‘You wrote?’
‘Told him – murder – me – I signal every half-hour – due in five minutes –’
Very gently he released her, laughing the while. He had moved her to where he could see through the window. A man stood with his back to the railings of the Park, smoking a short cigar. He was watching the house for the half-hour signal.
‘You never thought I was such a good actor,’ said Hermann with his set smile.
She staggered to the window and sank in a chair.
‘I didn’t frighten you, did I?’ he asked with a certain resemblance of tenderness.
She was shaking from head to foot. ‘Go out!’ she said. ‘Go away! I know your secret now!’
With a little shrug he left her, taking the silk cord with him, for that evidence was too damning to leave behind. She waited till she heard him speaking in the hall below, then she fled to her room and locked the door. With shaking hands she made her preparations. She dressed as quickly as she had dressed in her life and descended the stairs. In the hall she saw Martin, and paused. ‘Get me a walking-stick – any one will do – quickly!’
The man went away and, returning with the ivory-headed cane of her brother, found her by the open door.
She looked at her watch. It wanted twenty minutes to nine.
A taxi-cab carried her to Vigo Street, and the nearer she came to the man who she knew loved her, and to the freedom which was ahead the higher rose her spirits.
Gordon Bray was waiting. She paid the cab and dismissed it. ‘I knew you would be here!’ she said impulsively, and took his arm. ‘Gordon,’ she said breathlessly – it is strange how two people that day had been thrilled by the utterance of a Christian name – ‘you have known me for three years.’
‘And twenty-five days, Miss Zeberlieff,’ said the young man. ‘I count the days.’
The eyes turned to him were bright with a light he had never seen.
‘Call me Vera,’ she said softly. ‘Please don’t think I’m bold – but I just want you to – you love me, don’t you?’
The street lights went round and round in a giddy whirl before the man. ‘I worship you!’ he said hoarsely.
‘Then bear with me for a little while,’ she said tenderly; ‘and if I do things which you do not approve –?’
‘You couldn’t do that,’ he said.
There in Regent Street, before all the hurrying world, shocked, amused or interested, according to its several temperaments, she raised her lips to his and he kissed her.
‘Now,’ she said, and thrust him away, her eyes dancing, ‘show me the new shop that King Kerry bought.’
‘This is it’ – he pointed along the block – ‘the art fabric people. It was in all the papers.’
She ran along the pavement till she came to the darkened windows of the store. Then, without a warning, she raised her stick and sent the ivory head smashing through the plate glass.
A policeman seized her.
‘My God!’ said Gordon Bray. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘Votes for Women!’ cried Vera and laughed. She was laughing still when they took her away in a cab to Marlborough Street, and laughing the next morning when she was sentenced to three weeks in the second division.
King Kerry, sitting at the solicitors’ table with Bray, was not unamused. In three weeks Vera would be entitled to her share of her father’s fortune, and her brother’s machinations would be in vain. She would come out of prison a free woman in every sense of the word.
As for Bray, though he watched that delicate figure anxiously, he understood. It would be three weeks of hell for him with only the memory of those fragrant lips to help him bear the parting.
CHAPTER XV
‘I couldn’t get back to the office last night,’ said Elsie, ‘and I tried to get you on the phone, but you weren’t anywhere you ought to have been.’ Her voice was a little reproachful, for she had really wanted to see him to communicate a wonderful piece of news.
‘I suppose I wasn’t,’ admitted King Kerry, smoothing his grey hair. There was something almost childlike about the millionaire when he was penitent, and Elsie’s heart was very tender to him in such moments as these.
‘A young friend of mine smashed one of my windows in Regent Street,’ he said in extenuation. ‘Really, I’m never out of these infernal police stations,’ he added ruefully.
‘A suffragette?’
‘I guess so,’ nodded Kerry, biting off the end of a cigar. ‘Anyway, she’s gaoled!’
‘Oh!’ protested the girl in horror. ‘You didn’t allow her to go to gaol?’
