The Mysterious Three Part 15

I shall never forget that trial--never.

My opinion of legal procedure, never high, sank to zero before the trial at the London Sessions ended. The absurdity of some of the questions asked by counsel; the impossible inferences drawn from quite ordinary occurrences; the endless repet.i.tions of the same questions, but in different sets of words; the verbal quibbling and juggling; the transposing of statements made in evidence and conveying a meaning obvious to the lowest intelligence; the pathos indulged in when the old man's end came to be described; the judge's weak attempts at being witty; the red-tapeism; the unpardonable waste of time--and of public money. No, I shall never forget those days.

It lasted from Monday till Thursday, and during those four days I spent eleven hours in the witness-box. Ah! what a tragic farce. I received anonymous letters of encouragement, and, of course, some offensive letters. I even received a proposal of marriage from a forward minx, who admitted that though still at school, in Blackheath, she had "read every word of the trial," that she "kept a dear portrait" of me, cut out of the _Daily Mirror_, under her pillow at night. I felt I must indeed have reached the depths of ignominy when my hand was sought in matrimony by an emotional Blackheath flapper. A pretty flapper, I admit. She sent me five cabinet portraits of herself, in addition to a miniature of herself as a baby. Phew! What are our young people coming to?

Well, in the end I was acquitted, and told that I might leave the Court without a stain upon my character.

Certainly that was in a sense gratifying. In the face of acrobatic verbal feats Counsel representing the Director of Public Prosecutions had indulged in during the trial, I felt that anything might have happened, and was fully prepared to be branded a felon for life. The drug, the jury decided, had been administered without any intention whatever to do more than send the old man to sleep for an hour or so, and an a.n.a.lysis of the tea left in the cup proved beyond a doubt, that this tea could not possibly have caused death, which had been due to heart-failure. I had been traced, it seemed, by my gloves and umbrella left in the old man's room. Other details--long-winded ones--I need not describe.

The problem now was, what to do next. My name, Richard Ashton, had become a sort of b.u.t.t. Everybody knew it, had seen it in print twenty times during the past week. Mentioned by the comedian in a music-hall, it at once created laughter. I laughed myself--not uproariously, I admit--when a comedian at the Alhambra compared me to an albatross, thereby causing the entire audience to shake with merriment, and a stranger to turn to me with the remark--

"Richard Ashton! What a Nut, eh?"

Now the vulgar term "Nut" was in its infancy then, and new to me. I pawed the air in a vain endeavour to grasp the point of comparing me first to an albatross, and then to a nut. Nuts don't grow on ash trees, or I might have thought the "ash" of "Ashton" bore some kind of relationship to a nut. Finally I gave it up, convinced that I must be deficient in a sense of humour.

Meanwhile, my beloved had disappeared. To my chagrin I ascertained at the hotel at Hampstead that a man had called on the day following my arrest, and that she had gone away with him, taking all her luggage.

A description of the man failed to help me to identify him. From it I decided, however, that it was not Sir Charles who had called for Vera, nor yet the mysterious Smithson. My natural inference, therefore, was that the fellow Paulton had discovered her hiding-place, and compelled her to go away with him.

I tried hard to put into practice my theory that it is useless to worry about anything, and for some days I remained pa.s.sive, watching, however, the advertis.e.m.e.nt columns in the princ.i.p.al daily newspapers, for during our evening at the hotel, Vera had incidentally remarked that she had, while at Brighton, advertised for a bracelet she had lost, and by that means recovered it. I advertised for news of her. But there was no response.

On the Sunday, having nothing particular to do, I looked in during the afternoon at one of my usual haunts, Tattersall's sale yard. I thought it probable I should there run across somebody or other I knew, and I was not mistaken. At the entrance I overtook a little man whose figure I could not mistake. The little sporting parson from a village outside Oakham was a great friend of mine, and he had told me that, whenever in town for a week-end he invariably went to Tattersall's on the Sunday afternoon to see what horses were to be sold there next day.

"Not that I can afford to buy a horse, oh dear no!" I remembered him saying to me in the drawing-room at Houghton. "You know what parson's families are. Mine is no exception to the rule!"

I had upbraided him for his lack of forethought, and he had chuckled, adding seriously that in his opinion the falling birth rate spelt the downfall of the Nation, a point upon which I had differed from him more than once.

"Hullo, Rowan!" I exclaimed, as I overtook him, and quietly slipped my arm into his from behind, making him start. "I see you spoke the truth that day."

