by Headon Hill
CHAPTER XXI--_The Honor of the House_
The Treasury bonds had reached their goal in the vaults of the Bank ofEngland, and Senator Sherman, having duly discharged his duty to hisRepublic, was speeding back to his wife and daughter at Prior's Tarrant,with, as he quaintly phrased it, "a considerable load off his chest." Inthe reserved compartment with him were the Duke of Beaumanoir andGeneral Sadgrove, who had insisted on forming an escort.
The Duke, who had been buoyed up with excitement till the bonds weresafe in the bank, had fallen into dejection on the return journey. Histwo companions persisted in treating him as a hero, whereas he guessedthat they were both aware of the true state of the case. He knew thatone of them was, for he had himself, under threat of information beinggiven to the police, confessed everything to the General after thelatter's visit to the hotel on the day of "Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's"supposed confinement to her room; and, at any rate, the Senator musthave heard something of the truth, or he would not have been preparedthe night before to confound Cora Lestrade's correct accusation with agenerous but entirely erroneous construction of his complicity.
All this made Beaumanoir miserable and ill at ease, the more so that hehad three times attempted, without success, to terminate his falseposition. The two gentlemen had evidently entered into a friendlyconspiracy to maintain their own reading of his conduct; and whenever hebegan to make penitential allusions to it, one or other of them would,so to speak, jump down his throat with an encomium on the motive theychose to attribute to him for originally allying himself to the Lestradecombination. Nor did it add to his comfort on the last of theseoccasions to catch the Senator deliberately winking at the General.
Now this was exasperating in the present and intolerable for the future,for Beaumanoir had set his heart on that to which, conscience told him,a clear understanding with Senator Sherman was essential. But at last heabandoned direct efforts and sank back in his corner, hoping to obtainan opening by more diplomatic methods presently.
In the meanwhile, the General was satisfying the curiosity of theSenator, and incidentally that of the Duke, as to the identification ofthe self-styled Mrs. Talmage Eglinton with the mysterious ClintonZiegler. He described the tangle of doubt and surmise he had got intowhen he had convinced himself that the occupants of the neighboringsuites at the hotel were both concerned in the plot against the bonds,without being able to carry the matter further. And especially did helay stress on the deadlock that had been reached when "Mrs. TalmageEglinton's" artfully concocted anonymous warning against "Ziegler" hadcaused him to waver in his suspicions of her guilt.
"It took a woman to nose that out," said the General, with a whimsicalgrimace. "Miss Sybil heard me grumbling--unfortunate habit, talking toone's self--and put me right in a brace of shakes. 'Why,' she snaps out,after she'd pumped me about my difficulty, 'they must be one and thesame person. Mrs. Talmage Eglinton _is_ Ziegler, and her intention isthat after they've finished the business the Eglinton part of her willremain and the Ziegler part will vanish--with the odium of anything thatmay happen, don't you see. I didn't see it at once, but consented to laya trap, and blessed if the girl wasn't right. Soon as the Eglinton wasposted up by Sybil that I was going up next day to call on Ziegler atthe hotel, and that I was going to raise Cain if I wasn't admitted, sheshammed sick and sneaked out of the house, with old Azimoolah at herheels, to keep the appointment."
He went on to tell how his call on "Ziegler," followed by "Mrs. TalmageEglinton's" clandestine return to the house as witnessed by AlecForsyth, had brushed all doubts aside and cleared the way for the final_coup_ in the crypt, again suggested by Sybil, for obtaining the bogusbonds and so drawing the sting of the enemy.
"The girl has got grit," was the Senator's admiring comment. "The rightsort of grit, because she trusted to her man having it too. And,thunder, but it was plucky of him to face that crew in ignorance of thesaving clause in his favor."
"Yes, the boy behaved well," the General admitted. "But I think the Dukebeat him for courage in going to meet you at Liverpool in ignorance thatwe had drawn off the cut-throats who he had reason to believe would doghim directly he left the house. Alec had to make up for a bad lapse. Wenever allowed laxity in our service, and Alec was lax, very lax, ingiving them that chance on the railway."
Beaumanoir sat up at this, and, leaning forward, tapped the General onthe knee.
"Oblige me by not drawing comparisons," he said--for him--quitefiercely. "If I have come out of the ordeal of the last few daysunscathed, and with the honor of my house untarnished, it is in greatpart due to Alec's loyalty to a poor weak coward. Had I done my duty Ishould have gone to the police the moment Lestrade unfolded her plot,instead of embarking on a course of secrecy and moral cowardice whichkept alive the danger to Senator Sherman and his charge. I did not seeit at the time, but the gang would assuredly have matured some otherplan for trying for the plunder, using some other wretched tool,perhaps, if they hadn't been gammoned into believing that I had cavedin. It was gross moral cowardice of me to give them the chance."
The torrent of words flowed so quickly that neither of his hearers wasable to check it, and it was so evidently the outcome of deep emotionthat it was equally impossible to ignore it. The Senator, with a twinklein his shrewd gray eyes, laid a warning hand on the General's shoulderand took it upon himself to answer--with a question which had theinstant effect of soothing Beaumanoir, for it implied a concession ofthe position he desired to take up.
