Chapter Nine.The Gentleman Named Paulton.On creeping back to her room, I found Vera awaiting me anxiously.She, too, had heard the men talking, she had recognised her father’s and his companion’s voices, though unable to catch what was being said. I bent, and we exchanged kisses. In a few words I told her what had occurred, and explained the situation. I wanted to ask her about the man Davies; how she came to know him, and if she had known him long. There were other matters, too, that I wished to talk to her about, but there was no time to do so then.Though I pride myself upon a rapidity of decision in moments of crises, and have misled the more ingenuous among my friends into believing that I really am a man of exceedingly strong character, who would never find himself at a loss if brought suddenly face to face with a critical problem, I don’t mind admitting that I am an invertebrate, vacillating creature at such times. Oh, no, I never lose my head. Don’t think that. But when instant decision is needed, and there are several decisions one might come to, I get quite “jumpy,” half make up my mind to take one course, half make up my mind to take the opposite course, and finally take the third, or it may be the fourth or fifth.“Well, you had better get away at once, dear,” Vera urged quickly, when I had told her what I had heard below.“But what are you going to do?” I asked.“Oh, I know what I’m going to do,” she replied at once, “but I want to have your plan. I know, dear, you are never at a loss when ‘up against it,’ to use your own phrase. You have often told me so, or implied it.”Now I did not entirely like her tone. There was a curious gleam in her eyes, which I mistrusted. I had noticed that gleam before, on occasions when she had been drawing people on to make admissions that they did not wish to make. She was rather too fond, I had sometimes thought, of indulging in a form of intellectual pastime that I have heard people who talk slang—a thing that I detest—call “pulling you by the leg.” The suspicion crossed my mind at that moment, that Vera was trying to “pull my leg”—and I frankly didn’t like it.“This is no time for joking, Vera,” I said, for the “gleam” in her eyes had now become a twinkle. “This is a time for action—and very prompt action.”I wondered how she could jest at such a moment. “That is why I want you to act,” she answered innocently, “and to act promptly. However, as I believe you have no idea what to do, Dick, I’m going to tell you what to do, and you must do it—promptly. Now, follow me. I know my way about this place.” She led me softly along the corridor, turned to the right, then to the left, and then to the left again. Presently we reached the top of a flight of steep, and very narrow wooden stairs.“Follow me,” she whispered again, “and keep one hand on that rope,” indicating a cord that served as a bannister. “These stairs are slippery, or they always used to be. As a child, I used to fall down them every Sunday.”We were on the first floor. The stairs continued to the ground floor. She turned suddenly.“How about your gloves and umbrella?”There was the curious look in her eyes again, so I paid no attention.“Have you matches?” she asked, a moment later.I struck one, and, stooping, we made our way along a narrow, dark passage, with a low ceiling. Five stone steps down into a damp, stone tunnel, about twenty feet in length, then to the right, and we came to a wooden door.“Give me your keys,” she said.I did so, and she unlocked the door. It led into a little stone-flagged yard. On three sides of it were high walls, walls of houses. The wall on the fourth side, only a few feet high, was surmounted by iron rails. Stone steps led up to the gate at the end of the rails. She opened the gate, re-locking it when we had passed out, and we stood in a stone-flagged cul-de-sac, about fifteen yards long, across the open end of which, the traffic of the street could be seen passing to and fro.“And now,” she said, when we had reached the street, disobeying the injunction of Paulton, “you are going to tell me what I must do next.”I hailed a taxi, and we drove off in it, discussing plans as we went along.Then I secured a room for her in a comfortable little hotel I knew of, in a street off Russell Square. The difficulty that now arose, was how to get her luggage.She told me all her things were packed, as she was to have left for Paris that night, alone. The order received from her father was, that she should remain in an obscure lodging near Rue la Harpe, the address of which, he had given her. There she would receive further instructions. These instructions, she told me, were to come either from her father, or from Paulton. She had strict orders not to communicate with Davies. Her luggage was in Brighton. Sir Charles and Lady Thorold had been staying in Brighton, and she had come up that morning. Paulton had met her at Victoria, and taken her in a cab direct to her father’s empty house in Belgrave Street. He had told her that if she dared go out before he came to her at ten that night, he would go to the police.“But who is this man Davies?” I asked.“A friend.”“But cannot you tell me something more concerning him?” I demanded.“At present, no. I regret, Dick, that I am not allowed to say anything—my lips are sealed.”“And Paulton. Why obey him so subserviently?”“Ah!” she sighed. “Because I am compelled.”With these rebuffs, I was forced to be satisfied.With regard to the plan for recovering her luggage, I rose to the occasion. After pondering the problem for a quarter of an hour, I suggested that she should write a note to her mother in Brighton, saying that Paulton had suddenly changed his plans, and that her luggage was wanted at once. It was to have been sent off at eight o’clock that night, when Paulton would meet it at Victoria, she had told me. The bearer of the note we would now send to Brighton—a District Messenger—would be instructed to bring the luggage back with him. I looked up the trains in the railway-guide, and found it would be just possible for the messenger to do this in the time. To avoid any mishap, I told the messenger to alight, on his return journey, at Clapham Junction, and bring the luggage from there, in a taxi, to the hotel near Russell Square.We dined together upstairs, at theTrocadero—ah! how I enjoyed that evening! How delightful it was to sittête-à-têtewith her. Before we had finished dinner, word was brought to us that Vera’s luggage had arrived.“I think I managed that rather well,” I said. “Don’t you?”“No,” she answered, “I don’t.”“No?”“As you ask me, I may as well tell you that I think you could hardly have ‘managed’ it worse. You have simply put Paulton on my track.”“But how?”“How! Really, my dear Dick, your intelligence resembles a child’s. You send a messenger for my luggage. Acting on your instructions, he brings it from Brighton to Clapham Junction by train, then hails a taxi, and brings the luggage on it direct to this hotel. Paulton is told by my mother in Brighton, that a messenger from London called for the luggage. All he has to do, is to ring up the messenger offices, until he finds the one where you engaged your messenger. Having found that out, he ascertains from the messenger the address to which he took the luggage in the taxi, and at once he comes and finds me.”“But,” I said quickly, “Paulton is not in Brighton.”“How can that matter? He can easily find out who took my luggage. I tell you, dear, if Paulton finds me, worse still, if he finds me with you, the result will be terrible for all of us. You should yourself have gone to Clapham, met the messenger-boy there, and yourself have brought the luggage here.”I felt crushed. I had believed my plan had been laid so cleverly. At the same time, my admiration for Vera’s foresight increased, though I did not tell her so.We went back to the hotel at once, took away the luggage with us, and by ten o’clock that night she was comfortably settled in another small hotel, within a stone’s throw of Hampstead Heath.My sweet-faced, well-beloved told me many things I wanted to know, but alas! not everything, and all the time we conversed, I had to bear in mind the important fact that she believed me to be familiar with Sir Charles’ secret—the secret that had led to his sudden flight from Houghton with her mother, herself and the French maid. I mistrusted that French maid—Judith. I had disliked the tone in which she had addressed Vera, when she had called her away from me that night at Houghton, and told her that Lady Thorold wanted her. I had noticed the maid on one or two previous occasions, and from the first I had disliked her. Her voice was so smooth, her manner so artificially deferential, and altogether she had seemed to me stealthy and cat-like. I believed her to be a hypocrite, if not a schemer.The man who had called himself Davies, Vera told me, in the course of our long conversation that evening, was not named Smithson at all. That was a name he had adopted for some motive which, she seemed to take it for granted, I must be able to guess. Mexican by birth, though of British-Portuguese parentage, he had spoken to her, perhaps, half-a-dozen times. He appeared to be a friend of her father, she said, though what interest they had in common she had never been able to discover.Speaking of Paulton, she said, her soft hand resting in mine, that he had known her mother longer than her father, and he had, she believed, been introduced by her mother to Sir Charles, since which time, the two men’s intimacy had steadily increased.She gave no reason for the dismay the sight of the framed panel portrait of “Smithson” had created, or for the sudden dismissal that night of all the servants at Houghton, and the subsequent flight. I could not quite decide, in my mind, if she took it for granted that I, knowing Sir Charles’ secret—as she supposed—knew also why he had left Houghton thus mysteriously, or whether she intentionally refrained from telling me. But certainly she seemed to think there was no reason to tell me who had done poor James, the butler, to death, or who had fired the rifle shots from the wood, and killed the chauffeur. At the inquest on the butler, the jury had returned an open verdict.Could he have been drowned by Paulton, and drowned intentionally? Or was Davies responsible for his death? That it must have been one of those two men I now felt certain—supposing he had not committed suicide, or been drowned by accident.Another thing Vera clearly took for granted was, that I must have known why the man hidden in the wood had fired those shots at me. I had guessed, of course, from the first, that the bullet that had killed the driver had been meant for me; though why anybody should wish to do me harm I had not the remotest idea.Of some points, of course, my love was ignorant as myself.On the subject of the flask with the gelsiminum—a very potent poison distilled from the root of the yellow jasmine—that had been picked up on the drive at Houghton, just outside the front door, Vera said nothing. Indeed, though I referred to it more than once, she each time turned the conversation into a different channel, as though by accident.“By the way, darling,” I said, as our lips met again in a long, lingering caress, when we had been talking a long time, “why did you ring me up to tell me you were in trouble and needed my help, and why did you call with Davies at my chambers?”Several times during the evening I had been on the point of asking her these questions, but on each occasion she had diverted my intention. It seemed odd, too, that though I had more than once asked her to tell me Davies’ true name, she had each time turned the conversation without satisfying me. And at last she had point-blank refused to tell me.Why? I wondered.She looked at me steadily for some moments.“It seems almost incredible, Dick,” she said at last, speaking very slowly, and drawing herself away, “that knowing my father’s secret, you should ask those questions. Tell me, how did you come to make the terrible discovery about my father? How long have you known everything? Who told you about it?”
On creeping back to her room, I found Vera awaiting me anxiously.
She, too, had heard the men talking, she had recognised her father’s and his companion’s voices, though unable to catch what was being said. I bent, and we exchanged kisses. In a few words I told her what had occurred, and explained the situation. I wanted to ask her about the man Davies; how she came to know him, and if she had known him long. There were other matters, too, that I wished to talk to her about, but there was no time to do so then.
Though I pride myself upon a rapidity of decision in moments of crises, and have misled the more ingenuous among my friends into believing that I really am a man of exceedingly strong character, who would never find himself at a loss if brought suddenly face to face with a critical problem, I don’t mind admitting that I am an invertebrate, vacillating creature at such times. Oh, no, I never lose my head. Don’t think that. But when instant decision is needed, and there are several decisions one might come to, I get quite “jumpy,” half make up my mind to take one course, half make up my mind to take the opposite course, and finally take the third, or it may be the fourth or fifth.
“Well, you had better get away at once, dear,” Vera urged quickly, when I had told her what I had heard below.
“But what are you going to do?” I asked.
“Oh, I know what I’m going to do,” she replied at once, “but I want to have your plan. I know, dear, you are never at a loss when ‘up against it,’ to use your own phrase. You have often told me so, or implied it.”
Now I did not entirely like her tone. There was a curious gleam in her eyes, which I mistrusted. I had noticed that gleam before, on occasions when she had been drawing people on to make admissions that they did not wish to make. She was rather too fond, I had sometimes thought, of indulging in a form of intellectual pastime that I have heard people who talk slang—a thing that I detest—call “pulling you by the leg.” The suspicion crossed my mind at that moment, that Vera was trying to “pull my leg”—and I frankly didn’t like it.
