The Paternoster Ruby | Page 4

jolly diminutive priest who had just dined well. Never was mortal freer of affectation. And his cheerfulness? It was as expansive and as volatile as ether. His buoyancy was a perpetual, never-failing tonic for doubt and discouragement, and I have yet to witness him confronted with a situation that could in the least dash his spirits.
He awaited my reply to his question with an air which suggested that nothing less important than the well-being of his very existence was at stake.
"Tell me what you have learned," returned I. Things usually acquire a more comprehensible aspect when you have a few facts by which to measure and weigh them, and I wanted to hear Stodger's story.
"Yip!" he cried cheerily. "Might as well sit here as anywhere else; nobody to disturb us."
Weighted as he was with surplus flesh, his agility was amazing. He wheeled round and plumped down on an oak bench, not unlike a church pew, which stood against the panelled stairway beyond the newel. As I followed I drew my overcoat closer about me, for the hall was cold and dismal.
"This fellow Burke--Alexander Stilwell; queer chap. Close-mouthed? Say!"--he squared around and tapped my chest with an impressive forefinger--"a clam 's real noisy compared with him. Fact. Watched me steady all the time I--you know--looked at the body."
Stodger stopped abruptly, with the manner of one to whom has occurred a sudden brilliant idea. He thumped one fat knee with a pudgy hand, and whispered with suppressed eagerness:
"By jinks, Swift! I have it! I 'll get Burke--Alexander Stilwell. Let him talk--in there"--with a violent gesture toward the opposite side of the hall--"library. What say? There's a--you know--alcove--curtains. I 'll hide behind 'em and listen; if he don't tell the story just like he did to me, why, we 'll call the turn on him. See?"
For various reasons I thought the idea not a bad one, and said so. Stodger was off up the stairs like a shot. He went nimbly round the prostrate figure on the landing without so much as a look toward it, and disappeared.
He and another man appeared, after a while, at the back of the hall, having evidently availed themselves of a rear stairway.
I surveyed the private secretary with much interest, and must even now confess, after no inconsiderable study of the human face, that I have never since beheld one that was so utterly baffling.
He was a slender man of medium height, and of an age that might have been anything between twenty and fifty; his eyes, hair, brows, and lashes were all of a uniform shade of pale yellow--excepting that the eyes had a greenish tint--while his face and thin, nervous hands wore a dead, unwholesome pallor.
The effect was extraordinary. The ageless face looked as if it did not know how to conform to or mirror any inward emotion; and furthermore, one was never precisely positive whether or not the pale eyes were following one, for they somehow, in their uncertain fixedness, suggested the idea that they were windows behind which the real eyes were incessantly vigilant. So it was when Stodger introduced him; I could not tell whether he was watching me or my colleague--or, in truth, whether he was watching either of us.
"Mr. Burke, Mr. Swift," said Stodger, with a grand air--"Mr. Alexander Stilwell Burke." Then, in a hoarse aside to me:
"Little matter I want to look after; just 'tend to it while you two are talking."
CHAPTER II
THE PRIVATE SECRETARY
Stodger at once left us together, having, I surmised, his own method of getting into the curtained alcove of which he had spoken. In order that he should have ample time to reach it, I held Burke with a question or two in the hall.
"Mr. Burke," said I, "who besides yourself and Mr. Page was in the house last night?"
He replied promptly, but with a deliberate precision, as if he were making a weighty confidential communication, and wanted to be exceedingly careful to convey an exact interpretation of his thoughts.
I might now add that this cautious, reflective manner characterized all his speech, and in time it grew extremely aggravating.
"A young man named Maillot," he said; "Royal Maillot."
"And who is this Royal Maillot?" I next asked.
Was Burke returning my intent look? Or did he have an eye for some fancied movement behind him, or off there toward the closed library door? For the life of me, I could not have told with assurance.
"I can't tell you much from my own knowledge," he presently returned; and now I was pretty positive that he was meeting my regard. "Mr. Maillot is still here, however; he can speak for himself."
"I know that"--curtly; "but I prefer to be informed beforehand--even if it's only by hearsay. Who is Mr. Maillot?"
Again the furtive, wandering look behind the blank of the clean-shaven, ageless