'She certainly isn't. Mr Eggleston didn't say a word to me about it when I met him in London.'
'Naturally not. You see, it's a dead secret.'
'Well, go on.'
'Well, that's why he thinks we're engaged.'
Beatrice tapped her foot on the carpet, always a bad sign.
'Up to the present, all I have understood is that this Senator Opal wrote a letter and that Miss Opal wishes you to get it back.'
'Well, that's all there is to it.'
'Not quite. Isn't it rather a risky business, stealing this letter from Mrs Gedge?'
'You bet it's risky!'
'It might lead to your getting into serious trouble.'
'It certainly might,' said Packy, charmed by her solicitude.
Beatrice's lips tightened.
'And yet,' she said, in that soft, silky voice which women so often employ and which has never yet done any man any good, 'you were apparently quite prepared to take the risk for Miss Opal's sake. A girl who means nothing to you.'
Too late, Packy saw the quagmire into which she had led him. He felt some of the helpless desperation which comes to nervous witnesses when trapped by cross-examining counsel.
'Yes, but don't you see...'
'I think I see perfectly. To me, the inference is obvious. You are evidently infatuated with this girl. I think you had better take this letter and read it. It will save a lot of unnecessary talk.'
'But you don't understand.'
'Don't I?'
'I went into this business simply for the fun of it.'
'What is the fun of it?'
'Well, I mean... the spirit of adventure ...'
The spirit of absolute idiocy. It seems to me that you have not only been making love to this Miss Opal behind my back but are also a perfect half-wit. And it is quite plain to me that you are not the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. I thought I could make something of you, but evidently it's hopeless, and we might as well recognize it at once. Just glance at that letter, will you, when you have a spare moment. It says everything. Good-bye.'
'But listen...'
The objection to holding these intimate heart-to-heart talks in a public spot is that your movements are hampered by the necessity of observing the conventions. Even in France you cannot chivvy girls across the lobby of a hotel. Beatrice had begun to make for the door at a pace so brisk that Packy's only alternative to letting her go was to pursue her at a gallop. He let her go.
The envelope crackled in his hand. He opened it dully. He did not anticipate that it would add much to his existing information. After those last words of hers, so characteristically lucid, he presumed it to be the bird or raspberry in written form.
He had guessed correctly. The letter ran to three pages and a little over, but its gist could have been condensed into that poignant phrase so familiar to lovers of melodrama – Those wedding-bells shall not ring out.
The marriage which had been arranged between Lady Beatrice Bracken (who is, of course, the daughter of the Earl of Stableford) and Patrick B. Franklyn (who is, of course, the well-known young American millionaire and sportsman) would not take place.
4
Statisticians, who have gone carefully into the figures – the name of Schwertfeger of Berlin is one that springs to the mind – inform us that of young men who have just received a negative answer to a proposal of marriage (and with these must, of course, be grouped those whose engagements have been broken off) 6.08 per cent clench their hands and stare silently before them, 12.02 take the next train to the Rocky Mountains and shoot grizzlies, while 11.07 sit down at their desks and become modern novelists.
The first impulse of the remainder – and these, it will be seen, constitute a large majority- is to nip off round the corner and get a good, stiff drink. Into this class Packy fell. The imperious urge to put something cold and stimulating inside him swept over him within ten seconds of his perusal of the opening sentences of Beatrice's letter. Two minutes later he was in the cocktail bar entreating the kindly Gustave to come to the aid of the party. And it was while the latter was reaching for bottles and doing musical things with ice that he observed Senator Opal bearing down on him.
He was not surprised to see Senator Opal. To the other's thin story about having come to the Hotel des Etrangers to dispatch a cable he had attached little credence. He was perfectly aware that if he entered the cocktail bar one of the first sights which met his eye would be the great Dry legislator with his foot on the rail and his head back, restoring his tissues. All he felt on perceiving him now was merely that well-marked sensation of nausea which comes to broken-hearted young men who see would-be conversationalists making in their direction. He had no wish to chat with the Senator, and only the intense desire to get outside a Gustave Special immediately held him where he stood.
Before proceeding to the more vital agenda, Senator Opal had a word of warning to impart.
There was a girl out there just now, asking about you,' he said. 'I stalled her all right, but better keep out of the way.'
Packy's Gustave Special had arrived. He drained it without replying and asked for another. The kindly Gustave, who could read faces, had foreseen the repeat order. He filled it instantaneously, and Packy snatched at the glass like a frightened child reaching for its mother's hand.
'I don't know who she was. She knew you all right. But I told her you were the Vicomte de Blissac, and she went off quite satisfied. You go out by this door here, and she'll never see you.'
Having disposed of this minor matter, Senator Opal came straight to that other which was nearest his heart.
'Well, have you fixed everything up?'
Packy, now dealing with his third Gustave Special, stared with no human sparkle in his eye. The Senator's choler, always near the surface, began to rise.
'What the devil,' he demanded, 'are you goggling like a fish for?' A faint mauve, the first beginning of that royal purple which was wont to suffuse it in his Berserk moments, came into his face. 'Are you doped?' he asked sharply. 'Can't you talk? You went up half an hour ago to arrange things with that man of yours. What happened?'
