The girl from Scotland Yard
was indistinguishable under a mud pack, designed to preserve the face
from the ravages of age, and her hands were inclosed in complexion
gloves. Two dark eyes glared oddly from the mask of gray, and she
spoke with some difficulty, due to the dried earth that plastered her
cheeks. Just now she had an additional reason for annoyance.
“Tell her I can’t see her and I won’t see her. Tell her to come back
at twelve o’clock.”
“She’s from Scotland Yard, ma’am.”
“I don’t care; I won’t see her.”
The obedient charlady disappeared into the outer room. Greta heard the
murmur of voices, and after a while the woman came back.
“She says she’ll wait till you’re ready. She wants to know how you
hurt your leg.”
Greta had no need to stifle her fury. A sudden panic descended upon
her.
“Bring me some hot water.”
It took some time to remove the renovating mud, a little longer time
to substitute perfumed creams and powder. A brief glimpse through an
open door had revealed to Leslie Maughan the cause of the delay. She
waited patiently, having some sympathy with woman’s losing fight
against the ravages of time and care. When at length she was admitted,
it was the old Greta who smiled ecstatically.
“My dear! How wonderfully good of you to come! So sweet of you! I was
so hoping that I should have another opportunity of meeting you. The
princess is rather difficult, isn’t she? I did so want to have a
little chat with you the last time we met. I admire your style
awfully. Won’t you sit down somewhere? Yes, I’ve had an awful
accident. I was cleaning my husband’s pistol and it went off, but
fortunately no bones were broken.”
“Where did this happen?”
It was on the tip of Greta’s tongue to say “here,” but she thought
better of it.
“At a country house where I was staying for the week-end. People are
so careless. Imagine leaving a pistol loaded! I nearly died of
fright!”
“What country house was this?” asked Leslie.
Greta knit her brows.
“What was the name of the place? I don’t know the people very well.
Somewhere in Berkshire.”
“Was your husband there, Mrs. Gurden?”
“Er--no--but he had been staying at the place; left his box behind. I
was rummaging through it and found his pistol, and it looked so
awfully rusty and dirty that I thought I would clean it.”
“Who else was hurt besides you?” asked Leslie quietly.
Greta shot a swift, suspicious glance at the girl.
“Nobody, thank goodness!” she said.
Leslie waited a second, then:
“Was this before or after Druze was killed?”
Under the rouge Greta’s face went suddenly gray and pinched. She sat
bolt upright in bed and stared at the girl.
“Dead?” she said huskily. “Druze is dead? It’s a lie!”
“Druze is dead! She was found last night on Barnes Common--shot!”
“‘She?’” The woman’s forehead was puckered into lines. “‘She?’ What
are you talking about? I was speaking of Druze.”
“So was I,” said Leslie. “Druze was a woman; you know that.”
The open mouth, the wide eyes, every visible expression of amazement
revealed without question Greta Gurden’s ignorance of the “butler’s”
sex.
“A woman! Good heavens!”
She sank back on the pillows, exhausted by her emotion, her eyes fixed
on the ceiling. But for those wide-open pools of darkness, Leslie
would have thought that the woman had fainted. Presently she spoke.
“I’ve nothing to tell you. I shot myself by accident. I know nothing
about Druze--nothing. Why should I? The accident occurred when I was
in the country. I won’t talk to you! I won’t!”
She almost screamed the words.
Leslie realized that it would be cruel to question her more closely;
the woman was so distressed that she might have hesitated even if she
had not feared the effects of a further cross-examination upon one who
was in the surgeon’s hands.
“I will come along and see you when you’re a little better, Mrs.
Gurden,” she said.
Greta made no answer.
As Leslie’s cab turned out of the street, it passed a big car swinging
round to enter the unpretentious thoroughfare, and the girl had a
glimpse of the princess. She wished now that on some pretext or other
she had stayed, that she might see the meeting between these two.
Anita Bellini mounted the stairs and, entering the apartment without
knocking, summarily dismissed the charwoman, and Mrs. Hobbs, not
unused to such cavalier treatment, departed meekly.
“Has Maughan been here?” she demanded, as she strode into Greta’s
room.
Her eyes narrowed as she caught sight of the haggard face.
“I see she has,” she said grimly. “What did she come about?”
Greta raised herself on her elbow and pushed up her pillow to support
her; she was trembling so that after a second she rolled back on the
pillow with a groan.
“She wanted to know how I was wounded,” she said at last.
“What did you tell her?” asked the princess impatiently. “For Heaven’s
sake pull yourself together, my good woman! How did she know you were
wounded, anyway? Did you send an announcement to the newspapers?”
“I don’t know how she knew, but she did. I told her that it was an
accident, that I was cleaning my husband’s pistol and it went off.
Anita, is it true?”
“Is what true?” asked the princess roughly.
“Is it true that Druze is dead?”
“Yes.”
“And that she was a woman?”
“I thought you guessed,” said the Princess Anita. “Of course she was a
woman.”
“My stars, how awful!”
Anita Bellini’s cold glance transfixed the invalid.
“What is the matter with you?” she demanded harshly. “Druze was----”
She stopped short.
“How long are you going to be in bed?”
Greta shook her head.
“I don’t know; the doctor says another week at least.”
