CHAPTERXXIX.A MESSAGE FROM YOOTHA.
It was seven in the morning when Preston was awakened by his servant, Tom, and handed a telegram which had just arrived.
Before he opened it he guessed it must be from Yootha. It ran as follows:
“I am in great trouble. Can you possibly come to me? I am alone here and ill in bed. Jessica and the others have left Monte Carlo. Do please telegraph a reply as soon as this reaches you.”
“I am in great trouble. Can you possibly come to me? I am alone here and ill in bed. Jessica and the others have left Monte Carlo. Do please telegraph a reply as soon as this reaches you.”
Preston was not a man to deliberate. He always made up his mind at once, and acted without hesitation.
“Is the messenger waiting?” he asked Tom, who still stood at his bedside.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then give me a foreign telegram form.”
Swiftly he scribbled the answer.
“Give that to the boy,” he said, “and sixpence for himself, and tell him to get back to the post office as quickly as he can. Then come back to me.”
In a moment the man returned.
“Pack my suit-case, Tom. I am going to Monte Carlo at once.”
“For how long, sir?”
“Pack enough for a fortnight.”
He traveled through to the Riviera without stopping in Paris, and drove direct to the Hotel X. Upon inquiring for Yootha he was told that the doctor was with her. The hotel manager looked grave when Preston inquired how ill she had been.
A moment later the door opened, and a solemn-faced gentleman of patriarchal aspect entered. The manager at once introduced him to Preston, and explained who Preston was.
“She has dropped off to sleep at last,” the doctor said. “I had to give her a mild narcotic. She has been eagerly awaiting your arrival since she received your wire, and I believe your presence will do her more good than anything else. She appears to be suffering chiefly from shock—a mental shock of some sort. Her nerves are greatly upset.”
When some hours later Yootha awoke, her gaze rested upon her lover seated beside her bed. For a moment she fancied she must still be dreaming. Then, with a glad cry, she sat up and stretched her arms out to him.
“Oh, my darling,” she cried, “how good of you to have come to me! Even when I got your telegram I feared that something might detain you. I have had a terrible time since last we met—terrible!”
For a minute they remained locked in each other’s arms, the happiest moments they had spent since that never-to-be-forgotten evening under the shadow of the Sugarloaf Mountain in Monmouthshire. Andthen, perhaps for the first time, Yootha realized to the full the joy of being truly loved by a man on whose loyalty and steadfastness she knew she could implicitly depend.
Yootha’s recovery was rapid, and in the following week Preston decided to take her to Paris, which she was anxious to visit, never having been there.
“You had better telegraph to your aunt and ask if she can meet us there, as you say she is well again,” he said. “It wouldn’t do for us to stay there alone, as long as conventions have to be considered,” and he smiled cynically. “Which reminds me that Harry Hopford is in Paris—I had a letter from him yesterday. I am sure he will be glad to see you.”
And so, some days later, they arrived at the Hôtel Bristol, where they found Yootha’s aunt awaiting them. She was a pleasant, middle-aged woman with intelligent eyes and a sense of humor, and she greeted them effusively.
“You don’t hesitate to make use of me when I am in health,” she said laughingly to her niece. “I had not the least wish to come to Paris, but now I am very glad I have come. Yes, I am well again, but I don’t think you look as if Monte Carlo and its excitement had agreed with you. By the way, a delightful young man called here yesterday to ask if you had arrived. He was so pleasant to talk to that I persuaded him to stay to lunch. He seemed to think a lot of you. His name is Hopford.”
“Harry Hopford! A capital lad. I am glad youmet him. He served under me in France and was quite a good soldier.”
“He told me he had served under you. He wants you to meet him at an address in Clichy at nine to-morrow night. I have the address somewhere.”
“A bit of luck for me, your coming to Paris,” Hopford said when they met on the following night. “I particularly wanted to see you, Preston. My inquiries and those of these friends of mine,” he had just introduced to Preston the two Paris detectives, his friend onLe Matin, and Johnson’s friend Idris Llanvar, “have succeeded in making some astonishing discoveries concerning Jessica and her friends, and now I am on the way to tracking Alix Stothert to his lair.”
