The Duke Decides/Chapter 15

by Headon Hill

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CHAPTER XV

A New Cure for Headache

“I wonder if General Sadgrove and Mr. Forsyth are lunatics?” Sybil Hanbury purred softly, after joining in the chorus of thanks which greeted a superb rendering of Strelezki’s “Arlequin” on the long disused grand piano in the tapestry-room. This apartment was more cozy and homelike than the vast white drawing-room at Beaumanoir House, but it was quite large enough for isolated conversations.

The uncomplimentary confidence was made into the shell-like ear of Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who, faultlessly gowned by Worth, was sitting apart with her nominal hostess in the embrasure of an oriel window. The Duke was hovering near the piano, and Forsyth was talking to Mrs. Sadgrove and Mrs. Sherman. The General was not present, having excused himself from coming straight from the dining-room on the plea of having a letter to write.

Sybil’s disjointed remark—for it followed a discussion on French cookery—caused a sudden twist of the ivory shoulders towards her, the swift eagerness of the movement being discounted by the languorous stare of slowly interested surprise. There was a hint of resentment, perhaps also a trace of alarm, in the wheeling of the décolletée shoulders; in the stare these emotions were corrected into a mild desire to hear more of such a sweeping surmise.

“Lunatics—those two!” Mrs. Talmage Eglinton exclaimed, in well-modulated astonishment. “That’s what you English call rather a large order, isn’t it? What makes you say so?”

“Hush! My cousin is trying to persuade Miss Sherman to sing,” replied Sybil. “Wait till she has begun, and I’ll tell you. It’s too funny to keep to one’s self.”

For two days now the house-party at Prior’s Tarrant had been increased by the elegant addition of Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, and on the surface matters were pursuing their normal course. The Duke had received his latest guest with a democratic courtesy none the less cordial because of her floridly expressed note, which in the stress of other preoccupations he had forgotten altogether. He had a vague idea that the General had wished the vivacious American to be included because she was a fellow countrywoman of the Shermans, and that was quite enough to ensure his good-will towards her.

This view was so far from being the right one that Mrs. Sherman and Leonie had only succeeded in being coldly polite to the latest arrival. Mrs. Sadgrove, with an inkling that the beautifully dressed but too effusive American was an important factor in her husband’s schemes, was more outwardly complacent, but it was reserved for Sybil to shower upon Mrs. Talmage Eglinton special civilities which had ended, after two days only, in their becoming constant companions, if not bosom friends. If the handsome visitor wanted to walk in the park or to be shown some object of interest in the gardens, Sybil was always at hand to accompany her; and if it rained, as it had done all this day, she spent hours in entertaining her in her own rooms.

As for Forsyth, Sybil deserted him entirely; and as the other ladies abstained from discussing personal topics before the unpopular guest, there had been no making known beyond the small circle who knew it already of the new secretary’s engagement to his employer’s cousin. Singularly enough, this was one of the very few subjects which the girl did not touch upon in her confidences to her new friend.

Presently the importunities of the Duke, backed by a general murmur of request, prevailed, and Leonie began a quaint old melody in a clear contralto that at any other time would have held Sybil an enthralled listener. As it was, she took instant advantage of the rippling flood of sound that filled the room to resume her talk, though for the moment the continuity was not apparent.

“Beaumanoir House was burgled the other night, and we caught a man trying to get into my cousin’s bedroom,” she whispered.

“No. Really? I—I saw nothing in the papers,” replied Mrs. Talmage Eglinton in even tones, but with another turn of the white shoulders and a sudden shading of her eyes the better to watch the fair narrator’s face.

“That was because the Duke let the man go—didn’t want any fuss just after coming into the title; and quite reasonable, I call it,” Sybil proceeded, “And that’s where the fun comes in. Mr. Forsyth insists that my cousin is the proposed victim of some diabolical plot, anarchist or otherwise, and he took General Sadgrove into his confidence. The old gentleman, as you may not be aware, was a sort of policeman in India, and is cracked on finding out things. Naturally, to one of that temperament, the mystery Mr. Forsyth chose to make out of a vulgar attempt at robbery was like a spark on tinder, and the General caught on at once. They’re both fairly on the job—as amateur detectives, you know—and they think they’ve got a clue.”

