Kate Plus 10

I

Eighty-Three Pearls on a String

The Earl of Flanborough pressed a bell push by the side of his study table and, after an interval of exactly three seconds, pressed it again, though the footman’s lobby could not have been far short of fifty yards from the library and the serving man was never born who could sprint that distance in three seconds.

Yet, in such awe was his lordship held that morning by his man-servants, his maidservants and everything within his gates, that Sibble, the first footman, made the distance in five.

“Why the dickens don’t you answer my bell when I ring?” snapped the Earl and glared at his red-faced servant.

Sibble did not reply, knowing by experience that, even as silence was insolence, speech could be nothing less than impertinence.

Lord Flanborough was slightly over middle age, thin, bald and dyspeptic. His face was mean and insignificant and if you looked for any resemblance to the somewhat pleasant faces of the Feltons and Flanboroughs of past generations which stared mildly or fiercely, or (as in the case of the first Baron Felton and Flanborough, a poet and contemporary of Lovelace) with gentle melancholy from their massive frames in the long hall, you looked in vain. For George Percy Allington Felton, Earl of Flanborough, Baron Felton and Baron Sedgely of Waybrook, was only remotely related to the illustrious line of Feltons and had inherited the title and the heavily mortgaged estates of his great-uncle by sheer bad luck. This was the uncharitable view of truer Feltons who stood, however, more remotely in the line of succession.

Lord Flanborough had been Mr. George Felton of Felton, Heinrich and Somes, a firm which controlled extensive mining properties in various parts of the world, and the one bright spot in his succession to the peerage lay in the fact that he brought some two millions sterling to the task of freeing the estates of their encumbrances.

He was a shrewd man and an unpleasant man, but he had never been so objectionably unpleasant until he assumed the style and title of Flanborough and never so completely and impossibly unpleasant in the period of his lordship as he had been that morning.

“Now, what did I want you for?” asked Lord Flanborough in vexation. “I rang for something—if you had only answered at once instead of dawdling about, I should—ah, yes—tell Lady Moya that I wish to see her.”

Sibble made his escape thankfully.

Lord Flanborough pulled at his weedy moustache and looked at the virgin sheet of paper before him. Then he took up his pen and wrote:

Lost or Stolen: Valuable pearl chain consisting of eighty-three graduated pearls. Any person giving information which will lead to their recovery will receive a reward of two hundred pounds.

He paused; scratched out “two hundred pounds” and substituted “one hundred pounds.” This did not satisfy him and he altered the sum to “fifty pounds.” He sat considering even this modest figure and eventually struck out that amount and wrote, “will be suitably rewarded.”

He heard the door click and looked up.

“Ah—Moya. I am just tinkering away at an advertisement,” he said with a smile.

The Lady Moya Felton was twenty-two and pretty. She recollected in her admirable person many of the traditional family graces which had so malignantly avoided her parent. Well-shaped and of a gracious carriage, though no more than medium in height, the face with its delicacy of moulding was wholly Felton. If the stubborn chin, the firm mouth and the china-blue eyes had come from the dead and gone Sedgelys, the hair of bronze gold was peculiarly Feltonesque.

When she spoke, however, the carping critic might complain that her voice lacked the rich quality upon which the family prided itself, for the Feltons were orators in those days when a parliamentary speech read like something out of a book. Moya’s voice was a trifle hard and without body; it was also just a little unsympathetic. Lord Flanborough boasted with good cause that his daughter was a “practical little woman” and at least one man beside her father could testify to this quality.

“Dear, don’t you think it is a little absurd—advertising?” asked the girl.

She seated herself at the other side of the desk and, reaching out her hand, opened a silver box and helped herself to one of her father’s cigarettes.

“Why absurd, darling?” asked Lord Flanborough testily; “lost property has been found before now, by means of advertising. I remember years ago when I was in the city, there was a fellow named Goldberg—”

“Please forget all about the city for a moment,” she smiled, lighting her cigarette, “and review all the circumstances. Firstly, I had the pearls when I was at Lady Machinstones’ house. I danced with quiet, respectable people—Sir Ralph Sapson, Sir George Felixburn, Lord Fethington, Major Aitkens, and that awfully nice boy of Machinstones. They didn’t steal them. I had the pearls when I left, because I saw them as I was fastening my fur cloak. I had them in the car because I touched them just before we reached the house. I don’t remember taking them off—but then I was dead tired and hardly remember going to bed. Obviously, Martin is the thief. She is the only person who has access to my room; she helped me undress; it is as plain as a pikestaff.”

