The Adventures of Ethel King, the Female Nick Carter

by Jean Petithuguenin

  “Gladly, Eva.”

  Miss Newton clapped her hands like a child.

  “Oh! How happy I am. I feel I’m going to like you a great deal!” she exclaimed.

  She thought a moment and then gave Ethel King a questioning look.

  “What are we going to do while we’re waiting for lunch?” she asked. “Let’s see. I have a great number of letters to write…You could help me with that…Just think, I have to announce my engagement to my friends…and to my acquaintances. What a chore! No, we won’t do that this morning; it’s too boring. Tomorrow will be time to think about that.”

  The girl made a mocking gesture to show how little she thought of social obligations.

  “Don’t you find absurd, Ethel, that custom of keeping other people up on the ‘great events’ in one’s life?”

  “No, Eva,” the detective replied gently. “Don’t we live a little for our friends?”

  “For our friends, the real ones, agreed! But there are so few of them,” Miss Newborn said, making a face of disdain. “Do you believe that my ‘good friends’ will spare me their criticism when they learn of my official engagement to Mr. Jack Hawfinch? I can hear them now: ‘What a choice, my dear! What nest did that bird fall out of? A man hardly off the boat from England. No one even knows his family!’ ”

  Ethel King, amused, smiled.

  “Speaking of that, Ethel, you don’t yet know that I’m engaged, or almost,” the girl continued.

  She made a bow with comic gravity to add:

  “Well, Miss Briar, I officially announce to you that I have given my hand to Mr. Jack Hawfinch, a man of independent means, born an Englishman and a recently naturalized American.”

  Ethel King, joining in the game, bowed ceremoniously and answered:

  “Allow me to congratulate you, Miss Newborn.”

  The orphan burst out laughing.

  “Good, good, that’s exactly right. That’s the way all my friends will congratulate me. But then what, I ask you? What they’ll say when my back is turned, is basically true. They don’t know my fiancé. Can they know if I’ll be happy with him? How can they congratulate me on what is perhaps foolish. I would prefer that they had the courage to give me their opinion to my face. But there isn’t one who would dare to, not one.”

  The girl stopped for a moment, looked at her companion with a strange expression and observed:

  “You must find me silly, Ethel…or badly brought up.”

  “Neither one nor the other, Eva, but I’m afraid that you’re a little confused.”

  Miss Newborn looked at Ethel King with astonishment.

  “Well! You’re certainly frank, you are!”

  “I force myself to be so,” the great detective answered, without taking offense at that somewhat brutal reply.

  “You’re astonishing,” the girl exclaimed. “You’re poor, since you’ve tied down your freedom to earn your livelihood, and you dare to tell truths straightforwardly to the woman on whom your situation at this moment depends?”

  “Poverty is a harsh test, Eva. It kills a great number of souls, but those who survive are better tempered by it than by wealth.”

  “You’re decidedly the companion that I need, Ethel. I see Mr. Golding didn’t exaggerate in being lavish with his praise.”

  The girl sat down beside Ethel and took her hand confidentially. Her playfulness had given way to gentle gravity.

  “If you knew, Ethel, how hard it is to learn the truth when you’re as rich as I am. Nobody tells it to you. Everybody around you lies or dissimulates. Everybody. Even my fiancé, I’ve noticed.”

  “He does that, Eva? He lies to you, and you love him?”

  The orphan shook her head sadly.

  “They’re all alike, Ethel! He at least doesn’t need my fortune to live. If he makes love to me, it isn’t in self-interest…like the others.”

  “Ah! He’s rich?”

  “He once showed me proof of income which guaranteed him $80,000 revenue.”

  The comments Miss Newborn had just made about her fiancé greatly intrigued Ethel King and made her suspicious of Jack Hawfinch.

  “Don’t you find it strange, Eva, that the man who wants to marry you, has in this way spread out proof of his fortune for you to see?”

  “Oh! Yes I did. Jack showed me his proofs one day when he had them on him by chance. They were English papers and, as I had never seen any, Jack asked me if I wanted to look at them…Since then I’ve thought that Jack had acted out a little comedy for me.”

