Chapter Forty Two.
Advances a Theory
Next day, and the next, Charlie called upon the British Minister, but could obtain no further information.
Sir Charles had failed to establish his suspicion, and therefore declined to say anything further.
Rolfe, on his part, had learned from Drukovitch the full details of the dastardly attempt upon the Doctor’s life at Topschieder, and how the little child had been blown to atoms. The escape of Petrovitch had been little short of miraculous, and it was now whispered that the conspiracy had no political significance, but was an act of private vengeance.
Whatever its motive might have been, it had had the desired effect of preventing the Doctor from returning to Servia.
In various quarters Rolfe made diligent inquiry, and established without a doubt that Maud Petrovitch had within the past ten days or so been in Belgrade.
A young officer of the King’s guard, a Lieutenant Yankovitch, had seen her in the Zar Duschanowa Uliza. He described her as wearing a white serge gown and a big black hat. She was walking with a short, elderly, grey-haired woman, undoubtedly a foreigner – English or American. He was marching with his company, or would have stopped and spoken to her.
Another person discovered by Drukovitch was a domestic who had once been in the Doctor’s service. She declared that early one morning when going from her home to the house in the Krunska where she was now employed, she met her young mistress Maud with the same elderly woman – a woman rather shabbily-dressed. The pair were passing the Russian Legation, and she stopped and spoke.
The young lady had told her that she was only on a flying visit to Belgrade, and that she was leaving again on the morrow. To the servant’s inquiries regarding the Doctor his daughter was silent, as though she did not wish to mention her father.
According to the servant’s description. Mademoiselle Maud looked very wan and pale, as though she had passed many sleepless nights full of anxiety and dread.
The Prime Minister’s wife had no recollection of telling her husband about meeting the Doctor’s daughter. Somebody else must have mentioned it to the grey-bearded statesman, who, full of the cares of office, had forgotten who it had been.
A third person who had seen Maud, however, was one of the agents of secret police on duty at the railway station. It was this man’s work to watch arriving passengers, and detail agents to watch any suspected to be foreign spies. According to his report, made to the chief of police, Mademoiselle Petrovitch arrived in Belgrade late one night with an elderly Englishwoman and a tall, thin man, probably a German. They hired a cab and drove out to an address near the Botanical Gardens, on the opposite side of the city. Recognising who she was, he did not instruct an agent to follow her. The two ladies returned to the railway station four days later and left again by the Orient express for Budapest.
The officials of the international express, in passing through Servia, are compelled to furnish to the secret police the names and nationalities of all passengers travelling. When the train arrives in Belgrade the commissario is always handed the list, which is filed for reference. Upon the list on that particular day was shown the names of Mademoiselle Maud Pavlovitch, of Belgrade, and Mrs Wood, of London.
The girl had only slightly disguised her name.
These results of Charlie’s inquiry showed quite plainly that his well-beloved was alive, and that she had been in Servia with some secret object. The police were unaware of the exact address near the Botanical Gardens where the couple stayed. It is only within their province to watch suspected foreigners. Of Servians they take no account.
Therefore, beyond the facts already stated, Rolfe could discover nothing.
Day after day he remained in Belgrade, sometimes spending the afternoon by going for a trip across the Danube to that dull and rather uninteresting frontier town of Hungary, Semlin, and always hoping to be able to discover something further – some clue to the strange disappearance of the Doctor, or the real reason why his Maud was so determined to hold aloof from him.
Thrice he received wild telegrams from Max Barclay, asking for information as to where he might best seek news of Marion. News of her? Her brother was just as staggered by her disappearance as was her lover.
He telegraphed that she might perhaps be at the house of an old servant of their fathers at Boston, in Lincolnshire. But next day came a report despatched from Boston that the good man and his wife had heard nothing of their late master’s daughter.
Again to Bridlington he sent Max, to some friends there; but from that place came a similar response. Marion was, like Maud, in hiding! But why?
In the bright morning sunshine he strolled the streets, which were so full of quaint and interesting types. There in Belgrade, the gateway of the East, one saw the Servian peasant in his high boots, his white shirt worn outside his trousers, and his round, high cap of astrakhan. The better-class peasant wore his brown homespun, while the women with the gay coloured kerchiefs on their heads wore their heavy silver girdles and their ornaments reminiscent of the Turkish occupation. Big, burly men in scarlet waistbands and fur caps, women in pretty peasant costumes from the distant provinces, officers gay with ribbons and crosses, and ladies in gowns and hats that spoke mutely of Bond Street and the Rue de la Paix; all were seen in the ever moving panorama of that cosmopolitan little capital where East meets West.
