CHAPTERXXVII.AGAINST THE WIND.
George Blenkiron wrote in his usual breezy style, and much of the news in his letter interested Johnson greatly, in view of what Hopford and Preston had told him, also in view of his engagement to Cora Hartsilver.
It was a long letter, and Blenkiron mentioned among other items of news that, happening to be in the neighborhood of Uckfield, some days before, curiosity had prompted him to seek out Stapleton’s cottage, The Nest, which he knew to be in the vicinity.
“He calls it a ‘cottage,’” he wrote, “but in reality it is a good-sized house, approached by a carriage drive about half-a-mile long, and flanked on three sides by woods with thick undergrowth. The house itself lies in a hollow, and you come upon it unexpectedly. My intention was only to have a look at the place, but when I arrived at it so suddenly I concluded that most likely somebody had seen me approaching, so I went up and rang the bell, meaning to inquire if Stapleton were at home.
“Though I rang three times, the only sound of life within was the low growling of a dog; by the ‘woolliness’ of its growl I judged it to be a bulldog. This rather stirred my curiosity, so I went roundto the back door, and there knocked. Again nobody came; yet I distinctly heard a footstep just inside the door. Finally, I tried to enter, but the door was locked.
“By then my curiosity had become thoroughly aroused, and I determined not to go away until I had seen somebody. I therefore walked away from the house by the road I had come, taking care not to look behind me; then, when I could no longer be seen from the house, I turned into the wood and made my way back among the trees until I reached a spot commanding a view of the front door and carriage drive, but where I myself could not be observed. The only thing I feared was that the dog might presently be let out, when he would, I felt sure, at once discover me.
“After about twenty minutes a smartly-dressed young woman suddenly appeared. She came round from the back of the house, and looked about her as though expecting somebody. A few minutes later I heard the iron gate across the drive open and shut, and rather an old man came towards her. They met in the middle of the drive, kissed most affectionately, and then looked in my direction. You can imagine my astonishment when I recognized the man. It was Alix Stothert of the Metropolitan Secret Agency!
“Neither of them saw me, of course; nor did they suspect they were being watched. A minute later they turned, and went towards the house. Arrived at the front door, Stothert took a key out of hispocket, unlocked the door and entered, followed by the young woman. The door closed behind them, and I heard it being locked again. I waited about an hour longer to see if anything more would happen, then I went back into the carriage drive, walked boldly up to the house as if I had just arrived, and rang loudly.
“It is an old house with an old-fashioned bell-pull. Again there was no answer, or other sign of life; even the dog did not growl, from which I concluded it had been taken into some inner room. Four times I rang, but the place might have been unoccupied for all the notice that was taken. So then I turned and came away. Strange, wasn’t it?
“Of course Stothert may have been there on some ordinary matter of business; but then who was the girl—she was very dainty-looking—and why did nobody come when I rang? I can’t help thinking something queer is going on there.
“As I was walking back to Uckfield, a man overtook me, riding slowly on a push bike. About a mile further on I overtook him; he appeared to be repairing a tire. He glanced up at me casually as I passed by, and the moment afterwards called out to inquire if I had a match about me. I went back and gave him one, for which he thanked me with rather unnecessary profusion, I thought, and then he offered me a cigarette, and lit it for me. We exchanged a few words about the weather, and I went on.
“At the railway station, two hours later, I sawhim again. He was on the platform, waiting for the train, but had no bicycle with him then. I passed him twice, but he appeared not to recognize me, so I did not speak to him. When I alighted at Waterloo I happened to notice him behind me on the platform, still without his bicycle; and when I alighted from a taxi at Cox’s Hotel, in Jermyn Street, where I am staying, to my astonishment he was standing on the curb, about a hundred yards along the street—I could see only his profile, but there could be no mistaking him as he stood there staring up at a house on the opposite side of the street. Then, for the first time, the thought struck me that he must be shadowing me. I have not seen him since, but I should recognize him at once if I met him.”
