Number Six and the Borgia/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
THE STORY OF WELLAND.
Smith went on his way to the Strand. It had struck him as being rather remarkable that Cæsar had given him the addresses with instructions to pursue inquiries which he could have had made by any private inquiry firm in London. After all, it was only necessary that they should supply him with the movements of the suspected persons, and furnish him with sufficient material to prove or disprove the truth of his theory. But there were quite a number of things Mr. Smith did not understand.
On the river side of the Strand and running parallel with that famous thoroughfare is John Street, and it was to 104 John Street that he directed his steps. This was the address which he had found in the little book against the name of Welland. It was an old-fashioned Adam's house, and, scrutinizing it from the opposite pavement, Smith came to the conclusion that, whoever might have occupied it twenty years ago, it was now one of these genteel tenements which abound in the West End. The different pattern of curtains and blinds on each floor strengthened this conclusion, which was confirmed when he crossed the road and found a little pearl button labeled “Housekeeper.”
The janitor was an old gentleman of sixty or seventy—a cheerful old soul who wore the faded ribbon of the 'eighty-one African campaign on his waistcoat. “Welland?” he said in surprise. “Good Lord, no! Mr. Welland doesn't live here. Why, he's been gone—let me see, it must be nigh on twenty years ago. Well, that's a curious thing, you asking after Mr. Welland!”
Mr. Smith thought it was curious, too, but asked: “Why is it curious?”
The old man hesitated a moment, then said: “Come in,” and led the way down to a basement kitchen. “Did you know Mr, Welland?” asked Tray-Bong, when they reached the janitor's cozy little apartment.
“Know him?” he said contemptuously. “As well as I know my own hand. As nice a man as ever I met, Mr. Welland was. He had the three upper floors” he shook his head. “Ah, it was very sad, very sad indeed.”
“I don't know the whole story,” said Smith with truth. It was true, too, that he had never taken Cæsar wholly at his word. If he was a true Borgia, he was a liar, an exploiter of his friends, treacherous to his enemies, and wholly unreliable. Cæsar was using him—well and good. He was out to use Cæsar; and he gave his employer credit for this amount of intelligence, that Cæsar was never in any doubt that his employee's end was a purely selfish one.
Mr. Cummins, the janitor, was in a communicative mood.
“You don't know the whole story, eh?” he said with some enjoyment. “Well, I can't say that I know the whole of it myself. But what I know, I can tell you. Mr. Welland lived in this house, in those identical rooms, when he was a bachelor and before he met the young lady he married. He came back to this house after his honeymoon, and his little girl—poor little soul!—was born in this house. He was a very happy sort of gentleman, but I don't think his wife found the life quite up to her expectations. She was one of these complaining ladies who are always worrying about what other women have in the way of dresses and jewelry, and Mr. Welland, who was an artistic sort of man, used to worry a lot.
“About eight months after the baby was born, Mr. Welland brought a gentleman home to dinner. I know, because, when he had a party, I used to wait at the table, and on this occasion I got into what I call my butler's suit, and did a bit of handing round. A very nice gentleman, to all appearance, was this Mr. now, what was his name?”
“Valentine?” suggested Smith.
“That's it, sir,” said the janitor. “A nice-looking fellow, but what a rascal! What a scoundrel! A regular West Ender, he was. Plenty of money, carriages, and horses, a big house in Belgrave Square, and what not. Well, the long and the short of it is that Mr. Valentine used to call when Mr. Welland was away in the city. And sometimes he would call when Mr. Welland was home, but not often. Then Mr. Welland and his wife had an awful row—I think it was over a ring which this fellow Valentine gave her—and one afternoon, when the governor came home, she had gone and taken the baby with her. Bolted, sir! Gone off to America, by all accounts, with Valentine, and that was the end of her! Mr. Welland took on something terrible. He was like a madman, and I remember as though it was yesterday his coming to me and saying: 'Cummins, sooner or later that man will die at my hands.'”
“What happened to Mrs. Welland?” asked Smith. There was no need to ask, if he trusted Cæsar, but he did not trust Cæsar.
Cummins shook his head. “Died, sir. I only heard of it by accident about two years ago. She and the baby died of some fever—yellow fever, I think it was. It's curious you should come here asking about Mr. Welland,” he said, getting onto his feet and going across to a dresser. “I was turning out this drawer only this morning, and I found this picture; one he gave me on his wedding day.”
He pulled open a drawer and took out a cabinet photograph, handing it to the visitor. It was the face of an artist, refined and delicate, yet with a strength in its lines that one might not have expected after hearing the janitor's account of the man's breakdown. The high forehead, the long, thin nose, the firm jaw, were features impossible to forget.
“I suppose you couldn't let me have this photograph to make a reproduction?”