“Alix Stothert!” Preston exclaimed. “What has he to do with it?”
“A good deal, apparently. To begin with, he appears to be a friend of Stapleton’s, for a friend of mine in London has, at my request, been watching Stapleton’s house near Uckfield, called The Nest. Stothert goes there frequently, it seems; my friend believes he calls there for letters. And the other day some fellow arrived there, knocked and rang, and then, getting no answer, went and hid in the undergrowth in the wood close by, and remained watching the house. While he was watching, Stothert arrived and was met by a girl who, my friend says, is employed by Stothert secretly, and the two went into the house. When the fellow who had lain concealed in the wood—and been himselfwatched by my friend—went back to Uckfield, my friend followed him on a bicycle, and finally shadowed him back to London and to an hotel—Cox’s in Jermyn Street. But, though afterwards he made inquiries at the hotel, he was unable to find out who the fellow was.”
“George Blenkiron, when in town, generally stays at Cox’s,” Preston said reflectively.
“Does he? Then he may know who the man is, and his name. I’ll write to him to-morrow. It is such a small hotel.”
Hopford had also a good deal to say about Mrs. Timothy Macmahon and her intimacy with the late Lord Froissart; about Marietta Stringborg and her husband; about Fobart Robertson, whose whereabouts, he said, he was likely soon to discover; and about Alphonse Michaud, proprietor of the Metropolitan Secret Agency at the house with the bronze face. One important fact he had already established—Michaud was intimately acquainted with Jessica and Stapleton. Yet at the Royal Hotel in Dieppe, Preston had told him, Jessica, Stapleton and La Planta had openly stated that they knew Michaud only by name.
“Which confirms the suspicion I have for some time entertained,” Hopford went on, “that Jessica and her friends are in some way associated with the house with the bronze face.”
“There I can’t agree with you,” Preston said. “In view of all that has happened, such a thing seems to me incredible. Why, we used to consult theSecret Agency concerning Jessica and her past history, don’t you remember? And they found out for us several things about her.”
“Several things, yes, but not one of the things they ‘found out’ was of importance. It is the Agency’s business, to my belief, to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare, and they do it successfully. Surely you recollect Mrs. Hartsilver’s telling us how she and Miss Hagerston had been shown by Stothert what he declared to be the actual pearl necklace belonging to Marietta Stringborg, and saying the necklace stolen from her at the Albert Hall ball and afterwards found in Miss Hagerston’s possession, was made of imitation pearls? Well, I can prove that on that occasion, as well as at other times, Stothert intentionally lied.”
“Then what is your theory?”
“That in some way, yet to be discovered, Jessica and her gang—for they are a gang—and the Metropolitan Secret Agency, are playing each other’s game and have played it for a long time. Incidentally I have found out, too, that La Planta once represented an insurance company in Amsterdam, of which Lord Froissart was chairman or director, and that——”
“Forgive my interrupting you, Hopford,” Preston cut in, “but what you say reminds me that I too was told, by a Major Guysburg I met in Dieppe. He is a man you ought to meet; he was leaving for America when we parted, but ought soon to be back, and he promised to look me up in town on hisreturn. And he can tell you a lot about Alphonse Michaud, who, he assured me, at one time ran a most disreputable haunt in Amsterdam.”
Hopford produced his notebook.
“How do you spell the major’s name?” he asked quickly, and Preston told him.
“And where does he stay when in town?”
“At Morley’s Hotel, I believe,” and Hopford wrote that down too.
“Now for heaven’s sake don’t say ‘how small the world is,’ Preston,” Hopford observed lightly as he replaced his notebook in his pocket, “because that is a platitude which makes me see red. I must see Guysburg directly he arrives in London. Certainly we are getting on. I suppose Guysburg didn’t speak about a diamond robbery in Amsterdam from a merchant living in the Kalverstraat, which took place some years ago? The thief was never caught.”
