Chapter XXI: The Siren Speaks

She lay there, clasping at his knees, fragile as a piece of rare porcelain, with eyes as innocent in their gaze as those of a child, and it was minutes before Armourer could make up his mind to touch her.

He contrived not to look at her, staring vaguely into the night-shrouded open lands and the shadowy outlines of the forest beyond.

Strong man that he was, he felt that her presence there imperilled his soul. He saw her no longer as Vera--the wife of a cheery, fat, commonplace colleague; but as a siren from the underworld sent there to tempt him to some nameless indiscretion that would effectively shatter his earthly hopes.

The new cook-boy, shuffling in with the lamp, was the most welcome sound he ever remembered hearing.

She drew herself upright without his assistance and perched herself on the edge of the table, accomplishing each movement with an ease and grace that was remarkable in a woman in the early stages of convalescence.

The servant hung the lamp on a hook screwed into a beam and manipulated the wick until the centre portion of the broad verandah was bathed in yellow radiance.

“Hot water, Chong-Si,” said the magistrate briefly, and the Chinaman withdrew.

“So it _was_ your Butterfly?” he asked suddenly.

A rippling laugh escaped her lips.

“Yes, my poor Michael, and if you do not return it to me to-night, I promise you I shall conjure up every ounce of feminine spite at my command, and tell that brown-haired girl all about our romantic little dance at Rembakut.”

Armourer winced. He was beginning to realise that, during her illness, a subtle change had come over her. Even before the tragedy at Bukit-Serang she had conducted her rather indiscriminate love affairs in a way that deceived nobody but her husband; but there had been, nevertheless, certain glimmerings of delicacy and reserve, which now appeared to be entirely missing. There was an added hardness to her voice, too, which puzzled him.

He placed his back firmly against a post and folded his arms.

“Why do you want it back? Considering its associations, I should have imagined it about the last thing you would ever want to see again.”

She hooked a cigarette from the tin he always kept on the table, and held out a hand for matches.

“Associations!” she echoed mockingly, “what on earth are its associations to me? It’s a beautiful thing and I like it.”

He shook his head.

“I’m afraid it is entirely out of the question, Mrs. Battiscombe. It left my possession some days ago and will probably never come into it again.”

She slipped from her perch and came right up to him, her eyes never leaving his face.

“You are lying to me,” she cried hoarsely. “You have it here--in the house somewhere. I must have it, I tell you; it belongs to me.”

She threw a glance round the verandah as if contemplating a thorough search for the missing ornament.

Armourer felt for his pipe.

“I tell you I haven’t got it,” he said.

“But you have; you can’t have sent it away. You found it over there--where Dick died.”

He pressed the tobacco firmly home with his forefinger. He was beginning to feel himself again and was relieved to discover that this new Vera seemed a good deal less dangerous at the outset than the old.

“That’s perfectly correct. I found the Butterfly on Moberly’s table and brought it here; but it’s not here now and hasn’t been for some days.”

She clutched at his arm.

“Michael! Stop teasing me! You have locked it away in some drawer.” She began pleading with him, fondling him, coaxing him with all the nauseous persistence of a confirmed drug-taker. “You don’t understand what it means to me--this thing. It is essential to me for my health--for everything. Without it, I believe I shall die…”

This fresh attitude of hers presented too good an opportunity to be allowed to pass by. He resolved to ignore the professor’s advice and endeavour to glean a little information. Considering that she had mentioned Dick first, he could not see what harm a few questions would do.

“The pendant was in Moberly’s possession when we found it and it will probably go with the rest of his effects to his wife.”

A wild look flashed into her eyes.

“No, no,” she cried, “they mustn’t do that; you must stop them. Ann Moberly mustn’t have it. It belongs to me.”

Armourer nodded gravely.

“But you sent it back to Dick--and it was his property when he died,” he reminded her.

She stiffened suddenly and stared into the night. Presently her head came slowly round.

“Michael,” she whispered, “I want you to believe me, and to respect my confidence. That night when you rode to Rembakut--and kissed me--was a red-letter day in my life. After Dick and the others, it was simply wonderful to think that a great, strong, clean man like yourself could care for me. There were Dick’s presents and one other--this Butterfly pendant, I had accepted it in a moment of weakness and feared that to send it back to him would be to open up a correspondence with him again. I didn’t want to do that. I felt myself standing at the gateway of a new life. I didn’t want these men’s presents any longer; I just wanted _you_. Jim had been drinking and kept grumbling about my friendship for Dick, and suddenly I saw that this was my one opportunity of gracefully shutting the door on him. I declared I would return everything he had given me, and slipped the pendant into the parcel as well. After it had gone I was haunted with the thought that Dick might return it and there would be further complications with Jim. I rode over to get it back from him myself. You know the rest, don’t you?”

She dropped wearily into a chair.

There was no sound for some moments but the regular puffing of the magistrate at his pipe.

