HER COUSIN TO THE RESCUE
"GOOD evening," I said, coldly looking up at the young man, with a
glance that said as plainly as possible, "What do you want?"
"I hoped you might be kind enough to allow me to escort you on this
little stroll of yours, Miss Smith," said the young American politely,
lifting his grey felt hat. "See here, I guess I'd better introdooce
myself. I'm Hiram P. Jessop, of Chicago."
"You are a detective, too, I suppose," I said, still more coldly. We
were standing by the railings of the old London churchyard close to the
river. The dark-green leaves of the plane-trees rustled above us. "I
suppose you are following me to find out if I'm taking Mr.
Rattenheimer's ruby to a pawnshop?"
The young American smiled cheerfully down at me.
"Nix on the detective racket here," he said, in his queer, slow,
pleasant accent. "You can cut out that about Rats and his ruby, I guess.
I don't care a row o' beans where his old ruby has gann to. What I
wanted to ask you about was----" He concluded with a most unexpected two
words--
--"My cousin!"
I stared up at this big young stranger in the padded grey coat.
"Your cousin? But--I think you're making some mistake----"
"I guess not," said the young American. "You're my cousin's maid all
right, aren't you? You're Miss Million's maid?"
"Yes. Yes, of course," I said, clinging on to that one straw of fact in
an ocean of unexpectedness. "I'm her maid----"
"And I'm her cousin," said the young American simply. "Second cousin, or
second, once removed--or something of that sort. You haven't heard of
me?"
"No, I never have heard of any of Miss Million's cousins," I said,
shaking my head with a gesture of firm disbelief. For I summed up his
claim to relationship with my mistress as being about as authentic as
the Honourable Jim's alleged friendship with her uncle.
Only the fibbing of this second young man seemed rather more shameless!
I said: "I didn't know that Miss Million had any cousins."
"And you don't believe it now you hear it? Is that so?" he said, still
smiling cheerfully. "Why, it's quite right to be on the side of caution.
But you're overdoing it, Miss Smith. I'm related to old man Million
right enough. Why, I'm at the boss-end of no end of his business. The
Sausage King. Well, I've been the Sausage Prince. I see you looking at
me as much as to say, 'You say so.' See here, d'you want some proofs?
I've a wad of letters from the old man in my pocket now."
He put his hand to the breast of the grey-tweed jacket.
"Maybe you think those aren't proofs, either? Write myself a few
billets-doux signed, 'Yours cordially, Sam Million'--easy as falling off
a horse, eh?"
(Of course, this was what I had thought.)
"I guess I shall have to take you and my cousin along with me to our
lawyers the next time I'm calling, that's all," concluded the young
American with his cheerfully philosophical air. "Chancery Lane, Messrs.
Chesterton, Brown, Jones, and Robinson. That's the firm."
"Oh! You know Mr. Chesterton!" I exclaimed in accents of relief. I'd
quite forgotten Miss Million's dear old family lawyer. That nice old
gentleman! If I wanted advice or help of course there was Mr. Chesterton
to fall back on! I hadn't thought of him before.
"Know Mr. Chesterton? Sure thing," said the American. We had moved away
from the churchyard railings and were strolling slowly towards the
embankment now. "Why, Mr. Chesterton and I had a long, long
heart-to-heart talk this afternoon, before I came on in the great
trunk-searching act! I was just coming in to leave a card on my cousin,
Miss Nellie Million, when I found myself one of the galaxy of beauty and
talent that was going to make a thorough examination of you girls'
things."
"Oh, were you?" I said lamely. I couldn't think what else to say. Too
many things had been happening all day long!
I said: "Miss Million didn't know you were coming?
"Why, no! I guess she didn't suspect my existence, any more than I
suspected hers until a few weeks ago," said Miss Million's cousin. (At
last I found myself believing that he really was her cousin after all.)
"Horrible shock to me, I can tell you, that my Uncle Sam was cherishing
the thought of this little English niece of his all this time! Making up
his mind to leave his pile to this girl. Meantime Hiram P. Jessop," here
he tapped the grey-tweed jacket again, "had been looking upon himself as
the heir-apparent!"
"Oh! You thought all that money was coming to you?" I said, half-amused,
half-pityingly, for this was certainly the frankest, most boyish sort of
young man I'd ever come across. "And you've lost it all on account of my
mistress?"
"Say, doesn't that sound the queerest ever? A daisy little girl like you
talking about some other girl as her 'mistress'!" rejoined my companion
in a wondering tone. "Why, d'you know? When I saw you standing there in
the sitting-room, in your black dress and that cute little apron and
cap, I said to myself: 'If this isn't the image of some Society girl of
the English upper class playing the Pretty Domestic part in some private
theatricals where they rush you a quarter's salary, I guess, for half a
look and a programme!' I said, if you'll pardon me: 'It's just the
accent, just the look, just the manner.'"
