Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  For the first time since the confession had begun Henry Marchmont laughed.

  “Well?”

  “The third piece of advice, of course, I can’t follow, because Sir Hugo’s dead — and also,” she added quickly, “because you are here. The first I certainly did — I mean I should have if — well, once I did — that time — in the Isle of Wight.”

  The statement, confusing though it sounds, was clear as crystal to the Colonel. He nodded grimly.

  “The second piece of advice is where I went wrong,” the Duchess resumed.

  “You didn’t follow it?”

  “No,” said the Duchess.

  “You wrote some letters?”

  “I kept some letters,” the Duchess corrected.

  “From Hairy-heels?”

  Cynthia Saxemundham in her predicament did not think it worth while to challenge the name. She passed on.

  “And a maid whom I dismissed took them. The maid’s now in Lady Torrent’s service.”

  Colonel Marchmont whistled.

  “I see. Awkward, eh? Lady Torrent’s going to turn the screw a bit, eh? It’s not to be expected that she would do anything else. But what can I do about it, Cynthia?”

  Cynthia Saxemundham looked at him with displeasure. She remembered that he never would wrap things up decently, and just do what he was wanted to do without asking what it was.

  “You are going to amuse yourself at Emperor’s Gate to-morrow, aren’t you?...Well, then!”

  Marchmont whistled again. Then he grinned with a cynical enjoyment, as he contemplated the wistful, slender angel in front of him.

  “You want me to steal ’em, eh?”

  Cynthia looked hurt.

  “‘Steal’ isn’t the right word to use. Lady Torrent stole them. I want you to recover them.”

  Colonel Marchmont’s grin broadened. He was, after all, being offered a form of sport which would certainly have its difficulties and might have some thrills.

  “I’ll try. How many days have we got?”

  “I am expected to dinner on Thursday week. Lady Torrent won’t move before then.”

  “We have ten days, then. I’ll examine the ground to-morrow night,” said Colonel Marchmont. He shook hands with his hostess and amusement suddenly twinkled in his eyes. “Cynthia, what a fool you have made of me!” he cried.

  He went out of the house, and Cynthia Saxemundham heard him laughing aloud to himself as he went down the steps. She in her turn began to giggle. After all, she was not so sure that she had lost so much by her confession as she had predicted to her secretary. On the whole she was inclined to like him better as her cynical partner in the chase after her vanishing reputation than as the blindfold adorer in front of the snow-white statue.

  She found her secretary in the study.

  “I think he’ll do it, Muriel,” she said gaily.

  Muriel clasped her hands together in relief.

  “What a thing it is to have a man like that on his knees to you,” she exclaimed.

  “He has got up off his knees,” said the Duchess dryly.

  IV

  Colonel Marchmont found his quest so easy of accomplishment that he could not suppress an uneasy feeling that somewhere there must be a catch in it. He went to the big house in Emperor’s Gate early, and excusing himself to the butler on the ground that he had misread the time on his card of invitation, was shown into a quite empty drawing-room. His hostess had not yet come down from her dressing. On the other hand, she had left some evidence of how she had been engaged before she had gone up.

  For lying open upon a couch was a large and luxurious illustrated volume bound in vellum and gold.

  Marchmont glanced at the open page and laughed. Lady Torrent was altogether too easy an antagonist. For the book was The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and the particular tale which lay open was that famous story of diplomacy and the police, “The Purloined Letter.” Colonel Marchmont knew it almost by heart: how the Minister D got the whip hand of a Royal Personage by stealing a letter, and how he concealed it successfully against the minutest investigations of the police by placing it in an obvious position under their very noses. These details flashed at once into his mind. The conclusion from these premises was as obvious to Marchmont as the hiding-place of the Purloined Letter had been to Poe’s anlytical investigator. Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin.

  “Lady Torrent has taken a leaf out of this book,” he said to himself, “and the love-letters of Hairy-heels are not hidden in some locked cabinet or secret drawer where a clever burglar might find them, but in some commonplace receptacle in a public place where no one would for an instant think of looking for them — the dining-room, for instance, or here.”