“How truly interesting! And the clue?’

“Of the most remote kind—not even arrived at, à la Sherlock Holmes, by inspecting cigarette ashes. It seems that Mr. Forsyth—who, by the way, had been to leave a card on you—met the Duke at the Cecil, coming away from the suite of a Mr. Ziegler. He chose to think that my cousin was looking agitated, whereas he was only tired after his voyage. Mr. Ziegler, therefore, if you please, has fallen under the ban of suspicion from these wiseacres, and is supposed to be murderously inclined towards the poor Duke. Even the mischief of some wretched boy in playing tricks with the train he traveled by the other night is attributed to this probably harmless Mr. Ziegler.”

“And his Grace—does he also attribute these things to the same quarter?” asked Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, scarcely with the breathless interest due to such tremendous doings. She had a way of opening her eyes wide when putting a question—a mannerism which had the effect of creating doubt whether she was intensely eager or only bored.

“He thinks it all nonsense—same as I do,” Sybil made answer. “He has told these over-clever gentlemen to leave the thing alone, and I expect if he finds out what the General is up to that he’ll turn them both out of the house and give Mr. Forsyth his dismissal. Of course, you won’t say anything—will you?—because I’m only a poor relation, and I can’t afford to offend people.”

“I am discretion itself. What is General Sadgrove up to, dear?” was the reply.

Sybil’s pretty mouth bent close to confide the startling fact that the General was going to London in the morning with the intention of bearding Mr. Ziegler in his den—otherwise, in his rooms at the Cecil. If he should be refused permission to see Ziegler, or, seeing him, should be unable to satisfy himself of his respectability, he was going straight on to Scotland Yard to impart his suspicions to the authorities. Sybil sketched the carrying out of this amazing programme and its probable consequences with much animation and ridicule, but her hearer’s interest tailed off into undisguised indifference, ending in a deliberate yawn.

“What a very stupid affair!” Mrs. Talmage Eglinton murmured. “Do you know, it has made me quite sleepy, and—and I think I’ll go to bed. I have started a real, clawing, hammering headache. Shouldn’t wonder if I am not laid up to-morrow.”

Nodding a good-night to the others, she rose and swept from the room, followed by Sybil, who, profusely sympathetic, insisted on accompanying her to her own apartments. At the door of the latter a dark-eyed, slender woman, in a black dress with broad white collar and cuffs, was standing. This was Rosa, the French maid, on whose services Mrs. Talmage Eglinton professed herself entirely dependent.

“One of my headaches, Rosa. The pink draught—quickly!” cried the incipient invalid, and pausing on the threshold she bade an affectionate good-night to her girlish admirer. “I am not really ill—only a little run down,” she assured her. “I do hope I shan’t have to keep my room to-morrow.”

The brilliant vision of Parisian elegance having vanished into the room, Sybil made her way downstairs, and in the hall encountered General Sadgrove, who wore a light overcoat over his evening things and a gray felt hat. He was engaged in wiping the wet from his patent-leather shoes with his handkerchief, but looked up on Sybil’s approach, and, removing his hat, went on with his occupation.

“Still raining?” said Sybil, carelessly.

“Like the very—I mean, like it used to in the monsoon,” the General checked himself.

No more passed, except a slight raising of the old soldier’s eyebrows and a corresponding droop of one of the lady’s eyelids. The General having restored the gloss to his footgear and doffed his overcoat, they went on with linked arms to the tapestry-room, where, however, the party shortly broke up, the ladies to retire for the night, and the men to go to the smoking-room. The Duke remained but a short time, leaving the General and Forsyth with the playful remark that he was growing quite bold after two days’ immunity, and hoped they would not sit up all night—which was exactly what one or other of them had been doing ever since they came to Prior’s Tarrant, and, moreover, what they intended to do for the present.

