The young man strolled disconsolately enough into the billiard-room, thence (dogged by a specter of loneliness) to the bar, and finally, in sheer desperation, to the dining-room, where he selected a table and ordered an evening paper with his meal.
When the former was brought him, he sat up and began to take a new interest in life. The glaring head-lines that met his eye on the front page proved as bracing as a slap in the face.
"'The Maitland Jewels,'" he read, half aloud: "'Daring Attempt at
Burglary. "Mad" Maitland Catches "Handsome Dan" Anisty in the Act of
Cracking His Safe at Maitland Manor. Which was Which? Both Principals
Disappear.'"
A dull red glow suffused the reader's countenance; he compressed his lips, only opening them once, and then to emit a monosyllabic oath, which can hardly have proved any considerable relief to his surcharged emotional nature.
The news-story was exploited as a "beat"; it could have been little else, since nine-tenths of its "exclusive details" had been born full-winged from the fecund imagination of a busy reporter to whom Maitland had refused an interview while in his bath, some three hours earlier. Maitland discovered with relief that boiled down to essentials it consisted simply of the statement that somebody (presumably himself) had caught somebody (presumably Anisty) burglarizing the library safe at Maitland Manor that morning: that one of the somebodies (no one knew which) had overpowered the other and left him in charge of the butler, who had presently permitted his prisoner to escape and then talked for publication.
It was not to this so much that Maitland objected. It was the illustrations that alternately saddened and maddened the young man: the said illustrations comprising blurred half-tone reproductions of photographs taken on the Maitland estate; a diagram of the library, as fanciful as the text it illuminated, and two portraits, side by side, of the heroes, himself and Anisty, excellent likenesses both of the originals and of each other.
Mr. Maitland did not enjoy his dinner.
Anxious and preoccupied, he tasted the dishes mechanically; and when they had all passed before him, took his thoughts and a cigar to a gloomy corner of the smoking-room, where he sat for two solid hours, debating the matter pro and con, and arriving at no conclusion whatever, save that Higgins was doomed.
At ten-fifteen he began to contemplate with positive pleasure the prospect of discharging the butler. That, at least, was action, something that he could do; wherever else he thought to move he found himself baffled by the blank darkness of mystery, or by his fear of publicity and ridicule.
At ten-twenty he decided to move upon Greenfields at once, and telephoned O'Hagan, advising him to profess ignorance of his employer's whereabouts.