Lord Flanborough tapped his large teeth with his penholder, a practice of his which annoyed his daughter beyond words, though at the moment she deemed it expedient to overlook the fault. The loss had frightened her, for the pearls were worth three thousand pounds and she was one of those people whose standard of values had a currency basis.

“I have asked Scotland Yard to send their very best man,” said Lord Flanborough importantly. “Where is Martin?”

“Locked in her room—I have told Fellows to sit outside her door,” said the girl, and then, interestedly, “When will the detective arrive?”

Lord Flanborough picked up an open telegraph form from the table.

“ ‘Sending Inspector Pretherston’—by Jove!”

He blinked across the desk at his daughter.

“Pretherston,” she repeated thoughtfully; “isn’t it strange?”

“Pretherston—hum,” said her father and looked at her again.

If he expected to see any confusion, any heightening of color, even so much as a faltering of glance, he was relieved, for she met his gaze steadfastly, save that there was a faraway look in her eyes and a certain speculative narrowing of lids.

The romance was five years old, and if she cherished the memory of it, it was the charity which she might show to a favored piece in her china cupboard; it was something to be taken out and dusted at intervals. Michael Pretherston was a bad match from every point of view, though his invalid cousin was a peer of the realm and Michael would one day be Pretherston of Pretherston. He was hideously poor, he was casual, he had no respect for wealth, he held the most outrageous views on the church, society and the state; he was, in fact, something as nearly approaching an anarchist as Lord Flanborough ever expected or feared to meet.

His wooing had been brief but tempestuous. The girl had been overwhelmed and had given her promise. Recovering her reason in the morning and realizing (as she said) that love was not “everything,” she had written him a letter of fourteen pages in which she had categorically set forth the essential conditions to their union. These called for the abandonment of all his principles, the reestablishment of all his shattered beliefs and an estimate of the cost of placing Pretherston Court in a state of repair suitable for the reception of the Lady Moya Pretherston (née Felton).

To her fourteen pages, he had returned a thirty-two page letter which was at once an affront and a justification for anarchy. It was not a love-letter; rather was it something between a pamphlet by Henry George and a treatise by Jean Jacques Rousseau, interspersed with passionate appeals to her womanhood and offensive references to her “huckster-souled” father.

“He was always a wild sort of chap,” said Lord Flanborough, shaking his head darkly. “I understood that he had gone abroad.”

“I suppose there are other Pretherstons,” said the girl; “still it is strange, isn’t it?”

“Do you ever feel … ?” began her father awkwardly.

She smiled and laid down her cigarette on the crystal ashtray.

“He was wholly impossible,” she agreed.

There came a gentle tap at the door and a girl entered.

She was dressed neatly in black, and her prettiness was of a different type to that of her employer (for Lady Moya indulged in the luxury of a secretary). It was a beautiful face with a hint of tragedy in the down-turned lips and, it seemed, a history of wild sorrow in her big grey eyes. Yet of sorrow she knew nothing, and such tragedy as she had met had left her unmoved. Her abundant hair was of a rich brown; the hand that clasped a notebook to her bosom was small and artistic. She was an inch taller than Lady Moya, but because she did not show the same erectness of carriage she seemed shorter.

“Father, you asked me to let you have Miss Tenby this morning,” said Lady Moya with a nod for the girl. “I don’t know whether you will still want her?”

“I am so sorry this dreadful thing has happened, Lord Flanborough,” said the girl in a low voice; “it must be terrible to feel that there is a thief in the house.”

Lord Flanborough smiled good-humoredly.

“We shall recover the pearls, I am certain,” he said; “don’t let it worry you, Miss Tenby—I hope you are comfortable?”

“Very, Lord Flanborough,” said the girl gratefully.

“And the work is not too hard, eh?”

The girl smiled slightly.

“It is nothing—I feel awfully ashamed of myself sometimes. I have been with you a month and have hardly earned my salt.”

“That’s all right,” replied his lordship with great condescension; “you have already been of the greatest assistance to me and we shall find you plenty of other work. I was glad to see you in church on Sunday. The vicar tells me that you are a regular attendant.”

The girl inclined her head, but said nothing. For a while she waited and then at a word of polite dismissal, she left the library.

“Deuced nice girl, that,” said his lordship approvingly.

