AGAINST THE WIND.
George Blenkiron wrote in his usual breezy style, and much of the news
in his letter interested Johnson greatly, in view of what Hopford and
Preston had told him, also in view of his engagement to Cora Hartsilver.
It was a long letter, and Blenkiron mentioned among other items of
news that, happening to be in the neighborhood of Uckfield, some days
before, curiosity had prompted him to seek out Stapleton’s cottage, The
Nest, which he knew to be in the vicinity.
“He calls it a ‘cottage,’” he wrote, “but in reality it is a good-sized
house, approached by a carriage drive about half-a-mile long, and
flanked on three sides by woods with thick undergrowth. The house
itself lies in a hollow, and you come upon it unexpectedly. My
intention was only to have a look at the place, but when I arrived
at it so suddenly I concluded that most likely somebody had seen me
approaching, so I went up and rang the bell, meaning to inquire if
Stapleton were at home.
“Though I rang three times, the only sound of life within was the low
growling of a dog; by the ‘woolliness’ of its growl I judged it to be a
bulldog. This rather stirred my curiosity, so I went round to the back
door, and there knocked. Again nobody came; yet I distinctly heard a
footstep just inside the door. Finally, I tried to enter, but the door
was locked.
“By then my curiosity had become thoroughly aroused, and I determined
not to go away until I had seen somebody. I therefore walked away from
the house by the road I had come, taking care not to look behind me;
then, when I could no longer be seen from the house, I turned into
the wood and made my way back among the trees until I reached a spot
commanding a view of the front door and carriage drive, but where I
myself could not be observed. The only thing I feared was that the
dog might presently be let out, when he would, I felt sure, at once
discover me.
“After about twenty minutes a smartly-dressed young woman suddenly
appeared. She came round from the back of the house, and looked about
her as though expecting somebody. A few minutes later I heard the iron
gate across the drive open and shut, and rather an old man came towards
her. They met in the middle of the drive, kissed most affectionately,
and then looked in my direction. You can imagine my astonishment when
I recognized the man. It was Alix Stothert of the Metropolitan Secret
Agency!
“Neither of them saw me, of course; nor did they suspect they were
being watched. A minute later they turned, and went towards the house.
Arrived at the front door, Stothert took a key out of his pocket,
unlocked the door and entered, followed by the young woman. The door
closed behind them, and I heard it being locked again. I waited about
an hour longer to see if anything more would happen, then I went back
into the carriage drive, walked boldly up to the house as if I had just
arrived, and rang loudly.
“It is an old house with an old-fashioned bell-pull. Again there was no
answer, or other sign of life; even the dog did not growl, from which
I concluded it had been taken into some inner room. Four times I rang,
but the place might have been unoccupied for all the notice that was
taken. So then I turned and came away. Strange, wasn’t it?
“Of course Stothert may have been there on some ordinary matter of
business; but then who was the girl--she was very dainty-looking--and
why did nobody come when I rang? I can’t help thinking something queer
is going on there.
“As I was walking back to Uckfield, a man overtook me, riding slowly
on a push bike. About a mile further on I overtook him; he appeared
to be repairing a tire. He glanced up at me casually as I passed by,
and the moment afterwards called out to inquire if I had a match about
me. I went back and gave him one, for which he thanked me with rather
unnecessary profusion, I thought, and then he offered me a cigarette,
and lit it for me. We exchanged a few words about the weather, and I
went on.
“At the railway station, two hours later, I saw him again. He was
on the platform, waiting for the train, but had no bicycle with him
then. I passed him twice, but he appeared not to recognize me, so
I did not speak to him. When I alighted at Waterloo I happened to
notice him behind me on the platform, still without his bicycle; and
when I alighted from a taxi at Cox’s Hotel, in Jermyn Street, where I
am staying, to my astonishment he was standing on the curb, about a
hundred yards along the street--I could see only his profile, but there
could be no mistaking him as he stood there staring up at a house on
the opposite side of the street. Then, for the first time, the thought
struck me that he must be shadowing me. I have not seen him since, but
I should recognize him at once if I met him.”
