Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “You think they have been, bribed?”

  “No; I don’t think that. There seems to be a popular belief, all over the world, that a man with a million of money can do no wrong. I don’t believe the police have been culpable; they have only been faint-hearted. They have suffered themselves to be discouraged by the difficulties of the case. Other crimes have been committed, other work has arisen for them to do, and they have been obliged to abandon an investigation which seemed hopeless. This is how criminals escape — this is how murderers are suffered to be at large; not because discovery is impossible, but because it can only be effected by a slow and wearisome process in which so few men have courage to persevere. While the country is ringing with the record of a great crime — while the murderer is on his guard night and day, waking and sleeping — the police watch and work: but by-and-by, when the crime is half forgotten — when security has made the criminal careless — when the chances of detection are ten-fold — the police have grown tired, and there is no eye to watch the guilty man’s movements. I know nothing of the science of detection, Margaret; but I believe that Henry Dunbar was the murderer of your father; and I will do my uttermost, with God’s help, to bring this crime home to him.”

  The girl’s eyes flashed with a proud light, as Clement Austin finished speaking.

  “Will you do this?” she said; “will you bring to light the mystery of my father’s death? Will you bring punishment upon his murderer? It seems a horrible thing, perhaps, for a woman to wish detection to overtake any man, however base; but surely it would be more horrible if I were content to let my father’s murder remain unavenged. My poor father! If he had been a good man, I do not think it would grieve me so much to remember his cruel death: but he was not a good man — he was not a good man.”

  “Let him have been what he may, Margaret, his murderer shall not go unpunished if I can aid the cause of justice,” said Clement Austin. “But it was not to say this alone that I came here to-night, Margaret. I have something more to say to you.”

  There was a tenderness in the cashier’s voice as he said these last words, that brought the blushes back to Margaret’s pale cheeks.

  “You know that I love you, Margaret,” Clement said, in a low, earnest voice; “you must know that I love you: or if you do not, it is because there is no sympathy between us, and in that case my love is indeed hopeless. I have loved you from the first, dear — yes, from the very first summer twilight in which I saw your pale, pensive face in the dusky little garden at Wandsworth. The tender interest which I then felt in you was the first mysterious dawn of love, though I, in my infinite wisdom, put it down to an artistic admiration for your peculiar beauty. It was love, Margaret; and it has grown and strengthened in my heart ever since that summer evening, until it leads me here to-night to tell you all, and to ask you if there is any hope. Ah, Margaret, you must have known my love all along! You would have banished me had you felt that my love was hopeless: you could not have been so cruel as to deceive me.”

  Margaret looked up at her lover with a frightened face. Had she done wrong, then, to be happy in his society, if she did not love him — if she did not love him! But surely this sudden thrill of triumph and delight which filled her breast, as Clement spoke to her, must be in some degree akin to love.

  Yes, she loved him; but the bright things of this world were not for her. Love and Duty fought for the mastery of her pure Soul: and Duty was the conqueror.

  “Oh, Clement!” she said, “do you forget who I am? Do you forget that letter which I showed you long ago, a letter addressed to my father when he was a transported felon, suffering the penalty of his crime? Do you forget who I am, and the taint that is in my blood; the disgrace that stains my name? I am proud to think that you have loved me, Clement Austin; but I am no fitting wife for you!”

  “You are a noble, true-hearted woman, Margaret; and as such you are a fitting wife for a king. Besides, I am not such a grandee that I need look for high lineage in the wife of my choice. I am only a working man, content to accept a salary for my services; and looking forward by-and-by to a junior partnership in the house I serve. Margaret, my mother loves you; and she knows that you are the woman I seek to win as my wife. Forget the taint upon your dead father’s name as freely as I forget it, dearest; and only answer me one question; Is my love hopeless?”

  “I will never consent to be your wife, Mr. Austin!” Margaret answered, in a low voice.

  “Because you do not love me?”

  “Because I will never cause you to blush for the history of your wife’s girlhood.”

