The Island of Intrigue/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII.
The Last Word.
THE next few minutes were like a dream to me forever after. A rising cheer rang in my ears as we darted swiftly forward, and it must have reached the cutter with its message, for my precious Daddy waved the megaphone wildly over his head and danced about, bellowing inarticulately. Another man had joined him, and it seemed as if they were both about to leap into the sea.
We reached the cutter's side and strong arms bore me up the ladder, but it was not until I felt Daddy's arms about me, and his rough, shaggy coat pressing my cheek, that I came fully to my senses.
I clung to him as if I would never let him go, sobbing his name over and over, and he caressed me with a trembling, blundering hand. When I put up my face to kiss him I found that he was crying, too.
"Little Princess!" he gulped. "Daddy's little, stolen girl!"
His great strong body was shaken with sobs, and the tears rolled unashamed down his face. I had never seen a man cry before in all my life and I tried, in a half-frightened way, to console him.
"Daddy, dear, it's all right now, I'm safe! Don't, dear, I can't bear it!"
"They haven't harmed you, my baby? You're sure they haven't ill-treated you?" his voice broke harshly.
"No, Daddy! They didn't hurt me! It's all over now, Gilbert has brought me back to you!"
The man beside Daddy, who had been patting both our shoulders and coughing and choking suspiciously himself, suddenly grasped my arm and demanded:
"Who!"
"Gilbert Spear." I turned to him in surprise at his exclamation. He was a stranger to me, and an older man than Daddy, quite stout and bald and shining. "He saved me from them," I explained. "He rescued me from that island where they held me prisoner. Oh, where is he? What has been done with him?"
"God bless my soul!" the stout man's voice rang out in a shrill cry: "He's my boy!"
And he raced off down the deck with surprising agility, while Daddy tucked me under his arm and followed.
Gilbert didn't die. He had lost consciousness from loss of blood, but the surgeon brought him around long before we reached the mainland. We didn't have to tell Daddy anything, either. The way my arms closed around Gilbert, when they let me go to him, and the way his eyes sought mine when consciousness first returned, must have explained the situation between us far more completely than we could have done, for although nothing was said at the moment, I saw Daddy and Gilbert's father over in the corner shaking hands and clapping each other on the back, and then Gilbert drew me down and kissed me right before them.
Just then Laddie came hobbling in on three legs and nearly wagged his little screw tail off, and I hugged him and broke down and cried again; I didn't know why.
The revenue cutter had picked us up several miles out at sea, so it was as I feared. Gilbert in the storm and darkness and his pain, had lost his bearings. It was quite two hours before we reached the mainland, and in the meantime, after I had breakfasted and tidied myself as best I could, the chief of police, who was on board, as well as a higher official from Washington, who had been with Daddy and Arnold Spear throughout the search for me, came in to hear both our stories. I carefully kept my unspoken promise to Nicolette, and did not reveal the part she had taken in our escape, and Gilbert followed my lead, pretending that he himself had broken out of the lighthouse, and that we had found Laddie, crippled, on the beach of the cove. I told every other detail that I could remember which might have any possible bearing on the conspiracy, from the moment the doors of Miss Farmingdale's had closed behind me, even to that cry in the night and the flowerbed which was never completed, and which looked so much like a grave.
The chief could scarcely restrain his amazement when I told him of Herman Goebel and Connie Cole, and I wish I could have had a photograph of Daddy's face at the mention of May Grady and the role she had played.
"I know who they all are now," the chief remarked, when I had finished. "Pelissier is that scoundrel's real name, as it happens, although he's traveled under many another in his time, and Nicolette is his wife. They're infernally clever swindlers and confidence workers of the first grade, and they're wanted from Petersburg to Frisco, Scotland Yard to Cape Town. Years ago, before they met, Pelissier was a steamship crook and card-sharp, and this Alaric must have been his old side-partner, 'Kid-Glove' Craigen. Nicolette was arrested the day you disappeared, Miss Waring, in the lobby of the Hotel Blenheim, for turning a trick in Los Angeles a year ago, but she escaped. Goebel's been a menace for years, but we've got something on him at last, which will put him away for life. May Grady's been up to Auburn twice for grand larceny; posed as a visiting manicure and made off with family jewels. But Connie Cole's the queen of the lot! I congratulate you, Miss Waring, on discovering their identity so cleverly—you would have made a splendid detective. We'll drop you people ashore and go back and bag the lot."
