There was barely an inch between Violet and me in height, and that inch would be concealed by the Zenobia helmet. It would not be too difficult for me to imitate for an hour or two the lighter movements of a woman. Weathered would be quite unsuspicious; the dress, the artificial light, the noise and excitement of the revel would all be in my favour. The doctor, I gathered, drank freely on these occasions; I had only to wait till the night was advanced and the wine had done its work.
I told the distressed girl as little as possible of what I meant to do, or to attempt. I said merely that I must meet Weathered, and that it would be the best way for me to impersonate her for one night. She consented readily enough—what else could she do? She told me the date of the next dance, and undertook to send the mask and costume to my room some days beforehand, so that I should have time to see that it fitted, and to practice moving about with it on.
We did not bid each other any formal farewell. Nothing was said about our next meeting, indeed I felt no confidence that there would be another. She had been driven to appeal to me in her extremity, but she showed no sign of having forgiven me. Rather she seemed to find every moment painful that she passed with me. All the time she was struggling with herself, trying to speak to me as if I were a stranger whom she found herself obliged to trust, but continually faltering and letting her voice die down to a broken whisper.
When I had let her out at the street door she hurried away blindly like an escaping prisoner. And as soon as she was out of sight I hastened round to Montague Street, and locked myself up in Tarleton’s arsenal of poisons.
CHAPTER XIII
THE EARL OF LEDBURY INTERVENES
My first thought, when I knew that Violet’s confession was still undestroyed, was to hide the fact from her. I must spare her the torturing apprehensions that I felt myself. Fortunately she did not seem to be thinking of her own danger; at all events, she put no questions to me about the letters. Perhaps she took it for granted that I had secured them, or that they were no longer in existence. At all events, the possibility that they might be in other hands as dangerous as Weathered’s did not seem to strike her at the moment. The idea that I had murdered Weathered overpowered all her faculties.
Again and again I went over with her all that had happened.
“I don’t believe that I killed him,” I told her with the utmost earnestness. “Surely you can trust me to know what I was doing. I am not an ordinary doctor. I have made a special study of poisons, as the pupil, I may say the favourite pupil, of the greatest expert alive. I am prepared to swear to you or in any court of justice that the dose I gave him would not have killed any man in a normal condition of health. Sir Frank Tarleton and I both observed symptoms that point to some other drug having been administered to Weathered. Remember that you were not his only patient, and you are not likely to have been the only one whose confidence he abused. The Domino Club probably swarmed with his enemies, in fact the manageress as good as told us so. His own step-daughter asserts that there were other women with whom he had mysterious relations——”
“Other women!” She interrupted me with a cry of dismay. “Do you mean—does she know anything about me?”
I recollected Sarah Neobard’s fierce denunciation, and the scene she had described, when she sat with her hired spy in the restaurant watching the persecuted girl. I tried to explain away my unlucky slip.