“Sybil has done her part,” said the General, as soon as he was alone with his nephew. “And I have prepared Azimoolah to be on the lookout for results. He tells me that the men in the dog-cart were outside the park wall again last night, and that there was the same exhibition of a red lamp in that infernal French maid’s window.”

“An abortive attempt at communication?” asked Forsyth.

“That or something worse,” replied the General. “It may only be that the woman inside wants to confer with her confederates without; or it may be that the red lamp is a signal to them not to approach any nearer or try to get into the house. I incline to the latter being the explanation, as on each occasion the men in the cart have driven off immediately on seeing the red lamp, and there has been no attempt at short or long flashes, or any sort of code talk, Azimoolah tells me. In either case, it points to those beauties upstairs being aware that you and I are on guard, and that any attempt on their part to give admission to outsiders would be frustrated.”

“But if she knows that a watch is being kept, surely madam will not dare to leave the house?” suggested Forsyth, in the tentative tone that was necessary to preserve his uncle’s good humor.

“If she does, it will show that she’s cornered, and that Sybil’s guess has hit the bull’s eye,” said the General, adding, with a significant grimace, “a preparatory headache has been started already. You had better go to bed and leave me to see to the commencement of the cure.”

Two hours later Azimoolah Khan, lying flattened out like a huge lizard on the parapet of the terrace, and thanking Allah that the rain had ceased, suddenly pricked up his ears and thanked Allah again that the time for relieving his cramped limbs had come. At first his ears were the only part of his body affected by the slight sound he had heard, but some thirty seconds later, keeping the rest of him motionless, he goggled his eyes round to one of the ground-floor windows and saw—seeing in the dark was one of his accomplishments—a female figure turn from it and flit along the terrace towards the steps leading down to the park. Waiting till the figure had gained the lower level, he slid from the parapet and gave noiseless chase.

The woman in front spared no precaution to guard against pursuit. She stopped many times and listened; she doubled on her tracks; and as soon as she reached the woodland belt she proved to be an expert in the art of taking cover. But she had to do with probably the most wily exponent of woodcraft at that moment in England, and her pursuer was never at fault. Dark as the night was, Azimoolah never lost her for an instant. With sinuous movements that never caused a twig to crack, the lithe Pathan was always creeping, gliding, dodging close behind, till he stopped within ten paces of the park wall, and from the shelter of an oak trunk watched his quarry nimbly climb the obstacle. No sooner had she disappeared than he swung himself to the top of the wall, and peered over just as a horse broke into a trot on the other side.

Piercing the gloom, his keen sight distinguished the shape of a fast-receding rubber-tired dog-cart, in which three figures were seated; and, having fulfilled his mission, he dropped back to the ground. In a few minutes he was on the terrace again, hissing like a cobra outside the smoking-room. General Sadgrove opened the French casement.

“The daughter of Sheitan came from the fifth window, and has gone away, even as the sahib predicted, in the cart with two men,” Azimoolah reported.

“Which road did they take?”

“To the left—the Senalban road, sahib.”’

“St. Albans, eh? Then she’s going to catch the 3.15 up night mail,” muttered the General. “Well, good-night, old jungle-wallah. You’ve got your orders,” he added, closing and bolting the window.

The next morning there were two absentees from the breakfast-table—General Sadgrove, who by overnight arrangement had breakfasted by himself, so as to be driven to Tarrant Road in time for the nine o’clock train to town, and Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who was confined to her bed by a bad headache. The news of the indisposition was imparted to Sybil by the maid Rosa at her mistress’s door, and was accompanied by a regretful but firm refusal of admission to the patient.

