The Treasury bonds had reached their goal in the vaults of the Bank of
England, and Senator Sherman, having duly discharged his duty to his
Republic, was speeding back to his wife and daughter at Prior's Tarrant,
with, as he quaintly phrased it, "a considerable load off his chest." In
the reserved compartment with him were the Duke of Beaumanoir and
General Sadgrove, who had insisted on forming an escort.
The Duke, who had been buoyed up with excitement till the bonds were
safe in the bank, had fallen into dejection on the return journey. His
two companions persisted in treating him as a hero, whereas he guessed
that they were both aware of the true state of the case. He knew that
one of them was, for he had himself, under threat of information being
given to the police, confessed everything to the General after the
latter's visit to the hotel on the day of "Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's"
supposed confinement to her room; and, at any rate, the Senator must
have heard something of the truth, or he would not have been prepared
the night before to confound Cora Lestrade's correct accusation with a
generous but entirely erroneous construction of his complicity.
All this made Beaumanoir miserable and ill at ease, the more so that he
had three times attempted, without success, to terminate his false
position. The two gentlemen had evidently entered into a friendly
conspiracy to maintain their own reading of his conduct; and whenever he
began to make penitential allusions to it, one or other of them would,
so to speak, jump down his throat with an encomium on the motive they
chose to attribute to him for originally allying himself to the Lestrade
combination. Nor did it add to his comfort on the last of these
occasions to catch the Senator deliberately winking at the General.
Now this was exasperating in the present and intolerable for the future,
for Beaumanoir had set his heart on that to which, conscience told him,
a clear understanding with Senator Sherman was essential. But at last he
abandoned direct efforts and sank back in his corner, hoping to obtain
an opening by more diplomatic methods presently.
In the meanwhile, the General was satisfying the curiosity of the
Senator, and incidentally that of the Duke, as to the identification of
the self-styled Mrs. Talmage Eglinton with the mysterious Clinton
Ziegler. He described the tangle of doubt and surmise he had got into
when he had convinced himself that the occupants of the neighboring
suites at the hotel were both concerned in the plot against the bonds,
without being able to carry the matter further. And especially did he
lay stress on the deadlock that had been reached when "Mrs. Talmage
Eglinton's" artfully concocted anonymous warning against "Ziegler" had
caused him to waver in his suspicions of her guilt.
"It took a woman to nose that out," said the General, with a whimsical
grimace. "Miss Sybil heard me grumbling--unfortunate habit, talking to
one's self--and put me right in a brace of shakes. 'Why,' she snaps out,
after she'd pumped me about my difficulty, 'they must be one and the
same person. Mrs. Talmage Eglinton _is_ Ziegler, and her intention is
that after they've finished the business the Eglinton part of her will
remain and the Ziegler part will vanish--with the odium of anything that
may happen, don't you see. I didn't see it at once, but consented to lay
a trap, and blessed if the girl wasn't right. Soon as the Eglinton was
posted up by Sybil that I was going up next day to call on Ziegler at
the hotel, and that I was going to raise Cain if I wasn't admitted, she
shammed sick and sneaked out of the house, with old Azimoolah at her
heels, to keep the appointment."
He went on to tell how his call on "Ziegler," followed by "Mrs. Talmage
Eglinton's" clandestine return to the house as witnessed by Alec
Forsyth, had brushed all doubts aside and cleared the way for the final
_coup_ in the crypt, again suggested by Sybil, for obtaining the bogus
bonds and so drawing the sting of the enemy.
"The girl has got grit," was the Senator's admiring comment. "The right
sort of grit, because she trusted to her man having it too. And,
thunder, but it was plucky of him to face that crew in ignorance of the
saving clause in his favor."
"Yes, the boy behaved well," the General admitted. "But I think the Duke
beat him for courage in going to meet you at Liverpool in ignorance that
we had drawn off the cut-throats who he had reason to believe would dog
him directly he left the house. Alec had to make up for a bad lapse. We
never allowed laxity in our service, and Alec was lax, very lax, in
giving them that chance on the railway."
Beaumanoir sat up at this, and, leaning forward, tapped the General on
the knee.
"Oblige me by not drawing comparisons," he said--for him--quite
fiercely. "If I have come out of the ordeal of the last few days
unscathed, and with the honor of my house untarnished, it is in great
part due to Alec's loyalty to a poor weak coward. Had I done my duty I
should have gone to the police the moment Lestrade unfolded her plot,
instead of embarking on a course of secrecy and moral cowardice which
kept alive the danger to Senator Sherman and his charge. I did not see
it at the time, but the gang would assuredly have matured some other
plan for trying for the plunder, using some other wretched tool,
perhaps, if they hadn't been gammoned into believing that I had caved
in. It was gross moral cowardice of me to give them the chance."
The torrent of words flowed so quickly that neither of his hearers was
able to check it, and it was so evidently the outcome of deep emotion
that it was equally impossible to ignore it. The Senator, with a twinkle
in his shrewd gray eyes, laid a warning hand on the General's shoulder
and took it upon himself to answer--with a question which had the
instant effect of soothing Beaumanoir, for it implied a concession of
the position he desired to take up.
