The Lost Million

We wandered along the quay, Asta appearing unusually pale and pensive.

“I wonder you did not recount your strange experience to your father,” I exclaimed presently.

“It happened in the house of a friend, and not at home. Therefore I resolved to say nothing. Indeed I had grown to believe that, after all, it must have been mere imagination – until you described what happened to you last night. That has caused me to; think – it has convinced me that what I saw was material and real.”

“It’s a mystery, Miss Seymour,” I said; “one which we must both endeavour to elucidate. Let us say nothing – not even to your father. We will keep our own counsel and watch.”

When we returned to the hotel we found Shaw awaiting us. Asta, being fatigued, retired to her room, and afterwards he and I strolled down to one of those big cafés in the Place Bellecour. A string band was playing a waltz, and hundreds of people were sitting out upon the pavement drinking their bock or mazagran.

Darkness had fallen, and with it the air became fresher – welcome indeed after those long hours on the white, dusty road of the Bourgogne. My host, in the ease of straw hat and grey flannel suit, still wore his dark glasses, and as we sat together at one of the tin tables near the kerb a man and a woman at the adjacent table rose and left, so that we were comparatively alone and in the shadow.

After we had been chatting merrily – for he seemed in the best of spirits and full of admiration of the way in which the French roads were kept – he removed his spectacles and wiped them.

As he did so he laughed across at me, saying in a low voice —

“It’s a nuisance to be compelled to wear these – but I suppose I must exercise caution. One has always to bear the punishment of one’s indiscretion.”

“Why?”

He smiled grimly, but remained silent.

Even though he had admitted that he was not what he represented himself to be; even though I knew that he was an adventurer, and even though the dead man Arnold had urged me not to trust him implicitly, yet I somehow could not help liking him. He was always so full of quiet humour, and his small eyes twinkled merrily when those quaint remarks and caustic criticisms fell from his lips.

“I thought that the danger which existed that evening in Totnes had passed,” I remarked.

“Only temporarily, I fear. Thanks to your generous aid, Kemball, I was able to slip through their fingers, as I have done on previous occasions. But I fear that the meshes of the net may one day be woven a trifle too closely. I shouldn’t really care very much if it were not for Asta. You know how devoted I am to her,” he added, leaning his arms upon! the small table and bending towards me as he spoke.

“And if any little contretemps did happen to you?” I asked.

“Asta would, alas! be left alone,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “Poor girl! I – I fear she would find a great change in her circumstances.”

It was upon the tip of my tongue to acknowledges to him how madly I loved her, and of my intention of asking her to be my wife, yet somehow I hesitated, fearing, I think, lest he might scorn such a proposition, for I remembered how, after all, she was his sole companion, and that without her he would be lonely and helpless. She was the one bright spot in his soured life, he had declared to me more than once. Though scarcely yet out of her teens, she directed the large household at Lydford with all the genius and economy of an experienced housewife. Yes! hers had been a strange career – the adopted daughter of a man who was so often compelled to go into hiding in strange guises and in strange places.

“Let us hope nothing will happen,” I said cheerfully. “Why should it?”

His face broadened into a meaning grin, and he readjusted his hideous round spectacles and lit a fresh cigar.

“Really, Mr Shaw,” I said, “your dark forebodings and your strange declarations puzzle me. True, I have endeavoured to serve your interests, and I regard you as a friend, heedless of what I cannot help suspecting. Yet you are never open and frank with me concerning one thing – your friendship with Melvill Arnold.”

He started at mention of the name – a fact which caused me to ponder.

“I hardly follow you.”

“Well,” I said. “Shortly before leaving England I received a visit from a certain Mrs Olliffe – a lady living near Bath. I believe you know her?”

“Yes!” he gasped, grasping the edge of the table and half rising from his seat. “Then she has seen you!” he cried. “What did she tell you?”

“Several things,” I replied. “She alleges that you were not Arnold’s friend – but his fiercest enemy.”

“She has told you that!” he cried bitterly. “And what else has that woman said against me?”

“Nothing much.”

“Come,” he exclaimed boldly. “Tell me, Kemball, man to man, all that woman has said.”

I saw that his manner had changed, his small eyes were flashing with fire, while upon his pale cheeks showed two scarlet patches.

