Part 11 (2/2)
”I suppose that you will come up and duly report to the Chief,” rather uneasily said Captain Hardwicke, as they neared the Club on their return. Hawke cast a glance at the superb domes of the Jumma Musjid towering in the thin air above them, as he slowly answered:
”I am only here on a roving secret commission. I shall call, of course, and pay my personal respects to His Excellency, the General Commanding.
I am an official will-o'-the-wisp, just now, but my blus.h.i.+ng honors are strictly civil, and, by the way, in expectancy. Where does your promotion carry you?”
”Oh, anywhere--everywhere,” laughed Hardwicke. ”I may be sent home. I'm ent.i.tled to a long leave--there's my wound, you know. I've only stayed on here to oblige Willoughby.” It was easy to see that the frank, splendid young fellow was but awkwardly filling his role of polite inquisitor, for they talked shop a couple of hours over a bottle at the Club, and Hardwicke at last took his leave, no whit the wiser.
”If he did not post me as to the heiress, at least, old Willoughby gets no valuable information,” laughed the Major, that night. ”The boy seems to be ambitious and heart-whole. Old Johnstone will soon clear out to the Highlands, I suppose, with this hidden pearl.” But Major Hawke laughed softly when the morning brought to him a personal invitation to dine ”informally” with General Willoughby. ”Wants to know, you know,”
laughed the Major. ”All I have to do is to keep cool and let him drink himself jolly, and so, answer his own questions.”
”That Hardwicke is an uncommonly fine young fellow.” So decided the Major as he splashed into his morning tub. There was one man, however, in Delhi who now viewed Hawke's presence with a secret alarm, amounting to dismay. It was the stern old miserly Scotsman who had paced his floor half the night in a vain effort to rea.s.sure himself. ”What does he know?
I must have old Ram Lal watch him,” mused Hugh Johnstone. ”I was a fool not to have cleared out from here months ago, before these spies were set upon me. First, Anstruther; now this fellow, Hawke, and, perhaps, even Hardwicke. If it were not for the old matter I would go to-morrow, and let the Baronetcy go hang--or find me in the Highlands. But, I must make one last attempt to get them out. I must--” and the old man slept the weary sleep of utter exhaustion.
Before the nabob awoke, Captain Henry Hardwicke, swinging away on his morning gallop, had reviewed the strange att.i.tude of Major Hawke. ”He is very intimate with Hugh Johnstone, and he is a man of the world, too. I will yet see this charming child, when the ban of her prison seclusion is lifted.” He vaguely remembered the one timid and girlish glance of the beautiful dark eyes, when he had been presented, pro-forma, to the Veiled Rose upon that one memorable state visit. He then rode out of his way to gaze at the exterior of the great marble house, and was rewarded by the sight of a graceful woman walking there under her governess's escort in the dewy freshness of the early morn.
He doffed his helmet as Miss Justine paused among the flowers, and then Miss Nadine Johnstone looked up to see the graceful rider disappear behind the fringing trees.
”That was Captain Hardwicke, was it not?” asked the lonely girl. Miss Justine was busied in dreaming of her meeting of the morrow.
”Yes, it was,” she absently replied.
”They tell me that he n.o.bly risked his life to save his wounded friend,”
dreamily continued Nadine. ”He gave back to a father the life of an only son at the risk of his own. How brave--how n.o.ble.” And Justine gazed at her charge in surprise, as the beautiful Nadine bent her head to greet her sister flowers.
The resolute Major Hawke, at his cheerful breakfast, was busied with thoughts of the coming arrival of Hugh Johnstone's secret foe. ”I must have money from her at once to swing Ram Lal's Private Inquiry Bureau and to mystify these quid nuncs here. For I must entertain the clubmen a bit. It's as well to begin, also, to pot down a bit of her money for the future. She shall pay her way, as she goes.” And, with a view to the further cementing of his rising social pyramid, he planned a very neat little dinner of half a dozen of the most available men whom he had selected as being ”in the swim.” ”The next thing is to discover what the devil she really wants of old Johnstone! She must show her hand now, and then soon call on me for help.”
