The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ®. Морис Леблан
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for the mine at Cloetedorp, or elated at the novel description of himself as “a British nobleman;” which is not precisely our English idea of a colonial knighthood.
Three days later, accordingly, the Quackenbosses left the Lakeside Hotel. We were bound on an expedition up the lake ourselves, when the pretty little woman burst in with a dash to tell us they were leaving. She was charmingly got up in the neatest and completest of American travelling-dresses. Charles held her hand affectionately. “I’m sorry it’s good-bye,” he said. “I have done my best to secure your husband.”
“You couldn’t have tried harder than I did,” the little woman answered, and the tip-tilted nose looked quite pathetic; “for I just hate to be buried right down there in Kentucky! However, Elihu is the sort of man a woman can neither drive nor lead; so we’ve got to put up with him.” And she smiled upon us sweetly, and disappeared for ever.
Charles was disconsolate all that day. Next morning he rose, and announced his intention of setting out for the West on his tour of inspection. He would recreate by revelling in Colorado silver lodes.
We packed our own portmanteaus, for Charles had not brought even Simpson with him, and then we prepared to set out by the morning train for Saratoga.
Up till almost the last moment Charles nursed his dispatch-box. But as the “baggage-smashers” were taking down our luggage, and a chambermaid was lounging officiously about in search of a tip, he laid it down for a second or two on the centre table while he collected his other immediate impedimenta. He couldn’t find his cigarette-case, and went back to the bedroom for it. I helped him hunt, but it had disappeared mysteriously. That moment lost him. When we had found the cigarette-case, and returned to the sitting-room—lo, and behold! the dispatch-box was missing! Charles questioned the servants, but none of them had noticed it. He searched round the room—not a trace of it anywhere.
“Why, I laid it down here just two minutes ago!” he cried. But it was not forthcoming.
“It’ll turn up in time,” I said. “Everything turns up in the end—including Mrs. Quackenboss’s nose.”
“Seymour,” said my brother-in-law, “your hilarity is inopportune.”
To say the truth, Charles was beside himself with anger. He took the elevator down to the “Bureau,” as they call it, and complained to the manager. The manager, a sharp-faced New Yorker, smiled as he remarked in a nonchalant way that guests with valuables were required to leave them in charge of the management, in which case they were locked up in the safe and duly returned to the depositor on leaving. Charles declared somewhat excitedly that he had been robbed, and demanded that nobody should be allowed to leave the hotel till the dispatch-box was discovered. The manager, quite cool, and obtrusively picking his teeth, responded that such tactics might be possible in an hotel of the European size, putting up a couple of hundred guests or so; but that an American house, with over a thousand visitors—many of whom came and went daily—could not undertake such a quixotic quest on behalf of a single foreign complainant.
That epithet, “foreign,” stung Charles to the quick. No Englishman can admit that he is anywhere a foreigner. “Do you know who I am, sir?” he asked, angrily. “I am Sir Charles Vandrift, of London—a member of the English Parliament.”
“You may be the Prince of Wales,” the man answered, “for all I care. You’ll get the same treatment as anyone else, in America. But if you’re Sir Charles Vandrift,” he went on, examining his books, “how does it come you’ve registered as Mr. Peter Porter?”
Charles grew red with embarrassment. The difficulty deepened.
The dispatch-box, always covered with a leather case, bore on its inner lid the name “Sir Charles Vandrift, K.C.M.G.,” distinctly painted in the orthodox white letters. This was a painful contretemps: he had lost his precious documents; he had given a false name; and he had rendered the manager supremely careless whether or not he recovered his stolen property. Indeed, seeing he had registered as Porter, and now “claimed” as Vandrift, the manager hinted in pretty plain language he very much doubted whether there had ever been a dispatch-box in the matter at all, or whether, if there were one, it had ever contained any valuable documents.
We spent a wretched morning. Charles went round the hotel, questioning everybody as to whether they had seen his dispatch-box. Most of the visitors resented the question as a personal imputation; one fiery Virginian, indeed, wanted to settle the point then and there with a six-shooter. Charles telegraphed to New York to prevent the shares and coupons from being negotiated; but his brokers telegraphed back that, though they had stopped the numbers as far as possible, they did so with reluctance, as they were not aware of Sir Charles Vandrift being now in the country. Charles declared he wouldn’t leave the hotel till he recovered his property; and for myself, I was inclined to suppose we would have to remain there accordingly for the term of our natural lives—and longer.
That night again we spent at the Lakeside Hotel. In the small hours of the morning, as I lay awake and meditated, a thought broke across me. I was so excited by it that I rose and rushed into my brother-in-law’s bedroom. “Charles, Charles!” I exclaimed, “we have taken too much for granted once more. Perhaps Elihu Quackenboss carried off your dispatch-box!”
“You fool,” Charles answered, in his most unamiable manner (he applies that word to me with increasing frequency); “is that what you’ve waked me up for? Why, the Quackenbosses left Lake George on Tuesday morning, and I had the dispatch-box in my own hands on Wednesday.”
“We have only their word for it,” I cried. “Perhaps they stopped on—and walked off with it afterwards!”
“We will inquire tomorrow,” Charles answered. “But I confess I don’t think it was worth waking me up for. I could stake my life on that little woman’s integrity.”
We did inquire next morning—with this curious result: it turned out that, though the Quackenbosses had left the Lakeside Hotel on Tuesday, it was only for the neighbouring Washington House, which they quitted on Wednesday morning, taking the same train for Saratoga which Charles and I had intended to go by. Mrs. Quackenboss carried a small brown paper parcel in her hands—in which, under the circumstances, we had little difficulty in recognising Charles’s dispatch-box, loosely enveloped.
Then I knew how it was done. The chambermaid, loitering about the room for a tip, was—Mrs. Quackenboss! It needed but an apron to transform her pretty travelling-dress into a chambermaid’s costume; and in any of those huge American hotels one chambermaid more or less would pass in the crowd without fear of challenge.
“We will follow them on to Saratoga,” Charles cried. “Pay the bill at once, Seymour.”
“Certainly,” I answered. “Will you give me some money?”
Charles clapped his hand to his pockets. “All, all in the dispatch-box,” he murmured.
That tied us up another day, till we could get some ready cash from our agents in New York; for the manager, already most suspicious at the change of name and the accusation of theft, peremptorily refused to accept Charles’s cheque, or anything else, as he phrased it, except “hard money.” So we lingered on perforce at Lake George in ignoble inaction.
“Of course,” I observed to my brother-in-law that evening, “Elihu Quackenboss was Colonel Clay.”
“I suppose so,” Charles murmured resignedly. “Everybody I meet seems to be Colonel Clay nowadays—except when I believe they are, in which case they turn out to be harmless nobodies. But who would have thought it was he after I pulled his hair out? Or after he persisted in his trick, even when I suspected him—which, he told us at Seldon, was against his first principles?”
A light dawned upon me again. But, warned by previous ebullitions, I expressed myself this time with becoming timidity. “Charles,” I suggested, “may we not here again have been the slaves of a preconception? We thought Forbes-Gaskell was Colonel Clay—for no better reason than because he wore a wig. We thought Elihu Quackenboss wasn’t Colonel Clay—for no better reason than because