The Duke Decides/Chapter 9

by Headon Hill

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CHAPTER IX

The Strategy of the General

Some five hours later General Sadgrove, at his house in Grosvenor Gardens, was taking his morning tub, when a servant tapped at the door of the bathroom and informed him that Mr. Alec Forsyth wanted to see him very urgently. The General as speedily as possible donned his dressing-gown and descended to his sanctum. His keen eyes just glanced at the troubled face of the young man standing on the hearth-rug; then, in his laconic way, he asked:

“What’s wrong, laddie? Your chum Beaumanoir been in the wars?”

Forsyth favored him with a startled stare, and then broke into an uneasy laugh.

“You seem to have been exercising your faculty of second-sight already, Uncle Jem,” he said.

“The man was being stalked,” said the General. “Has anyone caught him?”

“Very nearly,” replied Forsyth; and he proceeded to narrate the events of the night, and also what Beaumanoir had told him of the previous attempts on his life. At mention of the Duke’s absolute refusal to disclose the cause of the vendetta and to invoke the protection of the police, General Sadgrove drew a long breath. On hearing that he had in the small hours of that morning, thanks to the vigilance of Sybil Hanbury, held one of his would-be assassins at his mercy, but had quietly escorted him to the door and let him go, the whilom hunter of Dacoits uttered inarticulate grunts.

“And now, Uncle Jem, I have come to you for help,” Forsyth proceeded earnestly. “I have persuaded the Duke to permit me to tell you in strictest confidence as much as he has told me, and I think if you can make any suggestions for baffling these unknown malefactors that he will adopt them—always provided your advice does not entail going to the police. He has given me his word of honor to remain at Beaumanoir House until I return; but the odds are they’ll have another shy at him directly he pokes his nose outside.”

The General had been absently toying with a tray of Indian curios, but he now looked sharply up at his nephew.

“You are not exactly blind, Alec, and can read between the lines,” he said. “Reluctance on the part of a man threatened with murder to communicate with the authorities must mean that he has got an ugly sort of secret himself.”

“You know his record, sir. Charles Hanbury was never anyone’s enemy but his own, and I expect the Duke of Beaumanoir is much the same,” replied Forsyth with a warmth which left the General quite unmoved. The old warrior reverted to his curios and spent a couple of minutes in balancing an Afghan dagger on his finger, till, apparently inspired by the performance, he laid the venomous blade aside.

“I agree with you in one aspect of the case,” he said. “An insurance company, knowing what we know, would be ill-advised to take a risk on his Grace’s life. The chances are in favor of his being a dead man within twenty-four hours of his quitting his present shelter. I presume that precautions have been taken against any more bogus detectives, or bogus anything else, gaining access to him during your absence?”

Forsyth replied that the Duke had promised to remain in his own room till he returned, and that the butler had been instructed to admit no one into the house on any pretence whatever. Moreover, he added, with a proud note in his voice, Sybil was co-operating, and was thoroughly alive to the emergency.

“Then,” said the General, briskly, “I will finish dressing, and when we have had a mouthful of breakfast I will go back with you to Beaumanoir House. We must get your Duke into the interior of a safer zariba than a Piccadilly mansion before we can open parallel trenches against such a persistent enemy.”

General Sadgrove and Alec breakfasted alone together, the former, indeed, hurrying the meal purposely so as to get away before the ladies appeared. He had seen enough the previous day, when the Duke was calling on the Shermans, to make him shy of explaining to his guests that he was bound for Beaumanoir House at nine o’clock in the morning, both Mrs. Sherman and Leonie being aware that his acquaintance with the Duke only dated from yesterday. He shrewdly suspected that the young people who had been fellow-passengers on the St. Paul took more than a platonic interest in each other, and he did not want to stimulate that interest into anxiety until he was better informed.

He pursued the subject apologetically as soon as he was in the cab with his nephew.

“Sorry I made you bolt your food,” he said. “I hate lying to women if it can be avoided. The Shermans, who are staying with me, know Beaumanoir—traveled in the same ship with him. It would have excited remark to mention our destination.”