‘I surely did,’ admitted King Kerry with his brightest smile, ‘and instructed a lawyer to press for it.’
He saw the troubled look on the girl’s face and waited.
‘It isn’t like you, somehow,’ she said, with a note of reproach in her voice. ‘You’re so kind and so tender to people in trouble – I just hate the thought of you being anything else than what I think you are.’
‘Everybody is different to what people think they are,’ he said mournfully. ‘I guess you’ve never read what some of the New York papers said about my big railroad combine. I thought not,’ as she shook her head. ‘One of these days I’ll hunt up the cuttings for you, and you’ll see how black it is possible for a man to be – and escape gaoling.’
‘You’ll not convince me,’ she said with decision. ‘I’m not even satisfied that you did what you said this morning.’
He nodded vigorously.
‘Sure,’ he said; ‘but I might as well tell you right here that the lady was a friend of mine, and she was most anxious to go to gaol – and I was obliged to help her.’
‘She is really a suffragette?’
King Kerry considered before he made a reply, drawing thoughtfully at his cigar.
‘No, she isn’t,’ he said. ‘She’s had enough to make her. If I were she, I guess I’d burn the whole of Regent Street. You’ll read about it in the papers, anyway,’ he said.
She opened a drawer and took out a copy of the Evening Herald.
‘Read about it in your own paper,’ she said proudly, and handed him the early edition.
He whistled. ‘I’d almost forgotten that,’ he said. ‘So you bought it!’
She nodded. She made a pretty picture standing there with her hands behind her back, her cheeks flushed and her lovely eyes bright with excitement. She stood like a child who had deserved commendation and was waiting expectantly for her due.
‘What did you give?’ he asked.
‘Guess?’ she countered.
‘Sixty thousand?’ he suggested.
She shook her head.
‘Fifty?’ with raised eyebrows.
Again she shook her head.
‘I’ll tell you the whole story,’ she said. ‘When I got to the office of the Evening Herald I found the staff had gone home, but the editor, the manager, and the proprietor were in the board room, and I found out afterwards that there had been a most unholy row.’
‘There always is when those three gentlemen meet,’ said King Kerry with knowledge. ‘If the publisher had been there too, you would have been obliged to ring for the ambulance.’
‘Well,’ she went on with a smile, ‘I sent in your name and was admitted at once.’
‘Such is the magic of a name,’ murmured the millionaire.
‘They were awfully surprised to see me, and the proprietor, Mr Bolscombe, started to “my girl” me, but he didn’t continue when I put it to him straight away that I had called to buy the paper.’
‘Did he faint?’ asked Kerry, anxiously.
She smiled.
‘Not exactly; but he asked sixty thousand pounds, whereupon I did all the fainting necessary. The paper is a young one – you know that?’ – King Kerry nodded – ‘and is just on the point of paying –’
‘That’s the editor’s view,’ suggested Kerry, and the girl nodded.
‘Especially if the policy was changed a little
–’
‘Do I hear the manager speaking?’ asked Kerry, looking up at the ceiling.
‘Yes – but on the other hand it may not, and there was a doubt as to whether it was wise to throw good money after bad.’
Kerry laughed uproariously for him.
‘That is the proprietor,’ he said. ‘I know what he’d say because I’ve seen him once or twice.’
‘So we talked and we talked, and the end of it was I got the paper for forty thousand pounds,’ she said triumphantly.
He rose and patted her on the shoulder.
‘Excellent, child!’ he said. ‘I shall put that in my red book.’
He had a locked ledger in which from time to time he made entries, the nature of which was unknown save to the writer.
‘I’ve something else to say,’ said the girl. ‘After I’d given the cheque and got the receipt I went home, and Mr Bolscombe, who was dining with – you’ll never guess whom?’ she challenged.
‘Hermann Zeberlieff – yes?’ retorted Kerry. ‘Go on!’
She was a little disappointed that her baby bomb had not so much as fizzed.
