“OH! GREAT IS THE POWER OF WEALTH!”
Winifred never forgot those terrible moments she spent in Ventris
Blake’s study in Park Lane. It was not so much the shame of being
caught like a common thief with her arm bared to the shoulder, tightly
wedged in a secret safe, although that was degrading and horrible
enough in all conscience--no, it was the full and complete
understanding that suddenly came to her that she had been
tricked--that after all, Vera had written no compromising letters and
that the millionaire had not got hold of a bundle of her cousin’s love
effusions which he held over the Langfords with a threat of
publication. This it was that burned into her heart and brain like
molten metal, and wracked her soul so much that finally, with a great
despairing cry, unconsciousness came to her mind’s salvation.
When she opened her eyes next it was to find herself released from the
grip of iron that had clamped those fetters on her arm and wrist
immediately she had striven to seize that bundle of letters tied with
red tape at the back of the secret hiding place. Somebody had lifted
her bodily from the wall, and placed her full length on a couch; and
then, as her distracted gaze wandered round the apartment she noted
too that even the safe had been again closed, and once more the monk
of Florence was gazing at her with that strange expression of pity
which she remembered now she had unconsciously observed when Vera made
that excuse and fled back to the safety and refuge of her own room.
How trifles like these come back to us all in life’s supreme crises!
Somehow, to twist around a phrase:--
It isn’t the shame,
And it isn’t the blame,
That stings like a red-hot brand--
it is just these details that rise up and confront us and dance about
us in some weird phantasmagoria of our own brains, only to vanish and
leave us supremely conscious of the horror of the real thing that’s
come upon us, and twisted our life like a tree struck out of the
Unseen.
Some of the softest of the electric lights had been switched on since
she last closed her eyes--but only one man was present now, a stout
burly, not unkind-looking London policeman, who had taken off his
helmet and seated himself in a tall, high-backed chair, evidently
prepared to stay an hour, or a day, or even a week if occasion
required, Suddenly, however, he observed her shudder, and rising he
came and stood in front of her.
“Are you better now, miss?” he said, nodding his head in the direction
of a huge bottle of smelling salts which stood on a dumb waiter near,
and which he had evidently made most liberal use of.
“A little,” answered Winifred feebly, passing her hand over her
forehead in a futile effort to recall the full possession of her
faculties. “I--I don’t think though I could get up yet. I feel so weak
and shaky and my arm aches so. Have you--would you send for my cousin,
Vera?”
The policeman shook his head.
“No, I can’t do that,” he said. “Mr. Blake has been already and told
her what has happened, and she, poor thing, was so horrified at your
wickedness that she had an awful attack of hysterics, and it is now as
much as Mrs. Gordon and two maids can do to soothe her and to assure
her that whatever happens, nobody will be unduly harsh.”
Winifred literally turned her face to the wall. Of course, she had
expected--nay, she had known this when she had just spoken, and yet,
so queerly constituted are tender clinging creatures like herself,
that she had suddenly resolved she would not think badly of her
cousin. Yet what better proof of the girl’s duplicity, her direct
intrigue with the millionaire, and her calm desertion of the friend
who had tried to save her, could there be than that? Treachery was
proved absolutely--and, try as she would, poor Winifred could not
suppress a groan of anguish.
Somehow the policeman, rather policemanlike, took this for a sign of
penitence.
“This is a bad business, miss,” he ventured to observe, drawing a
handkerchief out of his sleeve and mopping his forehead. “Pardon me
saying it but was you hard up or--”
“No,” said Winifred quickly with a faint smile. “I--I was
nothing--only a fool.”
The worthy officer looked disappointed. He hadn’t any imagination, but
he had a certain capacious kind of heart enlarged by beer and the
sentiment of the West End area, and he had really spoken out of
kindness, and not from any desire to secure admissions by which he
might shine with his more crafty and less scrupulous superiors.
“Yes,” said he, meditatively stroking his chin. “They all says that
when they’re caught. Somehow it doesn’t stop ’em though. The times
they beat us seems to turn their brains. They always seem to expect
that they’ll always have the luck!”
“I didn’t quite mean that,” protested poor Winnie helplessly, feeling
herself rather swamped in a gulf of criminal philosophy through her
own clumsiness. “I didn’t suggest I was silly just because I had been
caught in the act. I only thought I was foolish because I did the
thing for some one who was not worthy of it--who rather led me in
it--and who has now deserted me.”
“Exactly,” answered the active and intelligent officer, once more
growing keenly interested. “That’s precisely what I said to the
butler, Mr. Fitzgerald. ‘Mr. Fitzgerald,’ says I, ‘this ain’t no
ordinary case you’ve called me into. This is a plot. This ’ere young
woman hasn’t gone into it with her eyes shut. She’s got someone behind
her egging her on, and that’s why she’s abused Mr. Blake’s confidence
and the hospitality of this noble house. Women allus has accomplices.