"Not me, you won't!" Daddy declared. "Arnold, you and your boy can look after Maida for a few hours I guess. It looks to me as if Gilbert meant to, anyway, in the future, and if he succeeds as well as he has in the past, I can't ask any more! But I'm going to have one crack at that gang that stole my little girl, if I have to row myself back to that island in the broken-down cockshell we found her in, and I'll be there before the rest of you, at that! I want to get at 'em, that's all!"
But the officials overruled him and we were all four landed at Kittery and made comfortable in a neat, modest little hostelry. I rested, and the proprietor's daughter, round-eyed with wonder, lent me some clothes and I felt almost myself again.
The village went mad with excitement at the news of our coming, and the furore extended to Portsmouth, so that in a few hours the narrow streets were thronged. We were sheltered securely from publicity in our rooms at the hotel, however, and Daddy managed to get hold of a stenographer and dictated telegrams until he was hoarse.
Then he came into the big sunny sitting-room where Arnold Spear and I sat on either side of Gilbert's conch, while Laddie, all trussed up in splints, lay curled at his feet Mr. Spear was telling us how it was that the revenue cutter happened so opportunely to be in our vicinity. Some false clue had taken them—he and Daddy and the Washington official—as far as Boston, when, as I had supposed, Raoul Pelissier had sent that wireless offering fresh terms, to Daddy's secretary in New York, who had promptly forwarded the message. They had thereupon started out at once in the cutter to search the country adjacent to the wireless stations from which the girded but unmistakable proposition had come, and it must have been the sight of them cruising about the island on the day preceding my escape which had caused uneasiness to Goebel and his associates. At sundown they had made a wide detour out to sea, consequently the detonation of the explosive did not reach them, although they saw the glow of the flames but had thought it a bonfire at some beach on the mainland.
Two police boats had gone with the revenue cutter to the island, after putting us ashore, and we all awaited their return in indescribable suspense. Gilbert and I told his father and mine privately of the aid Nicolette had rendered us. I was determined to help her in some way if she were captured, and I saw that the others were of my mind, too, although Daddy said very little. Aside from dictating his telegrams he had been strangely silent all day.
When he did speak his mind at last, curiously enough, the indignation he expressed in trenchant, unqualified terms was directed, not so much against Herman Goebel, the ring-leader of the whole conspiracy, as against the two women, Connie Cole and May Grady. What he said about the latter alone was quite unprintable, but when he cooled down a trifle, a remark which he made to Mr. Spear concerning them both was characteristic.
"By George, Arnold, old man!" he exclaimed. "I thought I was pretty wise, but the Grady girl sold my office secrets and then helped hoodwink Maida; Connie Cole got to me first for thirty thousand, and then for my daughter! I guess I wouldn't be the first fool on record who'd been done twice by the same woman, but this goes double and takes in the lookout! Two scores apiece by the same two women! By Gad, I ought to be Oslerized!"
The afternoon passed, and just at dusk the proprietor knocked at the door, and called Daddy outside. He was gone more than an hour, and when he returned, he looked very grave and stern, as if he had received some kind of a shock, too.
"When you blew up their boathouse, Gilbert, you did for two of them," he said, in a significant tone. "Pelissier and Craigen have gone to their account."
"Poor Nicolette!" I cried softly, my thoughts darting swiftly to the unhappy wife, but no one heard me except Gilbert and he only pressed my hand, quietly.
"Goebel's injured, but he'll live, I hope, to spend a few wholesome years in prison," Daddy went on. "The chief got them all. The women aren't hurt. I saw them just now in the lockup, and that she-devil, Connie Cole, had the brass to laugh in my face and tell me I was beginning to show my age! They can't get the French one to say a word, but the Grady girl's cornered like a rat in a trap, and telling all she knows. Maida" he turned to me suddenly. "I don't want to distress you now, Little Princess, but that sailor on the yacht whom you told all of us about this morning—the one who picked up your handkerchief and called you 'Miss Smith' and whom you overheard talking in an insolent tone to Craigen just before you landed—didn't you say he was fair-haired, and very broad shouldered and tanned, with bold prominent eyes?"
"Yes," I replied, and without knowing why, I began to tremble.
"Well," continued Daddy. "You'll have to hear it at the time of the trial, anyway, and you may as well learn the truth now. His body was in that grave which you concluded was a flowerbed!"
I cried out, but Gilbert's hand on my shoulder stilled my rising horror.
