“What did she want—a glass of water, to meet a sweetheart, or was she looking for some lost article? For all of these things had I seen happen. It was the last, for, setting the candle upon the table, she began to grope underneath it, and, giving a soft exclamation of pleasure, held to the light a glittering diamond collar with a wide clasp of coloured gems. But it was not the sight of these that made me turn so cold that the lantern nearly fell from my stiff fingers; it was when the light of the candle flashed full on the girl’s face and reddish hair, and showed me Annie Fenton!
“Before I could pull myself together, I heard steps coming from the butler’s pantry just behind me, and a man’s figure, with a clean-shaven face and wearing the dress suit of a waiter, stepped into the light. Facing Annie, he laid his hand on her shoulder. She started and cringed, but not a sound left her lips.
“ ‘Why didn’t you come to meet me as I bade you?’ his voice whispered harshly. ‘Did you think now that I’ve found you, I would let you slip through my fingers again?’ Then, as his eyes fell on the collar, he closed his hand on it, saying, ‘That will be very useful to me just now; my plans aren’t working well. Forget that you found this, my girl, and if you are wise, don’t scream.’ Then ten words oozed from Annie’s lips, ‘John Scott, let go! I said I’d never meet you.’
“It was my brother,—at best, a would-be thief,—dogging my sweetheart. He was bearded when I left home, and so I did not know him. For a second my right hand was on the pistol that I always carry when at work; then I suddenly realized what it would mean to the two women I best loved if I shot my brother. If Annie would only scream, some of the gentlemen who slept in a chamber beyond the billiard room could hardly be asleep, and they would come. But how to make her?
“Dr. Russell, there’s something works in us besides ourselves at times. Yes, I see you know it, too. Scarce knowing what I did, I turned my bull’s-eye straight and full on Annie; with one hand reaching for the trap, I shook those fool rats loose, and they, half blinded, ran down the light streak toward her. Next thing I knew, she was up on a chair, and shriek upon shriek rang through the house. Before I could scarce move, the room was full of the gentlemen, Mr. —— and the artist being in the lead. The man, bewildered by the suddenness of it all, loosed his hold on the jewels, and vanished through the pantry, as if he dived into water, but quick as he went, they both knew that I had seen.
“Before either of us could offer a word of explanation, my employer took in the whole matter at a glance, as he thought, recognized Annie as the maid of one of his guests, and, laying the uproar only to the rats and me, laughed at it as a great joke, while the artist fellow, seeing Annie, who kept on screaming and was too frightened to get down from the chair, called,—‘By Jove! What a picture! Stay there just for a minute while I make a memory sketch,’—at least, I think that’s what he called it.
“Well, sir, we were married New Year’s Eve, and neither of us have since ever put in words what we saw and heard that night, just before I loosed the rats.
“A year after, I was overlooking some work in a picture gallery, when I came face to face with the picture as it’s there now, and I knew I’d have to buy it first or last, sir, even if it bit a hole in my savings, for even a rat-catcher, as I was then, if he had a good mother of his own, doesn’t want his wife, with no shoes and her petticoats up to her knees, to be seen outside his own home.
“Oh, yes, of course, that was twenty-five years ago. The rat money went into well-advised real estate; we are settled here, and the missus and the girls have gone to bring my mother, past seventy, to live with us. No, I didn’t go; I couldn’t. My brother is back on the place, and married to a girl with some property. Made money himself in Australia, they say,—God knows how.