What should bring fashion, and wealth, and beauty in one charming person
up to London from the country at the latter end of August? The town
house long since dismantled for the grand tour now finished--the charms
of the season abandoned for peaceful Suffolk--why should Lilian care to
return thus at the fag end of London’s feast of folly? Has the bronzed
and bearded Barndale anything to do with it? Lady Dives Luxor gives a
ball; and Lady Dives, being Lilian’s especial patroness and guardian
angel and divinity, insists on Lilian being present thereat. This
ball is designed as the crowning festivity of a brilliant year; and
to Lilian, blest with youth and beauty and high spirits, and such a
splendid lover, shall it not be a night to remember until the grey
curtain fall on the close of the last season, and nothing is any more
remembered? But a cloud of sadness settles on Lilian’s charming face
when she misses the bronzed and bearded. Lady Dives knows all about the
engagement, and is enthusiastic over it; and, when Lilian has a second’s
time to snatch an enquiry concerning the absent one, she answers, ‘He
has never been near me once. I wrote him a special note, and told him
you were coming. He will be here.’ So Lady Dives strives to chase the
cloud. Barndale does not come, having never, in point of fact, received
that special note which Lady Dives had despatched to him. So the ball
is a weariness, and Lilian goes back with mamma to the hotel with
quite drooping spirits. She makes excuses for the absent Barndale, but
fancies all manner of things in her feminine fashion, preferring to
believe in fevers and boat accidents and other horrors rather than think
that a valet has been lazy or a postman inaccurate.
Papa Leland, who is here to take care of his womankind, has ideas of his
own on some matters.
‘Hang your swell hotels,’ says Papa Leland; ‘I always stop at the
Westminster, It’s near the House, and quite convenient enough for
anywhere.’
It was thus that Lilian found herself under the same roof with Thecla
Perzio, who lived there with a sore and frightened heart, waiting for
that shallow lover who had caught her in love’s toils, and broken up her
life for her, and who now left her poor appeal unanswered.
Poor indiscreet little Thecla had a suite of rooms on the first floor,
and lived alone within them with her Greek maid, and agonised. She was
for ever peering furtively through the door when any manly step sounded
in the corridor, but she never saw the form she waited for. But it
chanced, the morning after the ball, that she opened her door and looked
out upon the corridor at the sound of Papa Leland’s footstep. Papa
Leland went by briskly; but Lilian caught sight of her and knew her in a
moment, and stayed to speak. The two girls had been too closely engaged
with their respective love-makings to form any very close acquaintance
with each other; but during a week’s imprisonment on board ship the
friendships of women, and especially of young and gentle-hearted women,
advance very rapidly. They had parted with a great deal of mutual
liking, and met again now with mutual pleasure. In a minute Lilian was
seated in the poor little Greek’s big and dreary parlour. She was a
proud creature was little Thecla, and would not chatter with her maid.
She had given nobody her confidence; and now, having once confessed that
she was unhappy, she broke out, with her pretty head on Lilian’s lap,
and had a grand, refreshing, honest cry. That over, she set forth her
story. She told how Demetri was madly, foolishly jealous; how he had
tried to murder the gentleman of whom he was jealous; and how at last,
finding herself alone in the world, and being afraid of Demetri, she
had sought an asylum in England. She did not say of whom Demetri was
jealous, and Lilian had not the remotest notion of the truth. It very
soon came out, however; and then Lihan was sore afraid for Thecla
Perzio’s happiness. She had no great belief in her brother. She loved
him very much; but she was dimly afraid that James was an impracticable
and unmarriable man, a person who could set all the wiles and all the
tenderness of the sex at calm defiance--a born bachelor. And, besides
that, being, in spite of her many charms and virtues, an Englishwoman,
she had a natural and ridiculous objection to the marriage of any person
whom she valued to any other person of foreign blood, excepting in the
case of British royalty, in whose foreign matches she felt unfeigned
delight--wherefore, Heaven, perchance, knoweth. But then Lilian was not
a woman of a logical turn of mind; she was inconsistent and amiable, as
good girls always are; and being strongly opposed to marriages of this
kind in general, determined to lay herself out, heart and soul, for
the prosperity of this particular arrangement. So she kissed Thecla
vivaciously, and went to mamma, and persuaded that estimable lady to a
visit to Thames Ditton in search of James. Mamma, having regard to the
missing Barndale, and being in some matronly alarm for him, consented,
and the two set out together.
