The Black House in Harley Street/Chapter 6

Don't go away, you boys," said Dr. van Mildart, in a rapid aside to Goulburn and Christopher as Pimpery ushered the visitors into the library. "Stay where you are, and you will have some fun."

The Countess of Maxton came into the room as if she were the heroine of some transpontine melodrama—that is to say, she made a rapid entry in tragic and perfect silence, with outstretched arms and clasped hands, her eyes full of tears, her face distraught with grief, her whole attitude that of a penitent suing for mercy at the knees of an irate parent. Coming to within a foot or two of Dr. van Mildart, she wrung her hands and rolled her eyes towards the ceiling.

"Oh, Dr. van Mildart!" she burst out. "Oh, Dr. van Mildart! Pardon this intrusion—so abrupt—so untimely; but you have, of course, heard our terrible news. Can you not give us some advice?—you, who are so clever, who know so much. We are in the deepest distress. Aren't we, Freddie dear? Freddie, this is Dr. van Mildart."

"How d'yer do—how d'yer do!" said the Earl of Maxton, who had followed closely upon his wife's ​heels, and was now struggling to fix a monocle in his right eye. "Awfully pleased, I'm sure. D'lighted if you could give us a tip about gettin' on to those infern—chaps, you know, who've got our diamonds. Monstrous bad business, you know, losin' diamonds worth two-fifty thou'. Heirlooms too, begad!"

"Except the dear darling necklace you gave me when we were married, Freddie dear!" said Lady Maxton.

"Oh, ah, yes, of course," assented Lord Maxton, in tones which seemed to imply that he didn't attach very much importance to that particular fact.

"If your ladyship will be seated," said Dr. van Mildart, drawing forward his most comfortable—and appropriate—chair. "Pray, my lord, take a seat. Yes," he continued, "I have read some account of your loss in the newspapers—it is indeed a very serious matter, and a most mysterious one. I cannot understand it."

"'Zactly what I say," said the Earl. "Doosed queer, I call it. Licks anythin' I ever heard of, eh? Saw the confounded things safely locked up with me own eyes, begad! Didn't I, Dolly?"

"You did, Freddie," assented Lady Maxton, "you did."

"Course I did. With me own eyes. Can't doubt yer own eyes, can yah?" said the Earl, who, having succeeded in fixing his monocle, now glared all round about him as if anxious to encounter some one who would dare to contradict him. His glance fell upon Goulburn and Christopher, and he screwed up his other eye in an ​effort to see them more clearly. "Friends of yours?" he said, turning to Dr. van Mildart.

"My friend Mr. Richard Goulburn and Mr. Christopher Aspinall," said the doctor, with a ceremonious bow.

"How d'yer do—how d'yer do!" said Lord Maxton. "Beastly hot weather, ain't it? Time we all got out o' this—I want to get a bit o' salmon-fishin' in before the twelfth. Small chance o' that now, though. Confounded p'lice say we shall have to stop in town awhile longer, begad!"

Lady Maxton heaved a profound sigh, and, conscious of an audience, fell into a pathetic attitude.

"Well, there's nothing but trouble in this world, Freddie," she said. "We all have our share of it, and it must be borne with patience."

It seemed to Mr. Christopher Aspinall, who had something of a weakness for studying the peerage, that if anybody's paths had ever been made smooth for them it was the two creatures whom he was now studying with as much curiosity as an entomologist studies a new specimen of the beetle tribe. The Right Honourable Charles William Frederick Fitzwalter, tenth Earl of Maxton, was one of the wealthiest, as he was also one of the most amiably stupid, members of the peerage. A big, fair-haired, mild-blue-eyed, fresh-coloured, open-mouthed, high-nosed, small-chinned giant of six feet, he could scarcely spell or write his own name, and certainly never read anything but Ruff's Guide and the ​sporting newspapers. He had taken his seat in the House of Lords on his succession to the title, and had solemnly vowed, on his return from that ceremony, that he would never enter the infernal place again unless he was absolutely compelled to. He would have been hard put to it to tell you, if questioned off-hand, which political party was in power, and would certainly have fallen asleep if you had read him a leader out of the Times. But he could handle the ribbons as cleverly as Selby, himself; had shot big game in Canada and tigers in India; was well known in the Shires as one of the boldest and straightest of riders; had done some noteworthy things in salmon-fishing; and was undeniably one of the best judges of horse-flesh (more by instinct than by scientific knowledge) in England. His manners were usually those of a superior stable-boy, and he was as dense as any rustic on his numerous estates so far as all the finer things of life went; but he was kindly-hearted, simple and unaffected.

