The Ashiel mystery Part 4

"That will be the best plan," the lawyer repeated. "Think it over, Miss Byrne. I am sure you would enjoy the visit to Scotland. Inveras.h.i.+el is a most interesting old place, both historically and for the sake of its beautiful scenery. A week or two of Highland air could not fail to be of benefit to your health, even if nothing further came of it, so to speak."

"I should love it," Juliet said again. "But, Mr. Findlay, I don't know Lord As.h.i.+el, or hardly know him. How can I go off and stay with someone I never met before to-day?"

"The circ.u.mstances are unusual," said the lawyer. "I fancy Lord As.h.i.+el is anxious to lose no time. He is in bad health, poor fellow. I am afraid he will worry himself a good deal if you cannot make up your mind to go."

"You see," said Juliet, troubled, "I know nothing about him. I don't know what my father-I mean, Sir Arthur would say."

"I am sure your father would have no objection whatever to your making friends with Lord As.h.i.+el," Mr. Findlay a.s.sured her. "He is one of the most respectable, the most domesticated of peers. Not very cheerful company, perhaps, but no one in the world can justly say a word against him in any way. He has had a sad time lately; his wife and only child died within a month of each other, only two or three years ago. They had been married quite a short time. Since then, his sister, Mrs. Haviland, keeps house for him; but he does not entertain much, I am told, except during the autumn in Scotland. You need have no hesitation in accepting this invitation, Miss Byrne. I am a married man, and the father of a family, and I should only be too delighted if one of my daughters had such an opportunity."

"Well," said Juliet, "I think I will risk it, and go. I am old enough to take care of myself, in any case." This she said haughtily, with her nose in the air. And then, with a sudden drop to her usual manner, she exclaimed in a tone of gaiety, "What fun it will be!"

"I am sure you will not regret your decision," repeated Mr. Findlay, as she got up to go. "You won't forget to let Lord As.h.i.+el know, will you?"

"No, I will telephone to him at once. But I will telegraph home too, of course."

Excitement over this new plan had almost dispelled the earlier disappointment, and if Juliet's spirits, as she drove back to Jermyn Street, were not quite as overflowingly high as when she had started out, they were good enough to make her smile to herself and to every one she met during the rest of the day, and to hum gay little tunes when no one was near, and altogether to feel very happy and pleased and possessed by the conviction that something delightful was about to happen. She sent off her telegram to Sir Arthur, spending some time over it, and spoiling a dozen telegraph forms, before she could find satisfactory words in which to convey her plans with an appearance of deference to authority. Then she called up the Carlton Hotel on the telephone, and was much put out when she heard that Lord As.h.i.+el was not staying there, or even expected.

It was the hall porter of her hotel who came to the rescue, by suggesting that she should try the Carlton Club, of which she had never before heard.

From the quickness with which Lord As.h.i.+el answered her, he might have been sitting waiting at the end of the wire, and he expressed great pleasure at her acceptance of his invitation. Indeed, she could hear from the tone of his voice that his gratification was no mere empty form. It was arranged that she should travel down on the following night, Lord As.h.i.+el promising to engage a sleeping berth for her on the eight o'clock train. He himself was going North that same evening. He had just been writing a letter to Sir Arthur Byrne, he told her. He hoped she had some thick dresses with her; she would want them in Scotland.

"I am afraid I haven't," she said. "I only expected to stay in London for a day or two, you know."

"Well," said the voice at the end of the telephone, "perhaps you can get a waterproof or something, between this and to-morrow night. I am afraid I don't know the names of any ladies' tailors, but there are lots about," he concluded vaguely.

"I suppose I had better," said Juliet doubtfully. "I wonder if the shops here will trust me. The fact is, I haven't got very much extra money. I think perhaps I'd better wait a day or two till I can have some more sent me."

"My dear child," came the answer in horrified tones, "you must on no account put off coming. Of course you are not prepared for all this extra expense. You must allow me to be your banker. I insist upon it. Your family, in whose confidence I happen to be, would never forgive me if I allowed you to continue to be dependent on Sir Arthur Byrne."

"It is very kind of you," Juliet began. "But suppose I turn out to be some one different. You know, you said-"

"If you do, you shall repay me," he replied. "In the meantime I will send you round a small sum to do your shopping with. Let me see, where are you staying?"

An hour later a bank messenger arrived with an envelope containing 100 in notes. Juliet had never seen so much money in her life, and thought it far too much. "I shall be sure to lose it," was her first thought. Her second was to deposit it with the proprietor of the hotel; after which she felt safer. Then, in huge delight, she sallied forth again with her maid, the alluring memory of some of the shop windows into which she had gazed that morning calling to her loudly; she had never thought to look at those fascinating garments from the other side of the gla.s.s. Intoxicating hours followed, in which a couple of tweed dresses were purchased that seemed as if they must have been made on purpose for her; nor were thick walking shoes, and country hats, and other accessories neglected. By evening her room was strewn with cardboard boxes, and on Wednesday more were added, so that a trunk to pack them in had to be bought as well. The shops were very empty; Juliet had the entire attention of the shop people, and revelled in her purchases. Time flew, and she was quite sorry, as she drove to Euston on the following evening, to think that she was leaving this fascinating town of London.

