The Complete Four Just Men (41 page)

May Sandford was expecting the colonel. She stood by the drawing-room fire, buttoning her glove and endeavouring to disguise her pleasure that her sometime friend had called.

‘Where are you going?’ was his first blunt greeting, and the girl stiffened.

‘You have no right to ask in that tone,’ she said quietly, ‘but I will tell you. I am going to dinner.’

‘With whom?’

The colour came to her face, for she was really annoyed. ‘With Colonel Black,’ she said an effort to restrain her rising anger.

He nodded. ‘I’m afraid I cannot allow you to go,’ he said coolly.

The girl stared. ‘Once and for all, Mr Fellowe,’ she said with quiet dignity, ‘you will understand that I am my own mistress. I shall do as I please. You have no right to dictate to me – you have no right whatever – ’ she stamped her foot angrily – ‘to say what I may do and what I may not do. I shall go where and with whom I choose.’

‘You will not go out tonight, at any rate,’ said Frank grimly.

An angry flush came to her cheeks. ‘If I chose to go tonight, I should go tonight,’ she said.

‘Indeed, you will do nothing of the sort.’ He was quite cool now – master of himself – completely under control.

‘I shall be outside this house,’ he said, ‘for the rest of the night. If you go out with this man I shall arrest you.’

She started and took a step back.

‘I shall arrest you,’ he went on determinedly. ‘I don’t care what happens to me afterwards. I will trump up any charge against you. I will take you to the station, through the streets, and put you in the iron dock as though you were a common thief. I’ll do it because I love you,’ he said passionately, ‘because you are the biggest thing in the world to me – because I love you better than life, better than you can love yourself, better than any man could love you. And do you know why I will take you to the police-station?’ he went on earnestly. ‘Because you will be safe there, and the women who look after you will allow no dog like this fellow to have communication with you – because he dare not follow you there, whatever else he dare. As for him – ’

He turned savagely about as a resplendent Black entered the room.

Black stopped at the sight of the other’s face and dropped his hand to his pocket.

‘You look out for me,’ said Frank, and Black’s face blanched.

The girl had recovered her speech.

‘How dare you – how dare you!’ she whispered. ‘You tell me that you will arrest me. How dare you! And you say you love me!’ she said scornfully.

He nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said, quietly enough. ‘I love you. I love you enough to make you hate me. Can I love you any more than that?’

His voice was bitter, and there was something of helplessness in it too, but the determination that underlay his words could not be mistaken.

He did not leave her until Black had taken his leave, and in his pardonable perturbation he forgot that he intended searching the colonel for a certain green bottle with a glass stopper.

* * *

Colonel Black returned to his flat that night to find unmistakable evidence that the apartment had been most systematically searched.
There existed, however, no evidence as to how his visitors had gained
admission. The doors had been opened, despite the fact that they were fastened by a key which had no duplicate, and with locks that
were apparently unpickable. The windows were intact, and no
attempt had been made to remove money and valuables from the desk which had been ransacked. The only proof of identity they had left behind was the seal which he found attached to the blotting-pad on his desk.

They had gone methodically to work, dropped a neat round splash of sealing-wax, and had as neatly pressed the seal of the organization upon it. There was no other communication, but in its very simplicity this plain ‘IV’ was a little terrifying. It seemed that the members of the Four defied all his efforts at security, laughed to scorn his patent
locks, knew more about his movements than his most intimate friends
, and chose their own time for their visitations.

This would have been disconcerting to a man of less character than Black; but Black was one who had lived through a score of years – each year punctuated, at regular intervals, with threats of the most terrible character. He had ever lived in the shadow of reprisal, yet he had never suffered punishment.

It was his most fervent boast that he never lost his temper, that he never did anything in a flurry. Now, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was going to work actuated by a greater consideration than self-interest – a consideration of vengeance.

It made him less careful than he was wont to be. He did not look for shadowers that evening, yet shadowers there had been – not one but many.

Chapter 11

To Lincoln races

Sir Isaac Tramber went to Lincoln in an evil frame of mind. He had reserved a compartment, and cursed his luck when he discovered that his reservation adjoined that of Horace Gresham.

