Chapter Fourteen. The Cipher of the Two C’s.

“I am going to ask you a question, dearest; I fear it is a painful one, but I think it ought to be put.”

It was Austin Wingate who spoke. He had dined with Sheila at Chesterfield Street, and after dinner the lovers had gone to her own sitting-room, which was on the first floor.

She looked at him steadfastly. “Painful or not, Austin, please put it. You would not hurt me, I know, unless you felt it was absolutely necessary.”

“Of course not, Sheila,” answered the young man fervently. “In our anxiety to solve this mystery concerning your father we must shrink from nothing. The question I am going to ask you, dear, is this: Have you ever had any cause to suspect there was some hidden mystery in your father’s life? Do not be offended—will you?”

She smiled faintly. “What is called a skeleton in the cupboard, you mean—eh? It seems impossible when one comes to consider the kind of man he was. In political matters he was reserved; that was natural. I have heard him laugh often over the efforts of people to draw him. But, in every other respect he seemed as frank and open as the day.”

“He gave me that impression certainly,” assented Wingate. “During my mother’s lifetime I don’t know that I counted greatly in his life. He was so wrapped up in her that he seemed to have no room for anybody else,” went on the girl, in a musing voice. “Then, after her death, and when his first passionate grief died down, he listened to me. I could not hope to fill her place, but I became very necessary to him. He has told me many times that but for me he would have been the most miserable man on earth. I gave him new interests, and weaned him away from his sad thoughts.”

Wingate leaned forward, and kissed her tenderly upon the brow. “You were born for the rôle of ministering angel, my darling,” he declared.

She thanked him with a grateful glance for the pretty compliment. “You ask me if I ever had cause to suspect that there was some hidden mystery in his life. I can only answer, none. His life seemed to me like an open book, that all who ran might read.”

Wingate was silent for a little time. This was the impression made upon his daughter, an only child, who would have the most intimate opportunity of judging him. It was the impression he had made upon close friends and casual acquaintances alike.

And yet who could be sure? A man trained to the law, versed in public affairs, was he likely to wear his heart upon his sleeve?

When he spoke, it was in a hesitating voice: “I agree that intuition is a very safe guide in many instances. And I believe with you that your father’s life was a blameless one. Still, there is one little thing we must not overlook.”

“And that little thing?” she questioned in a low voice.

“What was the connection between him and the man whom they have identified as Bolinski? Why does a man in his position make an appointment with a person so evidently not of his own world, unless to discuss something of a secret and mysterious nature? Remember where they met, in a little hole-and-corner restaurant in Soho.”

“It has puzzled me, I admit,” replied Sheila. “It is strange, too, that he told me nothing of the appointment, for he used to inform me of his most trivial movements. Thinking over it, as I have over every other incident, I believe it was connected with politics—there are plenty of under-currents in them, as we know. He would not say anything to me about this meeting for fear I might drop an incautious word to some of our friends.”

“It is evident that he apprehended no treachery from this man,” was Wingate’s next remark, “or he would have taken some means to safeguard himself. I mean, for one thing, he would not have left the House of Commons alone. It may be, as you suggest, that this curious meeting, in an out-of-the-way and obscure restaurant, may have had some political motive. But I can hardly bring myself to believe it. I am sure that what brought such a strangely assorted couple together was a private and personal matter.”

“And that we have no means of knowing,” said Sheila sadly.

He was glad that she had not resented his question, and the suggestions that arose from it. It emboldened him to proceed.

“As I have said, it is our duty to leave no stone unturned, to look even in unlikely places for any fresh evidence which might afford a clue. There must be a mass of papers in this house I think you ought to go through them, darling.”

She gave a little cry. “Oh!” she said in a tearful voice. “It seems almost like sacrilege.”

“If such a search were conducted by other hands, it might be so, but assuredly not in your case.”

She thought a little, and her common-sense came to her aid.

“You are quite right, Austin, as you always are. It will be a terrible task, but, as you say, we must leave no stone unturned. I will begin to-morrow, and keep on till I have finished.”

He called late next day, and found that she had got about half-way through the various piles. But so far she had found nothing of importance.

“I came across a few diaries. He seems to have kept them for the best part of five years, and then dropped the practice. They contain records of appointments, whom he met, and political events, but there’s not a single entry that throws any light upon this affair.”

“I wonder if Farloe has any of his papers, or, more likely still, has abstracted any?” said Wingate in a musing voice.

Sheila shuddered at the name. “No wonder that I always hated him,” she cried vehemently. “Shall we ever learn the part he played in this mystery?”

It took her a few days to go through her task, for she was fearful of missing a line in those carefully docketed piles of papers. But it was all to no purpose.

