by Marion Bryce
CHAPTER IV
On Tuesday afternoon, when Juliet, having hung up the telephone through which she had been conversing with Lord Ashiel, hurried out to see what Bond Street could provide her with, a little man was sitting writing in a luxuriously furnished room in a flat in Whitehall. He was small and thin, and possessed a pair of extraordinarily bright and intelligent brown eyes, which saw a good deal more of what happened around him than perhaps any other eyes within a radius of a mile from where he sat. He was, in other words, observant to a very high degree; and, what was more remarkable, he knew how to use his powers of observation. There was not a criminal in the length and breadth of the country who did not wonder uneasily whether he had really left the scene of his crime as devoid of clues as he imagined, when he heard that the celebrated detective, Gimblet, had visited the spot in pursuit of his investigations.
For this was the man, who, in a few years, had unravelled more apparently insoluble mysteries, and caused the arrest of more hitherto evasive scoundrels, than his predecessors had managed to secure in a decade. The name of Gimblet was known and detested wherever a coiner carried on his forbidden craft, or a blackmailer concocted his cowardly plans; burglars and forgers cursed freely when he was mentioned, and there was hardly an illicit trade in the country which had not suffered at one time or another from his inquisitive habit of interesting himself in other people’s affairs. Scotland Yard officials were never too proud to call upon him for help, and many a difficulty he had helped them out of, though he refused an offer of a regular post in the Criminal Investigation Department, preferring to be at liberty to choose what cases he would take up. Above all things he loved the strange and inexplicable. Gimblet had not always been a detective. Indeed, he often smiled to himself when he thought of the extraordinary confidence which the public now elected to repose in him.
No one was more conscious than himself that he was far from being infallible; in fact, his admirers appeared to him to be wilfully blind to that elementary truth; so that when he failed to bring a case to a successful issue people were apt to show an amount of disappointment that he, for his part, thought very unreasonable. It was, perhaps, in the nature of things that the puzzles he solved correctly received so much more publicity than was given to his mistakes; but he often could not avoid wishing that less were expected of him, and that his reputation had not grown so tropically on what he could but consider insufficient nourishment.
In early days, after leaving Oxford, he had gone into an architect’s office and had flourished there; till one day an accident had turned his energies in the direction they had since taken.
A crime had been committed during the erection of a house he was building, and, when the police were at a loss to know how to account for the somewhat peculiar circumstances, the young architect, going his ordinary rounds of inspection, had seen in a flash that there was something unusual in the disposal of a portion of the building material; which observation, with certain deductions following thereon, had led to the detection and arrest of the criminal. From that time on he had been more and more drawn to the fascination of tracing events to their causes, when these appeared connected with deeds of violence and fraud, till of late years he had completely dropped the study of the carrying powers of wood and stone for the more interesting lessons to be derived from the contemplation of the strange vagaries indulged in by his fellow human beings.
He kept, however, a strong taste for art and all that appertained to it; more especially he was devoted to the collection of old and rare bric-à-brac. There was not a curiosity shop in London that did not know him, and he was equally happy when he had discovered some dust-hidden treasure in the back regions of a secondhand furniture shop, or when he was engaged in running to earth some human vermin who up till then had lain snug in his own particular back region of crime, straining his ears, in a mixture of contempt and anxiety, as the sounds of the hunt went by.
Having finished his letter, Gimblet put his stylo in his pocket, and turned round to look at the clock.
“Twenty minutes to four,” he said half-aloud. “I wish to goodness people would keep their appointments punctually, or else not come at all.”
Five more minutes passed, and he got up and went into the hall.
“Higgs,” he called, and his faithful servant and general factotum came out of the pantry.
“I am going out,” said his master, taking up his straw hat. “If anyone calls, say I could not wait any longer. Ah, there’s the front-door bell. Just see who it is.”
He retreated to his sitting-room while Higgs went to the door of the flat. A minute or two later Lord Ashiel was ushered in.
“I’m very sorry I’m late,” said he, as the door closed behind him, “but you know what kept me.”
“Not the young lady, surely,” said Gimblet; “you were to see her at twelve o’clock this morning, weren’t you?”
“Yes, but she telephoned to me after lunch. By Jove, Gimblet, I believe you have got hold of the right girl this time.” Lord Ashiel’s tone was enthusiastic. “If she turns out to be half as nice as she looks, I shall be ever grateful to you for routing her out.”
“Indeed, I am very glad to hear it,” replied the detective. “And do you observe a resemblance in her to your family; do you feel satisfied that she is your daughter?”
“I can’t say I do see much likeness,” Lord Ashiel confessed rather reluctantly. “I thought at one moment, when she smiled, that she was like her mother; but otherwise she did not strike me as resembling either of us, I am sorry to say.”
“Did she know her history at all?” asked Gimblet. “Did she claim you as father?”
“No, she had never heard of me, as far as I could make out. And she assured me that Sir Arthur Byrne has no idea whose child she is.”
“That certainly seems very improbable,” Gimblet commented.
