Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  “And you slept with the window open!” the detective went on, still smiling to himself. “Well, here we have all the materials, to be sure, for a first-class mystery!”

  IV.

  For some days more, nothing further turned up of importance about the Great Ruby Robbery. It got into the papers, of course, as everything does nowadays, and all London was talking of it. Persis found herself quite famous as the American lady who had lost her jewels. People pointed her out in the park; people stared at her hard through their opera-glasses at the theatre. Indeed, the possession of the celebrated Remanet rubies had never made her half so conspicuous in the world as the loss of them made her. It was almost worth while losing them, Persis thought, to be so much made of as she was in society in consequence. All the world knows a young lady must be somebody when she can offer a reward of five hundred pounds for the recovery of gewgaws valued at six thousand.

  Sir Justin met her in the Row one day. “Then you don’t go to Paris for awhile yet — until you get them back?” he inquired very low.

  And Persis answered, blushing, “No, Sir Justin; not yet; and — I’m almost glad of it.”

  “No, you don’t mean that!” the young man cried, with perfect boyish ardour. “Well, I confess, Miss Remanet, the first thing I thought myself when I read it in The Times was just the very same: ‘Then, after all, she won’t go yet to Paris!’”

  Persis looked up at him from her pony with American frankness. “And I,” she said, quivering, “I found anchor in Browning. For what do you think I read?

  ‘And learn to rate a true man’s heart

  Far above rubies.’

  The book opened at the very place; and there I found anchor!”

  But when Sir Justin went round to his rooms that same evening his servant said to him, “A gentleman was inquiring for you here this afternoon, sir. A close-shaven gentleman. Not very prepossessin’. And it seemed to me somehow, sir, as if he was trying to pump me.”

  Sir Justin’s face was grave. He went to his bedroom at once. He knew what that man wanted; and he turned straight to his wardrobe, looking hard at the dress coat he had worn on the eventful evening. Things may cling to a sleeve, don’t you know — or be entangled in a cuff — or get casually into a pocket! Or some one may put them there.

  V.

  For the next ten days or so Mr. Gregory was busy, constantly busy. Without doubt, he was the most active and energetic of detectives. He carried out so fully his own official principle of suspecting everybody, from China to Peru, that at last poor Persis got fairly mazed with his web of possibilities. Nobody was safe from his cultivated and highly-trained suspicion — not Sir Everard in his studio, nor Lady Maclure in her boudoir, nor the butler in his pantry, nor Sir Justin O’Byrne in his rooms in St. James’s. Mr. Gregory kept an open mind against everybody and everything. He even doubted the parrot, and had views as to the intervention of rats and terriers. Persis got rather tired at last of his perverse ingenuity; especially as she had a very shrewd idea herself who had stolen the rubies. When he suggested various doubts, however, which seemed remotely to implicate Sir Justin’s honesty, the sensitive American girl “felt it go on her nerves,” and refused to listen to him, though Mr. Gregory never ceased to enforce upon her, by precept and example, his own pet doctrine that the last person on earth one would be likely to suspect is always the one who turns out to have done it.

  A morning or two later, Persis looked out of her window as she was dressing her hair. She dressed it herself now, though she was an American heiress, and, therefore, of course, the laziest of her kind; for she had taken an unaccountable dislike, somehow, to that quiet girl Bertha. On this particular morning, however, when Persis looked out, she saw Bertha engaged in close, and apparently very intimate, conversation with the Hampstead postman. This sight disturbed the unstable equilibrium of her equanimity not a little. Why should Bertha go to the door to the postman at all? Surely it was no part of the duty of Lady Maclure’s maid to take in the letters! And why should she want to go prying into the question of who wrote to Miss Remanet? For Persis, intensely conscious herself that a note from Sir Justin lay on top of the postman’s bundle — she recognized it at once, even at that distance below, by the peculiar shape of the broad rough envelope — jumped to the natural feminine conclusion that Bertha must needs be influenced by some abstruse motive of which she herself, Persis, was, to say the very least, a component element. ’Tis a human fallacy. We’re all of us prone to see everything from a personal standpoint; indeed, the one quality which makes a man or woman into a possible novelist, good, bad, or indifferent, is just that special power of throwing himself or herself into a great many people’s personalities alternately. And this is a power possessed on an average by not one in a thousand men or not one in ten thousand women.