They’re not like Charles Peace, believing in the might of a single
brain.’”
“But I’ve no accomplices of that kind,” cried Winifred, her eyes
dilated in pain and indignation. “You seem to think I am some ordinary
thief, whereas--” She paused and then stopped. How indeed could she
end that sentence? Was there anything she could say that would make
this all too solid impersonation of British reticence and common sense
understand the thousand and one complex motives upon which she had
acted. “No wonder,” she muttered to herself, “Arthur’s pet hero is a
don at Oxford, whose pet hobby is ‘the philosophy of mixed motives.’
Can I ever explain why I did this?” And she turned restlessly to and
fro on the couch.
“There! never mind, miss,” put in the officer sympathetically, once
again careeringly off wildly in the wrong track. “Don’t take on about
any on ’em. They ain’t worth it. Some of these young men ’as harp
about these swell houses is bad lots. We policemen sees ’em when they
aren’t on show, and we knows a deal about ’em which the papers
wouldn’t dare to print for fear they’d kick out and get the editors
put in prison. No doubt you didn’t mean any harm at all at first. May
be a pleasant bit of flirtation, and then perhaps he persuaded you to
take something as didn’t belong to you--and then you got frightened
and thought you’d come here and help yourself where there was a lot as
wouldn’t be missed. Maybe I’d have thought the same myself had I been
in your place. The Recorder at the Old Bailey is a nice kind sort of
gentleman. You take my tip when you get there and speak out to him
about it and tell him: ‘My lord’--(And mind always call him ‘my lord,’
because, he ain’t my lord really, but likes to think he is)--‘I am
only a poor weak girl as has been deceived.’”
Winifred could stand it no longer. True, her tired numbed mind had
only gathered one tithe of the meaning of the man’s conclusions--but
even those were intolerably loathsome to her. His coarse kindness was
worse than any brutality, and, while he spoke she felt as though some
indignant fury had seized her, and, in spite of her most strenuous
fighting, had dragged her bodily through miles and miles of
thoroughfare inches deep in mud. Now, starting to her feet, she
confronted him boldly:
“Why are you here at all?” she demanded hysterically. “What are you
standing about here for, wasting your time in all this idle
conversation? Why don’t you leave and go on your beat?”
The policeman’s face was a study in a kind of cloddish amazement and
stupefaction. Twice he opened wide his extremely big mouth and twice
he closed it, absolutely unable to speak. For a moment his resemblance
to a stuffed fish was really quite alarmingly life-like. Then,
however, he rallied the pride of his calling; and he spoke out with a
good deal of fine official sternness.
“I am here on duty,” he said gravely taking up his helmet and placing
it firmly on his head. “I was patrolling Park Lane just now when I
heard Mr. Blake’s electric alarm ring. I dashed to the door, which was
flung wide open by my friend Mr. Fitzgerald the butler, and I raced to
the study to find you caught in the man-trap, in the act of robbing
one of Mr. Blake’s secret safes. If I had had my way I should have
whistled for the police ambulance, and had you taken off at once to
Vine Street police-station, faint or no faint, only Mr. Blake himself
suddenly appeared. ‘I am terribly upset about this, Stemp,’ meaning
me, he said, ‘terribly upset.’ This young woman is a comparative
stranger to me--I have only spoken to her three or four times in my
life--but I am bound to recognise that she is a guest in my house.
Perhaps it is all some hideous blunder. Perhaps she walks in her
sleep, even though she’s got her clothes on. Just stand by her until
she comes to her senses. You’re a father yourself, Stemp. Well, just
give her a chance. Nobody must charge her with any offence in respect
to this safe robbery until I have seen her--”
“That is so,” said a quiet voice at his elbow, and wheeling round
swiftly the virtuously indignant Stemp found himself face to face with
the millionaire, who bowed his head in the direction of the door. “You
may go, Stemp,” he said firmly. “I want to speak first to Miss
Pontifex in private, so just wait in the butler’s pantry, will you?
and when I give you the word come back at once.”
Oh, great is the power of wealth! Stemp nodded and took himself off as
though his dearest wish was to obey Blake. Still, that interview
between Ventris Blake and Winifred Pontifex was destined to be in many
ways remarkable.
In the first place, that was the first time since that memorable hunt
ball at Stamford, when the millionaire fell so passionately in love
with her, that these two had met face to face alone. Since then the
man had engineered the whole of that astounding scheme of duplicity
and crime against her lover and herself, so that that day they were
both in the position of social outcasts, more or less--the one
apparently guilty of a most loathsome form of social sin and murder,
the other on the point of being branded a common but most dangerous
felon.