With an effort, Packy contrived to bring his mind to bear on the question. The strain of this made him feel as if the top of his head had worked loose. But something told him that only when he had supplied the desired information would he be permitted to return to his sorrow unmolested.
'Oh, that's all off,' he said.
The Senator was now completely purple.
'All off?'
'Yes. He says he won't do it.'
'Why not? He's a burglar, isn't he?'
'Yes. But apparently when he was doing some burgling the other night you planted him out on a window-sill and he didn't like it.'
'Goosh!' The Senator paused for a moment, aghast. 'You don't mean that was the fellow?'
'Yes.'
'And he's sore?'
'Very sore. He says if you're drowning he'll throw you a flat-iron, but outside of that he doesn't want anything to do with you.'
Senator Opal fermented silently. How true it is, he was feeling, that we never know how devastating the results of our most trivial actions may be. Just because he had done an ordinary everyday thing like putting a burglar on a window-sill, the sort of thing one does and forgets about next minute, ruin stared him in the face. He mourned, as many a stout fellow had mourned before him, over the irrevocability of the past.
Packy welcomed his silence. It enabled him to turn his mind to his own troubles. He was brooding on these, when an insistent noise at his side brought him to earth and with considerable annoyance he saw that the Senator was still there. And not only that, but he had begun to ask questions again.
'But what'll we do?'
'I don't know,' said Packy. He was relieved to find the conundrum so simple and easy to answer.
The Senator appeared dissatisfied. Observing that his young friend had fallen in some sort of a trance or day-dream, he secured his atte
ntion by the simple expedient of kicking him sharply on the right ankle.
'Ouch!' said Packy, and ceased to dream.
'We must do something,' said the Senator fretfully. 'We've got to have that letter.'
'Oh, the letter?' Packy could put this straight, and he did so. 'I got that.'
'You got it?'
'Yes.'
'When?'
'Just now.'
'My letter?'
'No, not your letter. Beatrice's letter.'
The Senator moaned a little.
'Are you mad?'
'I'm not any too well pleased,' admitted Packy. 'You see, it's the bird.'
'What's a bird?'
'The letter.'
It was possibly his presence of mind in clutching his temples at this point that prevented Senator Opal's head coming apart. He snatched at the vanishing skirts of sanity.
'Somebody's got to open that safe,' he said, returning to the one aspect of the matter about which there could be no argument or misunderstanding. 'Can't you open a safe?'
'No.'
'Why not?' said the Senator querulously, as if it were one of the things which every young man ought to know.
'It's a very complicated business, opening safes,' said Packy. 'Keesters and pressure-bolts and all that sort of thing enter into it. You have to have dynamite and gauze and thick things and thin things... all very complicated.'
'Goosh!'
'Unless it's the other kind of safe.'
'What other kind of safe?'
'The kind Mrs Gedge has. Then it's easy.'
'Easy?'
'Oh, very easy. Perfect pie. All you have to do is find out the combination.'
'And do you know how to do that?'
'Me?' Packy looked at him in mild surprise. 'Oh, no. I haven't the remotest idea.'
The Senator's hopefulness faded. Packy's attention wandered again.
'Then do you mean to say there's nothing to be done?'
'Eh?'
'Is there nothing to be done?'
Absolutely nothing. She says she thought at one time that she might make something out of me, but she sees now it's hopeless.'
Senator Opal's goggling stare was almost Gedge-like.
'What the devil are you talking about?'
Packy's mind cleared. He saw that he had been on the verge of imparting to this white-haired old Nosey Parker the inner history of a tragedy too sacred and intimate for human ear. With a little difficulty, for Gustave of the Hotel des Etrangers mixes a pretty potent Special, he detached himself from the bar.
'Good-bye,' he said.
'Here, wait!'
But Packy had gone. He had passed to where beyond these voices there was peace – or if not peace, at any rate uninterrupted leisure for musing in solitude on his fractured heart. As he made his way back to the jetty where he had moored the motor-boat, he wondered a little why Senator Opal should have been so interested in Beatrice's letter. Putting it down to mere idle curiosity, he dismissed the matter from his mind.
He started the motor-boat and, laying a somewhat zigzag course, drove it to the Château Blissac's boathouse. He was now completely distrait and unable to contemplate any mundane phenomena.
This was the reason why the faint gurgle which Blair Eggle-ston, lying tied hand and foot in a dark corner of the boathouse, contrived to cause to filter through the gag in his mouth, made no impression on his consciousness. If he heard it, he gave it no attention. He moored the motor-boat and walked up to the house, brooding.
5
Several hours later, when darkness had settled upon St Rocque, a lissom form might have been observed emerging stealthily from the Hotel des Etrangers and making its way with equal furtiveness towards the harbour.
Enforced detention in his room had long since started to prey upon the nervous system of Maurice, Vicomte de Blissac. He was a young man who all his life had liked mirth and gaiety, and there are few things less mirthful and gay than a protracted sojourn in a French hotel bedroom.
