CHAPTER XVI
A Delicate Mission
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It was on Sunday evening that Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, after a pious pilgrimage to the village church in company with her assiduous friend Sybil Hanbury, sought the Duke and asked if she might have a carriage to take her to the station for the up-train on the following morning. She would return in the evening, she said, but imperative business with her milliner and tailor demanded her presence in London for a few hours.
Beaumanoir, in courteously promising that her request should be attended to, regarded her with a wan smile. “You will have a companion—that is, if you do not mind Mr. Forsyth sharing the station brougham with you,” he added. “Alec has to go to London to-morrow on my business—leases at the solicitors’, isn’t it?”
He turned for confirmation to Forsyth, who, with General Sadgrove, had been strolling with him on the terrace.
“Yes, leases at the solicitors’,” replied the private secretary, flushing slightly. The General looked indifferent.
“Really?” said the lady. “There must be a lot of that sort of thing to see to just now, I suppose. Of course, I shall be delighted to have Mr. Forsyth’s escort, provided he drops me at Bond Street. I cannot have a critical male person following me across my tailor’s sacred threshold.”
She shook a gay finger at the party and disappeared into one of the French windows—a vision of dainty chiffons and rustling silks.
“She’s gone to put her prayer-book away,” laughed Forsyth, in the nervous manner of one wishing to cover an awkward situation.
“She needs one,” muttered the General under his mustache, shooting a furtive glance at his nephew.
Beaumanoir said nothing, and the three paced on, hardly speaking, till it was time to dress for dinner. Since the General’s return from town on the day of Mrs. Talmage Eglinton’s headache, not exactly a coolness, but a constraint, had sprung up between them. A suspicion of cross-purposes was in the air, which kept them silent when all together, but communicative enough when any two of them were alone in solitary places.
It was so now, for the General waited till the Duke had left them to go up to his dressing-room before he remarked in a tone of grim humor:
“I told you that you would have her for a traveling companion.”
“I don’t anticipate much pleasure from the journey,” Forsyth replied, gloomily, and reddening under the searching gaze with which his uncle raked him.
But with the exception of the short drive to the station, during which Mrs. Talmage Eglinton was unusually preoccupied, he was spared the uncongenial tête-à-tête he had expected. When the train came in the fair American said chaffingly that she knew he was dying to smoke—that, anyhow, she was in a mood for meditation herself, and intended to indulge it in the seclusion of a “ladies’ compartment.” Forsyth responded with the barest protest demanded by courtesy, and went away to a smoking-carriage, much relieved.
He saw her again at St. Pancras; indeed, he contrived to be near enough to overhear the direction to an address in Bond Street which she gave to her cabman, but he noticed the not unexpected fact that here in London she had no desire for his society. She had hurried into the vehicle without looking round for him, and was driven away at a pace that betokened special instructions to the driver.
Forsyth took another cab and bade his man keep the first cab in sight. Before long he perceived that the lady was in truth going to Bond Street, and presently he had the satisfaction of seeing her discharge her cab and skip lightly into the shop of a fashionable modiste in that thoroughfare. His complacence was a little marred by uncertainty whether she had observed him or not, but from the quick turn of her head as she crossed the pavement he was rather inclined to think that she had.
“It doesn’t matter, really,” he reflected. “‘She knows that we suspect her complicity, or she wouldn’t have tried to blind her trail to the hotel by driving here first. Strange, though, that, suspecting that, she should have taken so much trouble.”
He ordered his driver to take him to the Hotel Cecil, and at the same time to keep a lookout to see whether they in turn were being followed by the lady whom they had just run to ground. But when he was set down at the main entrance of the great twelve-storied palace he received the assurance that nothing of the sort had occurred.
“Not so keen after you, sir, as you was after her,” ejaculated the smart cabman as he whipped up and wheeled round, dissatisfied, after the manner of his kind, with the extra half-crown he had received for his “shadowing job.”
Forsyth shuddered. “Keen, by George!” he murmured ruefully. “If only my devotion to poor old Charley could have led me into paths untrodden by Mrs. Talmage Eglinton my task would have been a lighter one.”
He went into the bureau and inquired if Mr. Clinton Ziegler was in, receiving the stereotyped reply that Mr. Ziegler was always in, being an invalid. Whereupon he sent up his card, first penciling thereon the words, “Private Secretary to the Duke of Beaumanoir.”
The bell-boy who took up the card reappeared almost immediately, flying down the grand staircase three steps at a time.
“Please to come up at once, sir, the gentleman said,” was the boy’s urgent appeal.