Secondly, it was obvious that during the explanations which were about
to ensue, Ventris Blake would be bound to show his hand. He had so
skilfully contrived the present debacle that practically little
appeared to remain for him to do save to dictate his terms. These
terms might be taken, or they might be refused: but now they were
meeting, full concealment would certainly be practically useless.
With an odd touch of hysteria, Winifred, however, did not find that
her mind was troubling at all with the tremendous issues of that
conversation. In spite of the keenness with which she mourned Vera’s
treachery, and of the bitterness with which she resented this
particular disgrace to herself, she caught herself wondering about a
totally different object--the man’s dyed whiskers which seemed to hold
her gaze and her mind absolutely fascinated.
Why did he wear whiskers at all? she asked herself with a queer little
shudder. They were long ago out of fashion, and trimmed as they had
been, they suggested nothing of a man of wealth or refinement. His
clothes too, now she came to look at them, were last year’s clothes.
That tweed jacket he had on was distinctly shabby; his waistcoat was
stained by cigar-ash; even the trousers bagged at the knees while, as
though the idea was they should also match the second-hand appearance
of his outfit, the boots too had been re-soled.
In spite, though, of these things, the man’s figure was that of a
man’s. He had sturdy shoulders, a deep well-proportioned chest, and
strong square-fisted hands that looked as though, when they once
seized a thing they were never shaken off--for even at the knuckles
and backs were tufts of dark sinewy hair. His head, too, was set on a
thick neck that suggested the same bull-dog tenacity evident in his
fingers, and he walked this night with the long purposeful stride of a
man of destiny who sees at the end of his journey a prize which he has
toiled many many arduous weeks to win.
Away in the distance, the door clanged as the officer Stemp and his
“friend Mr. Fitzgerald, the butler,” foregathered in the pantry to
discuss that night’s strange happenings over an aristocratic whisky
and soda, for, it will be always observed, extraordinary occurrences
need extraordinary remedies. With something uncommonly like a moan,
the girl steadied herself, and brought her mind back with a jump to
its present environment. That look of passion in Ventris Blake’s eyes
filled her with a sense of most desolate nausea--but she instantly
resolved she would not show it. This was the moment to fight, not
repine, and she would show herself worthy of the sturdy soldier-stock
from which she had sprung.
On the man came till he reached her side, and looked deep into her
face. His breath, too, was coming and going rather quickly, but that
and the tell-tale glance were the only signs of his excitement. His
tones were cool, calm and even, and he moved his hands and feet in a
way most hideously precise.
“I am sorry to find you in circumstances like this,” he said,
motioning her back to her place on the sofa, and handing her that huge
bottle of smelling-salts as though it were a matter of course she
would need them sorely before he had finished his lecture. “I had
hoped that any little differences we might have had in the past would,
when you came here to visit my aunt, Prudence Gordon, be
buried--quite. It seems though I have been mistaken, and that you only
took care to be in my house five or six hours before you took
advantage of the fact to abuse my hospitality in the gravest fashion
you could.” And he nodded significantly in the direction of the Monk
of Florence painting behind which stood the safe she had been found
tampering with.
“Just now,” he added, as he saw she had no present intention of
interrupting him, “I am rather puzzled to know what I ought to do
about this insult to me, indeed about this most tragic business
generally. All my servants, of course, think it is only a matter of
form, or shall I say kindness, my seeing you. They are certain that in
a few minutes I shall call the policeman, Stemp, back to this room,
and give you into custody on a charge of attempted theft which must,
when proved, as it can be quite easily, land you at Portland or
Dartmoor, or wherever they confine female convicts, on a term of ten
years’ penal servitude and--and ten years late in your marriage with
Arthur Hudson.”
Again he paused, but Winifred still kept her head bent low, apparently
quite immoveable. Driven thus to go on he proceeded: “Naturally,
knowing your uncle so well, having so great an affection for the
memory of Colonel Pontifex, your father, I am loth to do this.
Besides, it seems to me peculiarly revolting to shut you up in a
prison into which no news of the outside world can penetrate during a
time when Hudson must stand his trial and will, in all human
probability, be condemned and hanged. For these reasons indeed I am
pondering most deeply whether I cannot devise some other expedient to
get us both out of these difficulties. It was for that reason I
hastened to your cousin, Vera Langford. ‘My child,’ I said, ‘tell me
at once what I ought to do to this unhappy girl, who has vainly tried
to rob me? As a Christian now, ought I to forgive her, or ought I to
stifle my feelings and give her up to justice?’”
“And what did your accomplice say?” queried Winifred, suddenly looking
up and gazing at him with her eyes aflame with scorn.
