The Complete Works of Arthur Morrison (Illustrated). Arthur Morrison

with the airy obstinacy that Hewitt afterwards knew so well. “I’m not going home again now to spend an hour or two more. My sister will want to know what has become of me, and she mustn’t suspect that anything is wrong, or it may do all sorts of harm. The place will keep till the morning, and I have the snuff-box safe with me. You have my card, Mr. Hewitt, haven’t you? Very well. Can you be at my house to-morrow morning at half-past ten? I will be there, and you can see all you want by daylight. We’ll consider that settled. Good-day.” Hewitt saw her to his office door and waited till she had half descended the stairs. Then he made for a staircase window which gave a view of the street. The evening was coming on murky and foggy, and the street lights were blotchy and vague. Outside a four-wheeled cab stood, and the driver eagerly watched the front door. When Mrs. Mallett emerged he instantly began to descend from the box with the quick invitation, “Cab, mum, cab?”

      He seemed very eager for his fare, and though Mrs. Mallett hesitated a second she eventually entered the cab. He drove off, and Hewitt tried in vain to catch a glimpse of the number of the cab behind. It was always a habit of his to note all such identifying marks throughout a case, whether they seemed important at the time or not, and he has often had occasion to be pleased with the outcome. Now, however, the light was too bad. No sooner had the cab started than a man emerged from a narrow passage opposite, and followed. He was a large, rather awkward, heavy-faced man of middle age, and had the appearance of a respectable artisan or small tradesman in his best clothes. Hewitt hurried downstairs and followed the direction the cab and the man had taken, toward the Strand. But the cab by this time was swallowed up in the Strand traffic, and the heavy-faced man had also disappeared. Hewitt returned to his office a little disappointed, for the man seemed rather closely to answer Mrs. Mallett’s description of Reuben Penner.

      II.

      Punctually at half-past ten the next morning Hewitt was at Mrs. Mallett’s house at Fulham. It was a pretty little house, standing back from the road in a generous patch of garden, and had evidently stood there when Fulham was an outlying village. Hewitt entered the gate, and made his way to the front door, where two young females, evidently servants, stood. They were in a very disturbed state, and when he asked for Mrs. Mallett, assured him that nobody knew where she was, and that she had not been seen since the previous afternoon.

      “But,” said Hewitt, “she was to stay at her sister’s last night, I believe.”

      “Yes, sir,” answered the more distressed of the two girls—she in a cap—“but she hasn’t been seen there. This is her sister’s servant, and she’s been sent over to know where she is, and why she hasn’t been there.” This the other girl—in bonnet and shawl—corroborated. Nothing had been seen of Mrs. Mallett at her sister’s since she had received the message the day before to the effect that the house had been broken into.

      “And I’m so frightened,” the other girl said, whimperingly. “They’ve been in the place again last night.”

      “Who have?”

      “The robbers. When I came in this morning——”

      “But didn’t you sleep here?”

      “I—I ought to ha’ done sir, but—but after Mrs. Mallett went yesterday I got so frightened I went home at ten.” And the girl showed signs of tears, which she had apparently been already indulging in.

      “And what about the old woman—the deaf woman; where was she?”

      “She was in the house, sir. There was nowhere else for her to go, and she was deaf and didn’t know anything about what happened the night before, and confined to her room, and—and so I didn’t tell her.”

      “I see,” Hewitt said with a slight smile. “You left her here. She didn’t see or hear anything, did she?”

      “No sir; she can’t hear, and she didn’t see nothing.”

      “And how do you know thieves have been in the house?”

      “Everythink’s tumbled about worse than ever, sir, and all different from what it was yesterday; and there’s a box o’ papers in the attic broke open, and all sorts o’ things.”

      “Have you spoken to the police?”

      “No, sir; I’m that frightened I don’t know what to do. And missis was going to see a gentleman about it yesterday, and——”

      “Very well, I am that gentleman—Mr. Martin Hewitt. I have come down now to meet her by appointment. Did she say she was going anywhere else as well as to my office and to her sister’s?”

      “No, sir. And she—she’s got the snuff-box with her and all.” This latter circumstance seemed largely to augment the girl’s terrors for her mistress’s safety.

      “Very well,” Hewitt said, “I think I’d better just look over the house now, and then consider what has become of Mrs. Mallett—if she isn’t heard of in the meantime.” The girl found a great relief in Hewitt’s presence in the house, the deaf old house-keeper, who seldom spoke and never heard, being, as she said, “worse than nobody.”

      “Have you been in all the rooms?” Hewitt asked.

      “No, sir; I was afraid. When I came in I went straight upstairs to my room, and as I was coming away I see the things upset in the other attic. I went into Mrs. Perks’ room, next to mine (she’s the deaf old woman), and she was there all right, but couldn’t hear anything. Then I came down and only just peeped into two of the rooms and saw the state they were in, and then I came out into the garden, and presently this young woman came with the message from Mrs. Rudd.”

      “Very well, we’ll look at the rooms now,” Hewitt said, and they proceeded to do so. All were in a state of intense confusion. Drawers, taken from chests and bureaux, littered about the floor, with their contents scattered about them. Carpets and rugs had been turned up and flung into corners, even pictures on the walls had been disturbed, and while some hung awry others rested on the floor and on chairs. The things, however, appeared to have been fairly carefully handled, for nothing was damaged except one or two framed engravings, the brown paper on the backs of which had been cut round with a knife and the wooden slats shifted so as to leave the backs of the engravings bare. This, the girl told Hewitt, had not been done on the night of the first burglary; the other articles also had not on that occasion been so much disturbed as they now were.

      Mrs. Mallett’s bedroom was the first floor front. Here the confusion was, if possible, greater than in the other rooms. The bed had been completely unmade and the clothes thrown separately on the floor, and everything else was displaced. It was here indeed that the most noticeable features of the disturbance were observed, for on the side of the looking-glass hung a very long old-fashioned gold chain untouched, and on the dressing-table lay a purse with the money still in it. And on the looking-glass, stuck into the crack of the frame, was a half sheet of notepaper with this inscription scrawled in pencil:—

      To Mr. Martin Hewitt.

      Mrs. Mallett is alright and in frends hands. She will return soon alright, if you keep quiet. But if you folloe her or take any steps the conseqinses will be very serious.

      This paper was not only curious in itself, and curious as being addressed to Hewitt, but it was plainly in the same handwriting as were the most of the anonymous letters which Mrs. Mallett had produced the day before in Hewitt’s office. Hewitt studied it attentively for a few moments and then thrust it in his pocket and proceeded to inspect the rest of the rooms. All were the same—simply well-furnished rooms turned upside down. The top floor consisted of three comfortable attics, one used as a lumber-room and the others used respectively as bedrooms for the servant and the deaf old woman. None of these rooms appeared to have been entered, the girl said, on the first night, but now the lumber-room was almost as confused as the rooms downstairs. Two or three boxes were opened and their contents turned out. One of