“Dear Rainshore,—I enclose cheque for £100,000. It represents parts of the gold that can be picked up on the gold coast by putting out one’s hand—so! You will observe that it is dated the day after the next settling-day of the London Stock Exchange. I contracted on Monday last to sell you 25,000 shares of a certain Trust at 93⅜, I did not possess the shares then, but my agents have to-day bought them for me at an average price of 72. I stand to realise, therefore, rather more than half a million dollars. The round half-million Mr. Vaux-Lowry happens to bring you in his pocket; you will not forget yourpromise to him that when he did so you would consider his application favourably. I wish to make no profit out of the little transaction, but I will venture to keep the balance for out-of-pocket expenses, such as mending theClaribel’sshaft. (How convenient it is to have a yacht that will break down when required!) The shares will doubtless recover in due course, and I hope the reputation of the Trust may not suffer, and that for the sake of old times with my father you will regard the episode in its proper light and bear me no ill-will.—Yours sincerely,“C. Thorold.”
“Dear Rainshore,—I enclose cheque for £100,000. It represents parts of the gold that can be picked up on the gold coast by putting out one’s hand—so! You will observe that it is dated the day after the next settling-day of the London Stock Exchange. I contracted on Monday last to sell you 25,000 shares of a certain Trust at 93⅜, I did not possess the shares then, but my agents have to-day bought them for me at an average price of 72. I stand to realise, therefore, rather more than half a million dollars. The round half-million Mr. Vaux-Lowry happens to bring you in his pocket; you will not forget yourpromise to him that when he did so you would consider his application favourably. I wish to make no profit out of the little transaction, but I will venture to keep the balance for out-of-pocket expenses, such as mending theClaribel’sshaft. (How convenient it is to have a yacht that will break down when required!) The shares will doubtless recover in due course, and I hope the reputation of the Trust may not suffer, and that for the sake of old times with my father you will regard the episode in its proper light and bear me no ill-will.—Yours sincerely,
“C. Thorold.”
The next day the engagement of Mr. Harry Nigel Selincourt Vaux-Lowry and Miss Geraldine Rainshore was announced to two continents.
Thebracelet had fallen into the canal.
And the fact that the canal was the most picturesque canal in the old Flemish city of Bruges, and that the ripples caused by the splash of the bracelet had disturbed reflections of wondrous belfries, towers, steeples, and other unique examples of Gothic architecture, did nothing whatever to assuage the sudden agony of that disappearance. For the bracelet had been given to Kitty Sartorius by her grateful and lordly manager, Lionel Belmont (U.S.A.), upon the completion of the unexampled run of “The Delmonico Doll,” at the Regency Theatre, London. And its diamonds were worth five hundred pounds, to say nothing of the gold.
The beautiful Kitty, and her friend Eve Fincastle, the journalist, having exhausted Ostend, had duly arrived at Bruges in the course of their holiday tour. The question of Kitty’s jewellery had arisen at the start. Kitty had insisted thatshe must travel with all her jewels, according to the custom of the theatrical stars of great magnitude. Eve had equally insisted that Kitty must travel without jewels, and had exhorted her to remember the days of her simplicity. They compromised. Kitty was allowed to bring the bracelet, but nothing else save the usual half-dozen rings. The ravishing creature could not have persuaded herself to leave the bracelet behind, because it was so recent a gift and still new and strange and heavenly to her. But, since prudence forbade even Kitty to let the trifle lie about in hotel bedrooms, she was obliged always to wear it. And she had been wearing it this bright afternoon in early October, when the girls, during a stroll, had met one of their new friends, Madame Lawrence, on the world-famous Quai du Rosaire, just at the back of the Hôtel de Ville and the Halles.
Madame Lawrence resided permanently in Bruges. She was between twenty-five and forty-five, dark, with the air of continually subduing a natural instinct to dash, and well dressed in black. Equally interested in the peerage and in the poor, she had made the acquaintance of Eve and Kitty at the Hôtel de la Grande Place, where she called from time to time to induce English travellers to buy genuine Bruges lace, wrought under her own supervision by her own paupers.She was Belgian by birth, and when complimented on her fluent and correct English, she gave all the praise to her deceased husband, an English barrister. She had settled in Bruges like many people settle there, because Bruges is inexpensive, picturesque, and inordinately respectable. Besides an English church and chaplain, it has two cathedrals and an episcopal palace, with a real bishop in it.
“What an exquisite bracelet! May I look at it?”
It was these simple but ecstatic words, spoken with Madame Lawrence’s charming foreign accent, which had begun the tragedy. The three women had stopped to admire the always admirable view from the little quay, and they were leaning over the rails when Kitty unclasped the bracelet for the inspection of the widow. The next instant there was aplop, an affrighted exclamation from Madame Lawrence in her native tongue, and the bracelet was engulfed before the very eyes of all three.
The three looked at each other non-plussed. Then they looked around, but not a single person was in sight. Then, for some reason which, doubtless, psychology can explain, they stared hard at the water, though the water there was just as black and foul as it is everywhere else in the canal system of Bruges.
“Surely you’ve not dropped it!” Eve Fincastle exclaimed in a voice of horror. Yet she knew positively that Madame Lawrence had.
The delinquent took a handkerchief from her muff and sobbed into it. And between her sobs she murmured: “We must inform the police.”
“Yes, of course,” said Kitty, with the lightness of one to whom a five-hundred-pound bracelet is a bagatelle. “They’ll fish it up in no time.”
“Well,” Eve decided, “you go to the police at once, Kitty; and Madame Lawrence will go with you, because she speaks French, and I’ll stay here to mark the exact spot.”
The other two started, but Madame Lawrence, after a few steps, put her hand to her side. “I can’t,” she sighed, pale. “I am too upset. I cannot walk. You go with Miss Sartorius,” she said to Eve, “and I will stay,” and she leaned heavily against the railings.
Eve and Kitty ran off, just as if it was an affair of seconds, and the bracelet had to be saved from drowning. But they had scarcely turned the corner, thirty yards away, when they reappeared in company with a high official of police, whom, by the most lucky chance in the world, they had encountered in the covered passage leading to the Place du Bourg. This official, instantly enslaved by Kitty’s beauty, proved to be the very mirror of politeness and optimism. He tooktheir names and addresses, and a full description of the bracelet, and informed them that at that place the canal was nine feet deep. He said that the bracelet should undoubtedly be recovered on the morrow, but that, as dusk was imminent, it would be futile to commence angling that night. In the meantime the loss should be kept secret; and to make all sure, a succession of gendarmes should guard the spot during the night.
Kitty grew radiant, and rewarded the gallant officer with smiles; Eve was satisfied, and the face of Madame Lawrence wore a less mournful hue.