“Accomplice! accomplice!” echoed the man, affecting to be greatly
shocked. “How--what do you mean--that I am in league with her to do
you some harm? Indeed, there is nothing of the sort afoot. On the
contrary, I can assure you that she was most pained and disgusted at
the turn of affairs, and before she broke down and gave way utterly to
hysterics, she begged me that I should, before you did any other
mischief to other less worthy friends than myself, have you locked up
and dealt with as a merciful law might direct.”
“But that was ironical,” put in Winifred suavely. “She didn’t mean a
word of it literally. On the contrary, it was a joke intended
specially for you to gloat over--you who engineered this treacherous
trick by which I was made to act the part of a thief.”
Secretly nonplussed, Blake bit his lip, and then took a stronger tone.
“You must not bandy words like this with me,” he retorted with a quick
stamp of the foot. “‘Bluff’ is useless--”
“Quite,” interrupted Winifred rising and facing him. “Now come to the
point. What do you want?”
The man flushed, and looked uncomfortable. “I wish to be your friend,
Miss Pontifex,” he murmured in a softer tone. “I came here anxious, if
possible, to save you from the consequences of your own follies. I
don’t like this feud between us any more than you do. Can’t we cease
to give blow after blow and arrange an honourable peace? For instance,
suppose I got Mr. Hudson released without a stain on his
character--what then?”
“I should say that at last you had performed a very tardy act of
justice!”
“But I am not a man of sentiment. I am a financier, and we financiers
know no justice save the rough and ready justice of the person and
thing stronger than ourselves to conquer and make their own wills
prevail. Now look at my offer without a trace of personal passion.
Hudson is in Scarborough police-station. In less than two months he is
practically certain to be in York Castle, condemned to death, if not
already hanged. Here also is yourself, caught in the act of a most
daring robbery. I have only to lift my finger and press the button of
that electric bell and in a minute you will be hurried off to Vine
Street police-station, and in less than two months you too will be in
one of our great penal establishments weighed down with the prospect
of a long term of penal servitude.
“Now what is it I offer to do? I offer to pardon you, and to hush this
matter up so effectually that not a word of scandal shall ever be
breathed about it--the incident shall be turned to the credit of your
great goodness and everybody will agree that the affair has been a
most shocking and unforgiveable kind of blunder. And, more than that,
I promise you Hudson shall get off scot free. Aren’t proffered pledges
such as these worthy of careful reflection? Are you justified, since
somebody else is concerned in the rejection of them, to push them
aside with insults or with thinly veiled looks of contempt?”
“But justice?” began Winifred again, but once more she was stopped.
“I tell you again,” the man interjected fiercely, “when you are
dealing with a man of millions like myself, London holds no such thing
as justice, only opportunity--trick--power. Now listen to me, look at
the matter from another standpoint. Women are said to be ambitious.
Don’t you ever sigh to wield an influence like mine? Haven’t you felt
enough of my power to be afraid of it? Think, suppose you too had it?
What could you not do with it? Rank--position--wealth--stupendous
favours all would be in your hands.
“Well, Winifred,” he went on, his voice thick with excitement, the
veins standing out on his temples like knotted whipcord, “you know on
what terms I will release you to-day and will procure the triumphant
vindication of Hudson. They are not arduous. They do not call for any
sensational exhibition. They don’t ask you to suffer in silence, to
eat the bread of tears, to weep till you can weep no longer. They are
the dictates of an overwhelming affection for you, I love you. Be
mine!” And with a sudden rush of feeling he caught her convulsively by
the waist and fixed his burning gaze on her as though he would force
her to yield her consent.
Winifred, however, who had stood like one petrified during this
amazing declaration, started to life immediately she found his fingers
on her hand. With a scream she broke away from his grasp and raced to
the half open door of the room.
“I loathe you, I loathe you,” she cried helplessly. And then all at
once she saw that the street door also was ajar, and instantly seizing
the opportunity it offered, she fled across the hall like a startled
fawn, and tore madly down the steps that led to the pavement.
A moment later she found herself in the street, and running wildly in
the direction of her uncle’s flat. “He must save me from this
monster,” she gasped as she fled on swifter, ever swifter. “There is
nobody else to do so. Oh! Mother of Heaven, pray with me that he may
not now fail his sister’s only child.”
Meanwhile, however, Stemp had been alarmed, and he and the butler,
furiously blowing a police-whistle, were now pounding after her.
Looking over her shoulder, she caught sight of them and tried to
increase her speed, but already she was worn with fatigue, and the
extra effort seemed to strain her heart, and to send her reeling
against a lamp-post, just as Blake too loomed up in the background and
also took up the chase.
Another moment, and she would have most assuredly been a captive again
in those vampire clutches, only deliverance came to her in the most
extraordinary way.