  “It seems so!”

  “Yes. He wanted to prove to me that he was rich and that he wasn’t courting me for my fortune. Can I blame him? No, but that was really one of the principal reasons that decided me to look at him favorably.”

  These words were followed by a silence during which Ethel King carefully observed Miss Newborn, who finally said:

  “What pleases me more in Jack is that he’s alone in the world, an orphan like me, free from all ties. He talked to me little of his past and I guess he must have had some terrible trials in his life. He only loves me better because of them. At least he doesn’t have behind him a procession of relatives, each one more churlish than the others, or abominably mealy-mouthed, who have to be pleased before the husband is pleased.”

  Ethel King was struck by the tone of fatigue in which the girl confided in her. Such melancholy wasn’t in Eva’s character. How could she have given in to it if she had really loved Jack Hawfinch? She gave the impression of having resolved to make a marriage of reason because she despaired of ever finding a sincere lover.

  Miss Newborn suddenly got up and ran to a secretary with that kind of child-like grace which was a characteristic of her beauty. She took a jewel case from a drawer and showed it, the cover open, to Ethel King, who immediately recognized the famous green diamond.

  “So, Ethel, look at what I bought yesterday.”

  The detective manifested admiration which, moreover, wasn’t feigned.

  “I’ll have it mounted on a headband,” the young girl said. “It’s a unique piece…incomparable. They also claim that it’s a talisman.”

  “A talisman?” Ethel King repeated, pretending to be surprised.

  “Yes, it lets its owner unmask lies and impostures,” Miss Newton explained.

  And she added in a slower and graver voice, as if speaking to herself rather than to her companion:

  “For example, if my fiancé is lying to me, this green diamond will let me find it out.”

  The detective didn’t appear to understand the implication of those last words.

  “Is that its only virtue, Eva?”

  The young millionaire began to laugh. A casual observer might have believed that her gaiety had suddenly returned, but Ethel King had too much good judgment and understanding not to discern a disturbing nervousness in that burst of laughter.

  “They say—it’s naturally a legend—they say the green diamond brings bad luck. Its owner doesn’t possess it a week without being the victim of a horrible catastrophe, unless another person sacrifices himself to break the charm.”

  Two Men

  In the afternoon, Ethel King went by her pretty cottage on Garden Street to confer with John Light. She had set up a meeting at her house with him and Charley Lux.

  They saw immediately by her expression that the case was more serious than they had at first supposed. Ethel repeated to her cousin and to Light the conversation she had had with Eva and added:

  “Miss Newborn is 22 years old, but she’s a child. She’s absolutely left to herself, without a protector, without an advisor. She gives the impression of having foolishly gotten engaged to a man she doesn’t know well and with whom she is not truly in love. I hope to meet this Jack Hawfinch soon and to have the opportunity to judge him. While waiting, I ask you to follow him, Mr. Light.”

  Ethel handed a paper to the detective and continued:

  “Here’s his address. I got it skillfully from Miss Newborn. This fello
w is too mysterious for my taste. It’s possible that Mr. Hawfinch is not what he wishes to appear. The young girl realizes that instinctively and I’m persuaded that the mistrust she has in regard to her fiancé isn’t without some relationship with the purchase of the green diamond.”

  “And me, Ethel, what mission will you give me?” Charley asked his cousin.

  “Stay here until you get further instructions. I’ll telephone you if I need you. In case I risk being overheard by someone, when I speak to you on the telephone, I will only say some commonplace sentences or something having nothing to do with the case. But that doesn’t matter. You’ll go hang around Miss Newborn’s town house, and I’ll arrange to communicate my instructions to you, by throwing a bill out of a window, for example. My bedroom window is on the third floor, in the front. It’s the last one on the right.”

  When Ethel King went back to her “mistress’s” house at about 5 p.m. and joined Eva in the drawing room, she found her talking to a young man with a loyal, likeable, and remarkably intelligent face.

