She obeyed him, with a small white frightened face; but it was not the white of powder now. Roy thrust his hand into the pocket of Vandermeer's dressing gown. Something jingled. He pulled out a bunch of keys.
"Vandermeer told me I was good at following up a clue. I'm going to follow one now, Mimika," he said. "This is the key of the safe."
He opened the safe, looked hastily at the bundles of papers and then pulled out the chamois leather bag. "Look here, Mimika!" he said and poured a glittering river of diamonds, several hundred of them, on to the table. The moonlight played over them with an uncanny brilliance.
"That's his Landsturm," said Roy; "and that settles it."
He took Mimika's hand, and she made no protest as he withdrew the wedding ring from her finger and added it to the glittering heap on the table.
There was a heavy footstep in the room above. Vandermeer was awake and moving about upstairs. The boards creaked over their heads, then they heard his bedroom door open, and the heavy footsteps began to descend the stairs.
Mimika shrank behind her brother and both stood motionless, waiting. They could hear the heavy breathing of Vandermeer, the breathing of a man roused from a dyspeptic sleep. He came down with an intolerable precision, making the twelve steps of that short descent seem almost interminable. At every step Mimika felt the edges of her heart freezing. At last that ugly rhythm reached the foot of the stairs; and with three more shuffling steps, as of a gigantic ape, the hairy bulk of Vandermeer stood in the doorway, facing them across the glittering mound of gems. The sharp searchlight of the moon made his face corpselike, showing up the puffy blue pouches under his eyes and picking out the coarse red hairs of his bushy beard like strands of copper wire. His eyes protruded, his mouth opened twice without any sound but the soft smacking of his tongue as he tried to moisten his lips.
"What are you doing here?" he said at last.
"Looking at your Landsturm," said Roy with all the deadly calm of his nation.
Vandermeer swayed a little on his feet, like a drunken man. Then he moved forward to the table and blinked at the diamonds and the gold ring crowning them.