Forsyth, who had experience of his uncle’s methods, perceived that he was being pumped, and he had no objection. Having summoned this wily man-hunter to his assistance, he was not foolish enough to expect results without full disclosure.

“I understand your reluctance to disturb the Shermans,” he replied. “Beaumanoir has spoken several times about them—in fact, he seemed rather unduly excited when he first heard from me that they were at your house. I have thought that he might be épris of Leonie, though, as I have not seen them together, I can form no opinion whether the attraction is mutual.”

The General, having acquired his information, relapsed into silence, which was only broken by Forsyth as the cab turned into Piccadilly. The short drive was nearly over, but before the cab stopped he contrived to describe briefly his chance meeting with the Duke, on the day of the latter’s arrival in England, at the Hotel Cecil, and with an effort of memory he recalled the name of the man—Clinton Ziegler—whom the Duke had been to see.

“I dare say it’s not important, but it just occurred to me that I had better mention it while there was an opportunity,” he concluded, stealing a sidelong glance at his uncle’s face, which, as usual, was illegible. But a movement of the General’s well-gloved right hand in the direction of his left shirt-cuff, coupled with the gleam of a gold pencil-case, suggested that the name of Mr. Clinton Ziegler had been deemed worthy of record.

They were admitted to the ducal residence by Prince, whose dignity barely enabled him to stifle the inward curiosity with which he was devoured. In common with the other servants, he had not been told of the midnight alarm, and his orders to put the house practically into a state of siege had naturally mystified him. The damage to the bedroom door was not visible except under close examination, and Sybil having swept up the sawdust, none of the household had yet discovered it.

“No one has called, sir, except one or two of the usuals to the tradesmen’s entrance, and they were kept outside,” the butler remarked as he relieved the two gentlemen of their hats and canes.

At Forsyth’s request they were shown into the smoking-room—a cozy den, with only one window overlooking Piccadilly, to which the General immediately walked. His gaze roved over the crowded thoroughfare, comprehending pedestrians and passing vehicles in one swift scrutiny, and, apparently satisfied, he turned away just as Sybil entered, looking as fresh and sprightly as though she had slept the clock round. The General greeted her in the curt maner he affected to all women impartially, but an extra pressure of her hand may have had reference to her vigilant gallantry.

“His Grace is sulking,” she said, with a smile. “At least, he refuses to leave his room until he has seen you, General Sadgrove. I tapped at his door and told him you were here, but he said that if you want to see him you had better go upstairs. Very rude of him, isn’t it?”

“Very sensible,” replied the General. “I would prefer to see him alone, if you will be so good as to escort me, Miss Hanbury. Alec,” he added, “while I am gone just sit on this ottoman behind the window-curtain and keep your eye on that apple-woman under the railings of the Green Park. When I come back, be prepared to tell me exactly what she has done and how many customers she has had.”

Forsyth nodded, and the General went away with Sybil, who conducted him up the grand staircase and left him at the door of the Duke’s room. It was characteristic of the man that, having heard all there was to hear of her proceedings from his nephew, he forbore to waste words on what had occurred, but dismissed her with an injunction.

“Now run away and help Alec, but don’t let the apple-woman know that those sharp eyes are observing her,” he said, unbending so far as to give her a playful push.

His knock and mention of his name was followed by the sound of footsteps as the occupant of the room remembered that he had turned the key and hastened to admit the visitor. Beaumanoir was fully dressed, and had just finished breakfast.

“Don’t think me a coward for locking the door, General,” he said, as he shook hands. “This is a pretty bad gang that I am dodging.”

The General’s comment was to turn and relock the door himself, after a critical glance at the sawn panel. “I have spent my life in breaking up bad gangs,” he said, when he had taken the chair indicated. “I am a bit rusty with disuse, but I should very much like to try conclusions with this one. From what I hear, they must be worthy of anyone’s steel.”