“And now,” said Kitty to Madame, when everything had been arranged, and the first of the gendarmes was duly installed at the exact spot against the railings, “you must come and take tea with us in our winter garden; and be gay! Smile: I insist. And I insist that you don’t worry.”
Madame Lawrence tried feebly to smile.
“You are very good-natured,” she stammered.
Which was decidedly true.
The winter-garden of the Hôtel de la Grande Place, referred to in all the hotel’s advertisements, was merely the inner court of the hotel, roofed inby glass at the height of the first storey. Cane flourished there, in the shape of lounge-chairs, but no other plant. One of the lounge-chairs was occupied when, just as the carillon in the belfry at the other end of the Place began to play Gounod’s “Nazareth,” indicating the hour of five o’clock, the three ladies entered the winter-garden. Apparently the toilettes of two of them had been adjusted and embellished as for a somewhat ceremonious occasion.
“Lo!” cried Kitty Sartorius, when she perceived the occupant of the chair, “the millionaire! Mr. Thorold, how charming of you to reappear like this! I invite you to tea.”
Cecil Thorold rose with appropriate eagerness.
“Delighted!” he said, smiling, and then explained that he had arrived from Ostend about two hours before and had taken rooms in the hotel.
“You knew we were staying here?” Eve asked as he shook hands with her.
“No,” he replied; “but I am very glad to find you again.”
“Are you?” She spoke languidly, but her colour heightened and those eyes of hers sparkled.
“Madame Lawrence,” Kitty chirruped, “let me present Mr. Cecil Thorold. He is appallingly rich, but we mustn’t let that frighten us.”
From a mouth less adorable than the mouth ofMiss Sartorius such an introduction might have been judged lacking in the elements of good form, but for more than two years now Kitty had known that whatever she did or said was perfectly correct because she did or said it. The new acquaintances laughed amiably, and a certain intimacy was at once established.
“Shall I order tea, dear?” Eve suggested.
“No, dear,” said Kitty quietly. “We will wait for the Count.”
“The Count?” demanded Cecil Thorold.
“The Comte d’Avrec,” Kitty explained. “He is staying here.”
“A French nobleman, doubtless?”
“Yes,” said Kitty; and she added, “you will like him. He is an archæologist, and a musician—oh, and lots of things!”
“If I am one minute late, I entreat pardon,” said a fine tenor voice at the door.
It was the Count. After he had been introduced to Madame Lawrence, and Cecil Thorold had been introduced to him, tea was served.
Now, the Comte d’Avrec was everything that a French count ought to be. As dark as Cecil Thorold, and even handsomer, he was a little older and a little taller than the millionaire, and a short, pointed, black beard, exquisitely trimmed, gave him an appearance of staid reliability which Cecil lacked. His bow was a vertebrate poem,his smile a consolation for all misfortunes, and he managed his hat, stick, gloves, and cup with the dazzling assurance of a conjurer. To observe him at afternoon tea was to be convinced that he had been specially created to shine gloriously in drawing-rooms, winter-gardens, andtables d’hôte. He was one of those men who always do the right thing at the right moment, who are capable of speaking an indefinite number of languages with absolute purity of accent (he spoke English much better than Madame Lawrence), and who can and do discourse withverveand accuracy on all sciences, arts, sports, and religions. In short, he was a phœnix of a count; and this was certainly the opinion of Miss Kitty Sartorius and of Miss Eve Fincastle, both of whom reckoned that what they did not know about men might be ignored. Kitty and the Count, it soon became evident, were mutually attracted; their souls were approaching each other with a velocity which increased inversely as the square of the lessening distance between them. And Eve was watching this approximation with undisguised interest and relish.
Nothing of the least importance occurred, save the Count’s marvellous exhibition of how to behave at afternoon tea, until the refection was nearly over; and then, during a brief pause in the talk, Cecil, who was sitting to the left ofMadame Lawrence, looked sharply round at the right shoulder of his tweed coat; he repeated the gesture a second and yet a third time.
“What is the matter with the man?” asked Eve Fincastle. Both she and Kitty were extremely bright, animated, and even excited.
“Nothing. I thought I saw something on my shoulder, that’s all,” said Cecil. “Ah! It’s only a bit of thread.” And he picked off the thread with his left hand and held it before Madame Lawrence. “See! It’s a piece of thin black silk, knotted. At first I took it for an insect—you know how queer things look out of the corner of your eye. Pardon!” He had dropped the fragment on to Madame Lawrence’s black silk dress. “Now it’s lost.”
“If you will excuse me, kind friends,” said Madame Lawrence, “I will go.” She spoke hurriedly, and as though in mental distress.
“Poor thing!” Kitty Sartorius exclaimed when the widow had gone. “She’s still dreadfully upset”; and Kitty and Eve proceeded jointly to relate the story of the diamond bracelet, upon which hitherto they had kept silence (though with difficulty), out of regard for Madame Lawrence’s feelings.
Cecil made almost no comment.
The Count, with the sympathetic excitability of his race, walked up and down the winter-garden,asseverating earnestly that such clumsiness amounted to a crime; then he grew calm and confessed that he shared the optimism of the police as to the recovery of the bracelet; lastly he complimented Kitty on her equable demeanour under this affliction.
“Do you know, Count,” said Cecil Thorold, later, after they had all four ascended to the drawing-room overlooking the Grande Place, “I was quite surprised when I saw at tea that you had to be introduced to Madame Lawrence.”
“Why so, my dear Mr. Thorold?” the Count inquired suavely.
“I thought I had seen you together in Ostend a few days ago.”
The Count shook his wonderful head.
“Perhaps you have a brother——?” Cecil paused.
“No,” said the Count. “But it is a favourite theory of mine that everyone has his double somewhere in the world.” Previously the Count had been discussing Planchette—he was a great authority on the supernatural, the sub-conscious, and the subliminal. He now deviated gracefully to the discussion of the theory of doubles.
“I suppose you aren’t going out for a walk, dear, before dinner?” said Eve to Kitty.
“No, dear,” said Kitty, positively.
“I think I shall,” said Eve.
And her glance at Cecil Thorold intimated in the plainest possible manner that she wished not only to have a companion for a stroll, but to leave Kitty and the Count in dual solitude.
“I shouldn’t, if I were you, Miss Fincastle,” Cecil remarked, with calm and studied blindness. “It’s risky here in the evenings—with these canals exhaling miasma and mosquitoes and bracelets and all sorts of things.”
“I will take the risk, thank you,” said Eve, in an icy tone, and she haughtily departed; she would not cower before Cecil’s millions. As for Cecil, he joined in the discussion of the theory of doubles.
