ATE a light lunch at Bellwood, alone, with Bella to look after me in the dining-room. She was very solicitous, and when she had brought my tea, I thought she wanted to say something. She stood awkwardly near the door, and watched me.
"You needn't wait, Bella," I said.
"I beg your pardon, sir, but—I wanted to ask you—is Miss Fleming well?"
"She was not very well this morning, but I don't think it is serious, Bella," I replied. She turned to go, but I fancied she hesitated.
"Oh, Bella," I called, as she was going out, "I want to ask you something. The night at the Fleming home, when you and I watched the house, didn't you hear some person running along the hall outside your door? About two o'clock, I think?"
She looked at me stolidly.
"No, sir, I slept all night."
"That's strange. And you didn't hear me when I fell down the dumb-waiter shaft?"
"Holy saints!" she ejaculated. "Was that where you fell!"
She stopped herself abruptly.
"You heard that?" I asked gently, "and yet you slept all night? Bella, there's a hitch somewhere. You didn't sleep that night, at all; you told Miss Fleming I had been up all night. How did you know that? If I didn't know that you couldn't possibly get around as fast as the—person in the house that night, I would say you had been in Mr. Fleming's desk, looking for—let us say, postage stamps. May I have another cup of coffee?"
She turned a sickly yellow white, and gathered up my cup and saucer with trembling hands. When the coffee finally came back it was brought grumblingly by old Heppie. "She says she's turned her ankle," she sniffed. "Turned it on a lathe, like a table leg, I should say, from the shape of it." Before I left the dining-room I put another line in my note-book:
"What does Bella know?"
I got back to the city somewhat late for my appointment with Burton. I found Wardrop waiting for me at the office, and if I had been astonished at the change in him two nights before, I was shocked now. He seemed to have shrunk in his clothes; his eyeballs were bloodshot from drinking, and his fair hair had dropped, neglected, over his forehead. He was sitting in his familiar attitude, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his palms.
He looked at me with dull eyes, when I went in. I did not see Burton at first. He was sitting on my desk, holding a flat can in his hand, and digging out with a wooden toothpick one sardine after another and bolting them whole.
"Your good health," he said, poising one in the air, where it threatened oily tears over the carpet. "As an appetite-quencher and thirst-producer, give me the festive sardine. How lovely it would be if we could eat 'em without smelling 'em!"
"Don't you do anything but eat?" Wardrop asked, without enthusiasm.
Burton eyed him reproachfully. "Is that what I get for doing without lunch, in order to prove to you that you are not crazy?" He appealed to me. "He says he's crazy—lost his think works. Now, I ask you, Knox, when I go to the trouble to find out for him that he's got as many convolutions as anybody, and that they've only got a little convolved, is it fair, I ask you, for him to reproach me about my food?"
"I didn't know you knew each other," I put in, while Burton took another sardine.
"He says we do," Wardrop said wearily; "says he used to knock me around at college."
Burton winked at me solemnly.
"He doesn't remember me, but he will," he said. "It's his nerves that are gone, and we'll have him restrung with new wires, like an old piano, in a week."
Wardrop had that after-debauch suspicion of all men, but I think he grasped at me as a dependability.
"He wants me to go to a doctor," he said. "I'm not sick; it's only—" He was trying to light a cigarette, but the match dropped from his shaking fingers.
"Better see one, Wardrop," I urged—and I felt mean enough about doing it. "You need something to brace you up."
Burton gave him a very small drink, for he could scarcely stand, and we went down in the elevator. My contempt for the victim between us was as great as my contempt for myself. That Wardrop was in a bad position there could be no doubt; there might be more men than Fleming who had known about the money in the leather bag, and who thought he had taken it and probably killed Fleming to hide the theft.
It seemed incredible that an innocent man would collapse as he had done, and yet—at this minute I can name a dozen men who, under the club of public disapproval, have fallen into paresis, insanity and the grave. We are all indifferent to our fellow-men until they are against us.