21 Greatest Spy Thrillers in One Premium Edition (Mystery & Espionage Series)

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “Then there seems to be very little left,” she declared, smiling up at him from the depths of her chair, “but to name it. I do wish you would sit down, and are you quite sure that you won’t have some tea or something?”

  He shook his head gravely and made no movement towards the chair which she had indicated. For some reason or other, notwithstanding her manifest encouragement, he seemed to wish to keep their interview on a purely formal basis.

  “Let me repeat,” he continued, “that I shall offer you no comprehensive explanations, because they would not be truthful, nor are they altogether necessary. In Ward Number Fourteen of your hospital—you have been so splendid a patroness that every one calls St. Agnes’s your hospital—a serious operation was performed to-day upon an Englishman named Phillips.”

  “I remember hearing about it,” she assented. “The man is, I understand, very ill.”

  “He is so ill that he has but one wish left in life,” Jocelyn Thew told her gravely. “That wish is to die in England. Just as you are at the present moment in my debt for a certain service rendered, so am I in his. He has called upon me to pay. He has begged me to make all the arrangements for his immediate transportation to his native country.” She nodded sympathetically.

  “It is a very natural wish,” she observed, “so long as it does not endanger his life.”

  “It does not endanger his life,” her visitor replied, “because that is already forfeit. I come now to the condition which involves you, which explains my presence here this afternoon. It is also his earnest desire that you should attend him so far as London as his nurse.”

  The look of vague apprehension which had brought a questioning frown into Katharine Beverley’s face faded away. It was succeeded by an expression of blank and complete surprise.

  “That I should nurse him—should cross with him to London?” she repeated. “Why, I do not know this man Phillips. I never saw him in my life! I have not even been in Ward Fourteen since he was brought there.”

  “But he,” Jocelyn Thew explained, “has seen you. He has been a visitor at your hospital before he was received there as a patient. He has received from various doctors wonderful accounts of your skill. Besides this, he is a superstitious man, and he has been very much impressed by the fact that you have never lost a patient. If you had been one of your own probationers, the question of a fee would have presented no difficulties, although he personally is, I believe, a poor man. As it is, however, his strange craving for your services has become a charge upon me.”

  “It is the most extraordinary request I ever heard in my life,” Katharine murmured. “If I had ever seen or spoken to the man, I could have understood it better, but as it is, I find it impossible to understand.”

  “You must look upon it,” Jocelyn Thew told her, “as one of those strange fancies which comes sometimes to men who are living in the shadowland of approaching death. There is one material circumstance, however, which may make the suggestion even more disconcerting for you. The steamer upon which we hope to sail leaves at four o’clock to-morrow afternoon.”

  The idea in this new aspect was so ludicrous that she simply laughed at him.

  “My dear Mr. Jocelyn Thew!” she exclaimed. “You can’t possibly be in earnest! You mean that you expect me to leave New York with less than twenty-four hours’ notice, and go all the way to London in attendance upon a stranger, especially in these awful times? Why, the thing isn’t reasonable—or possible! I have just consented to take the chairmanship of a committee to form field hospitals throughout the country, and—”

  “May I interrupt for one moment?” her visitor begged.

  The stream of words seemed to fall away from her lips. There was a touch of Jocelyn Thew’s other manner—perhaps more than a touch. She looked at him and she shivered. She had seen him look like that once before.

  “Your attitude is perfectly reasonable,” he continued, “but on the other hand I must ask you to carry your thoughts back some little time. I shall beg you to remember that I have a certain right to ask this or any other service from you.” “I admit it,” she confessed hastily, “but—there is something so outlandish in the whole suggestion. There are a score of nurses in the hospital to any one of whom you are welcome, who are all much cleverer than I. What possible advantage to the man can it be, especially if he is seriously ill, to have a partially-trained nurse with him when he might have the best in the world?”