On the next afternoon but one, policemen were still fishing, without success, for the bracelet, and raising from the ancient duct long-buried odours which threatened to destroy the inhabitants of the quay. (When Kitty Sartorius had hinted that perhaps the authorities might see their way to drawing off the water from the canal, the authorities had intimated that the death-rate of Bruges was already as high as convenient.) Nevertheless, though nothing had happened, the situation had somehow developed, and in such a manner that the bracelet itself was in danger of being partially forgotten; and of all places inBruges, the situation had developed on the top of the renowned Belfry which dominates the Grande Place in particular and the city in general.
The summit of the Belfry is three hundred and fifty feet high, and it is reached by four hundred and two winding stone steps, each a separate menace to life and limb. Eve Fincastle had climbed those steps alone, perhaps in quest of the view at the top, perhaps in quest of spiritual calm. She had not been leaning over the parapet more than a minute before Cecil Thorold had appeared, his field-glasses slung over his shoulder. They had begun to talk a little, but nervously and only in snatches. The wind blew free up there among the forty-eight bells, but the social atmosphere was oppressive.
“The Count is a most charming man,” Eve was saying, as if in defence of the Count.
“He is,” said Cecil; “I agree with you.”
“Oh, no, you don’t, Mr. Thorold! Oh, no, you don’t!”
Then there was a pause, and the twain looked down upon Bruges, with its venerable streets, its grass-grown squares, its waterways, and its innumerable monuments, spread out maplike beneath them in the mellow October sunshine. Citizens passed along the thoroughfare in the semblance of tiny dwarfs.
“If you didn’t hate him,” said Eve, “you wouldn’t behave as you do.”
“How do I behave, then?”
Eve schooled her voice to an imitation of jocularity—
“All Tuesday evening, and all day yesterday, you couldn’t leave them alone. You know you couldn’t.”
Five minutes later the conversation had shifted.
“You actually saw the bracelet fall into the canal?” said Cecil.
“I actually saw the bracelet fall into the canal. And no one could have got it out while Kitty and I were away, because we weren’t away half a minute.”
But they could not dismiss the subject of the Count, and presently he was again the topic.
“Naturally it would be a good match for the Count—foranyman,” said Eve; “but then it would also be a good match for Kitty. Of course, he is not so rich as some people, but he is rich.”
Cecil examined the horizon with his glasses, and then the streets near the Grande Place.
“Rich, is he? I’m glad of it. By the by, he’s gone to Ghent for the day, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, he went by the 9.27, and returns by the 4.38.”
Another pause.
“Well,” said Cecil at length, handing theglasses to Eve Fincastle, “kindly glance down there. Follow the line of the Rue St. Nicolas. You see the cream-coloured house with the enclosed courtyard? Now, do you see two figures standing together near a door—a man and a woman, the woman on the steps? Who are they?”
“I can’t see very well,” said Eve.
“Oh, yes, my dear lady, you can,” said Cecil. “These glasses are the very best. Try again.”
“They look like the Comte d’Avrec and Madame Lawrence,” Eve murmured.
“But the Count is on his way from Ghent! I see the steam of the 4.38 over there. The curious thing is that the Count entered the house of Madame Lawrence, to whom he was introduced for the first time the day before yesterday, at ten o’clock this morning. Yes, it would be a very good match for the Count. When one comes to think of it, it usually is that sort of man that contrives to marry a brilliant and successful actress. There! He’s just leaving, isn’t he? Now let us descend and listen to the recital of his day’s doings in Ghent—shall we?”
“You mean to insinuate,” Eve burst out in sudden wrath, “that the Count is an—anadventurer, and that Madame Lawrence—— Oh! Mr. Thorold!” She laughed condescendingly. “This jealousy is too absurd. Do you suppose Ihaven’t noticed how impressed you were with Kitty at the Devonshire Mansion that night, and again at Ostend, and again here? You’re simply carried away by jealousy; and you think because you are a millionaire you must have all you want. I haven’t the slightest doubt that the Count——”
“Anyhow,” said Cecil, “let us go down and hear about Ghent.”
His eyes made a number of remarks (indulgent, angry, amused, protective, admiring, perspicacious, puzzled), too subtle for the medium of words.
They groped their way down to earth in silence, and it was in silence that they crossed the Grande Place. The Count was seated on theterrassein front of the hotel, with a liqueur glass before him, and he was making graceful and expressive signs to Kitty Sartorius, who leaned her marvellous beauty out of a first-storey window. He greeted Cecil Thorold and Eve with an equal grace.
“And how is Ghent?” Cecil inquired.
“Did you go to Ghent, after all, Count?” Eve put in. The Comte d’Avrec looked from one to another, and then, instead of replying, he sipped at his glass. “No,” he said, “I didn’t go. The rather curious fact is that I happened to meet Madame Lawrence, who offered to show me her collection of lace. I have been an amateur of lacefor some years, and really Madame Lawrence’s collection is amazing. You have seen it? No? You should do so. I’m afraid I have spent most of the day there.”
When the Count had gone to join Kitty in the drawing-room, Eve Fincastle looked victoriously at Cecil, as if to demand of him: “Will you apologise?”
“My dear journalist,” Cecil remarked simply, “you gave the show away.”
That evening the continued obstinacy of the bracelet, which still refused to be caught, began at last to disturb the birdlike mind of Kitty Sartorius. Moreover, the secret was out, and the whole town of Bruges was discussing the episode and the chances of success.
“Let us consult Planchette,” said the Count. The proposal was received with enthusiasm by Kitty. Eve had disappeared.
Planchette was produced; and when asked if the bracelet would be recovered, it wrote, under the hands of Kitty and the Count, a trembling “Yes.” When asked: “By whom?” it wrote a word which faintly resembled “Avrec.”
The Count stated that he should personally commence dragging operations at sunrise. “You will see,” he said, “I shall succeed.”
“Let me try this toy, may I?” Cecil asked blandly, and, upon Kitty agreeing, he addressedPlanchette in a clear voice: “Now, Planchette, who will restore the bracelet to its owner?”
And Planchette wrote “Thorold,” but in characters as firm and regular as those of a copy-book.
“Mr. Thorold is laughing at us,” observed the Count, imperturbably bland.
“How horrid you are, Mr. Thorold!” Kitty exclaimed.
Of the four persons more or less interested in the affair, three were secretly active that night, in and out of the hotel. Only Kitty Sartorius, chief mourner for the bracelet, slept placidly in her bed. It was towards three o’clock in the morning that a sort of preliminary crisis was reached.