“This is no time for joking, Vera,” I said, for the “gleam” in her eyes had now become a twinkle. “This is a time for action—and very prompt action.”
I wondered how she could jest at such a moment. “That is why I want you to act,” she answered innocently, “and to act promptly. However, as I believe you have no idea what to do, Dick, I’m going to tell you what to do, and you must do it—promptly. Now, follow me. I know my way about this place.” She led me softly along the corridor, turned to the right, then to the left, and then to the left again. Presently we reached the top of a flight of steep, and very narrow wooden stairs.
“Follow me,” she whispered again, “and keep one hand on that rope,” indicating a cord that served as a bannister. “These stairs are slippery, or they always used to be. As a child, I used to fall down them every Sunday.”
We were on the first floor. The stairs continued to the ground floor. She turned suddenly.
“How about your gloves and umbrella?”
There was the curious look in her eyes again, so I paid no attention.
“Have you matches?” she asked, a moment later.
I struck one, and, stooping, we made our way along a narrow, dark passage, with a low ceiling. Five stone steps down into a damp, stone tunnel, about twenty feet in length, then to the right, and we came to a wooden door.
“Give me your keys,” she said.
I did so, and she unlocked the door. It led into a little stone-flagged yard. On three sides of it were high walls, walls of houses. The wall on the fourth side, only a few feet high, was surmounted by iron rails. Stone steps led up to the gate at the end of the rails. She opened the gate, re-locking it when we had passed out, and we stood in a stone-flagged cul-de-sac, about fifteen yards long, across the open end of which, the traffic of the street could be seen passing to and fro.
“And now,” she said, when we had reached the street, disobeying the injunction of Paulton, “you are going to tell me what I must do next.”
I hailed a taxi, and we drove off in it, discussing plans as we went along.
Then I secured a room for her in a comfortable little hotel I knew of, in a street off Russell Square. The difficulty that now arose, was how to get her luggage.
She told me all her things were packed, as she was to have left for Paris that night, alone. The order received from her father was, that she should remain in an obscure lodging near Rue la Harpe, the address of which, he had given her. There she would receive further instructions. These instructions, she told me, were to come either from her father, or from Paulton. She had strict orders not to communicate with Davies. Her luggage was in Brighton. Sir Charles and Lady Thorold had been staying in Brighton, and she had come up that morning. Paulton had met her at Victoria, and taken her in a cab direct to her father’s empty house in Belgrave Street. He had told her that if she dared go out before he came to her at ten that night, he would go to the police.
“But who is this man Davies?” I asked.
“A friend.”
“But cannot you tell me something more concerning him?” I demanded.
“At present, no. I regret, Dick, that I am not allowed to say anything—my lips are sealed.”
“And Paulton. Why obey him so subserviently?”
“Ah!” she sighed. “Because I am compelled.”
With these rebuffs, I was forced to be satisfied.
With regard to the plan for recovering her luggage, I rose to the occasion. After pondering the problem for a quarter of an hour, I suggested that she should write a note to her mother in Brighton, saying that Paulton had suddenly changed his plans, and that her luggage was wanted at once. It was to have been sent off at eight o’clock that night, when Paulton would meet it at Victoria, she had told me. The bearer of the note we would now send to Brighton—a District Messenger—would be instructed to bring the luggage back with him. I looked up the trains in the railway-guide, and found it would be just possible for the messenger to do this in the time. To avoid any mishap, I told the messenger to alight, on his return journey, at Clapham Junction, and bring the luggage from there, in a taxi, to the hotel near Russell Square.
We dined together upstairs, at theTrocadero—ah! how I enjoyed that evening! How delightful it was to sittête-à-têtewith her. Before we had finished dinner, word was brought to us that Vera’s luggage had arrived.
“I think I managed that rather well,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“No,” she answered, “I don’t.”
“No?”
“As you ask me, I may as well tell you that I think you could hardly have ‘managed’ it worse. You have simply put Paulton on my track.”
“But how?”
“How! Really, my dear Dick, your intelligence resembles a child’s. You send a messenger for my luggage. Acting on your instructions, he brings it from Brighton to Clapham Junction by train, then hails a taxi, and brings the luggage on it direct to this hotel. Paulton is told by my mother in Brighton, that a messenger from London called for the luggage. All he has to do, is to ring up the messenger offices, until he finds the one where you engaged your messenger. Having found that out, he ascertains from the messenger the address to which he took the luggage in the taxi, and at once he comes and finds me.”
“But,” I said quickly, “Paulton is not in Brighton.”
“How can that matter? He can easily find out who took my luggage. I tell you, dear, if Paulton finds me, worse still, if he finds me with you, the result will be terrible for all of us. You should yourself have gone to Clapham, met the messenger-boy there, and yourself have brought the luggage here.”
I felt crushed. I had believed my plan had been laid so cleverly. At the same time, my admiration for Vera’s foresight increased, though I did not tell her so.
We went back to the hotel at once, took away the luggage with us, and by ten o’clock that night she was comfortably settled in another small hotel, within a stone’s throw of Hampstead Heath.
My sweet-faced, well-beloved told me many things I wanted to know, but alas! not everything, and all the time we conversed, I had to bear in mind the important fact that she believed me to be familiar with Sir Charles’ secret—the secret that had led to his sudden flight from Houghton with her mother, herself and the French maid. I mistrusted that French maid—Judith. I had disliked the tone in which she had addressed Vera, when she had called her away from me that night at Houghton, and told her that Lady Thorold wanted her. I had noticed the maid on one or two previous occasions, and from the first I had disliked her. Her voice was so smooth, her manner so artificially deferential, and altogether she had seemed to me stealthy and cat-like. I believed her to be a hypocrite, if not a schemer.
The man who had called himself Davies, Vera told me, in the course of our long conversation that evening, was not named Smithson at all. That was a name he had adopted for some motive which, she seemed to take it for granted, I must be able to guess. Mexican by birth, though of British-Portuguese parentage, he had spoken to her, perhaps, half-a-dozen times. He appeared to be a friend of her father, she said, though what interest they had in common she had never been able to discover.
Speaking of Paulton, she said, her soft hand resting in mine, that he had known her mother longer than her father, and he had, she believed, been introduced by her mother to Sir Charles, since which time, the two men’s intimacy had steadily increased.
She gave no reason for the dismay the sight of the framed panel portrait of “Smithson” had created, or for the sudden dismissal that night of all the servants at Houghton, and the subsequent flight. I could not quite decide, in my mind, if she took it for granted that I, knowing Sir Charles’ secret—as she supposed—knew also why he had left Houghton thus mysteriously, or whether she intentionally refrained from telling me. But certainly she seemed to think there was no reason to tell me who had done poor James, the butler, to death, or who had fired the rifle shots from the wood, and killed the chauffeur. At the inquest on the butler, the jury had returned an open verdict.
Could he have been drowned by Paulton, and drowned intentionally? Or was Davies responsible for his death? That it must have been one of those two men I now felt certain—supposing he had not committed suicide, or been drowned by accident.
Another thing Vera clearly took for granted was, that I must have known why the man hidden in the wood had fired those shots at me. I had guessed, of course, from the first, that the bullet that had killed the driver had been meant for me; though why anybody should wish to do me harm I had not the remotest idea.
Of some points, of course, my love was ignorant as myself.
On the subject of the flask with the gelsiminum—a very potent poison distilled from the root of the yellow jasmine—that had been picked up on the drive at Houghton, just outside the front door, Vera said nothing. Indeed, though I referred to it more than once, she each time turned the conversation into a different channel, as though by accident.
“By the way, darling,” I said, as our lips met again in a long, lingering caress, when we had been talking a long time, “why did you ring me up to tell me you were in trouble and needed my help, and why did you call with Davies at my chambers?”
Several times during the evening I had been on the point of asking her these questions, but on each occasion she had diverted my intention. It seemed odd, too, that though I had more than once asked her to tell me Davies’ true name, she had each time turned the conversation without satisfying me. And at last she had point-blank refused to tell me.
Why? I wondered.
She looked at me steadily for some moments.
“It seems almost incredible, Dick,” she said at last, speaking very slowly, and drawing herself away, “that knowing my father’s secret, you should ask those questions. Tell me, how did you come to make the terrible discovery about my father? How long have you known everything? Who told you about it?”