Preston laughed.
“The very thing he did tell me,” he answered. “The stones had been insured by Michaud, to whom the insurance money was paid under protest because the idea had got about that Michaud himself, or some person employed by him, had stolen them.”
Hopford turned to the French woman-detective, and raised his eyebrows.
“You hear that?” he said to her in French. “Isn’t it strange how small—no, I won’t say it! Mademoiselle was employed,” he addressed Preston again, “on that very case in Amsterdam, and feels as convinced to-day as she did then that Michaud,aided by La Planta, spirited away the stones. Yet nothing could be proved. There were not even sufficient clues to justify the arrest of either of the two men. By the way, I am trying to get mademoiselle to return to London with me, and she hopes she will be able to. Also I have forgotten to tell you that Idris Llanvar is a famous mental specialist practicing here in Paris—isn’t that so, Llanvar? Years ago he was Johnson’slocum tenensin Shanghai, when Johnson practiced in Hong Kong. It was Johnson who kindly gave me an introduction to him, when he and I met in Jersey. Aren’t you glad, Preston, that Johnson is going to marry Mrs. Hartsilver? I think she is such a charming woman, though I don’t know her very well. But I met the late Henry Hartsilver once or twice—a typical profiteer, and, I thought, a most offensive person. She was well rid of him. Did you know Sir Stephen Lethbridge?”
Preston looked at Hopford oddly.
“What makes you suddenly ask that?” he said. “What was your train of thought?”
“I had no train of thought, so far as I am aware,” Hopford replied. “But there is a vague rumor in London that someone, a woman, a friend of Stothert’s, holds certain letters written by Mrs. Hartsilver to Sir Stephen Lethbridge, or by Sir Stephen to her, and that this woman is trying to sell them to Mrs. Hartsilver. Incidentally, Preston, your name has been whispered in relation to the affair, which leads me to suspect that Mistress Jessica maynot be wholly unassociated with this latest attempt at blackmail. Llanvar had a letter from Johnson yesterday, who is still in Jersey, and in it he alluded to the rumor, but in very guarded language.”
Preston did not answer. His lips were tightly closed. Then, as if to distract attention from what Hopford had just said, he produced his cigar case and passed it round.
Yootha was very anxious to see, as she put it, “everything in Paris worth seeing,” from the Bastille to the Ambassadeurs and the Cascade, and from the Louvre to the Palais de Versailles, so during the next few days Preston devoted himself to her entirely. The art galleries in particular appealed to her, also the Quartier Latin with its queer little streets of cobble stones and its stuffy but picturesque old-world houses of which she had so often heard. Exhibitions like the Grand Guignol and the Café de la Mort, on the other hand, she detested.
Hopford and Llanvar had dined with them once, and afterwards Hopford’s friend onLe Matinhad piloted them all to various interesting night-haunts of which English folk visiting Paris for the most part know nothing. He had also taken them into curious caverns below the Rue de la Harpe and streets in its vicinity, and shown them the houses there propped up from below with enormous wooden beams where the arches built over those old quarries have given way.
“But how come there to be quarries here at all?” Yootha had asked in surprise.
The representative ofLe Matinhad evidently expected the question, for at once he had entered into a long explanation about how, when Paris was first built, stones for building purposes had been quarried out in the immediate neighborhood; how the City had gradually reached the edge of those quarries, and how, in order to be able to continue to extend the City, it had been necessary to arch the quarries over and then erect buildings on the arches themselves.
“Of course the good folk who live in those houses above our heads,” he laughed as he pointed upward, “have no idea that their houses are propped up from below, and some day they may get the surprise of their lives by finding themselves and their houses suddenly swallowed up in the bowels of the earth.”
It was late when finally they had all separated. Then Hopford, on arriving at Rue des Petits Champs, had found a blue telegram awaiting him. It came from his chief, who said Hopford must return at once.
“I have most important news for you,” the message had ended.