And it happened thus.
Those whose business or profession takes them much about the streets
of London in the night hours know that in the best thoroughfares the
traffic is practically ceaseless. Even if there are no private
carriages with shining lamps and jingling harness whirling hither and
thither, there are always plenty of quick and hungry drivers of
hansoms who patrol up and down the streets at a walking pace with wits
so sharpened by days of lean experience that they seem able to detect
a fare almost before the object is quite conscious of his
determination himself.
The consequence was that as Winifred tore fleetly onward without hat
or jacket, one of these vigilants chanced to catch sight of her. Now,
whether he was half intoxicated or Irish, and so dearly loved a scene,
or whether he had had serious cause in the past to have more sympathy
with possible offenders against the law than the dread majesty of the
law itself will never be known. The fact remains that immediately the
chase began he set up a wild “Hurroo!” and flicking his mare viciously
he put her to the gallop with the result that the three men were soon
outpaced--their cries for a lift were disregarded--and he came with a
crash level with Winifred.
By this time the poor girl’s breath was quite gone. Her limbs had
given way beneath her, and she was swaying from one side of the
pavement to the other with hand clasped to her heart, and the pulses
within her temples throbbing like an engine.
“Here, miss, jump in, my mare’s quite fresh,” he cried in a kind of
hoarse whisper, making play to suggest that he was not helping the
girl at all but was having trouble with his steed. “Never mind those
men behind you. Only get in and tell me where to drive to and we’ll
lead them one of the finest chases in London.”
With a gigantic effort Winifred forced herself to the side of the
hansom and giving one frantic tug she literally dragged herself into
its friendly shelter.
“Go to Mr. Russell Langford’s, the lawyer, Emperor’s Gate,” she
gasped--and in a flash the man let the infuriated mare have her head,
and off she went at a wild gallop that meant death or destruction to
everything that gathered in her path.
Luckily too, Winifred did not lose her senses. Now indeed that she
realised that her prayer had been heard, and that she had been, in
truth, delivered from that inhuman monster Blake, her natural courage
reasserted itself; and she gripped on to the supports in the interior
of the hansom, and, with set lips and flashing eyes, she watched the
vehicle sway from side to side of the road like a ship in the storm,
absolutely reckless of all possible consequences.
As it happened, the driver was a man who knew his business from the
very bottom. Directly he had looked at Winifred he had recognised that
the business he had taken in hand was not the rescue of an ordinary
criminal from a peculiarly stodgy and unemotional policeman, but
turned on some far reaching Romance of High Life which, though he
might never know the secret of it, would none the less pay him
exceedingly well for the part he took in it.
Again he plied the whip. Again the mare bucked and kicked out
vigorously, only to get her head down and her feet well tucked under
her and to speed past Hyde Park like a flash of lightning. “I don’t
care miss if I smash the whole bag of tricks,” he shouted through the
trap in the roof. “I’ll save you.” And as if to give colour to this
vainglorious threat the hansom cannoned violently against a hand
hose-cart in use by the St. George’s Borough Council and drove it
clean through the windows of a small railway office at a corner.
Meanwhile, too, Blake had not been idle. His mind had taken fire with
the fear that Winifred meant nothing less than suicide by her wild
flight from his mansion, and, distracted by the possibility of the
scandal that would follow, he signalled another hansom, and sprang
inside with the butler, promising his driver £50 if he would overtake
the fugitives.
This new ally of his was keen enough and so was the horse he drove;
but they found a mighty antagonist in the wild exultant jehu in front.
In vain Stemp ran a few yards and stopped and blew mighty blasts upon
his police whistle. In vain constables sprang out from side streets
and comfortable porticos, and shouted all the mad bad things they
could think of, waving their arms like semaphores. Driver No. 1’s
blood was at boiling point almost, and he waved his whip about, and he
swore, and he urged his horse with such insane recklessness at
everybody who shewed the slightest disposition to try conclusions with
him on the “Hold! Enough!” principle, that Emperor’s Gate was reached
in a few seconds; and a summons that would have aroused the Seven
Sleepers of Ephesus battered on the great lawyer’s door.
Luckily, Russell Langford had sat up late that night to master the
contents of a brief in a big Society Slander Action that was down to
come before the Lord Chief Justice on the morrow. He heard the wild
crash with which Winifred’s hansom made its appearance and its
stoppage, and he had just got to the hall--to sally forth to see what
had happened--when there came that terrific rat-tat with the butt
handle of the driver’s whip.
A moment later Winnie was in his arms, sobbing out all her trouble to
him, telling him in a quick, rather incoherent but in some
intelligible fashion, all about the dreadful trap Vera had prepared
for her and the terrible things that had happened when she had gone to
the millionaire’s study and tried to rescue the packet of
incriminating love-letters.
