"Please--"

"Or did he spill soup on you some time when we didn't see it?"

"I imagine he's spilt a bit of soup in his day," I answered, remembering what I had overheard as to the safe wedge. And as I spoke I realized that my one hope lay in the possibility of getting a glimpse of the mark which that wedge had left--if, indeed, my whole sand-chain of coincidences did not split back into the inconsequentialities of dreamland.

"You can't shake my faith in Wilkins," said the blue-eyed woman in the blue silk dinner gown, as she leaned back in a protecting-armed and softly padded library-chair which suddenly became symbolic of her whole guarded and upholstered life. "Jim, tell Witter what a jewel Wilkins really is."

Jim, whose thought was heavy ordnance beside his wife's flying column of humor, turned the matter solemnly over in his mind.

"He's a remarkably good man," admitted the stolid and levitical Jim, "remarkably good."

"And you've seen him yourself, time and time again," concurred his wife.

"But I've never been particularly interested in servants, you know,"

was my self-defensive retort.

"Then why, in the face of the Immortal Ironies, are you putting my butler under the microscope?" was the return shot that came from the flying column. The acidulated sweetness of that attack even nettled me into a right-about-face.

"Look here," I suddenly demanded, "have either of you missed anything valuable about here lately?"

The two gazed at each other for a moment in perplexed wonder.

"Of course not," retorted the woman in the dinner gown. "Not a thing!"

"And you know you have everything intact, all your jewelry, your plate, your pocketbooks, the trinkets a sneakthief might call it worth while to round up?"

"Of course we have. And I can't even resent your bracketing my pocketbook in with the trinkets."

"But are you certain of this? Could you verify it at a moment's notice?"

"My dear Witter, we wouldn't need to. I mean we're doing it every day of our lives. It's instinctive; it's as much a habit as keeping moths out of the closets and cobwebs out of the corners."

"What's making you ask all this?" demanded the heavy artillery.

"Yes, what's suddenly making you into a Holmes's watchman?" echoed the flying brigade.

Still again I saw that it was going to be no easy thing to intimate to persons you cared for the possibility of their sleeping on a volcano.

Such an intimation has both its dangers and its responsibilities. My earlier sense of delight in a knowledge unpartic.i.p.ated in by others was gradually merging into a consciousness of a disagreeable task that would prove unsavory in both its features and its _finale_.

"I'm asking all this," I replied, "because I have good reason to believe this paragon you call Wilkins is not only a criminal, but has come into this house for criminal purposes."

"For what criminal purposes?"

"For the sake of robbing it."

Beatrice Van Tuyl looked at me with her wide-open azure eyes. Then she suddenly bubbled over with golden and liquid-noted laughter. "Oh, Witter, you're lovely!"

"What proof have you got of that?" demanded Jim.

"Of my loveliness?" I inquired, for Jim Van Tuyl's solidity was as provocative as that of the smithy anvil which the idler can not pa.s.s without at least a hammer-tap or two. Yet it was this same solidity, I knew, that made him the safest of financiers and the shrewdest of investors.

"No," he retorted, "proofs of the fact that Wilkins is here for other than honest purposes."

"I've no proof," I had to confess.

"Then what evidence have you?"

"I've not even any evidence as yet. But I'm not stirring up this sort of thing without good reason."

"Let's hope not!" retorted Jim.

"My dear Witter, you're actually getting fussy in your old age," said the laughing woman. It was only the solemnity of her husband's face that seemed to sober her. "Can't you see it's absurd? We're all here, safe and sound, and we haven't been robbed."

"But what I want to know," went on the heavier artillery, "is what your reasons are. It seems only right we should inquire what you've got in the shape of evidence."

"What I have wouldn't be admitted as evidence," I confessed.

He threw down his cigarette. It meant as much as throwing up his hands.

"Then what do you expect us to do?"