“Yes, it does. Still, I feel sure she was speaking the truth. Why, indeed, should she not do so? It seems that Byrne has married again, and that his wife has already three daughters of her own; so, as she says, he would probably be glad enough to get the fourth one off his hands, as they are not well off.”
“Yes,” said Gimblet. “I knew that. No, there seems no reason why Sir Arthur Byrne should not have told her about you if he knew she was your child. What is odd, is that he should not have known it.”
“He had promised his first wife not to make any inquiries, it seems,” said Lord Ashiel.
“Well, he is an uncommon kind of man if he kept that promise,” Gimblet remarked.
“He was devoted to his first wife, this girl told me,” said Lord Ashiel. “You never knew Lena Meredith, Gimblet, or you would not be surprised that people kept their promises to her. She was my wife’s friend, as I told you, and I only saw her once, but I don’t think I shall ever forget her. It was just after my wife’s death, and I was too heart-broken to take much notice of anyone, but she was the sort of woman who sticks in your memory, and I can quite understand a man being infatuated about her, even to the point of curbing his curiosity for a lifetime on any subject she wished him to leave alone. I went to see her, you know, about the baby. I remember, as if it was yesterday, how I told her the whole story. I told her how I had met Juliana two years before, and how, from the first, we had both known we should never care for anyone else. I told her about my old grandfather, from whom I had such great expectations, and who wouldn’t hear of my marrying anyone except the cousin, still in the schoolroom, whom he had picked out as my future wife.
“It was his wish that we should be married when I was twenty-five and the girl eighteen; but I was not yet twenty-two, so that there were at least three years of grace before he could begin to try and impose his design upon us. And he was old and ill, and I had heard that the doctors didn’t give him more than a year or two, at most, to live. I thought that if Juliana and I were married secretly he would die before the question of my marriage had time to become one of practical politics; and I persu
aded her to agree to a private marriage, which we would announce to the world as soon as my eccentric old grandfather was safely out of it. There was no possible obstacle to our marriage except the old man’s domineering temper. Juliana Sandfort was my superior in every possible sense, worldly or otherwise; but I came of a good family, was to inherit an old name and title, and a more than sufficient fortune so long as I kept on the right side of the old Lord, and we both knew that there was no objection to be feared from her relations or from any other one of mine. In short, much as she disliked doing things in that hole-and-corner sort of way, and ashamed as I was at heart of asking her to, we neither of us could see much actual harm in the idea, and we were married accordingly at a registry office in London. Everything would have been well, and all would have gone as we hoped, but for the one unforeseen and horrible calamity. My wife died six months before my grandfather, on the day her baby was born.”
Lord Ashiel paused, and sat gazing before him, over Gimblet’s shoulder. There was a look on his face which showed that for the moment he was blind to the scene that lay in front of him, and that he saw in place of the bureau which stood opposite to him, and of the Oriental china which was the detective’s special pride, and on which his eyes seemed to be fixed, some vision of the past which was far more real than the unsubstantial present. Presently he went on talking in a reflective undertone:
“All this I told Mrs. Meredith, and a great deal besides, for I was still in the first violence of bitter, self-reproachful grief. I wanted to be rid of the child, the cause of the catastrophe, whom I hated as vehemently as I had loved its mother, and I begged Mrs. Meredith to help me to dispose of it in such a fashion that, to me at least, the little one should be to all intents and purposes as dead as she was. Babies, I knew, had not a very strong hold on life, and I hoped, as a matter of fact, that it might really die, but this I did not dare to say aloud. Mrs. Meredith was kind to me. I remember well how good and sympathetic she was. She had heard most of the story from Juliana, whose friend she was, and it was at her house that the child was born. We had confided in no one else. She sat silently for a while after I had finished what I had to say, till at last she turned to me and tried to persuade me to alter my intention of disowning the baby. But I repeated doggedly that unless she had some alternative way to suggest of getting rid of it, I meant to leave the little girl at the door of one of the foundling hospitals, and that I would take her that very night.
“At length, seeing that I was resolved, she said she thought she could manage better than that. She had a friend, she said, an elderly Russian lady, who was a widow and childless. This lady was anxious to adopt a little English girl, and had lately written to ask her to find her a baby whom she could bring up as her own child. There was no reason why Juliana’s baby should not be the one. She would write at once and suggest it. I was greatly relieved at this idea. Although I had been determined to do as I proposed, whatever opposition I might meet with, my conscience had not been willing to let me leave my child on a doorstep without protesting, and, little though I heeded its condemnation, I was glad to be able to get my own way and at the same time to silence the voice of my inward critic.
“The plan seemed simplicity itself. My wife, as I have told you, had no parents living. Her brothers and sisters, who were all married and living in different parts of the country, had been led to believe that her death was the result of an accident. Mrs. Meredith had even managed to prevail on the doctor to lend himself to this fiction; for, my grandfather being yet alive, there was still every reason not to declare our marriage, while there seemed to be none in favour of doing so, and I shrank from the questionings and scenes which publicity now would not fail to bring upon me. Before I left Mrs. Meredith we had agreed that she should at once communicate with her Russian friend, whose name I refused to let her tell me.
