They dismounted at the gate, the garage being approached by an entrance a little lower down. Varney noticed that the foreigner got out very slowly, leaning heavily on his host’s arm as he did so. It was plain that this visitor, like the other, was in indifferent health.
Varney hung about during the greater part of the day, but he saw nobody. All the inmates of this singular establishment seemed to prefer the seclusion of the house.
After the inn had closed, he smoked a last pipe, and then went to bed. He was rather wakeful that night, and did not go to sleep for an hour or so.
Suddenly he was awakened by a loud knocking. Jumping up, he looked at his watch—it was two o’clock. He was evidently the first to hear it, for he could distinguish no sounds from the room at the other end of the passage, where the landlord and his wife slept.
He flung up his window and called out: “Hullo! Who’s that?”
He was answered by the familiar voice of Janson.
“Sorry to disturb you like this, Mr Franks,” cried the doctor, addressing him by his assumed name. “But I want your help. A foreign gentleman, an Italian, arrived at Forest View this morning, and he was taken alarmingly ill about half-an-hour ago. The poor chap’s hours are numbered. I have been trying to talk to him in his own language; he seems to understand me all right, but I can hardly follow a sentence of his, and there’s nobody in the house who understands him either.”
The incongruity of the situation forced itself upon Varney immediately. “What in the world makes a man come to a house where he can understand nobody, and nobody can understand him,” he whispered down.
“The same thought occurred to me,” came the answering whisper. “Mr Strange explained it. He said that their parlourmaid understood Italian perfectly, having lived in Italy for some years. She had gone up to London early yesterday morning and would not be back till late to-morrow.”
It flashed instantly across Varney’s mind that his suspicions about the young woman were correct: that she belonged to a different class from that which furnishes parlourmaids. She was a lady masquerading as a servant. Strange’s fiction of her having lived abroad was invented to keep up appearances.