CHAPTER XXVIII.

TELLS GORDON’S SECRET

A calm, cloudless evening.

The broad waters of the Channel lay bathed in the brilliant after-glow, for the sun was just disappearing below the horizon, and a fresh, health-giving breeze sprang up as Maidee and Gordon sat together upon a seat high upon Beachy Head.

They were alone. Already in the big lighthouse the light was flashing, it being lit at sundown, while away in the distance ships were passing--the busy traffic of England’s great waterway.

During the past fortnight Maidee had almost completely recovered--sufficiently, indeed, to ascend those steep, grass-covered slopes from Eastbourne. She no longer used her bath-chair, and already her cheeks showed that she was deriving great benefit from the sea air.

In her neat, dark brown tailor-made coat and skirt, and small, close hat with white veil, she presented a smart appearance, while her face, distinguishable through the wisp of net, was surely one which would be remarked anywhere. Gordon, as he sat at her side, her hand tenderly in his, presented a well-set-up figure in dark grey tweeds and soft felt hat. She was secretly proud of him--when on the esplanade she saw how, on every side, people turned and then whispered among themselves that the smart, clean-shaven young man was none other than Gordon Cunningham, the man of the moment, whose name was mentioned almost daily in the papers.

At the Grand, men and women were ever anxious to make his acquaintance, while several young girls had shyly brought her their autograph books, asking her to induce him to sign them.

As she sat there, her face bathed in the crimson sundown, he had wound his arm tenderly about her waist, and, raising her veil, had kissed her upon the lips.

Then, after much hesitation, he at last summoned courage to tell her something--something which he had longed to reveal to her for months, and yet had not dared.

“Maidee,” he said at last, peering into her eyes, “I want you to forgive me. I--I want to tell you something which, before we go further, you should know. I want to confess to you something--so that others may not tell you and, in the telling, distort the story.”

She started, staring at him in alarm.

“Why, Gordon!” she asked, “what’s the matter?”

“Nothing--only I want to tell you something--something about myself--a secret of my life.”

“A secret! Then tell me,” and her gloved fingers closed convulsively upon his as she looked into his face.

“Well, I want to tell you this, dearest,” he said in a low, intense voice, his gaze fixed upon hers. “A few years ago, soon after I left college, I met an elderly man named Tulloch, a financial adventurer, who I have strong reasons to believe was a friend of my late father. Though a man who moved in that shady set which haunts the big London hotels in search of pigeons to pluck, and though always full of schemes that were bogus, yet he became my friend, and to his secret influence I certainly owe my advancement. He assisted me, he said, because he owed a debt of gratitude to my dead father. Sometimes his movements were very strange. He lived in chambers in South Audley Street, and was often absent abroad for long periods--looking after mining properties in which he was interested. After my first journey in the East I met a young girl, who, though in humble circumstances, attracted me, and--well, I may as well confess it at once--I married her at the registry office at Marylebone.”

“Married!” she shrieked, starting up and facing him in dismay.

“Listen to the truth, darling,” he urged very quietly, still holding her hand, and slowly drawing her back to her seat. “Ours was a secret union. Nobody knew--not even Tulloch, my closest friend. We lived in lodgings in the north of London under an assumed name, yet--well, I was not happy. From the first week I knew I had committed a grave error. Yet I had married, and the girl was my wife. Before my marriage my wife had a pet fox-terrier, very old and half-blind, that had belonged to her brother; and one day she declared that the poor animal, being useless and complained of by the landlady, must be destroyed.”

“But why tell me this?” cried Maidee, interrupting. “You are married--Gordon!”