  The detective breathed a sigh of relief. She was wrong to be upset. If this was the orphan’s fiancé, she hadn’t made a bad choice. But Eva had already begun the introductions.

  “Mr. Edward Outburn, Chief Engineer of my steel works.”

  That was a disappointment for Ethel King. The man she had at first taken to be Eva’s fiancé was the Director of the metallurgic establishments which made up the principal source of revenue of the young orphan. Miss Newborn’s father had been the owner of ironworks. He had contributed truly remarkable progress to his industry. Before his death he had advised his daughter to trust the direction of the factories to Edward Outburn, a poor, young engineer, whose great abilities he had appreciated. Perhaps Newborn had even conceived more than esteem for Outburn and would have hoped to call him his son-in-law one day. If the industrialist had conceived that project, death had prevented his seeing it come to pass. When he died, Eva had just begun her 16th year. Since then, the young girl had lived in complete independence. Her guardian had taken care of managing her fortune until she was of age, but Eva’s upbringing had remained the least of his worries.

  Miss Newborn finished the sentences interrupted by Ethel King’s arrival.

  “That’s good, Mr. Outburn, build the new constructions that you judge necessary. I rely entirely on you…How much do you need? $500,000?”

  “I think $200,000 would be more than enough, Miss Newborn. That’s still a great expense, but the changes I have in mind will almost double the production of the steel mills.”

  “Then do it. You’ll have dinner with us, Mr. Outburn. We’re having Mr. Hawfinch, who will be delighted to see you.”

  An expression of sadness suddenly spread over the young man’s face. Then his expression froze. His look became hard.

  “I thank you, Miss. I would accept with the greatest pleasure if business…”

  Eva interrupted him, saying in a playful tone:

  “Come, come. You accept, Mr. Outburn. There’s no more business this evening.”

  “Excuse me, Miss, but…”

  “There’s no but. If you don’t stay…I’ll take your refusal for an offense, I warn you.”

  The young engineer gave the young girl a look of entreaty that she didn’t seem to understand, and submitted, resigned.

  That little scene, very significant in Ethel King’s eyes, had scarcely finished when a maid came to announce Mr. Jack Hawfinch.

  When her fiancé appeared at the door, Eva ran to the door with an eagerness that the detective didn’t find very natural.

  Jack Hawfinch was the perfect ladies’ man, a gigolo with jade black hair parted impeccably in the middle, a part going right down to the neck, lifted symmetrically over the temples and slicked down with a great deal of pomade. His clean-shaven face was more tanned than his English origin would seem to indicate. He had regular features in the photographic fashion, melting almond eyes whose languor was compensated for by an insupportable haughtiness. He wore a perfectly cut riding coat, but the elegance of his attire was unfortunately spoiled by a scarlet tie with an enormous solitaire stick pin. His fingers were loaded with rings. A square monocle that he pinched, grimacing, between his eyebrow and his cheek, made up the character.

  Hawfinch bowed before Miss Newborn and kissed her hand with an affected gallantry. He scarcely deigned to notice Ethel, even though Eva had introduced him to her. He held out his hand to Outburn, who shook it with manifest repugnance.

  “Let me tell you what just happened to me, my dear,” he said as soon as he was seated. “I’m still shocked and indignant.”

  He was speaking loudly and striking an affected pose.

  “Really? What was that?” Miss Newborn asked.

  “Can you imagine, my dear, that this afternoon, being at my club, I heard three worthless young men saying bad things about you. My blood boiled; I jumped into the middle of the trio. I gave a resounding slap to the most impertinent. I shook up the others. I demanded apologies.”

  The girl had frowned. She gestured with bad humor.

  “You were wrong, Jack,” she observed. “I worry very little about what two or three hare brains can say about me. Their gossip doesn’t risk compromising me. It’s not the same with your getting mixed up in it.”

  “I’m completely of Miss Newborn’s opinion,” Outburn declared.

