Trevor hitched up his chair to the table.
“There was a reason for that,” he exclaimed.
“I would like to hear it,” said Strickland.
“You were out of England at the time. Yes. You would be surprised,” he agreed.
A little time before this inquest, a coroner had overstepped even the latitude assumed by coroners. He had extracted from an unhappy woman, who was the merest witness to a death, that she had never been married to the man with whom she was living, and that their grown-up daughter was illegitimate. He had then belaboured her for her deceit, accused her of perjury for assuming the man’s name, and threatened her with prison, though he had no power to send her there.
“There was an uproar in the Press,” Angus Trevor continued. “A famous author joined in. An ex-Lord Chancellor rapped that coroner over the knuckles until he must have felt sick and dizzy. And the whole tribe of them suddenly acquired a little much-needed modesty. This man, for instance, in the Isle of Wight, was treading very delicately. The husband, whether alive or dead, did not come into the picture. That was enough for him. He kept his inquiry within the circle of the facts.”
“I see,” said Strickland, and once more he sprang up and betook himself to pacing between the table and the window. He was like a man in a maze. At every turn, when he was saying to himself, “At last I am coming to the heart and centre of this puzzle “ — no — he was face to face again with a hedge. First Thorne’s obstinate scruples, then the coincidence of a general election with Elizabeth Clutter’s death, now the coroner’s unusual reticence — always there was something to stop him from the truth. And he must reach it! He felt that as an obligation laid upon him. He imagined disaster falling upon Ariadne, her gallant adventure altogether spoilt. He looked out of the window and saw her face there before him, without a sparkle of its gaiety and her eyes wistful and yet tender with reproach. Quite unreasonably, the very accumulation of these obstacles in his way increased his conviction that peril was approaching her. In a panic he saw it approaching, a black menacing cloud overwhelming the sky. He was lost to all knowledge of the room in which he stood, he was unaware of Trevor’s curious glances. He had suddenly leapt forward with his fears for wings.
It was no longer mere scandal, mere discredit, a mere barrier against advancement which he envisaged, but some dreadful tornado in the midst of which, amidst the clamours of thunder, and the blinding glares of lightning, she must be fought for against the Powers of Darkness — chief amongst them a gaunt, hungry spectre of a man, armed with a cudgel which could break but not be broken.
The vision passed. The room swam into his sight again. He recognised Trevor standing by the table, with his eyes now discreetly lowered.
“I thank you very much,” said Strickland with a smile. “It was kind of you to give me these details.”
The conference was over, but Trevor did not take his leave. He showed an evident embarrassment and a no less evident good-will.
“I don’t want to butt in, Colonel Strickland,” he said, “and I haven’t one idea, nor do I seek to have one, as to why you are interested in the death of Elizabeth Clutter. But I do sincerely think that you are barking up the wrong tree.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Surely the person who deserves attention is Corinne?”
Strickland took out his cigarette-case and offered a cigarette to his companion. He was still a little absent in his manner.
“Do you know her?” he asked.
Mr. Trevor stopped in the middle of lighting his cigarette and stared at Strickland — stared until the match burnt his fingers.
“Of course,” he explained patiently. “The moment she returned to London I went straight as a Roman road to her dressing-room.”
“Oh! Then she told you something,” Strickland interjected.
“She told me exactly what I expected, and what I reported, and what I disbelieved. She said every right thing. She was overwhelmed, but her duty to the public must come first. She danced whilst her heart broke. Pretty sad, what? I could have wept. But I didn’t. I consoled myself with the impression that she had the brightest little pair of eyes for a cash-deposit that I had ever seen. It isn’t, of course, likely that Corinne would be foolish. But I should, I think — if I was interested in the matter — yes, I certainly should inquire whether just before this — accident, Corinne ever hinted that she expected to come into a handsome sum of money pretty soon. It’s the sort of little slip which people do make, especially if they are in debt and are being pressed to pay.”
With the gift of that advice Mr. Angus Trevor took his sharp red head out of the room. He had reached the corner where the lane discharged itself into Fleet Street, before he came to a stop. He liked Strickland. There was an ease, a frankness, a cordiality, something, anyhow, a freedom from jealousies and little things, which made a strong appeal to him. And there was not a doubt about his distress. Trevor had just remembered something — oh, nothing very important — an address merely — but an address which, wisely made use of, might help Strickland and one way or another settle his perplexities. It offered an opportunity, at all events, which a man like Strickland would never get hold of, unless a man like himself made him a present of it. He, Trevor, had only obtained this address by some very persistent espionage. For it was, very wisely, kept a close secret. Yes, Strickland should have the benefit of this item of inside knowledge. Whether he could make profitable use of it or not, well, that was not Trevor’s affair. He would have done his best to help a man and a brother.
Trevor turned smartly back and returned to the office of The Flame. But, quickly though he walked, Strickland had already gone when he arrived. As a matter of fact, Strickland had passed behind him whilst he stood deliberating upon his course on the kerb of the pavement in Fleet Street; had almost touched him on the shoulder and wished him good day. But he had not yielded to the impulse. He had just walked on and the address was not entrusted to him until a later day had come.