Through my brain surged recollections of the woman’s allegations, but, seeing him in such anger, I did not desire to irritate him further, therefore I declared that whatever the lady had said was in no way derogatory to him.

“You are not telling me the truth, Kemball,” he declared, looking straight into my eyes. “I know her too well. She has lied to you about me.”

“Probably,” was my reply. “I happen by a curious chance to know the character of the lady, and it is hardly such as would inspire me with confidence.”

“You know her then!” he exclaimed, staring at me hard.

“I know that at one time she passed as Lady Lettice Lancaster, and was sentenced to penal servitude as an adventuress.”

“Who told you that? How do you know that?” he asked quickly.

“It is surely common knowledge,” was my reply. “Therefore please dismiss from your mind that anything she might say to your detriment would impair our friendship.”

“Ah yes!” he cried suddenly, taking my hand and wringing it warmly. “I know, Kemball, that you, being my friend, will refuse to be influenced in any way by evil report. That woman is, as you rightly say, an unscrupulous adventuress. I knew her once – before her conviction – but I have since lost sight of her. Yet, I know she is my enemy, and – well, if it were to her interest she would have no compunction in giving me away to Scotland Yard.”

“Then she is your enemy?”

“My worst enemy.”

“Ah! Then I understand the reason of her allegations,” I said, and a moment later the subject dropped.

We returned to the hotel just before midnight, and I ascended in the lift to my room. Shaw shook my hand and turned into his own room.

From my window I found that I commanded a wide, view of the great Place Carnot and the adjacent streets, picturesque with their many lights. I had not switched on my light, and was standing gazing below, when, of a sudden, I distinguished Shaw hurrying out of the hotel again and crossing the Place towards the Pont du Midi, the iron bridge on the right which spans the Rhone.

He had in a moment changed both hat and coat, I noticed, and therefore his sudden exit, after having led me to believe he was about to turn in, struck me as curious. So, without hesitation, I, too, slipped on another coat, and putting on a golf cap descended in the lift, and was soon speeding away in the direction he had taken.

When halfway across the bridge I saw him walking slowly before me, therefore I held back and watched. I followed him across the river, when he suddenly turned to the left along the Quai Claude Bernard, until at the foot of the next bridge, the Guillotière, he turned to the left along the Cours Gambetta until he came to a small square, the Place du Pont.

There he suddenly halted beneath a lamp and glanced at his watch. Then he idled across to the corner of one of the half-dozen dark, deserted streets which converged there, as though awaiting some one.

For a quarter of an hour he remained there calmly smoking, and quite unsuspicious of my proximity.

But his patience was at last rewarded, because from the shadow there emerged a female figure in dark jacket and skirt, to which after a moment’s hesitation he went forward with words of greeting.

They met beneath the light of a street lamp, and from where I stood, hidden in a doorway, I was sufficiently close to get a view of her countenance.

I held my breath.

It was that of the woman who had stood in the dock of the Old Bailey and been convicted of fraud – the woman who now lived in such style at Ridgehill Manor, and who was known in Bath as Mrs Olliffe.

For a moment they stood there in the night, their hands clasped, neither uttering a single word.

And yet Shaw had only an hour before declared her to be his most bitter and dangerous enemy!

Chapter Nineteen

Falling Shadows

I watched Shaw strolling slowly with, the woman through the ill-lit back streets of Lyons, speaking rapidly with her. She, however, appeared to listen in silent obstinacy.

He grew angry, yet she seemed to remain obdurate.

She was dressed plainly in tweed skirt and blouse à la touriste, and wore a hat with a long veil in the fashion so often adopted by American women visiting Europe.

They traversed the working-class district on the eastern side of the Rhone, where from behind the dingy red blinds of the cafés came the sounds of music and laughter, and where many groups of factory hands were idling about enjoying the cool night air. It was a noisy bizarre district, which favoured me, for I could watch the pair unobserved.

At the corner of the Place Morand they halted for a few moments, while he emphasised his words by striking his palm with his clenched fist, and she stood listening, her gaze turned towards the ground. Then, together, they crossed the big square to the left and traversed the bridge, passing beneath the deep shadows of the high, handsome Hôtel de Ville.