From the multiplicity of doors which ventilate its rooms, one would imagine that the average foreign hotel must have been designed immediately after its architect had been to see a Palais Royal farce, in which every room opens into every other room in every act. The Hôtel de la Grande Place was not peculiar in this respect; it abounded in doors. All the chambers on the second storey, over the public rooms, fronting the Place, communicated one with the next, but naturally most of the communicating doors were locked. Cecil Thorold and the Comte d’Avrec had each a bedroom and a sitting-room on that floor. TheCount’s sitting-room adjoined Cecil’s; and the door between was locked, and the key in the possession of the landlord.
Nevertheless, at three a.m. this particular door opened noiselessly from Cecil’s side, and Cecil entered the domain of the Count. The moon shone, and Cecil could plainly see not only the silhouette of the Belfry across the Place, but also the principal objects within the room. He noticed the table in the middle, the large easy-chair turned towards the hearth, the old-fashioned sofa; but not a single article did he perceive which might have been the personal property of the Count. He cautiously passed across the room through the moonlight to the door of the Count’s bedroom, which apparently, to his immense surprise, was not only shut, but locked, and the key in the lock on the sitting-room side. Silently unlocking it, he entered the bedroom and disappeared....
In less than five minutes he crept back into the Count’s sitting-room, closed the door and locked it.
“Odd!” he murmured reflectively; but he seemed quite happy.
There was a sudden movement in the region of the hearth, and a form rose from the armchair. Cecil rushed to the switch and turned on the electric light. Eve Fincastle stood before him. They faced each other.
“What are you doing here at this time, Miss Fincastle?” he asked, sternly. “You can talk freely; the Count will not waken.”
“I may ask you the same question,” Eve replied, with cold bitterness.
“Excuse me. You may not. You are a woman. This is the Count’s room——”
“You are in error,” she interrupted him. “It is not the Count’s room. It is mine. Last night I told the Count I had some important writing to do, and I asked him as a favour to relinquish this room to me for twenty-four hours. He very kindly consented. He removed his belongings, handed me the key of that door, and the transfer was made in the hotel books. And now,” she added, “may I inquire, Mr. Thorold, what you are doing in my room?”
“I—I thought it was the Count’s,” Cecil faltered, decidedly at a loss for a moment. “In offering my humblest apologies, permit me to say that I admire you, Miss Fincastle.”
“I wish I could return the compliment,” Eve exclaimed, and she repeated with almost plaintive sincerity: “I do wish I could.”
Cecil raised his arms and let them fall to his side.
“You meant to catch me,” he said. “You suspected something, then? The ‘important writing’ was an invention.” And he added, witha faint smile: “You really ought not to have fallen asleep. Suppose I had not wakened you?”
“Please don’t laugh, Mr. Thorold. Yes, I did suspect. There was something in the demeanour of your servant Lecky that gave me the idea... I did mean to catch you. Why you, a millionaire, should be a burglar, I cannot understand. I never understood that incident at the Devonshire Mansion; it was beyond me. I am by no means sure that you didn’t have a great deal to do with the Rainshore affair at Ostend. But that you should have stooped to slander is the worst. I confess you are a mystery. I confess that I can make no guess at the nature of your present scheme. And what I shall do, now that I have caught you, I don’t know. I can’t decide; I must think. If, however, anything is missing to-morrow morning, I shall be bound in any case to denounce you. You grasp that?”
“I grasp it perfectly, my dear journalist,” Cecil replied. “And something will not improbably be missing. But take the advice of a burglar and a mystery, and go to bed, it is half-past three.”
And Eve went. And Cecil bowed her out and then retired to his own rooms. And the Count’s apartment was left to the moonlight.
“Planchette is a very safe prophet,” said Cecil to Kitty Sartorius the next morning, “provided it has firm guidance.”
They were at breakfast.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Planchette prophesied last night that I should restore to you your bracelet. I do.”
He took the lovely gewgaw from his pocket and handed it to Kitty.
“Ho-ow did you find it, you dear thing?” Kitty stammered, trembling under the shock of joy.
“I fished it up out—out of the mire by a contrivance of my own.”
“But when?”
“Oh! Very early. At three o’clock a.m. You see, I was determined to be first.”
“In the dark, then?”
“I had a light. Don’t you think I’m rather clever?”
Kitty’s scene of ecstatic gratitude does not come into the story. Suffice it to say that not until the moment of its restoration did she realise how precious the bracelet was to her.
It was ten o’clock before Eve descended. She had breakfasted in her room, and Kitty had already exhibited to her the prodigal bracelet.
“I particularly want you to go up the Belfry with me, Miss Fincastle,” Cecil greeted her; and his tone was so serious and so urgent that she consented. They left Kitty playing waltzes on the piano in the drawing-room.
“And now, O man of mystery?” Eve questioned, when they had toiled to the summit, and saw the city and its dwarfs beneath them.
“We are in no danger of being disturbed here,” Cecil began; “but I will make my explanation—the explanation which I certainly owe you—as brief as possible. Your Comte d’Avrec is an adventurer (please don’t be angry), and your Madame Lawrence is an adventuress. I knew that I had seen them together. They work in concert, and for the most part make a living on the gaming-tables of Europe. Madame Lawrence was expelled from Monte Carlo last year for being too intimate with a croupier. You may be aware that at a roulette-table one can do a great deal with the aid of the croupier. Madame Lawrence appropriated the bracelet ‘on her own,’ as it were. The Count (he may be a real Count, for anything I know) heard first of that enterprise from the lips of Miss Sartorius. He was annoyed, angry—because he was really a little in love with your friend, and he saw golden prospects. It is just this fact—the Count’s genuine passion for Miss Sartorius—that renders the case psychologically interesting.To proceed, Madame Lawrence became jealous. The Count spent six hours yesterday in trying to get the bracelet from her, and failed. He tried again last night, and succeeded, but not too easily, for he did not re-enter the hotel till after one o’clock. At first I thought he had succeeded in the daytime, and I had arranged accordingly, for I did not see why he should have the honour and glory of restoring the bracelet to its owner. Lecky and I fixed up a sleeping-draught for him. The minor details were simple. When you caught me this morning, the bracelet was in my pocket, and in its stead I had left a brief note for the perusal of the Count, which has had the singular effect of inducing him to decamp; probably he has not gone alone. But isn’t it amusing that, since you so elaborately took his sitting-room, he will be convinced that you are a party to his undoing—you, his staunchest defender?”
Eve’s face gradually broke into an embarrassed smile.
“You haven’t explained,” she said, “how Madame Lawrence got the bracelet.”
