Chapter XI: Joyce Displays Curiosity

Armourer felt Joyce at his side.

“I’m thirsting for information,” she explained softly. “Whenever I approach father--he just glares at me and carries on a conversation with somebody else. I’ve tried Mr. Trevor, but he only colours up and looks uncomfortable--and Mr. Vance seems so utterly miserable that I haven’t the heart to tackle him.”

The magistrate smiled down at her.

“What do you want to know?”

“Oh, heaps of things. Why Mr. Vance came for you in such a hurry after tiffin; why you sent for daddy; why Mrs. Battiscombe fell ill so suddenly--and why you all persist in indulging in whispered conversations? Is somebody dead?”

Armourer started.

“Yes,” he felt bound to confess. “The planter who owned that nice bungalow in the trees died this afternoon--very suddenly. There was no doctor handy, so we sent for Professor Standen. Mrs. Battiscombe rode over to see Mr. Moberly, and--well, the sudden news that he had pegged out upset her.”

“She fainted?”

“That’s right.”

“At Mr. Moberly’s house?”

The magistrate nodded.

“Then, if you wanted to move her at all, why didn’t you send her to her husband’s bungalow?”

Armourer glanced nervously over the rail at the group of men talking together below.

“Because, Miss Standen, this was a good deal nearer and there happened to be another white woman here who could look after her. We’ve sent for Mr. Battiscombe, but he happened to be out when our messenger called. He’ll come over as soon as the news reaches him.”

The girl appeared to be thinking deeply.

“Is Mr. Battiscombe a nice man?”

“Rather; one of the best.”

“She’s frightfully pretty, isn’t she?”

“Oh, yes.”

“He won’t be angry when he learns that her illness was caused by the news of Mr. Moberly’s death? She is dreadfully ill, you know.”

Armourer was not feeling any too comfortable at that moment. He was aware that Vera Battiscombe was in a high fever and a little afraid to what extremes her delirium might carry her. Above all, he had no desire for Joyce to glean from her ravings exactly what happened at Rembakut on the previous evening. In his keenness to solve the mystery of the Crimson Butterfly, he had forgotten until that moment that Battiscombe had surprised them on the verandah and would be inclined to regard the presence of Vera--ill and at Armourer’s house--with suspicion. Battiscombe had been blind for so long that it was difficult to make allowances for what he would think now that his eyes were opened.

“I expect we shall have to approach her husband very tactfully,” he said, “and, in case we decide to frame some ingenious little story to meet the emergency, you had better know nothing. She talks a good deal, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“About anybody in particular?”

She leaned back against the table.

“She doesn’t talk sensibly, of course. Sometimes she rambles on for minutes at a time; then there are long periods of silence, broken perhaps by little incoherent remarks. I can only remember hearing ‘Dick’ and ‘Jim,’ and once she murmured something about a butterfly. I nursed a man once who apparently saw the most beautiful butterflies in his dreams. He used to tell me about them. He had been hit in the head. Mrs. Battiscombe didn’t strike her head when she fell?”

“I don’t think so.”

There ensued a long pause, at the end of which Joyce said:

“I must go back to her now.”

She was on the point of entering the room when the magistrate called to her softly:

“Miss Standen!”

“What is it?”

“I want you to pay particular attention to anything further she says about that butterfly. Make some sort of note of her remarks, if you can.”

She smiled wistfully.

“All right; I will. More secrets?”

“I’m afraid so. I’ll tell you all about it one of these days.”

She turned the handle and pushed open the door.

“It’s been quite a day of butterflies, hasn’t it? Daddy chased a red one for quite a while this morning.”

“By Jove!” ejaculated Armourer with well-simulated surprise. “So he did!”

He went down the steps and joined the others.

The professor was leaning against a post; Vance, looking particularly dejected, stood with his hands in his pockets a couple of yards away; Trevor was sitting on the ground.

It was the hour of sunset again--and so much had happened since Joyce and Michael witnessed the last one together twenty-four hours ago! Dick had been alive then, and Armourer had waved to him as he passed his house on the way to the estate store for a tooth-brush. Vera Battiscombe--who now lay, fragile and fever-racked, babbling incoherencies--had been a desirable vampire-thing, woefully in possession of all her faculties.

“Have you still got that ornament on you?” demanded Trevor, as Armourer came up.

The magistrate felt in his pocket.

“Yes. Why?”

“Professor Standen would like to have a look at it.”

He passed the envelope to the professor, who withdrew the pendant and held it to the light.

He glanced presently from one to the other.

“Astounding! And you say it was on the table when the poor chap died?”

Vance nodded.

“We are taking Standen into our confidence,” he explained to Armourer. “It won’t go any further. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not in the very least. It’s quite on the cards he may be able to help us out.” He turned to the professor. “You’d better hear the whole of the yarn, anyway. I went to Rembakut--that’s Battiscombe’s place--last night, if you remember, to get some things for your daughter. Battiscombe was out, and his wife, pleading loneliness, begged me to stay with her until he returned. I didn’t see the Butterfly then, but I clearly recollect noticing that chain round her neck. It next appeared, with the pendant attached, on the table by Dick’s elbow this afternoon. We all remarked on the coincidence, the similarity to the mark on Dick’s face; but we could only regard it as a coincidence and nothing else.”

