CHAPTERX.A PARAGRAPH FOR THE PAPERS.
“Fifty pounds easily earned,” Hopford murmured as he strolled along Maida Vale, looking about him for a taxi. “I thought all along that fellow was hot stuff, in spite of the way the papers cocker him up. And so he wants people to think Mrs. Hartsilver committed, or at any rate had a hand in, that theft? What a blackguard! Now, I wonder why he owes her a grudge? Yes, he must owe her a grudge, and a pretty bad one, or he would never go so far as that.”
Quickly his train of thought ran on. There was not an empty taxi in sight, so he decided to walk part of the way. One thought led to another. Solutions to the problem which puzzled him suggested themselves, only to be dismissed one after another as improbable. Then suddenly an idea occurred to him. Could there be another woman in the case? Some woman who was jealous of Mrs. Hartsilver?
Instantly the name Jessica Robertson rose to his lips. Why, of course, that must be it! At a loss to suspect any of her guests of having robbed her safe, she would take the opportunity, if opportunity occurred, of casting suspicion on the widow who lived in Park Crescent, and whose beauty and personality rivaled her own. Stapleton’s partiality forMrs. Mervyn-Robertson was common talk. She, no doubt, had hinted her desire to him, and he had happened to remember it while being interviewed on the subject of the approaching ball.
So far, so good. A mystery to a newspaper reporter is like red meat to a tiger. Hopford felt that he had struck a mystery now which might develop later into a scandal. Then he remembered that at the Chelsea Flower Show he had met Mrs. Hartsilver. He must become friendly with her, and then he would play his cards.
He entered his office with a light heart. Those five ten-pound notes would be most useful, but what gratified him most was the thought of the news “story” he felt he was on the track of. Not the “story” Stapleton had hinted at. From the first he had not had the slightest intention of using that. Even if it possessed a grain of truth, which he doubted, that was not the sort of stuff he wanted for his paper, while to set out deliberately to wreck a woman’s good name on no evidence in return for payment, was not to be countenanced for a moment.
No, he would never see that second fifty pounds. And, so thinking, he sighed.
“Hullo, what’s up?” asked a colleague who sat near him. “Got the hump or something?”
“Oh, shut it!” Hopford snapped. “I’m dog tired.”
“For that matter so am I, but I don’t groan over it,” his neighbor rapped back. “And yet I well might, after reporting two inquests and a cremation in one afternoon.”
Hopford laughed.
“Never mind,” he said. “Yesterday you attended two parades ofmannequins, one in swimming suits. You told me so yourself, so you haven’t much to grumble at.”
For some minutes both went on writing, turning out their “copy” at a great pace.
“Odd thing this suicide—what?” Hopford’s friend remarked as he laid down his fountain pen at last and pinned his sheets of copy together.
“What suicide?” Hopford inquired, while his pen ran swiftly on.
“You haven’t heard? Everybody is talking about it in the clubs, though none of the evening papers has the story. I got details at the Junior Carlton, where I dined to-night. Lord Froissart belongs there.”
“Froissart! You don’t mean that Lord Froissart has committed suicide!” Hopford exclaimed, stopping in his work and looking up.
“Why, yes. His body was found at the foot of the cliffs at Bournemouth about six o’clock this evening. Nobody saw him go over, apparently, but while I was at the Junior Carlton the man I was dining with, a friend of Froissart’s, got a telegram from a friend in Bournemouth saying that an open letter had just been found in the dead man’s pocket, in which he confessed that he was about to take his life. My friend says Froissart never really got over the shock of his daughter’s suicide—it was suicide in her case, too, of course. He also said thatof late Froissart had been looking terribly ill and worried. It’s a good story, anyhow, and I think I have more facts than any other morning paper will get hold of. Lucky I happened to be dining with a man who knew Froissart intimately—what?”
Next day the papers were full of the tragedy. Lord Froissart had, it seemed, left his house in Queen Anne’s Gate about eleven o’clock in the morning, the time he usually went out. He had called to see his lawyers, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, shortly before noon, and remained there about three quarters of an hour. From there he had gone, apparently on foot, to the Metropolitan Secret Agency, “the house with the bronze face,” and after interviewing Mr. Alix Stothert, head of that concern, had lunched alone at Frascati’s. He had caught the three thirty-seven train to Bournemouth, and after that nothing more was known until his body had been found at the foot of the cliffs by some children, who had at once run home and told their parents, who, in turn, had notified the police. All this the newspapers had succeeded in ferreting out before their late editions went to press.
The report written by Hopford contained certain intimate and exclusive details, however. Lord Froissart had stayed late at the Junior Carlton the night before, writing one letter after another. A waiter of whom he had inquired at what times fast trains left for Bournemouth said he had thought his lordship seemed “excitable and nervy.” Before leaving the club, he added, deceased had pressed a five poundnote into his hand, greatly to his surprise, for he had never before known Lord Froissart to infringe the club rules.
