Okewood of the Secret Service Part 27

In the hall he met the housekeeper who told him she wanted to go into Stanning to do some shopping that afternoon. Desmond told her that he himself was going out and would not be back for tea.

Then, picking a stout blackthorn out of the hallstand, he strode down the drive and out into the road.

It was still beautifully fine, but already the golden suns.h.i.+ne was waning and there were little wisps and curls of mist stealing low along the fields. Desmond turned to the left, on leaving the Mill House, as he was bid and saw the road running like a khaki ribbon before him into the misty distance.

Swinging his stick, he strode on rapidly. The road was neglected, broken and flinty and very soft. After he had gone about a mile it narrowed to pursue its way between two broad ditches lined with pollard willows and brimful of brown peaty water. By this time he judged, from his recollection of the map, that he must be on Morstead Fen. An interminable waste of sodden, emerald green fields, intersected by ditches, stretched away on either hand.

He had walked for half an hour when he made out in the distance a clump of trees standing apart and seemingly in the middle of the fields. Then in the foreground he descried a gate. A figure was standing by it.

As he approached the gate he saw it was a small boy. On remarking the stranger, the urchin opened the gate and without looking to right or left led off down the road towards the clump of trees: Desmond followed at his leisure.

As they neared the trees, the low red roof of a house detached itself. By this time the sun was sinking in a smear of red across a delicately tinted sky. Its dying rays held some glittering object high up on the side of the house.

At first Desmond thought it was a window, but presently the light went out, kindled again and once more vanished. It was too small for a window, Desmond decided, and then, turning the matter over in his mind, as observant people are accustomed to do even with trifles, he suddenly realized that the light he had seen was the reflection of the sun on a telescope or gla.s.ses.

They were now within a few hundred yards of the house. The road had made a right angle turn to the left, but the diminutive guide had quitted it and struck out along a very muddy cart track.

Shading his eyes, Desmond gazed at the house and presently got a glimpse of a figure at a window surveying the road through a pair of field gla.s.ses. Even as he looked, the figure bobbed down and did not reappear.

"They want to be sure I'm alone," thought Desmond, and congratulated himself on having had the strength of mind to break his orders.

The cart-track led up to a little bridge over a ditch. By the bridge stood a tall pole, on the top of which was a blue and gold painted sign-board inscribed, "The d.y.k.e Inn by J. Ra.s.s." The urchin led him across the bridge and up to the door of the inn.

An undersized, yellow-faced man, wearing neither collar nor tie, came to the door as they approached. Although of short stature, he was immensely broad with singularly long arms. Altogether he had something of the figure of a gorilla, Desmond thought on looking at him.

The man put a finger up and touched his forelock.

"Madame Le Bon is upstairs waiting for you!" he said in a nasal voice which Desmond recognized as that he had heard on the telephone. "Please to follow me!"

He led the way across a long low tap-room through a door and past the open trap-door of a cellar to a staircase. On the first landing, lit by a window looking out on a dreary expanse of fen, he halted Desmond.

"That's her room," he said, pointing to a door opposite the head of the staircase, half a dozen steps up, and so saying, the yellow-faced man walked quickly downstairs and left him. Desmond heard his feet echo on the staircase and the door of the tap-room slam.

He hesitated a moment. What if this were a trap? Suppose Mortimer, growing suspicious, had made use of Nur-el-Din to lure him to an ambush in this lonely place? Why the devil hadn't he brought a revolver with him?

Then Desmond's Irish blood came to his rescue. He gave his head a little shake, took a firm hold of his stick which was a stoutish sort of cudgel and striding boldly up to the door indicated, tapped.

"Entrez!" said a pretty voice that made Desmond's heart flutter.

CHAPTER XVI. THE STAR OF POLAND

The room in which Desmond found Nur-el-Din was obviously the parlor of the house. Everything in it spoke of that dreary period in art, the middle years of the reign of Victoria the Good. The wall-paper, much mildewed in places, was an ugly shade of green and there were dusty and faded red curtains at the windows and draping the fireplace. Down one side of the room ran a hideous mahogany sideboard, almost as big as a railway station buffet, with a very dirty tablecloth. The chairs were of mahogany, upholstered in worn black horsehair and there were two pairs of fly-blown steel engravings of the largest size on the wall. In the centre of the apartment stood a small round table, covered with a much stained red tablecloth and there was a door in the corner.