  He began to move about the room, not touching anything, but taking note of everything. Hunting expeditions in thick jungles had not merely sharpened his vision, but given to it accuracy. His survey, therefore, was as complete as it was rapid.

  There were between twenty and thirty of the incriminating letters. Clearly the ordinary little toys and porcelain boxes of a drawing-room would not contain them. There remained two other objects — a handsome onyx cigarette-box on a side-table by the fireplace, and another, a cheap affair of painted wood, fashioned in the shape of a tiny travelling-trunk and fastened with a trumpery lock. It needed just the inscription “A Present from Switzerland” to complete it.

  “Now, what in the world is a thing like that doing here?” he asked.

  It stood in the centre of a round rosewood table which was pushed into a corner of the room, and about it were arranged a miniature, a tortoiseshell paper-knife set in gold, some silver ashtrays, a second cigarette-box, this time of silver, and one or two small pieces of Battersea enamel. Marchmont took a seat on the opposite side of the room.

  “She has followed the example of Monsieur D — too faithfully,” he reasoned. “That wooden box is too commonplace, too inconsiderable. She has given her self away by it. If the letters are in this room at all, they are there.”

  He was confirmed in his belief a moment afterwards when Lady Torrent on entering the room saw the book, and made a perceptible movement of annoyance. She closed it and put it away whilst Marchmont once more made his excuses, and her eyes glanced guiltily towards the Swiss wooden box and back again to his face.

  “The great thing is that you are here,” she said, “and I hope that you are not going to run away after dinner; for a good many amusing people are coming in, and the garden will be lit up.”

  Marchmont once more felt that the gods were smiling upon his adventure; for this room at odd moments in the evening would certainly be empty, and a throng of guests would make it difficult for his hostess afterwards to select the criminal.

  He had no further conversation with her until after dinner, when she sat down beside him and, with the dreadful habit which ruled her out of the company of great ladies, asked him eagerly what he had been doing, and, whilst he answered, gave her attention to the movements of her other guests.

  “It must have been charming,” she said as he told of an encounter with a crocodile.

  “It was indeed,” said he, and she rose abruptly and crossed the room; for two young people were standing by the rosewood table and bending over the miniature by the side of the Swiss box.

  In a few minutes the lanterns began to glow in the garden, and the increasing throng began to seek the coolness of the summer night.

  It was just a London garden — a square of lawn, a stone-paved path, a few lilac bushes and shrubs, and a border of flowers; but the lanterns were so arranged that a pleasant sense of great space was given, and the dingy walls which surrounded it were lost in shadows. Marchmont followed with the rest of the company, and noticed with satisfaction that from the house-door to the stone pavement four steps led down. The windows of the drawing-room were then well above the level of the garden, and Marchmont made sure that only from the far side of the lawn could the interior of the room be seen. He was safe, then, for Lady Torrent w
as busily engaged at the very bottom of the steps in receiving the fresh groups of people who had come on from theatres and dinners.

  Marchmont slipped back into the house at a moment when Lady Torrent was surrounded.

  The drawing-room was empty. In a second the wooden box was under his coat and he in the passage. His heart was beating now quickly enough to satisfy his thirst for adventure. He felt a mad desire to thrust his way out of the house just as he stood. But he must control himself to nonchalance; he must fetch his overcoat and his hat without haste. He must stand in front of the little counter, hiding the box beneath his arm, and wait his turn whilst other guests who were coming had their coats folded and packed away. It seemed a century before his were found and handed to him.

  He sauntered upstairs again with his coat over his arm and was approached by the butler. But the butler only said:

  “Shall I get you a taxi, sir?”

  “I’ll pick one up,” Marchmont replied, and hoped that the man had not noticed his gasp of relief.

  Twenty yards from the front door, he stopped a passing cab and gave the Duchess’s address.