Forsyth, with a feeling of having “burned his ships,” obeyed with equal alacrity, and was shown into the suite made memorable by the raid of his Highness the Thakore of Bhurtnagur, otherwise General Sadgrove’s faithful orderly, Azimoolah Khan. He noticed in passing in that the door of the next suite—that of Mrs. Talmage Eglinton—was slightly ajar, but his attention was immediately claimed by the welcome he received in Mr. Ziegler’s apartments. Just inside the door he was met by a tall, bold-eyed man whom, from Beaumanoir’s description, he had no difficulty in recognizing as the sham “Colonel Anstruther Walcot,” but who introduced himself as Leopold Benzon, Mr. Ziegler’s private secretary.
The idea of a professional criminal being served with such specious pomp tickled Forsyth’s sense of humor; but, restraining an impulse to laugh in the fellow’s face, he responded gravely to the salutation and stated his business. He had come, he said, after mentioning his name, on behalf of the Duke of Beaumanoir, to see Mr. Ziegler by appointment on a matter of private business.
“Mr. Ziegler is expecting you,” Benzon replied, scrutinizing the visitor’s face narrowly. “Unfortunately he is not so well as usual this morning, and is not yet dressed. I must ask you to wait a little till he is ready to receive you.”
Forsyth bowed and took the chair offered him, not without an inward chuckle at the discrepancy between the haste of the bell-boy’s summons to the suite and the delay in receiving him. To his mind the position was clear. Mrs. Talmage Eglinton desired to keep up the polite fiction of her innocence to the end, yet Ziegler was apparently not prepared to go forward with the business without an opportunity of consulting her. She had come up to town for the express purpose of advising, perhaps supervising, her colleagues at an important crisis, and was doubtless on her way to the hotel after the diversion he had created, so that it was necessary to get him out of the entrance-hall before she passed up to her suite.
“I shouldn’t wonder if she isn’t the boss of the show, with Zeigler, who is probably her husband, as figure-head,” Forsyth told himself.
Benzon, with a polite excuse, had retired into an inner room; but his place had immediately been taken by a well-dressed but cadaverous individual whom Forsyth recognized as the man in clerical attire whom he had seen descending the stairs in John Street after the forcible entry into his chambers, the miscreant who later on the same eventful night had called at Beaumanoir House in the character of a disguised police-officer.
There was evidently no disposition to leave him alone in the ante-room, and so give him a chance to open the outer door and witness Mrs. Talmage Eglinton’s arrival in the next suite. So twenty minutes passed, and Forsyth was speculating as to how communication would be carried on with the female partner during the forthcoming interview, when Benzon returned and announced that Mr. Ziegler was awaiting him. He could not help observing how much better suited was this bowing and smirking American swindler to the rôle of a superior flunkey than to that of a British cavalry officer.
The next moment he found himself in the principal reception-room of the suite, face to face with a frail old man of unpleasant appearance, who, Forsyth noticed with quick intuition, was reclining on a couch that had been drawn across a closed door. There was another—open—door leading into the bedroom, but the closed one must be the same which from the other side of it had confirmed the General’s suspicions of the occupant of the adjoining suite. Forsyth could picture to himself Mrs. Talmage Eglinton’s shell-like ear glued to that door, its fair owner prepared to tap gentle signals by the Morse code on the panels if things did not go to her liking in the audience-chamber.
His conjectures were brought down to the bed-rock of fact by the croaking voice of the invalid on the couch. Mr. Ziegler’s repulsive aspect, his purple cheeks, and green-shaded eyes suggested some horrible cutaneous affection, though Forsyth was not so ingenuous as to accept the disfigurements as genuine.
“I am sorry to have detained you, sir,” Ziegler began, and then paused abruptly. Forsyth wondered if he had been brought up with a round turn by a tap on the door close to his ear. There seemed something tentative, as though the speaker were trying his ground, in that first disjointed utterance.
“It does not matter,” Forsyth replied, and then in his turn came to a sudden stop. His diplomatic training at the Foreign Office had taught him the advantage of allowing the other side to open the proceedings. He who has the first word is seldom the one to have the last.
But it appeared that Mr. Ziegler was also alive to the value of reserving his fire. “I presume that the Duke of Beaumanoir instructed you on the nature of the business you were to transact with me?” he said, and there was a firmer ring in the curious metallic voice than when he made his first brief apology.
“On the contrary, he left me quite in the dark about it,” Forsyth made answer. “All I understood was that I was to fetch something which you would hand me in person.”
Ziegler took a leisurely survey of the young Scotsman through his green glasses. “Then you did not come here expecting to have to use your own discretion in any way—to traffic with me, in fact?” he presently asked.
“Certainly not,” Forsyth replied. “I gathered that the part I was to play was solely that of a trusted messenger who could be relied on to say nothing about his errand afterwards.”
