His first glance toward the massive street-door caused him to start and mutter an imprecation. The bell was muffled, and the door-plate hidden beneath heavy folds of crape.
Archibald Warburton was dead. The hand that stole his little one had struck his death-blow, as surely as if by a dagger thrust. His feeble frame, unable to endure those long days of suspense, had given his soul back to its origin, his body back to nature.
Within was a household doubly stricken; without, a two-fold danger menaced.
“So,” muttered Van Vernet, as he gazed upon this insignia of death; “so my patron is dead; that stately, haughty aristocrat has lost all interest in his wife’s secrets. Well, so have I—but I have transferred my interest to his brother, Alan Warburton. Death caused by shock following loss of his little daughter, no doubt. That tall, straight seigneur looked like a man able to outlive a shock, too.”
He was not at all ruffled by the sudden taking-off of the man he supposed to be his patron. He had not made a single step toward the clearing-up of the mystery surrounding the goings and comings of Mrs. Archibald Warburton. His discovery of Stanhope at the masked ball, and his machinations consequent upon that discovery, together with the fiasco of the Raid and all its after-results, had made it impossible that he could interest himself in what he considered “merely a bit of domestic intrigue.”
He was not sorry that Archibald Warburton was dead, and he resolved to profit by that death.
Since the discovery of Alan Warburton’s picture, Van Vernet’s mind had been drifting toward dangerous conclusions.
Suppose this wealthy aristocrat and the Sailor assassin should prove the same, what would follow? Might he not naturally conclude that a secret existed between Alan Warburton and the Francoises, and, if so, what was the nature of that secret? Why was Alan Warburton, if it were he, absent from his house on a night of festivity, a night when he should have been making merry with his brother’s guests?
If he were in league with those outlaws of the slums, it was not for plunder; surely the Warburtons were rich enough. What, then, was the secret which that stately mansion concealed?
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” quoted Vernet, grimly. “That Sailor assassin first—the Warburton skeleton first. They are almost under my hand, and once I grasp them, my clutch is upon the Warburton millions, too.”