Chapter Nine. The Gentleman Named Paulton.

On creeping back to her room, I found Vera awaiting me anxiously.

She, too, had heard the men talking, she had recognised her father’s and his companion’s voices, though unable to catch what was being said. I bent, and we exchanged kisses. In a few words I told her what had occurred, and explained the situation. I wanted to ask her about the man Davies; how she came to know him, and if she had known him long. There were other matters, too, that I wished to talk to her about, but there was no time to do so then.

Though I pride myself upon a rapidity of decision in moments of crises, and have misled the more ingenuous among my friends into believing that I really am a man of exceedingly strong character, who would never find himself at a loss if brought suddenly face to face with a critical problem, I don’t mind admitting that I am an invertebrate, vacillating creature at such times. Oh, no, I never lose my head. Don’t think that. But when instant decision is needed, and there are several decisions one might come to, I get quite “jumpy,” half make up my mind to take one course, half make up my mind to take the opposite course, and finally take the third, or it may be the fourth or fifth.

“Well, you had better get away at once, dear,” Vera urged quickly, when I had told her what I had heard below.

“But what are you going to do?” I asked.

“Oh, I know what I’m going to do,” she replied at once, “but I want to have your plan. I know, dear, you are never at a loss when ‘up against it,’ to use your own phrase. You have often told me so, or implied it.”

Now I did not entirely like her tone. There was a curious gleam in her eyes, which I mistrusted. I had noticed that gleam before, on occasions when she had been drawing people on to make admissions that they did not wish to make. She was rather too fond, I had sometimes thought, of indulging in a form of intellectual pastime that I have heard people who talk slang—a thing that I detest—call “pulling you by the leg.” The suspicion crossed my mind at that moment, that Vera was trying to “pull my leg”—and I frankly didn’t like it.

“This is no time for joking, Vera,” I said, for the “gleam” in her eyes had now become a twinkle. “This is a time for action—and very prompt action.”

I wondered how she could jest at such a moment. “That is why I want you to act,” she answered innocently, “and to act promptly. However, as I believe you have no idea what to do, Dick, I’m going to tell you what to do, and you must do it—promptly. Now, follow me. I know my way about this place.” She led me softly along the corridor, turned to the right, then to the left, and then to the left again. Presently we reached the top of a flight of steep, and very narrow wooden stairs.

“Follow me,” she whispered again, “and keep one hand on that rope,” indicating a cord that served as a bannister. “These stairs are slippery, or they always used to be. As a child, I used to fall down them every Sunday.”

We were on the first floor. The stairs continued to the ground floor. She turned suddenly.

“How about your gloves and umbrella?”

There was the curious look in her eyes again, so I paid no attention.

“Have you matches?” she asked, a moment later.

I struck one, and, stooping, we made our way along a narrow, dark passage, with a low ceiling. Five stone steps down into a damp, stone tunnel, about twenty feet in length, then to the right, and we came to a wooden door.

“Give me your keys,” she said.

I did so, and she unlocked the door. It led into a little stone-flagged yard. On three sides of it were high walls, walls of houses. The wall on the fourth side, only a few feet high, was surmounted by iron rails. Stone steps led up to the gate at the end of the rails. She opened the gate, re-locking it when we had passed out, and we stood in a stone-flagged cul-de-sac, about fifteen yards long, across the open end of which, the traffic of the street could be seen passing to and fro.

“And now,” she said, when we had reached the street, disobeying the injunction of Paulton, “you are going to tell me what I must do next.”

I hailed a taxi, and we drove off in it, discussing plans as we went along.

Then I secured a room for her in a comfortable little hotel I knew of, in a street off Russell Square. The difficulty that now arose, was how to get her luggage.

She told me all her things were packed, as she was to have left for Paris that night, alone. The order received from her father was, that she should remain in an obscure lodging near Rue la Harpe, the address of which, he had given her. There she would receive further instructions. These instructions, she told me, were to come either from her father, or from Paulton. She had strict orders not to communicate with Davies. Her luggage was in Brighton. Sir Charles and Lady Thorold had been staying in Brighton, and she had come up that morning. Paulton had met her at Victoria, and taken her in a cab direct to her father’s empty house in Belgrave Street. He had told her that if she dared go out before he came to her at ten that night, he would go to the police.

“But who is this man Davies?” I asked.

“A friend.”

“But cannot you tell me something more concerning him?” I demanded.

“At present, no. I regret, Dick, that I am not allowed to say anything—my lips are sealed.”

“And Paulton. Why obey him so subserviently?”

“Ah!” she sighed. “Because I am compelled.”

With these rebuffs, I was forced to be satisfied.

With regard to the plan for recovering her luggage, I rose to the occasion. After pondering the problem for a quarter of an hour, I suggested that she should write a note to her mother in Brighton, saying that Paulton had suddenly changed his plans, and that her luggage was wanted at once. It was to have been sent off at eight o’clock that night, when Paulton would meet it at Victoria, she had told me. The bearer of the note we would now send to Brighton—a District Messenger—would be instructed to bring the luggage back with him. I looked up the trains in the railway-guide, and found it would be just possible for the messenger to do this in the time. To avoid any mishap, I told the messenger to alight, on his return journey, at Clapham Junction, and bring the luggage from there, in a taxi, to the hotel near Russell Square.

