Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo. Le Queux William

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СКАЧАТЬ your father’s fortune, except by marrying Louise—which you don’t intend to do—what are you going to do now?”

      “First, I intend that this woman they call ‘Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo,’ the lucky woman who is a decoy of the Administration of the Bains de Mer, shall tell me the true circumstance of my father’s death. If I know them—then my hand will be strengthened.”

      “Meanwhile you love Lady Ranscomb’s daughter, you say?”

      “Yes. I love Dorise with all my heart. She, of course, knows nothing of the conditions of the will.”

      There was a silence of some moments, interrupted only by the pop-pop of the pigeon-shots below.

      Away across the white balustrade of the broad magnificent terrace the calm sapphire sea was deepening as the winter afternoon drew in. An engine whistled—that of the flower train which daily travels express from Cannes to Boulogne faster than the passenger train-deluxe, and bearing mimosa, carnations, and violets from the Cote d’Azur to Covent Garden, and to the florists’ shops in England.

      “You’ve never told me the exact circumstances of your father’s death, Hugh,” remarked Brock at last.

      “Exact circumstances? Ah! That’s what I want to know. Only that woman knows the secret,” answered the young man. “All I know is that the poor old guv’-nor was called up to London by an urgent letter. We had a shooting party at Woodthorpe and he left me in charge, saying that he had some business in London and might return on the following night—or he might be away a week. Days passed and he did not return. Several letters came for him which I kept in the library. I was surprised that he neither wrote nor returned, when, suddenly, ten days later, we had a telegram from the London police informing me that my father was lying in St. George’s Hospital. I dashed up to town, but when I arrived I found him dead. At the inquest, evidence was given to show that at half-past two in the morning a constable going along Albemarle Street found him in evening dress lying huddled up in a doorway. Thinking him intoxicated, he tried to rouse him, but could not. A doctor who was called pronounced that he was suffering from some sort of poisoning. He was taken to St. George’s Hospital in an ambulance, but he never recovered. The post-mortem investigation showed a small scratch on the palm of the hand. That scratch had been produced by a pin or a needle which had been infected by one of the newly discovered poisons which, administered secretly, give a post-mortem appearance of death from heart disease.”

      “Then your father was murdered—eh?” exclaimed the elder man.

      “Most certainly he was. And that woman is aware of the whole circumstances and of the identity of the assassin.”

      “How do you know that?”

      “By a letter I afterwards opened—one that had been addressed to him at Woodthorpe in his absence. It was anonymous, written in bad English, in an illiterate hand, warning him to ‘beware of that woman you know—Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo.’ It bore the French stamp and the postmark of Tours.”

      “I never knew all this,” Brock said. “You are quite right, Hugh! The whole affair is a tangled mystery. But the first point we must establish before we commence to investigate is—who is Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo?”

      SECOND CHAPTER

      CONCERNS A GUILTY SECRET

      Just after seven o’clock that same evening young Henfrey and his friend Brock met in the small lounge of the Hotel des Palmiers, a rather obscure little establishment in the Avenue de la Costa, behind the Gardens, much frequented by the habitues of the Rooms who know Monte Carlo and prefer the little place to life at the Paris, the Hermitage, and the Riviera Palace, or the Gallia, up at Beausoleil.

      The Palmiers was a place where one met a merry cosmopolitan crowd, but where the cocotte in her bright plumage was absent—an advantage which only the male habitue of Monte Carlo can fully realize. The eternal feminine is always so very much in evidence around the Casino, and the most smartly dressed woman whom one might easily take for the wife of an eminent politician or financier will deplore her bad luck and beg for “a little loan.”

      “Well,” said Hugh as his friend came down from his room to the lounge, “I suppose we ought to be going—eh? Dorise said half-past seven, and we’ll just get across to the Metropole in time. Lady Ranscomb is always awfully punctual at home, and I expect she carries out her time-table here.”

      The two men put on light overcoats over their dinner-jackets and strolled in the warm dusk across the Gardens and up the Galerie, with its expensive little shops, past the original Ciro’s to the Metropole.

      In the big hall they were greeted by a well-preserved, grey-haired Englishwoman, Lady Ranscomb, the widow of old Sir Richard Ranscomb, who had been one of the greatest engineers and contractors of modern times. He had begun life as a small jerry-builder at Golder’s Green, and had ended it a millionaire and a knight. Lady Ranscomb was seated at a little wicker table with her daughter Dorise, a dainty, fair-haired girl with intense blue eyes, who was wearing a rather daring jazzing gown of pale-blue, the scantiness of which a year or two before would have been voted quite beyond the pale for a lady, and yet in our broad-minded to-day, the day of undressing on the stage and in the home, it was nothing more than “smart.”

      Mother and daughter greeted the two men enthusiastically, and at Lady Ranscomb’s orders the waiter brought them small glasses of an aperitif.

      “We’ve been all day motoring up to the Col di Tenda. Sospel is lovely!” declared Dorise’s mother. “Have you ever been there?” she asked of Brock, who was an habitue of the Riviera.

      “Once and only once. I motored from Nice across to Turin,” was his reply. “Yes. It is truly a lovely run there. The Alps are gorgeous. I like San Dalmazzo and the chestnut groves there,” he added. “But the frontiers are annoying. All those restrictions. Nevertheless, the run to Turin is one of the finest I know.”

      Presently they rose, and all four walked into the crowded salle-a-manger, where the chatter was in every European language, and the gay crowd were gossiping mostly of their luck or their bad fortune at the tapis vert. At Monte Carlo the talk is always of the run of sequences, the many times the zero-trois has turned up, and of how little one ever wins en plein on thirty-six.

      To those who visit “Charley’s Mount” for the first time all this is as Yiddish, but soon he or she, when initiated into the games of roulette and trente-et-quarante, quickly gets bitten by the fever and enters into the spirit of the discussions. They produce their “records”—printed cards in red and black numbers with which they have carefully pricked off the winning numbers with a pin as they have turned up.

      The quartette enjoyed a costly but exquisite dinner, chatting and laughing the while.

      Both men were friends of Lady Ranscomb and frequent visitors to her fine house in Mount Street. Hugh’s father, a country landowner, had known Sir Richard for many years, while Walter Brock had made the acquaintance of Lady Ranscomb a couple of years ago in connexion with some charity in which she had been interested.

      Both were also good friends of Dorise. Both were excellent dancers, and Lady Ranscomb often allowed them to take her daughter to the Grafton, Ciro’s, or the Embassy. Lady Ranscomb was Hugh’s old friend, and he and Dorise having been thrown together a good deal ever since the girl returned from Versailles after finishing her education, it was hardly surprising that the pair should have fallen in love with each other.

      As they sat opposite each other that night, the young fellow gazed into her wonderful blue eyes, yet, alas! with a sinking heart. How could they СКАЧАТЬ