“Yes, certainly, Sir George wrote to me very strongly about her correspondence, and begged me to keep a sharp eye on it, so as to nip in the bud any attempt to communicate with Danvers. So far, however, she does not appear to have made any such attempt. She is frankness itself over her correspondence. Every letter that has come addressed to her, she has shown either to me or to my wife, and they have one and all been letters from old friends of her father’s, wishing to make her acquaintance now that she is in England. With regard to letter-writing, I am sorry to say she has a marked and most peculiar objection to it. Every one of the letters she has received, my wife tells, me, remain unanswered still. She has never once been seen, since she came to the house, with a pen in her hand. And if she wrote on the sly, I don’t know how she would get her letters posted—she never goes outside the door by herself, and she would have no opportunity of giving them to any of the servants to post except Mrs. Hawke’s maid, and she is beyond suspicion in such a matter. She has been well cautioned, and, in addition, is not the sort of person who would assist a young lady in carrying on a clandestine correspondence.”
“I should imagine not! I suppose Miss Monroe has been present at the breakfast table each time that you have received your daggers through the post—you told me, I think, that they had come by the first post in the morning?”
“Yes; Miss Monroe is very punctual at meals, and has been present each time. Naturally, when I received such unpleasant missives, I made some sort of exclamation and then handed the thing round the table for inspection, and Miss Monroe was very much concerned to know who my secret enemy could be.”
“No doubt. Now, Mr. Hawke, I have a very special request to make to you, and I hope you will be most exact in carrying it out.”
“You may rely upon my doing so to the very letter.”
“Thank you. If, then, you should receive by post to-morrow morning one of those big envelopes you already know the look of, and find that it contains a sketch of three, not two, drawn daggers—”
“Good gracious! what makes you think such a thing likely?” exclaimed Mr. Hawke, greatly disturbed. “Why am I to be persecuted in this way? Am I to take it for granted that I am a doomed man?”
He began to pace the room in a state of great excitement.
“I don’t think I would if I were you,” answered Loveday calmly. “Pray let me finish. I want you to open the big envelope that may come to you by post to-morrow morning just you have opened the others—in full view of your family at the breakfast-table—and to hand round the sketch it may contain for inspection to your wife, your nephew and to Miss Monroe. Now, will you promise me to do this?”
“Oh, certainly; I should most likely have done so without any promising. But—but—I’m sure you’ll understand that I feel myself to be in a peculiarly uncomfortable position, and I shall feel so very much obliged to you if you’ll tell me—that is if you’ll enter a little more fully into an explanation.”
Loveday looked at her watch. “I should think Mrs. Hawke would be just at this moment arriving at Waterloo; I’m sure you’ll be glad to see the last of me. Please come to me at my rooms in Gower Street to-morrow at twelve—here is my card. I shall then be able to enter into fuller explanations I hope. Good-bye.”
The old gentleman showed her politely downstairs, and, as he shook hands with her at the front door, again asked, in a most emphatic manner, if she did not consider him to be placed in a “peculiarly unpleasant position.”
Those last words at parting were to be the first with which he greeted her on the following morning when he presented himself at her rooms in Gower Street. They were, however, repeated in considerably more agitated a manner.
“Was there ever a man in a more miserable position!” he exclaimed, as he took the chair that Loveday indicated. “I not only received the three daggers for which you prepared me, but I got an additional worry, for which I was totally unprepared. This morning, immediately after breakfast, Miss Monroe walked out of the house all by herself, and no one knows where she has gone. And the girl has never before been outside the door alone. It seems the servants saw her go out, but did not think it necessary to tell either me or Mrs. Hawke, feeling sure we must have been aware of the fact.”
“So Mrs. Hawke has returned,” said Loveday. “Well, I suppose you will be greatly surprised if I inform you that the young lady, who has so unceremoniously left your house, is at the present moment to be found at the Charing Cross Hotel, where she has engaged a private room in her real name of Miss Mary O’Grady.”
