s in him.”

“And _I_ will never get out. You know that; you know it only too well, you old reprobate. Filthy as the weather looks ahead, catch me refusing to go through it, if it’s there to go through. Well, while we linger here the plot undoubtedly thickens. I’d best get a move-on. Good-by—for the moment.”

“Good-by, and good-hunting,” Whittaker said as he turned away, leaning more heavily on John’s arm. Closing his door he murmured “Ah!” on a breath, meaning, if he had troubled to say all he meant, “Well, well, see what we have here.”

Romany Video, in a great fluff of feathery negligee, lay face downward, a vibrant, hysterical puff-ball, on the bed. She was a mere speck of worried humanity troubling the white waste spaces of Whittaker’s four-poster; but an insistent speck, like a mosquito at a screen. Whittaker regarded her for a moment with an expression of mingled amusement, pity, contempt, and the faintly suggestive what-can-I-do-for-you look certain men always have for a fair damsel in distress. Thoroughly as Whittaker knew this particular damsel, no distress of hers would quite leave him indifferent.

But he took his time. There was no harm ever came in letting a woman wait—or weep. He said nothing. Sitting on the edge of the bed, as though Romany were not there, he let John help him exchange his pair of patent-leather for a pair of pigskin slippers, remove his dinner-coat and stiff shirt, and slip his green silk dressing-gown over his shoulders. Romany, properly responsive to the delayed attention, redoubled her sobbing.

“Thank you, John. That’ll do for now. No, don’t bother about my head. It’s hardly more than a mean bruise. I’ll call you later if I want you. Good-night.”

Whittaker, allowing John to depart, silently studied the trembling, haired-up curls of Romany’s dishevelled head. Then, on the click of the latch, he leaned across and touched her arm.

“Come, come, little one. What’s it all about? You’re taking it too hard. I’m sorry it had to be Crawford to begin with—for your sake. But you’ll get over him, if you have time, as you got over me. As you got over Blake. How did Blake let you get over him?”

“Oh, go away, you horrid, mean thing. I can’t bear you. Don’t _talk_ to me. Don’t you _dare_ touch me.”

“As bad as all that? Dear, dear! You’re taking him harder than you took most of us. You like them good, is that it? Gives you something to do making them over.”

“You bad man! How can you say such things to me? How _can_ you, after all we’ve been to each other? You used never to do anything to hurt me. And look at you now. What _has_ happened, Bertrand dear? It’s such a cruel world. I can’t bear it. I tell you, I can’t. I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to _die_, Bertrand.”

“My dear, for the first time of the hundred and one you’ve made that threat, there’s a chance of it’s coming off,” Whittaker said, and said the one thing in creation that, instead of aggravating them, could have stopped Romany’s hysterics dead in their tracks. Romany was quiet; desperately quiet. She lifted her head from the foam of maribou and looked at Whittaker with wide, distraught eyes, and parted lips.

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

“What I say,” he mocked her whisper by imitating it. “Even if you escape tonight, Romany (for death, whose name you so often take in vain, is on the _qui vive_ in the house tonight), you have Durian’s death to answer for.”

Romany screamed, and throttled the scream with her hand across her mouth.

“Bertrand! You are going—to tell—_that_? You’ve written it down as you wrote about Neil?”

“I have.”

“Oh, no-no-no-no. Please, no. I don’t believe it.”

“Then wait and see. But hope isn’t dead yet, Freckles. (Let me see; yes, there’s your one freckle that made me call you Freckles. Remember?) I’ll have to find the Diary, or rewrite it,—unless, of course, I—”

“Oh, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” Romany bounced back into her hair, her maribou, and the rumpled pillows.

“_Don’t_ say that!” he cried dramatically. And Romany caught at a straw. She sat up again.

“You care?” she said. “You _do_ care. Oh, Bertrand, _why_ are you making me suffer so? I don’t understand. _Darling_, is it because you’re jealous?” She threw both arms recklessly around his neck and clung to him with the wild strength of a drowning person. “Did he think his little Romany had really gone away and left him? Did he think she cared about all the other mans? Why, his poor little girl only thought the big man had got tired of her. She did, darling. Truly, she did.”

Whittaker slowly and carefully, with all the force of his hands, disengaged her arms, but, once disengaged, he found his own of necessity engaged in holding her.

“Brat!” he said, on a low, half-laugh, and kissed her lightly.

“Oh,” she breathed with a relieved sigh that rose, softly, from the bottom of her heart. “It’s so long since you called me that. I love it. How _silly_ of us to quarrel, Bertrand. And be jealous! After all these years. To think you could ever have been so cruel as to pretend to tell about Durian to bring me back. Couldn’t you have found a pleasanter way, darling?”

