CHAPTER XXXI IN WHICH SIR HUGH TELLS HIS STORY

"You know the truth, don't you, dearest?" Walter asked at last in that quiet, sympathetic tone which he always adopted towards her whom he loved so well.

Enid nodded in the affirmative, her face hard and drawn.

"He was killed, was he not—deliberately murdered?"

For a few seconds the silence was unbroken save for a whir of a taxicab passing outside.

"Yes," was her somewhat reluctant response.

"You went to his rooms that afternoon," Walter asserted point blank.

"I do not deny that. I followed him home—to—to save him."

There was a break in her voice as she stammered out the last words, and tears rushed into her dark eyes.

"From what? From death?"

"No, from falling a prey to a great temptation set before him."

"By whom?"

"By the doctor, to whom my stepfather had introduced him," was the girl's reply. "I discovered by mere chance that the doctor, who had somewhat got him into his clutches, had approached him in order to induce him to allow him to take a wax impression of a certain safe key belonging to a friend of his named Thurston, a diamond broker in Hatton Garden. He had offered him a very substantial sum to do this—a sum which would have enabled him to clear off all his debts and start afresh. Harry's younger brother Bob had got into a mess, and in helping him out Harry had sadly entangled himself and was practically face to face with bankruptcy. I knew this, and I knew what a great temptation had been placed before him. Fearing lest, in a moment of despair, he might accept, I went, by appointment, to his chambers as soon as I arrived in London. Barker, his man, had been sent out, and we were alone. I found him in desperation, yet to my great delight he had defied Weirmarsh, saying he refused to betray his friend."

"And what did Bellairs tell you further?"

"He expressed suspicion that my stepfather was in the doctor's pay," she replied. "I tried to convince him to the contrary, but Weirmarsh's suggestion had evidently furnished the key to some suspicious document which he had one day found on Sir Hugh's writing-table."

"Well?"

"Well," she went on slowly, "we quarrelled. I was indignant that he should suspect my stepfather, and he was full of vengeance against Sir Hugh's friend the doctor. Presently I left, and—and I never saw him again alive!"

"What happened?"

"What happened is explained by this letter," she replied, crossing to a little buhl bureau which she unlocked, taking out a sealed envelope. On breaking it open and handing it to him she said: "This is the letter he wrote to me with his dying hand. I have kept it a secret—a secret even from Sir Hugh."

Walter read the uneven lines eagerly. They grew more shaky and more illegible towards the end, but they were sufficient to make the truth absolutely clear.

"To-night, half an hour ago," (wrote the dying man) "I had a visit from your friend, Weirmarsh. We were alone, with none to overhear, so I told him plainly that I intended to expose him. At first he became defiant, but presently he grew apprehensive, and on taking his leave he made a foul accusation against you. Then, laughing at my refusal to accept his bribe, the scoundrel took my hand in farewell. He must have had a pin stuck in his glove, for I felt a slight scratch across the palm. At the moment I was too furious to pay any attention to it, but ten minutes after he had gone I began to experience a strange faintness. I feel now fainter . . . and fainter . . . A strange feeling has crept over me . . . I am dying . . . poisoned . . . by that king of thieves!

"Come to me quickly . . . at once . . . Enid . . . and tell me that what he has said against you . . . is not true. It . . . it cannot be true. . . . Don't delay. Come quickly. . . . Can't write more.—Harry."

Walter paused for a second after reading through that dramatic letter, the last effort of a dying man.

"And that scoundrel Weirmarsh killed him because he feared exposure," he remarked in a low, hard voice. "Why did you not bring this forward at the inquest?"

"For several reasons," replied the girl. "I feared the doctor's reprisals. Besides, he might easily have denied the allegation, or he might have used the same means to close my lips if he had suspected that I had learnt the truth."

"The dead man's story is no doubt true," declared Fetherston. "He used some deadly poison—one of the newly discovered ones which leaves no trace—to kill his victim who, in all probability, was not his first. Your stepfather does not know, of course, that this letter exists?"

"No. I have kept it from everyone. I said that the summons I received from him I had destroyed."

"In the circumstances I will ask you, Enid, to allow me to retain it," he said. "I want to show it to Trendall."

"You may show it to Mr. Trendall, but I ask you, for the present, to make no further use of it," replied the girl.

He moved a step closer to her and caught her disengaged hand in his, the glad light in her eyes telling him that his action was one which she reciprocated, yet some sense of her unworthiness of this great love causing her to hesitate.

"I will promise," said the strong, manly fellow in a low tone. "I ought to have made allowances, but, in the horror of my suspicion, I did not, and I'm sorry. I love you, Enid—I had never really loved until I met you, until I held your hand in mine!"

Enid's true, overburdened heart was only too ready to respond to his fervent appeal. She suffered her lover to draw her to himself, and their lips met in a long, passionate caress that blotted out all the past. He spoke quick, rapid words of ardent affection. To Enid, after all the hideous events she had passed through, it seemed too happy to be true that so much bliss was in store for her, and she remained there, with Walter's arm around her, silently content, that fervid kiss being the first he had ever imprinted upon her full red lips.