The lawyer himself was well accustomed to hiding his emotions--and he
heard the girl’s story through with a face as immoveable as a piece of
india-rubber which might be punched and punched, and punched and drawn
and twisted and torn at--nothing could rob it of its set professional
expression. None the less, his feelings of honour, of family pride, of
loyalty to his womankind were stirred to the most profound depths by
this account of Blake’s outrage on all the sacred laws of good
breeding and hospitality. What common humanity and justice and right
feeling could never have accomplished, these more superficial
qualities of his caste wrought like magic. His craven fear of the
millionaire and the mischief he could do to him in reference to the
Three Glass eyes was banished for ever from him. He hated Blake now as
much as he had been previously cowed by him--and all the forces of his
nature cried out to him that he could never have peace again till this
last crowning infamy of the financier’s was wiped out.
At the same time clever professional men of the world of the stamp of
Langford move--however deeply their inmost feelings may have been
roused--on in the grooves to which their daily experience has
accustomed them. Indeed, they are more dangerous thus for they are
trained to the use of these weapons and their blows are sharpened by
their daily practice. Hence Langford said nothing committal on the
subject--which was a bad sign in truth. Had he felt the indignity less
he would certainly have said more. He simply let Winifred finish her
story in peace; then he went to a decanter on the sideboard, and
poured out a tablespoonful of brandy for her, which he insisted on her
drinking with a like amount of water.
That done he went out to the driver, who was fumbling about on the
doorstep, not quite knowing whether, after all, this job to which he
had given so much moral earnestness was going to pay him quite so well
as he had expected. The delay had made him distinctly nervous in the
region of the pocket.
“I am very much obliged, coachman, for what you have done,” Langford
said, pulling out a pocket book stuffed with Bank of England notes.
“You have saved my niece from a scoundrel at the risk of your own
life, and to the danger of your own horse and hansom. Work like this
can’t be properly remunerated, but here are ten notes of £10 each for
you, £100, and remember if ever you are in a difficulty and want a
friend you will, if I am alive, find a helper in Russell Langford.”
The man tried to mutter his thanks--to shake the lawyer by the hand
and bow at the same time to the ground--to laugh and look respectful;
but he could succeed in nothing. He could only take the notes and
scratch his head and mutter in a poor weak forlorn kind of voice,
“Well, I’ll be blest!” when there was a sound of low shouting outside,
and the millionaire’s hansom drew up with a crash close to the
pavement.
Out sprang Blake, and tearing up the stairs of the mansion he found
himself confronted with the calm set features of the lawyer, close to
whom stood Winifred, quiet, cold, and defiant. For a moment even he
drew back a step and looked awkward, but the man’s confidence was
colossal, and almost immediately afterwards he recovered himself, and
advanced with jovial laugh, and ringing voice and outstretched hand.
“Ah, Langford,” he cried, distorting his face with a grin that was
meant to express pleasure. “So it is here that our little bird has
flown is it? No doubt she has told you that we have had a little
misunderstanding, hasn’t she? Of course I meant to forgive her
alright, but she got so hysterical that she bolted before I could get
the words out.”
Russell Langford’s expression never changed. Then he spoke at last.
“Ventris Blake,” said he slowly and deliberately, “You are an infernal
scoundrel.”
The millionaire’s jaw dropped. He had not expected this, but he was
game enough, and once again those lips parted, curled back, and there
appeared those fang-like teeth that insensibly recalled the savagery
of the fox.
“You mean that?” he asked quietly.
“Every word of it,” retorted the lawyer.
“Then I’ll make you a present of an old souvenir of yours,” proceeded
Blake feeling in his revolver pocket and producing therefrom a case
like a jewellers bracelet case, out of which he took a small velvet
shield of black, bearing three miniature Glass Eyes.
Langford took this and tore it in half, and flung it down the steps.
Ventris Blake looked as though he could have slain Russell Langford.
By this time, both cabs had driven off, and the two men stood in that
hall alone with Winifred. Both were white. Both looked stern. Both
seemed equally determined--but only the millionaire revealed the
seething depths of baffled rage that had followed his defeat in what
he had been morally certain would prove a gigantic coup for himself.
“So,” he said with a shrug, drawing back a step and buttoning up his
coat, “you are quite resolved, are you? You have decided to be quite
reckless; you have no fear of the consequences.”
“None!” returned the barrister. “You have put a light to a bonfire
to-night that will spread until it reduces all your fortunes and your
fine social fabric to ashes.”