He paced the long platform at King’s Cross, waiting for his guests. The Earl of Verlond had promised to go down with him and to bring Lady Mary, and it was no joy to Sir Isaac to observe on the adjoining carriage the label, ‘Reserved for Mr Horace Gresham and party’.

Horace came along about five minutes before the train started. He was as cheerful as the noonday sun, in striking contrast to Sir Isaac, whose night had not been too wisely spent. He nodded carelessly to Sir Isaac’s almost imperceptible greeting.

The baronet glanced at his watch and inwardly swore at the old earl and his caprices. It wanted three minutes to the hour at which the train left. His tongue was framing a bitter indictment of the old man when he caught a glimpse of his tall, angular figure striding along the platform.

‘Thought we weren’t coming. I suppose?’ asked the earl, as he made his way to the compartment. ‘I say, you thought we weren’t coming?’ he repeated, as Lady Mary entered the compartment, assisted with awkward solicitude by Sir Isaac.

‘Well, I didn’t expect you to be late.’

‘We are not late,’ said the earl.

He settled himself comfortably in a corner seat – the seat which Sir Isaac had specially arranged for the girl. Friends of his and of the old man who passed nodded. An indiscreet few came up to speak.

‘Going up to Lincoln, Lord Verlond?’ asked one idle youth.

‘No,’ said the earl sweetly, ‘I am going to bed with the mumps.’ He snarled the last word, and the young seeker after information fled.

‘You can sit by me, Ikey – leave Mary alone,’ said the old man sharply. ‘I want to know all about this horse. I have £150 on this thoroughbred of yours; it is far more important than those fatuous inquiries you intend making of my niece.’

‘Inquiries?’ grumbled Sir Isaac resentfully.

‘Inquiries!’ repeated the other. ‘You want to know whether she slept last night; whether she finds it too warm in this carriage; whether she would like a corner seat or a middle seat, her back to the engine or her face to the engine. Leave her alone, leave her alone, Ikey. She’ll decide all that. I know her better than you.’

He glared, with that amusing glint in his eyes, across at the girl.

‘Young Gresham is in the next carriage. Go and tap at the window and bring him out. Go along!’

‘He’s got some friends there, I think, uncle,’ said the girl.

‘Never mind about his friends,’ said Verlond irritably. ‘What the devil does it matter about his friends? Aren’t you a friend? Go and tap at the door and bring him out.’

Sir Isaac was fuming.

‘I don’t want him in here,’ he said loudly. ‘You seem to forget, Verlond, that if you want to talk about horses, this is the very chap who should know nothing about Timbolino.’

‘Ach!’ said the earl testily, ‘don’t you suppose he knows all there is to be known. What do you think sporting papers are for?’

‘Sporting papers can’t tell a man what the owner knows,’ said Sir Isaac importantly.

‘They tell me more than he knows,’ he said. ‘Your horse was favourite yesterday morning – it isn’t favourite any more, Ikey.’

‘I can’t control the investments of silly asses,’ grumbled Sir Isaac.

‘Except one,’ said the earl rudely. ‘But these silly asses you refer to do not throw their money away – remember that, Ikey. When you have had as much racing as I have had, and won as much money as I have won, you’ll take no notice of what owners think of their horses. You might as well ask a mother to give a candid opinion of her own daughter’s charms as to ask an owner for unbiased information about his own horse.’

The train had slipped through the grimy purlieus of London and was now speeding through green fields to Hatfield. It was a glorious spring day, mellow with sunlight: such a day as a man at peace with the world might live with complete enjoyment.

Sir Isaac was not in this happy position, nor was he in a mood to discuss either the probity of racing men or the general question of the sport itself.

He observed with an inward curse the girl rise and walk, apparently
carelessly, into the corridor. He could have sworn he heard a tap at the window of the next compartment, but in this, of course, he was wrong. She merely moved across the vision of the little coterie who sat laughing and talking, and in an instant Horace had come out.

‘It is not my fault this, really,’ she greeted him, with a little flush in her cheeks. ‘It was uncle’s idea.’

‘Your uncle is an admirable old gentleman,’ said Horace fervently. ‘I retract anything I may have said to his discredit.’

‘I will tell him,’ she said, with mock gravity.

