The Mysterious Three

Though I pride myself upon a rapidity of decision in moments of crises, and have misled the more ingenuous among my friends into believing that I really am a man of exceedingly strong character, who would never find himself at a loss if brought suddenly face to face with a critical problem, I don’t mind admitting that I am an invertebrate, vacillating creature at such times. Oh, no, I never lose my head. Don’t think that. But when instant decision is needed, and there are several decisions one might come to, I get quite “jumpy,” half make up my mind to take one course, half make up my mind to take the opposite course, and finally take the third, or it may be the fourth or fifth.

“Well, you had better get away at once, dear,” Vera urged quickly, when I had told her what I had heard below.

“But what are you going to do?” I asked.

“Oh, I know what I’m going to do,” she replied at once, “but I want to have your plan. I know, dear, you are never at a loss when ‘up against it,’ to use your own phrase. You have often told me so, or implied it.”

Now I did not entirely like her tone. There was a curious gleam in her eyes, which I mistrusted. I had noticed that gleam before, on occasions when she had been drawing people on to make admissions that they did not wish to make. She was rather too fond, I had sometimes thought, of indulging in a form of intellectual pastime that I have heard people who talk slang – a thing that I detest – call “pulling you by the leg.” The suspicion crossed my mind at that moment, that Vera was trying to “pull my leg” – and I frankly didn’t like it.

“This is no time for joking, Vera,” I said, for the “gleam” in her eyes had now become a twinkle. “This is a time for action – and very prompt action.”

I wondered how she could jest at such a moment. “That is why I want you to act,” she answered innocently, “and to act promptly. However, as I believe you have no idea what to do, Dick, I’m going to tell you what to do, and you must do it – promptly. Now, follow me. I know my way about this place.” She led me softly along the corridor, turned to the right, then to the left, and then to the left again. Presently we reached the top of a flight of steep, and very narrow wooden stairs.

“Follow me,” she whispered again, “and keep one hand on that rope,” indicating a cord that served as a bannister. “These stairs are slippery, or they always used to be. As a child, I used to fall down them every Sunday.”

We were on the first floor. The stairs continued to the ground floor. She turned suddenly.

“How about your gloves and umbrella?”

There was the curious look in her eyes again, so I paid no attention.

“Have you matches?” she asked, a moment later.

I struck one, and, stooping, we made our way along a narrow, dark passage, with a low ceiling. Five stone steps down into a damp, stone tunnel, about twenty feet in length, then to the right, and we came to a wooden door.

“Give me your keys,” she said.

I did so, and she unlocked the door. It led into a little stone-flagged yard. On three sides of it were high walls, walls of houses. The wall on the fourth side, only a few feet high, was surmounted by iron rails. Stone steps led up to the gate at the end of the rails. She opened the gate, re-locking it when we had passed out, and we stood in a stone-flagged cul-de-sac, about fifteen yards long, across the open end of which, the traffic of the street could be seen passing to and fro.

“And now,” she said, when we had reached the street, disobeying the injunction of Paulton, “you are going to tell me what I must do next.”

I hailed a taxi, and we drove off in it, discussing plans as we went along.

Then I secured a room for her in a comfortable little hotel I knew of, in a street off Russell Square. The difficulty that now arose, was how to get her luggage.

She told me all her things were packed, as she was to have left for Paris that night, alone. The order received from her father was, that she should remain in an obscure lodging near Rue la Harpe, the address of which, he had given her. There she would receive further instructions. These instructions, she told me, were to come either from her father, or from Paulton. She had strict orders not to communicate with Davies. Her luggage was in Brighton. Sir Charles and Lady Thorold had been staying in Brighton, and she had come up that morning. Paulton had met her at Victoria, and taken her in a cab direct to her father’s empty house in Belgrave Street. He had told her that if she dared go out before he came to her at ten that night, he would go to the police.

“But who is this man Davies?” I asked.

“A friend.”

“But cannot you tell me something more concerning him?” I demanded.

“At present, no. I regret, Dick, that I am not allowed to say anything – my lips are sealed.”

“And Paulton. Why obey him so subserviently?”

“Ah!” she sighed. “Because I am compelled.”

