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Chapter Twenty Seven
From a Woman’s Lips
The handsome, dark-haired girl had placed her hand upon my arm, and stood with her eyes anxiously fixed upon mine.
“Do you really mean this?” she asked, in a hoarse, strained voice.
“I have told you quite frankly my intention,” was my answer. “I know that scoundrel – in fact I am myself a witness against Him.”
“In what manner?” she asked naïvely.
“That man is one of a clever gang of thieves who for years have eluded the police,” I replied. “In England he lives in security in a Cornish village under the name of Gordon-Wright, while here, on the Continent, he frequents the best hotels, and with his friends makes enormous hauls of money and jewels.”
“A thief!” she exclaimed, with amazement that I thought well feigned. “And can you really actually prove this?”
“The coward robbed a friend of mine who, being ill, could not take care of himself,” I said. “I have only to say one single word to the nearest police office and they will arrest him wherever he may be. And now, to speak quite openly, I tell you that I mean to do this.”
“You will have him arrested?”
“Yes, and by so doing I shall at least save Ella. The thing is really very simple after all. I intend to defy him. Ella is mine and he shall not snatch her from me.”
“Then you know him – I mean you knew him before I introduced you?” she asked, after a brief pause.
“I know him rather too well,” I answered meaningly. “It is curious, Miss Miller,” I added, “that your father should be the intimate friend of a man of such bad reputation. He surely cannot be aware of his true character.”
She knit her brows again, for she saw that she was treading on dangerous ground. She was not an adventuress herself but a sweet and charming girl, yet I had no doubt but that she participated in her father’s many guilty secrets. Perhaps it was her easy-going cosmopolitan air that suggested this, or perhaps it may have been owing to her earnest desire that Ella should marry that man, and thus be prevented from betraying what she had learnt on that fateful night at Studland.
“Dear old dad always makes friends far too easily,” was her evasive reply, the response of a clever woman. “I’ve told him so lots of times. Travelling so much as he does, half over Europe, he is for ever making new acquaintances, and queer ones they are, too, sometimes, I can tell you. We’ve had visitors here, in this flat, of all grades, from broken-down English jockeys and music hall artists trying to borrow their fare third-class back to England, to lords, earls, Stock Exchange men and company promoters whose names are as household words in the halfpenny papers. Yet I suppose it’s so with many men. They are big-hearted, make friends easily, and everybody takes advantage of their hospitality. It is so with my father. All his friends impose on him without exception.”
“Well, it’s a pity that he’s intimate with the man I knew as Lieutenant Shacklock, for when he is in the hands of the police some curious revelations will be made – revelations that will reveal the existence of a most ingenious and daring Continental gang. You see,” I added, with a smile, “I’m not making a mere idle statement – I know. These men once robbed a friend of mine, and it is only just to him that, having discovered Shacklock, I should give information against him.”
“You mean you will win Ella by freeing her of that man?” said my companion, apparently following me for the first time.
“Exactly. If he holds any secret of hers, he is quite welcome to speak. Neither I nor Ella will fear anything, you may depend upon that. A man of his stamp always seeks some low-down revenge. It is only what may be expected. Perhaps I may as well tell you that I recognised him when you introduced us, and that I have already been down to Cornwall and seen the smug scoundrel at his home. He’s a church-warden, a parish councillor and all the rest of it, and the people believe he’s worth thousands. He poses as a philanthropist in a mild way, opens local bazaars, and makes speeches in support of the local habitation of the Primrose League. All this is to me most amusing. The fellow little dreams that he sits upon the edge of a volcano that to-morrow may engulf him – as it certainly must.”
“But is this worth while – to denounce such a man? You’ll be compelled to support your allegations,” she said.
“Oh! I can do that, never fear,” I laughed. “I shall bring his victim forward – the man he robbed so heartlessly. English juries have no compassion for the swell-mobsman or the elegant hotel-thief.”
I watched her face as I spoke, and saw the effect my words were having upon her. If I denounced him her own father would at once be implicated. Hers were alarming apprehensions, no doubt.
I saw that I was gradually gaining the whip-hand over circumstance. She recognised now that her father was in deadly peril of exposure.
And yet did she know the truth, after all? If she actually knew that the young Chilian Carrera, the man she loved when they lived outside Paris, had met with his death through her own father’s treachery, she surely would not hold him in such esteem.
Yet was it likely that such skilled scoundrels as the mysterious Miller, Milner – or whatever he chose to call himself – and Gordon-Wright alias Lieutenant Harold Shacklock would risk exposure by betraying their true occupation to a sweet high-minded girl such as Lucie really was? Had she been their decoy; had there, indeed, been any suspicion that she had assisted them in their clever conspiracies of fraud then it would have been different.