In addition this report stated that the writer knew for a fact that Lord Froissart had on several occasions recently spoken about suicide, a subject in which he appeared suddenly to evince a deep interest. Further, he had asked a friend of the writer’s, two days previously, if he had any idea what height the highest cliffs at Bournemouth were, and if he had ever heard of any one committing suicide by jumping off them. A sealed letter found on the body was addressed in deceased’s handwriting to his elder and only surviving child, the Honorable Mrs. Ferdinand-Westrup, then living in Ceylon with her husband, who was a tea planter. No motive could be assigned for Lord Froissart’s having taken his life, though the shock of his daughter’s death the year before might have unhinged his mind.
Some days later the usual verdict was returned—“Suicide whilst temporarily insane,” and within a fortnight the tragedy had been virtually forgotten.
By all except one or two people. Captain Charles Preston remembered it; so did Cora Hartsilver, and so did Yootha Hagerston. And the reason they remembered it was this.
Lord Froissart died quite a rich man. His sole heir ought by rights to have been his daughter, Mrs. Ferdinand-Westrup. Instead, the bulk of his fortune and property were left to an individual of whom nobody, apparently, had ever heard—a Mrs.Timothy Macmahon, described as the widow of Timothy Macmahon of Cashel, Co. Tipperary, and the will, which was not yet proved, had been executed on the morning of the very day of the tragedy, at the offices of Messrs. Eton, West and Shrubsole, solicitors, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Now those solicitors, as Preston happened to have heard from his servant, whose brother was a clerk in Eton, West and Shrubsole’s office, were solicitors also to Jessica Mervyn-Robertson. A coincidence, perhaps, as Preston said to Cora Hartsilver a day or two after Froissart’s death, yet in his opinion a curious coincidence.
And when, ten days later, Hopford succeeded in obtaining an interview with Cora Hartsilver, and told her of his interview with Aloysius Stapleton, and what Stapleton had tried to induce him to hint at in the newspaper—feeling it his duty to tell her, he had no hesitation in breaking faith with Stapleton—events in the life of Aloysius Stapleton began to look peculiar.
But still Stapleton and his intimate friends, Archie La Planta and Jessica Mervyn-Robertson, were to be met everywhere. Still their movements were chronicled almost daily in the social columns of the London press, while their portraits appeared frequently in the weekly periodicals.
But perhaps nowhere was Jessica so much noticed as at Ascot. The daily and the weekly papers had apparently laid themselves out to give her as much publicity there as possible. She was seen in hercar arriving on the course, accompanied by half a dozen friends, among them of course Stapleton and La Planta. She was seen walking on the course; she was seen in the paddock congratulating the owner of the winner of the Gold Cup; she was seen smiling at a duchess and shaking hands with a peer; she was seen conversing with a foreign premier.
Then the fashion papers “featured” her costumes—the gown she wore on the first day of the meeting, on the second day, and so on; the gowns she wore on different nights at the opera; the gowns she wore at Hurlingham, at Ranelagh, at the Military Tournament at Olympia, at the Richmond Show, on her houseboat above Henley until at last even her friends began seriously to ask one another who this woman was who, coming from nowhere, and unknown, had thus conquered London Society by her charm, her personality, and her beauty, but most of all, perhaps, by her lavish display and her extravagance.
And naturally people who were not her friends, women more especially, whispered. Others, when her name was mentioned, would smile significantly; smiles which did more harm than the whispers. For though nothing could be openly said against her, yet her would-be detractors were glad to insinuate evil.
That friend of hers, for instance, Aloysius Stapleton, why was he always at her heels? There might, of course, be no harm in the relationship; but on the other hand there might be harm, and as theremight be there probably was. That was the attitude many adopted towards her who nevertheless accepted her hospitality and were glad to be invited to her receptions—receptions which certainly were the talk of all the town. Yet, curiously enough, she had refused to act as hostess at the great ball to take place at the Albert Hall; more, she had declined to be included among the society hostesses who would receive the three thousand or more guests that night.
Why was that?
It was Hopford who asked the question, and he put it to Captain Preston. In short, while the social world of London for the most part worshiped at the shrine of the mysterious Jessica Mervyn-Robertson, Captain Preston, Hopford, Cora Hartsilver, Yootha Hagerston and George Blenkiron were banding themselves together—a little group of skeptics determined to find out who Jessica actually was, and who her friends were.
Perhaps had they known the sensation the approaching great ball at the Albert Hall held in store for them they would have hesitated before meddling with the affairs of Jessica Mervyn-Robertson, the idol of London Society.