As for the Countess of Maxton, whom her husband had married out of a country parsonage wherein he had spent some weeks with a broken leg, she was as well known in London as the lions in Trafalgar Square. As she had no children she went in for fads. Sometimes it was this, sometimes it was that. She had invented two new dances and an original riding habit. She had instituted several sorts of social reform amongst the poor, and had once lived a whole week in two rooms in Bethnal Green. She had given her approval and patronage to various forms of fancy religion, and had ​upon one occasion introduced to society an Eastern prophet who finally disappeared with a goodly amount of portable property from the Earl's town residence. The Earl, who was genuinely fond of her in his way, let her do exactly what she pleased. Her present fad was to study what she called the emotion of the nervous system, and Dr. van Mildart was her prophet. She had no guile in her, and was nothing more nor less than a fluffy-haired, feather-brained, pretty little fool.

"But I do not see what I can do to help you, Lady Maxton," Dr. van Mildart was saying.

Lady Maxton regarded the doctor with the air of a devotee.

"Oh, but you are so clever, Dr. van Mildart!" she said. "I'm sure you can do something for us if you only will. Couldn't you suggest who it is that has stolen the diamonds?"

"My dear lady!" exclaimed the doctor, "I have not the power of seeing into the unknown."

"'Zactly what I said," remarked the Earl. "Told you so, Dolly. Quite impossible to expect medical man to do such a thing."

Lady Maxton, however, was not satisfied. She made a little mouth, expressive of disappointment.

"Ah, but you do believe in second-sight, and thoughtreading, and crystal-gazing, and all that sort of thing, doctor, now don't you?" she said. "And just look how you cured me of the most frightful headache one day by merely telling me that I hadn't got it!"

​"That," said Dr. van Mildart, "is quite another matter."

Lady Maxton twisted her rings round and round her slim fingers.

"I believe you could suggest something if you liked to do so," she said. "The police are so stupid—aren't they, Freddie?"

"Awful rotters," agreed Lord Maxton. "Don't believe they'll ever find anything out. Clean sweep, yah know. Doosed queer, all the same."

Dr. van Mildart, who had been walking about the library as if in deep thought, came to a halt in front of Lady Maxton, and spoke.

"I will tell you what I can do, Lady Maxton," he said—"that is, if you and Lord Maxton really wish it. I know a medium who is decidedly clairvoyant, and whom I have known to do some very remarkable things. If she can get any insight, she might be able to tell you something. She lives close by here-shall I send for her? What does your lordship say?"

"Oh, I don't mind!" answered the Earl. "Don't believe in that sort of thing meself, yah know—all fudge, in my opinion. However, don't say other people don't see something in it. Dolly there does—eh?"

"Oh yes, do let us have this medium, Dr. van Mildart!" exclaimed Lady Maxton. "I shall love it. And she may tell us something. Freddie is a dear old stupid about such things, but I'm not. Why, I once saw some wonderful things by looking into a crystal—quite astonishing. Do send for the lady at once."

​"Very well," said the doctor. "I will telephone for her. In the meantime, Lady Maxton, I will fetch my niece, Miss Phillimore, and my assistant, Miss Lamotte, whom you know. But you must understand that I cannot guarantee that this lady can tell you anything—we shall see."

