Mr Joaquin Holmes was making a morning call one of those days on Mrs Theodore Livingstone—better known to the readers of these pages as Philippina—at her furnished apartments in Bury Street, Bloomsbury. Of late, Mr Joaquin Holmes had been down on his luck; and the weather in London that day was certainly not of a sort to propitiate the nerves of a man who had been raised on the cloudless skies of Southern Colorado. Though it was early April, a settled gloom, as of November, brooded impartially over city and suburbs. Mr Joaquin Holmes was by no means happy. Society in London had grown tired of his seership; the Psycho-physical Entertainment at the Assyrian Hall attracted every night an ever-dwindling audience; Maskelyne and Cooke had learnt to counterfeit all the best of his tricks; and things in general looked so black just then for the trade of prophet that the Seer was beginning to wonder in his own inmost soul whether he wouldn’t be compelled before long to fall back for a while on his more lucrative but less reputable alternative profession of gambler and card-sharper. However, being a man of sentiment, he consoled himself meanwhile by a morning call on Mrs Theodore Livingstone.
Philippina was looking her very best that afternoon, attired in a coquettish costume, half peignoir, half tea-gown, especially designed for the reception of such casual visitors. And Mr Joaquin Holmes was one of Philippina’s most devoted admirers. Florian had introduced him long ago to the good-natured singer, before her marriage, and the Seer had ever since been numbered among her most frequent and attentive callers. He could talk with her in German; for, as befits his trade, he was an excellent linguist; and Philippina was glad when she could relieve herself for a while from the constant strain of speaking English by an occasional return to the free tongue of her Fatherland. Theodore was out, she said, glibly, with her accustomed volubility; oh yes, he was out, and he wouldn’t be back, she supposed, till dinner. No fear about that; the horrid man never came near her now, except at meal times, or to go down to the theatre. He was off, she had no doubt, with some of his hateful companions in some billiard-room or something, wasting the money that ought to go to the support of the household. If it weren’t for herself, and for some very kind friends, Philippina really didn’t know what on earth would become of them.
The Seer smiled sweetly. He was an engaging man, and when he flooded Philippina with the light of his great eyes she thought him really as nice as anybody on earth, except Herr Andreas. They sat there long, and chatted in that peculiar vein which Philippina affected when she found herself alone with one of her male admirers. She was a born flirt, Philippina, and though she was a matron now, with a distinct tendency to grow visibly stouter on good English fare, she had still all that archness and that liveliness of manner which had captivated Florian the first morning they met her on the hill-top at St Valentin.
As they sat there, exchanging a quiet fire of repartee, with many ach’s and so’s of very Teutonic playfulness, the lodging-house servant came up with a note, which Philippina tore open and read through somewhat eagerly. The Seer noticed that as she read it her colour deepened—such signs of feeling seldom escaped the eyes of that observant thought-reader. He noticed also that the envelope, though directed in English letters, bore evident traces of a German hand in the twists and twirls of the very peculiar manuscript. He could see from where he sat an unmistakable curl over the u of Bury Street. A curl like that could only have been produced by a person accustomed to German writing.
Philippina crumpled the envelope, and looked vacantly at the fireplace. The fire wasn’t lighted, for the day, though damp and dark, was by no means chilly. The Seer noted that glance: so she wanted to burn it, then! Philippina, unheeding him, poked the envelope through the bars of the grate with the aid of the tongs, but laid the note itself on the table by her side, a little uneasily. The Seer, with that native quickness of perception which had made him into a thought-reader, divined at once what was passing through her mind; she must destroy that note before Theodore returned, and she was anxious in her own soul for a chance of destroying it.
Joaquin Holmes spotted a mystery—perhaps an intrigue; but, in any case, a mystery. Now little family affairs of this sort were part and parcel of his stock-in-trade; there was nothing so useful to him in life as possession of a secret. And Philippina was indeed an open book; he could read her as easily as he could read a pack of cards with the tips of his fingers. The longer he stopped, the more obviously and evidently Philippina fidgeted; the more she fidgeted, the longer he determined, as he phrased it to himself with Western frankness, “to stop and see the fun out.” Philippina grew more and more silent as time went by; the Seer talked on and on with more unceasing persistence. Meanwhile, the fog without grew denser and denser. At last, of a sudden, it descended, pitch dark, with that surprising rapidity we all know so well in our smoky metropolis. Philippina yawned; she saw there was no help for it. It was a case for the gas. “Will you ring the bell, Mr Holmes?” she asked languidly, in German.
The Seer seized his chance, and rose briskly to obey her. As he brushed past her side, Philippina, in a quiver, put out her hand for her letter. The room was black as night. She fumbled for it in vain; a cold chill came over her. “Why, where’s that paper?” she exclaimed, in a tone of most evident and undisguised dismay. “I wish I had a match. It was lying here a minute ago.”
Mr Holmes stood calmly in the dark, with his hand upon the bell-handle. He was in no hurry to ring it. “You’ll have to wait now,” he said, in his very coolest manner, “till the servant comes up. Unfortunately, I don’t happen to have a match about me.”
“There are some upon the mantelpiece, perhaps,” Philippina faltered, unwilling to rise and move away from the table that held that compromising letter.