He was frankly delighted to see me. I knew he would be, for he is one of the few Rutlanders I have met who are wholly devoid of what some Americans term "frills." I believe that if I were in rags and carrying a sandwich-board and I met little Rowan in the streets of London to-morrow, he would come up to me and grasp me by the hand. There are not many men of whom one can say that. I don't suppose more than ten per cent, of my acquaintances, if as many, would look at me again if next week I became a pauper.

"What truth, and when?" he asked, in answer to my remark.

"Don't you remember telling me," I said, "I believe it was the last time we hunted together, that when in London you always do two things? You said: `I always attend service on Sunday morning, and Tattersall's on Sunday afternoon.' How is the old cob?"

"Getting old, d.i.c.k, getting old, like his master," Rowan said with a touch of pathos. "I hear the Hunt talk of buying me another mount. It is good of them; very good. I am not supposed to know, of course."

"And so you have come to find something up to your weight, eh?" I went on. He does not, I suppose, ride more than eight stone twelve in his hunting kit. He is the wiriest little man I have ever seen.

"No," he answered. "I have come to have a last look at Sir Charles Thorold's stud. It comes under the hammer to-morrow, as, of course, you know."

"Thorold's horses to be sold!" I exclaimed. "I had no idea. Then he has said good-bye to Rutland for good and all. I am sorry."

"So am I, very. He is a man I have always liked. Naturally his name is in rather bad odour in the county just at present, but that does not in the least affect my own regard for him."

"It wouldn't," I said to him. "You are not that sort, Rowan. It is a pity there are not more like you about."

He changed the subject by asking if I had seen Sir Charles and Lady Thorold lately.

"I have not seen Lady Thorold since the Houghton affair," I answered.

"I have seen Sir Charles, but not to speak to."

I recollected how I had caught a glimpse of him in that house in Belgrave Street.

"You have heard the latest about Miss Thorold, of course?" he said, as we pa.s.sed into the Yard, which at this hour--about four o'clock--was crowded with well-dressed men and women.

"The latest? What do you mean?"

"Dear me," he exclaimed, smiling. "Why, we country cousins know more than you men about town after all, sometimes. She's at Monte Carlo."

"At Monte? Vera Thorold!"

"Yes."

"What is she doing there? Who is with her?"

"I don't know who's with her, or if any one is with her. She is pretty independent, as you know, and well able to take care of herself--a typical twentieth century girl."

"But who told you she was at Monte?"

"Several people. Ah! there's Lord Logan! He'll tell us. He was speaking of her yesterday. He returned from the Riviera only a couple of days ago."

CHAPTER TWELVE.

GOSSIP FROM THE SUNSHINE.

"Oh, yes, that's right enough," Lord Logan said, when we questioned him.

"I saw her the night before I left. She was playing trente-et-quarante--and winning a bit, too, by Gad!"

He was an ordinary type of the modern young peer--well-set-up, unemotional, faultlessly groomed. He produced a gold cigarette case as he spoke, and held it out to me. I noticed that the cigarettes it contained bore his coat of arms.

"These cigarettes are not likely to be stolen from you," I said lightly, indicating the coat of arms.

He smiled.

"You are right. I was the first to start the fashion--get 'em from Cairo every week--and now everybody's doin' it, haw, haw! I've got my cartridges done the same way. At some places where one shoots the beater fellers rob one right and left--the devils. I said to one of my hosts the other day, I said: `Your cartridge carriers are a lot of bally rogues.' `What do you mean?' he asked, bristlin' up like a well-bred bull-dog. `Well,' I said, `you make 'em all turn out their pockets, and you'll see,' I said. And he did!"

"And what was in them?"

"In them? Damme, what wasn't in them? My dear feller, every beater who had carried cartridges had a dozen or two cartridges in his pockets then--it's a fact. And we'd done shootin', and the beaters were goin'

home, so they couldn't pretend they were just carryin' the bally cartridges in their pockets to have 'em handy. But there wasn't a cartridge of mine missing among the lot. They knew only too well they wouldn't be able to sell to the local ironmonger cartridges with a coat of arms on 'em--eh what? And that's why I now have my cigarettes tattooed in the same way. I believe my servants used to rob them by the hundred. They don't now, except perhaps a handful to smoke themselves, and of course that's only natural. What was it you were askin' me just now? Ah, yes, about Vera Thorold. She seems to be a flyer."

"Did you speak to her?"

"Oh, yes, I talked to her right enough. She did look well. Simply lovely. White cloth frock, you know. She's all alone at Monte, stayin'

at the _Anglais_."

"Did she say how long she'd be there?"