The Mysterious Mr. Miller

“Oh! ever since I was quite a little girl. He used to give me francs and buy me bon-bons long ago in the old days in Paris. Why?”

“Because I had an idea that he might perhaps be a new acquaintance.”

“Oh, dear no. My father and he have been friends for many years. He comes here to stay, sometimes for a couple of months at a time. He has bad health, and his London doctor often orders him abroad.”

“Who is he?”

“A gentleman. He was in the Navy on the China station, I think. He’s a most amusing companion, full of droll anecdotes, and seems to know everybody. Dad says that he’s one of the most popular men about London. He has a splendid steam yacht and once or twice he has taken us for cruises. It was in port here for a week at the beginning of the year.”

“Where does he live?”

“In Half Moon Street in London.”

“Has he a country place?”

“I never heard of it.”

Then she was unaware, I saw, that he lived on the Cornish border. Her father, of course, knew the truth, and kept it concealed from her. The fact that he came there to hide for months at a time, and that he travelled about in a steam yacht were sufficient to show that he was one of the clever and ingenious band who had, during the past ten years, effected certain coups so gigantic that they had startled Europe.

“When I met him how long had he been staying with you at the Manor?”

“Only one day. He came on the previous morning, and he left an hour after you did. He wished to consult my father about something – some securities he contemplates purchasing, I think.”

“Was Ella acquainted with him?”

“No. Ella never saw him. He was upstairs in his room, you remember, when we brought her home, and she left in the morning before he was up.”

“You don’t think that it was he who met her in the park after she left me?” I suggested.

She looked at me strangely, as though endeavouring to read my innermost thoughts.

“No, I hardly think that. Why should he, of all men, attack a woman who was a perfect stranger to him?”

“But was Ella a perfect stranger?” I queried. “How do you know that?”

“Of course we can’t say so. He might have met her somewhere else before,” the dark-eyed girl was forced to admit.

“Do not the circumstances all point to the fact that she fled, fearing to face him?” I said.

“Well, it certainly is a theory – but a very strange one,” she answered, her eyes fixed thoughtfully away to the distant horizon. “But what you have told me is so extraordinary. Ella is engaged to be married in a month. To whom? You have not told me that.”

I was silent for a moment, wondering whether I should tell her. So complete were the confidences now between us that I saw I need conceal nothing from her. We entertained a mutual sympathy for each other – I broken and despairing, and she a woman with the mark of fate upon her countenance.

“She is to marry Gordon-Wright,” I said in a low, hard voice.

“Gordon-Wright!” she gasped, drawing back and staring at me open-mouthed. “Ella to marry that man! Impossible!”

“The fellow is compelling her to become his wife. He holds her in his power by some mysterious bond which she fears to break. She is in terror of him. Ella – my own Ella – is that man’s victim.”

“But – but you mustn’t allow this, Mr Leaf!” she cried quickly, and from the anxious expression in her countenance I saw that my announcement had struck her a-heap in amazement. “Ella must never marry him!” she added. “But are you sure of this – are you quite sure?”

“She had admitted it to me with her own lips.”

“Then she must be warned – she cannot know.”

“Know what?”

“Know the facts that are known to me. She is in ignorance, or she would never consent to become that man’s wife!”

“She has been entrapped. She admitted as much.” My companion made no answer. Her brows were knit in thought. What I had revealed to her was both unexpected and puzzling. She evidently knew Gordon-Wright’s true character, though it was hardly likely she would admit it to me.

Yet I wondered, as I had lately very often wondered, whether she were actually in ignorance of her father’s true profession.

“If she has been entrapped, Mr Leaf,” she said slowly, “then she must find a way in which to extricate herself. We must never allow her to become that man’s wife.”

“He is your father’s friend, and yet you hold him in little esteem?” I remarked.

“What I know is my own affair,” was her hard response. “It is sufficient for us to say that Ella is yours, and must be yours.”

“Ah! yes,” I sighed in despair, “if only she could be. Yet I fear that it is impossible. This fellow for some mysterious reason holds her future in his hands. She refuses to reveal anything to me, except that to break away from him is impossible. Indeed, the real reason of her flying visit to you at Studland was to consult him. She knew he was visiting there, and slipped away from her father in order to call upon you.”