“Eh! What! Private room! Real name O’Grady! I’m all bewildered!”
“It is a little bewildering; let me explain. The young lady whom you received into your house as the daughter of your old friend, was in reality the person engaged by Miss Monroe to fulfill the duties of her maid on board ship, after her native attendant had been landed at Malta. Her real name, as I have told you, is Mary O’Grady, and she has proved herself a valuable coadjutor to Miss Monroe in assisting her to carry out a programme, which she must have arranged with her lover, Mr. Danvers, before she left Pekin.”
“Eh! what!” again ejaculated Mr. Hawke; “how do you know all this? Tell me the whole story.”
“I will tell you the whole story first, and then explain to you how I came to know it. From what has followed, it seems to me that Miss Monroe must have arranged with Mr. Danvers that he was to leave Pekin within ten days of her so doing, travel by the route by which she came, and land at Plymouth, where he was to receive a note from her, apprising him of her whereabouts. So soon as she was on board ship, Miss Monroe appears to have set her wits to work with great energy; every obstacle to the carrying-out of her programme she appears to have met and conquered. Step number one was to get rid of her native maid, who, perhaps, might have been faithful to her master’s interests and have proved troublesome. I have no doubt the poor woman suffered terribly from sea-sickness, as it was her first voyage, and I have equally no doubt that Miss Monroe worked on her fears, and persuaded her to land at Malta, and return to China by the next packet. Step number two was to find a suitable person, who for a consideration, would be willing to play the part of the Pekin heiress among the heiress’s friends in England, while the young lady herself arranged her private affairs to her own liking. That person was quickly found among the steerage passengers of the Colombo in Miss Mary O’Grady, who had come on board with her mother at Ceylon, and who, from the glimpse I had of her, must, I should conjecture, have been absent many years from the land of her birth. You know how cleverly this young lady has played her part in your house—how, without attracting attention to the matter, she has shunned the society of her father’s old Chinese friends, who might be likely to involve her in embarrassing conversations; how she has avoided the use of pen and ink lest—”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Mr. Hawke; “but, my dear Miss Brooke, wouldn’t it be as well for you and me to go at once to the Charing Cross Hotel, and get all the information we can out of her respecting Miss Monroe and her movements—she may be bolting, you know?”
“I do not think she will. She is waiting there patiently for an answer to a telegram she dispatched more than two hours ago to her mother, Mrs. O’Grady, at 14, Woburn Place, Cork.”
“Dear me! dear me! How is it possible for you to know all this.”
“Oh, that last little fact was simply a matter of astuteness on the part of the man whom I have deputed to watch the young lady’s movements to-day. Other details, I assure you, in this somewhat intricate case, have been infinitely more difficult to get at. I think I have to thank those ‘drawn daggers,’ that caused you so much consternation, for having, in the first instance, put me on the right track.”
“Ah—h,” said Mr. Hawke, drawing a long breath; “now we come to the daggers! I feel sure you are going to set my mind at rest on that score.”
“I hope so. Would it surprise you very much to be told that it was I who sent to you those three daggers this morning?”
“You! Is it possible?”
