Mr Bazalgette’s Agent

by Leonard Merrick

  CHAPTER V.

  LISBON, October the ——

  WELL, horribly near November! I am not inditing a report, and I have a distinct aversion to “coming to figures.”

  This reservation, being interpreted, means I am ashamed to confess how long has passed since I opened my diary last; how long it is since the determination with which I perceive I penned the foregoing lines has been succeeded by an ever-increasing despair. Yes, it must be chronicled these leaves have been untouched for the humiliating cause that I have had nothing to say; I have not justified the confidence reposed in me, and my ardour is damped by the knowledge. While in Barcelona I had to ask for a further supply of money, the initial hundred pounds, beneath the claims of bills, railway-fares, and two weekly salaries, having melted with awe-inspiring rapidity.

  It was remitted forthwith, indeed Mr. Bazalgette does not appear to regard my lack of success as despondently as I do myself. From what he terms his “advices” he seems to think I shall be extremely useful in making Jasper Vining’s acquaintance when he is encountered, but that his discovery might be accelerated by the assistance of an “old hand,” Anglicè, a practised detective who should travel with me as my brother, in place of Dunstan.

  This suggestion I have respectfully but firmly declined; the Vicar of Daisies-on-the-Grass having full cognizance of the occupation to which I have lent myself, would, as it is, probably withhold an invitation to “drink tea” with his gentle offspring; but, the vicar’s censure notwithstanding, I still retain sufficient amour propre to object to trapesing about Europe in the society of a strange man.

  Dunstan, like port and the gentleman of the comic song immortalised by small boys in the London streets, improves with time; she is all right when you know her. She has favoured me with some reminiscences calculated, if publicly dispensed, to do away with the necessity for curling-tongs. If I ever had the chance of presiding over somebody’s establishment, I should, I think, be inclined to eschew a femme de chambre. That is,—I mean,—of course, if I were not a model of all the domestic virtues!

  “Dere diry,” although it was only between you and me, I am still red over that very equivocal remark!

  She tells me she is engaged to a young man in our profession, and on the last job (she calls it ‘job’) upon which she was employed, like Boisgobey and a female Gaboriau, they worked in collaboration.

  Her fianceé’s mission was to drive a Hansom cab, taking precautions to be, under various disguises, crawling along —Gate at the times conveyed to him by her; so that without surmising it, the ‘suspected person’ was almost always driven by an agent of the detectives. How nice!

  She is helping me in my search as much as she can, but avers that at this stage of the proceedings dexterity is less potent than luck. It sounds an unprofessional statement, but from experience I should say it was true. Nobody could have tried harder than I have, yet how far am I advanced? And I have the consolation of recognizing I may continue in a similar fashion for months. I feel myself developing into a sort of Juive errante without an eventual abiding-place; the whole length and breadth of the Continent may be traversed without bringing me relief! I pitch my tents in comfortable spots certainly (the dining-salon here is the handsomest I ‘have ever been in), but the lurking sensation of excitement which was at first a stimulant has deteriorated into a perpetual uneasiness which prevents me being still. I have no peace; what a beautiful word that is, and under ordinary conditions how seldom the want of it seems needful! Why, at that wretched boarding-house at home, I could compose myself on the sofa, and forget my troubles in a book; I cannot do that now. Granting I have the leisure, the printed paragraphs dance up and down beneath my gaze, and swim stupidly away into the margin where sense refuses to follow. My sleep is broken, and my dreams are horrid. In a sentence, my temperament is altering. Does not Victor Durny affirm that after changing man’s surroundings for two or three generations you will have changed his constitution, his ideas, and his disposition as well? It has not taken three generations in this case, merely three months, perhaps because I am a woman. Good gracious, what a monstrously egotistical production a diary is! You are ‘swellin’ wisibly,’ my manuscript, like the visitors at Mrs. Weller’s tea-fight, and to think your contents are all about me! I wonder if I could have scribbled so much of any other kind of composition,—probably not; I suppose most human beings find it easiest to be fluent upon themselves!