Chapter Ten.Relates a Strange Incident.Vera’s very direct questions took me aback, though I had expected them sooner or later. “Who told me?” I said, echoing the words in order to gain time for thought, my arms still about her. “Oh, I’m sure I can’t remember. I seem to have known it a long time.”“It can’t have been such averylong time,” she answered, still looking at me in that queer way that made me feel uncomfortable. “Surely you must remember who told you. It is hardly the sort of thing one would be told every day—or even twice in one’s life, is it?”“Honestly,” I said with quick decision, “I can’t tell you how I came to know it.”“Your ‘cannot’ means ‘will not,’” she said, and her lip twitched in the curious way that I knew meant she was nettled.However, after that she dropped the subject, and I felt relieved. I hated deceiving her, yet I was compelled. I am not an adept in the art of what Lamb calls “walking round about a truth,” at least, not for more than a minute or two at a time, and my love had such quick intelligence that it is no easy matter—as I had several times discovered, to my discomfiture—to mislead her.For the first time since we had met in the house in Belgrave Street, our conversation became purely personal.I had almost feared the events of the past weeks might have altered her regard for me, and it afforded me intense relief to find I was mistaken. For I was desperately in love with her, more so than I cared to admit even to myself. And now I found to my joy that my love for her was apparently fully reciprocated.And yet why should she care for me? This puzzled me, I confess, though I know as a thoroughgoing man of the world and as a cosmopolitan that women do take most curious likes and dislikes. I am neither clever, good-looking nor amusing, nor, I believe, even particularly “good company” as it is called. There are scores upon scores of men just like myself. You meet them everywhere, in town and in the country. Society teems with them, and our clubs are full of them. Men, young and middle aged, who have been educated at the public schools and Universities, who have comfortable incomes, are fond of sport, who travel up and down Europe, who have never in their lives done a stroke of work—and don’t intend ever to do one if they can help it—who live solely for amusement and for the pleasure of living.What do women see in such men, women who have plenty of money and therefore do not need to marry in order to secure a home or to better themselves? What did—what could Vera Thorold see in me to attract her, least of all to tempt her to wish to marry me?“Vera, my dearest,” I said, when we had talked of each other’s affairs for a considerable time, “why not marry me now? I can get a special licence! Then you will be free of all trouble, and nobody will be able to molest you. I shall have a right to protect you in every way possible.”“Free of all trouble if I marry you, Richard?” she answered, reflectively, evading my question, and looking at me queerly.“And why not?” I asked. I felt rather hurt, for her words seemed to imply some hidden meaning. “Don’t you think I shall be good to you and treat you properly?”“Oh, that would be all right,” she answered, apparently amused at my misconstruing her meaning. “I am sure, Dick, that you would be good to any girl. I have already heard of your spoiling two or three girls, and giving them presents they had no right to accept from you—eh?” she asked mischievously.I am afraid I turned rather red, for, to be candid, I am something of a fool where women are concerned. At the same time I was surprised at her knowing the truth, and I suppose she guessed this, for, before I had time to speak again, she went on—“You must not forget that I am a modern girl, my dear old Dick. I know a great deal that I suppose I have no business to know, and when I hear things I remember them. Don’t for a moment flatter yourself that I think you perfect. I don’t. My frank opinion of you is that you really are an awfully good sort, kind, sympathetic, unselfish—singularly unselfish for a man—generous to a fault, and extravagant. In short, I like you far, far better than any man I have ever met, and I love you very much, you dear old boy—but there it ends.”“I should rather say it did!” I answered. “If you really think all that of me, I am more than satisfied.”“On the other hand,” she continued quickly, “I don’t pretend to think—and you needn’t think I do—that you are not just like most other men in some respects, in one respect in particular.”“What is the one respect?”“You are dreadfully susceptible—oh, yes, Dick, you are! There is no need for any one to tell me that. I can see it in your face. Your eyes betray you. You have what I once heard a girl friend of mine call, ‘affectionate eyes.’ She said to me: ‘Never trust a man who has “affectionate eyes,” and I never have trusted one—except you.’”“I am flattered dear. Then why not do what I suggest?” I asked, raising her soft hand to my lips.“It wouldn’t be safe, Dick, it really wouldn’t. We must wait until—until Paulton is dead.”“Until Paulton—is—until he—is dead!” I gasped. “Good Heavens! that may not be for years!”She smiled oddly.“He may live for years, of course,” she answered drily.“What do you mean?” I asked, staring at her in amazement.“I mean,” she said, looking straight at me, and her voice suddenly grew hard, “that when he is dead, the world will be rid of a creature who ought never to have been born.”Her eyes blazed.“Ah! Dick—Ah! Dick!” she went on with extraordinary force, sighing heavily, “if you only knew the life that man has led—the misery he has caused, the horrors that are traceable to his vile diabolical plots. My father and mother are only two of his many victims. He is a man I dread. I am not a coward, no one can call me that, but—but I fear Dago Paulton—I fear him terribly.” She was trembling in my arms, though whether through fear, or only from emotion, I could not say. Nor could I think of any apt words which might soothe her, except to say—“Leave him to me, dearest. Yet from what you tell me,” I said after a pause, “I can only suppose that some one is—how shall I put it?—going to encompass Paulton’s death.”“Who knows?” she asked vaguely, looking up into my eyes.I shrugged my shoulders, but said nothing. There was nothing I could say. This much I had suspected at any rate—Paulton had been responsible for the chauffeur’s death—or Vera believed him to have been.When I left my beloved late that night, and returned to King Street, I was not satisfied with my discoveries. So many mysteries still remained unsolved. What was the danger that had threatened her when she had rung me up at my flat, and begged me to help her? Where had she been staying? What danger threatened her now? What hold had the man Paulton over her, and why did she fear to disobey him? Most perplexing of all—what was her father’s secret, and why had he fled from Houghton?There were many minor problems, too, which still needed solution. Who was Davies; what was his true name, and why was he so intimate with Sir Charles?Again I seemed to see that curious stain on the ceiling of the room in Belgrave Street, and once more I wondered what had caused it. It might be, of course, merely a stain caused by some leaking pipe, and yet—I thought of that remarkable conversation I had heard in the hall of the unoccupied house. What had they meant when they said they must “bring Vera to her senses”? Also, why had they seemed averse from calling in a doctor to see the old man Taylor, and to—Taylor! I had been so much engrossed with Vera and her bondage of terror for the past few hours that I had forgotten all about him. Taylor. Had he recovered consciousness, I wondered, or had he—A cold shiver ran through me as this last thought occurred to me.It must have been quite two o’clock in the morning before I fell asleep. I am not an early riser, and my first feeling when I was awakened by John shaking me rather roughly, was one of annoyance. With difficulty I roused myself thoroughly. My servant was standing by the bedside, looking very pale.“There are two police-officers downstairs,” he said huskily. “They have come—they say they have come, sir—”“Well, out with it,” I exclaimed wrathfully, as he checked himself abruptly. “What have they come for? Do they want to see me?”He braced himself with an effort—“They say, sir,” he answered, “that—that they’ve come to arrest you! It is something to do, I think, with some old man who’s been found dead in an unoccupied ’ouse.”
Vera’s very direct questions took me aback, though I had expected them sooner or later. “Who told me?” I said, echoing the words in order to gain time for thought, my arms still about her. “Oh, I’m sure I can’t remember. I seem to have known it a long time.”
“It can’t have been such averylong time,” she answered, still looking at me in that queer way that made me feel uncomfortable. “Surely you must remember who told you. It is hardly the sort of thing one would be told every day—or even twice in one’s life, is it?”
“Honestly,” I said with quick decision, “I can’t tell you how I came to know it.”
“Your ‘cannot’ means ‘will not,’” she said, and her lip twitched in the curious way that I knew meant she was nettled.
However, after that she dropped the subject, and I felt relieved. I hated deceiving her, yet I was compelled. I am not an adept in the art of what Lamb calls “walking round about a truth,” at least, not for more than a minute or two at a time, and my love had such quick intelligence that it is no easy matter—as I had several times discovered, to my discomfiture—to mislead her.
For the first time since we had met in the house in Belgrave Street, our conversation became purely personal.
I had almost feared the events of the past weeks might have altered her regard for me, and it afforded me intense relief to find I was mistaken. For I was desperately in love with her, more so than I cared to admit even to myself. And now I found to my joy that my love for her was apparently fully reciprocated.
And yet why should she care for me? This puzzled me, I confess, though I know as a thoroughgoing man of the world and as a cosmopolitan that women do take most curious likes and dislikes. I am neither clever, good-looking nor amusing, nor, I believe, even particularly “good company” as it is called. There are scores upon scores of men just like myself. You meet them everywhere, in town and in the country. Society teems with them, and our clubs are full of them. Men, young and middle aged, who have been educated at the public schools and Universities, who have comfortable incomes, are fond of sport, who travel up and down Europe, who have never in their lives done a stroke of work—and don’t intend ever to do one if they can help it—who live solely for amusement and for the pleasure of living.
What do women see in such men, women who have plenty of money and therefore do not need to marry in order to secure a home or to better themselves? What did—what could Vera Thorold see in me to attract her, least of all to tempt her to wish to marry me?
“Vera, my dearest,” I said, when we had talked of each other’s affairs for a considerable time, “why not marry me now? I can get a special licence! Then you will be free of all trouble, and nobody will be able to molest you. I shall have a right to protect you in every way possible.”
“Free of all trouble if I marry you, Richard?” she answered, reflectively, evading my question, and looking at me queerly.
“And why not?” I asked. I felt rather hurt, for her words seemed to imply some hidden meaning. “Don’t you think I shall be good to you and treat you properly?”
“Oh, that would be all right,” she answered, apparently amused at my misconstruing her meaning. “I am sure, Dick, that you would be good to any girl. I have already heard of your spoiling two or three girls, and giving them presents they had no right to accept from you—eh?” she asked mischievously.
I am afraid I turned rather red, for, to be candid, I am something of a fool where women are concerned. At the same time I was surprised at her knowing the truth, and I suppose she guessed this, for, before I had time to speak again, she went on—
“You must not forget that I am a modern girl, my dear old Dick. I know a great deal that I suppose I have no business to know, and when I hear things I remember them. Don’t for a moment flatter yourself that I think you perfect. I don’t. My frank opinion of you is that you really are an awfully good sort, kind, sympathetic, unselfish—singularly unselfish for a man—generous to a fault, and extravagant. In short, I like you far, far better than any man I have ever met, and I love you very much, you dear old boy—but there it ends.”
“I should rather say it did!” I answered. “If you really think all that of me, I am more than satisfied.”
“On the other hand,” she continued quickly, “I don’t pretend to think—and you needn’t think I do—that you are not just like most other men in some respects, in one respect in particular.”
“What is the one respect?”
“You are dreadfully susceptible—oh, yes, Dick, you are! There is no need for any one to tell me that. I can see it in your face. Your eyes betray you. You have what I once heard a girl friend of mine call, ‘affectionate eyes.’ She said to me: ‘Never trust a man who has “affectionate eyes,” and I never have trusted one—except you.’”
“I am flattered dear. Then why not do what I suggest?” I asked, raising her soft hand to my lips.
“It wouldn’t be safe, Dick, it really wouldn’t. We must wait until—until Paulton is dead.”
“Until Paulton—is—until he—is dead!” I gasped. “Good Heavens! that may not be for years!”
She smiled oddly.
“He may live for years, of course,” she answered drily.
“What do you mean?” I asked, staring at her in amazement.
“I mean,” she said, looking straight at me, and her voice suddenly grew hard, “that when he is dead, the world will be rid of a creature who ought never to have been born.”
Her eyes blazed.
“Ah! Dick—Ah! Dick!” she went on with extraordinary force, sighing heavily, “if you only knew the life that man has led—the misery he has caused, the horrors that are traceable to his vile diabolical plots. My father and mother are only two of his many victims. He is a man I dread. I am not a coward, no one can call me that, but—but I fear Dago Paulton—I fear him terribly.” She was trembling in my arms, though whether through fear, or only from emotion, I could not say. Nor could I think of any apt words which might soothe her, except to say—
“Leave him to me, dearest. Yet from what you tell me,” I said after a pause, “I can only suppose that some one is—how shall I put it?—going to encompass Paulton’s death.”
“Who knows?” she asked vaguely, looking up into my eyes.
I shrugged my shoulders, but said nothing. There was nothing I could say. This much I had suspected at any rate—Paulton had been responsible for the chauffeur’s death—or Vera believed him to have been.
When I left my beloved late that night, and returned to King Street, I was not satisfied with my discoveries. So many mysteries still remained unsolved. What was the danger that had threatened her when she had rung me up at my flat, and begged me to help her? Where had she been staying? What danger threatened her now? What hold had the man Paulton over her, and why did she fear to disobey him? Most perplexing of all—what was her father’s secret, and why had he fled from Houghton?
There were many minor problems, too, which still needed solution. Who was Davies; what was his true name, and why was he so intimate with Sir Charles?
Again I seemed to see that curious stain on the ceiling of the room in Belgrave Street, and once more I wondered what had caused it. It might be, of course, merely a stain caused by some leaking pipe, and yet—
I thought of that remarkable conversation I had heard in the hall of the unoccupied house. What had they meant when they said they must “bring Vera to her senses”? Also, why had they seemed averse from calling in a doctor to see the old man Taylor, and to—
Taylor! I had been so much engrossed with Vera and her bondage of terror for the past few hours that I had forgotten all about him. Taylor. Had he recovered consciousness, I wondered, or had he—
A cold shiver ran through me as this last thought occurred to me.
It must have been quite two o’clock in the morning before I fell asleep. I am not an early riser, and my first feeling when I was awakened by John shaking me rather roughly, was one of annoyance. With difficulty I roused myself thoroughly. My servant was standing by the bedside, looking very pale.
“There are two police-officers downstairs,” he said huskily. “They have come—they say they have come, sir—”
“Well, out with it,” I exclaimed wrathfully, as he checked himself abruptly. “What have they come for? Do they want to see me?”
He braced himself with an effort—
“They say, sir,” he answered, “that—that they’ve come to arrest you! It is something to do, I think, with some old man who’s been found dead in an unoccupied ’ouse.”
