Mr Joaquin Holmes was making a morning call one of those days on Mrs Theodore Livingstone?—?better known to the readers of these pages as Philippina?—?at her furnished apartments in Bury Street, Bloomsbury. Of late, Mr Joaquin Holmes had been down on his luck; and the weather in London that day was certainly not of a sort to propitiate the nerves of a man who had been raised on the cloudless skies of Southern Colorado. Though it was early April, a settled gloom, as of November, brooded impartially over city and suburbs. Mr Joaquin Holmes was by no means happy. Society in London had grown tired of his seership; the Psycho-physical Entertainment at the Assyrian Hall attracted every night an ever-dwindling audience; Maskelyne and Cooke had learnt to counterfeit all the best of his tricks; and things in general looked so black just then for the trade of prophet that the Seer was beginning to wonder in his own inmost soul whether he wouldn’t be compelled before long to fall back for a while on his more lucrative but less reputable alternative profession of gambler and card-sharper. However, being a man of sentiment, he consoled himself meanwhile by a morning call on Mrs Theodore Livingstone.
Philippina was looking her very best that afternoon, attired in a coquettish costume, half peignoir, half tea-gown, especially designed for the reception of such casual visitors. And Mr Joaquin Holmes was one of Philippina’s most devoted admirers. Florian had introduced him long ago to the good-natured singer, before her marriage, and the Seer had ever since been numbered among her most frequent and attentive callers. He could talk with her in German; for, as befits his trade, he was an excellent linguist; and Philippina was glad when she could relieve herself for a while from the constant strain of speaking English by an occasional return to the free tongue of her Fatherland. Theodore was out, she said, glibly, with her accustomed volubility; oh yes, he was out, and he wouldn’t be back, she supposed, till dinner. No fear about that; the horrid man never came near her now, except at meal times, or to go down to the theatre. He was off, she had no doubt, with some of his hateful companions in some billiard-room or something, wasting the money that ought to go to the support of the household. If it weren’t for herself, and for some very kind friends, Philippina really didn’t know what on earth would become of them.
The Seer smiled sweetly. He was an engaging man, and when he flooded Philippina with the light of his great eyes she thought him really as nice as anybody on earth, except Herr Andreas. They sat there long, and chatted in that peculiar vein which Philippina affected when she found herself alone with one of her male admirers. She was a born flirt, Philippina, and though she was a matron now, with a distinct tendency to grow visibly stouter on good English fare, she had still all that archness and that liveliness of manner which had captivated Florian the first morning they met her on the hill-top at St Valentin.
As they sat there, exchanging a quiet fire of repartee, with many ach’s and so’s of very Teutonic playfulness, the lodging-house servant came up with a note, which Philippina tore open and read through somewhat eagerly. The Seer noticed that as she read it her colour deepened?—?such signs of feeling seldom escaped the eyes of that observant thought-reader. He noticed also that the envelope, though directed in English letters, bore evident traces of a German hand in the twists and twirls of the very peculiar manuscript. He could see from where he sat an unmistakable curl over the u of Bury Street. A curl like that could only have been produced by a person accustomed to German writing.
Philippina crumpled the envelope, and looked vacantly at the fireplace. The fire wasn’t lighted, for the day, though damp and dark, was by no means chilly. The Seer noted that glance: so she wanted to burn it, then! Philippina, unheeding him, poked the envelope through the bars of the grate with the aid of the tongs, but laid the note itself on the table by her side, a little uneasily. The Seer, with that native quickness of perception which had made him into a thought-reader, divined at once what was passing through her mind; she must destroy that note before Theodore returned, and she was anxious in her own soul for a chance of destroying it.