“But we had no idea that they were acquainted,” Lucie declared.

“After she had gone to bed your father and Gordon-Wright remained up, talking, she crept back downstairs, I believe, and overheard their conversation.”

“She did!” she gasped, her cheeks going pale. “She heard what they said! Are you quite sure of this?”

“Yes.”

“Then – then she really came to spy upon Gordon-Wright – to spy upon us indeed!”

“Not with any sinister motive,” I hastened to assure her. “She is evidently endeavouring to discover something concerning this man who holds her so utterly powerless in his hands. It is but natural, is it not? It is only what you or I would do in similar circumstances.”

My companion’s face had changed. She was pale and anxious, eager to learn all that I had ascertained.

“She told you this – how she had overheard my father talking to him?”

“No, Gordon-Wright himself charged her with eaves-dropping – and she admitted it.”

“Ah! Then if this be true, Mr Leaf, she had better marry him.”

“Marry him!” I cried. “Why?”

“Because I have a suspicion that she knows something concerning my father. What it is sorely puzzles me.”

“I – I don’t quite understand you,” I said.

“Well – I thought I had spoken plainly enough,” she answered. “You have told me that she admitted to him that she overheard his conversation with my father.”

“Well, and what if she did?” I asked. “Was the consultation between your father and his friend of such a secret nature?”

She hesitated a moment, then lifting her eyes to mine, said: —

“I believe it was.”

“You believe,” I echoed. “You must know, if you are prepared to sacrifice Ella to that man!”

“He probably is in possession of some secret of hers,” she remarked slowly.

“And she on her part, it appears, is in possession of some secret of his.”

“And of my father’s.”

“What is it she knows?” I asked. “Come, give me some hint of it,” I urged. “A moment ago you were my friend, prepared to assist poor Ella to escape – yet now you declare that they must marry.”

“Yes,” was her hard response. “I did not know that she had acted the spy in my father’s house – that she was in love with Gordon-Wright and had come to see him while he was under our roof.”

“She’s not in love with him,” I protested. “She denies it. Unfortunately she is his victim.”

“She deceived you once, remember. Why do you still trust her?”

“Her deception was one for self-sacrifice – to save her father.”

“And my refusal to assist you in saving her from Gordon-Wright is from the same motive.”

“To save your father?”

“How do I know? I tell you I am puzzled.”

“Then the secret is perhaps a guilty one?” I said seriously.

“She must marry this man,” was all her response.

“And this from you, Miss Miller – you, who have always posed as her friend!” I exclaimed reproachfully, for her change of manner had utterly confounded me. I had relied upon her as my friend.

“I am certainly not her enemy,” she hastened to assert. “To see her the wife of Gordon-Wright is my very last desire. Yet it is unfortunately imperative for – ” and she stopped short, without concluding her sentence.

“For what?”

“For – well – for my peace of mind,” she said, though I was sure that she had intended saying something else.

“You have already told me that this fellow is unfitted to be her husband,” I exclaimed. “Surely you, her oldest friend, will never allow her to commit this fatal error – to wreck her own happiness and mine, without lifting a finger to save her. Need I repeat to you what I told you at the riverside at Studland, with what a fierce passion I adore her, how that she is mine – my very life?”

“I know,” my companion said, in a voice slightly more sympathetic. “I admit that she ought to marry you – that she is yours in heart. Yet in her secret engagement to Gordon-Wright there is a mystery which makes me suspicious.”

“Suspicious of what?”

She sighed, and moving forward rested her hands upon the balcony, gazing again towards the fiery sunset.

“Well – to put it plainly – that she is deceiving both of us.”

“Deceiving us! In what way?”

“Ah! that is what we have not yet discovered,” replied the girl. “Think of her ingenuity in coming to our house in order to see that man in secret, of how cleverly she made us believe that they were strangers – of her listening to my father’s words when he spoke with Gordon-Wright! All this proves to me that she is working with some mysterious end.”

