Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “A very tough customer, I’m afraid, sir. A human armadillo.”

  “The first matter was to find him. He was said to be in the Rocky Mountains, and I was prepared to go there after him; only such an expedition seemed improbable at the time of year. I had heard of him in chambers in the Albany; but on inquiry there I found he gave up his chambers last March, sold lease and furniture, and that his present address, if he had one in London, was unknown.”

  “Then I take it, sir, not having my professional experience, you were baffled, and went no further.”

  “No; I wasn’t beaten quite so easily. I think, Faunce, your profession has a certain fascination for every man. It is the hunter’s instinct, common to mankind, from the Stone Age downwards. After a good deal of trouble I found Rannock’s late body-servant, a shrewd fellow, now billiard-marker at the Sans-Souci Club; and from him I heard that Rannock’s destination was not the Rockies, but Klondyke. He left London for New York by the American Line at the end of March, taking the money he got for his lease and furniture and he was to join two other men-whose their way to Vancouver. He was to write to his servant about certain confidential matters as soon as he arrived in New York, and was to send him money if he prospered in his gold-digging, for certain special payments, and for wages in arrear. I had no interest in knowing more of these transactions than the man chose to tell me; but the one salient fact is that no communication of any kind has reached the servant since his master left his account. He has written to an agent in San Francisco, whose address Rannock had given him, and the agent replied that no such person as Colonel Rannock had been at his office or had communicated with him.”

  “Well, sir, Colonel Rannock changed his mind at the eleventh hour; or he had a reason for pretending to go to one place and going to another,” said Faunce, quietly, looking up from a writing-pad on which he had made two or three pencil-notes.

  “That might be so. I cabled an inquiry to the agent, whose letter to the valet was six weeks old, and I asked the whereabouts of the two friends whose party Rannock was to join. The reply came this morning. No news of Rannock; the other men started for Vancouver on April 13th.”

  “Do you want me to pursue this inquiry further, Mr. Haldane?”

  “Yes; I want to find Rannock. It may be a foolish idea on my part. But Lady Perivale has been cruelly injured by the association of her name with this man — possibly by no fault of his — possibly by some devilish device to punish her for having slighted him.”

  “That hardly seems likely. They may have done such things in the last century, sir, when duelling was in fashion, and when a fine gentleman thought it no disgrace to wager a thousand pounds against a lady’s honour, and write his wager in the club books, if she happened to offend him. But it doesn’t seem likely nowadays.”

  “I want you to find this man,” pursued Haldane, surprised, and a little vexed, at Faunce’s dilettante air.

  He had not expected to find a detective who talked like an educated man, and he began to doubt the criminal investigator’s professional skill, in spite of his tin boxes and reference books, and appearance of mental power.

  “In Lady Perivale’s interest?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Don’t you think, sir, you’d better let me solve the problem on my own lines? You are asking me to take up a tangled skein at the wrong end. I am travelling steadily along my own road, and you want me to go off at a tangent. I dare say I shall come to Colonel Rannock in good time, working my own way.”

  If that is so, I won’t interfere,” Haldane said, with a troubled look. “All my anxiety is for Lady Perivale’s rehabilitation, and every hour’s delay irritates me.”

  “You may safely leave the matter to me, sir. Festina lente. These things can’t be hurried. I shall give the case my utmost attention, and as much time as I can spare, consistently with my duty to other clients.”

  “You have other cases on your hands?”

  Faunce smiled his grave, benign smile.

  “Four years ago, when I retired from the C.I.,

  I thought I was going to settle down in a cottage at Putney, with my good little wife, and enjoy my otium cum dignitate for the rest of my days,” said Faunce, confidentially, “but, to tell you the truth, Mr. Haldane, I found the otium rather boring, and, one or two cases falling in my way, fortuitously, I took up the old business in a new form, and devoted myself to those curious cases which are of frequent occurrence in the best regulated families, cases requiring very delicate handling, inexhaustible patience, and a highly-trained skill. Since then I have had more work brought me than I could possibly undertake; and I have been, so far, fortunate in giving my clients satisfaction. I hope I shall satisfy Lady Perivale.”