Chapter Eleven.Contains some Strange News.My heart seemed to stop beating. Old Taylor, then, was dead, and I sat up in bed, staring straight before me.For nearly a minute I did not speak. All the time I felt John’s calm gaze, puzzled, inquisitive, fixed upon me. I had gone through enough unhappiness during these past weeks to last me a lifetime, but all that I had endured would be as nothing by comparison with this. I could not blind myself to one fact—I had poisoned old Taylor deliberately. Had I, by some hideous miscalculation, the result of ignorance, overdosed him, and brought his poor old life to a premature end? I might be charged with manslaughter. Or worse!Why! I might be convicted of murder. I might even be hanged! The grim thought held me breathless.And Vera—my thoughts fled to her at once—what would become of Vera? Even if I were only imprisoned, and only for a short spell, Vera would have none to look to for help, none to defend her. She would be at the mercy of her persecutors! I think that thought appalled me even more than the thought that I might be tried for manslaughter or murder.“Oh,” I said at last to John, “it’s some mistake. The police have made some grotesque blunder. You had better show them up, and I will talk to them.”No blunder had been made, and I knew it.I must say that I was surprised at the officers’ extreme courtesy. Seeing they were about to arrest me on suspicion of having caused a man’s death, their politeness, their consideration for my feelings, had a touch of irony.They waited while I had my bath and dressed. Then we all drove together to the police-station, chatting quite pleasantly on topics of passing interest. At the police-station my name and address and many other particulars, were taken down in writing. With the utmost gravity a pompous inspector asked me “what birthmarks I possessed, if any,” and various other questions ending with “if any.” I wondered whether, before he had done, he would ask me my sex—if any.Nearly a month dragged on—days of anxiety, which seemed years, and I had had no word from Vera!I shall never forget that trial—never.My opinion of legal procedure, never high, sank to zero before the trial at the London Sessions ended. The absurdity of some of the questions asked by counsel; the impossible inferences drawn from quite ordinary occurrences; the endless repetitions of the same questions, but in different sets of words; the verbal quibbling and juggling; the transposing of statements made in evidence and conveying a meaning obvious to the lowest intelligence; the pathos indulged in when the old man’s end came to be described; the judge’s weak attempts at being witty; the red-tapeism; the unpardonable waste of time—and of public money. No, I shall never forget those days.It lasted from Monday till Thursday, and during those four days I spent eleven hours in the witness-box. Ah! what a tragic farce. I received anonymous letters of encouragement, and, of course, some offensive letters. I even received a proposal of marriage from a forward minx, who admitted that though still at school, in Blackheath, she had “read every word of the trial,” that she “kept a dear portrait” of me, cut out of theDaily Mirror, under her pillow at night. I felt I must indeed have reached the depths of ignominy when my hand was sought in matrimony by an emotional Blackheath flapper. A pretty flapper, I admit. She sent me five cabinet portraits of herself, in addition to a miniature of herself as a baby. Phew! What are our young people coming to?Well, in the end I was acquitted, and told that I might leave the Court without a stain upon my character.Certainly that was in a sense gratifying. In the face of acrobatic verbal feats Counsel representing the Director of Public Prosecutions had indulged in during the trial, I felt that anything might have happened, and was fully prepared to be branded a felon for life. The drug, the jury decided, had been administered without any intention whatever to do more than send the old man to sleep for an hour or so, and an analysis of the tea left in the cup proved beyond a doubt, that this tea could not possibly have caused death, which had been due to heart-failure. I had been traced, it seemed, by my gloves and umbrella left in the old man’s room. Other details—long-winded ones—I need not describe.The problem now was, what to do next. My name, Richard Ashton, had become a sort of butt. Everybody knew it, had seen it in print twenty times during the past week. Mentioned by the comedian in a music-hall, it at once created laughter. I laughed myself—not uproariously, I admit—when a comedian at the Alhambra compared me to an albatross, thereby causing the entire audience to shake with merriment, and a stranger to turn to me with the remark—“Richard Ashton! What a Nut, eh?”Now the vulgar term “Nut” was in its infancy then, and new to me. I pawed the air in a vain endeavour to grasp the point of comparing me first to an albatross, and then to a nut. Nuts don’t grow on ash trees, or I might have thought the “ash” of “Ashton” bore some kind of relationship to a nut. Finally I gave it up, convinced that I must be deficient in a sense of humour.Meanwhile, my beloved had disappeared. To my chagrin I ascertained at the hotel at Hampstead that a man had called on the day following my arrest, and that she had gone away with him, taking all her luggage.A description of the man failed to help me to identify him. From it I decided, however, that it was not Sir Charles who had called for Vera, nor yet the mysterious Smithson. My natural inference, therefore, was that the fellow Paulton had discovered her hiding-place, and compelled her to go away with him.I tried hard to put into practice my theory that it is useless to worry about anything, and for some days I remained passive, watching, however, the advertisement columns in the principal daily newspapers, for during our evening at the hotel, Vera had incidentally remarked that she had, while at Brighton, advertised for a bracelet she had lost, and by that means recovered it. I advertised for news of her. But there was no response.On the Sunday, having nothing particular to do, I looked in during the afternoon at one of my usual haunts, Tattersall’s sale yard. I thought it probable I should there run across somebody or other I knew, and I was not mistaken. At the entrance I overtook a little man whose figure I could not mistake. The little sporting parson from a village outside Oakham was a great friend of mine, and he had told me that, whenever in town for a week-end he invariably went to Tattersall’s on the Sunday afternoon to see what horses were to be sold there next day.“Not that I can afford to buy a horse, oh dear no!” I remembered him saying to me in the drawing-room at Houghton. “You know what parson’s families are. Mine is no exception to the rule!”I had upbraided him for his lack of forethought, and he had chuckled, adding seriously that in his opinion the falling birth rate spelt the downfall of the Nation, a point upon which I had differed from him more than once.“Hullo, Rowan!” I exclaimed, as I overtook him, and quietly slipped my arm into his from behind, making him start. “I see you spoke the truth that day.”He was frankly delighted to see me. I knew he would be, for he is one of the few Rutlanders I have met who are wholly devoid of what some Americans term “frills.” I believe that if I were in rags and carrying a sandwich-board and I met little Rowan in the streets of London to-morrow, he would come up to me and grasp me by the hand. There are not many men of whom one can say that. I don’t suppose more than ten per cent, of my acquaintances, if as many, would look at me again if next week I became a pauper.“What truth, and when?” he asked, in answer to my remark.“Don’t you remember telling me,” I said, “I believe it was the last time we hunted together, that when in London you always do two things? You said: ‘I always attend service on Sunday morning, and Tattersall’s on Sunday afternoon.’ How is the old cob?”“Getting old, Dick, getting old, like his master,” Rowan said with a touch of pathos. “I hear the Hunt talk of buying me another mount. It is good of them; very good. I am not supposed to know, of course.”“And so you have come to find something up to your weight, eh?” I went on. He does not, I suppose, ride more than eight stone twelve in his hunting kit. He is the wiriest little man I have ever seen.“No,” he answered. “I have come to have a last look at Sir Charles Thorold’s stud. It comes under the hammer to-morrow, as, of course, you know.”“Thorold’s horses to be sold!” I exclaimed. “I had no idea. Then he has said good-bye to Rutland for good and all. I am sorry.”“So am I, very. He is a man I have always liked. Naturally his name is in rather bad odour in the county just at present, but that does not in the least affect my own regard for him.”“It wouldn’t,” I said to him. “You are not that sort, Rowan. It is a pity there are not more like you about.”He changed the subject by asking if I had seen Sir Charles and Lady Thorold lately.“I have not seen Lady Thorold since the Houghton affair,” I answered. “I have seen Sir Charles, but not to speak to.”I recollected how I had caught a glimpse of him in that house in Belgrave Street.“You have heard the latest about Miss Thorold, of course?” he said, as we passed into the Yard, which at this hour—about four o’clock—was crowded with well-dressed men and women.“The latest? What do you mean?”“Dear me,” he exclaimed, smiling. “Why, we country cousins know more than you men about town after all, sometimes. She’s at Monte Carlo.”“At Monte? Vera Thorold!”“Yes.”“What is she doing there? Who is with her?”“I don’t know who’s with her, or if any one is with her. She is pretty independent, as you know, and well able to take care of herself—a typical twentieth century girl.”“But who told you she was at Monte?”“Several people. Ah! there’s Lord Logan! He’ll tell us. He was speaking of her yesterday. He returned from the Riviera only a couple of days ago.”
My heart seemed to stop beating. Old Taylor, then, was dead, and I sat up in bed, staring straight before me.
For nearly a minute I did not speak. All the time I felt John’s calm gaze, puzzled, inquisitive, fixed upon me. I had gone through enough unhappiness during these past weeks to last me a lifetime, but all that I had endured would be as nothing by comparison with this. I could not blind myself to one fact—I had poisoned old Taylor deliberately. Had I, by some hideous miscalculation, the result of ignorance, overdosed him, and brought his poor old life to a premature end? I might be charged with manslaughter. Or worse!
Why! I might be convicted of murder. I might even be hanged! The grim thought held me breathless.
And Vera—my thoughts fled to her at once—what would become of Vera? Even if I were only imprisoned, and only for a short spell, Vera would have none to look to for help, none to defend her. She would be at the mercy of her persecutors! I think that thought appalled me even more than the thought that I might be tried for manslaughter or murder.
“Oh,” I said at last to John, “it’s some mistake. The police have made some grotesque blunder. You had better show them up, and I will talk to them.”
No blunder had been made, and I knew it.
I must say that I was surprised at the officers’ extreme courtesy. Seeing they were about to arrest me on suspicion of having caused a man’s death, their politeness, their consideration for my feelings, had a touch of irony.
They waited while I had my bath and dressed. Then we all drove together to the police-station, chatting quite pleasantly on topics of passing interest. At the police-station my name and address and many other particulars, were taken down in writing. With the utmost gravity a pompous inspector asked me “what birthmarks I possessed, if any,” and various other questions ending with “if any.” I wondered whether, before he had done, he would ask me my sex—if any.
Nearly a month dragged on—days of anxiety, which seemed years, and I had had no word from Vera!
I shall never forget that trial—never.
My opinion of legal procedure, never high, sank to zero before the trial at the London Sessions ended. The absurdity of some of the questions asked by counsel; the impossible inferences drawn from quite ordinary occurrences; the endless repetitions of the same questions, but in different sets of words; the verbal quibbling and juggling; the transposing of statements made in evidence and conveying a meaning obvious to the lowest intelligence; the pathos indulged in when the old man’s end came to be described; the judge’s weak attempts at being witty; the red-tapeism; the unpardonable waste of time—and of public money. No, I shall never forget those days.
It lasted from Monday till Thursday, and during those four days I spent eleven hours in the witness-box. Ah! what a tragic farce. I received anonymous letters of encouragement, and, of course, some offensive letters. I even received a proposal of marriage from a forward minx, who admitted that though still at school, in Blackheath, she had “read every word of the trial,” that she “kept a dear portrait” of me, cut out of theDaily Mirror, under her pillow at night. I felt I must indeed have reached the depths of ignominy when my hand was sought in matrimony by an emotional Blackheath flapper. A pretty flapper, I admit. She sent me five cabinet portraits of herself, in addition to a miniature of herself as a baby. Phew! What are our young people coming to?
Well, in the end I was acquitted, and told that I might leave the Court without a stain upon my character.
Certainly that was in a sense gratifying. In the face of acrobatic verbal feats Counsel representing the Director of Public Prosecutions had indulged in during the trial, I felt that anything might have happened, and was fully prepared to be branded a felon for life. The drug, the jury decided, had been administered without any intention whatever to do more than send the old man to sleep for an hour or so, and an analysis of the tea left in the cup proved beyond a doubt, that this tea could not possibly have caused death, which had been due to heart-failure. I had been traced, it seemed, by my gloves and umbrella left in the old man’s room. Other details—long-winded ones—I need not describe.