  “That’s that,” said he as he tucked the box away in the folds of his topcoat; and ten minutes later he produced it in the Duchess’s study.

  “I think they’re in that box,” he said.

  Cynthia Saxemundham seized upon it.

  “It’s locked,” she said, and she shook the box. “There’s something inside. We must break it open.”

  “No,” said Marchmont. “Any little key will open it; and if it’s not broken, we can return it through the post.”

  A bunch of little keys was found in a drawer of the bureau. With eager fingers Cynthia Saxemundham tried them.

  “Oh, I’ll never be such a fool again,” she said, and as she tried the third key the lock yielded, the lid flew open.

  Cynthia uttered a little cry of delight. A sheaf of letters tied up in a carefully sealed ribbon met her gaze.

  “Yes, they are here, untampered with,” she cried, and she turned the box upside down and shook them out on to the table.

  But she shook something else out too, something which rattled, and both of them stared at it, shocked out of all their glee. Under the letters at the bottom of the box had lain a string of pearls. It was now on the top of them on the table, milkily gleaming — dangerous to both of them as some white adder.

  Cynthia for the moment understood only the embarrassment of finding the pearls there.

  “They are valuable — they must be returned, of course,” she said; but she looked up and saw Marchmont staring at her with a look of consternation in his eyes.

  “It’s a trap, you see, Cynthia,” he said, “and I have walked straight into it.”

  “A trap?”

  “Yes. I found it so ridiculously easy to locate your letters. I was meant to find it easy. Lady Torrent knows I am your friend. She expected me to come early. The open volume of Poe, her annoyance when she found it open, her quick glances towards the box, her anxiety lest anyone should touch it — they were all meant for me, all meant to persuade me to do just what I did, slip the box under my coat and bolt with it. I am a real thief now, you see. I have stolen her necklace. I can be arrested, tried, imprisoned.”

  “No!” cried Cynthia, “I have only to come forward and explain—”

  “Exactly — that’s what she’s after; that you should explain in the witness-box before a crowded court that you had sent me to recover the letters which had passed between you and your lover. She’s out for blood, Cynthia. She doesn’t want you in her house on Thursday week. She wants you smashed for good and all.”

  Cynthia Saxemundham threw up her hands in the air.

  “The impudence of the woman!” she cried scornfully.

  “Yes, that won’t help us,” returned Marchmont.

  Cynthia’s thoughts took another direction.

  “She daren’t risk it! She would have to admit that she was blackmailing me to come and dine with her.”

  Colonel Marchmont shook his head gloomily.

  “Would that stop her?” he asked. “There are lots of women who, once they see red, wouldn’t mind coming an almighty crash if they could bring their enemy down with them.”

  “Enemy!” Cynthia exclaimed. It was doing altogether too much honour to Lady Torrent to allow that she could consider the Duchess of Saxemundham as her enemy. She fingered the gleaming necklace. “Couldn’t you go back now and quietly return it?”

  “She has laid her plans so thoroughly, that she must have foreseen that I might try to do that,” Marchmont answered. “I am willing to bet that there’s a policeman already waiting outside the house. I should never be allowed to enter the house. I should be arrested in the street with the damned thing in my pocket.”

  “Anyway, Henry,” said the Duchess stubbornly, “I am not going to let you go to prison on my account.”

  “And I’m not going to let you go into the witness-box,” he returned. “So there we are!”

  There they were indeed. They sat in a miserable silence, each one casting about vainly for an escape from their predicament, when they heard a car stop at the door, and a latchkey turn in the lock.

  “Muriel!” said Cynthia Saxemundham. “There’s no reason why she should see these things.”

  She threw the letters into the grate and set fire to them.

  “Muriel,” said Marchmont in quite a different note. He went to the door of the room and opened it.

  Muriel Chalmers, in an evening gown, was already half-way up the stairs. She turned and asked:

  “Do you want me?”

  “Badly,” said the Colonel.

  Muriel Chalmers ran down again eagerly. She was to be allowed to help after all.