Though at times I was quite near them, yet I could not, of course, catch a single word uttered by either. Only by their actions and gesticulations could I judge, and it appeared plain that she had met him under compulsion, and was refusing to act as he desired.

And yet he had only that very evening declared the woman to be his worst and most dangerous enemy!

I reflected as I strode slowly on, keeping the two dark figures in sight. Shaw had, after all, never concealed from me the fact that he was wanted by the police for some offence. His sportsmanlike attitude, combined with his deep devotion to Asta, caused me involuntarily to like him. Perhaps it was because I loved her and he was her foster-father, always kind, indulgent, and solicitous for her welfare, that I really held him in esteem, even though he might be an adventurer.

Yet why had this woman Olliffe – as she now called herself – declared that Shaw had been Arnold’s bitterest enemy? Surely it had been through my host himself that the woman knew of my existence, and my friendship with the dead man of mystery!

But even while I watched them turn the corner by the Hôtel de Ville, and stroll up that broad, deserted thoroughfare – in day so busy with its rows of fine shops, but now quiet and deserted – towards the Place Bellecour, my thoughts reverted to Asta, she who had lost her lover, but whom I had grown to love so truly and so well.

Suddenly I turned upon my heel and abandoned pursuit of the pair. What mattered it to me? Their affairs, whatever they might be, were their own. I loved Asta. Indeed, because of my deepening affection for her I had accompanied them upon that tour which had for its object my love’s forgetfulness of the black tragedy which had so suddenly overshadowed her young life.

Guy Nicholson had promised to reveal something to me in strictest confidence, but, alas! his lips had been mysteriously closed before he had had opportunity. Closed by whom?

I turned down upon the quays and, following the Rhone bank, was soon back at the hotel.

I left my hat in my own room and, on entering our private sitting-room found, to my delight, that Asta was still there. She had been reading and had just risen as I entered, for she stood by the pale-green curtains at the window, holding a fold of them in her hand, and looking forth into the starlit night, her slim young figure clearly outlined against their dull soft green, a becoming rose-flush upon her cheeks, her lips slightly parted, and her eyes bewitchingly bright.

“I’ve been waiting for Dad, Mr Kemball,” she said. “Do you know where he is?”

“Out, I think,” was my reply. “I suppose he’s smoking in one of the cafés. He believed that you had gone to bed, I expect.”

And I threw myself lazily into a chair.

I thought that her eyes filled with tears as she turned back towards the long open windows and gazed out into the Place below. And I confess that this surprised me.

“You are upset!” I said softly, rising and standing at her side. “What’s the matter, Miss Seymour? Tell me, confide in me – your friend.”

“I – I hardly know,” she faltered, in a strange hoarse voice. I took her hand, and found it trembling. “But – ”

“But what?” I asked. Her face was turned away from me towards the night.

“Well,” she said, after a long pause, as though reluctant to tell me, “I fear that Dad has gone out to meet some one. When we arrived in this hotel I saw among his letters a handwriting which I recognised.”

“The writing of a woman, eh?”

She started, turning to me quickly.

“How did you know?” she gasped.

“Well – I guessed,” I laughed.

“You guessed correctly. And I have suspicion that he has gone out to-night to meet her in secret – to – ”

I waited for her to conclude her sentence, but her lips closed with a snap. The colour had left her cheeks while in her eyes was a strange wild look of fear.

“In confidence, Miss Seymour, I may as well tell you that I saw him half-an-hour ago walking with a lady – a person who lives near Bath under the name of Olliffe.”

“Then my suspicions are correct!” she cried. “That woman has regained her power over him. My poor Dad! He has fallen into her clutches. Ah, Mr Kemball, if you only knew all!” she added. “If only I dare tell you!”

“Why not tell me? Surely I am your friend! You may trust me not to betray any secret,” I said in deep earnestness.

“They have met to-night. There is some mischief brewing. She is cruel, evil, unscrupulous.”

“I know – and a convicted criminal.”

“You know her, then?” she asked quickly, looking into my eyes.

“Yes. I am acquainted with Lady Lettice Lancaster, as she was once called, and I know that she was sentenced at the Old Bailey for a series of remarkably ingenious frauds. Is she an associate of your father’s?”