‘No, no,’ cried Horace, ‘I don’t want you to do that exactly.’

‘I want to talk to you seriously,’ said she suddenly. ‘Come into our compartment. Uncle and Sir Isaac are so busy discussing the merits of Timbolino – is that the right name?’ He nodded, his lips twitching with amusement. ‘That they won’t notice anything we have to say,’ she concluded.

The old earl gave him a curt nod. Sir Isaac only vouchsafed a scowl. It was difficult to maintain anything like a confidential character in their conversation, but by manoeuvring so that they spoke only of the more important things when Sir Isaac and his truculent guest were at the most heated point of their argument, she was able to unburden the anxiety of her mind.

‘I am worried about uncle,’ she said in a low tone.

‘Is he ill?’ asked Horace.

She shook her head. ‘No, it isn’t his illness – yet it may be. But he is so contradictory; I am so afraid that it might react to our disadvantage. You know how willing he was that you should . . . ’ She hesitated, and his hand sought hers under the cover of an open newspaper.

‘It was marvellous,’ he whispered, ‘wasn’t it? I never expected for one moment that the old dev – that your dear uncle,’ he corrected himself, ‘would have been so amenable.’

She nodded again. ‘You see,’ she said, taking advantage of another heated passage between the old man and the irritated baronet, ‘what he does so impetuously he can undo just as easily. I am so afraid he will turn and rend you.’

‘Let him try,’ said Horace. ‘I am not easily rent.’

Their conversation was cut short abruptly by the intervention of the man they were discussing.

‘Look here, Gresham,’ snapped the earl shortly, ‘you’re one of the cognoscenti, and I suppose you know everything. Who are the Four Just Men I hear people talking about?’

Horace was conscious of the fact that the eyes of Sir Isaac Tramber were fixed on him curiously. He was a man who made no disguise of his suspicion.

‘I know no more than you,’ said Horace. ‘They seem to me to be an admirable body of people who go about correcting social evils.’

‘Who are they to judge what is and what is not evil?’ growled the earl, scowling from under his heavy eyebrows. ‘Infernal cheek! What do we pay judges and jurymen and coroners and policemen and people of that sort for, eh? What do we pay taxes for, and rent for, and police rates, and gas rates, and water rates, and every kind of dam’ rate that the devilish ingenuity of man can devise? Do we do it that these jackanapes can come along and interfere with the course of justice? It’s absurd! It’s ridiculous!’ he stormed.

Horace threw out a protesting hand.

‘Don’t blame me,’ he said.

‘But you approve of them,’ accused the earl. ‘Ikey says you do, and Ikey knows everything – don’t you, Ikey?’

Sir Isaac shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I didn’t say Gresham knew anything about it,’ he began lamely.

‘Why do you lie, Ikey; why do you lie?’ asked the old man testily. ‘You just told me that you were perfectly sure that Gresham was one of the leading spirits of the gang.’

Sir Isaac, inured as he was to the brutal indiscretions of his friends, went a dull red. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that exactly,’ he said awkwardly and a little angrily. ‘Dash it, Lord Verlond, don’t embarrass a fellow by rendering him liable to heavy damages and all that sort of thing.’

Horace was unperturbed by the other’s confusion. ‘You needn’t bother yourself,’ he said coolly. ‘I should never think of taking you to a court of justice.’

He turned again to the girl, and the earl claimed the baronet’s attention. The old man had a trick of striking off at a tangent; from one subject to another he leapt like a will-o’-the-wisp. Before Horace had framed half a dozen words the old man was dragging his unwilling victim along a piscatorial road, and Sir Isaac was floundering out of his depths in a morass – if the metaphor be excused – of salmon-fishing, trout-poaching, pike-fishing – a sport on which Sir Isaac Tramber could by no means deem himself an authority.

It was soon after lunch that the train pulled into Lincoln. Horace usually rented a house outside the town, but this year he had arranged to go and return to London on the same night. At the station he parted with the girl.

‘I shall see you on the course,’ he said. ‘What are your arrangements? Do you go back to town tonight?’

She nodded. ‘Is this a very important race for you to win?’ she asked, a little anxiously.

He shook his head.