The problem now was, what to do next. My name, Richard Ashton, had become a sort of butt. Everybody knew it, had seen it in print twenty times during the past week. Mentioned by the comedian in a music-hall, it at once created laughter. I laughed myself—not uproariously, I admit—when a comedian at the Alhambra compared me to an albatross, thereby causing the entire audience to shake with merriment, and a stranger to turn to me with the remark—
“Richard Ashton! What a Nut, eh?”
Now the vulgar term “Nut” was in its infancy then, and new to me. I pawed the air in a vain endeavour to grasp the point of comparing me first to an albatross, and then to a nut. Nuts don’t grow on ash trees, or I might have thought the “ash” of “Ashton” bore some kind of relationship to a nut. Finally I gave it up, convinced that I must be deficient in a sense of humour.
Meanwhile, my beloved had disappeared. To my chagrin I ascertained at the hotel at Hampstead that a man had called on the day following my arrest, and that she had gone away with him, taking all her luggage.
A description of the man failed to help me to identify him. From it I decided, however, that it was not Sir Charles who had called for Vera, nor yet the mysterious Smithson. My natural inference, therefore, was that the fellow Paulton had discovered her hiding-place, and compelled her to go away with him.
I tried hard to put into practice my theory that it is useless to worry about anything, and for some days I remained passive, watching, however, the advertisement columns in the principal daily newspapers, for during our evening at the hotel, Vera had incidentally remarked that she had, while at Brighton, advertised for a bracelet she had lost, and by that means recovered it. I advertised for news of her. But there was no response.
On the Sunday, having nothing particular to do, I looked in during the afternoon at one of my usual haunts, Tattersall’s sale yard. I thought it probable I should there run across somebody or other I knew, and I was not mistaken. At the entrance I overtook a little man whose figure I could not mistake. The little sporting parson from a village outside Oakham was a great friend of mine, and he had told me that, whenever in town for a week-end he invariably went to Tattersall’s on the Sunday afternoon to see what horses were to be sold there next day.
“Not that I can afford to buy a horse, oh dear no!” I remembered him saying to me in the drawing-room at Houghton. “You know what parson’s families are. Mine is no exception to the rule!”
I had upbraided him for his lack of forethought, and he had chuckled, adding seriously that in his opinion the falling birth rate spelt the downfall of the Nation, a point upon which I had differed from him more than once.
“Hullo, Rowan!” I exclaimed, as I overtook him, and quietly slipped my arm into his from behind, making him start. “I see you spoke the truth that day.”
He was frankly delighted to see me. I knew he would be, for he is one of the few Rutlanders I have met who are wholly devoid of what some Americans term “frills.” I believe that if I were in rags and carrying a sandwich-board and I met little Rowan in the streets of London to-morrow, he would come up to me and grasp me by the hand. There are not many men of whom one can say that. I don’t suppose more than ten per cent, of my acquaintances, if as many, would look at me again if next week I became a pauper.
“What truth, and when?” he asked, in answer to my remark.
“Don’t you remember telling me,” I said, “I believe it was the last time we hunted together, that when in London you always do two things? You said: ‘I always attend service on Sunday morning, and Tattersall’s on Sunday afternoon.’ How is the old cob?”
“Getting old, Dick, getting old, like his master,” Rowan said with a touch of pathos. “I hear the Hunt talk of buying me another mount. It is good of them; very good. I am not supposed to know, of course.”
“And so you have come to find something up to your weight, eh?” I went on. He does not, I suppose, ride more than eight stone twelve in his hunting kit. He is the wiriest little man I have ever seen.
“No,” he answered. “I have come to have a last look at Sir Charles Thorold’s stud. It comes under the hammer to-morrow, as, of course, you know.”
“Thorold’s horses to be sold!” I exclaimed. “I had no idea. Then he has said good-bye to Rutland for good and all. I am sorry.”
“So am I, very. He is a man I have always liked. Naturally his name is in rather bad odour in the county just at present, but that does not in the least affect my own regard for him.”
“It wouldn’t,” I said to him. “You are not that sort, Rowan. It is a pity there are not more like you about.”
He changed the subject by asking if I had seen Sir Charles and Lady Thorold lately.
“I have not seen Lady Thorold since the Houghton affair,” I answered. “I have seen Sir Charles, but not to speak to.”
I recollected how I had caught a glimpse of him in that house in Belgrave Street.
“You have heard the latest about Miss Thorold, of course?” he said, as we passed into the Yard, which at this hour—about four o’clock—was crowded with well-dressed men and women.
“The latest? What do you mean?”
“Dear me,” he exclaimed, smiling. “Why, we country cousins know more than you men about town after all, sometimes. She’s at Monte Carlo.”
“At Monte? Vera Thorold!”
“Yes.”
“What is she doing there? Who is with her?”
“I don’t know who’s with her, or if any one is with her. She is pretty independent, as you know, and well able to take care of herself—a typical twentieth century girl.”
“But who told you she was at Monte?”
“Several people. Ah! there’s Lord Logan! He’ll tell us. He was speaking of her yesterday. He returned from the Riviera only a couple of days ago.”
Chapter Twelve.Gossip from the Sunshine.“Oh, yes, that’s right enough,” Lord Logan said, when we questioned him. “I saw her the night before I left. She was playing trente-et-quarante—and winning a bit, too, by Gad!”He was an ordinary type of the modern young peer—well-set-up, unemotional, faultlessly groomed. He produced a gold cigarette case as he spoke, and held it out to me. I noticed that the cigarettes it contained bore his coat of arms.“These cigarettes are not likely to be stolen from you,” I said lightly, indicating the coat of arms.He smiled.“You are right. I was the first to start the fashion—get ’em from Cairo every week—and now everybody’s doin’ it, haw, haw! I’ve got my cartridges done the same way. At some places where one shoots the beater fellers rob one right and left—the devils. I said to one of my hosts the other day, I said: ‘Your cartridge carriers are a lot of bally rogues.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, bristlin’ up like a well-bred bull-dog. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you make ’em all turn out their pockets, and you’ll see,’ I said. And he did!”“And what was in them?”“In them? Damme, what wasn’t in them? My dear feller, every beater who had carried cartridges had a dozen or two cartridges in his pockets then—it’s a fact. And we’d done shootin’, and the beaters were goin’ home, so they couldn’t pretend they were just carryin’ the bally cartridges in their pockets to have ’em handy. But there wasn’t a cartridge of mine missing among the lot. They knew only too well they wouldn’t be able to sell to the local ironmonger cartridges with a coat of arms on ’em—eh what? And that’s why I now have my cigarettes tattooed in the same way. I believe my servants used to rob them by the hundred. They don’t now, except perhaps a handful to smoke themselves, and of course that’s only natural. What was it you were askin’ me just now? Ah, yes, about Vera Thorold. She seems to be a flyer.”“Did you speak to her?”“Oh, yes, I talked to her right enough. She did look well. Simply lovely. White cloth frock, you know. She’s all alone at Monte, stayin’ at theAnglais.”“Did she say how long she’d be there?”“No. I didn’t ask her. She was winnin’ the night I saw her. I never saw such devil’s luck—never. I lost over a thousand on the week, so I thought it time to pay my hotel bill—what?”The three of us made the tour of Tattersall’s together, admiring, criticising, fault-finding. Among Thorold’s horses was the mare I had ridden on that last day I had been at Houghton. What a long time ago that seemed! I felt tempted to make a bid for her next day, she had carried me so well.Then I thought again of my well-beloved. What an extraordinary girl she was! Ah! how I loved her. Why had she not told me that she meant to go to the Riviera? Why—An idea flashed in upon me. I was getting bored with the mad hurry of London. This would be a good excuse for running out to the Côte d’Azur. Indeed, my chief reason for remaining in town had been that I believed Vera to be there still, either in hiding for some reason of her own, or, what I had thought far more likely, forced against her will by that blackguard Paulton to remain in concealment and keep me in ignorance of her whereabouts.Instead of that she was “on her own”—how I hate that slang phrase—at Monte Carlo ‘winnin’ a fortune,’ as Lord Logan had put it.“A strange world, my masters!” Never were truer words spoken. The longer I live the more I realise its strangeness. When I arrived at Monte Carlo by the day rapide from Paris, rain was pelting down in torrents, and a fierce storm was raging. Wind shrieked along the streets. Out at sea, lightning flashed in the bay, while the thunder rattled like artillery fire. I was glad to find myself in the warm, brilliantly-litHotel de Paris, and when, after dinner, I strolled into the fumoir, it was so crowded that I had difficulty in finding any place to sit.Among the group of men close to whom I presently found myself, conversation had turned upon the pigeon-shooting at Monte. From their remarks I gathered that an important event had been decided that day, the Prix de—I forget what, but the prize appeared to be a much coveted cup, with a considerable sum in added money. This had been won, it seemed, by a Belgian Count, who had killed twenty-seven pigeons without a miss.“Mais c’est épatant—vraiment épatant!” declared an excitable little Frenchman, as he pulled forward his chair. He went on to explain, with great volubility and much gesticulation, the difficulties that some of the shots had presented. This Frenchman, I gathered further, had backed the Belgian Count every time from his first shot to the last, and had in consequence won a lot of money.Time was when trap-shooting appealed to me. I have shot pigeons at Monte, at Ostend, and here in England at Hurlingham at the Gun Club, also at Hendon, but it has always struck me as being a cold-blooded form of amusement—its warmest supporters can hardly call it sport. Not that there is more cruelty connected with pigeon-shooting than with game-shooting, as some would have us believe. Indeed, I have always contended that trap-shooting is less cruel than game-shooting, for pigeon-shooters are one and all first-rate shots—if they were not they would lose heavily and soon give up the game—with the result that the greater proportion of the birds shot at are killed outright, a thing that cannot be said of game, where one’s tailor sometimes takes out a licence.But why is it, I wonder, that pigeon-shooters, considered collectively, are such dreadful-looking men? I have often wondered, and I am by no means the only man who has noticed this feature of pigeon-shooters. Glancing carelessly at the crowd seated near me now, it struck me forcibly that I had rarely set eyes on such a dissipated-looking set. Men of middle age, most of them, obese, fat-faced, with puffy eyes and sagging skin, they looked capable of any villainy, and might well have been addicted to every known vice.One man in particular arrested my attention. His age was difficult to place. Lying, rather than sitting, back in a softly-padded leather chair, with crossed legs, and with one arm hanging loosely over the arm of the chair, he talked in a singularly ugly voice between his yellow teeth, which clenched a long cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth.“Another twist, and he would have cleared the boundary,” he was saying to his companion, a good-looking English lad of five-or-six-and-twenty. “The second barrel cut him to pieces; it’s extraordinary what a lot of shot a blue-rock can carry away. How did you come out on the day?”“Badly—shocking,” answered the young man. “I backed the guns to start with, and you know how badly the whole lot of you shot. Then I started backing the bird, and you began to kill every time. My luck was out to-day—dead out.”I saw his friend smile.“Dago was the one lucky man this afternoon, I should say,” the first speaker remarked presently. “But there—he’s always lucky.”Instantly my interest was aroused. “Dago!” Could it be—surely—?“Yes, he’s lucky enough,” the other answered. Then, after a pause he added: “That’s a man I can’t stand.”“Can’t stand? Why?”“Oh, I don’t know. The fellow gets on my nerves. How does he live? Have you any idea?”“You mean, what is his source of income? I’m sure I can’t tell you. But for that matter, how do half the men we meet here at Monte manage to live? It would not be well to ask. They have money, and that is the main thing. All we require is to transfer to our own pockets as much of it as we can.”The young man looked at him thoughtfully for some moments, then said—“Yes, I suppose so.”The tone in which he spoke was ironical, but his companion didn’t notice it.“Do you know Paulton well?” the elder man asked himself.“As well as I care to. Why do you ask?”“Only just out of curiosity. Many people form an unfavourable impression of him when they meet him first, and afterwards they come to like him.”“That’s the reverse of my case,” answered the young man quickly. “The first time I met him I rather liked him, I remember. But after I had met him several times—well, I changed about him. He may be all right! I dare say he is. I suppose our personalities are not akin, as I have heard some one put it.”“He’s a fine shot.”“You are right. He is. I thought he would win the cup to-day.”“The bird that knocked him out was badly hit. If he had killed it, he would have won second money.”The young Englishman lay back, stretched himself, and yawned. “I’m getting fed up with this place,” he said at last. “I shall get back to England in a day or two. How long shall you remain here?”“It depends—partly on Dago. We’re running a sort of syndicate together, you know—or probably you don’t know. He has to see one or two men here about it before we leave.”“What sort of syndicate?”“I am afraid I’m not at liberty to tell you—yet. I can tell you this—though, we have a lady interested in it, a very pretty girl. That ought to appeal to you,” and he laughed.“Have I seen her?” the young man asked, looking at him curiously.His companion pondered. Then suddenly he exclaimed—“Why, yes—of course you have. She was playing trente-et-quarante the other night, and nothing could stop her winning. She won a maximum and went on and on, simply raking in the money. You and I were there together. I am sure you must remember.”“Thatgirl!”The tone in which he uttered these words surprised me. Could it be Vera of whom they had been speaking? According to Lord Logan she had won heavily at trente-et-quarante. And if so, who was this man, this partner and friend of Dago Paulton’s? And what could the secret syndicate be in which both were interested?I had my back to the door, and the middle-aged man who spoke between his teeth and was lying back in the lounge chair was almost facing me. Suddenly, a look of recognition came into his eyes—he had seen some one behind me enter, whom he knew.“Ah, here is good old Dago,” he exclaimed. He held up his hand and signalled to him.I had fitted a cigarette into my holder, struck a match, and lit up slowly, while I composed my thoughts. Now I half-turned to gaze upon this man of whom I had heard so much, and was now to see for the first time.
