A Fascinating Traitor Part 16

The old nabob's heart leaped up in a welcome relief at this command. His wrinkled face was of the hue of yellowed ivory, and his cold blue eyes were weak and watery, as he heavily lurched into a chair facing his hostess. Courage and craft had not failed him, for already Douglas Fraser was speeding on to Delhi from Calcutta, the sole occupant of a special train. In the long vigil of the night, Hugh Johnstone had evolved a plan to ward off the blow of the sword of Fate! But watchfully silent he awaited his enemy's conversational attack.

"d.a.m.n her! I will outwit her yet!" he silently swore.

"Before you give me your answer, Hugh Fraser," said the calm-voiced woman, "I wish to tell you again what, in your mad jealousy, you would not believe. I swear to you that Pierre Troubetskoi's letter, written to my dead sister, was written in ignorance of her marriage with you. The frightful scenes of the carnage of Paris had tossed us to and fro, and the careless destruction of the envelope, addressed to my sister under her maiden name, prevented me from proving her innocence as a wife.

Pierre Troubetskoi had long known my father, who had been an attache in Russia. He was Valerie's knightly suitor. And he fell into the estates which now burden me with wealth, while absent upon the Czar's secret affairs. My gallant old father was sacrificed to the frenzy of the time; his soldier's face betrayed him, his rosette of the Legion doomed him, Troubetskoi's letter to our father demanding Valerie's hand was returned to the writer, through the Russian Legation, a year later, after the reorganization of the Paris Post-office. I do not ask you to believe this, but by the G.o.d of Heaven, it is my warrant for forcing myself to the side of my dead sister's child. She shall yet have every acre and every rouble that Pierre Troubetskoi would have given to this child whom you hide. My sister died with her empty arms stretched to Heaven, imploring G.o.d for her child. And now, what terms will you make with me.

In the one case, an armed peace; in the other, 'war to the knife!'"

"What would you have?" he stubbornly muttered. "You seek my ruin."

"I do not!" solemnly answered Berthe Louison. "G.o.d has blasted your life in denying you the love of your own child. You rule her by fear. You, in your selfish pa.s.sion, once reached out your strong hand and crushed this girl's mother, a poor, fragile flower, in her girlhood. Valerie believed Pierre to be dead or false when she timidly crossed the threshold of the wedded home which you made a prison for her! You only care for this bubble Baronetcy and for your heaped-up h.o.a.rds. The tribute of the shrieking ryot! Now, here are my terms: I will go down with you to Calcutta, and deliver over to you there the receipt for the deposit of jewels which holds back your coveted honor. You may do with them as you will! A visit to the Viceroy will at once clear the path. Tell any story you will of their recovery. An underling's unfaithfulness or the loss of the paper. You may remove them and surrender them as you will. Perhaps a fanciful discovery of their hiding-place here, their surrender by Hindu thieves, frightened at last; any of these conventional lies will clear your official record of the olden stain. Long years ago I would have treated with you, but I wanted to find the child. You hid her away from me. I found you out by chance in your changed name and new official residence."

"And your terms?" demanded Johnstone. He saw, with lightning cunning, a pathway leading him out of his troubles. The vigil of the night before had borne its fruit already.

"That I have free access to your house and home. That I shall be the honored guest at your table. That I shall be left in no dubious social standing here. That I may see your daughter, learn to know her, and you may prudently arrange the story I am to tell her later. As Madame Berthe Louison, a tourist of wealth, an art dilettante, a French woman of rank and position, your social guaranty will keep the pack of human wolves away from my retreat here. I have my papers to prove all this."

"When must this be? Before I receive the jewels? Before my t.i.tle to the baronetcy is perfected? What guaranty have I?" he replied.

"My honor alone! I pledge you now that I will not make myself known to Nadine until you have received the jewels and the Crown has obtained its long sequestered property. We are to come back here together. The future relations can be decided upon when I have satisfied my natural affection; when your innocently besmirched record has been righted."

Hugh Johnstone's silvered head was bowed for a long interval in his trembling hands. "You will not betray me to the authorities, when all is done? Your lips shall be sealed as to the past?" Alixe Delavigne bowed in silence. "Then I accept your terms upon one condition only: That until we return from Calcutta, you will only see Nadine in my presence or in that of Mademoiselle Delande, her governess. It is only fair. When you have restored to me the jewels, you can then concert with me upon a plan to enlighten Nadine, with no scandal to me, no heart-break to her.