  “I think,” he said, “I mentioned that this is not a matter for reasoning or argument. It is you who are required, and no one else. I may remind you,” he went on, “that this service is a very much smaller one than I might have asked you, and, so far as you and I are concerned, it clears our debt.”

  “Clears our debt,” she repeated.

  “For ever!”

  She closed her eyes for several moments. For some reason or other, this last reflection seemed to bring her no particular relief. When she opened them again, her decision was written in her face.

  “I consent, of course,” she acquiesced quietly. “Is there anything more to tell me?”

  “Very little,” he replied, “only this. You should send your baggage on board the City of Boston as early as possible to-morrow morning. Every arrangement has been made for transporting Phillips in his bed, as he lies, from the hospital to the boat. The doctor who has been in attendance will accompany him to England, but it is important that you should be at the hospital and should drive in the ambulance from there to the dock. I shall ask very little of you in the way of duplicity. What is necessary you will not, I think, refuse. You will be considered to have had some former interest in Phillips, to account for your voyage, and you will reconcile yourself to the fact that I shall not at any time approach the sick man, or be known as an acquaintance of his on board the ship.”

  His words disturbed her. She felt herself being drawn under the shadow of some mystery.

  “There is something in all this,” she said, “which reminds me of the time when Richard was your protégé, the time when we met before.”

  He leaned towards her, understanding very well what was in her mind.

  “There is nothing criminal in this enterprise—even in my share of it,” he assured her. “What there is in it which necessitates secrecy is political, and that need not concern you. You see,” he went on, a little bitterly, “I have changed my role. I am no longer the despair of the New York police. I am the quarry of a race of men who, if they could catch me, would not wait to arrest. That may happen even before we reach Liverpool. If it does, it will not affect you. Your duty is to stay with a dying man until he reaches the shelter of his home. You will leave him there, and you will be free of him and of me.”

  “So far as regards our two selves,” she enquired, “do we meet as strangers upon the steamer?”

  He considered the matter for a few moments before answering. She felt another poignant thrill of recollection. He had looked at her like this just before he had bent his back to the task of saving her brother’s life and liberty, looked at her like this the moment before the unsuspected revolver had flashed from the pocket of his dress-coat and had covered the man who had suddenly declared himself their foe. She felt her cheeks burn for a moment. There was something magnetic, curiously troublous about his eyes and his faint smile.

  “I cannot deny myself so much,” he said. “Even if our opportunities for meeting upon the steamer are few, I shall still have the pleasure of a New York acquaintance with Miss Beverley. You need not be afraid,” he went on. “In this wonderful country of yours, the improbable frequently happens. I have before now visited at the houses of some whom you call your friends.”

  “Why not?” she asked him. “I should look upon it as the most natural thing in the world that we were acquainted. But why do you say ‘your country’? Are you not an American?”

  He looked at her with a very faint smile, a smile which had nothing in it of pleasantness or mirth.

  “I have so f
ew secrets,” he said. “The only one which I elect to keep is the secret of my nationality.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Then you can no longer,” she observed, “be considered what my brother and I once thought you—a man of mysteries—for with your voice and accent it is very certain that you are either English or American.”

  “If it affords you any further clue, then,” he replied, “let me confide in you that if there is one country in this world which I detest, it is England; one race of people whom I abominate, it is the English.”

  She showed her surprise frankly, but his manner encouraged no further confidence. She touched the bell, and he bowed over her fingers.

  “My friend Phillips,” he said, in formal accents, as the butler stood upon the threshold, “will never live, I fear, to offer you all the gratitude he feels, but you are doing a very kind and a very wonderful action, Miss Beverley, and one which I think will bring its own reward.”

  He passed out of the room, leaving Katharine a prey to a curious tangle of emotions. She watched him almost feverishly until he had disappeared, listened to his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the front door. Then she hurried to the window, watched him descend the row of steps, pass down the little drive and hail a taxicab. It was not until he was out of sight that she became in any way like herself. Then she broke into a little laugh.