“Come over here,” Cecil answered. “Take these glasses and look down at the Quai du Rosaire. You see everything plainly?” Eve could, in fact, see on the quay the little mounds of mud which had been extracted from the canal in the quest of the bracelet. Cecil continued: “On myarrival in Bruges on Monday, I had a fancy to climb the Belfry at once. I witnessed the whole scene between you and Miss Sartorius and Madame Lawrence, through my glasses. Immediately your backs were turned, Madame Lawrence, her hands behind her, and her back against the railing, began to make a sort of rapid, drawing up motion with her forearms. Then I saw a momentary glitter.... Considerably mystified, I visited the spot after you had left it, chatted with the gendarme on duty and got round him, and then it dawned on me that a robbery had been planned, prepared, and executed with extraordinary originality and ingenuity. A long, thin thread of black silk must have been ready tied to the railing, with perhaps a hook at the other end. As soon as Madame Lawrence held the bracelet she attached the hook to it and dropped it. The silk, especially as it was the last thing in the world you would look for, would be as good as invisible. When you went for the police, Madame retrieved the bracelet, hid it in her muff, and broke off the silk. Only, in her haste, she left a bit of silk tied to the railing. That fragment I carried to the hotel. All along she must have been a little uneasy about me.... And that’s all. Except that I wonder you thought I was jealous of the Count’s attentions to your friend.” He gazed at her admiringly.
“I’m glad you are not a thief, Mr. Thorold,” said Eve.
“Well,” Cecil smiled, “as for that, I left him a couple of louis for fares, and I shall pay his hotel bill.”
“Why?”
“There were notes for nearly ten thousand francs with the bracelet. Ill-gotten gains, I am sure. A trifle, but the only reward I shall have for my trouble. I shall put them to good use.” He laughed, serenely gay.
“Andthe launch?”
“I am unaware of the precise technical term, sir, but the launch awaits you. Perhaps I should have said it is alongside.”
The reliable Lecky hated the sea; and when his master’s excursions became marine, he always squinted more formidably and suddenly than usual, and added to his reliability a certain quality of ironic bitterness.
“My overcoat, please,” said Cecil Thorold, who was in evening dress.
The apartment, large and low, was panelled with bird’s-eye maple; divans ran along the walls, and above the divans orange curtains were drawn; the floor was hidden by the skins of wild African animals; in one corner was a Steinway piano, with the score of “The Orchid” open on the music-stand; in another lay a large, flat bowl filled with blossoms that do not bloom in England; the illumination, soft and yellow, came frombehind the cornice of the room, being reflected therefrom downwards by the cream-coloured ceiling. Only by a faintly-heard tremor of some gigantic but repressed force, and by a very slight unsteadiness on the part of the floor, could you have guessed that you were aboard a steam-yacht and not in a large, luxurious house.
Lecky, having arrayed the millionaire in overcoat, muffler, crush-hat, and white gloves, drew aside aportièreand followed him up a flight of stairs. They stood on deck, surrounded by the mild but treacherous Algerian night. From the white double funnels a thin smoke oozed. On the white bridge, the second mate, a spectral figure, was testing the engine-room signals, and the sharp noise of the bell seemed to desecrate the mysterious silence of the bay; but there was no other sign of life; the waiting launch was completely hidden under the high bows of theClaribel. In distant regions of the deck, glimmering beams came oddly up from below, throwing into relief some part of a boat on its davits or a section of a mast.
Cecil looked about him, at the serried lights of the Boulevard Carnot, and the riding lanterns of the vessels in the harbour. Away to the left on the hill, a few gleams showed Mustapha Supérieure, where the great English hotels are; and ten miles further east, the lighthouse on CapeMatifou flashed its eternal message to the Mediterranean. He was on the verge of feeling poetic.
“Suppose anything happens while you are at this dance, sir?”
Lecky jerked his thumb in the direction of a small steamer which lay moored scarcely a cable’s-length away, under the eastern jetty. “Suppose——?” He jerked his thumb again in exactly the same direction. His tone was still pessimistic and cynical.
“You had better fire our beautiful brass cannon,” Cecil replied. “Have it fired three times. I shall hear it well enough up at Mustapha.”
He descended carefully into the launch, and was whisked puffingly over the dark surface of the bay to the landing-stage, where he summoned a fiacre.
“Hôtel St. James,” he instructed the driver.
And the driver smiled joyously; everyone who went to the Hôtel St. James was rich and lordly, and paid well, because the hill was long and steep and so hard on the poor Algerian horses.
Every hotel up at Mustapha Supérieure has the finest view, the finest hygienic installation, and the finest cooking in Algeria; in other words, each is better than all the others. Hence the Hôtel St.James could not be called “first among equals,” since there are no equals, and one must be content to describe it as first among the unequalled. First it undoubtedly was—and perhaps will be again. Although it was new, it had what one visitor termed “that indefinable thing—cachet.” It was frequented by the best people—namely, the richest people, the idlest people, the most arrogant people, the most bored people, the most titled people—that came to the southern shores of the Mediterranean in search of what they would never find—an escape from themselves. It was a vast building, planned on a scale of spaciousness only possible in a district where commercial crises have depressed the value of land, and it stood in the midst of a vast garden of oranges, lemons, and medlars. Every room—and there were three storeys and two hundred rooms—faced south: this was charged for in the bill. The public rooms, Oriental in character, were immense and complete. They included a dining-room, a drawing-room, a reading-room, a smoking-room, a billiard-room, a bridge-room, a ping-pong-room, a concert-room (with resident orchestra), and a room where Aissouias, negroes, and other curiosities from the native town might perform before select parties. Thus it was entirely self-sufficient, and lacked nothing which is necessary to the proper existence of the best people. On Thursdaynights, throughout the season, there was a five-franc dance in the concert-hall. You paid five francs, and ate and drank as much as you could while standing up at the supper-tables arrayed in the dining-room.
On a certain Thursday night in early January, this Anglo-Saxon microcosm, set so haughtily in a French colony between the Mediterranean and the Djujura Mountains (with the Sahara behind), was at its most brilliant. The hotel was crammed, the prices were high, and everybody was supremely conscious of doing the correct thing. The dance had begun somewhat earlier than usual, because the eagerness of the younger guests could not be restrained. And the orchestra seemed gayer, and the electric lights brighter, and the toilettes more resplendent that night. Of course, guests came in from the other hotels. Indeed, they came in to such an extent that to dance in the ballroom was an affair of compromise and ingenuity. And the other rooms were occupied, too. The bridge players recked not of Terpsichore, the cheerful sound of ping-pong came regularly from the ping-pong-room; the retired Indian judge was giving points as usual in the billiard-room; and in the reading-room the steadfast intellectuals were studying theWorldand the ParisNew York Herald.
And all was English and American, pure Anglo-Saxonin thought and speech and gesture—save the manager of the hotel, who was Italian, the waiters, who were anything, and the wonderful concierge, who was everything.