  * * * * *

  I have been exchanging confidences with the waiter; au pied de la lettre, he was inclined to be communicative, so I let him talk. Like the majority of his compatriots in his own station, José has been on the staff of English and French restaurants besides the Portuguese, and his speech when he essays “English as she is spoke” is eccentric in consequence. He came up to me just now to inquire backwards:

  “Madame will not go out to visit the Passeio Publico?”

  “No, José, it is going to rain!”

  “But madame does not go out in the fine! It will not rain!”

  I am not to be worried into the Passeio Publico against my will, so I say crossly:

  “I have a headache, José, that is all!”

  At this the little man is genuinely concerned. “Shall he summon madame’s maid?” he demands; “at least madame will permit him to draw the curtains of the apartment where madame gives herself the trouble to sit!”

  After insisting on carrying out this ‘remedy’ he disappears, to seek Dunstan, it transpires, for he returns ten minutes later, much exhausted, with the intelligence that she is not in the hotel. Having dispatched her on an errand I was previously aware of the fact, but the kindness affects me all the same; affects me indeed to the extent of a gratuity at which the pathetic monkey-face beams rapture.

  “Madame is too liberal, too good! It is the same with all the English!” (If I had been a Hottentot I daresay a similar national characteristic would have been discovered.) “Unlike his fellow countrymen, who mock themselves of one’s distress, the English people are generous to exaggeration; otherwise how would a poor garçon exist in the great London cafés, where he gets no wages and must pay so much a day to be allowed to serve!”

  “All right, José, I am glad you are pleased,” I rejoin.

  “ ‘Pleased’! He ecstasizes himself! Is it not again the method of the English gentleman who stays at the Hôtel Durand? Do not the beggars in the Almada call him ‘milor’ solely on this account?”

  “What is that José?” I ask with sudden interest. “The English gentleman who flings always away the silver pieces!”

  “Oh,” I say, “and how long has this millionaire been here?”

  “It is,” he must pause to recollect, “perhaps six months since he first came!”

  I do a rapid mental calculation; Jasper Vining sent in his resignation with a month’s notice on April the eighteenth; roughly, therefore, he left for his unknown destination on the eighteenth of May. June, July, August, September, October! It is six months all but a fortnight! Why might this not be he? I can barely command my voice as I continue:

  “And what is his appearance, odiously ugly, I suppose?”

  “ ‘Ugly,’ not to think of it! He was tall, and of noble aspect!”

  Hotter and hotter! My fingers begin to twitch.

  “I must see this paragon,” I exclaim; “handsome and generous too, the combination is irresistible!”

  To verify Josh’s statement will, he assures me, be the simplest thing in the world after dinner; in the daytime, however, “Milor” seldom stirs abroad. He undertakes, if I post myself according to his directions, I may obtain a full view of the object of my curiosity this very evening.

  Can it be possible my efforts are at length on the verge of fulfilment? Scarcely, the information has been too casually come by to lead to great results! And yet,—why not? It is not in fiction alone that a hint from an unexpected source supplies the clue we have so elaborately sought in vain. I may be sanguine, I may be foolish, but my pres
entiments seldom mislead me, and I have an inward conviction now that I am at last on Jasper Vining’s track!

  * * * * *

  The “Milor” has been pointed out to me, at a favourable moment,—he was removing his hat to wipe his forehead.

  He is as bald as a badger, and eighty years of age! I am too disheartened to write another word.

  José has just handed me a telegram; it is addressed:—

  “MADAME LEA,

  GRAND HÔTEL CENTRAL,

  LISBON.”

  The cypher runs:—

  “The man is by nature a gambler; go to Monte Carlo.”

  CHAPTER VI.

  GRAND HÔTEL CENTRAL,

  October 29th.

  NO, I have not gone to Monaco; more than that, I am not going; mere than all, there is a very excellent reason why!

  All day I superintended Dunstan’s arrangements for our departure, feeling, after last night’s disappointment, a moral and physical wreck. What did the position of bonnets matter to me! I sat at the edge of the sofa, and looked on simply to supply an impression of assistance. Get crushed? Let them; was not I crushed too!