There was, however, no suspicion except that she had spoken of her father’s “secret,” which she feared that Ella had learned when she overheard her father’s conversation with his friend. That was a curious and unaccountable feature. She knew that her father held some secret that was shared by Gordon-Wright, that gallant ladies’-man who had wormed himself into the confidence of so many English and American women travelling on Continental railways, women whose jewels and valuables had subsequently disappeared.
She, however, held her father in the highest regard and esteem, and that fact in itself was sufficient to convince me that she was after all in ignorance of his true profession.
She might have entertained suspicions of the lieutenant, suspicions that were verified by the denunciation I had just made, but as I looked into her pale dark face I could not bring myself to believe that she knew her father’s true source of income. There was some secret of her fathers, a secret that she knew must be kept at any cost. It was that which she feared Ella might betray, and for that reason she deemed it best that my love should be allowed to become the false lieutenant’s wife.
Thus I argued within myself as I stood there beside her with the blood-red light of the dying day streaming in from across the sea.
I recollected Sammy’s warning; I recollected, too, the strange circumstances of Nardini’s death in Shepherd’s Bush, and of what had been told me by this woman now at my side. She was doomed, she said – and, true enough, there was black despair written in that dark face, now so pale and agitated.
She was as much a mystery as she had been on that first day when we had met – even though through her instrumentality the mystery of my well-beloved’s self-effacement had actually been cleared up.
That she detested the lieutenant had been palpable from the first mention I had made of him. Therefore I argued that she suspected him of playing her father false, even though she might be unaware of their real relationship. Indeed it was not natural for a father of Miller’s stamp to allow his daughter to know of his shameful calling. She had told me that she remained at home with old Marietta – the grey-haired Tuscan woman who had admitted me – while her father travelled hither and thither across Europe. Those unscrupulous “birds of prey,” known to the police as international thieves, migrate in flocks, travelling swiftly from one frontier to another and ever eluding the vigilance of the agents in search of them. The international thief is a veritable artist in crime, the cleverest and most audacious scoundrel of the whole criminal fraternity.
“I quite understand your feelings and all that you must suffer, Mr Leaf,” she said at last in a mechanical voice. “I know how deeply you love Ella, and, after all that has passed, it is not in the least surprising that you will not stand by and see her married to such a man as Gordon-Wright. Yet is it really prudent to act without carefully considering every point? That she is about to become that man’s wife shows that she is in his power – that he possesses some mysterious hold over her. And suppose you denounced him to the police, would he not, on his part, revenge himself upon her?”
“Probably. But I will risk that.”
“Personally I think that Ella will be the greater sufferer from such an injudicious action.”
Curious. Her words bore out exactly what Ella herself had said. Yet she surely could know nothing of the secret between them. Until half an hour ago, when I had told her, she was not even aware that Gordon-Wright was acquainted with the woman who had been betrothed to me.
“But I do not intend that she shall fall the victim of this adventurer,” I said quickly, for I recognised in her words a fear that her father’s secret might be exposed.
“If he really possesses a hold over her sufficient to compel her to marry him, any attempt to rescue her may only cause her complete ruin,” she said. “Have you any idea of the nature of this extraordinary influence he seems to have over her?”
“None. I am in entire ignorance.”
“When we met that night at Studland I certainly was deceived,” she went on. “I believed that she was beside herself with delight at finding you again, and still unmarried – I never dreamed that she was engaged to another – and to Gordon-Wright of all men.”
“Why do you say ‘of all men’?”
“Because – well, because he’s the last man a girl of her stamp should marry.”
“Then you know more about him than you care to admit, Miss Miller?”
“We need not discuss him,” was her brief answer. “It is Ella we have to think of, not of him.”
“Yes,” I said, “we have to think of her – to extricate her from the horrible fate that threatens her – marriage to a scoundrel.” Then turning again to my pretty companion I said, in a voice intended to be more confidential: “Now, Miss Miller, your position and mine are, after all, very curious. Though we have been acquainted so short a time, yet the fact of your having been Ella’s most intimate friend has cemented our own friendship to an extraordinary degree. We have exchanged confidences as old friends, and I have told you the secrets of my heart. Yet you, on your part, have not been exactly open with me. You are still concealing from me certain facts which, if you would but reveal, would, I know, assist me in releasing Ella from her bondage. Why do you not speak plainly? I have travelled here, across Europe, to beg of you to tell me the truth,” I added, looking straight into her pale serious face.