The financial business which Charlie had come there to transact had already been concluded, to the mutual satisfaction of his Excellency the Prime Minister and of the grey-faced old misanthrope seated in the silent room in Park Lane. Many cables in cipher had been exchanged, and Charlie had placed his signature to half a dozen documents, which in due course would be countersigned with old Sam’s scrawly calligraphy. The stake of Statham Brothers in Servia represented considerably over one million sterling, and nobody had been more conscious of old Sam’s readiness to assist in the development of the country’s rich resources than his Majesty the King.
Upon a side table in Statham’s study in Park Lane was a big autographed portrait in a silver frame, which King Peter had given him at his last audience. Therefore it was with feelings of gratification that Charlie heard from the Minister-President’s lips the verbal message which the King had sent – a message of thanks to Mr Rolfe for doing all that he had done to arrive at a satisfactory arrangement whereby with English capital Servia’s wealth was to be exploited and work provided for her industrial population.
Though he knew that Maud Petrovitch was no longer in Belgrade, yet he still lingered on at the Grand Hotel amid all its clatter, its hustle, and its music. Truth to tell, he earnestly desired to obtain the truth from Sir Charles Harrison. For that dastardly attempt at Topschieder a friend of his was responsible!
It was the identity of the friend in question that he was deeply anxious to establish, so that in future he would know whom to doubt and whom to trust.
Was Max Barclay really his friend?
Hour upon hour he reflected upon that problem. He recollected incidents which, in his present state of mind, filled him with misgivings. Why had he openly charged him with having been present at the house in Cromwell Road after the disappearance of the Doctor and his daughter? Indeed, had he not practically charged him with opening the Doctor’s safe and abstracting its contents? He had not made the charge directly, it was true, but his remarks had certainly been made in a spirit of antagonistic suspicion.
A long letter from Max explained the sudden disappearance of Marion from Cunnington’s, and begged him to give all information regarding any likely quarter where the girl had sought refuge. It was now plain enough to Charlie that his sister had been discharged from the establishment in Oxford Street – and in disgrace! In what disgrace?
When he read the letter in his room at the hotel, he crushed it in his hand with an imprecation upon his lips. Cunnington should answer to him for this indignity. He would compel the fellow to tell him the truth. His sister’s honour was at stake.
Disgraced by her sudden discharge, she had disappeared. She had, no doubt, been ashamed to face the man who loved her, ashamed, too, to write to her brother. Instead, she preferred to go away and efface herself, as, alas! so many London shop-girls have done before her.
Charlie Rolfe knew the cruelty practised by many a shop-keeper in London in discharging their female employées at a moment’s notice. For a man it matters little. Perhaps, indeed, it is best for both parties. But for a helpless girl without friends, without money, and without home to be cast suddenly upon the great world of London, filled as it is with lures and temptations, is a grave sin which no tradesman ought to commit. And yet there are to-day in London and its suburbs hundreds of smug, top-hatted, frock-coated tradesmen, who, though pillars of their chapels and churches and stalking round the aisles with their plush collecting-bags on Sundays, will on six days in the week cast forth any poor girl in their employ without a grain of sympathy or compunction merely because she may break a rule, or even because she does not lie to customers sufficiently well to induce them to make purchases.
The general public are ignorant of the tyranny of shop-life in London. There have been strikes – strikes quickly suppressed because, by lifting his finger the employer is overwhelmed with assistants glad to live on a mere bread and butter wage – and those strikes have been treated humorously by the evening papers. Ah! the tragedy of it all.
Charles Rolfe, though secretary and trusted factotum of a millionaire, knew it all. His sister had been in a snug “billet,” one from which he had fondly believed she could never have been dislodged.
But the hard, bitter truth was now apparent. Even his own brotherly protection had availed her nothing. She had been consigned to disgrace.
It was with such bitter thoughts he resolved to return to London. He went to the telegraph office and sent a long message to Sam Statham, explanatory of what had occurred, and beseeching his intervention with Cunnington.
Through the night he waited, but received no response.
Then he went round in the morning to bid Sir Charles adieu.
“Well, Rolfe!” exclaimed the representative of the British Government; “I’m sorry you’re off so quickly. My wife was asking you to dine to-morrow night – usual weekly dinner, you know.”
“And have you discovered nothing regarding Petrovitch?” asked Charlie quickly.
“Well,” replied the diplomat, after a moment’s hesitation, “to tell the truth, I have.”
“You have!” gasped the young man eagerly. “What?” The other knit his brows, and was for a moment silent.
“Something – something!” he said, “that is astounding. I – I cannot give it credence. It is all too amazing – too tragic – too utterly incomprehensible.”
Chapter Forty Three.
The Lost Beloved
Weeks had dragged by. To Max Barclay they had been weeks of keen anxiety and unceasing search to discover traces of his lost beloved.
