Ричард Марш
The Crime and the Criminal

CHAPTER XI
WHAT MR. TENNANT HAD WRITTEN

There were several letters by the morning's post. One's creditors, at any rate, seemed to be in town. Do those sort of people ever go away? Lily Langdale wanted me to look her up. Confound little Lily Langdale! I had looked her up too much already. Chirpy Mason, writing from Monte Carlo, wanted to know if I could do him a hundred or two. Would I wire? No; I would neither do the one or the other. I knew Chirpy. He had probably made the same request to half a dozen more of us. There were only two letters among the heap worth looking at. One contained just two type-written words, "Buy Boomjopfs." No address, no signature, no nothing. I put that aside. It would entail my going into the City as soon as I could. The other letter was from Haselton Jardine: -

"Sloane Gardens.

"Dear Townsend, – If you are in town and this catches you, and you have nothing else to do, come round to-morrow (Monday) and dine en famille. Only Dora! I have something which I rather wish to say to you.

"Yours,

"H. J."

I was to go down to them at Cockington on Friday. What had he to say to me which would not keep till then, I wondered. But I had nothing else to do-and there was Dora! So, scribbling a line of acceptance, I told Burton to take it round. When I opened the paper I found that Sir Haselton was leading for the defendants in the great diamond earring libel case-Mrs. Potter Segundi against Lady Lucretia Jenkyns. I should not have minded being in court to see the fun. They say Mrs. P. S. has brass enough to start a foundry. I know, of my own knowledge, that Lady J. is fairly well equipped. When I am in Queer-street I hope that Sir Haselton will be briefed for me.

It was past one when I got out. I ought to have gone straight to the City. Instead, I dropped into the Climax, and had just one rubber. I cut Pendarvon against Graeme and Bicketts. Pendarvon and I had the luck of the devil: we scored a bumper. Altogether, with bets, I walked off with about a pony. When I reached the City it was not very far from four. I made for a broker in Austin Friars-a man named Tennant, Thomas Tennant-as steady a file as ever I saw. I have done a good deal of business through him at various times. I don't fancy that he has much nose of his own; but he keeps quiet, asks no questions, and follows instructions to the letter.

Tennant was out. He was not in the House. A clerk thought that he was at Danby's; he would go and see. I knew where Danby's was-it is one of those City restaurants where there is more drank than ate-so I saved that clerk his trouble, and went myself.

I spotted Tennant directly I got inside the place-a plump little fellow, with round, pasty face, and hair which always looked to me as if he soaped it. A mild, unassuming neat-as-ninepence sort of man. He had a table to himself. As a rule, in a mild sort of way, he is jolly as a sandboy. Just then it appeared to me that he seemed hipped. Taking a chair on the opposite side of the table, carelessly, thoughtlessly enough, I took hold of a scrap of paper on which he had been scribbling. When I glanced at it a thrill went down my back. It was a bolt out of the blue. I do not think that in all my life before I was ever so taken by surprise.

Tennant had been scribbling all over the sheet of paper a woman's name-"Louise O'Donnel." That my appearance on the scene at that particular moment was a pure coincidence, I had, of course, no doubt. It could not have been otherwise. But how came he to have been writing that name? I could scarcely believe my eyes. I stared at the paper, and then at him.

"What is the meaning of this?" I asked.

"The meaning of what?"

When I showed him what he had been writing on the piece of paper he seemed to be as much taken aback as I was. At first he wanted me to believe that he had been writing a name over and over again without having an idea of what it was that he was doing. I could not make him out at all. He made me feel uneasy.

So far as I was aware, I was the only person in England who had been acquainted with the girl's real name. She had always assured me that such was the case, and I had believed her. Everybody, except myself, knew her by her stage name-Milly Carroll. Her father was the only relative she had in the world, and he was in Colorado. Father and daughter had fallen out. Coming to England with a burlesque company from New York, she had left him on the other side of the world. If this story of hers was true-and I did not, and do not, believe she lied-she was not that sort of girl-how did Mr. Thomas Tennant come to be in possession of her name?

I put the question to him point blank.

"What do you know about Louise O'Donnel?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? Tennant, I say!"

"I heard it mentioned for the first time in my life last night."

"Last night?" The coincidence made me shiver again.

"As I was coming up from Brighton."

"Brighton?" I had to gasp for breath. "Did you come up last night from Brighton? By what train?"

"The 8.40."

I figured it out in my mind. I should not be surprised if that was the identical train which had rattled over the arch while Louise and I had been leaning against the gate, just before I did something for the Honour of the Club. And Tennant was in it. "Was the long arm of coincidence going to make things pleasant for me?"

