Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1680 page)

“Come to the fire,” said Vendale.  “You look perished with the cold out there.  I will ring for some more coals.”

Obenreizer rose, and came slowly back to the desk.  “Marguerite will be as sorry to hear of this as I am,” he said, kindly.  “What do you mean to do?”

“I am in the hands of Defresnier and Company,” answered Vendale.  “In my total ignorance of the circumstances, I can only do what they recommend.  The receipt which I have just found, turns out to be the numbered and printed form.  They seem to attach some special importance to its discovery.  You have had experience, when you were in the Swiss house, of their way of doing business.  Can you guess what object they have in view?”

Obenreizer offered a suggestion.

“Suppose I examine the receipt?” he said.

“Are you ill?” asked Vendale, startled by the change in his face, which now showed itself plainly for the first time.  “Pray go to the fire.  You seem to be shivering — I hope you are not going to be ill?”

“Not I!” said Obenreizer.  “Perhaps I have caught cold.  Your English climate might have spared an admirer of your English institutions.  Let me look at the receipt.”

Vendale opened the iron chamber.  Obenreizer took a chair, and drew it close to the fire.  He held both hands over the flames.  “Let me look at the receipt,” he repeated, eagerly, as Vendale reappeared with the paper in his hand.  At the same moment a porter entered the room with a fresh supply of coals.  Vendale told him to make a good fire.  The man obeyed the order with a disastrous alacrity.  As he stepped forward and raised the scuttle, his foot caught in a fold of the rug, and he discharged his entire cargo of coals into the grate.  The result was an instant smothering of the flame, and the production of a stream of yellow smoke, without a visible morsel of fire to account for it.

“Imbecile!” whispered Obenreizer to himself, with a look at the man which the man remembered for many a long day afterwards.

“Will you come into the clerks’ room?” asked Vendale.  “They have a stove there.”

“No, no.  No matter.”

Vendale handed him the receipt.  Obenreizer’s interest in examining it appeared to have been quenched as suddenly and as effectually as the fire itself.  He just glanced over the document, and said, “No; I don’t understand it!  I am sorry to be of no use.”

“I will write to Neuchâtel by to-night’s post,” said Vendale, putting away the receipt for the second time.  “We must wait, and see what comes of it.”

“By to-night’s post,” repeated Obenreizer.  “Let me see.  You will get the answer in eight or nine days’ time.  I shall be back before that.  If I can be of any service, as commercial traveller, perhaps you will let me know between this and then.  You will send me written instructions?  My best thanks.  I shall be most anxious for your answer from Neuchâtel.  Who knows?  It may be a mistake, my dear friend, after all.  Courage! courage! courage!”  He had entered the room with no appearance of being pressed for time.  He now snatched up his hat, and took his leave with the air of a man who had not another moment to lose.

Left by himself, Vendale took a turn thoughtfully in the room.

His previous impression of Obenreizer was shaken by what he had heard and seen at the interview which had just taken place.  He was disposed, for the first time, to doubt whether, in this case, he had not been a little hasty and hard in his judgment on another man.  Obenreizer’s surprise and regret, on hearing the news from Neuchâtel, bore the plainest marks of being honestly felt — not politely assumed for the occasion.  With troubles of his own to encounter, suffering, to all appearance, from the first insidious attack of a serious illness, he had looked and spoken like a man who really deplored the disaster that had fallen on his friend.  Hitherto Vendale had tried vainly to alter his first opinion of Marguerite’s guardian, for Marguerite’s sake.  All the generous instincts in his nature now combined together and shook the evidence which had seemed unanswerable up to this time.  “Who knows?” he thought.  “I may have read that man’s face wrongly, after all.”

The time passed — the happy evenings with Marguerite came and went.  It was again the tenth morning since Vendale had written to the Swiss firm; and again the answer appeared on his desk with the other letters of the day:

“Dear Sir.  My senior partner, M. Defresnier, has been called away, by urgent business, to Milan.  In his absence (and with his full concurrence and authority), I now write to you again on the subject of the missing five hundred pounds.

“Your discovery that the forged receipt is executed upon one of our numbered and printed forms has caused inexpressible surprise and distress to my partner and to myself.  At the time when your remittance was stolen, but three keys were in existence opening the strong-box in which our receipt-forms are invariably kept.  My partner had one key; I had the other.  The third was in the possession of a gentleman who, at that period, occupied a position of trust in our house.  We should as soon have thought of suspecting one of ourselves as of suspecting this person.  Suspicion now points at him, nevertheless.  I cannot prevail on myself to inform you who the person is, so long as there is the shadow of a chance that he may come innocently out of the inquiry which must now be instituted.  Forgive my silence; the motive of it is good.

“The form our investigation must now take is simple enough.  The handwriting of your receipt must be compared, by competent persons whom we have at our disposal, with certain specimens of handwriting in our possession.  I cannot send you the specimens for business reasons, which, when you hear them, you are sure to approve.  I must beg you to send me the receipt to Neuchâtel — and, in making this request, I must accompany it by a word of necessary warning.