  There was a firmness in Faunce’s present tone that pleased Haldane.

  “At any rate, it was just as well that you should know the result of my search for Rannock,” he said, taking up his hat and stick.

  “Certainly, sir. Any information bearing on the case is of value, and I thank you for coming to me,” answered Faunce, as he rose to escort his visitor to the door.

  He did not attach any significance to the fact that Colonel Rannock had announced his intention of going to Klondyke, and had not gone there. He might have twenty reasons for throwing his servant off the scent; or he might have changed his mind. The new gold region is too near the North Pole to be attractive to a man of luxurious habits, accustomed to chambers in the Albany, and the run of half a dozen rowdy country houses, where the company was mixed and the play high.

  Sport in Scotland and Ireland, sport in Norway, or even in Iceland, might inure a man to a hard life, but it would not bring him within measurable distance of the hazards and hardships in that white world beyond Dawson City.

  John Faunce, seated in front of his empty fireplace, listened mechanically to a barrel-organ playing the “Washington Post,” and meditated upon Arthur Haldane’s statement.

  He had not been idle since his return to London, and had made certain inquiries about Colonel Rannock among people who were likely to know. He had interviewed a fashionable gunmaker with whom Rannock had dealt for twenty years, and the secretary of a club which he had frequented for about the same period. The man was frankly Bohemian in his tastes, but had always kept a certain footing in society, and, in his own phrase, had never been “bowled out.” He had been banished from no baccarat table, though he was not untainted with a suspicion of occasionally tampering with his stake. He played all the fashionable card games, and, like Dudley Smooth, though he did not cheat, he always won. He had plenty of followers among the callow youth who laughed at his jokes and almost died of his cigars; but he had no friends of his own age and station, and the great ladies of the land never admitted him within their intimate circle, though they might send him a card once or twice a year for a big party, out of friendly feeling for his mother — five-and-twenty years a widow, and for the greater part of her life attached to the Court.

  Would such a man wheel a barrow and tramp the snow-bound shores of the Yukon River? Unlikely as the thing seemed, Faunce told himself that it was not impossible. Rannock had fought well in the Indian hill-country, had never been a feather-bed soldier, and had never affected the passing fashion of effeminacy. He had loved music with that inborn love which is like an instinct, and had made himself a fine player with very little trouble, considering the exacting nature of the ‘cello; but he had never put on dilettante airs, or pretended that music was the only thing worth living for. He was as much at home with men who painted pictures as with composers and fiddlers. Versatility was the chief note in his character. The Scotch University, the Army school, the mess-room, the continental wanderings of later years, had made him an expert in most things that people care for. He was at home in the best and the worst society.

  He was a soldier and a sportsman, tall, and strongly built, a remarkably handsome man in his best days, and handsome still in his moral and social decadence. There was no reason, Fau
nce thought, why such a man should shrink from the dangers and hardships of the Alaska goldfields, if the whim took him to try his luck there.

  Again, there was no reason that he should not have changed his mind at the last hour, and gone to Ostend or Spa, to risk his capital in a more familiar way, at the gaming table instead of the goldfields. Faunce had allies at both places, and he wrote to each of these, bidding him find out if Rannock was, or had been, there. He was not a man who could appear anywhere without attracting notice.

  The letters written, Faunce dismissed the subject for the time being. Colonel Rannock’s importance, since he doubted if Rannock could be made instrumental in Lady Perivale’s rehabilitation. It was the woman he wanted, the woman whose likeness to his client was the source of evil.

  Women had been the chief factors in Mr. Faunce’s successful coups, and he had seldom failed in his management of that sensitive and impulsive sex.

  He had to find out who the women was, and her present whereabouts. He thought it highly the burlesque stage at some period of her career, as actress or chorus-girl. The theatre is the only arena where low-born beauty can win the recognition which every handsome girl believes her due; and the desire to tread the stage is almost an instinct in the town-bred girl’s mind. She has heard of actresses and their triumphs ever since she can remember. She looks in her glass and sees that she is pretty. She picks up the music-hall tunes, and shrills them as she goes about the house-work, and is sure that she can sing. She skips and prances to the organ in the court, and thinks that she can dance. She discovers some acquaintance of her father’s whose second cousin knows the stage-manager at the Thalia Theatre; and, armed with this introduction, her pretty face forces its way to the front row of the ballet, and her shrill voice pipes in unison with her sister cockneys in the chorus.