In another part of the letter Blenkiron told Johnson he had heard about
Jessica’s success at the tables at Dieppe, but he said nothing about
Yootha. He asked Johnson, however, if he had happened to come across
Harry Hopford, who he had been told had gone to Jersey. If he should
meet him, he ended, would he remember to ask him to write at once, as
he wished to communicate with him on a matter of importance.
Johnson refolded the letter, then opened the letter from Preston.
Preston’s communication was brief. There was no reference to his
engagement, nor to Yootha. He spoke of Jessica and her friends,
however, and again mentioned their having broken the bank.
“I am sick of this place,” he remarked towards the end of the letter.
“The town is crawling with the most impossible people--I can’t think
who they are or where they come from; holiday-makers, of course. The
chief attraction is naturally the Casino, where these holiday folk
swarm at night and seem to delight in showing how foolishly they
can squander quite a lot of money. Our countrymen and women show up
badly in a place like this, and give the French a poor opinion of the
British race. I shall probably return to London in a day or two, but my
movements will depend to some extent on circumstances.”
“On circumstances,” Johnson said aloud, as he finished reading the
letter. “Now, I wonder what those circumstances are? It is not like
Preston to conceal his reasons. He is worried about something, I am
sure. The tone of his letter shows it, and I can read between the
lines.”
He appeared to ponder for a minute.
“Strange,” he said at last. “I was under the impression that Yootha
Hagerston was still in Dieppe, and yet he makes no mention of her.”
He smiled.
“I wonder if they have quarrelled, or if----”
Suddenly his thoughts reverted to Cora; then to the contents of
Blenkiron’s letter; then to the anonymous letter Cora had received, and
finally once more to Alix Stothert.
“Of course,” he said reflectively, “that girl Stothert kissed so
affectionately in the carriage drive may have been his daughter, and
yet----”
“And he said the dog that growled sounded like a bulldog. La Planta has
one, a brindle. I wish the dog at Stapleton’s house had been let out to
pursue George, then he would have known its color!”
He smiled at the thought.
“But, after all,” his train of thought ran on, “why should La Planta’s
dog have been in Stapleton’s house? Plenty of people own bulldogs; and
for that matter it may not have been a bulldog.”
He had been singularly accurate in his conjecture that Charlie Preston
was worried. Indeed he was more than worried. At the time of writing
he had felt almost in despair at the extraordinary change that had
suddenly come over Yootha. From the night of her great success at the
tables she had become a slave to roulette. She played now with Jessica
during the afternoons as well as at night, and not infrequently in
the morning too. She could talk and think of nothing but roulette and
_petits chevaux_. At the moment her ambition was to evolve a system by
which she could never lose--a chimera pursued by many votaries of the
game, and invariably disastrous in the end.
Preston had made every endeavor to dissuade her from continuing to
play. He had assured her that in the long run she must infallibly lose
all she had won, and more; but when day after day went by and she
almost always came out a winner in the end, she felt she could afford
to disregard his advice, well-meant though she knew it to be.
But the worst had happened when one day after she had won a good deal
and Preston had again spoken to her, and had finished by trying for
the twentieth time to induce her to break her friendship with Jessica,
she had suddenly turned upon him, practically told him to mind his
own business, and ended by saying that if she were going to break any
friendship it would be her friendship with him and not with Jessica.
He had gone out that evening feeling miserable, though instinctively
knowing that in the end she must come back to him. Yes, in the end,
but how long, he asked himself, would the end be in coming? Jessica
seemed to have hypnotized her, to be able now to make her do her
bidding in any way she chose. Several times he had seen her and her two
undesirable friends and Yootha all seated together round a table on the
terrace of the hotel, smoking cigarettes and drinking what looked like
whisky and soda in full view of everybody passing.
Again and again he had blamed himself for having allowed her to adopt
Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson as her chaperone. Chaperone! Why, he said
mentally, a hundred times safer she would have been with no chaperone
than with that dissolute woman to look after her, and her _dévergondé_
companions.