“Yes, they were sent by me, and for a reason that I will presently explain to you. But let me begin at the beginning. Those roughly-drawn sketches, that to you suggested terrifying ideas of blood-shedding and violence, to my mind were open to a more peaceful and commonplace explanation. They appeared to me to suggest the herald’s office rather than the armoury; the cross fitchée of the knight’s shield rather than the poniard with which the members of secret societies are supposed to render their recalcitrant brethren familiar. Now, if you will look at these sketches again, you will see what I mean.” Here Loveday produced from her writing-table the missives which had so greatly disturbed Mr. Hawke’s peace of mind. “To begin with, the blade of the dagger of common life is, as a rule, at least two-thirds of the weapon in length; in this sketch, what you would call the blade, does not exceed the hilt in length. Secondly, please note the absence of guard for the hand. Thirdly, let me draw your attention to the squareness of what you considered the hilt of the weapon, and what, to my mind, suggested the upper portion of a crusader’s cross. No hand could grip such a hilt as the one outlined here. After your departure yesterday, I drove to the British Museum, and there consulted a certain valuable work on heraldry, which has more than once done me good service. There I found my surmise substantiated in a surprising manner. Among the illustrations of the various crosses borne on armorial shields, I found one that had been taken by Henri d’Anvers from his own armorial bearings, for his crest when he joined the Crusaders under Edward I., and which has since been handed down as the crest of the Danvers family. This was an important item of information to me. Here was someone in Cork sending to your house, on two several occasions, the crest of the Danvers family; with what object it would be difficult to say, unless it were in some sort a communication to someone in your house. With my mind full of this idea, I left the Museum and drove next to the office of the P. and O. Company, and requested to have given me the list of the passengers who arrived by the Colombo. I found this list to be a remarkably small one; I suppose people, if possible, avoid crossing the Bay of Biscay during the Equinoxes. The only passengers who landed at Plymouth besides Miss Monroe, I found, were a certain Mrs. and Miss O’Grady, steerage passengers who had gone on board at Ceylon on their way home from Australia. Their name, together with their landing at Plymouth, suggested the possibility that Cork might be their destination. After this I asked to see the list of the passengers who arrived by the packet following the Colombo, telling the clerk who attended to me that I was on the look-out for the arrival of a friend. In that second list of arrivals I quickly found my friend—William Wentworth Danvers by name.”
“No! The effrontery! How dared he! In his own name, too!”
“Well, you see, a plausible pretext for leaving Pekin could easily be invented by him—the death of a relative, the illness of a father or mother. And Sir George, though he might dislike the idea of the young man going to England so soon after his daughter’s departure, and may, perhaps, write to you by the next mail on the matter, was utterly powerless to prevent his so doing. This young man, like Miss Monroe and the O’Gradys, also landed at Plymouth. I had only arrived so far in my investigation when I went to your house yesterday afternoon. By chance, as I waited a few minutes in your drawing-room, another important item of information was acquired. A fragment of conversation between your nephew and the supposed Miss Monroe fell upon my ear, and one word spoken by the young lady convinced me of her nationality. That one word was the monosyllable ‘Hush.’”
“No! You surprise me!”
“Have you never noted the difference between the ‘hush’ of an Englishman and that of an Irishman? The former begins his ‘hush’ with a distinct aspirate, the latter with as distinct a W. That W is a mark of his nationality which he never loses. The unmitigated ‘whist’ may lapse into a ‘whish’ when he is is transplanted to another soil, and the ‘whish’ may in course of time pass into a ‘whush,’ but to the distinct aspirate of the English ‘hush,’ he never attains. Now Miss O’Grady’s was as pronounced a ‘whush’ as it was possible for the lips of a Hibernian to utter.”
“And from that you concluded that Mary O’Grady was playing the part of Miss Monroe in my house?”