  “That is no answer to my question, Margaret,” said Clement Austin, seating himself by her side, and taking both her hands in his. “I must ask you to look me full in the face, Miss Wilmot,” he added, laughingly, drawing her towards him as he spoke; “for I begin to fancy you’re addicted to prevarication. Look me in the face, Madge darling, and tell me that you love me.”

  But the blushing face would not be turned towards his own. Margaret’s head was still averted.

  “Don’t ask me,” she pleaded; “don’t ask me. The day would come when you would regret your choice. I could not endure that. It would be too bitter. You have been very kind to me; and it would be a poor return for your kindness, if — —”

  “If you were to make me unutterably happy, eh, Margaret? I think it would be only a proper act of gratitude. Haven’t I run all over Clapham, Brixton, and Wandsworth — to say nothing of an occasional incursion upon Putney — in order to procure you half-a-dozen pupils? And the very first favour I demand of you, which is only the gift of this clever little hand, you have the audacity to refuse me point-blank.”

  He waited for a few moments, in the hope that Margaret would say something; but her face was still averted, and the trembling hand which Mr. Austin was holding struggled to release itself from his grasp.

  “Margaret,” he said, very gravely, “perhaps I have been foolish and presumptuous in this business. In that case I fully deserve to be disappointed, however bitter the disappointment may be. If I have been wrong, Margaret; if I have been deceived by your sweet smile, your gentle words; for pity’s sake tell me that it is so, and I will forgive you for having involuntarily deceived me, and will try to cure myself of my folly. But I will not leave this room, I will not abandon the dear hope that has brought me here to-night, until you tell me plainly that you do not love me. Speak, Margaret, and speak fearlessly.”

  But Margaret was still silent, only in the silence Clement Austin heard a low, sobbing sound.

  “Margaret darling, you are crying. Ah! I know now that you love me, and I will not leave this room except as your plighted husband.”

  “Heaven help me!” murmured Joseph Wilmot’s daughter; “Heaven lead me right! for I do love you, Clement, with all my heart.”

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  BUYING DIAMONDS.

  Mr. Dunbar did not waste much time before he began the grand business which had brought him to London — that is to say, the purchase of such a collection of diamonds as compose a necklace second only to that which brought poor hoodwinked Cardinal de Rohan and the unlucky daughter of the Caesars into such a morass of trouble and slander.

  Early upon the morning after his visit to the bank, Mr. Dunbar went out very plainly dressed, and hailed the first empty cab that he saw in Piccadilly.

  He ordered the cabman to drive straight to a street leading out of Holborn, a very quiet-looking street, where you could buy diamonds enough to set up all the jewellers in the Palais Royale and the Rue de la Paix, and where, if you were so whimsical as to wish to transform a service of plate into “white soup” at a moment’s notice, you might indulge your fancy in establishments of unblemished respectability.

  The gold and silver refiners, the diamond-merchants and wholesale jewellers, in this quiet street, were a very superior class of people, and you might dispose of a handful of gold chains and bangles without any fear that one or two of them would find their way
into the operator’s sleeve during the process of weighing. The great Mr. Krusible, who thrust the last inch of an Eastern potentate’s sceptre into the melting-pot with the sole of his foot, as the detectives entered his establishment in search of the missing bauble, and walked lame for six months afterwards, lived somewhere in the depths of the city, and far away from this dull-looking Holborn street; and would have despised the even tenor of life, and the moderate profits of a business in this neighbourhood.

  Mr. Dunbar left his cab at the Holborn end of the street, and walked slowly along the pavement till he came to a very dingy-looking parlour-window, which might have belonged to A lawyer’s office but for some gilded letters on the wire blind, which, in a very pale and faded inscription, gave notice that the parlour belonged to Mr. Isaac Hartgold, diamond-merchant. A grimy brass plate on the door of the house bore another inscription to the same effect; and it was at this door that Mr. Dunbar stopped.

