"I want another good look at your patient, and I want your confidence since you and I may have to see much of each other before this matter is ended. You asked me to speak plainly and I have done so."
"You are from headquarters?"
"Coroner Perry sent me." Throwing back his coat, he showed his badge. "The coroner has returned to his office. He was quite upset by the outcry which came from this room at an unhappy moment during the funeral."
"I know. It was my fault; I opened the door just for an instant, and in that instant my patient broke through her torpor and spoke."
She had drawn him in, by this time, and, after another glance at her patient, softly closed the door behind him.
"I have nothing to report," said she, "but the one sentence everybody heard."
Sweetwater took in the little memorandum book and pencil which hung at her side, and understood her position and extraordinary amenability to his wishes. Unconsciously, a low exclamation escaped him. He was young and had not yet sunk the man entirely in the detective.
"A cruel necessity to watch so interesting a patient, for anything but her own good," he remarked. Yet, because he was a detective as well as a man, his eye went wandering all over the room as he spoke until it fell upon a peculiar-looking cabinet or closet, let into the wall directly opposite the bed. "What's that?" he asked.
"I don't know; I can't make it out, and I don't like to ask."
Sweetwater examined it for a moment from where he stood; then crossed over, and scrutinised it more particularly. It was a unique specimen. What it lacked in height—it could not have measured more than a foot from the bottom to the top—it made up in length, which must have exceeded five feet. The doors, of which it had two, were both tightly locked; but as they were made of transparent glass, the objects behind them were quite visible. It was the nature of these objects which made the mystery. The longer Sweetwater examined them, the less he understood the reason for their collection, much less for their preservation in a room which in all other respects, expressed the quintessence of taste.
At one end he saw a stuffed canary, not perched on a twig, but lying prone on its side. Near it was a doll, with scorched face and limbs half-consumed. Next this, the broken pieces of a china bowl and what looked like the torn remnants of some very fine lace. Further along, his eye lighted on a young girl's bonnet, exquisite in colour and nicety of material, but crushed out of all shape and only betraying its identity by its dangling strings. The next article, in this long array of totally unhomogeneous objects, was a metronome, with its pendulum wrenched half off and one of its sides lacking. He could not determine the character of what came next, and only gave a casual examination to the rest. The whole affair was a puzzle to him, and he had no time for puzzles disconnected with the very serious affair he was engaged in investigating.
"Some childish nonsense," he remarked, and moved towards the door. "The servants will be coming back, and I had rather not be found here. You'll see me again—I cannot tell just when. Perhaps you may want to send for me. If so, my name is Sweetwater."
His hand was on the knob, and he was almost out of the room when he started and looked back. A violent change in the patient had occurred. Disturbed by his voice or by some inner pulsation of the fever which devoured her, Carmel had risen from the pillow and now sat, staring straight before her with every feature working and lips opened as if to speak. Sweetwater held his breath, and the nurse leaped towards her and gently encircled her with protecting arms.
"Lie down," she prayed; "lie down. Everything is all right: I am looking after things. Lie down, little one, and rest."
The young girl drooped, and, yielding to the nurse's touch, sank slowly back on the pillow; but in an instant she was up again, and flinging out her hand, she cried out loudly just as she had cried an hour before:
"Break it open! Break the glass and look in. Her heart should be there—her heart—her heart!"
"Go, or I cannot quiet her!" ordered the nurse, and Sweetwater turned to obey.
But a new obstacle offered. The brother had heard this cry, and now stood in the doorway.
"Who are you?" he impatiently demanded, surveying Sweetwater in sudden anger.
"I brought up the drugs," was the quiet explanation of the ever-ready detective. "I didn't mean to alarm the young lady, and I don't think I did. It's the fever, sir, which makes her talk so wildly."
"We want no strangers here," was young Cumberland's response. "Remember, nurse, no strangers." His tone was actually peremptory.
Sweetwater observed him in real astonishment as he slid by and made his quiet escape. He was still more astonished when, on glancing towards the alcove, he perceived that, contrary to his own prognostication, the whiskey stood as high in the decanter as before.
"I've got a puzzler this time," was his comment, as he made his way downstairs. "Even Mr. Gryce would say that. I wonder how I'll come out. Uppermost!" he finished in secret emphasis to himself. "Uppermost! It would never do for me to fail in the first big affair I've undertaken on my own account."
XV
HELEN SURPRISES SWEETWATER
The returning servants drove up just as Sweetwater reached the lower floor. He was at the side door when they came in, and a single glance convinced him that all had gone off decorously at the grave, and that nothing further had occurred during their absence to disturb them.
He followed them as they filed away into the kitchen, and, waiting till the men had gone about their work, turned his attention to the girls who stood about very much as if they did not know just what to do with themselves.
"Sit, ladies," said he, drawing up chairs quite as if he were doing the honours of the house. Then with a sly, compassionate look into each woe-begone face, he artfully remarked: "You're all upset, you are, by what Mr. Cumberland said in such an unbecoming way at the funeral. He'd like to strangle Mr. Ranelagh! Why couldn't he wait for the sheriff. It looks as if that gentleman would have the job, all right."
"Oh! don't!" wailed out one of the girls, the impressionable, warm-hearted Maggie. "The horrors of this house'll kill me. I can't stand it a minute longer. I'll go—I'll go to-morrow."
"You won't; you're too kind-hearted to leave Mr. Cumberland and his sister in their desperate trouble," Sweetwater put in, with a decision as suggestive of admiration as he dared to assume.
Her eyes filled, and she said no more. Sweetwater shifted his attention to Helen. Working around by her side, he managed to drop these words into her ear:
"She talks most, but she doesn't feel her responsibilities any more than you do. I've had my experience with women, and you're of the sort that stays."
She rolled her eyes towards him, in a slow, surprised way, that would have abashed most men.
"I don't know your name, or your business here," said she; "but I do know that you take a good deal upon yourself when you say what I shall do or shan't do. I don't even know, myself."
"That's because your eye is not so keen to your own virtues as—well, I won't say as mine, but as those of any appreciative stranger. I can't help seeing what you are, you know."
She turned her shoulder but not before he caught a slight disdainful twitch of her rosy, non-communicative mouth.
"Ah, ah, my lady, not quick enough!" thought he; and, with the most innocent air in the world, he launched forth in a tirade against the man then in custody, as though his guilt were an accepted fact and nothing but the formalities of the law stood between him and his final doom. "It must make you all feel queer," he wound up, "to think you have waited on him and seen him tramping about these rooms for months, just as if he had no wicked feelings in his heart and meant to marry Miss Cumberland, not to kill her."