Once, and only once, had he seen Jean Adam, against whom Sam Statham had warned him. He had met the man of brilliant financial ideas by appointment at lunch at the Savoy, and had told him plainly that he had reconsidered the whole matter of the Turkish concession, and had decided to have nothing to do with it.
His excuse was lack of funds at that moment. To the old millionaire he owed a good deal for giving him the “tip” regarding the plausible Anglo-Frenchman. Adam, alias Adams, received Max’s decision without the alteration of a muscle of his face. He was a perfect actor, and betrayed no sign of surprise or of chagrin.
“Well, my dear fellow,” he remarked, raising his glass of Brauneberger and contemplating it before placing it to his lips; “you’re losing the chance of a lifetime. If Baron Hirsch had been alive he wouldn’t have allowed such a thing to slip. When old Statham knows of it he’ll move heaven and earth to come in.”
Max was silent. He did not allow his companion to know that Statham had been responsible for his refusal to join in the project.
“I’m sorry, too,” he said. “But just now I’m rather pressed. I was hard hit last week over those Siberians.”
“But the money required is a mere bagatelle. I have mine ready.”
“I regret,” answered Max, “but my decision is final.”
“Very well, my dear fellow,” replied Adam lightly. “I don’t want to persuade you. There are a thousand men in the City who’ll be ready to put up money to-morrow morning.”
And the pair finished their luncheon and parted, Adam, of course, entirely unsuspicious of the part Statham had played in upsetting his deeply-laid plans.
To every address which Marion’s brother had furnished he had gone at post-haste, only to draw blank every time. Charlie had, at Statham’s instructions, gone first to Constantinople, then to Odessa and Batoum, after which he had returned direct to London.
In Odessa he had been met by a special messenger from the London office bearing a number of documents, and his business in that city had occupied him nearly a fortnight. Therefore it was early in October when, arriving by the evening train at Charing Cross from Paris, he took a cab straight to Park Lane.
In greeting him, old Sam was rather curious in his manner, he thought. There was a lack of cordiality. Usually, when he came off a long journey, the old fellow ordered Levi to bring the decanter of whisky and a syphon. But on this occasion the head of the great financial house merely sat in his chair at his desk and heard his secretary’s report without even suggesting that he might be fagged by his rush across Europe.
Rolfe related, briefly and plainly, the various points upon which he had failed, and those upon which he had been successful. Some of his decisions had brought many thousands of pounds into the already overflowing coffers of Statham Brothers, and yet the old man made no sign. He heard all without any comment save now and then a grunt of satisfaction.
The younger man could not disguise from himself the fact that the millionaire was not himself. His face was paler and more transparent, while the green-shaded electric lamp shed upon it a hue that was unreal and ghastly. Old Levi, too, as he flitted in and out like a white-breasted shadow, seemed to regard him with unusual suspicion and distrust.
What could it all mean?
He looked from one to the other in puzzled surprise.
He was unaware that only on the previous night a thin, dark, bearded man had been ushered into that very room and had sat for two hours with the great financier. His countenance, his gestures, the cut of his clothes, all showed plainly that he was not English. Besides, the consultation was in French, a language which old Sam knew fairly well.
That man was a spy, and he was from Belgrade.
From the moment Charlie Rolfe had descended at the station to the moment he had left it, secret observation had been kept upon his movements. And to furnish the report to his master the spy had travelled from Servia to London. Samuel Statham trusted nobody. Even his most confidential assistant was spied upon, and his own reports compared with those of a spy’s.
More than once, as Charlie Rolfe, all unconscious of the surveillance upon him, related what had occurred in King Peter’s capital, the old man smiled – in disbelief. This the younger man could not understand. He was in ignorance of the great conspiracy in progress, or of the millionaire’s ulterior motives. The old man’s face was sphinx-like, as it ever was – a countenance in which no single trait was visible, neither was there human joy or human sympathy. It was the face of a statue – the face of a man whose greed and avarice had rendered him pitiless.
And yet, strangely enough, this very man was, to Charlie’s knowledge, a philanthropist in secret, giving away thousands yearly to the deserving poor without any thought of laudatory comment of either press or public.
Samuel Statham was not well; of that Charlie felt assured. He noticed the slight trembling of the thin white hands, the fixed, anxious look in his eyes, the curl of the thin grey lips, all of which caused him anxiety. In his ignorance he had grown to be greatly fond of the eccentric old man who pulled so many of the financial wires of Europe and whose word could cause the stock markets to fluctuate. A scribbled word of his that night would be felt in Wall Street on the morrow, whilst the pulses of the Bourse of Berlin, Paris, and Vienna were ready at any moment to respond instantly to the transactions of Statham Brothers, often so gigantic as to cause a sensation.
