“Just a matter of patience, old man,” said he.
A couple of hours afterwards, Olivia, in nightdress and wrapper, entered the room. The fire had gone out under its too heavy load of coal. Before it sprawled Alexis, asleep. On the small table beside him stood the whisky decanter, whose depleted contents caused Olivia to start with a gasp of dismay. His drunken sleep became obvious. She made an instinctive vain effort to arouse him. But the first pang of horror was lost in agonized search for the reason of this amazing debauch. He, the most temperate of men, by choice practically a drinker of water, to have done this! Could the reason lie in the events of the evening which had kept her staringly awake? She cowered under the new storm of doubt.
On the floor lay open a little dirty-paged book which must have fallen from his hand. She picked it up, glanced through it, could make nothing of it, for it was all in tiny Russian script. The horrible relation between this derelict book and the almost emptied whisky decanter occurred to her oversensitive brain. Then came suddenly the memory of a stupid argument of months ago at The Point and his justification of the plagiarist. Further, his putting of a hypothetical case—the finding on the body of a dead man a notebook with leaves of the thinnest paper. . . . She held in her hand such a notebook. It dropped from her nerveless fingers. Suddenly she sprang with a low cry to her husband and shook him by the shoulders.
“Alexis. Alexis. Wake up. For God’s sake.”
But the unaccustomed drug of the alcohol held him in stupor. She tried again, wildly.
“Alexis, wake up and tell me what I think isn’t true.”
At last she realized that he would lie there until the effect of the whisky had worn off. Mechanically, she put a cushion behind his head and adjusted his limbs to a position of comfort. Mechanically, too, she put the stopper in the decanter and replaced the siphon on the silver tray, and with her scrap of a handkerchief tried to remove the ring which the wet siphon had made on the table. Then she looked hopelessly round the otherwise undisturbed and beloved room. What could be done until Alexis should awaken?
She would go to bed. Perhaps she might sleep. She felt as though she had been beaten from head to foot.
The despatch box lay open on the hearthrug, the key in the lock. Its secrecy had hitherto been a jest with her. She had sworn it contained locks of hair of Bluebeard victims. He had given out a legend of Secret Service documents of vast importance. Now it was obvious that, at any rate, it was the repository of the little black book.