In another part of the letter Blenkiron told Johnson he had heard about Jessica’s success at the tables at Dieppe, but he said nothing about Yootha. He asked Johnson, however, if he had happened to come across Harry Hopford, who he had been told had gone to Jersey. If he should meet him, he ended, would he remember to ask him to write at once, as he wished to communicate with him on a matter of importance.
Johnson refolded the letter, then opened the letter from Preston.
Preston’s communication was brief. There was no reference to his engagement, nor to Yootha. He spoke of Jessica and her friends, however, and again mentioned their having broken the bank.
“I am sick of this place,” he remarked towards the end of the letter. “The town is crawling with the most impossible people—I can’t think who they are or where they come from; holiday-makers, of course. The chief attraction is naturally the Casino, where these holiday folk swarm at night and seem to delight in showing how foolishly they can squander quite a lot of money. Our countrymen and women show up badly in a place like this, and give the French a poor opinion of the British race. I shall probably return to London in a day or two, but my movements will depend to some extent on circumstances.”
“On circumstances,” Johnson said aloud, as he finished reading the letter. “Now, I wonder what those circumstances are? It is not like Preston to conceal his reasons. He is worried about something, I am sure. The tone of his letter shows it, and I can read between the lines.”
He appeared to ponder for a minute.
“Strange,” he said at last. “I was under the impression that Yootha Hagerston was still in Dieppe, and yet he makes no mention of her.”
He smiled.
“I wonder if they have quarrelled, or if——”
Suddenly his thoughts reverted to Cora; then to the contents of Blenkiron’s letter; then to the anonymous letter Cora had received, and finally once more to Alix Stothert.
“Of course,” he said reflectively, “that girl Stothert kissed so affectionately in the carriage drive may have been his daughter, and yet——”
“And he said the dog that growled sounded like a bulldog. La Planta has one, a brindle. I wish the dog at Stapleton’s house had been let out to pursue George, then he would have known its color!”
He smiled at the thought.
“But, after all,” his train of thought ran on, “why should La Planta’s dog have been in Stapleton’s house? Plenty of people own bulldogs; and for that matter it may not have been a bulldog.”
He had been singularly accurate in his conjecture that Charlie Preston was worried. Indeed he was more than worried. At the time of writing he had felt almost in despair at the extraordinary change that had suddenly come over Yootha. From the night of her great success at the tables she had become a slave to roulette. She played now with Jessica during the afternoons as well as at night, and not infrequently in the morning too. She could talk and think of nothing but roulette andpetits chevaux. At the moment her ambition was to evolve a system by which she could never lose—a chimera pursued by many votaries of the game, and invariably disastrous in the end.
Preston had made every endeavor to dissuade her from continuing to play. He had assured her that in the long run she must infallibly lose all she had won, and more; but when day after day went by and she almost always came out a winner in the end, she felt she could afford to disregard his advice, well-meant though she knew it to be.
But the worst had happened when one day after she had won a good deal and Preston had again spoken to her, and had finished by trying for the twentieth time to induce her to break her friendship with Jessica, she had suddenly turned upon him, practically told him to mind his own business, and ended by saying that if she were going to break any friendship it would be her friendship with him and not with Jessica.
He had gone out that evening feeling miserable, though instinctively knowing that in the end she must come back to him. Yes, in the end, but how long, he asked himself, would the end be in coming? Jessica seemed to have hypnotized her, to be able now to make her do her bidding in any way she chose. Several times he had seen her and her two undesirable friends and Yootha all seated together round a table on the terrace of the hotel, smoking cigarettes and drinking what looked like whisky and soda in full view of everybody passing.
Again and again he had blamed himself for having allowed her to adopt Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson as her chaperone. Chaperone! Why, he said mentally, a hundred times safer she would have been with no chaperone than with that dissolute woman to look after her, and herdévergondécompanions.
Two nights later, on returning to the hotel, he was handed a note by the clerk in the office. Recognizing Yootha’s handwriting on the envelope, he took the note up to his bedroom to read it in private. It was short, and ran as follows:
“Dear Charlie,—This is just to tell you that I am leaving here to-morrow with Jessica and her friends. We are going to Monte first, then probably we shall stay in Paris a little while, and after that we shall return to London, when I shall hope to see you. I don’t want to quarrel with you, dear. Indeed I don’t, and I am dreadfully sorry you should misjudge Jessica in the way you do. She is such a good friend to me now, and I hope we shall continue to be friends. But most of all I wish you would overcome your prejudices against her, so that we might all be friends together. I hate making you unhappy, as I feel I am doing, but truly I think you are unintentionally to blame. Lots of love, my dear.“Yootha.”