  Persis rang the bell violently. Bertha came up, all smiles: “Did you want anything, miss?” Persis could have choked her. “Yes,” she answered plainly, taking the bull by the horns; “I want to know what you were doing down there, prying into other people’s letters with the postman?”

  Bertha looked up at her, ever bland; she answered at once, without a second’s hesitation: “The postman’s my young man, miss; and we hope before very long now to get married.”

  “Odious thing!” Persis thought. “A glib lie always ready on the tip of her tongue for every emergency.”

  But Bertha’s full heart was beating violently. Beating with love and hope and deferred anxiety.

  A little later in the day Persis mentioned the incident casually to Lady Maclure — mainly in order to satisfy herself that the girl had been lying. Lady Maclure, however, gave a qualified assent: —

  “I believe she’s engaged to the postman,” she said. “I think I’ve heard so; though I make it a rule, you see, my dear, to know as little as I can of these people’s love affairs. They’re so very uninteresting. But Bertha certainly told me she wouldn’t leave me to get married for an indefinite period. That was only ten days ago. She said her young man wasn’t just yet in a position to make a home for her.”

  “Perhaps,” Persis suggested grimly, “something has occurred meanwhile to better her position. Such strange things crop up. She may have come into a fortune!”

  “Perhaps so,” Lady Maclure replied languidly. The subject bored her. “Though, if so, it must really have been very sudden; for I think it was the morning before you lost your jewels she told me so.”

  Persis thought that odd, but she made no comment.

  Before dinner that evening she burst suddenly into Lady Maclure’s room for a minute. Bertha was dressing her lady’s hair. Friends were coming to dine — among them Sir Justin. “How do these pearls go with my complexion, Lady Maclure?” Persis asked rather anxiously; for she specially wished to look her best that evening, for one of the party.

  “Oh, charming!” her hostess answered, with her society smile. “Never saw anything suit you better, Persis.”

  “Except my poor rubies!” Persis cried rather ruefully, for coloured gewgaws are dear to the savage and the woman. “I wish I could get them back! I wonder that man Gregory hasn’t succeeded in finding them.”

  “Oh! my dear,” Lady Maclure drawled out, “you may be sure by this time they’re safe at Amsterdam. That’s the only place in Europe now to look for them.”

  “Why to Amsterdam, my lady?” Bertha interposed suddenly, with a quick side-glance at Persis.

  Lady Maclure threw her head back in surprise at so unwonted an intrusion. “What do you want to know that for, child?” she asked, somewhat curtly. “Why, to be cut, of course. All the diamond-cutters in the world are concentrated in Amsterdam; and the first thing a thief does when he steals big jewels is to send them across, and have them cut in new shapes so that they can’t be identified.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought,” Bertha put in, calmly, “they’d have known who to send them to.”

  Lady Maclure turned to her sharply. “Why, these things,” she sa
id, with a calm air of knowledge, “are always done by experienced thieves, who know the ropes well, and are in league with receivers the whole world over. But Gregory has his eye on Amsterdam, I’m sure, and we’ll soon hear something.”

  “Yes, my lady,” Bertha answered, in her acquiescent tone, and relapsed into silence.

  VI.

  Four days later, about nine at night, that hard-worked man, the posty on the beat, stood loitering outside Sir Everard Maclure’s house, openly defying the rules of the department, in close conference with Bertha.

  “Well, any news?” Bertha asked, trembling over with excitement, for she was a very different person outside with her lover from the demure and imperturbable model maid who waited on my lady.

  “Why, yes,” the posty answered, with a low laugh of triumph. “A letter from Amsterdam! And I think we’ve fixed it!”

  Bertha almost flung herself upon him. “Oh, Harry!” she cried, all eagerness, “this is too good to be true! Then in just one other month we can really get married!”

  There was a minute’s pause, inarticulately filled up by sounds unrepresentable through the art of the typefounder. Then Harry spoke again. “It’s an awful lot of money!” he said, musing. “A regular fortune! And what’s more, Bertha, if it hadn’t been for your cleverness we never should have got it!”