"Oh!" I said, rather vexed.
I was annoyed that he should think there was any trace of "acting"
about my appearance. I thought I'd had the art that conceals Art. I
thought I'd come to look such an irreproachable lady's-maid.
"Just typically the English Young Lady of the Upper Classes," pronounced
this surprising young American, meditatively walking along by my side on
the asphalt paths of the Embankment Gardens. "As typical as the
Westminster Abbey, or those tea-shops.... Real sweet-looking, real
refined-looking, if I may say so. But cold! Cold and stiff! 'Do not dare
to approach me, for all my family were here dying of old age when
William the Conqueror landed on these shores.' That's the way you'd
impress one, Miss Smith. 'Look through my trunks?'" Here he adopted an
extraordinary voice that I suppose was intended for an imitation of my
own tones.
Then he pulled himself up and said gravely: "You'll pardon me if I'm too
frank. But I'm always outspoken. It's my nature. I'm interested in
types. I was interested in yours. Noo to me. Quite noo. The young lady
that looks as if she ought to be standing to have her portrait painted
on the grey-stone steps of some big English country house--the young
lady that turns out to be paid maid to my own cousin! A noo thing."
"Really!" I said gravely. I couldn't help feeling amused at his puzzled
face.
We turned again down the asphalt path between the flower-beds of those
gardens that are overshadowed by the big hotel. On a bench I caught
sight again of the quiet figure that I had noticed on the other side of
the Strand. It was the Scotland Yard man. He seemed to be reading an
evening paper. But I felt that he was watching, watching....
I didn't mind; even if he did think he was watching some one who knew
what had become of the Rattheimer ruby! I felt something comforting and
trustworthy in the presence of this other young man; this peculiar
cousin of Million's, from whom one heard, quite unresentfully, remarks
that one would not forgive in an Englishman, for instance Mr. Brace. Not
that Mr. Brace would ever venture on such personalities ... the
Honourable Jim now.... Yes, but he's a Celt. A Celt is a person who
takes, but cannot give, offence. Most unfair, of course.
The American pursued: "And this cousin of mine? There's another type I
shall be interested to see. Tell me about her, Miss Smith, will you?
Have you known her long?"
"Oh, yes," I said. "It's some years since I've known Miss Million."
"And well, considering the difference in your positions, that is?"
"Oh, yes, fairly well," I said, thinking of the many artless confidences
I'd listened to from Miss Million--then "Million," of our disgracefully
inconvenient little kitchen at Putney. Those far-away days seemed very
pleasant and peaceful to me to-night! But they--those kitchen days--were
no part of the business of the young man at my side.
"D'you get on with her?" he said.
"Oh, yes, thank you."
"You don't tell me much. It's this English reserve I'm always up
against. It's a thing you'd need an ice-axe for, I guess, or a hundred
years with your families living in the same village," complained the
young American, laughing ruefully.
"Were you two girls raised together? School together?"
"Oh, no."
He sighed and went off on another tack.
"Can't you tell me the way she looks, so as to prepare me some for when
I see her?" he suggested. "Does she resemble you, Miss Smith?"
"I don't think so," I said, suppressing a foolish giggle. It was the
first time I'd wanted to laugh at anything for the last twenty-four
hours. "No; Miss Million is--well, she's about my height. But she's
dark."
"I've always admired the small brunette woman myself," admitted Mr.
Hiram P. Jessop, adding quickly and courteously: "Not that I don't think
it's perfectly lovely to see a blonde with the bright chestnut hair and
the brown eyes that you have."
"Thank you," I said.
"And how soon can I see this little dark-haired cousin of mine?" went on
the American when we turned out of the Gardens. Unobtrusively the
Scotland Yard man had risen also. "What time can I call around this
evening?"
"I--I don't know when she'll be in," I hesitated.
"Where's she gone to?" persisted the cousin of this missing heiress.
"How long did she go for?"
I fenced with this question until we arrived at the very doors of the
Cecil again.
Then an impulse seized me.
All day long I had wrestled alone with this trouble of mine. I hadn't
consulted Mr. Brace. I had kept it from the Honorable Jim. I had put up
all sorts of pretences about it to the people at the hotel. But I felt
now that it would have to come out. I couldn't stand it any longer.
I turned to Miss Million's cousin.
"Mr. Jessop, I must tell you," I said in a serious and measured voice.
"The truth is I don't know!"
