"Well, I'm going, anyhow, and shall continue to think—until your spiritual mystery turns up—that a man who sends a note recommending a crime—that is, actually a crime that is actually carried out, at least tentatively, is, in all probability, a little casual in his moral tastes. Can I have that revolver?"
"Certainly," said Basil, getting up. "But I am coming with you." And he flung an old cape or cloak round him and took a sword-stick from the corner.
"You!" said Rupert, with some surprise, "you scarcely ever leave your hole to look at anything on the face of the earth."
Basil fitted on a formidable old white hat.
"I scarcely ever," he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance, "hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at once, without going to see it."
And he led the way out into the purple night.
We four swung along the flaring Lambeth streets, across Westminster Bridge, and along the Embankment in the direction of that part of Fleet Street which contained Tanner's Court. The erect, black figure of Major Brown, seen from behind, was a quaint contrast to the houndlike stoop and flapping mantle of young Rupert Grant, who adopted, with childlike delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective of fiction. The finest among his many fine qualities was his boyish appetite for the color and poetry of London. Basil, who walked behind, with his face turned blindly to the stars, had the look of a somnambulist.
Rupert paused at the corner of Tanner's Court, with a quiver of delight at danger, and gripped Basil's revolver in his great-coat pocket.
"Shall we go in now?" he asked.
"Not get police?" asked Major Brown, glancing sharply up and down the street.
"I am not sure," answered Rupert, knitting his brows. Of course, it's quite clear, the thing's all crooked. But there are three of us, and—"
"I shouldn't get the police," said Basil, in a queer voice. Rupert glanced at him and stared hard.
"Basil," he cried, "you're trembling. "What's the matter—are you afraid?"
"Cold, perhaps," said the major, eying him. There was no doubt that he was shaking.
At last, after a few moments' scrutiny, Rupert broke into a curse.
"You're laughing," he cried. "I know that confounded, silent, shaky laugh of yours. What the deuce is the amusement, Basil? Here we are, all three of us, within a yard of a den of ruffians—"
"But I shouldn't call the police," said Basil. "We four heroes are quite equal to a host," and he continued to quake with his mysterious mirth.
Rupert turned with impatience and strode swiftly down the court, the rest of us following. When he reached the door of No. 14, he turned abruptly, the revolver glittering in his hand.
"Stand close," he said, in the voice of a commander. "The scoundrel may be attempting an escape at this moment. We must fling open the door and rush in."
The four of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for the old judge and his convulsion of merriment.
"Now," hissed Rupert Grant, turning his pale face and burning eyes suddenly over his shoulder, "when I say 'Four,' follow me with a rush. If I say 'Hold him,' pin the fellows down, whoever they are. If I say 'Stop,' stop. I shall say that if there are more than three. If they attack us I shall empty my revolver on them. Basil, have your sword-stick ready. Now—one, two, three, four!"
With the sound of the word the door burst open, and we fell into the room like an invasion, only to stop dead.
The room, which was an ordinary and neatly appointed office, appeared, at the first glance, to be empty. But on a second and more careful glance we saw, seated behind a very large desk with pigeon-holes and drawers of bewildering multiplicity, a small man with a black, waxed mustache and the air of a very average clerk, writing hard. He looked up as we came to a stand-still.
"Did you knock?" he asked, pleasantly. "I am sorry if I did not hear. What can I do for you?"
There was a doubtful pause, and then, by general consent, the major himself, the victim of the outrage, stepped forward. The letter was in his hand, and he looked unusually grim.
"Is your name P. G. Northover?" he asked.
"That is my name," replied the other, smiling.
"I think," said Major Brown, with an increase in the dark glow of his face, "that this letter was written by you." And with a loud clap he struck open the letter on the desk with his clinched fist. The man called Northover looked at it with unaffected interest and merely nodded.
"Well, sir," said the major, breathing hard, "what about that?"
"What about it, precisely," said the man with the mustache.
"I am Major Brown," said that gentleman, sternly.
Northover bowed. "Pleased to meet you, sir. What have you to say to me?"
"Say!" cried the major, loosing a sudden tempest; "why, I want this confounded thing settled. I want—"
"Certainly, sir," said Northover, jumping up, with a slight elevation of the eyebrows. "Will you take a chair for a moment." And he pressed an electric bell just above him, which thrilled and tinkled in a room beyond. The major put his hand on the back of the chair offered him, but stood chafing and beating the floor with his polished boot.
The next moment an inner glass door was opened and a fair, weedy, young man in a frock-coat entered from within.
"Mr. Hopson," said Northover, "this is Major Brown. Will you please finish that thing for him I gave you this morning and bring it in?"
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Hopson, and vanished like lightning.
"You will excuse me, gentlemen," said the egregious Northover, with his radiant smile, "if I continue to work until Mr. Hopson is ready. I have some books that must be cleared up before I get away on my holiday to-morrow. And we all like a whiff of the country, don't we? Ha! ha!"
The criminal took up his pen with a child-like laugh, and a silence ensued—a placid and busy silence on the part of Mr. P. G. Northover; a raging silence on the part of everybody else.
At length the scratching of Northover's pen in the stillness was mingled with a knock at the door, almost simultaneous with the turning of the handle, and Mr. Hopson came in again with the same silent rapidity, placed a paper before his principal, and disappeared again.
The man at the desk pulled and twisted his spiky mustache for a few moments as he ran his eye up and down the paper presented to him. He took up his pen with a slight, instantaneous frown and altered something, muttering—"Careless." Then he read it again with the same impenetrable reflectiveness, and finally handed it to the frantic Brown, whose hand was beating the devil's tattoo on the back of the chair.
"I think you will find that all right, major," he said, briefly.
The major looked at it; whether he found it all right or not will appear later, but he found it like this:
Major Brown to P. G. Northover
£ s. d.
January 1, to account rendered 5 6 0
May 9, to potting and embedding of pansies 2 0 0
To cost of trolley with flowers 0 15 0
To hiring of man with trolley 0 5 0
To hire of house and garden for one day 1 0 0
To furnishing of room in peacock curtains, copper ornaments, etc. 3 0 0
To salary of Miss Jameson 1 0 0
To salary of Mr. Plover 1