“How can I tell you the truth when I am ignorant of it myself?” she protested.
“What I have told you this evening concerning Ella’s engagement to that blackguard has surprised you, and it has also shown you that the mysterious secret of your father’s of which you have spoken may be imperilled, eh?”
She nodded. Then, after some hesitation, she said: – “Not only that, but something further. That Gordon-Wright should aspire to Ella’s hand is utterly mystifying.”
“Why?”
“Well – you recollect what I told you regarding – regarding that man who died in the house where you were living in London,” she said, in a low, faltering voice.
“You mean the ex-Minister of Justice, Nardini?”
She nodded an affirmative.
“I remember perfectly all that you told me. He refused to speak the truth concerning you.”
“He laughed in my face when I asked him to make a confession that would save me,” she said hoarsely, her dark eyes flashing with a dangerous fire. “He was a coward; he sacrificed me, a woman, because he feared to speak the truth. Ah!” she cried, clenching her hands, “you see me here wearing a mask of calm and tranquillity, but within my heart is a volcano of bitterness, of scorn for that wretched embezzler who carried his secret to the grave.”
“I can quite understand it, and fully sympathise with you,” I said, in a kindly tone, recollecting all that had passed between us after she had discovered the mysterious Italian dead in that upstairs room at Shepherd’s Bush. “But I hope you are not still disturbed over what may, after all, be merely an ungrounded fear?”
“Ungrounded!” she cried. “Ah! would to Heaven it were ungrounded. No. The knowledge that the blow must fall upon me sooner or later – to-day, to-morrow, in six months’ time, or in six years – holds me ever breathless in terror. Each morning when I wake I know not whether I shall again return to my bed, or whether my next sleep will be within the grave.”
“No, no,” I protested, “don’t speak like this. It isn’t natural.” But I saw how desperate she had now become.
“I intend to cheat them out of their revenge,” she said, in a low whisper, the red glow of the sundown falling full upon her haggard face. “They shall never triumph over me in life. With my corpse they may do as they think proper.”
“They? Who are they?”
“Shall I tell you?” she cried, her starting eyes fixing themselves upon mine. “That man Gordon-Wright is one of them.”
“He is your enemy?” I gasped.
“One of my bitterest. He believes I am in ignorance, but fortunately I discovered his intention. I told Nardini, and yet he refused to speak. He knew the peril in which I existed, and yet, coward that he was, he only laughed in my face. He fled from Rome. I followed him to England only to discover that, alas! he was dead – that he had preserved his silence.”
“It was a blackguardly thing,” I declared. “And this fellow, Gordon-Wright, or whatever he calls himself, though your father’s friend, is at the same time your worst enemy?”
“That is unfortunately so, even though it may appear strange. To me he is always most charming, indeed no man could be more gallant and polite, but I know what is lurking behind all that pleasant exterior.”
“And yet you are opposed to me going to the police and exposing him?” I said in surprise.
“I am opposed to anything that must, of necessity, reflect upon both Ella and myself,” was her answer. “Remember the lieutenant knows that you and I are acquainted. I introduced him to you. If you denounced him as a thief he would at once conclude that you and I had conspired to effect his ruin and imprisonment.”
“Well – and if he did?”
“If he did, my own ruin would only be hastened,” she said. “Ah! Mr Leaf, you have no idea of the strange circumstances which conspired to place me in the critical position in which I to-day find myself. Though young in years and with an outward appearance of brightness, I have lived a veritable lifetime of woe and despair,” she went on, in a voice broken by emotion.
“In those happy days at Enghien I loved – in those sweetest days of all my life I believed that happiness was to be mine always. Alas! it was so short-lived that now, when I recall it, it only seems like some pleasant dream. My poor Manuel died and I was left alone with a heritage of woe that gradually became a greater burden as time went on, and I was drawn into the net that was so cleverly spread for me – because I was young, because I was, I suppose, good-looking, because I was inexperienced in the wickedness of the world. Ah! when I think of it all, when I think how one word from Giovanni Nardini would have liberated me and showed the world that I was what I was, an honest woman, I am seized by a frenzy of hatred against him, as against that man Gordon-Wright – the man who knows the truth and intends to profit by it, even though I sacrifice my own life rather than face their lying denunciation without power to defend myself. Ah! you cannot understand. You can never understand!” and her eyes glowed with a thirst for revenge upon the dead man who had so unscrupulously thrust her back into that peril so deadly that she was hourly prepared to take her own life without compunction and without regret.