  Hawfinch glanced at the engineer, then turned toward the young girl and protested:

  “I agree that I acted too quickly. But you are everything to me, Eva. My love places you so high you are in my eyes of an essence so superior to ordinary humanity…”

  “Please, Jack, you must know that I don’t like stuff and nonsense.”

  “After all, how could my intervention compromise you, since we’re engaged?”

  “We aren’t officially so, Jack, remember that. But finish your story. I suppose there was a scandal at your club.”

  “Yes, I confess it. One of the rogues wisely slipped away, but the two others stayed and I had a violent altercation with them. Everyone came running at the noise, of course. I admit,” Hawfinch added, lowering his head with a contrite air, overcome by anger, “I talked more than I should have. Facing these boors, I declared that I was your fiancé and I considered any reflection directed at you as a personal offense. As a beginning, although it’s not the custom at the club, I challenged two of the disparagers to a duel.”

  Hearing this story, Eva turned alternately red and pale. Outburn moved about in his chair as if he were tempted to strike Hawfinch. Ethel King didn’t take her eyes off the narrator, but her impassive expression did not betray her sentiments.

  “You have acted in an unbelievably inconsiderate manner, Jack,” Miss Newborn declared with irritation. “I haven’t yet authorized you to say we’re engaged. I’m angry, very angry! I want you to stifle this scandal immediately. I don’t want the duels to take place.”

  “But, my dear, to draw back now, that would be to expose myself to ridicule, to shame!”

  “Too bad for you, Jack. My reputation is well worth the sacrifice of your ego.”

  Hawfinch bowed. Ethel King thought she saw a mocking smile on his lips.

  “Your wishes are commands for me, Eva. I’ll take care of that business, whatever it may cost my pride.”

  Eva’s Hesitations

  After dinner, while the gentlemen were smoking their cigars, Eva led her lady companion into the winter garden, and, when she was very sure that Outburn and Hawfinch couldn’t hear them, she asked:

  “What do you think of my fiancé, Ethel?”

  She lifted her eyes to the detective with a worried look, as if she wanted to read her most secret thoughts.

  “I can’t answer such a question,” Ethel King answered gravely.” My opinion wouldn’t change anything about yours.”

  “Who knows?” the girl said sadly.

  Ethel suddenly took a great gamble. She sat down on a bench, under a palm with large leaves and gentl
y drew nearer to Eva, who still did not suspect the authority of the famous detective.

  “Listen, Eva, I must speak to you very seriously. I’m older than you are. Life has been hard for me and I have a great deal more experience than you do. I can counsel you like a mother, or, if you prefer, like a big sister.”

  Miss Newborn seemed at first astonished, then confused. Without saying a word, she leaned her head on Ethel King’s shoulder as if looking for the protection of which she had so long been deprived.

  “I have the impression, Eva, that you aren’t very sure of your own sentiments. Am I right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” the girl answered.

  “Would you like me to help you read your heart?”

  “Yes, Ethel.”

  “Then answer me frankly. Do you love Mr. Hawfinch?”

  Miss Newton made a despairing gesture.

  “I don’t know at all. There are moments when it seems to me that I love him, and others…when he gets on my nerves.”

  “Then that means that you don’t love him. You don’t yet know true love. It doesn’t leave any room for doubt. When you’re in love you’ll see that it’s impossible to be in doubt.”

  At that moment a mocking voice made the two women tremble. Hawfinch came out from behind a massive tree fern, two steps from Ethel King. He had to have walked very softly, placing his feet on the borders of the flower beds, for the sound of his approach not to have alerted the experienced ear of the detective.

  “Well, well! Ladies!” he said, snickering. “You are, it seems to me, about to take up a very interesting subject! A dissertation about love! May I not be allowed the honor of hearing it?”

  Ethel King bit her lip. She understood that the gigolo had spied on at least the last part of her conversation with Miss Newborn. Eva, at first taken aback, rose, trembling.

  “You were listening to us, Jack?”

  The young man smiled and answered with biting sarcasm:

  “No, Eva, I only surprised the end of your conversation, which wasn’t, admit it, very favorable toward me.”