“Hear me to the end,” he said very earnestly. “It is but right that you should know the whole truth. A few days after the suggestion made by my wife, I was, one evening, in Tulloch’s rooms, and our conversation turned upon curios. From a drawer in his writing-table he took a tiny bottle, which he said was one of the strangest curios he possessed--for the half-dried liquid it contained was a most deadly poison, a single drop of it, either taken by the mouth or injected into the blood, being sufficient to cause death. I examined it with curiosity, and asked where he had obtained it, but my inquiry evidently caused him annoyance, for he snatched it from my hand and threw it back into the drawer. Half an hour later, when he had gone into the next room to answer the telephone, I suddenly recollected the blind terrier. Therefore, I opened the drawer, took out the poison, and next day gave it to my wife, telling her to handle the stuff with greatest care. She expressed disbelief that any poison could be so potent, but poured out a small quantity upon a piece of sugar, which she placed on the mantelshelf of the sitting-room, intending to give it to the animal when he came in. I took the bottle back and left, for I was anxious to replace it in Tulloch’s rooms. When I entered his chambers he at once looked me in the face curiously, and asked what I had done with the poison. I fear I was confused, but was compelled to produce it and restore it to him. Judge my horror, however, when, a few hours later, I learnt through the newspapers that my wife had been found mysteriously poisoned almost as soon as I had left her. She had had, I recollected, a slight scratch on her left thumb, and, in holding the sugar as she dropped the fluid upon it, she had, no doubt, absorbed the noxious drug--whatever it was. My first impulse was to go to Camden Town and make a statement to the police. But if I did I should be compelled to acknowledge my secret marriage. Therefore, I refrained. In my despair I consulted Tulloch, when, to my dismay, he coolly declared me to be a liar, and accused me of the wilful murder of the girl Helen Weaver. He had somehow ascertained that I had married.”

“Helen Weaver!” gasped Maidee, pale and agitated. “And she was your wife, Gordon!”

“Yes, dearest,” he replied in a low tone. “I have told you the whole truth because--well, because from that moment Tulloch became my enemy. He blackmailed me--then disappeared, and I heard he had died in Italy. But only recently he has reappeared again to taunt and torture me with a crime of which I am entirely innocent.”

“But, Gordon, has it not been proved that the girl Weaver, and several other different persons in London, died by exactly the same mysterious drug as did Sir George and that poor old man in Pimlico? And yet this man Tulloch was, as you can prove, in actual possession of the mysterious poison!” she exclaimed.

“I know,” he admitted; “it is all a complete mystery. Tulloch returned, and urged me to put that question in the House--threatened that if I did not he would come to you and allege that I killed Helen; and yet, at the very moment when I had risen to interrogate the Home Secretary, I received an anonymous note declaring that if I did so my secret enemy would encompass my ruin. I stood with ruin on either side; I hesitated--and suppose I must have fainted.”

For a few moments a silence fell between the pair, a silence only broken by the screaming of a gull above them.

Then Maidee, her womanly sympathy asserting itself, took her lover’s hand, saying:

“Poor dear! I did not know all that. I--I ought not to have misjudged you. Forgive me!”

“Of course, darling,” he said, “I have told you this because--well, because I know not from one day to another whether Tulloch may not return and again repeat the dastardly allegation against me.”

She paused, her face turned thoughtfully towards the darkening sea, for the evening light was now fast falling.

“And yet, surely it is a very suspicious circumstance that this man Tulloch, who is your enemy, possessed the drug which has for so long mystified both police and analysts. Medland has told me that both Sir George and the man Goodrick fell victims to it. Could Tulloch have been acquainted with the pair?”

“Who knows? He is a strange person--a man who is a past-master of many professions, especially of politics. Once he told me, I remember, that he knew Sir George.”

“Ah! Then it was he who killed him--without a doubt,” the girl cried. “Cannot we tell Inspector Medland, and let him search for the culprit?”

“I think that would be injudicious at present,” was the young man’s reply. “Tulloch, having returned from the grave once, will again come back to taunt and torture me. When he reappears, then we will tell Medland of our suspicions.”

Maidee inquired what kind of man Tulloch was, and her lover replied, giving a description of him as near as was possible.

“But,” he added, “his very profession compels him to travel rapidly and sometimes to change his personal appearance. He has often confessed to me that to have dealings with thieves one must be a thief oneself.”