“If the person, at whom suspicion now points, really proves to be the person who has committed this forger and theft, I have reason to fear that circumstances may have already put him on his guard.  The only evidence against him is the evidence in your hands, and he will move heaven and earth to obtain and destroy it.  I strongly urge you not to trust the receipt to the post.  Send it to me, without loss of time, by a private hand, and choose nobody for your messenger but a person long established in your own employment, accustomed to travelling, capable of speaking French; a man of courage, a man of honesty, and, above all things, a man who can be trusted to let no stranger scrape acquaintance with him on the route.  Tell no one — absolutely no one — but your messenger of the turn this matter has now taken.  The safe transit of the receipt may depend on your interpreting
literally
the advice which I give you at the end of this letter.

“I have only to add that every possible saving of time is now of the last importance.  More than one of our receipt-forms is missing — and it is impossible to say what new frauds may not be committed if we fail to lay our hands on the thief.

Your faithful servant
ROLLAND,
(Signing for Defresnier and Cie.)

Who was the suspected man?  In Vendale’s position, it seemed useless to inquire.

Who was to be sent to Neuchâtel with the receipt?  Men of courage and men of honesty were to be had at Cripple Corner for the asking.  But where was the man who was accustomed to foreign travelling, who could speak the French language, and who could be really relied on to let no stranger scrape acquaintance with him on his route?  There was but one man at hand who combined all those requisites in his own person, and that man was Vendale himself.

It was a sacrifice to leave his business; it was a greater sacrifice to leave Marguerite.  But a matter of five hundred pounds was involved in the pending inquiry; and a literal interpretation of M. Rolland’s advice was insisted on in terms which there was no trifling with.  The more Vendale thought of it, the more plainly the necessity faced him, and said, “Go!”

As he locked up the letter with the receipt, the association of ideas reminded him of Obenreizer.  A guess at the identity of the suspected man looked more possible now.  Obenreizer might know.

The thought had barely passed through his mind, when the door opened, and Obenreizer entered the room.

“They told me at Soho Square you were expected back last night,” said Vendale, greeting him.  “Have you done well in the country?  Are you better?”

A thousand thanks.  Obenreizer had done admirably well; Obenreizer was infinitely better.  And now, what news?  Any letter from Neuchâtel?

“A very strange letter,” answered Vendale.  “The matter has taken a new turn, and the letter insists — without excepting anybody — on my keeping our next proceedings a profound secret.”

“Without excepting anybody?” repeated Obenreizer.  As he said the words, he walked away again, thoughtfully, to the window at the other end of the room, looked out for a moment, and suddenly came back to Vendale.  “Surely they must have forgotten?” he resumed, “or they would have excepted me?”

“It is Monsieur Rolland who writes,” said Vendale.  “And, as you say, he must certainly have forgotten.  That view of the matter quite escaped me.  I was just wishing I had you to consult, when you came into the room.  And here I am tried by a formal prohibition, which cannot possibly have been intended to include you.  How very annoying!”

Obenreizer’s filmy eyes fixed on Vendale attentively.

“Perhaps it is more than annoying!” he said.  “I came this morning not only to hear the news, but to offer myself as messenger, negotiator — what you will.  Would you believe it?  I have letters which oblige me to go to Switzerland immediately.  Messages, documents, anything — I could have taken them all to Defresnier and Rolland for you.”

“You are the very man I wanted,” returned Vendale.  “I had decided, most unwillingly, on going to Neuchâtel myself, not five minutes since, because I could find no one here capable of taking my place.  Let me look at the letter again.”

He opened the strong room to get at the letter.  Obenreizer, after first glancing round him to make sure that they were alone, followed a step or two and waited, measuring Vendale with his eye.  Vendale was the tallest man, and unmistakably the strongest man also of the two.  Obenreizer turned away, and warmed himself at the fire.

Meanwhile, Vendale read the last paragraph in the letter for the third time.  There was the plain warning — there was the closing sentence, which insisted on a literal interpretation of it.  The hand, which was leading Vendale in the dark, led him on that condition only.  A large sum was at stake: a terrible suspicion remained to be verified.  If he acted on his own responsibility, and if anything happened to defeat the object in view, who would be blamed?  As a man of business, Vendale had but one course to follow.  He locked the letter up again.

“It is most annoying,” he said to Obenreizer — ”it is a piece of forgetfulness on Monsieur Rolland’s part which puts me to serious inconvenience, and places me in an absurdly false position towards you.  What am I to do?  I am acting in a very serious matter, and acting entirely in the dark.  I have no choice but to be guided, not by the spirit, but by the letter of my instructions.  You understand me, I am sure?  You know, if I had not been fettered in this way, how gladly I should have accepted your services?”

“Say no more!” returned Obenreizer.  “In your place I should have done the same.  My good friend, I take no offence.  I thank you for your compliment.  We shall be travelling companions, at any rate,” added Obenreizer.  “You go, as I go, at once?”

“At once.  I must speak to Marguerite first, of course!”

“Surely! surely!  Speak to her this evening.  Come, and pick me up on the way to the station.  We go together by the mail train to-night?”

“By the mail train to-night.”

* * * * *

It was later than Vendale had anticipated when he drove up to the house in Soho Square.  Business difficulties, occasioned by his sudden departure, had presented themselves by dozens.  A cruelly large share of the time which he had hoped to devote to Marguerite had been claimed by duties at his office which it was impossible to neglect.

To his surprise and delight, she was alone in the drawing-room when he entered it.

“We have only a few minutes, George,” she said.  “But Madame Dor has been good to me — and we can have those few minutes alone.”  She threw her arms round his neck, and whispered eagerly, “Have you done anything to offend Mr. Obenreizer?”