Barndale in the meantime had gone to his own chambers, and had there
smoked many deliberative and lonely pipes. When he came near to the
enterprise he had so readily undertaken in his friend’s behalf, he began
to feel signally nervous and uncomfortable about it. Of course he did
not for one moment think of resigning it; but he was puzzled, and in his
be-puzzlement retired within himself to concoct a plan of action. Having
definitely failed in this attempt, he resolved to go off at once without
preparation, and ask at the hotel for Miss Perzio, and then a round,
unvarnished tale deliver. This resolution formed, he started at once
and hurried, lest it should break by the way. Lilian and he were within
twenty yards of each other, neither of them knowing it, when his cab
rushed up to the door of the hotel.
Lilian knew the house-boat and its ways. One of the Amphibia of Ditton
conveyed the two ladies in a capacious boat to the aquatic residence of
the two friends. Lilian stepped lightly to the fore deck, and assisted
mamma from the boat.
‘They are both away,’ said Lilian, smiling and blushing. ‘And the
careless creatures have left the doors open. We will wait for them and
give them a surprise.’
The two women, full of fluttering complacency, entered the living
room. Lilian went first, and fell upon her knees with a sudden shriek,
beholding the prone figure on the floor; the mother darted to her side,
saw and partly understood, whipped out a vinaigrette, seized a caraffe
of water, and applied those innocent restoratives at once. Neither
mother nor daughter had time to think of anything worse than a fainting
fit, until Lilian, who had taken her brother’s head upon her lap, found
blood upon her hands. Then she turned white to the very lips, and tore
open the blue serge coat and waistcoat. The white flannel shirt beneath
was caked with blood. The two women moaned, but not a finger faltered.
They opened the shirt tenderly, and there, on the right breast, saw a
dull blue stain with a crimson thread in the middle of it. A gunshot
wound looks to unaccustomed eyes altogether too innocent a thing to
account for death or even for serious danger. But the cold pallor of the
face and body, the limp and helpless limbs betokened something terrible.
‘Take his poor head, mamma,’ cried Lilian; and she darted from the cabin
to the deck, The boatman was lounging quietly in the boat some thirty
yards down stream. She called to him aloud--
‘Go for a doctor. My brother is dying here. Be quick, be quick, be
quick!’ she almost screamed as the man stared at her. Understanding at
last, the fellow snatched up his sculls and dashed through the water.
Lilian flew back to her brother; and while the two women, not knowing
what to do further, sat supporting the helpless head together; a man
leapt aboard.
‘You called for a doctor, madam,’ he said quietly, ‘I am a surgeon.
Permit me to assist you.’
The women made way for him. He was a youngish man, with a sunburnt
complexion and grey hair, a gentleman beyond denial, and beyond doubt
self-possessed and accustomed to obedience. They trusted him at once. He
raised the recumbent figure to a couch, and then looked at the wound. He
turned over the lappel of the coat and glanced at it. He had a habit of
speaking to himself.
‘Pistol shot,’ he muttered. ‘Close quarters. Coat quite burned. Decimal
three-fifty or thereabouts I fancy from the look of it. Ah, here it is!
Have you a penknife or a pair of scissors, madam? That small knife will
do. Thank you.’
A dexterous touch, and from the little gaping lips carved by the
penknife’s point in the muscle of the back rolled out a flattened
piece of lead with jagged edges like a battered shilling, but a trifle
thicker.
‘Yes,’ said the surgeon, laying it on the table; ‘decimal three-fifty.
What’s this? Wound on the head. Your handkerchief, please. Cold water.
Thank you.’
His busy and practised hands were at work all the while.
‘Now, ladies, wait here for a few moments. I must bring help.’
‘Stop one minute!’ cried the mother. ‘Is he in danger?’
‘Grave danger.’
‘Will he die?’
‘Not if I can help it,’ And with that the stranger leaped on shore, and
ran like a racehorse across the fields and into the nearest house,
where he turned out the residents in a body, and made them unship a
five-barred gate. There were plenty of cushions in the boat, and he
wasted no time in getting others. The helpers beaten up by the doctor
worked with a will; and one ran off in advance and seized upon a punt
belonging to the Campers Out, and set it at the end of the house-boat,
towards the shore. Over this they bore Leland, and laid him on the
cushions which the doctor had arranged upon the gate. Then they carried
him into the ‘Swan’ and got him to bed there.
Lilian and her mother, trembling and struggling with their tears,
followed the bearers. The crowd which always accompanies disaster, even
in a village, made its comments as the melancholy little cortege went
along, and Lilian could not fail to overhear. Hodges was there.
‘I know’d what it ud come to,’ proclaimed Hodges loudly. ‘They was a
naggin’ every night, like mad, they was. I told you all what it ud come
to.’
‘So a did,’ said others in the crowd. Then some one asked ‘Where’s
t’other chap?’ and in the murmur Lilian heard her lover’s name again and
again repeated.