“Is he still in London?”

“No--abroad, I expect. Were he in London he would, no doubt, call upon me. He is such an enigma that, on the one hand, he is ever doing me some little service, and yet, on the other, he declares himself ready at any moment to expose my secret marriage with the ill-fated Helen Weaver and assert that she died by my hand.”

“I wish I could tell Uncle John what you have explained to me,” said the girl reflectively.

“Uncle John? Who is he?”

“Only an old gentleman I call uncle, though he is no relation,” she replied. Then, on being pressed by her lover, she, in contradiction of Ambrose’s express wishes, revealed to him her long and strange friendship with the unknown old gentleman who had frequented the parks in order to get sight of her and listen to her childish prattle.

“How very strange!” exclaimed Gordon, when he had heard her to the end. “I wonder who he can be?”

“I don’t know, nor do I care. Only, he is my closest and dearest friend. I am anxious to see him, to ask his opinion regarding this fellow Tulloch--to ask whether he suspects that Tulloch is also responsible for that dastardly attempt to kill me.”

“Where is this Uncle John? Where does he live?”

“He has recently lived over in Walworth; but at present he is away. I last wrote to him to the poste restante at Maçon. He surely will return to London very soon.”

Gordon did not reply. He was thinking over the remarkable and romantic revelation which his well-beloved had just made. Who could the mysterious Uncle John be?

Together they sat hand in hand, almost in silence, watching the great, grey night clouds rising away to the left--watching until the navigating lights of the shipping began to twinkle in the dark blue, and the great, broad, warning ray from the lighthouse showed a bright beam across the darkening waters.

Then they rose. For a few moments he fondly held her slim form in his arms, kissing her passionately upon the lips. Then they retraced their steps down the hill into Eastbourne, both filled with grave wonderment.

That same evening, almost at the very hour when the pair rose to leave that seat high on the summit of the promontory, a respectably dressed woman called at Scotland Yard, and to the constable at the door gave her name as Mrs. Jewell, the wife of a private detective living at Willesden, and having an office in King Street, Covent Garden. She said she wished to see an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department.

After a brief delay, she was taken up in the lift and shown to one of the big, bare waiting-rooms at the end of the corridor, a cheerless, depressing place, in which many a strange story had been told and many a crime revealed.

Presently to her came two officers, one of whom was Inspector Medland.

“I am in great distress, sir,” she said, addressing Medland, who was the older of the pair. “I have lost my husband.”

The detective smiled. The story of lost husbands is an everyday one at the Yard.

“Well?” he said in his sharp, business-like way. “Tell me the facts--as briefly as you can, please.”

“My husband and I had a few words back in January, and he left home to go to his office as usual in the morning. He was at the office all day. About seven o’clock, just as Martin, his clerk, was about to leave, a gentleman called. I’ve got the card which he gave.” And she produced the visiting-card of Sir George Ravenscourt.

This caused Medland to become at once interested.

“Yes,” he said; “go on.”

“Well, the gentleman had been to see my husband before, it seems,” explained Mrs. Jewell, “and after Martin left he remained talking in my husband’s private room. Some private inquiry, I suppose, for my husband does a lot of work for the aristocracy. From that moment till this he hasn’t been seen.”

“You say this occurred in January. Why didn’t you come here before, Mrs. Jewell?”

“Because when he left the house in the morning he said he wouldn’t come back. He’d said that before, and he’d always come back after a day or two, so I waited and waited; but he hasn’t come. Therefore, I’m now afraid that something must have happened to him.”

“What causes you to suspect that, eh?” asked the inspector.

“Because only yesterday I found out that Sir George Ravenscourt had died on the very night my husband disappeared--the night of the seventeenth of January!”

“The seventeenth of January!” echoed Medland, for he knew the man Jewell quite well. He had been a sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Department, and on retirement had set up as a private detective. “And he disappeared on the night of Sir George’s death--eh? Well, what do you suspect?” he asked.