'O, that's the game, is it?' said Mr. Jacobs, handing him the sheet required. 'Want to see whether any of your old flames came to welcome you back. Hallo! what's the matter?' he cried, as Duval uttered a short groan.
'Nothing,' said Bryan; 'nothing at all. As Jacobs looked up at him he saw his finger resting motionless on a certain portion of the box sheet. 'Thank you, I won't intrude upon you any more. Good-morning, Jacobs;' and he sauntered off.
'Mrs. Alston E. Griswold,' murmured Jacobs to himself, reading the name underneath which Bryan's finger had been fixed. 'That's it; there's the mark of his black glove on the sheet now. Alston Griswold? Why, that's the name of one of your Wall-street customers, with a fine up-town house and--ah, Bryan, my boy, your propensities will get you into mischief one of these days.'
'All doubt is at an end now,' said Bryan, as he walked up to the hotel, 'and Clara was right. The case seems to me even darker and worse than she seems to think at present. It is lucky that she has a head upon her shoulders, for I shall have to take her into consultation.'
Thereupon he despatched an elderly Irishman to Miss Montressor's room, with a message intimating his desire to be allowed access to her as soon as possible. Bryan Duval's messenger returned with an affirmatory answer to his inquiry whether Miss Montressor could let him see her; they had not yet met on that morning, and she was in a high state of expectation of what the interview might bring forth.
Miss Montressor had been thinking intently on the subject in discussion during all her waking moments since she and Bryan Duval had parted on the preceding night. It had not kept her from sleeping; her nerves were in too good order and her constitution was too sound for her to be subjected to inconveniences of that sort by any abstract cause of emotion; but she had thought over it until she fell asleep, and it had recurred to her with her first consciousness on waking. She had endeavoured, in anticipation of Bryan Duval's possible line of interrogation, to recall everything that had been said during the conversation between herself and Mr. Foster on the terrace at Richmond, and, strangely as she considered it, she found this very difficult to do. If Miss Montressor had understood the laws of mental processes better, she would have known that this difficulty was of ordinary occurrence, and to be anticipated in her case. She was not in the habit of thinking about anything systematically, and a beginning in this direction is no easier than any other mental process directed with intention. So that Miss Montressor had got herself rather into a muddle between what had really been said by Mr. Foster and her general impression of the interview, when she found Bryan Duval in the small ante-room in which the residents at the hotel usually received their friends.
Neither was insensible to the gravity and incongruity of the occasion. That two strangers, come to New York in the trifling and superficial character of actors, should be--to their own almost indubitable persuasion, and quite unsuspected by the public--able to supply the key of one of the most terrible mysteries of crime which had for a long time startled and disturbed society, was a circumstance full of oddity and interest that they appreciated to the full. Literally nothing could have influenced, impressed, surprised, or agitated Duval out of the instincts of the dramatist who combines, and the actor who reproduces, the situations supplied by human events. When this story should be complete in its reality, it would find its way to the pigeon-holes in which Bryan Duval's materials, the pabulum of his ever-active brain, were stored up, with the regularity, in order and in date, of a privately edited edition of the Annual Register. In due, not in undue time--Bryan Duval was never so wanting in taste and judgment as to incur the charge of indecent haste--this drama of real life would no doubt be put upon the stage, with charming accessories of scenery, decoration, and padding-out. Bryan Duval saw his way to it already, though as yet the knowledge of the murderer and his motive were wanting to the story.
It had occupied his thoughts also almost exclusively; and though he had been trained to habits of mental precision, and the following of clues to human nature altogether beyond Miss Montressor's ken and capacity, he had not reached a much clearer state of mind than that in which his fair friend was about to join him. Bryan Duval was a man of too much natural keenness and too much acquired experience to accept generalities as bases for argument, or to seek conclusions in them. While he constructed a system with the skill and minuteness of a Procureur Impérial, he did not lend his judgment to one hypothesis, and turn the facts to fit it. Without ignoring or depreciating the influence of women in all human events, he regarded the 'Who is she?' which has become axiomatic as rather smart than sound, and was disposed to believe that dollars are quite as often to be found as women at the bottom of the crimes, as they assuredly are of the misfortunes, of men. In the present instance, if anything could be said to induce an explanation in the midst of the mystery of this crime, it was Bryan Duval's conviction that money was in question. Mr. Foster's private business in London; the disguise about his name, which he had avowed, but not explained; the perfectly conceivable rivalry and envy which his expedition might have excited--all these were plain to the mind of Bryan Duval as he pondered the matter, and they pointed each and all to another conclusion than that of 'Who is she?' Of Mr. Foster, or, as he had almost come to name the murdered man in his thoughts, Alston Griswold, he had not known very much, and their term of acquaintance had been short; but it had sufficed to create a strong regard for him, and Bryan Duval had formed a pretty accurate estimate of the New York merchant's character.
'An honest, true-hearted fellow,' said Duval to himself, 'and profoundly in love with his wife, who seems to have been equally attached to him. There was no woman in this case--no woman on either side the Atlantic. The murderer must be looked for in the ordinary category of ruffians, or if it is a put-up job, the wire-puller is here in New York among his rivals in business.'
The scene and circumstances of the crime, imperfectly as they could be gathered from the newspaper reports, made a very vivid picture to the mind's eye of the dramatist, accustomed to seize upon salient points; and he thought he discerned in them tokens of a surprise and a discovery, rather than of the common assault of a robber.