Читать книгу The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Max Pemberton - Pemberton Max - Страница 16

Table of Contents

We remained in Paris for some weeks after the affair of the golden egg before there was any thing happened to us worth writing about. When the luck changed, if you call it luck, it did so sudden, and the strange adventure of which I now propose to speak was upon us all in a minute. I date it from the moment when I heard that Michel Grey, Sir Nicolas' American friend, was missing, and that not a soul in Paris could throw any light upon the circumstances of his disappearance. The man had vanished like a phantom, leaving no word, no message, no letter. The city had taken him from our sight. Whether he were alive or dead, in France or out of France, a willing absconder. or the victim of the assassin, neither friend nor enemy could tell. He had gone like the night, and had left us to face the problem as we might.

That it was a problem for us, and that we could not begin and end with his going, I never had a doubt. He had been seen about with Sir Nicolas for the best part of a month; my master's game with his sister, Dora Grey, was known to all the town about; there wasn't a servant in the hotel that didn't understand where the hate between the two men came from. And, to cap all, the man went away at the height of it, and we were left with the girl, and with all the talk that followed his disappearance.

Until this moment, I had looked upon the whole episode as a handsome turn of fortune. There were many weeks after the strange hoax of the golden egg when my master never put his nose outside the Hôtel de Lille. In all the years I've known him, I can never remember such an upset as that business was to his health and to his energy. He seemed just like one stupefied, with no taste for work and no taste for play. The little money that he possessed dribbled away pound by pound, until I had to find what was wanted even for his daily living. He no longer earned any thing at the billiard table; he scarce read the newspapers. There were days when he never got up from his bed; days when he did not open his lips to man or woman. And I do believe that he was never so low, or in such a queer way, as upon the evening that brought him face to face with Dora Grey, and gave a turn to his life which he was to feel for many years.

She came to the hotel quite sudden—an auburn- haired, blue-eyed little thing, with the fairest skin woman ever had, and a way with her which was wonderful to see. The name down in the visitors' book was "Dora Grey of Boston," and just above it, I saw written, "Michel Grey, artist." But I didn't mark the man until the following morning, though Sir Nicolas, who had gone down into the garden that night, the first time for many weeks, was as full of the pair of them as he could be.

"Hildebrand," says he, "there's an American couple below which is worth the knowing. She's an artist from Boston, and she's come to the schools. It's the Greys, the railway people, they are; and rolling in the money. Did ye hear a fair-haired girl laughing at the top of her voice in the garden? Well, that's the one I mean. Faith, 'tis speaking manners these Americans have, for sure. She'd told me her history before we'd done the soup."

"Is she staying long, sir?" I asked.

"Three months certain, and likely longer. She's come here to be near the painting. It was her brother that sat opposite Jack Ames to-night. A white-faced man; with a liver, I'll wager. I'll know him better this time to-morrow."

It was extraordinary, I must say, to see how a little thing like this drew him out of himself. While he'd gone down to dinner telling me that I should find his body in the Morgue before the month was out, he came to bed all cheerful like a boy, and next morning he took an hour to dress himself. I saw him sitting down with the Americans to déjeúner; and after dinner he was three hours with the brother over at the billiard-room at the Cafe Rouge. Then I knew that the business had begun, and that luck had lifted us out of the groove again.

"They're a queer couple altogether, Hildebrand," says Sir Nicolas, when I took him his coffee next morning. "Bedad! the man puzzles me. He's as mean of the money as a Scotchman out of Montrose. There was three hours we were playing last night, and not a sovereign changed hands."

"You won't pay many bills out of that, sir," says I.

"And don't I know it? Isn't it the girl I'm thinking of? They're the railway people, I'd be tellin' you—the Greys of Boston. That was a lucky day which sent them to the Hôtel de Lille; and for three months, too! You can do much with a woman in three months, Hildebrand."

"That you can, sir, if she's willing."