He gazed at his little memorandum of ”pressing engagements.” ”A pretty fair book of events. First, old Johnstone's dinner--more of the boring process--then to welcome my strange employer, and, after that, Mademoiselle Justine! Later, I'll have my own little innings with General Willoughby, and, finally play the gracious host while Ram Lal watches Madame Louison's cat-like play upon her victim. Money I must have, her money first, to pay the piper,” he laughed, which proposed liberality was destined to doubly bribe the wily old jewel merchant. At that very moment Ram Lal, securely hidden away in the native compartment of the train, rus.h.i.+ng on from Allahabad toward Delhi, was dreaming of the long-deferred triumph of a life!
”If he has them--if they can be traced--they shall be mine if every diamond gleams red with his heart's blood! Perhaps these two strange people have brought them. Who knows? They are rich; it may be the jewels!” And Ram Lal dreamed of a tripart.i.te watch upon the three princ.i.p.al figures of the opening drama. ”The jewels were a king's ransom. But I shall know all,” he softly smiled, for every attendant of the beautiful recluse now burning to meet her advance spy was a sworn confederate of Ram Lal in a dark brotherhood whose very name no man even dared to lisp! And so the long, blazing day wore away, bringing the hunter and the hunted nearer together. The mysterious bungalow was now alive with the slaves of luxury, while Alan Hawke secretly inspected the last finis.h.i.+ng touches, for he, alone, was master of the private entrance once used by a man whose glittering rank had lifted him presumably above all human weaknesses!
Major Hawke departed for the Club in a very good humor, after his hour of inspection of the jewel box bungalow now ready for his fair employer.
It was a perfect cachette d' amour, and its superb gardens, so long deserted, were now only a tangled jungle of luxuriant loveliness!
The light foot of the beauty for whom this Rosamond's Bower had been prepared had wandered far away, for a substantial block of marble now held down the great man, who had in the old days found the welcome of his hidden Egeria so delicious in this long-deserted bungalow. For the dead Numa Pompilius slept now with his fathers, in far away Merrie England, and--as is the wont--the mortuary inscriptions on his tomb recorded only his virtues. But both his virtues and failings were of no greater weight now to a forgetful generation, which knew not the departed Joseph, than the drifted leaves in the garden alleys where the romance of the old still lingered in ghostly guise! ”There were no birds in last year's nest,” but the mysterious bungalow had been hastily arranged for the lovely successor to the vanished queen of a cobweb Paradise. The bungalow, itself, was adroitly constructed with a special reference to seclusion as well as comfort. An Indian Love's Labyrinth.
”Just the very place!” murmured Alan Hawke, as he hastened away to dress for the diner de famille, with his timorous secret foe, Hugh Johnstone.
”I wonder if my canny friend, in his humble days as Hugh Fraser, ever a.s.sisted at lespelits diners de Trianon here?
”Probably not, for friend Hugh was ever apter in squeezing the nimble rupee than in chanting sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow. How the devil did he ever catch a wife, such as Valerie Delavigne must have been?
Either a case of purchase or starvation, I'll warrant!”
Ram Lal Singh was growing dubious as to the perfect sweep of his hungry talons over Madame Louison's future expenditures. He had noted, with some secret alarm, a grave-faced, st.u.r.dy Frenchman, still in the forties, who was cast in the role of either courier or butler for the beautiful Mem-Sahib, whose loveliness in extenso he so far only divined by guess-work.
In the stranger lady's special car there was also, at her side, a truculent Parisienne-looking woman of thirty, whose bustling air, hawk-like visage, and perfect aplomb bespoke the confidential French maid. ”I must tell Hawke Sahib of this at once,” mused Ram Lal. ”We must, in some way, get rid of these foreign servants.” The man had a semi-military air, heightened by the sweeping scar--a slash from a neatly swung saber. This purple facial adornment was Jules Victor's especial pride. In these days of ”ninety” he often recurred to the stroke which had made his fortune in the dark reign of the Commune.
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