The Emperor's Snuff-Box Read online

  She had meant no harm. It never occurred to her that a good-looking, good-natured woman, who combines gentle manners with more sex-appeal than is good for her, can be suspected of sinister motives no matter what she does. She knew, of course, that she lived in dread of scandal. But she never went on to analyze why the brush of scandal never kept very far from her skirts. It just seemed to happen to her.

  Eve’s conscience was at her again. Fully convinced that she must have killed Ned Atwood, she had never been closer to loving him. The hall below, where the stairs curved, was so dark that she stumbled over his body. This seemed the fitting end to a nightmare, a time when she might as well open the front door and call for the police to end it. She could have wept with relief when the apparent corpse stirred and spoke.

  “What damn monkey tricks do you think you’re playing? Why did you push me?”

  The wave of relief passed like a wave of nausea.

  “Can you get up? Are you hurt?”

  “No, of course I’m not hurt. Bit shaken up, though. I s-say, what happened?”

  “Sh-h!”

  He seemed to be sprawled on his hands and knees, swaying a little, before he could push himself to his feet. His voice sounded almost normal, if rather uncertain. Bending over him, struggling to help him up, Eve touched his face and ran her hands across his hair; and her hands recoiled from the wet stickiness of blood.

  “You’re hurt!”

  “Nonsense! Bit shaken up, that’s all. Feel funny, though. Shoulder feels funny. Cripes, what a tumble. Look here, why did you push me?”

  “Darling, there’s blood on your face! Have you got a match? Or a lighter? Strike it!”

  There was a slight pause. “Blood’s from my nose. I can feel it. Funny, too. Didn’t seem to hit my nose; at least, it feels all right. Got a lighter. Here.”

  The tiny flame of the lighter sprang up. Taking it out of his hand while he fumbled with a handkerchief, she held it high to look at him. There seemed to be nothing wrong with him, though his hair was rumpled and his coat dusty. His nose had been bleeding; Eve felt a twitch of repulsion at the blood on her own hand. But he easily stanched this, and replaced the handkerchief in his pocket. His crushed hat he picked up, dusted, and put on.

  All this while Ned’s face looked faintly sullen and puzzled. Several times he licked at his lips and swallowed, as though testing a taste he could not account for. He kept shaking his head and flexing his shoulders, experimentally. The face was rather pale, the blue eyes blank and puckered up as though with concentration.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m perfectly fit, thanks.” He snatched the lighter out of her hand and extinguished it. It was a flash of that furious, diabolical temper he had shown in the past. “Queer. Very queer. And, now that you’ve tried to murder me, will you for the love of Christ let me get out of here?”

  Yes. This was the old Ned Atwood. It was a ghost which terrified her. For a while, there, she had almost thought…

  In silence they crept out through the dark villa to the back door in the kitchen. Eve unfastened its spring lock. From here, a few stone steps led up into a little rustic garden surrounded by the high stone wall. A back gate in this wall led you into a lane which in turn communicated with the Boulevard du Casino.

  The back door creaked in an utter hush. Warm air lay drowsy on the eyelids, full of a scent of damp grass and the perfume of roses. Far away over the roofs, the beam of the great inland lighthouse dazzled and then died, once every twenty seconds. They stood for a moment at the foot of the steps leading up into the garden. From the front, Eve could now hear a babble of voices in the street which indicated that the police had arrived.

  She spoke close to his ear, in a fierce whisper. “Ned, wait. You were going to tell me who …”

  “Good night,” said Mr. Atwood courteously.

  He bent forward, and in a perfunctory and absent-minded manner kissed her on the lips. Again she felt a faint splash of blood. He touched his hat to her, turned round, ascended the steps with a slight stagger, but walked steadily across the yard to the gate.

  Eve did not dare call out after him, though all her fears and energies boiled up into a kind of stifled shriek. She ran up the steps, the sash band of her negligée drooping loose again, and made frantic gestures which he did not even notice. This was why she failed to hear the slight click of the back door.