"Oh, she'll be willing enough by and by. There's no sugar for an American tongue like a title to roll over it. I was the man of the party before I'd known her an hour. She's just the sweetest bit of a brogue you ever heard, and her father's worth five million dollars. Get me my light frock-coat, will you now? I'm to drive her to St. Cloud this very morning."

Well, he went off with her sure enough, the pair of them dressed up until you might have picked them out of a thousand. When he was gone, and the place was put a bit straight, I strolled over to the Café Rouge to get my lunch and read the English papers. Paris was beginning to be full again then, for we were almost through the autumn, and the gardens were cold at nights. But you could find the folks you wanted any time from midday until four, and no sooner was I in the place than I saw Michel Grey, the brother of the little American woman Sir Nicolas had just driven to St. Cloud. He was sit- ting at a table, and there was a bottle of hock before him.

"Halloa, my man!" cried he, as I passed him, and he didn't speak a bit like an American; "I'd like half a dozen words with you, if you don't mind."

"With the greatest pleasure in life, sir," I replied, thinking, at the same time, what a peculiar looking gentleman he was.

"Is it long since you left Dublin?" asks he, quite calm like, and pretending to see nothing of the start I gave.

"Would that be any business of yours?" I said, sharp and short, and looking at him in a way he couldn't mistake.

"Certainly it would be," says he. "A cousin of mine knew a Sir Nicolas Steele in Dublin three years ago, and I was wondering if it was the same."

"Then you should have asked my guv'nor," says I, while my heart began to jump so that I could hardly hold my hand still.

"Oh, no offence!" cries he, and with that he slipped a five-franc piece into my hand.

"You've been in Paris long?" he asks.

"A month or more," says I, thinking where I could have him.

"Are you going back to England soon?"

"We are going back at the end of November. Sir Nicolas has engagements in London that month."

"Oh! then you are going back."

"Why, what would we be doing all the winter here in Paris?"

He seemed to think a while over this, taking a drink of the hock and rolling his bleary eyes as though he was looking for some one in the garden. Presently he said;

"Do you like the situation you're in?"

"Oh!" said I, "it's much the same as other situations. Here to-day and gone to-morrow."

"Then you travel a good deal?"

"That's so—but travel or no travel, it's all the same to me."

"Your master seems a pleasant sort of gentleman?"

"I should call him that."

"He's a baronet or something, isn't he?"

"Exactly; he's Sir Nicolas Steele of Castle Rath, County Kerry."

"A generous man, I should say."

I looked at him straight, for I'd read him up by this time.

"It's a cold morning for talking in the open air, sir," says I, and with that I turned on my heel and left him.

Now, though I had taken it coolly enough, a duller head than mine could have seen through the man's talk.

"What's in the wind is this," said I to myself when I got back to the hotel, "you've heard some gossip, my fine gentleman, and you want to get to the bottom of it. If it's true that a cousin of yours knew Sir Nicolas Steele in Dublin three years ago, then you'll write to him, and what you'll learn won't keep your sister at the Hôtel de Lille. Maybe that cousin is in Europe; more probably he's in America, which gives us a month. Any way, it's you that we've got to play, and the sooner we begin the better."

This was my thought, and yet, simple as it seemed, there was something happened later in the day which gave a new turn altogether to it. I'd been bothering my head with the matter all afternoon, making nothing new of it outside the fact that the danger signal had been rung, so to speak, when what would happen but that, just before seven o'clock, I met the man again, face to face, in the corridor of the hotel, and the sight of him fairly took my breath away. I shouldn't have called him a healthy person any time, but now his eyes were sunken away something dreadful to see—while his cheeks were hollow like the cheeks of one just got up from a fever bed. White as his face had been in the morning, the color of it in the afternoon was like a bit of plaster of Paris. And what was more than this was the way he walked, feeling his road with his hands, like a blind man, and staring before him as though he was frightened that every step he took might land him on nothing.

Never have I seen the muscles of a man's mouth twitch so much, or a man's fingers look so like claws. If he had been stark raving mad he could not have given me a greater shock; and I stood there, feeling like a child that has seen something horrible on the stairs and does not know whether to go forward or to go back.