“Well, so must it be,” Ventris Blake replied rather hoarsely. “After
all,” with a painful effort to be light and buoyant, “I am not the one
to fear the Three Glass Eyes. That is your own special and particular
dread, Langford, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” observed the man calmly. “We shall see. Maybe you may find
London hasn’t quite the same idea of you, you believe it to have. No
doubt the young men in the City in-a-hurry-to-be-rich and the women
who come to you, hotly eager to gamble to repair some private scandals
of their own, have never stopped to analyse the vaguely unsatisfactory
impression which you make upon each one of them, and upon everybody
you chance to meet in fact. They are bewildered by the knowledge you
possess of every one of their failings, through your system of paid
spies, that would do credit to the French Government, and they stop at
your pet-stage effect by which you fancy nobody is able to penetrate
your thoughts, or to guess what peculiar diablerie you will practice
on them some time through a series of artful moves in the future.
“Bah! I was not your intimate years ago,” added the lawyer, with an
impressive sweep of the arms, “without understanding that practically
since boyhood you had made your apparent good nature, your unfailing
readiness to promise to oblige, (although you seldom did oblige anyone
except yourself), your copious draughts of emotional protestations,
into a barrier between yourself and your victims, for, in spite of it
all, at times, you give glimpses of appalling depths of character.”
“Well, at all events, Miss Pontifex,” cut in the millionaire, who had
grown restive under this scathing exposure, “I had nothing to do with
the death of your father Colonel Pontifex, remember that.” And nodding
his head significantly in the direction of the barrister, he seemed to
suggest: “He had, ask him.”
“In due time, if you act as you no doubt will be driven to do by me,
that will all be explained,” said Russell Langford, drawing Winifred
proudly close to himself. “To-day understand I fear no one.”
“‘Explained’! Yes,” sneered Blake, pausing on the doorstep. “But how?
answer me that?”
“The Three Glass Eyes shall explain,” returned the lawyer; and Blake
was just about to utter another sardonic taunt, when a scuffle drew
all three out on the landing of the flat to the top of the stairs,
where they found the butler Fitzgerald, in his anxiety to reach them,
had caught his foot in a pot containing a shrub and had fallen full
length on the steps.
Now, however, he rose, his face purple with excitement. “Will you all
please come to Park Lane at once,” he cried. “I have just met one of
the footmen; Miss Vera Langford has just met with a dreadful
accident.”
“Accident?” thundered Langford--“What?”
“I don’t know--I can’t tell--neither could the messenger whom Mrs.
Gordon had sent after you. ‘Come at once’ were his words. ‘Come at
once. Miss Vera is shouting and shrieking as though she had gone
suddenly mad.’”
“My God, Blake, if this is any fresh devilry of yours, you shall pay
for it with your life,” said the lawyer facing the millionaire, and
repeating each word with slow, terrifying emphasis.
“It isn’t,” stammered Blake doggedly, and, truth to tell, he looked
equally frightened and astounded. “I swear it isn’t. I--I know nothing
about it.”
“That remains to be proved,” retorted Langford. “Come, Winnie, get
your hat and cloak and come with me. I know Prudence Gordon, and can
trust her all right. No doubt she will have acted promptly, and sent
for medical assistance. Our great object now is--to lose no time.” And
in another minute almost, fresh cabs had been chartered and all the
party were racing back for dear life to Park Lane.
Luckily, too, at the door they were met by Mrs. Gordon herself, whose
face bore quite plainly the mark of recent tears. “Oh, here you are,”
she cried, as the cabs drew up with a crash in front of the portico.
“Thank heaven, you have all come so soon. I feel nearly distracted.”
“But what has happened!” cried Winnie and Langford in a breath.
“I can’t really explain it,” protested the old lady tearfully, rocking
herself in her folded arms. “All I know is--that I was sitting
peaceably in front of the fire in my bedroom, saying a little prayer
in the hope that all the terrible mischief between my nephew and Miss
Pontifex there would be put right without any more trouble, when I
heard Vera give a loud scream.
“At first I thought it was only a return of the hysterics she had had
when she heard her cousin had been caught with her arm in the study
safe and my nephew upbraided her for not looking better after her--but
when she shrieked again--again--I grew frightened, and I slipped into
her room.”
“Yes, yes,” put in Blake who had now joined the party. “Get on with
your story more rapidly please. Tell us what did you see?”
“The poor girl, it seems, had been seated at a small writing-table
finishing two letters--one was addressed to Mr. Jules Prendergast, the
actor, and the other was to his future wife, Lady Desborough, who I
understand he will marry to-morrow at St. George’s, Hanover Square.”
“Oh, do go on,” pleaded Winnie. “What was it--a fit, or had she set
herself on fire, or what?”
“I really can’t tell you,” protested the old lady bursting into tears.
“That is just why I am making such a long rigmarole of it. I want you
or Ventris here to explain all this most bewildering mystery to me.”
