the major had retired to his, and now Anita was taking up her candle to retire to hers. She had barely touched it, however, when there came a sound of swift footsteps and young Burnham-Seaforth lurched out of the drawing-room door and joined her. He was in a state of great excitement and was breathing hard.
"Anita, Miss Rosario!" he began, plucking her by the sleeve and uplifting a pale, boyish face—he was not yet twenty-two—to hers with a look of abject misery. "I want to speak to you. I simply must speak to you. I've been waiting for the chance, and now that it's come—Look here! You're not going back on me, are you?"
"Going back on you?" repeated Anita, showing her pretty white teeth in an amused smile. "What shall you mean by that 'going back on you,' eh? You are a stupid little donkey, to be sure. But then I do not care to get on the back of one, so why?"
"Oh, you know very well what I mean," he rapped out angrily. "It is not fair the way you have been treating me ever since that yellow-headed bounder came. I've had a night of misery, Zuilika never showing herself; you doing nothing, absolutely nothing, although you promised—you know you did!—and I heard you, I absolutely heard you persuade that St. Aubyn fool to stop at least another night."
"Yes, of course you did. But what of it? He is good company. He talks well, he sings well, he is very handsome and—well, what difference can it make to you? You are not interested in me, amigo."
"No, no; of course I'm not. You are nothing to me at all—you—oh, I beg your pardon; I didn't quite mean that. I—I mean you are nothing to me in that way. But you—you're not keeping to your word. You promised, you know, that you'd use your influence with Zuilika; that you'd get her to be more kind to me—to see me alone and—and all that sort of thing. And you've not made a single attempt. You've just sat round and flirted with that tow-headed brute and done nothing at all to help me on; and—and it's jolly unkind of you, that's what!"
Cleek heard Anita's soft rippling laughter; but he waited to hear no more. Moving swiftly away from the well-hole of the staircase he passed on tiptoe down the hall to the major's rooms, and opening the door, went in. The old soldier was standing, with arms folded, at the window looking silently out into the darkness of the night. He turned at the sound of the door's opening and moved toward Cleek with a white, agonized face and a pair of shaking, outstretched hands.
"Well?" he said with a sort of gasp.
"My dear Major," said Cleek quietly. "The wisest of men are sometimes mistaken. That is my excuse for my own shortsightedness. I said in the beginning that this was either a case of swindling or a case of murder, did I not? Well, I now amend my verdict. It is a case of swindling and murder; and your son has had nothing to do with either!"
"Oh, thank God! thank God!" the old man said; then sat down suddenly and dropped his face between his hands and was still for a long time. When he looked up again his eyes were red, but his lips were smiling.
"If you only knew what a relief it is," he said. "If you only knew how much I have suffered, Mr. Cleek. His friendship with that Spanish woman; his going with her to identify the body—even assisting in its hurried burial! These things all seemed so frightfully black, so utterly without any explanation other than personal guilt."
"Yet they all are easily explained, Major. His friendship for the Spanish woman is merely due to a promise to intercede for him with Zuilika. She is his one aim and object, poor little donkey! As for his identification of the body—well, if the widow herself could find points of undisputed resemblance, why not he? A nervous, excitable, impetuous boy like that and anxious, too, that the lady of his heart should be freed from the one thing, the one man, whose existence made her everlastingly unattainable, in the hands of a clever woman like Anita Rosario such a chap could be made to identify anything and to believe it as religiously as he believes. Now, go to bed and rest easy, Major. I'm going to call up Dollops and do a little night prowling. If it turns out as I hope, this little riddle will be solved to-morrow."
"But how, Mr. Cleek? It seems to me that it is as dark as ever. You put my poor old head in a whirl. You say there is swindling; you hint one moment that the body was not that of Ulchester, and in the next that murder has been done. Do, pray, tell me what it all means, what you make of this amazing case?"
"I'll do that to-morrow, Major; not to-night. The answer to the riddle—the answer that's in my mind, I mean—is at once so simple and yet so appallingly awful that I'll hazard no guess until I'm sure. Look here"—he put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a gold piece—"do you know what that is, Major?"
"It looks like a spade guinea, Mr. Cleek."
"Right; it is a spade guinea, a pocket piece I've carried for years. You've heard, no doubt, of vital things turning upon the tossing of a coin. Well, if you see me toss this coin to-morrow, something of that sort will occur. It will be tossed up in the midst of a riddle, Major; when it comes down it will be a riddle no longer."
Then he opened the door, closed it after him, and, before the Major could utter a word, was gone.
III
The promise was so vague, so mystifying, indeed, so seemingly absurd, that the Major did not allow himself to dwell upon it. As a matter of fact, it passed completely out of his mind; nor did it again find lodgment there until it was forced back upon his memory in a most unusual manner.
Whatsoever had been the result of what Cleek had called his "night prowling," he took nobody into his confidence when he and the major and the major's son and Señorita Rosario met at breakfast the next day (Zuilika, true to her training and the traditions of her people, never broke morning bread save in the seclusion of her own bedchamber, and then on her knees with her face toward the East) nor did he allude to it at any period throughout the day.
He seemed, indeed, purposely to avoid the major, and to devote himself to the Spanish woman with an ardour that was positively heartless, considering that as they two sang and flirted and went in for several sets of singles on the tennis courts, Zuilika, like a spirit of misery, kept walking, walking, walking through the halls and the rooms of the house, her woeful eyes fixed on the carpet, her henna-stained fingers constantly locking and unlocking, and moans of desolation coming now and again from behind her yashmak as her swaying body moved restlessly to and fro. For to-day was memorable. Five weeks ago this coming nightfall Ulchester had flung himself out of this house in a fury of wrath, and this time of bitter regret and ceaseless mourning had begun.
"She will go out of her mind, poor creature, if something cannot be done to keep her from dwelling on her misery like this," commented the housekeeper, coming upon that restless figure pacing the darkened hall, moaning, moaning, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, doing nothing but walk and sorrow, sorrow and walk, hour in and hour out. "It's enough to tear a body's heart to hear her, poor dear. And that good-for-nothing Spanish piece racing and shrieking round the tennis court like a she tom-cat, the heartless hussy. Her and that simpering silly that's trotting round after her had ought to be put in a bag and shaken up, that they ought. It's downright scandalous to be carrying on like that at such a time."
And so both the major and his son thought, too, and tried their best to solace the lonely mourner and to persuade her to sit down and rest.
"Zuilika, you will wear yourself out, child, if you go on walking like this," said the major solicitously. "Do rest and be at peace for a little time at least."
"I can never have peace in this land. I can never forget the day!" she answered drearily.