The slightest gossip as to a family skeleton reaching the Viceroy or the home authorities would lead to my public disgrace."

Alixe Delavigne paced the room in silence for a few moments, while Hugh Johnstone's eyes were fixed upon the opened cabinet whence Jules Victor had so fiercely sprung forth as a champion.

"Be it so!" sternly replied Alixe Delavigne. "And may G.o.d confound and punish the one who breaks the pact."

"When do you wish to come? When can you go to Calcutta? I would like to hasten matters," demanded the old nabob, with his eyes averted. The beautiful woman paused, and after a moment replied:

"To-morrow, come here and bring me to your house to dine. This afternoon you may call here and drive me over Delhi in your carriage. This will set a public seal upon our acquaintance. My maid can accompany us. This done, I will go to Calcutta with my two European servants, as you wish.

You can take the train on either the preceding or the following day. It will avoid both spies and gossip."

"I will go before you and await you!" eagerly said Hugh Johnstone, rising. "I will ask another person to dine with us to-morrow, and this evening I will prepare my daughter for the dinner, so that your coming will be no surprise to her. Shall I bring my carriage here at four to-day?"

"I will await you," gravely said Alixe Delavigne, as she bowed in answer to her guest's formal signal of departure.

An hour later Jules Victor reported to his mistress: "We drove to the telegraph office, where I awaited the gentleman for some time, and then we repaired to his home."

There was a disgruntled man whose curses upon his kinsman's changing moods were both loud and deep when Douglas Fraser received a telegram that night at Allahabad. "Is the old man crazy?" he demanded, as he read the words: "Wait at Allahabad for me. Keep shady. With you in three days. Telegraph your address." The canny young Scot thought of a coming legacy and obeyed the head of his clan.

Madame Berthe Louison, as Delhi was destined to know her, lingered long over her afternoon driving toilet. There was a recurring fear which made her tremble. "Would Hugh Johnstone divulge the facts as to the jewels to the Viceroy, and so gain his free rehabilitation-and then defy her?

No-no! He never would dare!" she answered. "My agents are even now watching that bank. The bank would never give up the sealed packages contents unknown, save on surrender of the carefully drawn receipts."

And then Berthe remembered her own secret work at Calcutta. The Grindlays knew of the surrept.i.tious attempts made by the plausible Hugh Fraser to withdraw the deposit long before the baronetcy episode. And Berthe laughed, in memory of her capture of the receipts in the old days at Brighton, while looking for the stolen letter.

Long before that rising star of fashion, Major Alan Hawke, returned from General Willoughby's delightful dinner upon the day of Hugh Johnstone's crafty surrender, he knew that Hugh Johnstone had astounded Delhi by a personal exploitation of the Lady of the Silver Bungalow.

"By Gad! Hawke!" roared old Brigadier Willoughby, with his mouth full of chutney, "Johnstone is going the pace! First he produces a daughter, a hidden treasure, and now this wonderfully beautiful French countess."

"I suppose, General," lightly said the Major, "the old nabob will marry and retire to Europe on his coming baronetcy."

"Likely enough!" sputtered Willoughby. "You lucky young dog. I suppose you are in the secret?"

But neither that night, nor two days later, at Major Hawke's superb dinner at the Delhi Club, did the jeunesse doree of the old capital extract an admission from that mysterious "secret service" man, Major Alan Hawke. "You cannot deny, Hawke, that you dined at the marble house with the beauty whom we are all toasting," said a rallying roisterer.

"And--with the Veiled Rose of Delhi!" said another, still more eagerly.

"It is true, gentlemen" gravely said Major Hawke, "that I was invited to dinner at the marble house, but Madame Louison is a stranger to me, and I believe a tourist of some rank. It was merely a formal affair.

I believe that she brought letters from Paris to Hugh Johnstone." Late that night Alan Hawke laughed, as he pocketed his winnings at baccarat.

"Three hundred pounds to the good! I'm a devil for luck!" And he sat down in his room to think over all the events of a day which had half turned his head. Warned by Justine Delande that Madame Louison was bidden to dine with Hugh Johnstone, Alan Hawke closely interrogated her.

She evidently knew and suspected nothing. "Ah! Berthe plays a lone hand against the world," he smiled.