“Oh, that’s all right!” the Seer said quietly, in his slow Western drawl. “Don’t trouble yourself about me. I can see very well in the dark without one.” Then he began to read aloud, “Du liebste Philippina!”
Philippina made a wild dash across the room in his direction. This was horrible! He had abstracted it! But the Seer, unabashed, took a step or two backward with great deliberation. “That’s all right!” he said again, in a languid tone of the blandest unconcern. “There’s nothing fresh here; you needn’t trouble yourself. It’s only a little note from a very old friend, signed, ‘Thy ever affectionate, Andreas Hausberger.’”
Philippina darted once more blindly in the direction of the voice; Joaquin Holmes heard her coming, and stepped aside noiselessly. He passed his practised finger-tips again over the lines of the writing. “Very pretty!” he said, smiling. “Very nice, indeed—for Signora Casalmonte! Why, I fancied you were her friend. This is charming, charming! And only to think so prudent a man as our dear friend Hausberger should have ventured to write such a compromising letter! ‘At three o’clock to-morrow, at the usual place,’ he says. Dear me, that’s interesting! So you’ve met him there before! And what a fool the man must be to go and put it on paper!”
Philippina clasped her hands, and dashed wildly against the sofa. “Oh, give it back to me!” she cried, really alarmed. “What will Andreas ever say! How can you be so cruel? And my husband—my husband!”
The American, still wholly undisconcerted by her cries, popped the paper inside his breast-coat pocket, buttoned it up securely, drew a match-box from his waistcoat, and lighted the gas with a calm air of triumph. “Now, don’t be a fool, Philippina,” he said, taking hold of her by those plump round arms of hers, and pushing her back with conspicuous calmness into an easy-chair. “Compose yourself! Compose yourself! There’s nothing new in all this; we all know what you are—Theodore Livingstone, I suppose, just as well as the rest of us. Why trouble to give yourself these airs of tragic virtue? To tell you the truth, my dear girl, they don’t at all become you. Nobody expects miracles from an actress nowadays—not even her husband. Besides, I’m not going to make money out of you; you’re a very nice girl, and you’ve always been kind to me; so why should I want to show this letter to Theodore? What’s Theodore to me, or I to Theodore, that I should bother my head to uphold his domestic dignity? No, no, my child; that’s not the game. I hold the letter as a threat over Andreas Hausberger. Hausberger’s rich, don’t you see, and his wife’s his fortune. What’s more, she hates him, and he keeps her always precious short of money. She’ll be ready to pay anything for a letter like this; it’s a handle against him; and he, for his part, well—he’ll make any terms she likes rather than drive her away from him.”
He took up his hat, and made a courtly bow. “Good-bye, Philippina,” he said, smiling; “this’ll never come out at all, as far as regards yourself and your husband. Hausberger’d pay me well to keep the thing out of court; but I shan’t take it to him; I’ll go and offer it direct, money down, to the Casalmonte.”
He walked lightly to the door, leaving Philippina petrified. He turned into the street: the fog began to lift again. He walked briskly on in the direction of Portland Place. Before he crossed the Regent’s Park, he had made up his mind to his plan of action. It was no use trying to blackmail a cool hand like Andreas; he must offer the letter, as he said, direct to Linnet. He didn’t doubt she would gladly seize on the pretext for a divorce, or at least a rupture. It would give her a good excuse for going away from the man whom his observation and instinct had rightly taught him she despised and detested.
He rang at the door in Avenue Road. By a lucky chance, he found Linnet in—and alone: her husband, she said, was out; he had gone for the day, she thought, with a party down to Greenwich.
The Seer didn’t mince matters. With American directness, he went straight to the root of things. “I’m glad of that,” he said, coolly, “for I didn’t want to see him. I wanted to see you alone. I’ve got something against him I want to sell you.”
“Something against him?” Linnet cried, puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean, Mr Holmes; and why on earth should you think I’d care to buy it?”
“Now, just you look here,” the Seer went on, holding the letter, face downward, before him and fumbling it with his fingers; “why shouldn’t we speak straight? What’s the good of going beating about the bush like this? Let’s talk fair and square. You hate your husband.”
Linnet rose and faced him. She was flushed and angry. “You’ve no right to say that,” she cried. “I never told you so.”
The Seer smiled sweetly. “I wouldn’t be a thought-reader,” he answered, with unaffected frankness, “if I needed to be told a thing in order to know it. But that’s neither here nor there. Don’t let’s quarrel about these trifles. The real thing’s this. I have a letter in my hand here that may be of very great use to you, if you want to get away from this man—as you do—and to marry Mr Deverill.”
Linnet’s face was crimson with shame and indignation. “How dare you say such a thing, sir!” she cried, trying to move towards the door. “You know it isn’t true. I never dreamt of marrying him.”
By a quick flank movement, the Seer sprang in front of her and cut off her retreat. “That won’t do,” he said, sharply. “You can’t deceive me like that. Remember, I can read your inmost thoughts as readily as I can read this letter in my hand. I’ll read it to you now. It’s to your friend Mrs Livingstone.” And, without a passing tremor on that handsome face or a quiver in his voice, he read out with his fingers the short compromising note, from “Thou dearest Philippina” down to “Thy ever affectionate, Andreas Hausberger.”