“Did you tell her anything more? Really, Greta, you’re not to be
trusted, though I never dreamed that nosy little devil would find out
about your being shot. I suppose the doctor reported it.”
She stared down at the woman speculatively.
“I suppose I’d better give you some money,” she said, with no great
enthusiasm. “You look awful, you know that? You’re not wearing well,
Greta. All the mud in the world will not take those wrinkles from
under your eyes. Why, you’re old.”
The red in Greta Gurden’s face was natural: it came and went. Fury
blazed in the dark eyes, for now Anita Bellini had touched her upon
the rawest place of Greta’s self-esteem and put into words, at this
incongruous moment, all that this poor little _poseuse_ feared. But it
was Anita Bellini’s way, to go off at spiteful tangents, to sting and
hurt those from whom she expected unswerving loyalty. It was
characteristic of her that at this moment, when her mind and spirit
were tensed to meet the very real dangers which threatened her, she
could go out of her way to humiliate her creature.
“You aren’t able to attend to _Gossip_, of course. You’re having the
letters sent here?” she asked, and, when the woman nodded silently:
“The last batch were valueless; there was a little bit about the
Debouson woman, but I knew all about that. She isn’t worth a penny; in
fact, there’s a bankruptcy petition out against her husband. You had
better write a spicy paragraph about her; that is all the information
is worth.”
She was walking about the room as she spoke, stopping now and again to
look, with a contemptuous lift of her lips, at the tawdriness of the
imitations with which the room was stocked.
“I’m going to Capri in the spring,” she said. “The new villa has been
bought; I suppose I’d better take you along with me.”
She did not see the malignity that shot from the dark eyes.
“The paper will have to go. It is becoming more and more useless. If
you had had a spark of genius in you, Greta, you would have made that
into a property. You are sure you told that detective girl nothing?”
“Nothing,” said Greta, regaining control of her voice.
“What is this?”
Anita had stopped before a big secretaire, pulled down the flap and
was examining a number of letters neatly tied in bundles.
“Are those the papers of mine that I asked you to put in order?”
“Yes.”
The princess detached one letter from a bundle, read it and tossed it
back.
“Most of these things can be burned,” she said. “You found nothing of
importance?”
“No, nothing.”
Something in Greta’s tone made the other turn her head.
“What’s the matter with you?”
And then the pent-up fury of Greta Gurden burst forth. She was sobbing
with rage, almost unintelligible in her anger.
“You treat me as if I was a servant--patronizing! I hate your beastly
way of talking to me! I’m not a dog. I’ve served you like a slave for
twelve years, and I won’t be talked to as you talk to me. I won’t! I’d
sooner starve in the gutter! I suppose I am getting old. I know I am,
but you needn’t throw it in my face. You’re always talking about my
looks. If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all. I’m tired
of it.”
“Don’t be a fool!” scoffed the princess. “And don’t be hysterical.
You’ve got your future to consider and you’re not going to help by
quarrelling with me. You can’t go back to the chorus.”
“That’s the sort of horrible thing you would say,” stormed Greta. “I
think you’re loathsome! I won’t do another stroke of work for you.”
She ended in a passion of weak tears, and Anita Bellini did not
attempt to mollify her. She knew from past experience that in an hour
or two she would have a penitent message from her slave asking
forgiveness for this outburst; for this was not the first time that
Greta had revolted, only to come to heel at the snap of Anita’s whip.
With this assurance she took her ungracious leave, and had hardly left
the street before all thought of Greta was out of her mind. The
Princess Anita Bellini had other matters, more weighty, to think of.
There was very little for Leslie Maughan to tell to her chief, but he
did not seem greatly disappointed.
“We’ll leave her alone for a while. If you once start badgering these
people, they build up an unbreakable alibi, and that’s bad for trade.”
He looked glumly at the trunks in the corner of his room.
“We’d better dispose of these,” he said. “I’ll get in a clerk to write
down the inventory as you call them out.”
He rang for his secretary, the girl who had taken Leslie Maughan’s
place on her promotion, and, stooping before the first of the cabin
trunks, he unlocked it and threw back the lid. For half an hour Leslie
was lifting out articles of wearing apparel, and one little mystery
was solved when she came upon a parcel of men’s clothing. They were of
the ready-to-wear type, the parts roughly tacked. One of them,
however, must have been fitted, for it was partly sewed, and a small
tailor’s roll in a pocket of the trunk explained how Druze had avoided
the embarrassment of a tailor’s fitting. She was evidently a good
sewing woman, for the half-finished garment was beautifully tailored.
There was nothing, however, in the first trunk that threw any light
upon the mystery of her death.
The second box held a surprise: it was filled with women’s clothing.
“She was going to drop her disguise when she got to the United
States,” Leslie concluded, and with this view Mr. Coldwell agreed.
At last the second box was emptied, but again there was nothing that
could afford the slightest clue.
“There’s a suitcase; we only discovered it this morning; it was in the
parcels office at Waterloo,” said Coldwell.
He opened a cupboard and took out a crocodile skin travelling grip and
put it on the table. It was locked, but suitcase locks respond to
almost any key, and at the second attempt it was opened. Here the girl
found such articles as she would expect an ocean traveller to carry:
sponge bag, soap, a small jewel case containing a gold watch and
guard, a diamond-encircled wrist watch, and a small diamond bar