C. N. Williamson & A. N. Williamson: 30+ Murder Mysteries & Adventure Novels (Illustrated). Charles Norris Williamson
a bearded, red-faced man, who sprang up on her entrance.
"Well--well?" he demanded.
The veiled and scented lady put her finger to her lips.
"'Sh!" she breathed. Then, disguising her voice by whispering, she went on. "Russia China, and Japan have signed the alliance, in spite of England and France, whom they have defied very insolently, and it's only a question of a short time before the storm breaks. There! That's all, in a nutshell. I must run away at once."
"A thousand thanks! You're a brick!" Mr. Portheous pressed the gloved hand and left a cheque in it. "We shall go to press with this immediately."
Joan glanced at the cheque, saw it was for seven hundred pounds, and despised Lady Henry for cheapening the market. Her waiting cab drove her a few streets farther on, to the office of The Planet. A card with the name of Miss Carthew, and "Important private business" scrawled upon it, was the "Open, sesame!" to Sir Edmund Foster's door.
"Have you your cheque-book handy?" she nonchalantly asked.
"What for?"
"Quid pro quo." Joan rushed into her whole story, which she told from beginning to end, proving its truth by showing Mr. Portheous' cheque made out to Mrs. Anne Randall. "Lady Henry, no doubt, has an account somewhere under that name. She's too sharp to use her own," added the girl. "Do you believe me now?"
"Yes. You're wonderful. I shall risk printing the news exactly as you have given it to me."
"You won't regret your trust. But I don't want your cheque to-night. I'll take it to-morrow, when I can say: 'I told you so.'"
"Would you still like to come on our staff--at a salary of ten pounds a week?"
"No, thank you, Sir Edmund. I've brought off my big coup, and anything more in the newspaper line would be, I fear, an anticlimax. Besides, I want to play with my fifteen hundred pounds."
"What shall you do now?"
"Go back to the house which has the honour of being my home, change my clothes, hurry breathlessly to South Audley Street, and inform Lady Henry that her costume can't be found. She will then, in desperation, decide to send a note to The Daily Beacon, which, my prophetic soul whispers, she will order me to take."
"Shall you go?"
"Out of the house, yes--never, never to return, for my work there is done. But not to the office of The Beacon. Lady Henry's box shall be sent to her by parcel post to-morrow morning, and Mrs. Randall's cheque will be in the coat pocket. That will surprise her a little, but it won't matter to me; for, after having called here for my cheque, I think I'll take the two o'clock train for the Continent. I shall have plenty of money to enjoy myself, and I feel I need a change of air."
"You are wonderful!" repeated Sir Edmund Foster.
Chapter XI.
Kismet and a V.C.
"Now, where on earth have I seen that girl before?" Joan Carthew asked herself.
It was at Biarritz, where she was enjoying, as she put it to herself, a well-earned holiday; and she was known at her hotel, and among the few acquaintances she had made, as the Comtesse de Merival, a young widow with plenty of money. She was a Comtesse because it is easy to say that one has married a sprig of foreign nobility, without being found out; she was a widow because it is possible for a widow to be alone, unchaperoned, and to amuse herself without ceasing to be comme il faut.
Joan had amused herself a great deal during the six weeks since she had left England, and the cream of the amusement had consisted in inventing a romantic story about herself and getting it believed. It was as good as acting in a successful play which one has written for oneself.
At the present moment she was walking on the plage, pleasantly conscious that she was one of the prettiest and best-dressed women among many who were pretty and well-dressed. Then a blonde girl passed her, a blonde girl who was new to Biarritz, but who, somehow, did not seem new to Joan's retina. Her photograph was somewhere in the book of memory, and, oddly enough, it seemed to have a background of sea and blue sky, as it had to-day.
The girl was pretty, as a beautifully dressed, golden-haired doll in a shop window is pretty. She was also exceedingly "good form," and she was vouched for as a young person of importance by a remarkably distinguished-looking old man who strolled beside her.
They turned, and in passing the "Comtesse" for the second time, the girl looked full in Joan's face, with a lingering gaze such as a spoiled beauty often directs upon a possible rival.
Then, all in an instant, Joan knew.
"Why," she reminded herself, "it's the girl I saw at Brighton--the girl I envied. I know it is she. That's eight years ago, but I can't be mistaken."
Somehow this seemed an important discovery. If Joan, a miserable, overworked slavey of twelve, nursing her tyrant's baby, had not been bitten with consuming jealousy of a child no older but a thousand times more fortunate than herself, she might have gone on indefinitely as a slavey, and might never have had a career.
The little girl at Brighton had looked scornfully from under her softly drooping Leghorn hat at the shabby child-nurse, and a rage of resentment had boiled in Joan's passionate young heart. Now, the tall girl at Biarritz looked with half-reluctant admiration from under an equally becoming hat at the Comtesse de Merival, who was more beautiful and apparently quite as fortunate as she. Nevertheless the old scar suddenly throbbed again, so that Joan remembered there had once been a wound; and she knew that she had no gratitude for the girl to whom, indirectly, she owed her rise in the world.
Joan was usually generous to women, even when she had no cause to love them, for, with all her faults, there was nothing of the "cat" in her nature; yet, to her surprise, she felt that she would like to hurt this girl in some way. "What a brute I must be!" she said to herself. "I didn't know I was so bad. Really I mustn't let this sort of thing grow on me, otherwise I shall degenerate from a highwayman (rather a gallant one, I think) into a cad, and I should lose interest in foraging for myself if I were a cad."
As she thought this, the girl and her companion were joined by a man. Joan glanced, then gazed, and decided that he was the most interesting man to look at whom she had ever seen in her life. Not that he was the handsomest, as mere beauty of feature goes, but he was of exactly the type which Joan and most women admire at heart above all others.
One did not need to be told, to know that he was a soldier. As he stood talking to his friends, with his hat off, and the sun chiselling the ripples of his close-cropped hair in bronze, his head towered above those of the other men who came and went. His face was bronze, too, of a lighter shade, blending into ivory half way up the forehead, and his features were strong and clear-cut as a bronze man's should always be. He wore no moustache or beard, and his mouth and chin were self-reliant, firm, and generous, but Joan liked his eyes best of all. As she passed slowly, they met hers for a second, and their clear depths were brown and bright as a Devonshire brook when the noonday sun shines into it.
It was only for a second that the man's soul looked at her from its windows, but it was long enough to make her sharply realise two facts. One, that she was far, far beneath him; the other, that he was the only man in the world for her.
"To think that that girl should know him, and I not!" she said to herself rebelliously. "He is miles too good for me, but he's more miles too good for her, because she hasn't any soul, and I have, even though it's a bad one. Again, after all these years, that girl passes through my life, taking with her as she goes what I would give all I own, all I might ever gain, to have. It's Kismet--nothing less."
"Ah, Comtesse, bon jour!" murmured a voice that Joan knew, and then it went on