“She works well and quickly, and she can read French beautifully—I was very fortunate,” said Moya carelessly. “What were we talking about when she came in? Oh, yes—Michael Pretherston. I wonder now—”

The door opened and a footman announced,

“Inspector Pretherston, m’lord.”

“Inspector Michael Pretherston, you silly ass,” corrected the annoyed young man in the doorway.

It was Michael, then!

A little older, a little better-looking, a little more decisive—but Michael, as impetuous and irresponsible as ever.

“He spoilt my entrance, Moya,” he laughed, as he came with rapid strides toward the girl; “how are you after all these years—as pretty as ever, confound you. Ah, Lord Flanborough, you’re wearing well—I read your speech in the House of Lords on the Shipping Bill—a fine speech; did you make it up yourself?”

Moya laughed softly and saved what might have been a most embarrassing situation—for his lordship was framing a dignified protest against the suggestion that he had shared the honours of authorship.

“You are not changed, Michael,” she said, looking at him with undisguised, but none the less, detached admiration; “but what on earth are you doing in the police force?”

“Extraordinary,” murmured Lord Flanborough, and added humorously, “and an anarchist, too.”

“It is a long story,” said Michael. “I really received my promotion in the Special Branch—the Foreign Office Branch—and was transferred to the C.I.D. after we caught the Callam crowd, the Continental confidence tricksters. It is disgraceful that I should be an inspector, isn’t it? But merit tells!” He chuckled again, then of a sudden grew serious. “I’m forgetting I’ve a job to do—what’s the trouble?”

Lord Flanborough explained the object of his urgent call, and a look of disappointment appeared upon Michael Pretherston’s face.

“A miserable little larceny,” he said reproachfully. “I thought at least Moya had been kidnapped. Now, tell me all that happened on the night you lost the pearls.”

Step by step the girl related her movements and the periods at which she had evidence that the pearls were still with her.

“And then you reached your bedroom,” said Michael, “and what happened there? First of all, you took your fur wrap off.”

“Yes,” nodded the girl.

“Were you in a cheerful frame of mind or were you rather cross?”

“Does that matter?” she asked in surprise.

“Everything matters to the patient and systematic officer of the law. Temperamental clues are as interesting and material as any other.”

“Well, if the truth were told,” she confessed, “I was rather cross and very tired.”

“Did you take your cloak off, or did your woman?”

“I took it off myself,” she said after a pause, “and hung it up.”

He asked her a few more questions.

“Now, we will see the sorrowful Martin,” he said, “and let me tell you this, Moya, that if this girl is innocent she has grounds for action against you for false imprisonment.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Lord Flanborough with asperity. “I have a perfect right to detain anybody I think is guilty of theft.”

“You have no more right to lock a woman in a room,” said the other calmly, “than I have to stand you on your head. But that is beside the point. Lead me to the prisoner.”

The prisoner was very pale and very tearful; a middle-aged woman who felt her position acutely and between sobs and wails made an incoherent protest of her innocence.

“I suppose you have searched everywhere?” asked Michael, turning to the girl.

“Everywhere,” she replied emphatically. “I have had every box and every corner of the room examined.”

“Suppose the string of the pearls broke, would they all fall off?”

“No, they would still remain on, because each pearl was secured. Father gave them to me as a birthday present and he was very particular on that point.”

“I would like to bet,” said Michael suddenly, “that those pearls are not out of this room. Show me your wardrobe.”

The girl’s wardrobe occupied the whole of one wall of her dressing-room, and the tearful Martin opened the rosewood doors for his inspection.

“This is your fur cloak, I presume? Did you examine this after the loss?”

“Examine the cloak,” said Lady Moya in surprise, “of course not. What has the cloak to do with the loss? There are no pockets in it.”

“But if I know anything about the fur cloaks that are fashionable this season,” said Michael, wisely, “I should say that there is a possibility that this luxurious garment had a great deal to do with the loss. In fact, my dear Moya,” he said, “your mysterious loss has been duplicated and triplicated this year. In two cases the police were called in, and in the other case the owner had the intelligence to find her lost trinket without assistance.”

He lifted the cloak down very carefully and opened it to show the silk lining and there, caught in one of the long flat hooks, dangled the pearls. The girl uttered an exclamation of delight and slipped them from its fastening.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” said Michael dryly. “That is what has happened, not three times but half-a-dozen times since these flat hooks have been introduced. You take the cloak off in a bad temper, the hook catches the chain, breaks it, you bundle the cloak in your wardrobe and there you have the beginning of a great jewel mystery.”