She knew well enough--she could not fail to know--the meaning of the
murmurs; but she started as though she had been struck when Hodges said
aloud, so that all might hear--
‘They was a naggin’ again last night, an’ then theer was a shot; and
then ten minutes arterwards that Barndale bolts and knocks me over at
the bottom o’ the station steps. What’s all that pint to?’
‘Oh,’ said another, ‘there can’t be no mortal shadder of a doubt who
done it.’
For a moment these cruel words turned her faint; but the swift reaction
of certainty and resolve which followed them nerved her and braced her
for all the troublous times to come. She waited calmly until all had
been done that could be done. Then when the doctor had left his patient,
she took him apart.
‘My brother has been wounded by a pistol shot?’ she asked him very
bravely and steadily. The doctor nodded. ‘I must find out who did it,’
she went on, looking him full in the face with her hazel eyes.
‘The people here seem to suspect a Mr. ------’
She snatched the word out of the doctor’s mouth.
‘My brother’s dearest friend, sir. Why, sir, they would have died for
each other.’
‘As you would for one of them?’ said the doctor to himself.
‘You have experience in these matters, sir. Will you help me to examine
the boat? There may perhaps be something there to help us to track the
criminal.’
The doctor had but the poorest opinion of this scheme. ‘But, yes,’
he said, he would go, and then fell to thinking aloud. ‘Poor thing.
Wonderfully plucky. Bears it well. Brother half killed. Lover suspected.
Go! Of course I’ll go. Why the devil shouldn’t I?’ And he marched along
unconscious of his utterances or of the heightened colour and the look
of momentary surprise in Lilian’s face. ‘Pretty girl, too,’ said the
doctor, in audible thought. ‘Devilish pretty! Good girl, I should fancy.
Like the looks of her. Hard lines, poor thing--hard lines!’
They reached the bank and walked across the punt into the house-boat.
As she entered the door Lilian gave a cry, and dashed at the table;
then turned and held up before the doctor’s eyes a meerschaum pipe--the
identical Antoletti meerschaum stolen in the Stamboul Bazaar by Demetri
Agryopoulo.
‘This is it!’ she gasped. ‘The clue! Oh, it is certain! It is true! Who
else could have wished him ill?’
Then she told the doctor the story of the pipe. She told her tale in
verbal lightning. Every sentence flashed forth a fact; and in sixty
seconds or thereabouts the doctor was a man convinced.
But meantime where was Barndale? Poor Leland could tell them nothing.
For many a day he would bear no questioning. Could her lover, Lilian
asked herself, have started for the ball last night, and come to any
damage by the way?
‘Here is a letter,’ said the doctor, quietly taking up something from
the table. ‘A lady’s handwriting. Postmark, Constantinople.’
He drew the letter from its envelope and read it as coolly as if he had
a right to read it.
‘The story is clear enough,’ he said. ‘The lady is in London. Your
brother knew of her presence there. The Greek you speak of has followed
her. The pipe proves his presence here. But how did he find out with
whom the lady was in correspondence?’
‘That I cannot guess,’ said Lilian.
It had been late in the afternoon when Lilian and her mother reached
the house-boat first. Twilight had fallen when the doctor and the girl
started to walk back together. Lilian, turning to look at the house-boat
as they went, seized the doctor by the shoulder. He turned and looked at
her. She pointed to a figure in the fields.
‘The Greek!’ she whispered.
She was right. Demetri Àgryopoulo had come back again with twilight to
the scene of his crime, drawn by an impulse, passionate, irresistible,
supreme.
The doctor ran straight for him, leaping the hedge like a deer. Lilian,
mad with the excitement of the moment, followed she knew not how.
Demetri Agryopoulo turned and awaited the arrival of these two
onward-rushing figures calmly. The doctor laid a hand upon him.
‘I arrest you on a charge of murder,’ he said, gasping for breath.
‘Bah!’ said Demetri Agryopoulo quietly, and threw the doctor’s hand
aside.
The doctor seized him again, but he was spent and breathless. The Greek
threw him off as if he had been a child.
‘Are you mad?’ he asked. ‘What murder? Where? When?’
‘My brother’s murder, here, last night,’ panted Lilian, and flung
herself, a mouse against a mountain, on the Greek, and grappled with
him, and actually bore him to the ground. But before the doctor could
lend a hand to aid her, Demetri was on his feet again, and with one
bound sprang into a little skiff which lay with its nose upon the bank.
He swung one of the sculls about his head, and shouted, ‘Stand back!’
But the doctor watched his time, and dashed in upon him, and before he
knew it was struggling in the water, whilst Demetri in the skiff was
a score of yards away tugging madly for the farther shore. The doctor
scrambled to the bank and ran up and down the riverside looking for
another boat. But he found none, and the Greek was already growing dim
in the twilight mist. And again Demetri Agryopoulo went his own way, and
the darkness shrouded him.