With these rebuffs, I was forced to be satisfied.

With regard to the plan for recovering her luggage, I rose to the occasion. After pondering the problem for a quarter of an hour, I suggested that she should write a note to her mother in Brighton, saying that Paulton had suddenly changed his plans, and that her luggage was wanted at once. It was to have been sent off at eight o’clock that night, when Paulton would meet it at Victoria, she had told me. The bearer of the note we would now send to Brighton – a District Messenger – would be instructed to bring the luggage back with him. I looked up the trains in the railway-guide, and found it would be just possible for the messenger to do this in the time. To avoid any mishap, I told the messenger to alight, on his return journey, at Clapham Junction, and bring the luggage from there, in a taxi, to the hotel near Russell Square.

We dined together upstairs, at the Trocadero– ah! how I enjoyed that evening! How delightful it was to sit tête-à-tête with her. Before we had finished dinner, word was brought to us that Vera’s luggage had arrived.

“I think I managed that rather well,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“No,” she answered, “I don’t.”

“No?”

“As you ask me, I may as well tell you that I think you could hardly have ‘managed’ it worse. You have simply put Paulton on my track.”

“But how?”

“How! Really, my dear Dick, your intelligence resembles a child’s. You send a messenger for my luggage. Acting on your instructions, he brings it from Brighton to Clapham Junction by train, then hails a taxi, and brings the luggage on it direct to this hotel. Paulton is told by my mother in Brighton, that a messenger from London called for the luggage. All he has to do, is to ring up the messenger offices, until he finds the one where you engaged your messenger. Having found that out, he ascertains from the messenger the address to which he took the luggage in the taxi, and at once he comes and finds me.”

“But,” I said quickly, “Paulton is not in Brighton.”

“How can that matter? He can easily find out who took my luggage. I tell you, dear, if Paulton finds me, worse still, if he finds me with you, the result will be terrible for all of us. You should yourself have gone to Clapham, met the messenger-boy there, and yourself have brought the luggage here.”

I felt crushed. I had believed my plan had been laid so cleverly. At the same time, my admiration for Vera’s foresight increased, though I did not tell her so.

We went back to the hotel at once, took away the luggage with us, and by ten o’clock that night she was comfortably settled in another small hotel, within a stone’s throw of Hampstead Heath.

My sweet-faced, well-beloved told me many things I wanted to know, but alas! not everything, and all the time we conversed, I had to bear in mind the important fact that she believed me to be familiar with Sir Charles’ secret – the secret that had led to his sudden flight from Houghton with her mother, herself and the French maid. I mistrusted that French maid – Judith. I had disliked the tone in which she had addressed Vera, when she had called her away from me that night at Houghton, and told her that Lady Thorold wanted her. I had noticed the maid on one or two previous occasions, and from the first I had disliked her. Her voice was so smooth, her manner so artificially deferential, and altogether she had seemed to me stealthy and cat-like. I believed her to be a hypocrite, if not a schemer.

The man who had called himself Davies, Vera told me, in the course of our long conversation that evening, was not named Smithson at all. That was a name he had adopted for some motive which, she seemed to take it for granted, I must be able to guess. Mexican by birth, though of British-Portuguese parentage, he had spoken to her, perhaps, half-a-dozen times. He appeared to be a friend of her father, she said, though what interest they had in common she had never been able to discover.

Speaking of Paulton, she said, her soft hand resting in mine, that he had known her mother longer than her father, and he had, she believed, been introduced by her mother to Sir Charles, since which time, the two men’s intimacy had steadily increased.

She gave no reason for the dismay the sight of the framed panel portrait of “Smithson” had created, or for the sudden dismissal that night of all the servants at Houghton, and the subsequent flight. I could not quite decide, in my mind, if she took it for granted that I, knowing Sir Charles’ secret – as she supposed – knew also why he had left Houghton thus mysteriously, or whether she intentionally refrained from telling me. But certainly she seemed to think there was no reason to tell me who had done poor James, the butler, to death, or who had fired the rifle shots from the wood, and killed the chauffeur. At the inquest on the butler, the jury had returned an open verdict.