‘Nobody really bothers overmuch about the Lincolnshire Handicap,’ he said. ‘You see, it’s too early in the season for even the gamblers to put their money down with any assurance. One doesn’t know much, and it is almost impossible to tell what horses are in form. I verily believe that Nemesis will win but everything is against her.

‘You see, the Lincoln,’ continued Horace doubtfully, ‘is a race which is not usually won by a filly, and then, too, she is a sprinter. I know sprinters have won the race before, and every year have been confidently expected to win it again; but the averages are all against a horse like Nemesis.’

‘But I thought,’ she said in wonder, ‘that you were so confident about her.’

He laughed a little. ‘Well, you know, one is awfully confident on Monday and full of doubts on Tuesday. That is part of the game; the form of horses is not half as inconsistent as the form of owners. I shall probably meet a man this morning who will tell me that some horse is an absolute certainty for the last race of the day. He will hold me by the buttonhole and he will drum into me the fact that this is the most extraordinarily easy method of picking up money that was ever invented since racing started. When I meet him after the last race he will coolly inform me that he did not back that horse, but had some tip at the last moment from an obscure individual who knew the owner’s aunt’s sister. You mustn’t expect one to be consistent.

‘I still think Nemesis will win,’ he went on, ‘but I am not so confident as I was. The most cocksure of students gets a little glum in the face of the examiner.’

The earl had joined them and was listening to the conversation with a certain amount of grim amusement. ‘Ikey is certain Timbolino will win,’ he said, ‘even in the face of the examiner. Somebody has just told me that the examiner is rather soft under foot.’

‘You mean the course?’ asked Horace, a little anxiously.

The earl nodded. ‘It won’t suit yours, my friend,’ he said. ‘A sprinter essaying the Lincolnshire wants good going. I can see myself taking £1,500 back to London today.’

‘Have you backed Timbolino?’

‘Don’t ask impertinent questions,’ said the earl curtly. ‘And unnecessary questions,’ he went on. ‘You know infernally well I’ve backed Timbolino. Don’t you believe me? I’ve backed it and I’m afraid I’m not going to win.’

‘Afraid?’

Whatever faults the old
man had,
Horace knew him for a good loser.

The earl nodded.

He was not amused now. He had dropped like a cloak the assumption of that little unpleasant leering attitude. He was, Horace saw for the first time, a singularly good-looking old man. The firm lines of the mouth were straight, and the pale face, in repose, looked a little sad.

‘Yes. I’m afraid.’ he said. His voice was even and without the bitter quality of cynicism which was his everlasting pose.

‘This race makes a lot of difference to some people. It doesn’t affect me very much,’ he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched a little. ‘But there are people,’ he went on seriously, ‘to whom this race makes a difference between life and death.’ There was a sudden return to his usual abrupt manner. ‘Eh? How does that strike you for good melodrama, Mr Gresham?’

Horace shook his head in bewilderment. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you at all, Lord Verlond.’

‘You may follow me in another way,’ said the earl briskly. ‘Here is my car. Good morning.’

Horace watched him out of sight and then made his way to the racecourse.

The old man had puzzled him not a little. He bore, as Horace knew, a reputation which, if not unsavoury, was at least unpleasant. He was credited with having the most malicious tongue in London. But when Horace came to think, as he did, walking along the banks of the river on his way to the course, there was little that the old man had ever said which would injure or hurt innocent people. His cynicism was in the main directed against his own class, his savageness most manifested against notorious sinners. Men like Sir Isaac Tramber felt the lash of his tongue.

His treatment of his heir was, of course, inexcusable. The earl himself never excused it; he persistently avoided the subject, and it would be a bold man who would dare to raise so unpleasant a topic against the earl’s wishes.

He was known to be extraordinarily wealthy, and Horace Gresham had reason for congratulating himself that he had been specially
blessed with this world’s goods. Otherwise his prospects would not
have been of the brightest. That he was himself enormously rich precluded any suggestion (and the suggestion would have been inevitable) that he hunted Lady Mary’s fortune. It was a matter of supreme indifference to himself whether she inherited the Verlond millions or whether she came to him empty-handed.

There were other people in Lincoln that day who did not take so philosophical a view of the situation.