Whittaker regarded her obliquely through half-shut eyes.

“What about Crawford?” he asked.

She had the grace to color.

“Poor Neil,” she murmured. “But that’s for him to take care of, isn’t it?”

“I see it is.” She felt him shiver, but misinterpreted it.

“Happy?” she asked.

“The Devil has that reputation.”

He felt her take alarm again, with a defensive stiffening. She laughed shakily.

“Naughty boy! You’re being sarcastic.”

“Am I?”

Suddenly, Romany sprang away from him and stood trembling from head to foot, and chattering with uncontrolled and unexpected rage.

“You are go-go-_going_ to tell.” She stuttered feverishly. “You are going to tell on all of us. You r-really mean it. Don’t you? D-don’t you?”

“Ah, you’ve figured it out, have you? Yes, I’m telling. How often must I say it to get it through your pretty head?”

“You brute! You beast! You—,” like a spoilt child Romany stamped. “You’re a hateful, cruel, wicked man. You can’t do it. Just you try. No one will let you. You’ll be killed first. You can’t do it to me, do you hear. I’ll kill you myself. You’ve got to leave me alone. Leave me _alone_. What do you think I killed him for? Because he betrayed me, didn’t I? And what are you doing to me? Betraying me, too. You look out, Bertrand Whittaker. There’s nothing I’ll stop at if I’m roused. No, not even murder.”

Whittaker shed Romany’s tantrum as a duck sheds water.

“Histrionics, baby,” he said. “You never can get far away from them, can you? Fifth-rate quotations from sixth-rate melodrama. Not that I don’t wish you meant your big threat. I do. But if you really mean to kill me, don’t shout about it. The house is listening, if I know the house. Do it on the quiet. Now run away home to your room, child, and think it over. I’ll drop in later, if I may, and get the results. Pity I haven’t the poor old diary by me and I’d mark you the passages about yourself. They’re quite thrilling. Make you out a sort of Medici, of the willow-wand variety. You should be honored.” Romany swayed. “Don’t faint, my dear, _again_. You do it too often. It’s becoming a vicious habit. The thing for you to do is to get to bed.” Whittaker worked her gently toward the door. “Goodnight—sleep tight—wake up—”

Romany drew away from him with a shudder. Wrapping her gown tightly about her with a pathetic little gesture of pride and courage, she flung a parting shot from the doorway.

“And don’t think you’re the only one that can tell tales out of school, Bertrand Whittaker. I’ll match you revelation for revelation if it comes to the book of revelations. You’ll have a tall lot of explaining to do to the law if I let—.”

She was in the hall, and had dropped her voice. Whittaker failed to catch a name she gave.

“Who’s that you’ll let the world know about?” he shouted.

Romany put her dust-mop head back into the room.

“_Just you guess!_ And I hope you die of fright,” she hissed, and, turtle-wise, withdrew the head.

VIII

Julian, in dressing gown and slippers, sank back in the deep arm-chair before the fire burning in his room, and gave himself up to being downright worried. The situation at Thorngate seemed to him bewildering, terrifying, and positively insane, by turns. Obviously there was far more real trouble in the wind than the immediate problem of his own predicament, though heaven knew that was bad enough, largely because of Joel. However he was in a sense relieved and glad that Joel was to know. He had never yet been able to figure out a way to tell her about himself, but now this came along to settle the matter for him: she was bound to know, willy-nilly.

Why, _why_ had he ever told Bertrand Whittaker of all people? No one would have ever been any the wiser if he had kept his mouth shut that warm evening last summer when his conscience was eating him alive, together with the mosquitoes, and he had asked Whittaker what to do about it. Whittaker had said, “Oh, forget it, boy. It won’t do you, or Roger Dane, or Roger’s family any good to come out with it.” Then why was Whittaker so thoroughly airing it now? Or was he? Perhaps he considered Julian’s hot-headed crime of too light a weight to bother with in his gruesome Diary. But Julian felt that it was playing ostrich on his part to rely on such a hope. For a man is known by the company he keeps. And it began to be desperately certain that the house was full to the gables of murderers in one degree or another. Both Blake and Dorn had been too quick on the rise to speak well for themselves. Romany Monte Video and Neil Crawford had blown to bits under a little pressure. And the Diary had been of sufficient importance for someone to have already attempted murder for its sake. Murder to cover murder. What a weird and preposterous household it was proving to be. What was Bertrand Whittaker’s motive in assembling it unless he was playing a losing game with death? If Crawford were not so chicken-hearted he would have avenged tonight’s dreadful betrayal before now. He might get around to it yet. Some of the rankest cowards in an open fight have been known to be excellent stabbers-in-the-back. And if everyone else had a secret murder in his past, whoever got away with the Diary was getting a wonderful thrill—probably reading it now by flashlight in a cupboard or under the shrubbery (one of Julian’s most persistent fears was that Dorn, instead of having gone straight up to town, was haunting the grounds with murder in his heart), trembling at every creak of the floor or rustle of leaves.