  Bertha pressed his hand affectionately. Even ladies’-maids are human.

  “Well, if I hadn’t been so much in love with you,” she answered frankly, “I don’t think I could ever have had the wit to manage it. But, oh! Harry, love makes one do or try anything!”

  If Persis had heard those singular words, she would have felt no doubt was any longer possible.

  VII.

  Next morning, at ten o’clock, a policeman came round, post haste, to Sir Everard’s. He asked to see Miss Remanet. When Persis came down, in her morning wrap, he had but a brief message from head-quarters to give her: “Your jewels are found, miss. Will you step round and identify them?”

  Persis drove back with him, all trembling. Lady Maclure accompanied her. At the police-station they left their cab, and entered the ante-room.

  A little group had assembled there. The first person Persis distinctly made out in it was Sir Justin. A great terror seized her. Gregory had so poisoned her mind by this time with suspicion of everybody and everything she came across, that she was afraid of her own shadow. But next moment she saw clearly he wasn’t there as prisoner, or even as witness; merely as spectator. She acknowledged him with a hasty bow, and cast her eye round again. The next person she definitely distinguished was Bertha, as calm and cool as ever, but in the very centre of the group, occupying as it were the place of honour which naturally belongs to the prisoner on all similar occasions. Persis was not surprised at that; she had known it all along; she glanced meaningly at Gregory, who stood a little behind, looking by no means triumphant. Persis found his dejection odd; but he was a proud detective, and perhaps some one else had effected the capture!

  “These are your jewels, I believe,” the inspector said, holding them up; and Persis admitted it.

  “This is a painful case,” the inspector went on. “A very painful case. We grieve to have discovered such a clue against one of our own men; but as he owns to it himself, and intends to throw himself on the mercy of the Court, it’s no use talking about it. He won’t attempt to defend it; indeed, with such evidence, I think he’s doing what’s best and wisest.”

  Persis stood there, all dazed. “I — I don’t understand,” she cried, with a swimming brain. “Who on earth are you talking about?”

  The inspector pointed mutely with one hand at Gregory; and then for the first time Persis saw he was guarded. She clapped her hand to her head. In a moment it all broke in upon her. When she had called in the police, the rubies had never been stolen at all. It was Gregory who stole them!

  She understood it now, at once. The real facts came back to her. She had taken her necklet off at night, laid it carelessly down on the dressing-table (too full of Sir Justin), covered it accidentally with her lace pocket-handkerchief, and straightway forgotten all about it. Next day she missed it, and jumped at conclusions. When Gregory came, he spied the rubies askance under the corner of the handkerchief — of course, being a woman, she had naturally looked everywhere except in the place where she had laid them — and knowing it was a safe case he had quietly pocketed them before her very eyes, all unsuspected. He felt sure nobody could accuse him of a robbery which was committed before he came, and which he had himself been called in to investigate.

  “The worst of it is,” the inspector went on, “he had woven a very ingenious case against Sir Justin O’Byrne, whom we were on the very point of arresting to-day, if this young woman hadn’t come in at the eleventh hour, in the very nick of time, and earned the reward by giving us the clue that led to the discovery and recovery of the jewels. They were brought over this morning by an Amsterdam detective.”

  Persis looked hard at Bertha. Bertha answered her look. “My young man was the postman, miss,” she explained, quite simply; “and after what my lady said, I put him up to watch Mr. Gregory’s delivery for a letter from Amsterdam. I’d suspected him from the very first; and when the letter came, we had him arrested at once, and found out from it who were the people at Amsterdam who had the rubies.”

  Persis gasped with astonishment. Her brain was reeling. But Gregory in the background put in one last word —

  “Well, I was right, after all,” he said, with professional pride. “I told you the very last person you’d dream of suspecting was sure to be the one that actually did it.”

  Lady O’Byrne’s rubies were very much admired at Monte Carlo last season. Mr. Gregory has found permanent employment for the next seven years at Her Majesty’s quarries on the Isle of Portland. Bertha and her postman have retired to Canada with five hundred pounds to buy a farm. And everybody says Sir Justin O’Byrne has beaten the record, after all, even for Irish baronets, by making a marriage at once of money and affection.