“She has been endeavouring to effect her emancipation from that scoundrel,” I protested hotly. “She has been trying to break away from him, but in vain. Her motive, Miss Miller, is not an evil one as regards either your father or yourself, you may rest assured. She only desires freedom – freedom to live and to love, the freedom that you, if you will, can assist her to obtain.”

“I – ” she cried. “How can I?”

“You know who this fellow Gordon-Wright really is. If you will, you can save her.”

“I can’t. That’s just where the difficulty lies.”

“Then if you will not, I will!” I cried, angry at her sudden withdrawal after all the sympathy I had shown her, and goaded by thoughts of my love’s martyrdom. “Fortunately I happen to know that Gordon-Wright alias Lieutenant Shacklock is wanted by the police of half a dozen different countries, as well as certain of his associates, and a word from me will effect his arrest.” She started, and her face went ashen pale. She saw that I knew the truth, and in an instant held me in dread.

“You – ” she gasped. “You would do this —you?”

Chapter Twenty Seven

From a Woman’s Lips

The handsome, dark-haired girl had placed her hand upon my arm, and stood with her eyes anxiously fixed upon mine.

“Do you really mean this?” she asked, in a hoarse, strained voice.

“I have told you quite frankly my intention,” was my answer. “I know that scoundrel – in fact I am myself a witness against Him.”

“In what manner?” she asked naïvely.

“That man is one of a clever gang of thieves who for years have eluded the police,” I replied. “In England he lives in security in a Cornish village under the name of Gordon-Wright, while here, on the Continent, he frequents the best hotels, and with his friends makes enormous hauls of money and jewels.”

“A thief!” she exclaimed, with amazement that I thought well feigned. “And can you really actually prove this?”

“The coward robbed a friend of mine who, being ill, could not take care of himself,” I said. “I have only to say one single word to the nearest police office and they will arrest him wherever he may be. And now, to speak quite openly, I tell you that I mean to do this.”

“You will have him arrested?”

“Yes, and by so doing I shall at least save Ella. The thing is really very simple after all. I intend to defy him. Ella is mine and he shall not snatch her from me.”

“Then you know him – I mean you knew him before I introduced you?” she asked, after a brief pause.

“I know him rather too well,” I answered meaningly. “It is curious, Miss Miller,” I added, “that your father should be the intimate friend of a man of such bad reputation. He surely cannot be aware of his true character.”

She knit her brows again, for she saw that she was treading on dangerous ground. She was not an adventuress herself but a sweet and charming girl, yet I had no doubt but that she participated in her father’s many guilty secrets. Perhaps it was her easy-going cosmopolitan air that suggested this, or perhaps it may have been owing to her earnest desire that Ella should marry that man, and thus be prevented from betraying what she had learnt on that fateful night at Studland.

“Dear old dad always makes friends far too easily,” was her evasive reply, the response of a clever woman. “I’ve told him so lots of times. Travelling so much as he does, half over Europe, he is for ever making new acquaintances, and queer ones they are, too, sometimes, I can tell you. We’ve had visitors here, in this flat, of all grades, from broken-down English jockeys and music hall artists trying to borrow their fare third-class back to England, to lords, earls, Stock Exchange men and company promoters whose names are as household words in the halfpenny papers. Yet I suppose it’s so with many men. They are big-hearted, make friends easily, and everybody takes advantage of their hospitality. It is so with my father. All his friends impose on him without exception.”

“Well, it’s a pity that he’s intimate with the man I knew as Lieutenant Shacklock, for when he is in the hands of the police some curious revelations will be made – revelations that will reveal the existence of a most ingenious and daring Continental gang. You see,” I added, with a smile, “I’m not making a mere idle statement – I know. These men once robbed a friend of mine, and it is only just to him that, having discovered Shacklock, I should give information against him.”

“You mean you will win Ella by freeing her of that man?” said my companion, apparently following me for the first time.

“Exactly. If he holds any secret of hers, he is quite welcome to speak. Neither I nor Ella will fear anything, you may depend upon that. A man of his stamp always seeks some low-down revenge. It is only what may be expected. Perhaps I may as well tell you that I recognised him when you introduced us, and that I have already been down to Cornwall and seen the smug scoundrel at his home. He’s a church-warden, a parish councillor and all the rest of it, and the people believe he’s worth thousands. He poses as a philanthropist in a mild way, opens local bazaars, and makes speeches in support of the local habitation of the Primrose League. All this is to me most amusing. The fellow little dreams that he sits upon the edge of a volcano that to-morrow may engulf him – as it certainly must.”