"What should you have done in the same circumstances, but with this
difference--that you had landed in England a simple commoner instead of
the representative of an ancient and noble family?" the Senator
inquired.
"Informed the authorities, of course," the Duke replied without
hesitation.
"Good! Then assuming for the sake of argument your charge against
yourself to be correct, you incurred a mortal peril voluntarily, not
from personal considerations affecting yourself, but for fear of
involving other people--most of them dead, by the way--in disgrace. I
don't see how you can make moral cowardice out of that."
"_I_ do," said Beaumanoir, bluntly.
"But," proceeded the Senator, with bland insistence, "you might have
avoided the peril to your own life and the besmirching of the family
name by the simple expedient of carrying out the behests of Ziegler and
Company. You had every facility for pulling the job off without a breath
of suspicion ever touching you."
The diplomatic opening, the psychological moment, for which poor,
blundering Beaumanoir had been hoping, had arrived. It would be
uncharitable to suggest that it was proffered to him, as a card is
"forced," by an American gentleman with a taste for strawberry leaves;
but be it as it may, Beaumanoir was not too dull to seize his chance.
"I might have done that--I was tempted to," he blurted out. "In fact, I
believe I should have done it if--if I hadn't come over in the same ship
with your--with Mrs. and Miss Sherman."
The General, sitting up stiffly with his chin on the knob of his malacca
cane, turned his head sharply to hear his old friend's judgment on this
amazing confession. It was pronounced with Trans-Atlantic briskness.
"Then, sir, by token of that frankness, your Grace is a straight man,"
the Senator said, decidedly, and with an air that invested his words
with greater weight than was perhaps due to their moral perspective.
"And," he added in a lighter vein, "somehow, the honor of your house
seems to have got inextricably mixed with that of mine."
"That's exactly the way I hoped you'd look at it," responded the Duke,
earnestly. "I think you take my meaning. May I speak to Leonie?"
"It's what I should do in your place," was the Senator's reply--a reply
which had the effect of relaxing General Sadgrove's ramrod-like
attitude, and of causing that grim man-hunter to subside into his
corner, with a not unkindly chuckle.
----
On a winter afternoon, six months afterwards, Alec Forsyth entered the
firelit dining-room of the Prior's Tarrant dower-house, which, as agent
of the ducal estates, he had occupied since his marriage in September.
The Duke and Duchess were away in Egypt on their honeymoon, and Forsyth
had been doing the honors of a big shoot in the home coverts to a party
of neighboring country gentlemen. Sybil, who had been sitting in a low
chair by the hearth, rose and drew him to the blaze, first relieving him
of his gun.
"I won't light the lamp yet, dear," she said. "I am forced to refer to
the forbidden subject, and you may want to blush."
"Forbidden subject?" said Forsyth, not for the moment comprehending.
"Well, of course you haven't taken to forbidding me anything yet;
perhaps 'tacitly avoided' would be a better phrase," the young wife
replied, perching herself on the arm of her husband's chair. "I refer to
that poor creature whose one redeeming point was, as the dear General
put it on that eventful night, an unselfish attachment to your noble
self."
Forsyth had never been able to bring himself to talk of the reason of
his uncle's confidence in his safety in the crypt that night, when he
had lent himself to a ruse which he had believed meant death if he was
recognized. He had loathed "Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's" obtrusive
admiration long before he had entered the lists against her, and it was
from a knowledge of his feelings that the General had abstained from
informing him beforehand of the terrible Ziegler's identity, guessing
that his natural delicacy would have prevented him from turning to
account a sentimental weakness so necessary to a successful issue, yet
so revolting to his modesty.
"Must you really refer to that wretched woman?" he asked, as soon as he
saw Sybil's meaning.
"Only to tell you that she is dead," was the reply. "It is in the
_Standard_, which came after you had left for the coverts. There, I must
light the lamp, after all, so that you may read it yourself."
When the lamp shone out on the pleasant, homelike room, this was the
paragraph which Forsyth read:
"On the arrival at Vienna of the through mail train from Budapest on
Thursday night a fashionably dressed female was found alone in a
first-class compartment, stabbed to the heart. The police inquiries have
established her identity as Cora Lestrade, a notorious American
ex-convict, who is believed to have practised on the credulity of highly
placed personages in nearly every European capital. At the time of her
death she was traveling as the Countess Poniatowski. A man who was in
another compartment of the train, dressed as a Roman priest, but who is
supposed to be one of the band of professional criminals ruled by this
extraordinary woman, has been arrested in connection with the
occurrence."
Forsyth laid the paper down--Sybil told him a month later that it was
"with a sigh of relief"--and said:
"She seemed to expect something of the sort when she spoke about her
death sentence and showed such fear of the man Benzon. But isn't Uncle
Jem's intuition marvelous? He has always held that the confederacy would
come to loggerheads and be no longer dangerous after our victorious
tussle with them."
"Yes, dear," Sybil assented, dutifully. "Your uncle is a very remarkable
man, with very remarkable gifts." But she did not add, as she might have
added had she so chosen, that it had required a woman's knowledge of
woman's heart to inspire in the General the insight which had steered
the Duke's storm-tossed bark to harbor.