Could he have been drowned by Paulton, and drowned intentionally? Or was Davies responsible for his death? That it must have been one of those two men I now felt certain – supposing he had not committed suicide, or been drowned by accident.

Another thing Vera clearly took for granted was, that I must have known why the man hidden in the wood had fired those shots at me. I had guessed, of course, from the first, that the bullet that had killed the driver had been meant for me; though why anybody should wish to do me harm I had not the remotest idea.

Of some points, of course, my love was ignorant as myself.

On the subject of the flask with the gelsiminum – a very potent poison distilled from the root of the yellow jasmine – that had been picked up on the drive at Houghton, just outside the front door, Vera said nothing. Indeed, though I referred to it more than once, she each time turned the conversation into a different channel, as though by accident.

“By the way, darling,” I said, as our lips met again in a long, lingering caress, when we had been talking a long time, “why did you ring me up to tell me you were in trouble and needed my help, and why did you call with Davies at my chambers?”

Several times during the evening I had been on the point of asking her these questions, but on each occasion she had diverted my intention. It seemed odd, too, that though I had more than once asked her to tell me Davies’ true name, she had each time turned the conversation without satisfying me. And at last she had point-blank refused to tell me.

Why? I wondered.

She looked at me steadily for some moments.

“It seems almost incredible, Dick,” she said at last, speaking very slowly, and drawing herself away, “that knowing my father’s secret, you should ask those questions. Tell me, how did you come to make the terrible discovery about my father? How long have you known everything? Who told you about it?”

Chapter Ten

Relates a Strange Incident

Vera’s very direct questions took me aback, though I had expected them sooner or later. “Who told me?” I said, echoing the words in order to gain time for thought, my arms still about her. “Oh, I’m sure I can’t remember. I seem to have known it a long time.”

“It can’t have been such a very long time,” she answered, still looking at me in that queer way that made me feel uncomfortable. “Surely you must remember who told you. It is hardly the sort of thing one would be told every day – or even twice in one’s life, is it?”

“Honestly,” I said with quick decision, “I can’t tell you how I came to know it.”

“Your ‘cannot’ means ‘will not,’” she said, and her lip twitched in the curious way that I knew meant she was nettled.

However, after that she dropped the subject, and I felt relieved. I hated deceiving her, yet I was compelled. I am not an adept in the art of what Lamb calls “walking round about a truth,” at least, not for more than a minute or two at a time, and my love had such quick intelligence that it is no easy matter – as I had several times discovered, to my discomfiture – to mislead her.

For the first time since we had met in the house in Belgrave Street, our conversation became purely personal.

I had almost feared the events of the past weeks might have altered her regard for me, and it afforded me intense relief to find I was mistaken. For I was desperately in love with her, more so than I cared to admit even to myself. And now I found to my joy that my love for her was apparently fully reciprocated.

And yet why should she care for me? This puzzled me, I confess, though I know as a thoroughgoing man of the world and as a cosmopolitan that women do take most curious likes and dislikes. I am neither clever, good-looking nor amusing, nor, I believe, even particularly “good company” as it is called. There are scores upon scores of men just like myself. You meet them everywhere, in town and in the country. Society teems with them, and our clubs are full of them. Men, young and middle aged, who have been educated at the public schools and Universities, who have comfortable incomes, are fond of sport, who travel up and down Europe, who have never in their lives done a stroke of work – and don’t intend ever to do one if they can help it – who live solely for amusement and for the pleasure of living.

What do women see in such men, women who have plenty of money and therefore do not need to marry in order to secure a home or to better themselves? What did – what could Vera Thorold see in me to attract her, least of all to tempt her to wish to marry me?

“Vera, my dearest,” I said, when we had talked of each other’s affairs for a considerable time, “why not marry me now? I can get a special licence! Then you will be free of all trouble, and nobody will be able to molest you. I shall have a right to protect you in every way possible.”

“Free of all trouble if I marry you, Richard?” she answered, reflectively, evading my question, and looking at me queerly.

“And why not?” I asked. I felt rather hurt, for her words seemed to imply some hidden meaning. “Don’t you think I shall be good to you and treat you properly?”