  Once he was out of the house, she had thought, the danger would be over. She could breathe again; she could rid herself of this stifling fear of discovery.

  But things weren’t returning to normal. Eve was conscious of a vague fright arising from a source she could not name. But it clung round Ned Atwood. From the grinning, lounging boy she had known, Ned had been changed as though by magic into a courteous stranger, detached and a trifle eerie. He would be all right in the morning, no doubt. But in the morning…

  Eve drew a deep breath. She crept back down the stairs again. She put out her hand to the door, and stopped dead. The door had swung shut. Its spring lock was now fastened on the inside.

  To every person on this earth, there sometimes comes a day when every single thing goes wrong—and from no discoverable cause. To most women it comes oftener than that. She may begin, mildly, by breaking the eggs she is frying for breakfast: hardly a catastrophe, yet hateful to the feminine soul. Then she breaks something in the drawing room. Afterwards it is all trouble. Household perplexities, which may have slept for weeks like snakes in cold weather, suddenly awake and sting. When even inanimate objects seem possessed by malignant demons, her frustrated anger cannot break out except in the bewildered feeling: “What have I done to deserve this?”

  That was how Eve felt, when she tugged fiercely at the knob of the door which had blown shut.

  And yet…

  How could the door have blown shut?

  There was not a breath of wind. Though the night seemed chillier than she had thought, nothing moved or stirred under the clear stars and the trees of the garden.

  That didn’t matter now. If some devilish horoscope had decreed that all these things were to happen to her at once, it was no good asking how. It simply happened. What she must decide was how to get back in again. At any moment the police might come nosing and find her.

  Bang on the door?

  And arouse Yvette? The thought of Yvette’s strong, unimpassioned face, with its shiny little black eyes and eyebrows that met in the middle like sparse fur, caused in her a revulsion which was like rage. Admit it: she was terrified of Yvette, though she could not in the least understand why. But how to get in? The windows were no good: the ground-floor windows, each night, were locked and shuttered on the inside.

  Eve put her hands to her forehead; and, becoming once more aware of the wet stickiness of blood, snatched them away again. Her night clothes must be a sight. She tried to look at them, but the light was too dim. It was in plucking at her negligée, holding it out in front of her with a comparatively clean left hand, that she found in the pocket of her pajamas Ned Atwood’s key to the front door.

  One side of her mind cried: The street’s full of policemen! You can’t go round to the front! The other side whispered that, after all, there was the stone wall of the villa itself to shield her from being seen from the street. She could slip round the side of the house; and, if she made no noise, she might be able to whip through the front door without attracting attention.

  It was some time before Eve could make up her mind. Feeling more and more undressed with each passing second, she finally essayed it at a run. She kept close to the house. Breathing hard, she emerged into the front garden—and came face to face with Toby Lawes.

  He couldn’t see her, of course. That was the only piece of luck so far.

  They were looking for her, as she had predicted. Toby, wearing a long raincoat over pajamas and shoes, had crossed the street and was just putting his hand on the gate of the Villa Miramar.

  The wall fronting the street
was perhaps nine feet high, its entrance an arched opening with an iron-grilled gate. The tall, dim street lamps of the rue des Anges made a spectral green glow against the branches of chestnut trees; they threw the front garden of Eve’s house into shadow, and illuminated Toby’s figure outside the gate. Nor was the rue des Anges full of policemen. On the contrary, it was one officious agent who saved Eve from discovery. As Toby reached the gate, an excited voice thundered out behind him.

  “Attendez là, jeune homme!” the voice shouted. “Qu’est-ce je vois? Vous partez à l’anglais, hein? Hein, hein, HEIN?”

  The whirlwind of rattling syllables mounted with each “hein.” Footsteps came pounding across the street.

  Toby swung round, spreading out his hands, and replied in French. His French was fluent, though he spoke with an execrable accent which Eve often suspected he deliberately cultivated so as to show no concessions to any damned foreigners.

  “I go only,” he shouted back, “to the house of Madame Neill. Here!” He thumped the gate.

  “No, monsieur. It is not permitted to leave the house. You will return, please. Quick, quick, quick!”