As Cecil passed through the imposing suite of public rooms, he saw in the reading-room—posted so that no arrival could escape her eye—the elegant form of Mrs. Macalister, and, by way of a wild, impulsive freak, he stopped and talked to her, and ultimately sat down by her side.
Mrs. Macalister was one of those English-women that are to be found only in large and fashionable hotels. Everything about her was mysterious, except the fact that she was in search of a second husband. She was tall, pretty, dashing, daring, well-dressed, well-informed, and, perhaps thirty-four. But no one had known her husband or her family, and no one knew her county, or the origin of her income, or how she got herself into the best cliques in the hotel. She had the air of being the merriest person in Algiers; really, she was one of the saddest, for the reason that every day left her older, and harder, and less likely to hook—well, to hook a millionaire. She had met Cecil Thorold at the dance of the previous week, and had clung to him so artfully that the coteries talked of it for three days, as Cecil well knew. And to-night he thought he might, as well as not, give Mrs. Macalister an hour’sexcitement of the chase, and the coteries another three days’ employment.
So he sat down beside her, and they talked.
First she asked him whether he slept on his yacht or in the hotel; and he replied, sometimes in the hotel and sometimes on the yacht. Then she asked him where his bedroom was, and he said it was on the second floor, and she settled that it must be three doors from her own. Then they discussed bridge, the Fiscal Inquiry, the weather, dancing, food, the responsibilities of great wealth, Algerian railway-travelling, Cannes, gambling, Mr. Morley’s “Life of Gladstone,” and the extraordinary success of the hotel. Thus, quite inevitably, they reached the subject of the Algiers Mystery. During the season, at any rate, no two guests in the hotel ever talked small-talk for more than ten minutes without reaching the subject of the Algiers Mystery.
For the hotel had itself been the scene of the Algiers Mystery, and the Algiers Mystery was at once the simplest, the most charming, and the most perplexing mystery in the world. One morning, the first of April in the previous year, an honest John Bull of a guest had come down to the hotel-office, and laying a five-pound note before the head clerk, had exclaimed: “I found that lying on my dressing-table. It isn’t mine. It looks good enough, but I expect it’s someone’sjoke.” Seven other people that day confessed that they had found five-pound notes in their rooms, or pieces of paper that resembled five-pound notes. They compared these notes, and then the eight went off in a body down to an agency in the Boulevard de la République, and without the least demur the notes were changed for gold. On the second of April, twelve more people found five-pound notes in their rooms, now prominent on the bed, now secreted—as, for instance, under a candlestick. Cecil himself had been a recipient. Watches were set, but with no result whatever. In a week nearly seven hundred pounds had been distributed amongst the guests by the generous, invisible ghosts. It was magnificent, and it was very soon in every newspaper in England and America. Some of the guests did not “care” for it; thought it “queer,” and “uncanny,” and not “nice,” and these left. But the majority cared for it very much indeed, and remained till the utmost limit of the season.
The rainfall of notes had not recommenced so far, in the present season. Nevertheless, the hotel had been thoroughly well patronised from November onwards, and there was scarcely a guest but who went to sleep at night hoping to descry a fiver in the morning.
“Advertisement!” said some perspicacious individuals. Of course, the explanation was anobvious one. But the manager had indignantly and honestly denied all knowledge of the business, and, moreover, not a single guest had caught a single note in the act of settling down. Further, the hotel changed hands and that manager left. The mystery, therefore, remained, a delightful topic always at hand for discussion.
After having chatted, Cecil Thorold and Mrs. Macalister danced—two dances. And the hotel began audibly to wonder that Cecil could be such a fool. When, at midnight, he retired to bed, many mothers of daughters and daughters of mothers were justifiably angry, and consoled themselves by saying that he had disappeared in order to hide the shame which must have suddenly overtaken him. As for Mrs. Macalister, she was radiant.
Safely in his room, Cecil locked and wedged the door, and opened the window and looked out from the balcony at the starry night. He could hear cats playing on the roof. He smiled when he thought of the things Mrs. Macalister had said, and of the ardour of her glances. Then he felt sorry for her. Perhaps it was the whisky-and-soda which he had just drunk that momentarily warmed his heart towards the lonely creature. Only one item of her artless gossip had interested him—a statement that the new Italian manager had been ill in bed all day.
He emptied his pockets, and, standing on a chair, he put his pocket-book on the top of the wardrobe, where no Algerian marauder would think of looking for it; his revolver he tucked under his pillow. In three minutes he was asleep.
He was awakened by a vigorous pulling and shaking of his arm; and he, who usually woke wide at the least noise, came to his senses with difficulty. He looked up. The electric light had been turned on.
“There’s a ghost in my room, Mr. Thorold! You’ll forgive me—but I’m so——”
It was Mrs. Macalister, dishevelled and in white, who stood over him.
“This is really a bit too thick,” he thought vaguely and sleepily, regretting his impulsive flirtation of the previous evening. Then he collected himself and said sternly, severely, that if Mrs. Macalister would retire to the corridor, he would follow in a moment; he added that she might leave the door open if she felt afraid. Mrs. Macalister retired, sobbing, and Cecil arose. He went first to consult his watch; it was gone—a chronometer worth a couple of hundred pounds. He whistled, climbed on to a chair, and discovered that his pocket-book was no longer in a place ofsafety on the top of the wardrobe; it had contained something over five hundred pounds in a highly negotiable form. Picking up his overcoat, which lay on the floor, he found that the fur lining—a millionaire’s fancy, which had cost him nearly a hundred and fifty pounds—had been cut away, and was no more to be seen. Even the revolver had departed from under his pillow!
“Well!” he murmured, “this is decidedly the grand manner.”
Quite suddenly it occurred to him, as he noticed a peculiar taste in his mouth, that the whisky-and-soda had contained more than whisky-and-soda—he had been drugged! He tried to recall the face of the waiter who had served him. Eyeing the window and the door, he argued that the thief had entered by the former and departed by the latter. “But the pocket-book!” he mused. “I must have been watched!”
Mrs. Macalister, stripped now of all dash and all daring, could be heard in the corridor.
“Can she——?” He speculated for a moment, and then decided positively in the negative. Mrs. Macalister could have no design on anything but a bachelor’s freedom.
He assumed his dressing-gown and slippers and went to her. The corridor was in darkness, but she stood in the light of his doorway.
“Now,” he said, “this ghost of yours, dear lady!”
“You must go first,” she whimpered. “I daren’t. It was white ... but with a black face. It was at the window.”