  Such an apprenticeship to the Drama Faunce thought probable in the case of the lady known as Mrs. Randall; so he called upon two of the dramatic agents, most of whom had become known to him in his efforts to disentangle patrician youth from the snares of the theatrical syrens.

  He went first to the agent of highest standing in his profession; but this gentleman was either too much a gentleman or too busy to help him. He glanced at Lady Perivale’s photograph with a careless eye. Yes, a remarkably handsome woman! But he did not remember anybody in the theatrical world who resembled her. He remembered Sir Hubert Withernsea only as one of the wealthy young fools whom one heard of every season, and seldom heard of long, since they must either pull up or die.

  “This young man died,” said Faunce. “Now do you happen to remember any lady in your line to whom he attached himself?”

  “No; I don’t. With a young man of that kind it’s generally a good many ladies in my line. He gives supper parties, and chucks away his money, and nobody cares about him or remembers him when he’s gone.”

  “Ah, but this one had a particlar attachment, and the lady was like this,” said Faunce, with his hand on the photograph.

  Non mi ricordo,” said the agent, and Faunce went a little way further east, to one of the smaller streets out of the Strand, not more than ten minutes’ walk from his own office in Essex Street, and called upon agent number two, whose chief business lay among “the halls,” a business that paid well and justified handsome offices, with a lady typist, and the best and newest development in type-writing machines.

  Mr. Mordaunt was in the thick of the morning’s business when Faunce entered the office, but the detective cultivated an air of never being in a hurry, and he seated himself near an open window in a retired spot, from which he could observe two lady clients who were engaging Mordaunt’s attention, and one gentleman client in a white hat and a light-grey frock-coat, patent leather boots, and a gardenia buttonhole, a costume more suggestive of Ascot than of the Strand, who was looking at the innumerable photographs of lovely song-birds, skirt-dancers, lion-comiques, and famous acrobats, that covered the wall, and reading the programmes that hung here and there, lightly stirred by the summer air, and clouded with the summer dust.

  The ladies were young, handsome, in a pearl-powdery and carmine-lipped fashion, and dressed in the top of the mode, with picture hats on the most commanding scale, piled with the greatest number of ostrich feathers and paste ornaments the human hat can carry.

  “You must look slippy, and get me another turn, Mordy,” urged the taller damsel, whose name appeared in the theatrical papers as “Vicky Vernon, the Wide World’s Wonder.” “Fact is, I ain’t gettin’ a livin’ wage.”

  “Come, now; forty pound from one hall and thirty from another — —”

  “It ain’t enough, Mordy; nothink under the century suits my book, and it didn’t ought to suit yours, neither. You must get me another show — another thirty quid. You know you’ll get your commission off it.”

  Yes, Mr. Mordaunt reckoned that he would get his ten per cent.

  “But, you see, Vicky, there’s ever so many ladies who can sing bet — nearly as well as you — walking about London, with their hands in their tailor-made pockets.”

  “Not one of ’em whose songs have ever caught on like my ‘Rats’ and ‘The Demon of Drink.’”

  “Those were two ripping songs, Vicky. But your new ones haven’t hit as hard. They’re mawkish, Vicky; too much milk-and-water, and not enough Tabasco. ‘Rats’ was a fine song — and you did the ‘D.T.’ first-class.”

  “The man who wrote ‘ Rats’ is dead,” said Miss Vernon, with a gloomy look. “He was a genius, poor devil. Could knock off a song like that in a day — if he could keep sober — band-parts and all.”

  “I wonder how much you gave him for’ Rats’?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know? Well, then, not so much by ten touch-me’s as I give for this sunshade,” said the charmer, with a winning laugh, flourishing her gold-handled parasol.