Joaquin Holmes spotted a mystery?—?perhaps an intrigue; but, in any case, a mystery. Now little family affairs of this sort were part and parcel of his stock-in-trade; there was nothing so useful to him in life as possession of a secret. And Philippina was indeed an open book; he could read her as easily as he could read a pack of cards with the tips of his fingers. The longer he stopped, the more obviously and evidently Philippina fidgeted; the more she fidgeted, the longer he determined, as he phrased it to himself with Western frankness, “to stop and see the fun out.” Philippina grew more and more silent as time went by; the Seer talked on and on with more unceasing persistence. Meanwhile, the fog without grew denser and denser. At last, of a sudden, it descended, pitch dark, with that surprising rapidity we all know so well in our smoky metropolis. Philippina yawned; she saw there was no help for it. It was a case for the gas. “Will you ring the bell, Mr Holmes?” she asked languidly, in German.
The Seer seized his chance, and rose briskly to obey her. As he brushed past her side, Philippina, in a quiver, put out her hand for her letter. The room was black as night. She fumbled for it in vain; a cold chill came over her. “Why, where’s that paper?” she exclaimed, in a tone of most evident and undisguised dismay. “I wish I had a match. It was lying here a minute ago.”
Mr Holmes stood calmly in the dark, with his hand upon the bell-handle. He was in no hurry to ring it. “You’ll have to wait now,” he said, in his very coolest manner, “till the servant comes up. Unfortunately, I don’t happen to have a match about me.”
“There are some upon the mantelpiece, perhaps,” Philippina faltered, unwilling to rise and move away from the table that held that compromising letter.
“Oh, that’s all right!” the Seer said quietly, in his slow Western drawl. “Don’t trouble yourself about me. I can see very well in the dark without one.” Then he began to read aloud, “Du liebste Philippina!”
Philippina made a wild dash across the room in his direction. This was horrible! He had abstracted it! But the Seer, unabashed, took a step or two backward with great deliberation. “That’s all right!” he said again, in a languid tone of the blandest unconcern. “There’s nothing fresh here; you needn’t trouble yourself. It’s only a little note from a very old friend, signed, ‘Thy ever affectionate, Andreas Hausberger.’?”
Philippina darted once more blindly in the direction of the voice; Joaquin Holmes heard her coming, and stepped aside noiselessly. He passed his practised finger-tips again over the lines of the writing. “Very pretty!” he said, smiling. “Very nice, indeed?—?for Signora Casalmonte! Why, I fancied you were her friend. This is charming, charming! And only to think so prudent a man as our dear friend Hausberger should have ventured to write such a compromising letter! ‘At three o’clock to-morrow, at the usual place,’ he says. Dear me, that’s interesting! So you’ve met him there before! And what a fool the man must be to go and put it on paper!”
Philippina clasped her hands, and dashed wildly against the sofa. “Oh, give it back to me!” she cried, really alarmed. “What will Andreas ever say! How can you be so cruel? And my husband?—?my husband!”
The American, still wholly undisconcerted by her cries, popped the paper inside his breast-coat pocket, buttoned it up securely, drew a match-box from his waistcoat, and lighted the gas with a calm air of triumph. “Now, don’t be a fool, Philippina,” he said, taking hold of her by those plump round arms of hers, and pushing her back with conspicuous calmness into an easy-chair. “Compose yourself! Compose yourself! There’s nothing new in all this; we all know what you are?—?Theodore Livingstone, I suppose, just as well as the rest of us. Why trouble to give yourself these airs of tragic virtue? To tell you the truth, my dear girl, they don’t at all become you. Nobody expects miracles from an actress nowadays?—?not even her husband. Besides, I’m not going to make money out of you; you’re a very nice girl, and you’ve always been kind to me; so why should I want to show this letter to Theodore? What’s Theodore to me, or I to Theodore, that I should bother my head to uphold his domestic dignity? No, no, my child; that’s not the game. I hold the letter as a threat over Andreas Hausberger. Hausberger’s rich, don’t you see, and his wife’s his fortune. What’s more, she hates him, and he keeps her always precious short of money. She’ll be ready to pay anything for a letter like this; it’s a handle against him; and he, for his part, well?—?he’ll make any terms she likes rather than drive her away from him.”
He took up his hat, and made a courtly bow. “Good-bye, Philippina,” he said, ............