  He rang a bell, and was admitted immediately by a very sharp-looking boy, who ushered him into the parlour, where ha saw a mahogany counter, a pair of small brass scales, a horse-hair-cushioned office-stool considerably the worse for wear, and a couple of very formidable-looking iron safes deeply imbedded in the wall behind the counter. There was a desk near the window, at which a gentleman, with very black hair and whiskers was seated, busily engaged in some abstruse calculations between a pair of open ledgers.

  He got off his high seat as Mr. Dunbar entered, and looked rather suspiciously at the banker. I suppose the habit of selling diamonds had made him rather suspicious of every one. Henry Dunbar wore a fashionable greatcoat with loose open cuffs, and it was towards these loose cuffs that Mr. Hartgold’s eyes wandered with rapid and rather uneasy glances. He was apt to look doubtfully at gentlemen with roomy coat-sleeves, or ladies with long-haired muffs or fringed parasols. Unset diamonds are an eminently portable species of property, and you might carry a tolerably valuable collection of them in the folds of the smallest parasol that ever faded under the summer sunshine in the Lady’s Mile.

  “I want to buy a collection of diamonds for a necklace,” Mr. Dunbar said, as coolly as if he had been talking of a set of silver spoons; “and I want the necklace to be something out of the common. I should order it of Garrard or Emanuel; but I have a fancy for buying the diamonds upon paper, and having them made up after a design of my own. Can you supply me with what I want?”

  “How much do you want? You may have what some people would call a necklace for a thousand pounds, or you may have one that’ll cost you twenty thousand. How far do you mean to go?”

  “I am prepared to spend something between fifty and eighty thousand pounds.”

  The diamond merchant pursed up his lips reflectively. “You are aware that in these sort of transactions ready money is indispensable?” he said.

  “Oh, yes, I am quite aware of that,” Mr. Dunbar answered, coolly.

  He took out his card-case as he spoke, and handed one of his cards to Mr. Isaac Hartgold. “Any cheques signed by that name,” he said, “will be duly honoured in St. Gundolph Lane.”

  Mr. Hartgold bent his head reverentially to the representative of a million of money. He, in common with every business man in London, was thoroughly familiar with the names of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby.

  “I don’t know that I can supply you with fifty thousand pounds’ worth of such diamonds as you may require at a moment’s notice,” he said; “but I can procure them for you in a day or two, if that will do?”

  “That will do very well. This is Tuesday; suppose I give you till Thursday?”

  “The stones shall be ready for you by Thursday, sir.”

  “Very good. I will call for them on Thursday morning. In the meantime, in order that you may understand that the transaction is a bonâ fide one, I’ll write a cheque for ten thousand, payable to your order, on account of diamonds to be purchased by me. I have my cheque-book in my pocket. Oblige me with pen and ink.”

  Mr. Hartgold murmured something to the effect that such a proceeding was altogether unnecessary; but he brought Mr. Dunbar his office inkstand, and looked on with an approving twinkle of his eyes while the banker wrote the cheque, in that slow, formal hand peculiar to him. It made things very smooth and comfortable, Mr. Hartgold thought, to say the least of it.

  “And now, sir, with regard to the design of the necklace,” said the merchant, when he had folded the cheque and put it into his waistcoat-pocket. “I suppose you’ve some idea that you’d like to carry out; and you’d wish, perhaps, to see a few specimens.”

  He unlocked one of the iron safes as he spoke, and brought out a lot of little paper packets, which were folded in a peculiar fashion, and which he opened with very gingerly fingers.

  “I suppose you’d like some tallow-drops, sir?” he said. “Tallow-drops work-in better than anything for a necklace.”

  “What, in Heaven’s name, are tallow-drops?”

  Mr. Hartgold took up a diamond with a pair of pincers, and exhibited it to the banker.