CHAPTER IV

On Tuesday afternoon, when Juliet, having hung up the telephone through which she had been conversing with Lord As.h.i.+el, hurried out to see what Bond Street could provide her with, a little man was sitting writing in a luxuriously furnished room in a flat in Whitehall. He was small and thin, and possessed a pair of extraordinarily bright and intelligent brown eyes, which saw a good deal more of what happened around him than perhaps any other eyes within a radius of a mile from where he sat. He was, in other words, observant to a very high degree; and, what was more remarkable, he knew how to use his powers of observation. There was not a criminal in the length and breadth of the country who did not wonder uneasily whether he had really left the scene of his crime as devoid of clues as he imagined, when he heard that the celebrated detective, Gimblet, had visited the spot in pursuit of his investigations.

For this was the man, who, in a few years, had unravelled more apparently insoluble mysteries, and caused the arrest of more hitherto evasive scoundrels, than his predecessors had managed to secure in a decade. The name of Gimblet was known and detested wherever a coiner carried on his forbidden craft, or a blackmailer concocted his cowardly plans; burglars and forgers cursed freely when he was mentioned, and there was hardly an illicit trade in the country which had not suffered at one time or another from his inquisitive habit of interesting himself in other people's affairs. Scotland Yard officials were never too proud to call upon him for help, and many a difficulty he had helped them out of, though he refused an offer of a regular post in the Criminal Investigation Department, preferring to be at liberty to choose what cases he would take up. Above all things he loved the strange and inexplicable. Gimblet had not always been a detective. Indeed, he often smiled to himself when he thought of the extraordinary confidence which the public now elected to repose in him.

No one was more conscious than himself that he was far from being infallible; in fact, his admirers appeared to him to be wilfully blind to that elementary truth; so that when he failed to bring a case to a successful issue people were apt to show an amount of disappointment that he, for his part, thought very unreasonable. It was, perhaps, in the nature of things that the puzzles he solved correctly received so much more publicity than was given to his mistakes; but he often could not avoid wis.h.i.+ng that less were expected of him, and that his reputation had not grown so tropically on what he could but consider insufficient nourishment.

In early days, after leaving Oxford, he had gone into an architect's office and had flourished there; till one day an accident had turned his energies in the direction they had since taken.

A crime had been committed during the erection of a house he was building, and, when the police were at a loss to know how to account for the somewhat peculiar circ.u.mstances, the young architect, going his ordinary rounds of inspection, had seen in a flash that there was something unusual in the disposal of a portion of the building material; which observation, with certain deductions following thereon, had led to the detection and arrest of the criminal. From that time on he had been more and more drawn to the fascination of tracing events to their causes, when these appeared connected with deeds of violence and fraud, till of late years he had completely dropped the study of the carrying powers of wood and stone for the more interesting lessons to be derived from the contemplation of the strange vagaries indulged in by his fellow human beings.

He kept, however, a strong taste for art and all that appertained to it; more especially he was devoted to the collection of old and rare bric-a-brac. There was not a curiosity shop in London that did not know him, and he was equally happy when he had discovered some dust-hidden treasure in the back regions of a secondhand furniture shop, or when he was engaged in running to earth some human vermin who up till then had lain snug in his own particular back region of crime, straining his ears, in a mixture of contempt and anxiety, as the sounds of the hunt went by.

Having finished his letter, Gimblet put his stylo in his pocket, and turned round to look at the clock.

"Twenty minutes to four," he said half-aloud. "I wish to goodness people would keep their appointments punctually, or else not come at all."

Five more minutes pa.s.sed, and he got up and went into the hall.

"Higgs," he called, and his faithful servant and general factotum came out of the pantry.

"I am going out," said his master, taking up his straw hat. "If anyone calls, say I could not wait any longer. Ah, there's the front-door bell. Just see who it is."

He retreated to his sitting-room while Higgs went to the door of the flat. A minute or two later Lord As.h.i.+el was ushered in.

"I'm very sorry I'm late," said he, as the door closed behind him, "but you know what kept me."

"Not the young lady, surely," said Gimblet; "you were to see her at twelve o'clock this morning, weren't you?"

"Yes, but she telephoned to me after lunch. By Jove, Gimblet, I believe you have got hold of the right girl this time." Lord As.h.i.+el's tone was enthusiastic. "If she turns out to be half as nice as she looks, I shall be ever grateful to you for routing her out."

"Indeed, I am very glad to hear it," replied the detective. "And do you observe a resemblance in her to your family; do you feel satisfied that she is your daughter?"

"I can't say I do see much likeness," Lord As.h.i.+el confessed rather reluctantly. "I thought at one moment, when she smiled, that she was like her mother; but otherwise she did not strike me as resembling either of us, I am sorry to say."

"Did she know her history at all?" asked Gimblet. "Did she claim you as father?"

"No, she had never heard of me, as far as I could make out. And she a.s.sured me that Sir Arthur Byrne has no idea whose child she is."

"That certainly seems very improbable," Gimblet commented.