When Moira and Miss Lamotte came to the library the seven people left there during the doctor's absence at the telephone formed themselves into couples as if by instinct, Maisie, Christopher, and the Earl made common cause in one corner; Lady Maxton and Miss Lamotte in another; Goulburn and Moira got together in the deep window looking into the conservatory.

"What is going on?" she asked, in a low voice. "Something unusual?"

"Lady Maxton wants your uncle to give her some sort of supernatural help about her lost diamonds," he answered. "He has sent for a medium, who is, he says, very clever, to see if she can give Lady Maxton any satisfaction."

"Do you believe in that sort of thing?" asked Moira. Goulburn shook his head.

"No," he said, "frankly, I don't. But really I know nothing about it, so perhaps I am wrong in saying that I don't. I ought to know more of it before saying that I believe or not."

"I hate anything of that sort!" she said vehemently. "I never could bear it—it seems wicked to me. I don't even like hypnotism. By the bye, you know that my uncle is a very skilful hypnotist?"

​"Yes," replied Goulburn. "He cured Maisie of neuralgia by what I suppose was hypnotic suggestion."

"Cured Maisie! I did not know that," she said, looking, he thought, a little uncomfortable as well as surprised. "It is a tremendous power to possess," she added reflectively.

"Yes," agreed Goulburn. "Fancy how it might be abused. But never mind that now—when can I see you, Moira, alone?"

"To-morrow, I suppose," she answered. "Take me somewhere, and then we can talk."

"I want to know what you meant this morning," he said. "You seemed to me to be troubled."

"I am uneasy about something," she admitted. "We will speak of it to-morrow—see, here is my uncle with his medium. What an odd-looking creature!"

Dr. van Mildart reëntered the room in company with a young woman of apparently eight-and-twenty years of age, and of an appearance which could scarcely have failed to excite comment and attract attention wherever she went. She was a good deal above the average height, and of a remarkable degree of thinness; her garments, fashioned in very æsthetic style, clung about her as draperies would cling about a stick. Her face, very long and pale, was chiefly noticeable for the largeness of her eyes, which were dark and shadowy and set far back beneath her level brows, over which a profusion of black hair fell negligently. She was so very thin, and so gliding in her movements, that she looked as much like a ghost as a human being, and ​created an uncanny impression on such philistine minds as those of Lord Maxton and Goulburn, neither of whom had ever seen anything exactly like her before. As for Lady Maxton, she immediately evinced all the joys of a new sensation.

"Allow me to introduce Madame Astradente, Lady Maxton," said Dr. van Mildart.

"How do you do?" said Lady Maxton gushingly. "It's so good of you to try to help me, and I'm certain you're awfully clever. You can look into the unseen, can't you?"

Madame Astradente, who had replied to Lady Maxton's greeting with a cool and careless nod, sank into an easy-chair and disposed her draperies.

"At times—yes; at times—no," she replied, in a deep voice which was scarcely compatible with her extreme thinness.

"Oh, I hope you will be successful with me!" said Lady Maxton. "What will you do? Will you hold my hand, or put yours on my forehead, or gaze into a crystal, or what? I have had all those things done at one time or another, but I never had anything very serious told me."

"Give me your hand," said Madame Astradente. "I am acquainted with the facts of your case, and I wish to see if the presence of some inimical individuality in your chamber on the night of your loss has been impressed upon your mind and has left as it were a photograph of itself there."

"How clever!" said Lady Maxton, resigning her ​bejewelled fingers. "Freddie—do you hear what she says? She thinks there must have been somebody hidden in my bedroom the other night."

"Rummy business altogether, begad!" commented Lord Maxton. "Of course, there might have been, yah know—lots o' places where a fellow could hide."

Lady Maxton shuddered with horror at the thought, while Madame Astradente, who was now holding her ladyship's right hand between both her own, fixed her great cavernous eyes on the ceiling, and seemed to look through it to the stars. The others came up and formed a group about these two. Madame took no notice of them. After some little time spent in holding Lady Maxton's hand and in contemplating the ceiling, she frowned and shook her head.