“Oh, yes, that’s right enough,” Lord Logan said, when we questioned him. “I saw her the night before I left. She was playing trente-et-quarante—and winning a bit, too, by Gad!”
He was an ordinary type of the modern young peer—well-set-up, unemotional, faultlessly groomed. He produced a gold cigarette case as he spoke, and held it out to me. I noticed that the cigarettes it contained bore his coat of arms.
“These cigarettes are not likely to be stolen from you,” I said lightly, indicating the coat of arms.
He smiled.
“You are right. I was the first to start the fashion—get ’em from Cairo every week—and now everybody’s doin’ it, haw, haw! I’ve got my cartridges done the same way. At some places where one shoots the beater fellers rob one right and left—the devils. I said to one of my hosts the other day, I said: ‘Your cartridge carriers are a lot of bally rogues.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, bristlin’ up like a well-bred bull-dog. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you make ’em all turn out their pockets, and you’ll see,’ I said. And he did!”
“And what was in them?”
“In them? Damme, what wasn’t in them? My dear feller, every beater who had carried cartridges had a dozen or two cartridges in his pockets then—it’s a fact. And we’d done shootin’, and the beaters were goin’ home, so they couldn’t pretend they were just carryin’ the bally cartridges in their pockets to have ’em handy. But there wasn’t a cartridge of mine missing among the lot. They knew only too well they wouldn’t be able to sell to the local ironmonger cartridges with a coat of arms on ’em—eh what? And that’s why I now have my cigarettes tattooed in the same way. I believe my servants used to rob them by the hundred. They don’t now, except perhaps a handful to smoke themselves, and of course that’s only natural. What was it you were askin’ me just now? Ah, yes, about Vera Thorold. She seems to be a flyer.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“Oh, yes, I talked to her right enough. She did look well. Simply lovely. White cloth frock, you know. She’s all alone at Monte, stayin’ at theAnglais.”
“Did she say how long she’d be there?”
“No. I didn’t ask her. She was winnin’ the night I saw her. I never saw such devil’s luck—never. I lost over a thousand on the week, so I thought it time to pay my hotel bill—what?”
The three of us made the tour of Tattersall’s together, admiring, criticising, fault-finding. Among Thorold’s horses was the mare I had ridden on that last day I had been at Houghton. What a long time ago that seemed! I felt tempted to make a bid for her next day, she had carried me so well.
Then I thought again of my well-beloved. What an extraordinary girl she was! Ah! how I loved her. Why had she not told me that she meant to go to the Riviera? Why—
An idea flashed in upon me. I was getting bored with the mad hurry of London. This would be a good excuse for running out to the Côte d’Azur. Indeed, my chief reason for remaining in town had been that I believed Vera to be there still, either in hiding for some reason of her own, or, what I had thought far more likely, forced against her will by that blackguard Paulton to remain in concealment and keep me in ignorance of her whereabouts.
Instead of that she was “on her own”—how I hate that slang phrase—at Monte Carlo ‘winnin’ a fortune,’ as Lord Logan had put it.
“A strange world, my masters!” Never were truer words spoken. The longer I live the more I realise its strangeness. When I arrived at Monte Carlo by the day rapide from Paris, rain was pelting down in torrents, and a fierce storm was raging. Wind shrieked along the streets. Out at sea, lightning flashed in the bay, while the thunder rattled like artillery fire. I was glad to find myself in the warm, brilliantly-litHotel de Paris, and when, after dinner, I strolled into the fumoir, it was so crowded that I had difficulty in finding any place to sit.
Among the group of men close to whom I presently found myself, conversation had turned upon the pigeon-shooting at Monte. From their remarks I gathered that an important event had been decided that day, the Prix de—I forget what, but the prize appeared to be a much coveted cup, with a considerable sum in added money. This had been won, it seemed, by a Belgian Count, who had killed twenty-seven pigeons without a miss.
“Mais c’est épatant—vraiment épatant!” declared an excitable little Frenchman, as he pulled forward his chair. He went on to explain, with great volubility and much gesticulation, the difficulties that some of the shots had presented. This Frenchman, I gathered further, had backed the Belgian Count every time from his first shot to the last, and had in consequence won a lot of money.
Time was when trap-shooting appealed to me. I have shot pigeons at Monte, at Ostend, and here in England at Hurlingham at the Gun Club, also at Hendon, but it has always struck me as being a cold-blooded form of amusement—its warmest supporters can hardly call it sport. Not that there is more cruelty connected with pigeon-shooting than with game-shooting, as some would have us believe. Indeed, I have always contended that trap-shooting is less cruel than game-shooting, for pigeon-shooters are one and all first-rate shots—if they were not they would lose heavily and soon give up the game—with the result that the greater proportion of the birds shot at are killed outright, a thing that cannot be said of game, where one’s tailor sometimes takes out a licence.
But why is it, I wonder, that pigeon-shooters, considered collectively, are such dreadful-looking men? I have often wondered, and I am by no means the only man who has noticed this feature of pigeon-shooters. Glancing carelessly at the crowd seated near me now, it struck me forcibly that I had rarely set eyes on such a dissipated-looking set. Men of middle age, most of them, obese, fat-faced, with puffy eyes and sagging skin, they looked capable of any villainy, and might well have been addicted to every known vice.
One man in particular arrested my attention. His age was difficult to place. Lying, rather than sitting, back in a softly-padded leather chair, with crossed legs, and with one arm hanging loosely over the arm of the chair, he talked in a singularly ugly voice between his yellow teeth, which clenched a long cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth.
“Another twist, and he would have cleared the boundary,” he was saying to his companion, a good-looking English lad of five-or-six-and-twenty. “The second barrel cut him to pieces; it’s extraordinary what a lot of shot a blue-rock can carry away. How did you come out on the day?”
“Badly—shocking,” answered the young man. “I backed the guns to start with, and you know how badly the whole lot of you shot. Then I started backing the bird, and you began to kill every time. My luck was out to-day—dead out.”
I saw his friend smile.
“Dago was the one lucky man this afternoon, I should say,” the first speaker remarked presently. “But there—he’s always lucky.”
Instantly my interest was aroused. “Dago!” Could it be—surely—?
“Yes, he’s lucky enough,” the other answered. Then, after a pause he added: “That’s a man I can’t stand.”
“Can’t stand? Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The fellow gets on my nerves. How does he live? Have you any idea?”
“You mean, what is his source of income? I’m sure I can’t tell you. But for that matter, how do half the men we meet here at Monte manage to live? It would not be well to ask. They have money, and that is the main thing. All we require is to transfer to our own pockets as much of it as we can.”
The young man looked at him thoughtfully for some moments, then said—
“Yes, I suppose so.”
The tone in which he spoke was ironical, but his companion didn’t notice it.
“Do you know Paulton well?” the elder man asked himself.
“As well as I care to. Why do you ask?”
“Only just out of curiosity. Many people form an unfavourable impression of him when they meet him first, and afterwards they come to like him.”
“That’s the reverse of my case,” answered the young man quickly. “The first time I met him I rather liked him, I remember. But after I had met him several times—well, I changed about him. He may be all right! I dare say he is. I suppose our personalities are not akin, as I have heard some one put it.”
“He’s a fine shot.”
“You are right. He is. I thought he would win the cup to-day.”
“The bird that knocked him out was badly hit. If he had killed it, he would have won second money.”
The young Englishman lay back, stretched himself, and yawned. “I’m getting fed up with this place,” he said at last. “I shall get back to England in a day or two. How long shall you remain here?”
“It depends—partly on Dago. We’re running a sort of syndicate together, you know—or probably you don’t know. He has to see one or two men here about it before we leave.”
“What sort of syndicate?”
“I am afraid I’m not at liberty to tell you—yet. I can tell you this—though, we have a lady interested in it, a very pretty girl. That ought to appeal to you,” and he laughed.
“Have I seen her?” the young man asked, looking at him curiously.
His companion pondered. Then suddenly he exclaimed—
“Why, yes—of course you have. She was playing trente-et-quarante the other night, and nothing could stop her winning. She won a maximum and went on and on, simply raking in the money. You and I were there together. I am sure you must remember.”
“Thatgirl!”
The tone in which he uttered these words surprised me. Could it be Vera of whom they had been speaking? According to Lord Logan she had won heavily at trente-et-quarante. And if so, who was this man, this partner and friend of Dago Paulton’s? And what could the secret syndicate be in which both were interested?
I had my back to the door, and the middle-aged man who spoke between his teeth and was lying back in the lounge chair was almost facing me. Suddenly, a look of recognition came into his eyes—he had seen some one behind me enter, whom he knew.
“Ah, here is good old Dago,” he exclaimed. He held up his hand and signalled to him.
I had fitted a cigarette into my holder, struck a match, and lit up slowly, while I composed my thoughts. Now I half-turned to gaze upon this man of whom I had heard so much, and was now to see for the first time.