We dined together upstairs, at the Trocadero—ah! how I enjoyed that evening! How delightful it was to sit tête-à-tête with her. Before we had finished dinner, word was brought to us that Vera’s luggage had arrived.

“I think I managed that rather well,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“No,” she answered, “I don’t.”

“No?”

“As you ask me, I may as well tell you that I think you could hardly have ‘managed’ it worse. You have simply put Paulton on my track.”

“But how?”

“How! Really, my dear Dick, your intelligence resembles a child’s. You send a messenger for my luggage. Acting on your instructions, he brings it from Brighton to Clapham Junction by train, then hails a taxi, and brings the luggage on it direct to this hotel. Paulton is told by my mother in Brighton, that a messenger from London called for the luggage. All he has to do, is to ring up the messenger offices, until he finds the one where you engaged your messenger. Having found that out, he ascertains from the messenger the address to which he took the luggage in the taxi, and at once he comes and finds me.”

“But,” I said quickly, “Paulton is not in Brighton.”

“How can that matter? He can easily find out who took my luggage. I tell you, dear, if Paulton finds me, worse still, if he finds me with you, the result will be terrible for all of us. You should yourself have gone to Clapham, met the messenger-boy there, and yourself have brought the luggage here.”

I felt crushed. I had believed my plan had been laid so cleverly. At the same time, my admiration for Vera’s foresight increased, though I did not tell her so.

We went back to the hotel at once, took away the luggage with us, and by ten o’clock that night she was comfortably settled in another small hotel, within a stone’s throw of Hampstead Heath.

My sweet-faced, well-beloved told me many things I wanted to know, but alas! not everything, and all the time we conversed, I had to bear in mind the important fact that she believed me to be familiar with Sir Charles’ secret—the secret that had led to his sudden flight from Houghton with her mother, herself and the French maid. I mistrusted that French maid—Judith. I had disliked the tone in which she had addressed Vera, when she had called her away from me that night at Houghton, and told her that Lady Thorold wanted her. I had noticed the maid on one or two previous occasions, and from the first I had disliked her. Her voice was so smooth, her manner so artificially deferential, and altogether she had seemed to me stealthy and cat-like. I believed her to be a hypocrite, if not a schemer.

The man who had called himself Davies, Vera told me, in the course of our long conversation that evening, was not named Smithson at all. That was a name he had adopted for some motive which, she seemed to take it for granted, I must be able to guess. Mexican by birth, though of British-Portuguese parentage, he had spoken to her, perhaps, half-a-dozen times. He appeared to be a friend of her father, she said, though what interest they had in common she had never been able to discover.

Speaking of Paulton, she said, her soft hand resting in mine, that he had known her mother longer than her father, and he had, she believed, been introduced by her mother to Sir Charles, since which time, the two men’s intimacy had steadily increased.

She gave no reason for the dismay the sight of the framed panel portrait of “Smithson” had created, or for the sudden dismissal that night of all the servants at Houghton, and the subsequent flight. I could not quite decide, in my mind, if she took it for granted that I, knowing Sir Charles’ secret—as she supposed—knew also why he had left Houghton thus mysteriously, or whether she intentionally refrained from telling me. But certainly she seemed to think there was no reason to tell me who had done poor James, the butler, to death, or who had fired the rifle shots from the wood, and killed the chauffeur. At the inquest on the butler, the jury had returned an open verdict.

Could he have been drowned by Paulton, and drowned intentionally? Or was Davies responsible for his death? That it must have been one of those two men I now felt certain—supposing he had not committed suicide, or been drowned by accident.

Another thing Vera clearly took for granted was, that I must have known why the man hidden in the wood had fired those shots at me. I had guessed, of course, from the first, that the bullet that had killed the driver had been meant for me; though why anybody should wish to do me harm I had not the remotest idea.

Of some points, of course, my love was ignorant as myself.

On the subject of the flask with the gelsiminum—a very potent poison distilled from the root of the yellow jasmine—that had been picked up on the drive at Houghton, just outside the front door, Vera said nothing. Indeed, though I referred to it more than once, she each time turned the conversation into a different channel, as though by accident.

“By the way, darling,” I said, as our lips met again in a long, lingering caress, when we had been talking a long time, “why did you ring me up to tell me you were in trouble and needed my help, and why did you call with Davies at my chambers?”

Several times during the evening I had been on the point of asking her these questions, but on each occasion she had diverted my intention. It seemed odd, too, that though I had more than once asked her to tell me Davies’ true name, she had each time turned the conversation without satisfying me. And at last she had point-blank refused to tell me.

Why? I wondered.

She looked at me steadily for some moments.

“It seems almost incredible, Dick,” she said at last, speaking very slowly, and drawing herself away, “that knowing my father’s secret, you should ask those questions. Tell me, how did you come to make the terrible discovery about my father? How long have you known everything? Who told you about it?”