The voice that had arrested his attention was a man’s voice, and, turning, he made a hasty gesture toward Danton to remain where he was, and then stepped boldly through, closing the door behind him. The presence of a man in the room and the instant recognition of the tones of that man’s voice had driven all thought of the delicacy of his undertaking from his mind at once.
For Nick Carter to hear a voice once was always to remember it, and the instant those tones fell upon his ear he knew that he was in the presence of the master conspirator, in short, that the man, Rogers, was at that very moment at his mercy.
Having closed the door gently, he dropped upon the floor and crawled forward until he could peer through a crack between the folding-doors which connected the two rooms, and he almost exclaimed aloud when his eyes lighted upon the scene thus unfolded to his view.
At the first glance it seemed almost as if Mercedes herself was seated there, conversing with Rogers, so exact a copy had she managed to produce of the young woman she had plotted to impersonate. But even as Nick took in the details of her appearance, she spoke, and she did so with the voice of Isabel Benton.
“Oh, no,” she was saying. “I will experience no difficulty in getting her away from this hotel. Give yourself no uneasiness on that score. I have already made every arrangement. The doctor has given his opinion, the management of the hotel is ready to assist me in taking her out as quietly as possible. They are no more anxious to make an exhibition of a sick guest than I am of a sick maid; and Paul, her own brother would not know her, she is so wasted and changed. I don’t know what the drug is that you gave me to administer to her, but, whatever it is, it has done its work well. Mercedes Danton, the real, goes out of existence to-morrow when we ship her off to Canada. After that, you can put her out of existence in fact, at your own sweet pleasure. I wash my hands of it.”
“And your part here? What will you do?”
“Oh, I’ll play my part, all right. Don’t worry about me. You say the servant whom you have ‘fixed’ at the house in Newport, where the old lady is staying, will do her work this week, and that Mrs. Danton is too ill to travel here now. Well, that means that I have nothing to fear from that source; and Danton père—if your plans do not fail in regard to him——”
“They cannot fail. He will die on shipboard on the way over, of apoplexy, or of something that will look much like it. They haven’t time to hold autopsies on ocean steamers. I’ll take care of that. The steward who is to put him out of the way has worked for me before; he will not fail. But what of the son?”
“You leave the son to me. He has just twenty-four hours more to live and then, pouf! He goes out of existence. Thus all the obstacles are removed. Thus we will come into the millions.”
“You are a great actress, Isabel. You play the part superbly. Even now—here—to me—you look it thoroughly.”