Whittaker’s chances of seeing his scheme through appeared slim enough to Julian: but even should he fail to see a rewritten version of his Diary in print, he had already, by one evening’s work, made a rotten mess of at least six lives. Neil and Sydney and Romany could no longer ignore their situation; whatever was between them would from now on be an open wound. Belknap would have definite proof of at least one crime and the criminal behind it. Whether, in view of the preposterous and unfair circumstances, he would decently ignore Crawford’s guilt was a doubtful question. Romany had fainted dead away when the Diary was first mentioned, and later had lost her head and confused the names of Neil Crawford and that lover of hers, with the crazy name of Durian, who had been accidently killed in one of her plays—why, of _course_, he _hadn’t_ been accidentally killed, that was just it. What a fool he was not to have thought of it before? So now he had three murderers accounted for: Crawford, Romany, and himself. As for Nadia, she looked the part of a poisoner to the letter. Dorn had clearly run away from something. With Blake it probably all depended on your definition of a duel.

But then there was Joel! Something must be wrong with his whole figuring, or Joel wouldn’t be where she was. Surely Whittaker wouldn’t include an innocent niece in a crime wave unless there were others as innocent to make it proper. Julian smiled at his own charming conceit. But it might be that Whittaker was so intent on crushing the alliance between himself and Joel that he was taking drastic measures to acquaint Joel with her lover’s villainy. He _must_ see Joel. He must see her before things developed beyond anyone’s control, as they were rapidly doing.

He jumped to his feet and almost out of his skin at a tapping on an inner door of his room that led God knew where. Should he lie low and gaze hypnotized at the door knob, or shout boldly “Come in,” or open the door suddenly and take the intruder off his guard? Julian had by now strung himself up to such a pitch that his own murder wouldn’t in the least have surprised him. Before he could decide on a course of action the door quietly opened and Joel appeared in a flowing blue robe. All his breath deserted him at the vision of her in his room.

“Joel!” he whispered.

“Yes, dear, I’m on the other side of the door, with the key on my side. Must be more plot in that, don’t you think? If we fall any deeper into trouble than we have fallen already—I mean if it comes to calling the police or something—there’ll be a scandal about the connecting door between the rooms of Mr. Julian Prentice and his fiancée. Fiancée my eye, it will suggest! And if, hearing a shot, we should dash into the hall, it would add that we were seen emerging from the young gentleman’s room, in negligee, at—” she glanced at her wrist watch—“at 12:30 A.M. The fact that I am marking the time, with you as witness, may prove frightfully important. It _is_ late, isn’t it?”

“Very, yes.” Julian’s over-emotion at Joel’s nearness showed itself in understatement and a boyish stiffness that made Joel love him beyond anything. “Come and sit here, won’t you? While I stir this fire. What _are_ you doing out so late, dear heart?”

“I did a little listening and snooping in the halls and found everybody else doing likewise. So I naturally can’t sleep. The house is fairly creeping, Julian. I wish it would get to its feet and walk off. Perhaps in the sense of very strong cheese, it will eventually. Oh dear, I’m so tired, and therefore a little silly, as you see, darling.”

“I don’t wonder—that you’re tired I mean. Here, put your feet on this cushion and let me warm your hands that are so cold. Tell me, Joel, what do you think your uncle is up to; what is he doing to everybody, including himself?”

“I don’t know; truly, Julian, I don’t know, and I don’t care what he is doing to himself and all the others but us. But I do care dreadfully what he does to you and me, and I have come to see whether we can’t, you and I, pass a magic wand over ourselves to keep out his evil genius and whatever it’s leading to. That we may even begin to do it, I realize I must be very brave and tell you about myself. We can’t in the face of things leave any stone unturned between us.”

Julian looked up at her with a swift, tender smile.

“Now you are going to tell me _you_ have committed murder, too,” he said.

“Julian, be still; don’t be amused. Yes, I am going to tell you that I have committed murder. I have. But listen, please; don’t laugh that way. I can’t bear it.”