Chapter Thirteen.In the Web.I held my breath.I should have recognised him at once from the panel portrait, though he looked some years older than when that photograph had been taken.Of medium height, and rather broadly built, he had all the appearance of a gentleman. His hair was very short, with dark grey, rather deep-set eyes, and thick dark eyebrows. The hair was parted in the middle, and plastered down, but he was not in evening clothes, as were the men to whose conversation I had been listening.He shook hands cordially with his friend, nodded to the good-looking young man, and called to the waiter to bring him a chair, those near by being all occupied. While waiting for the chair to be brought, he suddenly caught sight of me, evidently in recognition, for he turned quickly and spoke in a low tone to his friend, who at once glanced in my direction.All this! “felt” rather than saw, for I was not looking directly at the two men.Where had Paulton seen me before? That was the first thought that occurred to me, and of course I could not answer it. I had no recollection of having ever seen him previously. Suddenly, he crossed over to me.“Mr Richard Ashton, I think?” he said in a genial tone, and with a smile.“Yes,” I answered rather stiffly, none too pleased at his addressing me. I certainly had no wish to know him.“My name’s Paulton,” he said, ignoring my coldness. “I’ve seen you before. You were pointed out to me one night at the Savoy. I want to introduce my friend. Henderson, let me present you to Mr Richard Ashton. Mr Ashton—Mr Henderson.”It was done before I could say anything—before I could avoid it. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to pretend to appear pleased.He asked me what I would drink, and I had to say something—though I hated drinking with the fellow. Put yourself in my place—drinking with a man who had tried in cold blood to kill me, and who had shot an innocent man dead! I felt it had been weak of me not to ignore his greeting and meet his look of recognition with a stony stare. But regret for a mistake was useless now. I had made a false step when I spoke to him, and I couldn’t suddenly, apparently for no reason, turn my back upon him.A sudden terrific gust of wind shook the heavy windows, and a sheet of rain splashed against the panes like a great wave, distracting, for the moment, every one’s attention. A storm on the Riviera is always heavy and blustering.“I have just come in,” Paulton said. “In all my life I don’t recollect such an awful storm as this, except once in the Jura, when I was out boar-shooting. How fortunate it didn’t start while the pigeon-shooting was on to-day.”He turned to me suddenly.“By the way, Ashton,” he said familiarly, “we have a mutual friend, I think.”“Indeed?” I answered drily. “Who is that?”“Sir Charles Thorold’s daughter, Miss Vera.”I was astonished at this effrontery—so astounded that my surprise outweighed my feeling of indignation at the tone of familiarity in which he spoke of Vera. He might have been referring to some barmaid we both knew.I think he detected my annoyance, but he said nothing. After a pause I replied, keeping myself in check—“Is Miss Thorold a friend of yours?”“A friend of mine? Rather. I should say so!”He glanced across at Henderson, and they both smiled significantly. This was intolerable.“I do know Miss Thorold,” I remarked, emphasising the “Miss Thorold,” “but I don’t remember that she has ever mentioned your name to me.”“No, probably she wouldn’t mention it. Vera is discreet, if she is nothing else.”The impertinence of this reply was so obvious, so pointed, that I knew it must have been intentional.“Really, I don’t follow you,” I said icily. “What, pray, has Miss Thorold to say to you, and what have you to say to her?”“Oh, a very great deal, I can assure you.”“Indeed? How intensely interesting!”“It is, very. Her flight from Houghton that night must have astonished you.”I could bear the fellow’s company no longer. Emptying my tumbler, I rose with deliberation, and, excusing myself with frigid politeness, strode out of the fumoir.In the vestibule I met the good-looking young Englishman. He had left the room soon after Paulton had entered. Now he came up and spoke to me.“I hope you’ll forgive my addressing you,” he said in well-bred accents, raising his hat, “but I heard your name mentioned when Paulton introduced Henderson to you. May I ask if you aretheMr Richard Ashton?”“It depends what you mean by ‘the’ Richard Ashton,” I answered. This young man attracted me; he had done so from the first.“Do you happen to live in King Street, St. James’s?” he inquired abruptly.“Yes, I do.”“Then you’re the man I have for weeks past been wanting to meet. I believe you know Miss Thorold—Miss Vera Thorold.”“I do.”“She wants particularly to see you.”“How do you know that?”“Because she told me, or rather a friend of hers—to whom I am engaged to be married—did. They are together at theAlexandra Hotel, in Mentone. My friend is staying there with an aunt of mine.”“Surely if Miss Thorold wished to meet me she could have written to me, or telegraphed,” I said rather frigidly.“No. I think I ought to tell you that the man who introduced himself to you some minutes ago—the man Dago Paulton—has entire control over her—she goes in fear of him! She did not dare write to you, or even send you a wire. She knew that if she did he would find out. The lady to whom I am engaged told me this some days ago, and told me a great deal about you that had been told to her by Miss Thorold.”“Do you mind telling me your name?” I said, looking at him squarely.“Faulkner—Frank Faulkner. Paulton is a man of whom you ought to be very careful. He is really a scoundrel, that I don’t mind telling you. I have just been told by a man who really knows, that he has forced Miss Thorold to take an active interest in a rascally scheme of some kind that he and Henderson have devised. I am told by my lady friend—her name is Gladys Deroxe—that Miss Thorold tried her utmost to have nothing to do with it, but Paulton threatened to reveal something he knows concerning her father, so in the end she consented. Paulton has no longer a card for the Rooms; he was shut out last year for some reason, and he has lately been compelling Miss Thorold to go and play there in his place. Her luck at trente-et-quarante has been phenomenal, but all the money she has won he has of course at once taken from her, she is his factotum. I am very glad for her sake that you have come out. I suppose it was by accident you came? You didn’t expect to find her here—eh?”“On the contrary,” I said, “I chanced to hear only last Sunday that Miss Thorold was staying on the Riviera—so I decided to come over at once,” I said.“She knows that you are here, you know.”“She knows? Why, who on earth can have told her?”“I have just been telephoning to Miss Deroxe over at theBristolat Beaulieu. Miss Thorold is there with her. I told them that a man named Ashton was here, and I described your appearance. Miss Thorold said at once it must be you. Unfortunately she leaves to-night for Paris, and Miss Deroxe goes with her.”“But why is she going to Paris?” I exclaimed eagerly.“Who? Miss Thorold? She’s acting on Paulton’s orders. Her visit has some mysterious bearing upon the scheme I have just spoken about.”The door of the fumoir opened at that moment, and Paulton and Henderson came out into the vestibule. At once they must have seen Faulkner and myself conversing, and for an instant a look of anger flashed into Paulton’s eyes. The expression subsided quickly, and he and Henderson approached smiling calmly.“I’m prepared to bet that I know what you two were talking about,” Paulton said lightly, addressing Faulkner. “You were talking of Vera. Ah! Am I wrong? No, I see I’m not. You have told our friend Ashton that she goes to Paris to-night. Well, you are mistaken. Information has reached me that there has been a landslip on the line beyond Beaulieu, and it is blocked in consequence.”Then he turned to me.“Would you like to come over to Beaulieu, Ashton?” he said, as though making some quite ordinary request. “My car will be here presently. I can take you too, Faulkner, if you wish to see Miss Deroxe. I am going straight to theBristol.”I was about to refuse, when Faulkner spoke.“I should like to go, and Mr Ashton will of course come.”“Good. My car should be here in a quarter of an hour.”He strolled over to the bureau, and I heard him inquire for letters. There were several. He took them from the gold-laced porter, sank on to a settee, and began to tear them open.“Why did you accept his offer?” I inquired of Faulkner, in an undertone, as I lit a cigarette.“Never mind,” he answered quickly. “I know what I’m doing. Leave everything to me now.” At that moment the large glazed double doors leading into the Place in front of the Casino revolved slowly and a tall, imposing-looking woman of thirty-five or so, in rich black furs, which had all the appearance of being valuable, sailed in, followed by her maid carrying a small bag. Paulton, glancing up from his letters, noticed her, and at once sprang to his feet.“Ah, Baronne, how pleasant to meet you again!” he exclaimed, as he approached her. “I expected you here sooner.”“I should have been here an hour ago,” she exclaimed, “but the train was delayed. This storm is awful!”She had a rich, deep contralto voice, one of those speaking voices that at once arouse interest and curiosity. It aroused interest now, for the guests seated in the hall simultaneously interrupted their conversation in order to look at the new arrival, so striking was her appearance.“I went to the station quite a while ago,” Paulton said. “They told me the train could not arrive.”“It has not arrived yet, I believe,” she answered. “I got off at a wayside station, drove the two miles into Beaulieu, and then hired the car which has just brought me on here.”She was indeed a handsome woman, obviously a woman of singular personality. Exceedingly dark, with great coils of blue-black hair that her travelling-veil only partly concealed, she was very handsome still. When I had watched her for nearly a minute, wondering whom she might be, my gaze unconsciously drifted to the quietly-dressed maid who stood respectfully and demurely a few feet behind her mistress, bearing a large leather dressing-case in her hand. Her appearance somehow seemed familiar. Suddenly she turned her face rather more towards me, and I recognised her at once.It was Judith, the French girl who had been Lady Thorold’s maid. Her beady little black eyes rested on me for an instant, then were quietly lowered. But instinctively I knew that in that single, swift glance she had recognised me—and I certainly held her in suspicion.“The rooms have been retained for you Baronne,” I heard Paulton say, “the rooms you had last year. Shall I order supper?”“Certainly. Please do,” the deep voice answered. “Tell Gustave to send it to my rooms in a quarter of an hour. Ma foi! I am famished.”For the first time I noticed that she spoke with a foreign accent. But it was not very marked.“Then I shall see you later,” Paulton said, as the new arrival moved towards the lift. “À tantôt, Baronne.”“À bientôt.”Paulton bent over her hand, and when the doors of the lift had shut he came across to us.“You’d better get into your coats,” he said. “My car is just coming round!”“Who is the lady?” Faulkner asked carelessly.“Who?” Paulton exclaimed. “You don’t mean to say you don’t know Baronne de Coudron? I thought everybody in Monte knew the Baronne—by sight. She’s one of my best friends.”As the big grey Rolls-Royce sped through the darkness, the storm still raged. None of us spoke. Three glowing cigars alone indicated our whereabouts.Whether or not it was the stiff brandy-and-soda I had had in the smoking-room, I know not, but I suddenly realised that I was becoming curiously drowsy. I tried to keep awake. My eyelids felt like lead. They were smarting, too. Presently I was aware that something glowing red had fallen to the ground. Afterwards I came to know it had been Faulkner’s cigar.I do not know what happened immediately afterwards. My mind suddenly became a complete blank.At last, hours afterwards, I suppose, I slowly struggled back to consciousness.Where was I?The room, and all in it, was strange to me. All was utterly unfamiliar. My head ached very badly. My back and limbs were stiff. I got off the sofa where I had lain asleep, scrambled to my feet, and looked about me. At once I saw Faulkner. He was asleep still, in a most uncomfortable attitude, in a big leather armchair. His mouth was wide open.A glance out of the window showed me that the house we were in was in the open country. Already it was broad daylight, and a perfect calm had succeeded the storm of the previous night. But had it been the previous night? I supposed so. Signs of the storm were still visible everywhere—trees blown down and lying on their sides, branches and great limbs lying about. The country all around was densely wooded. Look in what direction I would, only trees, grass fields and mountains were visible. There was not a house in sight; not a cottage; not a hut.I went over to Faulkner, and shook him roughly. He was still sleeping soundly, and it took me some minutes to arouse him into consciousness.His first observation when at last fully awake, was characteristic of the young man—“Where, in Heaven’s name, am I?”
I held my breath.
I should have recognised him at once from the panel portrait, though he looked some years older than when that photograph had been taken.
Of medium height, and rather broadly built, he had all the appearance of a gentleman. His hair was very short, with dark grey, rather deep-set eyes, and thick dark eyebrows. The hair was parted in the middle, and plastered down, but he was not in evening clothes, as were the men to whose conversation I had been listening.
