o’clock and remained there till noon, reading and smoking in continually renewed hot water. He descended blandly, begged Miss Moze not to trouble about his breakfast, and gently assumed a certain control of the funeral. After the funeral he announced that he should leave on the morrow; but the mystery of the safe held him to the house. When he heard of the existence of the second key he organised and took command of a complete search of the study, and in the course of the search he inspected every document in the study. He said he knew that the deceased had left a legacy to the Society, and he should not feel justified in quitting Moze until the will was found.
Now in these circumstances Audrey ought certainly to have telegraphed to her father’s solicitor at Chelmsford at once. In the alternative she ought to have hired a safe-opening expert or a burglar from Colchester. She had accomplished neither of these downright things. With absolute power, she had done nothing but postpone. She wondered at herself, for up to her father’s death she had been a great critic of absolute power.
The heavy policemanish step of Mr. Cowl was heard on the landing.
“He’s coming down on us!” exclaimed Miss Ingate, partly afraid, and partly ironic at her own fear. “I’m sure he’s coming down on us. Audrey, I liked that man at first, but now I tremble before him. And I’m sure his moustache is dyed. Can’t you ask him to leave?”
“Is his moustache dyed, Winnie? Oh, what fun!”
Miss Ingate’s apprehension was justified. There was a knock at the study door, discreet, insistent, menacing, and it was Mr. Cowl’s knock. He entered, smiling gravely and yet, as it were, teasingly. His easy bigness, florid and sinister, made a disturbing contrast with the artless and pure simplicity of Audrey in her new black robe, and even with Miss Ingate’s pallid maturity, which, after all, was passably innocent and ingenuous. Mr. Cowl resembled a great beast good-humouredly lolloping into the cage in which two rabbits had been placed for his diversion and hunger.
Pulling a key from the pocket of his vast waistcoat, he said in his quiet voice, so seductive and ominous:
“Is this the key of the safe?”
He offered it delicately to Audrey.
It was the key of the safe.
“Did they find it in the ditch?” Audrey demanded, blushing, for she knew that the key had not been found in the ditch; she knew by a certain indentation on it that it was the duplicate key which she herself had mislaid.
“No,” said Mr. Cowl. “I found it myself, and not in the ditch. I remembered you had said that you had changed at the dressmaker’s in the village and had left there an old frock.”
“Did I?” murmured Audrey, with a deeper blush.
Mr. Cowl nodded.
“I had the happy idea that you might have had the key and left it in the pocket of the frock. So I trotted down to the dressmaker’s and asked for the frock, in your name, and lo! the result!”
He pointed to the key lying in Audrey’s long hand.
“But how should I have had the key, Mr. Cowl? Why should I have had the key?” Audrey burst out like a simpleton.
“That, Miss Moze,” said he, with a peculiar grin and in an equally peculiar tone, “is a matter about which obviously you are better informed than I am. Shall we try the key?”
With a smooth undeniable gesture he took the key again from Audrey, and bent his huge form to open the safe. As he did so Miss Ingate made a sarcastic and yet affrighted face at Audrey, and Audrey tried to send a signal in reply, but failed, owing to imperfect self-control. However, she managed to say to Mr. Cowl’s curved back:
“You couldn’t have found the key in the pocket of my old frock, Mr. Cowl.”
“And why?” he inquired benevolently, raising and turning his chestnut head. Even in that exciting instant Audrey could debate within herself whether or not his superb moustache was dyed.
“Because it has no pocket.”
“So I discovered,” said Mr. Cowl, after a little pause. “I merely stated that I had the happy idea—for it proved to be a happy idea—that you might have left the key in the pocket. I discovered it, as a fact, in a slit of the lining of the belt. … Conceivably you had slipped it in there—in a hurry.” He put strange implications into the last three words. “Yes, it is the authentic key,” he concluded, as the door of the safe swung heavily and silently open.
Audrey, for the first time, felt rather like a thief as she beheld the familiar interior of the safe which a few days earlier she had so successfully rifled. “Is it possible,” she thought, “that I really took bank-notes out of that safe, and that they are at this very moment in my bedroom between the leaves of ‘Pictures of Palestine’?”
Mr. Cowl was cautiously fumbling among the serried row of documents which, their edges towards the front, filled the steel shelf above the drawers. Audrey had never experienced any curiosity concerning the documents. Lucre alone had interested the base creature. No documents would have helped her to freedom. But now she thought apprehensively: “My fate may be among those documents.” She was quite prepared to learn that her father had done something silly in his will.
“This resembles a testament,” said Mr. Cowl, smiling to himself, and pulling out a foolscap scrip, folded and endorsed. “Yes. Dated last year.”
He unfolded the document; a letter slipped from the interior of it; he placed the letter on the small occasional table next to the desk, and offered the will to Audrey with precisely the same gesture as he had offered the key.
Audrey tried to decipher the will, and completely failed.
“Will you read it, Miss Ingate?” she muttered.
“I can’t! I can’t!” answered Miss Ingate in excitement. “I’m sure I can’t. I never could read wills. They’re so funny, somehow. And I haven’t got my spectacles.” She flushed slightly.
“May I venture to tell you what it contains?” Mr. Cowl suggested. “There can be no indiscretion on my part, as all wills after probate are public property and can be inspected by any Tom, Dick or Harry for a fee of one shilling.”
He took the document and gazed at it intently, turning over a page and turning back, for an extraordinarily long time.
Audrey said to herself again and again, with exasperated impatience: “He knows now, and I don’t know. He knows now, and I don’t know. He knows now, and I don’t know.”
At length Mr. Cowl spoke:
“It is a perfectly simple will. The testator leaves the whole of his property to Mrs. Moze for life, and afterwards to you, Miss Moze. There are only two legacies. Ten pounds to James Aguilar, gardener. And the testator’s shares in the Zacatecas Oil Development Corporation to the National Reformation Society. I may say that the testator had expressed to me his intention of leaving these shares to the Society. We should have preferred money, free of legacy duty, but the late Mr. Moze had a reason for everything he did. I must now bid you good-bye, ladies,” he went on strangely, with no pause. “Miss Moze, will you convey my sympathetic respects to your mother and my thanks for her most kind hospitality? My grateful sympathies to yourself. Good-bye, Miss Ingate. … Er, Miss Ingate,