“But all this astounds me,” I said, in deep sympathy. “I am your friend, Miss Miller,” I went on, taking her slim hand in mine and holding it as I looked her straight in the face. “This man, Gordon-Wright, is, we find, our mutual enemy. Cannot you explain to me the whole circumstances? Our interests are mutual. Let us unite against this man who holds you, as well as my loved one, in his banal power! Tell me the truth. You have been compromised. How?”
She paused, her hand trembled in mine, and great tears coursed slowly down her white cheeks. She was reflecting whether she dare reveal to me the ghastly truth.
Her thin lips trembled, but at first no word escaped them. Laughter and the sound of gaiety came up from the promenade below.
I stood there in silence in the soft fading light await her confession – confession surely of one of the strangest truths that has ever been told by the lips of any woman.
Chapter Twenty Eight
The Voice in the Street
At last she spoke.
But in those moments of reflection her determination had apparently become more fixed than ever.
Either she feared to confess lest she should imperil her father, or else she became seized with a sense of shame that would not allow her to condemn herself.
“No,” she said, in a firm voice, “I have already told you sufficient, Mr Leaf. My private affairs cannot in the least interest you.”
My heart sank within me, for I had hoped that she would reveal to me the truth. I was fighting in the dark an enemy whose true strength I could not gauge. The slightest ray of light would be of enormous advantage to me, yet she steadily withheld it, even though she lived in hourly danger, knowing not when, by force of circumstances, she might be driven to the last desperate step.
She was a woman of strong character, to say the least, although so sweet, graceful and altogether charming.
I was disappointed at her blank refusal, and she saw it.
“If it would assist you to extricate Ella, I would tell you,” she assured me quickly. “But it would not.”
“Any fact to the scoundrel’s detriment is of interest to me,” I declared.
“But you have already said that you yourself are a witness against him,” she remarked. “What more do you want? The evidence which you and your friend whom you say he robbed could give would be sufficient to send him to prison, would it not?”
“I know. But I must prove more. Remember he has entrapped my Ella. She is struggling helplessly in the web which he has woven about her.”
“Much as I regret all the circumstances, Mr Leaf, I can see that it is against my own interests if I say anything further,” was her calm reply. “I have already given you an outline of the strange combination of circumstances and the unscrupulousness of two villains which has resulted in my present terrible position of doubt in the present and uncertainty of the future. The story, if I related it, would sound too strange to you to be the truth. And yet it only illustrates the evil that men do, even in these prosaic modern days.”
“Then you intend to again leave me in ignorance, even though my love’s happiness is at stake?”
“My own life is also at stake.”
“And yet you refuse to allow me to assist you – you decline to tell me the truth by which I could confound this man who is your bitterest enemy!”
“Because it is all hopeless,” was her answer. “Had Nardini but spoken, I could have defied him. His refusal has sealed my doom,” she added, in a voice of blank despair.
“But your words are so mysterious I can’t understand them!” I declared, filled with chagrin at her refusal to make any statement. She was in fear of me, that was evident. Why, I could not for the life of me discern.
“I have merely told you the brief facts. The details you would find far more puzzling.”
“Then to speak frankly, although you have never openly quarrelled with the lieutenant, you fear him?”
“That is so. He can denounce me – I mean he can make a terrible charge against me which I am unable to refute,” she admitted breathlessly.
“And yet you will not allow me to help you! You disagree with my plan to denounce the scoundrel and let him take his well-deserved punishment! I must say I really can’t understand you,” I declared.
“Perhaps not to-day. But some day you will discern the reason why I decline to confess to you the whole truth,” was her firm reply.
And I looked at her slim tragic figure in silence and in wonder.
What was the end to be? Was she aware that her father was the leader of that association of well-dressed thieves, or was she in ignorance of it? That was a question I could not yet decide.
I thought of Ella – my own Ella. It was she whom I had determined to save. That was my duty; a duty to perform before all others, and in defiance of all else. She loved me. She had admitted that. Therefore I would leave no stone unturned on her behalf, no matter how it might affect the stubbornly silent girl at my side.
I saw that I could not serve them both. Ella was my chief thought. She should, in future, be my only thought.
“I much regret all this,” I said to Lucie somewhat coldly. “And pardon me for saying so, but I think that if you had spoken frankly this evening much of the trouble in the future would be saved. But as you are determined to say nothing, I am simply compelled to act as I think best in Ella’s interests.”