“Not immediately. My suspicions were excited, certainly; and when I went up to her room, in company with Mrs. Hawke’s maid, those suspicions were confirmed. The orderliness of that room was something remarkable. Now, there is the orderliness of a lady in the arrangement of her room, and the orderliness of a maid, and the two things, believe me, are widely different. A lady, who has no maid, and who has the gift of orderliness, will put things away when done with, and so leave her room a picture of neatness. I don’t think, however, it would for a moment occur to her to pull things so as to be conveniently ready for her to use the next time she dresses in that room. This would be what a maid, accustomed to arrange a room for her mistress’s use, would do mechanically. Miss Monroe’s room was the neatness of a maid—not of a lady, and I was assured by Mrs. Hawke’s maid that it was a neatness accomplished by her own hands. As I stood there, looking at that room, the whole conspiracy—if I may so call it—little by little pieced itself together, and became plain to me. Possibilities quickly grew into probabilities, and these probabilities once admitted, brought other suppositions in their train. Now, supposing that Miss Monroe and Mary O’Grady had agreed to change places, the Pekin heiress, for the time being, occupying Mary O’Grady’s place in the humble home at Cork and vice versa, what means of communicating with each other had they arranged? How was Mary O’Grady to know when she might lay aside her assumed rôle and go back to her mother’s house. There was no denying the necessity for such communication; the difficulties in its way must have been equally obvious to the two girls. Now, I think we must admit that we must credit these young women with having hit upon a very clever way of meeting those difficulties. An anonymous and startling missive sent to you would be bound to be mentioned in the house, and in this way a code of signals might be set up between them that could not direct suspicion to them. In this connection, the Danvers crest, which it is possible that they mistook for a dagger, suggested itself naturally, for no doubt Miss Monroe had many impressions of it on her lover’s letters. As I thought over these things, it occurred to me that possibly dagger (or cross) number one was sent to notify the safe arrival of Miss Monroe and Mrs. O’Grady at Cork. The two daggers or crosses you subsequently received were sent on the day of Mr. Danvers’s arrival at Plymouth, and were, I should say, sketched by his hand. Now, was it not within the bounds of likelihood that Miss Monroe’s marriage to this young man, and the consequent release of Mary O’Grady from the onerous part she was playing, might be notified to her by the sending of three such crosses or daggers to you. The idea no sooner occurred to me than I determined to act upon it, forestall the sending of this latest communication, and watch the result. Accordingly, after I left your house yesterday, I had a sketch made of three daggers of crosses exactly similar to those you had already received, and had it posted to you so that you would get it by the first post. I told off one of our staff at Lynch Court to watch your house, and gave him special directions to follow and report on Miss O’Grady’s movements throughout the day. The results I anticipated quickly came to pass. About half-past nine this morning the man sent a telegram to me from your house to the Charing Cross Hotel, and furthermore had ascertained that she had since despatched a telegram, which (possibly by following the hotel servant who carried it to the telegraph office), he had overheard was addressed to Mrs. O’Grady, at Woburn Place, Cork. Since I received this information an altogether remarkable cross-firing of telegrams has been going backwards and forwards along the wires to Cork.”
“A cross-firing of telegrams! I do not understand.”
“In this way. So soon as I knew Mrs. O’Grady’s address I telegraphed to her, in her daughter’s name, desiring her to address her reply to 1154 Gower Street, not to Charing Cross Hotel. About three-quarters of an hour afterwards I received in reply this telegram, which I am sure you will read with interest.
Here Loveday handed a telegram—one of several that lay on her writing-table—to Mr. Hawke.
He opened it and read aloud as follows:
“Am puzzled. Why such hurry? Wedding took place this morning. You will receive signal as agreed to-morrow. Better return to Tavistock Square for the night.”
“The wedding took place this morning,” repeated Mr. Hawke blankly. “My poor old friend! It will break his heart.”
“Now that the thing is done past recall we must hope he will make the best of it,” said Loveday. “In reply to this telegram,” she went on, “I sent another, asking as to the movements of the bride and bridegroom, and got in reply this:”
Here she read aloud as follows:
“They will be at Plymouth to-morrow night; at Charing Cross Hotel and next day, as agreed.”
“So, Mr. Hawke,” she added, “if you wish to see your old friend’s daughter and tell her what you think of the part she has played, all you will have to do will be to watch the arrival of the Plymouth trains.”
“Miss O’Grady has called to see a lady and gentleman,” said a maid at that moment entering.
“Miss O’Grady!” repeated Mr. Hawke in astonishment.
“Ah, yes, I telegraphed to her, just before you came in, to come here to meet a lady and gentlemen, and she, no doubt thinking that she would find here the newly-married pair, has, you see, lost no time in complying with my request. Show the lady in.”
The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives Page 47