“Oh, that would be all right,” she answered, apparently amused at my misconstruing her meaning. “I am sure, Dick, that you would be good to any girl. I have already heard of your spoiling two or three girls, and giving them presents they had no right to accept from you – eh?” she asked mischievously.

I am afraid I turned rather red, for, to be candid, I am something of a fool where women are concerned. At the same time I was surprised at her knowing the truth, and I suppose she guessed this, for, before I had time to speak again, she went on —

“You must not forget that I am a modern girl, my dear old Dick. I know a great deal that I suppose I have no business to know, and when I hear things I remember them. Don’t for a moment flatter yourself that I think you perfect. I don’t. My frank opinion of you is that you really are an awfully good sort, kind, sympathetic, unselfish – singularly unselfish for a man – generous to a fault, and extravagant. In short, I like you far, far better than any man I have ever met, and I love you very much, you dear old boy – but there it ends.”

“I should rather say it did!” I answered. “If you really think all that of me, I am more than satisfied.”

“On the other hand,” she continued quickly, “I don’t pretend to think – and you needn’t think I do – that you are not just like most other men in some respects, in one respect in particular.”

“What is the one respect?”

“You are dreadfully susceptible – oh, yes, Dick, you are! There is no need for any one to tell me that. I can see it in your face. Your eyes betray you. You have what I once heard a girl friend of mine call, ‘affectionate eyes.’ She said to me: ‘Never trust a man who has “affectionate eyes,” and I never have trusted one – except you.’”

“I am flattered dear. Then why not do what I suggest?” I asked, raising her soft hand to my lips.

“It wouldn’t be safe, Dick, it really wouldn’t. We must wait until – until Paulton is dead.”

“Until Paulton – is – until he – is dead!” I gasped. “Good Heavens! that may not be for years!”

She smiled oddly.

“He may live for years, of course,” she answered drily.

“What do you mean?” I asked, staring at her in amazement.

“I mean,” she said, looking straight at me, and her voice suddenly grew hard, “that when he is dead, the world will be rid of a creature who ought never to have been born.”

Her eyes blazed.

“Ah! Dick – Ah! Dick!” she went on with extraordinary force, sighing heavily, “if you only knew the life that man has led – the misery he has caused, the horrors that are traceable to his vile diabolical plots. My father and mother are only two of his many victims. He is a man I dread. I am not a coward, no one can call me that, but – but I fear Dago Paulton – I fear him terribly.” She was trembling in my arms, though whether through fear, or only from emotion, I could not say. Nor could I think of any apt words which might soothe her, except to say —

“Leave him to me, dearest. Yet from what you tell me,” I said after a pause, “I can only suppose that some one is – how shall I put it? – going to encompass Paulton’s death.”

“Who knows?” she asked vaguely, looking up into my eyes.

I shrugged my shoulders, but said nothing. There was nothing I could say. This much I had suspected at any rate – Paulton had been responsible for the chauffeur’s death – or Vera believed him to have been.

When I left my beloved late that night, and returned to King Street, I was not satisfied with my discoveries. So many mysteries still remained unsolved. What was the danger that had threatened her when she had rung me up at my flat, and begged me to help her? Where had she been staying? What danger threatened her now? What hold had the man Paulton over her, and why did she fear to disobey him? Most perplexing of all – what was her father’s secret, and why had he fled from Houghton?

There were many minor problems, too, which still needed solution. Who was Davies; what was his true name, and why was he so intimate with Sir Charles?

Again I seemed to see that curious stain on the ceiling of the room in Belgrave Street, and once more I wondered what had caused it. It might be, of course, merely a stain caused by some leaking pipe, and yet —

I thought of that remarkable conversation I had heard in the hall of the unoccupied house. What had they meant when they said they must “bring Vera to her senses”? Also, why had they seemed averse from calling in a doctor to see the old man Taylor, and to —

Taylor! I had been so much engrossed with Vera and her bondage of terror for the past few hours that I had forgotten all about him. Taylor. Had he recovered consciousness, I wondered, or had he —

A cold shiver ran through me as this last thought occurred to me.

It must have been quite two o’clock in the morning before I fell asleep. I am not an early riser, and my first feeling when I was awakened by John shaking me rather roughly, was one of annoyance. With difficulty I roused myself thoroughly. My servant was standing by the bedside, looking very pale.