“Naturally. Well----?”

“Then Mrs. Battiscombe rode over and something prompted me to drag Vance into an adjoining room and watch what she did. I feel pretty rotten about it now, because the discovery has proved more of a shock to her system than I believed possible at the time. But there was that letter to be considered, stating that she and Jim had had a row over Moberly, and I wanted to prove conclusively that neither Jim nor she knew anything about the tragedy. I was so keen on my job that I actually jotted down what she said the moment she realised that Dick was dead.” He glanced at the back of an envelope. “‘It was true then!… They have killed him!… He told me.… The Crimson Butterfly!’”

“‘They have killed him,’” repeated Standen. “You are quite sure she said that?”

“Quite. You heard it too, Vance.”

The planter inclined his head.

“Quite clearly.”

The professor was still examining the pendant.

“And then----?”

“And then she began foraging among the various articles of jewellery on the table, apparently searching for _that_. She couldn’t find it, because I had it already--in my pocket. Her next remark was: ‘Gone!… They have found it!’--and then she fell.”

“But,” put in Trevor, “the interesting fact remains that the chief was stung by a butterfly--or some similar insect, because we all saw the mark and the professor noticed a strange-looking creature in the neighbourhood of the bungalow just before lunch. You can’t get away from that.”

“We all know that,” agreed Vance, “but what’s puzzling all of us at the moment is who told Mrs. Battiscombe that Dick was going to be killed. There’s another thing too: we’ve all of us been out East a good spell and not one of us can remember having heard of a poisonous butterfly--and yet she referred to _The Crimson Butterfly_ as if she’d known it all her life. I’m not inclined to be superstitious, and I take any native yarn I hear with a pinch of salt, but I’ve got an idea at the back of my skull that that damned ornament had everything to do with Moberly’s death.”

“You’re getting morbid,” declared the second assistant.

“Very likely--but I defy anyone to think deeply about an affair like this without getting morbid. Look at the facts: Mrs. Battiscombe sent that ornament to Dick, and about the first thing she did when she found he was dead was to try and get it back. It wasn’t the tragedy that knocked her out--it was the knowledge that somebody had found that pendant. Isn’t that so, Armourer?”

Armourer sucked thoughtfully at his pipe.

“It looks like it.”

“If it were merely one of Dick’s presents to her, why should she want it back? Who was the accomplice who, fearing that the resemblance between the ornament and the mark would be noticed, slipped into Moberly’s bungalow and employed some mysterious chemical preparation to remove the mark?”

In the weird half-light his long face looked more than usually sallow.

“Don’t you think,” he continued, levelling a finger at Armourer, “that, in the light of recent developments, the butterfly Professor Standen thought he saw is our one stumbling-block to the solution of the mystery? Without that, it seems pretty clear sailing. Dick and Mrs. Battiscombe were about a good deal together. It’s possible he may have offended some vindictive native and that she heard him threaten the chief. More likely still, Dick might have taken that ornament from some obscure sanctuary to give to her. You know these queer religions. The guardian of the shrine, or whatever you like to call him, could have poisoned Dick, made that mark with some corrosive fluid and----”

“It won’t work,” broke in the magistrate gravely. “You see, Vance, the ornament was left behind. He would hardly have forgotten that.”

The professor coughed.

“And,” he insisted, “I didn’t merely _think_ I saw a red butterfly. I did visualise it--and gave a very sound description to Armourer when I got back. Moreover, so anxious was I to make another attempt to catch it, that I got your very excellent Gholam-Singh to make me a net; and all this before anyone had heard that Mr. Moberly was dead. Personally, I adhere to the opinion that that particular insect--a four-winged monstrosity masquerading as a butterfly--was responsible for the tragedy we are now discussing. With regard to the fresh complications that have since arisen--I confess myself mystified. It is within the bounds of possibility that these will be found to have quite simple explanations as soon as Mrs. Battiscombe is well enough to tell us about them. You know, Vance, the longer I live the less anxious I am to jump to obvious conclusions. Whenever there are two sides to a question, I like to probe both very thoroughly. I don’t know the lady in question, of course. I’ve been on this island only a matter of days. But I have it on excellent authority that Mrs. Battiscombe was celebrated for her beauty, her easy-going disposition--if one may call it so--and her quick-wittedness. She came up the steps to Mr. Moberly’s verandah, saw the dead man and the scar on his face, and uttered a perfectly natural exclamation--‘_The Crimson Butterfly!_’ It was a crimson butterfly; it was shaped like one and it was crimson in colour. At that point she remembered the trinket and, recognising that its unfortunate resemblance to the mark would be bound to attract notice, decided to conceal it. It came as a shock to her to discover that the resemblance had been noticed and the ornament removed. The other purely hysterical ejaculations I should be disposed to wash out altogether. What does a delightful, butterfly creature like Mrs. Battiscombe know about _killing_!”

Darkness fell suddenly and they found their way one by one to the verandah.

Standen found himself next to Armourer.

“How does that strike you?” he demanded.

The magistrate wrinkled his forehead.

“I’ve listened attentively to both sides,” he announced. “I’m always doing it; it’s my job!--I’ve nothing to find fault with in your earnestness or your eloquence; but neither of your solutions is in the least bit water-tight. What do you say to a drink?”