The dainty beauty of Nur-el-Din made a very forlorn picture amid the unmatched savagery of this English interior. The dancer, who was wearing the same becoming gray tweed suit in which Desmond had last seen her, was sitting sorrowfully at the table when Desmond entered. At the sight of him she sprang up and ran to meet him with outstretched hands.

"Ah!" she cried, "comme je suis heureuse de vous voir! It is good of you to come!"

And then, without any warning, she burst into tears and putting her hands on the man's shoulders, hid her head against his chest and sobbed bitterly.

Desmond took one of her hands, small and soft and warm, and gently disengaged her. His mind was working clearly and rapidly.

He felt sure of himself, sure of his disguise; if this were an exhibition of woman's wiles, it would find him proof; on that he was resolved. Yet, dissolved in tears as she was, with her long lashes glistening and her mouth twitching pitifully, the dancer seemed to touch a chord deep down in his heart.

"Come, come," said Desmond gutturally, with a touch of bonhomie in his voice in keeping with his ample girth, "you mustn't give way like this, my child! What's amiss? Come, sit down here and tell me what's the matter."

He made her resume her seat by the table and pulled up one of the horsehair chairs for himself. Nur-el-Din wiped her eyes on a tiny lace handkerchief, but continued to sob and shudder at intervals.

"Marie, my maid," she said in French in a broken voice, "joined me here to-day. She has told me of this dreadful murder!"

Desmond stiffened to attention. His mind swiftly reverted to the last woman he had seen cry, to Barbara Mackwayte discovering the loss of the package entrusted to her charge by the woman who sat before him.

"What murder?" he asked, striving to banish any trace of interest from his voice. He loathed the part he had to play. The dancer's distress struck him as genuine.

"The murder of Monsieur Mackwayte," said Nur-el-Din, and her tears broke forth anew.

"I have read of this in the newspapers," said Desmond. "I remember you told me he was a friend of yours."

Briefly, with many sobs, the dancer told him of the silver box which she had entrusted to Barbara Mackwayte's charge.

"And now," she sobbed, "it is lost and all my sacrifice, all my precautions, have been in vain!"

"But how?" asked Desmond. "Why should you think this box should have been taken? From what I remember reading of this case in the English newspapers there was a burglary at the house, but the thief has been arrested and the property restored. You have only to ask this Miss--what was the name? ah! yes, Mackwayte for your box and she will restore it!"

"No, no!" Nur-el-Din answered wearily, "you don't understand.

This was no burglary. The man who murdered Monsieur Arthur murdered him to get my silver box."

"But," objected Desmond, "a silver box! What value has a trifling object like that? My dear young lady, murder is not done for a silver box!"

"No, no," Nur-el-Din repeated, "you don't understand! You don't know what that box contained!"

Then she relapsed into silence, plucking idly at the shred of cambric she held between her fingers.

Already dusk was falling and the room was full of shadows. The golden radiance of the afternoon had died and eerie wraiths of fog were peering-in at the window.

Desmond held his peace. He felt he was on the threshold of a confession that might rend the veil of mystery surrounding the murder at Seven Kings. He stared fixedly at the ugly red tablecloth, conscious that the big eyes of the girl were searching his face.

"You have honest eyes," she said presently. "I told you that once before... that night we met at your house... do you remember?

Your eyes are English. But you are a German, hein?"

"My mother was Irish," said Desmond and felt a momentary relief that, for once, he had been able to speak the truth.

"I want a friend," the girl resumed wearily, "someone that I can trust. But I look around and I find no one. You serve the German Empire, do you not?"

Desmond bowed.

"But not the House of Hohenzollern?" the girl cried, her voice trembling with pa.s.sion.

"I am not of the Emperor's personal service, if that is what you mean, madame," Desmond returned coldly.

"Then, since you are not altogether an iron Prussian," Nur-el-Din resumed eagerly, "you can differentiate. You can understand that there is a difference between working for the cause of Germany and for the personal business of her princes."