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  The letters were blazing and curling up and turning black, while the Duchess on her knees beat them into tattered fragments with the poker. The necklace and the wooden box still stood upon the table.

  “Let’s consider,” said Marchmont.

  The three of them sat about the table.

  “Do you know Lady Torrent?” he asked of Muriel.

  “No.”

  “But you have written to her?”

  “I have answered invitations.”

  “In your own name?”

  “No.”

  Here the Duchess interrupted. She saw the way out too, and her face was alight.

  “Muriel can take a false name.”

  “No,” Marchmont expostulated. “This time we’ll remember Sir Hugo’s advice. Let her go in her own!” He turned again to Muriel Chalmers. “Do you know really well any of these people?” and he recited the names of the guests at Lady Torrent’s party.

  In a moment or two Muriel stopped him.

  “Yes, Mrs. Daventry. She’s a friend of mine.”

  “Good!”

  Marchmont looked at the clock. The hands pointed to midnight. The party at Emperor’s Gate would be in full swing. Muriel was to take the box and the necklace and drive to the house. She would be shown upstairs to leave her cloak. She was to tuck the box and the necklace away somewhere — anywhere — in the room into which she was shown. She was to come down again. She was to give her real name to the butler, who would lead her into the garden. If Lady Torrent was still at her post she was to say boldly that Mrs. Daventry had asked her to join her there. If Lady Torrent wasn’t still on duty, then Muriel must find Mrs. Daventry for herself, and persuade her to say that she had asked Muriel to join her.

  “Will she do that, without asking you questions?” Marchmont asked.

  “Certainly.”

  “Otherwise I’ll give you a note to her. For I know her very well myself,” said the Duchess, beginning to rise from her chair.

  But once more Henry Marchmont interposed.

  “No, for heaven’s sake! No letters! Let’s stick to Sir Hugo. The only real danger is that Muriel may be presented to Lady Torrent when she is actually talking to
Mrs. Daventry. But we must leave it to her to make the best of it.”

  That catastrophe, however, did not occur. Muriel drove off to Emperor’s Gate in a taxi. She was shown upstairs to an empty room heaped with cloaks. She found a knee-hole writing-table in a bay-window, and into the bottom drawer on the left-hand side she thrust the box with the necklace. Coming downstairs, she gave her name to the butler and followed him into the garden. The butler looked round the dim garden, with its groups of people mingling and changing like a kaleidoscope.

  “Her ladyship is, I think, in the supper-room,” he said.

  “I’ll find her, then, sooner or later,” said Muriel lightly, and she sped across the lawn. For she had seen Mrs. Daventry shaking hands with a man as though she was bidding him farewell.

  “You asked me to join you here,” said Muriel, with determination.

  “I did, no doubt,” answered Mrs. Daventry, who was not easily surprised; “but I am going away now.”

  “That is all to the good,” said Muriel; and five minutes later she had left the house in Mrs. Daventry’s motor-car.

  Thus the restitution was made, and not a soul in Lady Torrent’s establishment was ever aware that the Duchess of Saxemundham’s secretary had been present that night as an uninvited guest.

  But Lieut.-Colonel Henry Marchmont, with a tail of decorations at the end of his name, was arrested the next morning for the theft of a valuable pearl necklace.

  V

  He was brought before the Chief Magistrate at Bow Street. Lady Torrent had the most convincing story to tell.

  “I wore my pearls in the afternoon,” she said, “and whilst I was having tea the clasp got loose and the pearls dropped from my neck on to the floor, I picked them up and placed them in a little wooden box on the table, which I locked. I meant to take the box upstairs when I went up to dress, but some friends came in and made me late. I ran upstairs in a hurry, forgetting about the box. When I descended, Colonel Marchmont was in the room. I told him of my misadventure whilst we were waiting for the other guests. Later on, when we were all in the garden, he was seen by two of my servants to enter the drawing-room. One of them watched him through the crack of the door and saw him with the box under his coat. He left the house immediately afterwards.”