Cecil, getting a candle, obeyed. And having penetrated alone into the lady’s chamber, he perceived, to begin with, that a pane had been pushed out of the window by the old, noiseless device of a sheet of treacled paper, and then, examining the window more closely, he saw that, outside, a silk ladder depended from the roof and trailed in the balcony.
“Come in without fear,” he said to the trembling widow. “It must have been someone with more appetite than a ghost that you saw. Perhaps an Arab.”
She came in, femininely trusting to him; and between them they ascertained that she had lost a watch, sixteen rings, an opal necklace, and some money. Mrs. Macalister would not say how much money. “My resources are slight,” she remarked. “I was expecting remittances.”
Cecil thought: “This is not merely in the grand manner. If it fulfils its promise, it will prove to be one of the greatest things of the age.”
He asked her to keep cool, not to be afraid, and to dress herself. Then he returned to his room and dressed as quickly as he could. Thehotel was absolutely quiet, but out of the depths below came the sound of a clock striking four. When, adequately but not æsthetically attired, he opened his door again, another door near by also opened, and Cecil saw a man’s head.
“I say,” drawled the man’s head, “excuse me, but haveyounoticed anything?”
“Why? What?”
“Well, I’ve been robbed!”
The Englishman laughed awkwardly, apologetically, as though ashamed to have to confess that he had been victimised.
“Much?” Cecil inquired.
“Two hundred or so. No joke, you know.”
“So have I been robbed,” said Cecil. “Let us go downstairs. Got a candle? These corridors are usually lighted all night.”
“Perhaps our thief has been at the switches,” said the Englishman.
“Say our thieves,” Cecil corrected.
“You think there was more than one?”
“I think there were more than half a dozen,” Cecil replied.
The Englishman was dressed, and the two descended together, candles in hand, forgetting the lone lady. But the lone lady had no intention of being forgotten, and she came after them, almost screaming. They had not reached the ground floor before three other doors hadopened and three other victims proclaimed themselves.
Cecil led the way through the splendid saloons, now so ghostly in their elegance, which only three hours before had been the illuminated scene of such polite revelry. Ere he reached the entrance-hall, where a solitary jet was burning, the assistant-concierge (one of those officials who seem never to sleep) advanced towards him, demanding in his broken English what was the matter.
“There have been thieves in the hotel,” said Cecil. “Waken the concierge.”
From that point, events succeeded each other in a sort of complex rapidity. Mrs. Macalister fainted at the door of the billiard-room and was laid out on a billiard-table, with a white ball between her shoulders. The head concierge was not in his narrow bed in the alcove by the main entrance, and he could not be found. Nor could the Italian manager be found (though he was supposed to be ill in bed), nor the Italian manager’s wife. Two stablemen were searched out from somewhere; also a cook. And then the Englishman who had lost two hundred or so went forth into the Algerian night to bring a gendarme from the post in the Rue d’Isly.
Cecil Thorold contented himself with talking to people as, in ones and twos, and in various stages of incorrectness, they came into the publicrooms, now brilliantly lighted. All who came had been robbed. What surprised him was the slowness of the hotel to wake up. There were two hundred and twenty guests in the place. Of these, in a quarter of an hour, perhaps fifteen had risen. The remainder were apparently oblivious of the fact that something very extraordinary, and something probably very interesting to them personally, had occurred and was occurring.
“Why! It’s a conspiracy, sir. It’s a conspiracy, that’s what it is!” decided the Indian judge.
“Gang is a shorter word,” Cecil observed, and a young girl in a macintosh giggled.
Sleepyemployésnow began to appear, and the rumour ran that six waiters and a chambermaid were missing. Mrs. Macalister rallied from the billiard table and came into the drawing-room, where most of the company had gathered. Cecil yawned (the influence of the drug was still upon him) as she approached him and weakly spoke. He answered absently; he was engaged in watching the demeanour of these idlers on the face of the earth—how incapable they seemed of any initiative, and yet with what magnificent Britannic phlegm they endured the strange situation! The talking was neither loud nor impassioned.
Then the low, distant sound of a cannon was heard. Once, twice, thrice.
Silence ensued.
“Heavens!” sighed Mrs. Macalister, swaying towards Cecil. “What can that be?”
He avoided her, hurried out of the room, and snatched somebody else’s hat from the hat-racks in the hall. But just as he was turning the handle of the main door of the hotel, the Englishman who had lost two hundred or so returned out of the Algerian night with an inspector of police. The latter courteously requested Cecil not to leave the building, as he must open the inquiry (ouvrir l’enquête) at once. Cecil was obliged, regretfully, to comply.
The inspector of police then commenced his labours. He telephoned (no one had thought of the telephone) for assistance and asked the Central Bureau to watch the railway station, the port, and the stage coaches. He acquired the names and addresses oftout le monde. He made catalogues of articles. He locked all the servants in the ping-pong-room. He took down narratives, beginning with Cecil’s. And while the functionary was engaged with Mrs. Macalister, Cecil quietly but firmly disappeared.
After his departure, the affair loomed larger and larger in mere magnitude, but nothing that came to light altered its leading characteristics. A wholesale robbery had been planned with the most minute care and knowledge, and executedwith the most daring skill. Some ten persons—the manager and his wife, a chambermaid, six waiters, and the concierge—seemed to have been concerned in the enterprise, excluding Mrs. Macalister’s Arab and no doubt other assistants. (The guests suddenly remembered how superior the concierge and the waiters had been to the ordinary concierge and waiter!) At a quarter-past five o’clock the police had ascertained that a hundred rooms had been entered, and horrified guests were still descending! The occupants of many rooms, however, made no response to a summons to awake. These, it was discovered afterwards, had either, like Cecil, received a sedative unawares, or they had been neatly gagged and bound. In the result, the list of missing valuables comprised nearly two hundred watches, eight hundred rings, a hundred and fifty other articles of jewellery, several thousand pounds’ worth of furs, three thousand pounds in coin, and twenty-one thousand pounds in bank-notes and other forms of currency. One lady, a doctor’s wife, said she had been robbed of eight hundred pounds in Bank of England notes, but her story obtained little credit; other tales of enormous loss, chiefly by women, were also taken with salt. When the dawn began, at about six o’clock, an official examination of the façade of the hotel indicated that nearly every room had been invaded by the balconiedwindow, either from the roof or from the ground. But the stone flags of the terrace, and the beautifully asphalted pathways of the garden disclosed no trace of the plunderers.
“I guess your British habit of sleeping with the window open don’t cut much ice to-day, anyhow!” said an American from Indianapolis to the company.
That morning no omnibus from the hotel arrived at the station to catch the six-thirty train which takes two days to ramble to Tunis and to Biskra. And all the liveried porters talked together in excited Swiss-German.