Two nights later, on returning to the hotel, he was handed a note
by the clerk in the office. Recognizing Yootha’s handwriting on the
envelope, he took the note up to his bedroom to read it in private. It
was short, and ran as follows:
“DEAR CHARLIE,--This is just to tell you that I am leaving
here to-morrow with Jessica and her friends. We are going
to Monte first, then probably we shall stay in Paris a
little while, and after that we shall return to London,
when I shall hope to see you. I don’t want to quarrel with
you, dear. Indeed I don’t, and I am dreadfully sorry you
should misjudge Jessica in the way you do. She is such a
good friend to me now, and I hope we shall continue to be
friends. But most of all I wish you would overcome your
prejudices against her, so that we might all be friends
together. I hate making you unhappy, as I feel I am doing,
but truly I think you are unintentionally to blame. Lots of
love, my dear.
“YOOTHA.”
“Curse the woman!” he exclaimed aloud, “and the abominable way she
has taught Yootha to gamble. Well, I suppose I can do nothing at the
moment. I only hope to heaven that at Monte the whole lot will lose
heavily, so heavily that Yootha at any rate will be brought to her
senses once and for all. Meanwhile I must try to hurry on our wedding.”
Yootha went off early next day without seeing him or even leaving a
note to wish him good-by. A week later he heard indirectly that at the
tables in Monte Carlo the four were still winning. A report reached the
Royal Hotel in Dieppe that they had won a fabulous sum. It was quite
extraordinary, everybody said. Never within the memory of the oldest
_habitués_ of the Dieppe Casino had players had such a run of luck. And
its consistency was that they all played “anyhow,” or seemed to. On
the few occasions when they had experimented with some system, they had
lost heavily--so it was said.
“Yootha, my darling,” Jessica remarked casually to her one night
towards the end of a champagne supper at which all sorts of people were
present, for their luck had brought them a whole host of “friends,”
“what has become of your knight-errant--or is he your knight-errant no
longer? I should be delighted if I heard you had thrown him over, or
even that he had thrown you over. Have you heard from him lately?”
“Not very lately,” Yootha replied quickly, with a slight frown which
Jessica did not fail to notice. “He has gone back to London, I believe.”
“‘You believe.’ That doesn’t sound promising, does it?” and she laughed
in her deep voice, though it was not a pleasant laugh. “When a man is
engaged to be married, especially to such a charming girl--a girl any
man ought to be proud to speak to, let alone be engaged to--it isn’t
very considerate of him to leave her in the lurch in the way Captain
Preston left you. And if he neglects you now, don’t you think he’s
pretty sure to begin neglecting you when you have been married a little
while?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Yootha answered awkwardly. “Men are queer animals.
I have always said so. At one time I made up my mind never to marry.”
“But changed it directly you had the privilege of meeting Captain
Preston.”
She spoke almost with a sneer.
“Not directly,” the girl said weakly, conscious that, had she drunk
less champagne and had all her wits about her, she would have said
something different, would have stood up for her lover.
Jessica edged a little closer to her.
“Why not give him up?” she murmured so that nobody but Yootha could
hear. “He has not treated you well; he has not played the game, has he
now? Just think--he is supposed to be your lover, yet after swearing,
as I am sure he has done, he has never in his life before met any woman
to approach you, he leaves you alone, lets you go roaming about the
Continent with two men and a woman he intensely dislikes, and himself
calmly returns to England without even wishing you good-by! Does that
look like true love, dear? Does it look like love at all? Supposing a
man you knew nothing about were going to marry some friend of yours,
what would you think, what would you say, if all at once he treated her
like this? Take my advice, Yootha,” she went on, speaking lower still,
“give him up. Write to him to-morrow; come up to my room and write to
him at once; saying that in view of all that has happened you have
decided to break off your engagement. He won’t break his heart--break
his heart, I should think not!--and believe me, you will one day thank
me for having saved you from marrying a man who doesn’t love you.”
As she stopped speaking she refilled the girl’s glass with champagne.
“And now listen to me,” she ended under her breath. “I have something
serious to say to you.”