"It must have been his death-cry you heard the night of your arrival," Daddy remarked. "When you told the chief of your suspicions concerning the grave, he made a point of having the spot dug up, and when they found him they confronted the Grady girl with the evidence, as she was the easiest to approach. Wild with terror she was eager to wash her hands of any complicity in the murder, and swore she knew nothing about it until after it was all over. It seems that this sailor, Ole Larsen, had been previously employed on ocean liners and recognized Pelissier and Craigen at once as crooks who had been posted in the smoking room. He wondered what new game they were up to, and became convinced that it centered around you, Maida, when he found you were not Miss Smith, as he had been given to understand. Just before you landed he approached Craigen with the idea of intimidating him into paying hush money. He didn't have any idea what the scheme was, but he knew there was something crooked in the wind. The yacht had only been hired for the occasion, so of course it would never have done to let him get away from the island with the information he already possessed. Craigen made an appointment with him for late that night, and then he and Pelissier did for the fellow—garrotted him, in true Apache fashion. May Grady doesn't know how they succeeded in explaining his defection to the Captain of the yacht, so that he would sail the next morning without the Swede; they probably said he had deserted, or was going to stay and care for the motor boats. I wouldn't be too sorry for him, Maida. He tried to blackmail, remember, and he only got what was coming to him."
"It seems terrible, though!" I exclaimed. "No wonder I had that presentiment about the flower-bed!"
"And you never would tell me what frightened you so, the day you fell in on my tea-party!" Gilbert said, reproachfully.
"It seemed too silly!" I confessed. "I was afraid you would laugh at me!"
"Laugh at you!" Gilbert added some more, but it hasn't anything to do with this story.
And indeed, there is little more to tell. The day after our rescue, the real Aunt Julie, with her family, arrived in a special car from Boston, and as soon as I saw her I wondered how I had ever been taken in for a moment by Connie Cole's burlesque of her, although the imitation of her voice and appearance had been remarkably done. Alaric was a good-looking, attractive boy, and he and Gilbert grew quite chummy almost at once, while Bijou was exquisite and dainty and fairy like. But it was the true Lorna who nearly took my breath away. Nicolette's representation of her had been marvelous, a superb exhibition of dramatic art. Indeed, so life-like had it appeared that I was uncomfortable at first in the presence of the real girl, as if an uncanny sense of dual personality oppressed me, but it wore away in time.
Mrs. Smith insisted vigorously on going to the prison and having a look at the culprits there, and when she returned she told much which helped to clear up the situation.
Connie Cole, posing as a wealthy Denver widow, Mrs. Collins, had met her casually in Europe and learned that she was an old time friend of ours. Months later, in America, evidently looking for more details about us, when the adventuress had been drawn into Herman Goebel's scheme, she looked up Mrs. Smith and wormed her way into our friend's confidence. Nicolette, for the same purpose of obtaining data concerning us, had worked for Mrs. Smith for several months as a French maid.
The rest came out later at the trial. The original idea of the band had been to steal me in Europe that summer, and May Grady had been sent to Daddy's office to learn what she could about him and his plans. Incidentally, she had sold his business secrets for her own private profit.
When they learned that our plans had changed and I was to visit Mrs. Smith, it appeared as if fate had played directly into their hands and they hurriedly arranged for their little coup.
The motorcar in which I had been conveyed from school to the yacht had been purchased and altered for that one occasion into an exact replica of Mrs. Smith's. The yacht itself, as well as the house on the island, had been rented for the season from perfectly unsuspecting respectable owners, and the servants, except Lucie, were absolutely innocent of any complicity in the scheme.
Raoul Pelissier had forged my two letters from Daddy, postmarks and all, and I might have discovered their plot far earlier than I did, if I had not unwittingly betrayed the fact that I knew Mr. Hilton, but not Mr. Fordyce, thereby giving them an opportunity to warn Herman Goebel to change the character in which he presented himself to me.
The result of the trial is known to all the world; how Connie Cole and Herman Goebel were sent to prison for life and May Grady and Nicolette Pelissier received terms of twenty years each. Nicolette is still in prison. Daddy says it is too soon to attempt to do anything toward her release, but I happen to know that he is privately pulling a few influential wires, and it will not be long before on some so-called technicality, the doors of the prison will swing open for her, and she will be spirited away to some forgotten corner of her beloved France, to make of the shattered fragments of her life what she may. Of the others I try not to think.
Daddy didn't leave me, after all, that summer. He announced pretty plainly where that European business could go to, and we all spent the rest of the season with Mrs. Smith. Daddy neglected his business shamefully and hung about me every moment that his idea of tact didn't suggest his leaving Gilbert and me alone together, and we had a perfectly lovely time.
We're going to Europe this summer, though, all of us together. That's why Gilbert and I went to Palm Beach on our honeymoon.
THE END.