"What did you hear about Louise O'Donnel as you were coming up from Brighton?"

"Nothing. The name was casually mentioned in my hearing, that was all. It seems to have stuck in my head."

It did seem to have stuck in his head-and it seemed to have crept unawares from the ends of his fingers. That something had been said or done to fix the name in his memory, I did not doubt. What had been said or done was another matter. Somehow I did not seem to care to question him too closely. Generally, in his own placid, fish-like fashion, Tennant is as cool as you please. Then he was as fidgety as if he had been sitting on hot bricks. He said he was ill, and he looked it-if his ailment was not more mental than physical I misjudged him.

I clean forgot all about the Boomjopf shares, which I had come up to instruct him to buy. I left Tennant in Danby's without having mentioned them to him from first to last. Indeed, I never thought of them till I pulled Groeden's tip out of my pocket when I got home to dress for dinner. Seeing the girl's name upon that sheet of paper made me all of a fluster.

Scarcely had I left Danby's when I all but cannoned into my scamp of a brother. He seemed as little pleased to see me as I was to see him, but as I had seen and heard nothing of him for the last two years, I thought that I might as well do the fraternal. He looked seedy enough, and cad enough to boot. The cad was in his face and bearing; the seediness was in his clothes. He had on what looked like, not a second, but a fourth-hand overcoat, trimmed with the usual imitation astrachan. If he had his way, I believe that he would be buried in imitation astrachan.

"Not in prison then?"

"No." He fidgeted inside his clothes. "I'm not in prison."

"Recently come out?"

"Nor have I recently come out."

"Or just going in?"

"Not unless, my dear Reginald, it is to visit you."

Alexander was cheeky; he must be in funds, although he did not look it.

"May I ask, my dear Alexander, what means you are at present taking to increase your fortune?"

He blew his nose with an old silk handkerchief and a flourish. Did he ever do anything without a flourish-even pick a pocket?

"I don't know, my dear Reginald, that it much matters to you what I am doing, but I don't mind telling you, in confidence, that I am at present devoting my energies to the detection of crime."

"To what?"

The idea seemed too funny.

"To the detection of crime. In other words, I am a private detective, on, I think I may say, a considerable scale."

"The deuce you are! That is something new."

"And you-may I ask what you are doing?"

I stared at Alexander. He certainly was coming on.

"I'm talking to you."

"I trust that the occupation gives you satisfaction. I regret that I am compelled to cut it short. My time is valuable. In fact, at this moment I have a pressing appointment with a gentleman well known in City circles."

"A bailiff or a policeman, Alexander? They are both of them well known in City circles."

"Probably, my dear Reginald, they are better known to you than they are to me. Good-day."

"Good-day!"

He raised his hat about three feet; I raised mine about three inches. We parted, I do believe, for the first time in our lives, on the most affable of terms.

CHAPTER XII
SIR HASELTON JARDINE

Sir Haselton Jardine was a man whom I had rather been in the habit of holding in awe. One never could be certain how much he knew. A man could scarcely rise to the forensic heights which he had reached without knowing something of almost every one. He was so quiet and so self-contained that it was impossible to gauge the extent of his knowledge until too late.

He was rather short, and he was very thin, and he stooped. He had colourless grey eyes, which you scarcely ever saw, though, if you had your wits about you, you felt that they all the time saw you. He had a peaked grey beard, too straggling to be Vandyke, and sandy hair, which he parted low down on the right-hand side. His voice was as soft and gentle as any girl's-when he was asking a jury to hang a man he was always the very pink of courtesy, and I wonder how many he had sent that way in his time. He had beautiful hands, and he either braced his trousers too high or else it was a principle of his to have them made too short. Jardine's trousers were a standing joke-he always looked as if he had got into his younger, and distinctly smaller, brother's. He was a widower, and Dora was his only child.

I always had had a tenderness towards Dora Jardine. I suspected that, under certain circumstances, she might not be ill-disposed towards me. It was Sir Haselton that I felt shy of. He had the reputation of being rich, apart from his practice at the bar, and that was supposed to be worth fifteen thousand a year. Dora was pretty; he might very well have eyes for an altogether bigger man than Reginald T. But somehow of late I had begun to fancy that he himself had a partiality for me. He had become quite fatherly. I was in a measure free of the house. On Friday I was to go down to his country place at Cockington to shoot; he had quite made a point of my making an indefinite stay.

Now there had been his note of the morning!

