Part 5 (1/2)
”My boy,” said Colonel Hughes as he rose to go, ”the threads of this tragedy stretch far--some of them to India; some to a country I will not name. I may say frankly that I have other and greater interest in the matter than that of the captain's friend. For the present that is in strict confidence between us; the police are well-meaning, but they sometimes blunder. Did I understand you to say that you have copies of the Mail containing those odd messages?”
”Right here in my desk,” said I. I got them for him.
”I think I shall take them--if I may,” he said. ”You will, of course, not mention this little visit of mine. We shall meet again. Good morning.”
And he went away, carrying those papers with their strange signals to Rangoon.
Somehow I feel wonderfully cheered by his call. For the first time since seven last evening I begin to breathe freely again.
And so, lady who likes mystery, the matter stands on the afternoon of the last day of July, nineteen hundred and fourteen.
I shall mail you this letter to-night. It is my third to you, and it carries with it three times the dreams that went with the first; for they are dreams that live not only at night, when the moon is on the courtyard, but also in the bright light of day.
Yes--I am remarkably cheered. I realize that I have not eaten at all--save a cup of coffee from the trembling hand of Walters--since last night, at Simpson's. I am going now to dine. I shall begin with grapefruit. I realize that I am suddenly very fond of grapefruit.
How bromidic to note it--we have many tastes in common!
EX-STRAWBERRY MAN.
The third letter from her correspondent of the Agony Column increased in the mind of the lovely young woman at the Carlton the excitement and tension the second had created. For a long time, on the Sat.u.r.day morning of its receipt, she sat in her room puzzling over the mystery of the house in Adelphi Terrace. When first she had heard that Captain Fraser-Freer, of the Indian Army, was dead of a knife wound over the heart, the news had shocked her like that of the loss of some old and dear friend. She had desired pa.s.sionately the apprehension of his murderer, and had turned over and over in her mind the possibilities of white asters, a scarab pin and a Homburg hat.
Perhaps the girl longed for the arrest of the guilty man thus keenly because this jaunty young friend of hers--a friend whose name she did not know--to whom, indeed, she had never spoken--was so dangerously entangled in the affair. For, from what she knew of Geoffrey West, from her casual glance in the restaurant and, far more, from his letters, she liked him extremely.
And now came his third letter, in which he related the connection of that hat, that pin and those asters with the column in the Mail which had first brought them together. As it happened, she, too, had copies of the paper for the first four days of the week. She went to her sitting-room, unearthed these copies, and--gasped! For from the column in Monday's paper stared up at her the cryptic words to Rangoon concerning asters in a garden at Canterbury. In the other three issues as well, she found the identical messages her strawberry man had quoted.
She sat for a moment in deep thought; sat, in fact, until at her door came the enraged knocking of a hungry parent who had been waiting a full hour in the lobby below for her to join him at breakfast.
”Come, come!” boomed her father, entering at her invitation. ”Don't sit here all day mooning. I'm hungry if you're not.”
With quick apologies she made ready to accompany him down-stairs.
Firmly, as she planned their campaign for the day, she resolved to put from her mind all thought of Adelphi Terrace. How well she succeeded may be judged from a speech made by her father that night just before dinner:
”Have you lost your tongue, Marian? You're as uncommunicative as a newly-elected office-holder. If you can't get a little more life into these expeditions of ours we'll pack up and head for home.”
She smiled, patted his shoulder and promised to improve. But he appeared to be in a gloomy mood.
”I believe we ought to go, anyhow,” he went on. ”In my opinion this war is going to spread like a prairie fire. The Kaiser got back to Berlin yesterday. He'll sign the mobilization orders to-day as sure as fate.
For the past week, on the Berlin Bourse, Canadian Pacific stock has been dropping. That means they expect England to come in.”
He gazed darkly into the future. It may seem that, for an American statesman, he had an unusual grasp of European politics. This is easily explained by the fact that he had been talking with the bootblack at the Carlton Hotel.
”Yes,” he said with sudden decision, ”I'll go down to the steams.h.i.+p offices early Monday morning.”
CHAPTER V
His daughter heard these words with a sinking heart. She had a most unhappy picture of herself boarding a s.h.i.+p and sailing out of Liverpool or Southampton, leaving the mystery that so engrossed her thoughts forever unsolved. Wisely she diverted her father's thoughts toward the question of food. She had heard, she said, that Simpson's, in the Strand, was an excellent place to dine. They would go there, and walk.
She suggested a short detour that would carry them through Adelphi Terrace. It seemed she had always wanted to see Adelphi Terrace.
As they pa.s.sed through that silent Street she sought to guess, from an inspection of the grim forbidding house fronts, back of which lay the lovely garden, the romantic mystery. But the houses were so very much like one another. Before one of them, she noted, a taxi waited.