His mysterious employer had merely bidden him be ready to meet her there, without surprise. There was as yet no lightning move up on the chess board, and in vain he studied her resolute, smiling face. "All I can tell you," murmured Justine to her handsome Mentor, in the seclusion of Ram Lal's back room, "is that this Madame Berthe Louison comes to spend the day in looking over Hugh Johnstone's art treasures. Nadine and I are to meet her, with the master. Do you know aught of her?"

"Nothing, dear Justine," unhesitatingly lied Alan Hawke. "Watch her and tell me all."

"I will," smilingly replied the Swiss. "I have a strange fear that Hugh Johnstone has known her before, that he intends to marry her, and then to send us two, Nadine and I, away to a quiet life in Europe." Whereupon Alan Hawke laughed loud and long.

"She is only a bird of pa.s.sage, some wealthy globe wanderer, perhaps even a sly adventuress. No, old Johnstone will not tempt Fortune."

"He has been so unusually amiable," agnostically said Justine. "Of course he could hide such a design easily from Nadine, who knows nothing of love."

"She will learn! She will learn--in due time," laughed Hawke. "There is but one thing possible. This whole pretended visit may be a sham--she may even be the belle amie of this old curmudgeon."

"I will watch all three of them! You shall know all!" murmured Justine, as she stole away, not without the kisses of her secret knight burning upon her lips.

"What a consummate actress!" mused Alan Hawke, when, for the first time, since Nadine Johnstone's arrival, a formal dinner party enlivened the dull monotony of the marble house. The round table, set for five, gave Hugh Johnstone the strategic advantage of separating his secret enemy from his blushing daughter. Hawke demurely paid his devoirs to Madame Justine Delande, with a finely studied inattention to either the guest of the evening or the beautiful girl who only murmured a few words when presented to her father's only visitor. "I wonder if Justine, poor soul, will see the resemblance?" It had been a triumph of art, Madame Berthe Louison's magnificent dinner toilette, those rich robes which effaced the opening-rose beauty of the slim girl in the simplicity of her rare Indian lawn frock. Rich color and flowers and diamonds heightened the splendid loveliness of the woman who "looked like a queen in a play that night."

Alas, for Justine Delande, she was so busied with her mute telegraphy to Alan Hawke that she never saw the startling family likeness of the two women so eagerly watched by Hugh Johnstone. But the keen-eyed Alan Hawke saw the girl's fascinated gaze. He noted her virginal bosom heaving in a new and strange emotion. He marked the tender challenge of her dreamy eyes as Berthe Louison's loving soul spoke out to the radiant young beauty only held away from her heart by the stern old skeleton at the feast.

The long-drawn-out splendors of the feast were over, and the ladies had, at last, retired. Hawke observed the stony glare with which Johnstone whispered a few words of command to Justine Delande, when the two men sought the smoking-room.

The door was hardly closed upon them when the coffee and cigars were served, when Johnstone, striding forward, locked the door.

"See here, Hawke!" abruptly said the host "I want you to serve me to-night, and to stand by me while this she-devil is in Delhi. I've got to run down to Calcutta on business for a few days. She will not be here. She has some business of her own down there, also. First, find out for me, for G.o.d's sake, all about her. How she came here; where she hides in Europe; who her friends are. When you are able to, you can follow her over the world. I'll foot the bill, as the Yankees say.

"Now, to-night, I wish you to take your leave conventionally. Get away at once, and go immediately and telegraph to Anstruther in London. No, don't deny you are intimate with him. I know it. Telegraph him that I am in a position, now, to trace out and restore those missing jewels. The secret of their hiding is mine at last. Here's a hundred pounds. Don't spare your words. Within a month they will be in the hands of the Viceroy. I have to play a part to get them--a dangerous part. I pledge my whole estate to back this. But I must have my Baronetcy so that I can leave India, for I fear the vengeance of the devils who robbed the captured Princes of Oude.

"Once in England, I am safe. I'll not leave till I get the Baronetcy, and the jewels will not be delivered up until I get it. I am closely watched here."

Hawke's eyes burned fiercely. "And if I was to take the train and tell the Viceroy this?" he boldly said.

"Then I would say that you had lied--that is all."

"What do I get?" coolly demanded Hawke.

"Five thousand pounds the day that I get my Baronetcy," quietly replied Johnstone.

"I'll not do it," hotly cried Hawke. "You might say I lied," he sneered.

"I want it now!"

The two men glared at each other in a mutual distrust. Hugh Johnstone pondered a moment, and said deliberately: