Cleek of Scotland Yard Part 27

But of a sudden the old crooked smile looped up the corner of his mouth; he stood at attention for a moment or two, breathing hard through his nostrils, and moving not at all until, abruptly starting into activity, he walked rapidly down the pavement and joined Narkom.

"Well?" queried the superintendent, looking up at him quizzically.

"Come to any decision, old chap?"

"Yes--and so will you in a second. Don't turn--don't do anything hastily. Just look across the street, at the jeweller's window, opposite, and tell me what you think of it."

Narkom's swift, sidelong glance travelled over the distance like a gunshot, arrowed through the small collection of persons gathered about the shop window inspecting the display of trinkets, and every nerve in his body jumped.

"Good G.o.d! Waldemar!" he said, under his breath.

"Exactly. I told you he knew how to wait. Now look farther along the kerb on this side. The closed carriage waiting there. It was dawdling along and keeping pace with him when I saw it first. The man on the box is a fellow named Serpice--an Apache. _Chut!_ Be still, will you?--and look the other way. They will do me no harm--_here_. It isn't their game, and, besides, they daren't. It is too public, too dangerous. It will be done, when it is done, in the dark--when I'm alone, and none can see. And Waldemar will not be there. He will direct, but not partic.i.p.ate. But it won't be to-day nor yet to-night, I promise you. I shall slip them this time if never again."

The superintendent spoke, but the hard hammering of his heart made his voice scarcely audible.

"How?" he asked. "How?"

"Come and see!" said Cleek for yet a third time. Then with an abruptness and a swiftness that carried everything before it, he caught Narkom by the arm, swept him across the street, and without hint or warning tapped Waldemar upon the shoulder.

"Ah, bon jour, Monsieur le Comte," he said airily, as the Mauravanian swung round and looked at him, blanching a trifle in spite of himself. "So you are back in England, it seems? Ah, well, we like you so much--tell his Majesty when next you report--that this time we shall try to keep you here."

Taken thus by a.s.sault, the man had no words in which to answer, but merely wormed his way out of the gathering about him and, panic stricken, obliterated himself in the crowd of pedestrians teeming up and down the street.

"You reckless devil!" wheezed Narkom as he was swept back to the limousine in the same cyclonic manner he had been swept away from it.

"You might have made the man savage enough to do something to you, even in spite of the publicity, by such a proceeding as that."

"That is precisely what I had hoped to do, my friend, but you perceive he is no fool to be trapped into that. We should have had some excuse for arresting him if he had done a thing of that sort, some charge to prefer against him, whereas, as matters stand, there's not one we can bring forward that holds good in law or that we could _prove_ if our lives depended upon it. You see now, I hope, Mr. Narkom, why you have seen nothing of him lately?"

"No--why?"

"You have not used the red limousine, and he has been lying low ready to follow that, just as I suspected he would. If he couldn't trace where Cleek goes to meet the red limousine, clearly then the plan to be adopted must be to follow the red limousine and see where it goes to meet Cleek, and then to follow that much-wanted individual when he parts from you and makes his way home. That is the thing the fellow is after. To find out where I live and to 'get' me some night out there. But, my friend, 'turn about is fair play' the world over, and having had his inning at hunting me, I'm going in for mine at hunting him. I'll get him; I'll trap him into something for which he can be turned over to the law--make no mistake about that."

"My hat! What do you mean to do?"

"First and foremost, make my getaway out of the present little corner," he replied, "and then rely upon your a.s.sistance in finding out where the beggar is located. We're not done with him even for to-day. He will follow--either he or Serpice: perhaps both--the instant Lennard starts off with us."

"You are going back with us in the limousine, then?"

"Yes--part of the way. Drive on, Lennard, until you can spot a plain-clothes man, then give him the signal to follow us. At the first station on the Tube or the Underground, pull up sharp and let me out. You, Mr. Narkom, alight with me and stand guard at the station entrance while I go down to the train. If either Waldemar or an Apache makes an attempt to follow, arrest him on the spot, on any charge you care to trump up--it doesn't matter so that it holds him until my train goes--and as soon as it has gone, call up your plain-clothes man, point out Serpice to him, and tell him to follow and to stick to the fellow until he meets Waldemar, if it takes a week to accomplish it, and then to shadow his precious countship and find out where he lives. Tell him for me that there's a ten-pound note in it for him the moment he can tell me where Waldemar is located; and to stick to his man until he runs him down. Now, then, hop in, Mr. Narkom, and let's be off. The other chap will follow, be a.s.sured. All right, Lennard. Let her go!"

Lennard 'let her go' forthwith, and a quarter of an hour later saw the programme carried out in every particular, only that it was not Waldemar who made an attempt to follow when the limousine halted at the Tube station and Cleek jumped out and ran in (the count was far too shrewd for that); it was a rough-looking Frenchman who had just previously hopped out of a closed carriage driven by a fellow countryman, only to be nabbed at the station doorway by Narkom, and turned over to the nearest constable on the charge of pocket picking.

The charge, however, was so manifestly groundless that half a dozen persons stepped forward and entered protest; but the superintendent was so pig-headed that by the time he could be brought to reason, and the man was again at liberty to take his ticket and go down in the lift to the train, the platform was empty, the train gone, and Cleek already on his way.

A swift, short flight under the earth's surface carried him to another station in quite another part of London; a swift, short walk thence landed him at his temporary lodgings in town, and four o'clock found him exchanging his workaday clothes for the regulation creased trousers and creaseless coat of masculine calling costume, and getting ready to spend the rest of the day with _her_.

CHAPTER XXV

The sky was all aflame with the glory of one of late June's gorgeous sunsets when he came up over the long sweep of meadowland and saw her straying about and gathering wild flowers to fill the vases in the wee house's wee little drawing-room, and singing to herself the while in a voice that was like honey--thin but very, very sweet--and at the sight something seemed to lay hold of his heart and quicken its beating until it interfered with his breathing, yet brought with it a curious sense of joy.

"Good afternoon, Mistress of the Linnets!" he called out to her as he advanced (for she had neither seen nor heard his coming) with the big sheaf of roses he had brought held behind him and the bracken and kingcups smothering him in green and gold up to the very thighs.

She turned at the sound, her face illumined, her soft eyes very bright--those wondrous eyes that had lit a man's way back from perdition and would light it onward and upward to the end--and greeted him with a smile of happy welcome.

"Oh, it is you at last," she said, looking at him as a woman looks at but one man ever. "Is this your idea of 'spending the afternoon'

with one, turning up when tea is over and twilight about to begin?

Do you know, I am a very busy young woman these days"--blushing rosily--"and might have spent a whole day in town shopping but that Dollops brought me word that I might look for you? But, of course----No! I shan't say it. It might make you vain to hear that you had the power to spoil my day."

"Not any vainer than you have made me by telling me other things," he retorted with a laugh. "I am afraid I have spoiled a good many days for you in my time, Ailsa. But, please G.o.d, I shall make up for them all in the brightness of the ones that are to come. I couldn't help being late to-day--I'll tell you all about that presently--but may I offer something in atonement? Please, will you add these to your bouquet and forgive me?"

"Roses! Such beauties! How good of you! Just smell! How divine!"

"Meaning the flowers or their donor?"--quizzically. "Or, no! Don't elucidate. Leave me in blissful ignorance. You have hurt my vanity quite enough as it is. I was deeply mortified--cut to the quick, I may say, if that will express my sense of grovelling shame any clearer--when I arrived here and saw what you were doing. Please, mum"--touching his forelock and sc.r.a.ping his foot backward after the manner of a groom--"did I make such a bad job of my work in that garden that when you want a bouquet you have to come out here and gather wild flowers? I put fifty-eight standard roses on that terrace just under your bedroom window, and surely there must be a bloom or two that you could gather?"

"As if I would cut one of them for anything in the world!" she gave back, indignantly. Then she laughed, and blushed and stepped back from his impetuous advance. "No--please! You fished for that so adroitly that you landed it before I thought. Be satisfied. Besides, Mrs. Condiment is at her window, and I want to preserve as much as possible of her rapidly depreciating estimate of me. She thinks me a very frivolous young person, 'to allow that young Mr. Hamilton to call so frequent, miss, and if you'll allow me to say it, at such unseemly hours. I don't think as dear Captain Burbage would quite approve of it if he knew.'"

"Gad! that's rich. What a mimic you are. It was the dear old girl to the life. She hasn't an inkling of the truth, then?"

"Not one. She doesn't quite approve of you, either. 'I likes to see a gent more circ.u.mpec', miss, and a trifle more reserved when he's gettin' on his thirties. Muckin' about with a garden fork and such among a trumpery lot of roses, and racin' here, there, and everywhere over them medders after ferns and things, like a schoolboy on a holiday, aren't what I calls dignified deportment in full-grown men, and in my day they didn't use to do it!' Sometimes I am in mortal terror that she intends to give me notice and to leave me bag and baggage; for she is always saying that she's 'sure dear Captain Burbage couldn't have known what he was a-doing of, poor, innocent, kind-hearted gentleman--and him so _much_ of a gent, too, and so wonderful quiet and sedate!'"

"Poor old girl!" said Cleek, laughing. "What a shock to her if she knew the truth. And what on earth _would_ you do if she were to chance to get a peep at Dollops? But then, of course, there's no fear of that--the young beggar's too careful. I told him never to come near the house when he carries any notes."

"And he never does. Always leaves them under the stone in the path through the woods. I go there, of course, twice every day, and I never know that he has been about until I find one. I am always glad to get them, but to-day's one made me very, very happy indeed."

"Because I told you you might expect me?"

"Yes. But not that alone. I think I cried a little and I _know_ I went down on my knees--right there--out in those woods, when I read those splendid words, 'There is but one more debt to be paid. The "some day" of my hopes is near to me at last.'"

Her voice died off. He uncovered his head, and a stillness came that was not broken by any sound or any movement, until he felt her hand slip into his and remain there.

"Walk with me!" he said, closing his fingers around hers and holding them fast. "Walk with me always. My G.o.d! I love you so!"

"Always!" she made answer in her gentle voice; and with her hand shut tight in his, pa.s.sed onward with him--over the green meadows and into the dim, still woods, and out again into the flower-filled fields beyond, where all the sky was golden after the fierce hues of the sunset had drained away into the tender gleam of twilight, and there was not one red ray left to cross the path of him.

"You have led me this way from the first," he said, breaking silence suddenly. "Out of the glare of fire, through the dark, into peaceful light. I had gone down to h.e.l.l but for you--but that you stooped and lifted me. G.o.d!"--he threw back his head and looked upward, with his hat in his hand and the light on his face--"G.o.d, forget me if ever I forget that. Amen!" he added, very quietly, very earnestly; then dropped his chin until it rested on his breast, and was very still for a long time.

"Yes," he said, taking up the thread of conversation where it had been broken so long a time ago, "there is but one more debt to be cleared off: the value of the Princess Goroski's tiara. A thousand pounds will wipe that off--it was not a very expensive one--and I could have had that sum to-day if I had thought of myself alone.

Mr. Narkom thinks me a fool. I wonder what you will think when you hear?" And forthwith he told her.

"If you are again 'fishing'," she replied with a quizzical smile, "then again you are going to be successful. I think you a hero. Kiss me, please. I am very, very proud of you. And that was what made you late in coming, was it?"

"Not altogether that. I might have been earlier but that we ran foul of Waldemar and the Apaches again, and I had to lose time in shaking them off. But I ought not to have told you that. You will be getting nervous. It was a shock to Mr. Narkom. He was so sure they had given up the job and returned home."

"I, too, was sure. I should have thought that the rebellion would have compelled that, in Count Waldemar's case at least," she answered, gravely. "And particularly in such a grave crisis as his country is now called upon to face. Have you seen to-day's papers?