  “You gave the poor devil a fiver for a song that has earned you five thou.,” said the agent. “Oh, I know the ladies. They haven’t got much head for figures, but they are closer — —”

  “Not closer than a music-hall agent, Mordy. They’re the nailers. And what would have been the good of giving that poor feller twenty thick uns for a song he was glad to sell for five? He’d only have drunk himself into his coffin a little sooner.”

  Here the gentleman in the white hat, who was on too friendly terms with his professional sisters to think of removing that article of apparel, broke in upon the conversation.

  “Business is business, Queen of my Soul,” he said, “but, if you expect me to wait while you and Mordy indulge in casual patter, you don’t know the kind of man I am. Come, old chap, I want your private ear for a little bit.”

  He took the agent by the buttonhole, and led him into a corner, where they conversed in whispers for a few minutes, while the two stars of the halls, the girl with fierce eyebrows and dark hair who sang “Rats,” and the girl with flaxen fringe and pink cheeks, who sang baby-songs in a pinafore, walked about the room, or stood in front of a looking-glass twitching their veils, and correcting the slant of their hats, whistling softly the while with rosy, pursed-up lips.

  “I say, Bill, are you going to stand Chippie and me a scrap of lunch?” inquired Miss Vernon, when the whispered interview was over.

  “Nought o’ t’ sort, my angel; but I’ll take you to a snug little Italian ristoranty near Leicester Square, where you’ll get the best lunch in London, and I’ll give you the inestimable advantage of my company while you eat it — but when it comes to ‘lardishong,’ it must be Yorkshire, my pretty ones, distinctly Yorkshire.”

  “There’s a little too much Yorkshire about you, Bill. Hurry up! Ta, ta, Mordy. Skip the gutter! “wheeling sharply on her Louis heels, with an artful turn of her skirt that revealed the crisp flounces and lace ruchings of a cherry-coloured silk petticoat. “For surely you’ll be your pint stoup, and surely I’ll be mine?” shrilled the cantatrice, in a voice whose metallic timbre made the electric globes shiver.

  The three prof
essionals bounced out of the room, and Faunce heard the ladies’ heels rattle down the stairs, and the hall door close behind them with a bang.

  “Nice, quiet, refined style, Miss Vernon,” he said, as he seated himself opposite the agent.

  “Not quite what you’d like for a permanency; gets on your nerves after a bit — eh, Mr. Faunce?” commented Mordaunt. “But she knocks ’em at the halls with her ‘Rats’ and her ‘Demon Drink.’ She can make their blood run cold one minute, and make ’em roar with laughter the next. Her father died with the horrors, and she’s a first-rate mimic. She got every trick of the thing from watching the old man. It ain’t every girl of eighteen would have had the grit to do it. The song ain’t a ‘Ta-ra-ra,’ but it has caught on, and she’s making a pot of money. And now, my dear sir, what’s up with you? Who are you lookin’ for, and what’s it all about?”

  “I want you to throw your memory back ten years, Mordaunt. Do you remember Sir Hubert Withernsea? He was knocking about London at that time, I think.”

  “Of course I do. Yorkshire swell, regular oof-bird, and a born mug; ran through his money as if he had an unnatural curiosity to see the inside of a workhouse. But he was a good-natured bloke; and I’ve seen some first-class company at his Sunday dinners, in a house he had in the Abbey Road. He used to have a dinner-party every Sunday in May and June, and a game of cards after dinner, and one met some queer specimens there sometimes.”

  “Was there a lady at the head of his table?”

  “Rather! There was Lady Withernsea — everybody called her Lady Withernsea in her own house, whatever they may have called her out of it. I knew her as Kate Delmaine, in the chorus at the Spectacular Theatre; but it isn’t for me to say he hadn’t married her. He was fool enough for anything, and he was awfully fond of her, and awfully jealous of every man who ventured to pay her attention.”

  “Did you ever meet a Colonel Rannock there?”

  “Did I ever dine there without seeing him? Rannock was ‘mine own familiar friend’ — the Mephistopheles to Withernsea’s Faust. I believe Rannock pouched more of his stuff than anybody else in the gang, though they were all blackguards. I never touched a card in his house; so I can talk of them with a clear conscience. A gang of well-bred swindlers, that’s what I call them.”