  “That’s a tallow-drop, sir,” he said. “It’s something of a heart-shaped stone, you see; but we call it a tallow-drop, because it’s very much the shape of a drop of tallow. You’d like large stones, of course, though they eat into a great deal of money? There are diamonds that are known all over Europe; diamonds that have been in the possession of royalty, and are as well known as the family they’ve belonged to. The Duke of Brunswick has pretty well cleared the market of that sort of stuff; but still they are to be had, if you’ve a fancy for anything of that kind?”

  Mr. Dunbar shook his head.

  “I don’t want anything of that sort,” he said; “the day may come when my daughter, or my daughter’s descendants, may be obliged to realize the jewels. I’m a commercial man, and I want eighty thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds that shall be worth the money I give for them to break up and sell again. I should wish you to choose diamonds of moderate size, but not small; worth, on an average, forty or fifty pounds apiece, we’ll say.”

  “I shall have to be very particular about matching them in colour,” said Mr. Hartgold, “as they’re for a necklace.” The banker shrugged his shoulders.

  “Don’t trouble yourself about the necklace,” he said, rather impatiently. “I tell you again I’m a commercial man, and what I want is good value for my money.”

  “And you shall have it, sir,” answered the diamond-merchant, briskly.

  “Very well, then; in that case I think we understand each other, and there’s no occasion for me to stop here any longer. You’ll have eighty thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds, at thereabouts, ready for me when I call here on Thursday morning. You can cash that cheque in the meantime, and ascertain with whom you have to deal. Good morning.”

  He left the diamond-merchant wondering at his sang froid, and returned to the cab, which had been waiting for him all this time.

  He was just going to step into it, when a hand touched him lightly on the shoulder, and turning sharply and angrily round, he recognized the gentleman who called himself Major Vernon. But the Major was by no means the shabby stranger who had watched the marriage of Philip Jocelyn and Laura Dunbar in Lisford Church. Major Vernon had risen, resplendent as the phoenix, from the ashes of his old clothes.

  The poodle collar was gone: the dilapidated boots had been exchanged for stout water-tight Wellingtons: the napless dirty white hat had given place to a magnificent beaver, with a broad trim curled at the sides. Major Vernon was positively splendid. He was as much wrapped up as ever; but his wrappings now were of a gorgeous, not to say gaudy, description. His thick greatcoat was of a dark olive-green, and the collar turned up over his ears was of a shiny-looking brown fur, which, to the confiding mind of the populace, is known as imitation sable. Inside this fur collar the Major wore a shawl-patterned scarf of all the colours in the prismatic scale, across which his nose lacked its usual brilliancy of hue by force of contrast. Major Vernon had a very big cigar in his mouth, and a very b
ig cane in his hand, and the quiet City men turned to look at him as he stood upon the pavement talking to Henry Dunbar.

  The banker writhed under the touch of his Indian acquaintance.

  “What do you want with me?” he asked, in low angry tones; “why do you follow me about to play the spy upon me, and stop me in the public street? Haven’t I done enough for you? Ain’t you satisfied with what I have done?”

  “Yes, dear boy,” answered the Major, “perfectly satisfied, more than satisfied — for the present. But your future favours — as those low fellows, the butchers and bakers, have it — are respectfully requested for yours truly. Let me get into the cab with you, Mr. H.D., and take me back to the casa, and give me a comfortable little bit of perrogg. I haven’t lost my aristocratic taste for seven courses, and an elegant succession of still fine sparkling wines, though during the last few years I’ve been rather frequently constrained to accept the shadowy hospitality of his grace of Humphrey. ‘Nante dinari, nante manjare,’ as we say in the Classics, which I translate, ‘No credit at the butcher’s or the baker’s.’”

  “For Heaven’s sake, stop that abominable slang!” said Henry Dunbar, impatiently.

  “It annoys you, dear friend, eh? Well, I’ve known the time when —— But no matter, ‘let what is broken, so remain,’ as the poet observes; which is only an elegant way of saying, ‘Let bygones be bygones.’ And so you’ve been buying diamonds, dear boy?”