"Yes, it does. Still, I feel sure she was speaking the truth. Why, indeed, should she not do so? It seems that Byrne has married again, and that his wife has already three daughters of her own; so, as she says, he would probably be glad enough to get the fourth one off his hands, as they are not well off."

"Yes," said Gimblet. "I knew that. No, there seems no reason why Sir Arthur Byrne should not have told her about you if he knew she was your child. What is odd, is that he should not have known it."

"He had promised his first wife not to make any inquiries, it seems," said Lord As.h.i.+el.

"Well, he is an uncommon kind of man if he kept that promise,"

Gimblet remarked.

"He was devoted to his first wife, this girl told me," said Lord As.h.i.+el. "You never knew Lena Meredith, Gimblet, or you would not be surprised that people kept their promises to her. She was my wife's friend, as I told you, and I only saw her once, but I don't think I shall ever forget her. It was just after my wife's death, and I was too heart-broken to take much notice of anyone, but she was the sort of woman who sticks in your memory, and I can quite understand a man being infatuated about her, even to the point of curbing his curiosity for a lifetime on any subject she wished him to leave alone. I went to see her, you know, about the baby. I remember, as if it was yesterday, how I told her the whole story. I told her how I had met Juliana two years before, and how, from the first, we had both known we should never care for anyone else. I told her about my old grandfather, from whom I had such great expectations, and who wouldn't hear of my marrying anyone except the cousin, still in the schoolroom, whom he had picked out as my future wife.

"It was his wish that we should be married when I was twenty-five and the girl eighteen; but I was not yet twenty-two, so that there were at least three years of grace before he could begin to try and impose his design upon us. And he was old and ill, and I had heard that the doctors didn't give him more than a year or two, at most, to live. I thought that if Juliana and I were married secretly he would die before the question of my marriage had time to become one of practical politics; and I persuaded her to agree to a private marriage, which we would announce to the world as soon as my eccentric old grandfather was safely out of it. There was no possible obstacle to our marriage except the old man's domineering temper. Juliana Sandfort was my superior in every possible sense, worldly or otherwise; but I came of a good family, was to inherit an old name and t.i.tle, and a more than sufficient fortune so long as I kept on the right side of the old Lord, and we both knew that there was no objection to be feared from her relations or from any other one of mine. In short, much as she disliked doing things in that hole-and-corner sort of way, and ashamed as I was at heart of asking her to, we neither of us could see much actual harm in the idea, and we were married accordingly at a registry office in London. Everything would have been well, and all would have gone as we hoped, but for the one unforeseen and horrible calamity. My wife died six months before my grandfather, on the day her baby was born."

Lord As.h.i.+el paused, and sat gazing before him, over Gimblet's shoulder. There was a look on his face which showed that for the moment he was blind to the scene that lay in front of him, and that he saw in place of the bureau which stood opposite to him, and of the Oriental china which was the detective's special pride, and on which his eyes seemed to be fixed, some vision of the past which was far more real than the unsubstantial present. Presently he went on talking in a reflective undertone:

"All this I told Mrs. Meredith, and a great deal besides, for I was still in the first violence of bitter, self-reproachful grief. I wanted to be rid of the child, the cause of the catastrophe, whom I hated as vehemently as I had loved its mother, and I begged Mrs. Meredith to help me to dispose of it in such a fas.h.i.+on that, to me at least, the little one should be to all intents and purposes as dead as she was. Babies, I knew, had not a very strong hold on life, and I hoped, as a matter of fact, that it might really die, but this I did not dare to say aloud. Mrs. Meredith was kind to me. I remember well how good and sympathetic she was. She had heard most of the story from Juliana, whose friend she was, and it was at her house that the child was born. We had confided in no one else. She sat silently for a while after I had finished what I had to say, till at last she turned to me and tried to persuade me to alter my intention of disowning the baby. But I repeated doggedly that unless she had some alternative way to suggest of getting rid of it, I meant to leave the little girl at the door of one of the foundling hospitals, and that I would take her that very night.

"At length, seeing that I was resolved, she said she thought she could manage better than that. She had a friend, she said, an elderly Russian lady, who was a widow and childless. This lady was anxious to adopt a little English girl, and had lately written to ask her to find her a baby whom she could bring up as her own child. There was no reason why Juliana's baby should not be the one. She would write at once and suggest it. I was greatly relieved at this idea. Although I had been determined to do as I proposed, whatever opposition I might meet with, my conscience had not been willing to let me leave my child on a doorstep without protesting, and, little though I heeded its condemnation, I was glad to be able to get my own way and at the same time to silence the voice of my inward critic.

"The plan seemed simplicity itself. My wife, as I have told you, had no parents living. Her brothers and sisters, who were all married and living in different parts of the country, had been led to believe that her death was the result of an accident. Mrs. Meredith had even managed to prevail on the doctor to lend himself to this fiction; for, my grandfather being yet alive, there was still every reason not to declare our marriage, while there seemed to be none in favour of doing so, and I shrank from the questionings and scenes which publicity now would not fail to bring upon me. Before I left Mrs. Meredith we had agreed that she should at once communicate with her Russian friend, whose name I refused to let her tell me.