There was a minute when, seeing him clutch hold of the banister and fix his dreadful eyes on me, I thought he was going to strike me. He half raised his right arm, but let it drop quickly again and began to mumble something that I could not hear. His speech was thick like that of a drunken man, and vet I could have sworn that drink was not the matter with him. Quite otherwise, he appeared to be in great pain; and when he got his words out at last, they came with gasps like the words of a man suffering.

"Where's your shoddy baronet?" he asked.

"What's that?" said I.

"Your Nicolas Steele, card-sharper and thief?" he went on, and this took me more aback than if he'd hit me.

"Look here," said I, "you're a bold man, but if you don't want to be horsewhipped out of this hotel, don't say that twice."

"Then you mean to say that he isn't?"

"A hundred times! A more honorable gentleman doesn't breathe in Paris, and if it wasn't for the state you are in, young man, I'd let you know it too."

This silenced him a bit. He stood rocking on his heels for a minute or more, and then, muttering something between his teeth which I could not make out, he continued his march up the stairs. A quarter of an hour later, Sir Nicolas himself drove up with the young American, and he hadn't been in the hotel two minutes before I'd told him what had passed and what I'd seen. Strange to say, he took it as calm as a man hearing of the weather.

"The fellow's a lunatic—that's what he is," he cried, while he began to dress for the opera; "she's told me his history, coming home. He's a drug- drinker, and what he remembers to-day he'll know nothing of to-morrow, or perhaps for a month or more. Ye needn't mind him no more than a toy-pistol. I have her word for it, and that's good enough for me."

"Then his cousin wasn't in Dublin three years ago?" asked I.

"Indeed and he was, and that's the humor of it. He left before my affair, d'ye see, and if they write him, it's a pretty tale of me he'll be telling. Bedad! I couldn't have wished it better if me own hands had the planning of it."

"I'm glad to hear that, sir," said I, "so long as the young lady doesn't listen."

"Listen! Not she. 'Tis easy for the ears to be shut when the heart is open. Sure, won't I be marrying her within the month? She's American, you must remember, and tied to nobody's apron-strings. Oh, it was a famous day that kept us at the Hôtel de Lille!"

He said this quite unconcerned, and not a bit ready to argue the point out with me. It was all very well for him to glide over it in that easy way, but what I wanted to know was, where had Michel Grey first heard talk about us? That the gossip was new to him was evident from the fact that he played billiards with my master the very first night he came to Paris. What chatter he had heard was heard between supper that evening and breakfast two days after. And this was what troubled me, even in the face of Sir Nicolas' tale about him taking drugs and forget- ting. "There's danger moving," I thought, "and if you're married within the month, Nicky, I'm a Chinaman."

This is how the thing looked to me, then and for days after. While, on the one hand, Michel Grey talked no more, either to me or to Sir Nicolas, of his suspicions, on the other hand, I could see that he would have no truck with us, and was doing his best to make his sister think as he did. That he did not succeed in this is to be set down to many things, but above all to the fact that for days together he would hang about the hotel like a man without a mind; and was, as all the world could see, tottering fast to his grave. What drug he drank, or where he learned the habit, no man could say, but a more pitiable spectacle than he made, looking for all the world like a blind thing come out of a coffin, I hope never to see. Luckily for us, there was no affection lost between him and Miss Dora. Talk as he might, the day was rare when she did not plan some excursion with my master. They spent hours together out at Fontainebleau or Versailles—were half their leisure time at the picture-galleries, the other half at the cafés and theatres. I saw them walking arm-in-arm in the gardens, I saw him kiss her when she went to her painting in the morning, I saw him kiss her when she came home again to déjeúner, and I began to think that after all he was right and I was wrong. Then, all of a sudden, the trouble came, and we woke up from our dream.