‘‘Not even to General Sadgrove?’’ flashed back the answering question so swiftly that for an instant Forsyth was taken aback.
“I am not one to betray my employer’s secrets—even to my uncle, General Sadgrove,” he said, recovering himself quickly.
“Very good!” was the croaking comment. “I deemed it necessary to sound you because we are aware of the foolish meddling—I might also say muddling—of that mischievous old man. We know also that you have aided and abetted him in an attempt to swim against a tide that is far too strong for both of you.”
“I quite admit that,” responded Forsyth, boldly. “My uncle has been doing his best to protect the Duke’s life, and as in duty bound I have used my efforts to assist him—up to a certain point.”
“What do you mean—up to a certain point?”
“I mean that as the Duke seems now to have taken matters actively into his own hands by opening up communication with you, I am naturally rather at the disposition of my employer than of anyone else.”
“Truly a faithful servant,” said Ziegler, with a strong suspicion of a sneer. “And now, Mr. Forsyth, I have a question to ask which you are at liberty to answer or not as you please, but on which the future security of his Grace will probably depend. I shall draw my own deductions from a refusal to answer, and take it as an affirmative. Has the Duke disclosed to either you or General Sadgrove, or, as far as you are aware, to anyone else, the reason of his recent differences with us?”
Forsyth rejoiced that he was able to reply in the negative. “No,” he said promptly and with evident truth; “he has always steadily refused to enlighten my uncle and myself as to the cause of his being so persecuted. We have been kept absolutely in the dark.”
He did not feel called upon to add, as he might have done, that a good deal of that darkness had been penetrated by General Sadgrove’s acumen, and that the design on Senator Sherman’s gold bonds was an open book to them.
Ziegler, however, was satisfied with the reply. Signing to the pretentious Benzon, who throughout the interview had hovered close to his master’s couch, he conferred with him in a whisper, and then addressed Forsyth again with a request that he would wait for a few minutes in the ante-room, when a letter for the Duke would be handed to him and he would be free to depart.
“Good-day to you, sir,” added the arch-plotter. “I regret that my infirmities preclude me from offering you hospitality. These little encounters become, I find, more fatiguing with advancing years.”
Bidding him a curt good-morning, Forsyth returned to the ante-room, accompanied by the cadaverous individual, who had also been present at the interview. Benzon remained behind, softly shutting the door on them, and there was a distinct click of the key being turned in the lock. His companion making no overture for conversation, Forsyth sat down and affected to read a newspaper, though he was really straining his ears to catch what passed in the inner room. Already perplexed by having seen no signs of communication between Ziegler and the next suite, he was trying to ascertain if a conference was now proceeding with the fair tenant next door. No sound reached him, however, till after the lapse of some twenty minutes Benzon came swiftly out of the inner room with a heavily sealed letter in his hand.
“This,” said Ziegler’s aide-de-camp, “is the packet which my chief wishes you to deliver to the Duke of Beaumanoir. You are alive to the importance of seeing that it reaches its destination without being lost or tampered with?”
“My dear sir, I should not, I imagine, have been entrusted with this very uncongenial errand unless I had been thought capable of carrying it out,” replied Forsyth, in a tone of annoyance.
“Take it, then,” Benzon proceeded. “And you are, please, to inform his Grace that Mr. Ziegler, though he would have preferred to see him in person, is satisfied with the discretion of his emissary.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think I need a testimonial from Mr. Ziegler to recommend me to the Duke,” replied Forsyth, coolly, as he buttoned the letter into the breast-pocket of his frock coat and with a bow took his departure.
Out in the corridor he breathed more freely. “I don’t think that I overdid my exhibition of temper,” he told himself. “A little touchiness was to be expected under the circumstances.”
He had begun to descend the stairs into the entrance-hall, when he saw—with something of a shock—coming up, and therefore about to meet him, the lady whom he believed to be in the next suite to Ziegler’s, advising her partners through the communicating door. He had got it firmly into his head that during the twenty minutes he had been kept waiting that door had been opened, and the terms of the letter settled between the two principals; and here was Mrs. Talmage Eglinton not in her rooms at all, but apparently only just arrived.
“Ah, Mr. Forsyth!” she cried, coquettishly. “You have been up to my suite to look for me, with a view to standing me a luncheon somewhere. Now don’t deny that you were disappointed when you found that I had not reached the hotel and that the suite was locked up.”
Could he have been mistaken? Forsyth asked himself. If so, the mistake was not really his, but General Sadgrove’s, and the entire bottom was knocked out of the veteran’s theory as to this woman’s complicity.
“But I have not been up to your rooms,” was all he could reply on the spur of the moment. “I had business with the gentleman who occupies the adjoining suite.”