“Then Moberly didn’t give you the Crimson Butterfly?”

“No.”

Her head was buried in her hands and the answer came to him through her fingers.

“It came from a man you disliked?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you so mortally anxious to have it back again?”

She withdrew her hands.

“Because,” she told him steadily, “I have had letters from this man, demanding it and threatening to see Jim if it is not returned.”

A broad ray of daylight filtered into his brain.

“He has been writing to you here?”

She moved impatiently.

“Why do you persist in questioning me like this. I have been ill.”

“I want you to answer this because I fancy I may be able to help you.”

She dropped her hands helplessly into her lap.

“Yes, he has written to me here.”

“Good! That’s all I wanted to know. Now, Mrs. Battiscombe, if you will bring me one of those letters and show me the address from which he writes, I think I can safely predict that your troubles will be at an end.”

Chong-Si appeared at the living-room door.

“Your bath is ready, _Tuan_,” he announced.

“_Baik-lah_! I will be there in a minute.”

The man vanished.

Armourer looked round to find Mrs. Battiscombe in tears.

She was using every artifice to induce him to surrender the Crimson Butterfly, which was really rather pitiful in its way, because, as he had already tried to make her believe, the pendant had passed from his keeping a week ago.

“My dear woman,” he protested; “it’s no earthly use upsetting yourself. It doesn’t matter to me one iota what this man was to you; I merely want his address.”

“Give me my Butterfly,” she sobbed, “and let me send it myself.”

“Now, look here,” he said sternly, “we’ve been at loggerheads over this wretched ornament for quite long enough. I haven’t got it, and, for reasons which I believe you partly understand, I never want to handle it again. The best thing you can do, in your own interests and those of your husband, is to make a clean breast of the whole matter. I want you to tell me how the Butterfly pendant killed Dick Moberly.”

She stared at him wildly.

“What do you mean? Why do you stare at me like that?--I didn’t kill him; surely you don’t think that?”

Armourer controlled his features with an effort.

“We have been waiting for you to recover,” he told her, “so that you might be able to clear yourself. The Butterfly pendant has in some way been associated with the deaths of two people--and the person actually in possession of it immediately before these tragedies--was yourself. Now will you show me those letters?”

“I have burnt them.”

“Will you tell me the address to which you intended sending the ornament?”

The fit of sobbing vanished as easily as it had come.

“No,” she said defiantly, “never, never, never!”

“I am going to suggest that there never were any such letters.”

She half rose from her chair.

“How dare you!”

She sank back again, feigning exhaustion.

“You have told me several conflicting things this evening,” he continued, “and I am about to sort from them what I consider to be the actual state of affairs. You were tired of Dick Moberly and sent that charm to him with his presents, fully cognisant of what the result would be. A little later you repented and rode madly from Rembakut to Bukit-Serang, hoping to be in time to prevent a tragedy.”

She sprang to her feet, her eyes blazing.

“God!” she screamed at him, “I hate you! I knew nothing of its powers. I had only had it since the afternoon. The man told me, jokingly, that it was a charm which would help me to accomplish my desires. In a stupid moment I wished Dick dead--and a superstitious feeling made me ride over to get the thing back from him. I never knew he would die--like that. I didn’t want him to die. It was such a shock to me that I have been ill ever since.” She fell back again and lay gazing dry-eyed at the ceiling. “And while I have been ill,” she continued brokenly, “all this has been said against me! But, Michael, I am innocent; you know that I am innocent.”

“I want the address of the man who gave you that charm,” pursued the magistrate relentlessly.

“I lied to you,” she confessed. “He has never written to me in his life. He calls to me when I am sleeping, he beckons to me and I see behind him the brazier in the wilderness and the red butterflies. On the night when I slept with the Butterfly at my throat I had no dreams. That is why I ask you to give it back to me. I am suffering all the tortures of the damned.”

His pipe had gone out and he knew that the water in the little bathroom annexe was turning from lukewarm to cold. In the living-room Chong-Si moved softly, with every now and then a jingling of forks and spoons as he arranged them for the evening meal.

There floated back to Armourer a memory of a sentence Joyce had written down for him on a card: “_I am a goddess_,” Vera had said in her delirium, “_and my kiss is death!_”

In a dim sort of fashion he was beginning to understand. He shuddered to think of the risk he had run during that mad evening on Battiscombe’s verandah. Her kiss might well have been death then, had a butterfly been released to fly in quest of its own image!

“The professor has the pendant,” he said at length. “He is employing it for some experiment in the little laboratory we have managed to fix up for him. I am sorry, Mrs. Battiscombe, if I have upset you. None of us actually supposed that you killed Dick Moberly. I shall be able to tell them that you were merely an instrument.”

She bent forward.

“Whose instrument?” she inquired fearfully, trying to discover how much he knew.

“_Abu-Samar’s_,” said Armourer steadily--and Vera Battiscombe hid her face.