Sir Haselton was not visible when I arrived. I found Dora alone in the drawing-room. Very nice she looked. Not one of the new order of tall girls, but tall enough, and straight as a dart. Brown hair, which, in certain lights looked golden, and which had a natural crinkle. Pouting lips-very pretty ones-good nose and chin. Her eyes were her most remarkable feature, as was the case with her father. Blue eyes-laughing blue eyes I have heard them called-and innocent and girlish too. But to me they were something else besides. I never knew a man or a woman with eyes like that who was deficient in grit. I will go further. If the women who have gone to the devil, and smiled when they met him face to face, could be polled, I should be disposed to wager that the majority of them had eyes like Dora Jardine's. I am not insinuating anything against her-quite the other way. Only I am a student of women's eyes.

She was standing by the fire as I went in. She turned, holding out her hand.

"I am glad you have come," she said.

I felt as I took her hand in mine-and I felt it not for the first time-that she and I were kindred spirits, and that, girl though she was, she was stronger than I. I said something; I don't know what. Then I looked at the fire. I felt that her eyes were on my face.

"What a strange face you have, as though, in you, were the makings of a man."

I don't know how she was in the habit of talking to other men; she was always saying that sort of thing to me. I laughed. "What sort of man?"

She did not answer my question. She ran her conversation on lines of her own.

"What have you been doing since I saw you last-killing time?"

"Unfortunately, Miss Jardine, I have nothing else to do."

"Would you like to have something?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On the something."

"I see. I suppose that you will be doing something else on Saturday; you are going to kill papa's pheasants?"

"You speak as though that was an improper thing to do."

There was a slight movement of her shoulders.

"I suppose that some men kill pheasants, and that other men rule empires. I might like to do both things, but I confess that if I had to choose I should prefer the empires."

I looked at her. Quietly, and without any ostentation, she gave me back glance for glance. Something from her eyes seemed to get into my veins.

"Suppose it was not yours to choose?"

"It would be were I a man."

"It certainly has never yet been mine."

"Then you certainly are not a man."

Her high-faluting amused me. That the little, brown-haired, blue-eyed thing should talk in such an inflated strain! And yet I felt that if she had been a man she would have gone for the gloves-nay, that though she was a woman she might go for them still.

She went on-

"That is the very essence of being a man; that he can choose what he will be and do."

"You are on the wrong track. He might choose to win the Derby-plenty of them do-but the odds are he will fail."

"He might try."

"And come a cropper. Men of that sort get posted every settling day. If he is a cautious man he will limit his range of choice to things which are within his reach."

"Are you a cautious man?"

As I met her eyes I could not have told her. I seemed to see so clearly in them something which was not caution, something which thrilled and kept time with a pulse of mine. While I hesitated Sir Haselton appeared-his dress shoes making the shortness of his trousers still more conspicuous. Immediately after, dinner was announced.

They always feed you well at Jardine's, and it seems to me that lawyers generally do. And, though to look at him you might not think it, Jardine can drink with any man-perhaps to counterbalance the dryness of his profession. And he has some stuff worth drinking. His guests can do as they please; he himself is old-fashioned-he sticks to the cloth when the women are gone. That evening, bearing the hint in his note in my mind, I stuck to it with him.

I was curious to know what it was he wanted to say to me; it took me aback when it came.

I lit up when Dora had gone-Jardine does not smoke-post-prandial wine-drinkers seldom do. As he leaned back in his chair a lean, dried up, insignificant little chap he looked; but whoever, on that account, would have liked to have tried a fall with him would have done well to get up early. The fingers of his left hand grasped the stem of his wineglass, but, used though I was to his trick of peering through his half-shut eyes, I could not make out if he was looking at me or at the glass.

"Townsend, I want to say something to you in confidence."

I nodded; though I don't mind owning that I felt a bit uneasy. He might have wanted to say all sorts of things to me in what he called confidence-and he was the sort of man to say them too. His next words, however, reassured me.

"I am not a man of strong likes or dislikes" – I should rather say he wasn't, being about the most bloodless creature going! – "but I like you, if you will excuse me, Townsend."

"Excuse you, sir? You flatter me too much."

He smiled-if the wrinkling of his thin lips could be called a smile.

"Flatter you? I hardly think I flatter you. I will tell you why I like you, Townsend."

He paused. I waited. The old fox kept twisting the stem of his wineglass round and round between his thin white fingers.

"I like you, Townsend, because, although you are out of the common run, you are not sufficiently so to be unpleasantly conspicuous. You have what I lack, passion. You are as likely to ascend to the top of the tree as to the top of the gallows. I hardly think I flatter you."