Linnet faced him, unmoved externally but with a throbbing heart. The Seer, as he finished it, darted a triumphant glance at her.
“Well?” Linnet said quietly, drawing herself up to her full height.
“Well, what’ll you give me for that, in plain black and white?” the Seer asked, with a calm tone of unquestioned victory.
“Nothing!” Linnet answered, moving once more towards the door. “It’s nothing fresh to me. I knew all that, oh, long ago.”
“Knew it? Ah, yes, no doubt,” the Seer answered, with a curl of those handsome lips. “There’s nothing much in that. Of course we all knew it. But it’s not enough knowing it. You want it written down in plain black and white, to put in evidence against him. You see he acknowledges—”
Linnet cut him short sharply. “To put it in evidence?” she repeated, staring at him with a bewildered look. “In evidence against whom? What on earth can you mean? To put in evidence where? I don’t understand you.”
“Now, don’t let’s waste useful time,” the Seer interposed seriously. “This is a practical matter. There’s no knowing how soon your husband may return. I just mean business. I want to hear, straight and short, what you’ll give for this letter. We all know very well you’ve got enough already to prove the count of cruelty upon. You’ve only got to prove the other thing in order to get a regular divorce from him. And the proof of it’s here, in plain black and white, under his own very hand, in this letter I’ve read to you. Now, what do you offer? If you name my figure, it’s yours; if you don’t—well, Philippina’s a very good friend of mine; here goes—I’ll burn it!”
He held it over the fire, which was burning in the grate, as he looked hard into her eyes. Linnet drew back a pace or two, and faced him proudly. “Mr Holmes,” she said, in her very coldest voice, “you entirely misunderstand. You reckon without your host. You forget I’m a Catholic. Divorce to me means absolutely nothing. I’m Andreas Hausberger’s wife before the eye of God, and all the law-courts on earth could never make me otherwise—could never set me free to be anyone else’s. So your letter would be absolutely no use at all to me. I knew pretty well, long since, the main fact it implies; and it mattered very little to me. Andreas Hausberger is my husband—as such, I obey him, by the law of God—but he never had my heart; and I never had his. On no ground whatsoever do I value your document.”
The Seer, in turn, drew back in incredulous amazement. Was she trying to cheapen him? He interpreted her words after his own psychology. “No; you don’t mean that,” he said, with an unbelieving air. “You’d get a divorce if you could, of course, like anyone else; and you’d marry that man Deverill. Don’t think I’m such a fool as not to know how you feel to him. But you’re seeming to hang back so as to knock down my price. You want to get it a bargain. You think you can best me. Now, don’t let’s lose time haggling. Make me an offer, money down, and I’ll tell you at once whether or not I’ll entertain it.”
Linnet gazed at him in unspeakable scorn and contempt. “Do you think,” she said, advancing a step, “I’d bargain with you to buy a wretched thing like that! If I wanted to leave my husband, I’d leave him outright, letter or no letter. I stop with him now, of my own free will, by the Church’s command, and from a sense of duty.”
So far as the Seer was concerned, this strange woman spoke a foreign language. Duty was a word that didn’t enter into his vocabulary. He scanned her from head to foot, as one might scan some queer specimen of an unknown wild species. “You can’t possibly mean that,” he cried, with a discordant little laugh, for he was used to the free Western notions on these subjects. “Come now, buy it or not!” he went on, dangling the letter before her face, between finger and thumb. “It’s going, going, going! Won’t you make me a bid for it?”
He shook it temptingly, held it aloft; it was valuable evidence. As he did so, the paper slipped all of a sudden from his grasp, and fell fluttering at Linnet’s feet. Mr Holmes was quick, but Linnet was quicker still. Before he could stoop to pick it up, she had darted down upon it and seized it. Then, with lightning haste, she thrust it inside her dress, in the shelter of her bosom. The baffled Seer seized her hand—too late to prevent her.
“Give it back to me!” he cried, twisting her wrist as he spoke. “How dare you take it? That’s a dirty trick to play a man. It’s mine, I say; give it back to me!”
Though he hurt her wrist and frightened her, Linnet stood her ground well. She was stronger than he thought—with all the stored-up strength of her mountain rearing. She pushed him back with a sudden burst of explosive energy. “You’re wrong,” she cried, indignantly. “It never was yours,—though I don’t know how you got it. You must have stolen it, no doubt, or intercepted it by some vile means, and then tried to make money out of it. I don’t want it myself, but I won’t give it back. It belongs to Philippina, and I mean to return it to her.”
“That’s a lie!” the Seer answered, catching her hands with a hasty dash, and trying to force her on her knees. “Damn your tricks; I’ll have it back again!” And, in the heat of his rage, he tried to unfasten her dress and snatch it from her bosom.
She tore herself away. The Seer followed her, still struggling. It was a hand-to-hand grapple. He fought her for it wildly.
At that very moment, before Linnet had time to scream for help, the door opened suddenly, and—Andreas Hausberger entered.