X. TERROR AT THE SEMIRAMIS
THE DINNER AT the Semiramis Hotel was certain to be one of the most notable events of that season from the hour when Lord Culalla consented to take the chair.
“This banquet has got to produce the Society’s record subscription. See to it!” he announced in his curiously metallic voice to his little army of camp followers and satellites. But he was not content with giving this order. He saw to it also himself.
He was such a man as each age begets and each age claims as its own peculiar product, accounting him a sign of progress or an evidence of degeneration, according to the divisions of its political opinions. Only fifteen years ago, a mere Mr. Gideon Bramber from the back blocks of Australia, he had swept into London, a man still under thirty years of age, quite unknown, but with a substantial fortune already built up out of nothing and a bosomful of limitless ambitions. He had the two great qualities which make for great success, the power to attract money and the power to keep friends. As to the latter, it was said of him that he might drop friends — and, indeed, he had a touch of the Sultan’s caprices — but that his friends never dropped him. As to the former quality — indefinable, unteachable, a gift found in association with any degree of intellect, Boeotian, vulgar, or razor sharp — Mr. Gideon Bramber undoubtedly possessed it. He was a magnet, before he became a magnate. Place a sovereign on a table, midway between him and me, and of its own accord it would presently begin to move towards his hand. But he did not live for the gift. It was to him a lever, a weapon, a thing to use, an opportunity of spreading out in a thousand activities. He entered Parliament, became a Minister, in due course a peer. He bought a newspaper, and then another, and then another, directed them, wrote for them, achieved a circulation for them, and meanwhile made another fortune out of spelter and a third, or a fourth, or a fifth — no one could tell which — out of rubber and an extra one out of artificial silk. In the midst of all these engagements he found time to achieve a culture of his own, founded largely upon
a knowledge of the Bible. On the other hand, he was too busy a man for the drawing-rooms, and took his relaxations in a less formal company. He was close upon six feet high, a little heavy about the shoulders, with a sleek black head and a sallow clean-shaven face; and as he stood in the reception-room welcoming the ambassadors, and the bishops, the stars and the ribbons and the medals, whom he had gathered to the banquet, he had rather the look of a polite buccaneer asking for their purses...
“My Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen, dinner is served,” a stentorian voice belonging to the toastmaster, dressed in a scarlet coat like a master of foxhounds, announced, and the company passed through the door in a tight wedge and spread out like water through a dam.
“We are all together round the end of the top table,” Ariadne began, and stopped short with a little cry of dismay. “Oh!”
For in the very corner, in the midst of the seats for which she had stipulated, a thin, narrow-shouldered elderly man with pince-nez bridging his nose, had just taken his seat.
A man spoke at Ariadne’s elbow.
“I am very sorry, Lady Ariadne. I am the secretary. I had to alter the arrangements at the last moment. He is a Mr. Julius Ricardo, very rich, but a little unmanageable. It was really necessary to put him at the high table.”
“Ricardo? Ricardo!” Strickland repeated the name to himself. “Now, where have I heard that name?”
Ariadne was gazing at the man ruefully.
“I shall hate him, I know,” she said to the secretary. “You have quite spoilt my party.”
The secretary smiled his apologies.
“I hope not. I understand that Mr. Ricardo can be quite entertaining if he begins to talk about crime. He is a great friend of the famous French detective Hanaud, and visits him in France when any sensational trial takes place.”
“Hanaud!” exclaimed Strickland. “To be sure!”
He remembered now how he came to be familiar with Julius Ricardo’s name. There had been a case at Aix-les-Bains which had brought Hanaud into contact with a Mr. Ricardo. “But it was before your day, Ariadne,” he added.
“I don’t care!” she said indignantly. “He won’t entertain me!”
Alas, Mr. Ricardo entertained nobody that evening, and towards the end of the dinner not even himself. Strickland was seated next to Madame Chrestoff, a young and brilliant prima donna from, it was supposed, Czecho-Slovakia; next to her sat Mr. Ricardo; then came Ariadne, Leon Battchilena and Julian Ransome. Thus Mr. Ricardo was in the midst of them, and he seized upon them with the soup, silenced them and held them, like the Ancient Mariner, but not with a glittering eye. The secret of Mr. Ricardo’s spell was a thin penetrating copious flow of words, banality upon banality, and all expounding his exiguous personality.
“Dear me!” he said, emphasising his remarks with little precise bird-like gestures, “a few years ago, to have sat through a public dinner in company however charming, with speeches to follow, whilst the music of dances was being played in the outer room, would have seemed to me the very height and crown of treachery. Every throb of the violins would have been poignant with reproach, would have cried, ‘Dance, Ricardo, dance!’ But now I find myself enjoying it. Eheu fugaces, Posthume, Posthume! This sole à la Marguery, this caneton à la Presse, this glass of Lafitte which I hold up to the light to enjoy its ruby hues. What would they have all meant to me years ago! Lafitte, even Lafitte, 1900, would have been no more to me than the occasion of a foolish joke. I might have said: ‘To the accompaniment of a waltz, we ought certainly to drink La-feet’”; and he punctuated with a reedy laugh this devastating example of his wit.