“Dear Charlie,—This is just to tell you that I am leaving here to-morrow with Jessica and her friends. We are going to Monte first, then probably we shall stay in Paris a little while, and after that we shall return to London, when I shall hope to see you. I don’t want to quarrel with you, dear. Indeed I don’t, and I am dreadfully sorry you should misjudge Jessica in the way you do. She is such a good friend to me now, and I hope we shall continue to be friends. But most of all I wish you would overcome your prejudices against her, so that we might all be friends together. I hate making you unhappy, as I feel I am doing, but truly I think you are unintentionally to blame. Lots of love, my dear.
“Yootha.”
“Curse the woman!” he exclaimed aloud, “and the abominable way she has taught Yootha to gamble. Well, I suppose I can do nothing at the moment. I only hope to heaven that at Monte the whole lot will lose heavily, so heavily that Yootha at any rate will be brought to her senses once and for all. Meanwhile I must try to hurry on our wedding.”
Yootha went off early next day without seeing him or even leaving a note to wish him good-by. A week later he heard indirectly that at the tables in Monte Carlo the four were still winning. A report reached the Royal Hotel in Dieppe that they had won a fabulous sum. It was quite extraordinary, everybody said. Never within the memory of the oldesthabituésof the Dieppe Casino had players had such a run of luck. And its consistency wasthat they all played “anyhow,” or seemed to. On the few occasions when they had experimented with some system, they had lost heavily—so it was said.
“Yootha, my darling,” Jessica remarked casually to her one night towards the end of a champagne supper at which all sorts of people were present, for their luck had brought them a whole host of “friends,” “what has become of your knight-errant—or is he your knight-errant no longer? I should be delighted if I heard you had thrown him over, or even that he had thrown you over. Have you heard from him lately?”
“Not very lately,” Yootha replied quickly, with a slight frown which Jessica did not fail to notice. “He has gone back to London, I believe.”
“‘You believe.’ That doesn’t sound promising, does it?” and she laughed in her deep voice, though it was not a pleasant laugh. “When a man is engaged to be married, especially to such a charming girl—a girl any man ought to be proud to speak to, let alone be engaged to—it isn’t very considerate of him to leave her in the lurch in the way Captain Preston left you. And if he neglects you now, don’t you think he’s pretty sure to begin neglecting you when you have been married a little while?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Yootha answered awkwardly. “Men are queer animals. I have always said so. At one time I made up my mind never to marry.”
“But changed it directly you had the privilege of meeting Captain Preston.”
She spoke almost with a sneer.
“Not directly,” the girl said weakly, consciousthat, had she drunk less champagne and had all her wits about her, she would have said something different, would have stood up for her lover.
Jessica edged a little closer to her.
“Why not give him up?” she murmured so that nobody but Yootha could hear. “He has not treated you well; he has not played the game, has he now? Just think—he is supposed to be your lover, yet after swearing, as I am sure he has done, he has never in his life before met any woman to approach you, he leaves you alone, lets you go roaming about the Continent with two men and a woman he intensely dislikes, and himself calmly returns to England without even wishing you good-by! Does that look like true love, dear? Does it look like love at all? Supposing a man you knew nothing about were going to marry some friend of yours, what would you think, what would you say, if all at once he treated her like this? Take my advice, Yootha,” she went on, speaking lower still, “give him up. Write to him to-morrow; come up to my room and write to him at once; saying that in view of all that has happened you have decided to break off your engagement. He won’t break his heart—break his heart, I should think not!—and believe me, you will one day thank me for having saved you from marrying a man who doesn’t love you.”
As she stopped speaking she refilled the girl’s glass with champagne.
“And now listen to me,” she ended under her breath. “I have something serious to say to you.”