Beaumanoir indulged in a careworn smile.

“Three attempts in forty-eight hours speaks to their zeal, at any rate,” he replied. “But seriously, General, you start badly handicapped,” he went on. “I don’t even know that I want them broken up, as you call it, for there must be no publicity. I can give you no clues nor answer any questions. All I ask of your great experience is how to thwart a determined hankering after my poor life—a hankering which may possibly cease if I survive for another week.”

“You positively decline to give me any assistance?”

“Positively; the honor of my house forbids it.”

The General tried to look pensive—a difficult matter to a gentleman of iron visage and bushy eyebrows.

“I am not going to ask questions,” he said almost plaintively, without mentioning that there were some he had no need to ask and others which he fully intended to answer himself. “I am here to give advice, and it is to get out of London into the open, so that your friends can look after you. Professors of crime find their art more difficult in the country, where every gossiping woman in the village street is a possible witness. I want your Grace to go down to Prior’s Tarrant, and allow me the honor of accompanying you as a guest.”

The suggestion was met by a blank negative, and caused the Duke to rise and pace the room in more agitation than he had yet shown.

“Why, the very place is hateful to me since last Sunday night,” he exclaimed. “You would realize that yourself, General, if you had been introduced to those silent fumes stealing down the chimney. I was thinking of going to some hotel by the sea when Forsyth and Sibyl induced me to remain here for the night, with such lively consequences. Come with me as my guest anywhere else, but not to Prior’s Tarrant.”

“Nevertheless, I should feel surer of your safety there than anywhere, and I do not speak without reason,” replied the General, with a metallic snap in his voice. “I should wish at least to be accorded the privilege of finishing my proposition.”

Beaumanoir promptly apologized very gracefully for his discourteous interruption, excusing it on the score of the strain on his nerves. He would be delighted to listen to any proposals, but nothing would shake his determination not to go back to Prior’s Tarrant.

“My dear sir, the tangled woodland of the park there is the ideal spot for a lurking assassin. Mediæval architecture provided the house with nooks and corners which it would tax even your foresight to patrol,” he insisted.

“But,” said the General, “there is safety in numbers; and I was going to propose—rather coolly, perhaps—that you should have a house-party there. If I might bring Mrs. Sadgrove, and Alec and Sybil Hanbury would also give us their company, it would lend color to my own presence. The last two-named, as you have occasion to know, form a valuable bodyguard.”

The Duke stared at his visitor with something like horrified amazement.

“You forget, General, in your kind eagerness to serve me, that you have guests staying in your own house whom you cannot desert,” he said, wondering how even an old man with his years behind him could suffer such lapse of memory when Leonie Sherman was one of the guests. He was almost angry that his visitor, being thus reminded, did not instantly abase himself.

But instead of shame General Sadgrove had only justification to offer—not profuse, because that was not his way—but complete.

“I had not forgotten the Shermans,” he replied, in a tone of oddly contrasted reproof and apology. “I had it in my mind that if you entertained my view you would stretch a point, and make matters easy for me by inviting my guests as well.” And the shrewd old diplomatist succeeded in looking as though the barefaced bait he was dangling was a piece of effrontery he only dared moot under stress of the emergency.

Beaumanoir, flushing scarlet, stopped short in his restless pacing and swallowed the hook.

“I never thought of that,” he said, looking down at the General with more interest than he had yet shown. “And,” he added, with unaffected modesty, “I very much doubt if they would come.”

This was virtual surrender, and the General had an easy task to brush away objections obviously raised in the hopes of their demolition. Short notice? Well, perhaps; but Americans were used to a less formal hospitality than ours, and would take it as a compliment. Brief shipboard acquaintance? Nonsense. Five days’ association on a “liner” was equivalent to a friendship of years. The chance of the Shermans being involved in a tragedy in which they had no concern? The General pledged his word that, whatever happened at Prior’s Tarrant, no harm should befall the Senator’s wife and daughter or breath of scandal assail them.