"It is strange," she said. "I am in a room, and yet I cannot see anything in it. There is something alive—human—in that room. But it is not your room, nor a bedroom at all. Ah, now I am beginning to see it—just as if one saw in the deepest twilight. It is a good-sized room with two windows, and there is a large dressing-table between them, and large clothes-presses around the walls. There is a big boot-rack with scores of pairs of boots and shoes."

"It's your dressing-room, Freddie!" said Lady Maxton, in an awestruck whisper.

"Begad, so it is, Dolly," replied the Earl. "Um! I wonder how she does it?"

"There is a stand, or a table, in a recess," continued ​Madame Astradente, still seeking inspiration in the ceiling, "and on it there is a small safe."

"Quite right, quite right," commented the Earl. "So there is. Queer how she knows it, begad!"

Madame Astradente was silent for some little time, and her dark brows drew themselves into vertical lines. At last, when everybody was waiting in hushed silence to hear what she would say next—

"There is something materialising in the twilight," she said. "It is a hand—a human hand."

"A human hand! How awful!" said the Countess.

"I cannot see the body to which it belongs," continued Madame Astradente. "It is a woman's hand. It is on the door of the safe."

This announcement caused Lady Maxton to thrill with horror and Lord Maxton to fix his monocle more tightly in his eye in order that he might stare at Madame in astonishment.

"Now, I wonder whose hand that could have been?" he said. "A woman's, begad!"

"It is a very pretty, slender hand," Madam Astradente went on. "Ah, I can see more clearly now—yet I see nothing but the hand on the door of the safe. I———"

She suddenly withdrew her fixed gaze from the ceiling and looked round the circle of expectant faces with an air of surprised displeasure.

"Please to retire," she said icily. "What I have now to say is for her ladyship's ear alone."

​When the audience had gone to its various corners, Madame Astradente bent toward the Countess and made a whispered communication to her, the effect of which was startling in the extreme. Lady Maxton gave voice to a slight scream, became very red and then very white, and almost snatched her hand away from the clairvoyant's grasp.

"Oh!" she said. "Impossible, Madame! Oh, Freddie, Freddie, come here at once. She says it was my hand she saw, because it had got that old iron ring that I always sleep in for luck."

"That is what I see," said Madame offendedly. "I know nothing of your ladyship's iron ring. I see a female hand on the door of a safe; on the third finger of it is an iron ring with the device of two circles intertwining within a square."

"Oh!" exclaimed Lady Maxton once more. "Oh—oh! That's my ring."

Madame Astradente shrugged her shoulders.

"I will retire," she said, glancing at the doctor. "I shall not see any more."

Dr. van Mildart came forward.

"Perhaps, Lady Maxton, you had put on your lucky ring before you placed the diamonds in their case in the safe?" he suggested. "The memory of your hand unlocking the safe may still linger strongly in your consciousness and lead Madame to see what she has described."

"But I never did put the jewels in the safe," said Lady Maxton, who was inclined towards tears. "Fred​die did that—didn't you, Freddie? And I remember now that I didn't wear my iron ring that night because I was awfully tired and forgot it. And I don't want to hear any more, because it looks as if I were going to be accused of stealing my own diamonds when she says that she saw my hand on the safe; and somebody may think that I've got debts and things, and have had to pawn them or sell them; and I think we'll go home," she concluded, with a glance at Madame Astradente which that lady received with cold indifference.

"Don't seem to get much farther, cert'nly," said Lord Maxton. "Have to try back, I suppose. Queerest business I ever knew."

When the doctor had seen the Earl and Countess into their brougham and Madame Astradente into a cab, he returned to the library, to find that the three ladies had gone back to the drawing-room, and that Goulburn and Christopher were alone and thoughtful. Dr. van Mildart smiled upon them.

"I told you you would have some fun," he said.

Goulburn looked at his host with some curiosity.