Presently Sam Statham commenced his cross-questioning regarding the exact situation in Belgrade, the attitude of the Minister-President, and the strength of the Opposition in that wooden shed-like Parliament-house, the Skuptchina, of whom he had seen, and what information he had gathered regarding the tariff-war with Austria.
To all the questions Charlie replied in a manner which showed him to be perfectly alive to all the requirements of the firm. To those in Old Broad Street, City, secret information regarding the future policy of Servia means the gain or loss of many thousands, and though during his sojourn in the City of the White Fortress his mind had been so perturbed over his own private affairs, he had certainly not neglected those of the great firm who employed him.
The old man gave little sign of approbation, and after nearly an hour suddenly dismissed him abruptly, saying:
“Very well. You’re tired, I expect. You’d better go to dinner. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“There’s another matter I wanted to speak to you about,” Charlie said, still remaining in his chair, watching the old fellow as he turned towards his desk and drew some papers on to his blotting-pad.
“Eh? What?” asked the old fellow sharply, turning again to the other.
“You did very well in Odessa. I was very pleased to receive that last cable from you. Souvaroff grew frightened evidently – afraid I should withdraw and let the whole business go into air.” And he chuckled to himself in delight at how he had worsted a powerful Russian banker who was his enemy.
“It was not of that I wish to speak,” remarked Rolfe quietly. “It was with regard to my sister Marion.”
The old fellow started uneasily at his secretary’s words. “Eh? Your sister?” he said. “What about her?”
“She’s left Cunnington’s,” Charlie said. “According to what I hear, she’s been discharged in some disgrace.”
“Ah! yes,” was the old man’s response, as though recalling the fact. “I’ve heard so. Your friend Barclay came to see me, and told me some long story about her. I wrote to Cunnington, but I haven’t seen any reply from him. It may have gone to the office.”
“My sister has left Oxford Street – and hidden herself, in disgrace. We can’t find her.”
“Then if you can’t find her, Rolfe, I don’t see how I can assist you,” remarked the elder man. “Girls entertain strange fancies, you know – especially the sentimental-minded. Been reading novels, perhaps – eh? Was she given to that?”
“The girls at Cunnington’s have little time for reading,” he said, piqued at Statham’s careless manner. Hitherto he had believed that the old man was genuinely interested in her, but he now saw that her future was to him nothing. He was too much occupied in piling up wealth to trouble his head over a girl’s distress, even though that girl might be the sister of the man who by his acute business foresight often won for him thousands in a single day.
Charlie rose, full of suppressed anger. He did not notice the look of anxiety and shame upon the old man’s face, for his head was bowed beneath the lamplight as he pretended to fumble with his papers.
“Perhaps your sister was tired of the place – too much hard work. Thought to better herself.”
“My sister was, like myself, much indebted to you, Mr Statham,” was Rolfe’s reply. “If she has been discharged in disgrace, it is, I feel confident, through no fault of her own. Therefore, I beg of you, to ask fit. Cunnington to make full inquiry.”
“What is the use? It is Cunnington himself who engages the hands and discharges them,” replied Statham evasively. “I can’t interfere.”
“But,” Rolfe argued, “for the sake of my sister’s good name you will surely do me this one small favour?”
“I have already seen Barclay, who says he’s engaged to her. Call on him, and he’ll explain what I have already said and the inquiry I have already made,” replied the old man in growing impatience.
“But weeks have gone by, and you’ve received no reply from Cunnington. He does not usually treat you with such discourtesy.”
“I can only think that he acted as his own judgment directed him,” the millionaire replied. “You know how strict the rules are that govern shop-assistants, and I suppose he could not favour your sister any more than the others.”
“Marion wanted no favours,” he declared. “She never asked one of anybody at Oxford Street. She only desires justice and troth – and I mean to have them for her.”
“Then go and see Cunnington for yourself,” snapped the old man. “I’ve done all I can do. If your sister chooses to go away and hide herself, how can I help it?”
“But she was sent away?” cried Rolfe in anger. “Sent away in disgrace, and I intend to discover what charge there is against her – and the truth concerning it?”
“Dear me, Rolfe!” snapped the old man impatiently. “Do go home, for heaven’s sake. You’re tired and hungry – consequently out of temper.”
“Yes,” he cried, “I am out of temper because you refuse to render my sister justice! But she shall have it – she shall?”
And he stalked out of the room and closed the door noisily behind him.
Then, after the door had closed, old Sam raised his head, and his eyes followed the young man. In them was a look such as was seldom seen there – a look of double cunning which spoke mutely of false and double-dealing.