‘I went back to my flat. Three hours later Mr Bolscombe called, though how he got the address –’
‘From Zeberlieff.’
‘Of course – how absurd of me to forget. He called and offered to buy back the paper for seventy thousand pounds!’
‘Excellent!’ laughed King Kerry.
‘He wanted to say that it wasn’t a proper sale, but I made him include all the considerations in the receipt – was I right?’
‘Child,’ said the admiring Kerry solemnly, ‘I shall take you into partnership one of these days. What was the end?’
She handed him the receipt. She had something more to say.
‘The editor is rather a clever young man,’ she said, hesitatingly; ‘and the manager seems pretty capable. I told them that you would make no immediate changes.’
‘Right again,’ said Kerry heartily. ‘A new man isn’t always the best man, and the old man isn’t necessarily a fool. Never change for change’s sake – except your dress.’
He stood by his desk meditatively.
‘This deserves more than the ordinary recognition,’ he said with mock solemnity. ‘Nothing less than a dinner can celebrate our first joint victory over the enemy.’
She looked at him with laughing eyes too near to tears for her complete satisfaction. That she had pleased the ‘grey man’, as she called him in her heart, was enough.
She had seen two handsome men in the past twenty-four hours – she puzzled her head to remember who the other was.
But it had not been the type that this man represented, the healthy skin and the laughing eyes, and that masterful chin – and the other had most certainly not been the owner of the greyest hair she had ever seen in a young man. She wondered why he was so grey. She had often wished to ask him, but something which was not the fear of impertinence (they had progressed too far in friendship for that fear to weigh with her) had prevented her.
‘Dinner at eight at the Sweizerhof,’ he said; ‘and if you feel incapable of coming without a chaperon, bring somebody nice.’
‘I don’t know anybody nice enough,’ she smiled, ‘so you must bear with me alone.’
She had a day’s work before her, and she tackled it with an energy which the prospect of an evening’s enjoyment increased. In the middle of the morning she stopped.
‘I know!’ she said suddenly.
He looked up.
‘What do you know?’
‘The name of the other man – I mean,’ she said hastily, ‘the man who came with Mr Bolscombe to the flat. It was Mr Martin Hubbard.’
‘Oh!’ he said dubiously, ‘The Beauty?’
‘Is that what they call him? I can understand it. He’s good-looking in a way, but –’ She hesitated.
‘There are lots of “buts” about Martin,’ said Kerry quietly. ‘I met him in New York. He’s some dollar chaser.’
He stared meditatively at the wall ahead of him.
‘A man who marries for money,’ he said, ‘is like a dog that climbs a steeple for a bone. He gets his meal, but there isn’t any comfortable place to sleep it off.’
He made no further reference to Martin, and was busy for the rest of the day.
For he was drafting the advertisement which was to shake the drapery world to its foundations.
CHAPTER XVI
‘When a man with no great moral perceptions, with no sense of obligation to his conscience, his pride, or his humanity, finds himself thwarted of his heart’s desire, his mind naturally turns to murder. Murder, indeed, is a natural instinct of man, as maternity is a natural instinct of woman. Thousands of years of civilization have called into being a super-instinct which is voluntary in application and is termed self-restraint. The wild waters of will have been directed through artificial courses, and woe to the errant stream that overleaps the bank and runs to its natural level.’
So wrote Hermann Zeberlieff in his diary two nights after the sentence of his sister. It embodied his philosophy, and was one of the most interesting articles of his creed and certainly one of the most coherent passages in the diary which was read in public on a subsequent occasion, Hermann Zeberlieff being unavoidably absent.
His worst enemies will not deny to this perverse man a certain literary quality or cavil at the description given to him by Simnizberg, the anthropologist of ‘Immoral Visionary’.
He finished the entry and put away the book in its private and proper place. He glanced with a sneer at the little stack of letters he had answered. Everybody who knew him had written kindly, indulgently, or humorously of his sister’s exploit. Little did they know how much that freak of hers had cost him. It might have cost him dearer had she not gone, but this he would never accept as a possibility.