Michel Grey had disappeared. For the first time since we had been at the hotel, he had exchanged words with my master over the dinner- table. It did not come to blows, but the hands of the people around alone kept the two men apart, and Sir Nicolas was heard by twenty folks to say that he'd beat the life out of the American with his hunting-crop. That night and the next Michel Grey did not sleep in his bed at the Hôtel de Lille. At ten o'clock two mornings later his sister Dora was knocking at my master's door, wanting to know what he had done with him.

I can see her now, with her pretty hair streaming down her back, and her face so flushed that she might have been rubbing her cheeks with a glove. Many women would have thought nothing of a man going off like that; but the quarrel stuck in her head, I suppose, and she was as scared as a rabbit. When

Sir Nicolas came out to her, she was no longer gentle with him as she had been before this, but stamped her foot and spoke angrily, with quick, biting words.

"Well," she cried, "where is he? You know, of course?"

"As God is my witness, I know nothing," said he.

"But you were with him last—you were the last to speak to him."

"Indeed, and I was; and when he'd done with me, he went straight to his bedroom. Dora, it's not lies that I'd tell you at such a time."

"Then where is he? what has happened to him? what shall I tell my father? Oh, they love him at home; indeed they do!"

She began to cry at this, and my master took her hand.

"You poor little thing!" said he, drawing her head down upon his shoulder. "Would I harm him, whatever he was—and your brother, too? Don't ye see, child, that he's just gone off in a bit of a huff, and will be back before your tears are dry. Ye'll be the first to laugh when he walks in here."

"He is not the man to do that," said she, though she was no longer angry. "I am sure of it. I dreamed of him all night. He is dead, Nicolas."

Now what should Sir Nicolas do when she said this but give her a great kiss, and burst out laughing.

"Dead!" said he, "then I'm thinking we should get ready for the waking, and ask him to crack the first bottle. Bedad! he's as dead as I am, little woman, and don't you think any such thing. Whatever put that into your head?"

"I could not tell you," said she. "We do not think these things—we know them."

At this he set off laughing again, and did his best to cheer her up—though it was poor work he made of it at the best. By and by, when he had seen a nice little breakfast sent up to her rooms, he came to me, and I knew then that he took it worse than I thought he would.

"Well," says he, "the fool's gone, right enough. There's no word or sign yet. I'll begin to think by and by that harm has come to him."

"In that case, sir," said I, "it's pity that what was said two nights ago couldn't wait."

"How do you mean?" he asked.

"Why—it's no good disguising it—you threatened to murder him."

"Good God! Would they think that?"

"There's some that might."

He stood stock still when I had said this, and his face was very white.

"It's luck to make one gnash the teeth," said he presently. "I'd have married her within the week!"

"There's no reason why you shouldn't now, sir," said I, "always supposing that it's well with him. But there are things to do."

"You think so?"

"Certainly; and if it was me that was concerned,

I'd be up at the police-station before the clock struck again."

"Do you believe they would find him?"

"They might, or they might not; but it would be cover for you."

"I'll do that," said he shortly. "Is there any thing else?"

"One thing," said I. "This young fellow has a father in America. If three days pass and we hear nothing of him, send a cable out to Boston, and advise that a reward be offered—a big one, say ten thousand dollars. Meanwhile, offer a reward of two thousand francs yourself."

"But I'd have to pay. What's the sense in that?"

"Sir," I said, "if Mr. Grey of Boston will offer a reward of ten thousand dollars for the recovery of his son, there is one man who will find him."

"And who is that, pray?"

"Myself."

He looked at me with blank amazement. Then he said quite simply;

"Ye're a clever man. I'd be sorry for the day when we parted."

"But we must part, sir," said I.

"’Tis no time for nonsense, sure," said he.

"And it's no nonsense I mean, sir. If I'm to find this man and to claim this reward, the work must be done away from here."

"Where would it be done, then?"

"From the house in the Rue Dupin, where we lived two years ago."

He thought over it a little while, and then he said;

"It's the devil of a head ye've got. How did you come to think of it?"

"Common-sense taught me," said I. "There's many a worse friend, sir."