  “Heavens alive!” she exclaimed to herself. “Now I have to find Aunt Molly and tell her that I am going to Europe to-morrow with a perfect stranger!”

  CHAPTER III

  Table of Contents

  Mr. Jocelyn Thew descended presently from his taxicab outside one of the largest and most cosmopolitan hotels in New York—or the world. He made his way with the air of an habitué to the bar, the precincts of which, at that time in the late afternoon, were crowded by a motley gathering. He ordered a Scotch highball, and gently insinuated himself into the proximity of a group of newspaper men with whom he seemed to have some slight acquaintance. It was curious how, since his arrival in this democratic meeting-place, his manners and deportment seemed to have slipped to a lower grade. He seemed as though by an effort of will to have lost something of his natural air of distinction, to be treading the earth upon a lower plane. He saluted the barkeeper by his Christian name, listened with apparent interest to an exceedingly commonplace story from one of his neighbours, and upon its conclusion drew a little nearer to the group.

  “Say,” he exclaimed confidentially, “if I felt in the humour for it I could hand you boys out a great scoop.”

  They were on him like a pack of hungry though dubious wolves. He pushed his glass out of sight, accepted one of the drinks pressed upon him, and leaned nonchalantly against the counter.

  “What should you say,” he began, “to Miss Katharine Beverley, the New York society young lady—”

  “Sister Katharine of St. Agnes’s?” one of them interrupted.

  “Daughter of old Joe Beverley, the multi-millionaire?” another exclaimed.

  “Both right,” Jocelyn Thew acquiesced. “What should you say to that young woman leaving her hospital and her house in Riverside Drive, breaking all her engagements at less than twenty-four hours’ notice, to take a sick Englishman whom no one knows anything about, back to Liverpool on the City of Boston to-morrow?”

  “The story’s good enough,” a ferret-faced little man at his elbow acknowledged, “but is it true?”

  Jocelyn Thew regarded his questioner with an air of pained surprise.

  “It’s Gospel,” he assured them all, “but you don’t need to take my word. You go right along up and enquire at the Beverley house to-night, and you’ll find that she is packing. Made up her mind just an hour ago. I’m about the only one in the know.”

  “Who’s the man, anyway?” one of the little group asked.

  “Nothing doing,” Jocelyn Thew replied mysteriously. “You’ve got to find that out for yourself, boys. All I can tell you is that he’s an Englishman, and she has known him for a long time—kind of love stunt, I imagine. She wasn’t having any, but now he’s at death’s door she seems to have relented. Anyway, she is breaking every engagement she’s got, giving up her chairmanship of the War Hospitals Committee, and she isn’t going to leave him while he’s alive. There’s no other nurse going, so it’ll be a night and day job for her.”

  “What’s the matter with the chap, anyway?” another questioner demanded.

  “No one knows for sure,” was the cautious reply. “He’s been operated upon for appendicitis, but I fancy there are complications. Not much chance for him, from what I have heard.”

  The little crowd of men melted away. Jocelyn Thew smiled to himself on his way out, as he watched four of them climb into a taxicab.

  “That establishes Phillips all right as Miss Beverley’s protégé,” he murmured, as he turned into Fifth Avenue. “And now—”

  He stopped short in his reflections. His careful scrutiny of the heterogeneous crowd gathered together around the bar had revealed to him no unfamiliar type save the little man who at that moment was ambling along on the other side of the way. Jocelyn Thew slackened his pace somewhat and watched him keenly. He was short, he wore a cheap ready-made suit of some plain material, and a straw hat tilted on the back of his head. He had round cheeks, he shambled rather than walked, and his vacuous countenance seemed both good-natured and unintelligent. To all appearances a more harmless person never breathed, yet Jocelyn Thew, as he studied him earnestly, felt that slight tightening of the nerves which came to him almost instinctively in moments of danger. He changed his purpose and turned down Fifth Avenue instead of up. The little man, it appeared, had business in the same direction. Jocelyn Thew walked the length of several blocks in leisurely fashion and then entered an hotel, studiously avoiding looking behind him. He made his way into a telephone booth and looked through the glass door. His follower in a few moments was visible, making apparently some aimless enquiry across the counter. Jocelyn Thew turned his back upon him and asked the operator for a number.