Thus they remained in each other's arms, their two true hearts beating in unison, their kisses mingling, their twin souls united in the first moments of their newly-found ecstasy of perfect love.

The fight had been a fierce one, but their true hearts had won, and, as they whispered each other's fond affection, Enid promised to be the wife of the honest, fearless man of whose magnificent work in the detection of crime the country had never dreamed. They read his books and were enthralled by them, but little did they think that he was one of the never-sleeping watch-dogs upon great criminals, or that the sweet-faced girl, who was now his affianced wife, had risked her life, her love, her honour, in order to assist him.

Next afternoon Sir Hugh called upon Walter at his dingy chambers in Holles Street, and as they sat together the old general, after a long and somewhat painful silence, exclaimed:

"I know, Fetherston, that you must be mystified how, in my position, I should have become implicated in the doings of that criminal gang."

"Yes, I am," Walter declared.

"Well, briefly, it occurred in this way," said the old officer. "While I was a colonel in India just before the war I was very hard pressed for money and had committed a fault—an indiscretion for which I might easily have been dismissed from the army. On being recalled to London, after war had been declared, I was approached by the fellow Weirmarsh who, to my horror, had, by some unaccountable means, obtained knowledge of my indiscretion! At first he adopted a high moral tone, upbraiding me for my fault and threatening to inform against me. This I begged him not to do. For a fortnight he kept me in an agony of despair, when one day he called me to him and unfolded to me a scheme by which I could make a considerable amount of money; indeed, he promised to pay me a yearly sum for my assistance."

"You thought him to be a doctor—and nothing else?" Walter said.

"Exactly. I never dreamed until quite recently that he was head of such a formidable gang, whose operations were upon so extensive a scale as to endanger our national credit," replied Sir Hugh. "At the time he approached me I was in the Pay Department, and many thousands of pounds in Treasury notes were passing through my safe weekly. His suggestion was that I should exchange the notes as they came to me from the Treasury for those with which he would supply me, and which, on showing me a specimen, I failed to distinguish from the real. I hesitated; I was hard up. To sustain my position after my knighthood money was absolutely necessary to me, and for a long time I had been unable to make both ends meet. The bait he dangled before me was sufficiently tempting, and—and—well, I fell!" he groaned, and then after a pause he went on:

"Whence Weirmarsh obtained the packets of notes which I substituted for genuine ones was, of course, a mystery, but once having taken the false step it was not my business to inquire. Not until quite recently did I discover his real position as chief of a gang of international crooks, who combined forgery with blackmail and theft upon a colossal scale. That he intended Bellairs should furnish him with an impression of the safe key of a diamond dealer in Hatton Garden is now plain. Bellairs defied him and threatened to denounce him to the police. Therefore, the poor fellow's lips were quickly closed by the scoundrel, who would hesitate at nothing in order to preserve his guilty secrets."

"But what caused you to break from him at last?" inquired Walter eagerly.

"Just before the armistice he and his friends had conceived a gigantic scheme by which Europe and the United States were to be flooded with great quantities of spurious paper currency, and though it would, when discovered—as it must have been sooner or later—have injured the national credit, would bring huge fortunes to him and his friends. He was pressing me to send in my papers and go to America, there to act as their agent at a huge remuneration. They wanted a man of standing who should be above suspicion, and he had decided to use me as his tool to engineer the gigantic frauds."

"And you, happily, refused?"

"Yes. I resolved, rather than act further, to relinquish the handsome payments he made to me from time to time. For that reason I got transferred from the Pay Department, so that I could no longer be of much use to him, a fact which annoyed him greatly."

"And he threatened you?"

"Yes. He was constantly doing so. He wanted me to go to New York. Enid helped me and gave me courage to defy him—which I did. Then he conceived a dastardly revenge by anonymously denouncing Le Pontois as a forger, and implicating both Enid and myself. He contrived that some money I brought from England should be exchanged for spurious notes, and these Paul unsuspiciously gave into the Crédit Lyonnais. Had it not been for your timely warning, Fetherston, we should both have also been arrested in France without a doubt."

"Yes," replied the other. "I was watching, and realised your peril, though I confess that my position was one of extreme difficulty. I, of course, did not know the actual truth, and, to be frank, I suspected both Enid and yourself of being implicated in some very serious crime."

"So we were," he said in a low, hard voice.

"True. But you have both been the means of revealing to the Treasury a state of things of which they never dreamed, and by turning King's evidence and giving the names and addresses of members of the gang in Brussels and Paris, all of whom are now under arrest, you have saved the country from considerable peril. Had the plot succeeded, a very serious state of things must have resulted, for the whole of our paper currency would have been suspected. For that reason the authorities have, I understand, now that they have arrested the gang and seized their presses, decided to hush up the whole matter."

"You know this?" asked Sir Hugh, suddenly brightening.

"Yes, Trendall told me so this morning."

"Ah! Thank Heaven!" he gasped, much relieved. "Then I can again face the world a free man. God knows how terribly I suffered through all those years of the war. I paid for my fault very dearly—I assure you, Fetherston."