The Late Tenant

by Louis Tracy

The man who had called was Neil, who, on hurrying to tell his master where Jenny was, had been sent back with instructions to try and induce her to leave the flat and come to Hanover Square. Neil had accomplished this to the extent of getting Jenny to leave Eddystone Mansions; but she would not go to Strauss, for David’s threat of the police if she disposed of the papers to any one else than their lawful owner was in her mind, and she now feared to sell the papers to Strauss, as she knew that she would certainly do if she once went to his rooms. Yet she was sorely tempted to sell to the lavish rich man rather than to the bargainer, and so, making a compromise between her fears and her temptation, she had told Neil that she would wait in a certain café, and there discuss the matter with Strauss, if Strauss would come to her. She was waiting there, and Strauss was going to her, led by Neil, when David had seen him in the landau.

At any rate, the girl was gone. David felt as if he had lost all things. He had promised the certificates; and Violet had said: “I shall owe much gratitude to the person who hands them to me.”

Now Van Hupfeldt had, or would have, them. While he had been dallying and bandying words in Porchester Gardens, Van Hupfeldt had been acting, and he groaned to himself in a pain of self-reproach: “Too much Violet, David!”

He strode to and fro in the dining-room with a quick step, pacing with the lightness of a caged bear, his fists clenched, keen to act, yet not knowing what to do. The girl was gone, the certificates gone with her.

One thing, however, he had gained by the adventure, namely, the almost certainty that Van Hupfeldt was Strauss—for he had seen the valet, Neil, who at Piccadilly Circus had declared that he was Strauss’s servant, sitting on the box-seat of the landau in which was the man whom David had heard Violet at the grave call “Mr. Van Hupfeldt.” This seemed a sort of proof that Van Hupfeldt and Strauss were one. The same man who had been so bound up with the one sister, and had somehow brought her to her death, was now about to marry the other! The thought of such a thing struck lightning from David’s eyes.

“Never that!” he vowed in his frenzy. “However it goes, not that!”

And then he was angry afresh with her, thinking: “He can’t be much good, this man—she must be easily won.”

He could not guess that Van Hupfeldt had promised to clear her sister’s name six months after the marriage, and that this was her motive, and not love, for being won. He did not realize that the certificates now lost by him would have freed Violet from Van Hupfeldt. He believed that she was entering lightly into marriage with a man of great wealth. Again, in this unreasoning mood, he saw her in her nocturnal wanderings.

But bitterness and regrets could not bring back the certificates, in the gaining of which her honor was almost at stake. If he had known where Van Hupfeldt lived, he would have gone straight there. Nevertheless, Van Hupfeldt was not at home, was hurrying away from home, in fact. Here, then, was another point. Jenny had clearly not gone to Van Hupfeldt’s on leaving the flat, or why should Van Hupfeldt be racing eastward? It seemed that Jenny and Van Hupfeldt were to meet somewhere else, perhaps somewhere not far from the mansions. If David had only kept the landau in sight, he might have tracked Van Hupfeldt to that meeting! He felt now that, if he could come upon them, then, by the mere force and whirlwind of his will, he should have his way. On a sudden he went out again into the streets.

He ran southward at a venture. If there was a conference going on in any house near by, and if the landau was waiting outside, he should recognize it by the horses and by Neil on the box. But, as it turned out, even this recognition was not necessary, for, running down Bloomsbury-St., toward a carriage of which he caught sight standing before a French chocolate-shop at the Oxford-St. corner, he saw a man and a girl come out of the shop. The man lifted his hat and nodded toward the girl with his foot on the carriage-step, and then was driven off westward. Half a minute afterward David had overtaken the girl.