“I can’t tell you how delighted I am,” said the girl. “Michael, you’re wonderful!”

Michael did not reply. He turned to the frightened waiting-woman with a kindly smile.

“I am so sorry you have been worried about this, Mrs. Martin,” he said, “but when people lose very valuable property they are also inclined to lose their very valuable heads. I am sure Lady Moya is sorry and will make you due compensation for any inconvenience you have been put to.”

The girl stared at him resentfully.

“Of course, I am awfully sorry, Martin,” she said, coldly.

“Oh, my lady,” said the woman eagerly, “I am only too pleased that you have recovered your chain. The worry of it has made me quite ill.”

“You can have a week’s holiday,” said Lord Flanborough, magnificently. “I will get you a free railway ticket to Seahampton,” he added.

“So you see, Mrs. Martin,” said Michael with that bland air of his which scarcely veiled the sarcasm so irritating to his lordship, “your generous employers will leave no stone unturned to minister to your comfort, regardless of expense. And when you are at Seahampton, Mrs. Martin, (I trust you will not lose the return half of your free ticket) you will be allowed to walk up and down the promenade on equal terms with the aristocracy and breathe the ozone which, ordinarily, is created for your betters. You may sit on the free seats and watch the pageant of life step past you and, reflecting upon the generosity of your betters, you may appreciate the good fortune which brought you into hourly contact with the aristocracy of England. And on Sundays, Mrs. Martin, you may go to church where quite a number of the seats are also free and may even share a hymnbook with a Gracious Person who is so vastly above you in social standing that he will never recognize you again, and there, I trust, you will pray with a new fervence that the deliberations of the House of Lords may receive divine inspiration.”

“Oh, indeed I will, sir,” said Mrs. Martin almost stunned by his eloquence.

He left the woman, overwhelmed, and returned with a very ruffled Lord Flanborough and an indignant Moya to the library.

“What utter nonsense you talk, Michael,” said the girl angrily. “I don’t think it was kind of you to attempt to set my servants against me.”

“Beastly bad taste,” said Lord Flanborough, “and really, Pretherston, you came here as an officer of the law and not as an old acquaintance and I think that you exceed your duties, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Old acquaintances,” said Michael, picking up his hat and his coat from a chair where he had put them before the interview, “are especially made to be forgotten, a peculiarity of which one is reminded in that Bacchanalian anthem which is sung at all public dinners where sobriety is bad form. I was merely endeavouring to inculcate into the mind of your slave a few moral principles, beneficial to you, and to society.”

“Don’t tell me that,” growled Lord Flanborough, “as though I didn’t recognize your sarcasm.”

“Children and the lower orders never recognize sarcasm,” said Michael with a broad smile.

He held out his hand and somewhat reluctantly his lordship extended his own flabby paw.

“Before I go,” he said, “I suppose I had better take a full account of this case. You haven’t a secretary or anybody to whom you can dictate the circumstances? You see I have to make a report to my cold-blooded superiors.”

Moya had reached the stage where whatever remains there was in her friendship with Michael Pretherston had not only died but had been cremated in the fires of her smothered anger and she was as anxious to see the end of this interview as was her father.

“Perhaps you will ring for Miss Tenby,” she said after a pause.

Her father pressed the bell and the waiting Sibble answered it.

“Send Miss Tenby,” said his lordship.

“And I do hope, Michael,” said the girl severely, “that when Miss Tenby is here you will not make such extravagant comments as you did before Martin.”

“Miss Tenby,” interposed Lord Flanborough, “will not welcome such talk. She is a young girl with—er—”

“I know, I know,” said Michael solemnly, “she is genteel. She does forty words a minute on the typewriter and goes to church, filling in her odd moments with needlework and accompanying you on the piano.”

“It must be a wonderful thing to be a detective,” said Moya, sarcastically; “as a matter of fact Miss Tenby is one of the fastest typists in the world.”

Michael swung round on her with an odd look on his face.

“Fastest typists in the world,” he repeated with all the humor gone out of his tone; “does she sing?”

It was the girl’s turn to be astonished.

“Yes, she does, and very beautifully.”

“Does she prefer Italian opera?” he asked.

At this, the girl laughed aloud.

“Somebody has been telling you all about her and you are trying to be mysterious,” she accused.