“My compliments to Captain Black,” said Cecil Thorold, “and repeat to him that all I want him to do is to keep her in sight. He needn’t overhaul her too much.”
“Precisely, sir.” Lecky bowed; he was pale.
“And you had better lie down.”
“I thank you, sir, but I find a recumbent position inconvenient. Perpetual motion seems more agreeable.”
Cecil was back in the large, low room panelled with bird’s-eye maple. Below him the power of two thousand horses drove through the nocturnal Mediterranean swell hisClaribelof a thousandtons. Thirty men were awake and active on board her, and twenty slept in the vast, clean forecastle, with electric lights blazing six inches above their noses. He lit a cigarette, and going to the piano, struck a few chords from “The Orchid”; but since the music would not remain on the stand, he abandoned that attempt and lay down on a divan to think.
He had reached the harbour, from the hotel, in twenty minutes, partly on foot at racing speed, and partly in an Arab cart, also at racing speed. TheClaribel’slaunch awaited him, and in another five minutes the launch was slung to her davits, and theClaribelunder way. He learnt that the small and sinister vessel, thePerroquet Vert(of Oran), which he and his men had been watching for several days, had slipped unostentatiously between the southern and eastern jetties, had stopped for a few minutes to hold converse with a boat that had put off from the neighbourhood of Lower Mustapha, and had then pointed her head north-west, as though for some port in the province of Oran or in Morocco.
And in the rings of cigarette smoke which he made, Cecil seemed now to see clearly the whole business. He had never relaxed his interest in the affair of the five-pound notes. He had vaguely suspected it to be part of some large scheme; he had presumed, on slight grounds, a connectionbetween thePerroquet Vertand the Italian manager of the hotel. Nay, more, he had felt sure that some great stroke was about to be accomplished. But of precise knowledge, of satisfactory theory, of definite expectation, he had had none—until Mrs. Macalister, that unconscious and man-hunting agent of Destiny, had fortunately wakened him in the nick of time. Had it not been for his flirtation of the previous evening, he might still be asleep in his bed at the hotel.... He perceived the entire plan. The five-pound notes had been mysteriously scattered, certainly to advertise the hotel, but only to advertise it for a particular and colossal end, to fill it full and overflowing with fat victims. The situation had been thoroughly studied in all its details, and the task had been divided and allotted to various brains. Every room must have been examined, watched, and separately plotted against; the habits and idiosyncrasy of every victim must have been individually weighed and considered. Nothing, no trifle, could have been forgotten. And then some supreme intelligence had drawn the threads together and woven them swiftly into the pattern of a single night, almost a single hour!... And the loot (Cecil could estimate it pretty accurately) had been transported down the hill to Mustapha Inférieure, tossed into a boat, and so to thePerroquet Vert. And thePerroquet Vert, with loot andlooters on board, was bound, probably, for one of those obscure and infamous ports of Oran or Morocco—Tenez, Mostaganem, Beni Sar, Melilla, or the city of Oran, or Tangier itself! He knew something of the Spanish and Maltese dens of Oran and Tangier, the clearing-houses for stolen goods of two continents, and the impregnable refuge of scores of ingenious villains.
And when he reflected upon the grandeur and immensity of the scheme, so simple in its essence, and so leisurely in its achievement, like most grand schemes; when he reflected upon the imagination which had been necessary even to conceive it, and the generalship which had been necessary to its successful conclusion, he murmured admiringly—
“The man who thought of that and did it may be a scoundrel; but he is also an artist, and a great one!”
And just because he, Cecil Thorold, was a millionaire, and possessed a hundred-thousand-pound toy, which could do nineteen knots an hour, and cost fifteen hundred pounds a month to run, he was about to defeat that great artist and nullify that great scheme, and incidentally to retrieve his watch, his revolver, his fur, and his five hundred pounds. He had only to follow, and to warn one of the French torpedo-boats which are always patrolling the coast between Algiers and Oran, and the bubble would burst!
He sighed for the doomed artist; and he wondered what that victimised crowd of European loungers, who lounged sadly round the Mediterranean in winter, and sadly round northern Europe in summer, had done in their languid and luxurious lives that they should be saved, after all, from the pillage to which the great artist in theft had subjected them!
Then Lecky re-entered the state room.
“We shall have a difficulty in keeping thePerroquet Vertin sight, sir.”
“What!” exclaimed Cecil. “That tub! That coffin! You don’t mean she can do twenty knots?”
“Exactly, sir. Coffin! It—I mean she—is sinking.”
Cecil ran on deck. Dawn was breaking over Matifou, and a faint, cold, grey light touched here and there the heaving sea. His captain spoke and pointed. Ahead, right ahead, less than a mile away, thePerroquet Vertwas sinking by the stern, and even as they gazed at her, a little boat detached itself from her side in the haze of the morning mist; and she sank, disappeared, vanished amid a cloud of escaping steam. They were four miles north-east of Cape Caxine. Two miles further westward, a big Dominion liner, bound direct for Algiers from the New World, was approaching and had observed the catastrophe—for she altered hercourse. In a few minutes, theClaribelpicked up the boat of thePerroquet Vert. It contained three Arabs.
The tale told by the Arabs (two of them were brothers, and all three came from Oran) fully sustained Cecil Thorold’s theory of the spoliation of the hotel. Naturally they pretended at first to an entire innocence concerning the schemes of those who had charge of thePerroquet Vert. The two brothers, who were black with coal-dust when rescued, swore that they had been physically forced to work in the stokehold; but ultimately all three had to admit a knowledge of things which was decidedly incriminating, and all three got three years’ imprisonment. The only part of the Algiers Mystery which remained a mystery was the cause of the sinking of thePerroquet Vert. Whether she was thoroughly unseaworthy (she had been picked up cheap at Melilla), or whether someone (not on board) had deliberately arranged her destruction, perhaps to satisfy a Moorish vengeance, was not ascertained. The three Arabs could only be persuaded to say that there had been eleven Europeans and seven natives on the ship, and that they alone, by the mercy of Allah, had escaped from the swift catastrophe.
The hotel underwent an acute crisis, fromwhich, however, it is emerging. For over a week a number of the pillaged guests discussed a diving enterprise of salvage. But the estimates were too high, and it came to nothing. So they all, Cecil included, began to get used to the idea of possessing irrecoverable property to the value of forty thousand pounds in the Mediterranean. A superb business in telegraphed remittances was done for several days. The fifteen beings who had accompanied thePerroquet Vertto the bottom were scarcely thought of, for it was almost universally agreed that the way of transgressors is, and ought to be, hard.
As for Cecil Thorold, the adventure, at first so full of the promise of joy, left him melancholy, until an unexpected sequel diverted the channel of his thoughts.