"I don't expect you to do anything. All I ask is that you let me try to justify this course I've taken, that the three of us dine quietly together. And unless I'm greatly mistaken, before that dinner is over I think I can show you that this man--"

I saw Beatrice Van Tuyl suddenly lift a forefinger to her lip. The motion for silence brought me up short. A moment later I heard the snap of a light-switch in the hallway outside and then the click of jade curtain-rings on their pole. Into the doorway stepped a figure in black, a calm and slow-moving and altogether self-a.s.sured figure.

"Dinner is served," intoned this sober personage, with a curate-like solemnity all his own.

I had no wish to gape at the man, but that first glimpse of mine was a sharp one, for I knew that it was Wilkins himself that I was confronting. As I beheld him there in all the glory of his magisterial a.s.surance I felt an involuntary and ridiculous sinking in the diaphragm. I asked myself in the name of all the Lares and Penates of Manhattan, why I had suddenly gone off on a wild-goose chase to bag an inoffensive butler about whom I had had a midnight nightmare?

Then I looked at the man more closely. He wore the conventional dress livery of twilled worsted, with an extremely high-winged collar and an extremely small lawn tie. He seemed a remarkably solid figure of a man, and his height was not insignificant. Any impression of fragility, of sedentary bloodlessness, which might have been given out by his quite pallid face, was sharply contradicted by the muscular heaviness of his limbs. His hair, a Kyrle-Bellewish gray over the temples, was cut short. The well-powdered and close-shaven face was bluish white along the jowls, like a priest's. The poise of the figure, whether natural or simulated, was one marked for servitude.

Yet I had to admit to myself, as we filed out and down to the dining-room, that the man was not without his pretended sense of dignity. He seemed neither arrogant nor obsequious. He hovered midway between the Scylla of hauteur and the Charybdis of considerate patience. About the immobile and mask-like face hung that veil of impersonality which marked him as a butler--as a butler to the finger-tips. When not actually in movement he was as aloofly detached as a totem-pole. He stood as un.o.btrusive as a newel-post, as impa.s.sive as some shielding piece of furniture, beside which youth might whisper its weightiest secret or conspiracy weave its darkest web.

I had to confess, as I watched his deft movements about that china-strewn oblong of damask which seemed his fit and rightful domain, that he was in no way wanting in the part--the only thing that puzzled me was the futility of that part. There was authority, too, in his merest finger-movement and eye-shift, as from time to time he signaled to the footman who helped him in his duties. There was grave solicitude on his face as he awaited the minutest semaphoric nod of the woman in the blue silk dinner gown. And this was the man, with his stolid air of exact.i.tude, with his quick-handed movements and his alert and yet unpartic.i.p.ating eyes, whom I had come into that quiet household to proclaim a thief!

I watched his hands every course as I sat there talking against time--and Heaven knows what I talked of! But about those hands there was nothing to discover. In the first thing of importance I had met with disappointment. For the cuffs that projected from the edges of the livery sleeves covered each large-boned wrist. In the actual deportment of the man there was nothing on which to base a decent suspicion. And in the meanwhile the dinner progressed, as all such dinners do, smoothly and quietly, and, to outward appearances, harmoniously and happily.

But as it progressed I grew more and more perplexed. There was another nauseating moment or two when the thought flashed over me that the whole thing was indeed a mistake, that what I had seemed to hear in my restless moments of the night before was only a dream projected into a period of wakefulness. Equipped with nothing more than an echo from this dream, I had started off on this mad chase, to run down a man who had proved and was proving himself the acme of decorous respectability.

But if this thought was a sickening one, it was also a sickly one.

Like all sickly things, too, it tended to die young. It went down before the crowding actualities of other circ.u.mstances which I could not overlook. Coincidence, repeated often enough, became more than fortuity. The thing was more than a nightmare. I had heard what I had heard. There was still some method by which I could verify or contradict my suspicion. My problem was to find a plan. And the gravity of my dilemma, I suppose, was in some way reflected in my face.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" asked Van Tuyl, with his heavy matter-of-factness, at a moment when the room happened to be empty.

"Don't you see it's a mistake?" added his wife, with a self-a.s.suring glance about the rose-shaded table and then a wider glance about the room itself.

"Wait," I suddenly said. "What were his references?"

"He gave us a splendid one from the Whippeny Club. We verified that.