  “But, I tell you —!”

  “Return, please. No stupidities, if you please!”

  Toby made a gesture of weary exasperation. Eve saw him swing round under the light: she saw, through bars, the good-humored countenance with its cropped mustache and brown woolly hair now strained and tautened by an emotion so strong that it seemed to bewilder him. Toby lifted his fists. That he was suffering horribly could not have been doubted by anybody, least of all by Eve.

  “Monsieur the inspector,” he said, and it must be remembered that the French inspecteur merely means policeman, “will you have the kindness to remember my mother? She is having hysterics upstairs. You saw her.”

  “Ah!” said the law.

  “She wishes me to find Madame Neill. Madame Neill is the only one who can help her. Besides, I am not taking English leave. I am only going here.” And he began to whack the gate again.

  “You are going nowhere, monsieur.”

  “My father is dead…”

  “And is it my fault,” snapped the law, “if an assassination is done here? An assassination in La Bandelette! That goes too far! What M. Goron will say I do not like to think. Suicides at the Casino—that is bad enough. But this!” Then the hoarse voice rose in despair. “Oh, my God, another of them!”

  This anguish was inspired by the fact that another set of footsteps, quick light footsteps this time, came rapping across the street. Janice Lawes, in vivid scarlet pajamas, joined the two by the gate. Her fluffy light-red hair, worn in a long bob, contrasted with the pajamas and with the dead pallor of her pretty face. Janice at twenty-three was small and round, trim and trig, bouncing and assertive, with an eighteenth-century kind of figure and (sometimes) an eighteenth-century demureness. Just now she looked dazed and ready to scream.

  “What’s wrong?” she cried to Toby. “Where’s Eve? Why are you standing there?”

  “Because this fathead says …”

  “Are you letting that stop you? I shouldn’t.”

  The law evidently understood English. As Janice looked through the bars of the gate—straight into Eve’s eyes without seeing her—another blast of a police whistle made all their scalps tingle.

  “That is for my friends,” the agent said grimly. “Now, then, monsieur! Now, then, mademoiselle! Will you come back with me quietly, or will you be escorted?”

  He came dancing into Eve’s sight, and laid hold of Toby’s arm. From under his cloak he had whipped out a short white hard-rubber truncheon, which he turned over in his hand.

  “Monsieur!” His blast became plaintive. “I regret! This is not pleasant for me. Nor is it pleasant for you, to see your father like that.”

  Toby put his hands over his eyes. Janice suddenly turned and ran back towards their own house.

  “But I have my orders! Come, now!” The agent’s voice had a hollow, not unsympathetic wheedle of persuasion. “It is not so bad, is it? A little quarter of an hour until the director arrives! One little quarter of an hour! Then you may see her, without the least doubt. Hein? In the meantime, if you please…”

  “All right,” Toby said despondently.

  The policeman released his arm. Toby cast one glance at the Villa Miramar before he left. An incongruous figure in the long raincoat, square-jawed and stocky, he spoke unexpectedly. He had lost all sense of the proprieties. His emotion was so strong that he sounded wildly melodramatic.

  “Finest, sweetest-natured person that ever lived!” he said.

  “Eh?”

  “Madame Neill,” explained Toby, and pointed.

  “Ah!” said the law, craning round for a glance at this paragon’s house.

  “Nothing like her,” said Toby. “Never has been. High-thinking and pure and sweet and …” He gulped, controlling himself with so fierce an effort that Eve could almost feel it. “If I am not permitted to go there,” he added in French, turning reddish eyes towards the gate, “would there be any objection if I telephoned to her?”

  “My orders, monsieur,” replied the law, after a slight pause, “do not include telephones. Yes. One may telephone. Faith, now, it is not necessary to run!”

  Telephones again.

  Eve prayed that the agent would not stay where he was, peering through the gate. She must beat Toby Lawes to the phone, and be there when it rang. She had never realized so clearly how much Toby idealized her. She could have walloped his ears for such high-flown nonsense. Yet it made her heart ache in a new, queer way. While one part of her mind fumed with impatience, yet the essential feminine—that side which almost exults in self-sacrifice—swore again that she would do anything rather than let Toby learn about this messy interlude of tonight.