  The world, for me at least, was over; it no longer existed, it had crumbled away. It is astonishing how frequently the world does assume this Stilton-like quality when there is a tinge of the ‘blue’ mood about one’s self!

  “What will you travel in, ma’am?”

  “I, oh anything,” I returned apathetically; “the one hanging up!”

  Deduced to black-and-white this question and reply look ambiguous, to raise the most mild objection; but though the word ‘dress’ was mentioned by neither woman it was perfectly understood by both.

  “Then there is nothing but the embroidered muslin to be put in, and that will go on the tray!”

  Dunstan’s tone as she confronted me on her knees was complacent in the extreme. “Now, ma’am, let me fetch you something to eat?”

  “I’ve no appetite! How can I be hungry after this awful, this grotesque failure? The man was as old as the hills, and I had never thought to ask that wretched José his age!”

  “Ah, you’re fresh at the business, ma’am,” she responded consolingly; “we get lots of false scents like this! Why, I’ll be bound Mr. Bazalgette didn’t expect you to be no quicker than you’ve been!”

  “ ‘Than I’ve been!’ You talk as if I had finally arrived at a result; Monte Carlo may be of as little good to us as everywhere else.”

  “And what then! The longer it takes, the better for Mr. Bazalgette, isn’t it; won’t he charge according to time?”

  This was an unconsidered aspect of the matter, and brought comfort, for I had been frightening myself into anticipating my recall. “Do take something, ma’am,” she persisted; “a plate of soup?”

  Like Mrs. Dombey, however, I could not “make an effort,” and decided upon waiting until the dinner-hour, succeeding during the interval under the soporific effect of a new novel in obtaining, what I sorely needed, a nap.

  Shortly after six I descended to the table d’hôte, and having taken my seat, was in the act of helping myself to tournados à la Rossini, when my attention was arrested by a man’s profile a few places lower down on the opposite side. He was a stranger in the hotel, most probably a new arrival in the city, for I had never encountered him in my ‘investigations,’ but directly his countenance caught my eye, it possessed some unexplained familiarity. Yet, so oddly does our memory play us tricks, when he had turned his head, and presented me with a “front view,” I was for several moments (to use an Americanism) unable to “fix” it.

  It was the bearded face of a man who had lived every hour of his possibly forty years, with a dissatisfied, cynical expression upon it augmented by the droop of his brown moustache.

  How did I know him? I had recourse to a patent method of procedure of mine under these circumstances which I usually find effectual; I, in fancy, attired him in every variety of masculine habiliment that occurred to me. I put him in a postman’s uniform, and I did not identify him as any postman I had been used to see; I clothed him in railway garb, and he defied recognition as a railway official. Then, with a reminiscence of London, I measured him for a frock-coat, and it fitted so admirably it might have been the handiwork of Savile-row.

  Simultaneously two senses were endowed with occult properties: I saw a likeness lying in my despatch-box upstairs, and I heard Mr. Bazalgette’s voice saying “Be prepared for the growth of a beard!”

  Had I become the dupe of my own eyesight; was this another fallacious hope to be shattered? Or was he sitting there, the absconded managing clerk of whom I was in search, Jasper Vining, bored and tangible, divided from me only by five feet of table-cloth, and an epergne?

  I have no recollection of what I ate after that; I may have taken caviare with olives, or powdered my ice with cayenne; I had one sole thought, to remove any room for doubt as speedily as I could, and to send a message to England rushing under the sea:—“J. V. is here!” The lights confused me; they seemed alternately to burn so low the apartment grew dark, and to blaze into such phenomenal brilliancy that I was dazzled. Still I kept my watch upon the stranger, longing and yet fearing for him to rise; he was amongst the last.

  I had José at my side in a second:

  “Is that gentleman staying in the hotel?” I whispered.

  “Ho, madame, he came to dine here; I do not know where he stop!”

  There was no time to lose then.