“I have told you before to-day, Gimblet, of all that has happened since. How I took passionately to books as a refuge from my sorrow; how, at my grandfather’s suggestion, I had been by way of working for the Diplomatic Service; of how I now worked in good earnest, and in course of time, and after my grandfather’s death, found myself attached to our embassy at Petersburg. During the two years I spent there I made the acquaintance of Countess Romaninov. One day when I was talking to her she happened to mention that she had once known an English lady, Mrs. Meredith, and I came to the conclusion that the little girl who lived with her must be none other than my own child. As you know, I could not stand living in the same town as she did, and for that, and for other reasons, I left the Diplomatic Service and returned to England, where I have lived a quiet life on my place in Scotland ever since. Eight years ago, as you know, I married for the second time, and after a few years of comparative happiness, found myself again a widower, my second wife and her child dying within a few months of each other, when my boy was only four years old.
“It is more than a year, now,” continued Lord Ashiel, after a pause, “since the girl Julia Romaninov came to my sister in London, with a letter of introduction from our ambassador in Russia. It was not until my sister invited her down to Scotland that I heard anything about her. Not, in fact, till the day before she arrived, for I always tell my sister to ask any girls she pleases to Inverashiel, and she very seldom bothers me about it. You can imagine my feelings when I heard that Julia Romaninov was expected within a few hours, and had indeed already started from London. It was too late to try and stop her, and my first impulse was flight. But on second thoughts I changed my mind, and stayed. Time had dulled the feelings with which I had contemplated her share in the tragedy that attended her birth, and I was not without a certain curiosity to see this young creature for whose existence I was responsible.
“I waited; she came; she stayed six weeks. You know the result. My sister liked her; my nephews, my other guests, every one, except myself, was charmed with her. And I, for some reason, could never stand the girl. I told myself over and over again that it was mere prejudice; the remains of the violent opposition I felt towards her when she was unknown to me; a survival, unconscious and unwilling, of the hatred I had allowed myself to nourish for the baby of a day old, which had made it impossible that she and I should inhabit the same town when she was no more than a child in pinafores. But I could not reason myself out of my dislike, and it culminated a few weeks ago when I found that my sister was anxious to have her with us in the North again this autumn. As you remember, I came to you, and told you the facts. I made you understand how repulsive it was to me to think that this girl might be my child, and begged you to sift the matter as far as was possible, and to find out if there were not a chance that I was mistaken in thinking it was Countess Romaninov who had been Lena Meredith’s friend.”
“Yes,” said Gimblet, “and all I could discover at first was that the two ladies had indeed been acquainted. It is difficult to get at the truth when both of them have been dead for so many years, and when you will not allow me so much as to hint that you feel any interest in the matter. People are shy of answering questions relating to the private affairs of their friends when they think they are prompted by idle curiosity, and in this case it seems very doubtful whether anyone even knows the answers. But in the course of my inquiries I soon discovered the fact that Mrs. Meredith herself had adopted a child, and it certainly seems more than possible that it may have been yours and her friend’s. As far as I can find out, both these young ladies are of about the same age, but no one seems to know exactly when either of them first appeared on the scene. If we can only get hold of the nurses! But at present I can find no trace of them, and you won’t let me advertise.”
“Gimblet, I shall be ever grateful to you,” repeated Lord Ashiel. “I had no idea that Mrs. Meredith had adopted a child. I never saw her again, as I have told you, and only heard vaguely that she had married and was living abroad. I purposely avoided asking for news of her. I wished to forget everything that was past. As if that had been possible!”
“I
hoped,” said Gimblet, “that you would have seen some strong likeness in this young lady to yourself, or to your first wife. That would have clinched the matter to all intents and purposes. But, as things are, I shouldn’t build too much on the hope that she is your daughter. It may turn out to be the girl adopted by Countess Romaninov.”
“I hope not, I hope not,” said Lord Ashiel earnestly. “I have got her to promise to come to Scotland, and in a few days I may get some definite clue as to which of them it is. It is a very odd coincidence that both the girls bear names so much like that of my poor wife’s.” He paused reflectively, and then added, “In the meantime you will go on with your inquiries, will you not?”
“I will,” said Gimblet. “And I hope for better luck.”
A silence followed. Lord Ashiel half rose to go, then sat down again. Evidently he had something more to say, but hesitated to say it. At last he spoke:
“When I was at St. Petersburg, twenty years ago, I was aroused to a state of excitement and indignation by the social and political evils which were then so much in evidence to the foreigner who sojourned in the country of the Czars. I was young and impressionable, impulsive and unbalanced in my judgments, I am afraid; at all events I resented certain seeming injustices which came to my notice, and my resentment took a practical and most foolish form. To be short, I was so ill-advised as to join a secret society, and have done nothing but regret it ever since.”
“I can well understand your regretting it,” said the detective. “People who join those societies are apt to find themselves let in for a good deal more than they bargained for.”