  THE CONSCIENTIOUS BURGLAR.

  Guy Lethbridge had got into debt. That was reprehensible, of course; but when we were very young, most of us did the same thing; and in Guy’s case, at least, there were extenuating circumstances. When a fellow’s twenty-four, and has been brought up like a gentleman, he’s apt to fall into the familiar fallacy that “we must live;” and if he has nothing to live upon, why then he lives upon other people. Now, Guy Lethbridge was a painter, without visible means of support except his art; and he glided into debt by a natural and easy transition which even that sternest of censors, the judge of the Bankruptcy Court, might well have condoned as next door to inevitable.

  The facts of the case were these. Guy had gone over to Germany with a knapsack on his back, an easel in his hands, and a pipe and a few pounds in his trousers pocket. He had no friends to speak of in those days, for his father was dead, and his mother, good lady, in her lodgings in Bayswater, could no more have sent her son a five-pound note from her slender pension, than she could have sent him the Koh-i-noor or the Order of the White Elephant. But Guy went abroad, none the less, with the reckless faith of the Salvationist or the impecunious artist. He meant to stay on the Rhine as long as his money lasted; “and then, you know, my dear fellow, I can smuggle myself across anyhow, in a cattle boat or something; and arrive with a sixpence and an immortal work at St. Catherine’s Docks some fine summer day, at six o’clock in the morning.” What a blessed thing it is, to be sure, to be born into this world with the easy-going, happy-go-lucky, artistic temperament!

  So Guy went to Königswinter, with a glimpse by the way at Brussels, Aix, and Cologne, and settled himself down, pipe, easel, and all, to summer quarters at the bright and sunny Berliner-Hof. There, he worked really hard, for he was no saunterer by nature; his impecuniosity arose, strange to say, neither from want of industry nor want of talent, but from pure force of circumstances. There’s no sillier blunder on earth, indeed, than to bel
ieve that if a man doesn’t succeed in life he must needs be either an idler or a bungler. Only fools imagine that industry and ability can command success; wise men know well that opportunity and luck count at least as equally important. Guy Lethbridge’s time had not yet come. He painted all summer up and down the Rhine, making Königswinter his headquarters, and dropping down by boat or rail from day to day to various points on either bank that took his fancy. As for black and white, his quiver was full of them. The Drachenfels from the North, the Drachenfels from the South; the Rheinstein from above, the Rheinstein from below, the Rheinstein from St. Clement’s — he sketched them all till he was well nigh tired of them. Meanwhile, he worked steadily at his grand Academy picture of “The Seven Mountains from the Summit of the Petersberg.” His plan of campaign, in short, was own brother to every other struggling young artist’s. He meant to do “a lot of little pot-boilers for the illustrated magazines, don’t you know, or the weekly papers,” and to live upon those while he devoted his energies to the real Work of Art which was to raise him with a bound to the front rank of living painters. Wyllie had done it, you see, with his great Thames picture, so why shouldn’t Guy Lethbridge? The Chantrey Bequest was meant on purpose for the encouragement of such works as the “Seven Mountains from the Summit of the Petersberg.” The trustees were bound to buy it as soon as they saw it hung on the line at the Academy; for they are men of taste, and men of knowledge, and men of experience; and if they don’t know a good thing when they see it, what’s the use of an Academy, anyway, I ask you?

  Incredible as it may seem, however, the pot-boilers failed to boil the pot. Guy sent his sketches, with elucidatory remarks, to the editors of nearly every illustrated paper in Great Britain and Ireland or the adjacent islands; who declined them with thanks, and with surprising unanimity. There were the same sketches, to be sure, which ran afterwards through eight numbers of a leading art review, and were then reproduced as an illustrated gift-book, which our most authoritative critic pronounced in The Bystander to be “the gem of the season.” But that was after Guy Lethbridge became famous. At the time, those busy editors didn’t look at the drawings at all, or, if they looked at them, observed with the weary sigh peculiar to the overworked editorial organism, “Ah, the Rhine again! Overdone, decidedly. The public won’t stand any more Rhine at any price.” For those were the days when there was a run on the Thames and our domestic scenery; and everybody who was anybody lodged his easel in a houseboat.