“What has happened, sir?” she asked. Her face altered as she put the question, and her large black eyes hardened fiercely, in genuine astonishment and alarm.
“Send for the police,” exclaimed her master. “Lecount, I insist on being protected. Send for the police!”
“May I read the letter, sir?”
He feebly waved his hand. Mrs. Lecount read the letter attentively, and put it aside on the table, without a word, when she had done.
“Have you nothing to say to me?” asked Noel Vanstone, staring at his housekeeper in blank dismay. “Lecount, I’m to be robbed! The scoundrel who wrote that letter knows all about it, and won’t tell me anything unless I pay him. I’m to be robbed! Here’s property on this table worth thousands of pounds—property that can never be replaced—property that all the crowned heads in Europe could not produce if they tried. Lock me in, Lecount, and send for the police!”
Instead of sending for the police, Mrs. Lecount took a large green paper fan from the chimney-piece, and seated herself opposite her master.
“You are agitated, Mr. Noel,” she said, “you are heated. Let me cool you.”
With her face as hard as ever—with less tenderness of look and manner than most women would have shown if they had been rescuing a half-drowned fly from a milk-jug—she silently and patiently fanned him for five minutes or more. No practiced eye observing the peculiar bluish pallor of his complexion, and the marked difficulty with which he drew his breath, could have failed to perceive that the great organ of life was in this man, what the housekeeper had stated it to be, too weak for the function which it was called on to perform. The heart labored over its work as if it had been the heart of a worn-out old man.
“Are you relieved, sir?” asked Mrs. Lecount. “Can you think a little? Can you exercise your better judgment?”
She rose and put her hand over his heart with as much mechanical attention and as little genuine interest as if she had been feeling the plates at dinner to ascertain if they had been properly warmed. “Yes,” she went on, seating herself again, and resuming the exercise of the fan; “you are getting better already, Mr. Noel.—Don’t ask me about this anonymous letter until you have thought for yourself, and have given your own opinion first.” She went on with the fanning, and looked him hard in the face all the time. “Think,” she said; “think, sir, without troubling yourself to express your thoughts. Trust to my intimate sympathy with you to read them. Yes, Mr. Noel, this letter is a paltry attempt to frighten you. What does it say? It says you are the object of a conspiracy directed by Miss Vanstone. We know that already—the lady of the inflamed eyes has told us. We snap our fingers at the conspiracy. What does the letter say next? It says the writer has valuable information to give you if you will pay for it. What did you call this person yourself just now, sir?”