“But is this worth while – to denounce such a man? You’ll be compelled to support your allegations,” she said.

“Oh! I can do that, never fear,” I laughed. “I shall bring his victim forward – the man he robbed so heartlessly. English juries have no compassion for the swell-mobsman or the elegant hotel-thief.”

I watched her face as I spoke, and saw the effect my words were having upon her. If I denounced him her own father would at once be implicated. Hers were alarming apprehensions, no doubt.

I saw that I was gradually gaining the whip-hand over circumstance. She recognised now that her father was in deadly peril of exposure.

And yet did she know the truth, after all? If she actually knew that the young Chilian Carrera, the man she loved when they lived outside Paris, had met with his death through her own father’s treachery, she surely would not hold him in such esteem.

Yet was it likely that such skilled scoundrels as the mysterious Miller, Milner – or whatever he chose to call himself – and Gordon-Wright alias Lieutenant Harold Shacklock would risk exposure by betraying their true occupation to a sweet high-minded girl such as Lucie really was? Had she been their decoy; had there, indeed, been any suspicion that she had assisted them in their clever conspiracies of fraud then it would have been different.

There was, however, no suspicion except that she had spoken of her father’s “secret,” which she feared that Ella had learned when she overheard her father’s conversation with his friend. That was a curious and unaccountable feature. She knew that her father held some secret that was shared by Gordon-Wright, that gallant ladies’-man who had wormed himself into the confidence of so many English and American women travelling on Continental railways, women whose jewels and valuables had subsequently disappeared.

She, however, held her father in the highest regard and esteem, and that fact in itself was sufficient to convince me that she was after all in ignorance of his true profession.

She might have entertained suspicions of the lieutenant, suspicions that were verified by the denunciation I had just made, but as I looked into her pale dark face I could not bring myself to believe that she knew her father’s true source of income. There was some secret of her fathers, a secret that she knew must be kept at any cost. It was that which she feared Ella might betray, and for that reason she deemed it best that my love should be allowed to become the false lieutenant’s wife.

Thus I argued within myself as I stood there beside her with the blood-red light of the dying day streaming in from across the sea.

I recollected Sammy’s warning; I recollected, too, the strange circumstances of Nardini’s death in Shepherd’s Bush, and of what had been told me by this woman now at my side. She was doomed, she said – and, true enough, there was black despair written in that dark face, now so pale and agitated.

She was as much a mystery as she had been on that first day when we had met – even though through her instrumentality the mystery of my well-beloved’s self-effacement had actually been cleared up.

That she detested the lieutenant had been palpable from the first mention I had made of him. Therefore I argued that she suspected him of playing her father false, even though she might be unaware of their real relationship. Indeed it was not natural for a father of Miller’s stamp to allow his daughter to know of his shameful calling. She had told me that she remained at home with old Marietta – the grey-haired Tuscan woman who had admitted me – while her father travelled hither and thither across Europe. Those unscrupulous “birds of prey,” known to the police as international thieves, migrate in flocks, travelling swiftly from one frontier to another and ever eluding the vigilance of the agents in search of them. The international thief is a veritable artist in crime, the cleverest and most audacious scoundrel of the whole criminal fraternity.

“I quite understand your feelings and all that you must suffer, Mr Leaf,” she said at last in a mechanical voice. “I know how deeply you love Ella, and, after all that has passed, it is not in the least surprising that you will not stand by and see her married to such a man as Gordon-Wright. Yet is it really prudent to act without carefully considering every point? That she is about to become that man’s wife shows that she is in his power – that he possesses some mysterious hold over her. And suppose you denounced him to the police, would he not, on his part, revenge himself upon her?”

“Probably. But I will risk that.”

“Personally I think that Ella will be the greater sufferer from such an injudicious action.”

Curious. Her words bore out exactly what Ella herself had said. Yet she surely could know nothing of the secret between them. Until half an hour ago, when I had told her, she was not even aware that Gordon-Wright was acquainted with the woman who had been betrothed to me.