“Madame is so désolée not to receive you, ma’amselle, but she ’ave ze malady too strr-rong for speak even with her dearest friend,” was the ultimatum which sent Miss Hanbury from the door with a doleful face, which somehow took quite a different expression when she had turned the corner.

For some mysterious reason her aloofness from her lover vanished that morning, and she and Forsyth were on the best of terms. They spent two hours together wandering in the park, where in one of the more remote glades Azimoolah flitted up to them from the bushes, and, regarding Sybil with awe-struck veneration, made a deep salaam and was gone. The Duke, who had given his word of honor to the General not to go beyond the park gates, passed the time partly with his bailiff and partly strolling with Leonie in the gardens and glass-houses. The friendship between Beaumanoir and his beautiful guest, so promisingly begun on board the St. Paul, seemed to have lost ground. Though he was much in her society, he avoided intimate topics, and often puzzled her with a hastily averted look of wistful tenderness in strange contrast to his assiduous but commonplace hospitality.

Half an hour before luncheon General Sadgrove, returning on foot from the station and looking five years older for his run up to London, met the two young couples, who had now joined forces, as they were entering the mansion. Forsyth gave his uncle an anxious glance of inquiry, but the old man passed him by unheeding, and addressed the Duke in a tone of icy formality.

“I shall be obliged if your Grace will give me five minutes in the library on a very urgent matter,” he said, adding, with significant emphasis, “I have been with Mr. Ziegler this morning.”

Beaumanoir, gone all pale and tremulous, made a palpable effort at self-control as he replied:

“Come into the library by all means, General. But I am afraid you will find me quite as reticent as I am sure Ziegler was.”

The interview lasted till long after the luncheon gong had sounded, and when at length the Duke and the General entered the dining-room two pairs of watchful eyes observed that their relative attitudes had been reversed. The General’s usually impassive face was working so painfully that Mrs. Sadgrove half rose from her chair at sight of her husband, checking herself with difficulty; while the Duke bore himself almost jauntily, and began chaffing Sybil about her devotion to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who was still, by latest bulletin from Rosa, “suffering ze grand torments” and unable to leave her room.

The afternoon passed without external signs that the house-party was living on the verge of an active volcano. But as it was growing dusk Forsyth, at the risk of being late for dinner, took a solitary walk in the direction of a certain stile, by which the Prior’s Tarrant pastures were approached by a short cut across fields from Tarrant Road railway station. He arrived at the stile in the nick of time to give a helping hand to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who had just reached the spot from the opposite direction. The hour was the one when the guests at the house might be expected to be dressing for dinner, and it also tallied with the arrival of a London train at the station; but neither alluded to these incidentals of such an obviously chance meeting.

“I trust that your headache is better,” said Forsyth, politely.

But the headache, he was assured, was rather worse than better. The sufferer averred that she had slipped out an hour before, to go for a quiet walk in the meadows in the hope of obtaining relief; but the remedy had been of no avail, and all that remained was to go back to bed.

“Won’t you walk back with me?” Mrs. Talmage Eglinton added, devouring the young Scotsman’s healthy, good-looking face with eyes of invitation. “I don’t seem ever to get you alone nowadays.”

“I am very sorry, but I have to go a little further,” replied Forsyth, and, raising his hat, he passed on. But it was a very little way further that he had to go, for at the end of the first meadow he turned and followed in the lady’s wake back to the mansion, catching, as he did so, a glimpse of Azimoolah moving stealthily in the bushes at the side of the path.

That night the post-bag which one of the Prior’s Tarrant grooms conveyed to the office in the village contained a letter addressed to “Clinton Ziegler, Esqre.,” at the Hotel Cecil, couched thus:

“The gentleman interviewed in the Bowery, New York, by Mr. Jevons on your behalf has reconsidered the matter, and is now prepared to carry out his commitment. He is so shaken by recent occurrences that he does not feel up to coming himself till he has received assurances, but his secretary will call at the hotel on Monday for instructions, which please hand to the secretary in writing and carefully sealed.”