Madame Chrestoff watched him with round eyes and a perplexed forehead. Once she said: “My!” and a little afterwards: “Goodness to goodness!” and now she said “Gee!” in an awe-struck voice; and all of these interjections struck upon Strickland as singular, coming from Czecho-Slovakia. But interjections meant less than nothing to Mr. Ricardo. He trod them down as a battleship treads down beneath its forefoot a piece of wreckage in the sea. Ariadne’s glances of wrath he never saw. He was not aware of her. He was aware only of so many pairs of ears entirely at his mercy as a bandit might be who had just captured a caravan of tourists in the mountains.
To the relief of all that party the stentorian voice rang out again.
“My Lords, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, pray charge your glasses, and silence for your Chairman, the Lord Culalla!”
During the reprieve of the loyal toasts, every one of them took a stern resolution that Mr. Ricardo should not get his head loose again; and the moment the company sat down again they broke out at once. The Society, music, any topic which could sweep over and drown Mr. Ricardo. Madame Chrestoff described how she walked out of the Imperial Opera House because a rival prima donna had kicked her puppy in the corridor.
“I said to the Herr Direktor: ‘Don’t talk to me No armour-plated Brynehilda is going to kick my Sealyham dawg, and as for your little old Opera House, it’s a bum place anyways,’ and I went back to my hotel and cried from rage — oh, outrageous! — until my nose was as red as that carbuncle on Ariadne’s chest!”
Strickland giggled with delight. The carbuncle was his priceless ruby, which glowed against the pale gold tissue of Ariadne’s frock like a great blot of fire, and waxed and waned with every movement that she made.
“What are you laughing at?” Madame Chrestoff asked.
“I wasn’t laughing so much,” he replied gravely, “as thinking that, but for your accent and idioms, I might have taken you for an American citizen.”
Terror at the Semiramis
Madame Chrestoff’s laugh rippled out.
“Aren’t you the goods?” she cried. “My, I’ll tell the world.”
“Be quiet, Strickland!” said Ariadne. “The big gun’s going to make his speech.”
Strickland looked along the table to where a Cabinet Minister was fidgeting in his chair. Then he shook his head at Ariadne.
“Alas! the bigger the gun, the greater the bore.”
Julian Ransome felt for a pencil and his diary.
“I should like to use that some time, if I may.”
Strickland waved his hand.
“I say that sort of thing every other minute.”
“Be quiet, Strickland!” said Ariadne.
And the speech of the evening was made. It was just afterwards, when the applause had died down and the guests were settling once more into their places, that the amazing thing occurred. Strickland was saying an enthusiastic word about the speech to the more or less Czecho-Slovakian prima donna, when he heard a very urgent warning hissed out behind his elbow, like this:
“Hist! Hist!”
For a moment he was inclined to believe that some waiter of more than usual insolence was choosing this method of demanding a tip from him; and he took no notice.
But the call was repeated and with an insistence still more sibilant.
“Hist! Hist!”
It was now a call to attention, imperative as an order on parade. But there was alarm in it, too. The man behind his elbow was afraid.
Strickland turned round, carelessly. When others were anxious, it was wise to be indifferent. He saw a foreign waiter, small and sturdy and broad-shouldered like a Japanese, but with the face of a ferret, and even a ferret’s red eyes. He was not looking at Strickland at all, it was not Strickland’s attention which he had been trying to arrest. But as soon as Strickland turned, his face managed to achieve a smile or something as near to a smile as can be expected from a ferret.
“It is my comrade. I call him,” the waiter said with a French accent. “I teach him to wait. But as yet he has not the practice. One, two, three times more and he will be a miracle.”
Strickland’s eyes took the line of the little waiter’s. They led him to Leon Battchilena — he was a big and well-proportioned young man with a dark, vivacious face, rather thick of features redeemed by a pair of black, clear, expressive eyes and a head which was
growing prematurely bald. Battchilena was turned towards Ariadne. He was talking to her with an intense earnestness and in a low voice, as if he shared some secret with her which must be jealously guarded — or as if he were making love. A flame of anger suddenly blazed high in Strickland’s breast and quite drove from his mind his momentary curiosity. He knew the worth of these public lovers — the men who could not discuss a triviality with a pretty woman unless they put enough fervour and secrecy into the argument to make all the company present smile and nod and think “There’s a case.” Strickland felt a great sympathy at the moment with Julian Ransome, who certainly held sound views about Leon Battchilena.
But his attention was once more caught by the Frenchman behind him.
“Hist! Hist!”
Strickland now saw on the other side of Battchilena a black-sleeved arm and a hand which held a box of cigars. A waiter was offering it to Battchilena, but he held the box in so awkward and inattentive a fashion that the cigars were on the point of tumbling out in a cascade upon the table. It was undoubtedly this waiter whose notice the little ferret behind was failing to attract.
Strickland’s eyes now followed the line of that outstretched arm with a certain amusement. Would the cigars slip out before this clumsy Ganymede waked to his duties? And what so engrossed him? His eyes mounted upwards to the broad shoulders and from the shoulders to the face, and then he fell back in his chair whilst a low cry broke from his lips.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 65