He went to his room to dress. Checked as he was by his sister’s action, he was in a sense relieved that the necessity for removing her had departed. She would make a will in prison – he did not doubt that. Cassman, her solicitor, had been sent for to Holloway for that purpose. His attitude of mind would have baffled the average psychologist, for now he had no feeling of resentment toward her. Frankly, he wanted her money, as, frankly, he had not abandoned hope of getting it. But the method must be more subtle – he had invited Martin Hubbard to dinner with that object on the night of the extraordinary behaviour of Vera.
‘Bolscombe is a fool’ – he had a trick of talking to himself, and he was dressing without the aid of a valet – ‘to sell the paper to that swine!’
‘That swine’ was King Kerry, toward whom this strange man directed the full force of his implacable hatred. He wondered what use King Kerry would make of his new toy – it was a weapon which might be easily employed to harass Hermann. It would not be the first time that ‘The King of London’ had bought newspapers to harass him. He had finished dressing when a discreet knock came to the door.
‘There is a man who wishes to see you, sir,’ said the servant who entered at Hermann’s invitation.
‘What kind of man?’
The servant was at a loss to describe the visitor.
‘Poorish – foreign,’ he said.
Poorish and foreign! Hermann could not place the visitor.
‘Tell him to come up.’
‘Here, sir?’
‘Here,’ said the master sharply. ‘Where do you think I want to see him?’
The man was used to these unreasonable outbursts and was undisturbed by them. He went away and came back with a little man, rather pallid of face, who wore a straggling, irregular beard and clothes of sufficient poverty to justify the ‘poorish’ and just enough eccentricity to make ‘foreign’ an accurate guess.
‘Oh, it is you, is it?’ said Hermann coolly. ‘Sit down – you need not wait, Martin.’
‘Well?’ he asked when they were alone. ‘What do you want?’
He spoke in French, and the little man raised his expres
sive hands deprecatingly.
‘What else, mon vieu – but money? Ah, money is a horrible thing, but necessary.’
Hermann opened a gold cigarette case deliberately and selected a cigarette before he replied.
‘Exactly why should you come to me?’
The little man shrugged his shoulders and glanced at the ceiling for inspiration. He was an unpleasant-looking man with a short, squat nose and small, twinkling eyes set wide apart. His skin was blotched and unhealthy, and his hands were big and red.
‘You were generous to us once, mon aviateur,’ he said. ‘Ah, the generosity! – but it was for’ – he looked round – ‘murder!’ he whispered dramatically.
‘Are you suggesting that I hired you to kill the young woman who was found dead in Smith Street?’ asked the other coolly. ‘You were told not to kill.’
The man shrugged his shoulders again. ‘She was drunk – we thought she was obstinate,’ he said. ‘How were we to know? Joseph gave her an extra squeeze, and, voilà! she was dead.’
Hermann eyed him as a naturalist might eye a new and a strange species of beetle. ‘Suppose I say I will give you nothing?’ he asked.
The big red hands were outstretched in pain. ‘It would be unfortunate,’ said the man, ‘for you, for us, for all!’ He seemed absurdly pleased with the rhyme of ‘vous’, ‘nous’, and ‘tout’, and repeated it.
He was standing now an arm’s length from the other. ‘Are you very strong, my friend?’ asked Hermann.
‘I am considered so,’ said the man complacently.
‘Attention!’ cried Hermann, and his small white hand shot out and gripped the visitor by the throat. He struggled, but he was in the hands of one who had had Le Cinq as a master, and Le Cinq was the greatest strangler of his day.
The fingers tightened on the other’s throat, skilful fingers of steel that gripped the carotid artery and compressed the windpipe in one action. Down he went to the ground limply, then, when death stared at him, the fingers released their clutch. ‘Get up,’ said Hermann, and laughed noiselessly. The man staggered to his feet, fear in his eyes, his face blue and swollen. ‘Mon Dieu!’ he gasped.
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