"What should you have done in the same circumstances, but with thisdifference--that you had landed in England a simple commoner instead ofthe representative of an ancient and noble family?" the Senatorinquired.
"Informed the authorities, of course," the Duke replied withouthesitation.
"Good! Then assuming for the sake of argument your charge againstyourself to be correct, you incurred a mortal peril voluntarily, notfrom personal considerations affecting yourself, but for fear ofinvolving other people--most of them dead, by the way--in disgrace. Idon't see how you can make moral cowardice out of that."
"_I_ do," said Beaumanoir, bluntly.
"But," proceeded the Senator, with bland insistence, "you might haveavoided the peril to your own life and the besmirching of the familyname by the simple expedient of carrying out the behests of Ziegler andCompany. You had every facility for pulling the job off without a breathof suspicion ever touching you."
The diplomatic opening, the psychological moment, for which poor,blundering Beaumanoir had been hoping, had arrived. It would beuncharitable to suggest that it was proffered to him, as a card is"forced," by an American gentleman with a taste for strawberry leaves;but be it as it may, Beaumanoir was not too dull to seize his chance.
"I might have done that--I was tempted to," he blurted out. "In fact, Ibelieve I should have done it if--if I hadn't come over in the same shipwith your--with Mrs. and Miss Sherman."
The General, sitting up stiffly with his chin on the knob of his malaccacane, turned his head sharply to hear his old friend's judgment on thisamazing confession. It was pronounced with Trans-Atlantic briskness.
"Then, sir, by token of that frankness, your Grace is a straight man,"the Senator said, decidedly, and with an air that invested his wordswith greater weight than was perhaps due to their moral perspective."And," he added in a lighter vein, "somehow, the honor of your houseseems to have got inextricably mixed with that of mine."
"That's exactly the way I hoped you'd look at it," responded the Duke,earnestly. "I think you take my meaning. May I speak to Leonie?"
"It's what I should do in your place," was the Senator's reply--a replywhich had the effect of relaxing General Sadgrove's ramrod-likeattitude, and of causing that grim man-hunter to subside into hiscorner, with a not unkindly chuckle.
----
On a winter afternoon, six months afterwards, Alec Forsyth entered thefirelit dining-room of the Prior's Tarrant dower-house, which, as agentof the ducal estates, he had occup
ied since his marriage in September.The Duke and Duchess were away in Egypt on their honeymoon, and Forsythhad been doing the honors of a big shoot in the home coverts to a partyof neighboring country gentlemen. Sybil, who had been sitting in a lowchair by the hearth, rose and drew him to the blaze, first relieving himof his gun.
"I won't light the lamp yet, dear," she said. "I am forced to refer tothe forbidden subject, and you may want to blush."
"Forbidden subject?" said Forsyth, not for the moment comprehending.
"Well, of course you haven't taken to forbidding me anything yet;perhaps 'tacitly avoided' would be a better phrase," the young wifereplied, perching herself on the arm of her husband's chair. "I refer tothat poor creature whose one redeeming point was, as the dear Generalput it on that eventful night, an unselfish attachment to your nobleself."
Forsyth had never been able to bring himself to talk of the reason ofhis uncle's confidence in his safety in the crypt that night, when hehad lent himself to a ruse which he had believed meant death if he wasrecognized. He had loathed "Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's" obtrusiveadmiration long before he had entered the lists against her, and it wasfrom a knowledge of his feelings that the General had abstained frominforming him beforehand of the terrible Ziegler's identity, guessingthat his natural delicacy would have prevented him from turning toaccount a sentimental weakness so necessary to a successful issue, yetso revolting to his modesty.
"Must you really refer to that wretched woman?" he asked, as soon as hesaw Sybil's meaning.
"Only to tell you that she is dead," was the reply. "It is in the_Standard_, which came after you had left for the coverts. There, I mustlight the lamp, after all, so that you may read it yourself."
When the lamp shone out on the pleasant, homelike room, this was theparagraph which Forsyth read:
"On the arrival at Vienna of the through mail train from Budapest onThursday night a fashionably dressed female was found alone in afirst-class compartment, stabbed to the heart. The police inquiries haveestablished her identity as Cora Lestrade, a notorious Americanex-convict, who is believed to have practised on the credulity of highlyplaced personages in nearly every European capital. At the time of herdeath she was traveling as the Countess Poniatowski. A man who was inanother compartment of the train, dressed as a Roman priest, but who issupposed to be one of the band of professional criminals ruled by thisextraordinary woman, has been arrested in connection with theoccurrence."
Forsyth laid the paper down--Sybil told him a month later that it was"with a sigh of relief"--and said:
"She seemed to expect something of the sort when she spoke about herdeath sentence and showed such fear of the man Benzon. But isn't UncleJem's intuition marvelous? He has always held that the confederacy wouldcome to loggerheads and be no longer dangerous after our victorioustussle with them."
"Yes, dear," Sybil assented, dutifully. "Your uncle is a very remarkableman, with very remarkable gifts." But she did not add, as she might haveadded had she so chosen, that it had required a woman's knowledge ofwoman's heart to inspire in the General the insight which had steeredthe Duke's storm-tossed bark to harbor.