“She was once, I believe – before her sentence,” replied the girl. “She exercised over him a strange, incomprehensible fascination, as an evil woman so often can over a man. He acted at her bidding, and – well, I know but little, Mr Kemball, but, alas! what I know is, in itself, too much. I am surprised that Dad, knowing the woman’s character, should dare to again associate himself with her.”

“She introduced me to her brother, George King. Do you know him?”

“Yes. He sometimes passes as her brother and sometimes as butler or chauffeur. But he is her husband, Henry Earnshaw, sometimes known as Hoare.”

“And your father assisted them in their frauds, eh?”

“That is my supposition. I have no actual knowledge, for it was several years ago, when I was but a girl,” was her reply.

“And you fear that the outcome of the meeting to-night may be another mutual arrangement?”

She nodded sadly in the affirmative.

“The combination of Dad and these people would, indeed, be a formidable one,” she said. “Ah! if he would only take my advice and end it all! He has sufficient to live upon comfortably. Why does he court disaster in this way? He has always been, so very good to me, ever since I was a tiny child, that I cannot help loving him.”

I did not reply. What could I say? I longed to speak frankly to her and take her out of that atmosphere of evil. Yet what could I do? How could I act?

“I have a suspicion that poor Mr Arnold was a friend of that woman,” I said a few moments later, as she stood against the table before me.

“Yes,” was her reply. “He was her friend and benefactor, I believe. He did all he could for her defence before the judge, but to no avail.”

“Somebody betrayed her into the hands of the police?”

“Dad told me so once. He believes it to have been her own husband, the man Earnshaw.”

I did not speak for a few moments. I was thinking of that strange letter which had threatened vengeance against the mysterious scholar, Mr Arnold. The latter had been accused of what he had not done, yet that very accusation had given me a clue to some very curious circumstances, and had forewarned me as to the true character of the wealthy widow of Ridgehill Manor.

“Has your father any ground for declaring the woman’s conviction to be due to Earnshaw?”

“Yes, I believe so; but he has never told any one, except myself.”

“But if he and Mrs Olliffe become on friendly terms again, he will doubtless reveal what he knows.”

“Probably. Then the man Earnshaw will turn against her – and against Dad also. In that lies the great peril for Dad which I apprehend.”

I realised how far-seeing she was, how carefully she had weighed all the consequences, and how anxious she was for her father’s safety. On the other hand, however, Shaw was certainly not a man to run any unnecessary risks. From what I had seen of him, he appeared full of craft and cunning, as became one who lived upon his wits.

“Tell me what you know concerning Mr Arnold’s association with this woman of a hundred different names,” I urged. “I have a reason for my curiosity.”

“I know but little. Once, when I was about fifteen, Dad and I travelled with Mr Arnold from Vienna to Territet, and met her at the Hôtel des Alpes there. She was very affable and nice to me, and she told me what an excellent friend Mr Arnold had been to her. I recollect the incident quite well, for on that day she bought me a little chain bracelet as a present. I have it now.”

“Your father quarrelled with Arnold, I believe?”

“Yes,” she said. “They had some difference. I never, however, ascertained the real facts. He evidently wished to see me, for he wrote to me making an appointment; and when I went to the hotel for that purpose, I learnt, alas! that he was dead.”

“Had he lived, his intention was to meet your father in secret at Totnes in Devonshire. Why in secret, I wonder?”

“That same question has been puzzling me for a long time, Mr Kemball,” she said quickly. “I have arrived at the conclusion that he feared lest Mrs Olliffe might know of his arrival in England and set some one to watch his movements. He feared her.”

“Then there may have been some reason why the woman desired that they should not meet, eh?”

“Apparently so.”

I reflected. Mrs Olliffe now knew that I had borne a message to Shaw from the dead man who had destroyed a fortune. Did she fear its results, and was she, for that reason, holding out to Shaw the olive branch of peace?

I suggested that to Asta, and she was inclined to agree with me.

“We must do what we can to break off your father’s friendship with this woman,” I declared. “It is distinctly dangerous for him.”

“Yes, Mr Kemball,” she cried. “I only wish we could! I only wish – ”

Her sentence was interrupted by a sound which startled both of us. We listened, looking into each other’s serious face without uttering a word. The sound emanated from the next room – Shaw’s bedroom – the door of which was closed.