  “Send my maid to me, José, will yon, at once; and tell her to “bring me a hat, I shall he going out!”

  The object of my scrutiny was now lounging in the entrance hall, rolling a cigarette, and as fortune would have it, a waiter, with a salver full of glasses, hurrying behind him as I passed slowly in front, pushed his arm. The pouch dropped to the floor, coming in contact with me as it fell, and scattering the long shreds of tobacco over my velvet skirt.

  He must apologise, though it was not his fault; French or English, I wondered breathlessly. “I beg your pardon,” he exclaimed; “it was awfully clumsy of me; pray allow me to brush it off!” English by all that was happy, and without a trace of foreign accent.

  “Don’t mention it; I think it was the waiter who was to blame, although it doesn’t appear to have occurred to him!” I said smiling.

  Would he continue the conversation, or let it die? He spoke again:

  “What a lovely night, is it not?”

  “Divine,” I answered (always vary the adjective in response to a platitude about the weather). “On such a night one can hardly realise that all the horrors of fog are just commencing at home, or one would be more grateful to be abroad!”

  “Just so,—that is, I suppose they are; of course it will be November soon, as you say we forget it!” Bis native land did not seem a topic adapted to arouse his eloquence, so I shifted to more general ground.

  “What a pretty town Lisbon is!” I remarked inconsequentially enough, “don’t you find it so?”

  “If you are not used to the style it’s rather interesting; but, for myself, I’ve lived on the Continent for years at a stretch!”

  He had been so ready to impart this piece of information that he presumably felt some sort of supplement to it essential, he added quickly:

  “I haven’t many acquaintances in London, and unless one has it is not lively!”

  “So,” I observed, “you escape that common malady of our compatriots abroad,—home-sickness!”

  “ ‘Home-sickness’!” he echoed with a little laugh, “don’t you think, deprived of the varnish of sentiment, ‘home-sickness’ generally means being profoundly sick of the place you’re in! Are you doing much sight-seeing, may I ask?”

  “I went to St. Roque to visit the silver chapel. I was told everybody ought to go there; but so far from imbuing me with the proper devotional spirit, I found all the lapis lazuli and mosaics had the opposite effect of making me dreadfully covetous. After that I gave up sight-seeing in despair!” I returned lig
htly. And at this juncture we heard Dunstan inquiring for “Mrs. Lea” as a moment later she approached us with my hat, she herself ready to accompany me.

  Now I could not invite this acquaintance of five minutes to come too, undesirable as it was that I should quit him for ever so brief a period at the present stage, nor could I evidently postpone an intended stroll for the pleasure of his society. Only one course remained: I said “Good evening,” very amiably, “one must choose the breeze on the promenade in preference to the stifling atmosphere of a house!” and trusted to his following me.

  It was a poor chance, remembering his experience, and the limited opportunity I had had of being nice, but I could not help myself.

  Once outside, Dunstan laid her hand on my arm, and muttered “It’s him!”

  Never did ungrammatical asseveration fall more sweetly on a woman’s ears.

  “You recognise the original of the photograph?”

  “I’d bet my life on it!”

  The ‘lady’s maid’ had vanished into air. We were no longer mistress and abigail, but two female police-agents on the right track.

  “Look back!” I murmured.

  “It’s worked; he’s coming out!”

  “Then we’ll take the first seat, and he’ll join us.”

  The prophecy was fulfilled; he presently came sauntering past, and interpreting my bow aright paused beside our bench. Being no boy, however, he spared me an involved demonstration that the meeting had been accidental, and was content to perceive he had not offended.

  Dunstan, again the discreetest of servants, moved to the other end, so as to allow him the space next me, and before long we were chatting together as if we had been formally introduced.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to ascertain his name, or his alias, as fortunately as he had done mine. “How we (we of John Bull’s island) drop our conventionality as soon as we are safely across the Channel,” I hazarded; “here you and I, who only spoke to each other half an hour ago, are talking as freely as it would have taken us months to talk if we had met at Morley’s or the Métropole!”