“There are two police-officers downstairs,” he said huskily. “They have come – they say they have come, sir – ”

“Well, out with it,” I exclaimed wrathfully, as he checked himself abruptly. “What have they come for? Do they want to see me?”

He braced himself with an effort —

“They say, sir,” he answered, “that – that they’ve come to arrest you! It is something to do, I think, with some old man who’s been found dead in an unoccupied ’ouse.”

Chapter Eleven

Contains some Strange News

My heart seemed to stop beating. Old Taylor, then, was dead, and I sat up in bed, staring straight before me.

For nearly a minute I did not speak. All the time I felt John’s calm gaze, puzzled, inquisitive, fixed upon me. I had gone through enough unhappiness during these past weeks to last me a lifetime, but all that I had endured would be as nothing by comparison with this. I could not blind myself to one fact – I had poisoned old Taylor deliberately. Had I, by some hideous miscalculation, the result of ignorance, overdosed him, and brought his poor old life to a premature end? I might be charged with manslaughter. Or worse!

Why! I might be convicted of murder. I might even be hanged! The grim thought held me breathless.

And Vera – my thoughts fled to her at once – what would become of Vera? Even if I were only imprisoned, and only for a short spell, Vera would have none to look to for help, none to defend her. She would be at the mercy of her persecutors! I think that thought appalled me even more than the thought that I might be tried for manslaughter or murder.

“Oh,” I said at last to John, “it’s some mistake. The police have made some grotesque blunder. You had better show them up, and I will talk to them.”

No blunder had been made, and I knew it.

I must say that I was surprised at the officers’ extreme courtesy. Seeing they were about to arrest me on suspicion of having caused a man’s death, their politeness, their consideration for my feelings, had a touch of irony.

They waited while I had my bath and dressed. Then we all drove together to the police-station, chatting quite pleasantly on topics of passing interest. At the police-station my name and address and many other particulars, were taken down in writing. With the utmost gravity a pompous inspector asked me “what birthmarks I possessed, if any,” and various other questions ending with “if any.” I wondered whether, before he had done, he would ask me my sex – if any.

Nearly a month dragged on – days of anxiety, which seemed years, and I had had no word from Vera!

I shall never forget that trial – never.

My opinion of legal procedure, never high, sank to zero before the trial at the London Sessions ended. The absurdity of some of the questions asked by counsel; the impossible inferences drawn from quite ordinary occurrences; the endless repetitions of the same questions, but in different sets of words; the verbal quibbling and juggling; the transposing of statements made in evidence and conveying a meaning obvious to the lowest intelligence; the pathos indulged in when the old man’s end came to be described; the judge’s weak attempts at being witty; the red-tapeism; the unpardonable waste of time – and of public money. No, I shall never forget those days.

It lasted from Monday till Thursday, and during those four days I spent eleven hours in the witness-box. Ah! what a tragic farce. I received anonymous letters of encouragement, and, of course, some offensive letters. I even received a proposal of marriage from a forward minx, who admitted that though still at school, in Blackheath, she had “read every word of the trial,” that she “kept a dear portrait” of me, cut out of the Daily Mirror, under her pillow at night. I felt I must indeed have reached the depths of ignominy when my hand was sought in matrimony by an emotional Blackheath flapper. A pretty flapper, I admit. She sent me five cabinet portraits of herself, in addition to a miniature of herself as a baby. Phew! What are our young people coming to?

Well, in the end I was acquitted, and told that I might leave the Court without a stain upon my character.

Certainly that was in a sense gratifying. In the face of acrobatic verbal feats Counsel representing the Director of Public Prosecutions had indulged in during the trial, I felt that anything might have happened, and was fully prepared to be branded a felon for life. The drug, the jury decided, had been administered without any intention whatever to do more than send the old man to sleep for an hour or so, and an analysis of the tea left in the cup proved beyond a doubt, that this tea could not possibly have caused death, which had been due to heart-failure. I had been traced, it seemed, by my gloves and umbrella left in the old man’s room. Other details – long-winded ones – I need not describe.