He shook hands cordially with his friend, nodded to the good-looking young man, and called to the waiter to bring him a chair, those near by being all occupied. While waiting for the chair to be brought, he suddenly caught sight of me, evidently in recognition, for he turned quickly and spoke in a low tone to his friend, who at once glanced in my direction.
All this! “felt” rather than saw, for I was not looking directly at the two men.
Where had Paulton seen me before? That was the first thought that occurred to me, and of course I could not answer it. I had no recollection of having ever seen him previously. Suddenly, he crossed over to me.
“Mr Richard Ashton, I think?” he said in a genial tone, and with a smile.
“Yes,” I answered rather stiffly, none too pleased at his addressing me. I certainly had no wish to know him.
“My name’s Paulton,” he said, ignoring my coldness. “I’ve seen you before. You were pointed out to me one night at the Savoy. I want to introduce my friend. Henderson, let me present you to Mr Richard Ashton. Mr Ashton—Mr Henderson.”
It was done before I could say anything—before I could avoid it. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to pretend to appear pleased.
He asked me what I would drink, and I had to say something—though I hated drinking with the fellow. Put yourself in my place—drinking with a man who had tried in cold blood to kill me, and who had shot an innocent man dead! I felt it had been weak of me not to ignore his greeting and meet his look of recognition with a stony stare. But regret for a mistake was useless now. I had made a false step when I spoke to him, and I couldn’t suddenly, apparently for no reason, turn my back upon him.
A sudden terrific gust of wind shook the heavy windows, and a sheet of rain splashed against the panes like a great wave, distracting, for the moment, every one’s attention. A storm on the Riviera is always heavy and blustering.
“I have just come in,” Paulton said. “In all my life I don’t recollect such an awful storm as this, except once in the Jura, when I was out boar-shooting. How fortunate it didn’t start while the pigeon-shooting was on to-day.”
He turned to me suddenly.
“By the way, Ashton,” he said familiarly, “we have a mutual friend, I think.”
“Indeed?” I answered drily. “Who is that?”
“Sir Charles Thorold’s daughter, Miss Vera.”
I was astonished at this effrontery—so astounded that my surprise outweighed my feeling of indignation at the tone of familiarity in which he spoke of Vera. He might have been referring to some barmaid we both knew.
I think he detected my annoyance, but he said nothing. After a pause I replied, keeping myself in check—
“Is Miss Thorold a friend of yours?”
“A friend of mine? Rather. I should say so!”
He glanced across at Henderson, and they both smiled significantly. This was intolerable.
“I do know Miss Thorold,” I remarked, emphasising the “Miss Thorold,” “but I don’t remember that she has ever mentioned your name to me.”
“No, probably she wouldn’t mention it. Vera is discreet, if she is nothing else.”
The impertinence of this reply was so obvious, so pointed, that I knew it must have been intentional.
“Really, I don’t follow you,” I said icily. “What, pray, has Miss Thorold to say to you, and what have you to say to her?”
“Oh, a very great deal, I can assure you.”
“Indeed? How intensely interesting!”
“It is, very. Her flight from Houghton that night must have astonished you.”
I could bear the fellow’s company no longer. Emptying my tumbler, I rose with deliberation, and, excusing myself with frigid politeness, strode out of the fumoir.
In the vestibule I met the good-looking young Englishman. He had left the room soon after Paulton had entered. Now he came up and spoke to me.
“I hope you’ll forgive my addressing you,” he said in well-bred accents, raising his hat, “but I heard your name mentioned when Paulton introduced Henderson to you. May I ask if you aretheMr Richard Ashton?”
“It depends what you mean by ‘the’ Richard Ashton,” I answered. This young man attracted me; he had done so from the first.
“Do you happen to live in King Street, St. James’s?” he inquired abruptly.
“Yes, I do.”
“Then you’re the man I have for weeks past been wanting to meet. I believe you know Miss Thorold—Miss Vera Thorold.”
“I do.”
“She wants particularly to see you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she told me, or rather a friend of hers—to whom I am engaged to be married—did. They are together at theAlexandra Hotel, in Mentone. My friend is staying there with an aunt of mine.”
“Surely if Miss Thorold wished to meet me she could have written to me, or telegraphed,” I said rather frigidly.
“No. I think I ought to tell you that the man who introduced himself to you some minutes ago—the man Dago Paulton—has entire control over her—she goes in fear of him! She did not dare write to you, or even send you a wire. She knew that if she did he would find out. The lady to whom I am engaged told me this some days ago, and told me a great deal about you that had been told to her by Miss Thorold.”
“Do you mind telling me your name?” I said, looking at him squarely.
“Faulkner—Frank Faulkner. Paulton is a man of whom you ought to be very careful. He is really a scoundrel, that I don’t mind telling you. I have just been told by a man who really knows, that he has forced Miss Thorold to take an active interest in a rascally scheme of some kind that he and Henderson have devised. I am told by my lady friend—her name is Gladys Deroxe—that Miss Thorold tried her utmost to have nothing to do with it, but Paulton threatened to reveal something he knows concerning her father, so in the end she consented. Paulton has no longer a card for the Rooms; he was shut out last year for some reason, and he has lately been compelling Miss Thorold to go and play there in his place. Her luck at trente-et-quarante has been phenomenal, but all the money she has won he has of course at once taken from her, she is his factotum. I am very glad for her sake that you have come out. I suppose it was by accident you came? You didn’t expect to find her here—eh?”
“On the contrary,” I said, “I chanced to hear only last Sunday that Miss Thorold was staying on the Riviera—so I decided to come over at once,” I said.
“She knows that you are here, you know.”
“She knows? Why, who on earth can have told her?”
“I have just been telephoning to Miss Deroxe over at theBristolat Beaulieu. Miss Thorold is there with her. I told them that a man named Ashton was here, and I described your appearance. Miss Thorold said at once it must be you. Unfortunately she leaves to-night for Paris, and Miss Deroxe goes with her.”
“But why is she going to Paris?” I exclaimed eagerly.
“Who? Miss Thorold? She’s acting on Paulton’s orders. Her visit has some mysterious bearing upon the scheme I have just spoken about.”
The door of the fumoir opened at that moment, and Paulton and Henderson came out into the vestibule. At once they must have seen Faulkner and myself conversing, and for an instant a look of anger flashed into Paulton’s eyes. The expression subsided quickly, and he and Henderson approached smiling calmly.
“I’m prepared to bet that I know what you two were talking about,” Paulton said lightly, addressing Faulkner. “You were talking of Vera. Ah! Am I wrong? No, I see I’m not. You have told our friend Ashton that she goes to Paris to-night. Well, you are mistaken. Information has reached me that there has been a landslip on the line beyond Beaulieu, and it is blocked in consequence.”
Then he turned to me.
“Would you like to come over to Beaulieu, Ashton?” he said, as though making some quite ordinary request. “My car will be here presently. I can take you too, Faulkner, if you wish to see Miss Deroxe. I am going straight to theBristol.”
I was about to refuse, when Faulkner spoke.
“I should like to go, and Mr Ashton will of course come.”
“Good. My car should be here in a quarter of an hour.”
He strolled over to the bureau, and I heard him inquire for letters. There were several. He took them from the gold-laced porter, sank on to a settee, and began to tear them open.
“Why did you accept his offer?” I inquired of Faulkner, in an undertone, as I lit a cigarette.
“Never mind,” he answered quickly. “I know what I’m doing. Leave everything to me now.” At that moment the large glazed double doors leading into the Place in front of the Casino revolved slowly and a tall, imposing-looking woman of thirty-five or so, in rich black furs, which had all the appearance of being valuable, sailed in, followed by her maid carrying a small bag. Paulton, glancing up from his letters, noticed her, and at once sprang to his feet.
“Ah, Baronne, how pleasant to meet you again!” he exclaimed, as he approached her. “I expected you here sooner.”
“I should have been here an hour ago,” she exclaimed, “but the train was delayed. This storm is awful!”
She had a rich, deep contralto voice, one of those speaking voices that at once arouse interest and curiosity. It aroused interest now, for the guests seated in the hall simultaneously interrupted their conversation in order to look at the new arrival, so striking was her appearance.
“I went to the station quite a while ago,” Paulton said. “They told me the train could not arrive.”
“It has not arrived yet, I believe,” she answered. “I got off at a wayside station, drove the two miles into Beaulieu, and then hired the car which has just brought me on here.”
She was indeed a handsome woman, obviously a woman of singular personality. Exceedingly dark, with great coils of blue-black hair that her travelling-veil only partly concealed, she was very handsome still. When I had watched her for nearly a minute, wondering whom she might be, my gaze unconsciously drifted to the quietly-dressed maid who stood respectfully and demurely a few feet behind her mistress, bearing a large leather dressing-case in her hand. Her appearance somehow seemed familiar. Suddenly she turned her face rather more towards me, and I recognised her at once.
It was Judith, the French girl who had been Lady Thorold’s maid. Her beady little black eyes rested on me for an instant, then were quietly lowered. But instinctively I knew that in that single, swift glance she had recognised me—and I certainly held her in suspicion.
“The rooms have been retained for you Baronne,” I heard Paulton say, “the rooms you had last year. Shall I order supper?”
“Certainly. Please do,” the deep voice answered. “Tell Gustave to send it to my rooms in a quarter of an hour. Ma foi! I am famished.”
For the first time I noticed that she spoke with a foreign accent. But it was not very marked.
“Then I shall see you later,” Paulton said, as the new arrival moved towards the lift. “À tantôt, Baronne.”
“À bientôt.”
Paulton bent over her hand, and when the doors of the lift had shut he came across to us.
“You’d better get into your coats,” he said. “My car is just coming round!”
“Who is the lady?” Faulkner asked carelessly.
“Who?” Paulton exclaimed. “You don’t mean to say you don’t know Baronne de Coudron? I thought everybody in Monte knew the Baronne—by sight. She’s one of my best friends.”
As the big grey Rolls-Royce sped through the darkness, the storm still raged. None of us spoke. Three glowing cigars alone indicated our whereabouts.
Whether or not it was the stiff brandy-and-soda I had had in the smoking-room, I know not, but I suddenly realised that I was becoming curiously drowsy. I tried to keep awake. My eyelids felt like lead. They were smarting, too. Presently I was aware that something glowing red had fallen to the ground. Afterwards I came to know it had been Faulkner’s cigar.
I do not know what happened immediately afterwards. My mind suddenly became a complete blank.
At last, hours afterwards, I suppose, I slowly struggled back to consciousness.
Where was I?
The room, and all in it, was strange to me. All was utterly unfamiliar. My head ached very badly. My back and limbs were stiff. I got off the sofa where I had lain asleep, scrambled to my feet, and looked about me. At once I saw Faulkner. He was asleep still, in a most uncomfortable attitude, in a big leather armchair. His mouth was wide open.
A glance out of the window showed me that the house we were in was in the open country. Already it was broad daylight, and a perfect calm had succeeded the storm of the previous night. But had it been the previous night? I supposed so. Signs of the storm were still visible everywhere—trees blown down and lying on their sides, branches and great limbs lying about. The country all around was densely wooded. Look in what direction I would, only trees, grass fields and mountains were visible. There was not a house in sight; not a cottage; not a hut.
I went over to Faulkner, and shook him roughly. He was still sleeping soundly, and it took me some minutes to arouse him into consciousness.
His first observation when at last fully awake, was characteristic of the young man—
“Where, in Heaven’s name, am I?”