“Act just as you will, Mr Leaf,” was her rather defiant response. “I trust, however, you will do nothing rash nor injudicious – nothing that may injure her, instead of benefit her. As for myself, to hope to assist me is utterly out of the question. The die is cast. Nardini intended that disgrace and death should fall upon me, or he would have surely spoken,” and sighing hopelessly she added: “I have only to await the end, and pray that it will not be long in coming. This suspense I cannot bear much longer, looking as I daily do into the open grave which, on the morrow, may be mine. Heaven knows the tortures I endure, the bitter regrets, the mad hatred, the wistful longing for life and happiness, those two things that never now can be mine. Place yourself in my position, and try and imagine that whatever may be your life, there is but one sudden and shameful end – suicide.”
“You look upon things in far too morbid a light,” I declared, not, however, without some sympathy. ”There is a bright lining to every cloud’ the old adage says. Try and look forward to that.”
She shook her head despairingly.
“No,” she answered, with a short bitter laugh. “Proverbs are for the prosperous – not for the condemned.”
I remained with her for some time longer, trying in vain to induce her to reveal the truth. In her stubborn refusal I recognised her determination to conceal some fact concerning her father, yet whether she knew the real truth or not I was certainly unable to determine.
The revelation that Ella was acquainted with Gordon-Wright alias the Lieutenant held her utterly confounded. She seemed to discern in it an increased peril for herself, and yet she would tell me nothing – absolutely nothing.
The situation was tantalising – nay maddening. I intended to save my well-beloved at all costs, yet how was I to do so?
To denounce the adventurer would, she had herself declared, only bring ruin upon her. Therefore my hands were tied and the cowardly blackguard must triumph.
The soft Italian twilight fell, and the street lamps along the broad promenade below were everywhere springing up, while to the right the high stone lighthouse, that beacon to the mariner in the Mediterranean, shot its long streams of white light far across the darkening sea.
From one of the open-air café-chantants in the vicinity came up the sound of light music and the trill of a female voice singing a French chansonette, for a rehearsal was in progress. And again a youth passing chanted gaily one of those stornelli d’amore which is heard everywhere in fair Tuscany, in the olive groves, in the vineyards, in the streets, in the barracks, that ancient half dirge, half-plaintive song, the same that has been sung for ages and ages by the youths in love: —
Mazzo di fiori!
Si vede il viso, e non si vede il core
Tu se’ un bel viso, ma non m’innamori.
Lucie heard the words and smiled.
The song just described my position at that moment. I saw her face but could not see her heart. She was beautiful, but not my love.
And as the voice died away we heard the words: —
Fiume di Lete!
Come la calamita mi tirate,
E mi fate venir dove velete.
Old Marietta, the Tuscan sewing-woman, entered and lit the gas. She looked askance at me, wondering why I remained there so long I expect.
“It is growing late,” I exclaimed in Italian; “I must go. It is your dinner-hour,” and glancing round the room, carpetless, as all Italian rooms are in summer, I saw that it was cheaply furnished with that inartistic taste which told me at once that neither she nor her father had chosen it. It struck me that they had bought the furniture just as it had stood from some Italian, perhaps the previous occupier.
Old Marietta was a pleasant, grey-faced old woman in cheap black who wore large gold rings in her ears and spoke with the pleasant accent of Siena, and who, I saw, was devoted to her young mistress.
“This is Mr Leaf,” she explained in Italian. “He is an English friend of my father’s.” Then turning to me she said, laughing, “Marietta always likes to know who’s who. All Italians are so very inquisitive about the friends of their padrone.”
The old woman smiled, showing her yellow teeth and wished me buona sera, to which I replied in her own tongue, for the position of servants in Italy is far different from their position with us. Your Tuscan house-woman is part of the family, and after a few years of faithful service is taken into the family council, consulted upon everything, controls expenditure, makes bargains, and is, to her padrone, quite indispensable. Old Marietta was a typical donna di casa, one of those faithful patient women with a sharp tongue to all the young men who so continuously ran after the young padrona, and only civil to me because I was a friend of the “signore.”
She was shrewd enough to continue to be present at our leave-taking, though it was doubtful whether she knew English sufficiently to understand what passed between us. I saw that Marietta intended I should go, therefore I wished her young padrona adieu.
She held her breath for a moment as our hands clasped, and I saw in her brown eyes a look of blank despair.
“Be courageous,” I said, in a low voice. “The future may not hold for you such terrors as you believe.”
“Future!” she echoed. “I have no future. Addio.” And I went down the wide, ill-lit stone staircase full of dismal foreboding, and out from the secret lair of the thief who was notorious, but whom the police of Europe had always failed to arrest.