It was that low, peculiar whistle which I had first heard on the morning I had visited Titmarsh after poor Guy’s mysterious death, and had heard on a second occasion when visiting at Lydford.

“There’s Dad again?” she cried, in a strained voice. “He evidently doesn’t know we are still up.” The whistle was again repeated – a low, long-drawn, peculiar sound, in a high shrill note.

It was not the unconscious whistle of a man thinking, but a sound full of meaning – a distinct call, which even as we listened in silence was repeated a third time.

Chapter Twenty

The Man with the Crimson Button

Pale and startled, she raised her finger in a gesture of silence, and we both stole noiselessly from the room, closing the door behind us.

Upon the thick carpet of the corridor we crept past Shaw’s door, and Asta disappeared into her own chamber, which adjoined, while I went on to mine.

I could not get that peculiar whistle out of my ears. It seemed as though it were a signal to somebody; yet though I went back to Shaw’s door and listened there for a full hour, I heard no sound of any movement. The room was in darkness, and he was, no doubt, already asleep.

When I turned in, I lay a long time thinking over the reason of Shaw’s friendship with the woman Olliffe. What Asta had told me only seemed to increase the mystery, rather than diminish it.

I must have dropped off to sleep about two o’clock, puzzled and fagged out by the long hours on the road, when I was suddenly awakened by hearing a loud, shrill scream.

I started up and listened. It was Asta’s voice shrieking in terror.

I sprang out into the corridor without a second’s hesitation and rapped upon the door, crying —

“What’s the matter. Let me in.”

In a few seconds she unbolted the door, and opening it I encountered her in a pale pink robe-de-chambre, her luxuriant chestnut hair falling about her shoulders, her large dark brown eyes haggard and startled, her hands clenched, her countenance white to the lips.

“What has happened, Miss Seymour?” I asked, glancing quickly around the room.

“I – I hardly know,” she gasped in breathless alarm. “Only – only,” she whispered, in a low voice, “I – I’ve seen the hand – the Hand of Death – again!”

“Seen it again!” I echoed; but she raised her finger and pointed to her father’s door.

“Tell me the circumstances,” I whispered. “There is something very uncanny and unnatural about this which must be investigated. Last night it appeared to me a hundred and twenty miles away, and now you see it to-night. Are you quite sure you saw it.”

I asked the latter question because it was still dark, and she had switched on the electric light.

“I felt a cold rough contact with my cheek, and waking saw the hand again! I burn a night-light – as you see,” and she pointed across to a child’s night-light in a saucer upon the washstand.

“And it vanished as before?”

“Instantly. I thought I heard a slight sound afterwards, but I must have been mistaken.”

“Yes,” I said, making a quick examination of the room, and looking beneath the bed. “There is certainly nothing here.”

I noted that the communicating door between her room and her father’s was still secured by the small brass bolt.

“Well,” I declared, “it is utterly inexplicable.” My voice evidently awakened Shaw, for we heard him tap at the door and ask in a deep, drowsy voice —

“What’s the matter in there, Asta?”

“Oh, nothing at all, Dad,” was the girl’s reply. “Only I fancy there must be a rat in my room – and Mr Kemball is looking for it.”

“Didn’t you scream?” he asked wearily.

“Yes,” I said, as she unbolted the door, and her father entered. “Miss Seymour’s scream woke me up.”

“Did you see the rat?” Shaw asked me.

“No,” I laughed, in an endeavour to conceal our fear. “I expect if there is one it has got away down its hole. I’ve searched, but can find nothing.”

“Ah!” growled the man awakened from his sleep. “That’s the worst of these confounded Continental hotels. Most of them are overrun with vermin. I’ve often had rats in my room. Well, dear,” he added, turning to Asta, “go to bed again, and leave your electric light on. They won’t come out then.”

The girl and I exchanged glances, and after a hearty laugh at the frightened spectacle we all three presented, we again parted, and I returned to my room.

What was the meaning of that inexplicable apparition of the hand? Why had the dying man warned me of it?

I could quite see Asta’s reluctance to tell her father what she had seen, knowing well how he – plain, matter-of-fact man – would laugh at her and declare that she had been dreaming.