Before he left the room the General had arranged to return later in the day, possibly bringing with him his Pathan servant, Azimoolah Khan, whose aid he meant to enlist in securing the Duke’s safety at his country-seat. In the meanwhile, he would go home and prepare the ladies for joining the party on the morrow, Beaumanoir’s formal invitations following by post.

On his way down the broad staircase General Sadgrove chuckled audibly to himself: “I thought the prospect of entertaining Leonie in his ancestral halls would fetch him. Mustn’t have her falling in love with him, though, till he can show a clean sheet.” A little lower down he stopped and stared at a huge canvas of the third Duke, but without heeding the bewigged and lace-ruffled counterfeit of the Georgian courtier. “Concentration!” he muttered. “The first axiom in a crime-problem is to concentrate the items. I shall have two of ’em now, by George, right under the same blanket—and with luck I’ll have three.”

In the hall Prince was hovering fatuously, assisted by a brace of tall flunkeys who fell under the General’s critical gaze. One of them was the absent-minded William, all unconscious that he had allowed “Inspector Chantrey’s” understudy to slip upstairs the night before. Him Sadgrove severely rejected, selecting his colleague.

“There’s an apple-woman under the rails opposite,” he said, producing a sovereign. “Run across and offer this for her basket and its contents. If she refuses, the chances are that she will almost immediately move away. In that case, if you can follow her a little distance, without letting her observe you, bring me back word directly she stops and speaks to anyone.”

The well-trained servant, with scarcely the blink of an eyelash for his extraordinary mission, started to fulfil it, and the General hastened on to the smoking-room, where Forsyth and Sybil were still on guard at the window.

“Has the woman been doing any business?” he asked as he entered.

“She has only had one customer, who got off a Hammersmith ’bus and walked on,” replied Sibyl, without removing her gaze. “And now—why, it’s one of our liveries—Steptoe, the first footman, is going up to her. Oh, but this is interesting. He is offering her a coin, and she is shaking her head.”

“Go on,” said the General.

“Steptoe is recrossing the road towards the house without buying anything, and—yes, the woman has taken up her basket and is leaving her pitch, don’t you call it? She too is crossing to this side of the road, but higher up. Steptoe has turned and is looking after her, and—now I can’t see any more without putting my head out of window.”

Sybil stopped, breathless; and, without comment on the episode she had just witnessed, the General informed her and Forsyth of the proposed move to Prior’s Tarrant. As was to be expected, neither of the engaged couple had any objection to an arrangement which would bring them together under the same roof, Sybil remarking naively that it was one thing to be allowed solitary house-room as a poor relation, and quite another to stay with the Duke as a guest. She promised to hold herself in readiness to join Mrs. Sadgrove and the Shermans on the morrow and go down with them, while Forsyth was to wait for his orders until the General returned in the afternoon.

“We may have a ticklish job in getting our noble convoy from one laager to the other, and I shall want you as an aide-de-camp, Alec, as well as Azimoolah Khan for the more serious work,” the General explained.

“Azimoolah!’ Forsyth exclaimed, remembering certain blood-curdling stories of his uncle’s old orderly, who had exchanged the fierce joys of Thug-hunting for the milder enjoyment of valeting his beloved Sahib in Belgravia. “Surely his methods smack too much of the jungle and the nullah for this country.”

“That’s why I want to cart the whole bag of tricks into the jungle,” said the General, grimly. “Well?” he added, as Steptoe entered and tendered the sovereign on a salver.

“The woman wouldn’t take it, sir,” was the reply. “She got up and went round the corner into Air Street, where she was met by the person who called here last night dressed as a clergyman, only he was dressed as a workingman to-day. They went away together in a four-wheeler.”

“Thank you—that simplifies things considerably,” said the General, and, announcing his intention of returning later, he bade the footman call a cab and followed him out of the room.

“I wonder what he has got up his sleeve,” Forsyth mused aloud, as he and Sibyl watched the wiry figure into the cab. “The spirit of the chase has gripped him tight, and he’s in full cry already.”