If it was not genuine, the look of disappointment that stole into her face was a consummate piece of acting. “Oh, was that all,” she said, with a queer little laugh. “Well, that doesn’t absolve you from asking me to lunch now that you have the chance.”
“I shall be delighted,” was the only answer he could make without showing open hostility.
“Wait in the hall, then,” said Mrs. Talmage Eglinton. “I am only going up to see if some jewelry I left locked up when I went down to Prior’s Tarrant is safe.”
She hurried up the remaining stairs, and Forsyth continued his way down to the hall, a prey to conflicting emotions. Disgust at having to lunch with a woman he abhorred was the least of them. What worried him most at that moment was the doubt, restored by this meeting, whether Mrs. Talmage Eglinton was not, after all, the victim of a chain of coincidences.
And then, suddenly, a flicker of light broke on the situation through—of all places in the world—a tiny flaw in the lady’s defensive armor. She had spoken of her suite as locked up, but he remembered now that the outer door of it had been slightly ajar when he went in to his interview with Ziegler. He went up to the big uniformed porter on duty at the swing doors, and asked him if he knew Mrs. Talmage Eglinton by sight.
“Oh yes, sir,” the man replied. “You’ll catch her if you run up to her rooms sharp. She’s just going out.”
“Going out?” exclaimed Forsyth, with well simulated surprise. “I thought I caught a glimpse of her going upstairs a moment ago. She seemed to have only just arrived.”
“Oh no, sir; she came in an hour ago, and was on her way out just now when she found she’d forgotten something.”
Forsyth left the proximity of the porter quickly, and went and waited at the foot of the staircase. The horizon had cleared again, and he smiled at the very thin trick which had so nearly deceived him—would have deceived him, in fact, if one of the gang, eagerly expecting her, had not chanced to be at her door when he went up. After concluding her business with her accomplices she had contrived the meeting on the stairs to throw dust in his eyes, going, in her desire for realism, to the had gone upstairs again after coming down into the hall. Well, he would hold her to the lunch invitation; let her think that she had hoodwinked him; and endeavor to ascertain whether she was courting his society as a mere bluff to lend color to her deception, or with some other object as yet undefined.
He had not long to wait for her. Tripping lightly down the stairs, she joined him with a charming assumption that he would be interested to hear that her jewels were “quite safe,” and she supplemented the information with the request that they should not lunch in the hotel.
“I am known here, and people stare so,” she said. “Take me somewhere where we can be quiet. I have got something to say.”
“Very well,” he replied. “Come over to Kettner’s. There won’t be much of a crowd there at this time of day.” And he strove hard to be polite as he steered her across the Strand, though he could have wished himself back at the Foreign Office, with no prospects and no Duke to serve, if Sybil’s brave young face had not been in his mind’s eye.
At the restaurant Mrs. Talmage Eglinton chose a table in a remote corner of the dining-room and devoted herself to a careful study of the menu. It was not till she had selected her dishes and quizzed the appearance of the other customers that she developed her plan of attack.
“You don’t seem at all interested in the fact that I have something to say to you,” she began, leaning back and scanning him critically. Her voluptuous style of beauty had never had any attraction for him; to-day it positively repelled.
“My worst enemies have never accused me of being curious,” he answered lightly. “Nay, I am not discourteous,” he protested, seeing the angry gleam in the fine eyes. “I only mean that I cannot work myself into a fever about a communication the subject of which I am ignorant of.”
“Tell me,” she said abruptly, “what reason you had for following me from St. Pancras to Bond Street this morning?”
Whatever her motive she was pushing him hard, and Forsyth’s presence of mind failed him. He flushed and began to stammer.
“It is useless to deny it,” she cut him short. “I saw you in the cab quite plainly as I entered the shop, and my cabby had previously ,_facing_p._253.jpg)
“I am very far from being indifferent to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton.” p. 253
This was a poser, and it had to be faced with instant decision. Rapidly reflecting that unless he was then and there prepared to accuse his fair vis-à-vis with complicity with Ziegler there was only one course open to him, he took it promptly. He little thought that within the next forty-eight hours his fate—to live or to die—would depend on the demeanor he then adopted.
“I certainly did not follow you with a bad motive, and—there, a straight question deserves a straight answer—I am very far from being indifferent to you, Mrs. Talmage Eglinton,” he said.
After that the amenities flowed in the most friendly channel, though Forsyth suffered agonies, and it required all his skill as an amateur actor of repute to sustain the part of a diffident lover hovering on the brink of a declaration.
In the afternoon they returned to Prior’s Tarrant together, outwardly on the best of terms; but, needless to say, Forsyth was still “hovering.”