“We will have more patience then, Mrs. Gordon,” interposed the lawyer
kindly. “Pray proceed.”
“Well,” said the old lady now reassured, “I noticed that the letters
she had written were letters of congratulation, and in each one she
had planned to enclose two curiously wrought rings as wedding
presents. Oddly enough, they were both of exactly the same
pattern--although, of course, they differed in size--with blood red
stones almost as large as the old-fashioned signets, and with a great
deal of scroll work on the gold itself, which was usually heavy and
thick. Directly, however, I got into the room she rallied. ‘Something
dreadful has happened,’ she cried. ‘Send for my cousin Winifred at
once.’ ‘But what is it, dearie?’ I asked for she looked so ill and
wild I feared she was going mad. ‘Never mind. Send for Winifred,’ she
answered. ‘It’s something dreadful about these rings although it’s
quite an accident--so go for her at once if you don’t care to send,
but understand I won’t see anybody else.’”
“Then, of course, I will do as she asks,” put in Winifred, loyal and
forgiving as ever and without a thought of self.
“And I will run for a doctor,” added the millionaire who suddenly had
gone ghastly grey. “It looks to me as though something terrible has
happened.”
And Blake sped off quickly towards Piccadilly, while Winifred hastened
up the stairs of the mansion, and, turning down the old corridor,
entered her cousin’s bedroom.
By this time Vera had stretched herself on the bed, but no sooner did
Winnie enter than she started up wild eyed with two great hectic spots
burning evilly on each cheek.
“Ah! thank heaven you’ve come, darling,” she cried excitedly. “Of
course you hate me. You do right to do so, for I am a treacherous
viper, and I deserve neither sympathy nor love!”
“Indeed, I can’t feel like that,” protested Winnie throwing herself on
her knees by the bed and attempting to enfold the distracted girl in
an affectionate embrace.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me as you value your life,” cried Vera
drawing herself up into a corner against the wall, “I am accursed. I
brought you into this home of horror by the wickedest of ruses, and I
got you to go to the safe by the most treacherous of lies--but now my
punishment has come.”
“Let me help you bear it then,” said Winnie bravely, holding out her
arms. “You are upset now, soon all will be well. Let me take you in
hand.”
“You cannot. Nobody can,” gasped the girl half choking. “The word has
gone forth. I am doomed.”
“How can anybody be that? God is good!” interposed Winnie, feeling
herself powerless to stem this tide of terror that threatened to
engulf her cousin completely.
“Yes,” replied Vera fiercely, “God is good, that is why He has saved
you. But God also is just, and that is why I am writhing here, waiting
for a horror that is stalking towards me from far distant centuries
when men and women hated, like they never do in these tepid days of
civilisation, and when they dared, and did, to the most profound
depths of pain.
“Listen,” she went on, suddenly becoming calm. “I will tell you why I
lured you into this snare. I was mad with jealousy and rage because
Jules Prendergast had flung me over, jilted me for that painted
traitor, Lady Desborough, and because that vampire Ventris Blake
promised if I did so he would help me to get my revenge on them--even
‘poison or death.’ It was Blake who devised that diabolical scheme
about the safe and the man-trap. It was I who first invented about the
love-letters and then egged you on to go into the study and steal
them. So consumed with rage was I that I could not let you stay even
the first night here in peace. I worried you till you went downstairs
for me, having previously got that master key from Blake himself and
no sooner did you commit yourself as the wretch wished than I sent to
Blake. ‘Revenge!’ I panted. ‘Revenge on Jules Prendergast and the
false-hearted creature he would make his wife.’”
“But how could he give it to you?” queried Winnie, feeling half
distracted.
“Easily enough,” snapped Vera. “He has never let a soul--man’s,
woman’s, or child’s--stand in his path. He has always removed everyone
who opposed his plans. That is why he understood me and that is why he
produced those two rings you see on the table--Abyssinian Poison
Rings, they call them, because if you press the sides of them, they
discharge a small milky-like fluid which penetrates the pores of the
skin and inflicts you with the most deadly leprosy of the Far East now
known to medical science. ‘Make them a wedding present of one each,’
he said with a diabolical grin. ‘Not either of them will be able to
resist the pleasure of trying one on--and then pouf! they will rot
away before each other’s eyes till they become most loathsome to look
on, and every doctor will agree that they are better dead!’
Unfortunately I forgot the deadly significance of the gift in the
satire I poured into the accompanying notes, with the result that, in
an absent-minded moment, when I was gloating over the sneers I had
written to Lady Desborough, I slipped one of the rings unconsciously
on my finger and pressed it--”
“And made yourself a leper,” screamed Winnie, starting madly to her
feet.
“Yes, look, the poison has begun to work.” And she pointed to the
hectic spots on her cheeks.