To-night, he had suddenly cracked under the strain. Days of contemplation of the ceiling, the wash-hand stand, the armchair, the other chair, the flowered wall-paper and the steel engraving of the Huguenot's Farewell had reduced him to a state of desperation when he was prepared to take any risk, no matter how fearful. Like the heroine of a modern play, he wanted to get away from it all.
And it was as he wrestled with this mood of recklessness that there came to him what he recognized as quite the brightest idea he had ever had in his life.
Why should he not steal off under cover of darkness to Packy's boat and in the name of their ancient friendship implore Packy to up anchor and take him over to England out of the jurisdiction of the gendarmerie of St Rocque?
The more he contemplated the idea, the better it looked. He wondered why he had not thought of it before. There would, of course, be a certain amount of danger in the passage of the streets that led to the jetty, but he scoffed at danger. All he wanted was to be away from that ceiling, that wash-hand stand, that arm-chair, that other chair, that flowered wallpaper and that steel engraving of the Huguenot's Farewell.
So here he was now, sidling with infinite caution through the crooked little streets that wound down to the harbour.
Luck was with him. No stern official voice bade him halt, no hard official hand descended on his shoulder. He reached the jetty, found a boat, climbed in, loosened the rope and rowed off. It was a task of some little difficulty to discover the Flying Cloud among all the craft that rocked at anchor on the incoming tide, but he managed it at last.
He called Packy's name cautiously, but there was no answer. Packy, it seemed, was on shore. He decided to go aboard and wait for him.
Arriving on deck, he recollected something very vital which he had learned on his previous visit to the yawl – the location of the cupboard where Packy kept his whisky. He made for it at his best speed. His whole soul was crying out for a restorative.
It was some moments later that he discovered that he was not the only person on board who had been thinking along these lines. The first thing he saw as he charged into the main cabin was a little man of tubby build whose fingers clutched a brimming beaker of the right stuff. His back was to the Vicomte, but at the sound of the latter's footsteps he sprang up in a flurry of arms and legs, spilling the contents of his glass over the tinned tongue which had constituted his modest dinner.
The Vicomte found himself looking into the protruding eyes of J. Wellington Gedge, the man whom, he had been informed by a usually reliable source, he had murdered three nights ago at the Festival of the Saint.
6
It was some four hours later, when the hands of a watch which he had stolen in Cincinnatti were pointing to twenty-five minutes after midnight, that Soup Slattery's better self, which had been stirring uneasily within him ever since Packy's departure, suddenly sprang to life and took charge.
He saw now that he had been within an ace of committing the sin which had the distinction of being almost the only one which his elastic code recognized as such – the unforgivable sin of refusing help to a buddy in trouble. A pal had given him the distress sign and he had ignored it.
There were many things about Soup Slattery at which a moralist would have pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. His views on the sanctity of personal property were fundamentally unsound, and he was far too prone to substitute a left hook to the jaw for that soft answer which the righteous recommend. But there was one thing, he had always flattered himself, which nobody could say of him, and that was that he had ever let a friend down in his hour of need.
He burned with shame and remorse. In spite of Packy's statement that only the purest altruism animated him in his desire to assist Jane Opal, he had read between the lines and come to the conclusion that love was the motivating force. Packy, he was convinced, was that way about this squab, and he, Soup Slattery, just because he was at outs with the squab's old man, had been planning to throw sand in the gear-b
ox. As he put on his trousers and reached for his little kit of tools, Soup Slattery was groaning in spirit.
It was with the inward glow of a penitent, the quiet elation of one who at the eleventh hour has seen the light, that he left the hotel some ten minutes later and started to walk up the hill to the Château Blissac.
This time, he knew, there would be no open window waiting for him, but he anticipated no difficulty in climbing on to that balcony which had so immediately won his approval on the occasion of his first visit. Nor did he find any. The thing might have been placed there purely for the convenience of the visiting heist-guy. He negotiated it noiselessly in a matter of seconds. And it was as he stood there, breathing a little heavily, for he was past his first youth, that he noticed that the window of the room was open.
This puzzled him. Packy had assured him that the Venetian Suite would be unoccupied that night. He crept closer and was further mystified to see that there was a light behind the curtains. Odd, felt Mr Slattery, and parted the heavy folds sufficiently to enable him to inspect the interior.
There was an electric torch lying on a table, so placed that its rays fell on the safe. And over the safe, fiddling with the handle, was bending a dim figure.
CHAPTER 17
1
PACKY FRANKLYN had retired to his room early that night. But he had not gone to bed. To one in his state of mental upheaval sleep was out of the question. At the advanced hour when Mr Slattery was setting out with his little bag of tools, he was still in a chair at his open window, fully clothed, gazing over the moonlit grounds with a pipe between his teeth and in his eye that strange, goofy gleam which had been its predominant expression ever since Beatrice had terminated the engagement.
In that world-famous brochure of his, to which we have already referred, Schwertfeger of Berlin writes as follows:
'Having round the corner nipped and the good, stiff drink taken,' says Schwertfeger – he is still on the theme of the young man disappointed in love – 'the subject will now all food-nourishment refuse and in 87.06 per cent of cases will for a long and muscle-exercising walk along the high road or across country at a considerable rate of speed and in much soul-agitation go.'