If there had been a secret in Reginald Monkton’s life, no evidence had been preserved in these documents.

“Newsom-Perry is pretty sure to have some papers in his possession,” said Wingate, when she had finished her futile task. “I want to spare you everything I can, dear. Will you give me a note to him, and I will ask him to hand them over to you?”

Mr Newsom-Perry was Monkton’s solicitor, the head of the firm which had acted for the missing statesman, and his father before him.

Wingate presented himself at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and sent in his sweetheart’s note.

The solicitor, a genial, kindly-looking man of fifty or thereabouts, welcomed the young man cordially.

“Pleased to see you, Mr Wingate,” he said, as they shook hands. “Poor Monkton has spoken to me several times of you, in warm terms. I understand that you were a frequent visitor at the house before the sad event.”

Wingate explained that he was with Sheila awaiting her father, on the night when the dying man was brought to Chesterfield Street.

The shrewd, kindly eyes watched him as he made the explanation. Mr Newsom-Perry had his own ideas as to how matters stood between the young couple.

“And what can I do for you, Mr Wingate?”

“We thought it pretty certain that you would have some papers of Mr Monkton’s here. If that is the case, would you let his daughter look through them, in the hope of finding something that might throw a light upon the case?”

“Under the circumstances, by all means, Mr Wingate. Of course, we have got all his business documents, leases, and that kind of thing. Those would be useless for your purpose?”

“I should say, quite useless.”

“But I have a couple of boxes of private papers which he brought about two years ago. He had been sorting out, he said, and his own house was as full as it could hold. Knowing we had plenty of room, he thought we would not mind storing them. I will send them round some time to-day. When she has gone through them perhaps Miss Monkton will let me have them back until, until—” He laughed, and did not finish the sentence.

“I quite understand. Now I will take up as little time as possible, but there are one or two questions I should like to ask you, if I may.”

The solicitor nodded genially. “Go on, sir.”

“I take it that, having known Mr Monkton all your life, and your firm having acted for his father, you were entirely in your client’s confidence.”

“That is so. Monkton and I were personal friends, as well as solicitor and client. We were at Cambridge together, before either of us commenced our respective careers.”

“Has he, to your knowledge, ever made any active enemies?”

“Not that I know of. Political enemies, no doubt, he has by the score—myself included. But you know what English politics are. It’s a fair stand-up fight, and the loser grumbles a bit, but bears no rancour. Men abuse each other across the floor of the House, and are good friends again in the smoking-room.”

“One other question, a somewhat delicate one, and I have done. Had he ever an entanglement of any kind, the effects of which might pursue him in later life?”

The solicitor rubbed his chin, and quite frankly replied:

“Not to my knowledge. That does not, however, conclusively prove a negative.”

“But you were close personal friends, in addition to your business relation. Would it not be natural that, under such circumstances, he would come to you for advice?”

There seemed an extra gleam of shrewdness in the solicitor’s eyes as he answered:

“In such circumstances as you suggest it is by no means easy to predict what course a man would take. If Monkton had got into some entanglement that, to put it bluntly—although, mind you, I don’t believe such a thing occurred—reflected some doubt either on his character or on his intelligence, it is just as likely as not that his old friend would be the last person to whom he would care to expose himself. He would be equally likely to go to a stranger.”

Wingate was fain to admit the force of the argument.

“One can never be sure of any man, even if you have known him all your life,” he added, as they shook hands. “Nobody knows that better than our profession. But I would stake my existence that there were no skeletons in Monkton’s cupboard. The man was as straight as a die, and he was passionately attached to his beautiful wife. Well, Mr Wingate, give my best regards to dear Miss Sheila. I will send those boxes round to-day.”

He was as good as his word. Late in the afternoon they arrived, and Sheila at once set to work reading the various papers, not, it must be confessed, in a very hopeful spirit.

But when Wingate came round in the evening he found her in a state of greatest excitement.

She took from an envelope a letter containing only a few words and passed it to him. “Read that, and tell me what you make of it,” she said. “There is no formal beginning, and no signature. But you see it is addressed to my father, and was evidently delivered by hand.”

Upon the flap of the faded envelope Wingate saw some initials, two C’s in a cipher scroll embossed in black, an old-fashioned monogram such as was in vogue in the early “sixties.”

Then he read upon the half-sheet of notepaper, traced in a bold hand in ink that was brown, as follows:

“You have ruined and disgraced me, and forced me to fly the country and become a wanderer on the face of the earth. Well, I will be even with you. I will wait, if necessary all my life, till my turn comes. Then, when it does, I will strike you at the zenith of your career, and mete out to you the suffering you have dealt to me.”