The janitor looked dubiously at Mr. Smith, and then at the photograph. “No, sir, I wouldn't like to part with it. You see, it's written on,” he said, pointing to an inscription, “I'll tell you what I'll do, though, if you like to pay for it. I'll have a copy made.”
“That will suit me admirably,” said Smith, and passed across a pound note to seal the bargain.
He went out into John Street puzzled. What was Cæsar's game in sending him to conduct these inquiries? He must have known that Welland was no longer in John Street. It was as certain as anything that he had employed detectives to trace the man. And yet had he? This imperious and imperial Cæsar had a lofty contempt for the small things of life; and was it not possible that Welland had faded from his mind until the news that Scotland Yard had put some mysterious detective on his track had set his mind wondering as to the shadower's identity.
Cæsar was not to be judged by ordinary standards, Smith concluded, as he walked back to his hotel. He expected to find some sort of communication from him, for Cæsar had said that he was leaving Paris by the midday train, and would arrive that evening. But there was no letter or telegram.
He went up to his room, which was now ready for him, and sat down to consider the somewhat complicated situation. Here was he, Tray-Bong Smith—how quickly the Paris underworld had caught on to that nickname—engaged by one who was probably the most dangerous man in the world, to carry out what was practically detective work on the strength of having thrown a man into the Seine! What sort of villainies he required of him Smith was curious to know. He would dearly have loved to stay on in Paris. The mystery of the manacled woman intrigued him vastly. It was one of the most creepy experiences he had had, he the man without nerves. That she was Cæsar's prisoner, he did not doubt, and that the deep, booming voice that had called her from the shadow of the poplars was the voice of Madonna Beatrice, he was certain. What had this woman done? Why did Cæsar, the last of the Borgias, who had, Smith suspected, so quick a way with his enemies, retain her in custody when he could have so readily and so easily rid himself of the necessity of keeping her locked up?
If Cæsar had come to him and said: “Slay this woman—I have not the courage,” Tray-Bong would have understood. That he would have killed in cold blood is unlikely. Tray-Bong Smith did not kill women.
Acting on a sudden impulse, he went out again to the British Museum, where, in the reading room, he revived his acquaintance with the Borgias, for it was certain that Cæsar had not only inherited their vices, but was a faithful copyist of their methods.
The book he chose was a small monograph by an eminent American professor, the best he knew, and it took him an hour and a half to read it from cover to cover. Tray-Bong Smith had always held that the coincidences of life are part of life's normality. That they are not confined to plays and stories, any observer will agree; but the fact that he should be there in the British Museum reading room studying a life of the Borgias on the very day and at the very minute another person should have been waiting impatiently to read that identical book, was remarkable.
He took the book back to the clerk and thought the frock-coated attendant breathed a sigh of relief.
“I'm glad you haven't kept it any longer, sir,” he said, scribbled out a ticket, and carried the book over to an old man who was sitting bolt upright in a chair, his gnarled hands on the handle of an umbrella, his stern, lined face turned resentfully in Smith's direction. The old man took the book with a grunt and shuffled off to a reading table.
“You wouldn't think a man worth all those millions would come in and sit here waiting for a book that he could have bought for a few shillings,” said the attendant when he returned.
“Worth all those millions?” repeated Smith, looking after the bowed figure.
“That's old Mr. Ross. You've heard of Ross, the millionaire?”
Smith laughed. “I can tell you something more about him,” said he cryptically; “he doesn't like people who snore.”
Cæsar's lieutenant took another look at the old man before he went out. He was above seventy, Smith guessed, and the main feature of his face was a white beard so closely clipped that he had the appearance of being unshaven. That and his shabby clothing impressed Smith most.
He dined at the hotel and had intended going to a theater, but when he came out into the hall the porter handed him an envelope addressed in typewritten characters to “T. B. Smith.”
He opened it. The letter inside was also typewritten. It ran:
Watch Ross. His lawyers are Baker & Sepley, of 129 Great James Street. If he goes to them or sends for them, he must be immediately destroyed.
In the lower right-hand corner were the words: “Quai Fleurs,” which was at once a reminder and an indication of the source from whence the letter came.
So that was Cæsar's game, and that was why he had sent the man from Chi So's to London and had arranged Room 41 for him. He was to watch this old man, this student of the Borgias, and in certain eventualities he was to be destroyed, and Smith was to destroy him.
The watcher put the letter away in his pocket and grinned to himself. The lordly Cæsar stepped too readily into the character of tyrant. Tray-Bong Smith was to be the hired assassin and have the police of the metropolis on his heels, or else to be exposed for something that had happened in France, and for which he was not liable in England. Anyway, Cæsar was in London, That was news.