“But I do not intend that she shall fall the victim of this adventurer,” I said quickly, for I recognised in her words a fear that her father’s secret might be exposed.

“If he really possesses a hold over her sufficient to compel her to marry him, any attempt to rescue her may only cause her complete ruin,” she said. “Have you any idea of the nature of this extraordinary influence he seems to have over her?”

“None. I am in entire ignorance.”

“When we met that night at Studland I certainly was deceived,” she went on. “I believed that she was beside herself with delight at finding you again, and still unmarried – I never dreamed that she was engaged to another – and to Gordon-Wright of all men.”

“Why do you say ‘of all men’?”

“Because – well, because he’s the last man a girl of her stamp should marry.”

“Then you know more about him than you care to admit, Miss Miller?”

“We need not discuss him,” was her brief answer. “It is Ella we have to think of, not of him.”

“Yes,” I said, “we have to think of her – to extricate her from the horrible fate that threatens her – marriage to a scoundrel.” Then turning again to my pretty companion I said, in a voice intended to be more confidential: “Now, Miss Miller, your position and mine are, after all, very curious. Though we have been acquainted so short a time, yet the fact of your having been Ella’s most intimate friend has cemented our own friendship to an extraordinary degree. We have exchanged confidences as old friends, and I have told you the secrets of my heart. Yet you, on your part, have not been exactly open with me. You are still concealing from me certain facts which, if you would but reveal, would, I know, assist me in releasing Ella from her bondage. Why do you not speak plainly? I have travelled here, across Europe, to beg of you to tell me the truth,” I added, looking straight into her pale serious face.

“How can I tell you the truth when I am ignorant of it myself?” she protested.

“What I have told you this evening concerning Ella’s engagement to that blackguard has surprised you, and it has also shown you that the mysterious secret of your father’s of which you have spoken may be imperilled, eh?”

She nodded. Then, after some hesitation, she said: – “Not only that, but something further. That Gordon-Wright should aspire to Ella’s hand is utterly mystifying.”

“Why?”

“Well – you recollect what I told you regarding – regarding that man who died in the house where you were living in London,” she said, in a low, faltering voice.

“You mean the ex-Minister of Justice, Nardini?”

She nodded an affirmative.

“I remember perfectly all that you told me. He refused to speak the truth concerning you.”

“He laughed in my face when I asked him to make a confession that would save me,” she said hoarsely, her dark eyes flashing with a dangerous fire. “He was a coward; he sacrificed me, a woman, because he feared to speak the truth. Ah!” she cried, clenching her hands, “you see me here wearing a mask of calm and tranquillity, but within my heart is a volcano of bitterness, of scorn for that wretched embezzler who carried his secret to the grave.”

“I can quite understand it, and fully sympathise with you,” I said, in a kindly tone, recollecting all that had passed between us after she had discovered the mysterious Italian dead in that upstairs room at Shepherd’s Bush. “But I hope you are not still disturbed over what may, after all, be merely an ungrounded fear?”

“Ungrounded!” she cried. “Ah! would to Heaven it were ungrounded. No. The knowledge that the blow must fall upon me sooner or later – to-day, to-morrow, in six months’ time, or in six years – holds me ever breathless in terror. Each morning when I wake I know not whether I shall again return to my bed, or whether my next sleep will be within the grave.”

“No, no,” I protested, “don’t speak like this. It isn’t natural.” But I saw how desperate she had now become.

“I intend to cheat them out of their revenge,” she said, in a low whisper, the red glow of the sundown falling full upon her haggard face. “They shall never triumph over me in life. With my corpse they may do as they think proper.”

“They? Who are they?”

“Shall I tell you?” she cried, her starting eyes fixing themselves upon mine. “That man Gordon-Wright is one of them.”

“He is your enemy?” I gasped.

“One of my bitterest. He believes I am in ignorance, but fortunately I discovered his intention. I told Nardini, and yet he refused to speak. He knew the peril in which I existed, and yet, coward that he was, he only laughed in my face. He fled from Rome. I followed him to England only to discover that, alas! he was dead – that he had preserved his silence.”