"How much do you believe in that sort of thing, doctor?" he asked.

Dr. van Mildart stroked his beard meditatively.

"There are a great many psychic powers of which we know next to nothing," he said. "We are still on the very threshold."

"You think that Madame Astradente really saw a hand which she identified as Lady Maxton's?"

"I think that Lady Maxton was very probably ​anxious about her jewels that night, and that it is quite possible that she left her bed and her room and went into her husband's dressing-room to feel if the safe was really locked, and that that fact had been so impressed upon her mind that it is still there, and could therefore be seen by Madame Astradente."

"But Lady Maxton says that she didn't wear the ring that night," remarked Chris.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

"Lady Maxton is not a very well-dowered woman in either brains or memory," he said. "She probably slipped on her ring from mere force of habit. Women of her peculiar temperament often walk in their sleep."

"What do you think is the real secret of this robbery, doctor?" asked Chris. "I know you've studied that sort of thing."

Dr. van Mildart lighted a cigar and blew out a curling wisp of fragrant tobacco smoke.

"I'll tell you what I think of it," he said quietly. "I think it's the work of a brilliantly clever gang of criminals who will not be caught. You will see that the Maxton diamonds will never be heard of again. From what I read in the newspapers, it seems certain that there is no clue. The thing was as cleverly executed as it was cleverly planned."

"Wouldn't it seem as if some members of the gang had intimate knowledge of Lord Maxton's house and of his custom as regards keeping the diamonds in the safe when they were not at the bank?" asked Goulburn.

​"Oh, I should say so," agreed the doctor. "It will be interesting to watch the doings of the police in this affair."

And then, yawning, as if he were tired of that subject, he began to talk about something else, and, having finished his cigar, proposed that they should go to the drawing-room for some music. He himself played the violin very finely, and Moira was a brilliant pianist.

"That is much better than bearing one's soul in patience while Lady Maxton vents her sillinesses upon one," he said smilingly, after he and Moira had played a duet.

"I dare say poor Lady Maxton doesn't consider it silly, though, to try to recover her diamonds," said Moira.

In this opinion Goulburn and Christopher were quite inclined to agree. When they had returned home that evening, and were sitting having a last cigarette together after Maisie had gone to bed, the Maxton diamond topic came up again, and Chris began to ventilate certain theories about it. Goulburn let him talk; it was one of his fads that he was a born investigator . . . "and that's what I should do if I were in charge of the case," Chris wound up a long suggestion with, "because——— Hello, Dick, what's the matter?"

Goulburn, who had just placed his hand in the left-hand pocket of his dinner jacket, where he carried a cigarette case, withdrew it, holding a triangular-shaped screw of paper. He uttered a sharp exclamation, for he had instantly recognised the material as akin to that ​on which the mysterious note which he had received at his former lodgings had been written. He spread out the folded half-sheet—yes, there was the same handwriting. And this was the message:—

"Sir,—If you and your friend would like to know something about the house next door, turn out the lights in your smoking-room to-night at 11.30, and leave the French window open, so that One Who Knows can get in."

Goulburn read this twice over, then passed it over to Christopher, who read it in his turn and whistled. He was already in possession of the story of the first note.

"What will you do, Dick?" he asked.

"Let him in, whoever he is," answered Goulburn. "There's some mystery about next door, Chris, and I'm going to have it settled—for Moira's sake."

"Ah—it's come to that, has it?" said Chris. "Well, old chap, I'm with you. It's close upon half-past eleven now."

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half-hour.

"Turn down that light and stand by it, Chris," said Goulburn. "I'll turn this down and open the window. As soon as our visitor is safely within the room, up with your light to the full."

The lights went down; Goulburn gently undid the fastenings of the French window. They waited in silence.

​A minute passed; then a step, almost as light as a cat's, was heard outside; a man's figure was seen to slip gently into the room and to draw the curtain behind it.

Christopher turned up the light by which he stood. It revealed Dr. van Mildart's footman, William Service.