"You at least credit me with having aspirations."

"I believe, Townsend, that your wealth scarcely exceeds the dreams of avarice-eh?" The remark had so little connection with anything that had gone before, that I think I stared. He favoured me with one of those lightning flashes which are among the tricks of his trade-then you can see what eyes he really has. "I said I wanted to speak to you in confidence."

"Precisely. You only flatter me too much."

Again that wrinkling of the lips which he, perhaps, intended for a smile. I wondered what the dickens he was at.

"You see, Townsend, things reach my ears which do not come to other men. May we take it, Townsend, that you are not a millionaire?"

"You may certainly take it, sir, at that."

"Pressed, now and then, for ready-money, perhaps."

What was he driving at? Was he going to develop into a sixty per cent. and offer me a loan?

"I believe that most men are."

"Yes-they are." It struck me that there was something about the pause he made which was anything but complimentary. I was beginning to feel like throwing something at him. "You have a brother, Townsend." How did he know that? "Have you seen him lately?"

"This afternoon."

"So recently? Is he doing well?"

"He said he was."

"There is nothing clogs a man so much as a brother of a certain kind."

"I take care that my brother does not clog me."

"I believe, Townsend, that you do." What did he mean by the inflection with which the words were uttered? "You are wondering why I talk to you like this. I will explain."

He took a sip from his glass. Then held it up in front of him, connoisseur fashion.

"I am something of a curiosity. I have lived my own life. In my way, I have enjoyed it. But I have one thing with which to reproach Providence. He has not bestowed on me a son." He emptied his glass. "Townsend, why don't you drink? I can recommend this port. Drink up, and let me fill the glasses." I let him. "That a son is not always an unmixed blessing I am aware. On the other hand, Dora has been a model child. Still, a daughter can hardly do for a father what a son can. So I still am hoping for a son."

What did the old beggar mean? He was still so long that I thought he had forgotten to go on. But I did not feel that it was my cue to break the silence. And at last he condescended to remember.

"You have in you the makings of the sort of son that I should like to have."

"I? Sir Haselton, did I not say you flattered me?"

"I hardly think I do. I think I know you pretty well. Dora seems to think she knows you even better." Now I began to see his drift.

"Townsend, what do you think of Dora?"

"I have sometimes feared, sir, that I have thought of her too much."

"Indeed." The word, as it came from between his lips, was a gently murmured sneer.

"I should not have imagined that you were that kind of man. Townsend, would you like to marry?"

"It has been my constant dream."

"Has it? And about Lily Langdale and others?"

What did he know about Lily, and the rest of them? I would have given something to have learned just how much the old sleuth-hound did know about everything or anything. I felt all the time that he had me at a strong advantage. When I am in his presence I always do feel like that.

"You yourself, sir, have been a bachelor."

"True-I have. I take it, Townsend, that when you marry you will cease to be a bachelor."

"Undoubtedly."

"What would you say to ten thousand pounds a-year?"

"Sir!"

"When Dora marries she will have that income to commence with. Should her marriage prove a happy one, it will be increased."

He paused, as if for me to speak. I deemed silence to be the better part of wisdom.

"The man who marries Dora will have to have a clean slate, if it has to be cleaned for the occasion. I shall require him to give me a correct statement of his position. I will see that his house is set in order. He will have to take my name; Dora shall always be a Jardine. He will have to enter public life."

"Public life?"

"Have you any objection?"

"It depends upon what you mean, sir, by public life; it is an elastic term."

"He will have to enter Parliament. Means will be furnished to enable him to do so. As a country gentleman he will have to take an interest in local and in county government. He will have to play a prominent part on the stage of national politics. He will have to aim at the top of the tree. Dora has ambitions; her husband must have them too."

When he paused I was silent again. There was a cut-and-dried way about his fashion of settling things which nettled me.

"Have you no ambitions, Townsend?"

"I have such ambitions as a poor man may have."

"A poor man is entitled to have the same ambitions as a rich one-if he is strong enough. I was poor once upon a time. I did not allow my poverty to hamper my ambition. What do you think of the programme which I have drawn up for Dora's husband?"

"I think it an alluring one."

"For a strong man it has possibilities. You may take it from me that, properly backed, you are strong enough to be able to say, with truth, that few things are beyond your reach."

"I think myself that, given the opportunity, I might find the man."

"I think so too. You shall have the opportunity. You have heard on what conditions. That is what I wanted to say to you. We shall see you at Cockington at the end of the week. Perhaps, before you leave us, you may have something to say to me."

"I trust, sir, that I may have something to say to you that will be pleasant to us both."