Further conversation was cut short by the arrival of the girl, who walked in, closed the door and came straight to the desk. She stopped dead at sight of Michael. Moya saw the meeting, saw the girl stiffen and her sorrowful eyes fixed upon the detective’s face.

“Why, Kate!” said Michael Pretherston softly. “Well, well, well! and to think that we meet again under such noble auspices.”

Miss Tenby said nothing.

“And what is the great game?” asked Michael, banteringly. “What beautiful impulse brought you to this sheltered home and how is the Colonel and friend Gregori and all those dear boys? By-the-way, the Colonel must be out by now, Kate. What did he get, three years?”

Still Miss Tenby made no reply.

“What is the meaning of this?” demanded Lord Flanborough, feeling that the moment had arrived to assert himself. “Do you know this lady?”

“Do I know her,” said Michael, ecstatically; “why, I am one of her greatest admirers, aren’t I, Kate?”

The girl’s sad face softened to a smile which showed the regular lines of her white teeth. She spoke and her voice was gentle and appealing.

“It is perfectly true, Lord Flanborough,” she said quietly, “Mr. Pretherston knows me. He also knows that my uncle, Colonel Westhanger, has been mixed up in a very serious scandal which brought him within the reach of the law. It is perfectly true that when I was a little girl I was known as Kate. It is just as true that I am trying now to live down my association with lawbreakers and am trying to rehabilitate myself in the world.”

“H’m,” murmured Lord Flanborough, a little taken back, “very creditable.”

Moya turned to Michael indignantly.

“I suppose that you think you are rendering a great service to the world in trying to drag this poor girl down to the gutter, in exposing her to her employers and in obtaining her dismissal from honest employment.”

“I do,” said Michael shamelessly.

“I think it is a barbarous thing to do!” said Moya angrily.

She had not yet decided in her own mind as to what steps she would take in face of this revelation. In view of her own character, it is possible that “Miss Tenby” would have a very short shift at her hands. But for the moment the opportunity for the display of benevolence and Christian charity was not to be passed over. She saw the girl’s appealing eyes and clasped hands and, for a moment, she felt a sincere thrill of pity for a brave sister struggling to escape the octopus tentacles of law and crime; for a moment she felt a genuinely unselfish desire to help another.

If she expected Inspector the Hon. Michael Pretherston—for such was his incongruous title—to wilt under her reproaches, she was disappointed. Michael had not taken his eyes from the secretary, nor had the twinkle in those eyes abated. He nodded to “Miss Tenby.”

“Kate,” he said, “you are really a wonder, and to think that you have never yet come into the clutches of the law until now.”

“Until now,” said the girl quickly, raising her voice.

He nodded.

“The Prevention of Crimes Act,” murmured Michael. “I can take you,”—he emphasized the “can”—“on a charge of obtaining employment with forged letters of recommendation, also with being a Suspected Person.”

The girl dropped her attitude of humility, threw back her head and laughed, showing her even white teeth.

“Oh, you Mike!” she railed him. “Oh, you busy fellow!”

Her amusement did not last long for instantly her face was set again and the grey eyes blazed with rage.

“One of these days you will be too clever,” she said bitterly. “I have seen better men than you and cleverer men than you go out, Michael Pretherston. You and your Prevention of Crimes Act! You can’t put that bluff over me. The Act does not come into operation until you have a conviction against my name, and that you will never get, you brute!”

“Kate, Kate!” murmured Michael. “There’s a lady present.”

She nodded.

“I guess I’ll get my kit together,” she said; “it hasn’t been exactly a holiday trip.”

“My sympathies are entirely with you,” said Michael; “it must have been awfully dull after the gay orgies of Crime Street.”

“There is one thing I have always wanted to know,” said the girl, pinching her lip thoughtfully.

She walked to the desk, and Lord Flanborough was too much taken back to arrest her progress. Without a word she opened the silver box on the table and took out a cigarette.

“I have always wanted to know what kind of dope this dear old gentleman smoked.”

She looked at the cigarette critically and with an exclamation of disgust threw it back on the desk.

“Gold Flavours!” she said scornfully; “can you beat it, Mike? And he has a hundred thousand a year!”

“You must make allowances for the decadence of the governing classes,” said the soothing Michael.

He turned and nodded farewell to the girl and with Miss Tenby’s arm in his he passed out of the room, and Lord Flanborough and his daughter looked at one another in speechless amazement.