"What?" he took up, startled. "Are you telling me that you don't know
where my cousin is at this moment?"
I nodded.
"I wish I did know," I said fervently. And as we stood, a little aside
from the glass doors in the vestibule, I went on, in soft, rapid tones,
to tell him the story of Miss Million's disappearance from my horizon
since half-past eleven last night.
I looked up, despairingly, into his startled, concerned face.
"What has happened to her?" I said urgently. "What do you think? Where
do you think she is?"
Before he could say a word a messenger came up to me with a telegram.
"For Miss Smith."
I felt that this would be news at last. It must be. I seized the wire; I
tore it open.
I read----
"Oh!" I cried quite loudly.
One of the commissionaires glanced curiously over his shoulder at me.
I dropped my voice as I said feverishly: "Yes, it is! It's from HER!"
And I held the telegram out, blindly, towards the young American.
The telegram which my mistress had sent ran simply and superbly thus:
"Why ever don't you bring my clothes?
"MISS MILLION."
There was no address.
The wire had been handed in at half-past seven o'clock that evening at
Lewes. It left me silent for a moment with bewilderment and dismay.
After waiting so long for a message! To receive one that told me
nothing!
"What is the meaning of this here?" said Miss Million's cousin,
repeating, in the accent that makes all our English words sound
something new and strange. "'Why ever don't you bring my clothes?' Well!
I guess that sounds as if nothing very terrible had happened to her. Her
clothes! A woman's first thought, of course. Where does she want you to
'bring' them to, Miss Smith?"
"How on earth should I know?" I cried, in desperation. "When I still
don't know where she is, or what she is doing!"
"But this place, Lewes. Surely that's some guide to you?"
"Not the slightest," I said. "We don't know anybody at Lewes! At least,
I don't know that she knew anybody there! I don't know who on earth can
have taken her there!" This with another nervous thought of young Lord
Fourcastles. "I shall have to go at once--no, it's too late to-night.
To-morrow I shall go. But----
"She may not be there at all. She may have been motoring through when
she sent this absurd wire!"
"Maybe," said the American. "But it's a clue, for all that. Lewes! The
post-offices at Lewes will tell you something about her."
"Why, why didn't she tell me something about herself?" I stormed softly.
"Here she is taking it for granted that I know exactly what's happened
and where she's gone! Does she imagine that she explained that to me
last night before she went out? Does she think she gave me any orders?
Here she is actually asking 'why?' to me!" I concluded, stammering with
indignation. "She sounds quite furious because I haven't brought her
clothes to her----somewhere in Space!"
"What clothes was she wearing, may I ask?" demanded the American cousin,
in his simple, boyishly interested manner.
And when I told him of the bright, cherry-coloured evening gown, and the
creamy restaurant coat, and the little cerise satin shoes with jewelled
heels that Million had on, he put back his head and laughed gently.
"Poor little girl! Poor little Cousin Nellie! I guess she must have been
real mad with herself and you for letting her loose in that get-up," he
said, "prancing about all day in the bright sunlight in that outfit.
Enough to jar any girl of taste in dress, I guess!"
Then his alert face grew grave again. He said, glancing over his
shoulder at the groups that were coming and going in the vestibule:
"Well, we'll discuss this. Come into the lounge, where we can talk
quietly."
We went into the lounge, where only yesterday I had perceived for the
first time the sumptuous apparition of Miss Vi Vassity pouring out tea
for my now vanished mistress.
It seemed to me that everybody there looked up at me as we passed in. I
bit my lip and frowned a little.
"You are right. This is no place for a quiet chat," said the American
softly. "It will have to be my cousin's sitting-room again, I reckon."
Upstairs, in Miss Million's sitting-room, that I seemed to know as well
now as a penal-servitude prisoner knows his cell, the American said to
me gravely and quietly: "There is one thing, I daresay, which you have
not thought of in connection with that----"
He nodded his smooth, mouse-coloured head at the tantalising wire that I
still held crushed in my hand.
"Now, I don't know much about your police system," said young Mr.
Jessop, "but I reckon it won't be so very different from our own in a
matter of this nature." He nodded again, and went on gravely:
"That telegram will have been read all right! The people here, the
manager and the Scotland Yard man, they will know what's in that."
"Know what's in it?" I gasped, staring at him. "Why, how can they? Do
you mean," indignantly, "that they opened it?"
"Why, no! You saw for yourself the envelope was not opened when you got
the thing. But that is not to say that they could not get it repeated,
as easy as winking, at the post-office," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, of
Chicago. "So I'd be ready to bet that everybody here knows what you're
up to when you leave this hotel to-morrow. My old acquaintance, Rats,
and all of 'em. They'll know you're taking something to your young
mistress--your confederate, they'll think her!--in Sussex. You may be
quite sure they're not going to allow you to take any trips into
Sussex--alone. Nope. Somebody will go with you, Miss Smith."