  The policeman, after opening the gate, sticking his head inside, and causing Eve to stop breathing for several seconds, seemed satisfied. She heard his footsteps cross the street. The door of the house opposite closed with a slam. Eve ducked her head and ran for her own front door.

  In a vague way it occurred to her that the negligée was flying; that the waistband had come loose once more. She paid no attention. Only a few running steps separated her from the front door. It seemed to her an endless, eternal void, a wild gauntlet running in which at any moment she might be caught and struck dead. Even putting the key in the lock seemed to take an eternity, while the lock eluded her and the flanges of the key rasped and wavered without taking hold.

  Then she was inside, in the warm and welcome dark. The soft thud of the closing door shut her away from devils. She had made it, and she felt—which was quite true—that nobody had seen her. Eve’s heart was thudding; the blood on her hand felt moist again; her wits seemed to turn round as on a slow wheel. While she stood crouched in the dark, getting her breath back again, smoothing out her mind and emotions so that she could talk sanely to Toby, the telephone commenced to ring upstairs.

  She needn’t fear that now. Everything, she told herself, would come out right. Of course everything would come out right. Everything must come out right. She drew her negligée more closely round her, and crept upstairs to answer the telephone.

  VI

  IT WAS JUST A week later—on the afternoon of Monday, September first—that M. Aristide Goron sat on the terrace of the Donjon Hotel with his friend Dr. Dermot Kinross.

  M. Goron made a face.

  “We have arranged,” he confided, stirring his coffee, “to arrest Madame Eve Neill for the murder of Sir Maurice Lawes.”

  “There is no doubt about the evidence?”

  “Unhappily, none.”

  Dermot Kinross felt a shiver, “Will she be …?”

  M. Goron considered. “No,” he decided, half closing one eye as though watching a scales, “I think it very unlikely. That is a soft neck, a handsome neck.”

  “Well?”

  “Fifteen years on the island: that is most probable. Ten years perhaps, or even fi
ve, if she has a clever lawyer and makes good use of her charms. Of course, you understand, even five years on the island is not a bag of shells.”

  “God knows it isn’t. And how is Madame Neill—taking this?”

  M. Goron fidgeted.

  “Dear doctor,” he said, taking the spoon out of his coffee cup and putting it down, “that is the worst of it! This charming lady thinks she has got away with it. She has not the remotest idea that she is even suspected! When it becomes my very painful duty to tell her…”

  If the prefect of police was pained, he had reason for it. Crime, rare in La Bandelette, distressed him. M. Goron was a comfortable man, a round, amiable, catlike sort of man, with spats and a white rose in his buttonhole. The duties of a prefect are seldom those of a policeman: he acted as a sort of master of ceremonies to La Bandelette. But M. Goron was also a shrewd man.

  Round him stretched his domain, the white Avenue de la Forêt asparkle with cars and open carriages in the late afternoon sunlight. Above was the facade of the Donjon Hotel, whose striped orange-and-black awnings shut away the sun from the terrace. There were not many persons sitting at the little tables. M. Goron’s rather protruding eyes regarded his guest fixedly.

  “Yet she is wretched, this Madame Neill!” he added. “Something terrifies her. She has only to look at this Lawes family, and she becomes a different person. Is it conscience, I ask myself? Or what? As I say, the evidence is complete…”

  “And yet,” said Dermot Kinross in pretty fair French, “you are not satisfied.”

  M. Goron’s eyes narrowed.

  “That is clever of you,” he conceded. “In candor: no. I am not altogether satisfied. Therefore I have a favor to ask of you.”

  Dermot returned his bland smile.

  It would have been difficult to say wherein lay Dr. Kinross’s air of distinction, so that you singled him out in a crowd and thought he might be an interesting person to know. It was perhaps the essential tolerance of the face, the suggestion that he was the same sort of person you were yourself, and would understand you.