  “Number 238 Park waiting,” the latter announced, a few moments later.

  Jocelyn Thew reentered the box and took up the receiver.

  “That you, Rentoul?” he asked.

  “Speaking,” was the guarded reply. “Who is it?”

  “Jocelyn Thew. Say, what’s wrong with you? Don’t go away.”

  “What is it? Speak quickly, please.”

  “You seem rather nervy up there. I’m off to Europe to-morrow on the City of Boston, and I should like to see you before I go.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Why don’t you come up here, then?”

  “I’d rather not,” Jocelyn Thew observed laconically. “The fact of it is, I have a friend around who doesn’t seem to care about losing sight of me. If you are going to be anywhere around near Jimmy’s, about seven o’clock—”

  “That goes,” was the somewhat agitated reply. “Ring off now. There’s some one else waiting to speak.”

  Jocelyn Thew paid for his telephone call and walked leisurely out of the hotel with a smile upon his lips. The stimulus of danger was like wine to him. The little man was choosing a cigar at the stall. As he leaned down to light it, Jocelyn Thew’s practiced eye caught the shape of a revolver in his hip pocket.

  “English,” he murmured softly to himself. “Probably one of Crawshay’s lot, preparing a report for him when he returns from Chicago.”

  With an anticipatory smile, he entered upon the task of shaking off his unwelcome follower. He passed with the confident air of a member into a big club situated in an adjoining block, left it almost at once by a side entrance, found a taxicab, drove to a subway station up-town, and finally caught an express back again to Fourteenth Street. Here he entered without hesitation a small, foreign-looking restaurant which intruded upon the pavement only a few yards from the iron staircase by which he descended from the station. There were two faded evergreen shrubs in cracked p
ots at the bottom of the steps, soiled muslin curtains drawn across the lower half of the windows, dejected-looking green shutters which, had the appearance of being permanently nailed against the walls, and a general air of foreign and tawdry profligacy. Jocelyn Thew stepped into a room on the right-hand side of the entrance and, making his way to the window, glanced cautiously out. There was no sign anywhere of the little man. Then he turned towards the bar, around which a motley group of Italians and Hungarians were gathered. The linen-clad negro who presided there met his questioning glance with a slight nod, and the visitor passed without hesitation through a curtained opening to the rear of the place, along a passage, up a flight of narrow stairs until he arrived at a door on the first landing. He knocked and was at once bidden to enter. For a moment he listened as though to the sounds below. Then he slipped into the room and closed the door behind him.

  The apartment was everything which might have been expected, save for the profusion of flowers. The girl who greeted him, however, was different. She was of medium height and dark, with dark brown hair plaited close back from an almost ivory-coloured forehead. Her grey eyes were soft and framed in dark lines. Her eyebrows were noticeable, her mouth full but shapely. Her discontented expression changed entirely as she held out both her hands to her visitor. Her welcome was eager, almost passionate.

  “Mr. Thew!” she exclaimed.

  He held up his hand as though to check further speech, and listened for a moment intently.

  “How are things here?” he asked.

  “Quiet,” she assured him. “You couldn’t have come at a better time. Every one’s away. Is there anything wrong?”

  “I am being followed,” he told her, “and I don’t like it—just now, at any rate.”

  “Any one else coming?” she enquired.

  “Rentoul,” he told her. “He is in a mortal fright at having to come. They found his wireless, and they are watching his house. I must see him, though, before I go away.”

  “Going away?” she echoed. “When? When are you going?”