"Go with me? D'you mean," I said, "that I shall be shadowed all the way
by that odious detective man?"
"Well, now, isn't it more than probable, Miss Smith?" said the young
American shrewdly. "They'd their eye on you two girls from the start, it
seems. You aren't a very usual couple. Noo to me, you are. Both of you
seemed noo to them!"
"I knew they gossiped about us!" I said ruefully.
"Sure thing; but don't say 'gossip' as if it was something nobody else
did only the folks around this hotel!" protested the American,
twinkling. "Well, to-day after the great Jewel Steal you aroused
considerable suspicion by refusing to let Rats and the others do the
Custom House officer's act through your wardrobe. This wire will have
raised more suspicion this evening. And to-morrow--d'you think they're
going to let you quit without further notice taken? Think!"
I thought for a second.
I saw that he was perfectly right.
It was just what would happen. Wherever I went to-morrow in search of
that baffling mistress of mine I should have that Scotland Yard
detective on my heels!
That sort of thing made me terribly nervous and uneasy! But I could
imagine the ingenuous Million being forty times worse about it! If I did
succeed in running her to earth at last, I could just imagine Million's
unconcealed and compromising horror at seeing me turn up with a
companion who talked about "the necessary steps" and "the Law!"
Million would be so overwhelmed that she would look as if she had a
whole mine full of stolen rubies sewn into the tops of her corsets. She
has a wild and baseless horror of anything to do with the police. (I saw
her once, at home, when a strange constable called to inquire about a
lost dog. It was I who'd had to go to the door. Million had sat,
shuddering, in the kitchen, her hand on her apron-bib, and her whole
person suffering from what she calls "the palps.")
So this was going to be awkward, hideously awkward.
Yet I couldn't go out in search of her!
I said, desperately: "What am I to do about it?"
"There is only one thing for it as far as I can see," said the young
American thoughtfully; "you will have to let me go down with a suit-case
full of lady's wearing apparel. You will have to let me make all the
inquiries in Lewes."
"You? Oh, no! That is quite impossible," I exclaimed firmly. "You could
not."
"Why not? I tell you, Miss Smith, it seems to me just to meet the case,"
he said earnestly.
"Here's this little cousin of mine, that I have never yet seen, that
I've got to make friends with. I am to be allowed to make her
acquaintance by doing her a service. Now, isn't that the real,
old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon chivalry? It would just appeal to me."
"I don't think it would appeal to Miss Million," I said, "to have a
perfectly strange young man suddenly making his appearance in the middle
of--wherever she is, with a box full of all sorts of her things, and
saying he is her cousin! No, I shall have to go," I said.
And then a sudden awful thought struck me. How far could I go on the
money that was left to me? Three and sixpence!
"My goodness! What's the railway fare from Victoria, or wherever you go
to Lewes from? I don't believe I have got it!" I turned to the young man
with a resigned sigh of desperation. "I shall have to borrow from you,"
I said.
"With great pleasure," said the young American promptly. Then, with a
twinkle, he added swiftly: "See here, Miss Smith. Cut out the railroad
business altogether. Far better if you were to permit me to take you
down by automobile. Will you let me do that, now? I can hire an
automobile and tear off a hundred miles or so of peaceful English
landscape before anybody has had time to say 'How very extraordinary!'
which is the thing they always are saying in England when any remark is
put forward about what they do in the States. Pack up my cousin's
contraptions to-night, will you? To-morrow morning, at nine or eight or
seven if you like, we'll buzz out of this little old town and play
baseball with all the police traps between here and Brighton! Does this
appeal to you?"
I could not help feeling that this did very considerably appeal to me.
If I went with this un-English, unconventional, but kind and helpful
young man, I should at least not feel such a lone, lorn female, such a
suspect in the eyes of the law! I could rise superior to the dogging of
detectives, just as I had risen superior to them this evening in the
Embankment Gardens.
Suffragists and college-educated girls and enlightened persons of that
sort may say what they choose on the subject of woman becoming daily
more self-reliant and independent of man.
But I don't care. The fact remains that to the average girl-in-a-scrape
the presence of man, sympathetic and efficient, does still appear the
one and only and ideal prop!
Bless Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, of Chicago! I was only too thankful to accept
the offer of his escort--and of his car!
Before he left me I had arranged to meet him at a certain garage at nine
o'clock in the morning.
"Bright and early, as we may want to have the whole day before us," said
the American as he went out. "Till then, Miss Smith!"